Characters / Ambience: A Fleet Symphony

As per Handling Spoilers, no trope names will be spoiler-marked. In addition, the very presence of certain names on this list may constitute spoilers by itself. You Have Been Warned!

Character types with their own pages:

• Ambience A Fleet Symphony One: Covers ship girls in general as depicted in this work.
• Ambience A Fleet Symphony Two: Covers the Destroyers of Kamikaze (pending implementation), Mutsuki, Fubuki, Ayanami, Akatsuki, and Hatsuharu-Class.
• Ambience A Fleet Symphony Three: Covers the Destroyers of the Shiratsuyu-Class.
• Ambience A Fleet Symphony Four: Covers the Destroyers of Asashio, Kagerou, Yuugumo, and Akizuki-class (pending implementation), as well as independent/single-member classes like Shimakaze.
• Ambience A Fleet Symphony Five: Covers the Light and Heavy Cruiser classes.
• Ambience A Fleet Symphony Six: Covers Battleships, Carriers, Submarines, Auxiliaries, and others.
• Ambience A Fleet Symphony Seven: Covers ship girls of other nations that are not Japanese.

The Combined Fleet - Humans

Damon Deimos Polchow ("Warlord")

The Hero, for certain values of hero. A 17 year-old who's seen too much of the world After the End, he seeks to gather the ship girls and make the world better, whatever it takes.

