Torhaent - Great to hear those words, this fic is... well, the amount of followers is downright a joke, both here and on AO3 :V It's nice to have some positive feedback to motivate myself to writing more of it lmao. Keep at it!
Shahryar - Yeah, thankfully Revenant is much less of a larper than AFO and Counterfeit is much less of a gamer than canon Tomura, so it's going to play out a bit differently xD
(***)
Saiko Intelli spent a relatively pleasant day combing through data, trying to figure out something resembling a game plan against the PLF and, probably, slowly preparing something that should end the threat that the New Vigilante Alliance was once and for all.
And, perhaps, SLIGHTLY fantasizing about all the things that could have happened if Mirio Toogata dropped by.
Her dedication to the act of doing stupid things in secret was proportional to how stressed she was. She really needed some release from time to time, and being all rational and logical was just… too much for her sometimes.
Then she heard of the first of the series of attacks for the day, and she immediately realized that she's going to have to openly ask him to take her somewhere private (or even not) and treat her like a goddamn rag for hours to rebound from this disaster.
Whether Lemillion was capable of something like that remained to be seen, but she was hopeful.
"Shouldn't we evacua…" One of her sidekicks tries to be helpful.
"Don't bother." Mindscape cuts in. "If Midoriya planned to attack Top Heroes, he would have started from that to make sure that we were going to have no advance warning on this."
It took twenty seconds under her quirk to figure it out. Together with the fact that there'll be a second wave of attacks, probably against targets that can't exactly defend themselves. Police precincts, probably? She isn't sure what else could be targeted, she doesn't have enough data about Midoriya, even with Sir Nighteye's archives. .
She told her sidekicks to relay the warning. Police precincts throughout the country are quickly evacuated. Not quick enough to avoid casualties entirely, as out of three attacked police precincts, one didn't get the warning in time.
She also didn't predict courthouses and support companies to be attacked. Good to know that Midoriya was willing to strike things that weren't part of the law enforcement proper. She was going to include that in her future predictions.
Mindscape was still hard at work, trying to contain the whole chaos, when she received a phone call.
Oh, great.
"Mindscape here." She says, as emotionlessly as possible.
"I want you in my office." The Prime Minister replies. Because of course it's that woman. If anyone else called her right now, she would tell them to fuck off. But there is a limit to how stupid she wants to act right now. "In thirty minutes."
Negative side-effects of having your hero agency in the untouchable redoubt that the Government District in Tokyo was today. So many police officers and heroes, so many crucial national institutions at every corner. Not to mention the strict checks-up for new arrivals and a handful of warp coordinate scramblers.
She could actually make it in time.
Shit.
(***)
"No, ma'am prime minister." Saiko Intelli replies, as calmly as possible. Having a face-to-face meeting with the woman in front of her was a rarity. But she really wasn't in a mood for it. Especially not right now. "I do not, as of now, possess any significant leads that might help in apprehending Midoriya Izuku."
"That man…" The Prime Minister speaks slowly and calmly. "... has declared war against the entirety of Japan. He has launched not one, but two devastating attacks. Destroyed the best hero school in the country and knocked the second best out of operations for at least months. In both cases, he did that without suffering any notable casualties."
Someone - probably one of her sycophants - was sugarcoating the news, it seems. According to what Intelli's intel stated, Shiketsu High was deader than UA. It only had a hero course, but a big one - but now, out of twelve classes, you could MAYBE piece up two from the survivors that weren't traumatized enough to drop from the Hero Course entirely.
"I'm acutely aware." Saiko takes advantage of the pregnant pause to speak. She is irreplaceable. She can do things like that, for as long as she doesn't go too far. And she doesn't plan to. As stated, her desire for stupidity doesn't reach the realm of the suicidal. "However, the Paranormal Liberation Front has a warper that we believe to be actually stronger than Kurogiri. Worst of all, Revenant, unlike Entropy, is clearly capable of utilizing that asset to its full potential."
"Meaning?" The prime minister speaks back. Somehow the desk that separates them doesn't catch fire. Her assistant, who would probably need to stop the fire if it happened, still looks rather uncomfortable with the… intensity of the meeting.
