After we'd repaired ourselves and treated our wounded crew, we scoured the docks, pulling out several useful systems from the I-class's wrecked at the pier. Mostly a handful of fire-tube boilers and piping, but also a large amount of small-caliber cannons, 5 inch mostly.

In the end, we took several tonnes of supplies, mostly Abyssal steel and bunker-C, as well as a surprising amount of aluminum. Probably rendered down from aircraft the pirates had captured, we even, oddly enough, found several crates of human goods, most likely stockpiled from merchants and smugglers overtaken by the pirates. We even found a stash of alcohol!

We weren't planning on eating any of the Abyss steel any time soon, but it would have its uses. Mostly the resources would go into the project I now hovered over on the deck, my engineers along with Chitose and Hakone's were there, guiding me as I made another incision with a small sharpened piece of the Wo's armor, the 'blade' was more of a scalpel, and I was using it to separate the damaged hull from the Ne-class we'd hauled aboard, alongside the Wo's unresponsive hull. This Ne had had her belt armor shredded by my missiles, avoiding the fate of the other Ne, who had taken the strikes clean to her head. But that still left her lower body a shredded mess starting at the end of her rib cage. Chitose, sitting off to the side with morbid curiosity spoke. "What are you even doing Georgia? without a Dry-Dock you'd never be able to repair that kind of damage. The Ne is dead, the boiler-room was completely destroyed and the bridge crew died from the fire." I nodded at her points as she made them, pausing as I made another cut.

"I'm not repairing the Ne-class Chitose," I said, keeping my eyes glued to the Ne's collarbone as I made an incision.

"Then what ARE you doing?! This looks like your just playing around with corpses right now!" Chitose finally burst out.

"I'm repairing the Wo." Chitose made an inarticulate noise of confusion as Hakone tilted her head at me, also in confusion. "Look, the Wo is basically done, the bridge is gone, boilers are gone, flight-deck and elevators are gone, and I'm fairly certain you speared its secondary bridge in engineering too, haven't seen any crew still alive inside anyway, after that royal rumble we had with her. But this damn ship nearly killed the three of us! imagine having an actual heavy hitter on our side!"

I looked over at Hakone. "No offense, you're dang good Hakone, but we all know the difference between us and a capital-ship now." She nodded, rubbing her mostly repaired face, her nose was slightly crooked, lower half sweeping gently to the right where she'd been backhanded. "The Ne, on the other hand." I finally got enough cut away to wrench the head off in a small spurt of depressurized oil, making the others flinch. "Has her bridge almost fully intact, and with the 8" triple mount cannons we took off her and the other one we left behind, we SHOULD be able to staple on four 8" mounts!" The gun turrets were lying off to the side with their weird tube connections yanked out, for now, we still needed to make sure the ship entered factory reset.

"I'm fairly certain this is wrong, on many levels." Said Chitose, she nonetheless, scooted closer. "What do you think the ship will wake up as?" I looked at her quizically, holding the Ne's now-severed head against the Wo's stump-neck as crews quickly erected scaffolding to hold it in place. "Will she wake up as a cruiser? or a Carrier?" I shrugged.

"Probably a heavy cruiser, we are using the bridge of one, after all." And the combined boilers of several I-class, and the main body of a Wo... "Wow, I've turned into Dr Frankenstien!" I said.

"I remember that movie! the Admiral showed it to us once!" Chitose said, before remembering what we were in the middle of and wincing. "To be honest I've never seen a field refit before, its a lot more... grisly then I was expecting." I shrugged at that, before helping a fairy up unto the little catwalk they'd erected above the soon-to-be-Wo's head.

"Can't see why it wouldn't be, I mean, we're basically mashing components from like, at least a dozen ships together, it would probably be a lot less disturbing if we didn't have human-looking bodies, I bet." I looked at the massive hole in the Wo's chest where Chitose had stabbed it to death, all bent metal and severed I beams. "At least our insides look ship-like, this would be way more gross otherwise." The others nodded quickly, no one wanted to see that kind of squicky mess. "That was a pretty awesome takedown by the way, never thought about using ship metal as a knife before," I said, Chitose bashfully waved my compliment away.

"Ah, I actually got the idea from Tatsuta, a Light Cruiser." She said.

"Oh? she uses knives?"

"A glaive actually, it's rather nifty from what I've seen, I heard she speared a So-class with it once! Right out of the water! just." She made a stabbing motion going down. "Wack! Dead submarine!" I nodded, impressed.

"Mabe I should get a knife?" I mused. "I do a lot of grappling, but that can go pear-shaped pretty quick if my opponent is a higher tonnage then me" I slapped the Wo's leg to emphasize, only to get yelled at as a mechanic fell off due to the sudden movement. "Sorry!" Chitose, meanwhile, had stepped into the hold for a moment, before returning with a couple bottles of wine and a glass from the kitchen. I looked at her, judgingly.

"I've been sober for the past month. If I'm going to watch you root around in another ship-girls guts all day I'm not doing it without a drink."

Fair enough, though I had to stop Hakone from sneaking a bottle. "You're too young!" I scolded, as Hakone pouted.

It was almost sunset by the time we (IE our engineering crews, we hardly did anything) had connected all the bits that needed connecting, we'd repaired the Wo's broken joints, having to replace the hamstring I'd bitten out of her with components from the Ne's elbow joint. The turrets connections, it was decided, would feed into the Wo's now unneeded interior hanger, replacing wrecked planes with magazines and accelerated ammo lines to feed into the giant hole in her chest and back Chitose had created.

The ship's giant pair of watertube boilers, cut and perforated almost to the point of being unrecognizable when they were finally hauled out of the ship, were replaced with a series of eight firetube boilers, a bit less efficient, and in need of a lot more careful maintenance. But we had many on hand, and combined they should actually produce more power for the ship.

The keel (her legs) also had to be reinforced to handle the weight of the new turrets that would be installed. The most noticeable change, by far, however, was the new bridge. Chitose said it was very odd, to see a Cruiser's command tower where a Carrier's Island bridge should be. I had to take her word for it, I'd never been able to see the ship silhouettes Chitose and Hakone said they saw behind Kanmusu, to me we were all just a bunch of machine-ghost people with ship insides. "Alright! final checks! Chitose, Hakone, you guys ready?"

The two nodded, standing behind the Carrier, its body bound with welded pieces of rebar to a slab of Abyssal steel, gun turrets aimed to disable the ship if it turned hostile. "Captain two?" My second Captain gave me an affirmative, ready with a few technicians to make any sudden changes if the shipgirl started spouting gobbledygook again or something. "Engineering team, you ready to start up the boilers?" I got an affirmative. "OK! let's GO!" My go-ahead was far more dramatic than the start-up actually was, it took almost a half-an-hour to warm up eight separate boilers. It was pretty boring really, to the point Hakone and Chitose had sat down, guns still trained, but hardly paying attention.

That changed quickly when the body finally shuddered awake, straining against its binds as it tried to sit up. "AHAHA! IT'S ALIVE! ITS ALIIIIIIVE!" I shouted maniacally.

I had been waiting all day to say that, worth it.

so the Wo class is repaired, though probably in a way few were expecting. Its basically the reverse of Kaga, who started life as a Tosa-class battleship, before being converted into the aircraft Carrier we know now. She's basically a carrier converted with parts from two separate heavy cruisers into an ad-hoc battleship. no citadel armor, and would probably lose against an actual purpose-built battle-wagon, but has the firepower of two Ne's combined.