Volume 14, Chapter 2: Freeloaders Tend to Grow in Number – Cannibalization.

Part 1

Kamijou Touma and Kamisato Kakeru.

Imagine Breaker and World Rejecter.

They saw each other down the dark road and ran along the shortest path toward each other.

The first to swing his arm was Kamisato.

“Do you wish for a new world?”

“!?”

They were still five meters apart, so Kamijou should have been out of the other boy’s range.

However, he felt a chill race through his entire body. As if flinching from a nearby lightning strike, he lowered his upper body on a baseless reflex.

That thoughtless reaction did not actually dodge anything.

But a moment later, a disturbing explosion sounded directly behind him as if space itself was being torn into and swallowed up.

Thick tension traced along his skin. The impatience felt like a weak electric shock. Mysterious beads of sweat instantly covered his entire forehead.

(Dammit, does he not have to actually touch his opponent!? What conditions does he need and what exactly can he erase? Regardless, his looks way more convenient than mine!!)

But that attack had not been targeting Kamijou.

If it had, it would have blown away his upper body.

(—————) He sensed something flinching back behind him, but he did not look back.

Something had been approaching there, but he did not have time to check.

He clenched his right fist again.

He ran toward Kamisato Kakeru to attack his target...which was something else approaching from behind the other boy.

“Ah...ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”

It had all been planned out.

As soon as Kamisato’s silhouette casually swung his head to the side, Kamijou’s fist passed by while clenched as hard as a rock. At the same time, it crossed paths with the “something else” that had been attacking the back of Kamisato’s head.

They collided and it was negated.

Imagine Breaker worked perfectly, so whatever was attacking Kamisato must have used a supernatural power. Whether that was magic or an esper power was still a mystery, though.

Kamijou and Kamisato now stood back to back, but they both turned 180 degrees.

“Were you testing me to see if I would save you or not?”

“Well, if you hadn’t, all I needed to do was swing my arm.”

Violently bright headlights reached them from a different road once again. The flash briefly dazzled them and burned the scenery into their retinas like a photograph.

That was when they realized two different kinds of violence surrounded them.

One was pitch black. Even from close up, Kamijou could not tell what it was. It looked like an octopus floating in the deep sea, like a soft piece of fat cut away with a knife, or like a loose rubber film being melted from the inside. The more he stared at it, the more its meaning changed and the more confused he became. The surface was covered in ominous bubbles and some things that were not quite eyeballs and not quite suckers blinked with a damp yellow or green light that resembled glow-in-the-dark paint. It almost looked like the colors of a strange poisonous frog or lizard.

The other one was red. It seemed to have the texture of a deep pile carpet soaked with water and left to rot. Something like uneven teeth or tongues could be glimpsed deep in the thick carpet. Kamijou was filled with a sense of caution warning him not to look any deeper.

Neither one seemed to have a solid form and they surrounded the two boys from several meters away.

“At any rate, it looks like the main task will have to wait.”

Kamisato Kakeru sounded relatively apathetic.

“Just to be sure, these things aren’t with you, are they?”

“Does it look that way? And if it comes to that, you seem more suspect than me.”

“Or rather...”

“Yes, what are they doing? Have they started cannibalizing each other!?”

The red and black amorphous monsters were acting oddly. With the disturbing sound of sludge flowing into a drain, they began wrapping around and chewing on each other.

Othinus narrowed her eyes from Kamijou’s shoulder.

“This seems to be an accident for them too, but we can’t just watch. In fact, a wounded beast is even more dangerous. They’ll be fighting for their life, so the standard rules don’t apply. Their routine becomes harder to predict and they go all out, so there’s a larger risk of anything nearby getting caught in the middle.”

“What a pain. I wanted to have a nice chat, but it looks like escaping here has to come first.”

“Perhaps so,” spat out Kamijou.

On the one side was something with uneven teeth or tongues deep inside its rotten red carpet and on the other was something with black bubbles that resembled eyeballs or suckers. The two twisted around, sharpened, and split open their own bodies to send out something like sharp claws. Also giant maws lined with countless fangs opened all over them.

“Here they come!!” shouted Othinus.

Countless predatory tools that resembled spears and blades shot from the creatures surrounding them in a donut shape. Kamijou and Kamisato both gathered strength in their right fists to break through the maw of death.

Part 2

Kamijou was entirely absorbed by his activity.

