Jpx0999 - And you'll learn it! :D
Shahryar - :D
Fencer29 - Oh, trust me, Yagi knows that very well xD It'll be adressed in this chapter, actually.
(***)
In Yagi Toshinori's opinion, his estimated lifespan (already much shortened by the injuries he suffered) has decreased further during the brief time when he was watching the battle on the Esuha Bridge.
It was an unbelievable emotional rollercoaster.
Governor Yagi started seriously regretting certain life decisions when Dabi revealed himself to the world to be a presumed dead son of one of the wealthiest people in the country. One of the four totally-not-kingpins that even the Prime Minister had to consult before making any changes to the economy-related laws.
He didn't immediately start asking questions like 'why the hell did you let him announce that', because it's not his command post. It's Aizawa's (and, well, Death Arms' too, however salty he appears over that).
And Yagi Toshinori has a very serious and well-defined opinion on politicians butting into military decision-making - one that might or might not include some variant of 'I wish some completely random grenade explosion or accidental gun discharge dealt with them for me'.
He extends that to the police nowadays. It's their operation, goddamnit. He is here as an observer, and he's going to act accordingly.
Well, an observer, but he can also slightly improve his public standing by being able to say (without lying) that he was overseeing the operation the whole time. When it works, that is.
Yagi is trying to be a successful politician, just not of the type Yagi-the-Soldier would prefer dead in an accident as stated.
This wouldn't stop him from asking Senior Commissioner Aizawa a lot of questions (when Aizawa wasn't busy with his work). Except, that's when Amplitude came forward as Shoto Todoroki, privately Dabi's younger brother.
And then promptly commited an act of fratricide in front of the entire Japan by blowing Touya Todoroki up with a point-blank explosion that in Yagi's opinion was comparable to the thermobaric bombs he saw during the war.
Wow.
Dabi totally deserved that and it was more or less legal, if a little in advance. Because while blowing up S-Rank villains when civilian lives were at stake was going to be legalized, the law wasn't exactly in effect yet.
Then again, they were doing that with the government's approval, which made it into more of an 'emergency situation'. And if everyone was to be held accountable, it would be the government in question for issuing the orders.
Also, by the way, the whole 'legalization of blowing criminals up' honestly sounded like music to Yagi Toshinori's ears. But that's beside the point.
Then things began to happen faster. Clash between Eclipse, Blackwing and the Quirk Suppression Squad and a crowd of villains that includes a… mecha?!
Yagi Toshinori begins to understand why Aizawa looks like he isn't sleeping even nearly enough nowadays. He had to deal with this sort of bullshit on a daily basis and was still sane? Wow. That man should be made Commissioner General as soon as possible, they need people adapted to deal with the quirk-grade bullshit.
The governor is listening to the radio chatter. He fought on enough battlefields to realize that the superheroes grabbed the Shie Hassaikai by the balls by making Overhaul redeploy his reserves with some very good feint.
Nice.
He's going to ask Aizawa how the fuck do the heroes have such a good recon later on, because honestly, he'd be seriously tempted to sell his soul to the devil for having such an information advantage over his enemy during the war.
Battle between Defiant, Eclipse and Overhaul starts. Not long after that, Paladin - who was punched out of the camera range by Carnage - returns alone, Goto Imasuji reported dead by Aizawa a moment later.
This was really turning into a one-sided slaughterfest.
Paladin, assisted by Gargoyle and Pinky (learning how to recognize the heroes and villains in his prefecture was one of the first things he did after discovering they existed) engages Impaler and the crowd of thugs in combat, the group of heroes that used to harass them sent north to apply pressure to Volcano's group.
Despite Overhaul engaging Defiant in combat, someone's clearly in command on the opposing side, Necromancer's group beginning to move north, ignoring Witch and Singularity, who were trying to keep it suppressed.
