Volume 5, 2: The Rescue Puzzle Sits Before You – Travel.(3/6)
“..”
“Paying back your debts sounds like a system unrelated to good and evil to me.”
The two girls’ gazes clashed while they crouched on either side of collapsed Kamijou.
But they didn’t have all day.
Kamijou was still groaning in agony from the deep wound and the unsettling feeling of the metal in his shoulder, but he still managed to reach out an empty hand to draw Youen’s attention by tapping her on the side of the hip.
He couldn’t get his voice out even though the wound was in his shoulder.
His position lying on the floor had allowed him to notice something before the others.
The artificial ghost’s face had just appeared out from a nearby concrete wall.
Whether it was natural or artificial, that was a real ghost. That meant the laws of physics might not apply. But could she really just pass through solid walls? That was cheating in a different way from teleportation. A foe that could do that without warning could sneak up on even by the most experienced combat veteran!!
Did Shirai and Youen even notice the bug zapper sound?
Unlike with the train crash, there wasn’t time to leave Alice and Youen with the teleporter.
Frillsand #G released a massive high-voltage current in all directions.
The white light was brighter than welding at close range and the rumble of the concrete walls and ceiling coming down shook the boy’s eardrums.
“Shi..rai!!”
All he could do was shout her name and give her a shove.
A moment later, something blurred and he saw another scene on top of reality. He wasn’t sure why, but the phone in his pocket heated up so much he feared it would burn him.
He had misinterpreted what happened last time. It wasn’t being hit by the high-voltage current that sent the strange hallucination into his mind. Yes, his phone and the station’s devices hadn’t malfunctioned because they received a direct hit from that thick beam of electricity.
The entire area around the artificial ghost was faintly electrified.
(My..hair? So that’s it. Static electricity or something is surrounding the entire surface of my head.)
The scene played out in hellish slow motion, but he still had no way of avoiding the ghost’s attack. Imagine Breaker couldn’t negate it. It was possible he could reduce the risk of death from the agonizing shock if he let the hallucination take over. Even if it only increased the odds he could get back up and fight back next time.
A moment later, the mass of high-voltage electricity pierced straight through the center of Kamijou Touma’s body.
Part 7
An old man’s voice rang through a dizzyingly vast but suffocatingly claustrophobic concrete space.
“The Vanishing Tunnel does not actually exist.”
He was answered by a young man who seemed threatened and driven to the edge.
“Do you want my research notes on Frillsand #G?”
Whose memory was this?
It wasn’t the old man’s or the young man’s. Neither one seemed to consider the presence of whoever’s eyes were watching them. Like they thought that person had already left the scene.
Maybe they weren’t entirely wrong.
The scene felt like a dream. Like the viewer didn’t have the ability to interfere in what they were watching.
“I’m no barbarian.”
Maybe that was why that person could only watch. Even though they knew the scene was headed toward disaster.
“A few of them.”
The old man pointed toward several small children in gym clothes. In the realm known as the dark side, those lives would be consumed in the name of combat or research.
“Just select a few at random.”
The young man had challenged the city’s darkness in order to protect them.
He had even pretended to be a Kihara to bolster his insufficient strength.
Even giving physical form to a pipedream like an artificial ghost and finetuning it as a weapon may have been a part of that goal.
So.
Even if he was backed up to the precipice of death, he had only one possible answer here.
“Go to hell, you son of a bitch.”
The observer had known from the beginning how this would end.
Finally, a dry gunshot rang out before their eyes.
They couldn’t do anything to stop it.
Not one thing.
Part 8
The ringing noise filling Kamijou Touma’s mind rapidly faded and reality rushed back in.
The high-voltage current might have actually stopped his heart for the few seconds his sense of time had been out of order.
“Gah!!”
The white light was replaced by color.
Sound crept back into the great pressure.
His limbs trembled. If he didn’t clench his teeth, he was afraid his convulsions would make him bite off his own tongue.
Something was messing with his mind. This was very bad. He had underestimated the risk. If this kept happening, he was afraid he would lose track of what was his own memory, what was a meaningless hallucination, and what was external data placed in his head.
In the instant of the blast, his senses had been so confused he forget whether he was standing up or lying down. Everything felt fake, like he was swimming through a strange liquid. But even in that state, what little of his mind was still functioning worked to rejoin reality.
The destruction of the concrete wall was very real.
However, that was not the result of the electric storm released from Frillsand #G’s body.
“Gwoahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!”
A deep roar shook the ground below them.
