Kevin Curry
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Psychoprotective Epilogue 16
🕑 Added 2024-12-23 15:00:10 +0000 UTCDespite the villain that crippled Tensei still being in the city, it was not deemed necessary for Ingenium to be moved from the Hosu hospital, as the serial killer had a sizable enough psychological profile that they did not anticipate the man coming to finish the job.
As someone who lived with psychonauts and thus knew a thing or two about serial killers, this made perfect sense to Tenya. In fact, he had discreetly downloaded Iidaten’s file on Stain using backdoors that he had installed years ago and used rarely, so it was quite obvious just how atypical Ingenium’s crippling was for the Hero Killer.
The reason why it happened was obvious: Tensei was hunting the serial killer down, as a hero should, and lost the fight. The madman’s usual targets were heroes that had been dirty in some way, the profile noted that he probably considered himself a holy warrior, on a crusade to purify the world. This was mostly speculation, but it made sense to Tenya.
In Hosu? There was something of a manhunt going on, and Tenya had, after visiting his brother, decided to go for a walk. To clear his head. That was his story, and he’s sticking to it.
Why was he walking through back alleys during his walk? Well, everyone knows the best way to clear your head is to get good and lost. Urban sprawl wasn’t the beauty of nature, but it had its own appeal.
Did his route seem to interweave itself to circle every hero agency in town? Well, he does know where every one of them are: if he spots one, he’s no longer lost, so he needs to change direction.
Was his cybernetic loadout- hey, that’s private information! What he was and was not optimized for is none of your business! He just feels stiff if he doesn’t change things up every once and a while, and anyone who knew Iida Tenya knew that he’s stiff enough as it is.
Did he drink an entire gallon of orange juice before his walk? Is it any surprise that his taste buds have a particular liking towards his quirk’s fuel? Visiting his crippled brother was very stressful, and he needed the comfort. Then that made him twitchy, so he needed to go on a walk to calm down. To clear his head. See? It’s all perfectly circu-reasonable.
Admittedly, Tenya didn’t expect a bunch of terrorists to attack Hosu while he was on the walk that he was enthusiastically going on, but he also didn’t expect anything of this walk beyond walking, and that’s the story he’s sticking with.
What he definitely didn’t expect was when he, completely by accident of course, walked through an alley near the agency of the local hero, Native, and found a serial killer standing over that very hero’s corpse.
Stain reflexively took a combat stance as he beheld Tenya’s killing intent, which was good enough for him! Tenya activated his mental acceleration cyberware, as quite a bit of the cybernetics from the Reaper War functioned perfectly well even without element zero, and the world slowed down to a crawl.
His Engine roared as it went into overdrive, and before Stain could process what had happened, he was already trying to leap out of the way. He just wasn’t fast enough, as the Iida line specialized in speed. Stain’s foot was caught by Tenya’s hand, and the serial killer was slammed into the wall hard enough to damage it, which was enough to cause Stain to drop his weapons.
The engagement went into a furious grapple, where Tenya wrestled away the man’s knives while the man attempted to cut Tenya up with them. He succeeded, albeit without being able to penetrate Tenya’s subdermal armor, so only cosmetic quantities of blood were shed by the time that Tenya got the bastard in a hold without any additional knives to use. “Got you.” Tenya whispered.
Stain’s tongue extended far longer than it had any right to, but all it could do was lick at one of the small cuts that Tanya received during the scuffle. He then renewed his struggles, but completely failed to budge Tenya’s mechanical muscles… which he could no longer move. Fuck. “Why can you still…” Stain murmured as he struggled.
“So that’s what your quirk does.” Tenya said, “It disables conscious muscle control below the neck.” With his quirk, he could maybe use the protocols normally reserved for homeostasis commands to execute gross motor actions… but it’d be slow. The fact that his mechanical joints locked up when undirected instead of relaxed like an organic’s would meant that Stain was stuck… shit, he needs to change his plans. “Let’s talk, then.” Tenya said firmly.
“Who are you?” Stain asked, still struggling. “Some hero wanting a bit of glory?”
“No.” Tenya said, “But I have a question: Why? Why kill heroes?” He already mostly knew, but it’s the obvious first question to lead into what he actually wanted to know. “What did Native do to deserve death?”
Stain laughed and relaxed his struggles. Like most zealots, they are desperate for validation by discussing their ideology. “Native’s no hero.” Stain hissed. “He’s a fake, caring more about money and his own comfort over helping people. He’s selfish.”
