CHAPTER 3

A Certain Misaka’s Last Order
Tender_or_Sugary.

1 (Aug.31_PM05:20)

The laboratory Accelerator had come to was immense.

It consisted of a line of three giant buildings that looked like field warehouses—they were the cultivation facilities made to provide the twenty thousand Sisters for the experiment. Inside them, metal shelves would be hung up all the way to the ceiling, each packed with cylindrical capsules like books in a library bookcase.

The building with the actual laboratory in it was next to these three buildings.

Made from reinforced concrete, the rectangular two-story building looked tiny next to the three cultivation facilities. It certainly didn’t look like it would be the main building in the complex.

Accelerator stood before the door of the laboratory.

There was a retinal scanner on it, but he ignored it. He doubted his ID would still work anyway. Instead, he rapped lightly on the door. He focused the impact of his knock at the lock, precisely and accurately destroying its metal fitting.

The old, mansion-like door opened with a creak.

The interior looked more like an IT room than a laboratory. What looked like industrial refrigerators lining each of the walls were apparently the latest and greatest in quantum computer technology, but it seemed to him that they were just older models—all that they could get their hands on for the experiment, basically. At the very least, he didn’t consider them appropriate substitutes for the Tree Diagram. The windowless room was illuminated by the eerie glow from dozens of monitors. The floor was all but invisible underneath the piles of data paper the machines had spat out. The only sound to be heard was the low, heavy whirring of cooling fans.

The room might not have seemed like a laboratory at first, but the devil was in the details. This kind of setup was commonplace for labs that focused mainly on simulations, like evolution experiments based on artificial life or modeling aerodynamic resistance on aerospace models.

One woman stood there, alone, in the middle of the room.

During the experiment, there had always been at least twenty researchers packed in like sardines doing their work, but there was no sign of them now. The woman was well aware of that, too. Instead of reclining on a chair, she was sitting on a table. She held sheets of data snaking across the floor, marking them up with a red pen. She didn’t seem to care much about manners at the moment.

“Hm? Oh, welcome back, Accelerator. You didn’t have to break the door. Your ID will still be valid for another ninety days,” she said, as if she hadn’t so much realized Accelerator entered as she had just looked up from the data sheets when her focus waned and happened to see him standing there.

This was Kikyou Yoshikawa.

She was in her late twenties but wore no makeup at all. She had on a pair of washed-out old jeans along with a T-shirt that had been worn thin by countless trips through the washing machine. Atop that was a white, long-sleeved sports shirt—the only thing she had on that sparkled like new.

Accelerator looked at the terribly long sheet of data Yoshikawa was holding and followed it down. There was a ton of dead trees scattered about below them, nearly covering the floor up entirely.

At present, the experiment was frozen. Its plan had been conceived in the supercomputer Tree Diagram’s simulations, but the results of those calculations had been judged to be erroneous.

But the experiment was only suspended, not canceled. All they needed to do was to locate the error and fix it, and then they could restart it at any time.

Accelerator didn’t think that would be possible, though. It wasn’t as if the Tree Diagram was performing overly complex calculations. However, the quantity of calculations it needed to make was enormous. For example, a human could easily calculate that one times ten equals ten, but a machine would end up doing one plus one ten times. This method was probably easier on the machine, but he pitied whoever had to confirm all of it. How many tens of years could it take just to skim through the entire code base?

“Jeez. Good work, I guess. Is starin’ at data all day actually fun for you?”

“No, not at all. I’m having so little fun that I’d actually want you to help out if you were able. Your calculation and problem-solving skills are fairly widely known, after all.”

“Wouldn’t it be a problem if I read what was behind the scenarios?”

The main part of the experiment only required him to complete twenty thousand scripted combat scenarios. Its ultimate goal was to initiate Accelerator’s shift from Level Five to Level Six by improving his skills as an esper through battle and controlling the direction they grew in.

In other words, if he knew more than he needed to, it became possible that he wouldn’t act in accordance with these predetermined scenarios. So they’d been careful not to let him see too much of the experiment’s data…

However, Kikyou Yoshikawa looked up once more from the data sheets and said, “Don’t worry, I’m actually not looking at the Tree Diagram data at the moment.”

“Eh? Leaving that goddamned mountain of data for later? Man, you sure have a lot of free time or somethin’. Or didja already give up?”

“Well, I think you’d probably be almost dead by the time we finished analyzing all of that. And in answer to your question, yes. As far as I’m concerned, at least, these data have more relative importance.”

She spoke with a tone implying that she didn’t actually have much free time, but Accelerator didn’t particularly care. All he needed right now was an incubator to adjust Last Order’s incomplete body, the necessary facilities to do so, and the knowledge and skill to actually use them.

He looked around, but all the files, notes, discs, and paper were strewn about the floor like a storm had gone through. He couldn’t tell what was what.

“Hey. Where’s the Sisters’ specimen-tuning manual? I need it for the hardware and software side—so I need both an incubator and a Testament. Also, I’m borrowing one of the tuning facilities. Don’t ask why. Just consider it my contract price for this whole experiment going under.”

Yoshikawa was a bit surprised at this.

“Hold on a second. Why do you know all this? I only found out about it three hours ago.”

“Eh?”

“I’m talking about this,” she said, waving the data paper she was holding.

It was the code for Testament.

The Sisters were clones of Mikoto Misaka that were created in approximately fourteen days thanks to a special cultivation device. Their personalities couldn’t be constructed via normal learning, though—it wasn’t enough time.

So their personalities and intelligence were electronically input via Testament, a so-called “learning device,” but more realistically, it was a brainwashing machine. Essentially it did the same thing as when a computer overwrites information on a hard drive.

In other words, Yoshikawa was looking at a blueprint of the Sisters’ minds.

“So what’re you doing with that?”

“Can’t you tell by looking? I’m searching for mistakes,” she came back, marking up the data sheet with her red pen. “Of course, I only noticed it three hours ago, so I’m still not finished.”

Accelerator frowned.

Then, Yoshikawa’s pen stopped.

“I’m in the middle of cleaning out the bugs in her personality data. Well, actually, they’re man-made commands…so maybe I should call them viruses.”

“…Wait. What did you just say?”

“Well, that’s not to say that all the Sisters’ personality data have been destroyed. It’ll still be an issue if the one goes berserk and ends up infecting the other Sisters, though.” Yoshikawa gave a little shake of her head. “I hadn’t explained it to you, had I? There’s a unique specimen called Last Order.”

Last Order.

Sparks ran up and across the back of Accelerator’s neck like electric impulses.

“You mean…her?”

“Her, huh? Do you already know her?…That must mean she’s still in the city,” she mused, twirling her pen. “Well, that’s all right. I’m sure you know some parts, but I’ll go over Last Order’s current situation again for you. This is important, so listen carefully,” she said, bringing herself down from the table and into a chair. She motioned to the chair next to her, urging Accelerator to take a seat as well, but he didn’t go for it.

He hated this side of Yoshikawa. She was acting like a mediocre teacher.

“First of all, she wasn’t created for the purposes of the experiment. Did you know that?”

“What’s that supposed to mean? They’re all dumbed-down clones of Railgun, so they were all made to be killed, weren’t they?”

“That’s correct, but how many of those battles needed to be done before it ended?”

“Whaddaya mean? Twenty thousand, right? I did think that was a nice, round number, but—”

Accelerator broke off, realizing something.

“Right. Her serial number is 20001. It seems like you knew that already. She is a specimen not required for the experiment’s scripted battles. She’s more like a safety measure.”

Yoshikawa sighed, then continued. “Try imagining this. What would happen if the Sisters revolted after we had already made twenty thousand of them? There were only around twenty of us—we wouldn’t have been able to handle it.”

“So that brat was your trump card? The hell? Is she a man-made Level Five or somethin’?”

“We can’t make something like that, and there wouldn’t be any point. Why add an artificial Level Five to the revolt? We created her as a safety measure, so she needed to have a more trustworthy system. She needed to be someone who even weak researchers like us could have complete control over.”

“?”

“Have you heard the term Misaka network?”

Accelerator scowled. If he recalled correctly, that was the name of the brain-wave link thing that connected all the Sisters. The network itself had a giant will of its own, and it also had a way to control each Misaka.

“You see, Last Order is the opposite. By sending a certain signal pulse into her brain, she can instead control the Misaka network. That would make it possible to send a halt signal to all twenty thousand other Misakas if we needed to. This way, the Sisters would never be able to betray us.”

Yoshikawa exhaled before continuing.

“Last Order is the command center for all of the Sisters. She cannot be allowed to go free. That’s why we kept her in that incomplete state. We really wanted her to be in a vegetative state, but we had to give her a certain amount of self-awareness to allow her to connect to the Misaka network in the first place.”

“So she’s basically…a breathing keyboard?”

It was a graphic way of putting it, but Accelerator wouldn’t put it past the staff here. And the other Sisters were basically just disposable walking targets to begin with.

Of course Last Order seemed different than the Sisters. Her body and mind had both purposely been kept in an immature state.

“And whaddaya mean ‘bug’? Or virus or whatever.”

“We were going to secretly keep her here in the cultivation devices even after the experiment ended, but about one week ago, we suddenly detected some odd brain waves from her. When we rushed over to the device, it had already been destroyed from the inside and she’d made her escape.”

Yoshikawa ran a finger over the data.

“We don’t know what exactly happened. The cause of her going out of control is still unknown, so for now, we’re having the staff look into that.”

“Eh? Why not just call up Anti-Skills or Judgment or somethin’?”

“We can’t. Our superiors have ordered us not to say a word about the experiment. I mean, it’s obviously not something you want going public.”

“So you never caught her. Wait, a freakin’ week?! That’s ridiculous. And dangerous. Isn’t she in control of all ten thousand Sisters?!”

“Our confidence in how well we made the system led to our mistake. We never considered she could run away. She shouldn’t be able to live outside the cultivation device in the first place, so I suppose we underestimated her capabilities…Goodness, the fact that she’s still alive after seven days is already against all logic. She wasn’t made to be very strong, was she?…I wonder if she got attached to you, hm?”

Accelerator gave a bitter, sarcastic smile at that one.

She didn’t notice it.

“Thinking on it now, that might have been one of her defense reactions. Somebody wrote some bad programming into her head, and she fled the laboratory to try and prevent it. She probably doesn’t realize herself why she ended up running away from the laboratory, though…”

And Yoshikawa had only caught on to this three hours ago.

She wanted to get together all of the research staff and have an emergency meeting about it, but she couldn’t get in touch with any of them. It seemed like they had already covered up the fact that they ever worked here in the first place.

“But, y’know, she wasn’t tryin’ to run away or nothin’. She came to me asking if I could get in touch with any of you scientists.”

“What? Wait, when and where was the last time you saw her? And—why were you even in contact with her?”

“Like I said, she just started followin’ me around. Besides, I don’t care how troubled they are or if they’re cryin’ or what, could you really imagine me goin’ over and talkin’ to them?”

“…I wonder what it means.”

Yoshikawa rested her face on her hand and began to think. She froze as still as a statue, like the thoughts flying about in her head were dizzying.

“So that bad programming—well, I guess it was nothin’ good. Like you said, that brat was supposed to be in charge of all of the other Sisters.”

He thought back to their conversation at the restaurant.

“The brain-wave link and each individual Misaka are like synapses and brain cells.”

“That’s right. I got myself an output of her personality data in order to find the root cause of her flight and pinpoint her current location, but upon closer inspection, there’s odd code everywhere, like graffiti. I’ve picked up on some of it, but it’s literally all over the place—including dummy data—so I don’t even know if I’ll be able to completely remove it. And as for what the bad code is doing…”

“What? What’s it doin’?”

