A/N:

I looked through the review sections to see whose requests I could do. I looked at Armarda's and decided it could be interesting to write more about American ship girls, particularly the carriers.

I know that most people depict carrier ship girls as wielding mainly bows of some kind. However, while I know that there's nothing that says that Americans aren't known for archery too, for me personally, it's more fitting for a carrier to wield something else...

In other words, I'll be taking some artistic licenses in this chapter. A few...big artistic licenses. So much so that perhaps jeanex wouldn't really consider them exactly his/her own. But it's alright - this's just a fanfiction, after all.

-Akyuu no Joshu

"Abyssal planes, spotted eleven o' clock high!"

In a classified location in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, a small seaborne convoy sails for Australia. The convoy itself consists of two freighters and an oil tanker, but its escorts consist of the U.S.S. Columbia (SSN-771), the U.S.S. Princeton (CG-59), the U.S.S. Bunker Hill (CG-52), the U.S.S. Chafee (DDG-90), and the U.S.S. Chung-Hoon (DDG-93). With the submarine sailing slightly ahead of the formation and the rest of the American warships assuming a diamond formation to protect their assigned convoy, this seems like an unnecessarily large military escort for a few cargo transport vessels that don't look like they're carrying anything out of the ordinary for Pacific transporters. However, regardless of their contents, Abyssal presence is heavy in this area - for a few months Abyssal presence has infested this area while the world's navies are busy quarantining and eliminating portions of the sea's Abyssal presences a batch at a time.

Off the deck of the lead left destroyer, Chaffee, boost three young ladies as the sailors on deck hastily dash aside to let them through and snap to strict salutes as they run past.

"Remember, Mahan, Maury, no glitches! I'll call 'em, you brawl 'em!"

"Don't worry, I'll get kinetic in this goddamn AO!"

"I've got your six!"

In the midst of sirens and alarms warning the small fleet of incoming Abyssal presence, the three elite American ship girls push off the tip of their destroyer's bow, and with their final steps, their cells release compressed energy to propel all three of them forward in powerful boosts that send them flying some two hundred meters forward, allowing them to remain airborne for a few seconds before their feet slam against the calm, sunny waves of the Pacific. Bright blue water splashes up as three pairs of boots crush the water's surface, and two of those pairs immediately boost forward a second time as soon as they make contact with the water.

The ship girl left behind, U.S.S. Enterprise, official designation CV-6, pulls down her naval peaked hat as she reaches behind her back and pulls a large weapon that is strapped there. Normally, the carrier girls of the world navies traditionally use bows and arrows as their mediums of launching planes. However, the American carriers have stepped up the ante a little bit, staying true to American militarism.

Enterprise carries the XM-6 Bazooka. Developed specifically to be wielded by Enterprise, hence the "6" designation, the Bazooka is the first and only one of its kind. Consequently, Enterprise is currently the only carrier in the world to use a rocket launcher as her medium of launching planes. It's basically as tall as her, and bandoliers of 60mm rocketheads are strapped around her chest and stomach, because conventional load bearing vests aren't meant to accommodate rockets.

Easily carrying her twenty-five-pound rocket launcher with just one frail-looking arm, Enterprise deploys the flip-up sights on her massive 160mm-long Bazooka and shoulders it to point it up at the air at the direction of the spotted Abyssal scout planes. Enterprise's sharp ruby eyes twist their multi-layered pupils about like telescope lens, allowing the carrier to zoom in to have perfect vision over the enemy recon planes, and the advanced targeting modules on the computerized flip-up sights of her Bazooka, scanning the scout planes, immediately list enemy information on these spotted planes, everything from plane type to estimated flight time. The sights can even estimate for Enterprise how much fuel the planes have, should that level of detailed information somehow come into handy in the future.

"CV-6 to DDG-90, enemy scout planes are going to be RTB! How copy?" Enterprise calls, her finger tapping her launcher trigger. She knows what the answer will be.

"Eliminate them."

Enterprise's Bazooka screams with artillery exhaust blasting behind her as backdraft, and a 60mm rocket flies through the air at a diagonal trajectory. Having locked on to one of the Abyssal scout planes, the live warhead seeks its target and smashes into it, detonating itself and swallowing up all Abyssal planes into a large cloud of black smoke before they have a chance to break formation and fly apart to avoid the missile hit. The battered ruins of the enemy scout planes fall out of the sky and drop down to the ocean below.

"DD-364 outcalling! No Abyssal fleet presence detected!" the American ship girl destroyer, U.S.S. Mahan, reports. "It's either an air attack or a submarine attack! CV-6, we need sonar support, our ships can't detect Abyssal submarines!"

"CV-6 copies."

Pulling a rocket straight off her bandoliers, Enterprise taps the front of the electronic rocket with her left thumb, manually configuring it to be a sonar detection warhead before pulling her rocket launcher down and directly inserting the warhead into the muzzle of her Bazooka. The Bazooka roars again with another explosion, and the backdraft, directed straight down, blasts the war apart from beneath the carrier's feet. Normally backdraft like this would be either very harmful or even downright fatal to any normal soldier, but for a ship girl, such damage is not even negligible; it's ticklish.

The sonar detection rocket detonates some seventy-five meters in the air, and like the energy waves of an EMP bomb, the sonar detection rocket explodes into several nebulous rings of blue energy that spread out like the ripples of water.

"Sonar detection is up! You're right, 364, it's a submarine attack!" Enterprise reports, her own personal on-board sonar, aided with the powerful sonar detection waves of her most recently fired warhead, pinpoints exactly the positions of the inbound enemy submarines. "They're launching torpedoes! Regroup and defend the convoy! Intercept all torpedoes!"

