Volume 17, 3: Or Isolation Surpasses a Group - Engage_U.F.O.(4/5)
Her lips continued to whisper.
She was not done yet.
“Something seemed off when I spoke with Fran before. I tried to suppress my doubts because I thought we were friends, but there’s no more need for that. And now that I look back, there was a lot odd about her.”
“?”
“For example, why could I detect the scent of aldosterone and cortisol in her sweat when she would speak with Kamisato-han? Why was she releasing stress-related adrenocorticotropic hormone? There is a massive bombshell hiding there. I’m not going to hold back, Fran.”
Part 10
Everything had been a complete mess.
Ever since the former Kamisato Faction showed up, nothing they did felt like their own decision. They could only sit idly by while other people made their decisions for them.
Some things truly could not be helped.
Kamijou and the others had fallen into a space supported by countless steel beams like a school gym or an airport hangar. While lying on his back, Kamijou shuddered at the distance to the ceiling. He did not know what had cushioned his fall, but he was amazed he had survived.
“Fran, Luca...”
After shaking his head and getting up, he saw a few metal objects crushed by rubble. Some were the half-trucks with mechanical legs and treads, some were short and stout transport helicopters, and others were the giant fans. Each of them was enough of a threat, but a veritable parade of them was lined up here. The original lights may have been insufficient because he could not see all the way to the back.
And this was no time to stare all the way back there.
Men in work uniforms were giving them surprised looks from quite close by. When they realized it was not just inorganic rubble that had fallen, they quickly reached into their coats, but...
“!! It’s gonna blow!!”
Kamijou raised his voice, placed his hands protectively over his head, and dove down onto the ground, so the men looked around in shock. The presence of the crushed and sparking helicopters increased the squeezing in their chests.
Then Luca ran out from behind a nearby pile of rubble. With the men focused elsewhere, she attacked them head-on with her cutlass and musket. She used them as blunt weapons instead of a blade and a gun. The sight was a sad history lesson in how, at close range, it was faster to just hit someone than to take the time to load the powder and bullet.
The first was caught completely off guard and knocked out in a single blow.
“Damn you!”
The rest drew long knives and attacked from multiple directions.
“Whoops.”
“!?”
After her cheerful voice, the men were overcome with confusion.
They did not feel the flesh and blood they expected their knives to hit. In fact, their target had entirely vanished. But their confusion was natural. Luca could freely manipulate her subjective age, so she could change the apparent age of her body. She had instantly lowered her age from 15 to 10, so her limbs and body shrank and her enemy would need to adjust their aim.
After slipping below the storm of blades, the small body grew until the swimsuit nearly burst from within.
She used her long limbs and greater body weight to knock out the confused men with the back of her cutlass and the stock of her musket.
“Fear not. I used the back of my blade.”
“Luca, I hate to interrupt your triumphant pose there, but your swimsuit bottom is slipping down. Hurry up and pull it up.”
“Oops.”
After eliminating the threat, Luca fixed her swimsuit, returned her body to normal, and spun the two long weapons around like she was juggling them.
“Nice job distracting them. You’d make a good pirate.”
“I don’t think that’s a compliment.”
Fran crouched down, took one of the unconscious men’s guns, and held it awkwardly, but Kamijou put a stop to that. People pulled the trigger easily enough in movies, but that clearly was not something he could leave with a girl who was shutting one eye and attempting to peer down the barrel. He was afraid she would accidentally shoot him in the back.
“Anyway, where’s the exit?”
They did not know where a stairway or elevator might be, the exit might have some kind of security lock, and it could have been blocked by the earlier collapse. They had no real reason to fight, so they wanted to leave as soon as possible, but the situation did not allow for it. Kamijou was always experiencing misfortune, but he was beginning to suspect Kamisato had something similar.
They did not know where someone could be hiding as they cut across a space as large as a schoolyard. They assumed an exit would be along the wall, so they moved to the wall and continued back from there.
It was generally the same as going on a rampage in a parking lot full of cars. They used the half-trucks and helicopters as shields, checked around and made sure no one dangerous was hiding behind cover, and then moved to the next shield.
Meanwhile, Kamijou and Luca heard a small sound as they moved out ahead. They looked back to find Rabbit-Ear Antennae Fran focused on her devices.
A voice came from the card-sized screen connected with a curling cord.
“Ksshhh! Fraaan, knowing you, you’ll definitely pick up this signal I’m sending out on a random band.”
