Thursday, January 30th, 2014.

Instead of the usual regimen for today, I assembled the task force at 1000 Hours. Everyone, even including Mamiya, Irako, Houshou, Akashi, and Ooyodo, was there. Those five I mentioned I didn't specifically order to be part of the task force, they just joined on their own volition because they understood how big the mission today was. Mamiya and Irako had spent the last night cooking lunches and dinners if need be for the fleet while they were out. Akashi joined as a mobile repair unit, and Ooyodo joined to be a sort of central command hub for the fleet, helping to coordinate their attacks. It seems like even the ship girls who aren't normally attack ship girls can still operate like one, just they don't have any weapons to defend themselves and have to rely on the rest of the fleet to escort them and keep them safe.

I told them that I highly advised not going with the fleet, but none of them listened to me. I told myself when it was clear that I wouldn't be able to convince them otherwise that even if it's not necessarily my fault for anything that happens to those five, I'll still feel guilty for not being able to refrain them so.

I made it clear for everyone again before sending them off: this was a capture mission they'd be in. They cannot shoot to kill; they must shoot to maim and disable. I made sure that everyone knew the implications and consequences of that change in objective.

Drawing from all my years as a soldier, I can guarantee you that taking someone alive is much harder than taking someone dead. Human or Abyssal, that law of combat remains universal.

I also made it even more clear that no matter what, they needed to keep one another alive. That was the most important objective: no one comes back dead. Not just because the ship girls were advanced pieces of technology who were expensive to produce and train, but because like any of my men whom I send out on dangerous missions like this, they're also my comrades.

I also mentioned to them that they must not act rashly. I've noticed from my limited interactions with Suzuya and some of the other ship girls that they really seem to be eager to win my attention. I'm afraid that that kind of attitude's going to get some of the girls in a bad spot, because they're going to be clambering and rushing forward like idiots to show off to me and whatnot and end up getting shot first thing they do.

And so after all that, I wished them best of luck and sent them off, and I sat back, did paperwork, made my own lunch, worked on the baths to do what I could while the others were away, made my own dinner, and sat out with a couple bottles of Ramune on the pier, waiting for my fleet to return.

As it turns out, they didn't come until fucking 0130 Hours in the goddamn morning. I'm surprised time even passed by that fast as I sat out there in the night, watching the moon rise over the horizon and up into the sky among the stars.

And there's a reason why they came back so late:

Murakumo, Samidare, Inazuma, Fubuki, Sazanami, and Souryuu are all critically injured.

Akashi, Shouhou, Houshou, Yahagi, and Akebono are all heavily injured.

Hatsuharu, Wakaba, Kiso, Atago, Takao, and Hiei are all moderately damaged.

Kiyoshimo, Ooyodo, Kitakami, Suzuya, and Kirishima are all only lightly damaged.

Mamiya and Irako are both uninjured, thank God, at least that much turned out favorably.

Imuya and Ooi are KIA.

They captured no live Abyssal specimens.

I can already see the bloodstains on this page. I spent the last three hours helping to get all the injured to the medbay, and everyone who could help out patched up everyone the best they could. Technically, this should also be the entry for the 31st, since it's literally 0500 hours in the morning and I don't know why I'm still writing this.

No, I'm lying to myself. I know exactly why I'm still up writing this.

It's because this mission, in short, was a complete and utter failure.

There's really no other way to put it. It's not because the girls themselves didn't follow my orders - from the report that was given to me by Takao, whom I made flagship for this particular mission, everyone did their best following the orders I had given them in the morning before they set sail. They had run into Wo-Class, Nu-Class, Re-Class, Ta-Class, Ri-Class, Ne-Class, and a whole fucking armada of destroyers and light cruisers. As it turns out, my entire fleet had become completely surrounded by the Abyssals, who found my fleet much faster because of their air superiority, and were able to track my fleet so patiently in such a way that they actually lured them deep into Sector B waters and making them think that they weren't running into anything. That's when they attacked - surrounded my fleet and pounded away with impunity like a goddamn firing squad.

The battle lasted for six hours - at least it appears that no one pulled a Samidare, or got taken out of the fight right as it started from a lethal first strike. They fought for so long that my fleet ran out of fuel - and they had tow the injured (and dead) all the way back here. They left at 1000 Hours, and they engaged the enemy fleet at around 1130 Hours. So do the math: if the battle lasted approximately six hours, that means the battle ended somewhere around 1730 Hours, and they returned at 0130 Hours this morning. They spent eight hours towing everyone else back.

And after all that, no live fucking Abyssal specimen to show for it.

The goddamn blood on my hands that I've tried my best washing off is smearing against the ink here. As if I didn't have enough shit to deal with today. Speaking of blood...

Murakumo took direct hits by three torpedoes and got smacked in the back of the head by an 8-inch shell that somehow didn't detonate upon contact, so I guess if it did detonate, she'd join Imuya and Ooi on the KIA list. Dive bombers from the Wo-Class dropped depth charges right on top of her and shattered all of her ribs and peppered her body with so much shrapnel that her internal organs were at one point literally covered by a screen of glass made of hot steel bomb shrapnel.

