…when tap, tap, grab!!

“Misaka wants to hug him from the other side, says Misaka says Misaka, joining in because it seems fun!! Yaaay!!”

This time, a girl who looked about ten was hanging off his left arm.

Shocked, Kamijou looked over to find that though her body was young, her face looked exactly like Mikoto’s. She had the same goggles on as the ones Little Misaka owned, but the rubber band was so loose, they ended up hanging from around her neck instead of on her forehead.

“Who is this?! Little sister of a little sister?!” asked Kamijou, bothered by the feeling of hardness that went beyond just being “meager.”

But before he could get a response…

“Serial number 20001, you have guts to show your face so casually in front of Misaka, says Misaka, shifting into serious mode.”

“Heh-heh-heh, Misaka is already tired of that game, says Misaka says Misaka, going off to dig up her next form of entertainment.”

“You think you can escape?! shouts Misaka, taking her submachine gun out of her bag!”

Jagkk!! came the metallic noise, causing Mikoto to sputter. The overly small girl, in the meantime, disappeared into the crowd of people.

After pushing the baby birds softly to Kamijou and whispering to him, “If you treat them poorly, I will beat you to death, warns Misaka,” she charged into the crowds with her submachine gun, which really didn’t look like a toy.

He could hear their voices from the other side of the wall.

“That’s you getting serious—how laughable! says Misaka says Misaka, making fun of you and stuff.”

“This is where the real fun begins, says Misaka, deploying into her final full boost form!!”

Clack crack clackack-crack!! came successive strange metallic sounds from past the crowds like someone was building something. Kamijou sort of wanted to take a look, but he was also scared, so he vowed not to get near them.

4

Five PM.

After leaving the air-conditioned apartment, Accelerator set his crutch on the asphalt. His other hand was already holding a cell phone.

In the end, they’d decided to look for Last Order, since she still hadn’t returned yet.

Today was apparently a half day for classes all around Academy City, but at this hour, things were no different than a normal weekday. To break in their newly made winter uniforms, the people walking around nearby were mostly wearing sailor uniforms and button-downs with stand-up collars and the like. If Accelerator had to pick out one difference, it would be the faint smell peculiar to new clothing wafting around.

“This goddamn weather…,” muttered Accelerator at random, looking at the sky. He hadn’t noticed since he’d been inside, but the blue sky was now gray—actually, it was almost black it was so cloudy. It might start raining any second. Because the Tree Diagram, Academy City’s supercomputer used for organizing atmospheric data, had been destroyed, meteorologists hadn’t been able to predict afternoon showers and other sudden weather changes lately.

“Ack. Let’s find her and get home before it rains, yeah?”

He heard Yomikawa’s voice through the phone; she must have been looking at the sky, too. Yoshikawa was minding the house. Last Order could always go back to the apartment during the search, so if they were all out, she’d be stuck standing at the front door since she didn’t have a key or pass code.

He sucked his teeth. It would be great if standing there stuck was all that happened, but the probability of her waiting in front of the apartment was low, given how she would run across the city if she had the time. If she got bored, she’d leave, and that could make the search more difficult than it needed to be.

Accelerator adjusted the cell phone in his hand. “But you’re in a freakin’ car.”

“I don’t want to get wet while I open the door and put my umbrella up, ’kay?”

How feeble, he thought, but he refrained from insulting her out loud. After all, he was the one whose skin color was white because the sun’s ultraviolet rays had never touched him. “Anyway, you get an idea of where that brat is?”

“The noise in the background sounded like the indoor music in the underground mall nearby.”

“Eh? You used that analysis gear just to look for a lost kid? Don’t you use that for crimes?”

“I told you. Looking for lost children is part of our job, ’kay? Uh, anyway. I’ve got a read on her location from analyzing the music in the background of her phone call.”

“Hah. You talkin’ about those sounds people can’t hear going through the city?”

“Wow, didn’t think anyone would catch on. More precisely, they’re low-frequency waves, below human hearing range.”

Idiot, Accelerator thought. He was an esper who could observe, calculate, and manipulate any vector one threw at him. If he let things he couldn’t see or hear through, he wouldn’t be able to block radiation.

“They’re secretly mixed in with the background music in stores and stuff, right?”

“Yeah. Just those waves don’t mean anything, but if you combine them with special frequency waves we Anti-Skill officers have, they turn into an actual sound. It’s set up so every speaker emits a different noise, and if you look it up, you can basically find out where the person called from. After all, you can easily buy a device to mess with reverse searches these days, so the process requires effort.”

Yomikawa then added stuff about this being only one search method and usually having to get more than one angle on the data by using a bunch at once.

What an annoying system. Accelerator sighed.

Being able to set up such rude systems without difficulty was one characteristic of Academy City. There were probably still many problems with it, like needing to revise the system and changing how to distribute equipment, but all those could be summed up with Well, it’s an experiment and pushed through anyway.

