nical noises soon followed.

“So!! So I had to think up a way to do it!!”

She had not touched anything yet, but Kuroyoru’s left arm moved unnaturally and the handgun swelled out from within. Kuroyoru tried to immediately throw the gun away, but her fingers would not function properly. The delay allowed the swelling gun to rupture. The gunpowder must have been triggered. The blast split open her cheek.

(EM!? How powerful a signal is that medical equipment spewing!? I guess this could be an application of a CT or MRI!!)

The silver contents of her left hand were exposed and her fingers were twisted beyond usability. She was a cyborg with more than half her body replaced with industrial machinery, so she had always had a weakness against electrical powers.

“How can you enjoy a taste of villainy while maintaining the foundation you’ve built up as a generally good person!? It was so infuriating having all these things I wanted to do that were off limits to me! But thinking through it all was a ton of fun. Creativity is such a gift, don’t you think? A helicopter can take you to the summit in just 10 minutes, but you still want to climb the mountain yourself, right!?”

Several more pieces of medical equipment began to move.

Most any tool used to save people could also kill people if misused. If the wrong blood type was given to someone in a transfusion, it could act as a fatal poison. A surgical stapler used to sew someone up could also be used as a gruesome projectile.

“So you decided to become an anonymous bomber?”

“No tactile feedback from the killing blow is a real shame, but better safe than sorry, right? And it’s not like I get no feedback at all. I can sense their emotions even over the phone. Their confusion, their panic, their terror!! And if I combine that digital sense with the tangible pieces of them they leave behind, I have all the pieces I need to feel the real thing. I can enjoy the life of an ugly and feared villain while remaining a pure and boring good person!!”

Firing bullets into Hikarizawa Megumi, even into her brain or heart, would not kill her.

When the machines used to maintain a life bared their fangs, they became weapons capable of slicing up and destroying the human body.

She was hard enough to kill she seemed like some absurd fantasy about the undead and she also wielded the cruelty of an execution device. On top of that, she also used bombs made from ordinary mobile devices.

Kuroyoru Umidori thought on all that and summed it up as best she could.

“What, is that all?”

She wrote her enemy off so readily the girl in the surgical gown and cardigan actually stared blankly at her when she heard it.

“You don’t have some special power and you aren’t using some kinda bizarre weapon I’ve never heard of. A life support system that leaves you as close to immortal as humanly possible? Shiokishi from the previous generation already tried that in the form of a whole damn powered suit. That just means you made artificial organs that are too big to fit inside you. You’re two whole generations out of date compared to a cyborg made with more compact tech.”

“..”

“I was really hoping you were at least using the abnormal criminal behavior as a cover for stealing DNA maps or to stir up social unrest so you could stimulate the esper population in a way that created the kind of AIM Diffusion Field aggregation you wanted. But what’s this? It’s so straightforward and pathetic I’m kinda impressed. With this little thought behind it, I might as well have been attacked by a stray dog or something.”

“Then what do you have?”

Hikarizawa was honestly asking.

Her curiosity won out over feeling insulted at being called out as small time.

“What do I have?” Kuroyoru tapped her temple with the index finger of her unharmed right hand. “I had a portion of that goddamn #1’s thoughts implanted in me. It increases the effectiveness of my power, but it also means that shithead’s shittiest parts come shitting out of me at times.”

“Fascinating!!” The smile on Hikarizawa’s face had no place in a kill-or-be-killed confrontation. “So you’re saying you had his evil deeds themselves implanted in you? You could build up both good and evil that way!! I wouldn’t even have to dirty my own hands to earn evil EXP. If I could directly claim a villain’s actions, I could skip all the intermediary steps and claim the end result for myself!!”

With metallic sounds, saws, drills, pliers, lasers, and other medical tools used to work on bone emerged from their boxes. It looked like a swarm of giant shrimps and crabs at this point. The girl’s eyes sparkled as she planned to pry open Kuroyoru’s artificial skull to extract the collection of live brain cells within and research the method used.

Kuroyoru breathed an exasperated sigh.

“Believe me, you don’t want this.”

“I want to say that too.”

They both sent out an attack.

The one that ended up sliced in two was the box-like medical machinery. But losing one or two of those was no problem for that girl. Another one fell from above to immediately replace what was lost.

In fact..

“From above?”

Kuroyoru looked up to see machinery dangling from the entire ceiling like grapes at a vineyard.

Machines lacked the presence of something alive, so she had entirely overlooked this.

(Oh, no.)

A moment later, all of the machinery dropped from the ceiling to bury her small body.

Is this all I can do? wondered Kuroyoru Umidori.

She was a Level 4 esper who used her cyborg body to push past the limits of her power.

But that was all she had.

Her power was on the rarer side, but it was not unique to her. And cyborgs were mass-produced machinery. She had gotten her priorities backwards, so continuing along this path would never give her the unique individuality she had sought as one of the Freshmen.

