A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 15 Read online

  …In order to correct that impact as much as possible, Block had set off an explosion to clean up after School’s mess. That was why Unabara had gotten caught up in this, too.

  …Block had apparently given up on doing anything about the negative effects from School’s mess and decided to go through with their plans anyway.

  School and Block. This is starting to get complicated…

  Then the brawny woman spoke to the bearlike man. “What about him? Is he all right?”

  “…Oh, our telephone man. No problem there. After all, the powered suits he uses to do his bidding are all occupied in the Avignon cleanup. There isn’t much the telephone man can do now. He’s got it rough, too, eh? Normally he just tosses down orders from above, but if we ever went out of control—well, we’re his responsibility, so he’d be executed for it, wouldn’t he? And the Hound Dogs were all wiped out, including their leader, Amata Kihara, after the 09/30 incident. They won’t get in the way, either.”

  It seems like the same person is giving this organization its orders as Group, thought Unabara. But was this “telephone man” the same person, or was there more than one? Was more than one person giving orders to one organization, or was there one per team? Maybe he pretended there were several, but he was using a voice changer. That was an unknown factor.

  Well, whether it’s one or a bunch, they’re probably not a very big team. And despite their size, they seem strangely flexible.

  The “telephone voice” could come later. Right now, Unabara focused on Block’s conversation, converting his thoughts into those of their group’s composition and such.

  At the very least, it doesn’t look like they’re acting out the intent of some higher Academy City power. The powered suits aren’t around right now, so what are they trying to do?

  Unabara glanced to the side. The men from Block’s ancillary were there. They were clearly assisting in this rebellious act, but…

  No, how many people realize that?

  Even if someone in a position of power handed them a command, saying “It’s an emergency. Meet up at location A,” things like that were commonly lies in the underworld. Nobody took orders at face value with how convoluted everyone’s ulterior motives always got. When push came to shove, at the very end, all anyone could do was base their actions on what they’d personally seen.

  Their intel could be a lie. Block would immediately shoot him if he turned his back right now. If he was to believe one of them, it had to be the latter. That was how he would live through this.

  That’s divine punishment for you, I suppose. Every day they deceive those beneath them. Now their information is less trustworthy because of it.

  “All right,” said the big, bearlike man, appearing to have made up his mind. “No more delays. We’re getting started, too. Who cares about Block? I don’t plan on living my whole life under their thumb.”

  So he said, but he didn’t move right away, instead looking around the room.

  Unabara asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, just wanted to do the usual safety check before that.”

  The bearlike man clapped his large hands twice. At his signal, a gloomy-looking girl moved slowly in front of them.

  “Tetsumou…We’re borrowing your Skill, Polygraph. Make sure we don’t have any traitors, just in case.”

  “All right. My only value is in reading people’s minds, after all.”

  …?! Mitsuki Unabara almost thought the surprise would show on his face.

  He glanced around the room, then pretended to casually take a bottle of hand cream from the business desk. The four members of Block (including him) and the dozen or so in the ancillary group—if he was found out here, he’d be in trouble.

  “Oh, one more thing. Anyone who refuses being read will be labeled a traitor on the spot. I like transparency, after all.”

  After the big man finished talking, the girl he called Tetsumou shook hands with each of her associates in turn. Only a mechanical, inorganic voice came from her lips.

  “Tatsuhiko Saku. Age twenty-eight, Block’s leader. Main job is to monitor coordination with outside agencies cooperating with Academy City.”

  The brawny woman spoke after the big, bearlike man.

  “Megumi Teshio. Age twenty-five. Official member of Block. Anti-Skill roles include— …?!”

  Tetsumou’s face twisted in surprise. For a moment, bloodlust filled the air, but Teshio spoke calmly. “…You don’t need, to be so enthusiastic, to read me. The reason she has no parents, and the cause of her inability to speak, do not make her past, very fun to see.”

  Tetsumou shook her head lightly, then looked toward Unabara next.

  That was when Unabara let the bottle of hand cream slip out of his hand. “…Oh, sorry.”

  The bottle rolled to one of the men in the ancillary. As he reached out for it, the young man came up and handed it to him.

  “Thanks. After you,” prompted Unabara. The young man had just stepped in front of Tetsumou, basically interrupting the order, so Tetsumou held out her hand to him instead. She seemed to want to get this check over with promptly.

  They shook hands, and then it happened.

  “……Gaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh?!”

  All of a sudden, a red flame erupted on the man’s and Tetsumou’s hands. With an explosive boom, blood sprayed. Several fingers flew. Tetsumou held her right hand, but she couldn’t endure the pain and blood loss. She fell to the floor and stopped moving.

  The young man, in a haste, reached for a first-aid kit, but the bearlike man blocked him. “What did you just do?”

  “I don’t know. How should I know?!”

  “I asked you what you did!!”

  “I’m a victim here, too!!”

  Saku said nothing more. He pulled his handgun from his holster, pressed the muzzle against the young man’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.

  “Wait, I didn’t—?!”

  The young man from their ancillary was arrested with surprise…but the gun discharged.

  With a thunderous series of bangs, the man, now covered in blood, fell to the floor.

