The Emperor's Dragon II

Heat Before Fire

Eren rubbed his temples.

This had been a bad day.

He glanced at the clock. It was still morning. He didn't care. It was about midnight in Reykjavik, so it was the end of the day.

It had been a bad day. A spectacularly bad day. A phenomenally bad day.

It was a day that was going to go down in the annals of Tartarus history. In world history.

And his name, Eren Kuchisu would be forever known as the man who had let Tartarus fall. It was a dubious honour he could do without. He couldn't even put it on Ryunosuke since the man had been sick for the last week. He was due back in another day or so but for now, Eren was having to do both jobs.

And losing Tartarus was an honour he couldn't see how to avoid.

The attack had come without warning. Their opening salvo had been so strategically placed that they had destroyed all but one of the gun emplacements on their defensive turrets. That still left the guards up there, with their guns but the higher calibre weapons had been destroyed. Then they blew up the power cables and... He wasn't sure if they had destroyed the generators or just the lines to them. Either way, the main backup generators hadn't kicked in.

That left the buildings with their batteries and their own smaller generators, but those had to be activated manually.

What was bothering him wasn't that the emplacements and the lines had been destroyed. Eren wasn't a fool. It was relatively easy to get explosives or have a quirk that could do it. What was bothering him was the fact that they knew where those placements were. That was not meant to be possible.

And with the way the attackers were rampaging wasn't random. They had knowledge. The way they were attacking screamed to him that they knew too much. They were covering it with a lot of wanton destruction, but their strikes were not accidental. Even with the numbers of attackers they shouldn't be taking out so many important places randomly. They knew what they were doing.

That worried him. It worried him more than the fact that the attackers appeared to have changed their plan. For all he knew that seeming change in plan was actually their plan.

He had watched the feed they had from the outside when the attack began. The Tartarus Managers were given briefings about multiple villains, not just those who resided in the prison. The latest briefing had been about their newest resident, the so-called super-villain All For One, but it had included a section on his known associates, including his son.

Nothing had said anything about a massive green dragon!

The huge creature had descended upon the island and begun destroying buildings. It worked in conjunction with the huge man and both of them just shrugged off gunfire from the guards. Eren knew that other guards had quirks which could probably deal with them but... The hordes of creatures - he believed they were called Nomu - were keeping the guards at bay. If that's all they were doing, they'd be in a good position, no matter what happened but Eren... He didn't want to look at the board that showed the status of guards. Tartarus Island was more than just the prison, but it was all guarded and he had control over them all... And could see the status of them all.

There was a distressing number of status indicators showing negative.

Then the Dragon disappeared. He had no idea where it went but realised that it had to be a transformation quirk. And... the most likely person it belonged to was All For One's son. Eren couldn't be sure of that but... It seemed like the most logical explanation and right at the moment, it actually didn't matter. What mattered was he had to come up with some way of stopping them.