A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 19 Page 6

  Along the wall.

  Terrorists, beaten and battered but still barely breathing, lay there. And facing those terrorists was a person with white hair and a crutch. He was facing away from the boy. It wasn’t visible what sort of expression this person was making.

  …That was the feeling the boy got.

  But maybe that wasn’t the reality.

  After all, a moment later, the white-haired person had disappeared into thin air. Without any announcement, as though two frames of film had been cut together wrong, the white-haired person was no longer anywhere to be found.

  The boy stared at the empty space he’d occupied for some time.

  A villainous piece of shit.

  He thought about who that person could be. The boy had been hoping for a hero, but all he had instead was that unflinching answer.

  9

  “Nice job out there. Looks like you have a pretty heroic streak, huh?”

  When Awaki Musujime spoke to him, Accelerator very nearly pulled the trigger on her.

  He’d disappeared so suddenly, of course, because he’d retreated using her Move Point. Now that he’d eliminated Spark Signal, the only things to be done were for the Hula Hoop employees to unlock the doors and elevators and quickly release the children onto the surface. There was no more need for a villain.

  Accelerator took a look around.

  They were in the basement of the air force building they’d originally arrived at before his assault. On the spacious floor, polished to a shine like a high-class department store, stood not only Musujime, but also Tsuchimikado and Unabara.

  “One thing is bugging me,” said Accelerator. “It’s about what those shithead terrorists were demanding from the higher-ups.”

  Tsuchimikado’s eyebrow arched with a twitch. “…I decided to look into it while you were storming the castle, but their guard is even tighter than I expected. All we know is that it must be something the higher-ups really aren’t happy about—”

  “I don’t want to hear about your incompetence. Shut up and listen to me, you half-wit,” spat Accelerator, getting back on topic. “While I was turning those assholes down there into meatballs, I heard a few of their screechings. I think they were crying because they wouldn’t be able to achieve their goal at this rate.”

  “…Are you saying they leaked what their demands were as well?” prompted Unabara.

  Accelerator was silent for a moment.

  Eventually, he answered, “…Dragon.”

  The simple six-letter word filled the air with tension.

  Even in the hidden nanodevice network Underline, that information was so secret only its name existed. Even Accelerator and the others, who lived in the heart of darkness, didn’t know what it was—but perhaps the act of searching for it would be the link they needed to oppose the leadership of the all-powerful Academy City. The term had enough weight and meaning behind it to warrant such speculation.

  Accelerator, Motoharu Tsuchimikado, Awaki Musujime, Mitsuki Unabara.

  They’d formed a temporary allied front, each searching for what Dragon was, each for their own reasons.

  However—

  Apparently, they weren’t the only ones chasing the Dragon.

  Then, as if offering proof, Accelerator said:

  “‘Disclose information on Dragon at once.’…Apparently, that was the only thing those shithead terrorists were demanding. Meaning the higher-ups managed to trick us into destroying a clue without knowing it.”

  INTERLUDE ONE

  Academy City, District 1.

  This district, lined with nothing but facilities presiding over judicature and administration, had none of the vitality of the other normal districts. Residential areas were absent as a matter of course, but restaurants were also few and far between. In exchange for condensing the mechanisms required to maintain a smoothly running megacity into one area, this district held only the bare minimum needed to function as a human settlement.

  It was a sprawling, highly mechanical landscape, and yet, mixed within that zone was one extremely peculiar building:

  The General Board office building.

  Considering how it occupied an entire skyscraper, it went beyond “office building.” Combined with the fact that its upkeep costs were 100 percent paid for by taxes, the term palace might have been more appropriate. In any case, it was an extremely extravagant building, and it had been prepared for but one of the twelve leaders of Academy City.

  That man’s name was Thomas Platinaburg.

  Thomas—the building’s owner—was currently standing in a vast, gorgeous room within his tower that resembled the audience chambers that could be found often in RPG castles. The space, used for meetings with visitors, took up one whole floor.

  His surroundings were currently absent of subordinates, however. Given his position, it wouldn’t be strange if Thomas brought countless bodyguards with him, but he purposely distanced others from this expansive room. And right now, this official General Board member was, in fact, meeting with a guest.

  A guest he’d called personally from outside the city.

  A guest who was a sniper for hire.

  She was a tall woman. Fair-skinned, with long blond hair. Her beauty could have easily earned her a spot to shine under stage lights, rather than stand on muddy battlefields. But at her feet, as she sat on the sofa, was a bag large enough to fit an entire person, most likely containing her “tool of the trade.”

  She was relatively famous in the industry—though Thomas didn’t know whether being famous was an honor for their particular line of work.

  “How is Mr. Sunazara doing, Miss Stephanie Gorgeouspalace?”

  Thomas named two people.

  Stephanie was the sniper’s name. And Sunazara was the name of the man that sniper had looked up to as a master.

  The woman nodded straightforwardly in response. “Things are going well. He hasn’t woken up yet, though. Still, it’s all possible because of the Academy City life support equipment you lent us, and so you have my thanks. Without it, he would have been gone by now.”