  The bearlike Saku threw a glare down at the crimson corpse. “…Well, it’s a good thing we found that before we started. Wonder what on earth he did.”

  “Now what? Do we continue?” asked Unabara.

  Saku shook his head. Tetsumou was hurt, and it didn’t look like she was getting back up. “No time to replace her. I’ll get a new checker later.”

  Seemingly uninterested in Tetsumou, he instructed those in their ancillary group to dispose of the body.

  “…” Unabara glanced at the young man unmoving on the floor.

  Just before he’d shaken hands with Tetsumou, he’d handed the bottle of hand cream to Unabara. At the time, there was cream from Unabara’s palm stuck to his hand. And mixed into that cream was a trace amount of liquid explosive.

  Unabara continued to blend the hand cream in his palm. This time, he mixed in a chemical to remove the explosive. They may be enemies, but…No, there’s no time to think about it, he thought, without letting it show on his face.

  Saku, collecting himself, said, “Now, then…Let’s get started for real this time.”

  He sat down in front of a laptop.

  4

  Beep!! went the electronic warning in the RV.

  The Group members had finished their lunches and had been discussing what to investigate next, but their conversation was immediately cut off.

  The hurried voice of the driver, also their operator, came over the onboard speakers. “E-emergency! I’ll send you the data now!!”

  Accelerator and the others looked toward the speakers. A screen was set upon the wall to separate the driver’s seat from the rear living space, and a map of Academy City came up on it.

  “The Virus Storage Center in District 5?”

  “They analyze Academy City–made computer viruses and develop anti-virus software there…Looks like they’re bei
ng hacked,” said Tsuchimikado, his eyes following the scrolling lines of characters.

  Despite finding out about a crime, the thought of notifying Anti-Skill or asking them for help never crossed their minds. Group never got jobs normal people could do themselves. If normal people could solve everything, Group wouldn’t exist.

  Accelerator, in an annoyed tone, said, “Do we really have to go out there? You said there’s a bunch of others like Group, right? Just leave it to them.”

  “They probably have different jobs. We don’t have a guarantee they’ll do anything, and besides, it’s pretty likely one of them is betraying Academy City. We have to be the ones to go.”

  Tsuchimikado continued, “About that Virus Storage Center…Aside from unanalyzed viruses, they have a multitude of experimental ones they made for research agencies in the city. If they end up outside…well, we’d have a panic on our hands.”

  “How far ‘outside’ are we talking, here?” asked Musujime, a meaningful smile on her lips.

  The scientific technology of inside and outside Academy City differed by two or three decades, and that went for the viruses as well. Even if a virus was an old version for city machines, it could be a completely unknown threat for outside machines. And if a brand-new type of virus that Academy City didn’t even have a fix for were to leak outside…

  “Let’s see if I’m remembering this right. Academy City’s security prefers guarding things going out over things coming in, right? There should be some place to do that.”

  “…The external connection terminals.”

  Academy City was cut off from the normal Internet—it had formed its own interior network. Every external line hooked up to the Internet had to go through one of the facilities called “external connection terminals” before connecting.

  “There’re four, right? One at each compass direction,” said Musujime.

  Then they heard static start to come over the in-vehicle speaker. The hard-pressed voice of their driver and operator came over it:

  “Beginning emergency quarantine of the external connection terminals. District 3 northern terminal, quarantined. District 12 eastern terminal, quarantined. District 2, southern terminal, quarantined…?! No response from District 13, western terminal! Cannot confirm quarantine!!”

  “Ha-ha!” burst out Accelerator at the report. “Predictable once again!!”

  Tsuchimikado grinned tenaciously as well. “Odds are ten to one they’re luring us there. I don’t know who they are, but they must really want us to turn ’em into scrap.”

  The RV started off toward the district in question, District 13.

  Their driver’s uneasy voice continued over the speaker. “Wh-what shall we do about the attempted assassination of Monaka Oyafune?”

  “Put it on the back burner.”

  “Actually, School might be doing that, too,” pointed out Musujime.

  “Also…What about Mr. Unabara?”

  “Never cared about that guy anyway.”

  5

  In a back alley, Shiage Hamazura flinched away from the electronic beeping.

  The source of the noise was the portable device in Shizuri Mugino’s pocket.

  “Hey, are we just ignoring that?”

  “I’m telling you, it’s fine. Someone else will deal with it, so we don’t have to.”

  Nevertheless, the device continued beeping incessantly. Mugino shivered at its awful persistence, then finally snatched the thing and shouted into it.

  “Quit your noise, you little shit!! Can’t you tell I’m not gonna answer you?!”

  “You little…! We’re not calling you up because we wanted to!!”

  She wasn’t on speakerphone, but it was loud enough for it to ring clearly in the nearby Hamazura’s ears. The voice belonged to a lady—the mystery woman always giving instructions to Item.

  “There’s an emergency at the Virus Storage Center in District 5. I want you all to move out and fix the problem!”

  “Aw, why?”

  “Don’t ‘Aw, why’ me, you little…! Seriously, those powered suits sure are busy cleaning up after Avignon and looking for some Terra of the Left guy’s corpse. You should be working, too!”

