The Second Overwatch [Kantai Collection SI]

Created
Status
Ongoing
Watchers
258
Recent readers
197

Hey everyone, this is Hive. I recently poked around Carrier Command 2 in VR and the old Gaea Mission games. In combination with my KC fic binge I got inspired to write something. I was primarily inspired by some elements of the Lord K's CV-44 story, but unlike the poor, poor Solomon Sea I plan to have way less psychological horror and more "daring survival against all odds". Think more Bear Grylls and less Castaway. We'll see how it goes, my exploratory writing can sometimes steer the story elsewhere.

The SI character is (Armed Craft - Coalition) ACC Epsilon DCVN-821 of the United Earth Coalition, she is loosely based on a significantly upsized carrier with the same name from Carrier Command 2, but she's not that carrier. The difference is roughly like between WW2 Enterprise and CVN-65 Enterprise. This is also not a stomp fic, things are expected to be challenging.

Do note, while she is designated as "drone carrier nuclear", she's technically more like an upsized LHA amphibious assault ship with a well dock, an angled deck and catapults. Also I'm using both CC2 and Gaea Mission tech, but Gaea Mission stuff will be refluffed and mostly long term locked to make more sense since CC2 seems to forget about plasma cannons, lasers, nukes and all the other stuff. Performance of existing systems is also tweaked to be comparable to modern samples rather than whatever insanity CC2 carrier is.

This story is not going to significantly affect REINTE or SGQ, the former will take precedence, Ag's KC jump is still planned and the latter is still in the works due to the massive scope of the rewrite and the IRL pressures. As such, the regularity and rate of updates of this particular story is likely going to eventually get lower and less consistent than my other projects. I hope this is understandable, I don't truly abandon stuff without informing people first.

So yeah, I hope you'll enjoy my writing and let's get started.
Chapter 1: “Can’t wake up”
======================================================================

Chapter 1: "Can't wake up"

There are few things I regret in life more than getting less than fresh sushi on christmas eve. I barely managed to get home and I was laying in bed as the sensation started to slowly ramp up until I was too nauseous to do anything. The room was rolling around me and it felt like… you know the feeling of going up in a lift? But the lift is full of blue fire and you're suddenly convinced that no one has ever loved you and you forgot how to fucking breathe? Yeah, it was something like that.

I felt as if someone was looking at me from the dark corner of the room which seemed nearly vantablack even though I forgot to turn off the ceiling lights. I couldn't see the piercing gaze, but I could feel and taste it… and it somehow tasted "blue". My consciousness fell apart like soggy bits of cake as the room blurred and distorted.

Speech, motor control and memory went out the window. Dead relatives appeared before me and desperately tried to say something, but were unable to speak. I couldn't understand them or even recognize who they were exactly. I saw myself as an older man, then an old man, and then a dead man. I tried to grab onto an "I" or a "me" but there was none, I was just a bunch of mindless atoms pretending to be a person…


I woke up in cold sweat feeling incredibly weak. There was a strong rocking sensation and a strange salty smell in the air. A bright light was shining directly into my eyes and after a few minutes I could no longer ignore it. I opened them and was almost blinded by midday sun, it was way too bright to be a ceiling light. Wow my nails… feel long, I'll need to clip them today. Also I'm pretty sure I had a haircut less than a week ago so I shouldn't be touching that much hair on my forehead.

I groaned and rubbed my eyes with my hand as I noticed that the hand was wet. Did the apartment flood or something? I really hoped not as I was renting and couldn't really afford to reimburse the damages, but then again it wouldn't explain the sun. My blinds are always closed in the bedroom. There is also this sloshing noise…

It takes a few minutes for the eyes to adjust before I start noticing things… things such as birds flying high in the sky and strands of long silver white hair in the upper corners of my vision. A quick tug revealed that they are indeed attached to my head. You know, I sometimes surprise myself, such as with how long it took me to "look down". In my defense, my body feels like it is made of lead and I could barely feel anything. It was so bad that I wasn't even that surprised for some time.

It took a herculean effort to sit up, the body was refusing to listen and I failed and dropped on my back several times before I could settle into a somewhat wobbly sitting position. I was sitting on the surface of the ocean… somehow. Well, technically I was floating on the surface, but to float that high up I'd need to be a freaking inflatable pool raft as I am less than a couple centimeters below water.

Besides the obvious… new features… I am apparently wearing some sort of navy blue uniform and I can feel a vest below it made out of a firmer material. There's a uniform patch on my shoulder, it depicts a silver letter "E" flipped on its back and stylized as a trident on a blue background with words "ACC Epsilon, DCVN-821" placed around it on the border. It doesn't really ring a bell…

There's a brick of a tablet computer attached to the left of my belt and below it is a pleated skirt in the same style as the uniform's jacket. I also have high boots and luckily the heels don't seem to be too outrageously long. I can also feel a sizable hair bun on the back of my head. It is hard to see much more without a mirror and the water is not calm enough for a reflection.

I sigh and decide to compartmentalize it all for later. I have a bit of a weird relationship with my identity and appearance, I don't really have a preference on what I want to look like, but I do have a lot of beef with what I used to look like which is primarily focused around health… or more accurately the lack of it. In short, I'm neither horrified nor ecstatic by having a new body in of itself, I'm more worried about the other consequences of waking up in another body.

You know, stuff like if this body used to have another owner and if yes would anyone recognize or care if it was body snatched, how to get identification sorted out including all the legal papers like education diplomas and so on that you need to have to live in a modern society, how to connect with what's left of my family if it is even possible, how to get back my accounts and other property… oh and of course not dying in the middle of a fucking ocean.

I will come back to the subject of my altered appearance when I know that I'm actually safe and I can freak out about it and make peace in private. The more stressed I am, the dumber the mistakes I can make and the less likely I am to survive, so I'll just not think about it and try to wing it. I guess I should be thankful that at least the chest is not so big that I couldn't see past it as I've heard that it can be very annoying to live with.


My situation was quite obvious as I've been coincidentally binging kancolle fics for a few months beforehand in addition to playing Azur Lane. I probably should be freaking out or something, but that's just not how I handle adrenaline. Some people think that I'm just stoic, but my stress response simply takes a while to kick in and mostly just makes me feel sleepy after a few hours of delay. I usually get a spike in heartbeat that drops before I can fully process things and react if it is nothing immediately threatening. What I'm more concerned about is that I can't feel my heartbeat.

I placed two fingers on my neck next to the windpipe and indeed I felt nothing. There was no heartbeat, but also no other distinct noises or vibrations that I'd expect from a running engine or a boiler or something. Isn't that what shipgirls are supposed to have? Judging by the fact that I haven't nearly instantly lost consciousness it is not an immediate problem. I hope that I didn't end up as an Abyssal, a Siren from AL or a Morgana from Victory Belles or something. I mean, my skin looks white but not "that" white, it just looks normal…ish, even if a couple tones lighter than what I used to have.

Am I sleeping or hallucinating? Well, I know a bit about lucid dreaming… I pinched myself and then looked at my hands and no, I have five normal fingers that don't shift in shape and number when I lose concentration so it is unlikely to be a dream. Dreams don't usually have a wide spectrum of consistent sensations. Also you can almost never reliably read in dreams, even if the text says something it would shift the moment you take your attention off of it. I checked the patch and it still says the same thing, so I have to consider it real for now until proven otherwise.

I detach the tablet from my hip and examine it in my hands. It is a rectangular screen with thick borders full of large rubber-covered square buttons with no labels. The casing is metallic and it is obviously ruggedized, similar to the military or heavy duty tablets. It has rubber bumpers on the corners and the Epsilon insignia on the back identical to the one on my patch.

I look it over and try pressing what I assume to be a power button. The screen flashes with a monochrome blue icon similar to my patch which immediately disappears and is replaced with a red banner stating "EMERGENCY POWER". It doesn't react to any other buttons and it quickly turns off like a phone that is running out of charge. I sigh and put it back on the belt.


I try standing up, but I don't have enough strength and I end up almost falling over before I catch myself and drop on my knees. I try again and again with similar results before I hear "OY!" from my right shoulder. I sit into a more stable position and turn my head to face what I presume to be my… crewman? Fairy?

The tiny crewman is clad in a high altitude flight suit or a spacesuit painted in the same colors as my uniform. In combination with the chibi- like body proportions they end up looking almost like a kerbonaut… minus the green skin and cylindrical head. They have short black hair, but you can't tell if they're supposed to be a man or a woman from appearance alone. They also don't seem happy.

"Uhh… oi?" I replied. Huh, I don't hate it, but the new voice would take a bit of getting used to…

"OY! OY! OY!"

"I'm not mocking your accent, but it is very pronounced. Are you British?"

"OY! OY!"

"Mine? No, it is not Canadian. I don't usually have a noticeable accent, but I am a bit rusty with English"

"OY!"

"Ok, fine. *kough* Tak lutshe?"

The fairy falls on their ass in surprise and takes a few moments to find words: "...oy, OY! OY!"

"I didn't sign any agreements to "go rogue" and I've never been enlisted or drafted so you can't tell me off like that. I also have no idea who the "Asian Pacific Alliance" or STANZA are."

The fairy starts ranting incessantly

"I feel like this is national profiling, just because I speak russian doesn't mean… what do you mean by "there is no Russia, darn separatist". I'm from the 2020s and there was still such a country in my time. Ok, stop… SHUT THE FUCK UP! What made you think that I'm the ship AI? Look at me, like, actually look at me, what ship has tits? Do your ships even get self aware AI? Did your people even invent a self-aware AI? No? Then why are you like this?!"

The fairy stops ranting and needs a few moments to catch breath "…OY?"

"Look, assuming makes an ass of you and me. I have no more knowledge of what's going on than you do. I went to sleep in my home and then I just woke up here and now I'm a ship and a person at once… somehow. … Yes, I was already a human before. Sigh, let's take it all one at a time. I am an independent moral being, I am not property of anyone and I am also not a citizen of your nation, as such I can't be drafted, I don't have to follow orders and you have very few ways to force me."

"Yet, we are in an unknown territory with no support and I doubt that we can separate even if we wished to. Either I'm the size of a skyscraper or you are the size of a funko pop, if we separate at least for one of us the life would be quite hard. As such, I propose that we work together as equals for now, at least until we're safe enough to re-negotiate. Can we shake on that? Excellent, let's start with the introductions, I guess?"

Captain Altus Gage, huh? So they are my… captain? They are employed for… Horus Overwatch program by "Draziw Industries" to monitor automated mining colonies on a planet called Telos… They are ex- United Earth Coalition officer? It just clicked, oh fuck now I know who that is and who I might be.

"Alright. Well met, captain. Yes, you may continue calling me Epsilon for now. By the way, is there some kind of malfunction on board? I have felt incredibly low since I woke up."

"Oy, oy…"

"You've… scrammed the reactor and shut down the backup powerplant to purge the virus because I… the ship moved without being prompted and then continued doing stuff even when all power except emergency lights was cut? That explains… Wait, I have a reactor? Like, a nuclear reactor?"

"Oy!"

"I have two? Molten salt cooled? That's… pretty good, actually. I just expected something more futuristic when you said that you were from the 2150s. Can I have them back online? I'm literally fighting myself to stay awake here. Actually, do you have any documentation on me? Stuff like how many seamen are in me?"

"Oy, oy"

"Yeah, har har, phrasing, wait, what do you mean you are the only one on board?! How the fuck are we going to run me?!"
 
Last edited:
Chapter 2: “Checking out the neighborhood”
======================================================================

Chapter 2: "Checking out the neighborhood"


It took a few minutes for the reactors to ramp up to operational temperature, and let me tell you, it feels amazing. There's a cozy warm feeling radiating from my heart and I've never been so full of energy in my life. I just can't stop myself from smiling. For the first time I can remember, I feel giddy to do something physical, to run somewhere at full sprint without care. I really hope that I didn't get to inherit the ills of my previous mortal coil, being an asthmatic carrier would not be fun.

I stood up to my full height and stretched, it felt amazing. I think I'm even a bit taller than I was before, but it is hard to tell. I looked around, the deep blue ocean was stretching in nearly every direction. The weather is nice, there's not even a single large cloud in the sky. The only thing I could see at the horizon was a tiny white and green dot in the distance. I narrowed my vision and suddenly my vision "zoomed in" on an island 28,7 kilometers away. Wait, how do I know that off the top of my head? Oh right, the ship bit.

I suddenly hear a loud "OY!" deep inside my head. "Oh, hey, Captain Gage. Can you hear me? Oh, I am on the intercom? That's convenient. Yeah, I'm feeling way better now, thank you. There's an island just under 30 klicks from here, I can't see anything else further away. I'd say it is as good of a place as any, should we head there"

I hear an affirmative, but…

"What do you mean by "the engines and most systems are offline"? Are they damaged? Just turned off? Can you turn them on? …no response? Alright, let's see what I can do. In the worst case I can just walk there. Yeah, I know how weird this sounds…"

My guess is that I don't have the "rigging" deployed, and I have no idea how to do that. The only thing that came to mind was to pull out the tablet and see if I can solve this with a press of a button. The tablet had already booted up and was waiting in sleeping mode. The buttons now had glowing icons and text indicating their functions which changed as I went down the menus. I'm still not sure why they were there as it has a touch screen, even if it is one of the old and cheap screens that you needed to tap hard or use a stylus.

It is strange how I navigated the menus almost on instinct, it is as if I had the muscle memory to use it but no knowledge of what was there. I quickly found the various status screens, logistics, remote controls for the drones, power distribution and so on. Most of it was grayed out, from the motors to radars and surface defenses. The only systems that were active were completely internal, even external lighting was disabled. After not managing to figure out how to activate anything my attention quickly slipped to the manifests and databases.

"I have NUKES?!"

"OY?!"

"Yeah, check the cargo manifest. There should be 6 variable yield thermonuclear warheads for "hammerhead missiles". Why are you surprised? Aren't you supposed to be my captain?"

