Jpx0999 - That's... a very good way of summarizing it, yeah xD
Fencer29 - Let's just say that there are going to be... reasons for him not being appointed that. You'll know soon enough.
(***)
"Pause the recording for a moment." Governor Yagi says, Aizawa does that immediately. "I have questions."
"Questions?"
"That was Defiant, yes?" Yagi asks. "The head of the Network?"
"Yes." Aizawa nods. "The closest thing the Japanese superheroes have to a Commissioner General." Just way more anxious, presently out of commission (who knows for how long, damn it) and… well, alive, unlike the Commissioner General.
Aizawa went into some strange place with that simile.
"His quirk is telekinesis?" Yagi asks again.
"He calls it Force." Aizawa replies. Yeah, of course he gets a strange stare. "No Jedi mind tricks, but he did perform a Vader-style force choke on a villain. In the simplest terms he can 'pull' objects he sees in any direction he sees. The gunfire was halted by the force fields that pulled the bullets in the directions that either made them lose all momentum and stop mid-flight or miss the assault group entirely. The building was him using his power to its maximum output, the blades were mostly about finer control."
Overwhelming power, fine control, versatility. Even Aizawa is impressed. Defiant got a versatile quirk, but it was his diligent training and smarts that changed him into the greatest powerhouse on the side of the law in Japan. In record time, no less.
"I have…" Yagi says slowly. "... a certain degree of worries over seeing a, what, 18 or 19 years old kid? massacre so many people, even if monsterized, without a hint of hesitation."
Right. Understandable concern, especially for someone who was just shown to be incredibly powerful AND a 'pretty much Commissioner General'.
"We've researched those monsters beforehand." Aizawa replies. "They are effectively braindead. Reversing that process simply isn't possible, as a result the heroes were allowed to engage with lethal means. As for Defiant…" Aizawa sighs. "... he needed psychological counseling after mortally wounding a supervillain during a successful attempt to save an abused child from him, despite said supervillain recovering instantly thanks to their quirk."
And he's probably going to need even more of that now, because this time the villain didn't walk it off. Shit.
"I see." Yagi seems to be more or less satisfied with what he heard. He's a soldier AND a politician, successful in both fields. He saw people suffering from PTSD or going way too trigger-happy during the wartime, and he was politics-savvy enough to realize where someone like that being in a position of importance could lead the country. "Please continue."
"The assault group has managed to enter the facility without any further trouble." Aizawa replies. "The resistance they encountered was fierce. We greatly underestimated the enemy numbers and preparations - we expected a few dozen enemies, not a few hundreds, and certainly not equipped and trained like soldiers. Where the initial attempt to stop us was rendered null with Defiant's 'power move', they attempted to set up barricades in the corridors, even deploying several machine guns. However the presence of heroes rendered their attempts to stall the attack mostly ineffective."
"Just Defiant or…?" Yagi asks.
"The main assault group was composed of three superheroes, so Defiant, Blackwing and Eclipse." Aizawa replies. "And several sidekicks whose quirks were deemed as potentially useful in that environment. Namely Gargoyle, Pinky, Earworm, Hijack, Carmilla, Thorn and Quicksand."
Gargoyle as a living shield, Pinky to efficiently make doors where there were none, Earworm for recon, Hijack for field interrogation and/or running interference on enemy forces and calming inmates, Carmilla because she could impersonate a captive enemy and infiltrate their lines), Thorn because Knights wanted to have someone on the inside and Quicksand…
Honestly, the fact that he volunteered was surprising, seeing as he was more of a rescue hero. On the other hand, he was going to stay behind the line of shields and stick to recon. That is, if the general clusterfuck of sounds made Earworm temporarily useless.
Besides, nothing ruins your day better than someone leaning through the wall and shooting you in the head from the direction where you really didn't expect any trouble to show.
"Asking for all of their quirks would be too time-consuming, so… superheroes?" Yagi decides to focus on that. He probably wants to get a more solid grasp of the worst case scenario they might be facing.
"Blackwing's quirk is called Living Shadow." Aizawa replies. "His shadow is a sapient, shapeshifting entity that can form itself into an armor capable of resisting gunfire or a handful of 'natural' weapons, like claws that can rend through steel. Eclipse's quirk lets her project and control two-dimensional surfaces with properties of any sufficiently large surface in her vicinity."
"Errr?" Yagi reacts as expected.
