Shahryar - Yes. This, in fact, was Revenant's serious vibecheck that he really was coming for a while.
Jpx0999 - :v
TheGreatBubbaJ - Aye.
MosesArk Reborn2000 - And it's not even the end of the hero casualties :v Let's just say that the rules of the game just changed completely.
(***)
If Tsuyu Asui could ask a higher power for a miracle - and resurrecting people wasn't a possibility - she would ask for a rather simple thing.
She would ask to never have to see Izuku in the state that he entered after Yaoyorozu confirmed that not just Apocrypha, but also Hypothermia, didn't make it.
He didn't cry. She hasn't seen him cry even once since they met again, and she knew well enough that it wasn't because she made him this happy. He just… ran out of tears, years ago. Some sort of mental blockade.
Midoriya thanked Yaoyorozu for the report, and told her to focus on reorganizing the survivors and then check how much equipment did they lose. Because, yeah, they failed to evacuate everything.
There was something worrying in the look on Counterfeit's face after she heard that Songbird and Biohazard didn't make it. Tsuyu decided to not dwell on that anymore, it was Izuku's job to figure things like that. Smooth things like that.
After that talk, Midoriya walked all the way back to their quarters. Tsuyu shadowed him the whole time. She wasn't exactly hiding her presence, yet he didn't appear to realize that she was there. Or maybe he was just too busy thinking?
Tsuyu would complain about him sitting on their couch in bloodstained clothes if he didn't just lose some people close to him. Including his sister.
He just sits there, staring blankly at space. His face is so perfectly emotionless that even Tsuyu, with her emotional intelligence bordering on empathic quirk, has no idea what he thinks.
Then again, her sense of smell is a minor empathy quirk. And she doesn't like what she smells off him.
She sits next to him.
"Izu…" She speaks, but is interrupted.
She almost died, Midoriya responding on instinct. She had no idea he could be so fast, his horizontal hand swipe going after her throat before his mind caught up with his body. She barely had the time to realize what was happening before it stopped.
The look on his face morphed from surprise to sheer horror at what he almost did.
"Tsu, I'm sorry, I didn't see you and…" He freaks out. It's… probably better if he speaks. Tsuyu should be worried that he almost killed her, but she is far past caring about her own well-being.
She hugs him, strangling the words out of him.
"It's alright, ribbit." She says, hugging him with all her might. After a second or two of horrified silence, Izuku hugs her back. "I'm alright. I'm more worried about you, ribbit."
"I fucked up." Izuku replies, his voice one of a dead man. "I fucked up everything, Tsu. And now Aiko and Michiko are dead. Because of me."
What is she supposed to say? That it's not his fault? He was the commander in chief of this operation. If there was someone whose job was to prevent an outcome like this, it was Izuku Midoriya.
No matter what she says, he'll just keep blaming himself. But to not say anything… it would make him blame himself twice as much.
"It's alright, ribbit." She replies, hugging him as closely as she can. He is doing the same. Two bundles of sadness and regrets seeking comfort in each other's hands, it was a good way of describing their relationship. "You did your best. It's a war. People die."
"I… I threw a knife at her. Next to her." Izuku says quietly. "Before Trumpet died. I… we talked afterwards, but… I never apologized to Aiko and…"
"I'm sure that she forgave you, ribbit." Tsuyu replies. Aiko kept fighting the government with them. She kept following Izuku's orders. Tsuyu could still smell emotions to a degree, and Aiko wasn't angry when Izuku was around. "And she wouldn't want you to beat yourself up over it like that."
"This doesn't change the fact that I fucked up." Izuku replies, his voice still down. "Why did I attack that hospital? I could have let most of them escape and only focus on Molecular. Why did I taunt Spyglass to the face? Why did I even try to backstab them? I could have just let them go, at least people like Crawler that are actually decent. So why?!"
Tsuyu wishes that her hugs could cure pain, at least the emotional one. It would be a much better quirk than being a frog. And her family wouldn't have been targeted, too.
