Toaru Majutsu no Index

When he came to, Accelerator was in an ambulance.

However, the equipment inside was different from that of a real ambulance. Most likely, this ambulance was not headed for the hospital. It was taking him somewhere else.

He couldn’t see who was in the driver’s seat from his position. No one else was on-board. On the floor next to him was a cell phone. It started ringing the second he noticed it as if he were being watched.

Accelerator picked it up and a voice that was familiar to him in a certain way reached his ear.

“You went a bit too far this time”

“...You again. I’m not going to sit here and be lectured by you people who watch from above without doing a damn thing. The people with the right to act arrogantly are the ones who actually risked their lives trying to stop me.”

“You understand, don’t you?”

“Tch,” Accelerator clicked his tongue in irritation at the person on the phone who wasn’t listening to him. “Yes, I understand.”

“Well, I was the one that gave you the information on Kakine Teitoku, so I won’t be too hard on you. I just wish you had put my information to better use.”

“What’s my penalty?”

“Hmm, good question. Merely increasing your debt won’t really seem like anything to you and you’re too important to dispose of. What am I to do with you?” free𝒘ℯ𝗯𝙣𝗼ν𝑒𝗹.𝒄o𝒎

The tone to those words pissed Accelerator off, but the person on the phone suddenly asked an unexpected question.

“By the way, are you really intending on coming back?”

“Ah?”

“I’m simply curious. After falling that far and announcing that you will stand at the very top of the darkness, you still haven’t given up on that warmth?”

“Of course not.”

“I see.”

“Aren’t you going to stop me?”

“I’ll give you the right to struggle. Although I can’t guarantee you that I have the right to grant you that.”

“Perfect,” Accelerator said and hung up.

He stared at the screen for a bit, but he finally put the phone in his pocket, opened curtain covering the window, and looked outside.

(...Ah.)

The warmth of that small girl still remained inside his arm.

He thought to himself as he clenched his fist as if trying to shake off the sensation.

(I will outwit them. I’ll outwit Academy City, the fucking higher ups, and everyone else.)

He had the USB drive with the blueprint to the choker-style electrode on it in his pocket.

He had checked it between battles, but the design wasn’t a simple one. To create Part 1, he needed Material 2 and Equipment 3 and, to make them, he needed Devices 4 and 5. Not to mention that it was all done using the frog-faced doctor’s original technology. It felt like he was looking at one of Princess Kaguya’s impossible tasks. It looked like it was going to take quite some time to analyze the electrode, remove all the unnecessary parts, and create a copy.

Even so Accelerator swore that he would do it.

He finally had a small hint hidden away in his pocket.

Unabara Mitsuki left through the hospital’s main entrance.

Xochitl who had come as the organization’s assassin would resent how it had all ended. She hadn’t been able to carry out her objective, she hadn’t been given the ending known as death, and her ultimate weapon, the grimoire original, had been taken from her. Her life now would surely be nothing but pain.

Even so, Xochitl lived on.

She had less than a third of her physical body left leaving her with nothing more than skin wrapped around a fake body, but she was still alive. That made Unabara happy. It was nothing more than personal satisfaction, but it really helped him out.

“Gh...”

His consciousness wavered.

A great amount of information had entered his head when he had taken in the original. However, it hadn’t mixed well with his human body. If he relaxed his attention, an intense pain would run from the top of his head down to the bottom of his feet as if he had iron sand in the folds of his brain.

(Maybe I shed a little too much blood...)

Unabara Mitsuki reached into his pocket.

He pulled out the true original that he had separated from Xochitl. The grimoire was a scroll written on animal skin. He spread out the several knowledge-filled meters and scanned through it.

The pain lessened a bit.

When all the pain was gone, he would truly understand the original.

(Ha ha. If the Anglican Church found this, I’d be taken out for sure.)

But that original was power.

And he needed power.

(...I was desperate when I entered the dark side of Academy City.)

He carefully rolled the scroll back up and stuck it back in his pocket.

(What’s going on in the organization? Why was a kind girl like Xochitl turned into an assassin? I need to head back there once more.)