She could not find the uniqueness that she had felt in the #1, who was the base of her combat thoughts, or that she had felt in a few others she had met in her days of combat. But now that she had chopped up her body and made herself into a cyborg, she could no longer shift to a different path. Not even if she wanted to.

Simply put, she was stuck.

Continuing on made no sense when you were stuck, so if someone was telling her to end this defective life of hers, it might be best to do just that.

However..

(Yeah.)

She had one more trick up her sleeve.

(If I would just do what people say, I never would’ve become such a villain.)

She did have one more way to fight back.

With a flash of light, it all fell apart.

The pile of machinery burying Kuroyoru Umidori was blown away in an instant, but she had not used her Bomber Lance. The wreckage had obviously been exposed to fiery heat and it was left twisted, bent, and broken. Shards had stabbed into the ceiling overhead and they did not fall back down.

“What..was that?”

“That’s the thing.”

Her surviving right arm had fallen apart as well, but it did not look like she had detonated an explosive gripped in that hand. The type of destruction was wrong for that.

She had switched off the arm, yet the pain remained for some reason.

Almost like a punishment for violating a taboo found somewhere other than the designs for that arm component.

“I could tell you, but you still wouldn’t really get what happens to a scientific esper when they try to use occult magic.”

She had experienced this before.

She would likely have suffered a fatal wound were she not a cyborg.

And she also knew the supernatural phenomenon that had shredded her arm would only bring harm to everyone else out there. Most anyone would be happier not knowing about it, but this girl in the surgical gown was one of the few exceptions. Kuroyoru knew all too well it would burrow into the girl’s heart as an unbearable temptation.

“..”

Hikarizawa had said she wanted to enjoy “everything” because you only live once.

She had wanted to experience evil as the opposite of good, so what would happen if she learned that magic existed as the opposite of science?

“......................................................................................”

The machinery that had just barely survived the scorching flames let out high-pitched warning tones.

That was meant to be life support system, so the girl’s brain must have been awash with chemicals that would only shorten her own life.

Kuroyoru Umidori spoke in a truly disinterested tone.

All while knowing this was the most effective attack here.

“Believe me, you don’t want this.”

“I want to say that too.”

Hikarizawa Megumi immediately took action.

Her obsession with enjoying the world was legit. She gathered data from her various attached devices to extract the footage of Kuroyoru’s finger movements from her peripheral vision and to work out the spell Kuroyoru must have uttered based on the vibrations that had reached her eardrums. Once she was done, she was ready to make her own attempt at real magic.

“Ha ha.”

She spread her arms and laughed joyously at the top of her lungs.

She had found a new world – something she had not even known existed. She looked like someone who had finally found the sunlight of an exit after being buried alive in a cave.

“Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!”

Kuroyoru tried to cover her face with a hand, but both of her arms had been destroyed.

She had no choice but to witness it directly.

Academy City’s espers could not use magic. That had to be an absolute rule.

Blood burst from the girl wearing a surgical gown and cardigan and then the life support equipment was blown away as well.

She collapsed.

Hikarizawa fell over, leaving a crescent moon trail of blood in the air behind her and she continued to convulse on the floor. She was awfully energetic for having lost her entire life support system.

The musty old mysticism must have decided those masses of silicon and rare earths counted as parts of her body.

The partially-broken cyborg sighed and pondered the rules of the world.

“It’s so benevolent I think I’m gonna cry.”

The TV news and newspapers had nothing to say about it.

Even the online news sites were only talking about how aquarium-born otters could not break open shells.

The following day, Kuroyoru discovered the ham, eggs, and toast morning combo at a café was not great, but the café’s owner was fairly old and had a habit of staying stocked up with plenty of newspapers and magazines in their original paper format.

The crime had been by a single person with no real objective in mind, so it should not have really helped or hurt anyone if word got out. Yet Academy City’s leaders had decided to cover up the conclusion of Hikarizawa Megumi’s case.

Was that to protect Academy City’s brand image as a place where parents could feel comfortable sending their kids?

Or was it because of the involvement of something from beyond science?

“..”

Kuroyoru fell silent at the answer her intuition gave her. Or maybe that the #1’s thought patterns gave her.

There was more to Academy City than met the eye.

So it was highly unlikely that the world outside the city was a peaceful place with no secrets to be found.

It was all too complicated to discuss in black-and-white terms of good and evil.

“Why the hell are you reading a paper newspaper in this day and age?”

Hamazura Shiage gave her a puzzled look, so she rolled up the newspaper and thwacked him on the face with it.

The drive to learn tended to be a self-destructive one.

In a way, it was the people who clung to their ignorance who remained happy. It was almost comical.

And this girl was having a hard time deciding which kind of person she wanted to be.