VT - Chapter 50 : With this one trick, I revived a dying economy! (Patreon)

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Somewhere on Earth Bet

–Simon–

He slumped in his seat, a chuckle escaping his lips before he bent over, laughing so hard that tears escaped his eyes. It was probably the hardest he had ever laughed in all his lives. He had never been this happy since he came here. Even when he figured out more and more innovative applications of his powers, and figured out stuff that, so far, had existed only in his memory, he had not been this happy.

Calming down a bit, he wiped the tears off his eyes before leaning forward and shifting through the celebration that had spread from the frontlines to the digital world, with social media across the planet ablaze with the news. Smiling at some of the memes he saw of the Helicarrier bashing into Leviathan’s face and pushing it back, he sniffed before getting back to work.

Unfortunately for him, he was but one man and, as such, did not have the luxury of taking a small vacation after something as monumental as this. For one, the hundreds of assets he had in Brockton Bay were all burned now, as he was not going to risk them falling into the wrong hands after being discovered.

So, he might as well put all of them to good use. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how one looked at the concept of destroying perfectly good stuff that could be used for years more just for information security, the city was not damaged at all.

Outside of some property damage, some minor street damage, a few streetlights falling, as well as some houses flooding because people did not turn off their taps before fleeing the city, which was the right thing to do, there was not much his suits could do to repair the city.

The biggest concern, the Helicarrier, was gone anyway, so all he had to do now was make sure none of the suits fell into Cauldron’s hands as well. While he was pretty sure in his black box tech, that would kill the suit the moment it detected something, and he was pretty sure that Cauldron did not need his tech, he could not trust his instincts about them anymore.

Because he hadn’t expected even Cauldron, what with all their cartoonishly evil plots, to take such a major step and kill so many capes in cold blood, all to pin on him the blame for breaking the Endbringer Truce. And what good was that going to do now? 

Even if the entire world media screamed at the population that he broke the Truce- the one thing that ensured the participation of villains in Endbringer Battles, something that was very essential because villains outnumbered heroes to a large degree- the world was just going to scoff at them. After all, what did it matter if he broke the Endbringer Truce if he had actually defeated an Endbringer? He might not have done it in the traditional sense, but he had definitely won there.

He could easily send out a PHO post and say that his concern, first and foremost, was for the people living in the city and their livelihood, and saving the city and its entire population was going to ensure he would not get hated on for breaking the Truce. Just like that, the biggest thing Cauldron had hoped to achieve with this idiotic move of theirs was rendered impossible. They had hoped to keep his popularity in check, which…..failed….miserably.

His thoughts slowed down as he went over the casualty list once more, before his hands flew across the terminal, opening a particular Watchdog report that was remarkably different from their usual reports. Since their powers did not work on him, and they were only able to work with the information they could glean off his creations, the entire thing was riddled with maybes, we think, we theorise, we assume, and more. 

It was something that had given many people at Watchdog sleepless nights, but that was not as important as the content of the report, apparently written only for the eyes of the Chief Director as well as the other local PRT Directors.

In that, they had explicitly stated that if they were sure of one thing, then it was the fact that no single tinker could ever make the breadth of technology he had crammed into his suits, into his ships, and that was even before they had seen the helicarrier. They were sure that it was a work of multiple tinkers. They theorised the number to be dozens, and the part they were unsure of was just how so many tinkers were working together perfectly to create such tremendous creations.

They had either a Super Master or a Super Tinker to be the reason for that eerie synchronisation, and therein seemed to be the reason why Cauldron might have killed their capes under his custody. Or, at least a secondary reason.

Were they trying to prevent yet another vehicle tinker from joining Grand Chariot? Squealer certainly fit the bill, even if her creations made him nauseous the longer he stared at them. They were so hideous, as if they were a reflection of her state at the time of creating the vehicles. Drugged out of her mind. Barely holding onto her sanity, and bound to fall off and die soon enough.

Shaking his head, he saw the list of capes killed under his watch, and a surge of fury entered his mind as he thought of the needless loss of life. Nine people were killed under his watch. All of them capes. Most of them were criminals, hardened ones at that, and he would not have lost one iota of sleep if they had all been killed while fighting other criminal capes. The fact that they died under his custody just pissed him off because it meant his preparations were not enough. All his means failed in keeping them alive.

Hell, even when he had evacuated hundreds of thousands of people and made sure that not a single soul was forced to stay inside the cramped Endbringer shelters, he had not lost that many people. Sure, they lost three people, but most of them were either really old or in the ICU already, and moving them just killed them on the spot. One of them was even brain dead for weeks before they tried moving the patient, who was kept in long term care in Brockton Bay General. He was still there only because Panacea refused to work on brains.