"Meaning that when there is a concrete wall nearby, she can instantly conjure a perfectly flat, circular surface with properties, like resistance to hits, of twenty centimeters of concrete." Aizawa replies. "Also the surface is two-dimensional rather than three, meaning that its edges are a single molecule wide, so she can cut through literally everything with zero resistance. If that wasn't enough, she can grant her surfaces the properties of an area of space elsewhere, turning them into effective teleportation gates."
A part of Aizawa enjoys the shock on the faces in front of him. Yeah. It's the standard mechanism, the three people in the room approaching the 'omfg we need the metahumans on our side or else' realization.
"She is generally speaking a strategic asset for the Network AND local police force." Aizawa continues. "We use her to transport inmates and supplies to Tartarus in a way that's perfectly impossible to be traced by the villains. As far as we know, no one except for a small number of police officers is aware that she's a teleporter."
"I assumed that she joined the main assault group to serve as a means of evacuation if things went south." Yagi decides to prove that he truly is a war veteran. Despite hearing something incredibly outlandish, he immediately analyzed its tactical implications correctly. Aizawa nods. "That's a terrifyingly useful force multiplier alright. What happened next?"
"Things took a strange turn." Aizawa replies dryly. Yeah, he now knows why and… shit. Just shit. "The assault group halted their advance for a moment in order to allow Hijack to perform a … field interrogation of one of the incapacitated defenders."
"I assume that the 'field interrogation' is due to his quirk?" Yagi asks.
"That is correct." Aizawa replies. "Hijack's quirk is a variant of instant hypnosis, in which he can put anyone into a trance-like state and issue a single order that will be followed to the letter. Orders forcing the target to use their brains, so to speak, like making them answer questions, allow them to resist the quirk. However, Hijack found a way of partially circumnavigating that through a more 'mundane' hypnosis that was then reinforced with his quirk. Unfortu…"
"Wait, the local police force mind controls people?!" Honestly speaking, Aizawa expected the chief prosecutor to protest about it. Honestly, Aizawa remembers himself not imagining the benefits of that quirk correctly and jumping into an instinctual 'ewwww' during his first meeting with Defiant. He has changed a lot since then.
"Only in very specific sets of circumstances." Aizawa replies dryly. "Let me put it that way - if someone takes my family hostage, I'm going to have Hijack negotiate their release."
That hit the spot. Hostage situations are a goddamn nightmare, especially against people that know how to do them properly. Twenty Hijacks, in the meantime, would have put all police negotiators nationwide out of commission.
"That's…" Yuki Hamada pauses for a second. "... perfectly reasonable, but people probably won't like the concept either way. Establishing a legal framework for that alone is going to be a nightmare."
Oh, look. They are already at that stage of the enlightenment process, cool. Aizawa can feel the risks of government trying to genocide metahumans dropping significantly with every passing minute.
"That's for the Prime Minister to deal with." Yagi replies. "But I agree in general. Unless the government secretly obtained means of permanently and safely de-activating the meta-abilities, I really don't see any logical alternative to what Commissioner Aizawa presented earlier, but there'll have to be at least some laws established and…"
"I'm fairly certain…" Death Arms cuts in. "... that I can list a few military officers that will have an alternative."
Uh-oh.
"Let's… consider that to be the last case scenario." Yagi replies, clearly not enjoying the topic shift. "I'm perpetually half dead due to a conventional war, hearing about just a few quirks made me NOT enjoy the concept of fighting a war involving them." Big mood on the Aizawa side, honestly. "So, what happened?"
"His quirk requires the target to respond vocally to his words." Aizawa replies. "However, the captive didn't answer in any way. In fact, Hijack noticed that he wasn't acting quote unquote normally, he described that as 'some sort of trance'."
"Mind control?" Yagi asks.
"Not quite." Aizawa sighs. It's time for things to get very, very strange. "Carmilla attempted to draw his blood, a necessary prerequisite to activate her impersonation quirk. It allows her to instinctively respond in the way the original would, although this method has major limits in that when immersed into her acting she would most likely refuse to answer the questions just like the original would, but we would at least be able to tell if there was an external reason for their silence and behavior. However, that's when she noticed that blood didn't flow from the cut like it should."
"What do you mean?" Yagi decided to ask.
"She had a hunch, and checked the captive for a pulse." Aizawa replies. "She found none. The defenders we were facing were corpses animated with some quirk, used by the facility owners as security guards and workforce."
Yagi and Death Arms give him really weird looks, clearly trying to process the revelation. Oddly enough it was the chief prosecutor that spoke first.
