FailLord
2050 lb bombs?
- Location
- very high up
There's 39 more chapters on SB if you want to continue reading.
A Certain Mental Isekai (Raildex SI)
- Thread starter Eotyrannus
- Start date
Chapter 10
- Location
- England. Tea and scones, wot wot!
"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. In this case, I had indeed found something very interesting, but my body and physical reactions had precisely lined up with that of a young woman very excited about her manga-reading- I was grabbing one of a small pile of manga in my handbag on the surface, but picking up some interesting signs with Mental Out underneath.
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.
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.
Hook, line, sinker. (Though I supposed this was more snag-fishing than waiting for her to take the bait.)
"Damnit!" she swore. This was nothing to do with me- she'd completely forgotten my own presence.
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.
Both of them showed some concerning signs; Kinuhata was a preteen (or close enough anyway) with signs of extremely invasive electrode usage, though the damage was old, while Takitsubo's calculative centres and optic lobes both showed signs of increased blood flow without the associated neuron growth. My fingers curled (outwardly, due to something romantic happening in the manga). But I didn't have time to focus on that; while I had tactical supremacy right now, I couldn't change their course without making them look suspicious, and their current path was leading them to the garage of one of the research buildings- a garage which still had its electromagnetic deterrents up and running.
I worked quickly. In their current state, unlike my normal scans, I could find memories as fast as they could think; the problem with doing this normally was that running on their brainpower got real suspicious real fast if they were occupied with anything. But as long as they were on the road- which was rapidly coming to a close, since they'd come to my attention less than a kilometre from their destination- I could get anything I wanted to know.
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.
"How cute," I said.
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.
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.
__________
The pawns were unusually well-defended around here. Their operational security was good; a lot of people were leaving work at the end of their hours by this time of the evening, but those I was able to pick up outside of the barriers didn't know what was going on in there, and I could only imagine that the members of staff going through other labs' psychic defences were the ones who knew otherwise.
I hadn't really thought about it before, but the most important scientists probably had to live in housing with anti-telepathic measures. I made a note of that.
By the time they re-emerged, I'd been restless enough to flick through the whole reserve of mangas. There wasn't any reason to immediately put them back under control. They were leaving in a different direction to the one they'd arrived in, which meant they wouldn't stay in my radius for long enough to get a deep dive in. I wouldn't be able to keep a grip on their minds unless I had a car to chase them in, either, and I had no way to secure a vehicle that quickly without being incredibly unsubtle. Instead, I skimmed the information on where their meeting spot would be- nearer here than there, Kinuhata's Offense Armour was worse at stalling or aggression than Frenda's pyrotechnics, so they needed to be more readily available for Kinuhata in this first building. Then I ran a search for an appropriate place to hole up, and called a taxi to drop me off nearby.
I decided to change into some slightly warmer clothes, to deal with the summer night's air. Staying the night at a second hotel would be suspicious, and I probably didn't have enough money on my dropped cards besides. Instead I'd sit in an alleyway outside the car park they were using, one which wouldn't have any of the city's helper robots at this time of night. If any of the city's gangs passed through, they wouldn't have the means to notice my presence if I was using Mental Out to prevent it- I was just as safe there as I was in the hotel.
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.
It turned out my initial assessment had been wrong. They'd been cyber-attacks, sure, but the cyber-attacker had been attacking via the electrical wiring, not through hacking or coded viruses. In the meeting they'd just had, ITEM's liaison had discussed how every security measure had been bypassed, including the air gapped ones and the sensors during the in-person attacks. From what they could infer, the most likely culprit was thus an Electromaster of no small skill. Unfortunately, a lot of identifying information had been restricted from ITEM, so I wouldn't know too much beyond that until I got there.
But a powerful Electromaster… Railgun? She'd been- no, I realised, it couldn't have been her. She had an alibi, one that I could attest to. People had seen her out and about, I knew from my snooping after Shirai's concern. The timings of the attacks didn't match up at all.
…Oh well. As long as they could avoid getting turned to pulp by Frenda's explosives before I got there, or having their neck snapped by Kinuhata's nigh-impenetrable Offense Armour nitrogen cloak, I'd probably be able to identify them; there hadn't been anything I could do to assist them at this stage. 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.
I considered my approach. With a bit of mental maths, I determined that stealing a bicycle wasn't a viable approach. Sure, I only needed to stay within a kilometre of them, but they'd be out of my range too quickly, and I couldn't just have them slow down to let me keep up. Besides, the faster I got there, the more likely the saboteur would stay alive. Commandeering a car was also right out; I could have done it at a much more leisurely pace than at the hotel, but cars needed to be hotwired instead of using padlocks.
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.
Or something completely unexpected could have happened, but it didn't, as I was able to stay in the car until the signal for the saboteur arrived.
"Here we go," said Mugino, with a savage grin, starting up the engine, before hitting the accelerator- she pulled out of the car park, and started driving at just over the speed limit. "Frenda's found the perp. Let's hope he lasts long enough that she doesn't get all the pay." For some reason, the payment agreement was that whoever took him in would get half of the payout- certainly motivating, but maybe not helpful for team cohesion.
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?
In front of her, Frenda jarred, and slumped- then caught herself. She was back under my control, hook, line and sinker. She looked up at Railgun's eyes with a glare, eyes that I was looking through now.
I demanded, "How the hell are you here?"
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.
"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."
"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."
"...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."
She stopped, and turned back to Frenda with a furious expression, sparks lighting up her arms. Of course, I wasn't Frenda- I was sitting back in ITEM's van, on cushioned seats, while Mugino and Takitsubo stalked their way up the facility in case Railgun did something stupid.
"Now," said Frenda, as I perused the brains of the scientists at the gathering point, "let's… see… here. …Ah."
The building they were in was called the S-Processor Pathology Analysis Research Laboratory. There was a wide variety of research done here, most being medical in nature. The most notable project, however- one that was being done as part of a larger research project known as 'Radio Noise'.
Its full details weren't available in this research centre- it was a cooperative project amongst multiple S-Processor facilities. Officially, it was using cloned materials to study the effects of trauma on the human body.
I… could see the corpses. That they'd brought in. The official story was clearly incorrect, and a lot of people here knew it. And… they weren't studies on cloned bodies. They were post-mortems of them.
Their 'research' came in two parts. First was identifying the exact causes of death- the mechanics of evisceration, or traumatic amputation, or catastrophic exsanguination, or blunt trauma- down to the finest level, attempting to define the exact forces that had been utilised to kill them. The second part was analysing the efficacy of the cloning process, taking note of hormone levels, organ deformities, and a million other minor details- all on one, oh-so-familiar face.
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.
Clones. Dolly's sisters. Dead.
I moved to speak- and found that while I'd been distracted, Frenda had been left unconscious on the floor, clearly having been electrocuted. Railgun was walking away.
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…"
She didn't stop walking. Not initially, anyway.
Then she stopped in alarm- and half a second later, the wall a few metres ahead of her exploded in an eerie green blast. Clearly, she could detect Mugino's blasts- I made a note of that. The shot had taken a little while to pierce through the layers of the building; a low-level blast. I wasn't letting her get away from the conversation that easy.
Frenda laughed. "You knew, right?" I asked. "What they're doing here?"
I was trying to count the bodies. It wasn't simple- a lot of them arrived in pieces, and the numbers suggested that not all of the pieces got here. The number I came up with was, 'too many', and the most recent one had only arrived yesterday, though she had been sent straight to the incinerator rather than having been studied first.
"You didn't think to mention all this to me?" I asked. "Let's look at my memories again… ah, yes. 'If you need some brain-punching for this sort of thing, let me know, though.' And somehow you didn't think to say anything." My puppet smiled, lips quirking upwards, still a bit twitchy from the electrical shock she'd had while I wasn't paying attention. "Instead, you stood me up. Left me standing at a pool, thinking everything was fine and dandy in the world, and you'd just had a late night or something. Though… thinking back, you did have a late night, after all. Isn't that right, Railgun?"
I could easily identify the exact moment she lost her patience for me. "And what right do you have to know, huh?!" she exploded- quite literally. Lightning burst through the walls and ceiling; if she'd been any less in control of herself, Frenda would have been fried alive, and Mugino had to throw up an electron barrier for herself and Takitsubo in case a stray arc hit them. I frowned. "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."
Takitsubo stepped through a second later, stepping neatly over the melted metal. She put her shoulder under Frenda's as the girl stumbled towards her, and the three of them turned to leave. Railgun stood there, trembling in fury.
"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?"
"This-" she hissed. "This is why I didn't want you to get involved. You had a breakdown just from hearing about Doctor Kiyama's experiment- why would I have ever thought you could handle knowing about this without doing something- stupid?!"
"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."
"...At least it's only my own life I'm risking," Railgun replied.
Mugino shrugged. But I'd let her have the last word on this one- I had more productive things to do than argue with her.
Like resuming my scan, and looking for someone who really did know what was going on.
__________
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?
I'd been very tempted to just send a beam from Meltdowner through the gathering point and move onto the next building. It would have been very clear. Sent a message. Caused irreparable damage to the research. Maybe it would have even stopped it.
But… well. I'd be an idiot if I assumed they didn't have plans for what to do if I went rogue. Or if Meltdowner went rogue, for that matter. As much as I wanted to, I couldn't just do whatever I wanted.
And even if I could make it look like an accident, somehow- it wasn't an excessively-narrow tower, as Exterior had been- I hadn't had the preparation time to figure out who were just pawns and who really deserved it.
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.
My lips quirked upwards.
There was something else I'd learned in my scans, and that was much more immediate of a concern- Railgun really should've guessed the other building. They were performing a transfer right now- evacuating the remaining clones in their growth chambers.
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.
I couldn't just blast through the research buildings with Meltdowner, but I couldn't sneak in without bypassing the psychic barriers, either- though they'd be more like detectors, in this situation. Mugino couldn't just hack or electrocute the computers through the wires; she needed an inside look at the building, if she wanted to get anything. And it wasn't like I, or her AIM Stalker buddy for that matter, could just point out a psychic security system from outside the building.
