TOPCAT-59 - Thank you :D
Shahryar - Understandable, we all are sometimes busy. And you're onto something with your guesses :P
(***)
"Revenant did what?" Spyglass stares at Soga Kugisaki over the table. She took advantage of Ryukyu and Gang Orca being temporarily too shocked to speak.
She was only barely less shocked, but… well, in a way, speaking was her job. And she was good at her job.
"Visited Naruhata, with Singularity, Chameleon, Biohazard and Songbird in tow." Soga Kugisaki, the Naruhata Vigilantes representative in the NVA leadership, replies calmly. "Inquired about setting out a summit between the Alliance and the Front."
Did Revenant lose his mind?
No. Most certainly not. Besides, even if he did, then if Spyglass' reading on Izuku Midoriya was to be trusted, it would manifest with insane goals, not means to achieve them. He was way too focused and committed to have it any other way.
"Crawler is offering to host it." Kugisaki adds.
In his personal opinion, that's madness.
Koichi Haimawari didn't spend years keeping the Era of Peace alive in at least a single part of Japan just to start cutting deals with the heir to the Symbol of Evil. Or, well, that's what Kugisaki thought until yesterday.
Personally speaking, Soga didn't like it. But at this point, Naruhata Vigilantes was at least partially running something akin to a personality cult, something that Crawler didn't exactly intend to happen. Yet, somehow, it happened.
No points for figuring out who was being worshiped as the central piece of a said personality cult. If All Might was the Symbol of Peace for Japan, then Crawler was the Symbol of Freedom for the Naruhata Ward.
Crawler decided to play nice with Revenant, and people were assuming that he had a plan in all of that. He probably did. But Soga wasn't sure if Midoriya dying was a part of it, because honestly, Crawler was an enigma.
Soga might have been one of his closest lieutenants, but this didn't make things much easier. The last person who had a tiniest clue how Crawler's mind worked was Knuckleduster, and he has been dead for years.
Even Lady Nagant, somehow, was following his orders to the letter. Riddle for the ages, her mind almost as secretive as Crawler's. Losing both legs during the downfall of the underground heroes conspiracy (the one that the old Vigilante Alliance' was a part of) didn't make her open up to people.
"Is he insane?" Ryukyu wakes up, Ayako Nakahara clearly too beside herself with anger to say anything more.
"No." Soga replies dryly. Personality cult is one thing, hearing his boss being insulted and doing nothing about it is another thing whatsoever. Kugisaki doesn't like that, even if their opinions somewhat align. "He most certainly isn't."
Unfortunately, he is a diplomat. Telling them to fuck off and try to be ten percent as much of a decent person as Crawler is before criticizing him is, unfortunately, not a very diplomatic way of solving the situation.
"How else would you call him meeting with the All for One bis behind our back?" Ryukyu replies, the Dragon Vigilante's eyes squinting. There is some hostility there, but not a lot of it. It's disappointment more than anger.
"I don't remember the Naruhata Vigilantes being supposed to report all details about their activity to the NVA." Soga replies dryly. "We're an independent group that works with you in order to overthrow the government. Just like the Levellers do. Neither of our groups work for you. We work with you. And after your last stunt, you should be happy that we have no alternative option, because then we would be severely tempted to sever our ties."
Gang Orca says nothing. He, of all the high ranking NVA members, appeared to have the most moral scruples left. He recognizes that it's not the time to pull their punches if they want to win, but it'd be a lie to say that he enjoys that fact.
He didn't vote against it, but he did point out that it was a bad idea in general. Unanimity among the leadership was a part of the image, clearly enough. Unfortunately, his critique didn't change a lot.
Levellers' opinion on the ghetto attack more or less aligned with that of the Naruhata Vigilantes.
"Ghettos are a stain on the honor of the Japanese Hero System." Ayako Nakahara replies confidently. "They have to be removed."
It costs Soga all his willpower NOT to mention another person that was very intent on removing stains on the honor of the Hero Society. He even used the term as their villain name. Alas… diplomacy.
