Grand Cross (2)
Word was spreading from every direction that players should gather in one place and launch a full-scale offensive on the Grand Cross fortress.
If that was how things were going, joining the other players would at least spare me from wasting strength on my own, so I prepared to leave base at once and head for the rally point in the Central Zone.
But right at that moment—
At that unmissable warning, I halted the fleet I had been about to launch and decided to sit this one out for a while.
Grand Cross. (2)
Obviously that alert wasn’t showing for me alone. The other players began scrambling to get clear as well.
Of course, at this point there was no way for anyone to know just how powerful the so-called primary weapon — the Grand Cross Cannon — actually was, no matter how badly they wanted to find out.
Players who could simply leave the danger zone moved their fleets out on their own. Everyone else, guided by the thoroughly sensible thought of why take damage if I don’t have to?, treated survival as the priority. Some even burned their once-a-month emergency base teleport — a decision of national-salvation caliber — just to get out from under that unknown main gun.
But as ever in this world, a certain number of players were always going to take a different path.
For the bases that had been forcibly swallowed into the blast zone simply because the designated range was so absurdly huge—
The prevailing judgment was that if they ran, jackal packs of other players might snatch their outposts the moment they left. So countless of them chose to dig in and trust nothing but their outposts’ defensive stats and the near-invincible base barriers.
Still, those cases at least had a sturdy outpost for a backbone. They had something to believe in. You could still file them under “normal people” without stretching the definition too far.
The real problem wasn’t those outpost holders. It was the players already pickled in pure lunacy.
Those were the ones broadcasting, with their entire bodies, something along the lines of Oh, Grand Cross Cannon? Try me and die. They parked their fleets dead center in the bombardment range and simply sat there.
To be fair, they did have things worth believing in. Unlike the other ships players had scavenged and earned so far, they had Super Dreadnoughts — hulls with outright deranged durability. And then there was the fleet barrier: a system that didn’t get much attention, but once activated could tank fleet-grade barrages without much trouble.
With that raw, swaggering display getting live-relayed across the gallery, players from other zones and everyone nearby treated it as a free show: sit still and let someone else confirm the Grand Cross Cannon’s actual power for them.
And if the cannon’s damage turned out weaker than expected, plenty of them were already planning to dive the fortress the second that became clear.
But three days later, with every player’s eyes glued to the scene whether they liked it or not—
Kuuuuuuuuu…
At last, right in front of the players, the weapon whose name had been repeated so often it was burned into memory — the Grand Cross Cannon — opened fire.
The cocky player fleet tried to dig in the moment a superluminal gamma-ray burst came screaming out of the Grand Cross Cannon’s muzzle, a torrent of energy that literally seemed to swallow the void. They slammed the fleet barrier online and braced for the hold.
The instant that torrent hit them, the fleet barrier — a shield sturdy enough to soak fleet-grade fire for a long time — failed to hold its shape for even a single second. It popped like a soap bubble.
With the barrier gone, the Super Dreadnought that was supposed to tank for the ships behind it lost its own shields in less than a tenth of a second. The frontal armor, plastered so thick people had compared it to an outpost’s outer plating, melted and boiled away as fast as a scoop of vanilla ice cream left in front of a space heater.
And while the bow was dissolving, nothing else about the hull was going to stay healthy either. The Super Dreadnought crumpled into something that looked less like a capital ship and more like the word shrdnought typed with a fist. The player, panicking, tried to force an emergency fleet recall as fast as humanly possible—
But as noted above, the fleet barrier and the front armor of a Super Dreadnought stacked with every armor enhancement available had lasted maybe 0.9 and 0.8 seconds respectively. By the time that player’s finger hit the button, the Super Dreadnought was already gone except for a scrap of thruster section. The ships behind it fared no better; under the Grand Cross Cannon’s output, their hulls lasted less than a second before blooming into fireballs one after another.
Naturally, watching the absolute best defense players could field get punched through in under five seconds total left the community in pure, speechless shock.
Of course a player fleet was always going to have less raw bulk than a fixed outpost. Still, somewhere in the back of everyone’s mind sat the quiet hope that the outposts — the ones that had been sitting in that space from the start, built to stay put — might actually tank the shot.
That hope clung especially hard to one place: the Fluxas Interstellar Fortress, a Level 5 fortress-class outpost under the Central Base Alliance. Unlike the shakier holdings around it, Fluxas had docking player base barriers and its own fortress walls. Surely that would be enough. Some players even started muttering, If I’d known it was going to be like this, I should’ve run there and bought time. Quietly or not, people had decided a Level 5 fortress could eat that insane barrage and live.
Then the Grand Cross torrent reached Fluxas.
KRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!!
Fluxas’s formidable defense batteries, hangars, and every other external protrusion fused into the outer armor plating in an instant—