…But, I realised, they wouldn't be inside the building for all that long. They needed to move their 'research materials', didn't they? And… I had an ambush specialist right here. While she didn't have her ludicrous quantities of explosives on her, all of them still being in the other building with Railgun, there was still plenty of knowledge for me to tap at will- and just a bit of explosive tape, if I really felt the need.
Not everything would be going in the same direction, but if I could sit in a good interception point, I could wait for any heavy equipment being moved, and take action that was appropriate to the defences.
I had Mugino park us, and ITEM consulted their maps. We said nothing- I didn't know if anyone was listening, inside the van. After a few minutes' processing, Frenda decided on a particular alleyway to set ourselves inside, and Mugino drove the van to its new destination.
The alleyway was narrow; if they tried to box us in here, having Meltdowner alone would turn it into a killing field. My own knowledge knew that this one wouldn't have any bin-bots at this time of night, and it was too far down to easily stay in contact.
But my eyes narrowed when I realised the alleyway was occupied, despite all that. The van trundled closer, having to take its sweet time in these confines, and the protected signal continued to approach in return. Someone wearing one of those new disruptive headsets, based… on…
Mugino turned on the high beam lights, flooding the alley with light.
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.
We remained silent.
"...If you are not here to interfere with the convoy, please clarify your absence at the S-Processor Pathology Analysis Research Laboratory, says Misaka, as she identifies one of the individuals in front of her as Mugino Shizuri," she said neutrally.
"...Mugino isn't available right now," I said. Her gaze turned to me.
She stared. "Unknown individual, please identify yourself, says Misaka, preparing herself for if violence should break out," she informed me. Her grip on her gun tightened.
Some more of her sisters were closing in on us. I could tell from the electric fields around them, just barely protecting them from my influence.
"...I don't want to fight you," I said.
She stared into my eyes- they were hidden by sunglasses, I'd put them on earlier, but her eyelids moved minutely after a few seconds' staring. "Then please vacate the area and allow Mugino Shizuri to resume her contracted duties, Shokuhou Misaki," she said, "requests Misaka, finally succeeding in identifying the individual before her."
…If I remembered correctly (and I did), they were a network, right? If one of them had figured it out, all of them did. So there was no point in trying to erase her memory for that.
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.
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."
The activity in the mathematical centres of her brain fell, all of a sudden. "Misaka has been specifically programmed not to feel human emotion," she said, not following up with a 'says Misaka', or any such variation. "Physiological stress is expected and accounted for."
I pushed through the fields of the others, and the stress levels of the girl in front of me elevated themselves a little. The others were swiftly catching up.
"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.
"...'Oneesama' is Misaka Mikoto?" I asked.
"Yes, Misaka can confirm," she replied.
"...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.
Her expression didn't change. "It will not, says Misaka."
"It has to." I looked away- the convoy was coming, and inside, I could detect a cluster of brains- neurologically-underdeveloped. "...Oh. They- they don't have personalities yet, do they?" I asked the girl. "There's nobody there to save."
"None of us have personalities, says Misaka, reiterating previous information," said the girl. The other girls stood around us, silent as ghosts.
Their neurologies were already starting to diverge. "You're wrong," I replied.
"I am not, says Misaka," she said.
Beyond us, the gentle rumble of vehicles at the roadside, and the white-noise whirring of industrial air conditioners in the labs nearby, were the only thing to break the silence of the night. "...There's nothing I can do to convince you to leave, is there?" I said.
"Usage of telepathic powers to alter our behaviour would be reverted by the network administrator upon detection, and would be responded to with hostile force," she told me.
So trying to get them to safety now would just end with me getting shot.
But… an administrator?
…If I could find whoever that was, stop them from changing things back…
Maybe I could…
"...I hope to see you again, then," I told them. "Until next time."
"...Goodbye," she said, instead of returning my sentiments.
I tried not to think about what that meant for her.
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.
I got back into the dorms, well after curfew, though nobody noticed.
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.
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. In this case, I had indeed found something very interesting, but my body and physical reactions had precisely lined up with that of a young woman very excited about her manga-reading- I was grabbing one of a small pile of manga in my handbag on the surface, but picking up some interesting signs with Mental Out underneath.
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.
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.
Hook, line, sinker. (Though I supposed this was more snag-fishing than waiting for her to take the bait.)
"Damnit!" she swore. This was nothing to do with me- she'd completely forgotten my own presence.
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.
Both of them showed some concerning signs; Kinuhata was a preteen (or close enough anyway) with signs of extremely invasive electrode usage, though the damage was old, while Takitsubo's calculative centres and optic lobes both showed signs of increased blood flow without the associated neuron growth. My fingers curled (outwardly, due to something romantic happening in the manga). But I didn't have time to focus on that; while I had tactical supremacy right now, I couldn't change their course without making them look suspicious, and their current path was leading them to the garage of one of the research buildings- a garage which still had its electromagnetic deterrents up and running.
I worked quickly. In their current state, unlike my normal scans, I could find memories as fast as they could think; the problem with doing this normally was that running on their brainpower got real suspicious real fast if they were occupied with anything. But as long as they were on the road- which was rapidly coming to a close, since they'd come to my attention less than a kilometre from their destination- I could get anything I wanted to know.
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.
"How cute," I said.
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.
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.
__________
The pawns were unusually well-defended around here. Their operational security was good; a lot of people were leaving work at the end of their hours by this time of the evening, but those I was able to pick up outside of the barriers didn't know what was going on in there, and I could only imagine that the members of staff going through other labs' psychic defences were the ones who knew otherwise.
I hadn't really thought about it before, but the most important scientists probably had to live in housing with anti-telepathic measures. I made a note of that.
By the time they re-emerged, I'd been restless enough to flick through the whole reserve of mangas. There wasn't any reason to immediately put them back under control. They were leaving in a different direction to the one they'd arrived in, which meant they wouldn't stay in my radius for long enough to get a deep dive in. I wouldn't be able to keep a grip on their minds unless I had a car to chase them in, either, and I had no way to secure a vehicle that quickly without being incredibly unsubtle. Instead, I skimmed the information on where their meeting spot would be- nearer here than there, Kinuhata's Offense Armour was worse at stalling or aggression than Frenda's pyrotechnics, so they needed to be more readily available for Kinuhata in this first building. Then I ran a search for an appropriate place to hole up, and called a taxi to drop me off nearby.
I decided to change into some slightly warmer clothes, to deal with the summer night's air. Staying the night at a second hotel would be suspicious, and I probably didn't have enough money on my dropped cards besides. Instead I'd sit in an alleyway outside the car park they were using, one which wouldn't have any of the city's helper robots at this time of night. If any of the city's gangs passed through, they wouldn't have the means to notice my presence if I was using Mental Out to prevent it- I was just as safe there as I was in the hotel.
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.
It turned out my initial assessment had been wrong. They'd been cyber-attacks, sure, but the cyber-attacker had been attacking via the electrical wiring, not through hacking or coded viruses. In the meeting they'd just had, ITEM's liaison had discussed how every security measure had been bypassed, including the air gapped ones and the sensors during the in-person attacks. From what they could infer, the most likely culprit was thus an Electromaster of no small skill. Unfortunately, a lot of identifying information had been restricted from ITEM, so I wouldn't know too much beyond that until I got there.
But a powerful Electromaster… Railgun? She'd been- no, I realised, it couldn't have been her. She had an alibi, one that I could attest to. People had seen her out and about, I knew from my snooping after Shirai's concern. The timings of the attacks didn't match up at all.
…Oh well. As long as they could avoid getting turned to pulp by Frenda's explosives before I got there, or having their neck snapped by Kinuhata's nigh-impenetrable Offense Armour nitrogen cloak, I'd probably be able to identify them; there hadn't been anything I could do to assist them at this stage. 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.
I considered my approach. With a bit of mental maths, I determined that stealing a bicycle wasn't a viable approach. Sure, I only needed to stay within a kilometre of them, but they'd be out of my range too quickly, and I couldn't just have them slow down to let me keep up. Besides, the faster I got there, the more likely the saboteur would stay alive. Commandeering a car was also right out; I could have done it at a much more leisurely pace than at the hotel, but cars needed to be hotwired instead of using padlocks.
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.
Or something completely unexpected could have happened, but it didn't, as I was able to stay in the car until the signal for the saboteur arrived.
"Here we go," said Mugino, with a savage grin, starting up the engine, before hitting the accelerator- she pulled out of the car park, and started driving at just over the speed limit. "Frenda's found the perp. Let's hope he lasts long enough that she doesn't get all the pay." For some reason, the payment agreement was that whoever took him in would get half of the payout- certainly motivating, but maybe not helpful for team cohesion.
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?
In front of her, Frenda jarred, and slumped- then caught herself. She was back under my control, hook, line and sinker. She looked up at Railgun's eyes with a glare, eyes that I was looking through now.
I demanded, "How the hell are you here?"
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.
"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."
"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."
"...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."
She stopped, and turned back to Frenda with a furious expression, sparks lighting up her arms. Of course, I wasn't Frenda- I was sitting back in ITEM's van, on cushioned seats, while Mugino and Takitsubo stalked their way up the facility in case Railgun did something stupid.
"Now," said Frenda, as I perused the brains of the scientists at the gathering point, "let's… see… here. …Ah."
The building they were in was called the S-Processor Pathology Analysis Research Laboratory. There was a wide variety of research done here, most being medical in nature. The most notable project, however- one that was being done as part of a larger research project known as 'Radio Noise'.
Its full details weren't available in this research centre- it was a cooperative project amongst multiple S-Processor facilities. Officially, it was using cloned materials to study the effects of trauma on the human body.
I… could see the corpses. That they'd brought in. The official story was clearly incorrect, and a lot of people here knew it. And… they weren't studies on cloned bodies. They were post-mortems of them.
Their 'research' came in two parts. First was identifying the exact causes of death- the mechanics of evisceration, or traumatic amputation, or catastrophic exsanguination, or blunt trauma- down to the finest level, attempting to define the exact forces that had been utilised to kill them. The second part was analysing the efficacy of the cloning process, taking note of hormone levels, organ deformities, and a million other minor details- all on one, oh-so-familiar face.
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.
Clones. Dolly's sisters. Dead.
