Jpx0999 - Do not worry. The news about the baby are going to be delivered very, very soon. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about the long awaited serious talk between Izuku and his mom...
Matt - ... you're onto something, unfortunately.
(***)
Yesterday
Sometimes it's the minor things that make the most major of differences. Midoriya Izuku, even when off-duty, always carried a panic button on himself. Sure, his face remained unknown to both the local police and the villains, but… you never knew.
They all learned their lesson after Firestorm almost killed Kirishima. They were waging a very real war, against people that wanted to do them harm. Heavy training was one thing, but quirk compatibility meant that even a random encounter might have been basically unwinnable by the hero attacked off duty (especially if they lacked their equipment on them).
So, sometimes the best thing you could do was to buy time until reinforcements could arrive. And, well, that required reinforcement to be aware that you were in trouble.
As a result, Mei Hatsume knew that shit hit about an hour after Izuku's departure from the UA hospital, when his panic button was triggered.
Unfortunately, Mei realized in about fifteen seconds that Eclipse simply wasn't operational, due to quirk exhaustion and combat injuries. She ran herself into the ground evacuating people from the mess that the Gunga Mountain compound turned into, and that was on top of her already high combat fatigue.
This was no time for half-measures. They had a hypothetical talk about situations like this, and he made it rather clear to her that letting the police learn about your identity is preferable to not receiving reinforcements when in a pinch.
And if he wasn't in a pinch, he would phone her to elaborate on whatever was happening.
Mei Hatsume immediately called Commissioner Aizawa. Who immediately panicked to almost the same degree (it's too much of a surprised for the whole day, and majority of the Takoba police isn't in Takoba), before contacting Tsukauchi (who was holding the ground in the capital city while Aizawa was out) and telling him to take everyone he can and head to the address in question.
As fast as possible.
(***)
Overhaul found out about what was happening in Takoba merely a few minutes later, where Hari Kurono called him.
To say that his mood was bad would be an understatement of a century. Overhaul was livid beyond comparison.
They lost Mustard, they lost Duststorm, they lost Purity, they lost most of his praetorians - and, chief among all, they lost Kurogiri, their greatest trump card. Because Shirakumo Oboro warped in a hurry, missed the destination - and suffered fatal injuries during his warp.
They recovered him, but not quickly enough. Oh, he was breathing, he was even talking, but it couldn't be even remotely considered to be a coherent speech.
Brain damage.
Overhaul had no idea how to fix this in a reasonable timespan. In the meantime, he could only hope that the Dictator (who seemed to have finally learned his lesson) would manage to get him under his quirk to make him actually capable of following orders.
The fact that he would no longer have to pay Kurogiri somehow didn't improve his mood.
Dabi was only alive because Kurogiri wasn't in a shape to tell them that he was done in by Rabbit and his Shizuoka survivors crew. Because fear of a situation like that was precisely the whole fucking reason why Overhaul told Dabi to target Kendou, Kuroiro AND the goddamn Rabbit.
And, well, because Overhaul was dangerously low on supervillains, even if he clearly recruited several prospective replacements. Or, more like, rescued. Recruitment was another thing altogether.
Kai Chisaki focused on it, and - thanks to the 'it wasn't actually a governmental facility' memo failing to reach the people he 'saved' - he had notable achievements in that field.
Hari Kurono was sent out on a bit of a recruitment trip with someone (whose price for their soul was almost laughably easy to pay). Overhaul wanted to avoid wasting time whatsoever, because he had no idea if the police wouldn't storm his headquarters tomorrow, taking advantage of some of his heavy hitters being out of the picture.
(he didn't know about the casualties police sustained after his retreat, all that he knew is that his forced failed to make a dent in their order of battle)
Then, as stated, Kurono called him. And things immediately went pear shaped.
"Overhaul!" Kurono yells at him, without giving him time to open his mouth. "Things fucked up, I'm fleeing out of Takoba right now, sent someone ahead in case of police giving chase!"
What now?! Isn't it enough disappointments and disasters for a single goddamn day?
Overhaul relays the orders to his nearest goon, before returning his attention to his second in command.
"What happened?" He asks immediately.
"You won't fucking believe." Kurono replies with a voice of shock and exasperation. "The kid that our recruit wanted to kill? It was fucking Defiant."