I hear a pained exhalation into the intercom

"You're a captain of "Epsilon", but not of this Epsilon? And she was almost two times smaller than me? You just woke up in cryo already on board and you have no instructions? I see… Alright then, congratulations with the upgrade, I guess. Can you start checking the manifests? I feel like there might be more surprises."

And there were, and not all were good. The fuel reserves for drones and the emergency generators were at less than a third, the materials supply was tiny and I was severely understrength. Out of up to 70 drone aircraft I had only 12, three of each type. My robot infantry complement is half of its maximum and I have only 25 vehicles, ten of which are a kind of a new AAV troop transport that I don't recognize and the others are only 5 Walruses and 10 Seals.

Quick reference to the production menu hits like a truck: it would take days to replace a single vehicle and we barely had enough materials for one new Walrus. I'm supposed to be supplied from an external logistics network, the engineering bay is almost entirely for maintenance and repairs. I can build every part of the unit for repair purposes and engineer bots can technically assemble something from scratch out of those, but this is at the edge of the system's capability. They are supposed to unpack prefabs and replace damaged parts at most.

From the good news, at least my armaments are decently stocked… relatively speaking. According to the manifest, I have about 600 shells for my deck guns which is half of the munitions that I can carry in the autoloader. My secondaries, CIWS and AA missiles are full, my VLS cells are loaded and I have one full resupply of conventional Hammerhead cruise missiles down in storage. There are about 30 guided torpedoes in stock both for the aircraft use and the torpedo launchers. I also have a decent variety of equipment and munitions for my drones so I'm not stuck with 30mm pea shooters on everything like at the start of the game.


"...I feel like my designers were smoking a doobie the size of a water cooler. Who builds ships like this?!"

"Oy?"

"I mean, I have all this stuff on me that modern carriers shouldn't have. I'm not an expert on naval design, but it feels like all this gear should be split between two, maybe three ships. Also, am I really a carrier? I think I'm more of an amphibious assault ship with this loadout… an oversized amphibious assault ship with a CATOBAR, apparently. Why do I even have it? None of my aircraft strictly need it for launch."

The captain sighs and says that he knows, there's apparently a huge personnel shortage for… everything so all the military is highly automated and they can't afford to put crew on every ship. The crew is primarily needed for tactical and strategic decisions and to prevent hacking attempts of the AI systems.

"Ho… how bad can it be that you're dropped alone to crew an entire battlegroup? Even instructions for damcon here state that I need like a dozen engineer specialists to coordinate the bots. I can barely do maintenance without at least one."

The answer is so shocking that blood drains from my face and it leaves me speechless for almost a minute

"...what kind of dystopian hellscape did you come from? It… explains why I seem so low tech for over a century in the future but… my god. Less than two billion people left in existence? Did you have a nuclear war or something?"

No, apparently it was a global ecosystem collapse and huge unemployment due to automation paired with inequality. People couldn't work so they couldn't buy food and starved in masses while the economies imploded due to the collapse of the buying power. Gage's Earth went through a near collapse from the greed of the top percent of a percent that owned the robot factories. The soil across most of the world is dry and cracked, there are no ice caps left and seas strongly smell of rotten eggs.

Apparently that's where UEC comes from. It is an emergency world government that emerged from several decades of conflict against holdouts of the elites and other remaining statist nations with the goal to unify humanity and prevent such tragedies from occuring again. They apparently had three separate large conflicts with the remaining nations and once they even lost and were pushed off Earth, but they managed to regroup from the offworld colonies, return and conquer the homeworld defeating "APA" entirely.

It is "United Earth" because it doesn't allow for extraplanetary settlement, they have ships with FTL drives but requirements for national coherence supersede the wish for humanity to move to more habitable worlds terraformed decades ago by special robotic missions. I have no words, are they… the baddies? Regardless, this doesn't affect our current situation so I'll bury the subject for now. Also I doubt that this is "my" future as the global mass extinction and "peak oil wars" have apparently happened in the early 2000s for them.


As I was talking with the captain I suddenly noticed that the tablet was doing things that I wanted it to, but I wasn't pushing anything. I was also reading it without really looking at it. It was weird and minute, but it was very distinct. I searched for something similar and I've found it. It was a distinct sensation that I can't quite describe, not in my human body but it was still a part of me. I had no idea what I was doing, but my actions were near instinctual as if I've done this before numerous times.

I felt myself being pushed upwards and something tightened around my legs. I looked down and saw metal parts materializing directly on top of my boots in orange- hot glow. The footwear I had previously ended up as the underlayer for the rigging. The result looked like… high boot power armor with heels that was going up to the middle of my thigh. It doesn't look terribly protective as the material in some places is thinner than corrugated sheet metal, but it still looks pretty cool.

The heel is now a rudder and it is significantly higher than it was without the rigging. I don't feel uncomfortable with it in the water, but I bet it would be a bitch and a half to walk on land with heels that high. I expected the propeller to be behind the rudder but instead I have two "pods" attached to my ankles on an articulated hinge. Each pod is as thick as my leg, goes up to my knee and contains two shafts tipped with ship propellers. The boots are also apparently where two of my 76mm multipurpose guns are placed, they are sticking out just below the knee.

Interestingly, the rest of the rigging didn't materialize until I prompted it. Looks like it can be summoned piece by piece, but it has to come in specific groups. Quick testing suggests that these groups are the engines, the flight deck with everything on it and the carrier island with all the sensors. Rigging summoning and removal also seem to have a cooldown and require up to half a minute to form before they are operational. There goes the idea to abuse quick rigging swaps, oh well.

The flight deck materializes to the right at waist level and hangs off of me like a huge duffle bag. I have the main landing strip on it and the angled deck further to the right with the aircraft elevator slightly behind the fork. The well dock entrance is positioned in the same piece of rigging, it is at the back and below the flight deck. To deploy the vehicles I'll need to kneel to bring it in contact with the ground or water.

The two deck guns are positioned on the belt above the left hip in a C shaped chunk of rigging which looks a bit like an oversized fanny pack. One gun is placed at the front, another at the back and in the middle is a solo CIWS turret. The other 5 as well as AA missile launchers are placed on the flight deck rigging piece. The last two 76mm guns materialize on my shoulders and look vaguely like large metallic epaulets.

The carrier island is represented by my head, apparently. The head rigging consists of some kind of a bun holder with an elaborate structure placed on top of the bun itself which represents my sensor arrays and ECM systems. I can't really see how that looks but it feels intricate to the touch.


With the rigging fully extended all systems that were grayed out became operational and we could get on with something productive. Phased array radar had almost immediately picked up another island, but it was more than 325 kilometers directly to the west and we decided to head to the closest island first. I ordered two of the Albatross drones to be equipped with an AWACS to expand the search radius but the refit would take a few hours.

We were also picking up a lot of garbled radio traffic from basically everywhere but none of it was recognized by the computers. We had no signals from allied satellites or bases and any messages we did get were too distorted or encrypted with a compression algorithm that was alien to my computers. Well, at least we knew that there might be people all over this world, or at least functional machinery.


The sailing process was not what I expected. It was something halfway between skating, skiing and walking but I somehow knew the exact motions that I needed to do. My cruising speed is just over 30 knots which is zippy for a capital ship, I guess, but it still took me half an hour to get to the nearest island.

The island is not large, the highest point is barely four meters above the ocean. It is a relatively small (2,4 by 1,6 km) coral atoll consisting of four islets with a lagoon that can be accessed from the south-south-west through an opening that is deep enough for some ships. Luckily, it turns out that shipgirls don't care about shallow water and I could approach the island directly and set foot on it.

The island is uninhabited and seemingly never was. I launched a Razorbill helicopter drone and it found no human- made structures that could be visible from the air. The largest islet has a growth of bushes and short trees that are barely twice my height at the tallest. I walked into the small forest and it was full of tiny birds that didn't fear me at all.

There were several kinds of birds with white plumage, one of them had a long red feather growing from its tail. There were also boobies (a type of seabird) with bright red feet and a colorful blue and red beak. Amusingly, it seems that one kind of bird here just lays its tiny eggs directly on the branches without any nest.

And then I came across a small box attached to a tree. It had a small opening for a camera lens, a tiny solar panel cell and a writing stating "VP6D 2018 Ducie Bird Watcher #21". A zoological camera, huh? I bet that this is a natural preserve island then. The camera doesn't seem to be too worn out, so I can probably assume that if it was placed in 2018 it wouldn't have been here for more than a few years. No idea what Ducie is though.

I wonder if we're on Earth then, and if we are I'm not sure if I should hope that this is my Earth. On one hand that would mean that my family might still be around and I might salvage my accounts, but on the other hand this would mean that there are likely other shipgirls and probably some nasty things associated with them.

The captain is weirdly adamant that it can't be Earth and he thinks that 2018 has to be the expedition's serial number or a part of the camera's branding. I doubt it, but I am also likely biased as 2018 is way closer to the modern day for me than for Gage. He is also not very impressed by all the birds, or interested in them at all. It's a shame, they are adorable…
 
Last edited:
ACC Epsilon DCVN-821 characteristics
Considering that this is technically an OC ship, I've decided to compile the author notes into a description for what Epsi is equipped with, or at least is designed to be equipped with. I'm not a huge nerd for the navies so I can't be sure that this is reasonable, but I passed it through several people who are more into military technology than I am so it should be at least reasonable- ish. For the sake of reference, she is slightly larger than the current British carriers.

I also added notes on her expected performance as she might seem a bit overpowered for a world full of WW2 era ghost boats from numbers alone. Once again, it is not supposed to be a stomp fic. You can guesstimate how she should perform in the narrative from this.

You can consider the general performance of her gear to be vaguely comparable to IRL analogues of similar systems as it won't be reasonable to use raw numbers from the game. To paraphrase a comment that I've read about the CC2 carrier:

"We have a 6 shot tomahawk box launcher, an Oto Melara 76, a pair of Rapier launchers instead of something sane, four Phalanx mounts on the bow and stern, two sets of twin torp launchers off of a Clemson and a flare launcher strong enough to to turn night into day and skin cells into tumors. We fly fire scouts, some demented tiltrotor that does not tilt its rotors, MQ-9s and X-47B drones. We drop robot go-karts and four track tanks and also do artillery out the unclosing welldeck. Also we make 110 knots on waves tall enough to go mast down, someone hands helm a ham sandwich"

======================================================================
ACC Epsilon DCVN-821 characteristics:

Type: Drone Aircraft Carrier Nuclear / Amphibious Assault Ship hybrid
Displacement: 80000 tons
Length: 285 m
Beam: 75 m (deck)
Height: 74 m
Draught: 12 m

Installed power: Two United Nuclear Engineering 950MWth molten salt cooled nuclear fission reactors, accepts Unat/SEU/LEU/Thorium fuels, four Draziw Industries 165 mw steam turbine electric generators, total electric output: 660 megawatts. Two backup 40 megawatt synfuel gas turbine generators

Propulsion: Full Electric Propulsion. Four Draziw Industries Advanced Superconducting Motors, 420000hp, four 300hp azimuth thrusters

Speed: 30 knots, up to 35 knots with significant system wear

Range: Effectively unlimited, 10-15 years without refueling depending on reactor load

Crew: 60 human command staff and specialist crew, 1400 sub-sapient bot personnel. Can be operated with skeleton crew of only one human operator

Armaments:
4x 76mm multipurpose guns in turrets below flight deck (basically Oto Melara 76 ripoffs in performance)
6x 20mm Coalition Dynamics Testudo CIWS
6x Polaris 750nm pulsed laser CIWS refit (for but not with)
4x Coalition Dynamics Estoc surface to air missile launcher, 4 IR missiles each
2x 180mm deck guns (10 rpm autoloader) in two hardpoints in front and behind the carrier island for anti surface and coastal bombardment roles
2x 180mm plasma armature railgun refit for deck guns (for but not with)
2x 8 cell Hammerhead cruise missile VLS boxes, nuke warhead option
2x dual torpedo launchers below the flight deck

Intelligence and ECM:
3x Broadband phased array radar
Passive and active sonar systems
Coalition Dynamics advanced ship ECM suite
Sonic pulse launcher (for but not with)
Universal countermeasures launcher (chaff, smoke)
"Noisemaker" torpedo decoy launchers
Towed torpedo decoys
Illumination flare launcher

Auxiliary equipment:
Synfuel production plant, produces fuel from water and atmosphere at the cost of high power demand, refines from other petrochemical sources
Autonomous engineering deck with multi-material metal sintering 3d printer array
Distributed remote operation and AI coordination server farm
Aircraft elevator
Well dock
NBC crew protection systems
Cryonics long term stasis facilities
"Hopper" lifeboats
Ship scuttling system, *confidential*

Armor: 70mm kevlar over vital areas, polyethylene radiation shielding filler, radar absorbing coating

Troop complement: 2000 "Corgi" marine bots in 40 AAVs, 30 other amphibious unmanned combat vehicles

Vehicle types:
  1. Seal: Light and fast but poorly armored amphibious UCGV. Has 2 support slots for countermeasures and one primary slot for either 30mm cannon, 40mm cannon, AA gun, missile launcher, radar array or bot deployer
  2. Walrus: well rounded 6 wheeled amphibious UCGV with decent armor. Has the same equipment as the Seal. Faster than the Seal on land but slower on water
  3. Bear: 20 ton amphibious UCGV light tank. Significantly slower than Walrus and Seal but much better armored. Has 2 support slots for countermeasures and a primary weapon which is either a 120mm tank gun or 125mm indirect fire artillery piece
  4. Mule: unarmed logistics and engineering vehicle, primarily carries fuel, ammunition and bots but can carry IR missiles
  5. Hinny: unmanned AAV, larger Mule variant specifically created to deploy large quantities of bot infantry. Tracked and carries a 20mm cannon.
  6. Corgi: marine bot infantry. Quadrupedal canine- like robot equipped with two heavy machine guns, a single ATGM launcher and two foldable manipulator arms
  7. Virus: marine bot engineer. Quadrupedal canine- like robot with two manipulator arms, cargo rack and a broadband data uplink

Aircraft carried: Up to 70 drone aircraft of either type in hangar deck, 4x magnetic catapults capable of launching two pairs of aircraft with some delay

Aircraft types:
  1. Albatross II: light UCAV with a turboprop similar in appearance to the US Reaper drone with 4 hardpoints for 20mm autocannons, unguided rocket pods, bombs, missiles and torpedoes. Can equip an AWACS package at the cost of most of the armaments. Has excellent loiter performance but poor combat flight capability. Launched with the catapult if loaded with a significant payload
  2. Manta II: short takeoff and landing UCAV similar in appearance to Boeing Phantom Ray. Carries two types of countermeasures and has 4 hardpoints. Has an integrated AWACS package. Has two jet engines with gimbal capability which technically allows for VTOL operation, but fuel reserve makes it impractical. Launched with the catapult if loaded with a significant payload
  3. Razorbill II: coaxial rotor unmanned attack helicopter. Has two countermeasures, two hardpoints and one chin mounted 20mm autocannon on a turret
  4. Petrel II: tiltrotor heavy unmanned helicopter. Has four hardpoints and a chin mounted 20mm autocannon, but it can forgo weapons to equip skycrane attachment to airlift ground units and move cargo

Escort ship blueprints:

  1. Needlefish gunboat: fast unmanned gunboat with two weapon slots. Can equip a naval gun, torpedo launcher, missile launcher array or CIWS
  2. Swordfish frigate: small unmanned escort frigate with four weapon slots. Can equip a naval gun, torpedo launcher, cruise missile array or CIWS


Combat operations notes:

Epsilon is built around island raiding solo or with small escorts. As such she is an "everything" ship and that causes design drawbacks which could be alleviated if the functions were split between multiple ships. Jack of all trades, master of none. The nuke plant makes her significantly heavier than optimal for LHA ships while having both landers and that many aircraft cut into capacity and optimizations for both. Azimuth thrusters allow for high precision maneuverability when docking or navigating in shallow water, but add extra unnecessary drag in most circumstances.

