Ambience: A Fleet Symphony is a very lengthy fanfic, and for some, it may be better use of time to simply go through a summary of events rather than spending potentially months on reading the entire story, especially if one finds that, some fifty chapters in, they realize that they hate the main character too much to continue reading and drop it altogether. The story can be broken up into arcs, though these are not officially named and are simply referred to as such throughout the tropes pages for this fanfic for simplicity's sake. Below you can find the arcs listed in chronological order:
Damon Polchow, a seventeen-year-old boy, is the sole survivor of an American government-run genetics program called the Genesis Thesis Project, whose goal was to develop a new sub-species of human beings who would be born resistant to radiation but ultimately failed. This was an early response to the nuclear World War III that broke out in the year 2010 and raged for about a month and left the world in apocalyptic ruins, and Damon, having lost his parents at the young age of two, has lived and grown up in the hardships of nuclear apocalypse, almost exclusively by himself and having to take care of and fend for himself.
While living and working in Chicago, he and a buddy discover that a developer involved with the F.L.E.E.T. Project is being airlifted to Chicago, so Damon tracks him down, kidnaps him, and interrogates him for the information about any remaining ship girls that are in the United States. The developer points Damon in the direction of Houston, Texas, where one ship girl should still be remaining, as her shipment had taken a brief detour to a developer's former home in the city before making the last leg of her journey to the Naval Weapons Station at Charleston, South Carolina. This is where the story begins, with Damon entering Houston after a solitary journey down the American midwest on foot to reach Houston, scavenging for food and supplies and fighting his way through irradiated wildlife and roaming bandits and rogues who now mostly rule the American South.
Damon succeeds in finding the ship girl, and her name is Murakumo
. At first, Murakumo doesn't recognize Damon as her proper Admiral, since she's been left deactivated and forgotten about for all this time and doesn't realize just how much time has passed in her dormancy, so Damon, armed with a hacking nanoknife that his buddy from before has built for him, hacks Murakumo by stabbing her in the head, changing what's called her "command prompt", a program that controls who she recognizes as her commanding officer, to himself. Obviously this doesn't sit well with Murakumo, but after learning of what's happened while she was dormant, she begrudgingly joins him in going to Charleston so that they can get her her ship weapons that are there, since she doesn't really have any other choice.
Their journey initially takes them from Houston to Mobile, Mississippi, where they stay for a night. They meet Baxter Harrison, the mayor of Mobile, with whom they make their acquaintance. Harrison points them in the direction of the old American World War II-era battleship, now a museum ship, that has survived even the nuclear war and still sits moored at its dock, though it's now designated off-limits to most people following the nuclear war due to constant attempts to salvage the ship for scrap over the years. With permission, Damon and Murakumo board the ship, and Murakumo receives a mysterious set of Morse codes that lead her to the captain's room of the ship, in which they find inside a small locker a headset and a cube. They discover that the headset allows Damon to communicate directly with Murakumo like two-way radio and that the cube can be loaded into Murakumo's stomach like a compact disc and give her access to a new power called the Waterfall Shield, a shield that can deflect bullets and other incoming forms of attack.
Armed with these conveniently placed goodies, the two then set off for Charleston again, but they stop by the city of Montgomery, Alabama, because the city is occupied with bandits and they need to fight their way through. But by a great stroke of luck, while hunting down bandits, Damon and Murakumo stumble across another crate that contains a ship girl, and this time they discover Amatsukaze, whom Damon hacks to get her to join his posse. Now armed with two destroyers, Damon and co. continue on to Charleston, freeing a large group of child slaves imprisoned at the former Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, in the process before reaching Savannah, Georgia. They pick up two little girls along the way who were in the middle of being kidnapped by bandits planning on selling the two of them into slavery and take them over to Savannah with them, and this rescue earns them a ticket inside the large survivor camp there, where Damon is able to buy gas from the survivors to refuel their truck.
They then continue onto Charleston to reach the Naval Weapons Station, where they then find Mutsu, the fleet's first battleship, left abandoned at the station due to the fact that radiation heavily blankets the area and has prevented looters from coming in and disturbing the military base. With Mutsu now, they then return to Savannah to see if they can spend the night there, but they find that the survivor camp is under attack, and they help the survivors fight off the bandits. The survivors also report that they've found another crate after going through the defeated bandits' vehicles and supplies, which contains yet another ship girl, this time the submarine I-19, or Iku.
After spending the night at the Savannah survivor camp, Damon and his growing fleet leave to prepare for their assault on Atlanta, Georgia, where they believe several other ship girls are being held by the local faction leaders there, but first, they double back to Macon to see if they can scavenge more supplies to use for their planned assault on the city. However, they run into what turn out to be Atlanta faction soldiers, and when they free a prisoner from the soldiers who turns out to be a captured survivor of the survivor camp, they realize that Baxter Harrison from Mobile is actually in negotiations with the Atlanta faction to purchase ship girls from them, and Damon and co. arrive reach him too late, as his helicopter flies away from their grasp just in the nick of time. However, as the chopper flies away, they see the aircraft carrier Kaga standing next to Harrison, revealing that Kaga is one of the ship girls under Atlanta's control.
Damon decides to fly himself and his ship girls directly to Atlanta to give chase, now that they have physical evidence that Atlanta possesses ship girls whom Damon wants in his fleet and not the city's, and they fly directly to a local high school in Atlanta, gunning their way through several of the Atlanta faction's armed military helicopters before landing and proceeding to scavenge for supplies at the school's football field-turned-outdoor armory. But while they are taking what they want, Shimakaze shows up, sent to dispatch of Damon and his small fleet, and Amatsukaze, being the only one who can possibly match her sister's speed, duels her briefly but ferociously, managing to grab Shimakaze and torch her, but her unwillingness to go for the kill results in Shimakaze taking advantage and laying a critical blow onto her by plunging her hand and arm through Amatsukaze's gut, tearing her spine in half and disabling her. Damon takes matters into his own hands and tackles Shimakaze after Iku distracts her so that he can hack her, and he succeeds, bringing Shimakaze into their group.
Now with Shimakaze joining their side, Damon takes his ship girls over to the nearby suburbs, where they take refuge inside an abandoned house to evade the patrols send to retake the school at which they've landed and scavenged and recollect themselves. Amatsukaze insists that the leave her behind, as she is paralyzed from the gut down due to her fight with her sister Shimakaze and thus will only serve as dead weight, but Damon denies her request and continues on with the rest of the girls while carrying her all the while. They reach an old, abandoned shopping mall, and Damon sends the faster ship girls to lurk on the bottom floor of the mall while he, Mutsu, and Amatsukaze head up to the higher floors to assume sniper positions over a nearby enemy garrison, which they proceed to attack and destroy, but not before the garrison's soldiers fight back and blow up the upper floors of the mall in which Damon and the other two are with rockets and grenades, forcing all three of them to jump off the top floor. Damon injures himself on the landing, but it's not enough to stop him, and they regroup with the others at the garrison to take one of the garrison's armed vehicles and use it to take them further into the heart of the city.
