1390/Automated Armament III

Automated Armament III
Date of Scene:	21 January 2015
Location:	Great Ocean - Eastern Loop
Synopsis:	Automated Armament III
Cast of Characters:	Kotone Yamakawa, Arthur Lowell, 342, 494, 571, Wo, 596, 637, 673, Nagato, Shigure

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Zwei (596) has posed:
    The Eastern Loop is stage to a the next in a series of multiversal incursions by the Collective's automated armed forces. A 300 meter class light warship has crash landed into the ocean from geosynchronous orbit, only to have apparently survived the impact, and risen to the surface once more. It's easy enough to see just by its sheer size, never mind the way the water literally boils around it, and even easier to track just from the fireworks going on overhead. Though it's happening at too high of an altitude to really make out, the air is filled with intermittent fireballs and the delayed rumble of explosions, setting a distant but noisy backdrop to the event.

    The ship itself is unusual, and clearly not originally designed for naval use. The entire thing is nearly featureless, with no visible outward serials or markings, no windows, decks, or seemingly even guns. It's a sleek, carbon black mass of strangely angled, flowing metal; looking halfway between a piece of postmodern sculpture and a bladed weapon. It chugs through the water slowly, as whatever passes for thrusters must have been severely damaged for it to crash in the first place, but it won't be especially long before it reaches the floating city on the horizon.

Wo has posed:
    Water is an excellent conveyor of pressure waves, and that made this splash down an event that certainly would have registered on detectors for quite some ways. Such is easily felt by a particular Wo-class Aircraft Carrier, that happened to be deployed nearby, but had formerly been concealed beneath the waves. When the wavefront hits, glowing, golden eyes open in the depths, barely touched by surface light at this depth. Was it just an impactor? A rare but not unheard of event in the oceans of the multiverse, certainly. Picking up on the low rumble of propulsion following, and then the far away clamor of an aerial battle, soon dispels such notions, and she begins making her way towards the source. An order from her trusted leader comes after, rubber stamping what she had already set out to do: Whatever would disturb the peace of the sea must be punished.

    Approaching the presumed theater, she surfaces, a for now distant and dark shape just on the horizon. This allows her her full speed and maneuverability, as well as to get some eyes on the intruder, as well as what might already be engaging it. Drawing her hat lower over her eyes, as though it might grant more shade to them, she quickly takes stock of the situation, relaying it back to whatever passes for her kind's headquarters. Though she'd rather launch her planes immediately, she'll await further orders before opening fire on what is basically an alien to her.

Shigure has posed:
    Kuma hasn't been around the Multiverse too long, but even she knows when to sortie. As soon as that alert was out, Kuma was in the launch docks, equipping her Fit-out and preparing her equipment, so when Nagato gave the order, she was ready and waiting for the launch bay to open. "Kuma! Setting off, kuma!!" crowing her deployment as she surges down the ramp, skating out into the water and taking point for the other two, larger ships.

Arthur Lowell has posed:
    ARTHUR LOWELL has arrived! He rushes in with intense speed, arms at his side in the traditional shounen flying posture. On his back may or may not be Alexis Maaka, who he seems to not at all mind the presence of as he SPEEDS over the water, kicking up a huge tailwind and blasting water up behind him. "ALRIGHT." He yells over the sound of rushing air. "YOU READY? Gonna DROP some BOMBS up in this motherfucker. HRRRRRGH YEAH!"

    Arthur intends to rush in VERY close immediately. Since he's such a small radar profile and he's using gravity propulsion, ideally he won't get himself murdered by point defense stuff. And then his intent is to drop Maaka as he swoops, low to the ship, somewhere on part of that smooth ship's surface that has some steady footing! He's going to enchant her with a gravity bubble first, of course: Something to break her fall, but also something to make it MUCH more impactful when she lands and it disperses, maybe something to breach to a lower deck!

Kotone Yamakawa has posed:
Kotone Yamakawa is not flying in no she's riding on a hover bike that looks like it was converted from a street racing bike of some sort and she's moving in not just sure about the nature of the attakc but clearly intent to help and it's good at keeping her above the water at the veyr least. She does open up a digital signal to any allies who might be here.

<Yamakawa here, just what what are we dealing with here?

Samar (494) has posed:
    With the news that the Fleet Daughters were eager and raring to go into battle against whatever this thing is, Samar was well aware that she would have little tolerance for having to work with them. For that reason, she decided it would be better to deploy someone more willing to be gentle and sympathetic. Maybe Samar doesn't tend to like Darwin's unwillingness for conflict, but she can at least recognize when the Seaport Princess's tendencies are better suited to a situation than her own.

    Darwin is not a fast vessel. As an embodiment of a harbor, she is more suited to staying in one place and bombarding from afar. Fortunately, the place she arrives is perfectly suited for such a position, for she surfaces between the floating city and the approaching ship. She's in her (relatively) human-sized form for now, but she's also come accompanied by the Escort Fortress, a trio of metal orbs floating around her whose human-toothed maws seep a crimson steam. That should help add some extra firepower to something already remarkably strong in direct action.

    Darwin sits in the middle of her mechanical frame, one giant hand resting on the maw/landing bay at her side, the other settled in her lap. A frown of concern creases her strangely gentle features, but she doesn't act just yet: the target has to be assessed, and her allies' positions planned. At least all her weapons are prepared to fire when necessary.

Nagato has posed:
    Hearing the red alert, and a will to prove herself to the Union for the sake of the Fleet Daughters, Nagato's skating out behind Kuma, her fit-out ready and primed with cursory checks at the docks. "We don't fully know the capability of the enemy nor do we know who else has responded to the distress call, fleet. Be watchful and ready for engagements." the first real sortie she's been on that wasn't rescuing a lost Daughter, it makes the heart palpatate with how important this sortie is to her.

    "Sending out a Recon Seaplane, scouting the area for contacts." she reaches behind her, plucking something off the steel attached to her back and nods, "Type O, Launch!" and with a charge up on a hidden launch rail, the plane is sent out to scout over where the red alert coordinates were. "Kuma, launch a scout plane thirty degrees east of mine, report back with information. Kongou, provide defense, line ahead formation."

Alexis Maaka (571) has posed:
    Somehow, Alexis is in fact clinging to Arthur without stopping his flight or even slowing him down. One supposes that the spacekid's abilities make him able to handle the load, and she lightens as well as she can over the rushing air. "Ready." There's something of a hint of hesitation as she says this, folding her faceplate into place while she braces herself. Usually she's content to do this out of an aircraft, not off the back of a space god.

    But beggars can't be choosers, so she begins to fall when Arthur gives the signal, the wing-pack on her back unfolding to provide a means for her to glide into place as she makes her descent. Her HUD gives a readout for her to determine a proper drop-vector and all that nerdy shit, and she detects a structural weakness on the ship's hull.

    Time to capitalize on this, as Alexis begins to activate her wingpack's hover-engines to slow her flight. Falling into the water, she begins to swim with the pack's assistance, the device folding its wings and providing propelers of some sort on the engines to sent her towards a hangar underwater. Good thing her suit provides an O2 feed for these occassions, not to mention waterproof sheaths for her weapons.

    She makes her way in via the hangar itself, silent and sneaky.

Rory White (673) has posed:
    Another encounter over the water!

    Without aid from others this time, Rory's chosen a very strange way of lending help... and taking reconaissance.

    The COGNIZANT ODYSSEY is in low orbit. It's a small, mostly unarmed craft that cannot handle atmospheric re-entry. But a tiny shuttle attached to it... CAN.

    That craft breaks free of its moorings and plunges through the atmosphere, growing red-hot from friction in no time at all! With programmed precision it reorients briefly to skim over the water top using its metallic fuel thrusters, filling a section of sea with a weird stench and boiling a few thousand gallons quickly into steam. But the flyby was necessary. For the landing ramp deploys while still in the air, and about a dozen small black drones deploy through the opening. Perhaps anyone else who might've been with Rory at the time might too, if they have the means to handle landing on the water.

    3 of the dog-sized devices hit the water and sink beneath the waves. 4 remain airborn and take up Eye in the Sky positions. A few hit the water. They have no apparent weapons - or rather, aren't built for combat - but these drones have manipulator arms, tools, and all sorts of weird things.

    No sign of Rory herself though...

    The LANDER, its job accomplished, follows its programming and hits MAXIMUM BURN to ascend back up into orbit...

Kongou (637) has posed:
    Kongou was not at the Hikari sea base! Rather, she was out on maneuvers when the call to sortie was issued. The result is that the sturdy fast battleship simply swings into formation aft and port of Kuma and Nagato shortly after they depart from the docks. With her arms folded behind her back, just above the mounting bracket for her Fit-Out equipment, Kongou lazily shifts from one foot to the other in a casual, low-speed skating motion. Eyes closed, she navigates by radar, humming to herself.

    Her posture shifts once the sortie zone is entered and orders are given, though. The girl shifts her hands to her sides, her guns shifting from their resting positions to aim more forward. From between the four turrets, the central superstructure swings out a launch gantry as well, with a small floatplane sitting on it. Kongou glances over her shoulder, "We're <Counting On You~!>"

    The tiny fairy inside responds with a thumbs-up, then hurtles down the gantry and arcs up into the sky. That will be three recon planes in the air once Kuma releases hers, more than enough for the fleet's recon needs.

    "Flagship~," Kongou glances over her shoulder, eyes open, "Already I'm seeing one of the Princesses here. Near the city, facing the sea. An enemy aircraft carrier is further out to sea." Eyes closing, she asks, "Do they mean to protect it~? How unusual for them, yes?"

Nozomi Houken (342) has posed:
    It seems like more and more often, Nozomi finds herself heading out to an unknown battlefield to help people she's never met. When she thinks about it, she can't quite figure out why. It's terrifying. Transforming is terrifying too. She often gets hurt, and every time she comes back with Taiga damaged, her boss's boss seems to get even more irritable than the last time. Even right after she became Taiga's user, she wouldn't have found herself willingly charging into danger again and again. So why is she here, on a low-flying Union dropship skirting in close to the waves to keep safe from anti-air fire?

    "Nozomi. I will not be combat-effective on my own in the ocean. You are aware of what this means, right?"

    She's not sure. "...yeah."

    And yet, here she is.

