[53: Cielito Lindo]
The large explosion happened near the first-aid station. The students were taken by surprise, and the actors playing the bystanders showed "shock" and "fear."
'Theodore, commence helicopter evacuations. Prioritize based on how "bad" the injuries to the bystanders are,' Eleanor commanded.
[Controlling other helicopters. I recommend making more.]
Eleanor let go of the machine gun and went to the other side of the helicopter. She summoned her bow and shot out a few more arrows. They transformed into helicopters, immediately forming into formation with the other helicopters. They were all heading to the first-aid location where the temporary helicopter landing spot was made.
'Theodore, take me there as well. I need to explain to them what's going on. And I also have to protect the whole darn thing.'
Eleanor's helicopter flew to the first-aid station. She would need to protect all of these helicopters. Her carrier rigging appeared, and large swarms of drones appeared. Most were for the purpose of protecting the helicopters. Whether activating shields, intercepting projectiles, or shooting back any…kinetic projectiles. The drone swarm followed the helicopters, maintaining a sort of protective shield around them.
Once she got to the landing site at the first-aid station, her helicopter landed. The fleet of helicopters also found their own spots.
"Everybody, listen up!" Eleanor's voice boomed from a megaphone. "We're going to do it this way! Load up everyone on these helicopters, so we can commence emergency evacuations! We have to do this now! The villains and terrorists who caused this attack have returned! Every moment we waste is a moment they have to kill people! Prioritize the most injured! In addition, at least one of you should get on the helicopter to look after the ones who are hurt! Don't worry about piloting! Leave that to me! Come on, get to it! I'll provide protection!" As soon as Eleanor ended her announcement, her helicopter took off. The other helicopters that landed had their doors opened.
In her helicopter, Eleanor got on the machine guns again. Down below, she could see the evacuation process start. 'Good, I'd hate to see them fight amongst each other. Oh, wait! Todoroki and Inasa! I forgot about that! Wait, no, that'll help; it delayed Gang Orca and his soldiers enough to successfully pull off an evacuation, so it's not that bad. I mean, it's bad for them because they fail, but good nonetheless overall. Besides, the priority isn't them, but these bystanders. As soon as they're all rescued and get to safety, the test wins. So, theoretically, I might not even have to shoot these machine guns,' Eleanor thought.
From the smoke and debris of the explosion, Gang Orca and "terrorists" came out. Despite his appearance, he was dressed quite fashionably in a suit and tie. He looked good.
'Those ultra-sonic attacks will be quite troublesome. Those are used against drones, but I just have to make sure he doesn't use it,' Eleaonor thought to herself.
Gang Orca started to advance slowly. His eyes were on the helicopters. From where he was, he could see multiple of the bystanders being loaded into the helicopters. Students were loading the "injured" into helicopters. Once those were full, the door was closed, and it took off, heading away from the first-aid station. They weren't going in any particular direction, since this was only a test and a stadium, and Eleanor didn't know if she was allowed to fly them out of the stadium, so she settled on keeping them in the air with a lot of protection.
Their efficiency was commendable. Those helicopters were taking off quickly, and some students were bringing in more and more, loading them based on how serious the injury was. To Gang Orca, this was something he liked to see. These were students who would be the next generation of heroes. But he still had a role to play.
While it was impressive, this entire operation had a single point of failure; it relied solely on Eleanor. If he could take her down, all of this would fall apart. But that was a lot easier said than done.
The "terrorists" started to run forward, holding concrete guns. But before they could get too far—
rat-tat-tat
Machine gun bullets strayed in front of them, kicking up small spikes and columns of dirt. Live rounds. Eleanor was smirking a little from where she was in her helicopter. Of course, she wouldn't actually aim at them, but with the help of the brain-computer interface and her visor, she could make sure to keep fatalities at zero. Fatalities and not injuries, because the human factor is the hardest to predict.
