What Do You Mean I'm The Captain Of A Yandere Mercenary Company? Chapter 947: I’m The Better Pilot

~6 minute read · 1,542 words
Previously on What Do You Mean I'm The Captain Of A Yandere Mercenary Company?...
The protagonist enters a space station hub in a game, initially creating a character that looks like himself. His companion, Ries, urges him to change his appearance, which he does. Ries explains they need to acquire a premium ship, the Verlandi, which requires significant grinding or a large sum of credits. As they discuss the difficulty of grinding, a spatial anomaly appears, and Renata emerges from it, revealing she can hack the game. She then magically generates a trillion credits for the protagonist, much to his concern and Ries's amusement.

We had to pause the session for now as we had to move ourselves to the recreation room and use the machines properly, since we only meant to test if that machine worked or not in the first place.

Once we were properly back into the game, Ries led me to the shop where I could buy ships and we bought ourselves a Verlandi with the same equipment that I have outfitted on mine.

We then left the hub together on the ship, though it seems like the game functioned the same way as the one back in my universe where the players travelling with you are just passengers while you get full control of the ship including its weapons.

"So... Where are we headed?" I asked.

Ries grinned, "Hold on, I’m stream sniping him right now. It just so happens that he’s hunting down players in a system not too far from us. The stream is a few minutes behind but he should be around that area."

I nodded and angled my new ship to initiate a jump towards the next system.

When I jumped into the system that he was supposed to be in, I found ourselves flying through what looked like the remains of a cracked planet.

My immediately flagged the place as a prime spot for ambushes as the system was littered with materials that players could mine and gather, but the debris would also mean that other players could just hide amongst them and wait for unsuspecting players to get close before attacking them and stealing their loot.

I slow my ship down and manoeuvre the ship carefully through the field of debris, keeping my eye out for any movement.

"Boss. The stream shows he’s behind a rock right now," Ries reported from behind me.

I shook my head, "Don’t rely on it. Are you recording right now?"

"Yep! Already started, Boss!"

"Good. I need both of you to stay quiet... Let me do my own thing."

Neither of them said anything but I could tell they had nodded their heads at me.

I grip on the ship’s control sticks and carefully drift the ship through the debris, trying to play the part of another player that was here to scavenge for loot.

So far, the only movement I see was from debris floating around me with no signs of any other ships.

There was always a chance that the guy had already flown off somewhere and wasn’t here at all... Of that he was on the other side of the planet and we were nowhere close to each other.

But my experience as a gamer told me that guy was most likely already stalking me the moment I appeared.

I kept my attention partially on the debris field to look for resources and partially to look for traces of an ambush.

If it was a normal player, they might wait for me to gather as much loot as possible before attacking me to steal it from me... But from what I know about this SonicSlayer, his goal isn’t to steal loot but simply just to get the thrill of PvP.

Which means I could kind of predict when he will attack me and that works in my favour.

I moved over to one of the floating debris and started using my mining laser to break it apart, watching as the pieces break into smaller parts which my drones could pick up to bring it to my cargo bay.

Even though the task was mundane, I kept my hands on the controls and gripped them tightly.

And there it was.

A sudden energy spike reading on my map that I had been staring at the entire time.

I reacted immediately and pushed the control stick to the side, sending my ship into a roll and dodging the laser that pierced through the rock I was mining.

I executed an emergency thruster turn and my ship was already facing in the direction of where the laser came from as I pulled the trigger, letting loose a hail of energy projectiles from my chain gun in that direction.

Another Verlandi flew out from behind a few scattered debris, dodging my attack effortlessly as it moved to a better position.

Instead of chasing after them, I pushed on my thrusters to move myself into another position instead, diving through the gap between two asteroids to hide myself.

That was proven to be the right thing to do as a laser passed through the space I had been moments before.

I repositioned myself, using the laser as a gauge to figure out where that guy was before shooting a laser of my own.

I watched as the laser pierced through an asteroid, burning through the stone to score a hit on the guy’s shield.

His shield flared as it protected him from getting pierced by the laser but it did drain his shields by quite a bit.

He reacted quite quickly as he engaged his thrusters again, shifting his ship behind the asteroid to move out of sight before I could fire another shot at him.

I didn’t mind since I was already boosting towards my own cover behind a couple of floating debris, shutting off my engine midflight and only using the auxiliary thrusters to spin my ship around and use the momentum from the thrust to move.

On that guy’s map, it would have looked like I suddenly disappeared as my engine’s heat signature disappeared.

If he was a noob, he would have thought there was a bug or he wouldn’t even be looking at his map. If he was a pro, he would have assumed I engaged some kind of jump drive that allowed me to blink forward and out of their immediate scanner range.

At this point, the pro would either zoom out his map to try and see where I ended up, or increase the parameters of his scanners to check if I really did jump ahead or activated a cloaking module.

Either way, they would not find me since the map would be looking for the heat signatures coming from my ship’s thrusters and if they tried a concentrated scan, the scanner would pick up the debris around me as well.

And while they were doing that...

I floated my ship past the debris, right into the line of sight of the other ship that was hiding behind another asteroid with all my guns bearing down on him.

To his credit, he reacted pretty quickly as he tried to dive out of the way, though my railgun and laser managed to score a hit each on his shield before he could move, leaving my energy chaingun to pummel empty air.

I pushed my thrusters forward, diving after the guy as I chased after him and filled the space between us with the projectiles from my energy chaingun.

The guy dodged and weaved through the gaps of the floating debris, dodging through the bulletstorm like he knew exactly where to go to avoid them.

Not only that, he was also making use of the debris to prevent me from firing my laser and railgun as I could not get a solid bead on him.

While I have to admit that he was definitely skilled, he’s currently just stuck trying to avoid my bullets and had no way of fighting back, even if I wasn’t able to hit him.

He then suddenly banked and flew into a particularly large asteroid with a hole at the bottom, prompting me to engage my thrusters to follow after him.

It was a straight road through it and when I burst out from the other end, I realised he was nowhere to be seen.

My shields then flared up as I was hit from behind, forcing me to engage in evasive manoeuvres myself.

I only then figured out he must have stopped somewhere inside the asteroid and hid himself in a nook, allowing me to pass by him before going after me.

Clever... This guy must have scouted this place ahead of time and knew where to go to turn the tables on his pursuers.

He must be thinking that I was also screwed now as I dodged and weaved through the debris to avoid him, only to do a speed boost in a straight line as if I was trying to get away from him.

Predictably, he also engaged his own thrusters, focusing his power purely into his engines to try and catch up to me.

That’s where I suddenly cut off my inertia dampeners and shut off my thrusters, initiating a high speed turn before pushing the throttle again to execute an emergency stop.

He could not slow down in time as his ship approached mine rapidly, right into the range of my ballistic cannons.

A shot from my laser shattered his shields and another pull of the trigger fired my ballistic cannons, shredding through his hull and blowing up his ship as his wreckage spiralled away uncontrollably before crashing into an asteroid.

Hmph. What did I say? I’m the better pilot~