Raw666 - Doing my best :D
Shahryar - Fairly sure that most people in the know about the Quirk Singularity would like to see Overhaul alive and kicking nowadays :v
(***)
"Alright, ladies and gentlemen." Midoriya announces a few hours later. In front of him are the PLF executives and a handful of… extras. "We had… quite an unexpected surprise that really derailed our campaign plans, but… it's over now."
"Surprise is a very light word." Trumpet comments, eliciting some chuckles from the audience.
"Yes, and I'd like to make it clear once again, that we weren't the ones to unleash Armageddon." Izuku decides to repeat it. "And that I want everyone in the Front to realize that fact."
They are villains, yes. But three million dead? Yeah, their villainy has limits. Oh, most of them would consider three million people dying to be an acceptable price for eventual victory, just…
… a significant part of those three million would be heroes, soldiers, police officers and government officials. They were sane (or pragmatic in their evil) enough to see that those three million people died for no apparent reason.
"In the meantime…" He adds, while making a quick gesture. Kouta clicked the right thing, and soon the large screen behind Midoriya filled with a list of locations. "... I think it's the high time to remind the heroes that we're still here."
Another wave of raids starts now.
(***)
Saiko Intelli would like to say that she was surprised by it, but to be honest, she wasn't. Of course Midoriya would come out to strike right now, as if to remind the world that the Paranormal Liberation Front exists.
A part of her hoped that he would avoid that to make sure that the raid wouldn't galvanize the population into supporting the government, but… yeah. No such luck. Midoriya clearly returned to his war.
And how.
Goddamnit, Midoriya.
"Looks like we can forget about this year's school reunion." Intelli states dryly. Slingshot - her former classmate, a short light-brown haired girl with an aiming quirk - looks at her over the table.
It's an electronic table. Pretty much built into the floor, to begin with (very bulky). It displays a lot of things, such as the reports coming in from the emergency responders.
She could do with something cheaper, but damn, it was her hero agency and she was going to do whatever the hell she wanted with her money. And it really gave her a 'futuristic command center' vibe.
"That's…" Slingshot replies calmly. "... a very particular way to react to the Paranormal Liberation Front changing our old school into a smoking crater."
Saiko Intelli had her old school - and other schools in the country - improve their security. Midoriya expected improved security and sent Frostfire and Hypothermia.
Saiko Intelli and Seiai Academy might have as well not bothered preparing anything.
Frostfire was clearly NOT using his ice half in any other way than for defense or mobility. This didn't stop him from generating a massive iceberg for Hypothermia to operate with her quirk.
Seiai Academy didn't survive that particular team-up. Thank God the attack came right after the end of the classes for the day, meaning that a solid 85% of the students just left the school grounds.
The same couldn't be said about the faculty.
"It was just a matter of time." Saiko replies. Externally she is calm and collected, internally… she would like to say that internally she was emotional, but… no. She was burned out. Too quickly after Shikoku. "I ordered major hero schools to improve security, but…" She sighs loudly. "I don't think that any degree of security improvement could help against that."
The picture of the leftovers of the school - practically crushed by a massive glacier that seemed to have fallen on it from above - was… haunting.
How to stop something like that from happening? Without particularly powerful quirks, it was simply impossible. Invincible would have stopped it. Redirect would have stopped it. Molecular, Old Flame and Nejire-Chan might be able to partially destroy it before its fall, and in case of the first one it was a very big maybe.
A few S-Ranks with particularly suitable quirks, maybe.
There was a low three-digit number of hero schools in the nation.
"Are you going to suggest the Lockdown plan to her?" Slingshot decides to poke the anthill with a stick. Saiko nods. "She won't like it."
"I don't like it myself." Saiko retorts.
It's true.
Closing down all hero schools in the country might be read as an announcement that the PLF got the upper hand over the government with its raids. But what other options do they have?
Keeping them open will only mean more dead teenagers. PLF will continue targeting them and, to be frank, they can do shit about it.