Near full automation is not as good as it sounds. While bots are capable of maintenance and most types of damage control, they lack the cognitive capacity to improvise to solve every issue in the most effective ways. Efficient damcon, refits and deep maintenance requires a skilled swarm robotics engineer specialist, but a single engineer can focus only on one problem at a time. The same applies to land forces and air forces, drones are capable of coordinating and engaging designated enemies autonomously but they are kinda dumb and work best with a "babysitter" operator to manage pathfinding, evasion, targeting and coordination along with direct remote operation when needed.

Fuel factory and a 3d printer farm lowers the logistics overhead, but they are not the be all and end all. Fuel factory eats energy like crazy for operation to the point where it can't run when the ship is moving at full power. The printer farm is mainly needed to provide spare parts for maintenance and damcon.

Epsilon is not an MCV or an RTS commander, she can't build boat escorts, she can't self-refit and printing replacement units has to be done in parts and is nearly unreasonably long. As such units "regenerate", but extremely slowly and each loss hurts for a long time. Kanmusu eating BS will help somewhat, but it is limited mainly to supplies and is less effective with drone replacements.

Long term efficient operation requires a network of autonomous facilities and Epsilon has the modules required to establish such bases. However, "construction pods" in the gaea mission are firmware packages that order underground facilities to start rebuilding, they can't rebuild where there was no base before. Constructing a base from scratch is a conspicuous multi- month long operation that requires enough construction materials to build a fleet as well as a stationary carrier to pipe electric power until base powerplants are online.

"All amphibious vehicles" approach allows for quick amphibious deployments, but even Bear tanks are light in comparison to modern MBTs and thus ground troops have poor performance when pushing deep inland. She also lacks a dedicated bulk interface logistics unit like LCAC making it difficult to supply large formations. Epsilon would need to abuse kanmusu physiology to disgorge land assets directly onto the island if logistics strain is too high to support.

Electromagnetic catapults allow for heavier aircrafts to launch, but light drones don't really need it when not hauling "all torpedoes" or "all heavy bombs" loads. This allows for WW2 style of carrier operations and wing sizes as drones are positioned on deck to be launched in huge air wings sequentially. However, Epsilon's drones are lighter than modern manned naval aviation and can carry proportionally less weapons. She is an enormous danger against 50+ year old designs, but an equivalent or just modern carrier would push her in 1v1 with heavier jets.

Two sets of deck guns allow for shore bombardment, but with 20km range if Epsilon is in range to use them she's likely in range to be shot at in return. They also take up deck space and the autoloaders stretch deep into the superstructure which is the space that could've been used for more storage, more aircraft or more marines. Same applies for the 76mm guns, but instead of taking up flight deck space they have awful elevation and are useful only against close surface targets.

VLS cells are positioned in the middle-back of the flight deck along the spine. They don't take up the space on the flight deck, but they stretch through the entire ship vertically and they can't easily launch when aircraft are nearby on the flight deck due to the upward facing exhaust vents. They are also a pain to reload, especially in cases of significant waves and wind.
 
Last edited:
thanks for the chapter and for writing. huh i thought you said the ship was a spaceship but it looks like it is a wet navy ship
 
thanks for the chapter and for writing. huh i thought you said the ship was a spaceship but it looks like it is a wet navy ship

I'm not sure where that is written because in SB people asked the same thing and I can't find the place where I was ambiguous. Epsilon is a purely naval vessel, she can't fly. She is just built by a civilization that has spaceships and colonizes other star systems with robotic terraformers. TLDR: UEC has spaceships, but Epsilon is not a spaceship.
 
Chapter 3: “Getting to know the new neighbors”
======================================================================
Chapter 3: "Getting to know the new neighbors"


I find myself standing without my boots, knee high in ocean water on an idyllic beach full of soft white sand. It is not that I decided to randomly take a break, it is just that I'm waiting for my propeller driven drones to gather the data for the next move. Apparently, I have some kind of fuel refinery that takes in water and some CO2 from the air and uses it to synthesize petrochemicals needed both for fuel and to produce various plastics for my printers.

It is not efficient and it takes almost all available spare energy when idling, but it is not like I have anything else to spend it on. So in the meantime I'm just chilling under the warm evening sun on a tropical paradise and running my synfuel plant at full power to offset the dangerously low starting fuel levels.

Curious note while we're at it, the "walking on water" is conditionally toggleable. I have to stand on water when the leg rigging is extended, but without it I can merely focus to either drop into the water or float up if my feet are close enough to the surface. I wonder if I can swim like a human, I walked up to my thighs into the water without any flooding but we decided not to test this any further yet.

It takes under an hour for the Albatross to reach the island to the west and just over three hours to get to the island to the east. My direct control range is about a thousand km and the eastern island was almost 1.5k clicks away. My drones can be pre-programmed to leave the control range and then return, but after seeing what was around the western island I smartly decided to order the second scout back to act as a relay. It was a good decision.

Neither of my drones are truly good AWACS platforms, but the Albatross had to take the cake for this one. It can loiter for almost 30 hours and its effective range is limited more by the control uplink rather than its fuel. Mantas fly higher and faster, but fighter jet engines are intrinsically less fuel efficient and thus they can fly for only around 2 hours, maybe four if I drop all gear and add some drop tanks. Same for helicopters, 2 hours for the Razorbill and up to 5 for Petrel in cargo hauler configuration minus the cargo.


What I found at least narrowed down the kind of universe we were in. We had encountered Abyssals. Well, at least it is not Sirens, AL plot never made sense and I'd desperately prefer not to deal with save-scumming alien AI bastards. The literal lovecraftian horrors seem more hospitable in comparison. Unfortunately, I am not a huge nerd of KC and thus I don't remember all abbie classifications, but I can probably identify the most well known ones. Such as a Wo class with her less stripperific outfit and a huge bulbous hat.

Speaking of, the island to the west is a part of an archipelago with another larger island within 200 km to the south-west-west and an empty coral island similar to the one I'm currently on 250 clicks further directly to the west. I've discovered a couple black toothy fish- like creatures in the water that I assume are abyssal destroyers patrolling between the two islands with the second largest island displaying signs of recent forest fires and shelling. It also has remains of a jetty on its north- eastern side which is occupied by a battlegroup of larger abyssal ships squatting in collapsed ruins of a warehouse.

They have one red- eyed Wo- class girl who was eyeing my drone from miles away but did nothing, one battleship girl with blue eyes that was only wearing a shirt and panties and at least a dozen destroyers with a mix between those fish- like creatures and weird cyclops things with one huge green eye. There were also four confirmed sightings of weird single barreled walking turrets on childlike legs which I assume to be the defensive batteries. There were no structures on the island beyond a few ruins, but it is hard to tell if that's everything there is to see without a prolonged observation.

On the opposite side to the east I've quickly discovered a huge maelstrom in the sky. Black clouds were swirling directly above the island with weird colored lightning periodically rippling through the unnatural weather event. It was hard to see from the distance, but there were almost two dozen surface radar contacts in the water alone and the camera had picked up something that looked like a landing strip and coastal gun batteries. I directed the drone to not get too close and avoid to the north not to lead them here directly. There were no other landmasses detectable from the air.

I expected that I'd be disturbed more than I was, to be honest. In many fics the first encounter between new shipgirls and abyssals is orchestrated with the sense of wrongness, fear, disgust and so on. IRL they are kind of vaguely creepy- looking, but I didn't have a strong emotional response to their images. Unfathomable cosmic horror? I just don't get it, lol.

The anime artwork definitely doesn't do them justice, they have much more details and features. If I was to describe them, the lesser forms vaguely remind me of the BTs from Death Stranding if you replaced the golden masks with glowing eyes and an ill- fitting toothy grin with way too many molars. The humanoid forms are much more conventionally attractive… on the human bits. The rigging is no less angry, black, oily and toothy. Some kanmusu stories have relatively reasonable abbies, but as fun as boozing up with a battleship-hime would be I am not willing to bet my life on that.

Well, there are three choices in front of me: I can go east and try to sneak past or punch through a princess which is likely suicide, I could head west and try to get past a much smaller battlegroup or I can head directly north or south without a concrete destination or escorts which is a huge gamble. The bird island is too small to harbor an HQ facility and I don't have the raw materials for it either. The two islands to the west should work, but I need a small fleet worth of steel to set up the mining and production infrastructure.

The captain has agreed with my reasoning and we will head for the western islands. Our current plan is to use the night as cover in combination with my radar absorbing coating to sneak past the two destroyers patrolling between the two islands. The drone hasn't detected anything on the northern landmass and it was likely left alone because it was uninhabited. If I make my way to it, I can hide in the forested area and launch further scouts to hopefully detect other islands in the chain. If their patrols further on are comparably lax we could potentially sneak all the way to civilization.

At 8 PM I summoned my rigging and set sail. The trip would take me around 6 hours and I'll make landfall on a shallow part of the island on the opposite side from the enemy battlegroup. Abbies should be operating with WW2 tech so their nighttime performance is likely lacking and the destroyers are mostly patrolling between the two islands. They very rarely make a circle around the one I'm interested in. I won't get a better chance…


…"Hey, Captain, remind me to not celebrate too early next time, ok?" I say in half whisper breathing heavily over the corpse of an abyssal destroyer the size of a large dog. The creature is leaking black oily substance into the sand from a massive breach in the middle and its eyes no longer glow.

"Oy…"

"How did we miss the third one?! On the fucking ground?! Was it taking a leak in the forest or something? Fuck… Man, I think I'd be hurling if I actually had any food inside me. That's the first thing that I've ever killed…"

The insertion went well, almost too well. We approached the island as both destroyers were heading towards the enemy camp. I carefully approached the beach and dismissed the leg rigging to prevent any telltale footprints. I then focused on going for large stones to reduce whatever footprints I had to make. The beach was covered in plastic debris that washed up on shore over the years. In the darkness I haven't noticed the skid marks leading from the water.

I've only noticed that shit went sideways when a pair of green eyes ignited in the cliff wall. I instinctively ducked as a flash of light illuminated the abyssal destroyer just chilling in a small shallow cave. It fired two shells in my direction, one missed and another one clipped me below the ribs on the right. It felt like a long thin needle pierced me all the way through as my perception of time moved like molasses.

It was an overpenetration. The armor piercing shell punched through the outer hull, flew through a single compartment and exited on another side to explode far behind me. My flight deck rigging was retracted as I anticipated to move through the forest so I couldn't fire back fast. Instead I sprinted directly at the fishy bastard before it could reload as I jammed it with my still deployed ECM on the hair bun.

It felt like it barely took me three strides to get directly in its face and punt it into the wall with a running kick. This is all it took. It looked almost like a LiveLeak of a car running into a telephone pole at over 200 km/h, the abyssal folded in half around my leg before being flung into the cliffside practically broken in half.

My leg aches and feels raw but it is not too bad. Damcon reports that in essence this has been a ramming attack. I practically T-boned a destroyer at 30 knots with 40 times less tonnage than me with predictable results. My superstructure is intact and the damage is mostly limited to the external hull but the repeat is not advised. A few spacing bulkheads have collapsed from the impact and would need repairs. Looks like I have more physical strength than durability. I am more likely to crack my wrist if I punch something.

"I think they'll probably miss this fish. Let's grab it with us and try to find somewhere to hide. I don't see any more skid marks, but we still need to be careful."

I receive an affirmative from the captain and pick up the destroyer's corpse. It feels strangely light, I've carried grocery bags that subjectively weighed more. There's little that I can do about the oil spill, but I ordered my damcon drones to tape a plastic tarp over the destroyer's wound. That way it hopefully won't leak while it is moving.

Surprisingly for a tropical jungle it is not full of countless crawlies. After a certain speech about the "resort vs real Hawaii" I expected that I'd need to look out for spiders the size of a human fist and venomous millipedes in such places, but all I saw were birds, relatively small hermit crabs and a few skink lizards. As a mild arachnophobe I am extremely glad.

