Chapter Text
“Forget my previous orders! Take them down however you can!” Momo shouted to the Wyvern squad. She initially wanted to just disable the fighter jets, rather than blowing them up, but it was clear that Russia was serious. These planes could handle a blast from a Colonel Grade Synthetic Shadow. There was no room to be merciful.
She now had an idea as to why Russia was using SU-57s instead of a newer generation fighter. It was probably easier to work with older models when using Magical Metals. Sure the SU-57 was outdated, but with a complete invulnerability to standard weapons it didn’t matter what fighter went chasing after it.
Only Momo’s F-54s could handle the job now.
“Copy that, Empress.”
The exchange took place just as the cloud cover thinned, revealing the city of Sapporo below. The beaches were overrun by Russia landing craft, with soldiers rushing for downtown. Meanwhile, destroyers behind them were peppering the city with shells. However, the shells didn’t explode into fiery shockwaves. Instead, they landed in a puff of smoke, the interior of the shell loaded with some sort of pressurized gas.
Knowing that her jets could handle the skies, Momo stepped off the wing of Wyvern 1-2, allowing gravity to take hold and drag her towards the streets they were flying over.
Moments before hitting the ground, she created a parachute on her back, slowing her just enough so that she could hit the ground running, rather than putting a dent into the pavement. It wasn’t necessary, she would’ve landed just fine without the chute, but it felt gratuitous to her.
She landed in a suburban neighborhood. It was littered with bodies. Children playing outside, parents watching them, friends talking. All of them were on the asphalt.
For a moment, Momo felt immense rage build up inside of her. But then she noticed something strange. Through her increased senses she could tell that everyone was still breathing.
Momo took a deep breath, feeling slightly woozy for a second. The air looked clean, but it was still filled with the gasses from that shelling. It wasn’t poison, it was anesthetic gas. The fact that it affected Momo meant it was laced with Magic, so that any Heroes in the area would fall unconscious as well.
Momo injected herself with a stimulant of her own, clearing the effects of the gas for herself.
It was a sound strategy. Knock out everyone who could be a threat and just waltz into the city. But it begged the question - why not just use poisonous gas? Why put everyone to sleep? Ethics seemed like a strange conclusion to draw since Russia was declaring war on Japan. It wasn’t like the UN had enough power to hold them accountable for any war crimes, and countries like America wouldn’t care enough to involve themselves. There was a much deeper reason for why these people weren’t just killed outright.
“Behemoth!” Momo yelled just in time for the tank shell to hit the Shadow rather than herself. There was a good chance she could’ve survived it, no problem. However, modern magical weapons created a brand new playing field. One had to handle the situation with care.
Of course, Behemoth was the Tankiest Shadow in the Army, with Null as a close second, so the shell exploded against his chest with zero effect. There was hardly a scratch that he needed to regenerate.
Momo peeked around the side of the giant, focusing her senses on the tank. It too, was made of magical materials.
There were several big reasons as to why humanity didn’t make vehicles or weapons with Magical Metal most of the time. The biggest was that it was in short supply. There was barely enough of it to make bits of armor for Heroes, much less vehicles. The other reason was that it interfered with technology since it put off Mana.
In day-to-day life, Awakened Heroes didn’t put off enough Mana to mess with electronics. The energy diffused quickly enough to not make it a problem and stronger humans learned to suppress it. But if a tank was built with Magical Metal, and surrounded on all sides by it, then the energy would just bounce around inside the tank, screwing with instrumentation.
It seemed that, somehow, Russia had solved the two biggest problems of working with the metal. That or Momo was encountering the sparse few Magical Vehicles. But she didn’t believe that the latter was the case.
“Disable it,” Momo commanded, and Behemoth obliged.
The tank fired shell after shell at the Shadow as they reversed away from him, but his strides were long and his skin was durable. It didn’t take long for him to catch up to the tank and slam one of his fists down on top of it. The metal caved in and bent in awkward directions. The cannon barrel itself was so distorted that it would never fire again.
The tank stopped its retreat, so broken by a single bash from Behemoth that it was basically just a hunk of scrap.