The concrete wall across from the one the ghost had emerged through was smashed apart by some great force. It must have been a punching fist or a tackling shoulder. The giant mass of muscle that emerged grabbed Frillsand #G and smashed through the opposite wall to disappear again. The attack made it easy to forget this was a straight corridor. It felt more like a crash at an intersection.
But aside from that, Kamijou forgot all about the pain in his shoulder while lying on the floor.
He was truly shocked.
That had been nothing but muscle.
Pure muscle had overpowered a scientific ghost?
What even was that monster? It looked like someone had taken the body of a storybook ogre and pasted on the head of a skinny middle-aged man with a combover and glasses. There probably were girls who read shoujo manga as a child and honestly wanted a sparkly guy who was disproportionally tall for the size of his handsome face, but there was no way anyone wanted that macho body with a tiny middle-aged head on top.
Yet someone seemed to recognize that otherworldly image.
Shirai Kuroko rubbed her eyes and grimaced before shouting into the hole in the wall.
“Rakuoka Houfu!! What do you think you’re doing!?”
She was only answered by repeated flashes of light and deep zapping sounds coming from the hole. The battle must have been fairly one-sided. A vending machine equipped with AI and a camera malfunctioned such that a female voice kept repeating “Facial recognition failed. Please take a step back.” while drink bottles spewed from the bottom.
Alice approached dazed Kamijou with a smile. She bent over and rubbed the top of her little blonde head against his stomach. The two pointy curls that resembled animal ears actually hurt a fair bit.
“Teacher.”
“Yes, that girl’s intuition is correct. The ghost is the greatest threat, so escaping the station is our top priority if we want to survive.” Youen spoke on Alice’s behalf. “I say we let the justice exhibitionist play her stupid role while we do the smart thing and get the hell out of here. Can you stand? If not, I can surround you with bees or ants and force you onto your feet with them. Go, creepy-crawly powered suit☆”
“No need!!” he insisted, springing to his feet. Having tens of thousands of ants and bees covering him too thoroughly for cutaneious respiration and tugging his arms and legs around like a puppet was the stuff of nightmares. But it turned out intense fear worked great to eliminate less-important pain and suffering. He doubted his sanity was going to last long like this, though.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going!?”
“Tch. The goody-goody freak noticed. But an emergency evacuation comes first right now!!”
They hurried him along, but Youen and Alice were too small to lend Kamijou a shoulder. He was forced to clench his teeth and walk forward under his own power.
They had to get through the broken shutter and outside the station.
Then they could escape this deadly nightmare.
Or so he thought.
After hearing a sharp “zing!!”, they ducked back toward building.
“What?”
Kamijou noticed orange sparks and a shallow scrape in the asphalt near his feet.
Someone was firing on them from a distance.
Part 9
Kamijou’s group weren’t the only ones shocked.
(What is that? A flamingo bat? That animal ears girl must be some kind of weirdo to choose a non-baseball bat in this country.)
The sniper wore a cowboy hat and a red China dress. You couldn’t find that kind of clothing at an ordinary store, so she must have stolen it back from the confiscated items being transported along with her in the Overhunting. She gulped at what she assumed that picture book dress girl must have done. A pink oar-like object had floated into the air and blocked the ricocheted bullet.
(Is she an esper, or is that a next-generation weapon? No, I can worry about the exact definition later! I just hope it isn’t something truly incomprehensible like that Coin of Nicholas.)
She lay on her stomach atop a store building on the other side of a major road from South District 7 Station. A semiauto sniper rifle’s stock was pressed against her shoulder and a plastic case bearing the Anti-Skill logo sat nearby.
(Sigh. Anti-Skill must not get paid very much. Wait, do they even get a special bonus beyond their ordinary teacher’s pay?)
A whirring motor hovered overhead.
“Yeah, these drones are more convenient than I expected. I honestly thought anything was fine as long it had a camera and could store images.”
She used a mirrorless multifunction scope that displayed both the moisture and EM waves in the air to check around the destroyed metal shutter again, but she displayed a different window at the same time. With those small drones, she wouldn’t miss the crucial moment even if it happened inside the giant closed room that was the station building.
“You can’t tempt a scoop junkie like me with such a juicy incident. Now I’ve just got to get a really shocking pic☆”
Yes. Benizome Jellyfish was a paparazzo who was willing to kill if it would get her what she wanted and nothing would ever change that. She even licked her lips as she kept whispering to herself.