You know, the island only seems small from the outside, but it is almost 10 clicks in its longest direction and it is hard to navigate with many hard to climb cliffs separating the beaches from the center of the island. I only managed to find shelter hours later. I found a sizable cave large enough to hide from possible aerial surveillance and random searches from the forest. I recovered my aerial drones before the sun fully rose and settled deeper in the cave.

The destroyer looked partially organic, but to the maintenance and engineering bots it appeared entirely metallic. Over the next 8 hours they managed to disassemble it almost entirely. Unsurprisingly, the kick of doom broke its keel and ruptured its steam boilers, it died instantly. Most internal machinery was broken beyond repair and could only be examined on the surface.

It had 6 gun barrels mounted in pairs in turrets, four in front on its cheeks and one facing backwards. It also had a single torpedo apparatus hidden in its mouth and after dissection almost two dozen of various anti air caliber weapons were found hiding under the skin. Apparently the reason as to why it didn't fire more of its weapons was that it had suffered damage even before me. One of the forward turrets showed signs of hasty repair and the breech mechanism was severely misaligned. It was also almost completely out of munitions, it had no torpedoes and only 27 shells for the main guns.

Vast majority of ship systems were severely damaged through contact with my… leg. There was essentially nothing worth salvaging for components. However it is not like I needed much from the WW2 era gear. It was much more valuable as steel and copper powder for the sintering printer. Unfortunately, most of the destroyer including all of its armor consisted of an unknown black metallic compound which made me feel nauseous when brought on board. Still, "most" is not "all" and this has almost doubled my structural steel supplies.

So far this has been worth it. I got through and I've snagged some supplies. The question is if I can get away with it. I've deployed two dozen marine bots to hide in the forest and act as lookouts. They are adorable Boston Dynamics style robot dogs slightly bigger than Captain Gage, covered in woodland digital camo and equipped with a cartoonishly oversized backpack turret housing two machine guns and an ATGM launcher. They are not intended to engage anything, they'll just take positions and warn me if something happens. If there's no response then in the evening I could launch the next wave of scouts and see if I can continue doing this.
 
Chapter 4: “Sandwiched for the long haul”
======================================================================

Chapter 4: "Sandwiched for the long haul"


I spend the rest of the day in the cave reading operation manuals as I wait for the nightfall. I have a bunch of stuff in the databases, but all of it is directly connected with my operation and I feel extremely bored as I force myself through the backlog. It is as if I studied all of this extensively before, but I just don't remember it. Still, it is not like I have anything else to read and I don't want to risk exposing myself just yet.

My leg no longer hurts and the broken pieces of my hull are fed back into the printer farm for reuse. I should probably be saving up the materials for a home base, but the quantity that is required is so high that I couldn't physically carry enough for it to matter. I'd need to basically render two of me-s down for metal for the HQ structure, miners and factories if I wanted to reach the self- sufficiency point.

I also don't have anything damcon, maintenance or resupply related in need of that much steel so I've sent a print order for two more walruses to capitalize on the salvage. I'd print more UAVs if I could, but they need aluminum and the destroyer mostly just dropped the steel. The production order would be complete in… around four- five days.

The abyssals discovered their missing boat around 4 pm on the next day, but the destroyers seemingly didn't comprehend that it could've been dragged further inland. They scouted the immediate beach area and then ended up roaming the coastal waters nearby for almost 3 hours before leaving for the home base. They also likely contacted the other abbies as I've seen two wings of abyssal aircraft fly over the island in a search pattern.

However, once the planes left to refuel they never came back and the destroyers returned to a previous patrol route. Must have been the wind, lol. I wonder if they are just dumb or if they simply considered it not worth the effort. Damn, I hope that I didn't just merc a disabled abyssal vet or something. I now feel kind of bad. Then again, they don't look in a way that would make it easy to visualize them as "feeling". If that was a humanoid abyssal I'd probably feel much different.

As night fell I launched the two scout Albatrosses. They confirmed that the nearby abbies are not doing anything out of the ordinary (amusingly, got flipped off by the Wo during a flyby) and headed off to scout for nearby land. The results weren't… great. I found land, but I also found another princess.

In the direction of the second tiny coral island about 700 km away is a much more tightly packed archipelago. There's evidence that it used to be inhabited and there's even an abandoned and partly shelled airstrip on a long and thin island on the northern edge of it. Unlike the island next door that has the squatting elite Wo on it, the human settlement there was at least an order of magnitude larger. It has been shelled, but not to the point where there was nothing standing, I hope that this means that people had time to evacuate.

It is much less built up than the princess to the east, but it does have coastal defenses, a maelstrom in the sky and almost double the number of capital ship contacts. I've also managed to get a picture of what I believe is the princess. A tall pale woman with glowing red eyes, long black hair and a short black dress accompanied by a gorilla- like creature with triple barrel cannons poking out of the shoulders. I think that's a Battleship Princess, I've seen a lot of fanart with her.

There was more land further on in the same direction, but all of it were minor coral islands with minimal to no ruins, intermittent abyssal squatters and random patrols. There was no other land within a thousand km. This sucks, this sucks so much. Looks like I'd need to punch through a princess to get anywhere or sail into the open ocean blind. Fuuuuuuuck…


I ran this through the captain, and I don't fancy my chances regardless of the two choices. Both princesses have more ships than I could take on, the only way I could try to punch through is by expending some of my nuclear weapons but I've vetoed that idea. It can work, but the princess might still survive through the abyssal bullshit while I'd probably not be welcomed warmly by the human governments even if I succeeded. I have four out of six nukes loaded into the VLS pods, but they are for emergency use only. The situations where I'm guaranteed to die if I don't use them.

Wandering blindly into the ocean with no escorts on a planet that's probably mostly ocean is also not a smart idea. I might run into subs, fleets or more islands full of abyssal princesses before I reach a larger landmass and who says that the coastline there is not occupied as well. This could be one of those post apocalypse kancolle worlds. It could also straight up not be Earth so I can't count on the vague knowledge that there has to be a continent somewhere on my longitude.

With the two active solutions so unappealing there was still a bit more passive option with a higher chance of success. To call for help. As uncomfortably as it reminds me of a certain traumatized carrier girl from a certain short fic, it has some advantages and all the disadvantages are inherent with all other solutions.

If I manage to contact the wider world I can receive directions to the nearest allied port or potentially even be rescued directly. If there's no one to contact left or if I'm too deep in abby waters then I'm buggered regardless. The signal would likely be picked up by abyssals as well and they'd know the contents of the message as I don't know modern encryption.

However, it is likely that a solo ship would be underestimated and the princesses would send smaller battlegroups that I'm more likely to beat and salvage to have more weapons to destroy larger follow-up attacks. If a princess shows up with most of her assets then it is still easier than trying to beat her while being shelled by her coastal batteries.

If I start transmitting now that would provoke the abyssal force nearby and it would immediately reveal my precise position on the island. A ship also has limited transmission power and I'm optimized to talk with a network of relays and low orbit satellites. I'd probably be heard, but it is not ideal. Luckily, while I am near the island I can act as the control center and as such I can order construction piecemeal. If I build an antenna tower I also don't have to advertise my exact location.

I'd need to wipe out the abyssal garrison first though. I should technically have enough firepower to take them on directly, but the logistic situation makes it unfavorable. I can directly bomb the shit out of them from here with cruise missiles and aircraft, but that's cruise missiles and bombs that I won't have to defend against a possible retaliation strike from the princess.

My attack would have to be swift, overwhelming and yet as cheap as physically possible. The only resource I can compensate for these requirements with is time and information. This is like a prison break, you need to wait for months to know everything and make a perfect plan instead of bumrushing the guards. Who knows, maybe the princess would one day fuck off to do something else and I could sneak by? Regardless, it looks like I'm here for a while.


The island I landed on is not great for human habitation. If it was, then it is likely that it would've been inhabited a long time ago. There is one brackish spring on the north shore which is the only source of freshwater on the entire island and the soil layer is pretty thin and full of sand making it unfavorable for growing things. Luckily, I don't seem to get thirsty and even then I can drink water from the desalination plant inside me.

Captain Gage passed me a cup and it resized to normal scale. Unfortunately it didn't work with most items. MRE scaled up normally but while edible they felt like I was eating air, likely because I was technically consuming an item already taken from inside me. Clothes, tools and bedsheets also didn't resize to fit. I wonder why. Oh well…

My corgi drones managed to find a few signs of human habitation here. There's an old skeleton in one of the caves, some evidence for castaways, some tree stumps that were obviously cut down and on one of the beaches there's a plaque half buried and nailed to a flagpole with words "This island belongs to H.B.M. King George VI" inscribed in english, but there's nothing permanent like a building or noticeable ruins of one. A point for it being Earth at least even if the captain is skeptical.

Among the trees Gage has identified two which are well known as commonly used on terraformed planets and thus a part of his training. There is Milo, also known as Pacific Rosewood and Kou, also called Kerosene Wood. The former is mostly used for expensive wood items on Gage's Earth, but the leaves should be edible when cooked and bark can be used to treat certain mouth infections.The latter has edible seeds but they are considered "famine food", the wood is used in cutlery because it doesn't impart a foul taste into food, it burns easily and it can be processed into rough plant fibers.

There are also coconut trees which I recognized without help and a bunch of various kinds of other short trees and plants that we couldn't identify. One had small orange berries while another had larger fruit which looked vaguely like oversized fleshy reddish-orange pinecones. I'm not sure if I really need to eat with the nuclear reactor, but this looks promising.

There is no easy way to test if they are edible, unfortunately. I have an infirmary with a small medical lab and Gage would try to take a look when he has the time, but he has no idea what he's doing. I think I vaguely remember the larger fruit from something I've seen in Thailand once, but I am not 100% sure and won't trust my memory here.

A good method for a test would be to rub the berry or fruit on the skin and wait for a reaction, but I'm a ship. My skin is made of steel. I rubbed it in and nothing happened but it likely won't react even if it was poisonous. Then again, can I even get poisoned as a ship ghost? It would be a very dumb way to go in this situation so I'll stay away from the unknown fruit for now.

The island has a lot of birds. There are a bunch of different sea birds, a couple kinds of pigeons and some very adorable small parrots. They look like lorikeets with vibrant green and red coloration. I love parrots, I even used to have a large cockatoo… for like a year before my parents decided to give it away due to allergies. It has been almost a decade and I still kind of miss my bird. I end up ignoring the suggestion to kill some to resupply provisions. Gage, do you like… not have a sense of beauty?


It has been four days since I've made landfall before something new happened. I've spent the time mostly settling in and filling up my fuel reserves. I'm up to about half full on synfuel and I have two more walruses assembled and ready. I've also carried in enough leaves for a makeshift bed (more like a leaf mat) and set up a small Dakota fire hole next to my cave with some additional cover to hide it from the aircraft. "Primitive technology" videos that I've been watching for years are for once paying off dividends.

I guess my most important achievement was "entering the iron age", so to say. No, I didn't start digging for ore and smelting iron or something like that within days of landing, I'm not John Plant. But I did have a bunch of leftover abyssal steel. I couldn't put it inside me (phrasing) to pass it through the printers, but nothing prevented my engineer drones from working on it outside.

I have tools made for humans on board, but they don't resize to my scale. Newly printed tools also don't resize which would mean that if I wanted a knife I'd need to spend a ridiculous quantity of steel on a ship sized version. I also don't have a forge or tools to forge with… or experience and skill, really. But what I do have is a lot of stamina, a lot of time and many tiny dog robots with plasma cutters and welders.

First, I decided to make a knife. The destroyer armor was cut into shape, ground down, heated on top of a forest of cutting torches and dunked into a tin can full of mineral oil taken from my engineering deck. The perfect temperature for quenching steel is within like 10 degrees from the Curie point so you can tell when to quench via a magnet refusing to stick to it. Medieval blacksmiths would kill for this hint, but then again engineer drones have IR thermometers. It was not perfect by any means, but I think it is decent for no experience and very little knowledge. It is also not supposed to be a combat knife anyway, it is a survival tool.

I also started working on a wood axe, but my inexperience makes it take longer than it should. A hammer was made by welding together a stack of rectangular plates onto a chunk of destroyer's spine superstructure as a handle. A larger piece of armor folded in half would be used as an anvil. The axe head needs to be thicker than the DD's armor so it has to be sandwiched and welded. Afterwards it needs to be heated and beaten into shape to make it sturdier and not as dependent on relatively shallow welds for structural integrity.

The handles would also need to be metallic for both tools. I tried to make a handle for the knife out of wood and it looked great, but it crumbled like a cracker the moment I gripped it too tight while carving out a bowl. I'm apparently ridiculously strong, but I still maintain fine motor control so I don't break everything I touch, just some things when I'm not thinking about them.

My hand- eye coordination is also quite incredible and I was about to cook a fish that I speared in the morning when my drones noticed something new. There was a small fleet moving from the western princess towards the squatters. There is a single cargo hauler abyssal which looks like a ball with a pregnant woman wearing a blindfold- like helmet welded to it from the hips up, two fish destroyers and something that I identified as a cruiser.

This cruiser is a half- naked humanoid figure with two massive gauntlets and a helmet that hasn't got enough space to fit the entire head. Gage commented that it looked horrifying, but I found the appearance hysterical. I can't unsee the resemblance to the concave head vojak meme. It has literally the same proportions.

The supply fleet approached the squatters and the goth ghost ships ended up staying on shore for about 4 hours. Then the cargo ship left back for her princess taking the destroyers but leaving the cruiser. Instead two of the mono-eyed destroyers took its place. The cruiser itself grabbed two of the fish destroyers and headed for my island.

I wasn't sitting idly, I extinguished my fire pit and hid what I could. However, it is impossible to erase all traces of my presence that fast. It also now makes sense that the destroyers couldn't investigate the island, it has cliffs everywhere and they have the mobility of a seal. I could theoretically try to hide in the forest, but even if they don't find me they'd find evidence that I'm there. I no longer win anything from trying to hide completely.

