Sunday, April 20th, 2014.

If Kiyoshimo's death was gut-wrenchingly depressing, I'm not sure where to begin to start describing today.

At 0800 hours, Carrier Strike Group One arrived to back up our squadron - the USS Carl Vinson, the Dewey, the Sterett, and the Gridley. Seal Team Six requested an emergency deployment of Carrier Strike Group One, which was the nearest available naval task unit, from Third Echelon, which was allowed. With these fresh reinforcements, we spent about two and a half hours pounding away at the Abyssal defenses at Dog District that they hastily set up during the couple hours of reprieve that we gave them to rest the platoon for today. They brought out all their capital ship girls for this one, more than we'd ever seen, including ones we hadn't fought against before.

I'd like to note here that Hoppo wasn't in the fight - the ship girls reported that Hoppo was nowhere to be found.

But despite the Abyssals' efforts, our superior air forces really helped tip the tide. You have to understand - the Abyssal ship girls, while individually very powerful and can go toe-to-toe with the ship girls even with their augmentations, still appear to share similar technology in that both the Abyssals and the ship girls of the Moebius Platoon have been created with the intention of condensing World War II technology into the package of a human being. In the end, they're still equipped with vastly outdated technology compared to the modern tech that was our air superiority. Sure, the Abyssals pose a significant threat to modern fleets by themselves in a straight up fight, but if they need to battle a platoon of ship girls like themselves and an entire naval task force worth of aerial artillery, then the Abyssals are kinda knee-deep in shit by that point.

That being said, it was a really weird feeling seeing World War II-era planes fighting alongside modern fighter jets and helicopters, especially taking into consideration that they were Japanese planes fighting alongside American fighter jets. What an odd twist of history this world's taken.

After breaching the rebuilt defenses of Dog District, I ordered the platoon further in and destroy the defenses of Dog Two and Dog Four, which were in the way of our progress to reach Dog Five. Because the Abyssal lines of defense had been pushed back so far, Commodore Sawatari was able to order our fleet forward and position the ships so that their own main guns could fire upon the land defenses of Dog District, and we ripped the Abyssals a new one. Listening to my fleet's battle chatter, I could tell that lots of the girls, too, were fighting like the world was going to end if they didn't succeed. Indeed, considering Shigure was, in every single fleet engagement for the past two days, was in the vanguard of the battles and slaughtering everything she got her hands on, the fleet had their own reasons to go ham, reasons that should be so obvious I won't even bother mentioning them.

Getting past the last defenses in between Dog Two and Dog Four and reaching Dog Five was the easy part. All the Abyssal activity that we'd seen at Dog Five yesterday got shrekt because they'd been moved up to the outer defense perimeters during the first couple of hours of fighting. It's what the fleet encountered there that made today so heart-breaking.

Both Kitakami and Yuudachi had become Abyssalized. I don't know how else to put it, and I know "Abyssalized" isn't even a word, but I'll make it a word, goddamn it, because that's exactly what happened. Seal Team Six had set up remote camera feeds in the control room of the Samidare so that I could see in first-person what the ship girls were seeing, and when Shigure, Naganami, Yayoi, Wakaba, and Murakumo reached the last security perimeter of Dog Five, they encountered ?Yuudachi and ?Kitakami.

?Yuudachi and ?Kitakami had been thoroughly remodeled, and not in the good way. They had adopted everything that characterized the Abyssals - pale skin, glowing eyes, and sentient weapons that look like they're straight out of an AvP movie or something along the same vein. Yuudachi's eye that was shot out recently was like a blast furnace churning out red fire like no one's business.

So just like the ending to some Final Fantasy game or something, the fleet had to fight Yuudachi and Kitakami. We called off naval support, since we didn't want to kill off ?Yuudachi and ?Kitakami. But even then, even though it was just the two of them versus the rest of their entire platoon, ?Yuudachi and ?Kitakami killed Fubuki, Sendai, and Ooi. ?Yuudachi shot Fubuki with something like looked like a charge shot so powerful it chomped out about 78% of Fubuki's body. Sendai tried to avenge Fubuki, but ?Kitakami hit her with two torpedoes that blew both of her legs off so that ?Yuudachi could pepper her with her own Abyssal torpedoes that she was throwing by hand instead of out of a torpedo launcher or anything like that. Ooi died halfway into the fight when she got into a position where she could've probably dealt critical damage to Kitakami and cripple her, but Ooi hesitated, and that was all it took for Kitakami to put a torpedo through Ooi's heart. Only with the price of one of our destroyers and two of our light cruisers were we eventually able to subdue ?Yuudachi and ?Kitakami, with Shigure beating ?Yuudachi down in dramatic fashion with her own two hands in an epic but cruel battle of ship sisters forced to turn against one another.