“Don’t give me that. I can’t have you escaping to safety, you little chicks. I went to the trouble of hiding out with my camera at the ready, after all. I’ll give you some chaos to start with, but I need to you to grow this into an incident with a shockingly high body count☆”
Part 10
More orange sparks scattered from the asphalt. This time, it was less than 30cm from Kamijou’s shoe. Shirai shouted “Benizome”, which he assumed to be a name.
The mysterious sniper fire kept them from leaving the station.
“Th-this is bad.” Kamijou had gone entirely pale. “And the worst part is I’m barely even questioning the presence of a real sniper rifle here in Japan.”
“Wow, it’s already night outside. The girl wants to spend the night with her teacher. She wants to talk about things she can’t tell anyone else!!”
Alice rejoiced for entirely unrelated reasons, so he grabbed the back of her collar to restrain her while walking back into the station building. He was afraid she would run out into the sniper fire with a big smile.
There were two large holes in the corridor walls. Sparking light came from one, suggesting the battle between the ghost and the muscles was still ongoing. That meant it would safer to try the other hole, the one Rakuoka Houfu had come from.
But Youen was still calm enough to think rationally. Which he found unbelievable.
“The accuracy of those shots suggests the sniper can see the moisture and electricity in the air. Bullets weren’t exactly rare in Operation Handcuffs, so I would rate them a lower-middle threat maybe? The biggest threats were all bizarre nonsense.”
“You are imagining things,” insisted Shirai. “It is the 29th. That nightmare ended on the 25th!!”
“For example, this justice exhibitionist’s teleportation. But I never saw that ghost back then.”
Could they confuse the sniper with Youen’s 3D images? No. No matter how many false images they created, it was still up to luck who the sniper actually targeted. That wouldn’t eliminate all risk of the girls being shot.
The hole in the wall led to a shower room. That seemed like an odd thing for a train station, but it may have been for the station workers. They couldn’t return home in their uniforms, so maybe they needed a place to change and freshen up. With the wall broken through, it was impossible to tell where the general public was and wasn’t supposed to go.
They walked across the tile floor and found a locker room. There was a bench with a back, so Kamijou finally got to sit down.
Low tremors continued to shake the floor.
Hanatsuyu Youen was focused on his shoulder.
“I should probably treat your shoulder wound now.”
“Eh? What?”
“First, I will remove the dart.”
The agonizing pain made stars dance before his eyes.
It honestly felt like the wound had swollen to several times its size.
He let out an incomprehensible shout, but he wasn’t sure the sounds leaving his mouth and the ones entering his ears were actually the same.
He was glad the dart didn’t have a barb. Removing what was plugging up the wound definitely caused the bleeding to increase, but the wicked 10-year-old wasn’t concerned.
“I need to disinfect the wound before I stop the bleeding. Come on out, you adorable maggots!”
“What? What did you just say, you horrible girl!?”
“Have you never heard of maggot therapy? Ignorant, hotblooded, and short-tempered is so not a good combination.”
She intertwined spider silk around a hornet stinger and used that to sew up a thick blood vessel and then used a coagulating mixture of snake venoms to seal up the wound itself. The difference between poison and medicine was mostly in how the substance was used, so there may not have been a strict boundary between the two. Of course, an amateur attempting it would only get the patient killed.
In other words, this small Carrier didn’t lack the skills to help instead of harm and it wasn’t that the option had never occurred to her.
She could do it, but didn’t.
The option was right there in front of her, but she didn’t choose it. Was that due to her personal interests and preferences? Or had she lived a life where her situation never allowed for that option?
It didn’t seem to bother her any and she patted her small hand on the closed wound.
“There, all done. When I decide to heal someone, I make sure not to leave a scar. You’d better cry your eyes out in thanks.”
She blew him a kiss and then pointed her small thumb toward a tall machine tucked into the gap between two sections of lockers.
“The bleeding has stopped, but you’ll still want some vitamin C or folic acid. I’ll buy you some vegetable juice from that vending machine, so hand over some change.”
“Vitamins?”
“As ingredients for a hematinic drug. Closing up the wound doesn’t bring back the blood you lost.”
That made perfect sense.
Needing blood made him think of iron-rich foods like liver or spinach, but if an expert in the field (what field?) said this was best, he wasn’t going to argue. Blood had several different components, so maybe there were ways beyond directly ingesting iron.
However..
“I-I only have 49 yen.”
“Garbage. Human garbage,” spat the white coat girl, giving him the look of a girl when her worthless date left her with the entire bill.