The "terrorists" had no choice but to seek cover behind some of the debris and rubble of the destroyed buildings. For Eleanor, it was perfect; this was the exact use of a machine gun. By laying down a large volume of bullets, she was stopping the "terrorists" from advancing, restricting their movement, and forcing them to stay in one location. Of course, there was the other purpose of killing lots of infantry or people, but that wasn't necessary in this case.
One brave "terrorist" tried to make an advance from his cover, but as soon as he stepped out to move across the terrain, Eleanor's machine gun lit up, bullets landing in front of his feet. He quickly went back. This was area denial.
Eleanor nodded, satisfied with the textbook use of a machine gun. With this, only Gang Orca would be a threat, but he was being taken care of. A massive wall of ice appeared in front of Gang Orca, stopping his advance. Undeterred, he let out a hypersonic wave, destroying the ice, but the ice kept on coming.
Eleanor kept watching. She was kind of hoping it wouldn't happen, but…A powerful gust of wind arrived, destroying the ice and giving Gang Orca a much easier path…Yup, it seemed to have happened.
Eleanor rolled her eyes. 'Come on. Hatred is a hell of a thing, but I can understand it sometimes. I myself love a good hate-watch. I will always remember where I was when, by some miracle of the gods, I found myself rooting for the French for the salvation of Western civilization. PSG and the San Antonio Spurs really pulled through in 2026. (A/N: Just the Western conference finals, not the NBA finals.) Oh, right, Todoroki and Inasa. Eh, let them hate, it's none of my business,' Eleanor thought to herself.
She continued firing her machine gun at the pinned-down "terrorists," completely shutting them down. It may be a test, but they weren't dumb enough to risk any injury from a live bullet. Plus, they could see the writing on the wall; the students were going to win this thing.
While Todoroki and Inasa were doing their best to seemingly sabotage each other, they eventually got it together. But it was too late; the points taken off from their score already caused them to fail. However, they coordinated an attack to unleash a tornado of fire with Gang Orca in the middle.
'Now, seeing that in-person is really cool.' Eleanor looked down. The evacuation was essentially complete. Just one more helicopter. A student below was helping load in the last batch of bystanders. Because those bystanders were very minimally "injured," they got on quickly. As soon as the door closed, the helicopter lifted into the air.
And just as it did, a loud horn sounded across the arena. "The test is over! All the bystanders have been saved!"
/\\//\\//\
Some time later, all the students stood in front of a small stage. On a podium was the announcer. And behind him was a large screen with the names of the students.
"Behind me are the names of the students who passed in alphabetical order. We scored you on a demerit system. Everyone started with 100 points and we took points off based on what you did during the test. The scores will be passed around to you on paper, where you'll see more information on where you can improve." A few people went around with the papers.
"Eleanor Hayes." The person handed the paper to Eleanor. She took it, before the person passed along.
She pretended to look, but she wasn't interested. She quickly folded it and put it in a pocket. She'd already seen her name on the screen. Now, she really wanted to go back to the dorms and get a sweet taste of the air conditioning. She ignored everything else, letting go in one ear and out the other.
Eventually, it finally ended.
"Hey, Eleanor, what score did you get?" Mina excitedly said, rushing up to her.
"Whoa, there, Mina, relax a little," Eleanor held Mina on her shoulders, keeping her at arms length. She took out the exam paper. "Let's see. I got a…96. Perfect."
"What‽ A 96‽ That's higher than Momo! She got a 95!" Mina exclaimed.
"It's just one point higher. It doesn't make much of a difference. Someone with a 50 would pass, and so would someone with a 100," Eleanor said.
"Yeah, but, I'd rather have someone with a 96 than a 50," Mina said.
"True, but none of this matters. At the end of the day, experience is the only thing that matters. Someone with experience doing something will always beat someone with a high test score and education," Eleanor said.
"Geez, you can be excited by this, you know?" Mina said.
"Yeah, I guess so. I think the heat is just getting to me. Why can't it be winter already?" Eleanor started to complain.
/\\//\\//\
(Heights Alliance, UA)
Back in the dorm, Eleanor was relaxing. She saw her license. It looked nice, but…something was grinding on her mind. She felt she was forgetting something. Or someone. A small laptop notification got her attention, dragging her away from her thoughts.
