[Chapter One]( https://www.reddit.com/r/AzureLane/comments/hidhf5/kaiser_lane_volume_one_the_gathering_stormchapter/)[Previous Chapter](https://ift.tt/3kv6S6H to alternate sites:[Fanfiction](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13630036/1/Kaiser-Lane-Volume-One-The-Gathering-Storm)[Ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24989680/chapters/60504472)[Spacebattles](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/kaiser-lane-azur-lane-x-kaiserreich-legacy-of-the-weltkrieg.863147/)_____A vicious war cry. The echoing boom of large-caliber guns. The shrill whistle of shells in the air. Scharnhorst’s ears rang with the familiar sounds of battle, the Yorck-class Fast Battleship’s body instinctively twisting to best protect itself from the incoming fire. Plumes of seawater burst skywards on every side as her opponent’s volley of twelve 45-cm shells plunged into the harbor around her. The waterspouts threw spray in all directions, soaking the Weltkrieg veteran to her bones.Absent was the usual hellish flame of high explosives going off, as well as the deadly storm of shrapnel and metal fragments. The yellow clouds of dye that marked the impact of each shell, too, served as a reminder that this was not a fight to the death, but rather a ‘friendly’ training exercise. Not that that fact was going cause Scharnhorst to hold back that much: the Fast Battleship had been taught long ago that the sea did not forgive half-measures. Training was no exception to that rule. If you slacked off in a spar, you might slack off in a battle, and if you slacked off in a battle you wound up sunk. Her old instructor Von der Tann had, quite literally, beaten that lesson into her head, and Royal Navy had damn well made sure that it had stuck. Now it was the Weltkrieg veteran’s turn to try and pass on what she had learned from a lifetime in the Hochseeflotte.Heavy emphasis on the word ‘try’.Almost casually, Scharnhorst dodged sideways as her trainee Deutschland’s next salvo screamed in, an annoyed scowl decorating the Fast Battleship’s features. The younger shipgirl’s gun control was almost laughable, the shots she had fired having less been ‘aimed’ at the lavender-haired woman and more ‘fired in her vague direction’. The dozen shells that composed the volley fell in four loose and easily-avoided clusters (one from each of the other girl’s turrets) rather than as a singular overwhelming blow, the pinpoint precision that would have been a given among the veterans of Jutland or Skagerrak almost entirely absent.Well, at least she’s using all her main guns at once. Only took her what, four years? Bitter sarcasm tinged the voice in Scharnhorst’s head as she took up her own firing stance, her eight 38-cm guns swinging into position. Completing her targeting calculations with near-trivial ease, the Weltkrieg veteran sent a real salvo back at her trainee: eight guns roaring as one, shells in a tight cluster, aim precise. For the sake of trying to teach the younger girl something, the Fast Battleship had made sure to telegraph her incoming attack as blatantly as possible, giving her opponent the chance to read her body language and try evading the volley instead of just relying on her armor.No such luck. Deutschland, as per her norm, simply stood there and took the shots, apparently deciding that things like ‘dodging incoming fire’ were for lesser beings than the (not entirely fraudulently) self-proclaimed strongest ship in Ironblood. For a brief moment, the Super Dreadnought disappeared in a cloud of training dye and seaspray; a second later, a coughing noise sounded out from where Deutschland had been standing, the cloud clearing to reveal the Super Dreadnought’s face and torso had been painted lime green, the Flagship-to-be spluttering as she tried to spit the rancid-tasting training dye out of her mouth.Another second later and a furious howl escaped from the black-haired girl’s lips, followed shortly by another flurry of 45-cm shells. Once again, to call it a volley would have been to stretch the definition of the word: it was clear to anyone with a trained eye that while the younger shipgirl may have been firing all her big guns together, she was still aiming each turret independently. Rather than in a true broadside, the shots were still plunging down as quartets of separate barrages, each one with only a bare fraction of the power that the shipgirl that had fired them should have been able to achieve.Scharnhorst didn’t quite roll her eyes as she again easily evaded the worst of the incoming fire. That even with sloppy gun control and sloppier aim Deutschland’s shots made her teeth rattle, that even with training shells her student’s raw power was apparent, only served to disappoint and frustrate the Fast