A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 20

by Kazuma Kamachi

  That he couldn’t afford to lose.

  The privateers, that foreigner mercenary unit on a homicidal safari, would be here soon.

  10

  Something had broken apart inside Accelerator. Something that had been holding him up.

  The black wings, symbols of malice, stretched out on and on, endlessly.

  But even that wouldn’t last forever.

  The core of his spirit, the part that caused negative emotions to spring forth, was gone. Neither candles nor lighters could retain their flame without something to burn.

  That was when it happened.

  Something came up at the edge of his vision.

  It was a motorcade. Several large vehicles were driving through the snow. They weren’t Academy City’s; the level of the tech used was different. Still, he couldn’t deny the possibility that the shadow group was disguised, purposely using Russian vehicles.

  If that was all it was, he might not have paid it any mind.

  The typical, astute Accelerator certainly would have cautiously observed. He’d have been on guard, considering the chance that it was the shadow group. But now, having lost his vigor, things that unimportant wouldn’t have been worth thinking about. In the worst case, he might have decided that he didn’t care if he was shot dead because of it.

  However.

  His heart, the empty husk that it now was, had stirred.

  The cause came from one of the big vehicles. A man’s face, seen from the side, riding within.

  It was the face of the man who had defeated Accelerator in a switchyard in Academy City. The face of the man who had stopped the experiment, permanently froze the Level Six Shift project, and saved the lives of a little under ten thousand Sisters. He would stand up for himself no matter how critical the situation, would always save lives in danger, no matter how desperate their position. That was the kind of man he supposedly was.

  He should have been in Academy City.

  Why was he in Russia, of all places?

  And.

  That hero.

  The hero who would properly save others, unlike Academy City’s half-finished number one.

  Why was he just trying to pass by, without noticing the threat to Last Order, who was suffering right nearby?

  Before he knew it, Accelerator was screaming with all his might.

  As he bellowed his throat-ripping roar, he snatched up a boulder buried in the snow and manipulated vectors to hurl it full force toward the motorcade.

  The back of the vehicle blew up like a balloon, and the motorcade instantly halted.

  He knew he was venting for no reason.

  This was originally something Accelerator was supposed to accomplish. Not only had he willfully abandoned it, he was denouncing someone completely unrelated, and he realized full well his anger was misplaced.

  However.

  “…Weren’t you the hero who saved all the Sisters? Weren’t you the real hero who rescued almost ten thousand clones, every single one of them?”

  That man climbed out of the busted truck.

  He seemed to have noticed Accelerator and the black wings he was sprouting.

  “Then save that brat’s life, you bastard!! Why only her? She hasn’t done anything wrong—why does she have to suuuffffffferrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr???!!!”

  With a roar, the black wings crashed outward, spreading even more.

  He knew he was wrong.

  He was perfectly aware, but he couldn’t stop his own powers anymore.

  Last Order.

  The symbol of goodness—but even her smile wasn’t enough for him to be able to hold it back.

  Academy City’s number one.

  Through sheer rage, the monster had gone above and beyond that title—and now, his battle was about to begin.

  INTERLUDE THREE

  Mikoto Misaka decided to pore over Academy City’s data for real.

  She’d seen that boy at the edge of the picture in the news from Russia, which meant that her hunch was correct—he wasn’t in Japan. And of all the places he could have been, he was just casually walking around the most dangerous place in this war.

  Something was up, out there where she couldn’t see. Maybe he was out there fighting some grand evil again, his right fist clenched.

  Focusing her attention on her PDA screen, she found several pieces of information.

  She had a bad feeling about this.

  She remembered when she’d been desperate to get any information on the experiment related to the Sisters.

  The screen displayed read: “Sightings of Imagine Breaker in Russia and the Elizalina Alliance of Independent Nations.”

  Imagine Breaker must have meant that spiky-haired boy. She recalled him having once called his ability that at some point.

  She scrolled down the screen. Along with several maps, there was some kind of annotation written in small lettering. Several arrows had been drawn on the maps…movements of Academy City forces and weaponry, maybe? Or was it the route the boy had traveled?

  “By the notification from the General Board chairperson, response to Imagine Breaker will be different from normal.”

  The “normal response” was apparently how they clamped down on any factions trying to leak Academy City’s supernatural ability development tech to outside organizations. It was a severe methodology, one that tolerated shooting to kill in the worst cases.

  However, for whatever reason, it seemed it didn’t apply to the boy.

  She was about to give a sigh of relief, but it was too soon for that. Hadn’t that very incident with the Sisters taught her, to a terrifying degree, how dark the shadowy parts of Academy City were?

  “Imagine Breaker is an esper possessing rare value, even throughout all of Academy City. In consideration of that rarity, our objective is to retrieve him alive if possible.

  “However.

