The Empress Surrenders
As the broadcast rolled on, the watching players split between elation and despair — and the prevailing consensus settled on something simple: might as well stick around and watch the close-quarters fight that was about to go down.
But then…
The Pirate Empress's flagship, the Empress, closed the distance and locked onto the player's fleet flagship — the Overseer.
And roughly three minutes later—
With the Pirate Empress's sudden surrender to that one player, the entire event chain simply… ended. Every last soul watching had their brain short-circuit on the spot.
Of course, unlike the vast majority of players—
"AAAAAAHHHHH!!!"
—there was one person who had genuinely, sincerely believed that Icarus would win against the Empress. The former leader of the veteran alliance, and current clan master of the Justice clan: Arcadia.
She was currently screaming her lungs out in pure joy inside her own commander's quarters.
An outcome no one had expected. Still, as for how the event had actually concluded, and how the rankings would be tallied — the players had no way of knowing just yet.
And the reason for that wasn't anything particularly special.
Amazingly — whether they simply hadn't calculated the results in real time, or whether there was no dedicated monitoring program at all — the admins had the sheer audacity to drop a global notice saying the event settlement would come in two weeks.
Naturally, the chat windows and gallery boards transformed into the flaming gates of hell itself.
Of course, as always, the admins didn't so much as blink at this kind of meltdown. And thanks to all that admin-directed aggro, interest in the fact that Icarus had accepted the Pirate Empress's surrender quietly withered away — a bizarre little side effect.
Then, before anyone knew it, two weeks had passed since the event ended.
Excluding the players whose bases had been completely wiped out and who had since gone dark, the remaining players could barely contain their excitement. After more than half a year of that godforsaken event, the results were finally dropping today.
To be precise, though — over the past two weeks, pirate raids had all but stopped. No space monsters were spawning either. So the players had been reduced to resource gathering, construction, upgrades, and the like… essentially forced to play an SF management sim instead of an SF war game. Starved for content and growing increasingly feral, they were all the more rabid for whatever "looks-important" event the admins were about to drop.
And at last… the global announcement from the admins appeared before every player's eyes.
The moment those utterly deranged numbers hit the screen, the players live-posting in the gallery absolutely lost their minds.
Of course, as with most players, the ones who read only the first line of a notice and immediately started reacting were a tiny minority. Everyone else ignored whatever was happening in the gallery and kept reading the announcement straight through.