Mind Games - Chapter 57 (Patreon)

Todoroki Enji tried not to worry about his children.

Tried, and often failed.

Touya, his eldest, had never forgiven himself for what had happened. Even now, years later, he rarely visited and phone calls were filled with awkward silences. Fuyumi, the shining light of his life... he knew she'd made the decision to go into the hero profession at least partially to ensure he wouldn't work himself to an early grave. Part of him loved her for that sacrifice, the rest of him hated himself for accepting it instead of pushing her to follow her passion teaching.

Natsuo was distant. Not like Touya. His second-youngest child checked in regularly. He made family dinners twice a week. Made sure to have gifts for every occasion and even showed up spontaneously with food every now and then. But... it felt like he was checking off boxes on a form. In a way – a horrible way – Enji was reminded of a younger version of himself in Natsuo. Driven, mechanical, not... rude, necessarily, but definitely curt. He blamed himself for that, too.

Shoko was...

Her position was not something he felt equipped to deal with constructively even on his best days, and those were seldom and far between when considering the overall requirements on his time. Suffice to say that Shoko's situation caused him a great deal of heartache and vitriol towards his former wife, but the fact remained that he was not there when it mattered.

But while he worried over his children, he was also aware that they seldom needed that concern.

All of them save for Shoko were involved in successful careers and making names for themselves. His eldest two in heroism, following in his footsteps, while Natsuo was running a surgical clinic as a specialist.

They knew what they were doing and they were capable young adults in their own right.

So when one of them asked for help, it meant something had gone very, very wrong.

And as The Flame Hero: Endeavor kicked open the battered door of the nondescript vehicle that had finally come to a rolling stop, he could barely keep himself from melting his way out of the wrecked car.

The scene in front of the courthouse was chaos.

The attack that had sent his vehicle flying had apparently destroyed several other cars, rendering them into smoldering wrecks from what looked to be a series of explosives. People in the streets and on the sidewalks were laying unconscious, bleeding, or simply too stunned to move. The facade of the courthouse was riddled with bullet holes, shattered stonework laying across the entryway along with jagged and gleaming glass.

He took all of this in with a single glance.

His hand went to his headset. “I need medical evacuation of injured civilians en route immediately!”

The only response he cared about was the affirmative before he snapped to the local communication line for his agency. 'Teamspeak,' he'd heard some of the others call it. “This is Endeavor! Call out if you're battle ready!”

In such an instance where a major national institution was being threatened by a villain infiltration, he'd brought ten of his sidekicks with him, three of them heroes in their own right. A bit of tension eased as he checked off each name that spoke up on the encrypted channel against the list in his mind.

“Charcoal! Start running a cordon!” Endeavor barked into his mic once he was satisfied with the responses, visually confirming many of the individuals as they guardedly-exited their own vehicles. “Extinguisher! Get those fires out! The rest of you, team leaders get civilians to safety and guard while medical help arrives! Flame Snake, you're with me!”

His heroes rushed into action, moving in a practiced and steady rhythm that identified all any deeply injured and began setting up care and triage points.

While that was going on, Endeavor stood in the shadow of the wrecked vehicle he'd just crawled out of, Flame Snake slithering over to his side before settling into his human form.

“Want me to charge in ahead, boss?” The transformation-quirk user asked, crouched next to him.

Endeavor flared his beard as he pointed to the signs of gunfire against the building's facade. “I see bullet holes, but no guns, no gunmen. You're the most mobile. I want you to track down high points and see if you can find where the sniper's set up.”

“Got it. You going in?” Flame Snake asked.

Endeavor nodded, checking his mic again. “This is Endeavor. I'll be making a frontal assault on the building. Keep vigilant and watch for any potential villains coming out.”

Because the other reason he didn't see gunmen could be that whoever fired those rounds had gone inside.

And that was where his daughter was.

Tactically, it was a questionable decision. He'd be taking himself off the scene of a major crisis and rushing into an unknown situation. But Fuyu-Hot Ice wasn't answering her comms. Hadn't since his car's fuel tank exploded and rolled it. That could be a technical glitch, even with as much funding as he dumped into upgrades, the damn things always seemed to malfunction whenever you needed them most.

