The Naval Base of the Unnamed Ship Girls

"Then why are there only three left now?" Hyperion asked the question that everyone on Adun's ship wanted to ask.

“I know that…” Now that she no longer needed the help of the engineering ship girl, Admiral Gita released her mechanical hand and said, “Apart from these three that remained at the Hong Kong Naval Base, the rest were transported to the Great Wall of the Himalayas by Admiral Le Yi.”

After all, it was General Gita who took charge of the handover; if someone didn't know this, they would be slacking off.

"Hehehe, so this is the flat-chested governor who listened to my advice," Hyperion chuckled.

"Flat-chested?" General Gita looked down at her own chest, then at Adun's... She couldn't compare, the difference was too great.

"Strange? Are the mechanical arms of these engineering ship girls directly installed on the ship's equipment?" Autumn Wind Mound asked curiously, her gaze fixed on the engineering ship girl who had been stopped and questioned by Admiral Gita.

"To be precise, it's part of the ship's equipment." The answer wasn't from Admiral Gita, but from the local expert, South Dakota.

Seeing the curious look in Autumn Wind's Mound's eyes, South Dakota continued, "Any engineering ship girls you see with extra parts are all subordinates of that General Yue Yi. Only they would recklessly add these things to their bodies to make their work easier, without any regard for aesthetics."

Anyway, ship girls who sign contracts with Admiral Le Yi don't need to worry about their sex lives. If they do, using a machine to solve the problem is no different from asking their own admiral to do it.

"Is this considered reckless?" Hyperion, delighted that his suggestion had been adopted, rubbed the back of his head with his hands and said, "This is normal, isn't it..."

"Is this normal in your world?" South Dakota, Admiral Gita, and the other ship girls under Adonis's command all looked at Adonis and Hyperion with surprise.

Sentinax from the Burning Legion, and the helmeted Executor, showed no change in expression; they even seemed to want to laugh.

Of course, the latter was mainly wearing a helmet, so no one could see what her expression was.

“No, but doing so also signifies one’s professionalism, which is a very respectable choice.” After stating his point of view, Hyperion continued, “For example, the phase technician from the Adun family has several mechanical arms attached to his body.”

Hyperion's words successfully shifted the horrified gazes of the ship girls to Adun.

"Pfft..." That was the sound of Hyperion being struck on the hand with a chop to the neck. Rubbing his slightly sore palm, Adun spoke:

"The mechanical arm on Phase Technician Karax is just an external device, while these engineering ship girls have directly modified these devices onto themselves."

“But you don’t have to hit me!” Hyperion said, his head spinning from being knocked on.

“Isn’t your ability to get stronger by getting beaten up?” Adon said.

“…Adon, can you forget my previous description of my abilities?” Hyperion said.

"No, besides, you can't hide anything from me no matter what abilities you have," Adun said seriously, shaking his head.

The ship girls under Adun's command were already used to the interactions between Adun and the Hyperion.

Admiral Gita, who was seeing this scene for the first time, glanced at the head of her secretary ship, the Gransefa, and the Sky People airship immediately covered its head and said:

"Admiral, I don't have the ability to get stronger by taking a beating."

"Besides, I'm just a wooden airship with very low defense."

"...I was just looking, I didn't intend to." Unconcerned that her own ship girl had exposed her thoughts, Admiral Gita patted her secretary ship's lower body again, seemingly unconcerned.

Granse, who was defending with his hands covering his head, did not expect such a feint attack and blushed slightly.

While the bigwigs were completely off-topic, the troops remaining at the Hong Kong Garrison had already prepared for the deployment of three Skyhawk fighters.

Each Skyhawk Warrior has two similarly dressed ship girl pilots who enter the cockpit from the rear neck position, and the one that uses electricity actually has three of them.

Upon seeing this, Hyperion recalled what South Dakota had said about how these robots were piloted, and said:

"By the way, how did you develop this mind-synchronization driving technology?"

"..." Unable to answer the question, Admiral Gita grabbed the mechanical arm of an engineering ship girl once again.

Compared to the engineering ship girl who just had two mechanical arms installed on her body, this one has undergone a more thorough modification, with even the lower half of her face connected to her body by pipes.