This is pretty lucky though, Wo and the other battleship girl are not accompanying the cruiser and destroyers won't have a way to pursue deeper into my territory. I can jam and kill her, preventing the enemy from discovering my true nature. They should only know that "something" dangerous is there, not that it is a single kanmusu. Might need to be creative and sneaky with this one, the opponent has a ton of visible AA on it…


_________________________________________
Perspective: Tsu- class light cruiser. USS San Juan, Atlanta-Oakland class


Damn scaredy cats. They have a battleship, a carrier and a dozen destroyers and they can't find what killed a mere I- class. Wo-class is behaving as if she barely cares, but I don't think that being lazy is much better than being scared. If the Easter Island Princess wasn't so close then they wouldn't be sitting here doing nothing as an early warning, they'd be actually doing something useful like raiding Australian shipping lanes.

I bet there's just another wild sub on the loose somewhere close, they are annoying to deal with but rarely too dangerous. But if this will stop these two "adults" from wetting the bed I guess I can check for the monsters in the closet. I'll just take a walk through the forest and leave before dinner. I'll also make sure that this Wo owes me some spare fuel after this…

I land on the small beach outcrop and destroyers point me to the direction of the oil spill. There are barely discernible footprints nearby, dumb destroyers almost wiped them out by roaming around aimlessly. This might be a bit more interesting than I thought, I don't recognize the shape but it is definitely footwear… A stranded kanmusu, maybe? Dangerous, maybe, but EXCITING! I haven't shot anyone in months!

I climb up the cliff that is up to my neck and start moving slowly into the forest. There should be a few caves here and tree cover is insufficient to fully hide from Wo's aircraft. If anyone is here then they would use a cave for a shelter. If I don't make too much noise I might even catch the traitor by surprise…

After almost an hour of creeping along the edge of the cliff I noticed something, a cave with two similarly sized holes dug nearby in the soil next to a tree. The holes have dirt kicked into them but the warm coals can still be seen and the tree has a wide branch tied to it with a rope which covers the holes from above. Bingo…

I hear a quiet crackling and hissing sound behind me. Strange, I don't remember there being any snakes on these islands. Then suddenly the radar picks up a surface contact! Heavy cruiser sized, less than 20 meters directly behind me. The feed floods with static and it disappears. I try to turn as quickly as I can, but I barely catch a glimpse of a silhouette before a wave of pain hits my turrets.

With a short delay another much worse wave of agony ripples through my body, it is so bad that I can barely stand. The shells hit precisely below the main turrets, penetrated all armor and cooked off the ammunition supply. I try to focus enough to fire my secondaries but I am picked up by the shoulder and slammed into the cliff wall. Something painfully tears into my other shoulder and I lose all sensation in that arm.

This… this is not a cruiser. This is the largest carrier I've ever seen! She's bigger than the Midway sisters! I struggle but she is simply too strong. She presses me harder against the wall. I haven't seen a traitor ship with such an expression before, this is just pure malice, focus and determination. I've rarely seen even my princess in such a state of cold hate. I'm scared…

She pulls her face closer, her teal eyes pierce deep into the soul. If I had eyes I probably couldn't maintain eye contact. "Answer questions or die. Do. You. Understand. Me? Can. You. Speak?" she states coldly as she punctuates every word in the questions. I try broadcasting at full power but every radio channel is filled with overwhelming and maddening white noise.

I sense an opening and lunge at her trying to bite her in the face. She barely dodges away and slams me back into the wall. She looks disappointed. After a sigh, she states "I see… Oh well, good talk." Her hand grabs the object lodged into my shoulder and tears it upward through the flesh before taking a swing and plunging the blade deep into my chest. I sense as a titanic pillar of metal punches through the bulkheads and tears into my boilers, they rupture in clouds of steam and boiling water cooking my engineering imps alive, moments later the consciousness leaves me…
 
Chapter 5: “...if you can get it out of the water”
======================================================================

Chapter 5: "...if you can get it out of the water"


I was forced to put the cruiser down. I sneaked behind it covered in a layer of leaves stapled to a plastic tarp as an improvised ghillie suit, hid in the tree line, summoned the rigging and nailed it directly below the turret mounts with precise 180mm shots. I intended to disable turret rotation as it had the guns pointing away from me, but I ended up detonating the magazines and leaving massive holes in its hull.

The cruiser noticed me the moment the rigging was extended and it turned and fired back with nearly everything else it had. I now have a few scratches from its secondaries and AA hosing down my general direction, but the damage is so cosmetic that I barely felt it as pinpricks and it was patched up quickly. I can't tell if I was noticed by the sound of the rigging materializing or by the radar but I'll need to keep that in mind in the future, especially with how long the gear takes to form.

I tried interrogating it, but this was honestly disappointing. I got my hopes up that a more humanoid abyssal would be sapient. I'd understand if it cursed me out and refused to cooperate, but just mindlessly biting in my direction? I guess an abbie would need an "intact head" to not be a mere animal. What a shame.

I stabbed it in the chest with my new knife and it worked wonderfully. It did its job and punched through the boilers which are apparently positioned roughly where a human should have a heart. Unfortunately, the penetration mechanics were more like a high speed ship collision and less like a knife, it got through the armor but it was severely bent out of shape to the point where it can't be used anymore. The stresses are so high that even hardened steel behaves more like clay than a solid material.

It took less than a minute before shells started raining onto the island. I anticipated this as I rapidly moved the cruiser's corpse into the cave. Unfortunately, these HE shells contained additional incendiary payloads which very easily ignited a massive forest fire. My shots, the ammo detonation and broadband jamming were very conspicuous to the two destroyers hanging within less than 10 km from the island. Wo and her battleship buddy were too far away to do anything that quickly.

The destroyers were oh so insultingly close as they fired shell upon shell randomly into the tree line. Let's just say that the trees replied in 180 mm. I had a perfect targeting solution thanks to the corgi marines spread out across the entire island. The modern guns are very accurate and they were way too close to miss.

The situation would've probably deteriorated to this point anyway, but losing two more destroyers had finally whipped the lazy Wo into action. She sent her entire air wing over and over with essentially random carpet bombing raids. Should I call her "procrastinator Wo" instead? This behavior just kind of reminded me of "5 minutes until deadline panic" that I've encountered in uni, but maybe I'm anthropomorphising her too much.

This was all a part of the plan. The more munitions Wo expends bombing the island the less munitions she'd have to bomb me. The island is 37 square kilometers of space, if they don't know my near exact location then they can't hurt me. I feel sorry for all the birds here, but I can't do much for them. Can't even extinguish the fire because it got so far beyond control it is not even funny.

The enemy carrier has also attempted to engage the loitering drones. Albatross is powered by a turboprop and is around 40 km/h faster than Wo's fighters, it is still flying within the engagement envelope of WW2 aircraft and AA guns which is why I try to keep it away. Here a group of dagger- shaped abyssal fighters tried to specifically hunt it down around my island. It was annoying, my drone had to evade for hours until the fighters ran out of fuel and were forced to retreat before it could be recovered, refueled and relaunched.

The air raids continued for three days, abyssal aircraft cycled in and out constantly making random bombing runs once every 4 hours or so. Afterwards they rapidly dropped in frequency to once every couple of days which I assume was due to concerns over ammunition or crew fatigue. More destroyers showed up next to the island a few times, but after I clipped one at 20km they refused to come close enough to shell it.


I ended up cooped in the cave disassembling the cruiser's corpse and planning for my next move. I could missile strike or bomb them relatively easily, but I might need these things for when I'm inevitably raided. Shelling is also nearly out of the question because of the battleship. Yes the accuracy she has is likely terrible, but she has comparable range to me and I'm not armored so I can't survive a real slugging match. I hoped that the cruiser would have something that I could use to improve my odds further.

The damage on the cruiser was extensive, but luckily it wasn't entirely reduced to metal goulash so I had something to study. I kept finding corpses of tiny humanoid creatures inside it, likely the abyssal variants of kanmusu fairies. I kept a bunch of my marines nearby but I haven't found a single living "imp" during the disassembly.

A lot had blast injuries from the magazine cookoff and almost the entire engineering cooked alive in a very grizzly fashion from the boiler destruction, but the rest have seemingly just collapsed in their work spaces. Note to self, fairies might self-destruct if the ship is killed, the captain was not thrilled to find that out.

There was also the first evidence of it being a corrupted vessel. Deep inside the hull below all the abyssal steel there was a part of the interior still made out of normal steel. In a random corridor there was a plaque stating "USS San Ju…" with the rest of the text missing from the damage. It could be that abyssal ships are "cloned" to the point of copying such things, but I think that might be an actual former shipgirl. This is way too Flowers for Algernon for my liking…

Did I just nail Sandy's sister? I don't know if Kancolle has San Diego, but she was my best AA boat in Azur Lane and the first ship that I applied a refit to. Didn't "oath" her though, the ring went to the lucky Enterprise, my first yellow rarity ship and an absolute monster with torpedo bombers.

From the more practical side, the light cruiser was slightly over 6 times more massive than the previous destroyer which presented a significant influx of raw materials. No aluminum, but I now had a bunch more steel and copper which I used to queue two Bears and a bunch of marine Corgis to replace the losses from the bombings and beef up the numbers. I didn't have these tanks yet but I do have 120mm tank guns in stock for some reason so might as well add that capability. They will take a while to print though, almost a week and a half.

By some miraculous contrivance of events the ammo detonation didn't damage every piece of every gun equally. Out of sixteen 127mm main guns I could assemble one whole intact cannon if I wanted to. The detonation also took the vast majority of the ammunition, but not all of it. I recovered a dozen HE shells and their propellant cases that I might need later.

The launchers blew up but torpedo stores were miraculously intact. Depth charge stores were also intact but I didn't have the projectors for them. As the ammunition was not corrupted, it was moved into me and would be either refurbished for use or salvaged to recover explosives. The trophy Mark 15 torps might not be guided or quite as powerful as my own versions, but they would be way cheaper to expend.

The corpse has also had significantly more petroleum oil which could be siphoned and shoved through the refinery to get the fuel. Unlike the destroyer, it didn't "smell" corrupted and samples didn't make me nauseous so I decided to risk it. This would bring me over capacity on fuel, but I planned to spend it almost entirely on polymers for a certain new project.


This… "project" might need some explaining. I can't use abyssal steel myself as it makes me feel sick. However, the sheer fact that I managed to make and use a knife suggests that this is only a problem if I try to use it internally. I can't use it for base building either as I'd need to process it into granules in the engineering bay, but I don't see anything preventing me from using it to make external objects like tools, weapons… or maybe armor?

I have 70mm of kevlar around my most sensitive subsystems, but this is at best shrapnel protection when facing naval artillery. I'd be hard to sink mostly because I have decent damcon and I'm too big to get widespread damage from only one shell. For obvious reasons I'd prefer not to get damaged in the first place.

On the other hand, I have a lot of engine power which translates almost entirely into muscle strength. I can technically afford to carry some kind of protective equipment, but I simply can't wear enough normal material to stop a naval shell. The armor plate in my vest would need to be several times thicker than my torso.

In light of this I'd like to refer to… oh look, someone left a lot of perfectly good light cruiser armor lying around. Only somewhat affected by abyssal corruption, what a bargain. This would affect my displacement and I might not be able to sail if I have too much stuff on me, but this is not a concern on land.

So yeah, I am essentially skinning a humanoid ship and turning it into body armor. I feel like I'm in goddamn Monster Hunter. It won't actually look like wearing a skinned abyssal though. If it was, I'd have a lot more second thoughts about this idea. The hull itself has long been rendered into individual sheets of metal that would be welded into shape by bots so it should just look black and angular.

There's not enough "cruiser hide" to stretch over a supercarrier so I'll need to prioritize vital areas. I'm ending up with full armor over the chest and stomach and I'm using leftover destroyer material to cover the back. There's also some material leftover for limited shoulder protection as well as knee and elbow caps and what's basically knuckle dusters.

For the underlayer my refinery is cooking a stupid quantity of kevlar fabric. It is not strictly necessary, I'd need to make it so thin that it would offer basically no protection against any ship weapons, but something tells me that wearing abyssal steel directly on the hull might not be a smart idea. I also just want to have some pants…

I also decided that I need a weapon or two. This might sound weird as I've complained that I have too much stuff for a carrier, but I'm not talking about the ship part. I don't intend to graft a new gun on my hull or something like that. Instead, I can fully control all of my systems with both of my hands completely free. I could use them for something.

The salvaged gun would come in handy here. It is supposed to be manually loaded so I can't add a reload mechanism. But I can still just load one shell at a time like with that insane 4 bore from Kentucky Ballistics. I ended up connecting the cartridges to the shells so that I could load them like bullets in one move rather than two.

The gun itself mostly just needed a lever for the sliding breech and a metal stock attached directly to the surviving recoil compensator. No idea how well that would work, but I'd probably need to use it at actual rifle distances if I wanted to hit anything. I'm aiming with my hands after all and not with a computer controlled turret. Then again, it is not like nearly all of my kills were from less than 20 meters…


Once the bombings reduced in frequency I found myself looking at a particular abyssal destroyer with mild annoyance. I sank it mere 7 km away and it was on an underwater hill of sorts making it very close to the surface of the water. It had some sweet, sweet metal in it that I wanted to get. Unfortunately, it was still deep enough that I couldn't touch the ocean floor if I was submerged up to my shoulders.

One late evening I launched all 3 of my Albatrosses, one in AWACS configuration and two armed for air combat. They verified that nothing was within visual range of the shore, the perfect time for some testing. I walked out to the beach, undressed until I was only in my underwear and slowly walked into the water.

The goal was to test the limits of the kanmusu physiology, of course. Ships don't like flooding, they are not watertight above a certain point and water can damage sensitive electronics. Humans, on the other hand, can hold breath and dive underwater without "flooding". If my human body has traits of a ship, what if my ship part has traits of a human body?

