Fortress Princess snapped her fingers at the opening and Lady M's eyes lit up. With a crack of her long whip, the white pinions at her back beat furiously.
"Exactly—their anti-air is wide open. Musashi, we have to seize this!"
The prompt jolted Abyssal Musashi into motion. She rubbed her hands, excitement breaking through her sternness. "Order the vanguards: launch every carrier plane and bomb their carrier group. Both wings surge—close and annihilate!"
The Abyssal host was arrayed like a crab: two one-million-strong vanguards left and right, with Musashi herself commanding the three-million central mass.
Carrier strikes travel far faster than hulls. Faced with such a heaven-sent window, Musashi even scolded herself—if only she'd advanced both vanguards last night to within fifty miles of the base instead of a hundred, they could have executed true combined air-sea operations: air strikes, gunnery, torpedoes, even subs—piled on at once. The threat to Hikaru's base would have spiked.
As it was, at over a hundred miles out, the attack had to split: air first, then the surface fight rumbling up late—an hour or more behind. Still, an opportunity like this was gold.
Each side had thrown a fist at the other's heart. The Abyssals were even stringing a combo. Now to see if the humans could stand it.
Airfield Princess raised a hand. On Base 544, half of "her" warped graveyard heaved, and from the earth beneath the tilted stones clawed up great birds—bodies tar-black, eyes blood-red.
Not crows, not hawks—fouler than crows, fiercer than hawks.
Flock after flock until four hundred blood-eyed black eagles broke the storm ceiling and arrowed south.
Airfield Princess smirked. "You keep telling me how fearsome their air wing is. Let's weigh it. Pity I can only put four hundred in the air at once; otherwise I'd drown them with this airfield alone."
A carrier's launch is bounded by two things: deck load and the carrier's firepower stat.
With 250 firepower, she could sortie more than four hundred—but there's a hidden limiter: every plane must be flown by the carrier's split attention.
Four hundred black eagles isn't multitasking. It's splitting one mind into four hundred.
Even Taihou's Shuttle Bombing—which mirrors 280 ghost aircraft on top of her own 72—leaves her winded. Airfield Princess was only level 100, two tiers below Taihou, and had none of those layered tactics/skills/cooking buffs. The only reason she could run four hundred at once was the raw ceiling of an Abyssal flagship.
Could she push more? Yes—at the price of power and control, to the point of mid-air blue-on-blue.
Four hundred was her cap.
She launched them all as Fighter III—let's see six hundred bombers stroll past that screen.
Lexington's F9F Panthers shadowed all three Abyssal columns. The instant both wings stirred, her warning snapped home:
"Abyssal riposte incoming—roughly eight hundred thousand carrier planes from the two wings are off the decks! They're forming up—ETA to target, thirty minutes!"
"As expected." Bismarck's mouth curled coldly. "Escort group—anti-air positions, now!"
Prince of Wales immediately led the girls to swap in AA mounts. In the warehouse, Tenryuu had already shoved the service door open and was hustling crates of fittings out by the armload.
If all they had to protect was the warehouse and the tight ring of sea directly before it, the base's AA might barely suffice.
But with every last carrier plane committed to the strike, the carriers couldn't help with local air control. The AA burden ballooned. Gaps everywhere; a single lapse meant a bomb to the teeth.
[End of Chapter]