Shahryar - Yaoyorozu was seriously vibechecked, yeah. And AFO's death was hilarious, karmic and long overdue indeed.
(***)
To say that Midoriya was displeased by having to leave his girlfriend (who turned out to be able to make a truly delicious katsudon, it's like tasting his mother's cooking again) on the evening before the second stage of the plan was executed, would be an understatement.
However, when Red Fang and - surprisingly enough, he was really taking that seriously - Stain sent him a message that Rini decided to go drink rather heavily, Midoriya decided to stage an intervention. +
Not like he's particularly interested in babysitting his supervillains. But it's rather clear that drunk Lady Murder might spell very bad things for Mastermind (or vice versa, it's not like the High Priest of the Creature Rejection Clan is a pushover), and Midoriya needs them both.
"Bad mood?" Midoriya asks when he enters Lady Murder's quarters. They are surprisingly austere, there's just a futon, a handful of bladed weaponry, some physical training corner and a collection of helmets she used to display in her throne room.
Rini gives him a moderately hostile stare. She is sitting cross legged on the floor, surrounded by several bottles of alcohol. Some beer, but also a bottle or two of something much stronger.
"Fuck you, Greeny." She replies. Oh, that nickname. It's been a while. "I do what I want."
Of course, she does. She might be chronologically speaking ten years old, but Midoriya certainly isn't treating her like a child.
He sits in front of her, right beyond the circle of bottles.
"I'm aware." Midoriya then says. "I just wanted to make sure that you won't decide to cap the evening with a visit to the CRC sector. Because I don't want the PLF to suffer massive casualties. Nor do I want to lose one of my executives, and we both know that if you and Mastermind end up fighting, one of you will die."
She gives him a glare. A moderately angry glare. Midoriya genuinely expected more.
"I'm angry and love fighting." Rini replies. "But I'm not fucking stupid. Mastermind and his little menagerie don't need to be afraid. I'm going to drink myself into the bed, and you don't need to act like you're an RPG protagonist and one of your teammates just got an event that might improve your relationship. So, fuck you. Also, who put you up for this?"
Midoriya considers NOT throwing them under the bus for a few seconds, then decides that he's curious about her reaction to that and speaks.
"Your dad and chief advisor." He replies. Rini groans
"I met my father fucking today and he's already pissing me off." She announces. "And Red Fang is, uuugh, I slept with her once and she keeps doing shit like that. I'm going to have a serious fucking talk with h… the hell are you looking at?" She gives him a strange look.
"You slept with her, really?" Midoriya asks, staring at her incredulously. "It would make for a good punchline when paired with Mastermind. A lesbian and a gay enter a bar, and the barman tells them to go murder each other elsewhere."
Rini groans loudly. Looks like she didn't like the joke. Shame. Midoriya quickly snaps one of the beer bottles and opens it up. She doesn't comment on that, she probably expected someone to drop by and pester her, at least judging from the number of alcohol prepared.
And the fact that she didn't start from the heavy stuff.
"I'm not a lesbian." Rini stares at him angrily. Wow, as if Midoriya cares about it at this point. Besides, he withstood nasty stares of the likes of All for One and Stain, who does she think she is?
"Well, either this is the foundation for a 'I'm not lesbian, but my girlfriend is' joke or there is something that I don't know about either you or her." Midoriya replies. "What is it, then? Open up, I'm not one to judge."
"Let me share with you a very important knowledge of the universe." Rini replies. "Sex was created when people took fight to the death and threw out everything even remotely nice about it."
…
"That's probably the most ISP thing I ever heard." Midoriya replies. "And I heard a LOT of ISP things in my lifetime. Congratulations." Rini decides to flip him the bird. Of course she fucking does, it's like seeing Uraraka before the Training Camp whenever Bakugou showed up on the horizon.
She really took the revelation of him bullying Izuku seriously. Midoriya, naturally, fell in love with her even more. Old times, old wounds.
"So, yeah, I was trying to figure myself out back then, and ended up settling on being fuckyousexual." Rini adds. "Stop acting like my father number two, even father number one is just pissing me off."
"Well, I did help you settle up after the tank, I'd argue that…"
"You're at best an uncle." Rini cuts in. "The type that pisses you off so you keep considering the option of cutting them out of the family tree, but you don't end up doing this because it requires actually thinking about them and you want to avoid that like a fucking plague."
"Wow." Midoriya deadpans. "That hurt. I see you've been training yourself in the art of hurting people with words as well, as expected of the High Warlord."
"With all due respect…" Rini replies. "... actually screw respect, just go fuck yourself, Midoriya."
