The Pirate King's Main Fleet
Feeling my grip on sanity start to slip, I decided to take the day off, citing a downturn in my condition.
Meanwhile, at the very hour Icarus was wailing over a spectacular 150-pull wipeout—
Survive the assault of a fleet belonging to one of the worst villains in the cosmos — and forge a legend!
"Son of a bitch."
Simply by the rotten luck of being closest to the Pirate King's spawn point, the clan leader of Hummingbird — a ragtag outfit of roughly ten players — had earned the dubious honor of being the first among countless clans to face him. He was currently unloading every curse word he knew.
"Clan leader, what do we do?"
"What do you mean, what do we do? If you don't want to die, we fight."
"Well, yeah, but…"
They'd banded together under the cheerful banner of newbies helping newbies, which meant everyone was a newbie — and their superhuman roster was accordingly mediocre. Anxiety sat heavy on every commander's face gathered at the clan leader's base.
Not that running was an option in this situation.
"Besides, our gacha luck hasn't been half bad, right?"
"Oh — that's true…!"
"We've got an S-grade cruiser, and our destroyers even include SS-grades!"
Unlike a certain someone out there who had just dumped 150 multi-pulls without a single rate-up hit and gone down in flames, beginner's luck seemed to be on their side. Their superhuman forces might have been thin, but their fleet strength was holding up reasonably well — and not just for one of them. All twelve clan members, the leader included, were in the same boat.
"Here's the plan. While that guy's S-grade cruiser, the Baltimore, anchors a cruiser squadron and holds the firefight… a mobile force with the SS-grade destroyers Kazemaru and Max as flagships swings around and hits the Pirate King's fleet in the flank."
"Hmm."
"Sounds solid."
"Honestly, isn't this the best formation we can field?"
"And Baltimore's a defense type — between her stats and loadout, she's got top-tier durability among cruisers."
"So half our superhumans will be stationed on Baltimore to hold the line against boarding attacks once she draws aggro. We'll fight it like a siege."
They laid out every scrap of strategy they could muster, burning with the determination not to go down without a fight.
That determination lasted less than thirty minutes.
—KRAAAAAAAAAANG!!!
"Ah… aaaaaah!!"
"Th-the Baltimore, in one shot—!"
"What the fuck is that?! What the hell is that thing?!"
—Ziiiiing… KRAANG!
"Are you kidding me — every single shot is popping a cruiser?!"
"The flanking force with Kazemaru and Max has been wiped out!"
"Why are there so many of them?!"
"Clan leader, this is genuinely impossible."
"God, they really made this game like shit."
Against players who had only just started fielding cruisers as their mainstay, the Pirate King had rolled out battleships — two full grades higher. The sheer malice of it was breathtaking: main-battery fire that didn't merely cripple a cruiser but sank one clean with every salvo, reducing every carefully laid plan to scrap. Mental fortitude shattered across the board, and one by one they hit the surrender button.
The Pirate King was not holding back. Not even a little.
In a curious twist, the developers had added a special event tab that live-streamed the Pirate King's main fleet in combat — ostensibly to amp up the spectacle and help players theorycraft a clear. Thanks to that, every player in the game got a front-row seat to the "battle" between Hummingbird Clan and the Pirate King's main force…
And the result:
[Video Capture 1], [Video Capture 2]
I just watched the Hummingbird Clan fight footage. Is that for real?
An S-grade defense cruiser tanks exactly one shot, takes a second, and turns into a kebab on the spot?
How the fuck are we supposed to kill that
Players watching the stream live — and the majority who only caught up later through the gallery — were hit with a catastrophic wave of morale collapse.
That reaction wasn't limited to a single thread. Every post, every comment chain, filled up with wailing newbies until the gallery looked like a street of pure lamentation.
And the fact that Hummingbird Clan hadn't even managed a proper hit before donating their entire fleet only piled MSG onto the newbies' grief, deepening the flavor of despair.
Of course, a few veterans tried to rally them, insisting it wasn't time to give up yet—
Unfortunately, those veterans carried original sin of their own. Trying to quell the newbie riot only got them swept away like action figures in a tsunami, left tumbling in a pitiful heap.
But the newbies' seizure-level frenzy was finally put down about three days later — when the fifth clan to face the Pirate King's main fleet, Makguksu Clan, fought a live battle and actually won.
Of course, there were a few minor differences. Unlike the four "small-scale" clans that had been steamrolled so far, Makguksu boasted a roster of over fifty members, twenty of whom were veterans who'd been playing since long before. And unlike a certain Mr. I living like a lonely old hermit somewhere, none of them had yeeted 150 multi-pulls into the void — which meant they fielded a grand fleet of several hundred ships, including ten SSS-grade cruisers and twenty SSS-grade destroyers.
On top of that, following the veterans' strategy, they exploited the fact that the Pirate King's main force did little more than charge head-on and dump raw firepower. They won.
Upvote this!
Gallery opinion flipped overnight. Praise poured onto Makguksu — the first clan to win — while condemnation rose against Hummingbird and every other clan that had simply donated their ships to the Pirate King.
But that chorus of idiots was shut down in an instant when the Makguksu clan leader posted directly to the gallery.
[Proof of resource depletion from status window]
To stop that damn Pirate King fleet, we dumped every rare resource we'd stockpiled and mass-produced the high-tier blueprint ships our veterans already owned.
Even then, half the fleet got vaporized. One SSS-grade ship went down completely, and another was so wrecked it had to dry-dock for repairs.
And if you watch the footage you'll get it — the Pirate King, unlike the Pirate Empress, is fundamentally a fleet-battle fetishist.
Close-range Boarding Actions only happen after he's already decided the gunnery fight with his battleships, and only when the player fleet is already in the toilet.
So whenever the fleet he painted as a target started getting shredded, we pulled it back immediately and rotated in another player's fleet — that kind of control—