out seeming to give it much thought.

“This is an experiment.”

“...?”

“Due to certain circumstances, I must become a unique Kihara that surpasses my teacher. But the problem is how exactly to determine I have surpassed him.”

She was not hoping the girl would understand.

She did not even bother explaining the most basic information.

“The simplest method would be with some monumental achievement, but then what project could no other Kihara hope to achieve? That would be annoyingly difficult.” She shrugged. “But then I found it.”

“Found what?”

“All of you. You are constantly faced with my unreasonable orders, but you are finally starting to work toward avoiding that fear. Just like a cat that falls in the bath will start avoiding anywhere with water. You’ve noticed that the look on my face can free you from that labyrinth of fear, haven’t you? That can also be seen as transplanting Kihara-esque behavior patterns, can’t it? You hate me, fear me, and abhor me more than anyone, but you are gradually growing more like me. By contacting and coming to understand an abnormality like me, you grow to become something similar but not quite like me.”

It was a lot like a famous experiment in which people were divided into a group of guards and a group of prisoners.

When placed in a special environment, people would accept special roles.

The girls felt the fear and pressure of having something more important than their life taken from them if they disobeyed, and that was squeezing at their hearts more oppressively than prison walls.

“The thinly-spread thought patterns that become like my own in order to curry my favor will eventually spread to cover the entirety of Academy City. Just like you fear me specifically, the residents of Academy City will fear you as a group. They will fear the royal guards who have been influenced by the tyrant’s genes. They will fear someone other than me.”

It sounded like a nightmare.

That truth only contained fear and pain and would bring happiness to no one.

“As the process repeats, it will spread like the rings of a baumkuchen or a tree. From Academy City to Tokyo, from Tokyo to Kantou, from Kantou to the Japanese Archipelago, from Japan to...who knows where. The thought patterns of a Kihara will change form like an amoeba and will surely become something that will surprise even me. As word spreads from person to person, aspects will be lost or exaggerated again and again.”[1]

“...”

“In the end, every last person on the planet will be remade into someone who fears the Kiharas but is a part of the Kiharas. You could say it is an experiment that goes beyond a society of mutual surveillance and forms a society of mutual crime. In that society, people will be comfortable dirtying their hands because they know their neighbors are all doing the same thing. The Kihara inside all of you will not be the same as the one inside me. This will endlessly create new Kiharas. Surely that qualifies as a great achievement no other Kihara has ever come close to matching. As long as we are defined as a family of bizarre scientists, no Kihara – not even sensei – can grow beyond being the minority.”

She giggled.

“More importantly, if the 6 or 7 billion people on the planet all become Kiharas, not even Aleister’s Archetype Controller can reach us. He has the power to divide portions of mankind and pit them against each other as he pleases, but when west and east, northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere, capitalists and socialists, and every other division have the common factor of being Kiharas, we’ll all be the same. It is a fear of Kihara that is not quite the same as being unique. It’s like being divided yet indivisible. It creates a world where abandoning the Kiharas means to destroy all of mankind. Then no matter how ugly and cruel our actions become, we will have become a bad majority that can never be removed. Yes, it’s perfect. Although between good and bad, it’s bad, and between like and dislike, it’s dislike☆”

Part 6

The bomb was meant as a diversion. The explosion at Useful Spider’s headquarters was meant to not kill anyone yet convince them they were under attack and thus needed to call back their other units for defense. That included the ones guarding District 11’s container yard where the original A.A.A. slept. Kamijou’s group wanted to avoid wasting that.

They also very much wanted to avoid failing to disarm the bomb they set up themselves and being blown up without anyone ever knowing. That would bring into question why they were even there in the first place. Kamijou wanted to believe he had not been born to meet an end like that.

So they naturally wanted to escape outside as soon as possible, but...

“Dammit. It’s like a giant scramble crossing out there. What are they so afraid of?”

He did not know how many times this made it, but Kamijou clicked his tongue as he observed the scene outside through the cracked door.

Fran was looking at the small screen connected to her backpack by the curly cord of a home phone.

“It’s 2 PM... An hour has passed.”

“Wait, wait, wait. Can’t we turn their attention away from here?”

“You mean fire Luca’s musket, or throw her cutlass out there? Either way, their attention would turn toward where it came from, not where it hit. That would only make this worse.”

“What about your balloon? Didn’t it have spare bombs on it?”

“If I could do that, I already would have. These cheap concrete blocks were forcibly reinforced with a net of steel wires, so it’s deflecting the signal and I can’t contact the balloon.”

