The Empress Who Crushed the Pirate King
[Pirate King flexing with Chain X]
[Pirate Empress sitting atop the crushed Pirate King]
Upvote if you miss the Empress
Meanwhile, in the midst of that absolute frenzy, I was watching a gallery post someone had cut together from the admin broadcast — just the Pirate Empress's entrance scene, looped into a highlight reel — and basking in pure satisfaction.
"Our Marianne has grown up so beautifully."
"Commander, that Marianne who 'grew up so beautifully' just severed the Pirate King's limbs."
"Pirates are supposed to lose a few parts growing up. Builds character."
"…"
So what if a few space-garbage pirates got their arms and legs chopped off? They weren't recyclable anyway. Might as well cut them into convenient, burnable pieces before tossing them out.
Besides — most of the users watching the live broadcast had completely missed it, given how fast she'd moved — but in the recorded footage, the execution technique Marianne used on the Pirate King was, astonishingly, identical to the execution motion our Ignis used.
Whoa. So she's got a learning function too.
The discovery of a feature I hadn't even considered left me nodding to myself in quiet amazement.
And so, while the rest of the universe burned in event-fueled chaos, I went about my perfectly peaceful life the usual way — tearing apart the pirates who wandered in without a thought, or else arranging a brand-new second life for them as excellent sources of free labor.
"Your name is Chunsik from now on."
"Huh?"
But unlike my fleet… and my base…
In the single week since that announcement dropped, every other user had been tasting pure, unfiltered agony at the hands of the Pirate Empress — who was putting on exactly the kind of deranged hit-and-run campaign the veterans had warned about months ago.
Is the Pirate Empress really just SS-grade?
Dude the way she fights, her close-combat performance is straight-up beyond SS-grade??
They said the Empress was SS-grade my ass…
[Pirate Empress vs. an SSS-grade anti-personnel defense character]
Why the hell is she going toe-to-toe with an SSS-grade anti-personnel character in a brutal slugfest and even WINNING??
And it's not just the fighting — her fleet command is completely different from the Pirate King era too, holy shit.
At least the number of ships she steals is lower than the Pirate King's, I guess.
The training regimen I'd put her through was clearly producing results far beyond anything I'd expected. Watching the gallery descend into collective wailing, I felt a twinge of conscience prick at me.
Of course, conscience or no conscience, I kept my mouth firmly shut.
But just because I stayed silent didn't mean the users had gone blind.
Something's off about the Pirate Empress
[Veteran credentials attached]
Okay so normally NPC and enemy boss grades get rated one tier higher than player grades, that's fair.
Even accounting for that, the current Pirate Empress is way too strong.
By NPC standards she's basically scraping the bottom of SSS-grade at minimum.
Command, combat — she's cracked at both. She's a nightmare to deal with.
Once the questions about the Empress's combat power set the entire gallery on fire, the veterans who'd latched onto the theory started gleefully dumping new info posts all over the board.
Why the Empress is this strong right now — explained.txt
A lot of veterans don't even know this one, surprisingly.
You all know the Pirate Empress gets randomly recruited by some player and then eventually deserts, right?
Well, how strong she becomes as the Empress depends entirely on how much she learned and grew under that player.
Which means: the player who raised this Pirate Empress trained the absolute hell out of her without even thinking about it.
And we're talking about a character who was A-grade on paper but basically B-grade in practice.
But as you can tell from the rampage she's on right now, she's a character who can actually grow. So the guy who raised her probably just kept throwing every training program and growth resource at her because hey, she was improving.
TL;DR
One unhinged affection-obsessed maniac turned the Empress into an untouchable Cthulhu. Yeah.
Sharp deduction.
Reading that uncomfortably accurate theory, I felt my chest tighten. And for good reason — our Empress, Marianne, was fighting far better than even I'd anticipated.
Just watched a base get hit-and-run'd while I was passing by
[The Pirate Empress's fleet attacking some random base]
Talked to some nearby users — apparently the guy had been solo-wiping every pirate in the area to grind fleet proficiency, for whatever reason?
So he pulled aggro from the Pirate Empress, and boom — base gone.
Weird part is, since he was a broke solo player with nothing worth taking, the Pirate Empress didn't even bother with a boarding assault. Just bombarded the place into scrap and moved on.
On top of everything else, she'd developed a new belligerence — freely attacking any solo player's base that happened to sit along her route. Combined with the doomstack she'd amassed through endless consecutive victories against users, it had already ballooned to an absolutely deranged scale.
At this rate, she was going to become a catastrophe no player could stop.