Chapter 82: Interesting Disasters

Summary: Oops? We didn't mean to open the door to extradimensional horrors! We can fix this! Probably!

Chapter 82: Interesting Disasters

"Kami fucking damn it."

Izumi's voice was so utterly dry and disgusted that Momo couldn't help but snort, her lips twitching despite the seriousness of the situation. Both of them were back aboard the JMSDF Koga, staring at the unnatural rip in space time that…used to be Gajajima island. Technically, there were still parts of the island visible, but looking at them was like looking through some sort of funhouse mirror. Worse, the navy had already had to shoot down some sort of tentacled flying space whale that had shoved its way through the rip and started attacking anything nearby. An eldritch horror if there ever was one. Though thankfully it had been Eldrich Horror Lite, rather than Elder God, as it has still died to sufficient amounts of high explosives.

The rip in local space time hadn't happened during Phase I. While there had been some worrying spikes in Earth's QE fields after the second through fourth Distortion Bombs had been sent through their target Gates, the powers that be had gone ahead with Phase II. Phase II had put an additional four bombs through Gates in Western India, Finland, Morocco, and Chile. The intent with Phase II had been to spread the Distortion Bombs out and see what effect it all had on overall enemy deployment.

Unfortunately, they'd gotten unlucky. Or, at least, that was the official story.

Specifically, they'd been able to confirm two useful but problematic things. First, that Gates were not related point to point geographically on Earth compared to their locations on World X, the current placeholder name for their enemy's home dimension. Unfortunately, they'd also confirmed that the 'staging areas' used by their enemies weren't selected by targeting geographic locations. In fact, they weren't at all sure what determined the locations each staging area fed into…because the Chile location had fed into the same region as the Laos-Cambodia and Japan staging region. That, despite there being over a 17,000km distance between Japan and Chile.

Unfortunately, they'd also discovered the hard way that there was some manner of backsplash from the bombs on Earth's dimensional integrity. Mere minutes after the Chile Distortion Bomb had been sent through, this…rip in space time that they absolutely did not understand had torn the island of Gajajima a new extradimensional orifice. Theoretically, they assumed it was due to the testing of the Distortion Bomb in their own reality weakening it in ways they couldn't observe.

Theoretically.

Thankfully, it wasn't all bad news.

For one thing, the powers that be had called a halt to operations, rather than going through with Phase III. Izumi would like to believe that hadn't been in question. But she knew better than to ask for the sake of her own sanity. She was quite sure there had probably been some people that had been all for pushing the next set of bombs through regardless of the risk.

On a more positive note, whatever had happened on their own side, World X appeared to be having much bigger issues. The Osaka Greater Gate had actually collapsed from the other side, spewing enough odd colors of energy over the night sky to make a hippie swear off drugs and a rainbow pack it in and call for an early retirement so it didn't have to try following that shit up. Given that the Monsters at that Gate had radically mutated and rampaged when those lights spewed all over them, and so had a few unlucky Heroes that had gotten caught in the open, it wasn't exactly a complete win. But once they'd put those monsters down and dropped a containment Quarantine around the area, it had simplified the fight in Japan. Particularly as a lot fewer Lesser Gates were opening throughout Japan as a whole now, with smaller drop offs in the rest of Asia and a few parts of South America.

Of course, the fighting wasn't over. The monsters were pushing all the harder to keep their remaining beachheads open, and there were still the Meta Liberation Army, League of Villains, and various other villain groups that had come out of the woodwork to deal with. Not to mention, you know, the rest of the world. Still, Japan had at least a little bit more breathing room that before…and, you know, also the relatively local disaster of a slowly expanding space time rip to figure out. No pressure, right?

Meanwhile, the rest of the Distortion Bombs had been effective, to an extent. The enemy seemed to have already started adjusting by the third wave of bombs, which probably helped explain why sanity had prevailed among the leaders of the world about not going through with Phase III. Phase I had seen almost identical responses to what happened in Japan, with much harder pushes by the enemy in those locations as a backlash.

The Phase II bombs, even those that hadn't caused the clusterfuck Izumi was now studying, hadn't gotten the same reaction. Instead of more violence at the point of bomb usage, greater surges had been pushed through other areas in the same parts of the world. Apparently, the enemy knew or had guessed that the powers that be had needed to weaken some defenses elsewhere to strengthen the areas around Distortion Bombed Gates to absorb the enemy backlash. The Second Reconstituted Republic of Brazil, which had been doing okay at containment with only a little WHA backing, had fallen into chaos as containment of a Greater Gate had failed. Worse, two more Greater Gates had been opened before the situation was wrestled mostly back under control.

Spain had faired better with the surge that had hit it, though no one was sure if that surge had originated as part of the Finland or Morocco backlash. Enough nearby powers had been able to scramble help to keep things from disaster there, whichever it was. While everyone was mostly sure the backlash from the Indian gate had hit the Middle East. The surge of poor monsters there had only caused a momentary informal ceasefire from the local chaos before everything had gone back to normal, with everyone killing everyone else. As well as the people in the DMZ around the region nervously ordering more Xanax deliveries. Despite a global shortage of anti-anxiety medication in this trying time, everyone had pitched in to send some. The brave souls maintaining that DMZ deserved that much help, at least.

