A/N:
Been a while since I've written one of these.
Chapter 12 was based on a request for one of the Taffy Three ships, an American task force credited with a heroic, 300-esque fight against a much more formidable IJN fleet. The only one that made sense to me to be turned into a ship girl was the USS Johnston, and because her commander was part Native American, I gave Johnston a Native American motif, tomahawk and all.
-Akyuu no Joshu
Hi, Zuikaku here. Today's another ordinary day at the Rabaul Naval Base. The wind's coming through the base from the sea, the sun's out, Shoukaku-nee's getting me Ramune and some ice cream because...well, it's the summer, so what other excuse do we need...really, it's great here.
And when I say ordinary, what I really mean is -
BYUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU! ! ! ! ! ! !
I literally slam my head against the ceiling of the hallway because I've jumped so high out of fright. An airhorn just got blasted right behind my head. I fall back down from the ceiling, spin around, and find my Admiral, a good-for-nothing seventeen-year-old who does nothing but screw around with his ship girls like me and sit in his office all day long playing video games and surfing the Internet, holding a goddamned airhorn canister.
"Y-You - what the hell was that all about!?" I start screaming at the top of my lungs. "More to the point, why the hell are you carryin' around a fucking airhorn!?"
But all the Admiral does is pull out a pair of sunglasses, put them on, cross his arms, and say,
"Ahem, that was for my 420 Blaze-it MLG 360 quickscope ladder-stall Y-Y claymore-drop montage, it'll be going up on my Youtube channel in about two hours." He makes the gun gesture out of his hands and wiggles his thumbs around like he's shooting them. "Bang bang. Deal with it."
This's gotta be one of his Internet-fueled non-sequiturs, right? Right? Right?
So I pull out my flight deck that I'm carrying around on my back in case of emergency sorties and smash it over his head so hard that I break my own flight deck in half.
"Can we, like, impeach you or something? Can't we do something like that?" I growl while my ears are still ringing like hell.
"Uh...huh? But...I'm your Admiral..." the Admiral says, dazed by my flight deck attack, but he shakes himself awake again. "Oh, more importantly, I'm gonna be doing large ship construction today. Do you have any recommended recipes that I should try?"
"Huh!? LSC? But I've heard that's just a waste of precious resources, nobody ever gets what they want from that crap anyway!" I object, tossing away the broken half of my flight deck. The fairies can pick up the bits later.
"But I'm too fucking lazy to send you all on missions, I don't wanna do the events 'cause I need to download all the H-doujins of you and Shoukaku from Comiket from my torrents, and it's summer, so I'm too lazy to do anything, really."
"WHY ARE YOU GETTING ECCHI STUFF ABOUT ME AND MY SISTER FROM COMIKET, YOU PISS-SHIT ADMIRAL!?"
"Um..." the Admiral tilts his head up to the ceiling, then flashes a thumbs up at me. "#JustTeitokuThings, what else?"
One moment later, the Admiral finds my foot in between his legs, and I watch him grovel in front of me with his hands in his crotch.
"Oh God...well, that wasn't exactly how I was imaginin' bustin' a nut over you today...talk about #badfootjobs..."
"Can I use you for modernization fodder? Please? Pretty please?" I threaten with a raised fist that's convulsing with a huge anger vein.
"No, you can't use normal humans for upgrading, Zuikaku-san..."
"THEN I'LL FIND A WAY FOR YOU THEN, SHAN'T I?"
"Zuikaku-san, you've - y-you've got this really scary look in your eye and I don't like it...if you wouldn't look at me like that, that'd be greaaaaaAaaaaaAAaaaAAAAHHHHHhhhHHHHHHH! ! ! ! ! !"
Three minutes later, I'm standing in front of the Admiral's desk, with the Admiral slumped over his desk sitting in his chair. I've beaten the living crap out of him so badly that his entire uniform is smoking from the amount of heat generated from the contact of my fists with his body.
"Look, we don't have a lot of resources, end of the line. Despite you claiming that you've been lazy these days, you've been sortieing me, Shoukaku, and Hiryuu-san a lot these days, so we've been plowing through our resource pool by ourselves a lot. We don't have a lot of destroyers to dedicate to pure resource runs either, so shouldn't your priority be to just complete a few low-end nodes so that you can get the basic destroyers? Honestly, you don't even know the basics of a stupid web browser game, how can you even have the balls to call yourself an Admiral?"
The Admiral looks up at me with teary eyes. "Yeah...you don't have to remind me...Shigure tells me that all the time whenever she's my secretary ship for the day...how my job is being a shitty Admiral..." The Admiral goes back to turtling his arms underneath his head, but I just roll my eyes again, feeling no sympathy whatsoever for him.
"Is this one of those #FirstWorldProblems that you always go on about?" I mumble unamusedly. "Geez, learn to man up, will you. It's not like you have to risk your life every day out at the front lines."
"Well, it's not like you need to either," the Admiral lifts his head up quickly, "I always give you and Shoukaku Instant Repair Goddesses, after all."
"I-Ignoring that, you asshole! So anyway, what're you gonna do about LSC? Are you gonna go ahead with it or not?"
The Admiral shrugs. "Sure, why not? Haven't done it in a long time, after all. I mean, if I got Shoukaku from it, then I can probably score huge on another one, too..."
This sends my brain out to orbit when I hear what he's just said. "W-WHAAAAA? You - You fucking scumbag, you got Shoukaku-nee from LSC!?" I shrilly scream at my Admiral. "So that's how she got here before me!"
"Wait, why is that so surprising to you, I thought she already told you, you two bein' ship sisters 'n all..."
"She didn't mention something like that! Ever!"