She must have felt responsible because Luca continued her attack on the gutter running along the wall of the propane base. She tried getting on all fours and sticking her hand through the metal grating and she tried lifting up the grating itself, but none of it was going well.

“Hey, Luca. You can change your apparent age by controlling your subjective age, right? Why not turn into a little kid for skinnier hands and fingers?”

“I already am, I already am. But that doesn’t seem to be the problem...”

Both girls got down on all fours and tried to get through the metal grating over the gutter. However, Luca had shrunk to age 10 with her clothes staying the same, so her naval coat and swimsuit were falling off in places, making it a dangerous view. It was strange how bright her skin looked.

The cylinder was right there, but none of them could touch it.

Fed up with it all, the hoodie bikini girl finally stood up.

“We have no choice...”

“Fran?”

“That’s using old-fashioned black powder, right? Just like with fireworks, get it damp and it won’t work anymore. Our hands might not reach, but if we pee on it from above, we can kill it!”

“Wait, Fran! Let’s talk about your dignity as a girl before you resolutely squat down there!!”

“Not to mention that it’s covered in glass, so you can’t get it damp from the outside.”

“Kh. Can’t you stick your cutlass through the grating and break it?”

“A shock like that would set it off. It’s kind of a miracle it didn’t burst when I dropped it.”

“I swallowed my shame and resolved myself, so why did you have to make something so unnecessarily perfect, Luca!?”

For some reason, the black rose eyepatch pirate girl averted her gaze. She returned her physical age to normal and repeatedly poked her index fingers together in front of her growing chest. And then the honest idiot confessed.

“B-because you said I was the key to the plan. When you look at me with so much expectation in your eyes, of course I’m going to try extra hard...”

“God, why do you have to go the extra mile at the worst possible time!?”

Luca staggered like the UFO girl had stabbed her, so Kamijou supported her shoulders from behind without even thinking. If he had not, the trembling pirate girl might very well have started crying.

Meanwhile, time passed.

“Let’s make a decision,” began Kamijou. “We can’t get the bomb out of the gutter no matter how hard we try. Staying here will only get us blown up. Nothing we do will change that.”

“Uuh... Someone bury me in some damp dirt far away from anyone else.”

“Don’t get so down, Luca. You did a good job.”

“But if we go outside, Useful Spider will find us and turn us into Swiss cheese. And the more noticeable a diversion we try, the more attention we’ll draw to ourselves.”

“That’s only for visible trouble.”

Kamijou slowly exhaled and then pointed his thumb toward the gray tanks filling the small building.

“Those are full of propane. That’s heavier than air. Let’s move one near the door and send gas out through the crack. Once it’s flowed past the fence, we just need to throw out a spark. Luca.”

“Fwhat?”

“It’s too soon to cry. We need one of your bullets. Fire one shot at the ground past the fence to create a spark and this will probably all work out. So wipe away the tears and snot and face forward.”

“Gas is invisible,” pointed out Fran. “We have no way of knowing how far it has spread. Depending on the terrain and wind direction, it could stay here without flowing toward the observatory, so we might just blow ourselves up.”

“Of course. But if we don’t do anything, there’s a 100% chance we’ll be blown up along with this building. Which do you want to bet on?”

They were quick to take action.

They freed one of the gray tanks held in place by thick chains and latches, they tilted it diagonally, and they rolled it toward the door along the edge of the cylinder’s bottom. It was about as tall as Fran. Since it was also a thick pressure-resistant container, it was even heavier than it looked.

After getting it near the door, they laid it fully on its side. To more efficiently move the heavy object, Luca had increased her physical age to give herself an adult body that left her clothes tight in places. She pointed the metal opening meant for a hose toward the cracked door and Kamijou slowly turned the valve.

They heard a sinister sound much like a hissing snake.

The invisible danger squeezed at their hearts with a different sort of pressure from an obvious knife or gun.

“D-do you smell a weird scent getting in here?”

“You’re imagining it.”

“Hmm. I can almost smell it...maybe.”

“Stop it, Fran. You’ll trick yourself through self-suggestion.”

If he was being honest, not even Kamijou knew how much gas they were supposed to send out. Too little and it would not work, but too much and it could be too powerful and kill some of the people running around beyond the fence. In fact, the explosion could even blow him and the girls away.

It was all guesswork.

Would someone’s palms be this sweaty if they were thrown into a self-serve gas station in a foreign country where they could not read any of the warnings?