Overhaul opens his mouth, but realized that he has no idea what to say. His first reaction was, indeed, that of a disbelief. There had to be thousands of young adults in Takoba, what were the chances of Bakugou Katsuki having a murderboner for the one that just happened to be Kai Chisaki's archenemy?!
"I ran the fuck away when the fight started, because I'm not sticking around for when the heroes and the police arrive." Kurono keeps talking. The part of Overhaul's mind that can think rationally right now realizes that it was the correct choice of actions. The situation changed massively ever since Mustard almost killed Defiant in that apartment block. Takoba is a hostile area now and… "Ah, shit, there they are. The entire fucking convoy of them, but once I pass by I should be… FUCK!"
What follows is a cacophony of screams, sounds of metal being torn and glass shattered.
"HARI!" Overhaul screams into the phone.
(***)
Sorahiko Torino is a hard-boiled cop. The type that disagrees with a lot of regulations and is only tolerated around because he has results - and because everyone knows that he would rather die than start taking bribes.
There was a reason why he didn't get promoted too far before his retirement. And why everyone in his precinct was secretly relieved that he was retiring.
And then the meta-abilities happened.
Torino hates the fact that they were going to mess the world even more than the war already did, but he loved the fact that they made Aizawa pull him back from retirement. Because in this new world, the one where regulations and laws were treated as more of a guideline than anything else, Torino felt like a fish in water.
He was a stereotypical American cop born in the wrong country. And now that said country started resembling the United States - just not in the right way, where's his goddamn right to bear arms as a civilian?! - he felt his entire life being vindicated.
Sorahiko Torino was the right man to have in the police force when it was waging what was shaping up to be a regular, no holds barred, war.
When he heard that an emergency occured, he refused to be sidelined, especially as he was at the Takoba precinct, which was used as an sort of a temporary containment area for the arrested villains ever since Eclipse decided that she needs a rest.
Which was perfectly valid in Torino's opinion, those kids were stars of the day they deserve fucking rest after doing what should be the job of a police officers with ten times their training and experience and fucking nailing it, although don't expect him to say that aloud.
He was still a damn good driver. So, he was driving one of the police cars speeding towards the place of emergency (something was happening to Defiant, and even if you somehow forgot that he was a civilian under a threat of something bad happening, they fucking needed that guy) when, suddenly, he realized something.
Hari Kurono, Overhaul's fucking second-in-command, was driving a car on the same road, from the opposite direction, trying to not get fucking noticed by anyone from the police convoy that he was passing by.
Well, tough luck, you little shit. Torino retired due to arthritism and old age, not fucking eye problems. Despite his old age, he has eyes like a hawk, and he is 100% sure that it's Hari fucking Kurono.
Speeding in the direction opposite to Defiant's house. The very same Defiant that just pushed a panic button (this is, by the way, a level of constructive paranoia that makes Torino awed).
You need no fucking Einstein to figure out what was happening. Especially as Defiant was clearly living in the southeastern portion of the city, while the police precinct was at the center of it… and Hosu, Overhaul's new base of operations, was to the north-west of the city.
So Torino yells at the police officers in his car to fasten their seatbelts (they already did, they were driving with Sorahiko Torino after all) and brace for impact.
Then he turns the wheel… and goes for a head-on impact with Hari Kurono's car.
Hari Kurono, naturally, freaks out and changes his trajectory as well. Just as Torino expected him to do. The risk he took was calculated - he didn't want a direct collision at that speed, what if that piece of shit somehow managed to kidnap Defiant and had him in his trunk? Torino can live with a few dead yakuza thugs, but killing Defiant by accident? Oh, fuck no.
Unfortunately, Sorahiko Torino is bad at math. Or, to be exact, Hari Kurono isn't even nearly as good of a driver as the elderly police officer. His attempt to circumnavigate the rapidly decelerating police car in front of him, without being run over by the police cars that stayed on their lane (and had their drivers probably freak out at what was happening) and without ending in a ditch ends with a collision.
Narrow one. And both sides were decelerating what was happening. To be honest, it was more of grazing hit, the corners of their cars meeting. But it still happened at a joint speed of about 100 km/h.
