ir chests together.

The Decomposer and the Carrier pulled something out like a magic trick. The twins held a pencil-sized electric candle lighter like the bride and groom at a wedding.

Their small fingers reached the trigger and produced a solid “click”.

The stench and gases of death had transformed the first floor into a single giant bomb, so it all exploded.

Part 10

A deep rumbling shook the entire reinforced concrete building.

“Shit, what is it now!?” cursed Hamazura Shiage with the borrowed phone in hand.

He heard several people running around in the darkness. Aneri, his one ray of hope, had gone silent. A look at the phone said it had no signal. Communications must have been cut off when the power went out.

He was alone from here on.

He used his memory to make his way to the room with the red dot on the map.

It was dark and all the security cameras and sensors were dead, but this was still hard to believe. If the Anti-Skill officers moving around were just a little more cautious about their surroundings, they would have found Hamazura curled up in a corner and holding his breath.

Something major had to be happening.

Someone had chosen to play the “direct attack” card that he had immediately rejected. That was convenient for him, but he doubted the monster would take his side. He had to keep in mind that he was effectively attempting to rob a burning building in the middle of a major urban riot.

Once the adults’ footsteps left, he moved out into the dark hallway.

The room he wanted was not far away.

“Takitsubo!!”

The instant he opened the door and stepped in, a powerful impact hit his right wrist. By the time he groaned, someone had already grabbed his collar and slammed his back against the wall. The phone’s screen shined light up from where it had fallen to the floor.

His assailant was a professional Anti-Skill officer.

He could not breathe.

Had this man been waiting in the dark room without lighting up his flashlight or phone to catch any intruders by surprise?

He had close-cropped black hair and muscles thick enough to look like armor. He had the stereotypical look of an authoritarian gym teacher. The delinquent boy would never have wanted to get anywhere near him even under ordinary circumstances.

“Gah!?”

“Hamazura!!”

His feet were already lifted from the floor. Nothing he did with his hands could dislodge that thick arm from his collar. Nevertheless, his world seemed to expand endlessly when he heard that girl calling his name.

“I’m..fine.”

It was Takitsubo Rikou.

He had been searching this entire time for that shoulder-length black hair, those vacant eyes, and that pink track suit.

Maybe Anti-Skill had simply not wanted to move a suspect around while security was so unstable, but the fact remained that his girlfriend was still alive in this shitty world!!

“Agh!! I swear I’ll save you. So don’t worry about a thing, Takitsubo!!”

“Another dark side punk?” asked a deep voice directly in front of him.

They had to do something about this man before they could have their emotional reunion. Hamazura briefly focused on his Coin of Nicholas, but he was unsure if he should use it here. It worked for things like “open this door” or “win me this roulette round”, but he did not know if it would work for something like “let me defeat this guy”. He wanted to avoid wasting a wish and having to wait another hour for it to charge.

“Anti-Skill will not give in to anyone. We will drag all of you out into the light, dark side. Handcuffs allows for no exceptions.”

Just then, something landed on the man’s arm.

Its surface shined even in the darkness, but..was that an earwig?

And it was not alone.

The next thing Hamazura knew, the man’s right arm was completely obscured by all the bugs covering it.

“Gwoh!?”

Once the Anti-Skill officer finally noticed, he let go of Hamazura’s collar and flailed his right arm. But the earwigs would not let go. In fact, Hamazura heard a sound like pouring sand as more of them dropped from the ceiling like a waterfall. They enveloped the man’s upper body and then crawled into his bulletproof jacket, gloves, and other equipment.

“Gya-gya-gya-gya-gya-gya-gyaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!???”

Hamazura could not bear to watch any longer. Once the dark silhouette was covered from head to toe, it began to crumble from within. It was unclear if he was being torn apart, eaten, or dissolved, but he was no longer in one piece. Hamazura was presented with an obvious death without ever seeing a corpse or an injury, just like he had watched a metal drum crushed inwards with someone stuffed inside.

He could not even run over to try to help.

Those were not just earwigs. They had something else to them – maybe a chemical and maybe a pathogen.

“Get away from there, Hamazura!!”

He had fallen to the floor, so Takitsubo called out to him. He had come here to save her, but here she was saving him. If she had not pulled him back toward her, he may have been destroyed psychologically rather than physically.

He detected an odor that stung his eyes. It was like something rotting, but not like kitchen garbage.