  “No, no. It pains me quite a lot as well. It seems we had a minor disagreement and some other minor issues, but your friend was still harmed by one of Academy City’s people.”

  Once before, five secret organizations—Group, Item, Block, Member, and School—had fought, and several had fallen apart. Chimitsu Sunazara had been hired by one of them and subsequently lost to someone from a different organization. The bomb he fell prey to had blasted an entire building apart, leaving him heavily wounded and comatose.

  When Thomas Platinaburg had heard about the news, he had secretly retrieved Chimitsu Sunazara and sent him and a life support–equipped bed out of the city to Stephanie.

  Not out of pure kindness, of course. It was to indebt her to him, to bring him business that would be to his benefit.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, who would you like me to target?”

  “Oh, yes. I will prepare the documents separately, but…You may know his name already. Academy City’s number one—the Level Five known as Accelerator.”

  This request wasn’t made as a representative of Academy City. On the contrary, it was an extremely personal ambition.

  On September 30, Accelerator, who had engaged an Amata Kihara–led Hound Dog force in battle, raided Thomas Platinaburg’s personal residence while searching for information and even fired a shotgun at Thomas himself.

  And this here was his act of retaliation, pure and simple.

  Of course, it was retaliation in two ways—both simple revenge on an emotional front and a clever way of disciplining his subordinates who couldn’t keep things under control.

  “Can you do it?”

  “If you tell me to.”

  Her answer was what he’d expected. He’d had the “consideration” to distance his subordinates from the actual talks, and above all, Thomas had prepared a trump card.

  “When firing on the target, there is no need
to worry about collateral damage. No matter who you involve in the process, we will cover it up…Yes, and if you wish to fill Saiai Kinuhata and the other former members of Item with lead the way they did to Mr. Sunazara, that’s be fine by me.”

  “Well, well. This on top of everything you’ve already done for Mr. Sunazara. Yes, Academy City’s technology is truly a wonderful thing. I have never seen healing devices quite like that.”

  “Ha-ha. There’s more than just good technology in this city, but I’m proud when it finds peaceful uses.”

  “Yes, quite…It is incredible that you managed to place a small transmitter inside Mr. Sunazara’s wounded body. It seems slightly different from a basic nanodevice, however. Still, one cannot quite find something so miniaturized inside a body anywhere else.”

  A moment later.

  A chill permeated the room’s air, all the way to its corners.

  Except…it wasn’t the air. Not on close inspection.

  It was just Thomas Platinaburg himself, perceiving the world around him again, this time through the filter of terror.

  “Please, wait.”

  Thomas held out a hand to stop her.

  “I’m sure you’re well aware of how vital the technology that went into that life support machine is. It may be downgraded to an extent for use on the outside, but it still has incredible value as Academy City tech. We wanted to deliver Chimitsu Sunazara to you as swiftly and safely as possible. However, we cannot have our life support technology leaking to external actors. That was why we put that in him. Without it, we wouldn’t have been able to get Mr. Sunazara, sleeping in his bed, to you this quickly.”

  “I see.”

  At this time, Thomas Platinaburg failed to notice something. No one could reasonably blame him, but it was a fatal oversight.

  After all…

  Stephanie Gorgeouspalace never normally spoke so politely.

  And the other fact…

  …was that purposely changing her tone like this meant she was suppressing her emotions to an extreme degree.

  “Well then, aside from the grain-sized transmitter, he’s been fitted with devices that give off shocks, so you could stop his four major organs at any time with one signal…Is that also part of the basic safety precautions?”

  A shock of another kind shot through Thomas’s body.

  An unpleasant sweat dripped down his skin, all over his body.

  But it was already too late.

  The next thing he knew, Stephanie, who had been sitting on the couch, quickly blurred and appeared directly in front of him. She reached out with her right hand, and with the feather pen she’d gripped in it, stabbed it straight into Thomas’s gut.

  Thomas didn’t feel the pain of his flesh tearing.

  There was no time for that.

  “I fear I must return the favor.”

  When Stephanie pulled the feather pen out, there was a small transceiver in her hand. What had she buried in the wound? And the transceiver’s frequency—what was it supposed to send a signal to? When Thomas came up with a guess, he felt the fear of death so clearly it paralyzed his most basic sensation of pain.

  “Your poor tricks were a mistake. If you had been up-front about returning Mr. Sunazara and making this request of me, I would have been glad to be your pawn.”

  “…Wa…Wait…”

  Thomas Platinaburg, face trembling, glared at the assassin…and more specifically, at her thumb on the transceiver. Abandoning the polite speech he’d been using for show, he made his final attempt at negotiation in a ragged voice.

  “…If you…cause a mess here…it could get in the way of your revenge…If you would be up-front…about letting me help you…you could easily…avenge Sunazara…”

  “Oh, yes, I forgot to mention one thing,” answered Stephanie immediately, without seeming to have particularly given it much thought.

  Almost like she was cutting the conversation itself off.

  “My revenge is against all of Academy City.”

  An instant later, she pressed the transceiver button.

  The transmitter buried in Thomas’s wound responded quickly, executing a special electric shock. It swiftly stopped four of his organs, which put an end to him as well.

  His final moments were one long scream.