Soga Kugisaki is torn between hatred for diplomacy and respect for the diplomats that are ready to enter that swamp for the greater good of society.
"Spare me the nice sounding phrases like that one." Soga replies dryly. "Leave them for the propaganda pieces. I don't give a fuck, pardon my french. What I want to know is what's your answer."
"No." Ryukyu replies. "The answer is no." It appears that they are all in agreement on that.
Now, things are going to get tricky. Because Crawler told Kugisaki to organize the meeting. And he follows orders.
"You should reconsider." He replies, trying to sound as peaceful as possible.
"Reconsider what exactly?" Ryukyu shoots back. "Striking a deal with the same bunch of bastards that ended All Might? That killed thousands of heroes and killed or displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians during the First Paranormal Liberation War?"
Oh, the things that Soga Kugisaki does for his boss.
"Yes, because we didn't kill an awful lot of heroes." Soga retorts. Ryukyu opens her mouth to shoot something nasty back. "Yes, we do that because we want a better Japan. But I'm sure that most of the PLF members had and have the same thing in mind. Our differences are a matter of the definition of 'better Japan'. Don't try to act like you have a moral high ground, there are no innocent people in this room."
It's not working. Soga is a shitty diplomat.
"I think that you're severely overstepping your boundaries as Crawler's representatives." Nakahara stares at him over the table.
Plan B then. His attempt to make the people in front of him realize they aren't much better than the PLF was a lost cause from the start. Why did he even try? Is he still thinking that there is something to be saved among them?
Crawler treats them as a distraction. They are useful in that regard, Kugisaki is here to coordinate their operations, making sure that the Naruhata Free Zone is useful enough for the NVA for the alliance to continue, but also that the government is too busy with the NVA to go after the NFZ.
It's like dancing on a tightrope. How the hell he didn't fall off yet? Soga Kugisaki is going to have to retire in a few years, his heart isn't doing an awful lot with all the stress, even the doctors are telling him so.
Then again, in a few years, they'll all either be dead or arrested… or victorious. They just need Crawler's final gambit to come into fruition. The Second Paranormal Liberation War moved the timetable ahead by a lot.
"Revenant implies that Invincible will show up." Soga replies calmly.
Silence by the table. Eventually, it's Gang Orca that speaks.
"... fuck." The killer whale hero speaking that word with such an intensity says a lot about the severity of the problem at hand.
That's not just 'bad news'. Those are monumentally bad news. 'All Might is dead' level bad news. 'Oops, everyone you loved just died' level bad news.
"We have to pull out from Marukane Ward." Ryukyu says the words first. "Can we…"
"Right now?" Ayako Nakahara aged by a few years in a heartbeat. "If the Government knows, they are already observing the exits from the ward. They know we're here. We can't evacuate everyone."
There are close to five thousand vigilantes in the Naruhata Ward. It's the biggest training ground of the NVA. They were expecting confrontation so they were slowly moving people group by group inside ever since they decided to change it into a trap for the heroes.
They didn't expect the Government to locate the NVA headquarters so quickly. They were supposed to achieve that thanks to controlled leaks on the vigilantes side. Ones downplaying the strength of the vigilantes deployed in the district, in order to make sure that the government wouldn't deploy enough of its assets. And no Invincible, that's for sure.
The NVA simply wasn't ready.
The assumption behind the plan was that Invincible was going to stay in the Government district to avoid Revenant walking into the National Diet and massacring the government. The assumption was clearly wrong.
If they were going to trust Midoriya on this.
Ayako Nakahara suspects that Revenant is entirely capable of manipulating the government into sending Invincible to the Marukane Ward just to make sure that the Government District was open wide.
That or he was lying, taking advantage of his supposed superiority in information sources over the NVA to manipulate them into the meeting. How was Spyglass supposed to figure him out?
"The best case scenario, we lose thousands of our best trained members." Nakahara adds. "We can pull ourselves and the Natural Disasters out quietly, but…"
"So, if it's true, then the NVA is done for." Ryukyu's eyes narrow down on Spyglass. "That was supposed to not happen, how the hell did she…"
"I don't know how Intelli figured it out." Ayako replies, trying to ignore the creeping chills on her back. "There is a possibility that she didn't, and Revenant is manipulating us. But…"
"But?" Ryukyu asks, staring at her chief advisor.