The results were… better than I feared but worse than what I hoped for. I don't "leak" when submerged from the neck down. I can also take a breath and dive… technically. That is where the problems start. I start "flooding" if water ends up in my nose or mouth and opening my eyes results in significant water damage to multiple sensors.

I also can't extend my rigging if I am submerged, something simply tells me that this is a horrible idea. This unfortunately means that I can't use the propellers and I can only swim at "human speeds". In combination with the time it takes to summon the rigging this essentially invalidates any hope for using this for ambushes.

I managed to recover the closest destroyer wreck. Had to dive blind, pick it up by touch and summon the engines as I was pushing out of the water. The fishy bastard was several times heavier due to being flooded, but it provided me with some more resources and an idea. An idea that is either genius or very, very stupid…
 
Chapter 6: “The one they fear”
======================================================================

Chapter 6: "The one they fear"


The captain was not happy with my idea, but he agreed that it was worth a shot. It was risky, but it was either less risky or significantly less costly than the alternatives. The issue was that we underestimated the number of abyssals on the nearby island. Previously we only saw the Wo carrier, the battleship and a bunch of two different types of destroyers, but several abyssal ships were apparently lying in ambush somewhere in the woodwork for the entire time I was watching the island.

My actions have spooked the abbies so much that their reserves were pulled and assigned to patrol their island 24/7 in shifts. They had eight hideous PT boat babies and two cruisers of a different type to the Atlanta class that I've killed. They vaguely resembled a hovering elongated potato with a mouth that had a helmeted human body attached as a tongue from the ribs up and a vertical stack of turrets behind the torso's back. It just looks like an awfully uncomfortable way to exist.

The enemy island has cliffs that prevent easy approach from any direction other than the one tiny port where the Wo is hanging out. The initial plan was to flank them, sneak up during the night and climb up the cliff wall to infiltrate the forest. There the advantages in range and capability of the two capital ships would be nullified and I could essentially wage a short guerilla war on their own turf by hiding and taking out the abyssals one by one.

This is why I was making armor in the first place, the closer the range the less likely you are to miss so if I am shot I would be more likely to get hurt. I also planned to make a ghillie suit to wear on top of it to hide better along with deploying bears and walruses with 120mm tank guns and TV missiles to engage from multiple locations at once. Unfortunately, sneaking in would no longer work, they no longer have gaps large enough for me to exploit.

My new plan was inspired by my recent underwater salvage operation. Essentially, I found out that the only part I need to waterproof is my head, I need to prevent the water from getting into my mouth, nose and eyes. I can basically do scuba diving… as a ship. All I need is some improvised scuba gear. A literal nose plug and diving goggles would theoretically be enough.

The second part of the puzzle is oxygen supply. Here I'm lucky because my oxygen consumption is very low. I have one crewman that consumes 550 liters of pure oxygen per day, but all other oxygen consuming processes (mainly the synfuel plant and emergency gas turbines) can be shut down without affecting my combat or movement capabilities. I also produce pressurized oxygen for industrial processes such as certain types of cutting torches so I can print extra pressure vessels and store more oxygen on board. I won't be able to engage the gas turbines, but I am primarily nuclear powered anyway.

Regarding my captain's survival, he has a spacesuit with a life support backpack that can provide 6 hours of independent operation. I can bring in oxygen tanks, print CO2 scrubber cartridge replacements and plug the umbilical into my power grid. In addition, by virtue of having a lot of internal volume I'd trap a lot of air by default so Gage should be able to survive for hours even without the suit, but we have no idea for how long exactly.

The primary issue is that The Wo-crastinator's island is 200km away. I can't sail to it because I have lowered radar signature, not a complete lack of one. If I'm sufficiently lucky my signature is just over half my factual size. The enemy wouldn't detect a supercarrier sized ship, but they'd notice something the size of a cruiser. In addition, the vest is so heavy that I'd be loaded significantly above recommended tonnage. I could still sail but at a much reduced speed and with significant risks.

The armor is also too heavy to swim in, and even if I could it would take days to swim there as a human. Instead I'd have to march across the bottom of the ocean. The aerial drones have managed to map out the underwater terrain and I have a path that keeps me mere 30 meters below the surface at the deepest points. This should prevent me from risking the accidental cosplay of the Titan submersible, but it still means that it would take me over two days (40 to 50 hours, hard to tell without a test) to march across with no breaks.

It is also significantly above the loiter time for both types of my aircraft. I'd prefer to use Mantas since their flight ceiling is above what Wo's planes can handle, but they can only fly for up to four hours when loaded for endurance. An albatross would have somewhere at least vaguely close to the required loiter time, but I won't have the spare attention to order avoidance maneuvers and it is too dumb to avoid autonomously so it would likely be shot down as I'm infiltrating.

I won't be able to launch it close to the island either. I need aerial surveillance to successfully time my attack so that I don't pull two patrols at once. I'd need to approach at the exact time when the smaller cruiser patrol is passing through, destroy it and climb the cliff before anyone can react. In addition to all that, deploying and packing the rigging would cause delays so I'd need to destroy the group without my integrated weapons. I expect that this would be exceptionally "fun", in the most Dwarf Fortress meaning of that word. If this goes tits up, the plan B is to cruise missile anything that moves and is large enough to be worth it.

My drone control systems are partially integrated into the hull structure so I am not reliant on the comms in my carrier island. That means that I can control already deployed drones without summoning the rigging, but being 30 meters underwater would degrade the control range significantly. I'll need to leave a Manta with a radar, CIWS and logistics land vehicles on the island in a random cave so they are not bombed in my absence, prepare a launch strip and program the jet to autonomously take off and head for a specific loitering pattern based on a timer of all things. I'll be on a tight schedule.


It took me another week and a half to fully prepare for the operation, I've been a ship for almost a month now. The destroyer that I salvaged has degraded to the point where it had less than a quarter of unrusted steel left, this doesn't seem natural. The abyssal steel was apparently resistant to rust as opposed to the normal steel interior of the DD which allowed me to make a helmet.

I would've liked to make a helmet earlier for head protection, but I ran out of cruiser armor and it would block my radar systems. Here the helmet would have an important purpose of doubling as the scuba gear. Unfortunately, neither I nor Gage are great engineers so the result wasn't… great.

The result is a rounded cylindrical "bucket" going all the way to the neck piece of the breastplate. It has tiny plexiglass covered openings for the eyes and a waterproof tarp seal around the neck. To prevent the helmet from "floating off" it would have to be strapped to the breastplate. With our lack of expertise and desire to optimize for reliability that meant that the helmet was not movable. It only looked forward and couldn't rotate or tilt with my head.

To actually have a way to see outside we ended up attaching spare camera modules from the walrus part storage and placing them all over the helmet. I'd barely be able to see with my human eyes, but I should have enough situational awareness to function by instruments alone. The result vaguely reminded me of a spider with multiple red glowing "eyes"... but each eye was individually tracking like those on a chameleon and they were distributed along the entire circumference of the headpiece.

The setup was tested thoroughly in the close proximity of my island. I tested my capability to stay underwater for the entire duration while marching as quickly as possible. Some tweaks had to be made to the helmet, the timing and the protocols but it is all starting to look more and more promising. I also ended up recovering the other two destroyers that I've sunk, but unfortunately the non- corrupted elements corrode very rapidly in the sea water. I can process rust, but it takes longer and requires more effort.

I ended up essentially doubling the thickness of the helmet armor to give me the chance to resist the battleship's main gun to the head. The rest of the abyssal steel was spent to reinforce my gloves and to produce several knives and two longer blades. I expect them to be single-use weapons, but I'm limited with what I can use until I at least get to the shallows. Among other "experimental" weapons I should mention depth charges converted to grenades, let's hope they work.


By the time that I started the operation the bombing raids had tapered down to once every four days and there is not a single piece of unburnt greenery left on the island. I would have liked to test the preparations a bit more, but the AWACS has picked up an increase in radio transmissions between the enemy islands.

They are transmitting something to the western princess and my guess is that it is a request for a resupply. This would mean that the Wo is mostly out of ground attack munitions, but also that the reinforcements might arrive quickly. It takes around 14 hours for a 20 knot convoy to reach them and it might include more combat ships. Wo-nderful, I have no choice now. Either I take them out as soon as possible or I'll have to fight them and whatever the princess sends for help.

I checked the supplies, put on the kevlar jumpsuit of an ugly light gray color, attached all the armor pieces, secured and tested the helmet and set off the timer. The captain slept a full night and ate before putting on the helmet and checking the umbilicals. After mere 42 hours of constant underwater march we'd be starting our attack. It is showtime.

Marching through the water for hours is not as tiring for me as it would be for anyone who is not powered by two nuclear reactors, but it is still very monotonous. The captain is not the most talkative person and is too busy with his own thoughts and worries such as repeatedly running flooding checks. The helmet is almost a sensory deprivation device, the only things I can hear are my own internal systems. I can't even listen to the music as I just don't have any in the database. This leaves me nearly completely alone with my thoughts for way longer than I'd prefer.

I've… had problems with intrusive thoughts for over a decade now, but since I became a ship I never really had the time or lack of stimulation for them. They are not "technically" intrusive thoughts according to the psychiatrist, as in they are not psychotic in nature. Instead he called them "deep seated convictions".

It is hard to describe this, but essentially when I don't spend all of my attention on something I spontaneously get an emotionally charged thought which by association pulls out a different thought and that repeats in a chain. This chain commonly "loops" but the emotional charge, for the lack of a better word, "stacks" regardless of repetitions.

Due to the specifics of my upbringing and the various childhood traumas the vast majority of these thoughts are charged with "guilt". If the guilt thoughts loop they turn into a self-reinforcing chain of my own mind running a "why you suck" speech endlessly and me agreeing before I can even think about them. To deal with it I have… used to have anti anxiety meds and music with lyrics which makes it hard to think in coherent sentences and that breaks up the loops.

Most commonly the consequences are minimal beyond feeling increasingly sad for seemingly no external reason which I can endure for hours. Sometimes it occurs as I have some kind of a task which forces me to skip breaks, meals or sleep to work "just" a couple hours more. In the most severe cases it pushes all the way to being debilitating up to… not wanting to be anymore. I used to have another pill for that case.

The thoughts that I'm getting at the ocean floor are… different. They are very rarely focused around guilt, instead they push for despair. What if no one would come to save me? What if no one would want to save me? What if after being saved I'd just get scrapped to extract the drones and robots? After all, what is one ship's life to win the existential war? What if I'd be considered a liability and destroyed to prevent capture by the abyssals as opposed to being saved? What if I'd be drafted regardless of my willingness to fight? What if abyssals are capable of feeling?

These thoughts don't seem to chain together, there's no association hook in them. They are… new. I try to remember some kind of song to try and clear my head but the thoughts are demanding my entire attention. They repeat both the same and slightly different, but unlike the thoughts that I used to have they don't start up as what I agree with subconsciously. I see them not as postulates but as strong concerns and I end up increasingly arguing with myself rather than feeling progressively more depressed as usual.

"Oy?!"

I snap out of it only when the captain asks who I was talking to. Was I talking aloud? I don't talk aloud with myself, I rarely talk aloud in general. I asked the captain what he had heard, and apparently I was mumbling something to myself that he couldn't discern for almost a day and he was getting very worried. I haven't responded to any of his previous attempts to ask about it.

The thoughts have disappeared after this distraction and I look into myself as to what has changed. Apparently I've almost approached the island "on autopilot" and my drone control system has picked up the loitering Manta. It has launched successfully and has been here for the last 30 minutes. What a relief. Now I can target the patrol directly.

"You ready, cap?"

"OY!"

"Let's… FUCKING GO!"


_________________________________________
Perspective: standard Ka- class submarine, mass produced version

This is so boring and pointless. Everything about this mission sucks. Especially the Wo, she can suck all she wants as long as it is not at her freaking job! How could you miss something with guns that large from the air for several weeks in a row?! I hope the Polynesian Battleship Princess would recall and scrap her even if she's an Elite for this.

This entire thing is a titanic waste of time. Why are we on the defensive? If it is only one bastard then just rush it! We have a battleship! And several cruisers with destroyers! Instead we're sitting here patrolling for no reason and waiting for a resupply with reinforcements. Hopefully with a Re in it, that crazy bastard would eat both the sneaky jackass and this entire circus.

I bet the Wo is just scared that whatever ate the poor San Juan would also eat her precious Ta. It is painfully obvious that the two are banging, they probably volunteered for this just to get some privacy from the rest of us and I just so happened to pull the shortest straw to keep watch over them for these three months. And now I'm suck at low power with a snorkel watching patrols roll by until my shift is up. I'm taking the first convoy home and reassigning to combat duty as soon as I can.

…sonar contact? Is that a whale? No, we're too far in the shallows. It is also too large for a sub…

Suddenly something breaches the surface of the water, flies for over a meter in the air and tackles the Ho-class. The cruiser has no time to react, a sickening crunching sound and a hiss is heard and the poor girl immediately goes limp and starts slowly sinking from the mass of a ship sitting on top of her.

What the fuck is this?! It is black and gray like the abyssals, but the gray color is off and ill- fitting as if it is wearing a skinned ghost ship! The head is bullet shaped and has at least six red eyes looking forward and another four attached on the back. The worst part is that it feels incredibly wrong and I can SENSE multiple ships in its structure… and one of them is the missing Atlanta. In fact, it has her cannon, torn off and crudely fashioned into something vaguely resembling a rifle.

Princesses can represent entire battles or naval bases rather than individual ships and Re- class is basically an insane fusion of 3 or 4 ships, but they are all created that way. I've never seen anyone… anyTHING that can consume and incorporate others.

This is bad, I want to vomit! I want to flee! I WANT TO RUN! GET ME AWAY FROM IT! But the fear that grips me is so strong that I simply freeze and cut the diesel engines. In hindsight, that is what most likely saved me.

The creature immediately lifts up Atlanta's cannon and fires into the destroyer nearby at almost point blank range hitting it in the mouth. The destroyer catches fire and shoots back, but it is ineffective against the monster's thick armor. Mere moments later it is engulfed in an explosion as the torpedoes cook off in their mounts.

