Noimizu hadn't managed to get through to the police by the time they reached the station, so he left Izuku there to run for a Hero agency and tell them about the creature that had almost killed them. Now the adrenaline had worn off, he found himself shivering at the memory as he waited on the platform, crowded with strangers also fleeing the flames and crashes from the city behind them.
An automated announcement reminded them to stand back from the edge as the next train would not be stopping there. He tried to shuffle backwards but there wasn't much room to move in the packed station, and then the loudspeaker was interrupted by an ear-piercing shriek of metal on metal.
Izuku covered his ears in pain and leaned forward. The train which had been on its way through the station had been derailed, knocked onto its side by an impact that had torn a ragged hole through one of the carriages.
The loudspeaker sounded again over the clamor of the crowd, a nervous male voice telling everyone to leave the station in an orderly fashion through the emergency exits. In a grim echo of the cafeteria incident at the start of the school year, what was supposed to be a calm evacuation rapidly devolved into a scramble of shoving and shouting.
Izuku carefully lowered himself from the platform to the ground. There was enough space between the rails and the edge of the platform for him to safely walk between, and he'd much rather step down carefully than get pushed off by accident. He found himself wishing he'd made something to get people's attention like Monoma had the last time. Taking command and reassuring people in these kinds of situations was the Heroic thing to do.
Oh, but he had the latest ability from his Quirk, didn't he? With the flip of a mental switch, the cut and fabric of his jacket shifted. No longer the blazer of a businessman, it had become the kind of jacket a Hero who dressed like an office worker might wear. He waved it over his head like a flag and pointed to the gap between the tracks and the platform. His shouts that there was enough space to walk safely and ease the pressure of the crowd could barely be heard above the rest of the noise, but enough people got the picture that they stepped down too.
By the time he reached the exit, his single-file group had a station attendant waiting there to help them back onto the platform. Izuku joined him in the mindless hard work of assisting the commuters rather than getting up himself.
His arms were aching by the time they boosted up the last office lady, leaving the two of them in a station that was now emptied. The attendant who pulled him to the platform was baby-faced, looking younger than Midoriya did in his suit, and panted heavily with his hands on his knees.
"Um, I don't have anywhere to go, I'm not from around here. Can I do anything more to help?"
"Phew… thanks, mister, but you should probably leave too. I've got to get back to the office, in case any more alerts have come in, and my colleagues will have the derailed train in hand." The railway worker gave him a look of gratitude and hurried into a staff-only door.
Izuku looked up and down the empty platform, then at the wrecked train. There was no way for him to leave the city tonight, and there was no way he was going to stand by while people were in danger.
-----
"Mom, I'm at Hosu. Please don't worry, I'm safe, but to make me safer can you close my warehouse and put the key away?"
Inko babbled panicked questions down the line, and he did his best to reassure her.
"It's fine, mom, I'm out of the way of the fighting. Stain? Oh yeah, but he only targets Heroes, he wouldn't care about me."
"No, don't stay up all night watching the news, I can tell you all about it myself when I get back. The train lines are damaged, I'll probably have to sleep in my warehouse or stay over with someone from work, but I'll let you know what happens."
"You put away the key?" He patted his pockets. "Yeah, I got it. Thanks mom, I love you. I'll stay in touch."
Izuku found a maintenance door a block away from the station and checked that no people or cameras could see him. He opened it with his key, walked inside, and almost trod in a bowl of soup. His mother must have been making supper when he called and left it inside for him. His Quirk reached out as he picked up the soup to put on a shelf out of the way
[2.175 ANTI-QUIRK DRUG - INSUFFICIENT CHARGE - 150 STORED]
Whatever it reached for felt close and familiar, in a way that was hard to describe, but it wasn't pulled in.
Leaving his rucksack by the door, he jogged over to the end of the row of precision fabricators he'd made out of store-bought crafts supplies the night before. The glow of the blacklights surrounding the nanite area had gone out as the power cord had to be unplugged to close the door, but the nanomachines themselves had grouped themselves into a black blob with a gritty surface texture once they had eaten through their feedstock. It gave Izuku the impression of an animal curled up to sleep after a meal.
With apprehension, he did some quick safety tests. Putting a pencil in and pulling it out left it untouched, repeating the process while telling the nanites to stick to surfaces made them pull away with the pencil like a big blob of black glue, and turning that off meant they dropped away back into their pile and left the pencil undamaged. His tools could never harm him or anyone he didn't tell them to harm, he reassured himself, and then he plunged his hand into the blob.
