Where Did the Neutrals Go?
"Still, there should be tens of millions of ships left, right? And the other factions may not outnumber them, but they've still got far more than the Zenobia Empire."
With that, I pulled up a minimap from the command console and tapped it with my finger.
"The event only ever scaled to a level players could actually handle. But if a full-blown war between the major factions broke out the way you're talking about?"
"…Then the Commanders' forces wouldn't be able to accomplish anything meaningful."
"Precisely — not in their current state, anyway."
I said that, then opened the management window for my base fleet and turned it toward Jessica.
"As you know, by other players' standards, my fleet isn't exactly large."
"True. Even counting the mining ships, you don't break a hundred and fifty."
"But once you hit the late game, the bare minimum Fleet Points a single Commander runs is fifteen hundred to two thousand. The average sits around five thousand."
"…Hmm."
"Granted, by then everyone's running almost nothing but cruisers and larger capital ships — aside from a handful of meat-shield corvettes. But the raw numbers still dwarf what we've got now. That much doesn't change."
"Ah…"
"So around that 'late game' they're talking about, a clan of fifty to a hundred people could casually field ten thousand ships from their fleets alone…"
"Taking the Earth Federation as an example — with a minimum of thirty thousand Commanders, the fleets they'd produce wouldn't be a joke. You'd genuinely be looking at over ten million ships."
"Exactly. But right now, nobody has the forces for any of that."
"Ah."
Jessica gave a small nod of understanding. I nodded back, left it at that, and decided to drop the subject — better to just keep browsing the gallery.
The moment I reopened it—
Huh. Yeah — where did those guys go?
The post snagged my interest, so I quietly clicked into it.
An Ordinary Day (2)
And after running a fact-check on the gallery regarding the so-called "neutral factions," this was the result:
Where the hell did these assholes go?
I mean, they were throwing absolute fits about building a fifth column — every kind of bullshit under the sun —
But the day of the actual founding rolls around, and other than me and a couple others, nobody shows up to the "let's make a neutral faction" meetup?
Did I just get baited? For real?
"…Oh."
Armed with the surprising intel that the vast majority of players who'd been screaming about a neutral nation had defected to the pirates, I immediately went looking for Marianne, who was still loafing around the base.
"Marianne, any chance you know roughly how many Commanders have joined the pirates by now…?"
"Mmm… sorry, Oppa. I don't keep track of that kind of thing one by one."
"Ah."
Come to think of it, Marianne wasn't stationed here as my "subordinate" the way Jessica and the others were. She was more of a guest commander, hanging around the base under the pretext of needing some mysterious energy source called Icarosneum — whatever that actually was.
More importantly, she was the head of one of those colossal "factions" Jessica and I had just been going sugoi over. Expecting her to know every individual headcount would have been the weird part.
Figuring I'd made a mistake, I was about to apologize on the spot —
"So just wait a second. There's an easy way to find out."
"Huh?"
—but Marianne herself acted like it was nothing, simply snapping her fingers once.
Jessica, of course, had no idea what that meant and just stared blankly at her.
Exactly fifteen seconds after Marianne's finger snap—
"What is it, Your Majesty!!!! Have these damn bastards finally laid a hand on you?!"
—a man in a classic pirate-coat outfit blasted through the reception room door like a gale, smashing it to pieces on his way in.
And this wasn't just any door. The room was classified as a facility convertible into an emergency bunker, so the door wasn't simple wood or sheet metal — it was built from the same armor plating used on cruisers and battleships…
Jessica's face stayed carefully blank, but the way her big rabbit ears shot straight up made it obvious she was losing her mind on the inside.
I, on the other hand, already knew exactly which pirate had just demolished someone else's doorframe.
"You absolute idiot! Why the hell are you smashing down my Oppa's base door like a maniac?!"
"Ghk—?!"
Marianne immediately drove a soccer kick into the man's side, folding him like a bow. Watching him crumple, I felt a sensation that was genuinely hard to put into words.
Because the man whose spine had just been bent into an L-shape was none other than Admiral Leonard — commander of the Empress's personal guard fleet, the so-called hunting dogs of the Pirate Empress, and one of the most powerful forces under her banner. Among players, he went by the unofficial nickname "Golden Sun," and ranked among the absolute top executives of the pirate coalition.
Right, his name is Leonard… isn't it? Or was it Leonid?
Not that it particularly mattered at the moment. Watching Leonard — who'd been spine-folded the instant he arrived, and was now having his head ground under a boot for the crime of destroying a door — I figured he might actually die if this kept up. I shook my head and set about defusing Marianne's rage first.
After somehow managing to calm her down (though "somehow" is generous — the second I hugged her from behind, she short-circuited like she'd been electrocuted and just… stopped), Leonard was left coughing on the floor, half his brilliant golden hair stained crimson from the thorough boot-stomping.
I turned to Marianne and asked why she'd summoned him in the first place.
She nodded as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
"Well, obviously — to get the answer to Oppa's question?"
"…"
Couldn't she have just asked one of her adjutants, the way I ask Jessica? Why go out of her way to personally summon one of her Seven Seas admirals and have him demolish a door on the way in was beyond me.
While I sat there short-circuiting over the whole situation, Marianne — still seated, one crossed leg bouncing idly — opened her mouth again.
"Leo. How many Commanders have joined our forces so far?"
"C-Commanders, Your Majesty? Well, that is… uh…"
From Leonard's perspective — a man who, much like me, normally left everything to his adjutants and only concerned himself with combat and the truly important matters — this was a bolt from a clear blue sky.
But the L-shaped spine kept delivering just enough stimulus to stop his brain from shorting out completely.
A moment later, whether out of pure survival instinct or because he'd actually known all along, Leonard answered with the expression of a man wringing every last drop from his brain.
"As of yesterday… about fifteen thousand? That many had come in."