The Long-Awaited Level 5

"Please don't be like that, Miss Jessica♡"

"Miss Pashtura."

"I enjoyed it, after all…♡ Haaah, this feeling—as if the Commander's resonance is still flowing through my chest and belly…♡"

"You see that, Commander?"

"Tsk."

At any rate, the gacha was done. I decided to throw myself into the long, grinding effort of tackling the tasks ahead of me one by one.

And among those future concerns—joining a faction, the gacha that would inevitably come around again, wars with other factions or players, and the rest—I resolved to handle the most important one first.

Namely, the base's Level 5 upgrade, which now needed to be taken seriously.

Before that, though, a look at the base's current state…

Right. Open base status window.

Perhaps because the only new unlock at Stage 4 had been the Rare Resource Synthesis Plant, the list didn’t look all that different from the last time I’d checked it.

Next… base upgrade window.

From Stage 5 onward, as you can see, a whole slate of brand-new facilities unlocked all at once alongside the usual expansions.

Aigoo, that’s a lot.

Granted, the resource cost had skyrocketed nearly tenfold from Stage 4—an absolute gut-punch of a price hike that completely abandoned any sense of fair dealing—but looking at that long, beautiful list of new construction options…

Is this day finally here?

…and at that final line about the stasis release sitting right there in bold, I felt my mental state—still reeling from the catastrophic gacha—stir back to life, if only a little.

Of course, who would wake up was still a complete unknown. But at the very least, it wouldn’t be a total dud like the gacha I’d just thrown into the void.

With that thought, I turned to Jessica beside me and decided to check how many resources we actually had on hand.

"Jessica, how many resources do we have stockpiled right now?"

"Hmm… one moment."

It occurred to me, not for the first time, why something this trivial couldn’t just be pulled up on the command console—why I always had to go through an adjutant like Jessica for it. The same old question surfaced again, but—

"Ah, found it. About twenty-five thousand minerals, and rare resources… around eight hundred?"

"Hmm."

Fortunately for the developers, Jessica’s report came faster than I could finish that line of thought. I shelved the complaint and went back to assessing our situation.

"Minerals I can live with. But why are the rare resources that low?"

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"Well, before, the Causality Fixation Device you kept rolling at least spat out piles of rare resources. This time there was almost nothing?"

"…"

My face hardened at that, and Jessica hurriedly waved her hands, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠insisting it was a joke as she continued.

"I’m kidding. It’s just that you’ve had so many places to spend minerals lately."

"…Did we really use that much?"

Jessica nodded, glanced at her tablet, and spoke again.

"Yes. Starting with the extra docking berths you’d been putting off for one reason or another, you’ve been running construction projects nonstop."

Calling it simultaneous was a stretch—more accurately, the moment one project finished, the next one started. Still, I nodded in agreement, and Jessica pulled up a hologram beside her to elaborate further.

"Plus, there was that commander who snuck in and hit our resource zones recently without so much as a declaration of war."

"Ah."

At her words, I recalled the little skirmish from just a few days ago and nodded again.

"But didn’t our pirate friends go and ransack that commander’s base and bring back minerals for us?"

"The pirate ships took so much moderate-to-heavy damage that most of those minerals went into repairs."

"Hmm…"

"On top of that, we lost a resource mining ship, so one entire resource zone and three destroyers went down with it."

"Ah… right. We had to rebuild those from scratch."

In short, everything had been spent where it needed to be spent. The realization that I’d been fretting over an upgrade without the resources to fund it left me feeling a little ashamed.

And then, about a week later—

Good. That’s taken care of.

Including the newly produced resource mining ships, I had stuck straws into more than thirty surrounding resource zones and sucked them dry. The result: my precious Stage 5 base upgrade was finally chugging along at full speed.

And at the same time, the long-awaited update rolled out alongside it…