Battleship further. This was the girl that was the new pride of Ironblood? This was the girl that was meant to be the Hochseeflotte’s future flagship, the heir-apparent to Kaiserin Friedrich der Grosse herself?In theory, yes. On paper, Deutschland was the greatest warship ever built, the ultimate symbol of the new order that the Kaiser’s Empire had brought to the world, a living testament to Teutonic might. Among all the shipgirls in the world, only her own sister Graf Spee could match her raw power: a hull close to 300 meters in length; enough engine power to give her a top speed of 27 knots; a dozen 45-cm guns and enough secondary firepower to arm a light cruiser flotilla; plate armor 410mm thick all along her hull, forged from only the strongest steel. Truly, Deutschland was born to rule the waves and lead the Kaiserliche Marine.And here she was losing a training match to a two-decade old Fast Battleship that wasn’t much more than half her displacement and had maybe 3/5ths of her firepower.Such things made one worry about for the future of the Kaiser’s Empire. It was a worry that only deepened when one remembered that a Wisdom Cube was shaped by the ideals and wills of the nation that built used it, and that an Ironblood shipgirl’s personality was therefore reflective of the mindset of the whole of the German people. Deutschland’s issues were emblematic of the problems that had developed in the entire nation’s post-war psyche: in the years since the Weltkrieg had ended, Ironblood’s eisen had become softened, and its blut had started running cold.The younger generations of the German people knew only the fruits of the labor of their forebears, not the blood, sweat toil and tears of the labor itself. The children that had grown up with the Kaiser’s Empire on top of the world had come to have an attitude built around three things: ingrained feelings of complacency, arrogance and decadence; a pig-headed belief that that just being German made you the best; and the dangerous assumption that the Empire’s place in the sun had been owed, and not earned. Gone was the unshakable discipline and unbreakable will that had won the Weltkrieg, replaced with…well, nothing of value, really.It was Ironblood’s own fault, of course. Omnipresent state propaganda, so key in holding the nation together through the war’s long, dark and grinding final years, had ultimately proved a double-edged sword. Not that it hadn’t been a necessary evil: The Empire had come closer, far closer, to collapse (both on the home front and the frontlines) than even its own citizens knew. If the public had had any idea of how bad things had actually been, the whole of Ironblood would have almost certainly collapsed.To be bluntly truthful, the Kaiser’s Empire hadn’t actually won the war: they’d merely convinced their enemies that they had lost. Half of a victory is accomplished by arms: the rest is done by convincing the foe that they’ve been beaten, regardless of whether or not they actually are. Or to put it another way: you can win at poker with a pair of twos if everyone else at the table thinks that you’re holding a full house.No better analogy could describe Ironblood’s victory in the Weltkrieg. The war had not been won with guns or shells, but with cracked codes and counterintelligence, with government proclamations that had not been allowed to be questioned and very tight controls on what the public had been allowed to know. The shining example of this policy of deception’s success was the tale of the Kaiserliche Marine’s victory in the naval war: in one of the greatest intelligence coups in history, the Ironblood propaganda machine had managed to bluff the entire British Empire (and the Kaiser’s) into believing that the Hochseeflotte had scored a ‘Trafalgar-esque’ victory over Royal Navy at the Battle of the Skagerrak, when nothing could have been further from the truth.Far from a smashing success, Skagerrak had been for Ironblood the very definition of a pyrrhic victory, and even merely achieving that had taken a near-miraculous series of lucky flukes. Almost everything had gone right for the Hochseeflotte (they had all-but annihilated the Royal Battlecruisers; they had savagely mauled Britain’s Dreadnoughts; they had decimated their light ships; they had even cut down Queen Elizabeth herself), and still Ironblood had come within a hair’s breadth of defeat.Royal Navy had matched their foes blow for blow, loss for loss, sinking for sinking. Skagerrak had not been (as was told to the German people and the world) a glorious rout of an outsmarted and outmatched enemy, but the Kaiserliche Marine’s most desperate and darkest hour. The Hochseeflotte had thrown everything and anything that it had had at Royal Navy. Experimental seaplane