Chapter 96: Skyfall
Summary: Assault on Jaku City.
Chapter 96: Skyfall
Momo had to admit, it was a hell of a rush to simply step out of an airplane, so high up her suit had needed an oxygen add-on, and just fall. Of course, she knew that this would most likely be properly terrifying if she didn't have a Quirk that let her fly. Miruko was Miruko and was undoubtedly enjoying the adrenaline rush. Other people…yeah the people who did this sort of thing for recreation without a flight Quirk were probably a little crazy. Particularly since it wasn't exactly going to last long. A thought which, as they came up to the invisible line one minute into the drop which marked the air-defense net around Jaku, caused her extraneous thoughts to vanish.
Taking a deep breath, she let it out and snapped her mind into focus. Her HUD could and did feed her an incredible amount of data, but she wasn't Izumi who could take all of it in. Instead, she regularly filtered what she was getting, and tonight was no different. As she and Izumi led the way across that invisible line, both of their armor's painted with a black radar-absorbing paint, she focused on the energy readings her suit was giving her. Any moment now…
…
…
There!
Momo, already holding 20 percent of One for All through her body, reacted to the energy buildup so fast that only a single blazing bar of light was able to lance out and up into the sky before she had her oversized railguns shifted to aim at it. That bar of light had been aimed at Izumi, not her, and it hadn't even come close to hitting as Izumi simply accelerated to make it miss. As for Momo's reply…the pinpoint railgun slug completely wiped away the top three floors of the building the shot had been fired from. There wasn't a second shot.
Not from there anyway.
That one beam of energy had heralded a dozen more lighting up the night, however. Not just additional beams of energy, but far more dangerous and hard-to-see things like flak and tracer-less minigun fire. They were crossing through the envelope far too quickly to deal with them all, but Momo managed three more eliminations, with Izumi's missile swarm hammering most of the rest. They both took shots in return. Thankfully not from the potentially-exotic beams, which they managed to dodge, but instead in the form of flak shrapnel and several bruising bullets each. Of course, despite the fact they'd been meant for aircraft, those bullets were no real threat to her or Izumi. Literally the worst either of them would have was a bruise or two. Which was the whole reason they were deliberately drawing the brunt of the fire.
Then they were through the envelope. Miruko and Pony would already be slowing, preparing for a less-violent touchdown. Izumi and Momo weren't doing anything of the sort. Two final rounds left Momo's railguns before she reabsorbed them…and then both of them were physically crashing through the massive hole she'd just opened right at the core of Jaku Hospital. Even with a last second, brutal pull on Float, Momo's impact sent another massive shudder through the building. Izumi's own less-than-gentle arrival a moment later did the same.
Leaning firmly on Danger Sense, Momo released a dozen razor-thin tendrils of Black Whip, all of them practically glowing as she accelerated them with Gear Shift. The first three Nomu that burst through the collapse of rubble simply fell apart in pieces as those tendrils diced them like a blender. She had learned quite a bit about how to most easily kill things with the combination of Quirks she currently had on the other side of the Bristol Gate. She also noted, with a slightly dark amusement, that her recent increase in combat operations had finally resulted in her beating Izumi to the punch. Her girlfriend was undoubtably using Hypercognition…but simply hadn't been able to line up on the Nomu fast enough despite that.
To her credit, Izumi didn't even twitch at that fact, instead simply launching herself into the now-partially-cleared Hallway the foolish Nomu had come from. It led deeper into the hospital, so it was as good a direction as any for their blind plunge…
... ...
It was, Izumi thought to herself in a spare nanosecond of accelerated time, more than a little disorienting how little of a threat any of the Nomu were posing. Certainly, none of them were the equal of the monster she and 2B had fought at the USJ. But the number of them should have made their still-exceptional strength mean something. Instead, the experience all four of them had gained since the start of the Invasion meant that Alpha Strike One hadn't even slowed down yet, despite having brutally slaughtered their way through two dozen of the things. She was almost concerned about her own nonchalance. But, in the end…only almost.