Kurono's car is sent flying into a ditch, one of his thug dying and the other being incapacitated due to them not having their seatbelts on during the impact. Hari himself is only injured.
Torino's car ends up overturned. It doesn't escalate into a police car pile-up simply only because Torino's car was the second last one in the column. And the last one had a very good driver too.
The old man yells through the radio for the remaining cars to continue on, glances at his companions (they are all alright, if beaten up a little and shocked) before crawling out of the car through the broken window.
He also pulls out his little girl. The love of his life, the one that he could finally carry around openly because police regulations on their own armaments were very, very lousy nowadays (one of the police officers in his car had a goddamn Uzi, because the police was openly carrying confiscated guns due to lack of resources).
Kurono manages to open the door of his car and fall onto the grass next to it, before hearing someone telling him to raise his hands.
An elderly police officer with what looks like a goddamn sawed-off shotgun is standing less than two meters in front of him. A lot of small cuts, some of them with shards of glass still sticking out of them. But other than that, he's mostly unharmed by the crash.
Kurono makes the mistake of thinking that he is facing a normal Japanese police officer, rather than a walking American Cop Action Movie Protagonist stereotype. He tries to grab his gun covertly while pretending to surrender. Sorahiko Torino promptly blows his head off his neck with a single pull of his little girl's trigger.
(***)
"Hari!" Overhaul shouts into his phone again when he hears what sounded like a shotgun. The thugs Hari took with him didn't have a shotgun, what the fuck was happening over there…
"Hari Kurono is dead." He hears a strained, elderly-sounding voice coming from the other side of the phone. "You're next, Overhaul. Musutafu Police Department sends its regards."
The connection is cut. Overhaul stares at the phone in his hands for several long seconds before starting to scream.
(***)
Tsukauchi has no idea why the world, God or commissioner Aizawa (he suspects it to be their co-op work to shake the detective out of his comfort zone) decided to make him the head of the police relief force sent to Defiant's house.
But once his car makes it past the corner and enters the street in question, he immediately realizes that things are going to be ugly, and that he would prefer anyone else to be in his current position.
The people are only beginning to exit their house or look through the windows of their homes after a battle that has clearly just ended. Some things are still on fire, although thankfully not a lot of them.
One building is very much on fire, and Tsukauchi realizes immediately that it was Defiant's house.
Shit.
SHIT.
(***)
Aizawa picks up the phone almost immediately. He was waiting for it for close to thirty minutes now, besides himself with worry.
He was supposed to be finding explanations to present to the governor tomorrow, and that's without mentioning the whole 'trying to make sense of this goddamn chaos', especially in the light of the recording of the meeting between Defiant and Nedzu.
Because honestly, this was way out of his department. He had no idea what was Mirai Sasaki doing right now (he was sent the same recording, the two of them supposed to figure out what the fuck are they supposed to do with this long sequence of revelations that came entirely out of the blue), but he was probably freaking out to similar degree.
Alas, Aizawa couldn't focus his mind on the subject of global conspiracies and world wars. At least not until he would know what happened to Defiant.
Thankfully, Tsukauchi knew what was on his mind.
"Defiant is alive." Tsukauchi says immediately, his voice… serious, grim and strained at the same time. "Mostly unharmed, same for some bruises and probably a light concussion."
Oh, thank the gods.
"It seems that one of the people that Overhaul got out of the Gunga Mountain compound had a history with his civilian identity." Tsukauchi continues speaking. "Hari Kurono did a repetition of Mustard and Mina Ashido's situation, probably to cement his recruitment. Good news is that Torino noticed that Kurono was passing by and went insane in his own way, by going on a head-on car collision and then killing Kurono when he tried to draw a gun on him. Overhaul just lost his second-in-command. As for the bad news…"
Commissioner decides to shout at Torino for being reckless this time around. The right idea was to chase Kurono and call for reinforcement, not risk a car crash to stop him, but that will hape after…
"... the villain drew Defiant back to his home by sending him a text message from his mother's phone." Tsukauchi says.
Oh no.
"Is she…"
"Pronounced dead on arrival by the paramedics." Tsukauchi confirms his worries. "He probably killed her around the time the message was sent. Was probably quite a fight, the neighbors said that they heard crashing and something akin to an explosion or two, but no one called the police because it's just that type of a neighborhood. Defiant… or, well, Midoriya Izuku, well, he didn't take it kindly."