tenders, practically every U-Boat in Ironblood, and even the brand-new Yorck-class Battlecruiser sisters, who hadn’t even had their shakedown cruises before being thrown into the fire: all of them had been sent forth in an all-or-nothing operation that had relied on a battleplan that many had considered so insane that it looped back around to genius.The ‘victory’ the Kaiserliche Marine won that day was bought with the sacrifices of dozens, hundreds of Ironblood shipgirls. Their Light Ships were decimated earning it: sent on death-or-glory torpedo attacks against the Dreadnoughts of Royal Navy (essentially being sent to die to buy breathing room for the Hochseeflotte’s Capital Ships), nearly a third of the entire Fleet’s combat-capable Destroyers had either been sunk or were badly damaged-losses further amplified by the destruction or crippling of around one-fifth of all Ironblood cruisers and a full half of their U-Boats.Among the Capital Ships, the news had been similarly grim. Of the four Bayern-class girls that could go toe-to-toe with the likes of the Queen Elizabeth- and Revenge-classes, two had fallen in the course of the battle, and the other pair would require months in drydock before they were ready to fight again. The rest of Ironblood’s Dreadnoughts had fared little better, with even the Kaiserin herself receiving wounds that could not quickly be repaired.It was the Battlecruisers that came closest to achieving what the government’s proclamations of victory declared that they had done (having decisively defeated their Royal counterparts in the battle’s early phases) but in the grinding night action that had ultimately decided the engagement’s victor they, too, had been made to pay the butcher’s bill. The old First Scouting Group, the proud veterans of Jutland, had been hammered so badly drawing fire away from their more modern comrades that none of them would see combat again for the duration of the war.That Seydlitz and her direct command had even managed to survive the battle could largely be attributed to the spectacular performances of their Mackensen- and Yorck-class protégés in the Second Scouting Group, who had thrived in the hellfire of their baptism by flame. It had been mainly been their guns that had responsible for the obliteration of the Royal Battlecruisers, and it was their arrival into the chaos of the night action that had sealed Queen Elizabeth’s fate. They would be the ones to be declared the heroines of the hour, and if anyone doubted those honors then Second Scouting Group possessed more than enough battle scars to prove that they rightfully had earned them.But that Ironblood’s Battlecruisers (half their number crippled and the rest badly maimed) had been by far the Hochseeflotte’s most intact formations by the time that the Fleet had returned to the safety of the Jade Estuary was telling. The Kaiserliche Marine may have struck the Royal Navy a blow the likes of which it had not felt in centuries, but they had effectively crippled themselves in doing it. There was no doubt in Wilhelmshaven: after Skagerrak, the Hochseeflotte could not afford to launch another assault against the Royal Knights. One more battle of such magnitude would have meant the utter destruction of Ironblood.But Royal Navy hadn’t known that. Royal Navy had known nothing about the losses their foes had suffered: as the final phases of the battle had been fought in near pitch darkness, the Royal Knights had not been able to see that they were bloodying their foes just as badly as they themselves had been bloodied. In the confusion and chaos of the night battle, Queen Elizabeth and her command had had no idea of what the tactical situation was outside of what they could see with their own eyes, and what they could see was sorely limited.And in the black of night, Ironblood had given Royal Navy a rather compelling reason to believe that it was they, not the Kaiserliche Marine, that were the ones to suffer the greater losses. When the First and Second Scouting Groups had limped into the confusing and brutal fray of the night action, they had done so by essentially pincering the Royal Knights between themselves and the Kaiserin’s Battle Line. Unable to clearly see the enemy’s reinforcements, the Queen was left to assume the worst: that Ironblood’s Battlecruisers were fully intact and that her own Battlecruisers had been completely wiped out.This, in turn, lead Elizabeth to believe that the arriving Ironblood reinforcements (which had caught the Royal Navy main body almost completely by surprise) were far combat capable than they had actually been. The Royal Knights, thinking themselves to now be surrounded by a superior force (and inexperienced in night combat), had panicked. Fearing a disaster, they had tried to