The Prime Minister wants to spill blood. Mindscape, honestly, is willing to help her in that. But wanting something doesn't make it randomly become possible. And that's the big problem right now.
"Meaning that if he's going to launch more attacks like the today's one…" Saiko Intelli sees no reason for him to stop. She'd suspect something very nasty brewing if it did. "... he's going to end up in the history books."
"What?" The Prime Minister didn't realize it.
"From the tactical point of view, both attacks were masterpieces." Intelli replies. "The Paranormal Liberation Front is writing a completely new chapter in military history books with its usage of warp quirks for high-intensity guerilla warfare."
"Could you stop singing praises about him and try to actually stop him?" Prime Minister retorts back and for a few seconds Saiko considers tearing that god-awful necklace from her neck and shoving it down her throat.
"I'm doing my best." Mindscape eventually settles on the safer alternative. "However, we do not possess any technological means of tracking warp gates. He has at least two precise teleporters available to him, which allows him to strike whenever and wherever he please."
People keep forgetting that Eclipse is a warper as well. Much less powerful than Cloud clearly is, but…
Stay calm. Do not escalate. Try to steer her towards your point of view without engaging in a shouting match. The Prime Minister didn't let emotions guide her actions, but… when you made her dislike you… it tended to end badly.
"So we can't stop him?" The Prime Minister asks.
"Not unless he makes a major mistake." Intelli replies. "Which, basically, means launching an attack in a proximity of Invincible or killing so many people that his main executioners like the second Arch-Arsonist or Apocrypha grow tired of it. We presently have no idea where his headquarters are located."
"He has thousands of people in his organization." The Prime Minister shoots back. "He can't just hide all of them from us!"
"We do not know the range of Cloud's warpgates." Saiko replies calmly. "His headquarters might as well be in Korea."
Considering the fact that the Republic of Korea's government was probably afraid of Japan invading it once it would manage to suppress the NVA and get its territory under proper control, it wouldn't be a bad move on their end.
Mindscape didn't think that such an invasion was ever a possibility, but fear makes people do stupid things.
The Prime Minister clearly swallows whatever words she planned to unleash upon her guest. When she speaks again, she sounds much calmer.
"Alright. Any suggestions on how to proceed with the current crisis?" She asks. Finally, something even remotely constructive.
"I have several." Intelli replies. "But it's going to be damage control more than anything else. I do believe that I managed to figure out his gameplan, but actually countering it is something entirely different."
"Elaborate." The Prime Minister says. Because of course she does.
"He's going to continue attacking hero schools, police facilities, courthouses, governmental offices, hero support industry and, eventually, army bases and other military facilities." Intelli replies. "Destroying our infrastructure, limiting our ability to project power and causing an uptick in crime and anti-government activities in areas that we can no longer effectively control."
"Mindscape, he has a what, five thousand followers?" The Prime Minister didn't figure it out. Ugh. "We have…"
"... seventy thousand pro-heroes, three hundred thousand police officers and up to a half million of soldiers." She decides to risk doing something stupid, and interrupts the Prime Minister. Oh, the sheer thrill was just wonderful. "However, if we divide those numbers by all the facilities we have to defend, we'll discover that we're going to be severely outnumbered during every raid. Unless we manage to perfectly predict what he is going to attack next, we won't stop him."
"And you won't manage to predict it because…" The Prime Minister decided not to react to the interjection.
"Because he's going to use Mastermind and Counterfeit to throw all my predictions off." She replies. "He probably asked them both to make a list of potential targets, then added it to his own potential targets and now chooses things out of it randomly. I cannot predict his attacks, because there are going to be no subconscious patterns to their choice of targets that I can catch."
And even if she DOES notice one, it'll probably be a trap. Or, a feint, to draw the government's forces from the actual target of attack. How absolutely fucking brilliant. Nakahara was bad enough, this is worse by an order of magnitude.
"So, we're just going to let them continue striking us with total impunity?!" The Prime Minister clearly didn't get the memo of Saiko Intelli telling her just that a while ago, just in different words.