They reach the Atlanta Congress Center building, where they fight their way through more Atlanta faction mercenaries and capture Harrison, who informs them that Kaga is located at a hospital nearby, so bringing Harrison with them so that they can take him back to Mobile, Damon and the fleet go to the hospital and track down Kaga inside a small ward, and when they find her, Kaga, being under the Atlanta faction's control, attacks Damon, but the ship girls come to his aid and pin her down long enough for Damon to hack her too, converting her to his side instead. There, they also find, however, a former F.L.E.E.T. Project developer who simply goes by his callsign of "Sanford", who introduces himself also as Damon's godfather, something Damon already knows somehow, because he believes that Sanford is the man at least in part responsible for his own father's death, as the two of them were teammates in the same special forces group, Seal Team Six. With the faction's forces descending upon them, Damon has no time to interrogate Sanford in the hospital and simply drags him along with them too, and together, they fight their way back to their helicopter at the school football field at which they'd landed to escape, but the delay that Amatsukaze causes because she's still injured and thus can't board the helicopter on her own ends up nearly killing Damon because he goes back for her and gets shot in the chest three times. He manages to muscle his way through the pain, fending off several attackers in the process, to get Amatsukaze and Rensouhou-kun on board while Sanford starts the chopper and flies them out of there just in time to head back to Mobile, and Damon collapses and falls unconscious inside the helicopter.
Upon reaching Mobile, Damon is treated for his wounds, and while waiting for him, Sanford makes his acquaintance with the fleet that Damon has managed to build up so far. He explains his circumstances and his activities over the years of the nuclear apocalypse, and he even reveals that he's personally had a hand in the designs of several ship girls, including Murakumo. When Damon wakes up, however, he almost immediately gets into a heated argument with his godfather, revealing to his ship girls the beef he's got with Sanford, an argument that gets broken up by the prospect of a hearty Southern-style dinner. After dinner, Sanford, armed with the knowledge of several areas that may still contain ship girls who still remain in dormancy because of the nuclear war, helps Damon plan their next move.
The next day, the fleet flies to Corpus Christi Naval Air Station in Texas, and it is there they find Shigure, Yuudachi, and Shoukaku. They also discover, while acquiring these three girls, that for some reason, the hostile soldiers they meet and fight here at the naval air station are Mexican soldiers, but they can't figure out why exactly they would be lurking in the naval air station and simply assume that they are just looters like everyone else who's been by the military base. They also find, to their shock, that in one of the helicopters that the Mexican soldiers had come in is a bag of navitasium cubes, and it's unknown how the Mexican soldiers have gotten their hands on a whole bag of the cubes, and why they would have them. Once they've gotten their three new ship girls and outfitted them with guns, they fly off for their next destination, taking the cubes with them, and with Sanford manning one of the Mexican soldiers' helicopters for some extra air support, because why not.
Their next destination is the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in New Orleans, which ends up not having any ship girls for them to find, so they simply fight their way back out through the warzone that is the Joint Reserve Base, with Sanford providing close air support from his own helicopter. They then fly over to their third and final location, the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Gulfport, Mississippi, where they discover that several men from Mobile were ordered by Harrison to recover the ship girls here before Damon and the fleet could get to them, but Damon lets the men go in exchange for leaving the ship girls behind so that he can activate them himself and add them to his own fleet. He acquires Samidare, Suzukaze, Haruna, and Amagi this way - Amagi is especially interesting, because this Amagi is supposed to be the personification of a ship girl who never even existed - at least, not as a complete warship. Sanford notes that Amagi's existence as a ship girl means that the F.L.E.E.T. Project has in fact produced ship girls under the radar, meaning that there may be more ship girls in existence that they may not expect.
Wanting to demand an explanation from Harrison as to why he continues to try to hamper his progress on finding more ship girls, Damon and his fleet arrive just in time to find that Mobile is going to be under imminent attack by two separate detachments of troops from Atlanta, one by land and one by sea, the latter of which is mainly composed of a modern US Navy destroyer sent to lay siege to Mobile from the Gulf of Mexico. Unwillingly, Damon deploys his fleet to handle both detachments at once, and the fleet defeats both prongs of the attack with ease. It is during this battle that Shigure and Yuudachi are emphasized using their "protocols", special abilities that are unique to them that give them powers that they can use at will to augment their prowess in battle. It is after the battle ends that Damon, needing to return to Chicago for some business, flies his fleet back up to the city, but when they arrive, he is confronted by a local marshal, arrested, and taken away to prison for his crime of kidnapping and interrogating the project developer from whom he'd extracted information about Murakumo, leaving the fleet without an Admiral and helpless, as none of them have been to Chicago before, naturally. Fortunately, Sanford has a contact in the city, and when Damon is taken away, he assumes temporary command of the fleet and directs them through the city.
After Damon gets carted away by the Chicago city police, Sanford calls up another limousine to pick him and the rest of the fleet up, and the Secretary of the city's provisional government, Hendsfield, arrives in said limousine to greet them, an acquaintance of Sanford's. They are taken into the heart of the city, during which time Sanford explains to the girls the situation going on in Chicago: being a major city that didn't suffer a nuclear strike during the war, and being in an optimal location in the Midwest, many refugees came to Chicago to restart their lives there, creating a divide between the rich and everyone else, with the rich residing in the walled and fortified heart of the city, known as "Inner Chicago". Once inside, Sanford and Hendsfield take the fleet to meet with the City Controller, another acquaintance of Sanford's and a former comrade of Sanford's from back in their special forces days, a Russian man named Benjamin (Venyamin) Korotayev, an ex-Spetsnaz who fled to America during the infamous Purges that rocked Russia for many years after the nuclear conflict, causing many Russians like Korotayev to flee the country if they could afford to do so.
After meeting with Korotayev, Sanford, himself also being a former Controller of Buffalo, New York, and being ex-operation partners with Korotayev, pulls a few strings with him, and Korotayev obliges by setting Damon free personally from jail. Reunited with his fleet again, Damon first stops by the Abraham Lincoln Cemetery outside the city, where Damon's mother, Losira Sawatari Polchow, is buried, a habit he's developed over the years during his intermittent stays in the city while growing up, along with his personal tradition of leaving a bottle of alcohol at his mother's gravestone every time he visits. After one last detour in the city so that Hendsfield, Korotayev, and Sanford can resume their work inside the city, Damon, and the ship girls head back outside into the city to take a secret elevator down into New Chicago, the underground city beneath Chicago that was built in response to the overwhelming population inflation due to the refugee crisis caused by the nuclear war, and the city in which Damon spent intermittent years growing up and working. He takes them to his friend's residence, the same friend who supplied him the information about the project developer who gave Damon the info on where to find Murakumo named Benjamin Yamamoto, a young and gifted hacker and hardware/software engineer who also turns out to be Damon's boss at one point, since Damon worked for the information brokerage business that Benjamin runs in New Chicago.
Upon greeting them, Yamamoto, thrilled to see that Damon has actually succeeded in recovering the ship girls and surprised at just how successful he'd been, lets Damon and his fleet crash at his place for a few days for the time being, as his residence, which also doubles as his home, is big enough to accommodate everyone. In making his own acquaintance with the ship girls, Benjamin reveals that he is possibly a descendant of the late Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who commanded the Japanese fleets during World War II as Commander-in-Chief, and obviously this is a very big deal to the ship girls themselves, with Benjamin even providing evidence in the form of Admiral Yamamoto's Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross medal, but the ship girls still maintain a degree of doubt, since Benjamin himself admits that he doesn't know if having the medal is full proof that he is in fact the Admiral's descendant, as his own parents never talked about the matter, and there's no way for him to return to Japan to uncover the truth.
While staying for a few days in New Chicago, Damon is approached by another ship girl, whom Murakumo, who recognizes her immediately, turns out to be Furutaka. She's sensed the presence of Damon's fleet through her radar and comes to investigate, confronting him about how he's managed to accrue such a large fleet of ship girls, but Damon denies telling her anything, prompting a standoff between them that eventually escalates into a scuffle in which Damon manages to get the upper hand, since Furutaka doesn't expect a human like him to have such monstrous strength thanks to his mutated state, and hacks Furutaka too to get her to join his fleet instead. Furutaka takes Damon and some of the fleet to her home, where two more ship girls, Kitakami and Fusou, reside with their own "Admiral" of sorts, a tailor in his 50's named Kiyoshi Araki.
