Mind Games - Chapter 68 (Patreon)

“Moshi-Moshi, you've got Hitoshi,” I answered the call as Himiko curled around me. In my ongoing quest to make the girl loosen up a bit, our dinner had been taken casually while watching a movie instead of at the table tonight. Of course, as my work never halted, the phone rang while she was doing the dishes.

“Hah-hah, very clever.”

“And how can I help you this fine weekend, Boss?” I asked kicking my feet up on the sofa as I turned to stretch out.

“Right, shit... it is Friday, isn't it?” There was the sound of ruffling pages in the background. “Ugh, I need to go home already... but I've got too much of a backlog. Anyway, I wanted to let you know I turned in the information to that Interpol woman, Mirage.”

I hummed. “Good. I mean, I did give it to you for them. I assume it was well-received?”

“By her, yes. My father? Not so much. Officially, I've been rewarded with some higher-level jobs that are going to eat up most of my time. Also to give me a bit of time to heal up more solidly. Unofficially...”

I took a wild guess given the fact that this was Fuyumi I was speaking to. “You're going to be stuck behind a desk for a while, right?”

I heard a deep sigh. “Got it in one, yeah. Apparently I really set him off by saying I was digging into some rumors I'd heard about a guy who could hand out quirks.”

I huffed a laugh. “I seem to recall explicitly stating the case was above your pay-grade and – at least implying – that no one would react well to you asking about it.”

“Yeah, yeah... you told me so,” Fuyumi grumbled, sighing again. “So barring using my contacts, I've been benched for the foreseeable future, but it looks like the case is moving forward so I'll take it.”

For a moment, I thought about asking...

'Dad grounded you, huh?'

She'd make me pay for it, though.

Instead, I pushed past the impulse and moved on to more pressing matters. “I'll let you know if I hear anything else and you can pass it along.”

“Not to be too much of a hypocrite, but don't put yourself in danger to get more information,” Fuyumi told me sternly, a trace of Hot Ice's authority in her voice. “You've already given us more than enough, even if you won't tell me how you know what you do.”

I grunted, Himiko coming in to lay down next to me as I shifted. “Is that Fuyumi-chan?”

A polite fiction. Her hearing was keen enough to have tracked the entire conversation from the kitchen.

Our mutual superior gave a small groan. “Ah, I should have known she was there. Also, I haven't forgotten about that whole 'love confession' detail.”

“Fuyumi-chan should confess to Hitoshi-kun, too! It'd be really cute if she admits she likes him!” Himiko chimed in.

This time, though, Fuyumi didn't rise to the bait. “No. I'd actually like that explanation, Hitoshi. What exactly is the nature of your relationship with Himiko? And hers with you, for that matter?”

I looked to the ceiling – which in this house was just another floor – and thought up a half-dozen ways to derail this conversation. Sadly, most of the ways I would need to resort to would be... counter-productive. “It's weird and complicated and will probably make your head hurt. Still want it?”

“Yes,” Fuyumi replied bluntly, giving me as little space to work with as possible.

Good, she was learning. My lips twitched in amusement at the thought.

“Alright, so... a very, very long time ago – so long ago in fact that a number wouldn't mean anything to standard human mind, powerful beings of energy and thought started to coalesce from the metaphysical power circulating the universe,” I began, droning out the explanation she wanted in the least-interesting way possible. In all actuality, it was pretty boring. Oh, the details were interesting, but the overarching narrative was a bit too simple.

“Okay, I'll buy that. I'm guessing you're talking about 'gods,' then? They'd be... whatever is in charge of this 'Celestial Bureaucracy' of yours, then?”

“Got it in one, yeah,” I nodded, though she couldn't see. “It took a long time, but they started to become truly sapient and notice things around them. In particular, they realized there were others of their own kind and that the energy they consumed was... well, it wasn't a finite resource, but there was a limited flow of it to be had. So as with any limited resource...”

“They started to fight over it.”

“Yep,” I hummed, pushing on as I gave her the very, very brief summary of what I'd looked up in The Company's archives. “The more powerful ones drove the less powerful into seclusion and hoarded the energy for themselves. Which forced the lesser gods to get creative. See, they realized that there were other sources of energy. In particular, there were all these little bald monkeys running around...”

