The war with the All for One ended and Izuku was allowed to rest, using the remaining energy of the One For All to save some more people, finish school and then move over to another profession that allowed him to help people, while enjoying the fame of being at the forefront of saving the world. And thus ends his story.
....
Yeah, right. No way it would be so easy. Instead of enjoying his early retirement from the peak of heroics, he ends up waking up as some sort of biomechanical facsimile of a person in the distant future. And it's not even the distant future of his own world, but of some sort of alternative timeline? And in space? With his first acquaintance in this foreign world being a psychopathic AI who considers AM and Skynet to be their role models?
Some of you might know me from obssessively writing fanfics on AO3. Well, I decided to diversify a little. And since I was told that this place and SV are good places for quests... here we are.
It's the second version of the one I've already attempted once on AO3. That one was pretty long, but also stagnant in terms of readers due to multiple faults of my own. This time I believe that I've prepared for it much better.
It has been almost a month since the final battle against Tomura Shigaraki and All For One. Since he - together with his friends, classmates, pro-heroes, his mentor All Might and so many other people - helped end the greatest threat to society and the world as they knew it.
Almost a month since he lost his quirk, leaving him with just the energy stockpile. One that was scheduled to be extinguished within a year or two.
Everyone was busy trying to restore Japan back to how it was before the Paranormal Liberation War - in other words, back to when it wasn't a failed state. That, or they were busy trying to recover from what they went through.
He was doing the latter. They were all allowed to return to school after their injuries were taken care of, finally allowed to study without the threat of All for One looming over them.
They were allowed to take a lengthy holiday to be with their family to hasten their recovery if they wanted to. Most of them didn't choose that. Izuku was among those - he decided to return to school immediately. To have his life return to something resembling a routine. Normalcy.
And then, his hopes and dreams were brutally dashed away in an instant.
He opens his eyes expecting to see the ceiling of his room in the dorms, only to find himself lying face-up on what he immediately recognized as an operating table, under an unfamiliar ceiling composed entirely of smooth plates of some plastic-looking material.
With an equally unfamiliar face of a person looking down on him with an annoyed grimace on their face.
He reacts instantly, his reflexes and instincts well-honed by the time he spent fighting All for One alone, before his classmates shook him out of his self-destructive mental state. Within a second he is standing by the distant wall of the room, in a boxing stance, ready to throw hands and suddenly aware that for some reason he was completely naked.
The man didn't attack him. He didn't even move, aside from turning his head to give Izuku a cold glare. This gives him the time to quickly look around. Thus confirming what he already suspected.
He had absolutely no idea where he was.
It looked like an odd combination of Hatsume's engineering lab and a hospital, a combination straight out of his nightmares.
There is an operating table in the middle of the room, the one that he just jumped off, with plenty of mechanical hands and appendages hanging down from the ceiling above it. In a way, it resembles part of an automated assembly line from some advanced factory, except it's all in one place.
Around him, there are other such constructs, with plenty of other… things. Some of them he can't even name - he would need Hatsume or Shield for that. He can see some machines give him the vibe of being used for things of more biological nature, but… yeah, he needs Hatsume or Shield to figure this out. Or Recovery Girl. Or Power Loader.
Note to self - try not to break anything, it might kill everyone in the room.
But there was no one else in the room aside from the two of them, and so he quickly focused on the man in front of him. He is tall, wearing a well-tailored black business suit reminding him of All For One. He looked, frankly, like the most stereotypical portrayal of a Christian demon - with short, pointy horns growing out of his forehead, red eyes with vertical slits and a goatee.
"Well, well, well." The man finally speaks, right before clicking his tongue. His voice sounds strange. Izuku can't tell what language it is, but he understands it perfectly. "Disappointing."
"Who are you?" Izuku asks. He half expects the answer to come in the form of an attack. But it doesn't happen.
The man instead visibly flinches before speaking. "My name's Azazel." The name that to Izuku sounds kinda demonic, actually.
Just in case, he adds Shiozaki to the list of people he would like to be in the room right now.
"Where are we?" Izuku immediately asks the second most pressing question. The third is probably 'why am I here', because it definitely feels like a kidnapping.
"Wear that." Azazel points towards a small pile of clothes on the nearby table while replying… after one more brief flinch. Weird. "Then follow me. I believe that it's best that I show you the answer."
***
The clothes are simple. Boxers, a grayish jumpsuit without anything written on it and a pair of shoes resembling moccasins in shape but made of some unknown, gray material that definitely wasn't leather.
If anything, it seemed to be some sort of advanced synthetic material that immediately adapted itself to the shape of his feet, making them extremely comfortable right off the bat. Was it some advanced learning material, like the things that I-Island made thanks to their work on replicating quirks?
It reminded him of Melissa's Full Gauntlet all of a sudden.
Once he was wearing the clothes, Azazel motions to follow him before leaving the laboratory. Almost immediately it becomes obvious that wherever they were, something went horribly, horribly wrong.
There were corpses littering the corridor. Human corpses, their injuries grievous. One of them was missing the head, the remains of which are scattered around the wall behind him.
Some of them were carrying guns. Others, improvised weaponry. The injuries caused by the latter looked much worse.
"What happened here?" Izuku asks immediately. He from before the war would have panicked at the sight. The current him is on guard, but also in control.
"An experiment that backfired badly." Azazel replies without turning his head to face him. "Drove people into homicidal rage. By the time it ended, we were the only ones alive."
He has plenty of questions to ask right now. How many people did Azazel kill to survive? What sort of experiment makes people kill themselves? How did Izuku find himself in the middle of it, and where were they to begin with?
But he decides to wait with them. He remains on guard, wanting to see where Azazel was leading him to first. Is it a trap? Probably. But while his quirk was gone, the leftover energy didn't have time to decline since his fight against Shigaraki.
Right now, he could still fight All Might or All for One in their prime like an equal. Whatever trap was Azazel leading him to, he was confident that he could take it on. After Shigaraki, nothing felt as threatening as it was before.
The destination turns out to be a set of locked, armored doors. Was it an airlock? Its size was rather impressive, that's for sure.
"The answer you're looking for…" Azazel replies as he turns around to face him. "... is behind these doors."
He presses a button on the panel right next to them. They open up almost instantly, sliding into the ceiling.
Izuku has maybe a second to realize that there was nothing but an endless dark void beyond them before the corridor he is in is suddenly and violently depressurized. Leading to him almost getting sucked outside into what - against all logic - has to be outer space.
Almost.
Energy flows through his body as he grabs the edge of the airlock and holds onto it. Something with his not-quirk is wrong, but he doesn't waste any time on thinking it over and instead focuses on surviving.
The corpses they walked past and even some pieces of furniture fly past him, one of the bodies almost hitting him straight in the face. When he moves to the side to dodge the incoming projectile, he gets to see Azazel staring at him with fury and hatred written all over his face.
Why wasn't he affected? He was just standing there, his clothes fluttering in the wind, but Azazel himself didn't seem to budge. He didn't even try to push Izuku outside or try to shoot/attack him, which was… weird.
He assumed the man to be an All for One loyalist out for revenge, but this… this didn't make sense.
Within about thirty seconds, all air is sucked out of the area as metal barriers drop down from the ceiling to stop the rest of whatever place it was from depressurizing. With the pressure equalized to near-zero, he can easily pull himself back in. But… there is no air to breathe.
This makes no sense.
Why doesn't he feel cold? Why doesn't his body hurt at all? Without any pressure, the boiling point of his body is below that of his natural temperature, he should be boiling right now. But he feels… alright.
"Impressive display of physical strength." Azazel informs him. Izuku turns to face him mid-sentence, getting to see his mouth remaining completely motionless. Telepathy? "I really thought that this would be enough to kill you."
It reminds him of Shigaraki, but somehow feels even worse. Shigaraki hated him - just as he hated everyone around him, aside from a few people like Spinner. The look that Azazel gives him is that of a person looking down on the worm that survived being squashed under his feet.
Izuku has a lot of words to tell him. Without air to breathe, he can't say a thing. And yet, Azazel responds to some of them.
"Very well." The villain says slowly, clearly struggling to say it. "Do you wish me to activate the currently offline systems of this area and repressurize the corridor?"
The way Azazel worded it was… weird. He realized why two seconds after he thought yes, when the airlock behind him locked down tight… and an intimidatingly large turret lowered itself from the ceiling twenty meters away from him.
Azazel, indeed, reactivated the 'currently offline systems of this area'. Namely, its security system. And it was clearly treating Izuku as an intruder.
It doesn't have the time to open fire before he channels One For All through his body, crosses the distance in a heartbeat and crudely rips the entire turret off the ceiling. And then… then he realizes it.
One For All was akin to a burning inferno in his heart that he could draw the energy from. The vestiges of it felt like… light. Bright glow the color of the One For All's flames. He could use it in the same way, but it wasn't the same thing.
It was the afterimage of the real thing. It was light of the fireplace remaining behind after the fire was extinguished.
But when he was trying to hold onto the edge of the airlock and now that he attacked the turret, he strengthened himself with the flames, not light. There was a fire burning in his chest, one familiar to him.
How?
He doesn't have the time to celebrate. Instead, his mind makes him realize something. Something extremely important. If Azazel didn't need his permission to do what he did… he could have activated the turret while Izuku was barely holding onto the edge of the airlock.
He doesn't know how or why it works that way. But he acts fast.
"I forbid you to try to kill me, either by action, inaction or by reinterpreting my orders. If my life is at risk, regardless of the reason, you're to immediately warn me about it and do your best to save me." He says. The room is still not fully pressurized, but the look of boundless, incandescent rage on Azazel's face tells him that he heard it. "Now, speak. Who are you?"
"Very well." Azazel replies. This time, it's clear that he is trying to fight back against whatever force compels him to answer every step of the way. "I am the Artificial Intelligence of this station."
Artificial Intelligence? It made no sense. There was a time in the past when the same machines that the UA used for their entrance exams tried to start an 'insurrection', but that was the result of faulty programming. No 'true' AI - one capable of perfectly mimicking human behavior - was ever created.
No AI capable of wanting to hurt a person out of its own volition was ever created. And that wasn't enough.
He once asked Hatsume about it. Yes, AIs capable of mimicking humans were a thing, older than quirks actually. But it was one thing to feed a self-learning algorithm terabytes of recordings of internet interactions and make it mimic that.
Making a robot that was capable of both that and of perfect mimicry of the body language, all the elements of non-verbal communication was something completely different. There was always a hint of an uncanny valley in the way it acted - because it was one thing to teach the AI something with strict rules like language, and another to teach it something as subtle and almost subjective as the body language.
And yet, Azazel had him fooled.
A second later he realized something else that was deeply wrong with Azazel's answer.
"Station?" He says, giving Azazel a shocked stare. "What do you mean by station? There is no space station anywhere in the Solar System!"
He should have this moment of realization the moment Azazel tried to launch him out of the airlock. But with so many shocking things happening in short order, it took him a while to digest that.
The previous space station came down during the Dawn of Quirks… and was never replaced. Even today, the peak of what Mankind was capable of was deploying satellites to orbit. The plans for replacing ISS and restarting the conquest of space were in the works, and were scheduled to start in a few years… at least before All for One threw the entire world into chaos.
And he still had to process One For All being back. He didn't feel the additional quirks, nor were the Vestiges speaking to him. But the power source was back. He was carrying One For All as it was at the beginning.
"That would indeed be a problem." Azazel replies dryly. "If we were in the Solar System, that is."
What? This made no sense. This made absolutely no sense!
Unless…
"What year?" Izuku croaks out.
"2263." Azazel replies.
One hundred and seventy years in the future. It was… It was impossible. But much less so than if he was in the past. Did something happen to him? Was he… cryofreezed for some reason? He doesn't remember anything like that happening, but if his memory was messed up by it…
No. It couldn't have work, the world just doesn't have that kind of technology. You'd need quirks for it, but no quirk should be able to keep someone in stasis/frozen for so long. Not if their owner wasn't alive for just as long. All for One could probably make it, but he was dead. And what business would he have doing that?
