A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 8 (16 page)
…I-I-I-I-I have to! I need to do something…!!
She looked at the one blocking her in the middle of the runway-like road and nodded to herself again. She needed to do something. But that was the ultimate question. She needed to do something.
Accelerator was complaining, wondering why Awaki Musujime had to be the one to show up here, but Musujime wanted to take his words and turn them right back at him.
This was more than just a little out of place. This incident was so minor—this feast was nowhere near lavish enough for him to show up for a trivial esper like her. It was like bombing an entire nation just to stop a children’s fight.
Musujime’s thoughts spun out of control.
This wasn’t the same as the skill difference between amateurs and professionals playing sports against one another. It was more like a human playing tug-of-war with a jetliner. You didn’t need to explain in detail which one would win. The jetliner didn’t have to do anything, and the human wouldn’t be able to move a centimeter.
It was over.
It was all over.
Awaki Musujime’s face twisted up at the revelation…
But then…
“…I know.”
Her face, with distorted muscles, slowly began returning to normal like a ball of string unraveling.
“I know all about it! You don’t have your calculation abilities right now. That power you once had is gone! You can’t use it! You’re not the strongest esper anymore, or even close!!” she shouted as though elated by her triumph.
Accelerator, in the darkness, sighed. “You’re pathetic.” He paused, waiting for the wind to blow past. “If you’re actually serious, then man, you’re so pathetic I almost want to give you a hug.”
“Ha-ha! I can see right through your bluff! I was always near that person. I know a little about what’s really going on in Academy City. Accelerator, you
lost
your namesake’s ability on August thirty-first. Right? If you didn’t, then you wouldn’t just be standing there! Why don’t you attack me? It’s not that you won’t—you
can’t
. You thought you could beat me by using your old title as a shield?”
Her jeering declaration only caused the white one to narrow his eyes.
Musujime took it as him making fun of her, and one of her eyes twitched. “…!! How about you say something?! Don’t just stand there; it creeps me the hell out!!” she shouted, while at the same time harboring an odd doubt deep down.
Something was wrong. It was like he didn’t match the traits of the Level Five in the data.
“You really are pathetic! Listen up, ’cause I’m only gonna tell you this once.” The person spread his arms slowly to either side in the darkness. “I did take some brain damage that day. As you can see by looking at my face, I’ve gotta outsource all my calculations with these electrodes now. If I go out of range of those damn clones’ waves, they can’t help me do the calculations. I don’t even know if I’ve got
half
my old power left. I wouldn’t last fifteen minutes in real combat with how fucking terrible this thing’s battery life is.
“But—” said Accelerator, pausing.
“—just because I’ve gotten weaker doesn’t mean you got any stronger, now, does it?”
His smile appeared to splatter across his face.
He slammed the foot of his crutch into the ground with a
thud!!
The firm ground shook as though being pressed from underneath. Accelerator crouched. Cracks stretched out in the asphalt road, each with him at its origin. The nearby buildings creaked, and all the glass windows, unable to withstand the change in the buildings’ structure, shattered, scattering shards of glass everywhere.
No…Impossible…?!
Musujime looked up. The shards were raining down from every building along the main road. She couldn’t flee using Move Point. They were covering too wide an area. Fleeing into a building wouldn’t be a good plan, either. The windows were broken because the buildings’ construction had been distorted. She didn’t think the furniture inside was in the same place anymore. In the worst-case scenario, she could finish herself off by using Move Point and jumping right into a collapsed wall.
That means to get away…I need to go up!!
She grabbed the luggage and immediately used Move Point to get herself into the air. She went past the rain of glass and into the night sky dozens of meters above the ground. Simultaneously, she was struck by an overwhelming nausea, but she put all her effort into quelling that. She worked her mind furiously—she wasn’t used to this, but she needed to jump again to a different building top before she started to fall…
And then her mind went blank.
The equations she’d been desperately constructing in her mind all blew away.
“Aha-gya-ha! Thank you
very much
for that low-angle shot you’re givin’ me!!”
Ka-boom!!
came an explosion. Accelerator stomped on the broken asphalt again and blasted off into the sky like a rocket. He hadn’t only changed the vector of the force his legs exerted. Behind him, there were four powerful, whirlwind-like bursts of air connected to him.
