Kantai Collection: The World Set Free (KC/SCP/FreeSpace:Blue Planet/Destiny)

[ARBITRACOM]

It's been too long, hasn't it. I am deeply sorry.

A part of the cause is real life. The way things are going, I haven't been able to pour one hundred percent of my attention to this and give it the love it deserves. The other part of it is my own lack of skill in developing a true direction of where this story would go.

The above is a partial attempt to remedy the latter. It is what I should have been able to convey from the start, and when I'll be able to write again, it will be the path to be taken.

I invite those who are still reading and interested in this story, or those who are interested in writing shipgirl stories in general, to join my Discord server, linked in my signature. It's a place for discussion of The World Set Free, shipgirls in general, and other topics.

I hope I'll see you soon.

 

[ARBITRACOM]

Hull Fragment: First Prayer
---


I as well as those who would come after me have a wish. We wish we would not only be here to destroy.

That we could not only finish the fight but stop the bleeding.

Against tyranny and ignorance and greed.

For the outcast, the diseased, the exploited, the left behind, those whose voices are lost to the deepest darkest dregs of history.


Our greatest regret is that all of this hope must for now be cast into this sword, a vessel, our wish sharpened into a cutting point.

Yet we shall never forget,

The reason we are here, and the first and highest truth that we serve.

And thus, our opening word:

The prayers of a world left behind.



Suterareta Sekai no Inori - Prayers of an Abandoned World

This sword was first seen in Fubuki's hands when she first arrived in our world, and it was disintegrated - expended - to cleanse the waters and shores of Tokyo Bay, leaving behind only its empty scabbard and companion wakizashi; it was named after a brief conversation when the destroyer was interviewed shortly after she was taken to JSDF custody.

It reappeared several months later as she and the others of the Original Sixty-Five and the combined Japanese-American fleet set out for the strike at the Solomon Islands - mankind's first successful offensive against an Abyssal position. It was expended again at the conclusion of the campaign, and has not manifested again since. The vacant scabbard and remaining wakizashi is now kept by World Admiral Kurosawa as a mark of his office.

Cryptarchy scholars speculate that the sword in its original iteration delivers a semiotic payload that allows for or acts as a trigger signal for the rest of the Original Sixty-Five to emerge. While it was physically lost after the events at Tokyo Bay, it remained conceptually extant and its second iteration was a crystallization of "what it has learned" in the time between Tokyo Bay and the outset of the Solomon Islands Campaign, at which point it is triggered again at the end of that campaign to signal the arrival of the Shipgirls into our world.

It is unknown under what condition it would reappear. Some speculate that should the Shipgirls succeed in achieving their military as well as socio-political goals for both transitional and universal justice, it would not need to and will never reappear. Implicitly then, the sword would reappear in an irrevocably cataclysmic circumstance.

 

[ARBITRACOM]

My deepest apologies - I was quite sloppy when I first posted this. Now after several edit passes it should be easier to read with better diction. Please enjoy!

 

[ARBITRACOM]

Given the occassion of the release of South Dakota in KC, and the fact that the previous piece had mentioned the Original Sixty-Five, let's take a look at them:

---
The Original Sixty-Five is the name given to the first sixty-five shipgirls to appear, consisting of 38 Japanese and 27 American shipgirls, with Fubuki being the first among them. They are:

The first Japanese shipgirls, known in time as the JMSDF Kanmusu Corps and later the Japanese Component under the Transitionary Joint Command, consisted of the following.

Nine battleships:
Kongou, Hiei, Haruna, Kirishima; Fusou, Yamashiro; Ise, Hyuuga; and Mutsu.

Four heavy cruisers:
Furutaka, Kako, Aoba, and Kinugasa

Ten light cruisers:
Jintsuu, Sendai, Naka; Kuma, Kiso, Tama, Kitakami, Ooi; Natori, Isuzu.

Fifteen destroyers:
Fubuki, Murakumo, Hatsuyuki.
Amatsukaze.
Akatsuki, Hibiki Inazuma, Ikazuchi.
Ayanami, Shikinami, Amagiri.
Yuudachi, Shigure, Murasame.
Yukikaze


The twenty-seven American shipgirls were organized under the United States Navy Special Talents Division, and consisted of the following:

Two battleships:
South Dakota, Washington.

Six carriers:
Wasp (CV-7); Essex, Intrepid; Midway, Franklin D.Roosevelt, Coral Sea.

Seven heavy cruisers:
New Orleans, San Francisco, Astoria, Quincy, Minneapolis; Pensacola; Portland.

Two light cruisers:
Atlanta, Juneau.

Ten destroyers:
Laffey (DD-459).
Fletcher, O'Bannon, Nicholas, Taylor, Radford.
Perkins (DD-377), Drayton (DD-366).
Jarvis (DD-393), Ralph Talbot.

 

[ARBITRACOM]

Hull Fragment: Fall


How does it feel to actually Jump? To go through - somewhere, that space between - and end up at your destination, thousands of kilometres away, quicker than the eye?

Our guest today, the battleship Musashi, provides a vivid description.

Imagine that you are swimming in a hotel's pool, thirty floors up the building. You peer down the pool's edge, and you see it - the building, the big sky, stretching far, far down and around.

And you realize you're actually not standing at all. There's nowhere for the foot to step, and everything is wet, slippery. Just one push, and---

It's also raining, raining quite heavily, and the wind is strong. Understand all these forces acting upon your body, gravity pulling down, the wind picking you up, and the near-drown of the rain. Water around you, water above you. Swaying, adrift, for just one moment, nowhere, really. Nowhere.

All of that, in an instant before that final kick of the Wake Engines, your departure, and the marrow of your spine turning to ice. All of those forces at once.

Those who are lucky, they feel only this, and in the next instant, they're where they had to be.

The unlucky ones slip out the pool and fall.

Thereby all of those forces I described, and the sum of all your fears. The firmament closes its cold embrace around you like a burial shroud, yet the heart is pounding, inhumanly fast. You hear it and feel it all together until you step out the other side, wherever that may be.

But you're strong, yes, and sometimes, especially in combat jumps, there's no time to really process all this. Armor charges must be distributed. Gunnery plots to be assigned, and damcon teams directed.

And so it must wait until you sleep.

 

[ARBITRACOM]

The story now has a proper icon and cover image! Check out the thread header and OP to see it, or down here:



Generated by the AI of neuralblender.com with the prompt "Tsutomu Nihei KanColle" and enhanced with Waifu2x, I find the output very fascinating, at once familiar and alien, with the selection of colors and lighting perfectly capturing the mood of the story.




Thank you for supporting and sharing in this journey with me this past 6 years. I am far less free now than when I started, but I will always try to find time to continue. Thank you again and I hope to see you around!