A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 19 Read online

  This wasn’t his problem alone anymore.

  It involved everyone he needed to protect.

  They could freely control his electrode and block his abilities whenever they chose. Crawling through the mud and rain during the battle like he did with Amata Kihara of the Hound Dogs would be unavoidable.

  But…

  “I’m the strongest Level Five in the city. Some random brat doesn’t have the right to worry about me.”

  Accelerator didn’t mention any of the hardships that awaited him.

  The boy didn’t need to know.

  What he said was simple. It was so that he wouldn’t drag the boy into the darkness, so that this child wouldn’t be exposed even to a fragment of the risks that would soon befall Accelerator.

  “Listen up. Even if you see someone suffering, grabbing a weapon without thinking and killing the thugs makes you as much of a villain as them. Someone who can murder people just because it makes sense to them, without thinking about other people’s feelings or giving them a chance to become better—you can’t call that a good person. You don’t need to turn into that. That’s my territory. Something I need to do alone.”

  That was courageous, and only those who knew the details would have understood that.

  Monaka Oyafune and her secretary both only understood a small piece of it.

  “I can fight just fine on my own. There’s no room for someone like you.”

  “…I still want to,” said the boy abruptly, resisting the gentle words that tore him down. “I still want to fight, too.”

  Then the boy looked up at Academy City’s strongest Level Five and shouted at the top of his lungs:

  “I don’t want to give Academy City to cowards like them!!”

  Other people finally seemed to notice the commotion.

  Several men in black, maybe other secretaries or the facility’s security, came up to them, and one placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. The gesture itself was gentle, but it was clearly for the purpose of getting him away from Oyafune. Even as the man restrained him, the boy didn’t turn away from Accelerator’s gaze. Even when their teacher came out a few moments later, he looked into his eyes until the end.

  Accelerator watched the boy for a while as they brought him back to his classmates at the astronomical observation event. And he wasn’t the only one.

  Monaka Oyafune, official member of the Academy City General Board, was watching the boy go as well.

  “…You mentioned Shiokishi before, didn’t you?”

  “Mrs. Oyafune!!” the secretary said frantically, trying to stop her.

  But Oyafune was looking directly at Accelerator. She knew, thanks to the incident with her daughter, how politically fearsome Shiokishi could be.

  She also knew the dangers of this battleground that Accelerator was about to enter.

  In contrast, Accelerator spoke his next words as though spitting them out. “Nothing you need to worry about.”

  “By that, I take it…you intend to fight him, like that boy said.”

  Oyafune gave a short sigh, considering the boy’s final words.

  I don’t want to give Academy City to cowards like that!

  The boy didn’t have a particular enemy in mind. In his mind, the “cowards” were just a vague image about the darkness that lurked in the city.

  But perhaps that was why Monaka Oyafune thought the way she did. As someone who knew about the city’s darkness but decided to stop fighting—didn’t that make her one of those cowards?

  She was merely one old woman who tried to argue things out with the world, without shedding blood or relying on military force, using only her powers of negotiation. Was she not someone who could proudly object to hearing the word coward applied to her?

  “…I wonder what I should do,” she murmured suddenly.

  “Hell if I know,” answered Accelerator, clicking his tongue, peeved. “It’s your life. You decide.”

  The words cut to her core, and despite herself, she smiled.

  Accelerator could deliver that line so assuredly because that was how he lived his own life. Even now, he was protecting something.

  Monaka Oyafune placed her hand on something nearby.

  It was a black, bulletproof car.

  She placed her right hand on the expensive vehicle’s roof first, and then placed her left hand on it in the same way. Then, she turned to face the car fully.

  Bang!!

  She drove her fist as hard as she could into the car.

  “Mrs. Oyafune!!” cried the secretary.

  But she ignored him. For the first time in a very long time, she’d felt the pain of damaging something in her fist. She turned to face Accelerator again, her expression looking like she’d expelled all the negative emotions she had held deep down.

  “…My eyes are finally open.”

  “Give me a break. I just decided I’d do this alone like a minute ago, you know,” said Accelerator, almost like asking for confirmation.

  “It’s my life. I get to decide,” she answered immediately. “When I received that photograph of my daughter along with a magnum, I decided that breaking my own fangs would be the most appropriate way to protect what’s important to me.”

  “…”

  “But I wonder why I didn’t think like this: ‘They’ve severely underestimated me by going after my daughter.’ Why didn’t I realize that if I don’t root out the evil, nothing important to me will ever escape them?”

  Monaka Oyafune moved to stand directly in front of Academy City’s strongest Level Five.

  They stood on equal terms now, not because of any trivial violent power they possessed at their fingertips, but because of something in a different dimension, something that came from a pillar deeper inside the human heart.

  Accelerator knew others with eyes like that.

  Aiho Yomikawa from Anti-Skill and Kikyou Yoshikawa, formerly a scientist.

  “Let’s pay Shiokishi a visit. That would be the best plan. His base of operations is impenetrable, whether by raw power or political sway, but if I add my own authority as another board member to the fight, I can remove the latter obstacle, at least.”

  Accelerator tsked in irritation.