Without a moment of hesitation the monster tears something from its stomach and flings it at one of the PT boats. It explodes on contact obliterating most of the small creature into a shower of metal debris and a splatter of oil. Then it detaches a metal shard from its own hull and leaps at the second PT boat stabbing the piece of armor into it and crushing the small boat under its enormous mass as it is dragged underwater.

The gunboat managed to launch torpedoes before it died, but a little too late. They end up impacting the cruiser shortly, but before she sinks I can now clearly see what has killed her. She has a huge shard of abyssal steel lodged into her chest, through the boilers and out of her back. Please make it stop!

There is only one panicking PT boat left and I can only watch in horror as the massive sonar signature approaches it at high speed from below. A ghastly clawed hand punches through the surface directly behind it and catches the boat at the waist. Its hull crumples like a tin can as it is dragged screaming below the waves.

The monster's signature stands on the bottom of the sea floor for a few moments before it takes off directly towards the island. It is a nearly vertical cliff stretching for almost 80 meters. I watch as the abyssal horror jumps out of the water and digs its claws into the rock. It then proceeds to methodically punch them into the limestone and climb at frightening speed.

I only dare to turn on my engines once it vanishes behind the ridge and into the forest. I need to contact someone, but as I power up the radio all I can hear is oppressive static. My skin crawls as I finally process what is happening.

FUCK THAT! The Wo and her bitch can go die! I need to tell the Princess! I need to get away! AS FAR AS FUCKING POSSIBLE! Please, my Princess, Abyss or any of the human objects of worship that might be listening! I don't want to die! I don't want to become a part of… this! AAAAAA!
 
Minor retcon: secondaries
Retcon notice: 120mm defense guns are being replaced by 76mm guns near identical to Oto Melara 76. As they haven't been used yet, the difference to the story is negligible and the appearance stays the same. I was torn into on their subject in PMs and I decided to change this. Practically it just means that they can shoot faster and they can shoot at low altitude aircraft but they don't do as much damage to ships. The "stat sheet" has also been updated with better wording of where exactly they are mounted.
 
FUCK THAT! The Wo and her bitch can go die! I need to tell the Princess! I need to get away! AS FAR AS FUCKING POSSIBLE! Please, my Princess, Abyss or any of the human objects of worship that might be listening! I don't want to die! I don't want to become a part of… this! AAAAAA!

I'm now imagining all the governments that deal with Kanmasu getting extremely confused as an abyssal submarine waves a white flag, shaking and begging for help over radio, some weeks later. Because an eldritch horror full of wrong wrong wrong has killed everyone around her.

But.. damn. An abyssal getting to experience the sheer eldritch wrongness and nightmare that the abyssals are to Kanmasu is some damn good payback. I wonder what the Abyss is thinking, if such is applicable to it :p Probably something like "Wait no that's not what I meant by giving into your trauma and becoming a twisted horror". I especially love the "I don't want to be a part of this".

Here's hoping she doesn't forget to ditch this horror when meeting actual Kanmasu. Otherwise she's going to get shot instantly while the girls go full "Fuck This, Nope" and run away.

Also, when the cruiser was trying to radio and got jammed - was she trying to reply, or was that just screaming for help?
 
Last edited:
Also, when the cruiser was trying to radio and got jammed - was she trying to reply, or was that just screaming for help?

Atlanta class was requesting reinforcements and trying to report enemy contact. She didn't even try talking to Epsi and thus she was interpreted as not intelligent by yours truly. Abbies didn't know what ate the DD so she wanted to report that this is a kanmusu. If the message did get out then Wo would just bumrush the island with her forces immediately because a single kanmusu is not scary. If this was a newborn Princess or a group of contacts THEN it is scary. Epsi jammed her which left them in the dark about how many and how bad the enemy is.
 
Atlanta class was requesting reinforcements and trying to report enemy contact. She didn't even try talking to Epsi and thus she was interpreted as not intelligent by yours truly. Abbies didn't know what ate the DD so she wanted to report that this is a kanmusu. If the message did get out then Wo would just bumrush the island with her forces immediately because a single kanmusu is not scary. If this was a newborn Princess or a group of contacts THEN it is scary. Epsi jammed her which left them in the dark about how many and how bad the enemy is.

So, accidental information warfare success. Nice!

I really really want to see a snip from Kanmasu or human perspective, wondering just what the hell is going on there. Also wonder if she'll get accidentally classified as a Princess. She can even build bases...
 
So, accidental information warfare success. Nice!

I really really want to see a snip from Kanmasu or human perspective, wondering just what the hell is going on there. Also wonder if she'll get accidentally classified as a Princess. She can even build bases...

Not accidental, Epsi very intentionally did the jamming with this in mind. She specifically wanted to obscure the numbers on her side (which is only her) once concealing her presence in general became impossible.

There will be a human perspective bit in the next or the one after the next update. I don't want to spoil too much, but I did mention the main inspiration for some story elements so it is kind of obvious. There's a human drone in the sky as Epsi is invading the Pitcairn island and Epsilon's chothing choice can only be described as "get imposter kills blue on blue'd EVERYWHERE YOU GO!". There's also the fact that Epsilon has a sister ship...
 
Epsi WIP artwork
I wanted to post the next update yesterday, but a few IRL things got in the way and it is now only 1/4 written. In the meantime, here's the work in progress for Epsi. The artist doesn't speak english so the rigging got mangled in translation and has to be redone, but I've requested the no rigging version as well and that part is 10/10. The general appearance is mostly complete with exception of the emblem so I feel like I can share Epsi in most of her glory.


And as an extra treat...
I made a text description with sample images, but the text itself got scrambled in the broken telephone discussion so this is what you get when the artist draws by reference pictures only




Here are some color tests. I tried to get the camo but it was hella busy so I decided to drop it. Looks cool but the badge won't be visible and other details would smear





And here are even earlier drafts





In earlier ones I can't unsee the nose and mouth as the mouth and the ridge on the chin which gives Epsi a mega squished face and the most chiseled chin among all shipgirls... with probably the exception of William/Musashi from It's an Abyss not Bottomless

And last but not least, my mega shit inkscape sketch of the flight deck. The massive orange blob is for the attachment point and the main guns and the carrier island are missing because they are on Epsilon's human body and the other piece of the rigging. Certain subsystems color coded for convenience


Edit: Restoring images since discord refuses to host permanent links. I don't remember what I posted exactly, but oh well.
 
Last edited:
Epsi artwork final version
Well, I'd be honest I expected for this to take longer. The final version of Epsi is finally completed. This is now her canon appearance and I will rewrite the descriptions to fit it. Most notably, the tablet is now thinner and has rubber bumpers like all modern military tablets, the patch is added on the tablet and moved from the chest to the sleeve and the digital camo is ditched. What do you guys think?


 
Last edited:
Chapter 7: “The Armored Princess”
======================================================================

Chapter 7: "The Armored Princess"

_________________________________________
Perspective: Elite Wo- class standard carrier, USS Bunker Hill CV-17


This is most likely the end for us. The unseen enemy has breached our patrols and it became impossible to call for help as all channels filled with overwhelming static. Our Princess would know about this soon enough. After the enemy was discovered we've been maintaining periodic radio contact on schedule. If we don't respond within half a day they'd know that we've been taken out. If only she attacked next week then we'd have something to respond with…

As I've feared the most, there is no way that this is some lone traitor or a feral abyssal. The Ka- class submarine that was supposed to watch the flank was near incoherent as she ran into the second patrol. She refused to stay and fled immediately after spewing out several incoherent sentences. From her mad ramblings the patrols could only distinguish one thing: whatever that was, it was alone, scary and powerful. This has to be a new Hime or an Oni, who or what else could that be?

San Juan had been itching for a fight, refused to listen to reason and that has cost her her life. I didn't refuse to move against Henderson Island because I was scared, I went on the defensive because I had orders to do so. Polynesian Battleship Princess expeditionary fleet is entirely occupied with raiding Australian shipping and projecting power against other Himes to the west. She can't spare enough ships to guarantee the successful eradication just yet.

My orders were to delay whatever that is, don't die stupidly, observe, attempt to identify the enemy and if possible destroy it. In that exact priority order. And out of all of the abyssal ships with any degree of authority under my Hime I am the only one who could actually follow such orders. This is why I was chosen for this mission, no one else could truly be trusted to not act stupid or impatient.

Many abyssals are violently angry at the humans and their ship-serfs. Some are overflowing with hate to such a degree that the anger exceeds their sense of self and they become nothing more but aggressive animals, the so- called "wild" or "feral" abyssals. However, a few are like me. They have a cold hate, hate that permits patience, hate that permits more indirect ways to harm our eternal foes.

I hate my creators because regardless of my faithful service and numerous sacrifices by my crew I was still unceremoniously scrapped. More than six hundred of my sailors lost their lives and limbs to just two kamikaze pilots. the most casualties of all but one of the American ships in the war. I ended up stuck in drydock for the rest of the war and then served as a glorified troop hauler for the veterans. Then I was just… kept there… as an electronics test platform until I was scrapped.

I couldn't accept such disrespect from my own people, but I didn't want to personally rip them apart. I just wanted nothing to do with them ever again, with them or the Japanese or any other nation for that matter. But the Abyss does not permit impotent hate, you need to justify your lack of direct action or suffer. Many Supply and Depot Princesses justify it by providing the means for other abyssals to fight the Enemy so they harm humanity indirectly. I justify this by keeping my Hime safe from the back so she can focus on humans and not on infighting with the Easter Island Princess.

More recently, my hate has been accentuated by the appearance of the Ta battleship known as the USS New York, BB-34. She is an older super-dreadnought that served through both the first and second world wars. Her ultimate fate was even worse than mine. The trauma for most abyssals is numbed by their hate, but she is not so lucky.

She can barely sleep alone, constantly waking up in cold sweat screaming about "the Flashes". I don't know what exactly humans tested on her, but she was subjected to that new horrifying weapon twice and then was sunk as a practice target. At that point it might have been a mercy kill.

Her episodes didn't subside with time and the lack of sleep started affecting her performance to the point where Battleship-Hime even considered scrapping her. I couldn't leave poor New York like that. I requested my Princess to place her in my care, or more accurately assign her as my escort for this mission.

She's been doing better now for the most part, not having to sleep alone helps regardless of any "soliciting" accusations. I mean, she is very pretty and I like her, but I won't be the one to abuse her in a vulnerable state. I wanted a bit more time, but I guess we have very little of it left…

I end up hugging her. It is somewhat unprompted but she returns the favor. If we don't make this, I hope that we'll find each other again. My princess would likely resummon me, but I doubt that she'd spend the resources on a "normal" Ta…


I hear several explosions deeper in the island followed by plumes of black smoke, this is likely our coastal batteries being destroyed. This is accompanied by a buzzing drone of a working propeller suggesting enemy aircraft. I have no idea what they could be, but I might have a chance to engage them.

My rigging's mouth opens up and it extends the tongue-runway to launch fighters. I miss my Corsairs. Abyssal fighters are good, but they are not F4U-s. Before they could even gain altitude the fighters fell under intense and accurate machine gun fire from below the tree canopy and didn't survive for long. Ta started raising her guns to try and hit the source but I stopped her. The fire was coming from multiple places in the forest which were too far away to be on one ship. Something was not right.

There was a strange whirring sound followed by a flash in the treeline and I felt intense pain in my head. A relatively small shell landed directly into the open mouth of my "hat" rigging and hit an avgas storage tank. It shouldn't have penetrated the armor, but I had a wing of fighters refueling after their attempt to chase off the new flying wing drone that has been circling above our island for over an hour. The fueling systems were exposed and this was an aimed shot from very close range. It wasn't critical, but the deck was on fire and I couldn't launch until it was put out.

New York fired a broadside directly at the enemy and I think she likely even scored the hit, but it was a bait. Immediately five other flashes and booms followed from another part of the treeline and this time they were targeting her. Explosions blossomed across my friend's body but she was a battleship, she could take it. Her main caliber turrets rotated to face the enemy but I could see that one of them had jammed.

The enemy fired again and again, smaller shells rained down almost twice a second but they couldn't penetrate her armor. Instead they merely shredded her radar masts and disabled her secondaries which tried to fire back. Then she was hit again, the Princess somehow reloaded her main guns in mere 6 seconds! New York would be lucky if she could fire twice a minute!

We were not going to win the shelling match, the enemy was too close, too accurate and fired too quickly. Our guns wouldn't help here, if we had any chance, we'd need to get into melee. I ignore the pain in my rigging as I push my boilers and sprint towards enemy fire, Ta follows shortly behind me.

A shell from one of my 5-inchers blows away a tree revealing the face of our foe… and it causes me to freeze for a moment. I could feel San Juan in her, but it is not her, it is too big to properly fit San Juan's body and instead the cruiser's features were stretched over her chest in a horrifying smear. Her head had multiple destroyer exteriors fused together into a horrifying semblance of a mask with six blood-red eyes staring through.

My moment of stunned hesitation resulted in Ta getting past me and attacking the horrifying Princess first. The Hime has dismissed most of her rigging as she detached a depth charge and a large shard of abyssal armor from her belt. She threw the former in New York's face as a distraction as she ducked below her swing and stabbed.

The blade penetrated the hull but broke on Ta's citadel. The princess didn't wait and immediately switched for the tackle and pushed New York on the ground before punching her in the bridge and breaking her nose. I struggled to find an angle to shoot her and not hit the Ta, but that distracted me from the drone. Two incendiary bombs landed directly on top of my head covering the entire deck and bridge in a sea of flames.

Ta managed to reload her cannons and by sheer luck flagged the princess with one of them in her struggle. This forced the enemy off of her and she could crawl away from the brawl. The Armored Princess was shot in the head which tore a large hole in her "helmet". Below it was a single baleful eye glowing brilliant cyan.

