'It's only a cartoon, don't take it so seriously!'
"It's a comment you often hear, whenever anyone points out that the writers of a series such as My Little Pony have done a terrible job. That they have voided previous canon, or turned a previously heartfelt series into a wacky 40's era Looney Tunes romp, that, ultimately, they have broken the tone and world of the story universe. "It's only a cartoon".
The people saying such things are almost exclusively American, and they are ignorant, something which almost doesn't need to be stated. In other nations, animation is seen as an artform, no different than live action film in essence, which can be put to any use: serious, silly, dramatic, meaningful, adult, childish, whimsical or dark and dire. Animation is understood to simply be another form of storytelling."
The two had found each other at long last.
Laffey. 'Laffeychan'. a boy inside a overgrown body and feeling at home inside a childlike body, softly frowned as she noticed a shipboy approaching her. turning to look at him calmly. An ominous aura of extreme magic energy surrounded the enlarged Benson-class. as well as a emerald-green glow.
"Matthew..." The destroyer greeted with a calm. almost too calm tone for her soft smile. "I'm so happy now... I've never been so happy. My mind is becoming very clear. I know everything now, Sirens. The World. Azur Lane. None of it matters, All i have left to do now is only one thing..." Laffey allowed her features to morph into that of a smile. The smile of someone who was glad at long last to have found relief.
"Laffey... It's you. Laffey, Aren't you?" Matthew wondered. Not a single sensor could tell him the difference between the person in front of him and the manifestation of the 'original' Magical Kansen as she had been known before her defection. but Matthew was sure this was the famed destroyer who had ordered the extermination of a million people once. And behind that mask was a boy who claimed to be from another world, and who had overwrote the original Laffey's consciousness.
"It's me... yes." The destroyer levitated. her gold-white gunspear held in her right hand. pointed at him. "The Radar cross-section readings are still the same... and there is no Mirror Seas reading, is it? You're reading my exterior hardware. this is my fully awakened form..."
Laffey allowed a look of smug pride to cross her face. "The original Laffey is me, now more wise. I'm the only one from Azur lane who saw them for the fools they were behind their idealistic, PR-calming gibberish." The destroyer's eyes began to glow brightly.
Despite the immense evil and hostility coming off the destroyer. Matthew didn't let himself be intimidated. "You're wrong. The readings are the same, but you're different." The shipboy shook his head. his sword drawn from its sheath. "This isn't the real Laffey I know, You're just someone else pretending to be her. Even if you're in control. I feel that the real Laffey is still in there. So I fight whoever you are. and bring back the true Laffey!"
The white-haired girl laughed in a sarcastic manner and smiled, unsettlingly. two pairs of violet wings manifesting behind her back as her main railgun aimed at the battleship in front of her. Was he stupid enough to believe that she and the 'real' Laffey were separate instances? And here she thought. Thunderer was worse! "Then. There's no more need for small talk!" 'I'll show you the 'truth' about the original Laffey, and the reason why I'm still in control! No matter how much of sleephead the original Laffey really was...'
She burst into action, bearing down on Matthew. her Gunspear drawn.
In any other time. It would have felt like the hardest battle the silver-haired destroyer had ever fought, Not just because her opponent was something who shouldn't exist. but a completely mythological ship that should not exist. Laffey. despite being heavily modified was still forced to follow reasonable design limits to some extent. and had to rely on her thinking in three dimensions with her ability to fly and dangerous. close-in fights once she was unable to rely on her bombers.
But she had been awakened to her full potential as originally intended by her creators;a powerful. destructive living weapon desiring only to exterminate all sentient thought.
Furthermore, the Quantum Singularity Reactor was also. in addition to generating power output measured in the terawatts. fueling her with magic energy as a byproduct of the black hole's mechanism. giving her more energy for her attacks and letting her regenerate. Usually, inefficiency and fragileness were the destroyer's weakness for her extreme raw power. but this twisted version could very well fight for a few days non-stop, even with her power-hungry abilities. If anything, the ominous aura was only thickening.
"Mass Accelerator. That's far enough." Advancing on the battleship with a predatory look on her face. Laffey's main railgun. awakened again to its full potential by the same factor began to crackle with EM fields and gigajoules of energy in sub-millisecond pulses. In its previous life, the 150mm railgun would be operating at 32 MJ per shot. capable of much. much higher velocities thanks to bizarre obtuse alloys and physical effects that even the destroyer hadn't figured out. but the barrel life at least was in the thousands. Now no longer bound by it's owner's inability to generate sufficient energy in any reasonable time. let alone unlock the higher settings. it was able to charge each shot to truly astronomical amounts of energy.
Even the best of Star war's CGI Animators would have let their jaws drop to the floor as the railgun let loose with a tungsten gauss round accelerated to nearly half a thousand kilometers per second. the atmosphere superheated by the round's departure as it missed the battleship by a couple of feet... and struck the ocean. disintegrating into plasma and massive shockwaves as a titanic detonation shook the seas behind the battleship with the force of a 'suitcase' tactical nuclear warhead. each round representing the devastation of entire towns.
