Summary: Here to kick ass and chew bubble gum...

  Chapter 109: Operation Missile Storm

  Izumi waited, trying not to count the seconds as she crouched on a rooftop next to Mist Me. Camie wasn't any sort of front-line combatant, which might have made most people wonder what she was doing a stone's throw from the Yokohama Greater Gate defensive line. A stone's throw in front of that line, in point of fact. None of those properly briefed on Operation Missile Storm would have been among those confused souls wondering why she was there, however. The name of the game with the worldwide Operation was 'surprise,' which meant they couldn't allow the enemy to see rge force buildups around the Greater Gates that were being targeted.

  Misdirection and stealth had been a huge priority in the leadup to the Operation's activation hour as a result. For the st three days, sixty Greater Gates worldwide, over half of the total number open outside Africa, had been periodically pounded by missile barrages. An extremely expensive misdirection intended to make the opposition think they were foolishly trying to batter their way in through the shields. The first half dozen of those barrages had produced lots of movement and even some counter attacks from the defenders. But that behavior had slowly died off into a desultory dismissal of the annoying lights and sounds shaking their deployment areas. Now, the enemy was barely paying attention to the missile strikes as they came in, which is exactly what operation Missile Storm's pnners had wanted.

  Over those same few days, individuals like Mist Me had been used to move rger numbers of Heroes into pce among the 'defenders' of the containment lines around each of the twenty Greater Gates that were actually their targets. Izumi, as well as Momo for that matter, had been among the st to be moved into position. Not because they were less important, but because their assigned starting areas were exposed. Normally, rooftops and the like were avoided by both sides as being too vulnerable to artillery of various kinds.

  Without Mist Me actively hiding the small team around Izumi, they'd have been subject to snipers and the Empire's version of artillery. With Mist Me's illusions acting to hide them, the risky open position turned into the perfect springboard to unch from in the moments after the Achillies Missiles hopefully did their work. The roof was one of several that gave a perfectly clear approach to the shield line, at least for those capable of flight. Those shields only stopped attacks, based as near as they could tell on the total energy of whatever was trying to pass through. Meaning that even if the shields weren't taken offline, which was honestly somewhat probable of a result, Izumi and others would be able to close to the shield line in an instant and cross normally. That much had been done before.

  The problem, previously, was that the shields forced whoever tried crossing them to slow to walking speed for just a moment to cross through the barrier. That obviously left you hideously vulnerable to fire from the defenders, turning previous attempts to force entry into brutal failures even with support from Heroes like All Might. But the total chaos and confusion that should be present if all went well ought to cover that brief instant of vulnerability this time. After which they'd be inside the shield and aiming directly for the Gate and its Guardians.

  The entire point of this was to blitz the defenses, softened by the shield-penetrating missiles, too fast for the enemy to reinforce from their world. The Elites already on this side of the gate would be virtually certain to live through the immediate barrage. But without their cannon fodder, they would be sitting ducks for the assault forces. Heavy hitters like Izumi, Momo, and All Might would be the second strike, the first being the missile barrage. After them, entire waves of heroes and regur troops would be flooding in, doing their best to hammer both the enemy and Gate itself while the heavy hitters tied up the Elites.

  Izumi checked the clock again, mentally cursing her own compulsive nonsense. It was the next best thing to physically impossible for her to not know the time. It had been for years, since 'system clock' was a permanent feature that her progressive transformation had integrated a long, long time ago. As in, she was pretty sure it had integrated when she was around six. Long enough ago it was before even her enhanced memory had come into py. It was only her own anxiety, waiting for the exact execution time, that had her double checking anyway. Thankfully, the unch time for the missiles was only seconds away, and flight time was only going to around 30-seconds…ish. They were being unched from ground attack fighters, so exact precision of arrival time was slightly iffy.

  "Look alive if you're not already, people. Under one minute. Resolution, you already know what to do."

  It wasn't Izumi who had spoken, obviously. For all that she was one of the major powerhouses for this battle, she wasn't exactly senior in command terms. More so than virtually anyone else her age due to various factors, yes. But that still wasn't much compared to the big picture. It had, instead, been Ryukyu who had issued the warning.

  The entirety of Clean Ste had been retasked to this operation, and Izumi was actually technically still doing 'work study' with Ryukyu as her mentor. The reality of that was…flimsy, at best. But it was a good enough reason to assign her under Ryukyu's command. The entire Hero System was currently a clusterfuck as far as seniority and command teams went, with most of it functioning ad-hoc still, despite Nedzu's best efforts to institute some measure of structure. Heroes were intended for solo or small team operations, not battlefields, and just didn't have the right mentality to file into a neat and orderly command hierarchy.

