Different AA guns vary in rate of fire, patterns of fire, and shell type; what they share is punch.
Historically, a classic WWII AA gun doing fifteen rounds a minute was considered decent.
In Leipzig and the others' hands, though, the gold-grade mounts spit over 6,000 rounds per minute—modern top-tier SPAAG levels—stitching the sky into an upstreaming waterfall of fire.
And because shipgirl rigging doesn't worry about overheated barrels, as long as ammo holds, that rate doesn't dip—no openings, ever.
Any Abyssal carrier planes that slip past Lexington's fighter screen and approach the district still have to run that gauntlet.
It's like a red-hot iron comb raking flesh—the great formations get stripped away layer by layer.
And that's not all. The heaviest AA punch is inside the district.
Bismarck, Repulse, Tirpitz, Prince of Wales—one and all swap out main batteries for AA, and even, shamelessly, load five-star Type 3 shells.
Type 3 was Japan's timed-fuse shrapnel shell—bursting into hundreds of burning bomblets—meant for battleships to swat planes.
Historically it wasn't great: limited power and crude directors meant it mostly made pretty "fireworks" that scattered formations.
In these hands, Type 3 becomes an apocalypse.
The principle is a burst high in the sky that scatters thousands of tiny "meteors" which cling and burn like burrs.
Over the district, a meteor fire-rain comes down.
Any Abyssal aircraft that breaks through doesn't come back; one lick of flame and it spirals down.
Sheltered by Tirpitz, Hikaru clicks his tongue at the sight.
Brutal—cruder even than Abyssal Barbarossa's Clear Skies that day.
Under three layers of AA like this, even a million Abyssal planes can barely threaten the district.
There are still strays, of course.
A bomb or two, more often sea-skimming torpedoes, but the girls snatch them out of the air and water.
Even so, they can only shield the most valuable zones; the floating island is pitted and scarred, some buildings damaged.
Against a raid this size, those losses are acceptable.
Bismarck is not entirely satisfied.
"I wanted to keep Vittorio Veneto and Taiho as a trump. The Abyssals have surely noticed."
"It can't all go our way," Hikaru says, consoling. "Who'd have guessed they'd change their playbook?"
The whole point of hiding Veneto and the others was to ambush enemy flagships—strictly speaking, they'd already pulled it off once.
With raids on this scale, hiding strength would be stupid—the Abyssals clearly can't win a flagship duel and are going for a mobbing fight.
"Which just shows they're not that bright," Hikaru laughs. "If they'd thrown everything in from the start—subs for torpedo strikes, battleships for bombardment, flagships for decapitation—we'd have been running, like it or not."
Under that kind of pressure, battleships wouldn't have had the leisure to refit Type 3 shells just for AA. Hikaru would've been in a bad spot.
"If they hadn't bloodied their heads first, the Abyssals wouldn't have put aside their pride for human-wave tactics."
Repulse glances toward Prince of Wales. "Commander, given the situation, we should raise the district's combat strength as much as possible."
She's hinting about the strange horn—that it can bump any level-100+ shipgirl to 110—and she's speaking up for her master.
Prince of Wales is her master as well.
But Repulse can't say it outright. Hikaru intended to award it to the battle MVP, and she knows Prince of Wales's pride—she'd never accept power that looks like favoritism.
Only if Hikaru thinks of it himself and orders it as Commander will it fly. So Repulse can only nudge.
[End of Chapter]
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