    "Disengaging Independent Mode. Rerouting Gensou Engine power to motive and combat systems. Rampart Mode engaged."

    Moments later, a black-armored girl drops out of the side of the dropship, falling until she's just a meter or two above the water before her suit's thrusters kick on and send her over the water at high speed.

Zwei (596) has posed:
    The air battle seems like it'll be going on for a while, judging simply by the volume and intensity of the misty, muffled sounds of weapons fire, explosions, and atmospheric maneuvering. Debris falling from above traces tiny trails of fire through the sky, setting out a miniature comet shower above, though it all either burns up completely, or else lands so scattered that none of it is a real danger to anyone within the combat zone. The ship the air forces belong to seems uninterested in the fact it is going to lose all of them. In fact, it seems uninterested in the people who show up; solely fixated on making landfall, deploying ground troops, and repairing its FTL drive. Everything else to that end is disposable. Enemies that aren't attacking are insignificant. There are no crew to become paranoid and no captain needed to enforce discipline. Only cold, unfeeling AI.

    It isn't until Maaka breaches the hangar that the ship sees fit to respond. The first sign of hostile action causes it to divert reactor power from nano-repair to combat systems. The water suddenly pulses with a singular, rolling wave as the shields establish themselves, barely visible to begin with, before fading swiftly from view. The weapon systems begin to warm up, visible as rivulets of golden light streaming across the outer hull, tracing patterns vaguely reminiscent of a circuit board, before collecting at specific points along the sides. It isn't long before the entire craft is lit up, sending a palpable spike of electrostatic energy into the air, like the calm before a thunderstorm.

    Darwin is directly in the way, and so it opens fire on her first. Light streaks along the sloped halo of metal that surrounds the craft's bow, congealing into two points, and then letting loose a cross shaped flash that kicks water up into a surging halfpipe around it; sending a pair of bolts of pure, white light flying towards her, and then impacting into the water precisely to either side of her; detonating into towering clouds of steam, cratering the ocean around them, and catching her between both blast waves. Wo is next, as a similar event takes place on the ship's starboard side, launching a single blasts for her position with equal force. Arthur is in and out too quickly for the point defense guns to bother with him just yet, but the recon planes and drones sent out by Nagato, Kongou and Rory are targets that an AI knows should be dealt with. Faint trails of steam issue forth through the air towards each of them in turn, marking the passage of an invisible, high intensity series of laser beams aimed to pick them out of the air. The Fleet Daughters are responded to after the ship determines the direction the planes were launched from, as the port side charges up and releases a short salvo of three raiser bolts, aimed in a precise triangle around their formation.

    Finally, Nozomi and Kotone enter the range where their enemy can't fire its main batteries. Light collects at a multitude of smaller points studded around the big guns, and then unleashes in the form of a rapid string of smaller projectiles; scything through the air to follow after them with unerring accuracy. The point defense bolts are set to a kinetic rather than explosive charge, essentially functioning as high speed bullets of theoretically infinite hardness. Maaka is aboard already by the time things get hot, and so she is spared any significant counterattack. She wanders into the only spacious part of the ship; taking the form of a central hangar that is mostly filled with racks of robotic appendages holding the densely packed forms of smaller machines, folded into configurations that make them recognizeable as little more than lumps of vaguely organic looking metal. Approximately half the hangar is empty by now, which means that it must have been stacked floor to ceiling before. The only ways in and out are hexagonal tracks embedded into the walls like a beehive, which seem only just large enough for a human to crawl through at most.

Shigure has posed:
    Kuma looks over her shoulder to Nagato, "Aye aye, kuma!" Instead of a launch rail, she just grabs a Floatplane from her rigging, holds it up and HURLS it like a major league pitcher. "Type 0! GO, kuma!" The poor Fairy in the pilot seat holds on for dear life at the acceleration, before taking the stick and pulling to the side, taking the wider arc as Nagato ordered. "Multiple contacts on radar, kuma~." her breath catches a moment. "It's huge, kuma!" she relays, as her scout plane makes a pass by the corvette.

    As it passes over and makes to return, the Fairy spots black, white and red dots on the ocean surface, making Kuma's eyes go wide. "ABYSSALS!"

    The sudden change in the craft's posture causes the Cruiser to bristle. "You shot down my Reimetei! NOW YOU'LL PAY, KUMA!" she roars, the single turret on her superstructure swiveling into position, before unleashing a rapid series of shells. They're underwhelming, 14cm and fired wildly from maximum range, so even a target that big will likely have a few fall short or overshoot. She then swerves hard to port as the Corvette opens fire, getting singed by the near-miss. "Taking evasive action, kuma!" she calls, then starts weaving to throw off the Corvette's targetting. "I'm closing to torpedo range, kuma!"

Alexis Maaka (571) has posed:
    Alexis picks up a SHITTON of augmented reality tech as Rory's network hooks up with her. Given smartlink tech on her coilgun, this might be useful as she consults data analysis provided by the tacnet on friend or foe when she manages to make her way inside. Lucky for her, she's spared the counterattack as she sneaks her way inside the ship, and she climbs out to solid footing.

    Her pack folds back into place, and she unslings her coilgun after flushing out water from the sheath covering it and removing the outer covering. A soft, electronic whine hums as Alexis activates the weapon, and she shoulders it as she begins her way deeper into the hangar. "Lotta unactivated drones here, best to not set them off." She muses to herself, approaching a small hole and crouching. She slings her rifle, and then begins to army-crawl into the opening itself.

Wo has posed:
    A few moments of radio contact is all that's required to further confirm matters, not that the carrier is physically seen to be talking to anyone. Darwin, practically a floating fortress in her own right - even at her current scale, has taken up a defensive position. Other units, presumably other defenders, are also arriving. There's no further need to hold back, then. Standing stoically a few inches over the waves, the Wo-class keeps one hand on her rough-hewn staff, while extending the grasp of the other, apparently making some kind of silent command to some presently unseen force. It makes its identity known shortly after, the toothy maw of her hat gaping as the throaty wine of turbines spinning up growls from somewhere within. Some manner of aircraft fly out, four in number and each loaded with a single torpedo fixed beneath. Their size balloons the further they fly just above the ocean's surface, until they are four meters across. The tongue affixed behind their jaw flexes as they emit a buzzing, presumably some rudimentary communication.

    The planes are coming in low, and making no secret of their target - the alien dreadnought, itself. They present a small target profile, and their low flight path further complicates things, but if nothing else it is predictable. Their mothership continues watching impassively, not the one to get hot-blooded over even this travesty. That is, until something catches the glowing 'eye' atop one of the jets, causing its buzzing to raise an octave, which is immediately relayed back to Wo. 'They came after all.' Not only that, but there's more than one, now. The normally passive expression on her face moves into a somewhat pained scowl. The one calling herself 'Kongou' now is also among them, which is somehow the final insult, and a reminder of her own failures. If she were less in control of her faculties, she might not be able to restrain herself from making this a three-way engagement.

    However, at least for today, Samar had made clear their intentions that they would be cooperating on this sortie. Personal anger aside, there was something far more threatening to their peace than those traitors today. This is made even more clear as the presumed enemy vessel appears to 'warm up', and begins attacking the positions of others closeby. Evasive maneuvers, all but bellowed out by some mental captain, is clear as a beam attack charges up and is aimed at her position. She's thankfully pretty agile, for a carrier, but the nature of the attack still catches her off guard: The force is still enough to graze her side, and the sudden energy kicked into the water practically makes it an explosive, roiling her around and coming close to knocking her off-balance. The planes she had launched earlier aren't left alone, either. One getting vaporized somewhat by chance, but the other three remain intact, dropping their sleek, black payload into the water before executing an abrupt climb.

    It's all that Wo can do to remain on her feet, propping herself on her staff, but she's still not sunk - or thankfully particularly damaged, aside from one of her hat's precious tentacles getting reduced to a stump, now leaking what looks like half-congealed oil for 'blood'. Its mouth soundlessly howls in pain, and the grimace on her own face is hard to gauge whether she's sharing in it, or if her pride is just what is wounded.

Nozomi Houken (342) has posed:
    As planes establish an uplink with the TIGER, it displays the information in a holographic HUD before the girl's eyes; the info they can offer is rudimentary at best, but any enhancement to her battlefield awareness is better than none. It at least gives her several perspectives on the ship's weaponry as it fires, and a better idea of how to see it coming and how the projectiles move. The first shot from the point-defense weaponry grazes the TIGER's shoulder, but Nozomi banks hard enough to evade a direct hit, and then begins weaving a pattern that leaves her much more difficult to get a bead on in general.

    But even if she /is/ closing to melee range where she's most effective, that doesn't mean she /has/ to be in melee range to start attacking. With the EM Zanbatou shifted to her left hand, the armored girl lifts her right gauntlet up, closed fist pointed forward, and begins firing shots of her own at the ship. Hers, unlike those of the enemy, are a blend of bog-standard Multiversal particle shot weaponry, energized and bolstered by the magical engine that runs the suit. A mix of scientific and magical attack in one yellow shot the size of a baseball, and she can fire them off fairly quickly.

Samar (494) has posed:
    Well, if Darwin had any question of how willing this ship was to /not/ barrel right through her, that's confirmed to be a nearly nonexistant value.

    Even without Darwin's order, the Escort Fortress moves into position as the alien ship opens fire. While relatively small, their abilities are set up in such a way as to help mitigate the damage to the Princess they guard, and since Darwin herself is so terribly immobile, there will be a great deal of protecting they'll be tasked with. The type of weaponry the enemy ship uses is unfamiliar to the Abyssals, but the tactics are similar, and so two orbs of the Escort Fortress flank Darwin on either side and cast out brief, yet strong barriers. The blast waves flare out and crash against the shields formed by the Fortress, and while the shields flicker out shortly after, that's at least not damage Darwin has to endure.

    This leaves the Seaport Princess free to act. The Fleet Daughters don't go unnoticed, but as Samar ordered, they were to be treated as a lower priority this time. Darwin is probably the most willing of any of the Capital Ships to obey such an order, and with that in mind, her firepower can be entirely focused on the alien vessel charging in toward the city. Her unchanging expression remains fixed on the ship, and the attacks she sends volleying out toward it are twofold: first the cannons to her side begin blasting out their artillery in one volley after another aimed to smash into the front of the ship to one side, and despite their size, the explosion they create on impact is enough to match that of an actual ship's blast; and at the same time, the Escort Fortress segment that did not move to guard her opens its maw and blasts a spiraling crimson beam for the same spot. A beam of remarkably powerful energy, all of an Abyssal's hatred, pain, and sorrow condensed into a blazing cannon of destructive power.

