A galactic war was just beginning to broil in the galaxy of Ambrose au Stellaris’ universe. But in a separate reality altogether, a different war was fought. One fought for acclaim. Honour. Being among the top Players on the community leaderboards.

In that reality, spacefaring civilisations charted not across star systems, but across the creative imaginations of a planet-locked society. Their level of technology had not yet matured enough to colonise other planets, but it was advanced enough to craft highly immersive experiences, which ran on the latest virtual reality headsets that interfaced fully with their users’ senses and bodily sensations. Such brought the advent of the highly popular Sci-Fi VRMMO (Science-Fiction Virtual Reality Massive Multiplayer Online) genre, which allowed their players to become the planet-hopping, starship-commanding stellar wayfarers they had always dreamed to be, in every way but physically.

This genre was a market of high demand. And one game stood heads and shoulders above the competition.

Astraia Online.

Unlike its more modest contemporaries, Astraia simulated, at realistic 1:1 scale, the vast expanse of an open galaxy. Cutting-edge mathematical and scientific algorithms modelled, with exacting detail, astronomical phenomena such as the infrared radiation given off by a white dwarf, or the orbital cycles of a gas giant. From the congested fields of an asteroid belt to the wild plains of an alien exoplanet, every location—both in and out of atmosphere—was fully explorable.

The only limit was the physical ends of the in-game galaxy’s 400 billion traversable star systems—and that was using the word ‘limit’ lightly. It would take real-life months even for a Player piloting a ship with the quickest skip drive to chart such distances. Though, that didn’t stop many of the most dedicated Players from launching such expeditions, either just for accomplishment’s sake, or to contribute to the community’s herculean (and virtually impossible) goal of cataloguing the entire unexplored galaxy.

With all that said, peaceful exploration was not the main draw of the game. No, its enormous open galaxy served as the backdrop for something else: conflict.

Even as a game with substantial economic and PVE (Player Vs Environment) content—mining asteroids for exotic minerals, transporting resources between orbital stations, defending merchants from pirate NPC (Non-Player Character) ships—PVP (Player Vs Player) conflict was a keystone of the game’s design. Even if an Astraia Player directly avoided PVP fighting, they could not escape its reverberating effects felt across star systems.

The largest, most spectacular conflicts became the chief appeal of the game. Such events, the ones that consistently spawned real-world media buzz—“Astraia Online’s latest territorial dispute sees 74,000 players involved. Ship losses estimated to cost real-world millions.”—were the galactic wars fought between the Player Alliances, organised fleets of Players combining their resources and skills together.

Sure, one could easily say that with 400 billion available star systems, there should have been enough territory and resources to go around for the entire playerbase and all its Alliances. However, that was naive thinking. In reality, the vast majority of star systems were uncolonised, and far-flung from the galactic centre—or the ‘Stellar Nexus’, as the game termed it—where the fulcrum of industrial and economic activity lay. Thus, they had little value.

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As a result, the tenuous balance of power in the galaxy constantly shifted, as Alliances forged pacts and trade deals with one another as frequently as they skirmished and butted heads. This sent them rising up and falling down the in-game leaderboards, which aggregated every Alliance’s overall strength from statistics like manpower size, controlled star systems, industrial output, military performance, and so on.

The mightiest Player Alliances—having member counts of anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of Players—were economic, political and military monoliths. They were known to be largely run like actual companies in the real world, as the administrative demands of managing weekly operations, inter-system trade lines, military deployments, et cetera, simply necessitated so.

Among the top 50 in particular, there existed many notable Alliances in the game’s community.

There was ‘The Singularity’, an Alliance composed solely of Players of the Android race piloting Cyber and Nanotech ships, and who were feared for their deadly PVP specialty, both ship-to-ship and hand-to-hand.

Then there was ‘Space Truckers’, who had the highest number of Players, mostly stayed out of armed conflicts, and brought in record-breaking amounts of minerals to the market each week from their massive fleets of cargo haulers.

There was also ‘HFC CORPORATION’, the proverbial new kid on the block that had meteorically risen through the ranks during the game’s later years, through a hardcore member base that pooled exorbitant sums of real-world money to buy squadrons of in-game ships.

This non-exhaustive list only went on and on.

But even then, one Alliance specifically could be said to stand out in its own unique way, even if it was not technically the strongest in terms of industrial output or raw combat power.

It was called ‘Eclipse’. For an Alliance in the top 50, it was considered small, with only a few hundred members. That, in addition to the fact that it had barely hung on to its top 42nd position when it had been at its peak, may have made one hard-pressed to understand how Eclipse would be particularly notable. One might just assume that in times of war, Eclipse would simply be, well, eclipsed, by other larger Alliances with their ginormous fleets.

That was not the case. Most other Alliances were reluctant to pit their forces against them in battle. In their long history stretching from the game’s initial alpha release, they had even tustled with The Singularity once, and ended the conflict with a stalemate. Eclipse rarely lost their fights. And if they did, they often experienced far fewer losses than the opposing side.

How was this possible?

The answer lay in their thirty-two core Alliance Officers, who formed a strong leadership that was as solid as bedrock, and as sharp as obsidian.

Internally, members addressed each Officer by the unofficial title of Fleet Commander—for on top of their regularly assigned administrative roles in the organisation, each Officer was also in charge of a fleet (albeit a small one) of other Players that they personally commanded. This was unorthodox. Even among the best PVP-specialised Alliances, it was uncommon for an Alliance’s core leadership to be composed entirely of military tacticians who could capably lead fleets—and in joint operations with the other Fleet Commanders.

In times of galactic strife, while the other, much larger Alliances tended to deploy their forces in a manner that resembled vaguely herding a swarm of mindless bees, Eclipse was able to make the most out of their limited manpower through commanding their fleets with the concerted power of a fine dagger. Their battlefield doctrine was to identify key target objectives, and swiftly eliminate them in combined-fleet actions, striking critical blows to enemies far larger than themselves.

However, despite everything said, their reputation of PVP prowess was not the reason that made them especially unique. In fact, them being so well-known for their PVP skills was simply a product of the true factor that made them special, special enough to even be featured several times in official press releases of the game’s developers.

That factor was a single ship.

Eclipse’s titular flagship: the Eclipsius Two.