“Well, I can’t say anything for sure, since I haven’t totally analyzed the code yet, but if I’m to assume the outcome from the general direction these statements are headed in…it looks like something that will make a command to indiscriminately attack humans.” Yoshikawa broke off for a moment before continuing. “I’ve figured out how long there is until this virus activates. It’s set to go on September 1 at exactly midnight. At that time, the virus will begin to activate, and it will finish ten minutes after that. It will infect all of the live Sisters through the Misaka network, and they will begin to run wild. Once that happens, they’ll be unstoppable. They may not be on your level, but if ten thousand of them all start swinging around Metal-eaters, then they will be a force to be reckoned with.”

“…Wait, that means…”

“That’s right. What happens after that is exactly what you’re thinking,” said Yoshikawa in a hard voice—not calmly, but rather one that felt like her thoughts had all hardened around this point.

Accelerator thought about what she meant.

At the moment, nearly all of the ten thousand remaining Sisters were spread throughout the world, having their bodies readjusted. That meant that it was impossible both in terms of time and distance to have an anti-esper force stationed in Academy City, such as Anti-Skills or Judgment, quietly take care of the problem.

The Sisters that went berserk and attacked people would probably be dealt with by outsiders. And if it happened to nearly ten thousand of them outside the city all at once, there would be no way to keep it secret. Plus, if they discovered that all of the espers responsible for the situation had been artificially created, secondary problems would spread like wildfire. Even if by some miracle there were some Sisters who were excluded from the command, they’d be eliminated as soon as someone decided they were dangerous.

The corporations and agencies throughout the world cooperating with Academy City on the readjustments would see this, and it would flip their opinion of the city upside down. After all, it was an insurrection of ten thousand clones. If all of those institutions dropped support for Academy City after that, the city itself wouldn’t survive.

And he could scarcely imagine what would happen after that.

Academy City would likely be dismantled entirely, and the various scientists would probably be pulled into military laboratories across the planet because of their strange skills. Or maybe Academy City, held back by the fear of destruction, would resort to more forceful measures and begin a world invasion using next-gen weaponry and supernatural abilities.

Either way, it would completely shake up the world’s power balance. Panic the world over would ensue. In the worst case, there was a danger of all-out war. And not on the simple level of the inside of “Academy City vs. the outside.” The huge political and social tremors would tear subtle but profound fissures across every government, people, religion, and ideal. It would scatter pieces of the world map right and left like a once-complete jigsaw puzzle thrown to the floor.

It would be the end of the world.

Accelerator understood what those words meant. He could imagine it more realistically than anyone else, since he held the power to destroy in the palm of his hand.

No matter how the world was destroyed, Accelerator would almost certainly live through it. He would stand there, alone and unharmed, in a city ruined so badly he wouldn’t even be able to tell up from down.

But there wouldn’t be anything left there. Convenience stores wouldn’t be open, the power wouldn’t be working, and he wouldn’t be able to get his hands on even one can of coffee. The only thing that would be left for him would be a primitive lifestyle, subsisting on animals and berries cooked over a fire. Actually, if the nuclear option ended up being the one to do it, there wouldn’t even be anything left alive. If that happened, he’d just have to live by eating mud or something. And if it came to that, he’d end up cursing his powers for not letting him die. He had searched for strength, and yet what awaited him was a position at the lowest end of the food chain. The weakest. People create civilization, so if there were no people, there would be no civilization.

That was what it meant for there to be nothing.

“Hah, that’s interestin’. Totally interestin’. So that’s it, then, huh? End of the world? And here I always thought that was my job, heh.” Accelerator grinned savagely. “Can’t you just call Anti-Skills or Judgment or somethin’ to help? The city may be big, but it’s got freakin’ walls around it. Just send ’em out in human waves to attack, and they’ll catch Last Order in no time. Besides, she was just walkin’ around and eatin’. No caution at all, I’m tellin’ ya.”

“I can’t report it to them. Like I said, when you think about what we were doing…The upper echelons are keeping silent, certainly, but this is way too big for us to go public with. Besides…”

“Besides what?”

“We wouldn’t save the Sisters that way. If Last Order gets picked up by outsiders and studied, they’d discover that the ten thousand Sisters could have gone berserk. That’s reason enough to get rid of any artificial object, isn’t it?”

“So if you don’t catch this one brat, it won’t help.”

“I don’t have any way to respond to that. She may not know she’s running away, but I think she’s using the protocols regarding destruction of evidence, which are up in the Misaka network. She does basically seem to be living on the streets, after all. She won’t use any money, nor will she use an ID. She doesn’t leave a paper trail. There are areas where the satellite can’t quite see, and if she avoids the police robot patrol routes, she won’t even show up on those videos. Ahh…How long has it been since you left her? There isn’t another organization who has caught on to this, right? If she gets kidnapped, I’ll have a serious problem.”

At first, her tone made it sound like she was only thinking about herself, but he noticed just a hint of actual worry for Last Order.

When he saw that, he clicked his tongue angrily.

This particular researcher was more naïve than most. She’d desperately try to remember the faces of each of the genetically identical Sisters. She’d also try and give them human names instead of serial numbers.

But that was just naïveté, not kindness. It was her being soft. If she had truly been kind, she would have stood up against the whole experiment in the first place—like that boy and that girl had.

Yoshikawa didn’t notice his annoyance and continued.

“But the flee command only applies to us, the researchers. She’s not showing any sense of caution toward you, after all…Yes, if we take advantage of that, we may actually be able to do something…”

She trailed off like she was talking to herself, but Accelerator was listening to her carefully. He scowled. There was no way these people were going to use him as a pawn. He immediately changed the subject.

“You said virus, right? Not a bug, but a virus. Some warmonger agent tryin’ to start somethin’? Or is some bankrupt military business tryin’ to get back in the game?”

“Ao Amai,” replied Yoshikawa briefly to Accelerator’s banter.

He frowned. He was pretty sure he saw the guy while he was eating lunch with Last Order at the restaurant. But if he really was the culprit, then why on earth was he still wasting time in Academy City? If there was a week until the thing actually went off, then he should have just escaped the city…

Yoshikawa read his thoughts and explained.

“Only one of the researchers disappeared right before this happened. Though he did send me a text saying he was going to use some paid vacation time.”

“That’s it?”

Accelerator looked around the deserted room.

Only eccentric people took on jobs for no money. He wouldn’t think it strange if the guy were to sell out to some other lab or become a convenience store clerk. The rest of the researchers had probably done just that.

Yoshikawa, on the receiving end of his doubtful stare, went on.

“He was one of the original researchers on the deadlocked Radio Noise project. When the Sisters were substituted in for the experiment, he transferred here as staff. His specialty was the creation of personality data using Testament. Basically, he was the most knowledgeable about the Sisters’ software—their minds.”

“Wait, it’s like he wanted you to know or somethin’! And the way he did it, too! Why the hell did he decide to have it wait till today? If he wanted to destroy the world, he shoulda just ended it all as soon as he put the virus in. Why wait a week?”

“That would be a question for him, not me. Though if I had to make a logical guess”—she sighed—“he was waiting for the Sisters to become accustomed to the outside establishments where they’re awaiting treatment. He wanted to create a situation where they were perfectly safe until now, and then they suddenly go crazy. Perhaps he had to plant a sense of trustworthiness toward the Sisters in them first?”

Accelerator paused for a moment.

He thought about what should be done.

“So what the heck were you doing? How’re you gonna stop the virus in the brat’s head?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out now.”

Her words were tinged with a hint of confusion. Accelerator curled his lips. She could use Testament to mess around in Last Order’s head all she wanted, but she had to write a vaccine program, find her, and inject it. The chances honestly seemed around fifty-fifty, if not lower.

What to do, then?

Of course, he knew the answer to that full well. If they didn’t find a way to deal with it, they would dispose of the infected specimen to prevent the virus from being transmitted. That way, the 9,969 remaining Sisters outside the walls of the city would be protected from the infection and be able to go about their normal lives.

By sacrificing just one person.

By disposing of her, by throwing her in a trash can, just because a little problem came up.

“…I’m working as hard as I can to keep that from happening. Of course, there’s something you can do, too,” she suggested, as if she had noticed something from Accelerator’s reticence.

“Did you forget who you were talkin’ to or what? I’m the guy who killed ten thousand of ’em. You’re telling me to save someone? I can kill, but I sure as hell can’t save.”

“Allow me to respond that we were the ones who urged you to do that. You did take out more than ten thousand of the Sisters. But if we had found a way for you to shift to Level Six without using them, you wouldn’t have had to kill anyone.”

“And you’re telling me to believe you just because you said that?”

“There’s no helping it if you don’t want to. I’m not strong enough to detain you. Go spend the rest of this time doing whatever you want. And pray—pray that her body will reach its limit and die before the virus activates.”

“…”

Accelerator looked right into Yoshikawa’s eyes.

There she sat, same as always.

She just sat there, expression unchanging, and spoke.

“I can’t catch her. Her trait of unconsciously running away if she sees a researcher relies heavily on the magnetic field patterns emitted by our bodies. Even if I kept myself out of sight, she would detect my magnetic field and flee. On the other hand, if I could just figure that out, it would give me a chance to get closer to her…but I don’t think I’d be able to pursue her while analyzing the virus code at the same time. But if you’re here, it’s different. If we work together, we could be able to do something about it.”

“…What a damn pain.”

Accelerator fell silent, narrowing his eyes. This was why he hated this woman. She was just so naïve. If she wasn’t strong enough to shoulder something herself, then no matter how far she went with it, it would never become kindness.

It wasn’t so much about the ten thousand Sisters going berserk—the notion was too vast to seem real. Instead she used the idea of Last Order’s death, which was much easier for him to grasp. That’s some psychological manipulation, right there, he thought, speechless. Even if she were doing it because she wanted peace, a person couldn’t call it kind.

Yoshikawa took a pair of large envelopes, which looked like they had project proposals in them.

“Right now, you can do one of two things. The first is to subdue the culprit, Ao Amai, who is in hiding somewhere in the city, and force him to tell you how the virus works. The second is to secure Last Order before the virus activates. Pick whichever you like. Of course, you seem more suited to killing than protecting.”

She slid the envelopes across the table, and they came to a stop before Accelerator. Some of the documents from the two open envelopes peeked out.

There were a number of photographs in the one on the left. They were shaky pictures, like from cameras used to detect speed violations on the highway. They depicted a low-riding sports car from above, and in the driver’s seat was Ao Amai. There were also maps that had been marked with a red ballpoint pen.

Yoshikawa had probably hacked into all sorts of police and crime-fighting systems to investigate where Ao Amai would be predicted to hide and in what area he was moving. The fact that he still hadn’t been caught probably amounted to the simple fact that there weren’t enough people or that he was switching hiding places in rapid succession.

What looked like a data stick and a superthin electronic book came out of the one on the right. The data stick had a label on which was written “Serial Number 20001 Personality Outline (Before Infection).” It might have been too much to output on paper.

It must have been Last Order’s personality data. It was probably telling him to predict her path based on her likes, dislikes, principles, thoughts, intellect, motions, biases, etc., and use that to chase her down or anticipate her movements. Of course, the last time he saw her in the restaurant, she didn’t look like she’d be moving anywhere by herself.

“Hey. None of you can catch Last Order, right?”

“Yes, since she appears to be using the experiment cover-up protocols subconsciously. And besides, the only piece I have to move around the board is me.”

“But Amai’s the guy who made all those data? He’s a personality data specialist, isn’t he? So wouldn’t he know about that cover-up protocol or whatever?”

“Knowledge and skill are two different things. He is actually putting in a lot of effort, though. It’s just that he slacks off, so he hides his head but leaves his tail sticking out. On the other hand, any knowledge input into the Sisters instantly becomes skill. That’s why we can’t catch Last Order. And we can look at the money flow, too. He leaves traces of where he’s been when he uses a store, but she lives on the streets. She can conceal herself completely. It goes without saying which would be easier to follow.”