• Accidental Truth: in chapter 62, when Zuikaku questions him about the things he's been saying to her sister Shoukaku, Damon flips it on her by saying that they were talking in regards to the matter of Zuikaku glomping Shoukaku in her sleep and hits the jackpot.
• All Just a Dream: after he gets resurrected under Lukenstor's rehabilitation, he is able to enter a dreamworld-like state every time he goes to sleep, where he meets the seventeen-year-old version of his long-deceased mother, Losira. There do come times when this dreamworld state becomes threatened by what happens to Damon in the real world, and there's even two instances in which Losira does actually materialize under very specific conditions outside of Damon's dreamworld.
• All of the Other Reindeer: suffered this for much of his childhood because of his distinct appearance due to the mutations caused by the Genesis Thesis Project. This contributes to his Misanthrope Supreme mentality.
• Allohistorical Allusion: he jokingly suggests that if the nuclear war had never occurred, Gen Urobuchi would've probably come up with a very dark magical girl show.
• Analogy Backfire: when Sanford compares a self-destructing ship girl to the Nagasaki nuke, Damon calls him out on this.
  Damon: "You just HAD to go with that analogy, didn't you, you fuck?!"
• An Arm and a Leg: Damon loses his left arm when he takes a hit for Kawakaze from Suzukaze, who, in her Angel form, thrusts her hand through his left shoulder and amputates his left arm, including the arm of the exosuit that he was wearing at the time.
• And Show It to You: in chapter 87, he plunges his hand into Akebono's potential rapist's gut and pulls out a length of his intestines to hold it up in front of his face.
  Damon: "You've got guts tryin'a lay a finger on my girls...good for ya. Now let's see what they fuckin' look like."
• Awesome, but Impractical: Happens to Damon a few times throughout the story: he's had to leave behind high-grade military guns because of severe limiting factors such as ammunition leading up to the start of the story, and when he shows up in chapter 170 after he receives his exosuit and returns to the fleet, he has to pick targets carefully and make sure not to waste ammunition for his new revolvers and will scavenge more ordinary firearms to complement his firepower instead.
• Ax-Crazy: has shown glaring signs of this throughout the story whenever he deals with people whom he's caught doing terrible things to ship girls, but he truly invokes this at Baltimore while fighting the mutants there. He also goes berserk when he battles the mutants again during his fight against Blackwood.
• Backstab Backfire: a bandit whom Damon interrogates for information tries to shoot him while Damon and Murakumo are leaving him in chapter 7, but Damon reacts faster and chases him away for good.
• Badass Family: his parents were part of what was known as the best counter-terrorist organization in the world. Losira, his mother, has a right eye that's capable of burning everything and anything called Hellflower, and Deimos, his father, is implied to be the one who designed the Metal Slug and possibly a few ship girls of his own. In addition, according to Losira, his uncle Hank may have possessed the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception.
• Being Human Sucks: in chapter 8, he deplores the lack of durability of human bodies relative to those of ship girls' in a rant-inducing slight.
• BFG: he's found or used, or both, quite a few over the course of the story, such as the DSR-50, the Barrett M-82, the LSAT light machine gun, the .80caliber revolvers that come with his exosuit, the double-barreled eight-gauge shotgun, the memento left behind by one of his late squadmates at Baltimore, the Barrett M-95, the Barrett M-107CQ, etc.
• Big Damn Heroes: Does this not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times: first at Savannah with his ship girls under his command at the time to help the men of the survivor camp there ward off a large rogue attack, second at Atlanta to save a group of his ship girls disabled by an surprise EMP attack and about to be mass-raped by Atlantan faction men, third again at Savannah, this time to fight off a substantial mercenary assault on the survivor camp, and fourth to save both his own fleet and the British fleet at Whiskey Hotel by battling President Blackwood in a duel to the death.
  • and add a fifth time with chapter 378: he and Samidare jump down from a Cloaked helicopter to save Kongou's squadron before they get raped and carried off by a bunch of Agents who managed to subdue them with a special debilitating gas attack.
• Big "SHUT UP!": has to do this a couple times at some of the ship girls when they get too rowdy for his liking.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: a very polarizing example. He makes it clear to everyone in the fleet and everyone he works with that he's rude, blunt, violent, and perhaps emotionally insensitive and that he's capable of doing some terrible things to get what he wants and won't lose a minute of sleep over them. However, most of these terrible things are directed at people who probably deserve to suffer them in the first place, and considering at times Damon seems like the only one actually doing anything to look out for his own ship girls, such actions are passed off as acceptable, relative to what the bad guys have done and will do.
  • However, this morality standpoint of Damon does get him in quite a bit of trouble within his own fleet when news of his execution of the Harper family at Nashville spreads among the ship girls, turning him into an In-Universe Base-Breaking Character.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: in chapter 174, in order to access a small tablet, Damon finds that he needs a matching thumbprint. So he cuts off and keeps with him a thumb of the tablet's owner, an Inner Circle A.T.P. Engineer, to access the device at his leisure.
• Bullying a Dragon: several captured Trenton rebels in chapter 53 decide that it's a good idea to taunt Damon when they're brought before him. Apparently they didn't know that Damon figured out what had happened to Kisaragi and pay the ultimate price for their behavior...in lots and lots of blood.
• Calling Your Attacks: does this once in chapter 250 - upon summoning his Yellow Reality Cancel, his first attack is called the Tsumugari no Tachi.
  • of note, for the record, Damon calls this attack in Japanese, and with no apparent difficulty. This may raise a question among readers, because Damon is quite known throughout the story for giving easily pronounceable English nicknames to his ship girls who may have Japanese names that are tricky for non-Japanese speakers to enunciate smoothly, so why Damon has decided to pronounce the one attack he's ever called like this in Japanese may come as a complete mystery.
• Chainsaw Good:
  • One isn't good enough for Damon when he goes Ax-Crazy in Baltimore. He's gotta have two.
  • Gets another chance to do this again when he rips the chainsaw off a scrake during his fight with Blackwood and goes ham with it.
• Character Development: His journey has done a lot to gradually file off his rougher edges.
• Chick Magnet: for quite a few of his ship girls, the most (in)famous example being most of the Shiratsuyu-Class.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: the candy cigarette Damon is smoking in chapter 296 seems to be this.
• Combat Medic: oftentimes is this to his own ship girls, if they have wounds that he can help treat with steel patches or the like. Justified because he worked in hospital wards and emergency rooms when he was younger, and probably had field medic training during his time with the military.
• Combat Pragmatist: doesn't hesitate to use whatever he can get his hands on to help him win a fight, whether it be metal-studded playing cards, a Coke bottle, or a pair of empty Desert Eagles.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: invokes this in chapter 74 - when Pop Jones of the Granite Quarry car extortionists attempts to keep them from leaving without paying for a couple of cars, Damon simply lets his ship girls loose on their whole base of operations, saying that if only Pop Jones had decided to agree to his terms, Damon wouldn't find a need to kill him and shut down the entire place.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: his fight against Suzukaze at Houston, which goes very poorly for him. Same for him and Jeannie versus Franklin.
• Death Dealer: buys a pack of steel-studded playing cards during his night out with Shiratsuyu during the Charlotte campaign and uses the cards as stealth projectiles to take out enemies quietly during their infiltration of the Fantasy Express hotel.
• Destination Defenestration: subjects Malcolm O'Reilly, the faction leader of Atlanta, and one of his henchmen to this by throwing them out of the window of O'Reilly's office, which is at least a few stories above street level. At least the henchman was already dead before he got defenestrated.
• Determinator: if it comes down to the safety of his ship girls, Damon will stop at nothing to ensure that they're bailed out. Not even death has been able to hold him down - three times, in fact, so far.
  • in chapter 312, the way he saves Kawakaze counts - Suzukaze, in her angel form, has active a huge gravity field that amplifies the power of gravity many times to pin her sisters down, and they have a very hard time moving around because of it. With the help of his exosuit, Damon gets up fast enough to push Kawakaze out of the way to take a hit for her from Suzukaze and ends up losing his entire left arm as a result. This isn't the end of it - when !Samidare arrives to defeat Suzukaze in her angel form for them, Damon assists her too by using his Tsumugari no Tachi attack to distract her enough so that !Samidare can purify her and return her to normal.
• Determined Defeatist: He's a very pessimistic person who's convinced that the worst will always happen, but that won't stop him from fighting on.
• Didn't See That Coming: Happens to him in chapter 65 during the second phase of Operation Norfolk, when one of the bridges that the team was planning to use to cross over to the other side of the ship yard turns out to be accidentally destroyed by the opening artillery salvo fired from the Oceana Naval Air Station.
• Distracted by the Sexy: exploited by Damon in chapter 77, when he orders all of the capital ship girls in his fleet to dress up to participate in an outdoor ball in front of the Fantasy Express hotel and casino during Operation Charlotte so that he and a team of destroyers can slip inside undetected and begin their assault on Kerrigan Badeau's office.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set: invoked in chapter 81, when Damon has his friend Benjamin hack into Orlando's public announcement system so that he can issue Arrechea, the faction leader, a remote ultimatum.
• Dramatic Gun Cock: does this with his Desert Eagle at Sanford to force him to finally tell the truth about the Shiratsuyu-Class.
• Dressing as the Enemy: during Operation Atlanta, because Damon technically isn't supposed to be fighting with the fleet in the city because of how potentially dangerous it is for him, he secretly has himself flown in and needs to disguise himself as an Atlantan mercenary soldier while trying to reach O'Reilly on his own. He even gets shot by his own ship girls as they pass him in the middle of the city because they see him and identify him as an enemy, but his body armor tanks the hits.
• Empathy Doll Shot: comes across a discarded dinosaur plush in an abandoned mall in Atlanta.
• Everyone Has Standards: Damon is surprisingly heavily tolerant of deviant and oftentimes downright insubordinate behavior on the part of his own ship girls, even citing their distrust and dislike of him as ways to keep himself from becoming too complacent with himself in the fleet. However, he will not stand for any signs of violent disagreement or potential morale-breaking divisions in the fleet and will use deadly force if he deems it necessary to put his foot down on them. One such example is the scuffle between Kaga and Takao, which Damon interrupts and breaks up by force by shooting Kaga with his .80caliber revolver, which is designed to heavily injure Abyssals, just to get the carrier to let go of the cruiser.
• Extreme Mêlée Revenge: remember those two Trenton rebels mentioned in the above Bullying a Dragon? This is their fate, provided by Damon.
• Experienced Protagonist: Gunfighter, pilot... Despite his youth, if you can name it, he's already seen some shit even before he meets Murakumo.
• Eye Color Change: Has eyes these that are sickly yellow in color and fade to colorlessness when he engages night-vision.
• Eye Scream: delivers a scoop of this to Harold Harper in chapter 92, ripping out his right eye during their fight.
  • Does it again to two gang members in New Chicago in chapter 275, stabbing one eye with his flat wooden [[{Pun}} ice cream spoon]] and slams another's head against the edge of a table, hitting him square in the eyes.
  • he himself suffers the loss of his right eye when Red Samidare shoots half of it out after stealing Umikaze's pistol.
  • and not even a full day later, when trying to subdue Samidare's boiling blood, Damon gets his right eye gouged out - again - by the power of Samidare's raging blood.
• Fantastic Racism: in chapter 275, Damon and the girls who've gone to eat ice cream with him are confronted by a few gang members who call Damon a "chunky". Damon explains later that the term is an extremely derogatory term
• Female Gaze: the recipient of this from Kagerou when he takes his shirt off in chapter 61. Also gets this when some of the girls tried to peek at him when they were at the bathhouse in chapter 258.
• The Fettered: While he doesn't seem like this at first, Damon does come to demonstrate many times that he deeply cares about his ship girls and other people who can't protect themselves. His goal slowly changes from plans of world conquest to a desire to protect his subordinates when, technically, they should be the ones protecting him, given their natural resistance to bullets. He's even died to keep his fleet or part of his fleet safe...not once, but twice.
• Foreshadowing:
  • suspects the possibility of another faction having a substantial fleet of ship girls of their own in chapter 27.
  • when the exosuits that the Inner Circle was planning to manufacture are introduced, it's mentioned that normal human beings cannot equip them due to the stress that the exosuits put on their users. Put two and two together, and Damon is the only logical answer to the question of who can use one of these exosuits.
  • the yellow flames that were a prominent presence in many of the renditions of Damon's dreamworld allude to Damon's eventual acquisition of his own supernatural power, Yellow Reality Cancel.
• Frontline General: Does this a lot throughout the entire story. In every campaign the fleet embarks on until the Germany arc, Damon is there, either fighting directly alongside his own ship girls or fighting where his efforts will either directly or indirectly assist his fleet operating elsewhere. He himself feels this trope is justified because at first, before he has many ship girls to his name, he needs to be the squad leader, so to speak, and lead his ship girls out of his own personal experience in Urban Warfare, and even when he does have enough ship girls to constitute a fleet, he continues fighting anyway because it's his only relevant strength as the fleet's Admiral and is the only thing that can make up for his complete lack of naval knowledge that a proper Admiral ought to have.
  • This is also a rather divisive point of concern among the ship girls in the fleet. Some admire and respect Damon's willingness to fight with them and be with them in the thick of the fight, others are afraid that Damon will end up getting seriously wounded or even killed because he chooses to fight with them (which actually does come to pass in chapter 95), and still others disagree with this because Damon doesn't know how to be a proper admiral, both in terms of not having any knowledge of naval warfare and fighting like a common soldier in what should be their fights, and thus do not treat him with high regard.
• Godzilla Threshold: averts this in chapter 229, when he feels that honoring his verbal agreement with Ooi is much more important than going to her to ask for her help.
  • however, at the end of chapter 313, when Suzukaze is restored to her normal self, Damon tells her that he and she are going to have a talk once they return to base, something he's never said to any other ship girl in the story. It's safe to say that Suzukaze's relapse is enough to have to sit one of his ship girls down and reprimand them, or whatever else he plans to do.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: Damon gets a lot of opportunities to use his superhuman physiology to survive and recover from things that would kill a baseline.
• Grave-Marking Scene: has several throughout the story, but all at the same place: his mother's grave at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery outside of Chicago.
• Grievous Bottley Harm: after seeing the states of Umikaze and Kawakaze, Damon feels that stabbing someone in the eye with the mouth of a partially-filled Coke bottle is mandatory.
• Hand Cannon: receives a decorated and well-maintained Desert Eagle from the faction leader of Mobile, Mr. Harrison, but he gives this to Murakumo to keep as her personal sidearm. He gets one of his own to use in combat much later in the story in chapter 242.
  • Daemonbane and Daemonedge, the two .80caliber heavy revolvers that come with his exosuit and that can ONLY be used while in said exosuit because shooting them without the suit would break even Damon's wrists. Because they were specifically designed and constructed to help Damon fight Abyssals with the ship girls out at sea, if they're ever used on humans, it's an instant case of There Is No Kill Like Overkill and potentially Half the Man He Used to Be.
• Heal It With Fire: in chapter 170, Damon orders Kawakaze to cauterize his gunshot wound with her Firewater Protocol once he's gotten the bullet out.
• Hidden Depths: multiple aspects of Damon: his exact history is, for the most part, uncharted, though over the course of the story, Damon reveals more and more about himself and his past, the biggest of which being the Noodle Incident at Baltimore.
  • One of the more recent developments in the story in chapter 241 is the revelation that Damon may be unknowingly cultivating his own super power like his mom Losira's Hellflower, and Ooi helps cement this by absorbing a mysterious energy from Damon and materializing it into a small yellow flame that she can emit from the tip of her finger.
    • This is later revealed to be Damon's power, Yellow Reality Cancel.
• Holding Back the Phlebotinum: at Sanford's urging, Damon orders his fleet not to use their powers they've gotten through contracting with his YRC, for those who have, so that the Abyssals won't find out about them and come up with something to counter them and thereby helping them power up faster than they do.
  • This all goes out the window following the aftermath of Operation South Town, in which Sanford gives Damon permission to lift that order due to what happened during the that op.
• Hollywood Healing: ties in somewhat with Good Thing You Can Heal, but subverted nonetheless, as Damon, while able to regenerate any wound that doesn't outright kill him at rates that are still considered impossibly fast for normal humans, still needs the time to heal and cannot fight at the top of his ability if his wounds are severe enough.
• Homage: Damon's activation of his Yellow Reality Cancel is one to the CG scene of Chihaya when he gains the power of the Kusanagi and wields the Tsumugari no Tachi for the first time, complete with the same Pre Ass Kicking One Liner.
  • his interrogation of Katherine is one to the "English, motherfucker" scene in Pulp Fiction.
• Horrifying the Horror: inadvertently ends up doing this to Tatsuta, one of the fleet's most severe Ax-Crazy members, after she learns of what Damon ended up doing to the Harper family at Nashville.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: ties in with his Misanthrope Supreme views and represents the basis of his opinion of ship girl-human relations that he's seen so far. Damon firmly believes that while ship girls do admittedly have mental and psychological flaws of their own, for the most part they're all built to be (or at least emulate) decent human beings; thus, from this perspective, he determines that humans are overall much more inhumane than they are and even comes to the conclusion that ship girls are more "human" than humans.
• Hypocritical Humour: has to stop himself from pointing out in chapter 187 that it's a bit silly for Mary Britain, the sister of the newly-instated Queen of England to mock the implausibility of a name like Sir Hunter Stormrider.
• I Have Your Wife: the reason why Damon is compelled to launch the Coalition campaign to recover the ship girls being held hostage by the Coalition faction leaders to coerce their own ship girls to do what they order.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: after learning what's happened to Yamakaze, on top of the truth behind the Shiratsuyu-Class, Damon feels like he needs a drink, even though he himself doesn't actually drink.
• In-Series Nickname: Damon recalls that when he was young, he had a few nicknames because of his odd appearance with navy blue hair and yellow eyes, such as "Yellow Fever Kid" and "Chameleon".
• Insistent Terminology: insists that all his ship girls refrain from calling him "Admiral" and instead simply address him by name. "Sir" is okay for those who just can't bring themselves to do so for whatever reason.
• It Gets Easier: admits that killing and violence have become more and more of an integral part of his life in chapter 69 as the years have passed.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Damon takes it personally whenever he hears someone call his ship girls as anything less than human.
• It's All My Fault: when Samidare says this, Damon tells her that this is not her fault because she's done nothing to garner the blame. She doesn't agree, however.
• It's Quiet… Too Quiet: in chapter 21, Damon maintains a level of paranoia upon reaching an abandoned mall with his squad that there may be an ambush just waiting to get sprung on them, but it never comes. He invokes this again when the fleet secures the secret Abyssal base up in Newfoundland.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: he's loud, mean, insensitive, sometimes unnecessarily confrontational and violent, and profane. But if there's a ship girl who needs his help, you can bet he'll be there to bail them out. Examples of this below:
  • During his first excursion into Atlanta to steal Kaga away from the Atlantans, Damon refuses Amatsukaze's invocation of I Will Only Slow You Down when she gets crippled by her own sister and can't walk on her own and personally carries her on his back for the rest of the mission. He even leaps out of a collapsing building five or so stories up while carrying her and cushions the landing for her and nearly breaks his own spine in the process.
  • When Yuudachi is killed in action during the London campaign, at Shigure's pleading, Damon organizes Operation Trenton just to get her repaired back to life, along with repairing other ship girls who have sustained debilitating wounds during the previous operation like Kagerou. During this same operation, when Ushio gets hit by a sniper bullet on the roof of the hospital in Trenton, he goes back to ensure she stays safe while taking a bullet of his own in his shoulder and suffers a dislocated shoulder on top of it when the roof caves in on them.
  • At Sanford's urging, Damon also tries his best to counsel his ship girls whenever they have psychological troubles that they can't overcome by themselves. Several ship girls who receive his counseling, both voluntarily and involuntarily, are Shigure, Murakumo, Kisaragi, Shoukaku, and Ooi, to name a few.
  • The anti-Abyssal campaign in Newfoundland is the result of Damon's willingness to recover Kaga and Shoukaku, two out of the four carriers in the fleet at the time, who had been captured by the Abyssals in the previous operation at Norfolk. He even secures the help of the nation's largest military defense company, Lukenstor, through its CEO Eagle Clinton just so that they can get a satellite up in the air to help them look for any signs of the two missing carriers, and once it pinpoints their location in Newfoundland, Damon throws his entire fleet up there and even flies a small portion of his fleet in his own helicopter all the way there from their base in Virginia.
  • All of the anti-Coalition campaigns also apply, as they can be seen as Damon's wish to free the ship girls of the Coalition from their oppressive masters' command.
  • Damon dies protecting the ship girls who are with him and are crippled by a surprise EMP detonation by killing Alastor Scott. He even manages to save Shoukaku from getting permanently killed by blocking the shot from Scott that was going to kill her for good by sacrificing his incredibly expensive and difficult-to-build hacking knife to block it.
  • When Damon is brought back to life by the scientists of Lukenstor and is tasked with investigating a remote Inner Circle research facility in Mexico, he finds Umikaze and Kawakaze almost dead from weeks of rape, malnutrition, and abuse and wrecks the entire base in retaliation. From that point forward, his mission is no longer about the information that the research base has yielded; it's about nursing the two destroyers back to health and getting them repaired again to full functionality.
  • When Blackwood betrays the fleet and Damon, Damon fights to get his fleet back for weeks on end, at first all by himself, culminating in a final confrontation between the two to determine the fate of the Japanese and British fleets.
  • There are more times than Damon can count with his fingers when his own ship girls injure him for various reasons, yet he puts up with it all unless he's got a very specific reason not to. The one exception to this seems to be after Damon manages to return Samidare to normal from her evil persona, and that's only because he gets so frequently and so severely injured during the process that even he runs out of patience with Samidare, but even then, by the end, he seems to have forgiven her and put it past him.
• Kill It with Fire: his initial strategy for dealing with the mutants of Baltimore, executed with a napalm-based flamethrower.
• Lampshade Hanging: it's always a constant question to him about why anyone thought that personifying warships as young women, impossibly beautiful young women at that, was a great idea. This also extends to some of the more questionable fashion designs that the ship girls come with.
  • Also does this with Aoba when the two of them watch Iowa steadily lose her cognitive reason when she gets closer and closer to Damon's new puppy Toshi, discussing the legitimacy of the Cuteness Proximity trope.
• Le Parkour: demonstrates some of this during the daytime phase of Operation Night Tide, when he climbs his way up a school clock tower.
• Letting Her Hair Down: in chapter 316, Damon admits that seeing girls with different hairstyles let their hair down is a small fetish of his. Girls with long hair in general are a plus in his book.
• Literalist Snarking: does this to Zuikaku when she tells him to "bite me", so he tries.
  • does this again, though in a much more dramatic fashion, to Sanford, when he tells him to pull the trigger of his Desert Eagle. So he does.
• Living Battery: He becomes able to emit a yellow energy that ship girls can use. Later, that same yellow energy can be used by the girls to gain their own unique, seemingly magical powers and skills.
• Loan Shark: has had a friend whose entire family (including her) was murdered by loan sharks when he was young.
• Lodged-Blade Recycling: after Akagi shoots him in the lung with a crossbow bolt, Damon pulls it out and hurls it back at Alastor Scott, downing him so that he can crawl over and finish him off with Scott's own revolver.
  • does this again at the climax of chapter 250, when he rips out his own karambit that Blackwood has plunged into his chest and throws it back at him, hitting him in the left eye and killing him. Like what he did to Alastor Scott prior, he also crawls over to Blackwood and stabs him again in the head with the karambit to make sure he's dead.
• Love Confession: receives one from Murakumo, but due to his ignorance of the moonlight confession, he unknowingly lets it slip past him.
• Magikarp Power: In chapter 244, Kevinson suggests that Damon has a latent potential that, if realised, will make himself and !Samidare but mere mortals in comparison. The Yellow Reality Cancel might be this, though exactly how powerful it is still remains to be seen.
• Megaton Punch: his exosuit's Vulcan Punch qualifies as one, and it produces a burst of flames upon contact to boot.
• Mercy Kill: does this multiple times: one to an infant exposed to lethal doses of environmental radiation, one to a bandit who paralyzed himself by jumping off a tall highway bridge and breaking his ankles trying to escape him and his ship girls, and one to an irradiated fox after it got its lower jaw torn off.
• Mid-Season Upgrade: after the Coalition campaign, while the fleet is under the impression that Damon is dead, he is resurrected by Eagle and his team of scientists at Lukenstor and given an exosuit that gives him many of the same abilities as his own ship girls. He loses it before the Baltimore mini-arc but manages to recover it in chapter 242, just in time to help him defeat Blackwood eight chapters later.
• Misanthrope Supreme: Subverted. While he doesn't outright hate all of humanity, he certainly doesn't think highly of the human race as a whole.
• Misery Builds Character: practically his unspoken motto.
• Mistaken for Gay: Amusingly, is subjected to this by Nagato at Charlotte, who was coerced to work there as a prostitute and, when Damon's team comes in to extract Nagato and the other ship girls in Charlotte, asks him why he seems resistant to her offers of sexual activity. Damon has to clarify to Nagato that he indeed is heterosexual, but the circumstances at the time allow him to ignore the sexuality of the situation and focus on the task at hand.
• Mood Whiplash: after having a few intimate conversations with both Murakumo and Kisaragi, he walks in just in time to catch a makeshift fashion contest held by the fleet and is immediately badgered by his ship girls as to who looks the best to him.
  • Invokes this again when, after having a serious sit-down talk with Shoukaku and Zuikaku, he promptly joins the destroyers in a pillowfight.
• More Dakka: his exosuit comes with a microgun with a starting ammo supply of 5000 bullets and comes with a pair of .80caliber revolvers that automatically deal Half the Man He Used to Be damage if their bullets hit human targets.
• Naked People Are Funny: laughs off Sendai, who's slipped into his room naked the night she's brought to his fleet by Blackwood after the President nonchalantly informs her that in order to gain favor with her new Admiral, she just needs to offer her body to him for a night. Damon even sends her straight back to the dorm hangar exactly as she'd come into his room.
• Never Found the Body: Damon and Ooi both realize that following the massacre at Spring Hope, the bodies of Dee Jay, Big E, and TK have never been found.
• The Nicknamer: gives English nicknames to his ship girls whose names are a bit hard for him to pronounce with his American enunciation, such as Amy for Amatsukaze, Mutslug for Mutsu (though this is just because of her appearance), Shirley for Shiratsuyu, Sugar for Shigure (a more affectionate one), and Cookie for Kikuzuki.
  • He's now given nicknames to the entire Shiratsuyu-Class, and he's also been calling Zuikaku "Zui" as of late. He's even inadvertently called her "Zui-Zui".
• Noodle Incident: Baltimore. It's what makes him a Shell-Shocked Veteran.
• No One Gets Left Behind: His mentality towards several ship girls like Amatsukaze and Suzukaze.
• Not Distracted by the Sexy: multiple instances prove this, as Damon, despite being straight (or at least claiming to be), doesn't let the beauty of his ship girls distract him or tempt him.
• Not With the Safety On, You Won't: informs one of Blackwood's advisors that his gun's safety is on. Also informs Tenryuu of the same mistake in the next chapter.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: in chapter 276, after getting harassed by a few gang members, Damon goes to their hideout and wrecks shop.
• Only a Flesh Wound: upon getting hit by a bullet in chapter 8, this is Damon's reaction.
• The Only One: Views himself as such in terms of being the only one who can sensibly and responsibly lead a fleet of ship girls. Given that every other person who's ever explicitly commanded ship girls in the story other than himself (minus Retia Wedekind, whom Damon has never met), combined with his overall growing feelings of disdain for other human beings as a whole, this isn't a terribly unreasonable conclusion for him to reach.
• Orphan's Ordeal: Never having known his father and his mother dying when he was very young have left indelible marks on his behaviour and psyche.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: becomes soft-spoken and somber whenever he visits his mother's grave in Chicago.
• Parrying Bullets: with the help of his Yellow Reality Cancel, he parries his own .80cal bullets when Blackwood shoots him with his own Daemonedge with nothing but the back of his left hand.
  • In chapter 266, it's revealed that Damon parries attacks by releasing a burst of his YRC energy with his hand at the moment an attack connects with it, as described when he does so during a spar with Losira. If Damon can parry things like his mom's telekinetic flame bursts, then it's definitely not just bullets Damon can parry.
• Paying Evil Unto Evil: anyone he catches doing terrible things to ship girls, whether his own or not, is sure to have a nice, swift death.
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: "I am the God-slaying blade..."
• Pre-Climax Climax: the narration cuts out just before he and Shigure secretly begin having sex in the base's bathhouse in chapter 289.
• Playing with Fire: as of chapter 250, Damon's latent power that has been hinted at and demonstrated on a minor scale has now fully matured and allows him to manipulate powerful yellow flames, just like the ones that had been seen in his dreamworld, called Yellow Reality Cancel.
• Please Kill Me if It Satisfies You: tells this to three different ship girls of his as a way of dealing with their resistance to his leadership of the fleet: one to Murakumo in chapter 33, one to Shiranui in chapter 44, and one to Takao in chapter 82.
• Post-Victory Collapse: does this after finally assassinating Blackwood with his karambit knife.
• Power Copying: subverted - during his fight against Blackwood, upon using his Yellow Reality Cancel, Damon copies Kawakaze's ability to produce telekinetic flames, but his Yellow Reality Cancel is his own power, not a copy of her Firewater Protocol.
• Rage Breaking Point: Damon goes through one when he repeatedly gets injured trying to force Samidare back to her normal self. Given his list of grievances that he accumulates throughout the process, which includes getting his right eye shot out, then gouged out a second and third time, deep cuts all over his body thanks to Samidare's boiling blood effects, and then assaulted in his own dreamworld when Samidare tried healing him in his sleep, some may find it surprising that Damon even decided to put up with it all.
• Real Men Cook: Because Damon had to fend for himself when he was growing up, he had to learn to make food all by himself. And he's gotten really good at it.
• Shoutout: quite a few in chapter 250:
  • the music playlist that his exosuit plays is titled "Fight Like Hell".
  • his staple attack against Blackwood that's at all effective against him is his exosuit's Vulcan Punch, taken from Ralf of Ikari Warriors and the The King of Fighters series.
  • one of his attacks involves him sliding and pushing Blackwood up into the air, then shooting him twice with his revolvers, one of Erron Black's attacks in Mortal Kombat X.
  • another one of his attacks is a high boosted divekick, a reference to the drop kick mechanic seen in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
  • his latent power, Yellow Reality Cancel, is one to the ingame mechanic Yellow Roman Cancel featured in the Guilty Gear fighting games, but in name only.
    • Once his YRC is triggered, flames begin bouncing up from the ground around his feet just like Ken's during his V-Trigger state.
    • the part where he uses Blackwood as a human surfboard to ride his own yellow flames may be one to "Ride the Fire", a song featured in Guilty Gear, seeing this story's frequent references to the franchise.
    • Tsumugari no Tachi, his opening attack against Blackwood after he draws on his Yellow Reality Cancel power, is one to the Hero Skill of Chihaya in Eiyuu Senki: The World Conquest.
    • Two of his attacks after he draws out his Yellow Reality Cancel are references to one of Kyo's supers, Ura 108-Shiki Orochinagi, and his Climax attack, 100-Shiki Oniyaki, as seen in The King of Fighters XIV.
    • he also throws an arc-shaped ground fireball at Blackwood that's a reference to either Iori's or Kyo's 108-Shiki Yamibarai.
    • the final attack he performs to "defeat" Blackwood before his Yellow Reality Cancel expires is one to Kishima Kouma's melee Arc Drive in Melty Blood.
  • in chapter 264, Damon makes one to World of Warships when he says, "Friendly destroyer severely damaged!" after giving her a requested kiss on her forehead.
  • at the conclusion of chapter 292, his dialogue towards Sanford closely matches that of Captain Price's when he confronts Yuri about his connection with Makarov.
• The Siege: Damon and the fleet have to hold out in a hospital in Trenton against the local rebels while Sanford and Mr. Araki get the wounded ship girls repaired.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: is told this by the controller of Orlando, Arrechea, in chapter 82.
• Skyward Scream: does this up at Kaga when she is seen flying away in a helicopter with Mr. Harrison.
• Slasher Smile: is described to have one while fighting and slaughtering the scrakes and fleshpounds in Blackwood's containment lab.
• Smoking Is Cool: has taken a great liking to candy cigarettes. Amusingly averted at the same time because he actually dislikes tobacco cigarettes and tobacco smoking in general.
• Sole Survivor:
  • While he technically wasn't the only surviving test subject of the Genesis Thesis project that he was subjected to before he was even born, he effectively became the sole survivor after the only other surviving test subject passed away from complications relating to the experimentation at the age of seven.
  • Also the only member of his team to walk away from Baltimore.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: oddly enough, between Damon and Blackwood. Blackwood at one point indirectly calls himself a god among men, but Damon, just before unleashing his Yellow Reality Cancel for the first time onto him, calls himself a god-slaying blade.
• Super-Empowering: he can now do this with his YRC, for ship girls only.
• Super-Senses: night vision.
• Super-Soldier: subverted. The Genesis Thesis Project intended to create a new subspecies of humans born with a natural resistance to radiation, not necessarily super soldiers explicitly, though Damon does conveniently gain a level of strength considerably greater than a standard human being. Beginning with chapter 241 and the awakening of his Yellow Reality Cancel, it's more and more likely that Damon may possibly truly be this, and then came speculation in chapter 426, and later confirmation in chapter 429, about the true intention of the project: To create a a human subspecies with the power to control ship girls.
• Survivor Guilt: It eventually comes out that he has it pretty bad over being the only member of his team to walk away from Baltimore.
• Taking the Bullet:
  • in chapter 95, he takes one to his hand to block Alastor Scott's revolver bullets that were meant to hit Shoukaku in the head to kill her for good.
  • in chapter 312, when Suzukaze is about to begin tearing Kawakaze's limbs off one by one in her angel form, she starts with her left arm - but Damon pushes her out of the way just in time to have his own left arm torn off instead.
  • in chapter 378, Damon manages to save Naganami from a potentially very painful shot to the face from the Desert Eagle of an Agent who tries to get a last-minute shot off while Damon and Samidare are distracted trying to stabilize everyone's conditions. Damon ends up getting his nose blasted off, and the armor on his upper right arm from his exosuit ends up blocking the bullet.
• Tap on the Head: pistol-whips a bandit gang leader with the butt of his handgun.
• Tempting Fate: In chapter 7, he talks about the possibility of getting through an area undetected and is almost immediately interrupted by an explosion.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: tells a frustrated Akebono who's fed up with him trying to be a "hero" that if she doesn't like what he's doing, then he'll gladly go out of his way to not act like a hero. Akebono finds out that he's not kidding when she finds what he's done to the Harper family inside the Nashville state capitol building.
• There Are Two Kinds of People in the World: according to Damon: "people who do their jobs bein' themselves" and "people who do their jobs bein' people they ain't".
• This Is Reality: jokes around with Benjamin that they don't live in an FPS world where they all have infinite regenerating health as long as they hide behind cover for a few seconds and wipe red jelly off their eyes.
  • Ooi tells him that he's not a harem manga/anime protagonist.
• Troll: there are quite a few times when he intentionally provokes the wrath and ire of his own ship girls by teasing them.
• Uncle Pennybags: The way he throws his own cash around for the betterment of the ship girls has shades of this.
• Underestimating Badassery: During Operation Little Rock, when he and the fleet fly down to the final Coalition faction of Little Rock to deal with the faction leader there, because Little Rock is most well known for their agricultural production and not so much their military strength, Damon believes that Little Rock should technically be the easiest faction to deal with. This assumption ultimately costs him his life.
• Wants a Prize for Basic Decency: Not used by Damon himself, but discussed by the Mutsuki-Class destroyers with regards to him during the Germany campaign. Kikuzuki considers his actions as fleet admiral up until his death mundane and not worthy of any sort of special recognition, but her sisters, Mutsuki and Kisaragi in particular, disagree heavily.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Happens in his relationships with the rest of his fleet members, both ship girls and fellow humans alike. His confrontational attitude and desire to do things his way tend to have him butt heads with those who have differing opinions. He even gets into a fistfight with Sanford over one particular decision of whether or not Shiratsuyu should be allowed to return to Charlotte on her own to take care of Murasame.
• Weapon Specialization: The MK-14 Rogue Chassis designated marksman rifle and the Glock 37 .45 GAP pistol. He only uses other weapons if the mission at hand compels him to do so, and he faithfully uses these two weapons up until his death at Little Rock. The karambit curved knife also counts, as he uses one in conjunction with the previously stated weapons. While he does lose it for a time, he gets another one back in chapter 239.
  • Later chapters establish a constant in his choice of long gun, starting with the aforementioned bullpup M14, as every long gun he goes through has been some sort of self-loading marksman rifle chambered for .308 Winchester / 7.62x51mm NATO, as the M14 is followed by the Kel-Tec RFB, and later the LaRue OBR.
• Weapon Twirling: does this with his revolvers sometimes.
• With Friends Like These...: with Admiral Kevinson. Damon does not like having to work with him during Operation Goldmine, and he doesn't speak in amicable tones to him if they must talk or even fight together, but they're still on the same side - if only for this operation alone.
• Yes-Man: discusses this in chapter 92: because he's grown up in harsh conditions and has been through a lot, Damon admits that he doesn't prefer having everyone in the fleet love him and hold him in high regard because he wouldn't be able to keep himself on his toes otherwise.
• You Can Barely Stand: exploited in chapter 92 when he intentionally feigns exhaustion from his wounds to get a killing blow on his opponent.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Blackwood subjects him to this when he returns from Baltimore and almost immediately gets shot, lit on fire, and left for dead in his own base.
• You Killed My Father: more like "You Abandoned My Father". This is the main source of hostility between him and Sanford, though it's not enough to dissuade them from working together.
• You Watch Too Much X: is told this by Yuubari who makes this conclusion after being given a summary of events in chapter 66.