"Izuku, you…" She tries to speak.
"I've started acting like Entropy, haven't I?" He says bitterly. Tsuyu decides that sometimes… sometimes it's best to just let someone talk. "It feels so much easier to just vent it all out, to step on people you dislike, to not ask yourself any harder questions."
Tsuyu pulls back a little, her fingers holding the sides of his head, their eyes meeting.
"You're not Entropy, ribbit." Tsuyu announces her verdict.
"How am I different from her?" Izuku asks back.
"Can you imagine Entropy beating herself over something she did like you are doing right now, ribbit?" Tsuyu asks. She might have never met the woman in question, but she heard enough about her to know that much.
Izuku looks at her in shock for a few seconds, before chuckling bitterly.
"You're truly my emotional support frog, aren't you?" He asks.
"I'm your fiancée, ribbit." Tsuyu replies calmly. "It's a part of it."
Yeah. It works both ways. Tsuyu… wasn't sleeping well ever since their first visit to the Marukane Ward. Izuku being there for her helped a lot.
"If I slip again…" Izuku asks, but she doesn't let him finish.
"... one of us will die, ribbit." Tsuyu replies. Is she reconsidering the option of whether she can kill him or not, or does she feel like her dying would be more of a deterrent for Izuku than his own life?
She is probably right.
Izuku doesn't know what to say. So he does the rational thing and changes the subject completely.
"Does it make me a horrible person…" Izuku asks, his face still that of a corpse. "... if losing Hypothermia hurts me more than losing my sister?"
Aiko was… they were close, once. Very close. A family, still. But he fucked up. He let her go after Deika. She was still so small back then, but… she just told him that she was going to do her own thing.
Izuku fucked up. He fucked up so much. He shouldn't have let her go. But he didn't want to let her see her older brother that she looked up to so much to try to burn Japan to the ground. It's like some reverse Nana Shimura and her children's situation.
He of all people should have learned a lesson out of it.
By the time they met again… Aiko just wasn't the same person he used to know.
Tsuyu blinks at him. Being his personal therapist, she understands it almost immediately.
"You loved her, didn't you? Ribbit." Tsuyu asks. Izuku, after a few seconds, nods faintly.
"It was a romance doomed from the start." He says. Pushing those words out of his mouth hurts. He's admitting to Tsuyu something that he didn't even want to admit to himself. It was easier that way. "But… yes. And I know that she loved me too, until the end, just… it couldn't have worked."
"Why?" Tsuyu asks, before ribbiting her confusion.
"For a handful of reasons." Izuku sighs painfully. "One of them was that… she was brought up in some stupid group of quirk supremacists that Re-Destro purged after they rebelled against him. It was just quirk this, quirk that, training all the time. She never got a proper education and…"
He looks away from her. He… talking about his dead ex-girlfriend in front of his fiancée (especially one this jealous and clingy) felt… wrong. But she was letting him talk. And, to be frank, he just wanted to let it all out.
"... then, she started hanging out with people like Re-Destro, his daughter and me. People that were both extremely intelligent and well-educated." Izuku sighs. "We all tried to lift her out of her inferiority complex, but she was extremely stubborn about it. She was intelligent, just uneducated. But she refused to learn, looking down on herself and thinking it was just a waste of time for someone 'like her'."
Tsuyu blinks at him.
"Did she… break up with you because she thought she didn't deserve you, ribbit?" She asks. Straight to the point, huh.
"That was a solid ⅔ of her reasoning." Izuku replies, before sighing tiredly. "I tried to make her change her mind, but she was… too stubborn for her own good. The same thing that helped her train her meta-ability so well also ruined her life."
"And what was the remaining ⅓, ribbit?" Tsuyu asks.
"We'd have to take… steps to make sure that she couldn't get pregnant, permanently." Izuku replies calmly. "Despite her, always wanting to have children of her own. Because if we ever had made a mistake with contraceptives and she had gotten pregnant, we would have had to kill our child."