Samidare, an hour into the battle, was near a 16-inch cannon shot when it exploded, and two huge chunks of shrapnel flew at her so fast that one sliced her left arm clean off before she could react and the other one sank right into her solar plexus. She pulled it out like a badass and tossed it aside to fight the rest of the battle with only one fucking arm. She didn't take another injury until the very end of the fight, when the last few Abyssal fighter planes unloaded the rest of their machine gun bullets into her back. While machine gun bullets normally can't break ship girls' skin because of the Smartsteel construct that they've been constructed with, they shot so many rounds that eventually, the machine gun fire caused her windpipe to cave in to the point where she was breathing about 15% of what's normal, like an emphysema patient's lungs. She almost choked to death before the others who were still standing could scare the planes away.

Inazuma got gunned down by three packs of Ro-Class destroyers. They managed to cut her off from the rest of the fleet who could support her and kept jumping out of the water, shooting their cannons at her until she couldn't boost-dodge anymore, and as soon as that happened, she got hit by twelve 5-inch dual cannons in a row. She's lost both her eyes from three cannon strikes that hit her in the upper face, her right leg got hit so many times in a row that it got ripped off entirely and left her with only four inches of her upper thigh. Not only is she blind, but she nearly bled out on the way back, despite Akashi's best efforts to stop the bleeding from her severed right leg.

Fubuki was with Yahagi and Kiyoshimo when Re-Class decided to pick on them. To try to divert attention towards herself, Fubuki attacked Re-Class from behind. She was successful, but Re-Class then proceeded to rush up to her, pin her down, stuff her foot into Fubuki's stomach so hard that Fubuki was gushing blood out of her mouth for nearly half an hour, and have her little tail guy hold Fubuki by the ankle (with razor-sharp teeth) and pound her against the surface of the water until the teeth sliced her right foot off. (That's possible because ship girls who aren't submarines can't technically ever 'swim', which basically means they can't go underwater.) Not too long after, when Kiyoshimo was trying to protect Fubuki, a pack of I-Class destroyers managed to pull a run-by on Fubuki to try and kill her off, and Fubuki took another two 5-inch cannon blasts to her sides, further worsening her internal damage.

Sazanami managed to make it clean through the battle until about four hours in, when finally she accidentally drifted too far away from the rest of the fleet, trying to shoot everything that she saw, and so Ru-Class came along and blasted her at such a short range that the 16-inch shell didn't even have time to detonate when it smashed right into Sazanami's forehead. That basically caved in her skull, gave her a major traumatic concussion, and tossed her like a ragdoll rolling along the water all the way back to the fleet, ironically, where the others saw her knocked out cold and were able to cover her.

Souryuu, as our only standard carrier, was a natural priority target to the Abyssal fleet. They sent waves after waves of Abyssal planes to take her out, and occasionally even the Abyssal battleships would take pock-shots at her from beyond their standard range just to see if they could land a lucky shot to take her out. One of the Abyssal fighters that fired at her ended up hitting her in the right eye, so she had to fight with only one eye for about half the battle. Since lots of the girls from my fleet knew that the enemies were targeting Souryuu as best they could, they were protecting Souryuu as best they could too, since Souryuu provided lots of valuable air power that took a lot of pressure off them from destroyers and light cruisers and whatnot. In the end, she came back to base with her right arm completely shattered, her right thumb dislocated (her shooting thumb, no less) and twisted in a way that it shouldn't be, and her left shoulder torn open until you can see the bone and nerves. Oh, and don't forget about her right eye that got shot out.

Everyone else suffered the normal wounds that you'd expect from a fight, but the wounds that I've mentioned are what distinguished the critically wounded from the heavily wounded: for example, Akebono got hit a lot of times but suffered no ghastly or gut-wrenching wound, just heavily bloodied up and exhausted.

Oh...how could I forget...

Imuya got depth-charged. That's how she died - well, that's one of the major reasons why she died. They dropped so many depth charges onto her that she didn't have anywhere to swim to avoid them. So she tried to surface out of desperation, and when she did, she popped up right in Re-Class's face. Re-Class smacked Imuya right out of the water like a bear slapping fish out of a river with her tail and put three shots of 16-inch shells into her while she was still airborne. That smack alone apparently snapped Imuya's neck and broke it. Submarines are by far the weakest ship girls - they can't handle that kind of firepower, much less sustain even one 16-inch shell. Three shells are more than enough to kill a submarine, probably even overkill, and that's what happened to Imuya, on top of having her neck slapped back so hard that it snapped in half.

True to her nature, Ooi fell tanking for Kitakami. That's why Kitakami got out of the battle light damaged instead of anything else. Morbidly speaking, it's actually quite impressive what Ooi managed to tank for Kitakami: five torpedoes, twelve 5-inch shells, six 8-inch shells, two 16-inch shells, and a few depth charges. By the end of it, all of her guns and gear were destroyed, and most of the bones in her body were either broken into a couple dozen pieces or sticking out of her skin. Her body was damaged beyond all repair, but according to Kitakami, who was basically with her the entire time, Ooi only fell when the Abyssal fleet retreated - I'll explain why they left in the first place later, it's stupid, trust me - but until the Abyssals fell back, Ooi refused to fall. Whatever doubt that I had in my head regarding Ooi is now nonexistent for a damn good reason. If she were in the American navy, Ooi would've posthumously received both the Navy Cross and the Medal of Honor at the same time.

Needless to say, there will be no further missions for a very long time. I'll sleep, I'll send the post-action mission report over to HQ, I'll take care of the wounded...

...and I'll fly over to HQ and find the bastard who thought this capture mission was a good idea...

...and when I do find him, we're going to play a little game.