Ulyanovsk breezed through the Yenisei Gulf without bothering to launch his AWACS planes.
The waters here were too shallow for a proper Abyssal ambush, and his onboard radars easily swept the entire area.
The Kara Sea, which he entered five hours later, was a completely different story.
One of the coldest seas in the Arctic Ocean, it was notoriously unforgiving.
Freezing temperatures, drifting ice floes, a treacherous seabed, and navigation equipment that glitched even before the Abyssal Fleet showed up made for a miserable voyage.
Nowadays, the indigenous fishermen of the Taymyr Peninsula didn’t dare set sail for the ocean’s bounty.
No one could guarantee that the dark, freezing waters wouldn’t suddenly part to reveal a toothy maw, or that a starving pack of monsters wouldn’t lunge from behind the nearest iceberg.
Spotting them before the first shells ripped into your hull was a nightmare, even for a Kanmusu.
Ulyanovsk had it slightly easier, thanks to superior hardware and over-the-horizon detection capabilities.
Yet, despite the massive payload of Soviet anti-submarine weaponry sitting in his VLS cells, he was completely alone.
No escorts.
Just him, his wits, and his bitter experience surviving the frozen northern seas.
The aviation cruiser had three days before the Murmansk convoy reached the Kara Gates—the strait separating relatively safe waters from the wild, untamed territories where every floating chunk of ice practically wanted to kill you.
It took him exactly one day to reach the Novaya Zemlya archipelago and officially begin his combat patrol.
However, neither on the coast nor on the approach had he encountered a single Abyssal.
By all rights, he should have stumbled across at least one feral, primitive grunt or a small pack of low-tier stragglers within the first twenty-four hours.
Instead, the sea remained stubbornly, dead silent.
It was as if someone had taken a giant broom and swept the ocean’s nightmare clean off the map.
“Talk about major deja vu,” Ulyanovsk muttered, straining his ears against the white noise of his sonar arrays.
“Either all the local trash migrated to ambush the convoy, or…” One of his forward-patrol AWACS planes, currently approaching Yuzhny Island, banked sharply and set a course for the strait.
If a large Abyssal pack was laying an ambush near the entrance to the Kara Sea, they would give themselves away.
Usually, they moved out in the open, arrogant and utterly fearless.
But even if they were moving submerged, the radar operator would pick up the distinct surface disturbance that outlined a moving Abyssal swarm.
Half an hour later, the scout plane reached its destination.
Zero enemy signatures.
What it did find was the convoy’s payload.
Specifically, the escorted vessel.
It was pretty hard to miss a two-hundred-meter barge crawling at twelve knots, lighting up the radar scope like a flare in night-vision goggles.
‘Then again, even that barnacle-crusted freak didn’t have total control over her pack,’ Ulyanovsk mused, recalling the Hime he had looted a trophy from back in the neighboring Barents Sea.
Still, the radar and sonar remained dead silent, painting a picture of an entirely vacant warzone.
As if the enemy had just packed up and left to mind their own business.
Suddenly, Ulyanovsk flinched like he’d been slapped.
He instantly lost connection with his long-range scout and its two escort fighters.
Three high-altitude bogeys wiped off the map simultaneously.
Sure, the Abyssals had the firepower to do that theoretically, but doing so would have lit up his threat-warning receivers.
Simultaneous destruction of three separate targets without a single missile launch warning?
Impossible.
At least one of the pilots would have triggered a distress signal.
A second later, his acoustics operators screamed warnings.
Multiple torpedo launches.
They were coming from beneath an iceberg positioned right off his starboard beam.
Thankfully, the distance gave him just enough time to maneuver without needing to deploy active anti-torpedo countermeasures.
But the ambush raised massive red flags.
For a volley that large—way too many torpedoes for a single stray Abyssal—there had to be a spotter.
A regular ‘Destroyer’ grunt could fire from concealment without surfacing.
But they were too braindead to coordinate.
It required a high-tier Abyssal to force those feral brutes to sit perfectly still and fire a coordinated spread in the right direction.
That meant a surface-tier commander had to be nearby.
Someone the AWACS or his own radars would have easily spotted.
And the elite Abyssal submarines?
The ones capable of this kind of logic?
They didn’t associate with their surface-dwelling cousins.
They hunted alone or in small, specialized sub packs.
Moreover, even a sub would need to raise at least one unit near the surface to visually ID the target and direct the strike.
And Ulyanovsk’s systems were specifically tuned to catch that exact maneuver, instantly turning the hunter into the prey.
The sheer volume of incoming torpedoes completely ruled out a simple grunt ambush.
