Friday, March 28th, 2014.
Geez...I really ought to buy some better job insurance or something. Just kidding, like that shit's gonna help with a job like this.
Anyway, let's start from square one.
Akashi took time out of her day in the morning to remind me at breakfast that Ooyodo's launch day's coming up, on April 2nd. Well, shit, time to put in the order for some more baking supplies, then, since we don't have any more remaining.
Like yesterday, I went out there to the training waters to oversee the fleet's training. Completely unlike yesterday, Imuya and Shioi were fired up and rearing to go, asking me what kind of training program I had ready for them. Imagine their disappointment when I informed them that I had intended to focus on the destroyers today, so in order not to blue-ball them, I had the fleet repeat the training exercise from yesterday, with similar objectives. Imuya easily broke her record from yesterday, even managing to lock down Yuudachi, who's one of the faster destroyers in the fleet, and scoring six out of eight hits, while Shioi scraped up an incredible nineteen hits out of twenty torpedoes launched.
After that exercise, I worked on sorting out the destroyers' combat styles. The main problem that I see with the destroyers' combat effectiveness is that the destroyers are split in half by their combat styles - half of them, like Murakumo and Akebono, are aggressive, attack-minded hunters who seek out the enemy themselves and proceed to destroy them, while the other half, like Samidare and Inazuma, are more passive and are more prone to defend, the "shoot only when shot at" type. This clash of combat style clashes too much, and there have been some critical mistakes that the destroyers have made in the past that have been a direct result of this clash. The biggest problem is that because of the fleet's dichotomy in fighting style, there's no effective way for the defensive destroyers to move forward to support the aggressive, rushdown-oriented destroyers. They can defend the bigger ship girls very well, but because their combat styles benefit the slower ship girls, the aggressive destroyers oftentimes have no means of immediate backup. Mind you, there are a few destroyers who can fight both ways just fine, like Fubuki and Hatsuharu, who rise up to the occasion whenever the situation calls for it.
Therefore, in order to resolve this issue, I reorganized the fleet's combat formation to look like something straight out of a basketball coach's clipboard: I organized zones of patrol for the defensive destroyers to occupy, making these zones large enough so that they could give the aggressive destroyers up in the front covering fire if they needed it but still be within a manageable distance from the heavier ship girls who need destroyer backup. For the aggressive destroyers, while I didn't assign zones of activity for them, what I did do was take a survey of all the destroyers who preferred fighting in aggressive roles. They are as follows: Murakumo, Akebono, Shigure, Yuudachi, and Ikazuchi. I also included the more aggressive light cruisers too, since they share high enough combat mobility as the destroyers, and they are Kiso, Sendai, and Yahagi. I'll focus on light cruiser training some other time, but for today, I included them in the destroyers' training regimen. After making sure I knew who were the more aggressive ones, I created a battle rotation system and imposed it upon the destroyers.
If this battle rotation system kind of sounds like some sort of RPG game mechanic, you're not crazy, since it's kind of meant to work similarly. I've divided the rotation into three zones: the front line, the mid-line, and the back line. Keep in mind, this is all still meant to be up in the front lines, so don't confuse the "back line" to be the actual back lines of the fleet, it's just the back lines of the front lines, if you can follow. God, this is already getting confusing. Anyway, the default cycle formation is to have Murakumo, Akebono, and Sendai up in the front line, Yuudachi, Shigure, and Suzuya (because she kept bugging me to put her in, Coach!) in the mid-line, and Ikazuchi, Kiso, and Yahagi in the back line. The fleet flagship can change around the positions of this battle rotation system at will in accordance with extenuating battle situations, but the concept behind this kind of lineup is that Murakumo, Akebono, and Sendai, being the most aggressive destroyers (this doesn't take Yuudachi's Nightmare Protocol or Shigure's glitched aggressiveness into account) during normal battle conditions, will handle the brunt of incoming fire, since they have high tolerance to taking sustainable damage. That, and Sendai tends to go crazy in battle anyway, so why the hell not just indulge her each time. Suzuya, since she doesn't have the mobility of light cruisers or destroyers, is with Shigure and Yuudachi in the mid-line so that she can be protected while her Heavy Repeater goes to work, and Shigure and Yuudachi can retaliate against whoever tries to attack Suzuya. Ikazuchi, Kiso, and Yahagi, the more level-minded of the aggressive ship girls, will hold the back line so that they can keep the girls up ahead in check and rotate out in case any of the girls ahead begin taking dangerous levels of damage. This way, damage will be shared with all the ship girls in the front lines and possible chances of fatalities can be avoided, as the more aggressive ship girls have a tendency to end up taking quite a lot of damage - at least, at a higher rate than other ship girls.
The defensive formation of the rest of the destroyers and light cruisers involve the rest of the girls occupying zones that I laid out for them. The battleships are in the center, and since they have the greatest shelling range of any ship type, being in the center allows them to complement all fleet attack avenues sufficiently. The carriers are in the rear, just behind the battleships, and the other heavy cruisers are in front of the battleships, and the rest of the light cruisers and destroyers surround them in those zones I've been talking about. The one major weakness about this fleet formation is the fact that if the Abyssals focus their main attacks in dedicated flank maneuvers, especially a direct rear attack, then they'll hit the carriers hard, but Akagi's - er, no, Shouhou's, I forgot I reassigned the augmentations earlier - Shouhou's Long Range Scanners solves this weakness, since there's literally no way for the fleet to be caught off guard by any flank attack, so long as Shouhou is well protected and keeps a diligent eye on her planes, the fleet doesn't have to worry about flank attacks.
