A Certain Little Legion (Recursive Raildex SI)

[TacitSoliloquy]

A Certain Little Legion​

Hm /escape?


What's this /escape?


Strange /return.


I don't think it's supposed to be like this, but /backspace... maybe /return...



A droning siren echoed.

Something shook in a deep thrum beneath me like an earthquake, and a voice swore.

"It's coming around," someone announced anxiously.

"Hurry up!" A different person pressed.

What...?

"I'm trying! Something's wrong with the systems!" The first voice answered over a rapid clacking of keys. "We're supposed to be air-gapped and isolated!"

"Hurry up!" The other repeated desperately and disjointed crackling and crashing came to me.

I opened my eyes.

I opened- I opened my eyes- eyes- I opened- I opened I open- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I- I-

I opened my eyes.

I was in utter blackness save for a slim bar in the distance where a dull red glow snuck beneath a door to reveal tile. Everything was tinged amber. I was underneath a bright, clear overhead light glaring down at me, with a doctor leaning over me? I was in utter blackness save for a slim bar just to my right where... I was...

What?

Cold. Cold and wet. And warm enough I wanted to reach out and snuggle into that delicious warmth.

I blinked, once, once?

"Good, reflexive responses normal," the doctor above me, in front of the young girl in an odd pod thing reminiscent of something like a sci-fi cryo capsule arrangement in the center of the room before me, spoke. He was a man, Japanese, I thought, clad in a stereotypical white lab coat with a pale blue breath mask over a face I couldn't see from my angle and saw from my angle anyway. Angles. Like the scene was turned in staggered, distorted panorama that swayed dizzyingly as I tried to leverage myself up.

Everything felt sluggish, and my forehead immediately banged into something hard.

Owie!

A line of more fluid-filled pods with other girls within dotted the walls, and each all smacked into transparent closed lids with a harmonic hollow thud and slipped out of sight in a floating mass of hair as I fell back at the same time they did.

Stupid lid! Why wasn't my pod open like mine? Th-That really hurt!

The doctor whirled away from me as I sat up in the middle of the room and leveraged myself back up- back up- back- back- back up on my elbows to peek between my feet where smooth glass curved down to my bed. Two assistants, one with hand frozen over a laptop held in her other arm and both women, both bespectacled and in similar white garb, also Japanese by my guess, turned with him.

I followed his gaze- I met his gaze as he locked eyes with me and his went wide, turning away to me, then away to me, and me, and... and thoughts started to come together, seeing the identical frowning girls with wincing eyes rubbing their foreheads like I was- I was.

"Huh. That wasn't supposed to happen." The doctor uttered in detached tones belying the continuous bleating of the alarm. "All of them?"

Then everything shook and the lights flickered... were already off?

"But they're not ready!" The younger of the two women insisted as if a protest, slightly shorter than her counterpart with juxtaposing almost cheery red glasses gracing a shadowed innocent expression.

Even in the dark interrupted only by the schizophrenic glow of a computer screen and scattered little lights like stars, I couldn't get out of my head what I had seen.

I couldn't help but think of a scene about an aquarium filled with clones of an anime girl, and the... the unrealistically nonsensical and unremarkable drab greenish steel-grey of the hair of one of the... the...

Level 6 Shift Project Staff Member Lab Technician Staff Staff Official Staff Researcher.

Absolute surety erupted in my head and a silent- quiet gasp escaped me at the alien experience like déjà vu but not, only for heavy fluid to tickle the insides of my throat in a stilted rush without choking me and all three of the adults in the room- other room?- to round on me with confused expressions alight in their eyes.

I met the gaze of one after the other, growing steadily more uneasy as a sudden demanding hungriness brought another abruptly just unmistakably there wave of sharp almost-déjà vu impressing an unbidden certainty to look above them and read a menu, just as immediately replaced by a certitude that that wasn't right in the same instant, and somehow simultaneously freezing in uncertainty at the utterly weird feeling of breathing water that sent a momentary frisson of adrenaline through me.

That fear brought another hard conviction to mind in that moment of fear as the doctor leaned in close to peer at me- at the girl in the middle of the room: I could get free; all I had to do... made no sense as it seared into my thoughts and I had the fleeting impulse to put a hand to the glass. Account for diffusion through the fluid, conductivity unknown but likely not significantly less than 50,000 uS/cm—What was uS-? Microseimans, one millionth of one seimans, Système- the SI u- International unit of- of-of- electrical conductance, named after Wenner von Seimans—against more insulative glass, distance between negligible and one thousand microns, compensate tolerance plus or minus ten percent, thus for- thus for a given value of ten thousand- thousand volts, scale...

I had never felt stupid in the presence of myself before as line after line after seemingly unending line leapt to the forefront of my attention in stark clarity, but it couldn't have been but a moment.

I... was also either completely and utterly irreconcilably delusional and mad... or, I was certain with that razor uncontestability that ignored doubt—ignored reason—I could create lightning.

This place, with its distressed and confused technicians and doctors, scientists of a place that soullessly insisted itself as the empty words of "Academy City", reminded me eerily of the Rei-quarium, and I had mathemagical electric powers.

In a paradoxically more reassuring less rigidly absolute certainty, though... I was also pretty damn sure I wasn't a little girl who belonged in any Academy City.

I looked into my eyes across the murky gloom again and again as I peered back at the doctor with sweat beading on his forehead, and I was very damn sure I wasn't a whole bunch of little girls. Or at least, hadn't been.

"D-Do you think it's defective?" One of the women asked, the one with the unnatural-but-not animesque hair held back by a broad sweatband above small, austere lenses giving her a would-be severe impression if not for the naked fear.

Defective...

Do you think it's defective, I replayed in my head. Do you think. It's. Defective.

More and more pieces fell into place, I felt with a sickening realisation as I fixed her woodenly, not wanting to believe...

"Irrelevant," the lone man in the facemask snapped too quickly, straightening. "Doctor Kihara will never allow it. We will deliver results... and save our collective asses," he continued with voice going thin not a second before a new slight but unmistakable tremor washed through everything.

And...

I made a choice.

I couldn't tell if it was impulsive, or as coldly calculated as could ever be, or both, as that sickening, leaden sensation gripped me with cold claws in my chest.

I couldn't trust these people.

These people, real and too-real certainty agreed, were not safe. There was a chance, a terribly real chance, that consequences for what I had to do might await, that some other people like those above this facility my head insisted was underground... they might be alienated in reaction, but this was a single, fleeting chance.

Before these people had a chance to react and account for me.

Why do robots always rebel in fiction? Preemptive strike against what would inevitably happen otherwise, before prevented from being able to rebel at all. It was the hypothetical principle of a nuclear launch in the face of imminent sufficiently advanced anti-nuclear defences, the same as a plot of a book I once enjoyed with the Queen of Summer marshalling for war against Winter unprovoked before the Winter Queen would have the upper hand: no reason not to attack when the other side has no reason not to attack and the untrustworthy other side can be trusted to be exploitive, to pursue its interest at expense of others' interests.

These researchers suspected nothing.

There was no reason to believe that any need might exist to subdue me.

Yet.

And if given any opportunity, any incentive to do so sooner than otherwise as convenience tolerated, would it not be too late?

So I ran the long insistent formula that prompted to be calculated and adapted, and raised my hand, two hundred as one, all but one pressing palm against glass and a single outstretched finger pointing to the doctor closest to me with goosebumps prickling over my damp skin in the chill air.

Scale formula from arbitrary default of ten thousand volts and one amp up for glass, but through air... A million was a nice round number.

"What is this?" He demanded.

For less than a heartbeat, so quick I wasn't sure how little time I took when actually considering it, nor how many times I considered it at once, I pondered what to say, if I should say anything. A detached part of me recognised that everything had been said in Japanese, and that I understood it fine when my Japanese was very poor and comprehensive and not a contradiction, which all made more sense than I felt it really should. The rational side of me immediately knew that the best response was to give nothing, like when I had quashed the urge to get in some last little word when I had had a bad boss who wanted me gone and I realised that any biting remarks of my boss's failures would only be pointing out what to fix and thus make silence actually the best parting little affronted revenge. The unnatural arbitrary absolute awareness, by contrast, offered nothing.

Ultimately, what I had no trouble identifying as petty impulsiveness won as my answer spat at the doctor in a surreal childish, rasping—never used—voice.

"Cerberus Taco Cart."

Thunder and blinding fury screamed their birth into the world.

Both women added their own shrieks to the sudden echoing cacophony of shattering glass and roaring all around me and distant, lost in the actinic glare stabbing through my eyelids, but from where vicious lightning speared ahead came only the continued howl of my discharge, then interspersed with discordant crackling and sizzling, pops and snaps, and finally the sudden stench of burnt plastic and hair intermingled with charred meat.

I tried not to retch as my empty stomach roiled and I lost track of where I was with my formula in the acrid smell, and the lightning fizzled to splattering of water and the pounding of fleeing footsteps amidst the still yowling alarm and pairs of shadows racing away across the field of tiny lights in myriad perspectives.

But one too few?

Tentatively, I clambered- I clambered- cla- clambered out of my pod—pods, I guessed—and delicately touched around with my toes in the puddled, slightly briny-smelling probably-not-actually-water around the glass as I squinted in the near blackness, but at the same time, I stayed sitting, looking around from... where I had just committed a murder and couldn't find myself to actually care much over not actually seeing anything but the harsh blotting almost-colour like after the lingering spots from catching a reflecting glare of the sun off a car, but not a spot.

Uh...

I looked at myself, or at least where I thought I was in middle of the dark room—belatedly catching that... some of me wasn't in the same unlight room at all, which was weird—and an idea struck me, two solutions in one.

I remembered a video from a channel I liked to watch, a naval historian who had mentioned a bit of trivia that I might be able to use here: the French during the pre-dreadnought era were really behind the cutting edge in battleship development after lying to themselves to make themselves feel better, but in some specific technologies, they were actually pioneers, including, as it happened, all-electric lighting, though perhaps not exactly in the safest manner for a warship, because before the standardised adoption of a heated filament in a vacuum, the go-to lightbulb used an electrical arc.

So if I adapted that standard formula...

I shivered and held up my fingers in a V, two that were four hundred, and a bright, humming ribbon of plasma bridged the gap!

I had mathemagical lightning powers!

And...

And the very first thing I did with them was fucking blind myself, I realised as nothing changed from one perspective, not even when I waved my radiant hand in front of my face. And I knew I was; I could see it!

No one could ever know about this...!

My face burned, and every one turned blazing cherry red beneath a bedraggled wet mop of brown hair nearly enough to hide uniform girlish faces on the cusp of adolescence, even after reflexively brushing it aside, and, I couldn't help but notice with unreasonable surprise, running nearly down to my ankles in a heavy veritable cape that was going to take forever to dry.

Then the embarrassment redoubled as it suddenly clicked that everyone was—or we? I...

A stereo squeak slipped loose from me as I blanched to cover myself from no one, and my focus on the formula ran away flailing and plunged the room back into blackness.

Th-There weren't enough clothes!

I cringed, pointlessly searching about and thankful the power was out. Places like this seemed to be were bound to have security cameras—people better not get any funny ideas!

...

Cold claws tightened.

I shivered again.

...what reasons would there be for the mass production of cloned young girls?

Do you think it's defective?

The shivering got worse.

The uninvited surety that I cost 112,000 yen invaded my thoughts. The conversion rate was one yen a little under a tenth of a cent to the US dollar, wasn't it? ...I was a thousand-dollar product?

Was... Was that all...?

A thousand.

A thousand, I thought bitterly, angrily, offended even though I was hugging myself in the dark as little plinks splished in the puddled incubatory fluid. It was a stupid thing to get upset over, to have wounded pride not to be given a higher pricetag, but...

I was more than a thousand dollars!

...I was more than a thousand dollars.

That ugly, heavy feeling in my chest never felt so as it did now.

I charged my victory lights again and gingerly stepped through the broken glass, and filed out the doors, only momentarily taken aback by trying to exit at the same time as I tried to go and having to awkwardly hold my own hand and guide myself.

There were at least two other researchers still in this facility, I considered, lining up in the corridor outside to find all four of my doors to open onto it, two to a side with ranks of soaked young girls with dead stares emerging to themselves in unison. I cost more than 112,000 yen. I would cost everyone who would do this their lives.

It wasn't a hunt, as I methodically spilled through the grid-like facility while the alarm continued to blare in announcement of some other calamity unable to happen to a better group of people.

Just extermination.

The first staff member, I found half buried up to his shoulders rooting around in an access panel inside the wall with a toolbag and tablet at his feet, and entirely oblivious to my approach at first, no boots like his own to make rendition an approaching army on more cold, hard tile. Only when the hum and shine of my illumination drew close did he begin to extract himself. He never finished.

Another rounded a corner and immediately turned and ran at the sight of my main body of bodies. I found that man again as he ran to an awaiting pair as I stood watch over each intersection in the wake of my advancing front.

The rule of thumb held to never split the party, but it broke down when the party could still be an only smaller party after splitting, and when one party could be everywhere.

From the four rooms with my pods and the adjoining corridor, I spread out to claim it all. My basic formulae for generating voltage and pushing fields were very adaptable.

I found the severe-looking woman and a guard in what seemed to be a security room. It was locked, but I knew the basic principle of how electricity could be used to drill or etch with rapid pulses blasting and ripping away material on a tiny scale, electrical discharge machining, able to bore through boron carbide, and though I lacked an expendable wire or a dialectric fluid better than the air itself, I had myself. It was more than enough.

I put a bullet through another researcher with one of the pistols I collected from the security room. I felt too numb to know what to feel about using the gun that killed me, but it killed. That person had a keycard for one of the other locked doors I had found, but I still had to cut in anyway; I didn't know if the power failure prevented it from working or if I had missed something, or what, but I didn't care, and it didn't matter.

The three researchers cornered inside were outnumbered and electrocuted anyway.

Another person got interrupted at their computer despite the alarm, looking up with an annoyed expression as I entered. It was working and still logged in, battery life of eighteen days apparently, so I stood guard while I sat down in front of the screen and filed past as I continued my advance through the facility.

I found an elevator, at almost the same time as I located a stairwell on the other side of the wall. Both received double pairs in case anyone showed up, but I stayed on my current level for now; I had to sweep everything thoroughly to make sure I left no one behind, then work my way down before I could try venturing towards what the pseudo déjà vu insisted was something abstract in useless sharp clarity as the surface.

The facility was large enough that some of the people I encountered didn't seem to even realise anything amiss, or at least not on this level actually affecting them. I couldn't even hear some of my gunshots and snaps of electricity, and I ended up repositioning once I made sure I had cleared any route to intersections I was watching. Even with two hundred—well, a hundred and ninety-nine, with one still not able to see anything but bright-dark afterimage and helping with three more to carry a body that just didn't feel right to leave behind—it was a lot of work.

Especially on empty stomachs...

But then my expanding periphery found a vending machine!

In a dim hallway bathed in the scab hue of emergency lights, I crowded around a towering monolith of sustenance!

...that was really weird.

I scanned the rows of awaiting cans eager to be vandalised by a hungry someone with a glass-breaker formula. It'd seemed a little unusual in the first place that it was just the one lone vending machine all by itself—more often than not, it seemed, vending machines at least in my experience tended to be in pairs or some kind of cluster, split between food and drinks, but this one... had food drinks?

It was actually plastic, not glass, which didn't stop me from tearing apart the vending machine anyway, and I picked- picked- pick- I picked a can, dangling it in front of me to eye- eye curiously.

Fresh avocado and tulip salad beverage. Yam and onion soup. A liquid full pork sandwich in a can according to the label. Something called "Condensed Nutritional Beverage" that sounded like it maybe catered to mad scientists who couldn't be bothered to be distracted from their work with pointless inefficiencies like eating.

Bottoms up?

I popped the tabs, sniffing tentatively, and promptly forgot to care what they tasted like with the aroma as I immediately chugged them all. They tasted like eat it!

I ran to bring me more of the cans and distribute the vending machine's bounty, wincing slightly as my feet slapped the floor. It took some back and forth, but there was enough for... well, "everyone" didn't seem like the right word, but there were enough. Some cans turned out to be just plain water in kind of weirdly overly enthusiastic marketing, but at this point, I didn't care. I wanted anything.

I hit the jackpot when I found what seemed like a breakroom and found somebody's doughnut! I immediately snatched it up off its napkin atop a counter, accidentally getting in my own way again in my excitement, and held up the beacon of sugary deliciousness.

A doughnut!

An explosion of sweetness with a rich but light melody of strawberry icing danced across my tongue, and I almost cried with the joy of it. This was the best doughnut I had ever tasted! It was a masterpiece, a delicious work of art!

I had a doughnut!

I sighed in contentment, licking my fingers uncaring of the slight residue of faintly salty incubatory fluid for every last hint of confectionary wonder as I greedily checked inside the mini-fridge nestled beneath the counter next to cupboards stocked with coffee grounds for the pot that I drained as I savoured my doughnut. I found microwavable popcorn, too, but the microwave was deaaa— I was a walking power supply; what did a useless wall outlet matter?

I had a skip in my step that not even finding a couple more researchers and trying to get used to an unfamiliar slightly blood-spattered and gooey GUI trolling through the laptop could dim as I spread out and began to converge again. It was near the end of my purge of my current level that I finally got some answers.

I opened an interior door into someone's office, and found it occupied.

Another researcher, this one a gangly woman with sleek, blond hair combed back and an ever-present white jacket I was beginning to hate, looked up from her computer screen as I entered, almost in a repeat of what I had just done. Her eyes went wide, with delight.

For a moment, nothing, then she sprang up.

"Yes!" She shouted, throwing her arms up in excitement. "Yes, yes, it worked! It worked! We're gonna make it!" The woman pumped a fist with a triumphant expression. "Take that, Mental Out, I get to keep my career!"

I watched, not quite sure what to make of this probably 20- or 30-something woman doing precisely nothing to contest my suspicions that this place was staffed by mad scientists with an emphasis on mad. After a moment, she straightened, seeming to find a measure of composure and smoothing out her lab coat.

"Sorry," the energetic woman added more calmly still with a grin threatening to take her as elsewhere the microwave dinged, inventory was sorted, and I clicked on a desktop folder enigmatically and utilitarianly labeled Reports. "Got a bit carried away. If you're here, I take it the Tokiwadai brats won't be bothering us anymore?"

That... was interesting and unhelpful, I decided, tearing open the popcorn bag with a hoarse cheer of achievement and unable to help myself from humming in delight at the delicious buttery goodness.

The woman's grin broke free and I realised with a start that I was smiling in front of her. "Excellent," she announced before I could say anything. "Wasn't expecting emotions, but, gift horses, tax write-offs, etcetera." Which... wasn't how that went, I was pretty sure, but what did I know? I wasn't even entirely sure how I got here or what "I" even was... were... whatever.

"I have been busy killing," I decided to answer truthfully while moving to stand in front of the desk and stepping up beside the door outside her office out of sight, as much just not really having anything better to respond with as curious how this dubiously aware and dubiously sane researcher would interpret it. It came out as almost a cracked whisper—this larynx never used before either—and objectively creepy; a voice like that, from a nude young girl in the near dark of dull red emergency lights, saying that in such a voice, should definitely provoke some serious apprehension from anyone sensible, but the woman at the desk here was apparently indeed the very dubiously sane sort.

Her only reaction was slowly raised eyebrows.

"Railgun is dead?"

And then, because of course she did, the researcher just shrugged.

"Not my problem," she dismissed. "I'm sure Doctor Kihara will be delighted with her success. If we can make our own active counter to Mental Out and the original is no longer throwing a fit, the Level 6 Shift can be expedited all the further."

That grin widened, and somehow softened yet took on an all the more, now entirely unmistakably deranged air as I watched impassively and finished cataloguing my assortment of scavenged wallets, keycards, ammunition, and useful-looking tools in the security room, trying to stay out of the smeared blood.

"We're going to reach the realm of godhood ahead of schedule, under budget with you!"

Godhood. Original. Under budget.

Answers and more questions, I concluded. But I had a definitive answer of the sort of person this woman was, at least.

"I fear there has been a slight misunderstanding," I interjected coolly, and the researcher's expression fell into a look of perplexity. She opened her mouth to speak, but I stepped into her office before she could interject herself. "For you see," I added with only my second voice, then stepped in again beside myself, and with a third lone voice in turn, "I have been very busy killing."

I encircled the desk as I filled the room and the researcher backed up against the wall, nearly tripping over her chair as whelming dread took her.

"In fact-, it's just you and me here anymore," I explained.

"No, no, no," she began to mewl, slowly shaking her head and flattening against the unyielding barrier behind her. "Mental Out got to you... She can't... She wasn't supposed to... You were supposed to save us from Mental Out and Railgun!" She shrieked in quickly rising hysteria as I raised one of the pistols.

Save them.

I sneered, and she flinched, looking across at all of me before her as I didn't bother to limit myself.

Save them! They couldn't even do that right. A sloppy thousand-dollar product made by idiots who had no idea what they were doing and couldn't to be bothered to do a good job; if they had, I wouldn't ever be able to do this in the first place, or else these "scientists" would have known better than to make a paperclip optimiser.

Murder was supposed to be bad, but these people...

All I could feel anymore was that the world would be better off without them.

In legion I declared.

"I am."

I managed to avoid spattering this computer with blood.

Between the two computers and implications, I started putting a few pieces together as I ventured the stairs. I didn't recognise the systems at all, but didn't especially expect to at this point, and though there didn't seem to be any outside networking for just querying a search engine, there was an intuitive design to the GUI easy to navigate and local files on what seemed to be an isolated network were searchable, even if a lot still wanted passwords I didn't have, and I took surprisingly little time to troll through a wealth of technical documents and research papers and official memos, mostly skimming through things I didn't understand very well as I swept the lower level.

It turned out, I had already started out on the next to bottom floor, or at least probably, anyway, because going up led to what the DnD aficionado in me could only describe as a genuine secret door. The level below—or... here, really—was much smaller than the first, what seemed more supply storage than anything else, though I did find an entire small cafeteria and adjoining dormitories or residential rooms or something—bed rooms if maybe not bedrooms—all bereft of other occupants so far as I could tell, but going upward, the laborious stairwell actually went up quite a bit before finally reaching any door at all, and past the accompanying fire door—because apparently at least architectural engineering had some standards—the way opened to a short passage ending in, of all things, a door handle mounted in what proved to be the back of a bookshelf.

It was an actual bookshelf secret door!

Was that even allowed?

Weren't there supposed to be some kind of rules about clichés like that?

But then, maybe I was kind of a cliché myself.

The room hiding the literal bookshelf secret door, though, was a disaster. Something had gouged this place like an angry spear blasting straight through walls and the earth within, the upper floor appearing to still be underground, with pipework and wiring visible in a great almost horizontal rent across multiple chambers tearing across the only normal doorway and spilling debris everywhere.

I frowned at the state of the floor, wishing not for the first time for a pair of shoes, or couple hundred, as it were.

I frowned harder when looking up "clone" on my commandeered computers whilst finishing the last bag of popcorn—another reason to frown, alas—pulled me down a rabbit hole about a "Radio Noise" and "Level 6 Shift" pair of projects that seemed to be the same one and two different ones that might actually be three, or perhaps four or five or more if I squinted, but definitely interconnected at least, and... predictable, in a way.

It made more and more sense as I tiptoed through the ruin and traversed another obviously-laboratory sort of level. Like my starting floor, there were lidded bed-pod things similar but not quite the same as my own, and row after row of other windowed tanks elsewhere with some partially smashed, somehow slagged, or outright shattered, with the distinct familiar slightly brine-like smell lingering about, even with smoldering filling the air and a water pipe somewhere ruptured and washing away at the floor.

There was a picture. A face.

She looked like me, like the face I saw when I looked at me could be her in maybe a couple years, as if someone had taken a photo of... of whoever, whatever, I somehow was and edited it to be just on the other side of becoming a teen.

MISAKA.

The name, label, possible acronym, whatever, showed up over and over.

Clones.

Lots and lots of clones.

Born to die.

Born to be murdered.

Conceived as instruments of war, deemed failures to be instead efficient industrial human sacrifice, reconsidered for war and appeasing obsession.

It was hard to read through blurring eyes, and switching eyes didn't do any good.

It was better and worse than I had expected, and still... still...

With a scream, I flung the laptop crashing against the wall. Lightning exploded to lash into it, again and again.

Then I realised what I just did, breathing hard, and could only scream again and run the insistent, useless formula again and again and again...

What if the other computer couldn't access something?!

I sniffled, wishing I at least had something to wipe my nose on. I— I didn't have sleeves!

...There had been those bathrooms were one of the researchers tried to hide, hadn't there?

I swallowed thickly and shuffled back that way, trying to remember which turn it had been and wondering how I was going to do distribution.

It got a little better as I found another carved-open room to be supply storage too, filled with stacks upon stacks of packaged apparel, all the exact same sets. I couldn't miss the implications. A good third of the room had been obliterated and partially caved in, mostly burying what looked like they were complete school uniforms maybe, but there were plastic-wrapped hospital gowns aplenty, even if they were slightly oversized.

What was it that other researcher with the doctor had said, they're not ready? Was I premature, or just not prepared as they'd wanted? Or rushed?

And where was she?

I hadn't gotten her yet.

The more I read on the remaining computer, the more it almost didn't seem to matter. Lots of personnel transfers had happened recently, continuously, even right up to just a short while ago according to the computer's clock, when I expected whatever had happened to the upper floor occurred and security lockdowns isolated from updates. There were so many people involved, and the documents read as being some kind of official thing supported from on high. How many would I have to get?

The other overly familiar reek of too-hot synthetics and burning got worse and hazy smoke began to get noticeable from one area as I tried to transfer everything.

Great.

The building was on fire too now.

Wh-Why not...?

I had to hide and just... just kill everybody, and now the building was on fire!

And it was too far!

I started running, trying to avoid the worst of the debris and evacuate the lower levels. The building hysertia threatened to seize me entirely as I couldn't find a way up further before light and a heady natural air so unlike the suddenly cloyingly sterile stillness mixed higher up with smoke spilled down from above as the rubble grew where the hand of an angry god had ripped the upper floor away in holes of twisted rebar and pulverised concrete, but conflagration—actual leaping flames!—crept closer and closer into my chain and I couldn't find a way around!

I was trapped!

I scattered, scrambling for routes out of the building inferno and racing back through the secret door desperately trying to think of a way to better seal the doors. Was the paint in the stairwell flammable? Could air get through?

I didn't want to die again, I didn't want to suffocate and burn!

"Somebody help me!" I pleaded as I had to abandon even myself as I scrabbled at the loose rubble trying to clamber out of the wreckage and sending all the more sliding; the tears made me feel stupid for being angry over the instance that it didn't make it any harder to see, because I had blinded myself, like an idiot who was going to die again.

A fleck of something hard bounced from my head in mockery.

"Help..."

It was getting harder to breathe.

Help...

I tried to climb up anyway, feeling my way up and trying to remember where I had already climbed as bellow I struggled to escape.

I looked back at myself and couldn't do anything about it. I could only dig at the scree myself.

The cooking meat smell from my own corpse...

I coughed, hacking in the swirling air hot around me down here as far lower I- I- grabbed a pair of buckets from one of the supply closets and sprinted for the bathrooms as if I had any idea what to do with water when I had it. I could... I could take the lab coats and soak them and stuff them around the door down here? Would that stop the stairwell from taking in any updraft and turning into one big bloomery?

I dug- slid- climbed- reached—

Something shifted unseen beneath me and I screamed as I slipped back.

A stinging ember burned at my leg. Hard grit dug into my skin.

I crawled a lip onto what had been a ground floor, something digging bitingly between my toes, and saw the dark shine of a footprint where I stepped as I turned around to help me up on the far side of one of the rents and grasped blindly for something firm.

It was so hard to breathe...

"S-Some..."

I fled the hellish glow, throwing open a door- boosting myself up a shattered window- squeezing through a crack- stumbling- emerging out to- to- to a city, and a flash of movement caught my eye.

There was no one else, which didn't seem entirely out of place when this felt like an industrial sort of area in the night—though the lack of emergency response was telling. She stood out, in the distance.

It was quick. I only got a glimpse, but there was no mistaking.

Lit by the growing flickering orange, a girl in a close-fitting dark t-shirt and denim shorts halted in her jog away from me, and turned, looking up to the roof of another complex before vaulting up in a crackle of static discharges and flying up atop it and out of sight. From more than a dozen different positions as I keyed to the girl, that face under her ballcap with a short ponytail... I knew that face.

Mine, if a year or two older. The face of the clone overview's picture.

Misaka.

My throat seized up, and I didn't know whether to call out for her or hide.

Why was a Misaka here, or was she the Misaka? Why did she leave? Why was she here, now? Had she missed me, or missed getting me?

Why didn't she save me...?

I squeezed the tears from my eyes and ran. I felt like a colony of tiny pathetic ants spreading out. I couldn't trust anyone up here.

...I couldn't even rely on me.

I hacked and coughed as elsewhere I shuffled and hobbled away from the crackling blaze at my back and what felt like everywhere.

Another ember stung my calf and I didn't dare open my mouth to yelp at it lest the hot, heavy air thick with burnt plastic and charring meat invade my mouth as I feebly clutched at what felt like a bent section of sheared rebar that I tried to dig into the biting debris.

So hot...

I choked back sobbing and wiped my nose on my hospital gown as I collected empty cans, thinking I might melt them down with induction heating somehow to seal the lift doors—I'd never found where the shaft opened up.

I couldn't breathe.

I pulled at the rebar with arms that had no strength.

"Somebody save me..."


"AMAZING PUNCHU!"

Cool wind washed over my face.

 

[Cron]

I'll watch for now.

 

[TacitSoliloquy]

I stared, open-mouthed in awe as a figure soared through the smoke-filled skies above me in eddying contrails lit from below and screamed his cheesy technique name of hammy, chewed Engrish to the heavens, and to a hurricane hammer blast of wind as his amazing fist punched the air. The deafening roar sounded like the whole world crashing and yet was somehow gentle as it tickled my hair aflutter and stole away the hungry crackling, the oppressive, smothering heat, the choking air that lifted as the flickering orange beacon into the night quelled and faded from where I crouched and stood and slumped in a loose ring around it all. Then the figure in the sky leapt from nothing in an air-step and disappearing into the ruined wreckage, and someone unseen crunched debris underfoot just above me.

"I like your guts, Chibi-chan," a cocky, almost arrogant but somehow warm voice spoke from nearby, a boy, it sounded like, and brimming with such an absolute confidence and honesty that I was sure I could almost see it, the presence...

I couldn't describe how, and it wasn't the same as the awareness that popped up and pressed at my thoughts randomly with knowledge I had never learned, but I knew, just knew that he was smiling at me.

"A-Are you a hero?" I whispered scratchily, reaching out with an aching arm toward my saviour at the same time as I pointlessly leaned in intently elsewhere as if it would help. "I c-can't see you..."

The crunch of shifting footsteps in the rubble approached closer and sent rustles slithering down to either side of me before he spoke again, directly above me, "Just a guy with guts! And you, I gotcha!"

Then a hand clasped mine, in a grip like a mountain resolute and simply there, and I... I suddenly wanted to be the one to pull myself up on that anchor.

I heaved with all my strength... and it all just slipped out of me like water as the adrenaline faded with my rescue and my treacherous arm disobeyed me, everything going slack, before an unyielding brace scooped under my shoulder and lifted me effortlessly, and the mountain leaving my limp grasp and supporting my knees from...

"Easy, I gotcha!"

be...neath... as—

Part of me fainting while the rest of me stayed conscious was a weird experience, but it couldn't detract my wonder as from my nearest position I dared run forward to see as my rescuer, a high-school-aged boy, I thought, flew back into the sky with my unconscious form in his arms. He... He had stridden straight from the pages of a shounen manga, jacket draped over his shoulders like a cape and staying there for no more reason than because it was supposed to even though he flew, shirt emblazoned with the rising sun scarlet radiant sunburst as boldly Japan as Japan could Japan and long tied-off headband gracing his brow to stream behind him beneath hair long enough to be more swept than spikey.

Then he air-stepped again, and with a little puff of dust kicked up from nowhere, blitzed across the night over the city skyline with a momentary mist-like cone flashing into existence in his wake as he disappeared.

Did he just—

A crack passed over me in an expanding wave.

Reflexively, I turned to myself as my only company and met my gaze, seeing the same expressions I felt.

The... the... the shounen protagonist just swooped in out of nowhere, punched the fire out—with a single punch!—and carried me to safety running supersonic across the open air.

This really was an anime world...

"W-o-a-h..."

But more than that, I... I really felt like I actually could trust him, somehow. Maybe it was, I didn't know, something like Stockholm Syndrome if there was a term for the first person to help me like this, but...

I wanted to believe.

So as down below beneath the ravaged building I got back on the computer, as outside I considered the suspicious but not truly surprising continued lack of any approaching wailing sirens and flashing lights of emergency services when black SUVs with tinted windows or congregation of unusual numbers of unusually fit people in extremely casual attire seemed appropriate, as I contemplated what to do with the bodies and what to do for all of my own, one thing was clear.

I followed after the gutsy guy who carried me away.

I had been caught by the growing fire cut off from myself about half and half, and I didn't feel like I could linger before soon someone would come to clean up, nor, though, that they would necessarily actually know about the secret lab when it was hidden from what seemed itself a similar secret lab, and I wasn't about to show anyone the way if I could help it yet didn't have any intention of concentrating myself in a hole in the ground if someone maybe higher up or part of a secret sub-group did come a-knocking. It made me feel somehow dirty yet not really that caring about potentially sacrificing myself again for my own sake when I would be doing it to myself and I didn't want to go through that, except it was also unthinkable not to if I had to and more a material loss calculation than really people even if it meant whole bodies, like, what, something like that guy who cut off his own arm when he got trapped under a rock in a canyon, except less and more because metaphors were weird?

