A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 19 Page 12

  She’d never directly asked Sunazara the reason, but she eventually built up a general idea from the things he’d casually do and say.

  Maybe Sunazara was tired of the life.

  Because of his job, he was almost guaranteed to kill others. Even if he avoided vital spots and aimed for arms or legs, his high-speed, high-powered rifle bullets would tear limbs right off and cause them to die of blood loss, agony, and shock. Snipers pinpointed their targets from far away—he’d never be able to use less powerful rounds.

  On the other hand, Stephanie’s realm of expertise was not long-range sniping.

  She’d fooled around with sniper rifles, taking after Sunazara, but she knew they didn’t match her personality on a fundamental level. She was best in high-speed combat after closing to extremely close ranges.

  And there was no rule that said she absolutely had to kill her hostiles.

  She fought her enemies inside ten meters, five meters, and occasionally one meter. If she used low-powered handguns, she could shoot their limbs and end the fight without killing them. And if she didn’t know if someone was an enemy or not, she could also opt to use martial arts to disable them.

  Maybe Sunazara, who only ever killed, envied her options and flexibility. And maybe it was crying for the moon, but perhaps Sunazara had viewed those choices—and her—as valuable.

  As he put his sniper’s skills to good use, he analyzed Stephanie’s movement patterns and gained the ability to close in to middle and close range without making a noise.

  Maybe then, if he did that, he could use low-powered rounds and shoot his opponents in the limbs, creating tactics that could end conflicts without killing.

  Of course, doing things you aren’t used to on a battlefield brings mortal danger with it.

  However.

  If he could use those tactics, then it would be fine.

  If those tactics failed, then at least it would decrease the number of people who died at his hands.

  …Maybe that was what the taciturn man had been thinking.

  When she considered that, she decided she wanted to save him.

  Using a method other than the worst one, the one that Sunazara himself unconsciously longed for.

  In spite of all that, Stephanie’s determination would, in the end, come to naught.

  Group, School, Item, Member, Block. Sunazara had participated as a mercenary in the conflict between five organizations in the darkest parts of Academy City and had been beaten instead, leaving him a comatose patient in critical condition.

  And by curious coincidence, in a situation Sunazara himself would probably have described as “the meagerest salvation born of a worst-case scenario,” Stephanie Gorgeouspalace now swore vengeance.

  Even knowing he hadn’t asked for it.

  But she did anyway, against the one person who had granted him a path to salvation through the utterly banal, trivial method of death and violence when it should have been more complex, more nuanced—she vowed vengeance against Saiai Kinuhata.

  CHAPTER 3

  Destruction Opens Yet Another Path

  Battle_to_Die.

  1

  Accelerator and the others had returned to the camper.

  The air was heavy.

  There was normally no festive, jovial mood when the four were together, but this was far worse. The camper interior was tense beyond the breaking point. The stress could have killed small animals.

  “…And so, everything goes the way Shiokishi wanted it,” spat Accelerator. “Anyone who tries to learn about Dragon gets erased wholesale. I bet those guys we took captive in the Hula Hoop aren’t alive anymore, either.”

  “Sugitani, you said his name was?” said Tsuchimikado suddenly, leaning against the wall. “Back when Shiokishi made that video call to us, he said the name of a couple of subordinates—I think they were Sugitani and Minobe.”

  “Still,” said Musujime tiredly, her fingertip playing with her hair. “I wonder what Dragon is, in the end.”

  If it was a question they could answer so simply, nobody here would be suffering, but she couldn’t help asking it.

  Unabara glanced at Tsuchimikado for just a moment. Tsuchimikado, a sorcerer like him, gave no reaction, so Unabara decided to put in his own two cents. “Unlike all of you on the science side, I happen to be on the magic side. If you want my opinion, the term dragon has religious connotations to it. For example…Angels.”

  Accelerator’s shoulders twitched when he heard the word.

  All because of one night:

  September 30.

  That night, Accelerator and Hound Dog’s Amata Kihara had fought to the death over a girl named Last Order. And there, he had witnessed something he might call an angel. A mad dance of glowing wings, each over ten meters long. There were still parts about the incident that day he didn’t fully understand, but he’d done some of his own research and figured out a few things:

  The wings’ appearance was connected to Amata Kihara and Last Order.

  And the name of the virus Kihara used that day was ANGEL.

  He lived in Academy City, so he couldn’t just discard it as something magical, something occult.

  It could be that Unabara’s viewpoint was completely misguided, and that Dragon really was something entirely different…but if there was a possibility that angel and Dragon were connected, Accelerator wouldn’t be able to stay uninvolved. It would link Last Order to Dragon, Academy City’s best-kept secret.

  … What aren’t we seeing?

  From the start, Last Order and the other Sisters had supposedly been created as materials for the Accelerator experiment. They should be useless now that the experiment was over. And yet, they were very deeply related to the city’s depths.

  At this point, he had to start wondering whether his initial assumptions were wrong.

  In other words, whether there had been something else to the Level Six shift experiment.

  If all these results had been in accordance with someone’s plans, they could have conceived the experiment as something designed to fail from the outset.