She already saw the recording from Seijin High School. Especially the part with Yaoyorozu gunning down the fleeing students with several automatic machine guns she had Cloud deploy through the warpgates.
Practically a battue, except rather than hunting animals, she was hunting people. The PLF clearly figured out the school's evacuation plan, resulting in the initial attack making most of the students and faculty run right into Counterfeit.
Blindside was probably livid over his alma mater getting annihilated like that. Saiko, honestly, didn't give a shit about it.
"We can partially move over to online lectures." Saiko adds. "Yes, conducting combat training will be impossible unless we tell the schools in question to organize those for themselves, in some unaligned gyms and dojos, but… the PLF turned the hero schools from places of safety into death traps. If we keep the prospective heroes and their heroic teachers bundled up in one place that the PLF can locate through checking google maps, we're only going to end up with a mountain of dead teenagers."
No one was ready. No one could be ready. What the PLF was doing was something previously unheard of.
They had reasonable numbers for a high profile villain organization. Not as impossibly large as the Meta-Liberation Army managed to amass in secret before the first war. But comparable to groups like the CRC or ISP back then.
What really made them a nightmare were three things. The absurd number of S and SS-Rankers they had when compared to their numbers in general. Cloud literally goddamn existing. And the fact that they had nothing to lose.
Lemillion was right about Deika making the next war a 'no holds barred' one, wasn't he? It changed the rules completely. Things previously unthinkable were becoming a new normal.
And they weren't ready.
The PLF didn't have the numbers to actually attempt to take something over and hold it. It lacked the mooks that it could use to garrison something and hold ground against the heroes and the army. But with its number of supervillains and Cloud to help them move faster than the heroes could, it could dish horrific amounts of damage.
And since it couldn't hold things… It focused on destroying them. As the first three attacks proved, they were VERY good at destroying things.
"Well, good luck trying to persuade that woman to agree to that without losing at least twenty more hero schools." Slingshot comments dryly. Yeah, it was going to be… hard to achieve, which didn't stop Saiko Intelli from hoping that she would see reason.
Intelli doesn't reply. Instead, she looks through the list of attacked facilities.
Seijin High School and Seiai Academy. Three police precincts (casualties approaching 70% of personnel in total). Four more hero agencies (casualties include two more S-Ranks). Two lesser villain prisons attacked mostly by the PLF' mooks.
Mooks, as in, no S-Ranks. But Fleshwarp the Archtraitor was there, probably looking forward to breaking open more prisons. Biohazard was there. Ragdoll was there. Hell, goddamn Jetstream was there, alongside the former Pussycat.
One of the villain prison fell quickly and completely. The other was visited by two S-Ranks at the time, which resulted in the attack failing. But the moment the PLF realized that things might be going harder for them than they anticipated, they organized a very efficient retreat while Biohazard with a bunch of minor goons was holding them off.
Small mercy.
Biohazard ended up successfully escaping too. What a fucking shitshow.
Then she notices something.
"They attacked Rapier's Hero Agency?" She asks Slingshot, who promptly nods. The S-Rank in question died during the earlier raid against Daybreak's hero agency, making it…
…feel kind of pointless?
"Yeah, why do you ask?" Slingshot asks.
There is something of a question forming in Intelli's mind. No, not a question, at least not yet. Unless you consider a half-formed 'why?' to be a question, despite the asker not knowing why he asks that. Or what he asks that about.
"It's odd." Intelli decides on saying. "The attacks are more or less spread equally nationwide. But here? Here we have two attacks happening in close proximity." It doesn't take her a lot of time to make a close-up of a certain region in Tokyo displayed on the table.
Two clicks later, the locations of Daybreak's and Rapier's hero agencies are displayed on it. Both of them to a particularly large black area, spread around that part of Tokyo like some cancerous tumor.
Naruhata.
"Midoriya is blowing up the sanitary cordon around Naruhata." Slingshot realizes it right now.
If it was just about Naruhata, Saiko thinks bitterly, it wouldn't be that much of a problem. What came to be called 'Naruhata' nowadays included Naruhata Ward itself - and a large part of several neighboring wards.
