VT - Chapter 51 : Truce Trivia, Gang Extermination & Aladdin’s carpets..... (Patreon)

Disclaimer: Worm belongs to the one and only absolute chad, Wildbow. Enough said.

Somewhere on Earth Bet

–Simon–

The sight of hundreds of his suits, all helping people come back to their homes, all of which were accessible with no sign of an actual Endbringer invasion, was something to behold. He figured that since he was going to have all the suits self-destruct anyway, he might as well do something good with them.

A last deed before he had to waste what were perfectly cromulent suits that could have survived purging an entire big city like Boston or New York of their villains before….being….destroyed.

……Huh.

Snapping upright in his seat, his fingers flew across the terminal as his mind flew towards something that was definitely breaking the Endbringer Truce. After all, with Coil, the Merchants, the E88 gone, the only gang left in Brocton Bay was the ABB.

The gang that matched the E88 despite having only a fraction of their capes. All because of the existence of Lung, who was a pretty strong A-tier cape, with the potential to ramp up to S-class if he had a sufficiently powerful foe in front of him who was also courteous enough to wait for Lung to fully ramp up.

Lung was someone who had soloed the entire PRT cape team in the city, and as such, had quite the aura in the city.

Unfortunately for the city, Lung was also a grade A  asshole and a coward who did not even show his face during the Endbringer battle, despite the battle happening on his turf. Even if Lung hadn’t shown his face at any other Endbringer battle since his battle with Leviathan at Kyushu, where he, very briefly, matched the Endbringer, he had expected the man to show up to defend his gang.

After all, what use was being a gang leader if the gang did not have a city to rule over? 

Obviously, that did not happen. What did happen was that Lung, whose real name was Kenta and who did not have a secret identity for the most part, had evacuated with the rest of the people in his territory and was currently at evacuation site 3.  

He was one of the capes that Ashley had detected early on, and knowing who Lung was, she had refrained from giving him the same level of warning she gave the others. What she did do was make sure that Puppy did regular fly bys over Lung, making sure that Lung knew he was being watched. 

Puppy was actually more than capable of punching a hole in Lung’s head with a single repulsor beam, killing the man before he even had time to ramp up, which is probably why Lung had chosen a corner of the site and had stayed just out of it, accompanied by just a single man.

That man was also a cape, and had a blank look on his face and eyes, which meant that he was Oni Lee. Along with them, there were many others who were capes but had just decided to flee the city, which was fine, as long as they did not raise a ruckus or expect special treatment. 

Fortunately, until now, nothing of note had happened in the evacuation sites, and he expected the same situation to continue, especially since the number of suits patrolling the skies and assisting everyone in safely getting back home had exploded.

He had already made sure that the second Contessa pulled the trick she did when she disabled all the communication modules in a certain area instantly, all the other suits would converge on that location, and the suits which could no longer communicate with the greater whole would explode instantly, destroying anything of value.

He was not playing around here, as he was still angry about Cauldron’s actions from before. He might have decided to take revenge in a controlled, mature manner, instead of going about it in the most destructive way possible, but that didn't mean he wasn’t going to take measures to deter any more attempts. 

Contessa should be able to predict the suits and what was being programmed on them, so he must know that the moment one of his suits was so much as touched, they will explode and automatically reveal a bunch of information that would definitely waste a lot of effort on Cauldron’s part. Not even they were stupid enough to risk the entire PRT, and the governing structure they had brought about with it, unraveling instantly.

Lung, for some reason, stayed behind even as people from his site were evacuated rapidly, with the young and able bodied people evacuated first as they were all crammed together into rescue bogies, and onto giant platforms welded together by his suits to expedite the whole thing, of course with multiple escorts in case something happened.

He was not going to risk someone dying on his watch now, when he was just taking people back to their homes, when he did not let them die during a freaking Endbringer attack.

As he contemplated attacking Lung and Oni Lee to destroy all the gangs in the city once and for all, he realised that this was not the right time to do it. Even going beyond the Truce, he had to take into account the overall vibe of the city, and it was probably not wise to outright kill a cape in their civilian identity just because he had killed the others and might as well just take out all the trash at the same time.

It might put a damper on celebrations everywhere, as Cauldron would just seize the opportunity to paint him as a bloodthirsty Truce breaker, but letting Lung go back to his human trafficking days was also not an option.

Maybe he could warn the man? But looking at his track record, it would be foolish to just expect the villain to give up all that he had accumulated for himself over his villainous years. No matter what anyone might say, this was the best time to identify and root out all the core members of all the gangs, so that when the money inevitably came pouring into the city, it was not gobbled up by the gangs.

His actions of clearing out Lung’s rivals also gave him a massive leg up. He could foresee Lung’s finances swelling up in the near future if he did not do something about it. 