From the shape he had expected it to feel like some kind of gel, but the sensation was more like sinking his hand into the sand at the beach. Tweaking the cohesion of the nanites by sending commands with the phone in his other hand so that they would stick less to each other and more to other surfaces, they adhered to him and spread out into a heavy but flexible black glove with a long sleeve.
That glove was made up of millions of nanomachines. How many more would he need to be able to make a difference? His nanites had a doubling time of about two hours, but that was when they were harvesting ambient EM waves and vibrations. A dedicated power supply could speed that up significantly.
He was becoming increasingly aware of how crude his first batch was. Although they could self-replicate and be given commands, those commands were received by the entire swarm and then executed based on the local context. While that worked for assimilating weapons to repair them or speeding up healing, that self-organized approach with top-down commands would make any kind of complex construction much more challenging.
He wanted to make a fabricator with this new technology, something capable of producing anything he designed with nanoscale precision, or to start creating more specialized nanite types that could give the rest of the swarm a sense of position and relay targeted orders, but there wasn't time. People were in danger, and he'd have to make do with what he had.
Could he fight the monster himself? Definitely not. His emotionless second thoughts amended that to probably not: he could weaponize his nanites to eat the creature alive from the inside and out, but he'd have to stay dangerously close to command them and such a grisly attack would have serious consequences even if it succeeded.
Thinking back to his conversation with Toya at the start of term, the main risk to civilians was probably from damage to buildings, and the fires he'd seen could also spread dangerously. His nanites wouldn't be able to last in a fire for long, even if they clustered together to limit the surface area exposed, and they didn't have the numbers to save more than a couple of buildings from collapse. The fight with the monster itself would draw the Heroes in, so as an unknown he'd risk being mistaken for a Vigilante or worse. That left evacuation: he could use his hoverbike to move around the city finding blockages like the car the monster had thrown at him and breaking them down with his nanites to clear the roads away from the danger.
He checked his phone, hoping that somebody on social media was already curating reports of the monster's location. Instead of reports on one monster, he discovered there were three of them. A cold sweat trickled down his back.
In addition to the pale crawling one he'd encountered, blurry photos showed another one with a similar build and black skin that stood upright, and a smaller winged one. As he scrolled through the news while putting on his old armor, he got a rough picture of what was going on. The pale monster was moving erratically, and had derailed the train by throwing Barbearian into it. Thankfully that Pro Hero was known for his toughness. The eyeless black one was fighting several Heroes downtown, and the winged one was only documented in a couple of photos against the evening sky.
Izuku taped his phone to the dashboard of the hoverbike so he could monitor the situation on the go, lowered the newly-polarized visor of his helmet, and got on board. With a flick of a mental switch, his mismatched ensemble transformed into a costume and vehicle fit for a Hero, colorful accents giving off the feeling that he was here to help. A press of a physical button had the now-modular prongs of the hoverbike fold away temporarily so that it was narrow enough to maneuver through the warehouse door. A quick dismount to close it and grab the key, and he was on the move.
-----
Izuku knew enough to improve the unknown technology of the hoverbike even if he couldn't replicate it, and a few laps around his warehouse the week before had been enough to familiarize himself with the controls. The thrust from the repulsors decreased sharply as they got further from the ground, but with his upgrades they were able to lift the bike above the level of the neighboring buildings even if the power supply couldn't sustain forward motion while keeping him that high.
He surveyed the city of Hosu from his bird's-eye view. He'd only been in his warehouse for perhaps five minutes, and already the situation had visibly worsened. A trail of flame was rising up from downtown, and more smoke and dust was rising from several other points around the skyline. As he considered where to start, his Quirk twitched.
[10.92 SPELLMAKER - INSUFFICIENT CHARGE - 250 STORED]
Putting it from his mind, he decided to spiral his way in from the outskirts. It would be easy to tell which routes away from the fighting would be clear from the traffic on them, and that approach would keep him away from the danger himself for as long as possible. He lowered his bike back to the street level and began to build up speed.