(Ellen...?)
The girl sounded confident that Kamijou’s group was in the same area. If that tracer had detected their footprints or caught their scent, it would be a major problem.
Based on everything that had happened via the Spheres, it was obvious what the point of this conversation was.
“(Fran, turn it off! We don’t gain anything from this and she’s trying to provoke us into revealing our location. She might even pick up on the sound of your radio playing her voice!)”
Kamijou had no idea how much it would help, but he naturally started whispering. But Fran did not respond. She was fully focused on the small screen.
“I was oddly curious why you alone would respond differently. Luca’s case isn’t as odd if I view you as the source and her as a secondary infection. When you get down to it, I think our singularity is you, Karasuma Fran.”
She did not want to know, but she felt the need to crush any hint of worry. It may have been the mindset that led people to type their own name into a search engine despite knowing it would lead to nothing good.
“Hey, Fran. Why weren’t you captured by Kihara Yuiitsu’s...no, Kamisato Kakeru’s curse? It wasn’t that someone talked you out of it. Your heart was never shaken in the first place. Once I started wondering about that, I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. Other things from the past started occurring to me.”
“...”
“We know you spend all year chasing after UFOs. Whether that’s true or not, you know more about astronomical bodies and electromagnetic waves than any of us. And the station you used to produce Academy City’s heat wave is real ...But that is a piece of external equipment, so you haven’t really shown your own internal ‘power’, have you?”
No, it was not just the hoodie bikini rabbit-ear antennae girl.
Kamijou and Luca found themselves just as trapped by the sticky and invisible strings. Flipping over this card would accomplish nothing, it would only work against them, and it was a lot like digging up a landmine so it could blow up in their faces, but they could not stop the voice arriving over the device.
“Fraaan,” said the tracer. “You’re actually a magician, aren’t you? And since you’re oddly obsessed with a British mascot, you’re probably with someone from there. So wouldn’t it be reasonable to think you were only pretending to be a scientific UFO girl to monitor Kamisato Kakeru’s actions, if not actually guiding him here to Academy City?”
Part 11
Those words were a heavy shock to the chest for Pirate Girl Luca as she listened in.
A spy.
Someone to monitor and control Kamisato Kakeru’s actions.
But when she thought about it, it would be odd if no one had put together any kind of countermeasure against someone capable of slaughtering Magic Gods by the dozen. Kamisato himself claimed to be the kind of normal high school boy one could find anywhere, but the people around him would not have been able to see it that way.
And this raised a question about when Luca had been recruited here. Kamijou Touma would not have known who to pick from the former Kamisato Faction, so it would naturally have been Fran’s decision.
Then how had a UFO girl from the science side been able to choose someone as ideal for the job as Luca? How had she known so much about Luca’s magic?
Both questions could be answered if she was a magician too.
“UFOs,” muttered the pirate hat and eyepatch girl. “Mysterious lights in the night sky were originally researched as unlucky stars that were seen as ill omens. The idea that they are vehicles piloted by aliens developed and took over in just a few decades, but the same things have been viewed for millennia.”
“...”
“Fran, were you that kind of magician? Did you read the future from the stars, seal the twinkling light into talismans and amulets, and draw out that power when you saw fit? Are you from the Golden-style of magic that had its heyday at the beginning of the 20th century and has become a standard by this point!?”
The hoodie bikini rabbit-ear antennae girl did not respond.
There were things that caught Kamijou’s attention too. When they had run into the pirate girl in the plaza, the hoodie bikini girl had suggested drawing out a code that only Index and Othinus could understand and then retreating. But what kind of code could “only” Index and Othinus understand? She had drawn a few circles with horizontal and vertical lines along the edges. They had looked like crop circles, but there may have been another way to look at it.
Those had been ancient runes or magic circles.
And the antennae sticking out from her backpack like a sea urchin or a chestnut burr seemed painfully obvious now. They were almost like ugly thorns meant to protect the delicious contents from an external enemy.
Ellen’s words continued as if to tear into that soft flesh.
“In that case, we definitely can’t leave this to you. Fran, you understand, don’t you? If you were monitoring Kamisato-han’s actions and influencing his decisions, then it’s hard to say it was the natural course of events for him to arrive in Academy City and meet that cruel fate.”
“...”