"Yes." Mindscape replies. "As I said, there are certain ways of minimizing our casualties and buying ourselves the time needed to locate Revenant's headquarters."
"Alright." The Prime Minister groans. "Elaborate."
"First, Cloud's warpgate is rather visible." Intelli replies. "I suggest deploying various forms of automatic surveillance around as many potential targets as possible. Have someone program it to ring an automatic evacuation alert whenever the system spots the black clouds suggesting an incoming attack."
"Costly. And we'll probably end up with a lot of false alerts." Prime Minister notes. "Suggestion accepted. What else?"
"Second, I suggest forming regional fast response units of the local higher ranked heroes." Intelli replies. "Keep local SS and S-Ranks on the move, preferably away from their agencies for most of the time. This will limit the casualties they'll suffer during the raids, but it will also raise the chances of the PLF making a mistake. If we have them move randomly during the day, there is a chance that they'll be near the location of the on-going raid and will intervene quickly enough to engage the retreating enemy forces before they warp out."
"This will limit the casualties we'll suffer in the major urban areas." The Prime Minister notices. "The rest of the country will still be entirely open to attacks."
"I'm afraid that we can't do anything for the rest of the country." Saiko replies. "For as long as we manage to keep enough high ranked heroes active and maintain the JSDF as an effective fighting force, we'll be able to secure anything we lost if the PLF tries to straight up occupy anything there."
It won't. Saiko was sure of it. The Sword of Damocles and the absolute numerical superiority of the government made it a suicide. And Revenant didn't feel suicidal in the slightest. But it sounded like an argument, so she used it.
"I see." The Prime Minister fell for it. Probably. She was, when she really wanted to, absolutely unreadable. "It'll also make our top rankers less vulnerable to ambushes."
"I don't think that SS-Rankers will become the PLF's target in the near future." Saiko replies. That caught the Prime Minister off-guard.
"Are you serious?!" Yeah, it was hard to believe. "They killed FOUR during the first ten minutes of the war!"
"Because they needed to re-establish themselves as a group to be feared." Intelli cuts back. "Killing the SS-Rankers was a mean to an end, not the end itself. If the PLF planned to focus on us, he'd start the second series of attacks from it. And seeing as I'm the heroes main strategist, I'm the first target of that. The governmental district is an impenetrable fortress, but we thought the same thing about Tartarus."
That line of logic caught the Prime Minister's attention.
"Why?" She asks, narrowing her eyes.
"Because if my theory is correct, he's planning to continue hitting us in order to make some people lose their faith in the system… and the rest focus their faith on the SS-Rankers." Intelli replies. "And that's when he'll attempt to kill as many of them as possible in a quick succession. I STRONGLY suggest tailoring the PR strategy to take that into account."
"I see." The Prime Minister doesn't look persuaded by it. "I don't think that they can cause a major dent in them, not without the advantage of surprise. And, similarly, I don't think that we have anyone else to focus the public's attention on."
Saiko has a faint feeling that they're going to regret that decision. Oh, well. She did her part.
"You're trying to out their traitor that way too, aren't you?" The Prime Minister replies. This actually surprised Saiko a little.
"In a way, yes." Mindscape replies. "I don't believe that we can have more than one spy among them. If the spy is selling us to both the NVA and PLF, there is a chance I'll manage to glean it out from seeing the PLF's choice of targets. Meaning that if there'll be an SS-Ranker led regional response unit that somehow is never close to the local PLF raids, it'll tell us a lot."
"I don't believe that there is a traitor among the SS-Rankers." The Prime Minister cuts in. "Even Lemillion is at best a critic of the government's policies, not a traitor. And I don't picture him as selling us out to the Front of all groups."
Would she still have thought so if she read Sir Nighteye's Archive? Lemillion was practically the closest thing that Sir Nighteye had to a son, and Mirai Sasaki clearly did a lot of unsavory (even borderline villainous) things, against All for One and the HPSC.
"It might be someone close to them." Intelli replies. "A chief sidekick of their agencies or someone like that."
