Chapter 149: Varying Perspective

Chapter 149: Varying Perspective

“Gah! I’m awake, I’m awake!”

Mina flopped around, trying to escape the ruthless tickling of Setsuna’s fingers. Given that she most certainly hadn’t been awake, snoozing facedown on the latest Raid Reports, and Set had been able to get her fingers inside her clothes…it wasn’t working well. Thankfully for Mina, Setsuna wasn’t without mercy, and let up once it looked like Mina was in danger of peeing herself. As the other girl flopped and panted, trying to recover, Set picked up the reports the pinkette had been drooling all over in her sleep.

Thankfully, they didn’t have acid burns on them at least, meaning Mina hadn’t been having nightmares this time. She’d just been, justifiably, exhausted. Taking over management of all Rift Bubbles in Japan had been hell, even before recent events had caused Mina to start losing sleep. Even if the total number of Bubbles had dropped, once the enemy realized that Japan specifically was a target of significant importance for its mech factories and spaceport, every Rift Bubble that did hit the island became more intense. They’d taken actual losses, mostly among the soldiers, but a few of their fellow students and other heroes hadn’t made it.

Mina’s recent nightmares were the understandable result of the recent loss of Kirishima. Which, given they’d finally gotten over their obliviousness to each other and had started dating, had hit her harder than any of the other deaths on a personal level. Enough so that Setsuna had needed to pull Mina off the actual combat rotation for a while, sticking her with managing some of the Guild details. The fact Mina had barely protested wasn’t a great sign. Unfortunately, what she was reading from the Raid Reports she’d picked up was an even worse sign, given it wasn’t something Mina should have been bothering with. She tapped an intercom key that wasn’t really an intercom, so much as it was a direct and constantly-open call to a specific android.

“6O? Why does Mina have a set of logistics paperwork for every Raid that’s been handled in the last month? Even the ones that weren’t taken by UA teams?”

6O had, much to everyone’s relief, solved the issue of central management of the Guild network by injecting herself into the process. Having formerly being 2B’s Operator, 6O apparently had a lot of experience in supporting large combat drops…as well as in handling all the background details for those sorts of operations. Combined with the advantages that all the androids, and the Operators in particular, had in multitasking, the cheerful and personable 6O had become the perfect lynchpin to glue the various Raid Teams from different parts of the country into something cohesive. She’d since been joined by two other Operator units, but as the overall person in command of the four Raid Teams now operating from UA, Setsuna always got 6O directly.

“Oh, hello Setsuna! I’m not sure! She asked for them almost six hours ago, and I didn’t see any problem with sending them! She didn’t say why she wanted them, though! You should ask her, now I’m curious too!”

Setsuna sighed. She liked 6O quite a bit, but at times her irrepressible nature and relative innocence could be a bit problematic. Admittedly, the fact she kept trying to set various Guild Heroes up with android harems or polycules was the height of entertainment though, so even the occasional moments like this were worth it.

“Thank you 6O. In the future, please check the duty log to make sure Mina’s actually supposed to be working, before you give her something like that. She’s been burying herself in work to avoid everyone, even when she’s supposed to be resting.”

Mina had recovered and was looking an odd mix of mulish and sheepish at Set’s pointed words. 6O, of course, cheerfully acknowledged the request before signing off. Suppressing another sigh, Setsuna flopped down onto the floor to sit across from her friend and coworker.

“So? What was it this time Mina?”

There was a stubborn set to Mina’s jaw as she looked away and mumbled something. Unfortunately for her, Setsuna was fluid in Mina-mumble and had detached an ear to get closer and pick up what she’d said. Enough, at least, to put the pieces together.

“You were double checking to make sure each Raid Team got the Power Armor repairs they needed?”

Mina flushed, not in embarrassment, but in reaction to knowing exactly what Setsuna was about to say. Adding more Power Armor troops to every Raid Team had been the response to Kirishima’s death. He’d died covering regular soldiers, ones without PA, against a barrage of boulders from an Ogre team that had set an ambush. He’d have been fine, if he only took the shots aimed at him, but he’d intercepted boulders meant for a entire squad of regular troops as well, and been pounded past the limits of even his Unbreakable form.