  “We’re busy. Can we do this later?”

  Mugino sounded incredibly fed up, but the person on the phone again cried out, “You little…!” Then, “Just so you know, it’s Item’s job to get rid of troublemakers in Academy City. Do your damn jobs!”

  “You say that, but…”

  “And you! You said you’d killed School’s official sniper already! You said they wouldn’t be sniping Monaka Oyafune! You little…! Then why the hell did things come to this?! I thought it was all over, so I reported that the danger had subsided…I’m the one seriously pissed off here, so shape up!!”

  The voice sounded like someone telling off a waitress who got her order wrong.

  “You’ve sure done it now, damn it…,” the voice continued. “I’ll ask another post to deal with the Virus Storage Center. In the meantime, I want a report on the attempted sniping. Double time that, at least!”

  “Sorry. Can’t do that.”

  “What the hell? What do you mean?!”

  “Because we’re about to slaughter all the shitheads in School right now.”

  The yapping female voice stopped abruptly for a moment. “Um, could I put in a request? Could you put, like, ten bullets in at least one of them?”

  “…Um, on an unrelated note, this is when our supervisor—i.e., you—is supposed to be stopping us.”

  “Don’t give me your sass, you peon. I’ve hated those School bastards for a long time. And anything that I have to worry about should just get wiped off the face of the planet!!”

  With a giant, warlord-like Gah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, the call ended.

  Mugino put her portable terminal back in her pocket and made a face that questioned whether someone like that was really the right person to lead an organization. She glanced around. “By the way, Hamazura, can we really get an assistant?”

  “Everything just goes right through you…Anyway, I’ll manage on that end,” he replied. “More importantly…”

  Hamazura walked up to a passenger car parked on the road. He attached a fiberscope device to his cell phone’s lower port, ran the light cable, more slender than a soumen noodle, into the keyhole, then began looking for where the pin was. Using the data about the keyhole’s interior that was coming up on his cell phone screen in conjunction with several wires, he unlocked the door easily.

  After climbing into the driver’s seat, he studied the engine keyhole under the steering wheel.

  “Huh. What a handy skill,” said Mugino with genuine admiration as she got into the passenger seat.

  Kinuhata, Frenda, and Takitsubo piled themselves into the rear seat. The car was a family four-door, like most taxis, but with five people inside, it felt cramped.

  “Where to?”

  “Kirigaoka Girls’ Academy, in District 18. The Particle Physics Institute is nearby. It was the only place during the Oyafune commotion to be thrown into chaos, with the people there getting called up for emergency security and to transport equipment. Because of that, their guard is pretty much down. A perfectly simple criminal scheme.”

  “Only that one place? Seems really easy.”

  “Excuse me, I forgot to say. There was only one place beneficial to them out of several.”

  “Ah,” replied Hamazura effortlessly. “The Particle Physics Institute? Even if that was School’s real target, what are they after?”

  “Who knows? It would have to be something more important than Monaka Oyafune’s life, right? Anyway, time for our little whoop-ass tour.”

  “Right,” mumbled Hamazura as he easily started the engine.

  Takitsubo spoke up from the back seat. “Hamazura, I didn’t know you had a license.”

  “The card isn’t what you need. It’s the skill,” answered Hamazura casually, smoothly driving off in the automatic car.

/>   6

  The RV Accelerator and the others were riding in charged into District 7.

  Attentive to the clock, Tsuchimikado said, “…About ten minutes until we get to District 13.”

  The deal was that they couldn’t quarantine the western terminal, but if they went to the site and directly disconnected the large-capacity cable, they could prevent access for now. The important people, stubborn about their budgets, didn’t like this kind of solution, but the situation called for drastic measures.

  But then, yet another alarm beep rang.

  Tsuchimikado responded harshly, “What now?!”

  “Hacking confirmed in District 23 as well! The Aerospace Engineering Institute’s satellite control center is under electronic attack!!”

  “Satellite?” repeated Accelerator, frowning. The ones Academy City had launched were spy satellites pretending to be weather satellites. If you used them, you could have a complete view of all the city and its surrounding areas. “Hey, things are getting interesting after all. The one satellite, Altair II—that thing had a large-bore ground-attack laser on board, didn’t it?”

  “This is bad,” said Musujime. “The Virus Storage Center is still being hacked, too, right?”

  “The countermeasure team is probably running around like a chicken with its head cut off,” mused Tsuchimikado. “Means this is a decoy so they can’t bring their full force to bear, but that doesn’t mean we can leave the Virus Storage Center alone, either. Even if it is a decoy, it doesn’t change how much damage it could do.”

  “Do you think this is School, too?”

  “No idea. It could be different group.”

  “Wh-what will we do? Which one should we head for?!”

  “Ha-ha. That’s a stupid question,” grunted Accelerator, kicking the RV’s side door with the bottom of his foot. He had already turned on his electrode, and the bundle of force, its vector altered, sent the metal door flying and bouncing wildly off the road.

  Tsuchimikado, in spite of himself, shouted, “Accelerator!!”