Shahryar - And thank you for being here to comment, it's like the only reason for make to keep publishing this fic on :V
(***)
Normally the news of an assault such as the one perpetrated by the Paranormal Liberation Front would spread slowly. The government would do its best to curtail the spread of news, while attempting to manipulate the narrative. Increase the official number of enemy casualties, downplay their own, find the guilty (or the scapegoats), etc. etc.
It could still do it in case of the Tartarus attack. But the USJ attack was simply impossible to hide. Of course, not everyone saw it at the same time. The news spread quickly, and within a day not a single person nationwide (maybe except for some utter hermits) managed to avoid knowing that the world changed. And that the Paranormal Liberation Front was back in business.
The reactions were mixed.
(***)
"And as for our beloved government, the heroes and the police…" Revenant says with a mocking smile. "... be afraid. Why?" He chuckles. "Because we are here." The feed is cut, the message is delivered. The world trembles in shock.
Inasa Yoarashi leans back in the seat, observing the TV in silence. It's back to the normal feed, but it's rather clear that the news anchor that was left to deal with this bullshit has no idea what to say. They were supposed to comment on the USJ attack anniversary, instead they got… this.
Inasa Yoarashi didn't get to know Midoriya Izuku. His first meeting with the Cursed Class happened during the Provisional Hero License Exam. He still remembers the disturbingly quiet and depressed-looking kids that really didn't match his image of UA students.
Inasa was a man of blazingly hot blood. He had an image of heroes as people like him - strong, courageous and passionate. But he wasn't stupid. He could differentiate lack of passion for heroics from mourning and trauma. In his opinion back then, the fact that they all decided to stay in the Hero Course was passably hot-blooded on its own.
He also remembers seing some hero students getting almost lynched by them for repeating that 'Midoriya Izuku helped end All Might' in their hearing range. It was a very serious berserk button for them all.
That frog girl felt particularly threatening when someone said that. Yoarashi could practically smell blood in the air when that happened. Seriously, how could a cute girl like that project so much killing intent that the onlookers felt like they saw Stain's recording from Hosu?
Well, they all realized that after she torched the Marukane Ward to the ground, killing thousands of people.
All that Yoarashi knew about Midoriya came from one lengthy (and manly) talk with Eijirou Kirishima after the exam. Back then he thought that Kirishima exaggerated Midoriya's smarts, since he made that guy sound like a second Nedzu. Seeing the USJ assault changed Yoarashi's outlook on the issue by a lot.
Kirishima also insisted that Midoriya was the most heroic-minded person he ever met, maybe except for Mina Ashido. Though the two of them were completely different types of heroic-minded apparently.
That seemed to have changed. Probably. Looks like there really isn't anything more terrifying than a hero that was pushed too far, hmm?
Inasa laughs loudly. Oh, the future is going to be fun! The Paranormal Liberation Front feels passionate about their goals! Even if most of them feel like utter assholes (seriously, the CRC and ISP? Midoriya, what the fuck).
Time to leave the office.
He pushes the door open and steps onto the waiting room.
"HAVE YOU SEEN THAT, PEOPLE?!" He yells from the top of his lungs. "SOMETHING UNBELIEVABLE JUST HAPPENED!" There are a handful of people in the room, all of them working under him. He truly struck big in life.
"Yeah, totes lit." Camie sighs from her place on the couch. Her sole remaining eye is clearly locked onto the phone in front of her. "TikTok's on fire right now." Is that someone's hero name? Yoarashi isn't sure. Well, it doesn't matter right now.
"AND HOW'S OUR HOST DOING?!" Inasa yells another question. She looks at Sidestep, the A-Rank hero to whom the agency belonged. He is on the couch right next to her, although he remained remarkably quiet.
"Bled out." Camie replies, without even looking at the hero. Oh, right, she did slit his throat while Yoarashi was wiping out his sidekicks. The whole hero agency looks like a slaughterhouse now.
Two weeks of planning, and the New Vigilante Alliance's newest attack on the government ended up being suddenly overshadowed by the Paranormal Liberation Front's Revival Celebration. Shame.
Ehh, at least Tornado - the SS-Rank villain and one of the NVA's Four Disasters - will get to level the hero agency down once they're done extracting all data from the computer room's hard drives. It's going to be fun!
(***)
"Oh." Ayako Nakahara - known also as an S-Rank villain, Spyglass - says. The PLF's transmission just finished, Spyglass watching it on the TV in one of the New Vigilante Alliance safehouses.
