A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 15 Page 16
“Hamazuraaa. Couldn’t you please stop making this difficult and hand over the Crystals and Takitsubo already? I won’t be satisfied until I’ve killed every single person in School.”
As he ran, Hamazura rejected her words. “I refuse. I’m not letting Takitsubo use the Crystals anymore. She’s at her limit!”
“So what? If Takitsubo dies, we can just get another esper to replace her. She’s probably the only one who can search for people by their involuntary diffusion fields, but I don’t mind having an esper who does it differently. As long as we know where the School bastards are, we don’t have any problem.”
Hamazura made it to the area where the remnants of grapes were temporarily gathered once the alcohol had been wrung out. But Mugino’s Meltdown reduced that place to a mountain of debris in mere seconds.
As he hid behind a heap of hot metal, Hamazura said, “…Sorry, but I can’t go with you.”
“Eh?”
“You can’t beat that Kakine guy. You’ve already run away twice—once at the Particle Physics Institute, and again during the last battle.”
He thought he heard her grating her teeth.
But he continued anyway. “Now that I faced him personally, I know. It’s not about you being fourth place and him being second. You’d lose to him in a different way. What good is it going to do for you now, finding out where he is?”
The people in School were perverted in their own way, but they at least let people farther down the scale escape. Even when their enemy, Takitsubo, exhausted her strength, they didn’t move in for the kill.
Meanwhile, Shizuri Mugino was baring her fangs at even her allies, just because she didn’t like it. She didn’t seem stronger than them. However overwhelming her power, that impression didn’t change.
“Being able to win or not isn’t the problem. Even if you risked your life and won, all anyone would get out of it is self-satisfaction. I can’t let Takitsubo go along with something that petty. You’d squander her life away on that?”
“Hah. Ha-ha!!”
Even when she heard Shiage Hamazura’s answer, Mugino just laughed it off. She slowly followed him as he changed cover, from rubble to rubble, to get away from her.
“How did she train you, Hamazura? Did her cute face make you do it? Or was it because she was nice to you even though you’re a Level Zero?”
When Hamazura stayed silent, Mugino’s smile deepened.
“There’s a word for you: an idiot. Is everyone who says nice things to you a good person, and everything who says harsh things to you a bad guy?! You talk like you’re the center of the world!!”
“…I know that.”
Hamazura didn’t deny it.
If Rikou Takitsubo hadn’t said those nice things to him, he wouldn’t have changed his mind.
“But she said she didn’t want me to die to some calculating bastard like you. She’s capable of saying things like that, you know! A girl like her deserves to be happy. Neither of us is fit to stand above others. If a nice idiot doesn’t get to the top and lead us all to a new kind of society, this shithole of a world will never be saved!!”
He didn’t get an answer.
Instead, with a roar, light rays so white it was like a nuclear explosion blew away both Hamazura and the pile of metal he was hiding behind. The blast sent him careening back, but suddenly, he felt the presence of someone right along his back.
Before he turned around, he noticed something felt off in his right ear.
Shizuri Mugino had stuck a screwdriver into it.
“Hey, wait. It looks like you have a screw loose in your head.”
Slshh…The screwdriver’s tip slowly went into his ear.
“Want me to screw it back in for you?”
He couldn’t move. If he moved his head at all, it would damage the inside of his ear and he’d start bleeding everywhere. As Mugino maintained their positions, she brought her empty left hand in front of him and held out her palm.
She was telling him to give her the Crystals.
Hamazura reached into his pocket.
The clear case with the Crystals was inside.
Damn it…
He clenched his teeth, shut his eyes, and made up his mind.
Whirl!!
He disregarded the screwdriver and whipped around.
9
Shiage Hamazura ignored the screwdriver in his ear and twisted his body.
“Wha—?”
Even Mugino seemed a little surprised.
The screwdriver chewed up the inside of his ear. Unimaginably intense pain exploded in his head, and sounds on his right became muted like he had put in an earplug. On top of that, for some reason, half his vision seemed faintly red.
He ignored it all and took the Crystal case out of his pocket.
It was a small, rectangular, clear case, like the tubing inside a mechanical pencil.
He squeezed it, and using its corner, shoved it lengthways into the clinging Mugino’s face.
It crushed her right eye in an instant, like a pirate captain.
“Guh, ooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”
Mugino wobbled backward, grasping at her red, dripping face with her hands.
Hamazura watched quietly and smiled. “A Level Five’s eye for a Level Zero’s ear…Bargain shopping, am I right?”
When Mugino heard that, her face distorted in anger. “Hamazuraaaaa!!”
Bam!! A flash of light burst from her.
Her left arm, from hand to elbow, blew away as though it had melted. The pure-white light it created aimed at Hamazura’s face. She was trying to fire her weapon without taking precise aim first.
“…!!”
Hamazura swung his head out of the way a moment before.
It was total coincidence that he dodged an overwhelming attack like that.
Mugino reached out with her blood-covered right hand, shoved Hamazura to the ground—he had lost his balance, and was unsteady—and climbed on top of him. As she did, the case of Crystals left his hand and clattered across the floor. Mugino wasn’t paying attention to that anymore.