His Imagine Breaker was extraordinarily destructive to supernatural powers, but its effective range was limited to his right hand, which made it weak against multiple simultaneous attacks. St. Germain had given him trouble by taking advantage of that.

He only managed to escape being surrounded here due to Kamisato’s help.

He was honestly unsure what would have happened had he been alone.

“Pant, pant! Dammit!!”

He did not know how far he had to run before he could relax, so he just ran and ran. He clicked his tongue when he remembered he had left the supermarket bags behind.

Once he realized the ability to regret something like that meant he was subconsciously beginning to relax, he finally came to a stop.

Not even he was sure where he had ended up.

He was amazed that District 7 had a back alley like this.

He also realized Kamisato was gone.

He had been so focused on escaping that he had not been able to worry about the other’s safety.

“What was that? Kamisato, natural enemy of the Magic Gods, was bad enough, but now another problem has shown up. And in a group of two!”

“You sure are kind. Did you not consider the possibility that Kamisato set this up himself? He did seem to be testing what you would do.”

“Eh? But he said it wasn’t.”

“You really are stupid.” Othinus pinched his earlobe. “I don’t know what exactly World Rejecter does or what conditions are needed to use it, but it defeated Magic Gods by the dozen, didn’t it? Would he really run away when faced with just one or two attackers?”

“Then...”

“I’ll admit I don’t know whether they were working together or not, but he was definitely enjoying it. He was watching how you reacted with a serious look on his face. He was probably playing around and using a different form of communication for what couldn’t be said with words.”

As he listened to Othinus, Kamijou leaned his sweaty body against a nearby building wall to think.

“What even were those red and black attackers?”

“Who knows.” The eyepatch girl sounded entirely casual. “The red one had the scent of the Dark Continent, but the black one is a complete mystery. It may have been a conflict between magic and science.”

“What’s the Dark Continent? Some ancient civilization that sank into the ocean?”

“It means Africa. Expand your vocabulary.”

Then why couldn’t you just say Africa in the first place!? complained Kamijou in his heart.

“Othinus, you did some science-related stuff in addition to your Norse magic, right?”

“Yes, but that was mostly Bersi.”

“But even you couldn’t figure anything out about the black one?”

“I wouldn’t say that... It’s like it’s on the tip of my tongue, and that’s what makes it so strange. I’m the god that constructed every last part of this ‘original world’. Although that was a lot like watching an infinitely-expanding snow crystal growing from a calculated core, so I didn’t actually design every little thing...”

If asked whether Kamisato Kakeru or the black and red attackers were more powerful, Kamijou probably would have said Kamisato.

But based on what Othinus had just said, it may not have been that simple.

Which meant...

“Oh, no. Did Kamisato manage to get away safely?”

“...Human.”

“I know I’m being na?ve, being inconsistent, and getting my priorities backwards, but I won’t be able to sleep tonight if I don’t check. It would be no laughing matter if I was saved while he was captured and devoured.”

“You’re aware how foolish it is, yet you’re still going back!? How am I supposed to control this idiot!?”

Despite Othinus’s fierce protests, Kamijou hesitantly retraced his steps to revisit the scene of the attack. He did not know where he was, but he remembered the different landmarks more than he had expected. Eventually, he found the familiar location.

“Kamisato...isn’t here.”

“At the very least, it doesn’t look like he was eaten as a human sacrifice.”

He heard a rustling sound from the dimly lit road, so he quickly looked down.

“Hm? Hey, it’s my supermarket bags!!”

“Don’t tell me you’re retrieving them. It may be December, but the ice cream will have melted.”

“Othinus, the fact that they’re on the road isn’t what matters. It’s whether they have germs on them or-...”

He trailed off because the heavy bags moved unnaturally.

Then a large cat hopped out.

“Human, the ingredients list has grown while we were gone.”

“Enough with the black jokes, Miss God. And stop right there, stray cat! That’s our precious dinn-...”

He was cut off by further movement.

He heard some mewing from a nearby alleyway and a few kittens approached the large cat. Based on the fur color, they were a family.

This truly cornered Kamijou Touma.

“No fair!! No fair!! This is like seeing a puppy being swept away in the river or a cat separated from its owner by war! I can’t do anything about it now! All I can do is cry!!”

“It’s grabbing the bags and calmly leaving. It probably does this all the time. The damn creature really knows how to live in the city.”

“I know that! But knowing better doesn’t help when it comes to emotion!!”

Kamijou was helpless against this strange barrier.

He was overwhelmed by sorrow and stood stock still for a while.