“Fran, your betrayal killed Kamisato-han. The presence of an outsider like you shattered our age of happiness. I don’t know why you did what you did. It’s possible you didn’t intend to do any of it, but you brought destruction all the same. Whatever excuse you might make, you led Kamisato-han to take action on his fixation with the Magic Gods, you incited Sunny and Rain to action, you created the idea that Academy City was suspicious, and you led everything to this conclusion.”
“......”
“We can’t leave Kamisato-han’s fate with someone as risky as you. No matter what you might think yourself, you may have been set up to sever this last remaining thread of hope.”
“..........................................................................................................................................................................................”
She had been called a traitor, but she did not argue back.
She looked tiny. The way she peered at the screen in her hand looked like she was hanging her head and she showed no sign of life for several minutes. She was a withered tree. A standing husk. Luca was dumbfounded by the truly unexpected shock, but this girl’s downfall was a quiet one, like she was seeing the end she had known was coming someday.
Luca wondered what she would have done.
What if she had hidden something important from him and that came to light? Would she go on a desperate rampage? Would she make a desperate plea and try to repair the relationship? Would she give up all hope and take her own life? No, that was not it. She would not even find that negative sort of energy. She would surely stay standing, stop breathing, and simply cease to function as a living being.
“...Uuh...”
So it could not have been Karasuma Fran who stood up to those one-sided and disastrous words.
“Ah...hh.”
“That’s enough, Fran.”
It was the spiky-haired outsider who interrupted.
The girls assumed he would meaninglessly tell her she did not need to listen to any more of those painful words and she should switch it off.
But that was not what he said.
“How long are you going to sit there sobbing? If there’s something you want to say, then say it. Don’t worry about whether they’ll locate us from the signal. I’ll make up for that. More importantly, do you not care that she can just say whatever she wants about you? Of course you care, right!?”
“...?”
The withered tree in its hoodie and bikini looked unsure what he was telling her.
But the powerful light in the boy’s eyes made it clear he would keep talking until it got through to her.
“Don’t you have something to say!? If she’s saying that betraying people is always wrong and that you can’t trust someone who tries to be everyone’s friend, then you can argue back, can’t you!?”
“What...are you...?”
“Think back, Fran! Think back on everything you’ve done!!”
“But...you don’t know the truth. I kept a smile on my face all this time just so I could report back to the Anglican Church about Kamisato-chan...”
“That’s not what I meant!! That’s not what I meant at all!!!!!” cut in the boy. “I’m not talking about what it says on paper or what your official duties were. It doesn’t matter how it started! What did you think when you actually met Kamisato and how did you feel when smiling with Ellen and Salome!? Wasn’t that the true Karasuma Fran that wasn’t forced onto you by anyone else? Then! Don’t just assume that your affiliation, your actions, and your secrets are who you really are!!”
He grabbed her slender shoulders, stared into her hollow eyes, and roared at her without giving up on her strength as a human being.
“From the very beginning to the very end, you were never thinking about anything but Kamisato Kakeru, right!? After risking your life for that so many times, just what part of Karasuma Fran has wavered and just who have you betrayed!? So tell her! Tell her you wanted to bring back Kamisato Kakeru more than anyone else in the world! Tell her you were prepared to fight all of your former friends on your own to do it! You have the right to say that after walking through the winter cold, getting hit by explosions, and yet clenching your teeth to make it this far, Fran!!!!!”
That was obvious.
It was not even worth discussing.
If Fran was truly nothing more than a spy sent in from an outside group and if she simply saw Kamisato Kakeru as a threat, why had she tried to bring him back after World Rejecter erased him? Shouldn’t she have rejoiced that someone so dangerous was gone? Or if she could not ignore the right hand that could slaughter Magic Gods by the dozen even after Kamisato himself was gone, shouldn’t she have joined Kihara Yuiitsu’s group when the owner of the right hand became the ruler of the girls? But she had not done that. No matter who owned the right hand, she had continued to pursue Kamisato Kakeru. She did not know if it was even possible, but she had still bet her life on that thin, thin thread. The Anglican Church would never have ordered her to do that.
Opposing the girls of the former Kamisato Faction meant to oppose Kihara Yuiitsu. It was unclear how much the Anglican Church knew about World Rejecter, but they must have felt threatened to send Fran in. But she had expressed her desire to face that frightening power by saving Kamisato and she had proven that intent through her actions.
Didn’t that settle it?
Whatever her official position or duties were, wasn’t it obvious who Karasuma Fran’s “true affiliation” was with deep inside her heart!?
