Disclaimer: I don't own Infinite Stratos in any sense.
Discord: A3dTszc
(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)
Ichika punched through the wall of the room with all of his strength. The whole thing blew outwards, shooting building materials in all directions, and creating a gaping hole there.
His eyes were glowing a burning shade of scarlet red, and a furious snarl was spread across his face.
He was livid.
If he had been in public, he'd have murdered everyone in his sight, innocent or not. No question at all. He was so pissed off in that moment that he would have killed anyone who so much as looked at him the wrong way. Which was sort of the reason why he was in a secret bunker that he had built, instead of out on the streets somewhere. When he lost control of himself like this, the only thing he could do to stop himself from doing something he'd regret was to lock himself away somewhere where no one could find him.
He had utterly smashed everything in the room. Again. This had not been the first time he had lost control over himself like this, but it was certainly the first time he had ever gone this far. He wanted blood. People needed to die, and he wanted to kill them himself.
The government had tried to fuck with him. After he had spent years working with their military and launching their satellites, and letting them use his robots, they had turned on him in an instant, and had expected him to just fucking, roll over.
As soon as he had been outed as an IS pilot, they had wanted access to his genetic data.
The thing was, the only process that they could use to get it from him would kill him. A simple DNA test would not suffice for this. So the government had basically ordered him to give himself up voluntarily so that they could euthanize him like an animal to see what his genes looked like.
'For the greater good,' they had said.
And then they had said that he didn't really have a choice in the matter. If he refused, the entire Japanese military would simply be mobilized if it came to that, and he would be taken in by force and killed, consequences be damned.
Ichika stalked down the hallway that he had just revealed with his last punch.
There had been a door just a few feet to his left, but he had been way too angry to use it like a normal person.
'This is it,' Ichika thought to himself as he sat down at the computer terminal at the end of the hall.
This was his killing floor. The point of no return.
He logged in, and accessed his private server.
'The government wants to play hardball with me? Well alrighty then! Let's play some hardball!'
What was the population of Japan? 150 million?
He'd fucking halve it before this night was through.
He'd economically collapse the entire country, kill tens of millions of its people, and irreparably destroy it.
He'd wipe it off this Earth!
'Let's see what the government has to say about that,' he thought to himself. 'You want to pick a fight with me?! I'll destroy your entire country!'
Ichika opened up a program labeled 'Plan B,' on his desktop and typed in the password.
A map of the world appeared before him.
This was the furthest he had ever gone.
On two separate occasions in the past, he had been angry enough to make it to this room. The point where he was just a few mouse clicks away from becoming the world's first biological super terrorist. But he had never actually sat down and logged in before. He'd always calmed down and turned back well before doing so.
But not this time.
He was the first human being in history to wield this level of power. The power to terminate all life on Earth if he so wished. Not even nuclear weapons could manage this feat. They were pretty devastating all things considered, but even in the event of a worldwide nuclear holocaust, there would inevitably be some people somewhere, who would slip through the cracks and survive.
Somebody, somewhere, would live through an event like that. Whether they were on a submarine at the time, or on board a space station, or they were a caveman, someone would make it through.
But Ichika's Plan B had the potential to truly get them all if he wished it so.
He could poison the atmosphere itself.
A caveman would have to eventually come outside to breathe. And an astronaut, or a submarine crew member would one day have to land back on land. And when that happened, they would die then.
Every last human being. He could take them all out.
Ichika had never wanted this power. It certainly hadn't been why he had invested so much of his time, effort, and money into researching nanomachines, originally. Ichika's nanomachines were without question the most highly advanced in the world. No one else's even came close.
They were the engine that powered all of his technological pursuits. He could 3d print anything now with atomic scale resolution with them, giving him the potential to create anything he could ever imagine so long as he had the raw materials, designs, and the energy requirements.
If he licensed out these machines for the rest of the world to use, he would utterly change the world.
Instead, however, he kept them a secret. He kept them to himself. Hidden in all of his factories behind the scenes, where they were used to build his robots, his computers, and his rockets. Lesser technologies that the world wouldn't freak out too much about.
He didn't let anyone else ever even see his real technology in action, because getting rich had never been his end goal. So he would not benefit from sharing his real technology with others. Instead, he had another plan. And his nanomachines were crucial to its success.
But as fantastically capable as they were, they came with a downside. Technology was a double edged sword. Fire could keep a person warm on a cold winter night, and it could cook a person's food. But it could also be used to burn down buildings and kill people.
The same was true with his nanomachines. They could be used to create almost anything. Including a self-replicating, highly contagious, artificial pathogen that had been specifically engineered to have the capability of exterminating the entire human race.
