Chapter Text
[Impromptu Quest: Stop Nine! has been completed!]
[Rewards:]
- 64 Synthetic Shadow Slots
*******
“Twenty minutes to next contact,” Kaina reported as Momo continued to pick through the wreckage on the ground. They had just made landfall on a small beach to the north of Chumikan. After choosing a landing site, Momo had the Ravagers shell the area until it was decorated with craters. The Russians knew the path they were taking, so they had a bunch of infantry and tanks lining the coast. Unfortunately for them, the Ravagers’ range far exceeded theirs.
“Whatchya looking for?” Rumi asked, leaning over Momo’s shoulder like a little kid.
“Still trying to figure out how they’re managing to get their technology working with Magic. We’ve destroyed pretty much everything we’ve come into contact with, or had more pressing issues to deal with.” She picked up what looked like a normal piece of metal. “I can create Magical items with my Quirk, mostly via instinct, but when I understand the physical makeup of something, I can forge it much better. Magic is… well… Magic… It’s the opposite of science.”
“I thought sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from Magic?” Kaina asked, mostly in jest.
“Hang on…” Momo looked up at the sniper. “So far, we’ve yet to understand Magic because we can’t examine it closely enough. Any high-powered research machine can only capture static, if it’s not completely fried that is. But your eyes aren’t technology.”
“Ohhh!” Kaina realized where she was going, moving over to their little huddle.
“You guys building sandcastles or something?!” Mori shouted over at them as the Japanese off-loaded onto the beaches.
All three girls ignored him as Kaina focused her eyes on the metal scraps.
“Molecules and atoms are mostly empty space, so I’m not even sure you’ll be able to see anything, but if you can, and sketch it for me, I might be able to figure it out.” Momo was trusting in Kaina’s Magic eyes to see that which no human could see without advanced technology. Momo pulled a notebook from her arm and a pen, handing it to Kaina.
“Ugh…” Kaina held a hand to her head and closed her eyes for a moment.
“Are you alright?”
“Yeah it’s just… weird… like my entire perception of reality changed.”
Miruko raised her hand. “You mean like when you zoom out of a map and it adjusts to show you everything on a different level?”
“That’s… not exactly what happened, but it’s not a bad comparison,” Kaina admitted, trying once again. “Okay, I can actually see stuff this time around.” She narrowed her eyes. “Isn’t our depiction of particles simplified for understanding them?”
Momo nodded. “Actual particles look nothing like the stuff in textbooks, we just don’t have any other way for our 3-dimensional minds to comprehend it.”
“Then I’m not actually seeing particles, my eyes are just… making sense of it.” Kaina began to scribble on the notebook, delicately diagraming the bonds between the atoms and the positive or negative charge.
“Well isn’t that what our eyes already do?” Rumi asked innocently. “Sand only looks like sand because of the way our brain interprets information from our eyes.”
“Yep,” Momo herself had a hard time wrapping her head around the concept, but, “To different beings, the universe looks completely different from what we perceive.”
“Oh by the way we’ve maybe got another couple minutes before they get here,” Miruko added, her ears hearing the march of man and machine and calculating the distance between them and the coast.
“Behemoth.”
“Yes, my Lady,” Behemoth didn’t need to hear anything more to rise from the depths of his Mistress’s shadow and advance towards the Russian forces.
Momo couldn’t help but feel bad for them. Behemoth was practically a Kaiju with infinite regeneration. He would do his best to not kill anyone, but he was still churning up earth and causing local seismic activity with each step. And with the Russian pheromone control, many of the soldiers would be forced to press on regardless, forcing the Japanese invasion to kill them.
“Hopefully that special National-Rank doesn’t hide out in Moscow, otherwise this is gonna be a long war.”
Miruko turned up her nose at Momo’s bleak prediction. “I don’t think they’re all that far away…”
“Really? How could you guess that?” Momo’s plan boiled down to doing enough damage until the National-Rank was forced to reveal themself, in which case they could take them down after trying to pursue a peaceful resolution and free the soldiers from the mind control. It worked for Nine at least.
“I dunno,” Miruko replied. “But, at least to me, it doesn’t seem like the goal of this whole scheme is anything normal. When wars break out, it’s usually over land, resources, political or religious doctrine, etc. Nothing about this feels standard, obviously, but I get the sense that it’s beyond the scope of humanity. Some goal we can’t even comprehend yet.” Momo, reluctantly, found herself agreeing with the sentiment.
“Okay, this is the best I could do,” Kaina said, handing over the piece of paper to Momo.