Tenya scoffed. “So that deserves death?” He asked rhetorically. “You’ve just decided to become the arbiter of who can and cannot be a hero?”
“The world is sick!” Stain insisted, “The word hero has been polluted, tainted, by all of these fakes! The world needs true heroes! I must cut away the rot…”
He really wished he could slam Stain’s head into the wall again. It would punctuate his sentiment quite nicely. “Ingenium is one of the most selfless heroes in the business!” Tenya’s voice trembled with rage, “You ended his career!”
“Heroism isn’t a family busine-” Stain began.
“THAT’S AN EMPTY JUSTIFICATION AND YOU KNOW IT!” Tenya shouted at the top of his lungs. “No, I don’t need to hear a single more word from your lips to understand.” He quickly started issuing the orders through the alternate pathways.
“Only All Might-” Stain said, before Tenya’s grip tightened. “How?”
“No.” Tenya hissed, “I talk, you listen. You prattle on about fakes, but there’s nothing special about you. You’re just like any other middle school edgelord, talking about necessity and your divinely ordained mission, but when it comes right down to the test? When you have to pick between your ideals and your self-interest? Every zealot meets that dilemma eventually, and it’s what separates the martyrs, the true believers, and the fakes who spout rules for thee, but not for me?”
“Don’t you da-” Stain choked out.
“You doubled down!” Tenya yelled, cutting through his objections. “You decided that you were more important than your ideals, and made whatever lies you could use to calm your own hypocrisy. Your conviction is weak.”
Above all other statements, that last one seemed to hit Stain like a physical blow. Tenya’s damage control software reported the blockage cleared, and full control of his body returned. “What now, Hero?” Stain asked.
Tenya squeezed, and the serial killer’s neck snapped under the stress. “I’m no hero.” He said, letting the meat fall to the ground. Oddly, the corpse on the ground stood up at Stain’s death, limbs shaking as the paralysis expired. “...Shit.” Tenya said.
The hero dressed like a parody of a Native American looked Tenya and the eye and flinched. “You killed him.” He said, clearly terrified.
Tenya briefly considered killing the witness. …No. He had already thrown out his oath of pacifism for what, now that he was thinking clearly, was not something he needed to do. “I surrender.” Tenya said, raising his hands.
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The Japanese legal system wasn’t exactly ideal even in Tenya’s first life, and it had only gotten worse after the advent of quirks. In most worlds Tenya had been in, being the guy to finally put down a serial killer with less collateral damage than a fender bender would get you a high five from the Chief of Police with only the most perfunctory “investigation” that would get you back out on the street within the week.
Tenya did everything right for that setup, too: He had a good reason to be out and about, he ran across the serial killer by random chance (conveniently ignoring how many times Tenya had rolled those dice), and there was a physical altercation that led to Tenya getting many injuries and the serial killer in question getting dead. Objectively speaking, it was far from an open and shut self-defense case, but given that the “victim” was the Hero-killer, Tenya figured that it was a good enough facsimile of such a case that the prosecutor wouldn’t even bother.
He was wrong.
Apparently, Native had enough integrity that he didn’t let a little thing like gratitude prevent him from painting Tenya as a deranged murderer who verbally dissected Stain before killing him in cold blood, and naturally his testimony was considered far more reliable than Tenya’s. So he was tried as an adult and swiftly sentenced to ten years in prison, which led to him being expelled from UA. Worth it.
Tensei was angrier than Tenya had ever seen him, of course. “How could you do such a thing?” He asked, now in a wheelchair. “You always told me you didn’t want to be a hero, that you hated violence, and then you go do this? There’s a reason heroes need training, and it’s so you can take villains alive!”
“Tensei…” Tenya said slowly, sympathetically. “I do hate violence. But… I don’t think I ever told you why. It’s not because I’m a peaceful person. I haven’t been one of those in a very… very long time.” He sighed deeply. “I know that doesn’t make much sense, but it’s true. I’ve become a very violent person, and I hate that.” Tenya looked down at his hands. “I saved one life, at least. On top of however many lives Stain would have taken until he was caught. Plus however many lives those heroes will save with the extra time I’ve allotted to them. Even bad heroes save a few.”
“You ruined your life, Tenya.” Tensei said, “I don’t think you understand just how bad villains have it, and you’re a villain now. That’ll stay with you forever.”
“No it won’t.” Tenya said dismissively.
