Chapter 147: Recovery
Chapter 147: Recovery
Five days after waking up in the UA medical center, Izumi was actively relieved to be sitting behind a desk for perhaps the first time in her life. Also for perhaps the first time, she didn’t feel an overwhelming drive to be back on the front lines, in the thick of it and making a difference. Even before UA, she’d always had that drive, pushing her to be better and participate in things like disaster relief efforts. That desire was, if not gone, at least quieter and more strained than it had ever been before.
Only a small part of that was due to the fact her QE pathways still ached, and she was doing to need actual, honest-to-God, physical therapy to get back up to one hundred percent.
No, the far larger part was that she was simply tired of fighting.
She wasn’t, thankfully, experiencing PTSD symptoms yet. Her body was sufficiently inhuman at this point that the physical component of that disorder couldn’t properly get a grip on her. She was, unfortunately and according to outright mandated sessions with her therapist, definitely feeling the effects of Combat Fatigue. A layman might have thought that the two terms were interchangeable, or that Combat Fatigue was, like Shell Shock, just an older term for PTSD.
That was not, in fact, the case.
It would be more accurate to say that Combat Fatigue, or ‘Combat Stress Reaction,’ as it was more properly and formally called, was a precursor to PTSD. The first sign that something was wrong. That wasn’t entirely accurate, of course. The entire branch of related trauma was too complex to boil down to simple explanations like that, even hundreds of years after they’d figured out what it was and methods to treat it. Yet it was a good enough summary to be getting on with.
She was, simply put, emotionally wrung out from all the fighting.
Well, not just the fighting. All the related stress building up to it had contributed, too.
The struggle for Iztiliana had been intense and lasted for days. The fighting for Alpha Base had been just as intense and had lasted even longer. Before that had been a brutal slog to get as many assets in place as quickly as possible for the assault in the first place. Then before that had been the months upon months of brutal work getting an orbital infrastructure set up in so impossibly little time. Not to mention all the things before that, like the MLA, the start of the invasion in the first place, All for One and his protegee…
The last two years of her life felt like an entire lifetime had passed. The idea that it had actually only been a little over twenty-two months since her first day of UA was an almost alien thought. Something that she knew to be true, objectively speaking, yet couldn’t in her heart-of-hearts really find herself able to believe. Something which made her guiltily grateful that she had been outright ordered to take it easy and perform only ‘light duty.’ As much as that was even possible, with all the things still on her an Aegis Inc’s plates, at least.
That feeling of guilt wasn’t made any lesser by the fact Momo was still on Ziltmach.
Thankfully, her lover wasn’t actively participating in combat operations there. Instead, she was serving as a 3D printer and people manager again, helping to supply electronic parts that wouldn’t survive being taken across the Gates. Doing so meant that more and more defenses could be built up around the city they’d captured, dramatically increasing their ability to hold what they’d paid so dearly for. Koyka, thankfully, had been allowed to see their mutual lover, despite not being part of the ‘military’ side of things. According to her, Momo was in better spirits than Izumi herself was, the bottomless reactor of One for All having seen her through the fighting better than Izumi’s Quirk had seen herself.
She’d still prefer Momo to be back here with her.
She could really use her Emotional Recharge Station.
Kyoka’s smaller breasts were nice enough, but faceplanting in them just didn’t have the same impact that Momo’s momos provided. Something the smaller girl readily, and a bit dreamily, agreed with. Though, to Izumi’s mild embarrassment, Kyoka had claimed Izumi’s were nearly as good. Still, despite missing her Emotional Recharge Station, she knew that wanting Momo back here with her was a selfish thought. It was one she only let herself linger on for a few moments, before getting on with the reason she was behind this desk in the first place. A desk not in space or at an Aegis Inc facility…but one in UA’s Think-Tank department.
Aquatic Countermeasure Design.
With so many groups the world over now working on designs for the space industry, which was now rapidly expanding under its own momentum rather than needing them to keep the process going, a good chunk of the UA Think Tank had been re-tasked. It was odd, in a way, to consider that she was even still part of that Think Tank, almost alien to realize that much of her previous work had been graded at some point. She and Momo had quietly passed 2nd year with top marks, in fact. It was utterly bizarre to even think about, given they’d barely been in a classroom environment beyond those first few weeks where they’d needed a grounding in proper engineering.
She supposed that helping push mankind back out into space, and doing so in such a spectacular fashion, was worth a few A+ marks on academic requirements. Apparently, some of the ‘forms’ and ‘applications’ she’d filled out had, in fact, even been ‘homework.’
Now, sitting in the UA facilities, behind a desk that was part of the Think Tank, Izumi was looking over the new task they’d been given as Third Years. In some ways, the scale was actually lesser than the massive and slightly insane undertaking that had been their space endeavors. But the team had also shrunk a bit, with the older students having graduated and been pulled into bigger Think Tanks continuing their space design work. Yet, for all the smaller team now had a slightly less complex topic in some ways, the task at hand still had serious challenges of its own.
They had, in short, been tasked with exploring possible solutions to find and fight the enemy forces that had gotten into the Earth’s oceans.
