A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 15

by Kazuma Kamachi

  Hundreds of meters in front of her, the helicopters had begun their attack on the mercenaries scaling the outer wall as well.

  Whole groups blasted apart like popped balloons. It was so terrible that she could see the crimson splashes even from her distance. Other mercenaries who were safe were pushed by the force of the blasts and starting falling off. They were strafing the ones who could counterattack first.

  At this rate, they’d kill everyone.

  Megumi Teshio shouted over to Tatsuhiko Saku, who was some distance away. “The mercenaries, should give up!! They may be moving, as a large group, but from above, they’re nothing but a giant target!!”

  “There’s five thousand of them! How hard do you think we worked for this single moment?! Are you telling us to let it go to waste?!”

  “They mistakenly think, they’ve been betrayed, anyway. The ones, on the other side of the wall, won’t be coming now. We’re getting, the ones who fell inside, and leaving!!”

  “Yamate, you bastard…I’ll kill you, I swear it!!” bellowed Saku from his thick throat.

  “Ha-ha…I should have expected as much from lethal weapons that cost two hundred fifty billion yen each…,” muttered Unabara to himself, having crawled out of the sewers and behind some rubble. He was the one who’d done it, but the scene was still spine-chilling.

  He looked into the distance and saw several groups hoisting anti-air missiles on their shoulders and firing them.

  But the Hexawings fired things that looked like softballs at the missiles. Iron sand exploded from them, and a high-tension current went through. An entire area, twenty meters square, turned into an electrical current zone, the missiles flying into it exploded of their own accord.

  In response to the attack, the Hexawings fired a barrage of anti-surface missiles, transforming the entire plane into a sea of crimson flames.

  For now, it looks like I prevented the mercenaries’ entrance as much as I could, but…

  Unabara pressed his back to a giant concrete chunk and covered his face with his hands.

  He ripped away the protective skin talisman he’d used to create the false countenance of Yamate and pulled his Mitsuki Unabara face back on. A moment later, his entire physique and voice, not just his face, had switched to a different person.

  He didn’t need the Block’s face anymore.

  The problem is how to survive this. Those Hexawings’ arithmetic processors probably won’t object to labeling me an enemy, too.

  For now, the Hexawings’ objective was the elimination of the soldiers scaling the outer wall.

  If he stayed hidden until they left, the helicopters would leave on their own, but…

  A brat-rat-rat-rat-rat sound splitting the air squeezed Unabara’s heart.

  He looked out from behind the rubble and saw a Hexawing taking aim at him.

  “I suppose it won’t be…that easy!!” he shouted, no sooner than jumping out and swinging his obsidian knife.

  It reflected Venus’s light, triggered the Spear of Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, and broke apart the Hexawing in a surprise attack.

  Another Hexawing, notified of what happened, pointed one of its wing-mounted machine guns at him. It was positioned so that its flank was facing him, but that didn’t pose an issue. Its six-jointed guns aimed at Unabara.

  The Spear of Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli could break any object apart.

  However, it couldn’t aim for multiple targets at once.

  “Argh!!”

  He quickly tried to dive behind cover, but the helicopter was far, far faster.

  The Hexawings he’d called here were trying to blow him to bits.

  So this is the end…!!

  Unabara brought up his obsidian knife, knowing it was futile, but before he could do anything—

  Bang!!

  A white-haired Level Five dropped down hard on top of the unmanned helicopter. He grabbed the fast-spinning rotors and stopped them. The Hexawing couldn’t deal with such an insane action, and it fell to the ground and exploded everywhere.

  “He” came walking slowly out of the flames.

  The tension finally left Mitsuki Unabara’s body. “Accelerator…”

  “Heard something was goin’ on near the outer wall, so I came. Man, what a shit show,” said Accelerator, sounding bored, returning his electrode switch to normal and leaning on his cane. “Looks like Tsuchimikado and Musujime cleaned things up at the external connection terminal, and I thought busting their satellite antenna would put an end to things. And now control is crying there’s some invaders making a mess of things on the outskirts.”