“You’re a high school dropout now. Your career prospects are nothing.” Tensei said.
“Only in industries where history matters more than skills.” Tenya retorted, “Which, admittedly, includes education. So that’ll be tough, but I could use a challenge.”
“No one’s going to let a villain teach.” Tensei said, growing increasingly frustrated.
“I have a plan.” Tenya insisted, “This is just a bump in the road, punishment for my lapse in following my oath.”
Tensei sighed deeply, running his hand over his face. “...You’re disowned, by the way.” He said sadly. “I tried to convince them otherwise, but they wouldn’t have it.”
Tenya frowned. “Hurtful, but I understand. Stain on the family honor, after all.” Tensei groaned at the pun. “Now that I don’t have a reason to pretend otherwise, I’m not going to say that I regret killing Stain. He was the worst kind of zealot. The kind that is willing to die for their beliefs at least can be respected for their conviction, but it takes more than being able to speak with conviction in order to have it.”
“So what is your plan, may I ask?”
“First, be a model prisoner, get probation. Second, find one of those heroes that sponsor vigilantes for the provisional hero license.” Tenya said. Tensei used to be one of them, after all. “You’re calling me a villain, but as my only victim was a literal serial killer, it’d be an easy sell.”
“So you’re going to become a hero after all?” Tensei asked, amused at the coincidence. “Figures.”
“I have a high speed internet connection in my head, it won’t be difficult at all.” Tenya pointed out, “I do know how to nonlethally subdue people.” Her life as Fairy Dancer/Kaleidoscope made her learn plenty about nonlethal Brute tactics. “Anything else is just academic knowledge.”
Tensei looked like he was about to object to that last statement, but Tenya’s unimpressed look killed it in his throat.
“Once I get the license, speed through the necessary accreditation for becoming a teacher while sidekicking, maybe get the full hero license.” Tenya continued, “Ideally, I’d then get employment at UA, where they use heroes to teach non-heroics courses,” Which Tenya always thought was a bit gimmicky, but they had to cultivate exclusivity somehow. “-but I’ll likely have to accept teaching actual heroics at a lesser institution. Once I have experience with actual teaching, I then parley it to teaching at an elementary or middle school, which is my goal.”
Tensei stared at Tenya. “...Okay, that sounds like it could actually work. It’d take years, but… Yeah.” He stared at his brother. “You got a backup plan?” He asked.
“Back alley doctor.” Tenya immediately replied, “My quirk has plenty of medical applications, and I already have the knowledge, just not the degree.”
“...it does?” Tensei asked, baffled. “You do?”
Tenya nodded, although he had to stop himself from shifting his cybernetics to include the nanohive for a demonstration. The collar around his neck would detect the shift in his body and set off an alarm. “Nanomachines. I control them wirelessly, and I have good enough scanners and medical software that I can fix pretty much any trauma.” The software part wasn’t wrong, but it was mostly a lie. Being able to act through nanomachines just allowed him to operate in a manner extremely similar to what he did as Sakura.
Tensei’s brow furrowed and he visibly stopped himself from reacting. After taking a deep breath, he asked: “Any?”
“If I had been given a free hand to work, which wouldn’t have happened given my lack of official credentials, and if I had gotten to the injury immediately, I would have been fairly confident in saving your spine.” Tenya said softly. “Now? I would give you… maybe a one in three chance of a successful operation. That number grows smaller the more time goes on, but it will never become zero.” Unless he died, of course.
Most people would likely have thought Tenya a madman, or lying. Tensei, on the other hand, knew more than anyone else just what Tenya’s quirk could do. He knew that if Tenya said he could do something… he could. “...Healing quirks are rare enough that I can maybe convince the HPSC to arrange something. I’ll volunteer to be a test case.”
Tenya smiled. He knew Tensei couldn’t bring himself to be selfish unless it was in service to a greater selflessness. He started to mentally rearrange his plan if Tensei succeeded.
This life was kind of a wash anyway, so he didn’t feel too bad bringing out the full stops to ensure his own personal comfort.
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In the end, Tensei just didn’t have the influence necessary to make it happen, but it wasn’t a big deal: the supervillains that got soundly thrashed by students with a literal week of training were actually pretty dangerous, and in less than a year they ended up destroying the prison Tenya was placed in, along with every other prison above a certain security level.
