Chapter 6: 6- Ruminations of a bygone devil

Mustafa Private Middle School, a certain Third Year’s dorm

 

The lone resident of the room woke up within the first two rings of their morning alarm. No longer did they have to suffer from anaemia in the morning! One good thing Akira had learned about her latest go at life was that she did not suffer from her past life’s ailments.

 

When before, seeing heroes give up their own lives for the benefit of others would have had her laughing at the utter idiocy of their actions and thought processes, now, she could see why heroes were known as such.

 

After all, her own personal hero had saved her from a hell she could have never escaped from, and did it without even breaking a sweat.

 

Though a lot of bones had been broken…

 

When Akira had been three  years old, and her idiot of a brother had been four, they had gotten into a big tussle. It had not been the first tussle they had been in, but it would be the last for a long time to come.

 

Akira had grown up as a girl living a life without any of the crutches that had supported her through the end of her previous life. She was without guns to provide a simulacrum of safety, without alcohol to cloud her blasted memories and feelings, and without money to drown in vices.

 

For some reason, Akira felt that she would have been in a much worse state had she not met with the old man. Doubtless a counterpart of Being X, and yet an existence she could easily look up to, instead of heavily disdain.

 

After all, what kind of salary man would feel negativity towards a member of the higher classes that actually listened and acknowledged advice? Certainly not the kind Tanya had been.

 

Tanya von Degurechaff had been many things, a salaryman, a soldier, a leader, a revolutionary. Some might call her stubborn, others would know her as the woman of the heart of frozen winter, those close to her, when she still had those close to her, had known her to be a genius who could not understand the human heart.

 

For the most part, all of the above could be considered correct. Towards the tail end of when Akira went by the name of Tanya, she had witnessed miseries and felt pains well beyond what any single person should have endured.

 

Her body had never grown beyond that of a pre-teen, due to the excessive abuse she had showered upon it at that age. She had lost her comrades…

 

She gained a new partner, to replace them. It’s name was alcohol. How her first life would have laughed. Him? A person of logic? Cry over the death of an underling due to their own incompetence? What utter nonsense.

 

The masses knew Tanya as a woman of great vision and power. She had eventually gotten the post in the rear she had wanted so badly. But with the prize in hand, she had thrown away the concept of safety and gone from one danger to another, seemingly suicidal to those who read the mission reports.

 

As an unintended consequence of testing the known limits of mages, breaking them entirely, and creating an entirely new book meant for herself and those who could follow her…

 

She grew too much, too fast. No enemy could fell her. Her pride, worthless as it was, prevented her from slacking on the job. Her guilt, something she thought to be free of, pushed her forward endlessly.

 

Until finally…

 

The inconceivable happened. The unstoppable force broke through the immovable object. The fate known as ‘history’ to a certain young girl was broken. Finally.

 

The Empire had won the Great War.

 

Suddenly, Tanya von Degurechaff, the Tarnished Silver of the Empire, had nowhere physical to divert her frustrations towards.

 

At this point of her career, Akira’s past self had amassed quite the fortune from investments in lands and technologies.

 

And then, the most prestigious officer in the Empire, feared watchdog of the three-headed-dragon, the most powerful air mage in the world…

 

Took the hardest left turn known to man. She gave up on her military career and became a career politician, catering to the masses.

 

It was recorded in the history books that she was the very first female leader of great power and renown in the modern world. It was also recorded that she had died at the age of forty from an unforeseen enemy ambush.

 

What was not written however, was that Tanya had gained a taste for danger and dancing with death during her tenure in the military. After the war, she chased that next high, in the form of cutthroat politics.

 

She even did her utmost to be sloppy, as much as her pride allowed! She got herself addicted to alcohol as soon as she reached legal drinking age, after gaining too many qualifications to be listed.

 

Tanya got what she wanted most the night after her crowning achievement. The very night she had strong-armed the modern world into signing the treaty for total disarmament of all member countries, with the exception of a central peacekeeping force, with several measures in place to prevent corruption.

 

The party she had after the signing, by a total of a whopping 16 member countries, including the Albish, could have been the stuff of legends.

 

Except for the tiny speedbump midway through, but we are not here to talk about that.