"It seems so." Saiko admits.
"To what end?" Slingshot then asks. "Sure, it's going to cause an awful lot of problems with policing that area, but… it's not exactly a strategic threat to us, right? Unless Midoriya is courting Crawler to try to recruit him into the PLF."
Saiko shivers visibly.
"I don't even want to imagine the results of the Symbol of Despair and the One-Eyed Warlord of Naruhata teaming-up against us." Intelli then says. And yeah, she means that.
Wholeheartedly.
Revenant's title might not be as grounded as those of All Might (the Symbol of Peace), Entropy (the Symbol of Ruin) and Invincible (the Symbol of Hope) were, but… he was clearly getting there. And 'Despair' being a counterpart to 'Hope' was a fact that Saiko noticed.
Intentionally. PLF was working on its PR through the Villain Network, and the name began to stick. Together with Apocrypha's Symbol of Madness, a fact greatly exaggerated but how entirely out of place she felt as a villain. Together with the whole 'worship me as a deity' thing. And usage of what felt like multiple quirks.
Oh, and the fact that she apparently drove a few defenders of the last hero agency she raided into madness through some offensive mental quirks.
Saiko sometimes deeply regretted the fact that All Might decided to become a Symbol of Peace. Today the public was geared towards borderline deifying certain individuals in similar light.
Discovering that All Might did that to become a counterpart for Symbol of Evil made her understand WHY it happened. She still didn't like the fact that it did.
"Is it really possible?" Slingshot asks. "Crawler works for Nakahara, and I don't think she's willing to let it change. Or that Crawler is maniacal enough to work for the Paranormal Liberation Front."
"Hard to say." Saiko admits, and hates the fact that it's like that. "Crawler isn't technically a member of the NVA, more of an ally. He is loyal to the people of Naruhata first and foremost. His word there is law, and Naruhata Vigilantes are his arms, eyes and legs. He is working with Ryukyu and Gang Orca because they were his best shot at overthrowing the government and avenging Knuckleduster."
"You think he'll change sides?" Slingshot appears to be surprised by that fact.
"I honestly have no idea." Saiko admits. "Crawler is a goddamn menace that has a potential to develop into another SSS-Ranker and I have repeatedly stated to the Prime Minister that Naruhata needs to be dismantled as soon as possible. But I keep being rebuked by some variants of 'we have more pressing matters' or 'it's not worth the effort in the current state'." She groans.
The 'I hate working with stupid people' remains unsaid, but heavily implied.
"He's good at inconveniencing us as much as possible without going far enough to make us drop a hammer on him." Slingshot admits. "He is doing that on purpose, doesn't he? He clearly took a page from the old Vigilante Alliance book."
Yeah, those guys' entire shtick was to keep a low profile while doing their job, and being efficient at it - but without making the HPSC focus on them too much. Saiko was almost certain that Crawler was using the New Vigilante Alliance to keep making noise elsewhere so that he would have a reasonably free reign.
Despite living in goddamn Tokyo. And it wasn't even that far from the governmental district, merely a dozen kilometres. Naturally, that was the one direction in which Crawler wasn't pushing.
"At this point I wouldn't be surprised if he let Emoji take his eye just to make us undervalue his combat skills." Saiko replies with all the frustration she could muster. "Emoji's quirk is the worst nightmare of most villains out there, but she can do jack shit when rescue is involved, so she is near the bottom of the SS-Rank. So despite her threat level, Crawler losing that fight cemented his low position on the priority list."
"You really think he would lose an eye just for that?" Slingshot seems unconvinced if Saiko truly means it.
"At this point…" Saiko replies. "... I'm past the point where something can surprise me."
Especially after her brief foray into a foreign world that Sir Nighteye's archive contained within. Transferable quirks, quirks that could be stolen, centuries old demon lords, yeah, reading that was one hell of a way to start questioning reality.