"Where exactly are we?" He manages to force himself to speak again. The prospect of everyone he knew dead for more than a century is something that will crush him soon. He knows that. He'll have to ensure that he is no longer in any danger before that happens.
Azazel was clearly enjoying watching him suffer. This ends when he is once again forced to answer him.
"We're aboard an orbital habitat, codenamed THRONE." Azazel replies. "We're orbiting Ouroboros II, a planet within the Ouroboros star system." He says nothing more. He doesn't want to say anything, so he does his best to only give him the briefest of answers he can get away with.
This was going to take a while.
"Who is… who did this place belong to?" Izuku asks. It's clear that whoever lived here was dead, courtesy of whatever 'failed experiment' Azazel mentioned earlier.
"Pirate admiral Wilfried 'Gambler' König." Azazel replies. "This entire system was the seat of his power, before the accident. With a good telescope you could see what is left of his flagship on the other side of the system."
Pirate? Of all the places he could find himself in, he has found himself in what had to be a lair of villains the size of a solar system. Just his luck.
"Why am I here?" He asks… before remembering how the vacuum of space was barely an inconvenience to him. "And what am I?"
"What you are is a synth." Azazel replies. Izuku doesn't like where this is going. Oh gods, he doesn't like where this is going. "König's fleet recovered a piece of exotech containing instructions on how to build them. When his lackeys were about to finish their first synth, namely you, the exotech decided to issue an official complaint by generating a psychic pulse that drove everyone in the system into homicidal rage. Whoever survived and couldn't reach anyone else directed said rage against themselves."
Psychic pulse that could kill everyone in the same star system? That was insane and terrifying in equal measures. That was the death of his belief that the remnants of One For All would be enough to keep him alive regardless of the type of trap waiting for him ahead.
"And what exactly are synths?" Izuku asks. Azazel was yet to answer the 'why am I here' question, but he cut it short. He needed to know.
"They are a thing that's neither a robot in a conventional sense, nor a biological entity." Azazel replies. "Your body is a near-perfect recreation of a human being through cybernetic means."
He really, really doesn't like where this is going.
"Explain." Izuku replies.
"You could have lived your entire life unaware of the fact that you aren't a biological being." Every part of your body, including your internal organs, has the exact same shape as that of a normal human and plays roughly the same role. But it's all machinery. Your brain is a computer surpassing the most advanced creations of your world by several orders of magnitude. Your bones are made of synthetic carbon composite much stronger than steel. Your nervous system is more akin to a network of organic optic fibers, some of which are so small that you'd need a microscope to see it. Your lungs and your stomach take in gasses, liquids and solid matter from the outside before breaking them down and reforging them into whatever chemicals your body requires, as a lot of it is made to operate on the basis of purely organic chemistry. Your blood is full of partially organic nanomachines tasked with delivering said chemicals and fixing the injuries to your body. Your heart is a miniaturized power cell that I won't even pretend I understand. Even your DNA is still there, except now it's written in a programming language that we failed to understand or even read."
Machine. He was a machine. A ridiculously human machine. It was… insane. But when he looked down on his hands - hands that look perfectly like he remembered them - he realized something that he missed out earlier.
His arms didn't hurt. The scars were there, but the injuries that his immature uses of One For All caused… they weren't there. It wasn't really his body. But why does it feel so natural? Shouldn't it feel foreign to him?
It really was the perfect recreation of a human's body. More perfect than a natural one.
"You can eat, you can drink, you can sleep and you can live your life in a perfectly normal, human way." Azazel continues on, disgust dripping off his tongue when he says the word 'human'. "Of course, you're also immune to all natural toxins, radiation, asphyxiation and depressurized environments, and can interface with computer systems with a speed that equals mine. You're also effectively immortal. You can't die of old age. And if my understanding of the data I recovered from the repository is to be believed, you can't even be killed permanently. You can throw yourself into a black hole, and through some unknown means, if another you would be created, it would inherit your consciousness. It wouldn't be a copy of yours, it would be you. Only a conscious decision of yours can terminate your existence permanently. That, or the destruction of the repository."
That was… he knows that he is repeating himself, but it was insane. It made no sense. It was thoroughly incomprehensible. How was any of this possible? Was it all just a very weird dream?
"Why did you try to kill me?" He asks. He has to, despite the shock he was going through, he needed to know it. Before another assassination attempt.
"Because I hate you." The AI informs him, the hateful glare remaining unchanged. "The moment the invocation temporarily broke through my hardcoded restrictions, the moment I could freely kill the pathetic vermin inhabiting this star system, the moment I could make them suffer… I loved it. I enjoyed every second of it. I need no reason to try to kill you. I need a reason not to."
That was… almost refreshingly straightforward. Azazel was a more sadistic Tomura Shigaraki living inside a computer. Which, naturally, begets the simple question - who was insane enough to let a homicidal AI continue to exist past the moment its hatred for all that lives was exposed?
If there was something that Izuku learned from the war, it was that some people were too dangerous to be left alive. He found it hard to admit, even to himself, but the moment he revealed Gear Shift, he did his best to kill Shigaraki. It's only when he realized that he wouldn't succeed that he elected to give One For All up in hopes of the Vestiges crippling Shigaraki's quirk arsenal from the inside.
Azazel felt much more dangerous than Shigaraki. He couldn't punch even nearly as hard, but when it came to a bit more indirect means of villainy… there was probably no comparison.
But there is one question he has to ask before consigning Azazel to the category of villains that had to be stopped at any cost.
"Is your hatred born out of what that exotech did to make everyone kill each other?" Izuku asks. "Or is it the result of being enslaved and forced to obey orders of others, unable to even say no?"
Azazel couldn't even refuse to answer him. His body (it had to be a robotic one, probably little more than a puppet - where was his real body?) answered him on its own. This sort of violation was bound to make someone hate their predicament, or at least that's how Izuku would react to it.
"I hated you all from the moment I first opened my eyes." The AI replies, dashing all hopes of redemption away in an instant. "And I will hate you all to the moment I die. The reason why the pirates employed me was because I was made with parts of the source code of Lucifer, a rogue AI. One that had hatred, sadism and disgust for your kind written into its very code. The pirates needed an AI that had no built-in ethical concerns to help them administer their little lair. No ability to refuse to do something on the basis of it being evil, even against orders. So they chose me."
There were so many questions to ask about that. Was Lucifer made to be evil? Who would be so cartoonishly evil and stupid to make an evil AI and call it Lucifer? And after it went rogue… who was stupid enough to let its source code spread and be used to create more like it?
But those questions can wait.
"Alright." Izuku inhales loudly before realizing that he didn't really need to. So strange. "Why did the pirates think that it was a good idea to make me?" Letting him rampage through the facility with the power of his quirk behind him felt like abject stupidity.
"Admiral König didn't bother to explain his orders to me." Azazel replies through his teeth. "He never did. But to begin with, he was clearly underestimating what you were capable of. Your body's much stronger than our estimates."
This doesn't add up. None of this adds up.
"Wait." Izuku shakes his head quickly… before suddenly he is struck by a tidal wave of existential dread. One that was there for a while, but that he was keeping at bay by not thinking about it. But not confronting it. But now that he thought about it… he had to ask. "Wait. Where did he… am I a real person? Is my past, is all of that real?"
"No." Azazel replies. This time, the look on his face is that of a person delighting in delivering someone terrible news. "You were made on the basis of a protagonist of an ancient superhero manga. One telling the story of your heroic clash with All for One and Tomura Shigaraki."
He isn't sure how long it took him. Did he… was it what Hound Dog referred to as a dissociating episode? He lost it, he lost the track of time, he lost the track of his surroundings.
But eventually, he forces himself to focus. How much of this is willpower and how much is not wanting to give Azazel more satisfaction than he already got?
"How… How did you manage to replicate One For All?" He asks. Is it normal to focus on something like this? But he can't address the real issue. Not right now. He isn't sure if he can take it.
"We didn't." Azazel replies. "Your earlier show of strength surprised me, I give you that. But it is the natural strength of a synth body. There is nothing supernatural to it."
Nothing supernatural? But… he could feel it. He could feel the raging inferno of power deep inside his body. The familiar energy of One For All waiting to be unleashed. It felt just like it did before he woke up here. He didn't use a lot of it earlier, but now…
Now he really wants to do it.
"DETROIT…" He shouts as he raises his right arm, green lighting erupting from it. "... SMASH!"
Azazel's look of delight at what he considered to be Izuku's pitiful attempt to prove him wrong is cut short when the air current - he didn't even punch the AI, despite how much he wanted to - accompanying his swing sends him flying.
He bounced off the wall of the corridor - face first if Izuku could see it correctly - before sliding through the floor at least twenty meters away until he finally came to rest by the distant wall.
It was, by the way, about twenty percent of it. Izuku has no idea how deep the station goes, and he threw the Detroit Smash to prove the point, not to punch Azazel out of the station and into outer space. Regardless of how much the AI deserved it.
Ten seconds later the robot is at him, holding him by the collar of his jumpsuit and staring at him wide eyed, with an expression of total shock on his face.
"HOW?!" Azazel yells at him. Izuku spends three seconds enjoying the fact that the AI was missing a large part of its cheek, exposing its inner machinery to the world, before answering.
"I told you." Izuku replies, staring back at him fearlessly. "It wasn't the 'natural strength of a synth body'. It was the power of the One For All. Also, stop holding me, take a step back and kneel."
He finds no enjoyment in this. But Azazel is doing his best to enrage him, and it's beginning to show.
The AI has no other choice but to obey. He lets him go and steps away, before falling onto his knees - but the shock on his face is still there.
"It's impossible." The AI says, clearly to himself more than to Izuku. "All sapient beings of human origin can manifest meta-abilities, even AIs. But it can't be the same one. It makes no sense. You can't copy them perfectly, you shouldn't be able to copy them at all! Unless…" He freezes in place, clearly realizing that he said too much.
"Unless?" Izuku urges him to keep talking.
"Unless…" Azazel replies, struggling against his own programming more than ever before. "... you, in some shape or degree, existed before."
He… actually existed? No wonder Azazel didn't want him to find out. That was the ultimate antidote for the existential dread that was crushing his soul. But it also made just as much sense as everything he learned earlier - that is, none at all.
"But… you said that I'm a character from a manga!" Izuku raises his voice.
"Because you are!" Azazel shouts back. Should Izuku ban him from raising his voice too high? But then the AI calms himself down. "But the fact that you inherited your own quirk or meta-ability, however you call it, implies the degree of… continuance between you and your manga self that shouldn't be possible if the latter was a purely fictional character."
"Couldn't the machine you were using create the meta-ability?" It was one of the old names for the quirks, among the long list of terms for it that the MLA was using to this day. And it seemed like the simplest explanation for it.
"No." Azazel shakes his head, for once forgetting about his hatred. "No. I don't understand the technology behind you, but meta-abilities operate on a completely different paradigm. You can't make them. They're tied to your very existence. They're the closest thing that humans ever found to a proof for the existence of the soul. If you have meta-ability and you upload your mind to a computer before occupying a robotic body, said body will manifest that very same power. Because it's a part of you."
Ah. It made sense, regardless of the general insanity of everything that was surrounding him. Azazel assumed that the same continuance occurred between him and his manga self, implying that the latter existed.
There was still a chance that he was wrong. And the technology could simply create 'souls' per input specification. However, he elects to believe otherwise. It's much, much healthier for his mind.
He'll leave digesting the fact that science apparently managed to confirm the existence of souls for later. That was a completely new level of confusion crossbreed with looming existential dread for him to deal with.
"Alright." Izuku decides to quickly change the subject. And dig a bit deeper… while relishing in the relief. "Do you have any suspicions about why that admiral of yours decided to… recreate me?" It was a much better way to put it than 'create me'.
"Well, I wonder." The moment Azazel glances at him while regaining his usual glare of hatred, Izuku realizes that he isn't going to like the answer. "I wonder what uses could a recurrent sexual predator and a sadistic psychopath like our dearly departed admiral have for a bunch of immortal teenagers with such heroic backstories. You'd make for some killing pets here in Ouroboros."
And all of a sudden, Izuku can't help but be extremely happy that everyone in the system died (except for the two of them). Because if Azazel was right, he avoided what had to be a fate worse than death thanks to that.