  “Ha-ha. I suppose you realized they were using you, too.”

  “You didn’t call the Hexawings for no reason, yeah? Where’s Block?”

  “They got away,” said Unabara, wiping his sweat. “I think they brought about a hundred of the mercenaries from outside.”

  “From outside…Damn it, that’s what the satellite thing was for? Block, Member, mercenaries…Too many shitheads running around,” grumbled Accelerator, realizing he’d been played. “Still, didn’t think we’d let people break in. What a bunch of useless idiots.”

  “To be fair, they said they had about five thousand at first.”

  “Here’s a neat little expression. A miss is as good as a mile.”

  A Hexawing sliced through the sky, interrupting him.

  This time, though, it wasn’t aiming at them.

  After a general scan of the area, the last remaining helicopter began to fly back toward District 23.

  “Looks like they’re done cleaning up.”

  “They probably don’t want their allies breaking another one,” said Unabara, shrugging. “They apparently cost two hundred fifty billion each.”

  6

  Motoharu Tsuchimikado, Accelerator, Awaki Musujime, and Mitsuki Unabara all met up in the District 11 warehouse town. Mitsuki Unabara, who had been out of the loop until now, asked Tsuchimikado, “What’s an ‘external connection terminal’?”

  “Just some building. The paperwork would have been a pain, and they wouldn’t answer us, so Musujime and I blew up their core. Anyway, there’s three more terminals, so there shouldn’t be any issues with the access situation.”

  Musujime, who had been with Tsuchimikado, asked Unabara, “Should I take this to mean Block were the masterminds behind these incidents? I think I remember School being the ones behind the attempted Monaka Oyafune assassination.”

  “It doesn’t seem like Block and School were directly cooperating,” he replied. “The two organizations were acting on their own, causing those incidents independently. Although, they probably had some contact due to Management’s introductions and such.”

  “Shit. Member’s been crawling around, too. This is getting out of hand.”

  As Tsuchimikado listened to Unabara and Accelerator, he moved his gaze elsewhere.

  Blood and flesh were sprayed around the outer wall, but survivors still remained. Mercenaries unable to die, unable to run—and not recovered by Block, either.

  “All right, question time,” said Tsuchimikado bluntly. “What were you five thousand mercenaries going to attack?”

  “Wh-what do you mean?”

  “Five thousand may sound like a lot, but it’s not enough to take down Academy City. Tell us your business here, mercenary. What was this plan of yours that needed so many people?”

  “…” The mercenary looked at the four members of Group in turn. He seemed to be mentally at a loss. He hesitated, looking at this disaster, wondering if his Block allies had failed or if they’d been planning on betraying them all along. Eventually, he opened his mouth and spoke.

  “…School District 10.”

  “District 10?”

  With the cheapest land prices in the city, it was home to all sorts of unsavory facilities, like abandoned animal testing sites and nuclear power-related laboratories.

  The mercenary continued, “We planned to attack the juvenile reformatory there.”


  “!!” Awaki Musujime grabbed the mercenary’s collar. “Why attack a place like that…? Trying to save some VIP criminals, were you?!”

  Accelerator, staring at Musujime being driven by impatience, took the time to think.

  Academy City’s juvenile reformatory was a facility for holding criminals who had used abilities during their crime. Nobody knew the details, but he’d heard stories that they had anti-esper measures there. That meant a regular military combat force would have a much higher success rate for an assault.

  The mercenary Musujime was holding by the collar eventually said, “Our target…was Move Point.”

  Her eyebrow twitched.

  The mercenary didn’t seem to have any idea who the girl in front of him was.

  “We heard…that Move Point’s allies are being held there. We wanted to capture them…and use them to negotiate with Move Point.”