    Perhaps her efforts are not as devastating as they could be if she were larger, but Darwin's goal isn't direct obliteration right now. Instead, she's focusing on using her raw power to redirect the ship's course to the side to get it to veer away from the floating city and buy some time for it to be properly sunk.

Arthur Lowell has posed:
    ARTHUR LOWELL backs off, and then, abruptly, he realizes those info drones are getting focused on! The boy decides to leap into action and draw attention, hoping to become a bigger threat. He's suddenly coming to a realization. "SHIT." He declares. "I know what this is! I'VE TRAINED FOR THIS!" Pulling out of his retreat and floating now, just in front of the bow, his eyes go wide. "RORY." He calls. "KEEP THAT OVERHEAD VIEW!" Sunglasses go on from his Sylladex, letting him see an overhead view of himself. "I'll keep the HEAT OFF!"

    He whips out his BATTLE BROOM from his Strife Deck, the metallic thing suddenly whipping around his hands, before he puts it under him, mounting it like a flying broomstick. And then the rocket-thrusters at the bottom rush into action. The others can take the main hull damage: Arthur intends to attack the carbon structures responsible for regulating all those photonic blasts. He puts his thrusters onto a slow burn that lets him strafe from side to side, back and forth, intending to begin a path that goes all along the length of this craft! And, oddly, he... Inserts a single boondollar into his broom, at a slot along its length.

MISSION
 !!! START !!!

    With a shounen SHOUT, he begins emitting a vast gush of brilliant, magical celestial bolts of power out of his body in a constant stream, a spray meant to slam into the surface of the craft and detonate weapons as he finds them. "HELL YES, I KNEW THIS SHIT WOULD COME IN HANDY! Time to ROCK AND SCROLL you giant HUNK OF JUNK, let's DO THIS FUCKING THING!" Yes, it is clear by now: A combination of Rory White's overhead data interface and Arthur Lowell's history playing videogames has come together perfectly. Arthur is attempting to begin a SHMUP Run along the length of the ship, busting up or damaging weapons of all sizes where he can. Not much damage to the hull, obviously, but...

Nagato has posed:
    The notice of steam coming directly for herself and Kuma, as Kongou was a bit far from fleet, has Nagato's eyes squinting until that laser beam makes itself known around the cruiser and battleship. The water splashes up violently around, causing Nagato's arm to move up and protect her face, her superstructure hit from the beam with a glancing hit, a black singed mark on the turret gantry. She gives out silent orders through her radio, making pointed directions that seem to make no sense until she skates off towards the west, the twin turret fourty one centimeter guns are leveled towards the black 'ship' in view.

    Nagato's eyes Wo and Darwin but seeing as they aren't advancing towards her or the other Daughters, she looks out cautious. "Why are they here and what are they protecting..." she questions to herself, speeding up her skating to get closer to the black ship that is disrupting the waters. With a pointed nod, she gives the order, "Fire when ready!" as she finishes her maneuver, the turrets all finished with aiming and, with a loud 'bang', all four guns fire out Type 3 shells at the ship.

    The fact Wo and Darwin are here and /not/ attacking them sends a red flag towards the Fleet Admiral and, with an open communications line... "Abyssal Fleet, respond. What brings you to these waters and this ship and what is your purpose?"

Kotone Yamakawa has posed:
Kotone Yamakawa is able to avoid getting her hide shot off as zhe arrives with a good number of the syundicate sorts thankfully she does have some firepower but she's more of well a support type she can't help but be cowed a bit at the technological terror that is before her. She kinda looks at it as the tatical feed from rory boots up and she rapidly starts taking in all the data. She's going to make a go for the hanger she pulls back on her bike pulling off and sending it away as she goes to get as close as she can before she leaps with inhuman power and speed.

She lands with a bit less grace than she'd like but she gets through the breach that Alexis made. She takes a moment to get up ready her weapons and checks out the drones, she's tempted to try to jack one but gets the idea it would likely be out of her league to do so so sje's moving to follow up after Masska and yes is on her belly crawling after her.

Rory White (673) has posed:
    Unfortunately for Rory, her drones are none too resilient. The little Saucers weren't designed for warzones! Two of her half-dozen Saucer drones are taken down. Their hulls are melted clean through and drive units disabled. The Saucers, half-melted, wobble and plummet.

    Chunks of the Tactical network go dark in a hurry.

    Up in the Cognizant Odyssey, Rory stews in Infospace and queues up four more saucers to be Fabricated. Not that they'll be ready until tomorrow...

    "These things are too flimsy. I need new models. Armor. And some kind of armor!"

    Thankfully the underwater drones have gone unmolested, and the floating drones are now beelining for the big flagship. They fire their own high-intensity lasers back at the emitters that fried the Saucers! ... So that's what those little holes are.

Kongou (637) has posed:
    In the air, the tiny floatplane dips its wings in an effort to evade, narrowly dodging the first of the point defense cannons. It immediately ducks in the opposite direction, clearing a second. The third shears off one of the wing pontoons, hurling the aircraft into a spin, and a fourth beam slices the tail off completely. Trailing smoke, Kongou's recon plane spirals down into the water. A couple dozen meters up, a tiny parachute pops open, the fairy pilot dangling from it.

    The incoming beams do not seem to be intent on direct hits, but through pressure waves created by near-misses. Or perhaps it still thinks it's in space fighting large spacecraft? Kongou doesn't know, and she certainly doesn't have the expertise to work it out in her head. What she does do is throw her arm up defensively when things explode around her, threatening her integrity. However, it will take more than rough seas to sink the indomitable Kongou!

    With Kuma advancing forward and Nagato turning west, Kongou banks eastward. Fighting a massive seagoing warship with this equipment... Nope! Mid-skate, Kongou's body becomes surrounded by a silvery white glow, a sphere of light that expands rapidly until, as it reaches its maximum size, the sleek gray hull of a fully sized battleship erupts from the side in the same direction Kongou had been traveling in. Coming out at a slight upward angle, the vessel crashes down into the waves with a splash, then bobs up to the normal waterline. Already, the four main gun turrets are rotating towards the black starship. However, the transverse is quite slow, and so Kongou opens up at first with her 15.5cm secondary batteries amidships, bursts of smoke and flame hurling medium weight armor-piercing shells towards that pitch black hull.

    She'll pick up her fairy later.

Zwei (596) has posed:
    A corvette it may be, but only in terms of tonnage. Despite weighing roughly the same as one from earth, the ship is far larger than anything of that class, meaning that a couple of Kuma's shells at least manage to hit. They detonate prematurely a few meters away from the craft, exploding in mid-air in such a way that half the fireball stops flat against an invisible surface. The air ripples ever so faintly at each impact, indicating the continued presence of shielding. It's far less flashy than the energy barriers of most worlds, being so efficient that almost no waste energy escapes it in the form of a glow or sound. The trio of torpedoes launched by Wo's aircraft encounter much the same underwater, encompassing a complete, elongated sphere around the entire ship; the water rippling for the brief instant the barrier is made solid. Nozomi's gunfire spatters over the ship's side, which causes the shield to flicker even from the opposite angle, meaning that it is a single, unified field rather than sectioned off into partitions. Darwin's considerable firepower should normally be enough to halt a ship with such little propulsion in its tracks, but apparently no recoil is felt through the shield either. Arthur joins in the steadily escalating attack effort on the corvette, and the sheer volume of his shots turn the shield into a steady, constant presence, rather than a momentary flicker. While established like this, it becomes more apparent that the continued weapons fire makes the shield more noticeable with each impact, going from nearly completely invisible, to something like a pane of glass. It's obvious that they must be doing damage to it, but it's impossible to tell at what point it will actually collapse. One can see it shivering faintly as Nagato's shells make their mark, distinct from the normal haze of superheated air that washes off explosions of that magnitude.

    Of course, the corvette isn't just going to sit there and tank fire. The fact that it responds at all is an indication that its AI has already determined it won't reach the port if all of its targets continue to fire on it the entire time. The golden glow tracing along its outer hull intensifies as it diverts all power from engines to weapons, coming to a complete halt in the water; opting for the strategy of eliminating all enemies before proceeding. The Fleet Daughters are still out at such a distance that it can fire its big batteries, and so it takes its chance before they close in too far; letting loose a thundering series of cannon shots that carve trails into the ocean as the heat of the bolt's passing flash vapourizes the water beneath it. A steady hail of raiser bolts rains down on Nagato, Kuma and Kongou, some aimed as a screen in front of them to prevent further advancement, and the rest aimed directly at them; the latter of which are configured directly for thermal release, which makes them explode as an omnidirectional wave of radiation that obliterates huge chunks of the ocean's surface as the water undergoes nuclear fusion at the point of impact. Wo and Darwin are spared for a few brief moments as the batteries pool their energy together to charge joint attacks, and then release blinding beams of colourless energy that rip through the air almost too fast to see; hitting both of them with a precision application of jacketed antimatter particles with enough firepower to blow a straight line through most of a small city.

    The point defense fire intensifies on Nozomi as a number of extra guns 'swivel' to track her, angling their discharge in a series of carefully calculated overlapping streams designed to cut off her avenues of movement while a single gun aims for her center of mass. Arthur setting off his SHMUP mode has made him a giant, flying, priority target, and so he too becomes the focus of over a dozen guns, filling the air around him with an overwhelming flood of glowing projectiles, aimed to screen him off in steadily closing curtains of fire. Oddly enough, Rory's underwater drones continue to go unnoticed, even

Zwei (596) has posed:
    as they return fire. The shield blocks them out, but it seems the guns on the ship's underside must have been smashed when it fell from orbit. It makes sense, seeing as its shield must have been down at the time if Zwei managed to blow out its engine.

    Alexis and Kotone are allowed to proceed through the hangar until they begin climbing up into one of the carrier chutes, at which point a drones is suddenly released from the ceiling, slamming against the floor with a reverberting clang. Taking the shape of a flat-bodied, six legged design the size of a large dog, it leaps into the passage behind them and reorients itself so that each of its six swivel-mounted limbs are anchored to the hexagonal surface around it. It then skitters straight after them at high speed, blocking off their way back, and promptly filling the corridor with a hail of magnetically propelled tungsten slivers, obviously meant as anti personnel rounds that won't damage the ship's inner hull.

