A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 19 Read online

  Meanwhile, Shiokishi, one of only twelve official General Board members in Academy City, frowned.

  This dome-shaped building, shielded with special armor, was quite spacious but had little in the way of furnishings. The general impression it gave off was that of a battleship. Only a few lavish chairs and wardrobes dotted the area, just enough to highlight their captain’s tastes.

  For Shiokishi, peace and security were the greatest luxury and the result of having expended a maximum amount of work and capital. In reality, this heap of military secrets had enough money spent on it to purchase an entire European castle, complete with furniture.

  And now—that peace and security, the highest and richest form of pleasure, was beginning to shake under his feet.

  “An enforcement of the equal-authority inspection system by an official member of the General Board…?”

  Yes, the twelve had an agreement like that, didn’t they?

  The General Board’s main members needed to have equal power at all times. They couldn’t allow one to amass significantly more influence and cause the balance to collapse. During their assemblies, all twelve members’ opinions were treated equally. The objective, he figured, was that they needed to lead Academy City in an extremely democratic way.

  It was, of course, all a farce.

  Each of the twelve amassed power in their own fields that set them above the others and tried to control the city in any way that could possibly benefit them, all purposely at the expense of the others who nominally had “equal authority.”

  Normally, there was no possible way any of them would come waving the flag of such an ornamental system.

  … Can I reject it? Shiokishi wondered immediately.

  Usually, he’d be allowed to.

  But it wouldn’t work this time.

  After checking his avenues of metaphorical escape on the General Board’s network again, he saw the twelve members each had their own trivial little pacts. No one pact had very much effectiveness, but strangely, they were put together so that they would interfere with the equal-authority inspection system. If he tried to use one method to block it, that would violate a different pact, and if he tried to dissolve that pact, that in turn would trigger yet another one. It felt incredibly tenacious to him, like a spiderweb strung over many years only to finally corner its target at a dead end.

  “That fox…! She kept on forming asinine peace treaties even if it meant cutting off her own authority or support divisions—but it was all for this?!”

  It was terrifying that, despite its tenacity, her plan had never revealed even a hint of itself until the trap was sprung. He thought he’d been keeping tabs on Monaka Oyafune’s movements this entire time.

  “What shall we do, sir?” asked his hand-reared assassin Sugitani as the man stood beside him. “This shelter has equipment to physically and politically prevent third parties from entering, but almost all our political defense functions have been disabled by Monaka Oyafune enforcing the equal-authority inspection system. And…”

  “If the cameras are right, we can presume that Oyafune either has Group, not the least of which is Accelerator, under her thumb, or is working jointly with them. Refusing her inspection and holing up inside the shelter won’t lead to peace and security…After all, I fully prepared an assassination on her, and it ended in failure. We should assume they currently have more strategic value than a nuclear weapon.”

  Clad in his thick powered suit, Shiokishi kept folding his hands together nervously. In contrast, Sugitani, who served him, was more self-possessed.

  “…Will they really go through with such a hardball approach, sir? Even if ignoring their official inspection gives them the casus belli they need, attacking this place would lead to a war between General Board members.”

  “…They’ll come,” answered Shiokishi, tapping the foot part of his composite armor on the floor. “This all relates to Dragon, after all. They’re grasping at straws, so they’ll come.”

  “Group aside, that wouldn’t be Monaka Oyafune’s intent, would it?”

  “That woman’s reasons for acting are even more dreadful. I’d thought her declawed until now, but she’s always been the sort of woman who would fight entire countries with her life on the line just because some kid she’d never seen before was crying. There are no political methods that will work. If she’s making her move, the only thing we can do is respond by force.”

  “Shall I capture her daughter, Suama Oyafune?”

  “It might work for Oyafune, but not Group. Does it seem like we have time to do anything we don’t need to?” responded Shiokishi, almost cutting him off, as though he’d run the simulation on that possibility several times. “We’d split our forces to secure a hostage. What if they occupied this shelter in the meantime? We might have a hostage, but it’d be meaningless if they pointed a blade at my own throat. Doing that wouldn’t lead to a foundation for peace and security.”

  …If Shiokishi and his forces got their hands on something more important to the enemy than their lives, then even if they pressed a gun to his head, there would probably be room for negotiation. But this decision to pursue another path was a matter of Shiokishi’s principles. He would never factor the possibility of risking his own life into his plans, not even as a joke.

  Whatever the case was to be, Shiokishi made his decision for meeting it:

  “We fight them here.”

  Sugitani didn’t voice any objections. He would merely obey his master’s decision.

  As though he felt his attitude was peaceful and secure, Shiokishi softened his tone and continued. “All of us. Gather the Group pursuit team and the hostage retrieval team here. Hold off their invasion from within the shelter and, in the meantime, have another unit surround them from the outside as well. We’ll crush them with a pincer attack.”

  “Oyafune has the justification for her actions. What about that, sir?”

  “Yes, we can’t just repel her. Have our intelligence division thoroughly scrape the inspection-request paperwork. They can claim her stamp on the paper is blurry if need be—as long as they can materialize a reason we can’t accept it, we’ll gain the upper hand.”