retreat, and had then, at the absolute worst possible moment, Royal Navy been confronted by an actual disaster: in the chaos of their attempt to disengage, their Queen had fallen.Staggering away from the battlefield, Elizabeth’s successors would be left stunned by the shock of her loss, the Flagship’s sinking amplifying the psychological impact of Royal Navy’s casualties tenfold. The shocks to their pride and self-confidence were massive: Not since the Siren Wars had a Royal Navy Flagship been lost in battle. And not only had the sinking of Queen Elizabeth been devastating to the Grand Fleet’s morale (indeed, Elizabeth’s fall would inflict upon her successor Warspite and most of her Court a kind of mental paralysis which the Grand Old Lady would never fully shake), it had thrown Royal Navy’s chain of command into chaos, crippling their ability to deal with the ensuing crisis. And as they scrambled to rearrange its hierarchy and regain its bearings, the Hochseeflotte had struck again.The decisive blow of Skagerrak would not be made by a naval cannon, but by the printing presses of the Ironblood state media. Knowing from intercepted and decoded messages that their enemy believed themselves crushingly defeated, the Kaiser’s Empire could not and did not allow the truth of Skagerrak to escape. The propaganda techniques that had shifted Jutland from a stalemate to a smashing victory in the public consciousness had been perfected in the years since that earlier battle, and now they were put to good use: the whole world was told of a story of complete and utter annihilation of the enemy, and were informed that the Ironblood Fleet could easily steam out and do it all over again at a moment’s notice.That the shipgirls had no crews that could have allowed the truth to leak out made the lie all the easier. Dutiful to the last, the girls of the Hochseeflotte had done all that they could to help foster the illusion, and soon carefully doctored photographs of them were circulating throughout Ironblood, showing the German people images of decisive triumph and flawless victory. The censors did the job of hiding the girls’ injuries and disguising the fleet’s losses almost perfectly: if you looked through the newspapers of the continent, one would never have known how badly the Kaiserliche Marine had been bled.Royal Navy (which even accounting for its losses at Skagerrak would have still have held notable advantages in numbers and firepower over Ironblood, and in all likeliness would have been able to destroy them on a whim if it came to another surface engagement) took the bait. The newly-crowned Queen Warspite, already plagued by self-doubt, grief and regret, had been in no mood to go combing through her enemy’s declarations of triumph looking for discrepancies or trying to challenge Ironblood to a rematch, and nor had her advisors.Convinced by the loss of their Flagship that they had been dealt a crippling defeat (an illusion reinforced by a the Hochseeflotte’s continued hit-and-run raids on the British coast, which seemed to imply that the Kaiserliche Marine still had enough strength left to go picking a fight), the Grand Fleet would spend the rest of the war hemmed up in port, terrified of losing more sisters-in-arms than they already had. And by the time that Ironblood’s façade began to crack the truth started to leak out, it was too late to make a difference.Similar stories had played out on land. The Kaiser’s government had had to convince starving people scavenging for turnips and horse-feed that the citizens in enemy lands had it worse and were on the verge of breaking, and had managed to loot enough food from its conquests to sustain the illusion. The army had fended off Azur Lane’s almost feral counterattacks to try and stop the push on Paris by making them think that they had enough reserves to launch attacks along the flanks of the main thrust, tying down entire enemy divisions guarding against attacks that would never come.By lying long enough and loud enough, Ironblood had been able to create an entirely new truth and convince the world of it. The Kaiser’s Empire held together long enough for mutinies in the Iris Army to rip the Orthodoxy apart. The British Expeditionary Force, in perfect position to relieve their beleaguered ally by launching an assault that would have cut the German lines to pieces, had called the attack off, believing it to be a suicide mission into impregnable defenses (defenses that had been held by undermanned ‘ghost divisions’ that in practical terms existed only on paper). And so it was that in the end, Ironblood won the war: a victory built on the greatest set of lies ever told.Because their new world order was built on the foundation of such lies, the Kaiser’s Empire could never