  But the secretary wouldn’t let it go with just that. “But, Mrs. Oyafune, that method would be—”

  “I’ve made up my mind. Even if this person was to leave, I would fight Shiokishi alone. In which case, working together would be ideal, wouldn’t it?”

  The secretary, sensing her strength of will, then gave a sharp glare at Accelerator. He’d just said he wouldn’t get Oyafune involved in this so—

  “This young man told me to decide. He didn’t force me to do anything. And I decide how I live my life. You’ve no right to blame him. He afforded me the utmost consideration.”

  “Damn it…!!”

  After cursing, something he would normally never, ever do, the secretary opened the black bulletproof car’s door and groped around the dashboard. He came out with a gun.

  But it wasn’t to point it at Accelerator or Monaka Oyafune.

  It was the opposite.

  “Someone as amazing as you doesn’t deserve to die over something this worthless, Mrs. Oyafune. This person has the capacity to bring happiness to many people on a much larger scale than this.”

  With practiced movements, he checked how many bullets remained in the magazine and then glared at Accelerator. “You! Now that you have her cooperation, I expect a modicum of responsibility!! Protect her with everything you have! If you let Mrs. Oyafune be killed, I will turn you into Swiss cheese!!”

  “That was good. You know, you might be cut out to be a villain.”

  “Would you not say awful things and make them sound like compliments?” he muttered as the three climbed into the black sedan.

  Their destination, at last, was the home base of Shiokishi, the General Board’s string puller.

  With history’s strongest villain in tow, the General Board’s negotiator
Monaka Oyafune rose up once again.

  4

  Something must have happened to Saiai Kinuhata.

  Hamazura and Takitsubo finally guessed as much after sneaking out of the private salon building. The terrorists were no longer in control of it, and Anti-Skill officers were still performing a site verification.

  “…I got a message from Kinuhata on my cell phone.”

  On the screen of her cutely designed phone was a message saying she was going to lead Takitsubo out of there and to wait for her for a little while. Time had passed since then, but Kinuhata hadn’t shown herself at all. Eventually, the two of them escaped the private salon building on their own.

  “Hey, did you get in touch with her? I hope we didn’t pass each other by.”

  “I’ve been calling her, but I can’t get through.”

  Takitsubo’s vacant eyes stared at her cell phone. Hamazura couldn’t tell whether she was like that all the time, or if she hadn’t completely shaken off the ill effects from the Crystals. She’d already been using them when she and Hamazura first met.

  “Hamazura, what should we do?”

  “Well, Kinuhata is a lot more durable than us,” said Hamazura. “I mean, she’s a Level Four. And she did send a text. Maybe we shouldn’t make any careless moves and wait for her to get in touch. It would take something pretty crazy to kill her—”

  Boom!!

  All of a sudden, a huge explosion went off in another part of District 3.

  It didn’t blow up a building; it had gone off underground. No sooner did the distant ground start to crack than crimson flames began to erupt from underneath.

  Because there was more than one explosion.

  Bam-ka-bam-ka-boom!! Several roiling balls of fire flared up at once. The asphalt split, swallowing passenger vehicles parked on the road into its ant-lion pit. Few people were nearby, probably because of the terrorist incident at the salon building, so thankfully it didn’t seem as though any bystanders had fallen into it.

  Somehow, the explosions seemed to be getting closer, little by little.

  As Hamazura watched, he eventually said with trembling lips, “You’ve gotta be kidding me. This is ludicrous, isn’t it?!”

  There was no guarantee Kinuhata was directly involved with those explosions, but flashy bombings like this usually had something to do with people on the “dark” side like Hamazura and Takitsubo. The possibility was higher than zero.

  “What’s even exploding anyway?”

  “Hamazura, it might be the underground mall.”

  When he looked where Takitsubo was pointing, hordes of customers were just starting to pour out of a department store entrance. The smoke had probably come up from underground, and now they were frantically evacuating.

  Hamazura looked around and found an entrance to the underground mall that was also connected to a subway ticket gate. After descending the staircase, essentially a smokestack now, an orange-colored light was there to greet them.

  It was a hellscape.

  There were no flames near where he stood yet, per se. However, the massive, burning orange inferno farther in was flinging tiles from the floor and ceiling and glass panes all over the place, becoming almost like a thick wall made of light. The air itself was strangely warm. It made him feel like he was inside a giant oven.

  Something was definitely happening, but there was still no proof Kinuhata was in there.

  Hamazura wavered.

  This firestorm was far too dangerous to enter to search for someone he wasn’t sure was there. But it wouldn’t solve anything if the flames got to him while he was trying to make up his mind.

  … Keep going or turn back…?

  “Hamazura, look!!” shouted Takitsubo, pointing at something.

  Something was flickering beyond the orange flames. No, it was a silhouette. A small one, standing still, obscured by the wall of fire.

  When Hamazura spotted it, he unintentionally cried out, “Kinuhata!!”

  The young woman, surprised, turned to look. She wasn’t relieved at seeing the face of someone she knew—in fact, she shouted back, her expression seeming even more tense after noticing them.

  “Get down, dumbass!! Hiding behind things won’t work!!”