“Humans.”

“Humans,” I nodded again in agreement, leaving out more details. It wasn't like this had happened in the local universe, after all. No, the world I was referencing was so old that its reality had been sanded down by entropy into nothingness. “It took a lot of work on their part to figure out how to most-efficiently harvest that energy – probably a few hundred years, if not thousands – but in the end, and after killing a bunch of them and eating their souls in failed experiments, the gods figured out that worship and prayer worked best. Not that it matters too much, but there's something about the willing offering of spiritual energy that makes it more potent.”

“Okay... all of that's a very disturbing take on classical mythology, but how does it play in to someone being bound to you if they confess their feelings?”

“Getting there,” I replied tiredly, closing my eyes as Himiko began to work on sore muscles. I'd have to remember to return the favor before bed. She couldn't be feeling too good after all the work we'd done today. “Alright, so skipping over a lot of details... the original energy streams that made up the young universe had slowly dried up, the new gods now had secure streams of power, and eventually they all overthrew the old gods. You can see this reflected in a lot of mythology like the Greek Titanomachy.”

I paused, reorganizing my thoughts so I didn't get dragged down into a tangent.

“Anyway... once that was all settled, the new gods didn't actually have to pay all that much attention to the humans they were farming for energy. And they didn't want to. I mean, it might have been fun for the first few centuries, but doing something for a long enough time gets old no matter what,” I explained. “So they picked their favorite humans and said, 'You and your descendants are in charge no, I have to go do important god-stuff.'”

“I feel like this should be sacrilegious.”

“I haven't met a god or goddess, but having seen some of their paperwork, I don't have the highest opinion of them,” I replied, rolling over and letting Himiko work on my back. “So, yeah, they left a human in charge and fucked off to do something more fun than train a bunch of hairless monkeys how to best serve them. And that worked... for a few generations. Traditions got muddled, hymns got corrupted, people started to lose faith, some people started saying they were the messiah and the gods were false... you know, standard human stuff.”

“I'm getting more disillusioned by the second here, Hitoshi. When do we get to the important part?”

I chuckled against a pillow, stifling a groan as Himiko worked on a particularly tight cluster of muscles. Instead of responding to Fuyumi, I pushed through. “Eventually, the gods figured out their water and power weren't working, so they came down and set the clergy to rights, killed a bunch of non-believers to send a message and went back to their divine paradises. Rinse and repeat... about three or four times, and pattern recognition kicked in. The gods realized that this was just going to keep happening unless they did something new.”

Fuyumi made an interested noise on the other end.

“The 'new thing' was to pick a few select humans to bear a tiny shard of divine power,” I continued. “And it worked, for a while. These exalted humans kept order in the lands and maintained the divine utilities that kept the gods' lights on upstairs. But there were only a few of them. And they were spread out all over the world. And, even with divine power, they were still human. That meant they wanted what most humans wanted. Safety, security, family, connections...”

“I think I see where this is going.”

“These divinely-empowered humans, though, didn't age. They weren't immortal, they could still be killed if you hit them hard enough, but they outlived their children, and their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren, and... eventually, it got to be too much. They stopped caring, making human connections, doing their jobs...” I trailed off leadingly.

“Okay, okay... let me see if I can guess,” Fuyumi interjected. “These gods let them pick spouses and empowered them, too. That right?”

“That's a few steps later, but... mostly correct,” I hummed. “The catch, though – there's always a catch – is that human relationships are messy. Fights, breakups, divorce... then you've got two immortal, divinely-empowered people who can't stand each other and who have to work together for the next eternity.”

“So – wait. You're telling me that this whole 'binding' thing you've got going on is so that you can have people around you who'll love you forever so that you don't get depressed and lonely in a few hundred years and stop wanting to do your job?”

I chuckled outright at her disbelief. “I never said it was a good solution, but it did fix the problem. The bindings... well, I won't sugar-coat it. They're mind-control. But... the kind I have are the lowest-level possible. They don't actually affect your personality all that much. Honestly, neurological medication does more to alter your moods or thinking than what I'm running. The primary effect is to make the low points of a relationship more tolerable and to make the person your bound to more attractive. 'Attractive' in this instance includes physical, emotional, and psychological characteristics.”