Momo leapt up to the top of the tank, conjuring a sword from her skin. With Cosmic Forge, she’d gotten better and better at making things. The sword she held was a pure black katana. The energy it held was close to an S-Rank, meaning that it was weaker than something like Izuku’s gauntlets or Mekanism, which Igris was wielding. However, it was still more than enough to bear Momo’s strength and cleave the top of the dented tank in two. Using her powers of creation, she constructed two winches either side of the tank, which had burrowed their legs into the asphalt.
Momo was really starting to get more comfortable with her creation. As long as she was focused, she could expand her energy to the immediate area around her, meaning she didn’t need to use her skin to create things anymore.
The winches activated in sync, practically ripping the entire tank in half and spilling forth its contents. Four men, all unconscious. This time, they weren’t just sleeping. And it wasn’t Behemoth’s or Momo’s actions that had killed them. White foam was gushing from their mouths. They had committed suicide.
Momo was so taken aback that she almost didn’t hear the distinctive march of an army and their tanks. She tried giving the Russian tank crew different healing potions and poison cures, but they were dead. There was no turning that back, not even for her.
“Deep Blue, please oversee the deployment of the remaining Shadows…” She said as she turned one of the soldiers over, noticing something strange on his neck.
“Of course, my Lady,” Deep Blue replied. He no longer had Paragon, the Skill that made him virtually unstoppable, but he had retained his intelligence, his calculating personality, and it seemed that he had a couple of Skills that made him better at research, strategy, etc. It was almost like he had transitioned from a soldier to a general of sorts, one with a mind for the scientific.
Tenebris and Nomu began pouring out of Momo, Behemoth, and Deep Blue’s shadows, rushing the army head on. They would incapacitate them if possible, but the main assignment for the Shadow army was to protect the city, and the 2 million unconscious civilians it housed. They would kill if they needed to. Momo knew that Izuku wouldn’t so readily give his Shadows the order to kill, even in such a situation, but that was precisely why she gave it. Izuku was the more moral of the two, so Momo made the decisions he would struggle to make.
As the city filled with explosions and gunfire, Momo took off the helmet of the dead soldier, brushing aside his black hair to reveal the base of his skull, where she had felt something when trying to save his life. It was an army-green… something…
From what Momo could see it was a small green dot, but judging by the way it pushed aside the soldier's skin, she could only conclude that it wasn’t just on the surface of his skin, but that it was burrowed into his skull. Everyone else in the tank crew had them as well.
“Deep Blue, take these bodies to the Luxian Lab and figure out what this is,” She commanded.
Deep Blue was capable of making thousands of decisions every millisecond, meaning that he barely needed to divert any concentration away from the war effort, even as he picked up the corpses and walked into the portal Momo created for him. She closed it, before opening it once more, this time on a different level.
“Loren!” She shouted, walking into Bael’s Forge.
“My Lady,” He greeted with a bow. “How may we be of assistance?”
Momo explained the situation as quickly as possible. And before she was even finished, many of the Tenebris in the room were scrambling to grab weapons, armor, and inform other demons of the conflict.
“I know I’m asking a lot of you-”
“Nonsense. We have been living in war for millenia. You and the Monarch helped free us from that cycle. It is only natural we return a favor.” A gruesome grin stretched across his face, reminding Momo that this was, in fact, a demon who may have inspired much of the folklore surrounding such myths. “Besides, we do not fear humanity. This war will not last millenia, it will not last decades, or years. We will not let them drag out this war. We will show them the errors of inciting conflict,” Loren scooped up his own armor and weapons, fresh from the forge. He truly resembled a Demon Lord. But unlike Bael, he was a Demon worthy to lead his kind into a new age. “Now, we do not fight for an age-old conflict none of us can remember the start of. We fight for peace.”
The portal behind Momo expanded and the legion of Tenebris, over a hundred-thousand strong, began their march into Japan, not as invaders, but as protectors. She wanted to tell them to be careful, to try and not take so many lives. But this was war. And beyond that, the Russians seemed willing to kill themselves for whatever their cause was.
