You didn't expect this, did you? An update on a monday afternoon? Ahahahaha.
It's time to finally get rid of some cliffhangers.
-Spirit
The world had almost completely frozen as an invisible bullet shot towards Hans.
Lightning crackled as Rikasakusei stepped towards him with his superhuman speed. Kirishima and Ojiro turned their heads, reaching out their hands towards Hans's slowed figure. Sero shot his tape wildly, but the two strands that he made in that short amount of time would be too slow to intercept a crossbow bolt. Yaoyorozu had begun to create a steel net that would hopefully ensnare the bolt.
All of their efforts would be too late.
As quickly as possible, Hans tried deploying whichever summons he had left. Thumbelina, being made of mostly flesh, was punctured immediately. The Tin Soldier was somewhere else, acting as a big, metal blockade against the ninja's attacks with his still mostly-invisible weapons. And none of his other tales not deployed had the durability to actually guard against the projectile.
However, Thumbelina getting punctured showed where the bolt was headed. Rikasakusei, having followed Hans's direction to run away, was… currently approximately between the invisible bolt and Hans.
Hans looked at the determined look on the reformed villain's face, and began to shout for him to stop. To not throw away his life now that he had just gained it back from the blade. That he wasn't worth it, and that the world would continue on without Hans in its intended course.
He wanted to say that he was an interloper. A factor that wasn't supposed to be there, intruding on a narrative that was never supposed to center on him.
Rikasakusei jumped… Right in front of the villain's quirk. Now, with the woman's view of Hans obscured by his large, bulky body, Hans was free to finally scramble free.
But neither of them got off scot free.
The invisible arrowhead shot through the villain's stomach, and into Hans's shoulder. Hans screamed in pain, noticing for the first time that he had collapsed right in front of a camera. His blood poured out of his body through the gaping hole, flowed up to the lens slowly and stained the view.
He staggered to his feet, pulling the crossbow bolt out with shaking hands. He wanted to scream, but he was too dizzy to feel the pain.
The curses from his readers on his spirit origin wouldn't let him die that easily. Even now, he could feel the irritating mermaid scales that grew all over his body slowly pulsing. Bringing out his tablet, he amplified the natural healing that the mystical creatures known as mermaids had, and suddenly, his wounds didn't exactly hurt anymore. It still bled slowly, but it wasn't as life threatening.
Rikasakusei, however, didn't look so good.
Hans looked at the man lying prone on the floor, his rather disfigured face and storm gray eyes staring up into nothingness. Lighting cracked across the patchwork body, as the formidable physical paragon tried to repair itself.
"I thought I told you to live, you idiot!" Hans shouted. "You saw the future that you could have had! Why would you throw it away… just for me?"
"Because without you…" Rikasakusei rasped, "There will be no future for us."
Hans stayed silent, a glint of a tear in his eyes.
"I could continue living." he continued rasping, "But without you, the day that millions of my brethren will be free will never arrive."
In dialogue that was not at all like a medieval romance, Hans continued his shouting.
"I'm just fucking worthless!" Hans cursed. "I'm a failure of a hero, a coward, and a failure as a person!"
"You're not like that." Rikasakusei said stubbornly, one hand reaching up for Hans's face shakily. "Nobody had ever spoken up for us before. Not even All Might. For us, you are…"
"Don't die, god damn it!" Hans said, pulling out his blue tablet and channeling everything into trying to heal the fallen villain.
"Our… hero…"
The villain's arm flopped back onto the ground. Slowly, his eyes shut. Hans almost ceased his efforts, but looking at the villain's throbbing chest and the crackling electricity still coursing around Rikasakusei's body, Hans realized that he was still somewhat alive.
So, he wrote. He activated his noble phantasm again with an urgency that wasn't even rivaled by the time he saved that hero Iceblade from a simple stab wound from Stain.
Because he didn't deserve anybody's martyrdom, nobody would die for him. Not today, and not ever.
…
Sero looked down at the villain that had just almost shot Hans's arm off, and basically killed the Frankenstein-looking person.
This… was terrifying. Even worse than at the USJ. They had all come out in mostly one piece during that attack, but now?
One of their number was seriously injured, and another was on the verge of death, held to the boundaries of life by whatever Hans was doing while the diminutive student was injured himself.
It was up to the first year students to fix this. Students that had barely been in class for a month… to stop two experienced villains. They were clearly a step up from the goons at the USJ, and their quirk combination was terrifying. Being slow and not being able to run out of attack ranges against invisible bladed weapons… was a quick combination for death.