“…”

It also went without saying which one Accelerator was more suited to.

His power was good at breaking things, not protecting people. No, actually, there was a more fundamental problem than theory and practical skill.

“Ah, she’s here she’s here finally! says Misaka says Misaka, pointing to the waitress. Yay! Misaka’s food came first!”

He’d never protected someone before. He didn’t know how he would do it, either. He couldn’t even imagine using his power to help somebody.

“Wow, this is the first time I’ve had a hot meal, like, ever! exclaims Misaka exclaims Misaka. Some really hot steam is coming off the plate and stuff, says Misaka says Misaka, eyeing the food carefully.”

It was already a more fundamental problem than theory. His power couldn’t save anyone, and that’s just how his world was. People in his world never got saved. If someone did, that would be stranger—that was the first statement of the common sense within him.

“But this is also the first time I’m eating with somebody else, answers Misaka answers Misaka. I’ve heard that people give thanks for their food before eating it, recalls Misaka recalls Misaka. I wanna do that! says Misaka says Misaka, ever hopeful.”

If, hypothetically, he were to try and save somebody with that power, then all the common sense he’d surrounded himself with would come tumbling down. He wouldn’t be Accelerator anymore. An Accelerator who helps others was not Accelerator. He would, in essence, have been replaced with an entirely different person.

“Heh, guess so. Anyone would understand which one I should take, huh?” murmured Accelerator to himself almost mockingly.

He wasn’t that boy or that girl. There were plenty of other people far more suited to saving others than him. Unfortunately, every seat was taken. There was absolutely no room for him to come in at this point.

If his power wasn’t suited to saving people…

If his power was suited to killing people…

Accelerator recalled someone’s face, just for a moment.

“Hah, hate me all you want, you freakin’ brat. This was my only choice.”

Then he chose. He selected his option by removing one of the big envelopes. As though giving up on something, he took one of them in his hand.

The envelope on the right.

The envelope containing the data stick loaded with personality data and the electronic book.

So that he could go secure one man-made girl named Last Order.

At that moment, Accelerator ceased to be Accelerator.

He rose to protect. He acted to help. He wielded his power to save another. It wasn’t at all about whether it was unlike him. Far from it. If someone who knew him well had seen what he had just done, they’d think there must have been something wrong with their eyes. Perhaps they would shout that this Accelerator was a fake.

That’s how much impact his decision held.

You could say that he lost his entire identity as Accelerator.

The boy, who was now no one, without power, spoke as if sneering at himself.

“Smile already. Looks like I still somehow want salvation, eh?”

“Yes, I will indeed smile wide for that.” Yoshikawa fixed her gaze on him. “If you still have those sorts of emotions within you, then that is something to celebrate. So relax, and prove that your power can protect somebody important to you.”

Accelerator took the envelope with the data stick in it without replying, turned on his heel, and headed for the exit. That’s exactly why I hate her and how damn soft she is, he said to himself.

“I’m gonna be workin’ for you researchers, got it? You’d better have a hefty reward for me when I get back.”

“Yes. You can leave her physical adjustments to me,” answered Yoshikawa to the boy’s silent back as he left the laboratory.

2 (Aug.31_PM06:00)

Kikyou Yoshikawa sighed, now alone in the room.

Accelerator coming here at the last moment was nothing short of a miraculous stroke of luck. If he hadn’t, she really wouldn’t have been able to do anything, and Academy City would have been destroyed.

Now that he was going looking for Last Order, Yoshikawa’s job was to catch Amai and make him explain the virus code, but she lingered here—making sense of the code herself seemed the simpler option when compared to getting herself involved in a running fight, which she’d never done before.

Nevertheless…

Weeding out every last bit of the virus code from the enormous personality data when she didn’t even know how much of it existed was an arduous task in and of itself. She couldn’t mess up and delete needed code, either. If she got rid of memory-related programming, Last Order would simply lose some memories, but if she damaged the code governing her autonomic nervous system, the girl would die.

She sighed again.

She looked up from the data sheet. Readjusting Last Order’s body was no simple task, despite her easy reply to Accelerator previously. It was less of an issue of technical skill and more one of her current position.

The laboratory had only frozen the experiment, not terminated it entirely. That meant they had to make sure the experiment could be restarted at any time. Of course, they could never allow Last Order, the core of controlling all the Sisters, to run amok because of a single researcher’s own scheming. If she took independent action, she would doubtlessly be on the receiving end of the responsibility.

Yoshikawa was just soft. She was not a kind person.

For example, when that experiment was on the brink of ending, when just short of ten thousand Sisters conspired to control the wind-generating propellers in Academy City to hamper Accelerator’s attack, she could have stopped them by sending a halt signal through the Misaka network with Last Order, but she didn’t.

The fact that she didn’t, however, was not out of any sort of kindness because she didn’t want them to die. It was only because she was too soft to risk causing irreparable damage to the whole experiment by interfering with the Sisters during their work.

“Still, though…”

Kikyou Yoshikawa made up her mind.

Accelerator was trying so hard to save someone that he had thrown aside his own identity. That reality was probably enough to drive a heavy shock into his heart. It was a pretty simple, fundamental point that he could help people with his power—but he had given up. He purposely deprecated himself, saying that he couldn’t do anything but kill, to give himself a way out of his own life, in which he would never be saved.

If Accelerator, in that condition, were to realize that he was able to protect someone with his own hands…

…he would definitely have regrets.

About what those people who had fallen before him meant to him.

About why he didn’t lend a hand more quickly.

However, he still set his mind on facing that reality so that he could save just one girl. Yoshikawa didn’t want to walk all over his feelings. Even if he had realized it far too late, and even if he had reached a point from which there was no return, she didn’t want to trample that.

“In the end, I’m just soft. I’m not kind at all.”

Dry words, spoken to herself. Yes—Yoshikawa was not a kind person. A truly kind person wouldn’t have begged for Accelerator’s help and made him bear such suffering. A truly kind person wouldn’t have relied on him and instead chosen to settle the score by herself, even at a huge disadvantage.

Yoshikawa hated herself for being so soft.

She wanted to try being kind just once in her life.

“Well, then, I suppose the time has come for me, too—to destroy myself.”

She sighed again, then got to work preparing for Last Order’s physical adjustments with the data sheet in one hand. Being prepared to take a risk to do something for somebody else didn’t seem like an action she, soft but not kind, would ever take. If it were the normal her, if she ran across an abandoned cat on the street while it was raining, she would only think that she felt sorry for it. She wouldn’t actually take it back home and raise it.

But she hated that side of herself.

Just once, she wanted to try doing something unlike her.

3 (Aug.31_PM06:15)

He remembered something that happened a long time ago.

The person who came to be known as Accelerator once had a human name. His last name was two syllables, and his first name was three. It was a very Japanese name and not at all an uncommon one.

It wasn’t as if he’d reigned as Academy City’s strongest since the beginning.

At the beginning, he only knew his skills were a bit above average.

And, as they say, the nail that sticks out gets pounded down.

The disaster probably came because he was more talented than he’d realized.

Boys in his class attacked him, and their bones broke just from touching him.

The teacher who tried to stop it ended up having bones broken, too.

Then, a group of adults surrounded him, but he dispatched them all, too. In the end, Anti-Skills and Judgment rushed to the scene like he was some bank robber, attempting to attack him using all sorts of abilities and next-generation weaponry, but he wiped them all out, too.

He was just scared.

He was scared of having a fist raised against him and just waved around his arms frantically.

For the ten-year-old him, that was the most natural response.

But that’s all it took for him to turn out like this.

Unmanned, windowless attack helicopters flitted around in the air, while robot-like Anti-Skill reinforcements wearing powered suits stood between him and wounded comrades. He was like the giant kaiju monsters he’d seen on television. A fearsome creature feared by all.

Then he realized it. Despite his age, he figured it out. He could hurt people just by touching them with a fingertip. People could die if he so much as thought grr to himself. If this madness escalated, eventually all of Academy City, then all of the world, would become his enemy, and he might really have to destroy everything.

In order to avoid such destruction, he had to prevent himself from displaying any emotion to anyone. That went for malice as well as goodwill, since even the latter could turn into aggression via jealousy.

He had to become an immovable rock, so that no matter what anyone did to him, he wouldn’t hurt them. If the slightest bit of annoyance could cause someone’s death, then he couldn’t let himself even feel a little bit of emotion. If he became like ice, then he could protect people from his rampant powers.

But his younger self had already made a mistake at this point.

He would become like ice, so that he wouldn’t think about anything anyone did to him and that was exactly the problem. Somebody who didn’t complain about anything others did to him was actually somebody who had no interest in the lives of others.

And so he set himself upon this path, never realizing this.

He had just barely managed to avoid destruction.

He surrendered himself right then and there, having lost all interest in others. He was stuffed into a coffin that others insisted was a “special class.” But the cogs in his mind would not be so easily stopped. His awareness floated along aimlessly like a jellyfish until it guided him to another solution.

If he didn’t want to war with others carelessly, then he could just create a situation in which that conflict wouldn’t occur.

If he could acquire such power that even beginning a conflict with him would seem insane…

If he could move past being the strongest and become absolute…

Then he wouldn’t have to hurt anyone else, nor would anyone else threaten him anymore. His rust-covered heart wondered if people would then be able to acknowledge his existence.

He just didn’t realize his idea would harm so many people afterward.

“What a pain…”

Accelerator left the laboratory and, ignoring the memory stick with the personality data on it for now, ran through the city and toward the restaurant where he had left Last Order. Hours had passed since then, but he didn’t think she could move around on her own strength given the state she was in.

He ran through the city.

He bared his teeth against the fragments of memories that clung to his mind and ran.

Someone had acknowledged him.

Not as someone absolute, nor as the strongest.

That one girl had done it.

Maybe it was too late. Maybe it was far too late to change anything at this point. But she’d acknowledged him. With an equal gaze, with no fear, as a fellow person.

He had embraced something that he didn’t want to lose.

And somewhere in his mind, he reveled in the fact that he felt like he didn’t want to lose it.

Something was about to change.

He was finally able to think that he might be able to change something.

Even though he knew he was too late.

4 (Aug.31_PM06:32)

Accelerator ran through the city.

It took a few hours to walk from the laboratory to the restaurant. His conversation with Kikyou Yoshikawa had taken a while, so the sun had already set.

As he ran, he picked up on nearby sounds. There seemed to be a lot of Anti-Skills in the area. Listening in revealed that there was apparently a foreign invader who had broken through Academy City’s security.

Someone with Ao Amai? That would mean that he put the virus together for someone outside, eh? Damn. Does he want to get out of here?

He thought further, running with a speed that could overtake an average bicycle.

Nah, if the other guy came in to let Amai escape, they wouldn’t have busted their way in and tipped off the police. So it must be something else entirely…but I guess I can’t just ignore it.

Either way, Last Order came before Ao Amai right now. He didn’t know whether or not the intruder had anything to do with this. It could wait.

While he was deciding as much, the restaurant he’d left Last Order in came into sight.

What a damn pain. If I knew this was gonna happen, I’d’a just brought her to the lab with me.

He hadn’t, though, because he didn’t know what kind of position Last Order would find herself in once they got there—he was concerned that they’d just up and dispose of her, but his decision to leave her had totally backfired. Too late to curse his luck now. Was Last Order still in there, or had they kicked her out? He darted toward the restaurant…

…when crash!!

All of a sudden, the restaurant window in front of him shattered to pieces.

“Eh?”

Accelerator paused in spite of himself.