He’d been so tough that he hadn’t died immediately, pushing through to use a rocket launcher to drop a cliff on the ambushing forces. The action had been heroic to the core, ensuring not only that the ambush failed, but that every single other member of the team he’d been leading made it out. The failure of the ambush had even led to that particular Rift Bubble being brought down much faster, when the enemy hadn’t been prepared for an angry and vicious attack to come from the direction of the ambush site as the rest of the team pushed through. But the victory had been too late for Kirishima.

“Mina…I know you’ve said no, but you seriously should consider transferring to—”

“No!”

Mina’s head had whipped around, and her flush was one of anger now, an expression that looked very out of place on the pink girl’s face. Setsuna refused to flinch away from it, even as she settled to lean back against Mina’s desk.

“Okay. But if you won’t accept a transfer, then you’re still under my command, and you will be getting help. You can’t keep going like this, or you’re going to make mistakes that get other people killed.”

It was a low, nasty blow, and she felt horrible for using it, but Mina had so far refused to deal with her grief. She’d used every trick in the book to dodge the shrinks, while burying herself in work like this to avoid all her friends. All of Kirishima’s friends, given they’d had essentially the same social circle. For a moment, Mina looked mulish, but when Setsuna only leaned forward and hugged her, she collapsed. As Mina cried silently on her shoulder, Setsuna’s own face took a harsh cast.

She wouldn’t forgive the Empire for what they had done. Not now, and not in a thousand times a thousand years. If she had her way, they would burn every last monster until there wasn’t a cell of their species left, regardless of what the brass said about ‘good’ monsters helping on Ziltmach. So far as Setsuna was concerned?

The only good monster was a dead one. Too much blood had been spilled by Earth’s defenders, by her people, for it to be otherwise.

… … …

“Yes! Eat Plasma Torpedo, bitch!”

Izumi’s little victory jig might have been slightly inappropriate for watching a Froghemoth get blown into bloody chunks and have those bloody chunks promptly devoured by the plasma in question. It was a technically sentient ‘monster’ after all. One that, like many of their enemies, had been named after a fantasy equivalent. Just like those others, it didn’t quite match up to the fictional creature it was named after, but it was an elephant-sized aquatic monster with tentacles. Six instead of four, with no feet, and its eyes were properly inset in its skull in an ambush predator configuration, unlike the Dungeon and Dragons monster. The naming convention had caught on by now, however, and so a Froghemoth it had been labeled.

It had also, until now, been one of their biggest nuisances when it came to the Empire’s ocean raiding.

Prior to Izumi and the UA Think Tank getting involved, the vast majority of mundane sea defenses had been one of just two types. Traditional explosives or sonic emitters. Traditional explosives had included things like depth charges, sea mines, and traditional torpedoes. Sonic emitters, meanwhile, had been based on Quirks like Kyoka’s or Gang Orcas. Sound propagated pretty well in water, and could be weaponized, though it tended to be very short ranged and extremely hard to focus in any particular direction. This caused problems, as the only other method they’d had to fight under the waves had been aquatic Heroes, who would be put at risk of friendly fire with basically any of those methods.

One simple solution had come about from the Think Tank even before Izumi got involved, upgrading underwater melee weapons with a thermal component to make them far more deadly. Which had been great for giving better odds to those Heroes and Heroines who could fight underwater already, but it had forced them to fight in melee all the time. Nor was it a great solution for regular soldiers either. Said regular soldiers had gotten a bit of a boost by being armed with gauss weaponry that fired sufficiently defense tungsten slugs that the bullets didn’t just shatter in the water. But even those had been of strictly limited utility against bigger beasties like the Froghemoths. Creatures which, for reasons of frankly bullshit anatomy, were also virtually immune to pressure explosions.

Since they were the rough equivalent of Ogres for the enemy at sea, used as heavy units, this had presented a major issue and significant threat to their ocean borne assets.

Then Izumi came along and said, ‘if heat works, we just need ranged heat effects that aren’t impacted all that much by water.’ To her, the answer had been obvious, with plasma torches having been used for underwater welding since the pre-quirk area. Of course, creating a plasma-based torpedo still hadn’t been easy, exactly. Plasma did have the properties they needed, being able to deliver damage underwater, without having the tendency to propagate and become friendly fire. But coming up with a way to weaponize it into torpedoes had been a bit of a challenge.

One that had taken months but had just been proven definitively to work.