Before they are introduced to him, while first walking up to his door, Damon and the ship girls find a woman and her child exiting the house first before them. The woman remarks that Damon looks familiar, but says nothing more and leaves with her daughter.
Upon meeting, Mr. Araki introduces himself as being one of the former developers of the F.L.E.E.T. Project, and he reveals that as a descendant of Furutaka's former captain from back in the Second World War, he felt the need to track down and save Furutaka when the nuclear war first erupted, so after they were released from their quarantine, he'd traveled to the United States, specifically San Francisco, found Furutaka's shipping container, along with Fusou's and Kitakami's who happened to be there with her too, released and reactivated all of them, and took them to a CCPL Post (Controlled Center for Protected Living), camps set up and run by the government to house nuclear war refugees, in Boise, Idaho. There, they'd lived for a decade in anonymity, but they had to move because the ship girls' slowed aging would mean that people would start to get suspicious of them for showing no signs of aging, and they'd moved to New Chicago to restart their lives again and had been living here for three years already. Because Mr. Araki shares Damon's vision of one day bringing all the ship girls together into one fleet, and because he recognizes that Damon is much younger and fit for the task of doing so, he willingly transfers control of his three ship girls to Damon, but at his ship girls' urging and insistence, he stays with the fleet, becoming one of their "fleet administrators", as they're called later on in the story, due to his knowledge and expertise with ship girl programming.
Meanwhile, Sanford, who's been called to meet with the President of the United States who's dropped by Chicago to speak with him, messages Damon and tells him that the President, Tawney Blackwood, would also like to meet with Damon, and that he needs to bring his fleet with him. Fearing the worst, Damon prepares for it and gets Benjamin to make 3-D printed pistols for everyone so that they're all armed for this meeting, and the next day, they set off for Inner Chicago again, this time to meet with the President. There, before the meeting starts, they run into Chuck, another ex-special forces squadmate of Sanford's whom Sanford has managed to track down and invite to join them in the fleet, which Chuck is more than happy to accept, due to his additional relationship with Damon, as the two of them have both worked in the same vehicle repair shop before. Once the meeting starts, they find that Blackwood already has a fleet of ship girls of his own, ship girls that the Federal troops have found in various military bases across Federally controlled areas of the country, and that they've been consolidated at an undisclosed military base for the past few months and kept on standby until now. After a heated argument, a Mexican standoff between Damon's ship girls and Blackwood's Secret Service agents, and Damon beating one of Blackwood's military aides to death by repeatedly punching him in the face, Blackwood settles for giving Damon full control of both fleets, effectively combining them - hence, the "Combined Fleet", but in exchange, Damon must obey all orders given to them by the President, and their first order is to be deployed to London immediately.
The ship girls who join Damon's fleet here are Akatsuki, Hibiki, Ikazuchi, Inazuma, Sazanami, Ushio, Kagerou, Shiranui, I-168, or Imuya, Tenryuu, Tatsuta, Ashigara, Ise, and Zuikaku.
The fleet, including Sanford, leave Mr. Araki behind at New Chicago while they fly to Chatham Naval Air Station in Massachusetts to get geared and prepare for their flight across the pond. While there, Damon receives a letter from a local commander, Major Lester, with the instructions to give said letter to the Prime Minister. The fleet departs for England, their destination set for Menwith Hill Royal Air Force Base, but when they reach the United Kingdom, they find that southern England is under attack by other ship girls sailing from the south, from the coast of France and other surrounding waters, so they deploy immediately to the English Channel to fend them off. The fleet splits up into two groups to combat both prongs of the assault, and one half runs into a fleet of nothing but enemy ship girls, who turn out to be English ship girls who, like Amagi, are not registered on the F.L.E.E.T. Project's official roster, and the other half must contend against a combined fleet of both Abyssals and more English ship girls. The Combined Fleet manages to defeat the English ship girls and Abyssals and forces them to retreat, but Amatsukaze defeats one of them and weakens her enough for capture, an English dreadnought named Conqueror.
This battle, known as the Battle of the English Channel, is won by the Combined Fleet, since they successfully repel both the English fleet and the Abyssals in their two-pronged naval assault, though they take a few casualties in the process. Conqueror, whom the Fleet captures, is subjected to fleet hacking by Damon, though obviously she isn't happy about the nature of this process. But her attitude changes when she meets Sanford, who introduces himself as a project developer, so she tells him what she knows of their current situation. The Abyssals had captured the English ship girls and stole them from their native country before they could be activated and taken to France, from where the Inner Circle, capable of constructing and deploying their own ship girls known as "Abyssals", are deploying both the English fleet that is under their command and their own Abyssals to attack the UK. The fact that Conqueror and her fellow Orion-Class dreadnoughts, who are ships dating all the way back to World War I, further raise more questions about just what types of ship girls have been constructed in total, like Amagi's case. And afterwards, Damon gets into an argument with Shiranui, whose sister Kagerou has been critically wounded by Kongou during the battle, which prompts Shiranui to tell Damon that she intends not to deploy so that she can look after Kagerou, but Damon denies this request, since he believes he needs all ship girls to be out there fighting.
During the night, however, Damon and Furutaka, who are sharing a tent with two other ship girls, get into a brief argument but are interrupted by a British soldier, who tells them that the city of London is currently under attack and could use assistance from the fleet to fend off the Ringers, or the Inner Circle insurgents trying to attack the city. Rather than wake up the entire fleet, as they're all exhausted from their first major naval engagement from the previous day, Damon and Furutaka go with Sanford and Chuck to defend the city by themselves, but things take a turn for the worse as the hospital on which the four of them are defending one of the accessways into the city gets destroyed by the Ringers shooting the building down with RPG's, and while Sanford and Chuck have moved positions to get better firing angles, Damon and Furutaka, who have remained on the roof, fall down to the bottom floor due to the weak structural integrity of the building and are forced to escape and make their way back to friendly territory to hitch a ride back to Menwith Hill.
Thus begins the fleet's ground defense of London, fighting off mainly against the Ringers who swarm the city. However, in a bid to force Shiranui to fight, Damon brings the critically wounded Kagerou with him to defend a sinkhole located in the heart of London so that Shiranui at least won't be completely useless. The battle sees the fleet briefly encounter the enigmatic leader of the Abyssals, called the Abyssal, and eventually the fleet has a final showdown at the Serpentine and Round Ponds with the invading English fleet girls. During this final battle, Yuudachi is killed in action, prompting Shigure to go berserk with her protocol out of revenge and defeat the English fleet more or less on her own, notably with Hibiki's help, since she and Shigure were the two to witness Yuudachi's death in its entirety. Interestingly, Shigure doesn't kill any of the English ship girls herself.