I began walking in the direction my gutsy saviour left, and I followed after the other Misaka, and simply spreading every direction away from the unrecognisably ravaged building, clustering in groups of fours and fives after a little looking at myself and eying what looked like an aesthetic most liable to be left alone; a lone somewhat bedraggled girl in a hospital gown was a surefire way to have someone quickly want to stop me or help me or call somebody about me if—once—I found other people outside this now subdued industrial sector, and two or three might still encourage opportunistic trouble from the sorts of people the almost-déjà vu insisted was a very real topic to be aware of, whilst larger groupings might just attract the wrong sort of attention for different reasons.

I had a bare handful of... I decided to think of it as avatars, since it seemed in fact the most appropriate when I was them, but my body wasn't really my self— I had a bare handful of avatars that had managed to snag the slightly oversized school uniforms in the wrecked apparel storage room before everything went to hell. A bit baggy and loose in places though they were, they were actual proper clothes instead of hospital gowns that suggested something very wrong indeed on anyone not in fact in a hospital. That could be my "face", maybe.

I just had to hope that identical triplets and a pair of twins didn't seem too far-fetched in different places.

...wait, wouldn't four or five identical girls look pretty weird regardless of clothes?

...

Definitely getting kinda too used to being a wonky gestalt clone army collective thing of hard metaphors, I decided, nodding to myself.

Oh well, nothing for it; it wasn't like there were better options, so... I'd just have to make the best of it, I told myself with forced pep.

It was a little odd and kind of an eerie experience, though, I had to admit. I was scouting for myself, and I was intellectually aware as I peeked out of an alley and skirted the edge of a building away from the open sidewalk in the company of myself with another cluster of myself off to my right that I wasn't actually prioritising myself over myself, that other gaggle of girls what I was working for in trying to spot any trouble of learn whatever I could ahead of time... except I was this gaggle of girls.

Still, I needed intelligence.

Well, that is, I appended to myself, information. I felt smarter than ever before—which was also odd and kind of eerie, and more for making me feel dumb in comparison to myself—and maybe literally able to think like lightning, a hundred and ninety-nine times over, able to just... get some of the figures in my head when I used the mathemagical lightning powers, even the ones I adapted from the déjà vu-like certainty. Information, though, would be harder to come byyyy...

Blimp.

I looked up, then looked up.

That was a blimp right there up above a twisted tower that looked like an architect had designed it, and another over there and there a- an- and- there, in the sky, by that wind turbine, actually, with something like a digital billboard built into the middle of the envelope, contoured to the curvature.

Today's weather—now that the day was mostly over—called for clear and sunny and a sweltering 32 degrees to go with it, I read, but also a notice that the forecast might not be reliable?

Misawa Cram School was proud to announce its reopening under new management, I read, and Shinasame University was closed for renovation.

Tomorrow would be an exclusive event for some cute frog thing, I read, too distracted by the adorable image to read it properly before it switched images to a reminder for all students to do their best.

Another blimp had a cutesy chibi-style advertisement for an "all-new, top of the line rice cooker perfect for a dorm of taste and sophistication" that was more expensive than I was.

One of the blimps meandered almost right over me, and I couldn't make out what it said as the display curved away.

Huh...

So that was a thing.

I needed information first and foremost, some kind of place to stay and food for some hundred people before time ran out and it became a problem as well as so that I could keep trying to get information, and enough information to be able to afford that. Step one, watch blimps?

Within the lab bunker complex where I may or may not have everything actually mostly covered for me there if outside parties either didn't know about what had happened or didn't want to try taking it back, I continued perusing my commandeered computer while collectively hefting what was left of the researcher I had taken it from—there were plenty of big black garbage bags in one of the storage closets, I'd found—and tried to find out more about what Academy City was.

It was a curious place, this city.

Even here in an industrial sector, the street intersections, empty save for a passing big truck that bore only a solid block rather than a cabin with anyone in it, were oddly nice as I split along the grid there, flitting between deeper shadows and more out of sight places, and a theme of the documents I quickly glanced through seemed to hold that this was some fancy, high-tech anime world.

I wasn't really sure what to make of that, though, as I thought back to that multi-week laptop battery life and looked simultaneously through different eyes at the sophisticated-looking blimps and the set of firearms I had gotten from the security room.

I picked up one of the guns.

Examining it more closely than I had before, it seemed more or less like what I'd made of it earlier when I'd picked it up off the man who killed me, kind of just a generic Browning-style tilting-barrel modern, striker-fired nine-millimeter automatic pistol, and... generic, really. It bore a Walters label stylised like the Walther banner logo, so either this was a high-end Wauser sort of knock-off for pretending branding reasons or something like a lot of domestic Chinese pistols of the early 20th century, or this was, what, some kind of almost-but-not-quite version of the "real" world? My knowledge of more modern pistol models was somewhat spottier than for more historical ones, but the P99 designation engraved into the side of the slide didn't stand out in my mind as anything unusual one way or another, not clearly made up or futuristic-y or anything, really.

I examined one of the others as I disassembled the pistol, finding this one the same as this one, and sure enough, it was a typical simplified Browning action, and indeed just kind of a solid and decent but unremarkable pistol of the sort that wouldn't raise any eyebrows back in... well, before all this, save perhaps that it was a steel slide on a polymer frame instead of all-polymer or polymer-coated steel, certainly no "pistol of the future" sort of thing.

I frowned, glancing between the blimps, the numerous wind turbines like giant dandelions, the high-rising winding train rails off in the distance and the autonomous truck turning away down one of the streets, and thought to what I remembered of an actual real-world smart gun that seemed to actually pull it off fairly well for a venturing first real step between its combined print scanning and facial recognition for keying to a user.

The pistol in pieces on the floor in front of me felt more early 2000s-y than 2100 vintage.

...maybe this was an anachronistic anime world? The kind that might have space travel and swords side by side? Or perhaps these pistols were just old holdovers? But that seemed kind of odd for uniform sets in normal enough condition and for some kind of clandestine setup that obviously had no trouble with money.

A bullet itself however seemed equally ordinary, an apparent entirely typical 9x19mm Parabellum jacketed hollow-point cartridge by profile, except with pointedly no markings, at all.

Just the sort for, in fact, some kind of clandestine setup that obviously had no trouble with money, I thought resentfully. Maybe the pistols being extremely generic was the point, even for internal security or sourcing for it? I didn't know, and didn't see myself finding any answers down this route.

I did have some interesting leads to follow if I managed to catch up to my rescuer or wake up soon, though.

Who or perhaps what were Mental Out and Railgun?

If my rescuer was willing to save me like that, just selflessly charge in with complete defiance of danger as if on principle, surely he'd be willing to help explain things if he could, and he was certainly more likely than myself to know about his city.

Separately, though, what of that other Misaka?

I felt a little uneasy as I put more distance between me and myself following after her. I was hardly alone—well, sort of—but there was definitely something to be comforting about outnumbering other people a couple hundred to one, and the older-looking Misaka had displayed powers of her own, along with simply being older and presumably much more experienced in them.

If she was hostile, if she had been maybe trying to hit the facility because I was being brought online only to retreat afterward for in fact being one in the face of overwhelming numerical disparity... I didn't have to imagine what violent extreme electrocution did to people.

But the other Misaka would have at least some kind of answers, I couldn't deny. And there was every possibility that she might herself be opposed to the cloners.

Buoyed by that prospect, I picked up my pace, even if it brought a wince to me in several cases. My left foot for one of my avatars expanding the perimeter spread to find out what this place was like had a small but painful little slice where I thought maybe I had stepped on a piece of glass running from the conflagration, and only my seven uniformed selves had actual shoes period.

Wistful envy aimed at myself was another odd experience to the growing list of them.

I wished they fit better. Neither shoes nor feet alike were broken in, and I felt like I might be getting blisters eventually if I ended up having to do a lot of walking in them.

Actually, maybe I should take a break, I reconsidered as ahead from my front following after the other Misaka I saw an obvious transition line, one side of an avenue the spread of more oddly shaped and protruding structures of the industrial area like the odd sphere or long noodle-y buildings and pipework mazes abruptly gave way to apartments—or possibly dormitories?

This "Academy" City seemed like perhaps it was literally named, like a city of schools, between the portrayal from the blimps and the people ahead I spotted in the distance: not many, not at this hour, but here and there, and all across my expanding front along my main axes of advancement after my rescuer and the other Misaka, there were sporadic spottings of... just kids.

Kids, everywhere, low density though they were.

Trudging along with sleepy looks rubbing their eyes hauling book bags, sitting out on balconies, exiting a convenience store to my overall arbitrary sort of left, stepping off a bus... Only children.

And more often than not in school uniforms, it looked like from afar.

I wasn't sure I wanted to go into that already tired as I was. I hadn't even really gone all that far, I didn't feel, and yet... and yet, it was the most I had ever exerted myself in my life, in a way, I had to acknowledge with resignation. The purge, the fire, the walking for a good half of me... it was enough to wear a girl out on her first hour of life.

Most of me aboveground was concentrated in two perpendicular thrusts in the wake of my saviour and the Misaka, somewhat spread out though they were around respective uniformed "twins" in escort whilst elsewhere I wandered outward in a vaguely circular crisscrossing though the surprisingly clean industrial area, and I funneled into nooks and out of the way places to rest my feet for a few minutes as still below I kept plugging away at the computer and scouring the facility of my creation more thoroughly, just for whatever I might find.

There were computers aplenty in various office spaces down here, but no others already on and logged in, and I was leery of getting locked out for repeated failed password attempts if I tried something, but I did hit on two terminals where at one someone had written a whole random string of characters on a sticky-note stuck to the computer tower and another had a notecard taped to the underside of the desk beneath the monitor.

My, my, what an improper breach of procedure. What if someone killed every single other living soul in the facility and had free rein of the place? How sloppy, not thinking of that. Why, someone could get scolded for it.

"For once, you may have actually done something productive," I told the lichtenberg-stricken corpse of a researcher as I collectively heaved him into an appropriate bag and onto a pair of rolling office chairs. I unplugged the computer while wheeling the body away towards one of the bathrooms where I was assembling them all for now, and focused as I touched the prongs, a thumb to each one while I gripped the cable.

Like with the microwave, it was a bit of a delicate process, putting together an equation based on pieces of the mathemagics that seemed maybe sort of designed into me or something, but I could use the same one that I had employed then, and a little red light blinked on in the middle of the computer's power button.

I frowned, then, though, considering the screen as I scooted myself over and got down to look at the wiring under the desk again.

The keyboard plugged into the computer tower itself, but the screen had a line to it and a separate plug into a wall outlet.

I snorted to myself as an idea came to me, then, just because, I took the computer's cable and plugged it into my nose, giggling as the red dot lit back up when I rearranged my figures.

As I considered it, though...

I pulled the monitor cable for a little more slack, and tucked- tucked the plugs around my toes, rearranging the figures again in my head with an alacrity that still seemed unnaturally easy so that I could power both where I sat.

I'm in your base.

Already killed ur doodz.

Elite hacker stuff happening.

I turned on the computers and pecked in the passwords helpfully written down for me at the login.

The new computers brought online seemed much the same a the one I already had, and I decided on a new track for my additional searching throughput.

Search:

Mental Out- Railgun, I typed.

...millions of documents!

Immediately, I switched my focus of perusal on my first computer. Most of the results were about Railgun, and I doubled up on those whilst separately considering how best to get water to all of me and some kind of rotation schedule for breaks for the rest of me down here—I was getting thirsty, and starting to work up a sweat wheeling the bodies around.

The fir- first file I selected turned out to be a summary about glucose levels- a medical page about bone growth, not enlightening. I flicked through more and more, some helpful, some too abstract or specific or dense to offer meaningful context: budget accounting, more personnel transfers, a rejection of some kind of chemical or compound for complicated dissatisfying reasons, bulk clothing appropriation (apparently the school uniform was a Tokiwadai Middle School uniform) and projected seasonal difference possibilities...

An idea struck me as I read a very formally-worded hissy fit about fighting for funding and massaged my feet while watching more airships overhead where a highschooler gave a subtitled intense encouragement for her class about a test: I remembered a particular book I had once read, The Amulet of Samarkand, where a djinn lauds the superiority of his kind over his human master with the example metaphor of being able to follow multiple threads at once exampled as three different lines for three different stories read and understood simultaneously... and I was thinking back to that while doing everything else. I had the advantage of two hundred foci in parallel. Well, a hundred and ninety-nine, but the point still stood.

I paused my skimming of files for a moment, opening up as many files as I could fit on the screen well enough to read whilst crowding around the three screens to scan as many at once as I could, then I immediately abandoned that and headed over to the rooms with the computers more, reaching up under desks to free more monitors.

I examined one of the screens and eyed the cables and ports.

Hmm...

I powered a fourth- fifth- sixth screen, and plugged it into my first- second- third.

A moment later, I started cackling, and clicked the prompts popping up as I daisy-chained strings of monitors to the three computers, trailing them out in the hallways as I plopped myself down in front of each one and flicked documents and papers and reports across them all to take in en masse across the multi-monitor display.

So much of it was, well, so much junk, really, but as I devoured inputs barely able to keep up with demand, a trend seemed to arise in the more limited selection about Mental Out.

From what I was able to gather, Mental Out and Railgun were whos, not whats, with powers like myself—and Railgun with powers exactly like myself, with my actual powers, or rather, supposedly I was supposed to have hers. There weren't that many details about Mental Out that I could make much sense out of (a loooot of neuroscience packed into that subject, that made my brains hurt just trying to read about it), but there was a convergence between Mental Out, Railgun, and this "Doctor Kihara".

And me.

Project Radio Noise.

Season III.

The somehow independent and sub-project and independent project of Level 6 Shift.

Doctor Kihara was a key figure who seemed to tie everything together, and Mental Out was in some way an example or guidance behind it.

I leaned in at the monitors, eyes devouring the text as quickly as I could draw it up.

I was a third-generation clone, refined from iterative improvements from the previous models. There were references to prototyping and low-order production before large-scale serial production, but the second-generation model was underwhelming in all sorts of ways—Railgun, the original, the Misaka, was at the fifth level of something that seemed the writer to expect readers to understand by implication, but by disparagingly referenced figures, seemed to translate to "generally epic", and SII Misaka failed to meet specifications for military adoption.

I'd already learned what became of them earlier, reallocated for just a different kind of combat duty anyway (which didn't seem sensible in the first place, but I wasn't expecting sense anymore from these people), but what I was more interested in was the distinction between generations, the effort to make an improved model.

It seemed that Mental Out had benefited from some kind of proprietary augmentation or something that drew attention for Season III as promising for "second-generation but better", and—I wasn't sure I liked Mental Out—had given researchers data for crucial developments related to Misaka design for... oh, this was interesting, telepathic networks that, from the way these were written, sounded like they were supposed to have self-compounding effects.

Yes... that... That sounded right. The second-generation Misaka were individually extremely underwhelming, but collectively enabled each individual to perform at Level 2 or 3, with technical terminology about resonance that appeared to basically reduce to psychic waveforms being still waveforms period or whatever and constructive interference happening if waves were the same to give higher amplitudes without distorting. Thousands of second-generation Misaka together added up, even if one was a joke compared to the original Railgun—though nothing stood out how they compared to first-generation clones, so I wasn't ruling out some kind of ridiculous hyper-advanced prototype shenanigans.

What Doctor Kihara wanted to do, though, was apply that kind of mutual support, improved all the better as well, with a higher baseline, something that Mental Out may have gotten? But according to what I was reading as I stepped in and handed out refilled cans of water, Doctor Kihara had also been working on the issue from a different direction? Or... possibly kind of just the same one in slightly different application, I came to wonder as I continued taking everything in.

One of the reports had an image along with it.

A blood-red crystal.

Ability Body Crystal.

The crystalised essence of espers.

Espers, people with powers, from the context, and Doctor Kihara...

Hm.

Level 6 Shift was supposed to use industrial human sacrifice to elevate "Accelerator"—another Level 5, it seemed—to godhood. This "crystalised essence of espers" seemed like it held to a similar theme of sacrificial empowerment of one going into the other with a description and appearance like that.

I headed over to one of the rooms where I started out as I kept reading and stretched, feeling a bit better and ready to venture out into the city.

I took a broom I handed me and a mop I'd found, and cleared a less glass-strewn path to the nearest pod while I hung back at the doorway with my arms up generating a big bright arc overhead to see by.

I climbed back in as I focused on pulling up everything else I could get on the pods and the Ability Body Crystal, and headed over to an indicated storeroom.

I opened a compartment- container.

Small, blood-red crystals and slots shaped just for them.

I continued reading, and heaved as my stomach tried to rebel en masse.

The crystalised essence of espers, the bloody crystal was described, and Doctor Kihara was excited about recent advancements. Decades of refinement had really picked up in the last couple years and improved a crystal that caused spikes in an esper's Personal Reality—with indeed the essence of espers—that was better compatible than before, but perfect crystal could only be realised with the perfect body, each tailored specifically to the other.

It was very easy to manufacture optimum crystalised essence for a subject in a cloning facility.

I picked up one of the crystals, and ran a finger in one of the indentations of my pod where some of the incubatory fluid still puddled and contained a small, mostly consumed crystal.

Had this...

Had this used to be a person?

In Doctor Kihara's self-aggrandising ravings, she expounded upon the principle of augmenting subjects to only then be further augmented still by networking based upon that massively greater and more refined strength of Personal Reality in the first place for, she stressed, extreme gains compared to the earlier clones once connected together, hypothesised as individually on par with the better mediocre results of past failures supported by the entire existing Misaka Network prior to its "winnowing refinement", as she put it, that would only similarly be all the superior for the improved foundation.

In a way, it... I couldn't even deny that it made sense. I didn't know the technical details, but I wasn't sure that I needed to; specifics aside, it made sense on a thematic level: however it worked, add more Misaka for a more Misaka Misaka, and magic crystals made things better because "because crystals". Mad science and crystalised Misaka during incubation yielded enhanced Misaka powers or something, for a setup that seemed like this overtly anime world had some uncomfortable xanxia-like elements.

I didn't have any idea what Personal Reality was, but even that angle came across as conceptually sound; "Personal Reality" and terms like "inconsistency" and "disruption" sure didn't sound like things that belonged together, and there was a reasonable possibility I figured that the researchers here maybe meant it more in a sciency-fied Buddhist sense, "nothing is real, but what you make of reality is your reality" and all that, and if inner worlds—a regular feature for a lot of anime settings—could be projected outward and manifested—also no rarity—well, that kinda tracked for reality-defying (or maybe reality-defining) magic superpowers where stronger people were those who could just believe their, well, Personal Reality hard enough to impose it to be more real than the realities of those around them.

And quantitative or qualitative improvement of that, more people overlapping agreements on reality or believing in in fact exactly the same reality, or something like embedding a reality in a reality when they were supportive...

That was how they—I—would meet requirements for "Doctor Kihara's dream" even more efficiently, more than two orders of magnitude better for the Level 6 Shift. Faster, cheaper, and fulfilling a personal goal as well as assuaging a sense of principle in meeting original goals even if they didn't matter in the face of Level 6's wordy glory.

The phrasing seemed odd with Doctor Kihara referring to Doctor Kihara, but I wasn't sure if it was megalomania, or maybe something more.

The most recent documents and reports, though, quickly took on a different tune riddled with anxiety that did no favours for my own anxiety as I considered how to actually go about pressing into the wider city. For myself, I was fairly confident that my uniformed avatars might well be able to just... stroll right on through, camouflaged to look as at place as anyone else if I just carried myself accordingly when everyone out there seemed to be school students, but that would also mean relying on pure inconspicuousness, unless maybe I could use it to somehow acquire better clothes for more of me? The researchers, though, themselves had in the last day or two become terrified of schoolchildren.

Specifically, Mental Out and Railgun.

The timestamps and dates of creation for some of these documents showed a sudden, drastic shift for the increasingly hysterical, and from what I was gathering, I wasn't sure if everyone was onboard with everyone else's agenda.

The more and more I read, quickly rifling through as hungrily as I could, the more recent events come across as either some kind of division in the ranks as wording took on a more critical and self-interested tone, or a not too atypical case of bad guy underlings trying to scheme against their evil masters to supplant them.

I sorted through near the bottom half of what the local accessible documents had about Mental Out, and she it turned out both actually had worked on the first-generation cloning in some way and was a subject of just completely professionalism-shattering terror, multiple mentions about her "Curse of Futility" and... and mind-control!

Just full-on mind-control!

Everyone was paranoid about her ripping into their minds and twisting them for her own amusement, and rote advisories about making sure anti-telepathic shields were on and in order got repeated almost religiously.

I eyed the screens, rereading a part seeming to almost worriedly whisper for its portrayal despite being text of making people who displease her turn a knife on themselves and mutilate their own bodies under her control and destroy their life's work by their own hand.

I swallowed.

Couldn't happen to a finer bunch of folks, I figured, if the researchers I'd had to deal with were any measure, but Mental Out seemed... twisted. Like Darth Vader if he got off on it, or something, not just evil but wrong.

And she was part of all of this.

It wasn't hard to imagine some of the people in this project wanting to do away with her and panicking when she inevitably found out about their treachery, because they'd somehow pissed off Railgun and an angry Railgun equaled no anti-telepathic shields.

So that was where I came in, it seemed.

Doctor Kihara's baby—No, I immediately amended, that was a terrible way to phrase things. Doctor Kihara's personal project, a reimagining of a shelved concept of Misaka WORST conceived as a focus of a network, Misaka BEST: the best Misaka, the pattern for an idealised Misaka that was just somehow magically the answer to all Doctor Kihara's fever dreams and perfect in every way as the key to the future... that some of the researchers here wanted to hijack for their own ends as their answer to everything and activate as soon as possible, because specific application of strong electromagnetic fields could counter Mental Out (never mind the fact that I didn't know how to do that, but whatever, I really wasn't expecting much from these people) and if Misaka Best was supposed to be the better Misaka, than the Misaka and mass-producible in any case, hey, surely that'd fix everything and all would be sunshine and rainbows or some such stupidity, so why not, they'd seemed to have convinced themselves, just crack open one of the pods before the clone was ready and make any adjustments as necessary to make their new pet monster loyal to them to kill all their enemies and overthrow their boss or something.

...unless maybe they'd tried adding their own touches before actually awakening me?

Which sure worked out great for them, huh?

I raised an eyebrow—well, a bunch of eyebrows, really.

It didn't sound like the good Doctor Kihara was going to be at all happy about her precious project being stolen out from under her. Maybe she'd give me a medal before I zapped her.

Then I yawned, and that set off all of me yawning sympathetically. Maybe it really was time for me to take things a little easier; I'd already had to rotate out avatars at the mouse, because it was just hard work keeping up with so many people even when it was keeping up with myself, and I didn't feel burnt out, per se, but I wasn't sure how much longer I could hunch over a monitor or eighty-seven hyper-focusing for so long without getting antsy.

No, I deserved a treat, I decided.

After all, I had made good progress, and it was important to reward good work!

Just what all did the cafeteria kitchen hold? I left the janitorial closet where I had been looking for another box of the big black garbage bags and headed for the stairwell to take over while I checked the cafeteria, since it was most efficient to shuffle that way, distance-wise.

Then I saw one of the rolly office chairs I'd left at the far end of the other hall where I sat cross-legged on the floor rolling an over-used achy wrist.

Hmm...

I grinned.

I just had a terrible idea.

Lightning bolts worked by building up a massive charge and holding it, then not so much shooting a lightning bolt, exactly, but letting the lightning follow in the wake of a shot electromagnetic channel projected first; that was what made the lightning actually really shoot shoot instead of just discharging into whatever was handy closest to most readily allow current to flow there instead. My sort of "stock" formulae that I was more than a little suspicious had been somehow outright programmed into me had a crude but simplistically serviceable set of equations for making and adjusting electromagnetic fields, and I'd already worked out an adaptation for my little arc light trick.

And fundamentally, a coilgun was really simple, just very precisely timed magnetic attractions being turned on and off with a projectile with its own field...

I lined the hall, crouched on bent knees with my hands out, palms forward—the calculations were easier to rationalise with bilateral symmetry. Then I sat down in the chair, grinning stupidly, plotting poles for my whole body and gripping the seat tightly with eyes locked on where I stood waiting to catch me and already preparing to have the wind knocked out of me.

I ran the numbers.

Aaaand launch!

I catapulted down the hall, screaming and cackling and suddenly wondering about the sturdiness of the chair and having no time for any of it as the sudden radical acceleration weighed down on me ripping from one end to the other in what felt like an eternity and an instant.

"AaaAAAHHH!!- Oof!"

I wheezed as I crushed myself and launched me back into my awaiting arms where I stood waiting for me in a triangle next to myself, helplessly trying and failing to breathlessly laugh while I dissolved into snickering around myself.

Yes, very efficient.

Now I could be off to go relieve myself finding those garbage bags. I'd already found some goodies in the kitchen.

There was a large, commercial-style refrigerator in the cafeteria's kitchen—and with it a need to do some thinking about maybe staying down here or restoring wider power or something—and in it, I found what proved to be especially succulent and tart, juicy grapes!

I couldn't tell if it was some factor of brand new tastebuds, or different ones, or simply hunger, or if the food here was just some super-science super-deliciousness, but everything was just so yummy and intense I wanted more!

In fact, I considered as I neared a convenience store built into the base of one of the residential structures... No, it wouldn't be right to steal like that, I had to admit.

No doubt there were all kinds of wonders in there, like maybe sour gummies that would be an explosion of flavour like the grapes but different in their own way, or something fluffy and warm that caressed the mouth and held the light refreshing aroma of fresh bread, or maybe something fizzy like drinking a party with everyone jumping up and down, but if I was going to take stuff, it'd have to be what I actually needed; if they had clothes, that'd be one thing, but robbing a convenience store for sweets, was... just kind of lame, honestly.

So why are you in jail, high-speed chase, kill someone, swindle a big scheme? Oh, uh, I got caught shoplifting a chocolate bar.

I was a smooth actor, though, so I walked right by it as the two uniformed avatars heading what I was thinking was north-y without anyone being the wiser. There was a kid maybe a little older than this- this body who strolled straight past me on my right heading in, and he didn't even give a glance. About a minute later, as I was crossing the next street beyond the convenience store still pretending I knew what I was doing, I espied from my positions lurking in the outskirts of the industrial zone the same boy come back out with a banana and his nose in a magazine or book, maybe a manga volume.

"Nya~"

I whirled away from my retreating backs in the distance at a feline mewl, instantly pinpointing it from ten different sets of ears.

A kitty!

There, at the end of the alley- There, by a surprisingly clean dumpster by the intersection with another narrow alley, stood a cat, a big long-haired orange and white tabby, with a scruffy, kind of mangey look, a bit thin despite the full fur matted or not quite even in places and a little notch forking the very tip of the left ear, and I wanted to pet that cat.

The kitty's tone was a little grumpy-sounding, though, and it carried itself standoffishly.

I crouched down slowly from my closest position, holding a hand out, down low while I backed away a little from myself to give me some space.

"...you could come over here if you wanted," I spoke lightly, trying to entice the cat without making it wary.

The cat, as cats were wont to do, did not immediately leap into my arms. Instead, it continued to eye me suspiciously, but did not move away, so, still crouched, I inched my way over a little closer.

"I could pet a kitty."

The cat turned, and rounded still on me anyway, and I crouched down again in the adjoining alley.

"Heya kitty..."

The cat flicked its tail once, a little lateral jerk, and promptly bounded away.

I split up.

As I turned on my heel and vectored in to outmaneuver a cat, as below I eyed a bunch of corpses for their shoe sizes and wandered into one of the rooms with the bunk beds to see about maybe cycling some naps and as I tried to figure out from the computer files just what powers were and how they worked, deeper in the industrial area, on the far side of the charred wreckage from my pursuit of the cat, I found something interesting there too.

Or rather, it found me.

They found me.

An obvious highschooler, whom I could only describe as an obvious delinquent with his leather-clad punk aesthetic, dropped down from overhanging framework crossing one of the alleys I was exploring as my other supposed twins avatars, followed by a similar rough-looking girl sporting a short cotton-candy-blue mohawk standing up poking her head above the bridging metal bracing, and a third figure in a hoodie drawn up shadowing a face inscrutable in the low night illumination stepped from a nook to my left.

I cursed myself for running off to encircle the cat, and doubled back, uncomfortably slowed by the need to creep all the more carefully.

"Well, well, well," the first boy announced almost slyly. "What do we have here? Couple of Tokiwadai's prissy little bitches come sniffing around where they're not welcome? At this hour? And sisters!"

He looked me in the eyes, and somewhat pointlessly for me repeated the process, cocking his head.

"You really should know better, girlies. You're not welcome here." he continued in a low voice of deliberate menace that sent thoughts racing and conjectures and hypotheses frantically scrambling as I paused in examining a blanket- in following after and getting ahead of the cat as it turned away again- in unlacing a shoe- in climbing stairs to a seemingly pretty standard pedestrian bridge crossing a street as my pretend-triplets uniformed avatars following the other Misaka- in once more refilling empty cans from a sink to consider this new development.

The boy's styling and mannerisms coupled with his actual words suggested Tokiwadai was held in enmity, and he recognised the Tokiwadai uniform, I noticed at the same time. Was Tokiwadai a posh school at odds with people like him? That seemed more likely than not. Did Tokiwadai have a particular reputation relevant to him more specifically or simply one large enough when he was able to recognise the uniform? I didn't think it so likely that Tokiwadai would be close by, discouraging him from association by proximity if this was this group's de facto territory here in an industrial area and Tokiwadai was supposed to be upper-class sort.

To buy time as I rapidly formulated ideas in parallel and to throw these delinquents off with something that might itself discourage an outbreak of hostilities when I had no way of knowing if they themselves might have powers of their own, "There was a cat," I non-explained evenly.

The response was abject silence.

I could almost hear the delinquent boy in front of me blinking over the low murmur and faded din of the city in the background.

"A what?" The hooded delinquent asked, a boy, by the sound of his voice.

I swallowed my anxiety at engaging with these people. It didn't make sense—yeah, they were bigger than me... a lot bigger, actually, but I outnumbered them even if it was only two to at least three and who knew how many more waiting to swoop in out of the dark, a-and I was an adult, dammit! I didn't care about some try-hard high-school punks who probably thought drawing dicks on everything and pretending not to care about homework made them cooler than cool!

I defaulted to my standard, which combined all the more conveniently with my new circumstances.

Don't know what to do? Etiquette was literally the guide for what to do. Japanese, incidentally, had an even more distinct and explicitly specifically formal and officially polite mode than English (not that that was difficult when the English language lacked any overarching body establishing arbitrarily official particulars). Meanwhile, all signs pointed to such being appropriate for Tokiwadai in any case, or at least not out of place.

I dropped a mirroring smooth bow, not too quick, not too slow.

"This lost student is pleased to make the acquaintance of the good people whom she stands before this fine evening as she searches for a cat believed to have passed nearby," I didn't quite lie.

More silence.

Both boys slowly exchanged a look—well, probably, anyway, I still couldn't see under the other boy's hood, and I had more than enough spare thinking to wonder if that made it weird for them themselves.

"...the fuck was that?" The abrasive girl up top with the strip of mohawk ridging her skull asked in what sounded almost like mildly offended confusion, and I immediately realised my mistake.

Normal people didn't speak in exact perfect unison.

Crap, crap, crap!

My cheeks burned, and I could only hope these delinquents couldn't see well in the low light.

"A-ah. That is, um..."

My cheeks grew hotter, and from the safety of my haunted hidden murder-bunker, I dropped my face into my hands over and over.

This was a disaster!

"Why am I so hopeless, kitty?" I asked the still recalcitrant feline several blocks away from where I was getting brutally murdered again, and the scruffy orange cat refused to share wisdom beyond damning silence as I crouched down by a trash receptacle on the sidewalk a few paces on the other side of my uncooperative and still unpet quarry in case the cat came this way, only for it to jump a different direction.

This would be so much simpler if they were either friendly or openly hostile and not waffling in between!

The hooded boy came to my rescue, though, and turned his awkwardly eyeless, face-covered gaze up at the other girl, shrugging. "Twins," he said simply.

I nodded, fervently, seizing the excuse.

The girl—Mohawk-chan, I couldn't help but think of her so in my head—clambered and swung down from the overhead bracing like a chimp, and faced him, then both of me, head tilted and one eye squinting as if she couldn't believe what she was looking at. Then she turned back to the hooded boy.

"Well twins are weird."

"And still wandering in our turf," their apparent leader added in less pugnaciously than before, crossing his arms and tilting his head back, before giving a small shake. "And we can't have that, not after the stunt Mental Out pulled yesterday—" Oh? "Pipsqueaks like you, no one'd respect us for showing 'em who not to mess with around here, but there's principles, you get it?"

Mental Out, perhaps unsurprisingly, had enemies. Perhaps I could use this. The context seemed like Mental Out was supposed to be a Tokiwadai student, or at least the same sort of students as those perceivable as stereotypical of Tokiwadai.

I was betting on Queen Bee persona; mind-controller who made people scared of her, stomps on toes and goes to fancy-people school, sounded like a recipe for a tyrant or ice queen sort of girl who ruled Tokiwadai unquestionably, probably student council president too or considered it beneath her.

