She doesn't even use a mnemonic like her counterpart in the upper year; everyone knows that without that, mind-controllers are far too slow to be effective!
She has somehow forgotten that the person she's talking about is a LEVEL FUCKING 5, and thus if she is slow it's only in comparison to the absolute most powerful espers.
Onizuka shows that she has a brain, and Tatsuki stops doing her one smart behavior of listening to her friend.
Also, her not saying that the person she's trying to play is Mental Out because she thinks her mom will say her plan is bad, and thus she doesn't learn just how bad/good of a plan it is, is quite funny.
"And if I do it anyway?" I argued. "Miss Hokaze hasn't exactly been very convincing in her approach, and neither of you have shown any real capacity to prevent us from doing as we wish. You'd have more control if you agreed to our terms."
She waved him off. "Don't worry about it, your facilities are much better than a lot of alternatives I looked at," she responded. "You've updated your workplace standards significantly, I hear? I'm sure you have a prosperous career ahead of you!"
He paused. Then he responded, "...Thank you for your kind words, Miss Mental Out. I'm sure we'll manage." I rolled my eyes; what would workplace standards help with? A bit more ambition would do this man good. "I'll show you to the labs you've booked."
You know, I was thinking, and isn't Meltdowner just really pathetic for a level 5? It's even more obvious here than in canon because of Misaki's increased motivation. She has a single barely-flexible gimmick, and only manages to rank where she does among the 5s because of how weird it functions. After all, despite common perception, they ARE based on research value rather than strength. I mean, the closest analogue to her functionality-wise is if Misaka just had her Railgun and nothing else.
You know, I was thinking, and isn't Meltdowner just really pathetic for a level 5? It's even more obvious here than in canon because of Misaki's increased motivation. She has a single barely-flexible gimmick, and only manages to rank where she does among the 5s because of how weird it functions. After all, despite common perception, they ARE based on research value rather than strength. I mean, the closest analogue to her functionality-wise is if Misaka just had her Railgun and nothing else.
Like, yes, Meltdowner is very much the closest to a one-trick-pony out of all of the Level 5's... but that's a very qualified statement, right? She can still do blasting, shields, plasma constructs, and outright cellular manipulation with it, the underlying mechanism of her power is something incredibly valuable and unique, and the way her power interacts with others shows that it legitimately has the power to overcome even some of the very strongest esper powers in existence.
She's also relatively competent and has a strong set of physical skills to back her up. Her narrowness of focus is a legitimate liability that can easily be exploited, but I think she's still clearly earned her position among the Level 5's.
You know, I was thinking, and isn't Meltdowner just really pathetic for a level 5? It's even more obvious here than in canon because of Misaki's increased motivation. She has a single barely-flexible gimmick, and only manages to rank where she does among the 5s because of how weird it functions. After all, despite common perception, they ARE based on research value rather than strength. I mean, the closest analogue to her functionality-wise is if Misaka just had her Railgun and nothing else.
In canon you have little miss "railgun, hack everything and fly" as the other electromaster to compare her to so I'd say it's even worse there given with Misaki it's just a case of "either you're immune or you lose" but yeah, Meltdowner's just kind of sad (ITEM needs its own spin-off tbh "A certain shadow run" is a title that writes itself).
Then again, Misaka isn't allowed to win any important fight in her own series so it might be even sadder, but yeah Meltdowner really needs a twist to be brought up to par (though to be fair, Accelerator also is a one trick pony, it's just that his trick is "whatever the author wants").
I know that Meltdowner said that the Rank 1 and Rank 2 "control reality" but all Misaka needs to do to warrant the same description is work on illusions and making sounds at a distance. Everything on a human scale except gravity is electromagnetic at base.
A strange concept. One contrasted with its description of science- where it matters not what the scientist does, for science is not the impulse, merely a tool, and this is its virtue.
But science was an impulse, was it not? The creeping yearning to discover, to tear apart, to break something down into tiny pieces and suck out the goodness from it. How could it be both science and philosophy? They were incompatible.
And yet… and yet. I tapped my pen upon the pages I'd printed off. It made a certain kind of sense, that impulses would effectively work to explain themselves. It matched with the cold, hard psychological facts- but I couldn't accept that science was some trundling little machine, driven by something else.
Most of the papers had been papers. Boring explanations for why she was so boring about how best to study. She'd slipped in a few like this one, though, almost without explanation.
I flipped back to the cover. 'Beyond Good and Evil. Friedrich Nietzsche.'
Then I flipped back to another passage that had troubled me.
'Philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual will to power, the will to creation of the world, the will to the first cause.'
Wasn't that the most fundamental goal of science, the 'will to power' and the 'will to the first cause', as he called it? And yet, here, once again- 'philosophy', he called it.
The rest of this section was scorn, scorn, all scorn- it was a scornful book, or at least a scornful introduction, and I couldn't understand why she'd given this to me. Perhaps 'prickly' was a better word. It took joy in doing its utmost to contradict- it warned of sacrifice in the name of knowledge being pointless 'martyrdom', and it accused the deepest part of the mind of being unteachable. And yet it did so in the same ways that a true scientist might scorn a petty mystic or god-believer, almost self-flagellatory in its love and hate of knowledge.
The later chapters described an ideal that was simultaneously of creation and self-destruction, of blissful disregard and eager acknowledgement. Almost a parody of itself. Was it a self-contradiction? A joke, that the blonde idiot was playing on me? If that was the case, though, why had anyone bothered to preserve this drivel in the first place?
It was a book I'd learned to hate through painful experience. This was the third time I'd read through it.
As I tried to glare it into submission, I was distracted by my aide's giggling.
"...Miss Onizuka, what is it that's gotten you so pleased, exactly?" I groused, finally giving up on my readings.
She jumped a little at the sound of my voice, before shuffling closer. "Look," she said, in that quiet little voice of hers.
It was… some sort of cartoon of a long, navy-blue needle-tailed creature, throwing a spear or needle at some orange-headed lizard with a pair of long, tubular frills. Antenna, perhaps? The next frame depicted the lizard biting down on the spear as it snatched it from the air, resulting in the other animal looking fearful, with flattened ears and wide, pupil-less eyes.
"They drew a picture," she explained. "The author."
I blinked, slowly. "I… fail to see the point," I said, after a moment, adjusting my glasses. It was certainly an unusual design, but the drawing wasn't particularly impressive. "What on Earth is the context that's gotten you so excited?"
"Oh! It's from a story," said Onizuka. "Someone here- the city- wrote it." She pointed at the blue creature; it had certainly gotten more words from her than I usually would, not without some significant prompting at least. "Slugcat," she said.
"Slug…cat?" I questioned, putting the two words together. She nodded back at me. I gave it a second look; its design was dominated by large, white eyes, a slim body, and a large, spiky tail. I made a guess for the sake of conversation- "Is it intended to be… cute, somehow?"
She considered that. Then she said, "Maybe? They're very mean to it. The author. Their story is weird."
"Ah. Well, I'm not interested in it at all!" I said. I looked back at the text I'd been perusing. "I'm going to warm up instead; it's certainly more useful than this drivel I've been trying to read. Philosophy! Pah."
Soon enough it would be time to go find the two cotton-brains, but for now, we were reading for pleasure in the Shokuhou Clique's main room. Or at least, Onizuka was, and I had been attempting to; she seemed to be succeeding, but I certainly wasn't. She nodded, understanding my motives, and I headed out.
Even most high-schoolers expected a school building, but prestigious Tokiwadai had a wide, expansive campus instead. Entire buildings were reserved for the most prestigious of its cliques, small as those buildings may be relative to the main one, and its grounds held everything from riding areas to a forest.
Ah, I would never admit it to anyone, but Forestry had to be one of my favourite classes outside of the hard sciences… There were many different little things to learn- law and policies, the benefits of different degrees of forest management, the more playful aspects of arboriculture- and it was all linked together by the psychological benefits of green space. It was simply charming, and if I'd been in need of a tiebreaker with my choice of tutelage (though that certainly hadn't been the case), I might even have chosen the school for such classes if I known how satisfying they would be.
But alas, I would not be doing any of that today. Instead, I would be meeting my opponent on one of the high-performance, self-repairing sportsgrounds, used to cope with the toughest of treatment an esper could give.
Imagine my surprise when- after I'd changed out of my school uniform- I wasn't the first person there.
She noticed me before I noticed her. Shokuhou was in her uniform, leaning on the wall of the adjacent building. She was folded practically in half, tugging her bandaged leg closer to her body, head turned towards me. I decided to speak up. "Hah! Warming up? I didn't know you were expecting to fight, Lady Shokuhou. What are you going to do, shoot dewdrops at us?" I needled- everyone knew high-level espers with low-level Kinesis were touchy about it.
Apart from the idiot, apparently. "Ah, no, I just needed to stretch- thought I'd take some time to do it," she replied. "Hokaze hasn't finished her lessons yet, but she should get here soon enough."
"Something about those leg injuries of yours?" I asked. "Couldn't afford the full treatment or something? Those should have been easy enough to treat, especially on a budget like yours. Going somewhere else, is it?" Come to think of it, I'd never heard her brag about her parentage- even Misaka, refined girl she was, had been heard to praise her parentage on the occasions she'd been challenged on their quality.
For a moment I saw that strange intensity in her gaze. She'd never acted on it, so she couldn't be feeling particularly strongly- perhaps it was merely a tell for her power usage? It would explain the starry eyes she had if her gaze was linked to it… I filed that away for later.
"No- it's just a growth spurt," she replied, straightening up and arching her back. "I think the rest of me needs some time to catch up to my long bones- especially my tendons."
I raised an eyebrow. "You? A growth spurt?" I asked, incredulously. "What, did you grow an inch?"
"Actually, I seem to be growing quite quickly," she said- her smile was small, but it reached her eyes, which was practically shouting from the heavens by her standards. (Her peon would probably disagree with some nonsense like 'oh, she smiles a lot when you spend all your time with her' or something.) "My gut- and a bit of maths, of course- says I'm getting quite a bit of height, quite quickly. If my assumptions are correct, I will be the ultimate beanpole soon."
"...Beanpole?" I questioned, raising an eyebrow. "No hopes for anything more… horizontal?"
She looked at me with a raised eyebrow. "Horizontal?" she asked, apparently confused. I sighed. Really?
"Most girls would be aiming for something more… feminine," I said to her, gesturing at my chest and hips. "Given your current figure, I'd assume you to be drinking milk straight from the bottle, if it might make you look less like a doll."
"Oh, that's what you mean. Nah, not at all. I mean, I do drink milk, but who do I look like, Barbie?" she asked me facetiously.
…Who was Barbie, and what did she have to do with this?
"Nope- I have a feeling that soon, I shall reach all of the top shelves, untethered by any such excess mass. I shall be entirely bone, muscle, and a healthy layer of body fat as required for healthy organ maintenance, and I shall laugh at all the people who remain short," she declared, and did a sort of half-hearted, very fake laugh to emphasise her point.
I glanced at her chest. If my analysis techniques were correct… "If that's the case, then why are you wearing a training bra already?" I asked. "Even when you're barely an inch or two taller?"
She paused. And then, slowly…
"...Are you blushing?" I asked, confused, but positively gleeful at the observation now I'd spotted it. She glanced away. Weakness! "Is… This is the thing you're embarrassed about? Out of all the things I've tried?"
"This is not a conversation we're having," she tried. "My underclothes are irrelevant to your general existence."
"You're blushing!" I crowed, starting to laugh. I tried to imagine what else might get under her skin even more, if merely mentioning bras was enough to disrupt that famed placidity of hers. "W-wait, are you having that time of the-"
My mouth clacked shut of its own volition, as she made a pinching motion with her hand. "Up thy shut," she said.
I'd finally provoked her enough to actually use that power of hers! Without it being used to simply one-up me, more specifically. I grinned at her behind my closed jaws. It was a small victory, but any victory was something to savour!
"Oh!" said a voice behind me, and I jumped. "Are you both finally making friends?"
"Of course not!" I denied, whirling around to see that violet-haired menace behind me, as the blonde simultaneously said, "Nope."
"That's wonderful!" Hokaze clapped, completely ignoring our words. She was wearing her gym uniform, as expected. "Ah, I shouldn't have interrupted, I shouldn't have interrupted at all…! But I must admit, I'm too excited for our little spar to slow down," she said to me. "I didn't get here too early, did I? Do I need to fetch Miss Onizuka?"
"...Enthusiastic, are we?" I asked, raising a questioning eyebrow. Did she even know how sparring worked? "Certainly- though we may need to wait for her to finish reading… I really don't see why she likes that drivel."
__________
We stood on opposite sides of the pitch. I watched my opponent with careful eyes; at this distance the image was crisp and clear, but I would have to be cautious when she made it to close range. ('When', rather than 'if', being due to my lack of ranged options.)
She was… completely unprepared. Oh, she was ready to move, alright, and she seemed to understand martial arts judging by her posture- but my analysis of her had revealed she didn't have any of the violent intent needed to win, just giddy energy. Hah! Pathetic.
A few watchers had gathered, beyond simply Shokuhou and Onizuka. They were Hokaze's cake-brained friends, and they were going to be disappointed, obviously.
"Do you remember the rules?" asked Hokaze, still smiling stupidly.
I scoffed. "Of course I do!" I told her. "Whoever tags the other thrice is the winner. A solid hit- not just tippy-taps." I would have preferred something more aggressive, but the punishment needed to down a regenerator was not something the school would find acceptable, capable as I might be of it.
"Excellent, I'm glad!" she said, and turned to her pet doll. "Miss Shokuhou?"
I tensed. "Ready," said Shokuhou, "set-"
Something in my brain told me to move, and my enemy moved simultaneously.
"Go!" shouted Shokuhou.
Her first move was obvious- her legs tensed, and she thrust herself at me, with force that was more than human.
But not much more.
I shifted to the side, and dropped partially through the ground- the sportswear was organic- to dodge her follow-up spinning kick. That was right, my first impression hadn't been mistaken. "You're holding back?" I laughed, walking backwards to make the distance I needed, as she paused to listen. "Oh, you aren't going to win this."
"It's just a spar- I'll put some more effort in once I know it's safe to do so!" she said, still with a cheerful expression. "But that was a well-drilled movement, Miss Tatsuki; I can put a bit more into it, it seems."
"You really think you can win if you're holding back?" I asked her tauntingly. "That's the first rule of combat- use anything you have. And I'm not going to play nicely."
"Unfortunately, I always hold back," she said- apologetically? I couldn't figure out if she was entering a combat stance or not. "But I'm always happy to expand my horizons! If you're going to try and make up the difference with such plays, I won't begrudge you."
…Was she looking down on me? I snarled, and charged her.
Before I hit, though, I dropped through the ground- neatly dodging the palm-thrust she threw at my face. I rose up, perfectly aimed for her kidneys as she inevitably turned around-
A blurry foot caught me in the gut with immense force as I surfaced, and my breath left me. With no footing to speak of, I was sent rolling by the impact, and found myself trying to regather my breath on the floor rather than striking my first blow.
"First point to Hokaze," announced Shokuhou.
"Oops! That might have been a little bit much," I heard Hokaze say sheepishly, and rolled over to glare at her. She shook the weakness faster than I expected, expression refocusing as her eyes met mine. "That was rather sloppy of you, Miss Tatsuki," she said, shaking her head. "You broke eye contact with your foe, and you didn't keep yourself grounded in melee range; if you can strike before your foe can react, a rush like that can work, but you left me with far too much time to respond."
"Are you pitying me?!" I gasped, pushing myself back to my feet. "I'll rip you to shreds if you are."
"A spar that doesn't teach your foe anything is pointless aggression," said Hokaze, readying herself again. And yet my eyes still told me she was holding back. "And, as your senpai and prospective friend… it's my duty to make sure you're taught a lesson."
"...Was that a threat?" I said, honestly unable to tell, my bafflement breaking my focus briefly.
"Third mistake- losing focus in a fight," said Hokaze, and she charged- but this time, she was a blurred object in my face before I could start to react.
I threw up an arm to block her attack, and my bones jarred at the impact of her palm- not her fist- on my forearm. This- this was holding back?! I found my footing before she threw her next strike, and folded my hand into a fist. She'd blatantly left herself open, my instincts noticed, and I hit her in the gut as hard as I could-
It was like punching steel- this time I was the one jarring my bones. She didn't even tense up, beyond using her abdominals as damnable armour! I hissed, my arm pulling back as part of the movement, when a hand closed around my wrist. "Fourth lesson- if your opponent is skilled, obvious openings, aren't."
And then she single-handedly swung me like a pendulum over her head, and with her own mass weighing me down too much to phase, I was slammed into the ground like I'd been suplexed. "Second point, Hokaze," came that irritating voice from the sidelines.
Hokaze backed off as I tried to recover- damnation, that was going to bruise… "Don't think… you've won," I breathed, pushing myself back to my feet. I wasn't going to lose to someone… someone like her. I wouldn't! I looked over her stance… she was still holding back?! "If you don't give it your all…"
"Given that I will need your respect if we are to become friends, and a fight is the easiest way to gain your respect with our respective personalities- let me make myself clear," said Hokaze, that smile finally leaving her face. "If I am not holding back, then not only will I injure myself, but- perhaps more importantly- I will injure you. There is nobody in this school, not even Miss Misaka, who I believe could reasonably expect to deflect a well-placed punch that I have thrown with all my heart, and so I refuse to. If you desire to see Rampage Dress at anything more than its lowest intensities, I'm afraid you have a lot of bad habits to unlearn-"
I screamed in frustration at her softness, and charged her, this time with my ultimate technique- my feet phased through the ground, and I let it flicker, leaning into gravity to build my speed to a height. This would be difficult, but I'd pulled it off before. She said I needed speed to take her off-guard? I'd get that speed-
And more, as the moment before impact, I let go of my phasing and let my fingers scrape the ground. Whatever she was expecting, it wasn't the sandy surface of the pitch being thrown in her eyes.
My foot left the ground to slam into her side-
The impact was loud- but it had landed in entirely the wrong place. Hokaze Junko had raised one arm, eyes closed- not even looking at me after the grit I'd thrown in her face- and blocked my most furious assault without effort.
She opened her eyes, and even with the blur from my inability to see this close-up, I saw them glow briefly with a fearsome light. "Fifth lesson- self-control is the foundation of all successful combat," she said.
Then- equally-effortlessly- she slammed her palm into my jaw, and I was sent flying to the floor. Just as I rolled to a stop, I felt myself go over a little lump in the terrain, and then my back was on grass instead of sand.
"Third point and ring-out to Hokaze. Hokaze Junko wins, three-zero," announced Shokuhou.
"...How?" I breathed, asking myself. She was weak- soft- squishy, even! How had she… she utterly destroyed me?! That didn't make any sense! She didn't have the personality for it! She didn't have the willpower a successful woman needed! She had nothing, and I had everything! And yet- she- I hadn't even- argh!
I heard footsteps beside me; that violette idiot, again. "That was a fun match, but you'll need to work hard if we're to spar as you'd wish us to," she said, that idiotic smile back on her face. She extended a hand towards me… She wanted to help me up, even after humiliating me like that?
"Oh, give your pity to someone who wants it," I hissed. "I'll get up when I want to."
"...If that's what you want, Miss Tatsuki," she replied. "Enjoy your day?"
"I will," I informed her stubbornly. Not quite sure what to make of my unbroken pride, she waved at me, and walked out of my field of vision. I could hear the others leaving, which suited me just fine.
…Ugh. It would be a while before I wanted to get up.
There was one more set of footsteps, however. Another person walked into my field of view, this one more appreciable. "Are you okay?" asked Onizuka.
"Just… peachy," I growled, letting myself feel the aches and pains I'd just gathered in my idiocy. What could I have done wrong? It made no sense. "I'll need to think… about how I'll beat her next time."
"Okay," she said, and sat down with her tablet- presumably to read that stupid story again. "I'll wait."
At least there was one person who I could understand.
__________
Hokaze must have had a plan. The combat had re-solidified it in my mind, after the brief doubt that the meeting had put in me; she was too strong to be led around like a duckling, no matter how much she acted like one usually. But how to explain her usual behaviour, then? Shokuhou had clearly been acting as her subordinate by doing something menial like counting points, and thus…
I was rudely interrupted in my thoughts when something jabbed me in the side- I hissed, that area still bruised from being kicked so hard, almost dropping my soldering iron. "Still too dazed to think straight?" laughed an unfortunately-familiar voice, and I turned towards her indignantly.
Haughty-looking eyes, those ridiculous goggles and silver memory-alloy ribbons, one of which was coiling around her arm as it was retracted… and a smug, stupid smile on her face. Yonaki Reika- the person in this school most deserving of the title 'rival', in both the positive and negative senses of the word.
We were in a mechanics class, a field that had attracted the attention of a number of different up-and-coming stars of the first year. Here was Misaka Mikoto, the Ace of Tokiwadai, in the front rows; there was Iori Mashiro, eagerly tinkering as a jelly-like blob of water warped to offer her the tools she needed; and here we were, Yonaki and Tatsuki, most passionate first-years in the art of science, both vying for supremacy in the eyes of our future power base. In all honesty, it was not one of my favoured classes, but with the number of notable first-years who were a part of it- Kokuchou and Shokuhou being some of the few who weren't present- and the value of having it on my grades, I'd be a fool to pass it up.
It was simply unfortunate that Yonaki and her sycophants took my presence as a slight against her, and my current state as weakness.
My temporary subservience to Shokuhou was a long-term stratagem, the sort of stratagem that was anathema to Yonaki. I was making myself look weak in the short term, but building her up with my presence, then pulling out a chunk of her clique from under her when I left, was sure to be an excellent debut as an independent clique leader. In retrospect, it would be completely obvious and completely genius; right now, it seemed as though I'd walked into a spider's web of my own volition.
"Dazed? Pah! As if," I scoffed. "What sort of idiot sticks only to taking cakewalks? Miss Hokaze is one of the strongest espers in the school, don't you know- I gleaned a lot of useful information from my interaction with her." The 'useful' part was a lie. "Progress is worth a few bruises, is it not, Yonaki-chin?"
She laughed. "Poor, stupid Mirei-chan," she said. "Walking up to a Level 5 and thinking you have them eating from the palm of your hand? Face it, moron- you're not getting anything from her. She'll use you up and kick you out. That's what mind-controllers do, you are aware, aren't you?"
How uncouth. I idly noticed one of the other girls in our year- Mitsuari, if I recalled correctly- curl in on herself slightly; she was the one with the weak, remote-based mind control. Perhaps it was worth investigating if I could draw her in? Shokuhou was one of the few who'd accept her, in theory, and if I could scope out her personality and earn her loyalty while under the Level 5's protection…
"Don't you think she'd have more people by now, if it were mind-control rather than idiocy which made people act like that?" I sighed. "Yonaki-chin- can I call you Yonakin?- you may have me beat in engineering, but seriously. Don't try to show me up in psychology. Your knowledge is nowhere near as broad as your waistline, and certainly not as deep as that thick skull of yours."
"Oh, but Mirei-chan- people are just another kind of machine, aren't you aware?" said Yonaki. "The whole purpose of Academy City is to build a better human machine, and machines are predictable in how they follow their purpose." She flexed the coils of memory alloy around her arm. "I, Yonaki Reika, am strong, flexible, and my memory lasts. You, Tatsuki Mirei, are weak, scarcely interacting with the world in your delusions. And people like Shokuhou? Their perfect machine is controllable. So a girl like you, and a girl like her…" She grinned maliciously. "They fit right together. You're controllable."