"... our highest ranked spy reported that Invincible is preparing for a deployment in the next two weeks." Ayako admits. "We don't know where, but… if Revenant is approaching us for a team-up now, the attack will happen soon."
Ryukyu shrinks in her seat. Gang Orca looks somewhat pale (Soga didn't know he could even do that), existential dread clearly settling in hard.
"Can we take him down?" Ryukyu asks Ayako. Soga almost laughs at the degree of delusions that it took to ask that question.
"Maybe if we focus all our heavy-hitters on him, but if there'll be more SS-Rankers in the Marukane Ward, they'll tear through the rest of the vigilantes easily." Ayako replies. Wow, delusions are infectious. Time to cut them short.
"Stop daydreaming." Soga Kugisaki comments, drawing the eyes to himself. "We all know that Crawler's the strongest fighter in our team, and he has a stronger army than you have in Marukane Ward. And his reaction to Invincible showing up too close to Naruhata is dispersing through the Ward together with his executives, all of them hiding under their best disguises, while telling the regular vigilantes to hide their equipment and pretend they are fucking tourists. That's despite us having enough SAMs and anti-air guns to shred through the Japanese Air Force. You know you can't beat him."
Thank fuck Invincible wasn't interested in rolling down the Naruhata Ward, arguing that sending a living nuke like him to fight an entire district was just a waste of time. He would tear through everything that the Naruhata Vigilantes had, but he was just a single man.
He could only catch-up so many of the fleeing people. Sending a thousand normal heroes and soldiers would be a much more logistically sensible choice than sending Invincible, especially as Crawler made sure to avoid contact and Invincible, for all his skills and power, wasn't the person you sent to find a single person in a crowd of tens of thousand.
Discovering that this was probably the only reason why the Naruhata Free Zone still existed (because the government didn't want to risk a lot of said 'thousand normal heroes and soldiers' dying in the current political climate) thanks to their spy was like a slap in the face for Soga. But, a past one. He somehow got used to it.
"And so, we're supposed to work with fucking Revenant?" Ayako switches back to her normal, probably an inferiority-complex fueled behavior. Is she afraid of Midoriya changing her into an assistant for the duration of the alliance?
"Do you have a better idea?" Kugisaki glares back at her. "Can you find us a better tactician and strategist than Midoriya? Better quirk-warfare expert than he is, someone to dissect Invincible and formulate a plan to take him down? Bigger assortment of powerful quirks to make the plan work than what his League of Villains has? He says his plan for the day is the deaths of Invincible and Saiko Intelli. Doing that will let us achieve more than we did for years. It will make Hokkaido possible on a reasonable timescale."
"Midoriya is going to throw us at the heroes, achieve his objectives and run away." Nakahara replies. "That's his plan for the day. End of the NVA and the end of the government in one fell swoop."
"If Invincible is going to show up…" Kugisaki glares back at her. "It's going to be the end of the NVA either way. And, in case you didn't notice, your plan to counter the Fast Response Unit can be used to ensure that Midoriya doesn't stab us in the back. Or that we'll at the very least drag him down with ourselves."
Silence. The people in front of him were exchanging glances. Probably hoping that one of them would have a better idea than this.
"Midoriya mentioned something about his willingness to free the NVA-aligned former Tartarus inmates." Kugisaki decides to give them a further push. "Including Miruko. Before the battle, for as long as the meeting actually happens."
Silence once more. Especially Gang Orca wants Miruko back. She is what the NVA lacks the most nowadays - a properly trained heavy-hitter. And that's without mentioning the part of being his former comrade.
Regular vigilantes were, to be honest, beneath the level of the regular heroes, combat-wise. If you excluded Crawler's elites. The secret training facilities could only take you so far, it turned out.