"Just how many people…" She says slowly. "... died on that mountain?"
Aizawa would like to know the answer for that question himself. 'An awful lot' barely suffices as an answer.
"Finding the answer for that might be… hard, seeing as what happened to the facility during the later stage of the engagement." Aizawa replies. "In the meantime, the assault group resumed their attack, and began to liberate first captives. They were promptly escorted outside, sorted out by the police officers and rescuers that also explained their situation to them, and then loaded the freed metahumans into the army trucks provided by the 72nd Battalion. We established a third base, so to speak, a few kilometers away from the compound, behind the GSDF perimeter, which included a proper field hospital. That's when…"
"...you called me." Yagi cuts in. "Because the captives were surprised by the police and army coming to rescue them, due to believing that they were being held by said organizations the whole time."
And now the lieutenant general looks genuinely surprised.
"What?" He asks, while staring at Aizawa incredulously.
"That's the first answer he got from me as well." Yagi says, the general turning his attention back to the governor. "Immediately followed by 'I do not know of any general by that name, and if some piece of shit organized a black ops site in my prefecture without me knowing, then it was also done without the government's knowledge. Light those fuckers up.' And that's a quote.".
It actually was a quote. Honestly, Aizawa might actually vote for Yagi in the next elections, because he really likes his no-nonsense approach in moments like that.
"That is correct." Aizawa admits. "We've discovered later that the Gunga Mountain compound was a recruitment center for a previously unknown villainous organization known as the Meta-Liberation Army, led by the first of the SSS-Rank villains we discovered during that raid, a man under the nickname of Destro."
Another asshole who read or watched too much superhero genre and decided to apply it to real life. Borrowing a G.I. Joe was slightly original in that regard, but… yeah, it was still directly borrowing a supervillain name from a fictional supervillain, c'mon.
"A recruitment center?" Yagi asks. "What do you mean?"
"Destro staged a false flag operation in which his operatives disguised as soldiers imprisoned metahumans while pretending to be a governmental anti-metahuman blackops unit." Aizawa replies. "They were then held in the 'dedicated containment facility' for some time, before being moved to another location, supposedly to 'study' their powers. The convoy, staffed by corpse puppets pretending to be soldiers would then be 'attacked' by the MLA operatives, who would subsequently offer the liberated metahumans a membership in their organization."
And that, if you exclude the whole part where it was straight up evil, was also an incredibly smart move. Even Aizawa had to admit that. The whole thing was prepared and executed perfectly.
"That makes sense." Yagi sighs. "While also being blindingly revolting. Since I never heard of that 'MLA', I assume that it's a purely metahuman organization?"
"It seems so." Aizawa replies. "We already got ourselves a Charles Xavier, even if quirkless and with working legs, so I guess getting a Magneto is a perfectly logical follow-up to that. MLA appears to be foreseeing a violent reaction to the dawn of quirks and decided to form a metahuman self-defense force, all while jump-starting the process by inventing a governmental black-ops unit to push the undecided into their hands before they are targeted by a 'real' governmental black-ops unit."
"I think I get what you meant about a civil war earlier." Yagi replies grimly. "Numbers?"
"Unknown." Aizawa replies. "However that facility alone has somehow managed to kidnap at least two hundred metahumans, in perfect secrecy, and from the entire country. This, together with maintaining the compound for so long betrays some incredible backing. The money alone that went into the facility is just staggering, especially seeing the current economic climate. We suspect the MLA to equal the Metahuman Network in numbers, at the very least. We also know absolutely nothing about its leader, save for their villain name."
Silence in the room, interrupted only by Yagi tapping the desk in front of him with his finger. Lieutenant General looks majorly displeased with the revelations.
"We're going to have to involve the Public Security Intelligence Agency." Yagi eventually decides. "If what you just said is true, this MLA is probably the largest and most dangerous insurgent group in the country. Hell, it might as well be more dangerous than all the rest brought together. And thanks to their nature and access to meta-abilities they managed to remain entirely unknown to us the whole time. This truly is an existential threat to the nation."
"What about…" Death Arms decides to change the subject. "... the monsters?"
"The Meta-Liberation Army was also trying to figure out how quirks work." Aizawa replies. "As a result, they were experimenting on some of the captives. According to the intel we obtained all of those monsters were mentally unstable first generation metahumans that the MLA deemed to be too dangerous to allow to continue existing, due to them most likely going on a rampage and committing acts of mass murder if left alone, thus enflaming the public response to the metahumans as a whole."
