H-class destroyer, Hostile. Though I work under the Royal Navy, I place more importance on guns and torpedoes than on manners and etiquette. Nobody ever protected you with a tea party, after all.

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【An H-class destroyer belonging to the Royal Navy, a loyal dog type who's just a bit tongue-tied. Once the gun barrel of her, who holds absolute loyalty to the Commander, locks onto an enemy with hostility, the guardian bullets unleashed will pursue the enemy all the way to the ends of the sea.】

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She was laid down at Swan Hunter's yard on the Tyne in 1935, a lean hull taking shape amid the industrial clatter of Newcastle, one of eight sisters ordered under the 1934 Naval Estimates. HMS Hostile was launched the following year and commissioned in September 1936, sliding into Royal Navy service as part of the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla — a compact, purposeful vessel of roughly 1,340 tons, fast and lightly armoured in the manner of her class, built for speed over endurance and aggression over staying power. She carried four 4.7-inch guns on her centreline, a bank of torpedo tubes amidships, and the stripped-down silhouette that marked the H-class as working destroyers rather than showpieces.

Her early years were the quiet kind — exercises in home waters, fleet manoeuvres in the Mediterranean, the unhurried routine of a peacetime navy that still moved as though war was a matter of policy rather than imminence. That changed in September 1939. Within days of Britain's declaration of war she was at sea in earnest, and she did not stop moving.

The Norwegian campaign of April 1940 defined her operational record. She was among the destroyers dispatched into the fjords during the frantic Allied effort to contest the German occupation, operating in waters that punished the unwary and offered no margin for error. She participated in the Second Battle of Narvik on 13 April 1940, a hard-pressed action fought in the narrow reaches of Ofotfjord, where British destroyers and the battleship Warspite drove into the fjord and destroyed the German destroyer force sheltering there. Hostile acquitted herself in the fighting, working through difficult water against an entrenched and determined enemy.

She survived Narvik. She did not survive the summer. On 23 August 1940, operating in the Mediterranean following the Norway campaign's conclusion, HMS Hostile struck a mine off Cape Bon on the Tunisian coast. The damage was fatal and immediate, flooding progressive and uncontrollable. Her crew was taken off by HMS Hero — one of her own sisters — before she was finished with a torpedo to prevent capture. She went down in the early hours, in warm water far from the grey Tyne where she had been built, four years almost to the month from her commissioning.

She was twenty-three months into a war she had approached without hesitation, and she had not turned away from a single order she was given.

What remains of her — what was salvaged from the hull and the record and the particular texture of how she moved through the world — arrived in Azur Lane as something already formed. She did not need to be taught loyalty. She did not need to be taught what it meant to follow an order into difficult water. Those things were already the shape of her, worn into her the way the fjords wore into steel: not gently, and not without cost.

As a shipgirl she is slight and quieter than her history might suggest — a compact figure with ash-grey hair and half-lidded chartreuse eyes that miss very little, whatever their sleepy angle implies. She carries herself without drama. She does not announce her arrivals or explain her departures. She simply appears where she is needed, and she stays until the task is finished, and she does not require acknowledgement of either fact. The antique flintlock musket resting at her shoulder is longer than she is tall, and she carries it as though she has never considered setting it down.

Her loyalty to the Commander is not a disposition she arrived at through deliberation. It is simply the organizing principle of her interior life, the same way a compass does not decide to point north. She will stand post without being asked. She will notice if he seems cold, or tired, or has not eaten, and she will address each of these things in the most direct way available to her without once framing any of it as sentiment. That would not occur to her. She would find the framing unnecessary.

The social architecture that surrounds her in the fleet — the tea, the ceremony, the carefully managed distances people maintain in conversation — moves past her the way weather moves past a fixed point. She participates when directed. She does not see the purpose. She has been found seated at the edge of harbour installations watching the water with an expression that reveals nothing, and when asked what she is doing she answers, without irony, that she is guarding.

What she felt in Ofotfjord, working through smoke and narrow water with her sisters close astern, is still in her. What she felt in the hours before Cape Bon is still in her too, though she does not speak of it. She came back from the bottom of the Mediterranean the same way she went down: without hesitation, without complaint, and still, unmistakably, pointed at the target.

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Author's note: Coming soon!

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Original artwork by 青羽 香

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