When she said that there is probably only a single spy, she lied. Unless there is some 5D planning and thinking involved, the NVA would know that the spy also sold the intel to someone else. This means that they'd at least suspect that something was brewing.
Instead, all her sources at the NVA's peripheries were clear that the vigilantes were completely surprised by the Revival Celebration. Unless Nakahara located all her informants and made them feed Intelli with misinformation, she could trust that to be true.
But the chances of the Prime Minister believing that this was an option were low, and her disbelief would make her doubt the rest of Intelli's words.
The problem was that Mindscape was supposed to be the most informed among the eighteen SS-Ranks, and even she didn't know about the Shinigami Record. Who could know more? Invincible? Not unless the Prime Minister had a tendency to babble about things like that in front of her precious Symbol of Hope.
And Midoriya clearly knew even some of the names. There was a large chance that it was due to Shishikross finding it out on his own, but…
"Maybe." The Prime Minister doesn't seem awfully convinced. "Anything else?"
"Aside from announcing a state of emergency nationwide?" Saiko asks, the Prime Minister giving her a tired stare.
"Yes, because I was about to do that either way." The Prime Minister then says. Additional legitimacy for additional executive power, right.
Time for the big one, it seems.
"I suggest preparing the activation of the Citadel Project." Saiko says and she can immediately see the flinch on the Prime Minister's face.
"Are you insane?" The woman barks out. Yeah, that was the expected reaction.
"Ma'am Prime Minister." Saiko says officially. "If the attacks on our infrastructure continue with the intensity that the first raid showed us, Citadel might be the only option to maintain our firepower and ability to project it, not to mention the perpetuity of the government if the worst case scenario comes to pass. I believe that it's better to prepare it and then not use it rather than wait with the preparations until we discover that we've lost too much for Citadel to be of any use."
"I thought…" The Prime Minister's eyes narrow. "... that you were against that project."
"Because I considered it to be a gargantuan waste of assets, especially idiotic when our country is under international sanctions." Saiko Intelli has no reason to sugarcoat it. "However, since we've already created it, we can as well use it when the situation calls."
They could have used those assets to actually make ghettos livable instead. Thus severely decreasing the amount of troubles the heroes had to deal with it on a daily basis. But no, they had to spend them on one more Giant Project born out of the Prime Minister's paranoia.
Saiko Intelli has, at this point, given up on trying to explain to the Prime Minister what was the exact way the mutant ghettos' operated. They were permanently underfunded, resulting in their inhabitants living in poverty and growing to hate the government more and more. And then, when some of them escaped, they were already fully radicalized.
And that's if you excluded some of them, especially those for already violent mutants, where the total neglect made things worse.
Why? Because the Prime Minister enjoyed hearing things that agreed with her worldview. So, naturally, most of the people around her were very willing to tell her such things and such things only.
She genuinely thought that the ghetto's were (relatively) well-maintained, and that the governmental neglect changing some of them into hellscapes was NVA' propaganda. And Intelli failed to change her mind about it.
There were a lot of reasons why Mindscape's average stress level was so high that she considered something as stupid as a sexual relationship with someone that hated her and the government as a whole as a mean of venting it.
"How nice of you to be so open about it." The Prime Minister retorts. "I'll consider it, though we'll probably only do it if the situation worsens."
In Saiko Intelli's opinion, democracy and autocracy were two equally valid systems, each having their own pros and cons.
Autocracies were typically more efficient, especially when dealing with crises was involved - they saw that first hand during the First Paranormal Liberation War. If they were maintaining the pre-war procedures and let the Diet debate everything for days in order to make the right decision, they'd lose the war ten times over.
And that's without mentioning the fact of how many Diet members were to a various degree puppets of AFO or Re-Destro. Having solid 28% of your legislative be villains in disguise changed Saiko's outlook on the issue a lot.
Unfortunately, the country was still in a state of crisis. Maintaining the executive over legislative made sense. The problem was that Intelli was increasingly dissatisfied with the person in charge of it.
