Tuesday, March 25th, 2014.

Same shit, different day.

Yesterday's victory didn't even feel like a victory. We're all falling single file into the mentality of true war-weathered veterans - at least, the fleet is. I was already far too used to it. Instead, as Kirishima put it, it felt like this was the way things should be.

That all the Abyssals would pay for what they did to Kiyoshimo by being sent straight to the bottom of the sea.

That the ship girls, not these unholy Abyssals that came from God knows where, should rule these seas.

Yuudachi especially embodied the thoughts of the fleet. She came back pissed that the Abyssals managed to take her down once. She swore that she'd never fall in battle against the likes of them again, and yesterday's and today's battles proved it. Even the girls who have normally gentler, sweeter dispositions are stone-faced when they came back from yesterday's and today's missions. Inazuma just had a blank stare on her face these past two days.

I'll elaborate more later.

At breakfast, I announced that the fleet would have to continue its training regimen of non-augmentation nonlethal combat. It'd worked yesterday for their mission, so I didn't see why I shouldn't have it continue. The fleet went with it - two hours of non-augmentation, barebones practice, with the last hour before lunch reserved for real combat training. I finished my office work quickly to go see the fleet train during their last hour of combat practice.

The fleet was surprised that I came out to oversee their training personally. They thought I'd have my hands full with officework. I corrected them, saying that I used to always watch my men train atop the decks of the U.S.S. George Washington before I was transferred here. That, and officework is straight boring shit. I would rather spend my morning hours observing the fleet and their training.

As I watched them train, the naval strategist part of me began to fill my head subconsciously with ideas about the ship girls' combat style. I began to slowly realize that I should have been overseeing their training from the very beginning - some of the things I saw the girls do was just...plain wrong. Was it because I'm a soldier at heart and I can just tell if something's being done wrong in the way of keeping oneself alive in combat? I'm hesitant to tell the girls what to do as an Admiral who's never going to experience what it's like to fight like they do on a daily basis. Nevertheless, I put those thoughts on my laptop and saved them...in case I do decide to give the girls advice on how to polish up their combat styles.

Today's satellite image photos indicate that the Abyssals are reinforcing Able District again. Judging from their positions, it seemed like they set up defense perimeters to make sure that the territories we'd destroyed in the past can be repaired and set up again. It may take them a week or so, but I don't feel like letting them have Able District again. Because fuck those assholes.

I designated Yuudachi as flagship for this mission. I ordered the fleet to maintain a consistent state of aggression. Safe aggression - no incredibly risky moves, but I ordered the fleet to never let up the aggression. This mission was going to be like yesterday's - everything was to die.

That meant that like yesterday, I ordered,

"Repeat protocol from previous mission. We don't accept surrender - no prisoners."

The looks on the girls when we saluted each other just before their deployment sent chills down my spine.

They had all accepted that in order to achieve total victory, they needed to stop being human...stop being normal teenage girls.

They had to stop being people, and become weapons.

You might be thinking, well, obviously, for what other purpose were these girls built for, then? But spend about two and a half months with them and live with them on a naval base, and see if you can last that long treating them as nothing more than just weapons. If you're anything like a decent human being, you wouldn't.

I still don't know what those chills were that I felt running down my spine. It's like the very first time I saluted my men when I first obtained command of the U.S.S. George Washington. Literally hundreds of men, suited sailors and soldiers in full uniform, looked me straight in the eye atop the decks of the supercarrier and saluted me. That time, when I was just a fresh leftenant, I got the chills because never before had I assumed so much power in one moment over so many people. This, I thought back then, was what made and broke the people who were destined to become leaders.

But that kind of feeling you only get once in a lifetime, because once you've experienced something like that once, you never get it back. It's like a drug, a high, because the only way to get the same feeling back is to replace it with an even greater bliss. That's not what I saw when my fleet saluted me today before they sortied.

But I do know those looks that they gave me. Dead, straight stares into my soul. No facial expressions - if anything more than a frown. Yuudachi, because she was thrilled to be assigned flagship, I could tell, was itching to deploy. She told me after they returned from the mission at dinnertime that she had wanted to go out and redeem herself from that last night battle last Thursday. She just wanted to kill every single Abyssal she got her hands on. No wonder she came back with her hands stained with drying blood.

Anyway, back to the point - those chills. Were they chills of pride, that quiet pride I had in any of my soldiers because I knew that they were all good men and women who were able to commit themselves to a cause that not everyone had the courage to reenact? Or perhaps were they chills of fear, that what I was doing and what the Moebius Four Armament Program was doing to these girls was slowly eroding their humanity to this point, where they go to war blindly, driven only by this arbitrary sense of duty to their nation and their Admiral and a sense of burning revenge for a fallen comrade.