The area wasn’t physically large enough to hide that many Destroyer-class Abyssals.
And elite submarines carrying that kind of payload knew better than to fire blindly from a distance; they liked to get up close and personal.
Whatever official naval science said about them being mindless, Ulyanovsk knew for a fact they knew how to conserve their ammo.
“Getting sloppy in my old age,” Ulyanovsk reprimanded himself, watching a massive geyser of water erupt behind the iceberg.
One of his bombers had just dropped a depth charge right on the suspected launch origin.
Overhead, the engines of a fresh AWACS aircraft roared to life as it launched from the deck, quickly joined by a pair of interceptors.
Gaining altitude, the trio bolted toward the coordinates where the first scout had vanished.
Following close behind, though keeping a safer distance, was a flight of bombers fully loaded with heavy anti-ship munitions.
“Never thought I’d end up cosplaying as an ASW destroyer,” the cruiser grumbled, carving a hard anti-submarine zigzag into the water.
A spread of sonobuoys hit the waves, expanding the carrier’s underwater picture.
Right beneath his feet, at the optimal cruising depth for submarines, his instruments picked up a strange anomaly.
It looked like an underwater current.
Relying strictly on his active sonar, he initially dismissed it as unpredictable Arctic hydrography.
But as he widened the scan radius, he noticed it wasn’t acting like a natural phenomenon at all.
A natural current didn’t randomly halt and change directions.
‘One step east, two steps west.’ It was advancing in an eerie, rhythmic pulse straight toward the Kara Gates, gradually thinning out as it moved.
Directly toward the location where his scout had been shot down.
Directly toward the Kanmusu convoy.
That gave Ulyanovsk a very solid reason to pay a personal visit to Yuzhny Island.
But first, he had to deal with the anomaly squirming below him.
As if reading his mind, a spread of three torpedoes burst out from one of the turbulent patches.
Whoever was hiding down there promptly received a generous delivery of depth charges, quickly turning the icy water into a cloud of red mist.
The aviation cruiser wasn’t about to tempt fate by waiting for the next spread to catch him in a bad position.
He unleashed hell on every single anomalous current his buoys picked up.
The decision paid off.
Realizing their stealth was blown, the Abyssals poured out of the depths like grain bursting from a torn sack.
They surfaced so aggressively that Ulyanovsk immediately recalled the bombers he had sent toward the strait, scrambling his primary strike wing into the air.
His other two scouts, previously patrolling toward the Gulf of Ob and Severny Island, adjusted course to converge on the carrier.
Ulyanovsk needed targeting telemetry.
If something incredibly dangerous decided to breach the surface, he couldn’t afford to be distracted by manual target acquisition.
For now, luck was on his side.
He managed to sink the enemies as fast as they surfaced.
Blanketing a large cluster with RBU rocket-mortars from both sides—forcing him to carve a massive circle into the water—Ulyanovsk pushed east.
Something had driven these Abyssals into a suicidal frenzy.
They completely ignored their self-preservation instincts, abandoning their massive tactical advantage underwater to charge him head-on.
Just minutes ago, they had been sitting in absolute, undetectable silence, passing up a golden opportunity to sink an oblivious target.
Now, they were throwing themselves onto his guns.
He had plenty of firepower to guide their path to hell.
Ulyanovsk orchestrated surgical torpedo strikes from his ASW helicopters, taking out three elite submarines—including a nasty So-class.
If he hadn’t saturated the water with sonobuoys, he never would have noticed the sub hiding beneath an ice floe, using its lesser brethren as meat shields.
The moment the sub sensed danger, it briefly breached, managing to swat one of his helicopters out of the sky before taking a 500-kilogram FAB bomb directly to the face from a passing ‘Sukhoi’.
But the very presence of these elites, and their bizarrely aggressive behavior, forced him to think fast.
He had absolutely zero desire to meet whatever apex predator was driving these notoriously cautious stalkers to just throw themselves into the meat grinder.
Still, Ulyanovsk had plenty of experience dealing with entire Abyssal swarms erupting under his feet.
The Pacific Ocean hid far deadlier secrets and was highly unforgiving of mistakes.
His superior firepower and precise instrumentation allowed him to dictate the rules of engagement.
Otherwise, his Command wouldn’t have possessed a detailed map of Hime territories across the stormy northwestern Pacific and North Atlantic.
Though that map came with a heavy price in blood.
After crushing the desperate boarding attempt by the swarm, Ulyanovsk began recovering his air wing to refuel and rearm.
The mystical Kanmusu ‘magic’ that granted them effectively unlimited ammunition—provided they had time to reload—conveniently stopped working on aviation ordnance larger than autocannon shells.