They did not have time to run several smaller experiments to build up experience. With his fingers on the valve, Kamijou spoke to the rabbit-ear antennae girl, the only one who knew the time.

“Fran, how are we doing on time?”

“It’s been half an hour since last time.”

“You’re kidding. So we have less than an hour?”

Lamenting would not solve anything. And with nothing else to go on, he felt like that “one hour mark” was a sign. He turned the valve to cut off the flow of gas and they rolled the tank away from the door. It felt a lot lighter than when they had first struggled with it. He felt a chill run down his spine at the thought that they had overdone it, but there was no redoing it now.

“Luca. Count to 30 and then fire on the ground beyond the fence. The time gap should let the last bit of gas flow away from this building...I think. At the very least, it should be better than firing right away.”

“Will this really be okay...?”

“Either way, your musket is our only hope.”

“Kh.”

“Yeah, you need to learn that flattering Luca like that is a bad idea,” complained the hoodie bikini girl.

But Kamijou ignored her and changed places with the pirate girl. Perhaps to endure the recoil, her clothes were tight once more.

“(...I get the feeling her swimsuit will burst apart from the recoil if she fires like that.)”

“You can’t hope for that to happen, Fran. We’re on the same side here.”

While standing in front of the cracked door, Luca grabbed the skull container attached to one of the belts she wore like a waitress’s suspenders. She shook it, and removed the cap with just her fingertips. The cap was like those for fabric softener and she used it to measure out enough gunpowder for one shot. She poured the black powder into the musket’s muzzle and compressed it with the thin stick held in the same scabbard as her cutlass.

She also slid a portion of the case shaped like an arm bone to pull out a round bullet like it was a mint tablet. She used the ramrod to push it down as well. From there, she held the gun just like in the movies. The highly varnished stock glistened with an amber light like an old violin as she pressed it against her shoulder, she pressed her cheek against the gun to peer through the sight, and she used her thumb to raise the flint hammer.

She focused on the imaginary line extending from the muzzle and whispered a warning in her college-aged body.

“You should cover your ears.”

Kamijou and Fran moved to obey in the small closed space, but something interrupted.

A large explosion knocked them over.

And that was no exaggeration.

While she stuck her gun out from the cracked door, Luca was struck by the metal door as it swung inwards and she was knocked backwards. Kamijou and Fran were not directly hit by the door, but the explosive noise entering through the doorway echoed off the concrete blocks again and again. The pressure was so great they nearly fainted.

As Fran tearfully curled up on the spot like a turtle, she shouted at the adult pirate girl whose clothes were coming off in places.

“Luca!!”

“No! The timing was off! That explosion wasn’t from the gas!”

The door had been torn from its hinges, so the scene outside was fully visible. The explosion had occurred at one of the single-story buildings further in, not on the ground just past the fence.

Luca lay sexily sprawled out on the ground after being hit by the blast and the musket in her hands was still loaded with the bullet and black powder.

“Nn.”

Just as the pirate girl groaned and twisted her body, orange sparks burst from the muzzle with an earsplitting noise. The bullet bounced around the propane base like a pinball, but it was moving too fast to follow with the naked eye. This time, both Kamijou and Fran grabbed at the troublemaker of a pirate girl.

“Are you trying to kill us, you idiot!?”

“This is partly our fault for praising her too much,” said Fran. “A bit of contempt might be the better course of action with her.”

Meanwhile, more and more oddities arrived.

The unexplained explosions continued. A lot of the Useful Spider members were aiming upwards and firing their guns wildly. There was something in the sky, but Kamijou’s group could not tell what while indoors. And with someone else gathering so much attention, they no longer needed the propane.

“Fran, Luca!”

Heading outside when the gunfire and explosions never seemed to end was more frightening than heading home from school in a downpour after lightning struck nearby. But this was their last train back. The situation was far from ideal, but they would not receive another chance.

The three of them made up their minds and headed outside while keeping low to the ground.

Something cut by overhead. They saw an unidentified flying object beyond the rustling tree branches.

“Maya...”

The rabbit-ear antennae girl spoke another girl’s name.

“But why now?”

Kamijou did not know if it was true, but that girl claimed to be a ghost. She specialized in aerial surveillance and information warfare and she had caused them a lot of grief through the Spheres.

Had she identified Kamijou’s group or was she simply destroying all of the buildings?

They did not have long to think about it.

A large mass fell on the propane base they had been hiding in, so the many gas tanks and their bomb of love both contributed to a massive explosion.