“Anyway, I’m going to the underground mall now, right?”

“For now, yes. The rascal probably won’t stay in one place very long, so you’ll need to start asking around once you arrive.”

“…Me? Accelerator? Like this?”

“Yes, now smile, practice your smile.”

Are you stupid? Accelerator sucked his teeth. He was just too famous—in a bad way. If he, a Level Five esper, tried to smile and talk to someone, it could put the person into a state of shock. He wouldn’t blame them for thinking they were about to be murdered and then shooting him on the spot. And honestly, he couldn’t do anything about that. So he’d just have to kill them first.

Even so, he needed information to search for Last Order.

“This is gonna be a fucking pain,” he muttered under his breath.

Then Yomikawa suddenly spoke. “Hey, Accelerator?”

“What?”

“Are you really that scared of being nice to people?”

“…Great, another delightful conversation. Perfect for an after-school walk, I’ll tell ya.”

“Must be nice being a tyrant.”

Yomikawa wasn’t listening.

Actually, she heard him, and now she was ignoring him.

“Well, everyone’s got their own troubles, but there’s gotta be something brighter in there. Tyrants never get betrayed, yeah? Don’t have to worry about friendships ending. Don’t have to fear others pushing your goodwill away. You’re just a target of fear and hatred, after all.”

The words came smoothly. Accelerator listened to them.

“I’m not gonna say you can only make relationships by being nice or being mean. That’d be too simple. But until now, all you had to do was push aside that rejection and ill will. And that’s a fact. That was easy. Now things are different, though. That’s why I’m asking, ’kay? Are you that afraid of choosing whether to be nice or mean to someone?”

“This is bullshit. I—”

“It’s a fact,” interrupted Yomikawa. “You accept all of Last Order’s friendliness, but you’re afraid of showing her your own. Your relationship might look positive, but it’s actually a precarious one—because if that supply of friendliness from Last Order goes away, you can’t bond with her.”

Her voice was flat. Because she didn’t place emphasis anywhere, she sounded relaxed, and that lent credence to her words.

“Accelerator, are you afraid to act because you don’t know how to close the distance and because she might go farther away? Are you afraid that if your actions go wrong and that distance increases, that you’ll never be able to put it back to normal? But if you don’t act, you can’t try.”

“Lecturing me?”

“I know it’s not my style, but I am still a teacher, ’kay? Anyway, I’m a low-level Anti-Skill officer, so I probably won’t have the chance to learn about your darkness.”

Oh. Accelerator understood.

She already knew who he was—she’d probably looked into the city’s data banks.

And she’d hit a wall, which was why she asked him directly now.

“That was a roundabout way of doing things.”

“The place you were before…Well, the names being what they were…”

“The EEMA, yeah?”

Accelerator flatly spoke the name Yomikawa hesitated to say aloud.

It was the name of a facility, one recorded in an especially tight part of the data banks, sealed away from everyone.

“Its full name is the Exceptional Esper Multi-Adjustment Tech Lab. The ‘school’ they threw me into until I was nine and a hell where they disposed of dead bodies, people would say.”

School and dead bodies were words that shouldn’t have gone together at all; it was unique to Academy City. A lot of schools here also served as Ability Development institutions and testing labs. When rumors like that branched off, one got stories about “murderous” facilities that “conducted inhumane research.”

“That place was actually worse than the rumors. It was no body-disposing site. It was the opposite—a rubbish heap for disposing of living people. I’m sure you’ve at least heard the rumors?”

“…Yes, I suppose.”

The EEMA mainly did research and experimentation regarding double espers, or espers with more than one ability. Right now, students could only use a single ability, and the general consensus stated that using two or more at once was impossible. The data used for that conclusion, though, had mainly been collected at this lab.

In other words, it was a series of “failures” that went on forever until they discovered the rule.

Ability Development even used suggestive techniques and drugs, and its process directly affected brain structure—it was better not to imagine the tragedies the word failure implied. One would discover the true meaning behind the silly phrase better off dead.

Yomikawa spoke. “My unit was the one that pacified it and took it apart.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“They’d probably discovered the rule near the end—that espers can only have one ability. But they were after honor. They wanted a completed double esper, and they sacrificed a lot of children to do it. Especially using the Child Error.”

Child Error was a societal phenomenon in Academy City.

The city was mostly made up of dormitories, and it was a general rule that one lived inside the city, even if they did so outside the dorms, such as freeloading in a bread shop in the city or something. But in rare cases, people would pay the Academy City matriculation fees just to abandon the child, make sure they got into a dormitory, and disappear completely. It was better than stuffing a little kid into a coin-operated locker, but it was essentially the same thing.

Academy City had a system in place to secure children like that.