"Besides, he might have planned to lose the fight and escape, but slightly miscalculated and lost an eye." Saiko replies, before sighing loudly. "You know what's worse? I don't even know how many people Naruhata Vigilantes recruited recently, because Naruhata is a dark zone. Aside from aerial surveillance, whoever we deploy there, vanishes. But I know for certain that Crawler was buying a lot of weapons and support equipment off the black market. For years. The sanitary cordon was making things significantly more complicated for him, but Midoriya just blew it up."
Slingshot seems to dislike the implications. Worst of all, Naruhata as a phenomenon is going to expand after this, isn't it?
Wait a second.
"I'm going to need some good tea to confirm it." Saiko says after a few seconds. "But I think I know why he is doing it."
"Midoriya?" Slingshot asks. Mindscape nods. "What exactly?"
"He might be using Crawler and his vigilante army as bait." Saiko replies. Slingshot gives her a questioning look. "PLF beats us in mobility, and by far. What if he is expecting us to crack down on Naruhata, only to have his forces jump at the strike force's back after the attack starts?"
"That would end… badly." Slingshot agrees. "The counterargument is that if we don't do that, Crawler is going to take over one or two more wards, and this strikes a massive blow to the government's image."
"Midoriya is setting us up for a Xanatos Gambit here." Saiko replies bitterly. "Add the fact that if we reinforce the nearby hero agencies and police precincts to prevent another attack… he'll most likely not attack there anymore and take full advantage of the fact that we just committed our reserves to Naruhata."
It didn't matter what was going to be their answer to the Naruhata situation. Midoriya - especially with his traitor being whoever the fuck it was - could easily turn every response into his success.
Goddamnit.
On a sidenote, she seems to begin to understand how Sir Nighteye felt during the peak of his (and All Might's) war against All for One. Midoriya might not have a fraction of AFO's combat power, but in terms of brains and desire to see the hero system crash down and burn they were at least equals.
"Alright, before I move over to try to make someone see reason…" Saiko says. "... what about the Marukane Ward?
(***)
"What were the chances…" Gang Orca asks. His sheer bulk makes him intimidating, even after so much time working together. "... of PLF releasing whatever thing erased Shikoku from the map?"
Problems of conspiracy without goddamn cheat codes like Kurogiri or Cloud? Organizing meetings isn't exactly fast.
Ayako Nakahara honestly believes that if she had a single warper like them, she would have already won her little war - or was at the shortest route to achieve that.
Instead they are all huddled around a large table in an abandoned warehouse, save for one or two people that choose to lean on the walls or something like that. They aren't exactly doing all that well.
"Low. Very low." Ayako replies. "I knew Midoriya in the past. What was done to him was horrible, but I can't even imagine him breaking to the point where he would consider killing three million people for no apparent reason."
In her opinion, she could as well imagine All Might do the same thing. Then again, she didn't meet him after his expulsion, or even after All Might's death, so…
"Are you fucking kidding me?" Firestorm explodes almost instantly. "He is a monster and you…" Nakahara glances at Tornado who was sitting standing by the wall right next to her. He nodded to her back. Yeah, he'll interrupt if Kamiji loses it a bit too much. "...are just going to defend him?!"
"If you prefer a more grounded explanation." Ayako decides to be reasonable for once. "Then it was a gargantuan waste of extremely potent assets and something that is going to make the population flock to the government for protection. Which means that it's exactly counterproductive to Midoriya's goals."
"That's…" Moe tries again.
"Moe, do us all a favor and stop being disruptive." Ryukyu clearly lost her patience. The two exchange furious glares, but eventually, Firestorm looks away. "Good. We've gathered here to figure out what to do next now that the Shikoku changed the… strategic situation."
"It didn't change it an awful lot." Soga Kugisaki - Crawler's representative for the NVA meetings like this one - comments. "We were neck deep in crap before and we're still neck deep in crap right now. What changed is that the government is beginning to realize that they are in the same crap lake as we are."
The spike-user hasn't changed much since the time before the end of the first Vigilante Alliance. Even in a meeting like this he was still wearing a combat vest, and had a gun holstered by his belt.
