As Anna's visit of the Demolition elective shows, Anna is actually a very capable tactician, and probably could be a capable strategist if she didn't have her issues. She is just a lot like STRATNET, where she analyses the situation at hand, forces at hand, enemies at hand and then finds an optimal solution based on these factors. Not very inspiring, but gets the job done with Valkyries.
Battle Action Harem Highschool Side Character Quest (No SV, you are the Waifu)
- Thread starter Avalanche
- Start date
- Original
- Location
- UTC -6
Supposing the option to Engage this group wins, and further supposing that Anna's reasoning includes "half my class thinks I'm a loser": What would the reaction of the UN thinkers be? Would they be pleased that the pressure cooker of their academy worked even on the literal top Valkyrie? Or would they freak out because their freakishly powerful and unstable trump card wants glory now?
Our goal is to make sure no humans die.
Opening up from this range is mostly going to get rank and file Antagonists, but they (1) aren't likely to get past drones+missiles in numbers, (2) aren't really a threat to the next line of Valkyries, and (3) are really unlikely to get past the Valkyrie line to the ordinary troops.
The thing most likely to kill a human is Types (threats to the nearby Valkyries) hidden among the mass, so we should lurk until the ambush shots can go into worthwhile targets.
[X] Wait. STRATNET's assessment appears correct. You will hold, unless something goes seriously awry. You should do your best to not place your squadron in danger, the drones are quickly replaceable and expendable. Keeping your ability, or that of your Heavy Particle Projectors to make such long range attacks through terrain secret will be strategically significant in the medium term future.
Opening up from this range is mostly going to get rank and file Antagonists, but they (1) aren't likely to get past drones+missiles in numbers, (2) aren't really a threat to the next line of Valkyries, and (3) are really unlikely to get past the Valkyrie line to the ordinary troops.
The thing most likely to kill a human is Types (threats to the nearby Valkyries) hidden among the mass, so we should lurk until the ambush shots can go into worthwhile targets.
[X] Wait. STRATNET's assessment appears correct. You will hold, unless something goes seriously awry. You should do your best to not place your squadron in danger, the drones are quickly replaceable and expendable. Keeping your ability, or that of your Heavy Particle Projectors to make such long range attacks through terrain secret will be strategically significant in the medium term future.
@Avalanche
CORRECTION
She blew up a Breach and subjugated Sekhmet; not commissioning her as a fresh nugget second lieutenant is the least they could do.
Though I wonder if her previous service does count for time in grade.
ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY
That's moderately mind-boggling, and explains why the UN chose to make a big deal about it's recommissioning on broadcast media. It incidentally also will account for significant political capital for Sandra and the UNHCR who oversaw this project. And increased support for their future proposals.
Which might explain the sabotage, if you are competing for influence and resources with less scrupulous sorts.
Which gives a benchmark for how horrifically the human population has dropped since the first shiny rocks dropped from the sky.
Two apocalypses and counting leaves a demographic mark.
Norilsk to Saranpaul is a distance of roughly 1700km, but at Valk speeds apparently vicinity is measured in hundreds of kilometers.
They covered a distance of 1300km in 4 minutes, and not a single person is fatigued.
And these are just third-year cadets, with the exception of Anna.
Only two of whom have any combat experience, and only one of whom is an Ace. It really does help drive home the whole Person of Mass Destruction esthetic that the Valkyries are rocking when even student cadets are rocking ICBM speeds.
Furthermore, it helps me conceptualize the timescales on which the UN military operates strategically.
The alert went out less than twenty minutes ago, possibly less than ten minutes.
The UN has already repositioned carriers, drones and Valks from over a thousand kilometers away to blocking positions.
Might be burning methane or hydrogen instead of JP-8, but it's still a turbojet engine instead of a fusion drive or scramjet or some other more energetic type of reaction drive.
Guess it's considered good enough for a disposable drone.
If/when the UN finally figure it out, they'd just be catching up with what the Types can already do.
EDIT
Also:
Nice callback by the GM/author.
CORRECTION
Anna is previously established as a full Lieutenant.
She blew up a Breach and subjugated Sekhmet; not commissioning her as a fresh nugget second lieutenant is the least they could do.
Though I wonder if her previous service does count for time in grade.
ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY
Full reactivation of the Sydney Arcology took only one week from Anna's arrival.
That's moderately mind-boggling, and explains why the UN chose to make a big deal about it's recommissioning on broadcast media. It incidentally also will account for significant political capital for Sandra and the UNHCR who oversaw this project. And increased support for their future proposals.