  “Should we discern that the Imagine Breaker will align himself with an organization other than Academy City, our secondary objective is then to swiftly attack him, apply Number Two’s treatment to him, and retrieve him inside a life-support system, thereby minimizing further disruptions.

  “We have confirmed that Imagine Breaker is currently acting alongside a member of an external organization.

  “Should he only be treating them as a temporary guide, we will withhold punishment, but if he crosses the line, we will execute our secondary objective.

  “It will not cause a problem, as we have approval from the General Board chairperson.

  “In that case, though it is impossible to view details for authority reasons, he has said his ‘plan’ will still commence.”

  “…”

  Mikoto Misaka fell silent for a while.

  She was certainly surprised, but at the same time, she figured that might be the case.

  Also recorded on the PDA were specific paratrooper unit personnel, equipment, and operational schedules for attacking the target boy. Naturally, the military’s airplanes were ready in District 23, where its aeronautics and space-related technology was assembled.

  She turned the PDA off and headed for District 23.

  …Once, that boy had risked his life to prevent the Sisters from being massacred during the Level Six Shift project, standing up against a great darkness in Academy City. It may have been that he didn’t actually have a good handle on just how terrifying it was. But the undeniable truth was that he’d crossed a dangerous bridge for her sake and the Sisters’.

  She had a big debt to repay him.

  As she ran, she figured it was high time she paid a little of it back.

  CHAPTER 4

  Here Begins the Counterattack

  Heroes_Congregate.

  1

  Three attack helicopters provided by the Russian Ground Forces tore through the white scenery. Pushing speeds of about three hundred kilometers per hour, the helicopters were large and heavily laden with ammunition. The sound of their rot
ors hitting the air was grand as well. Many people associated helicopters with being extremely loud, but military models tended to be quieter than others.

  The design philosophies were probably different from their American counterparts, which concentrated on small size, high speed, and little sound. The fact that it took three crew to operate a single helicopter meant they weren’t exactly the most commonplace machines. As kings of the sky, they had no need to hide. In exchange, by loading as much ammunition on board as they could, they aimed to deal as much damage to the enemy as possible. That’s what these machines were for.

  They left air-to-air combat, where both speed and maneuverability were necessities, entirely up to fighter jets like MiGs and Sukhois, and they didn’t even consider engaging in helicopter-versus-helicopter combat. Instead, they were designed to blow up all surface targets without fail. That was the sort of specialization they’d been made with. That was what it meant to be an aircraft belonging to the ground forces.

  “This is pretty nice. I could get used to this kind of layout,” one of the privateer pilots said.

  They didn’t share a common nationality. No common religion, ethnicity, gender, or age. Even their tastes in food and music were so different it was almost funny.

  They only shared one thing:

  The desire to kill—and kill one-sidedly.

  “This thing’s a vaunted prototype that one of the largest militaries in the world was developing in secret. I can’t get enough of it. I’m basically living the life of a main character in a side-scrolling shoot-’em-up.”

  “It’s not just a test machine.”

  A transmission came in from another pilot in their group.

  “This is a prototype test on a tactical level—to see whether large aircraft designs are still practical. No guarantee military tactical theories will work with them…And the Russians seem to want them coordinating with smaller helicopters and fighter jets when they actually deploy them into real combat zones. They could have a whole list of shortcomings—namely, people on the ground having an easier time hitting them because of the increased size.”

  “None o’ that matters. We just have to hit them before they hit us. All we gotta do is blast ’em with long-range missiles before we enter their firing range. That’s why these things are so big, right? Just like a side-scrolling shmup—we can fire away without worrying about how much ammo we’ve got left.”

  As they were bantering, the target location was approaching.

  A small settlement where the only stuff piled up was rubble.

  The armored car and anti-air cannon vehicle that had gone ahead of them had evidently met with resistance and were now immobilized. But none were indignant about it. They didn’t care whether other privateers got captured or killed or whatever. The battle that was about to begin was simply more important to them.

  Gripping the yoke so hard it creaked (and while exposing how self-educated his way of squeezing it was), the pilot let out a cry as though excited by the sound of the rotors.

  “Ah-ha-ha!! Kill ’em, kill ’em, kill ’em aaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll!!”

  2

  A low growl escaped Accelerator’s throat.

  The motorcade of large vehicles had stopped a few dozen meters in front of him. The back section of one had been utterly destroyed. And he’d seen one boy open the destroyed vehicle’s front door and step out onto the snow.

  The one.

  The boy who had once stopped the experiment that would have been fulfilled through the murder of twenty thousand Sisters.

  Accelerator knew he didn’t have a good reason to feel anger toward him. His words and actions had no justification, no integrity. Any outsider, from their perspective, would have judged him to be the one in the wrong.

  But.

  What if the hero, great enough to put a stop to that damned experiment, was to die so easily, for such a shitty reason? What if this being who existed for the sake of stopping tragedies, the one who occupied the most important position in Accelerator’s mind, lost so simply?