Only Kirishima and Yaoyorozu could survive anything that the ninja villain did, considering the fact that none of them could see his thrown weapons, Yaoyorozu could only survive by creating armor, and Kirishima by hardening his body.
And that was just half of the problem. Because the crossbow villain's slow quirk was terrifying.
Once he and Ojiro were slowed, they would die, either via thrown knife or crossbow bolt.
Then why was Ojiro still down there?
As Sero futilely shot tape towards the crossbow woman in order to restrain her, she slid out of the way while firing at Hans, still wholly engrossed in the typing that was somehow healing the villain's wounds. Ojiro threw up Kirishima with his tail, and the walking wall deflected the shot with more of his sloped armor.
"Just quit, kids." the ninja said. "We'll finish off those two and just be on our way."
"No way!" Kirishima shouted hotheadedly, being pulled back into the battle by Yaoyorozu's grappling hook after he was thrown. "Abandoning Hans and defendant-san would just be unmanly!"
Yaoyorozu chose this opportunity to throw two glass bottles into the air, each filled with a suspicious liquid and tipped with a bit of cloth. The crossbow woman shot a bolt at the improvised molotov cocktails, shattering them both once they lined up in their sights in front of the crossbow.
"You just made a great mistake, girl." she said. The words were menacing, but the tone was not. "We'll be forced to take you out as collateral as well."
"Are you sure about that?" Yaoyorozu said. "Check your crossbow."
"A little alcohol from your Molotovs won't do anything!" the crossbow woman said, grabbing another invisible bolt and aiming it at Yaoyorozu. She pulled back the string, but-
Snap
With a noise that reminded Sero of a violin string or a particularly taut line of tape breaking, the crossbow string… had snapped.
"It took me a while to remember." Yaoyorozu said, smirking coldly, "But peracetic acid is great at making steel rust. Most crossbows have steel strings as well, so my gamble was right."
"Now…" Ojiro said, growling in determination. "We'll take you all down!"
"Slow the girl!" the ninja commanded. "We don't need her throwing more things and rusting over all of our weapons."
Thinking quickly, the crossbow woman abandoned her now broken weapon and pointed both fingers at separate targets. One? At Kirishima, who was threatening with his invulnerability and strength. The other? At Yaoyorozu, who was a threat that could disassemble their quirk combination. The glass ball filled with paint that Yaoyorozu was about to throw clattered onto the floor and broke into shards of glass mixed with red.
"She's trying to make your weapons visible!" the crossbow woman shouted. "Watch out for projectiles."
"It's them that should be worrying, now that the girl can't throw anything." The ninja said, trying to circle around the group to throw a knife at Hans. Sero, snapping out of his shock at the sudden situational turn around, reacted much too late to try and intercept with tape.
Ojiro, however, was swift in his response. Picking up Kirishima by the neck with his tail, he swung his fellow hardened student like a movable wall. One knife stabbed into Ojiro's tail, but the other made a dull thunk on Kirishima's skin and clattered onto the ground.
Thinking fast, Sero screened off one half of the room in a practiced motion that really, really strained his elbows. Then, for good measure, he did so for the right side of the room as well.
But as he continued to snipe at the woman with the tape, he couldn't help but feel… empty.
Those three…
He didn't look down on any of his fellow students. Yaoyorozu being exceptional, he could understand. She was the first in the quirk assessment test, after all. Kirishima was tough, and a formidable opponent.
But how was Ojiro, a person that just had a tail for a quirk, being more useful than Sero, somebody that had a convenient adhesive quirk?
As he shouted to pump himself up and emptied his tape dispensers at the villain duo, the crossbow woman decided to switch her slowing quirk to target Ojiro, because him using Kirishima as a weapon was simply too annoying.
Now, Kirishima was the one free, though not any less formidable. After Kirishima handed Ojiro a curtain of chainmail to block projectiles, he went into the two on one battle with the skill of a martial arts master and the durability of a rock.
"Slow him down, Honey Jar!" the ninja shouted, constantly backing away from Kirishima's blows as his katana skidded uselessly off of Kirishima's skin.
"Do you want the tail boy to attack using him, then?" the crossbow woman said, dodging Sero's endless barrage of tape all the while.
Slowly, the villains grew more and more desperate as Kirishima pursued them with dogged determination. But something was going to give out… and that was Sero's tape reserves.