Good and bad news mixed, really. Though overall the fact that they'd managed to seal a few trouble spots and make the enemy shuffle forces seemed to have created an equilibrium of sorts. Africa was still mostly lost, but most of the rest of the world was at least somewhat stabilizing to a new normal. It was a horrible normal and would be until they found better solutions. Better solutions that could take literal years to fight back the tides against them. But it was better than it had been, at least. The fact that they'd actually managed to do noticeable damage to the enemy, of a sort at least, had also raised morale.

Morale that might well collapse if Izumi, 2B, Momo, and several guest scientists didn't figure out how to deal with the rip in space time that used to be Gajajima Island. After all, that rip was growing…which couldn't possibly be a good sign!

... ...

It had taken four tense days to figure something out. During which, several more 'things,' all but one of which had been violent, had come from the Rip. The one thing that hadn't been violent had been a giant floating eye with too many eyelids that had blinked and vanished. No one was sure if it had gone back through the Rip…or was now loose in their world. A disconcerting thought that would have had them all redoubling their efforts if they hadn't already been working as fast and dirty as they dared.

In the end, it surprised pretty much no one that it was the combination of Izumi, Momo, and 2B that had come up with a possible solution. Though that solution had been uncomfortably reliant on things they didn't understand. Specifically, Izumi had demanded, and gotten access too, as many samples of the ritual objects and 'magical staffs' that the various intelligent monsters had been using all along to stabilized Rifts into Lesser Gates. Most of the time, those items were unrecoverable, or else went unrecognized for what they were. But enough mid-stabilization closures had happened by now for various teams to collect a fair few ritual items that they knew were related to Rift stabilization. And, of course, there were plenty of 'magical staffs' around from various monster kills. Even if no one had been able to sort out much about them yet.

Izumi had realized immediately that they didn't have time to actually understand the Rip in space time enough to close it. Not from scratch. Which is why she'd instead focused everyone on the team that would listen to her on the idea of figuring out how the 'magical staffs' worked, and then what the Rift stabilizers did. The first part had been relatively easy, given that Izumi had access to a lot of very dense MASO theory. YoRHa's approach to the MASO phenomenon had been a little bit too scientific to make it fully applicable. But her and 2B both beating their heads against what they had and what they knew of the staffs' practical usage had produced a crude ability to make them function after a single day of study.

That had gotten a lot of interest, and most of the team that had been resisting someone so young running the show had gotten on board. The result had been three intense days of exhaustive testing of every 'Rift Stabilization Relic' they had, in order to quantify what they were doing to the QE fields of Rifts. It had included having to actually take the relics out into the field at one point. They'd brought along a lot of ranged support Heroes freed up from Osaka to keep pouring entirely organic-based fire, such a Gunhead's keratin bullets, through a Rift. Using ranged Quirks that didn't emit enough QE to slowly destabilize said Rift had allowed them to fiddle with the Rift Stabilization relics…until they'd accidentally stabilized the Rift themselves. They'd closed it with siphons shortly after, but the data on what they'd done had been what they needed.

What they'd come up with, and hoped would work, was an unholy combination of Izumi's siphons, several dozen of the Rift Stabilization Relics, and the Teleportation Blockers that Izumi and Momo had developed what seemed like forever ago. Those blockers worked by disrupting QE fields with 'noise,' which they were slowly starting to realize might have been why no Greater Gates had formed near UA, despite it being one of the highest QE areas in Japan. That bore potentially looking into, as a possible way to restrict where Gates or Rifts could form, but for the moment…they had a bit more pressing of a problem.

After all, the Rip in space had grown to twice the size of the original island.

Their answer was a dozen of the horrifically crude abominations to half-mad science and engineering they'd cobbled together, then stuck on ships in a perimeter around the Space Time Rip. Designed to siphon ambient QE, stabilize it into a uniform pattern with the relics they still barely understood, then project it using the Teleport Blocker tech, they hoped it would reinforce the Natural QE fields in the area. The radical disruption of which was what they hoped was causing the Rip in the first place. Though they weren't entirely sure how related the cause and effect there were. One way or another, now that the ships holding their stabilizers were in position, it was time to find out. Izumi, having wrangled de facto control of the project by this point, double checked the positions and took a deep breath. Then, she gave the order.

"Alright. Operation is go. Repeat, operation is GO. Activate the QE Stabilization Engines!"

There was a deep rumble, one that shook you somewhere deep down in your bones, as the QE-SE aboard the Koga powered up. The sensation was disconcerting, but not painful, and thankfully faded in just a few minutes as the QE in the immediate vicinity of the ship became steadily more uniform. Izumi watched the passive sensors that showed the horrifically managed QE fields around the Rip tensely for ten minutes, then twenty. At half an hour she sighed in relief as she spotted a pattern of slow, creeping stabilization becoming clearer.

"Get me an estimate of the Rip's growth rate!"

Someone had clearly already been on top of that already, as the response was immediate, coming from somewhere behind her.

"It stopped growing three minutes ago, ma'am! I'm seeing indications it might be shrinking. But you know how iffy our ability to properly monitor this thing is. It will need to shrink far enough for visual comparison before we can be totally sure."

Izumi nodded at the qualifier but leaned back in her seat with an exhausted sigh regardless. Even if they couldn't be certain if this was the final solution yet, it was at least progress. Better yet, they'd discovered quite a few things that they could now attempt to apply as more solutions against the enemy and their own dimensional Rifts. They were playing catchup to an enemy that already clearly knew what they were doing. But it was the first real sign that they might be able to fight back with more finesse than highly questionable weapons of mass destruction…