They were just another type of monster, after all.
So little threat were they, that the team had almost automatically chosen Revision 3 of their contingency plans less than two minutes after Alpha Strike Two had hit the front of the hospital. Revision 3 was the least cautious approach. The one that called for Izumi and Miruko to split off from Momo and Pony, each of the two teams taking a different floor as they descended farther into the building. It was risky, but with the blind nature of their plunge, trying to find and capture/eliminate some of the actually sentient people behind the Nomu meat puppets before they could react…it was worth the risk.
Hopefully.
The fact that they'd just begun to see the first clones as they made that choice had made it extra dangerous, but was also the explicit reason for the choice. They needed to find that damn cloner. Not doing so quickly enough was the single largest potential point of failure in this entire operation. They had brought the Power to deal with the League. Numbers were a much sketchier proposition. The fact that the JDSF would be moving in, along with a reprogrammed drone-swarm equipped with suicide-bombs and orders to hit Nomu, would alleviate the issue during the opening phase. But if the cloner was able to produce mass numbers quickly, they would eventually be overwhelmed. They had to get either the cloner or their primary targets before that happened.
Miruko dove into another clump of a dozen Nomu clones that were surging to try and bottle them up in the hall they were in, only for half of those clones to abruptly vanish. But only half. A moment later, Ryukyu's voice snapped out over the command channel.
"All teams, be advised. The cloner that was just killed was a Nomu. Assume multiple cloners. Repeat, assume multiple cloners!"
Well…fuck them, Izumi guessed. Somehow, that possibility hadn't occurred to anyone. They had considered that the cloner might be a Nomu at this point. But multiple Nomu with the cloning ability? Yet, she'd already killed at least two non-clone Nomu that had the same hyper-regeneration the USJ Nomu had possessed, even if their other Quirks had been weaker. If someone here was able to duplicate Quirks and implant them, that would explain multiple cloners being present. It also meant, unfortunately, that they couldn't count on eliminating the cloner being possible at all. Letting her mind spin through the possibilities, Izumi slowed down her hypercognition just enough to make herself understood as she broadcast to the rest of her team.
"Revision 5. This close, I can pinpoint an underground that shouldn't be here with my sensors. We're going to have to gamble that's a lab, rather than clearing the hospital floor by floor."
Izumi wasn't actually in charge of the team, of course, but Miruko was quick to back the call.
"Agreed. Punch us a hole."
Letting Miruko keep up the task of occupying the Nomu, Izumi duplicated Virtuous Contract. The moment she had one blade in each hand, she went airborne and whirled. The shockwave attack she normally used was channeled down and in a circle, carving a hole through the floor they were on and sending the shattered plug of concreate and metal into the one below. She was quick to follow, Miruko right behind, with Izumi negligently throwing capture-foam grenades back up into the hall. Those wouldn't hold the stronger Nomu for long, but it would keep them from immediately chasing.
Jaku General Hospital was six floors, plus an official basement. They'd crashed through two in their initial landing, then descended another before splitting up. Izumi and Miruko had to floor three, Momo and Pony to floor two, attempting to sweep the floors for possible targets. Now, Izumi was already repeating her feat, even as she felt the building shudder as, somewhere, Momo used raw power to do the same thing. The Nomu weren't able to zero in on them as Izumi repeated the process again…but when they landed in the official basement level, they found Momo and Pony already fighting an outright horde. A horde of Nomu that weren't vanishing when damaged, marking them all as the real deal.
Not even a single heartbeat passed before she and Miruko were also under assault, and these Nomu were a cut above the fodder they'd dealt with so far. They weren't quite up to the USJ Nomu, but they were closer than Izumi would have liked, and the close confines weren't exactly helpful to four Heroines who all preferred mobility. Even so, the fact none of those Heroines were even attempting anything non-lethal let them make headway, scything their way through the Nomu horde, even as more kept joining in. This was too slow.