He heard a quiet thunk and then saw someone else standing in the room. Even though he did not recall blinking. It was a girl with twintails. The middle school girl had appeared out of thin air, but all she did was move over to the wall and then slide down to sit on the floor.

She was the one who had handcuffed him.

The armband on her right arm said she was an esper from Judgment.

“Gh..”

He noticed she was bruised all over and there were scorch marks on her uniform from some school or another.

She was burned and battered.

She had the look of someone who had narrowly escaped a fire or an explosion. He had been in his fair share of fights, but he could not even hazard a guess about any possible internal damage.

“I couldn’t..teleport away..in time.”

“Hey, what’s going on?”

She did not answer his hesitant question. She appeared to have passed out.

“Don’t just pop in here and then die! What happened!? Aren’t you Judgment people supposed to protect us at times like this!?”

He heard some quiet footsteps.

He had no idea what was happening, but this sudden visitor had apparently brought a new threat along with her. She had apparently been teleporting out of danger, but he really wished she had chosen any room but this one.

He heard some giggling laughter as a pair of twins casually peeked into the room.

They were short, yet had weirdly large chests.

“Kaai, there’s some people in here. Why not get them bitten to infect them?”

“No, Youen, this is an interrogation room. We need to be careful in who we target. That boy there has a pretty stupid face, but I don’t think he’s Anti-Skill or Judgment.”

“Hey, Decomposer? Why bother discriminating after coming this far?”

“Well, Carrier, the more careful your aim, the more they will despair at their chances of escaping.”

He did not dare even breathe.

He could tell his life was in their hands. If this room was full of the methane gas use in lighters, then a single spark from them would fill the room with an explosive blast.

The unconscious twintails girl was apparently their target, but he could not predict what they would do in this situation.

Why should they care if they accidentally killed him or Takitsubo? There was no penalty outside of whatever rules they were using to score their own performance. They might just take those two lives as casually as they would kick a small stone along the way to school.

One of the twins grinned over at him while playing with a rat at her feet.

“Do you want to live?”

“I do.”

He planted his knees down on the dark stain spreading across the floor and folded his hands in front of his face. The twins grinned in satisfaction while he looked like a loser with a gun’s muzzle pressed against the back of his head.

“And please don’t kill the Judgment girl either. I don’t want to see anyone else die.”

The twins looked taken aback.

The flow of time stopped.

“Pff.”

One of them burst out laughing while they pressed their cheeks together.

“Ah ha ha ha!! If you want, mister. You’re hilarious!!”

“Are you sure, Kaai? What happened to having careful aim?”

“It’s fine, Youen. We do need to leave a few of them alive to spread word of the fear.”

It all changed there.

The girl called Kaai put on a meltingly sweet smile and blew a kiss toward the pathetic boy.

“I quite like people who go out of their way to defile themselves.”

Youen sighed, giving the impression that her sister did this a lot.

“Tell everyone of this fear.”

That was a command. In a school society, school years created an absolute hierarchy, but this little monster looked down on him.

She explained the only way he and Takitsubo were going to survive.

“Tell them the dark side will not go away. Tell them what happens when they so foolishly try to shine a light on the darkness. Tell them what becomes of every fool who even thinks of it.”

He could not even nod, but the girl narrowed her eyes in satisfaction, pulled her head back out of the room, and walked down the hallway with her sister. The light sound of their beach sandals was joined by intermittent eruptions of shouts and screams.

Living creatures.

And infectious disease.

The darkness controlled by Kaai the Decomposer and Youen the Carrier was on another level altogether.

Part 11

“Looks like nothing’s actually broken. Okay.”

“Hamazura, I’ll apply pressure here, so you tie that on tight.”

After tightening a bandage using the light of the phone, he attached a metal clasp.

Since runaways could not visit the doctor, that simple first aid kit was a valuable asset for them, but he could not just leave that twintails girl there to die.

She did not wake up even when he poured disinfectant on her wounds, so she must have been out cold. He had covered up most of the wounds he could see, but he did not know what things were like inside her. She was breathing, though, so he would have to hope Anti-Skill could take care of the rest.

Assuming any of them were still alive.

“There’s nothing more we can do. Let’s get out of here.”

“Mhh.”

He had not expected this now.

Takitsubo Rikou expressionlessly puffed out her cheeks.

“By the way, Hamazura, did those twins do anything to you?”