I moved to speak- and found that while I'd been distracted, Frenda had been left unconscious on the floor, clearly having been electrocuted. Railgun was walking away.
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…"
She didn't stop walking. Not initially, anyway.
Then she stopped in alarm- and half a second later, the wall a few metres ahead of her exploded in an eerie green blast. Clearly, she could detect Mugino's blasts- I made a note of that. The shot had taken a little while to pierce through the layers of the building; a low-level blast. I wasn't letting her get away from the conversation that easy.
Frenda laughed. "You knew, right?" I asked. "What they're doing here?"
I was trying to count the bodies. It wasn't simple- a lot of them arrived in pieces, and the numbers suggested that not all of the pieces got here. The number I came up with was, 'too many', and the most recent one had only arrived yesterday, though she had been sent straight to the incinerator rather than having been studied first.
"You didn't think to mention all this to me?" I asked. "Let's look at my memories again… ah, yes. 'If you need some brain-punching for this sort of thing, let me know, though.' And somehow you didn't think to say anything." My puppet smiled, lips quirking upwards, still a bit twitchy from the electrical shock she'd had while I wasn't paying attention. "Instead, you stood me up. Left me standing at a pool, thinking everything was fine and dandy in the world, and you'd just had a late night or something. Though… thinking back, you did have a late night, after all. Isn't that right, Railgun?"
I could easily identify the exact moment she lost her patience for me. "And what right do you have to know, huh?!" she exploded- quite literally. Lightning burst through the walls and ceiling; if she'd been any less in control of herself, Frenda would have been fried alive, and Mugino had to throw up an electron barrier for herself and Takitsubo in case a stray arc hit them. I frowned. "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."
Takitsubo stepped through a second later, stepping neatly over the melted metal. She put her shoulder under Frenda's as the girl stumbled towards her, and the three of them turned to leave. Railgun stood there, trembling in fury.
"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?"
"This-" she hissed. "This is why I didn't want you to get involved. You had a breakdown just from hearing about Doctor Kiyama's experiment- why would I have ever thought you could handle knowing about this without doing something- stupid?!"
"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."
"...At least it's only my own life I'm risking," Railgun replied.
Mugino shrugged. But I'd let her have the last word on this one- I had more productive things to do than argue with her.
Like resuming my scan, and looking for someone who really did know what was going on.
__________
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?
I'd been very tempted to just send a beam from Meltdowner through the gathering point and move onto the next building. It would have been very clear. Sent a message. Caused irreparable damage to the research. Maybe it would have even stopped it.
But… well. I'd be an idiot if I assumed they didn't have plans for what to do if I went rogue. Or if Meltdowner went rogue, for that matter. As much as I wanted to, I couldn't just do whatever I wanted.
And even if I could make it look like an accident, somehow- it wasn't an excessively-narrow tower, as Exterior had been- I hadn't had the preparation time to figure out who were just pawns and who really deserved it.
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.
My lips quirked upwards.
There was something else I'd learned in my scans, and that was much more immediate of a concern- Railgun really should've guessed the other building. They were performing a transfer right now- evacuating the remaining clones in their growth chambers.
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.
I couldn't just blast through the research buildings with Meltdowner, but I couldn't sneak in without bypassing the psychic barriers, either- though they'd be more like detectors, in this situation. Mugino couldn't just hack or electrocute the computers through the wires; she needed an inside look at the building, if she wanted to get anything. And it wasn't like I, or her AIM Stalker buddy for that matter, could just point out a psychic security system from outside the building.
…But, I realised, they wouldn't be inside the building for all that long. They needed to move their 'research materials', didn't they? And… I had an ambush specialist right here. While she didn't have her ludicrous quantities of explosives on her, all of them still being in the other building with Railgun, there was still plenty of knowledge for me to tap at will- and just a bit of explosive tape, if I really felt the need.
Not everything would be going in the same direction, but if I could sit in a good interception point, I could wait for any heavy equipment being moved, and take action that was appropriate to the defences.
I had Mugino park us, and ITEM consulted their maps. We said nothing- I didn't know if anyone was listening, inside the van. After a few minutes' processing, Frenda decided on a particular alleyway to set ourselves inside, and Mugino drove the van to its new destination.
The alleyway was narrow; if they tried to box us in here, having Meltdowner alone would turn it into a killing field. My own knowledge knew that this one wouldn't have any bin-bots at this time of night, and it was too far down to easily stay in contact.
But my eyes narrowed when I realised the alleyway was occupied, despite all that. The van trundled closer, having to take its sweet time in these confines, and the protected signal continued to approach in return. Someone wearing one of those new disruptive headsets, based… on…
Mugino turned on the high beam lights, flooding the alley with light.
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.
We remained silent.
"...If you are not here to interfere with the convoy, please clarify your absence at the S-Processor Pathology Analysis Research Laboratory, says Misaka, as she identifies one of the individuals in front of her as Mugino Shizuri," she said neutrally.
"...Mugino isn't available right now," I said. Her gaze turned to me.
She stared. "Unknown individual, please identify yourself, says Misaka, preparing herself for if violence should break out," she informed me. Her grip on her gun tightened.
Some more of her sisters were closing in on us. I could tell from the electric fields around them, just barely protecting them from my influence.
"...I don't want to fight you," I said.
She stared into my eyes- they were hidden by sunglasses, I'd put them on earlier, but her eyelids moved minutely after a few seconds' staring. "Then please vacate the area and allow Mugino Shizuri to resume her contracted duties, Shokuhou Misaki," she said, "requests Misaka, finally succeeding in identifying the individual before her."
…If I remembered correctly (and I did), they were a network, right? If one of them had figured it out, all of them did. So there was no point in trying to erase her memory for that.
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.
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."
The activity in the mathematical centres of her brain fell, all of a sudden. "Misaka has been specifically programmed not to feel human emotion," she said, not following up with a 'says Misaka', or any such variation. "Physiological stress is expected and accounted for."
I pushed through the fields of the others, and the stress levels of the girl in front of me elevated themselves a little. The others were swiftly catching up.
"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.
"...'Oneesama' is Misaka Mikoto?" I asked.
"Yes, Misaka can confirm," she replied.
"...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.
Her expression didn't change. "It will not, says Misaka."
"It has to." I looked away- the convoy was coming, and inside, I could detect a cluster of brains- neurologically-underdeveloped. "...Oh. They- they don't have personalities yet, do they?" I asked the girl. "There's nobody there to save."
"None of us have personalities, says Misaka, reiterating previous information," said the girl. The other girls stood around us, silent as ghosts.
Their neurologies were already starting to diverge. "You're wrong," I replied.
"I am not, says Misaka," she said.
Beyond us, the gentle rumble of vehicles at the roadside, and the white-noise whirring of industrial air conditioners in the labs nearby, were the only thing to break the silence of the night. "...There's nothing I can do to convince you to leave, is there?" I said.
"Usage of telepathic powers to alter our behaviour would be reverted by the network administrator upon detection, and would be responded to with hostile force," she told me.
So trying to get them to safety now would just end with me getting shot.
But… an administrator?
…If I could find whoever that was, stop them from changing things back…
Maybe I could…
"...I hope to see you again, then," I told them. "Until next time."
"...Goodbye," she said, instead of returning my sentiments.
I tried not to think about what that meant for her.
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.
I got back into the dorms, well after curfew, though nobody noticed.
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.
SV5195R
C-Weapon
- Location
- Russian Federation
And so the adventure begins in the earnest, even as Shokuhou's hard-won (pretense of) normal life ends.
That said...
That said...
Oh boy, does this line make so much sense in the proper context (provided later in the story).
- Location
- Gainful Employment
- Pronouns
- He/They
The dumbest thing I've ever seen Railgun say in any fanfic, though as people pointed out over in the SB thread, her failure to correctly parse what MiSaki had said was caused by just how strongly she's holding on to the exact rationalization she is telling MiSaki.
SV5195R
C-Weapon
- Location
- Russian Federation
Too bad for Railgun that she unwittingly stomped on MisaSI's Dolly-related trauma button hard.
It's also rather telling that, going by this exchange, she either considered Shokuhou a friend already or thought that Shokuhou considered her a friend.
Oh well, she'll get another chance later.
Last edited:
- Location
- England. Tea and scones, wot wot!
there is an extra chapter in this thread after your message was posted, so naturally, there are still 39 more chapters on SB to go
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Math is so beautiful, isn't it?
SV5195R
C-Weapon
- Location
- Russian Federation
...
Sir, you work terrifyingly fast.
It seems that the SV readerbase will be catching up to SB for a long time.
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
Chapter 10 is absolutely up there as one of the best ones across ACMI so far - it just does so much to advance the narrative, and its reverberations are still relevant in the story even now.
It's the moment that Misaki got pushed out of the passive acceptance that maybe she'd done enough, that Clone Dolly was an outlier and that she could trust the City to self-regulate now that she'd done her part.
Instead, she learned that the city had no morals whatsoever, reunited with Michan, learned that the rot went all the way to the top, and decided to do something about it herself.
It's the moment that Misaki got pushed out of the passive acceptance that maybe she'd done enough, that Clone Dolly was an outlier and that she could trust the City to self-regulate now that she'd done her part.
Instead, she learned that the city had no morals whatsoever, reunited with Michan, learned that the rot went all the way to the top, and decided to do something about it herself.
FailLord
2050 lb bombs?
- Location
- very high up
And then the floor fell out from under her.
The bullying commences!
Meltdowner has an amazing power. The thermal and electromagnetic weirdness she can call up by obstinately refusing to let electrons do their normal jobs is very interesting and very dangerous.
Meltdowner is also... well, that's the thing. That's about all there is to her. She's just scientifically interesting and highly lethal. She's got scientific uniqueness for now, but when you get right down to it lots of strong espers have super murder powers. She's not directly leveraging the esoteric nature of her personal reality for any task more complex than mob politics and advanced thuggery.
Having the best beam weapon in the city is impressive but she's got stiff competition to look impressive when stacked up against Accelerator, Shokuhou, or Misaka.
And thus the bullying. Meltdowner is very very dangerous, but she doesn't have an answer to Shokuhou right now.
