War never changes, but the people who fight them do. With war between factions on the horizon everyone is worried about what it might mean for the shipgirls, however a recent advancement has the potential to quite literally flip the entire table on...
"How long has it been since this damned war started? How long have we suffered under their near constant attacks?"
Those were the questions I, and many others, always asked. No one really remembers what the world was like before they suddenly showed up one day and began their onslaught.
One day, the world was fine, filled with the normal everyday issues of politics, economics, and other comparatively mundane affairs as people went around their daily lives, and the next suddenly we are facing a war of annihilation against some strange girls who are floating on water, and their near endless tide of futuristic ships.
Calling themselves the Sirens, they swept the oceans clear of our vaunted fleets, though it is not like we keeled over died without a fight. Few books remain from before that time, and even fewer of that time. I recall hearing stories of individual pilots, captains, and admirals who would lead others into combat against this neigh unstoppable foe.
Most of these engagements would result in near total devastation on humanity's part, with comparatively few casualties for those abominable invaders, at least where the casualties mattered. They didn't seem to care about their more traditional ships. Lead a dozen into a carefully laid ambush, they would just be replaced within a week. Oh, how the shipbuilders and engineers loathed their apparent shipbuilding capacity.
However, that is not to say we were without heroes on our part. As if ripped from history new names and legends were formed during those years, Admiral Perez commanding the defense of Valencia before it was reduced to rubble, Captain Evans and his miraculously successful counterattack pushing the Sirens away from New York City, one of the last remaining coastal bastions of humanity. Their stories, and many others became almost common of the era, but it was all for naught. One by one our "heroes" fell, one by one our cities were bombed, bombarded, and blasted. I've heard the global population was roughly eight billion, now it is perhaps between one or two.
It was not just people that we lost though, great technologies and works of art were ripped away from us. Once we supposedly sailed the stars, putting items in the sky and walked on the moon. Now? No one even understands what went into that. Supposedly the reason we have so few remaining books from before the collapse was due to everything being in what was called "the internet", some digital construct we have since lost any capacity to access, that or its apparent storage devices have all been demolished.
So much was lost that we can no longer replace or rebuild, but in our darkest moments after decades of defeat, retreat, death, and despair something, somewhere, finally went in favor for us without being an elaborate trick, or a fleeting hope. Roughly half a century into the conflict, the scientists and engineers managed to finally get a breakthrough that could change the tide, the discovery and manipulation of the Wisdom Cube.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
We had generally known what they were to the Sirens, data storage, batteries, etc. But never had we considered beforehand that they could be used for our own benefit. Over the span of the next two decades prototypes were tested until we were ready for the real thing.
Four cubes, four tests. After the call went out the four groups that would eventually create the major camps stepped forward with ship offers for transformations. As time was critical and these were in fact tests, three of them were pre-existing ships that had, somehow, survived these trying times, thus, the first Kinetic Artifactual Navy Self-Regulative En-lore Node, or KANSEN were born.
From the Eagle Union came one of their most prestigious ships, USS Constitution, which had been relocated to NYC harbor, from the Royal Navy a champion of old, HMS Victory, proudly falling apart in Liverpool as the Sirens paid it no attention when it was retrieved, and finally the Sakura Empire gave a ship long since abandoned after Tokyo was lost, the Mikasa, retaken after ten thousand soldiers volunteered to make the suicidal expedition to secure it long enough for the process to occur, only the Ironblood built a dedicated ship, the Großer Kurfürst, leave it to Ironblood to extend a three week test into a three year construction program.
The tests now proven a success beyond anyone's wildest dreams, we saw a chance for not just survival, but for victory. Each one of them was placed in command of a small group of more traditional warships and small counterattacks were launched to see how effective they truly were, and not one disappointed.
With our newfound technology we sought to expand this potential breakthrough and began a mass program, converting surviving museums, collecting old husks sitting on the ocean bottom, and occasionally outright rebuilding those that could not be found, but all of that would take time.
Meanwhile as the great construction, or should I say reconstruction projects were beginning to commence Humanity took the initiative. With four great champions, and many more slowly rising up to join them the Sirens were viciously attacked on nearly every continent to shove them back into the seas and away from the coastal areas so that additional dockyards could be recovered and repaired.
Slowly, surely, over the next decade ground was retaken, fortresses stormed, and fleets wasted as the Sirens were effectively pushed to the brink. After nearly a century of death, destruction, and carnage of a scale never before seen or imagined in history it seemed to be finally over. The Sirens soundly defeated, but they were never truly destroyed. We knew, there was always a real, tangible chance of their return. Patrol fleets remained, bases in the middle of the vast oceans left to be scoured but compared to how things had been they were paltry in comparison easily dealt with at a later date once the world had recovered from, well, everything.
Unfortunately, the road to recovery was long. Months turned into years, years into decades. Slowly the alliance we had all formed, Azur Lane, began to fracture and eventually shatter as each nation began looking out more for their own individual interests then aiding the group, though that was not the only point of contention.
First rumors and then later full reports were shown that some of the members had been reverse engineering and working on Siren technology in order to improve themselves, despite the protests of others. What might have originally been seen as a simple rift between human governments suddenly now also encompassed the Kansen, or shipgirls as they came to be called, in a philosophical and technological break on how things should be treated.
Thus, with nations on the road to rebuilding the world each going their own way, the Sirens seemingly defeated, the various militaries demobilizing as more shipgirls are completed to replace them, and the rift between factions both human and Kansen widening further and further with every passing year, the great alliance that saved the world, Azur Lane, came to an unceremonious, quiet, end.
---Caden Yeager, Last Fleet Admiral(rtd.) of Azur Lane