"Hardly," I scoffed. "Another interpretation- there is nothing that can constrain me." I put my hand on the desk. "Especially not you, Yonakin."
"Nothing that can constrain you… except for people," said Yonaki, smirking. "That's how she beat you, isn't it? That's how I'll beat you, Mirei-chan. People are going to tie you down for the more ambitious of us to take advantage of. Like that Onizuka idiot-"
"My aide is no idiot," I interrupted, cutting her off sharply. "Her intellect could tear you to pieces any day."
"Try saying that when she can hardly get out two words edgeways," she laughed, and her sycophants laughed behind her.
She was the real moron. If you put her in human resources, she'd be torn up and thrown out the door before the day was out. I scoffed at her. "Tell somebody who cares," I told her.
"Oh, I will, don't you worry," she said, and I rolled my eyes. "See you later, Mirei-chan."
"Have fun with that, Yonakin," I replied. She knew science, but her understanding of having proper underlings clearly needed work.
I returned to my soldering. I had more productive things to do than argue with her. She had the right idea about how the world worked, but she certainly didn't know how to turn it to her purposes.
And that was why I was going to come out on top.
…
I still couldn't get a proper read on Shokuhou. Was it possible that Yonaki wasn't… entirely wrong?
If Hokaze was strong, but so fluff-brained the rest of the time… could that inconsistency have a cause? I'd heard rumours in passing from the upper-years, that someone- perhaps the Mitsuari girl (she was rumoured to have been kicked out of the project that had elevated Hokaze to her current power), perhaps Shokuhou- had constrained her, out of fear or hate for what she could become. I sincerely doubted it, it was illogical if you thought about it very hard, but people could indeed be illogical sometimes.
When school was over, and we were back in the park on our usual claimed territory, I discussed this with Onizuka.
"I think you're right," said Onizuka. "It's silly. But it's easy to test."
"Hmm?" I asked her. "How so?"
"We make a log," she suggested. "Pictures. Then you can check."
"...I see," I said, nodding. "If we keep something, to analyse our activities at the second order… We'd have something to keep an eye on, something that a theoretical hostile Miss Shokuhou would have more difficulty subverting. Yes, yes- that's good. This is why you're the ideal subordinate, Onizuka- that idiot Yonaki can't recognise the value in independent thought, hah."
"She annoyed you?" Onizuka asked me.
"Annoyed me? She's infuriating!" I complained. "Talking like she knows how people work just from a little thinking… Who does she think she is? I've studied psychology! I've studied neurology! And she just waltzes in saying, 'oh, mind-controllers are inherently untrustworthy! oh, quiet people are stupider than me!' She's clearly inferior to both of us, and yet they're flocking to her just because I've seen the merits of having an actual strategy instead of just throwing around childish insults. I'll show her soon enough."
"You will," she agreed. She looked at the shadows on the ground, and hummed. "Time to go?"
"Yes, let's leave," I agreed, phasing through the bars as I usually did and landing on the ground. "We have work to do."
As we walked away, I noticed those idiots- 'the Fury Squad', or some chunni little elementary-schooler thing- creeping up on our territory. I barked out a laugh. Did they think a Judgment officer was enough to get us to stop staking our claim?
But I had more exciting things to focus on. "Hey!" I shouted over my shoulder, and they all froze. "Your superior is feeling magnanimous. Enjoy yourselves there while you can; we have better things to focus on."
"Screw you!" shouted one of the boys, and I chuckled. Ah, they'd learn to stay in their place one day.
I noticed Onizuka roll her eyes. "Something to say?" I asked her.
She smiled slightly. "No," she said.
"Of course not," I replied, puffing up my chest. "You know image is as important as I do. We're on the winning team, after all- and people like that should know it!"
And here we see another installment dealing with our favourite science gremlin. Reading ACCF and the scenes featuring Tatsuki in the main story is like night and day. She's clearly changed a lot, even if Misaki has only recently noticed that.
"Nope- I have a feeling that soon, I shall reach all of the top shelves, untethered by any such excess mass. I shall be entirely bone, muscle, and a healthy layer of body fat as required for healthy organ maintenance, and I shall laugh at all the people who remain short," she declared, and did a sort of half-hearted, very fake laugh to emphasise her point.
Ultimately, Misaki's dream of being tall came true, but her own body got the last laugh regardless. Clearly, some of her predictions regarding her rapid-onset puberty were off the mark.
I glanced at her chest. If my analysis techniques were correct… "If that's the case, then why are you wearing a training bra already?" I asked. "Even when you're barely an inch or two taller?"
She paused. And then, slowly…
"...Are you blushing?" I asked, confused, but positively gleeful at the observation now I'd spotted it. She glanced away. Weakness! "Is… This is the thing you're embarrassed about? Out of all the things I've tried?"
And, of course, the Gremlin was enough of an arsehole to use MisaSI's own self-image issues and self-consciousness to get under her skin.
Still, Tatsuki has now learnt not to underestimate Hokaze. Meanwhie, Onizuka is apparently the more socially apt of the two and has recognized that her friend is being managed... and is apparently okay with it.
She says something this overwhelmingly stupid... in the same part of the chapter where she says she has read Beyond Good and Evil three times. So clearly some part of her gets the importance of philosophy, but seriously, how does she know nothing about the history of science?
In the spar, she reads like a supervillain angry that Spiderman dares to not punch her hard enough to take her head off. Also, the fact she thinks you need a will to hurt to win a spar shows she knows literally nothing about martial arts, like seriously
She says something this overwhelmingly stupid... in the same part of the chapter where she says she has read Beyond Good and Evil three times. So clearly some part of her gets the importance of philosophy, but seriously, how does she know nothing about the history of science?
To be fair, she is a twelve-year-old raised by STEMlords.
In the spar, she reads like a supervillain angry that Spiderman dares to not punch her hard enough to take her head off. Also, the fact she thinks you need a will to hurt to win a spar shows she knows literally nothing about martial arts, like seriously
In addition to what other people have said, caring about people's attitudes more than their actual capabilities seems to be a consistent thing with her. ...For good and for ill, I guess.
In-universe, it does make some sense that a society of 70% children is going to end up with some pretty skewed social norms, when you've got so many people going through puberty in a confined space without adequate adult role models. Not surprising that Misaki has just straight up decided to tune this all out for the past few years.
"...Okay, Operation: Card Stray Dogs," I corrected bemusedly.
This is pretty realistic childish banter. Having this kind of silliness interspersed makes the ultraviolence and messed up experiments seem all the more horrific because of the juxtaposition, which is one of the strengths of this setting.
As a brief tangent… Level Uppers weren't really a threat to people in Academy City any more, since there were too few network members to really make Level Upper worth the risk of buying into. However, it had still altered the makeup and nature of the city's ever-present delinquent problems. A lot of Level 0s had been outraged by the loss of Level Upper, the only real way for them to get psychic powers, or had been victimised by other delinquents who'd used Level Upper and made their powers much more dangerous.
This had meant the previously-existing phenomenon of 'Skill-Outs' had become a major face of the city's lowlife. Level 0s were already vulnerable to dropping out of the psychic programs for various reasons- bullying, reduced income, feelings of inadequacy and unfairness- and so the local delinquents were often skewed towards Level 0s on one end. Combined with the rarity of high-levels as delinquents, mostly due to absolute rarity- there was a bit of a bias per-capita for high-levels also being delinquents, likely due to egoism or other power-induced mental issues- it meant that Level 0 gang members needed to either attach themselves to a high-level for protection, or to group up and use numbers, aggression and soft tactics to carve out a safe space for doing Level 0 delinquent things. Those who followed the latter strategy- more common now, due to Level Upper fracturing and coagulating the gangs along level lines- had become known as Skill-Outs.
This is an interesting insight into the low-level crime ongoing in the city. Level Upper didn't so much create the Skill-Out phenomenon as much as it exaserbated an existing fracture point. Having the vast majority of children straight up told to their faces that they're "zeroes" was always going to lead to this kind of backlash, honestly - ideally, the "Level" schema as a whole would be retired, really, since it's a deeply arbitrary classification system that aslo leads to poor social results, but unfortunately it's become ingrained enough that even if there was a pliable City administration, actually getting that cultural shift through would be an uphill battle.
They were fairly threatening to most of the lower levels. Saten was the only Level 0 among us. Even if she were diving deeper into the alleyways on her lonesome, a first-year Level 0 who bumped into the less passive or ideological Skill-Outs would be in major trouble against any who weren't feeling friendly. Even Wannai and Awatsuki would just get swamped in numbers if they got attacked. But between my psychic powers and Hokaze's raw strength, durability and regenerative abilities, Level 0s were basically non-threats to either of us two. Academy City had pretty strict firearm controls for civilians, so the only real equaliser- being able to shoot us in the back- wasn't really an option... Even then, a gunman would still be in real trouble if they triggered my passive alarms anywhere within a kilometre of me, or if they didn't do enough damage to Hokaze to keep her from activating Rampage Dress (as the usual esper weakness of not being able to concentrate through extreme pain was basically a non-issue for her).
The idea that a bunch of teenagers trying to have a day out have to make plans for roving criminal gangs really helps sink in how much Academy City approaches the standards of a failed state. Yeah, they're going around various dark alleys, but they're doing it during the day, in a pretty small and confined enclave that has a stupid amount of funding. This is a catastrophic level of mismanagement - or at least it would be, if the City administration gave a shit about such plebian concerns as "crime".
I, meanwhile, was relegated to being a glorified GPS and pack mule. Mental Out, unfortunately, didn't have any direct relevance to this task unless I was getting my ass kicked- after all, anyone who'd seen one of the envelopes would have retrieved it for themselves, so scouring nearby memories would bring up only irrelevancy and disappointment. But for orienteering through the alleyways, Mental Out made itself useful primarily for the transferrable skills it offered. Psychic powers needed excellent memory and spatial awareness, so I'd ended up following the other two with the map, marking any cards we found onto it and carrying them in the crook of my arm.
She's sort of complaining, but I get the impression that Misaki actually appreciates that she's in a scenario where her ability doesn't dominate, when it comes to actually making connections with Saten and Awatsuki as a person instead of as a figure of semi-worship.
In the meantime, we had some… intellectual discussions.
No surprise that teenage girls left to their own devices are interested in fashion. Really, the interesting takeaway here is the lack of choice that Tokiwadai leaves its students with. It does seem like the sort of thing that a "most exclusive school in the world for the ultra-rich" might go for, but for Misaki the idea of mandatory clothing choices no doubt reminds her of the lab rat outfits she was given in Clone Dolly -all she's really done is trade in the hospital gowns for tailored skirts and vests.
"Aww, you're like a big Uiharu!" cooed Saten. "You're so shy!"
I absolutely didn't expect Saten to come to this conclusion back when I was first reading this chapter, but it does kinda make sense for that to be the connection drawn, honestly. And hey, Misaki should take that as a compliment - not everyone can match up with the Gatekeeper, after all!
"I'm practical," I countered.
They continued the conversation along such lines, while I made some incomprehensible noises and slowly died inside from having to partner with these two idiots. Hokaze had clearly combined forces that should not be combined, removing their external limiters in the form of Wannai and Uiharu respectively, and had unleashed their terrible darkness. Then, to top it all off, she'd abandoned me to my fate, ensuring that her group was entirely composed of cinnamon rolls who'd probably either blush at holding hands, or who might not even know what romance was.
Truly, my bestie was a traitorous wretch, one who would soon reap the horrible seeds that she'd sown in the ruins of my sanity. I'd have to do something horribly cruel to her in retaliation, like…
Okay, I couldn't think of anything that wouldn't either make me sad, get me chased down by a rabid Rampage Dress-enhanced Gekota fangirl, or both. But I'd think of something eventually.
Misaki's low-key suffering during schoolgirl shenanigans gives me life. It's also very cute that she can't even think of actually doing anything cruel to Hokaze in retaliation even in the privacy of her own thoughts.
Her thinking of Hokaze actually being willing to chase her down if she actually did something is neat too - shows that Hokaze is a lot more willing to put her foot down regarding Misaki shenanigans in this timeline compared to canon, which makes sense, given that Misaki has spent more time putting her in positions of co-equal authority and has also done more silly things that required Hokaze to dig her out of in the first place.
Still, I was no more immune to the dopamine rush of free stuff than anyone else; my mood thus improved significantly whenever we were actively on the hunt, and found an area that had a particularly high concentration of cards. Being the group's pack mule also meant that I got to hold all the free stuff we found, which made the part of my brain that likes freebies feel very content. This was enough to preserve my sanity for the duration of the mission.
Canon Misaki would not survive trekking across the city on foot in the first place, much less acting as a pack mule while doing so.
It's also very neat to see the Level Five Mental Out getting bullied into doing stuff she really doesn't want to do by a bunch of schoolgirls, when we absolutely know that if she really wanted to, Misaki could perfectly model their responses and come up with the perfect arguments to make them agree with her even without directly using her power on them. She doesn't want to go clothes shopping, but she does want to spend a genuine fun day out with friends without weird esper power disparities getting in the way, and the second desire is by far the stronger.
Though we did have one interesting encounter.
We'd located a card, but this one was underneath a set of wall-mounted air conditioners. Which would be fine, except these were very large and very close to the floor, meaning that there were some… slight difficulties happening right now. "Darn… We've met our match," I overdramatically announced, watching Saten and Awatsuki both trying to shove their arms far enough underneath it to retrieve the envelope, and both of them largely being unable to do so.
"...What are you idiots doing?" asked someone behind us.
I turned with a little jump, as did my other two compatriots. Apparently our shenanigans had drawn some attention- specifically, of a rather scrawny teenager on his lonesome, who was in dire need of a comb.
White hair slumped over his face in a messy fringe. He wore a tight black t-shirt with white decorative marks; it was sort of an abstract rib pattern, with the white parts being in a few downwards-curling streaks, centred on a few diamond shapes in the centre of the design. His jeans were similarly tight-fit as his shirt was, which didn't do much to accentuate his figure, given he had all the musculature of a pool noodle; the bottoms of his jeans were tucked into his sneakers. I noticed with some idle curiosity that, in addition to his hair colour, his skin was very pale, and his eyes were red.
Not genetically an albino, but the net effect of literally never having any harmful UV radiation hit his skin, plus manually messing with his biological processes, leads to pretty much the same result.
More immediately noticeable- he wasn't triggering my scans. It wasn't like Misaka; rather than getting too fuzzy to read, there was just a point around the surface of his skin where my awareness… stopped. It made me a little nervous.
This reminds me that canon!Misaki seemed confident that she could totally mind control Accelerator if she tried - and that it seemed very much like silly arrogance on her part. It very much makes sense that Accelerator's passive shields would reflect any form of elemental manipulation, which would include the hydrokinesis behind Mental Out. At least this Misaki, with the immediate feedback she gets from her passive scans, can immediately put any such assumption to rest instead of persisting in a delusion.
I glanced around- there was another dumpster, not too far away. If my paranoia was suddenly justified, I could probably mind-control Awatsuki and brain him with a dumpster, even if my powers didn't seem to work… though even alone, I did enough exercise and copied enough brains that I could probably just lay him out with a punch if he tried anything.
This is legitimately funny too. Misaki sees that she can't mind control someone... and her immediate reaction is to consider the various ways she can throw hands, and decide "meh, I can still take him".
That was assuming he tried something, anyway- I wasn't about to go making assumptions about strangers in alleyways. "Hi," I said, politely friendly. "Right now, we're trying to reach one of those cash card envelopes- there's one more under those air conditioners." I gestured to the pile I was holding in the crook of my elbow, and followed it up by pointing to my map. "If we can, we'd like to figure out what the pattern to them is, so we're making a note of each one we retrieve; we can do some analysis of the patterns when we get back. Either they're being distributed for some diabolical purpose that we can stop, or we get free money, so either way we win, right?"
This clearly hadn't been the answer he expected. He stared at us with an expression of somewhat disgusted confusion. The other two had stood up again, to join the conversation; Saten seemed a bit embarrassed to have been caught rummaging around in an alleyway, looking away. Awatsuki, meanwhile, was making direct eye contact and smiling pleasantly at him, challenging him to say anything else about it.
After a moment, he scoffed and looked away. "Whoever's been dumping them here has been messing with me," he growled. "I have a schedule, and all these idiot kids scrounging around for cash keep messing with it…"
This is unironically probably the friendliest interaction Accelerator has had in weeks. Maybe months.
And it's all thanks to someone trying to stop him from continuing this bloody experiment, much to his displeasure.
I'd ignore the 'idiot kid' thing. "Do you know who might be doing it?" I questioned.
"Yeah, we haven't found anything yet…" Saten complained.
He gave me an incredulous look. "I'm the strongest in Academy City… Do you think they'd still be doing it if I did?"
I blinked, then checked his mind to confirm it- or at least, tried to, before getting blocked by that weird barrier again. "You're Accelerator?" I asked- Saten, meanwhile, decided this was a good time to have a silent crisis about her ridiculously-weird luck. "Huh. Neat. A pleasure to meet you then; you're the second other Level 5 I've met, actually?"
"Huh, neat" is probably not the reaction Accelerator is used to when people recognize who he is. Usually there's a lot more screaming.
Misaki is pretty uniquely positioned to see Accelerator as "just a guy", hence her pretty nonchalant reaction - she's seen behind the "Level 5" curtain firsthand after all - to her, he's just another kid who got handed way too much power, not some sort of god or demon.
He paused. "Other?" he questioned, and looked me over. Recognition flickered in his eyes. "...You're that telepath," he noted, with a little consternation behind his wall of ego. "Are you going to try and fight me?"
I blinked. "...No, I'm here to look for cash cards," I repeated. There wasn't any need to let him know I couldn't read his mind, if that was the first thing he jumped to. I decided to divert him from this train of thought- with words, for once, as he was still immune to brain-poking. "Say, would your powers be able to reach under this thing?" I asked. "It might help us figure out what's up with them, since we're only noting down the envelopes we actually retrieve…"
He stared for a moment, figuring out his response. In the end, it turned out his response was resigned apathy. "...Tch," he scoffed. Then, Accelerator- he hadn't actually given us his real name- resumed his walk, and the three of us watched him go.
It really speaks volumes about Accelerator's life so far that his first reaction to learning that Misaki is indeed Mental Out is getting ready for a fight. But no, she's just... there. No fighting, no fear, just a friendly chat.
Actually meeting with her in this context makes her fight against Accelerator take on a very different tone from his match with Touma. Rather than some kind of storybook hero he's never heard of dropping in and "saving the day" against Accelerator's "villainy", it's just the girl that he's already met with before standing her ground against what she thinks is him making a mistake. That's going to put Accelerator in a very different mindset going forward.
Saten was first to break the silence.
"I know I shouldn't be laughing, but… Did you see his face?" she whispered, stifling laughter. "He looked so… so concerned!"
"Oh, I thought nobody was going to say it," Awatasuki quietly giggled. "He was so confused when we told him what we were doing… And then when he learned you're a Level 5, too, he looked nervous…!"
"Don't be rude, you two," I scolded. "And besides, he has nothing to worry about. Apparently both Level 5s I've met can just ignore my powers with their passive fields… Big ol' blind spots, they are." Cheaters, the lot of them, they were.
Saten laughing at a nonplussed Accelerator is a very funny mental image.
She was done fairly quickly; scanning them didn't take long with a specialist Level 4 esper ability, after all. "There's no trace of anything strange on these cards," Sakibasu informed us. Since they weren't to be ingested, inorganic toxins wouldn't really be a danger in the quantities require to be detectable, or would significantly alter the bacterial makeup of it; it meant that organics, and properties that could indirectly be measured by organic activity, were the only major concern for the cards themselves. Which meant, concluded Sakibasu out loud, "The cards are safe to spend."
Some nice quiet competence from Sakibasu here. That's a pretty good way to check for shenanigans, and in AC I can't say it's not called for.
After requesting the map that Uiharu's team had prepared- which was marked in Hokaze's neat little check marks, with notes on the precise context of where each envelope had been located- I did some mental maths. "Right," I said, starting to draw some hatch marks. "If you look here, there's a few different patterns. First, there's a concentration gradient from the areas closest to the street to the areas that are furthest. Even when taking selection bias into account by assuming random movement of envelope collectors from the streets with reasonable odds of returning once an envelope has been discovered, the distributions are skewed towards being deeper into the alleys, suggesting that the majority are placed not where people will easily find them, but where they'll be less likely to be found unless you go out of your way to look for them."
There were a few nods. I didn't bother beaming the exact maths to anyone else; even Hokaze would need me to slow down significantly, from what I knew of her own calculative output. I may not have been able to mind-control the fellow Level 5s I'd met, and I doubted I'd be winning any prizes for raw output, but given that they were all primarily dealing with first-order effects, while I was handling multiple layers of computational complexity on a massive scale? I sincerely doubted that any of them were on my level when we were talking about pure number-crunching capacity. Nobody in this little group, then, could even start to approach me on that particular front.
"Second," I said, "the notes seem to be distributed in linear clusters. If you look at these lines-" I drew connecting lines between many of the envelopes' locations on the map- "-you can see that the most likely way they've been laid out is a person or persons walking a path, and placing envelopes without backtracking. Plus, if you plot the concentrations and note that lower concentrations are more strongly skewed away from easily-accessible points, you can see that it's likely to be one area being scattered with notes on each day, suggesting that a single person is responsible."
A nice flex of her calculation skills on Misaki's part here - she really is a walking hypercomputer. Her supposition about her mental prowess compared to the other Level 5's is pretty reasonable too - the only one with comparable feats of calculation intensity is motherfucking Accelerator himself, and she hasn't seen nearly enough of him to consider him in that light.
"Ah…?" said Hokaze, raising a hand. "Couldn't you use your psychometry to check?" She was referring to my ability to effectively peel memory residues off of objects.
I considered that for a moment. Then I mentally facepalmed. "...In all honesty? I forgot I could do that," I admitted flatly. "I only ever really use it for the System Scans- it makes no sense compared to everything else I can do, so I don't really think about it... Reading minds is easier if I want to find out things."
I started flicking through the envelopes one by one, poking them and putting my fingers to my temples, while Sakibasu slowly cracked up at my small brain moment in the background.
...and that display of high intelligence is immediately followed up with an example of Misaki's low wisdom. Not that I can blame her - psychometry really is pretty unrelated to both water manipulation and mind reading by any reasonable standard.
"No, it's just the swim club," I denied. "They bet on things all the time." And they were the number-one distributor of contraband snacks and drinks in Tokiwadai, too, with links to the swim clubs of other schools. "Academy City school swim clubs are the world's friendliest hives of scum and villainy, don't you know?"
"Really? No!" gasped Saten. She looked at Uiharu. "Uiharu~! As a Judgement officer, you need to do something about this!"
Uiharu had a discount in her own school's contraband snack ring, in return for her silence on these matters. "Ah, well, we don't really have any proof of that here…" she said.
Misaki casually doing mindreading to ferret out little tidbits like this makes for a fascinating viewpoint character. Kind of a mix of first-person and third-person omniscient.
Also, this is legit just plain funny.