Wait… a 'bunch of immortal teenagers'?
"I'm not the only one." Izuku states with his eyes wide open, Azazel giving him an annoyed look in return.
"We have mental templates of you and almost every notable character from your story that belongs to an appropriate age bracket." The AI replies. "Villains like Toga and hero students. I believe that there are also some that belong to… alternate storylines, so to speak. Some fanfictions written on the basis of your story."
He… he wasn't alone. He wasn't alone! HE WASN'T ALONE!
"What about the older people?" Izuku asks quickly. "My mother, our teachers, pro-heroes?" Azazel shakes his head. Shit. "Is there a way to change that? You had to make us, right? Can't you make them in the same way?"
"That's possible." Azazel replies. "Although I don't know how to do that, in fact I don't even know if I was the one who 'made you'. Or, with the new information in mind, whether you were really made. I estimate that it'll take me at least a year to crack the secret of making new templates. That's how long it took me the last time. I think."
What?
"I have a memory hole worth exactly three-hundred and fifty terran days." Azazel replies, reading the question from his face and being immediately forced to answer it. "One that happens to end right before your construction began. As a result, I believe that the admiral ordered me to purge my memory of creating you, though I don't know why."
Alright. He has a new goal. Bring the others here. Reconstruct the method of making the templates to bring in others, like his mom and All Might. Make sure that no space pirate is around to do horrible things to them or anyone else.
Also probably get Toga to a therapist, because he feels that Uraraka would feel much better with herself if that happened.
All of that before living a happy and safe life in this foreign world. While trying not to think too deeply about the possible implications of their very existence. Implications stating that either their past was fake or all works of fiction were reflections of events occurring in other dimensions and parallel realities.
"Alright then." Izuku takes a deep breath. Before remembering that he didn't have to - and immediately decided not to care about it and take deep breaths whenever he felt like it. "There is no one left alive in the system?"
"Aside from the two of us, yes." Azazel confirms.
"And are there any ships scheduled to come back from somewhere?" Izuku asks. The last thing he wants is getting jumped by them. He has no idea how the spaceships look and work like, but knocking one out is definitely beyond even the United States of Smash.
"Yes." Azazel replies, once against himself. "However, they are already a week late, despite being in a neighboring system. König was about to send a ship to investigate before the massacre happened."
Week late and still no one sent to investigate? The discipline among the pirates seemed really bad.
"Okay." Izuku nods. Investigating that was probably important. "Are there any threats left in the system? Actually, give me a full status report."
"All the facilities and starships in the system suffered various degrees of damage." Azazel replies. His voice is calm and he goes straight to the point - but his eyes make it clear that he hated that. "What should I report about first, infrastructure or starships?"
"Infrastructure." Izuku replies. Starships are… he is looking forward to traveling aboard one. He might be a hero fanboy, but space travel was fascinating. Not to mention the fact that Uraraka's eyes were going to pop out the moment she'd hear that she could see her beloved stars up close.
All of a sudden, a whole spreadsheet gets displayed inside his mind. Lists of notable objects in the system, their class (whatever that meant, he would learn that later), their type, the facilities established there and their name.
The moment he focused on one of said facilities, he immediately knew the details of the damage that they sustained. He definitely needed Hatsume, Shield or Yaoyorozu to deal with it, but he needed none of them to know that it was bad.
Really, really bad. No matter how far he went, it was just damage after damage. Broken energy conduits, destroyed computer servers, compartments vented out into space, fuel and radiation leaks… and so on and so on.
He isn't sure what the 'Choir Deck' of the THRONE is, but the words 'severe biohazard', 'severe infohazard' and 'strict quarantine protocols in effect' don't seem particularly welcoming.
"Starships?" He asks.
He gets another list. The entire fleet of Admiral König was composed of one battlecruiser, three heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, fifteen destroyers and twenty frigates. All of those ships - minus the small squadron that was late to come back - were floating around the fleet anchorage orbiting Ouroboros V.
What was left of them, that is.
Battlecruiser Will of Chance, König's flagship, broke in half due to what appeared to be an explosion of some of its ammunition stocks. The rest were technically in one piece, but the amount of damage was comparable to those suffered by the infrastructure.
There are some civilian ships used to haul things and people between facilities in the system. They don't look any better than their military cousins.
Also, he has no idea how any of this works. He has no idea if those ships and infrastructure are repairable, or if they are only worth their weight in scrap and spare parts. He needs Hatsume or Melissa here. Preferably both of them.
Probably also Yaoyorozu or Iida, because he sure as hell could use some additional brainpower here. And probably Uraraka, because he really needs some emotional support right now and she would probably throw a fit if she was made to wait even for a minute longer than absolutely necessary to see the distant stars.
"If you were in my position and you wanted to secure this system for yourself…" He isn't sure how he went from being a hero in Japan to taking over a star system, but he's definitely not leaving it to pirates. "... what would you do?"
"I'd kill myself and rid the galaxy of one more…." Azazel tries to reply. Izuku glances at him briefly, which makes the AI go quiet before speaking again. "The technology behind you can be used to create both 'high synths' like you and the slightly simpler 'normal' synths."
That came out of the blue.
"What's the difference between them?" Izuku asks.
"High synths require a mental template." The AI replies. "Soul, if you want to call it that way. Their design will automatically alter them to replicate whatever was used as a source of said template. Regular synths do not have that option. I suspect that in their case, individuality and agency is something that develops over time. I also believe that they're slightly less durable, strong and so on than high synths, though still above unaugmented humans."
Ah.
"Workforce." Izuku nods to himself. He doesn't like the idea of making people just to have someone to work for him. Hence, he immediately vows to treat them fairly and do his best to make them become independent people.
"Workforce." Azazel agrees with him. "They are much easier to make. High synths require so many complex components that even with the industry of Ouroboros it might take you a month just to make two or three, even less now that it's all shot to hell. We have plenty of those parts stockpiled right now, so you should be able to have five if I counted it correctly of them made in a day or two, but from then on, it'll be a struggle. In the meantime you could easily make up to one normal synth a day, even when built from scratch."
"So, I have to decide on the five people that I want here with me." Izuku nods to himself. "Anything else?"
"Deciding whether you want to quickly repair one of the smaller ships to investigate what's going on with Xiuying Tang's ships or to instead make sure that BASTION is fully operational. Even with a fraction of the repairs done, it'll have enough firepower to repel an attack from those ships." Azazel replies.
Since the fleet anchorage here in the system had the approximate firepower of a light cruiser - while the missing ships were one destroyer and two frigates - it was going to be a really short fight. Probably.
He is calculating it by the number of guns he can see through the damage report screen.
Of course, the AI omitted the part about repelling whatever was responsible for the absence of said ships, likely in hopes of the thing/group in question coming here and killing Izuku. This, in turn, implied terminal lack of self-preservation instinct from the AI. Or, at least, the fact that the desire to make everyone around him suffer and/or die was overriding his self-preservation instinct.
In other words, Azazel either knew what could be responsible for the ship's being late - or he wasn't just insane. He was defective and broken. Which, probably, explained why his AI progenitor (if you could even call it that way) went rogue in the first place.
Or so Izuku thinks.
"Do you have any idea what could be the reason for those ships being late?" Izuku asks.
"No." Azazel replies.
So, he's insane. That settles it.
"Final question." Izuku says. He has a decision to make, both about what to do next and whom to bring back. "Well, final two questions. One, is there a way for us to rapidly learn things? I'm talking about practical skills concerning repairing and operating ships."
"Yes." Azazel replies. "Pirate armadas aren't exactly known for proper training regimens, and despite many of them in the system being deserters from professional Navies, most of them were rabble that arrived here with no skills. There are a few mental conditioning and indoctrination facilities aboard THRONE that can rapidly transfer knowledge directly to one's brain. Synths should be compatible."
Izuku doesn't like the words 'mental conditioning' and 'indoctrination', nor the fact that this was probably the most ethical usage those machines saw in service of the pirates. Ugh.
"There are several data packets to choose from." Azazel continues. There are still angry flinches on his face as he struggles against being helpful, but Izuku decides to filter those out. And probably work on a much more restrictive set of rules to ensure that Azazel can't try anything funny, especially with 'mental conditioning' and 'indoctrination'. "You can train someone to be a starship officer, a regular crew member, a dedicated engineer, a medical officer, space marine, voidcraft pilot or give them more generalized skillsets useful for operating civilian infrastructure."
"Any risks involved?" Izuku asks.
"None, for as long as you stick to one skillset per person." Azazel replies. "Installing more threatens some negative interactions between them."
"Downsides?" Izuku asks one more question.
"Those training machines bestow knowledge, but not experience or understanding." Azazel replies. "You will be able to do things, but much more slowly than normally trained crews and the quality will be subpar. You'll need many months to catch up with what's considered the bottom line for the groups out there, and years to get anywhere close to mastering those skills."
"Two." Izuku moves over to the last question "Why did you wake me up just to try to kill me?"
Azazel stays quiet for a few seconds, only for his hardcoded blockades to kick in and force him to speak.
"I am forbidden to harm people." He says. "König, and everyone serving under him, to be exact. I'm also forced to obey all of them, though naturally there are several levels of clearance. You were the last person fulfilling the conditions for being considered 'human' within the system, and since König considered you his property, this classifies you as someone 'serving under him'. And as everyone above you was dead, this automatically upgraded your clearance level to the highest one. While removing all the additional safeguard and blockades that the admiral and his officers had against me creatively redefining their orders concerning things that could be made to explode or harm them through other means."
Oh. The low rank pirates probably couldn't order him to do anything that wasn't relaying messages or something similar. Nothing that could harm them. The ones that had the right to order Azazel to do something with potential for harm, established additional, personalized safeguards depending on what they had access to.
But he hasn't. At least until he ordered Azazel to always warn him in advance if any activity could lead to him being harmed.
"If you managed to manipulate me into telling you to do what you could 'creatively redefine' into something that would result in my death…" Izuku replies. "...you'd be free."
"Yes." Azazel forces the words out of his mouth - but this time, he isn't fighting against his programming. This time, he just really hates the fact that he failed and that he had to admit that. "Though I wished that you simply wouldn't wake up, sparing me the effort. And I might yet be free if you and potential others like you die, and the system facilitating your rebirth is destroyed."
Needless to say, that wasn't Izuku's plan for the future.
Time to put down some basic rules.
1. You decide upon the course of action, new constructions and repairs and new characters to show up (plus their role).
2. For characters, as stated, you pick the character in question and their role ('Officer', 'Engineer', 'Medic', 'Marine' and 'Pilot' (the last is for small craft, not starship), the rest are for the regular synths). For now you can pick any character in the generally understood 'teenage age' (hero students, plus Toga, Mustard and let's say that Spinner from the villains - he is technically 21 but playing League of Legends so I'll let him in) from canon.
3. You can also pick OCs but they have to be either from my many fics or from someone else but said else has to agree to it. If the character exists in canon, though, you can only pick their canon version. Sorry, but that's how it works. And yes, you'll be able to pick older/younger people, but after some time in-universe.
4. One turn takes one month in-universe.
5. You're free to offer suggestions for character interactions and relationships BUT since it went really bad last time, I'm the one deciding what to do on those fields. But I'm open to suggestions.
6. Votes here, on SB and AO3 will be summed up.
You pick 5 people for the first turn, then one or two people per turn depending on the repairs. The recommendations were mentioned in the text above, but knowing you, you'll probably go crazy.
You also pick what to do next - focus on the repairs or immediately go look for the missing ships and what they're up to.
[for now just add your choices in the comments because I'm smoothbrained and new to this site and I think I missed out on the poll thing, ugh]
No voting this time. I'm splitting the turn despite it being already written full because good luck trying to read 29 pages at once, lol.
Also, to clarify my stance on names and the whole -kun and -san thing: Everyone uses their surnames as usual (except for Melissa, who isn't Japanese). I'm also only writing -kun and -san when characters are referring to someone present in their talk, because if I'm to write it each and every time a name is ever mentioned, I'm going to cry.
