The Grand Cross Announcement

While the Earth Federation was still around—complete with a double-strength Leviathan Fleet event, their own provisional government, and a personal stronghold—they'd strutted around all high and mighty after I tossed them a mere twenty battleships plus some extras.

Only once I realized they could call up as much additional force as they wanted did I finally feel a genuine sense of awe toward those monsters.

Anyway, I spent my time on all sorts of miscellaneous odds and ends like that.

Compared to Paschutra and Lepant, they were smaller, so the impact was a bit lacking, but...

"Um, what do you think, Commander...?"

"Is this the diagonal quad-core Oppa wanted?"

"Oh."

Even so, Marian and Jessica were sporting pirate pockets and adjutant pockets that ranked right up there, so I spent my days playing around with their utterly seductive diagonal quad-core attacks and the like.

In many ways, I'd started living a leisurely, pastoral life that felt busy yet not busy at all. About a week into it—

More precisely, a little over a month and a week after the 4th Anniversary Event had ended.

"Peaceful."

—Slurp

Just as I was leisurely sipping the Earl Grey tea Jessica had made for me, complete with sugar cubes, as always...

Hoehhhhh.

With more than a month having passed since the last event wrapped up, it was about time for talk of an "up-date" to start floating around.

Seeing the brand-new event notice pop up so naturally, I felt a genuine rush of excitement.

But that feeling only lasted a moment.

"...Jessica, have you ever heard of something called Grand Cross?"

"No, this is the first I'm hearing of it as well."

The second I realized this event was something that had come out during the period when I "hadn't been around," I dropped everything else and opened the wiki tab first thing to start gathering information as fast as I could.

The Ancient Empire was packed full of romance. (1)

Unfortunately, even the wiki tab I'd trusted so much turned up nothing related to Grand Cross.

And it wasn't even a case of the information simply being "incomplete," the way it had been with past events and the like...

"Nothing."

"Nothing at all."

"Just like the breast fat on Ignis, Vendalof, and Dornea."

"Commander, if you said that in front of the people in question, two of them—not counting Vendalof—would burst into tears."

The complete absence of any information had me, and the rest of the player base, thoroughly baffled.

But that bafflement didn't last long. Some of the veterans—no, the actual demons who'd still been playing the game back when the rest of us, myself included, got collectively isekai-kidnapped—started posting and cleared things up.

That was it.

Even those demons were seeing the event for the first time in their lives, so of course there was no information on it.

"Whoa! A brand-new event!"

"You've never seen it at all?"

"That's right!"

"That's incredible."

Naturally, once that fact came out, I and the rest of the player base started getting genuinely hyped about the appearance of something completely unknown.