"So, I start with the information I get from the water," I said. I drew a circle. "That goes in this slot, at the bottom. From there, I sorta have to… feel around with my power, for little wobbles."
"Wobbles?" asked Hokaze.
I nodded. "I'm not really sure how to explain it," I said, "or what it is precisely. Did you know it's harder to use psychic powers on things that are part of a person?" Many of them gave an affirmative to that one- Saten and Hokaze were the main exceptions, the former having been an aerokinetic while Level Upper was available, the latter not being able to use her power beyond her own skin. "Since I have very fine perception, and use my powers weakly on a lot of espers, I'm pretty familiar with the feeling; people and animals feel wobbly, sometimes the more responsive plants or other non-animal organisms too. I'd tentatively identify the wobbles as AIM fields most of the time, but currently there's no evidence of AIM fields outside of humans or AIM fields leaving residues, so I can't really say for sure."
Misaki picking up on the "feeling" of AIM Fields/Souls from her constant scanning, and it acting as the vector for her psychometry, is a very neat bit of canon bridging that makes a lot of sense. Within the metaphor of her power, it also works as her sensing the "Waters of Life/Chaos" too.
"That looks like a Tree of Sephiroth, wouldn't you say?"
"A what?" I asked. Was there some sort of Final Fantasy equivalent here? But no; I remembered a few of the names from other properties, so there was probably some base symbolic concept that all of those games had been referencing.
"It's- ah, my parents founded a games company when I was little," she said, a bit embarrassed at admitting they were entrepreneurs rather than old money, "and while they're very popular, they like branching out. So I sometimes assist them by looking up ideas… After reading about the origins of ouija boards, I decided to look into magic- not that I believe in it or anything, it was just… fun?"
"Oh, yeah, don't worry. I've done that sort of thing before," I commented. "I actually have a deck of tarot cards I use sometimes. I like to use them if I need a random generation element in something that's emotional rather than numerical- making plans, getting past a writing block, that sort of thing… People wouldn't have kept using them if they weren't helpful, even if they didn't work the way they thought they did, right?" There were a few murmurs of understanding. "So, what, is this Sephiroth thing a magic concept?"
Sakibasu nodded, regaining her smug confidence now she'd had some validation on the relevance of such an unscientific topic.
Archetype Controller alert. It's legitimately hard to say how much of this is an artificially imposed effect and how much is just the natural consequence of the culture of the city emphasising "science" and "reason" to such a high extent.
When I got in, I decided to do a quick search of my own. "Sephiroth, huh…?" I muttered- it wasn't something which would be widely-known enough for a psychic search to get a good sample size, so instead, I booted up my computer to go and have a look for myself.
We decided that Saten's house would be the best location for the esper revision session. My own room was still something of a 'no visitors' space, as well as being fairly small. While the inner dorms were fancy, this came at the cost of reduced personal space; a lot of the facilities were shared, because the much fancier needs of fancy students (such as cooking or having decent-sized bathrooms) were outsourced to other parts of the dorms.
Saten, meanwhile, had a room that would make any student outside of Academy City weep with envy. Even though she was close to the bottom of the barrel in terms of her student funding, her residence had two rooms and a bathroom, all to herself! My past life memories made me incredibly jealous of this, and it left me rather miffed that I'd been assigned to Tokiwadai.
No casual clothes, ridiculous uniforms, mandatory curfews, smaller living spaces, when the main advantages were the free cooking- which was one of my hobbies- and bonus prestige that I didn't really care about anyway…? The grass really was greener on the other side, wasn't it? Alas, I'd look pretty silly if I asked to be transferred to a different school just so I could live in different housing, especially when most of my friends were in Tokiwadai.
Yeah... Tokiwadai is legitimately stifling and toxic in a lot of ways for Misaki. Unfortunatly for her, it's also the best possible school for advancing her education and power, gives her the greatest degree of security from the dark side, plus it's where Junko went. I'm still kind of curious what the AU where Misaki decided to go to school with Michan instead would have looked like.
The two girls were more used to laying horizontal on medical-style benches than sitting on soft backrest chairs like I was, so they were both flat on Saten's bed while I worked. Uiharu was holding a glass of hot water in each hand, with a pile of sugar in the middle of each; Saten, meanwhile, was pretty zonked, with her palms facing upwards and emitting tiny breezes.
Misaki really is a bit of an "Academy Individual" herself, isn't she? Not anywhere close to Takitsubo's hypothetical degree, of course, but she's still able to just about match top end expensive esper development classes purely on her own, with no other supportive equipment. Any foreign esper development program would snap her up in a heartbeat if they could.
Beyond that observation, Saten going though more-or-less the same process available to high-level espers and it immediatly causing significant improvements to her ability kinda shows the effects of the Parameter List when it comes to artificially lowering the potential of low-level espers and raising the potential of high-level espers. Forget any notion of equality, it's all about maximum return on investment baybeeeeeeee.
I wonder if these ability development sessions will lead to any changes in Saten or Uiharu's arcs? I could see an Uiharu with more ability development info go through the Jailbreaker arc differently, if that still happens, for example...
"Huh. That might be a useful thing for me to practise, actually," I commented. "It'd be nice if my psychokinesis was a bit stronger- maybe I'd be able to keep rain off my face or something…"
"You never did it in elementary?" she asked.
I shook my head. "No, I didn't," I replied. I'd been in Clone Dolly for the duration; Tokiwadai was actually the first and only school in Academy City that I'd attended.
And here's Misaki's lab rat roots slightly showing again. Poor Uiharu, no ouju-sama refined Queen for you.
"That's what happens when you've got wind going past your fingers for like, fifteen minutes," I said. "Go hold hands or something if you're cold."
I got some good practice on using Mental Out hydrokinetically after that, in an effort to clean up the subsequent spilled sugar-water. Uiharu's hands had still been holding two glasses full of sugar and warm water at the time, and it wouldn't be great if it soaked between the floorboards.
As much as I'd like to say that I glared at them right back for the entire journey, that would have left me susceptible to my one mortal flaw- travel sickness. I instead spent it with my head rattling against the glass. The vibrations tended to soothe my stomach a bit. Still, they would've gotten their asses kicked if they tried anything.
Aha! Misaki gets the window rattling sensation she craves! Her naturally getting motion-sick does explain that quirk a fair bit - though I'm actually a bit surprised she didn't just make a subroutine to deal with that - Mental Out's hydrokinesis should easily be able to deal with the inner ear even if she doesn't want to go for mental self-edits, after all. Maybe she *does* have such a subroutine but prefers not to use it unless she's in a scenario where it actually matters?
We got off at the relevant station, in the middle of District 12. Uiharu was discussing a diner that Shirai and Railgun had apparently visited at some point. "Miss Misaka said that they serve this dish known as 'Hell Lasagna'," she said. "It's bitter melon and escargot lasagna!"
"Probably accurate," I commented. "How do those things go together? Is it just a tourist trap or something? I mean, we barely even have a tourism industry, but I can't think of why else you'd want to make that…" Then I looked at Saten.
Saten was drooling. "It sounds good…" she said. I made a mental note: she was probably the sort of girl that would eat dark chocolate and consider espresso shots to be the epitome of deliciousness, and I was never going to trust her with anything edible ever.
... but Misaki, dark chocolate and espresso shots are the epitome of deliciousness!
I guess getting isekai'd into a preteen has also given Miskai a pre-teen's tastebuds.
The strange thing about District 12, my scans were telling me, was that not many people here actually believed in the places of worship. A lot of the visitors did, admittedly. But most of the staff? Well, I'd say 'priests', but remarkably few held the sort of faith you might expect from their offices. Perhaps it was this way everywhere, and it was only my ability to see their minds that made it all look so cynical; I was convinced that there was real faith elsewhere.
It made sense, in a way. There was only one God in Academy City, and that God was Science. The cultishness of the place wasn't even that well-hidden, if you read between the lines- for example, the fabled Level 6 was considered to be the holder of absolute power, rather than the next magnitude up on a scale. More personally, though, many of the more powerful scientists across the city behaved like they were cultists of reason than members of a cooperative institution, and you didn't get cultists without belief in a higher purpose.
More evidence of the artificial cultural split between Magic and Science leading to weird stuff. It's kind of surprising that AC even bothered with something like District 12, honestly.
For all these reasons, we were mostly visiting the museums rather than the temples- though Saten and Uiharu insisted on visiting a shrine, and in my obligations as their senpai, I managed to find one that was reasonably legit rather than being a bunch of money-grubbing researchers.
Mental Out using her powers for their most incredible feat yet - finding a legitimate public temple in the middle of the main nest of the science side.
As long as there wasn't secretly a shrine of Quetzalcoatl or Ashur in a hidden bunker somewhere, I'd be more than happy to soak up the knowledge that was provided here, and the sights and colours made it a fairly enjoyable place to spend time in.
... don't tempt fate, Misaki. Those are very real possibilities.
What if you didn't always need maths as a proxy, and some parts of the equation needed only the mind? It would neatly explain how I was able to use an incomplete equation in the first place; perhaps the pieces had all been there, a part of the equation already, and I was on the verge of learning how to slot them into the optimal positions.
And it would also explain how two different espers might use the same maths, and only have one get a result. If it wasn't the maths that was the problem, but the pre-existing concepts and how they were arrayed in an esper's mind… Perhaps this was something that Tree Diagram, and its denial that Dual Skills could exist, had missed in its mathematical calculations? Could it be the key to Personal Reality?
It was a deeply foreign concept, and ninety-five percent daydreams and wishful thinking.
Misaki getting close to some hints about the Deep Lore here. But it makes sense, given her constant pushing for esper development and her ability to scan esper's brains in particular.
Precedent came the next morning, almost in a flash of insight. I'd been saying that psychometry made no sense, but I was on the verge of changing my mind.
There was another esper who was famous for making no sense- Sogiita Gunha, no official title. What if, then, the scientists had been making the same assumption that I had. What if they'd been thinking that mathematics was the only lens they could use, and were missing this other, more subjective part that was rattling around in the edges of my brain?
I feel a great disturbance in the force, as if hundreds of scientists cried out in terror...
A fit of giggles crept up on me.
I was starting to grin like a madwoman. If I could make myself that much more flexible, and make not one, but two of the Level 5s be users of mathematically-incomprehensible nonsense? It tickled me.
Even though TreeESP hasn't featured much in the story up to this point, this is still a pretty pivotal point in the story - it's Misaki figuring out something that has eluded basically all of the researchers behind the PDC up to this point, and opened her mind to all kinds of other possibilities. This is no-doubt a large factor in why she handled the "magic" revelation so well, for example.
"Misaka's powers can block mine, and that's exactly what I'm looking for. Remember when you left us alone in a hospital for five seconds, and when we met up again, the two of us had made a holographic projector out of a kettle and some Poltergeists?" She groaned at the reminder, but made a sound of acknowledgement nevertheless. "That's basically what I want to check," I replied, "but on a larger scale."
Makes perfect sense that she'd seek out a way to trigger her poltergeist at will, if she wants to study it and find a way to replicate that effect directly.
"So, whatever prompted this… all the signs are saying it's over?" I asked, a little bemused. "No evil plots? No weird advertisement campaigns? Just thousands of yen being littered around for no apparent reason, before it stops for no apparent reason either?"
Hokaze smiled. "It seems that's the case," she responded honestly. "I'm glad... I think I much prefer this kind of mystery."
"Shokuhou," said a certain Railgun on the other end."How are you?" she asked, politely friendly. Ah, yes, my prediction had been borne out- it was indeed her.
"Oh, good, good," I said. "I trust Shirai passed on my message?" After a moment, I added, "Preferably with at least 50% of it not being about how a sauna is a better idea than my one or something."
"She did," Railgun replied. "And most of it was about saunas, but she told me that about the pool first. I'm pretty confused by what you're trying to do. Aren't Poltergeists supposed to be uncontrollable? Seems kind of stupid to be messing with them."
"Clearly they're controllable enough to be safe when purposefully created in a controlled environment by experienced espers, given the kettle incident," I pointed out reasonably. "Though… my goal isn't really the Poltergeists themselves. I've been working on some mnemonics, and I want to see if I can use how the Poltergeists work as inspiration for doing the same thing in the proper way. Or, well, 'a' proper way, at least."
"Oh, that makes sense," she replied. "Just don't blame me if you cause an earthquake~ What sort of mnemonics do you use, anyway? Your reaction times are terrible, no offence, so they gotta be nothing like mine."
"It's code-based," I told her. "I've done a little bit of coding as a hobby, but I mostly did a ripoff version for the usual psychic stuff I do. Pinging the area for brains and other structures that I can interact with, getting a subsection of my scan area to work from, stuff like that."
"How's the new stuff going to compare?" she asked. "Trying to catch up?" she added, taunting me a bit.
"More of the same, really- I'm still going for breadth over depth," I said. "I mean, you can move stuff, break stuff, detect stuff, all with the same ability. And it's a physical tool. The only way that I can use Mental Out as a physical tool is by getting someone else to do it for me, and that's neither polite nor particularly fun, is it?"
"Having a whole bunch of people waiting hand and foot on you wouldn't be fun?" questioned Railgun. I could hear her grinning over the phone.
"Of course it would, but that's what money's for, y'know?" I retorted. "What's a sense of smug ojou-sama superiority even for, if it doesn't have a ridiculous price tag on it? Anyway," I continued. "You sound like you're in a good mood. What's up?"
... I hadn't noticed this when I was first reading this, but Misaka totally considers Misaki a friend at this point. Her whole deal is being crushingly lonely at the top, and here she is, making time to spend with Misaki, ribbing her over her reaction times, and joking around about stuff. It's easy to take it for granted as Misaka just being friend-"ly", but if you actually look at her behaviour throughout the series... that's not how Railgun acts around someone she isn't friends with already.
Even just working together on the AIM Burst case was enough to strike up this kind of rapport, it seems, despite everything.
"Ah, just had a scare," she replied. "It turned out I had nothing to worry about, though."
"The great and mighty Railgun?" I interjected. "Scared of something? What, is Hokaze still a mini-Shirai and I haven't noticed? Though I suppose it'd be more a mega-Shirai…"
"Shokuhou!" Railgun complained. "No, just some creepy experiment that got cancelled." She paused for a moment, obviously considering whether she wanted to explain or not. In the end, she decided against it- "Let's just say that the Board of Ethics did its job for once."
"Really? Miracle of miracles," I said in a neutral tone, though it did make my eyebrows raise. "Does this place even have a Board of Ethics? …If you ever need some brain-punching for that sort of thing, let me know, though."
Narrator: It later turned out that Academy City did not, in fact, have a Board of Ethics.
I let out an amused sigh. "...I don't even know if I'm younger than Railgun or not," I mused. We were within a year, given our mutual status as second-years, at the very least- my birthday was coming up soon, but I had no idea where hers was in relation to mine. "She might even be older than I am? …eh, probably not, she seems a bit short for that. Oh well."
Enjoy your timeskip, Misaki. They're about to become increasingly rare as time goes on.
I did notice that there were a few more people than usual going around with those sorts of protections on. They were pretty obvious; they used magnetic field protections for the most part, though what they were rolling out seemed to be more inspired by Railgun's field than anything.
Misaki missed the Sisters, here. Can't say I blame her, though - "mass cloning of the Railgun" wouldn't be my first thought if a bunch of electrical defenses superficially similar to hers showed up either. (She can still blame herself, though.)
Coincidentally, it was a good moment to cross the road now. So I did, and called out- "Hey, Kamijou!"
He looked at me, but as I approached, there was no spark of recognition. In fact… the more I looked, the more there seemed to be something wrong with him, many of his brain cells having massively degraded in terms of their connections.
Mister Hero is suffering from a very minor case of serious brain damage.
…Even as I read them, Kamijou's brain cells appeared to have zero recollection of who I was. They immediately flickered to a manga he'd read instead of anything relevant. He clearly hadn't told his friend about this issue, because his next memory was the girl's sad face, thinking he'd lost his memories of her completely (which, yeah, I was getting the impression he'd lied to her).
But rather than throwing him under the bus, I decided to throw him a bone.
Misaki immediately choosing to back up Kamijou's lie is certainly one of the decisions of all time. :\
I suppose she figured that she could always choose to reveal the mess later if she decided it was prudent after further examination, whereas the reveal would require direct Mental Out use to stuff back into the box?
"She's saying she's a super-strong esper," Kamijou clarified for her benefit. Enough of his memory seemed to be intact that he was functional, at the very least- it was only his episodic memory that had been annihilated somehow. So he remembered facts, but experiences were right out. "There's only seven Level 5s in Academy City- the fifth-rank Level 5 is Mental Out, who can… read… minds."
In response to his increasingly-horrified expression, I winked at him. "Don't worry, Kamijou," I said, "I don't blab! She won't know what sort of manga you're reading."
Given that 'the sort of manga he was reading' was 'whatever would let him figure out what the past Kamijou was like'- which was smart, but also kinda sad- he got the message easily enough.
I didn't usually get a hostile response to talking about my mind-reading, but today was an unusal day- with a yelp, I abruptly found myself getting grabbed by the lapels (or at least the sides of my t-shirt).
The little nun-costume girl dragged me to eye-level, standing on her tiptoes. "You must promise that you won't read my mind," she said unflinchingly.
"...Eh-?" I replied, intelligently.
"You must promise me that you won't read my mind!" she repeated, in almost exactly the same tone of voice. "If you do that, then you'll surely die a painful death!"
I normally would have asked her what sort of chunni she was, but right now, I could see her emotions- this wasn't a threat or a joke. This was something she fervently believed. More dire than that was Kamijou- his expression had gotten even more horrified than when he first realised I could mind-read, and in his mind, I saw a girl. Her cheek was blowing out under her skin, her was lip tearing, her body cracked and popped as her clothes began to soaked with blood.
"Err- you should listen to her," he said urgently, not even registering that I could see the reason why he had to tell me. "Don't read her mind. Really."
I immediately slammed the connection shut, and in the lull, I promptly coded a blacklist and put her into place on the very tippy-top of it.
"Right," I said, voice a little high-pitched. "Don't read the nun cosplayer's mind, or you'll start exploding for no apparent reason. Got it. What the hell, Kamijou?"
In which: Misaki finds out that cognitohazards are a real thing.
This was about the gentlest possible way she could have had this revelation, and it's saved her ass already on multiple occasions. Clearly she got some of that luck that slides right off of Touma with this encounter, since it was incredibly fortuitous for her -and that's not even the biggest revelation she has during this meeting.
"Where are you even going to put all that food…?" I questioned, staring at the pile of food that the girl had collected for herself. Did she only eat one meal a day or something? Who would need that big a burger-to-mouth ratio?
"I'm hungry," she clarified unhelpfully, and we all took a seat.
The girl did her best impression of a trash compactor with her burgers as Kamijou figured out where to start. 'Where to start' was not with my name, as I hadn't re-told him that yet. I'd throw him a bone for that one, too, then. "So," I started. "What's with this exploding I'm apparently threatened by? Because if Academy City News has to report something like-" I put on a news reporter voice. "-'Level 5 esper Shokuhou Misaki exploded for no apparent reason while walking in the park', my friends are going to be very upset."
"Well…" he said, considering- then he looked at his hand, and after a moment of thought, very deliberately slouched with his head resting on said esper-blocking hand. I gave him an annoyed look in response to that, which he returned with slightly lower intensity.
"...Right," I said, after a moment. "Define 'magic', then. If people weren't so ridiculous when it came to old-timey concepts around here, I'd have called esper powers 'magic', and I certainly haven't had any problems using those. What's the difference?"
And here we see Misaki's Out of Context memories helping her figure things out - going in with "esper powers are basically magic" as her baseline both let her get around Archetype Controller and meant that her starting position was already basically on the right track.
The nun spoke up. "You're the only one who didn't believe me when I said magic was real, Touma," she grumbled, before turning back to me, putting on an informative tone. "A-hem. Magic is a system created by those without gifts, who still want to achieve what those blessed with talent can. They do this by invoking powers that are beyond humanity, such as gods, angels and demons. The pathways that allow magic to be used are not present in espers; attempting to do so anyway would destroy your body."
I considered what she'd said- then cottoned on. "When you say 'those blessed with talent'... You're talking about Gemstones, right?" I said. "The espers who got their powers without the Academy City program? I know that there's a couple of people like that in this place."
Ding ding ding! This guess of Misaki's is very insightful... but then, just a chapter or two ago, she was already considering that Gemstones would naturally have used other methods to focus their personal reality instead of mathematics, and even considered religious imagry as a potential focus. It's a pretty natural extrapolation of that to assume that non-Gemstones trying to achieve the same results may have used the same mnemonics. Misaki's deep dig into esper mechanics is what let her make the connection here so quickly.
"First… magic-users are usually called magicians, not wizards," said the girl, patronisingly. "Second, spells are stored in Grimoires- books of magical knowledge that are poisonous to know of. I am Index, of the forbidden books; I have one-hundred-and-three thousand grimoires stored inside my head, which means you should keep your promise and never, ever look. Understand?"
"Poisonous?" I asked, looking for some clarification- mostly out of morbid curiosity. "Is this also the 'explode' sort of thing, or something else?"
"You'd die or go insane if you tried to look at any of them!" she informed me. "Probably both. Hmph."
"...So basically your brain is full of Necronomicons," I said facetiously. "Right."
"That's only the name of a few of them!" the girl- Index, apparently- retorted.
Misaki is gaining all sorts of capital-I Insight here. Soon the eyeballs will fully overtake her brain.
"Fun," I said, voice cracking a little. Right. Apparently I'd been wandering around assuming I was in a superhero story, and now a bit of the old eldritch horror had been creeping around the edges while I'd been fairly consistently looking the minds of everyone in a kilometre radius. "I think I'll start working on some filters for that sort of thing."
This pays off in spades, at least. Chalk it up to a victory of knowledge over ignorance.
…It was very odd calling this 'magic', instead of something like 'proto-ESP'. It'd probably make even more sense to call it 'proto-ESP' than 'magic', since I was using supposed magical knowledge for something that had definitely not exploded my brain. But if the weird nun's precedent was to call it magic, well, who was I to argue? After all, apparently my brain would explode if I thought about it too hard, because that was just something that happened.
The cultural indoctrination tries to strikes back! But it's no match for Misaki's current "done with this shit" status!
"As far as I can tell? Yeah," I replied. "I stumbled into Kamijou, Railgun's guy friend, again; I think he's lost his memories, but he was keeping it a secret from his friend, who also seemed to have lost her memories at some point. She was in a nun costume, held together with safety pins, which apparently wasn't a cosplay?"
"...If he was keeping it a secret from his close friend, my Queen, wouldn't that imply keeping it a secret in general?" asked Hokaze.
I paused.
"...I may be an idiot," I commented reasonably.
She sipped her boba tea, one eyebrow raised.
My face flushed. "I-I mean," I started, "you don't gossip about that sort of thing, but-"
"Shokuhou," said Hokaze. "You don't have to ask me to keep it a secret for him. I would do it anyway. Just be more careful, please?"
Hokaze: "This is my idiot. There are many like her, but this one is mine."
"Hokaze," I warned.
"Then if you had a power like Rampage Dress," she said, smiling, and sending a flicker of electricity down her arm, "and were able to regenerate the damage…?"
"Hokaze, if you become a magic cultist or something I'm reporting you," I told her.