The window was facing the road, and on the road, a man almost two meters tall and big enough to be a pro wrestler was standing. He was wearing a jet-black suit and was currently leaping in through the broken window.

He heard a retort from inside the building—angry words.

After a moment, he heard somebody’s footsteps coming out through the smashed window and into the road. But it was only footsteps. He didn’t see anyone. It was like an invisible man; he heard glass breaking as a transparent distortion in the shape of a foot crunched one of the window shards underneath it.

The invisible man ran off in the opposite direction from Accelerator. He collided with a strange girl with black hair and shrine maiden clothing as he went. Everything the girl was carrying flew all over the place. It looked like cat food. The box’s lid must have been open, because the invisible man got covered in the cat food from head to toe.

As Accelerator was trying to think of what to do, wondering who that guy was, a single boy leaped out of the smashed window into the road.

He knew that one.

“It’s…that bastard!!”

Accelerator glared at him. It was that Level Zero kid who’d punched the hell out of him and gotten the experiment frozen in order to save the Sisters.

The boy also ran off, going after the invisible man. Though from an outsider’s perspective, it looked more like he was running away. There was a man and a waitress chasing him around for some reason.

What the shit is going on in that restaurant?…Does it have anything to do with the brat? I can’t even think about it. Guess there’s always a chance that moron would stick his nose into this.

He wondered for a moment whether or not to chase after him, but decided to go into the restaurant. He didn’t have the luxury of moving around in the dark. Besides, once he got some information, he could easily catch up to him with his legs.

He went in.

It was like a whole different world from how it had been earlier that day. The front-facing window had been broken, and one of the tables was on the floor, ripped apart like a laser had cut it in half. The other patrons still hadn’t regained their calm after whatever had happened and were all staring at the busted table from afar, talking among themselves as if they were watching a small fire.

Accelerator looked around.

The inside of the restaurant wasn’t very big at all…but he couldn’t find the now-familiar Last Order anywhere.

Hey, wait, did they seriously kick her out? I don’t think that brat could’ve even walked by herself.

He cast his gaze around again and locked eyes with one of the waitresses. She was short in stature and looked easily mistakable for a middle school student. At first, she returned Accelerator’s stare vacantly. She seemed to have been caught up in everything and forgotten that she was on duty. After about three seconds had gone by, she finally snapped back to reality and came over to Accelerator. She gave him her business smile, though her face was pale.

“W-welcome. Um, is it just you today? Also, we don’t allow smoking here—”

“I’m not a customer. I’m looking for someone. She should’ve been here.”

“Huh?”

“It was this naked kid like ten years old wearing a light blue blanket as a cloak. She was with me at about three. You remember?”

There was no real way Last Order wouldn’t have stuck out in people’s minds, so Accelerator didn’t go into details. He thought it would be enough.

Unfortunately, the short waitress gave him a troubled stare.

“Um, well, I’m sorry, I don’t remember. Do you know which table you were sitting at?”

“…You’re kiddin’, right? You don’t remember? She was in here today and wearing that.”

“I’m sorry.”

The waitress bowed her head politely, but her facial expression made it evident that she was about to cry. She really didn’t seem to remember.

Damn. Is it because of all this nonsense that just happened?

Accelerator clicked his tongue. It had been a few hours already since Last Order was looking for food, after all, and some incident had occurred here just minutes before. It was somewhat natural that would make someone forget about a guest who came in dressed oddly.

He’d suddenly lost her. His expression turned to one of irritation, and the small waitress, scared, disappeared into the back of the restaurant.

What do I do? Check the security cameras?

Normally, this sort of video recording would be transmitted through a direct line to a security firm. The master copy wouldn’t be kept here. If one were skilled enough, they could use hacking to steal a peek at those recordings from the outside, but…

…but I can’t do that. Where do you think we are right now?

Accelerator shook his head.

He didn’t have those skills, and there was no way that Academy City, with all its research institutions and confidential information, would leave its safety to a common security firm. As a matter of fact, he didn’t think there was even a path into it in the first place. The only ones who would be able to do that would be a seriously abnormal genius who was able to find a back door without the system’s developer himself realizing.

Then, as he stood there thinking, two or three employees came up to him from the back of the store. The short waitress from before was there, too, hiding behind one of them.

Maybe they think I’m obstructing their business or whatever, he predicted. Of course, he didn’t have time to give them any more than a brief explanation about his circumstances. A sharp, dangerous light glittered in his eyes.

But actually, a male employee in his thirties gave him a relatively friendly smile and asked, “Are you that blanket girl’s family?”

“Huh?”

“Well, the girl who came in at three. We wondered if she had some sort of chronic disease.”

Accelerator mulled over the man’s words in his head. Last Order had fever-like symptoms as a side effect of her unadjusted physical body. She couldn’t get up and walk around by herself.

“I think it was past four? She was still laying on the table, so I thought it strange. I had my daughter try and talk to her, and that’s when we realized she had passed out. We called an ambulance, thinking it was an emergency.”

“Wait, so is that brat in the hospital right now?”

“Actually, before the ambulance arrived, a man in white clothes came in. He said he was a relative and that her symptoms visited her from time to time but didn’t pose a threat to her life, and then brought her away.”

A man in white clothes.

Accelerator pulled his lips back. It was too soon to judge from just that, but…

“If you’re looking for the girl, then why don’t you ask him? You know who, right?”

“…Yeah. I know him far too well,” he spat in response.

It could only be one person—Ao Amai. He’d witnessed Accelerator hanging around here during lunch. Besides, Last Order didn’t have any relatives.

5 (Aug.31_PM07:02)

Accelerator left the restaurant and decided to contact Yoshikawa with his cell phone.

“What? Amai took Last Order away?”

“I heard it from someone else, so I dunno for sure. What do you think? The virus would start up by itself, so he could just leave it alone, right? Why’s he messing with her now?”

The fact that Ao Amai was still present in Academy City was weird from the start. He had disappeared, fearing that he’d be suspected. Wouldn’t the obvious thing to do be to get out as soon as possible? Even the powerful Anti-Skills and Judgment wouldn’t be able to bring much force to bear on the outside—their peacekeeping abilities could only be used on the inside.

“If we just look at his skills, the guy’s a top-class scientist. There’s probably a ton of places outside that’d be happy to shelter him despite the risks.”

“You’re right, and I don’t know, either. The answer could end up being simpler than we think, though.”

They both paused for a moment.

On the other end of the phone, he could hear the sound of keys clacking.

Finally, Accelerator said, “He apparently took her away at around four. Think he’s still in the city?”

“It’s already after seven…so it’s been a little less than three hours. I’d normally say that we’re in trouble, but it seems that for once our luck is turning around.”

“Eh?”

Accelerator became attentive to the sounds on the other end—Yoshikawa was typing on a keyboard, hard at work on something.

“Somebody has broken through the security net from the outside and forced their way in to the city. On top of that, a large-scale battle occurred near a fast-food restaurant in the Seventh School District since a bit after noon. Earlier today, the security code was orange, but it’s gone red. Code orange…you know what that means, right?”

Orange meant that there was the possibility a terrorist had invaded, and red meant that it was completely certain. If either of them had been issued, it would mean that entrance to and exit from Academy City was entirely restricted. Convenience store managers were probably worried about their products not being delivered even.

If code orange had been in effect since noon, then Amai wouldn’t have been able to take Last Order outside the city, even if he had captured her. He didn’t know what idiot caused all this, but he was thankful for it for the moment.

“He’s still in the city. Then do you know where he is?”

Yoshikawa answered his question, still typing. “It’s tough to search for him, but he’d probably avoid crowded places. If a proper adult were walking around with a naked girl in just a blanket, he’d stand out far too much. I don’t think he’d want that, fugitive that he is.”

It sounded logical, but it also sounded like a pain in the ass. Today was August 31. Most of the students were shut up in their homes grappling with their homework, so the entire city was like a ghost town.

“Can’t you hack into the police bots, or the satellite’s observation data, or something? There were data in the one folder on where Ao Amai was that you got from hacking into the security systems, wasn’t there?”

“Mechanized security isn’t really that secure. I mean, we did conduct that experiment despite being under alert, didn’t we?”

“…”

“I don’t think security is any more than pursuit support. I’ve been tailing him mostly by targeting the movement of money. Did you know that there is an IC chip embedded in your wallet right now?”

“Huh? Yeah, you mean, you can make all the fake bills you want. It’s to stop that, right?”

“It actually has another use. It collects detailed information on money distribution by recording personal information on the holder,” she explained, still typing. “I mean, we live in an age where if you buy more than one thousand yen’s worth of stuff using a credit card, the information will get stolen…But on the other hand, if you don’t use any money and live on the streets like she is, then we have no real way of following her.”

“Okay, fine, different question. How has he been getting away so far?”

“Mainly by car. He seems to be stopping at parks and abandoned buildings to sleep. He does have to clean himself and acquire gasoline, though, so he is using money. He couldn’t seem to completely cover his tracks.”

As the sound of keys being pressed came through the phone again, he replied plainly, “So he’s not using any hotels or inns or anything. Has he gone to visit people he knows?”

“I’m not sure he even knows anyone well enough for that.”

“…Heh. He’s trash, then, just like me.”

“He has quite a bit of debt resulting from the lab’s closure of the Radio Noise project. This was a private institution. It was emotionally like he was the president of a company that had just gone under. Love lasts only as long as money endures, right?”

Accelerator clicked his tongue, uninterested, and thought about it.

“He can’t get out of the city at the moment, right?”

“If he’s worried about being inspected, then he probably can’t even flee the school district.”

“Hmm. All right, then.”

Accelerator told her the name of a certain building.

Kikyou Yoshikawa, upon hearing it, raised her voice in surprise.

“Hold on a second…That’s strange. It’s true that he hasn’t gone near that place yet. I’d have thought he wouldn’t hesitate to go straight there, but…”

“He’d normally avoid the place you’d think of first, right? But when humans lose their cool, their movements get easier and easier to predict.”

Grinning, Accelerator walked out onto a big road.

His destination was the former site of a certain laboratory.

It was the facility where the mass-produced Level Five Railgun “Radio Noise” development had been carried out.

6 (Aug.31_PM07:27)

A sports car was parked next to a certain former laboratory.

The air-conditioning was up way too high in this cramped car, but his palms were still drenched in sweat.

In pain, he desperately held his stomach with his sweat-soaked hands.

He had originally wanted to go into the actual building. There were plenty of places to hide a car, as long as everything was how he remembered it. He’d even be able to escape the eyes of the satellite. Unfortunately, the front gate was locked up with thick chains and padlocks, and he couldn’t get them off.

But he also couldn’t leave. He might be stopped for inspection as soon as he started moving. And he’d be stopped for sure if he left the car behind and carried Last Order, who was essentially naked, around the city.

“Damn it…”

This was the wrong choice, he thought in regret. He had initially prepared to flee Academy City as soon as he’d injected the virus into Last Order’s head. Members of an anti–Academy City faction were waiting for him on the outside. Then, he’d follow them out of the country and go to whatever institution he liked in whatever country he wished, bringing his supernatural ability–related skills as a souvenir.

And yet, Last Order ran away as soon as he injected the virus.

His grand schemes began to unwind at that moment.

Last Order’s body was incomplete and unadjusted, so she couldn’t live for very long outside her incubator. If he was careless, she could die before the virus activated.

If that happened, the virus wouldn’t infect the Sisters throughout the world. His plans of destruction would come to naught. The enemy faction wouldn’t forgive that. Not only would they refuse to assist his escape—he wouldn’t be surprised if they just killed him on the spot.

Strangely enough, Amai needed to capture Last Order—to save her life.

Now that he couldn’t prepare an incubator for her, though, the goal seemed unattainable.

