Thursday, March 20th, 2014.
Today is the most depressing day of my fucking life. I don't even want to write this and just go straight to sleep.
The fleet met extremely heavy resistance at Charlie District, way heavier defenses than the we'd been anticipating. The problem was that when the fleet sent out their recon planes to scout the place out, the recon planes didn't see anything at Charlie District, and as you might guess, it was a complete trap. Admiral Akbar would be screaming his infamous line at me for this. As it turned out, the Abyssals had intentionally left a big chunk of their carrier force seemingly undefended, so the fleet took the bait, since nighttime limits the view range of the recon planes. The two halves of the massive Abyssal fleet waiting about a klick to the west and east (the fleet swung in from the south) pincered the hell out of the girls.
Every single ship girl is at least heavily wounded. The destroyers and the light cruisers, because of their weaker constitution compared to the rest of the ships, took the severest casualties.
Samidare got her right leg blown off by a shell from a heavy cruiser.
Wakaba lost her left eye, and she got hit by so many Abyssal destroyer 5-inch shells that her ribcage was exposed.
Shigure had both of her arms broken and a fractured skull.
Akatsuki had her spine broken from the base of the pelvis down.
Hibiki lost her right hand when Re-Class's tail chomped it off.
Kitakami had her left kneecap busted and her right elbow broken the wrong way.
Ooi, in defending Kitakami, got trashed by Floating Fortresses, so half her skin is burnt right off.
Akashi's right arm torn off by a single critical hit from a payload bomb from an Abyssal dive bomber.
Kiso's Golden Eye got shot out.
Yuudachi, Shigure, and Sendai carried the fleet. As annoying as Sendai's been lately, always begging for night battles, I checked the post-action mission report, and Sendai alone had some 45 confirmed kills in that battle alone. Virtually every single round from her 14cm naval gun was a critical hit, and when she ran out of ammo, she ran around beating the crap out of the Abyssals with her own hands. When Re-Class decided to fuck with her, Sendai went toe-to-toe with her. Yuudachi and Shigure, too, went batshit crazy, and between the two of them, they shared some 60 confirmed kills.
But none of that matters if Yuudachi's dead.
Yuudachi and Kiyoshimo are KIA.
Yuudachi died because she got overeager and high on night battle adrenaline and ended up attacking a squad of heavily guarded Abyssals who turned out to be a squad of five new capital Abyssal girls we've never seen before. Scratch that, another Battleship Symbiotic was there, so technically only four new capital Abyssals. Needless to say, before Yuudachi realized her mistake, she got about three big holes blown in her legs, abdomen, and torso, and she got dropped like a fly.
Kiyoshimo...
In the most tragic twist of irony I've ever seen, Kiyoshimo managed to body-block a triple-volley of 16-inch shells from one of the capital Abyssals to protect Yamato when she was pinned down by heavy Abyssal fire. A destroyer body-blocking an attack like that is like trying to hit a 110mph fastball with a whiffle bat: you might stop the ball, but that whiffle bat's definitely not gonna survive. Kiyoshimo, luckily, wasn't torn to shreds right away, and she lasted just long enough to fire off the Yamato Cannon towards the capital Abyssals. The fleet couldn't confirm the kill, because the Yamato Cannon was fired at danger close and threw the entire battle into chaos and allowed the fleet to disengage and retreat under the cover of the chaos, but judging by the fact that the Abyssal fleet didn't pursue the fleet while they retreated, Kiyoshimo's last Yamato Cannon may have heavily damaged them, even killed them if we're lucky.
A single destroyer who once dreamed a seemingly futile dream of one day becoming a battleship died this morning protecting not just Yamato but the entire fleet. The destroyer whom I sat with one night who wished for the most ridiculous thing - the wish to surpass her physical limits that aren't supposed to be surpassed - essentially sacrificed herself for the fleet to save everyone else. You can debate whether or not she really did "sacrifice" herself, but I think I'm qualified enough to know what a sacrifice is and what isn't. And to me, this is a sacrifice.