There was the sound of tired exasperation on the other end of the line. “I really hate how reasonable you make all this sound. Like it's just stupid enough to be real.”

I chuckled again, lower and smoother than previously. “It is what it is. I informed Himiko about the situation openly and bluntly. She decided to activate it herself.”

Aforementioned blond chose that moment to lean in to the phone over me, squishing her breasts against my back. “It's actually really cute! Hitoshi makes all the nasty, mean, uncute things in the world matter less! Fuyumi-chan should give it a try.”

A slightly strangled laugh in reply.

“Fuyumi should not,” I replied sternly. “Himiko enjoys our bond because it emotionally grounds her. You'd probably find the borderline co-dependency suffocating. Or at least cloying. I'd suggest avoiding saying the magic words, even if we both know you're interested.”

Fuyumi choked slightly on the other end of the line. “Hitoshi, I... I need to go. I'll talk to you later, once... I've had a chance to think about all this.”

I grunted and said goodbye. She’d be back again, trying desperately to pick and pull at all the interwoven fibers of my story, attempting to uncover something that didn’t line up so she could confront a lie that didn’t exist. That was fine, I’d be here. Waiting for her to get tired of her own skepticism and exhaust her disbelief. I slipped my phone into my pocket, the call firmly disconnected.

Then I flipped Himiko into my position.

“Eep!”

Holding her down against the cushions of the couch, I began to massage her back. My slow kneading of her muscles instantly drew a low groan of appreciation. “You've made your offer, you won't tease her further.”

“Yes, Dear,” Himiko whined as I moved on to more tense areas.

“It's not that I don't like her, it's that she deserves to make this kind of choice without being pressured into it,” I continued firmly. “Given how things are going, I'll have Kyoka before the month is out and you can play with her as much as you want. Mina might be good for a romp in the sheets, too, but I won’t be binding her. As flighty as she is, she's got too much good sense in her head.”

I managed to wrestle a promise out of Himiko on those terms before reducing her to a warm puddle of girlfriend-wife and getting up to head back out.

No rest for the wicked.

…

The great thing about living in the second digital age was that most of the information I needed for Grand Scheme #2 was online. Or, at least, it was accessible via online means. Between my own talents and Himiko's, we could access most 'secure' databases with a fair amount of ease. The primary danger in doing so was not the normal cybersecurity measures. Any building staffed by humans was only ever secure as the least attentive person on staff.

All it took was finding and exploiting that weakness.

And, again, almost none of that took physical penetration of a building to do so.

Usually, you could get into a system by sending an email to an appropriately incautious staff member. Frequently, the largest collection of those were in the management rank; people who'd long since purchased or connived their way into semi-invincibility and used their status to grant themselves exceptions to the rules other people lived by.

What was the point of having power if you couldn't flaunt it, after all?

Sometimes 'flaunting' that power meant fancy suits.

Sometimes, on the other hand, it meant having an unsecured personal device on an otherwise secure network.

For those companies who were especially paranoid and air-gapped their systems to some degree, physically partitioning data on servers that had absolutely no online-capability... well, those took a bit more effort. Sometimes I had to make an actual phone call and talk someone into transferring data because 'Sumeragi in Accounting' wanted this done as soon as possible. Rarely, I resorted to walking through an employee parking lot and dropping off a USB stick with the company's logo on it. Maybe even attaching the thing to a keyring with hero merch on it for extra authenticity.

Someone picked it up, plugged it into their workstation, and it uploaded the viral load right onto the system.

I filled the thumbdrive with creative kinds of porn, naturally.

Just for shits and giggles.

My point being that, if you had the time and skills to do it, any networked computer would eventually crack under enough examination and pressure. There was always a hole somewhere, it was just a matter of what kind of timeframe you were running on.

Me? I'd started this project before the ink was dry on the Shie Hassaikai case files.

I'd been patient. Hell, I was being patient.

But if a system hadn't at least allowed me to glimpse a vulnerability over the course of a month, then I was going to take steps.

