Chapter 146: Siege of Iztiliana

Chapter 146: Siege of Iztiliana

Izumi doggedly fought through her mental exhaustion as she continued dogfighting over the skies of an alien world. As arguably the heaviest hitting fliers that had come through the Gate to the world of Ziltmach, she and the YoRHa B-Series combat androids had been pressed into service as the main aerial asset for an assault force shortly after they’d truly secured their base camp. That action, the securing of Alpha Base, had itself been a three-day hell slog as the Empire threw everything they could move quickly at the beachhead, in a desperate attempt to dislodge it. The other two prongs of the initial invasion, pushed through captured Greater Gates, had eventually been forced back. That was something which had been planned for all along, and they’d admittedly held far longer than anyone expected. Yet, their eventually defeat still meant that the pressure on Alpha Base had only increased once those prongs had been pushed back off Ziltmach.

Despite that, those prongs holding out so long were probably the only reason they’d managed to hold Alpha Base at all.

The Terran Alliance had vastly underestimated just how fast and brutal the Empire of Kurrick would react, once they finally realized there was a serious threat on their doorstep. Apparently, despite the fact that they hadn’t had a true equal to fight for at least their last half dozen conquests, they hadn’t been incompetent enough not to have contingencies in place. Wasteful teleport arrays that burned QE like crazy had been employed to rapidly reinforce the nearest city to Alpha Base, and wave after wave of enemies had pushed in to try and dislodge them.

If not for the fact that the Empire had needed to send similar forces to dislodge the other two prongs, Izumi doubted they’d have been able to hold long enough to turn the tide.

As it was, enough scrambling and ramming through of every asset the Alliance could lay hands on to reinforce and expand Alpha Base had seen them through, if only by inches and fingernail holds at times. From what little contact she’d had back with Earth, she knew that there had been costs to rerouting so much material and so many Heroes to the effort. Several war fronts back on Earth had stalled or lost ground in order to keep up the stream of reinforcement to Alpha Base…but the call had been made by the higher ups that it was worth it.

Given that she, Momo, the androids, and almost fifty additional fliers were now fighting for the airspace over the City of Iztiliana, an Imperial City and major manufacturing hub, Izumi was forced to agree. More troops, including a new wave of Operator and Shieldmaiden II Mod Q mechs, American hovertanks that had been assembled on this side of the gate in a bid to bring through more heavy firepower, nearly a thousand Heroes, and over 15,000 infantry, were down on the ground. The army, and it had to be considered a full-scale Army Division at this point, if a very weirdly mixed one, was pressing the assault into the city. They’d already breached the walls and were fighting in the streets…and a surprising number of locals had starting rebelling to fight with them after the Siege had finally broken through the walls this morning.

Apparently, the Empire of Kurrick was not popular with its own people. An unexpected and possibly immensely important boon.

Not that Izumi had the brain power to work through all the implications right now. She’d been fighting nigh-continuously for days, her QE pathways aching with how many times she’d artificially refilled her QE reserves. Part of the reason she was no longer helping groundside at all, was because she wasn’t at all certain she could remain upright without the Flight Unit taking most of the strain. Even 2B was the next-best-thing to offline, doing nothing but running the Flight Unit, in order to minimize the strain on Izumi.

They had to hold.

If they failed here, there might not be another chance.

Air assets were the one area in which the Terran Alliance was horribly on the back foot. Local partisans had done something to destroy the teleport arrays, meaning the Empire could no longer bring additional ground units into Iztiliana quickly. Air assets were another story, unfortunately. The Empire having plenty of elite air units that moved fast enough to keep coming in a stream of living waves form hell.

Something readily in evidence as Izumi barely dodged a flaming sword strike from something that looked like a literal flying demon. The bloody thing was nearly as big as an Ogre, faster, and tough enough to shrug off missile fire. It was just one of a several dozen Elites that had arrived in the latest air wave, to be met by increasingly exhausted screening units. Their drones were long gone, a paltry few still showing up in bursts when Alpha Base could get more of them online. Now it was just her, the androids, and every flight-capable Hero that could be pulled from a dozen fronts and pushed into the meat grinder.

Gritting her teeth as she pushed through the agony of activating ‘Berserk’ for bare heartbeats, Izumi managed a slash with a briefly-formed spear that took down the flying ‘demon,’ then came to a panting stop as she looked for more enemies…

…and didn’t find any.