  Why did they bring up that name in particular? thought Musujime to herself. She soon realized the answer. “The guide…to the Windowless Building where Aleister is…”

  “Yeah. The guide’s identity is top secret. They’re directly linked to Aleister, after all. But Block found out that Move Point was the guide. So we decided to investigate her, then get resources we could use to bargain.”

  “What did you want to bargain with the guide for?” asked Tsuchimikado.

  “For info on how goods get inside—the Windowless Building, that is,” the mercenary answered. “Even nukes can’t destroy it from the outside, but what about from the inside? They say it has no entrance or exit, but they have to be bringing goods in and out somehow. We were going to use that and blow the Windowless Building apart from within.”

  “Blow it apart?”

  “Block said they had procured multi-synchronous bombs. You’re all tactical weapons made by Academy City, right?”

  Multi-synchronous bombs were large-scale bombs where you systematically set up multiple high explosives. While normal tactical weapons tried to make ever more massive blasts that would spread out farther, multi-synchronous bombs aimed to focus the high-energy blasts on a single, extremely small target and destroy it thoroughly. They were devised to blow up enemy fortresses in urban areas without causing civilian casualties.

  “We had to stop the worldwide chaos. I’m a mercenary by trade, so I understand: The world is on the brink. Strife is going to start all over soon. Wars have to be stopped before they happen.”

  The mercenary looked at each of the faces in Group in turn.

  “It would have been too much to ask for Move Point herself to join us. Anyone you can’t trust—well, you can never trust them in the future, either. We wouldn’t pursue that very far. If the info is right about Move Point’s ability, things would have gone much easier with her cooperation, but it’s one thing we couldn’t do anything about. We assumed we wouldn’t get her cooperation to begin with—”

  “You’re right about that,” interrupted Musujime. “By the way, do you know who’s standing in front of you right now?”

  “What?” said the mercenary, frowning—before his face went beet-red a moment later. “N-no, that can’t be, that’s not…!!”

  Before he could finish speaking, there were almost ten iron nail-like objects pierced through his body.

  He lost consciousness because of the shock from the pain, but he still seemed to be alive. Musujime let go of the ragged mercenary and stood there, head down, clenching her teeth.

  That which she wanted to protect most—that which she had to protect no matter the cost—was being stolen away at this very moment. In the face of that, the other three were silent. Each carried something similar, so they said nothing.

  Aleister was probably using some unknown tech to watch all this from on high. And though he watched, he wouldn’t want to intervene. He was, without a doubt, watching and laughing at the little people floundering in the miniature garden he’d created.

  “Let’s go.”

  Eventually, Tsuchimikado prompted the group onward.

  Everything to come wouldn’t be a Group problem but an Awaki Musujime problem. But nobody was willing to point that out. The situation had changed from each Group individual having to overcome the hardships that came with their own assignments by themselves, like it had been for Unabara when he was within Block’s ranks.

  “To District 10. Block’s still got almost a hundred mercs with ’em. We don’t know what they’re armed with, but one thing’s certain: We can’t be optimistic about this.”

  7

  Accelerator and the rest of Group used a transport ambulance to get out of District 11. Their destination: a certain juvenile reformatory in District 10.

  “This is the only juvenile reformatory in Academy City. Looks like it’s split half and half, with a boys’ block and a girls’ block,” said Tsuchimikado, pressing a few buttons on his laptop. “Academy City doesn’t consider treason a crime right now. That means Musujime’s allies can’t be legally sentenced. They wouldn’t put people like that into one of the normal houses.”

  “Which means…there must be a hidden room?” Unabara looked at Musujime, but she didn’t seem to know.

  “What a pain,” muttered Accelerator. “Don’t we have a map of the place? If we can’t hack their data, including hidden passages from their facility, can’t we just steal it from the construction company’s computer?”

  “It’s not a normal building. I don’t think that sort of data would still be at the company.”

  Tsuchimikado looked at the screen.