But if the bags were there, it meant this was definitely where he and Kamisato had clashed. And thus where those red and black creatures and interfered.

The area was poorly lit, but as he stared into the darkness his eyes adjusted to the light and he noticed something else lying on the ground.

“Ugh...”

“That cat is lucky it didn’t try to take this with it too.”

It resembled a rotten red carpet. It had seemed to spread out like an infinite sea when it had attacked, but it had been cruelly torn apart and pieces of it were stuck to the asphalt and concrete walls. The way it continued wriggling even then was disturbing, but that was not the main point.

Kamisato had done this.

His World Rejecter was real.

Just like Kamijou’s Imagine Breaker, it most likely had some idiosyncratic and hard-to-use effect or conditions. After all, it had slaughtered Magic Gods by the dozen. Without something holding it back, the entire world – both science side and magic side – should have been slaughtered already.

But in the right environment, it was this incredibly destructive. Kamisato had claimed “escaping here has to come first”, but if he had been alone, he might have been able to slaughter both of the creatures.

He had been playing around.

Kamijou was unsure how to react to that fact.

He viewed the horrific scene before him once more...and he noticed something.

“Wait a second...”

He had spotted something else amid the remains of the rotten red carpet.

At first, it only looked like a dense object, but a closer looked revealed that a relatively large piece of the rotten carpet was covering something. He began to flip it over, but it reacted to his right hand and vanished, revealing what lay below.

“This is...”

He found an unconscious girl of about twelve.

“This is what that red thing was?”

She had white skin and shoulder-length blonde hair. She wore a white blouse, a short skirt, and black stockings for the chic and luxurious look of a grand piano. She seemed ill-protected against the December chill, but the rotten red carpet may have acted as a coat.

Kamijou had a lot to be surprised about, but the biggest shock was that he recognized her.

As Othinus placed a hand on her forehead and sighed, he muttered the girl’s name.

“Bird...way?”

Part 3

Meanwhile, Kamisato Kakeru gave a confused look of his own a short distance away.

He tried to crack his neck in the darkness, but it did not work. He tried a few more times, but he gave up because he felt like he was going to hurt the joint.

Instead, he spoke into his cellphone.

“I can’t believe this.”

“You getting caught in the middle of someone else’s problems is hardly new. This is sure to be related to a cute girl as always. I bet a naked girl is going to appear from the monster’s belly. I’d bet my virginity on it.”

The voice on the other end had a certain elegance to it. Although Kamisato had no idea if she was using a proper Kyoto dialect or not.

“Don’t bet that. Anyway, how long will your analysis take?”

“That depends on how accurate you want it.”

Kamisato sounded carefree, but he was surrounded by a horrific scene.

The ground and walls were covered in the remains of the attacker that looked like a deep sea octopus instead of a rotten red carpet. Those remains resembled black clumps of fat or a loose rubber film being melted from the inside.

He heard what sounded like a tabletop fan, but it was actually the spinning of a small motor.

He looked up and saw what appeared to be a toy in the night sky. The device looked like a crane fly made as a craft over summer break and it had a transparent case on its stomach. That case contained a sample of the black substance.

“Taking a peek at Academy City’s junk street proved useful. My container lab is doing better than it ever has. It’s pretty cool that the kind of electron microscopes we use ‘outside’ is small enough to fit in your palm here. It was as much of a shock as seeing my first mirrorless camera. Just leave this to your tracer and the earliest results will be in within the hour.”

“I see.”

Kamisato pictured the short girl who had glossy black hair that reached the ground, let her baggy lab coat drag behind her, and laughed while covering her mouth with the sleeve.

“But Academy City isn’t as different from the ‘outside’ as I’d heard,” said the girl. “I thought we would be stuck acting like the old lady who can’t figure out how to use the ticket machine.”

“Yeah. At first, I thought there were going to be cars driving through tubes, but it doesn’t seem that different. They even use the normal Japanese yen...or at least something that looks just like it.”

He watched the handmade drone fly away. That girl never went outside and had a bad habit of ordering everything over the internet and picking up anything else with her drone’s manipulator. The indoor girl was an incarnation of the magic that kept certain girls from gaining weight even though they mostly ate pizza and never went outside.

Also, she called herself a tracer.

Her specialty was using the same forensic and crime scene investigation skills as police to pursue and track down an individual from the microscopic trail they left. And the title was not wasted on her.