"I don't need to fuck myself." Midoriya deadpans. "Tsuyu leaves me fully satisfied, please and thank you."
Rini Akaguro (Midoriya believes that this will be the result of their spar, at least), looks exasperated. Izuku laughs briefly when he sees her reaction.
"So…" Midoriya decides to return to the breach. She doesn't let him.
"You're not going to leave until you decide that I said enough." Rini then says. "So I'm going to fucking say it. Yes, it fucking hurt. Miruko's a bitch, and I really hope that we meet on the battlefield. No, other than that, I don't care anymore. Got it?"
"Rini, we both know that you aren't an authority even on your own emotions." Midoriya rolls his eyes around. "Yes, you do care. Look, just give Miruko some time to digest everything, alright? Call it a hunch, but… I don't think she'll like the NVA all that much. Okay?"
"Fuck you, Midoriya." She replies. "Anything else?"
What are the chances of this working? Well, he can only hope. Most of his major followers are broken people, he needs to make sure that they'll all stay in working conditions for as long as possible.
"Just don't murder Mastermind while under influence… or, well, while sober too." Midoriya replies. "That's all I want from you right now."
"Yoshihiro's ass is safe." Rini rolls her eyes around. "He's a jerk and I hate his guts, but I also respect him the most out of all members of the Paranormal Liberation Front. I might scream at him and threaten bloody murder, but I won't go physical."
Midoriya would have probably been less surprised by All Might briefly returning to the world of the living to confess his deeply hidden crush on All for One, to be honest. That was… wow. He really, really needs a context on this.
"With all due respect, Rini…" He says slowly. "...the fuck?"
She responds with laughter.
"For all your fucking big brain energy, you still didn't figure him out, eh?" She looks at him smugly. "C'mon, I had him all fucking bare on the first day. Mastermind talks a lot of smartass shit but deep inside he and the ISP are made from the same fucking clay."
"I get the feeling…" Izuku replies calmly. "...that he would murder you for telling him that."
"Oh, absofuckinglutely." Rini shrugs. "Look, deep inside, he and I both want to be fucking famous and feared by our enemies. I bet he was more fucking insecure about being 'merely' an A-Ranker before the Tartarus that you can possibly imagine. Now he's soothing his complexes and making his balls tremble with concentrated delight by rubbing my lower villain ranking in my face. Simple as that."
"That's…" Midoriya quickly runs what he knows about Yoshihiro Rai through this new outlook on him. "... probably correct. But I still don't get where the 'respect' comes from."
"Look." Rini is clearly enjoying lecturing Midoriya on his favorite subject. "Despite being born in the CRC, he could leave it. He's smart enough to do that, and we know he had some external influences, even from his own family. But he wanted a challenge. Something truly extraordinary to fight against, because the stronger the opponent the more impressive your victory. So from all the groups he could fight against, he picked up the mutants. He probably had it all planned."
She grins slightly. She's… enjoying it, for some reason. And while Midoriya is outwardly calm, on the inside he is extremely confused by that.
"The ultimate brawn versus brain clash." She says smugly. "Legions of powerful mutants, physically superior and more numerous than his own followers, but th Mastermind outthinking them, achieving victory against overwhelming odds and going down in history as some new Alexander the fucking Great. That was his fucking dream, the one that the government ruined."
"... because they've achieved it for him." Midoriya concludes. Rini, to his surprise, shakes her head.
"No, because they made his dream fucking meaningless." She replies. "People don't exactly fear the mutants anymore. Just yeet them into a ghetto when they act nasty, and be done with it! So his entire backstory, his entire war, his entire dream… no one gives a shit about them anymore. And as for respect…"
She sighs dreamily.
"He could pick any other group as his enemies, as I said." She replies. "But he chose the mutants. He looked for the meanest, toughest and most dangerous people to defeat for fame and glory, and he chose us. If his dream 'race war' happened and he won, we wouldn't be forgotten. We wouldn't be left to rot in the ghettos. He would have killed us all, but then he would put statues commemorating what sort of scary and deadly bastards we all were on every city plaza in the country, just to make it remembered that he managed to defeat such a threat."
Rini sighs while opening another beer bottle. She must have gotten thirsty over all the talking.
"So yeah, I respect him." She says to Midoriya. "I hate him, but I also fucking respect him. Because in a twisted way, he respects us. If only just the threat that we are. And, just so we're clear…" She grins. "... I hate the government much more than him."
"That's an interesting take on Mastermind." Midoriya admits. "It seems to check out well enough, and it's something that I genuinely didn't think of."
