ARBITRACOM
Sic transit gloria mundi
I think she's alternate history Nagato, where she became a museum at Pearl.
"Harbor she was all too familiar with" and "actual paint from Kure" points to this.
Yeah, but I hear Kure and my brain instantly jumps to Yamato. I need to be sure.I think she's alternate history Nagato, where she became a museum at Pearl.
"Harbor she was all too familiar with" and "actual paint from Kure" points to this.
To be fair, though, at this moment fishing industries just affects surface area instead of bathypelagic and lower. I mean, sure, it was bad, but the one affected the most was surface dwellers. Bathypelagic and Abysalpelagic were mostly untouched.Makes me think of shipgirls as white blood cells of the ocean, lol. They can respawn (but as stock), and they'll disappear when the Abyssals are dead. Then again, the Abyssals would have to be harming the ocean instead of humans, and I'd rather not think about what it'd do to the fishing industry. xD
Execute [SHROUD] on maximum counter-tracking cycles. Harden for ECM intrusion - claimspace violation detected: revoke revoke revoke--
Vampires, vampires. Tracking, irregular projectile activity detected, count six--twelve--sixty. Staking vampires. Stakes out. Array firing. Vampires, eight redirected, two down. Count fifty, count forty-seven--
Hold for evasive action. Blink sequence started. Wake engines activated. Commit for translocation. Cycling, executing Blink--
Cycle ends. Sequence spin complete, translocation committed. Vampire threat ended by evasive action. Recharging sequence begin--
"...and those're the swarm torpedoes. Data transmitted. Are you getting this?"
"Some storage latency on my end but it's fine. How long will you keep doing this?"
"As long as necessary. Purging saturated facets now."
"And the shells--"
"They devour face-hardened armour and special-treatment-iridium alloy by the ton. I don't fancy being hit by even one, and I don't plan to."
"Of course you don't."
"Shut up."
---
Heavy cruiser Choukai is dancing in the rain, stitching a haphazard path around ear-splitting salvoes and brackets of fire. One of the world's strongest and most experienced heavy cruisers is fighting to understand, and more secondarily, for her life.
The world spins and blurs around her in a watery swirl. The stirring seas and dark, lightning-illuminated skies united by the falling precipitation weighed down the ragged tatters of her turquoise uniform and charred rigging. Her mental voice was earnest, a near-death passion, a caged high, a savage thrill tempered with clinical analysis as she teeters on the razor edge of destruction. The world defined as connections, and all that threatens to sever it.
"If this goes bad - no, worse than it already is - I just want you to know that in the end, I do not regret meeting you, and in all my life, you are the one variable I will always consider, and the outcome I'll always work toward-"
The answering voice was coy, almost dispassionate - not a sneer though - reassuringly calm yet infuriatingly casual. Somewhat cold and sweet, rather like ice cream.
"Hey, hey. What's that, hmmmm?. I'm catching up to you. Just a bit more till the spin's complete. Can't hold that long~~?"
That drawl, she thought. She stopped and threw into a short reverse dash. Her pursuer a flowing shadow in-between choppy waves and curtains of spray, a lethal shade, manifest-incarnate of a empty will devouring thought and structure. Blasts of secondary battery fire peppered the sea between them, but both are too agile for each other as Choukai's movements are a jitter. Janky reverses and counters chained together with bursts of speed and sudden decelerations, all calculated to throw off microsecond firing adjustments and predictions, both the computations of her movement and the aim of the Abyssal Princess fueled by echoes of possible pasts and futures.
Another supersonic thunderclap, and a cluster of the Abyssal howling shells screamed past, slamming into a wave, throwing up huge gouts of flash-steam and shrapnel that burned ephemerally with the temperature of the universe's birth.
The burn is a major concern, to some degree the reaction is self-sustaining-
At that she paused, noticing how empty her lungs felt and thought:
I know how Musashi felt now.
Through the din and noise, the pitter-patter of the rain, the thrum of her own engines, the swarming reports and inputs, she spoke again.
"No, no, not a problem. Besides, I still want to try something. Have you sent your girls?"
"Mmhm. They're on the way. My rocket Corsairs for you!"
"Thanks. I'm going in now."
"A danger-close pass?"
"...Yes."
"..."
"Watch over me...?"
"... I will. Good luck."
"Thank you. I trust your timing, White."
----
Seven warbirds in grey and blue coating flew through the squall, bearing the mark of a stallion, rearing 'midst crimson flames.
"Flare Riders, check arms. There's a possibility that our Miss will outrun us, so just be prepared for anything."
"Got it, Chief."
"Roger that."
----
Log NEMESIS BELOW entity directly observed parameters.
Aberrant, asymmetrical design. Adapted for maneuver and counter-maneuver combat, sharply optimized for extreme sophistication to produce tactical effect. Tandem CASTER and ASSASSIN adaptations degrade both radar and visual as well as signal acquisition. LINEAR and LANCER accurizes medium-range gunnery. Defensive capabilities unknown, melee capabilities unobserved. LONER adaptations are implied through solitary behaviour and lack of sophisticated organization between multiple entities.
Shells, provisional name Howler. Fired from new hypervelocity gun design: 254mm, moving at 1.06 soundspeed, cycling in at eleven seconds. Fast traverse, limited elevation. Primary hazards are kinetic shearing impact and pyrophoric discharge afterblast. Degrades armour and inflicts massive internal damage.
Hypothesis: counter to advanced self-repair and damage control heuristics.
She has committed herself into a knife-fight. A way to limit the spray of outcomes. The chase is over; the play is reversed. So far, Choukai had been on the defensive, forcing a Fabian exchange; probing the enemy's capabilities, its intents and conceits. She'd seen how it acted so far. The only thing left to do now is to see how it would react when the violence is turned against it.