Hm. Maybe the Academy City ethics board was too busy stopping 'chop up clones for organ harvesting schemes' to review this one?
And thus Meltdowner the 'cleaner's gets to live another day. One girl saved from vivisection today keeps the telepath away, apparently. Of course, Meltdowner might explode from frustration if she ever finds out Shokuhou's reasoning.
The bullying continues. If you dont have a solution to Mental Out, you keep losing over and over again until you get one.
A little more styling on them for the road. For a mercy, Misaki didnt bring a makeup kit, and wouldnt have the appropriate clown makeup to use here even if necessary. Plus having Meltdowner find out about this might end... explosively.
Oh, hey, Railgun! She's been off being a protagonist on her lonesome for a bit. Wonder how that's going for her?
Hm. Seems it was traumatic. Good news, Shokuhou is here to weigh in with her own trauma!
Which she is adding to with each passing moment, apparently.
Our daily reminder that on top of the brain stuff, Shokuhou Misaki also has silly levels of control over fluids. Low overall kinesis rating, sure, but she's got enough oomph and enough precision that she can do this.
Shokuhou's ethics and caution are her biggest limitations when it comes to slaughtering her enemies. She used this to unelectrocute Frenda, but this is a power that can be used for a lot less nice things.
Shokuhou: So I opened up my past and faced my trauma to try to put us on the same page for the purposes of teaming up to defeat evil.
Misaka: Okay, when you put it that way it sounds bad, but think of it from my perspective for a moment...
Misaka: ...okay, that may have come out wrong... I may be working through some of my own trauma here in an unhealthy way.
Shokuhou: The dumb part of fandom on the internet informs me that an emotional teenage girl making a stupid mistake is not to be easily forgiven.
Misaka: and you know better than to listen?
Shokuhou: and since I just saw you can detect incoming electron beams, let me escalate straight to a level of violence that conveys my emotional state. Try not to die.
Oh, how nice. Canon Misaka would never have interpreted that as Shokuhou referring to her as a friend. She also wouldn't have cared a huge amount about Shokuhou's trauma.
Shame that Misaka is not winning very many friendship points right now.
Shokuhou: You know, I bet if I just improve in ways the Power Developmemt Curriculum doesn't help, I can continually upgrade my power until I hit a new magnitude of awesomeness.
Level 6 Shift: Hey, what if we just give up on being ethical and innovative scientists and teachers and instead do death matches? Oh great perfect computer god in the sky, will enough deathmatches grant us our wish? Oh, only 20,000 dead teenage girls to probably create a god of science that at best disdains us? Let's do it!
Seen here: Mental Out casually destroying the lives of everyone in range. The only hard part is hitting the right balance between plausible deniability and deadly threat.
Our daily reminder that while ruling the city as its telepathic overlord would almost definitely fail, the 10% chance of it actually working hangs over the city like a shroud. The science exists, ready to go whenever.
Shokuhou said, nailing 95 theses to the side if the Windowless Building.
The Misaka Sisters talk funny, but they are not robots and can make their own decisions. Sometimes. Loopholes exist.
The Sisters are not really subtle or, unless you want to believe them, convincing when they spout their prerecorded arguments that they are actually meat robots. But having the other side of the conversation be a telepath makes it crystal clear when they lie.
Misaka Network: We have electric field defenses. This is fine. This is a normal level of stress.
Shokuhou, making casual probes: Your daily reminder that it is only the threat of orbital cannons, sniper squads and killer robots that keep me from breaking in whenever I want.
[QUO=Eotyrannus, post: 29494454, member: 17599"]
None of us have personalities, says Misaka, reiterating previous information," said the girl. The other girls stood around us, silent as ghosts.
Their neurologies were already starting to diverge. "You're wrong," I replied.
"I am not, says Misaka," she said.
[/QUOTE]
The telepathy makes their canned protestations infuriating rather than believable.
Mind controlling the right person is a proven tactic, after all.
And yet another major canon divergence swiftly approaches!
Chapter 11
- Location
- England. Tea and scones, wot wot!
I ended up only briefly informing Michan as to what was going on. That the cloning project had been resumed, and that they were being experimented on. She agreed to meet me in the morning.
I didn't get much sleep.
Dawn came soon enough. So did the time for the meeting; I was really not looking forwards to it, but... well. I had to do this.
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."
The meet-up point wasn't anywhere fancy; it was just a fast food restaurant, as Michan was perpetually skint. Busy places like this were the best place for me to talk privately. The background chatter would make it hard to hear what we were saying from a distance, and the people up close wouldn't even notice that they couldn't understand what we were saying. Using Mental Out to muffle voices after they'd been heard was a technique I'd used before- I used it frequently enough- but I made sure to expand the range beyond what I'd normally use as I entered the room, just in case, linking it to my hearing so it would take Hokaze and Michan into account as well.
Only one of the people here was familiar. She was someone I hadn't seen in a while. Her hair was naturally a deep, rich purple, halfway in shade between Hokaze's pale violet and a brunette, done up with pink ribbons in two long pony-tails on either side of her head. She was a bit shorter than I was, slightly more so than Hokaze, and she wore the black blazer and white skirt that marked her as being from one of the city's other schools. The skin below her eyes was red and blotchy; she looked distracted.
But those same eyes brightened immediately when they noticed my approach.
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.
…Well. No point beating around the bush. "...Two days ago," I began, "I decided to take advantage of the recent saboutages on the S-Processor research group to see if there was anything suspicious going on. Usually, research buildings are protected by electromagnetic barriers- they interfere with my powers, so I can't break past them without making it too obvious- but the fact the break-ins were disabling the security systems meant that wasn't the case, briefly. And someone being that hostile is reason enough to think there's something concerning happening."
"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."
"...I'll do my best as well to help you with whatever this is as well," Hokaze agreed with a determined expression. "Tell us what they've been doing, and we'll do our best to aid you, my Queen."
My heart cracked a little, and I gave them a weak smile. "...Guess there really isn't anything to worry about, huh?" I said, taking a moment to rally myself. "Well. Given there were only two S-Processor facilities left, I thought my best shot was to check the area between them, to see which was most likely to go down while I was still there. So I prepared a disguise, set myself up in a hotel room near the larger of the facilities, and waited. I was expecting, I dunno, extra security from Anti-Skill or something… But apparently, they called in a hit squad to deal with the saboteur instead."
"A hit squad?" asked Michan, alarmed. "I knew they did that, but…"
"It was a group called ITEM- all espers," I told them. "Youngest was a preteen. Oldest was Meltdowner."
Hokaze's breath hitched. "Meltdowner? She's… an assassin?"
"Not subtle enough to be called 'assassin'," I said, "but yes. She didn't have anything to stop Mental Out like Railgun has; there were a few tricks up her sleeve, but I managed to disarm her before she noticed what was wrong. Unfortunately, I could only control two of ITEM; there's four girls in the team, and two of the others had cooped themselves up in the two buildings they'd been paid to watch. So I needed to wait for the saboteur to walk right into one of them before I knew which building they were hitting- by the time I got there, they'd been fighting for a while."
"I heard the Firestarter was a pacifist," said Michan. Firestarter? I checked her mind- Michan had snuck into a few messaging lists for people who wanted to pick a fight with the powers-that-be, and the saboteur had apparently earned herself something of a reputation, as well as an appropriate nickname. "But they were able to fight off a hitman?"
"Hitwoman," I corrected. "Hitgirl, actually… But yeah. I didn't believe who it was at first. 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.
"...Probably not," I admitted. "I think she's just… mad. Like, angry, not crazy. But… we should stay out of her way. She made that clear enough. Let's just hope she just stays out of ours, too."
"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.
"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 solve. First…"
I took a moment to consider- I needed to know if there was anything missing before I spoke. The other two waited.
"First, and most importantly, there's Accelerator," I said at last. "Whatever we do, we either need to convince him to go along with it, or beat him in a fight. And I don't think the first is an option. I've spoken him before- his dream is to become a Level 6, so by trying to stop this, we're putting ourselves at direct odds with what he wants. I don't know how strong he is in a fight- he's immune to Mental Out, so I can't check, or beat him that way, either. Without Mental Out, though, any other Level 5 I've met would still be a fight for our lives, and that's with Hokaze-" I gestured with my head- "-being an Electromaster to counter Meltdowner or Railgun. Whatever we do… we have to have an answer for him."
"...How strong would we have to be to win?" asked Hokaze.
"I don't know," I admitted. "If his field is off when he's asleep, like with Railgun, we might be able to force him to back down that way. But if that's not the case, we'd be idiots if we didn't make a plan for him coming knocking… There's two potential sources of information that I know of. One, the youngest member of ITEM was part of an experiment that tried to copy his powers. She has a similar power- she has a passive, protective air field around her, and can control wind movements outside of it, rather than using vectors- so we can try to reverse-engineer his original maths from that."
"Right," said Michan. "If we know how his power works, we can try and find a way to beat him up."
"Just so," I agreed. "But even if we do that… The second issue is the sisters themselves. They've tried and failed to kill him, too many times, but they still remember how their sisters tried. They're too jaded to try anything else. I met one of the sisters last night… I couldn't convince her she was even a person, and they told me they'll become hostile if they notice me messing with their heads too much. But they have an administrator of some kind- maybe controlling them, maybe just monitoring them. Whoever they are, if we take over their control of the network, we can get all the information we need to help them. I'd say it'd let us mind-control them to safety while we deal with everything else, but…" I sighed. "There's far too many of them for me to do it without them noticing, even if they didn't have a mental shield from Railgun's power. And being some sort of 'superior'... It doesn't sit right with me."
"...So we have to save them the hard way," said Michan. "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?"
I smiled weakly. "Right."
"I'd certainly be delighted to help," agreed Hokaze.
I took a breath. "The third issue," I said, "is the obvious one- whoever's running these experiments doesn't think of them as human, so they won't let us help the sisters unless we can do something to stop them. We… I can't just sit around and wait for news to come to me, not any more," I told them. "So we have to try and cut it off at the source somehow. Make sure we can find these things in advance, next time, and figure out who's doing it right now. I only found rumours as to who was commissioning all this, yesterday, when I was reading the minds of the researchers. If we can't figure out who's commissioning this, or at least know enough to keep them quiet, then I'd expect that the sisters would just get sold off to another project… or worse."