"That's all you have to say about that?" Ryukyu was there as well, sitting on the opposite side of the table. High profile NVA's members rarely met up aside from joint operations. It was a recipe for disaster. But sometimes, they had to talk face-to-face. Coincidentally, the PLF decided to announce their revival while one of such meetings was happening. "Midoriya just restarted the Paranormal Liberation War, and all you have for me is 'oh'?"
Spyglass is younger by almost ten years, but she's an established villain/vigilante. The main strategic and tactical advisor to the duo in charge of the NVA. Ryukyu doesn't exactly intimidate her. If anything, NVA could survive without Ryukyu but not without Spyglass.
"I'm afraid that I'm still busy processing the trauma." Spyglass replies bitterly. Ryukyu's eyes narrow.
"Trauma?" The dragon woman asks.
"I've spent years hoping that Midoriya was dead." Ayako admits, leaning back in her seat. "Not because I hated him, because he was a friend of mine, even if not for long. Not because I thought that he 'helped end All Might', because that was pure bullshit. But because I was thoroughly terrified of the results of someone with his degree of smarts getting so many valid reasons to hate the hero society." She sighs. "Well, looks like my fears were spot-on the whole time."
It feels good to be right. Even if she would have preferred to not be right on that one thing.
"So he is THAT dangerous?" Ryukyu's brow raises. "I mean, I know that he just did something practically impossible, but…" Oh, that's where she is heading to. Time to cut things short before they escalate.
"I'm not playing in the same league as he does." Spyglass cuts in. "I never did."
"I worked with you for more than two years." Ryuky replies. "I can scarcely imagine someone smarter than you." Flattering, but not exactly correct.
"Well, PLF's new leader is someone smarter than me." She replies with a shrug. "I beat him in the field of organizational work. I doubt he could run an underground organization the size of the NVA. But he knows about it, rendering my only advantage null."
"Explain?" She can do that.
"He's probably keeping his forces in one place to avoid the organization collapsing on him." She shrugs. "I'm ready to bet at least a limb that it's going to be a high-intensity guerilla warfare rather than what we're going for. If the USJ and Tartarus attacks are any indication, it'll be heavily reliant on warp quirks. The thing is, he's much better than I can ever be when strategy and tactics are involved. I can't outthink him on this."
"Weren't you both studying under Nedzu?" Ryukyu still has problems wrapping her mind around that. "You should have at least some understanding of how he works. And you stayed with the rat much longer, so…"
"It doesn't work like that." Spyglass shrugs again. "Stuff like that is heavily reliant on natural talent. I'm good, but he is just better. Nedzu and Sir Nighteye were just as talented as he is, but had way more experience. I'm confident that if Sir Nighteye knew that Midoriya was alive and on the PLF side, it'd be Midoriya that would end up dying. There is a very important lesson in that."
She leans forward a bit, raising a finger.
"You can't predict what a heroic or villainous mastermind does unless you know what he knows." Spyglass announces. "Even if you're from the same league, quality-wise. The problem is, Revenant clearly has some extraordinarily well-placed information sources. Without something similar to it, I can't even begin to decipher what his endgame is."
"What about Mindscape?" Ryukyu asks the correct question.
"Depends on how much the government's telling her." Ayako shrugs. "Intelli's probably in the best position to try to counter the new PLF' on the strategic level. The presence of Yaoyorozu and Mastermind in the Revenant's team are going to make things much harder for her, especially if Midoriya plays it out correctly." She sighs. "And he probably will."
"Your recommendations for the NVA?" Ryukyu then asks. Yeah, back to what's really important. The quote-unquote business.
"For now, stay quiet." Spyglass replies. "Yes, that attack just overshadowed the operation that we've spent weeks planning. But Midoriya just blew up the chessboard that we were playing on… which is actually great, because we were losing the game. Now we can expect the government to be on the receiving side of a major beating. We can take advantage of that, but we should first wait for the PLF's next move. See what we're dealing with here."
A few seconds of pause. Spyglass is weighing certain options in her mind. She eventually decides to say it.
"... I'd be much more worried about Firestorm and Landslide." She says, Ryukyu suddenly making a face as if she bit a sour lemon. "I can't even begin to fathom how Tsuchikawa is going to react to Ragdoll coming back to life, not to mention Kouta Izumi becoming a villain. And Moe Kamiji might end up being utterly uncontrollable now that she knows that Revenant and Frostfire were the ones to kill Endeavor… and both of them are still at large."