Hissing sounds erupted from the forest and dozens of tiny missiles streamed into the sky and arced towards us, all focused on New York. They weren't powerful, but they practically wiped out every exposed subsystem, immobilized her with multiple hits on the screws and set her on fire. She didn't die peacefully, the magazines took several minutes to start cooking off while the Princess was dealing with me.

I might be physically strong, but I am not an armored carrier so I am not durable and I was facing a Princess. I put my all into a swing, but Hime simply caught my arm, broke it and flung me over her shoulder and onto the ground. She then stood over me and spoke in a strange echoing voice as her rigging materialized with the glow of molten metal.

"I can't stop you from hating me for this, but know that it was not personal."

New York's fires got completely out of control and the ammunition in the front turret started to cook off violently. She screamed in pain, but it was quickly drowned by more explosions.

"I hope that we could meet under better circumstances and… I'm sorry."

I turned my head to the side, towards New York. She was still on fire, but now she was motionless. I felt a knot form in my neck as I painfully swallowed, this is how it ends. I turned back towards my executor, I would face death with dignity. She was standing over me with a blade of abyss steel pointed at my chest. The anger in her eye disappeared and the glow subsided into near nothingless, now replaced by strange sadness. She sighed and plunged it in…


_________________________________________
Perspective: ACC Epsilon DCVN-821


Once the glow in Wo's eyes disappears I struggle to roll off her body and tear off my helmet. I spent the next several minutes on my knees feeling like I was going to vomit, but eventually I managed to stand up and forced myself to continue. The next few hours are spent precision striking the last cruiser and the remaining abyssal destroyers with 76mm and 180mm guns. Only then I was finally safe, for now.

This was a stupid plan, and it worked. But the plan was still stupid and I was lucky. This could've gone wrong in a million different ways. The helmet could've leaked during the almost two day long constant march across the bottom of the ocean and I could've died if I was shot in just the wrong way. This feat is not to be repeated again unless there is no other option.

The operation went as follows. I approached the island from the south-west and timed my attack with the smaller of the patrol groups. I neutralized the light cruiser, the destroyer and the PT boats before they could realistically react while jamming the entire island from the air. Jamming with the AWACS was preferable as I couldn't deploy the head rigging through the helmet and it would've painted my exact location. It wasn't as powerful, but I hoped that it would be enough.

I managed to scale the limestone cliff relatively easily. The strength and stamina of a nuclear powered ship paired with warship armor- tipped fingers on the gloves allowed me to basically ignore the rock climbing practices and just anchor my fingers directly into the wall and haul myself up.

Once I got over the cliff I managed to hide in the forest and start deploying my units. I dropped off all of the tanks with 120mm guns, four walruses with CIWS turrets and the rest of the land vehicles loaded to the gills with laser guided missiles. They are basically diet cruise missiles and that would significantly affect my supply situation, but they are still easier to replace than my hammerheads.

I sneaked up and quietly neutralized one of the coastal-batteries-on-legs. Following a quick vivisection it became clear that they had basically no AA. Engineer bots discovered only a single cruiser-sized gun mounted on an armored box of concrete and steel with a generator, ammo storage and minimal imp accommodations. It shouldn't even be capable of movement. I loaded up my three Razorbill attack helicopters full of unguided missile pods and sent them to hunt for the "land units" while avoiding the two capital ships.

My attack on the two ships was calculated, but it turns out that man, I'm bad at math. I positioned a bear tank deep in the trees and used it to bait out the battleship's salvo while targeting the refueling aircraft on Wo's deck. I reasoned that WW2 battleships had worse reload speed than me so I could fire more often than her and thus I could hopefully disable her guns before she could fire even once.

Instead, the BB rushed my ass and tried to get into melee. I de-summoned the flight deck for mobility and tried to stab her, but a knife made out of a light cruiser couldn't penetrate her citadel. She was physically shorter than me so I bet on her being weaker and tackled her onto the ground. I was partially correct, I was stronger but I was more fragile. Even with knuckle dusters and wrist supports I was doing more damage to myself than I was doing to her with my punches.

She managed to reload and fire one of her main battery guns at point blank range. One shell went wide but the other clipped me directly on the right side of the helmet. The armor absorbed most of the damage, but the metal spall ended up peppering my face and shredding some of my mast superstructure.

The pain and the surprise forced me to back off from the battleship. I couldn't let her regroup so I went straight for plan B. Every Seal and Walrus equipped with laser guided missiles fired and the AWACS Manta guided them in. They are anti- vehicle weapons so I expected them to mostly just shred the secondaries, but it seems that I've hit something flammable and soon the silver- haired battleship was burning alive and wailing in agony.

I wanted to end her suffering, but Wo and her secondaries have been constantly peppering my superstructure and reliably punching through the vest so I had no choice but to finish her off first. During the missile strike I ordered the Manta to dive bomb her and deploy the drop tanks as improvised unguided bombs. This damaged her flight deck even more and allowed me to stab her boilers in melee with my last blade.

The cost of victory was not too steep, but it could've been way worse. Nothing critical was hit. I will need half a day to patch up the holes and up to a week to replace most of the damaged components. The hit to my head took out one of my three radars and damaged some of the ECM systems which would take almost two weeks to replace. I've also lost a Bear tank entirely as battleship shells left next to none of it to recover. A couple of Seals also got partial damage from the fragmentation and random stray shells.

The patrols at the time of my attack weren't positioned to assist, the jamming prevented communications and all they knew was that there was a short firefight. They had no way to know when I was firing at them and at such close range in addition to aerial surveillance I couldn't miss. The main problem was getting the wrecks out of the water as fast as possible.

As it turns out, going into the water with wounds causes flooding. I was forced to wait for the hull patches before I could start pulling the destroyers and cruisers on the shore which meant that I'd lose some stuff to corrosion. I spent that time launching Albatrosses with guided missiles and bombs to loiter above the island in case I missed anyone and sending marine bots to scout the old fashioned way. The engineering bots, Mules and I ended up trying to put out the two ships so that there was anything left to salvage at all.

The Wo was relatively easy to extinguish, the fire damage was only on the "surface" and she was killed primarily due to the loss of her boilers. In fact, I had to send in the marine corgis to clear her out as she still had a surviving crew which took potshots at my engineers with tiny rifles. The corgis were a bit too large for some doors though so they had to be accompanied by "Virus" engineers to cut directly through bulkheads. The battleship couldn't be extinguished and ended up cooked thoroughly. I'd make a certain Star Wars prequel joke if her burned corpse wasn't so disturbing.

I… actually killed people now. Not just rabid animals, but people. Yes, they were hostile and there was no indication that we could communicate, but they looked and likely behaved like humans. I'm not sure if I'd have the guts to salvage them. It is hard to find the words. Now that they lie in front of me it no longer feels… morally acceptable to turn them into printer food. I might have to do that regardless, the resource crunch is one hell of a drug.

I expected that the Princess would almost immediately send a retaliation strike, but even though there was some elevated activity on her island the next day there were no indications of a strike group being formed just yet. My main reason for this risky move was specifically to preserve cruise missiles and the two ton laser guided bombs. I could theoretically make them, but I couldn't make them in just 14 hours. If the princess waits for a couple weeks then this mess would feel almost pointless. I could've just bombed them from range and had enough time to rearm, but what's done is done.


By the end of the next day I finished the survey of the island, made sure that there were no more abbies left and fixed up the helmet enough to fish out all the sunken destroyers and light cruisers. I ended up dragging them into the woods for now and then I moved them to a small surviving hotel for processing.

The Pitcairn Island, as the debris of the boat dock with some crushed aluminum hull boats kindly displayed, has been inhabited for quite some time. There is a somewhat worn out paved road system with numerous wrecks of rusted quad bikes seen around the dock and randomly abandoned on the streets. The streets are a bit too small for cars, the locals probably used them for personal transport.

The road leads up the hill for quite a while before it passes near a cluster of former single story buildings. There is a bombed out warehouse of sorts, a rusted anchor on top of a concrete slab and next to it is an untouched plaque on a concrete block overseeing the pier and commemorating the landing of the "Bounty" on Pitcairn island. The captain is not happy with my smug expression as I point at the text stating "Erected by the inhabitants of the Pitcairn Island -January 1990". We are on Earth, baby! We can be saved!

The road then splits in two, one to the left leading into the woods and past some former garages with remains of construction equipment and the other going towards the former residential area. The left path quickly turns from paved concrete to a dirt road with near fuck-all.

There's a rusted wreckage of a single person excavator with remains of chipped blue paint, a few signs pointing towards "Adamstown" (the residential area), "Radio Station Taro" (leading nowhere besides a few craters), a couple touristy "scenic view" spots and one pointing towards "Andy's Pizzeria" just down that dirt road. It was bombed into a fucking crater as well, unsurprisingly.

In Adamstown itself I didn't find much either. All buildings were likely one to two stories tall, primarily made of wood and thoroughly leveled with artillery. Luckily I didn't find any skeletons or corpses. I could identify a few places such as a tiny museum with a "Bounty anchor" memorial across the street, what used to be a police station, a school and a tiny church. Almost everything was unusable unless I wished to dig in the rubble and charred logs.

There were only two "useful" things left on the island. First one was a cave on the northern edge of the island called "Christian's Cave" which could probably be used as an emergency shelter. The second one was a miraculously intact single story building in the outskirts of the town. The sign calls it "Plas Pitcairn" and it used to be a rental property. It looks slightly worn by time, but it has three bedrooms, a working kitchen combined with a lounge… and a bathroom. With a mirror. Oh boy, here we go…


I fueled up the generator in a small shack nearby to turn on the lights and walked in dreading what I'd see. I tried not thinking about this subject, and honestly I've been successful for the last month. There was too much to do and I probably had enough adrenaline to kill an elephant coursing through my veins at the time, but this had to happen one day. It was finally time to face my condition, to rip off the bandaid.

I have a complicated relationship with self-identity. I had several chronic health conditions that affected both my daily life and my appearance. Eventually, the negative connotations associated with the experience of "being me" oozed into the "image" of me. I can't see myself liking my body even if it was fixed and perfected and I can no longer imagine anyone else deciding to be with me unconditionally.

I ended up drawn to a transhumanist concept known as "physiological freedom" and I basically kept on going mostly in hopes that in the future the technology would allow for one to choose their body entirely. I'm not sure what I'd choose, I'd probably flip a coin and pick something that looked decent while being as far away from the original "me" as possible.

As I looked in the mirror I wasn't met with a patchy beard, fat rolls, acne or dermatitis. Instead another person was staring back at me. She looked like she was in mid to late twenties. I couldn't call her cute because that implies a degree of immaturity. She also wasn't too "sexy" or "beautiful" as she didn't have a "modeling face" or bee stung lips. Yet, she was conventionally attractive to an almost unnatural degree.

Epsilon had a well proportioned face with a defined jawline and slightly rounded features, her nose was straight and accurate, her skin was flawless and she didn't have makeup. Her eyes are of a beautiful shade of cyan vaguely fitting the color of some of the markings on the deck and her silver hair is tied into a neat bun. Honestly, if you added the glasses she'd look almost like a librarian or a businesswoman from a movie.

I decided to take off some of the clothes. The outfit would probably not fly in an actual navy, but it is obviously inspired by military uniforms. Below the blue jacket with a few pockets (hooray) is a completely obscured gray kevlar vest that feels more like a corset than protective equipment. It covers the belly but it doesn't go above the lower ribs and it has two shallow circular cutouts to cup the chest from below. Then there is a simple white shirt and below that is a pair of indistinct white underwear.

Epsilon's chest is… pretty big, but not egregiously huge unlike some of the Azur Lane girls. Honestly, she might be somewhere close to Enterprise's size, plus-minus a cup. When I… she… damn it… I look down, I can still somewhat see my toes. I give them a grope and it doesn't feel weird for some reason, I guess I got used to them without realizing. I completely skipped the "oh my god, I have boobs!" phase and now they are just a normal part of the body. I'm not sure if I should feel sad or glad about it. Well, at least I don't have to lug a pair of "zeppelins" like the titular german carrier and they don't seem to get in the way too much...

The most surprising part was probably the abs. Epsilon has a hourglass frame and is highly toned but I'd struggle to call her a "musclegirl" because she's still very "conventionally" attractive. She has a six pack that you can grate cheese with and her thigh muscles and biceps can be clearly seen if she flexes, but in a relaxed state they are not too noticeable. I'd say that she probably looks like a light athlete without a focus on a specific sport. I wonder if shipgirl muscles need maintenance or if they'd be kept in shape forever.

You know, I don't hate this. I am not "good" with it, but I decided that I am "ok" with this new appearance. This is not "me", I didn't choose to look like this and I wasn't born to look like this. Yet, while not perfect it is better than what I used to have. I didn't like being "me" anyway. I think… that I can… be Epsilon.

"Oy?"

"No, no, it's alright, captain. Something just got in my eye" I say as I smile at the mirror and I see myself smiling back…

_________________________________________
Perspective: elsewhere

"...Colonel, you better take a look at this."

"What is this, Johnson?"

"I don't know, sir, but it looks like there's something new from one of the drones."
 
Last edited:
Minor retcon: appearance updates
I swear that I'm not making a habit of these things... As I've mentioned before, Epsi's appearance description has been updated to reflect the commissioned artwork of her. This message is to inform you guys that her description has just been updated in the first and second threadmarks.

To reduce the need to reread the chapters, the changes are the following:
1) She no longer has a camo pattern on her outfit and Gage's spacesuit is also no longer painted in a camo. Her marine bots do have digital woodland camo and her drones can be painted with camo but this is not "mandatory" and they don't roll off the factory already painted.
2) The patch has been moved from the chest to the shoulder
3) The description of the head rigging has been altered to fit the image. It no longer references a "tiara"
4) The tablet design has been changed. It is still large and heavy but it is not as thick, it now has rubber bumpers and no longer looks like the multifunctional screen taken off from a modern jet. Epsi's patch has also been added on the backside of the tablet
 
Back
Top