"Spend a few months in a ghetto when everyone's ready to steal your food and leave you to starve." Rini rolls her eyes around. "Really teaches you how to read people. A bit of a crash course, with an accent on crash."
Midoriya leaves the brief meeting with a small degree of doubts of whether Masterrmind is genuinely buying his racist ideology or whether he just built the whole thing to start a racial war and become famous as a result. He has no idea if it makes him more of a monster or less, to be honest.
Drinking with Rini is a really confusing experience.
(***)
"It is time for the second step of our strategy." Midoriya announced to the members of the League of Villains and the heads of the sub-organizations. While ignoring the occasional hostile stares exchanged between Mastermind and Lady Murder.
Kids these days.
It has been almost a week since the Revival Celebration. The waves it made were still there, but he needed something more. Something to amplify the result. Something to further sow fear throughout both the civilian population and the hero society.
In Midoriya's opinion, the potential of certain quirks in guerilla warfare was simply unmatched. He had a plan on how to use it, one that they never got to use during the first Paranormal Liberation War.
Sir Nighteye's existence was a problem. By the time Midoriya got him out of the picture, Entropy had first of her breakdowns. Midoriya shelved the plan, and then threw it out after Overhaul died and he realized that without Chisaki he can't hope to restrain the destructive desires of Entropy any longer.
"Let me…" He smiles faintly. "... summarize the plan now."
(***)
"Oh..." Momo blinks at him a few times. "...fuck me." In the background, Todoroki adopts Dabi's face. He's looking forward to the blood being spilled and heroes being burned alive.
Lady Murder looks pleased. Yeah, he did offer her some action. Less than she clearly hoped for, but… she suspected that it was going to improve later on. She wasn't wrong.
Mastermind finally finishes calculating things. Then he looks at Midoriya with an expression of delight on his face.
"We're starting in two hours." Midoriya concludes the meeting. "Get ready." It's going to be another big day for the Paranormal Liberation Front.
(***)
"That really took us off-guard, didn't it?" S-Rank hero, Daybreak, says. They are in his personal office at the top of his hero agency. The one place where he could just… rest, more or less safe from the mess on the streets.
It… wasn't exactly a safe district. Not so close to the Naruhata Ward, the biggest stronghold of the New Vigilante Alliance in Tokyo. Crawler spent more than a decade building a reputation that he could now capitalize on.
Nowadays, Naruhata Ward is a mess. It's like seeing a picture from the Third World country of old. Crawler offered protection and many mutants, quirkless and people having issues with the government accepted it.
Haimawari was training an army there. Those regular inhabitants of the district that didn't hate the government enough to tolerate that happening outside of their homes have long ago left. Today, Naruhata ward was a festering wound.
Daybreak might have been an S-Rank hero, but he had no start to Crawler, who was a double S-Rank. The government sent Invincible to arrest him, and Haimawari managed to avoid it mostly by Invincible failing to find him in the mess that Naruhata Ward was.
"The Paranormal Liberation Front?" Rapier asks. Another S-Rank hero, head of another agency in the area. Competition in better times. A much needed ally and a crucial part of the perimeter defense around Naruhata nowadays.
"Yeah." Daybreak leans back in his chair. "The whole area is low-priority as it is. If the Paranormal Liberation Front does some big moves, we're going to get even less support. Crawler's going to breach the line in no time."
Frankly, the government was losing not just Naruhata but the entire region of Tokyo. The area patrolled by the heroes from the local agencies was slowly shrinking for months now. Merely two days ago Slipstream, B-Rank sidekick from Rapier's agency, ended up being killed by Crawler.
Koichi Haimawari (in his All Might hoodie, no less) figured out which road Slipstream was using to go to work. Then he walked up into the overpass and used his quirk to fire a grenade through Slipstream's car front window.
NVA naturally released footage incriminating Slipstream into some very questionable actions. Edited, in their opinion. But Naruhata was buying it wholeheartedly. It would buy everything that pictured the government in a bad light.
"We're going to have to do our best, then." Rapier replies. When Daybreak gives her an odd look, she shrugs. "What do you expect me to do? Offer you some grand strategy on dealing with the issue? This area is not glamorous enough for an SS-Rank to move in permanently unless Crawler starts leveling down hero agencies. So, we're going to h…"
She never finished her words. Prominence Burn fired from a rooftop of the building on the other side of the street melts most of the Daybreak's agency within several seconds, killing two S-Rank, three A-Rank, seven B-Ranks and three C-Rank heroes together with some support personnel.
