The players who had just been revived wasted no time. The first thing they did was sprint back to their corpses and strip off their gear.
Every piece of equipment was bound to its owner, so there was no wild swapping in the middle of a battlefield. That left the first wave of surviving players to cover them while they got dressed.
"This is not going to work. There are too many of them. We need to take turns!"
"One squad goes in, then the next. That way the guys in back still have time to gear up!"
"What about ammo? I'm out of money. I can't buy any more ammo!"
"Damn it, the devs are still making this hardcore at a time like this."
"Shit, shit, shit, shit!"
The players shouted back and forth like a pack of lunatics, and some of them even tagged Drex Valen on the forum while they were at it.
Drex thought about it for a moment. This was reality, after all. Even in a game, repairs and resupplies cost money. The players were already bleeding resources fast enough.
So he had the Black Queen set up a temporary supply depot. From there, players could grab ammo and equipment for free.
The new resupply point poured oil onto the fire.
The players became even more fearless.
Supergiant and the Black Order fought on, more and more bewildered. What the hell was going on with the Kryptonian Empire? Why were there so many iron-willed soldiers throwing themselves into death without hesitation?
If they were machines, or beasts with no sense of self, that would have made sense. That was the kind of thing Outriders and Chitauri did. But these were clearly not mindless creatures. These were Kryptonian soldiers.
The players, meanwhile, were suffering just as badly in their own way. Their low-tier units were getting wiped out by the thousands.
Even so, the strategy was working.
On the forum, the players gave the tactic a name: the corpse-stacking clear method.
Over the course of three brutal days, they threw wave after wave of near-suicidal assaults at the Black Order's forces, grinding down the dark army bit by bit until the elite enemies were forced to enter the fray themselves.
Even then, the Black Order could not stop the Fourth Calamity.
The players were growing sharper with every death. Their casualty count was dropping. Their coordination was getting tighter. And the Black Order itself was starting to look ragged.
That was because their abilities and weaknesses had already been exposed. After three full days of being hammered by players who learned by dying, the Black Order had long since lost the advantage of mystery.
Cull Obsidian, with his rough hide and simple patterns, suffered the worst of it. The players focused him down relentlessly, and he was the most heavily injured of the five by far.
Ebony Maw was in better shape. He could still force players to slaughter one another and turn the battlefield itself into a killing field.
Corvus Glaive had the benefit of his undead body, and he had personally torn through who-knew-how-many players by now. Still, he had noticed something troubling: most of the players' attacks were being directed at his weapon.
If Corvus's weapon were not harder than vibranium and even primordial adamantium, unbreakable under almost any force, he would have been brought down long ago.
On the forum, the players carefully tallied their losses over those three days of corpse-stacked assaults against the Black Order.
Every battle. Every death.
The repair bills for exosuits, mechs, and weapons.
The cost of gear damaged in the fighting.
The cost of weapons that had been ruined beyond repair and had to be bought again.
When it was all totaled up, the players had burned through nearly five hundred thousand copper in just three days.
That nearly wiped out everything they had saved up to this point.
If the devs had not opened that automatic supply depot, the players would have been forced into pure melee. Even their close-combat weapons had been wearing down from the constant slaughter, and they would not have been able to afford repairs for those either.
The side effect was immediate.
The price of gold skyrocketed.
Even the whale players stopped spending money to buy currency.
Meanwhile, the development of the Kryptonian Empire's thousands of life-bearing worlds entered a rapid new phase.
Watching the players grind day and night like tireless laborers, Drex Valen felt quite satisfied.
As for whether they could actually grind the Black Order down to death, he did not hold out much hope. They had already done more than enough by reaching this point.
Besides, the dwarves had already been safely evacuated from Nidavellir under the players' frantic cover.
And now the players were sounding the horn for a full assault on the five elite targets.
First came a new thread on the forum.
[Raid Strategy for the Elite Bosses: The Black Order]
Within just an hour of being posted, it had already exploded with views and replies.
Drex clicked into it and skimmed the top. The opening post included a photo of the Black Order, along with another shot taken from a long distance away.
Then came the body of the post.
Drex read through it and found it surprisingly thorough.
"Hello everyone, I'm [A Guy Who Lives for Mai Sakurajima and Still Somehow Ended Up Here with a Knife] (lol)."
"This post is being published by me. The previous thread documented our losses and casualties over the last few days, and as the data shows, our opening push was absolutely brutal."
"But every sacrifice has been worth it! We've completely cleared out the Outriders, Chitauri, and other Black Order trash swarming around the elite units!"
"Just as we suspected, those minions do not respawn!"
Honestly, the game was already hardcore enough. If those small fry respawned too, then this entire large-scale war was basically designed to stop players from clearing it in the first place.
In fact, even before this, when we were out hunting monsters with our own squads, we'd already noticed that the monsters in our territory were getting thinner. We discussed it before and confirmed that everyone was seeing the same thing.
We had to go farther and farther out just to find enough monsters to farm. Back then, someone brought up a theory: in this game, monsters might not respawn after they die.
In other words, players might actually be driving them to extinction.
If that turns out to be true, then the gameplay of this world may be something far beyond anything we expected.
Not the usual loop of farming mobs, making money, and collecting gear over and over.
Instead, the players might be collectively pushing the world forward, with our actions directly shaping the game's future. We could wipe out entire monster populations. Every boss might be a one-of-a-kind existence!
If that is really how this game works, just thinking about it makes my head hurt, because it means if I log off for even an hour, I might miss a major plot event in the world.
Still, that also makes it feel more real and far more immersive. Even now, we have already said more than once that this game is absurdly realistic. Long live Drex Valen!
All right, enough praising the game. Let's talk about the raid plan.
After several rounds of opening pushes, we have confirmed the attack patterns of these five elite monsters...
Without any healing support, taking down these five elites is basically a race against time. We have to bring them down before we run out of people.
Or we can grind them to death.
So far, we have confirmed that once the Black Order is injured, they do not recover after leaving combat. That fits the game's brutally realistic design very well.