Which led me to hanging from the landing treads of a weather helicopter as it rounded the Tokyo airspace, its hacked flight plan telling me that it would take me exactly where I wanted to go.

I sighed within my helmet as we made the final approach before I would dismount from where I had attached myself. “You know, I could have avoided this if you were just a little less security-conscious, Murayama.”

Then we crossed into my five-second window and I released.

The body of Perspicacious Mauve Avenger dropped into freefall for two seconds before my wings unfurled.

The wingsuit I was wearing was part of the armory I'd purchased from The Company. It was a next-next-next-next generation piece of hardware, a lesser variant of the Solid Wing armored assault loadout. Fully stealth-capable with shielded thrusters capable of breaking my speed or accelerating me into a kind of near-flight glide. I controlled my breathing as the skyscrapers shot past me, most still below me as I made an elongated curve towards the specific high-rise apartment building I had my eye on.

A notification popped up in the display on my helmet.

I bit back a curse.

It's always something.

A flick of my eyes dismissed the notice and I shifted my posture to catch the wind. This specific insanity was only possible thanks to a mix of skills borrowed form Cassandra Cain and Ranma Saotome. River's supercomputer mind sat in the driver's seat, crunching all manner of wind speed and velocity scrolling by my face on the translucent screen before my eyes.

It was foggy tonight. The mist rolled in off the ocean in thick waves that obscured the city below in a sea of haze. Crisp neon and led bulbs turned into luminous blobs of indistinct origin as a map of the city gave suggested guidance in the back of my mind.

Seeing my target approaching, I leaned back and cut my speed.

The wind caught me like a punch to the gut, testing both my personal resolve and the strength of my 'wings,' but both held firm.

Thrusters fired in a braking action, cutting my speed further.

I still hit the ground in a tumble, bleeding momentum as I rolled over the hacked pressure plates strewn across the rooftop. I suppose with flying quirks, you couldn't be too paranoid in this day and age. But at the very least, the sensor-net still needed to be networked to call out an emergency alert to the local hero office. It was a miniscule window of data transfer, but it was one that Himiko could work with, bullshit Coordinator superhuman coding skills being what they were.

“Now let's see,” I hummed, cuing up the alert that I'd received and sighing as I made my way towards the access ladder under the blinded eyes of cameras that couldn't see me. “Ah... you couldn't have picked a better time?”

It was an email.

Normally, not something that would ping me. I could ignore alerts like that all day long. This one had bypassed my blocks because it was from a VIP. Someone that, were they ever to send me a message, I'd want to know immediately.

“Let's see...” I muttered, traipsing through a stupid web of lasers as I bent this way and that in order to dodge them. “Need to talk to me... call as soon as feasible... thank you for everything... stupid sincere giant blond idiot...”

My feet were whisper-quiet as I walked past the middle-aged man and the hookers he'd contracted for the night. Although I think he called them 'escorts.' It did sound classier.

“Not only does the helmet stop all sound from getting out, it also stops smells,” I muttered, shaking my head. “A countermeasure I meant for toxic gases, but works just as well in this case.”

Pulling out my phone, I made sure it was linked to my helmet and set to the proper incognito mode fiat-backed by a hyper-advanced interdimensional civilization's tech base.

I pushed the call button.

It only rang once.

“This is my private line, Young Lady.”

I chuckled into my helmet's receiver. “You did ask me to call you back as soon as possible. I figured I'd skip the song and dance of getting through your secretaries.”

“I suppose I did. You aren't going to answer how you got this number, are you?”

“I wasn't planning to. I'm happy to see that Eri is in good hands, though. It seems I picked the right hero to take on Chisaki,” I commented idly as I swept around the room to the chief financial officer's private PC.

Once again, this would have been so much easier if the trading company he ran hadn't locked down their network to the point of having a private security firm on retainer. One that included an entire team of individuals with quirks relating to information technology.

But once again, the human element was the weak link.

Just another obsessive Japanese salaryman who takes his work home with him.

All Might cleared his throat on the other end of the line. “She is, I mean Eri is... I don't know if I'll ever be able to thank you enough. I put off this conversation for so long, in fact, because I didn't know how to do that. Thank you, I mean.”