This was what he referred to as Plan B.
He had already created and mass-produced this pathogen, and he had a massive population of the cells just waiting for him to press 'Go.' They were stored on the backs of his own specially designed air burst ballistic missiles that he had deployed in secret locations on every single populated land mass in the world.
Ichika had a grand strategy in place. He had had one ever since the day his life had changed back when he was in middle school. And since most people in the world would probably not be ready for what he intended to do in this vision, Ichika had created a backup plan.
If someone tried to fuck with him and derail his vision, they would die. It was as simple as that.
And with the added possibility of a gender war on the horizon interfering with things, with women piloting those damn suits and destabilizing the balance of power, he had needed a way to tip the scales again.
This had led him to the creation of Plan B. His Nuclear Option.
If the whole world united against him, he would win the ensuing battle. That was the point. Even if that meant he'd purge the rest of the world of all life. Humanity would die before he'd let his vision fail.
He had been in a very dark place both mentally, and emotionally, when he had conceived of this backup plan. And even more so when he had actually gone through with the steps to set it all up for real. But he had never really expected to use it. Simply knowing that he had this option was usually enough of a deterrent whenever he ended up in one of these psychotic frenzies of his.
Just knowing that if things spiraled out of his control and truly started to go wrong he would still have a way out, was usually enough to liberate him from that state of mind.
But even as furious as he was at the moment, now that Ichika was in front of his computer, the reality of the situation became very real, very quickly.
He could actually do this. There was no exaggeration or hyperbole here. He could hit a few keystrokes and kill hundreds of millions of people. The world wouldn't even know what hit it. It wouldn't even take three hours for his nanomachines to do the job, either. He had already strategically positioned them to maximize the death toll.
However, they were too imprecise for his liking. He could not target specific individuals with them and leave others unscathed. He had not yet developed this capability. If he pressed 'go,' everyone would be affected except for the select few individuals that he had secretly given the cure to in advance, without their knowledge. Like his sister, and a few of his friends.
He could also limit the geographical area if he wanted to. He didn't have to launch all of his missiles at once. If he launched his pathogen in Japan only, he could shut the nanomachine swarm down before it started spreading overseas to other locations. Which was what his current plan was.
Japan had fucked with him, so he would fuck with them right back harder.
But it was a truly humbling experience, knowing that he had this ability and was moments away from potentially unleashing it. There would be no going back if he crossed this line. And with this thought in mind, Ichika took a deep breath and sighed.
Someone like him definitely shouldn't have this power.
Ichika had a demon in him. He had discovered that when he was six. There was this side of him that was an absolute monster. A genuinely insane, cruel, psychotic monster. And it came out whenever he was truly angry.
He had spent all of his life trying to hide it as best as he could, but his grip on it wasn't ironclad. It slipped through the cracks every now and then. But he had known about this well before this moment. He had carefully tried to manage this side of himself in the same way one would manage the side effects of a disease they had.
By carefully managing the symptoms as appropriate, and trying not to let it control his life. So he was used to preparing countermeasures against himself in advance for these moments of weakness where the monster slipped out of his grasp.
He had put in a few failsafes into this kill-system of his so that he couldn't just activate it instantly on a whim. In front of him, one of them had just appeared. It was a simple text prompt telling him to call his sister. It was a simple thing that he had programmed in as one of his many last ditch attempts to ground him back on Earth if he ever made it to this moment.
Just a simple textbox pop-up with a picture of his sister Chifuyu, and a phone number.
Ichika hated other human beings. But there were a few of them that he didn't. And one above all that he treasured above everything.
That human.
His sister.
This simple text prompt was just supposed to serve as a last reminder to really get him to consider what he was doing. And just as planned, this pop-up cut through the red haze that his mind had been reduced to, and brought him back from the edge.
He reeled the monster back in most of the way, and the aura of sheer malice surrounding him significantly reduced in intensity.
Taking a few more moments to collect himself, Ichika opened up his cell phone, and dialed the number. He was pretty sure that he had already calmed down enough to not become a mass murderer today, but he really wanted to hear his sister's voice again anyway.
Ichika had lived a pretty sheltered life, all things considered. Everything he had ever wanted or needed, his sister had provided for him. Despite the useless burden to her that he had to have been until only recently, she still seemed to genuinely care about him, and he had never figured out why.
She had sacrificed so much over the years for his sake. He had constantly held her back at every turn. And once he had been old enough to realize this, all he had ever wanted from then on was to find a way to pay her back. Because he owed her so much.