A battleship or cruiser Kanmusu could fire her main battery forever, as long as she was well-fed.
A destroyer could dump her torpedo tubes, run around for thirty minutes, and launch another spread.
But carriers?
Carriers actually had to physically land their planes to strap new bombs and missiles onto them, preventing them from just carpet-bombing the ocean into oblivion in a single wave.
Whether the Japanese creators of the Shipgirls had deliberately hard-coded that limitation to prevent their saviors from turning into localized weapons of mass destruction, Ulyanovsk didn’t know.
The flat-tops just had to adapt.
Abyssal planes, on the other hand, could easily conduct multiple bombing runs without ever returning to their host…
assuming the plane survived the first pass.
As Ulyanovsk’s air group queued up in their landing pattern, the remaining airborne AWACS picked up a massive blip surfacing on the horizon.
It was way too large for a regular Abyssal.
Moreover, standard grunts didn’t warp the local weather just by existing.
The wind began to howl, and the storm clouds seemingly descended, growing thicker and darker.
What concerned the carrier wasn’t the appearance of a Hime on his radar.
It was the complete lack of her escort.
A personal guard always flanked the alpha, with only one exception Ulyanovsk knew of.
Changing course, he planned to launch his second scout to get a better look at the new threat, unwilling to risk sending his fighter escorts in blind.
Right at that exact second, his radar spiked.
The unidentified Hime fired.
The fact that his sensors actually picked up the incoming shells drastically narrowed down the suspect list.
Nine eighteen-inch armor-piercing slugs would have hit him square in the jaw if he hadn’t already begun banking away.
The guy was certain the Hime was firing blind.
She had no spotters left—the unnatural current hiding her scouts was gone, and the sonobuoys bobbing in the water registered nothing but dissolving Abyssal flesh.
The airspace was clear.
Over-the-horizon firing for a battleship—human or Abyssal—was a doomed gamble.
The shell dispersion was too wide, the flight time too long.
Especially against a fast-moving, relatively small target…
With a sickening screech, three glowing red projectiles tore past his starboard side, trailing crimson energy like massive tracer rounds.
They slammed into the water, kicking up geysers of spray that crackled with red lightning.
The dispersion was so wide that Ulyanovsk, even if he were in his full 300-meter steel hull, could have sailed comfortably between them.
But the rest of the salvo?
Terrifyingly tight.
With that same awful screech and crimson trail, six shells slammed directly into two precise kill-zones, each barely a meter wide.
His turboprop AWACS roared, ascending sharply as it cranked its radar to maximum power.
Leaving a Hime capable of aura-infused strikes right in the path of the convoy was not an option.
A plastic card slid smoothly into Ulyanovsk’s hand.
It was the size of two standard aircraft cards.
The back was dark gray, featuring the image of a wolf pack sprinting through a frozen forest.
Fabricating this specific card had cost him weeks of grueling, meticulous work.
The payoff, however, was unparalleled.
Pinching it between two fingers, Ulyanovsk took a few practice swings, never taking his eyes off the target.
He was waiting for the second AWACS to gain enough altitude.
In a perfect world, a full salvo from his main battery required three scouts in the air, but he didn’t have the time.
If a Hime entered the fray, she became priority target number one.
Finding the exact rhythm, the guy swiped the edge of the card hard against the armored plating of his deck rigging.
Sparks flew into the air.
With a sharp flick of his wrist, he threw the card toward the Hime.
The target was adjusting to an intercept course, actively summoning her retinue from the abyssal depths as she moved.
The smaller blips popping up around her on the radar couldn’t be anything else.
In seconds, over a dozen new hostiles breached the surface.
But the P-700 Granit anti-ship missile was a very, very smart weapon.
Mid-flight, the plastic card shattered into twelve streaks of light.
They materialized into miniaturized, deadly replicas of the aviation cruiser’s main caliber.
“The Carrier Killers,” as the West had once dubbed them, announced their arrival with the apocalyptic roar of their solid-fuel boosters, instantly cloaking their host in a massive cloud of toxic exhaust.
Temporarily blinding his own optical sensors and totally giving away his launch position, the smoke forced Ulyanovsk to aggressively change course again.
The lead missile, actively fed data by the two AWACS planes, shot upward into the stratosphere, acting as the pack leader.
It dragged its eleven brethren behind it, skimming just meters above the icy waves like a flock of predatory shadows.
From its high-altitude vantage point, the pseudo-electronic brain of the lead Granit actively assigned targets and coordinated the entire flight.
This terminal-phase networking system was exactly why naval engineers called it the ‘Wolf Pack’.
