INTERLUDE TWO

She had wanted to look into it, but this wasn’t something she could investigate.

…Well, I guess that much was obvious, though.

Mikoto Misaka looked away from her PDA with a soft exhale.

Until now, she’d always extracted confidential information from the data banks and such, but this time, the situation was different. The security had been strengthened quite a bit. Unexpectedly, the term war had started to feel real for the first time.

The data she’d been trying to obtain must have been valuable enough to warrant it.

If the details of operations and such leaked, it would affect many people’s lives.

But she’d still gotten more than one thing out of it all—she’d been able to grab several pieces of information unrelated to the war.

Mikoto Misaka had once watched Touma Kamijou’s school compete in an event during the Daihasei Festival, a large-scale athletic meet in September. Which meant that she knew his school’s name. She used it to consult their attendance data, but as she thought, it seemed he hadn’t gone to school ever since the day of that phone call from London.

When she checked his attendance count, she found he’d already gone below the minimum requirement, ensuring he’d get penal courses. Normally, this wouldn’t have been possible in their school system…or at the very least, there should have been data that showed traces of confusion or panic into a sudden disappearance of a student. But it just said that he hadn’t been to school a single day since then, full stop—and that was abnormal, no matter how she thought about it.

Perhaps it was as she’d surmised: That boy really wasn’t in Academy City any longer.

And if the phone conversation was true, he might not even be in Japan.

The war was centered in Russia, and the United Kingdom was, if only somewhat, removed from it. However, that didn’t give her any guarantee he wouldn’t be caught up in it. And actually, this was a big, planetary war. Safe places were probably harder to come by. Academy City seemed peaceful at a glance, but they’d already intercepted several ballistic missiles. Maybe looking for a safe place wasn’t the right move.

…What now? Do I risk the danger and try to get deeper information?

Mikoto began to think about this seriously but then heaved a sigh. She knew the blood had gone to her head. Even if she tried to hack in, if she started in her current mental state, she was sure to mess it up. She’d be better off taking a break, resting her mind, and thinking about what to do next.

The decision made, she switched her PDA to a 1seg TV service.

Like always, a lot of the news was about the ongoing conflict. Many normal programs had been canceled, and though a variety show was on, it felt somehow stilted—they were refraining from using any words related to the war or that might make people think about it.

Nothing she saw gave her any peace of mind.

She considered switching to a browser and watching shows online, but then her index finger, which was controlling the screen directly, stopped dead.

On the news program, the anchor was explaining the situation in snowy Russia. It wasn’t a live stream, so it must have been filmed a short time ago.

The edge of the screen showed a small person. A spiky-haired boy with a Croaker cell phone strap hanging out of his pants pocket.

One she was sure she’d seen before, somewhere…