Chapter 76: Taking in the Disaster
Summary: A snapshot of the scope of the disaster...
Chapter 76: Taking in the Disaster
It had been so long since Izumi had actually needed a full 8-hours of sleep that she was a little bit disoriented when she woke up from just that. The fact that she still hurt was even more unusual, though as the disorientation slowly faded, it was easy to track down the cause. She had well and truly, brutally, strained her QE absorption ability. Even after a full eight hours of outright sleep, she was barely 2/3rd full on QE, and the roughly-treated QE channels in her body ached. The only upside was that her total reserves seem to have jumped a good fifteen percent in size in the process. Feeling Momo laying on her shoulder, Izumi kept her communication silent as her mind got properly into gear and she reached out to 2B.
"2B? Any developments? And any idea how long I'll be stuck recovering for?"
Her partner was prompt in getting back to her.
"Lots of developments, virtually none of them good. Though I've kept my data feeds minimal to reduce the strain on your recovery, so I'm not fully up to date. As for said recovery, if you are able to stay off the field today and sleep the same again tonight, you'll be recovered fully. If, as I suspect, that isn't entirely possible, it may delay your recovery to anywhere between two days and twenty."
Izumi suppressed a wince at that. Silently, she requested a précis covering events while she slept. 2B sent it over quickly enough for Izumi to guess her partner had been updating it as events happened, and the grim feel across their link didn't give her a lot of positive vibes about what she was going to find. An assumption that proved to be perhaps the easiest bit of fortune telling in all of human history as she popped open the file and began to read.
The declaration of an ongoing state of emergency was no surprise. Though the estimated death toll so far, even just for Japan where they could make the best guesses, was grim reading. The deaths weren't in the thousands, they were in the tens of thousands. Not just because of direct kills by the monsters, but by secondary effects. Collapsed buildings, fires, disrupted emergency services, panicked civilians firing off poorly trained Quirks. 2B thought the Japanese government was intentionally lowballing the estimate currently, and even that lowball estimate was for over 75,000 dead in less than 32 hours. The biggest chunks of those in Osaka and Yokohama, of course.
The population density of big cities meant that there were a lot of people within the initial invasion zones. Worse, the need to concentrate on controlling the Gates as chokepoints had led to a lot of leak-through monsters running wild as the JSDF and Heroes held the not so proverbial line. Police deaths as they tried to deal with those leak-through monsters were particularly painful, though they'd had at least some measure of success once they'd broken out emergency anti-villain armaments that were rarely authorized for regular police use. Likewise, Heroes that focused mainly on rescue, as well as a lot of Heroics students, had been organized into groups to deal with those leakers. A pattern of approach to the invasion that started in Shizuoka and radiated out as Nedzu helped organize the disjointed and confused country-wide efforts into some sort of vaguely cohesive plan.
The only good news so far, really, was that they had managed to largely maintain containment on the Greater Gates. Heroes and Heroines like Cementoss and Pixie Bob had worked through the night to establish crude fortifications around the two Greater Gates in Osaka and Yokohama, and satellite images showed that the MLA had been doing something similar with their gate near Deika city. Those fortifications were nowhere near complete yet, of course.
Buildings were still a major weak point in the containment rings, with a lot of forces currently tied up in a slow slog to clear those buildings. As soon as they were cleared, the containment forces were either filling the lower floors with concrete or demoing the building to let the rubble do most of the work. The process would likely take days yet, and there had barely been whispers about what to do after that. Those Gates were a beachhead that needed closing, but it was a daunting undertaking to even contain them, let along push back the horde of monsters to close them. If they even could be closed without something as drastic as a nuclear strike.
Unfortunately, there was more bad news elsewhere. While the Greater Gates had been mostly contained, the same couldn't be said for what were now being referred to as Rifts and Lesser Gates, respectively. Rifts were what happened when either an intelligent monster managed to sacrifice enough people to tear open an initial portal…or when something on the other side managed to do the same thing somehow. The fact that they could apparently be opened from the enemy's reality, much like how the very first portals must have been, meant that it was impossible to contain them entirely. Some efforts were being made to predict where they would be opened by monitoring QE levels on a national level, at least. So far, that was a little hit-or-miss, but the predications were seeing enough success that there was some hope they'd soon be able to anticipate where the majority of Rifts would open. If they could do that, it should be possible to assign people to meet whatever came through and collapse the Rift before it formed a Lesser Gate.
Lesser Gates were what Izumi's team, along with plenty of other teams throughout first Japan, and then the rest of the world, had been focused on closing yesterday. Those gates formed after a Rift had been farther stabilized by additional sacrifices or, potentially, any other method of QE concentration. Lesser Gates could be closed by either the Heavy or Light methods that Izumi had come up with, and the vast majority of the initial wave of such had been successfully closed…in Japan, at least. The same wasn't true worldwide, where entirely too many war-torn or otherwise weak countries had lost control of Lesser Gate closure. The World Hero Association was doing its best to deploy groups to keep those gates from turning into Greater Gates. But at least a fistful of failures had already happened, opening additional Greater Gates that would have to be dealt with eventually…assuming that humanity could beat back this invasion at all.
Then, of course, were the idiots. The subversive elements of humanity like Japan's MLA, who had taken this as their chance to act. Despite the best efforts of the over-strained JSDF and Heroes, the Meta Liberation Army had succeeded, overnight, in their efforts to cut Japan in half on land. They now controlled a strip of Japanese territory between Hamamatsu and Toyama thoroughly enough to prevent any idea of mass land movement between the now split halves of Japan. Nor, unfortunately, were the MLA the only ones going active.