Did he have some weird mold or bug on his back? He doubted he could have missed anything with how powerful that infection had been, but now he was worried.

“When the one blew you a kiss.”

“Bff!? That was an accident, a surprise attack, a force majeure!!”

His flustered shouting only made his girlfriend act like a grumpy cat.

Anyway, he turned off the phone’s light and cautiously exited the interrogation room. A few explosions erupted down the hallway, but those were not the work of the mysterious twins. He was throwing burning pieces of paper into the darkness to intentionally detonate the gas up ahead and create a safe zone for them.

Methane gas was dangerous, but it could be contained to a single space. By dividing things up with a door or shutter before detonating it, the explosion would remain small and it would safely “use up” all the gas.

It worked, but nothing else happened either.

He clenched his teeth and had to stay focused lest his feet stop moving.

“Hamazura.”

“Is there really no one else left in here?”

There were sticky strings stretched across the entire floor.

The stuff dangling from the ceiling looked like natto, but he doubted it was such an ordinary type of bacteria. There was no sign of anyone here anymore. The place had been packed full of fully-equipped Anti-Skill officers, not to mention the communication operators and administrative workers.

All that remained of those people was the disturbingly sticky and dark slime staining the floor and walls.

Hamazura had said he wanted to live and that may have sent the twins in this direction instead. What if they had killed someone else here because they had chosen to spare the twintails girl on a whim? He had nothing to prove that, but he still felt a great weight in his stomach.

And he doubted this was over. The dark side had made a show of force, but Anti-Skill controlled all 23 districts with its military might. Things would only escalate from here. Anti-Skill was sure to pull out something even more bizarre next.

“What do we do now, Hamazura?”

“We escape outside of Academy City.”

“..”

“Anti-Skill is serious about this. I’ve personally seen them kill two people and I’m sure they’ve killed even more that I didn’t see. The adults really are trying to crush the dark side. I don’t know what standards they’re using to purify the city, but I do know that the two of us are on some list called Outrank. So they’ll get us if we don’t leave. For today, hiding in some deeper and darker place will not be enough to safely lose them.”

Even in the darkness, he could tell she was frowning.

“But I doubt we can cross the outer wall so easily,” she said. “The four gates will be on max alert, so trying to break through will only get us killed.”

“I know that, but I do have an i-”

He stopped talking because he saw someone blocking the way ahead in the long hallway.

“Hamazura.”

The voice he heard meant someone had escaped harm.

That was a relief, but he could not relax yet. He was not supposed to be here and, based on how Anti-Skill had been acting today, they might just gun down any suspect without giving him a chance to explain himself.

But that was not what happened.

They spoke to him instead.

“Is that you, Hamazura!? What are you doing here!?”

He recognized the voice.

This was not his first time here. He had been thrown into this place’s holding cells plenty of times after stealing a car or getting into a street fight during his Skill Out days.

So he knew some of the officers who worked here.

(Yomikawa Aiho.)

That teacher had her long black hair tied back. She normally wore a green track suit, but she was in a sinister black bulletproof jacket today.

He was scared.

He was, but while they did not get along, he knew she was not a bad person.

He briefly considered abandoning all his plans and asking her to save his girlfriend, but then he remembered the reality he was living in. Or maybe he just did not know the difference between a jinx and a wrong assumption.

Regardless, he held an arm out to the side after only a slight delay. He guarded his girlfriend with his body and raised his voice.

“Outta the way. I can’t trust you!!”

“Do this and you’re a criminal, Hamazura. Just tell me why you’re here and the grownups can handle it if necessary!! That’s how it’s supposed to work!!”

‘You’re not the only one I would need to trust!” he shouted back.

It was unusual for him to be able to overpower her with words. She always had the right thing to say and used that to crack down on even the smallest crimes.

Yet he was overpowering her.

That seemed to show the hesitation within her.

“Yomikawa, you’ve seen it yourself, haven’t you? Something isn’t right today. Something is preventing your ideal of justice from working like it’s supposed to. If I don’t figure out what’s causing it, leaving this in your hands will only bring death!! I’ve already seen it happen for myself!! At least twice!!”

“Then what are you going to do?”

It took her a bit before she got out that reply.

She really had lost her edge. But there were types of pain that could only be produced with a blunted edge.