Which might explain the sabotage, if you are competing for influence and resources with less scrupulous sorts.
This city is currently between 19% and 23% of it's pre-Impact population.
Which gives a benchmark for how horrifically the human population has dropped since the first shiny rocks dropped from the sky.
Two apocalypses and counting leaves a demographic mark.
Thats roughly five kilometers per second travel time. Mach 15.
Norilsk to Saranpaul is a distance of roughly 1700km, but at Valk speeds apparently vicinity is measured in hundreds of kilometers.
They covered a distance of 1300km in 4 minutes, and not a single person is fatigued.
And these are just third-year cadets, with the exception of Anna.
Only two of whom have any combat experience, and only one of whom is an Ace. It really does help drive home the whole Person of Mass Destruction esthetic that the Valkyries are rocking when even student cadets are rocking ICBM speeds.
Furthermore, it helps me conceptualize the timescales on which the UN military operates strategically.
The alert went out less than twenty minutes ago, possibly less than ten minutes.
The UN has already repositioned carriers, drones and Valks from over a thousand kilometers away to blocking positions.
Note that the drones are apparently still using turbojet engines instead of antigrav or anything more exotic.
Might be burning methane or hydrogen instead of JP-8, but it's still a turbojet engine instead of a fusion drive or scramjet or some other more energetic type of reaction drive.
Guess it's considered good enough for a disposable drone.
Note the similarity of what Anna's particle projectors can do, with what the Type 10s can do in a shorter distance, as noted here in that battle sim:
Beyond line of sight particle beam fire is a known Antagonist Type capability.
If/when the UN finally figure it out, they'd just be catching up with what the Types can already do.
EDIT
Also:
This gives some context for why Setsuna, the camp refugee, thought that the word aristocrat was a perjorative.
Nice callback by the GM/author.
- Location
- Somewhere.
Which post was that?
Post 18.
Mixing and matching seems a given. Can't have proper Pray style without both Red and Blue waves, after all.
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
The almighty Purple wave.
Hm been thinking on this a bit. One of the possibilities of this attack may be the Antagonists wanting to pick off Valks.
From the update this kind of attack has occurred several times before, each time beaten back with minimal UN losses. Perfect way to put a sense of complacency in the local UN forces. The Antagonists are likely aware that there are usually Valks around. Maybe even lower capability (cadet) Valks in the backline.
A worst case scenario possibility that comes to my mind is there may be a suckerpunch planted in this recon in force. Maybe a stealthy rank E Type Zero (since all the high level Type Zeros would have the UN's extreme attention) which is still enough to murder weaker Valks. Send several unsupported recon in force against the UN line over a period of time, lure it into a sense of complacency about this wave, and the Type Zero with attendant units burst out of the clutter and blitzs at the Valks in the area to kill as many as possible before withdrawing.
From the update this kind of attack has occurred several times before, each time beaten back with minimal UN losses. Perfect way to put a sense of complacency in the local UN forces. The Antagonists are likely aware that there are usually Valks around. Maybe even lower capability (cadet) Valks in the backline.
A worst case scenario possibility that comes to my mind is there may be a suckerpunch planted in this recon in force. Maybe a stealthy rank E Type Zero (since all the high level Type Zeros would have the UN's extreme attention) which is still enough to murder weaker Valks. Send several unsupported recon in force against the UN line over a period of time, lure it into a sense of complacency about this wave, and the Type Zero with attendant units burst out of the clutter and blitzs at the Valks in the area to kill as many as possible before withdrawing.
The progression of other Aces in learning Wave Force is mechanically linked to cumulative levels Anna has, so if Blue Wave lvl 2 takes more progress then grabbing Red Wave lvl 1 would end up letting everyone* use Wave Force attacks faster than doubling down on Blue Wave.
Which also makes sense narratively, in that getting mastering Static Wave and getting the entry level of Red+Blue lets Anna go "Okay, here's the basics of how Wave Force can be used - go nuts."
*Who isn't a scrub and puts in the time/effort.
That's interesting, in a macabre sort of way. Anna presumably didn't have anyone around to try friendly impeller merging with in her backstory, so the "never again" bit probably refers to letting someone into her impeller and it turning out really badly.
With the forces Anna's impeller is capable of, the mental images are pretty gruesome. Yikes.
"Weird, our beta translation program looks like it's working and we've got some tentative matches on UN Archive data, but when we try it on Anna's transcript it still just turns out as incoherent electronic shrieking. Except this bit here marked as 'AAAAAAAHHH it's inside me! Get it out get it out get it out!'? But after that it's just more screaming."
These kids are great.