Momo briefly scanned the atomic structure, before shaking her head and rubbing at her eyes.
“Is it too confusing?” Kaina asked.
“No… no that’s just the thing, I know exactly what this is… I just… I can’t believe it… I can’t believe we never found it in our past research…”
“What is it?” Kaina and Rumi exchanged anxious glances.
“There’s no such thing as Magic… it’s all just…”
*******
Five Days Later:
“You’ve gotten pretty good at that,” Kaina commented as Momo pulled a fully formed and fully loaded KRISS Vector from her arm. By itself, it wasn’t a very big achievement for Momo, she’d already gotten good at assembling things all at once when creating them. No, the big accomplishment here… was that it was fully Magical. Everything from the gun body itself, to the bullets were about C-Rank. Not all that high in quality compared to the sort of monsters Momo usually faced, but they were more than enough to give the normal soldiers a fighting chance and she could pump them out relatively fast.
“That tiny piece of information was all we ever needed…” She muttered, still in disbelief over the discovery. “It even fills the gap of knowledge I had about the Eternal Slumber… The real question is how the Russians got to it first. Did they have some sort of Skill or Magic that allowed them to see it too?”
Kaina shrugged. “Guess we won’t know until it’s all over. Considering that it required a National-Rank set of powers - the Dragon God’s eyes - it might have been discovered by their own National-Rank, whoever it may be.”
Momo continued to produce Magical firearms as one of the squad commanders came over. “It’s official, they’ve been directing us.”
Kaina clicked her tongue in annoyance. Over the past few days advancing into Russian territory, it became clear that they weren’t meeting much resistance so long as they marched straight. If their convoy attempted to deviate in any other direction, it received heavy resistance. They were leading them in a very specific direction. Nine times out of ten, that sort of behavior was a trap. But it made no sense.
The Russian soldiers didn’t care about their own well-being, but at the same time, they couldn’t stop powerhouses like Miruko, Kaina, Momo, or the Shadows. It was a strange stalemate, not quite a truce, but also not trickery.
“Miruko should be back soon,” The commander reported. The Rabbit Hero was the strongest in terms of physical prowess, so she was scouting out the nearby area, where the Russians apparently wanted them to be.
With the rest of the Japanese forces holding the convoy’s path and covering a potential retreat, there weren’t all that many individuals on the frontlines. It was really just a few battalions and the Shadow forces, which included Kaina, Momo, and Rumi. But that was the plan after all, launching a spear of powerful individuals deep into the country.
“I think Rumi was right…” Momo remarked. “Whoever is in control of these soldiers… they don’t seem to be operating by human motives.”
“You think a Villain is behind this?” The soldier asked.
“...No.”
The soldier briefly looked confused and was about to open his mouth to ask what the heck she meant, but before he could, a white-haired woman came jumping into the camp.
“Looks like a launch site,” She said, commenting on the buildings up ahead.
“Like a missile silo?”
“No, I mean a launch site for spacecraft. There’s a rocket on the launch pad, and it’s not a nuke.”
Kaina and Momo both lowered their heads in contemplation. Something was extremely bizarre here, more so than even their usual bizarre encounters. “So what are they putting into space?”
“I’d rather not find out,” Kaina responded. “We’ll take the facility right now, and see for ourselves before they can put it up there.”
There was no reason to hide, they were some of the strongest people on the planet. So with a startling lack of gravitas, the soldiers and the Shadow forces began to march towards the launch site.
The cold and dew-covered woods did not last for long, revealing a large complex surrounded by what seemed like miles of barbed wire atop a concrete wall.
“This isn’t on sat-maps,” The commander relayed as Miruko, quite literally, walked through the wall, causing other sections to crumble and fall. “They were actively hiding it. It’s not some research platform.” The soldier tapped his ear, sending the signal to his squad that the Mana condensation was thick and that their comms wouldn’t be functioning very reliably while inside.
“I'll hold the perimeter. Make sure no one leaves and that the rocket doesn’t take off. Destroy it if I have to.” The sniper began handing out commands to the Shadow forces. “Miruko and Empress, take the command room, Shadows spread out and help the soldiers clear the other buildings.” As soon as she was done, and Momo had verified the commands to the Shadows, she used Omni-Movement to leap straight up, climbing to a bird’s eye view to monitor everything.
Like any astronomical facility, there was more than just the mission control and launch platform. So the small but elite group split up, their Magical weapons and armor, courtesy of Momo, giving them just a bit more confidence.
Momo watched through the Shadow’s eyes as they rushed into dark rooms, seemingly abandoned long ago. All-in-all, the girls didn’t feel any living presence… aside from the group in mission control.