Alternatively, though, it could mean Hot Ice and Bootstrap had been hit and weren't able to respond.

Or they were pinned down and the system was glitching.

But, he could argue the decision, when the political class decided to put this incident under a microscope – and they would. This was too big, too public. You can't shoot up a national courthouse without everything being raked over the coals and held up to the light.

Civilians were in the building. Officials. His – Associate Hero – Hot Ice and the youngest member of their agency, Bootstrap, were as well. Unknown condition. No contact. Gunfire.

The accusations would still come, he knew.

Nepotism. Favoritism. Compromised Judgment.

When the time came, he'd be sure to subtly remind anyone who complained that they would surely want him to consider their positions within the government as he was now doing so for the judges and staff of the court.

“If you can't find the villain, take an overwatch position and coordinate with law enforcement and medics as they arrive,” Endeavor ordered the man, then clicked comms again. “Charcoal, in Flame Snake's absence, you've got command.”

He didn't wait for a response, turning to the red-clad hero beside him. “Go!”

Instantly, the man morphed into a serpentine form made out of liquid fire, sliding off into the urban jungle behind him.

Endeavor amped up his heat and surged forward, fire coming from his boots and elongating his steps into great leaps.

Then he hit the front doors and melted through the destroyed glass and metal frames.

And encountered a wall of steaming carbon dioxide made solid.

That was a good sign.

He allowed himself a sliver of hope before melting his way through.

…

-Five Minutes Earlier-

…

We'd caught the bad guy.

Who was actually a girl.

And the day was saved!

But, actually not yet.

That was the thing about being a hero, as Hot Ice and I escorted the detained villain into the stairway-

Because you don't take a probability manipulator into an elevator unless you have a death wish.

-the job wasn't done until it was done. That meant, even with the villain in cuffs and the immediate danger passed, even with me having put a tiny bit of pressure on Glasses' paranoia at the sudden villain appearance and him already on his way to the prosecutor to cut a deal, even with everything... until the villain was behind bars and the paperwork signed, sealed, and delivered, you didn't get to go home.

Also...

“Front or back?” I asked, my grip like iron on the woman's arm.

“Not our call,” Hot Ice replied. “Endeavor will set up a cordon around the building-”

-I felt the knot of fate shift-

“-and then radio us with instructions. Which way we go depends on a lot of different factors. We'll hold her here until he makes the call.” Hot Ice stated, the bottom of the stairwell deserted, with two different access doors leading off into less public spaces as well as the primary one in front of us.

I stopped, frowning as we passed by the atrium door.

Hot Ice must have seen something in my body language, because she frowned as well, albeit more visibly than I did. “Is something wrong?”

“Gut feeling,” I replied, my grip tightening slightly on the criminal.

Why then? Was that random? Significant? Had she missed a check-in with-

My eyes widened and I turned the woman forcibly, my hands reaching out for-

“Bootstrap, what are you-?!” Hot Ice began, then inhaled sharply as I pulled a strand of wire from under her uniform, carefully pinned.

“We checked her for weapons, not for a wire!” I hissed, the villain's expression shifting from a blank obedience to a sharp and villainous amusement.

We’d assumed that she was working alone.

That was the catch! The reason why I still felt the tangle of probability even though I had her quirk locked down!

“Too little, too late, heroes,” she grinned, and I reached out to stun her with my quirk, forcing her back into an empty-minded trance.

“What-” Hot Ice started, but the building shook.

Gunfire rang out.

People started screaming.

“Sleep,” I ordered her, feeling her body sag in my grip.

“Fuck,” Hot Ice scowled, taking the woman from my arms and shoving her underneath the stairwell before throwing up a pair of ice-walls to box her in, making an impromptu holding cell. “Bootstrap, guard the villain.”

“We both know I'm not letting you charge into danger alone,” I replied, feeling... something move.

“You-” Hot Ice started.

But the door blew open before she could finish.