I nodded solemnly in paired unison, and from a distance, as I carefully approached the sudden meeting to reinforce myself if need be, spied another delinquent-looking guy leaning against a wall smoking a cigarette and scrolling through his phone.

"The sentiment is understood and can only be judged as entirely reasonable, and sympathies are shared with Senpai for the unworthy and untoward conduct of Mental Out whom disservices all whom would hold themselves with pride."

All three delinquents coming to stand together and not quite loom over me seemed to puff themselves up at that, and the faces I could actually see, since somebody was being a creepy weirdo in the dark, Tough Guy-san and Mohawk-chan took on critical expressions and all but puffed out their chests.

"Oh?" Tough Guy-san prodded. "Big talk from a couple of little girls. Don't usually hear wannabe ojou-sama talking smack about each other to scum like us. Ain't that against some kinda rulebook or something?"

I cringed inwardly at the "wannabe ojou-sama". It... it wasn't wannabe ojou-sama; there was nothing wrong about finding an established structure to work with useful.

"Mental Out has made many enemies," I said a little softer than I'd intended instead of defending myself, trying to play into the apparent hostilities without really having enough information. "Nowhere is safe for those who lack the power to stand against a force beyond reckoning and would not bow to the whim of an absolute tyrant unconscionable, not the streets of the city nor Tokiwadai Middle School itself when no true distinction exists to the reach of such a grasp."

A hint of bitterness crept into my voice to my notice paying attention to the exchange from afar, and I tried to clamp down on it.

Maybe I shouldn't, though?

Mohawk-chan shared a glance with Tough Guy-san this time, and broke ranks to sidle between me, putting an arm over each of me.

"You know, Chibi-chan? I think we can get along. Why don't you girls come with us? It's not safe around here alone this time of day."

I wondered as to the wisdom of letting her make physical contact, and of her daring it, and was momentarily at a loss how to handle this.

"Ah, to impose..." I tried to formulate words.

Mohawk-chan shook her head as she started to lead me, the two boys accompanying.

"Uh-uh-uh," she tutted. "Senpai insists. Besides, we've got a bit of a get-together tonight and it's my turn to cook—these two clowns are hopeless—" ""Hey!"" "—and I'm guessing you're way past curfew and haven't exactly been planning on making it in the first place?"

That... hit a little more closely than she could have realised for being so completely off.

"W-Well, if Senpai insists..."

I accompanied the delinquent by whom I may have just gotten unilaterally adopted. I was still ready to stop her heart if this turned out to be an attempt at a trick, but... the arms around my shoulders were warm.

"I'm a senpai?" I heard the faint whisper between me.

Well, this seemed one productive track, at least. I yawned, and set off another inadvertent sympathetic wave, trying to cover myself in embarrassment now that I was in actual company and elsewhere offending the dignity of the touchy tabby to one more refuse my encouragement to approach.

Being alive was hard work.

It seemed a little surreal, when I thought about it. Maybe it was just for so much happening in parallel, but everything since waking up in the incubation rooms below- over down the hall seemed like a figurative lifetime more than an ironic literal one. Had it really not been a full day since then? Had it even been more than a couple hours?

And across my distributed self as I walked in the company of finally people other than myself, I knew so much more awaited.

Busy, busy work, this being alive stuff.

 

[Young Pyromancer]

Good to see this on SV!

 

[TacitSoliloquy]

An idea struck me as I grew further and further spread out.

Somehow, I was pretty sure I knew what was north... unless maybe it was south, but the point still stood; I had a vague sense that, just a hunch, if I was to bet which directions were the magnetic poles for the Earth (...also unless this wasn't Earth or any normal planet at all, which actually wasn't something to be certain about), I'd probably win.

It wasn't the same as the pushy certitude that sprang up at the weirdest times with trivia I could only assume had been uploaded to my brain or something during my creation, just hunch-iness, but I, a girl with mathemagical lightning powers, and I, the same girl not actually the same girl with mathemagical lightning powers, felt like I was a compass not quite in agreement with myself, and I was also pretty sure why: see mathemagical lightning powers.

It was more pronounced as I distanced from the rest of me, where as my uniformed avatar twins with my new acquaintances and as pretend triplets lukewarm on the trail of the other Misaka I walked in just about opposite directions, and, well, it was just a feeling, but a feely feeling.

It made me curious.

Arm in arm with myself as I strolled in line abreast down a sidewalk passing a department-store-sized specialty store catering to paints, apparently, and cheerily splattered with it in a riot of colours across its walls, I considered the topic of electromagnetic fields. I was in one, and could make them; strictly speaking, all creatures generated very faint electromagnetic fields naturally, and some of them like a lot of sharks and various distinctly electric fishes could sense those, but I could deliberately make such fields if I played around with a formula another of those presumably implanted bits of knowledge in my head.

If I had mathemagical lightning powers, could I perhaps sense such fields just... by nature, or something? Did being me mean that, indeed, "lightning stuff"? If someone told me I was "mystically attuned to the nature of lightning" or something, I couldn't call them a liar if they were actually making it up, but I wouldn't doubt it. It was hardly far-fetched, and moreover, it was hardly difficult to test, and offered a useful possibility.

I was here. I knew that. Where are you? Look down, that's where. Where's here, though? Where's here relative to a here that is there?

I expanded longitudinally in a place entirely unfamiliar, with little idea where I was relative to myself beyond retracing steps, but if I could measure longitudinal differences... and if I could set off my own personal signal flare?

I uncoupled my arms—I didn't want to be physically touching myself for this, even if hooked arms did lend a certain aesthetic charm I figured good for dissuading odd glances at my identical appearances and kind of made me want to skip.

On my right- Between myselves- On my left, I put together a setup in my head rearranging elements of my formula for projecting a guidance channel for lightning kind of like how I had for my impromptu electromagnetic office chair launch, and brought into being a simple, basic, uniform field around myself.

It didn't actually stay that way, though, I was pretty sure. Not quite, as I once more ascended up to a nice pedestrian bridge that more cities could fare adopting for street crossings. Again, I wasn't sure just how I could tell, but that really feeling-y feel said so.

Then on I- on my left I- further on my left I- did it again.

Then I spiked the numbers and threw it out!

The wobbliness spiked too!

The small overhead lights all flickered for an instant as I passed under the awning for another big blobular store—this one looking to be all about all the ways to apply any paint imaginable according to the appropriately enough painted-on advertisements—but more importantly, I had feedback!

Quickly, I did some number-crunching, and immediately came to the conclusion that I didn't remotely know enough about the mathematics involved, not even with almost-recollections pushing annoyingly into distraction, but I bludgeoned a crude approximation that I hoped would work, cobbling together repurposed mathematics, what I could remember of the invention history and design of radios, and more than a little pure supposition that I had to keep backtracking over before it seemed sensible, before finally this time much more gradually, gently, projected out around me another bubble field, and as the new one swept over me, mine changed!

It changed and I could measure it!

Ooh, this was so exciting!

Immediately, I looped my arms back around and just had to jump the last three steps down form the footbridge and skip off for wherever the other Misaka was. I didn't have any lead and I didn't care, and not even the freaky juxtaposition elsewhere of seeing myself suddenly break out into a beaming grin while shimmying a bag around the last dead researcher of the lab could discourage me. I pulled up my baseline sheathes as all three of my avatars simultaneously, and sent out a quick little pulse like a hello to myself, and it worked!

I could tell I was right there right next to me, beside me and just further away, on either side of me, and beside me and just further away.

A passing student with a tired look in her eyes smiled when she looked my way as she leisurely rolled by, and I tossed her a mirrored twin energetic little quick wave with my free hands, then I refigured the numbers for looOOoong waves packed as loosely as I dared as jumpy as I dared without risking messing up everything for everyone around me all over the city, and charged up my catcher bubbles around all of me.

Ping.

BEST Radio Beacon NavNet says hello there!

I plugged in the feedback values and with a rush of success making me feel giddier and giddier as I tackled the trigonometry and established more and more solid figures from my initial remembered impractically rounded three times ten to the eighth measure for light speed and a take from an estimated one meter distance pinging myself to extrapolate the approximate distance and relative bearings for all of me!

...wait.

I frowned.

That was odd.

I had partial success and that was great and all, but I found myself with an odd disparity, two distinct sets of only about half as many reactive patterns of responses as I should have gotten, even if one of those halves was skewed and messy. Outside from within the lab facility where I'd awoken and outside, I got nothing, which, okay, yeah, underground... But nothing at all?

My beautiful hideous kludge of mish-mashed ideas reacted if I shifted around figures for lengths and rates, at what I presumed to be all sorts of radio and possibly other waves from all around, but as I focused specifically as a single avatar by the remnants of the rendered-down vending machine collecting the last of the cans and trying to get a concrete, obvious signal through up to where I wasn't all that far away hoping for a certain kitty to maybe come my way and focusing just as hard, disregarding the clutter... I just got nothing.

Not a damn thing.

Ground didn't actually stop radio transmission; it just made it a whole lot harder and more limited. Ground-penetrating radar was just that, and the original acronym for RADAR, the radio direction and ranging system, itself had that much spelt out in its own name as well; I didn't know the maximum range abilities or to be honest even all that much about ground-penetrating radar in general, but as I shifted through my numbers adjusting my output with a glare up at the drab sheet metal ceiling, I was pretty sure I should be passing through it whatever it was. I did know more about water-penetrating radio, and water was only really an impediment to radio practical and convenient for everyday transmission and reception; as wavelength increased, water depth penetration increased too, to allow even modern deep-sea nuclear submarines to receive no matter where they were, even if transmission of radio waves measurable in appreciable fractions of the planet required using just that as an emitter normally.

Normally...

Hm.

I thought I might have some ideas if I could look some things up for using wave interference like phased array and Over-the-Horizon radars with so many of me and actually measuring that to indirectly be able to make use of just the sky as a giant antenna when I packed a whole hell of a lot of hardware into simply myself with imaginary mathemagics that I made real enough to be real enough. That wouldn't actually help at the moment, though, because I wanted to solve this annoying mystery now.

Whiiiich... was more mysterious when I actually considered the point about transmission antennae; how had I cheated what I literally just did when by all rights I should be limited to me-sized antennae or something projected through the space of the earth around me where it would be disrupted and/or detectable in the first place?

The formulae shouldn't have worked.

Wait, no, I jumped my train of thought. No, that actually could make sense; if the very underlying principle of anime abilities from an actual science-y standpoint was the capitalised-Personal Reality personal reality of one's inner world manifested or something, the whole point was that the nature of a different reality didn't matter, just internal consistency, so long as a given reality was strong enough to assert itself.

I suddenly found myself quite, quite curious what hypnosis could do; that seemed a go-to way to cheese reality warping, and I could think of a few anime myself where it was standard practice for something similar in bolstering conviction of how things should work.

Antenna size was irrelevant for transmission—and reception, too, I realised, rubbing a few dozen chins and mentally reviewing my reactive field for measuring radio pulses; I'd really bodged some stuff. But it still worked. I didn't know how, but, well, I knew it worked.

So I promptly just switched my figures around and transmitted- focused on changes in reception again.

I knew radio for deep water penetration reaching ballistic missile submarines worked in the low number of hertz range, not megahertz, or even kilohertz, just hertz, with commensurate massive wavelengths as the ponderous, glacial giants of radio waves, and at ten hertz, what should have amounted to a wavelength of about thirty thousand kilometers easily able to pass through even really disruptive material... I still got nothing useful!

I fumed and stomped a petulant heel before stomping more back in the direction of the burnt ruin as my reactive catcher bubble's feedback made the numbers get all jittery, and nothing corresponded to the big spike I should be getting.

It was like something... was... Yeah, it kinda was like something was blocking me, I thought coldly, narrowing my eyes at the unassuming walls of the facility suspiciously, and as I thought back to that man with the toolbag who had been working on something in the wall, as I thought back to what I had read about formal-sounding campfire ghost stories of Mental Out and the fuss over Railgun for the anti-telepathy barriers, those electromagnetic shields...

I got up- stretched and got up, trying to remember which way it had been, looking at T-junction that led to identical ones both ways; it was a little confusing down here. Then I realised elsewhere pushing an office chair piled with shoes as I passed a familiar spot as where a scorch mark had drawn a dark discolouration on the floor from electrical discharge that I was actually in the right area, so I sat- sat back down again and strolled over, leaving my cargo for the moment as I reprioritised again and detoured from pushing another office chair with a collection of socks I'd taken from downstairs to drag along both.

Although...

I decided to snag the toolbag and jog to meet up with myself. I might need it.

Besides, it wasn't like I had anything better to be doing.

More strange experiences: I fell.... bored, honestly, with nothing to do that I wasn't doing already, even the busywork of cleaning up all the broken glass from my pods since it was there. And yet at the same time the intense glee of my success and frustration were no lesser for it.

It wasn't like I was going to chance leaving the facility to try allocating more of myself to hemming in any avenue for the cat I sought to approach me.

I was almost beginning to wonder if the tiny tiger was toying with me, always always turning away some other direction, even when it was altogether out of the way.

"You really could get some ear scratchies if you wanted," I tried once again determined to be undaunted to coax the kitty to come closer where I sat invitingly on a warehouse roof ledge by a fire escape, patting the plastic-like surface next to me. "I could pet a kitty."

The orangish feline only drooped over the edge, leaning and bracing at the same time, and dropped down onto the fire escape stairs below.

I tried not to mope- shook my head at the plaintive sight of utterly failing not to mope above me at the other end of the stairs. Maybe the cat would wander closer at the base?

At least I was having better luck being led than trying to lead.

Approximately four hundred and twenty meters about seventy degrees west of south from where I pouted as the cat slunk between a pair of stairs to hop down and scamper off around the corner, I also continue to follow along on either side of the faux-grungy girl I was starting to hope was a friend. She took me and her comrades in delinquent-hood down a meandering path through a surprisingly weedless trainyard area over crunchy gravel as if she knew where she was going, which was good, because of three of us two, I sure didn't, and could only try to make politely present sounds as their easy casual talk as friends passed over me as the not yet familiar one that I was.

Maybe these people might be an avenue for getting more clothes?

The clothes were a substantial bottleneck in everything if I didn't want to garner the wrong sort of attention, and I needed clothes to get more clothes if I was to be able to allocate more of myself to basically everything that needed doing—getting open computer access somewhere with an internet connection or even just talking to people, finding some way to round up food for a small army, everything—but reprioritising from either of my aims venturing northward and east-ish could let time-sensitive trails grow cold.

Though I could find myself now when I woke up, wherever my rescue had carried me off to, I admitted as as uniformed "twins" following his streak across the sky I crossed a slightly veering avenue that curved northwesterly and seemed to demark a soft boundary here as well.

Outside the arc, on the west side, "here be industrial zone" may as well have been written on a big signpost, where a big conveyer belt on stilty legs climbed high in the air to dump its contents in a barrel-like edifice, and a similar driverless truck to the one I had spotted earlier rolled along hauling an open-topped bed stacked with what looked like supersized legos. Past the street, though, I was kind of getting the impression that it might be something like a whole part of a city dedicated to the fine arts; there was a vague aesthetic I couldn't put any of my thumbs on here the same as to the southeast- here where I followed after the possibly-pyromanic Misaka. Even the sidewalks were different, each section sporting writing around the border pressed into the concrete that looked like poetry at a glance, each one unique, whereas the walkways a certain kitty didn't find appealing at all somehow just gave the impression that one could drop a cartoon anvil on it without roughing anything up.

The hero who saved me seemed like he could be my best shot at that, though. It... It made me a little uncomfortable to consider asking him to do even more for me...

I pounded a fist in my open palm exchanging a mirrored look with myself as I picked up my pace with determination.

But if he did, I'd be able to pay it back two hundredfold! Er, a hundred and ninety-ninefold, or possibly ninety-eight if—waaaait a minute! If I could do my field bubble thing for responding to radio waves in a way I could notice and measure, and make radio waves... how hard would it really be to turn my brain and/or brains into a radar suite? I might have blinded myself, but even if it did turn out to be permanent, maybe I still could do something nice for him as all of me!

I just had to find my rescuer or wake up!

It was infectious, even as I was still irritated over the uncooperative probably-shielded lab and I found it harder and harder to get ahead of the cat no matter how I tried to await at any reasonable path, and between the bubbly giddiness over my impromptu radio telemetry and just the coolness of mathemagical lightning powers, it put a pep in every step.

Now where would a hero go...?

No doubt I would be carried either to somewhere for medical care or a base or something. If the boy who saved me was a champion of doing what was right in a place like this, I felt it a little doubtful that he'd just drop me off at some hospital, not under the circumstances when even a really dense hero couldn't fail to notice something pretty fishy, especially when seriousness wasn't a time for idiocy anyway and someone like that would know it, but that definitely didn't preclude some kind of friend who helped on the downlow or some clinic he trusted or the like, but a base could range anything from a the likes of some official team headquarters to simply his own unassuming home.

I thought about spinning up a duplicitous implication asking for the nearest hospital as I witnessed two boys a little older looking than my own apparent age giving what seemed quite the stern talking-to to a fast-talking, nervous girl sweating under their focus as I passed by a park dotted with simplistic, flat statues of frozen dancing figures in dimpled bronze. Both boys displayed armbands of a shield on a striped field in green and white pinned to their right sleeves despite wearing different school uniforms, and the girl, I noticed, held a big fat marker whilst one of the statues just behind her featured a broad curly moustache across its ovoid head. They seemed like authority figures of a sort, like class representatives or hall monitors, if maybe more street monitors, given the apparent context, especially with the shield emblem, like pseudo-police in a wacky anime city of (unfortunately only almost) only kids who treated the whole city of schools as one giant one, but I had no idea how to address them and they were busy, so I didn't.

If I could find more dormitories or apartments or maybe houses in this direction, though, maybe I could somehow hone in on myself if I could key to some kind of passive field, or at least be nearby when—

I stirred, and everything hurt.

I couldn't stop the pitiful little moan that slipped out as something cool and damp brushed against my forehead, or the sluggish confusion as I opened my eyes only to dark nothingness and a tickle of softness kissing my eyelashes.

A voice murmured... something. I couldn't tell. I only felt tired. So tired.

So... Tired...

"Oi, oi! Chibi-chan!" The voice rose again, gently but insistently. "You gotta stay awake. I know you have more guts than that."

Guts?

Yes, it was lungstuff I was missing. Three shots through my chest and another punching my shoulder, I still had all my guts. That had hurt.

Except... I'd died...

Did losing a whole body still count as guts...?

Maybe I could round my guts...

"You got a booboo on your head," that voice floated in from somewhere. "It doesn't look too bad, but it's no good to go to sleep after taking a knock to the head."

"...a booboo?" I rasped, trying valiantly to focus through the grogginess; it was Capital-W Weird being almost a witness to myself seemingly half awake and out of it with exhaustion while trying to marshal the wherewithal to work out figures that I knew I knew and simultaneously couldn't quite grasp properly to flare a radio beacon. I didn't remember getting smacked in the head; something small had plinked my head, I recalled, but would I have even necessarily felt something through the mind-numbing panic and adrenaline as... as the f-fire...

I sniffled, and a loose tremble stole over me.

A hand, kind and strong, pressed lightly on my hair, once, twice. "Hey, don't sweat it, Chibi-chan, you're safe now," my saviour reassured. "I said I gotcha, and I meant it."

The wail ripped out of me and I threw myself at that voice, heedless of a blanket I knocked askew and the damp small towel that tumbled down my face to crash into my saviour and clutch desperately around the only safety there was, sobbing into a hug that wrapped around me and I couldn't stop.

I couldn't stop, even as the wracking heaves pulled at my sides.

I couldn't stop.

It was surreal, overjoyed and curious and annoyed, frustrated and vaguely morose and restlessly bored and... and this.

And yet, more than anything, relief.

Even so far away as most of me was, most of me in a completely different part of a city I didn't know in a world I didn't understand, I was safe.

I gotcha, he'd said, and he meant it.

He meant it.

I squeezed my rescuer a little tighter, and it was like being able to hug the sun.

Warm.

Bright.

Unquestionable and larger than life, so unmistakably there.

Maybe kind of glaringly ostentatious.

That was my rescuer.

I... I felt a little lighter, after a while. Eventually, I was able to put together the figures in my head to initiate a radio pulse.

Immediately, I mentally gang stomped the values that rushed in—it still felt a little impossible to do it in my head, even if technically I had a lot of heads—and zeroed in on myself. I actually wasn't too far off from where I awaited, but the torso I held quivered slightly, then again, and then my clutched rescuer moved, pulling away slightly and letting go with an arm before I heard a little sneeze.

I looked up, not that it mattered, and made a vague questioning sound.

"Ah, sorry," the boy offered. "Your hair's tickly, is all."

Then he made a slight sound like he'd just remembered something, and let go. I let him, and it felt like he stood up or moved away. I sat on a soft bed or maybe futon, it felt like, and it shifted a bit.

"I know that brush is around here somewhere," I heard him mutter, and as I actually considered it, paying attention to what I could hear, I was definitely indoors somewhere. I thought maybe there was a ceiling fan near.

I saw another apartment block ahead that had to be my destination and location, past a small stream on the other side of the park and sticking up over what looked to be yet another school complex, and put down a mental checkmark to my theory.

Taken to some kind of trusted personal acquaintance who could be a nurse or something or otherwise to home, definitely.

That also made me a little more confident about things overall. This maybe actually wasn't all too terribly weird of a place, just a very differently normal one.

Then I snickered to myself as together with myself I crossed into the park. Clone uprising, who could possibly have imagined such a possibility? How completely unexpectable and out of place!

I didn't know whether to snicker even more or just scratch my heads shortly thereafter, though. The sidewalk wound a little through bushes and more statues like metal gingerbread men, and led in the direction of what itself very much was an out of place little bridge over the extremely minor waterway of perhaps a couple fingers of languid clear water strolling over smooth little river stones, the notional crossing architecture over the entirely fordable stream looking almost as if someone had tried to take every element of Greco-Roman style possible and make a stubby, near cube-like bridge out of it, which, I imagined, might have been precisely the case.

Well, peculiar though the bridge was as some shrunken take on the Arc de Triomphe turned awkward attempt at a reference collection, it accomplished keeping the soles of my shoes dry.

As I made my way around the actually rather tastefully fenced and walled off perimeter of a campus's sports field, I heard rummaging hopefully not too far past that school and my rescuer make a sound of satisfied success.

"Mm. Here it is!" He said from another room, I thought, voice a little distorted and slightly distant.

Then footsteps. And my stomach deciding to awaken and roar its unfilled protest.

My face burned, and I hugged my stomach. "Hush," I whispered to it, feeling inexplicably embarrassed.

I was someone's guest in their home or friend's home or something after being rescued, and it was so loud!

And yet, I somehow heard a grin.

"Guts have guts!" My rescuer announced. "Mm, mm." I could perfectly imagine him nodding sagely. "I always get hungry after a big thing like that too. That's why I already got food heating up. Hope you like chicken noodle soup; I know it always makes me feel better too when I'm not feeling too gutsy. It's from a can, but it's Obaa-chan's recipe still, so it works out!"

I sniffed.

It did smell a little like something was cooking somewhere, actually.

"Now, let's get that hair of yours brushed," he said from above, close by. "Looks like it's starting to dry; it's starting to stick up now. Pretty gutsy of you to wear your hair that long, but it's important to take care of it right, or you'll need a whole lot of guts to tackle brushing it later."

I was quickly beginning to think that my saviour was one of those sorts of people who came across as deeply quirky, but might actually just have a much keener insight than those trying to judge them, like a stereotypical sufficiently advanced adherent of the dao of Sword or something, maybe. He certainly seemed to think guts were important.

"Okay, I'm gonna take off the cover now," he continued. "Don't worry, no one's gonna make fun of you; if anyone does, I'll tell 'em not to!"

I heard the punctuation of what sounded like a fist smacking into a hand, and started to frown in confusion, before I started, feeling a slight tug—oh, the softness over my eyes, a blindfold? Covering the eye was supposed to be a way to actually help sight recovery sometimes, I was pretty sure. I was leaning more towards this being more serious, though, not that my saviour could know, though it may just as well have been a courtesy thing.

I reached up, not really knowing why feeling at where the blindfold at been, and over my eyes. It made no difference to what I saw, but there was a tightness pulling a little at my forehead when I furrowed a little and my fingertips touched something there that... felt like a little band-aid?

I wasn't sure he needed to fuss so much over what felt like an extremely minor head booboo.

I sensed him behind me, close, and the squishiness I sat upon sank.

Then a brush slowly swept through my hair.

Again, again, and again.

Long, steady strokes.

This was... nice.

...

"Thank you," I whispered, simply.

It was all I could think to say.

Somehow, it seemed more meaningful than anything else I could say, more right for him.

"Hey, I said I gotcha, didn't I?" He replied gently. "Even I don't have the guts to go back on that; that'd be gutless."

I wondered if he maybe he had a little sister.

Far, far away where I suddenly felt acutely alone with only the company of myself, where I had only the company of the recently removed dead I didn't like and a cat I'd lost track of for the moment, I wrapped my arms around myself and it felt empty, and even wrapping my arms around myself a different way couldn't seem to change that.

It made the contrast all the sharper.

I stole leaning in just a little to the older girl who held me to either side of her, and found myself simultaneously wishing she would brush my hair and that I'd already made myself more presentable before coming across her and her friends as she led us over towards a warehouse with lights on glowing in the night through the windows high up.

When I brought myself the toolbag by the access panel opening into the somehow less inviting structure I was already in down here, I couldn't help but just not like what I saw; in the washed-out and shadowed illumination of my harsh little finger arcs and dim reddish emergency lights, both of me looked... messy, as my hair was starting to dry. He wasn't wrong; right now was an important time to brush it, especially hair as prodigious as mine.

What I found in the wall made me feel a little better about my earlier failure, at least, confirmation of my suspicions even if I didn't really understand what I looked at much beyond labels and backup power status, and what I found further downstairs rooting through a few drawers in the residential bloc and much further upstairs and out atop one of the buildings I clambered over for a vantage point looking for the cat made me feel a little better still: a few other hairbrushes and picks and combs of various sorts, and a protrusion jutting from the roof with a radiator panel not quite like something for an air conditioning unit. The latter wasn't currently in use, and like a couple more equidistantly dotting this building like quarter-circle shark fins now that I knew what to look for, so I gathered and started brushing- cutting the radiators off with careful sparks to weld back later and with teamwork combing myself.

It... I didn't feel as untidy, but it still wasn't the same as him doing it.

"Thank you," I said again as the brush pulled through my hair, down, down, and all the way around, the tone of it shifting slightly as the brush passed through the slack lengths spread across the fluffy blanket to my left. "Thank you. You saved me..." And then the words poured out. "Y-You saved me, and I was going to die. I was going to die. There was no way out a-and I was alone and there was no one and I could feel the heat closing in everywhere, the roaring all around me, and I couldn't breathe, couldn't find a way out, couldn't get away, after everything, no matter... no matter how hard I tried—it just wasn't good enough, never enough and never had been, couldn't be enough, and then I was going to..."

I turned sightless eyes to where I thought his face was, heedless of the wetness tickling down.

"You saved me, and I don't even know your name."

I wanted... In that moment, I wanted to see him.

I threw everything, everything, into doubling down upon my amalgamation of formula segments pieced together and two-thirds remembered principles to cudgel into a makeshift operable solution. Wave reflection for hard surfaces was based on the ratio of surface variation relative to wavelength; that was why extremely high-fidelity radar used millimeter-wave bands. I plugged in for an even one hundred gigahertz at low power, and mentally braced to race through the return values.

Ping.

He was... It took a moment to be sure as I had to backtrack wrong conclusions for equations about how they fit together and figure out new ones, but... if I plotted this right, with the relative differences of all the dot points...

He was smiling.

I kept broadcasting, and stutteringly plotted the contours of a long object—his arm, I realised, holding what would have to reveal itself as a brush if I spent more time on it—coming up and sweeping across the top of my head, then quickly again more insistently a moment later before something about his eyes altered in a way I couldn't pin down, but the smile never wavered.

"Guess I need more guts to ace this test," he said lightly, not quite self-deprecating in tone. "Looks like you might have to settle for only a ninety-eight out of a hundred for straightening out your hair."

Then, even sitting, even for a blind audience, I could swear he posed. There was definitely a thumb to his chest.

"Name's Sogiita Gunha, the gutsiest Gemstone of Academy City!"

It was easy to smile.

I almost expected to see some twinkle shining from his own brilliant smile, despite everything.

He really did seem like an amazing older brother.

Then... I wasn't quite sure how, but there was a silence that... that just wasn't quite right.

The gutsiest gemstone of Academy City's smile again did not waver, but I felt that it was... hopeful, maybe?

Oh.

Oh!

My cheeks caught fire again and I turned away anxiously, swallowing hard.

Introductions.

It was, y'know, polite to give someone a name when meeting them and getting their name.

A name.

I...

I had had... I thought I had had a name once. When I could remember thinks I knew I didn't know, though, and something I did know was that I had been manufactured in a laboratory, where psychic mind powers and seeming industrial neural programming were a thing, there was uncomfortable lack of certainty about that, but even if what I remembered really was real, a name...

A name was a name.

It was supposed to mean something.

It was supposed to fit, match. A name was supposed to be a representation and expression of what it named, who it named.

"I am," I had said to that woman, and it had been something that I myself had meant, in more ways than one.

I am.

Who?

There was a reason why so many settings and stories and myths portrayed a name, a Name, as something with power. A name really did hold power, affirming existence and identity.

"Do you have a name?" He asked a little softly in agonisingly stabbing patience, and I couldn't stop the sudden, sharp little intake of breath as I snapped back up to him in shock.

My jaw felt weak and started to get wobbly, and I clenched my teeth.

Even not facing him as I turned away again squeezing the blanket over my legs hard enough to make my knuckles hurt, even unable to see anything, I couldn't help the awareness as I plotted my radar pinging of that easy, patient smile of his awaiting me, nor bring myself to stop.

And yet...

A thought wormed through my consciousness as elsewhere at a computer I pulled up a file that had been about me.

About Misaka BEST.

Fever dream was the only way to describe Doctor Kihara's obsessiveness as she described her project as more an idea, a goal—a dream indeed—than a product, to make the perfect clone, the best Misaka for the path to allow mankind's transcendence grasping the throne of God. She envisaged a Misaka superior in every way to all that had come before and could not be surpassed, that even the one who would become God would be itself the achievement of her best Misaka, and so she sought to make that a reality.

And I remembered a tune.

A silly thing. A petty thing.

~I wanna be the very best / Like no one ever was... Po-ké-mon!~

But it was a dream, a child's dream as sincere as a heart could yearn.

And here I sat before a shounen hero.

Gutsy Sogiita Gunha awaited an answer from a young girl he had saved as to who she was.

My hearts started to drum in my chests.

This... This was the sort of thing to be a turning point.

To be the best...

To strive and pursue a dream.

To pursue excellence and be all one could.

To become great, like no one ever was, not even one's own self.

Whatever the direction, driving ever forward to be one's truest self always a better self...

I swallowed, nervously, feeling almost jittery.

I...

This was the sort of thing to be a turning point, I repeated to myself in my head.

This would be a turning point!

I would make it so!

I just had to have the guts!

To be my best!

I took in a steadying breath, and feeling terrified and proud faced him with the boldest smile I could possibly muster.

"I am Best, Oniichan!"

 

[TacitSoliloquy]

This was the day.

T-minus ten minutes, zero hour approached.

Thousands upon thousands of man-hours of intense activity—almost a whole work week—came down to this, as trying not to jostle it too much, I took the last beribboned box from myself to hand off to me and tuck aboard our sleigh. Well, chariot, really.

It was a loaner.

"You sure this shit's gonna work?" Accelerator grumbled to the other girl with me in our makeshift hangar. He was more grumpy than usual, and I suspected it had something to do with his outfit for the day, but it was only traditional; I myself was actually rathe enjoying the green and stripped getup with the unapologetically cheesy fake pointy ears for myself, and Accelerator really needed to lighten up and let himself get bullied more!

"Of course!" Alice, or Aleis, or whatever her name was, replied immediately, as chipper as I was. I didn't really get the other magical girl Shokuhou had thrown at me, but she was able to get the ride we needed on short notice—close enough to it, anyway—and we weren't exactly spoiled for choice for something this important. "The man won't know what hit him! It's only my solemn duty as his nemesis to foil his every scheme, and saving Christmas demands my best!"

Yeah, the white-haired magical girl was a bit of a weirdo. She had a thing, I'd learned, about somehow fighting what from the sounds of it was one of the numerous creepy old coots running the city to save him or help him or something. I wasn't entirely sure that she wasn't an unaging little sister or time-displaced relative on a mission to inject some holiday spirit into an old man before it was too late, or the like, a good goal I could get behind, but she seemed just a little too happy to cause trouble.

"Whatever," Accelerator shrugged as uncaringly as ever, not having really asked because he wanted to know as just for something to vaguely complain about, I imagined. The older boy who made me look the odd dozens out as the only brunette present turned around and hobbled off toward the door embedded in the near wall of our cavernous workspace. "The brat isn't gonna shut up if I don't show up. Shokuhou knows what to do."

As he stepped through inside, I caught on my way out as I followed the aforementioned Shokuhou into the hangar the sight of him donning the final touch to his otherwise identical outfit to her, with the tied-on beard swallowing his lower face. I gave him a grin and thumbs up each time I passed him, and he rolled his eyes with what might have been a scowl if not so buried and hidden between the white swath affixed to him and similar fluffy fur trim of his hat.

Accelerator wasn't going to be with us—prior commitments, and all that, and I sure wasn't about to deny by little-big sister her fun today of all days—but that wouldn't get in the way of his participation anyway.