Good autocracy was better than good democracy, but bad autocracy was worse than bad democracy. And the difference between good and bad autocracy lies entirely in the person in charge of it. And people change.
There was a lot of people that could do the same job, but without letting themselves be led astray by stupid and self-serving people. They just needed to be intelligent enough to avoid that.
That was something that Intelli needed to keep in mind, while dealing with this mess.
"I'll need to discuss it with the cabinet, however." She states. "Any other ideas?" Saiko shakes her head. "Alright. Anything that you can report to me about the progress in the investigation into Revenant?"
"I looked through Sir Nighteye's records." Saiko replies. "I've learned… a lot. He apparently suspected that there was some unspecified third co-leader of the Paranormal Liberation Front after Deika, one going by the name of Revenant. He didn't manage to pinpoint their identity before his assassination, and all the leads he had have long since gone cold."
She decides to not elaborate on 'a lot'. It might not be… wise, in the current circumstances.
"So you think that he didn't make it all up?" The Prime Minister looks actually shocked at that. Yes, that's rare. "You're trying to tell me that a quirkless kid killed, even if indirectly, not only Endeavor but also who knows how many other top heroes?!"
"It'd be shocking if he did that personally." Saiko decides to be honest about it. "However, I see no reason why a quirkless individual with sufficiently good teachers, high intelligence and some practical experience couldn't think of a plan to take down a hero. Even the top one."
Even without her quirk, she has an IQ of 150. She does most of her planning without using it. It's helpful in analyzing large amounts of data, but it also makes her rather blind to less… rational decisions. That's how Yaoyorozu managed to take her down during the provisional license exam.
Saiko Intelli learned her lesson back then.
The prime minister appears unconvinced. Saiko decides to make another push.
"Sir Nighteye's archives appear to suggest that Revenant was a student of Re-Destro, perhaps even a member of the Meta-Liberation Army." She says. "Seeing as Yotsubashi managed to become a mastermind to equal All for One and Nedzu without the former's experience and the latter's intelligence quirk, he was probably the best person for Midoriya to learn from."
"A quirkless person studying under a quirk supremacist." The Prime Minister cuts in. "I'll never believe in that."
Saiko actually stares at her for a few seconds after that. The Prime Minister should be the one most aware that Re-Destro being a quirk supremacist was a state propaganda. He wanted to limit restrictions on quirk usage, not change the society into a might-makes-right hierarchy.
She didn't start to believe her own propaganda or something, right?
"Thus far his behavior and operation planning appears to be in-line with what can be considered Re-Destro's school of mastermindry." Saiko decides to point it out. "In fact, there's a chance that All for One, yes I know about him now, gave him some intelligence quirk to 'fit in' more, besides it feels like something to cement his loyalty after being abused for quirklessness for so long."
"What about the theory that he's only a figurehead?" The Prime Minister replies, clearly changing the subject. "And the true leader of the PLF is Counterfeit or Mastermind, maybe Apocrypha?"
"I find it unlikely to be true." Saiko replies dryly. It's safer answer than 'the analysts behind this theory should be thrown into a shark pool because they were either grotesquely incompetent or completely habituated into telling the prime minister what she wanted to hear, and both options were actively harmful to the country'.
"I see." The Prime Minister nods. "What about Apocrypha?" Ah yes, the great mystery, a demon pretending to be a god showing up out of nowhere, all known facilities of her cult going up in flames on the day of the Revival Celebration.
No one in the government is buying the existence of Judgment. It's just Apocrypha, pretending to be a 'god' enough to fool a five digit number of people into worshiping her made-up deity.
"We cannot discount the theory that she inherited her father's quirk." Saiko admits. The Prime Minister looks for a moment as if she just tried to bite a sour lemon. "Of course, we only have Revenant's words about that, so there is an option that she's actually unrelated to him and we're all falling for an intimidation scheme. However, considering her… performance during both of the PLF attacks, there is a high chance of her being in possession of multiple quirks."
"High chance?" The Prime Minister blinks at her a few times. "She used at least three different quirks during the USJ attack alone! What other option is there?!"
