Anti-air—ironically—was exactly where the Airfield Princess and the Fortress Princess were soft.
Their AA stats weren't low, but because of their rigging, they were painfully vulnerable to air strikes.
Airfield Princess: speed 1, evasion 0.
Fortress Princess: speed 1, evasion 10—which might as well be nothing.
At their scale—measured in tens of kilometers—both fortress and airfield were walking bull's-eyes. For shipgirls, the rig is, in a very real sense, the body itself.
So even with the Airfield Princess sitting on 200 AA bare, and the Fortress Princess at 100 AA bare, anti-air was still their weak flank.
There's no mystery to it: when the target is that big, you eat bombs. High defense only means you eat more bombs before you go down.
Abyssal Musashi therefore ordered the central host into a ring formation, specialized for anti-air.
A ring formation is literal: screens of escorts form concentric circles around what must be protected, layering AA barrages to shred anything that tries to break in.
Even carrier planes—hawk-sized for shipgirls—must dive to low altitude to drop accurately and shorten their bomb run. No matter how high Lexington's wave climbs, they have to come down to deliver.
And because a strike won't always attack from the same compass point it approached on, the package will circle to probe for gaps, then knife in. Defense has to cover all 360°.
Musashi's reaction was quick. And she hadn't just sat on her hands waiting for the N-class and the Princesses to arrive, either—she'd been drilling the host and tightening command.
At her barked order, the Abyssal flagships moved as one.
Musashi was overall commander; Lady M and Abyssal Hindenburg served as her deputies—the command hub through which she could wield three million Abyssals in the center like her own arm.
Below those two named flagships came thirty-odd unnamed flagships (about half of the full allotment, since many had been detached to the flanks)—mainly Battleship Type IV, i.e., six-star, level-100 "ordinary" Abyssal battleships.
Under the two deputies, those unnamed battleship flags each drove their sub-formations toward Base 544 and slotted into the rings.
They'd rehearsed this. You could see it in the clean geometry: no collisions, no milling—just three million hulls snapping to posts under thirty-odd battleship flags, the wake-lines sketching elegant arcs across the ink-black sea.
Overhead, the central carrier arm launched in waves—over a million aircraft stacking into upper/middle/lower tiers, howling above the core—half of them fighters.
Clearly, Lexington's air wing had taught Musashi respect; she wouldn't have invested this much in AA geometry otherwise.
And yet she still worried, face lifted into the rain.
The AA envelope was sound, but Base 544 was simply too vast—a floating island over a hundred square kilometers. With Lexington's level of gunnery control, at ten thousand meters they could practically drop blindfolded and still hit.
Carrier planes are built to kill person-sized shipgirls—or at most rigs in the tens or hundreds of meters.
A fortress. An airfield. Those are targets.
Musashi fretted; the Fortress Princess did not. She'd eaten her share of punches, but not enough to pick up a phobia. As the unprecedented strike loomed, she popped up AA batteries across the bastions—and then her first thought was, naturally, counterattack.
"Say," the Fortress Princess lounged against the sea, one hand braced on the surface, the other idly stroking her black-and-crimson cat-ear headband, tongue wetting her lips. "If their air wings are all in the sky, then their AA screen is hollow. Musashi—if your vanguard can't block a thrust, are you seriously telling me you don't even dare bomb an enemy without air cover?"
[End of Chapter]