"DOWN"
Izumi heard the shout over the comms and reacted instantly, grabbing Miruko and pulling them both flat. An instant later, it proved that Momo had agreed with Izumi's assessment, as flashing tendrils of Black Whip, again super-charged with Gear Shift, diced the entire floor at head-height. Nomu and innocent surroundings alike. The majority of the Nomu died in an instant, and Izumi didn't give them a chance to refill their numbers. She popped up and repeated her earlier action, cutting through the floor…but this time went much larger, opening a good third of the floor in an attempt to find their target.
It worked.
It might not have been the best idea, though.
That was the only thought Izumi could summon before she was holding back a wall of fire from dozens of clones, after they blasted apart the falling rubble. It wasn't the best way to use her telekinesis. In fact, it was shit at doing this sort of thing. But she could make it work for a few moments…and Pony's weapons hosed the area the fire villain and his clones had been in. Enough of the flames died to open a route for Momo and Miruko, the latter's mission-specific stealth suit thankfully far more protective than her usual leotard. Pony kept up the suppressive fire, even as Izumi fell so deep into hypercognition that time seemed to stand still.
She couldn't keep this level of it up for long without melting her brain. But it would be long enough. She took in everything about the lab they'd just hit. The now-crushed tanks of Nomu, the walls full of specialized equipment, the handful of much tougher Nomu that were utterly ignoring the mini-gun fire from Pony. The presence of the flame villain as his fire turned blue…and the missing tank on one wall. The lack of any of the other villains. The small, seemingly unimportant Nomu, that was standing next to the only one of the flame villains that was producing blue flames.
She put the pieces together instantly and mentally cursed in a dozen languages. Lashing out with her telekinesis in a brutal display of its actual power, she simply squished the small Nomu. Some of the more brutish ones might have survived that. But this one clearly didn't have the durability enhancements and turned into so much horrifying red jam. She slowed her hypercognition enough to speak and keyed the comm line direct to command.
"Evidence of teleportation present. Primary targets likely gone. One real villain remaining, moving to subdue."
With that, Izumi snarled and moved on the flame villain. Sadly for him, her full transformation was thoroughly fireproof to anything even blue-shifted flames could manage…
... ...
Miruko not-so-silently cursed as she heard her favorite henchwoman rap out on the command line. She wasn't sure what the girl had seen to convince her that most of their targets were gone…but it had always been a possibility. They'd hoped the speed of their assault or something that the enemy needed here would keep them from doing a runner. They'd also brought in jammers to try and disrupt the ability for anyone to leave. Unfortunately, those jammers mostly worked above ground. It took much more powerful units, such as those installed at UA, to jam very far below the surface, and this lab was deep enough that they must have been beyond the range of the mobile jammers.
Fuck.
Well, nothing to do but eliminate what they could of their enemy's assets. Which was proving tougher than ever as a vaguely female Nomu that had just liquified itself to avoid her Luna Rising kick detonated part of its own body. Miruko was thrown back, and only lived through the next few seconds because Pony hit the thing with a salvo of micro-missiles. Missiles that did little but disperse it as the Nomu liquified again and reformed a second later. She barely managed to recover in time to avoid its next strike.
Fast.
This Nomu was head and shoulders above anything she'd fought so far in this raid. If it wasn't for all the time spent sparring with Favorite Henchwomen 1 and 2, it might have been fast enough to cost her an arm. As it was, she stayed ahead of it…barely. The thing was a shit matchup for her, completely ignoring physical damage, and she was doubly aggravated when she got a view of the larger fight and noticed two more such Nomu fighting Izumi and Momo to a standstill. Pony, thankfully, wasn't engaged by one. Instead she was hosing down the Nomu clones that were trying to swarm into the room from elsewhere. The fire villain, at least, was down and foamed. So that much was going right.
Now they just needed to get rid of these three extra-premium Nomu. High-ends? Yeah, that was a decent name for them. They needed to defeat them quickly and then find any more cloner Nomu. Otherwise, this raid could still prove a complete disaster, rather than only half a failure. She focused on her fight, looking for options to use against this thing. Maybe the arcing power lines from that broken console?