Kugisaki wasn't exactly sure what was going to be the Rabbit Hero's reaction to seeing what sort of bullshit NVA was up to so often nowadays. It was probably going to include a lot of expletives, that's for sure.
Maybe he would get to recruit her for the Naruhata Vigilantes? She would certainly like it in Naruhata.
He was certainly going to have to try. If only to see Miruko chew Ryukyu and the others. It would be absolutely hilarious and cathartic to watch.
"Spyglass?" Ryukyu eventually asks.
"I… don't know." She admits. "If he is ready to give us the inmates merely for organizing the meeting, it… might not be the worst deal, even if he'll probably try to sneak some spies into our ranks. We would also get an occasion to get a proper read on him, find out if Invincible's really coming and… hell, the best case scenario, we might get a shot on him."
She's probably salivating to get an occasion to assassinate the heir to the All for One. Except… Midoriya is no Entropy. You can't just throw Lemillion at him and hope that death would stick.
And this, well. Kugisaki's reply is going to really rain on her parade.
"He wants to attend the meeting as Twice's quirk clones." Kugisaki announces. Nakahara stares at him in shock.
"He knows his quirk?" Spyglass says. Yeah, having your secret weapon revealed before your enemy must sting.
"Clearly enough." Kugisaki replies dryly. "Looks like we might have a PLF mole in the inner council. Revenant was dodging the subject to hell and back, giving different reply and different names of the informant each time Crawler asked him."
At some point of the meeting Crawler made a game out of it, trying to see how many outlandish replies Revenant can make with a straight face. After the one where Ryukyu was supposed to secretly be Midoriya's mother - supporting him from shadows - Crawler conceded defeat.
"Fuck." Nakahara lets out. Then she slams the table with her arms. "FUCK! How the everliving fuck does he know that? We barely even used Twice thus far, there is no way he could guess it and we've checked every member of the Inner Council thoroughly, how could he…"
Being outplayed stings, eh?
"That doesn't matter right now." Ryukyu cuts in. "What matters right now is us figuring out a way to respond to Revenant's offer."
That's a substantial amount of venom in the last word. It's about as powerless as the NVA when it doesn't face completely surprised heroes and police-officers. The Marukane Ward is going to be the first serious frontal clash between the vigilantes and the heroes, and it might very well be the last one.
Soga Kugisaki is so done with these people.
But it seems like they are heading in the right direction, just really slowly.
Alright, let's continue and hope for the best.
"Crawler offered Midoriya proper guarantees if it comes to pass." Kugisaki adds. "We need to get Twice there, he will make copies of Revenant's executives plus some, then Cloud will warp them to Marukane Ward."
"Firestorm is going to shit bricks." Ryukyu comments dryly.
"Make her remember that the visitors are clones and that there is nothing to kill." Kugisaki replies. "And pray that Midoriya isn't insane and he won't bring the second Arch-Arsonist."
The chances for that are small, but not zero. And if his past experiences with the Mad Flame are anything to go by, she will default to murder when Shoto Todoroki enters her line of sight. Even Midoriya is a solid 50/50 on murder and not murder.
"Bold of you to assume that Firestorm will be anywhere close to the negotiation table." Nakahara shoots back dryly. "Expletives and murder threats aren't exactly a good way of breaking the ice."
Well, looks like Soga Kugisaki wasn't good at breaking the ice, then. Because he'd really love to do this to at least some members of the NVA. And probably all members of the PLF. Alas, here they are.
(***)
The Naruhata Vigilantes representative leaves the room a few minutes later. Leaving Ryukyu, Gang Orca and Spyglass alone.
"We're boned, aren't we?" Gang Orca states calmly.
"If Invincible shows up, yeah." Ryukyu replies. "That man is a monster on the battlefield. We had our clones engage him in combat when Ayako wanted to get a gauge on his actual strength and he ended us both in twelve fucking seconds."
Twice-made clones couldn't survive broken bones. Any actual impact damage enough to damage (they didn't have to even break in full) was even enough to dispel them. They were at a fraction of combat ability of the originals.
However, it was durability that mattered. More durable originals meant more durable clones. And Invincible ended them both.