I want these girls to be good soldiers - as a military officer, that's what I want to do the most, no matter whom I have command over. But at the same time, I want these girls to realize that in the end, they, too, are human beings.

I want war to make them, not break them.

The three AC-130 gunships from the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan that's still passing by at a safe distance from Sector B on its way to Yokosuka Naval District returned, as Seal Team Six had promised, and provided heavy air support for the fleet. The fleet returned six hours later at 1900 hours for dinner with some casualties, but the most heavily damaged was Yuudachi herself with moderate damage, at that.

According to Yuudachi's post-action mission report, the AC-130s tore open the Abyssal defense perimeters around Able District and let the fleet surge in. One of the capital Abyssal girls, Southern Demon, was there, but Imuya managed to lock her down with a Lockdown torpedo at an angle Southern Demon wasn't expecting, and that was the game-winning play right there. It gave the fleet ten minutes to go hard like a motherfucker and slaughter everything else. Normally, if Kiyoshimo's death wasn't still so heavy on my memory, I would've puked at the terrifying damage that the fleet dealt within the first half hour of the fight. I took the time to check the girls' individual combat records for today's mission, and everyone had over 70% accuracy. That's unheard of - Ikazuchi had the lowest at 71% hit accuracy, and Yuudachi had the highest at 97%.

Those first ten minutes were enough to establish the fleet's dominance over the seas around Able District. Once they destroyed Southern Demon's escort squadrons, they hammered her hard - Ooi, at Kitakami's advice, used her Shotgun Ordinance augmentation to fire all eight torpedoes from her launchers, and Yamato fired a Yamato Cannon at her too. These two attacks by themselves nearly killed Southern Demon. She barely managed to escape simply because Abyssal reinforcements from the rest of the defense perimeters drew the fleet's attention away. Because they'd punched such a wide hole in the Abyssals' defensive lines, and because Akagi advised their heavy air support to cover the north flank, the fleet was able to rip apart the Abyssals who tried to attack them from the south while the AC-130s kept the other half of the Abyssal reinforcements at bay to the north and bought them enough time so that by the time the gunships had to return to their supercarrier for refuel, the fleet had already rolled through their half of the Abyssal force and could turn around to destroy the rest. Once they obliterated the Abyssal defenses, they proceeded to shell Able One, Two, and Three again and stop the construction that was going on there.

But it didn't stop there. Yuudachi didn't include this part in her post-action mission report, but she told me at dinnertime that apparently, the Abyssal capital ship who landed the kill shot on was in fact Southern Demon. When they'd shelled Able Three to hell, Yuudachi ordered the fleet to return to base. When Shigure asked her why, Yuudachi said that she had a "favor" to return to the enemy. But Shigure insisted on following, so Yuudachi ordered the rest of the fleet to return to base, that she and Shigure would catch up later. So Yuudachi and Shigure sailed to Able Four, alone, because that was the most logical place for Southern Demon to have retreated to after she'd escaped. And sure enough, they found her there. Able Four had literally no defenses, because they'd already been destroyed when they were sent to the west perimeter of the district to fight the main fleet. The two destroyers found Southern Demon floating near the shores of Able Four, and Yuudachi told Shigure to just watch. Yuudachi turned on her Nightmare Protocol, and she dueled it out alone against Southern Demon. Judging by Southern Demon's reactions, Yuudachi could tell that she was in fact her murderer, because Southern Demon kept yelling at her things like "Why are you still alive!? I killed you the other day! Why are you back?"

So naturally, just like in an epic anime, Yuudachi won the duel by grabbing one of her last torpedoes straight out of its torpedo tube and stabbing it into Southern Demon's stomach and kicking her away so that it exploded without catching Yuudachi herself in the blast. Yuudachi grabbed her off the water before she could start sinking below the water's surface and said,

"Don't you know? Nightmares haunt you. Once you get one, it never goes away. It'll always come back to haunt you, no matter where you go. You're in a nightmare right now - My nightmare."

And keeping with her canine motif, Yuudachi chomped her fangs on Southern Demon's throat and tore her throat out before tossing the corpse into the water and watching it sink and disappear.

My Yuudachi can't be this epic.

Shigure was there to confirm as a witness. I informed the two of them that as a military officer, I did not approve of deviating from a set strategy to indulge personal grudges and whims. I couldn't officially allow those two to continue doing things like that, otherwise I would have to bar them from sortieing. Yuudachi was disheartened by this, and she complained to me that it was something she had to do.

I told her not to worry. Because as a soldier, I think Yuudachi's move was fucking awesome. I congratulated Yuudachi on a resounding success on her very first mission as fleet flagship, and Yuudachi returned the favor by tackling me off my chair onto the floor of the mess hall. Suzuya yelled at us later for that.

But this begs the question, for how much longer will my fleet fight like this? How long will the motivation of revenge and redemption last until the fleet cools off and returns to normal?