"Thank you for reminding me of that." Ryukyu groans. "It's going to be a clusterfuck. Especially if I correctly saw Ms. Joke on one of the recordings from the Tartarus attack. Can you imagine Shindo's reaction to that? So only Yoarashi out of our Four Disasters isn't at the risk of going batshit crazy over this."
The issue of Miruko being there and Kugo Sakamata's reaction to that (or Ryukyu's own thoughts about her old intern returning to life) was a completely separate can of worms. Neither of them felt happy about opening it.
(***)
Unfortunately for her, the 'caretakers' realized what was happening early enough and cut the feed. Soon after the first members of the PLF emerged from the black cloud, making it clear that it was no signal interruption but a genuine, public villain assault.
The facility was comfortable. And, almost certainly, very, VERY wiretapped. But you couldn't wiretap everything. There was a large (if walled and guarded) open space in the middle. Something to give the 'inmates' a place to stretch their legs. Go on a walk among nature and so on.
That's a safe place for talks, more or less. Once the commotion died down, the three of them secreted themselves there.
"That's an… interesting development." Eri announces to her two unofficial sidekicks. "I told you that my dad was going to look for us."
"Right." Mahoro Shimano replies. She is no longer the older of the Shimano siblings. She was pretty much Crucible's assistant, not one of the kids. Eri acted fast enough to rewind her for a few years while Crucible was holding the heroes back. To make the heroes think that she was one of the kids, rather than a part of the organization. It wasn't exactly reversible, so… "Isn't that a super weird way of looking for us? I really thought that he would, you know…"
She still didn't fully get over the discovery of who exactly her best friend's father was. She knew that she was a bit of a crown princess to the Support Network, her father running it all. But she only found out the name a few weeks ago.
What he just did… they didn't get to see a lot, but it was probably going to be scary. If Eri's standard behavior was any indication of anything, it was that her father was occasionally super scary.
"Oh, it's part of the plan." Eri waves her hand. "Thunderbolt is deeply involved in the Paragon Program. I'm almost certain that part of the plan is kidnapping him and discovering where exactly we were taken. The rest is a smokescreen. Plus a lot of pent-up anger finding its outlet."
She knows that her dad has a lot of it. In all honesty, so does she.
"Y-your dad is scary." Katsuma says. As timid and soft-spoken as ever.
"He is on our side, Katsu!" Eri smiles and slaps his back a bit. Katsuma doesn't seem to be fully convinced, and looks down. "That's what is really important. Guess we're postponing the jailbreak plan."
"Now?" Mahoro blinks at her a few times. "After you blew up the head of the facility with a pipe bomb? Why did you even do that, again?" She has long ago given up on trying to be able to guess what was happening in her friend's head.
"I did it because I wanted to take advantage of the chaos accompanying the change of leadership of this dump." Eri replies, looking slightly exasperated of having to do that. "And I didn't 'blow him up', only injured. What really did him in was me offering the wardens to heal him, only to 'lose control of my quirk' and rewind him until he was three years old."
Mahoro has to admit that Eri played her Cuteness Card perfectly. They all fell for it. She even cried profusely while apologizing for her mistake. She actually cried for a few days afterwards. Incredible. Even her friends would have fallen for that if they didn't know for certain that it was her plan all along.
"Right." Might be a good moment to ask the question, Mahoro decides. "How are you even so knowledgeable about explosives?" She DID piece up a pipe bomb from kitchen supplies. Rather strong one, even.
"Uncle Asa." Eri replies. "To quote him: 'there is no such thing as a problem that can't be solved with properly applied explosives'." All she gets are moderately worried stares. "What?"
"Uhm, nothing." Mahoro decides that she doesn't want to know. Her best friend is a villainous mastermind-to-be, and an heir apparent to Midoriya's Support Network. Maybe even the Paranormal Liberation Front, now that Midoriya rebranded. She should probably get used to stuff like that.
Besides, to be honest, fuck the government. They are all in agreement on that.
"To change the subject, everyone's doing what they were told to?" Eri asks. Yes, Mahoro is somewhat of a second-in-command here. She might be the oldest one, but it's Eri that's the main player here.
"You mean, the whole 'cooperate and act as if Crucible kidnapped you'?" Mahoro asks back. Eri nods. "They aren't exactly happy about it, but they are acting as told to. Uhm, why though?"
She didn't get that part explained properly. Katsuma is looking at Eri questioningly as well. Eri promptly sighs.