“If you’re not going to say it, I will.”
Kamijou had made up his mind.
Even if their paths would not meet and even if he would never walk by that girl’s side, he could still fight for Karasuma Fran. He had found something worth that.
“If you’re fine with that, then stay silent. If you don’t want that, then you’d better speak up. The result will be the same either way. Now, it’s time for a real fight. I don’t care who we’re up against! You’ve decided to fight for Kamisato Kakeru and I’m with you!!”
The hoodie bikini girl did not move for a while.
No, she probably could not move.
There was no need to peek up at the face lowered toward the screen. The trembling in her shoulders faded and her groaning sobs were brought under control, so he only had to wait for her to speak for herself.
Finally, the girl raised her head.
And she spoke.
“Please don’t mock me. I am perfectly capable of deciding my own destiny.”
Her fingertips operated the screen, but Kamijou and Luca were taken aback.
She did not open a short-range line using the same radio signal Ellen had. She accessed the entire disaster information network that used the Spheres to cover a wide area.
She used the key station she had prepared for herself.
She had to know better than anyone that her accumulated influence would act as a weapon now.
“If I’m going to confess, I’m not going to half-ass it. It won’t reach him and he definitely won’t hear it, but I have to try my best to get this out to Kamisato-chan.”
Fran smiled a little.
She had recovered enough to smile with her own strength.
historical
“So let’s make a show out of it.”
Part 12
The confession would be meaningless to the people not privy to the internal situation. But the small, small key station still sent a message out to the entire network so that it could never be taken back.
“My name is Karasuma Fran.”
Most of the people would have been confused by that.
She was not a resident of Academy City and a search through the database would not find any records on her.
“The heat wave that crippled Academy City was entirely my responsibility. I caused all of you so very, very much trouble. The hot environment weakened the Elements and restricted them enough to avoid truly catastrophic damage, but that does not excuse my actions. I must be punished.”
But.
Even though no one told them to, large crowds gathered in front of the Spheres that were opened like lotus flowers. They seemed drawn in to the planetarium-like dome and could not leave the footage played there.
“Even so, please wait just a while longer.”
It happened in the park where order was slowly returning even without a ruler.
“Please allow me just one more selfish act.”
It happened in the Show Business shelter she had once opposed.
“I am in love with someone.”
It happened in the overcrowded Hospital.
No matter how many complicated equations went into developing an advertisement, a few words from a complete amateur could fill the world instead.
Perhaps that was the power of the truth. This had a different attraction than the eerie one of Ellen’s words.
“I was told he would never return. I was told he had gone somewhere so far away that I could never reach him no matter how hard I tried. But I still want to save him. I want to do whatever it takes.”
Everyone understood.
They all thought about this girl they had never met.
“I know my feelings of love will never be fulfilled. Even if I do save him, I have carried a sin from the beginning and I can never claim that happiness for myself. But that’s fine. I just want to see his smile one more time.”
They listened.
No, perhaps it was best to say they were charmed by her.
“Once this is over, I will accept any punishment.”
So no one stopped the girl from speaking.
None of the shelter rulers interfered to the very end.
All of the Spheres agreed to act as her broadcast network. They all became regional stations for her key station.
“So please.”
And she spoke the final words.
She reached her conclusion.
“Please allow me this once-in-a-lifetime confession, so I can bring this love to an end.”
Part 13
Fran cut the connection to the Sphere.
Kamijou slowly exhaled and spoke.
“...You’re okay with that?”
“Yes.”
“You’re okay with that conclusion, Fran? Don’t give me that! Like hell you are!!”
“If we’re talking about what’s right or wrong and kind or cruel, then it might be easier to go along with what you’re saying.” The girl gently narrowed her eyes and did not hesitate to respond. “But this is between one boy and one girl. No one in the world can answer for me better than I can.”
“??? Dammit!!”
He could not exactly argue with that.
He had protected the world from Fiamma of the Right of God’s Right Seat when he had set the Star of Bethlehem in motion. He had spent a nearly infinite amount of time repeatedly challenging a true Magic God and ultimately returned to his original world. But Kamijou had no confidence when it came to his experience in matters of romance. This was a fight where what was right and what was kind were not enough to advance, and that was just too difficult.
“Fran.”
As a pure member of the former Kamisato Faction, Pirate Girl Luca had to have been trying to judge what distance to keep from this, but she spoke to the hoodie bikini magician.