'Let's see. What do we have here?' Eleanor went to the desk where had a "laptop." Really, it was just her tablet with keyboard attachments that basically turned it into a laptop. The little worm she put on the device of the HPSC announcer finally reconnected. For one, she had to be grateful for Japan's work culture, and especially that of a government agency. She knew how bad things could get, but this once she was glad they had to go through it.
It was simple. That person just returned to the headquarters of the HPSC, and he connected to their network.
'Let's see. A few commands here and there, and there we have it. Worms are a magnificent thing. And since it's the 22nd-century, this worm is a fully autonomous AI agent. This thing can do real-time exploitation by assessing network environments and deduce how to breach a system, and it can't be solved by patching. And by hijacking the computing power of the HPSC as it spreads, it can power its own AI system on it and it propagates itself. Not only that, it can rewrite its own code to evade detection, a form of mutation. This is literally something that would come out of some fiction story, but this is real. The 22nd century is wonderful,' Eleanor thought to herself.
Eleanor watched for some time, seeing what the worm gathered and giving it some commands to avoid any suspicion. She knew not to get too confident, even if the offensive threats always held an advantage over defence. Eleanor's worm only had to be successful once. The defences of the HPSC has to be successful every. Single. Time. Even if the HPSC has a 99.99% success rate, that's still a liability. Eleanor's autonomous worm can test thousands of configurations simultaneously until it finds only one flaw and starts to reason from within. And even taking into account the 22nd-century, which no doubt has AI-driven cyber defences, the amount of logs and alerts it would give would be way too much, and therefore be more of an annoyance than an actual thing to be taken seriously, and even if the AI contained it, high-stakes decisions like shutting down entire servers of the HPSC require human input, so the human factor becomes the thing to exploit. Eleanor's worm operates at machine speed, giving it more than enough time to mutate and evade detection by the time a human can make the decision. And that AI defence? Just another target to attack. Eleanor's worm can use methods like prompt injection or data poisoning to make the defensive AI model ignore the breach entirely.
'Interesting. They've already built a file on me. That's obvious, but…it's a bit more than just a file on me. They really don't care that I'm from America and a Medal of Freedom recipient given by Star and Stripe herself if what they wrote here is right,' Eleanor's thoughts raced as she saw what was being gathered. Then came the really shady stuff. 'They still have her files? So much for wanting to erase her from history and rebranding her a villain and all that cover-up stuff. I'll make a copy of that, thank you. Using child soldiers, but I knew that already. State-sanctioned assassinations. Now, that one I can agree with and support to a certain extent. Heroes as dispensable pawns? Well, damn.'
Eleanor saw multiple reports, audio transcriptions, videos, emails, phone calls, details on how to get "rid" of any potential whistleblowers, and more. But there was one thing that surprised her.
'Hold on a minute. She's still with the HPSC? What were those files I saw then?' Eleanor checked the files again. When she checked the information and referenced them, she understood it. 'Add blackmail and conspiracy to the list. That isn't out, but…seeing what I have, they're threatening to run that misinformation against her. It doesn't matter if it's false. It's the HPSC, and they have their ways. She's out there.'
Eleanor gave a few more commands to the worm before deciding to go back to sleep. Despite the magnitude of what she just saw, she calmly fell asleep. She's seen worse and knows worse. But she also knew that this would be a nuke on the hero society of Japan and the image the HPSC tries so hard to maintain.
She would act, but not yet. Not until she had a good reason. As for what "good" meant for her, she'd just have to find out.
(A/N: All I'm going to say is that the love interest was basically revealed in chapter 40. The clues I left are kind of obvious. It's literally in the chapter name. And it's beyond obvious here, and because of this note. So, the yuri is coming! I don't know why people left reviews about this. I thought they'd read further ahead and read what I said about me finding a way to insert the romance. I think I also said that there was room for things in this story to change, despite the outline I have, and the romance is one of them. I put the yuri tag in this for a reason. I'm not going to leave y'all hanging. Just have patience; it's a virtue or something.)