Even criminal organizations used people like that. Tracking down a target or traitor used to mean gathering witness information or using an information network (mostly made from loan shark client lists), but now they hired hackers to target the Juki Net and online shopping records, analyzed the many photographs and images on the internet in search of the face they wanted, or analyzed samples on the molecular level. These were of course all techniques invented by the police, but technology was just as effective no matter who was using it.

In other words, this girl could track someone down even if they were put into the witness protection program or treated as dead in official records, given cosmetic surgery, had their fingerprint changed, and even had all of their blood swapped out. It was much like hunting down a target in the jungle using the footprints and broken branches on the ground. She had the grim reaper known as data at her fingertips and it could be even more frightening than simple violence.

“Oh, since you had the UAV out, I wanted to have you do a scan to see if I’m being followed.”

“Why?”

“I’m trying to figure out what to do now. I could return to the container house or I could use a different safe house in case I’m being followed. I was hoping for some extra information to make up my mind.”

“Ah ha ha! Come on, this is Academy City. Their technology goes two or three steps further than anything we can even imagine. They say truth is stranger than fiction, but this goes beyond even that. They’re probably tracking you in some really nasty way, so completely losing them would be impossible. Besides, they’re scanning the entire city by satellite.”

“Perhaps.”

“I’m sure even this phone call is being intercepted. Of course, you knew that but you’re confident you can shake them from your tail by force and escape.”

“...”

Currently, Kamisato Kakeru – or rather, the Kamisato Faction that had gathered around him – was opposing the Magic Gods. Academy City and the science side had no reason to complain about that. That said, he had entered the city without permission and he had enough power to slaughter Magic Gods by the dozen. The city’s ruler might not choose to ignore him, either because he would be profitable subject for research or because he was a frightening threat.

But what did that matter?

World Rejecter had enough power to deflect that conclusion.

It was the ultimate strike.

It was a truly definitive blow.

“Then I’ll go to the spare safe house and see how things go.”

“That sounds like a good idea. The other girls are going nuts after hearing you contacted the Imagine Breaker without bringing a bodyguard. Especially when you were attacked by some red and black things afterwards. That should scare you a lot more than Academy City or Kamijou Touma. You need to cool your head and think of a good way to placate some girls. Nya ha ha!”

“My head hurts... Anyway, the safe house is at-...”

“'Is that really something to say on a call that’s being intercepted? Don’t worry. I’m a tracer, remember? I’ll track you down even if you don’t tell me a thing. Bye bye☆”

She hung up.

A look of exhaustion briefly came over Kamisato Kakeru and he put his cellphone in his pocket.

Then he looked around the gruesome scene again.

The disturbing black substance was splattered everywhere, but one piece of what looked like bubbling fat was being pushed up by something below. He had no idea what kind of toxins it contained and, in the worst case, it could suddenly attack and began devouring him with its giant maw, but he did not hesitate to approach the creepily pulsating blackness.

“Do you wish for a new world?”

It sounded like some sort of password.

After a light movement of his right hand, the entire clump of black vanished and what slept below was revealed.

She appeared to be between ten and twelve. Her short blonde hair was pushed up with a hairband, leaving her forehead exposed. She wore a down jacket and jogging wear that was as skintight as a wetsuit. There was a slit below the arms, so it likely had temperature regulation for use in any season. The cordless headphones around her neck were most likely linked to the wearable smartwatch on her wrist. Based on her face and the brands of her clothing and accessories, she did not seem to be Japanese.

“Now, then.”

Kamisato Kakeru placed a hand on one hip and sighed.

A girl had indeed appeared from within, but she was not naked. He felt that proved the world could be kind after all. He no longer had to worry about the virginity that the girl on the phone had bet.

(If possible, I want this girl to explain the situation as well. They’d probably claim my own testimony lacked objectivity and refuse to listen.)

In order to get their story straight ahead of time, he wanted to know about her.

He crouched down and checked through her pockets, but he found a card case instead of a wallet.

“A girl of around ten has multiple credit cards? And they’re all black cards?”

The lineup looked like something a casino magnate from Macau would have. She might have been the type who had never seen an actual coin in her life. All of the card companies were from outside Academy City and each card had the same name printed on it.

“Pa...Patri...”

Kamisato traced his finger across it as he read the name aloud.

“Patricia Birdway? Is that it?”

Part 4

“...”

“...”

“...”

The broken window had only been covered by a plastic sheet, so the dorm room was chilly. Pressure bore down on Kamijou Touma as he silently sat on the wooden flooring of that room.