“Good job, Izumi! The method looks like it scales well. Everything from single-fire handheld tube versions to the shipboard weapons, they all look good. Now we just need to sort out better mass production. The plasma lances also seem to be working pretty well. Even if the range is only a dozen meters or so on those, it’s still better than pretty much anything else since they can focus in a stream over that distance.”

Izumi nodded happily at Professor Aiko, enjoying the head of the Think Tank’s praise. Almost as much as she enjoyed the fact that these designs weren’t ones that she’d need to worry about Aegis Inc producing, now that they were ready. The Think Tank had deliberately and ruthlessly kept the designs as simple as possible so that other manufacturers could make them in bulk, both in Japan and worldwide. Aegis was already overstrained as it was trying to pump out as many mechs as possible, as well as maintaining the HSN network and a double dozen other things. No one wanted to risk slowing down the production of the mech lines that were so critical to taking the war to the Empire on Ziltmach, so others would have to pick up the slack in mass manufacturing the new weapons for use here on Earth.

Still, it was satisfying to have helped fill a critical gap in their defenses. The challenge of it, without having to constantly throw herself into every battle, had helped Izumi a lot. She had occasionally needed to step in. With so many of their heavy hitters still on Ziltmach, she was one of the few who could respond quickly to salvage a situation if a battle turned completely against defenders. Yet she’d only needed to do so a handful of times over the last three months. Which had been amazing for her ability to first recover physically, having needed almost three weeks of physical therapy to fully get back up to one hundred percent, and then to recover mentally too.

She felt a lot more balanced now, even if she was desperately missing Momo. At least things were going mostly well with the war, and she still had regular access to Kyoka for headpats, cuddling, and kinky sex…

… … …

Nedzu was both having a blast and, conversely, was furiously unhappy. Such had, unfortunately, been the state of affairs almost since the start of the Invasion, of course. An extradimensional invasion of monsters from another world? That had offered an incredible challenge that stretched even his intellect! Why, without individuals like Midoriya, Yaoyorozu, Intelli, and the androids, he might even have been overwhelmed! Eventually, at least. In that sense, Nedzu was having a blast and had been since the start of the war.

He was also, however, furiously unhappy with the attrition rate his students had suffered.

He wasn’t human and, frankly, wouldn’t have cared to be. The vast majority of humans he cared for only in the sense that they were a useful species that made nice things like tea and war-crime-adjacent combat robots for him to enjoy playing with. His humans, though? The children he took into his territory and nurtured? Those humans he legitimately cared about. Albeit often to wildly different extents. He had his favorites and didn’t particularly care about the silly notion that he shouldn’t.

Unfortunately, far too many of his humans had died since the Invasion started.

The most recent loses had been Kirishima and Shoda. The latter hadn’t been a favorite, but still one of his, and the former had been a favorite. The young man had been an exemplar of what it meant to be a Hero. Perhaps the most like All Might of any of his current crop. Midoriya and Yaoyorozu had the power of course, but both of them were ultimately big picture thinkers, not Punch Evil in the Face and laugh about it types. Kirishima had been exactly that sort, right until the very end, where he’d gone out in properly heroic fashion saving the day.

That didn’t mean Nedzu was okay with losing the young man while he’d still nominally been under Nedzu’s care.

Still, even as he quietly raged with each death of one of his, he knew that the overall war was going extremely well. The only reason the Guild System had been able to take the full burden of the Rift Bubbles so soon was due to the sharp drop in the numbers of those bubbles. Yes, the ones that came to Japan specifically were filled to overflowing with elites, causing the Raid Teams to strain and lose people. But there were fewer of them than before, by nearly half in fact. The effect of their enemy needing to spend much of their forces defending their own homeworld.

Likewise, the Think Tank had been producing excellent results, as expected, regarding methods to deal with the ocean assaults. Izumi had proven just as brilliant there as she had on every other task given, and the new plasma lances and plasma torpedoes were already easing the difficulty of defending the coasts, even with them only being available in limited production for now. A line they’d barely been holding was firming up, and eventually they’d have enough of the new weapons to start running trade fleets under escort. Nearly all ocean travel that wasn’t military had unfortunately shut down for the time being, but the world as it was now wasn’t nearly as reliant on global trade as it had been in the pre-quirk era. What little truly critical trade was needed could be and was being handled by air, where they thankfully still retained dominance.

