Sunday, April 6th, 2014.
At 1000 hours, a full week after they'd picked her up and taken her away, Seal Team Six delivered Shigure Kai 2 back to our naval base.
Yuudachi and Samidare, as expected, were the first ones to greet her with hugs all around. Shigure was back to her normal self again, but when she came to give me a hug too, she looked a bit different from the last time we saw her around.
She explained to me that the changes she'd undergone over the past week had changed many things, including her appearance. Now she has these little hair flaps that look like some sort of cat or dog ears. While cute in and of themselves, I don't know if I prefer Shigure's new look or her old one. For sure, a bit of me misses the Shigure of old. I guess I'll just have to get used to her new image now.
Big came, along with Chuck, Sanford, and Deimos, to explain what they'd done to Shigure. As it turned out, Shigure's self-inflicted mental damage thanks to her auto-termination protocol was so great that a single Kai upgrade wouldn't fully repair her, and it warranted such an extensive amount of additional repairs and internal remodeling that it just wasn't a normal Kai upgrade anymore. So the team decided to dub the second operation on Shigure "Kai Ni" or "Kai 2".
In addition, Big informed me that he and his team had extracted and learned enough about the Abyssals that we've captured to directly translate Abyssal technology into conventional military technology that they could in turn use on their own ship girls. So things just fell in place for Shigure's Kai 2 surgery, and they took the liberty of infusing Shigure with new technology that they'd developed.
I asked Big if Akebono's internal augmentation, Slayer, was evidence of that, and he confirmed it.
Big continued on that the success of Shigure's Kai 2 surgery opened up an entire slew of technological opportunities for the ship girls, but it was the single most resource-intensive and effort-intensive operation they'd had in a long time.
"Shigure gave us a lotta shit, man," Big told me. "It was tough, but we pulled it through. She won't break again. We've made sure 'a that."
And then he gave me Shigure's updated Kai 2 profile.
Shigure's 12.7cm Twin Gun Mount also got the Kai 2 upgrade - apparently Seal Team Six even drew up Kai 2 schematics for weapons as well. Big explained to me that the old 12.7cm Twin Gun Mount was "too simple" for Shigure to use, because her data processing power and multi-tasking capabilities got expanded so much that having her continue using her old guns was, for intents and purposes, an inefficient use of an equipment slot for her. So now Shigure Kai 2 is armed with a 12.7cm Twin Gun Mount Kai 2. Virtually every aspect of it is improved over the default 12.7cm mount: Shigure's shells are multi-purpose, meaning that she can configure them to become fragmentation, high explosive, or armor/shield-piercing at will. She can also set them on air-burst, meaning that even if Shigure misses a shot, if Shigure is paying attention to her shot, she can detonate it in mid-air near an enemy that she's missed and still deal damage. They even went so far as to make it so that Shigure can customize the color of her shell's tracers and use it as a signal flare if need be.
Shigure also received a specialist rifle, just like how Yamato wields her XM-109 25mm anti-materiel sniper rifle into sortie. And just as crazy of a weapon as Yamato's experimental 25mm sniper, Shigure's own gun is, militarily speaking, just insane. She's now programmed to carry an XM4-A9 assault rifle that fires .50 Beowulf rounds - a heavily modified and upgraded M4 rifle with a 20-inch barrel that fires .50 caliber rounds with enough power to match a standard .50 caliber sniper rifle, like the Barrett M-107. It may not still outright kill Abyssals, but it'll make 'em hurt real bad. It also comes with an integrated Houndrider LRHS (Long Range Hybrid Scope) so that Shigure can flip easily between long-range and short-range targets. Fitting, that Shigure should use a weapon that fits in with her dog motif.
Shigure's torpedo launcher also got upgraded, and fittingly enough, once again, Seal Teal Six dubbed it the "Black Hound". It looks like a miniature missile array, just stretched out vertically and drilled with ten torpedo launch tubes. It carries 150 31cm mini-torpedoes for close-range use against packs of Abyssal destroyers and closely bunched up Abyssal targets, since Shigure can launch ten of those 31cm torpedoes simultaneously and instantly. The Black Hound can also transform its torpedo launch tubes from ten launch ports to five to fire its secondary ammunition supply of 30 61cm seeker torpedoes that will automatically hunt down Abyssal targets if Shigure doesn't specifically assign a target to them, and if she does, they become homing torpedoes.