It was no longer man versus monster. It was man versus man… with some monsters mixed in. But regardless, Momo was still damning a huge amount of soldiers to death.
She would live with it, as long as she knew that she had done so for the millions of innocent people behind her.
“Empress to 1-1, how’s the dogfight going?” Momo asked as she stepped back into the real world with the Tenebris.
“Wyvern 1-1 to Empress. Enemy bandits are putting up a good fight, but since we regenerate and they don’t, this fight was won the second we entered it. Estimating about 10 more minutes before we can break through the defenses of the SU-57s.”
“Good, once you’re done, take care of the navy. We can’t have them dropping more shells and soldiers on our beaches.”
“Copy that Empress.” The exchange was conducted mentally, meaning it only took a second. By that time, Loren was already directing Merrix to teleport their troops along the coast to create a defensive perimeter. Their exchanges seemed less tense than before. Perhaps they had managed to work out some of their grievances with each other and the sorrows of their pasts.
“Can you direct some of your people to protect civilians? Move them out of harm's way?” Momo asked. She could’ve set the Shadows to do it, but they were immortal. She’d rather have them on the front lines to not risk as many Tenebris lives. The Demons were all at around S-Rank, meaning they were incredibly strong by human standards, but there was no telling how the battle would evolve. Conservation of resources was a critical aspect of war.
Loren nodded. “Once a defensive line is created, Merrix will assist the weakest of my people to move as many as we can.” He shouted to some of the Tenebris leaving, giving them instructions as everyone flew off in different directions.
It was a slapdash operation, but the speed at which Momo, the Shadows, and the Tenebris responded kept the situation from being F.U.B.A.R. (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition).
“Deep Blue will manage the Shadows, the rest is up to you,” Momo said, looking back into the city, towards one of the nearest tall buildings.
“What will you do?” Loren asked.
“There’s still too many ships in the water for the Wyvern Squad to handle alone. So… I’m gonna split their hulls in half.”
*******
Kaisel landed silently just a few miles away from what appeared to be a separate landing site for the Russian army. It was a small group of maybe 300. Soldiers, engineers, and so on.
Kaisel was hiding in Kaina’s shadow as she crept up on the operation. A sniper had to be good at concealing themselves, and Kaina was no different. She’d spent several lifetimes doing little more than avoiding detection, so finding a cliff with a good view of the landing site was no trouble.
She propped up her rifle and began looking through the scope. The soldiers were setting up defenses, establishing a small base of sorts. Kaina wasn’t sure for what reason though. It would be too small for a forward operating base, and the part of the island they were on didn’t seem all that important. Sure it led into cities, but the strategy felt weird. Why bring only 300 men when the Russian army had hundreds of thousands to spare?
Kaina got a glimpse of their goal when several men began offloading several large crates. They set them down beneath the tree cover, obscuring the contents of the crate from Kaina’s view as they began opening the wooden boxes.
After they were opened, groups of ten or so began to gather around and put their hands out towards whatever had been inside. Kaina could tell, even from a distance, that they were using Magic.
“A small operation to detonate a Magical bomb of some sort?” She theorized. “Sapporo is just a diversion for whatever this is?” Whatever the case, she decided to not let it go on any further. She tore out a piece of her hair, molding it into a special-type of bullet that was designed by Darpa. It basically traveled in a straight line, not needing to account for wind or drop. Kaina was already a sufficient markswoman without bullets like them, so adding it to her arsenal meant that she would almost never miss a target.
She began with anyone putting off any sort of Mana. Whatever they were up to… well, it was safe to say it wasn’t benevolent.
The crack of Kaina’s rifle was loud in her ears, but because it had a silencer on it, the soldiers near the beach wouldn’t be able to easily discern its location. They began to panic as the men and women around them dropped dead from an unseen assailant.
Kaina, unlike Izuku or even Momo, had no trouble personally pulling the trigger to put a hole in someone’s skull.
She put down dozens of soldiers and Awakened Humans without issue. But within no time at all, the rest of her targets had taken cover beneath the foliage of the forest. Even with her enhanced senses, Kaina was essentially rolling the dice trying to pick off anyone beneath the trees.
