.)

That was when the usual flashbacks hit the Anti-Skill Negotiator.

Not even she could figure out what triggered it.

Anti-Skill officers melting into black goo.

A slaughter carried out by the very children they were supposed to be protecting.

More experienced officers holding their handgun to their temple and sobbing as they pulled the trigger.

“..”

Tessou Tsuzuri bit her lip as the images filled her mind.

The nightmare of Handcuffs on December 25 would not leave her.

The word “acupuncture” grew ever so tempting, but she shook it from her mind. The adrenaline and noradrenaline strongly linked to tension were produced in the adrenal glands, so shutting off the signals from there could forcibly free her from this. But she could not afford to fill her mind with meaningless optimism.

Rakuoka Nodoka asked a nervous question.

“U-um, uh. Wh-what..next?”

“Good question.”

The Anti-Skill Negotiator pondered the question in amusement.

It was too soon to make her next demand. Rakuoka Nodoka was not normally the kind of person to place a deadly roller below a stranger’s tongue and drag them into the same hell she was experiencing. Perhaps people could counteract their guilt as long as they were able to view themselves as a victim.

Tessou Tsuzuri chuckled as she turned her gaze elsewhere.

“Hanatsuyu Youen the Carrier. Yes, negotiating with her would be the safest option.”

Part 9

Kamijou’s group walked through the city to reach a neighboring district.

This would never end if they failed to rescue Youen before Anti-Skill Negotiator Tessou Tsuzuri reached her.

They arrived in District 10, but unlike in Alice’s world, they had no business with the abandoned leisure spa.

“The garbage incinerator? Oh, that’s the place next door, isn’t it? But why there!?”

“The Carrier wouldn’t get scared and skip town just because the law is after her,” said Shirai Kuroko. “I agree with your assessment there. During Handcuffs, she repeatedly attacked an Anti-Skill station and a forensic investigation facility to keep anyone from investigating further.”

She wasn’t sure why, but her teleportation didn’t work on Kamijou Touma. She had tried it herself, so now she was stuck traveling on foot with him.

“So we only need to work backwards from there. The garbage incinerator is not much of a threat itself, but many garbage trucks gather here, those trucks contact the garbage collection areas around the city, and those areas are accessed by the countless cleaning robots. So if a high-density contamination begins here, the microbe or chemical can spread to every part of the city.”

“This late at night? I thought garbage collection was done in the mornings.”

“It’s winter break. And close to New Year’s. The restaurants are packed, which means more garbage. They must have a special schedule in place for this time of year.”

“Damn. Why are the villains always so clever and calculating?”

“But that aside,” continued Shirai Kuroko. “The Carrier specializes in controlling urban pests and vermin. Even more than the garbage collection infrastructure, this place is like her home turf.”

“So what do you think Youen is trying to do? Cause a large enough panic to escape safely, or eliminate all of her enemies?”

“With her twin missing, I have to wonder if she even has a real goal in mind.”

“?”

They could see a boxy concrete building with several smokestacks on top.

Kamijou’s feet nearly stopped moving as soon as it came into view.

“This isn’t good.”

“What isn’t?” innocently asked Alice, wiggling the round fluffball on the back of her apron.

It wasn’t clear if she really didn’t understand. With that otherworldly storybook girl, it was possible she actually understood every little thing that was going on.

The large facility had more than just the one building. And it didn’t seem to just be split between the kinds of garbage. It was clearly linked to the adjacent facility beyond the concrete wall.

“The closed leisure spa. Hasn’t it been overrun by illegal homes? Man, those expand its silhouette more than you would think. Are there really that many people stuck living there?”

“You know an awful lot about this underground area,” noted Shirai. “Did you hear about it on a test of courage video? Anyway, there is definitely a large uncounted population here.”

“Does the Carrier see humans as no more than larger vermin she can convert into infection bombs?”

“I don’t know if she will use the water or air to spread the infection, but it could spread to the leisure facility through the ducts and pipes, leading to victims there. The place appears to be shut down, but the pipes are still connected. And at her small size, she might be able to travel directly through them herself instead of just sending bugs or microbes.”

The front gate was open and there was no sign of any guards.

No, that wasn’t accurate. The concrete wall surrounding the facility was unusually swollen in places due to the thin white threads covering it. The collections of threads took the shape of humans.

“Eek!?”

“That looks like the Carrier’s work all right,” said Shirai. “Uiharu, arrange to have backup and an ambulance sent to District 10’s garbage incinerator. Uiharu!?”