    When Kongou finally makes her full sized appearance, a significant portion of the corvette's fire diverts from the other Fleet Daughters and the members of the Abyssal Navy; pausing for an instant as the ship scans her and reacquires target lock, and then immediately lighting up again as the entire port side focuses on her alone, pouring a torrent of heavy firepower into her flank even as it recieves a continuous barrage in turn.

Shigure has posed:
    Kuma is dancing across the water. She can't take the hits her larger fleetmates can, but she makes up for it in agility... the sheer weight of fire is tearing parts from her superstructure though, leaving black scorches along her arms and legs as she pushes closer, trying to get inside the 'Deadzone' of those cannons. Once past that point, she grins ferally, the ankle racks swiveling into position. "Don't underestimate me, kuma! Launching torpedoes, kuma!" a quartet of Long Lances drop from the racks into the water, turning into trajectories to stagger strike into a single point on that shield. Kuma follows them in, stance low, legs set wide so her cannon can fire freely. Instead of impact explosives, these new shells are more heavily reinforced, to penetrate armour before detonating, maybe they'll have a better effect than her previous salvo!

Alexis Maaka (571) has posed:
    Alexis notices something following her, someone as well, and she looks back not only finding Kotone but also...

    "Shit. GET A MOVE ON!" She calls after Kotone before she accelerates her crawling, trying to avoid getting herself shredded by tungsten rounds as she looks for a way through. Eventually she stops, dropping an unprimed EMP charge for Kotone to catch. "Pull the pin and drop it. Do /not/ stop crawling, understood?"

    Then she hauls ass until she can find an opening to pop out of.

Wo has posed:
    The Fleet Daughters' Admiral is concerned with this turn of events? Try being on the other side of it. As water continues to wash around her, before finally settling down from the last salvo, the Wo-class carrier regains her sea footing. The sizzling tingle of foreign radio waves attempting to invade her conscious thoughts is an unwelcome distraction, but eventually they receive their answer: If a bit garbled and staticy, reluctant as she is to entertain them. "..disturbing..our peaceful, sea.. ..sink..the enemy." Well, hopefully they didn't expect the most intelligible or articulate of answers, seeing as this abyssal is currently in something of a battle trance. She was assaulted, directly! Even if she were in the mood for making small talk with the nominal enemy, now isn't a good time for it. Regardless of the circumstances, it seems at least as far as she is concerned, they are by chance on the same side, for now.

    Tuning back out any further electronic advances, she refocuses herself, maneuvering closer as the large vessel continues its course mostly unswayed despite all the firepower being leveraged at it. There's even a - is it still valid to call a flying person a surface-dweller? - human seeming to use what Wo now knows is 'magic' to attack from a closer range. Through a more personal link, she directs her thoughts toward Darwin, an inner voice calling out to her; "Moving..closer.. Are you - intending..remain there?" The part unspoken is, 'even if it continues on its collision course.' They're doing this because it's an unwelcome invader in their waters, right? So that surface dweller city on the coast better not think it's because they like them, or anything.

    Regardless of that, her closing in will shorten the time it takes to launch her planes, and hopefully will prevent more of those gigantic beams from being trained her way. Smaller bore guns, she's better equipped to deal with, even if they are alien lasers. Unfortunately for her, the artificial intelligence on board this craft apparently has similar ideas, and directs a more pinpoint assault her way as she moves on a flanking approach. Her poor hat once again takes the worst of the abuse as she ducks under it while still somehow remaining on her feet, vaporizing a good third of its bulbous body, and causing it to gurgle that same blackened oil again, now spilling down Wo's deadly serious face and staining the white parts of her suit. She comes out of the cloud of smoke the briefly burning fluid produces, apparently a bit off balance from the damage, but still able to fire with the remaining battery on the less damaged side of her hat. Less of a bullet, and more of a set of twin, crimson beams not unlike the one Darwin had fired earlier, if of an obviously lesser caliber.

    Her planes also return, entering the mouth of the heavily damaged mouth, and somehow diffusing back into it. She's uncertain if she can launch any others in this state, with her 'flight deck' in such a condition. It looks like she'll have to continue her support fire, instead, while whatever passes for equipment fairies to an abyssal work on getting launches going again. Her maneuvers seem to be taking her to the rear of the ship, which conventionally is more lightly defended, and just maybe she can do enough here to not allow it any more artificial thoughts about moving, ever again.

Nozomi Houken (342) has posed:
    The AI in control of the ship is smart. Attempting to pin the armored girl into taking a direct hit is a sound tactical decision. But at the moment, she's running on the combination of an AI that can make similarly smart tactical choices, and a human mind that can introduce creativity and surprise into the mix. The AI quickly realizes what's being done, and the user decides that if she has a choice between being pinned into a direct hit or accepting lesser damage, she'll take the one less likely to put her out of the battle.

    And so Nozomi banks, turning herself sidelong so that the shot from the point defense system goes across her left side, just above her hip skirting, something that draws a quiet hiss of pain but allows her to slip the net and continue fighting. A couple more gauntlet shots are fired, but by now she's close enough in that it's time to shift gears. Both hands take hold of her weapon's grip, and she brings it around, turns to one side, and kicks the thrusters on the EM Zanbatou's hilt into full power; the blade is swung with incredible force, bringing its full magically-enhanced might to bear against the shield protecting the hostile ship - and hopefully the hull beneath.

Kongou (637) has posed:
    Well! Kongou expected to become the center of attention when she made herself into a bigger target. The enemy ship's crew must clearly recognize the might of a Battleship to prioritize her as a main target. This takes the pressure off the rest of her fleet and allows them to work with much less gunfire headed their way!

    The price however is that now Kongou's port side is the literal Broad Side of a Barn and every gun on the starship is aimed at it. Beam fire slams into the armored belt and hull, dents and, in places, pierces the superstructure, and outright bores a hole through her smokestack. However, the much heavier armor on the faces of her main battery turrets causes the beams to refract off, scoring the metal but not penetrating the protective housings surrounding eight 35.6 centimeter guns.

    "All guns, <FIYAH~!>"

    So the 15.5cm shells didn't penetrate? With her main battery rotated into position, Kongou tries a different tactic. A rapid-fire staccato of explosive charges rolls up from the stern of the warship to the bow, each one hurling a one ton, red-painted armor piercing shell 14 inches across.

    "Try this~!"

Arthur Lowell has posed:
    Arthur draws fire! He can't manage to kill any of those other guns until he busts that shield, but it's working for now! Of course, this has drawn the attention of the other guns on the ship. As he continues to fire, slowing his movement down its length, he swings very low, getting right up next to the ship's shield surface, screaming his lungs out as he continues to try to pierce it. Of course, the ship doesn't simply leave him alone or ignore him. He's battered by a stream of lasers that, while he's doing his best to dodge around, fill the air with such a volume that the kinetic point-defense is making wide webs of bruises all along his body with vicious, wet smacks.

    Then, an abrupt thought. Clearly, this thing is affected by gravity. The shield doesn't defend against that! Rory says it's defending against kinetic and particle weapons, so... Arthur swaps out his "ammo" type! It's at this point where a hypothetical player would swap to a different button on the cabinet. Arthur Lowell changes up his fusion energy bullets for GRAVITY PULSE BULLETS, firing enchanted masses of pure gravitational force. Unfortunately, there's NO way that something this large and resilient will suffer any substantial hull damage from this sort of packaged graviton projectile. But he could hopefully pierce the shield ahead of time, and disrupt the weapons properly! Because holy shit, he really needs to get some of the heat taken off him FAST, and the others are likely gonna need some help with those raisers, so he's going to try to ease the DPS on him first, then punch the raiser weapons he can get on Rory's overhead view with streams of more gravity.

Nagato has posed:
    Nagato tchs a bit at the response. "Understood. Do your best." she replies, "Only because we have a common enemy." A shake of her head and another salvo is fired towards the large ship. She mutters something under her breath and nods, "This is Fleet Admiral Nagato, I'm entering close to the enemy ship, preparing for broadside attack." with this statement, the Admiralship skates in closer, pouring on what (little) speed she has to get into close quarters with the enemy ship. That is, if she can pass through whatever is blocking the shots at least.

    Attempting to try and peirce the shield with her own body, she readies her guns once more, focusing the spread to a singular point in the armor, and with another resounding bang, she lets loose another salvo from her eight turrets, the bullets converging in on a singular spot of that ship's armor in a hope to peirce whatever is blocking it and to let her through if attempts at ramming herself into it fail.

Rory White (673) has posed:
    Noticing that her drones aren't being fired on from below, Rory orders the surface ones to submerge. They do this crudely, sucking in some water to tanks as ballast, but they're not able to go more than 10 feet down and this slows them dramatically. Because they were NOT designed to be hydrodynamic.

    The lasers were also not designed for underwater fire, and they suffer considerable diffusion... but the machines are powering forward on ionic drives and heading for whatever holes they can find!

Kotone Yamakawa has posed:
So the pair of cyborgs are able to make some progress though the hanger so far until they get to the chutes that's when something notices them or so she thinks. She tries to not gape at the drone oh this is going to be bad but Maaka's got an idea s she starts picking up speed she takes the emp charge and she nods. She keeps crawling as she goes and she's going to drop it at the time that her friend incidated and does not /stop/ she knows wht a high powered EMP might do to /her/.

Samar (494) has posed:
    The raw firepower from Darwin doesn't seem quite as effective as it should be, thanks to that frustrating barrier. The Seaport Princess keeps up her attack, but her serious frown is leveled to the battlefield around her, watching for any options she may have to deal with the situation in another way. And it seems that teaming up just might be the way to do it.

    "Go," is all Darwin says, and the two segments of the Escort Fortress that aren't directly attacking obey. In exchange for defense, Darwin sends them flying off to the offense, sending the mouth-filled orbs hovering near Nagato as the Admiral makes her attempts through ramming and firepower. Their mouths open in turn, ichor dripping from between their teeth...but it's fortunately not the battleship admiral they're aiming for this time. When a blazing beam fires out of each mouth, it's aimed for the exact same point Nagato's aiming for, focusing a constant stream at that location to help break through the shield in a concerted effort.