Misaki gets so animated when it comes to power development. It's one of the few things that Clone Dolly tried to encourage in her which she didn't refuse out of spite, really.
I picked up my phone and called Railgun at quarter-past, tapping my foot as I waited for her to pick up.
She did not, in fact, pick up. Instead, she disconnected before the call went through, and she repeated that the second time as well. I gave her another five minutes after that, in case she was- I don't know- in a crowded train or something or something, but by then, she'd already burned through a good third of the time I'd booked.
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which a storyteller gives hints at or alludes to future plot developments which-
I'd need to practise parallel processing, focused on using other parts of my brain, in more controlled circumstances. And I'd be better-off doing it without shoving a boatload of psychic powers through it, so long as I could find a way to reasonably do such a thing. And finally, I'd follow the same multi-week timescale of anyone else doing weird stuff with their brain. This was new territory, after all, I really did not feel like accidentally giving myself a split personality or something just because I got excited about suddenly being able to make ice cubes of unusual size.
But if it all paid off… well, half a litre of ice wasn't that much. But it was massive compared to a thimbleful. The changes I'd made had made it a lot stronger for no comprehensible reason, and if I had the skills necessary to fine-tune those changes, or to expand on this as a mere starting point, well… it might still be nothing, and it was some factor I missed that would be making changes, but I was really doubting that at this point.
Misaki makes a lot of progress pretty quickly. It shouldn't be that surprising that tapping into the raw emotional resonance might be more effective than deliberate calculation when it comes to low-accuracy, high-power applications of powers - that kind of subconcious thought is probably a lot closer to the fundamantal viewpoint of the world that defines a Personal Reality than impersonal mathematics can be.
The decision-making side of things didn't take too much thought; calculating multiple decisions at once would be good for certain genres of video games. There were certainly genres that sounded interesting, but that I currently didn't find too enjoyable due to needing to balance too much at once. Emotional parallel-processing was a bit trickier, but in the end I decided that I might be able to improve my writing- or perhaps being better at a Town of Salem-style game on the internet- if I could use emotional multi-processing to empathise with multiple characters or people simultaneously.
All else aside, if she can pull off these skills reliably and without causing side effects, they seem likely to be useful on a day-to-day basis even if they don't lead to paradigm shifts in her esper powers.
Despite all my talk of using the divine will as direct inspiration, I still didn't really buy into the idea of Level 6, an esper whose mathematics offered perfect understanding of the Universe. It assumed there were no limits- no maximum diffusion range of an AIM field, no maximal calculative potential, no topics that physics lacked the sheer processing volume to calculate within the grounds of a Personal Reality.
If I were to go back to the bicycle comparison… Let us assume that the bicycle frame is my Personal Reality, the wheels and their connections are the mathematics, and the handlebars are the cognition- lower than intent, higher than maths- that directs the bike. Given my mathematical training, I was basically using carbon-fibre alloy wheels; however, my suspicion was that the handlebars were still plastic things from baby's first tricycle, and my ability to change directions was being sharply limited by them. However, spiritual theory was all about finding the right handlebars to better direct your life. While none of them were designed for the wheels of the bike I was using, since they'd been written for non-espers, I could still look at the blueprints they'd written down. If I was lucky, and diligent, I could write up a blueprint for my own, unique set of handlebars, and the whole bike (my psychic powers) would become much better at ferrying me around town.
Meanwhile, the scientists around me were probably hoping I'd spontaneously invent a motorcycle. There was also a non-zero chance they'd want me to crash it into the nearest wall.
This is, again, quite insightful of Misaki - both in terms of how conciously adopting a worldview she finds compelling and useful might help her steer her Personal Reality in useful directions, and in terms of the qualitative difference between "merely" improving herself in this kind of deep, holistic way, as opposed to the paradigm shift of a Level 6 Shift.
If Misaki does undergo a forced Level 6 Shift attempt at some point, I wonder if she'll call back to the motorcycle analogy.
Because this was Academy City, I inevitably ended up catching the eyes of a bunch of delinquents as I passed through. "Oi, oi," called one of them, from halfway down a 'canal' alleyway I needed to walk through if I didn't want a fairly significant detour. "What's one of you prissy Tokiwadai girls doing in a place like this, huh?"
I was approaching the School Garden, which had far fewer detached or semi-detached buildings on its outskirts, and thus had relatively few places you could get through the entrance- going down a side alley here would probably make me a good five minutes later, and I was running short on time as it was. I sighed, and scanned the area to see what I could see.
And was promptly alerted to a little hole in the readings, something I'd added to my scans after the blacklist I'd made for Index had prompted ideas on adding a few more notifications along those lines to my rote code. Really? I'd been waiting for one Level 5 for an hour with no show, and now the one I hadn't even bothered looking for, I was just going to stumble into them in an alleyway? Again?
Another Skill Out encounter, plus a chance for Misaki to chat about her life philosophy with Accelerator.
The delinquents had apparently noticed him too, because a second one shouted, "Oi! Fuckin' espers! We don't want your kind here; beat it, or we'll beat you!"
Accelerator looked up belatedly, seemingly only just realising they were they. Maybe that was true; a vector-manipulator probably needed much less situational awareness than a telepath, if he'd gotten it to the point of a passive power, after all. He paused after he saw them. "Oh?" he called darkly to them. "You think you can hurt me?"
"Fuck you!" shouted another one- a girl, this time. It seemed that this particular bunch were more a mob-rule than being clustered around a leader, at least for the ones I could see. Their brain scans all suggested them to be Skill Outs, so this was likely a small subsection of a larger gang, whose turf the two of us had simultaneously barged in on- and they weren't very happy about it. She yelled, "Let's teach him a lesson- then we can see if the girl still feels like waltzing through us!"
If they're this bold about ganging up about any random esper who gets in their way, I have a feeling they've left more than a few Level 1s and 2s bruised and beaten. Still, doing this kind of shit near the School Garden remains deeply unwise. Even just a Level 3 could seriously hurt them when they fought back. And of course in reality they managed the near-impossible and had two Level 5s show up at more or less the same time, and recognized neither of them.
They charged at Accelerator, who made no move to stop them- I was guessing he was going to flex on them somehow, but the universe was being too stupid right now for me to bother with human stupidity as well. For the sake of letting them know who was doing it, I pointed my index finger at them like a gun, then snapped with my thumb and middle finger on the same hand.
Before they could reach him, they all stopped in their tracks, frozen. Accelerator turned around, jaw clenched, and finally realised I was here.
"Afternoon," I said, continuing to approach- I stopped when I reached him, and shrugged off my backpack partially. Then I leaned on the wall opposite. "Let me know if you want me to unpause them, I know some people who'd want to beat them up."
Misaki saved these guys from some serious injuries here, but I doubt they're in the mood to appreciate that. Getting casually frozen in place while the Level 5s had a conversation has to have been terrifying.
Accelerator looked at me for a second. "What do you want, Mental Out?" he growled.
"People to be intelligent enough not to attack random Level 5s strolling down an alleyway, but we're not getting that, apparently," I said, gesturing at the six different people who were silently realising their predicament.
He scoffed. "If people are still going to try and fight me? All I need is to be stronger," he said. "Fuck off." He did not, however, move from his position and go on with his day.
"Have you ever heard the saying? 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.' Einstein once said that two things were infinite," I added, "the universe, and human stupidity- and we've only been able to disprove the former."
He chuckled scornfully, and turned to face me properly. "If that were true, then humans would have already blown themselves to smithereens," he pointed out. "There's a level of power that no human will face- the kind that can destroy everything, before they can even begin to fight it.
Misaki can literally see the insides of these people's brains, Accelerator, I think she's got the right of it. But then, pre-Sisters Arc Accelerator's goals were always intended to be silly and childish - they are, after all, simply the conclusion of an abused child who wanted to have the world stop hurting him, and was steered by the adults around him into thinking that seeking power would grant that wish. If anything, it's a miracle that the kid isn't more fucked up.
And that's not even the limit of power- if you achieve Level 6, the heavens themselves will be yours, won't they?"
"I was thinking about that earlier, actually," I mused. "What even is Level 6, anyway? It's not like being good enough at maths will just let you ignore the uncertainty principle beyond your AIM field, or anything like that." I shrugged. "It doesn't make any sense to me, y'know? You might as well just use a magnitude scale…"
"Oh?" asked Accelerator. I met his eyes- a flicker of interest had lit up in his eyes. I tilted my a little head. "You? Don't believe in the possibility Level 6? Are you just going to stay a Level 5 forever, then?"
This is a pretty direct rebuttal of Accelerator's current goal - "I simply do not believe that an Esper can attain omnipotence".
She's half-right and half-wrong - by all indications, Level 6 is very much a real thing, the Science side equivalent of ascending to become a Magic God... and yet, at the same time, it's not a worthwhile goal. There's a lot of talk even in-text about To Aru about the sharp limits that even unlimited power comes with if you don't also have the wisdom to actually do anything useful with it. But those are things Misaki hasn't really come to grips with yet.
"I don't believe in Level 6, rather than not believing I can improve," I countered. He watched confusedly as I took my backpack off, and grabbed something specific out of it- a litre-bottle of water. If I was on a long trip outside, I tended to prefer bringing more hydration than I needed, so in addition to the smaller strawberry tea bottle I'd brought this as well- and hadn't drank any of it. "So… Watch this!"
I dramatically thrust the bottle of out in one hand, and activated Mental Out- using the parallel decision-processing version of TreeESP, boosting my brain temporarily to reach it- and proceeded to hold the bottle for about eight or nine seconds. Accelerator stood there, impassively, as it crystallised into ice. "...Am I supposed to be impressed?" he asked, a few seconds into the whole display. "An esper power this weak? Aren't you supposed to be Level 5?"
This feels like a cut-to-commercial comedy point. If it wasn't Accelerator saying it, an anime sweatdrop might even show up.
"Well. I might not believe that Level 6 is real, or that there's a level of power which no degree of stupidity can defy, but power is the way to do whatever you want with your life. And I quite like the sound of that." I flashed him a smirk- "Maybe I'll even reach this supposed Level 6 in the process?"
He backed down. "Tch. If you think you'll get to Level 6 before I do, you're insane," he said.
If the previous interactions with Accelerator were what built the rapport that let him ultimately back down and listen to Misaki, then this is the misstep that made him choose to fight her to "prove her sincerity" in the first place. Power as a goal in and of itself, plus a teasing suggestion of seeking ascension ahead of Accelerator, when that has become synonymous with "safety" in his mind? It shouldn't be surprising that he didn't back down without a fight.
"Eh, worth a try," I replied. "Anyways, I should be off-" I gestured at the delinquents before us, who were still frozen- "So I'll just be knocking this lot out, unless you have anything to say about it?"
"Why should I care about what you do with them?" he asked. "They don't have the strength to inconvenience me."
Fair enough- they all slumped to the floor; they'd be shorted out for a while until they recovered, hopefully knowing better than to attack random people in alleyways. "Have a good day, then," I responded, and got to power-walking back to the dorms, to make up for the time I'd burned talking shop.
... I do wonder what all of these guys (and gals) made of this talk about Level 6 and seeking omnipotence, coming from the very same people that they just tried to beat up in a darkened alleyway. This likely cemented Mental Out as a monster to match the Accelerator among some people in Skill Out. Makes me wonder what Hamazura's thoughts on Misaki will be if he eventually shows up.
One of the websites I was looking at made me pause, though.
Interspersed amongst the various other subscribed feeds- some stuff on cooking, exercise, various video games I enjoyed playing (most of which were fairly niche so I couldn't get frustrated and go download someone else's skills before I got to enjoy them properly)- was a feed on Academy City events. Apparently, someone had been setting fire to the research buildings over the past few nights.
That was… an interesting little opportunity there. One of the big reasons I couldn't do any major snooping was how easily I'd get caught, but something like this was simultaneously a big red flag and a big ol' distraction. "Hmm," I said, looking it over. There didn't seem to be any casualties, either, so I doubted I'd be in any danger…
Misaki sees an opportunity to fuck with scientists, she takes an opportunity to fuck with scientists. Given what the future holds, she's likely to consider herself to have been too placid, but this shows it was more a case of the scientists treading carefully enough around her that she never picked up the scent until things started going wildly kinetic, rather than any great degree of complacency on her end.
One of those days would likely have to be spent on planning. I had those cards I'd picked up, still- I could make some anonymous purchases of clothing using them, and slip out of my uniform in a public bathroom or something. If I purchased a few more, and brought them as well, in case I started getting suspicious looks… I couldn't spoof conventional, ordinary security cameras with my powers, but I could certainly create opportunities for spoofing them the old-fashioned way. As long as I could stay within a kilometre of the building for long enough without getting pegged as up to no good, I could pretty easily get the signs of my presence misidentified as part of the damages.
They'd probably suspect I'd done something, maybe even know it, but… well, plausible deniability was a two-way street. I didn't crack down on them with Mental Out because I didn't want to risk a full-on clash, but the same thing could apply in reverse easily enough.
I'd just have to pick a building, and wait to see if the mysterious attacker would unknowingly lend me a hand. If I needed to wait, I would likely require some additional equipment to do said waiting with- ways to distract myself, food and drink, that sort of thing. I could buy that tomorrow, too. I could see the science groups adjusting their plans if I showed up on the first day and got noticed, so spending tomorrow as a preparation day and focusing all my wait-and-see energies on the expected final day of the attacks seemed like my best shot.
Though it all left me wondering- what, exactly, would I be discovering when I got there? And did I really want to know?
…
Well, of course I did. I couldn't kick anyone's ass over anything I hated if I didn't have more information.
"Huh. Well this looks interesting," I said to myself, sitting in a hotel room.
To an outside observer, I was looking at the front cover of a romance manga with enthusiastic eyes. Now, I was not really a romance reader, and I could only really appreciate certain very niche subgenres of romantic comedy. By all accounts, this particular manga- 'The Umbramancer Steal My Heart?!'- should have been utter tripe, and… well, it was.
But I wasn't really reading it; I was just following a mental pattern, overlaying my normal behaviours with a perfect mimicry of how someone else would have done the same thing.
This is a neat performance - nothing perfect, but it's likely to throw off most forms of both direct surveillance and postcognition, as long as she's disguised well enough to not be immediatly identified as Mental Out.
Those signs came in the form of an unmarked van, full of girls who were all espers (even if one wasn't very good at it), driving directly towards the building.
I'd been waiting here for most of the day, hoping that the mystery saboteur would show up. At random, I'd picked a research facility to scope out; whoever was doing the sabotage, they seemed to go for two or three per day, generally acting in bursts as she did. My expectation was that today might have a few Anti-Skill response teams stationed nearby, or something; however, no such organised response had appeared, and this was the first thing of interest that I'd seen happen.
One of them in particular seemed to be more powerful (in terms of processing) than the rest; I focused on her first. If I checked through her active memories- a largely passive process- then I could get an ID on who these people were, and from there, figure out if they were the saboteurs.
Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be Meltdowner, the fourth rank Level 5. And, to my even greater delight, she had next to zero passive protections on herself.
Mental Out destroys Meltdowner before either side even realizes that Mental Out is fighting Meltdowner. Incredible.
She started to realise something was wrong the moment I started interfering with her nerves. As expected of a Level 5 Electromaster, really. The changes to the electrical impulses in her brain were incredibly subtle, but you didn't get to Level 5 by being incapable of detecting stuff like that at point blank. Her fail-point was, when you need to make a decision about something to defend yourself, you're first running on neurochemicals- and I could affect those with impunity.
Before I'd struck, I'd inhibited her dopamine and norepinephrine. For the brief moment I needed, the neurochemical systems that triggered her reward system and her fight-and-flight response were nonfunctional- I set my control systems in place (including the extra steps of work it took to avoid the sympathetic shoujo manga eyes showing up), scrubbed her realisation of my presence from her working memory, and tuned in.
Gotta give Mugino at least some credit for managing to spot the interference, I suppose, even if it happened late enough that her ability to care about spotting the interference was already disabled.
Mugino Shizuri, also known as Meltdowner, had been driving the van; she was apparently a twitchy driver, gripping the steering wheel a bit too tight as a course of habit, which meant her brief moment of apathy had been just barely enough to make her hit the curb. I'd decided that was better than swerving to the opposite side of the road; neurotransmitters had a higher lag time than nerve signals, so it would have taken slightly too long to get a bead on her before I could establish control and course-correct.
The impact startled her coworker to awareness with a yelp. "Eh?!" Frenda Seivelun (Frenda being her given name) was the only member of the team to be working powerless, and was a talented explosives expert, despite only being high-school age. That she'd been falling asleep had been some more preparation on the part of myself; all I'd needed was a bit of extra melatonin being taken up by her receptor neurons, and it was pretty easy to get her to doze off for long enough to take over Mugino without her awareness. "Hey, what did we hit?"
"The curb," Mugino growled- I put a fabricated memory in her head. "Damn cat shouldn't have got in the way."
"Aww, Mugino!" said Frenda. I took the pause as an opportunity to get Mental Out's grip on her, too. It would have taken her a bit too long to reply because of that, so to compensate for the lag, I provoked Mugino to respond.
She growled in irritation. "Do you think we'd look like professionals if the van showed up with a bloody dent in it?" she told Frenda, who deflated under the realisation that it was exactly the reasoning she should have expected.
The other two, in the back, were called Takitsubo Rikou and Kinuhata Saiai. Their powers were AIM Stalker- being able to see and track AIM fields- and Offense Armour- using a thin shield of nitrogen gas as a protective barrier- respectively. I'd checked the former; the whole city was basically covered in AIM fields, apparently, so the scale of mine made it a forest hidden in the trees.
Very professional work from Misaki, here. Jump from target to target using natural pauses, scrubbing all signs of anything wrong, and keeping them acting believably even when fully under her control. ITEM has no reason to even believe that they've been compromised in the first place - and all that, just from passing by within a kilometre of Mental Out.
First: how could they counter a telepath? Mugino, basically. Most telepaths other than Mental Out would need to create unusual electrical signals in the brains of her compatriots to send or receive any info that she could identify, triangulate the source of, and shoot with a laser beam; failing that, she could manually shield them with semi-phased electron barriers. They also had a psychic barrier in the van (like the research institutes had) that they could manually activate in an emergency, and they'd been trained in identifying and responding to psychic problems otherwise.
Misaki, not content with destroying ITEM psychically, also chooses to destroy them emotionally.
Second: who were they, and why were they here? They were a team called ITEM, with a stated objective of balancing the power between the upper echelons of Academy City and everyone else. Also, dangerous mercenaries, many of whom actively enjoyed killing. They were here because the pharmaceutical company running the show had called them in as a response team to the saboteur; they'd get more information from their handler when they were parked.
That hadn't been what I'd expected. Instead of getting some official group to show up, getting a non-lethal response to what had so far been non-lethal sabotage, they'd just gone… straight for calling in a hitsquad to ambush them? And apparently one of the strongest psychics in the entire city was living off of blood money? Why? How?
ITEM's basic plan of action would be to split up after receiving the briefing and hashing out the details, with Frenda covering one building, Kinuhata covering the other, and Takitsubo and Mugino being the reinforcements for the targeted building- using AIM Stalker and Meltdowner as a potent scry-and-fry combination of powers. It was a simple plan, but with Frenda and Kinuhata's capacity to stall or kill a foe outright, and the lethality of a Level 5 who could bombard her foes without any sight range? There were very few effective answers to it.
I could plan from that plan. I could trail the response team when they left, set up near where they did, and then they'd lead me straight towards whichever building the saboteur left open. From there, anyone in the area would be an easy target, and I could do whatever I saw fit. Alas, their operational security meant I wouldn't know anything about the saboteur until after one of them had been split off from the rest, which meant one of them would be going into the plan without getting their plan messed with.
Misaki begins to be concerned about the fourth-strongest psychic in the city being a hitwoman.
Third: what was up with the preteen's electrode scars?
It was nothing to do with ITEM, as far as any of these four knew. Kinuhata had escaped from a facility where Accelerator's thought patterns were being implanted into children to make Level 5s, and Kinuhata was just happy not to have been one of the kids who got vivisected.
I went over that point again in my head a few times.
She thought that not being vivisected was a good outcome.
And the only reason they stopped was because one of the kids went on a murderous rampage with their newfound abilities.
…
I covered my tracks and disconnected.
They passed under the psychic barriers without consequence.
It was… sort of funny, I noted, as my facade starting to giggle. First, I'd thought that Clone Dolly was an exception. Then I'd thought that AIM Burst and Level Upper were an exception. And then- and then?- I thought that the kids in comas were something terrible, something they'd never do again.
And now, here was an incident that was somehow even worse. Vivisection. The word rang in my head like a church bell. I hadn't even gotten to checking this building for anything wrong; whatever had happened to Kinuhata, it had happened long enough ago that it was completely unrelated to anything here.
I idly wondered if they'd used reference data from Mental Out to run the project that scarred the girl's brain.
That thought was enough to have me make a decision. Sure, ITEM was a bunch of murderous psychopaths, but… well, 'consequences' were for other people tonight. That would be the case if I found even a hair out of place.
Such as hiring a traumatised preteen and her friends to commit murder.
…Tonight was going to be a very long night. For everyone involved.
Misaki abruptly stops caring about the fourth strongest esper in the city being a hitwoman, because she has much bigger issues to deal with right now.
And that's *before* she finds out about the Sister's Noise project! I wonder how Kinuhata would feel about Misaki being 100% down to throw hands over her treatment even before all of the Dolly trauma showed up?
Eventually, they returned. Once they parked, I repeated the process of getting inside their heads- disable Mugino's alarm neurochemistry, brainwash her, wipe my tracks, and grab the other one.
Meltdowner continued to just play with her hair boredly, completely oblivious to the fight she'd lost for the second time tonight. No wonder she'd been placed a rank below Railgun. Sure, it was a lot harder to set up and take over her than most other people I'd met, but without a passive defence or an alpha-strike advantage on her part, her usual self-defence strategy- being a muscular, nearly-grown woman with deadly lasers and precise electrokinetic control- made her even less threatening than the Level Upper electrokinetic that Hokaze had helped me to beat up. I started rummaging through her and Takitsubo's brains to see what they'd been up to in my absence.
Even now, on-edge about the vivisections, Misaki retains good OPSEC and maintains best practises.
Trying to implant something like 'don't kill that guy' was pretty hard when I didn't even have any recognisable details on them, and the timespan made it basically impossible to manage without immediately tipping off their liaison during the meeting. It was very difficult to suddenly want to avoid murdering someone while also not doing anything suspicious in a meeting about murdering said person, after all.
Apparently, their last mission had resulted in them personally snapping the necks of their targets, so my hopes for the saboteur's survival were pretty low, all things considered. But given the parameters of ITEM's mission, they'd have time to drop the defences whether they lived or died.
That's cold, but I suppose that's fitting for Mental Out in go-mode. She's totally willing to let the hacker get killed if it gets her the opening she needs to pry open this can of worms. She'd prefer if they lived, but if they die... it's a sacrifice she's willing to make.
I can't even say that it's the wrong decision in an objective sense, given how horrific the details of the project do end up being, but it's terrible that this is a decision that a middle-school girl needs to make in the first place.
After some careful thought, and some consultation from Mugino and Takitsubo, I decided on what looked to be the best option.
I put some plastic gloves and a hair-covering hat on, checked to make sure my hair was fully covered using Mugino's glassy eyes, then opened the van's back door and sat myself down opposite Takitsubo.