The pressure came from Index, Othinus, and Nephthys.

After eating all the pet food, the calico cat alone was satisfied and it had completely melted while lying on its belly. For some reason, the cute cat was reminiscent of a hopeless old man after having far too much to drink. The pet was sleeping so defenselessly that there was no hope of it making a gallant entry to rescue its owner.

The discussion was focused on a single issue.

“Touma, what are we going to do about dinner?”

“No, not that!! I know I shouldn’t be restarting this argument, but isn’t there something more important here!? Besides, whose fault do you think it is there’s only miso and soy sauce in the fridge!?”

“Personally, I don’t see why you would even keep soy sauce in the fridge,” added Nephthys. “The Japanese put dashi and soy sauce in everything, so don’t you go through the bottles pretty fast? Do you even have to worry about oxidation?”

“Huh? No one else cares? We’re really focusing on this? O-okay, then!! You’re wrong! Soy sauce goes on hiyayakko too, so it tastes better when it’s chilled!! What kind of idiot would go to the trouble of chilling tofu and then adding room temperature soy sauce!? It makes no sense!!”

“More importantly, this girl.”

Othinus alone was taking things seriously.

Kamijou was on all fours and pounding at the floor in frustration, but the eyepatch girl ignored him and kept the conversation going.

“That idiot picked up another one. There were two attackers, a red one and a black one, and this is apparently one of them. It’s his usual sickness that makes him save anything he can call a ‘girl’. And that means we have a problem beyond Kamisato Kakeru. So what should we do?”

“Hmm.”

Index cutely vocalized her thinking.

They had a grimoire library with 103,000 grimoires memorized and two legit Magic Gods. If this had anything to do with magic, there would be no hiding it.

They poked at the fragments of the rotten red carpet reluctantly clinging to Birdway’s clothes as she lay on the floor.

“Nya-Nya Bulembu. That African Cinderella story had something like this. It’s the story of a princess forced to wear an ugly animal skin. Everyone found her repulsive because of it, but it actually kept the men from attacking her and a beautiful princess filled with a mystical power was raised within the skin.”

Kamijou quickly grew fed up with it.

“That sounds more like the Ugly Duckling than Cinderella. And it straight-up attacked us instead of acting as camouflage. Is that supposed to be how it keeps men from attacking her? What would make it take such a sharp turn towards offense!?”

“...”

“...”

“...”

That should have been a perfectly natural question, but all three girls(?) glared quite intensely at him. There was even a hint of scorn mixed in like they were looking at a dung beetle.

The small Othinus sighed.

“But its main focus was raising the princess inside it, not keeping the men away. And wasn’t it supposed to be green and covered in moss?”

“There might be something else,” said Index as she moved her fingers a short distance above Birdway’s slender form. “Based on the symbols...there’s more to this. Other African myths and legends have been broken down and implanted.”

“Why Africa?” bluntly asked Kamijou. “I don’t know all that much about magic, but isn’t Birdway from Europe? Doesn’t she specialize in Western magic that uses the alphabet?”

“Hmm, I see.”

Bandaged Nephthys seemed to have recovered a fair bit since she had first shown up, so she gave a bewitching smile while still sitting on the floor.

“This might be the usual pattern for Europeans.”

“What?”

“It happens a lot.” Othinus sounded annoyed. “ ‘Modern Western Magic’ sounds like it’s European magic put together by Europeans using European cultures, but that isn’t quite accurate.”

“It isn’t?”

Hadn’t Agnese once said that Western magic was essentially made up of tricks using Christianity and the cheating magicians made the serious worshippers look like fools? Hadn’t she said that was why she could not allow them to use magic?

However, this was how the Magic Gods saw things.

“They try really hard for a while. Yes, for a while.”

“But in the end, they realize there are wishes that they can’t grant with their own rules. So what are those Europeans to do? The answer is simple. They begin innocently believing that the equation lies hidden in some as yet unseen paradise.”

“Of course, it’s usually nonsense like trying to find some strange grand master in distant Tibet and gaining the key to the gates of heaven through his teachings. Sometimes they even mention Atlantis, Mu, or some other continent that sank long ago. Oh, right. I think there’s even one about receiving the knowledge and wisdom of god from the radio signals sent by the sun.”

Othinus laughed as she explained.

As those who really did know the greatest secrets of the magic world, humans who thought they could pray to god and unconditionally receive knowledge may have seemed hopelessly shallow.-->>

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