Unfortunately, it also had parasitic research teams that took advantage of them. PRODUCE, Project Dark May, the Explosion Experiment for Analyzing Runaway Ability Laws…That was how research that even the progressive city wouldn’t allow still happened anyway.

“…I saw it, too—what was lying behind those heavy doors.” Yomikawa’s voice was grave.

Accelerator smiled. It was normal to think that was where the bottom of hell was.

Her poor powers of imagination were proof that Aiho Yomikawa lived in a healthy world.

Unlike Accelerator, who smiled, knowing everything.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see your grand actions. Like I said, I was only there until I was nine. Then they moved me. You wanna know why?”

Accelerator’s lips curled down.

“Because they couldn’t handle me. Even that nightmarish place, the EEMA, couldn’t handle my power. Even those devils in white lab coats feared me. That’s the kind of monster I am,” the white student said into the cell phone. “It was the same afterward, too. Bullshit. The Imaginary Number Facility, the Wisdom Labs, the Kirigaoka Attachment…It goes so deep, you’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. But the response was the same wherever I went. The tragedies there were actually pretty lame. That’s why I went through ’em so fast. Nobody could keep me there, so I just sank deeper and deeper.”

Accelerator stomped his crutch. Its tip hit the asphalt as though he’d spat on the ground.

“I was never in the same place for more than two months. Every time, I was reminded of how much of a monster I am. They were all devils in the flesh, sure, but even they were scared of me. So what does that make me, eh?”

That was how the monster, whom nobody could deal with, ran out of places to go and ended up with the Level Six labs where Yoshikawa worked. He was treated totally different there, and that, among other things, kept him nearby for more than two months. But it was all just an inverted version of their fear toward Accelerator. It was written all over their faces—they didn’t want to get him angry. About the only one who wasn’t like that was the “soft” Yoshikawa.

Even the researchers who ended up massacring over ten thousand people in the end, their reaction was the same.

A sense of distance, of never being able to fit in.

Fear.

The color white—rejected even by darkness.

It became a word to indicate Accelerator, the One-Way Road.

“Be friendly to her? Impossible. It doesn’t mean shit. What’s the point of giving one yen back to someone you owe a hundred million? That wouldn’t even pay the interest on it, so I don’t feel like paying it at all. Just thinking about it is fucking stupid. Gives me the creeps—thinking about smiling in the sunlight, all my debts paid.”

His voice was awkward.

What am I bragging about my debt for? wondered Accelerator, swearing at himself.

Yomikawa remained silent for a few moments. Then she spoke. “It might not mean anything from me, but you hate yourself for forgetting to pay that debt, don’t you? If there was a way to pay back that hundred million, you’d be all over it in a heartbeat. Am I wrong?”

“…Hmph.” Accelerator didn’t give her a real answer to that.

Yomikawa’s tone didn’t change, though. She’d been serious from the start. “Like, for example, I never raise a weapon at children. Doesn’t matter if they’re an esper or whatever, I don’t point a weapon at them. That’s a rule I set for myself, but…”

“Eh?”

“Why do you think I’m doing that?”

“…”

“Do you know why I don’t want to point weapons at children?”

This bitch…, Accelerator thought to himself. The scent of dark emotions leaking through her voice made him unconsciously think about that scene in the alley.

“There you have it. Maybe the ‘quantity’ I have can’t even be compared. But the ‘quality’ isn’t all that different. So even if we’re operating on different scales, it’s all in the same category, yeah?” Yomikawa’s voice dug into Accelerator. “…It may not look pretty, but all you can do is pay it back, one yen, one coin at a time. Eventually it will pile up and open the way for you. I mean, unlike me, you have the strength. There are plenty of ways for you to repay it all at once.”

“That’s a funny opinion. You’re gonna warp my face, being all wishy-washy like that.”

“I guess the easiest way would be to join Judgment. The peace in the city would go up thirty percent just with your name, yeah? I can get the paperwork ready if you want.”

“You’re insane,” Accelerator said in flat refusal.

This power he had wasn’t like that. All it let him do was wave his arms and bathe in the blood spatter. The category was lower than nuclear energy, an immensely negative strength with absolutely no way for it to be used for peace. He could do his best, but it would never bring about any results. Through his actions, all he could create was destruction.

But even still.

Maybe he had thought about what-ifs.

If he’d stopped the experiment with his power.

If he could have prevented the Sisters from walking along their road to death.

And…

…if it wasn’t too late now.

The dead, which had been scattered before him in the past and might very well be scattered before him again in the future—how much could he reduce that number?

An impractical proposition. One that absolutely couldn’t happen.

There was no way he could.

He knew that.

He didn’t need someone to tell him that. He’d used this power for so long. He knew it best.

And yet…

“It’s bullshit.”

“If you just keep accumulating what you’re calling bullshit, you’ll start paying back that debt.”

That is what Aiho Yomikawa said…

…in a voice steeped in sunlight.