Momo, Miruko, Igris, Beru, and the squad commander wasted no time throwing open the doors and charging in. There was a small huddle of men, women, and children by a control panel. Only one of them had a pheromone control spike at the base of their skull.
“Yuri Orlov?” Momo recognized him immediately, he was nearly a National-Rank after all.
The commander threw out orders, getting the unarmed men and women to move away from the console and put their hands up. They all maintained their distance, not knowing the situation. And then, the last woman at the console finally turned around.
“Katya Orlov…?” Now everyone was confused. “What’s the Russian President doing here?” The squad commander held his position. The Shadows were bringing some of his men to help apprehend the men and women and also to escort the children safely.
The woman’s eyes were bloodshot and her lips dry and cracking, like she’d spent a week in the desert. “Just let us leave…”
Miruko laughed loudly at the pathetic plea. “You think you get to start a war, mentally enslave a people, and then fuck off into space? Where are you even gonna go?”
Katya was looking around, as if something would emerge from the darkness at any moment. “You don’t understand, this is humanity’s only chance at salvation!”
“Hey could you guys like… smack her across the face for me?” Yuri Orlov asked.
“You can speak?”
The Russian Hero couldn’t move, but he answered affirmatively. “Everyone here is our family. I was in staunch opposition to whatever this war is, so this happened to me.” Even an expert at supper Barrier Magic was completely helpless against the control mechanism. “In case it isn’t obvious, this wasn’t my idea!”
Momo could see he was telling the truth, all the people there had a passing resemblance for each other, and none of them seemed to have any sort of combat prowess. They were completely lost in this situation, having been dragged here by the president and not told anything.
Soldiers and Shadows piled into the control room, having cleared the rest of the facility. Kaina was still watching overhead with Kaisel and the Wyvern Squadron.
The children were the first to be removed, some crying, others too afraid to do anything besides following instructions.
“What was your plan?” Momo asked Katya directly. “I wanna hear everything.”
“Ants… no… Nine was wrong about that…” She looked right at Momo, without a hint of sanity. “They’re watching us, playing with us… like chess pieces… T-The rocket is filled with thousands of embryos and artificial wombs… we can do it, start over, hide for as long as possible…”
“Is that what it is? A colony ship?” It didn’t take long for anyone to catch on. They had all seen sci-fi movies before.
“An ark… to wait out another flood… but when the one after that comes… we will have no more boats… no more prophets… no more hope…” The soldiers put all the adults in handcuffs or zip ties, sitting them down around the room.
“You wanted to abandon the planet? Why? It couldn’t have been because of the Villains. Your country just figured out how to produce Magical weapons on a mass scale, so it’s not them.”
Katya violently shook her head. “No, not them, they’re just other parts of the chess board. There’s no true escape, just prolonged survival. They’ll always find us… but she promised me time… more time…” Her eyes finally settled, fixating on a single bug buzzing through the air. “YOU! You promised me more!”
“She’s clearly not in her right mind, let’s get-” The squad commander was cut off as a haunting voice filled the room, like a virus spreading through the air.
“Of course I promised more. That is the key to manipulating you mortals. A little more power, a little more money, a little more time,” A cackle sent many of the ziptied prisoners running, and the soldiers didn’t even try to stop them.
“Run,” Momo said, directing the squad commander to follow up on his earlier thought. It was time for the weaklings to leave.
“It’s pathetic how easily it works! You have no grand purpose, no true end goals! You’re just struggling to breathe one last futile breath!” The room grew dark. Katya attempted to run, but Yuri encased her in a box of his own barriers. It was just them, the Shadow forces, and a swarm of insects.
The bugs began to coalesce into a single shape, a woman with an hourglass figure, but long distorted limbs and claws. Her face was beautiful, but horrifically pale. Her eyes were completely black. No iris, no pupil, just black goo that oozed out of her tear ducts.
Her Mana was like a pungent odor that overwrote any other thoughts. The smell was all they could focus on. There was no other way to describe her presence. It was a sickness.
“But I have a greater purpose. I am not some worm wriggling in the mud. To Higher Beings, purpose is so easily sought.” While she didn’t have a pupil, Momo was certain that she was looking right at her. “I have caused death for millenia, all for the sake of my one true love! A love that you have ruined!” Her screeching pierced Momo’s ears. “I am the only one he needs! Me! Quaresha! The Monarch of Plagues!” Her body began to glow with a sickening Mana. “You, Shadow Empress, took him from me! I want him back! I want my Shadow Monarch!” With a horrific screech, she launched herself into battle.