Oddly, to Musujime, it made him look like an angel ascending into heaven.
An angel who had fallen into the pit of the earth, utterly disgraced and defiled, baring his fangs toward Paradise above.
Accelerator tore into the layer of glass rain between them. Then, with a terrible cracking sound, he broke through it all at once. There wasn’t a wound left on his body as he launched straight toward Musujime like a bullet.
His fist was already clenched.
He crushed in his grip the walking stick supporting him and it fell away from him like a multistage rocket. The demonic fist came for Awaki Musujime’s face with the speed and weight of his whole body behind it.
“…………………………………………………………………………………………???!!!”
There was no way for her to remain calm in this situation.
She’d renounced her calculations, and now she abruptly moved the luggage between them to protect herself. Accelerator’s fist, however, plunged through her measly defenses, shattering them. The luggage’s outer case broke apart, its antishock padding flew away, and the contents, rigidly fixed inside, met their end as a mess of parts and fragments, scattering before Musujime’s eyes like a blizzard of cherry blossom petals.
“Sorry, but from here on, it’s a one-way road.” The corners of the esper’s lips turned up. “Meaning you can’t come in! So tuck your damn tail between your legs and crawl back to wherever it is you came from!!”
Musujime’s throat let out a strange breath of air.
The tightly balled fist, ignoring the mere luggage, collided with her face at a ridiculous speed.
Crunch!!
Awaki Musujime was sent flying even higher up at an angle, high into the sky. She flew toward the edge of a building roof, coming at it from diagonally underneath, then she hit the metal fence meant to prevent people from falling off of it. Several of the fence’s braces pulled out of their roots like a forcefully kicked soccer ball breaking through a net. Finally, she came to a stop.
Accelerator, having transferred all his momentum to her, stopped dead in the air. Then, drawn by gravity, he began to fall back down to the dark ground beneath.
He didn’t look at the ground.
As he fell, he slowly looked up at the building Musujime had collided with, and said under his breath, “Yeah, if this is all I got, then maybe I’ve gotta retire the name of Academy City’s strongest.” Quietly, he closed his eyes. “But still, if it means brats like you don’t get to use it, I’ll keep on using the title, you fucking trash.”
The night wind carried away his unheard words as he fell toward the ground.
Their Lives
One_Place, One_Scene.
The next day…
After Touma Kamijou called the school and said he’d be late that morning, he visited a certain hospital. Not for treatment. This time, he really didn’t get hurt at all. He was going to visit Kuroko Shirai.
And now he was standing around in a vending-machine-corner-slash-café, a kind of lounge meant for conversation, a little bit away from the hospital room. There was a bright red hand mark on his cheek. When he’d opened the door to visit, Shirai had been changing.
Now that he’d been forcefully expelled from the room, he speculated that she’d probably take a little bit longer to change, so he decided instead to drag the offended Index beside him over to visit Little Misaka’s room, which was in the same hospital.
Little Misaka was currently in another room. She had already been undergoing treatment, and yesterday’s physical activity had apparently placed her in a good bit of danger. At the moment she was floating in a reinforced glass capsule with clear liquid inside, like from some sci-fi movie, the kind that you would never see at a regular hospital.
She seemed to be conscious inside the capsule, and she bowed to Kamijou expressionlessly when she saw him. However, she was entirely naked save for the electrodes attached to her body with white tape, which caused Index to start chomping on the back of his head on the spot. (Little Misaka didn’t care at all.)
And she bit him pretty hard, too—hard enough that the black cat curled up in the pet cage in the corner of the room (specially designed not to let dander or germs outside it) summoned its fight-or-flight instincts. It began raging about, unnaturally scared, as though a huge earthquake were on its way. It was one of those “when it rains, it pours” sort of days.
In any case.
After Kamijou and Index had been chased out of the two hospital rooms, they ended up back in the lounge.
“…What rotten luck. Good old Kamijou is already unlucky on a daily basis, but this is a rotten luck fever (whose chances fluctuate)! Oh, God, if the Nine Gates of bad luck came to me today, I wouldn’t be surprised!!”