"Because all of this…" She spreads her arms around. "... is the facility for the 'obedient' Paragon candidates. Getting us out of here is going to be much easier than from where we'll be sent to if we disobey. You catch my drift?"
She knew a lot of things. Most of which the assistant caretakers weren't privy to, much less the children that the Network took care of. Her being there when the heroes struck was a blessing to the kids, even if a curse to the world.
Both of them nod quickly. Yes, it makes perfect sense when she puts it that way.
"So don't you worry." Eri smiles wryly. "Follow my orders and we'll all get out of this alive and well."
"I-I'm not worried!" Katsuma shoots back. "Because you're h-here, and you always know what to do and…" Awkwardness takes him over when he realizes what he just said. Mahoro has a wry smile bloom on her face.
"That was super smooth, Katsu!" She says. Eri is giving them both a hard-to-read look. "Are you sure that Eri was visiting me, and not you? Because you seem to have been hanging out together, even when I'm there. " Her tone of voice leaves no doubts as to what sort of 'visiting' and 'hanging out' she was implying.
He looks down, not knowing what to say. Unfortunately, Eri was there. And Eri, probably due to spending too much time with uncle Asa, was mischievous. So she promptly approached Mahoro, before putting her hand on Mahoro's cheek. The other one lands on Mahoro's waist, pulling her closer.
"And what if I…" Eri whispers into her ear, her voice seductive. "... was actually visiting you the whole time?"
Mahoro opens her mouth wide, clearly too shocked to speak. That's when Eri pulls back, looking as if nothing has happened.
"Okay, then, time to go!" Eri announces. "I need to think my plans over a bit, try to find a way to get some intel from the wardens. I need to know how my dad's plan is going along. So… who's back at the dormitory last is a HPSC dog!" Then she runs off.
Katsuma almost runs after her, but that's when he sees that Mahoro for some reason isn't moving. Instead, she is still standing there, frozen. And there was quite a blush on her face, something that her brother never expected to see on her face.
"...S-sis?" He decides to ask.
"D-do you remember when I told you that I'm going to help you?" She replies, her eyes still on the part of that small forest where Eri vanished. "With your crush on her?"
"Uhm, yes?" He replies. It's not like they managed to get anywhere before the whole 'mass kidnapping by the government' thing happened.
"We might have a problem." Mahoro replies. "Because I think that I just discovered that I might be a tiny itsy bitsy gay. And MAYBE have a crush on her as well. It is incredibly confusing to me right now."
"Oh." Katsuma scratches his cheek. "A-are you sure that this is the r-right moment for that? With us being kidnapped and…" Being technically twenty years old (sixteen again, to be honest) is a rather late moment to discover that. Then again, it probably explained why she never really got herself a boyfriend. Huh.
"I-I think that I'll leave thinking that over for after we're freed, yeah." She nods quickly, Katsuma can't help but think that she's trying to convince herself here. "For now, let's run after her."
(***)
Kinoko Komori wakes up. She's groggy, dazed and has a hangover that was borderline deadly. Ugh. They must have partied a bit too much last night. Well, they don't get to see each other often, so when they do, they have a lot of catching up to do. Still…
"Awww… fuck, my head hurts." She says. He doesn't respond. Hopefully he didn't kick the bucket or anything. Too fun of a boyfriend, too good in bed. Ugh. "Shi, you're there?" She isn't sure if she's ready to open her eyes yet.
"Yep." She hears his voice. Somewhere close to her, so probably still in bed with her. "You're really wasted, ma'am Shemage. I told you not to eat so many of… what did you call them? 'fun shrooms'?"
Why is she even in a relationship with Kuroiro? She's really starting to question her own life choices right n…
"... also I'm currently holding a glass of water and some painkillers a bit above your head." She hears and yeah, suddenly, she understands why she was still in that relationship. She carefully grabs both and chugs the tablets down. After a few minutes, the pain subsides enough for her to open her eyes.
The cheap hotel room is more or less as it was yesterday, except there are some discarded clothes scattered throughout it. They partied really hard. Shihai Kuroiro is in the bed next to her, some pillows sandwiched between his back and the wall over the bed. His chest is naturally exposed and…
… not the time to get thirsty, Komori.
He noticed the looks she was giving him so he ended up winking at her. Oh that sexy looking bastard.
"What hour is it?" She asks.
"Noon." Should she also ask 'what day is it'? Nah, fuck that. "I must say that last night was rather memorable. You can even say it was…" fuck no "...shroomtastic."