Now homeless, Tenya met up with Tensei and crafted a cybernetic replacement spine for his brother. Because of the older boy’s quirk, Tenya was able to replace large enough portions of Tensei’s skeleton that it was able to synchronize up with the man’s Engine, and his atrophied muscles weren’t anything that couldn’t be fixed with even more cybernetics.
It took months to source the materials, to fabricate the replacements, and to install them using a combination of the medical knowledge he had accumuulated from two lifetimes and the engineering knowledge from nearly two centuries of life in an interstellar multi-species polity. He got bored, and as element zero didn’t really play nice with biology most of the time, that was a subject that he could actually use in other lifetimes that met certain technological benchmarks, and modern support gear met them.
In hindsight, Tenya was pretty sure that he went overboard with Tensei’s upgrades, but there were quite a few villains in the League of Villain’s final battle that certainly didn’t expect two bullet trains on legs to come barreling through the battlefield, surprising everyone with Ingenium’s return to the scene.
Villains who helped out in that battle were given generous parole agreements by the new leadership of the HPSC, and Tenya managed to shortcut his planned timetable as a result to… well, about the normal age people start teaching elementary school. He never married, despite Miss Hatsume’s half-hearted attempts. Iidaten flourished under Tensei’s returned guidance, and he spent the rest of those decades, until the day he died of quirk failure at age 76, teaching children the most basic and fundamental skills that would serve them well as they go into society.
As they slipped back into the inbetween of worlds, they could only call it a life well lived. Yes, they failed in his quest to have a second life where their body count was zero, but they’ll just… try again. Maybe something rural? A quiet life where they didn’t meet that many people? Yeah, that sounded good.
They followed the streams of souls, but skipped two worlds, in the hopes that they’d find something different than superheroes.
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He was a boy again, which shouldn’t have surprised him but did. His mental capacity expanded sufficiently to contain his memories surprisingly quickly; he would guess that he’s about two years old.
He has to guess, because he was orphaned once more, and adopted by a band of literal gorillas. In the presumably African jungle. He wanted to be in a more isolated area, but wasn’t this a bit much?
Another oddity was that he was still fair-skinned, with his name in gorilla language even meaning Paleskin, so unless this wasn’t some iteration of the Earth of his birth, he was likely the child of some European nobles on safari. Or one of their staff, he supposed. He didn’t really remember the events that led to him being adopted by gorillas.
Still, he knew enough about wilderness survival to be able to avoid getting himself killed as he grew, so he bided his time, wrestling with the other juvenile gorillas, joining in on group activities, and learning enough of their primitive language to be able to communicate.
‘
Well… it actually wasn’t that primitive. The animals in this jungle seemed a fair bit more intelligent than they usually were, in his experience. He didn’t have zoolinguism, he had to learn each animal’s body language and attempts to communicate individually, but in his third life, the fact that animals could process language well enough to communicate with those who had it meant they were a step above the intellect of, say, his patients back on Eden Prime.
If he was less educated on the subject of animal intelligence, he might have chalked it up to gorillas and elephants, the smartest of his new friends, just being smarter than they were ordinarily given credit for, but he was quite informed from his veterinary courses, and this was unusual.
…Well, it was unusual from the perspective of a mundane existence. Whatever local magic was here, it was sufficiently non intuitive that he couldn’t puzzle it out. His point is that if a normal Gorilla was about as smart as a five year old, these were more at the level of pre-teens. Even the animals that were not particularly intelligent he’d rate most of them at the level of a three year old, able to communicate basic concepts and understand things like bribery and the difference between playtime and when things are gravely serious.
It did mean that he had limited meat intake, but while it was tricky getting good protein with foraging, the bugs were… edible.
Still, despite that unpleasantness, he still grew strong, as while he couldn’t quite match a gorilla for climbing ability, he was also much lighter, and thus was capable of using the sturdy vines that the gorillas couldn’t.
When he was about thirteen, old enough that the gorillas that counted as his ‘age group’ had more or less reached full size, he managed to convince his “mother” to take him to the place he was found, which gave him some details. For one, the coast was on the west side of the landmass, so if this was Africa, he’d guess he was somewhere in the Congo. It was a massive treehouse, one with a base that was substantially below the cliff’s top, rooted into it sideways. That… could not possibly be safe long-term, but it hasn’t collapsed yet, so he’ll be cautious.
The bridge was also sturdier than his brain told him it was supposed to be… but he just chalked it up to local laws of physics being off compared to what he thought of as standard and confidently walked across. It was only afterwards that he realized that the hundred-fifty kilo gorilla had followed him, albeit gingerly, across the bridge, and still it held up.