  Then, in the realest sense:

  This world would already be over.

  “Ooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!”

  A scream.

  The black wings burst from Accelerator’s back anew. After instantly stretching to over a hundred meters long, he turned them into terrible weapons and swung them down at the Level Zero boy’s head.

  There was a shattering roar.

  The destructive power was enough to cleave a high-rise building vertically in one strike.

  Despite that, the boy who was his target didn’t end up a clumpy puddle of flesh.

  The cause—his right hand.

  That one arm, held directly aloft, disbursed the jet-black darkness.

  “…”

  Accelerator’s lips twisted slightly.

  What was he thinking, deep down in his heart, about the boy not dying in his first attack?

  Without coming to a clear answer himself, Accelerator swung his black wings again.

  This time, in a horizontal sweep.

  A blow that would have severed any object that existed in the world in two at chest height shot cruelly toward the Level Zero boy.

  This one, too, was repelled by his right hand.

  But the situation was different. Despite canceling out the black wings, the boy still staggered to the side, as though shoved by the force.

  Accelerator knew: That boy had a secret that could cancel out Academy City’s top Level Five power with just a touch. But he also knew the boy couldn’t deal with attacks that blew away everything in a fixed area, like intense winds or plasma. Either he couldn’t cancel out force exceeding a certain level, couldn’t deal with abilities applied over an area, or didn’t have the strength to cancel out secondary physical phenomena caused by supernatural abilities. Accelerator hadn’t discovered the correct answer yet, but he didn’t need to understand the logic or rules behind it to know what he had to do to crush this Level Zero boy.

  In other words.

  I’ll use overwhelming force, give him no chance to counterattack, and pound him to bits…!!

  A dull, creaking pain assailed the back of his head.

  It was like his left and right brain were going to split apart, and something was about to fly out from within it.

  This was abnormal.

  It wasn’t even clear whether it was really Academy City’s number one Level Five.

  He didn’t know what would happen.

  He could begin to disintegrate in the process.

  But he clenched his teeth. So what?

  In this place.

  In this situation alone.

  He had to rally every last ounce of his strength and fight at full power.

  Boom!! The wind roared.

  His pair of black wings turned into dozens of sharp stakes, lashing out toward the Level Zero boy as he tried to run in closer. Accelerator wasn’t aiming for the small target from many directions—he was laying down a carpet bombing on an area that included the boy.

  A shock wave ripped out.

  White snow and black earth erupted over ten meters into the air, blocking their field of view. Accelerator could see giant cracks forming in the ground here and there. Seismographs had probably picked up the shaking from far away.

  The boy standing in the center of the blast couldn’t have been safe.

  Even if he could nullify powers with just his right hand, he couldn’t have been able to intercept all those attacks without missing anyone.

  The damage had definitely been done.

  There was no way the Level Zero boy would be saved.

  And even the resulting shock wave created by a single one of the dozens of stakes packed enough punch to mash up an unarmed human body.

  It should have ended with that.

  As he gained victory, so, too, would Accelerator have lost a glimmer of hope.
/>   And yet.

  A figure stood before him, swaying beyond the dust of white snow and black earth.

  The Level Zero boy was standing.

  He wasn’t unharmed, of course.

  His clothes were stained with dirt. Something red dripped from near his temple. It seemed like his center of gravity was leaning to the side somehow.

  But the boy was still standing.

  Standing on his on two legs, never breaking.

  “Ha, ha-ha…”

  Accelerator chuckled quietly.

  He didn’t understand the logic. The boy shouldn’t have been able to deal with that attack with just his right hand. But Accelerator was definitely grinning. He appeared to be enjoying this. It was like he was happy his theory that his attack was absolute had been overturned.

  And that.

  That looked to him like a symbol that he’d easily leaped off the unalterable rails of fate.

  “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!! Gya-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!”

  Laughing, Accelerator funneled even greater energy into his black wings.

  The awful cracking sound inside his skull got louder.

  The Level Zero boy, fist clenched, ran toward Accelerator.

  This time, it wouldn’t be a warm-up.

  This was where the real clash would begin.

  3

  “They’re here.”

  Digurv, only his head poking out from the anti-air tank’s upper hatch, announced it with binoculars in one hand. Hamazura was in the front of the same anti-air tank, sitting in the seat for controlling the caterpillar treads and moving the vehicle—because there was nothing else he could do. The controls were similar to heavy construction equipment like excavators, but he couldn’t fully handle expert work like manning the radar or aiming the machine guns at targets.

  Peering out the horizontal slit made of reinforced glass to glance at the snowfield, Hamazura asked:

  “Is it attack helicopters like we thought?”

  “Yeah, a group of three,” Digurv answered, without looking in his direction. “Never seen the type before. They’re pretty large. Maybe they’re doubling as prototype tests.”