Benjamin Yamamoto ("Hacker")

Damon's tech genius not-a-friend who may or may not be descended from Admiral Yamamoto himself.

• Ancestral Weapon: while not a weapon, he has in his possession the late Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku's Knight's Cross medal to prove that Admiral Yamamoto is indeed his ancestor, though even he implies that this is at best speculative, as he'd never had the opportunity to ascertain his relation to the Admiral. It's enough for the ship girls to accept him as part of the fleet, though.
• Badass Normal: see Teen Genius below. When he gets captured by the Feds and dragged off as a prisoner, he endures a fair amount of torture and interrogation in the White House before Damon and the others bail him out during their first assault on the White House. This is all the more noteworthy considering that he, along with Damon, is the youngest administrator in the fleet without any of the strong magical powers that Damon has.
• Official Couple: with Haruna - the author wrote it in based off an anonymous reviewer's suggestion. See Fandom Nod in the Trivia tab.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: in one of his first dialogued conversations with Haruna once it becomes clear that the two of them are going out, Benjamin promises Haruna that he will do whatever he can do in his power as fleet administrator to help her and Kongou find their missing sisters, even if it means abusing his privileges and power within the fleet and risking putting his friendship with Damon in danger.
• Teen Genius: at the tender old age of seventeen, before the events of the story, he's managed to become independent by building up an underground and small intelligence and black market goods trafficking firm, a self-taught hacker, electronics designer, and software programmer, to the extent that he can even serve as a backup administrator for the fleet, and even a soldier, as he's physically participated in Operation Night Tide.

Kiyoshi Araki

A tailor living in New Chicago. He is not only the descendant of the last captain for Furutaka, Tsutau Araki, prior to her sinking, he personally designed her ship girl counterpart for the FLEET Project. After the Great War, he managed to locate and acquire not only her, but also Kitakami and Fusou. All three girls have lived with him for almost 20 years prior to the fic's first chapter.

• Muggle Foster Parents: he's taken care of three ship girls all by himself in the beginning, Kitakami, Furutaka, and Fusou, and they've lived together for thirteen years in the apocalypse in a fairly isolated CCPL post in Boise, Idaho before moving to New Chicago to start up new lives.
  • this is especially true for Furutaka, because Mr. Araki's own ancestor was at one point Furutaka's captain - Captain Araki Tsutau, who survived Furutaka's sinking.
• Poirot Speak: his grasp over English is fairly moderate, so while he can hold a conversation well enough, sometimes he'll sprinkle some Japanese here and there, especially if he's trying to say something that he doesn't know how quite to phrase in English.

Irene Rall ("Athena")

A mute Royalist whom Lauren and Jeannie meet and befriend during their clandestine operation in England who works with the Royalist movement there whose objective is to remove Prime Minister Holmwood from power and restore the British Royal Family back to the throne. After the Royalist movement, she opts to join Lauren and Jeannie and travels to the United States to join the Combined Fleet.

• Affectionate Nickname: Mary likes to call her "Reno", a throwback to their SAS training days.
• Anime Hair: has very long vivid tangerine-orange hair, a mutation caused by the radiation passed to her before she was born.
• BFG: her sniper rifle of choice is the fifty-caliber Accuracy International AS-50. During Operation Lockpick, she provides sniper support for her team with another fifty-caliber rifle, the Barrett M-95 borrowed from Enterprise.
• Cold Sniper: not because her personality is cold, but simply because she's got a speech impediment and is usually extremely quiet.
• Exotic Eye Designs: while probably not the most exotic, Irene does have pure black scleras and white pupils, another mutation caused by the radiation she received before birth.
• Handguns: according to her equipment listing on chapter 286, she carries a Desert Eagle as her sidearm.
• Hidden Depths: when Eagle debriefs Lauren on the background circumstances surrounding their Royalist operation, he mentions that there was once a triumvirate of power holders in England who ran the country, but eventually Holmwood emerged as the sole leader. Irene reveals to Lauren that she's the one whom Holmwood sent to assassinate the two other leaders so that Holmwood, with plausible deniability, could seize power for himself. In addition, the baby he gave her after raping her was born with crippling mutations and died soon after its birth and left her heartbroken and traumatized, making her speech impediment even worse.
  • in chapter 298, it's also heavily implied that ever since the death of her first child, Irene has wanted to redeem herself as a mother...and luckily for her, there is a chance now that opens up for her.
• Odd Friendship: with the Princess of England herself, Mary Britain. The two of them joined the SAS at the same time and even were assigned to the same unit to train as a sniper/spotter duo, though the "odd" comes in when you consider the extreme conflict their two polar opposite personalities produce.
• The Quiet One: to the point where her comrades initially introduce her to Lauren and Jeannie as mute. She's not really mute, but she does speak very slowly and always in a whisper.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: she eventually reveals to Lauren that Prime Minister Holmwood raped and impregnated her after taking an interest in her watching her train as an SAS sniper.
• Replacement Goldfish: subverted; Jeannie befriends her during the Royalist operation, reminding Irene of how much she misses her own deceased child and almost wanting Jeannie as her own - however, she does keep herself in check and doesn't try to actively make Jeannie her goldfish. Though, this being said, it's never mentioned why Irene joins them in the first place, so there's nothing that says Irene didn't join them simply because she wanted to be with Lauren's daughter.