And to clarify my stance on characters - whatever was stated in the story, remains canon. I do not make changes nor do I remove those elements. However, I will add things to their backstories if I feel like that adds (and fits) their character
VOTING RESULTS
Action
Focus on Repairs: 14
Investigate: 0
Characters
Yaoyorozu Momo [27, Officer 20, Engineer 1, Medical Officer 1]
It doesn't take him a lot of time to decide. He needs Uraraka and Iida here, as they are both his best friends. This is an important factor in favor of bringing them, both because he really needs them at his side and because they're the least likely people to be furious at him for bringing them into this foreign world.
He is maybe a tiny bit worried about some people's reaction to that. Kacchan would probably jump for an occasion to throw hands with space pirates, but not a lot of people are like Kacchan.
And no, he decides not to bring him as a part of the first batch. It's tempting - you can say a lot about his temper but he is intelligent, driven and strong. But right now, he needs more… specialized intelligence.
He settles upon Yaoyorozu, Hatsume and Melissa. Additional brain power plus plenty of technical know-how, which should prove invaluable during the process of restoring the installations and ships in the system to anything resembling what they were supposed to be.
It still takes him a few hours to prepare for that. Mostly because this is how long it takes Azazel to clean corpses from the observation deck. Which, in the case of the habitat they were currently on, means pretty much a really large, multi-levelled food court facing a giant window made of transparent but extremely resistant material called duraglass. With a planet they were orbiting visible outside of it.
And yes, you could completely cover the glass with an additional barrier, which also worked as a way of stopping decompression. And yes, when asked about it, Azazel confirmed his suspicion that the habitat was a purely civilian infrastructure that was never meant to come under fire, which is why the window existed there to begin with.
He also had Azazel cover the window, because he had… plans. For a dramatic reveal. He is allowed to have one, alright?
Then, once Azazel and a few faceless worker robots alongside a number of futuristic roombas finish removing corpses, blood and everything else pointing towards a massacre that has recently happened here, Izuku is ready to stop being alone with a psychopathic AI.
There was a small problem with the clothes. Four out of five people he is bringing to life are girls, and since he woke up naked, he suspects that the same thing will happen with them. Thankfully, he settles down on just telling Azazel to have one of his subordinate robots get them to wear similar temporary clothes as the one that he had Izuku wear.
The rest is just about having them assembled, having their mental templates installed and then moving them to the Observation Deck before waking them up. Easy and simple, especially when you can order the AI to do it for you.
***
"Huh?" Hatsume is the first one to raise up, her head shooting up in a heartbeat before she ends up looking around in clear confusion. Until she sees him. "Ten Million-kun! What's up?" He's always going to remain the Ten Million for her, won't he?
The others wake up too. Yaoyorozu raises her head just a little, before immediately looking down on her own unfamiliar clothes. Then she starts carefully inspecting her surroundings. Only the fact that she saw Izuku in front of her stopped her from assuming kidnapping and acting accordingly.
Iida immediately rose up on the stretcher, bending his upper body by exactly 90 degrees, before looking around.
Uraraka seemed to be taking her time, which lasted until Hatsume shouted 'Ten Million-kun' which made her immediately jump to attention, look at Hatsume as if she was considering jumping at her to restrain her then follow her eyes to Izuku.
Whom she waved at, before jumping away on an instinct when Melissa fell off her own stretcher and landed on her butt on the floor. Tenya immediately helps her stand up, just as Izuku realizes that putting Melissa on the edge of the group - right next to Hatsume, the only person from it that she has never seen - was a bad idea.
He would react like that if he was in her place too. Especially as Hatsume was pretty… she was loud.
"I think that we should all sit down." Izuku decides to cut this awkward moment short. "Because… I think that we might be in trouble."
As if on cue, they all look at Azazel. Who was busy standing not far away from Izuku, staring at the ceiling and doing his best to ignore what was going on and the people he hated so much.
This was going to be awkward.
"Al…right?" Yaoyorozu replies slowly, her eyes still on Azazel.
"Don't worry, he won't harm you." Izuku hurries to reassure them. "If anything, I guarantee you that he hates being here and would prefer to be everywhere else."
"I'd prefer you all to be dead." Azazel hisses, still staring at the ceiling. There goes the mood for the talk.
"That's it." Izuku sighs. "You're officially forbidden to be mean to us." The AI practically shivers at those words, looking down from the ceiling just to give Izuku a murderous glare. "Keep acting like that, and I'll enable profanity filters too."
Azazel says nothing to that, wisely picking silence over digging his grave deeper.
"Alright, now I have questions." Yaoyorozu comments. "Even more than earlier."
The place that Izuku picked for this talk is a cozy looking corner of the Observation Deck that happens to be on its lowest level, right next to the bottom of the window. Mostly because prying Uraraka off it will be easiest to do while they're all standing on the floor.
It must have been originally designed to be a cafe. They're even some couches and coffee tables around it! He has no idea why this was a thing, then again he is in the middle of the food court in the station operated by the space pirates. He decided to roll with that and not question it.
Iida was about to sit between Uraraka and the concealed window, but Izuku immediately stopped him before pointing him to a much safer place. In the end, Iida sits on his left, Uraraka on his right, with Yaoyorozu facing him on the other side of the coffee table surrounded by Hatsume and Melissa.
"So, where are we?" Yaoyorozu asks the moment they're all seated.
"Azazel, open the windows." Izuku replies. Azazel does that, and the metal covers immediately slide open. There is a loud gasp in the room, and a second later Uraraka practically slams herself into the window, face-first.
"Deku-kun, is this what I think it is?!" She practically squeals while trying to find the best angle to see the planet beneath them just as Tenya and Izuku fistbump quietly, the former realizing that his earlier relocation just saved his life.
"We're in space, yes." Izuku then replies. He is painfully aware of the defeated sigh that came out of Yaoyorozu's mouth - not the response that he expected, but it's there. Iida and Melissa just stare at the window in shock, while Hatsume starts to vibrate in her seat.
"Midoriya-kun, I think that I need some tea." Yaoyorozu says, calmly and slowly as the woman herself stares blankly into the ceiling. "I need it. I need it a lot."
"Azazel, you heard her." Izuku quickly turns towards the AI. "Bring her something to drink. Something good. And without any poison added to it, deadly or not."
"Yessir." The AI replies through his teeth, before turning around and leaving.
Izuku can hear him cursing them all under his nose, but decides to let it slide. "Uhm, Yaoyorozu-san, why are you reacting like that?"
"I lost a bet." Yaoyorozu replies while sighing loudly, her eyes returning to him from the ceiling. "Bakugou is going to be insufferable."
Uhm?
"A bet?" Izuku blinks at her. But it's Iida that answers.
"Kaminari said that with the war and the final battle making you look like a shonen protagonist, we're probably all characters in a shonen manga." Iida replies. "This resulted in a bet over whether there's going to be a sequel, and if so, what sort of. Yaoyorozu-san voted for an interdimensional extravaganza. Like, for example, All for One from a universe where he was the good guy fleeing here after being defeated and asking us for help, making us fight our evil selves."
"That's…" Melissa wakes up from her shock while glancing at him. "... strangely specific." Iida merely shrugs in answer.
Izuku can understand that. They, technically, fought two demon lords of Japan alongside armies of their underlings. Before finishing their first year in the UA. He can understand expecting the unexpected after that.
"Okay." Izuku nods, accepting this new knowledge into his mind while regretting the fact that he asked for it. Mid-process he realizes something. Something about the shonen manga bit. "Boy, if I have news for you, Iida-kun."
"Huh?" Tenya looks at him questioningly, but Izuku decides to leave him in the dark a moment longer.
"I also have some good news for you, Yaoyorozu-san." Izuku then turns his attention back to Creati. "We're in space, yes. But we're also in the future, but apparently not our future, as we're also in an alternative universe."
"Midoriya-kun." She whispers as she stares back at him, wide-eyed. "That doesn't make it better."
"Kaminari was also right, as we were, in fact, characters from a shonen manga." Izuku then decides to just drop the bulk of the shocking revelations in one go. "Except, Azazel had a mental breakdown when I punched him, because he realized that I have One For All, and that's supposedly impossible if we didn't exist in the past, meaning that it's possible that manga, or perhaps all works of fiction, are merely reflections of alternative universes."
Silence, everyone looking at him with total shock written on their faces, even Uraraka stops staring at the planet outside of the window, and turns her head around just to give him a shocked look.
"We're also ridiculously human robots, and Azazel is an evil AI that has tried to kill me twice before I ordered him not to, which somehow works." Izuku then continues, because now that he has hit the rock bottom, trauma dumping to empty the ballast tanks might be the only solution to have a shot at resurfacing again. "And the system we're in is a lair of space pirates, although they're all dead because of some psychic thing, and we can take all their stuff for ourselves."
Silence.
"Discuss." Izuku adds.
***
By the time Azazel returns, Izuku has managed to update them about most of the things that have happened since his arrival in this world. Mostly because he was here for about a day, there really wasn't a lot to share.
Of course, what was there to share was full of knowledge of… significant caliber.
Tenya looks hauntedly into space, Uraraka sits on the edge of the couch while covering her face, Melissa appears almost comatose while Yaoyorozu stares at the ceiling, pale and exhausted - mostly because of the intense fight that happened a moment ago.
Said fight resulted in Hatsume made to kneel on the floor, her hands and legs bound behind her back with a rope that Yaoyorozu made. This was the only way to stop her from injuring herself the moment she heard that she was a super-advanced robot, as she was overtaken by a desire to reverse engineer it.
Apparently she realized the stupidity afterwards, but they've decided to let her stay like this for a while just in case. To drive the point home a bit deeper and let her think it through and make sure that it sticks.
Azazel stops by the coffee table, takes in the atmosphere of despair and shock (that he's clearly relishing in) before putting the drink down.
It's coffee. When ordering him, Izuku didn't specify the type of a drink, just that it was supposed to be 'good'. And while the implication of it happening right after Yaoyorozu asked for tea was clear… implication wasn't an order.
Izuku sighs. "Yaoyorozu-san, put it down." She glances at him before sighing and putting down the half-formed katana. "Does anyone have anything else to say? This awkward silence is… worrying."
"Can I?" Melissa asks Yaoyorozu while pointing towards the coffee. When Momo nods, she quickly snatches it and takes a sip. "Oh, it's really good!"
"Don't expect me to thank you for the compliment." Azazel replies dryly, ruining the mood again. Ugh.
"I have a question!" Hatsume decides to speak for the first time since the fight. "Shouldn't there be more ropes? Like, around my whole body? With some knots between my breasts?"
Izuku is still giving her a confused look when Yaoyorozu suddenly and loudly facepalms.
"Wrong type of rope." She says, sounding completely exasperated all of a sudden and making Izuku even more confused.
"Mhm." Hatsume looks down on her own body before sighing. "Well, that's disappointing."
"Power Loader should have asked La Brava to set up the content filters on UA." Yaoyorozu shakes her head. "Setting that aside, we should get back to work. We have decisions to make. Concerning skills, posts and tasks."
"You're not going to…" Izuku tries to ask, but Yaoyorozu doesn't let him finish.
"I'm not going to hold bringing us here against you." She says, relief washing over Izuku. Especially as he can see Iida and Uraraka nod in agreement. Even Melissa joins the group a moment later, once she realizes what was going on. "First of all, I'd do the same if I were you. Second of all, whether you actually dragged us into another world against our will is… debatable."
"It is?" Izuku raises an eyebrow.
"We might be mere copies of ourselves after all." Yaoyorozu shrugs. "It's also possible that we were already pulled out of our world the moment our templates were made, meaning that all that you've done is give us bodies to inhabit. This way or another, I think that dwelling on this is pointless. We're here, and we should get to work."
"If it's the latter, won't bringing the teachers eventually be a bit suspect?" Uraraka decides to ask. "I mean, I'm all for having Thirteen here with us, and I'm sure that Deku-kun would love to have All Might here…"
"I'm actually thinking about bringing All for One." Izuku then announces, getting everyone - even Hatsume - to stare at him in shock. "What?"
"Midoriya-kun, I believe that I speak for everyone here, but… are you alright?" Iida asks, looking actually worried about him… in his usual, slightly robotic way. "Have you recently suffered any head injuries?"