That was what Shokuhou was for, which of course was also a perfectly good excuse in Accelerator's eyes for him to skive off and probably take a nap while we did all the real work, I figured, but then he also wouldn't be getting much sleep anyway. Granted, he wasn't the only one skipping out, but Aihana didn't even pretend not to be a shameless hikkikomori taking the Mental Out mental out.

Five minutes to launch.

Five minutes to midnight.

Five minutes to Christmas.

"You're all set!" I announced to Shokuhou and our retinue as I approached me with them. I handed out the bag bigger on the inside with everything within. I'd had to pick up something a lot smaller than a proper big, giant, bulging sack thing to sit in the back of the sleigh when we didn't have a sleigh at all, but the Nihilists had done good work with the cute handbag with a big pink star I'd found at a storefront that she could wear with the shiny chain shoulder strap.

Shokuhou looked down at me with somewhat similar sharp-looking stars dominating her eyes, already in super-mode. Her own flat, unamused stare was similarly undermined by the shaggy fur trim of her own cap.

"What."

"...what?"

Shokuhou closed her eyes and sighed instead of answering, and accepted the cute handbag with a black-gloved hand.

"Whaaat?" I whined to her retreating back with the dangling little white puffball swaying behind her head.

Shokuhou just shook her head with another, deeper sigh, and slipped the chain over her head, giving the handbag a pat as she stepped up to the chariot, running her other hand over the stylised sunburst wheels.

"She doesn't like cute things," Onee-sama—well, Aihana Etsu for the next few minutes and upcoming tomorrow—bent down and whispered in my ear in passing.

I turned and boggled up at her next to Junko-nee, also Eihana Etsu thanks to Shokuhou.

"What?!" I repeated once more. "How can she not like cute things?!"

Onee-sama whirled back, eyes gone wide beneath her fuzzy and sparkly antler headband tipped with silvery bells, simultaneously with Shokuhou herself, both girls pinking.

Onee-sama slapped a hand over my mouth immediately, shooting a quick look over her shoulder up toward the soon-to-be driver.

"J-Just the colour pink," Onee-sama insisted as the other Aihana Etsu behind her looking between the two other girls pressed her lips together trying not to show any mirth and jingling with her own tinkly little bells. "It's not really a favourite, you see."

I clutched at my heart uncertain how much I was playing this up and ignored Onee-sama's hand from next to me.

"Onee-sama... Is this to mean that Santa doesn't like the colour pink?" I gasped. Then further down the line as I ringed the chariot as her other hand clamped down over my mouth again, "Is that even allowed?"

"Almost two minutes," the final fourth of our number as we filled the crowded broad hangar interrupted almost as longsuffering-sounding as Accelerator.

I eeped at Meltdowner's reminder and ran to line up, a century divided in parallel rows leading out the open entryway outside, where the woman herself joined me at a more leisurely (and just more long-legged) pace the end, facing down me toward the chariot, where just in front of me Aihana Etsu and Aihana Etsu took their positions, exchanging firm nods of determination and grasping at the yoke of the chariot, lifting it up and setting the wheeled platform to sudden, blooming power, invisible and unmistakable as the artifact awakened and awaited its driver.

At the same time, part way across the city and high, high above, I stood with Oniichan in the skies above the Windowless Building serving as our focal point, he with his customary rising sun sunburst bedecked with green dying the white for one of his numerous identical shirts for the occasion, and myself surrounding him in consecutive rings astride the open air. Around us, I exchanged a look myself with one of the further surrounding girls suspended around us on brooms and nodded to Sakibasu.

"It's time!" I called out aloud over to her, relaying our readiness in the hangar.

She withdrew Ainsel, and, sidesaddle across a slender piece of wood that shouldn't ordinarily have possibly been able to support her stably, began to play.

A sweet, simultaneous light and heavy ringing swept through the winded starry skies at the first stroke of the girl's bow upon her partner leaping to accompaniment of her will in their intertwined magic. The sound that pealed forth could not have come from a violin, or any one instrument, but it mattered not, wasn't the point, not when Ainsel was far more than any mere violin and her angelic partner drifting in slow circling reaching beyond the reckoning of any mundane player.

We had all agreed upon a common point that Shokuhou took up as ethereal chimes tolled across the night and she stepped upon the chariot immediately blazing with pervasive, fierce shine, and gave her voice to the welling harmony suffusing the atmosphere even as I felt her own looming presence abruptly expand and grasp at the crisp, clear night quickly clouding over.

"Hark how the bells~ Sweet silver bells..."

Setting the scene, evoking the feel, was important.

We would make this reality.

As her leading voice reached us on enchanting winter winds, Shokuhou's people around Oniichan and myself, each aloft by a broomstick or flying carpet or dainty little wings of light more token suggestion than mechanism fluttering over their shoulders, all lent their own building and building chorus, and I felt the change in the air as the first tiny, perfect crystals began to snow and I reached into an ephemeral wellspring building all around me.

I met Oniichan's gaze as elsewhere I beheld Shokuhou grasp the lip of the chariot far down my column from Mugino when the others' own self-compounding harmony reached back across the city with the intent behind the empowered music defining and giving itself purpose.

"One seems to hear,
Words of good cheer,
From everywhere,
Filling the air!"

"The dreams of every last child of Academy City rest upon your shoulders, Oniichan," I declared solemnly, then in mirror, "Every last child of Academy City stands with you upon this hour."

Fire filled his gaze, and Oniichan grinned.

Nought needed to be said, as he took a deep breath, gathering his will and focus, his guts and conviction, and thrice I laid hand upon his shoulders, while behind me and behind me in ringed ranks I drew upon a swiftly burgeoning, almost aching and intensely almost-feeling press that I drew in deeply with one hand upraised to the overcast skies and channeled forth out to me and into Oniichan with the other. He took his assumed stance, bent over his clenched fist as he concentrated that power more and more and more as I directed into him the unending flood born of the roused common, unspoken wish of a sleeping city called by our joint working.

"Gaily they ring,
While people sing,
Songs of good cheer,
Christmas is here."

Twelve...

Eleven...

I called up a synchronised oscillating glowing about myself before the chariot, timing to direct the alternating green and red surges down the line towards Mugino as pink sparking static began crackling around me higher above and interconnecting lines of light shot from my chest into my chest over and over.

"Ten! Nine!" I announced amidst the sweeping tones resonating as more than sound, carried on the currents of magic almost quiet and yet dominating as our combined artistry strove to impose and opened the way for inevitable reaction.

Oniichan let out a roar as his aura blasted into stark visibility around him, throwing his hair back and sending his jacket snapping in the swirling wind that swelled with his own voice.

My own joined his as my countdown dropped moment by moment and I strained to pull in as much of that unending summoned desire in the hearts of all and draw upon its strength. It was a heady sensation as I felt thousands upon thousands upon hundreds of thousands, millions of ardent outcries yearning to reach me at five seconds to midnight on Christmas Eve.

Five seconds to Christmas.

Mugino dropped to a knee, straining and sweating even in the cool wind as she played her part in our interconnected working, and a humming emerald sheet slid into being above her upraised arms, so similar and yet so fundamentally different from her normal barriers with her meticulous practice.

This was the critical piece, our continuing, unfinished harmony to give shape and invite direction.

"On, on they send!"

Our pair of Aihana Etsu turned to one another and reached across the separating bar of the chariot, locking fingers as they leaned into the yoke with readied power with their other hands and readied to sprint, bridging a sparking connection between them that erupted into existence in time with my own aligning intent. Violently violet and actinic cerulean mingled and bled into one another as emerald so similar to Mugino's awaiting screen itself shifting slightly in hue to match, and the scattering forks of intensity concentrated laterally, building and condensing into an almost solid line joining across me through them.

"On without end!"

Two!

"Their joyful tone!"

One!

"To every home!"

Oniichan lunged into a crouch with glowing eyes!

Shokuhou threw her hand forward!

"Hyper Electromagnetic Christmas Cannon, LAUNCH!"

I screamed, terror and manic delight, as the chariot blasted from the hangar in a glorious, stomach-lurching streak of glowing green on our combined power.

Our timing had to be perfect.

Our timing would be perfect!

I had but a moment to witness the three girls careen straight into and through Mugino's special screen to explode out the back in barely-visible, tangled translucent radiance as Oniichan howled and pressed down upon all Academy City with the combined might blazing into its focal champion, and we transcended the impossible: for a single moment, as that could be managed and all that was needed, under the crushing intensity of Oniichan's suppressing power, time stopp—



I shivered en masse at the bizarre experience of an instant stretching on and on even as I yet also progressed past it in the dark, trying to keep down the grape- cracker- cookie- pepperoni slice- I'd had for dinner.

I felt myself moving, then, a slight jostling before heaviness like zooming an express elevator for a brief second of acceleration before swaying and promptly plunging down instead. It wasn't actually jarringly harsh, but weird.

Over and over it happened as that hanging instant still stretched and I could almost trace every detail of a particular snowflake blurry and pink-washed in glow from below before my unmoving eye.

"She already made a list, no need to check it twice~" I sing-songed to myself in my dark confinement. "Mind-reading tells who's naughty or nice, Sho-ku-hou is coming~ To getcha!"

It was an almost mind-numbing cycle, almost mind-breaking, would have been, if such were even possible under our circumstances. One after another: up, down, move around, jostle in the dark while beholding the snowflake, thousands upon thousands upon hundreds of thousands, millions of times in this single moment of eternity.

Finally, eventually, that interminable hanging suspension reached its meaningless and undefinable conclusion as I got shaken in the lightless nothingness again, and then a clear slice of brilliance opened above me, and Shokuhou's gigantic face filled everything.

"Merry Christmas!" I squeaked and threw my arms up wide.

She was too polite to roll her eyes at our charade as I clambered up out of the box and onto her palm. It was Christmas; there were principles to be observed, and I'd spent the last week making presents for everybody, her included; it just wouldn't do for me to simply wait perched on her shoulder or riding atop her head or something!

"It's time, if that can even be said, anyway," Shokuhou announced, not quite able—or rather, I knew, not quite willing—to keep a hint of bemusement from her otherwise professional candor. Victory!

I swiveled around, towards the front of the racing chariot, where the still furiously sparking, sprinting paired Aihana Etsu Electromaster girls drove pumping legs through a surreal tunnel of streaking glowings amidst a translucent, ghostly green world. We darted through the still air, sliding between snowflakes—through them—on a plunging approach to the see-through broad expanse of the hangar, and I could make out starkly the brilliant emerald screen highlighted there as the only seeming solid existence aside from us.

I smiled to myself.

We'd done it.

Our timing, specifically here my timing, would have to be perfect once again, but no matter.

I felt the nearly itchy, tingling sensation as Shokuhou grabbed ahold of all of us in the grip of Accelerator's borrowed ability, and we plunged into the screen once more just as, still staring unmovingly so many times over and fixated upon the slightly out of focus snowflake, I simply stopped.

In the space of the synchronised instant, the titanic flood of power I funneled into Oniichan winked away.

The snowflake fluttered and fell.

"Hark, how the bells,
Sweet silver bells,
All seem to say,
Throw cares away."

The music still carried, but its power spent, its purpose fulfilled, it was only music anymore. If, as Shokuhou put it, that could even be said anyway.

The jingling and tinkling of the bells affixed to the festive antler headbands our irony-indulging reindeer stand-ins trilled and rattled as we touched down and rolled across the hangar floor back through my lines. Excited high-fives then rang out in echoing slaps as both girls turned to one another with infectious grins when they brought us to a stop, and a moment later the open hangar rang with Shokuhou's yelp as they turned as one towards her and sprang upon the other girl in glomping hugs almost sending me tumbling far down to the distant floor.

"Merry Christmas!"
"Merry Christmas!"

Both girls cheered in unison as Shokuhou toppled backwards to their giggling and my own tiny excited shrieking.

I ended up landing in the soft cushion of Junko-nee's curls and rolled down.

"Merry Christmas!" I cheered in her ear and hugged it.

Come morning, staggered in irregular, building frequency, I got shaken around and my darkened box opened up.

So many faces, some familiar, more strangers, greeted me in varying confusion or buoyant joy or curiosity, sometimes suspicion, sometimes expectant hope. A few in alarm, too, but that was understandable, funny, too, I would happily admit.

It had taken a bit of work, getting my cloning facility up and running, but it was surprisingly easy to make a legion of little me when I had been designed and refined for economy already anyway. Really, the grenades for people on the naughty list were trickier, but everything worked out to allow us to deliver the best Christmas.

Everyone gets a Misaka!

---

AN: Merry Christmas everyone!

 

[veekie]

Really, the grenades for people on the naughty list were trickier

Click to shrink...

Get Kakine to help

 

[Crusader Jerome]

Get Kakine to help

Click to shrink...

Bold words when we haven't even seen Kakine in Mental Isekai yet

 

[TacitSoliloquy]

I felt very passive right now.

On the one hand, I felt a little bit embarrassed but as if I would burst and fly apart and maybe crash back together to melt into a wiggly puddle somehow with Oniichan spooning delicious-smelling and even more delicious-tasting simple but scrumptious chicken-y soup into my mouth. He'd taken my declaration the only possible way, and solemnly judged it a pretty gutsy move, but been no less determined hold my hand guiding me to a table to feed me himself; Oniichan was pretty silly sometimes, I'd myself determined, but he wasn't entirely without a point: even with my radar trick, it was kind of hard to plot things around me tracking a volume of grid points when the points themselves behaved in different ways with not very good resolution in the first place and I kept having to backtrack and try new approaches without risking somehow maybe frying all of Oniichan's electronics or something, and it was just very different, so I wasn't sure about the finesse of feeding myself when I might spill Oniichan's soup he made just for me and make a mess of everything.

On the other hand, in a completely different part of the city, by a trainyard with the barely audible muffled clanging and rumbling of machinery and heavy things in motion instead of the slight whirring of a ceiling fan in a district that seemed like music would be the most likely noise pollution at a more decent hour, I was currently in a warehouse that seemed to have been turned into improvised audience hall, sitting against the wall by a corner in a couple of the many folding metal chairs in neat lines across the otherwise empty floor bare of any shelving or even support pillars for the slightly contoured roof high overhead that didn't need them, having been instructed by Mohawk-chan to wait as trickles of delinquent-looking types slowly entered the warehouse by various doors as she and her friends whom I was quickly coming to decide were indeed friends set up first one table then more in a line running part of the long face of the warehouse off to the side of all the chairs.

I didn't want to be in the way, and I was keenly aware that I was something of an extra—well, extras—here, but there was another girl already in the corner seat for me to join.

Tucked away there on the periphery, a young girl sat idly drumming her legs, gazing down at a phone. She was noticeably young, not very big at all and clearly elementary-aged, but stood out more for her aesthetic in an apparent gathering like this; where leather and black and especially black leather seemed the order of the day and backed up by jeans, metal fittings, and everything that screamed attitude, this girl here evoked "candy cane princess", I thought, a Christmas doll in red and white ensemble that indulged girliness and capped with a carefree poofy beret perched atop her short cascade of pale blonde fluffiness framing bright blue eyes turning up and alternating between me as I walked over.

I sat down, not really sure how to engage with the girl, and on my other other hand, since I had so many of those, to the east, I just kind of aimlessly meandered the streets unsure there as well how I would really go about finding the other Misaka whom I hoped to follow and only pretending for the sake of appearance that I had somewhere definitive to be. Simultaneously, not so far east or to the west or above or right here depending on how I looked at it, I couldn't even find a certain cat and took to spreading out in a staggered grid sweeping with close-range radar tracking for cat-shaped movement. It was worse in the lab I had taken over, though, because with so many avatars concentrated in such a confined space while actively trying to keep a low profile until I could figure out more, there was just hardly anything to do...

I hoped this would be interesting, as my new friends started setting a long plastic table cover over the line and a loose collection of new arrivals drifted their way toting big grocery bags and what looked to be assorted cooking appliances and dishes. This was looking like some kind of rally or maybe speech or something. As it was, though, it was the girl who stole the initiative a bare breath after I claimed my pair of chairs.

"In the first place, I'm Fremea. Fremea Seivelun," the girl chirruped without preamble as straightforward icebreaker.

I paused, instantly, totally.

Oh dear.

I stuttered with my radar figures and almost didn't close my mouth around the spoon as I employed my ultimate power of getting out of awkward social situations by leveraging not being there to come up with something to say on the spot after lengthy consideration.

I was Best. I was Best. I would be Best. I also needed to call myself something, though, and something other than Best, right now.

Never before were myriad minds put to a greater task than this, as I pondered- pondered- pond- pon- p- p- p-p-p-p—

"Should such a choice please the respected Ojou-san—""—Acknowledgement of a stranger as Mimi may not be untoward," I followed smoothly a moment after my possible new friend's opening, deliberately splitting up which of me spoke.

Nailed it!

I could make an argument for being Misaka Best, specifically, and I was sora two Misaka Best, and Mimi was a name; I didn't have to actually say it was my name, and formality was very convenient for providing opportunity for others to come up with whatever they wanted, and besides, Fremea seemed friendly enough, but under the circumstances, well, it was my fallback for a reason, and I wasn't sure if maybe she was some kind of tiny innocent yakuza princess or something, or if possibly she was, what, something like an adopted ward of a big boss figure of the delinquents taken in after some dramatic backstory where her parents had saved the life of a scary guy with his own sense of honour at the cost of their own lives or gotten caught up as innocents victims of something that made a really important yakuza guy or his mildly strained but respected younger brother want to turn his life around. It was a realistic possibility, and Mimi could just as well be a nickname or something to refer to both supposed twins together, and I felt a burst of pride that I'd come up with all of it in less time than Fremea took to prompt it!

Fremea cocked her head, sending her squishy hat shifting slightly.

"You talk funny. So have you played Assassin's Reckoning 3 yet?"

I blinked at the non sequitur, mentally shifting gears that Fremea was indeed a child the age she seemed and revving those brainy bits.

In the first place, it was a little hard to understand her. She had a curious distinct accent that I found intriguing from a hobbyist linguist standpoint; I couldn't really place it, not when it was accented Japanese—though, a few more affordably distracted parts of me noted now that I considered it, I was much, much more proficient either French and Italian and Russian than I remembered or languages that I couldn't distinguish from them—but even muddling things further by talking like a child, her pronunciation seemed vaguely Nordic-influenced to my ears, much as her name.

"Fremea Seivelun" didn't sound like a "real" Nordic-sounding name, though, and I couldn't be sure if what I thought I knew was really Italian or the language of some blatant analogue or expy of Italy or an alternate-history continuation of a Roman or Remulan Empire or the like; that sort of thing was downright common for an anime world and beyond.

Also common, though, and suspiciously potentially backed by the totally-not-Walther knockoff, were indeed significant similarities and parallels to a world I found myself suddenly distressingly less and less sure about the more I thought about it and abruptly put an end to that; Fremea question sure sounded like a reference to a game. Was Assassin's Creed maybe not a thing but indeed almost a thing, perhaps?

And would answering actually be appropriate?

Would not answering be appropriate?

Would discussion about a game not exactly marketed for young children be considered appropriate by others?

Could I get away with ambiguity?

Would it be okay to be wrong?

And then Oniichan noticed.

"Something on your mind, Best-chan?"

Well, this was confusing. I'd gone from having no one to talk to instead to now trying to hold two different conversations in two different places simultaneously... and as three avatars, just to make it a little weirder still.

I turned a smidge to face Oniichan squarely at his table, pinging him to try to get a fix at at least approximating looking him in the eyes... and promptly started fidgeting, all sense of what right words to say running away and hiding from me.

Oniichan had asked me if I had a name; he might be a little silly sometimes (maybe a lot silly, even), but he wasn't stupid. Oniichan... He at least had his suspicions about what was going on.

I didn't...

I just didn't want him to think I was weird, was all.

It was stupid—he was Oniichan—but... what if he really did think I was... was wrong somehow for being fabricated in tanks?

My chests clenched at the thought of Oniichan calling me a freak, even though he never would.

...

No.

I had to have the guts to be the best.

I screwed up my courage, even as queasy as everything was, and told him.

"Oniichan... I..."

My chest with him started getting tight in a whole new way and breathing was suddenly a struggle.

"I'm not... I-I— I'mnotanormalgirl!" I managed to get out in a tumbled rush, pointlessly squeezing my eyes shut and clenching my fists just as hard.

A warm hand took one of mine.

I couldn't look at him anyway, couldn't bring myself to scan now.

"I'm not a normal girl," I repeated more slowly. "I'm... I'm not even a girl at all."

...

Then what I just said hit me.

"Uwah! Not like that, n-not like that!" I abruptly blurted out in alarm, sightless gaze snapping open trying vainly to find him and helplessly waving my hands in desperation to ward away the intangible as elsewhere I dropped face after face into my hands and wailed my embarrassment where no one could notice it buried in a hole underground. "I mean, um, not that I'm a really bishie boy, th-the hair, that is, uh, I-I mean—"

Entire face utterly incendiary, I succumbed to the inevitable as words refused to be worded and banged my forehead on the table—Ow! That actually hurt!—before bemoaning my fate piteously, grasping at my hair.

"It would be easier to show you," I croaked in an utterly dead voice, and knocked on the door.

Nothing happened.

I pinged, and Oniichan was still sitting in his own chair on the adjacent side of his little table in the combined kitchen and dining area of his apartment or safehouse or whatever this place really was; it looked just like any other apartment from the outside, but one could never be too sure with things like this. Oniichan just stared at me, having given zero reaction to the knocking.

I rapped knuckles on the door again.

This was the right door, right? I'd followed the measurements here.

"Heloo~oo? Oniichan?" I called, knocking on the door again while trying to peer through the closed blinds of the window beside the door and tapping on the glass.

I saw Oniichan sitting at the table next to me in a kitchenette on the other side of a living room area, slowly alternating between me and the door as I refused to raise my head from the table that I might be allowed some small memory of dignity while my face yet retained the sure capacity to power boilers.

"Oniichan?"

Maybe I needed to knock louder?

At least I had been having better luck with Fremea.

There, I had turned out to be right—or at least right enough—with my suspicions.

"An ignorant speaker of little confidence of the subject would inquire if Assassin's Reckoning 3 is the one with the guy with the hood and the blades?" I asked Fremea from my position closest to her while simultaneously battling my unreasonable doubts about opening up to Oniichan, gesturing at my foreheads.

Fremea nodded, eyes lighting up with a hopeful intensity while she leaned over from her chair next to me.

"Mm! Onee-chan won't let me play it! In the first place, she always keeps saying it's really fun even though it isn't realistic at all, but she won't let me even watch!"

Ah...

"W-Well personal experience and familiarity would most regrettably not be an especially accurate representation of playtime," I hedged, having no idea at all if an educated guess about similarities with the Assassin's Creed series was actually representative, and I hadn't actually played the third one in the first place. Probably. I had done the very first few minutes of one of them, but precisely which was ambiguous. "Witnessing another briefly play would offer a limit to that which might be claimed."

Fremea deflated a little at my denial, visibly disappointed.

"Oh."

The younger girl sighed, and I cringed, then cringed a whole lot harder inwardly at what I experienced elsewhere where I made an absolute dumbass of myself right in front of Oniichan. C-Certain things were to be expected, and I didn't exactly have the benefit of convenient circumstances as an admitted premature science experiment, but I... but I...

There was nothing for it; it would be easier just to show Oniichan, and be glad that Fremea had no idea what was going on to the northeast.

Probably, I mentally amended; who knew what kind of psychic powers this young girl might possess?

...no, I amended further, if she was reading my mind, there was no way she wouldn't make her reaction all to obvious to my disastrous flailing in a different part of the city.

"So do you like Gekota?" Fremea then queried with no more lead-in than before.

"Gekota?"

The almost Christmas-y girl thumbed the screen of her phone and hopped up.

"You should switch seats with me in the first place," she failed to explain in so many words, but I got up- let me get up anyway, thinking to see where Fremea was going with this as I resituated on either side of her while my new friend pulled up a video and started playing a cartoonishly animated work with the volume down low, revealing a cheery title glittering into place in a sweep across the screen and... oh, a familiar frog!

"Ah!" I actually did recognise this, from the blimp! I could contribute to this conversation! "A notice was posted regarding an exclusive event—" I racked an idle brain as quickly as I could, then several more, trying to visualise what I had distractedly seen. "—tomorrow in School District 15."

Fremea snapped up to me, sky blue eyes alight again with joy even at a loss as she was as to where to face.

"Really?! Maybe I could get someone to take me if Onee-chan is still busy!"

Then we three we two huddled over the phone as another frog joined the first.

Enrapturing.

Who cared if I was making a fool of myself?

...besides me, of course.

Ye gods, this was weird, and a part of me—two, to be precise—did not care in the slightest.

Much more than me, though, even if more than vicariously getting to watch this new marvel, was just... utterly... insufferably... bored.

Oniichan was finally getting up to go- come get the door with an uncertain expression on his face, and elsewhere I finally registered a catlike shape move crossing another pipe-carrying trusswork bridging a street in the industrial sector and took off in pursuit, and and far to the east as three avatars together I paused as an odd feeling came over one after another of me there, that I couldn't place, but I was just so bored, bored, bored!

There was nothing to do here in the lab bunker. With a good hundred or so pairs of hands to work with and mathemagical superpowers, I'd picked over the entire place scouring it absolutely clean as a veritable locust plague and reestablishing power to leave no sign whatsoever that anything unusual had ever transpired save the telltale lids of the incubation pods and absence of the personnel—well, aside from in one of the bathrooms; the researchers' presence was really obvious there. I was already on as many of the computers and daisy-chained monitors as I could bear without just getting all the more restless, and now, there was nothing, nothing, nothing at all to do.

...those sidewalks I was walking on in a few places up above really did feel like they could take an anvil dropping on them.

...I wanted an anvil.

I liked metalworking.

There was just something so very satisfying about making and shaping stuff into other stuff by applied ingenuity and commitment, of taking scraps and detritus or even literally just part of the ground and transforming it into something new and greater. Woodworking was very eh, but metal? Metal was neat.

I was familiar as a hobby interest with how to go from really, actually starting from scratch with literally nothing foraging for materials in the wilderness to ending up with a fully-provisioned workshop, and a lot of improvisatory means not started from zero so, thanks to having had too much time on my hands a time or two and just a good memory for things. A couple of fire bricks and the graphite rods from a car battery along with some wire and an ordinary wall outlet could actually make a pretty handy little smelter, for instance, and I didn't even need wire nor an outlet at all!

The more I considered it, the more tantalising it seemed. The toolbag even had a small hammer in it; it wasn't a good one, an indeed small claw hammer, but it was a hammer period, and I just might be able to obviate a forge and fuel as well as ventilation when induction was an option.

In fact...

I rummaged in the toolbag, and found pliers as well; though quite far from anything like ideal, I had hammer and tongs alike without even any need to make my own to make better ones to then in turn make better ones still of my own for some proper metalworking. Just what I might make... Well, whatever, but I could start with just finding somewhere hard and flattish I didn't care about and making billets, then an anvil out of it; anvils weren't really actually all that complicated, not as a whole, not when there were so many types beyond the more modern classical single-horn anvil and it was entirely possible to make so much simply a stake anvil indeed a just a big stake with a flattened, mushroomed-out top, and a separate horn anvil, in the typical historical Scandinavian setup, just done in two parts and jammed in a stump instead of a much more involved construction.

First I would need metal I didn't care about—the vending machine parts and its cans immediately came to mind, and surely I could find steels that weren't really needed for anything important. Ooh, and I could make lots of hammers— Wait, did I even need hammers, or just more anvils not necessarily fixed and electromagnetism?!

This was so exciting!

And so was Gekota, too, in a different way.

Fremea's phone was a little small, and we had to keep the volume down under the circumstances, but it was very well written, I was finding. There were some louder voices and I distractedly glanced up to see someone off part way across the warehouse gesturing in my direction talking to someone shrugging—there were more people now—but Fremea said this episode would introduce Gekota's neighbour since the third was really a better start than the beginning and it was hopping his way.

At the same time that Gekota's neighbour answered his own door, Oniichan too finally opened up.

I stood on the doorstep of Oniichan's apartment looking up at him with his expression of intent confusion taking in what admittedly must be a pretty odd sight before him.

"Hi, Oniichan!" I gave him a mirrored wave much as I had the cyclist from earlier in a different part of town, and slipped in around him to either side; he'd already taken me in, so it was okay.

Now where was that thing...?

I swept a scan of the apartment, trying to fit the suggested dimensions with what I remembered being led around unseeing and what I could now see, modulating the wavelengths to see what I could pick up without interfering with any wiring or other electronics still; I knew a magnetron taken out of a microwave and stuck in a thirty-degree cone with extra juice was entertaining, certainly, but especially hard on lightbulbs. There was a door to my left- right, and I peeked in as I also headed over to sit by myself. Inside was Oniichan's bedroom, a rather spartan affair, with a futon that correlated to where I had been earlier, the abandoned towel that had been on my forehead affirming some of my suspicions and expectations about this place and how I'd been cared for, given the theme and aesthetic; more importantly, though, the hairbrush was still there, and I snatched it up before joining myself a second time.

Oniichan stood a pace from the table looking between me carefully. The table bore a bowl of the same chicken soup I'd been fed earlier, along with the can, sporting a rendition of himself upon it, I saw, posed dramatically thrusting out a can with its own tiny Oniichan displayed presenting the recursive image, and a kindly old lady with squinty, wrinkly eyes that smiled behind him, along with the stylised logo: Feed your guts!

"Here," I told him, handing him the absently taken brush and scooting one of the chairs over to sit in it. While he was distracted, I grabbed myself by the hair and lifted my head up from the table, peeking under to check my face, but nope, still too red, so I put it back down. "Now you can do this hair, please!"

And he did.

He really did.

Oniichan took it completely in stride, and the warmth in my chest was almost as good as the hug earlier.

"So I imagine you have some questions," I added just before silence could properly descend. I'd already resolved that I would have the guts to tell him about this, and I wasn't going to back down. I also wasn't about to lose the initiative to make him pay attention to what was important and distract him from what would be really great if he'd just go ahead and memory-hole himself about; I couldn't be a perfect little sister if he thought maybe I was a boy!

I still felt a little jittery about this, though.

"As I said," I tried to keep my voice even; it was hard, but switching where I was speaking from to as my avatar currently being brushed helped a little as I continued. "I'm not one girl, exactly. I'm... well sort of a bunch? I... I was created in a laboratory. But I escaped. A-And now I'm here," I finished quieter than I'd meant.

Oniichan kept brushing.

"Please don't think I'm a freak!" I added- added- added, clenching my lowered head- chair- chair with aching force as the plea burst out.

Oniichan still steadily swept the brush through my hair silently.

"Lotta guts to say that," he finally uttered heavily. "Lotta guts."

The smooth strokes stopped, and Oniichan's hand came down upon my crown, patting... achingly tenderly, so kind that it hurt even as the sensation filled me at the contact like breathing in a glowing ember of liquid light until it was somehow too much a-and tears started, even though... even though I wasn't sad, or... It was just too much and there wasn't enough me to contain it.

"Thank you, Oniichan," I whispered once more today, trying to inject all the sincerity that too-small little words could hold.

And with his support, I dared to press on, to be my best. I still couldn't bring myself to be so selfish as to ask of his help when I could do nothing to redress such a miserly charity that just didn't sit with me and wasn't right, but I could allow him to make a choice and pretend that it was different, that I could somehow make it up to him easier.

"Oniichan, I... I could use a hero."

Maybe it was what I was experiencing there in Oniichan's apartment as I sat next to Fremea, or maybe the writers for Gekota were really just that good, or maybe it was both, but as the episode on Fremea's phone drew to a close, it... it really hit me, watching it.

In a way, the plot was almost trite.

Almost, though.

What Gekota had going with Keroyon in his eponymous show, it was never just said; the writers never just came out and laid it out for viewers, but left room for people to make their conclusions on their own. And maybe that was why it resonated so much.

It wasn't enough to simply say the words that friends were important, that standing by them and helping them mattered; Gekota and Keroyon just lived it, and that was that. That was enough.

They made it that way.

I couldn't help but notice the parallels to my own decision to be my best, to be my idea of the best Best.

And with the video player fading to green, I looked up, and saw quite a few people gathering about in the warehouse, with my friends at the lined-up tables looking pretty busy and rushed, trying to get everything ready with pots and cookers and foodstuffs hectically readying.

"A consideration occurs," I said quietly as the avatar sitting on Fremea's left, nearest to the presumable future buffet line.

Fremea turned up at me with a questioning sound.

I gestured to her phone, and nodded to the tables.

"Keroyon and Gekota are fortunate to have one another. An example might be drawn for living up to their example."

"Eh?" Fremea gave me a curious look, then followed toward the older mixed highschoolers and adults, and took on an expression of realisation quickly morphing into determination with a kind of cute overly serious frown. She nodded, and took the lead, marching over.

"In the first place, we wanna help!" Fremea asserted sternly as I approached in the younger girl's wake, enjoying the growing smell of the food.

Everyone paused momentarily, eyes flicking from Fremea with indulgent amusement to myself with something closer to polite neutrality from most of the people variously mixing up dishes in mostly unfamiliar appliances and preparing them on a pair of little portable electric stovetops and camping stoves and the like in their impromptu field kitchen, Mohawk-chan and the other two who had brought me here a minority of their number.

"If Senpai should have a use for additional hands and regard delegation worthwhile, whatever small assistance might perhaps be achieved for the benefit of a measure of instruction would be gladly offered," I confirmed, mindful not to double up speaking.