And finally, her internal augmentation: just like Yuudachi's Nightmare Protocol, Seal Team Six removed the glitch in Shigure's personality codex, isolated it, and weaponized it into an augmentation and incorporated it again into Shigure's database, giving Shigure full control over it. However, the glitch was so unstable and erratic that Big and the guys eventually decided to use the technology that they'd developed from researching Abyssal tech through the captured Abyssals to keep the glitch in check. This means that Shigure is now legitimately capable of paranormal and supernatural abilities. Her internal augmentation is now called the "Standalone Protocol". I'm just disappointed that Seal Team Six didn't build a tachikoma for Shigure to ride into battle on.
Shigure is now the world's very first esper - proof that humans are now capable of producing other humans (for now, androids) capable of insane powers.
Problem is, neither Seal Team Six nor Shigure knows exactly what kind of paranormal powers she has. They only know that she possesses them.
And I thought this was only supposed to be a journal about an Admiral and his ship girls.
Needless to say, Suzuya was quite annoyed at the fact that there was now someone who could legitimately say that she as more upgraded than Suzuya herself was.
Big also gave me another batch of a lot of new augmentations. Two copies of each, and all of them were ones I'd never seen before. Must be in preparation for Operation Rising Sun.
The Medical Nano-bot Dispersal is a passive augmentation that releases nano-bots whenever the augmentation detects that its user has taken damage. The nano-bots burrow beneath the user's skin into the blood vessels to quickly travel to the wounded areas of the user and repair the damage. It takes the nano-bots from two to five seconds to start repairing, depending on the area of the wound relative to the augmentation's placement, but it works immediately and quickly so that the user, if careful enough not to take any more hits, will slowly and steadily regenerate over time.
The Kellorian Reactor is a free passive destroyer-specific augmentation that, when equipped, will strengthen the user's other augmentation(s)' effects by an estimated 20%. It also buffs all combat aspects of the user by some 10% and grants the user a regenerating shield that can block one full attack, regardless of caliber, and regenerates every sixty seconds, like a weaker version of the Kai upgrade shielding. An all-around augmentation, it seems.
The Fusion Core is a free passive augmentation specific to the submarines, battleships, and carriers and has differing effects depending on the user's ship type. For submarines, it allows the submarines, who normally can hold their breath for nearly five hours without surfacing for air, to simply extract oxygen straight from the water itself and not have to deal with surfacing and risking exposing themselves, and it also strengthens their torpedoes with small amounts of depleted uranium that strengthen the submarines' torpedoes by an estimated 40% without dumping radiation into the water. For battleships, it infuses all ammunition with depleted uranium to add an estimated 25% to battleship stopping power and allows the user to "charge up" a cannon shot to push its maximum additional damage gain all the way up to an estimated 75% increase. For Yamato specifically, if she were to equip it, the Fusion Core will allow her Yamato Cannon reactor to split a Yamato blast, splitting the cannon in half so that Yamato can fire two blasts at half damage each. For carriers, it will multiply their external sensors and radar capabilities by some 300%, strength their body cells with benign radiation particles so that any incoming attack will be weakened by an estimated 15% when they hit, and strengthen attack planes' bullets, bombs, and torpedoes with depleted uranium for an estimated additional 50% power.
The Corvid Reactor is a free passive light cruiser-specific augmentation that is the light cruiser variant of the destroyers' Kellorian Reactor. Same effects and everything, just a different name and a different programming due to the light cruisers' higher amount of internal coded complexity.
The Moebius Reactor is a free passive heavy cruiser-specific augmentation that behaves a little bit like the Kellorian and Corvid Reactors, but its effects are a bit different. One similarity is that the Moebius Reactor, too, increases the potency of the user's already equipped augmentation by 20%, but that's really the only similarity it shares. The differences are that the Moebius Reactor reprograms the user's weapons to fire at higher velocities, meaning that shell travel distance time is reduced by an average of 30%, stopping power is increased by some 30%, and that there is a small chance that a round will simply penetrate a target all the way through depending on the angle of entry and distance from the user.
The Behemoth Reactor is a free passive battleship-specific augmentation that, like the previous augmentations before it, increases the user's other augmetation(s)' potency by about 20%. It also gives the user a flat 40% movement speed bonus to all aspects of movement - cruising speed, top speed, boosting speed, everything. Very helpful for battleships, since one of their main weaknesses is the fact that they're very slow compared to other ship types and thus have to cope with incoming attacks by simply tanking them rather than evading them.