He’d been frantically running around all week looking for Last Order. And when he’d finally acquired his target, having evaded the vicious Accelerator, with whom she had been for some reason, he’d finally ended up in this sorry situation.

“…”

He turned his glare to the passenger seat.

The incomplete physical body of Last Order was sunk into the seat, wrapped in the blanket. She was sweating all over, and her breathing was so shallow he had to pay attention to even hear it.

A handful of electrodes were attached to her face. The cords coming from them connected to the notebook on her lap.

The screen displayed various vital signs, such as her pulse, body temperature, blood pressure, and respiration. The numbers and graphs would have been undecipherable to the untrained eye…but those who could read it would be dumbstruck. It was bad enough that she could stop breathing at any moment.

This can’t be happening. Not here, not now…

Ao Amai had a reason he needed to get away.

He was responsible for the Radio Noise project to create mass-production espers based on Tokiwadai’s Railgun. Unfortunately, the mass-produced versions were low spec—he’d been unable to recreate Railgun perfectly. The project was deadlocked and the labs were shut down. Deep in debt, he had barely managed to pick up Accelerator’s Level Six project.

Unfortunately, that project, too, was essentially frozen for good.

He couldn’t pay back his debts like this.

He had no place to return to in Academy City. All he had left was an enormous debt—enough that he could buy a submarine with the money. The fact that the Level Six laboratory was a private institution, unlike the Radio Noise one, hurt him all the more. If he still wanted to go on living, he had to skip out on his debt and flee.

So he’d joined forces with an enigmatic group. If he broke with them now, hell surely awaited him. He wasn’t optimistic enough to think he could make an escape while caught between both Academy City and the opposition faction.

Damn it, damn it! Why is this happening?!

He punched the steering wheel of his small sports car.

He had finally managed to capture the runaway Last Order today. Unfortunately for him, the security code had been set to orange and soon changed over to red, making it impossible for him to leave the city. On top of that, Last Order’s physical state was worse than he had anticipated. At this rate, she really might just take her last breath before the virus activated.

Please, please! Just a little longer! Just hold out until the virus activates!

He had plenty of other options when it came to places where he could regulate Last Order’s body, but now that the security code had moved to red, everywhere in the city was to be inspected. He couldn’t bring a naked girl wearing a blue blanket through an inspection, especially since she was an artificial, mass-produced specimen without an ID.

Ao Amai couldn’t get out of this one city block, much less the city. And so there he sat trembling in the cramped vehicle, staking everything he had on a virus he wasn’t sure would activate.

Suddenly, something flew past his front windshield.

“?!”

His lowered gaze reflexively shot back in front of him. However, it wasn’t anything related to Anti-Skills or other researchers. It was a crow. A black crow had simply flown past the car, from right to left.

“Ah—”

But his eyes opened wide.

There was nobody in front of him. There was an unoccupied road before him, plain and simple. Nothing that was any danger to him. It would have seemed like he had lost his calm and was freaking out at an impossible hallucination.

“Aahh…”

However, Amai wasn’t looking in front of him at all.

He was staring into his rearview mirror.

What he saw in it made his blood curl. His irises vacillated. Sweat broke out over his whole body like a thin film. His fingers tensed and trembled.

There was a lone boy in the mirror.

He was walking slowly up behind the yellow sports car Amai was in.

It was a white-faced, white-hot, bright white Level Five.

“…Eh…hee!”

A strange voice leaked out of Amai’s throat.

From his point of view, he didn’t know why Accelerator had come here. However, the fact that he was trying to do anything made things dangerous.

Accelerator unhesitatingly made his way toward the car.

Amai glanced at Last Order in the passenger seat.

She was someone he had to treat more delicately than snow crystals. He didn’t know what Accelerator was about to do, but if he gave her over, she wouldn’t last a second before being destroyed.

He could not let him have Last Order.

He needed to intercept him.

But how?!

He had a pistol tucked in a pocket of his white coat, but that wouldn’t help much against Accelerator. Taking him on physically would be as reckless as racing on foot against a Lamborghini Gallardo, as foolish as engaging a Type 90 tank in a game of tug-of-war.

Then he had to run.

Amai grabbed the car key.

His quivering hands had trouble locating the ignition. He tried over and over again to get it in, about to cry the whole time, until clack, it went in.

He feverishly twisted the key.

The engine roared to life. In his tension, he mistook it for a manual and went for the nonexistent clutch. The car kicked up and leaped forward.

7 (Aug.31_PM07:39)

Accelerator watched Amai’s car with a grin as it violently shot forward, betraying the man’s panic.

Let’s see, that brat is…in there, is she? Here I thought he’d just throw her into the trunk or something, but I s’pose Amai can’t afford for her to die, he figured to himself, slightly dropping his stance.

Bang! He kicked off the ground.

Accelerator flew nearly ten meters into the air, overtaking Amai’s sports car, and touched down in front of it. He could see the man’s face pull back in surprise and terror. He threw the wheel to one side, but it was too late. The accelerator of the cheap domestic sports car had been jammed right down to the floor, and it crashed into Accelerator with the force of a cannonball.

Then roared the sound of crushing metal, a thousand times stronger than the noise an empty soda can makes when stepped on.

Accelerator stood there, without budging an inch. Not a single hair on his head even moved. The car was what had been crushed. He had redirected the car’s force vector straight down. All four of its tires went flat, and the wheels got squashed into an egg shape. The ground clearance of the car went to perfect zero, and it sunk into the asphalt a few centimeters. The glass windows on all sides shattered to pieces, too, as if the car’s body itself had been twisted out of shape.

The face of the driver, Amai, was a contorted smile.

He must not have been able to believe he was unharmed, even though his car had been completely wrecked. The air bags weren’t working, either. His mercy directly showed the sheer difference in strength between the two of them.

“Ek…gh…d-damn it!”

Face nearly in tears, Amai slammed on the accelerator over and over, but the front wheels had already been so deformed that they were eating into the bumper. The car wasn’t moving any time soon. It took him more than ten seconds to finally realize this, and then he threw open the door, maybe deciding to flee even if he had to abandon Last Order.

“Calm the hell down, old man. You look disgraceful.”

Accelerator lightly kicked the car’s front bumper with a bam. However he’d controlled the impact, the open driver’s seat door slammed shut again. It was less a normal door opening and closing than it was a steel trap clapping shut. The fleeing Amai got caught in the door, which knocked the wind out of him. He slid down to the ground, motionless.

“Yeah, sorry about treating you so roughly. Hey, at least you’re not dead, right?”

He received no response, but he wasn’t expecting one anyway. He looked at the passenger seat. Unlike the sunken driver’s seat, it was gently cradling the girl.

“Stupid brat. You sure are a pain in the ass,” muttered Accelerator, as if venting the pent-up pressure within him. Then, he took out his cell phone.

“Yoshikawa? Yeah, I’ve got her.”

There were more than four hours left until the virus’s activation.

8 (Aug.31_PM08:03)

Accelerator opened the passenger door. Last Order, wrapped in her blanket, didn’t react. Her splayed limbs were soaked with a sickening sweat.

He was about to carry her out of the seat when suddenly he realized something.

“Hey, there’s electrodes or somethin’ stuck to the brat’s head. Should I leave ’em on?”

“Hm? Could you give me a little more detail?”

Yoshikawa listened to what Accelerator had to say about it for a few moments, then said, “That’s probably the Sisters’ system scan kit that our staff has. It just displays her physical state, like her breathing, pulse, blood pressure, and body temperature, as well as the healthiness of her mental state, including her personality data. You can remove the electrodes if you need to.”

There was a laptop connected to the electrodes’ cords. A handful of graphs were being displayed on its screen. Aside from them, there was a percentage value of some sort, which said “BC Rate.”

When he asked what it was, she responded, “Oh, that’s the operation rate of Last Order’s brain cells. BC stands for brain cells.”

Accelerator was taken aback. It was no small order, keeping the movements of every single one of a person’s brain cells under observation. Such a small device didn’t even seem able to handle something like that. The Sisters were electric users, though, so maybe they assisted.

Either way, the technology was all foreign to him.

“Hey, can’t you use this thing to get rid of the virus? It’s gonna take me some time to actually get back with her.”

“That wouldn’t work. It’s just a terminal to display those data. You need a special incubator and Testament to write to her.”

Accelerator mulled on that for a moment…then noticed something.

All sorts of noises were coming from the other end of the phone.

“Wait, aren’t you at the lab?”

“You just realized now? I’m driving over there as we speak. I’ve got an incubator and a Testament in the back. I figured this would take less time than you returning to the lab. She might try and run if she sees me, but with your athletic abilities, I don’t think there’s anything to worry about,” she said. “So you just wait there. I obviously couldn’t manage to pack one of our giant quantum computers in here, but the DNA computer was just the right size, so I’m bringing that, too. It doesn’t have as much power, but it should be more than enough for this job.”

“…You know, if you can just analyze this with a machine, then what were you doing with that pen before? Doesn’t seem like you needed to do anything by hand.”

“Leaving it up to a machine would be inflexible, too polite…Anyway, it has its own problems. Are you familiar with video games? Debuggers have to physically hold a controller and brute force it. They run the data through a machine, then fix them by hand, and then run the data through again to make sure they’re not wrong…They just repeat that process over and over.”

Accelerator reached out a hand for the electrodes stuck to Last Order’s face, but then suddenly asked, “So did you finish analyzing the virus code?”

“I’m about eighty percent of the way through. I need to write a vaccine to get rid of it after I’m done, so we’re still in a race against time here,” she explained. Then, she added, “Of course, I’ll make sure we succeed.”

Accelerator frowned, thinking that something about her was different from usual, but he relaxed his shoulders a little. He could feel things marching toward their resolution.

Sheesh, what a pain. How much trouble does this stupid brat think she can put me through?

It was the first time he’d ever had to wait for somebody. It felt like time was stretching out, each second going by meaninglessly. It didn’t feel very good. He tapped the asphalt with his foot, anxious, but even that motion caused odd fissures to erupt in the road.

“Mi…sa…”

Suddenly, her mouth moved.

Her lips trembled like those of a human with a terrible thirst for water.

“Mi…saka…is…Misa…Misaka…is…”

Eyes still closed, her mouth was the only thing moving—desperately, earnestly, as if to complain. Accelerator thought about whether or not to ask about it. Either way, until Yoshikawa the specialist arrived on the scene, he had no way to ease her pain—

“Mi…sa…ka, misa. Ka misa, ka misa! Ka misaka misaka misaka misaka misaka misa misa misa misa misa misa misa misa misa misa misa misa misa misa misa misa misa m<iju0058@Misagr misa qw0014codeLLG misaKA misaka ieuvbeydla9((jkeryup@[iiG:**ui%%ebvauqansicdaiasbna:!!”

“Eh?” muttered Accelerator at Last Order’s sudden shout.

She didn’t look right at all. The girl before him with her delicate body was tossing and turning like a fish out of water. She was bending quite a bit backward. Was the creaking noise her bones? Her muscles? Still there was no hint of pain on her face. He even sensed delight, like she was about to start singing a hymn or something.

But there was just one thing.

He could see tears coming from beneath her closed eyelids.

That was the only thing that wasn’t delighted.

They were tears of pain.

The laptop screen started going crazy. Dozens of warning boxes popped up one after another like raindrops hitting a window, burying most of the screen underneath. The only sounds to be heard were the warbling tones trying to warn him of something.

“Shit! Yoshikawa, what the hell is this? Is this one of the symptoms or somethin’?!”

“Calm down, and explain everything to me in order! I can’t know anything just with that. Right, does your cell phone have a camera? If you can sent a video text, that would be bes—”

Yoshikawa’s voice suddenly cut off as he heard a surprised, quick intake of breath. Their call hadn’t been dropped. He could hear her saying things to herself—and it sounded like the usual “No way,” “It can’t be,” “This shouldn’t be happening.”