stop lying if they wanted to maintain their oh-so-fragile hold on world hegemony. The end of the façade of unchallengeable power would have meant the end of Ironblood itself, the German people too exhausted and bled too dry to even consider withstanding a renewed enemy assault. The slightest lowering of their guard might have invited such a challenge, and so Ironblood’s great bluff had continued: They showed their enemies and allies alike nothing but strength and power, never backing down from a challenge, launching interventions the world over as displays of might and praying that no one would ever catch a glimpse behind the curtain.By sheer luck or divine intervention, the illusion had held. The rivals of the Kaiser’s Empire had each had their own reasons for failing to see through the veil: Northern Parliament was embroiled deep in its Civil War; The Iris Orthodoxy, Sardegna Empire and Royal Navy had all been struggling to rebuild themselves, and had soon found the fires of Revolution sweeping across their lands; Eagle Union and the Sakura Empire, both isolated in their own continents far from Europa, had had little reason to challenge Ironblood’s claims of incomparable strength. But that the deception was allowed to persist only let the lies take deeper and deeper root among the German people, and even those that remembered the truth eventually began to convince themselves otherwise.The lies that Ironblood had told the world started to become the lies that they told themselves. Public opinion, mirroring what the state press had told them in the war years and beyond, became convinced that that the British were weak and decadent, that the French were spineless cowards, the Russians were a backwards people a century out of date, that none of them were legitimate threats to the new order. The guard was relaxed. Vigilance was not maintained. The lies were taught to children in the schools, who grew up believing that state’s official explanations of how the war was won, never knowing that the ‘inevitable victory’ had had more to do with sheer luck, clever lies and the shortcomings of Azur Lane than any of Ironblood’s own military accomplishments.And those that didn’t remember the war, didn’t remember the truth about it, had no alternative but to learn the lies by heart. Who was going to tell them otherwise? With the old enemies gathering their strength once more, who would dare admit weakness? Rather than being told of the full extent of the nation’s sacrifices and suffering, a whole generation was instead raised believing their parent’s propaganda: that the war had been a smashing and glorious victory, thinking that Ironblood’s ascendency had come at the hand of destiny, and that in both the present and the future that would be enough. That if there ever was another war, the Kaiser’s Empire was fated to win it.Given that a shipgirl’s Wisdom Cubes (and thus their personality) was shaped by the wills and beliefs of their nation, how else could a girl like Deutschland (who had been built specifically just to one-up the other Great Powers) have turned out but entitled and arrogant to the extreme? The black-haired girl seemed totally convinced that their own strength was all that they would ever need, that fate itself would bend to meet her whims, that she had been born perfect and had no need for improvement. The Super Dreadnought was the physical incarnation of post-war Ironblood’s air of self-assured supremacy and untouchability: Brash cockiness, flashy demeanor, raw power that very few (if any) could possibly hope to match…and almost nothing of mental or spiritual substance to back any of it up.Such things were not appreciated by those that had been through the hellfire of Jutland and Skagerrak, that knew full well that Ironblood should have by all rights lost the war and that the fruits of their victory were privileges, not rights. The unearned pride and unbacked arrogance of their intended successors (well-designed and well-built, but untested and unready) was, to put it mildly, deeply frowned upon by the veterans of the Weltkrieg.Fortunately, the shipgirls of Ironblood were in a position to do something about it. Those that had since the war remained in the Kaiser’s service had taken up the duty of trying to beat such complacent attitudes out of the thick skulls of their trainees and to take lessons they’d learned during the war and beat them in. It was a difficult process, and the success of their attempts varied heavily from girl to girl, but it damn well wasn’t for lack of effort on the part of the instructors.With a veteran’s skill, Scharnhorst dodged yet another of Deutschland’s attempts at a salvo. That wasn’t to say that she was entirely unscathed: given the raw firepower of her guns, even simple