Chapter 18 - Pressing Matters

A team of five stood in front of the vault-like entrance of the camp's underground bunker. Each of them appeared to be special and unique in their own way, like a group of heroes ready to embark on a legendary journey.

The one standing in the middle had a head of luscious golden hair and vertical golden eyes. He emitted the aura of a fierce dragon and radiated extreme confidence.

To his right was a young boy with dark blue hair and ocean-blue eyes. Soft blue electricity crackled around his body as an invisible wind blew.

To the man in the middle's left was a young girl with flowing golden hair and gem-like blue eyes. Her figure was akin to that of a goddess of war, ready to head on to battle and decimate whatever foe stands in their way.

On the far left stood a tall young boy with dark skin and shaved head. His skin shifted from flesh to metallic, switching back and forth between each state in random intervals.

Lastly, on the far right stood a petite young girl with a boisterous aura. Her hair was short and brown, and her light brown eyes looked around with slight anxiousness to them.

The unknown two beside the trio were Pindle Torgis, a young girl whose quirk allows her to create and concoct strange fluids with numerous properties, ranging from healing wounds to being acidic. And the acids she can create were more than potent enough to melt through steel.

Then there is Luke Klee, a young boy with a quirk that modified his body into something similar to that of a robot. His muscles can turn into a strange bio-metal that can be manipulated with his mind, and he can intuitively shapeshift his body into different forms of technology ranging from lasers to jet thrusters.

The group of five stood at the entrance, and the trio remained calm and astute. But unlike the three, the two newbies felt anxious and worried, with Pindle being the most obvious.

"W-Wow, I'm quite surprised that you chose us, Dolian." Pindle scratched the back of her head; making small talk like this helped her keep calm in tense moments like the one she is in right now.

Who wouldn't be worried and anxious when they suddenly find themselves facing death right in the face so quickly and so suddenly? It's already a miracle that Pindle didn't straight-up cry on the spot.

"Indeed. Although I do find that you choosing me quite a big compliment." Luke showed the same inclinations as Pindle while his body rapidly morphed and shifted from human to metallic. His dark brown eyes turned a glaring red, while more and more bio-metal covered his body and changed him from the inside out as he knew that the clock was ticking and their time was running out.

Turning to look back at the two, Dolian shook his head and reminded them, "Don't thank me. I just sent you two directly to the battlefield, so frankly, you guys should hate my guts."

"While that is indeed true, we know that this is something that you needed to do." Luke's robotic and monotonous voice echoed.

"Y-Yeah!" Pindle chimed in, "It must have been pretty tough for you to give that crazy speech, right?"

"Not really." Dolian's smile faded as he turned to look toward the vault-like entrance, "It's easy for me to rile up that bloodlust and lunacy to raise our morale with my quirk. You just need to act like this and say that, then boom, everyone's just gonna act like how you wanted them to."

"Isn't it scary? To have the hearts and minds of thousands readily available for you to fiddle with." Dolian chuckled with a solemn tone, causing silence to dawn upon the team.

The duo immediately felt awkward due to Dolian's inexplicably pessimistic response. They felt the hidden darkness and negativity inside the usually cheerful boy's heart.

In fact, they felt like their image of the boy was being shattered piece by piece throughout the entire day as he showed more and more madness in a bid to keep them safe. From his moralizing speech that nearly drove everyone in the room to be bloodthirsty, to his solemness and negative thoughts.

Aleksandra coughed and looked at her fellow teammates, intending to ease up the mood, "Are you all ready?"

"Yes." Luke nodded his head and helped Aleksandra break the sudden sadness.

"Why wouldn't I be?" Alastor snorted and crossed his arms.

"Yes!" Pindle straightened up her back and glanced at Dolian.

Dolian chuckled as he slid back his hair and smiled, "Yes."

She took a deep breath and approached the door. Extending out her hand, she hovered her hand right in front of the wheel, and turned to look back at them, "In three."

"Two." Wind gathered around their bodies, acting as their protective shield from anything that may occur.

"One." They grabbed a vial of strange colorful liquid from Pindle, and they gulped it down in quick succession. They felt their energies surge and their vigor explode.

