A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 19

by Kazuma Kamachi

  As Tsuchimikado reached for the rear door leading outside, he said, “Let’s go give ’em the usual fight to the death.”

  5

  When it came to one’s wallet, the underground mall in front of the District 3 station was the kind of place a person needed some courage.

  The area the former Spark Signal members were proceeding through was already closed and unpopulated. This section dealt in various kinds of sports brand clothing; uniforms from world-famous soccer leagues were lined up in year order. Those who knew their value would be okay with the cost, but for those who didn’t, the price tags this place was buried in were completely inexplicable.

  “(…Over there. Low-recoil submachine guns are made to be used in one hand, but attaching a heavy grenade on it defeats the purpose. Fortunately, it looks like this will be easier than we thought.)”

  “(…Shouldn’t we still consider the dangers of grenades being used in an enclosed space?)”

  Tsuchimikado and Unabara were discussing their plan in hushed voices as they peered around a corner of the hallway.

  Cell phone in hand, Tsuchimikado got in touch with Musujime, who was waiting slightly farther afield.

  “Targets sighted at point BBE. Can you see them?”

  “I’d like to tear them all a new one now. Would you mind giving the signal?”

  “Count down from five. Start at the edges and move in.”

  Tsuchimikado hung up and gripped his handgun in both hands.

  Twenty terrorists, formerly of Spark Signal, ventured through the dark, closer and closer to their position.

  Exactly five seconds after hanging up:

  Tap.

  Almost without any noise, a corkscrew had penetrated one of the armed terrorists.

  Normally, Awaki Musujime’s Move Point didn’t make a sound. The soft tap was likely made by the flesh near the wound as it was pressed inward by the corkscrew that had suddenly appeared, ignoring three-dimensional space.

  A scream rang out.

  But at first, the armed band didn’t realize they’d been attacked.

  Continuing further, corkscrews attacked a third person, then a fourth.

  The terrorists were grouped together in one cluster as they watched their comrades in the front, back, left, and right all fall down at once, writhing in pain. That was when they finally realized the situation they were in, but since all four victims had fallen together, the ones still on their feet couldn’t figure out which direction was safe to escape toward and instead ended up staying rooted in place.

  They could expect their prey to be frozen in confusion for only two, maybe three seconds.

  And Tsuchimikado didn’t let that slip.

  “Here we go,” he said quietly to Unabara, before bringing his gun up from around the corner.

  Without hesitation, he pulled the trigger.

  Bang!!

  A gunshot and a flash—clear as day this time—and another terrorist fell. Now that there was a clear enemy, the remaining units began to counterattack with their submachine guns as they retreated, firing in Tsuchimikado’s direction while looking for anything they could use as shields.

  As he and Unabara attacked with pistols from the front, Musujime, who had gone even farther around them, used Move Point and shot through one Spark Signal supporter after another.

  In the blink of an eye, the group was down to half its original number.

  But then:

  “(…Crap, the grenades!!)”

  Seeing his opponents’ fingers reach away from their the triggers on their firearms to another one close by on the gun, Tsuchimikado focused on those points and fired.

  But they got the better of him.

  All of them, about ten now, completely synchronized, aimed their grenades at Tsuchimikado and Unabara. Ten explosives fired off at the same time, arcing toward them while revolving through the air like soda cans.

  “… Jump!!” hissed Tsuchimikado, leaping through the glass window next to them in the passage. It shattered as he landed inside the store.

  But Unabara didn’t follow.

  He reached out for a large button on the wall. It was for the shutters, which were for both crime and fire prevention.

  After he slapped it with his palm, a thick metal wall slammed down right before the grenades got there.

  It blocked the explosives.

  Boom, boom!! Enormous blasts rattled from beyond the wall, wrenching the shutter inward toward them. Still, any fire-hot gales and fragments that made it through wouldn’t be able to hurt Unabara.

  “You idiot!!”

  However, Tsuchimikado was furious.

  “Why’d you reduce our chances to attack?! If we give them time, it’ll only make their counterattacks stronger!!”

  To get around the shutter, the pair tried going through the broken window and the store, but the seconds it took drastically affected what happened next.

  Whoom!! A new blast split the air.

  It hadn’t been to attack Tsuchimikado or Musujime or Unabara.

  “!!” Tsuchimikado hastily checked the passage and saw, past the dust cloud, a large hole in the ceiling. That was right where Spark Signal had just been. The wreckage that had fallen was piled up just like a staircase, giving them a perfect route up to the surface.

  And now, the former Spark Signal members were nowhere to be found.

  They’d made a clean getaway.

  “Damn it!!” swore Tsuchimikado loudly, grabbing his cell phone. He called up Accelerator, who was waiting aboveground. “They got out of the mall!! About ten! We’ll get up there with Musujime’s Move Point, but leave your position and pursue them!! They probably aren’t going back there anyway!!”

  6

  Even Accelerator, who was waiting behind the front lines, managed to get a good view of the explosion.

  White stuff was billowing up; he didn’t know if it was smoke or disintegrated building particulate. As he made his way in that direction on his crutch, he received even more information:

  The asphalt had been blown away, as if something had erupted from below.

