Icarus Drops from Third?
By this point, the users had started to notice something was… off.
That was the thing.
Right up until the battle started, Icarus's presence had been impossible to miss — lending out Tannhauser for the users' gate assaults and making himself useful in a dozen other ways. And yet, at some point, his presence had simply… vanished.
Naturally, the suspicion wasn't confined to the chat room. The gallery was asking the exact same questions.
[Icarus and a bunch of other users who just naturally faded out at some point.jpg]
To be precise, it's not just Icarus — a pretty solid number of users had their presence just evaporate mid-fight.
What's going on with that?
A guy like Icarus, with those signature Krakens of his, has no business just blending into the background.
Given the makeup of Icarus's fleet, a deployment should have left an unmistakable, overwhelming signature somewhere on the battlefield. And yet, throughout the entire Central Zone Grand Cross siege, the ships he was famous for — Kraberos and the rest of his specialty vessels — never once made their presence felt.
[Krakens going berserk.jpg]
Weren't we using Icarus's Tannhauser to stage fleet assaults into the Central Zone in the first place?
And then at some point the guy himself, his fleets, his superhumans — all of them just vanished off the map.
Where the hell did everyone go?
And it didn't stop there. Even when the event results finally rolled in — even as that long, brutal Grand Cross event drew to a close and the results were broadcast to every user — Icarus's presence remained completely absent.
[Grand Cross event conclusion notice screenshot.jpg]
The event's wrapping up right now.
And his presence still hasn't come back from America. That make any sense to you?
Faced with a situation that made no sense at all, most of the userbase could only tilt their heads in collective confusion.
But that confusion didn't last long. The moment the Grand Cross event ended, two pieces of news dropped — and users who had been grinning at the thought of their rewards, or still frowning over the mystery, suddenly found giant question marks hovering over their heads.
Icarus — dropped from third place?!
The first of the two was the ranking recalculation based on event scores. The problem was that the new rankings carried enough impact to blow every previous theory clean off the table.
Commanders, thank you for your hard work throughout the event!
Based on the scores earned during this event, Commanders' rankings have been updated!
Only the top 10 are displayed here — please check the full rankings through your individual ranking systems!
1st: Betelgeuse
2nd:Arcadia
3rd:Monalisa
4th:Antares
5th:Snow Leopard
6th:ToothFairy
7th:Hippo
8th:Rio Grande
9th:Bersaglieri
10th:Tenta
In a stunning turn, every so-called "solo player" among the previous top-ten rankers had been completely knocked out — and those seats had been claimed by the leaders of the great clans.