The thought of that- the sisters being 'liquidated', or 'processed', or whatever clean euphemism they'd use- left us all silent. Michan wiped her eyes, and sniffled again.
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…"
__________
About ten hours later, we'd somehow convinced ourselves to break into one of Academy City's major prisons.
It was called the Special Criminal Adult Correctional Facility. It wasn't the largest, by any means- that title went to the Reformatory, the juvenile prison, given the massively skewed demographics. The reason we were focusing on it was entirely different- after all, we weren't looking for a juvenile criminal, were we? It wouldn't be too easy. Much like everywhere else of importance, it had psychic interference fields around it, of course, and there were a lot of guards that weren't known for their gentleness and mercy. While there weren't many adult criminals in Academy City, they were certainly harsh on those people they did arrest, and this was the place they were kept.
The prisons were located in School District 10. This sector was generally considered to be the most unpleasant one in the city; for some reason, Academy City had decided to centralise everything with social stigma over here, such as graveyards, nuclear plants (including the one that AIM Burst had attacked in its brief rampage), and- most importantly for us- prisons. On top of all that, it was run down as all hell, that being a big factor in why we'd attacked here, instead of performing our information-hunt in the core of Anti-Skill in School District 1; after all, it was a lot easier to disguise ourselves as delinquents in a run-down district than as businesswomen or clerks in the city's shiny administrative heartlands.
We were all wearing hoodies of one kind or another; Michan and Hokaze were both wearing shorts, though I had to wear baggy joggers on the grounds of my legs being more than a little recognisable. It would've been pretty dumb to get recognised because I kept a massive scar plainly-visible.
Despite having prepared for attacks like the ones we were planning, the correctional facility was rather poorly-defended compared to a similarly-sized research complex. Oh, sure, it had armed guards, a psychic barrier on the building itself, and a noticeable perimeter, but they weren't using the usual, multi-layered defences against me. That was quite possibly because they never expected me to show up around here; my usual haunts were around the research facilities they guarded more fiercely, and I'd never shown any inclination towards criminal activity, so there just wasn't anything around here to draw my attention. They'd normally be right. But we had two different goals around here, and their lack of preparedness made those goals much easier to achieve.
The facility had armed guards patrolling at the edges of their perimeter, but those guards didn't have any personal psychic defences. All we really needed to do to breach their most important line of defence- their informational security- was get someone to stray far enough for a mind-reading, and then let them get back to their posts once the information was in our hands.
We needed bait- so Michan would be first up. Hokaze would probably have volunteered if we didn't have her, as Rampage Dress made her the closest thing you could get to bulletproof, but we all preferred the plan where Hokaze could minimise how many bullets she was tanking.
We were currently huddled in an alleyway together, staring over her shoulder at an old laptop. While Michan had once only been able to control certain metamaterials, specifically liquids made primarily of osmium or iridium nanoparticles- materials like that commonly being called 'liquid metal'- the lack of access to Clone Dolly's funds had forced her to try and vary her approach using less hyper-specific materials. She'd done that successfully with one readily-available mixture in particular.
We'd liberated a car from somebody deserving, just to carry all of the equipment she needed. We'd collected a backpack full of gadgets from her apartment, as well as various plastic beads and toylike decorations; then we'd had to drive off to find one of Michan's stashes beside a small lake, where she'd stored the ingredients to make one of the dolls she could animate using Liquid Shadow, her power.
"Miss Kouzaku, are you sure you can get it away in time?" asked Hokaze. Her disguise made her look exactly like an ojou-sama trying to pretend to be a delinquent, despite our best efforts, though for once her hair was frizzy and ragged instead of in perfect curls. Her main concern right this second was ensuring that the mission didn't get messed up because she found getting shot to be somewhat painful (as specialised System Scan tests had proven). She hedged, "It seems rather slow…"
"Oh, don't you worry Junko," she replied comfortingly, and winked. "My dolls are plenty fast when they need to be, no matter how blobby they look- I'm just saving my energy right now!"
To be specific, Michan's 'doll' was a hulking, man-sized mass of oobleck- oobleck being a simple putty-like admixture, made entirely out of water and cornstarch (though she tended to add some pink, purple or black dyes, for colour). While the dolls weren't as useful to Liquid Shadow's idiosyncrasies as the flowing masses of hyper-dense liquid metal she'd once controlled, its unusual ability to solidify under external stresses gave it the necessary resistance for Michan's ability to get a grip on it anyway. The main downside of this was that it made the substance much harder to work with in general, as it resisted flowing and flexing unless handled gracefully; she'd had plenty of practice with that, though. And while it wasn't exactly 'solid', its ability to both resist force and easily be collected afterwards made it an extremely versatile material to make use of.
She decorated the cornstarch masses she made with beads and whatnot for two reasons- to conceal the cameras and auditory equipment she needed to run the things without direct lines of sight, and to make it resemble one of those claymation models that used to be common in kids' shows. Her power's range was effectively limitless, but her material restrictions meant her power couldn't actually grasp any details outside of the doll at extreme ranges. The cameras, then, were vital for ensuring that she could still use the doll at those extreme distances; with satellite internet and a means of comprehending where the doll was (such as by maintaining control as it travelled away, then remembering where it last stopped moving), she'd once been able to control a similar metal doll from an Academy City facility across the sea, in Russia.
The doll approached the corner of an alleyway, wearing a vague plastic smile. Then she metaphorically pulled up its pants, having it take a more human shape than its previous vague anthropoidal blob. If she'd been using liquid metal, she could've used structural iridescence to make a fairly good approximation of the correct colour, too- it was a trick she'd learned for Dolly, with her little metal dolphins-in-a-jar trick, after I'd informed the two of them that one type of dolphin had a yellow stripe on its flank.
Then it stepped forwards into the edge of the light, and did its duty as a distraction- it stepped back when one of the guards looked directly at it. Seeing a pale human figure skulking around a corner, he moved to investigate. A few tens of metres was enough to achieve our intended goal; he didn't have any body-mounted cameras that Mental Out would be unable to mess with, so as he turned the corner in pursuit, the doll was able to slip away without being spotted. That was all I needed to start rummaging around for the information we'd need for step one of the plan. He didn't know everything, but then again, he didn't have to.
The man went back to his circuits, while Michan opened up a manhole cover and hopped down it- nearby, the oobleck doll squirmed its way down a similar manhole shortly thereafter. Both of them being down there meant that she could much more effectively keep a signal while she looked for the target I'd beamed into her head.
She found her target soon enough. It was a small outpost within the perimeter, one of eight, a little security building with its own backup power generator. Michan slunk her doll up through a gutter on one corner of the building, and crept it like a slime mould through the corner of an open window; the single guard inside, busy idly monitoring screens, didn't notice the doll until it was too late. We'd previously agreed to go non-lethal unless one of our lives were in danger, since none of us actually had anything against the people here (and because none of us were exactly keen on murder), but that was little comfort for the guard when he was abruptly attacked by an organless, smiling amalgam straight from a child's nightmare.
He was slammed into the monitors by the doll's hydrostatically-propelled pseudopod, before being thrown to the floor and knocked out with another powerful blow. The fight- if it could be called that- was over in seconds. It was probably horrifying from an external perspective, even if you were looking at the puppeteer, rather than the doll she controlled. Externally, Michan had a slightly psychotic grin on her face the whole time- internally, she was going 'boom, pow, yataaa!' every time she hit something.
Then the mass of saturated cornstarch lumbered its way through the two or three rooms present, until Michan's cameras spotted the one we were looking for- containing the psychic barrier generator. That was the third thing we had the doll tear apart; no use in making them think it was our priority, after all. The screens and local backup generator were thus the first targets, and with its work done, the putty quickly oozed its way back to the sewers. The hole in their defences let me start using Mental Out to aid its escape.
By the time we'd repeated it with two more nearby stations, the whole prison was on high alert- but by then, our work was done. We didn't need to prove that there weren't any psychics, we just needed to put enough doubt for plausible deniability that the psychic was Mental Out, and with enough telepathic coverage having gone out to gather information and decide on the next phase on our approach, this much damage was all that was needed.
Michan emerged from the sewers with a grin, having stationed her doll up ahead- she'd reconnect to the doll when she was closer and her gizmos were back in range. "Ready?" she asked me and Hokaze.
I was currently being held in a bridal-carry by Hokaze, looking fairly ridiculous given that I was slightly larger than she was, in just about every dimension. After all, I was the only person here who couldn't achieve superhuman speeds with their powers.
"Always," I deadpanned.
"Then let's go!" she responded.
We crept to the edges of the walls waited for a gap in their lines of sight to open up- or rather, I made a gap in their lines of sight, given Mental Out's presence. After that, all we had to do was close the distance.
Hokaze pushed off, leaping the perimeter walls with ease, the force of it turning my stomach- she broke into a sprint enhanced by super-strength a moment later. Michan followed at similar speeds, having packed plastic bags full of oobleck in strategic locations within her clothes, as well as keeping some of the material underfoot to help with her balance. True, Michan may have specialised in piloting her dolls at a distance, but any form of reasonably-powerful psychokinesis made for very fast forms of improvised transport when the need arose.
We'd already mapped out the internal layout by consulting the brains of the guards, so we had an excellent idea of where we needed to be going. An oobleck rope tethered itself to the top of the building, and the three of us held on tight as it pulled us the rest of the way up, made solid by psychokinetic pressure so we could keep our grips.
From the rooftop, well… unless you were expecting an artillery bombardment, rooftops didn't need to be quite as tough as walls- we could break into the base wherever we liked from up here.This was just an ordinary prison for ordinary people, rather than a military camp or a prison designed to hold espers, after all. Still, the roof was steep and slick, coated in that type of paint which flaked rather than giving you any sort of grip, and so Michan had to use her power to make a ledge for us to travel on. Our goal was the central nexus of a number of long sub-buildings within the prison, as it was the control centre of the whole facility, and it would have all the information we needed.