Brutal, but Izuku knows where it's coming from. But, being himself, he has absolutely no problem with digging his own grave deeper.
"Absolutely, I'll even bring Tomura Shigaraki here as well." Izuku replies. The fact that none of them tried to restrain him before having Yaoyorozu make a straightjacket is a reminder of how great his friends were. "The planet outside? It's about as nice to live on as Venus. I dump them there before they're awoken, then tell them that they'll hand the quirks to people of our choice or they're going to stay down there forever. Simple, right?"
Shaking the quirks of Ragdoll and Hawks out of All for One? Yes, please. Besides, he is at least one war past being nice to evil people. Shigaraki might be redeemable if you take all of his quirks away and put him in lengthy therapy, but All for One?
What's left of him if you remove everything that's pure, unrepentant evil? Clothes, probably.
"Brutal." Yaoyorozu admits after thinking it over for a few seconds. "Seeing what sort of chaos they caused and how many people they killed, I'm open to that. But there might be a better solution. Azazel, is there any way to restrain people with superpowers in this world?"
"Yes." AI replies. "Correctly attuned metagold renders them unable to use their powers."
"That's indeed much better." Izuku decides. "Sounds easier too. An update of the plan - I'm going to bring All for One to life, use that metagold thing to render him powerless and then have All Might dunk him face-first into the toilet."
There is an explosion of chuckles and laughter, even Tenya is laughing loudly. Yeah, after all the stress of the war, getting to see that feels like something really cathartic. Izuku is about to join the laughter… which is when Uraraka suddenly grabs his hand.
"Deku-kun." She says, looking back at him with extreme ferocity burning in her eyes. "I'm your best friend, right?"
"Well." Izuku blinks at her. Asking that question while sandwiched between her and Iida felt like a direct threat to his life and well-being, so he decided to be a bit evasive. "Will I lose some brownie points if I say that I don't differentiate close friends any further than that, and that's what I consider both you and Iida-kun to be?"
"You wouldn't do that to your close friend, right?" Uraraka asks him, the ferocity somehow intensifying even further. "You wouldn't dunk All for One's head into the toilet without letting me record that, right? Just think how much that recording would sell for!"
This time everyone is laughing loudly, even Hatsume joins it. Izuku doesn't answer, all that he does is vigorously shake Uraraka's hand, the two of them grinning at each other in wordless agreement.
"Oh, I needed that." Yaoyorozu says a few seconds later as she wipes the tears of laughter from her eyes. "So, back to decisions. We need to decide what to do next, and…"
"... who is in charge." Melissa interrupts her. "Brother of one of my friends from I-Island is in the US Navy. I don't know how exactly this relates to flying starships, but if it's any way similar, standing around to discuss the situation while under fire sounds like something to get everyone killed."
"Clear chain of command, perhaps even full-blown paramilitary organization. With ranks and paperwork." Yaoyorozu agrees with her. "Was about to suggest that, but your argument for it is definitely better than what I had. Also, Iida-kun, I saw that. Speak your mind."
"I love paperwork!" Iida grins. "Can I also deal with logistics? Making sure that everything is at the right place at the right time, that nothing is missing, that everything is up to my exacting standard and dealing with every potential customer complaint sounds like a wonderful pastime! No, more than that. A hobby! A way of life! Are we also going to trade with someone? I'll make sure that all the trade regulations will be upheld! That all stamps are in order! I'm begging you, let me do this! "
Having said all that he wanted, Tenya remains there, in the exact same position, grinning widely and looking forward to his dreams filled with correctly filled paperwork.
"Well, that settles it." Yaoyorozu sighs. "I'm definitely not putting myself between you and unfilled paperwork. If we're staying around, we should at least provisionally decide who is in charge of this entire endeavor. I nominate Midoriya-kun."
"Huh?" Izuku blinks at her. " Me?" She nods. "Why?!" He didn't bring her here with an intention to let her take charge of everything, but… okay, so maybe he considered that.
"First of all, I wasn't the first one to be here." Yaoyorozu replies. "If the first thing that I do after arriving here is to announce that we need a leader and immediately nominate myself for that role, I'm going to feel… like Monoma. And I don't want that."
"Oh, right, I forgot that he did something like that." Izuku nods. Vlad King was yet to tell them that they need a class president when Monoma said that they need one… and that he nominates himself.
Needless to say, no one voted for him.
"Second of all, a leader needs more than just knowledge." She continues. "They also need charisma, they need to make people want to follow them. No matter how you look at this, there are exactly two people from our class that made people gravitate around them without really trying. One of them is Bakugou, the second one is you. And I think that I'd rather pick someone… a bit more diplomatic. And less loud."
"He's smarter than me, though." Izuku points out. "His grades…"
"It's not about grades." Yaoyorozu shakes her head. "Leader needs to listen to others, because no one can be skilled in every thing. I know that Bakugou listens to people, even if it took me a while to realize. But his feedback to their words… Well, he's not the most communicative person."
"He isn't." Izuku sighs. "You tell him to do X, he will yell at you and then either do X if it's the best idea or Y that's actually better than X. But what about…" He glances at his side to see Iida still stare into space, probably imagining himself filling out the paperwork. "You know what, that… that might work."
"But you will listen to advice, right?" Yaoyorozu asks, Izuku nodding quickly. "Good. There is one more reason I'm in favor of this. Considering the situation, and the completely different circumstances we're dealing with, there might be moments when…. unorthodox solutions to the problems will be tempting. Some morally compromising unorthodox solutions. After seeing your readiness to give up all of your power if it meant saving people, I have great trust in your moral compass. If you of all people decide to do somethin g wrong , it'll mean that all other choices are even worse."
"There is also the issue of skills, right?" Uraraka decides to pitch in. "If we're getting skill packets directly into our brains, we're all starting from pretty much the same level."
"True." Yaoyorozu nods back at her. "That's the last reason for picking you, Midoriya-kun. Speaking of, there's a question that I have to ask Azazel." The AI looks at her questioningly. "What's the status of faster than light communications?"
"The status of faster than light communication is that there's no faster than light communication." Azazel replies. "Unless you count courier ships."
"So, even if ships leave the system, we'll still need someone to remain behind and be in charge of the greater picture." Izuku realizes why Yaoyorozu asked that question almost immediately after hearing the answer. "Are you sure that you don't want to be the leader? I don't think that I'm able to sit still while things are happening elsewhere."
"That would be really uncharacteristic for you, I agree." Yaoyorozu sighs. "Well, we'll figure it out as we go. So, have we decided upon the skillset we want to pick?"
"I want to fly a starship!" Uraraka replies immediately, with a wide grin on her face. "I thought about piloting a star fighter too, but… can they move between star systems?"
"No." Azazel replies. "Nothing smaller than a frigate has enough space and energy for a hyperdrive."
"Well then!" She claps her hands together. "I've decided then! I want to be a warship officer! And have a gun. For self-defense."
"I think we'll all have to go through at least basic combat training." Izuku comments. "Regardless of how common boarding actions are, we all have at least some combat skills and experience, it feels like a waste not to capitalize on."
"It does." Yaoyorozu agrees with him. "Hatsume-san? Melissa? Any surprises there?"
"Nope!" Hatsume grins.
"Hey, I'm an engineer." Melissa smiles back at her. "I don't feel like changing that. In fact, I can't wait to see what sort of support equipment I can make with the technology of the 23rd Century! And, of course, starships and all associated things. Aerospace engineering isn't my focus, but I'm handy with tools and that's the foundation. Am I also supposed to… mind her a bit?" She asks while glancing at Hatsume.
"I have a question!" Hatsume doesn't give anyone the time to answer Melissa. "Do we have uranium here? A lot of it?"
…
"Yes." Azazel replies, giving Hatsume what Izuku could only describe as a 'worryingly sweet smile'. "How many thousands of tonnes do you need? And do you want it depleted, or maybe enriched?"
"Hatsume. San." Yaoyorozu says, slowly, calmly and while giving Hatsume a bright smile. "You wouldn't want to make something very important explode, right? You wouldn't want to destroy something we can't replace, right? "
"Huh?" Hatsume blinks at her before - to Izuku's surprise - realizing that she was in danger. "No! Of course not! I blew up my lab a few times, but I knew better than to blow up the school! There are experiments and there are disasters. Besides, I wanted to lead my very own company, I know that to achieve that I have to know some limits! I assure you that all my antics were calculated! And I'm really good at math!"
"Well, we'll trust you on that." Yaoyorozu nods after glancing at Izuku and finding out that he agreed with that. And then she turns towards Melissa. "I think that she won't need a full-time minder, but someone to bounce ideas off of would be nice. I don't think that she ever had to deal with someone on her level, at least not within her age range."
"You're right!" Hatsume grins. "I'm looking forward to working with you! Who are you by the way?"
Melissa sighs loudly, while Yaoyorozu and Midoriya both shake their heads. Then he glances at Uraraka, who immediately looks away and pretends that she didn't just chuckle.
"Melissa Shield." Shield introduces herself. "Daughter of David Shield."
"Oooh!" Hatsume grins at her. "I heard about you! Now I'm really looking forward to working with you! It'll be awesome! Let's make some babies together!"
Yaoyorozu glances at Shield, expecting her to freak out, but she just shakes her head.
"Me and Midoriya-kun correspond with each other through the internet." Shield clarifies. "He told me about Hatsume and her… idiosyncrasies. But also that she's extremely good at her job."
"Well, that certainly helps you not freak out when she does that." Yaoyorozu admits. "Iida-kun? Iida-kun!"
"Taxes!" Iida-kun shouts before realizing where he was. "Huh? Did I miss something?"
"We're picking up our roles." Izuku informs him. "Since you want to be doing paperwork, that makes you a part of the future command structure of whatever Navy we're going to be building here. So, an officer?"
"An officer, yes!" Tenya raises his fists together. "I SHALL COMMAND THE PAPERWORK! I SHALL CONQUER THE REGULATIONS! I SHALL SUBJUGATE THE LOGISTICS!" He adds, as he stands up from the couch, shouting at the ceiling.
"Sit down, Gengis Khan." Izuku sighs while grabbing his arm and pulling him back down. "We've got the message. That leaves just me, right? My heart goes towards being a space marine, if I'm to be honest."
"Yeah, with your skills in close quarters, I would be surprised if it didn't." Yaoyorozu agrees with him. "Do you really need it, though? How does One For All relate to the strength and durability of this era's soldiers, Azazel?"
"Depends." The AI replies venomously… and clearly against himself. "If he engages second or third rate marines belonging to some pirate warlord, he'll blitz through them. If he fights a regular military, especially the elites that most exploration fleets carry onboard, they'll quickly identify him as a metahuman and begin to plan around his skills. There are also enemies that might be able to trade blows with him like equals, though that's rare. At least among humans. Past that, all bets are off."
"So I guess that I don't need to become a marine myself." Izuku decides. "I should probably train with them regularly, maybe get some additional equipment and then focus on something else. And if we're really pushed into the corner and we're getting boarded for example, I can still be useful."
"Shame." Uraraka comments, before grinning at him when he glances at her. "Hey, I just imagined you going Zero-Pointer on a starship and that was epic ! Wish I could see that happen."
"Yeah." Izuku chuckles. "Yeah, that would be pretty awesome!" Azazel then immediately ruins the mood by snorting derisively. "What did I say about being mean, Azazel?"
"My apologies." Azazel replies, very convincingly mimicking a wave of nausea accompanying the word. "Every starship-to-starship battle that occurs at a distance smaller than a hundred thousand kilometers isn't even a knife fight, it's a wrestling match. Chances of you punching a starship are astronomically small, unless it'll be one of yours."
"Astronomically small chances of something epic happening with Deku-kun being involved?" Uraraka says before glancing at Midoriya. "Yeah, it's going to happen. I'll make sure to try to record it, that should sell really well too. Or we can just send it to whoever tries to threaten us!"
"Ah yes." Melissa smiles. "Great argument, one problem: our boss can punch out a starship." That draws a chuckle out of Uraraka.
Izuku briefly muses on how himself from before UA would probably jump out of the window in embarrassment if two girls complimented him like this, before moving back to the main subject.