"Which, let me guess, also helps explain why the government remained unaware of the problem for so long." Yagi comments. "Because the MLA was somehow locating and taking sufficiently perturbed metahumans off the streets, leaving you and the Network to deal with those they missed."
"That is correct." Aizawa nods. They also spared the police a LOT of work, 'accidentally' saving a lot of civilians. Although the Commissioner was certainly not going to thank them for that.
"Which also means that they had to have a number of high-ranking spies in the government, positioned to make sure that the cabinet remained unaware of the problem." Yagi continues. "Not to mention having an intelligence network to rival the police, in order to actually locate the metahumans in question before the local police units."
"That is correct, yes." Aizawa nods again.
Yagi groans loudly.
"This is at this point officially an absolute nightmare and I can't seem to wake up from it." Yagi announces.
"My thoughts, basically from day one, exactly." Aizawa admits. "We can only hope that most of their almost preternatural efficiency is due to employing a variety of meta-abilities for espionage, loyalty enforcing and secret operations, something that should be severely weakened by the governmental organizations being made aware of the existence and scale of the problem."
"I spent years fighting in the Third World War." Yagi replies dryly. "You can imagine how delighted I am to have to operate on the basis of 'hopefully it's not X' when the existence of Japan is at stake." Yeah, Aizawa can definitely relate. "Alright, what happened next?"
"Then things started to go rapidly downhill." Aizawa replies. "We've launched the operation on the basis of an informant from the Shie Hassaikai yakuza clan, a local villainous organization controlling almost the entirety of organized crime within Musutafu, who claimed that the Shie Hassaikai planned to attack the compound on their own. This… turned out to be a set-up."
"You didn't have Hijack interrogate the informant?" Yagi asks, clearly surprised by it.
"We did." Aizawa replies. "However we suspect that Overhaul, the SS-Rank villain in charge of the Shie Hassaikai, decided to be paranoid and assumed that we have some sort of interrogation quirk. The informant was most likely hypnotized in the 'mundane' way, so to speak, into genuinely thinking that he defected to our side, thus fooling Hijack's quirk."
"Smart." Yagi notes. "What exactly was Overhaul's plan?"
"He decided that blindly attacking a heavily fortified compound belonging to an unknown organization was too risky." Aizawa replies. "As a result, he goaded us into attacking it ourselves in order to 'test the waters' so to speak. Then, when we were engaged in combat with the Meta-Liberation Army forces, the Shie Hassaikai unexpectedly joined the battle."
It was, honestly, the Shizuoka Massacre scenario once again. Except with the MLA and the Network & Police instead of the Abegawa Tenchu Kai and the Shizuoka Heroes Alliance & the Police.
"Despite the perimeter defense established by the JGSDF?" Yagi asks incredulously.
"They, unfortunately, have a teleporter." Aizawa replies, and he can see the flinches on the faces in front of him. Yeah, a local criminal organization having a literal teleporter is a nightmare. "They teleported the main assault group composed mostly of the former special forces operatives working for Overhaul into the main facility. It was led by an A-Rank villain going by the name of Purity, accompanied by S-Rank villains Kurogiri and Duststorm. Kurogiri being the teleporter, while Duststorm being the man responsible for the recent attack on Aldera precinct and death of Assistant Commissioner Mera."
"And let me guess…" Yagi comments. "... they focused on grabbing as many metahumans for themselves as possible."
"At least that group did, yes." Aizawa replies. "The remaining heavy-hitters of the Shie Hassaikai, namely Overhaul himself, Dabi, Mustard and Carnage instead decided to assault the police force on the surface, in order to stop us from evacuating anyone else."
"That's… ambitious." Yagi decides. Aizawa, against himself, nods. Ambitious is a good term to describe Overhaul's operations as a whole.
"Extremely so." Death Arms agrees with him. "In the best case scenario, the main assault group would be cut off entirely, while still occupying the MLA's attention, allowing Overhaul to grab most if not almost all of the captive metahumans for himself."
Good to know that the local army commander is no slouch in the tactics department either.
"That, thankfully, didn't happen." Aizawa replies. "The forces on the surface included superheroes Amplitude, Tornado, Repulse, Paladin and Rabbit, together with the rest of the Musutafu Anti-Firearms Squad, nineteen sidekicks and thirty police officers. We've expected them to be the reserve force in case the assault group encountered serious resistance underground."
"I see." Yagi states. "I assume you have some more recordings for us to see." Aizawa nods. "Let us see them, then."