His words were… colorful, but the vigilante had a point.
"A bit too pessimistic." Ayako decides to intervene. "Our work in Hokkaido is progressing extremely well. Intelli focusing on the Paranormal Liberation Front has given us some breathing space elsewhere, letting me start reconstructing several regional cells that she dismantled recently. We've also begun to be seen much more… favorable in recruiting terms, since the PLF' rampage is weakening the government's image while making us look more moderate in comparison."
Yeah, 'moderate'.
Moe Kamiji was legitimately unhinged and Nakahara fully expected her to lose it completely ever since the news about Frostfire being out of Tartarus and Midoriya planning Endeavor's death came out. It was just a matter of time and circumstances.
Yo Shindo was a doublefaced dickwad from day one, but at the beginning he was motivated mostly by wanting to make the heroes suffer for what they did to Ms. Joke. By now, Nakahara suspected that he was actually pressing on because he enjoyed ending lives.
Ryuko Tsuchikawa took what happened to the Wild Wild Pussycats badly. She was trying to act like it didn't affect her all that much, but Ayako could read her well enough. That was an awful lot of glee while fighting for someone who was pretending to be in for 'justice'.
Inasa Yoarashi was the only one more or less functional among the NVA's Four Disasters. How it happened, Ayako had no idea. But he was still on the 'I'm happy that the work went well' page rather than on the 'I'm happy because I got to murder some governmental motherfuckers'.
Being an organizer of her quality required her to be a good judge of people. Those in the room with her were.. less than stellar.
Yui Kodai (in her clearly Mr. Compress inspired attire, although one closer in colors to her old hero uniform), keeps giving her one of her slightly unsettling stares. Ayako didn't trust her, but Levelers were crucial in obtaining intel for the NVA's operations.
Kodai was still a better pick than Gentle Criminal. Gentle was… Gentle made it clear that the Levelers didn't enjoy certain parts of NVA's operations. Like, say, their recurrent involvement with organized crime.
Nakahara really wanted to scream at him over all his disapproving stares. She had thousands of people to outfit and organize nationwide, how the hell was she supposed to finance that?
Switching him for Kodai was an improvement, in her opinion.
"However, the problem remains." Ayako continues. "Thus far we've focused on recruitment, securing funds and equipment and so on. Actually attacking the government was… relatively low on the list of priorities."
"Stupidity." Tsuchikawa cuts in. "We should have…"
"Armies win by defeating their enemies. Guerillas win by not getting defeated." Ayako replies. It's an old adage, but she internalized it. "For as long as the NVA was there, its very existence undermined the government, drawing attention to our cause. Staging a large-scale attack was actually more dangerous to us than to the government, because suffering a defeat would have ruined our image, in turn threatening the integrity of some of our local cells. I thought that we already talked about this."
She is trying to not look at Landslide with accusation in her eyes (she is technically more of a chief advisor). Ryukyu covers that for her and Tsuchikawa takes a metaphorical step back.
"The problem is that we're now getting sidelined by the Paranormal Liberation Front." Ayako continues. "And we have to remind the country that we exist and we're a threat. Without being deterred by our lack of mobility and massively increased alert level of all potential targets."
"I assume that you already have an idea or two." Ryukyu says while Gang Orca stares at her quietly.
She always has ideas. She just needs the help of more experienced tacticians to… sharpen them a little.
"Two, in fact." Ayako replies. "Option first is striking against the cordon facilities surrounding more problematic ghettos. We can present that as 'freeing the people that the government was unfairly persecuting' for our PR campaign, while unleashing a lot of very dangerous people who will certainly begin to spread even further chaos in the country. This is the low risk low reward plan."
"I assume that the other one…" Gang Orca's eyes grow narrower. "... is the high risk high reward one."
"To say the least, yes." Ayako replies, before bracing herself for the shouting match. "The second option is the Marukane Ward."
Days until the Second Battle of the Marukane Ward:
20