Confused for painfully long moments, it was only when she looked down at the city and saw the new Terran Alliance flags raised over the city center that she realized what had happened. They had taken the city. The Siege of Iztiliana was over, and the Empire had stopped throwing waves of airborne enemies at them in an attempt to change that outcome. Too exhausted to cheer at one of the most important victories of the war so far, Izumi barely managed to land before passing out…

… … …

When Izumi finally woke again, it was slow. Such a thing was so alien to her, slow awakenings not having been a thing since she was perhaps seven, that she wondered for a seemingly indeterminate amount of time if she’d been drugged. Finally, as her brain began to clear and the dull ache of her QE pathways informed her that reality was demanding she pay for her hubris, she realized that she was…drowsy. The faint smell of coffee, something she secretly liked but knew Momo hated and thus usually avoided, filled her nose as someone held a cup near her. Half-blindly reaching for it, her vision began to clear as well as she took her first sip.

She’d love to overdramatically pretend the first sip of coffee caused her to wake fully, but that would be a complete and utter lie she couldn’t sell to a blind man with a straight face.

Instead, it took her an unknown amount of time and half the large cup of coffee before she even processed that it was a worried-looking Kyoka who’d handed it to her. For long moments, even that bit of information only got a thought from her that ‘Oh, that makes sense, Kyoka is a heathen like me that prefers coffee over tea, despite Momo’s best efforts to convert us.’ Only another minute, and another quarter of the cup, finally got the neurons of her brain making enough connections to wonder why and how Jirou was here. Or if Izumi herself was even where she’d thought she was.

A quick check of the Wi-Fi proved that she very much wasn’t.

Instead of being at Alpha Base, or in some field infirmary in the newly captured city, she was back in Japan. Her eyes shot open wide, a jolt of adrenaline surging through her as she finally checked her system clock…and realized it was almost ten days after the Siege of Iztiliana had concluded! What the fuck, what had happened?! Why was she just waking up! What was that beeping nois—

“Ow!”

The firm smack to her forehead, delivered by a cane shaped like a needle, hadn’t really hurt. But it had certainly gotten Izumi’s attention and forced the reflexive exclamation. That attention was drawn up the point of the cane, to the scowling face of Recovery Girl, who looking a well-preserved 45 these days. She only dropped the cane out of ready ‘idiot whacking position’ once she was sure she had Izumi’s undivided attention.

“Calm down or I find a way to knock you out again, even if will be hard now that your Quirk is starting to properly recover.”

Izumi’s brain spun with questions, and apparently the exasperated healer could see them.

“Fool girl, you nearly managed to burn your Quirk out. If not for how strong your regeneration is, you’d probably have permanently crippled it with the stunt you pulled, fighting for days while constantly injecting yourself with stored QE. As it is, it’s taken your body nearly ten days to restore you far enough to wake up, and if you even try to use your Quirk for another five, I will personally design a drug just for you to keep you unconscious! No Quirk usage! The passive stuff is fine, but don’t even think about even accessing your digital storage, let alone fighting!”

Izumi gaped, not even sure how to process all of that, despite the fact her brain was mostly working again. Her self-diagnostics, which were thankfully ‘passive,’ were reporting…alarming things. Instinctively, she nodded at the healer, who was still glaring at her, and Recovery Girl gave her one last evil eye before hmphing and striding off.

“Well, that went surprisingly well. I was sure she was going to strap you down and shove needles in you for being stupid.”

Kyoka’s voice was so deadpan and dry that Izumi, despite still being a bit dazed, couldn’t help but crack a smile.

“Of course, I’d have helped hold you down if she wanted to. Seriously, Izumi, you could have fucking died if you kept fighting any longer, and taken 2B with you.”

Izumi winced, instinctive response to the first part being brutally cut off at the knees with the low-blow of pointing out 2B would have died with her. It was a truth that was, much to the exasperation of many who knew her, one of the only things that kept her from being more reckless than she already was. The fact that 2B was nearly as inherently self-sacrificial as Izumi was, and only staved off that same behavior because it would hurt Izumi, wasn’t an irony that wasn’t lost on either of them. Or, for that matter, on anyone that knew them. Finally, she croaked out a response.

“It was really that bad?”

Kyoka nodded firmly and instantly.

“Yes. They couldn’t even heal you, for fear the damage to your QE pathways would get worse from the Quirk Energy used for it. They didn’t dare use even Eri’s Quirk, since you weren’t actively dying and there’s little to no way to know what being rewound would do to a sentient Quirk. It would have required consent from both you and 2B to even try it. With that and traditional healing Quirks both out, there was literally nothing anyone could do but provide your body with plenty of fuel and hope your regeneration could hack the repairs.”

Izumi winced at that. She’d known she’d been pushing herself. But if she’d been that far gone into QE Pathway failure, then she likely really had almost killed herself. Yet…

“Did we win? I know we took the city, at the end, but…”

Her lover looked some sort of confused mix of cross and fond for a moment, before sighing.