  … What have that brat and I gotten wrapped up in?

  Accelerator didn’t personally care what happened to the former Spark Signal members who had occupied the private salon. But the fact that they could have gotten clues about Dragon in that situation only to have them snatched away made him feel worse, powerless.

  “For now,” continued Unabara, “the string of incidents starting with the Hula Hoop has ended, so…that would mean we all go home now.”

  “What about Dragon?” asked Accelerator pointedly. “We gonna go hide under our beds without finding anything?”

  “…What, then you’d rather raid Shiokishi’s hideout?!” spat back Tsuchimikado, amazed. “Considering he wears a powered suit around the clock, he’s serious about protecting himself. His home base is probably as strong as a reinforced fallout shelter. We’re not going to get in so easily—after all, he would have designed it assuming people like us were the ones coming for him.”

  Without a word, Accelerator turned his glare on Musujime. She had a means of transportation that ignored three-dimensional limitations: Move Point.

  Musujime, however, shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t think how we do it is the issue.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Only that we can’t peacefully invade a fortress of that scale. We’re up against one of Academy City’s twelve leading figures. To put it bluntly, we’d need the resolve to become terrorists on the level of those at the Hula Hoop.”

  “…If we could ally with someone equally prominent—in other words, one of the General Board’s official members—we might get in smoothly from using politics or have the fortress itself be opened,” added Unabara. “Though that’s predicated on the assumption that there’s someone like that we can ally with, of course.”

  Accelerator, Motoharu Tsuchimikado, Awaki Musujime, and Mitsuki Unabara each had people they needed to protect. Consi
dering that, unraveling the Dragon mystery through terroristic brute force wasn’t a very good plan.

  Academy City’s number one thought for a moment or two about a certain young woman, casually looking over to the camper window as he did so—and then, suddenly announced, “Doesn’t look like we have much time to prepare.”

  “?”

  Not understanding, but deciding to observe what Accelerator was staring at for now, the rest directed their gazes out the same small window.

  A moment later.

  Ga-boom!!

  The payload of a portable antitank missile launcher collided with the camper, the explosion transforming it into scrap iron.

  Naturally, it would take more than that to kill the likes of them.

  The camper had several entrances and exits. Tsuchimikado and Unabara each jumped out separate doors, Musujime used Move Point to escape, and Accelerator used his ability to bust through the wall himself and flee in the direction opposite where the missile came in.

  The four, however, didn’t group back up and confront their new enemy—or anything of that sort.

  They each fled, scattered, following different routes. That was how Group did things.

  … Must be Shiokishi. We learned too much about Dragon during these incidents, and now we’re targets, too, predicted Accelerator calmly, diving into a narrow alley for the moment. Which means it’s likely he put together an assault team in full knowledge of my “weakness.” Instead of trying to kill me in the shortest possible time, they make it a battle of attrition to drain my electrode battery. They know I’d break them like toys if they just rushed in.

  For a moment, he wondered about the camper’s driver, but he didn’t spare him many thoughts. He hadn’t heard any screams right after the blast hit. The driver was probably an accomplice; it was likely they fled before the attack.

  … But that doesn’t mean I have to stick to running away like they want me to. It’s actually a plus that I know who the enemy is now. Better than not knowing who I’m fighting anyway. If I find their group first, then exploit the right blind spots to wipe them out, I won’t have any issues.

  And to use a tactic like that, he’d have to shake them off for now. He took a left, then another left into an alley, trying to get a look at the enemy lines from behind.

  Greee.

  All of a sudden, Accelerator’s electrode shut off.

  … ?!

  Accelerator, who had been adjusting his leg force using his vector ability, promptly lost control and fell to the road. It wasn’t purely a physical problem. A thin sensation akin to a numbness racked his brain, right up to the deepest parts of his mental faculties.

  As though he were drunk or sleep addled, his thoughts became incoherent and lost their continuous flow.

  He understood his current state of being on the ground but couldn’t connect that to any thought processes that could tell him what to do next.

  What had attacked Accelerator as he squirmed along like a caterpillar was a very simple phenomenon.

  Someone had controlled his electrode switch remotely.

  And if it had affected him despite being deep inside an urban canyon, they were probably spreading the remote-control waves over a wide area. Accelerator’s ability borrowed power from an electromagnetic network composed of almost ten thousand military-grade clones, and if he was cut off from that, he wouldn’t be able to use his ability at all.

  Normally, Accelerator would have been able to consider all this in an instant—and even think of a countermeasure.

  But in the current situation, he’d been robbed of the very ability to think.

  “…”

  Gritting his teeth, the fallen Accelerator looked at his right hand.

  It held a homemade crutch he’d added features to for times like these.

  It had all kinds of motors and sensors built in, but it hadn’t retained any function to suitably carry Accelerator when his ability was removed. Right now, he faced the very real problem of not being able to get up.

  In the meantime, he heard several sets of footsteps getting closer.

  He could feel a sense of crisis at something, but he couldn’t concretely relate that to what he should do in response.

  “…”

  Footsteps approached from the other direction, too, where the alley let out. He was boxed in now, but Accelerator couldn’t even calmly analyze the sense of danger.