Kamijou’s shoulders drooped at his utter failure in the New Year’s Tokyo survival life, but then he felt something crinkle at his feet.
It was a rolled up 10000yen bill.
“Good fortune does exist!!”
“It’s lying near a change machine, so take it and I’m handcuffing you for theft,” warned Shirai.
“Fine, whatever. You can let the fugitive criminal take care of it.”
Youen swiped the money from terrified Kamijou’s hand and inserted it into the vending machine. She ignored Shirai’s protests and bought all of the vegetable and fruit drinks shown on the display.
“Go, creepy-crawly fusion☆”
“You aren’t just going to give me the drink as-is!?”
“I said they were only ingredients, didn’t I? Now say ‘ah’?”
“Wait, no! I’ll drink it, I’ll drink it! I won’t waste your home cooking, so at least let me decide when I do it!”
“Shut up, you.”
“Hm? Why did you just put it in your mouth!? I really don’t have any good memories when it comes to receiving sketchy drugs mouth-to- mghmghmghgmgh!!!??”
The mystery liquid allowed Kamijou Touma to realize the male dream of a cute girl giving him his medicine mouth-to-mouth. And unlike with Anna, this wasn’t even poison. For some reason, Alice stared jealously with her mouth forming a small triangle.
This was supposed to help with his blood, but his mouth tasted like a grassy soup.
After pulling away and letting out a breath, Youen held a finger to her lips in realization. The gloomy but hard-to-read girl whispered to herself.
“Oops. That was my first kiss, wasn’t it?”
His male dream received an added bonus. This was reaching legendary levels on par with warming each other’s naked bodies with a cute girl while snowed into a mountain cabin. (Q1. By what miracle would a guy end up snowed in alone with the kind of girl he would normally be too nervous to even talk to?) At this point, he was terrified a horrifying catch was about to reveal itself.
“(And here’s half the change.)”
“(Why do I get a 5000yen bill while you get four 1000yen bills and 520yen in coins? The way you can combine substances into just about anything, I don’t like the idea of you carrying around several different metals like that.)”
She placed the money in his hand and he whispered back with a shadow on his face. If he didn’t get that money back from her, he feared she would use it to create a chemical that could melt through anything. But if he did take it from her, he feared she would claim he owed her a debt.
“So is all that stuff with bugs and snakes really safe? The area around the wound feels hot. I’d swear it’s swollen to twice its size.”
“You’re just imagining things. But if the pain bothers you that much, I could inject the affected area with a medicinal leech’s anesthetic. The stuff makes sure you don’t feel a thing while the leech tears through your skin with saw-like teeth and gorges on your blood, so it’s more effective than the morphine issued by the military. Although if I did use hirudin, your blood wouldn’t clot and the wound would open back up.”
“No, thanks!! I don’t want to rely too much on drugs!!”
Shouting made his shoulder throb with heat.
He grimaced and groaned, which created a heavier mood.
He told himself to be more careful about that. They were already in a bind, so the most badly injured person’s mood could affect the overall mood.
“Let’s review what we know.”
He had refused the easy help of anesthesia himself, so he would have to accept the pain in his shoulder. He tried not to let it show on his face as she got talking.
“The station is deserted, a weird ghost is wandering around, and she got in a fight with some mass of muscles. We were right to conclude this place is dangerous, but when we tried to leave, a sniper fired warning shots to push us back in. If we tried to force our way out, I bet they really would have shot us.”
Shirai Kuroko sighed.
“At 17:20 today, the Overhunting prisoner transport train issued a break alert within South District 7 Station. That means criminals from Operation Handcuffs are loose in and around this station. The muscles, the sniper, and this pest here are the fugitives who triggered the break alert. But the ghost I have no information on. The Overhunting’s EM brakes and a few other safety devices malfunctioned, so I would imagine the ghost played a role in the crash, though.”
“Ee em brakes?” asked Alice, tilting her head and smiling. She was harmless as long as her attention was on that, but Kamijou feared she would start poking at his treated wound if he let his guard down.
“It’s an emergency brake system that uses electromagnets to clamp down on the trains wheels,” explained Shirai. “But contrary to what you might think, it doesn’t send electricity to the device to produce the magnetism needed to stop the train. The magnetism is always on to keep the brake pads open and the electricity is cut off in an emergency, freeing the brake pads’ springs.”
“Wait, but how could that malfunction?”
If the electromagnets were used to stop the heavy wheels, a lack of power would cause a malfunction. But when the electromagnets were preventing the springs from returning to their original position, electrical trouble would cause the brakes to activate.