“Yes. Iztiliana remains in Alliance hands, despite constant probes and two serious attempts by the Empire to take it back. We lost some ground on the home front in exchange, but came out on top according to the strategic experts.”

Kyoka frowned, then shrugged and continued.

“Rifts and Rift Bubble assaults have fallen by nearly a quarter world-wide, the Ogres actually retook one of their own trade cities, and there seems to be sporadic rebellions on Ziltmach. Apparently, someone succeeding in actually hurting the Empire for the first time in at least a century and a half has spurred open a lot of cracks between the ruling caste and the more recent servant species. Despite the lost ground on Earth, including a building issue with them dumping more units into our waters, the big thinkers say we managed a much bigger success than anyone expected.”

Izumi’s shoulders, painfully tense since she’d realized how long she’d been unconscious for, slumped in relief. At least it hadn’t all been for nothing, which she’d feared when she found herself waking back in Japan. The assault gate hadn’t even been in Japan, the primary counter offensive had been staged out of the United States, since the much-larger country could supply the logistics train far more comprehensively than basically anyone else.

They may not be quite the Superpower that they had been before the Quirk Wars and Era of Chaos, but the States still had one of the largest militaries on the planet. It was just more focused on its own defense now than policing the world as it once had been able to. They’d taken back far more of their own industrial production, too, after learning painful lessons during the early Quirk Wars about relying so heavily on trade. The result was that they’d been, by far, the best positioned to keep the insurgent force supplied. So finding herself on near enough the opposite side of the planet, ten days after their victory, and let horrible fear the victory had only been temporary set in.

Thankfully, that didn’t seem to be the case, even if the news wasn’t all good.

“How bad are the setbacks here on Earth?”

Kyoka sighed, looked like she wanted to protest, then clearly decided Izumi was too stubborn and it would be better just to answer her questions. Wise of her. Izumi was too stubborn. More importantly, she also still had Wi-Fi access even when restricted to just her passives.

“Here in Japan they aren’t too bad. We’ve had some issues with attacks from the water, we are an island nation after all.”

Ah, there was that delightful, dry deadpan again.

“But we were mostly prepared for it. After all, we are an island nation, after all.”

And a repeat in exactly the same tone that made Izumi crack a smile.

“So attacks from the ocean have always been what we were most prepared for on the military side. The JMSDF has been handled a bit roughly, but Endeavor managed a hell of a thing and used the enemy being distracted to capture and close the Osaka Gate. Which means no more Greater Gates within Japan at all. That, plus the Guilds finally fully hitting their stride and taking over Rift Bubble management entirely, allowed assets to be shifted to cover coastal cities. Which was enough, combined with the militias most major cities have up and running now, to blunt the issues with water assaults.”

Izumi’s eyebrows had climbed at the news that the Osaka Gate had been successfully shut down, and she nodded appreciatively at the news that the Guild System was working. It was nice to know her idea had panned out, even if she hadn’t been able to give it the personal attention she’d originally envisioned.

“And elsewhere?”

Kyoka sighed, then shrugged, taking a sip of her own coffee before answering.

“Less awesome. Africa is the worst of it. A lot of front-line units were pulled back with haste to feed into first defending Alpha Base, then into the Siege. Everyone was worried if we let the Empire breathe, we might never get another chance as they took their defenses more seriously.”

Izumi winced at that, the same thought having occurred to her early on. Apparently, she hadn’t been the only one to consider what the unexpectedly stiff resistance meant if they’d been forced back and needed to try again later, without the advantage of surprise.

“The Empire retook a big chunk of central Africa, and it’s going to be absolute hell to take it from them a second time with so many forces tied up on Ziltmach. Raiding has managed to keep them from opening any new Greater Gates there at least, though. So it’s a bit of a stalemate, really. Same for a half dozen lesser fronts. There was some lost ground in Europe and India, but nothing crippling. South America was a bit worse, since they’ve been iffier from the start, but it hasn’t degraded to another Africa situation, at least.”

Izumi nodded slowly, putting the pieces together from what she knew and what Kyoka had told her, eventually reaching the same conclusion that High Command apparently had. While it had cost more than they’d wanted and in different ways than expected, they really had come out significantly ahead overall. If Izumi was reading between the lines right, the Empire was finally starting to strain to keep so many balls in the air, with the drop in Rifts and Rift Bubbles being the strongest indicator there. That was a good sign. A great one even. A huge chunk of the reason for assaulting them ‘at home,’ as it were, had been to force strain onto their logistics pipelines. Which was apparently working.

Finishing off her own coffee, Izumi switched topics to more personal matters, asking first, of course, about where Momo was and what she was up to…