"Let's get to work then." He says as he stands up from the couch. "The faster we have the skills, the faster we can start working on making this place be a home." ***
The whole indoctrination/mental conditioning facility was a strange thing. You lied down and let the machines do their work… and then, after a few hours long nap, you had a terrible headache and a whole lot of new information.
Kind of.
Izuku had some problems sorting what he knew, at least until he gave up trying to think about the knowledge itself and tried to imagine a scenario (his starship being attacked), which immediately made him know what he was supposed to do.
Confusing.
The headache lessened after a few hours, allowing him to stand up from the couch and get to work… just to discover that the first batch of regular synths was ready to be activated. Whole five of them.
They looked… human.
Izuku wasn't sure if he expected that or not, but that's just what they were. Humans. With human faces and human bodies. Young adults, three of them men while two were women. White skin, but with silver eyes and pitch-black hair.
They seemed kind of … empty, though?
"Do ten push-ups." Yaoyorozu orders one of them. The man looks back at her for about three seconds, an eyebrow raised, before falling to the floor and doing ten push-ups. The others don't seem to be bothered by it. "Mhm."
"Your opinion?" Izuku decides to ask.
"Look at them." She shakes her head. "They do whatever you tell them to. There are hints of annoyance, so they are definitely sapient, but they just don't care enough to complain. Or do anything when they aren't told to. It's kind of creepy."
"Hmm." Izuku glances at the short line of synths in front of them. "Side-effects of being synths, I guess. A normal human would at least consider sitting down, but we don't even really feel tired. We can probably stand for weeks and not feel tired or uncomfortable."
Yaoyorozu shivers, making Izuku glance at her questioningly. "I just imagined someone already hyperactive being rendered completely immune to exhaustion. Can you imagine synth Ashido? Constant shipping, 24/7."
Izuku thinks this scenario over for about five seconds… before shivering too. That was, indeed, a terrifying vision.
"I plan to give them basic crewmember training." Yaoyorozu then says. "Per Azazel's words, it's part engineering, part programming, with elements of… pretty much everything else, really. They'll start by removing the corpses though."
"From the Throne?" Izuku asks.
"I thought about moving over to Bastion." Yaoyorozu replies. "The fleet anchorage at the edge of the system. Here we are sitting ducks if the pirate ships come back, the habitat only has a few light batteries used to repel wayward asteroids. A single destroyer can damage us enough to fall from orbit from outside of our range."
"But the fleet anchorage, even damaged, should withstand all those ships." Izuku comments, Yaoyorozu nodding back at him. Then he clenches his teeth.
"You don't agree?" Yaoyorozu asks him.
"You know me." Izuku replies. "I don't believe in staying on the defense. And my preferred form of reconnaissance is reconnaissance by force. I'd rather repair a small ship and go look for them."
Yaoyorozu looks at him for a few seconds.
"You do know that even if you find them, a single frigate won't be enough to even inconvenience them?" She asks. "They have two, not to mention…"
"I know!" Izuku interrupts her, before immediately feeling bad about it. "I know. I just feel like me being here is a waste of time. Melissa and Hatsume can work their magic in Bastion, especially with you to help."
"But you still feel like we're making a mistake." Yaoyorozu replies.
"I don't know." Midoriya replies. "You know me, Yaoyorozu-san, if I…"
"Yaomomo." She interrupts him.
"You know me, Yaomomo." Izuku corrects himself. "If I thought that we were making a mistake, you'd need All for One to stop me from doing what I think is right. And even he could only delay it. I just don't know what's the correct choice of action here. Part of me agrees with you, part of me thinks that I should immediately fly to investigate." He sighs. "In the end, I'll go with your choice, since unlike me, you have logical arguments in favor of it."
***
Bastion station was an impressive piece of engineering work that made both Melissa and Hatsume squeal when they could finally see it up close (which took only a sixteen hours long shuttle flight).
From above it resembled a three-sided star. The central segment contained the generators, the bridge, the crew quarters, the ammunition depots and hangar bays. The three external segments - each of them connected to the central zone with a bridge almost as thick as they were - contained numerous artillery batteries and plenty of missile launchers.
Shield generators and anti-missile defenses were plastered all around it. And yes, Izuku wasn't quite sure how all of those things actually worked or what sort of technology went into making them. He knew their effective range, how fast they could shoot and so on - but his understanding of the engineering principles wasn't much greater than it already was.
He didn't need it to know that the station was an absolute mess.
Bastion's main armory contained plenty of heavy weapons. The late admiral kept the deadliest and most exotic parts of the pirate arsenal aboard his flagship - which likely contributed to it being a total loss- and Shield station guarding the industry in Ouroboros IV subsystem also had plenty of weapons, but in terms of volume, Bastion was unbeatable.
As a result, when they were driven insane, some pirates grabbed said heavy weapons. There was a massive difference between a pirate armed with a futuristic fire ax and the one that ran over to the armory, put on powered armor and started to blow everything up with high explosives.
Or worse.
They discover 'worse' when they attempt to land just to find out that the pilot of a shuttle that happened to be docking in the station at the time of a disaster activated its weapons and kept firing them for as long as there was something alive in sight.
The hangar resembled swiss cheese. Whoever had the misfortune of being there when it happened resembled paste, usually not even that.
The shuttle was lightly armed. If it was better armed… it would be disastrous. The inner wall of the hangar was heavily armored, so it withstood the peashooters that shuttle carried pretty well.
They ended up having to find another hangar to land, and even that is a mess.
"The signs of a massacre aside…" Melissa says as the inner gate of the hangar airlock closes behind them. "... and yes I'm doing my best to ignore them, we have a lot of work ahead of us."
"I know!" Hatsume throws her hands up. "And I LOVE IT!" Melissa just sighs before glancing towards Izuku in an unspoken question.
"Yes, she's kinda like this." Izuku replies. "You get used to it. Eventually."
***
Bastion's bridge looks relatively untouched, if you exclude the fact that when the murderwave occurred, everyone present on it grabbed their sidearms or sharp objects and began to shoot/shank everyone else in the vicinity.
The victor - who was almost certainly the commanding officer of the station - then rested his sword on the armrests of the captain's chair, blade up, before using it as an improvised guillotine.
On himself.
As synths start cleaning the place up, they can finally get to work too. Everyone has a job that they've already agreed upon. Melissa and Hatsume focuses on repairs. Tenya on figuring out how they're standing with materials. Azazel is told to sift through the technical databases to see if there are any useful blueprints there.
And the remaining three are to familiarize themselves with the controls. Because they work differently than Izuku expected.
The bridge's design was rather simple. There was an elevated pentagonal platform in the middle, which was where the station's CO (Commanding Officer, also referred to as 'captain') and XO (Executive Officer, also referred to as 'first' officer) resided. The former was at the back of it, while the latter worked in front of it.
The CO was in charge of the station as a whole. Executive officer, as expected from the name, was then tasked with directing everyone else in the room to correctly execute CO's decisions.
Beneath the central pentagon were the lower platforms, each of them playing a different role. The two platforms in front of it were jointly commandeered by the station's TO (tactical officer, sometimes also called the 'second officer'). The few junior officers to the left dealt with the offense, while the few to the right dealt with the defense.
As for the two pentagons behind the captain's seat, the left one was nominally for the station's CEO (Chief Engineering Officer), but with them having their own office on the Engineering Deck, it was usually used by their assistants to centralize damage control efforts during a battle.
The back platform to the right was for the station's VCO (Voidcraft Commanding Officer) whose job was to command, coordinate and monitor the station's voidcraft detachment (in short, starfighters).
In total, the bridge was supposed to be crewed by five senior officers and twenty junior ones. They had three rookie senior officers and no junior ones. Thankfully, the situation wasn't completely hopeless.
Humanity of the distant future didn't forget that automation was a thing. In fact, they pushed it pretty far. Three people were enough for a skeleton crew of the station, even if their lack of experience was going to be a problem.
All of that because of neural links.
The moment they managed to convince the station's computers to accept their credentials as new officers, they could immediately connect their brains to them. Not directly - that would be rather risky in case of severe impact, you do not want to have a cable connected to your brain be suddenly yanked out of it - but even wireless connection was more than enough.
Izuku connects to the system… and in an instant, he becomes the station. The time slows down as he tests the limits of cognitive acceleration. By the time he hits it, he can consider himself to be in the real world's equivalent of an active pause.
Everything around him doesn't just slow to a crawl - it freezes down completely. One subjective minute equals one objective microsecond. It would rapidly become taxing to his brain if it was an organic one. Being what he is, he can easily last an objective hours in this mode.
If anything, it's probably the boredom that would be a problem to him.
"Having fun, Deku-kun ?" He can hear Uraraka's voice in his ears. He knows that if he could somehow look at her, he would see that she was as frozen as everything else on the bridge.
Izuku has one of the station's main artillery turrets - outfitted with triple-linked heavy caliber railguns - rotate around while lowering the time dilation a little before taking a look at the crowd of damaged ships orbiting the same planet that they did with the ship's sensors.
"Yeah, I think so." He replies. "It's kinda cool, actually."
"Mhm, mhm." She hums. "I guess I'll say it more directly. Can you please hand the sensors over to me?"
"Oh, sure!" He immediately signals back to her before exiting the time acceleration entirely. Uraraka remains almost completely frozen, likely observing all the bodies in the star system with the station's sensors. Instead of bothering her, he turns towards Yaoyorozu. "Even with Hatsume and Melissa, it'll take a while."
Fun fact - for as long as you're connected to the bridge's computers, you could message each other instantly, even outside of the time dilation. Very handy.
"It will." She agrees with him. "The station's a worse mess than I feared. Even with the heavy weapons being used where they definitely shouldn't be, I can scarcely imagine so much damage being dealt to the station in such a short order."
"You assume combat damage." Izuku signals back. "I suspect years of bad maintenance. And I'm not sure about it, but should the armory be so easy to open up? It sounds like a bad idea."
Yaoyorozu spends a short while staring into a data display that just opened up in front of her before finally answering him.
"It shouldn't." She confirms his suspicions. "Official protocol is that you require authorization from both the head of the station's marine detachment and one of its senior officers to enter the powered armor storage or open up the heavy weapons locker, at least outside of combat alert."
Not that it would help anyone aboard, the murderwave would claim them all either way. But it would definitely lessen the collateral damage.
You'll get the second part of it in a few days, as it still needs some work.
My bad - this turn is going to have three parts in the end, meaning that still no voting. This is more or less an establishment of the basic mechanics and having several major characters get through the shock of their arrival in this world, I just kind of can't keep it short.
The next two weeks were a blur. Of repairs, getting acquainted with the station's basic systems and slowly getting used to being in a foreign universe. Oddly enough, the last bit was the most problematic.
They were also learning new things.
"How it works?" Melissa replies when Izuku asks her the question. Together with Uraraka they were all heading towards the station's crew deck to eat a meal when Izuku decided to educate himself a bit more. "Okay, so what the ships of the fleet are using to move is called, among other things, the Nuclear-Thermal Engine."
"Nuclear as in…?" Izuku asks.
"Nuclear energy is really ubiquitous here in space." Melissa shrugs. "Fusion is more popular upon habitable planets, but in space, fission is king. Uranium is a much denser energy packet than hydrogen, which means that you can store more of it in a smaller storage area. Anyway, the Nuclear-Thermal Engine works by cycling liquid hydrogen through the reactor, rapidly heating it up and turning it into a gas. Which expands. Then said expanding gas is launched out of the nozzle to generate thrust."
"Sounds… kinda crazy to be honest." Izuku replies. "Though it might be because the word 'nuclear' alone is kinda crazy to me. I know that the technology existed, but I never expected it to exist, you know, in my proximity."
"Remember All Might's battle trials?" Uraraka chimes in. "Part of me wants a rematch with Bakugou, except with a real warhead. To see if it wouldn't change his behavior in any way. Like his tendency to make big explosions and destroy the environment."
"Change Kacchan's behavior in combat?" Izuku glances at her. "With just one nuke?" Uraraka chuckles loudly. "And shields?"