-----
Unlike the conventional cars of the city, his hoverbike could cruise at motorway speeds while floating metres above the road and making no more noise than a sustained hum. As he followed the ring road, most of the routes out of the city had flows of traffic out and some emergency services vehicles coming in from the neighboring wards. He sped above those, then turned to go deeper into the city when he hit a main road that was almost empty.
As he'd expected, it had been blocked by wreckage. A bus had been thrown across the road, judging by the scrapes it had left, and one side was now buried in a parked car. Any occupants of the vehicles seemed to have fled through the broken windows already.
Pulling up next to the debris, Izuku told his nanites to lose their cohesion as he swept his hand out, splattering the side of the bus with the black dust, then sent another command on his phone for them to disperse and break down any metal they found.
He kept the engine of his hoverbike running at a high level to keep the nanites powered with the ambient EM emotions and vibrations it put out, and while he waited for them to do their work he took a few photographs of each of the vehicles being deconstructed. After the disaster was over, sending the owners evidence of what happened to their cars might help their insurance claims. He didn't have all that long, though: telling his nanites just to tear the metal apart rather than making more of themselves allowed them to work much faster. Soon the metallic dust left behind was blowing away in the wake of Izuku's takeoff as he moved to the next blockage, the nanomachines back to serving as a glove.
-----
The hoverbike rider kept moving through the city, chewing through debris from the fighting wherever he found it blocking roads, but the intensity of the battle wasn't letting up. If anything, each time he checked his phone it seemed to be escalating: Endeavor had been there from the start, skirmishing with the pale creature then joining the battle with the eyeless monster, but now there were rumors that agencies from the neighboring cities were being called in, even All Might being woken up to consult with his experience in dealing with one of these creatures before.
Along the way he'd had a couple of encounters with sidekicks from the Idaten agency, but they had accepted his introduction as someone from out of town helping to clear the roads without questioning it, even pointing him to the areas with the most severe damage.
Traffic did seem to flow smoother in the areas he'd cleared, but the pale monster was leaping about the city and attacking at random faster than he could remove the worst of the damage. Between the testimony of the bystanders who sometimes came up to him as he worked and the videos he watched in transit, the crouching creature seemed to at least be too mercurial to commit to bringing down an apartment building or fighting a Hero to the death. Instead, it would throw a single attack or two before abruptly shifting focus, usually leaping to the rooftops to reposition to its new target. Even so, Izuku was grateful not to have run into it again.
It was past midnight that the situation seemed to stabilize: the Idaten agency took command of the other Hero agencies as they arrived on the scene, cycling tough Heroes in to keep the endlessly regenerating eyeless monster occupied rather than trying to overwhelming it with powerful attacks, coordinating mobile Heroes to draw the pale monster out of the city, and filling the air with enough fliers that they finally caught and took down the elusive winged monster.
That capture seemed to mark the end of the ordeal. The next rubble-blocked intersection he came to, an exhausted sidekick in the signature Idaten armor joined him as they watched the shattered tarmac crumble away into dust.
"The incident's over, you've been here from the start, right?"
Izuku jumped, startled and running on too little sleep. "Huh? Ah, yeah, that's right."
"Go get yourself some rest, we've got enough agencies coming in to handle the rest of the cleanup."
"Are you sure? I mean..." he trailed off, gesturing vaguely to the ruined intersection and the smoke rising from the rest of the city.
The sidekick clapped him on the back. "You did good work, but with the pale one outta the city the roads aren't getting blocked any more. There'll be a debrief tomorrow afternoon at our agency, we'd like to see you there." She handed him a business card. "You're not with an agency yourself, right?"
"Um… no," Izuku admitted. Did they know he wasn't a licensed Hero?
The woman seemed too tired to care. "Well, we're always hiring."
Accepting the card and her dismissal, he pulled his nanites back to him one last time and slumped onto his bike, hovering away until he could find a secluded doorway to maneuver his vehicle into. Setting the door ajar, he sent his mother a quick text to let her know he was safe and sleeping in his warehouse. Izuku staggered over to a secondhand sofa, shedding pieces of his armor in a trail behind him, and flopped onto it to sleep, uncaring of the harsh fluorescent lighting.
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Word count: 2831/51509
A/N: While I was writing this, "nanites" kept getting corrected to "babies".
There'll be another roll at the start of the next chapter, for those of you keeping track.
OC fact of the day: Toya Hokuto has thick, bushy, angular eyebrows that each look kind of like the Big Dipper if you squint.