I didn't catch this the first time through, but the mental image of this scene is pretty hilarious. I imagine Koujirou scootching sideways with normal-person motions, and then Anna just slides away sideways without any visible means of propulsion like a regular anime sight-gag… but then they slide out onto the invisible seats and you realize Anna is literally sliding herself around with her force field.
(Really this is how I envision a lot of the Anna physical gags, that she follows cartoon physics in-universe. Her exploring Sandra's jet is another great example.)
I hope that Perth cadets passing by later came across this scene, correctly identified events, and added it to the bread-chan memes.
[A scene of fat, happy birds amid partially eaten loaves of bread. Captions such as: "A visit from the bread fairy." "Bread-chan shares of her bounty." etc.]
It's funny how the non-Perth Valkyries who don't know Anna react to her – there's probably going to be some funny dissonance when they talk with the Perth cadets. Depending how it goes, it may take a lot of funny misunderstanding for that conversation to bridge the gap between "that scary special constable in the black demon armor who enveloped the whole arcology in her impeller" and "Anna, who is definitely an Ace but who is also like the most awkward cinnamon roll."
Bonus points for trying to explain to them that no, really, the Black Devil is this girl in all the bread memes.
This is a nice little characterization moment for Koujirou and Setsuna, but it's also interesting that Anna herself doesn't see it the same way. Anna is no stranger herself to resource shortfalls, but she's not decrying the waste here.
As some other folks have brought up, I think maybe Anna doesn't feel the difference between "think of the resources the UN expends on this flying luxury mega-yacht, how amazing" and "we have a breakfast buffet with whole bottles of maple syrup free to use, how amazing" because both of those things represent a fantasy society with totally alien levels of wealth to her.
A minute after the first activation of the machine, one of the cadets spoke.
"This isn't random," she said.
"This- this has to be a mistake in our spec, right?"
"We all reviewed it independently, the math checks out. I think… I think it's a legit result. We're not in baseline reality. A sequence like that… according to my calculations, an output like that is only consistent if we're in a story posted on an internet forum."
"Run it again."
"But-"
"Run. It. Again."
"Running it now. Uh… 3 1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5."
"Wait, is it reciting pi? That's even worse! Now we're in an omake!"
There was another long, horrified silence before the elective class president spoke up.
"Fuck it, let's all go to Macau and get wasted. All in favor?"
"AYE."
Typos:
You probably meant Ordnance, unless this is a testing ground for municipal laws. Though that would explain why they're so zealous about Anna observing the speed limit. (That and the giant linear fireball.)
The pinnacle of the East, unless it was a small boat.
You probably meant Ordnance, unless this is a testing ground for municipal laws. Though that would explain why they're so zealous about Anna observing the speed limit. (That and the giant linear fireball.)
The pinnacle of the East, unless it was a small boat.
Anna consumes all foods, but does not react to them equally, and Anna is very expressive. Anna's reactions are exhaustively documented in the meme record and in official surveillance both.
Meanwhile, Leonhart is a transhuman who improves over time at the things she does, and one thing she does is cook for other people a lot.
Leonhart likely had zero problems isolating "foods Anna likes" and extrapolating from there. And successfully extending that extrapolation into territory of "foods that are not human foods but are Anna Foods", hence the delicious gasoline smoothie.
---
I expect Anna found it the moment she realized she needed to look – between her own sensory capabilities and her effective technopathy in a massively-surveilled environment, finding it's a non-issue for her. But I enjoy the thought of everyone else's run-ins with a curious, exploratory car-bot. Especially if the main cast get involved. It could be an anime comedy filler bit.
Imagine Koujirou or Setsuna in hot pursuit, finally catching up to the mischievous car-bot, only for it to inexplicably teleport away at the end. Koji and Setsuna chalking it up as one of the unsolved mysteries of the arcology…
…and then a couple episodes later the show gets to the "decorating Anna's room" activity or something, and their nemesis lives there in a little RC-bot charging station.
---
It could be that the chamber's smaller than Anna, but another possibility – and the way I took that on initial read – is just that she shrank her externally-apparent volume in order to shrink her surface area and reduce the overall heat transfer.
---
While there's no proof in-story that it's anything but a coverup, I do think it makes sense as a theory that the intel folks had ahead of time.
Initially, it's not clear if the UN even knew that missing AG industrial output was getting destroyed, just that wasn't showing up anywhere they could see it. Which would actually be worrying as hell during the assault on Fairbanks. Imagine you're a UN commander, and STRATNET has got a pretty good estimate of Antagonist industrial capabilities… and somewhere between 20-40% of the forces Fairbanks should have built are just nowhere you can find them.