Meanwhile, Damon, Shiranui, and Kagerou are joined by Conqueror, who helps them detect Kongou, who's headed straight for the sinkhole for unknown reasons, so Damon and Conqueror move to intercept her. After exchanging a few words, they get into a brief but violent scuffle, and even Shiranui comes along to punch Kongou in the face for what she's done to Kagerou. But Kongou reveals her true objective: to throw a small nuclear device down the sinkhole in an attempt to destroy the entire city with one swift move, and Damon is compelled to go down the sinkhole to stop the device from rolling all the way down to the point of no return. He stops it and defuses it just in time before the device is set off, making his way out of the sinkhole and hacking Kongou, who's been subdued while he was away, to join his fleet. Afterwards, with the assault defended and the English fleet captured, the Combined Fleet reconvenes at Menwith Hill, and Damon hacks the entire English fleet to remove the Inner Circle control over them, meaning that he has control of the two fleets but allows the English fleet to begin serving their country as they are rightfully want to do. However, several English ship girls do in fact join the Combined Fleet, and they are Orion, Monarch, Conqueror, Thunderer, Wakamiya, or Lethington, and Kongou. They join for various reasons: the Orion-Class join so that they can travel and fight all over the world, and they predict that the activities of the Combined Fleet, seeing that they've traveled across the Atlantic to fight them, will allow them to do just this. Wakamiya joins in thanks for the Combined Fleet's efforts in returning the English fleet back home, and Kongou joins because Haruna is already part of the fleet.
The fleet returns to the United States, specifically New Chicago, briefly for some rest, but they are given another assignment, this time to quell a rebellion by CCPL post inhabitants at Trenton, New Jersey, so the fleet redeploys again. Sanford says that this is a perfect opportunity for the fleet for several reasons: first, there is an old F.L.E.E.T. Project facility underneath one of the hospitals in Trenton that has what are called "operating chambers" in which ship girls can be repaired and restored, and even revived back to life, so long as sunken ship girls still have their brains intact and can be repaired within seven days. A container yard further south of Trenton is also reported to have a few containers' worth of ship resources that they will need for the repair surgeries for the ship girls who are either badly damaged or killed in action, so the fleet splits up, one half going with Sanford and Mr. Araki to Trenton to secure the hospital, and the other half deploying with Damon to the container yard to secure the resources.
However, while securing the resources, Murakumo kills several rebels, several of whom may have been the parents of a young and terrified boy hiding in an open shipping container, and out of remorse, Murakumo takes the boy in, wanting to take care of him because she doesn't know if she's the one who's ended up killing his parents. In that same container, though, Damon and co. find that Kisaragi has somehow ended up in the container yard, and that the rebels had gotten to her first and raped and abused her without even reactivating her. Damon seeks revenge for this on two of the rebels that the fleet manages to capture, brutally murdering them before taking both Kisaragi and the resources back up to Trenton, where they regroup with the rest of the fleet to get the repair surgeries under way. Damon and the fleet then hold out at the hospital, defending against waves of attacking local rebels, until the repair surgeries are finally done. In addition, Mr. Araki, who reveals that he's been working on a reconstructive method for the ship girls back at New Chicago that will increase the ship girls' capabilities and powers, called the Kai remodel, applies this to Yuudachi, since she's the easiest to apply the Kai remodel to, since the remodel requires a manual shutdown of the ship girl in question, and Yuudachi, being dead, has already gotten this first step down. Yuudachi, revived and remodeled, emerges from the hospital to easily wipe out the rest of the attackers, clearing the way for the fleet to return to New Chicago. But just as they take off, the boy Murakumo wants to take care of gets shot right through the chest before Murakumo can react fast enough to pop her shield to protect him, and his death scars her tremendously going into New Chicago that day.
As the fleet is able to take a well-deserved rest for the back-to-back operations, Damon speaks with Kisaragi to make sure that she's okay after the fiasco that was the Trenton operation. She reassures him that she will recover with time and thanks him for all that he's done for her, even giving him a kiss for his trouble. He also seeks to comfort Murakumo, as the boy's death has horribly unsettled her, and Damon has to endure some violent backlash from her before finally succeeding. Just to ensure that he'll lift Murakumo's spirits, Damon gets the body of the boy, which they've brought with them to New Chicago, cremated so that he can get the ashes pressed into a jewel at one of the jewelers in Inner Chicago to give to Murakumo, and the trip he takes to get these initial few chores done is spent with Shigure, whom Damon brings along to keep him company. But when they return from cremating the body, they find the same woman and daughter whom they met previously at Mr. Araki's tailor shop/home, who reveal that they've tracked Damon and his fleet down to the fleet's new residence, a small old mansion that's big enough to house the growing Combined Fleet and located behind the Plaza where Benjamin's shop and home are.
The woman is Lauren, Damon's aunt-in-law and his mother's best friend/ex-teammate, and her daughter is Jeannie, Damon's cousin and a prototype of an unheard F.L.E.E.T. 2 Project, both of whom have turned fugitive and are hiding from the Federal government.
Fulfilling one of Sanford's realizations, because Damon had mentioned his first sighting of Lauren and Jeannie to Sanford, who then predicted it could indeed be them, Lauren and Jeannie join the Combined Fleet and explain the existence of the F.L.E.E.T. 2 Project and their run from the government for the past four years. Lauren explains that following the nuclear war, she and her husband David, Damon's blood-related uncle and his mother's older brother, lived on their own in California, in San Francisco, until David finally succumbed to radiation poisoning that he'd contracted from the fallout of the nuclear war. After he died, Lauren gave birth to their daughter, but due to David's radiation poisoning, their daughter, Jeannie, had been doomed to die an early death, so in an effort to save her life, Lauren put her through the F.L.E.E.T. 2 Project, a successor to the original F.L.E.E.T. Project, though this organization's exact aim and objective are still unclear. What was clear at the time, however, was that Jeannie's life was saved, but she was heavily experimented upon and biologically modified, essentially being turned into a human quantum computer with the talents that ship girls commonly exhibit but losing much of her humanity and emotion in the process. What especially alarms Damon and Sanford is the fact that Lauren mentions that someone by the name of the Abyssal was involved in the F.L.E.E.T. 2 Project, meaning that there is now a definite Inner Circle connection tying the Abyssals and this particular F.L.E.E.T. 2 Project together. Nevertheless, eventually Lauren became sick and tired of watching her daughter get experimented on year after year, so together with her daughter's help, she broke herself and Jeannie out and escaped to New Chicago, where they've been living in hiding ever since, as New Chicago is a safe haven of sorts from the perusals of the Federal government. They'd actually known that Damon and the fleet were in the area, but they waited until now to make absolute certain that they weren't introducing themselves to the wrong crowd.
After their initial reunion, Damon heads out to Inner Chicago to go make Murakumo that jewel, taking Lauren, Jeannie, and some ship girls with him along. They reach a jeweler that Damon knows and trick the jeweler into processing the boy's ashes into a jewel for free, but while they're waiting, several Secret Service agents spot and approach him, and Damon, fearing that they're here to take Lauren and Jeannie into custody, confront them first. However, they don't recognize the fugitives (or at least they don't show that they do) and instead give Damon instructions on his next assignment with the fleet, leaving him wondering why Blackwood doesn't just approach him in person.
Once they get the jewel for Murakumo, Damon and co. return home to New Chicago, where they have the fleet convene so that they can plan accordingly for their next mission, which is to capture the Norfolk Naval Yard from the hands of local Coalition forces; the Coalition is a loose organization of five Southern factions that are "technically" allied to one another to form a sort of modern-era Confederacy, or at least that was the idea, and the faction of Atlanta with whom Damon and the early members of the fleet had fought against earlier is one of the factions of the Coalition. To sweeten the deal, the plans that the agents gave to Damon suggest that there are potential ship girls at Norfolk that they can capture if they move fast enough. Damon, Sanford, and the other fleet administrators decide to split up their fleet again, with one half of the fleet going with Damon, Sanford, Chuck, and Benjamin to the Oceana Naval Air Station to capture it from Coalition forces so that the fleet can bombard the shipping yard from there before going in. The second half will attack Norfolk by sea, essentially creating a pincer move to take over the shipping yard as swiftly as possible for the Federal troops to come in and capture in their wake. Once their plans are set, Damon gives Murakumo the jewel in the form of a ring, though he buys a necklace for it so that Murakumo can wear it like a pendant instead, as wearing a ring in combat could prove troublesome and annoying, and Murakumo greatly appreciates the gift, causing another dogpile of destroyers onto him, which is quickly becoming his personal in-story meme.