Unabara Mitsuki looked ahead carrying his new power.

He didn’t look into the depths of the darkness, but the Aztec magician did not hesitate.

From a distance, Musujime Awaki stared at the juvenile hall with smoke rising from it.

Something like a bandage was wrapped around her bloody leg. It was organic artificial skin made of corn fiber. It felt weird to her, but her body’s regenerative ability would eventually unite with it and shape it into “human skin” without leaving a scar.

“...”

Without looking at her painful wound, she continued to stare at the juvenile hall.

Her comrades were there. She had become a pawn of the dark side of Academy City in order to ensure their safety. But when the place had actually been attacked, Academy City hadn’t even called in Anti-Skill. And yet when the mercenaries had crossed Academy City’s outer wall, the latest attack helicopters, the HsAFH-11’s, had been sent in.

(As I thought, I can only trust them so far.)

Nevertheless, she wasn’t going to immediately rise up in revolt. Academy City had them in its power. Even if she managed to free her comrades from their cells, they had nowhere to run. Musujime Awaki herself had just recently suppressed Skill-Out when they were making secret plans in the back allies. The odds were that, if she recklessly let her comrades flee, they would meet a similar fate. It was possible the higher ups had sent Musujime on that mission so she would make that very connection.

But...

(I will return this favor), swore Musujime.

She determined that she would carve in her heart the truth that she had realized and the feelings that had sprouted in her on that day. The stage where she relied on some unknown person to protect her comrades was over. From now on, she would create a protective wall of things she could confirm with her own eyes and touch with her own hands.

Musujime Awaki looked back in the direction of the juvenile hall once more and then turned her back on it.

She left silently and thought.

(I will rescue you from there.)

At an unknown time and in an unknown place, Accelerator, Tsuchimikado Motoharu, Unabara Mitsuki, and Musujime Awaki gathered together.

Tsuchimikado had a glove made of machines on his hand. There were long glass claws on the index finger and the middle finger. The blood-smeared device was the one that Kakine Teitoku had before.

It was called the Tweezers.

Accelerator stared at it and expressed his shock.

“So you took advantage of the confusion to recover it? I can’t believe you were hiding among the crowd of onlookers.”

“Apparently, a nanodevice known as Underline is stored inside. It seems School was trying to collect Underline from the air to examine it.”

(How do you know that much?) Accelerator thought suspiciously, but he decided Tsuchimikado must have been taking secret actions of his own.

Unabara was looking unwell and he slowly asked a question.

“What did the data inside say?”

“Underline is the core of Aleister’s direct communications network. The information inside is of a completely different level from what you would find in a normal databank.”

Come to think of it, when Accelerator attacked the residence of Thomas Platinumburg, a member of the board of directors, he had tried to steal information there. When he had, he hadn’t been able to get any information above a certain level, but that could have been because the information was divided by level of secrecy between the normal network and the special network created by Underline.

Musujime spoke with a bored expression on her face.

“What a pain. So what kind of information was hidden on that nanodevice?”

“Wait a second. I’m getting it now.”

The small monitor on the portion of the Tweezers that went on the back of the hand gave an electronic beep. The result of the analysis that looked like corrupted text scrolled across at high speed and it was soon replaced by the proper form of the results.

“It’s the various codes treated as secret in the dark side of Academy City.”

“Could it be a hint towards overcoming them?”

“The names are...Group, School, Item, Member, and Block...This one is the Tweezers...This is data on the Hikoboshi II and then the blueprints for the juvenile hall...”

“Secret codes? You say it’s something as grandiose as that, but it’s just information the higher ups are gathering to keep an eye on Group’s actions. Seeing this data now does us no-...”

“There’s one more,” said Tsuchimikado and everyone in Group focused on the Tweezers’ screen. They interpreted the fact that Tsuchimikado had made a distinction between this piece of information and the others as meaning that it was different than the rest.

That is, it was a new piece of information.

Tsuchimikado slowly read off the text that was displayed.

“The last one on the list is...Dragon.”

After all that fighting, they had made a tiny, tiny discovery.

Now that the four members of Group had a new key, they began moving again.