Volume 13, 4: End of an Unwinnable Battle — A.A.A.(3/3)
“A Bishop’s Ring,” muttered Mikoto as she lent him her shoulder. “Ten thousand tons of space dust pours down on the earth every day. It’s proven by the new layer measuring only a few millimeters that accumulates on the relatively unchanging ocean bottom every century. A Bishop’s Ring is a blurry ring of light that appears around the sun when an especially large amount of space dust is present.”
“What? Why would it be appearing now?”
“I don’t know. There’s more than one reason for a Bishop’s Ring to appear. For example, when a large portion of the debris storm circling the earth slams into the atmosphere, during a rocket or shuttle accident, or when a comet approaches and scatters a bunch of space dust-...”
Mikoto trailed off and her body tensed.
“When a comet approaches....”
Kamijou realized a moment later.
“Do you mean the Arrowhead Comet!?”
Part 9
There was no water or air there.
It was said outer space was filled with as-yet-unseen dark matter or small dust that would eventually form new astronomical bodies, but they were not dense enough to propagate sound or voices.
Nevertheless...
“Ho ho.”
He had been drenched in scorching molten rock that easily exceeded one thousand degrees, he had been exposed to the extremely high voltages of the plasma flow filling a mass driver, he had experienced the overwhelming air friction from an escape velocity of over Mach 20, and he had left the atmosphere with nothing to protect him.
The mummy’s entire body was wrapped in tremendous heat, but there was no oxygen for that heat to create fire. Melting the ice on the comet’s surface scattered quite a few chemical elements around, but it was still not the same as on the earth’s surface. That was why the High Priest only glowed brightly like a lightbulb’s filament.
“Uho hoi☆”
And his joking voice overturned those assumptions.
The lack of air kept him from bursting into flames, yet his voice freely propagated through that airless space.
He could control dirt.
The Magic God known as the High Priest sat in Zen meditation atop a one hundred meter mass of frozen rock shaped something like a rugby ball.
A Magic God could handle being thrown into space.
The Arrowhead Comet was mostly made of ice and dust. He had manipulated those particles like iron sand to take control of the comet. He had decided to use anything available to him to return, so he had hitched a ride back to Earth on that star.
Hadn’t Nephthys said that the stars could be plucked from the sky so easily?
(Now, what will you do? What will you do when you see me approaching after you put so much into that attack, Kamijou Touma!? Can I trust that you will raise your na?ve ideals against me!!!???)
The Arrowhead Comet left the supercomputer’s predictions and clearly altered its trajectory.
It turned toward Earth.
He gave no thought to a proper approach angle. He did not care if the comet itself burst at extremely high altitude. The mummy himself could force his way through the thick atmosphere with no planning whatsoever.
As soon as he entered the atmosphere and was surrounded by oxygen, his incredible amount of heat would set him on fire. As soon as he crashed into District 23 at top speed, a giant dome shaped explosion would fill the entirety of Academy City. Still, that was just more entertainment.
He intended for this to reach beyond what Kamijou Touma’s Imagine Breaker could handle.
But because of that...
“Ho hohhhhh!! It wells up inside you because it is impossible! It is only worth sending your way because it is an unreasonable demand! Kamijou Touma! Mankind!! This isn’t the extent of your possibilities, is it!? Now show me the hidden power that has allowed you to keep history running until this day!!!!!”
Still in his Zen pose, the High Priest spread his arms as if to welcome the blue planet with his entire body.
This was the exact opposite of comforting or calming.
The heat was so great that the mummy’s body had more melted than burned and it began to fuse with the one hundred meter comet. He controlled all the dust to indirectly command the hunk of ice. He himself became a sinister star.
The intense friction carved away at the comet’s surface.
At some point, it gained a giant face, arms, legs, and a torso, so it almost looked like a mummy.
The sinister glowing spear stabbed straight down toward the blue planet.
“Now come, Imagine Breaker!! No, the One who Purifies Gods and Slays Demons!! Show me your resolve by literally leaving everything up to your right haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnddddddddddddddddddddddd!!”
Part 10
There was nothing they could do.
They could only watch as the orange light ignored its trajectory and dropped straight down.
Its speed may have been Mach 10, Mach 20, or even Mach 30.