Kamijou was literally thrown three meters when the blast hit his back.

Part 7

They had been looking at it wrong.

Ellen, Maya, and the rest of the former Kamisato Faction had not put together a plan to specifically attack the meteorological observatory at the peak of that District 21 mountain.

They had simply attacked the individual Useful Spider bases around Academy City and pursued them into the mountain when they retreated.

For example, there was the girl cradling a bottle full of old 10 yen coins like it was a baby. She gave a report while smelling black smoke.

“I’m sure you’re piggybacking off of the nearby Spheres, but being able to use radios sure is convenient. This is Elza. I went too far and destroyed them, so we aren’t getting any hints from here. Sorry, but you’ll have to check with someone else.”

For example, there was a girl with countless thick squid or octopus tentacles covered in suckers growing from her back. Her bizarre beauty would drive anyone who saw her mad and she whispered her report.

“Milcah here. I have conquered the broadcast station in District 15. A few of the helicopters got away. You can use the direction in which they fled to work out the location of their headquarters.”

For example, there was a young wife in a swimsuit and apron. She shook the kind of shaker used by bartenders while her flushed face slowly swayed back and forth.

“This is Machina the Elemental Spirits Internal Summoner. I have conquered Bee Hoon Street in District 4. I brought down the giant fan before they could lift it up into the air. Hic. But I didn’t touch the unit that passed by overhead. It looked like they were flying west from District 11. ...Myyyy circulation seems really good today. The salamander is running wild in my blood☆”

Fran had found the radiating pattern from the information uploaded through the Spheres, but these girls took a more direct route toward working out their enemy’s lair.

And they did not spend a long time preparing before making their attack. As the “modern” weapons obsessed girl (in other words, she was never too fixated on any one thing and continued updating her repertoire as time passed) Aileen moved the pieces on the game board, everything moved to match.

First, Ghost Girl Maya, whose existence was supported by the Censer drones, and Cosplay Girl Olivia, who flew through the sky on a magic wand equipped with a jet engine, bombed the headquarters as the first wave. Next, Killer Patissier Berry and Athlete Soldier Lemon arrived close enough on the ground to throw sugar javelins and hammer throw hammers along parabolic arcs that rained down on the headquarters. The explosions and shockwaves hid Mary’s wolf-like approach on all fours through the forest and Lime’s approach on a giant mechanical lizard. Before Useful Spider could fight back, they had trampled the fence around the observatory’s grounds and charged on in.

“Watch out for the Doppler radar. If they’ve cut the limiter and upped its output, it quickly becomes an anti-air electromagnetic weapon. It’s like a weaker version of Fran’s station, so focus on destroying it first.”

No one knew if this was really the right thing to do. For one thing, what qualified as “the right thing to do” in a military operation differed from country to country. This was a collection of obsessed girls who had essentially taken only the most attractive bits of each country’s standardized military. They were something like a theoretical “perfect fighter jet”, so it was uncertain if they would be of any practical use. The only reason it had not all fallen apart by this point was due to the great strength of the strange powers and abilities of the former Kamisato Faction’s 100 girls. Even if their commands did not quite match the situation before their eyes, they would each trample the enemy regardless.

Why had the former Kamisato Faction changed targets and started hunting down Useful Spider now?

“We want to use our information media to its fullest to hunt down Kamijou Touma, Karasuma Fran, and Toyama Luca who is something of a gray zone, but we can’t exactly do that with the shelter Sphere’s blown away,” whispered tall Maya as she circled through the sky along with her crane fly shaped drones. “Plus, we can’t rely on the Spheres when they were set up by Useful Spider to make the rulers feel like they had some power. I should have realized it sooner and cut it off at the source.”

Kihara Yuiitsu had not directly given them this target, but that no longer mattered.

Useful Spider was interfering with their search for Kamijou and thus threatened Kamisato, so they were an enemy. They needed to be eliminated.

At this height and speed, it was unlikely her voice could reach anyone. Even if she had a radio, her head was entirely exposed, so the blowing of the wind would get in the way.

But the unlikely happened. A late-night anime heroine was flying alongside her too close to even call it acrobatic. However, Maya was fairly certain the real heroine had not used a handmade jet engine.

The violently live action version of Magical Powered Kanamin spoke.

“Keep an eye on things down below. They’re going to recover from the shock soon, so it’s time for the boss round with some monstrous Academy City weapon they’ve been hiding underground.”

The ghost girl with bewitchingly exposed cleavage gave a derisive snort.