  It showed several data points on the reformatory, but the map itself was designated secret. They wouldn’t be able to touch it from here.

  Accelerator, who was also peering at the screen, noticed something. “This place doesn’t have a fire office.” He looked over the data again. “There wouldn’t be many fires in the facility, so they left it out to cut costs. But that means if there was a fire, the fire station would act. They would have gotten a rough map beforehand to be able to move cleanly through that maze.”

  Tsuchimikado directed his hacking attempt elsewhere.

  He got results quickly.

  “Here we go. Part of the secret area is blotted out, but if we assume there’s a hidden staircase, then construction-wise, it has to be here. Beyond that is the underground block for traitors.”

  Judging from how there was only one predictable location for the hidden stairs, the traitors’ block must not have been separated between male and female. They were all individual cells, with no common spaces at all.

  “Technically, it is hidden,” said Musujime. “From Block, too, who are attacking the place.”

  “Hah. Group and Block have equal authority. Anything we can get our hands on is free game for them, too, right? You’re the one who said our secrecy levels in the data banks were the same, idiot.”

  Musujime glared at Accelerator, but he didn’t budge.

  “Tsuchimikado,” he said instead, “what about security?”

  “The guards are using MPS-79s—an old powered-suit model. Anti-esper equipment, but we can’t expect much from them. They’re only using self-defense tools to stop out-of-control espers, but Block has real lethal weapons. The mercenaries left in District 11 had the whole nine yards of outside equipment—knives, guns, rifles, blasting powder, you name it—but they probably have Block’s brand-new stuff now. From what Unabara said, they’ve still got almost a hundred mercs with them. We don’t know how many people Block has, or their abilities. What’s important is whether or not they have lethal abilities. Powered suits are really just big, rugged targets, after all.”

  “Not that,” interrupted Accelerator casually. “That reformatory holds brutal espers, right? What about their anti-abilities setup?”

  “Mostly IDF jammers—around twenty-five.”

  “So, what? We can’t use our abilities inside?”

  “No, it just ruins your focus or purposely leaves thoughts easy for psychometer espers to track. Your abilit
ies will be somewhat weaker, but it won’t completely erase them. Those prison guards are apparently in one of the three professions most hated by insurance companies. It means they can’t fully neutralize everything, even though the facility is so large in scale.

  “But,” warned Tsuchimikado, “using your abilities carelessly could make them go out of control. Especially ones that need complex calculations. It’s too dangerous for you and Musujime. Be careful. That would be a stupid way to kill yourself.”

  8

  When the ambulance stopped in front of the juvenile reformatory in School District 10, Accelerator, Motoharu Tsuchimikado, Mitsuki Unabara, and Awaki Musujime burst out of its back door.

  From there, they couldn’t spy the actual reformatory. Walls almost fifteen meters high were in the way. But even from where they stood, the sickening scent of smoke reached their noses.

  “…!!”

  Musujime grated her teeth and immediately tried to dash in through the already destroyed gate, but Accelerator, leaning on his modern-design cane, frowned.

  “Does this seem odd to anyone else?”

  “You noticed, too?” said Tsuchimikado slowly, pulling a military pistol from his inside pocket. “No noise. If Block is in combat with the reformatory guards, we should be able to hear gunfire, at least.”

  The four passed through the gate, which also served as a checkpoint. Beyond it was a roundabout for police wagons. As they stepped toward the edge of the asphalt surface, twenty meters long per side, Accelerator felt a slight pain around his temples.

  “…The IDF jammers, eh?”

  He looked up and saw a net of thin wires drawn over the entire grounds, from one fifteen-meter-high wall to another. Were they emitting special EM waves or something?

  They were probably causing espers to interfere with their own abilities by throwing their involuntary diffusion fields into chaos. He’d never heard of Anti-Skill using them, so they likely needed immense electricity or processing instruments, making them usable only in limited spaces like this one.