  As soon as he heard those words, he saw it.

  Another figure, this one fairly tall, standing behind the flames.

  It was holding something long and slender—something that looked like a machine gun.

  “!!”

  Hamazura pounced on Takitsubo, and they both fell to the floor. The heated tile felt like it was scalding him, but this wasn’t the time to worry.

  Ba-bam!!

  A volley of bullets flew at them from beyond the flames.

  A line of them flew horizontally at about waist height. And the bullets didn’t seem like regular rifle rounds. Not only did they damage the glass-block walls, they tore big chunks out of even the concrete pillars near the stairwell.

  “Nya-ha-ha!”

  The firing stopped for just a few seconds.

  The bullets had ripped through like a tempest, but the shooter probably hadn’t intended to kill Hamazura and Takitsubo. The tall person’s target was probably Kinuhata. They brought the huge gun up again and pointed it in Kinuhata’s direction, and then the tall…probably woman said:

  “You’re using nitrogen to make walls, so I figured I could stop you by messing with the air. But it sure is hard to get all the nitrogen out when it makes up seventy percent of the air, isn’t it?”

  … Is she the one who did all this…? Hamazura, pressed to the floor of the fire scene, struggled to make heads or tails of the situation. Was she using the propane gas in restaurants or something to turn the mall into a sea of flames?

  The way she held her gun…It seemed to vaguely resemble the bearing of the delinquent-wrangling Anti-Skill officers.

  But someone who fought to protect children wouldn’t be willing to set an underground mall on fire just to fight an esper.

  Someone in the darker parts of Academy City like us … ? That huge gun is clearly different from the terrorists’. Theirs weren’t meant to be hidden …

  The enemy knew how Kinuhata’s ability worked and was trying to take advantage of her weakness.

  After considering that, Hamazura took out his handgun.

  It was good for carrying around, but with a short barrel, its accuracy at long distances was pretty poor. If he wanted to make sure he hit, he’d have to get within at least thirty meters.

  … That machine gun is obviously better than my piece. If she realizes I’m trying to shoot her, she won’t think twice before mowing me down. What do I do? How do I get in close without getting noticed…?

  He racked his brain over the question, but his opponent didn’t wait for him. The tall female figure continued, “But if I get the specific conditions right, explosions can create something like a vacuum for a moment, can’t they? Like cutting winds, a strictly localized event…The hole would only be a few dozen centimeters across, but still.”

  “?! Hamazura, get out of here right—!!”

  “If I shoot a bullet from that hole, you won’t be able to use your precious shield, will you?!”

  Ba-boom!!

  Several explosions went off at the same time.

  They almost appeared to be surrounding Kinuhata’s small frame. Overwhelming flashes of light blinded them, and a shock wave rolled toward Hamazura and Takitsubo as if through a tube.

  Hamazura immediately covered Takitsubo’s mouth and nose with his hands and shut his eyes tight. If they inhaled this sirocco, it would sear their throats and organs.

  Once the scorching gale had passed, Hamazura finally opened his eyes. Beyond the flames, the tall figure was pointing her gun at Kinuhata.

  This was what the enemy had meant.

  If she created a localized vacuum, Saiai Kinuhata wouldn’t be able to cover that part with her shield. Then, if her adversary fired a bullet through that hole, the shot wo
uld hammer into her defenseless body.

  “Kinuhata!!”

  There was no response.

  Only the awful, continuous rattling from the tall woman’s smoking gun.

  5

  Accelerator’s group reassembled.

  Location: District 2. The area boasted many R & D facilities in fields that created a lot of noise pollution, like automobiles and explosives. Large soundproof walls encircled the district; the place even had noise-canceling equipment installed that worked by emitting sound waves of opposite phase.

  “Given the neighborhood, it’s not very populous…Lot of munitions-related facilities, too,” explained Tsuchimikado, somewhat appalled. “Considering the fact that Shiokishi is an armaments fanatic, it’s basically his home turf.”

  They were on a street built alongside a large bypass, in an area populated by gas stations and fast-food joints. It might be easier to think of it as a highway rest stop.

  Musujime, leaning against the black sedan, asked, “So do we know where this Shiokishi person’s hideout is?”

  “According to Oyafune, it’s one of the testing shelters in the district,” Accelerator spat. “They use explosives here, don’t they? They set up model shelters and do endurance tests by hitting them with explosions from different angles. Shiokishi’s private fortress is way tougher, and it blends right into the scenery.”

  “And as for Oyafune…?” Tsuchimikado craned his neck, bringing the old woman into his view. A smile crossed his lips. She had changed into a suit.

  When she met his gaze, she bowed slightly and said, “Yes, I’m quite prepared.”

  “You were having your secretary wait ‘somewhere safe,’ right?” asked Tsuchimikado with a shrug.

  Accelerator looked at Oyafune. “Surprised your secretary let you do this.”

  “Well, can’t allow any dangerous acts, after all,” she replied vaguely.

  Tsuchimikado clapped his hands together. “We have everything we need, so let’s finish this quickly. We’re not exactly going for a polite visit and a pleasant tea party.”