 

When Tanya woke up once more after the party, she had been struck dumb. She had been sent back to japan, just as she had once wished, but it was apparent that the japan she had landed up in was not the one she had originated from. Or at least, to her recollection.

 

She did not remember being in a world where a person is just as likely to be born with the ability to grow feathery wings or the ability to create energy projections in the form of silver discs. And society as a whole was propped up by ‘heroes’ too.

 

Tanya had been disillusioned by the world at large. She did not see the need to grow closer to those related to her by blood. After all, she had been through too much to care.

 

This all changed on a sunny day, out in the park, where she sat in the side as she watched her elder brother mess with his best friend, who was a late bloomer in terms of Quirks apparently. But he did have impressive patience, to have managed to not get annoyed with Kacchan despite his… let's call it childish carefreeness.

 

They were interrupted by a… crab thing? A huge crab-man-thing had bombastically entered the playground via air, causing a puff of smoke and dust around him when he did.

 

Tanya did not mind the unruly distraction. The weird was merely the usual here in her new world. She currently was busy attempting to perform her old magic, bastardising an old electronic for the purpose.

 

A good thing about being born in the far-flung future was the ridiculous availability of electronics. She did not even need that many! Just enough to perform two parallel processes. Which in modern day technology, was about two atoms large.

 

Which was utterly absurd. So, naturally, she stole her alarm clock (after working enough unpaid hours around the house) and tinkered with it for a few days, before getting it up to par in terms of an operation orb,

 

Operation orbs were different from what the people could consider ‘machinery’. Other than the precise machinery essential in their making that was well-known to the general populace.

 

To channel magic, the mundane would not be sufficient, but this had been sidestepped by ‘Mages’. Operation orbs, while essential for mages to function properly, were but tools. But they were tools useless in the hands of any hand other than a mage’s.

 

How did Tanya know? In her crazy stint as a politician, which in hindsight, was a move that could only be described as insane, she had attempted to utilise magic to create a new form of ‘clean’ energy.

 

She succeeded. Kind of. A story for another time. It involved the largest clock in the world, the disposal of the Type-95, and the very first magical nuke the world had ever seen.

You are reading story Bringing Forth Deflagrations on This Quirky World! at novel35.com

 

And if her treaty had done what it had been intended for, it would be the last for at least a while.

 

She held her hand over the slipshod operation orb she had created. While technically it had a much higher capacity than actual orbs, what made it shoddy was the simple fact that she did not have spells set into the orb.

 

A Type-97, for example, could parallel process four spells simultaneously, say, a spell to hover the frenchie, a spell to suck away the warmth from the frenchie, another spell to condense the air around the frenchie, and a final spell to stop the noise from around the rat to escape.

 

The Type-95… did things differently.

 

The clock in Tanya’s hand at that moment could not do any of what she could have reasonably expected even from a standard military issued orb in ‘29. But she did not want an orb that could fry a chicken from afar.

 

She just wanted an orb to let her levitate objects for a couple seconds, and to finally shut the face of her idiot brother, who gloated over her lack of a Quirk till his head got bigger than an award-winning watermelon daily ever since he had gotten his own.

 

She just wanted an orb to drive the stupid nightmares away. Even if it was a stupid test-orb…

 

So, she began her very first experiment. She tried to channel her mana like she had a million times prior. She closed her eyes and scrunched her cute face till she almost got wrinkles.

 

The orb did not respond. Not a single iota of magic ran in her veins.

 

Tanya froze in place. She did not notice the faint glitter encompassing her hair as she swallowed her frustrations.

 

She redirected her focus to her idiot brother to distract herself from the melancholy of having lost her greatest ally in a world rife with war.

 

But at least in the new world Tanya had a family… The youngest member of which had somehow managed to fling a body, namely, the body belonging to a Mr. Bakugou Katsuki, towards herself from a huge pile of fine smoke.

 

Tanya wondered how her idiot brother even managed to create that phenomenon with his Quirk. Maybe he exercised a bit to sweat more than usual, and then ignited all of his sweat at once? But that would require a measure of patience that would be much beyond him. Did his friend with the green hair awaken a Quirk that involves dust somehow?