(***)
Momo Yaoyorozu came prepared. There were a lot of things to create, yes. It really tired her out. But once she was done with them, she could rest, grab some food out of the bag together with Jirou, and enjoy the show.
Even if it meant giving Thunderbolt a pause.
They even brought a blanket. It was, by all intents and purposes, a picnic. Rather enjoyable one, although Momo missed Shoto. Then again, he had something to do elsewhere. And they could always repeat that somewhere on the surface above the Overlook.
"Final adjustments done." Mastermind announces. Momo doesn't exactly like him as a person (they are work colleagues, all that can be said about it), but his quirk is incredible. And extremely useful in moments like this.
He has a drone controller in his hands. His eyes are still on it. It's a special drone made by Hatsume, with numerous interesting abilities. It's not even armed, it doesn't have to. But it can measure wind and a lot of other things.
Behind Mastermind, thirty members of the Quirkless Liberation Front and Creature Rejection Clan, finish loading up seven field guns that Momo created earlier. Each has a few additional shells lying in wait right next to them. Mastermind analyzed everything he could with his quirk to ensure perfect accuracy of both the first and the subsequent salvoes.
Mastermind raises his hand. Jirou pours some tea into Momo's cup from a thermos. Mastermind's hand falls and all seven field guns unleash their payload simultaneously.
Several seconds later, seven 152mm artillery rounds filled with lethal doses of gaseous Trigger (thank you, Humarise, for giving Momo the idea on how to make it before being dismantled by the heroes) explode right in the middle of Shiketsu High. During the morning roll call.
More rounds follow up during the next minute. By the time the heroes arrive, they only find an empty stretch of land, a carpet and a mostly empty picnic basket.
(***)
Landshark's hero agency had a very scenic view of the nearby lake. The area it oversaw was mostly rural, known before the current times as a major tourism spot. Then things got a bit more complicated.
What was considered a benefit by its heroes (who doesn't like nice views outside of your window?) changed into a nightmare when Hypothermia stepped out of Cloud's warpgate and immediately froze a big part of the lake. Before dropping it on the Hero Agency.
No one survived.
Hypothermia stayed around for a few more minutes, reshaping the ice into a massive sculpture of Re-Destro. She made the ice perfectly transparent, and decorated its insides with mangled corpses of the heroes she just killed.
She liked Rikiya Yotsubashi. Almost as much as she liked Midoriya Izuku. They both helped her NOT get killed by that loser of a brother she was cursed with. They both helped her grow in power. They were both among the short list of people that were nice to her, that saw a human rather than a living weapon of mass destruction in her.
Now that the MLA she once knew was destroyed, and most of those she knew were dead, she had nothing left to live for. She only had her meta-ability, now. Not many useful skills, no megacorporation to support her. Her only options were unskilled labour, prostitution or villainy.
Was it really a wonder that she was ready to kill at Midoriya's orders?
(***)
Aiko Midoriya (officially, Shigaraki) loves her older brother.
It's a fact that might come as a surprise to many. She shook off most of her real world attachments when she became Judgment. She didn't care about the world out there, the people in front of her.
Judgment was, even in her own eyes, a god. God that didn't particularly care about the existence of humans, unless the humans in question cared about them. She would protect her believers, because they saw the world like she did. Because they, to various degrees, understood her. And because she vaguely suspected loneliness to be a dangerous thing to an immortal that she saw herself as.
Other than that, she didn't care. She would level down a city and only cry because two or three of Ascending Path members were there. Because a dozen more might have been converted, and were on the right way to that.
Did it make her evil? That depended entirely on your own definition of the word, in Aiko's opinion. To her followers, she was a manifested goodness. And while she didn't care about the others, she also didn't see a point in trying to kill anyone - aside from those that took her mother from her. That made things personal.
Very much so.
Cloud dropped her in front of some big hero agency in Kyoto. There was some emergency meeting going on inside. Aiko transformed into her Apocrypha form and phased through the wall at the top floor of the skyscraper. Right into the whole room filled with A and B-Rank heroes. None of them wore their hero uniforms. None of them had their support items on them.
There was also an S-Rank hero that was the agency's head. She killed him first, with a small Extinction Ray fired before he realized what was happening. He could actually be a problem to her if she had to face him and the others at once.
She also used a form of All for One's sludge summoning quirk to bring in Fumi, Ragdoll and a few more of her templars. There is no need to fight on her own, after all. She isn't alone. She will never be alone.
She is a god, and unleashing your worshippers against your enemies and changing their temples (okay, hero agency, but it was pretty much a temple dedicated to the government) into slaughterhouses is a very god-thing to do.
