YSS Kaiyō - Hallway Outside of the Bridge
23日 3月 YE 39
21:03:02.01 Hours
Hayashi Akiko, somewhat weary and
extremely sore after the
events of several hours prior, had just made her
second grievous miscalculation of the day. It was something that, well, had never happened to the Intelligence Neko ever before in her four years of existence - and it was a sin that, in the Juni's mind, was completely unacceptable for a Nekovalkyrja (
especially one trained by Star Army Intelligence) to commit.
Once was bad enough, given the sheer number of failures and imperfect decisions involved - but
twice?
It was simply inconceivable, yet there it was, playing out right before Akiko's jade-colored eyes.
Even worse was the fact that the cobalt-haired Neko (sore, as mentioned earlier, and too exhausted to perform her usual evening workout routine) had been in the Power Armor Bay itself when the attack began. Such an Empress-blessed stroke of luck should, no,
would have ordinarily given Akiko a lethal advantage over the NMX (as
indicated by Boss) by granting her the time she needed to generate a rough prediction of what tactics and assets the enemy would utilize and formulate a response - but with her compromised emotional state, those few seconds caused something...else to occur, instead.
For the first time in her life, Akiko had worried about the lives of her crewmates instead of focusing on the success of the mission, her inquisitive, analytical mind thinking of scenario after scenario in which Muyomi-Hei and Rei-Yojimbo suffered death (or worse) at the hands of the Mishhuvurthyar boarders - which meant that her usually zesuaium-sharp analyses were rushed and hastily-drawn. Although she was indeed correct in assuming that the OPFOR commander would utilize a multi-pronged plan of assault against the
YSS Kaiyō, most likely critical and/or exposed areas such as the bridge, cargo bay, and power armor bay, she one very, very incorrect assumption: that the ship's bridge would be assaulted by powered armor.
It was, of course, an easy conclusion to make - the NMX were quite fond of their Reapers and Rippers, and besides, how
else was one supposed to assault a starship's control center? - but it was also one that didn't take into account one very, very important detail: it, quite bluntly, was a royal bitch to invade a
Plumeria's command center thanks to the heavy armor plating surrounding it, therefore making a power-armored an exercise in futility...unless one could simply ignore all that armor by passing straight through it, like a Ghost Mishhuvurthyar was capable of doing.
Further compounding things was Akiko's natural distrust of the Minkan on duty at the time, Kawazoe Riku; had it been a Nekovalkyrja manning the Mission Ops/Communications console, the SAINT Neko would've been more inclined to notify them of the impending attack. Akiko's less-then-pristine mental condition, however, meant that she assumed Teien-Taii had already accounted for such an occurrence and that Kawazoe-Hei was too busy with managing communications to bother listening to the Juni - and it meant that didn't realize the rampant imperfection of this logic until long after the mission's conclusion.
These reasons and more were why Akiko momentarily felt something akin to terror as she watched the Taii become infected, for it was then that she remembered just what she'd forgotten to take into account when determining her tactics and equipment loadout.
It was why she acted on instinct alone, using her armor's inertial and gravimetric manipulation abilities to hop backwards (still facing the Ghost head-on as she did so) while activating the Mindy's Combined Field System and firing a short burst of 7x15mm armor-piercing rounds back at the aforementioned Mishhuvurthyar.
Then her emotion-clouded mind finally caught up with reality and noticed the other two individuals on the opposite side of the Ghost.
"
DOWN!"