Michan brought us to a halt, spreading out a layer of putty beneath us. She wouldn't be the one breaking the roof. Hokaze walked forwards and knelt, coming to a halt at the edge of the material, and flexed her knuckles one by one. Then- with a sound like thunder- she drove her fist into the roof at impossible speed, the material shattering like glass beneath her.
We fell into the building, the oobleck laid out beneath us cushioning our fall. With a crackle from the electrical interference, I used Mental Out to knock out the single, very startled guard who was now in a room with us. He and his gun clattered to the floor, and the automated alarms began to blare- probably a response to the noise of our entrance, or from a security camera witnessing our dramatic entrance, rather than detecting anything that had happened to the guard.
Now we were on a time limit- we had to reach our destination before the men manning the station left it. Fortunately, speedrunning was much easier when walls were an effective non-issue. "Time to get serious," quipped Michan, shifting the oobleck doll into a broad, thick form to keep the two of us protected from debris, as Hokaze readied her fists.
With a roar, she punched down the nearest door, revealing a stairway behind it- and a gun-wielding guard that I'd already detected. He fired instinctively, but the bullets were useless as she stepped through, Rampage Dress healing her skin before bruises could even start to form. She lunged at him. A simple one-handed grab was enough to break the gun in his hand, before she batted the man in the face with what was still intact of it, letting him slump to the floor.
"Let's keep moving," Hokaze said serenely, expression stern, and she vaulted the railing. She landed with a resounding crash three floors down- Michan made a platform for us to follow her route, albeit much more sedately. We could already hear the sounds of her breaking down more walls, having memorised the route we needed to take in advance, and we trailed along behind her.
The last wall she punched down brought us into a short corridor, with carpet flooring. This time, Hokaze refrained from punching down the final wall between us and our destination; instead, Michan brought the oobleck doll forwards, having it fill the doorframe. Then she turned the handle and pushed. "Knock, knock!" she yelled- somewhat anticlimactically, as there were but a few extremely worried technicians in here with nothing but peashooters, and their brains were as unprotected as anyone else's.
I knocked them out easily, and started rifling through their memories as we turned and shut the door. Hokaze was putting some gloves on, and I said with a pointed gesture towards one of the screens, "Could you log into that computer over there, please? The password is '098765 lol exclamation mark', no spaces."
"Of course," she replied, and I could hear the unspoken 'my Queen' at the end of the sentence.
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.
With that basic barrier set up, I headed to the computer- I gave Hokaze a thumbs-up, which made her smile- and started compiling the information I could find.
Our first goal was simple- get access to the police databases, and collect some information on how they were finding any secret societies or websites or anything. In a classic design failure, the desire to interconnect data and facilities in Academy City made it much easier than it should've been to get this; I took my notes, looked over some case studies of successful criminal networks I could either refer to or use to look up the real deal later, ignored the sound of Michan's oobleck doll clobbering reinforcements in the corridor outside, and filed it all away in a tidy corner of my brain.
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."
The decision had been fairly simple once Hokaze pointed it out. If we wanted a source of information, both with something that might help us beat Accelerator in a fight, and in getting a bead on the worst excesses of Academy City, then the inventor of Level Upper- and a victim of those excesses- would be the perfect target. I wiped my tracks from the database as best I could, then had Hokaze punch out the computer for good measure.
By this point, the prison's forces had regrouped, and were about to make a push against us. They would be sorely disappointed, as we had no intentions in sticking around for the counterassault. Hokaze, in her best impression of the Koolaid Man, bust through the nearest wall- and the next few walls, as well, with the last one giving us an exit one floor above ground level. She picked me up in her arms again, and the three of us jumped down- then we made a break for it.
Between Mental Out, a moving fortress of putty, and the speed at which the three of us could move, there really wasn't anything they could do to stop us. As soon as we leapt the perimeter, we were pretty much home-free.
There was no point in tempting fate by sticking around. Anti-Skill proper would be getting here as soon as they could. We collected our stuff, drove the stolen car away from the scene of the crime, changed our clothes in the back, and dumped the vehicle somewhere for the police to return to its owner (even if said owner had indeed been an ass). Then we simply headed onto the bus for our last destination of the night.
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.
__________
A few minutes later, we were sat down over a cup of tea. Kiyama looked at the three of us, stirring a cup of black tea, as she waited for us to get on with it. Though we'd expressed that yes, she did have a choice, she hadn't exactly been convinced. But she'd hear us out. "What do you want me to do?" the Doctor asked tiredly.
"Well… there's two things we need to do," I told her. "Dismantle a project called the Level 6 Shift, and beat Accelerator in a fight if he tries to stop us. I know that you were involved in a project that… went dark, before you started work on Level Upper. And if we do have to fight Accelerator, then being able to use Multi-Skill or Level Upper would help put us on even footing… Even without AIM Burst and its ten-thousand espers, we know how badly things can go wrong if the AIM fields go out of control."
"We were all a part of a project called Clone Dolly," said Hokaze, "if you've heard of it. I was a part of Clone Dolly: Ideal. My powers were part of what destroyed that project- it made the scientist who was taken over by the resonant powers impossible to stop…" She swallowed, and unclenched her fists. "...I would very much like to avoid risking that with an even stronger power."
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."
"...Exactly," agreed Michan. "There's evil people in Academy City, and they're all really good at hiding from Misaki's powers- they have electrical generators all of the place to stop her. We need somewhere to start if we want to save Dolly's sisters."
"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.
…We needed to keep talking if we wanted to stop this. So I kept talking. "As far as we've figured out," I told her, "we'll need to keep the people running the experiment from selling off or killing the sisters once it's over, and we need to stop the experiment itself. Having as many leads as we can will help with that. And if we stop the experiment- well, Accelerator really wants to be a Level 6, so whatever we do, we'll have to stop him."
"...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. "So go see your friend. Level Upper didn't need much more than synchronised brainwaves, which a telepath like you would be able to recreate. I have some electroencephalograms I can use to help, since the Board encourages working in your free time. I'll need to set up the devices for your friends if I want to tell you whether you can use Multi-Skill safely or not."
Even if she didn't think we could stop it… "...Thank you," I said anyway, and followed Hokaze and Michan upstairs.
Michan was sobbing her eyes out in the bathroom.
Hokaze, meanwhile, was awkwardly crouched next to her, rubbing her back, eyes downcast. I didn't say anything.
I just sat down next to them and gave her a hug, which she returned desperately. That was enough to make the tears contagious, and gave Hokaze the motivation to just join the hug herself.
"...I-I didn't know it was that many," said Michan eventually, lip trembling. "How do we even help that many people?"
"...W-we do our best," I replied simply. I hated when my throat got tight like this.
We headed back downstairs, and after looking over the absolute state we'd all gotten ourselves into (me and Michan more so than Hokaze), she sighed.
"Miss violet-hair," she said, gesturing to a massage chair with a boxy medical device next to it. "Would you mind sitting yourself down here?"
The testing was fairly simple. And it didn't require a single vivisection, murder, or hospitalisation in the process.
First, she got a baseline for each of our brain waves; next, she had me tap into her knowledge on the subject matter, and worked on getting me to understand how to read and interpret them with Mental Out rather than via the electroencephalogram. From there, it was a fairly simple matter- basically, copying the equations she'd used for Level Upper for brainwaves other than her own.
If I'd tried to just mimic the original Level Upper, all it would have done would be connecting my brain back to her. She generated a tiny candle-flame with her finger to demonstrate it. Such a flame would be impossible for any normal adult, since trying to turn a fully-developed brain into an esper would mostly just cause brain damage. "Level Upper has mostly been suppressed, but a few idiots are still using it," she explained. "I have to keep helping them track them down… it's very irritating. When the AIM Burst broke free, it only disconnected that iteration of the network from me- it didn't disconnect Level Upper as a concept at all. It's why they're still guarding me even when I'm on bail."
With the information on Mental Out's interactions with brainwaves collected, we just had to do the maths and model the stable states it could reproduce in notable circumstances. We ended up processing the data late into the evening. Normally, the calculations would've taken days- even on a home computer fit for science, as Doctor Kiyama had- but my processing power was enough to cut that number down to a few hours.
By that point of the test, all the other two could do was wait for the verdict. Hokaze had gone home, making sure that at least one of us was back for curfew. Michan was curled up on the couch watching late-night cartoons. There wasn't much she could do to help at that stage, other than cooking some of the ready-meals in Doctor Kiyama's freezer.
Eventually, though, she was finished. Michan and I sat down in front of her, and we called Hokaze, to put her on speaker so she could listen.
"...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?"
There wasn't much left to say. As much as Multi-Skill could help… it was worthless if we couldn't find a way to leverage it properly, without risking the lives of complete strangers- or friends.
…But it was all we had to go on, right now. There wasn't much left to say after that. It was better than nothing, and maybe it would be enough, but combining the powers of two Level 4s wouldn't help much if they couldn't break past the top-ranked Level 5's defences. And I was willing to guess it wouldn't be the case.
We walked back to the bus stop in silence. The sun had already gone down a long time ago- but I caught a familiar signature.
"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.
"...Hello, Misaka. This is Michan," I introduced. "Ah, Kouzaku Mitori. She's the other one of Dolly's friends."
Michan pulled away with a watery smile- her eyes were going to be very sore tomorrow. "Hi," she said quietly.
"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.
"Misaka will see you tomorrow, alongside any assistants you believe would be relevant, affirms Misaka, looking purposefully at Miss Kouzaku," she said, taking a moment to stare at Michan. Then she looked back to me. "Misaka must leave now."
"...It was nice to meet you," said Michan, with a little wave of her hand. "I hope we can be friends."
"...Misaka considers this a reasonable sentiment," she replied, her voice neutral. "The bus is coming."
With that, she walked wordlessly into the night.
I almost had to drag Michan onto the bus to make sure it didn't leave without us.
I didn't get much sleep.
Dawn came soon enough. So did the time for the meeting; I was really not looking forwards to it, but... well. I had to do this.
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."
