Saturday, March 1st, 2014.
The fleet returned at 0457 hours this morning. Every single one of them came back with heavy or critical damage.
But no one died or sank.
And I found the new Abyssal life form sitting tied up with towing cables on my couch, in my office, bandaged up and looking really disappointed with herself.
So let's explain how the battle went first.
At approximately 1530 hours, the main fleet's recon planes pinpointed the location of the main Abyssal fleet, which ended up going on patrol around the large perimeter of Able and Baker Districts. Judging by their movement patterns, according to Souryuu's post-action mission report, the main fleet determined that this Abyssal fleet was actively patrolling to seek out the main fleet, since the afternoon is roughly the timeframe that the fleet's always led attacks into Sector B. They followed my opening strike strategy flawlessly, and they managed to knock out one of their three Wo-Class aircraft carriers and heavily damage the two others, effectively slicing the enemy air power to pieces, and with that, the main fleet engaged the Abyssal fleet about three nautical miles north of Baker One. However, the Abyssal fleet got lots of reinforcements, and because the fleet hadn't realized just how close they were to Baker One, some of the incubation platforms still loitering around Baker One hatched and joined the fray to complicate matters as well. Thus, the battle dragged on for over eleven hours, and nearly everyone ran completely dry on ammo by the end of it. It was a battle of epic proportions, by the looks of it, and every single ship girl fought like this battle was going to be their last. If they didn't, it probably would've been, too.
Suzuya ended up making good on her promise. I know I didn't take it seriously when I first deployed the fleet, but it turns out that she was completely serious. Clearly, I've drastically underestimated her, because in Souryuu's report, Suzuya had Yamato and Kirishima time their volleys simultaneously to destroy the new Abyssal ship girl's defender escort lines and dashed in with only a tiny window of opportunity to land critical hits onto her and crippling her dead on the water. Without this decisive attack, it's likely the battle would've dragged on for a lot longer, because apparently the Abyssal ship girl ordered her own fleet to leave her for dead and sent her comrades to retreat. Unbeknownst to her, Suzuya didn't have any intention of killing her, so they captured her straight away.
No wonder she looked so disappointed.
But this came with a cost.
Murakumo suffered the loss of both of her arms - her right arm got showered in a huge dose of that weird acid when Floating Fortresses from Baker One attacked her, and it eventually stung and hurt so bad to the point where Murakumo asked Yamato to amputate it with a shot from her 25mm XM-109 AMR, which Yamato reluctantly did. She lost her left arm when her elbow took a direct hit from Ta-Class's shot at a mere seventy-five meters, and the explosion just cleanly ripped her left arm off from the elbow down and burned her entire left side. She still kept fighting with her main mast held in her teeth, though. Although she did lose her Waterfall Shield augmentation as a result of getting her left arm blasted off, it wouldn't have mattered either way, since she had already long since broken it from overuse to get herself out of lots and lots of dangerous situations, so it was an augmentation well used.
Sazanami also got splashed with acid, but she took the most amount of it, and it got all over half of her face, her front chest, and all over her stomach down to her waist. It even creeped into her left eye, so Sazanami had to fight while the acid ate away at her skin and her eyeball. Souryuu's report said that apparently it was hurting so bad that Sazanami's eyes were gushing tears out, but she didn't dare let herself actually start crying because of the fight at hand.
Hatsuharu got her lower jaw literally ripped out from her skull when Re-Class targeted her. She would've had her skull crushed too by Re's curbstomp, but Kitakami and Ooi managed to scare her away before Hatsuharu received lethal damage. Surprisingly, Hatsuharu was more annoyed than anything else, though obviously it was hard for her to really communicate with everyone else, but she stopped the bleeding with Akashi's help and continued to fight without a lower jaw. Yikes.
Kiyoshimo had both legs blown off, since she rashly tried to face off against Ru-Class and some heavy cruisers by herself without proper support. Her right leg got ripped off from the knee down, and her left leg - well, she doesn't have a left leg anymore. Akashi managed to perform emergency repairs on Kiyoshimo just in time to stop the bleeding and close the wounds, so Yamato lifted up Kiyoshimo and placed her on one of her huge 46cm turrets so that Kiyoshimo could act like a stationary and auxiliary gun turret for Yamato. Hilarious, but it makes sense once you start to realize that each 41cm/46cm gun emplacement of the Japanese warships during the war really did weight more than an entire destroyer apiece. Even though she did lose both legs, Kiyoshimo was quite proud of herself of serving as one of Yamato's support guns.