To Izumi, it was honestly a refreshing and exciting challenge, as it was one area in which the androids of 2B’s world hadn’t ever seriously delved. YoRHa androids weren’t even rated for significant water emersion, let alone fighting underwater. The Machines hadn’t been big into fighting in water either, for frankly similar reasons. While both sides had used surface ships to some degree, underwater fighting just hadn’t really been a thing. Understandable, really, when both sides of the war were made up of components that don’t exactly natively play nice with water.
It was something which meant that, for the first time in a while, Izumi couldn’t draw on any designs that were in her mental database of YoRHa’s tech. Oh, she could and would still abuse things like their better power systems, superior materials science, and so on. But the design, or even what she chose to make as a possible counter, would be entirely original! With that exciting thought sparking some actual joy amongst her tiredness, she opened up the suggested projects so far, to see what others had come up with. No use treading over ground someone else was covering, and it might spark ideas too.
It was time for some brainstorming so she could build more cool stuff!
… … …
Kyoka was pleased to see that Izumi was showing signs of life again. Her lover had been a bit…listless, in a way that she’d never seen from her before and hadn’t liked. Izumi had, even more than Momo, always been an unending font of chaotic energy and dauntless will. Seeing her laid out for ten days, recovering from a type of damage no one could heal without potentially making things worse, had been horrifying. She’d known both of her lovers had self-sacrificial streaks that they only barely reigned in, generally in order to not hurt each other, but that fact had never been made clearer before.
Which is why she’d intercepted a number of calls attempting to get Izumi back on the front lines and firmly told the Very Important People on the other ends of those calls where they could stick it.
Honestly, she might have been in trouble for that, if Nedzu hadn’t caught on and seemingly been both extremely amused and thoroughly approving. He’d taken over redirecting those requests with considerably more diplomacy than Kyoka could have ever managed, and with far less chance of Izumi catching on. He’d even sounded genuinely apologetic for not being able to do the same for Momo, though he had been the one to pull strings to get Kyoka a chance to check in on their other lover.
Thankfully, Momo was holding up better than Izumi.
Less, it had to be said, because she wasn’t stressed to the extreme, than simply because Momo was better at saying ‘no’ than Izumi was. She wasn’t great at it, but she was capable of it when she could clearly see better ways to leverage her own abilities, at least. Something which meant that she’d easily brushed off the pushes to have her back in the thick of fighting, in favor of tackling building up an industrial base on Ziltmach. More than just pumping out finished pieces, Momo had taken the task of equipping their forces on the alien world to a whole different level by directing a half-hijacked corps of engineers from the Americans into overhauling a section of that city they’d captured. The one whose name she didn’t even want to try pronouncing in her thoughts, let alone aloud, thank you very much.
Momo was in her element there, barking out orders and managing people, getting a manufacturing line set up. One that could produce critical components that couldn’t be brought across the Gate without being damaged by the crossing. Already, Iztiliana was producing the missing pieces required for secure military comms, and would soon be producing components for basic vehicles and drones. Barebones versions, of course, but enough to have the Terran Alliance military excited at getting access to a steady supply of familiar options on the enemy homeworld.
Honestly, once the brass had realized what she was doing, they’d gotten behind the effort and pushed, shutting down the attempts by others to get Momo back into a combat role. The result was that, despite the fact Momo was still ‘on the front lines,’ and had participated in a few defensive actions, Kyoka wasn’t too worried that she was going to get run down the same way Izumi had been. Doubly so as she hadn’t suffered the sort of backlash injury that her other lover had. Momo’s only real complaint was that she was separated from Izumi for now, which wouldn’t be a problem for a while. It wasn’t like they hadn’t ever been apart before.
Thankfully, Nedzu also appeared to have been right, again, in saying that they still needed to assigned Izumi something useful to do. The five additional days Izumi had been down healing enough to be allowed out for light duty had shown Kyoka that the dean was probably right. Her lover had gone a bit stir-crazy despite being listless, and it had been a struggle to get her to properly rest, instead of trying to remotely dive back into the various Aegis Inc projects that were still ongoing.
Working on something that was useful, without being incredibly stressful, seemed to be the piece needed to solve the conundrum. Breathing a sigh of relief at that being the case, Kyoka moved away from where she’d been snooping on her Mistress. Right, now that she’d gotten Izumi sorted out, she needed to find a new task for herself too.
Thankfully, another new system, this one created by Nedzu, provided the solution for that. Seeing how his remaining Hero Course students had been treated much like a pool of temp talent to draw from in their very non-traditional second year, the dean had formalized that idea for their third year. Now, all Kyoka had to do was access the ‘Hero Exchange’ app and flag the sort of missions she was available for, and she’d soon have a new assignment. Taking a set number of those per month was now taking the place of work study for Hero Students, and Kyoka found that it suited her just fine. It allowed her to help, while still keeping her hours flexible enough to make sure her two adorkable mistresses didn’t do themselves a mischief by being too noble and heroic for their own good.
Mentally blinking, she also noted that she should maybe spend less time around that British-themed hero that had been pulling her into a lot of investigation cases lately. Sherlock made good use of her skills, but she and her partner Watson had apparently infected Kyoka’s use of language, if she was thinking phrases like ‘do themselves a mischief’ without realizing it…