"That's certainly the most likely option, yes." Mindscape admits. She is still uncomfortable with the discovery of what exactly was All for One's quirk. It was a state secret even today, and probably for a good reason. "However, neither of the powers she displayed match what we know about the quirks that All for One had. We've run them through our quirk databases, we've also managed to run them through the United Nations database, and… no match. If Aiko Shigaraki is in possession of multiple quirks, we have no idea where she took them from."
"So we know nothing." The Prime Minister sighs. Her assistant supplies her with another cup of coffee. Saiko is blessed with a cup of some very good tea as well. "You know, considering how odd some quirks are, I'm half convinced that she has a transformative quirk that lets her change into an actual magical girl."
This actually gets a dignified chuckle out of Mindscape. It would be weird, yes, but… honestly, it'd work. The biggest source of hilarity of that concept was the fact that All for One's daughter would get such a quirk. The demon lord always wearing impeccable business suits, having a magical girl as a daughter? Hilarious.
Of course, she seemed to equal him in malevolence. And already racked a rather impressive killcount. And without knowing what the hell her quirk actually was, they couldn't even think of any good countermeasures.
"There are two anomalies about Apocrypha that we've managed to notice." Saiko continues. One of them is an oddity, one is… honestly, Mindscape has no idea what to think about it. And she's going to time it so that the Prime Minister is drinking her coffee while she hears of it.
Just for her own sadistic enjoyment.
"Anomalies?" The Prime Minister decides to inquire when the silence grows a bit too long.
"The first one is the fact that she was accompanied by several… individuals during her assault on the Longbow's Hero Agency." Saiko replies. "Those individuals all share the trait of being able to continue fighting despite receiving injuries that should be fatal or at least debilitating. Their wounds regenerate almost instantly, however it appears that doing so multiple times makes them shrink, for the lack of a better word."
It was… weird. Seriously, goddamn, weird. Even to Saiko Intelli, who really thought that she saw almost every weird thing out there during her service as a hero. Being the government's main analyst made you see a lot of strange things.
"It must be some form of shapeshifting." She continues. "In fact, we don't think that they have any internal organs. It's as if the heroes were fighting physically existing projections. They couldn't be injured, only depleted."
"Some new type of Noumu?" The Prime Minister asks. It's a correct question.
"We do not presently know." Mindscape replies. "We've managed to track the quirks of two of them to people that vanished mysteriously two and three years ago. We're currently investigating those disappearances, and we hope for some progress soon. We also believe Fumikage Tokoyami to be another case of… well, whatever those things truly are."
"Brilliant." The Prime Minister sighs. "More mad science. Forward your findings to the heroes out there, we need them to know what they'll be dealing with. What about the second strange thing?"
"Well, one of my sidekicks had an… idea." Saiko says. The Prime Minister looks at her questioningly and motions her to hurry it up. "It was rather unorthodox, but we've lacked other leads to follow, so I let him go for it. He analyzed the skull on the Apocrypha's staff. We're almost certain that it's truly a human skull, and…" She pauses for a second, letting the Prime Minister sip on her coffee. "... it belongs to All for One."
As Saiko expected (and planned), the woman in front of her ended up almost choking on the coffee. Yeah. That was a natural reaction.
"It belongs to whom?!" The Prime Minister finally manages to say.
"To All for One." Mindscape says again. She can scarcely believe it herself, to be honest. "We've made a facial reconstruction based on the recording of its shape, and it's an almost perfect match to All for One's face. We aren't sure how that's possible with him dying in Deika, however. Honestly…" She sighs. "... Apocrypha is pretty much one big walking mystery, even more so than Revenant."
(***)
Look, people. Using All for One's skull as a part of your villain costume is the ultimate power move, and you can't change my mind.
The next chapter is the conclusion of the State of Emergency Arc. I originally wanted to put a World That Was intermission chapter but then realized that you'd burned me at a stake for making such a cliffhanger (because chapter 30 ends WILDLY), so it's going to happen after the conclusion of the second (after Revival Celebration) 'proper' combat arc of this fic.