Beaten up by a couple different people now, Kamijou looked exhausted. He took his bag with the fruit pastry from Kuromitsu House that went for 1,400 yen a pop (while not even being that big) in one hand, as he thought about Index, next to him, possibly just eating the entire bag whole—but now, she would at least have the common sense not to devour a gift for someone at the hospital—still, though, it was worrying.
Index, though, was actually more interested in the lights for the vending machine’s lottery roulette than the confectionery. “So I don’t know anything about that tree or the rem-whatever, but after you acted all cool and went,
Then I’ll go take care of the other half now
, you didn’t get anything out of it, did you…?”
“Urk…Well, I went to the route Shirai said she’d run away using. And then I found the entire street corner with all the windows smashed, and wreckage everywhere, and all the contents in a billion pieces, and there was a real roughed-up girl hanging on the roof…I don’t know who did it, but I want to thank them for it.”
“Touma, Touma. I don’t usually use this word, but you’re worthless!”
“Hooray, I knew you would say that, damn it!! I want to know who the hell butted in and stole my prey then left without saying anything! How stupid do they need to make themselves look before they’re satisfied?!”
“…I think that honestly one of you is enough, Touma.”
Another pained shout of
Hooray!
made its way through the morning hospital halls.
“What the hell’s goin’ on out there? Some idiot tryin’ to have a festival in the hallways or what?”
Accelerator scowled at the voices he was hearing from the other side of the wall. The voice sounded somehow familiar, but it was probably just his imagination. The room was for a single person, but it wasn’t very big, and Accelerator pulled the covers on the bed in the middle of it back over him. You wouldn’t have been able to tell with how strangely long his hair had been growing, how quickly his wounds had been closing, and how high he’d been jumping into the night sky, but he was so wounded any normal person wouldn’t have even been able to stand.
There was a table set up across the bed. It was about where a pedestrian walkway would be sitting over a road. It was for eating meals while in bed, but at the moment, there was a girl who looked ten at first glance sprawled out on it, flapping her feet to and fro. Once, she’d been in a terrible state—completely naked save for a blanket—but today she was wearing a children’s sky blue camisole. It was one of the articles of clothing the woman in the jersey had brought for her.
“So apparently Yomikawa went
outside
and beat up an organization called the Asociación de Cienia or something, says Misaka says Misaka, announcing the news she got over the network. It seems like Ao Amai had been in contact with them, too, so that’s why he knew so much about the Tree Diagram, says Misaka says Misaka with a touch of overflowing realism.”
“’Zat so…?”
“So then Yomikawa went home with those shadows under her eyes like she’d been up all night working and stuff, says Misaka says Misaka, calmly remembering that age really can be revealed by how your skin looks and stuff…Wait, you seem waaay less into things than you usually are, you know, says Misaka says Misaka, looking at you sideways.”
“…I just got back this morning and I’m sleepy, so can we do this later?”
“Ohhh! I think maybe it would be really bad if you were sleepy, says Misaka says Misaka, transforming into alarm clock Misaka! Come on, it’s morning, and it’ll be afternoon in two hours, says Misaka says Misaka, flapping her feet around and encouraging you to wake the heck up before your sleepiness gets the better of you like some spoiled brat!!”
“…”
Did she have some experience where my sleeping did something bad to her or something?
Accelerator, dubious, pulled the covers over him and plugged his ears. He could employ his power to a certain extent by using the electrodes and having the Misaka Network do it, but that normally didn’t get allotted to any more than general speech and calculation functions and the absolute minimum reflection needed, such as for ultraviolet rays. Otherwise it would just drain the prototype’s battery.
“You must really have it nice, you stupid brat. I nearly died getting out of this hospital with my brain like a milkshake, and I did all that work until this morning cleaning up afterward, and meanwhile you’re snoring away in bed with your damn air conditioner somehow getting results—guh, urgh. I implore you not to take away my language processing capabilities based on reasons originating in religious beliefs, please!!” shouted Accelerator angrily, his words losing their normal shape midway through.
The Misaka Network had suspended its proxy calculations for Accelerator’s speech center.
In other words, he was trying to say, “Don’t take away my ability to talk just because it’s convenient for you.”
“Misaka doesn’t do your proxy calculations for you to hurl abusive language at her, retorts Misaka retorts Misaka cutely—wait,
bfft!
Why are you wrapping Misaka up in that blanket, asks Misaka asks Misaka, sensing a little bit of danger!!”