Neither of them paid any notice to me, beyond Takitsubo moving her feet so I could stretch out my legs. The van had no internal cameras, and this was pretty much the last place anyone would expect a mind-reader to be. The only thing that could really go wrong was an unexpected call from their liaison, which would trigger the psychic barrier to no ill effect on Mental Out. Without external evidence, they'd have considered it ridiculous to think a telepath would just stroll into their vehicle and sit around versus doing literally anything else, and they'd purposefully parked themselves in a camera blind spot ever so kindly- meaning that the external evidence simply didn't exist.
This shows one of the more quietly terrifying aspects of being Mental Outed - she's fully capable of using all of your knowledge to take precautions that will prevent you in the future from ever realizing she got to you.
Once again, she's very careful here, even as she invites herself along in ITEM's van. The hairnet, avoiding cameras, keeping reasonable behaviours in place...
Just as I'd hoped, the building no longer had its psychic protections on. The alarms had gone off a while earlier, drawing the staff away from the main building, and the gathering points' protections had gone silent. I was ready to act. Of more immediate concern was Frenda, who- rather than blowing her foe to kingdom come- had apparently been cornered by…
…fucking Railgun?
Of all people, the one person- well, of two- I couldn't mind-read. The person who'd dropped off the map for no reason, whose genes had somehow ended up in Clone Dolly, who I'd already confirmed had been elsewhere at the time of previous break-ins-
Why was she here? And if she wasn't the Electromaster I'd been looking for- then what was she here to do?
For a moment, she stared in confusion. Then she recognised it- my stupid shoujo-manga eyes, a pair of little starbursts showing up over Frenda's pupils.
"Shokuhou?" she hissed, clearly not having expecting me at all. "You're controlling her, all of a sudden? I should be asking you that!"
"Eh?" What, I was just going to have to- accept that Miss Suspicious was just strolling around here, doing her own thing? "No, no, you answer first," I insisted. "I'm here following these… chucklefucks, trying to keep them from murdering whoever keeps taking down the security while I go see what's up, and I just- blunder into you? Really? Should I be thinking that's a coincidence?"
"Coincidence?" she snapped back. "I'm the one who's been taking these creeps down, you idiot!"
"Me? Idiot?" I giggled. "Oh, no. That doesn't sound right at all. Maybe if I just check my memories-" I did so. "-ah, see here. After your roommate seemed worried about you- that was when you stood me up, thanks for that, by the way- I decided, 'oh, let's see if anyone seen her'! And you've been in the park, walking through a shopping mall, basically everything but taking down creepy companies! And now I'm to believe you're the one who's been doing all this?" I accused.
Misaki's been forcibly stopping herself from assuming that Railgun is the arsonist all chapter. Despite all the evidence seeming to fit a powerful electromaster being behind the attacks, she's been fully convinced that Misaki has an airtight alibi. But, of course, that isn't the case.
"This is nothing to do with you," she deflected. "Get out of here, Shokuhou- you don't know what's going on. This is my mess to deal with. You're not needed here."
"Well, I'll admit that I don't know what's going on. But if this is your mess to deal with… Y'know that this little murderer calls herself a cleaner?" I said, patting Frenda's shoulder with one hand (one of her own, specifically). "Yeah, she cleans up messes- she was breaking some necks last night, since it's hard to clean up a mess when people are still making it. So… Railgun…" I gave her a sarcastic grin. "You'd understand if I wanted to double-check, yeah?"
Her eyes widened incredulously, and she bared her teeth in a grimace. "If you think I'm like that, you're delusional," she told me. "Get out of here. I don't need your help, and you can't stop me."
Misaka gets to see some of Misaki's paranoia here - outright getting accused of maybe being a "cleaner" has gotta sting.
"Ah, I'm supposed to just 'believe you', even though you're not telling me anything about what's going on here," I sighed. "Well… the rest makes sense. Sort of. I mean, you're looking pretty beat up there, Railgun, and you've only been fighting one little psycho that doesn't even have any powers- what's your plan for dealing with the other two?"
That was enough to give her pause. "The other two?"
"Yeah, yeah," I told her, letting a little bit of Frenda's native ditziness slip through. "The other two, y'know? The super-incredible Meltdowner, and her buddy who can track you down wherever you go? Not me, by the way- they've got their own tracker, I'm just borrowing them. This girl," I said, having Frenda gesture to herself, "isn't even a Level 1, and you've been struggling against her. I can see her memories right now, y'know," I added, "so don't even try to lie about that."
Misaki showing that actually, she CAN stop Railgun and she DOES need her help.
With a bit of comedy on the side - Misaki has the receipts of the mighty Railgun getting beat up by a Level 0, caught in 4K.
"...Do you even know what they're doing here?" she ground out through gritted teeth. "If you don't, then just leave." She turned on her heel, away from Frenda. "You don't want to know."
"Of course I want to know," I called out after her. "I always end up regretting it when I don't. So… y'know. I'm going to go do what I was doing and find out now."
Misaki's been burned by this shit before. Finding out about this will indeed hurt her badly... and yet, her only regret will be not having learned about it sooner.
Suddenly, I understood how I'd seen Railgun all over the place, when supposedly she was destroying these places. They hadn't been Railgun at all. They'd been the sources of the post-mortems.
Excellent write-up of Misaki's breakdown here. The way the narration veers between distant clinical language and short choppy bursts of emotion...
That wasn't a problem. "You do realise," I said, pushing Frenda to trembling feet, "that electrocution only works if you can't just reset the ion concentration gradients manually, right? Unless you denature the tissues, but given she's not the one talking to you, I don't think you want to do that…"
...y'know, in an Alt!Railgun manga/anime, this is a really creepy showcase of Misaki's power - having an entire conversation by proxy with someone who just keeps getting up after getting electrocuted.
"For all your powers, you didn't notice the clones walking around like they owned the place- you didn't even know they were walking to their deaths, letting that rank 1 psycho kill them! Let me tell you, here and now- those things aren't even human- so-"
I interrupted here. She looked across to the side, eyes suddenly widening- and dived to the side as an enormous green blast of light pierced through where she'd been standing.
Meltdowner stepped through a second later, glaring.
"Don't you ever," I breathed, "ever, say that again."
Misaka steps on an emotional landmine. If nothing else, the sheer vitriol in this reaction is likely to have her second-guess herself about the humanity of the Sisters a bit sooner.
"That's what they said about Dolly. Maybe she'd have lived longer if they didn't." Mugino paused in her walk away, and looked over her shoulder. There was no expression of incomprehension on Railgun's face; neither was there any guilt. "If you'll excuse me," I said, "I'm going to take a look around the other place. I need to go help my friend's sisters."
"They're not my sisters," she said, her voice simmering. "Not them, not that clone you met- none of them."
I just laughed at her. "I wasn't talking about you," I replied. "Go fuck yourself, okay?"
...man. Even in the middle of this argument, even after the Meltdowner shot, Misaka still thought of Misaki as a friend.
"We're both idiot teenagers trying to fight something we shouldn't, Railgun," I responded. "If you think your plan isn't just as dumb as mine, you're even more of a moron than I am for trying to get involved."
Misaki is fully self-aware that this is a dumb and potentially futile effort. She's just committed to doing it anyway.
It had been a minute later when I realised what Railgun had said. 'Walking to their deaths, letting that rank 1 psycho kill them'... A more focused search through the researchers confirmed it.
Twenty-thousand planned deaths. One recipient.
And I'd had two different friendly chats with him.
That was how Accelerator planned to reach Level 6.
…Why? Why could I never just realise it the first time I met someone?
They weren't getting off scot-free. Not the worst of them, not even the middle-grounders, for something like this. I'd already had a weak mental grasp on them from reading through them all, so I could quite easily upload a few variants of code to their brains- a few different ways to make them sabotage themselves if they tried to commit any more atrocities. Nothing much… for me, at least. The hardest part was making it inconsistent, so from a top-down perspective, they'd have a harder time catching on.
They'd certainly suffer for whatever they did- or rather, whatever they chose to keep on doing- if they didn't learn their lesson quickly.
The curse of failure spreads. The Crowley parallels write themselves.
People, produced on an industrial scale like fodder. Though, from what I knew of Child Errors, from Kinuhata's electrode-scarred brain, from the vivisected children she knew of, even from Clone Dolly… perhaps this was just the obvious next step. But this was the exact opposite of what Clone Dolly had been made to do, what Dolly had been killed for… Clone Dolly had been an attempt to make exceptional people, not walking corpses. Her death had been pointless, but they'd decided to make up for her loss by having that wastefulness be the entire plan for her sisters.
My face slackened again. Mugino's grip tightened on the steering wheel, white-knuckled.
Misaki is absolutely livid, and it's conveyed well. A horrific desecration of her friends memory which is also an industrial-scale crime against humanity in its own right.
A girl in a Tokiwadai uniform- the same height and body shape as Railgun- stared back at us, through unwieldy, rectangular goggles. She carried a gun in two pale hands.
I stepped out of the car. Mugino followed, staying a little bit behind me.
The girl lifted her goggles over her hair with one hand. I saw that she had Railgun's face, with the only significant difference being the dull lifelessness in her eyes. "Interference with the convoy will not be tolerated, says Misaka, issuing a warning," said one of Dolly's little sisters, speaking in monotone.
Yeah. Having to actively fight the Sisters... that would have destroyed Misaki.
I had to try something else. "I have ethical concerns about the Level 6 Shift project," I said.
"...ZXC741ASD852QWE963 apostrophe," she said.
I didn't know what she meant. And I couldn't afford to let her refuse to talk to me, which left only one real option. A few static sparks flickered in the air as I pushed through her protection.
I noticed that her levels of adrenaline and cortisol were rapidly increasing. Mine would too, if I were standing against two different Level 5s. Anyone's would, really. I didn't change anything there; all I did was my most basic trick, flicking her perception, switching her views on whether I'd given the correct answer from 'negative' to 'positive'.
I'd expected the network to have it flick back, only having planned to use it to identify exactly where the real passcode was stored so I could give it- but it didn't. She took it as fact that I'd given her what she wanted to hear. "Passcode accepted," she said blandly.
This is a surprise tool which will help Misaki later.
Her brain activity, in the parts of her brain that dealt with psychics- it looked like my own did, right now. Both sending and receiving data. She wasn't a drone; she was a full contributor to the network, I could see that right now.
"You're a person," I said. "You shouldn't die."
Her stress hormones reached an unsteady plateau. "Misaka is a copy, specifically produced for this project, Misaka clarifies," she said. Her sisters began to emerge from the side alleys, one by one. "Misaka has a manufactured body and a borrowed soul. Misaka is nothing but a lab rat that costs 180,000 yen."
The computer I had at home, it had cost about as much as her life did. It wasn't right.
"I don't notice any irregularities in your brain function," I told her.
"Misaka is designed to function with the efficiency of a human being, explains Misaka," she said. "Full brain function is expected."
"I… you're terrified right now," I informed her. "Your brain function is exactly the same as that of a terrified human being. You're not a lab rat. That's the truth."
Having direct insight into the Sister's brain activity makes the false premises behind the dehumanization all the more blatant, but really anyone who wasn't utterly blinkered by AC office culture should have come to the same conclusion.
"When they're using lab rats, they have to perform experiments that show the lab rat isn't pained or distressed," I said. "Whoever programmed you would never have succeeded in that. You're human. Please, just…" I stopped, trying to figure out what to tell them. "...stop dying."
Their mathematical activity increased. "Previously, only Oneesama has expressed comparable sentiments, notes Misaka, uncertain as to the correlation," the girl in front of me said.
Yeah, Misaka's little rant about the Sisters not being human was more her lashing out at the absurdity of these circumstances than it was anything that she actually believed.
"...I was friends with an older sister of yours called Dolly," I said. "She was known officially as 'Prototype', and was part of the Clone Dolly project. She was human. I… think she'd have wanted me to take care of you."
Her expression altered minutely. "We request more information on 'Dolly', asks Misaka, not previously aware of this relationship between clones of Misaka and Shokuhou," she said, after a moment.
"...I'll recount our association in full if you refuse to be involved in the Level 6 Shift project," I tried.
"This request is denied," she said immediately.
There wasn't much I could say to that. "...Let me know when that changes," I replied.
Brainwashing and indocrination, plain as day when looked at by someone who can actually see their neurology act as it happens.
I had my three members of ITEM pull back out of the alleyway. The dainty Tokiwadai uniforms faded into the night as the headlights left them.
I had them drop me off at a car park, covered my tracks in their heads, and sent them back to their base to sleep. It would be more sensible to catch a taxi home, so I changed in a public bathroom, dumped the clothes I didn't need, and did exactly that.
After how careful and meticulous Misaki was at each prior stage of ITEM brainwashing, here she just fumbles the bag hard and sends them home without even bothering to pick up their last member. Misaki is SHOOK by this revelation.
I checked my phone when I got in. One by one, I scrolled through my contacts, until I found one near the bottom of the list.
I pressed the call button. Somebody needed to know about her friend's sisters.
I was trudging through the corridor, running on a single cup of black tea, when I heard a familiar voice- "Shokuhou?"
I looked up. Hokaze was staring at me concernedly, dressed in her school uniform. She'd obviously been on her way to breakfast; she was not exactly a good cook.
She asked me, "Are you alright? I know you were busy these past few days… Did something happen?"
"...I'm meeting with Michan today," I said. "There's something we need to talk about."
She paused, briefly, staring me in the eyes, and took in my general expression and posture. Then she put a hand on my shoulder, firmly. "Misaki," she said quietly. "If there's something wrong… let me help you with it. You look terrible. I'd be a terrible friend if I didn't say anything."
The silence hung. But… I remembered what happened when I lost my temper yesterday, and part of why I'd been livid with Railgun.
I wasn't going to make myself a hypocrite. Not with Hokaze.
"...Okay," I agreed, pulling out my phone, and typing out a quick message. "I'll text her." She gave me an affirmative reply, with a little 'okay-hand' smiley she'd learned off of me, a few moments later. "She says yes."
Hokaze nodded, with a small smile on her face. "You've told me a lot about her," she said. "I'm looking forwards to meeting your friend."
Hokaze can tell that her friend is suffering and wants to help, and Misaki isn't willing to leave Hokaze out of the loop. The, uh, heated discussion she had with Misaka about how silly it is to shoulder all this by yourself no doubt contributed too. Still, this is a big step for Misaki - by all indications, she's tried to keep Hokaze out of these sorts of messes up until now.
Without warning, I found two arms thrown over my back- "Misaki-chan!" she said, face buried in my shoulder, before she pulled back and met my blinking eyes. She looked to the side. "Oh, and you must be Junko, right?" She stepped away from the hug, and gave her a short bow. "Thank you for looking after her!" she told Hokaze.
"A-ah- any friend of Miss Shokuhou would do the same," replied Hokaze, bashfully. "...And I'm glad she has other friends who'd do the same," she added with a nod.
Michan nodded firmly in return, and returned to her seat, as the two of us slid in on the opposite side.
You can really see both of them immediately deciding that any friend of Misaki's is a friend of theirs. This is also Michan's first in-person appearance in the fic, and right from the getgo it's clear how much they meant to each other -and in turn, how much of a departure from canon their pasts were.
"Right," said Michan immediately. "You just have to take opportunities like that when you find them, if you want to see what's fishy." At Hokaze's confused look, she gave a sheepish smile. "Uhm, I have… hobbies? Investigative journalism?" she tried, before seeing that Hokaze was having none of her blatant lies. "Okay, I might do a little snooping… And some breaking-and-entering… It's only after school, and I make sure it's not too dangerous, but… uh…"
I checked her mind. Apparently she'd been… busy. "...Ordinarily, I'd complain that you've been going out as a vigilante with no support," I said- her work was amateurish compared to what I'd seen of ITEM, breaking down doors and ransacking places she'd picked up rumours of bad things happening, but she'd learned how to do it quickly and had a Level 4 power to back it up. "...But as of last night, I think it's you that should be complaining about us not doing the same."
Her eyebrows furrowed. "You've a right to be happy just as much as any of us do, Misaki!" she told me. "That's what you fought for, right? I won't blame you for that, but if we need to fight for something again, I'm with you all the way." She crossed her arms with certainty. "People don't deserve anything less."
...honestly, this is about as healthy an attitude as you can have in a city like this, which again makes for a sharp contrast with Canon!Mitori. Both accepting that there's evil in the City which has to be fought, and that the victims of the City deserve the opportunity to live pleasant lives instead of being forced to fight against that muck 24/7.
That said, it seems that Mental Out's little self-care break in middle school is about to come to a screeching halt.
I thought people had seen her around town when the attacks were going on, but the saboteur was actually Railgun. She'd found out what was going on in there, and she was doing- I don't know. Blowing things up until something gave out and they stopped, I guess. She hadn't told anyone else what she was doing, so I was just as surprised to find her there as she was me."
"So… you teamed up?" Michan prompted.
My mood darkened. "...Ah, we didn't," I said, without further elaboration.
"Oh… Do we need to beat her up for something, then?" she added. Hokaze gave her a look.
Mitori is so precious. Immediately ready to throw hands with the Third Ranked just because she made Mi-kun upset. Hokaze once again acts as the reasonable one amongst this bunch.
"What was this project she was assaulting?" asked Hokaze, bringing the conversation away from that fiasco before I had to explain anything else. "Miss Misaka is usually sensible enough, even if she has a few… eccentricities." As she said that, I could almost hear the sound of a shoe impacting a vending machine in her words. "So it must have been something… extremely concerning, to provoke her to such actions."
"I told Michan- vaguely," I added- "but… they're reusing the original Clone Dolly. Dolly… She was supposed to be a prototype for printing single, strong espers. Her powers were never very strong, so Exterior and Ideal replaced her, boosting rather than creating espers. But they've repurposed her cloning process." Michan's bubbly exterior went stern; she nodded simply, waiting for me to tell her more. Hokaze's eyebrows furrowed. "They cloned a number of Dolly's sisters in an effort to make Level 5s again, see if her low Level was a one-off, after they developed the mental implantation techniques to bypass the learning process. They failed, and sold off the project- and the girls. Someone, I don't know who yet, wanted to use them for an experiment."
"...What are they doing to them?" asked Michan. Her tone was serious, rather than her usual, relentlessly-upbeat tone. Hokaze wasn't breaking eye contact either.
"They've been killing them as training fodder," I said.
Whatever she'd been expecting, it hadn't been that. Michan physically recoiled; her hands clasped the table like a vice, her arms clenched, and one of her shoes collided with the bar supporting the table with a loud clang. Her lips moved silently. It would have made a scene, if I hadn't been enforcing our privacy.
"The sisters are connected in a network," I explained. "If one learns something, they all do, so they've been having them fight the rank 1 to the death. Both have to react faster, more effectively, every time they run the test- they simulated it on Tree Diagram, and it figured that he can reach Level 6 if he keeps it up."
They needed no prompting to reach my conclusion. "...So we need to stop the experiment," said Hokaze.
Michan's eyes were burning- both literally, tears obviously stinging at them, and otherwise. "What do we have to do?" she asked.
Anyone with a functioning moral compass would reach the same conclusion - so that the experiment got so far in the first place is a damning indictment of the entire system that allowed things to reach this point.
"Well… That's what we have to figure out," I said. "I… don't know. But whatever we decide, there's some problems we need to so
"Is- are they trying to escape?"
I shook my head. "No," I replied. "I tried to convince one of them, but… they're not like Dolly, they weren't raised naturally. They haven't been taught to emote, let alone think for themselves. They only follow orders."
"...Well then," said Michan, stifling a sniffle. "We'll just have to teach them how to make trouble and have fun once we break them out, right?"
This takes on a very different cast once you read the Clone Dolly sidestories, and find out about Dolly and Michan's initial crusade to get Misaki to figure out how to make trouble and have fun.
Hokaze was staring at the table, but unlike the rest of us, her brow was furrowing as she did. "You got an idea, Junko?" she asked. "You look like you're thinking hard."
"...Perhaps," Hokaze replied. She took a deep breath, straightening up. "We need a way to beat Accelerator in a fight, and we need to know more about who's doing this. I think there's someone who can tell us both. If we can find her, or find someone who knows where she is…"
I'd legitimately forgotten that prim and proper Junko was the one who comes up with the jailbreak plan in the first place. When the chips are down and it's time to fight for her friends... she's willing to do whatever it takes, isn't she.
About ten hours later, we'd somehow convinced ourselves to break into one of Academy City's major prisons.
I won't go throught the entire jailbreak line-by-line, but it's overall extremely well executed. Hokaze comes across as the one with the least experience with these sorts of things, but she still fulfills her role excellently. And yeah, this kind of minimum-security facility isn't going to be able to withstand an assault by top-percentage espers - even Academy City's budget has limits.
While she did that, me and Michan were freezing an oobleck barrier in front of the wall. I couldn't offer much strength to the barrier on my lonesome, but by combining my own meagre hydrokinesis and cryokinesis and applying my processing capacity as best as I could to Michan's Liquid Shadow power, we could freeze the material into a laminated lattice that was stronger than it had any right to be. It wouldn't last long against a concerted effort to break through the door, but it would last long enough to disrupt any attempts to evict us from the computer room.
Neat call-forward to the mechanics of the Liquid-Proof Railgun.
Then, I looked up the prisoner records. "Here we go," I said. "There's our woman. Doctor Kiyama Harumi… She's on bail? Oh, I've heard of the guy who did it! He's a pretty renowned scientist even outside of Academy City, and he's contributed a lot to medical ethics, so I don't think there's anything shady going on with him. Current location… Ah, that's where she'll be."
This was legitimately an excellent idea on Hokaze's part - and her being the one to suggest it is all the more notable, given the parallels between Level Upper and the trauma she suffered in Clone Dolly: Ideal - she was really ready to put herself through that again, on a moments notice, if it meant that she could help Misaki do the right thing.
Beyond that, it's interesting that Misaki already encountered Heaven Canceller's work while doing her digging into scientific ethics, and approved. I wonder if she shared any of his work with Tatsuki?
While she had a security detail, Doctor Kiyama was not all that well-defended. Apparently, she'd been put on bail so that she could assist in reviving the littlest coma patients that had led to Level Upper and the AIM Burst rampage in the first place; those incidents had done a number on her physical health, but she'd ultimately achieved her goal in the end. Which I could approve of, because… y'know. Children in comas after being used as lab rats.
I knocked on the door, giving her pause as she was just finishing up a plate of scrambled eggs; it was late in the day, by now, and she'd been making dinner. She hadn't expected any visitors, as she'd basically been on house arrest for all intents and purposes. Unfortunately for her peace of mind, she didn't exactly have anything that could be used as a weapon, so all she could do was head to the door and open up.
"Good afternoon, Doctor Kiyama," I said, having taken off my contact lenses. Unlike the last time, she recognised who I was immediately, eyes widening. The security detail was completely ignoring the presence of the three of us. "We were wondering if you'd be interested in helping us with something?"
"...Do I have a choice?" she responded, deadpan, staring listlessly from under her messy fringe.
Man, this interaction becomes even funnier once you realize what kind of reputation Misaki picked up in the darker scientific circles of the City, and that Kiyama ran in those circles. It must have seemed like the mythical grim reaper decided to pay her a house call.
