Chapter 20: The Hokkaido Siege
The Hokkaido mountains were a jagged, unforgiving landscape of black rock and ancient pine, buried beneath three feet of fresh snow. The wind howled through the trees like a dying animal, masking the faint, localized hum of spatial manipulation.
In the shadow of a rusted, abandoned logging facility, reality peeled backward.
The silvery-blue tear of Rin's Sanctuary Phasing blossomed against the snowbank. The Vanguard stepped out into the freezing night.
Rei Arata—the Winged Sovereign—led the way, his long black cloak absorbing the moonlight, the violet butterfly patterns dim and stealthy. Behind him came his Swarm: Kenji, Akio, Shinso, Rin, and Giulio, all dressed in dark tactical gear lined with the Sovereign's crest.
Waiting for them in the snow, leaning against the frozen steel of the logging camp's primary structure, was Lady Nagant. Her breath plumed in the freezing air, her bi-color hair tucked beneath a dark beanie. She looked at the six individuals who had just walked out of thin air, her eyes lingering on the masked entity at the front.
"You're on time," Nagant murmured, stepping away from the wall. "I hope your hacker is as good as you promised. The outer perimeter is automated, but the moment we step inside the subterranean elevator, we are on the Commission's clock."
"GateL0ck?" Nocturne prompted, his distorted voice barely a whisper over the wind.
Rin stepped forward, pulling a heavy-duty, weather-proofed tablet from her jacket. She tapped a sequence of keys, syncing her device to the encrypted flash drive Nagant had provided. "I'm piggybacking on her biometric signal. As long as Lady Nagant is in the lead, the exterior turrets will register us as a single, authorized VIP escort."
"Then let's open the door," Nagant said.
She walked toward the rusted facade of the main logging building. Behind a wall of decaying timber was a massive, pristine sheet of reinforced titanium. Nagant approached the biometric scanner mounted to the steel. She pressed her thumb to the glass and leaned in for the retinal scan.
A green laser swept across her eye.
"Clearance Accepted: Lady Nagant. Welcome back."
The heavy titanium blast doors hissed, breaking a vacuum seal, and slid apart to reveal a sterile, brilliantly lit, white concrete corridor.
"Overmind, you're up," Nocturne commanded.
Shinso pulled his black half-mask up over his nose, his eyes already beginning to glow with a faint, telepathic purple light. He stepped past Nagant, taking point as the Vanguard moved swiftly into the corridor. The blast doors sealed shut behind them, cutting off the howl of the wind.
Fifty yards down the hall, a pair of elite, heavily armed Commission guards stepped out from a security checkpoint. They saw Nagant, and then they saw the six unknown figures behind her.
"Hey! Halt!" the guard on the left shouted, raising his assault rifle. "Identify your escort, Nagant! We have no scheduled—"
"Does it look like I care about your schedule?" Shinso interrupted, his voice modulator projecting a metallic, commanding echo down the hall.
"What did you—"
Snap. Shinso's Synaptic Overclock engaged. The purple lightning flared violently around his shoulders. Both guards froze instantly, their eyes rolling back into their heads. Shinso's muscles bulged beneath his tactical jacket as the cognitive processing power of two trained mercenaries flooded his nervous system. The heavy, intoxicating rush of superhuman strength coursed through his veins.
"Drop your weapons and open the security gate," Shinso commanded, his voice perfectly level despite the immense strain.
The guards rigidly placed their rifles on the floor, turned around, and swiped their keycards. The heavy security gate buzzed and slid open.
Rin didn't waste a millisecond. She slid under the rising gate, sprinting to the guards' security terminal. She jammed a physical override cable from her tablet directly into the mainframe. Her fingers flew across the glass screen in a blur.
"Looping camera feeds... now. Disabling internal pressure sensors... now," Rin muttered, her blue eyes reflecting the scrolling code. "We are officially ghosts in the machine. The Commission thinks this hallway is empty."
"Flawless," Giulio praised softly, his cybernetic arm clicking as he kept his golden eye scanning the ceiling for hidden countermeasures.
"Move," Nocturne ordered. "The Seraph containment level is fifty stories down. We take the freight elevator."
The descent was agonizingly tense. The large, industrial elevator hummed as it carried the Vanguard deep into the bedrock of Hokkaido. The only sound was the heavy breathing of the team and the crackle of Shinso's purple aura as he maintained his psychic grip on the guards above, using them as living batteries for his physical enhancement.
"Sovereign, this is your spy," Aoyama's voice crackled softly in their earpieces, broadcasting from his dorm room miles away. "I am monitoring the Commission's encrypted hero-net. Utter silence. They have no idea you are in the vault."
"Maintain overwatch, Yuga," Rei replied.
The elevator ground to a halt. The heavy iron grate slid upward.
They stepped out into a massive, cavernous subterranean laboratory. It looked like a hospital crossed with a military bunker. Banks of supercomputers lined the walls, but the focal point of the room was in the dead center.
A massive, cylindrical stasis pod, ten feet tall and filled with glowing, translucent blue fluid.
Floating inside, attached to dozens of life-support tubes and neural monitors, was Icarus. The gray-scaled, six-eyed abomination was perfectly still, its chest rising and falling in a slow, chemically induced rhythm.
