Saturday, April 19th, 2014.
I'm writing this at five in the morning, which means that the sun's already damn well up, even out here in the middle of the Pacific. Which also means that in order to keep my sanity, I need to keep this a lot shorter than usual so I can actually get some damn sleep.
We don't know exactly when, but according to the time that Seal Team Six received Losira's Osprey's distress radio signals over at the West Coast, the Osprey that Losira was flying and was carrying the girls I had selected to receive Kai upgrades over the weekend somehow went down sometime between 0000 and 0200 hours, which, if you roughly estimate its flight progress over the Pacific Ocean, means that it went down probably in the region of Sector B, though we don't know exactly where. Our base at Okinawa got the base-wide alarm treatment blasted in our face again like a cold bucket 'o water, and I phoned HQ to see what was wrong, and they gave me the basic rundown before they transferred the call and put Lauren and Hank on the phone, and they explained the rest from there.
Thus I put the base and the fleet on high alert and set them to train lightly to keep themselves warmed up while we waited for Commodore Sawatari's ship, the JMSDF Samidare, and his squadron of the JMSDF Hyuuga and Yuudachi to arrive in Okinawa. Due to his haste, the Commodore couldn't get a bigger squadron to respond to this emergency, as the Samidare and the Yuudachi were the only two ships available for tasking at the time, but this was off-put somewhat by Seal Team Six bringing in their own air fleet with the enlisted assistance of local US Coast Guard aircraft and seacraft that regrouped with us about 500 kilometers northeast of Sector B. This's justified since they're assisting in the rescue of an American special forces agent, who's also the younger sister of the Commodore.
At first, the girls were pretty excited to have a chance to board the big modern navy destroyers, especially Samidare, who enjoyed quite an unusual spike in her usual popularity within the fleet when the girls learned that the JMSDF Samidare would be our flagship. But to be completely frank, the shitty situation at hand really dampened the mood, so the excitement didn't last. When we regrouped with Seal Team Six and their emergency response force, the Commodore and I met with Big, Hank, and Lauren. Big informed us that Dog Five was showing way too much activity to go unnoticed and determined that wherever Losira's Osprey went down, the crew it held was most likely captured somehow and taken to Dog Five. He also theorized that perhaps Re-Class went berserk as she's usually known to do and probably wrecked the Osprey from the inside out to bring it down, which would mean that our assumption that the Abyssal ship girls are powerless when on land is probably very, very wrong. Or it could be that Re-Class is just really fucking weird. Either or, it still means that our ship girls and Losira is in enemy hands right about now.
We plunged into Sector B by ourselves - three modern Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force ships, a platoon of ship girls, and American Coast Guard aircraft. I took this as a preliminary test run of Operation Rising Sun later on next week, because today has been a live field-command test. Seal Team Six brought me some nifty equipment to help me guide the fleet and pinpoint their exact moves. It was a lot like playing a real-time strategy game, and I got flashbacks of the old days when I used to play Brood War. God, that game was hard. But at least in video games, if your unit dies, you can just make another one. I didn't have that luxury today. One wrong move, and I would lose a ship girl for good, was the way I saw it.
The destroyers first launched six of their Type 90 SSM-1B as an opening strike as a pre-emptive surprise attack. The Samidare and the Yuudachi are stealth destroyers, so while they aren't completely invisible, their angled superstructures and hulls make it hard for enemy radar to detect them so that they can get within optimal firing range for their missiles. We coordinated them so that they would hit just minutes before the platoon entered Sector B waters. And just as the Platoon penetrated the outer defenses of Dog District, heavy attack support choppers from the Hyuuga, which included the US Coast Guard aircraft that Seal Team Six brought along, assisted the platoon in lightning-fast hit-and-run (more like hit-and-fly-the-fuck-away) ATS rocket strikes. After that, I took over from there and took direct command of my fleet, using equipment from Seal Team Six and their orbital satellites that had complete vision over Sector B.
After today's day-long battle, I can safely say that I honestly prefer this kind of fleet command. No longer do I have to sit my ass down in my office twiddling my thumbs like a fucking idiot and worrying myself silly over what's happening to my fleet. Today, unlike every other time I've sent my fleet on sorties, I had complete battle knowledge of everything: enemy fleet formation, enemy fleet tactics, statuses of individual ship girls, everything. It's every decent field commander's wet dream. In addition, we loaded up the JMSDF ships with supplies for the platoon, so instead of having to trek all the way back to Okinawa for resupply, the platoon just needed to retreat outside of Sector B waters and regroup with our destroyers, and with Mamiya and Irako facilitating their resupply, the platoon continued fighting for an entire day. In fact, the last push into Dog Five just ended an hour ago.
With the Navy destroyers' missiles pointed in all directions at Sector B, ready to fire, we have Dog District locked down - any Abyssal reinforcements that try to intervene will be wrecked instantly. In two hours, I'll have to wake up again and direct the next and final push into Dog Five so that we can send in choppers with the guys 'n girls from Seal Team Six in there to locate, rescue, and extract our missing ship girls and their squadmate.
This's for the record.