... ...
Momo wasn't exactly distressed, but she would have fully and freely admitted to being very, very annoyed. She'd spotted the same missing tank that she suspected her girlfriend had, and seen Izumi squish a specific Nomu like a bug, near the fire villain that had been captured. It didn't take a huge leap of logic to realize their primary targets had done a runner, as it were. They could still deny them the resources here, which likely accounted for the majority of all Nomu they had access to. But they weren't going to finish everything in one well-executed strike like they'd hoped.
All of that was annoying.
Even more annoying was the Nomu she was fighting that JUST WOULDN'T DIE! The creature was some sort of beefy elephant-morph, with thick, armored skin that could resist even her Gear Shift enhanced Black Whip tendrils moderately well. Add in an equally armored trunk acting as a fifth limb, a Quirk that allowed it to 'bulk up' its muscles to the point it was going toe-to-toe with her, and super regeneration that just wouldn't let her finish it when she did land a solid hit?
The bloody thing was a regenerating tank that was, if anything, stronger than the USJ Nomu. She wasn't at risk of being overwhelmed, but it was tying her up nicely, just as she could see two more of these extra-tough Nomu doing with Miruko and Izumi. Thankfully, Pony was doing an excellent job of keeping the rabble out of their way, but something had to give or they were going to get bogged down and possibly overwhelmed.
Alright. One for All and its associated Quirks wasn't cutting it. That left Creation. Which was still what she was most familiar with anyway. Stop trying to overpower it and outsmart it. What could she create that would deal with this thing? Acid was a promising option, but a little bit too risky given this thing had been intelligent enough to actually throw out a few taunts. It might try using the acid against her or her allies, and none of them would be immune. Poison was even more quickly discarded. It was possible its regeneration would ignore that, only working on physical damage, but Momo seriously doubted that its creator had overlooked something that obvious.
Fire, then.
Throwing her mind back, she mentally nodded as she realized all three of the Nomu had avoided the fire-user when he cut loose. Better yet, all four of her team had their own oxygen. It had been required for the HALO jump, and given the bio-weapon nature of Nomu, it had been decided from the start that they'd retain the self-contained oxygen as long as possible, even once they entered the building. Even Miruko was still wearing the lower facemask that had been added to her usual hard-light visor. For the best, really, since she was pretty sure that fire user had dropped the air in here dangerously low on Oxygen. Something that sadly didn't seem to be slowing the Nomu.
Still, she could do fire. More accurately, she could do plasma. In fact, it would be a chance to use a pet project she'd been working on for years that Izumi occasionally tweaked her teasingly about. Smirking behind her armor at the chance to actually use it, Momo started forming the hilt of her latest iteration from the small of her back. It was an extremely complex object, which is part of why Izumi tweaked her over it, as it really wasn't all that combat-practical. Still, as it finished, her eyes practically sparkled as she reached back to catch the hilt as it fell away from her body.
A second later, she flicked the switch and activated her lightsaber.
It wasn't actually a lightsaber, of course. It was only single edged, for one thing, with a thick metal filament that helped guide its magnetic containment fields running up the back as a 'spine.' But it was a condensed beam of super-hot plasma contained in electromagnetic fields. Better yet, her most recent design used QE and could last for an entire forty-five seconds before it ran out of juice! Much better than the single swing she'd gotten out of it back when she'd first made the MK 1 years ago!
Forty-five seconds would be more than enough. She darted back in, inwardly squealing in totally inappropriate joy as she managed to lop off an arm with the blade. It worked! Pressing her advantage, she lopped off the trunk next, then chopped down through the monster's brain before the much-more-slowly-regenerating arm could recover enough to help the monster block her strike. She held the blade in place until it failed, then watched the monster closely for several more seconds to make sure it wasn't recovering. Convinced it was properly dead, she quickly turned to alleviate the pressure on Pony. Izumi had finished her own fight and was helping Miruko finish off the last of the special Nomu, their foe's ability to liquify giving them both a headache…
... ...
