Battle for the North (Rogue Merchant Book #4): LitRPG Series by Roman Prokofiev (best beach reads of all time .txt) 📗

English-speaking roots, the American alliance hadn’t forgotten that humiliation and went out of their way to sting their perpetual enemy.

Apart from the representatives of the Northerners and NAVY, there was a man from Hird, whom I was surprised to recognize as Dar. The alchemist gnome from the Bazaar turned out to be a big shot, maybe even the leader of the largest Russian-speaking alliance. He didn’t miss a beat, nodding to me as if we were old friends.

Officially, Hird didn’t want to fight Pandorum. Their interests didn’t intersect. However, the leaders of the growing alliance realized that they would be next on the Pandas’ list. After defeating the Northerners and occupying Dorsa, they would sooner or later focus on the second-largest astral fleet in Sphere. Pandorum wouldn’t allow for any competition, using one excuse or another to start a war. It was only a question of time.

Our conversation lasted several hours, involving various data, calculations, and tactical and strategical options. I was happy to meet sensible and fairly cynical people capable of clear thinking and prompt actions. All of us wanted the same thing: put an end to Pandorum’s leading role in the Sphere of Worlds.

We knew that even if we combined our forces, we couldn’t defeat the Pandas in direct confrontation. Farming the Astral Plane, taxes from conquered worlds, numerous vassal alliances, and unique NPCs gathered in Atrocity gave them an immeasurable advantage. The only way of breaking them was attacking all of their vulnerable points from all sides at once.

The task list for this campaign turned out to be quite long, and military operations were far from the most important item. All kinds of weapons would be unleashed; leaving our hands clean wasn’t an option.

Propaganda: The Pandas would have to become the villains in the eyes of the player community, their alliance, even their own members. An information war both through Sphere’s own channels and the external network would make them look like monsters. Thankfully, we didn’t even need to work hard on that — Pandorum had always preferred the image of the bad guys.

Initiative: we had to continue attacking them, terrorizing them on all fronts and making them stay on the defensive. We would haunt them in their sleep, breathing down their necks. It would give us a lot of advantages, starting with the shock from our ruthlessness and ending with exhaustion from constant raids.

Economics: wrecking the enemy economy was the foundation of victory. Unfortunately, we couldn’t block the Pandas’ main source of income — farming astral anomalies and taxing the vassal population of several conquered worlds. However, we could do something else, something that would seriously hamper their ability to steamroll our trump cards with juggernauts.

Ellurite: it was the source of many good things in Sphere, including airship fuel. Processed ellurite was consumed by mage reactors that powered domes, elemental engines, and spelljumpers. Actually, to a certain extent, all magitech devices in Sphere required ellurite, the so-called “liquid magic.” On paper, the amount of expended fuel didn’t look like much, but considering the sheer size of Pandorum’s astral fleet, its high level of activity, and the frequency of astral jumps, it added up to a high number. I ran the analysis: our enemies would have to buy two or three astral naves of ellurite on the Bazaar weekly. My idea was to cut them off from this market for good.

At first, it might have looked impossible. My proposition only made everyone laugh. Ellurite was the strategic resource of Sphere of Worlds. Its Bazaar supply was immense and couldn’t be bought out even with our combined efforts. Even changing its price seemed challenging. On top of that, there were multiple sources of ellurite, some of them controlled by Pandorum themselves. In short, this seemed unreal.

But the longer I explained my scheme, the more attention our allies gave me. In the end, after looking at the data and the preliminary plan, Dar fell silent, and Joker nodded in agreement, implacable. They knew it could work out.

The concept was simple. If we couldn’t cut off ellurite from the Bazaar, we needed to cut off the Bazaar from Sphere. Now that would be a real shake-up!

The operation we christened Black Friday required thorough preparations and an enormous budget. However, if it succeeded, the expended resources would be recouped with a giant profit, significantly weakening our common enemy.

Brick by brick, all parts of our plan were designed to erode the foundation of Pandorum’s power, triggering an avalanche of events that would destroy them once and for all.

“In real life, I’m a psychologist,” Joker said at the end of the meeting. “Sphere’s a good demonstrator of how societies rise and decay. I have a theory. Would you like to hear it?”

After the others stayed silent, agreeing to his offer, he continued. “Any gaming community goes through periods of creation, surge, stagnation, and collapse. When an important element that brought people together — a charismatic leader, warm atmosphere, comfortable gameplay — disappears, the rest starts crumbling down. The social fabric of the community bursts at the seams and inevitably unravels. Stopping this process is almost impossible. Your power, Russians, is that your communities are monolithic, even the majority of large alliances. That’s why I prefer working with you.”

“Pandorum, in contrast, is far from homogeneous. Germans, British people, Scandinavians, even your compatriots... As I see it, the glue holding them together is the ability to always win, be the first. As soon as the Pandas start losing, forfeiting their leadership, as soon as they’re no longer the elite — they’ll fall apart. Our job is to pull out the first stone.”

We shook each other’s hands and parted ways. The coalition had been created, our duties determined, our roles assigned. It was time to implement our plans.

* * *

The preparation and the first stage of the enterprise would take at least a week. For starters