She took all that in silently. Then she said, "If you're doing this just to make Misaka Mikoto feel better, or because you were friends with the prototype, I don't think you should bother."
Michan's eyes narrowed. "Explain," she said, clenching her fists.
Kiyama didn't need to explain why- I could already see her reasoning, as much as I hated it. I spoke before she could give that explanation. "If they were just biological robots like you think they are, I could just shut their brains down and go on with my day. But they're as human as anyone else," I told her. "All that's different is… they've never learned how to show it. So nobody cares, and they keep dying. We're going to stop it."
She needed a moment to take that in. "...Ah," said Kiyama. "I see… Since you can see their minds, you would be the authority on the subject, wouldn't you? And we both understand that the scientists wouldn't stop if you simply filed a form telling them about it."
I do appreciate that Kiyama was willing to update her priors once she was presented with compelling evidence that went against her previous worldview - and Mental Out straight up saying "I checked their brains, they're human" is very compelling evidence indeed.
"Hmm. How many of them are left?" asked the doctor. "They still had seventeen-thousand, last I heard, but that was quite some time ago..."
Michan's eyes widened- she looked at me, and saw my complete lack of surprise. "W-w-wait…" she said. "There were seventeen-thousand of them? How? W-why?"
"...It will take twenty-thousand dead sisters before Accelerator reaches Level 6," I admitted. "They've killed around ten-thousand so far… the rate of deaths has slowed down now that they're killing them out in the open."
Her eyes watered. "But.. All those little Dollies…?" Michan whispered.
Then she stood up- and ran, each step she took pounding the stairway. Hokaze was put-together enough to give me an affirmative look, and rushed upstairs after her. Kiyama's gaze followed them, leaving me to continue the conversation alone.
Hokaze and Michan were already willing to throw down with the city when they thought this was a much smaller-scale issue - but only now is the true scope of this crime against humanity coming into focus for them.
"...There is a man called Kihara Gensei," said Kiyama. "He was the man who hired me, and led the experiment. He as much admitted to me that the failure of the experiment was because he'd planned for it to happen- and the Board of Directors fully supports him in it."
My eyes widened- that was right at the very top, wasn't it…?
"I'm not telling you this because I think you should try and stop him," she told me. "I'm telling you this because I know you can do nothing. If you want to save the clones, you'll have to find a way to do it yourself." She took a sip of her tea. "It's a nice idea, using Mental Out to subvert anyone who would do such things, but you would have to be strong enough to fight the entire city if you wanted it to work. You'll have to try something else, like I did," she told me simply.
And here it is, stated plainly for Misaki. This isn't an isolated incident. This isn't even a creeping rot beneath the administrations notice. No, this is something sanctioned from the very top - this City is an abbatoir all the way up, and this isn't a mess that she can resolve just by exposing it to the "rightful authorities".
The testing was fairly simple. And it didn't require a single vivisection, murder, or hospitalisation in the process.
That's a piteously low bar, and yet it seems unattainable by so much of this fucking city.
"...With the network led by a sufficiently-powerful telepath," she began, "the chances of an AIM Burst event can be safely discounted. Multi-Skill is not only possible, it's viable. While it would need to be synchronised slowly to avoid causing brain damage, without the self-sustaining resonance needed for Level Upper or Clone Dolly: Ideal in the first place, the network would be unable to coalesce into an independent entity regardless of circumstances."
"Really?" I asked. If we really could use Multi-Skill… That would be enough to even the odds against Accelerator, right? If we could borrow Shirai's teleportation, Kamijou's AIM field disruption- the Level 5 powers of someone like Sogiita, Meltdowner, or perhaps even the second-ranked Level 5, Dark Matter… Would that be enough?
"Your friends," she said, gesturing to Michan, as well as the phone on the table that was currently representing Hokaze, "would similarly be affected by something similar to Level Upper- though with the small size of the network," she added, "there wouldn't be enough overlap between powers for it to change much. So you'd all be stronger. But there's one major flaw you would have to take into account."
We held our breaths.
"With the sheer power of a Level 5 esper's brainwaves, combined with how the network would need to be enforced… if Mental Out were to die while the network were active, the disruption in her brain waves would cause that catastrophic resonance cascade. It wouldn't create an AIM Burst- it would just kill you, either by your powers self-destructing or by triggering a lethal stroke. So whoever you put in that network, Mental Out," she said, "you best make sure they're either your best friends… or your worst enemies. Because their lives will be dependent on you."
… So if I died, then unless I disarmed Multi-Skill, it would kill everyone I dragged into our mess. And I already knew she was telling the truth.
"...Well," Michan joked weakly, "we were already expecting it to be dangerous to pick a fight with Accelerator, weren't we?"
And here, Misaki picks up a power-up that the entire Dark Side would very, very much have preferred that she hadn't. A lot of people are going to be cursing Kiyama's name for months once they put two-and-two together.
"Michan," I said. "One of the sisters is up ahead of us."
We didn't change course, and kept walking until she was visible. There- standing ahead of us, pallid in the light of a street lamp, stepping out from underneath the bus stop- was another girl with Railgun's face. She waited impassively as we approached.
Michan looked like she was seeing a ghost. "Dolly's sister…" she breathed.
Then she dragged the poor girl into a hug.
The clone didn't really react, even as one of Michan's pigtails wedged itself in her cheek. "...This is not a normal manner of greeting a stranger, says Misaka, even if it makes her feel oddly warm," she said, not leaning into the action whatsoever.
Mitori suffers from Dolly flashbacks. And man, the Sisters are incredibly cute without even trying.
"Hello," clone-Misaka greeted her impassively, before looking back to me. "Misaka's sisters happened to have noticed your presence when you were arriving in this area, and Misaka is here to deliver a message from the administrator, says Misaka," she told us. "She says: We were created for this experiment, but I think there might be more helpful things to do for Accelerator than this, so please find another Misaka tomorrow morning who will take you to visit me and I can talk to you, says Misaka, says the administrator."
The phrasing- that gave me pause. It took me a short moment to figure out the meaning. "The administrator's another of your sisters?" I asked. I'd been under the impression that it was something more like Exterior- a computer-brain at the top- but…
"Yes, says Misaka with a nod," she said, her head not moving an inch despite her words. "As this is an attempt to improve the experiment, any attempts by members of staff to inhibit you from communicating with the administrator will be taken as disruptive to the experiment, and prevented. Given that you possess the access code, you are obviously a fellow member of staff for the Level 6 Shift project."
…Her voice was completely uninflected, but something told me she fully understood the absurdity of what she'd just told me, and saw no reason to comment on it.
"As you are not wearing appropriate uniforms for the facility, we will provide appropriate uniforms and guest passes upon arrival, Misaka informs the consultants."
"That sounds great, Misaka!" chirruped Michan, with a thumbs up- then skirted around beside Misaka, to keep talking to her as the clone girl turned and started walking. "Uhm, do you have a name? I mean, specifically for you, as an individual?"
"This unit's code is Misaka 10037, informs Misaka, noting that Michan's position as an assistant advisor for the Level 6 Shift project entitles her to know such details," she said. I noticed Michan dying of joy a little at hearing the nickname 'Michan' from the girl's mouth. "Please be advised that it is against standard policy to refer to unit codes as 'names', even if we understand what is meant, says Misaka, even if she expects this policy to imminently be defied."
She was completely correct on that account. "Ah," said Hokaze, as Michan was still busy being overcome by emotion. "Have you and your sisters considered nicknames, Miss Misaka? I understand it may be somewhat forwards to use your given name, but you have a number of sisters, and 10037 is a significant number of syllables."
"..." She didn't reply for a minute, thinking it over. Then she responded, "Misaka has asked her sisters, and none of them possess such a nickname presently, says Misaka. She has been advised that 'Girl' or 'You' would most likely receive complaints, based on the commentary of individuals when presented with comparable suggestions on similar matters- Misaka comments sadly."
"Hmm. How about Rei?" I asked idly, and immediately regretted it, because nobody deserved to be named after an Evangelion reference. (Regardless of whether or not Evangelion existed.)
"Like, 'Rei-ilgun'? Aww, that's be a super-cute name!" said Michan. "What kanji would you use? 'Custom', right, since it'd be the first nickname the Misaka sisters get?"
The girl hummed. "Misaka believes that the nickname 'Rei' is appropriate and serves a useful logistical purpose, Misaka 'Rei' 10037 declares," she said.
…I decided to refrain from commenting, and took a moment to be glad that I was the mind-reader, rather than any of the other people here. Nobody could ever know.
... y'know, "Asuka" isn't that uncommon a name. Even without Misaki's intervention, it's entirely possible that she'll meet a Sister who chose to be named "Asuka" someday, and die inside.
"Do you have permission to be here?" one of the guards asked, in a gruff tone of voice. He was not a small man. While the most obvious examples of transhumanism in Academy City were the super-powered teenagers that warped reality with their thoughts alone, genetics and cybernetics hadn't been left out either; judging by the size and frame of the man before us, he'd probably had genetic enhancements to make him larger and stronger (good both for carrying heavy equipment and for standing there menacingly in important places).
Granted, genetics and cybernetics were less notable transhuman developments for a reason. In this case, the regal teenage girl currently standing in front of him, with her pretty violet drills and a dainty air about her, could probably rip his spine from his back with her bare hands if she felt so inclined. And that was regardless of whether or not he'd paid top dollar for his physical enhancements. Espers were unfair like that.
"Yes, answers Misaka. Misaka confirms that these individuals have appropriate access to the Level 6 Shift Project for entrance to this building, says Misaka," said not-Rei. "This has been confirmed via the Misaka Network administrator."
He took another look at Hokaze, standing there politely in a way that was definitely not squaring up to him, and decided to take her at her word. "Go ahead," he responded. "Be sure to keep the clones with you, or another suitable member of staff, or we will have to remove you from the premises."
"Thank you, says Misaka," said not-Rei, and led us through.
The guard visibly decides that he isn't paid enough to deal with this shit. If only more scientists had his level of wisdom.
"Oh, you're the one who got the guest cards for us? Thanks, 10044!" she said. "Have you had any thoughts about a nickname?"
"No, says Misaka," she replied.
"Hah hah. Rei believes 10044 is jealous, says Misaka smugly," Rei monotoned.
"Misaka 10037 does not require things such as 'nicknames' to function at full efficiency, Misaka grumbles sourly," said 10044, in the exact same monotone.
Hokaze smiled softly. "You really are sisters…" she said.
"This is technically correct, says Misaka factually," Misaka 10044 replied.
"Oh?" said the shorter one, turning to us- ignoring the two clones as he did. "Are you…?"
Then she got something of a better look at us, seeing a bunch of obvious middle-school girls strolling into the laboratory- and meeting my shoujo manga eyes in the process. Her eyes widened, and she made a strangled noise. Clearly, she knew who I was.
The blonde didn't spot the same signs, but in a city where random children could have super-powers, having some of them strolling into your secret project unannounced was very much a cause for concern. "...Ah, we weren't expecting anybody to be entering at this time…? Any unscheduled visits are absolutely forbidden…"
"This visit is scheduled, says Misaka," 10044 said. "If you wish to confirm, please contact the network administrator."
"Professor," said the younger woman, "her eyes. Th-that's Mental Out."
Her eyes widened. "No," she breathed, in similar horrified realisation.
This is real horror movie shit, where you realize that the monster is right behind you.
"Changes to the experimental schedule are strictly prohibited, and the Misaka Network has administrative instructions to enforce this schedule by any means necessary so long as the chance to disrupt the primary goals of the Level 6 Shift project are minimised, says Misaka sternly, displaying her firearm in an implicit threat," interrupted Rei. Her weapon gleamed in her hands, pristine and new.
The two of them looked at each other- the blonde moved to a computer. "...I'm getting confirmation from the administrative unit that it's all true, and there's been nothing showing up on the building's telepathic defence network," she said. She turned, and glanced at the two clone girls, who were both holding rifles as big as their torsos, and making sustained eye contact with her. "...We should stop bothering them."
"Thank you for your patience with us!" I said, faux-pleasantly, and the sisters led us past them.
Either this is all above-board, and they should let her through... or she's already subverted all of the armed-and-dangerous sisters along with the administrator without setting off a single alarm, and they should let her through and then run like hell.
"A-ah…" said Michan. "Oh! If we're going to talk to… the administrator," she said, looking at the young girl floating in the tube, "would it be easier if Misaki just hooked someone up to her so she can talk to us directly?"
The two girls glanced at each other. "This is reasonable, says Misaka," said Rei.
Hokaze immediately stepped forwards, eyes closed, and turned her back to the girl in the tank. "I volunteer," she said, and I nodded.
The floating girl's electromagnetic shielding was no stronger than that of any of the other clones I'd met; there was a small static crackle, a little set of bubbles rising in the liquid that seemed to sustain her, and I was through it. She was… different, mentally, to the other clones. It took me a few seconds to map her responses to those of Hokaze, who would be watching in the background with veto powers while the administrator controlled her body.
Hokaze opened her eyes- wearing a bright, cheerful, childish smile.
"Wooow," said the administrator, unexpectedly, "so this is what being out in the open feels like, says Misaka, says Misaka excitedly as she spins around?!"
As I commented when this chapter first came out, this is a real show of trust towards Misaki on Hokaze's part - just casually volunteering to be used as a communications proxy like that. But then, of course, Misaki's more than earned that trust by this point, in Hokaze's eyes.
"Misaka 20001, also known as Last Order, is a clone of Misaka Mikoto created to serve as the command centre of the Misaka Network after security concerns were raised, summarises Misaka, referring to Misaka 20001 as she floats inside her tank." She did not gesture. "It has been explained to Last Order that the intent is to assist Accelerator by using the Level 6 Shift experiment, but she theorises that the Level 6 Shift is fundamentally flawed in achieving this goal, says Misaka neutrally."
"...You don't think the experiment can work?" I asked, confused. The whole point of Level Upper was to get ten-thousand esper brains to mimic Tree Diagram- if she had ten-thousand Misakas in a network, capable of the same sorts of processing feats, could she have…?
She shook Hokaze's head. "No, the predictions for the Level 6 Shift makes sense as far as Misaka can tell, says Misaka says Misaka, quickly recovering from her disappointment at her older sister spoiling her fun," Misaka- Last Order, according to 10044- told us. "But part of Misaka's duty as administrator is in ensuring that her sisters are not manipulated into cancelling the experiment, and so information on identifying emotional manipulation was uploaded to her! explains Misaka explains Misaka." She stuck up a finger for emphasis. "Misaka is aware that someone can be convinced to do or approve of things that are bad for them, and thinks that the researchers in the Level 6 Shift are doing this to Accelerator, says Misaka says Misaka, announcing her bold conclusion."
Such wisdom, from the mouth of babes. Because she's absolutely right - being pushed to increase his power by hurting others... that's no way for Accelerator to live.
"We were made to fight Accelerator, so we shouldn't refuse, says Misaka says Misaka to answer your question," she replied. "But ever since the outdoor testing, we've met kind people who would want us to be happy instead of dying, like you and Big Sister, and who are doing dangerous things to stop the experiment, says Misaka says Misaka. If you think that we're human, and Accelerator would refuse the experiment because it's hurting humans, then it would be very cruel of us not to help, says Misaka says Misaka!"
"You're going against your programming because you don't want Accelerator to be hurt," Michan realised. My friend smiled, lower lip trembling a little.
"We're not going against our programming, because- unlike Big Sister, or anyone else that might be able to stand up to Accelerator- Shokuhou has permission to be involved with the project directly, as she's definitely given the correct passcode before, says Misaka says Misaka cheekily with a facetious wink!" Last Order countered. Which sounded an awful lot like malicious compliance.
Michan sniffled. Then, being the touchy-feely person she was, promptly gave Last Order (or rather Hokaze, being temporarily piloted by Last Order) a hug.
"Ooh, this is nice, says Misaka says Misaka as she feels very appreciated and comfy," said Last Order- she wrapped her arms around Michan in return, and peeked over her shoulder to keep talking. "Misaka understands if you want to keep fighting for us, but… if you promise to talk to Accelerator- and try to solve things without anyone being hurt- before you try anything else, Misaka and her sisters would be very grateful, and would do their very best to help you, pleads Misaka pleads Misaka!"
I gave her a half-smile, and Michan stepped away. If the price for her help was simply trying to end things peacefully… "...Well, when you put it like that," I said, "what other choice do we have?"
They can't stop the experiment for their own sakes, because it's against their programming, but they can stop it for Accelerator's sake. Now there's an example of deep selflessness.
What if the telepathic barrier being stronger than I expected wasn't anything wrong with my own expectations, but…? "I've just had a thought," I told my compatriots. "Let's take a breather for a moment, just in case."
As far as I was aware, Meltdowner couldn't just keep electron barriers up 24/7, but if there was an outside observer, then it was fairly likely they would have suspected telepathic interference in their last mission given the rather anaemic attempt to kill Railgun. And the obvious solution to telepaths was to put up electronic defences of one kind or another, as the majority of telepaths couldn't detect those.
And here are Misaki's mistakes with ITEM in the past starting to compound. She put them on alert earlier, so she had to go loud here to get through their defenses, which in turn gave them the information that it was Mental Out in particular messing with them, and gave them the impression that she wouldn't stop targetting them. It's all very understandable, though - hard to expect Misaki to have remained at the top of her game after having a bombshell like the Sisters dropped on her.
Offense Shield worked in a fairly simple manner. Kinuhata had a thin shield of telekinetically-controlled nitrogen protecting her skin. While she'd built on the foundation she'd gotten implanted into her, she both remembered and showed physical scars of the original setup, and I was able to roughly reconstruct the differences between her and the Accelerator of when her brain had first been altered.
Kinuhata's power worked in a thin, passively-generated shell over herself- including while she was sleeping, though not while she was unconscious. Within that shell, she could manipulate the movement of nitrogen atoms, with something of a small delay. Both of their powers worked on a basis of vectors, but Kinuhata only worked with the psychokinesis of nitrogen. The original maths of Accelerator was designed to affect a much denser substrate, but it was much simpler as well. He was affecting the vectors themselves.
And that was vectors, straight-up, no prioritisation system. Combined with his observed ability to completely ignore an anti-tank rifle that had been seen by the sisters in some of their fights to the death, and… well… it could reasonably be assumed that no amount of force we could muster would get past him. More force would be worse, in fact- the way Kinuhata's passive shell worked was suggestive of Accelerator's passive shell being a simple 'reverse vectors' equation, with a whitelist rather than a blacklist, meaning anything we threw at him would bounce off just as hard.
Misaki's past experience with power development coming in clutch, here - putting together a working model of Accelerator's ability that quickly based on years-old implanted brain scarring of a small subsection of his power into someone using a completely different base ability is deeply, deeply impressive. It also demonstrates the wisdom behind Misaki's approach, when you compare it to canon Railgun's first encounter and her shock at getting her... Railgun... reflected.
The biggest problem with the 'poison' plan was that we needed a plan which would work in the space between 'talk to him' and 'Misaka 10032 dies'. Talking to him, somehow succeeding, and then having him fall unconscious from too many sleep pills? Yeah, that probably wouldn't result in anything good for us. And Last Order would probably be rather angry- I didn't exactly feel like betraying the trust of the little girl with an armed hive-mind of ten thousand people at her beck and call. Or the trust of little girls in general, though with the number of lives at stake, that was secondary.
That left three more viable options for beating Accelerator in a fight.
The first was trying to abuse his passive reflection. In theory, if you timed it right, you could slip through his passive protections by reversing his reversal- pull your punch (or other such attack) at precisely the right moment, and his vector manipulation would drag it back through. The only reason this might work was because his vector manipulation seemed to be an on-touch effect; Kinuhata could manipulate condensed masses of nitrogen within a few centimetres of her shield, but I wagered that in the original, it would travel up the whole object for as long as it remained in those few centimetres.
If this was indeed how it worked, then- rather than instantly deflecting and leaving his range- you'd effectively be 'caught' in Accelerator's vector reversal for a few moments until you left that space. So the more you pushed, the faster you'd accelerate in the opposite direction; but the more you pulled, the faster you'd be pulled back towards him. Preferably towards his delicate-looking cheekbones or something.
The main problem was that, if he caught you doing it… Well. You'd be well within his direct vector manipulation field, which basically meant your only option for escape if he decided to act on the opportunity would be amputation. Not ideal, by any means.
The second possibility was much more widely applicable. Accelerator could control vectors, but given how short his range was, he couldn't control an absence of vectors. If we could smother him of something vital- oxygen being the obvious- and keep it away from him for long enough, we'd win. But this idea assumed we could keep him smothered for that length of time, given we'd have to keep the smothering method tracked onto him for long enough to use the entire supply of oxygen within the bounds of his field, and that was in serious doubt.
The last possibility was that you could attack the AIM field, rather than Accelerator himself. While powers that affected AIM fields were rare, they did exist; Takitsubo here in ITEM could detect them, and Railgun's rival Kamijou seemed to have a means of directly nullifying them on contact. It was a reasonable guess that psychometric powers- at least, ones of the same type as my own- were interacting with AIM as a source of their information potential as well.
These are all, indeed, fully viable methods of messing with Accelerator, at least in theory. It's once again very impressive that she was able to compile a list like this in no time flat. Post-Character-Development!Accelerator would probably agree too, honestly.
"...I'm here to talk," I responded. We stopped, a few metres away from each other.
"Eh, you don't sound so happy… I take it you've figured out my little training program?" He was totally relaxed, hands still in his pockets as he slouched, tilting his head to the side as he looked at me. Somehow, he seemed more relaxed now than any time we'd encountered each other before. "Funny thing. I've heard that- if I weren't already the best- you'd be the one who'd benefit most from all this… So, what do you think of all this?" he asked me. "Jealous?"
"...No," I responded, and he waited for me to continue. "I want to ask you to stop."
"Hah!" he barked. "And why would I do that? Slow down, just so you can scramble to catch up?" He spread his arms wide. "If playing with dolls can give me the power of the heavens-"
This is how he's been justifying it to himself, after all. Gain power, get safety, and don't get hurt again.
"They're not dolls," I snapped.
His eyes, which had briefly been turned skywards, turned back to me. "Hmm?"
"They're not dolls," I repeated, trying to keep myself calm with sheer willpower. "We've spoken to them, they're the same as anyone else. They've got emotions. Preferences."
And here the internal tension starts. Mental Out is the best possible person to discover something like this, if it was true... but she also told him that she was seeking to gain power for herself, and it would make perfect sense to sabotage him. So what's the truth?
"...Do you really think I'm going to trust some girl I've met twice over the smartest people in this damn city?" he said, after a moment. His smile had lost its amused tension. "There's hundreds of scientists working on making me the strongest. What, do you think they'd all just not notice something like that? Or do you think they're secretly mass-murderers, somewhere in those happy little labcoats?"
"I encountered a 12-year-old girl called Kinuhata Saiai within the mercenary team ITEM. She was part of an experiment called the Dark May Project," I continued, and his eyes flashed with recognition- his fists clenched. "The experiment was an effort to use data from your own brain to boost the powers of others. Her brain tissue had noticeable electrode scars from implanted knowledge, and her personality was significantly affected. Her power is now creating a passive barrier of nitrogen close to her skin; the inability to control how it was reflected meant that she almost suffocated, due to being unable to bring oxygen through the barrier under her own power. She was in a minority of survivors, as the majority of children involved were vivisected under anaesthesia-"
That's the one that got to him. And no surprise, given the personal connection and the recognition of it - he presumably didn't know the specifics, but it's still evidence that she isn't just pulling these project names out of thin air, if it's something he's heard of before.