His biggest dream had been to one day show to his sister that it had all been worth it. That everything she had done to get him that far had paid off in the end. But for such a long time, he had no idea what he could do.
What could he have ever done for her? Chifuyu hardly needed any sort of protection. She was basically the strongest person in the world. She was unbeatable, clearly. Nobody would ever be able to hurt her, she was invincible. It would be an insult to her to suggest that he could protect her from anything. He'd never be in a position to do that.
Getting rich certainly helped, he supposed. She no longer needed to pay for his expenses, and he had even been able to completely refund every last penny that his sister had ever spent on raising him, plus interest. Ensuring that she had actually profited significantly from doing so.
But this wasn't enough for Ichika. It was the time loss that he had caused her that truly bothered him. How many times had he unintentionally forced her to set her own dreams aside for a month or two so that she could come back to the house to look after him? That was time that she would never get back.
And it had been wasted on him. It was as if he had simply been born into the world for the sole purpose of holding his sister back from true greatness. To be some sort of needless weight on her, dragging her back down to the ground whenever she tried to do anything.
And he hated it. He hated it so much.
But one day, everything had changed.
Ichika had had a rather violent middle school experience. It had been at a time when he was still trying to come to terms with just how much of a monster that side of him could be when it slipped out. He had been piss poor at controlling it, and he had wanted to fight people all the time.
But he had eventually figured out that that side of him was surprisingly reasonable, psychotic as it was. It was almost as if he could make deals with it. As long as he provided an outlet for that rage, it would be content and wouldn't cause trouble. And it didn't really matter what the outlet was.
So Ichika had started coming up with constructive ways to direct that anger. Controlling it and suppressing it had failed, so he had decided to redirect it.
He had picked up gaming as a hobby. Mostly because it allowed him to kill thousands and thousands of people without actually hurting anyone because they were virtual NPCs, not real people.
And that had worked for a while to sate this demon in him. It had simply been a side effect that in his quest to optimize the amount of virtual people and creatures he killed, he turned into one of the best gamers in history.
But eventually, the novelty of it had faded, and it was no longer enough for the demon. So he had needed something more real. And he had eventually come up with a pretty interesting scheme.
He had met this girl named Rin back in middle school, who had been an absolute bully magnet in school. Nobody he had ever met in his life had been bullied as badly as she had been. She hadn't been able to do anything without a group of bullies falling out of the sky and tormenting her about it.
So naturally, Ichika had chosen to 'befriend' her.
Of course, it hadn't been because he actually liked her at all. Not at first, anyway. It had mostly been because it had provided him with a legitimate excuse to get into fights.
The math had been pretty simple.
Rin attracted bullies who picked on her. The bullies pushed her around. Nobody ultimately cared if a bully got their asses handed to them. So Ichika would wait for these moments and be the guy to provide this service.
Everybody would win, in theory. Rin would stop getting bullied, and Ichika would be able to cut loose a little. A bunch of bullies would also be shown their proper place in the world. Underneath Ichika's boot.
But this plan of his had been far more successful than he had ever anticipated. It had started out small. The first time Rin had been bullied in his presence, she and Ichika had been in grade 6, and the bullies had been in grade 8.
So Ichika had let her get pushed around a little, even though he could have easily stopped it before it happened, and then had acted outraged when he 'happened upon the scene.' This had given him the excuse he needed to walk right into the grade 8 section of the lunch room after this bullying incident, right up to the bully's table, to 'settle the score.'
And that had really been the start of it all. He had severely underestimated how well connected those bullies had been.
From that point forward, he had gotten into fights all the time with bullies from all over the city. Some of them would take hours out of their day to commute across town, just to try and fight with him and get revenge for their fallen brethren.
And naturally, the demon inside him had loved every single second of it. He'd kick the asses of 20 or 30 bullies all on his own, and then find himself up against the cousins and siblings of those bullies the very next day. And then the cousins and siblings of those bullies the day after. And it just kept on escalating in this fashion. Forcing him to take on larger and larger groups of thugs. It just went further and further until eventually, Ichika had found himself up against a Yakuza gang.
Ichika had still simply refused to ever back down.
The demon in him had a simple rule when it came to physical confrontations. Always escalate every conflict. Someone insults you, insult them back worse. Someone pushes you, throw the first punch. Someone messes with a friend of yours, and all bets are off.
This mindset, along with the ridiculously well connected group of bullies he had originally targeted, had created a perfect storm that saw Ichika spending almost his entire middle school life in massive brawls against dozens of opponents, and one day even facing down a Yakuza gang leader.
