Swarming the Grand Cross
Because of the sheer distances involved, the deployed users ended up scattered all over the Grand Cross interior, landing in sparse, widely separated clusters.
Some, unfortunately, didn't even make it inside the Grand Cross's internal zone at all…
Those who hadn't earned the favor of the Dice God sometimes dropped straight into the middle of an active firefight — right in front of a defensive line trading heavy fire — and lost entire fleets for nothing. It happened more often than anyone liked to admit.
What mattered, though, was this: our Central Zone users, fifty thousand strong. No — once the scavengers who'd come sneaking in to pick up the spoils of a fight that now looked winnable were counted, the number climbed to eighty thousand. The moment that total offensive crashed down, the Grand Cross's command AI shed its swaggering composure in an instant. All that remained was the face of a total nerd getting dogpiled by AIs and players alike.
Of course, only the people actually fighting — the Central Zone users — thought of it as a "desperate struggle." From the perspective of the other zones, who had already finished their own boss raids and were sitting back to recover, the whole spectacle looked bizarre beyond belief.
[jpg of three different users' battleships performing ramming attacks on a dreadnought from the Grand Cross defense fleet]
Before the fight started we were barely over fifty thousand combined, give or take.
Then extra people just kept pouring in from god knows where
and now it's ballooned to almost a hundred thousand
Before the offensive even began, people had been shaking their heads and saying the total force was barely scraping past fifty thousand. The moment the Grand Cross started taking a beating, nearly twice that number of users sprouted out of nowhere like mushrooms after rain.
[jpg of a single dreadnought belching black smoke from every section of its hull as it rams the main gate of the fortress, which is pouring anti-air fire in every direction inside the star system]
I thought you guys didn't have ships
What the actual hell are you thinking pulling crap like that?
On top of that, people were openly talking about looting the Grand Cross's ships and every other scrap of chaos imaginable. The gallery was a dopamine firehose. For the users watching, it was like getting permanently topped off.
But the single biggest culture shock for the other zones was something else entirely.
Your ships? All mine now.
[jpg of dozens of superhumans estimated at SSS-grade racing across the surface of the Super Dreadnought flagship of the Grand Cross defense fleet; they're moving so fast they leave afterimage trails like threads of yarn whipping across the hull]
The superhumans running around on the ship surface are so fast it literally looks like yarn fluttering across the plating
They were supposed to be running a boss raid, and instead half of them treated ship capture as the higher priority. Central Zone combat looked nothing like what the other zones did, and the culture shock hit the outsiders hard.
Naturally, once the Central Zone users eventually saw those reactions, they would grumble that this was just how they scraped by to survive… but for the moment they had no way of knowing what was being said about them. So the users still chewing on the Grand Cross like a swarm of army ants simply ignored the gallery and poured every last scrap of effort into growing their fleet power.
One-third of the force had joined the offensive from the start. Another third had shown up pure out of rage. The last third were the freeloaders who only sprinted over once victory looked certain, hoping to snatch a piece of the fruit. And on top of all of them—
—KRA-KOOM! BOOM!
—FWOOOOSH!
—came the combat fleets of Daidalos, eyes completely rolled back after taking the first punch from the Grand Cross, ramming anything that moved. From every direction, millions of years of ancient scrap fortress were being torn apart. The Grand Cross command AI could not stop itself from weeping.
Granted, from the AI's perspective the entire situation was pure, unrelenting bad luck, so a certain amount of self-pity was understandable. But at the end of the day the root cause of everything was the command AI itself. If the users ever saw that pitiful display they would call it a hypocritical little shit, and instead of one beating it would walk away with three or four extra. The Grand Cross command AI really ought to have been grateful that neither players nor NPCs could see its current face.
While that spectacularly filthy chaos unfolded on every front, two figures began to stand out among the users fighting inside the Grand Cross itself. And who those two were… well, looking back on it, it was almost inevitable—