“Are you going to justify picking up a gun and committing more crimes you know are wrong just because you needed to protect someone you care for? Only you will accept that justification. Society won’t. They’ll check the laws and judge you guilty!”

“..”

“Operation Handcuffs isn’t an evil thing. The idiot standing at the top of the world is tearing apart his own life to accomplish this, so I won’t let it go wrong!!”

She was not just trying to keep up appearances.

He could not ignore the words of someone standing in the same field as him.

“You have some vision for the future, don’t you? You wouldn’t have come all this way to save that girl otherwise.”

Yomikawa stepped forward.

It was just one step, but it was a heavy one.

“Then don’t destroy that ideal future with your own actions here!! It’s the dark side that justifies their own actions with exceptions like that! So leave all the pain-in-the-rear fighting to the grownups! I promise you we’ll treat you well!!”

He was not moved by her words.

He had already seen that kind of promise fall apart.

But could he really force his way past Yomikawa when she was saying this? His mind focused on the gold coin in his pocket. That was the only real move he had left. It would give him 100% odds just once here. If he used that, could he get Yomikawa away from him without hurting her!?

He thought about it and raised his lowered head.

He opened his mouth.

“Yomi-”

Something hot and hard crashed into the center of his chest.

He had no idea what had happened.

The deafening gunshot seemed to come after a short delay like thunder. But he did not have the presence of mind to actually figure out what had happened. The powerful blast launched him backwards into some glass protected by a thick sheet.

With a loud shattering sound, he was thrown outside the window.

“Hamazura!!”

Part 12

“Gh.”

Shirai Kuroko awoke to a sharp gunshot.

She found herself in a small room instead of the first floor lobby. Was this an interrogation room? She briefly had trouble remembering how she had gotten here, but then she noticed someone peering down at her face.

It was an overbearing middle-aged man.

“A-are you okay, Shirai-san?”

“Thanks to you.”

Seeing a combover and glasses was not how she liked to wake up. Only after sitting up from the floor did she realize she had been lying down. She felt an odd tugging at her skin. She checked in the interrogation room’s large mirror to see bandages and gauze all over her.

“I guess I have to thank you for treating my wounds.”

“Oh, um, that wasn’t me.”

“?”

Then who had done it? Rakuoka Houfu showed no interest in answering that question. It seemed like a long shot, but was the camera in the monitoring room on?

She stepped out into the hallway to find a horrible stench and lots of dark stickiness.

She saw two surviving members of Anti-Skill out there, but they were staring at a broken window for some reason. Some pink fabric was caught on the jagged edge. It was the synthetic material used for track suits and the like.

“The girl fell with him?” blankly muttered a young Anti-Skill man carrying a battle rifle that could be used at long or close range. “Anyway, we’re safe now, Yomikawa-san. Are you hur-”

“Did..you..”

Yomikawa’s trembling lips moved.

The next thing Shirai knew, the woman had grabbed at her subordinate’s collar.

“Did you aim your gun at a child, Namino!? What were you thinking!?”

The brown-haired man looked puzzled by her question.

“H-he was only some dark side punk. And if he snuck into the general station, he’s clearly a harmful, right?”

“Only..only!? These kids’ lives are our responsibility!! Their parents are trusting us to protect them!!!!!”

Her words did no good. The man appeared to shrink down, but he showed no sign of learning his lesson. It was like he had no interest in why she was angry and was only trying to weather the storm.

Shirai could tell just from watching that common sense had broken down.

She chose to approach them and the short walk was enough to wind her. The skinny combover and glasses man was not sure what to do. He may have wanted to lend her his shoulder, but was unsure if he should really carelessly touch a middle school girl. He was such a strict rule follower that he would overreact at times.

“Are you the only two still standing?” asked Shirai. “What happened to all the others???”

No one responded.

They were hesitant to speak the accurate number of losses out loud, which was why they had only received the numbers from a report over the radio. The young Anti-Skill officer holding the battle rifle shook his head with Yomikawa still grabbing at his collar.

And he gave the answer.

“South District 7, District 8, District 17..and District 1 are all down.”

“1..”

Yomikawa was speechless despite yelling so much earlier.

That was understandable. District 1 was the government district where all the city’s administrative functions were gathered. The general station there also functioned as the central station that connected all the others. In terms of the police outside the city, it was like the National Police Agency’s headquarters.

Yet it had fallen so easily.