Izumi was thoroughly disgusted, as well as exasperated. The Nomu she was fighting was a cut above even the USJ Nomu…but most of its abilities were far less pleasant. It kept growing teeth all over its body, then turning those teeth metal. It was like some sort of eldritch horror out of a particularly disturbed horror game, and Izumi was not a fan of those. Worse, despite looking like a round ball of fat, the bloody thing was fast, strong and durable.
It wasn't as fast as her, but it was disturbingly close. It was nowhere near as strong, either. But those stupid teeth were creepy and it had the same sort of regeneration as the USJ Nomu. It even had an extra Quirk that it could use to expand its already considerable size by bulking up body parts. With that bulk and the teeth both acting as a sort of armor, she hadn't been able to penetrate deep enough with any combination of strikes to get to its brain, and everything else it simply healed from.
Growling as she checked her reserves and realized she was under a third of her safe usage levels left, Izumi embraced hypercognition more deeply to give herself subjective time to think. She'd already tried telekinesis, of course. It was simply too durable for her to squish, and she still sucked at the sort of fine control needed to reach in and cut off blood flow or similar. She'd gotten better, but that was a level of control she'd probably never have over anything but her own constructs. With raw strength not cutting it and cutting force having issues with its ability to bulk up, what did that leave her?
2B, sharing a combat link with her as always, even as she managed the Drone Swarm outside, pushed an idea to her. Izumi mentally blinked, considered it, then snorted. If this was anything but a Nomu, she'd probably feel bad about the idea. As it was, she dismissed Virtuous Contract and dipped into her inventory for an unfished piece of a RADS array, along with a fully charged QE battery from one of her flight suits. Ducking under an attack, she took advantage of the fact the Nomu wasn't really bothering to guard its torso to jam the pointy end of the RADS array bit into its body.
The particular piece in question was a focusing element that concentrated QE right before dispersing it on whichever random frequency it was assigned. Now, as she used a bit of capture foam to glue the QE battery to it, then forcefully discharged the battery with a pulse of her own QE, the focusing mechanism poured randomly-aligned QE into the Nomu. For a second, it did nothing, the Nomu not even realizing it was a threat. Indeed, for that brief second Izumi was forced to deflect blows instead of dodge as the rush of QE empowered it…
Then its Quirks started to run wild.
QE not aligned to your own field was toxic. Having too much QE in your body was even worse. Having too much QE that was non-aligned suddenly pour into a body's QE pathways? Disastrous. Just like a lightning strike overpowering a person's nervous system and burning it out, the same happened to the Nomu's QE pathways, its Quirks randomly activating for a few seconds before its QE system went into total melt down and its body began to break down not just on a cellular level, but an atomic level. The Nomu screamed, flailing…and Izumi took a small amount of pity on it as she rammed a charged spear thrust through its head.
The Nomu slumped in death, and Izumi quickly batted the crude device she'd made away from it. No telling what would happen if she just let it keep going. Turning to check the others, she twitched as she saw Momo using her 'lightsaber.' Her girlfriend was going to be insufferable about the fact it seemed to be working, given how much Izumi had twitted her about it over the years. Shaking her head, Izumi pushed off toward where Miruko was dueling with the single most annoying Nomu in the room. She seemed to have had some success by using electricity from sparking wires against it. But the Nomu was quickly recovering. Summoning up a high-powered taser from her inventory, Izumi fired it as she closed…
... ... ... ... ... ...
Author's Note: So...I took a good hard look at the original Jaku raid, and realized there was virtually no way this one was going to end in a quick win for the Heroes. Too many things had to stack up in the Heroes favor to catch Garaki, in particular. Here, the LoV has been prepared for a raid for months, and had an escape plan in place. Dabi only got his ass caught because he couldn't resist the temptation to stick around for some violence. Thus, the League has taken a big hit to their resources, but only Dabi has gotten caught.