The Coalition

A group of American cities that have seceded from Federal control.

• Cosmopolitan Council: They are led by a very diverse bunch, some of whom would be outright opposed to each other under normal circumstances - an elderly white supremacist slaver, a Psycho Lesbian, a Latino drug lord, a far-right religious nutjob, and old Southern-style aristocracy who act as though they were dropped in right from the American Civil War days.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: several of the faction leaders suffer this at the hands of either Damon or the ship girls, including Premier Kerrigan Badeau and the Nashville family.
• Hobbes Was Right: The factions certainly make one think of this.
• Scream Discretion Shot: happens to Badeau...but subverted when we find out what the Shiratsuyu-Class did to her in the next chapter.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: Slavery is practised by some of them.

The Feds and Other Governments

• Hobbes Was Right: only Germany under Retia's control is the sole exception, and even then, not only is Retia a bona fide dictator, but there's a possibility that she didn't earn her power legitimately. Once the Royal Family in Britain take over, they're another exception too.

Alton Holmwood

The British prime minister.

Mary Britain

• Cool Sword: carries a regal sword made with golden hilt.
• Collective Identity: she and the rest of the British Royal Family set up a fake identity known as "Sir Hunter Stormrider" as the leader of the Royalists during the Royalist movement against Prime Minister Holmwood to protect themselves while operating underground.
• Cunning Linguist: speaks French fluently along with English. Considering that British nobility has traditionally learned French, a tradition dating back to medieval times and beyond, this may or may not come as a surprise.
• Expy: of Mary Britten from Daiteikoku.
• Fangirl: she appears to be quite a big fan of the Harry Potter series, specifically the books, since she's mentioned she likes reading in her spare time.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Mary's the responsible sibling, as evidenced by her plucky personality and lack of proper court manners in the presence of the French President.
• Genki Girl: always in a cheery mood and lets nothing dampen it for long. Her personality hardly changes between the time Damon meets her for the first time at MAPS and when they meet again following the prisoner breakout in chapter 243, despite the fact that she's been held prisoner by the Feds for all that time.
• Hidden Depths: as Irene reveals, she's actually a former member of the Special Air Service who joined at the same time as Irene and trained with her as her spotter, because her mother wanted to have her and her sister Sarah train in case they get themselves into situations like her imprisonment at the White House. Maybe it's her training as a special operative that's allowed her to keep a steady mind throughout her imprisonment in the White House.
• Plucky Girl: despite the hardships she's been through in the story, she still remains upbeat and cheery as ever.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: the Royal Family organize a stealth revolution to overthrow Prime Minister Holmwood from power and, once successful, set about rebuilding the country and bolstering its defenses against a possible German conflict.
• Shoutout: oftentimes randomly shouts out "(insert number here) points to Gryffindor!", a clear one to Harry Potter, sometimes at random and embarrassing moments.
• Sweet Tooth: in chapter 303, she asks for plenty of snacks from the French President upon being offered.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: apparently has a mild case of cynophobia, or a fear of dogs, as Toshi reminds her when he jumps on her lap and makes her shriek a little. It's not really a phobia so much as inexperience with dealing with household pets, as Mary reveals that growing up, she's never had chances to interact with pets or animals in general due to her mother's fear that she may come into contact with irradiated animals.

Eliza Britain

• Collective Identity: she and the rest of the British Royal Family set up a fake identity known as "Sir Hunter Stormrider" as the leader of the Royalists during the Royalist movement against Prime Minister Holmwood to protect themselves while operating underground.
• Cunning Linguist: speaks French fluently along with English. Considering that British nobility has traditionally learned French, a tradition dating back to medieval times and beyond, this may or may not come as a surprise.
• Expy: of Eliza Britten from Daiteikoku.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: the Royal Family organize a stealth revolution to overthrow Prime Minister Holmwood from power and, once successful, set about rebuilding the country and bolstering its defenses against a possible German conflict.
• Shipper on Deck: suggests that hooking up with Eagle could be a thing to her sister Sarah, but Sarah refuses it because of the sheer political complexity of the situation that would follow.

Sarah Britain

• Cool Crown: a circlet with the Royal Coat of Arms on a brooch in the middle.
• Cool Sword: not just one, but two that also have golden hilts, but the handles look like they've been built from rough cobble for some reason.
• Collective Identity: she and the rest of the British Royal Family set up a fake identity known as "Sir Hunter Stormrider" as the leader of the Royalists during the Royalist movement against Prime Minister Holmwood to protect themselves while operating underground.
• Cunning Linguist: speaks French fluently along with English. Considering that British nobility has traditionally learned French, a tradition dating back to medieval times and beyond, this may or may not come as a surprise.
• Expy: of Sarah Britten from Daiteikoku.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Sarah's the responsible sibling - expected, seeing that she's the Queen of England.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: the Royal Family organize a stealth revolution to overthrow Prime Minister Holmwood from power and, once successful, set about rebuilding the country and bolstering its defenses against a possible German conflict. In chapter 303, they're seen meeting with the French President in an effort to establish an Anglo-French alliance against Germany.
• Royalty Super Power: in chapter 397, Sarah reveals that she indeed does have some form of access to magic powers by summoning the sword that she wears out of runes. And in the same chapter, she reveals herself to be the head of the Royal Order of Protestant Knights, the secret magic branch of the Anglican Church.
• Sweet Tooth: apparently has one according to Mary.

Retia Wedekind

The interim chancellor/president of Germany in the wake of her father's assassination.

• The Chessmaster: according to the British, Retia may be planning to expand Germany's borders and influence throughout continental Europe. And in chapter 282, Retia reveals that she is indeed having her negotiations team deal with Russia so that they will agree to a truce in the near future.
• Determined Defeatist: she doesn't have much hope for her country or for the world after the damage the nuclear war's done. This doesn't mean she'll let her country get wiped off the map while she's in power, however.
• Early-Bird Cameo: crosses over with Mythology Gag in that she appears as a minor character in the alternate universe story, Ambience: Contingency Summer as the daughter of the main character for that story, Grecia Wedekind.
• Expy: Of Retia Adolf from Daiteikoku.
• Hand Cannon: she carries a fifty-caliber Luger pistol as her sidearm.
• Iron Lady: dresses like a military officer and leads her father's former political party and military faction, the SDP, following her father's assassination.
• Phenotype Stereotype: the classic Caucasian blonde hair with blue eyes. Considering the character she's supposed to be an Expy of...
• Popcultural Osmosis Failure: whenever Sanford and Benjamin make some video game or other such pop culture references, Retia doesn't get their references at all.
• Self-Made Orphan: Holmwood accuses her of being this. Things are further muddled up when the British Royals, who would oppose Holmwood in any other way, join in. Her godfather, and Italian President, Marco Santini confirms that she had her father assassinated, and he pays the price for revealing this to the Combined Fleet with his life.
• Teen Genius: sixteen years old, fluent in English, German, and Chinese, if the ending of chapter 282 implies such, and controls Germany as the Chancellor-President. She is also apparently an extremely talented programmer and hacker, as she's built her own holographic device, much to the surprise of Benjamin when the fleet arrives in Germany.
• The Worf Effect: she impresses even Benjamin, the story's resident tech wizard, with her knowledge of hologram device construction.
• You Are in Command Now: when her father, Gernot, gets assassinated, Retia assumes immediate control to take up her father's post.

Tawney Blackwood

The 47th and incumbent President of the United States.

• Cigar Chomper: smokes one after he shoots Damon and lights the gasoline poured on him with it.
• Evil Old Folks: He's a baby boomer born in the 1950s, which means he's in his seventies as of now.
• Eye Scream: gets killed by Damon's karambit knife that Damon pulls out of his own chest where Blackwood stabbed him with earlier, and the knife gouges out his left eye.
• Faux Affably Evil: He's always polite and smiling even when doing some very sinister things.
• Hidden Depths: as he's preparing to shoot Damon dead, Blackwood reveals that one of his main goals as President is to find those who are truly responsible for the nuclear war that killed his family, leaving him a Sole Survivor in a sense. His words imply that there is a lot more to the nuclear war than what little is publicly known about it. However, he mentions no more about it during the rest of the fight, and eventually winds up getting assassinated before he can give any more leads, leaving it unknown if he was really going anywhere with it or just trying to make himself appear more sympathetic.
  • Eagle Clinton manages to get his hands on Blackwood's personal notes after succeeding him as POTUS, and they seem to indicate the former. Operation Sandblast, which involved the human members ofST6 going into Iran to confirm the notes and find the truth, outright confirms that there was a lot more than what the public knew about the truth behind the nukings.
• Lightning Bruiser: fast enough to Flash Step, hits like naval cannons, and tough enough to resist Damon's anti-Abyssal .80caliber revolver rounds.
• Mad Scientist: Damon finds him at the bottom-most floor of Whiskey Hotel, in one of the two laboratory rooms there, where Blackwood is working at a large computer terminal hooked up to the stasis cells that the fleet girls are all imprisoned inside. Blackwood goes on to reveal to Damon that he plans to use his ship girls to build up a personal army that will be loyal only to him by personally impregnating the ship girls in order to reestablish international American hegemony.
• President Evil: While his true aim remains unknown, he's using very shady means to accomplish his stated goal of reestablishing American hegemony. He doesn't even properly care for his people while he's at it.
• Shoutout: his "meteor strike" attacks are one to Takamichi T. Takahata's hand iaijutsu techniques from Negima! Magister Negi Magi. Even the initial battle scene between him and Damon, in which he uses these techniques for the first time, mimics the battle scene seen in the manga during the school martial arts tournament in chapter 98 between Negi and Takahata very closely.
• Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide": he apparently issues an executive order for all United States personnel to begin rounding up mutated people to execute them to eliminate any chances of people having strong powers borne from their mutations to stop him.

Eagle Clinton

The CEO of Lukenstor, the largest aerospace corporation in the Americas. He eventually replaces Blackwood as the 48th President of the United States, following Damon's assassination of Blackwood.