With ?Yuudachi and ?Kitakami subdued and under control, we then sent in Seal Team Six to Dog Five, and they found the rest of the missing ship girls, who'd been put into special holding cells that somehow suppressed their ship powers. They also found Losira with them, who had suffered the loss of her own left eye in the helicopter crash when her face got struck by a flying piece of one of the Osprey's rotors on the chopper's way down, and the Abyssals had done something to Losira's own eye too, because it was glowing red just like the other Abyssals and our own Abyssalized ship girls, but other than that, she was fine. Seal Team Six managed to extract them just in time, with the rest of the platoon and air forces covering their retreat, and they all got the hell outta there because Dog Five was triggered to self-destruct if unauthorized personnel infiltrated the island. And sure enough, we managed to pull out of Dog District in time before Dog Five went up in flames. We then moved the fleet together back to the West Coast, and the flagship, the JMSDF Samidare, that held the platoon, Seal Team Six, and the rescued ship girls sailed for San Pedro, where Seal Team Six's forward research base is located so we could start on repairs as soon as possible.

There, we found out that it was in fact Re-Class's doing. Judging by the ship girls' accounts of what had happened inside that Osprey when it went down over Sector B, Re most likely calculated the exact moment in time that she needed to go berserk and wreck the helicopter so that it would go down. Losira managed to get her hands on a parachute before the Osprey broke in two from Re's berserking, and then Re grabbed Losira with her tail and dragged her down to the bottom, where they landed practically right next to Dog Five, where the Abyssals then moved in and captured everyone. Karma at its finest - we've been capturing their kind for how many months now, and now they were finally able to capture some of ours.

If there's anything to be thankful for, it's that none of our casualties were fatalities, but the fact that Yuudachi and Kitakami had been Abyssalized really stung us all. It was only when we reached land that this fact really started to sink in. Sure, Fubuki, Sendai, and Ooi going down was sad, yeah, but at least the girls brought their bodies back before they sank so that they can be repaired. But we don't even know if ?Yuudachi and ?Kitakami can be reverted back to their normal states. I took some time with Kitakami's ship sisters to speak with ?Kitakami, since she'd seemed to calm down enough and was still capable of human communication, and it seemed like ?Kitakami still had some of her human wits about her. She said that she was sorry to Tama, Kiso, and Kuma for killing Ooi, but she was under orders to kill every one of them, and that she wasn't going to let sisterly ties stop her from completing her objective. At least ?Kitakami had the decency to talk - ?Yuudachi wasn't even capable of comprehensible speech at all. She just growled at us like a rabid dog, always trying to lunge at us despite her restrictive shackles. Shigure was the only one who was willing to stay with her in ?Yuudachi's holding cell, but then again, she's really the only one who can afford to.

So the Moebius Four Platoon and I spent the rest of the day at San Pedro at Seal Team Six's base, recuperating from the exhaustion and damages they sustained from the last two days of frantic fighting. This was a great experience for them, objectively speaking, because they've now gotten familiar with and good at coordinating attacks with modern air forces - in fact, we lost no piece of modern aircraft hardware over the weekend so far, and none of our modern destroyers were touched, which was ideal. So technically, the fleet is in great shape for Operation Rising Sun later this week. Only, they're in no mood to fight, and morale is at an all-time low. We're probably going to be spending the rest of the week until the date of Operation Rising Sun.

I did meet with the Abyssals we'd captured, though, and they'd turned real friendly towards humans during all this time that they'd been here at San Pedro. Kuubo-Hime, walking around in a tank top and real short beach jeans, gave me one of those "hey ol' buddy haven't seen ya in a while" hugs and nearly choked me, and Ritou-chan ran up to me asking me if I'd watched To Aru Majutsu no Index yet, which I had, except I still need to get around to watching Railgun. It was pretty interesting (weird, mainly) to see the Abyssal destroyers waddle around after me and the Floating Fortresses floating after me as I walked around Seal Team Six's underground base.

But just an hour ago, Losira called me to Seal Team Six's main research labs that're normally off-limits to everyone except the members of the team. I was given special exemptions because of what they wanted to show me. With the captured Abyssals' help, Big, Sanford, Deimos, Hank, and Chuck were able to come up with an emergency reverse-surgery that restored both ?Yuudachi and ?Kitakami back to their old selves...sort of. Yuudachi no longer saw us as enemies, but her mind was still in a primordial state, like she really was just a wild dog trying to lick everyone's faces off and barking in Poi's. In addition, they couldn't completely get rid of the Abyssal haze in her left eye. Kitakami's reverse surgery proved much more successful, as the only traces of her Abyssalization was in her voice, which still sounded weird like when she was still Abyssalized. They had to quarantine Kitakami and Yuudachi for the night, though, since we don't know if the reverse surgeries will really keep them from turning back into Abyssals again. In addition, it's extremely likely that the Abyssals, by turning some of our ship girls into theirs, was able to steal information about the augmentations they had on them, so we're expecting them to develop augmentations of their own, which is going to be really scary once we know they have them.