    And what of Darwin herself? The Seaport Princess continues firing from where she is with the aid of the third Escort Fortress, blasting at the offending ship with artillery and energy alike. The giant maw at her side even comes to her aid: its jagged entrance widens, and the depths of its throat glow with that same crimson light. As power gathers in its mouth, it begins to rattle and shake on its mounts, dripping black ichor between its teeth and seeping steam from its throat until, at last, a beam even larger and stronger than the one the Escort Fortress fired blasts out from it to crash into the vessel's shield as well! All firepower is sent out; nothing will be spared against this enemy.

Zwei (596) has posed:
    The sea thunders around Kuma as colossal explosions hound her every step of the way, heaving titanic waves up from the surface one after the other, making for sudden hills and deep valleys as she glides over the water. Just when it seems as if she's about to run out of room to maneuver, the main guns cease their barrage, and switch over to the point defense raisers; suddenly turning the space around her into a whizzing hailstorm of hard-light rounds of such volume that they are nearly impossible to avoid. At this range however, it's also impossible for her cannons, and her torpedos to miss, causing the shield to sudder and the water to bulge and burst from their explosive impacts. Wo's beams leave faint ripples across the semi-visible barrier as they rake across it, earning her another salvo of fire from the main batteries, but by the time the particle beams recharge, she's already out of their firing arc. The rear of the ship would also normally be well saturated with CWIS equivalent guns, but the hit it took to its thrusters seems to have blown them away completely, judging by the cracked and scorched nature of the metal and the gaping holes that have only just recently been fabricated over.

    Kongou bringing the best of her firepower to bear on the enemy ship seems to be having its effect. Though she takes what she dishes out, her full broadside causes the shield to crackle with tiny flickers of electromagnetic distortion, destabilizing more with each massive shell that rams into it. The AP shells are indeed more effective, as the barrier has to absorb the full kinetic energy of the shell rather than a fraction of the explosion of HE loads. Arthur's idea is also sound, in that the shield is currently acting on the electromagnetism force, rather than the gravitational one. The first salvo of graviton bullets slide through with minimal effort, cratering the hull where they strike. The armour is so thick that they don't do significant damage to anything underneath, but the faceless 'ports' for each gun are a different story, where the fragile rydberg-kerr lensing apparatus is crushed instantly, silencing their fire. After a dozen or so guns have been taken out this way however, the shield pulses again as it engages a second mode used for fighting a specific world-native race that loves to use gravitational weaponry. The energy drain of maintaining two shields however, detracts some from the weapons.

    Once the combined attack from Nagato and Darwin lands, the shield finally buckles and fails entirely; kicking up an enormous wave as the containment field collapses and lets loose the barrier's energy in all directions. Nozomi's sword slams straight into the hull, and carves through several meters of armour; layered on preposterously thick for the warship's size, owing to its incredibly light weight, and lack of need for crew space; and opens a small breach into which water begins to flood. Rory's drones are now free to climb into the hangar, where they will easily fit through all but the smallest of the lifts. This means they escape the ship's retribution for losing its shield, as the moment the barrier is down, formerly invisible ports open up along its top surfaces in lengthy rows, and immediately daisy chain a launch of seemingly innumerable miniature missiles; filling the air with the deafening screech of hundreds upon hundreds of thrusters going off at once. The swarm corkscrews in on itself as the AI remotely and individually guides each missile towards every target it can see, where their micro warheads will detonate with pinpoint bursts of nuclear incineration that travel in narrow cones rather than a sphere, so as to focus the blast away from the ship.

    It's likely that Alexis and Kotone will have to suffer a couple of hits in the moment before the EMP goes off, but though the slivers are exceptionally good at penetrating armour, they can't really hit any vital areas at that angle, and don't have too much stopping power on their own, since they're designed not to breach the walls. The charge

Zwei (596) has posed:
    goes off right under the drone, immediately disengaging the electromagnets powering its weapons, and the ones anchoring its feet to the walls, sending it sliding back out and crashing to the ground outside, rendered completely useless. A minute later, the two emerge into a chamber just barely large enough to stand in, where a nexus of tunnels link up, and the sounds of electric whining and churning can be heard elsewhere. Several racks of unidentifiable canisters in varying sizes and shapes appears to have been placed here; possibly an ammo elevator meant to resupply the drones in the hangar after a sortie.

Alexis Maaka (571) has posed:
    As Alexis continues her climb up the chute, she feels some rounds penetrate through her armor. There's the telltale stinging feeling, but luckily her vitals aren't hit. She works through the pain, urging Kotone along just in case the girl's been hit as well before they find themselves out of the passage. Popping her way out, she climbs into the chamber and drops a flare, reaching down to help Kotone out as well before she notes the ammo-carrier.

    "Hmm..." She produces two things; a repair kit should Kotone need it, and an exploside charge. The elder cyborg and commando approaches the ammo racks with a sly smile. "I got an idea." She says, placing the charge onto a shell. "If that thing manages to cycle all the way up into one of the guns, it should srew with the internals something fierce." She says, before placing more charges, one at a time every six rounds until she's out of them. There's no activation, not yet anyway, as Alexis motions to a detonator. "We're going to want to get the fuck out and fast, they're gonna daisy chain like crazy when we set these off." She points out, before she begins to look around for a path out.

Wo has posed:
    Whatever sinister forces are at work within an abyssal's equipment, they are feverishly at work restoring some semblance of order inside the Wo-class carrier's hat. It takes several precious moments, through which Wo has to dodge secondary harassment fire, with her hat billowing smoke from the damaged parts leaving a trail behind her. She, for the most part, succeeds in making it to the aft of the ship. While her guess was correct, it's not for the right reasons -- but she'll take the momentary ease of things to evade to concentrate more on getting back operational. The hat makes a coughing, gurgling sound, before belching more pitch out into the water, as well as perhaps even on the enemy vessel, itself. Ew. But this seems to have been it clearing things out, for soon after the whine from inside is of jets, again. Once they're out, they're obviously not in the same configuration as before, as they have no torpedoes or even bombs affixed. Instead, they have doubled up on their cannons. Fighters. It's the best she could muster out in this shape.

    When the shield finally falters, she begins readying to direct all that firepower of her remaining battery as well as her four jets at sinking the hulking behemoth in front of her. Instead, it has its own last gasp, as it begins practically spraying out missiles. This..this isn't what she or her squadron of planes needed, right now. In a moment, though, she diverts her planes from moving into defensive positions around her, and spots something else not so far away. Kuma, already inundated by incoming fire. Some protective instinct inside of her happens to stir at such a fight, and with a fanged grimace, she instead gestures her hand towards the air around the light cruiser. Is it a sneak attack at such a terrible time!? Instead, the jets only enter a protective formation around her, seemingly intent on taking any missiles coming in for her. Unfortunately, this also leaves Wo a bit open, and while she makes a good effort at dodging the missiles, she was already well-damaged, herself. A near miss knocks finally knocks her off her feet, leaving her bobbing in the water, and then coughing up more icky black gunk, this time from her more human mouth. As her cape pulls away, a bit of her lower torso has more or less been vaporized where it was. Welp..

    After a moment, she falls forward in the water, but still seems to be moving. And then she starts going under, though it's hard to tell whether under her own power or if she's sinking.

Shigure has posed:
    Kuma whoops as her torpedoes strike the shield, making it shudder. "How do you like that, kuma!" she crows... until she takes a chest full of Point Defense fire. This causes her to stumble backward, landing on her backside on the water with a large plume from the impact. The sudden shatter makes her skid backwards, tumbling end over end a bit before regaining 'traction' and skidding to a stop.

    The sudden thrumming and whine of jet engines gets Kuma's attention, as those mini missiles come screaming out. "The Barrier is down, but... KYAH!" she's caught by those missiles, explosions striking into her Outfit, scoring more black marks across her body and tearing at her uniform. One smoke stack loses its cap, the metal tumbling into the water, and another missile strikes the turret, mangling it and causing it to spew smoke. "It's launching Kamikaze!" She doesn't know what 'Missiles' are, after all. Luckily, she's spared much more impact by those abyssal fighters. She takes the opportunity, while the fire is being blocked, to move, pouring on speed to get around to the aft, just in time to see Wo sinking below the water. "Kuma! Hold on, kuma!" she cries, skating over to try and drag the Carrier back to the surface.

Nagato has posed:
    The combined fire from the Admiral-ship and those two Abyssal escorts, which visibly unnerves Nagato, makes that barrier go down, however the shockwave from dissipating that barrier and that wave not only gives the Admiral a good bath, but it knocks her aside, stumbling to get her 'footing' back into the water. "Nngh, Abyssal Princess, I appreciate your help." she comments only to have the missiles start peppering down towards her location, turning her back towards it to allow the missiles to strike into the armor. "I'll show you that my armor is not just for show!" Visibly, she's straining under the constant peppering until a break in it allows her to turn right around and sail into the area closer.

    Nagato looks at the two Escort drones near her, the Abyssal escorts.. She points and drags her finger along a line around the enemy ship in front of her, as if drawing an attack plan for the drones to follow, if they would even accept her command. With a whir of mechanics, the turrets shift into a line formation along the same line she drew out and with eight rapid bangs, each turret fires on the line. "FIRE!" She lets loose another salvo of shells towards that same line, trusting the two escorts to at least understand what she's doing.

Nozomi Houken (342) has posed:
    While the TIGER in Rampart Mode offers Nozomi some protection from environmental hazards, a point-blank micro nuclear blast is going to be far more than they can protect against. A holographic warning appears in the corner of her vision briefly, and she pushes away from the ship on instinct to get herself maneuvering room; for a second or two she simply fires gauntlet shots, trying to hit as many out of the air as she can. And then there's nothing to do but dodge and dive, avoiding and evading as best she can, swatting them out of the air with her blade; but there's only so much she can do, and one of them clips her just hard enough to go off, scorching her shoulder armor and searing the arm underneath. Once again, the expression of pain is made completely without voice.

    But an idea comes to her in the midst of all that. And then she darts right back up to the ship, digs her sword in, and begins cutting again - while flying as close to the surface of the ship as possible. Practically scraping herself against it. Ensuring that any missiles coming after her will be coming at the hull, too. The hull that she's carving open like a tin can.