Then another blast rocks the Hosu suburbs. Aizawa loses his composure, and honestly, so does Yagi. But hey, Defiant lives, even if he and Eclipse clearly need a medevac right now, and Defiant's comms are clearly down.
Then Aizawa loses his composure again, because Defiant clearly heads off for a final confrontation with Overhaul, doing so too quickly for Aizawa to relay order to stand down to him through Eclipse.
Paladin disengages in a hurry a moment later, dashing towards the bridge.
Impaler was almost down for the count. He turned out to be a surprisingly terrifying combatant with the sheer degree of teeth he could expand like blades, but they simply failed to find purchase against Gargoyle's hardening.
While the sidekick was withstanding the assault (while taunting the villain verbally, it seems), Paladin and Pinky tore through the remaining villains, before Paladin had to rush away,
Gargoyle ends up tackling Impaler into the wall, sliding on Pinky's acid while taking advantage of the fact that Impaler was clearly trying to attack Paladin that was running away from the fight. A few punches later, Impaler was out of the game.
It is at this point that Yagi realizes that he was played by Defiant like a cheap kazoo, because he'll probably argue that when the Governor told him to not risk his life excessively, he only asked if he was making himself clear. And he did. The acknowledgment of the readiness to follow the message simply wasn't there.
Yagi Toshinori decides to send sincere written apologies to several higher-ups he played similarly during the war after this is over, because holy shit if it doesn't sting to be on the receiving side of this treatment.
No wonder they were pissed off AND highly obstructive towards him ever since. He is going to have some serious words with Defiant about this.
If the kid survives it, because judging from his sudden and suicidal charge, he probably won't make it.
Aizawa gasps loudly, looking at the screen in shock. Death Arms stares at it with a combination of vindication and horror. Yagi Toshinori is deeply terrified of the fact that Nana Shimura is about to see their hopes and dreams dying on live television.
Then somehow, just fucking somehow, Defiant makes it to Overhaul, taking him down in one of the most beautiful and highly fucking inspiring ways imaginable. In front of the cameras, meaning that probably most of the world (because the battle was going global at this point) have just seen it.
Let's be fucking real, if this image won't make thousands of metahumans worldwide go 'holy shit I want to be this cool' and then apply to whatever equivalent of superheroes was being organized in their neighbourhood then Yagi Toshinori clearly knows shit about teenagers.
And there will probably be memes about it. A lot of it. Yagi shivers slightly at the mental images.
The feed starts going down, the Shie Hassaikai - what's left of it, that is - clearly collapsing. Death Arms is sending his rescue helicopters for some medevac, because Eclipse is out and it doesn't seem like Defiant can even stand for much longer.
Yagi decides that this is the right time to intervene a little.
"I think you should resume the stream." Yagi announces while approaching Aizawa for a moment. The Senior Commissioner looks back at him questioningly. "Record the villain arrests, I think you have some new goodies to show. No other police unit in the country is equipped like you are, but the public doesn't need to know."
Aizawa manages to restrain his deeply seated desire to have a Very Serious talk with Defiant as soon as possible, and instead nods quickly. He is a police officer, politics aren't exactly his forte, he's leaving that to Yagi and he assumes that Yagi has a point in what he asked for.
He does.
There is a short interruption of the broadcast, but eventually it resumes, except it's run by the police at this point. The public gets to see the villains - including Valiant and Impaler - being loaded into reinforced police criminal transport vehicles. Each of them is guided by several police officers, each of them having something resembling a man-catcher or Japanese sasumata.
Impaler, bless him for this, tries to escape by using his quirk to impale the police officers surrounding him (while the whole scene is recorded from the drone hanging over them). He promptly discovers (and after him, the whole country) that the tools he is locked into double as tasers, and that using his quirk is much harder when you're being tased.
The fact that all the equipment involved (yes, even the reinforced criminal transport vehicles) didn't technically belong to the police was a bit of a pain. Local police was field-testing them for the Hatsume Industries.
Yagi Toshinori was ready to bet his liver that Hatsume Industries was going to experience a period of unprecedented growth, despite the general economic climate.
