Decarabia and the Daedalus Migration
Of course, it wasn’t as if there were no other superhumans capable of “command.”
“But Commander, it’s not like there are no superhumans who can handle command, right?”
“Tiamat, as she herself always admits, only knows aircraft and carriers.”
“Ah, that’s true.”
In Tiamat’s case—whose character was to wrap herself in as little as possible while boldly declaring that underwear was pure decoration—she was clearly a commander-type superhuman. Yet, as she herself certified, she was thoroughly a one-trick “carrier and strike craft specialist,” which left her completely useless in fleet battles. To put it more precisely, it was less that she couldn’t do it at all and more that whether she did it or not made no meaningful difference.
And as for the last remaining superhuman, Grianar…
“…Honestly, it’s hard to trust her with that kind of responsibility.”
“I don’t know how she ended up with that reputation, but Grianar isn’t the commander type to begin with.”
She was far removed from personally directing anything. Her role was that of a buff totem who radiated enhancements simply by existing. Even in combat, if you had to classify her, she was the type who jumped in herself and fought like the rest of them.
“Anyway, looking at the end result, it means that right now the only person in our forces who can handle fleet battles is Belial.”
“That was more serious than I thought.”
“It’s not for nothing that after every fight Belial is completely drained and groaning.”
“Aha.”
Our poor Belial, while the other superhumans ran wild smashing everything and declaring how much fun they were having, was stuck alone with the fleet, forced to command it in my place. And that meant that although it had never happened so far, if Belial ever took a serious injury mid-battle and ended up confined to the medical bay, the fleet’s command buffs would drop the instant she went down. Performance would plummet like a rock. So for me, the sudden appearance of Decarabia—this hexagonal fleet-command superhuman—at exactly this timing filled me with pure joy.
There was one more reason the timing felt truly perfect.
“Besides, Jessica, we just received that ‘Rapid Enhancement Ticket’ as an event reward.”
“Ah, come to think of it, we did have that, didn’t we?”
“It’s the perfect item for Decarabia, who’s still level 1.”
It was the Rapid Enhancement Ticket that had come as a set with the fifty Dimensional Causality Anchor usage rights—gacha tickets—as ranking rewards for the Grand Cross event.
“Although the gacha crashed and burned so hard it spent a while sitting in storage…”
“Even if it was ‘a while,’ it wasn’t even half a day, was it?”
“The important thing is that the Rapid Enhancement Ticket we left unused because of that has finally found its rightful place!”
“Ah, yes.”
After wrapping things up like that, I raised Decarabia to level 30, immediately handed her over to Belial for one-on-one man-to-man (girl-to-girl?) coaching so the leveling could continue, and at the same time I was already progressing another extremely important matter.
What was that, you ask? The migration to Daedalus—something many people already knew about, and something every other user was watching with careful eyes.
Of course the migration itself could proceed without any problems, smoothly and peacefully. That was because the users near Daedalus had both their bases and fleets heavily damaged when the Grand Cross fired its main gun, so they couldn’t move for a while. The remaining users had also taken severe losses while clearing the event, which meant they couldn’t simply charge into Daedalus whose power and defensive facilities had been shredded either.
Of course, three days had already passed since the event ended…
…and the fact that Daedalus’s completely exhausted defensive forces had recovered to some degree only added more weight to the other users’ hesitation.
The only annoying points were a few practical ones. I had scattered all my resource-mining forward bases and mining fleets around Tannhauser. Moving the base to Daedalus meant I would have to dismantle every mining fleet and every forward base and rebuild them from scratch. Mining fleets were one thing, but if I skipped the forward bases out of laziness, resource income would start having problems. Like it or not, I would have to spend thirty to fifty thousand minerals each, build them, and properly upgrade them.
The other problem was that because I was relocating to Daedalus, the question of who would receive the Central Docking zone of Tannhauser—where my base had been sitting—suddenly became an issue. And this wasn’t something I could just shrug off with “eh, give it to whoever and be done with it.”
“Commander, we’re getting not only communications but also cargo containers constantly arriving from Tannhauser to Daedalus.”
“Hmm.”
On top of Tannhauser itself, new users were docking at the intermediate hubs I had recently acquired and at Daedalus’s escort outposts, making the whole situation chaotic. To settle the chaos, I felt the need to start appointing a large batch of new local chiefs.
It was time for new chiefs.
Fortunately, finding a chief for Tannhauser wasn’t particularly difficult. Unlike the other outposts where the “chief hiring” problem had given me headaches, Tannhauser already had its own self-governing management body among the docked users.
Just looking at reactions like that, the management body of Tannhauser turned out to be none other than the mercenary “agency” users who arranged employment for mercenary players. At first I had quietly wondered whether the Tannhauser users would accept them, given that the agencies had always felt closer to middle management. But the agencies must have had a firmer grip on the mercenaries than expected, because selecting Tannhauser’s new chief went far more smoothly than I anticipated.