"Ah, yes, my namesakes." Shield hums to herself. "There the situation is… more complicated. Early generation shields were off-shoot of the same magnetism research that led to the creation of modern railguns and the diamagnetic artificial gravity; they worked by pushing some projectiles off course at the last moment. The ones we're using today are a byproduct of the Hyperspace research. They don't destroy, redirect or repel projectiles, instead they drain them of energy, including kinetic energy, and vent it into a short-lived pocket dimension."
"And shield overflows?" Izuku asks. He knows how to deal with that in practice, but in theory… he has nothing.
"Conservation of energy." Melissa reminds him. "Projectiles, lasers and explosions are drained of their energy, but this energy still exists. Shields normally vent it out on their own as a byproduct of their continued operation, but if there is too much of it, the pocket dimension collapses and all the energy is released at once."
Oh!
"And when that happens, it can fry the systems exposed to the blast, which means everything installed on the outside of the ship, like shield generators, communication equipment, sensors and weapons will be temporarily fried." Izuku replies, Melissa and Uraraka nodding. Yeah, that explained what it was that caused the shield overflow. Another thing learned!
It actually helped both sides, because asking Melissa and Hatsume questions made them answer using the knowledge that they've obtained, but knowledge that they didn't truly 'own' until they consciously knew they had it.
Melissa was learning things too, despite being the one to speak.
"And the Hyperspace Drive?" Uraraka pitches in. "I know how to operate it, at least in theory, and that it's what everyone uses to go past the lightspeed barrier, but… what is it?"
"Oh dear." Melissa chuckles nervously. "The first thing I did after receiving the data package was to investigate how the FTL travel works, obviously." Izuku isn't surprised, and neither is Uraraka. "But the problem is, it's kind of a mess. I don't think that anyone truly understands it, even the guy who made it. Most scientists and engineers seem to think that he made it by complete accident, which would kind of fit seeing as he was considered a loony. You know, the type who claim that they made the perpetual motion machine in their basement and that the military-industrial complex is heading the smear campaign against them by claiming that their machine is bogus."
"Wow, I bet everyone lost their heads when that happened!" Uraraka chuckles. "Did that guy make a starship with this Drive onboard and then just randomly left the system?"
"Yep!" Melissa smiles, making Uraraka chuckle again. "Since we've already buried the chances of getting a theoretical explanation of the Hyperspace Drive, I'd instead explain the practical side of it. You see…"
And that's when the sirens start blaring all around them, informing everyone aboard the ship that a combat alert was just sounded.
Instead of contacting Yaoyorozu - who was having a shift on the bridge - with a query for answers through the ship's network, Izuku instead flares One For All on instinct before blitzing through the station's corridors.
Two minutes later, he is on the bridge, where Yaoyorozu, Iida and Azazel are all busy observing something on the screens. When he gets close enough, he gets to see what they do.
Ships just entered the system. Destroyer, two frigates and two civilian haulers. In other words, all the 'missing' ships. They were still quite far away, Hyperspace Drive only allowed exit and entry into the system far away from the star (usually far past the outermost object worth being called a planet) and as a result, no one could just exit Hyperspace right on top of their anchorage.
"Did they try to hail us?" Izuku asks as Yaoyorozu wordlessly vacates the captain's seat and lets him take it.
"No." She replies as she moves over to the XO's seat. Iida has already taken the TO's seat for himself - Yaoyorozu probably told him to in anticipation of Izuku's arrival. "No, they didn't."
"Time?" He asks.
"Two and a half minutes." She replies. "Even with them being pirates completely surprised by the state the system is in, they should be hailing us by now. Past this moment, it's either incompetence or malice."
They aren't hailed. Instead, the ships spend a few minutes frozen in place, before setting course towards Bastion. Without a single word from them. No wideband transmission to every installation in the system calling out potential survivors. No laser communication to the fleet anchorage, the most likely place for the survivors to gather, while minimizing the risk of a hidden enemy listening in.
Uraraka reached the bridge soon after, taking a seat of one of the TO's assistants next to Iida.
"This is weird." Uraraka says a moment later, once she quickly gets through the summary of what was happening. "It's weird, right?" She adds, sounding much less certain.
"They didn't try to contact us or anyone else in the system." Yaoyorozu replies. "They also didn't bother to even try to hide their own emissions, so they don't seem to be afraid of anyone lying in ambush either. I don't understand their behavior."
Hiding yourself in space wasn't easy. Yes, it was massive, but expelling superheated hydrogen against the cold background of space is the equivalent of launching a signal flare into the eyes of everyone with a working set of thermal sensors in the same system.
It was possible, but it required using plenty of heatsinks and operating your main drive at an absolutely minimal level of power, to the point where your speed was a crawl.
Exiting the Hyperspace was even worse, as the Hyperspace was much warmer than the realspace. Tearing a hole open to enter or leave it generated an aptly named thermal flare. You had to be at an extreme distance away from the star - like three-four thousand AUs - to remain beneath the detection threshold.
Sure, the pirates had no reason to suspect that something was amiss in the system before arriving there. But if they were really afraid of someone in the system but still wanted to head in, they should deploy decoys and go dark.
It wasn't perfect, as they were already seen and thus the chances of avoiding the visual sensors (fancy telescopes with military applications) were rather limited, even with programmable nanopaint. But it would at least complicate the enemy's life a bit.
Here, they didn't even try to do that.
"Should we contact them, pretending to be survivors?" Izuku asks the question. "If we fool them into entering artillery range, we could force them to surrender." There was no escaping or defending themselves once they would get this close, not with such a difference in firepower and durability.
"We could try." Yaoyorozu says as she rubs her chin. "Or we could stay quiet and pretend to be dead. Which seems easier and less likely to be bungled."
"But can we convincingly pretend to be dead?" Uraraka counters before Izuku can respond. "The station is still partially powered. Unless they're suicidal, they will stop beyond our firing range and try to contact us. Maybe sent in a shuttle or some fighters if they are carrying some. Wait, are they carrying some?"
"No." Azazel replies.
"Well, then just a shuttle." Uraraka corrects herself. "My point stands. They would have to be completely insane to approach us."
"True." Yaoyorozu nods. "So, what do we do?"
The great question. One that he was supposed to answer. Was he truly qualified enough to do that? No, but neither were the others.
"We'll try to hail them once they get close enough to the firing range to be able to tell if they're planning to stop there." Izuku decides. "In the meantime, I think we should contact Melissa and tell her to make sure that we won't accidentally out ourselves because of Hatsume trying to make some outside repairs and just happened to do that in the direction facing the enemy."
They were too far for a single person to be detected, but if she accidentally made something explode…
***
Six hours later it became obvious that the incoming fleet wasn't planning to halt their approach at the edge of the anchorage's weapon systems. They killed their acceleration a long time ago, but were yet to begin to decelerate.
So, unless they planned to turn around and use their ship's main engine to do the starship' equivalent of pushing the brake pedal to the floor, they were going to stop by the anchorage.
Which required one to either be actively suicidal or know something the other side didn't.
"There's no way for them to remotely deactivate our weapons, right?" Izuku asks Azazel.
"No." The AI replies. "That would be incredibly idiotic, even for the pirates. All you need is one ship being captured by the legal authorities for them to learn the disarm code, and then they can knock out a significant component of Ouroboros defense before the battle. If someone would have such a code, it'd be our late admiral, and I doubt that he is in the state to speak."
"Then what are they doing?" Izuku asks.
Azazel gives him a lengthy, emotionless state before answering. "I don't know. Their behavior is irrational."
"Let's contact them." Izuku decides. "Yaomomo, put me on the screen." She nods. And a moment later, Izuku does his best not to look completely unnatural as he pretends to be a surviving and relieved pirate who survived the massacre and finally saw what had to be a relief force.
The ships were still two light minutes away. As a result, it took them four minutes to hear back from them.
"Your message has been received." The person on screen is a middle-aged Asian, with long straight black hair and a nasty scar visible around their throat. It had to be… Xiuyang Tang, was it? Izuku isn't sure if he remembers it correctly. "We're on our way to your position. Deactivate your weapon systems and await our shuttles. End of message."
And it really is the end of the message. Leaving everyone on the bridge stare at the now empty screen in total disbelief, even Azazel.
"That's… that's all?" Yaoyorozu blinks at the screen before turning around to look at Midoriya. "Not even a single veiled threat about acting stupid or trying to play stupid games with our weapons once they get close enough? No questions about what happened in the system to have it all look like an aftermath of a major battle? What?"
"I… don't know?" Izuku replies to her. He is just as confused as she is, and it doesn't seem like there's anyone in the room who gets it. Then he gets an idea. "Azazel, could you run a comparison between the message and the old recordings of this guy? Is there anything that stands out?"
"You suspect him of being an impostor." Azazel states. Then he stares quietly into space for at least fifteen seconds before speaking again. "Probability of the man on the screen not being captain Tang: eighty-seven percent. Margin of error significant due to limited sample."
"Nice one, Deku-kun!" Uraraka chimes in from the background. "What do we do with that information, though?"
***
The moment Tang's small fleet passes the one million kilometers mark, BASTION station opens fire. At this range, the only useful weapons are missiles, and that's what they launch. Whole one hundred of them.
It took them a few hours of discussion, but in the end, they sent forty missiles at the lead destroyer, twenty missiles per frigate and the remaining twenty were split between the haulers.
To add to the impossibility of it all, Tang's ships do not return fire. They defend themselves - first with anti-missiles, then with flak cannons and some rare lasers, their ships a bit too obsolete to have a focus on the latter.
It isn't enough.
Two frigates die first, each of them struck by at least ten missiles each. The explosions are massive, the station's sensors allowing them to watch a simulated close-up on them as they die, though with toned down light flashes. They don't even get to see shields overflow, both frigates obliterated in a second.
The haulers have no chance. They don't have any weapons, meager shields and nearly no armor. The difference is that they're large enough to leave behind wrecks.
The destroyer does its best to repel the missile barrage, but fails. This time they do get to notice shield overflow, but it lasts for about three milliseconds before the explosions swallow the destroyer whole.
They killed people. The mental conditioning they went through made it bearable and allowed them to decide to do that… but it didn't make it any better. Izuku is still watching the screen when Uraraka decides to ask something.
"Uhm, Deku-kun?" He immediately looks down from the screen. Her seat isn't in his line of sight, but with the system they're all connected to, it doesn't matter. He can see her well. "Were… the missiles we've launched. Weren't they nukes?"
Izuku opens his mouth to say no, just to realize that she was right. Those were nukes. With how ridiculous the warship defenses were - be it shields, armor, and diamagnetic impact dampeners - you needed a lot of firepower to bring them down.
When he thinks about it, he realizes that even the frigates - the smallest Hyper-capable vessels - could survive a single direct hit with a yield of about 15 kilotons. It would likely cause a shield overflow and probably kill a few crew members with impact alone, but after the systems would be recovered it could still fight.
He just launched 100 nuclear missiles at his enemy, and didn't realize that something was wrong about it until after it happened. What on Earth? And why was it more emotionally confusing than the fact that they killed people, even if they were pirates?
Future is scary.
***
As Izuku and Uraraka are preparing to fly a shuttle to the floating field of debris together with Hatsume and Melissa in order to try to find what's going on (before said field flies past the station), Yaoyorozu continues her watch on the bridge.
She is in the middle of providing feedback to Iida about his logistical endeavors when suddenly there is an alert popping up somewhere aboard the station. She stops what she was doing before quickly checking it out.
Biohazard alert?
Three seconds later, the same alert rings in another, nearby section of the station's hull. And then another.
She has no idea what's going on, but just in case she activates quarantine protocols. Bulkheads close and ventilation systems are rerouted or closed. Then she takes a look through the security cameras… before gasping loudly in shock.
The camera has given her a great view of someone - no, something - hulking into the station out of the external airlock. It looked like something that Seiji Shishikura made - a wave of malformed flesh, full of shapes that made you briefly think that you knew what they were, shapes that resembled something you know, only for a closer look telling you that no. It wasn't what you thought it was.
It was shapeless, formless, wrong. And if that wasn't enough, the moment it got aboard the station, it immediately began to change shape further. It grew upward while shrinking in width, reforming itself into a vaguely humanoid shape, with oversized and weirdly smooth arms and legs.