Few of them were smart enough to run away. The rest were exterminated. Aiko would lose a few of her most ardent followers if not for the fact that spirits could survive much more punishment than humans of flesh and blood.
Damage their body enough and they'll shrink, no longer having enough energy to maintain larger forms. Eventually, they won't have enough to exist. But here, none of them reached that point.
Aiko followed the escapees, stepping out of the conference room. She got rid of the blood splatters on her clothes and body, except for the feet. A small girl walking barefoot out of a place of massacre and leaving bloody footprints on the floor as she hunted the survivors through the building felt… aesthetic enough. Artistic even.
By the time she had Cloud warp her out, most of the building was filled with nothing but corpses.
(***)
Within the next three hours, four lesser hero agencies (all of them led by A-Rankers) were destroyed when Cloud warped Clockmaker-patented High Yield Explosive Babies #13 inside of them.
Cloud also warps Lady Murder together with a selection of her lieutenants into another hero agency, this time run by another S-Ranker. She picks them all up once all the defenders are dead. Lady Murder returns to the Overlook with a new headgear to her collection, the one belonging to the agency head that she slew in a duel while her followers were massacring his sidekicks.
No warp coordinate scramblers, street addresses that could be found on the internet in fifteen minutes… changing that into the knowledge of their exact coordinates was a child's play to Cloud.
All the attacked agencies were annihilated with negligible resistance. The same happened to three police precincts, two courthouses and five hero support workshops targeted by another wave of attacks during the next hour.
(***)
Few hours later, Midoriya is back doing his fake family routine. He is half-sitting on his bed, his legs under the quilt but his back on the wall. Tsuyu is changing from her villain uniform to her pajamas, and… honestly speaking, Izuku is enjoying the view. And he's fairly certain that she knows.
Midoriya sort of wishes that Eri didn't walk him out of his brief cigarette addiction (by threatening to stop talking with him forever if he doesn't stop smoking). He gets the feeling that doing it right now would really… fit the aesthetic, maybe?
Of course, Tsuyu would then kick him in the face for making their bedroom smell bad. So, yeah, maybe not much of a loss.
"That was…" She says suddenly. "... quite scary, ribbit."
"My intent exactly." Midoriya replies. Tsuyu's finally done with changing and quickly slips under the covers. A moment later her head emerges from them right next to him and blows him a kiss. "Warp quirks open so many possibilities when guerilla warfare is involved. No advance warning, no risks of a random patrol detecting your assault unit beforehand, no problems with delivering the bombs to the target location, easy retreat after the fight is over… it's like playing a game on the lowest difficulty setting."
"Hmmm…" She snuggles closer to him. He enjoys the warmth. "Why didn't we do it during the first war, ribbit?"
"Because AFO was an unimaginitive shit." Midoriya replies. "And after Deika, Kurogiri was too much of a strategic asset to even potentially risk him. And, because it was a different war, Tsu. Because back then, we wanted to win. We wanted to conquer Japan in a traditional sense. We couldn't destroy too much infrastructure."
"And now?" She asks.
"Now we don't have enough resources to win in that way." He replies. "So I'm focusing on making the government lose rather than us win. This was merely the first attack of many, Tsu. We'll continue to destroy police precincts, hero agencies, hero schools, governmental offices, courthouses and hero support factories, all those small and on their own insignificant pillars that hold the system afloat. We'll change the numerical advantage of the government into an asset, forcing them to divide their forces too much to be able to stop our raids. We'll teach those working for the government that they can never be sure that Todoroki isn't powering a Prominence Burn on the rooftop of the building right next to their workplace right now. Without taking over even a single square meter of Japan that the heroes could try to retake from us. That the heroes could strike back against." He smiles wryly. "I told them during the Revival Celebration that anarchy is the word for the day. I think it's time to make them realize that I meant it."
Your move, Intelli.
(***)
Not gonna lie, this war is going to go downhill for the government from here. Although the second raid is going to be significantly derailed due to certain... yeah, I'm not spoiling, let's just say that the last chapter of the State of Emergency Arc ends with a lot of oomph.
Also daily reminder that the way Tomura employed Kurogiri in canon was an idiocy. He could use him to open 2-3 small warpgates a day, touch a wall of a hero agency through it and bam, the building collapses killing several heroes. I STILL think that the reason Kurogiri was caught by Gran Torino off-screen was just so that he could be taken out of the picture because the author realized that people are going to start asking him wtf is the Hero Society still existing when Tomura has an asset of this magnitude and this would make Tomura Shigaraki look murderhobo rather than growing societal menace.