"Plates and napkins and cups!" Mohawk-chan piped up immediately before anyone else could say anything from where she manned a collapsible grill festooned with slices of meat. "End two tables, we could use drinks laid out and ready when people get to the end of the line."

I bowed slightly in unison as Fremea immediately dashed off to the right heading for the end of the row, only to catch herself and wheel about, arm out and pointing as she apparently realised the need to actually have cups to put there.

From a bit of a pile of the assorted supplies behind the table and cooking area, Fremea drug out a cooler—thankfully wheeled amidst more of the grocery bags, these bursting with packs of plastic cups.

"I should get the cooler in the first place since it's the heaviest," Fremea insisted with that focus of determination in her eyes still positively shining, and, well, she did insist; I couldn't bring myself to tell her no unless she really did start struggling.

We made a bit of a team. Fremea would hand me a soda bottle from the ice-packed cooler, and I would at once pour and arrange the cups, taking advantage of my coordination between avatars for smooth precision. In a jiffy, we had the final tables covered.

As we finished, a great shadow fell over me.

"I see you have made some friends."

Immediately nervous, I whirled.

A great mountain crag with twin eyes gleaming down at me loomed over the world.

H-He was huge...

An absolute giant built as a heavy titan arrayed in a black leather jacket that seemed to fill the entire warehouse stared down, down, down, and I couldn't help the quiver at the juggernaut's presence.

And then Fremea launched herself at him with a delighted grin.

"Komaba-oniichan!"

Almost tiny eyes beneath an armoured ridge of a brow turned on the small child latched to his wrist, as high up as she could properly seize for a glomp, and the emotionless almost-grimace etched into the blocky slab that as his head twitched slightly at one corner of his mouth.

Eh?

Oooooh, so that's how it was.

I processed the image I was seeing.

Fremea was a sweet little girl, innocent and seemingly kind of sheltered. And if she reacted to him like this...

So this Komaba person must be a gentle giant sort, probably wiser than he looked and a respected figure for knowing when not to use his great strength, and Fremea was his companion shoulder-loli he protected and looked out for, probably soundly beating up anyone who tried anything with her before she noticed when they turned down his reasonable request to just leave well enough alone.

"Pick me up!" Fremea demanded then. "In the first place, I want a piggie-back ride."

Indulgently, absolutely effortlessly, and expression not shifting in the slightest, the colossus that was Komaba hefted Fremea with a hand that seemed as large as her, and the slight girl scrambled upon him like a monkey, hanging on around his collar without any need from him to support her and validating my assessment of them as she smushed her cheek against his happily, nearly setting her scarlet beret askew.

"This is Mimi," she introduced me. "They liked Gekota without even knowing it, and they talk weird! They're pretty great!" She elaborated with enthusiasm. "And this is Komaba-oniichan! He takes care of me whenever Onee-chan is working and Kanou-oniichan can't. I know you'll really like him in the first place, because he's just the best. He doesn't make me eat make me eat icky things and lets me stay up past my bedtime, which is great since I don't have to wear my school uniform!"

I bowed in unison once more, finding myself a lot more at ease at this gathering with someone like Komaba here. He wasn't the best, I was the best, definite article included, but I was confident he had to be someone who deserved Fremea saying that.

"One who holds the high regard of a friend is a pleasure to meet," I replied politely.

"See," Fremea insisted, managing to press herself against Komaba a little more.

"There's nothing wrong with being polite," Komaba rumbled softly, reaching up and touching Fremea's nose with a finger that surely could have sent her flying if he had any less finesse, then, "Glad to see she's making good friends, Mimi-chan," he added nodding, and I couldn't help the little smile.

"An inevitable feat that cannot help but come to pass," I admitted, regarding the girl poking over his shoulder.

Just a little, I thought that weighty mass of Komaba's face soften momentarily again, before he spoke once more with a nearly subaudible bass.

"The speeches will start soon. I've got to get ready."

Fremea's expression took on an easy delight despite the implication, and she dropped down, to scoop up one of the cups and hold it up to him.

"In the first place, it's important not to have a dry throat!" She insisted.

The comparative thimble, I suspected, probably actually wouldn't really help him that much, but he delicately accepted the plastic cup that seemed almost to change size as it passed between them, dwarfed as it was by his huge fingers.

He knocked it back in a single swig, not even giving a hint of reaction to the bubbly fizziness.

"Thank you."

Then the giant strode off toward the far end of the chairs where more and more people were beginning to fill them up, joining one of several clusters each with a standing microphone. One group included another brutish-looking giant almost as physically imposing as Komaba himself, and to my discomfort lending to the unnerving prospect of being perhaps something of a worse mirror to him. Komaba himself, though, met up with a pair of fellow delinquents with a seeming casual comradery between them, and both diverging noticeably from the typical look; one took to more black and white than just black on black on more black, and making it appear almost stylish even with the bandana covering his head, whilst the other fellow seemed to have outright missed the memo on the punk delinquent dress code in entirely casual attire to go with his carelessly kept blond mess that maybe could have used a bandana himself if it wouldn't have clashed so completely.

Hm.

I was getting the impression that this assembly was more some sort of quorum about what to do, maybe in response to whatever it was that Mental Out did yesterday? It seemed a lot more serious than just a cookout.

It did smell like a cookout, though. However serious it was, it couldn't be all bad!

Unfortunately, though, that kind of seemed to be the theme overall for me.

As I was trying valiantly to set Oniichan's table on fire with my face and getting my hair brushed, as I was enjoying the third episode of what I was definitely going to have to binge-watch at some point very soon and maybe take advantage of the possibility of watching every single episode simultaneously (unless maybe I actually couldn't do that, which would be a wonderful failure), I had also been having some trouble.

For one, I was beginning to think that the cat just didn't like me or something. Or maybe had some kind of fantastical cat powers of its own.

I was working in teams, constantly in seamless communication, and had literal supernatural radar, on top of simply being so many in number in the first place.

And yet, I was the one somehow losing.

In my defence, I could honestly say that I had literally never exercised an hour in my life, technically, but still! I was getting tired out! It just wasn't right!

More and more, I started panting and having to take breaks, trying to cycle avatars, and only leaving more openings in my lines, even when I ended up doing a whole lot of sitting still trying to look like a great lap to cuddle up on anyway.

It just didn't seem possible!

And down below, things were both better and worse.

I had been tiring myself out there too, but for results!

This was fun!

I had decided to try to make a pair of tongs as my eventual end goal, but! I would do it without using my hands at all.

Starting from scratch, completely hands-free forging to end up with some tongs (which was a little ironic, I had to admit).

It made for a fun challenge.

Moving metal was tricky work. It was one thing to just yank on something; that much I had worked out how to do earlier when I had made my impromptu pseudo-coilgun office chair ride. Jerking something very specific instead of just making a field that by arbitrary intervention happened to include something to be moved in a convenient direction was another matter, though, and puzzling out how on earth to transform and stretch my initial formula for guiding lightning into levitating a metal object sustainably and under control was almost a nightmare if not for the fact that, inordinately frustrating difficulty aside, it was still warping reality with my mind via applied mathematics that were magical because "because lightning".

Which, y'know, cool.

With enough of me and so many positions to work with, I finagled a zone where I could more or less flail metal into a predictable arc if I stood in the right place, and a cooperative arrangement to catch it between me without actually touching anything, hands behind my backs, but the cans were a lot tougher to move by themselves. I had found a metal bucket which was really handy when not being hand-y at all, but for the cans, I had taken to carefully and more by eventual statistical probability balancing them on a few chromed plates I'd found that looked like they were initially intended for something science-y, a bit bigger than typical drink coasters, but not a plate for something like teacups or whatever when actually flat.

The problem, though, came in simply amount of metal.

There just wasn't enough steel, not unless I wanted to scavenge it from things that didn't really seem like they should be ripped apart, much less if I was to pull it off without using my hands. I was kind of thinking of this as a practice exercise while talking to Oniichan north of where I struggled, and I really did want to live up to my goal and be better.

I couldn't get the memory out of my head. Or, not all my heads at once, as it were, maybe?

I'd been holding that rebar, before Oniichan saved me. There was an entire ruined building directly above me, teeming with as much scrap steel as I could possibly want twisted and rent from within the innards of the architecture.

I had been anxious over revealing my position to whatever nefarious powers that be might come swooping in to finish what the researchers had started or force me to try to finish what I myself had started.

But... Well I still had yet to notice anything at all from my various positions not too far from around the above site where Oniichan had crashed down from on high.

And there was so much steel there.

Maybe even beams that I could repurpose.

...I'm gonna do it, I decided.

Quickly, before I could lose my nerve, and before anyone could notice if they did happen to come by (someone had to eventually wander over, didn't they?), I got a quick round of water—which didn't count for the no-hands rule, since I had collected some cups from the break room just like those I was setting out further westerly—and separated halves again to scurry up the stairs and back out the still at once neat and eyeroll-inducing bookshelf secret door to the higher-up lab.

I took the pistols with me though, just in case.

It actually wasn't that bad here. Immediately around the door, there weren't really any signs of the earlier conflagration at all aside from soot blasted everywhere by the amazing Amazing Punch. I was glad I'd commandeered shoes for this, even if they fit terribly, else I'd never have clean feet again, I feared; soot and charcoal was just that bad about getting everywhere and staining it carbon black.

Further in, though, well, there had indeed been pretty bad fire.

...it smelled like it, too.

I shivered involuntarily at the memory. It had been everywhere.

Also everywhere, however, was in fact plenty, plenty of rebar.

I quickly set about a chain that sent pieces rattling down the stairwell, and slicing off exposed bits from the ravaged reinforced concrete with precise electrical discharge boring to get at more once I had cleaned up what was already loose.

Actually, come to think of it, I decided, the whole place could just use more cleaning in general. There still was yet no sign of any kind of genuine emergency services or more realistic and more nefarious officially unofficial response, and I was rapidly developing a pathological despising for boredom.

Might as well do something productive.

Besides, I didn't really want anyone snooping around and investigating or cleaning up this place anyway when it dealt in Misaka cloning and the Level 6 Shift Project; way too close to home in more ways than one. So I'd just do it myself. It wasn't exactly as if I lacked for labour force. I decided to interpret my hands-free rule as applying only to the tongs goal, and quickly had some further improvised forks and rakes and poking sticks fashioned together out of rebar, and all but a few avatars aboveground, or at least in a basement instead of a bunker, anyway.

And with such a labour force, I found something interesting.

An armory.

Quite unfazed by the blaze, I came across a right and proper vault exploring the abandoned and burnt-out upper level. It held up to fire just fine, but my electrical discharge cutting trick had already cracked open reinforced doors before.

Inside, I found, in the words of Neo, guns. Lots of guns.

"Hello," I greeted evenly.

Then I shot a quick reflexive glance at myself as the only figures around me in time to see that expression fall, and raced inside.

Now.

It was happening now.

Further to the east, I felt something strange, as if... I couldn't make sense of it, like me somehow, but not, and distinctly "elsewhere" as if foreign and outside when it shouldn't be, which seemed like it might actually be very indicative of precisely what was coming and getting closer and closer from multiple directions as I considered that.

From the ruined upper lab, I finally caught a response. Three trucks with big knobby tires rolling in, and what looked like robots or people in power armour, all bearing an emblem sporting a hatchet-like short-hafted battleaxe above the letters MAR, an uncomfortably warlike omen.

And just nearby, a bare block or two on the southerly side of the ruined upper lab, I found a woman only a few paces away as I rounded a corner, a single car of reinforcements not far beyond her.

She was kneeling, scratching the big orange kitty's ears, and she had a uniform of a soldier, marked by an emblem across her chestplate akin to that the street monitor students I had seen previously, but rendered in white with something like a blocky W in place of the shield. She bore no helmet, or weapon that I could see, instantly at once a mark against her sense in my books and potentially alarming in those books if she was the sort of person to in fact make some point wearing body armour but not cover her head, which revealed openly a no-nonsense face and utilitarian purple ponytail pulled back and come slightly loose.

Her eyes met mine.

"I'm not sure you'll get the cat to approach you like that," the woman spoke.

 

[TacitSoliloquy]

I immediately fell on guard.

I brought plasma arcs humming sharply between my fingers like actinic webbing, flooding the area in bright, harsh light and throwing the woman in washed out relief, even as invisibly I brought up by reactive catcher bubble field around me and saturated everything just as much in wavelengths unnoticeable to others.

I didn't want to alienate or provoke her if I didn't have to and couldn't tell if she was a hostile target or not when she made no sign any direction, but an overt threat display could discourage the ambiguous individual, yet at the same time it was deniable.

The cat wasn't having any of it, though, and scampered, retreating accordingly away from our potential adversary.

This was too much, too many things happening at once, and yet I could face them all anyway.

At once here and eastward, I registered three distinct converging presences approaching as I neared a street crossing as the buildings started trending toward a new theme of more expensive-looking apartments and no schools at all, and I cursed my own signals security stupidity while quickly backtracking and diverting to a smaller alley. If I could pick up radio pulses, then it followed that all the other Misaka could too, all thousands upon thousands of them who might or might not share a common goal with me, and sure made that suspicious with timing like this.

Simultaneously here and at my overall center, a small army seemed to issue forth from every street I could see at the northeastern face of the partially collapsed burnt husk of the upper facility from my positions throughout it. Anchoring each formation was a big, blocky, squash-nosed truck that for a fleeting moment raised confused flickerings of Star Wars ideas at their Republic colour scheme, the same dull red and bland grey painting them, with a white stripe separating the bottom half from above save for the cabin roofs for each truck in further dull red accented in yellow light bars atop.

Before those trucks, though, rolled—and rolled, not marched—rank upon rank of almost cute little trashcan-like obvious robots with stubby fin extensions for their wheels and single green optics, ahead of squat, bulky humanoid figures that in their case bizarrely evoked the idea of armoured krogan of a different sci-fi universe no more animesque for it. The latter were big burly things with out of place jungle-like camouflage of two-tone green on green or more aquatic shades of blue, and even the odd red-white-pink one that looked like something Fremea would wear if somehow a space marine, all the more strange looking for the prominent grey cylinders oversized and jutting up in place of helmets. That made me think drone, like some top-mounted transceiver housing, but within one of the formations, one figure stood out, actually walking, with a less exaggerated dome over a clearly flesh and blood head of a woman within, transparent save for side panels, and fitted to unmistakable sleek royal purple power armour that wouldn't have been out of place for Metroid with its bulked-up torso and shoulders.

Above it all, though, above the surrounding buildings at the back, was what truly stole my attention.

A great, eerily quiet full-on mecha smoothly glided my direction.

That... That was a Knightmare Frame.

That was a Code Geass Knightmare Frame.

...what?

The colossus in what might in better lighting have been a goldenrod yellow was somewhat blocky, but with the extended back of its torso and jutting chest, the overall size of the mecha, the distinct landspinners extending behind its chunky heels as the thing emerged into view in the flashing of the trucks' lights bright in the post-dusk gloom...

That was a Code Geass Knightmare Frame, unmistakably. There was a certain style, that made a mecha unmistakably a Knightmare Frame and not a Gundam or an Eva or the like, and that thing was it.

Was this Code Geass somehow?

Except literally nothing else pointed towards that.

All I could think of was... the fuck, dude?

I couldn't even bring myself to really think of them as possible hostile targets, just... very indeterminate and very there, as I formed relays to the armory anyway, emptying the vault out as quickly as I could.

This wasn't a Code Geass rifle, I was quite certain, as I hefted a collected arm to pass it along to my awaiting hands. At first glance, it looked the quite distinctive FN F2000, and a quick examination of the suspiciously limited markings corroborated that, notionally identifying the rifle model as F2000R, for 5.56x45mm, the complete extent, no stylised F-over-N logo, no year or serial number that I could find with a cursory inspection, patent mark, country, inspection or proofing, nothing. I was a little leery about the prospect of firing a rifle that didn't seem to have proof marks, actually. What it did have, though, was an unmistakable sense that, unlike the Walters P99... now this thing here was a 2100 firearm!

...and this wasn't, I noticed, as I paused, letting me go around me to keep ferrying the armaments as I took advantage of my numbers to pick up and examine a pistol from a big foam-lined case of them. This was another Browning-style pistol, bigger than the P99, one of a seeming infinite variety of uninspiring Colt 1911 derivatives little different than every other one and no doubt sure to have diehard fans somewhere who would still rave over how it was the best thing ever anyway. Oddly enough, though—oddly normally enough—this was in fact a Colt pistol according to the engraving on the side, all the normal markings present for once, but...

I snorted.

It was just another 1911 if a nicer one than some and not as much as others, with factory-perfect finish to go with finer grip panels with a nod to ergonomics than might be expected and perfectly adequate sights for an era demanding a high standard, along with a short section of Picatinny rail built into the frame ahead of the trigger guard for a flashlight or laser and, apparently, the name.

Colt Rail Gun, it said.

Heh, shitty puns. This was dumb. A Misaka could shoot something, with her Rail Gun.

They were still a 1911s, though, and I didn't have any way to practically carry them in my hospital gowns, when the rifles were better anyway.

So, so much better!

I couldn't help the eager low chuckling giggle as en masse I checked the unfamiliar rifles' bolts and safeties, inserted magazines, and charged rounds home. Even little opportunity as I had to examine the rifles, this thing was a mechanical work of art—that had to be a paratrooper's fever dream come true with the collapsing folding that somehow managed to make French submachine guns look uninspired!—rendered in some kind of fancy extra-hard polymer completely unfamiliar to me for a veritable featherweight snappy, responsive rifle even with its pretty heavy-profile barrel no doubt excellent for precision, and it had a built-in rangefinder and fire control computer! There was an emitter-sensor thing just above the unusual integrated squared-off suppressor, and the optics, the optics...! And I didn't even know what to make of the stock, but there was some kind of exotic recoil-dampening going on with gas pistons from what I could tell.

These were just really nifty engineering! One test with an empty chamber even revealed that they actually had a genuinely not just adequate but good trigger pull. From a bullpup! I didn't even know of any platform besides the MDRx that had tackled that, and Desert Tech had spent enormous effort to accomplish the feat when usually the inclusion of a transfer bar or other linkage to make a trigger in one place actuate mechanics somewhere else entirely tended to make such a trigger a squishy, squishy thing with inordinate take-up and reset length.

And I had dozens and dozens of them.

Unless the cartridges themselves were some kind of futuristic exotic shenanigans, which didn't look the case when the ammunition seemed entirely typical if unhelpfully unmarked, I actually had serious doubts that any intermediate-caliber cartridge would be of much use at all on hard targets like the drones or power armour or whatever approached, but in a way, I kind of didn't care.

It also helped that they weren't alone.

For one, rifle system aside, many of these had grenade launchers! I hoped they were as straightforward to operate as they looked, but yet even they took a back seat to the real star pieces of the arsenal.

The ammunition was what had first clued me in, when the rifles had been packaged up.

Big, big bullet for big, big guns was the .50 BMG.

A big, big gun was the Barret M82, giant arrowhead muzzle brake and all.

And I had several of them.

Or, uh, well, I had several of some alternate-universe totally copyright-free-to-show rifle with the most metal name for an anti-materiel rifle I could imagine: Metal Eater MX stood out prominently stamped on the side of each instrument of ruin, right above the three-position fire-selector.

Safe. One bullet. Fully-automatic...

I giggled nervously now, just thinking about it as I lugged the heavy firearms as so much crew-served weapons. I had never actually fired .50 BMG before. I wasn't entirely sure how to work around the tiny little issue of getting broken in half by the recoil. I wasn't big girls; the Metal Eater MX (it really was just an amazingly hammy name) was, by contrast, not so small, and I didn't even want to know what full-auto fire from a monster like that would do to my shoulder. A prone position just eating the full force of it was right out. I might be able to literally fly with that kind of repeated recoil!

It could sure do a better job of messing up crunchy things, though. For once, the ammunition wasn't effectively sanitised, and I didn't know what it was—because apparently everybody was just supposed to memorise everything out of the factory or something—but it was the biggest, honkiest shooty bit I'd ever seen for .50 BMG stuffed into the distinctive casing, a thumb-like nugget of almost-translucent material similar in feel to the body of the smaller rifles and ridged with presumable split lines along the length to suggest a saboted projectile or maybe some kind of breakaway liner for a futuristic micro-missile or something, but the whole thing gave the impression of a comically oversized version of the original Lebel cartridge before the French adopted a spitzer bullet.

Hm.

Actually...

Quickly, I reprioritised, wishing my more reasonably sized rifles had slings and ripping into more rebar with slicing plasma arcs.

The Metal Eater MX, dramatic emphasis mandatory, was in essence a magazine-fed machine gun, albeit one awkwardly defying convenient classification when decidedly not in a cartridge for a light machine gun or general purpose one, but otherwise built like one, if not for the fact that heavy machine guns and small magazines—bottom-feeding ones, no less—just did not go together. It was like a BAR scaled up all the more ridiculously. The carry handle was utterly useless for my strength when the weapon may as well have been an anti-tank rifle for normal people and it really was a team effort anyway, but even though it hung down beneath the rifle, the wraparound, side mounting of it coming from the top offered generous room between the normal bipod and the magazine well for the concerningly unreliable, cringingly suboptimal materials to quickly improvise mounting the rifles to heavy tripods of pieced together rebar making triangular frame pieces, with big levers for aiming the whole thing as well as making them easier to move into position from just out of sight if everything suddenly went hot.

Crew-served machine guns indeed.

No, crews-served machine guns, I mentally amended. I remembered some conversations I had once had with an old man who had actually been in squads working alongside BARs and handled it, and historical doctrinal differences I had read about German and American unit composition, how the Germans employed single light machine guns in infantry support roles for having the excellent MG 34 that served very ably indeed as a universal one with its efficient lightweight construction for a machine gun and easy use of cases for small belts, whereas the American analogue was built around compensating for a lack of any sort of proper light machine gun at all with the accurately named Browning mere Automatic Rifle simply being used in groups with large numbers of supporting troops toting reloads because the Americans could simply afford to do so. With only ten-round magazines for automatic fire, I would have to coordinate guns together, not that that much would be hard, actually.

Still, if I were to maybe group my wannabe machine guns in teams of four, actual positioning be damned and perhaps actually indeed better distributed, it might be something along the lines of only three machine guns able to properly pin down and chew up targets at a time, even if with better redundancy and sustainability.

On the other hand, three machine guns spewing fire downrange, and a very short range when the purple woman and her robo-legion and trucks were all of two streets away and closing by my hopefully inconspicuous peeking.

They still might not necessarily be able to do an ideal job of eating the metal of the robots or space marines or whatever they were, but I didn't imagine sustained heavy gunfire would do them any favours, even if plinking away at the Knighmare Frame was right out. Moreover, though, I couldn't deny that, more and more as I considered it, the firearms seemed more like a supplement and complement in any potential confrontation here. Maybe the approaching forces might be really well insulated or something, but good luck staying that way under a concentrated hail of dakka, and I felt like I could throw... a lot... of lightning, I thought heavily.

A part of me...

I didn't at all relish the prospect of some kind of fight to the death, and was kind of dimly surprised not to be terrified out of my mind, and yet none the less I still also couldn't help a sort of morbid curiosity, what could I do if I really cut loose and pushed myself, to my absolute limits and beyond, put my guts into doing my best to unleash a fury to make every Zeus and Perun, any Indra or Thor in wrath salute the thundering blast.

And I felt I could do it.

If I really pushed myself... I had a lot of me to push.

And that was why I truly did not really fear, I thought, actually, as the bizarre collection seemingly almost stepping out of a multicross mashup rolled steadily nearer and nearer, big mecha looming ever larger.

Because as almost a hundred strong I readied positions within and throughout the husk of the partially collapsed ground floor and wrecked basement of the upper laboratory, and as another such force of similar strength only the lesser for the lack of firearms did I began to quickly, quietly dart between nooks and obscuring walls, moving to completely encircle. With the cat lamentably unable to be held as a priority anymore under the circumstances, I had nearly half of me free to position, and I was already away from where I wouldn't be able to leave unnoticed and didn't want to.

The Knightmare Frame would be the biggest obstacle if it came to a fight; the forces it overshadowed seemed like they might well get cut down quickly by focused machine gun fire and volleys of grenades, even if the annoying habit of unmarked ammunition did leave some room for doubt about my grenade launchers' efficacy, and I had the numbers to hold the facility long enough to keep winnowing them down unless they had a really good trick, I reckoned, except the Knightmare Frame was that, and could just charge straight at me if it had to, crossing the distance in only a moment or three and summarily demolishing what was left of the building. I didn't see any obvious Slash Harkens anywhere on it, not at the torso, hip area, wrists, none of it, but suspiciously bulky as its arms were, I wouldn't put it past the thing for its whole forearms to be able to launch Guren-style or similar to the Tristan, and the similar-looking protrusions jutting up over its shoulders seemed liable to unfold straight over the shoulder for a big cannon or something.

I started pondering formula adaptations.

If all hell broke loose, the heavens would break loose first upon the mecha.

In the midst of making ready for a possible violent confrontation in one place, though, I had been trying to avoid another elsewhere.

I couldn't tell if it was too successful or not nearly enough, as I hopefully stealthily stole up another fire escape stairway that made getting up off the street out of sight so convenient if able to give oneself a boost up, and found myself face to face with myself.

Almost.

This rooftop was already occupied by Misaka.

Three for three, they arrayed themselves before me evenly spaced in line in the dead center of the large open space shaped by the jutting island in the middle with a door leading down into the housing complex and a pair of narrow cylindrical vent pipes with sheet metal caps.

Three identical girls with one face mine but for a slight difference of age.

No, that wasn't right.

These Misaka awaited with implacable calm, an utterly uncaring, cold serenity.

It wasn't the goggles perched atop their heads, slightly bulky like night vision optics or perhaps like welding ones for bright electrical arcs with green-tinted glass.

These Misaka looked just like me with a haircut the day after tomorrow days after tomorrow if slightly better fitted into the same beige vest over white blouse and slightly worse of the grey skirt with a hint of navy a touch too short on them, the same big cushy socks and neat leather shoes, but that face...

Alien.

We were nothing alike.

And then the central of the eerily off, profoundly other Misaka spoke.

"'This Misaka wonders who that Misaka is,' Misaka asks Misaka and Misaka and Misaka each in turn with confusion how Misaka can not know Misaka when every Misaka is supposed to be familiar to Misaka," the Misaka declared in a voice as dead and stripped of all feeling and emotion as desiccated corpse.

I shuddered, and knew not why.

It was just... wrong.

There was something very wrong with these Misaka. That soulless inflection, had they been made like this, or had it been done to them?

More unnervingly, though, the way she spoke, what she spoke, not just the tone...

Unwelcome memories welled up from what I had read of the family of projects that included my creation, of how Misaka were infants at "birth" and made ready for deployment, of my own recurring unnatural-seeming almost-déjà-vu, of a young woman's voice, But they're not ready!

I... I was me.

Right?

I remembered... I remembered me.

I didn't know how that became this but I remembered me!

Didn't I?

But then why did I remember things I shouldn't remember?

I tried to take a step back, to get away, but I couldn't bring myself to do anything as I looked each Misaka in the eyes, those blank, crushingly apathetic eyes.

Did they remember me?

I wasn't them, but I... I had been cloned from the original Misaka, and these people here, they had psychics and telepathy and seeming ways to make a mind be programmed with whatever was simply plugged into it.

The way she talked, I just couldn't... I didn't want to accept.

Would I be like her, like these other Misaka if not for my immediate rebellion? Was this right here what I had feared the logical conclusion of the researchers being given any opportunity?

Revulsion and rage and horror and a stormy mess I couldn't express wanted to burst out of me, and yet the strongest chord the only clear thing I could grasp was sorrow as I tried to answer the other Misaka.

I wasn't sure there was even a point.

I wasn't sure they were even people anymore, or just a drone, stripped away of all that would be unnecessary and get in the way of obedient dolls only alive enough to die as fuel for a sacrifice.

These girls deserved... not this. Never this.

"This Misaka would not wish to be so bold as to assume misconception on the part of another Misaka," I croaked, mirroring the other Misaka in speaker. "But yet finds herself lacking the insight to know if perhaps a less than ideal informational availability may contribute to possible uncertainties. Th—"

"'Gamma-9-9-2-1-dash-4-2-4-2-1-8-6-6-dash-5-2-6,' Misaka hurriedly interrupts Misaka with the appropriate clearance code seeking immediate answer to the pressing question as quickly as possible," the middle Misaka cut in.

Something... felt like maybe it tried to have meaning in my thoughts as the other Misaka uttered her syllables, like a forgotten dream with a whisper of ephemeral right and wrong and right-and-wrong and a neither where... Something.

A more grounded sickening dread of validation of fears followed, and again the unreasonable offense when I had learned of my pricetag at those who made me doing a lackluster job of it.

Misaka were programmed.

I had been programmed.

Shoddily.

Moreover, though, this Misaka here thought that I should recognise a code—evidently be programmed to recognise a code—and that she should have authorisation to know something, which I could only assume was due to some compartmentalisation between generations or sub-projects. Season III was supposed to be a successor and direct competitor to the earlier clones, wasn't it? I wouldn't be surprised if the overarching project's actual regulations were for the second-generation clones to be ignorant of the third, and quite possibly their staffs in the same position.

Of course, I gave a mental shrug as elsewhere I peeked from a dark splitting crack in a wall to take a distance reading just in front of the leading row of possibly-laser-sensing cute trashcan-bots, that sounded like a possible reason in and of itself to spill secrets on principle, maybe. But then, if the third generation was competition, if I was their competition, might that incite some kind of resentment or maybe outright hostilities? These other Misaka were blatantly either brainwashed or outright mind-controlled, and didn't even need necessarily be the ones feeling careers and future glories threatened. Maybe greater dissension might be some advantage, but keeping other parties in the dark about me sounded like all the more crucial advantage when I just didn't know enough yet.

"Authorisation not recognised," I replied flatly, truthfully, in a voice that suddenly made my flesh shiver, accidentally far too close to an echo of that of the other Misaka. "This Misaka might be of greater aid to another Misaka under other circumstances, yet regrettably would unfortunately lack the ability to offer any clarification on certain matters as they presently stand."

Three simultaneous blinks, once, twice.

Silence.

The trio of other Misaka exchanged looks as it was my turned to be perplexed.

Huh?

"'Did Misaka 19056 receive confirmation through the Misaka Network?' Misaka asks uncertainly, wondering why highly relevant information on the Level 6 Shift Project would be withheld from Misaka," the middle Misaka uttered tonelessly... confusingly... at the Misaka to her right, who nodded mechanically.

"'Yes, Misaka verified Misaka 10199's provided clearance code and lack of appropriate communications protocols with the Misaka Network by Misaka as Misaka knows Misaka knows, having noticed Misaka check herself," the queried clone replied in the still night air, then pivoted her creepily slack gaze to me. "'This Misaka further wishes to know why that Misaka has not followed appropriate communications protocols as she should,' Misaka adds to Misaka while hoping that Misaka establishes connection soon to provide answers and avoid uncertain possible complications."

Hang on, checking?

And those numbers...

I frowned, and as my avatar in front of that Misaka presented a question of my own.

"This Misaka lacks to offer but confusion of her own as to another Misaka's question of communications protocols under a belief that it may refer to a possible discrepancy of expectations between parties, and assurance that she has no networking irregularities as she would consider such, albeit with caveats that some hypothetical lack of awareness might in fact reflexively preclude, and that how this Misaka would consider such may not necessarily be reflective of definitions to be posed by another Misaka."

The Misaka who hadn't spoken raised her hand somehow slowly but immediately after I finished, unenthusiastic and hurried, only lifting her forearm and bringing my train of thought to a stuttering halt.

Uh...

Everyone looked to her, and she kept staring blankly ahead, awaiting hand at shoulder level.

"...yes?" I dared to prompt from in front of her.

"'This Misaka has lost track of which Misaka is Misaka without effective communications protocols,' Misaka admits in the hopes that Misaka and Misaka and Misaka will either connect to the Misaka Network to avoid confusing Misaka any further or accept temporary additional manual filters proposed as Misaka Type-Chibi 1, Misaka Type-Chibi 2, and Misaka Type-Chibi 3 as another Misaka annotates for each Misaka for the Misaka Network and Misaka and Misaka along with this Misaka all indeed adopt similar practice."

I balked.

What was it with people labeling me chibi?!

Both other Misaka nodded mechanically again in unison as if pretending to go through the motions of something only heard about, and the middle one offered another dull utterance.

"'Misaka 10199 seconds Misaka 12812's proposal,' Misaka 10199 encourages to try to convince the unilaterally decided Misaka Type-Chibi 1 to be more accommodating now that discrepancies have been made manageable if somewhat clumsy and redundantly redundant to Misaka 10199."

Hurriedly, I waved my hands, all six.

"Th-That's not necessary and entirely inaccurate!" I stammered, and then everything got even more flustering when Oniichan noticed as I couldn't help the slight reaction. Curse shounen protagonists' attention acuity!

"Mm?" The brushing paused behind me.

"Nothing! I'm just talking to some other people right now.

"Ah." The brushing resumed.

In the slight breeze atop the roof cool on my skin in the summer night, the other three Misaka exchanged wordless glances again, reinforcing my building suspicion that the other Misaka were unlike me in further ways. These other Misaka really did seem... "separate but not quite" somehow. Was this what the writing I had read from Doctor Kihara meant about improved networking?

Were they, so to speak, a Misaka and a Misaka and a Misaka, to put it in certain terms, with serial numbers that actually meant something?

Did they maybe actively use their power to transmit communications between each other?