“What the fuck is wrong?! Can’t I do some kinda first aid for this?!”

“Be quiet for a moment. Can you let me listen to what she’s saying?”

“I said, give me an expl—”

“There’s no time!!”

Yoshikawa sounded like she was at her wit’s end. Accelerator could feel something was wrong. But he couldn’t do anything but put the phone up to the screaming Last Order.

“aweuvll;**0012uui%%0025$#gui’&=//nsyulljwidnl’jwucla:@]aucneisdkaudj!!”

Her shouts were no longer even a language.

He heard Yoshikawa gasp again when she heard it.

“I see…so it’s true.”

“What is? What the hell’s goin’ on?”

Yoshikawa replied in simple tones to the aggravated Accelerator.

“It’s the virus code. Though it seems to be encrypted. The virus is already starting up.”

Accelerator froze.

The virus wasn’t supposed to start until midnight that night. It was only just past eight. They should still have a little less than four hours…

He could only think of one possibility.

Dummy information.

The enemy, Ao Amai, had intentionally falsified the time limit. There was no way all the information from the enemy would be the truth. Accelerator said it himself, too—telling them what time the virus would go off from the start made the game far too easy.

It was a simple, cruel, playful trap.

Even Amai himself probably didn’t think it would actually come in handy. It seemed more like something he’d thrown into it in his spare time than him trying to defend his interests.

Accelerator thought back to what would happen once the virus began.

“At that time, the virus will begin to get itself moving, and it will finish ten minutes after that. It will infect all of the live Sisters through the Misaka network and they will begin to run wild.”

He remembered what would happen…

…to the girl in his arms.

“I haven’t finished analyzing the code yet, so I can’t be sure, but the symptoms will likely involve indiscriminate attacks against humans.”

Accelerator found himself unable to move.

Last Order repeated her indecipherable screams. Hundreds of warning windows flooded the laptop’s screen. Between the windows, he could just barely make out the BC Rate—the operation rate of her brain cells.

The number was rapidly increasing. Seventy percent, 83 percent, 95 percent…and then it exceeded 100 percent and continued rising.

Last Order’s small body jolted and writhed like it had been struck with electricity.

Finally, another warning window completely covered up even that BC Rate value.

Just like the strange virus data were overwriting the personality data that originally belonged to Last Order.

Yoshikawa said something to him over his phone, but he wasn’t listening anymore.

They wouldn’t make it.

Yoshikawa hadn’t finished looking at the virus code yet, and she hadn’t put together a vaccine. On top of that, there were dummy data in the code she had analyzed, so there was no guarantee she could write a safe one anyway. And they couldn’t even bring her back to the lab, where all the equipment was.

Amai, who had created the virus, would understand its code. But there was no time to interrogate him and then make a vaccine after that was done.

An odd sensation tingled at the back of Accelerator’s head. Before he could figure out what it was, Yoshikawa’s calm words carved themselves into his thoughts.

“Listen to me, Accelerator. It’s too soon to despair. You need to seal the deal.”

“…What deal? We can still do something?”

“Before the virus is uploaded to the Misaka network, the current code has to take time to gain administrator privileges so that the Sisters won’t be able to resist it. If it had privileges from the start, the virus code would be easy to detect within the actual personality data, so that’s being prevented. You only have ten minutes. You understand, right? You can only do one thing—deal with her. Killing her will protect the world.”

Yoshikawa had never considered saving Last Order in the first place.

That’s what she meant by “seal the deal.”

Protect the world.

In order to stop the Sisters, scattered to every corner of the world, from going insane, he had to…

This girl was writhing in pain, unable to even cry out for help, and he had to…

Accelerator sneered. Of all the things, she was telling him to use his power, which could only be used for killing people, for this outrageous reason. To consent to the smallest harm. To kill this one girl.

Given time, the commands written into Last Order’s head would tear apart her mind. The only way to stop that from happening was to take her life before that mind fell apart.

“Fuckin’…”

Yoshikawa was saying that if nothing he chose could save her…

…then at least kill her with a smile.

“That’s fucking bullshit!!”

Accelerator’s teeth grated. A knife drove deep into his chest. It was the same kind of pain as when that Level Zero punched him in the switchyard. There was nothing like it. It was the pain of loss. He had figured it out. And he realized how heavy, how important, the girl in his arms really was. Ten thousand times this. He finally realized that he had caused ten thousand times this pain to someone.

It was too late at this point.

It was far too late for him to do anything.

Accelerator howled. He had no solution.

His power couldn’t get rid of the virus inscribed in Last Order’s mind. It wasn’t that convenient. It may have been the strongest power, but it was only the ability to alter kinetic, heat, and electric force vectors. And the way to use them always ended in killing. He had so much power, but all he could think of was blowing people up by touching their skin and reversing their blood flow or bioelectric field—

…?

He suddenly stopped, caught up on something, after having thought that far.

He closely examined his own words.

Reversing bioelectric fields?

Wait. What am I hung up on?

Scraps of words began to float into his mind, one after another.

Then, all of a sudden, whoosh, time seemed to slow down for him.

Time’s up in less than ten minutes. Can’t call for help. Things I have here—memory stick and electronic book. They contain her personality data before infection. Level Five, Accelerator. The ability to alter any vectors, whether kinetic, heat, or electric. Doesn’t matter. What I need now—Testament. A device for manipulating brain information via electrical means. Control of electrical impulses. The vaccine program. Data to find and delete the virus code from the enormous personality data. Solution for if we can’t erase the virus quickly enough—killing Last Order.

Accelerator’s thoughts reached breakneck speeds.

He eliminated all unneeded words, reducing his sentences to pure meaning.

Just a few seconds felt like an eternity as he immersed himself in his thoughts.

To not kill her. Need to destroy virus. Two options. One—find just the virus code in her enormous personality data. Two—manipulate electrical impulses within her brain and destroy only the virus code that I find.

In Academy City, which loaded its classes with supernatural Ability Development, the strongest esper in the city equated to the smartest esper in the city. Accelerator had once perfectly calculated and predicted the winds blowing through the city down to each and every particle. He used all of his neural pathways to search for a way out.

Data stick. Contains preinfection personality data. Find differences between it and current infected personality data…Wait. What am I so hung up on? This is masochistic abuse. Remember. What I’m good at. The thing that most easily comes to mind.

Finally, Accelerator’s shoulders shook like he’d been hit by lightning.

Reversing bioelectric fields.

If Accelerator’s ability really could control any and all vectors, regardless of what kind of force it was…

If he could reverse the direction of somebody’s blood flow and bioelectric field just by touching their skin…

He looked up. Not even ten seconds had passed since he began thinking.

“Hey. If I can just control her brain’s electrical impulses, I can mess with her personality data without having to use a Testament, right?”

“What are—” Yoshikawa began, then stopped and realized something.

A Testament was a device for installing a personality and knowledge base into a person by controlling their brain’s electricity.

“…You want to be a replacement for a Testament? That’s impossible! You can freely control any vectors with your ability, but manipulating someone’s brain signals is…Wait!”

“There’s nothing I can’t do. I killed people by reversing their blood flow and electric fields just by touching their skin during that experiment, yeah? I can reflect stuff already, so it’s not strange that I can go beyond and control it.”

Of course, he’d never actually messed with someone’s brain signals before. He wasn’t absolutely confident in this plan.

But he had to go for it. It would have been better to use a Testament. It would have been perfect to write a vaccine program to beat the virus, but the situation wouldn’t allow for it. Nevertheless, he didn’t want to give up, so the only thing left was for him to do something.

With his own hands.

Even if it was a makeshift plan, he had to help her.

“There’s no way you can do something like that. Even if you were able to control Last Order’s brain with your ability, I don’t have a complete vaccine program for the virus. It’s impossible for you to remove the entire virus!”

“…”

Yoshikawa was right—she hadn’t finished analyzing it yet. But considering she hadn’t noticed dummy code, he couldn’t be sure there weren’t errors in the already-analyzed data.

“Do you hear me? I said to kill her. I know her body a hundred times better than you, and I say there is no other way. Do you understand me?” Yoshikawa’s voice was like ice. “You cannot hope to eliminate her virus by yourself. If you fail, you’ll be sacrificing ten thousand sisters, and when the problem escalates, Academy City will be an enemy to the world. You need to give up on Last Order to prevent that!”

She wielded her remonstrating voice like a sword, trying to stab it into him.

“Of course, maybe you can write a vaccine yourself. Can you do it in this situation? The virus is going to be finished working in minutes!”

“Sure thing,” he answered immediately. Kikyou Yoshikawa caught her breath.

He lowered his gaze to Last Order, lying in the passenger’s seat, and looked at the envelope’s contents again. There was a label on the memory stick that read “Serial Number 20001 Personality Outline (Before Infection)” on it.

Her pre-virus personality data were in there. That meant he would match up Last Order’s current brain with these data, find the extra parts, and root out the virus code. If he could do that, then he just had to overwrite it with the proper data to fix it, just like flattening a bumpy steel plate with a hammer.

The corrected data he’d stick back in after fishing out the virus could loosely be called a vaccine.

“Bullshit…Of course I can do it. Who the hell do you think I am?”

She said something back to him, but he was no longer listening. He was about to hang up, but the phone slipped out of his hands onto the ground. It was out of his mind already. He gave a crooked grin.

He already knew the weak point in his plan. The personality data he held were from before infection. So if he overwrote everything extra in her personality data, any memories she had would all be wiped away along with the virus. It was the same as smearing the ink all over a paint canvas, covering up the old picture with a new one.

Their meeting.

Their conversations.

Her smile.

All of that would be lost, and he’d have to bear the pain.

“…And so what? Her forgetting all that is for her own good.”

It seemed pretty obvious. He just had to think back to that alley last night and to the state of his dorm room. If she stayed with Accelerator, she was liable to be attacked just for that reason.

Last Order had accepted Accelerator without fear. A person like that, however, couldn’t be part of this world.

She needed to go back.

Not to this blood-soaked monster of a world, but to a kinder world of light.

He laughed weakly to himself, then inserted the memory stick into the electronic book. He read through the insane amount of text on the screen, scrolling past with the speed of a waterfall. It took him fifty-two seconds to read the whole thing and forty-eight to ruminate with his eyes closed. He opened his eyes again and spent sixty-five seconds comparing what he remembered to what was on the screen.

He was ready.

Ready to put an end to all of this.

His hands crushed the electronic book in them with a squash. Fragments of the machine containing the blueprint for a certain girl’s mind fell from his hands to the ground.

“…”

He turned the reflection off on his hands, and his fingers touched the girl’s forehead. Her skin was hot like she had caught a fever. He then found a bioelectric field and made contact with its vector, like it was an antenna leading to her insides. He started to calculate the vectors of the fields around it using the one he touched as a base.

Finally, the entire construction of the girl’s brain revealed itself to him.

The thought circuits that came to him were very warm.

They were so warm it almost made him not want to lose them.

But…

Still…

“Seriously, you fucking brat. Do you not see me helping you? Don’t you dare start saying I didn’t do anything, got it?” he demanded, grinning.

If he had a mirror, he would have been surprised at how gentle his smile looked.

His hands trembled.

He would use this power that could do nothing but kill in order to save someone. It was a stunt as ridiculous as feeding a baby food using a spoon taped to a tank cannon.

“…That’s pretty funny. I’ll give you something to be scared of, sure,” he declared to himself.

He applied his power. He changed a vector. The battle began.

The virus would activate at 8:13. There were fifty-two seconds left until time ran out.