Tsuyu's eyes go wide. Yes. To her those words are the worst heresy. Izuku half-expects to get shouted at, to get slapped in the face, but… no. She speaks instead.
"Why, ribbit?" She asks, staring at Izuku with an intensity that's downright intimidating.
"Because of the Quirk Singularity." Izuku replies. Tsuyu keeps staring at him, clearly not realizing what he meant. Izuku sighs and starts speaking again. "By my current understanding of quirks, the Quirk Singularity is going to have three stages."
It's not the right moment to talk about quirk theory, but… Izuku likes talking about it. And she asked. And it hurts less when he focuses his thoughts on this subject.
"First stage are quirks too powerful for society, while still controllable by their users." Midoriya replies. "Frostfire is here. Counterfeit is here. Endeavor was here. Geten, Hypothermia's brother, was here. Most of the NVA's Four Natural Disasters are here. Get a thousand people of this level, make half of them go villain and the other half go hero, and suddenly the battles between them will collapse society as we know it. They are already being born in growing numbers, indicating that the Quirk Singularity is right around the corner."
It was only a matter of time, really. Overhaul realized it earlier than everyone else, and almost developed a cure. Almost. There was a reason why Izuku didn't cut him out of Eri's life entirely after adopting her, still supplying Chisaki with her blood.
After Overhaul died, Chronostasis became the world's one and final hope. If he doesn't develop a quirk-erasing drug to depower singularity quirks before Mankind as a species hits the Singularity…
"Stage two singularity quirks are those that are too powerful for their users." Midoriya continues. "Dabi was here. Twice's here, probably, if his recurrent identity disorders are anything to go by." How many clones could he do, again? He was always half-assing it, not wanting to worsen his mental issues. "And so was Hypothermia."
"She had no problems with her quirk, ribbit?" Tsuyu interjects, clearly surprised. Izuku chuckles.
"Michiko was an exception among her kind, with a completely impeccable control over her meta-ability." Izuku replies. "She could have killed herself a thousand times with improper handling of her quirk, accidentally freezing herself to death in an instant. She weaponized that effect to kill Redirect… and herself." Don't think about it. Don't. "Now, a question to you, Tsu."
He looks at her, with all the sadness on his face that he can muster, before speaking.
"What sort of quirk would our children have… if their quirk was a mixture of our own, like what Todoroki has?" Izuku says, Tsuyu's eyes going wide in realization. "Stage three singularity quirks, Tsu. Quirks too powerful for the world. If the child inherited the control factor of Mastery, it might have been alright, if you excluded the part where they could as well be physical gods that could beat All for One and All Might at once. But if they only inherited the output increasing part of Mastery…"
He doesn't want to imagine it. He doesn't want to imagine what's going to happen to the world and what he was ready to help happen when he had decided to attack Chronostasis lab, before discovering that Eri wasn't there. Monoma, in a way, might have saved Mankind that night. But for the purpose of this talk, he could as well say it. And never think of it again if he can help it.
"Their quirk could as well freeze all water, including those in living organisms, including that in their own organism, on its first manifestation." Midoriya says. "All water… in, say, a kilometer radius. Or a ten kilometer radius. Or a hundred kilometer radius. And if we were in Tokyo when it would happen, environmental and climate damage would be the smallest of our problems."
And that's if Mastery's overbearing activity (the whole 'killing the host if used as intended') wasn't a sign of it being a Second-Stage Singularity metaquirk. Because if two high Second-Stage quirks came together, with additional boost from Mastery's quirk-boosting nature…
Their child might have as well freeze a significant chunk of the Pacific Ocean on the day they quirk manifested. And neither Izuku nor Hypothermia were interested in producing a Final Boss for Mankind as a species.
Izuku sighs, leaning forward, away from her for a moment, covering his face in his hands. He just…
"I think I have a thing…" He says quietly. "... for doomed romances, don't I?"
Tsuyu, being herself, hugs his back from the side, not letting him sulk anymore. He really doesn't deserve her, does he?