near misses from the Super Dreadnought’s didn’t feel all that different from, say, a direct hit from a destroyer (or maybe even a light cruiser). If the Kaiserin’s heir-apparent ever managed to get her head out of her ass, there would be few in the world that would have a hope of standing against her. Until that happened, though…Well, it was Scharnhorst’s job to try and make it happen, and there was nothing like a solid beating to knock someone’s pride down a few notches. With that in mind, the Fast Battleship decided to it was time to become a bit more assertive in her teaching. Evading more fire from Deutschland, the Weltkrieg veteran gunned her engines and broke straight towards her opponent, taking hold her rigging’s spear as she did so.Under Ironblood doctrine, Deutschland’s response to this charge was meant to be as follows: given the superior caliber of her guns to all but a small handful of potential opponents, the Flagship-to-be was supposed to always try and maintain distance between herself and any enemies, thereby taking advantage of her longer effective firing range to devastate any attacker, optimally long before they could even get close enough to hit back.The heir-apparent of the Kaiserin, though, tended to ignore any advice that didn’t come out of her own head. With another hail of gunfire (this one accompanied by a storm of cursing and an assortment of age-related insults), Deutschland drew her massive zweihander sword from the scabbard on her back and began a charge of her own, her rigging groaning as the black-haired girl’s redlined her propulsion system.With sounds like railroad cars being thrown across the sky, Deutschland’s latest barrage streaked impeccably towards Scharnhorst…and proceeded to mostly pass harmlessly over the lavender-haired woman’s head, the Flagship-to-be not having bothered with things like ‘properly leading her target.’ The Weltkrieg veteran easily used her spear to turn aside the handful of threatening shots (mainly blindly sprayed shells from the Super Dreadnought’s secondary guns), the storm of shells having barely slowing the Fast Battleship as she closed into melee range.“Come and get it, you old hag!”Here came Deutschland, charging in like a raging bull, not even bothering with her guns anymore. She was waving her zweihander around above her head like it was meat cleaver, her face red and a vein in her forehead throbbing. You would have had to have been blind to miss the Super Dreadnought’s body language screaming ‘overhead strike with sword’ with all of her being, and unfortunately for the black-haired girl, Scharnhorst was anything but.Oh, I’ll show you ‘old hag.’An instant before the two shipgirls would have collided, the Weltkrieg veteran sidestepped right, a move which, judging by the look of total surprise on Deutschland’s face, caught the Super Dreadnought completely off guard. The Flagship-to-be stumbled, overbalancing as her sword swing came up against empty air. Her opponent didn’t hesitate to press her advantage, Scharnhorst needing only the blink of an eye to slam the butt of her spear into the black-haired girl’s rigging and shoulder blades, using the younger shipgirl’s massive weight and momentum against her.Deutschland was sent sprawling forwards, her sword toppling out of her hands as she tried to catch her balance. Before she could recover, though, the guns of her lavender-haired opponent had swiveled into firing position. In an instant, eight guns had sounded as one and the Super Dreadnought was engulfed in cloud of green dye. Another instant later, and the heir-apparent of Ironblood felt herself being slammed face-first into the water by the impact of the training shells.Shaking her head to clear it, Deutschland tried to get back up, propping herself onto her hands and knees. Just as she did so, though, the Super Dreadnought felt a sharp kick be driven into her right side, flipping her over onto her back. Not even a second passed before the black-haired girl felt the same foot stomp down on the center of her chest, pinning her to the water’s surface. Blinking water and training dye out of her eyes, Deutschland was greeted by the sight of an angrily scowling Scharnhorst, the elder shipgirl’s spear tip hovering near the younger’s throat, her guns just waiting for the smallest movement form Deutschland’s own to fire.“You lose.”For a long moment, Deutschland looked like she was ready to try and defy that statement, a look of impotent fury crossing the Super Dreadnought’s face, her rigging twitching slightly. Before the black-haired girl could say anything, though, Scharnhorst reiterated her statement.