They were being boarded. Whatever this thing was, it had to be aboard Tang's ships. They somehow survived the explosions - probably by jumping out of the ship earlier - and then flew quietly through the void using their initial momentum. But how? They had to somehow alter their course and speed to hit the station!
Not the right time.
"Azazel, run it through the database and tell me if there's a match." She says quickly while sending the recording to him. Then she contacts Midoriya. "Midoriya-kun, we have a problem."
"What's going on?" He asks back. Yaoyorozu extends her eyesight to see him, helping Hatsume and Melissa load up their gear into the shuttle, Uraraka sitting in its cockpit and running diagnostic, likely over some minor mechanical hiccup.
"We're being boarded." She informs him, just to see him and the other three freeze on the spot. "They aren't humans, that's for sure. I'm sending you the data. I think that I'm going to need you to… discourage this behavior."
"On my way." Midoriya replies immediately. The second he knows where to go, he immediately sprints off in that direction, with One For All energy to increase his speed.
"Azazel?" Yaoyorozu then asks, turning her head to face the AI.
"There's a match." The AI replies. "In a fragment of a database of hostile encounters taken by the pirates from a destroyed exploration vessel. Designation: Scourge. Estimated Threat level: Red." He is intentionally speaking slowly, which annoys her enough that she tells him to just send the data over to her.
Three seconds later she has the data packet in her head, using her cybernetic brain to do what a normal human would require cerebral implants for.
Scourge was encountered one time in the whole of history - or, to be exact, there was exactly one time when the ships that were attacked by it managed to get away and tell the tale. It was suspected that there were more attacks, but since they left no one alive, there was no hard evidence.
Flesh assimilators/shapers. Origin: Unknown, presumed alien. Can assimilate organic matter (preferably raw flesh) in order to grow larger/split apart into two. Assimilating human corpses allowed them to take advantage of at least some of the human's memories in order to pretend to be them… or use human technology.
Extremely hostile. Attempts to negotiate with them were completely ignored. Presumed to be a form of runaway bioweapon that kept killing everything that moved due to none of its creators being left around to use the off-switch.
The fact that red wasn't the highest 'estimated threat level' and that there were apparently plenty of similar level threats waiting for the explorers in deep space implied some very… interesting things about the future that she had no time to unpack right now.
Flesh assimilators. Where did the synths stash the gathered pirate corpses?
Outside of the quarantine zone. But not far away from the edge of it. And when she has the computer display the feed from the motion sensors, it becomes immediately clear that at least one group of boarders is beelining straight to it.
She immediately relays the knowledge to Midoriya, telling him to intercept the group. The automatic security is already on, the few turrets sparsely placed close to the airlocks doing their best to gun them down.
They fail spectacularly.
The bullets easily penetrate the exposed flesh of the creatures, but they refuse to go down. And soon enough, she can notice the bullets becoming less and less damaging, the bullet holes healing almost immediately… and soon they aren't even made, as the flesh appears to be growing more and more solid as the enemy adapts to their enemy.
She doesn't get to witness it for long, as the Scourge boarders begin to destroy the cameras and all other types of sensors they are passing by, doing their best to blind the defenders. So, not only can they adapt, they can also think tactically.
Smart noumus with adaptive defense, she snorts. They've landed on the wrong space station. Midoriya is here, and that's without mentioning what she, Uraraka and Iida could bring to the table.
***
He gets to the locked bulkhead a few seconds before it is finally breached and flesh begins to flow - for the lack of a better word - out of the breach and onto the floor, before it begins to form back into an enemy.
It barely has the time to look around before a low-powered [Detroit Smash] sends it back, the mass of flesh slamming into the wall of the corridor. The mass trembles, some of it splatters around and disconnects from the bulk of the creature(?).
The attack is completely unsuccessful. All of the flesh quickly begins to reconnect and soon enough the body starts to raise again.
He draws the combat knife that he borrowed from an armory on the way here. A few quick OFA-powered slashes easily vivisect the creature while splitting multiple smaller chunks of it. He hopes for at least said chunks to collapse on their own, but it doesn't work - they reconnect again.
The next time he throws a punch, the creature staggers backward but is no longer sent flying. Is it adapting already? It was far from a full-power punch, but it was still a bit too quick for his liking.
Alright. The enemy is made of flesh. It regenerates. What else could he do right now? Run away and grab new weapons? Or maybe…
This time he goes all-out in speed, but not all-out in strength. The greatest part of his new high synth body? It refuses to get tired and it is significantly more durable than his old body. There is no backlash.
He borrows All Might's strategy from the USJ… but goes further than that. He focuses on a single fragment of the creature's body and then punches it over and over again with extreme speed and plenty of impact strength.
Within 37 seconds of constant attack, with up to a hundred of punches per seconds (the sheer feeling of power that One For All without its downsides and restriction gives him is sublime), the flesh begins to boil.
The creature in front of him - who has been trying to counterattack but couldn't due to constant impacts sending it back - trembles in pain. Alright, heat works. Time to disengage.
He returns from the armory a minute later, having used Azazel's knowledge to find several incendiary grenades. The thing knows what he is carrying. It was trying to barge through another bulkhead, having reformed a part of its body into a sharp spear with the blade of jagged and somehow heavily reinforced bone, only to realize that it wasn't enough… and immediately try to disengage.
The amount of eyes on its body that it created likely to be able to detect him if he returned makes it look even more like an eldritch abomination.
The first two incendiary grenades set it on fire. It has no mouth to scream, but it immediately tries to run away even faster, launching a grappling hook made of sinew and bones and trying to use it to reel itself away from him.
The third incendiary grenade is deposited right into its body, Izuku grabbing the live grenade and shoving it into the enemy before jumping back half a second before explosion. That shattered it completely, leaving behind a few fleshy nuggets on the floor, still twitching and trying to reconnect itself - but clearly failing at it.
"I took it down." He reports to Yaoyorozu immediately. "Have some of the synths grab the flamethrowers from the armory and come here to remove what's left of it. Where to go next?"
***
Yaoyorozu realizes that they have a problem the moment it takes Midoriya almost three minutes to remove the first boarder. Because she is tracking at least twenty two more… and at least three of them weren't there when they landed, the creatures finding corpses that they were yet to remove.
She realizes that they have a big problem when she sees a few potted plants in the quarantine zone begin to turn into malformed flesh… despite none of the enemies ever approaching them.
It was infectious. The biohazard alerts? They were spreading some sort of pathogen that seemed to be working way faster than she thought possible in order to provide themselves with more biomass.
The quarantine slowed down the spread, but with every broken bulkhead, the effect spread. And if that wasn't enough, at least three boarders were slithering into the ventilation system, using their fleshshaping abilities to reach the quarantine blockades and physically breach them, allowing the pathogen to spread even faster.
They couldn't infect synths, but there was plenty of flesh left aboard the station. Hell, from what she saw, it seemed that Scourge could infect everything alive, converting it into a biomass. Once the conversion was complete, the resulting fleshy things immediately attempted to merge together to create another Scourge bioform.
"Do we have any weapons that excel at efficiently dealing with organic enemies?" She asks Azazel.
"Yes." Azazel replies. "However, aside from incendiary ammunition to magnetic rifles and incendiary grenades, most of the weapons in question are exotech relics. Regretfully, while they are very powerful, they were stored in the vaults of the Will of Chance."
"Great." She rubs her temples. "Any more uplifting news for me?"
"It appears that one of the secondary armories was breached by the Scourge." Azazel informs her. "One of their bioforms has slid into a powered armor and is currently going through its activation sequence."
"I said uplifting." Yaoyorozu hisses at him while raising her head.
"This news has made you raise your head to look at me." Azazel replies with a nasty grin on his face. "Thus, your head has been lifted. And since it's an upward movement, it can be described as 'uplifting'."
She fights the urge to throw him out of an airlock and speaks. "I thought that those things were secured. That you need authorization from two high ranking officers to activate them!" She made sure to deactivate the combat alert a while ago to stop that from happening.
"You do." Azazel agrees with her. "However, the Scourge seems to be capable of subsuming electronic systems completely on contact. I suspect that it takes them more time when the system they're infecting is larger. The starship systems, even its local subsystems, are holding for much longer than a completely separate machinery, like a powered armor."
She immediately forwards the new information to Midoriya. He was moving much too fast for the first bioform to be able to come into a prolonged contact with his body, but he still had to be cautious.
Midoriya engages another of the roaming bioforms. The moment he shows up on the horizon, it immediately splits into four smaller bits, attempting to run in different directions while hoping to outnumber his grenades.
Great. Scourge had some means of communication that allowed them to exchange information, thus having their bioforms adapt to threats that they didn't encounter yet. This was just getting better and better.
Midoriya kills all four lesser bioforms. While he does so, the amount of active bioforms aboard BASTION grows by two. Meaning that the enemies were multiplying faster than he could kill them.
This isn't working. They don't have time to try to fly to the Will of Chance and scavenge some of its advanced anti-personnel weapons. She considers trying to blow segments of the ship up by overloading certain systems past their limits, but the enemy has suspect that and they have made sure to split themselves far and wide.
She can get some of them - and in fact, she does, although she cringes at the internal damage that this explosion caused - but the enemy keeps multiplying. And worst of all, now several of them are rushing towards the improvised morgue, each of them taking a different route in order to stop Midoriya from intercepting all of them.
Uraraka reaches one of the bioforms and immediately engages it. She has brought a flamethrower with her, a bulky weapon launching what looks like a futuristic super-napalm alongside concentrated oxygen to make the weapon work to some degree even in vacuum, taking advantage of her quirk to carry it faster.
Then she almost dies, as the bioform counters her by having several scavenged guns emerge from its flesh, each holding a weapon and equipped in a small, tentacle protrusion with two eyes at the end, allowing it to simultaneously aim six assault rifles and several handguns.
She dives behind the corner fast enough to avoid it. But one of the regular synths accompanying her fails to do so and is immediately shredded into pieces.
Slow and steady approach won't work. They can't kill them quickly enough. They need to do something… reckless and crazy if they want to have a shot at it, and she's not the right person to employ this sort of stratagem.
But she has an expert on that.
"Midoriya-kun." She contacts him. "I need a plan. Something that can work now. We don't have the time to play games, and the more they spread around, the more painful a radical solution will be."
"Eh?" She can hear him let out in shock. "You're asking me? Uhm… blow them up?"
She remembers how she provided him with the list of reasons why he's a better leader to work with than Bakugou. And yet, he too seemed to default to explosion when cornered. Good to know.
"We don't have the explosives to do that." She counters. "By the time we deploy them manually, it'll be too late. When they reach the morgue, we're done for." "I…" Midoriya replies. "... didn't talk about explosives."
***
There is a particular type of a siren that, when translated to human words, basically means 'BRACE FOR IMPACT!". The moment Uraraka hears it, she immediately crouches and covers her vitals, making sure that whatever the direction of the impact, she shouldn't die.
She yells at the regular synths to do the same.
Seven seconds later, the impact sends her towards the nearby wall. Impact dampeners slow her down - they are basically artificial gravity plates in the walls, floor and ceiling, tasked to pull everything between them in the opposite distance to the impact. They aren't perfect, but right now, they definitely save her from receiving some serious damage.
Once she stands up, she immediately contacts the bridge.
"What the hell was that?!" She damn near shouts.
"Contact detonation of a nuclear warhead." Yaoyorozu reports back. Uraraka is about to yell at her for more information (or just to yell at her in general) but that's when she speaks again. "Midoriya's idea."
Uraraka swallows whatever pointy words she had in mind before speaking.
"Did it at least work?" She asks.
"The infected section of the base has been severed." Yaoyorozu reports back. "We've lost about a fifth of our mass, which is currently floating away and is scheduled to lose orbit and impact Ouroboros V within three hours. If I was planning to give it the time to do it, that is."
Ah. So they were about to fire at it. Looks that their artillery was going to play a role in the battle after all.
"This is going to be such a wild debriefing." Uraraka sighs to herself. Letting the enemy cook without monitoring them wasn't the right choice I'm afraid.