Glaring at Hamazura through her remaining left eye, she screamed, overtaken with fury. “It doesn’t matter!! It doesn’t fucking matter!! An ear? An eye?! You can break off my limbs and crush my heart and it wouldn’t change the fact that I’m stronger than you! This is what a Level Five is. I am the fourth-ranked Meltdown!! Don’t get full of yourself, bastard. I could kill a hundred of you fucking Level Zeroes without even moving a finger!!”
As spittle flew from her mouth, Mugino grabbed Hamazura’s neck with her right hand. If she activated her ability like this, she’d definitely annihilate his head.
Hamazura smiled as she held his neck like a can of juice.
The strength left his body as though he had given up on something.
“…Hey, I’m no idiot. I figured this would happen,” he said, listening to Mugino’s ragged breathing. “You’re the kind of person who can’t be satisfied unless she can beat a video game without dying. The slightest mistake, and you fly into a rage—and even if you see the ending, you’re not happy.”
“Eh?”
“When people like that make a tiny mistake, they’ll find another goal so they can write it off. If you can’t win without dying, you’ll get a new high score and be satisfied…You never needed to obsess over some boring Level Zero. You should have just used your Level Five shit and sniped me from far away.”
He grinned.
“What I’m saying is that wasting time to come here and declare victory was a fatal opening!”
Shka!!
It was the sound of Shiage Hamazura stretching his arm, and the ladies’ gun up his sleeve sliding out.
“Wha—?”
Before Mugino could say anything, Hamazura pulled the trigger.
Bang, bang, bam!! With a series of dry sounds, several holes opened up in her upper body. Hamazura kept on firing until he ran out of bullets, and even after that, his in
dex finger continued to move for a while.
“…”
Mugino looked at the blood all over her, surprised.
Eventually, she rolled limply to the side, fell to the floor, and stopped moving.
“Easy win, Level Five,” said Hamazura casually, dragging his own beat-up body to its feet. He picked up the case of Crystals and put it back in his pocket.
He probably couldn’t have beaten her if he’d taken his gun out right away. She would have easily used her ability to protect herself. He needed to be stingy about it until the very last moment. Even when she put the screwdriver in his ear, he hadn’t taken it out—to lull her into a false sense of security, that he had no actual weapons.
Ritoku Komaba, Skill-Out’s leader, had once locked out Academy City’s strongest Level Five’s ability and gotten within inches of taking his life. Hamazura had done the same kind of thing.
He pushed his pinkie into his wounded right ear.
The eardrum didn’t seem damaged. His finger came out with a clump of blood, and some of his hearing returned.
“…Sheesh. Bargain shopping indeed,” he grumbled, about to leave.
“…ma…zura…”
Then a voice, as though from the depths of hell, gave Hamazura a terrible chill up his spine.
He slowly turned around.
“Hamazuraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!”
Despite the dark-red holes in her body, a left arm missing from the elbow down, and a right eye crushed into mush, she was just shooting to her feet. An all-too-unhealthy white light surrounded her right hand. She was probably looping her high-speed wave-particle cannon, which used an immense number of electron beams. One hit from that would wipe Hamazura clear off the map.
The handgun in his right hand had no ammo left.
He wouldn’t be relying on it.
“Ohh…Oooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”
He flung the gun aside and charged straight into Mugino’s zone.
Their arms intersected.
The slightest hesitation would have created an opening.
The slightest opening would have ensured his death.
But Shiage Hamazura had made up his mind. He simply stepped forcefully in, gripped his fist tight as a boulder, stared straight into the face of the enemy he had to defeat, and let loose the strongest, fastest attack he could.
A loud slam thundered through the room.
The energy left Shizuri Mugino’s body; she crumpled to her knees, then to the floor. The terrible white light in her hand melted into the air and vanished. There was no danger there.
Hamazura picked up the gun he’d thrown away, then looked down at the unmoving Mugino and took his cell phone out of his pocket. He called up Yomikawa, who had given him her number when she’d put him in custody, saying something about being there if he wanted to talk.
“It’s Hamazura. Don’t need Anti-Skill support anymore,” he said, walking through the demolished building, heading for the exit.
“Yeah. I ended it all.”
10
Shiage Hamazura left the District 3 vegetable ethanol plant. Several people from Item’s ancillary were standing by to erase all the evidence, but nobody stopped him. From the looks of things, he’d just crushed the fourth-ranked Level Five in Academy City. Nobody would want to foolishly lay a hand on him.
“Yo.”
A figure standing a short distance away from the building saw him and spoke up.
“Hanzou?”
Delinquent members with their bases in District 7 had nothing to do with the celebrity-filled District 3. It couldn’t have been a coincidence he was there. Had he tapped into their radio or something?
“Heard all about it, Hamazura.”
“What, and how much?”
“You beat a Level Five on your own, right?”
Some information source he’s got, thought Hamazura with a sigh, then he remembered something. “It came in handy, by the way.”
“It?”
