California's unfiltered mouth earned her a prompt beating from the door-bursting Vittorio Veneto. The screams were so pitiful that Blücher felt if Hikaru weren't already deaf, the shrieks alone would rupture his eardrums.
In truth, the Commander's summoning wouldn't be disrupted so easily—California had just been venting.
Even so, when Vittorio Veneto's ruby eyes fixed on Blücher, her courage evaporated.
Nope. Not going in. Not at all.
Mumbling something about "just looking around," she tiptoed deeper into the warehouse.
California's howls seemed to echo at her back.
But Blücher soon had no room in her head for California's fate.
She had wandered into a treasure vault!
Row after row, shelf after shelf of top-tier rigging—much of it gear Blücher had only ever seen in equipment compendiums, and plenty that didn't appear in any compendium at all.
Rainbow gleams, golden flares—dazzle enough to drown in.
"Six-star Mk.16 triple 8-inch automatic gun—long range, +12 Firepower, +2 Accuracy. My God—the crown jewel for a heavy cruiser!"
"Six-star UK-Faction twin 6-inch HA/DPS Mark N5—8 points of base AA with 30% AA modifier and a 2.8 anti-air multiplier… I could die happy!"
She nearly pounced to lick the gun mount. G-Faction shipgirls—each and every one—were AA-challenged. Strictly speaking, outside the US-Faction, no faction excelled at AA.
This piece alone would boost Blücher's combat strength by fifty percent!
And it wasn't the only six-star heavy-cruiser gun of its model—counting down the line, there were over a dozen.
Which meant these were the leftovers after Hikaru's girls picked their favorites. They must have even better pieces equipped.
Reeling with awe, Blücher caressed each mount as if handling fragile glass, reluctant to let go.
Beyond one row of heavy-cruiser guns, an even more heart-stopping sight filled her vision.
More than ten gold-capped, green-bodied shells lay neatly in an ammo crate, misting a faint golden glow.
Five-star Super-Heavy Shells.
The holy relic for heavy cruisers.
For battleships and battlecruisers, the sacred kit was Type 91 AP shells; for heavy cruisers with lower base firepower, Super-Heavy Shell was the grail.
+5 Firepower, and +25% attack cap.
A full quarter raise to the damage ceiling!
Blücher's mouth could barely contain the flood of drool. She knelt, both hands trembling as they pressed to one shell; its cold metal sent joy surging through her.
Like Grandet beholding a mountain of gold; like a veteran reviewer finding, at last, a film that touched the soul.
Questionable metaphors aside, Blücher let out a dreamy little moan.
"If only these were mine…"
Sighing thus, her nose twitched.
Not a scent, strictly speaking, but a pull—an inexplicable tug, as if something fated were calling her.
She flipped her red hair back, regretfully set the shell down, carefully wiped away the few drops of drool she'd left, and stumbled toward the source of that pull.
Rounding a shelf, she found row after row of strange items.
Below ran silver-white concave metal docks; on each dock's left stood a gantry crane, and behind it, a color-coded overhead frame.
Nestled in the center of each dock was a miniature warship model.
Taken together, each unit looked like a ship in a refit slip mid-upgrade.
Different frame colors mapped to different classes:
Gold for carriers
Copper-red for battleships
Grass-green for cruisers
Sea-blue for destroyers
Dark violet for submarines
Easy enough to tell at a glance.
What tugged at Blücher was the grass-green cruiser slips—a quick count made over thirty.
Each palm-sized model seemed to thrum with boundless magic, alive, inviting Blücher to join them.
Half-dazed, she reached out.
The instant her palm touched a cruiser slip, it turned to streaming light and poured into her hand—not just one, but the six nearest.
And then—100 units of oil/ammo and 200 units of steel flared out of nearby resource crates and flowed into Blücher's body.
She yelped, panicked, as rigging power surged out of her control. A massive black iron anchor snapped into being, its shank chained around the top of her left thigh, the haft slamming into her grip.
In fright and wonder, Blücher began to change—rapidly.
[End of Chapter]
[100 Power Stones = Extra Chapter]
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