The next day, Damon and his fleet (except for Lauren and Jeannie, who remain behind to look after the fleet's mansion at New Chicago for obvious reasons) are taken to their new base that Blackwood has prepared for them to use, a former spaceport called the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, located near the capital city. It is renamed to the Mid-Atlantic Provisional Seabase, or "MAPS" for short, upon their arrival, and the fleet make themselves at home wherever they can and prepare for their mission in a few days. Blackwood also gives Damon another ship girl, Sendai, whom Delta force soldiers have managed to recover during a recent infiltration mission into the Norfolk naval yard, and Sendai tries to get on Damon's good side by sneaking into his room naked to convince him to go save her sisters who are still stuck back at Norfolk, which Damon laughs off, since the fleet's going to go there anyway.
On the day before the scheduled Norfolk assault, as planned, Damon takes the designated half of the fleet with him to Oceana Naval Air Station, spending the entire day making their way over to the station as stealthily as possible so that they don't raise any alarms, and to ensure this, they near the station but wait until it's nighttime to commence their surprise attack. Once it's night, they make their way in, stealthily at first, but once they hit the heart of the station, where they'll be killing too many enemies and leaving behind too many bodies to cover up, Damon orders the fleet to go loud, and the fleet wreaks havoc on the station. In the middle of the fighting, Shoukaku suffers the loss of her left eye after she gets shot there by another sniper rifle bullet, revealing the one weakness ship girls have against bullets due to the sensitivity and complexity of the human eye. However, other than Shoukaku, Damon's squadron suffers no other major casualties, and after taking the station over, they wait until morning to commence the next part of their operation.
The next morning, Damon orders the second half of the fleet to deploy to Norfolk from MAPS, as it's quite close by, all things considered, while the fleet members with him at Oceana bombard the shipyards to soften up the Coalition's defenses there before taking a convoy of captured ground vehicles at the station to get over to the shipyards themselves, where they bust through the Coalition's weakened defenses, locate the ship girls that the Coalition was planning to pawn off to their various factions, and steal them away. Meanwhile, the seaborne fleet engages and fights a combined fleet of the Coalition's own ship girls who are under orders to protect Norfolk from them, but a fleet of Abyssals shows up out of nowhere and crashes the party, prompting the two fleets of ship girls to fight together to drive the Abyssals away. However, in the process, Kaga and Shoukaku are isolated from the fleet, captured, and taken away, and after the battle, the Coalition's combined fleet decides to leave their most injured ship girls behind for the Combined Fleet to take care of, since they can just make up the excuse that the Combined Fleet had captured their most weakened ship girls, and they return to their respective factions not long after. The Combined Fleet report everything that's happened to Damon, who orders the fleet back to home base at MAPS so that they can consolidate their losses and figure out what to do next.
The ship girls acquired as a result of their venture to Norfolk are as follows: Shiratsuyu, Mutsuki, Satsuki, Kikuzuki, Asashio, Kasumi, Kuroshio, Wakaba, Oboro, Akebono,, Yuubari, Jintsuu, Naka, Haguro, Takao, Kinugasa, and Musashi.
Shiratsuyu, one of the captured ship girls from the Coalition fleet, wakes up the next morning and announces her intention to return to her home faction of Charlotte, where Murasame, one of her other Shiratsuyu-Class sisters, is being held hostage as a "victim" ship girl - in order for the Coalition to exert control over their respective ship girls, they have all selected one of the ship girls in their respective fleets each to become a "victim" and have broken their limbs before reactivation so that their lives hinge on the mercy of the faction leaders, and that if they don't want to risk having their friends (or potentially sisters) be left to die, the others must behave and do as they're told. Shiratsuyu is worried out of her mind that without her, Murasame will have this fate done to her, and Damon, sympathizing, is more than happy to leave the choice for her to decide, but he strictly forbids her sisters from following her, which understandably ticks many of them off. Suzukaze in particular doesn't like how Damon is handling the situation and confronts him, trying to convince him to order Shiratsuyu to stay, as he's already hacked all of the ship girls to be under his control and not the Coalition's - eventually, Shiratsuyu does decide to stay with the fleet, since she eventually wisens up to the fact that going back to Charlotte alone is just not a good idea.
Later that day, Damon meets with Sanford and Benjamin to discuss what steps they should take in order to begin searching for Kaga and Shoukaku, the carriers stolen away by the Abyssals. Benjamin suggests that they try to get into contact with the CEO of Lukenstor, North America's biggest defense corporation and possibly the most powerful company in NA, as they can easily have the means to help them search for their missing carriers, so Benjamin uses a contact that he's hacked in the past to get in touch with the CEO, who surprisingly responds to them and introduces himself as Eagle Clinton, with an explicit mention that he has no blood relation to the Real Life Clintons. Because of his own agenda, Eagle agrees to assist the fleet by providing them with a whole satellite that they can operate themselves, a prototype low-orbit attack satellite called HAVOC that's capable of firing down a massive laser artillery cannon from the atmosphere. Eagle sends down a crew to launch HAVOC clandestinely so that Blackwood doesn't know about the fleet having an observational satellite all to themselves, as this would inevitably blow Eagle's cover in assisting the fleet without authorization by the President, since it's made clear early on that Eagle has some sort of vendetta against Blackwood.
Within a few days of HAVOC's launching, the satellite locates unusual activity in Newfoundland and discovers that the Abyssals are operating a land base out of one of the harbors, so Damon immediately throws the entire fleet northbound, even flying a small portion of the fleet in his Merlin helicopter to join them. After a day of sailing, they reach Newfoundland and attack the Abyssal base, wiping them out with the help of HAVOC and destroying the base. They recover Kaga and Shoukaku, but to their dismay, it's found that the Abyssals were in the middle of converting them into Abyssals, but since the fleet came in time to interrupt the processes, they are only partially Abyssalized; they still retain their senses and their original personalities, but now they are infused with Abyssal energy that makes them stronger, but with the implication that the more they use that energy, the faster their Abyssalizations will accelerate. The fleet also collects whatever they find interesting or valuable, such as differently colored canisters of Abyssal liquids that they know nothing about so that the fleet administrators can study them.
After successfully rescuing the two carriers and taking with them an intact body of a Ru-Class whom they've killed in action, Damon and a portion of the fleet return to New Chicago to check up on Jeannie and Lauren and to return some weapons that Damon's borrowed from a weapons dealer he's friends with for Operation Night Tide. He also buys an eyepatch for Shoukaku that she can use to hide her left eye, which now exudes Abyssal energy on its own, due to a combination of her injured eye from Operation Night Tide and her Abyssalization, and boxes of doughnuts for the fleet because why not. Upon giving Shoukaku the eyepatch, Damon comforts her, saying that despite whatever she becomes, she'll always be part of the fleet and that she'll always be welcome in the fleet. Afterwards, he gathers the fleet again to review their plans against the five factions of the Coalition.
Damon and the other administrators decide that the order in which going about attacking the Coalition to rescue the ship girls under their control will be from east to west - in other words, Charlotte, Orlando, Atlanta, Nashville, and Little Rock, in that order, since this way, they can come back to MAPS after each day of fighting, assuming that the fleet can capture each of the factions by the end of the day. So after preparing the fleet, they set off for Charlotte first.