My eyes flashed through the smoke of shattered concrete, seeking more than just what I could see. I moved, stepping quickly out of the way of two shots, feeling them graze me. My hand came up, striking Fuyumi's arm in a way that sent her spinning-

A hail of bullets whizzed by her harmlessly.

Fate shifted again, the woman at my back still unconscious in the makeshift cell.

There's another.

I'd been looking at it wrong. It wasn't a single twisted bundle of chance and probability. No, it was two. But I'd been looking at the one so closely, watching for the slightest deviation that the other had been lurking in the shadows behind it.

Big guy, tactical outfit, military cast-off, overlarge arms, quirk likely strength-enhancing.

He reached for me-

A wall of ultra-cold ice shot into the space between us.

“FUCK THAT BURNS, BITCH!” A voice cried out, but I was already moving as his fist came careening through the barrier, Fuyumi throwing up another in its place instantly.

We both dove for the atrium, outside the close-quarters of the stairway lobby where we'd be able to-

Gunfire

Luck, probability, chance... it had twisted while I wasn't looking, manipulated things in their favor and put us out of position.

Essence twisted within me, the anti-chronal energy tightly controlled as events that had already taken place swept backwards and were rewritten so they'd never happened.

I moved.

Making contact with Hot Ice's arm again, I pulled her into position to avoid the shots, the flow of primal energy within me leaking into her. I couldn’t allow it out into the real world, but with physical contact it was just more internal manipulation.

Inside her instead of me, though.

That was all I had time for, though, in the chaos.

Or, not quite.

One shot grazed harmlessly, leaving little more than an abrasion. Another impacted a ballistic plate at a good angle, shattering the momentum and leaving a nasty bruise. The third, though, would slip the gap and puncture my liver. It'd be a bad way to die, I thought, as muscles clenched and forced the organ out of the way.

Pain, but it was clean.

Through-and-through.

Something they would have once called a million-dollar-wound.

I hit the ground, rolling, already forcing energy into the wound to lessen the bleeding. I couldn't seal it, too many cameras, too many witnesses, too much evidence... man, that was a lot of blood.

“Dipshit says what!?” I yelled out, laying prone on my back as I stared down the swiveling barrel of the gunman's rifle.

“Huh-” The black-masked figure blinked, and froze.

“AAAAAAAHHHHH!” The man with the giant arms cried out, the atrium's temperature dropping a dozen degrees in an instant as the icy fog rolled off the new statue.

Eh, quirk-humanity is bullshit, he'll probably be okay.

And, if not, the brutal pragmatism of the issue was that Hot Ice had made the call, not me.

“Drop the gun,” I ordered the man. “Discard all ammunition and weapons, lay down and go to sleep.”

“Bootstrap!” Hot Ice called out, hurrying to my side.

Explosions rocked the building from outside, a hail of gunfire striking what was left of the glass doors tweedle-dee and dweedle-dum hadn't broken. I pushed her to the side as another stream of very lucky shots headed our way. This time, though, I wasn't preoccupied. In the shattering glass and the thrown-up dust of the concrete that had been smashed to pieces, a pair of ball bearings flashed out in a perfection motion, deflecting two bullets in an impossibly-perfect impact.

A wall of ice was up a second later, catching the remainder of the bullets as Hot Ice shielded us from further fire with a wall so thick that no degree of probability-manipulation could have pierced them.

For a moment, there was silence.

Or close to it.

People breathed, whimpered, and tried to crush gasps of pain and horror.

Fuyumi was on top of me, gasping as she lowered her head to stared down at me. One arm was still outstretched, the other holding her up above me as her legs parted over my stomach for her knees to take her weight. I was grateful for that, since the alternative was turning off my pain receptors.

“Bootstrap... didn't I... wasn't I...”

…

Fuyumi flinched as the bullets impacted, already knowing the wounds were lethal. Still, her hands reached out to channel her quirk to save Hitoshi-

'Sorry Dad, looks like-'

The world twisted.