Without a physical body, she was not afraid of bullets. No one would feel any tension when playing a bullet hell game while using a cheat code to reduce their hitbox to zero pixels.

A dull explosion rose from the surface.

The dome-shaped radar facility had been successfully bombed. Now there was no risk of the will-o’-the-wisp-like drones being fried.

And so she uttered a single singsong word.

“Perfect.”

Part 8

Kamijou had so much trouble breathing he could not even pass out.

He clung to a nearby tree trunk, wrinkled his brow, and forced his vision to recover as it flashed in and out like a dying fluorescent light. Pain passed from one temple to the other, but he could do nothing about it but clench his teeth.

When he somehow managed to gather strength in his legs and look around, he saw Pirate Girl Luca sprawled out on the ground and groaning. Due to the full backpack on her back, Fran had her butt sticking up toward heaven like someone who had been hit by a German suplex while upside down. She looked like the end result of a robot model designed with no thought given to the center of gravity.

“Hey, are you both alive...? I’m only borrowing you, so don’t die before I get you back to Kamisato. I don’t want to be indebted to him.”

That had a dramatic effect.

The name Kamisato was like brandy to someone lost in a snowy mountain, so the girls shook their woozy heads and forced their eyes open.

The explosions had not let up.

And the situation was no longer unilaterally moving in the former Kamisato Faction’s favor. Those giant fans that resembled tunnel boring machines had appeared and large helicopters with heavy machineguns sticking out of the side cargo doors were pursuing the ghost and cosplayer in the sky.

Fran was kicking her feet wildly while upside down, so Kamijou helped her up and spat out an irritated comment.

“I’m not sure which side are the true monsters. Anyway, let’s get out of here.”

Needless to say, their goal had been to get the Useful Spider unit in District 11 to fall back to the headquarters so they could get to the A.A.A. inside the container yard. There was no point in continuing the fight against Useful Spider here. And there was no guarantee that the former Kamisato Faction would not find them here.

They could not lose sight of the situation. Neither side winning here would bring back Kamisato Kakeru. If they poured their energy into the wrong thing, they would lose their chance at success.

“Fortunately, the former Kamisato Faction and Useful Spider are so busy fighting that they haven’t noticed us. And with this many explosions, the unit in District 11 is sure to be scrambled. Let’s get back to the cart and head to the container yard. And then...”

But Kamijou Touma should have known better than to say “fortunately”.

In case he had forgotten, misfortune was his constant companion.

“?”

Fran noticed something and looked to her feet. Kamijou and Luca followed her gaze.

Several strange cracks ran through the dirt.

“Wait...”

After an explosion large enough to shake the entire observatory, the ground below their feet seemed to reach its limit. It crumbled away and they were swallowed up.

“Owaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?”

Yes, hadn’t Fran and Luca mentioned that Useful Spider may have been storing their next-generation weapons in an underground facility covered in thick electromagnetic shielding?

Part 9

“Hmm?”

Tracer Ellen tilted her head while dragging her baggy lab coat behind her.

She crouched down and focused on the ground.

“Hmmm...???”

“What are you doing?” asked “modern” weapons obsessed Aileen. “Wasn’t most of your inspection kit destroyed by Fran’s heat wave?”

But Ellen’s curiosity did not wane.

“It is true I specialize in gas chromatography and carbon dating using cutting-edge equipment. I’m well aware that my forensics skills don’t work without the equipment.”

She formed Ls with the thumb and forefinger of both hands and created something like a picture frame to focus on the ordinary-looking ground.

“But did you know that human senses are a type of inspection equipment? It can be a perfumer’s nose or a convenience store bento researcher’s tongue. When you create a system using senses more delicate than any machine, it’s known as sensory analysis.”

“What about it?”

“And I’m not just talking about perfect pitch. My senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch are all perfect sensory analysis devices that provide readings I can express numerically. Although if I don’t intentionally keep my mind in a lower gear, the world grows very boring very fast.”

Someone had pulled that girl up out of that gray bog. He had shown her a color that she could not express numerically with any of her senses. She believed that was the color of love.

She would do anything for him. She would eliminate even the smallest risk to him.

“Maya, Olivia, and the rest of aerial group. Our radios might be jammed before we have further orders for you and any gestured commands might be spied on. Follow the timetable we set up in advance.”

The hand in Ellen’s baggy sleeve held a radio they had stolen from their enemy.

She based this on her digitized senses as a tracer.

“Fran will be there. That threat to Kamisato-han spends all year star-->>

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