Chapter 52: I didn’t sign up for a Kaiju movie!

Summary: Wait...I think we accidently stepped in the wrong genre!

Warning! Chapters 50-54 were all posted back-to-back! Make sure you don't miss any of them!

Chapter 52: I didn't sign up for a Kaiju movie!

The horrific shriek of tearing metal woke Izumi from a dead sleep. Despite 2B's own activity meaning that her brain never really, fully, shut down anymore…there was still several seconds of utter disorientation as the world seemed to violently shift and twist around her. It was only when she instinctively caught a half-terrified, half-disoriented Jirou who was falling toward her, that it clicked for Izumi that the world really was violently lurching. Even as it finally processed that the entire ship was being shaken about like a ragdoll, the sounds and sensations got much worse for a few moments that seemed to last forever. Then, the compartment they were in ripped in half and Izumi found herself free falling through open sky.

Despite her continued confusion and disorientation, the adrenaline surge triggered by the sudden fall finally caused her battered mind to fall into hyper cognition mode. Until that moment, even 2B had been so hammered by the confused environment and horrific sounds being reported by Izumi's senses that she'd been rendered unable to react as she scrambled to pull her own consciousness from the deep net where she'd been working. Given they'd been sleeping on an armed and armored Coast Guard ship, surrounded by heroes and paramilitary personnel, neither of them had thought any sort of watch had needed to be kept…and they were apparently paying for it now.

As hyper cognition fully activated and time slowed to a crawl, Izumi finally got some idea of just what in the unholy hells of H.P. Lovecraft's nightmares was going on. When she did, she almost wished she hadn't, because apparently All for One must have been one of that author's fanboys. At least, that's the only reason she could think of for coming face-to-torso with a 30-meter-tall monstrosity with a dozen spiked tentacle arms thicker than buses, and the distinctive exposed brain of a Nomu resting over the face of a squid. The pulsing blackened skin, entirely too similar to the Nomu from the USJ, didn't make things better. Though the fact that it was holding the ripped in half pieces of the Cost Guard Training Vessel Nagura in half a dozen tentacles certainly explained what all the shaking and noise had been about.

Worse, Izumi's rapidly-coming-online transformation was already telling her that they were dozens of kilometers out to sea, rather than just barely off the coast. So the initial shaking must have been the monstrosity grabbing them and heading away from the coast at its best speed. A little detail that likely explained why the Oki Mariner was no where in sight. Hopefully, it hadn't destroyed Selkie's ship. Of more immediate concern…she was falling in midair, with a dazed and confused Jirou held to her chest by instinct. And her rapidly transforming body most certainly wouldn't be able to swim.

Cursing internally, Izumi shifted her transformation mid-process. She spent a single heartbeat sending a mayday directly to Nedzu, complete with snapshot of what she was seeing, then cut most of her ECM/ECC systems out of the transformation. There was, ironically, no time to use shortcuts here. None of her current partial transformations were properly suited to the horrifying situation in front of her. Instead, she ruthlessly and rapidly hacked together a minimally augmented body, 2B lending her aid as she realized what Izumi was doing. Speed augmentations, all of them. But absolutely nothing for strength, damage protection, electronic warfare, Pod support, and so on. Only those alterations necessary to keep her body from breaking down under the stress she was about to put on it were allowed through the brutal weeding process…even as she split off a fraction of her mind to start summoning a full Flight Unit.

This was not the stripped-down version of a Flight Unit she'd summoned during the UA invasion. This was a full-blow YoRHa military model that, even with the stripping-down of her transformation, Izumi wouldn't be able to keep summoned for more than twenty minutes. Maybe thirty at best. She didn't know, since she was making this shit up on the fly. It was also, for all intents and purposes, a mini-mecha. Which meant that she needed to do something with Jirou before it crushed the girl while it was forming. Tossing her friend up, even as Izumi continued to fall, was the best solution Izumi could come up with, as overtasked as she and 2B were at the moment. The smaller girl screamed, the few seconds since they'd started to fall finally having gotten her brain working…but Izumi was there to catch her in armor-encased arms moments later, burning hard upward to arrest their fall.

Even as she fought gravity, others who had been thrown clear of the ship were reacting. Momo was the first, an instinctive channeling of One for All having boosted her reaction time even as she was thrown away from Izumi and Jirou at an angle, having somehow ended up on the other side of their cabin when it had been ripped in two. She'd completely ignored any fuckery with attempting to summon her armor, arresting her flight with Float. Though she had been wearing her emergency bracer. Not the heavier set she'd developed for use on this trip, which covered her a bit more completely to comply with costume regulations. But the original stripperific model she'd used on I-Island. It was covering her, in so much as it ever did, now. But, now that Izumi's mind wasn't fully occupied by the emergency creation of an entire new partial transformation, she coldly noted that it was probably useless. Bringing this monstrous thing down was going to require more power than could be covered up by the idea of that limited armor. If All for One was still hunting for which one of them was the inheritor of One for All, he might be about to find out.

