The Chaotic Operation to Assassinate Max-Favorability Icarus (2)
If anything, he figured the whole affair would only raise his standing within the clan — and privately, he was looking forward to it.
To produce results that spectacular, he first began making contact with the superhumans who had followed him this far… or rather, with the former pro-Icarus faction commanders who led those superhumans.
On top of that chat, he threw out bait after bait of every kind. The Humanity forces that took the Loki Clan spy's lure shared vision through their own superhumans, assessed the situation, and — upon confirming that the number of supers inside Icarus's base fell within their expectations — decided they had a real shot and resolved to launch the operation immediately.
While Icarus's superhuman forces were pinned down keeping watch on the remaining supers the Humanity representative had dragged along by accident, the infiltrators would quietly slip into the base and execute a rapid sabotage campaign against every major facility on the premises.
But there was one thing that neither the remaining four users nor IndianMachete, who had stirred them all up, managed to anticipate.
And that was…
"Oh, is that so?"
"For now, place every remaining Humanity Clan superhuman under confinement. As for the ones who infiltrated… Griyanaar is with you, right?"
"You've got plenty of things made specifically to stop people coming in through ventilation shafts, sewage systems, and other access routes, right? Deploy all of them."
"I was going to tell him the moment this conversation ends."
"Ahem… ah, Commander?"
In the middle of what had been a perfectly pleasant conversation, Jessica suddenly started muttering to herself — and then turned her head toward me. I looked at her with open suspicion.
"Who exactly have you been talking to, Jessica, and about what?"
"Oxianor contacted me via telepathy. But that's not the important part…"
"Hm?"
"Seven of the Humanity Clan's superhumans have suddenly left their posts and are infiltrating various parts of the base. How would you like us to handle them?"
"…"
"…"
And with that bombshell from Jessica, the warm atmosphere that had been hanging between Tiara and me cooled over in an instant.
The Chaotic Operation to Assassinate Max-Favorability Icarus (2)
On Jessica's orders, the roughly ten remaining superhumans from the Humanity Clan were forcibly confined in the blink of an eye. Once she'd briefed me on the situation, I turned to Tiara — still sitting right in front of me — and opened my mouth with a thoroughly unimpressed expression.
"So… would someone care to explain exactly what the hell is going on here?"
"Mmm."
But the look on Tiara's face wasn't so much panic as something else entirely. Separate from her sheer dumbfounded shock, she had the air of someone whose mental fortitude was halfway broken — the face of a person thinking, There really are idiots out there who would pull this kind of stunt.
She let out a long, heavy sigh, then began explaining the situation to me from the top. One thing led to another, this and that, so on and so forth…
"…Whose idea was it to include opposition members in the diplomatic delegation?"
"I think the same thing, but the opposition side insisted on being included… In the end, it's all just petty power struggles."
Watching Tiara stare blankly out through the reception room's massive glass window at the distant mountains — or rather, the distant void of space — and mutter her lament, I quietly pressed F to pay my respects to the weary eyes of a middle manager.
That aside, I wanted solid confirmation that this whole mess genuinely wasn't some scheme of Humanity's. Sensing as much, Tiara asked for a moment to contact Antares over chat.
"…The clan leader says to proceed as you see fit. Those people simply did something stupid, and the Humanity Clan has no connection to this incident whatsoever."
"Hmm."
She had just handed me legal permission to round up and thrash those superhumans. I nodded immediately, gestured for Jessica — who had been standing by — to come closer, and spoke.
"Jessica. How many of them infiltrated the base total?"
"Seven. But three of them are moving as a single team, so… they're probably operating under one commander."
"We've got permission from our friends in the Humanity Clan. Capture or eliminate every last one of them."
"Yes. I'll pass that along."
Of course, if I had my way, I'd have loved to scoop them all up nice and clean the way we did with Smeragi. Unfortunately, the absolute catastrophe that followed the last time we captured Smeragi and two S-grades all at once was still seared into my memory. So I gave the order to the superhumans: kill or spare as they saw fit — just don't hold back, and be thorough.
One of the superhumans swept up in IndianMachete's agitation was named Setia, and she was using an unusual infiltration route. Rather than crawling through the spiderweb of ventilation shafts, she was exploiting the blind spots of the security cameras and moving through the internal corridors.
Her target: Icarus's base's own resource production facilities.
"Setia. Destroy as many resource facilities as you can. Understood?"
"Yes, Commander."
At her commander's voice dripping with trust over the comms, Setia nodded and continued advancing toward her objective.
And then, immediately after—
Thud!
BOOM!
Right in front of the corridor Setia was moving through, thick bulkheads slammed down one after another, sealing the path — and at the same time…
"I heard some rats had snuck into the base. Looks like that was true."
"…Commander. I've encountered an enemy superhuman."
"What? Which one?"
"You can forget about walking out of here in one piece."
"…It's Ignis. And she's far more developed than I am."
"Ah, of all people…"
Hair the vivid red of open flame, searing heat pouring from the gaps in her suit, dual energy blades in hand — Ignis appeared. Even though her grade was technically lower, Setia knew full well that Ignis's close-combat performance far outstripped her own. Her entire body tensed as she shifted into a combat stance.
Of course, the idea of an assassin-type like Setia winning a straight fight against a bruiser-type warrior like Ignis was absurd.
A short while later…
"Ugh…"
"This isn't working. Setia, surrender."
"I surrender. Please spare me."
"Oh."
On the order from her commander, who had been monitoring the situation, Setia — her whole body covered in blade cuts — raised trembling arms and begged Ignis for mercy.
And Setia was far from the only infiltrator whose situation had gone completely sideways.
Raymond, who had infiltrated the shipyard intending to wreck the facilities, ran into Partia. After a brief resistance, he was subdued by a holy scripture to the skull and was currently undergoing forced confession.
Rococo, who had tried to sever the circuits of the Long-Range Warp System to cripple fleet mobility, was surrounded by Belial's puppet legion during the infiltration — then preemptively snagged by Smeragi and subjected to a "hunting game" that ended with all four limbs disassembled.
Rakan, who had slipped in through the base's sewage system and ventilation shafts to destroy the Gravity Detector Radar, was set upon by the things Griyanaar had released for sewage purification duty, plus tentacles that had escaped from the lab. Cornered in a cramped space with nowhere to run, he was currently mid-nggiit-nggogogok.
…In short, even though their grades were comparable, the infiltrating superhumans were purely assassin-types — while the ones facing them were genuine close-combat specialists. A frontal fight was never going to go well for the intruders.
Their only real chance would have been to keep running, avoid direct confrontation, and rely on the assassin's natural tool: ambush. Unfortunately, thanks to Griyanaar, Oxianor, and various others, the entire base had been fitted with detection devices that functioned like the nerve cells of a living organism. No matter where the infiltrators went or what they did, Griyanaar and the kaiju-side personnel who had built the system pinpointed their locations in an instant and fed real-time coordinates to everyone else.