• The Chessmaster: He plans to overthrow Blackwood, and eventually succeeds, and he has fingers in many, many pies.
• Expy: of Eagle Douglas from "Daiteikoku".
• Must Have Coffee: seems to be quite a big fan of coffee, as the recent chapters are frequently depicting him drinking it. Given that the times at which he's depicted being up, along with his inevitably heavy workload as the new President trying to manage both the clean-up of the country and juggling international alliances with other countries abroad, this might be justified.
• The Team Benefactor: ever since they first get into contact with the Combined Fleet, Eagle has faithfully lent his company's support to supply the fleet with what they need to achieve their successes. He's given them everything from firearms, supplies, and replacement ship guns to a low-orbit attack satellite armed with a laser cannon and even additional ship girls.
• Teen Genius: it's implied that he took over the role of CEO of Lukenstor in his late teens. And while for the events of the story itself he is no longer a teenager, it must be noted that he's become president in his early twenties.
• The Usurper: while Eagle himself doesn't directly cause Blackwood's death, he has been planning with other significant figures in the Federal government plotting Blackwood's demise and, when things go awry, assists Damon and his crew to carry out the assassination for him to take the presidency.

Katherine Kovalevskaya

A sixteen-year-old girl who's the newest leader of the Russian Federation, following the latest coup d'etat.

• An Arm and a Leg: loses her right hand that contained her mind-control jewel when Damon blasts it off with one of his massive revolvers.
• Captain Ersatz: one to Katherine in Daiteikoku. All of her cabinet members as introduced in chapter 355 are also named after generals and characters in the Soviet faction in the game.
• Badass Longcoat: she wears a big black cape that's red underneath.
• Icy Blue Eyes: fits well with her Russian ethnicity and her bitingly curt demeanor.
• Iron Lady: sixteen years old and controls the government.
• Iron Woobie: even though she positively loses her shit when Damon confronts her in Moscow, not to mention losing her hand in the process, a few days later she's right back to business, even attending the second Transatlantic Alliance conference like she'd never met Damon.
• Mineral MacGuffin: her right hand contains a red jewel embedded in the back of the hand, and in chapter 346, she appears to draw on the jewel's power to mind-control the former Prime Minister to seize control of the Kremlin. She eventually loses it when Damon shoots her hand off.
• Proper Tights with a Skirt: wears full-length pantyhose underneath her purple dress.

SEAL Team Six

Not the original US Navy SEAL unit, which was disbanded and is Most Definitely Not reconstituted as DEVGRU, but an American black ops unit reusing the name who, among others, developed the F.L.E.E.T Project. This folder is for those who aren't already part of the Combined Fleet.

• All There in the Manual: the activities and work of Seal Team Six can be typified in this story's stealth prequel, Naraku no Hana.
• Cape Busters: They had eventually evolved into a counter-paranormal force - Sanford describes his unit specifically as a "counter-psionics" unit.
• Child Soldiers: They started their training when they were kids.
• Legacy Character: in this case, the entire unit of Seal Team 6. Sanford mentions that the actual, historic Seal Team Six did indeed disband on schedule, and that his Seal Team Six was merely borrowing the name to give them extra confidentiality. And then the name gets reused again for the first four American shipgirls, which causes some confusion down the line.
• Magic from Technology: their unit's main responsibility. Sanford eventually reveals that during the short time that it was active, its members worked tirelessly to gather data on magic throughout the world to better prepare themselves against paranormal threats around the world, and that he and Big, another Seal Team Six member, used this data to help them build the original ship girl construct to make the F.L.E.E.T. Project a success.
• State Sec: They didn't answer to the US military or even the usual government chain of command, but rather a specific Federal division. According to the stealth prequel, this division was known as Third Echelon.
• Super Team: heavily subverted; only two members of the team were known to distinctly have superpowers, Losira and Hank. But considering that everyone in the team, regardless of their ability to wield superpowers, was in his/her teens and were Child Soldiers, it at least makes everyone who aren't the aforementioned Badass Normals.
• The Team: subverted; they started out completing operations together, but up until the nuclear war, as they got older and more experienced, they started operating individually or in smaller groups so that the team could do more things in the same period of time.

Sanford ("Meathook")

Damon's godfather who worked on the F.L.E.E.T Project.

• Boom, Headshot!: gets smacked in the nose by a flying weapons crate that gives him a bloody nose.
• Captain Ersatz: One of Sanford, a character in the Madness Combat series. Anything that's a stand-out quirk of Sanford's in the animation, Sanford in this story's probably got too in some shape or form.
• Didn't See That Coming: says this to Damon when they find out for themselves that the fleet's accidentally taken out the bridge that they were meaning to use to cross over to the other side of the naval yard at Norfolk with their opening bombardment during their assault.
• Dirty Old Man: Frequently makes ribald remarks at Damon's expense.
• Don't Make Me Destroy You: threatens this to the fleet when events begin fraying general conduct levels. He makes it clear that he's nowhere near as lenient as Damon was.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: when Fusou says that Sanford might need some time to deliberate on recent events, he shows up not long after.
• Genre Savvy: in chapter 299, he calls Damon "Mister Faceless Harem Anime Protagonist."
• Hidden Depths: chapters 224 and 225 reveal that Sanford was an active part of a nameless project that used the first generation of Shiratsuyu-Class destroyers as guinea pigs to give birth to the second generation of Shiratsuyu-Class destroyers.
  • and as the plot develops, Damon and co. realize that Sanford knows a lot more about the circumstances surrounding the fleet than he seems to be willing to reveal. It's clear that Sanford is of the "if no one asks me, I don't need to say anything" mentality, so Damon has to ask very specific things about the ship girls in order to learn more about them, and even then Sanford isn't guaranteed to cooperate.
• Holding Back the Phlebotinum: suggests to Damon that the girls who've received powers from his YRC should restrain themselves from using them to avoid the Abyssals finding out and strengthening themselves to counter them. Coincidentally, Sendai gets this idea first before him, but they think of this independently.
  • Following the events of Operation South Town, he has Damon rescind the order and have him focus on making contracts with as many of the girls as he can and getting them trained on using their new powers properly, due to what happened during the op and what it could mean in the fleet's upcoming engagements with the Abyssals.
• Interservice Rivalry: as all of Seal Team Six are, naturally, Navy SEAL's, Sanford calls Blackwood's Delta Force soldiers amateurs, a reference to the historic Real Life rivalry between the two organizations, and also pokes fun at the Marines.
• Interrupted Suicide: stops Murasame from drowning herself just in time, and judging by Murasame's exposure to Abyssalized navitasium cubes, he has reason to believe that perhaps the Abyssals might be to blame.
• Japanese Honorifics: as a result of his developer status within the F.L.E.E.T. Project, the ship girls acknowledge this by addressing him as "sensei".
• Lampshade Hanging: in chapter 97, Sanford makes a point to indicate the Mildly Military tendencies of the fleet (and perhaps to Kantai Collection in general), saying that the ship girls would never get away with their usual conduct in an actual, proper navy.
• Mad Scientist: Chapters 224 and 225 reveal he was involved in the things done to the first generation ship girls, and not exactly regretful about it.
  • after he finds out that Shigure has had sex with and received magical energy from Damon,, Sanford expresses his deep interest in seeing just how powerful the Shiratsuyu-Class's powers can get, should they develop their relationships with Damon.
• Morton's Fork: what Operation Dualsight boils down to. When Abyssal reinforcements show up at the site of the grounded freighters carrying vast quantities of valuable ship supplies, the fleet needs to decide between withdrawing to cut their losses or to press forward to secure those supplies. Sanford orders them to continue, but as expected of this trope, it comes at a huge price.
• Mythology Gag: when the Inner Circle Agents show up in Germany to assist the NDP, Sanford and Chuck immediately gun them down, a double-reference to both the stealth prequel and the web animation, as they were common enemies of Sanford's in both.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: if Sanford drops his smirk at any point, it's got to be something worth paying attention to.
• Psychotic Smirk: a big fan of this. It's practically his trademark physical feature.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: he's kept the S&W 629 Stealth Hunter that Damon picked up during the Coalition wars as his sidearm ever since. This is true to his depiction in Madness Combat, in which he's seen using a revolver.
• Shipper on Deck: wants Damon to hook up with the Shiratsuyu-Class. See the second entry in Mad Scientist above.
• Shoutout: in chapter 299, he goes in depth about the Shiratsuyu-Class's protocols: they're basically computerized magic spell frameworks derived from an ancient magic technique called the Unrestricted Spell method.
• Steel Ear Drums: averted in chapter 293, when Damon discharges his Desert Eagle right in his face, shooting slightly wide right. Sanford complains to him that Damon should've at least let him wear some ear protection.=
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: with Damon, mainly, though it's mostly from Damon's side and his animosity towards him rather than from Sanford's side.
• Troll: Trolls Damon with every chance he's got, even during life-threatening missions.
• Unperson: inflicts this onto Suzukaze are he banishes her from the fleet for a severe account of misconduct.
• You Watch Too Much X: tells Benjamin this when the latter wonders aloud if Murasame managed to somehow pull her anchor out from in between her breasts.

Deimos D. Polchow

Damon's now-deceased father. As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that there was a lot more about him than meets the eye.

• Genius Bruiser: While every member of SEAL Team Six was supposed to be both a special forces operator and a technical expert, Deimos was a master even for them. The Slugs and several ship girls might not even exist without his personal contributions.
• Posthumous Character: Dead as of the story proper.
• Shrouded in Myth: Every reveal involving him just makes Damon and the readers question more and more what they think they really know about him.

Chuck ("Sioux")

One of the members of SEAL Team Six (see below) who worked on the F.L.E.E.T Project.

• Badass Bookworm: he's seen reading on an electronic book reader...and always caries two primary weapons and a sidearm while most other members of the fleet, even the ship girls, only carry two weapons total.
• Determinator: a standout example among the humans in the story. It's a 25.
• Gentle Giant: not only is he tall and burly, he's also apparently very friendly with the Akatsuki-Class destroyers.
• Long-Range Fighter: in all of the loadouts he picks for missions in the story, Chuck always has at least a marksman rifle to engage enemies from afar.
• Only One Name: If he has a surname or patronymic, or if Chuck is his real name at all, it hasn't been revealed. Even his stat sheet doesn't say.
• Perpetual Smiler: not the bad kind, though. And while not allthe time, Chuck is never seen angry. It's worth nothing that Chuck is the only member of the fleet who possesses a negative insanity rating.
• Shoutout: in chapter 279, Chuck is seen reading Full Metal Daemon Muramasa.
• Sniper Rifle: for Operation Sandblast, he uses an LWRC R.E.P.R. Spiral-Fluted DMR to provide overwatch for the rest of the team.
• You No Take Candle: speaks somewhat like this, presumably because of his Indian (not Native American) heritage.

