I'm not just an H-class destroyer – I'm a mage who puts you to sleep with a smile~ Of course, I'm a great fighter, too! Though... I do have to put myself under a hypnotic trance to do it...

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【H-Class destroyer affiliated with the Royal Navy, the smiling hypnotist magician. She can hypnotize enemies to make them obey her commands, or hypnotize herself to focus intensely on battle or tasks. The incantation activation trigger is

"Chumimeen☆ Look at my smile!"】

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She began as steel and intention — laid down at the John I. Thornycroft & Company yard at Woolston, Southampton, in 1894, one of the nimble H-class destroyers commissioned to give the Royal Navy speed where it had previously only had weight. HMS Hasty slipped into service as a vessel built for pursuit and harassment, her slender hull designed to cut water at better than twenty-seven knots, fast enough to run down anything she was sent after and quick enough to vanish before heavier guns could answer. She was not a ship of grand broadsides or towering superstructure — she was a blade, and she was treated like one.

Her early years were unremarkable in the way that peacetime service tends to be: patrol rotations, fleet exercises, the steady and unglamorous business of keeping a warship ready. She belonged to the era when destroyers were still proving their worth as a class, and she did so quietly, accumulating sea hours and the particular kind of institutional confidence that comes from a ship and her crew learning one another's temperaments.

When the First World War arrived, Hasty found herself committed to the work the war demanded of her type — convoy escort, patrol duty, the relentless and exhausting vigilance of the Dover Patrol and surrounding waters. Destroyers in those years were ground down by operational tempo rather than glory; they were consumed in service rather than in single, decisive actions, and Hasty was no exception. She moved through fog and Channel chop on rotations that offered little rest and considerable risk from mines, submarines, and the steady attrition of wartime maintenance cycles stretched thin.

She survived the war, as a number of her sisters did not, and was paid off in the years that followed — her active service ending not in fire but in the quieter dissolution of postwar reductions. The Royal Navy, reshaped by the Washington Naval Treaty and the economic pressures of the 1920s, had less room for aging destroyers, and Hasty was struck from the Navy List without ceremony. She was sold for breaking, her steel returned to the industrial cycle from which she had emerged a generation before.

No plaque marks where she was built down. No monument preserves her lines. She passed out of the physical world the way most ships do — gradually, practically, without witnesses who thought to record the moment. What she left behind was a name, a record, and the quiet suggestion that something as temporary as a warship can nonetheless earn a kind of permanence in the telling.

What endures of HMS Hasty is not steel but character — and when the kansen take shape, character is precisely what fills the void where a hull used to be. She arrives in Azur Lane carrying the inheritance of her original form without the weight of it: the speed, the evasiveness, the instinct to close distance fast and make herself difficult to pin down. A destroyer built to pursue and vanish becomes a girl who drifts in from the side of a room you thought you were watching, already smiling, already halfway through a scheme you didn't see start. The transition is seamless in the way that translations sometimes are — something is carried over whole, even if the container has changed entirely.

Her hypnosis is the truest expression of that naval identity, rewritten into magic. Hasty was a ship designed to unsettle — to arrive before the enemy expected her, to disrupt formation and force reaction before heavier assets could respond. As a shipgirl, she does exactly this, only the weapon is a smile and a sparkle and the particular theatrical confidence of someone who has decided that looking like she's winning is most of what winning requires. "Chumimeen☆ Look at my smile!" is not the incantation of someone who doubts herself. It is the announcement of someone who has converted a lifetime of speed and disruption into a single, concentrated gesture, and who expects it to land.

What the history gives her, beneath the performance, is a particular texture of resilience. Hasty was not celebrated. She was useful, then used up, then quietly dissolved. There is no memorial. That kind of end leaves a mark on a kansen in ways that are hard to name directly, which is perhaps why she never names it directly — why the possessiveness reads as a game, why the love lines dress themselves in inevitability rather than request, why she reaches for your hand after an oath and asks if you're real. She knows what it means for something to be real one moment and simply gone the next, unmemorialized, unremarked. She does not say this. She says "Twinkly-dinkly☆" and grins with her whole face and demands a snack and a doll and your complete and undivided attention, and all of that is also true.

The result is a girl who is genuinely, boundlessly warm underneath every layer of performance — mischievous because joy is a choice she has made and intends to keep making, theatrical because she has earned the right to take up space, clingy because love is not something she plans to let pass through her like fog. She wants to be here. She wants you to notice. And if you won't notice on your own, well — she knows a spell for that.

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Author's note: Coming soon!

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Original artwork by soul (dp11)

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BONUS ART!

Pic 1 by paashe

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Pic 2 by shiranuinuiko

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Pic 3 by akanechanyadee

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