In the meantime, well, in the meantime he had to call Nana. It was going to be… an adventure.
Nana Shimura's desire to strangle what's left of Yagi Toshinori's life out of him for this stunt has its ups and downs during the duration of the battle.
Touya Todoroki being alive AND a deranged mass murderer responsible for deaths of hundreds of people? Shoto Todoroki being a superhero and dealing with his brother through what read to her as a small nuke?
Then, Defiant. She was yet to meet him, so she operated purely on the basis of second-hand intel.
Yagi Toshinori apparently talked with him once or twice. His opinion could be summed up to 'Nana, if I had a thousand people like him, we'd have a victory parade in Pekin. Even without meta-abilities'.
This alone told her a lot. Not necessarily good things.
Her opinion could be summed up with 'this is getting out of hand, now there are two of them'. Because, yeah, this stunt felt like something that Yagi Toshinori would do if he ever got a superpower.
She dreads the idea of Yagi Toshinori with a superpower.
"Are we sure…" Her minister of the interior interrupts the shocked silence in the room. "... that he isn't Yagi's secret love child?"
Oh, look. She isn't the only person to suspect it. Good to know.
"God have mercy on us all if that's the case, because it'd mean that it's hereditary." Nana sighs. "At least he'll move to Tokyo so maybe, just maybe Yagi will stop being a bad influence." The concept that Defiant was just like that from birth was too terrifying to comprehend. "Alright, I'm going to need a press conference. Right now."
"You're going to make an announcement?" The minister asks, his brow raising.
"We need to strike the iron while it's hot." Nana replies. "There'll be no better moment to announce the creation of the Hero Association than today, right after people saw how dangerous villains can be, and then saw heroes risk their lives to apprehend them. And win."
Not to mention how. She's a politician who saw the best and the worst in people for decades, but even she found the final clash and the subsequent gesture to be inspiring. Overhaul really gave them all a present by transmitting the battle to the world.
Someone was crowned on Esuha Bridge, just not the person and the crown that Chisaki intended.
She'd rather admit that certain parts of the legal framework of the system are still being debated and that the hero deployment to Esuha Bridge was more of an emergency decision that straddled the fence between legal and illegal than let this occasion go to waste.
She is the exact opposite of surprised when Yagi announces his return to the living with a phone call fifteen minutes later.
(***)
"Aaand… there he goes." Shihai Kuroiro sighs loudly as Defiant slams Overhaul's head into asphalt. "Wish that was me doing the slamming."
He is sitting on a couch with Cloud, watching the events on the screen. There is another person in the room, sitting by the table beside it, but they stay quiet for now.
"Are we going to try to get Chisaki out of police custody to get him killed properly?" Cloud asks. "Since the Shie Hassaikai is out, I don't think that the non-aggression treaty is still in eff.." Her boyfriend interrupts her with a loud burst of laughter. "... what?"
"Sunako, my dear." Kuroiro smiles. "Overhaul is already dead. If he didn't use his quirk to give himself a resilience boost, that impact was enough to break his neck or damage his brain. If he did, then Aizawa will most likely have someone strangle him to death with a pillow in the hospital and then announce that he died during an attempt to break him out by his compatriots. His quirk is just too dangerously powerful to risk someone managing to restore his hands."
Especially during such a time. It didn't matter how well Aizawa prepared the prisons for villains, Overhaul was simply uncontainable. And if allowed to escape…
It would be the months of warfare all over again, except this time Overhaul would be much smarter about it. Say what you want about that man, but he CAN learn.
Cloud looks at him That way. She's really into smart people. Well, smart AND criminal, truly a woman after his own heart.
Not yet, though.
"Watching the battle made me realize a few things." Kuroiro continues. "First of all, we need more equipment. We've managed to nail some disgraced member of the Hatsume family, and he has some interesting ideas on equipment, but we're going to have to give him even more money."