Kotone Yamakawa has posed:
Kotone Yamakawa is going right after Alexis at this point she knows to not stop and she takes a hit and it's not so plent she had a nanovest on which keeps her form worse harm but shes' clearly taken damage here she's beleeding something red but her body is compenstating though as she keeps up with Alexis urging helps push her own as she looks to the repair kit and will take it, she moves to try and patch her self up quicly as she's able to do so.

"I get you and we can bring the whole house down if we're lucky."

She does not stop following Alexis now she's on the move again and her pistol's ready for what it's worth.

Kongou (637) has posed:
    Over the thunder of her guns and the beams striking her hull, scoring out chunks of metal and structure and filling her vision with the red haze of pain, Kongou's vision is suddenly distracted. The black aircraft carrier just collapsed. Trailing smoke from damaged sections of the superstructure, Kongou accellerates, turning sharply.

    Missiles draw the attention of Kongou's secondary and anti-air batteries, filling the sky with flak and explosions, pruning the cloud around Nozomi's own efforts. Within a few moments, the battered hull of Kongou slips between the alien warship and Kuma's efforts to recover the sinking carrier. The roar of her main battery sounds again, filling the sky with black smoke and flame and armor piercing warheads, while the secondary batteries contribute flak and machine gun fire. With every single weapon mounted to her hull going off all at once, Kongou lets out a cheerful war cry that bears just the subtlest hint of anger.
        "Burning LO~OVE~!"

Rory White (673) has posed:
    Into the hangar Rory's drones go! Hooray!

    And now that she's in there, her remote control begins getting a little laggy. Too much interference, and signal loss. One of the remaining Saucers is forced to reposition to act as a relay and fly closer to the monstrous ship!

    Regardless, now the drones are seeking out any kind of maintenance hatches or important things. A path to engineering or the reactor might work - if she can trigger a shutdown or rip out some useful part...

Wo has posed:
    As the water laps over her, the Wo-class' vision seems to dim, even as she's looking up at the sky distorted by surface ripples. Her mind flashes and replays some strange images, as has happened with less clarity the other times this had happened to her. Are these her 'memories'? Bubbles boil up around her, as she struggles to remember..but still cannot. The weight of what she's done and continues to do drags her down more assuredly than any physical anchor would. However, as she's about to drop out of reach, more ripples coming up to where she is. And then a hand. She's confused by the gesture, both through her muddled mind and the fact that it hadn't really happened before. But, instinctively, she's able to reach her own up toward it. No ship actively *wants* to sink, when there's an alternative.

    When she's hauled up, she's not quite dead weight for Kuma, but very close to it. She's practically on auto pilot by this point, not really having enough wits about her to question her own thoughts she'll have later about helping, and being helped, by one of the hated Fleet Daughters. Their enemies. For now, they are just fellow denizens of the sea. Something that, if Kuma isn't careful, earns her a half-conscious head pat from a gloved hand. "Wo," she mumbles weakly, able to get out her designator and assumed alias, but little more at this point. "..so you, were okay." Despite her near monotone, some amount of relief manages to come through. She strains her head to try and get a look at the crashed ship, now under such duress. Maybe it'd be good to clear out before they're noticed again!

Arthur Lowell has posed:
    Arthur manages to take a bit of the heat off of him, which means the kinetic point-defense weapons are still blazing but at least he's not needing to use a Bomb or anything. Because, you know, he doesn't /have/ one. But, the main shield disperses! Arthur wastes no time: He swaps immedately from GRAVITY BOLTS basck to STARFIRE BOLTS. Having raked a line of damage through the weapons, Arthur's freshly enthused to work on both the hull and the weapons! His less gimmicky celestial particle bursts spray out with renewed energy, the boy still SCREAMING!

    Oh shit, wait, the ENEMY has the Bombs! Missiles are now heading for him! Arthur suffers just enough INTENSE thermonuclear burns and battering up and down his body from the first rush of missiles that he is very, very keenly aware that he needs to not get hit by more if he doesn't want to /die/. Harshly altering his own personal spatial properties, he hard-stops in mid-air, allowing several more warheads to slam into his body alongside multiple point-defense raiser beams, but putting the remaining missiles all in front of him, and then emits a titanic cone of blasts intending to destroy the swarm that focuses on him all at once! Unfortunately, this leaves him bruised, blistered, and panting with exertion, clearly heavily damaged! However, Nagato and Kongou are striking hard at the hull now! And Arthur knows how this needs to finish.

    Ships like this always, ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS, have a big core with a lot of internal defenses. With the hull ideally coming apart shortly, Arthur rocket-rushes along its length again, trying to feel local space for the sensation of strange, massive reactors. As he does, he catches up with Nozomi Houken! Or Nozomibot as the case may be at the moment. "Oi! HEADS UP!" As she scrapes along the surface of the ship, he fires blasts of light at the missiles, trying to detonate them behind her, and take some of the heat off, as well as damage the hull in the meantime! He's primarily looking to blast more holes open though. With what he hopes will be holes and massive slices blown open by Nagato, Kongou, and Nozomi, Arthur intends to get inside an ideally wrecked-open interior, hopefully something he can maneuver inside!

    After all, how do all of these end? Attack the core, of course. This had flying escorts, right? Look, let's be honest: Arthur is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT sure that there's no way this isn't ending in the core loading up on a cool smaller ship for a boss form to fight, and he wants to get the jump on it from the inside.

Shigure has posed:
    Kuma nods a bit, her Adhoge has survived this entire ordeal... until that headpat, which makes the thing bob, weave... then finally collapse for the moment. "Kuma... You helped me... it's only right to return the favour, kuma." she replies softly, hauling the damaged Carrier up, and getting under one arm, skating slowly away with Wo under 'towing'. It's slow going, despite being about the same size, Wo's got more overall mass, that Kuma's having to overcome, especially with being nearly deadweight.

    For the moment, Kuma's making to evacuate the engagement zone, too damaged to continue fighting herself, and under strain from evacuating the carrier, she's out of the fight.

Samar (494) has posed:
    Finally, the shield is broken...and the ship immediately retaliates. With two of her escorts sent out to aid Nagato, Darwin is left nearly as a sitting duck. She lacks the speed to evade such a violent volley of missiles, and while the one escort that stayed with her immediately rushes in front and endures the brunt of the impacts with its own field, it has to falter eventually. Such powerful explosive force quickly eats through the remains of its barrier, crashing into its metal form and blowing it apart from within. Darwin cries out in fear and surprise, lifting her arms as a makeshift shield, but it's just not enough.

    Smoke, fire, debris, and water explode around her, obscuring her completely and muffling her pained scream. It's several moments until it fades, but when it does...Darwin is a struggling wreck. Clothes and body alike are scorched and blasted. Huge segments of her mechanical base are twisted, shattered, burning; anything more, and she's not going to be able to make it through this. Much like her ally. "-Wo!"

    It's possibly the loudest thing Darwin has said recently, tinged with fear for her precious carrier ally. But Kuma is helping her; strange, Darwin thinks, for a Fleet Daughter to protect an Abyssal. Still, there's not much more for the Seaport Princess to do there. Her efforts are best spent directing further attacks against the ship that still hasn't sunk.

    Anger crosses Darwin's features. She breathes heavily and hunches where she sits, but she's not going to just lie back and take this any more. The escorts with Nagato continue their blazing beams against the ship, and the mangled mouth beside Darwin opens up again. Still steaming and smoldering, it doesn't take long to charge up that swirling beam of negative energy again; a beam whose roiling scream is paired with the uncharacteristically enraged howl of Darwin herself.

Zwei (596) has posed:
    Kuma and Wo are spared an interruption in the form of gunfire by their position in the ship's damaged firing arc, the former to attempt to save the latter without incident. Kongou manages to thin out the small portion of the missile cloud going for them without incident, but she is still made to intercept a pair of them with her 'body' owing to the sheer number of targets to shoot down. On the other hand, she's already at a barely-repaired part of the corvette's hull, and so the next salvo of shells that sounds off from her smashes through the hastily made patch job like bowling balls through a window; ripping through the engine structure and exploding amidst the densely packed power conduits. Something inside violently explodes, blowing off a huge section of the jet cluster, issuing steam and plasma like smoke and fire. Nagato's shells are hitting intact armour, but Darwin's amped up beam weaponry is strong enough that her escorts carve massive, glowing gouges through the armour, easily enough for the shells to fly inwards. The blast waves and shrapnel shred the firing chambers of several of the main guns, causing the hull to bulge outward and then burst into streams of fire and fragments as the rydberg lasing apparatus fails.

    Coincidentally, Nozomi's sword draws a line straight outside of the chamber Alexis and Kotone are standing in, after which a volley of missiles fail to bank in time before sliding straight into it and detonating, blowing a wide hole through several meters of semi-metal until daylight streams into the dark interior, providing them with a most convenient exit. This also provides Arthur a death star style trench run avenue deeper into the ship, where he'll just /barely/ fit if he clings to his broom very tightly. The interior is a complete maze of honeycombs with no regard for up or down, but with his ability to sense spatial distortions, he can locate the reactor cluster simply by the presence that the hundreds of miniature singularities give off. The reactor room itself might be a disappointment, as it is extremely cramped; clearly only meant to be serviced by tiny, dedicated machines embedded in the walls rather than a real crew. The dyson sphere casing built around it is enormous and heavily armed; so much that it would have to suffer a direct hit from an extremely powerful attack to actually breach, making it the most fortified position on the ship with how deep inside its guts it is. He'll have to make his move and escape very quickly however, because there's no guarantee that something explosive won't go off with how many attacks are hammering their way steadily inwards from outside. Rory should be advised the same of her drones. Their small size and flight capability gives them an easy time of nagivating the interior, where they happen upon more ammo storage for the ground forces, motivators for the launch catapults, power conduits for the weapons and engines, and loosely termed 'cargo holds', where homogenous degenerate matter is being stored inside of a densely packed network of nano-fabricators to mass produce more drones and affect repairs.

    With little left other than roughly half of its CWIS guns still blazing away at everyone involved, the corvette starts throwing its interception lasers into the mix; individually only powerful enough to melt a hole through a missile, but fired with extreme accuracy, and in great number, especially targeting the more heavily damaged members of the battlegroup. As a last resort measure, the shipboard AI seems to have called down what remains of its flight team, filling the air with the thunderous roar of positron turbines as a squadron of hypersonic craft blurr overhead and strafe the area with explosive rounds and fusion bombs. It's clearly on its last legs if it's abandoning the fight in the air.

