Lexington hurriedly dressed and slipped out, not forgetting to add a layer of sound- and shock-proofing to the bedroom—so the commotion outside wouldn't wake Hikaru.
Before long, Tirpitz and Bismarck came trotting over from the adjacent quarters—the district was short on shipgirls for now, so everyone wasn't split into the old per-faction dorms; otherwise it would be too far.
At the end of the dark corridor, Tenryuu stepped into view.
As she passed Lexington's door she glanced through the crack—just in time to see Tirpitz, in soft cat-print pajamas, pounce onto Hikaru.
Hmph. Discipline in ruins.
Out on the water, the district's shipgirls were intercepting torpedoes while trying to punch out and hit the Abyssal submarine groups.
And far away over the East Sea, the Abyssal Ryuujou was nursing her own headache from torpedo attacks.
Since London, under Takeyama, had "hooked" her out, she'd been hammered wave after wave, with the worst being concentrated submarine strikes and air attacks.
Right now it was a night-long gauntlet of mine-and-torpedo assaults that had already lasted over three hours.
By day, carrier air wings strut and roar; at night, it's the small, stealthy hulls—destroyers, submarines—that shine.
Over a thousand submarine shipgirls, organized into strike packs, plus more than fifty thousand destroyers formed into a torpedo special-attack arm, had ringed Ryuujou in tight.
Ryuujou hadn't broken out alone, of course—hundreds of thousands of Abyssal troops had come with her.
But in the desperate intercepts and ambushes, the Abyssal mass either fell behind or bled numbers fight after fight.
From noon, when Ryuujou headed west, to past midnight now—more than ten hours later—Ryuujou had barely ten-odd thousand Abyssals left at her side.
Because of speed, those that could still keep up were mostly the fast Abyssal destroyers.
On paper, destroyers are perfect for ASW.
But Gorou was a veteran commander, and the marshals and captains under him were all old hands. They weren't about to leave a hole that big.
Instead they used Ryuujou's impatience to prosecute subs against her—and carved off a slab of her force.
Now, within a heavy encirclement of tens of thousands of level-100 destroyers and over a thousand subs, the sea—black as ink and blind as a cave—filled with the terrifying hiss of torpedoes knifing the waves, sheets and sheets of them, as if the whole sea were boiling.
Every moment, tens of thousands of torpedoes were being loosed, arrowing for Ryuujou.
At that scale, even she couldn't stand under the massed blows.
The destroyer host couldn't parry it all; they had to throw themselves in the path. First the sharklike rigging met torpedo with torpedo; then the destroyers themselves.
They were gnawed down in a rush, like an onion peeled layer by layer to its core.
At the core, wrapped tight by the mantis-shrimp rig, was Ryuujou.
The few fish that punched through to her would smack the rig and burst, only leaving a white scuff on the shell.
That was Ryuujou's skill, "Hide Head, Show Tail"—the rigging circled to shield her and shaved off sixty percent of incoming damage.
Without it, she'd have gone under long ago. For all that she was an Abyssal flagship, she was still only level 100—and at base a light carrier without standout fundamentals.
But hold long enough and you'll be broken.
In less than a quarter of an hour, Ryuujou would be laid bare to concentrated fire from tens of thousands of torpedoes.
Under the night, Heizou stood on the sea's surface and nodded to Takeyama. "Looks like we'll finish this in phase six. No need for the 'Tenfold Ambush' trump at all."
The seven-step interception plan had rated Ryuujou very highly: on paper, this sixth step—night torpedo swarms—wouldn't keep her; the commanders were even expected to be driven back.
Then would come the Tenfold Ambush: ten Commanders with their kill teams appearing in layers, boxing Ryuujou into a place with no sky above and no ground below.
As it was, they'd overestimated her.
The units assigned to the Tenfold Ambush had to cancel early and redeploy to support elsewhere—the other fronts were under heavy pressure thanks to the forces pulled off to whittle down Ryuujou's escorts.
With victory in hand, it was only right to spare more of their own.
[End of Chapter]
[100 Power Stones = Extra Chapter]
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