Weaving through massive icebergs, the missiles closed the distance relentlessly.
New targets kept popping up on the radar, instantly forcing the pack to update its kill priorities.
But five missiles remained absolutely locked onto one single victim.
The largest, most visible, and heavily armored target on the board.
The smaller fry blocking their path were ignored; the heavy Abyssal battleships attempting to shield the leader were instantly erased from existence as the supersonic missiles plowed straight through their hulls.
One by one, the shaped charges punched through and melted the thickest Abyssal armor, tearing the heavy warships apart from the inside.
The resulting magazine detonations cleared the path for the killing blow.
Just as the remaining missiles initiated their terminal dive, another massive signature breached the surface.
The targeting logic reacted instantly.
Three missiles originally meant for the escorting Abyssal carriers violently adjusted course, only to lose radar lock seconds later.
Realizing the two highest-priority threats were suddenly off the board, the lead Granit redirected its flock toward the secondary targets, before diving straight into the closest Abyssal battleship.
Miles away, remotely monitoring the final approach, Ulyanovsk tried to process exactly what the hell had just happened and where the Hime had gone.
His entire salvo of heavy anti-ship missiles had effectively been wasted.
At best, he wouldn’t be able to reload and fire his main battery for another four hours.
Everything he had just sunk could easily have been mopped up by his strike fighters, who were already en route to finish off the surviving grunts.
One kilometer off his port side, a small object rocketed up from the seabed at a terrifying speed.
He had seen a maneuver exactly like this a year ago.
And just like last time, he didn’t have the time to react.
Breaching the surface, a pink sphere instantly ignited with a crimson blaze, blooming open like a grotesque, giant flower.
Ulyanovsk’s RBU mortars were already firing, and a pair of ‘Sukhois’ in the sky banked hard for an attack run, but it was too late.
A massive, gray-skinned hand materialized from the crimson fire and simply swatted the incoming projectiles out of the air.
Rapidly expanding in size, a creature stepped out of the flames.
It looked like a hairless, gray-skinned silverback gorilla.
Standing nearly four meters tall, its hyper-muscular torso was riddled with casemate gun batteries.
It walked on its knuckles, utilizing two incredibly thick arms that ended in massive, triple-barreled gun turrets growing directly out of its shoulders.
Its round, eyeless head was completely encased in smooth, pitch-black plates that looked exactly like naval armor.
The newborn monster opened a maw burning with inner Abyssal fire and let out a thundering roar that rattled the hull plating of Ulyanovsk’s rigging.
However, the beast completely ignored him, turning its attention to the figure standing comfortably between its two massive arms, resting on the water’s surface as if it were solid concrete.
She was a tall girl with unnaturally pale skin that seemed to glow in the reflection of the beast’s fiery maw.
Despite the pallor, she was devastatingly beautiful.
Wide hips, a heavy chest, and perfectly styled, midnight-black hair.
Dressed in a scandalously short black dress, she raked the guy with an evaluating stare from eyes that burned like liquid ruby.
[image here] Having reached a conclusion, she took a deliberate step toward him, a provocative, challenging smirk playing on her lips.
Ulyanovsk wasn’t waiting.
Attack helicopters were already taking off from his deck.
From a distance, his jets launched their anti-ship missiles, prioritizing the massive gun turrets on the Demon’s shoulders.
Trying to shoot the humanoid host while her symbiote was still active was a useless endeavor—the Demon would always throw itself into the line of fire to protect her.
Exactly as predicted, the giant raised its massive palms to shield its master from the helicopter barrage.
It simultaneously tracked the aviation cruiser with its shoulder turrets.
The beast suddenly bellowed in agony.
One of the Moskits dropped by the jets managed to punch directly through the armor of the left shoulder turret, disabling it entirely and ripping away a massive chunk of gray flesh.
The second missile failed to penetrate the right turret’s armor, but the kinetic impact completely threw off its aim, allowing Ulyanovsk to easily sidestep a volley of battleship-caliber shells from the Abyssal Hime.
If he hadn’t wasted a full salvo of Granits, he would have deleted this Battleship Hime without breaking a sweat.
Now, he’d have to slowly chip her down with lighter ordnance.
But not before eliminating every single capital-class Abyssal to his east.
“Enough!” a commanding, echoing voice rolled over the water.
A massive whirlpool opened up directly between Ulyanovsk and the Battleship Hime, and a second high-tier entity breached the surface.
She was just as pale, but with long, wavy, snow-white hair and striking sapphire-blue eyes.
She was slightly shorter than the brunette, but boasted a similarly alluring, mature figure.
