After privately all but drooling over the thought of hero planes, the Airfield Princess wasn't about to pass up this chance. She snapped, "How many carriers are in your air wing, and who's commanding?"
Abyssal Musashi gave her a long look. "We're split into left, center, and right groups. Left and right are ten thousand each, with three to four hundred thousand aircraft apiece. The center's about thirty-three thousand, with a little over 1.2 million aircraft. Each group is under an unnamed flagship."
Carrier-type Abyssals are scarce—barely one percent even among elites. Out of five million Abyssals, having over fifty thousand carriers was already a luxury.
Among carriers, aviation repair ships and carriers with AWS planes are the rarest—one in ten thousand. Next come full carriers; light carriers are most common.
Light carriers launch pitiful numbers, so if you treat "launched" as "carried," the average load across the Abyssal carrier groups is around forty. That's only because this mobilization scraped together nothing but veterans—no low-level riffraff.
"A carrier formation without a true carrier flagship is a joke," the Airfield Princess said, eyes gleaming. "How about I take your carriers?"
Musashi smiled. "I'd love that."
Truthfully, she would have preferred an N-class flagship to lead—those all-rounders are born to command air, gun, torpedo, even ASW. But today the two N-class were sprawled on their dragonback rigs, letting the storm soak them, too lazy to be bothered.
The Airfield Princess, satisfied, was just about to offer a token olive branch when Lady M rushed up, pale.
"Over three hundred thousand fighters from the left and right groups can't block the enemy strike. They climbed to high altitude. I've ordered the escort line to throw up a wall of AA—but the strike is headed straight for the center." She swallowed. "Front line reports: the entire enemy air arm is bombers. Not a single fighter!"
Musashi's face changed; she snatched the dispatch. "How could they punch through three hundred thousand interceptors?"
"Speed," Lady M's voice shook. "Their formation is tight, and they're wringing every knot from the airframes. Over twice the speed of sound—at ten thousand meters—maybe three, four, even five times the speed of sound!"
The thinner the air, the lower the drag. For feather-light carrier craft, high altitude is a gift.
Musashi still couldn't believe it. She read the telegram twice, muttering, "Mach two while maintaining formation? That's… absurd."
Mach two is just under 2,500 km/h—about 1,300 nautical miles.
Mach three? Two thousand nautical miles per hour.
And they might be faster.
Unthinkable performance. Unthinkable control and command.
Her central host was now only three to four hundred nautical miles from Hikaru's base. In other words, in ten minutes, the bombs could be falling.
The enemy's intent couldn't be clearer: an all-bomber package—one savage uppercut to announce the opening bell.
Musashi lifted her arm and shouted, "Halt! Form a wheel circle—protect the core!"
Not them—the "core" was the fortress-scale rigs of the Fortress Princess and the Airfield Princess, the combined sprawl of Base 544 covering a hundred-plus square kilometers.
Anyone with a brain would see it: with the base on the field, and both Princesses boosting it, the Abyssals were built for a war of attrition.
So the moment Musashi heard "all bombers, full-tilt sprint," she knew their target—our base.
[End of Chapter]