 

What was his name even? Why on earth would he decide to explode right that instant? He had seemed like a calm(er) kid. Tanya sighed as she got into position to receive her elder brother, the youngest member of her family.

 

She greeted him properly, as any superior would to a subordinate who went out of his way to enrage them would.

 

She stopped him in his tracks, with a fist to his stomach. She had learned enough martial arts in her life to be considered a master, if only barely. Apparently skill carried over well between lives.

 

Her idiot brother was stopped dead in his tracks, with a plume of fist-wind weakly flashing behind him, invisible to Tanya but clearly visible to those behind him. Her fist had cleanly killed all of his momentum. He dropped straight down, cradling his stomach. He then did not move a single inch.

 

She had not put that much force into hitting him had she? Did she knock her brother out from a single punch? As Tanya grew concerned over the state of her excessively sturdy brother and crouched over his dead comatose body, he snapped out of whatever funk that had him walking the rosy path to hell and jumped straight up, all prior damage to his body damned and forgotten. All the while shouting his defiance to the world.

 

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh, ya damn crab-monster-villain! Ya won’t get away for this!!!!”

 

As he turned his head to crack his neck before jumping into the fray, he spotted a fiery demon towards his right, with fiery red eyes that promised great pain…

 

“Aww, hell…”

 

Bakugou Katsuki was one incredibly unlucky kid this evening. He had managed to rouse a devil from its place of slumber.

 

Tanya was genuinely happy that her idiot of a brother had decided not to walk towards that light at the end of the tunnel. She was! Promise! It just was that, on his way up from the ground, he had somehow managed to clobber her chin in the exact angle and strength needed to do a multiple of things at the same time.

 

First, she chipped her front tooth, which, while mildly uncomfortable, was excusable.

 

Second, she bit her tongue, which was unfortunate, and caused her a great deal of pain. This was enough to start to make her angry, but not to make her fly off the hinges.

 

The third thing his fist’s unfortunate contact with her chin had done, and the unluckiest, was rocking her brain in its container.

 

Katsuki had given the one priorly known as the greatest mage in the world a concussion. The concussion made Tanya lose her iron hold on emotions that had not been loosened since her early teens.

 

Not since she had escaped from the Federation, to be specific.

 

Luckily for Bakugou Katsuki, something would distract her from her righteous anger as a younger sibling receiving damage from an elder sibling.

 

Said older sibling had gotten himself bodily slammed to the floor by a very angry crab-man spewing unintelligible nonsense from his frothing mouth. He seemed to have satisfied his anger by this and had turned to walk away, only to stop, dead in his tracks. For some reason, he felt immense danger at his back, with everything about himself screaming to get down and hide, or to stay as still as possible, and hope that the danger had passed him by.

 

What the poor unnamed crab-man did not know was that, while Tanya was not one to nurture relationships on her own, she was very much one to cherish any relationship she has.

 

Seeing her big brother suffer excessive violence in front of her eyes, especially because she saw him as more of an extremely young and cute nephew than an elder brother…

 

Tanya snapped entirely, and the gift granted to her by her friend with the excessively shabby workspace etiquette revealed its true purpose.

 

Tanya found herself in her uniform, dressed as a Major of the Imperial Army, with a single road before her, extending indefinitely on either side. Though if she squinted, she could see the end of one side, shrouded in a thin mist.

 

She needed no explanation. She needed no sign. She knew what the road represented and what walking down either end would do to and for her.

 

On one end, the path thinly veiled behind the mist, lied her past. She could choose to remain stubborn. Tanya was the right one after all. Why would she need to change? She had already proven her point once by being one of the forerunners at the front of the pack leading to the Empire’s victory. She could do it again. Professionalism above all else. Discipline above honour. Word of the law over the spirit.

 

But she already knew how this path would end.

 

On the other end, a path where she did not shackle her emotions. A path where she could do what humans do best and adapt. She could choose the unknown, where she was unproven, where she could learn of new ways, be part of the next generation instead of a forerunner. Akira could be a child. Honour over discipline. The spirit of the law over the letter of the law.

 

Akira knew what she would choose.

 

But did Tanya?

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