Mikoto could only fire an arcade coin at three times the speed of sound, so this was beyond anything she could handle. She could only wait to be crushed and turned into a portion of a giant crater.
But...
“...”
Kamijou had been unsteady on his feet after the previous battle, but she felt him moving slightly while still resting on her shoulder. He silently reached up as if to grab the giant falling comet with his right hand.
She could not tell what meaning there was in that.
The boy himself probably could not explain what was hidden there.
“You...?”
She asked a pure question.
She was answered by an ominous cracking sound. It came from the body of the boy who was right next to her yet seemed impossibly far away.
—It honestly doesn’t matter to me who the hero is.
After everything that had happened, it was only now that Mikoto truly felt fear.
—As long as everything’s been resolved, I couldn’t ask for anything more.
She felt fear rising from the pit of her stomach.
—So... So Misaka, this didn’t need a hero.
All the while, she heard the intermittent sound of cracks running through something.
—It ended without losing anyone and that’s all that matters.
Specifically, it came from the boy’s right arm.
And...
And...
And...
Part 11
“Sensei,” called a well-mannered voice.
It came from Kihara Yuiitsu, a woman in a cheap suit and a lab coat.
She was constantly mocking the entire world and the entire human race, but she was acting differently just this once. Just like a well-trained maid seeing her master off, she bowed at the proper angle, breathed at the proper times, and spoke in the proper tone.
“Have a good time.”
“I will. Today should be a little rough, so stay here in this sturdy building.”
A synthetic voice answered her.
It came from a golden retriever.
That dog was Kihara Noukan.
“Just to be clear, the situation is at D. That is four from the worst possible level. I assume you have already given thought to the local residents in case this happened.”
“Yes, although I consider it a completely unnecessary concept for Kiharas like us.”
“Yuiitsu-kun, this is not the time to be discussing that definition. I believe that was a personal promise between the two of us.”
“Yes, it was! I scattered a few pieces of bait, but the liquid diamond seems to have been effective. The people involved are not aware, but they were gathered together like iron sand to a magnet. The population distribution and the dispersion patterns for the shockwave and shattering glass are all good to go. Even if you activate Situation D and go all out, the degree of human damage will not exceed what you have calculated. Everything is within acceptable bounds☆”
“Very good. ...Otherwise, we would be no different from the animals.”
The dog had no way of forming expressions, but he would have been smiling if he did.
Even without the expression, his scent and aura were enough to charm Kihara Yuiitsu.
“If anyone actually believes the cover story about the vault bending under its own weight because the building was flipped upside-down, they must be quite the pacifist.”
“Between good and bad, that would be a bad sort of stupidity, but between like and dislike, I would say I like it. A heart that can innocently believe others is a beautiful thing. I can sense the breath of romance in it.”
“Oh? So you see that as romance, too?”
He was surrounded by countless rocket boosters and he had a single weapon. It ran through the entire unit from front to back, but it was not the giant gun of a warship. It was overwhelmingly heavy and hard, it achieved blinding speeds using the same electromagnetic acceleration as railguns and mass drivers, and it ultimately produced its destructive power from a massive rotation. It was known as a tactical armor-piercing drill. The giant drill was dozens of meters long and it could break into an underground silo or directly destroy a military base.
“Heh,” laughed the dog. “Men really can’t get enough of drills and pile bunkers. We’re perfectly willing to ignore profit when it comes to them.”
“That sure is amazing. Although to an amateur like me, it only sounds like phallic compensation.”
Oddly enough, the dog cleared his throat.
He seemed to be embarrassed.
“Anti-Art Attachment, set up.”
With those words, the mass of metal came to life.
“Confirm connection to Aleister in District 7’s center.”
Kihara Yuiitsu knew she was in the danger zone, but she did not take even a single step back.
“Light boosters alpha through delta. Omit countdown. Takeoff.”
It weighed more than twenty tons in all, but it seemed to forget all about gravity.
Only a few seconds later, the golden retriever bearing the entire unit became a spear to pierce the heavens.
Part 12
It truly happened in only an instant.
“Ho.”
As the High Priest laughed amid the pressure of the intense wind, he saw a point on the surface flash.
By then, it was already over.