“...If you need to cry, I’ll lend you my chest.”
“I’ll take you up on that later, believe me. But I have something else to do now.”
She stuck her index finger from her baggy sleeve and silently pointed toward heaven.
And then Karasuma Fran awoke.
“Let’s blow away all of these nuisances and leave this place.”
Part 14
In the sky, Ghost Girl Maya covered her face with her hands with her tall body wrapped in burial clothing.
She had heard most of what had happened in the network of Spheres. But due to Useful Spider’s attack, she had lost the Sphere she had directly controlled as a key station. She had only heard reports from the girls who had been sent elsewhere to assist her.
Yes, she had only been away for a short while.
She should have been able to graphically display her influence by linking to a search service that checked for the passwords and codes mixed into the messages. But it was gone. It was all dead. No, the entirety of Academy City had been dyed in another color altogether.
All Maya had left were the Spheres directly under the former Kamisato Faction’s control. Those dots were more like a stain on the otherwise pure map.
“The Spheres are so busy talking about Karasuma Fran that all the other rumors have been drowned out! ‘Do what you like.’, ‘Well, I can’t say no to a girl in love. Not to a girl in love!’, and ‘Let’s go drinking once it’s over!’ That’s all the shelter rulers who control the Spheres are saying!! What do we do? How do we turn this back around!?”
“No, our stuff has already grown ‘outdated’. If we start forcing things back onto those old topics, they’ll only grow suspicious. We can’t stop the flow of information and we have to avoid standing out as much as a record scratch!!”
“What do we do? What do we do, Maya!?”
The words “shut up” nearly escaped through her clenched teeth.
It was over.
The bubble had popped.
The rumors she had nurtured and raised like the child she could never have had been destroyed so easily in the short time she had been absent.
“Fran...”
Her outline flickered unnaturally while they were supported by the will-o’-the-wisp-like Censers.
But she may have made a fundamental misunderstanding. This was a battle where the lives of the girls surrounding Kamisato Kakeru were at stake. So she had no time to lament the loss of her child. She should not have assumed that nothing Fran could do could reach her.
It started with a shining star in the heavens.
No, it was not actually a star.
It was a piece of fan art titled the Bunny Grey Messenger.
Needless to say, Karasuma Fran had created it. It was a high power microwave galactic communication station meant to speak to some unseen individual for 100 years.
Ghost Girl Maya with her long, swaying black hair had no physical body.
She only seemed to exist by using the Censers’ low-frequency waves and faint aromas to destabilize the mental states of any surrounding life forms.
But what if the Censers themselves were destroyed?
“Karasuma Fraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!!!!”
Immediately after that cry, a 360 meter hammer swung down toward Academy City and accurately landed on the meteorological observatory on a District 21 mountain peak. And everything in between was brought down with it.
The sweet dreams were no longer necessary.
Fran had stared into the starry sky and floated through the emptiness for so long, but now she placed her feet on the ground and cast off her identity as a UFO girl.
Between the Lines 3
They spent a long time circling the earth.
Breaking free of the atmosphere using the Windowless Building had been easy enough, but matching their trajectory and speed to Magic God Tezcatlipoca for a rendezvous had been difficult. That had forced Kamisato into a trip around the planet in satellite orbit.
The earth had become a white planet where massive numbers of white bugs whirled about instead of clouds. Kamisato had initially thought it was a typhoon or something, but he had belatedly realized it was a colossal roulette wheel. This may have been Nuada’s latest obsession.
Kamisato knew everything would return to normal at the end of the day, but it was still a sight void of all hope. If this was what he had seen, what would the Soviet cosmonaut have said?
“Oh, there he is, there he is☆ Tezcatlipoca is way too relaxed.”
Niang-Niang licked her lips, placed her hands on her hips, and pushed out her flat chest. She did not seem to care that the weightlessness was causing the bottom of her mini-China dress to rise quite a bit.
They were truly in outer space, but none of the things in the textbooks seemed to apply. Kamisato did not need a spacesuit, the words of the god next to him reached his ears like normal, and no concern was given to the heat and radiation that was no longer being blocked by the earth’s atmosphere. The Magic Gods were insane in everything they did.
“But...Tezcatlipoca? What does defeating just one of them matter when the earth is like that?”
“We just have to start by repairing the global environment. The earth has quite a few problems right now, but the biggest would be Proserpina’s artificial ice age. Spring will nev-->>