"It's not your fault, Izuku." Tsuyu states, before ribbiting loudly. He can read her ribbits enough to know that she is completely certain of what she just said. "We'll finish the war for them and for Eri. Soma-chan and Aiko would have wanted it, either way."
Soma-chan? Someone scored some brownie points with Tsuyu due to being completely supportive of their relationship, despite loving Midoriya deeply. Perhaps because of it.
Izuku decides to forget about what he'll have to do next, and just stays on the couch with Tsuyu. Yaoyorozu and Mastermind (plus the surviving executives) will keep the PLF working in his absence.
His next move is going to be a tad bit unpleasant, especially right after he admitted to going a bit too far in his pursuit of victory.
(***)
It took Saiko Intelli almost seven hours after the battle ended to return to her hero agency, the command of the clean-up operation delegated to the commander of the JSDF reinforcements that arrived at the battlefield way too late to change anything.
Mindscape herself was numb. She could have stayed, helping with the logistical side of the whole mess, with making sure that as many soldiers and heroes would get proper medical help as soon as possible, but… she just couldn't.
"I…" She says quietly, sitting on her couch, the back of her head lying on the top of the backrest, her eyes on the ceiling. "... I think I'll never look at ice the same way."
"Big mood." Lemillion deadpans. He is sitting right next to her on the couch, mirroring her position perfectly. Didn't he have his own hero agency to live through his newly found ice-related trauma in?
Why is he here? It'll start some gossip. The fact that both of them are the only SS-Rank survivors out of the Marukane Ward (if you exclude Invincible, but that man was an SSS-Rank in all but name) didn't change a lot.
That's no place to do a debrief.
"Can you believe that when Airhammer was about to blast me to death, my almost-a-last-thought was 'damn it, I should have grabbed Mirio and settled overseas instead of dealing with this bullshit'?" Saiko asks, her eyes still on the ceiling. "I swear to god, I was almost at the point of figuring out the names for the children we would have when someone diverted his attention."
Lemillion actually raises his head, enough to give her a surprised look. She looks bad, looking supremely exhausted. Mirio then returns to his earlier position, before speaking again.
"My thoughts when I saw a goddamn meteor falling towards me were more akin to 'I wish that I didn't meet Saiko…" This time it's Saiko that looks at Mirio in shock. "... because she's going to be really goddamn sad after I die here'."
Awwww.
"Romantic idiots, both of us." Saiko sighs, her head returning to the top of the backrest. "I feel tempted to flee overseas right now, you know? That's it, Spyglass and Revenant just murdered the country, and it might be the last moment to…"
The phone rings. It's probably the Prime Minister. Jesus Christ on a donkey, get a hint you stupid bitch.
Against herself, Intelli stands up from her couch, makes the 'shhh' gesture to Lemillion before approaching her phone and picking it up. Although she sets it to the loudspeakers.
"MINDSCAPE, WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?!" The Prime Minister screams. "IT WAS A SIMPLE OPERATION, HOW COULD YOU…"
Lemillion is looking at her, probably seeing how close she is to getting a brain hemorrhage out of sheer fucking anger. But in the meantime, she's holding it in.
"You decided to make a high risk high reward bet." Intelli replies calmly, cutting the Prime Minister's rant in half. "Turns out that it was too risky, and everything went to hell. That's all. We have to activate the Citadel plan, Variant Red. Now."
That actually made it sound like it choked the fury out of the Prime Minister for a moment. Yay. Mindscape is too mentally exhausted to give a fuck.
"What?" The Prime Minister asks, her voice actually calm all of a sudden.
"The Citadel Plan includes repositioning most of the JSDF forces, riot police units and the pro-heroes deemed as most loyal to the government…" Intelli narrates calmly, mostly for Lemillion. "To a network of heavily fortified bases spread throughout the territory of Japan, especially near major cities." Lemillion blinks at her in shock from her couch. "Each of them is capable of resisting all conventional attacks, and includes warp scramblers. Not to mention being connected with a network of warpgates established by the HPSC' second warper, so that they can reinforce each other in a matter of minutes."