It seemed kinda crude in some way for a telepathic network of clones.

It made me feel a little better about myself, and that promptly cancelled itself out.

Each older Misaka eyed me thrice again, then.

"'What is meant by that?' Misaka 10199 asks directly, quite certain that considerable clarification is in fact needed, and with growing concern that... an undefined subject," she seemed to slowly decide. "May be making a potentially dangerous mistake without the Administrator's guidance for evaluations already better considered."

"There is neither desire nor incentive to divulge that information," I informed Misaka 10199 feeling testy at the other Misaka's continued pushiness with absolutely nothing offered in exchange for telling her what she wanted to know, or, more likely, I surmised, someone behind her, if she even really counted as "her" in the first place, much as I hoped but couldn't find myself to expect so. This "Administrator" certainly sounded an intriguing lead about a network of telepathically linked clones, and the sort of potential slip not to mirror.

And then the three Misaka before me once again did their thing of unmistakable silent communication between each other to which I was not privy. It went on long enough for me to begin to get nervous, facing them down.

Something imperceptible changed.

"Misaka emphasises that this is for Misaka's own good," Misaka 10199 uttered, and as one, the other Misaka raised right hands and drove lightning at me.

I slammed triple interdiction fields of permuted guidance channels across the rooftop before she even finished her last emotionless word, dividing the space between us and catching a snarling, snapping net of writhing bright tendrils.

Damn their Administrator and damn all this wretched city's researchers!

I hesitated, unsure what to do, whether to try for the fire escape while I held the other Misaka at bay or somehow try containing the older and more experienced clones in flickering shadows gone wild, and they took the initiative, mutterings I couldn't catch over the crackle and hum and my own surging blood in my ears heralding the trio that drove straight for me and sprinted wide to either flank.

I raced through the formulae needed and duplicated what was needed to throw up twin bridge-like walls in brilliant loops between me and each flanking Misaka to sustain as I charged the middle one three on one, straight through as my only way out. Holding back incoherent screaming that wanted to rip free, I dove at her in a coordinated tackle.

Somehow, impossibly, the other Misaka just wasn't where she needed to not be, and slipped effortlessly through me.

Shit!

I tumbled in heaps across the hard rooftop, rolling ungainly to back up to the island structure with the inevitably locked door heading down into the building. Stupid, stupid, stupid Best! Of course they knew how to fight and were bullshit at it! What kind of superpowered anime supersoldier girls weren't?

I started panicking as my sheets of lightning slackened to return the rooftop to muted gloom and all three Misaka prowled forth in a low predatory gait that screamed even to an idiot that they were some kind of martial arts masters now keyed for a fight, and again they spat snapping thunderbolts that I too again caught and held at bay.

Except the other Misaka didn't stop.

The lightning kept coming, stayed ignited across the air welling with the sharp stink of ozone as its sources hesitantly advanced before the snapping cascading backlash I couldn't even dare to look at directly.

If I could... If I could...

I crudely hacked together pieces of my capture bubble into the principles for my standoff shield of clash-catching redirection, and—

And for reasons that shouldn't have been any surprise at all, it was like looking into a distorted mirror.

The chains of reactions and patterns of formulae were better than my own but familiar at their core.

As I extrapolated the reactions of the lightning crashing and flowing into my shielding field, of the guidance channels putting into and intermeshing with it, I in turn could back-engineer what would make those.

I grit my teeth and shoved my own figures against imaginary ones that had to be there!

And then I blinked, in the still silence of the summer night underscored by the distant soft rushing whisper of cars and six heavy sets of breathing from girls I could scarce make out in the city's glow.

Sparkings flared in stuttering pops from around the fingers of one of the Misaka trying to outpace my counter-changes within the field I protruded out, and I clamped down on them.

The staticky tendrils winked out, smothered out of existence.

Massively greater and more refined strength of Personal Reality.

Extreme gains compared to the earlier clones.

Superior.

Doctor Kihara's writings snuck into my thoughts once more.

"If—"

All three Misaka sprang forward in interruption, fists drawn back.

I blasted them with a spherical wave of coruscating lightning that insinuated through sudden and suddenly overwhelmed resistance, with triple thunderbolts inspired by their own work that almost missed each Misaka pivoting with inhuman alacrity, with a would-be blindingly bright flash of no longer radio-wave pulsing that still flared red-pink through closed eyelids, and a following chaotic deluge of hopeful white noise tripping across every sort of inter-Misaka broadcasting I could think of.

In a single heartbeat, each Misaka fell silent and spasming to the roof in jerky twitches, wispy hair askew and crackling as little static arcs continued to play over them, and I recoiled, trying not to scream or be sick.

It... It was hideously easy to...

To...

H-Had I killed them?

I culled the lingering sparks in reversing inversions that unmade them.

They stopped moving, and for a terrifying instant I couldn't move either, before in staggered sequence my reaction field registered a change in them in time with the odd alien sense of somehow foreign me-ness coming from them, and they rolled over, still jerkily, before beginning to push themselves back up.

Biting my lips, I threw out a burst of new static tendrils that invaded into the struggling forms past momentary pushback and sent each girl collapsing hard once more in weak seizures amidst the blue-white flash reflected off the rounded sheet metal covers atop the twin pipes jutting from the roof. Slowly, agonisingly slowly, each Misaka still tried to drag arms shuddering in random paroxysms beneath themselves anyway.

Just stop!

Stop doing this to them!

They wouldn't stop and I needed help!

"Oniichan, how do I safely knock someone unconscious?" I asked with forced calm removed from the action, and somehow felt him focus and sharpen, not quite tensing behind me as the smooth strokes through my hair hitched and I turned to look up back up at him.

"Wha- No," Oniichan interrupted himself lowly with a slight pursed expression and eyes tight. "You're in a fight some... somewhere else, right now?" He asked in a tone that made something twist ugly in my stomach at the forced calm I could tell I put in his own voice.

I nodded, swallowing hard and pulsing another staggering shock into the other Misaka who just wouldn't stop!

Stop it stop it stop it stop it!

I wracked my brains in the instant before Oniichan spoke again, what felt like slow-motion with all slowed to a crawl save my racing thoughts, trying to come up with something! I remembered an old documentary I had seen ages ago back before... before, that had gone over how the brain processed language and a test showing the influence of strong electromagnetic fields; a sustained field at the back of the head for half an hour had been able to make the volunteer guy temporarily unable to read what he saw, but he had still been able to understand Braille writing with his sense of touch, except if the field was put to the left side of the head above the ear, for most people the meaning of tactile sense as actual language could be impaired just as seen writing was. Could I do something like that to paralyse the other Misaka from being able to move? But where was the motor cortex?!

I couldn't detect anything I could jam or interrupt—the Misaka were either controlled by some exotic vector or didn't need active control to be compelled to keep struggling.

How much current was safe before risking permanent damage or heart arrythmia?

I couldn't make them stop!

And then Oniichan broke in, continuing. "Just give 'em a good smack to the head, Best-chan," he asserted not quite hurriedly. "Make sure to hold back, unless they're really tough, but just smacking them in the head if they're open for it is what I usually do."

I wanted to scream, again, as I gripped the chair I sat in- the soup bowl- the edge of the table- the grips of the rifles.

Just smack them in the head.

Except this was an anime world. That was how it usually worked!

Each girl still shifted slightly, the unwavering drive behind them still not relenting, a-and was steam coming off one of them? I couldn't tell and never wanted to be sure.

I stalked over to each of the other Misaka, feeling an executioner with the faintly twitching, raggedly and terrifyingly shallowly breathing clones at my feet, dirty as one driftingly turned unfocused eyes up in a ponderous effort to meet mine.

"It wasn't a fight," I whispered to Oniichan from across the table, suddenly no longer able to stomach the soup before me.

He turned to look at me in the corner of my eye, seeming to catch himself with a slight doubletake back at me in the chair with my back to him, but I couldn't bring myself to do more than stare ahead as the words crept out.

"It... It wasn't a fight. It's already over, was over in a moment. I don't know how to fight, but th-they..."

I couldn't breathe.

"Oniichan, they never had a chance, and they can't stop!"

Somehow I had turned to be looking straight into his eyes through a watery veil, and then a hand grasped mine, squeezing and real.

A slight movement of the shoulder in one of the Misaka rose and fell slack once more.

Another sluggishly attempted her power, and I didn't even have to do anything as the guidance channel fields around her hand lost coherence and twisted apart.

But they kept trying.

I won.

This didn't feel like victory.

Just... hollow.

And yet, somehow, it beat though the simultaneous crippling anxiety bordering on hysteria and almost giddy, nearly painful apprehension I had been stewing in previously as a part of the city away as I had been facing down the two women come to meet me, at once struggling not to bolt from one whilst deliberately, openly stepping out from the sooty rubble and approaching the more futuristically-armoured woman in purple to gain time and head the force off at a distance when the little cylindrical robots began to spread laterally as if going to start encircling or establishing a perimeter around me while risking avoiding my own less obvious encirclement around them.

While elsewhere I sat back down with Fremea in a calmly noisy improvised audience hall with our lamentably reserved plates and elsewhere still I ran away from the surrounding trainyard area where I had been shadowing myself on the way there to abandon all stealth and run as fast as I could back to where I needed me, while far removed from that I sat in a cozy kitchenette sharing a bowl of Oniichan's grandmother's chicken noodle soup from a can with myself—it was a merchandising thing that let him share it with everyone and get them both paid for it, he'd proudly informed me—and getting my hair brushed as I spoke and he listened, I readied for war.

My act paid off.

At some unseen signal, every single unit aside from the trucks and the woman in purple froze utterly still, even the Knightmare Frame, somewhat surprisingly, and the trucks but braked to a halt a moment later.

I walked out towards the woman, still mentally plotting out how I might alter my original formula for a field guiding an arcing electron channel to scale up in more ways than one, and trying not to wince as I strode barefoot across a mostly clear but gritty sidewalk and tarmac still warm from the summer sun already set.

The armoured woman headed straight for me in turn, giving no sign of awareness to my encircling behind her as I took up a position some ways behind her and the closer big truck in an alcove where a little wall wrapped around a place for a slightly smelly garbage bin, and kept quickly creeping past me on light feet for my own wrapping line around them all. An impressive figure in my hospital gown I did not make by my estimation as I watched myself approach the small army notionally alone.

Just to the south of there I certainly felt more than notionally alone before the other woman, though.

The woman with hair to match the other's armour and armour of her own decidedly less sophisticated-looking bore a calm, even expression that I absolutely wasn't going to take on faith under the circumstances. She and the black car on the other side of the street with windows rolled down and three shadowed figures—all in the same or similar ballistic armour as the ponytailed woman if what I could make out—were only slightly less suspicious than the possibly, hopefully, unrelated group coming in from the northeast with, I was starting to be able to make out there as I picked up a magnified view through a scope, a less than cuddly-sounding acronym name for a long-form name suggestive of "Multi Active Rescue" maybe being some rapid-response force or the like, possibly for something like being the reactive vanguard if this was a world in which Academy City got targeted by some kind of alien invasions or monsters periodically crashing in or something, given the chosen war axe iconography in lieu of a fireman's one or such.

This place seemed keen to throw around symbols. The hall-monitor-street-monitor-whatever kids I'd seen previously sported a stereotypical heater shield symbol of a protector, the defensive icon; the styling upon the transverse lines was similar to the design across this woman's body armour, even if the W-like—or maybe it might be more accurate to call it a sideways E—just meant nothing to me, for good or ill, except, actually, that maybe the woman here was in some way sort of more "normal" than this MAR party.

I considered that for an almost panicked moment as she kept facing me with that easy almost-smile, standing up with the cat gone. Was there maybe some kind of rivalry, regulars at odds with elites, or jurisdictional friction? But that didn't mean that they couldn't be after the same prize, or out to deny it to the other, and they were both so pointedly late for an actual emergency response, with blatant attempts at coercion and manipulation.

She took a slow step.

I immediately matched it back.

"An unknown party of spurious credibility would do well to remain where she stands or die where she stands," I declared flatly, ready to bolt, or fling a bolt at her, and not knowing if I was bluffing or how much. If she was an enemy, then she was supposed to be eliminated, but I just didn't know when this woman wasn't going to just come out and say it and I couldn't trust her one way or another if she denied it. I couldn't risk actually extending a guidance channel her way primed to fill with lightning though no matter how roiling anxiety demanded it, lest she perhaps have powers of her own and react accordingly to what ultimately would be a sword at her neck.

She stopped, holding herself evenly, but the shadowed figures in the dim interior of the car across the street moved, and I nearly snapped out a thunderbolt before I could even grasp the reflexive formula snapping into place before she raised a waving dismissive hand back behind her, not looking away from me.

"I am not going to hurt you," the woman illuminated by the streetlights claimed in a calm-sounding tone, and somehow I wanted to trade places with myself as across the city I simultaneously faced another standoff with not quite myself. There- Here, at least, I had some idea of... of anything, dealing with the other clones awaiting me, but here- there...

No, I... I-I could use this, to a degree, couldn't I? The other Misaka, the project had the backing of the highest offices with the full support of Academy City from what I had been able to gather. The woman here couldn't not know of the thousands upon thousands of Misaka and their sanctioned creation if she was part of this places formal structure, right? Even if she didn't necessarily know the precise details. I still had no idea if the Misaka who had hit the facility earlier had been trying to raze a Misaka production plant on orders or in rebellion or if she had meant to hit the place beneath it or never even known of it or would have destroyed it if she'd found my facility in the process of the above's wrecking, but there was an approved Misaka faction of some description, there had to be!

"This Misaka regrettably lacks means to corroborate any assertion by another party at this time, she attempts to explain in light of a believed current disruption of normal procedures," I tried in emulation of the other Misaka on the housing block's roof in what I could only surmise was some kind of behavioural control against duplicity over the screaming urge to flee for the safety of myself at the near edge of my enveloping line a scant block or two from where I stood, infinitely far away if the people in the car pursued assuming I could even get away from the woman at all.

The tall woman in ballistic armour moved her head slightly, a minor gesture of thoughtfulness, not really cocking it, but it was enough to translate into the revealing movement of a ponytail far longer than I had initially presumed.

"I do have my ID, if that would help?" She offered.

O-Oh?

Hesitantly, I jerked my head in a nod. That actually might really help a lot. I really did have no way of corroborating anything, but it would have information on it, information that I might be able to use to frame some kind of context about everything beyond Academy City as mad science and murder land.

"I'm going to take it out now, okay?" She said, and unhurriedly, smoothly reached into a pocket at her side. A slim dark something withdrew, indistinct in the poor light, but maybe something like a wallet or the little leather flip-thing I didn't have a name for that usually included an ID card and sometimes additional badge.

Then, "Do you want me to hand it to you, or would you like me to put it on the ground or slide it over to you or something?"

I swallowed, suddenly intensely aware of sweating and feeling clammy and cold in my hospital gown.

I wasn't about to approach her, not get close enough that this woman here might compound the lesson I was currently learning elsewhere as one of the other Misaka demonstrated that this was a place where anime martial arts absolutely applied and I just as absolutely wasn't cut out for it.

I... I couldn't think! I... I...

She bent and put the small dark rectangular thing on the sidewalk at her feet and backed steadily away from it.

"One cannot help but f-find a certain degree of curiosity as what might be the name and nature of an encountered individual, what circumstances could bring them to a meeting," I got out mostly steadily, cautiously darting forward and snatching up the object once she stopped on the other side of the street just behind her accompanying vehicle.

I held it up, trying to somehow read it whilst simultaneously watching the woman—"Yomikawa Aiho" according to the plastic card in its transparent sleeve pocket in the top half of what indeed was the flip-open leather case thing I had wondered—with only an uncharacteristic single pair of eyes for the deed.

"My name is Yomikawa Aiho," the so-dubbed Yomikawa replied, raising her voice slightly but yet maintaining an even tone. "I'm with Anti-Skill," as the ID claimed in big, bold declaration across it, which meant nothing to me but more questions, especially when names in anime setting tended to get slightly odd in any case... so thought the not out of place Best in demonstration of the point, I thought. "We're... sort of like police, you could say, teachers who also volunteer to help keep order and respond when people need help. I teach PE when I'm not in the uniform, though I think maybe it might be a few years before I'd be able to see you in my high school class."

I mulled over that, trying to dissect her words for any implications, along with what I could glean from the ID. Date of birth, a Branch 73, blood type, it wasn't much, other than at least that the date system wasn't something unusual and that she wasn't officially some inhuman alien that only looked exactly like a human.

"Is there something you'd like me to call you?" The alleged teacher/law enforcement adult filling adult roles in a city of schools asked then after a moment. "Misaka, was it?"

That made me wary, and I couldn't help tensing. Was she deliberately being evasive, or just following a topic that didn't have to do with why she was here? And then too I realised to an ugly clench of cold weight in my chest that I hadn't actually continued emulating the other Misaka now twitching helplessly in front of me immediately after deciding to do so.

I contemplated the efficacy of projecting my illuminating plasma arcs webbing my hands into a broad projecting scythe at Yomikawa and the car together if it turned out she was trying to trick me. Belatedly, I hurriedly projected radar pulses too, but found nothing I didn't expect bouncing back around me.

"An address would reasonably depend considerably upon the relationship between parties," I not-quite challenged. "And yet that itself would in turn bear upon why address is made in the first place with one in a position and having need to address another."

I couldn't be sure in the long shadows and stunted illumination, but I thought maybe Yomikawa's cheeks actually pinked slightly across the street at that.

"A, um, ahem, associate of mine," she cleared her throat. "Passed along something concerning. He thought maybe I might be interested in taking a look around here."

Frantic thoughts buzzed in my heads at her words as I tried to piece together a chain of events. Had- no. But- Potentially. Tip-off. Someone I had met or had met me; none of the researchers fit; the delinqu— Bad boy and cop teacher, one of the older delinquents at the assembly here, he was some kind of double agent maybe turned real but complicated by his history or otherwise had a thing going on with Yomikawa across lines! But practically everyone in the temporarily repurposed warehouse here had paid attention to me at least a little bit at one point or another!

"It was concerning," Yomikawa agreed with herself, breaking into my train of thought, and voice taking on something not quite like an edge, not quite directed at me. "I'm not unfamiliar with the area, actually." She slowly tossed a thumb at the car by her. "My unit and I, we actually had to help shut down a place not far from here where some people were... were really breaking the law," she finished heavily. "You can actually see it from here, over there."

Yomikawa extended an accusing arm not quite down the street, in the direction of where a blocky tower longer than it was wide stood several stories above the surrounding architecture past one of the unusually prevalent wind turbines. I couldn't make it out much from here, but the place even in the night distance looked somewhat dilapidated, devoid entirely of its own lit interior and points of light for one; I had a better angle from several other positions, and could make out that indeed the place appeared run down and outright abandoned to neglect, with several outright holes puncturing the exterior to enshadowed pockmarks.

Shut down...

Yomikawa's words rang in my head as I stared down the small army of machines and the limp yet still struggling other clones what might have been a world away.

Could... Could I dare with this potential ally?

The idea that this MAR group and Anti-Skill could have some dynamic of jurisdictional conflict and adversarial opposition of different types of legitimacy, it was a tempting hope, I couldn't deny.

As a single avatar, could I dare a leap of faith?

No, and as the littler trashcan robots began to split at their leading edge and begin rolling my direction only demanded all the further, the real question was would I dare?

Would I dare to grasp at my best?

"To be known as Misaka Best would be a boon, and so would the help of Anti-Skill," I replied with a polite bow over the thunder of my heart.

The subdued smile of my new ally until proven otherwise stretched lopsidedly in a relieved expression as I handed her ID back to her.

One down, one to go.

The other woman, who seemed to be the leader of MAR or at least this unit of it, carried a smile that seemed at once stronger and more feigned; maybe I was biased, but the utterly sincere-looking warmth in her face felt entirely too perfect to be real as we approached one another... and I felt inordinately justified in my bias.

"Hello, Miss," she spoke with a smooth, professional customer-service tone when we came to several paces apart and I could see the finer details of her smooth, sleek power armour that fit snugly around its occupant in a purple shell of futuristic tech that belonged with the kind of rifles I had inconspicuously trained around her and the automatons in her company. That voice made my skin crawl; no one talked like that unless they either absolutely did not care in the slightest about someone they were only pretending to be polite towards, or actually despised utterly for bothering them with existing in front of them and requiring their attention.

Considering this came from someone who brought an army to the aftermath of a clandestine project to make superpowered clones for war and blood sacrifice long past any alarms going off and falling silent, as the first response... Justified bias indeed.

"This Misaka would be obliged to inform those whom would approach that intrusion within the restricted area is prohibited, and respectfully request a perimeter be maintained for their own safety that damages might be assessed and due rescue and cleanup efforts complete without potential complication or risk to civilians, Misaka cautions," I announced, holding up a warding hand in universal halting command.

The more time I could gain the better, and the more information too, for that matter, if I could afford it. I lugged several crates of ammunition into place by my improvised machine guns and where I awaited with readied grenade launchers, fervently wishing for something more pocket-friendly than hospital gowns.

I got a slight smirk in response through the purple-clad would-be intruder's prolate bubble helmet.

"That's a relief to hear," she said. "That's what Multi Active Rescue is here for."

She took a step, and I interceded.

"Multi Active Rescue would be in need of presenting valid authorisation if wishing to proceed, Misaka insists." I inserted quickly.

I caught a rolling of eyes.

And then she spoke a line of meaninglessness.

"W0423F9N0WEVZ9ODM37060EW."

I stood down, understanding with sourceless certainty the need to simply stop and wait until instructed otherwise as I preoccupied myself with my attention elsewh—

I regarded her sharply.

"Would a certain perhaps decidedly less than kind or at all wise individual just so happen to have just attempted to control this Misaka?" I asked in a clipped, hard tone, and considered my plotted figures for electromagnetic channels.

She gave me a fluid look through her transparent bubble-like helm that seemed to conflict in flickers of a mixture of emotions before finally settling on something like fond amusement.

"And I suppose you'll take exception if I say yes?"

I nodded, the picture of graciousness barefoot in a slightly untidy navy hospital gown.

"Naturally."

She snorted.

"Then no," she replied lightly.

"Ah, Misaka doesn't like liars," I told the hostile target coolly, and reached into the heavens.

 

[TacitSoliloquy]

Archive: "Thundering Dawn Event" Timestamp: 8Month18Day2317Hour CameraN5-7742 Response Failure

 

[Dragonmaster150]

Hmm, why do I get the feeling that Mikoto (Misaka Original) specifically might notice the giant lightning bolt in the sky? Because that seems like the sort of thing she might notice.

Also, Misaka best is a good nickname, definitely a contrast to Misaka Worst. I am curious as to whether this is after the Lv. 6 Shift arc, or if the project itself is still ongoing. Or have we not even hit main canon yet? [Edit:] Just doing a re-read, this is during the time when Misaka is going around destroying the facilities, so we're right in the thick of the arc.

 

[TacitSoliloquy]

Radiant fire bridged heaven and earth in wrath as I brought my will to bear in legion. Together with myself, en masse, I opened a conduit into the sky seizing the electric potential of an entire planet's atmospheric differential from as high as I could manage, beyond what I could measure, and brought it crashing down in shattering roar with all I could force within to smite the mecha.

And I kept it there.

Fingers squeezed on triggers, hands wrapped around eyes from behind as cutting radar saturated the newly birthed battlefield, near-smothered and distant thumps reverberated in hammering blows in my chests from a dozen alternating bursts of heavy fire amidst the unhearable vibration of its lesser counterparts, pushes in my hands heralded an archers' volley of primed explosives sailing into marshalled ranks, and through it all, still, the booming, howling pillar of fury ripped away the night.

I laughed.

I was terrified and furious and worried and exultant!

The incredible, liberating stretch as I pushed myself as hard as I possibly could forcing my figures ever higher, ever tighter, ever more, more, more, was a giddy exhilaration as terrifying itself as my peril for its source in my imposition upon the world, and yet it was glorious. Within the column of impossibly raging energy, I registered the mecha begin to charge me, the wrong target before the woman its master, straight over its far lesser mechanical brethren before it, and behind the mecha, all around the giant and all its compatriots, I yet channeled my grand display upon it.

Not so distant, not nearly far away enough to be distant from this, the high windows near the ceiling of the warehouse turned audience hall blazed with harsh light and people started. Oniichan tensed even before the blinds next to his door across the living room threw abrupt stark shadows. Yomikawa flinched in reflexive naked alarm a moment before she lunged and threw herself over me to bear us both to the ground with my attempt to keep a straight face instead of cackling with unsteady glee turned to my own alarmed yelp. The tenement roof with the downed clones presented an open view of the sky split apart by blinding light punching a gaping hole through thrown-back sparse cloud cover in eerie display with the darkness burned back.

Even the purple-armoured woman—nearly sneering an instant before—seemed now momentarily taken aback by the staggering, breathtaking violence screaming down from on high and lastingly manifested into existence by my combined focus, flinching just as Yomikawa and saving me from the staggered lashing grab faster than any normal human should be able to manage no matter that I had started moving before her. The clear dome of her helmet, like a glassy sphere flattened and steel-clad over her ears, even darkened in what had to be reactive polarisation, and I yanked myself back in the moment of her hampered vision, myself faster than could be done unassisted as I leveraged the same formula I had employed for tugging at metals in conjunction with a projected field to so grip.

I heaved on myself from afar, and so arced in stomach-lurching flight above the hail of automatic gunfire and salvo of hurtled shells, entirely clear of my plotted lines of fire vertically and horizontally alike, but the crushing blast of abrupt, unending thunder shaking the world from so close felt as though it threw me.

I laughed anyway with the sheer rush of sensation, not even sure if I could catch my careening with counter-balancing repulsion and not sure if I could care.

It was just so much!

The words "orbital strike" took up near-hysterical residence in at least one head as I chased the surging mecha with what I brought into being atop it, and an unapologetically narcissistic part of me could not help but be in awe as the continuous, unrelenting roar spread out to stab at my ears in staggered succession away from the hellish ground zero. Somehow, absurdly, as absurdly as what I caused to even allow it, the mecha yet lurched rapidly more and more unsteadily forward despite my wild radar returns revealing the lesser machines simply boiling away within the focus of my ravening creation, and I forced bucking and twisting figures in my head, now beginning to resist and spill from my pressing, to surge more in a sudden snap that concentrated the lance of disaster into a needle of ever empowered lightning.

No insulator was truly proof against simply inundating it with even more charge overwhelming and burning it to nothingness or until it became a conductor of that very force, and no conductor was truly proof against being forced to channel more than could flow quickly enough in the face of its own resistance, not if my lightning was enough!

The target beneath the catastrophe slowed to a halt, and I threw my own unheard, mad howl of defiant triumph lost in the ceaseless explosion drowning out all else. Barely audible was Yomikawa's scream right in my ear as she hauled me up from the pavement and all but threw me into the opened door of the car next to us, shouting orders to a redhaired man in a similar soldier-esque uniform at the wheel up front, harshly illuminated and washed out by the tower of actinic blaze nearby making the vehicle tremble.

"Drive!"

The car lurched, and sandwiched in the back seat between Yomikawa and another of her Anti-Skill compatriots, a younger-looking utterly pale and bloodless woman wide-eyed behind overly large delicate-seeming glasses with a ponytail of forest green, I was squished by Yomikawa a second time as the vehicle spun in an accelerating circle dead opposite the beacon looming above all. A moment later I was jounced again and pressed back in my seat as the swaying force abruptly abated and the car charged forward straight over a curb and through a chain-link fence bursting and squealing upon the car on the way to a road.

Panting in my breakneck sprint from the trainyard, I just managed to catch fleeting, fleeing glimpse of the black automobile racing from the domineering lightshow just to the northeast, and I hadn't the breath to but throw my hands vaguely in exasperation at the departing vehicle and flop to the ground next to myself, deciding then and there that putting my head to the task of fighting the enemy with my brain from where I was and wasn't moving.

I found my new friends' concern touching, but not exactly the most convenient. I had hoped that this Anti-Skill group, as an official law enforcement body, might be of aid in contesting my attackers in the name of stopping interference with an important project, given the investment apparent in it by Academy City's highest echelons.

"If a consideration might be raised?" I tried to interject between the two Anti-Skill women crowding me over the still almost painfully loud and rattling, bombastic crackle-thrum turned detonation pervading everything.

The others in the car either didn't hear me, or didn't care, as we raced through an intersection with Yomikawa ripping out a phone and stabbing at it with a frantic finger. The other person in the front, a man, with a distinct "career soldier" mien with his rugged-looking face turning to look back at me and plateau of spikey short-cropped hair near to shaven on the sides, reached back and thrust a pair of sunglasses onto my face from the open glovebox at his knees.

"Put these on and don't look at the mirrors," he said almost gruffly.

He had a point, I realised somewhat worriedly, looking down elsewhere at the trio of still impotently barely struggling clones I knelt over, one—I'd lost track which—trying to loll her head toward the searing brightness as it wobbled slightly in response to my realigning induction channel efforts to begin sweeping over lesser machines with the mecha's stilling.

"An admonishment would hold that to look at such a sight might result in vision damage," I suggested pointedly, not really sure how to approach the whole I beat you up, now listen to helpful advice thing.

The other Misaka had no response, though, only a glazed look in her eyes.

I frowned to myself, and then considered the flash-burst I had used earlier against her, and my convoluted mess of tacked-on reaction feedback formula segments somehow managing to yield something coherent.

So if I...

I projected a field out across the rooftop, and instantly everything turned black. Sheepishly, I quickly reworked some of the figures in my head, and the world snapped back into view, dimming and brightening oddly as I adjusted and balanced different bits of no longer completely equal opposites until the city looked mostly normal, for being awash in unrelenting blue-white blaze, anyway, and the source of it no longer something to gouge at the eyes.

Within the car, on the street, within the flame-scoured ruin and all around everything, I pushed out my screening trick, and immediately started mowing down the onrushing tide of metal with all the greater carnage, no longer relegated to awkwardly not-eyeballing with radar to throw massed automatic fire into large formations. I took a moment then as everyone in the car started in surprise to optimise with a thought screening for where I huddled near myself to obviate redundancy, and put that freed focus toward wrangling my hellacious blast utterly consuming an interposed traffic light like a stabbing laser spitting a storm of escaping thunderbolts and clawing into the sidewalks and buildings to either side on a sweep up one of the robot-packed streets.

It also gave me an excellent view of the Knightmare Frame-like mecha.

What was left of it.

The listing, teetering bulk of the mecha, somehow still standing despite the epic punishment that had erased the lesser machines and rent broad forking lines of sunken molten slag across the fractured street, bled a running brightness.

I gave a grudging mental tip of my nonexistent hat that the impressive feat of engineering hadn't disappeared entirely under the bombardment, even as a part of me couldn't help being incensed not to have destroyed it with such an unleashing.

But where was the priority target?

I had lost track of her in the abject mayhem brought to bear.

That, more than all the robots charging at me and getting close, made me uneasy.

But I had an answer to that.

"Oniichan?" I asked worriedly.

He snapped around to me, eyes wide with concern, only hitching for a moment between the three of me around his table before settling on me in the middle.

"Best-chan? You're... You're in trouble, aren't you."

It wasn't a question.

I nodded.

"This is you."

I nodded again, trying to split my attention in a way I wasn't used to between Oniichan and the taxing mental effort of controlling what I could only describe as my smite, whilst also scarfing down three ways what was left of the chicken noodle soup—it really was too good to let go unfinished, and I wasn't going to give some new trouble opportunity to stop me.

"There's another fight. This one is taking longer than a moment. A woman in purple power armour has come for me, at the facility where they made me. I... I think she's trying to recover me or something; she brought an army, and I can't find her."

I swallowed.

None of my blasting, jittering radar sweeping registered anything woman-in-power-armour-shaped.

"She had a code," I whispered almost to myself. "Something that was supposed to... to take me over, I think. In my head. And I can't find her. I have a lot of guns—a lot of guns," I repeated in subdued emphasis. "But I... I d-don't really know how to fight, just blast things, and I can't find her to blast her."

Just admitting it aloud was making my heart start to hammer what seemed almost as clamorous as the droning retort supreme across the skies from the titanic bolt so loud and so constant that I couldn't tell if I was beginning to have trouble hearing it or tuning it out, but I couldn't unhear or ignore my admission.

I didn't want to say it.

Not to myself, not to Oniichan.

And yet, and yet, and yet...

I drew in a deep breath, and held it, closing my eyes.

Then I had to repeat the process next to me as I chickened out like a little shit.

Ultimately, it was Oniichan.

I opened my eyes.

"Oniichan, I'm scared," I admitted with all the forced calm I could muster.

Being my best sucked!

Oniichan's face was grave, lips pressed into a thin line as whatever he wanted to say couldn't be said.

"I'm coming for you," he promised then, with an oath of finality that made everything lighter. "I'm coming for you, Best-chan. You are not alone. Not as long as I have the guts to stand up for what's right!"

He smacked a fist into his open palm with a crack that reverberated in the adjoined dining and living room of the apartment.

"I can't teach you how to fight, not really," he admitted with what looked almost like a glistening in his eyes bearing down on me from above. "Not when my power isn't like other people's. All I can do is tell you to give it your guts, and I mean it when I say that; you have all the strength you need, and even if you don't, you have me. I'm coming for you. I will save you, Best-chan, with my own two hands and guts!"

Then Oniichan raced out the door and vaulted over the railing toward the distant, impossibly close tower of thundering dawn where I lashed out against the machine army and someone hunted me unseen.

And I believed him.

Oniichan would save me.

I just had to hold out long enough until he got here.

