New Chiefs Overnight
It was true that I had been thoroughly talked into it by the friends from the Central Base Alliance, so I settled for simply cutting them from their base chief posts.
And since the people involved themselves had seen what price the Date Palm Clan paid for choosing madness, things went far more smoothly than expected — nothing like that clan's fate at all.
"That's a relief. At least those people aren't putting up a fight."
"Right? We almost ended up with a real headache."
Of course, "headache" here was not a synonym for "hard work."
"You'd have a rough time hammering the hire-mercenary button one by one all over again, after all."
"Huh? I brought a sewing machine for that."
"The mercenary dispatch office chief had it torn out. Said not to leave that kind of thing lying around."
"...Ah."
A brief, sad story slipped out in the process, but the important part was elsewhere.
I hadn't driven them out the way I had the others, but I had undocked every base that had been berthed there — including the former chiefs — which meant the empty slots needed new players and new chiefs appointed.
And that need was not mine alone. Other players felt the same, and chat started flooding in with a dozen messages at a time begging me to make them chief.
Yeah, no. Already decided.
I ignored most of those chats and resolved to fill the base rosters and chief seats exactly according to the plan I had already formed in my head.
And so, the next day…
> [NOTICE: New village chiefs have been elected]
Just as the gallery post said, I drove every player who had been plotting treason out to the exile settlement, then handed Barracuda to Vermouth of Erosance, someone I had known for a while, and Spiralis to Viridi and the former Biomass Clan players who had defected from the Loki Clan, with Viridi as their representative.
The remaining Level 1 bases, for their part, accepted my measures and yielded their seats to other players. Both clans and the new arrivals all expressed satisfaction with the arrangement.
Before long the turmoil in my territory settled, and the two clans that had taken their new seats — namely Erosance and New Biomass — began to adapt and live in their own ways.
Only, the way those two clans "adapted" looked rather different from what I and ordinary players had imagined.
In the case of Erosance on Barracuda…
In that fashion they behaved like an artisan guild — maintaining just enough fleet and superhuman combat power for self-defense, and pouring the rest of their resources and mental energy into crafting all kinds of items, or into making ERO-skins the way they had during the Erosance contest.
Of course, the Erosance Clan had always been known for that temperament, so other players simply accepted it and moved on…
But the New Biomass Clan on Spiralis was another story.