Shirai Kuroko called the name a few more times before giving her phone a puzzled look. She had apparently lost her connection. Was Youen responsible for that?

(Or was it someone else? Youen might not be the only threat here.)

The dark roadside trees rustled unnaturally nearby. They had no idea how many people were here. Kamijou had no real reason to do it, but he made sure to grab smiling Alice’s small hand and pull her forward. More than just let him do it, she innocently pressed against the side of his hip.

“What now? Should we go in on our own?” he asked.

“Yes.” Shirai Kuroko shook her uncooperative phone. “I would normally suggest we wait for backup, but if we are even a second too slow to prevent Hanatsuyu Youen’s distribution plan, Academy City really is doomed. Similarly, there isn’t much we can do if the Anti-Skill Negotiator gets the Carrier on her side.”

Kamijou was afraid to touch the clumps of white threads on the wall, but they had to do something if someone was trapped inside. He wasn’t sure how much it would help, but he covered his mouth and nose with his jacket’s sleeve and peeled away the clumps of threads with a stick he found on the ground nearby. It felt less like breaking through a spiderweb and more like splitting open a cocoon the size of a sleeping bag.

He worked to at least get the faces of the silhouettes open. None of the guards he uncovered were conscious, but he could at least hear them breathing.

“Good, they’re still alive,” he said.

“Are those moth scales?” asked Shirai.

“The girl knows about poisonous moths! They already have their pokey bits as caterpillars, so everyone says not to touch them. They can’t do anything to the girl, though.”

“These aren’t scales,” said Kamijou, staring at the Judgment girl, who shrugged.

“If you can’t tell just by looking, that sounds all the more dangerous to me. I can’t tell you what that specialist is using, but let’s hope the hospitals have a serum or antidote available.” She placed a handkerchief over her mouth and carefully observed it from a step away. “But laying them down or treating them with our bare hands would be too much of a risk. We can’t say what they were infected with like this and the threat might not be visible like scales. Since they’re unconscious, we can be certain the Carrier used something meant to knock them out. They should have airtight hazmat suits in a specialized garbage incinerator, so it would be best to help them after ensuring our own safety.”

“Are you serious?”

“With that Carrier, I find it odd she didn’t just kill them when they were in her way. That makes me suspect they are meant as infection mines.”

Kamijou couldn’t rely on what he knew from Alice’s world. The real villain named Hanatsuyu Youen wouldn’t open up to you so easily.

He had thought he understood that, but seeing the harm she caused still came as a shock.

“Damn, that’s one more reason we can’t die here.”

“Agreed. We need to stop Hanatsuyu Youen, acquire a hazmat suit, and get them medical care. We must not be taken out of the fight before then.”

They passed through the open front gate and entered the grounds.

It was a large place, probably because so many garbage trucks had to come and go. As they approached the service entrance to the large boxy building, they found the doorknob melted. That would be Hanatsuyu Youen the Carrier’s handiwork. Kamijou and Shirai exchanged a nod before pushing open the stainless steel door with their foot to avoid touching the melted portion.

There was no one inside.

But once they stepped into the building, the air felt so much more tense.

It was like they had crossed a line with that step over the threshold.

“This is pretty big for a garbage incinerator. Where would Youen have gone?” asked Kamijou.

“Probably not the actual incinerator at the very core. She wants to infect the entire city by sending it back through the garbage collection route - from here to the trucks, to the garbage collection areas, and finally to the cleaning robots. I don’t know if she’s using a microbe or a chemical or what specific pest or vermin will be carrying it, but she doesn’t need to expose any of it to those temperatures above 1300 degrees for extended periods of time.”

“Then where?”

“Where the garbage trucks gather. She only has to infect the pit where the trucks dump their garbage. Then every truck that stops by will be infected.”

According to Shirai, most of the garbage was sent to be recycled, so there wasn’t really very much “fuel”. That meant most of the garbage gathered around the city was sent to sorting facilities.

The unnatural lack of people suggested the place was almost entirely automated. Or maybe everyone else had been neutralized like the guards out front.

“Anyway, I wonder where the hazmat suits are,” said Shirai. “Whether she is using microbes or a chemical, I want to be protected from the microscopic threat as soon as possible.”

On the way, Kamijou found an open door, checked inside, and looked puzzled.

Youen wasn’t there.

“Hey, Shirai. What’s this?”

“?”

The twintails girl gave him a curious look, so he tossed her what he had found in the small room. It was a cardboard box about half the size of a chocolate bar.

She caught it and checked the front and back.