“Concede”, the Fast Battleship snarled, moving her spear incrementally closer to Deutschland’s throat, Scharnhorst’s turrets waggling a bit to drive the point home. With a snarl of her own, the Super Dreadnought slowly raised her hands, admitting defeat.With a curt nod, the Weltkrieg veteran accepted her trainee’s concession, pulling her spear away from the younger girl’s neck and sheathing it, her guns turning away from the Super Dreadnought in the same moment. Then the lavender-haired woman growled, reaching down and grasping the Flagship-to-be by her hair, giving the younger shipgirl the assessment of her performance in the training exercise as she did so.“Pathetic! Absolutely pathetic!” Scharnhorst declared, roughly hauling Deutschland to her feet by the scalp, ignoring the Super Dreadnoughts protests and small exclamations of pain.“Absolutely! Pathetic!” The Weltkrieg veteran repeated, still grasping the heir-apparent by the hair to ensure that the younger girl was looking her in the eyes. “How many times do I have to teach you THE SAME DAMN LESSONS!” the Fast Battleship continued, her voice raising as she spoke.“You can’t shoot worth shit! You never dodge!” The lavender-haired woman listed, her face flushing red as she clutched the younger shipgirl by the head, daring the Super Dreadnought to respond. “You never use your head! You just throw raw power at everything!”Deutschland was unmoved by her instructor’s tirade, her face fixed as one of angry defiance. With a frustrated cry, Scharnhorst released her trainee, shoving the Super Dreadnought away from her. The black-haired girl stumbled slightly as she was let go, but stayed on her feet, her expression still one of prideful rage. For a long moment, the Fast Battleship simply stood panting, trying to catch her breath, clear her head and bottle her rage back up. She’d been screaming at the heir-apparent for four years: the lavender-haired woman knew full well that just adding more volume wouldn’t get through to the younger girl. She tried (tried) for a calmer approach.“All. The strength. In the world. Is useless. If you have no discipline to guide it.” the Weltkrieg veteran spoke slowly, her gaze stony, making sure that the Super Dreadnought was actually listening to her. The black-haired girl clearly wanted to launch into a tirade of her own, but the Super Dreadnought stayed quiet: even she knew better than to interrupt her instructor in the middle of a dressing down.“Those guns mean nothing if you can’t shoot hit your target,” Scharnhorst spoke on, her voice terse, jamming her index finger into the Flagship-to-be’s chest. “Your armor is tinfoil if you don’t know its limitations. That sword,” the Fast Battleship said, pointing out Deutschland’s zweihander, “is a good as a butter knife if wielded incorrectly. And you need to pull your goddamn head out of your fucking ass and understand that.”The look on the Super Dreadnought’s face only tightened in response, the defiance in her features as strong as ever. Scharnhorst’s own expression twisted into an even deeper scowl as she mulled over her options. Kicking the black-haired girl’s ass (again) was one of them, but the Weltkrieg veteran was well aware had been sent to train the Flagship-to-be, not to break her: push too hard or too far and she’d have the Kaiserin to answer to. And honestly, the Fast Battleship had simply put up with enough of Deutschland’s schisse for the day, if not the week (or maybe even the month). Time to let her be someone else’s problem for a little while.“Report to Von der Tann at 0400 tomorrow morning for remedial gun training. She’ll be expecting you. And don’t even try skipping out, or I’ll make the beating I just gave you look like a playground scuffle. Understood?”Deutschland nodded stiffly. That wasn’t the answer the Scharnhorst had been looking for. “I’m sorry, I didn’t fucking hear you. I said, is that understood, Deutschland!?”“Ja, Frau Scharnhorst!” The Super Dreadnought gave the Weltkrieg veteran the most painfully overexaggerated parade ground salute that the latter had ever seen, its over-rigid nature clearly out of spite for her instructor. It was also a technically correct salute, so as much as Scharnhorst wanted to slap the black-haired girl upside the head for it, the Fast Battleship let her little act of defiance slide and returned the salute with a frustrated grimace.“Good. Now get the fuck out of my sight.”Deutschland didn’t have to be told twice: the Super Dreadnought turned on her heel and skated away across the harbor’s surface, trying to wipe away the green training dye off of herself and mumbling yet more curses as she did so. Scharnhorst watched her go, her face still set in a deep scowl. There went the future of Ironblood. With a resigned groan, the Weltkrieg veteran shook her head, another frustrated curse of her own slipping past her lips.“Goddamn fool.”