“The girl gun. If you hadn’t given it to me, I’d be dead.”
“Hah. If you took down a Level Five with that tiny little gun, that makes you a real beast.” Hanzou took out a cigarette, then handed a second one to Hamazura. “Well, isn’t that a nice little present? With all this under your belt, nobody would turn you down. Not that many people actually hate you anyway.”
“…”
“Your old position’s available, Hamazura. A bunch of others are waiting for you, too.”
“Sorry,” said Hamazura, lighting the cigarette and grinning. “I found something else to do.”
“Pfft. Now I’m jealous.”
Nevertheless, Hanzou didn’t persist. The fact that Hamazura, of all people, had stood up to the monster that was Shizuri Mugino all on his own—he could sense something different about his state of mind.
“Whatever. I’ll round up Skill-Out for the time being.”
“Thanks.”
“But don’t forget about us. We’ll save you a seat. Come on back when you’re done.”
They talked, they laughed, and they bumped fists, before each headed for his own destination.
INTERLUDE FOUR
After holing up in a hotel room for about an hour, the girl in the dress went back to School’s hideout. Teitoku Kakine, Level Five, was in there.
“Huh? Where’d you go, exactly?”
“Just making a little pocket change. Academics are the worst, you know. They calculate a base rate and don’t bother tipping.”
“Hmm. One hour—sounds like a rousing time.”
“I wasn’t doing anything shameful. We got a hotel room, sure, but we just flipped through magazines and talked a bit.”
“…Not having sex?”
“No! And I didn’t need to. It depends on the person, but my ‘customers’ don’t generally come looking for something like that. Do you know why rich people go to stores and give money to women? It’s not because they have some sexual desires they want to fulfill. They just want to form a personal relationship by themselves outside of work.”
“Strange world,” said Kakine.
The girl in the dress seemed half-exasperated. “You know workaholics, right? Their jobs are so much fun for them that they wreck their families because of it. For them, relationships they can build with money are like salvation. Money is the result of their work. They use it to buy friendship and love, and then get the satisfaction that they made personal relationships on their own, or really are fit for this society. I’m just relieving some of the complex they feel by having money.”
“Right,” said Kakine, his voice perfectly uninterested.
The girl in the dress lost the will to explain. “Oh, right,” she said. “Looks like Item, the ones we were after, are out of business. Infighting. Shizuri Mugino, number four, went down, and now they can’t keep their group together.”
“Huh? Infighting— So Mugino escaped my attack…But wait, who took her out? Frenda ran away after making a deal with us, and we crushed Saiai Kinuhata. Rikou Takitsubo doesn’t have any direct fighting power, so…”
He stopped. “No…”
“Yes. If it wasn’t an official member, it’s most likely someone from their ancillary group.”
They both thought of the Level Zero who had come back up into the elevator lobby to protect Rikou Takitsubo. Kakine whistled in praise.
The girl stared at him. “Anyway, how’s the analysis on the Tweezers going?”
Teitoku Kakine wore a mechanical glove on his right hand, and two clear nails were equipped to its index and middle fingers. Plus, though you couldn’t see it with the naked eye; the nails were filled with silicon chunks absorbed from the air. Although they were chunks, they were only seventy nanometers across—you’d have to use an electron microscope to observe them.
“I always had doubts,” said Kakine, clicking the nails together. “That jackass Aleister always knows too much about what we’re doing. He’s not just watchi
ng through the surveillance cameras, security robots, or satellites. I was always confused about how he got his information.”
“…”
“Turns out, it’s nothing much. He just has about fifty million invisible machines floating around the city he pulls intel from. It’s no wonder he knows the place inside and out.”
It was called the Underline.
It took the form of a spherical body, with three wiry cilia extending from each side. It didn’t walk along the ground to move—it was closer to drifting through the air.
These ultra-small machines rode on convection currents in the air to generate their own power, pseudo-perpetually gathering information and using a straight electron beam to send internally produced quantum signals to and from the Underline, creating a sort of network. The Underline was the only place information entered the Windowless Building, and naturally, the little things would contain several pieces of information powerful enough to shake the world.
“But even knowing the Underline exists, it’s really hard to find machines you’d need an electron microscope for. And even if I did catch them, I’d have no way to get information out of them. After all, you’d have to pry open a nano-sized device and hook up to its circuitry. On top of that, I hear the quantum signals inside them would get changed if an outside source carelessly observed it.”
That was where the Tweezers came in.
However small the nanodevices were, the Tweezers would have no problems, since they were developed to grab elementary particles themselves. They would make it possible to extract information from the Underline.
The girl in the dress looked at Kakine and asked, “What did the analysis show?”
“What we thought it would,” answered Kakine. “It won’t work. There’s a lot of data stored in the Underline, but I don’t think this by itself will put us on an equal playing field with Aleister. We’ll need one last push, in addition to this data.”
“Then we’re going to do it?”
“…Yeah. We’ll kill Academy City’s number one. That’s the only way. If we want to have an advantage negotiating with Aleister, a spare won’t cut it. Instead, I’ll have to become a main.”