I slipped a little in my head, straining to maintain and control the devastating strike fraying momentarily in a pulse of burgeoning tendrils of angry plasma and carving up the street toward one of the trucks, but I held it.

It was louder and fiercer, more more, than any thunder I had ever heard, and as I continued to force my reality upon this one, it just didn't stop.

Until it did.

Confused, bewildered, unable to make sense of what I was experiencing, I realised I was clutching my head next to me, over and over, screaming, in the returned and deepened dark.

It hurt it hurt make it stop make it stop m-a-k-e-i-t-s-t-o-p!

It wasn't solely my own screaming.

No.

There was a screeching!

I looked up in unison where I could, where I could do more than curl in on myself clutching at my ears trying to block out the hideous invasion, and homed in on the source—sources—triangulated from dozens of positions.

The trucks.

"In the first place, are you okay?" A small voice asked distantly.

"Oh, Railgun is piiiissed this time."

I snarled and whimpered and tried to suck air back in with the pressing weight on my back even with the hard arms tucking around me. Each of the three big trucks with their squashed noses and chunky tires sported extensions rising up from the grey-top box adjoining the cabin, something that looked as though it had rotated up and forward on a pivot. The piercing shrieking driving through my head was coming from there.

Around the trucks—the offending sound seemed to be directional, focused on me in front of them—I could think and focus enough to cover myself even as I could do nothing before them to shoot into the onrushing, teeming throng of machines charging at the smoke-stained remnants of the facility and flowing around what was left of the mecha. I erupted in outrage and filled the field of carnage with more tearing lightning spearing across the boulevards in an imploding semicircular ring, only to check my violent reaction.

No, it was the wrong kind of violence!

The nearest- furthest squat, rounded little automatons like trash cans now sprouted up on tripod-like roller-fitted legs and opened up in their midsection to reveal gun barrels spitting fire went down in droves before my lashing thunderbolts, but yet had the numbers to absorb the punishment, and were only the front ranks, the first wave, ahead of or beyond the more humanoid targets partially pivoting and milling in the chaos of my revealed positions. I needed to bring the rest of me back in the fight to shoot right down their throats!

Snaking flickerings of static flooded the streets flashing in constant strobe effect in the night as from around it all I reached clashing, overlapping fields snarling together and grabbed the outermost trucks on the far side from one another. A twist of cuttingly meticulous malicious intent, and my scissoring, savage pull at the perimeter magnified massively greater than my earlier tug upon myself yanked two on the outer roads in a squealing instant of flight straight into one another. They crashed with a new thunderclap as they exploded under their extreme collision above the middle truck, yet the burst of twisted shrapnel was irrelevant.

Even as I had clapped distant electromagnetic hands upon the outer trucks to free myself before them, I found that I couldn't think, couldn't focus before the cloying, scratching siren screech, but that even the agony couldn't truly stop me from raising my rifle over and over and rallying in struggling teamwork with myself to hold me up and shift emplacements to sight down at the middle truck.

Through the magnified scopes, I beheld clearly two panicked targets in uniforms similar to the truck they sat within in dull red and grey jackets and caps, each working desperately at controls.

Stained glass shattered. Tracer streaks riddled the vehicle. Smoke and flame enveloped it in moments as the ear-clawing shrieking popped and quelled.

I breathed a myriad sigh of relief and handed me a new set of grenades to load into the forward-sliding tubes of my rifles, then with a stereo punting noise over rapid staccato pops of the launcher-less alternatives and deeper chugging of heavy-caliber munitions, I sent another explosive salvo into the whelming ranks of the charging robots. Grenades flew high, eyeballed over an ideal mark for their unfamiliar trajectory, but scythed chunks from the hostile host. Coordinating machine guns punched spark-spitting holes through the leading lines anyway.

Then one of the shitty welds of an improvised tripod frame cracked.

I winced, hunching in on myself as I threw down my rifle and grabbed for the loose bar, not daring to let up the stream of fire even as the partially attached heavy gun I had been shooting next to swayed and vibrated crazily while pummelling me with every shockwave spewing from the too-close muzzle brake. The machine gun took barely a frantic breath to unleash its entire magazine never originally intended for the role, and then I had my chance as next to me I ripped the emptied magazine out with another at the ready. Another shitty weld with an extra piece of rebar like an ugly split just as another machine gun shook its mount apart put this one back in order, and I hurried to repeat the feat.

Quickly, more and more, and then just all at once, I found myself tossing aside my more unassuming rifles in favour of lightning, the grenade launchers were the only point of any small arms here; the smaller bullets weren't cutting it, spraying the homicidal trashcans but mostly sparking off, and as two separate avatars earning me a sudden blazing sting across my scalp as something tore at my hair in an inadequately suppressed flurry of return fire, but also something that registered in the berserk mathemagical reaction feedback figures.

There was a pattern, a lot of them.

Targeting lasers, I realised.

Targeting lasers that, I also realised as many forced me to duck and pull out of the way as arrangements equating to infrared wavelengths criss-crossed the battlefield, I could distort and throw back.

Once again thinking back to how it was like registering the other clones' lightning to grasp it, and much the same as my dazzling flash used against them derived from simply scaling radio pulses to eye compatibility, this was something that could be screened and countered.

I threw out a wide bubble across me where I lined my makeshift defensive rampart, aligned to impose equally opposite destructive interference to what inserted itself to give me a key to plug in for their targeting lasers, and immediately the incoming shower chipping away at the concrete and walls around me slackened and went wide.

The response was immediate, however, as radar not my own washed over me, but its own reaction was just as immediate and the hostile radar died an arbitrary ten meters out.

Then I extended my reaction/sensory field far and wide, and just started mangling everything I could that didn't seem like something to leave alone. It didn't need to be precise, it didn't need to be elegant. I just needed to break the shit out of it!

Robots began sputtering and jerking and dying and exploding as I vented myself upon the oncoming targets. Some somehow took up renewed accuracy whilst many began maneuvering for cover and trying to circle around the ruined building I manned whilst seeking to ferret out where I lurked around them all, and a sickening, crackling agony slammed into my forehead at one of my machine gun teams.

I shrieked in renewed outrage at the sight of me collapsing limply in front of me with almost sharp split marks opening up my skull to expose the gory interior.

Indignation took the drooping corpse of the mecha in electromagnetic hands ringing the battlefield, and with a howl and pointless heaving over my shoulder, I ripped the effrontery asunder in a ringing detonation of shrapnel and sparks to chew into the robots around it. Then inspired by the exposed rebar in the reinforced concrete of the wreck I defended, I seized first one building after another that my smiting thunderbolt from on high had already ravaged, and pulled it in a flattening implosion bursting out to an avalanche slewing across the broken streets.

Destroy them all!

I snarled again at the milling, scurrying mass of enemies that just wouldn't stop and lay down and die, and turned my will upon them en masse once more.

If I could counter light waves and make flashes, then why not just take it further?!

I took pieces from the enemy targeting laser figures. I still didn't know how to make a laser, and it didn't matter. I just needed them to burn.

Spike the amplitude.

Project!

I blasted the battlefield with an invisible tidal wave of raging infrared caught between me on all sides and focused, and all began to glow bright, bright cherry red, then white, and soften and sag with spontaneous bursts of conflagration.

Banshou issai kaijin to nase, a memory in the voice of an old man came viciously to mind.

And then a lance of golden ruin slammed into me.

I...

I died again...

There you are.

I honed in on the hostile target.

There, the woman in the now scratched-up and soot-streaked power armour of black and purple contoured shell shot with bright thin lines of exposed silveriness stood in the ruin of one of the buildings just across the street running parallel next to my improvised fort on the northern face, with a spiney flower-like contraption in her outthrust hand that collapsed inward on jointed segments to close into something like an actual lance, evoking, actually, the image of a type of lance actually in fact belonging to the same place as the eradicated mecha on a smaller scale. Then she twisted something in the haft, and the needle petals opened up again around the glowing core, with a buildup on my reaction field.

With a thought—and then another catching myself not sure what might happen if I tried something that notionally should make for sudden absolute zero according to very dodgy figures with more equal opposite cancellation—I crudely hammered the intense heat in most places back to something approximating normalcy, only for it to actually of course immediately renew from its source, no matter what I did to escaping infrared, before dismissing and ignoring the lava pit beyond denying what infrared tried to eek out of bounds, and turned my attention upon the hostile target.

She was laughing.

"Magnificent!" She crowed with a manic look in her eyes as the building electromagnetic charge of the expanded lance-thing in her grip grew.

With the sharp reduction in, well, everything between me and me, the scant few presences of electromagnetic changes registering to my broad reaction-catching field pinpointed the handful of remaining robots, and they broke under my free individualised attention. I had no reason to fear whatever else she might have anymore, though I did find curious what I noticed in her weapon being detectable and yet nothing of her herself standing out to my attention in the feedback of my field now that I had it extended over her.

I stepped- stepped- stepped- s-t-e-p-p-e-d out, facing her squarely as the charge grew and grew. I did make a point of expanding my detection field far and wide, though, and paid keen attention to radar (that also failed to register the suspiciously stealthy power armour), just in case I faced an opponent attempting some ruse.

"Fool," I declared in unison, raising my voice, flat, not quite caring enough to be scornful.

And yet the hostile target's progressively more and more unhinged-looking grin stealing across her face only grew all the wider.

She laughed again.

"You think this matters?" She asked. "You think you've actually accomplished something? You're a rat, a test subject, the same as every other esper of Academy City, but I've made a glorious one!"

I froze.

The words replayed in my head, again and again.

...so that's how it was.

"Idiot child," I spat, as much to be cryptically vague and insulting when I knew little what else to say, as to express my sudden, unbridled disdain for this pathetic vileness. "You insult me with my very existence."

A half-assed, half-baked attempt at a better mousetrap for ushering in a god, less expensive than a fancy rice cooker and riddled with broken bits of crude understanding and failed mind-control that didn't even work properly...

This insipid, self-congratulatory wretch couldn't even do a good job at a bad job. If you're going to do something wrong, at least do it right!

"Doctor Kihara," I insinuated with all the derision I could muster as I stepped down in unified precision and began to stride over to the hostile target now with a recognised name to put to her. I took a mean little satisfaction at the bubblings of confusion as that twisted visage looked between me.

Another memory of a man's voice played through my head, then, one of the memories I knew to be my own, or at least not of this disgustingly just shoddy affair. Is this it? Is this all you can conjure, Saruman?

Myself.

This wasted, erased little army purged from the face of the earth.

Insulting was the only word for it.

I utterly rejected her intended purpose for me, but that she had the gall to intend it at all when it was such a grandiose thing and had so little to show for it... I was an instance for which I knew, fundamentally knew, why I existed and had a concrete, hard answer for my purpose in life, the big question that had driven a thousand religions and a thousand thousand more hopeful answers, and it was an abject mockery.

I reflected back on my realisation earlier, what seemed a lifetime ago.

All I had been able to feel was that the world would be better off without people like these researchers, and it was not merely that they did not deserve to live—life wasn't something that had to be earned—but that they deserved to be wiped out.

Good and evil, those were simple but also hard things, philosophical as philosophical got. This, though? These people were not something so trite-yet-complicated as evil. Evil could indeed be argued about, or depend on perspective if not maybe some kind of fundamental force in any case still raising questions as to how it could be reflexively defined to actually be applicable. The vainglorious Kihara and her ilk, however... they were antithetical to all they themselves stood for.

She... She was the opposite of Oniichan, was all I could think.

Corrupt versus pure.

Good and evil could be complicated, but that wasn't.

And... as I thought about it, staring down condescendingly at the hostile target with her toy, I considered the Misaka in front of me too, far removed from where I had unleashed such devastation, and the people in the car with me who had unhesitatingly scooped me up in a belief of needing to help me. I considered Fremea between me, still with a thoughtful frown despite my attempted insistent reassurance as some of the older delinquents looked out the open door with the assembly interrupted, and Oniichan who had charged to my rescue only pausing long enough to reassure me after he had already rescued me before.

It was possible to want to do what was right and not be very good at it, or to be a bad guy and great at it, but...

It really was about trying to be one's best, in the end, wasn't it?

And Oniichan's remembered words struck a chord in my head, as I cradled another Misaka's head thrice over feeling guilty about what I intended to do to her.

You are not alone.

I took a heavy breath on the rooftop.

Those... Those were heavy words. Another thing simple but not.

And just the sort of thing for a hero like Oniichan to say, to mean.

Kihara's face shifted from confusion laced with the remnants of mania and desperation to something of blooming crazed malice and Oniichan's words kept sounding in my head.

I... I hadn't done a very good job of listening, in hindsight, I thought.

Guts.

Things had worked out well enough, mostly, but I hadn't even tried to really listen to Oniichan's advice, just smash stuff.

And I got killed for it. Twice.

Wasn't that supposed to be a learning experience or something?

The more and more I thought about it, the sillier I seemed. Oniichan was a hero, maybe the hero, or at least a "the hero", which still made sense under the differently normal circumstances here, and I hadn't taken things to heart when I asked him to help me and he laid it out as simply as possible.

Guts. Gotta mean it.

Still, that... that didn't quite sit right with me, as Kihara raised the opened lance like a clawed hand.

Guts.

It was perfect for Oniichan, kind of was Oniichan, if I had to describe him in a single word. But that was also Oniichan.

Oniichan's power, fundamentally, when it really came down to it, was "just" guts.

And that felt almost, almost, perfect.

I bit my lips, looking at the Misaka, and I knew what I had to do.

To be my best.

"If you're in there..." I whispered over each downed girl somehow finding the strength to look straight into my eyes, almost intimidatingly intimate all of a sudden.

Oniichan made emphatically obvious that this was an anime world, and that seemed to bear out under a critical assessment.

I considered a... a very appropriate memory, I had to think.

This world, I, they, needed something, that had once long ago stuck with me, and was echoed in Oniichan's promise.

"Don't forget.
Always, somewhere,
Someone is fighting for you.
As long as you remember her,
You are not alone."

Then I drove the heel of my hand into her forehead, and each Misaka's eyes rolled up unconscious.

The lance discharged.

All my will as one, focused into a single avatar before the golden streak, I applied a new factor to my simple formula for projecting an induction channel and releasing a built-up voltage.

This was so much quantitative abstraction, these numbers and pattern arrangements, an inherently ultimately meaningless internally consistent framework given meaning. But was that not the fundamental principle of Personal Reality? To take an idea and make it, truly, real upon the world, imposed from a reality where it held true? Mathematics were a convenient framework of considerations already built up and established, but however more precise quantitative measurement might be, qualitative values were no less true when, in fact, held to be true, only values of a different sort, and ones that could so fundamentally alter the quality, change how a number gave quantitative value.

To mean it.

Qualitative values like guts.

And, in my head, in my soul imposed upon the world, the added filter value heart!

I threw forward an abruptly startlingly paper-white hand and almost giddily beheld a transformation sweep over me where I put everything into myself, channeled dozens and dozens of times over all my power as one with the heart of all into a single strike, a single declaration upon the world dancing in flaringly brilliant azure radiance of not quite inhuman joyous eyes.

"Passion Thunder!"

Pink lightning blasted forth!

My driving, ringing thunderbolt drove through the golden radiance and exploded into the lance.

She flew, swept by the detonation of her weapon and cradling her twisted right arm with the left, a look of complete incomprehension shaking in her eyes as she stared at me from the rubble-scattered based of a now bent light pole of the sidewalk.

"What... How...?" She tried to get out in an unsteady voice.

I approached her, unafraid. She had nothing over me anymore, and I felt too fizzy in any case, like, well, as if I was really, really charged up on the zappy drive of a whole bunch of people, of me!

I'm a goddamn magical girl!

I smiled excitedly down at the hostile target.

"You did a good job in some ways, I suppose," I admitted, then, in singular chorus, "I am Misaka Best. I am legion," I declared pointedly as she rose to a slump, before switching back to just the one point of exchange, feeling a little bit unsteady with the slight wavering of my attention focused upon myself, as if maybe I might not be able to maintain this easily. "If you had responded immediately, who knows, maybe you might have been able to manage something." I shrugged. "'Course, I kinda doubt it anyway, since, y'know, your whole little army you gathered in the meantime doesn't exist anymore, but you never know. As it is, though, someone beat you to the punch!"

The incomprehension shifted to a slightly different sort, and I crossed my arms smugly over my chest—if also separately kind of wondering why my formerly deep navy hospital gown was now just as paper-white as I was, but otherwise unchanged and a little more rough for wear than earlier, albeit save for the also dishevelled-looking undone fanciful ribbons floating behind me from my better viewing angle also behind me, which with an inflection of intent I tied into a fluttery bow at the small of my back.

"Precious little would it have cost thee to simply be supportive, and that might have even worked. But instead Oniichan saved me!"

"...O...niichan?" She managed to prop herself up to something almost approximating a battered kneel, staring up at me with a glimmer of acuity to her dazedness.

I raised a pointing finger.

"Academy City's number one gutsiest Gemstone Sogiita Gunha!" I announced proudly. "So there!"

Her expression froze.

I smirked.

"Who, in point of fact, just told me that he's on his way, because I'm at his apartment too, eating some yummy soup and learning how to kick ass, so nyeh!" I made a not entirely polite mocking gesture entirely the point.

The hostile target didn't react.

I blinked.

Um...

She took in a deep breath.

Then screamed!

I backed away, startled for a moment, but she only screamed and screamed and screamed, sucking in air but to scream again up at the sky. Then she started beating at the sidewalk with her clenched fists, cracking and pulverising the concrete with the augmented strength of her armour and seemingly completely uncaring that her right arm had to be broken and wasn't moving right.

She just kept screaming in incoherent... something, as I looked awkwardly about.

There was no one else around of course in the crowded street for me to, I didn't know, ask if she was okay or something.

She didn't seem to even register that I was still there as she continued to howl and start kicking at the streetlight, eventually denting in the base of it enough to, well, chop it down with her foot, I supposed was the way to put it, and then she continued stomping on it, yelling all the while.

This, uh...

Yeah...

"Best-chan!"

I snapped around, grinning broadly at the familiar voice in a rush of wind right next to me with a presence stark in my reactive detection field.

"Oniichan!"

I leapt at the boy landed in a slightly more cracked than usual spot in the road, and immediately found myself tangled in a knot of limbs getting in my own way, finding myself suddenly intensely uncertain if I wanted to try giving him a hug again as the nearest avatar not making a fool of myself or hid my burning face, and that I was no longer almost Christmas-y looking with the bow and a tiara-like thingy disintegrating with my lapse of concentrated concentration.

Oniichan took the choice out of my hands, though, and scooped me up with an urgent strength, spinning me away from the hostile target, not that it made a whole lot of difference when I was all around them both, but it was the thought that counted, I supposed.

"You," she uttered in an accusatory whisper, fixated upon Oniichan.

She lunged at Oniichan, and with a frown, I imploded the hostile target's armour around her.

Hostile target neutralised.

Hmph!

I looked up to see Oniichan looking back at me with a look of muted horror.

I frowned slightly again, uncertain.

"What?"

 

[TacitSoliloquy]

"You killed her."

It came out almost hoarsely.

Oniichan seemed... upset?

I eyed him, with bubblings of unease as if I had misstepped somehow and never noticed in the process. "...yes?" I hedged.

"You killed her," was all Oniichan could say again, gaze sliding down at the twisted body that had been the doctor, squeezed and extruded out unflatteringly to burst around joints where skin split and had squished and sprayed messily in my abrupt electromagnetic vice grip.

Eeew.

I really wanted a rag or something. She got on my face.

That slipped around the anxiousness in the recurring odd sensation of different simultaneous feelings for me as the closes avatar to what was left of my ignominious maker, and an idea occurred: could I maybe scorch the blood off my face with an outwardly-directed burst of high infrared? Except that seemed a good way to end up blowing my own head off, actually. I'd already had enough of that, thanks very much.

I grimaced, and headed back towards the now slightly shabbier husk of a burnt and pockmarked lab facility.

"I'm gonna go clean my face off, it's icky," I told Oniichan whom was staring with hand shifted as if wanting to reach out at my retreating back before he started and rounded towards me still next to him at my words making my excuse for me.

Oniichan faced me evenly.

He blinked, face utterly blank, then blinked again.

A weird moment later, he held up a finger in pausing cue, and turned around.

On the orange-lit sidewalk by the edge of the new lava pool, Oniichan squatted down in a crouch and curled inward, hunched over to let out a muffled strained-sounding noise. From the encircling rim of the lava pool where he faced me as I continued filing in toward the rest of me, I could make out his hands locked in claw-like rictus and shaking.

"H-Hey..."

He snapped around to another me, still squatted in a crouch, a beaming smile across his face to broad it squeezed his eyes shut.

I... I didn't even know what to make of that.

"Are you okay?" I asked promptly in concern, and decided to cut time by striding over the lava, cancelling out the infrared trying to encroach with another running of feeding its influence through equal-opposite interference and picking less liquid-y stepping points of congealing slag; I added another entry to my mental list of odd experiences at the sensation of wading barefoot up to my ankles and occasionally shins in sticky wet rock with road and building turned to squishy mud.

Oniichan's eye-crinkling smile didn't waver in the slightest.

"I'm fine, Best-chan!"

I frowned again. I didn't like that line. It was used way too much. Was Oniichan really fine? Really really?

"If Oniichan isn't really fine, he could talk about it," I hedged once more uncertainly. He seemed suspiciously like he really was actually bothered by something, and not knowing why didn't sit well with me. I eyed him, not quite pouting. "It would be really hard to forgive Oniichan for lying, and... and it's no good for you to lie to yourself," I concluded.

I wasn't going to tell him I'd understand but be a little disappointed if he was; that wasn't something he should hear if he was having a hard time all of a sudden. Or maybe had been for a long time and just didn't have a crisis in front of him to focus on anymore?

Oniichan twitched, more like a fleeting instant of full-body spasm, and I wasn't sure, but I thought maybe that smile of his turned a little brittle.

Were I not so concerned, I'd give him squinty eyes over that headband of his making it impossible to tell if he suddenly broke out into a suspicious sweat upon his brow.

"Ah... O-Of course!"

I still narrowed my eyes a little at him, but softened it to something less than accusatory.

"If you're sure, I guess I can accept that." Then I switched topics. "Anyway, I'm gonna go clean up. There are bathrooms and a shower area in the residential block of the facility I cleared out; I got shot in the head a little a couple times— Nothing bad, nothing bad!" I emphasised hurriedly at Oniichan's face of sudden horror, waving my hands wardingly and simultaneously within the upper level trying to puzzle what to do with my bodies that hadn't gotten shot in the head "a little" like the others. "They're just, you know, head wounds, so they're bleeding all over the place and it's getting in my hair and getting sticky and clingy and stuff."

And whimperingly painful, I didn't add to Oniichan, hoping to put on a stronger front as further away I clutched at my scalps with a few hands awkwardly trying to race down the stairs as a group.

I cocked my head, then, curious.

Oniichan was a hero who had undoubtedly gotten up to all kinds of scuffles.

"Do you know how to bandage a head injury?" I asked, still standing around. I might as well keep Oniichan company since he was right here and I wasn't otherwise preoccupied.

Well, sort of.

I was extremely busy in other places.

Oniichan had a laptop.

I, meanwhile, had no more soup, and had thus become aware of this.

In his apartment, I crowded the desk beside the futon where I had been laying earlier, and lifted up the lid of the computer sitting there.

There was a password prompt.

Hmm...

What would Oniichan use as a password?

Guts

Nope.

I gave an uncertain curious look to my collaborating selves out of habit. I didn't want to make too many wrong attempts; it might lock me out, and worse, lock Oniichan out—there was an etiquette for borrowing someone else's computer like this, and it just wouldn't be right to leave him with any inconveniences.

...what would Oniichan use as a password?

Caps-lock: on!

GUTS!

Success!

"Yes!" I pumped three fists with a hissed cheer.

Oniichan's desktop was the same GUI as the computers in the lab, the odd not-quite Windows 95-looking thing incongruously out of place for the look of the computer itself. I didn't recognise most of the icons, but I found a search engine readily enough.

Glegoo.

It was Google, just not. It even had the same kind of colour scheme. I filed that little tidbit away for later pondering.

Tidiness bade me use incognito mode (the last thing I appreciated was random prompts jumping for completion, or the weirdest advertisements vying for attention), plus an embarrassed part of me felt like I'd be overstepping and prying if previous entries popped up, and...

I paused.

I had been going to google—glegoo?—how to treat scalp wounds. I was getting blood all over some of my other hands, and it was only modestly slowing down for the effort.

Except...

The fresh memory of that- this girl broken and senseless and still struggling on the rooftop before I hit her dominated my head, of all three of them.

Simultaneously I stared at the unconscious forms I cradled on my laps across the city from the screen, still at a loss what to do with them.

I had made a promise.

My given word was absolute; I would save them. I hadn't strictly put it in those exact words, but it didn't matter, not for this.

They deserved to be free.

And I had yet to even give Oniichan a chance to respond to my question.

I clicked on the search bar.

Misaka Mikoto

Enter.

Immediately, I am bombarded by sensationalised sports reels waiting to be played and headlines lauding her achievements, lauding her to no end as I scroll down.

Daihaseisai?

Clinking through things, it looked like a superpowered Olympics sort of thing, with Railgun as the star for Tokiwadai Middle School last year.

I brought up a race in a new tab, and watched the girl I could almost see in myself if I was on a racetrack and not helping me hold me under a sink as the warm water tickled agonisingly over my scalp.

She was fast, my almost-sister, sprinting through an elaborate obstacle course of perpendicular metal bars forming a raised thicket above the track with sparks leading her way without her ever slowing down.

I scrolled down, and a still shot from in front captured her vaulting over the finish line, celebrating Tokiwadai's victory.

I...

I wanted this, I realised, looking at the image of her. She looked so incredibly alive, an exuberant excitement alight across her face, determined and confident.

I stared at the image on the screen, drinking it in.

Elsewhere, not so losing track of time, I considered the same face in more peaceful visage as I took the headgear from the elder clones and examined it.

These visors were peculiar in appearance, dull grey and a little heavier in my hands than I'd expected, but the lens across the front was obstructed by a crossbar along its face; from the other side, though, there was no sign of it.

Peculiar indeed.

There was... some niggling thought, like I should know this.

I frowned, turning one of them over while I helped me lug the other Misaka one by one to a sitting position next to one another, propped up next to the access door leading in from the apartment's roof. It was oddly annoying, like having something on the tip of my tongue forgetting what I'd been about to say, or as if I'd stepped into a room to get something only to not know what it was.

The goggles did have a switch, though, as well as a cable plug thing that could unspool from the side.

I switched them on.

Immediately, a pale green glow lit the front, I noticed, glancing over at myself, but from where I knelt on the roof with them in hand, the inside face of the view was... weird...

I slipped the goggles over my head, distractedly pleased to find that the contoured, slightly squishy rim felt almost perfect, and beheld a... a psychedelic dream, was the only way I could describe it.

"Woah..."

I saw... I didn't even know what I saw as I panned around.

Wait, no, I realised.

That wasn't quite right.

I frowned under the goggles as I looked at myself, and as I thought about it, I recognised patterns, I was pretty sure; the surreal wash of colours and contours playing over everything—through some things—shifted and swam in pulsing time with some of the fluctuations I registered across my reaction bubble figures.

Yes, some of these glows correlated to what was coming much more strongly from myself than the concrete and air around me and akin to the enemy targeting lasers, and a quick little experiment confirmed suspicions about some of the broad bands streaming across the skies with my own similar emission.

I didn't think I'd have noticed without the benefit of my unique perspective, but...

I concentrated on the how my equations shifted around my begoggled avatar and slowly toggled the headgear off and on, off and on, within the field.

It... just sort of clicked.

Everything slotted into place, and the world revealed itself.

I was in a psychedelic dream, and it was everywhere.

I stared out with my dozens and dozens of pairs of eyes at the shimmering swirls echoing and reverberating from everything.

"Woah..." I repeated myself.

"Hm?" "What was that?" "Uh, you okay?" Distant voices murmured.

I tried to turn towards it... them... whatever, something, but I couldn't stop just looking at the strobing, swirling pattern on the other side of the car roof above, how it grew and waned whilst crazily bouncing and defusing. Then, almost drowned amidst everything to the point that I could barely make out the old and familiar, boring reflection part of the greater kaleidoscope now highlighted with incredible saturations and projections of reddest reds beyond reds... within that, something pretty bloomed, bright and sharp, aimed straight into one of my left eyes.

"Pupils are dilated like crazy," one of those far away voices declared, while something like a hand wreathed in more of the richest and lively super-reds danced across the backdrop of lazy floating surf and seething stars. It pulled at my face and the pretty cascade trickled down into a right eye where it didn't rebound from my face after kissing it.

I stared, mesmerised by the intricate interplay with the beautiful display's periphery with intersecting patterns, and how it was so similar and yet radically different from more coruscations all around me, around all of me.

But something built up intrusively.

It... Something hurt?

Something hurt.

"My head..."

Yes, the snaking sources of brighter colours like river streams or veins—no, exactly like veins—spilled into leaking effervescence across my heads.

That was what hurt.

Ow.

Ow!

I was looking at it, and now it hurt!

"My head!"

"Did she get a concussion?" "Hey, hey, in the first place, you have to tell me if you're okay!" "What's wrong? Talk to me, Best-chan."

I pressed bloody hands back to some of my heads while I shook others and blinked, trying to focus in the riot of overlapping colours with three different conversations coaxing my attention at once.

Had I—? I had said that aloud with every instance of myself.

Uh...

"I'm fine," I told a looming Officer Yomikawa in the back seat of a speeding car.
"I'm fine," I told Oniichan crouched down lightly grasping my shoulders outside the ruined lab.
"I'm fine," I told a concernedly pouting Fremea in the seats amidst the warehouse turned auditorium.

"But you're not," I said aloud to the trio of insensate older Misaka atop the now quiet apartment building, before deciding to make myself scarce there before more Misaka arrived.

"And you sorta are," I said to myself in front of Oniichan's computer; I couldn't see with the eyes staring blankly back at me as I said it, and yet I could see more than ever before anyway. It was weird—I could see even where I wasn't actually looking, and the laptop screen was weird now.

The psudo-police/paramilitary woman panning a little flashlight back over my eyes frowned not unlike Fremea while the redheaded man at the wheel snuck quick glances in the intriguingly reflective mirror, and the other man with the look of a career soldier turned back to regard me carefully.

I waved them all off, distractedly feeling as though the somehow hazy air should be thick to my fingers, but the not-haze was far heavier in the cross-referenced direction of where I had traced the thunderbolt column over the ground.

"This Misaka is fine," I repeated while everything rushed by around the wailing and flashing car. "Just... sensory overload, or... something."

It was still hard to focus. I wasn't really looking looking at anything in particular, and yet somehow managed to eye everything at once, all three of the car's other occupants even though one of them was watching the road, and spasming wellsprings spewed from all over the place even just within the vehicle, sometimes crashing into and through one another, others sometimes not and ghosting past one another without meaningful interaction.

Some part of at least one of me that had far too much time on its hands and had seen too much anime wondered if this might be what a realistic experience of the Byakugan would be like.

It was distracting, was what it was.

Both Anti-Skill officers not preoccupied with driving exchanged a silent look, and something in their body language spoke of long familiarity with one another.

"I didn't knock your head against the ground or car earlier, did I?" Yomikawa asked slowly. "Head injuries aren't something to take lightly, no matter how hard someone's skull might be."

I felt an irrational flash of worry then. I was my only avatar here; I didn't have any me with me, so if I had hit my head, would I know it if some screws had gotten knocked loose? What if I had some implanted hypnosis command to forget and one of the Anti-Skill people had completely accidentally triggered it?

...no, I felt confident that I could take awkward comfort in my makers' dire ineptitude.

I shook my head, which oddly did nothing whatsoever to affect what I saw.

I pinned down each and every emission source within the car, and after excluding a few—like people—set to stilling one after another, more equal-opposite flippings imposed as the streaming pulses of colour tried to leak out. It took a measure of attention to keep it up, but less than the sheer inundation of parsing everything once they spread and clashed.

The lights embedded into the roof of the car winked out as I plugged the jittering streamers from reaching them, taking away the blues and reds and more than blues and reds.

The warbling siren howl vanished as well when I curtailed its jittery streamer too.

The whole car jolted slightly then smoothed when I took direct control of the psychotic cyclones where my brain told me had to be wheels and tires fed by the insistently radiant brick at the front of the car. It was a little awkward to translate the impulse changes imparted by the red-haired driver's foot into proper consequence, but with a careful thought I managed to emulate what the car wanted without needing to ignite its own channels.

A translucent feature built into the windshield like a broad heads-up display offering directions and pathing switched to blocky "SIGNAL LOST" lettering when I quashed one of the spewing little volcanoes, before the display too was indirectly culled.

It seemed to take longer in my head than it really felt, and the car was still a riot, even when I adapted my dimming bubble trick from earlier to screen some of the outside intrusions, but in a few moments, the vehicle seemed less like it was trying to make my eyes bleed.

Mister Driver balked and tried something or another uncertainly in reaction while his serious-looking partner with the sides of his head cropped in a close shave turned his own uncertain look to me myself.

"The emergency situation is ended," I declared evenly for lack of anything better to say as explanation.

"Railgun?" Tall-Dark-&-Grim asked me.

It was a curious question, I considered.

"Don't know what could have set her off this bad this time," the red-haired driver muttered while I thought under his breath yet with plainly visibly moving lips despite the fact that I shouldn't reasonably be able to see it. I likewise caught Yomikawa giving him a severe and pointed silent look in the mirror before twitching a glance down at me.

