Miss Fontaine actually understood the reasoning. She simply wanted an excuse to take Captain Planck down a peg. After all, they shouldn't have had to hide in this shipping lane, eating sand.
They were the mighty Black Serpent Pirates, for crying out loud. They shouldn't have been hunkered down in a crack at the edge of a shipping lane, pretending to be earthworms.
The Marauder invasion last year and the great expeditions launched by the various nations in its wake had thrown the entire New World into chaos. Most underworld operators had suffered a devastating blow, but the Black Serpent Pirates were no rabble.
A crisis for the industry was a crisis for ordinary people, but an opportunity for the capable. Under Captain Planck and Miss Fontaine's leadership, the Black Serpent Pirates leveraged their value through an infiltration strategy, empowered the supply side by building on synergies and awareness, quantified key paths with an outcome-oriented approach, integrated the industry's best practices, and finally grasped the underlying logic of the piracy business in the midst of the crisis. They adopted a matrix-based strategy, developed a deep chain of production capacity, and strengthened their core tactics.
...All right, to put it simply, the Black Serpent Pirates were pretty professional, and they'd had some good luck, too.
They'd avoided the recent fierce battles and captured a group of rampaging space crystal cluster creatures, which they managed to control with a powerful artifact Captain Planck had obtained from one of the organization's bigwigs. Then they'd watched the entire Battle of New Lushun from the shadows and "happened" to find an ancient mining-drone command ship that had drifted away from the battlefield, along with a few accessories. After that, they'd seized a medium-sized flamethrower ship from some long-whiskered demons fleeing after their failed attack on