Aside from that, he could say with pride that not a single person lost his life. Not a single cape who came to Brockton Bay, knowing that every single Endbringer battle carried with it a risk to life, was going to go back home safe, all because of him. 

And this was him unprepared for the battle. If he had been prepared, he could have aimed for a perfect score.

Alas….

Taking things calmly for a bit, he suppressed the anger as he focused on the here and now, which was a time of celebration. No need to upend the current order in the country by revealing the existence of Cauldron to the entire world. He wouldn't even have to do much to make the group implode from inside.

A well placed tip to Legend, as well as a few people all around the country, would lead to widespread anger for the public facing members of Cauldron, and a few pointed questions would resolve the rest of the members.

But that had a lot of problems associated with it. For one, the global economy was only slowly dying because of Number Man’s contributions, likely with some help from Contessa. Without the two of them keeping things running, he was pretty sure that a series of horrible events would hit Earth Bay, as well as the other Earths that Contessa presumably ran.

Then, the Triumvirate. The premier heroes of North America, as well as the PRT. The frontline at every single Endbringer battle, irrespective of the location of the battle. Then came the PRT and the Protectorate. The revelation of Cauldron would mean reduced trust in those institutions, lower than it already was, and that would lead to more and more deaths across the country.

Villains would be emboldened, and unless he was willing to step up and take the place of those law enforcement organisations, he was not sure exposing Cauldron was the right step to take here.

Even if his anger demanded it, he couldn't go ahead with it. Just taking a moment to think things through, and thinking of the consequences of what he wanted to do, he had to take a step back and not choose the worst possible option. While bringing ruin to Cauldron sounded nice to his angry mind, it would also mess up a lot of stuff in Earth Bet.

For one, it might give the CUI or the Yangban free rein over the planet. They were a pretty powerful organisation here, being blessed with many powerful capes who had powers that were very useful, not strictly for Combat purposes. 

The main lynchpins of the entire Yangban were two capes only. Null, who was the creator of the cape power network, and Two, a cape that boosted the power of Null, allowing everyone in his network to access pretty potent versions of the powers Null stole from other capes. These two capes meant that at any given point, the Yangban capes had a number of powers they could cycle from, aside from the basic Brute/Flight/Energy weapon powers that were given to every single numbered member of the organisation, with others accessible based on the opponent.

While Cauldron was arguably worse than the CUI, that was only because Cauldron had multiversal reach instead of just ruling a massive nation with an equally massive population. 

Dismissing the Yangban, he thought of just what he could do to make sure this move would hurt Cauldron. Because he was going to make them regret doing this. He was pretty sure that not even Cauldron had expected him to make Leviathan turn tail and retreat, so it should be pretty hard to make the Truce Breaker tag stick, so the question was - how much he wanted to hurt Cauldron.

Just enough to make them regret doing it, and jostle things up at their leadership level, but not enough that the repercussions of his attack on Cauldron would end up affecting the things they ran in the background that kept the majority of the population under a somewhat coherent government structure.

It would have to be the Case 53 for the external news, and on the internal front, maybe leak the same to Legend? He was pretty sure Legend wouldn’t do something stupid, like try to assassinate any other members of Cauldron. The most likely thing that Legend would do is quietly withdraw from the PRT as well as Cauldron, instead of doing a public breakup with either one of them.

Moving on from his revenge thoughts, he watched as a squad of suits fell out of formation and began bringing the city back to working condition. Cars were moved out of the streets. Utilities were tested, and multiple houses had to be condemned because of flooding.

Power had to be restored to multiple sections of the city, particularly the coastal part. 

There was all that to do and more, as he had to make sure the city was prepared for all of the people to be back in the city by the next day. He was going to target the aggressive timeline just to set a benchmark.

As his suits did that, though, all the capes gathered for the battle were returning to the city, with the PRT scrambling to create camps to host the gathered capes. They couldn’t just let the capes back into an empty city, and with the situation not being as urgent, Strider was given his due rest.

He could see a multi day party happening in the city, along with a surge of tourist attraction to the city, for being the first city to have successfully repelled an Endbringer without the city being destroyed in its entirety.

He foresaw a very significant uptick in money pouring into the city, from all fronts, be it federal, state, or even private money.

He might just have reversed all the damage that was done to Brockton Bay for that stupid experiment that Cauldron was running on it, despite there being ample examples of what would happen with Parahuman feudalism in Africa and some parts of Asia.