But the most soul-crushing part about all this is that Kiyoshimo broke another limit: the cooldown on her Yamato Cannon. It's only supposed to be meant to be used once every thirty minutes, presumably to allow the guns to cool down and not melt from the sheer power of the cannon. That's actually false - Kiyoshimo's 12.7cm guns cools off enough to fire the Cannon once every ten minutes. When I emailed Seal Team Six this morning after the fleet returned at daybreak, demanding to know why Kiyoshimo was able to fire the Yamato Cannon twice in a row, Big said that the Yamato Cannon's true cooldown isn't dependent on the gun, but instead on the user's main systems. Every time Kiyoshimo fires the Yamato Cannon, her main systems absorb a lot of radiation - after all, the Yamato Cannon's energy comes from the miniature nuclear reactor inside the augmentation's PDA. So to prevent the radiation from leaking out into the environment, the user's main systems absorb the waste radiation, and the thirty-minute cooldown really indicates Kiyoshimo's radiation tolerance. If she'd ended up firing it maybe five minutes too early or even up to ten minutes too early, she might still be fine, just severely weakened, but Kiyoshimo fired a second Yamato Cannon thirteen minutes after her first one. This means that the radiation built up too quickly for Kiyoshimo's main processing unit (brain) to handle, and it completely fried her brain. Even if the 16-inch shell barrage didn't kill her somehow, she was still going to be dead no matter what.
Kiyoshimo, for all intents and purposes, has been sunk.
Not killed,
sunk.
This is the one tragedy that looms over the ship girls and all the people who're involved directly with them, like myself.
You can rebuild these girls, sure. But no matter how many times you rebuild them, if the most important part about them, their memory banks and memory files, are destroyed, they will never remember what happened to their previous selves.
This is the worst part about the entire Moebius Armament Project.
Because at the core, of this entire platoon, the ship girls have been designed as, and always will be, genetically modified clones.
They were constructed as warships, and they will live and die not as girls, but warships. And all the stories that they carry with them - the fun times, the bad times, the tales of combat heroism they showed, and most importantly their humanity, no one will know about them.
Except, that is, for me.
Thanks to Kiyoshimo, Sendai, Shigure, and Yuudachi, the fleet didn't suffer any more fatalities. But that still doesn't change the fact that this last mission was a complete and utter failure. None of the primary objectives were achieved, and we suffered two fatalities on top of all that. I've marked today as my single most disastrous military battle on my combat record. I've had shitty engagements and battles before, and I've lost a lot of men, but right now, nothing quite amounts to this right now.
As though it was supposed to be some kind of consolation, Kiyoshimo's Yamato Cannon augmentation somehow survived mostly intact. Seal Team Six will be here tomorrow morning again to pick up the bodies and the augmentation to analyze the data that Kiyoshimo's managed to compile on it before she died.
And finally, to wrap up this fucking shitty journal entry, Shigure is completely shell-shocked. She treated the loss of Yuudachi like it was the last straw. When I tried looking for her, wondering where she'd gone off to, I couldn't find her anywhere, no matter where I looked. I asked Houshou if she'd seen Shigure, but Houshou shook her head sadly and told me that it'd be best if I left her to herself for a day or two first before I went to go talk to her. This probably meant that Houshou knows where Shigure is, but for the sake of everyone involved, I didn't press Houshou for Shigure's whereabouts.
And to add insult to injury, I have no idea what'll happen with a ship girl who's been sunk. Will HQ send me a replacement? And if they ever do, will it be immediately or later in the future?
It's just like when Samidare died. The absence of Kiyoshimo's lively presence is excruciatingly conspicuous around the base.
I'm just going to sit in bed listening to Linkin Park's "Until It's Gone" until I fall asleep. Fuck everything.
Fuck this shit...just when Kiyoshimo got what she'd always wanted...