Lauren Sawatari

• Assault Rifles: she's seen using an LWRC M-6 Personal Security Detail Carbine for Operation Sandblast.
• Best Friend: with Losira before the nuclear war. And in chapter 273, they reunite via Damon's YRC in Ushio, when Losira is able to freely move from Damon's subconscious into Ushio's body if Ushio so allows.
• Chekhov's Gunman: she and Jeannie run into Damon by complete accident when the latter arrives with some of his ship girls at Mr. Araki's place in New Chicago. She even looks at him and says he looks familiar, but she doesn't recognize why immediately. She eventually realizes that Damon resembles her best friend Losira and tracks him down to the mansion he's bought for the fleet with Jeannie's help to see if he really is her late friend's son, which he is.
• Cunning Linguist: Lauren can speak Japanese and English fluently, and when they go to England to support the Royalist movement, she even adopts a perfect English accent to help herself less conspicuous. In the stealth prequel, Lauren is said to speak many more languages than the two she's spoken in this story.
• Emergency Transformation: had to do this to her daughter before she died of complications at birth in order to save her life.
• Fugitive Arc: had one of her own with her daughter Jeannie, as they were hiding from the Federal government for three years before the start of the story in New Chicago.
• Glamorous Wartime Singer: except without the glamor and without the crowds of soldiers as her audience. She's taught herself how to sing, and she even taught (or at least inspired Losira) to sing too. Even now, when she's in her thirties, she can still apparently sing very well.
• Mama Bear: after she gets rescued from the White House, she joins the Black Ops to recover her daughter, who's also being held in Whiskey Hotel with the rest of the fleet.
• The Power of Love: in chapter 298, she discusses at length the importance of the Shiratsuyu-Class knowing that there are people who still do love them for who they are.
• Shoutout:
  • the songs she's seen singing in the story are Touhou Project doujin songs. Considering the stealth prequel, this makes...not a lot of sense.
  • her rescue from the White House closely resembles the rescue of Captain Price in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, complete with Iowa handing Lauren her own M-45 pistol, a modernized M1911.
• Target Spotter: acts as one for Irene during Operation Lockpick.

Losira Sawatari Polchow

Damon's now-deceased mother.

• The Ace: along with her brother Hank; the two of them were undoubtedly the two strongest members of Seal Team Six back in its active years, mainly due to their supernatural powers.
• All Just a Dream: she only appears starting with chapter 172 in Damon's dreams...but in Baltimore, with the help of the reality marble in the city, she becomes more than just a dream.
• Ax-Crazy: demonstrates this very well at Baltimore when she emerges in Ushio, and a Blood Knight, to boot.
• Body Snatcher: as a result of Ushio's contract with Damon, Losira has now become this because she can leap from Damon's subconscious directly into Ushio's body so long as Damon and Ushio are physically near each other and take control of her body. However, Ushio can reassume control of her own body if she thinks Losira is going overboard with something.
• Blessed with Suck: She considered Hellflower to be her own worst nightmare.
• Captain Ersatz: one to Alma Wade from the First Encounter Assault Recon series.
• Continuity Cameo: she is one of the main characters from the stealth prequel.
• Exotic Eye Designs: her right eye, Hellflower, is described to have a design of a nuclear radiation hazard symbol, with three black prongs revolving around a center black dot in her pupil.
• Eyepatch of Power: Wore one over her right eye to hide Hellflower. It's even got a yin-yang emblem sewn into it to correspond with the one on Damon's cap.
• Hidden Depths: she states both for her and her brother Hank, they needed to go through a lot in order to gain their powers.
• Homage: Her Hellflower eye is named after one of the opening theme songs to Higurashi: When They Cry, Naraku no Hana.
• Mama Bear: Very much so at Baltimore, going on a brief Roaring Rampage of Revenge to protect her son.
• My Greatest Failure: slowly begins to consider her death as this because she was never able to be any degree of a mother to her son.
• Mythology Gag: she references characters from the Touhou Project series, a nod to the stealth prequel.
• Playing with Fire: Hellflower allows her to create and manipulate black flames that have an uncanny resemblance to Suzukaze's Darkwater flames.
• Playing with Puppets: in Baltimore, Hellflower allows Losira to attack the mutants and convert them into monsters of her own that do her bidding.
• Shipper on Deck: in chapter 316, she meets with Umikaze and Kawakaze, who somehow end up in Damon's dreamworld with her and Damon, and upon learning of the course of events just before Damon and the girls entered the dreamworld, Losira actively tries to get Damon to hook up with the two.
• Shoutout: gives one to Rainbow Six Siege in chapter 173 when she asks Damon what an artist and a sniper have in common. She's even toting Glaz's OTs-03 marksman rifle while she asks her son this.
  • an obscure one: Losira's name is taken from a Korean professional Starcraft II player, Losira.
  • her Blink is one to the Stalkers' researchable Blink teleport in Starcraft II.
• Teleport Spam: subverted; her Blink ability lets her teleport a short distance only once, and the ability must recharge after a set period of time before she can use it again. But in Naraku no Hana, she finds that, due to the sheer concentration of magic energy in the atmosphere in Gensokyou, Losira can blink up to four times in quick succession. She's also seen using this ability in some of the dream sequences in Damon's dreamworld, when she's helping him train his control over his Yellow Reality Cancel power.

"Big"

• The Ghost: Downplayed; he has briefly appeared in Franklin's flashback, but nowhere else, not in present day at any rate.
• Mad Scientist: He was involved in the same morally suspect project involving the first-generation Shiratsuyu-Class as Sanford.
• Shrouded in Myth: Very little is known about him or his current fate both In-Universe and out. The one person who might know, Sanford, is also the person who has the most reason to obfuscate the truth, which is why Benjamin and Damon don't just ask directly. Even after Sanford spills the beans on his last known movements, it remains unclear what he's up to.

"Kane"

• Sniper Rifles: she's introduced carrying a KAC M-110 SASS on her back.
• Tomboyish Ponytail: works as a Colonel in the Australian special forces and wears her hair up in a ponytail.

Hank

• The Ace: along with his sister Losira.
• Expy: of Hank Wimbleton, the main protagonist of the Madness Combat series, but perhaps in name only.
• The Ghost: more so than Big, he's always been given passing mentions, but never has he once showed up in the story himself in person.
• Hidden Depths: it's revealed with Seal Team Six's operation in Iran to investigate the A.A.H.W.'s pre-war hidden nuclear sites that Hank most likely had a hand in the launches of the nuclear missiles that destroyed the world.
• Perspective Flip: at the end of chapter 384, very briefly, the narration changes to first person, heavily implied to be Hank's own thoughts as he contributes to the nuclear world war.
• Posthumous Character: given that he's never contacted the rest of his team after the nuclear armageddon, the rest of his teammates who are still alive assume that he's dead after all these years, but Sanford is more cautious, saying that, since they've never found his body when the team went to Iran to investigate the hidden nuclear missile sites, he could actually still be alive. Just where he would be now if he was, however, is a tough mystery.
• Shoutout: the description of Hank's Super-Reflexes is one to the Point Man.
• Super-Reflexes: one of Hank's skills that Sanford describes was his incredible reflexes, to the point where in Hank's perspective, the world around him would slow down if he triggered his reflexes to react to a situation.

Warning! Unavoidable Walking Spoilers past this point! No spoiler markings will be used from here on!

The Inner Circle

A terrorist group with outsize influence and resources.

• N.G.O. Superpower: They have international reach and way more resources than they should have. During Operation London they deploy enough mooks to give the British Army trouble. In chapter 51 they're briefly mentioned among a list of major power holders, the rest of which are nations.
• The Remnant: The Inner Circle was born from what was left of their pre-war predecessor, the Advanced Administration of the Holy War (AAHW).
• You Are Number 6: Agents are only identified by numbers.

"The Sheriff"

The apparent leader of the Inner Circle, who affects a cowboy persona.

• The Team Normal: In chapter 293, Sanford claims he was the only member of the AAHW that didn't have a supernatural power.

"The Abyssal/Xenolith"

A mysterious higher-up in the Inner Circle.

• Authority Equals Asskicking: He is high in the Inner Circle hierarchy and his first appearance has him boredly slapping aside RPGs.
• Bad Liar: He considers himself this in chapter 238.
• Dragon with an Agenda: In chapter 235, it is speculated that his collaboration with Blackwood may not be something done with the knowledge or approval of the rest of the Inner Circle. Solidified in chapter 238. Similarly, in chapter 297, a comment by Imwalle about a belted fellow telling him about shipgirl EMP weakness strongly suggests he has dealings with Whitewater.
• No Shirt, Long Jacket: He doesn't wear a top under his coat.
• The Spook: He is a mystery even to his fellows and subordinates.
• The Stoic: He almost always appears bored, even in the face of mortal danger.

The Abyssals

Our not-so-favourite usual adversaries, reimagined as an Henchmen Race for the Inner Circle.

• Evil Counterpart Race: The Re-class claims to Shigure and Yuudachi that Abyssals are just evil, uglier-looking ship girls.
• It Runs on Nonsensoleum: In-Universe, when Benjamin and Mr Araki get their hands on Abyssal code, they find that it doesn't make any sense and really shouldn't be able to work.
• Noodle Incident: in chapter 303, a Ta-Class battleship mentions someone called "the Demon Angel", and the Wo-Class she's speaking to reacts by rolling her eyes and telling her not to remind her of such a time and person.
• Zerg Rush: Like in the games, Abyssals below the Demon/Princess level are individually inferior to ship girls of the same class, but there are a lot more of them to go around.

Re-Class

• Recurring Boss: Is fought three times before it is finally defeated.
  • she does come back in chapter 410, but her dialogue implies that she's a newly constructed Re-Class, and she gets annihilated by a Demon Angel-triggered Yuudachi.

Seaplane Tender Princess

• Defector from Decadence: In chapter 310, it is revealed that she has been freed from Abyssal control and is secretly staying with the French.
  • eventually, by the time of the second Transatlantic Alliance, she officially becomes part of the La Royale, the French ship girl fleet, to provide her Abyssal strength that will help compensate for the French fleet's lack of numbers.
• In-Series Nickname: she goes by Charlotte, according to the narration. Indeed, it would be a mouthful to call her "Seaplane Tender Princess" every single time she were to be addressed.

Others

Franklin Roosevelt Kevinson

The former admiral of the first-generation Shiratsuyu-class and the current admiral of the American ship girls.