Proper secure communication in your villain uniform alone was going to be incredibly important from now on.
"Second of all, we've trained our combat skills, we've even got ourselves some special moves…" In Kuroiro's opinion, reading some superhero comics was a surprisingly constructive way of spending your free time nowadays. "..but the heroes showed up something completely new. Namely, combo moves."
"Oh!" Cloud realizes it. "Like when that shadow hero used the other hero's black circle thing against that mecha!"
"Yep." Kuroiro nods in approval. "We're going to have to consider the options when the synergy of our quirks are involved. For example, I've already proven to be able to take over Kurogiri's mist due to it being sufficiently black. And, since his mist doubled as a warp medium, I could use his warp quirks. I wonder what I could do with your clouds, hmmm?"
"Well, I'm always ready to have you enter my body, Shi." Cloud replies, her voice alone offering him some interesting thing for the near future.
Kuroiro is going to celebrate seeing Overhaul die by getting very, very laid.
Rogiya Yonenaga, his adoptive father in all but documents and a previous head of the Abegawa Tenchu Kai would like to be avenged by Kuroiro, but he also wouldn't want the ATK to lose its future over that.
That was good enough, especially if Vantablack's certain plans about the Shie Hassaikai will come to fruition.
"Before we get to… testing how far your conviction on that field is going, Sunako…" Kuroiro replies. "... anything to add, Mastermind?"
Saiko Intelli finishes sipping on her tea in the background.
She took to the League's unofficial dress code very dearly. And, in Kuroiro's opinion, she looked smoking hot in a suit.
She was also giving him a very high class vibe that initially made him think that she wasn't going to fit in. That she would return to her very high class family to keep sipping on very high class tea and take part in very high class parties and other social events.
He was proven completely wrong in his assessment extremely quickly.
Saiko Intelli felt among the villains like fish in the water.
She also had zero intention of returning to her place of birth.
She wasn't very vocal about her reasoning, but Kuroiro was ready to bet a lot of money that it was due to her absolutely voracious bedroom appetites and associated… interests. She was much more free as a villain.
Mastermind was still learning, Kuroiro making a lot of veteran ATK members impart their knowledge of crime onto her. In their opinion, she was going to be running the LoV's White-Collar Crime Division in a few months. While being only narrowly less gifted in other fields.
Because LoV was going to have such a division. Diversifying your income sources sounds like something a good businessman would do, right?
"I do, indeed, have something to add." Saiko replies. "First thing is that I noticed the disappearance of one of Chisaki's praetorians right before the shadow hero engaged the rest in combat."
Oh?
"A traitor?" Kuroiro asks.
"Unless the Inquisitor had the flu and got sick leave, it's highly unlikely." Saiko replies. "There is a possibility that the heroes have access to a person with a quirk that allows them to impersonate others."
Oh, dear.
That's why Kuroiro believed that getting Mastermind on-board was a blessing to the League. Intelli's ability to analyze copious amounts of data and not just notice but also correctly interpret oddities was going to be of immense benefit to the organization.
Even if he also suspected that she was a number one on the list of his underlings that might develop some aspirations further down the line.
"It would have to be incredibly potent to fool even Inquisitor." Kuroiro muses. "It implies that the mysterious impersonator even answers the question like the original would. Dangerous, very dangerous. Any ideas on how to proceed with that threat?"
He is cautious. League of Villains is an emerging superpower of the underworld, but the heroes are much more powerful. He isn't going to end like Overhaul. This… this sounds like a big threat.
"I suggest having our members, at least those close to the League itself or taking part in major operations, wear some sort of tracking beacon." Saiko replies. "If the impersonator can copy outfits too, we'll pick up two signals, even if for a brief time. If they can't, we'll pick up no signals."
It won't be easy to do it correctly. They would have to do that without making it known that those items are used as localization beacons OR someone from the police cybercrime division would find a way to hack into the system and detect the position of all involved criminals.