Even if the campaign is actually easier than it should be, the whole time you've got to be worrying whether the antagonists have a catastrophic surprise waiting in the wings (like the AGs in fact did, further south at "Interstate Five"). But you go take what precautions you can and go ahead with the critical assault on Fairbanks anyway, always ready for the other shoe to drop.
Except… the other shoe never drops. Fairbanks's armies are pushed back into the hive, and the hive itself falls, and its missing forces never show up.
So your analysts offer many ideas why. Maybe there's still an army hiding underground waiting for an ambush, even if they didn't spring it during the assault for whatever reason. Or maybe those troops are reinforcing AG positions somewhere else that was too far away to respond, or maybe that industrial capacity went into some big scary secret project that'll activate soon and kill tons of UN forces. One idea is that the AGs lost forces to infighting, but really, that's pretty unlikely – nothing anywhere near that level of conflict has ever been seen between Antagonists.
So anyway, you send recon forces pushing east – drones and Valkyries scouting for leftover AG facilities and Saskatoon's western forces, but also any evidence of what happened to Fairbanks' missing forces or whatever else they were up to.
And you do find evidence. Lots of it. Big battlefields – some older ones picked clean by resource harvesters, some much newer ones – and they all have one thing in common: dead AGs. And only dead AGs.
Despite the Valks and Types and Aces and Zeros, the world war is still in large part a matter of two titanic military-industrial complexes trying to grind each other into dust. UN/AG battlefields wind up with a lot of smashed war machines and debris on both sides – we see that literally raining down on the human troops in their interlude. It's not tough to see who was fighting in any given place, at least not before the winner's salvage machines have time to pick everything clean. The killing zones around Fairbanks are littered with evidence of who fought there.
These new battlefields are littered too, but only with Antagonists and more Antagonists.
That's suggestive, is what it is. Like, maybe the Antagonists really were killing each other? That's still weird and unprecedented, but compared to the idea that they were fighting some third party whose forces left no casualties fighting them, the idea's looking a lot more likely than it was.
It's not conclusive, though.
Not at first.
But the first recon teams keep finding more new sites as they sweep east, and the second-wave teams have the time to get in and take a close look at some sites with Valkyrie-grade investigative capabilities.
For many of them, it's still hard to tell. A lot of those dead AGs were taken apart with energy weapons – lasers, particle beams, superheated plasma – that don't leave enough of a fingerprint to tell AG systems from not. Other AGs were torn apart by impellers and raw physical force. On others, it looks like they were partially salvaged and that covered up the signs of what killed them ("it's almost like they were eaten or something").
But.
Here is a flight of downed Antagonist air-superiority fighters… and the fragments of the standard-pattern Antagonist missiles that killed them. There is the ruin of a subterranean AG facility, cracked open by precise suicide detonations from Type Tens. Over there is a small army of dead AGs blown apart by weapons that are a precise match for other dead AG units on the field. (Hell, all of the solid munitions found are of antagonist make – and a lot of those are found in other antagonists.) More and more examples like that build up.
That's conclusive. There aren't really any other explanations for battlefields where only Antagonist corpses are present, many clearly killed by Antagonist weapons fired by other Antagonists on the field.
…Well, okay, maybe it's not completely impossible for some other explanation to be true. You could imagine some sort of theoretical god-monster Valk who could bend Antagonists' lasers and projectiles and particle blasts back at them with spatial manipulation, or snatch live AG missiles out of the air and turn them back on their senders, or forcibly teleport high-level Types into the middle of their own allies right in the instants they self-destruct. But… well, the only known things with both the power and skill to do that on this sort of scale of battle are, themselves, Antagonists – the Zeros, really only the stronger of them. Maybe Jatayu Sen, The Valkyrie, could do it on a good day.
You can't prove there's no super-powerful unknown out there, so yes, theoretically it's possible that the Antagonists could've gotten some alien invasion in their alien invasion by something powerful enough to leave no casualties behind, or that The Valkyrie's Bigger Badder Sister has been living in central Canada all this time and the UN has never noticed, or that Santa and his elves rode out on mecha-reindeer and trashed the AG horde as an early Christmas present to the UN.
But really, the UN doesn't believe in Santa Claus.* And now piles of evidence, plus Occam's Razor, strongly favor the theory that AG rivalry really does escalate to violence sometimes.
Until the recon forces find Sekhmet, and Saskatoon, and, well, The Valkyrie's Bigger Badder Sister Who's Been Living In Central Canada All This Time.
Welp. Not an AG civil war after all.