The Icarian Reactor is a free passive carrier-specific augmentation that, while different in that it doesn't strengthen the user's existing augmentation, allows the carriers to double the amount of planes they can have in the air at one time. Each carrier's limit on how many planes they can have operating at the same time is different, and it is prone to change from variables such as experience, training, and internal coded structure. The Icarian Reactor doubles this capacity, meaning that air superiority can be attained twice as quickly and twice as easily, very broadly speaking. In addition, all carrier planes have a flat speed increase of 50%, giving them greatly increased battle survivability.
I asked Big how it was possible to have technology like this, as mysterious and frighteningly powerful as Akebono's Slayer augmentation, or like Shigure's Standalone Protocol, which honestly scares the shit outta me. Big simply told me to go ask the Abyssals on how it worked, since he and his team had no idea themselves. Well, I said, that's not possible. How do you work on something and not know how it works? That's like having a teacher in school teach you something that they themselves have no idea about, like a substitute teacher for an Algebra II class who knows nothing about Algebra II and is just parroting out instructions the original teacher's left behind for them. To my dismay, Big said that was exactly how he and his team felt. They knew what kinds of technology that the Abyssals seemed to have and the potentials for them, but they didn't know how it worked or what made them work. Big said that he and his team merely identified the Abyssal tech, converted it into a kind of technology that humans could use, and developed them into augmentations, like Akebono's Slayer or Shigure's Standalone Protocol.
I told Big that doing this sounded like a really, really bad idea. Surely he and his team raised a whole bunch of bad flags along the way to get to the point where we are now. Big said that so long as nothing got out of the ordinary, everything should be fine, but I told him I'd be on my guard regardless. I told him that I was getting to the point where I didn't know if I could trust him and his men and women to fiddle around with my ship girls.
"Your ship girls?" Big gave me a huge, snarky smirk. "Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot you were the Commander here. I guess the fact that we're the ones who built these girls in the first place doesn't matter one single fucking bit, right?"
I forgot all about the fact that Seal Team Six were the creators of Moebius Four. Whoops.
After Seal Team Six flew back home, I got an email from HQ with more roster updates. Again, they only sent five more.
Destroyer Yayoi,
Light Cruiser Abukuma,
Heavy Cruiser Nachi,
Standard Carrier Hiryuu,
Standard Carrier Amagi.
Afterwards, I spent the whole rest of the day hanging out with Shigure, Yuudachi, Samidare, and the gang at Shinsengumi, celebrating Shigure's Kai 2 remodel and return. Shigure seemed perfectly normal so far today - if anything, the usual depressed mood that I often perceived her having is completely gone, and she always gives me a smile whenever we happen to lock eyes.
Later that night, Shigure asked me to come with her out to the pier, and when I asked why, she said that she wanted to sit with me like last time by the pier, and that she wanted to spend some time with me alone. She's become surprisingly very straightforward now, I could tell immediately. So we went out there to the pier where Samidare and I sat with her some weeks ago. Shigure asked for my forgiveness for all the terrible things she'd done to me. She said that she was all too aware of the things she'd done, and that she didn't deserve her Kai 2 remodel, that I should've just had her scrapped instead for insubordination and threatening her own Admiral's life. She said all of this with a straight face, but a really apologetic face, at that. A huge change over the old Shigure.
I told her that all of that was in the past, and that those weren't things I preferred not to dwell on anymore, for everyone's sake. I told her that I wasn't going to forgive her for something she didn't do - in other words, there was no need for me to forgive her, since I didn't feel she did anything that I was angered by or I felt was wrong. Though, I did say that it'd be nice not to wonder whether or not Shigure was going to rip my heart out again.
"I'm sorry," Shigure said. Her hair flaps even bowed over, like a real dog's ears.
I put my hands on her head, my fingers curled around her hair flaps, and I proceeded to mofu-mofu them. I thought initially that Shigure wouldn't like it, since my image of the old, shy Shigure was still strong in my mind, but to my surprise, Shigure sat in between my legs so that I could pet her more easily. She reeeeeeeeeally likes being petted.
Before we headed back inside, Shigure pulled me by the collar down to her and gave me a really long kiss on my lips. She said that the rain had finally stopped, and that the moon tonight truly was beautiful.
I got the reference. I told Shigure that she ought to look for someone better than me, but Shigure said she didn't need to. She'd already found that someone.
"At least give it some more time," I advised Shigure, but she told me back,
"For someone like me, finding that person is timeless."
Wow, Shigure, that's deep.