That wouldn’t lead to the train crashing at full speed.
“That is why I think that ghost is behind it. Really, it’s scary to think that anyone other than Onee-sama can control such a deadly amount of electricity. But this doesn’t tell us who they are or why they attacked the Overhunting.”
“It has to be someone involved in Operation Handcuffs,” said Youen. “And the whatever tech that ghost is using doesn’t seem to be standard issue Anti-Skill or Judgment gear.”
“Are you suggesting it’s a criminal neither of us are familiar with?”
“My guess is she was the final boss of that crazy bloodbath. If we had seen Handcuffs through to the end, we might have encountered her then.”
“There it is again,” muttered Kamijou.
Good Shirai Kuroko and bad Hanatsuyu Youen both turned his way and innocent Alice followed suit without appearing to understand what this was about.
He continued now that their attention was on him.
“You keep mentioning that term. What is that Operation Handcuffs thing?”
His question earned a sigh from both the good and the bad. They narrowed their eyes as if to criticize him for being so behind the times, but also with some envy of his ignorance.
Then they both explained it for him.
Operation Handcuffs.
It had started as the new Board Chairman’s sweep of Academy City’s dark side.
The initial focus had been on shining sunlight on all that darkness, so it was a long-term plan that included rehabilitating the arrested criminals so they could be released as productive members of society.
But that had fallen apart somewhere along the way.
The information had gotten confused and the cause was still under investigation. Some claimed that the damage had grown beyond anyone’s expectations when some criminals slipped past Anti-Skill with an uncanny level of luck and furious Anti-Skill had drawn their lethal weapons and relied on deadly force. There had been heavy losses on both sides.
The two girls made a point of mentioning the Coins of Nicholas as a key item.
They took about an hour to charge, but if you held one in your hand and prayed, a locked door would open, you would win the lottery you were playing, or something else bordering on miraculous would occur. That was apparently how the criminals had escaped the smart encirclement and gotten in an unexpected “lucky punch”.
“Hold on,” interrupted Kamijou, pale in the face. “Coins of Nicholas? Those have got to be spiritual items. There’s no way they’re a product of the science side’s research. Why was a magic side toy being passed around in Academy City’s darkness!? In a way, that’s one of the biggest taboos out there!!”
“?”
“?”
Shirai and Youen both tilted their heads. They weren’t playing dumb to hide something from him - they simply weren’t familiar with the terms “spiritual item” or “magic side”.
But that was a major problem in and of itself. What if those coins were given to people with no understanding of how they worked and they kept using them with no knowledge of the risks and downsides?
(Was there something magical going on this city and I didn’t even know about it?)
His anxiety spiked.
The Coins of Nicholas were extremely effective and creepy, but no one would give them away for free like that. He didn’t know who, but someone had benefited from it.
(So that operation was the new Board Chairman’s plan? I sure hope he wasn’t letting R&C Occultics or someone trick him. Setting aside what their exact domains are, the magic side and science side do not get along. Hopefully he understands that.)
“Yawwwn.”
His thoughts were interrupted by a weirdly lengthy yawn.
It came from Alice who leaned against him on the bench and helped herself to his lap pillow. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“How are you sleeping when we’re still at risk here?”
“No! The girl was not asleep! Because she is staying up all night with you!!”
She tried to sound very awake, but she was still slumped down in his lap pillow. The most she could manage was waving her little hands up from the bench. She always seemed overly careless for the situation. She rubbed her eyes while muttering something.
“Guh. The only actual occult element of Operation Handcuffs was the Coins of Nicholas. But ghosts are occult too, so does that mean the ghost is connected to the coins?”
“I..don’t think so?” Kamijou looked down at his right hand. “Alice, I know you know this.”
It wasn’t just the electricity that pierced him to the core. His little finger still hurt from its burn. That meant Imagine Breaker did not work on the ghost. How was still a mystery, but that ghost had to be something scientific. She had to be separate from the purely magical Coins of Nicholas.
It was Alice’s immediate realization of that fact that let her shove him out of the way and save his life.
“Hm, then it’s a lot more straightforward. She would count as an ordinary robber, so wouldn’t there be a record somewhere?”
“But that justice exhibitionist and I didn’t see Handcuffs through to the end. We don’t know what went down later on.”
“..”
Could they be making a crucial misunderstanding here?
That concern suddenly crossed Kamijou’s mind. It wasn’t that they had made the wrong decision back at the beginning. It was mo-->>