Even if the Truce meant that he couldn’t go anywhere near the capes themselves, the BBPD should be able to do something about the lieutenant?

Shaking his head, he rejected the prospect of acting right now. After some thought, whatever he wanted to do, he could do it later on, when the Truce was not in effect. He was thinking about moving in right now only because he wanted the suits to be sued for something impactful before he had to destroy them.

But maybe he could delay the destruction? The suits could go on for weeks on end without needing any maintenance, even in a high intensity battle such as an Endbringer battle, so they could definitely survive a  few weeks, until the Truce ended.

The PRT as well as the Federal government had announced the longest Truce this time, in honor of finally pushing Leviathan back. Some of the politicians and their TV channels were running with the Leviathan defeated storyline, but that was not the entire truth. That half truth was being celebrated in the form of a 15 day Truce period. Over two weeks of some semblance of peace guaranteed across the nation.

Even villains usually kept to themselves and did not poke the bear that was the Endbringer Truce because that would just earn them the enmity of every single hero, and in that case of a Truce Breaker, the PRT did not subscribe to the niceties they usually did when they played the game of cop and robber with villain capes.

The early Truce Breakers experienced firsthand what it was like to have the Triumvirate come down on any single villain or villain group hard, with all the might they had behind them. It was rather telling that not a single Truce Breaker was either alive or not in the Birdcage right now.

His fingers moved across the terminal in front of him as he searched for an appropriate location to store hundreds of suits, or maybe he could have them patrol the city for safety purposes? Yeah, that sounds like a better option than having a bunch of humanoid looking hulks of metal stashed in a single location, depowered. That might attract the wrong kind of attention.

With that decision made, he made sure that Ashley was aware of and wary of Lung and Oni Lee, as these were the only capes around that could actually give either her or Michael any trouble. 

The PRT, the federal government, as well as many state governments, had sent out congratulatory messages, thanking him for his role in the Endbringer battle. He rolled his eyes at their subtle tactics of including the PRT in the battle, even though it was pretty clear that it was Grand Chariot alone that had pushed Leviathan back.

The comments on the PHO threads were quite hilarious as people just roasted the shit out of the PRT, and even the Triumvirate. In most cases, where the PRT was criticised by the populace, they still left out the Triumvirate and held a certain hero worship towards the three strongest capes on the hero side.

Exhaling, he just stepped back for a bit and closed his eyes, letting them rest after what felt like an eternity of staring at screens as he had to coordinate a lot of stuff. At first, it was the Coil attack that soon escalated into an Endbringer attack. He supposed that he should thank his lucky stars that he managed to get Leviathan to back off with the helicarrier.

Not to mention he had been fast asleep when all this began. He felt like his body was full of lead, especially after the main battle was done.

Deciding that he was going to get a ton of sleep once all the people were back in the city, and he had handed over control of the suit cluster to Ashley, he sighed before stepping forward and subjecting his eyes to the screens that had so much information on them that he had to slow down to understand what was happening there.

His brain was really working at a lower capacity than before, and it was not like he was some kind of uber genius before when it came to handling large amounts of information and gathering it all in a coherent form and making decisions using that same information.

Groaning out loud at yet another complication that needed him to intervene, he got to work.

Hopefully, aside from the minor coordination issues with the suits, as well as the other authorities who were all trying to help in their own ways, he did not face any other major issue.

He prayed to any God who would listen, to grant him just one day of peace in this godforsaken grimdark world.

___xx___

–Ashley Brent–

No one had been happier than her when Leviathan finally went back into the ocean, and did not come back even after hours of vigilant watch on the oceans surrounding the East Coast.

Soon after, the government declared victory and extended the Truce for a period of celebration.

A while after that, when she was in the middle of coordinating the transport of all the people who had to be taken back to their homes, she blinked as she was now apparently given total command over 145 different suits, with six different specific purposes, all so she could better facilitate the movement.

She was also told that she had to make sure the suits were regularly patrolling the entire city for the whole period the Truce was active.

She was slightly suspicious of why that might be necessary, but the current set of orders were palatable to her, so she assumed command and began assigning tasks. 

For one, they were short of rescue bogies that could ferry people to and fro from Brockton Bay, atleast the ones who were capable of handling a little jostling during the journey back home.

Everything back in the city was ready, and according to Grand Chariot, the entire city should be up and running, or alteast, back to the state it was before Leviathan showed up, before the end of the day.

The government was being unusually proactive, and she could hazard a guess as to why that was happening.

She was in the middle of assigning a few clusters to build more of these makeshift flat surfaces to carry more and more people, the ones that people had affectionately dubbed Aladdin’s carpets, only metallic, when she received an alert.

An alert she had specifically created for Michael.

A gesture opened the notification, and her eyes widened at what Michael was doing.

He was approaching Lung.