The flitting shadow of the predator looms in the distance.
Choukai made a sharp, keeling turn weighted on her armored right leg. Turrets whirring as the guns are brought to bear, torpedo tubes unshuttered and loaded.
"Searchlights, activate!"
Her first salvo is weightless, fireless; a guiding illumination lancing out from either side of her head. The sweeping beam caught the location of her adversary in a flash. Choukai concentrated as throughout her body, arcing and snapping off into the air, the electrical wisps of her jump-charge, carefully husbanded throughout the running battle, delivered her. In a blink and in a Blink, she crossed more than nine hundred meters, materializing within an explosion of colours and lightning a scant twenty meters before her adversary, the Large Cruiser Princess.
It was here that the heavy cruiser took a brief, silent regard of the Princess' visage. A gaunt, long-legged body poised to strike. Two gun-creatures, vapor hissing from the coolant being pumped through their barrels. Pale, fluttering hair and storm-grey eyes that met her scarlet gaze with mute hatred and lethality. Her very presence appeared to stifle the rolling seas, silencing the soundscape, creating a sphere of unreality around them.
Mute?
A mouthless thing, that's what the others called her. Where a mouth and jaw should be there was a tumorous growth, caged in teeth and framed in black metal embedded to her skin, wormed by tubes and wires.
Even this brief sight came close to overwhelming her. Ghastly code-apparitions and distorted visions began creeping in from the edges of her vision. Alarms blared within her thoughtspace as they alerted: the Princess is about to fire.
Both took aim, and the Princess fired first.
Alarmed by a prediction delivered perilously close Choukai threw herself low as six sharp cracks pierced through the sound barrier, howling a shrill scream past her and detonated in a white-hot flash way behind her.
But even that near miss was ruinous in its passage, as the attack boiled off the last vestiges of her shields and the shockwaves wrought havoc on her systems. She hardened herself through this. Ignoring the growing pain and heat and suffocation from the burning air, she delivered her counterattack within the space of less than a second.
Ten 203mm rifles spat artificial thunderbolts, delivering devastating, accurate fire at point-blank range. Long Lances departed their tubes amidst cries of eels out, eels out! with just barely enough range for them to arm.
If the counterattack surprised her, the Princess let none of it show. The heavy cruiser's shells smashed into her shields and exploded in a dazzling cascade, sending burning fragments slicing and cutting into her as a flaming whirlwind. The front quarter of her shields collapsed into ethereal fragments swept away by the rain. A lucky hit pulverized the secondary battery concentration on her forearm.
Staring on with a silent fury, the Princess delivered her rebuke. Cells embedded along the necks of her gun-organisms snapped open and threw a fusillade of charges that went off in a series of staggered bone-snapping impacts and bursts of blinding light, violently raising a curtain of water between them. More than half of Choukai's torpedoes detonated without reaching their target, and the rest was destabilized off course or dodged easily.
Engulfed within an assault of shock, noise, and burning light, Choukai found herself flung through the air, hitting the churning surf with a sharp crack. She pushed herself up to her knees and touched the left side of her face, staved in by the impact and the counter-torpedo detonation, dripping clotted dark red blood and bits of machinery. Her glasses bent and shattered, leaving her half-blind. Out of breath, out of options, she whimpered as more noise entered the fray.
Yet amidst the cacophony, a single voice, stretched by blueshift, reached her, and her chest tightened in recognition.
"Girls, you know what to do. Ride the flare down."
Both White Plains and her strike wing had arrived.
---
Samar had changed her. Changed them both.
I'm almost late.
A singular thought consumed the escort carrier's mind as she finally made the jump. She punched through to realspace finding herself materializing on the far edge of the battle. She saw Choukai, a bleeding, convulsing wreck, barely holding herself up, and the Princess interposed between them.
"Light'er up ladies."
Piercing through the rain-squall the rockets fell as a spill of incandescent fireflies, an inferno pouring down at the target of their mistress' contempt. The Princess, her upperworks already aflame and lacerated from Choukai's earlier attack, fought them off with scattered bursts of FLAK fire. She turned around, searching for the source of this newest mockery, and found her transfixing the Princess' own gaze with murderous eyes, cape fluttering in the wind, holding a single five-inch mount, turret face painted red.
White Plains charged into battle unhesitatingly and shouted, as if to defy both storm and conflagration around her:
"Hey!! Right here, fucker!!!"
---
To be continued (?)
JDS Kaga was opened to the public at Port Kanazawa.
Selected notable pictures in case the embed fucks up:
You want to know something more horrifying......Dammit, man, I'm already writing one Kancolle magical girl story! I don't need the idea for another stuck in my head!
Dammit, man, I'm already writing one Kancolle magical girl story! I don't need the idea for another stuck in my head!
I believe it's still within the planning phases.
It's actually being written as we speak, and it's Shipgirls as Magical Girls. Got a first "season" planned out, and vague plans for future "seasons".Ah... are we talking Shipgirls as Magical Girls (or vice-versa as the case may be) or Magical Girls alongside Shipgirls?
Also, I'll reveal one thing planned: taking my cue from a specific author's doujins, Kai Ni upgrades are basically an activate-at-will Super Mode.
I hope so. That's a great story.Ah, a certain story involving Best Mombote and a certain shitty admiral?
Ah, a certain story involving Best Mombote and a certain shitty admiral?
Same author, yes. Though I'm more inspired by their Kiso doujin, both because I like Kiso and because we see more Kai Ni action there.