  Debris was scattered everywhere, while nearby car and restaurant windows had been shattered.

  Was that girl crouching and holding her head…bleeding?

  He heard groaning and crying from around him, mixed with the sounds of approaching ambulance sirens.

  The Spark Signal troops must have already fled.

  “(…Villains.)”

  As Accelerator watched those caught in the cross fire moaning indecipherably and the curious onlookers who had come to see what was happening lollygagging their best, he slightly, ever-so-slightly, clenched his teeth.

  “(…A bunch of piece-of-shit villains go charging in, and this is what they pulled out?)”

  Tsuchimikado and the others were probably chasing Spark Signal like honest idiots, but Accelerator didn’t really feel like going along with the whole thing. He’d honestly started to consider just shooting them alongside the targets.

  His fingertips had just begun to crawl slowly up toward the switch of the choker-style electrode at his neck when it happened—

  A much louder wail drifted to him.

  There were a lot of people confused by the sudden incident, but this voice went beyond that. Reflexively, he looked toward the source and got a little closer. He saw a boy, about high school age, yelling at an ambulance crew. The crew member seemed to be trying to give medical aid to a woman the boy knew, and the boy was desperately trying to stop him.

  “…?”

  The woman looked like she was in college, or maybe older. Somewhere around there. The papers that had fallen out of her bag were school-related, so maybe she was a teacher. She seemed more gravely wounded than the youth, who had a line of blood trickling down from his forehead. She was unconscious, lying limp. Normally, you’d think she needed medical attention at once, but…

  “Just stop!! Stop!! Don’t give her that medicine; you can’t give it to her!! If you do
, it’ll have the opposite effect!!”

  “But if I don’t give it to her, she won’t make it to the hospital! Do you know what her heart rate is right now?! And she doesn’t have any allergies to this medication. Why on earth are you refusing her treatment?!”

  The high schooler and the paramedic both seemed worked up about an urgent problem.

  “…Look, you just can’t,” said the boy, clinging to the paramedic’s arm, his voice sounding squeezed from his throat.

  “She’s…She’s pregnant.”

  The crew member’s face turned to blank surprise at the word. There was no need to question why and who it had been.

  The high school boy looked away but continued frantically working his trembling lips.

  “You hear all the time about how drugs that are fine for normal people have bad effects on the baby, don’t you?! What about those meds? Is it really safe?! She could die, you know!!”

  “That’s…I…”

  It was a delicate problem. A great deal of medicine was developed on the premise that it wouldn’t be used on very small children or pregnant women, so they probably hadn’t done any real testing to check how safe it would be for a pregnant patient. Theory was one thing, but even a medical professional wouldn’t know exactly how things would turn out in practice.

  “I’ll be honest. When I heard she was pregnant, everything went black. I had no idea what to do. I wished the whole problem would disappear, like fog. Actually, I still do. Really. Why did this have to happen?”

  The high schooler bit his lip after his rambling, then continued.

  “We were walking around here, and it would sound good if I said it was for a date, but she was trying to calm me down because I was so panicked. I kept asking myself what I should do, but I had no idea. But this isn’t fair. It can’t end like this. What did I want to do? Did I want to break up? Then why am I still clinging to her now…?”

  For a moment, he fell quiet.

  Moving his lips furiously, he continued, his voice scraping.

  “I don’t want to lose her…”

  The shaking high school kid finally had tears in his eyes, and he shouted with all his might.

  “Maybe I have to make a decision, but this is bullshit!! I don’t have a clue what I should do, but I don’t want to let things get decided for me like this!! Please, do something!! You’re an expert at saving lives, aren’t you?! Please, save them both!!”

  The ambulance crew member faltered. But think about it as he might, there was only one thing he could do.

  One possibility was to not save either of them, and the other was to definitely save at least one.

  He was a professional, and if someone had asked him to choose, he already knew which it would be.

  “…I’m using the tonic. At this rate, they’ll both just die.”

  “But…!!”

  As the scrupulous tirade continued, both men heard the clatter of a crutch on the ground.

  “Move.”

  It was Accelerator.

  “Huh…? H-hey, wait! This is for professionals to hand—!”

  Without waiting for an answer, Accelerator shoved the paramedic aside with one hand and took his spot. He crouched there, then reached for his choker electrode switch. After that, he slowly reached for the pregnant woman’s belly.

  Once before, to save a certain little girl, he had reverse calculated from skin-level electrical signals to completely analyze her entire brain structure.

  From his point of view, gathering precise information on a baby by touching the mother’s skin was a piece of cake.

  … Sex, female. Weight, 244 grams. Nourishment supply level, 3,825. Mental activity rate, 3.8. Heartbeat, 60. Stimulation response rate, 5.52. Cytodifferentiation, 88…

  After closing his eyes for only a few seconds, he finally turned off the electrode.

  To the paramedic, who was on his butt on the ground, he said, “The tonic. Two and a half grams of Ectorin. Attach a coating-type chip to the carotid and inject it over five doses, ten seconds each with a short break of twenty seconds in between. If you do that, you’ll save them both.”