9 (Aug.31_PM08:12:08)

“89aepd’das::-qwdnmaiosdgt98qhe9qxsxw9dja8hderfba8waop code9jpnasidj resist9w:aea from route A w’waveform red from code08 to code seventy-two subroutine to point A8 via route C sealing area D diverting code fifty-six to route S casting blue waveform to yellow”

Last Order’s indecipherable words began to change into Japanese. Sweat dripped from Accelerator. He felt like something hot was burning the back of his head. He could see his vision tunneling. As a result of him focusing all his calculation abilities to one place, his reflection didn’t work, so his sweat clung to him unpleasantly.

He matched up Last Order’s personality data now that she was infected with the virus with the preinfection personality data on the memory stick.

Any differences between the two would be due to infected code. Included in that were memories of Accelerator from after the virus, but he couldn’t at all tell which parts were the virus and which were memory.

The number of lines of code he needed to rewrite came to him.

In all, 357,081.

The only thing to do was to delete all the code to get rid of the virus.

The monitor showing Last Order’s vital signs continued displaying warning windows at a terrifying pace.

10 (Aug.31_PM08:12:14)

“after casting code twenty-one from waveform red to orange proceeding through route D branching to points A7, C6, F10 lifting sealed area D and inserting code thirty-two adding additional limitation to area F focusing route A toward code 112 from code eighty-nine and so on with code 113 possessing point D4 via route C”

As soon as he understood the alien code flowing through Last Order’s brain, Accelerator issued a command to all of it—a single write command.

Whoosh…

He sensed the huge signal moving like a wave.

Last Order’s body squirmed.

Her fingers began to dance madly, as if controlled by invisible threads.

He couldn’t distinguish between virus and memory. For now, as if pasting Wite-out over letters written by a black ballpoint pen, he painted over every single piece of code that he deemed dangerous; 173,542 lines of code remained.

The speed at which the caution windows appeared on the monitor slowed, slowed, slowed…until finally, they stopped being shown. This time, they began to disappear one by one, like a video being rewound.

11 (Aug.31_PM08:12:34)

“casting every code from route K to waveform yellow dividing to points V2, H5, Y0 dividing code 201 changing to code 205 from code 202 registering waveform pattern to red constructing route G connecting to areas C, D, H, J branching to points F7, R2, Z0.”

I got this, thought Accelerator, confirming. He’d already fully caught up to the part of the virus that had gotten ahead of them. He would wipe out the entire virus code just in time at this rate.

Some 59,802 lines of code remained. He thought of the code he was madly painting over and grinned with a bit of loneliness at what he was erasing along with the virus.

Electric signals danced in his hand.

The memories being erased were writhing in their final moments.

Warning windows were disappearing from the monitor. The speed at which he was overwriting data increased. Gaps appeared between the vanishing windows.

Sweat flew from the fearfully flailing Last Order’s forehead, but those movements, too, steadily lessened and lessened, as if her body was restabilizing.

12 (Aug.31_PM08:12:45)

Then, all of a sudden…

Accelerator heard a rustle. He directed his eyes toward the noise as he overwrote and fixed the virus code to see that Ao Amai, who should have been out cold, caught in the driver’s seat door, had approached his side.

This in itself wasn’t at all a problem.

However, his hand gripped a handgun shining black.

“Don’t…get in…my…”

Amai groaned, his eyes bloodshot.

Now 23,891 lines of code remained. He still couldn’t remove his hand. If he caused a malfunction in the fragmented code, it could possibly destroy Last Order’s brain.

The number of warnings on the screen was now numerable, but Accelerator saw that as representative of the state Last Order was in. He couldn’t allow a single warning message to exist.

13 (Aug.31_PM08:12:51)

There were less than four meters between them. He couldn’t miss at this range if he tried.

“Kuh…?!”

Accelerator was using all of his strength to control Last Order’s brain signals, so he couldn’t divide it to reflect anything. If he did, he’d introduce an error in the precise electrical signals on the scale of an electron microscope. That would mean frying Last Order’s brain to a crisp.

Only 7,001 lines of code remained.

Only nine warning windows were left.

His work wasn’t over. Time slowed to a crawl.

Amai probably had no idea what Accelerator was doing, but from his point of view, just the thought of him touching Last Order, whom he absolutely couldn’t let die, was probably close to driving him insane.

“Don’t…get in my way…”

Froth formed in Ao Amai’s mouth. His eyes were red with blood.

He seemed to have even forgotten just how reckless it was to point a gun at Accelerator.

But Accelerator couldn’t divide his power in order to reflect anything at the moment. There was nothing he could do in this situation.

If that one insignificant lead bullet hit him, he’d die from it.

His survival instincts implored him to take his hand from Last Order. They screamed to take back his reflection. He knew that if he did, he’d be saved. He wouldn’t take damage from a rain of nuclear missiles, much less a handgun.

14 (Aug.31_PM08:12:58)

However, he still didn’t take his hand from Last Order.

There was no way in hell.

Only 102 lines of code remained. Just one warning window was left.

“Don’t…get…goaahhhh!!”

The trembling hand of the shouting Ao Amai, the handgun he held, its muzzle—all stared Accelerator down.

There was nothing he could do to avoid it.

He could only stare vacantly at his fingers moving to pull the trigger.

A dry gunshot.

Before the sound reached his ears, it struck Accelerator right between the eyes with a shock that felt like being walloped with a hammer. The impact to his head bent his entire body backward. He heard an unpleasant noise from somewhere around his neck. His feet, unable to withstand the blow, jolted up into the air.

But he still didn’t let go.

He would never let go.

“Error. Break_code_No000001_to_No357081. Administrative command canceled due to improper usage. Reawakening serial number 20001 in accordance with descriptions.”

With a light, electronic blip, the final warning window vanished. As soon as he heard the girl’s familiar voice, he understood.

He’d finished overwriting the dangerous code all by himself.

Strength left his hand. His body had been blown into the air by the bullet impact. Slowly, slowly, he fell away from the warm girl.

Accelerator, now airborne, reached his hand out.

But his fingers couldn’t reach her anymore.

He’d wanted something, but none of that would be fulfilled.

He’d desperately picked something up, but it all fell from the palms of his hands.

Lord, how naïve can I be? After all I’ve done—

His vision quickly blurred and then went black. He slammed into the ground below as if falling into the depths of hell. His muddy awareness crumbled, and his thoughts rapidly tumbled into the darkness.

—did I really think saving somebody would give me a chance to do things over?

15 (Aug.31_PM08:13)

“…I did it? Ha-ha…why? Why…why am I alive?”

Ao Amai, holding onto the automatic pistol with white smoke swaying upward out of it, was dumbfounded.

It had hit him right in the center of the forehead. Accelerator had taken a direct hit from the bullet, flown back close to a meter, and fallen to the ground faceup. His forehead was split open, and bright red blood oozed from it.

He had no idea why, but Accelerator hadn’t used his reflection. That meant there was no way for him to live if he took a .09mm military round to the forehead. And Amai hadn’t just used any bullet—he’d used a special-order trial product.

The Shock Lancer.

By carving special grooves in the bullet, it would deliver a shock-wave spear by controlling its own air-resistance properties. The spear would follow after the passing bullet to strike the target. On top of increasing a bullet’s killing potential by five to ten times just by putting grooves on it, because the grooves were melted into the bullet’s surface owing to the extreme air friction heat, it also couldn’t be analyzed by an enemy, even if they had gotten their hands on it. The special bullet was currently being advanced by anti-berserk esper development teams.

The wound in Accelerator’s head would have been struck two or three times over by both the bullet and the spear made of air.

“He’s…dead…Hah! What about Last Order? And the virus code?!”

Ao Amai pried his gaze from the corpse on the road and looked at the unconscious girl in the passenger seat. If the virus didn’t activate, he was finished. He’d end up on the run from both Academy City and the opposition faction.

The girl, with exhausted limbs stretched, moved her lips.

Her tiny mouth formed quiet words.

“Code 000001 to code 357081 have been suspended due to illegal operation. Reawakening based on current normal descriptions. Repeat—code 000001 to—”

All of the moisture in Amai’s body burst onto his skin as sweat.

If the virus had activated properly, then Last Order would have sent the order through the Misaka network for all of the ten thousand Sisters to freely use weapons and their abilities to kill humans completely at random. Then, her heart would stop itself and she would die—which he’d engineered so that a cancellation order couldn’t be issued.

But despite all that, Last Order was still alive.

The virus hadn’t started. He knew well what that meant.

He realized he couldn’t do a single thing anymore.

Wobbling, he took two steps back, then a third.

“Ha-ha-ha. Oh, ah, gah, u​ww​o​aaa​aaa​aaa​aaa​aa​aaa​aaa​hhh​hhh​hhh​hhh​hhh​hh​hhh?!”

Ao Amai screamed, then aimed his gun at the one person who had smashed his life to pieces.

At the one girl, asleep in the passenger seat.

He stabbed the gun toward her chest, rising and falling with her shallow breathing. He placed his finger on the trigger. Just by moving his finger a bit, his special bullet, the Shock Lancer, would tear her delicate body apart completely. He wasn’t thinking about where he’d shoot, nor how many rounds. He pulled the trigger, content to keep on firing until the gun was empty.

The sound of the gunshot rang out in the night.

But that round didn’t pierce the girl’s body.

“—Not gonna happen, you pile of shit!!”

The corpse had risen.

The boy, blood steadily flowing from his torn forehead, had reached out with his hand to block Amai’s gun. The bullet had been cleanly reflected back into the muzzle, and the handgun exploded from within. It ripped through the wrist holding on to the gun.

“Uhg, ghu…aaaahhhhhh?!”

He grabbed his left hand onto his right, which had been cut up like a pomegranate, and stepped away from Accelerator.

Shit! That special round went into his forehead. How the hell is he still alive?! It makes no sense!

The Shock Lancer was a next-generation weapon that reversed air resistance through special grooves cut into the bullet and created a spear of force behind it. There was absolutely no way anyone could survive a direct hit to the brain.

But Amai had been mistaken.

The specialized warhead created a spear-shaped shock wave using the bullet’s air resistance. Because of that, a lot of the bullet’s speed is taken away by the air resistance. It was like a bullet flying with an opened parachute behind it.

The shock wave would lag behind the bullet and follow its trajectory. The lag time wasn’t even one fourth of a second. But in that time, Accelerator had finished healing Last Order, and at the last moment, he regained his reflection.

In result, the slow-flying bullet cracked open his skull, but he fended off the fatal shock wave.

But to Ao Amai, who didn’t know these specifics, the scene he was currently witnessing was like a nightmare.

Amai pulled a second handgun out with his left hand, now the only usable one. He hadn’t, however, had any training with his nondominant left hand. It trembled under the weight of the gun. There was no way he could aim it properly. And Accelerator took one of the special rounds to the forehead and still got up. His left hand’s unnatural quivering made perfect sense.

Accelerator stood before him.

As if to shield the young Last Order behind him. As if not giving a thought to the blood flowing from his forehead. Despite his feet shaking badly, despite his focus beginning to waver, he stared down the muzzle of Amai’s gun.

The scientist in white saw this and grinned.

It was a half-desperate smile, even though he was aware of his absolute disadvantage.

“Hah. What’re you gonna do at this point? You’re too far gone.”

“…You know it, old man. I’m human trash. Even the thought of saving someone at this point is completely ridiculous. I’m so damn naïve my skin is crawling with disgust.”

If he saved someone else, then he might be saved as well.

The words sounded pretty, but in actuality they were ugly and self-serving. Calculating the worth of someone’s life against your own is not what a decent person does. Someone like that could never be saved.

And in the first place, every single person who lived on this planet was beyond salvation. The soft, yet never kindhearted Kikyou Yoshikawa. The one who blasted a lead bullet into a man without hesitation in order to protect someone, Ao Amai. The one who killed more than ten thousand people and just now began to talk about how precious life is, Accelerator.