It did mean his tea selection was looking less robust than it used to. But that would be solved soon enough, once the tea garden he’d had built on the grounds, properly able to reproduce optimal growing conditions for the plants, started properly producing a larger variety of strains. He considered it a perfectly sound investment, as Tea was Life. The fact Midoriya was one of those heathens that secretly preferred roasted bean water was the reason he liked Yaoyorozu ever so slightly more.

Tea aside, the war on Earth was manageable, for the moment. They were regaining ground by inches in Africa, and South America had mostly stabilized again. Various island nations were struggling somewhat, though the fact Japan was taking the biggest and nastiest ocean borne assaults helped blunt the problems for others. Meanwhile, the situation on Ziltmach, as well as on several of the other worlds under the Empire’s control, was even better.

A third city was about to fall on Ziltmach, giving them control of the entire region they’d first made a beachhead in. Better yet, Yaoyorozu was working her usual miracles to provide ever-increasing local manufacturing capacity. Capacity that was being put to good use by the numerous local rebellions that he’d personally hoped to see, but hadn’t openly predicted due to lack of certainty. The Ogres, in particular, had nearly stopped appearing in fights on the Empire’s side as their world was once more in full-swing Rebellion. A rebellion supplied by Earth, and which had managed to virtually cut off a major source of heavy units for the enemy.

They were winning. Slowly, and it wasn’t truly obvious to everyone yet, but Nedzu could see the patterns. The Empire was beginning to properly panic now, and the cost of throwing so many of their Elite units, both to try and harm critical infrastructure on Earth and retake their cities on Ziltmach, would eventually come due. Already, he suspected from the increasingly exotic Elites they were seeing in small numbers, that the Empire was running short of such units. Once they did, the every-increasing production of Mechs from Aegis, Hovertanks from the Americans, and some promising new artillery designs from Russo-Kazakhstan that used barely any electronics, would grind the rest of their military down.

The Empire of Kurrick had bitten off more than it could chew, attacking his world. Why, the humans were even mostly getting along with each other under the umbrella of the Terran Alliance! Such unity was something he’d never expected to see, and was already taking quiet steps in the background to make sure survived once the war was over…

… … …

Inko was extremely familiar with both pride and worry.

She supposed that such was true of most parents. At least the good ones. But she dared to say that the vast majority of them didn’t have to deal with a pair of daughters that were quite such drastic and dramatic sources of both. Izumi and 2B were the best children a mother could ask for, despite their risk taking, as they took those risks for reasons that made Inko incredibly proud of her children. Even if she sometimes wished they’d stuck to changing the world via inventing…she’d never hesitated to support their seeking to help in more direct ways too.

Whatever God or gods was or were out there, he or they had certainly heard from her often when the two had first gotten heavily involved in disaster relief. She’d been immensely proud of them, particularly as they’d gone so far as getting properly certified as First Responders and, eventually, more. It hadn’t exactly been a safe thing for them to be doing, but it hadn’t been that dangerous either, given how durable 2B made Izumi.

She’d stressed, but channeled that stress into trying to be better herself, first in going to work as a model…and then eventually getting her own First Responder certifications. She hadn’t actively used those before the Invasion, but she’d responded to emergencies once or twice when she’d been nearby enough. It had helped her understand just why her amazing daughters had felt so compelled to help others, even if she’d still worried about them.

Then, of course, had come their Hero careers.

To think, she’d thought they’d probably be in less danger as the trained at UA of all places! With All Might as an instructor! Only, it hadn’t worked out that way. In a series of events that she still half-believed were some sort of horrible dream-nightmare kaleidoscope, they and their girlfriend had become wildly recognized as the two most likely successors to All Might. Something that they’d done by getting in direct fights with the minions of an ancient Supervillain, like out of some sort of dubious shonen anime!

Then had come the Invasion. Which had seen Inko’s own training as a First Responder put to serious use for the first time. The entire thing had been horribly frightening, and she knew she was personally incredibly lucky that she had a 2B body for personal protection. Not to mention a penthouse worth of space in an increasingly cramped city. Part of that penthouse had now been made over into a small clinic where she could see people with minor injuries, the rules about who could do that sort of thing having been relaxed a lot with the medical system so heavily overburdened.