  “Wait!!”

  It was not the crew member but the high school boy who argued.

  “What’ll happen to the baby if we do?!”

  “That’s what I just did those goddamn calculations for, shithead!!” shouted Accelerator in return.

  The kid, overwhelmed, fell silent in spite of himself.

  Ignoring him, Accelerator continued, “If you really don’t want them to die, do what I said. If you medicate with the values I gave you, it won’t harm the mother or the child. You don’t want both of them to die because you’re fussing over the details, do you?”

  Having said as much as he intended to, and without waiting for a reply, he looked at the paramedic.

  “You’ve only got five minutes to decide if you want to start. You want to save them both if you can, don’t you? Give my method a shot. You’re using the damn tonic anyway. No reason to refuse, right?”

  The paramedic shook his head, then eventually took a strip out of a handbag. It looked like a stick of gum. He put the thing on the woman’s neck, like Accelerator said, and then peeled it off again after a short time before repeating the process.

  Finally, he’d done it five times, just as Accelerator had told him to.

  “ … Uughn … ”

  They heard a quiet groan.

  At first, her companion didn’t know whose it was.

  But then, the moment the unconscious woman opened her eyes a crack—

  He honestly felt like he was going to collapse on the spot.

  “…No effect on the baby, either. Cell division rate looks fine, too,” said Accelerator, turning his electrode on for a short time and doing a quick examination with his fingertip. “Get her to the hospital,” he said to the paramedic. “And also, take it outside District 3’s jurisdiction and into District 7. It’s a little longer to get there, but their hospital would never turn someone down. With a delicate patient like this, not every place will accept her, even if you request it normally. In the end, it’ll be quicker to bring her somewhere that will take her no matter what.”

  Finished, Accelerator turned his back to them.

  He couldn’t afford to stay here forever. He needed to be sure he wiped out all his targets, now also to make sure this situation didn’t happen again.

  But—

  “Hey!! Wait up— Hey!!”

  It was the high schooler from before. Accelerator didn’t turn around to his shouting, but he did stop rather than leave.

  The boy rambled to his back. “Thank you. If you hadn’t done something back there, I would have lived the rest of my life an empty shell.”

  “…Get lost already.”

  He’d muttered that, but maybe the high schooler hadn’t heard him.

  He continued. “I won’t forget what you’ve done. I’ll never forget that you saved something more important than my own life!! At some point, I want to make it up to you. So—”

  The boy’s words cut off.

  The cause was a sharp clack and a dull impact to his cheek.

  Something hard and black was pushed up against his forehead before he knew what was happening. It was a small gun. Accelerator had pulled it from his pants belt and hit the kid’s cheek with the grip, then pressed the muzzle against his brow. Maybe it would cause a new commotion, but Number One wasn’t the kind to care about that.

  “Get lost,” he repeated.

  For a few moments, the teenager was speechless. He backed away a few steps. Finally, he bowed his head to Accelerator. Very deeply. Then, he turned around and ran in a straight line to the ambulance with his acquaintance on it.

  After the vehicle drove off, Accelerator returned the gun to his belt and took a slow look around.

  “…”

  He mumbled something.

  But no one heard it.

  Eventually, his slender finger reached for hi
s electrode’s switch.

  Gra-bam!! An explosion rang out.

  Neither the victims nor the curious onlookers at the scene saw anything of Accelerator after that.

  However.

  They would say they saw giant new cracks in the asphalt, as though they were the traces of a monster’s wrath.

  7

  The family sedan Shiage Hamazura drove (after stealing it) was on its way from District 7 to District 3. They were on an elevated road bypass. Currently, he was chasing some terrorists to help with Kinuhata’s job, but…

  “Hey, what is this? Hey!! What is that crazy thing following us?!” cried Hamazura after glancing in the rearview mirror, then turning his head to check behind them. He was baffled.

  No one could really blame him, though.

  “An HsAFH-11 Hexawing—an unmanned attack helicopter, by the looks of it,” said Kinuhata with the kind of mild irritation someone might get from being stuck in traffic.

  It resembled an Apache or something, clearly a military helicopter since it had wings with missiles and stuff attached to it. But it wasn’t that brand specifically; its jumbled wings each split in three, and with a loud cracking noise, it now had six wings. They moved and rotated as though they were human arms with joints, lining themselves up with their target.

  And all six had the hots for the car Hamazura was driving.

  At least it was polite enough to match their speed. As he stared at the low-flying helicopter in the mirror, he felt his throat dry up.

  “This is horseshit!! Okay, fine, I stole a car so we’d have transportation! But that’s all I did! And they sent that after us?! Is that normal?!”

  “Does that look like one of Anti-Skill’s toys to you, Hamazura?! They’re totally not the ones who sent that!!”

  “Then what? Are those terrorists you’re chasing intercepting us? You’re telling me they have stuff like this?!”

  “No. Hexawings are unmanned weapons belonging to Academy City’s air defense forces, right? Some rando dregs would never be using it for combat.”

  “So it really is Academy City?! The leadership is after us?! There’s only one reason I can think of! It’s because you ignored the instructions you received on the phone and went home!!”