Aside from U-47, every surface shipgirl in the mixed escort swapped to Type 3 anti-air shells. Those aren't "big-ship only," so the whole sky turned into flaming rain—anything that brushed it melted; anything it touched fell.
Even so, there were just too many Abyssal aircraft—eight hundred thousand of them.
Forcing their way through curtain after curtain of fire, the thinned-out swarms dove to a thousand meters and struck.
Torpedo bombers laced the water with wakes; dive bombers dropped strings of bombs straight at the four carriers.
Tens of thousands of bombs and torpedoes, aimed at barely a dozen shipgirls. The kind of fire that topples cities and sinks islands.
Veneto and the others would have to blast the torpedoes; the bombs, everyone would have to dodge.
Changchun, meanwhile, kept splitting her fire—one missile left, one missile right—into the two Abyssal vanguards, all while strolling through the falling bombs like she was out for a walk. Not a single bomb could land on her.
Quiet as she'd been, her attack had been ferocious. In barely half an hour she'd launched over a hundred missiles, deleting seventy or eighty high-threat targets across both enemy wings—escort destroyers, air-defense destroyers, carriers included.
Her cruise missiles fly at 3,500–4,000 m/s—north of Mach 10, roughly 7,000 knots.
With the enemy vanguards only 90–100 nautical miles out, her shots were blooming over their heads in under a minute.
Abyssal AA destroyers only manage ~15 points of intercept. Against a level-110 Changchun's gold missiles with 20+ penetration—and her superior skill and control—they can't stop a thing.
So every shot hits. And each one hits like fifteen B-25 sorties from Lexington—anything short of an Abyssal flagship just dies on contact.
Even an unnamed Abyssal carrier flagship, if it takes one, ends up with decks shattered and flight ops dead—Abyssal carriers block with the deck, not the face.
Changchun was the base's strongest gun platform.
Like her, Lexington's quartet split their focus: guiding their strike wings while waltzing through the bombing with not a hair singed. It looked less like a fight for survival and more like a ballroom turn.
The only one really suffering was the base.
Veneto's group blew a lot of torpedoes, but plenty slipped through. After the carriers dodged them, those live fish slammed straight into the floating island itself.
Good thing when Hikaru created the island he picked an almost "all-metal" build. Beneath the soil, the base is basically a single solid ingot.
Otherwise, after dozens—hundreds—of torpedo hits, the place would already be in pieces.
Even so, Hikaru felt awful. The constant hammering set off a hard, metallic shudder through the whole structure; the vibration crawled up his bones until his limbs tingled, and he had to brace the Dragon-Slayer sword against the floor just to stay steady.
The warehouse was worse—racks dumping gear and crates in avalanches that rolled everywhere.
Hikaru caught the squealing Vampire as she slipped, pulling her into his arms with Glowworm, and managed a grin through the chaos. "Leipzig's going to have a lot to pick up."
A heavier shock hit a heartbeat later—an explosion that threw them to the floor anyway. Moskva tumbled off the step-ladder.
The roof shook like it meant to jump free. If the whole warehouse weren't special-grade metal, the ceiling would already be down.
Tenryuu's voice tightened. "They've switched to area bombing. Their pin-point runs failed, so now it's splash damage."
Ella hugged her knees beside Hikaru, cheeks pink and eyes anxious, listening.
"A bomb fell inside the base," she said softly. "Sounds like the dorms… collapsed."
[End of Chapter]