Meanwhile, in the room next door…
“N-n-n-n-n-now, n-n-n-now, Big Sister. It is finally time for the moment of supreme bliss where you feed me, Kuroko Shirai, apple slices cut into little bunny rabbits! Heh-heh, heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!!”
“Be quiet, shut up, how are you this freaking energetic after what happened yesterday, Kuroko?! —Wait, you don’t actually have the energy?! If you’re forcing yourself to crawl across the bed like that with sheer willpower, you’re really gonna kill yourself!!”
Kuroko Shirai, massively wounded, grinned happily and tried to get closer to her “big sister,” but Mikoto Misaka managed to push her back into bed and tuck her in.
“Ah, ahh…This sensation, of Big Sister’s hands violently shoving me into bed…I-I suppose I really was correct for getting involved in that life-threatening melee combat. The world—the whole world is shining so brightly right now!”
“Do you not understand what the doctors told you?! Complete, quiet bed rest!!”
“If you want me to settle down, then please, feed me those bunny apple slices. Come to think of it, wouldn’t that gentleman who came in here before prefer a more family-oriented girl?”
“…R-really? I mean…Hey, Kuroko, do you really think so?”
“There you go reacting so innocently to something I totally said at random, Big Sister! I knew it! I knew it—it was that jerk who came in the room while I was changing!! You were with him!! That little punk!!”
Mikoto stood dumbfounded at Shirai’s wondrous vitality.
How is she thrashing about so vigorously when she’s so badly hurt, anyway?
It was enough to make her almost forget why she’d come to visit her in the first place. And she felt a pang of regret at not giving the certain young man who walked in on them a firm palm strike (with a moderate
biri biri
attached) in place of Shirai, who couldn’t move like she wanted to with her injuries. The after-incident report she’d gotten of Awaki Musujime being treated as a study-abroad student at her own school, Kirigaoka Girls’ Academy, didn’t seem at all important to her anymore.
The conversation’s rhythm came to an abrupt halt.
There was a short silence.
The warm air in the room started to cool down.
It took more strength than she thought it would to reopen the closed window.
Mikoto knew exactly why.
There were several stab wounds on her underclassman’s body.
After all was said and done, she’d gotten
another
person mixed up in this.
First the Sisters, then that boy, and now her simple underclassman.
“You know, I…,” began Shirai from the bed, interrupting her thoughts. Mikoto gave her a slightly confused look, and Shirai smiled. “I suppose that I realize it now. The place you were that night—it was the world you’re fighting in. Nothing about it made the least bit of sense to me. And after you came running up to me at the end, I stopped thinking a few times, as absurd as that sounds.” She laughed just a little bit and loosened slightly. “I don’t think I can stand there as I am now. I forced myself into that world once, and this is how it turned out.”
“Kuroko…” Mikoto’s expression betrayed her pain at the thought—but a new one immediately hid it. She was the sort to hide that kind of feeling. Shirai knew that was exactly the reason Mikoto was so fragile, though.
“Big Sister, if you are thinking that it is your fault for getting me mixed up in this incident, I’m afraid you are entirely mistaken.”
“Huh?”
“What did you expect? My weakness is my own fault. What do you have to do with that, Big Sister? I would much rather you not make fun of me. I am able to carry out my own responsibilities by myself. Making you shoulder those burdens rips my pride to pieces,” she said dully. “I would much rather you smile, Big Sister. Your underclassman failed but still returned safely—you should be laughing uproariously at me, pointing and asking me how I screwed up so badly. With that sort of amusing memory to nourish me, I would be able to stand back up again.”
And one more thing
, she added to herself.
This only goes for me
as I am now
. Not a hair on Kuroko Shirai’s head wishes to stop where she is. I will not make you wait long, Big Sister. When Kuroko has a destination in mind, she gets there fast.
Now that she knew how good it felt here, she could resolve herself to return from any battlefield.
Quietly, so that the girl at her side would never know.
This was how Kuroko Shirai learned where she stood.
And how she realized there was a world her hands couldn’t reach.
However, that was why she wouldn’t give up—she would reach her hands higher and higher.
But not at all because she wanted to feel that she was above anyone.
Only because she wanted to protect the one place she was in right now.