He had become a giant star of doom, but a long drill of tungsten steel pierced through the center of his body.
He was not even allowed to scream, cry out, or cough up blood.
Naturally, this was not contained to mere physical phenomena.
There was a systematic trembling that could be called an extremely high-speed high-frequency vibration. There was a slight unevenness in the drill’s rotation, that pattern conveyed the power of someone’s will, and it took the form of something that destroyed the High Priest’s body from within. He had become one with the comet, but that strange something caused his flesh and bones to tremble and crumble.
Just as a second could be divided by a thousand or ten thousand, that instant seemed to last an eternity.
There was no time for a voice to propagate as a wave, but the golden retriever’s will still reached the mummy.
“This is a message from the ghost named Aleister.”
The weapon, the special steel drill, tore through the High Priest’s giant form and its rotation produced and extremely high-speed and systematic fluctuation. Not only did it bring about the High Priest’s death, but it created waveforms which were converted into words to convey someone’s will directly to the High Priest’s body rather than through the vibrations of his eardrums.
“Do you remember the life that was taken by destiny as if to smash the childish gears of a desire to make the world a better place and to save every last member of the human race? Do you remember my daughter’s name?”
The mummy High Priest received that will and his body was still pierced down the center.
The heated surface of the comet split apart...in the shape of a slight smile.
Oddly, what he remembered was not the daughter’s name, but the “ghost” who had created that situation.
That ghost had been a coldhearted pragmatist and yet went on the passionate rampages of a madman. Even as he cursed the imperfections of mankind, he had married a woman. Even as he rejected human emotion as impure, he had kept a journal. Even as an expert who had mastered magic, he had shown interest in the path of science. And even as he had determined he would need to fill so many boys and girls with chemicals, he had left a transparent tearstain in his journal on the day his own daughter had died. That “human” was the king of man who had rejected becoming a god of magic. He had seen meaning in that and had chosen to remain in the same realm as his family without giving up on anything.
The Magic God tried to speak a single word.
If the speed of sound had been just a little faster, he would have said that word: sorry.
A moment later, there was a flash of light.
Kihara Noukan refused to let the comet fall to the earth.
Acting in his role as messenger, the golden retriever had finished conveying the willpower of the “human” named Aleister.
The Arrowhead Comet had been racing toward the surface at greater than Mach 20, but the golden retriever had risen to meet it at the same speed. What result this had went without saying.
As had been shown at the Tunguska Event in Russia, when an astronomical body of a certain size broke apart in midair, it would cause an explosion large enough to spread a shockwave for dozens if not hundreds of kilometers.
All of the glass in Academy City shattered.
The high-rise buildings with excellent earthquake countermeasures creaked and swayed as they desperately worked to remain standing.
The commotion spread in a chain-reaction, but Kihara Noukan kept a perfectly cool head.
High in the sky, he adjusted the force of his boosters and slowed to a hover.
A skinny arm unrelated to the weaponry extended to place a cigar in his mouth and light it.
After that moment of bliss, a transmission arrived.
The golden retriever exhaled some sweet smoke as he opened his mouth to speak.
“One down. No, with Zombie, I suppose it’s two.”
“Well done.”
He found it odd for Aleister the “human” to display such obvious emotion even if it was in response to defeating a Magic God.
But that was not it.
He heard something quite strange next.
“That takes care of Gremlin. You made quick work of them.”
“Wait.” Kihara Noukan double-checked something while grabbing the cigar with the arm. “I only took out the High Priest. I still have at least Nephthys and Niang-Niang to go.”
“What are you talking about?” The emotion had vanished from Aleister’s voice once more. “Then you didn’t do that?”
“...”
The golden retriever honestly wondered what that meant.
He looked down on Academy City once more.
What was happening in that city?
Cycle Arts Collection 4
Hug
Difficulty: 2
Instead of sitting in the saddle, the performer clings to it from the side. That alone is simple, but there are a number of ways to hold on such as making a handstand on top of the handlebars. For that reason, the difficulty was increased by one point.
Stairs Shift
Difficulty: 1
Smoothly climbing stairs with the acrobike. At first glance, it looks like simply riding up the stairs while leaving everything to the suspension, but doing that will blow a tire. The performer must raise and lower his or her weight a little to help absorb the impacts.