The meet-up point wasn't anywhere fancy; it was just a fast food restaurant, as Michan was perpetually skint. Busy places like this were the best place for me to talk privately. The background chatter would make it hard to hear what we were saying from a distance, and the people up close wouldn't even notice that they couldn't understand what we were saying. Using Mental Out to muffle voices after they'd been heard was a technique I'd used before- I used it frequently enough- but I made sure to expand the range beyond what I'd normally use as I entered the room, just in case, linking it to my hearing so it would take Hokaze and Michan into account as well.
Only one of the people here was familiar. She was someone I hadn't seen in a while. Her hair was naturally a deep, rich purple, halfway in shade between Hokaze's pale violet and a brunette, done up with pink ribbons in two long pony-tails on either side of her head. She was a bit shorter than I was, slightly more so than Hokaze, and she wore the black blazer and white skirt that marked her as being from one of the city's other schools. The skin below her eyes was red and blotchy; she looked distracted.
But those same eyes brightened immediately when they noticed my approach.
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.
…Well. No point beating around the bush. "...Two days ago," I began, "I decided to take advantage of the recent saboutages on the S-Processor research group to see if there was anything suspicious going on. Usually, research buildings are protected by electromagnetic barriers- they interfere with my powers, so I can't break past them without making it too obvious- but the fact the break-ins were disabling the security systems meant that wasn't the case, briefly. And someone being that hostile is reason enough to think there's something concerning happening."
"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."
"...I'll do my best as well to help you with whatever this is as well," Hokaze agreed with a determined expression. "Tell us what they've been doing, and we'll do our best to aid you, my Queen."
My heart cracked a little, and I gave them a weak smile. "...Guess there really isn't anything to worry about, huh?" I said, taking a moment to rally myself. "Well. Given there were only two S-Processor facilities left, I thought my best shot was to check the area between them, to see which was most likely to go down while I was still there. So I prepared a disguise, set myself up in a hotel room near the larger of the facilities, and waited. I was expecting, I dunno, extra security from Anti-Skill or something… But apparently, they called in a hit squad to deal with the saboteur instead."
"A hit squad?" asked Michan, alarmed. "I knew they did that, but…"
"It was a group called ITEM- all espers," I told them. "Youngest was a preteen. Oldest was Meltdowner."
Hokaze's breath hitched. "Meltdowner? She's… an assassin?"
"Not subtle enough to be called 'assassin'," I said, "but yes. She didn't have anything to stop Mental Out like Railgun has; there were a few tricks up her sleeve, but I managed to disarm her before she noticed what was wrong. Unfortunately, I could only control two of ITEM; there's four girls in the team, and two of the others had cooped themselves up in the two buildings they'd been paid to watch. So I needed to wait for the saboteur to walk right into one of them before I knew which building they were hitting- by the time I got there, they'd been fighting for a while."
"I heard the Firestarter was a pacifist," said Michan. Firestarter? I checked her mind- Michan had snuck into a few messaging lists for people who wanted to pick a fight with the powers-that-be, and the saboteur had apparently earned herself something of a reputation, as well as an appropriate nickname. "But they were able to fight off a hitman?"
"Hitwoman," I corrected. "Hitgirl, actually… But yeah. I didn't believe who it was at first. 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.
"...Probably not," I admitted. "I think she's just… mad. Like, angry, not crazy. But… we should stay out of her way. She made that clear enough. Let's just hope she just stays out of ours, too."
"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.
"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 solve. First…"
I took a moment to consider- I needed to know if there was anything missing before I spoke. The other two waited.
"First, and most importantly, there's Accelerator," I said at last. "Whatever we do, we either need to convince him to go along with it, or beat him in a fight. And I don't think the first is an option. I've spoken him before- his dream is to become a Level 6, so by trying to stop this, we're putting ourselves at direct odds with what he wants. I don't know how strong he is in a fight- he's immune to Mental Out, so I can't check, or beat him that way, either. Without Mental Out, though, any other Level 5 I've met would still be a fight for our lives, and that's with Hokaze-" I gestured with my head- "-being an Electromaster to counter Meltdowner or Railgun. Whatever we do… we have to have an answer for him."
"...How strong would we have to be to win?" asked Hokaze.
"I don't know," I admitted. "If his field is off when he's asleep, like with Railgun, we might be able to force him to back down that way. But if that's not the case, we'd be idiots if we didn't make a plan for him coming knocking… There's two potential sources of information that I know of. One, the youngest member of ITEM was part of an experiment that tried to copy his powers. She has a similar power- she has a passive, protective air field around her, and can control wind movements outside of it, rather than using vectors- so we can try to reverse-engineer his original maths from that."
"Right," said Michan. "If we know how his power works, we can try and find a way to beat him up."
"Just so," I agreed. "But even if we do that… The second issue is the sisters themselves. They've tried and failed to kill him, too many times, but they still remember how their sisters tried. They're too jaded to try anything else. I met one of the sisters last night… I couldn't convince her she was even a person, and they told me they'll become hostile if they notice me messing with their heads too much. But they have an administrator of some kind- maybe controlling them, maybe just monitoring them. Whoever they are, if we take over their control of the network, we can get all the information we need to help them. I'd say it'd let us mind-control them to safety while we deal with everything else, but…" I sighed. "There's far too many of them for me to do it without them noticing, even if they didn't have a mental shield from Railgun's power. And being some sort of 'superior'... It doesn't sit right with me."
"...So we have to save them the hard way," said Michan. "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?"
I smiled weakly. "Right."
"I'd certainly be delighted to help," agreed Hokaze.
I took a breath. "The third issue," I said, "is the obvious one- whoever's running these experiments doesn't think of them as human, so they won't let us help the sisters unless we can do something to stop them. We… I can't just sit around and wait for news to come to me, not any more," I told them. "So we have to try and cut it off at the source somehow. Make sure we can find these things in advance, next time, and figure out who's doing it right now. I only found rumours as to who was commissioning all this, yesterday, when I was reading the minds of the researchers. If we can't figure out who's commissioning this, or at least know enough to keep them quiet, then I'd expect that the sisters would just get sold off to another project… or worse."
The thought of that- the sisters being 'liquidated', or 'processed', or whatever clean euphemism they'd use- left us all silent. Michan wiped her eyes, and sniffled again.
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…"
__________
About ten hours later, we'd somehow convinced ourselves to break into one of Academy City's major prisons.
It was called the Special Criminal Adult Correctional Facility. It wasn't the largest, by any means- that title went to the Reformatory, the juvenile prison, given the massively skewed demographics. The reason we were focusing on it was entirely different- after all, we weren't looking for a juvenile criminal, were we? It wouldn't be too easy. Much like everywhere else of importance, it had psychic interference fields around it, of course, and there were a lot of guards that weren't known for their gentleness and mercy. While there weren't many adult criminals in Academy City, they were certainly harsh on those people they did arrest, and this was the place they were kept.
The prisons were located in School District 10. This sector was generally considered to be the most unpleasant one in the city; for some reason, Academy City had decided to centralise everything with social stigma over here, such as graveyards, nuclear plants (including the one that AIM Burst had attacked in its brief rampage), and- most importantly for us- prisons. On top of all that, it was run down as all hell, that being a big factor in why we'd attacked here, instead of performing our information-hunt in the core of Anti-Skill in School District 1; after all, it was a lot easier to disguise ourselves as delinquents in a run-down district than as businesswomen or clerks in the city's shiny administrative heartlands.
We were all wearing hoodies of one kind or another; Michan and Hokaze were both wearing shorts, though I had to wear baggy joggers on the grounds of my legs being more than a little recognisable. It would've been pretty dumb to get recognised because I kept a massive scar plainly-visible.
Despite having prepared for attacks like the ones we were planning, the correctional facility was rather poorly-defended compared to a similarly-sized research complex. Oh, sure, it had armed guards, a psychic barrier on the building itself, and a noticeable perimeter, but they weren't using the usual, multi-layered defences against me. That was quite possibly because they never expected me to show up around here; my usual haunts were around the research facilities they guarded more fiercely, and I'd never shown any inclination towards criminal activity, so there just wasn't anything around here to draw my attention. They'd normally be right. But we had two different goals around here, and their lack of preparedness made those goals much easier to achieve.
The facility had armed guards patrolling at the edges of their perimeter, but those guards didn't have any personal psychic defences. All we really needed to do to breach their most important line of defence- their informational security- was get someone to stray far enough for a mind-reading, and then let them get back to their posts once the information was in our hands.
We needed bait- so Michan would be first up. Hokaze would probably have volunteered if we didn't have her, as Rampage Dress made her the closest thing you could get to bulletproof, but we all preferred the plan where Hokaze could minimise how many bullets she was tanking.
We were currently huddled in an alleyway together, staring over her shoulder at an old laptop. While Michan had once only been able to control certain metamaterials, specifically liquids made primarily of osmium or iridium nanoparticles- materials like that commonly being called 'liquid metal'- the lack of access to Clone Dolly's funds had forced her to try and vary her approach using less hyper-specific materials. She'd done that successfully with one readily-available mixture in particular.
We'd liberated a car from somebody deserving, just to carry all of the equipment she needed. We'd collected a backpack full of gadgets from her apartment, as well as various plastic beads and toylike decorations; then we'd had to drive off to find one of Michan's stashes beside a small lake, where she'd stored the ingredients to make one of the dolls she could animate using Liquid Shadow, her power.
"Miss Kouzaku, are you sure you can get it away in time?" asked Hokaze. Her disguise made her look exactly like an ojou-sama trying to pretend to be a delinquent, despite our best efforts, though for once her hair was frizzy and ragged instead of in perfect curls. Her main concern right this second was ensuring that the mission didn't get messed up because she found getting shot to be somewhat painful (as specialised System Scan tests had proven). She hedged, "It seems rather slow…"
"Oh, don't you worry Junko," she replied comfortingly, and winked. "My dolls are plenty fast when they need to be, no matter how blobby they look- I'm just saving my energy right now!"
To be specific, Michan's 'doll' was a hulking, man-sized mass of oobleck- oobleck being a simple putty-like admixture, made entirely out of water and cornstarch (though she tended to add some pink, purple or black dyes, for colour). While the dolls weren't as useful to Liquid Shadow's idiosyncrasies as the flowing masses of hyper-dense liquid metal she'd once controlled, its unusual ability to solidify under external stresses gave it the necessary resistance for Michan's ability to get a grip on it anyway. The main downside of this was that it made the substance much harder to work with in general, as it resisted flowing and flexing unless handled gracefully; she'd had plenty of practice with that, though. And while it wasn't exactly 'solid', its ability to both resist force and easily be collected afterwards made it an extremely versatile material to make use of.