The two destroyers, Mahan and U.S.S. Maury, DD-401, boost back to Enterprise and then past her as they spread out to intercept the launched enemy torpedoes that they can track the progress of through their sensors. Chafee and Bunker Hill, the ships that the enemy torpedoes are targeting, respond by launching their own counter-torpedoes, and the ship girls can see the shadowy silhouettes of the torpedoes sailing out to meet their adversaries in underwater battle.

"Torpedoes engaging!" Maury keeps a keen eye on her sensors to watch the torpedoes slam into each other to neutralize one another, watching for any stray Abyssal torpedoes that may end up punching through. Sure enough, a few do, so she reacts accordingly. "364, take the ones at our twelve! I'll get the ones at our tens!"

"Roger!"

Maury boosts herself to intercept the incoming torpedoes that are inbound for Bunker Hill. On her right arm is a a knobbed circular shield with the emblem of the American eagle on it, but also attached underneath the shield, built into the arm braces that secure the shield to Maury's right arm, is a an autoloading quadruple 21-inch torpedo launcher. Maury points this arm-mounted torpedo launcher down at the sea, and calculating the speed of the incoming torpedoes and taking the explosive data of her own munitions into account, Maury fires exactly one torpedo as the first of the trio of enemy torpedoes reaches within one hundred and twenty meters of her. Her lone torpedo plunges into the water and, set on a timed fuse that Maury electronically has placed, detonates underwater right over the closely-packed group of Abyssal torpedoes, detonating all of them. By this time the American destroyer herself is safely removed from the scene, as she has returned to her original post immediately after deploying her lone torpedo, and a spectacular pillar of water caused by the combined explosive power of all those torpedoes is erected for a few moments. In fact, two more of these pillars of water shoot up into the air, albeit at different times, as Mahan and Enterprise successfully intercept and destroy the torpedoes headed their way.

"We're not done," Enterprise warns to the entire fleet, "enemy submarines are still inbound. No torpedoes, though."

"They want a melee," Maury grins devilishly. "Well, they chose the exact wrong convoy to pick a fistfight with. Permission to engage first?"

"Granted," Enterprise nods. "Don't be reckless, we'll provide support in one mike."

"What about you? Will you be fine for now?" Mahan asks, pointing at Enterprise's Bazooka.

"If they so wish a fight, I will give it to them. I will be collecting my usual fee, though," Enterprise grins as she begins loading rocket after rocket from her bandoliers into her Bazooka, and Mahan boosts off after Maury, who is about to make contact with the Abyssal submarines.

"Contact!" Maury reports as her minimap flashes with the first few red dots of Abyssal submarines. "Another torpedo wave inbound, watch it, 364!"

Boosting aside to dodge the proximity-based enemy torpedoes, Maury sidesteps the attacks. In her left hand, she has been carrying an American flag whose stand is taller than Maury herself, but it is made out of steel, not wood. Returning fire with her own torpedoes, emptying her quad launcher, Maury then runs straight after her own torpedoes to close the distance between her and the Abyssal submarines trying to draw near to the convoy to hopefully torpedo it at an easier distance. Because her sensors indicate that these submarines are making the grave mistake of not staying safe deep beneath the surface, Maury takes advantage of this and plunges her flagpole deep into the water, then pushing through the water and back out of it like she's trying to shovel out snow. But only this isn't snow she's shoveling out of the ocean, but instead a huge quantity of seawater and three Abyssal Ka-Class submarines, who go flying into the air helplessly. Behind Maury, a several shots detonate, and Mahan shoots them all in the air with her rapid fire 5-inch turret. While Mahan sinks the submarines that Maury has shoveled out with her mysteriously powerful flag, Maury raises her right hand into the air like she's about to do a fistpump, then drops a knee down to the water's surface and pounds the surface of the sea with the face of her shield. The knob turns as soon as the shield hits the water, and Maury generates a shockwave of violent energy that ruptures the water's surface, thus popping out all the submarines from the ocean like she's done with her flag, only it reveals more enemies but doesn't send them flying into the air as high as her flag did. And this time, instead of Mahan shooting them with her 5-inch gun, Enterprise quick-aims her Bazooka without bothering to let it lock on and pulls the trigger multiple times, her rocket launcher bobbing up and down with each successive launched rocket.

Even as the flying submarines are being torn to pieces in the air from Enterprise's launched warheads, the American carrier boosts forward herself to join Maury in the fray.

"Finish it, Enterprise!" Maury, grinning, reaches out with a fist as she backs up to let Enterprise do the rest. The carrier, tapping knuckles with Maury, skids to a stop on the water, points her Bazooka straight down, and then starts to unload the rest of her Bazooka's stored rockets, splashing herself over and over with water that gets kicked up from her own munitions. Having set all of the rest of her rockets to be auto-seeking depth charges, Enterprise empties her XM-6 and watches her sensors as the Abyssal submarines, not knowing what these strange rockets are doing tracking them even while underwater, flee the scene en masse, retreating from the site of the convoy. Enterprise wipes the seawater splashed onto her face off with her left sleeve and turns around to sail back to the convoy.

"Good work out there," she gives both Mahan and Maury pats on the back.

"Man, what we'd do without your Bazooka," Maury just laughs. "That's a real lifesaver, ain't it?"

Enterprise smiles before raising a pair of fingers and snapping. Right on cue, some two hundred meters behind them, a half dozen more pillars of seawater blast up into the sky, and the soundwaves of the explosions rumble past them shortly after.

"It sure is a lifesaver."