  Without so much as a glance to the fallen corpse, Stephanie pocketed the transceiver, her expression annoyed at the triviality.

  She began to hear the pattering of footsteps nearby.

  Thomas’s black-suited bodyguards had probably heard his screams and were finally coming. Judging from the number of people she noticed on her way to this reception room, she estimated there would be around two hundred of them.

  But Stephanie’s expression was utterly unconcerned. Humming to herself, she unhitched the fasteners of the giant bag at her feet, then withdrew her “tool of the trade.”

  It was no sniper rifle.

  Her weapon of choice was a light automatic shotgun.

  She could carry it around, with effort, but it was a special firearm, based on the high rate of fire of a machine gun and normally used while mounted on a tripod, except its ammunition was purely shotgun rounds. A custom gun, designed just for Stephanie, with enough destructive power that firing at point-blank range would transform an armored car into a crunched-up aluminum can.

  The reason Stephanie, who nominally worked as a sniper, had brought a direct weapon like that was very simple.

  “Mr. Sunazara took potshots from afar.”

  At last, mixing in a somehow nostalgic tone, Stephanie Gorgeouspalace finally returned to her usual voice as she spoke to herself.

  “But isn’t it simpler to get up close and start firing like crazy?”

  Bam!!

  The massive doors crashed inward.

  At the same time, a calamitous storm thundered out from her shotgun.

  Her revenge had begun.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Simple Yet Complex Point

  V.S._Calamity .

  1

  “I see.”

  The voice of one of the General Board members, Shiokishi, drifted into the camper.

  That didn’t mean such a prominent city figure had personally visited the vehicle Accelerator and the others were aboard. No, it was simply a live-video call, displayed on a screen.

  “Well, I’m glad you could resolve the Hula Hoop issue without much damage … But still, I checked the battle report you sent, and I have to say that you’re all incredibly high spec. As always,” the man continued, his tone half appalled.

  For once, Accelerator and the others were in agreement: This was the last person they wanted to hear that from.

  Pictured on the large screen was not a soft old man who would look good in a tuxedo.

  Well, maybe he was like that on the inside, but at a glance, you wouldn’t be able to tell, because…

  He was wearing a powered suit.

  It increased the user’s physical abilities with highly elastic wires and powerful motors, which in turn was covered by thick armor. The stocky mech, better described as weapon than armor, was making Shiokishi’s elegant chair creak.

  “Is that what’s on your mind?”

  They didn’t know who of the four he’d spoken to, but Shiokishi’s tone was casual. He didn’t appear unhappy, even though his subordinates looked at him the way someone might regard a crazed person.

  “Calmly think it over for a second and you’ll understand. This world we live in has no shortage of things that can end a person’s life. People often say ‘I can’t believe that happened to him’ or ‘He wasn’t a person anyone would hate’ … But that’s absurd. Humans die when their time comes, whether or not there’s an apparent reason. And all the more true for someone in my position. I’m of the opinion that anyone who wants to escape the grasp of sudden misfortune has no choice but to be on guard at all times.”

  With his heavily armored hand, he rapped on the caramel-brown table in front of him. />
  “That’s why I excuse myself from meeting with you all in person, instead using video feeds and the like. Why let others know where I am? One can never be too careful.”

  “What’re you so scared of?” spat Accelerator. “I bet you’re just holed up in some nuke shelter.”

  “Are you saying I should stop worrying if that’s true? Perish the thought. We’re in Academy City. Let’s see—Musujime, was it?—the thickness of the walls doesn’t mean much if you have an ability like hers. Even now, I’m scared someone might throw a bomb inside this room.”

  “…You may be on the General Board as well, but you seem quite different from others on it, for instance, Monaka Oyafune.”

  The one who said that was Mitsuki Unabara. It was probably because he’d been in contact with said board member during the Hula Hoop incident.

  In contrast to Shiokishi, Oyafune started by trusting others, then trying to advance matters through compromise and cooperation—a rare sight in the General Board, which was mostly a collection of blackhearted men and women of authority— But…

  “No, that’s simply how she defends herself.”

  …Shiokishi saw it differently.

  “It’s rather like the Self-Defense Forces. She makes an appeal to her harmlessness on the basis that she doesn’t possess any apparent offensive capability, denying others any excuse to attack her. It’s a high-level technique in its own right, and one I certainly can’t imitate … In the past, though, she used to be quite the aggressive negotiator. Her daughter must be the main reason that she …

  “Still, even with this, I feel uneasy,” noted Shiokishi, wrapping his hands around his stumpy powered suit. “I would be slightly more reassured if there were cyborg technology that let me change out pieces of my very body instead of having to equip a machine like this. But it seems there are many problems on that front as well. Understandable, too—precision equipment starts to die after around five years, and having major surgery each time to exchange artificial organs would be too much of a strain. It would be less taxing to take those artificial organs and consolidate them all into a life support machine, put that into a powered suit, then wear it on the outside. And while cyborgs still have bodies with limited capacity, you can add as much machinery to a powered suit as needed. I will admit that as a development of the hospital bed and the portable oxygen tank, it is nice, but if you asked me, I—”