Shame that Spider's quirk worked by establishing a network of locations, that he had to be in to add them to the system. They couldn't restore the FRU with him. His only redeeming feature was that the warp scramblers didn't influence his already open warpgates.
"We have to move everyone, everyone to the Citadel bases before it starts." Intelli adds. "And to this end, you have to activate Variant Red of the plan. Now."
"Are you insane?!" The Prime Minister is back to being unhinged. "It'll be seen as us abandoning cities if we suddenly pull the majority of heroes out of them! And what the hell is supposed to start?"
"The regular civil war." Intelli replies calmly. "The one that will make the First Paranormal Liberation War look like a group of children fighting in a sandpit."
"What?" The Prime Minister asks. Lemillion, for the first time ever (probably) is in agreement with her.
"People were arming and training themselves everywhere ever since Revenant's call to arms during the Revival Celebration." Intelli replies. "The dissent against the government was there the whole time, especially among the discriminated groups, but not only them. It's just that we looked undefeatable, so it stayed just like that. Revenant, however, continued to one-sidedly pummel us for weeks, weakening our image. We've switched propaganda to focus on SS-Rank Heroes and Invincible especially, against my advice, as our solution to the problem. Except Revenant and Spyglass just killed half of the SS-Rankers and defeated Invincible. At the same time."
The Undefeated Hero just died. Yes, he killed a lot of high ranking villains. Yes, he wasn't even injured. But to the people of Japan? He, the last pillar of the government after the FRU and the Sword of Damocles, just fell. He was no longer the unstoppable force of nature the people of Japan trusted.
Invincible no longer felt worthy of his hero name after Marukane Ward.
"We have to move as many of our assets to the Citadel bases to avoid the NVA, PLF, Entropy's remnants and who knows who fucking else from destroying the outlying garrisons and arming themselves with captured weaponry." Intelli is too tired to be properly surprised by Blindside's revelations. "We have to act now."
"You're overreacting due to exhaustion after Marukane Ward." The Prime Minister retorts, Intelli somehow getting even more angry. "The only sign of unrest is what's happening in Hokkaido, but we're already arresting the members of that conspiracy and…" Oh, yeah, she read the reports about it on the way here.
"We're not." Intelli cuts in again, too tired to care.
"What?" The Prime Minister asks. She clearly wasn't used to being interrupted like that.
"According to my analysis on the situation, it's not the loyalists that are arresting the traitors, but the traitors that are arresting loyalists." Intelli replies calmly. "Someone, most likely Spyglass, was steadily converting the officer corps of the Hokkaido' JSDF units, police higher-ups and notable local heroes to her cause for months, in perfect conspiracy, while our attention was focused on the mainland. Now that we're reeling from the blow, they must have decided to act. Madam Prime Minister…" Intelli sighs. "...we've just lost Hokkaido. And if I managed to correctly predict the American reaction to Star and Stripe kicking the bucket during an unsanctioned operation on our territory that we initiated, Okinawa and Senkaku Islands."
Silence on the other side of the call.
"We have to move what's left from our Navy after Shikoku to blockade Hokkaido and stop the NVA forces from crossing over to the mainland and inciting their revolution there." Intelli continues. "We have to…"
"No." The Prime Minister cuts in. "The answer is no. I'm tired of your defeatism. I'm tired of tolerating enemies in our midst. We let Revenant be born by letting a quirkless son of a villain into a hero school, and we've let Nejire backstab us like that because we haven't forced Lemillion and his entire 'faction' to retire or just flat out arrested them when we had the chance. This is going to change right now."
Lemillion's eyes grow wider in the background, just as Saiko Intelli finally has enough.
"You stupid, fucking, prejudiced bitch." Intelli says, her voice dripping with venom.
"... what did you just say?" The Prime Minister replies a few seconds later. There is no anger in her voice, just shock and disbelief.