They were lucky to even have an accurate list of fallen stations with the top of the command structure broken off. Anti-Skill could easily cease to function as an organization unless they reorganized to bring their network back up.

“I told you,” said a voice. It was Rakuoka Houfu, the Anti-Skill officer with a combover and glasses. “We aren’t doing enough. If we really want to clean up the dark side, we have to treat it like a war.”

Something had gone terribly wrong with Operation Handcuffs.

Yomikawa Aiho bit her lip as one of those who had set this in motion along with the new Board Chairman.

Part 13

His consciousness flashed in and out.

Landing on a pile of snow removed from the road had apparently cushioned his fall. Without that, the fall would have killed him. Falling from a great height was far more deadly than it was depicted in movies and dramas.

Yes, Hamazura Shiage was alive.

“Hamazura.”

He heard his girlfriend calling out to him from nearby. She must have jumped out of the same window, but she was clinging to him instead of checking on her own injuries.

“Are you okay? Hey, Hamazura, you’re scaring me. Please wake up. Don’t leave me behind.”

He moved his trembling fingers to unbutton his jacket.

A smooth metal panel lay below. It belonged to the bulletproof jacket of the Anti-Skill officer he had knocked out in the apartment. He had known things were bound to get bad, so he had taken a precaution against that negative prediction.

And he had been proven right.

Asking anyone in Academy City for help would only get them killed. The adults were a threat, no matter what any individual one tried to do. The back alleys, the depths of the dark side, and every other loophole would be filled in. If they wanted to survive, they had to move outside the walls. He had no idea when Anti-Skill would return to normal, but for now, they had to leave.

They had to find freedom in the world outside.

Still collapsed on his back, he rubbed his girlfriend’s head and made a suggestion.

“Let’s go to the airport.”

“?”

“We can’t try to climb over the wall or try to get through the gates. Security will be so tight we’ll never get close to it. All of the low-level dark side people going for that idea are probably being torn to mincemeat by machinegun fire from unmanned helicopters or the robots on the wall right about now. Trying to be clever won’t work here. There might be hundreds of options, but they all lead to dead ends. Trying to climb the wall, trick the gate, or hide inside a long-distance truck will only end in failure.”

“But.” Takitsubo shook her head to reject his idea. “Security will be tight at District 23’s airport too. There are several layers of security and I doubt we can get on a plane while hiding our faces.”

“We just have to find a way to not rouse suspicions while showing our faces.”

He pulled a key item out of the small sling bag.

The passport was printed with a blatantly false name: School Boy.

He had no idea what about it was so impressive, but maybe it was impressive because an amateur could not explain it. If that voice on the phone was using it, it had to be a quality product.

He powered off his phone with a trembling hand and then held up the passport. He held it up within range of speeding sensor set up along with a traffic light.

The paper glittered.

The infrared produced a rainbow light thanks to the cutting-edge imperfect crystal printing. It looked simple enough, but the crystallographic defects creating irregular gaps in the thin layer of artificial crystal was a counterfeiting protection method that no one could ever reproduce. Supposedly, anyway.

But that had been proven wrong.

“The dark side must have a technician capable of making perfect counterfeit IDs. We’ll go talk with them and get our own. Then we have a free pass onto a safe flight out of here.”

Map

South District 7 General Anti-Skill Station

Shirai Kuroko – Judgment

Rakuoka Houfu – Anti-Skill

In Front of South District 7 General Anti-Skill Station

Hamazura Shiage – Beneficial

Takitsubo Rikou – Beneficial

District 15 Luxury Hotel

Hanatsuyu Kaai – Harmful

Hanatsuyu Youen – Harmful

Between the Lines 1

“Your silence tells me it wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

She was not wearing any real clothing.

A girl who looked only about 10 was pulling a red cloth thinner than a bed sheet up to her flat chest. Her long strawberry blonde hair was divided into several fried shrimps and had rose decorations woven in.

She was standing and leaning against the cell’s hard and cold bars.

The Level 5 with white hair and red eyes was seated on the floor in the adjacent cell.

Accelerator was Academy City’s #1 and the new Board Chairman, but he was now awaiting trial.

R&C Occultics CEO Anna Sprengel grinned.

She continued the conversation between two who were in position to take the world for themselves.

“I would love to hear how it was supposed to go, but maybe that’s irrelevant at this point. Hee hee. The fund you secretly gathered f-->>

next page