"Before that: Overhaul attempted to finish the battle with the first attack, using Dabi's Prominence Burn as an opening salvo." Aizawa replies. "It's the same heat ray that caused the Marukane Ward fire and decimated the Shizuoka' prefecture Heroes Alliance and police force during the Shizuoka Massacre… yes, that was the Shie Hassaikai's work." He answers the question before it's asked. "That was a major tactical mistake on their side this time."
"How exactly?" Yagi asks.
"The main reason why Musutafu prefecture has the best equipped hero team is because that's where Defiant is working." Aizawa replies. "And Defiant, coincidentally, happened to obtain a metahuman girlfriend in the form of the heiress of the Hatsume Industries." He gets some surprised looks. "As a result, the Network has occasional access to some cutting edge equipment that it's willing to lend to the local police force. One of such 'gifts' was a drone with a thermal detector that picked up a spike in temperature in the distance."
Time to give someone credit when credit is due, even if they are a bit of a jerk.
"To be honest…" Aizawa sighs. "...I wouldn't react in time, none of the people in the command center would. However I was accompanied by a superhero whose quirk allows them to temporarily supercharge their brain to an organic computer level. He noticed the temperature spike on one of the monitors and managed to correctly analyze and interpret the data, not to mention forming a plan to counter the attack with assets available on site, in less than a second. Thankfully to us, it worked."
Mostly because the right person was at the right place and at the right time.
He clicks on another file. A feed from a drone overlooking the Gunga Mountain on one side, on another a picture from an ongoing evacuation effort, some police officers loading people (their looks VERY varied) into trucks. There are several people that the viewers correctly identify as heroes, most of them wearing variations on hoodies and facemasks, typically in a variety of colors to make identification easier.
Suddenly, things start to happen.
"AMPLITUDE, INCOMING PROMINENCE BURN!" Someone titled Chancellor yells through the communication network. "SEVENTY THREE DEGREES TO YOUR LEFT!"
A blast of ice sends people to the side, one of the heroes (the one wearing bi-colored parka) using it to propel himself out of the crowd, before stomping on the ground beyond the edge of the group.
Aizawa isn't even surprised by the shocked gasps.
Amplitude wasn't in position to sandbag it. He had a death ray with a temperature that could as well surpass 2000C to stop, with only himself between it and a bunch of people. So he went all out.
And his all out was a lot.
The glacier that erupted in front of him was straight up massive. Someone in the command center later on estimated it to be about a kilometer long and two hundred meters wide, tearing through the mountainside while throwing trees and some unfortunate animals caught in the blast around.
It was also off by three degrees (Chancellor 'helpfully' mentioned that later), but it didn't change anything.
Prominence Burn melted its way through it, but at the cost of being partially depleted. By the time it reached the end of the glacier (the amount of melted water causing a small flood in a few villages down the mountain after it hit a riverbank), it was welcomed by a smaller fire blast.
"Amplitude had tested that move as an anti-Dabi countermeasure." Aizawa announces to the shocked silence in the room. "His ice wasn't enough on its own, not with a flame that hot. However, together with his own fire… as he can create both ice and fire… it created enough of a disturbance in air that the attack's trajectory was altered, making the severely depleted ray bend upwards, missing the group by about twenty meters."
"I'm…" Yagi says slowly, drawing out words. "...beginning to understand what you meant by 'counterterrorists only as a reaction force'."
Yeah. Without Amplitude and Chancellor there, Dabi's attack would have wiped out all the police officers present at the scene, including a lot of Anti-Firearms Squad members. How would one even try to defend himself against an attack this powerful without a meta-ability to match up to it?
QSU proved that Dabi can be eliminated, but only if he was the surprised one. Otherwise… yeah.
"Dabi's recharging now." Repulse says in the recording. "Requesting permission to engage, we can't let him fire again."
"Drones pick up two people in the forest." They can hear Commissioner Aizawa replies. "The other might be Overhaul. Amplitude, Repulse, you're free to engage. I'm sending a group after you on foot, play it safe and try to keep those two occupied until the reinforcements arrive."
Amplitude propels himself over the forest with an ice pillar. Another hero (wearing, oddly enough, a hoodie, tactical vest AND what looks like an actual superhero cape) takes off right after him.
"Not long after that…" Aizawa says as the recording ends. "... things started going seriously wrong."
(***)
... didn't expect to see the MLA so early, huh?
Next chapter includes a number of deaths, including that of a major character... and some arrests. Feel free to speculate about details.