They start by flying down to Granite Quarry - for their Charlotte operation, since Charlotte is a rich casino city, akin to Las Vegas, Damon and Sanford decide that it's best for the fleet to come in with a disguise, and so in order to do this, they fly to the town of Granite Quarry, where a local gang runs a car repair and sales shop with plenty of sports and luxury cars that will help sell their disguise. They also bring with them, courtesy of Mr. Araki, spare evening gowns and formal attire for the ship girls, specifically for the capital ship girls, who have instructions to dress up to make a diversion. When they land, Damon and the fleet have a brief run-in with the Chop Shop gangsters, who attempt to turn Damon and the girls away and threaten them with violence, so Damon and the girls take them out instead once it becomes apparent that the gangsters are willing to fire shots. Damon and the girls take the vehicles that the gangsters have brought with them and drive to the car lot, fighting off more Chop Shop gangsters along the way.
Damon and the girls meet with Pop Jones, the proprietor of the car lot, and Damon starts to negotiate with him the purchases of a handful of cars. Pop Jones tries to get greedy and pulls a gun on Damon, prompting Murakumo and Amatsukaze who are with him to retaliate, and the fleet take out all the gangsters at the lot, since the gangsters were using enslaved children as labor and were being quite inappropriate to them, anyhow. Damon calls in one of the helicopters that have flown him and the fleet to Granite Quarry to come pick up the child slaves so that Lukenstor can take them in, and the fleet helps themselves to the cars that are now up for grabs, and taking however many they need, the fleet continue on to Charlotte.
After reaching Charlotte, the fleet settles down at their hotel to wait until nighttime, when their operation will commence. Their target is the Fantasy Express casino/hotel, which is the largest casino in the city and where, according to Shiratsuyu, is where the premier of the faction, Kerrigan Badeau, resides, along with the ship girls who belong to the faction. As the girls relax and have some fun before the action starts, Damon takes Shiratsuyu out for dinner in the city; it's here when he gives her the nickname of "Shirley" due to his inability to pronounce Japanese names well. They return with a few plush dolls as a gift for the Shiratsuyu's sisters, and then Shigure swaps places with her sister to go with Damon over to the Fantasy Express casino to scout it out. They find Nagato and Jun'you, who tell them that the ship girls here have been forced to work as as employees in the casino hotel - Nagato as a prostitute, Jun'you as a bartender (fittingly), and Taihou, Shioi, and Shiratsuyu (before she was captured by the fleet) as room service.
When they return from their little scouting mission, Suzukaze, who's been worrying about where her sister's gone off to, confronts Damon and demands to know where they've been. Shigure tries to defend Damon, explaining what they've been up to, but Suzukaze, whose opinion of Damon has steadily been degrading over the weeks that she's known him, accuses Damon of being a womanizer and trying to win over the hearts of her siblings. Shigure gets angry and grabs Suzukaze by the neck to lift her up, but Damon stops her, calming her down, and Suzukaze run away back to her room. Damon has to take Shigure up to the roof of their hotel so that he can calm her down, and eventually she does. Shigure and Suzukaze reconcile shortly thereafter, and by this point, it's time for the fleet to begin their assault on the Fantasy Express casino.
As instructed, the capital ship girls doll themselves up and head to the casino directly to take part in the outdoor ball that is held outside the casino, while the rest of the fleet approach the casino from the rear and wait until the capital ship girls draw the brunt of the attention around the casino towards themselves to allow the others to slip into the hotel while Benjamin hacks the casino's security system from their own hotel so that their infiltration will go unseen. They then set the ship girls inside the casino free and fight the casino's security forces in the upper floors of the hotel, and the girls stumble upon a box of navitasium cubes just like the one that Damon and Murakumo found at the U.S.S. Alabama, but many of them are found to be corrupted by a strange energy, so Damon orders the girls to keep it with them so that they can take it back for the administrators to research them. In the meantime, Damon and the girls finally confront the premier, and once Murasame, the victim ship girl of Charlotte, is secure, Damon first interrogates her about the infected navitasium cubes, then plays a game of Russian roulette with her, burns her eye out with a spent cartridge from the revolver he's taken from Pop Jones earlier at Granite Quarry, and leaves her to the Shiratsuyu-Class, who tear her apart like hounds in revenge for what she's done to Murasame while Damon himself carries Murasame out to the helicopter that lands on the roof of the casino for the girls inside the casino to use as their extraction.
The ship girls whom they recover from Charlotte are Shioi, Jun'you, Taihou, and Nagato.
The fleet briefly returns to base at MAPS to get their newly acquired ship girls situated in the fleet; with the base equipped with operating chambers just like the ones underneath the hospital in Trenton, the ship girls are quickly repaired so that they, too, can participate in the fleet's operations against the Coalition the next day, with their sights now on Orlando. However, when the day comes, the fleet takes a detour down to the Gulf of Mexico first to intercept a merchant fleet being escorted by Abyssals headed for Orlando from an unknown port along the eastern Mexican coast. Flying down to the Gulf, they find the merchant fleet and proceed to take it over, with Damon taking some minor injuries in the process, and after a brief fight, the fleet succeeds in taking over the merchant convoy. However, just after they're done capturing the merchant fleet, they're greeted by a small insurgency fleet sent by Harrison of Mobile, also with the same intentions, as Mobile is in sore need of supplies and resources too, so Damon orders the fleet to escort the merchant fleet back up to Mobile, where they can divide the resources between them.
After their second detour to Mobile, where they refuel their choppers, Damon and the fleet head for Orlando. Damon gets Benjamin to hack the PA system installed in Orlando so that he can issue an ultimatum to the faction, threatening them with utter destruction of the city if they don't give up their ship girls to them. Surprisingly, the faction complies, and the fleet receives the ship girls of the faction, taking them immediately back to base to get them repaired and restored back to fighting fit. However, Takao, who was captured by the fleet at the end of Operation Norfolk, expresses her desire to get revenge on the premier of Orlando, Monroe Arrechea, so Damon accompanies her into the city, the two of them alone, using the sewer system to navigate their way directly behind a pub that Takao knows is a favorite of Arrechea. They find him there, and after interrogating him about the infected navitasium cubes to see if the information he's gotten from Badeau matches up with his, he lets Takao finally get her revenge and murder Arrechea before they leave and return to base.
The ship girls they recover from Orlando are Shirayuki, Hatsuyuki, Goya, Chitose, and Chiyoda.
The fleet's next target is Atlanta; for this operation, Eagle steps in and lends the fleet some aerial firepower in the form of a small fleet of fictional Harrier III's that his company's built to cover them while they land in the city for a direct frontal assault, no subtleties or tricks like in Charlotte and Orlando. Given Damon's history of constantly getting wounded in the fleet's operations up until now, the ship girls convince Damon to remain behind at base, for fear that a direct engagement like this will most certainly wound or even kill him; unable to talk his way into going with them, Damon relents - or at least he pretends to; once the fleet departs from base, Damon contacts Eagle and arranges for him to send him an XV-29 Banshee, another fictional aircraft, this time a stealth tilt-rotor helicopter with Cloaking capabilities, perfect for Damon to use to slip into the city unnoticed by either his own ship girls or the Atlantan mercenaries. Incidentally, when he arrives in Atlanta, he briefly meets with Ushio, who got separated from the rest of the fleet because the Chinook helicopter that was flying her and her fellow ship girls into the city was shot down by an RPG, and in an effort to save the pilot, Ushio pulled him from the cockpit and jumped out together, crashing straight into the middle of an old diner and making her way back to the pilot, trying to carry him to safety but only to have him shot just as Damon's Banshee rendezvouses with her to cover her. After comforting Ushio and making sure that she won't tell the others that he's actually in the city with them all, Damon heads off just before Ushio's sisters find her.