Maybe.

After all, Momo's first action after stabilizing herself, occurring only moments after Izumi started her hard burn to avoid crashing into the ocean, wasn't to try punching the giant Nomu. Instead, she created a series of aerial flares. Those flares lit up the night, finally letting people that didn't have Izumi's low-light vision get a good look at their situation. Her girlfriend's second action was to create an oversized rocket launcher…which she targeted on one of the tentacles of the monster even as Izumi targeted two more with her own missiles. Not all Flight Units were configured for it, but Izumi had long ago settled on them as the best option, able to do a lot of damage quickly without the constant drain of a laser unit. It proved to be a good choice now, as the half of the ship that the monster had been rearing back to throw had all three of its attached tentacles blown apart. The ship dropped, which wasn't going to do wonderful things for anyone still aboard it…but it wasn't as instantly lethal as being thrown by the monster would have been. Hopefully.

Of course, given that it was half a ship, and had dozens of holes from those spikes, it was also sinking now that it had touched water again. Thankfully, the HUD of Izumi's Flight Unit had already highlighted Selkie, who'd somehow gotten into the water and was beelining for the sinking half of the ship. He'd rescue anyone still alive in there. As for the greater problem of the Nomu…only made all the more brutally 'greater' as the tentacles began to regenerate, it would be up to those that could both get at the monster and dish out a lot of damage to deal with. She and Momo weren't the only ones to have gotten into the air, thankfully, and Izumi angled for a terrified looking Tokage, who was hanging midair looking very lost. She risked coming to a hover beside her fellow greenette and thrust Jirou at the other girl's chest. Another moment of effort to pull from Izumi's inventory, and one of the earlier prototypes of Jirou's sonic canon was being thrust at the punk girl, who Setsuna had instinctively latched onto.

"Get behind it! Momo and I will keep its attention! Aim for its brain!"

That was all she had time to shout, as Momo was desperately weaving in midair, ducking and darting around the three remaining tentacles that had dropped the other half of the ship and were swatting at her. She was fine for the moment…but the other tentacles they'd destroyed had already half-reformed. Izumi needed to contribute. Grimacing at the power cost, she summoned the oversized plasma sword of the Flight Unit and boosted toward the fight.

She managed to slice off another tentacle as she arrived, freeing Momo to create another rocket launcher and blast another one. For a few seconds they were nearly clear of assault and Momo managed to close with her, shoving a spark of power from One for All into Izumi in the brief moment of contact, before they were forced to separate again to dodge the last tentacle. Relieved at seeing the pure QE of that spark bring her own reserves nearly back to full, Izumi used some of the power to summon up another pair of missiles. She locked onto two of the reforming tentacles just as they began to move, and fired…

The next thirty-five minutes were a terrifying slog. Izumi and Momo could only just barely keep ahead of the Kaiju Nomu's regeneration, keeping is more-or-less contained. A few of the other survivors had made valiant efforts to contribute to the damage, with mixed success. Manual had actually taken a sizable chunk out of one of its legs, before having to be rescued by a battered-looking Tamaki before a swiping tentacle could turn him to paste. Vlad King managed to temporarily cripple another tentacle by using blood constructs to jam large pieces of debris into the appendage. The mauver prevented easy regeneration of that tentacle, buying a bit of breathing space…right up until the Nomu proved willing to bite it off itself to get the regeneration going. Even one of the second years managed to do some damage, deep freezing a tentacle and causing it to shatter, before having to be pulled away from the fight by another student as that action had apparently pushed her to her limit.

The entire fight see-sawed back and forth, every combatant except Momo starting to flag…and then the Kaiju Nomu abruptly staggered sideways, screeched, and slowly began to collapse. As it did, its body shrunk, proving that its size had been the result of a gigantification Quirk of some type. It was that shrinking body that showed how it had met its demise, as it revealed an exhausted looking Tokage still carrying Jirou in her arms, both of them utterly splatted in blood and brain matter from where Jirou had fired her sonic canon at max power straight into the Nomu's brain from point blank range. Given it was an early model, without the lesser fire modes, that attack had done enough damage to end the Nomu. Which was exactly what Izumi had been desperately hoping for when she'd shoved it at them and ordered them to make the attempt. Though she'd begun to fear they'd been swatted out of the sky during the mayhem.

Thankfully, even if they both looked like hell, they were alive. Of course, their collective job was also only half done, even assuming there were no more enemies. Momo got them started on the other half as she used her original Quirk to generate half a dozen self-deploying life rafts. It was time to put their newly learned Water Rescue training to use, to try to save whoever had survived the fight…

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A/N:Yes, I made them fight a Kaiju Nomu ;-). Honestly, it's not exactly much of a stretch and I'm surprised it never showed up in series (to my knowledge). After all, you just need access to a Giantification Quirk. Like, say, the Villain from the very first episode which gets ass-checked by Mount Lady...