“This is where I found you.” Mother said, morose. “Your parent’s remains should be over there.” The bones were picked clean, of course, and the marrow-dense thighs and pelvis were broken open, and the craniums were broken into as well, but otherwise they were surprisingly intact.
On a hunch, he searched through the house for some kind of writing, and in an oilskin satchel, he found a diary. Hm… It was in English, as it didn’t have that subtle change in certain letters that he associated with Albish. Parent’s names were John and Alice Clayton, nee Rutherford, and they were nobles; his inherited title would be as the Earl of Greystroke. His own name was John II, born 1881, in July. Didn’t have the exact day, though.
“What is that?” Mother asked.
“Marks.” John replied, using the word in ape language that roughly translated to ‘trail-sign’. Doing something intentional so that other apes could see it and infer a warning. Apparently, they were shipwrecked while traveling to South Africa for a reason that they didn’t write down in the library. Or even if that was their final destination or merely the leg they were on.
Still, it was what he was hunting for. Despite the surprisingly sturdy construction, he wouldn’t trust this place with his treasures. “I’m going to gather tools.” He announced, using the word that meant ‘useful stick’ more than anything else.
The amount of useful items was surprisingly large; he had to make multiple trips. Metal tools, more canvas bags, and even some more books, which from a brief glance included notes from John Sr about what local resources he found that were useful. “...This nest is grand.” He said after finishing, seeing the intimidatingly large pile of packed loot. “I want to make a better one.”
Mother seemed a little pained at the pronouncement, but nodded. “I’ll help you. Whatever you need. I love you.” She said, misty-eyed.
Creating his new home wasn’t easy. The cliffside tree was a naturally defensible location, but it was also at the very edge… well, more like a little past the edge, of his new family’s migration range.
His new home would need to be within that range, and preferably be in a place where he could be reached by his friends. He ended up picking a cliffside that had a waterfall, as there was a similarly anchored tree about twenty meters away from the river, and as the tree was securely attached to the cliffside, it made a fine foundation that would be unlikely to be blown away entirely by a typhoon or have its foundations undermined by an increase in rainfall upstream.
John thought he did a pretty good job over the two years or so it took to make his new “nest”. He cleared the trees closest to his new home, shepherding the durability of his metal tools as much as possible by supplementing with stone tools and enlisting gorilla strength when he could. It was actually a lot easier than he thought it would be, the tools were more durable than he gave them credit for, and it was rare that he made a mistake big enough that it constituted a large setback.
One of the advantages of dealing with animals, even as intelligent as they were, is that while they were confused as to how John knew how to construct wooden buildings, they chalked it up as a ‘weird Paleskin thing’ and accepted that it was beyond their understanding.
So when a particularly large and ferocious jaguaress attacked the tribe, nearly killing the silverback that led the troop, no one questioned John when, after slaying the predator, he brought the body back to his home and started to skin the thing. He wasn’t exactly… well-versed in how to properly tan hides, but it wasn’t nearly as difficult as he thought it would be.
His life was peaceful, or at least as peaceful as things could get while making a subsistence living, but he never saw any other humans, not even African ones. He didn’t look… that hard for them, only about a five kilometer radius around the twenty-ish square kilometer area that Kerchak, the local silverback, claimed as his domain. He knew that if he really wanted to, all he needed to do was follow the coast and he’d find a port eventually.
But… he didn’t. He wasn’t sure why, but… well, it was relaxing. He always had something he could be doing to improve his chances of survival, from more foraging, preserving food in clay jars, making more clay jars, and occasionally just going to find the gorillas with a bulging sack of gifts, spending a week or more with them like he never left.
No, he was happy with his life without other humans… until he found a woman in a full dress running from a bunch of baboons, and rescued her.
What the hell was she doing in Africa?
Comments
SoralTheSol
Well the funny thing is, this will probably save Clayton. Tanya can just point out the Apes and Elephants are under his protection, but that the Jaguares would make a more impressive kill.
Dragonin
Tanya/John/Tarzan: I want a peaceful life without killing a person Jaguaress: so anyway I started clawing Tanya/John/Tarzan: no Hunter: so anyway I started blasting Tanya/John/Tarzan: NO, do not Ta
Eldar ortell
I can already imagine Tanya/Tenya/John/Tarzan going back to England and starting a wildly successful company using her future knowledge of technology or just invest in the stock market and retire