"Ah, well..." the Admiral picks up the sheet of paper that he'll use to submit to the fairies over at the LSC port at base. "For the time being, let's...put in all max..."
I quickly walk over to his table, put my hands underneath the desk, and flip his table so hard it crashes through the back wall of his office.
"I didn't actually hear what I just thought I heard, right...?" I approach the Admiral with steps that'll echo in his brain for the rest of his life.
"C-Calm down, Zuikaku-sama, there's - there's no reason to get angry, I can explain - !" the Admiral tries to worm his way out of this, but I won't let him.
"Explain? EXPLAIN? YOU'RE GOING TO TRY TO EVEN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN TO ME WHY YOU JUST SUGGESTED PUTTING IN MAXIMUM RESOURCES FOR SOMETHING AS DUMB AS LSC? ARE YOU TRYING TO MAKE ALL OF US SUFFER? SHOULD I SEND YOU TO HELL FIRST BEFORE THAT HAPPENS?"
"Zuikaku-sama, your back! You're growing wings! You're growing really evil-looking wings right now, I don't know if you noticed, but they look really dangerous! We can't be breaking copyrights right now, you can't do that here! ! !"
"Zuikaku, I brought our ice cream~" my older ship sister, Shoukaku-nee, walks into the office with a tray of ice cream and Ramune bottles, and I instantly calm down at the mind-soothing sight of my beloved ship sister.
"Shoukaku-nee~" I prance over to her to get my ice cream. "It didn't take you too long, did it? I know everyone at base's trying to get their hands on these things, now that it's summer..."
"It wasn't too bad. In fact, I was the first one there," Shoukaku-nee discloses quite proudly.
"Huh, really? At this time, the destroyers would be all over that stuff in the kitchen..."
"By the way, Admiral, I heard you were planning to do some LSC today?" Shoukaku glances over at the Admiral, who's resumed his seat behind his now-nonexistent desk. "Um...Admiral, why is there a big hole in the wall behind you? And why is your desk missing?"
"Well, you see, Shoukaku-kun..." the Admiral again pulls on his sunglasses and assumes the Gendou pose on his knees, "I, um...had to exude some of my overflowing manliness and libido for a second, so I had to throw my desk out of my office in a vulgar display of strength and rage. Please, this is not because a certain carrier around here got pissed off at me for wanting to go all max into LSC planning. It really isn't."
Shoukaku, much like me, just stares incredulously at the Admiral.
"Uh...yes, sir, whatever you say..." Shoukaku-nee nods dryly and slowly. "Hopefully...erm, hopefully you can manage our resources well, we are running rather low the last time I checked, so we ought to go on some resource gathering runs very soon..."
"That's the plan. In the meantime, I'll continue with LSC. I mean, I've been pretty lucky with it so far, may as well give it another spin in the tank. #YOLO."
The Admiral writes in his numbers on the LSC sheet.
"It's time to aim for Yamato...hehehehee, I heard from the other Admirals that she's the fuckin' beaut..." the Admiral chuckles to himself quite heinously. "Airhorn for good luck!" He pulls out that airhorn canister from nowhere and blasts it again, making me and Shoukaku-nee jump.
"Is that a cue for me to go grab another flight deck and break it over your head again?" I threaten murderously. "If so, I don't mind getting used to that kind of cue."
"No, Zuikaku-san, you're misunderstanding the proper use of a flight deck...believe it or not, it's actually not used to be broken over your Admiral's head..."
"Oh ho? And who's the carrier here who'll actually use it, hm?"
"...you, Zuikaku-san."
"That's what I thought."
Shoukaku just giggles. "You two have gotten so much more lively around each other, now that he's married you, Zuikaku."
I click my tongue. "But it's not like anything's gotten any different!" I raise my left hand, looking at the ring on my ring finger. "He's just still a brat Admiral who does nothing but thrive on his stupid little dank memes all day long and drive the rest of us mad doing stupid shit all the time. He's not the kind of person I wanted to marry!"
At this, the Admiral gets up from his chair and walks over to us, with that usual stupid cheeky scrublord grin of his, as he likes to call it himself.
"Oh? Tsundere Zuikaku much, huh? But our honeymoon night was great, wasn't it?" he grins like a madman as he leans in towards me, and I can't help but to feel my face redden and punch him in the face against on reflex. But this time he's wised up to it, so he backs off before he gets hit and suddenly breaks out that silly, stupid dance that's apparently based on me and is all over the Internet or something.
"Zui, zui!" he laughs as he pumps his arms in that retarded dance. "C'mon, Zuikaku, this's supposed to be for you, ain't it? Zui zui zui zui!"
"N-No! Dumbass, I'm not gonna do somethin' that embarrassing, you fucking kidding me!?" I holler. I turn to Shoukaku-nee, wanting her to back me up to get the Admiral to stop. "Shoukaku-nee, you think it's - "
My jaw drops to the floor. Shoukaku-nee, laughing contagiously, hops over to the Admiral and also imitates his dance.
"Oh, c'mon, Zuikaku, this looks fun! You should try it," Shoukaku-nee giggles. "Zui, zui! See, it's fun!"
"Yeah, your sister knows how it's done! You're always on about Shoukaku-nee this and Shoukaku-nee that, right? C'mon, don't'cha wanna join Shoukaku-nee this time too?" the Admiral's face has turned into the Troll face meme, and the sarcasm burns hot on my face. Seeing this, the Admiral then pulls out a saltshaker from his back pocket, which makes me wonder why he even bothers keeping a saltshaker in his back pocket int he first place. "Ooohhh, Zuikaku's gettin' a bit salty, eh? I like my tsundere's nice 'n salty!"
"ADMIRAL, YOU ASSHOOOOOOOLLLLLLEEEEEE! ! ! ! !"