"Zero." Aleksandra tightened each muscle fiber in her body. She turned the wheel, and the sound of numerous gears churning was heard.

"Let's do this." Dolian grinned, and his vertical golden eyes revealed a piercing golden glow.

…

"What happened in here." A group of cloaked figures walked through the hallways and stopped in front of a group of unconscious people wearing the same outfit as them.

They stared at the unconscious bodies in front of them with wary eyes, and the leader of the group looked at one of his teammates who wordlessly nodded his head.

The person who nodded then approached the unconscious bunch and crouched down. As they unsheathed their knife, they placed it right in front of the nostrils on a certain body and waited to see if the exposed knife would moisten up like how mirrors would turn foggy if you exhaled right at them.

When he saw no mist appear, his heart dropped for a split second before promptly turning his head towards his team, "She's dead."

Hearing his response, the leader of the group ordered, "Continue."

"Yes, sir." The man moved towards the other bodies around him, and one by one, he confirmed their status.

"They're all dead." He sheathed his knife and stood up; a bit shook from the result he just saw.

He returned to the side of his teammates and remained silent while their leader approached the corpses with a piercing gaze.

"What could have happened here." His voice echoed as he pondered in deep thought, staring at the closed eyes of the lifeless bodies in front of him as he was greeted with a mysterious case.

'Heroes, regardless of nationality, very rarely kill others like this.' He scratched his chin and squinted his eyes, 'The way they died is also strange. There's no stab wound, no signs of poison, no nothing. It's like they just slept and never woke up again.'

As he ruminated over the bits of clues he found, he looked up from the corpses and was surprised to find himself standing all alone in the hallway.

'Hmm?' He didn't panic because his experience told him that panicking and letting his emotions cloud his judgment was a one-way trip down to hell.

Instead, he calmly activated his quirk and chains exploded out from the shadows around him, enveloping the area around him and ensuring that anyone close to him would have been hit.

But like human nature, he forgot the one part of the terrain around him that also matters, the ceiling.

With lightning-quick movements, the wind seemed to gather above him and formed a whip of wind. Then as it wrapped around his neck, the man was brought up to the sky and was suffocated until he became unconscious.

…

'W-What happened?' He suddenly regained consciousness and held his breath. By sheer instinct, he held back the urge to outright open his eyes or jerk his arms or legs. If he did so, then he might get executed on the spot.

'My arms and legs, they're tied up.' He soon noticed numerous details about his current predicament. From his body being completely immobile, to the distant sound of others talking, and to the presence of a person right beside him and the penetrating gaze that seemed to see through all of his secrets.

As he tried his best to remain unmoving and act unconscious, he heard a boy's voice ring through the air and a hand slapped his face, shocking him awake and causing his eyes to turn wide open, "It seems our little sleepyhead here is finally awake!"

He looked at the one who slapped him and saw a young boy no older than eleven, with golden eyes and golden hair staring right at him in the eyes. He surveyed the area around him with open eyes and noticed his teammates were also unconscious just like him.

'They managed to capture us with such ease?' Grasping at the core issue they faced, he couldn't help but feel a shiver run down his spine as he and his team were easily dealt with.

"Who are you?" He pressed in an attempt to gain more information about his unknown enemy.

"Me?" Dolian stared at him in the eye like he was a stupid baboon, "Why should I tell you?"

"Do you really think I'll tell you anything about us?" Dolian shook his head and ruthlessly slapped the man in front of him once more, "Now, Du Seok, I already hypnotized all of your teammates and basically confirmed all of the information we have at our hands, but maybe you have some intel that only you know."

"So, do you want to do this the easy way where you'll tell us everything you know and the people backing you, or do you want to do this the easier way where I'll just have to hypnotize you and make you spill the truth?" Dolian tightened his grip on Du Seok's face, and his face wore a malignant smile akin to that of a devil.

…

"Wow…" Pindle stared at Dolian in the distance with awestruck eyes, "He's way too good at this interrogation act."

"Indeed." Luke nodded his head as he made sure to record the interrogation session using his quirk as a precaution if anything bad were to happen. Because of his robot-like biology, he has a built-in camera that can record videos on the spot with a simple mental command.