  Someone grabbed his arm. Then they threw him into the passenger’s seat of a sports car parked near the alley’s mouth.

  There was nothing he could do. The car zoomed off, driving through the nighttime streets at a high speed.

  As the distance from Shiokishi’s pursuit unit increased, the remote-control waves lost effectiveness, which gave Accelerator his faculties back. Number One returned his electrode switch to normal, glared at his crutch, and then looked at the driver.

  “…You?”

  He remembered the face.

  It was the high school–age boy who’d gotten wrapped up in the explosion in District 3. He was supposed to be with the wounded pregnant woman and heading for a hospital in District 7…

  “Why are you suddenly so surprised?” asked the high school kid, dropping the sports car to a legal speed. “Anyway, I guess your body really does move when it has to. Thanks to that, I didn’t have to let the person I owe my life to—no, someone who protected something even more important—die.”

  The high schooler smiled from his eyes.

  Accelerator, however, pulled his gun from his pants belt and smoothly leveled it at him.

  “…You learn quite a bit, even in a bullshit world like this,” he spat. “Rescues in the nick of time don’t happen very often, for example. Especially if one of the General Board members, Shiokishi, set up this raid. I’d never coincidentally run into a familiar face.”

  “…”

  “You’re the same as me, aren’t you? Someone who lives in the world of evil. Who put you up to this? Did Shiokishi think up a two-layered trap?!”

  The high schooler, gun trained on him, looked not at Accelerator but straight ahead.

  “You are right…,” he said, the words coming out like molasses. “I’ve got the same scent as you. Totally different grade, though. My job is to be a lackey and support the big shots like you. Grunt characters bought at a discount and expended wholesale. But,” he added, “no matter how foul I may be, that doesn’t change the fact that you saved someone more important than my own life. And I’m not rotten enough to let a guy like that die without helping.”

  “…”

  “This isn’t just some cheap I-owe-you-one situation. Totally different level. It’s a debt, and I’m repaying this debt. If you don’t like it, you can feel free to shoot me right now.”

  For a short while, Accelerator stared at the side of the high schooler’s face.

  He never looked his way.

  He was probably convinced he wouldn’t get shot.

  Accelerator tsked, then moved his gun’s aim away from him. “Keep going.”

  “How far?” asked the young man with a smirk.

  Without thinking about it too much, Accelerator answered, “I’ve gotta kill that Shiokishi bastard.”

  Shiokishi of the General Board had bared his fangs at Accelerator and the others to make sure certain information on Dragon wouldn’t get out. Once he knew his first wave hadn’t been able to finish them off, he would probably go after the most effective vulnerability.

  In other words, he’d take Last Order hostage.

  Accelerator presumed he hadn’t yet played that card. If he’d had a hostage from the start, he’d have threatened them before attacking and tried to contain them.

  Accelerator had to settle things now, before Shiokishi could move on to plan B.

  To defend or to attack?

  He had the option of quickly grabbing Last Order and going to ground…but he didn’t think that was a good idea. It wouldn’t be enough. What he wanted to prote
ct wasn’t her alone, but the very world she loved. It was too difficult even for Accelerator to keep fighting while protecting everyone around Last Order at the same time, like Aiho Yomikawa and Kikyou Yoshikawa.

  Then what should he do?

  After thinking for a moment, a wicked grin came over Accelerator’s face.

  What he would do was simple.

  Victory favors the bold.

  Kill before being killed.

  A duel of speed, of which could wipe out the enemy camp faster.

  … Well, obviously, thought Academy City’s number one deep down, letting out a low, unintentional laugh. I’m already covered in blood—this suits me far better!!

  2

  A dull, throbbing pain ran through Saiai Kinuhata’s head.

  Stephanie’s automatic shotgun had delivered massive damage despite Kinuhata’s Nitrogen Armor. Without her shielding, Kinuhata was an incredibly frail (according to her) girl. If the shotgun shells kept pelting her, one would eventually be fatal.

  … Ow. Taking more than seven hits when I’m super-close, like closer than five meters, would be really bad…!!

  Kinuhata did some broad analysis from the damage she’d sustained as she burst onto a slope leading out from the District 3 underground. The subterranean mall was apparently closed off because some terrorists had been running amok, but…

  “Nya-ha-ha!”

  Behind her, Stephanie laughed, wielding her hunk of steel over a meter long in both hands. The large firearm was extremely strange to see against the scenery of a Japanese city.

  “Your escape route is quite straightforward considering you’re running from bullets, isn’t it?”

  “?!”

  Another volley of shots followed without hesitation.

  Bshaaaaa!! A long sound from many short ones overlapping.

  Stephanie would have been aiming down at Kinuhata on the slope from aboveground. In other words, the ground, that thick wall of asphalt and concrete, should have gotten in the way.

  Nevertheless, a rain of bullets stormed toward Kinuhata.

  It was like an avalanche. The scattershot was powerful enough to turn an armored car into a sponge within three seconds, and it took her a few seconds to realize it was even tearing away chunks of the artificial ground. And during all that, a ton of pellets struck her body.