[Bonus Chapter]
Fleet Admiral Gorou waved his hand weakly, like a lion beaten in battle. "I'll stay and command the rearguard. You take them and live."
With his level over 100, if he went all out and put his life on the line, he figured he could stall Abyssal Barbarossa for at least a little while.
The retreat order was immediately relayed to the battlefield. It wasn't a chaotic rout—that would lead to total collapse. Instead, shipgirls began withdrawing in small squads, group by group.
"Trying to run?" Abyssal Barbarossa stood thousands of meters high in the sky, divine and demonic at once. Her voice rumbled like thunder, infused with overwhelming power, shaking the sea into a thousand towering waves. "You think it's that easy?"
Her naval guns expanded to 533mm caliber. The barrels blazed with searing light so intense that even the blazing sun in the sky seemed to dim.
"This is purification—for the inferior!"
A hellish salvo fired, each shot more powerful than a hundred billion tons of TNT. The blast streaked from sky to sea, and everyone below felt the same dreadful certainty—there's no escape. Even resisting felt utterly pointless against such divine force.
If the blast landed, it wouldn't just wipe out seventy or eighty percent of the South Seas fleet—it would trigger a massive shockwave, a tsunami a thousand meters tall, that would surge inland across East Asia, flooding half of the Country.
Who could save the world now?
Cumberland didn't know. She just raised her camera, determined to record this final moment. It might very well be the curtain call of her life.
Then—amid the raging winds and crashing waves—a small figure appeared beneath the column of hellfire.
That overwhelming force, powerful enough to shatter mountains and split oceans, paused before this lone figure.
Paused—and then, like countless rivers flowing into the sea, it was absorbed into her body.
The storm vanished. The sea fell still.
Tirpitz summoned her rigging and let out a burp. Her whole body glowed faintly with a soft light.
She looked mildly annoyed, waving her hand lazily. "All you useless extras, get lost already."
A shockwave surged outward. The stunned or frozen shipgirls across the battlefield were swept up and thrown dozens of nautical miles away.
Yamato tried to rush forward to help but was held back by Lexington.
"Don't harbor hostility toward Abyssal Barbarossa. Don't attack. The more people join in, the stronger she becomes."
Yamato gasped. "She has an ability that broken?"
Placed on a normal shipgirl, this power wouldn't be game-breaking—they wouldn't have enough endurance to survive being targeted by so many—but Abyssal Barbarossa was in a league of her own.
That's how she'd just one-shot a max-level shipgirl.
Up above, the demon dragon began rapidly shrinking, returning to a hundred meters in length.
Abyssal Barbarossa stared at Tirpitz like she was some kind of rare creature. "Tirpitz, you're as noble as I am. You're destined to rule over those inferior creatures. The power within you… it even surpasses my expectations. Why not join me?"
Tirpitz had been hit so hard by the last attack that it triggered her damage control fairy—granting her temporary invincibility, which completely negated Barbarossa's world-ending blow. That feat alone was far beyond what Barbarossa could comprehend.
"Save your talk. A mutt like you shouldn't even exist!"
Tirpitz didn't hold back. She fired a full broadside—point-blank.
The shells burst forth as icy dragons, roaring toward Barbarossa's face.
But Barbarossa wasn't defenseless. She returned fire instantly. In the blink of an eye, both adjusted their angles. With eight barrels apiece, each of Barbarossa's shots collided mid-air with one of Tirpitz's ice dragons, shattering them.
It was like the two were firing machine guns at each other, with every bullet colliding perfectly in mid-air—a duel at the pinnacle of combat mastery.
Yet the ice dragons weren't fully destroyed. The fragments retained their power, crashing into Barbarossa and forcing her to crush them with brute force, taking some damage in the process.
Lexington nodded slightly. "That's more like it—her defense is back to normal levels, around 140 armor."
Tirpitz seized the advantage and dove in, clashing head-on with Barbarossa.
Her training and level were a full tier above Barbarossa's. To borrow terms from the manga she read: if Barbarossa was a legendary peak demon boss with the ultimate template, Tirpitz was a human warrior who had broken through into the sacred domain.
[End of Chapter]
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