“It is an ethanolamine drug.”

“Which is?”

In this case, his ignorance wasn’t due to being a failing student. That term wasn’t found in any high school textbooks. He initially wondered if it was used in esper development, but apparently not.

Shirai actually seemed surprised he didn’t know.

“Oh? Do you live a happy life free of seasonal allergies? It’s just an allergy medication. It works on pollen as well as some inflammation and bug bites, so it makes sense that they stock a stronger version at a garbage processing facility. The only problem is that the histamines involved in allergies exist within the body, so suppressing them too much makes you drowsy. What about it?”

Kamijou pointed toward a corner of the small room.

There was a clear gap there.

“At least two or three of the cardboard boxes of the stuff is missing. Maybe more.”

“There’s our answer then. Damn!! The over-the-counter stuff wouldn’t be a problem, but this is much stronger!!”

Shirai clicked her tongue and walked down the corridor. At a rapid pace.

Kamijou was afraid she would teleport away if he didn’t follow and call out to her.

“Hey! If the real Carrier is as bad as you say, then why is she sticking to something that only knocks people out? Just like striking with the back of the blade, safely knocking someone out is a lot harder than killing them!”

“The real Carrier? If you only look at its effects, this drug is no more than an allergy medicine. Even if this one is stronger than you can buy over the counter. So unlike dioxin and PCB, this won’t trip the cleaning robots’ toxin sensors. Can you think of an option more efficient than using the very drug they already have stockpiled here?”

“By any chance, do you have a non-efficiency-related reason in mind too?”

“It’s an irregular side effect and won’t happen to everyone, but even a small percentage collapsing is a problem. You should never take a drug you don’t need. And remember that the Carrier is an expert at using urban pests and vermin. I’m sure you can imagine what will happen to any victims who end up collapsed helplessly in their rooms or around the city. The creatures they usually crush underfoot without even noticing will swarm them while they can’t move a finger.”

“..”

Was Hanatsuyu Youen the Carrier really that bad a person?

“Wait, Shirai! Look!!”

“?”

A plastic board hung on the wall. It displayed a simple map of the facility. The garbage dumping pit Shirai had mentioned was on the west end of the building. The map showed the entire outer wall as a metal shutter. With so many garbage trucks lining up to dump their trash in that pit, it made sense.

“So we take a left at the next intersection to reach the western outer wall. This means Youen wouldn’t have had difficulty reaching the goal either.”

“It isn’t that far, but just to be safe..”

Kamijou pulled out his old folk’s phone and took a photo of the map. Then a few more in case the first was blurry from his unsteady hand. He had to hold Alice back so she didn’t photobomb him with her smiling face.

At the same time, something dripped from the ceiling and the map started to grow dark. He initially thought the roof was leaking, but this was different. The board was made of plastic. Simple rainwater wouldn’t discolor it like this.

Plus, the dark stain was moving.

This wasn’t a liquid at all.

“Cr-”

He tried and failed to force his dried throat to operate.

Alice’s cheerful voice spoke for him.

“Crickets!”

They all looked up. A glistening light moved in waves along the corridor ceiling. As soon as they noticed, tens of thousands of crickets began vibrating their wings at once, creating an explosion of sound.

Part 10

Several heavy metallic sounds happened all at once. The incinerator facility had more than just the incinerator and conveyer belts. To sort between burnable and non-burnable trash, it also needed machines and chemicals to break apart large items, remove the metal pins from cardboard, and to remove the plastic paints from wood. Not to mention machines that determined if something could be recycled or not. For Hanatsuyu Youen the Carrier, this place was a treasure trove.

Even in the noisy facility, she could just barely make out the explosion of noise.

(I caught someone. It’s not great that I can hear it myself, though.)

At a certain country’s embassy, some workers who complained off severe dizziness and a buzzing in the ear were thought to have suffered brain damage. It was likely a special form of sound wave attack. Rumors spread in the embassy that the attack was intentional and that it would develop into an international incident..but it was later theorized that the chirping of local crickets had caused it.

Crickets chirped by rubbing their wings together, so as long as you knew the dangerous frequency, you could subtly alter their wings with chemicals to reproduce the same phenomenon. It had helped that the heat-filled garbage incinerator facility had been full of creatures that couldn’t normally survive the winter.

(And it is still connected to the filthy slum with a thick pipe.)

“Now, then.”

Youen lowered the stack of cardboard boxes she held.

(Resisting too hard on the 25th was a mistake, but my Carrier trait may not be welcome outside of Academy City.)