Both Kitakami and Ooi suffered huge bite marks on their stomachs when Re-Class dueled with them and had her tail try to take chomps out of them, and thanks to Ooi's Targeting Jammer augmentation, they took no damage from torpedoes but got hit a lot by destroyer fire instead. In addition, because of the heavy Abyssal destroyer fire at the front lines, they both lost an eye apiece.
Suzuya's daring gambit didn't happen without a huge price itself, either. The Abyssal life form herself shot a round at such a close distance that it actually just punctured a clean hole through Suzuya's right breast, and if Akashi wasn't part of the fleet, there was no way Suzuya would've survived the return trip home. It certainly didn't help that Suzuya had been taking hits all day long before that final deciding attack.
Kirishima tanked a lot of shots for Hiei, so she ended up with her entire front teeth shattered, both wrists broken, and her right hip dislocated.
The critically injured were put into the medbay first so that Akashi, Ooyodo, Mamiya, Irako, Houshou, and Error could treat them right away and fix whatever they could so that they could go use the docks with no problem. Lots of them had to stay in the docks until at most late atfternoon, so Mamiya, Irako, and Houshou ended up serving the meals to the girls while they were still docking.
I took care of paperwork, sent reports to both HQ and Seal Team Six, especially regarding the capture of the new Abyssal girl who sat in my office staring at me the entire day. It was awkward. Really awkward. Because basically the entire fleet was more or less docking during the day well into the afternoon, the base was pretty quiet for the most part, even when I headed out for lunch.
HQ sent me an email informing me that the official name that was chosen for this new Abyssal girl was "Soukou Kuubo-ki Oni" (装甲空母鬼), or something like "Armored Carrier Oni/Demon". Since it's a pain to constantly say "Soukou Kuubo-ki Oni" all the time, I just decided to call her Kuubo Oni.
Surprisingly, when I called her by that while bringing her some lunch, she demanded that I call her Kuubo-Hime. So I was like, okay, sure.
She wasn't in a talking mood at all. I asked her if she wanted to eat, but she didn't say anything, so I tried to give her a chopstickful of white rice, and she snapped at it like a fish snapping at some bait on a hook. I fed her that way, silent and awkward. So for the entire afternoon, she just sat on the couch while I handled afternoon paperwork stuff and played some chillstep from my speakers. During that time, I received an email from Big saying that while they wanted to fly over right away to pick up Kuubo-Hime, they were running into a shortage of aviation fuel back in the States for their Osprey, so they were just going to perform Kiso's Kai operation first and then come pick up Kuubo-Hime afterwards.
Much to my chagrin, I suffered another untimely sleep attack in the late afternoon, so I found myself with my head in my arms with the clock reading 1815 hours. Kuubo-Hime was still sitting on my couch, and she was watching me as I lifted my head off my arms on my desk. She asked me if I was tired. I just grinned at her a bit and said that being a Commander wasn't easy at all. She told me that she could sense that I was injured somehow, which surprised me. So I showed her the bandages on my chest and told her that there were some rather disagreeable people who had come along here and had tried to kill me two Mondays ago. I told her not to worry about what happened to me; after all, caring for your enemy was something more or less unheard of in modern day conflicts nowadays.
After eating dinner, the girls weren't really in the mood to do much of anything since they were absolutely exhausted by the battle yesterday, so those of them who got out of the bath in time for dinner headed straight for their dorms to go to sleep. Mamiya, Irako, and Houshou were all really tired too, since they've been up since early in the morning. So I just decided to bring Kuubo-Hime with me to my room, since I wasn't about to just leave her there in my office, and the medbay right now wasn't an option either, with all those girls critically wounded in there and waiting for their surgeries tomorrow.
That's when I realized that Kuubo-Hime isn't wearing anything below her waist. I just assumed all this time that she might just be wearing something really skimpy when she was sitting on the couch. Not really the case. And because I'd brought her to my room, that was awkward. Kuubo-Hime thought I was gonna do some real nasty things to her, and when I told her that I was going to just go to sleep for the night, she just stared at me. I told her that while I didn't necessarily want to untie her bonds just yet (they're fucking towing cables, and with the way they've been tied, I can't untie them alone), she could stay in my room and use the the bathroom whenever she needed to. The old TV that sits on one of the drawers next to the wall finally got used for the first time ever today when I laid out some blankets for Kuubo-Hime and turned on the TV in the hopes that it would entertain her somewhat. I showed her how to turn the thing on and off and how to increase and decrease the volume and how to switch the channels so she could fiddle around with the remote control with her feet, and I told her to remember to turn off the TV once she wanted to go to sleep.
Seems like she's pretty into watching TV. Right now, she's watching some sort of documentary on coral reefs. How appropriate.