Bruceus reached out to every first-round player.
Except, of course, for Drool.
“Is the price difference really that high?” Vrekk was genuinely surprised by the difference between the two ammunition types.
One you could burn through without thinking.
The other required actual budgeting.
“That’s right.
Standard rounds have a fixed supply.”
“I’ve observed this carefully.”
Bruceus hadn’t just called the first-round players together on impulse.
He had spent time observing before he made his move.
“You have to give the Stellaris dev team credit for the details.
However many rounds Antor produces, that’s exactly how many are available to buy.”
“It follows reality completely.”
“Which means the supply can theoretically be bought out.”
The first-round players exchanged knowing smiles.
Ammunition was a consumable.
Exploration was ongoing.
Drool eventually decided he needed to stock up.
On his way into the engineering section to buy rounds, he ran into Vrekk.
Drool’s instinct was to bolt.
“Where are you going?”
Drool laughed awkwardly and played dumb.
“What a coincidence, Vrekk.”
Vrekk rolled his eyes.
“You little rascal.
Quite the move you pulled.”
“Hehehe, Vrekk, I don’t know what you mean.” Drool kept up the act with an innocent smile.
“Alright, they’re just two miners.”
“I’m not a petty person.” Vrekk gave Drool a pat on the shoulder.
“Back to buy bullets, right?” he asked.
“Yeah.
Ammunition burns fast down there.
those rock worms, one after another.”
“Go ahead, Antor’s got stock.
I’m going to mine now.”
With that, Vrekk left without pausing.
His backpack was noticeably bulging.
Drool rubbed his chin.
“Why does that smile look so fake?”
He didn’t think much of it.
Getting his ammunition topped up was the priority.
“What?
This expensive?”
“Are standard rounds just a lie?”
He thought it through.
Ammunition was a consumable.
No ammunition meant no kills.
No kills meant no Reputation.
No Reputation meant the exploration would stall. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
If he became the reason the run failed, the backlash would be catastrophic.
Drool gritted his teeth and bought anyway.
The scheme the other first-round players were running didn’t last two full days before it collapsed.
Drool started noticing that every time he went to buy ammunition, other players were already there.
“What are the odds?”
The real reason it fell apart was a traitor in his own stream chat.
“The first-round players are buying out the ammunition!”
One line in the comments snagged Drool’s attention.
“What?”
It turned out the other first-round players didn’t have as much Reputation as Drool, but they had enough.
Everyone was a talented FPS player.
Bruceus, for instance, was every bit Drool’s equal with a rifle, in any FPS game, consistently at the top of the bracket.
But his contribution points weren’t as high as Drool.
Not because his aim was worse.
Purely because Drool was more reckless, more willing to throw himself into things.
Any two first-round players combined outmatched Drool’s total Reputation alone.
As for whether the first-round players could actually absorb all the available standard rounds, that was underestimating how many rock-borers were down there.
Standard rounds were the essential consumable for underground exploration.
Rock-borers converted directly into Reputation under standard rounds.
When all the first-round players pooled their purchasing power, the total was enough to buy out Antor’s entire production capacity.
As for why Drool kept running into them every single time.
Simple.
The moment they spotted Drool heading over, one of them would sweep the whole stock before he arrived.
They had someone stationed there watching for him.
The most absurd part was that Drool’s stream chat had spotted it on the very first day.
And every single viewer kept quiet.
Watching Drool get played was more satisfying than any profit they could have made.
But with tens of thousands of viewers in the stream, someone was always going to break ranks.
By the second day someone couldn’t hold it.
Through wave after wave of identical messages flooding the chat, Drool finally found the pattern.
“Every time I run into a first-round player, they’ve all been waiting there specifically to cut me off?”
Drool, having learned the whole story, was dumbfounded.
“Holy crap!”
“You animals!
You absolute animals!
Every last one of you!”
Perfect timing.
Bruceus, the ringleader himself, was just walking into the engineering section as Drool arrived.
“You animal!”
Bruceus lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly.
“Let’s be reasonable here.
I’ve got one miner.
My whole squad has three total.
I live in fear of losing even one of them.”
Drool froze, giving an awkward laugh.
Fair enough, honestly.
A normal squad ran four at minimum, most had five.
Only Drool had six.
In terms of mining progress, of course he was the fastest.
“You played me, I played you. The source of this chapter is g.com.
we’re even.” Bruceus picked his nose and said.
“even?
Do you have any idea how much Reputation I lost?
My Reputation!” Drool snapped and lunged.
Bruceus snapped his fingers calmly.
Vrekk and several other first-round player victims materialized behind Drool and formed a ring around him.
Drool looked around at the faces surrounding him.
The outrage on his face locked up.
“Haha…
can we maybe call it even?”
Vrekk, Bruceus, and the rest drew slow fingers across their throats and smiled.
“You have some nerve asking that right now.”
Vrekk waved a hand.
“Bring him to my room.”
“No, I’m afraid of pain!”
After a thorough roughing up, Drool was left behind with wounded dignity and, if we’re being honest, a few genuine tears.
Of course, most of it was content.
The victims had vented a little, worked out some frustration, and moved on.
Yes, they had been played.
But even without Drool’s scheme, their miner count might not have been any higher.
It was purely the satisfaction of getting one back at someone who had gotten one over on them.
And naturally, a good amount of it was played up for the stream.
It also helped to liven up the increasingly chilly atmosphere of the camp.
As time passed, fear crept back over the miners one by one.
The strange sounds and movements kept pulling at already frayed nerves.
*Rumble Rumble Crack Skritch Skritch Bang*
The earth trembled again, but this time the amplitude was very low.
“Warning…”
A fragile balance gave way.
A long, thin slab of rock, unable to bear the pressure any longer, began to fracture.
The workers sheltering beneath the energy shield dome looked up in horror as the slab dropped from above, and the chain reaction it triggered sent a cold shock through every person present.
The camp’s dome was on the verge of collapse.
The sound of the rock being crushed was like a heavy hammer hitting everyone’s chest.
Panic spread through the camp.
A mysterious fluctuation quickly changed the area of collapse, forcefully pushing back the boulder that was about to fall, blocking the area that was about to collapse.
The pulse originated from the engineering section nearby, from the man every miner in the camp had come to think of as their foundation.
Aldric took a slow breath.
The Federation had its own psionic corps.
A commander was never supposed to use psychic energy to directly manipulate reality.
It was roughly equivalent to using a gold ingot as a club.
Wasteful and beneath the position.
The miners stared at what Aldric had just done, something that made no sense by any measure they had, and they instinctively worshipped him.
Although they hadn’t truly escaped their perilous situation.
“The Federation…
the angel…
will shelter us…
because…
our piety…
will allow us to survive the catastrophe…”