  Shiokishi’s mind worked quickly within his powered suit. His brain was built to do calculations the fastest when pursuing peace and security.

  “Ulterior motives are hidden within the reasons for action we give one another. After offering a suspicious justification, all that remains is to win or lose through violence. If we win, it will be easier to influence the other official General Board members…and I’ve made that happen many times before. This will be no different.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “It’s time to begin. Whatever the case is, I’ll have no peace of mind until Monaka Oyafune and Group are annihilated.”

  Having come to an area with many similar dome-shaped shelters, Accelerator and the others stopped.

  The shadows grew behind parked cars, building corners, and factory roofs.

  At a glance, the scenery was mundane—but professional combat specialists, geared with special bulletproof equipment and weapons like submachine guns and rifles, had blended in with it.

  Shiokishi’s pawns.

  When Accelerator’s group stopped, they took it as a signal.

  Not of surrender or capitulation.

  No, they took it as a gesture that they would resist until the bitter end.

  Powered suits began to jump off building rooftops, each almost seven meters tall, one after another. Remote-control armored vehicles with arms equipped, often used for bomb disposal, made sudden stops, creating a barricade. Giant, tanklike turrets were attached to the armored cars’ roofs.

  Tsuchimikado chuckled in spite of himself. “Classic Shiokishi, so keen on his munitions. The weapons he gives his chess pieces just ooze with playfulness.”

  “…What do you think?” asked Musujime. “Someone on the General Board would know normal forces won’t work against Accelerator.”
r />   “Haven’t you noticed that?”

  Accelerator, on his crutch, jabbed his jaw toward the sky, toward the very top point of the domed shelter Shiokishi was probably hiding in. There was some kind of basketball-shaped metal sphere on it. It looked almost like an omnidirectional transmission radar used for jamming.

  “That thing interferes with AIM fields. I bet the main part of it takes up a ton of space in the dome. The juvenile reformatories in this city have AIM jammers to prevent people escaping using their abilities, right? It’s a special version for the General Board. It’s probably set for you, too. The scariest thing for a shelter that can stand up against nuclear detonations would be a teleport ability that ignores three-dimensional defenses.”

  Musujime took the military flashlight off her waist. She twirled it in her hand like a baton and frowned. “…I can use the ability itself, but it feels like my aim would be thrown off. I could warp things, but they’re likely to get stuck in the ground.”

  “If this guy is on the General Board, and he’s a weapons and munitions specialist, he’d obviously know my military value. And that these minions could never finish me off,” growled Accelerator, fed up. “But if he can get an AIM-field sample from me during the fight, he might use it to calculate the data for interference waves or something. And if he keeps going, he could wipe out at least Musujime and me by forcing our abilities to go out of control.”

  “What will we do, then?” asked Monaka Oyafune, who had never been directly involved in combat in any way, with a somewhat tense expression.

  “Same thing I always do.”

  Accelerator, in contrast, bent his neck as if to crack it and brought his hand to its side.

  To where the button for his choker electrode was.

  “Use the front door.”

  6

  Shiokishi was famously prudent, a fact that was clear from how he kept himself in a powered suit twenty-four hours a day. His base of operations was highly sturdy, too, of course. The domed facility, about two hundred meters across, blended in with the other test shelters in District 2. People said it could withstand standard strategic weapons.

  However.

  “Not sturdy enough, is it?”

  Accelerator’s murmurs drifted on the wind.

  “When something uses the catchphrase nuke resistant you gotta use power like this.”

  A massive ga-boom rumbled through the air.

  What Accelerator fired had been simple. He’d used one hand to grab a car parked nearby and lobbed it with all his might. The physical laws he took advantage of were nothing special; the tool he used wasn’t made of a unique material, either. Just by adding in his anomaly of vector control did a simple projectile throw end up smashing the shelter.

  “Let’s go,” muttered Accelerator in annoyance before flicking his electrode back off. To save as much battery power as he could, the Level Five proceeded forward with his handmade crutch. No one present could stop him. The nearby defenders had lost consciousness from the impact caused by the shelter’s destruction, the remote-controlled armored cars had been flipped over, and the powered suits’ joints were destroyed.

  Accelerator stepped over the remains of a blasted-away wall section and set foot inside the facility. “Should be ten or twenty minutes before Shiokishi’s forces reorganize. We capture Shiokishi and have him order them to stand down before that happens.”

  “Such a pain,” said Musujime, unamused. “If you can do something this monumental anyway, we might as well crush him to death from a distance right now.”

  Accelerator answered with a tsk. “We kill him after we get info on Dragon out of him.”

  “E-excuse me, but…,” started Oyafune, who had come with them, looking behind her. “Tsuchimikado isn’t following us.”

  “He’s holding them off outside,” said Accelerator. “We didn’t check to make sure they’re all down for the count, and reinforcements could still come later.”

  “It would be bad if he decoded my AIM diffusion field or Accelerator’s, but Mr. Sunglasses doesn’t rely on his ability anyway.”