The fleet fights their way through the city, heading over to the Congress Building again to find and capture both the faction leader O'Reilly and the ship girls who are under the faction's control. Damon also heads to the Congress Building at the same time, since he's been there before and knows how to get there, and he disguises himself as an Atlantan mercenary in order to slip behind enemy lines - at one point, their paths cross, and Damon actually gets shot at by his own ship girls who aren't aware of his presence in the city, with only his body armor preventing him from getting seriously wounded. As for the fleet, naturally, since they drive straight into the heart of the city, they get attacked constantly, and at one point, a skyscraper that's been damaged heavily by the initial airstrikes finally collapses due to Kongou's deflection of a tank shell with the back of her bare hand, and the building drops right on top of several ship girls, immediately killing Zuikaku. When Shoukaku learns of this, she starts to freak out, and her Abyssalization starts to take her over as a result, and Kaga is forced to knock her out with her own Abyssal energy before she completely turns. The fleet decides to send forward an advance unit while the rest of the fleet fights off the mercenaries headed their way, and the advance unit reach the Congress Building to corner O'Reilly and find their missing ship girls. However, when they reach the room in which O'Reilly lurks, O'Reilly's men disable them all with EMP grenades, against which the ship girls have no defense or protection, and the men drag them inside O'Reilly's conference room, where they promptly begin to rape them.
Or, at least, that was the intention, if Damon didn't get there in time to thwart them. While the advance unit was clearing out the Congress Building, Damon reached the Congress Building first, but mistakenly entered a building adjacent to the actual one where he would find O'Reilly due to misinterpretation of the mercenaries' comms. He arrives just in time at the right building and room, kills all the men inside, and confronts O'Reilly, who tries to bribe him with money, but Damon doesn't have any of it and promptly throws him out of the window to his death. The rest of the fleet catches up to them, and Damon as the girls load back up into the helicopters to take the EMP'd ship girls and the ship girls under Atlanta's control back to base for repair and restoration.
The ship girls acquired from Atlanta are Maru-yu, Ayanami, Shikinami, Ise, and Shouhou.
The next day, the fleet departs for Nashville - this time with Damon in tow, after his fortunate timing and intervention at Atlanta the previous day; in addition, Damon gets notice from his cousin that she intends to join them for their operation in Nashville. The fleet lands in the far outskirts of Nashville in the rain and make their way into the city, using the lakes and rivers to attack the city and play to the fleet's strengths. They encounter Nashville faction forces along the way and defeat them to move onto the city, with Damon, not surprisingly, taking a few wounds in the process. Once they hit downtown Nashville to assault the Tennessee State Capitol Building, Damon goes ahead of the fleet to chase after one of the sons of the Harper family, the family in control of the faction, to hunt him down, and he's led all the way to the state capitol building, where he confronts and fights against the other sons of the Harper family. After he kills them all (or most of them), the rest of the Harper family also come out with a large squad of soldiers, and Jeannie arrives just in time to save her cousin, helping him defeat the soldiers and the Harper family before Damon enters the state capitol building to hang their bodies up on the rafters like effigies.
The ship girls acquired from Nashville are Arashio, Hiyou, and Ryuujou.
After eradicating the Harper family and their regime in Nashville, the fleet, too far from their home base at MAPS by this point, fly halfway to Little Rock and camp out for the night in an abandoned lot. They tend to their newly acquired ship girls from Nashville as best they can, especially Arashio, who was Nashville's "victim" ship girl, since they can't afford to send any helicopters back to base to have them repaired and restored so that the whole fleet can move together. Damon and his fellow fleet administrators discuss the nature of their strategy upon entering Little Rock, which is noted to be mainly an agricultural faction with a focus on economic growth and trade rather than militant expansion like some of the other factions, so they decide that trying their hand at simple negotiation will be enough to deal with the Little Rock faction, as a direct assault like the ones they've done on Atlanta and Nashville would potentially ruin the economic value the faction has.
So the next morning, Damon and a select group of handpicked ship girls fly down to Little Rock, with the rest of the fleet also flying down with them but instead remaining just outside the limits of the city, just in case things go south. Damon and his ship girls, including the submarines, who are tasked with Cloaking themselves so that they can sneak around the main Little Rock capitol building to search for the ship girls controlled by Little Rock, land at the community airfield in north Little Rock and are driven down to the capitol building after stating that they seek to speak with Alastor Scott, the premier of Little Rock, who meets with them. Then, Scott pulls a fast one on Damon and his girls by setting off a hidden EMP bomb somewhere in the capitol building that disables all of Damon's ship girls, just like how the ship girls were disabled at Atlanta because they have no EMP resistance. And when Scott brings in his own ship girls, who are clearly under direct control, almost like a mind control influence of some kind, Akagi, who's one of them, shoots Damon through the chest with her crossbow, despite Jeannie's attempt to block the shot, despite being EMP'd. When Damon falls, Shoukaku, who struggles with the help of her Abyssal power, manages to stop Akagi by knocking her out with a pulse of Abyssal energy and manages to resuscitate Damon by giving him some more of her energy, but Scott stops her dead - literally - by shooting her multiple times with his .44 revolver. But just before he can put a final shot through her head to kill her for good, Damon, revived just barely, blocks the shot with his own hand that holds his karambit/nanoknife, sacrificing it to save Shoukaku from being truly destroyed for good. Damon pulls out the crossbow bolt that Akagi's shot through him and throws it back at Scott with such force that he puts Scott down near the brink of death, though Scott trades blow for blow with him by shooting him in the gut with his revolver. Still, Damon uses what strength he has left to crawl over to him to finish him off with his own revolver, just before the faction guards in the capitol building hear the commotion and enter to investigate.
The fleet, getting wind of the situation, fly down to the capitol building in their helicopters to take control of the situation, even deploying HAVOC to cover their entry and protect the ship girls already inside the city who'd gone with Damon, but by this point, it's too late: Damon is dead.
The ship girls acquired from Little Rock are Naganami, Hatsushimo, Suzuya, Kumano, Kako, and Akagi.
The fleet briefly returns to MAPS to have the ship girls captured from Little Rock repaired and restored, but part of the fleet then immediately flies over to Chicago to have Damon's body buried alongside his mother's at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery. Sanford leaves, instead of a tombstone, a fresh karambit knife into the ground to mark the grave before he, being the new Admiral of the Combined Fleet, returns with the ship girls who've come to pay their respects. It's then revealed that Jeannie, who was in the middle of developing her relationship with her cousin Damon, is heartbroken at his death, while Akagi, who played a big part in his death, feels horrified and guilty that she is largely to blame for the loss of her new fleet's Admiral, since it's thanks to the efforts of Damon and the Combined Fleet that she and her fellow ship girls from Little Rock have been set free from the tyrannical and religiously fanatical Alastor Scott. While the other carriers do their best to convince her that it couldn't have been her fault, as she was completely under Scott's control at the time, but this isn't Akagi can live down for a long time. Murasame, too, after returning from Chicago following Damon's brief funeral, suffers a nervous breakdown that may have been caused by her partially Abyssalized nature, due to her treatment at the hands of former Charlotte premier Kerrigan Badeau, and she almost commits suicide by intentionally drowning herself off the waters from the fleet base at MAPS, but Sanford notices her just in time to prevent this. In order to restore her spirits, Sanford decides to give Murasame Damon's old gun, his MK-14 Rogue Chassis, as a memento of sorts.