"That 'quirkless son of a villain', for your information, was never quirkless. He was also a biological son of All Might, if Sir Nighteye's archives are anything to go by." Intelli replies. "You created the biggest threat to the existence of Japan because you acted out of your personal prejudice and bigotry caused by the fact that kids bullied you for quirklessness before your quirk came in late, and the quirkless remind you of your little trauma. Also, seeing as the mother of the first Eclipse was your distant cousin, and yes, I know about it, you are the last person to talk about someone's biological connections to villains, you goddamn hypocrite. Consider this talk to be my official resignation. Go burn in hell right next to All for One, you two deserve each other."
The call is over, Saiko looking at Lemillion quietly over the phone, not sure what to say.
"That was the hottest thing I ever saw you doing, and yes, I include that surprisingly skillful pole dance in my home into the list." Mirio admits quietly. "What's your plan for the next, say, seventy two hours?"
She doesn't have a lot of options here. In 72h the civil war is going to be in full-swing, and neutrality for someone like her will no longer be an option.
"We already have on-going anti-government revolutions run by villains and vigilantes." Intelli replies calmly. "Don't you think that heroes are missing out on the fun?"
Deep inside, she fears. She fears that Lemillion, despite the Prime Minister all but announcing that she was going to arrest him or demote him, will say no and she'll stay very, very alone. But… she isn't the only person who has enough of it.
"I've spent years protecting the careers of those few heroes that still cared about the quirkless, about the complex mutants and about the people with quote unquote villain quirks." Lemillion replies while standing up from the couch. "Making sure that something of All Might's legacy remained in the business. Hoping that one day we'd be numerous enough for the dictatorship to fade away without another civil war with who knows how many victims. Because the first one taught me that even a rotten peace is better than a civil war. But guess what?" Their eyes meet. "I think that I know a lot of heroes with a grudge against the government. And I know that plans sometimes change."
Becoming a villain wasn't what Saiko Intelli expected to do today, but hey, it's as Lemillion said. Plans sometimes change.
(***)
Later, the same evening, Izuku enters the cell in the Overlook, Molecular chained to the chair, a complicated contraption keeping her hands from touching anything.
She is a quite beautiful young woman, built like Momo Yaoyorozu but with blonde hair, wearing a white bodysuit with some carefully planted red crosses. She was a healer, chief among all.
She was all glaring hatefully at Midoriya. Yeah, Aya Kuwahara saw Izuku Midoriya commit a regular war crime, no wonder she hates him.
"I knew where your quirk came from the second I saw you save some people on live television." Midoriya replies, sitting down on the chair right in front of her. "The HPSC was rather ballsy to try that. They had to use what he made, because by the time you managed to replicate the process, his blood was stale."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Kuwahara glares at him. Yeah, they didn't tell her about the details of the backstory of her quirk. One more quirkless woman led astray, and made to become a hero… with a quirk. Oh, the irony.
"You were too strong willed to lose." Midoriya says, ignoring her words. A knife carves open her bodysuit on her left leg (Molecular struggling as much as she can), Midoriya promptly injecting something into her body. The last dose of that particular temporary quirk bestowal drug. "Makes you wonder if you'll also win the rematch?"
The injection of the temporary quirk copy should aggravate the Vestige. Or, at least, that was the theory. If not then Izuku just traded something that could heal a lot of injured PLF soldiers for nothing.
"The hell are you… the hell are you…" Molecular blinks at him, her voice dying out on her. Then she has a seizure, thrashing violently in her binds, Midoriya calmly observing the spectacle. It lasts for nearly half a minute, but eventually, the SS-Rank hero stops struggling.
She then glances at Midoriya, her hateful and defiant expression gone. Instead, she looks tired, and vaguely surprised.
"I don't remember you being this old, Midoriya." She says, her voice the same but the emotions behind it completely different. Molecular then glances down at her body. "... or me having an almost disgustingly large pair of breasts. Care to elaborate on what I missed?" She then asks, her eyes back on Revenant.
"That's a long story…" Midoriya smiles faintly. It seems that it worked. "... Overhaul."
For once, the causes of saving the world and destroying Japan happen to align.