Having been firing off tape almost nonstop for the past minute, and also having created the barriers that separated the two halves of the room, Sero was almost running on empty. Slowly, he used his tape more cautiously, giving the crossbow woman breathing room that made Sero's heart start beating in his throat.
Then, the crossbow woman made her move. Bringing out several crossbow bolts, she stood still for one moment while lining up a throw, all the while pointing at least one finger from each hand at either Yaoyorozu or Ojiro.
Promptly, the dart was thrown at Yaoyorozu's leg, the one patch of bare skin that wasn't covered by chainmail…
Only for a drone to pop out of her leg and intercept it. The mess of circuitry fell to the ground, being the incomplete
"A drone?" the woman said incredulously. "What are you going to do with it?"
Yaoyorozu's slowed movements parted her arms and revealed what looked like a long, paper strip filled with holes coming out of an old card reader secured by a steel band to her upper arm, which had a weird double-sided USB protruding out of it.
"Since I'm limited to using punch cards to program these drones, all they are programmed to do is go forward." Yaoyorozu said, more drones popping out of her limbs. With quirk-induced slowness, she put the one made in her left hand up to the USB and plugged the USB into the port, and after a couple of seconds, the drone hovered into the air and flew into the wall of the court, where it crashed and broke its propellers.
"And?" the ninja wheezed, wall-jumping out of a tough spot after Kirishima had finally punched him into a corner.
"The next one will carry an anti tank shell, which will explode on impact with the ground or the walls." Yaoyorozu said coldly. "Surrender now, and I won't annihilate the building and render you all with puncture wounds from all the shrapnel."
"You don't have the guts to do it." the woman said, crossbow bolts still in her hand.
"You shot Hans in the shoulder, aiming for a kill." she said coldly. "I'm only saying this because I don't want to kill you both. There is still the need to interrogate you to determine who your real employers are."
"Stop with the nonsense!" the woman shouted, winding back her arms to throw her crossbow belts. Released from the hold of the quirk, Ojiro quickly threw his sheet of chainmail at the woman while Yaoyorozu created two more drones carrying anti-tank shells and gingerly uploaded the code from the USB, before letting them zip towards the walls.
As two bolts hit Ojiro's chainmail sheet, making the curtain-like structure ripple like water, Yaoyorozu began to run backwards.
"Brace!" she yelled. Kirishima hardened and shielded his eyes as Ojiro sprang backwards, wrapping himself in the chainmail sheet.
With a fiery explosion that Sero had only seen rivaled by Bakugo's gauntlet grenades, the walls were annihilated in a bright flash of white. Quickly averting his eyes, he saw the ninja villain effortlessly slice through the tape barrier, having abandoned his comrade to brave the explosion herself.
The single-layered tape barrier that was Sero's best effort.
The ninja stepped through the barrier while a chunk of flying concrete stabbed through his thigh and a piece of rebar impaled his foot. As Kirishima ran to stop the villain from making it to Hans, a yellow-and-red flash came into the room from the now exposed sky and knocked an invisible knife out of the air with a slash of a swordlike object.
"I'm sorry I'm late." the number three hero, Hawks, said.
Sero felt stunned, hanging from the crumbling ceiling and looking at Hawks's confident smile.
Even though he had survived unscathed, there was a lingering sense of inadequacy that remained. It was his failure that the ninja villain had gotten past the weak tape barrier. It was his fault that he couldn't restrain the crossbow woman.
Suddenly, talking down on Hans and his associates, who he had seen as unheroic and whiny, felt hypocritical.
Because while they went above and beyond their roles, what was he doing? As he fell, he sighed. Why did thinking about it like that make him feel so… defeated?
Wait, fell?
Sero had to be brought out via fireman carry.
…
In the end, when the tape barrier was broken down and the villains had been restrained (and given emergency medical care), the first responders finally reached Hans.
As the media flooded the broken-down courtroom and began to take frantic pictures of the injured students and the courtroom before anybody could shoo them out, Hans was glowing gold at that point. A shimmery gold powder slowly floated away into the blue sky as he gritted his teeth, bled from his shoulder wound, and kept Rikasakusei alive.
"It's alright, kid." Hawks said, a glint of… something in his eyes. His grip tightened on his feather sword for a second, before it loosened. "The fight's over."