Still, the theory makes for a half-decent cover story while you verify this terrifyingly powerful girl isn't about to kill herself, or berserk into the nearest Major Breach and pick fights with Zero-A's until she goes down, or flip out and try to kill everyone because you didn't get there in time. None of those things make for a good press release.
*Modern UN territories do have a myth about a cheerful figure who sweeps down out of the sky in an extravagant transport with gifts for everyone, but it's Santa's distaff counterpart Sandra Claus.
[Edited for typos.]
Last edited:
- Location
- In Space
[X] Wait. STRATNET's assessment appears correct. You will hold, unless something goes seriously awry. You should do your best to not place your squadron in danger, the drones are quickly replaceable and expendable. Keeping your ability, or that of your Heavy Particle Projectors to make such long range attacks through terrain secret will be strategically significant in the medium term future.
[X] Yukari
-[X] You can help.
--[X] Task: Yukari is not okay. Solution...
---[X] Task: Anna is not okay. Solution: apply extra blankets until task is resolved.
----[X] Supposition: Yukari is not okay when her status is set to away, she is alone, and she is still watching her messages.
-----[X] Action: next time Yukari has status set to away, is alone, and is still watching her messages, find her and apply extra blankets, pillows, etcetera until [Task: Yukari is not okay] is resolved.
[X] Yukari
-[X] You can help.
--[X] Task: Yukari is not okay. Solution...
---[X] Task: Anna is not okay. Solution: apply extra blankets until task is resolved.
----[X] Supposition: Yukari is not okay when her status is set to away, she is alone, and she is still watching her messages.
-----[X] Action: next time Yukari has status set to away, is alone, and is still watching her messages, find her and apply extra blankets, pillows, etcetera until [Task: Yukari is not okay] is resolved.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Or she let them in and they shanked her because they sided with the terrorist faction in her hometown.
Well-reasoned enough to be plausible, at least.
See, I would have missed this bit if I didn't quote you, which largely defeats the point of making a joke.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
What, you haven't picked up the habit of obsessively highlighting suspicious bits of empty space?
Alphaleph
The Firstiest of First
That opinion has already debunked with Anna thumbing an instructor with witnesses btw.
NuclearConsensus
Herald of the Thorned One
- Location
- the Philippines
Quite sadly, it also fits in with refugee jokes about the UN. Like Santa, they only show up one day out of a year.
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Except Anna is shooting through the planet with her particle beams. Types need some sort of open path to the target and there might be limits on how they can bend it. Anna can just make the particles ignore everything until the target.
It's also entirely plausible that it's not at all a cover-up but the culmination of 6 months to a year of investigative journalism looking at what public data is available and coming to a reasonable sounding but wrong conclusion. Sure, the UN recovered Anna ~ a month before that article came out, but there she went through several weeks of debriefing/demonstrating Wave Force and such that would almost certainly have been classified beyond what Joe Schmoe Reporter would have had access to.
- Location
- United States
[X] Wait
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
You need to put the entirety of the vote after the X if you wanted it to be counted properly.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Anna having a grasp of tactics makes perfect sense, she wasn't always monstrously powerful, she got there the hard way and she's had to fight when outgunned and outnumbered for a long time.
The main problem is that her first impulse is always going to be to apply solo tactics to do everything herself.
Spectral Waltz
Scatterbrained Writer
- Location
- Walking the Endless Corridors
Let me rephrase, Anna is an excellent tactician in terms of personal tactics. She is a shitty team tactician and has very little idea how to use assets that aren't herself beyond 'keep them out of harm's way'.
Again, wrong, I believe. Demolition elective shows that Anna is perfectly capable of analyzing the abilities of her allies and applying them as necessary. It's just that her first instinct is to deal with the problem by herself - and it's not exactly a wrong reaction, considering that "Apply Anna to the situation" is the correct answer for anything on the battlefield short of higher levels Type Zero. Even here, concentrating all other Valkyries in the rear is a tactically sound decision, because Anna is perfectly capable of wiping out the whole Antagonist force with nothing but her Impeller, so the biggest danger is in some rookie panicking or some sneak attack bypassing Anna and attacking rear elements. So, you reinforce the rear to reduce the chance of that. But, if you put Anna in some tactical simulator and have her control a flight of normal Valkyries, I believe she would be quite capable of using them to their maximum effectiveness.
Abao
Le Halpful One
- Location
- Theocracy of Derpism
She could if she doesn't care about sending humans to their deaths. As she is the best she'd do is probably have them retreat/long range bombard anything that has a chance of actually giving them trouble.