• Abnormal Ammo: whatever Kevinson is using to shoot his double-barreled shotgun, it's shattering Damon's shields extremely easily and hurts Jeannie quite badly.
• An Arm and a Leg: He lost his right arm and both legs when NAS Pensacola, where he was stationed at while still in active duty, was attacked by an unknown force. Notably, these are the exact same limbs that his original counterpart lost in the Abyssal surprise attack at the end of that story. In this story however, he's been granted cybernetic replacements for the missing limbs courtesy of Lukenstor Defense Systems.
• Coat Cape: apparently wears his Admiral's coat this way, even while fighting, which may beg the question of how it stays on while he dashes around like he does.
• Eyepatch of Power: not a conventional eyepatch, but instead layers of gauze over his left eye.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: In chapter 293, Sanford says that he and Big made the mistake of thinking Kevinson would just be some indignant but ultimately powerless nobody who would just disappear once his part in Moebius Four came to an end.
• Gory Discretion Shot: he's described to raise his Scythe to chop Damon's head off, but in the next scene, Damon is still alive with his head on his shoulders.
• Homage: A Captain Ersatz of Gehrman of Bloodborne - scythe, gun, clothes, and, of course, the Hunter's Dream. Even the dialogue he gives Damon matches the one Gehrman gives the Hunter at the end of the game, should they choose to resist his offer.
• Magical Eye: It's the exact same as Losira's Hellflower. When questioned by Damon, he reveals that he received this eye from Lukenstor to replace the one he lost, which raises the question of not only how Lukenstor managed to obtain Losira's Hellflower eye, but also why.
• Mirror Character: compare Kevinson to Damon: both are Admirals of their respective fleets, one former and one current. Both have special mechanized augmentations supplied to them by Lukenstor - Kevinson has cybernetic limbs, while Damon has a powered exosuit. Both have scythes as weapons - Kevinson an actual bladed scythe, Damon a microgun named "Scythe". And finally, both have relationships with Samidare - Kevinson with the mother, Damon with the daughter.
• Obfuscating Disability: Damon and Jeannie meet him for the first time seeing him seated in his wheelchair. But just like the character to whom he pays homage, Kevinson soon shows that he doesn't actually need it at all.
• Older Than They Look: his initial description seems to indicate this, that despite his late thirties, he may look much older.
• Unorthodox Reload: reloads his shotgun one-handed with a special reloading node on his left cybernetic leg so that he can not only reload one-handed but also speedily get his gun back into the fight.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: he's seen with a double-barreled shotgun strapped to his side when Damon meets him for the first time.
• Shoutout: his scythe is one to Gordeau's, as the description of its colors being purple and black (albeit with a white blade) matches the one that it's shouting out. The handle also reads "DEVOURER", but that's technically not the scythe's name. The fact that both Kevinson and Gordeau have special left eyes and are seen with their right hands in their coat pockets can be considered one, too.
• Sinister Scythe: wields a huge mechanical scythe called "Burial At Sea". Meaning that both Damon and Kevinson have scythes...
• Tragic Keepsake: that scarf he's wearing very well may be Yuudachi's second remodel scarf, seeing that !Samidare wears Shigure's second remodel ornament as a hair pin to keep her hair in a ponytail.
• We Have Reserves: Is entirely willing to let those he considers expendable throw themselves into danger before bothering to get his own hands dirty.
• Rivals Team Up: he and !Samidare join the fleet during Operation Goldmine and fight together.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: It is telling that his complaint about !Samidare indirectly causing Damon's premature death at Cape Canaveral was not that he died at all, but that he died before he had finished playing his part in the plan.

Metal Slug and Slug Gunner

Sapient vehicles apparently created by Deimos and loaded with ship girl programming.

• Arm Cannon: how the Slug Gunner deploys its secondary weapons.
• Artificial Intelligence: more so this than the ship girls are.
• Big Damn Heroes: the Slug Gunner pulls one of its own off, landing on and crushing to death an Abyssal cruiser to defend Suzuya and Kumano at the end of chapter 156.
• Captain Ersatz: with a few modifications to make them fit into the story, both the Metal Slug and the Slug Gunner have practically been transplanted into the story wholesale from the Metal Slug series.
• Lightning Bruiser: while normally very slow, the Slug Gunner can become one if it decides to use its thruster pack for drastically increased mobility.
• Mighty Glacier: They are heavily armed but, barring fuel-ravenous short boosts, plod at a painfully ponderous pace.
• More Dakka: The Metal Slug has a pair of gatlings, one mounted on each flank of the vehicle, for use on soft targets and as point defense. The Slug Gunner has an arm-borne autocannon that fires depleted uranium rounds. And that's not counting their main guns.
• Pile Bunker: the Slug Gunner has one, an explosive-tipped one at that.
• Walking Tank: the Slug Gunner, but it can also crouch down to enter tank mode for increased mobility.
• Those Two Guys: with tanks, in this case. Ever since they meet one another in Germany, the Metal Slug and the Slug Gunner haven't ever been depicted apart from each other.

Yukari Yakumo

The one and only Gap Hag.

• Adaptation Personality Change: given that Ambience: A Fleet Symphony and Naraku no Hana are set in alternate universes and seeing that Sanford and the members of Seal Team Six behave pretty much on par with how they did in the latter, it's safe to assume that the Touhou characters also behave similarly between the two stories. In Yukari's case, she's a much more serious and hardworking version of herself who doesn't actually sleep half the day away and spends her time doing things while not leaving absolutely everything to her shikigami Ran.
• Alternate Universe: Naraku no Hana firmly establishes her fanonically malleable relationship with Maribel Hearn as her mother.
• Awakening the Sleeping Giant: in Naraku no Hana, she springs into action when she detects a foreign energy in Gensokyou's atmosphere that is slowly causing the Hakurei Barrier to dissolve.
• Big Damn Heroes: Without her intervention, Samidare would have died when !Samidare refused to let her emerge from her womb.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: averted. Yukari is all business and perfectly rational in this universe, with a definite agenda that she has in mind.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: averted. Yukari is most definitely not portrayed as lazy in this universe, considering what kind of agenda she's got. Then again, no one knows what it entails.
• Brought Down to Normal: in Naraku no Hana, if residents of Gensokyou travel to the contemporary outside world, their powers are scaled down to a bare miminum due to the lack of magic in the atmosphere. This phenomenon applies to everyone, including Yukari herself. This is why she forces Reimu to learn how to shoot a gun before they venture out.
• Cryptic Conversation: averted; she isn't known in this universe to speak vaguely.
• The Gods Must Be Lazy: averted. Basically any trope related to laziness with Yukari can be counted as averted by this point.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: averted. In A:AFS, she was actively involved in the F.L.E.E.T. Project and directly intervenes in the birthing of the second-generation Shiratsuyu-Class destroyers.
• Heavy Sleeper: averted. She apparently has a regular human's sleep cycle.
• I'm a Humanitarian: possibly averted. Since she's not known in this universe to spirit people out of the outside world into Gensokyou, that would imply that Yukari herself doesn't rely on human flesh to sustain herself.
• Immortal Immaturity: subverted. While she's usually pretty serious and down-to-Earth much of the time, in Naraku no Hana, she can have some amusing exchanges with Reimu, like when Reimu asks her in the first chapter where she managed to get so much money.
  Yukari: "...it is not as if anyone will notice..."
• I'm Taking Her Home with Me!: averted; it's implied that instead of frequently bringing people from the outside world into Gensokyou, she herself goes out to visit the outside world and learn more about it. In the case of A:AFS, Sanford says that she did this frequently because she was very interested in the direction that modern human technology would take and its influence on magic.
• Lady of War: is still this in this universe, through and through.
• The Omniscient: on top of her canon knowledge and information, she is heavily invested into modern world technologies - in Naraku no Hana, she's the one who teaches Reimu the basics of firearm training, and in A:AFS, she lends her help to Seal Team Six when they first invented Smartsteel.
• Omniscient Morality License: averted. Yukari in this universe gives off no serious sense of screwing with things for the sake of trolling and acts with firmly good intentions.
• Opposites Attract: taken a step further in Naraku no Hana, in which Reimu and Yukari appear to be more than just work partners and/or mentor and student, but they're also very close friends.
• Oxymoronic Being: taken a step further in this universe, as due to Yukari's previously mentioned Alternate Universe changes, Yukari may not even harbor any ill intent towards humans at all despite being a youkai. In fact, Sanford even specifically states that Losira worked with Yukari in the outside world many times, even in A:AFS's world, pre-nuclear apocalypse.
• Perpetual Smiler: averted thoroughly. In fact, she's described to be the exact opposite - not smiling at all unless there's a good reason for her to.
• Portal Network: in Naraku no Hana, due to the laws of atmospheric magic energy, she can only open portals to specific locations around the world. One of them, fittingly, leads right into the courtyard of a Shinto temple in Japan.
• Schrödinger's Butterfly: averted. In this universe, the outside world and Gensokyou are firmly established as two separate dimensions in the same world independent of Yukari's machinations.
• Super-Empowering: Sanford speculates that she might be the one who gave Franklin and !Samidare their powers.
• Thinking Up Portals: can gap herself at will right into the outside world. Gapping herself back into Gensokyou, however, is a different story.
• Trickster Mentor: averted. It doesn't seem like she tricks Reimu much in anything in Naraku no Hana.
• Troll: subverted. She likes a good joke here and there, but not to the extent that her canon or even Fanon versions do.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: is this in A:AFS. She gets directly involved in the F.L.E.E.T. Project, and from Sanford's testimony, it can be implied that Yukari probably wants to know how well the ship girls would perform once constructed. Then again, no one knows what she's going to do with this knowledge, but given the author's previous depictions of her, it's probably safe to assume that Yukari's going to act in the best interest of humanity and/or the world.
• Wild Card: No one knows what her agenda is.

Yumemi Okazaki

The strawberry-loving professor at Todai.

• Adaptation Personality Change: given that Ambience: A Fleet Symphony and Naraku no Hana are set in alternate universes and seeing that Sanford and the members of Seal Team Six behave pretty much on par with how they did in the latter, it's safe to assume that the Touhou characters also behave similarly between the two stories. In Yumemi's case, she's a subverted version of herself, only a slightly unhinged but otherwise rational and "normal" human being.
• Alternate Universe: According to Naraku no Hana, she's a very famous professor at Todai (Tokyo University), where she works not only as a professor of advanced physics but also as a magic researcher, much like how Sanford described his own team in chapter 293, who works with Maribel Hearn and Renko Usami in their own magic research club, the Secret Sealing Club.
• Improbable Age: probably still maintains it, at least as far as what Naraku no Hana describes - though, it's likely that she was older than 18 by the time of the nuclear war.
• Mad Scientist: according to Sanford, she was the leader of the the classified F.L.E.E.T. Project branch based in Okinawa that had been assigned to come up with a workable, feasible ship girl archetype. Later events also had her working with Sanford and Big in the Moebius series of sub-projects, and Kevinson's memories from chapter 228 confirm Sanford's testimony.
• Magic from Technology: subverted; like Seal Team Six, Yumemi also researches magic to gather data, though it's never explained why she does, much less what she's doing with the data in Naraku no Hana. Given her usual persona, she may simply be doing it For Science! - but here in A:AFS, due to her involvement in the F.L.E.E.T. Project with Sanford and Big, this trope is maintained.
• Teen Genius: subverted; she may be in her early twenties in the timeframe of Naraku no Hana.
• They Called Me Mad!: averted. In Naraku no Hana, Yumemi is actually a well-known, well-respected professor at one of the most prestigious universities in Japan. This being said, there has been no comment made on her canon stance regarding magic, or whether her colleagues and the rest of the university committee and/or staff tolerate her magic theories, let alone know about them.
• Trademark Favorite Food: fulfills the fanon trait of loving strawberries.

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