"I can't repair organs on the fly." Hans said, still frantically typing things that vaguely resemble sentences describing healing processes. "And I'll be out of energy soon. Is another person with a healing quirk here, or…"
"The hospital is the best choice, kid." Hawks said. "The ambulance is already here. Stop before you suffer quirk exhaustion."
"Do you want him to die?" Hans said, narrowing his eyes and looking at Hawks.
"Of course not." Hawks said. "It's just that… sometimes, it's too late to do anything for some people. He should have died a long time ago."
"...Fine, then. Take me to the hospital with him." Hans said stubbornly, looking at Rikasakusei slowly slipping from life.
…
"Fourteen of the villains are dead." one of the board members said to the present. "One in critical condition."
"And will they survive?"
"We can't influence the healthcare system." the board member said. "But with all of the villain attacks that we sparked today, most doctors should be treating wounds. Today will go down as a second attack by the League of Villains."
"How many of our operatives were captured?"
"Airslash and Honey Jar were captured at the courtroom. Poison Dart was not captured at the police station, and was able to escape undetected. Apart from that, from the street disturbance crew, Whiparm, Lightning Rod, and Flint were captured.
"That's five people gone…" the president sighed. "And… the boy?"
"He's still alive. In fact, with his healing and support type quirk, he was able to keep the last villain alive. They're on the way to the hospital as we speak."
The president sighed. She didn't know if she was relieved or disappointed.
"Should we really have done this?" one of the other board members said, his sleep deprived expression finally morphing into one of concern.
"This was the only way." the president said. "Besides, we've done it to Destro and the Meta Liberation Army. Even if these sixteen don't know it, they are boosting his cause, and slowly accelerating the destruction of the Hero system and society."
"How can this Hans kid be so blind?" somebody muttered. "Without heroes and the illusion they paint, society will collapse!"
"It's a tenuous peace that we keep afloat. None of us will like what we're doing but it's what has to be done." the president said. "For now… let's hope that the villain dies, and that we can nip this court case in the bud. With any luck, the UA sports festival will wash this stuff away from the news within three weeks."
…
"He's lost too much blood already." the young doctor said, his eye buzzing with some sort of quirk energy that was giving him information. Two of his organs are pulverized, but those are a stomach and a kidney. He'll survive the organ loss."
Hans felt his vision slip in and out as everything slowly shook. He didn't know whether or not it was because of the mana loss or the blood loss.
"Get me a blood bag." he slurred.
"Injecting it into him won't do any good." the young doctor said nervously. "He has too many exposed wounds. It-"
"I said, get me a blood bag! Any type!" Hans shouted. "I'm about to run out of energy here! Do you want this person to die?"
"Get him a blood bag. The most common type." the doctor ordered. A nurse scrambled to fulfill the order.
Drinking the salty blood through a straw, Hans felt some of his mana return. His vision refocused, and he stopped glowing gold. Sighing in relief, he noted that his existence was stabilizing again.
"The lot of you, keep him alive for ten minutes." Hans said. "I'm going to pull a… super move. Yeah, that. It'll hopefully regenerate this wound."
"Y-you can do that?" the doctor asked hopefully.
"I don't know." Hans said, shrugging. Most of his healing experience only extended to healing heroic spirits, which was much easier than working with actual flesh and blood.
"But I can try."
As various tubes and people with helpful quirks tried to stall the bleeding and delay the inevitable, Hans plunged deep into his noble phantasm once again.
…
There was nothing.
Absolutely nothing there.
Contrary to Ojiro's narrative mindscape, absolutely nothing was in Rikasakusei's mindscape. Which made sense, considering the fact that he wouldn't even have been involved in the court case or do anything significant without Hans's interference.
The comatose figure within the mindscape floated in the void, illuminated by a blue ambience. His stomach was still missing.
And for a character to survive, they had to possess some sort of significance to the story. Luckily, he had a storyline… sort of on hand.
There was a servant in Chaldea, also named Frankenstein, that he had to tolerate during the London singularity, something that nobody probably remembered. However, during that time, he had gotten a pretty good picture of her barely present personality.
A homunculus created to be a partner to another, she was deemed as a failure and eventually murdered her creator. However, all she really desired was… to be a real human being.
Something that (minus the murder part) Rikasakusei could probably relate to. Looking like an abomination, and wanting to be a real human. Although Hans doubted that Rikasakusei would ever find the act of presenting dead dog intestines as a present to be proper like the Frankenstein in Chaldea did according to her lore, it was… close enough.