Just in Japan, partway through the invasion, Jaku City had been…lost. Specifically, Nomu had flooded out of Jaku General Hospital when it had been attacked by monsters. The Nomu had proceeded to rampage, with mass clones of several League of Villains members joining in. Though, curiously Shigaraki himself hadn't been seen at all. Thankfully, the villains had focused more on the invading monsters than the civilians and Heroes, allowing the Heroes to focus on evacuating the city. Since the Villain Clones and Nomu had attacked Heroes, JSDF, and police whenever they came across them, there had been no hope of them being reasonable. Hence essentially abandoning Jaku to them. Though, curiously, once Jaku had been evacuated and the Nomu had overloaded the portals there with emitter Quirks, the Nomu had gone into a holding pattern. Whatever the League of Villains were up to, they apparently weren't intent on conquering at the moment. Just holding their HQ and its surrounding area.
Several other locations across Japan, including a small island that was now surrounded by a constant thunderstorm that appeared to be Quirk generated, had experienced similar but smaller issues. A variety of gangs and villain groups who normally wouldn't be much of a threat had taken over small towns or individual city districts. The Heroes, police, or JSDF forces that could have rooted them out are currently spread too thinly to respond, though the JSDF at least had been managing to keep most of the locations under observation via drone and satellite.
Worldwide, the same thing was repeated ad nauseum and at wildly varying scales. In some places, entire countries were in open rebellion while both the governments and rebels fought the invasion. In other places, Cartels and other organized crime had already swept away the local governments and were running brutal new regimes whose only good point was that they had a lot of firepower to keep their own Greater Gates under control. Not everywhere in the world had been so successful in rooting out groups like the Yakuza since Quirks came about, and those places that hadn't were paying the price now. Hilariously, the Americans infamous gangs were mostly rallying to fight the monsters instead of causing more trouble. But that was going to cause its own issues when things settled down, as the locals rallying into those gangs with their own collections of assault weapons and other small arms were turning recognized criminal groups into something closer to militia. How that would work out when the dust settled was anyone's guess.
Overall, as Izumi finished the summary of events, she came to the terrible conclusion that Japan was actually doing comparatively well. North America had weathered the crisis the most completely, with the high number of Heroes, powerful military, and extremely high rate of civilian gun ownership allowing them to contain the high number of Greater Gates they'd also been stuck with. Asia was next down the list. The reformed Republic of China, reunited after it had fallen apart early in the Quirk Era, had almost as high a Quirked population density as Japan, and a larger military. They were still struggling with their initial wave of Lesser Gates, but had quickly achieved containment on their Greater Gates. India and Myamar had faired about as well. Thailand, Laos-Cambodia, and what used to be Vietnam were all something of a mess. None of them had ever truly recovered from the Era of Chaos, and now it was only the fact that the WHA had been present in significant numbers, trying to keep a lid on the numerous villains there, that was averting total meltdown.
Europe was, as always, a mixed bag of successes and disasters. Though the reformed NATO had managed to put a lid of the worst of things, there had been several losses of containment that had needed major efforts to regain control of. South America had possessed the fewest greater Gates of any continent, but the relatively weak militaries and some long-lasting issues with criminal and villain groups there had spelled disaster. The Gates were contained…but it had mostly been criminal groups and the WHA that contained them. Africa, meanwhile, was a clusterfuck that was terrifying everyone since several Greater Gates there weren't being contained and whole countries had been lost. The Middle East had so many fucking guns and armed groups that even the Era of Chaos hadn't actually changed much. They'd been blowing themselves and each other up since before Quirks manifested and the invasion had resulted in remarkably little changing.
In fact, the various militaries manning the giant DMZ around the entire region were now watching in horrified fascination as it only got more chaotic. The new invaders shot at the locals, everyone local shot back, and the locals were still shooting each other as often as the invaders. At least the poor monsters weren't making any more headway than anyone else ever had in the region. Frankly, everyone mostly seemed to agree that the policy of 'isolate them and let them sort out their issues' was still working as much as it ever had. Which was to say, not at all. But since that was normal, everyone felt they could count on it to stay the same regardless of a mere alien invasion and that they could come back around to deal with it later when those were the only Gates left.
Australia, of course, had been lost two centuries ago when a saltwater crocodile with human-level intelligence had rallied the rest of the unusually high population of Quirked animals and killed all the humans. Satellite imagery showed that no Gates had opened there at all. Making everyone assume that whatever forces the enemy had tried to slip onto that isle of Death had likely been eaten. Honestly, most of the monsters would probably fit in there anyway, as part of the prey species of the local food chain. So it was being safely left alone like always, by everyone not certifiably crazy.
Likewise, Russia was still an irradiated wasteland. To this day, no one knew why the psychopath with control of nuclear reactions had decided to detonate hundreds of Russia's nukes right where they were. But the result had caused massive destruction and gutted the former world power relatively early on in the Quirk Wars. The world was very lucky that the crazed man had only gotten to a fraction of the nukes that had existed, before the radiation had killed him. Thankfully, the invaders didn't seem to have any interest in the area. Either because of the radiation or the lack of high QE levels.
Sighing, Izumi began to gently try to extricate herself from bed. Currently less than a hundred percent or not, she had no business lazing around in bed when the world was still going increasingly to hell outside…
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A/N: A quick note here! Chapter 76 briefly goes over the state of the world. Given that I've depicted the early Quirk Era as very chaotic and nasty in a few snippets, it shouldn't be a shock that I've tried to show a few major changes to the world. That said, most of those changes are pretty tongue-in-cheek. Don't mistake them for political commentary on my part. I mean, I do think Australia has a good chance of being taken over by a Quirked Salt Water Crocodile if Quirks happened. But I'm pretty sure anyone who has seen one of those things will agree...;-).