But during the few moments I had to speak with Kitakami after she was turned back, Kitakami asked me to let the fleet know that she was really sorry to everyone, especially her ship sisters, for what she'd done to them, especially Ooi. She said that instead of trying to do her best to resist the Abyssal influence, she'd simply given up from the very beginning because she felt there was nothing that could be done for any of them, that she and everyone who got captured were screwed and couldn't be saved. Her memories of her Abyssalization were too hazy for her to remember properly (Big told me that her memory files during that time were too corrupted to salvage), but all she remembered just before she was forced to remodel was herself thinking that it would be nice to have been a battleship, maybe in the next life as well.

Kitakami was brutally honest with me in that she made it clear that she was extremely disappointed with herself for having given up hope so easily. With a sister like Ooi, who would be more than willing to trek to hell and back any number of times to drag Kitakami back from the dead, Kitakami said that she should've known better. She also said that it was only just starting to hit her that she was responsible for Ooi's death, that she had struck down someone who was so devoted to her with her own two hands, and with no hesitation, on top of it all. At least, Kitakami lamented, she could've brought herself to hesitate at least a little bit so that Ooi could get away with her life, but that wasn't to be. Kitakami said that it was almost as though she wanted to kill Ooi so that Ooi could join her side again as an Abyssal, just like herself - whether that was out of spite or out of love for Ooi, Kitakami said she couldn't tell. Either way, Kitakami said that she couldn't possibly bear to bring herself to face her own ship class anymore.

"If I turn back into an Abyssal," Kitakami told me, "please just scrap me. I'll just go around killing everyone until I'm dead. Before they turned me, I thought I was the almighty Super Kitakami-sama, able to take on any challenge. Now I know that I'm just full of crap...that I'm too weak to stop myself."

I wasn't having any of that, so I gave Kitakami a hug. I said that I'd invested far too much time and effort into this fleet, and I wasn't about to abandon any of the ship girls for anything unless I myself felt that there was truly nothing left for me to do for them. Kitakami didn't expect me to put on the feels, 'cause she started crying real quiet. She said that this wasn't supposed to be some lame war manga about an Admiral and his fleet; this wasn't how real life was supposed to be. Ships are abandoned or scuttled when their effectiveness as weapons are rendered obsolete; Kitakami said that ship girls like herself should be treated no differently. Sure, I'd been quite the unorthodox Admiral at base, but this was too dire of a situation to continue to be unorthodox. Besides, she asked,

"You're a Navy commander before. You said that you've sent lots of men and women to their deaths. Why aren't you the same with us? Why do you try to treat us like humans? It's not like anyone else will if any of us survive this war."

I told her, real nice 'n concise, that I honestly felt that Kitakami and the rest of the fleet were more human than lots of the humans I knew in my life. I also said that I wanted to change my outlook on what a military officer's true role is in the military. I said that a long time ago, one of an officer's biggest responsibilities was to send men and women to their deaths - no longer.

"My job is to turn you girls into the best soldiers this world's ever seen," I told Kitakami, "and if there comes a time when I need to send you girls to your deaths, I'll make it happen in a way that no one will ever forget who you were or what you did."

I told Kitakami that because she'd expressed her regret in killing Ooi and that she admitted to her own personal weakness to her darker Abyssal persona, she would never have to worry about being scrapped. She was too valuable to be scrapped, anyway. This fleet needed its Super Kitakami-sama, its torpedo light cruiser superstar. Scrapping her would solve nothing and only serve to sink morale even further.

"Besides, Ooi would castrate me if she found out that I'd scrapped you once she gets revived," I added. "By this point, I think I've come to accept that there can be no Ooi without Kitakami. I think the world is just better if you two stick together."

Kitakami said nothing for about half an hour. So I just sat there patting her head like there was nothing wrong at all.

"Now I know why those destroyers like you so much," Kitakami finally said when I was getting up to leave. "I can't believe I'm one of them too..."

I just gave her a small grin and told her to save it for Ooi. After all, she needed some way to make up to Ooi for killing her.

Reading back, Kitakami's confession kind of sounded like a real cliche plotline or something. But hey, it is what it is. I'm not the one writing this story here. I'm just here to do my job...and end this war for better or for worse.