Alexis Maaka (571) has posed:
    Alexis yelps with surpise at the sudden opening, leaping to cover kOtone protectively from the blast with her superior body armor, grunting as she picks herself up. Eyeing the opening, she glances at Kotone as well, "Well...it beats being here when this thing gets critical!" She says, shrugging as she carries the younger cyborg bridal style, and then makes a /leap/ into the water, sprinting before making a flying leap.

    "HOLD ONTO ME!" she shouts as they fall through the air, then activates the wings on her back to glide their way to a soft landing in the water. /Hopefully/ there's a vehicle they can use, the hoverbike Kotone used perhaps, but that doesn't seem too likely...

Nozomi Houken (342) has posed:
    Battlefield telemetry is keeping Nozomi at least slightly appraised of the entire fight, and as she carves her way through the ship, the TIGER unit informs her of the damaged state of Darwin; someone's covering the other Abyssal, but Darwin is relatively unprotected. And whether or not she's ordinarily an enemy, for this battle she's been assigned to the 'friendly' list. And one of the TIGER's top battlefield directives is to cover friendlies.

    She's done enough ship-carving. The technomagical girl banks away and comes around, right about the time the lasers start lighting up the airspace alongside other ordnance. One nicks her hull, two, one cuts through protective enchantment to scorch bare skin, but she flies on and up, catching sight of the incoming fighters just in time. At least a couple of them are on a trajectory right over the damaged Abyssal.

    But a bombing trajectory makes their movement predictable. Especially if they're coming in at hypersonic speeds. The TIGER does the calculations in an instant and tells her just where to fly; so the armored girl is right up in place and stopped just seconds before they'll arrive. And seconds are all she needs for...

"EM Siege Breaker."

    Yellow energy floods the blade, pressed in and tightly packed, sending its already-impressive cutting power through the roof. But even with superb cutting power, a human alone wouldn't be able to make this cut. It would take supercharged processing power. Machine calculation. Prediction far faster and more accurate than the human mind is capable of, and superb reflexes to make the most of it.

    Being linked with the TIGER's neural processors gives her exactly that.

    The EM Zanbatou swings once as the first goes by. The second as another screams past. And on the third swing, the gathered energy in the cutting surface finally explodes outward, giving the third fighter to try an attack run on Darwin the bulk of the weapon's destructive power.

Nagato has posed:
    Nagato continues her shelling upon the ship, the Escorts doing their job quite nicely, now only if they wern't enemy escorts assisting her. Tch. The Admiral-ship scans the area as she continues shelling, watching over the battlefield and keeping a good eye on Kuma and Wo not because she distrusts Wo, because she does, is that her Fleet is damaged and is escaping. With the fliers now coming down to assist the giant ship and strafe, Nagato abandons her position and starts making a beeline towards Kuma.

    Her battlefield scanning isn't without merit, however, as Alexis and Kotone make a leap from that massive ship, the Admiral-ship turns as quick as she can to move in for a catch, reaching out to them both. "Hold on! I got you!" she shouts, grunting a bit as the two bodies land on her, the ship stumbling in the water from the off balance and sudden impact of two human-sized bodies landing on her.

    She sails to a slower pace with the added weight, moving them to one side of her turrets, "Hold on, I'm heading towards Kuma. If you have any ranged weaponry, please keep the aircraft off us." With that said, she goes back to skating towards KUma, trying to move into position to use her armaments to take the hits for the already damaged cruiser. "I'll get you all back to port without further damage!"

Kongou (637) has posed:
    There's something intensely satisfying in the way the starship's internal structure is all but annihilated once its shielding is brought down. A certain visceral joy Kongou always feels when her shells do appreciable damage. Her radar rotates briefly, giving her sight of Kuma and Wo on a retreating course, and there's an unseen nod somewhere within the colossal battleship.

    That's good. She had come here to protect her peaceful sea, she shouldn't have to sink for that.

    Kongou's attention returns to the corvette, bringing down its aircraft. While there are no more missiles to contend with, the anti-air batteries and flak cannons on board the battleship continue to fire, filling the sky with shrapnel that would create an extremely bad day for any engine intakes that suck it up. This is not the extent of Kongou's anti-air power, however. The two inboard main battery turrets, closest to her superstructure, lift their 35.6cm cannons skyward.

    The shells that are hurled forth on tongues of flame and smoke sail up into the sky, hissing and trailing flame all the way up until they explode in midair, hurling out shards of shell casing, steel rods, and sticks of burning magnesium. It creates an incredible hazard to fly through, as if Nozomi's sword wasn't enough of a problem.

    The other two turrets remain focused on the flagging corvette. Having reloaded as well, shortly after the Type 3 shinkaisen shells are fired, they also speak, hurling type 94 High Explosive shells through the exposed sections of the corvette's armor. Without armor to stop them, the high explosive fragmentary rounds will be able to do a whole lot more damage than if she had fired them earlier in the engagement.

Rory White (673) has posed:
    And so, in a pinch, Rory is faced with a crisis.

    Use her drones and their minimal equipment to sabotage things... or try to nab some of this technology for study and reverse engineering? The implications are amazing. It doesn't take her long at all to deduce just what everything is and figure out the scale and complexity of this stuff.

    Focus her efforts on stopping the attack? Focus her efforts on raiding the technology?

    Nope. She'll pick option 3.

    Sabotage the efforts by RIPPING STUFF OUT OF ITS MOORINGS. Or trying to anyways.

    One might guess that more effort would be put into securing the outside than the inside. Given the lack of internal defenses, the internal engineering shouldn't be ARMOR-GRADE.

    She'll hinder the thing by using LASERS. Lots and lots of lasers. One drone goes for the AMMO ELEVATOR and attempts to melt the framework to block the elevator and jam up all of the transfers.

    Another drone hunts for any power conduits to slice and grab that would be powering the Launch catapults and engines.

    But the final drone goes for the Nanofab.

    Chances are the degenerate matter might be too dense to transport with her little drones, but all she needs to do is rip out ANYTHING and have a good chance at learning amazing things. Just the casings would be great metallurgical finds! Or the controlling computers...

Samar (494) has posed:
    Protection is the last thing on Darwin's mind right now. Whatever strength she has left is to be pushed and pushed toward sinking the ship that she and her current allies have been smashing into this whole time. Her beams and those of her escorts continue, blazing with the roiling power of an old, old grudge given physical form. So, when those last assaults come shooting toward her, Darwin seems to ignore them. For nearly sinking her sister, another cherished Abyssal, this ship must /pay/...even at the cost of herself. Darwin's eyes squeezes shut as she braces for the oncoming impact...

    But the strikes never come. Darwin lingers for a few moments before finally opening her eyes and looking up, just in time to see Nozomi's series of precise, cleaving strikes. It's jarring; she has no idea how to respond to it...and so she doesn't. Not yet.

    Instead, she takes the opportunity to continue her assault, pushing more of her power into her beams to cleave into the ship's hull and burn it through. Deeper and deeper, carving trenches into metal, scorching with the agony of a tormenting spite. She won't rest until this hated opponent sees the bottom of the ocean at last.

Arthur Lowell has posed:
    Arthur... is not here to destroy the core! Oddly. After BLASTING through the chamber near Alexis Maaka, Kotone Yamakawa, and Rory's drones are, he's bouncing brutally around the interior of the ship while he maneuvers to the core itself. He did use that time, at least, to think about what the core IS. And usually they're explosive. It's armed, too! Oh shit. Arthur focuses on two things: Taking out any links the core has with the main ship! Surely the dyson sphere module can self-regulate, right? So he immediately OPENS FIRE on any connections that branch out of the sphere itself, into the craft! The core itself is way too armored for even Arthur to think about breaching it at the moment, really, and these things are multi-stage anyway.

    Of course, he's gonna be here a while, even as MASSIVE EXPLOSIONS from Kongou, Nagato, Darwin expending their firepower blast around him. He seems to find them, while damaging, EXTREMELY ENCOURAGING! While he blasts the particle bolts out of his body, he summons up an intense series of gravitational shifts, intended to wrench the core out of its position and just let it roll free. If you can't crack a fortress, destroy the land it's sitting on, right?

    Of course, the core isn't likely defenseless, as it's armed after all. If it fires back, Arthur will just be tanking it, the same way he took the horrible blistering and irradiation of the nuclear missiles, and the same way he's been taking those lasers smashing against him, and the bruises from breaching the ship. All to achieve his priority! TEARING OUT THE HEART! When the massive lasers and huge shell explosions crashing around the chamber and blasting it open eventually become too much, only then will he blast his way out of the ship, using his own bolts to cut a fresh trench and emerge violently from the craft on a rocket-ride, still screaming.

Kotone Yamakawa has posed:
Things are just getting nuts at this point okay just nuts really she's keeping with Alexis untill the cleavage starts. This gets a bit nut Kotone's freaka a bit as she wasn't expecting something like that and well this thing might be cooking off. She looks to Alexis and she does not argue she gets the reactor is going to cook off if she stays she's going to die and that will be the end of her. She also saw how Alexis has protected her and started feeling guilty she however does hold on as they fall and hopws this isn't the end for them.

it turns out nopt to be the end as she's landing on Nagto she's a bit dazed but should be otherwise okay, right? She does groggly hope, Rory, Arthur and the others are all right.

Alexis Maaka (571) has posed:
    Alexis grunts as she lands onto what feels like a ship, protecting Kotone the whole time. Just before she relaxes, however, the commando produces the detonator and blows the charges she set, "Bye bye, fuckers." She growls, before she flops onto her back and sighs, releasing Kotone as she sits up and draws her coilgun, taking idle potshots at the enemy aircraft as the battle begins winding down, just to be sure.

    All the while, she also begins calling targets for Nagato just in case, single-shots blasting away at each little drone thingy the enemy vessel's sent.