She had never questioned any of this when Kaai was with her. She had never feared anything no matter who in the world hated her as long as they were holding hands. Even if it meant planting a tracking device in her sister’s stomach.

But things had changed.

She lightly kicked the side of the box stack with a sulky look on her face.

(So would it be best to go with Option 3 - playing dead? I can make them think I escaped the city while the citywide panic brought down their investigative abilities but then actually hide among all the bodies. As long as I change my face or ID later, I can escape them. Doing that requires overloading their ability to identify corpses, so more than 300 thousand deaths should do the trick.)

She froze in place after reaching that conclusion.

She was certain her answer was correct. She alone could take control of the 29th that way. But what did she really want to do?

She hadn’t cared what the rest of the world thought. She had been perfectly satisfied racing against her twin every day. They had worn the same clothing and eaten the same foods so their conditions were exactly the same. But Kaai had grown tired of it and left, leaving Youen all alone.

She was afraid of dying and she certainly didn’t want her life cruelly taken from her. That much was true. But what did she want to do beyond surviving? What was worth tearing down others and taking so many lives?

Hanatsuyu Youen was not like Kaai. Youen did not take lives for fun or on a whim. She might pretend to do so in order to paralyze an opponent with fear or anger, but deep down, she always manipulated her pests and vermin in the most effective and efficient way possible.

But not everyone would accept an answer just because the math proved it to be correct.

She always considered the shortest route to her destination, thought up the fastest method to achieve her goal, used every shortcut that would eliminate unnecessary steps, and received plenty of disapproving frowns from the people who only ever climbed the stairway one step at a time.

They all wondered how she could be so obsessed with something so gross.

Those questions always confused her. What did gross have to do with anything? Wasn’t the entire point to climb the treacherous mountain and reach the summit? None of them had the strength, equipment, or plan needed to reach the summit, so how could they criticize her for making all the necessary preparations to reach it faster than anyone else?

It was so strange and weird. It made no sense.

She only wanted to win first prize, to succeed, to receive praise, and to show everyone there was a perfectly safe and convenient route up the mountain.

All she had done was minimize the time and effort required to reach the summit.

Kaai was the only other person racing to the summit under the same conditions as her, so only she had been worth training against.

“..”

She shook her head.

She could ponder these philosophical questions after surviving and escaping to safety.

The bad kind of gifted child opened the top cardboard box and viewed the smaller boxes of drugs packed inside.

They were ethanolamine drugs. Industrial strength.

They were only allergy medication, but healthy people’s bodies could malfunction if they took enough of them. There was no such thing as a perfectly safe drug and the difference between poison and medicine was more about dosage and usage than substance.

(I need this to travel backwards from the incinerator facility to the garbage trucks, to the garbage collection areas, and to the cleaning robots, so I need something better at surviving the cold than crickets. Something with a resistance to the cold, something not afraid of people, and something that won’t be incapacitated when covered in the drug. Something that can also be used to carry pollen would be best. Let’s see..)

A low buzzing tickled her ear.

With no fear or disgust, she raised her skinny index finger to let a silver-glowing bug land on it. Then she winked.

“Drug resistant flies, perhaps?”

Part 11

In a vortex of noise too loud to hear his own shouting voice, Kamijou saw Shirai Kuroko stagger to the side. She couldn’t use her teleportation. And this was the girl who had just barely managed a jump when under attack by Frillsand #G.

Looking purely at simple damage, the chorus of tens of thousands of crickets was apparently worse than the ghost.

“Gah.”

Kamijou collapsed to the floor. There was nothing he could do. He saw a few crickets drop from the ceiling and then they all came down like a black waterfall. They didn’t bite or scratch, but he did feel the weight of the bugs - not something he was normally even aware of.

And within it all..

“Oh, dear.”

A small girl’s voice reached his eardrums with unexpected clarity.

It belonged to the storybook girl named Alice.

The noise was enough to rattle the mind and the bugs were cascading from above, but she had the same smile as ever and held both soft hands out toward him. She pulled his upper body out like she was rescuing the victim of an avalanche and then she dragged him away.

Neither the cricket defense nor the executioner made an appearance.

Tens of thousands of bugs apparently wasn’t enough for her to feel repulsed or disgusted. She had used the bat and balls before. Poison gas, curses, and other forms of internal damage never seemed to affect her. (It almost felt like trying to drown a fish in water.) But her soft skin could not deflect the macroscopic external damage of the crickets. Plus, she was wearing a skirt and short sleeves.