"You two shouldn't be so relaxed." Alastor reminded them as he inspected the motionless bodies around them with caution. He used the invisible wind around him to move around the comatose bodies and he observed them to make sure they were actually unconscious instead of pretending to be unconscious unless he wants to suffer a sudden attack from one of the numerous bodies around him.

"S-Sorry!" Pindle hastily apologized and hastened her movements. On the ground in front of her, a big pot of liquid was mixed with other fluids until it finally turned a yellow color.

She poured the mysterious yellow liquid from the pot into numerous syringes, slowly and carefully to not waste any of it, and passed it to Aleksandra who silently stood beside her.

"Thanks for the help, Pindle. We wouldn't have been able to deal with them so easily without your help." Aleksandra praised Pindle to ease her lack of confidence in herself and boost her dwindling morale.

After being friends with Dolian for so long, a blunt person with no filter that told her that he would praise others by exaggerating their help so that they can boost their confidence, it wasn't so surprising for her to start doing the same.

'In reality, Dolian himself can just waltz in using his Psychological Invisibility and knock them unconscious using his quirk.' Aleksandra sighed inside her heart as she approached the unconscious bodies around her and injected the yellow liquid into their bloodstream one by one.

'That should keep them unconscious by a few hours more.' Aleksandra injected the last bit of the yellow liquid into the last person's veins and pulled it back out from their skin.

She stood up and walked towards Pindle. Giving it to her, Pindle put on a happy smile and said, "I'm glad that I'm helping the team. I really thought I'll just be useless with how lacking in combat my quirk is."

"Useless?" Aleksandra chuckled upon Pindle's self-deprecating words, "If Dolian heard that, he'll probably retort your claim till his last breath."

"I assure you, he'll maximize your quirk's usefulness, it's what he always does." She chuckled softly before she then turned her head towards Dolian.

He appeared to have finished his final interrogation session with the first group they encountered as he was approaching them with a smile. As he walked, both Aleksandra and Pindle noticed the pile of black cloaks he was dragging along.

"So…" Dolian dropped the pile of black cloaks to the ground and squatted down to the ground. "There's a lot to unpack here."

"What did you learn?" Alastor asked as he and Luke approached them and sat down on the ground just like Dolian.

"First, this is a lot more complicated than I thought." Dolian sighed and clicked his tongue, "We're basically dealing with human traffickers here, so I basically jinxed ourselves with what I said back then in my speech."

"What?!" Pindle stood up in shock upon hearing Dolian's words. "H-Human traffickers?!"

"Yeah, and a big one at that." Dolian urged for her to calm down and raised his index finger to his lips so that she stays quiet, "They go by the name Kryptos, a great analogy for their hidden existence in the world. This should be the same group my mother has been trying to track till now."

"We're not the first instance they've kidnapped a bunch of students in America. But this is surely one of their biggest heists."

"They're definitely not dumb. Because of the current rise of villain activities in the country, the school and the government can only afford to assign five pro heroes with great history and trustworthiness. But numbers can still make up for the difference in power, and they barraged us with over a hundred members."

"The five core members of this operation go by the code name of One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and they're as strong as any of the teachers in the camp. Along with a hundred other members, it's only a matter of time before they kidnap us and leave with success in their hands."

"Not only that, but this is a joint operation because they launched attacks in numerous other schools that are doing their training camp, and some were launched a bit earlier. Because of this, the distribution of forces is skewed as the available pro heroes were already sent to other schools and help would only arrive when it's already too late."

"They have the numbers, power, and the brain. If we're not careful, then we'll surely get killed." Dolian lets out a turbid breath and caused silence to descend.

"So…" Pindle mumbled.

"Do you mean that…" Aleksandra bit her lips.

Dolian stood up with a sigh and clenched his fist, "Yep, shit just turned to eleven real fast."

AN: This chapter has 2564 words.

To be completely honest, I've been avoiding writing because I don't wanna finish Arc 1. Alas, my stocks has dwindled down to less than 10 so I gotta pump out those chapters soon.

But I'm scared as fuck for shit beyond Arc 2. Writing it is like walking on a thin rope. I mean, besides the obvious galaxy-brain level scheme that defies fate, there's the fact that the amount of characters with gigabrains will increase!

(April 7, 2023 - 498th day of writing)