So, only for major operations or if they are anywhere truly close to the League. Plus, of course, League members themselves.
Smart. Costly, but smart. And besides, even if the police don't have such a quirk at their disposal, who said that they couldn't find it later. Or that some competition in the underworld wouldn't get one for themselves? Quirks, as Kuroiro learned thus far, were bullshit.
"Approved." Kuroiro nods. "Anything more?"
"We need to widen the recruitment." Saiko replies. Kuroiro knows that they do, it's obvious, so he assumes that she means something else than he thinks. "Recruit people with quirks that don't have direct combat applications, like, say, me."
"Oh?" Kuroiro asks curiously.
"None of the meta-abilities of the heroes we've seen during the fight fully explain how exactly the Shie Hassaikai's positions and deployment were so thoroughly and easily read." Intelli replies. "Even if you take into account things such as observation satellites, they simply shouldn't be reading the defenders as well as they clearly did."
"Overhaul was literally transmitting the whole encounter, though." Kuroiro replies, his eyes narrowing a little.
"Before that." Intelli replies. "Dabi was hiding in a building. Yet, somehow, Amplitude, the person who was his perfect counter, was right there at the beginning of the fight. No, the impersonator doesn't explain that, unless they put a tracking beacon on Dabi, because Amplitude knew exactly which building to go to right after arriving."
And now, yeah, now things started to get interesting.
"Some additional reconnaissance quirk?" Kuroiro asks.
"Most likely, yes." Saiko nods. "And that's what did Overhaul in. He focused his recruitment, like we did, on powerful combatants. Those are extremely useful, but the heroes clearly invested into a support structure of people with quirks that aren't as directly useful in combat."
And now Kuroiro understands it fully.
"A quirk that gives you a sense of smell comparable to a dog won't let you fight people like Carnage…" Kuroiro replies with the first potential example that comes to his mind. "... but you'll be able to detect explosives, confirm the authenticity of drugs with a single sniff, not to mention your ability to track fleeing people."
Saiko nods.
"Alrighty then!" Kuroiro claps his hands. "Both ideas are accepted. I'm going to be a bit busy for a moment, so be so kind and relay the orders to the ATK. I need them to send an envoy to the Shie Hassaikai. Tell them that our feud was just with Overhaul and if they need protection, the League will be ready to provide it." Intelli smiles before nodding and standing up from her chair.
"Uhm, Shi?" Cloud asks while leaning towards Kuroiro. "I'm not sure if it's alright with you, but… I'm not exactly sure if I want her to leave."
…
Right, smart villains.
Kuroiro glances at Saiko, who replies with a rather suggestive smile… and slow unbuttoning of her shirt.
Oh yes, Kuroiro is getting very, very laid today.
"Was that…" Ryo Inui asks. "... what you planned from the start?"
The battle just ended. Defiant was clearly grievously injured but still standing. And for as long as he was going to live for a few hours, they could get Eri to patch him up properly. They could only hope that the kid was going to be alright.
"No." Mirai Sasaki replies. Once again, they are in his office. He is, after all, just a principal of a prestigious school - inviting him to the command center for this operation, now that the government was involved, was out of the question. "Midoriya just outdid even my most optimistic predictions."
Sasaki then does what he expected to get to do almost from the day when he met Midoriya for the first time.
He stands from behind his desk, pulls a framed picture of Defiant (in his hero uniform, secrecy and so on) and puts it on the UA's wall of fame. Next to people such as some former prime ministers.
Ryo Inui is observing him during this little ritual from his seat.
"To this day, the golden scenario was the country fragmenting, Midoriya becoming a Symbol of Hope for the metahumans and, well, for the cause of eventual reunification." Sasaki replies, while returning to his chair. "This is no longer the golden scenario."
"Then…?" Ryo asks.
"The new golden scenario is the country not collapsing into a civil war at all." Sasaki replies. "Which, I believe, will make Midoriya into the future Symbol of Peace."