Quickly, he began to write. He didn't know how long he still had until Rikasakusei finally collapsed from his wounds. From nowhere, flowers began to blossom. At first, they were stray petals, but eventually, a scene not unlike when Merlin used his noble phantasm was created. The whole blank surface that Hans was standing on spontaneously sprouted white lilies, glowing ephemerally blue as they were influenced by the glow of Hans's blue tablet. The stems of the flowers began to writhe and spread, seeking any space upon which they could grow and ingraining themselves into the nothingness.
Slowly, the void was filled with piercing white, and all that Hans could do at that point was hope that the two stories were compatible enough for Rikasakusei to survive.
…
Opening his eyes, he discovered that he had replaced Rikasakusei's stomach with a bunch of pulsating white flowers.
And somehow… he was still alive.
"Oh, god…" Hans whimpered as the medical staff recoiled from the body. "What have I done?"
Then, Rikasakusei woke up and began to scream.
…
"Surprisingly, you are actually still stable." the young doctor said. "Despite the, well… vegetation growing out of your stomach."
"These are flowers?" Rikasakusei said, raising his eyebrow and looking down. "Oh fuck, they are!"
"...What were you screaming about then, sir?"
"Somehow, I dreamt about chasing somebody to the south pole and watching them… well…" Rikasakusie trailed off. "And all the while, I was wearing a dress for some reason. Is this normal for people that suffer major blood loss?"
"I… may be able to explain that." Hans said from the side, his wound now being bandaged by the various nurses swarming around the medical anomaly that the both of them were.
What type of quirk gave somebody mermaid scales? And makes flowers grow to replace organs?
…
In the holding car, the wrapped up villains were driven away slowly from the court. Eventually, it stopped on a conveniently empty street alley, before two people wearing suits stepped in.
"...Are you our dispatcher?" Airslash muttered.
"No." the man grunted. "But I was sent here by them."
"Did we do good?" Airslash wheezed, looking at Honey Jar's rather dire situation. Despite not being in danger of dying, she was utterly mangled by the shrapnel of the anti tank shell and the crumbling wall.
"No. Both targets survived."
Airslash's breath seized up. With a cough, he covered up the sounds of the dull thump of rope hitting ground, before he planned his escape.
This was not going to end well for them. He knew the nature of his work.
"You all have been deemed liabilities, and-"
Airslash shouted, jumping out with his fists and a last hidden knife, and struck for the two suited men.
He was promptly kicked to the side of the transport car, before a gun was aimed at his head.
"Goodbye. Your employment at the Association was not a fruitful investment."
Many things flashed across his mind. His fake life. His struggles of surviving and his harsh training. Every time he had done what he was told, and all of the times he had stopped himself from doing what he wanted.
Were the only people that sort of knew him the scammers he kept bothering for conversations?
Two gunshots echoed across the empty alleyway, before the other person in a suit swiped his hand and activated his quirk, causing a ravenous bunch of throbbing plant mass to rapidly devour the two corpses, before returning down the second man's sleeves.
"Leave the car before you cross a third block. It will explode."
The agent in the front seat nodded.
…
"Hey, this camera still works. It even still has its mic attached." two tabloid reporters said, kneeling down in a pool of blood besides a torn-up steel structure too deformed to be identified. Gingerly he lifted the blood-crusted camera off of the ground and tucked it into his jacket.
"Send that footage to me later, okay?"
"Hey, you two! The media isn't allowed in here! Scram!" one of the first responders shouted, waving a baton threateningly.
They quickly left the building, the only known recorded copy of the battle within their clutches.
Hopefully, that wraps up the court attack. And remember that, even after all this, Hans still has to go back to testify because he was never successfully called to the stand, and the defense side would obviously call Hans as a witness.
His pain shall never end.
Hopefully, I portrayed the new and improved trio pretty well. Yaoyorozu learned to be more creative, Kirishima learned how to fight and not just be a wall, and Ojiro learned that actually using tools probably enhances his combat capability, along with martial arts training. This was a bad matchup for Ojiro, though.
Discord link: discord . gg / 9t9MK3jHmV
TY to the discord peeps for editing literally all of the chapters of this fic. I may have forgotten to mention it a couple of times, so I'm thanking them now.
-SpiritOfErebus
PS: If you could all complain about how this story ended on a copout in the reviews to scare the people who haven't read this chapter (because now I've marked it complete as a scare) that would be great. This story isn't actually complete.