Stepping casually onto the surface of the water, she extended both hands toward the combatants, palms open.
The Battleship Hime narrowed her eyes.
Catching sight of the blonde’s index and middle fingers pressed tightly together in a specific gesture, the brunette relaxed her aggressive stance.
She gave the cruiser a squinting, almost disappointed look.
It was a look that practically begged him to keep fighting, even as she officially refused to throw the next punch.
Ulyanovsk, however, had no choice but to immediately cease fire.
The blonde Hime’s other hand was giving him the exact same finger gesture.
He knew that sign.
It was the very same sign that began his bizarre introduction to the Abyssal social structure—a society completely contradicting everything naval scientists preached.
Continuing the fight under these conditions was suicide.
And trying to buy his way out meant leaving the Kanmusu convoy completely exposed to two extremely powerful Abyssal elites.
So, his only remaining option was to stall for time, hoping to talk his way out of this while his main battery finished its multi-hour reload cycle.
Why the absolute apex predator of the Abyssal battleship evolutionary tree was casually taking orders from a Submarine Princess was a question he would shelf for another day.
“The Guardian of the Great Gates obeys the will of Khane Varla,” the battleship purred, lazily dropping into a seated position on the offered palm of her demonic symbiote.
Crossing one leg over the other, she watched the unfolding drama with clear amusement.
“You know the customs,” the blonde Hime stated, locking her blue eyes on Ulyanovsk.
“That makes this conversation easier.” “About what?” the guy asked.
“You killed my older sister,” the Submarine Princess declared.
Ulyanovsk tensed.
“You want revenge.” Handling a high-tier Abyssal Submarine was barely an inconvenience.
The AK-630 rotary cannons were utterly terrifying in close-quarters combat against unarmored subs, and his reloaded RBU rocket-mortars were explicitly designed for that exact scenario.
A Battleship, however…
Feeling the cruiser’s gaze on her, the brunette licked her lips predatorily, showing off rows of razor-sharp, triangular teeth.
“I came to talk,” the Submarine shook her head.
For a split second, Ulyanovsk desperately wanted to pinch himself just to prove he hadn’t time-traveled two years into the past.
Yes, the environment was completely different, but the terrifyingly familiar script was exactly the same.
The same appearance of the Abyssal Hime, the exact same offer dropping from her lips…
“Though you eliminated the Guardian of the Great Arc, the Adept of the Currents, and claimed her trophy as your own, Velka’s fate is of no concern to me,” the Hime continued casually.
“Time flows inexorably, and only the winds have the power to disrupt its path, something far beyond our reach.
But you have returned to the Great Arc.
Why?
Your brethren are approaching from the direction of the Great Gates.
You could have indulged your foolish feud over there, just like last time.” “You knew?” “I know absolutely everything that happens in the waters of my ulus,” the Hime replied with absolute calm.
Ulyanovsk cursed internally, damning his luck, his commanding officers, and the government in general.
“Abort the operation!” he barked into the encrypted emergency channel to HQ.
“On what grounds?!” an angry voice snapped back instantly.
“I have a Super-Hime sitting in the convoy’s direct path.
I am engaging,” the aviation cruiser replied.
Now all he could do was pray to whatever gods were listening that the Brass had enough sanity left not to throw an entire Kanmusu detachment and billions of rubles of specialized equipment into a literal meat grinder.
For the longest time, the scientific community absolutely refused to believe in the existence of ‘Super-Himes’—entities capable of subduing other high-tier Himes and bending entire Abyssal armadas to their will.
That theory was brutally confirmed in practice when a Princess glowing with a blinding blue aura, leading five other Himes and their massive respective packs, shattered the defenses of Gibraltar as if they were made of wet paper.
It forced Europe to frantically divert their combined fleets into the Mediterranean just to establish a desperate, bleeding stalemate.
Unlike Command, Ulyanovsk had first-hand intelligence regarding these Super-Himes.
He knew their numbers, their territories, and their sheer, unadulterated power.
His previous informant hadn’t provided a perfect wiki page, but she had casually dropped enough terms for him to put the pieces together.
‘Why the hell is the Super-Hime of the North popping up right under my nose?!’ the aviation cruiser internally raged.
“So why are you here?” the submarine pressed.
“For the exact same reason my comrades are.” The blonde Hime let out a thoughtful “Hmm,” tilting her head to the side.
“I wanted to observe your actions.
But this…
this is actually much better,” she arrived at a conclusion.
“I will not accept the Rite of Trade…” With those words, the Hime permanently severed the aviation cruiser’s only guaranteed avenue for a safe retreat.