There was no time to react. None at all.
Lexington's squadrons were flown by the shipgirls themselves; thought became motion.
The Airfield Princess's "kaleidoscope" idea was elegant on paper—a layered, near-inescapable vortex of fire.
But the problem was scale: those six-hundred-thousand-plus fighters were each being flown by one of more than thirty thousand Abyssal carrier shipgirls.
For the Airfield Princess to move them, she had to issue orders to three nameless carrier flagships; those three had to relay to their ten-thousand-strong carrier groups; and only then would it filter down to individual pilots.
Even noticing the bottleneck and carving the airspace into sectors, she simply didn't have ten full minutes to work with before Lexington's bombers wheeled and came again. In that sliver of time she'd only just learned the carrier formations and barely got them into a rough shape. "Moving like one arm" was a fantasy.
Too stiff. The so-called kaleidoscope changed like a tottering old woman with bound feet.
So through fire from hundreds of thousands of Abyssal fighters, five hundred sixty hero bombers cut like storm-petrels through the squall—like surfers skimming the crest of a tsunami—and in less than half a minute tore open a ten-nautical-mile-deep air defense layer to reach the sky over the main force.
That airspace was an ocean of flak. No amount of flying would keep every bomber untouched.
Worse, the faster Lexington's planes flew, the faster enemy shells closed in head-on—the harder to jink away.
The bombers were literally soaring through a furnace of fire.
Taihou's voice tightened. "We're losing craft. Group 4 lost three. Group 5 lost two!"
Lexington clenched her jaw. "Dive. Rip the firelines. Groups 1–2, take a shot at the N-class if you see an opening. The other four groups: pick off the nameless flagships."
Through a lattice of flak, the bombers tucked and dove for the hulking targets below.
In the old world, that kind of run was already the height of valor; only ramming a warship beat it for madness.
What they faced now was worse by orders of magnitude. No pilot had ever dived through over a million guns. It sounded impossible even to imagine.
"Seventy-three down in one breath!" Taihou cried.
In a heartbeat, seventy-three gone out of 560—an eighth burned away. Only hero machines under top-tier hands could have made it this far at all; any other carrier force wouldn't even dare attempt a strike through this.
Three million Abyssals had emptied their magazines to build a hell that killed planes.
For a split second Saratoga felt the relief of finally punching through—then she saw the defenses below and swore under her breath.
"You've got to be kidding me. Again—and worse!"
Below, the Abyssal formation sprawled wide—but what stood out were tight hedgehog clumps packed like quills.
Abyssal flagships sat at the cores. Around each, ranks of tough battleships and battlecruisers ringed tight, guns hurling fire into the sky.
They were meat shields first and foremost—there to eat the bombs for their flagships.
And that wasn't all.
Six to seven hundred thousand Abyssal bombers split into six or seven hundred separate formations. Around Musashi alone, a hundred thousand-plane blocks stacked to blot out the sky.
The instant the hero bombers appeared, half of those thousand-plane packs broke off, converging from every side—above, below, all around—with a clear intent to ram.
The rest stayed overhead like a second wall, sealing the bombing lanes; if a bomb came through, they would throw themselves into it and die with it.
[End of Chapter]