Everyone in the world was rotten. Searching for salvation after all that was wrong. Granting salvation to man? The concept was beyond ridiculous.

He knew all that.

He was painfully aware of it—he was a member of this world, too.

“But”—he said, as if cutting himself off from something—“the kid has nothing to do with it.”

Accelerator was grinning.

He was talking while smiling, despite blood gushing fervently from the hole in his forehead.

“No matter how rotten we may be. Even if I’m a helpless piece of human trash and it’s ridiculous for me to even mention helping another person…”

The blood flowing from his wound slid into his left eye.

His vision was tinted with red.

But even now, he desperately retained the strength in his feet, which seemed like they would collapse beneath him at any moment.

“There’s no fucking reason it would be okay to watch this kid die. No way it would ever be right for trash like us to trample all over what she has!” shouted Accelerator, his eyesight red with his own blood.

He understood his actions were unbecoming. He knew they were beyond his means. He felt his own words flying back to stab his chest.

He still shouted.

If he didn’t have the right to save somebody, then would he not be allowed to save anyone?

Would it be natural to bat away the small hand that had reached out to him?

What had she done?

Had she done anything to deserve him shaking away her desperately outstretched hand?

“You piece of shit. How much more obvious…can it get?” he murmured, as if letting himself hear it.

Last Order needed to be saved by somebody. She still had that opportunity, unlike Accelerator and Ao Amai.

It didn’t matter who it was that saved her.

That wasn’t the meat of his reasoning. It didn’t matter who it was—if somebody hadn’t reached out to her, Last Order really would have died.

One way or another, he realized what that Level Zero who had arrived at the switchyard to stop the experiment must have felt like. He stood up to save the Sisters without any reason or objective. Accelerator had always thought the Level Zero had seemed like a hero who had lived in a different world than him all his life, but he’d been wrong about that.

There was no main character in this world. Superheroes wouldn’t just conveniently appear. If a person stayed silent, nobody would help, and if one cried out, they still weren’t guaranteed anything.

But if a person still didn’t want to lose something important to them…If help didn’t come even after someone waited such a long time, and they lost them because of such a stupid reason, then he would just have to become that savior.

Even if it was pointless, or meaningless, or beyond his means.

To become somebody who would defend what was precious to him with his own hands.

There was no salvation in this world. People could never become superheroes.

That’s why whoever happened to be present there needed to do something.

They needed to act like the main character.

“Yeah, I killed ten thousand of those Sisters. But that’s no reason to let the other ten thousand die. Ah, jeez, I know that sounds whitewashed. I know the words coming out of my mouth right now! But you’re wrong! We may be the epitome of human trash, but no matter what your reason is, there’s no fucking way it’s okay to kill that kid!!”

Accelerator’s feet lost their power with a snap.

Fresh blood spilled from the wound on his forehead as if it had been blocked before.

But he couldn’t go down yet.

No way.

“…Ugh…gaaahhhh!!”

Accelerator dropped his body low, then leaped toward Ao Amai with the speed of a bullet. Though he looked to be in the stronger position, Accelerator was the cornered one. He couldn’t endure a long fight. He needed to settle things with this one hit, or he’d pass out. And even though he understood that, he didn’t have the luxury of using a big attack. So his only option was the simple one—to charge at him at close range.

Amai devoted himself to running away, perhaps because he understood that fact. Compared to the bullet speed of the jumping Accelerator, if he ran backward, he’d get caught. So instead, he lurched his body to the side to get out of the way of the incoming Accelerator. The nails of the devil ripped through where he had just been.

Accelerator moved his mouth silently and looked to his left.

He saw Ao Amai. He must have put all his strength into his sideways jump, because he fell to the ground quite pathetically. He wouldn’t be able to repeat that leap in that state. Was he trying to stall for time? He pointed the gun that his left hand, the only safe one, was holding.

Accelerator turned his body around.

Or rather, he tried to. Unfortunately, his feet got twisted up, ruining his balance. He tried to stop himself, but his feet were no longer moving. Immediately after the wound on his forehead suddenly stung with great pain, the sensation disappeared. He heard a thump and finally realized he’d fallen to the ground.

In his sideways vision, he saw the girl he needed to protect.

A particular thought came to mind, but his awareness quickly slipped into the darkness.

16 (Aug.31_PM08:38)

Ao Amai, for a while, didn’t feel like he had lived.

He stared at the fallen Accelerator vacantly, then finally wiped the sweat from his brow.

I’m…alive. Ha-ha…somehow…I survived somehow?

He smiled, drained of strength, and scratched Accelerator’s forehead with his nails.

His reflection…gone. I didn’t want to bring something like this out if I could help it, but there’s always the million-to-one chance he gets up again. He won’t be able to dodge the next one.

He pointed the muzzle at Accelerator’s forehead.

If he didn’t have his ability, Accelerator should be nothing more than an exercise-deprived student. He figured he would die normally if he hit him in the head with ten .09mm rounds. Of course, now that he’d failed to activate the virus and was caught between Academy City and the opposition faction, he had no time to be doing this. He had to run—as soon as possible, to get even another millimeter away—but he should pluck the seeds of disaster now.

“Hah. After all that, you weren’t hero enough to settle things. It’s only natural—we’re all like that. Everyone is like that.”

He put strength into his trigger finger.

Bang! came the sound of a dry gunshot. The murderous noise sounded like a firecracker.

“…”

Ao Amai’s face distorted.

The shot hadn’t come from the gun he was holding.

A hole opened in Amai’s back, around his waist, and he felt a scorching heat burn into him as if melted lead had been poured into it. He turned around slowly—his body wouldn’t move any faster.

Away from him was a parked, used station wagon, so old that one might begin to doubt the driver’s car sense. Its door was open. A woman in white came out. In her hand was a toylike self-defense gun that only held two shots.

White smoke curled upward from the gun in her hand.

“…Kikyou…Yoshikawa…,” he said, as if squeezing the words out of his throat. The woman in white didn’t reply.

17 (Aug.31_PM08:43)

Amai was lying on the ground.

He shook his head at his flickering vision. Finally, his consciousness cleared up. He must have passed out, but he didn’t know if it had been ten seconds or ten minutes.

He could see the woman wearing white.

Kikyou Yoshikawa.

With her back turned to him, she opened the back door of the station wagon and manipulated something inside. He knew what the equipment back there was—an incubator.

Geh…

He moved his shaking head around to look at his own car. Last Order, who had been sitting in the passenger seat, was nowhere to be found. The specimen was probably in that cylindrical glass incubator, though Yoshikawa’s movements were blocking it.

He tried to stand up, but his body was barely moving. He just barely managed to get his upper half up and, with quivering hands, took his Italian-made military handgun.

Suddenly, Yoshikawa turned around.

Her work had long since finished, but after she closed the back door, she pointed her self-defense gun at Amai. It almost looked like she was smiling. She slowly walked over to him, gun at the ready.

“I apologize. I’m always so soft when it comes to things like this. Not kind or gentle, but soft. I didn’t have the guts to go for your vitals, but I see I can’t just let you leave. My choice to pointlessly prolong your pain may have been so soft it was cruel.”

“How did you…find…?”

“Cell phones have had GPS for some years now, you know. Didn’t you realize that the kid’s phone was stuck in the middle of a call?”

Yoshikawa looked down at Accelerator with motherly eyes.

“I only know what was going on here from the sounds I picked up from the phone, but at the very least, there doesn’t seem to be anything going on outside.”

The shivering of Amai’s hands grew more severe. Feeling steadily left his fingertips, like they were stuck in the snow for an extended period of time. The finger he had on the trigger trembled in violation of his own will. He heard the clinking of metal parts hitting together inside the gun.

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about him. I know a pretty amazing doctor. His face looks like a frog’s and he lacks dignity, but people do call him the Heaven Canceler and say that he can bring people back from the dead. I’m sure he’ll be able to work something out.”

He heard ambulance sirens drawing near from somewhere far away. She’d probably notified them before she even shot him. Perhaps she even designated which hospital to carry him to.

Yoshikawa looked down the muzzle. He could fire it at any time, but she didn’t stop walking.

She didn’t seem at all concerned about her own well-being.

She was here to defend the children. She forgot all about protecting herself by running away from the responsibility of the experiment’s failure, which everyone was trying to push onto someone else. She didn’t fear standing before a loaded gun about to fire. She did all this in order to return the children, who had been unfortunate enough to be wrapped up in this experiment, to their proper worlds.

And she said she was being soft? That she wasn’t at all a kind person?

“…Why?” Amai squeezed out. “I don’t understand. This doesn’t follow your thought patterns. You could only ever put risk and reward on a scale. Your decision is impossible, given your personality. Or are you saying you have enough of a reward to justify this action?”

“If I had to answer that, it would probably be yes. I hate my own thought patterns. I didn’t want to watch myself see more and more success by doing that. I’ve thought about it ever since I was born—that I wanted to do something kind rather than something soft, just once in my life.”

Kikyou Yoshikawa smiled with loneliness and continued to walk.

Not three meters were between them anymore.

“You see, I never wanted to turn into this kind of scientist,” she said, adding with a hint of scorn directed at herself, “though you may not be able to believe it.”

Ao Amai was astonished at those words—he knew of her talents well.

“I wanted to be a schoolteacher. A teacher, or a professor, or whatever. Not some rigid job. I wanted to be a nice, kind teacher. I wanted to remember each and every one of my students’ faces. I wanted to give them counsel whenever they had trouble. I wanted to engage myself, so that I could give a reassuring smile to just one student without expecting anything in return. I wanted to be a kind teacher, the sort that would be made fun of at graduation ceremonies when they saw me crying. Of course, I abandoned the idea myself, thinking that somebody as soft as me and not at all kind should never be in a position to teach others.

“But even still…” She smiled.

One meter between them. Yoshikawa slowly bent down onto one knee to meet the sitting Amai’s gaze, like she was trying to talk to a small child.

“I probably still had regrets about it. Just once, I wanted to try doing something nice, instead of defaulting to being soft. I wanted to display the same kind of actions as a teacher who would do everything she could for just one student.

“That’s all,” she finished.

Their guns each pointed into the other’s chest.

She herself should have understood how difficult it would be to bring Accelerator back into everyday life. There was no doubting the fact that he had murdered ten thousand of the Sisters. And that didn’t mean it would end here. He may have had vast power, but the one controlling it was an unstable mind in the first place. If left alone, he could even cause more damage than before.

But still, she wished in her heart.

The strongest esper, whose real name nobody knew anymore, had tried to protect a single girl, even with a bullet in his head. Even if he couldn’t walk alongside her, even though he could never meet her again as she walked the path of light, he never gave up. He never abandoned her. So instead of choosing the softer option of protecting himself, he was able to choose the kinder option of saving another.

He may have been far, far too late, but he had finally realized that he was capable of making that choice.

He now knew the meaning of defending someone with one’s own hands.

Yoshikawa wanted to protect the kindness he showed.

She couldn’t allow the cruel ending that came at the end of that kindness.

“It’s over, Ao Amai.”

Each placed their finger on the trigger of the gun pointing at the other’s chest.

“You’re probably scared to die alone. I’d be honored if you chose me to go with you. I will absolutely never allow you to lay a hand on those children. I will bet what little kindness I have within me on that.”

“Hmph.” Amai gave a half smile.

Either way, though he was caught between Academy City and the opposition faction, there wouldn’t be a tomorrow for him.

“Kindness really doesn’t suit you,” he intoned, placing strength in his trigger finger.

“What you have is already what they call strength.”

Two shots rang out.

Amai and Yoshikawa, their bodies both pierced by bullets, were each launched backward.

Aug.31_PM08:57 End