Commander's Rounds Volume 1

Entry 100-1: Judgement

"Sorry, commander, but I don't really have any Kansen I can spare to help you. Compiler and Omitter have started feeling their oats, and I've got fires to put out all over the North Atlantic. And you know that this isn't a coincidence."

The commander rubbed his forehead. "That's all right, Marco, I knew it was going to be a long shot, and I was already prepared to go it alone. It just would've been a nice bonus if you could spare even a few ships."

"Yeah, but you can't stop me from feeling bad about it. We commanders are supposed to be the kinds of guys who can help people out, yeah?"

He shook his head. "That does seem to be the way, doesn't it? As for stopping you from feeling bad, I can and I will, you just do a good job over there."

"Can do!"

The commander hung up. It would've been nice to have some of Azur Lane Atlantic's kansen with him, but he did trust Marco Barisi to tell him the truth about what was happening on his side of the world. This was a battle he and his people would have to win on their own.

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There was no getting around it now.

Everything was ready to go. With Purifier's help, Yuubari, Akashi, and Marblehead had devised a way to bring Tester down for good, as well as eliminate all of the results of the research gained from her battles with Azur Lane. It had also turned out that they didn't really need to do much to provoke Tester to fight, as the Siren relished the idea of collecting more and more battlefield data.

If the commander had done something to provoke her, it was only by accident. It seemed that letting her know that they believed they had a way to put her down had only increased her interest in tangling with them, just to see if it was true. As twisted as she was, Tester was, at the heart of things a scientist.

As the commander thought of things, the five members of the Siren Elites were each some perversion of the scientific impulse. Purifier wanted the purest empiricism- to test the readiness of man by launching a true war. Tester hungered for data of any kind, and so set up the most outlandish and cruel experiments to test the power and psyche of the Kansen to the limit. Compiler was its impartiality, taken to its most callous degree. The pompous Omitter refused to allow anyone to accept their monstrous work without the proper gravitas and respect. And Above all of these was Observer, who was happy to manipulate both subjects and experimenters alike for the sake of a study that heartlessly toyed with the life of an entire world.

Purifier had defected to them because she recognized the others for what they were, and now they had a chance to do away with Tester for good.

And Tester welcomed the chance to see just what they could do.

In this case, she was the one who had issued a challenge to him, telling him that she was ready to conduct a large-scale study and that he should bring a very large sampling of subjects, with the punishment of burning the Sakura Empire to the ground if he refused. Considering the forces that Tester was willing to bring to battle, he would have to bring a huge amount of the strength of Azur Lane to challenge whatever devices she had in store for him and Azur Lane. He would normally hesitate to take a battle that a Siren offered, but the truth of the matter is that Sirens could rarely be forced to battle, and there was no telling when he'd get another chance.

However, as he organized the forces, he encountered a wrinkle.

Leutnant Zur See Albert Kesler.

He stood at attention in front of the commander. "So, it has been decided that all of them must go?"