The Grand Cross's Final Curtain

One of them had been forcibly appointed as the group-project leader — no, as the commander — but if anyone was going to pull that off, it had to be a Central Zone user.

Under the Central Zone motto of If you can't avoid it, enjoy it!, Snow Leopard put his talents as a commander on full display and wielded real leadership. The other one, of course, was Raksha — widely regarded as the single most skilled pilot among every player alive.

It wasn't as though no other users were making their mark. Still, one of them spent every second barking orders in the chat room as the overall commander, so his presence was impossible to ignore. The other leveraged that infamous skill of his, carving through the interior of the Grand Cross without hesitation alongside the players supporting him, hammering every weak point in the defensive lines until they collapsed. He couldn't exactly "command" the other users in the formal sense, but he followed pure instinct — dragging players around with him and, at just the right moment, smashing the Grand Cross's counterattacks flat as a living warhammer.

No matter how frantically the Grand Cross's command AI scrambled to respond, Snow Leopard issued orders while scrupulously protecting the frontline players' autonomy. The result was a swarm of users freely deploying their own personal tactics and making a complete fool of the AI. And when the inevitable cracks showed — because these players had never once practiced coordination with each other —

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Raksha, who by all rights should have been fighting an entirely different fleet somewhere else, appeared like a ghost and punched yet another hole in the command AI's defenses. Under the twin-headed assault of the Central Coalition's two lead horses, the command AI was left with nothing to show for itself except the spectacle of being thoroughly, mercilessly, and repeatedly dismantled.

And after the players — plus Daidalos's combat fleets — had thrown themselves into that ferocious fighting with everything they had…

Reading a message that players from every other zone had already seen ages ago, the Central Zone users finally understood that they had won.

The fruits of victory are sweet… probably?

The moment the event message appeared, the end of the mobile fortress they had been thrashing around inside came roaring into view.

Kuuuuuuuuu…!!!

Maybe it was the sheer novelty of watching a mobile fortress — no, an entire planetary system — annihilate itself under a black hole whose mass had hit critical mass and was now growing exponentially out of control. Or maybe…

…or maybe it was watching the fortress they had barely scraped through hell to take down try, right up to the very last second, to flip them one final massive middle finger.

Our players abandoned their joyful ship-looting and the last-minute interior smashing they'd planned for self-sufficient rewards. Instead, they scrambled to get their ships and superhumans out of the Grand Cross's interior — out of the black hole's gravity well — and preserve what they still had.

And as they did, they nodded along with their own good sense, a warm little glow of self-satisfaction settling in.

Of course, the frantic evacuation was only ever about keeping their precious fleets and superhumans from being flattened by the black hole. So when, a short while later, the black hole itself collapsed for one reason or another and simply vanished, the players watched the far-faster-than-expected disappearance of both the black hole and everything that had once been a mobile fortress — and were left with the overwhelming sense that the universe truly was beyond anyone's understanding.

Still, they filled the quiet with idle chatter, trading commentary on the rare spectacle of something compressing into a single point and vanishing under a black hole. It was a strangely peaceful stretch of time, calm and unhurried, minutes slipping by one after another — until, right then…