“Heave ho, heave ho. Hmm, you are heavy, teacher. Ah ha ha. Boys backs really are big☆”

“..lice, wai..second. Shirai..still..!?”

“The girl can’t carry you both at once.”

Did she drag him 10m or 20m?

Alice acted like the shiny bugs weren’t even there as she walked backwards down the corridor and stepped into another workroom. The swarm of crickets vanished entirely once they crossed the threshold. There was no way that was natural for them. An invisible maze must have been drawn out with a predator’s bodily fluid or some other chemical.

The high frequency wave continued to rattle his head, but it sounded more muffled, like hearing live music through a wall.

“Agh! Ahh!!”

“Kya ha ha. There’s still a cricket in your mouth, teacher. Don’t move, okay? There, got it!”

Kamijou still couldn’t get up from the floor as Alice shoved her small fingers in his mouth and pulled out a surprisingly large and squirmy bug, but he grabbed her wrist.

“Please, go save Shirai too. Hurry!”

“What will you do?”

The endlessly superhuman girl smiled and he glanced deeper inside the facility.

“I doubt I’d be any help just waiting here, so I’ll keep going and prevent that stuff from being spread across the city.”

‘The difficulty level is way higher that way.”

“Doesn’t matter. Really, that’s all the more reason I can’t make you or Shirai do it.”

Alice nodded and turned back so readily it actually worried him. In fact, she spread her little arms and toppled forward to do a bellyflop into the torrent of black bugs. Her definition of gross appeared to be different from his. He heard her laughter from beyond the thick black wall, like a child enjoying getting dirty in the mud. She really didn’t seem to have any hostility or malice inside her.

Meanwhile, Kamijou crawled deeper into the facility.

He got his trembling legs moving enough to stand up and slowly walked forward.

He chose to trust in the things he couldn’t see. When he had a bad feeling or sensed a mysterious pressure, he kept away from that room even if it meant going the long way around. He didn’t know if it had helped at all, but he wasn’t attacked by anymore bugs. It was possible he had noticed a faint dizziness or headache from the chemical smell or the change in room temperature or air pressure.

Regardless, he referenced the map photo on his old folk’s phone to take an S-shaped detour around the most direct route and finally reached the destination of that labyrinth.

He had found the dumping pit on the westernmost end of the facility.

The large hole there was used to hold all the garbage gathered by the trucks that lined up outside. It was longer and wider than a school pool and there was a drop of more than 10m just to reach the top of the trash piled up there now.

He saw someone small standing on the edge of that steel cliff.

The black-haired girl wore a white coat tightened around the hips with a medical corset and she wore a gasmask on the side of her head.

She was surrounded by opened cardboard boxes and she was crouched down shaking a test tube with a frown on her face.

She was already preparing to infect the pit.

“Youen!! Please wait!!”

“!? ..Who are you?”

She looked back in surprise without standing up and her question filled Kamijou with an irrational feeling. It made sense. Nothing in Alice’s world had really happened, so this was her first time meeting him. Having a stranger use her given name out of nowhere may have come as a surprise.

Maybe it was cheating and maybe it made no sense, but he did already have some information on her.

(Hanatsuyu Youen is the Carrier. She can attack individuals or entire areas by distributing dangerous microbes or chemicals using urban pests and vermin.)

Once she got started, he would have no way of stopping her.

Her Carrier abilities were not an esper power, so Imagine Breaker wouldn’t work. If she used artificial pheromones and synthetic nectar to draw in tens of thousands of gross creatures, he would be swept away by the swarm.

However..

(So no matter how dangerous she is, she doesn’t use her poisons directly! She uses the nectar in her test tube to gather creatures, places the toxins on them, designates the target, and sends them in to attack. That’s a lot she needs to do. She’s a threat, but not an immediate threat like a gun! I can win this as long as I rush her before she can act!!)

“!!”

Kamijou Touma took his first step forward.

To repeat, the Carrier abilities were not an esper power. She only had some bizarre technology and she herself was only a girl of around 10. He could see her eyes widening and her legs locking up in the face of such primal violence. Kamijou didn’t actually need to punch her. She needed her test tubes to attack, so he could neutralize her by tackling her to the floor and pinning her arms against her body. Without her pests and harmful substances, she was only a 10-year-old girl.

On the other hand, he lost all chance of winning if she broke free of her surprise.

If that happened, Academy City was doomed. If she managed to spread that efficient industrial-strength drug, he couldn’t even imagine how many people would collapse and be gnawed on by rats and roaches.

(That makes this my-->>

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