“Happy to see you too, schwester.”Scharnhorst turned to towards the voice behind her, instinctively readying her rigging. The Fast Battleship’s guard dropped immediately, though, when they laid eyes on the speaker: the shipgirl behind her shared her uniform, her rigging, her hair, her eyes and actually most of her other physical characteristics. The main things setting the two apart was the newcomer’s glasses and the splatters of pink training dye covering swaths of her uniform and rigging.“Very nice Von Der Tann impression, by the way.” Gneisenau continued, casting her gaze out into the harbor. The youngest of the Yorck sisters jutted her chin after the recently departed Deutschland. “Don’t you think that she hates your guts enough already?”Scharnhorst snorted. “I’m here to train her, not be her friend. Beating her down’s only way I can get anything to stick inside her skull, and when I’m screaming is the only time she listens to me. Gott im Himmel, nothing else works.” The Fast Battleship turned fully towards her sister. “If she hates me, she hates me, same way we hated the 1st Scouting Group right up until we realized that all they were trying to do was keep us alive.”Gneisenau quirked an eyebrow at her sister. “I remember it taking Royal Navy to make us realize that. I thought we were trying to make sure that these girls didn’t have to learn on the job like we did.”Scharnhorst let out a bitter laugh. “With the way that things are going, there might not be a choice.”The elder sister’s eyes had turned back towards the horizon. The lavender-haired woman wasn’t watching Deutschland anymore, though: her gaze was going past the Super Dreadnought, past the harbor entrance and the protected waters of the Jade Estuary, past the cold waters of the North Sea. The sky was clear, the wind was warm and the sea was calm, but the old veteran of Skagerrak knew full well when a storm was brewing.Fell winds were blowing in, carrying whispered warnings of the typhoon being formed. They blew in from the west, from the Trade Congress and Vichya Commune, inheritors of most of the strength of Royal Navy and the Iris Orthodoxy, all of their vengeful fury and almost none of their old moral restraints. They blew in from the east, where Northern Parliament remained an unknowable enigma. They blew in from the colonies, overstretched and exposed, where the cracks in Ironblood’s façade of invincibility were already starting to show. They blew in from the lands of weakening allies, from the realms of increasingly bold enemies, from Eagle Union, Iberia and Latin America and beyond, all so ready to burst into flames…“Have you ever actually tried just talking to her?” Gneisenau said, breaking her sister from her musings. “Maybe she just needs to feel like she has someone who will listen to her. It worked wonders with Spee.”The elder sister let out another short laugh at that. “Yeah, because Spee’s the good egg. Speaking of which…” Scharnhorst looked her fellow Weltkrieg veteran up and down, a look of slight bemusement coming across her features at the sight of all the training dye caking her sister’s features. “You didn’t go easy on her, did you? It looks like you were the one I sent to remedial with Tante Von.”The youngest Yorck sister smiled at that. “No. It’s just that Spee didn’t go easy on me. She’s getting the hang of things. Still has hurdles to clear, of course, but I think I’ve got her on the right track.”“Well, at least one of them’s got their head on straight,” Scharnhorst replied. “That’s better than nothing.” The older Fast Battleship stretched, cricking her necks a few times and cracking her knuckles above her head before trying to wring the water out of her hair. “I,” she declared “need a damn drink. You coming with?”“To Tante Seydi’s?” Gneisenau questioned. The third of the Yorck-class looked down, gesturing at her uniform and presenting the various splotches of pink training dye marking her clothing for her sister to see. “We both know she’d kill me if I stepped in looking like this. I have to go get cleaned up before I go anywhere.”Scharnhorst grinned. “Well then, more for me. Do you want me to get anything for you?”“Just the usuals,” her sister responded. “I’m going to head up to the Kriegerdenkmal once I’m presentable. Meet me there?”“Ja, ja. I’ll see you there, schwester,” the elder Fast Battleship responded, nodding. Her sister smiled and returned the nod before skating off across the waters. As she had with Deutschland, Scharnhorst watched her go, though this time no angry scowl was decorating her features.And then the Weltkrieg veteran turned and headed for the docks, and for that most beloved of German pastimes: a nice drink after a day’s work. via /r/AzureLane https://ift.tt/31EEc3O
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