The engineering ship girl, who spoke using a "voice device" similar to that of Admiral Yue Yi, hesitated slightly before saying:

"The initial Skyhawk puppet armor also used a single-ship control method."

"To avoid the motion delays and high failure rates caused by manual operation, we use a holographic A-stage control room and a gesture control system."

"Because this system has a very good simulation, the earliest operators will be able to summon their own ship from inside the cockpit."

"So we later added a dual-ship operating system, so that even if two pilots want to summon their own ships during battle, they will be unable to do so because they are not the same ship."

Although the engineer ship girl's mechanical voice wasn't pleasant to listen to, her answer was extremely detailed, so detailed that Hyperion immediately followed up with a new question:

"Then why don't you use regular ship girls as pilots?"

"Ship girls below the Hero class cannot truly unleash the combat power of the puppet armor, and operating such a massive war vehicle can easily cause ordinary ship girls to develop self-perception problems."

"Self-awareness disorder?" Hyperion asked curiously.

"This is something that ship girls encounter on their path from Hero-class to Leader-class. To put it bluntly, they don't understand whether they are a ship or a ship girl," South Dakota explained.

"In other words, ordinary ship girls piloting these combat mechs can easily confuse themselves with the combat mechs themselves?" Hyperion said with a sudden realization.

“Yes…” The engineering ship girl paused briefly, then continued in a mechanical voice, seemingly searching for information, “Lord Hyperion”

"...Okay, you can continue with your work." Hearing this unfamiliar ship girl address him as "Sir," the Hyperion smiled and let her off the hook. The ship girl didn't move.

"Huh?" Hyperion looked at the engineering ship girl who was looking her up and down with a puzzled expression.

"If given the opportunity, I would like to conduct an in-depth and comprehensive physical examination of Your Excellency Hyperion. I would like to see what the differences are in the composition between your starship and the human form of our native ship girls."

As the engineering vessel spoke, Adun and his crew could see a hint of fanaticism in the vessel's soulless pupils.

"...Roll, roll, roll, roll!" The Hyperion, who had just been gloating, was so shocked that it almost pulled out its Yamato cannon and fired a shot at the engineering ship.

"I regret that if my words have displeased Your Excellency Hyperion, I am willing to accept the punishment in form, but I implore Your Excellency to preserve my mind device, specifically the part above my neck." The engineering ship girl's tone remained unchanged.

Watching the engineering ship girl, who had ultimately been spared, and her octopus-like back, Hyperion asked Admiral Gita with lingering fear, "Are all of Admiral Yueyi's subordinates this kind of scum?"

“No, to be precise, Yue Yi is that kind of person.” General Jita said, holding a bag of popcorn.

Chapter 1285 This World is Too Deep

In the fleet under the command of Yue Yi, the self-proclaimed orthodox successor of the Mohist school, the Grand Minister of the East Asian Theater, and the forging general, those who modified their bodies to a greater extent held higher positions.

The engineering ship girl who wanted to study the humanoid form of the interstellar warship, which had been modified beyond recognition, was the manufacturing director stationed at the Hong Kong garrison.

In other words, compared to the acting admiral Gita who slacks off all day, she is the true controller of this naval base.

...Well, it's a good thing the Hyperion didn't just shoot the enemy to death in a fit of anger, otherwise those three Skyhawks wouldn't have been able to start.

He's using his core organ, the power plant, as the start-up key—what the hell?

Admiral Gita, who was learning about this setting for the first time, was somewhat bewildered as she held the power unit that the engineering ship had pulled out from its chest.

"The command is now in your hands, General. My mission is complete. Please put the power reactor back into my body after this." After the manufacturing director finished speaking, her mechanical legs went limp and she sat down in a chair, lifeless.

"...Engineers from your hometown could do this?" South Dakota asked, glancing sideways at Hyperion, who had just said it was no big deal.

"Are they crazy?" Hyperion repeatedly checked the engineering ship girl who had taken her own power reactor. She wasn't dead, but she was in a state of suspended animation.

It's truly remarkable that these engineering ship girls can modify their bodies to remain alive even after leaving the power plant.