…

“Don't get used to it,” I warned her, feeling the world thrum behind the thin curtain of reality around us. Things were circling, trying to find where that causality-violating energy was coming from. Hungry things. Deflecting the bullets hadn't been a problem. No, it was the stunt I'd pulled with Fuyumi, the surge of energy that hadn't entirely been my own conscious will.

It was a feeling I recognized, if only distantly.

Reaching back to change things in the immediate past.

If I valued the lives of everyone here, myself included, that was as far as I could push things.

I took a breath – now a painful necessity – and shifted, only to blink and snort in misplaced amusement as my hand caught on a sublimating shard of dry ice.

“Are you okay?!” Fuyumi asked, sitting up as I winced in pain, carefully removing herself from over top of my body.

“Second probability user,” I breathed out, content not to move at the moment as I reached for the small emergency kit I kept buckled to one leg. “Check your bodycam, they got mine. Probably tried to destroy the footage of their accomplice.”

Hot Ice blinked, reaching inside her firefighter's armored cloak to produce a small box with a shard of concrete in it. With a disgusted sigh, she dropped it to the ground.

She froze, looking at her glove.

It was stained red.

“You were shot!?” She cried, instantly going for her own medical pack. “Why didn't you say anything!?”

“Just a flesh wound,” I chuckled, then winced. “Ow.”

“Fucking gods, Hitoshi!” She spat, pulling at my uniform. “You're bleeding like a stuck pig!”

I snorted, wincing again. You never realize how often you use those muscles until someone puts a hole in them.

“At least ask my girlfriend first if you're going to be taking my clothes off,” I grumbled, my eyes locking onto Fuyumi's fingers as she produced an extremely sharp blade of ice the size of a scalpel and sliced through my clothing.

“If you can joke like that, you're obviously not too injured,” she grumbled, pulling out gauze and beginning to pack my wound.

The sound of a gun cocking made us both freeze.

No, that was a lie.

“Fuck this shit, bleeding all over the place, bitch get up! You're my ticket out of here!” He growled, a thin stream of blood trickling down from where a bullet had grazed his arm. Obviously, he'd taken just enough of a wound to wake him from his nap and he'd decided to make one final play.

How incredibly... lucky.

“Dipshitsayswhat?” I asked again.

“Ah-” The black-masked gunman froze.

Fuyumi sighed in relief, then jerked with a quick intake of breath. Then again. “Hehehahaha-”

“Hahahaha,” I mimicked her, chuckling through the pain as she held gauze to my wound.

Twenty seconds later, Endeavor melted his way through the icy barricade to find us collapsed in hysterical laughter, a gunman still frozen with his rifle at us while his daughter's blood-drenched hands were all over my naked torso.

I was still smiling as they threw me in the ambulance and carted me off to the hospital.

…

She stared at the wall, the burns still hot on her arm and leg. Escape hadn’t been easy, preoccupied as she had been.

The hired help had been captured, their insurance plan gone up in smoke as someone - one of the heroes, it had to be - managed to weave in and out of their designs, fouling them up from behind the scenes.

Had this been a trap all along?

She shook her head, it didn’t matter.

There was only one recourse left to her, now.  At least, unless she was content to see her sister behind bars.

Fuck that.

A phone was dialed, a number she’d never wanted to use. A number her sister Sarina had talked her out of using more than once while they were in this part of the world. A number that she wasn’t here to talk her out of using now.

“Greetings, who may I ask is calling?”

An old, gravelly voice, but one that was simultaneously amused in some way. “This is Clotho. They say you sell quirk enhancements.”

“For a price, yes. Everything for a price, My Dear.”

~~~

What's this? A new chapter!

Not just a new chapter, but the end of the trial arc! Woo!

And, as promised, everything goes just as plan-

Oh. Oh my. Uh... well! Never mind all that! I'm sure nothing too horrible will happen!

So... next update will be The New Ron. Possibly. Maybe. I'll try to get a chapter out, anyway. In any event, thank you all for your continued support! I hope you enjoyed this chapter and are getting through your week without any major problems! Oh, and my AC is fixed! Woo!

P.S. - Look forward to The Hand We're Dealt at some point later in the month. It won the top-tier poll.