I've specifically assigned the defensive destroyers to specific zones in accordance with what kind of augmentations they have equipped right now. For example, I had Hatsuharu, whose Danger Close augmentation has proven extremely useful, because now her torpedoes can one-shot Abyssal light cruisers instead of merely dealing heavy damage to them with only a single torpedo, occupy a zone in between the heavy cruisers and the battleships so that she can provide lethal torpedo support in all directions. I put Sazanami towards the rear of the fleet, since her mobility's even faster now with the Cell Reactor Booster, so she can cover more distance in the same amount of time or the same distance in less time, among assignments like this.
Obviously, now at this point this doesn't sound so much like a destroyer-specific tactic as it does a fleet formation strategy. There was quite some resistance to it, too, especially from, not surprisingly, the more aggressive destroyers - namely, Murakumo and Akebono. When I explained to them why I was trying to have them follow a base fleet formation, they argued that their losses in combat weren't because of a lack of a solid fleet formation, but just random contingencies and outside factors that they had no control over. It wasn't their fault that they were ending up taking damage all the time, in other words. Regardless, I told them that despite the reasons why they were frequently getting themselves into positions of high combat risk, I designed this fleet formation in an effort to see if the fleet overall could fight in a safer manner and ensure that combat survival was at an absolute maximum. My highest priority, both as their Commander and as a fleet Admiral, is to make sure everyone comes back alive. Or, in their case, if not alive, make it so that their bodies can be salvaged by the others easily and returned to base to be revived.
Because the bigger ship girls, notably Kirishima, Akagi, and Yamato, supported my fleet formation plan, any resistance to it didn't really make much headway. However, I did say that if today's sortie proved that my fleet formation was ineffective and useless, then they didn't have to follow through with it and just fight as they did prior.
Today's satellite image photos show that the Abyssals have yet again formed a defensive perimeter on the northwest side of Sector B. That's where we normally enter the sector, so it means they've managed to figure out where the fleet comes in from, which is worrying, since there's a chance they could trace the fleet's sail path back to this base here in Okinawa. So I ordered the fleet to take the long flank and attack Dog Four. This was to be a longer mission for sure, so I had Mamiya and Irako prepare some obento for the girls to take with them to eat on their way to the mission area.
After sending them off on sortie, I found Isolated Demon sitting in my chair in my office when I arrived to get started on my work. She demanded to be entertained, since as a prisoner and an Abyssal on land without functional weapons, there wasn't much she could do to amuse herself. I didn't know what would "entertain" her, so I asked her if she knew what anime was. She said no, so I pulled up the entirety of Code Geass on my office laptop and let Isolated Demon watch through both seasons. I like to think that Code Geass is a very good anime to help people who want to get into anime transition right in, like Code Geass is a pretty good standard for what a good anime should be. Maybe I'm wrong. But personally I really enjoyed it, and it's one of the few animes I won't ever mind rewatching again, and again, and again and again and again. So I wrote off my paperwork while Isolated Demon sat in front of me, her eyes glued to my laptop screen, and whenever the episode ended, she demanded me to flip to the next episode so she could find out what happened next. Not surprisingly, she binged through the first half of the first season.
In exchange, Isolated Demon told me that I could call her "Ritou-chan". Ritou means "Isolated Island". Hence, Ritou-chan. Well...okay, I guess.
The fleet returned, and luckily, my fleet formation tactic worked just the way I thought it would. Honestly, I didn't expect it to work that well as Murakumo's post-action mission report described. Maybe it's because I always worry that the tactics that I come up with are always going to have some sort of fatal flaw that'll result in terrible repercussions. After all, I'm used to flipping through sheets of paper with the names of all the dead servicemen and servicewomen killed in combat as a result of my navy strategies. Effective strategies that completed crucial objectives, but not without the blood of many a good soldier and sailor. In any case, the fleet's long flank paid off, and they dealt massive damage to Dog Four and retreated before the main Abyssal fleets could reinforce the position.
Now here's where the problem came...
After dinner, when I was heading back to my office to check for any evening emails that came in during a very late dinnertime, I saw Shigure heading down the corridor that I use to head to my office. I called out to her, since I wanted to talk to her about how the mission today went. But as soon as I approached her, Shigure spun around faster than I could react to and grabbed my neck with her left hand, lifted me up into the air, and pulled back her right hand behind her back. Her eyes were glowing blood-red in the moonlight, and she had a small, crooked smile on her face. And she said,
"雨は、いつか止むさ...でも、今のところ、雨が血があります."
"The rain, it will pass eventually...but for now, the rain shall be blood."
I've seen enough anime to know what Shigure was planning on doing with that hand. And I was right.
She plunged her hand right where my heart was. The tips of her five fingers stabbed into my skin, thanks to both her ship strength and her sharp fingernails.
But obviously since I'm still here to write this, Shigure didn't go past any further. She held me up in the air, her hands shaking like an earthquake, while the blood that leaked from her fingers dripped out onto my military uniform. She finally let go of me and let me fall on my ass on the floor as I gasped for breath, since she nearly choked me out while she held me up, and Shigure ran away without even saying a word to me.
On top of which, Seal Team Six still hasn't sent me a reply email regarding the things I talked about yesterday.
I've managed to keep today's incident with Shigure a secret. I sneaked some gauze out of the medbay and wrapped it around my chest and heart in my room and put my military jacket in the wash so that Houshou can do laundry with it tomorrow. And since the weekend's coming up, I have the perfect excuse to hang around in civvie clothes.
What the hell exactly is wrong with you, Shigure? Running away isn't going to solve anything. I thought I'd managed to calm her down, but...clearly, it's not enough. What should I do now, for Shigure? Is there even anything I can do for her at this point? I tried to look for her afterwards, but I couldn't find her anywhere, and I didn't want to risk bringing attention to this incident by asking the girls if they'd seen her.
Maybe I'll just end up getting my heart ripped out for real soon at the hands of Shigure. Who knows...