"How bad is it?" Aizawa asks.
"We're going to have to use shovels to pack up what's left of the villain." Tsukauchi replies. "Midoriya practically tore him into shreds."
It finally happened, didn't it? Defiant's eventual emotional breakdown that Mirai Sasaki was predicting for weeks now. So many people dead in short succession, including Tornado, his friends injured, then… his mother was murdered.
So it happened. And when it happened, he killed someone for the first time.
It was worse than the worst scenario that Aizawa imagined after hearing that Defiant is eventually going to break.
"Is he still there?" Aizawa asks.
"Yes." Tsukauchi replies. "But I don't think that he can listen to you. He is just sitting at the backseat of one of the police cars and staring blankly in space. Do me a favor and contact Eclipse if she can scrounge up one more warp after resting for a while. We need him elsewhere and under a watch, in case he…tries to take the quick way out."
Shit.
(***)
The positive side of having Eri around was that the injured returned to being healthy relatively fast and with no complications. The most injured among them was Momo Yaoyorozu, but once Chiyo Shuzenji managed to take all the bullets out of her body, Eri promptly rewinded her back to full health.
Unfortunately, Recovery Girl's quirk didn't work on foreign matter. They needed it out of the body before rewinding them. Momo had five bullets in her, one of them being dangerously close to heart.
The negative side of that was that they were all back to their hideout in Takoba. Even the people from Aldera and Sekoto branch, although mostly because Eclipse set up a warpgate between it and the UA (where the hospital that was dealing with injured heroes was set-up).
There were no active warp gates between it and the branch offices in Aldera and Sekoto. And, unfortunately, Eclipse practically fainted after evacuating Midoriya. Who promptly walked into his room, and locked the door behind himself.
The result of that was the common room filled with quiet people.
Most of them wanted to say something, but somehow, no one wanted to address the elephant in the room. And there were at least two of those, one of them being the Midoriya' situation, the other one were the sudden doubts some of them developed towards their vocation.
Losing someone made some of them question themselves if they had the courage to continue. On the other hand, it also made them feel like going with that would be betrayal of Yoarashi.
Eventually, Yaoyorozu is the one who decides to speak of the elephant.
"How is he doing?" She has a lot of doubts about continuing on herself, especially with how close she was to death and how goddamn painful being shot turned out to be.
Todoroki - her totally not boyfriend but clearly something more than just a friend - is sitting next to her, still in his hero uniform. It's covered with soot, but Todoroki feels too apathetic to clean it up right now.
The only sign of life from him is the hand that's still holding Yayorozu's. Whether he felt like she needed it or whether he needed it himself (he was friends with Yoarashi, they worked together as Aldera superheroes after all), no one can tell.
"Still sitting on the floor right by his bed." Jirou replies, her earlobes jacked into the floor. "Tsuyu is roaming in front of his bedroom door, ribbiting at him to let her in for like an hour now, but I'm not sure if he can hear her."
Jirou is their main mean of keeping watch over him. She is fairly confident that if he tries to do something bad, she'll know about it quickly enough to react to it. Unless, of course, he tears himself to death with his own quirk.
They kind of can't do anything with that.
"This wasn't supposed to play out like that." Mina says, while looking down at the floor. "So many operations and no casualties, I just hoped that…"
"Yeah, when those new soldiers arrived…" Kinoko Komori shivers in his seat. "I really thought that we were all going to die, that's not how I imagined the whole thing at all. I mean, I knew that it was an option, I just…"
"... you just didn't imagine that it would actually happen." Mina cuts in. Witch nods faintly. "Yeah, it was… more of 'theoretical' knowledge, you catch my drift? I know it's dumb, but I just… kind of not imagined any of us actually dying. Sure, people did die, but it was the police officers, like assistant commissioner Mera, not us. I just…"
They were all pretty much teenagers. Superpowered, but still teenagers. Facing the concept of mortality was the final test on their route towards heroism. Except, one of them was impacted to a severely smaller degree.
"You can't be serious." Kirishima says while standing up. "You can't be thinking about dropping out after this."