  None of which mattered at the moment. Right now, she was under Ryukyu's command, and according to her internal clock, the missiles would have just fired. Tensing, Izumi braced against the slight slope of the roof. Ten seconds, five, four, three, two, one…plus two, plus three. At plus four seconds, the slight dey unexpined but unimportant, nine missiles screamed in from overhead. They'd been unched from JSDF fighters to give them the best angle down at the Gate, and Izumi had fallen deeply enough into Hypercognition to watch as their shield penetrators lit up at the st second. One of the missiles failed to engage its penetrator fast enough, making it useless. Three more failed to penetrate, which was pretty close to the simution statistics.

  The other five burst right through the shield like it wasn't even there.

  The Gate Shields only projected themselves roughly fifty meters over ground level, meaning that the missiles had only microseconds to deploy their payloads after penetrating. One of them didn't succeed, though the missile wasn't useless as the payload did arm and smmed straight into an Elite, some sort of 4-meter-tall four-armed giant in a pte mail equivalent. The sheer kinetic energy, combined with all of it's payload detonating, managed to kill that particur elite. A pricey kill, but still a net gain. Though it was the other four whose payloads did work correctly that were truly important.

  Those four all fired off cluster munitions that definitely would have been considered a War Crime in other circumstances. Dozens of shaped charges had blown in order to move the munitions away from the center point fast enough, then the kinetic impact as they hit the ground set off the payload's own explosives. Thousands of razor-sharp depleted uranium shards exploded out into the low and mid ranked foot soldiers of the empire. The incredibly dense, armor-piercing bits of shrapnel cut through the masses of monsters with somewhat sickening ease, those bits that made it back outside the shield to their own defenses only stopped by armor ptes of the same material that had been quietly stripped off of tanks and put in pce for exactly that purpose.

  Izumi refused to let herself properly process the brutal, bloody slurry of death that the grounds before the Greater Gate had just turned into. Instead, she moved, pushing off and closing to the shield line in the space between heartbeats. Only two others were simirly fast, and even All Might and Momo were a full heartbeat behind her due to her Hypercognition already being fully active. Not all of the mid-level enemies were dead. Not even all of the cannon fodder were, though the low rank monster's still alive were either screaming in pain from vicious wounds or untouched by pure luck. Neither attracted any attention from Izumi, however. She'd been pre-authorized to move the instant she could precisely because no one else was capable of matching her reaction speed.

  She checked her momentum just barely long enough to bypass the shield, then accelerated forward again, already firing her own payload of missiles. These missiles were summoned ones, YoRHa munitions that were much nastier than anything Earth could currently produce. Of the 23 elites still alive and starting to react, three went down missing everything from the shoulders up as those munitions struck. Then, Izumi was in among them, removing a fourth head with a brutal swing of her Type-40 Great Sword. The next monster proved that these were elites, ones that had given even All Might trouble in numbers, by actually managing to parry her next blow…only for her not-at-all-held-back-this-time telekinesis to hammer it so hard that ribs shattered, throwing oversized monster into two of his fellows.

  She didn't follow through. Instead, she attempted to angle for the Gate itself. The Greater Gates were tough. But enough had been learned about them to pick out their weak points. She dismissed her Great Sword and summoned Virtuous Dignity as she leapt for one such point. The Elites were reacting now and tried to move into her path, to divert her from the vulnerable point. But Momo and All Might had been right behind her, and the duo of mentor and successor brutally body checked the only two Elites that could have reached her. With a vicious snarl, Izumi plunged the unbreakable spear into the hardened cluster of metal runes that helped stabilize the Greater Gate's rift. She had to leap back a moment ter to avoid the blow of a monster that had managed to get through the Gate as the head of a fast reaction force.

  The rest of that particur monster's reaction force was diced to bits an instant ter as the Gate flickered wildly out of control, the damage she'd done to the rune cluster rendering the Gate unstable and unable to allow safe passage. With a fierce grin on her face that could have matched any of Miruko's, Izumi repced the fading copy of Virtuous Dignity with Virtuous Contract and parried a blow from an enraged defender. The blow was strong enough for even her to feel it in her bones, but her test opponent wasn't fast enough to fight her on his own. He fell swiftly, though he was quickly repced by others as they tried to reach the cluster Izumi had damaged. As All Might rampaged and Momo fell in beside her with some sort of Psma Give Izumi hadn't realized her girlfriend had finished prototyping, Izumi mentally dared the Empire's Elites to bring it on.

  This Gate was going to be shut today, whether the enemy liked it or not. A sentiment she could feel echoed all about her as Heroes and JSDF alike charged onto the killing field and made their own opinions to that effect felt…