  Oyafune looked like she wasn’t convinced, but Accelerator and Awaki Musujime ignored her. If he died, then that was that. Group was only held together by their value as a combat team. In Group, you proved that value without saying a word.

  Accelerator’s strike had turned the inside of the dome to mush. The interior was now like a Swiss roll that someone had taken a fork to and mashed up as the group went through it. The normal routes didn’t matter. They proceeded farther and farther inside through gaps in collapsed, crushed, and exploded walls.

  Eventually, they saw several men who looked like Shiokishi’s personal soldiers lying on the ground. The aftermath of Accelerator’s dome-rattling attack had probably knocked them all out.

  “Officially, this is an inspection,” said Accelerator. “Oyafune, it’s your job to have a face-to-face discussion with Shiokishi while we protect you from the flanks.”

  “We’ll keep breaking walls until we get to his hideout, but in the end, you’ll be bearing the brunt of—”

  Before Musujime could finish, something changed.

  All of a sudden, a partition slammed down from the ceiling like a guillotine. It blocked the passage and isolated Accelerator and Musujime from Oyafune.

  “Musujime!!”

  “!!”

  Her ability could freely move people at a distance without regard for three-dimensional restrictions. But as Musujime stared at the partition, she shook her head. “No response. Something else must have happened on the other side. Oyafune isn’t over there.”

  “Useless piece of shit!!” Accelerator almost reached for the electrode switch at his neck, but they heard a new set of footsteps.

  “I request a match.”

  The one who had said that was a man in a suit. He was familiar to Accelerator. It was Shiokishi’s private soldier who’d killed all the former Spark Signal members occupying the District 3 private salon using a large handgun. If he remembered right, the man’s name was Sugitani.

  Sugitani took a box of cigarettes from his suit’s inside pocket, then pulled one of the thin tubes out of it with nothing but his lips. “I do believe I told you I’d be praying to never see each other again.”

  “That’s rich, coming from the ones who set this all up.”

  “I also remember telling you it was your job to see to it that this didn’t come to pass.”

  In order to light the cigarette, Sugitani exchanged the box for a cheap lighter. Contrary to his outfit and mood, it was a clear plastic lighter one would find for sale at a convenience store.

  “Do you know about Dragon?”

  “That?” said Sugitani, bringing the lighter closer to the cigarette in his mouth to light it.

  At least, that was how it looked to Accelerator.

  But the next thing he heard was the soft shhhh of gas escaping.

  The sound came from Sugitani’s lighter, and it knocked Awaki Musujime, who had been standing next to Accelerator, to the ground.

  It was as if she’d been punched.

  There was no scream.

  The strange attack had completely knocked her out.

  It’s not lighter gas … ?

  The device probably encapsulated a gas of a higher pressure. By releasing it all at once, he’d fired a small paralyzing bullet. With his frontal surprise attack a success, the man spat out the cigarette and said to Accelerator, “Modern combat isn’t about how many forces either side controls. It’s about settling things before it gets to that point.”

  “…”

  “Shiokishi’s orders. Musujime was a higher priority to destroy than Accelerator—she can hop freely through walls, whereas you only have high destructive power.”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “A Koga. Or a descendant anyway,” answered Sugitani in a self-deprecating tone. “A band of cowards who have been doing this sort of thing and calling it justice for a very, very long
time.”

  As he spoke, he took out his large handgun.

  But that probably wasn’t his main weapon. Considering his fighting style until now, he wouldn’t use such obvious methods. Or maybe that was what he was going for, and he’d purposely commit to a direct attack using bullets.

  With this kind of enemy, the more someone thought about it, the deeper they sank into the mire.

  As Accelerator watched him closely lest he slip up, Sugitani said, “Oyafune is done for.”

  Accelerator’s eyebrow twitched at that.

  “Two old people from the General Board are now face-to-face, but Shiokishi is wearing his special-order powered suit. It’s too strong for any weapon Oyafune could hide in her clothes to affect it. The woman will die, torn apart by greater force than a heavy construction machine.”

  “I doubt Shiokishi would give the okay if the plan involved his own life and limb.”

  “Think of it as a bit of selfishness on my part. I’m sure Shiokishi is surprised right now, but he should be able to carry out his duty regardless. Someone armed with a powered suit wouldn’t lose to an old woman, after all.”

  Sugitani spoke simply, without sounding especially prideful.

  “If we can eliminate Oyafune of the General Board, we will eliminate all political opposition. He will mobilize all of Academy City’s forces to drive you into a corner, and if they go through the appropriate channels to secure a trump card like Last Order, everything will be over for you.”

  7

  Two of Academy City’s highest executives—two General Board members—were currently meeting face-to-face.

  Between them stood a table, one with no teacups and snacks, constructed instead for honest dialogue. It was wrapped in a quiet air, characteristic of the upper class. Accelerator’s attack had fractured the dome and exposed the starry sky to the two people below, but even that seemed tolerable as an element for such an interior.

  Oyafune and Shiokishi.

  Two elders, both deeply involved in many historical affairs, each offered the other a peaceable smile.