Like everyone else who had ever picked a fight with him, Ichika had kicked that guy's ass too without much trouble. It hadn't mattered that the man had been an adult, or that he had been a decent swordsman, or even a gang leader. Ichika had simply been better.
But that Yakuza gang leader had been the guy that had shown Ichika his purpose.
Wanting to get in one last shot in at the kid who had kicked his ass, that man had simply said that it didn't matter what either Ichika or his sister did in their lives. One day, maybe in 50 years, or maybe in 90, his sister Chifuyu would either be dead or senile in some old folks home.
That had been the moment where it had all changed. The very moment where the purpose of his life had been revealed to him.
Because the gang leader had been right.
His sister was not invincible after all. There was one, very specific weakness that no matter what she did, she could not guard against.
She was dying. She had slow onset cancer, slow onset heart disease, slow onset Alzheimers, and many other conditions. Sure they may have been very slow onset, as in, she would not get them for another 40 or 50 years, or perhaps even longer, but she would one day get them.
The only reason why she may never get cancer, or any of those other conditions would be because of the fact that something else would have killed her first. Everyone alive was on the path to getting those conditions simply because they were side effects of being alive.
But this was simply unacceptable.
So Ichika had decided to do what he had always done when faced with a problem that pissed him off. Throw every last thing he had at it. He would protect his sister from the one thing that she would never be able to protect herself from. Time itself. And he would not fail.
This realization had upended his entire view of the world.
It was like a conveyor belt. A simple conveyor belt that had on it, every single human being currently alive.
At the beginning of the belt was where all the newborns were. They would be put on at one end, representing the moment they were born into the world, and would slowly start making their way to the other end as the belt moved. As time went on. At the end of the belt, however, there was a furnace that burned alive everyone who fell into it.
Every single human being who had ever been alive had once been on this belt, and had met their fates in an inferno. And every human being who would ever one day be alive, would eventually find themselves there as well.
It wasn't a perfect analogy by any means. People could die before ever reaching the end of the belt for example, so it would probably be more accurate to say that this conveyor belt was running through the middle of a shooting range, but it illustrated the concept.
What this random Yakuza gang leader had done for him had been to present a choice that for some reason, nobody else seemed to ever think about.
As a human being on this conveyer belt, you could either recognize your situation and say something to the effect of: 'Oh well. What can you do? It's just how things are meant to be. It's natural for everyone to fall off the end of the belt one day into that furnace to be cooked alive,' like everyone else seemed to, or you could take the other option.
'No, fuck you.'
Ichika liked this option a lot more. It seemed way more reasonable. So he had now dedicated his life to fixing this problem at all costs. Because Chifuyu Orimura, his sister, was on this belt too. And that meant that no matter how powerful she was, she would one day fall off the end of it unless he did something. So Ichika had decided to make a stand.
That wasn't going to happen without one hell of a fight first.
He would find a way to halt the entire conveyor belt if he had to. Finding an ultimate cure for aging had simply been resolved into a choice between right and wrong. If he didn't do it, his sister would die.
He would sacrifice everything to succeed if that was what it took. His humanity, the lives of all 8 billion or so other humans, and even his own life if it came to that. Because Chifuyu was more important than any of that.
That was how he would repay her.
Every step he had taken from that point forward, developing his computers, nanotechnology, robots, and rockets, had all been planned out in order to facilitate that ultimate goal.
The IS Academy. That was Chifuyu's plan.
It was certainly a step up from his own plan, that was for sure. It would buy him three years.
Thanks to a couple of legal loopholes, his sister had managed to shoehorn him in there as a student. And while he was there, he would be immune from the reach of all world governments, including Japan's.
This would mean that he could delay the government's mission to capture him until after he graduated.
But this wouldn't happen for another 3 years. More than enough time for him to come up with a better solution in dealing with them than Plan B.
It would certainly be annoying having to go to an academy like that, but the idea had merit.
It would slow down his research and waste a lot of his time since he'd be forced to go to classes and learn about a stupid machine he couldn't care less about, but it could work.
Ichika sat back with a sigh and considered his options again.
Yeah. He would do it.
The pros outweighed the cons. And he may even be able to weasel out of a few classes due to how busy his schedule was.
Ichika was legally forced to be in certain locations at certain times due to the nature of his businesses, so he'd have to negotiate something with the headmaster of the IS Academy to allow him to take certain days off.
But he had a team of crackpot lawyers a phone call away to handle most of that. They had been unable to help get the government off his back, but maybe they would be able to help him out here at least.
AN: I have no beta reader for this story by the way. So there may be errors.