I hummed in response, carefully installing the hardware I needed to behind his PC.

“You know you don't have to, right?” I asked him idly. “It's like what you've always said to people who thank you... I helped you, I helped Eri. That's all the reward I need.”

“...I suppose this is what it's like to be on the other end of that,” All Might huffed a quiet laugh. “To feel inadequate before a hero who saves your life so casually and gives it new meaning.”

Something in me moved at that, and I swallowed.

“The reason I do what I do... and the way I choose to do it, I'm not someone who needs to be appreciated,” I answered carefully. Nothing so trite as, 'I'm no hero,' but an admonishment all the same along different lines.

“Then despite not needing it, you won't mind if I do,” All Might said solemnly, then abruptly and awkwardly cleared his throat. “But... that isn't the only reason why I called. You obviously knew quite a bit about me. My... condition.”

“Your injury,” I confirmed, not having the patience to dance around as I installed a bit more monitoring gear in the apartment. He'd made me come all this way, after all. “All For One's parting gift to you... or, at least, that was the impression he left you with at the time.”

An explosive sigh. “So you do know. About all of it. Will I get a straight answer if I ask how?”

There were a lot of things I could have said at that moment, to the world's greatest superhero.

I picked a lie so close to the truth that the former could be indistinguishable from the latter.

And I let him come up with it himself.

“One For All should reach its singularity soon, you know?” I asked, dancing around the laser beams once more. Again, the mark of paranoia – justified though it was – the system sat in air-gapped containment with a dedicated alarm tied to it. Untouchable by the world's greatest hacker no matter how creative.

“...singularity?” Toshinori asked slowly, his voice cracking slightly, as if something unnerved him.

“The point at which the user can start to manifest the previous quirks absorbed through the generations its been active,” I explained. “The point at which the vestiges of the past users start to wake up.”

“Past users-!” All Might cut himself off. “What you're saying is-no, wait. How do you know this?!”

“Granted, I had to track down the names and quirks for the past users of your version of One For All,” I chuckled lightly as I stepped up to the edge of the top-floor penthouse's outer wall, the city stretched out before me. “It's an interesting mix of abilities you'll have access to, soon. Gear Shift, Fa Jin, Danger Sense, Blackwhip, Smokescreen, and Float.”

I could hear a shocked inhalation from the other side of the line.

I hardened my heart at the deception.

“It shouldn't be any question which one you're likely to manifest first,” I continued, my visor checking the wind direction and thermal maps, matching them to my preplanned route. “Ah... before I go, though. That boy of yours, Shinso.”

“Young Hitoshi? What of him? He's... he's not involved in any of this.”

“No, he's not. However, he's set useful dominoes in motion. Ones that I'll be taking advantage of as they fall. If you would, make sure he knows that what happens next isn't his fault,” I told the other man.

“...what's going to happen next?” All Might asked, an edge to his voice that hadn't been there before.

Dangerous.

Implacable.

The Symbol of Peace.

“People are going to get hurt,” I told him plainly. “Bad people. Lots of them. But innocents will be caught in the crossfire no matter what I do, and I'm sorry for that. But as long as you're attacking the head of the snake, his tail is left unguarded. But even a serpent's tail can be dangerous, and for that it must be removed.”

I cut the line and leaped off the building.

At least Nezu would have fun chewing on that.

~~~

New Mind Games!

Yes, yes, although it came in second it'll still get a pair of chapters this time around. Don't worry. Both of them will also be Hitoshi doing vigilante stuff as Perspicacious Mauve Avenger. Or, at least, most of them. Half the chapter this time and the full chapter next time. I may or may not extend this short arc out a bit longer, depending on where next chapter ends.

Anyway!

The next update... hmm, I may go ahead and hammer out the next Hand We're Dealt chapter. Or I could see about getting that Nexus Event chapter out. One of those two, probably. Have to see. Dark Horse update would be Paldean Knights, which I also want to do sometime this month.

Have a great weekend!

PS: I welcome speculation on Hitoshi's Plan! Either of them, actually. The first one that he's working on right now, and the one with what he just told All Might! He's a scheming schemer, that one!