"Kiri, it's a bit…" Mina decides to say something, but he doesn't let her.
"You all see what sort of state the country is in." Kirishima says. Not to his girlfriend, but to the people in front of him. "You know that meta-abilities are going to make it worse. How many of the people in this room do you think are going to die of old age?"
It's as if a thunder struck in the room. The second elephant in the room is finally addressed, and not a single person knows how to respond to that.
"Spoiler alert: maybe a few, if we're lucky." Kirishima announces. "But guess what? We're all going to die eventually. And how much do you think resigning from being a hero will change? We're all going to be targets either way, simple because we have powers that others do not." Mina freezes slightly. This… struck a bit too close to home. "Staying heroes will at least make less people out there die, and the lives of others being slightly better."
"Kirishima, one of us died right now." Shinsou tries to cut back. "Yoarashi…"
"... knew the risks." Kirishima responds in kind. "His parents were soldiers, they both died in the war. He was proud of them for not deserting even when our army was collapsing and staying loyal to the country, despite the fact that it led to their deaths. I know that if I died, he'd press on regardless. I know because we talked about that, and we promised each other to make sure to jail whatever villains or criminals ended the other. And I'm not going to disrespect the memory of my best friend by quitting simply because things got dangerous."
Silence in the room, Kirishima still standing in front of them. When the silence grows awkward, he decides to speak again.
"I'm totally paraphrasing an anime here, I'm not one to be silver-tongued enough for this…" He says. "... but if you want to live forever, then stay heroes. Save a ton of people. Become famous, and get a few interviews… and then make someone be inspired by them to follow in your footsteps." He takes a deep breath, before concluding his short speech. "I'm going to bed. It's getting late, and I have a morning shift in Tartarus. I refuse to let someone like Mustard escape simply because I was too exhausted to do my job properly. Simply because Yoarashi would have fucking punched me in the face for that after we would meet again in the afterlife. You do whatever you want."
He then turns on his heel and walks out of the room.
The silence continues for a few more seconds, before Mina decides to speak.
"He had a point." She announces while standing up from her seat herself. "Most of us have a job to do tomorrow. Whether we'll decide to resign or not, we can't just do it right here and right now. Just walking out of the Network would be… bad, for the police and the rescue services, especially after so many of them died. Even if we decide to do it, we shouldn't do it without an advance warning. Let's just… go rest a bit, and leave making decisions for tomorrow, alright?"
Some of them nod, some of them leave out a scarce vocal agreement. Some simply follow up without a word. But eventually, the room starts emptying itself out, one or two people at a time.
Jirou prepares herself for a long sleepless night, before Mei announces that she can take it over from her because she'll ask Quicksand to help her sneak in a small camera through a wall to make sure that someone's keeping watch over him.
(***)
Uraraka is midway to her room (her thoughts and emotions a mess, then again, when they weren't a mess) when she receives a text message. It's from Ryo Inui.
"I believe that Midoriya learning of your backstory - yes, I know the truth - could help him." Uraraka reads it, while feeling her blood go cold. "Do not let him wait for too long. It'll only get worse if you do."
(***)
"Are you sure…" Ryo Inui asks Principal Sasaki, after reading the message that the man sent from his phone. "... that this is ethical?"
"Probably not." Mirai Sasaki replies. "But it is necessary. In light of the new revelations, and with Midoriya Inko, our only potential source of intel on the Council of Twelve's operations, dead, we need Defiant more than ever before."
Principal Sasaki has no idea how to process the revelations about the global conspiracy straight from a dystopian sci-fi fiction actually existing in the real world… but he already fears Hisashi Shigaraki. And his thrice accursed quirk.
And right now, Defiant might be the only weapon they have.
(***)
I do plan on showing some snippets of the confrontation in a form of a flashback, in a chapter or two. In the meantime... yeah, bad coincidence. The Gunga Mountain Raid Arc was a disaster to all involved groups to various degrees.
Also I'm making it a semi-official canon that this Kirishima managed to live long enough to become popular enough to inspire Crimson Riot, who in turn inspired the 'future' Kirishima's stand-in (so, the Red Riot). Kirishima is manly enough in that one scene to warrant creating a long line of manly hardening heroes.