Zwei (596) has posed:
    Drones designed for high speed atmospheric maneuvering don't stand a chance in the face of Nozomi's blade. The first two swings take the passing fighters from nose to tail, splitting them cleanly in half, and sending each piece tumbling through the air before shattering on the ocean surface below. The third one is basically obliterated on the spot, leaving precious little to even be remembered by as it is cut off before reaching Darwin, leaving the Abyssal to continue her attack. While certainly effective against conventional assault, the corvette's armour offers little in the way of protection from supernatural enemies, and so the beams raking across it managed to carve huge sections of its plating straight off, even separating less connected pieces of the ship from the whole, which crash down into the waves below. Each part that comes off opens more undefended internals for Nagato to hit, steadily blasting through the ship from bow to stern, smashing guns and missile silos one after the other and nothing but mangled metal and venting plasma behind.

    A second wave of aerial reinforcements dives out of the sky, only to fly straight into Kongou's anti-air screen; impacting flying, burning shrapnel at absurd velocities that send steel and magnesium rods stabbing straight through their chassis. The majority of them are picked off and sent spiralling into the sea before the rest can break off; wheeling around to have a pass at Kongou with their bomb payload, before being stabbed out of the sky by bolts of energy travelling so fast that they look like a straight line, no doubt from Zwei chasing after them. Her type 94s detonate inside the rear power couplings, causing the thrusters to shut off completely, and then blow themselves to pieces as their fuel containment fields disappear; shooting out pressurized jets of superheated gas as they blow out from the inside.

    The guns remaining on the side of the corvette opposite Nagato and Darwin's escorts go silent as Rory's drones gradually cut through their power supply and ammunition stores. The bulk of the fabrication machinery is indeed, too much for the drone to make off with, but the fine manipulator equipment attached to it seems like a good alternative choice, though they don't seem to possess any recognizeable tool tips. The drones elsewhere are immediately consumed in multiple types of futuristic explosive doom as Alexis blows the charges. Normally the damage would be contained to one compartment, but the sabotage has rendered the entire train stuck, and so the whole elevator daisy chains in such a way that it blows an entire 'deck' of the ship out from inside, causing it to list severely in the water.

    This is the point where Arthur would normally be killed by the reactor cluster actively redirecting its output into beams of insanely intense hawking radiation straight through his torso, but they only manage to fire for a fraction of a second before the explosion forces it to reconfigure its entire power output arrangement to avert a feedback loop. The result is, with a lot of effort, shooting and screaming, the massive sphere finally comes loose with a howl of screeching metal, and then every light on the outside of the ship goes dim. The reactor seems to be self contained enough that it won't melt down or explode if left like this; likely so it can be retrieved later; but the ship is basically only still floating because the entire hulk weighs less than 3000 tons.

    As the last of the fighter bombers are swatted out of the air, one last flying figure hurtles down out of the atmosphere and smashes into the topside of the corvette, resolving into the silhouette of Asche after the smoke and condensation clears. Weiss is nowhere to be seen, for probably obvious reasons. "Again I am impressed by the multiverse. If you wish to be hailed as heroes, make your way to the closest land. I will do little other than congratulate you. Once you have reached a safe distance, I will destroy this ship, and that will be the end of it."

Arthur Lowell has posed:
    Arthur is hit dead-on with a blast of radiation! Oh man! For a moment, he has every kind of cancer, but he's a space god and so that gets dealt with immediately. He's also ionized to hell and back, and that's not going away for a while. When he blasts his way out of the chamber and up to the top of the boat, it's with much yelling and gusto!

    Then he just sort of splats onto the deck near Asche. Radiation burns, kinetic impact bruises, lacerations from near misses from lasers, and blunt trauma from ramming into walls, plus a little blood toxicity from sheer volumes of radiation, have sort of rendered him immobile for a moment. "SHIT YES." He declares, despite being face-down on the carbon. "You mind WAITING A BIT? I just need a moment to PICK UP ALL MY BLOOD." His voice is a little muffled from being face-down in the ship, and after that last part he goes sort of limp.

Kotone Yamakawa has posed:
Kotone Yamakawa looks up as the charges go off and looks to Alexis.

"Is there something about the more advanced a species gets the more murderous and umempthatic it becomes?" She does seem very happy to see then looks to Nagato and says "Thank you."

She's not much use for now but she'll happy enjoy the ride and that she's still alive.

Nozomi Houken (342) has posed:
    Floating in the sky, breathing heavily, Nozomi holds her weapon at the ready until she's absolutely sure the fighter drones are done coming and the ship has fallen silent. Asche only gets a flat stare, devoid of anything but a simple, cold appraisal; and then the black-armored girl turns and begins descending out of the sky in a controlled drop that stops just above the waves, less than a hundred feet from Darwin. She heaves her weapon up onto one shoulder, and turns to regard the Abyssal - her gaze starts out sharp and cold, but upon seeing that, if not unhurt, Darwin will at least be all right (and is not likely to attack), her expression softens just faintly.

    That's when the dropship banks around, called by an automated signal from TIGER, and she turns and simply floats into its passenger deck. Darwin will be treated to the sight of Rampart Mode disengaging, releasing Nozomi from her combat armament; including the change in hair and eye color, the reapparance of her ordinary clothes... and the moment when that emotionless combat machine expression leaves her face, to be replaced with silent fear as the memories of the battle hit her reasserted personality. Only once she's safely out of the armor does the pilot dare to bank around, close the side hatch, and hurtle off into the sky.

Samar (494) has posed:
    Finally, that struggle is done.

    Darwin slumps forward in exhaustion after the ship has been disabled, finally ceasing the outpouring of laser fire from herself and her escorts. The two that remain, at least. The scraps of the third are carefully scooped up in Darwin's massive hands, showing a gentleness that seems nothing like her appearance. A sorrowful frown is given to the remnants of the strange orb, a look that is quickly cast toward Wo next, as the Seaport Princess tries to make sure her sister is safe. They'll both need to return to Iron Bottom Sound immediately for repairs.

    When Nozomi lowers down nearby, though, Darwin's head lifts to quickly look at her from afar. The Princess says nothing; she stares at Nozomi, but in the soft sadness of her eyes, there's a slight glimmer of gratitude. She clearly has no interest in fighting anymore, at least not tonight. Whatever battle fury she holds has been more than expended already.

    Ashe gets a narrow-eyed stare when she arrives. It's not exactly hostile, but Darwin doesn't really seem comfortable, either. This has all been too draining, too jarring. She seems content to simply shake her head, then float over to retrieve Wo, followed by the remaining segments of the Escort Fortress as they sink underwater and swim off toward their home again. Kuma, at least, gets an ever-so-soft "thank you" from Darwin; otherwise, the Princess doesn't seem interested in talking much more tonight.

Kongou (637) has posed:
    The new figure that descends on the corvette from SPACE also draws the attention of Kongou's guns, but with the corvette's own weapons going silent and the last of its aircraft spiralling into the sea, those great guns remain quiet. Only once she recognizes Asche do Kongou's weapons start swinging away to centerline, barrels lowering. The anti-air guns in particular, their barrels sizzling red and beginning to warp, swing down to a 0 degree elevation.

    With a rapid-fire Ka-Chunk noise, the 25mm barrels disconnect and eject over the side, hitting the water with an angry hissing sound. New barrels, slide into position over several moments, then lock into place with a ratcheting noise. Only then does the warship assume a silvery glow and, surrounded by this light, compress into Kongou's human form.

    A hard look is rested on Asche for a long moment, and then Kongou simply nods. Turning in place, she accellerates after Kuma if only to observe the collection of the fallen Wo-class. Just as much to make sure the carrier is alright as to make sure Kuma isn't harmed further, though Kongou herself is in pretty rough shape, she can still fight if pushed to it.

    The gratitude is returned with a bow, though Kongou stays silent--For some reason, the carrier reminds her of someone, which has put her in a nostalgic mood. She watches the Seaport Princess depart, reaching out to hook Kuma across the shoulders and help the smaller cruiser back to Nagato.

    Her recon plane fairy, chilling in a tiny inflatable raft, has just enough time to reel in its equally tiny fishing line before it's scooped up in passing and returned to Kongou's kit.

Nagato has posed:
    Nagato, once the firing has stopped, gives a light nod and takes a look towards the Seaport Princess. Its here that the admiral-ship gives a light sigh and a bow in thanks towards her, turning back towards Wo. No words are exchanged once Seaport Princess acquires Wo, just an understanding nod and a turn around. A look to Kongou, "Let's go home, you two deserve rest and I'm happy I did not lose either of you this sortie." she lets out a soft sigh and a smile embraces her lips, sailing off with the two Daughters. Content that everything from here will be taken care of, she gives no regards to wanting thanks, she did her job, she proved herself in front of her allies... and her enemies... and solidifies herself in her mind that she's still capable of her duty.

    A few words escape her lips... "Maybe... just maybe..." before she shakes her head, falling silent for the rest of the trip home.

Rory White (673) has posed:
    With the ship going dead, and Zwei announcing it's soon to be DESTROYED and she will brook no arguments, Rory directs her drones to use the amount of time Arthur's unwittingly buying her to scrape up as much salvage as possible from the exposed machinery. Even the tiniest scrap of wiring and conduit might reveal amazing metallurgical secrets for stronger alloys, after all!

    And then they're hurrying the hell back out and DOWN into the water and away, with their tiny cargo compartments stuffed with as much as they can still fly with. (And that not being much.)

Alexis Maaka (571) has posed:
    As Alexis climbs off Nagato, she unfolds her helmet and flops onto the beach, prying off her wingpack as well as she kinda watches Zwei go off to explode the ship. She tosses Rory a cannon shell of some sort, before she lies back and closes her eyes, sighing. It's only now just hit her she's without a way home, and she sighs with irritation as she rubs her face. "Goddamnit."

Kotone Yamakawa has posed:
Kotone Yamakawa also climbs off Naago and sighs as she watches Zwei blow up the ship and she looks to Alexis who has no ride homne she pauses issuing a recall command for her bike which is a bit worse for warew but it's intact she looks to Alexis

"Need a lift?"

Alexis Maaka (571) has posed:
    "Yeah." Alex says, hearing that bike coming as she picks herself up. "I'll take that." She hops on, making room for Kotone to drive as she rides shotgun, semi-literally.

Kotone Yamakawa has posed:
It's built from a street racing bike so it's a bit of a tight fit with Alex and Kotone but it should be fine.

"If there's one thing I learned the sooner I upgrade the less dead weight I'm going be. I need to set up that appointment with megatech sooner rather than later..."