Also, the durability ratio meant little considering the fact that he tore Ryukyu's head off. In her dragon form. There was a fair chance that the actual fight would end similarly quickly. And that, yeah, none of them wanted to try it again.
The shittest part was the fact that the memories of the clones were uploaded to the original was what they didn't expect Revenant to know. Because it's what allowed Hokkaido to progress so quickly.
Being able to effectively be in two or three places at the same time was a massive asset.
The real question they all had was whether Midoriya knew about fucking Hokkaido. Because that was going to be Ayako Nakahara's final gambit. Her last shot at winning against Saiko Intelli.
Thus far, Mindscape seemed to not know a thing.
Thus far.
"What's the plan for the day?" Ryukyu asks, finally interrupting the silence.
"Revenant is most likely planning to betray us." Ayako Nakahara replies. She has no doubts about it. She might have regretted what happened to Izuku Midoriya and believed that Analyst would be a good hero, but Revenant… Revenant clearly chose his side. "We should be able to turn the trap against him if we deploy Lockdown."
"Accepted." Ryukyu replaces after glancing at Gang Orca and getting a nod out of him. "Lockdown's kinda pointless right now, after Revenant squashed out the Fast Response Unit, either way."
This should help them gauge the infiltration level.
Because Lockdown could only truly work once. After that, the government would take precautions.
And Nakahara wanted zero risks involved with that particular plan, just as she didn't want any with Hokkaido. What the majority of the council knew about it was only the fact that something was brewing there, but… Hokkaido was a big island.
She also didn't want Crawler to find out, because he might have as well demanded her to be transferred to the Naruhata Vigilantes.
Instead, Lockdown stayed comfortably anonymous.
If Midoriya knew about her too, they could as well just shoot themselves in the head. Because then the Alliance had no secrets, Hokkaido was going to be outed and everything they tried to achieve for years was a lost cause.
"Lockdown can keep them boxed, which should catch them off-guard and allow us a few good hits in." Nakahara replies. "The thing is that unless I know the details of the supposed joint deployment…" Oh, how venomous she sounds about it. "... I can't tell you more. But I can provide you with the list of PLF members that will be a priority target."
"Good, do it." Ryukyu replies. "I assume that whether we go with that or not depends on the situation on the battlefield."
Ah, so that's what they are going on about.
"In short…" Nakahara looks at Ryukyu. "...we're going to attempt to eliminate PLF as an organization for as long as it won't ruin our chances of retreating from the Ward and if it won't make our organizations eliminate each other, while the Government is still there."
"That's the orders, yes." Ryukyu replies. "If Invincible appears, he takes priority. If we take him down and are still in a position to engage Paranormal Liberation Front members and eliminate the key ones among them, we will. Otherwise, we focus on the successful retreat in order to preserve our forces, using Lockdown if needs be.
"What if Invincible is out, but we fail to cause significant casualties to the other SS-Rank Heroes?" Spyglass asks back. She needs to know the orders in detail to be able to craft the best way of achieving their stated goals.
"Invincible is the target." Ryukyu replies calmly. "The rest doesn't matter. Without their third superweapon and their precious Symbol of Hope, the Government is going to start the process of its collapse. The rest of the heroes do not matter. Yes, even Intelli."
… Spyglass doesn't like hearing that. She has a major feud with Saiko Intelli, and she truly and surely wants to have it settled. In blood.
"... you can consider her a secondary objective." Ryukyu decides to amend the situation. "She's the second most dangerous of the heroes after Invincible. If the Prime Minister sends her as a field commander, feel free to find a way to eliminate her, for as long as it doesn't endanger the NVA and the plan to take down Invincible. Understood?"
"Yes." Spyglass nods. "Orders received. I don't think I can tell you a lot more without knowing what the Revenant's plans for the day are, though. Organizing the meeting comes first. If it's really going to happen tomorrow, it's going to be…"
"... a rushed job." Ryukyu sighs, while Gang Orca nods. "Not the first time, not the last. Defeat isn't an option."
It never was.
Days until the Second Battle of the Marukane Ward:
12