“Come on!” She said, calling to Kaisel, who leapt out of her Shadow and changed into her four-legged Drake-Form. Kaina jumped atop Kaisel’s back as two plummeted off the cliff, hitting the ground running.
Kaina flipped the scope of her rifle to the side, allowing her to fire at closer ranges.
As they approached, the soldiers began to form a firing line now that they were aware of the threat. It was, after all, hard to not notice a giant Shadow Dragon rushing at you.
The bullets pinged off Kaisel’s chest and neck area, but it was clear that they were impacting with far more force than a normal bullet. They were actually pretty close to Kaina’s own bullets in terms of power, which meant she would have to be wary of getting hit.
Kaina leaned around Kaisel’s neck, popping off a shot and taking down another soldier.
Kaisel went for a more destructive tactic, activating Divine Retribution and firing a super condensed beam of energy. Anyone who got hit with it was instantly eradicated from existence. If it hit a soldier’s upper-body, then all that would remain would be their legs.
The beam sweeped back and forth, careful to not aim where the wooden crates had been set down. If they were bombs, Kaisel didn’t want to do anything that might set them off.
Strangely, despite the clear disadvantages that the Russian troops faced, they weren’t backing off. In fact, Kaina could tell with her excellent eyesight that they weren’t even somewhat unnerved. In her past lives, her squad had engaged with North Korean soldiers, people so strictly controlled by the government that they didn’t even consider the idea of freedom. They were so bound by societal norms that they were devoted to a disturbing degree. And even then, Kaina had seen fear in their faces before. This was beyond devotion. It was downright delusional.
As Kaisel leaped into the center of the soldiers’ formation, flicking her tails and claws to shear people in half, Kaina caught sight of what had been in the boxes.
For a brief moment, she thought her theory was confirmed. The black orbs surrounded by mages looked like they were bombs of some sort. They didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen before, but Izuku, in her past life, had been an expert at defusing bombs and passed along a great deal of his knowledge to her. She wagered she could disarm them.
But then, much to her confusion, the bomb trembled. It wiggled back and forth as if something was…
“Kaisel torch everything!” Kaina shouted upon realizing what the black orbs were. They weren’t bombs. They were eggs.
Kaisel didn’t question Kaina for a moment. Her Lady trusted the sniper, so Kaisel trusted her in turn.
The first egg, and the people surrounding it, were enveloped in a blue light. They were vaporized. And left on the ground was a small slimy shape, struggling for life. It was the baby that the egg had housed. Somehow, it had survived the initial blast, so Kaina put a few extra bullets into the monster to be safe. Even still, the creature that had nearly been birthed shook her to the core, because she recognized it.
“We have to destroy them all!” She jumped from Kaisel’s back, abandoning all caution to leap into the fray. Pulling a knife from her belt, made of Magical Metal, she began cutting into the soldiers, breaking down their defenses and working her way towards the eggs. Kaisel split up from Kaina, realizing that they would need to cover ground separately to prevent the hatching.
There were over a dozen eggs, spread out along the beach, each with several mages pouring their Mana into it, as if speeding up the hatching. In fact, the one closest to Kaina had a limb poking through it. She slashed the egg open and shot the creature after executing the mages. They were still weak, just enough for Kaina to be able to kill on her own… but if they hatched…
“Faster! Faster!” Kaina urged herself on, practically throwing her body into the eggs to crack them open and stab the newborn Villains.
But there were still five eggs left. Two of which had fully hatched, the mages sacrificing their lives to feed the monsters, which grew more powerful by the second. Then a third hatched.
Kaina and Kaisel destroyed the last two eggs simultaneously, but it left them staring down three monsters, all feasting on the mages.
Kaina, in that moment, felt like she was back on Jeju Island, staring down something that was beyond her capacity to kill. Even Kaisel bristled with anxiety staring the Villains down. After all, they were spitting images of her Liege’s greatest weapon.
All three figures standing before Kaina were identical… to Beru.