She didn’t charge for it, of course. Izumi and 2B had made sure she wanted for nothing, even on top of her own successful career as a model when they were younger. It was simply her way of trying to help, just as her daughters were. Daughters who seemed to be at the forefront of every major change, rubbing elbows with some of the most powerful people in the world, as they tried to turn back a literal alien invasion.

Some might have fretted or cursed at their life getting so…interesting, because of their children. Inko, while she certainly still fretted more than a bit, mostly chose to simply be proud. Also, to roll up her sleeves and do her best to contribute too! She couldn’t get her kids do all the work making the world a better place, even if they were obviously much better at it!

Of course, she was also aware that she had a somewhat unique view of events. On the one hand, she had what amounted to a back-channel into knowledge of the war, from 2B and Izumi who would happily answer anything not outright classified. On the other, she was also running a small clinic that gave her day-to-day views of regular people when they were frustrated and scared. She thought she probably had a better finger to the pulse of how the war was being viewed by the public than nearly anyone else...

Which meant that she was very aware how much the average Hiroshi and Yui were increasingly discontented with the various governments. All while also being increasingly positive about Heroes, ‘Adventurers’ from the new Guild System, and the Terran Alliance that was growing out of the old United Nations.

Heroes had always been popular, but the utter failures of the HPSC had disenchanted the public with government management of them. Something made all the sharper of a disconnect when it had been the Heroes that stepped up and organized the world against the Invasion. Heroes or Hero Support personnel, particularly Izumi and Momo, but also individuals like Nedzu, Hatsume, and Ms. Shield, had provided nearly all of the major breakthrough technologies that were keeping them all safe.

Yes, the various militaries, like the JSDF, were winning some points with the public. Yet, that wasn’t as much an endorsement of the world governments as it might have been. Militaries, with the exception of some giants like the United States Armed Forces, had largely suffered downsizing by the governments of the world after the Era of Chaos had finally been declared over. Those governments who had overseen disarmament of the strong militaries and defensive systems that had come out of the Quirk Wars? All of them were currently suffering a massive downward spike in popularity. Governments which included Japan’s own, as it happened.

It was something which was only being made worse by the fact that the governments of the world were, mostly unfairly it had to be said, being blamed for the many issues that came with nearly the entire population of the planet being crammed into cities. That move had been out of necessity to keep them safe, of course. Bringing the vast bulk of the population under the protection of RADS arrays that prevented Rifts or Rift Bubbles from simply popping up in the middle of your apartment had been unquestionably important. Yet there was also a lot of strain involved in having done so. Overcrowding, overtaxed public services, insufficient police forces, open presence of military personnel keeping order. The list of problems and complaints went on for kilometers.

Why, Inko was fairly certain even that American chain CVS couldn’t fit them all on one of their receipts!

So, despite the fact that the various individual governments were, in fact, actually doing an amazing job keeping everything together? Well, the people needed someone to blame, and all the victories and amazing stories of heroism were coming from groups that weren’t viewed as really ‘connected’ to the politicians. Heroes, Guild Adventurers, previously half-derided militaries, even corporations who were surprisingly all pulling together and in the same direction, at least here in Japan, for possibly the first time since World War II.

Then there was the Terran Alliance.

The Alliance that was reporting victory after victory, both here on planet Earth, and on the Empire’s homeworld. The United Nations had been given some more teeth by the Quirk Wars, but it still hadn’t been overly popular. Only now, both the big, hopeful push into Space and the combat arm that was the Terran Alliance, were on everyone’s lips as the great hope for the war to be won. While the individual governments were taking blame for the bad things happening on the home front…the U.N. and Terran Alliance were becoming viewed as the great hope of humanity.

Somehow, Inko suspected that the world wasn’t going to be the same any longer, even if the war with the Empire somehow ended tomorrow…

... ... ... ... ...

AN 1: Conversely to the previous chapter, THIS one goes on to highlight just how difficult the transition from enemies to possible allies actually is. The 'Monster' races have done a lot of damage and killed a lot of people that were cared for. There were always going to be those, even those who are otherwise heroic, who can't handle seeing them as anything but more enemies.

AN 2: It also serves to give an overview of how the civilians are seeing things, via Inko. As well as an overall snap show of how currents are shifting via Nedzu. Both of which with be extremely relevant to the fic's ending. Sort of. They honestly would have been MORE relevant with one of the previous versions of the ending, but its still semi-important...