For the first time in the face of the enemy. Matthew felt true fear, He had not seen anything like this used even by their more powerful shipgirls. the borderline-WMD attack had narrowly missed him and still had enough energy left travelling downrange to cause a nuclear-like detonation and mushroom cloud. It would have been a scene out of a 'horror movie' if it weren't for the fact that he knew. This was a shipgirl. And as they say. a 'destroyer doesn't need enemies.'
But the destroyer didn't stop there.
"Organic fleshbag of air and biomatter." The male didn't even heard what she said before she fired off a barrage of energy shells. he barely evaded each bolt, only to be hit in the face with a crescent energy wave as the destroyer aimed her spear to fire off heavy bolts. only to suddenly raise her spear overhead and then bring it down. letting lose a crescent wave of violet energy that gouged a deep cut into the flight deck. leaving it inoperable when all of a sudden. Laffey stopped. only to raise her other free hand into the air. then with a furious look. slam it down into the waters as she was covered in a purple flashing dome of energy.
"SHI-!" He was too late.
"Destroying Flasher!"
Hundreds of purple arrow-shaped energy projectiles shot out. peppering the battleship and destroying weapon emplacements as they were either flash-melted or defeated physically by the combined kinetic and thermal energy of each long rod. his hull going up in flames as his unprotected superstructures were all punctured by Laffey's 'spell'. the destroyer staring in sly satisfaction at the results.
530mm guns and nearly a hundred destroyer-caliber guns returned fire. but she leaned forwards. her feet almost slightly levitating off the water as she suddenly jolted forward at such a speed that she left behind afterimages. almost as if there were ten copies of her, and they all looked real to radar or sensors. too.
"Owari da." Laffey was running out of patience. Was this really the best that Azur lane was capable of against the original Magical Kansen awakened to her full. intended potential? It felt like sending a bunch of noobs to fight against Delta Force or SEALs as a team. And you don't send 'only noobs' or 'militia men pretending to be professional soldiers' into such a situation. She casually side-flipped. shifted her body to her right. leaned back to her left. spun around. dancing around her opponent's weapons. and even swatted around a gigawatt-class laser intended for her.
"Very well..." Tiring of the battle. The silver-haired destroyer flicked her spear to one side. Having grown bored of the shipboy. The aura around Laffey thickened almost palpably. and she raised her spear overhead, She was putting every inch of her magic into the attack. The technique that Laffey had been working on, meant to rely on hypothetical physics as weapons. The spear flared brightly, the energy blade tip extending. before she swung it down. This was Laffey's pinnacle technique. leaving no room for escape or tanking.
"Phantasm Cosmic String Breaker!"
Desperately, Matthew drew on the full power of his shields. feeling it all concentrated in front of him. Two huge loops of open. unlinked string. overlaid with complex waveforms, a series of ripples. culminating in sharp. pointed cusps raced toward him. destroying all in its path with focused beams of electromagnetic and arcane energy at having being forced into existence. as if physics itself. which did not allow for Supersymmetry and Strings. had been told to take a break.
The loops struck the face of the battleship's shields. It was no contest, the open strings cut through the shields in a burst of arcane energy and scythed toward the battleship. battering even skyscrapers aside like blades of grass. He never even had a ghost of a chance. Cosmic Strings were gravitational defects with a truly enormous density. A string fitting in your hand would have a mass of around ten million billion tons. A string stretching from Sol to Saturn would weigh the same as the sun. A fine tube containing charged particles:Quarks. Electrons and their anti-particles. gathered into super heavy clusters. Only now that it was forced to exist as a special attack, it contained extremely concentrated magic energy of every element and type possible. but other than that one specific property. it was faithful to String theory's knots.
Laffey for months had been trying to develop the technique. even when Magnetic Monopoles. Zero-dimensional topological defects made out of bizarre particles in GUTs would have been easier to learn and develop. Mostly for her efforts in nearly twelve hours of training, She just only gave herself a migraine or passed out. Even when she finally got it right, the incomplete version was a far cry in that the strings were incapable of cutting into anything. Not even it could cut through a South Dakota's armor.
However. In her current state. She was able to supply the extreme amounts of energy needed and materialize the math-breaking properties of the SUSY Cosmic strings capable of disintegrating anything into energy or into proto-matter. There was, by definition. not a single passive form of practical armor or non-corporeal defenses that could stop her attack. and many corporeal ones or nearly a entire Kowloon Walled city would be needed.
Matthew did not have especially thick armor on the scales needed to stop a pair of open-ended Cosmic string shells/loops hellbent on converting the battleship's steel into a hard flash of quark-gluon-magic plasma and Fe56 Iron.
Were anyone looking on from a safe distance. Observer Alpha and Enterprise would have learned first hand what it was like to measure topological defects outside of particle accelerators and see the laws of physics being broken at the same time. Fortunately for them, They had enough time to get into the deepest floor of a deeply buried. globe-shaped concrete bunker and watch the whole thing with drones where Javelin and Z23 were cowering in with Tester Beta.
"Now isn't that a nice story. And fuck you, too" - Harlan Ellison, 1974
