Chapter 39

Posted by Kuze, ? Views, Released on January 2, 2025

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Chapter 39. Raising the Empress (2)

Our Mary Ann, Marian…

…Since calling her ambiguously every time felt weird, I decided to just call her Marian in my head.

Contrary to my expectations, I realized that the curriculum to turn the Pirate Empress (fake) into the Pirate Empress (real) was way more thorough than I imagined.

“Ugh, huff, I finished the training!”

Right after Marian reported to me that she had completed her training…

—————————————-

—————————————-

Seeing the event pop up like that, I nodded and gave Marian an order.

“Good job. Go ahead and take a break for now.”

“Ah, yes…”

Hearing my words, Marian made a strange expression and left.

After Marian completely left, only Jessica and I remained in the command center.

I let out a deep sigh and started venting to Jessica, sounding utterly baffled.

“Seriously, with the curriculum laid out so clearly through quests, what on earth were those guys doing to get bad endings?”

“…Yeah, I wonder.”

I mean, I’ve seen those veteran players always leaving comments like -[90% of them go straight to bad endings lololol].

So, naturally, I thought the difficulty level of raising her would be insane, and I struggled to come up with all sorts of plans and worries about how to raise her properly.

But when I actually started, seeing such a solid manual and curriculum laid out…

I couldn’t help but feel disappointed, thinking, “Were those so-called ‘veterans’ just failing to execute even the most basic stuff?”

To shake off this disappointment, I decided to browse the community forum I had open to watch fools make fools of themselves.

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Title: Hey, I’m a newbie. How do I get the Pirate Empress?

Author: VanillaFlavoredSodaIce

Content: [Image of the Pirate Empress]

I saw this going around the gallery, and I want to recruit and raise her too.

But I heard you can recruit her early with luck. How do I do it?

Comments:

-[Newbie, even if you recruit the Pirate Empress early, she’s trash and unusable…]

-[Instead of that, you should tell them the difficulty of raising her is insane]

-[For real]

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While reading the newbie’s post and the comments, I couldn’t help but chuckle.

“The difficulty of raising her is hard?”

Who in their right mind would say that when the curriculum is so clearly laid out?

But as soon as I saw the next post, I couldn’t hide my confusion…

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Title: It’s hard to explain in comments, so I’m writing this. If anyone got the Pirate Empress, read this.

Author: Iron of the Deep Sea

Content: [Image of a bald eagle staring straight ahead with the American flag in the background], [Proof of completing Pirate Empress events 1, 2, and 3], [Scene of getting a 5% discount on mercenaries from the Pirate Empress]

First, let me verify myself.

Long story short, if you successfully recruit the Empress now, right?

And you realize that the one you recruited is the Empress, right?

Then, quests start popping up like crazy, telling you to train the Empress this way and that way.

That’s a trap. ㅇㅇ

… … … … … …

—————————————-

I read up to that point and felt momentarily confused.

“Wait, seriously?”

In games, when a quest tells you to do something, you’re supposed to do it, right? What kind of nonsense is this?

But I figured I’d finish reading before making any judgments, so I held onto my sanity and kept reading.

—————————————-

… … … … … …

You might be wondering what this is all about, but let me break it down for you clearly.

You’re doing everything the quest tells you to, right? Well, turns out the Empress character’s mental state goes boom, and she bails. LOL.

So yeah, it’s basically a straight shot to the bad ending. LMAO.

A few people got so mad about this that they tried to dig into the source code and do all sorts of crazy stuff.

But turns out, the code is so tangled up with the game’s core that it’s like spaghetti, and even the devs can’t roll it back. LOL.

Originally, if you just figured out the Empress thing, you could progress smoothly.

But these idiots messed up the code so bad that it’s beyond repair. Yep.

Anyway, if you follow the quest as is, you’re screwed. But if you ignore the quest, that’s not great either.

Because then the Pirate Empress might start hating you or your favorability with her could tank.

In this game, there’s no visible favorability gauge. You have to manage character favorability and performance based on “feel.”

You think that’s gonna work out well? Nah.

So you gotta handle quests appropriately while also chatting with other characters to manage favorability, like that other guy showed.

Plus, you gotta train hard so that when she leaves, it’s on her own terms, not because she bailed on your base.

And you gotta manage all this without the quest’s help, so it’s ridiculously tough.

—

Comments:

– [What a trash game LOL]

– [Why no TL;DR?]

– [If you can’t read this, just go die.]

– [You piece of…]

– [So following the quest leads to failure? That’s some next-level bug. LOL]

—

And as that long, long wall of text went up, the old-timers in the chat started creaking their spines and rising.

—

– [Ah, Empress of Refunds…]

– [The newbies in the gallery are getting a taste of the Empress’s true nature and losing their minds. LOL]

– [But back then, we all lost our minds too.]

– [I still remember it. I did everything she asked, and still got a bad ending with my base destroyed.]

– [I did everything.]

– [I did the quests.]

– [I rested.]

– [I did everything, dammit.]

– [LOLOLOLOL]

—

I watched those veterans’ spine organs kick in and spent a long time in deep agony.

‘Wait, this is new info.’

Sure, you could ask why I didn’t know this, even though I’ve been playing since launch three years ago and spent hundreds of thousands of won.

But sadly, this is the first time I’ve recruited the Pirate Empress early in the game.

It was inevitable.

If you look at how I’m playing now, you’d understand.

Even back when I was playing this game before I got reincarnated here, I had this lone wolf playstyle.

I barely touched the community and just enjoyed the game as a casual player. So yeah.

I kept making excuses in my head about why it was natural I didn’t know.

‘Wait, why am I even doing this?’

I wondered who I was even making excuses to, so I pulled myself together and decided to focus on raising our Empress properly.