"I'm going to grow an entire mushroom farm on your vocal cords." She replies and he laughs. "I'm off work, so shut it with that." She was legitimately sick of that at this point. Why the hell did she make mushroom puns a part of her image as a hero? What sort of demon possessed her to do that?! "Did I miss anything?"
"Nah, just me staring at your tits for like twenty minutes straight." Kuroiro replies honestly. "Also Kendou phoned you like five times already."
"Shit. What part of 'it's my day off' doesn't she get?" She was only supposed to get back to the agency tomorrow. Ugh.
"I was almost tempted to pick it up, say hello to an old friend and so on." Kuroiro says with a cheeky grin.
"Yeah, brilliant way to get us both arrested." Komori replies, while slowly gauging her ability to rise from bed. "Did you forget the whole 'I'm an A-Rank villain and an information broker that just happens to be sleeping with his mole in the local hero agency' bit you have going, or what? Too much 'fun shrooms' for your poor brain?"
She couldn't blame him for defecting. 'Villainous quirk', too much shittery. She never understood that part. She could attach spores of some lethally poisonous mushroom to someone's food remotely, then grow them up in their stomach. She could instantly poison every single person in some restaurant. She was WAY goddamn scarier than Kuroiro, but he was the one that was shat upon. Where's the logic in that?
He joined the first PLF, they ran into each other after Entropy's defeat, she ended up not turning him in to the authorities. They had some serious talk about his reasons for defection. She even found out that he almost ended in juvie a few years before UA for saving a quirkless girl from rape. Because he had a villainous quirk.
The girl turned out to be a late-bloomer and an heir to the throne of the leader of the Quirkless Liberation Front. Which probably explained the speed of his later villain career. He tried his best to become a hero regardless of that, but eventually the hero society broke him.
Like it did to many others. His story did the same to her as well. Too many blows in too short of a succession. From Midoriya's expulsion (that was absolutely bullshit) to the government nuking a city (even if filled with villains) to kill one man. She had enough.
She ended here. She wasn't sure if she didn't make one or two bad decisions along the way, to be honest.
She manages to get herself off the bed and goes to the bathroom. She needs to make herself look at least vaguely presentable. Kuroiro seems to find the fact that she is now wearing his slightly oversized shirt and pretty much nothing else rather hot (she'll deal with that when she'll be able to think straight).
When she disappears in the bathroom, he pulls up a laptop. Untraceable and so on. He got some very good intel on local hero operations from her yesterday, and he's gonna cash in on those. His secret retirement fund will grow nicely, he can only hope that Kino will decide to retire with him. Somewhere outside of the reach of the Japanese law enfr…
He almost chokes when he sees the messages he got. The Villain Network is on fire. Something ha… holy shit. Holy motherfucking shit.
"Uhm, Kino?" He says loudly. "You might want to pick it up after all." Kendou is probably freaking out that someone got her while she was off the grid.
Tartarus. Jesus fucking Christ, Midoriya you son of the bitch. Is that why you wanted to get in contact with Shishikross? Kuroiro needs to hide real deep real fast, if the heroes begin to investigate the newest archtraitor of Japan, they might trace it back to him and then…
"Why?" He hears her slightly tired reply.
"Because Midoriya Izuku just destroyed UA, massacred the Fast Response Unit, killed four SS-Rank heroes in like twenty minutes… and cracked open Tartarus, releasing almost every single inmate." He says (still in slight disbelief, but this clearly isn't 1st of April).
Something in the bathroom falls to the floor and breaks. Yeah. Correct reaction. Holy fucking shit, what did the two of them slept through?!
(***)
It's the seventh time the recording is repeated. Once again, when the moment comes, his hand clasps on the chair's armrest with enough strength to almost break it.
"Well, I wonder." Midoriya smiles widely. "Who do you think planned Sir Nighteye's death, Thunderbolt?"
This time the armrest has enough. He broke it off. He didn't even notice that.
"Uhm, are you alrig…" One of the sidekicks tries to say. He isn't letting them finish.
"Gather up everyone." Mirio Toogata, one of Japan's eighteen SS-Rank Heroes (well, they are down by four now that Valiant, Foresight, Medusa and Interdict died, so it's just fourteen) replies. On his face, murder.
(***)
Next chapter is one of the few one-chapter long flashback intervals (titled World That Was Arc), helping you better understand how exactly did everything went to hell to this degree. Once that happens, we're starting the State of Emergency Arc, which is going to be the continuation of the plot :P