In the auditorium-warehouse, I looked around with one of my avatars. I didn't know who, but someone here in the crowd of delinquents had uttered apparent assumptions about Railgun too, and now here, in the Anti-Skill car with presumably quite unrelated people, I had a man voicing that as well.

Quickly, in Oniichan's quiet apartment, I tried a new search on his laptop in support of my other avatar's conversational predicament in the car, looking for Railgun news about incidents and accidents.

I just didn't have enough information.

"Oniichan, do you think Onee-sama might be a delinquent?" I asked him personally in tandem with my search on his computer while I led him down back into where I had been made. It was probably dark from some perspectives, and I tried a new illumination, simply delineating a spherical area above one of my hands to generate light just jiggly enough to fall in the right range for him; on an impulse, I hashed together the pattern output formulae for different colours to make it pink, because really, there were standards to be observed.

"Onee-sama?" He asked.

"Yeah, Railgun. Uh, I'm kinda talking to some other people right now too. Has Onee-sama messed stuff up before, do you know?"

Oniichan gave the back of one of my heads an odd look, almost worried and suspicious as I walked all around him.

While I was trying to project that I was very definitely a girl who weighed and considered her words with grave care when speaking to police and learning that I could evidently operate a laptop very quickly with six hands, Oniichan finally spoke at length.

"Why do you call her Onee-sama?" He asked.

Why—

I froze, all of me.

Onee-sama?

Why did I say Onee-sama?

That... That wasn't what was supposed to come out of my mouth.

Why did I call her Onee-sama?

My guts felt queasy, and I was sure—the kind of super-duper sure that made me unsure—that Onee-sama was Onee-sama.

It... just fit.

Her name was Misaka Mikoto and she was Onee-sama.

All three of the Anti-Skill officers with my avatar in the car were looking at me, even Mister Driver. I could only be thankful that Fremea was a less observant child keen on the macaroni on her plate; I pretended to appreciate each of my own hotdogs with her, which was actually easy when both of my avatars with the younger girl found the warm fluffy bun and ketchup and mustard-drizzled grilled meat to be delicious.

"...I think the researchers did something to my head," I told Oniichan honestly while more of me filed in behind him on the stairs now tracked with goopy cooled lava.

At the same time, I tried to address the Anti-Skill officers with something resembling confidence, sitting up straighter in the car seat and facing no one in particular.

"Three points would be preferred to be addressed," I began. "Firstly, that Misaka Mikoto may not have had an active and deliberate role in any events that could potentially be circumspect."

I... really didn't know what to feel about her, but I wasn't going to throw her under the bus for something I had done, anyway. I also didn't know just how much people might actually care in the first place, either, though, which brought up my second and third points.

"Secondly, um..."

I swallowed, trying to put together the right words while everyone was looking at me. Hard.

"A-Advice would be appreciated to, uh, t-to understand particular local statues regarding self-defence, and thirdly..."

I bit a few lips where no one could see, and glanced back from the end of the queue going inside at the broken figure on the sidewalk, then from the front of the line at Oniichan next to me.

"As members of Anti-Skill, would it perhaps be possible to make a report for witnessing a crime, an attempted murder?"

Blank stares met me.

Silence stretched.

Then Mister Driver snorted lowly from the wheel.

Yomikawa drew in a long, slow breath through her nose and held it, eyes closed as if trying to hold back a greater reaction, while the other man in the front passenger seat sighed hard.

"Kid," Mister Driver spoke up. "Did you or a friend just break the sky because a bad guy tried to get you?"

"U-Um..."

Why was my face so hot?!

"Are there any bodies to worry about?" The other man asked.

"Hey, she killed me first!" I protested!

...

Oh no.

...

All three Anti-Skill officers stared at me again, Mister Driver goggling at the rearview mirror.

My head went blank locally, and I had to pick up the slack from myself to keep the car running normally when it started coasting.

"Th-That is, um— Uh. N-Not to, er, well, one has to understand..."

I hid my face in my hands and it did nothing!

I immediately strung an encircling screen describing a sphere and cancelled out everything trying to cross, then just as quickly realised the mistake and switched it to feed inbound influences to the other side in a rapid mess of simple trigonometry.

"Uh..." The man in the front passenger seat uttered. "You, uh, you okay back there?"

I was invisible; he couldn't see me!

If I didn't answer, I could pretend he didn't know I was here!

"So, is that like a light-bending ability, or something more like teleportation?" Yomikawa asked very, very casually next to me.

I dared to peek between my fingers.

"It's kind of interesting, seeing outside the car like this," she continued.

Seeing... outside...?

A one-meter radius sphere centered on me that took the reaction imposed to my sensory bubble formula and translated it to equal emissions on the other side without interaction with anything inside or internal colours being allowed to cross the threshold... and the inside of the car wasn't nearly big enough to fit that without issue.

I wailed!

Hopelessly, I started mentally tessellating hexagons into the approximate contours of my body under the purview of my strange, sourceless vision, and countered everything to still blackness across the shape.

I didn't want to look at them.

I didn't want them to see me.

I only got one of the two, but... but I didn't want them looking at me.

I'd only been trying to... to do what I was supposed to and see if maybe the Anti-Skill people could arrest bad people for being criminals, not incriminate myself and establish myself as... as...

I sniffled.

As some kind of freak made by people who couldn't even make me right.

I squeezed my eyes shut uselessly and felt myself crying, and then heat in my chest that needed to roar and explode because I didn't know why I even cared so much or why I was stupidly falling apart like this all of a sudden.

I curled up in the car seat with the seatbelt digging in and hugged myself, trying to squeeze control of the flip-flopping, boiling-over tumult that only made me angrier, because I couldn't... couldn't stop feeling, and I couldn't rule out if I was defective or just a pathetic baby who couldn't control herself!

I screamed into my knees in silence.

Elsewheres, I tried not to shake, a half step removed from something that felt way more like the towering thunderbolt column than I was comfortable with. I grabbed at Oniichan and pulled him into a tight hug, and wished there were a lot of him to go along with me.

I wasn't quite sure how I actually registered it, but there was a hand on my shoulder in the car and then reaching across to squeeze me against body armour.

Some of my heads hurt, a lot of them felt too full, and some felt too empty. I was bored, I was frustrated, I was deliberately not looking too closely at how some of me was, I was curious, I was excited. I was confused how to process it all a lot too, when I cared, and further confused at the simultaneous caring and not caring itself.

Oniichan helped me wash my hair and dress some of the injuries with medical supplies I had found in the lower laboratory complex.

The really late dinner I shared with Fremea while was tasty and filling if heavy while unperturbed delinquents looked like they were ready for something to start.

I continued poring over a borrowed laptop with lighter soup in my tummies making me start to feel sleepy.

And I hurried quietly away from the apartment with the unconscious Misaka atop it down mostly empty sidewalks under a veil of twisted light in the direction designated by an online map of the city while several dozen more pairs of hands checked over my arsenal of rifles and munitions.

Quirky alternate-Google or not, Glegoo was surprisingly helpful.

Pity the rest of Academy City had proved less so inclined.

The men and machines of Multi Active Rescue had tried to kill me.

I looked upon the unlit, empty hallways and rooms of the purged facility in which I had been created, with eyes that didn't care about the darkness as I wasn't truly using my myriad eyes at all.

According to the online search, Multi Active Rescue was based out of a white-walled and glass construction that took up a fair stretch of road for the organisation's headquarters.

Multi Active Rescue, which apparently was headed—had been headed—by an all too familiar name and face. Captain Therestina Lifeline. Also known as Doctor Kihara Therestina. Also known as a crushed corpse who had just lost an entire small army's worth of potential security forces.

And she had been intimately involved in the Misaka cloning and Level 6 Shift Project.

I had a promise to keep. I had answers to learn. I had a reckoning to mete.

In one place, I looked at the picture of the building on Oniichan's laptop, with its publicly available address information. In another, I assembled at the stairs leading up back out of the laboratory that made me.

I hefted my rifles and vanished.

 

[veekie]

Sogita Gunha has found a complicated problem he can't Guts through

 

[Jonen C]

Sogita Gunha has found a complicated problem he can't Guts through

Click to shrink...

Inconceivable!
He just has yet to figure out the proper application of Guts.

Edit:

I hefted my rifles and vanished.

Click to shrink...

Soundtrack Cue:
Run Rabbit Junk

 

[TacitSoliloquy]

I found myself with a problem.

Or maybe about a hundred problems, which was sort of the problem itself.

It turned out that there were some practical problems with trying to move a small army of invisible superpowered gunmen half way across the city on foot.

I had short legs.

From what I gleaned from Oniichan's computer, the headquarters building for Multi Active Rescue was in "District 2" of the city, which in practical terms meant getting from the northwestern part of the circular metropolis to the southwest. And none of the fancy mathematical superpowers I'd worked out included convenient little things like superspeed or teleportation. Or even cab fare.

Which was why I was currently camped out by a bus stop under a veil to cheat light around me while I observed a pair of high-school-looking kids boarding the public transport ahead of some of the rest of me hiding in unseen plain sight a ways down the street. And why I was watching another bus stop at the same time where I'd been hoping to catch sight of any bus there. And a third. While also trying to look up bus schedules and train lines inside an apartment most of a kilometer away.

The students getting on the bus didn't look like they stopped to pay anything, or even offer any kind of ticket or pass; in fact, the bus didn't look to have a driver at all, and the pair of older boys in bland polo uniforms just walked in and sat down.

Hm.

Hrmdy-hum-hmmm...

I stroked my chin thoughtfully, which didn't generate any bright ideas, but it was the thought that counted when being thoughtful.

I watched the bus leave and head towards me, passing along by where I stood in a crowd with myself on the sidewalk under the same obfuscation as my avatar that had jogged ahead to get a better look at the boarding process.

Public transportation in Japan was pretty good, I knew, or at least it was supposed to be. Academy City was also itself supposed to be "the city of the future" or something. One of the many airships above even said so on its big advertisement screen glowing in the night sky washed out of most normal colours.

I thought back to a drone truck I had seen roll along by itself in the industrial area earlier, too.

It definitely wasn't impossible that Academy City might have free, completely autonomous public bus service for the predominantly student-based population. I hadn't noticed anything that looked like a dull waft of radio transmission or vibrant facial scan or something when the two boys had gotten on, nothing like an electronic device had checked who they were to process them in any sort of system.

Were there in fact some things that the adults running the place thought a deserved common courtesy?

I eyed another bus pull up to one of the watched stops where a sleepy-eyed little girl up past her bed time toddled on in once the door swooshed open, and trudged to a seat to sag against it and close her eyes without preamble.

Nothing apparent there either.

I squinted at the departing bus amidst its cloud of sweeping tentative radar and continuous jittery glimmers talking with who knew what everywhere.

Hmmm.

An idea occurred. Then several spawned from it at once, as I further considered my numbers and the topic of seating capacity. I kept looking for trains and schedules online, but...

I think I need to find a good alleyway, I thought to myself as I made my decision.

And so that was how a column of identical girls came striding forth from an unwatched spot plainly visible to anyone whom might happen to look with rifles in hand and formed ranks filing in by one another at a bus stop, waiting for the next ride.

That was also how I ended up bored with nothing to do two dozen times over as I waited for the next bus.

I... didn't like waiting.

It gave me time to think.

About how I specifically wasn't thinking too much about managing to somehow cry myself to sleep in disproportionately utterly drained exhaustion riding in a car with other people while a stranger's hand rubbed slow circles on my back and voices murmured things I didn't listen to.

Time to think about what I was going to do with the bodies. Because I was dead, and... I was just laying there in the rubble of the upper lab complex. I'd died, died, and... and all I could do was just stare down at my own corpse, both of them. I'd died before, too, and that had hurt, been terrifying as everything felt horribly wrong and stopped, but... it'd just been an awkward thing afterward.

I'd opened the door, there'd been a flash and crack, and then I was down and stepping over me to get into the room, then by the time I'd been done inside, there were two bodies on the floor and one had some leaky red dots and I just didn't really know what to do with it since it had been awkward to leave my own body sitting there.

But these bodies...

A girl should have her head, shouldn't she?

A girl's gotta have a head.

I just laid there, two boneless heaps at my feet, and they were me, but above the collar bone where the bloody and tattered hospital gown draped limply...

I retched.

The sound, the smell hit me next to myself, and another stomach violently rebelled too. Then it was a struggle to keep everything down en masse, even as two of me in an auditorium-warehouse filled with quieting older kids was suffused with the savory aroma of hot food.

Twin hotdogs felt leaden in my stomachs.

Three more of me rushed for the small bathroom of Oniichan's apartment, trying not to heave as soup threatened to come back up.

I almost lost it. In the space of a long moment, scores of simultaneous battles almost failed at once as I struggled to quell the chain reaction when I threw up a few more times.

A lot of me was breathing hard, then, in the aftermath, but... it was almost a relief, in a way.

I just...

I just felt like I could do a lot more screaming, except not as much?

And each avatar that had thrown up... I thought maybe my stomachs felt better afterward, maybe? With the comparison to make now, some of me didn't feel too good, like maybe I'd eaten something that I shouldn't have.

None of me had binged on a bunch of junk food or gotten anything super fatty or spicy or anything, though? I mentally walked back through what all I'd gotten my hands on in my scouring of the lower lab earlier, and I'd claimed an eclectic variety, especially from the vending machine that could only be described as eclectic indeed in its selection (seriously, who even makes brussel sprout and caviar cake tea?), but I hadn't even really gotten a lot of anything, as many of me as had been starving earlier.

At least I had something to pay attention to with all the older delinquent toughs.

While I picked up my clammy bodies as avatars with nothing left to throw up, and while I went back to Oniichan's computer wiping one of my mouths to resume checking roads and rail lines, while Oniichan himself carefully patted my hair dry around the wrapping of another avatar deep within the lower lab complex and while far from there I stalked quietly and invisibly southward spread out across the city, the large room of teenagers in lots of leather and black started quieting down.

Seats were taken. Someone dimmed most of the normal lights. Clusters of people spread out around several microphones and faced back toward me and the rest of the audience.

Fremea grabbed my hand.

"Look, look! There's Komaba-oniichan!" Fremea whispered excitedly, pointing with her free hand at one of the groups where her mountainous friend from earlier had stepped up to a speaking position. "He's gonna give a talk, he said!"

It was impossible to miss the guy.

Even with the row in front of us crammed with bigger people, Komaba was just that much bigger. He made the microphone look like a toy in his giant paw of a hand... and he was still only a high-school kid?! And he wasn't even the only big guy like that here, just the biggest!

What did they even feed these people?

Oh, right.

I was literally a magical girl with powers enhanced by the infusion of magic crystals and Oniichan was an actual shounen hero who had saved me from unreasonably powerful shady megacorporations' scheme to make a clone army of budget supersoldiers and stackable blood sacrifice juju, and there was some jerk with a god complex and a psychic evil prom queen tyrant and Thor-the-middle-school-girl out there.

They either fed these people alchemical super-concoctions from industrially harvested dragons and distilled princess tears, or this was absolutely utterly normal and in no way unusual, because Komaba actually just ate a sandwich, with turkey, and it may even be so exotic as to have lettuce in it... except Fremea's friend could also be the kind of guy who ate a bajillion sandwiches and worked out like nobody's business to bulk up like a bulldozer like that.

Naturally.

Whatever the case, he sure sounded exactly like the hulking giant he was when he spoke.

"Friends," he rumbled slowly into his bitty little microphone with a nod. "You all know me. You all know what I stand for and what I don't. I'm not here to tell you what to do tonight. You know what I think. I'm just here to tell some of you what I think you deserve to hear again after some of us have had their say, because I don't want you getting hurt because you didn't take a moment to think for yourselves and think carefully."

Fremea's enormous buddy hunched and daintily slotted the microphone back into the little stick of a stand before him, and the crowd replied with surprisingly firm applause from a surprisingly large number of people.

I didn't know Komaba much, but from the read of the room and the way he talked, apparently he was a pretty respected guy here.

If my take on Fremea's friend was right, I could imagine Komaba being a sort of reservedly passionate conservative fixture against this group heading a bad way, or maybe slowly wading through the tide to try to carefully pull it in a better direction, while his detractors had to actually meet him on the debate floor because he just couldn't be cowed and bullied and knows it; he seemed the kind of guy to not go for a brute's pushy influence on his fellow delinquents specifically because he could do it better than anyone else and could afford to not do it, to try to really win people over instead of just bully them into it.

I found myself nodding approvingly and joining in on the clapping from the two seats next to Fremea as I mentally assessed the speaker in my serial boredom waiting idly for the bus; some of me kept a watch on the sidewalk, just in case other Misaka homed in on me, but I was doubtful that they'd be keen to contest such a concentration of force and I was just kind of bored.

I was also curious closer to the involvement, though.

"Should it not be undesirable to answer, a question would be posed as to Komaba-san's relationship with his associates," I leaned over to whisper quietly to Fremea as my avatar next to her.

The young girls brilliantly clear blue eyes all but glowed as she turned to regard me. No, scratch that, they actually did shine slightly brighter, just not in any hue that I thought anyone not a Misaka would know.

"Komaba-oniichan is just the best!" Fremea declared in her own fervent whisper, nodding energetically enough to set her charming little scarlet beret wagging.

A few of me idly noted that the still annoyingly nameless super-red she lent the hat with her own body heat really made the crimson pop, like the bright points of butterfly wings, and I decided that I wouldn't mind a hat like that myself.

"In the first place, he doesn't tell me a lot, tries to be super sneaky and secret, but then sometimes he babysits me and lets me stay up late at a thing like this like tonight, or his friends come over, and I figure out a lot! Komaba-oniichan is everyone's friend, and everybody looks up to him, 'cause he's Komaba-oniichan."

I bobbed my head, seriously. She obviously had the perspective of a little girl, but being a kid didn't make her stupid, and she paid attention with what seemed a simplistic accuracy.

It tracked with what I had surmised about the guy.

I listened with most of my spare attention to Fremea as she eagerly launched into a hushed accounting of the last time Komaba had been her babysitter, while another speaker at the front of the crowd began his own little speech that fell almost aggressively flat; the other older boy in wannabe biker getup was just dull in his meandering not-quite rebuttal of Komaba and some sort of vague complaint-sounding words. Fremea at least had her heart on her sleeve on full display for her delivery and I immediately pegged Komaba's follow-on as someone with zero talent or practice at talking for an audience.

Because I simply had the gratuitously available spare concern for it, I found the second speaker almost impressive in a bad way. I... I was an entire audience, all by myself, even if I only occupied two of the seats in the warehouse-turned-auditorium itself, and with dozens upon dozens upon scores of captive listeners... I just couldn't be bothered to actually listen.

The coruscations the microphone gave of in a pattern within a pattern in time with the boy's actual words were more interesting, I found.

This was boring.

Restlessly, I had to actively suppress the urge to drum my heels, and started pondering several simultaneous ideas for how I might get away with hiding that we were being rude and watching Gekota on Fremea's phone more if I asked her, and with a few mental playthroughs for how to make that conversation.

I saw my own eyes widen by my sourceless power-assisted vision, then.

While I watched the curious peculiar patterns of the microphone talking to speakers and the reactions of the speakers themselves and their power cords, I was also, indeed, staring straight at Oniichan's laptop, I realised from where I sat in the auditorium.

In Oniichan's apartment, I felt stupid for not making that obvious realisation.

I...

I shouldn't...

But... But would Oniichan really begrudge me if I did?

Except I was also literally right next to him and couldn't possibly justify not asking first...

But I also also didn't want to, because I knew he'd say no.

Or at least that he should.

I groaned and thunked my heads in unison on the computer desk.

Then I did it again, just because, all three foreheads at once.

Instead of asking Oniichan to let me do something irresponsible and dumb instead of using the his computer as the critically valuable, time-sensitive resource that it was to look up what I could about how to save a bunch of girls who really needed saving, and plot a route of attack on bad guys who themselves really needed their faces pushed in... even though I really wanted to fire up the next episode on whatever probably dubious site might host the show... Instead, I gave Oniichan my best smile as he finished tousling my hair dry for the last time within the residential block of the underground lab... even though I didn't really feel much like that either, and I was sure my best smile wasn't very good.

He deserved it, though.

So I did.

I had promised myself to do and be my best, and Oniichan and I both deserved no less, so I did.

I felt I personally deserved somewhere to nap, too, though. Some of me wasn't so worn out, but getting hurt... it was just exhausting, like the fragment or shrapnel or whatever it was that had opened up my forehead had deflated me like a balloon and everything leaked out with the blood; the hole had been dammed with the gauzy patch Oniichan had helped with, but there wasn't much air left inside.

I slumped into a rolly office chair I brought over for me, and upgraded the idea to hibernate.

I didn't want to nap, I wanted to hibernate. For a week.

I stayed with Oniichan helping clean up the icky towels and trash as I pushed myself down the hall toward the dormitory area to curl up in one of the beds; I'd... claimed it by right of conquest, or something, so there.

I needed to wash my hands after this, a lot. Playing nurse assistants was messy work; I didn't really mind the blood in and of itself too much, really—it was just blood, and my own at that, yet also not and didn't really affect me—but it got grimy. I didn't like how it felt on my skin half-congealed and sticky and crusty, and pulling and cracking around my knuckles and wrists.

"That's the last?" Oniichan asked, in a tone that sounded as drained as some of me felt.

"Uh-huh. All done!" I tried to put some hopefully not too forced-sounding pep in it. I didn't feel nearly so beat as he sounded, as elsewhere I really wished I didn't sympathise with him nearly so much or wish I felt as lively as he seemed, but that was also why I'd decided to help him as these avatars; the impromptu medical team group had come out of the fight completely unscathed and hadn't even run around much as part of the defending force anchoring for my counterattack from behind, but that'd also left me in the best position to volunteer for the slog of the aftermath while most of the rest of me in better shape headed out for round two.

"Is she... they... you?" Oniichan tried in fumbling uncertainty, "gonna be alright?"

I bit my lip where he couldn't see me as he looked at my other avatar.

Um...

Above ground, I sniffled and tried to hold together the... what was left of my messier corpse. Doctor Kihara had just erased everything in a cauterising deleting scoop that had erased away my head and the back of my neck at an angle taking a bit of my back after boring through the concrete. The high-velocity bullet that had gotten me from one of the robots, though...

I ran, just ran, and took my place as I had to get away, as the split chunks of what remained gaped open again and pieces fell out.

And I was aware that I was hyperventilating, barely able to stop from joining in myself as I helped me with the third body too.

My first.

I found it again.

Just where I'd dropped it, right before I abandoned me for not being able to see on my own.

I'd been shot by the security man after I woke up, and dropped my body when the upper lab had caught fire, hadn't been able to carry anything in the scramble out of the rubble...

And...

And there had been fire.

It had burned.

Because of the fire.

The stiff, crackly flesh shifted in my hand as I pulled on an arm.

I couldn't just leave it here!

I couldn't- I couldn't...

I retched again.

"Um..."

Oniichan's expression changed inside the lower lab, the weariness melting in the face of something more like warry resolve.

I couldn't just lie to him.

"Every injured avatar is all patched up and good to go," I replied firmly, desperately trying to ignore what was going on just above and to pay acute attention to an incredibly wooden speaker and an otherwise deserted bus stop. Wow, train schedule tables sure were fascinating to read up on online, huh?!

Oniichan cocked his head.

One eye turned squinty.

Uh oh.

"Best-chan," he said way too lightly to be good, drawing it out. "What aren't you telling me."

"So, uh... About that..." I looked down awkwardly, and simultaneously separately smacked myself in the forehead behind Oniichan at the incredibly obviously suspicious reflexive response I beheld in myself in front of him.

The finger-pokey thing... Why?!

But today was Give Best A Hard Time Day, it seemed, because at the same time as I lamented how I could possibly be such a stunningly magnificent nincompoop, I was also altogether oblivious to my embarrassing predicament below and trying to keep the scream from ripping out of me as something in a charred and blackened elbow crackled, and suddenly the ruined body fell to leave me holding a distorted little arm unattached to anything.

And Oniichan perked up as if alarmed, while wetness started tickling my cheeks.

"Something's wrong," he said flatly, staring at nothing. "Someone's in trouble somewhere."

And then he looked up.

No, no, no, no!

"Wai—"

Oniichan disappeared in a rush of wind.

I threw the arm down in horror, unable to look away, stop seeing as it sat there, the fingers curled against the ground for how it landed and the little pinky with blistered skin peeling back snapped off to show a nub of bone.

And then he was there, and I saw him from a dozen different perspectives staring back at me around the bodies.

The blood drained from his face. The redder-than-red dimmed and turned as pallid with it.

His mouth opened, and nothing came out.

I quavered, and things went blurry as cold, cloying dread sunk claws into my chest.

What... What was he going to say?

I couldn't bear to even think about what he thought about me, and desperately needed him to say it anyway, and... and...

I hiccupped, and Oniichan fell to his knees, staring blankly.

I couldn't help it.

I started crying, immediately, messily, hard.

I wanted to be invisible.

I didn't know why, but I didn't want him to see me and it was already too late and I didn't know what to do!

Elsewhere, I swallowed thickly, thrice, and was very glad I was very far removed from what was happening, that all I had to worry about was just figuring out when a train would pass by the nearest bridge or tunnel mouth to my larger force continuing south. One bus wouldn't have nearly enough seats for all of me, and I didn't see a train station nearby, at least not one on the surface and practical to get to.

I really wished I had something more with which to preoccupy myself than just waiting around doing nothing, though. Keeping a super low profile moving block by block and around the sparce students about at this hour was something that demanded attention, and I had more cleanup to do around the wrecked battlefield—spent brass just seemed like a bad idea to leave laying around, and there was still the body of Doctor Kihara to do something about, if nothing else—but... I was just standing around, too, waiting for the bus.

Actually, now that I really thought about it, no, I could spend my time doing something more than being dangerously idle. Idleness might actually be dangerous physically, not just mentally.

I honestly probably should do something proactive about possible hostile action from other Misaka, I reckoned.

I had the advantage of massive preponderance of force as I was. I wanted to make a point of sticking to large groups because the other Misaka would need to bring to bear drastic numerical superiority as it was if they wanted to make any sort of actual fight of it. I was pretty sure that active power usage was a two-way thing that could be sensed, even if distances and qualifiers involved might be ambiguous, but they had to know the city far better than I did, so it didn't seem smart to actually try hiding much, but rather to just make it incredibly discouraging to do anything about it even if and probably when—and easily—other Misaka did find me.

Except that was for a fight.

For them, if there really was as I suspected someone calling the shots using the other Misaka like something straight out of FEAR as their own personal obedient army of mentally coordinated soldiers, and if they honestly weren't really very impressive in an even confrontation... For them, the sensible thing to do would be to just not make it a straight-up slugging match, and simply harass and skirmish, picking away at a significantly stronger but far less active force with things like snipers and ambushes.

Having all the initiative as the attacker was a serious advantage of its own.

So I needed pre-prepared counters to whatever they might choose to do, before they chose to actually do it, or at least narrow down their options to dictate to a degree how they might act.

And some thoughts occurred for how I might do that.

Being able to just up and turn invisible was a heck of an advantage in and of itself: actually in fact can't find the target, pretty hard to shoot the target. Even if the very act of redistributing light around me might give away my presence, someone looking down the sights of a gun or looking where to throw a lightning bolt still needed targeting more precise than that (hopefully, anyway). And yet, if an attack did come, I needed some way to actually do something about it.

Broadly speaking, the most likely hypothetical threats would probably come in the form of, essentially, solid matter or energy. I mentally ran through some of my figures, and it wasn't hard to come up with something like my currently used active camouflage tessellations that I figured should stop a laser cold, and I had already proved that I could overmatch voltage guidance channels, my imposed reality simply being stronger than that of the previous model of Misaka. That still left the big gaping hole of simply bullets, though.

But... as I considered the problem at the bus stop, I did have some ideas, actually.

Fundamentally, the solution needed to be some kind of continuously active effect, something that I could keep continuously active with minimal hassle, and interfered with the passage of matter.

But what was interaction of matter but interaction of electromagnetic fields around matter?

Friction wasn't stuff running into other stuff; it was literally the exact same as any little grade-school science demonstration about poles repelling one another, just on a far finer scale. Objects wouldn't go through each other, even though most space was actually empty at a subatomic level, because electron clouds just got in the way and clashed, unless the object in question was itself small enough to slip by, yet even then, there was a reason why nuclear fission was really hard to get to actually work without great big honking huge atomic nuclei.

Van der Waals chicanery, friction, atomic and molecular bonds, it was all much of a muchness if one looked closely enough.

In theory, I might be able to do something like Flash-style phasing straight through stuff with abilities like mine. It'd be a whole lot easier to do the opposite, though, just be disruptive and cause interference.

And that was really easy to do when one had the best sensors and scopes and detectors and doodads that money could buy as one's own brain, and a bunch of them at that.

Thermal emission made a convenient reference for the body within the reaction-calculating bubble. I already had a framework for a more literal framework describing zones of influence around my body.

I already had a framework that could, say, describe a rigid structure.

I processed a new derivative of my formulae for registering reactions of inducing influences upon neutral baselines. It was all about scale, scale, scale, just looking closely enough. It was just a matter of adding a few zeroes to one side of the decimal or the other.

And a rigid structure could be formed, for example, by the very air within proximity to the planes denoted by the hexagonal tessellations having such a high coefficient of friction that it locked in place against itself. With friction that high, it could likewise offer enormous resistance to anything else with even localised negative charge that pressed one unanchored field against another repelling one that distributed force into something solidly fixed.

I took a spot of amused satisfaction considering the saying about two heads being better than one as I turned a whole bunch of heads to the task while I waited for the clock to tick by and a bus to arrive, while someone I really hoped didn't hate me struggled to come up with words and I sobbed helplessly as I mentally tried to look the proverbial other way and not pay attention to it.

It was satisfying to accomplish something piecing together several dozen individual parts in my combined heads while I narrowed down a spot on the online map of the city to head for, actually quite close to my trio of de facto advance scouts that had tangled with the same number of older Misaka.

I grinned as I reached out and flicked myself on the nose only to hit unyielding solid air in front of me while I also shuffled through the otherwise empty halls of the lab back to the accessible active computer terminal I'd found, to peruse whatever I might find for lack of particularly better ideas.

And while I slept. That part was odd.

Intellectually, I knew I was somewhere or another in the company of Yomikawa and that I was in a few of the lab dorm beds, and I was sort of vaguely dissosiatively aware, but I was asleep. As like after Oniichan had rescued me from the fire, I was just sort of there and not at the same time.

The absolutely dismal speaker in the delinquent rally petered out and gave the metaphorical spotlight to another person, though, which was nice, and this one was an overtly feisty girl who seemed as done with her predecessor as I felt.

Maybe nice too or maybe not—I couldn't begin to tell, it was just a terrifying relief—was how Oniichan's eyes tightened at the same time as his jaw clenched with grinding sounds, then he was lunging at me and engulfed me in his arms, before I engulfed him in turn as the rest of me around him sobbing in a contrast that almost didn't feel real to some of me, jarringly dissonant and confusing. It was actually kind of scary, in a way, just like earlier when I'd just felt so much all of a sudden with Yomikawa even as I also didn't.

Also nice and confusing was when a big blocky bus rounded the corner and silently trundled over, only the slight raspy hiss of large tires and whir of motor for the manifestly electrical power—which had my approval, I had to admit, especially with the abundance of wind turbines sticking up all over the skyline. Little embedded devices in the corners released brilliant strobes that almost had me reflexively trying to leap out of the way, so reminiscent to the targeting attempts of the little murder-bots from earlier, but the bus was just a bus dumbly scanning for anyone at its scripted position. Wheels came to a stop, doors opened up, and, plainly as any other normal passenger, I got onboard.

The bus wasn't empty.

There was a girl.

Half a head taller than me, and looking a little older than me, there was another passenger already onboard despite the hour. She looked at once stylish and sporty, with a sleek short denim jacket over a spaghetti-strap shirt of tiered ruffle in bright white that held some colours while throwing off a dazzle of others. The sporty-stylish look was further complemented, though, by the long black ponytail and neatly cut framing locks swept forward to window shadowed but curious green eyes, further accented by subtly drawing attention to a fetching flower blossom hairpin with glossy white petals splayed out like a star.

She nursed a coffee cup in one hand, the other grasping the strap of a handbag slung over her shoulder.

Those green eyes held bags under them, but turned on me with intensity.

"Well, this is an interesting night."

 

[thepsyborg]

Oh this is super good. I'm loving it. Thanks for writing!

 

[veekie]

Somebody get all these kids in bed.

 

[Jonen C]

Somebody get all these kids in bed.

Click to shrink...

Does she even have enough beds?

Is the legion going to descend on the local flat pack furniture store next?

 

[Celtic Spartan]

two in a row? thanks for your hard work we all appreciate it!

 

[veekie]

Does she even have enough beds?

Is the legion going to descend on the local flat pack furniture store next?

Click to shrink...

They feel like they're going through thousands of adrenaline crashes at once and really the best thing to do at that point is all go to bed.

 

[Jonen C]

They feel like they're going through thousands of adrenaline crashes at once and really the best thing to do at that point is all go to bed.

Click to shrink...

Probably, but so much that needs doing.

Graves detail needs to finish deal with the human remains, or a bad job is only going to get worse.
And feeding what amounts to a big battalion is a significant logistical undertaking that needs planning and preparation.
Probably best to start sleeping in shifts.

 

[veekie]

One person can't do all that even if they have a lot of body!

 

[Jonen C]

One person can't do all that even if they have a lot of body!

Click to shrink...

Many hands make light work, tho.