Nagant aimed her arm-rifle at the glass, her finger resting on the trigger. "It's regenerating from the damage your Swarm inflicted in Musutafu. If we destroy the pod, the shock to its system should be lethal."
"No gunfire," Nocturne warned, placing a hand on the barrel of her rifle to lower it. "Physical trauma will trigger the manual alarms, bypassing Rin's digital loop. GateL0ck, initiate the purge sequence. Delete the Seraph blueprints and flood the pod with the lockdown neurotoxin. We kill it quietly, and we leave."
Rin nodded, rushing over to the primary control console situated in front of the pod. She plugged in her tablet. "I'm in. Initiating data wipe... thirty percent complete. Preparing neurotoxin flood."
Akio stood closely behind Rin, his fists already glowing with the golden-violet warmth of the Aegis Pulse, ready to throw up a shield if the console was trapped. Kenji stood beside him, the silver Knight's Vow shimmering over his skin, his eyes locked on the monster in the tank.
"Data wipe at seventy percent," Rin called out, sweating in the sterile chill of the lab. "Neurotoxin is priming. Ten seconds to lethal injection."
Inside the tank, the blue fluid suddenly began to bubble.
Icarus possessed multiple Quirks, spliced together through horrific experimentation. One of them was a latent, hyper-sensitive Danger Sense—an evolutionary survival mechanism that didn't rely on the facility's cameras or alarms.
It relied on the pure, killing intent in the room.
The monster's six black, soulless eyes snapped open simultaneously.
"It's awake!" Kenji roared.
"Rin, finish the hack!" Giulio yelled, stepping in front of the console.
Icarus didn't wait for the neurotoxin. The monster thrashed violently, tearing the life-support tubes from its scaled flesh. It slammed its heavy, bone-white talons against the reinforced glass of the stasis pod.
CRACK!
A spiderweb of fractures instantly spread across the cylinder.
"It's breaking out!" Akio shouted, slamming his hands into the floor. A golden-violet dome erupted over Rin and the console, shielding the hacker.
With a deafening screech, Icarus shattered the glass. Thousands of gallons of blue fluid and jagged shards exploded across the laboratory floor. The sheer concussive force of the physical breach tripped the manual fail-safes.
Instantly, the sterile white lights cut out. The room was plunged into darkness, replaced immediately by the strobing, blaring red glare of emergency klaxons.
"WARNING. CONTAINMENT BREACH. SUBJECT 09 IS ACTIVE."
Icarus hit the floor, slipping on the wet tiles, but its gravity Quirk instantly engaged, anchoring it perfectly to the ground. The monster locked its six eyes onto the largest concentration of energy in the room: Nocturne.
Icarus vanished.
"Sovereign!" Shinso yelled, his purple lightning flaring as he tried to track the spatial displacement.
Icarus materialized directly above Nocturne, its talons raised, the air warping around its hands as it prepared to crush the Sovereign into a bloody smear.
But it never reached him.
A blinding flash of crimson light illuminated the red-drenched laboratory. Giulio Gandini had moved with the lethal, impossible speed of a seasoned assassin. He materialized between Nocturne and the falling monster, his cybernetic arm raised high. A massive, jagged broadsword forged of pure, crackling crimson energy manifested in his grip.
CLANG!
Giulio swung the Crimson Arsenal blade upward in a flawless arc. The crimson energy clashed violently with Icarus's gravity-enhanced talons. The resulting shockwave blew the surrounding supercomputers backward, ripping wires from the walls.
Giulio gritted his teeth, his golden eye burning as his boots dug into the floor, perfectly halting the monster's downward momentum. "You dare raise your hand against the Sovereign?!"
Icarus screeched, trying to push through the blade.
"Get off him!"
From Giulio's left, Kenji arrived like a freight train. Encased entirely in his indestructible silver armor, the Quirkless Knight launched himself into the air. He didn't use a weapon. He used the sheer, unyielding density of his Knight's Vow.
Kenji drove a devastating, silver-plated right hook directly into Icarus's ribs.
The sound of shattering bone echoed over the blaring alarms. Icarus was violently thrown off Giulio's blade, sent skidding across the wet, ruined floor of the laboratory, crashing heavily into the steel wall.
Giulio spun his crimson broadsword, taking a ready stance beside Kenji. The butler and the knight stood shoulder-to-shoulder, a terrifying wall of red and silver standing between the monster and their Sovereign.
"Rin!" Nocturne's voice cut through the chaos, utterly unshaken. "How much longer?!"
"The data is wiped!" Rin yelled from inside Akio's golden shield, ripping her tablet from the console. "The Seraph blueprints are gone! But the facility is going into total lockdown! Heavy blast doors are sealing the elevators!"
Against the far wall, Icarus slowly stood up. The monster's ribs snapped back into place with a sickening crunch as its rapid cellular regeneration engaged. It let out a low, vibrating growl, the gravity in the room beginning to warp and buckle around it.
Nagant raised her sniper arm, aiming directly at the monster's head. "It's not going to let us leave."
Rei Arata stepped forward, the violet butterfly-wings on his cloak burning with intense, aggressive cosmic fire. He looked at Giulio and Kenji, then at the regenerating abomination.
"Then we will have to break it," the Winged Sovereign declared. "Vanguard. Tear it apart."