"I think you're lying," he said. "Do you really think there's anything you can do to prove yourself?"
Something glinted in his eyes, and he started to walk forwards, slowly, one step at a time. Hokaze and Michan stood up, alarmed. I stood my ground. "...Would I keep trying to stop you, if it was all a trick?" I asked him, and clenched my fists.
He didn't answer. Three steps, two steps, one- he stopped.
He laughed. "No more talking," he said. "I've set my power to block sound, so… now I can't hear a word you're saying. But that doesn't matter- actions are supposed to speak louder than words, right?"
Then Accelerator lunged forwards with one hand, and I dove to the side.
The ground exploded where I'd been a moment later.
In a neat reversal of canon... Accelerator lost on the very first move, here. He's already implicitly accepted Misaki's framing here - if she stays and fights, then this is something she holds to with conviction, so it's likely true.
Our first plan, and our least dangerous plan for that matter, was simple. Accelerator only had a certain range at which his vectors were effective. If we could drain the oxygen within that range, without crossing into it, we could win- an angry esper of any sort would be using a lot of oxygen, after all. It wasn't a graceful plan, and it wouldn't win any dramatic prizes, but so long as Mental Out could maintain a distance between Michan's boosted Liquid Shadow and Accelerator's instant victory radius, we could win.
Oxygen deprivation is one of Accelerator's very few weaknesses, yes. However...
Accelerator huffed in irritation. "...Well well, this is going to be harder than I thought… this attack can't be an illusion. You'd need to be able to reach my brain for that," he determined, "and if that were true, you'd have already won the fight, wouldn't you?" He chuckled. "It's getting a bit stuffy in here, actually… your plan's to try and choke me with whatever this stuff is, huh? Unfortunately…"
Then, Accelerator moved, far too quickly for us to respond.
...that sort of plan relies on keeping the unstoppable force pinned in place, and that's really, really difficult.
We all dodged the barrage- but the crates beneath our feet couldn't, and suddenly our footing was falling out from beneath us. Accelerator didn't take advantage of our airborne immobility, but that didn't mean he was just idly watching… Well, he was, but that didn't mean he wasn't using that time well. "Ah…" said Accelerator, realising something.
He glanced at the mass of oobleck rushing at him, and in response, lazily kicked up another storm of gravel from under one foot. When that didn't completely stop Liquid Shadow from getting closer, he tutted, and simply started slowly walking- the ground was thrown out from underneath him like a woodchipper with every step. The raw force was easily enough to beat back our Liquid Shadow attack, and his aim was good enough that the mass was still forced back as we tried to circumvent the hail of concrete chunks. "That's a neat trick there, Mental Out. I'm not sure how you're doing it- using those sparks to make you faster, like your friend is," he said, observing the lightning running through me and Hokaze as we were forced to reevaluate our approach. "Some sort of Electromaster ability? I've noticed something, though."
His eyes turned on Michan. And then he moved in her direction.
"It's not something all of you can use at once, is it?!" he asked as he moved- and as unskilled as Accelerator was, Michan didn't have any close-range skill either, and his advantage in simple height meant he had more reach than any of us in melee.
Accelerator may not have combat skills, but you don't become the Rank One by collecting bottlecaps either. As should be expected of the peak of esper science, his ability to reason is nothing to be scoffed at.
But then she turned back to me in shock.
Mental Upper had just winked out- I'd broken the connection. "Misaki?!"
But I dodged Accelerator's next strike, even without Rampage Dress- and the next one, too.
Misaka 10032 had already been in my range, and I'd hooked myself up to her as a simulation source. Now, any way she could dodge, I could dodge too. "Don't worry!" I shouted back. "I have a plan! And I'm not borrowing your power when Michan needs it more- get her away from here!"
...man, this must have hit Hokaze's trauma of Doctor Toomine telling her to leave during Ideal hard.
Left unsaid was that I wasn't going to risk any of their lives if I failed. If Michan bled out, or if he caught a Rampage Dress-enhanced strike and reflected it through my skull…
It doesn't come up in her narration... but Accelerator is also one of the lives she doesn't want to risk, isn't he? If she had done the reverse punch with Rampage Dress at full blast, she'd have ripped him in half, and that isn't the outcome she wants from this fight either. As she promised to Last Order, she's doing this for his sake too.
Accelerator didn't have the same thoughts. "Well, that's a shame about the view," mocked Accelerator, "but if your little minions are leaving, I guess things are coming to a close, soon?" He met my eyes more closely, and his eyebrows raised a little. "Ah, your eyes have changed colour? You were doing something to them… Were you controlling her, using her power to boost your own strength, maybe…? Hell, it doesn't matter now," he decided. "Now you're as helpless as anyone else!" He lashed out with another wild swing of his arms, aiming to get a hit of some kind on me.
It must have really stuck out in Accelerator's memory of this fight that literally all of the major hits that got landed on him happened after he said things were basically over already.
I moved to the side, dodging it as cleanly as any other of his strikes. Then I grabbed a pipe- there was clutter all over the yard, wreckage left by the steel bars and gravel he'd shot into the crates around us- and used it to hit him in the face.
Or at least, I tried. He grinned as he saw me pick it up, and stopped trying to attack, letting me hit him- I hissed, the bones of my fingers having virtually creaked under the suddenness under which the swing had been reflected. "Hah! What was that wimpy strike, telepath?" he asked me. "If you'd been trying, you'd have broken your fingers, at the very least. Come on," Accelerator gloated, "try a little harder, won't you?"
She's finished simulating his ability, and already plugged in all the observations she's made of the fight so far. But she still needs to double check the most important thing - how long things get caught in his field prior to reflection. No need to make the strike powerful - the whole point is just to see how it reflects, after all.
I redid my maths. Given the inability to control the pipe as well as I could control my own hands… it wasn't the most effective weapon I could be using, not when I needed maximum responsiveness if I wanted to have even the chance to hurt Accelerator. I checked the signals that I'd be firing up my arms with my power alone, the physics of my muscle contraction simulation; I bunched up my arms in preparation as he waited for me to try again.
And then I threw another punch.
This time, the vectors reversed in synchrony with the contractions of my muscles. My fist was pulled through his shield, and gloriously, it made contact with the unblemished skin of his face.
In the anime, this would be the moment that that the OST changed tracks.
The boy himself staggered from the pain of the impact, stunned more by the shock of it than by any actual damage. After all, on one hand I was just a well-exercised middle school girl, and I'd literally had to pull my punch; on the other hand, he probably hadn't even stubbed his toe before, let alone been punched. But now I had a second data point; using Mental Out to recalculate where the black void of his AIM field boundary lay, I lined up another punch.
This one dug into his kidney, a harder hit than the last- he yelped in pain, flinching away from it. It exposed his face, and he was bent over now, much closer to shoulder-height- I took my shot, and slugged him as hard as my muscles would let me.
If I punched too hard, I wouldn't be able to reverse the vectors in time. If I punched too weakly, he'd have more time to react.
The strike struck true, knocked him to the ground-
-and, below my vision, a hand he'd desperately moved to push me away made contact. It had been unpredicted by my meagre brawling skills or the Misakas' overly-specific training, and now, it blasted me away like I'd been hit by an elephant.
For a second or two, I was airborne. The hit wasn't like an ultra-strong punch- it had no point of impact, no collision to hurt me. He just batted his palm against me and, instinctively, changed my direction to 'away'.
Then gravity kicked in, and on Accelerator's behalf, the ground rushed up to hit me in the face.
He hadn't noticed me moving- it had… only been a few seconds, I thought? His laughter came to a wheezing stop; the only noise was the slow, rhythmic sweep of wind turbines through the air.
…Were they doing that before? I wasn't sure. My head felt fuzzy. Thoughts were bouncing around my head like pinballs.
Warning! OG Misaka is approaching your location at high speeds!
"Whew," he said, turning to Misaka 10032. She was watching from the sidelines, wordlessly. When had she gotten there? "Man… That's the first time someone's even come close to killing me, y'know? Agh," he hissed, "this doesn't feel good at all…" He shook his head. "It makes me wonder why she's only fifth… That electric bitch couldn't think of anything but 'shoot pennies'. But I guess it doesn't really matter. Maybe she can get a side note in the history books when I'm Level 6?"
Real shade being thrown at Railgun here. But yeah, this is one part of the reason for Accelerator's unusual level of respect for Misaki.
He groaned in dismay. "Tch," grunted Accelerator, fumbling for something in his pocket. "They didn't even have the decency to-"
Then he paused. A rock had just bounced off the ground next to him.
He turned around, back towards me, an incredulous expression on his face.
I was standing there, panting heavily, half crouched, halfway to picking up another rock. Then I straightened, hissed as the movement pulled on my bad shoulder, thanked the stars that I'd installed ambidextrousness at an earlier point in time, and lobbed another rock at him.
It bounced off of him harmlessly; he stood there, completely unresponsive to the gesture. "I… can do this… all day," I panted. "...wait, you wouldn't understand that reference."
His only response was to keep staring, even as I picked up another rock.
The third rock missed like the first one had, going over his shoulder. He glanced behind himself, watching it land, then turned back to me. "...You?" he asked. "Looking like that…" He smiled menacingly. "You still think you can fight me?"
Also: Notice that he's responding to her again. He's stopped blocking out the epic mind manipulator's words. No doubt a lot of the scientists reviewing footage of the fight are totally convinced that she managed to slip him an infohazard here and that's why he "flipped" so "abruptly". (They're even almost right, except that the "infohazard" is "basic moral reasoning".)
She kept talking. "I am a borrowed mind in an artificial body. My retail price is one-hundred-and-eighty thousand yen. There is no need to halt the experiment to preserve the remaining nine-thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-six of us in the inventory, emphasises Misaka." I didn't respond; she switched tracks when she realised I wasn't listening, her speech speeding up as I got closer to Accelerator, even as she kept her monotone. "This is pointless, says Misaka, trying to find something that will convince Miss Shokuhou to stop. This makes no sense, says Misaka. What on Earth are you doing, Misaka asks." She came to a halt in her speech for a moment, trying to find the words. "Please don't get hurt for me, begs Misaka," she said neutrally.
"Eh… I'm not okay with that," I said, denying her request entirely. "Sorry, uh, Misaka. And even if I was okay with that… I'd still have to get hurt for your sisters' sake, wouldn't I? They'd have to… ask me… one by one."
This spiel probably started getting through to him. The Sisters never reacted to anything he tried to do to shock them, but here... she's clearly in a panic and desperately trying to avoid having someone friendly to her die.
"I don't even know what you were trying to do there. But that little hole in my defences you found, pulling your punches…? I fixed it already." He grinned down at me. "It didn't take long. Thanks for that, by the way- who knows what would have happened if it had been something dangerous that got through? Now." He raised his arm. "It's time for you to-"
In the distance, Kihara Amata sighs unhappily and crosses a line off of his Accelerator contingency list.
"You know, I sometimes get told tidbits from the experiment log, if they think something will mess it up if I don't do it right. Like when I hadn't gotten to grips with killing dolls; they said that if I didn't get my act together and start using my power right, I'd mess up the experiment," he explained to us. "Or when I'm not allowed to do something that's getting stale- yesterday, I had to 'try something new', even if I was thinking of doing it anyway. And today?" His grin, if anything, got wider. "They told me that it says, 'Misaka will lose on the first move'. I thought that was odd. And not just because you things usually put up a better fight than that, even if you can't hurt me at all."
Odd…? Why would it…?
"It's odd, because every other time, they've mentioned the code for the doll I'm putting in the ground," he told Misaka Rei. The tension returned to his arm, and he raised it higher. "And if they didn't? If it just says 'Misaka'? It means they already knew this was going to happen. That it doesn't really matter which 'Misaka' gets reduced to burger meat." His eyes were wide and excited. "So… I guess it's goodbye to two of you, tonight."
This is legitimately interesting, because of the implications. Tree Diagram, it seems, did not predict Misaki's interference. That was, after all, the prediction of what Railgun's plan to shut down the experiment was, and it's one that she won't be in any position to try because of how things unfolded. I wonder why... something about Lateral kicking up interference?
"NO!" bellowed Hokaze. Accelerator glanced to his left- just in time for a shape to crash into him. Despite his absolute barrier, despite it all?
Whatever it was that hit him, it sent him sprawling. He crashed into the ground, and as I followed with my eyes, the blurry shape materialised into a familiar, spiky-haired form. Railgun's boyfriend, what's-his-name… Kamijou? What was-?
I heard a familiar crackle- the static shriek of Rampage Dress at full power. Hokaze blurred into view, interposing herself between Accelerator and the two of us, kicking up gravel as she skidded to a standstill. "Stop!" she shouted, furiously. "Just stop, please!"
Another pair of shoes skidded into my frame of reference, and I saw another Misaka clone- wait, no, her face looked wrong.
"Shokuhou?!" she said, and I realised that this wasn't one of the sisters; this was Railgun. She sounded too worried, too afraid, too angry, to be one of the sisters. "What are you all doing here? This was- it was supposed to be-"
I interrupted her. "You didn't think we would go this far?" I wheezed, with a sardonic grin. "You… expect too little from us."
Railgun grit her teeth, uncharacteristic tears gathering in her eyes.
The cavalry arrives. And appropriately enough for the esper with the power to make connections, it's those connections to others that ended up winning the day in the end.
"Accelerator, listen to me, damn you!" shouted Hokaze. "You said you'd stop if we proved we were serious, so- so- just stop and look at what you've done to Shokuhou!"
And, miraculously, Accelerator- rather than swinging his fingers another time-
Something brought him to a stop, and he looked.
He stared. I stared wordlessly back up at him.
Then, without prompting this time, his eyes flicked to Rei. Rei was still standing between us, unflinchingly. The fact that Hokaze had moved to protect her had done nothing to make her move.
The silence stretched between Accelerator and the clone in front of him, filled only by ragged breathing. Nobody else spoke.
"...Hah. That's… funny," said Accelerator. "Really, really funny…" He panted for a moment, seemingly overwhelmed by the adrenaline. "You really don't want that starry-eyed idiot there to die, huh?" he said, finally.
"I don't want anyone to die, says Misaka simply," Rei replied.
Accelerator's stare lingered. He said nothing.
Then, Accelerator reached into his pocket- and, after a second's rummaging, he pulled out a severed finger.
It was too small to be his own; my eyes crossed over to Rei's hand, and I saw that the shape matched perfectly. Why did he have a clone's severed finger in his pocket? I… didn't know. But from the looks of it, he didn't know why he had it either. Not any more, at least.
He stared at it. Then finally, he slumped down to his knees, without dropping it, and took no further action against us.
"...Thank you," said Rei, "says Misaka."
"Ugh," he said listlessly. "...Go. Before I change my mind. All of you."
The breath I'd been holding left me, and I let the darkness close in.
It's been discussed before, but this conclusion has got to have led to a wildly diffrent state of mind for Accelerator going forward. He isn't the ultimate villain who got foiled by some cosmic hero... he's just another confused and scared kid in a city full of them, trying his best to balance not getting hurt and not hurting others. He made a mistake... and he took responsibility for fixing that mistake.
I was halfway through the first chapter when there was a knock on the door. I raised an eyebrow. Who'd be here this early, and on a holiday, at that…? "Come in," I said.
To my surprise, it wasn't Hokaze or Sakibasu or someone. Instead, it was Kamijou, strolling in with an icepack on the side of his face. "Shokuhou," he said, his spiky hair looking even messier than normal. "Hello. You're awake?"
"Good morning, Kamijou," I said, raising an eyebrow. "I have to say, you're not the first person I was expecting to see after getting my shit kicked in."
The precision expletive made him snort. "Man, people really have the wrong impression of Tokiwadai girls…" he said to himself.
Kind of cosmically appropriate, to have the canon main protagonist have a chat with the fanfiction's main protagonist right after the first arc's big climax in both works. A sort of "compare and contrast" of thoughts, approaches, ideologies, and all that jazz.
That said, it's also just a plainly nice character interaction with some neat comedy interspersed.
"How'd you have that much warning?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.
"They have a network administrator called Last Order," I explained. "She's a little girl in a jar, and she's as emotive as you'd expect a girl her age to be. I'd used Mental Out to spoof their passcode previously, so she took it as an opportunity to ask me for help without having to break the rules. She guessed that Accelerator was being manipulated, which made her sad about Accelerator, so she wanted us to cancel the experiment for his sake if it was going to be cancelled at all." I shrugged- or at least, I tried, promptly hissing in pain since one of said shoulders was broken at the moment. "Gah, ow… Well, her plan worked out in the end."
He winced in sympathy. "Those sisters… They really do care for anyone but themselves, don't they…?" he muttered.
I hummed. "It's part of their charm, I guess," I commented neutrally.
The moment I first saw a frog's beating heart, understood the wonders that lay beneath the world my human eyes could see, was a moment that would never leave me.
Now, I was a subject; one day, if I worked hard enough, I'd be someone who'd have subjects of their own. Those with true potential were never at the bottom for long, after all.
The only one who had ever managed that was an undeserving ditz- known as Shokuhou Misaki, the Doll of Tokiwadai. Perhaps even she may have been rejected, if her standards for herself had not been high enough.
But she was only one of the Level 5s that attended, which meant that the presence of a second Level 5 in the school all the more impressive, and had easily vindicated my schooling choices. The other one, Misaka Mikoto, was perhaps the prototypical fine young lady one would expect in an establishment such as Tokiwadai, a refined individual who distanced herself gracefully from clique politics, instead of using it as an excuse to play house like the other one did. Some called her Tokiwadai's Ace.
What a misread! MisaSI I get, but Misaka, who is essentially the metaphorical lovechild of a tsundere pre-teen girl and the MC of your average shounen series, being described as a "refined individual" just shows Tatsuki is terribad at reading people.
She was a woman of few words, but I listened to those words more than most. "...You're right," I admitted. "I apologise."
Onizuka was my secretary and confidant. Among the morons I'd been surrounded in for my last school, only she had dared to approach me. She'd profited from the relationship, obviously. While our previous elementary school had been held in some esteem, only those with both exemplary grades and exceptional remarks on their conduct could make it through to a place such as Tokiwadai. She had been the only one among those short-sighted fools who'd seen the potential of her own intellect, and of her regenerative ability, Rewind Burst.
That she had trouble properly holding a conversation was the only thing they cared about; not the immense knowledge of human biology her ability required, and not her willingness to go above and beyond in her role as a subject. When I hadn't rejected her out of hand, deigning to let her sit at my table where all others would deny her, she had similarly observed my keen intellect and my ambition. Where everyone else- her teachers, her peers- weren't willing to allow herself to be pushed, my parents had taught me vision. So when she had requested advice on how to push herself to Level 3, I'd been the only one willing to offer something useable.
My parents had been the only ones who'd been proud of our initiative; when the schoolteachers found the topical anaesthetic I'd obtained and stashed in the science lab, having put sweat and tears into getting a hold of it without my parents' coddling, they'd scorned me. Told me I was 'abusing my friendship'. Hah! In a city like this, where our Level affords us our futures, they were telling me I was the cruel one?! It was plainly obvious to me and my assistant that we'd never make anything of ourselves, that we would be stuck in dollhouse schools that made us feel nothing but pretty, if we bound ourselves up in niceties like that. And I'd do well to make sure I gave Onizuka the respect she deserved, because of that.
Pathetic!" I announced, stepping to the side, and using my ability to phase through his cheap plastic shoe as I stomped on his nearest foot- he tripped and fell, starting to cry like the other one after he landed
And the first sessions with her are often the most helpful, from what I hear… If we could provide something similar, using our collective scientific knowledge, but with stronger leadership…" The idea was starting to flower in my mind. "Do you think we could get a headstart in setting up our own faction, if we infiltrated theirs?" Like a parasitoid wasp; something stronger bursting forth from something weak.
…I was never going to admit that the blonde's methods actually seemed useful.
"The methodology appears to be something replicable, and with relatively practical results given the number of restrictions," I informed Onizuka instead, passing her a glass of milk (full-fat, as skimmed milk didn't possess the necessary oil content to dissolve the capsaicin). "Increases in stamina have been noted, with minimal damage to red blood cells from psychic exhaustion."
"Mmh," replied Onizuka, after having thoroughly washed down the last of the capsaicin test sample. She licked her lips in shallow discomfort, presumably yet to shed the last of the burning sensation.
"It appears," I said, "that there's also a factor that I did not previously anticipate." The mental maths for calculating the variance and whatnot was a bit tricky, but not impossible, especially not for individuals as genius as us. "Alternating the control and tests appears to show a medium-term change in the rate of improvement of temporal recombination from the baseline, and doubly so with sequential exposure to other novel human-safe neurotoxins…"
The date of that damnable practice session was approaching, and we were doing our utmost to squeeze the use out of whatever Shokuhou was willing to give us. Or, rather, waste on us, in her attempts at 'friendship'. Pah.
I was coming to realise that they were both bad influences on one another. Hokaze made Shokuhou soft, and Shokuhou made Hokaze placid. They would both be much better off if they had more constructive influences in their lives, hah.
The relationship of researcher and aide between myself and Onizuka was, in contrast, an excellent example of symbiosis in action. My own presence enabled Onizuka to increase her confidence and offload any social situations beyond her tolerance, which increased her productivity and innovation by a substantial amount. Meanwhile, I was occasionally slightly- slightly!- too reckless, or otherwise likely to act on my first impulses. Onizuka made for an excellent moderating influence and secondary innovator, which was why she was 'aide' and not 'test subject'. Admittedly, she was clearly benefiting more than I did, but I could live with that. Symbiosis was a rare example of a game that wasn't zero-sum, after all.
"We need to catch the bus," said Onizuka suddenly- given that we had to be there in less than five minutes now I was looking, her action provided an excellent example of why I kept her around.
After very, very quickly following the procedures for locking the lab up behind us, we sprinted for the bus stop. I was fitter than her, so by all rights she should have been the one gasping for breath when she hopped on board… Unfortunately for me, she simply used a Rewind Burst just before the bus arrived to replenish her blood oxygen, and stepped onto the bus with a perfect visage of a fine young lady. Traitor.
It was the middle of the school day, and the reason we'd been rushing was so that we'd be back in time for lunch. Being a School Garden bus, it was perfectly on-time, because our fine institute(s) would settle for nothing less. The smoothness of the drive, and even of the braking at the bus stops, was also excellent- my aide and I took the time at the upstairs cafe to enjoy a cup of tea each on our brief travel, and the cups were undisturbed by the journey.
We were thus able to step regally off the bus and re-enter the school grounds, alongside some other students who had been outside of the grounds for whatever reason. I noticed that the members of the equestrian club (one of them, anyway, there were a few different places for pony-lovers to congeal) had also been on the bus, for example. Myself and Onizuka were relatively unusual in that we were acting in a self-driven activity, but then again, many of the girls here lacked our maturity and independence, so that was not unexpected.