However, the night after the fleet leaves Chicago, Damon's grave gets robbed - well, sort of. Masked men in suits, gloves, and weird masks dig it up to open the coffin in which Damon is interred, but his body is already missing, and instead, the Ru-Class that the fleet had brought with them back to base from their Newfoundland mission from the week before is inside instead. The men take the Abyssal's body and replace the coffin with weapons before restoring the grave to how it was before they'd arrived and leave.
Meanwhile, the fleet gets notified by the Federal government that there are four freight tankers that have run aground down at Cayo Romano, near Cuba, and they have huge stores of ship supplies aboard that could potentially mean more Kai remodels, which the ship girls want since the Kai remodel done for Yuudachi has proven very strong and useful; that, and if they simply leave it alone, the Abyssals will get to it first, seeing that they have active bases established in and around the Caribbean region, and the fleet doesn't want that, too. So Sanford deploys the fleet down to Cayo Romano, but at the same time, he and the former members of Seal Team Six, which now includes himself, Chuck, and Lauren, and now Jeannie, the latter two of whom have flown in clandestinely to MAPS to join them specifically for this mission, fly down to Tampico, Mexico, to investigate and search the area for Ken Simpson, the scientist whom Damon interrogated before the start of the story to begin his ship girl-seeking journey, because it's believed that Simpson may have some details regarding the Genesis Thesis Project, of which Damon was a part.
The new Seal Team Six reaches Tampico and makes their way across the town, where they confirm that the Inner Circle indeed has a base established here, specifically a manufacturing plant set up to develop and produce experimental tech for both the Abyssals and the Inner Circle itself. While searching for Simpson, Sanford runs across an early blueprint that he steals from the Inner Circle scientists and workers at one plant, a blueprint for an exosuit of some kind that would give its wearer similar powers to a ship girl or Abyssal. They also realize that, because Jeannie hasn't detected any Abyssals during their search around the town when they'd clearly seen some patrolling the town in the week before, before their Coalition Wars, Tampico was the staging point for the fleet of Abyssals who must now be headed for the freight tankers at Cayo Romano as well, and Sanford tells Benjamin, who's remained at base manning HAVOC for them as their main communicator and operator, to reposition HAVOC over to Cayo Romano so that they can use it to support the fleet.
While Seal Team Six is operating on the east coast of Mexico, the Combined Fleet, as Sanford fears, runs into heavy Abyssal opposition when they reach the area, taking very heavy casualties and even fatalities due to the sheer intensity of Abyssal resistance, due to the Abyssals' deployment of boss-type Abyssals and constant, swarming reinforcements, and the fleet's own relative inexperience with fighting the Abyssals, since they'd only ever fought them once before. When Nagato, the flagship, contacts Sanford and notifies him of their dire situation, Sanford must decide between pulling the fleet back to safety to mitigate their losses or simply order the fleet to push on, but if the fleet pulls back, then they automatically concede both the victory and the valuable spoils to the Abyssals, which they don't want, and if the fleet continues fighting, they suffer even more casualties and losses, without a guarantee that they'd still win. Sanford ultimately orders the fleet to keep fighting.
Back in Tampico, Seal Team Six finally tracks down Ken Simpson, and after Jeannie eliminates his Abyssal guard, Lauren and Sanford interrogate him about the details of the Genesis Thesis Project and the F.L.E.E.T. 2 Project, both of which he was involved. Sanford demands from him to know how Simpson and his coworkers in the GT Project managed to get their hands on what he refers to as the 'Rebirth' strain, a cell strain that's responsible for rapid regenerative tissue, based off the infamous "immortal cells" from before the nuclear war. Sanford claims that he and his own team had initially developed the strain for the purposes of the original F.L.E.E.T. Project, but reinforcements sent to recover Simpson interrupt them, and not wanting to kill Simpson just yet, Seal Team Six is compelled to relinquish him to escape and evacuate from the town and return to base.
The Combined Fleet, suffering more and more losses as projected, do get closer to their prize of the freight tankers with their ship supplies, but the fleet eventually gets split up and fragmented, resulting in the fleet trying to consolidate their position to fight as one fleet, rather than two or three and get surrounded and sunk piece by piece. However, in the middle of the regrouping effort, Shoukaku sacrifices herself so that Zuikaku and Kaga and others can make it back to the bulk of their fleet and gets swarmed by Abyssals, quickly getting confronted by a Wo-Class. After a brief verbal exchange with her, Shoukaku attempts to go out fighting by detonating an arrow of hyper-charged Abyssal energy right down at her feet to blow herself and all the Abyssals around her up.
More Abyssal reinforcements arrive to take down the ship girls, but this time the ship girls get some backup of their own, in the form of Lukenstor's Harrier III fighter jets who have been deployed to bail them out of their tough situation; it is this battle that proves that in this story, modern military technology can actually combat the Abyssal threat very well, provided that the ship girls are there to act as a buffer against the Abyssals so that human technology can deal its damage against them. To make things better, Jeannie herself arrives on the scene, just in time to save Murasame, who was about to be shot by an Abyssal, and helping the fleet clean up the rest of the remains of the Abyssal fleet. With these reinforcements, the Combined Fleet swings the tide of the battle in their own favor and defeat the Abyssals to claim their supplies, but not before having more than half the fleet moderately, heavily, or critically damaged and suffering their biggest number of sunken ship girls yet.
When the fleet returns with their spoils and remains of their fallen ship girls to have them repaired back to life, the fleet administrators calculate that after all the repairs are paid for with the resources they've taken from the freight tankers at Cayo Romano, they barely have enough to remodel just a few more ship girls.
After Operation Dualsight (the name for the combined ops of Seal Team Six and the Combined Fleet just prior), when the fleet is being repaired and recuperating, Kisaragi, who incidentally also wanted to have Damon's gun for herself, finally confronts Murasame about it, and the two of them soon devolve into a quarrel, in which Suzukaze, who notices them fighting, also gets involved with to defend Murasame, who's her sister. But the way she defends Murasame is by attacking Kisaragi, and the two of them engage in a brief scuffle that quickly ends when Suzukaze traps Kisaragi in a bubble of water using her Water Cascade power. Murasame then rebukes Suzukaze for using excessive force against Kisaragi, causing Suzukaze to feel incredibly miffed and rejected, and the harsh words that Murasame brings out against her younger sister compels Suzukaze to run away from the fleet. Kisaragi, who snaps back to her senses when Murasame and Suzukaze start arguing violently with each other, tries to intervene by apologizing, but it's too late, and Murasame doesn't accept Kisaragi's apology anyway. Once the incident is let known to Sanford, he sends out the entire Shiratsuyu-Class to search for Suzukaze, of whom Shigure finds her first, with orders from Sanford to force Suzukaze out if the latter decides for good not to return, which is what Suzukaze indeed does in talking with Shigure, and so Sanford removes Suzukaze from the fleet roster. Shigure tells Suzukaze that she's not welcome back in the fleet anymore and promptly abandons her sister, leaving Suzukaze alone to now fend for herself.
The Fleet Logs are short vignettes that catalogue the thoughts of all the ship girls in the fleet (except for the ones currently missing from the fleet at the time of the arc). This provides a degree of Day in the Limelight for the ship girls who have been less frequently depicted in the story and insight into the ship girls' opinions and perceptions of their past lives as warships, the world as it is now compared to how they remember it from the past, and their Admiral, Damon. Due to a case of Arc Fatigue by the readers who found the months of nothing but Fleet Logs for the story at the time of the logs' writing, the author has not yet made another set of Fleet Logs for the new members of the fleet who have joined since this arc.
A list detailing what ship girls have logs in what chapters can be found here.