"Rather than calling him a madman, it's more accurate to say that if the upper beam is crooked, the lower beam will be crooked too." South Dako said that the real culprit for all of this was General Yue Yi.

"Is it really necessary to go to this extent?" Hyperion also felt that these engineering ships had gone too far, especially the other ship girls who were waiting for Admiral Gita to give the order to attack, who showed no surprise whatsoever.

"Who knows?" South Dakota hadn't delved into why that general had persisted to this extent.

General Gita, who had been slacking off and knew nothing about the issues, carefully inserted the power reactor in her hand into the control panel of the command center and said, "For him, it's not worth it."

"Knowledge is power, and this has always been the belief of the Mohist school that Yue Yi followed."

"Faith? Are you sure... this is a doctrine and not a religion?" Hyperion asked curiously.

"...If you insist on calling it a religion, it's not so bad." As Admiral Gita answered, in her capacity as acting admiral of the Hong Kong Naval Base, she ordered the ship girls waiting in the command center: "Attack!"

"The Brave Ship is ready."

"Destiny is ready."

"Azure is ready."

Following General Gita's command, images of the cockpits of three Skyhawk fighters and the view seen by the pilots in the A holographic pod appeared on the large screen in the command center.

"Adjust the tracking satellites and lock onto the target's location."

"Determine the target's location and calculate its movement trajectory."

"Trajectory calculation complete. Adjust launch angle."

"Launch angle adjusted, launch countdown: 10, 9, 7..."

After the countdown ended, the three Skyhawk Warriors, each weighing hundreds of thousands of tons, were launched along with their respective maintenance bays.

The shockwaves from the launch caused the command center to shake as well.

"I don't see anything wrong," General Gita replied to Hyperion, her gaze fixed on the seven red dots on the screen that marked the enemies.

"Besides Yue Yi claiming to be a descendant of the Mohist school, he and his fleet also called themselves the Mechanical Cult."

“I thought it was Scientology…” Hyperion said with a subtle sarcasm.

“Le Yi has never believed in science… at least not in the fact that science is the only thing in the world.” General Gita’s expression was very subtle, as if she shared the same thoughts as General Le Yi.

"Indeed, there is more to the world than just science... or more precisely, there is more than just the technology side. But no matter which path you take, the final result is the same," Adun said calmly, gazing at the large screen in the command center.

Upon hearing what Adon said, Autumn Wind Mound sighed and said, "Unfortunately, my world doesn't have that many mysterious powers."

“Whether it exists or not, it doesn’t affect our pursuit of the truth of the universe,” Ardon said.

"But it affects my combat power in this world." Because the world I was born in is a rare world that is purely technological, Qiufengzhidun has an inherent flaw in this world, which is that its magic resistance is not enough.

When facing enemy ships from the mysterious side, they were hesitant and full of concerns.

Especially after joining Adun's personal guard fleet and witnessing the mysterious and unpredictable powers of the ship girls on the side, Autumn Wind's Pillar felt that her usefulness was decreasing.

Even the artificial intelligence within her couldn't give a complete answer to this, and its logic even became disordered several times.

"Not enough magic resistance? Come to me! I'm a professional!!" Dalaran, with an expression of business in hand, approached Autumnwind Mound and pinched and squeezed here and there.

Fortunately, the ship at Autumnwind's Mound has an incredibly good temper. If it had encountered a ship with a short temper, it would probably have immediately started a full-blown brawl with Dalaran.

...Who told Dalaran to always be so fond of touching certain private parts?

After squeezing for a while, Dalaran suddenly changed his expression, revealed an embarrassed look, let go of his hand, and took a step back to the side... then took another step back, as if he wanted to distance himself from Autumn Wind's Mound.

"What's wrong?" Autumn Wind's Mound hadn't yet realized that his secret had been seen through by the mage academy of Dalaran.

"Uh...no, it's nothing." Dalaran took another step back to the side, almost touching Sentinax, which didn't seem like anything was wrong at all.

"You... saw my true nature?" Even if Autumn Wind's Helm was slow-witted, he noticed the hint of fear in Dalaran's unnatural expression. Moreover, Autumn Wind's Helm wasn't as stupid as Hyperion.