The dining hall was similarly privileged. For example, we were served by students from Ryouran Maid School. Serving staff were always in demand amongst the super-elite, and it was an immense status symbol for even an apparently-lowly member of staff to be at the peak of education. Thus, maids- the symbol of highly-trained courtesy, combined with the skills to maintain a household and ensure it never wanted for comforts- were one of Academy City's most esteemed career paths, and it was no surprise that the halls and dormitories of Tokiwadai would be a place where trainees of such a school could practise and network with future employers.
There were no butlers, unfortuntely. Even without considering that they'd be useful for testing a variety of psychological tricks once I was more physically-developed (though those tricks would be worth practising regardless), I thought there was something dashing about a boy in a suit. Oh well.
We made our orders, which- thanks to the education of the Ryouran staff- would be excellently tailored to both our nutritional needs and our palates, and took our seat at our usual table.
I had seen fit to order a quail dish- delicately removing the meat from the bones made for a slow-paced lunch that would leave time for thought and easy conversation. Onizuka, meanwhile, had ordered an appropriately-classy pizza with a creamy mushroom base. "I take it you're not in the mood for anything else that's spicy," I surmised, and she giggled daintily in response.
When our food arrived, she cut a piece of her pizza away with a knife and fork, then paused to talk. "We should do more talking," Onizuka suggested.
"Hmm?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.
"If you want to lead, we need more people," she said, gesturing at our lacking company. "I'm not a whole clique."
"True, true," I mused, acknowledging her point. "My hope was for a victory against a clique leader- prospective or otherwise- to display my talents, and give others a reason to follow. But that needs a certain level of flair. One which I doubt the doll's strategy will allow us," I added with a stab of my own fork.
The plan had been fairly simple. Make a name for myself, work on emphasising my features that would place me in a leadership position- my maturity, intelligence and grace- then once I had a nucleus to work with and we were in a new school year, I'd rival myself with an appropriate target to establish a position in the school's social hierarchy. It was unlikely to get me into the top three immediately, but it would give me enough influence to pursue a position of prominence- the student council, perhaps.
Given my esper level, I doubted I'd ever be Queen, let alone Majesty- those who couldn't reach Level 4 clearly weren't working hard enough, or didn't have enough broad-spectrum talent to get real power, according to conventional wisdom. But accepting those doubts was the first step to making them a reality.
Something about that thought tickled my mind. "...We should find an individual whose powers would be compatible with these same tests," I suggested, and Onizuka blinked questioningly. "An interference-based method is inappropriate for someone whose powers can do them real harm- I can't exactly regenerate if I cut my foot off with a ceramic floor," I pointed out. "But that's a chicken-and-egg argument. Who would be willing to join such an experiment, with no prior experience…?"
"You're doing an experiment?" said a voice behind me, and I made a questioning noise, instead of any sort of immature girlish screams of surprise that the gossipmongers might attest to.
I turned around calmly.
"Can we join?" asked a girl I quickly recognised- admittedly, I didn't know her name, because she was one of Hokaze's cake-brained associates whose name I hadn't bothered to memorise.
"...I haven't even said what it is, yet!" I pointed out, reasonably irritated.
"Yeah," said the other one, who acted as rough-and-tumble as a prissy brat thought normal people acted. "But Miss Hokaze's trying to make friends with you, so that means we have to try as well!"
"Yay!" cheered the other one, with a little hop, narrowly avoiding the spillage of her bowl of soup. "So can we sit next to you and your friend?"
"She's my assistant," I corrected, and Onizuka nodded firmly beside me. "Nothing so wishy-washy as 'friendship'."
The rowdier one took a moment to think. "So you're besties?" she checked.
No. "She's my assistant!"
Apparently the cake-brainedness didn't diminish with time spent talking, as the other one leaned into the rowdy one and whispered, "I think they're tsunderes…"
"What's a tsundere?" was the reply, which was received with a confused shrug. I groaned, holding my head in my palms.
I shared a bewildered look with Onizuka, before she waggled her eyebrows in a 'look, opportunity!' sort of manner.
"...While we're in our temporary association with the Dollho- the Shokuhou Clique," I said, stressing the 'temporary' and swapping out my word choice on Onizuka's signal, "we've been looking into how… spicy compounds," rather than pain, "affect powers. It's been more useful for improvements in Miss Onizuka's ability to regrow cut hair than expected, and we'd be very interested in volunteers to continue the experiment."
"You mean we get to eat spicy stuff and improve our powers?!" said the blunter of the two. "Sold!"
"...It's not 'spicy food'- just samples of spicy compounds," I stressed.
"But if you're going to be using it anyway, you could put it into a set portion of food so people have more fun?" suggested the girlier one.
"Right!" agreed her friend.
"Oh, we haven't introduced ourselves yet! I'm Kando," said the girly one, "and my friend here is Miss Sanada. And you're Miss Tatsuki and Miss Onizuka! Ah, that's very forwards of me- it's just exciting to meet new friends…"
"Test subjects," I tried, and they looked between each other momentarily- then decided to follow in the footsteps of their precious Lady Hokaze and ignore my insistences, beginning to babble happily to the two of us.
I held in a sigh, and shared a look with Onizuka, to which she merely shrugged. I could already tell that this was going to be a trying experience.
__________
Shokuhou raised an eyebrow as she read over the results. "Huh- not what I was expecting," she said. "In all honesty I wasn't predicting it to have much effect, let alone a positive one."
"Whyever not?" I asked, scoffing slightly. "Without sacrifice, there can be no development! Increasing the range of stress at which an ability can function is practically a no-brainer. Take the Daihaseisai- it's not uncommon for individuals to show significant improvement soon after the festival. It's perfectly obvious that being able to cope with a bit of pain would increase our personal reality manipulation."
She huffed, an unamused sound. "Unfortunately, not everyone takes the time to test these things," she responded. "You know, I looked up a similar study before the summer. Turns out that pressuring your subjects into experiments of a similar kind to this one, that they wouldn't normally agree to, has an unpredictable effect- either mildly strengthening or significantly constraining their personal reality."
I paused. "Well, that's just hiring unmotivated subjects," I decided. "If they didn't want to be there, they should have been kicked out for their disrespect! Or their lack of cooperation, at the very least. These are great opportunities! Not things to simply throw away!"
The doll gave me a crooked grin. "You'd think that," she said mildly. "Nah, some people are just arrogant, and don't know how to keep an experiment from falling to pieces. No fault of the… subjects."
"Now you're just stating the obvious," I needled. "Of course there are people whose ability falls behind their belief. Or who think they always know best," I added sourly, thinking of the people that had dared to hold me and Onizuka back. "But that doesn't mean those who could benefit anyway, shouldn't boldly press ahead regardless!"
She didn't exactly look pleased, but she visibly mulled it over. "...Hmm. You're incorrect, but perhaps not completely," she responded, which was basically admitting I was perfectly accurate in my response. "I know my development's been a bit slow since… since I've been at Tokiwadai." I raised an eyebrow of my own. She leaned back in her chair. "Have you considered the utility of a power like Mental Out for ability development? Other than just cheating at getting the maths in line, I mean."
"Not particularly," I responded. "Why? Do you really think a blonde midget like you could do better than the esteemed institutions of our city, at pushing the boundaries of what it means to be human? Hah," I crowed. "No chance."
"Why not?" she responded thoughtfully. "I mean, a lot of the research is restricted, but with a bit of effort… Labs currently have a monopoly on esper development. If that monopoly could be lifted a little," the doll pointed out, "perhaps by an individual with on-hand neural scanning and analysis tools and an in-depth knowledge of neurology…"
That… was a good point actually. My mind ticked towards the Mikagami Clique, and the power that mere fat manipulation offered in a school of young ladies. I opened my mouth to tell her that it would never work, and besides, how would she even get permission?
But I didn't speak, because she'd lit a spark of curiosity in me, and- even if it would disadvantage my final position, when I had my own clique- I wanted to see where it would lead.
It was the only thing that could be more important than personal achievement- knowledge.
"...So long as you're an individual with the appropriate security checks," I advised, "I've heard that it's surprisingly easy to be registered in esper research. It's supremely difficult to get those security checks done, but- well- if you're already a long-term member of Academy City, in good standing… You've had those checks, I'm certain. I've also heard an urban legend that the Meltdowner was developed by a girl younger than we are, and while I doubt it's correct, it's suggestive that an exceptional individual might be able to contribute to research at a surprisingly young age…"
"Exceptional, am I?" she drawled.
"I- you- w-w-well, anyone within an institute as fine as Tokiwadai would be!" I spluttered. Gah! Confound her abnormal competence at turning my own words against me! "O-of course, you're vastly inferior to my own associate, let alone myself! It's merely that I don't have the budget for the tools I'd need for such an endeavour, and I need to build a firm foundation of knowledge before I invest in such things! That's all."
The doll rolled her eyes. "Yes- 'that's all', of course," she demurred, facetiously so. "Anyway," she continued, moving onto my next papers. "I see you have some new volunteers for your current experiment?"
"Ah yes, certainly!" I agreed, readily permitting her to change the topic. It was to my convenience, as I didn't want to waste my time on etymological arguments. "Hmm… Here it is," I said, pulling out a book of notes on the matter, which I passed to her. "Miss Kando and Sanada have exhibited Level 3 phytokinesis and pyrokinesis, respectively, and have provided the details for me to record herein. They'll make excellent secondary case studies so long as the samples are spread out enough to prevent disruptive levels of stress, though given the burning sensation and phytotoxic nature of capsaicin, I plan to seek other comparisons in the future to reduce confounding variables on hot or plant compounds."
"Actually, that's a thought," said Shokuhou. "Have you considered data security and management?"
"Hmm?" I asked. "No. These are all middle-school experiments, with nothing much of value coming out of them- not with something this paltry, anyway. I presume you're going to give me some inane reasons I should care until I follow through with your suggestions…?"
She smiled. "That sounds about right!" she agreed. "The main problem, from the perspective of someone who wants people to contribute to your work, is that it's not just data going out that could have value- it's data coming in. You're aware that there's a minor taboo against doling out information about your power?"
"More that it's stupid to do so, but yes," I noted- I'd go over it out loud, for the sake of discussion. "After all, unknowns about powers contribute significantly to the safety of our populace. Minor details, that the wielder knows of and the opponent doesn't, grant a significant defender's advantage to any conflict- so it's generally recommended that one doesn't go letting people know your… Ah."
I saw the conclusion that she was leading me to. I could take advantage of naivety in these studies, but if I wanted a larger and richer experimental basis, then some guarantee that information wouldn't go to unworthy hands would be desirable.
"I would need a guarantee, or guarantor, or a trustworthy reputation- at the very least- if I wished to bypass such societal conventions for my own gain," I reasoned. "Correct?"
"Not the way I'd have phrased it, but that's pretty much on the mark," the doll agreed with a nod. "An NDA for research staff being the easiest kind of guarantee. Guarantors and reputation both need a trustworthy resource in the first place- though if you're intending to do this in the long term, and everyone involved follows through with the ethics and whatnot, I could act as a guarantor until you change it out for official accreditation or something."
…Having the mind-reader who can already know those secrets at a whim- as a certain incident with the glasses had already informed me- backing up my claims to privacy was not an unreasonable deal. I sighed. "Very well then, Lady Shokuhou," I responded, rolling my eyes. "But don't think I can't see your influence creeping up on me! I'll be looking into that independent accreditation as soon as possible, thank you very much."
__________
Despite my expectations, the two cake-brains did not abandon ship on the first day. In fact, they were rather more enthusiastic even once we got to the higher doses, and explanations of statistical changes observed appeared to entice them further. They were still doing their best to thoughtlessly antagonise me with their 'friendship' drivel over my ally, but our studies were starting to attract attention, and their inanity was tolerable because of that.
"It appears that the menthol treatment has had a lesser effect to the one seen on Miss Onizuka for the both of you," I explained to them. The sample size and type of effect was too small for a double-blind test, and we were working on a technique rather than a paper besides- a placebo effect wouldn't do any harm, so long as I took the possibility into account in a responsible manner. "However, the combination appears to remain effective; we can move onto the sichuan-spice compound in our next sessions. It would also be useful if you could remain available for study of whether long-term progress will be made."
"So we can keep training with you?" asked Sanada, and made an over-dramatic pose with her fist. "Awesome! I've never don anything as intense as this, other than the first time I got on a horse, or the first time I jumped in a pool feet-first. I'm pumped!"
"We really appreciate you including us in this- I know you have trouble with people you're not familiar with," she said, cutting me off by pulling something out of her bag before I could argue with her complete misinterpretation of my unwillingness to deal with idiots. "So we wanted both of you to have these!"
I stared as they gave me and my ally a bow, presenting… chocolate?
I looked at Onizuka, and she was just as baffled as I was. Certainly, we were more than deserving of accolades and adoration, but our efforts were always… expected, or ridiculous. I couldn't really recall a time that either of us had gotten more than a kind word, and even then we generally had a reminder to keep working, too.
"I… thank you?" I responded, receiving it, and passing the other box to Onizuka. I felt oddly self-conscious, and I wasn't quite sure why.
"You're welcome!" said Sanada, and patted her friend on the back. "Anyway, can we hang out for a bit, while we wait for Hokaze-senpai? School's out, so we're gonna have tea with her! You can come too, if you want?"
I shook my head, my gut demanding I get back to familiar territory. "No, no- I'm flattered, but we need to tidy up, and I imagine Miss Onizuka will be studying with me this evening." I turned to her to check, and she nodded quickly, clearly as off-balance as I was. "...Thank you, though?"
"Aww, have fun!" Kando replied, with a happy little look on her face. "If you'd ever like to join in with us, please, just let us know." Then she glanced behind me. "...Is something wrong, Miss Onizuka?"
I was going to give her the most incredulous look of my life if Onizuka was crying over such an offer.
But no- she was looking towards the door with a frown. "That's not Miss Hokaze," she pointed out.
A moment later, somebody kicked in the door. Acting on instinct, I tackled the two airheads out of the way, as a human shape rocketed into the room.
She turned around with a cocky stance. "Knock knock, bitches!" shouted a girl in a storebought sci-fi helmet and a Tokiwadai uniform, followed shortly by two more- one with icy hands, the other picking up the door behind her with telekinetic force. "Someone call for a reality check? Your stupid Dollhouse isn't going to go steal our future members with something like this, not if we can help it!"
"H-how rude!" gasped Kando, clutching my shoulder with a distressed look. "How did you even get past the security?"
The girl laughed- it sounded odd with the voice-changer inside, but I could recognise her physical frame as one of the memory-alloy moron's lackeys. A toughness-enhancer, specifically. We'd gotten more attention than I thought, apparently! "Oh, we have ways," she said grandly. "And we all know that Judgment stays out of clique stuff. So get ready for a beatdown, losers!"
The nerve- I put my glasses on the table beside me, and stretched my arms, taking a moment to limber up (and shake off my phytokinetic limpet). I took in the room- the telekinetic and cryokinetic were the bigger problems, as they could damage our research even if we won.
Unfortunately, I was the only one here with the aggressive instinct to act, so my first priority was to group up my other allies to give them the confidence to fight back. Onizuka could do it, I knew for certain, but my decision to protect Kando and Sanada from being ambushed had left my aide separated on the other side of our enemies, and she was trembling in uncertainty.
…In retrospect, perhaps I'd rubbed my growing success in Yonaki's face a little too much. This was completely disproportionate, and far too much of an inconvenience to be worth the wonderfully-frustrated expressions she gave me… Wait, no, I was fairly sure she wasn't so stupid as to beat up the Level 5 mind-reader with a 'deniable attack'. She was very stupid, certainly, but not that stupid.
My mind was wandering- I focused, preparing to launch myself at her with my ultimate technique, and end this quickly… but stalled, when I recalled how poorly that had gone in my recent spar. I'd need to ground myself, then hit, or I'd be leaving myself wide open to counterattack. And that would just be pathetic.
Decision made, I slipped a foot through the floor (and most of my clothes), and launched myself at the toughness-manipulator between me and Onizuka- but this time, my feet touched the ground just as I reached striking distance, and a sideways push permitted me to dodge a blast of ice that shattered the window behind us.
Certainly, I could phase through ice, but I would've been right in its path if I'd made the arm-grab I'd been intending, and it would have either knocked me off-balance as my phase slipped out of it, or struck me as I made contact- instead, I slipped behind my foe's sloppy punch, and hooked her by the neck to tug her backwards into the floor.
She went down with a strangled yelp, and I turned around, getting the two others back in my sight just in time to phase through a thrown chunk of doorframe and a subsequent chunk of ice. That phasing was a mistake- I'd made the error I'd only just avoided, and before I could phase back up out of the ground, the girl on the floor struck my legs from underneath me.
I didn't phase this time, and let myself hit the ground, feeling her leg still wrapped around me- my foe didn't have super-strength, but momentum and a grip I couldn't phase through? Those forces would risk breaking my own ankle if I fell through the floor without shaking her first.
Now on the ground, I kicked her in the face, and she laughed it off. Then an invisible force hoisted her upwards. The telekinetic! That was how she'd rocketed in with so much force- she'd been telekinetically thrown!
The realisation was belated. It did very little for me- she was still holding onto my foot as she was dragged upwards, and I found myself dangling upside-down, wearing nothing but my underwear, as I struggled to break free from my foe. Her grip was stronger than it had any right to be, even with me held at an awkward angle, facing away from her; it was being held closed telekinetically then.
I snarled, and tried to elbow her in the groin. She twisted to avoid it, and promptly kneed me hard in the kidney- the pain made me gasp. Her second attack was a kick to the head that left me dazed, and she probably would have done it again if Onizuka hadn't intervened.
The willowy girl launched herself with a half-scared, half-furious shriek at the telekinetic, and her efforts to throw a fragment of door in reply caused their tough-girl to drop my now-unsupported weight.
I struggled to my feet, but found myself kicked in the gut before I could stand fully, sending me sprawling onto the floor a second time. "Crazy bitch!" I wheezed at my foe, in lieu of any ideas that would let me go support my frie- my ally! Definitely ally.
A jet of flame promptly separated us, and she backed off with a curse. "Oi! Don't hurt our friends!" yelled Sanada, spurred to action- she was being pressed backwards by the backwards force of the white-hot spew of fire, but Kando was straining at her back, holding her upright against the force from her own ability.
"Icy!" shouted tough-girl, and billowing, surface-cracking frost forced Sanada to intercept it with her fire instead- Sanada could only aim her jet in one direction, and though she could probably pierce through and fry her attacker, she'd have to pierce through and fry her attacker, with obvious consequences for said ice-girl if she tried it. Then something buzzed on her phone, and she checked it.
Onizuka wasn't having much better luck than the rest of us- the cryokinetic had iced the floor around the entrance, and Onizuka was getting beaten back by a telekinetic club of door pieces, even as she tried her best to Rewind Burst her way into having never been pushed in the first place. We were losing!
"Excuse me," said a voice from the shattered window, and the fight cut off as I remembered who'd been coming to meet her friends. I looked towards it woozily, and truth be told, I'd never been as glad to see an overly-friendly fluffball as I was to see Hokaze raising herself by the arms to meet everyone's eyes. The fact she was hanging from a second-floor window didn't seem to matter to her at all. "You're hurting my friends- get out. Now."
"Shit!" yelled tough-girl. "Icy, get her! You two are taking too long!"
"Got it!" shouted the cryokinetic in response, and Hokaze dropped with a surprisingly-dark expression to avoid a hailstorm of shards that chilled the air without even being near the line of fire.
The toughness-enhancer tackled Onizuka by the waist, knocking her to the floor. "Regenerator like this- you're being too nice!" she growled, then grinned fiercely as she intercept Onizuka's noodle-armed attacks with a wristlock each. "I'll break her elbows- don't worry! She'll walk it off later!
"...Did we get her?" asked the telekinetic, taking a step away from her teammate. I was trying to get up- and to get up before she hurt Onizuka. Then we all heard a horrible metallic squealing noise from outside. "What was-"
That was the moment before, with a terrible noise and a hail of scattered brick, an object I only belatedly realised was an entire fucking streetlamp was hurled like a javelin through the room.
The girl trying to hurt my friend was Hokaze's target, and she disappeared from the room with a cut-off yelp, going through the ceiling and out-of-sight, leaving Onizuka staring down the side of its metal surface with wide eyes.
There was a light reverberation through the metal, followed by the sound of delicate footsteps; I felt just a hint of the static charge on the streetlamp's metal. Hokaze Junko, sparking with a full-power Rampage Dress and with an absolutely livid look on her face, stared down the two remaining intruders.
"Your behaviour is beyond the pale," she informed them, tightening her fists. "I won't give you any more warnings- get out, and leave my friends alone."
They fled without any further struggle. I let myself collapse to the floor, and sighed in relief. What excellent fortune.
"...Ah. Perhaps I could have dealt with that more delicately," said Hokaze, all grace and bashfulness again as she took in the room. The streetlamp had torn through the doorway and a corner of the room below us, despite her impeccable aim in regards to the people in the room, and I could still hear pieces of the roof and wall falling apart. "N-not that I regret it! …Gosh. I hope they have insurance. I'll call Miss Shokuhou! Oh, a-and perhaps you should get the rest of your clothes back on before anybody gets here, Miss Tatsuki…?"
The look on our (temporary) leader's face as she arrived on the scene, which I observed with an icepack on my head and a thoroughly rattled Onizuka hugging her gift-chocolate like a doll, was legendary.
"...What, exactly, am I looking at?" she questioned Hokaze, blinking at the streetlamp still embedded in the building, a few Anti-Skill officers standing beside them all.
"Hah," I muttered quietly to Onizuka. "Thinks we're a low-risk investment, does she?"
Onizuka snorted despite herself, and I smiled. "Glad we're on their side," she responded. "Let's stay that way. Even with our clique."
"Don't tell me you're chicken?" I ribbed her, shaking my head, and wincing when I recalled the headache I had right now. "But yes, I think it's for the best anyway. I suppose we'll need allies, and… well, they have more to offer than I thought they did." …We'd still do better under my own leadership, of course, but I was feeling somewhat humbled about the latter stages of our plan right now.
Funnily enough, I forgot how many chapters of Cerebral Fanatic there were, so when I saw the last one come out here, I thought it was you posting a new one. Now, a day later...
Go, team Cake-Brain! For great justice friendship! Neat to see Tatsuki slowly changing and mellowing without realizing it, even if we knew that'd be the case given that Onizuka had to take a photo to show her her own body language next to Misekai.
I was coming to realise that they were both bad influences on one another. Hokaze made Shokuhou soft, and Shokuhou made Hokaze placid. They would both be much better off if they had more constructive influences in their lives, hah.
Though she isn't entirely wrong, Tatsuki is severely underestimating either the positive effect they have on each other's mental health, the importance of that effect, or both.
Admittedly, she was clearly benefiting more than I did, but I could live with that. Symbiosis was a rare example of a game that wasn't zero-sum, after all.
Thinking non-zero-sum scenarios are rare shows you have a beginner level of understanding of game theory, but at least she's better at it than the average libertarian or republican, as she atleast recognizes that such things exist.
She says nothing else that sticks out as monumentally dumb to me in this chapter, so she's already growing! She even forgot to 'correct' herself from thinking of Onizuka as her friend at one point near the end!
Edit: incase anyone thinks I'm being inconsistent by not calling out Tatsuki's thought about the will to hurt in this chapter, I didn't call her out because this is a situation where, unless you have notable prior experience with similar things, having that """will""" helps keep you from freezing, so she is at worst just overstating its importance this time.