She decorated the cornstarch masses she made with beads and whatnot for two reasons- to conceal the cameras and auditory equipment she needed to run the things without direct lines of sight, and to make it resemble one of those claymation models that used to be common in kids' shows. Her power's range was effectively limitless, but her material restrictions meant her power couldn't actually grasp any details outside of the doll at extreme ranges. The cameras, then, were vital for ensuring that she could still use the doll at those extreme distances; with satellite internet and a means of comprehending where the doll was (such as by maintaining control as it travelled away, then remembering where it last stopped moving), she'd once been able to control a similar metal doll from an Academy City facility across the sea, in Russia.
The doll approached the corner of an alleyway, wearing a vague plastic smile. Then she metaphorically pulled up its pants, having it take a more human shape than its previous vague anthropoidal blob. If she'd been using liquid metal, she could've used structural iridescence to make a fairly good approximation of the correct colour, too- it was a trick she'd learned for Dolly, with her little metal dolphins-in-a-jar trick, after I'd informed the two of them that one type of dolphin had a yellow stripe on its flank.
Then it stepped forwards into the edge of the light, and did its duty as a distraction- it stepped back when one of the guards looked directly at it. Seeing a pale human figure skulking around a corner, he moved to investigate. A few tens of metres was enough to achieve our intended goal; he didn't have any body-mounted cameras that Mental Out would be unable to mess with, so as he turned the corner in pursuit, the doll was able to slip away without being spotted. That was all I needed to start rummaging around for the information we'd need for step one of the plan. He didn't know everything, but then again, he didn't have to.
The man went back to his circuits, while Michan opened up a manhole cover and hopped down it- nearby, the oobleck doll squirmed its way down a similar manhole shortly thereafter. Both of them being down there meant that she could much more effectively keep a signal while she looked for the target I'd beamed into her head.
She found her target soon enough. It was a small outpost within the perimeter, one of eight, a little security building with its own backup power generator. Michan slunk her doll up through a gutter on one corner of the building, and crept it like a slime mould through the corner of an open window; the single guard inside, busy idly monitoring screens, didn't notice the doll until it was too late. We'd previously agreed to go non-lethal unless one of our lives were in danger, since none of us actually had anything against the people here (and because none of us were exactly keen on murder), but that was little comfort for the guard when he was abruptly attacked by an organless, smiling amalgam straight from a child's nightmare.
He was slammed into the monitors by the doll's hydrostatically-propelled pseudopod, before being thrown to the floor and knocked out with another powerful blow. The fight- if it could be called that- was over in seconds. It was probably horrifying from an external perspective, even if you were looking at the puppeteer, rather than the doll she controlled. Externally, Michan had a slightly psychotic grin on her face the whole time- internally, she was going 'boom, pow, yataaa!' every time she hit something.
Then the mass of saturated cornstarch lumbered its way through the two or three rooms present, until Michan's cameras spotted the one we were looking for- containing the psychic barrier generator. That was the third thing we had the doll tear apart; no use in making them think it was our priority, after all. The screens and local backup generator were thus the first targets, and with its work done, the putty quickly oozed its way back to the sewers. The hole in their defences let me start using Mental Out to aid its escape.
By the time we'd repeated it with two more nearby stations, the whole prison was on high alert- but by then, our work was done. We didn't need to prove that there weren't any psychics, we just needed to put enough doubt for plausible deniability that the psychic was Mental Out, and with enough telepathic coverage having gone out to gather information and decide on the next phase on our approach, this much damage was all that was needed.
Michan emerged from the sewers with a grin, having stationed her doll up ahead- she'd reconnect to the doll when she was closer and her gizmos were back in range. "Ready?" she asked me and Hokaze.
I was currently being held in a bridal-carry by Hokaze, looking fairly ridiculous given that I was slightly larger than she was, in just about every dimension. After all, I was the only person here who couldn't achieve superhuman speeds with their powers.
"Always," I deadpanned.
"Then let's go!" she responded.
We crept to the edges of the walls waited for a gap in their lines of sight to open up- or rather, I made a gap in their lines of sight, given Mental Out's presence. After that, all we had to do was close the distance.
Hokaze pushed off, leaping the perimeter walls with ease, the force of it turning my stomach- she broke into a sprint enhanced by super-strength a moment later. Michan followed at similar speeds, having packed plastic bags full of oobleck in strategic locations within her clothes, as well as keeping some of the material underfoot to help with her balance. True, Michan may have specialised in piloting her dolls at a distance, but any form of reasonably-powerful psychokinesis made for very fast forms of improvised transport when the need arose.
We'd already mapped out the internal layout by consulting the brains of the guards, so we had an excellent idea of where we needed to be going. An oobleck rope tethered itself to the top of the building, and the three of us held on tight as it pulled us the rest of the way up, made solid by psychokinetic pressure so we could keep our grips.
From the rooftop, well… unless you were expecting an artillery bombardment, rooftops didn't need to be quite as tough as walls- we could break into the base wherever we liked from up here.This was just an ordinary prison for ordinary people, rather than a military camp or a prison designed to hold espers, after all. Still, the roof was steep and slick, coated in that type of paint which flaked rather than giving you any sort of grip, and so Michan had to use her power to make a ledge for us to travel on. Our goal was the central nexus of a number of long sub-buildings within the prison, as it was the control centre of the whole facility, and it would have all the information we needed.
Michan brought us to a halt, spreading out a layer of putty beneath us. She wouldn't be the one breaking the roof. Hokaze walked forwards and knelt, coming to a halt at the edge of the material, and flexed her knuckles one by one. Then- with a sound like thunder- she drove her fist into the roof at impossible speed, the material shattering like glass beneath her.
We fell into the building, the oobleck laid out beneath us cushioning our fall. With a crackle from the electrical interference, I used Mental Out to knock out the single, very startled guard who was now in a room with us. He and his gun clattered to the floor, and the automated alarms began to blare- probably a response to the noise of our entrance, or from a security camera witnessing our dramatic entrance, rather than detecting anything that had happened to the guard.
Now we were on a time limit- we had to reach our destination before the men manning the station left it. Fortunately, speedrunning was much easier when walls were an effective non-issue. "Time to get serious," quipped Michan, shifting the oobleck doll into a broad, thick form to keep the two of us protected from debris, as Hokaze readied her fists.
With a roar, she punched down the nearest door, revealing a stairway behind it- and a gun-wielding guard that I'd already detected. He fired instinctively, but the bullets were useless as she stepped through, Rampage Dress healing her skin before bruises could even start to form. She lunged at him. A simple one-handed grab was enough to break the gun in his hand, before she batted the man in the face with what was still intact of it, letting him slump to the floor.
"Let's keep moving," Hokaze said serenely, expression stern, and she vaulted the railing. She landed with a resounding crash three floors down- Michan made a platform for us to follow her route, albeit much more sedately. We could already hear the sounds of her breaking down more walls, having memorised the route we needed to take in advance, and we trailed along behind her.
The last wall she punched down brought us into a short corridor, with carpet flooring. This time, Hokaze refrained from punching down the final wall between us and our destination; instead, Michan brought the oobleck doll forwards, having it fill the doorframe. Then she turned the handle and pushed. "Knock, knock!" she yelled- somewhat anticlimactically, as there were but a few extremely worried technicians in here with nothing but peashooters, and their brains were as unprotected as anyone else's.
I knocked them out easily, and started rifling through their memories as we turned and shut the door. Hokaze was putting some gloves on, and I said with a pointed gesture towards one of the screens, "Could you log into that computer over there, please? The password is '098765 lol exclamation mark', no spaces."
"Of course," she replied, and I could hear the unspoken 'my Queen' at the end of the sentence.
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.
With that basic barrier set up, I headed to the computer- I gave Hokaze a thumbs-up, which made her smile- and started compiling the information I could find.
Our first goal was simple- get access to the police databases, and collect some information on how they were finding any secret societies or websites or anything. In a classic design failure, the desire to interconnect data and facilities in Academy City made it much easier than it should've been to get this; I took my notes, looked over some case studies of successful criminal networks I could either refer to or use to look up the real deal later, ignored the sound of Michan's oobleck doll clobbering reinforcements in the corridor outside, and filed it all away in a tidy corner of my brain.
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."
The decision had been fairly simple once Hokaze pointed it out. If we wanted a source of information, both with something that might help us beat Accelerator in a fight, and in getting a bead on the worst excesses of Academy City, then the inventor of Level Upper- and a victim of those excesses- would be the perfect target. I wiped my tracks from the database as best I could, then had Hokaze punch out the computer for good measure.
By this point, the prison's forces had regrouped, and were about to make a push against us. They would be sorely disappointed, as we had no intentions in sticking around for the counterassault. Hokaze, in her best impression of the Koolaid Man, bust through the nearest wall- and the next few walls, as well, with the last one giving us an exit one floor above ground level. She picked me up in her arms again, and the three of us jumped down- then we made a break for it.
Between Mental Out, a moving fortress of putty, and the speed at which the three of us could move, there really wasn't anything they could do to stop us. As soon as we leapt the perimeter, we were pretty much home-free.
There was no point in tempting fate by sticking around. Anti-Skill proper would be getting here as soon as they could. We collected our stuff, drove the stolen car away from the scene of the crime, changed our clothes in the back, and dumped the vehicle somewhere for the police to return to its owner (even if said owner had indeed been an ass). Then we simply headed onto the bus for our last destination of the night.
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.
__________
A few minutes later, we were sat down over a cup of tea. Kiyama looked at the three of us, stirring a cup of black tea, as she waited for us to get on with it. Though we'd expressed that yes, she did have a choice, she hadn't exactly been convinced. But she'd hear us out. "What do you want me to do?" the Doctor asked tiredly.
"Well… there's two things we need to do," I told her. "Dismantle a project called the Level 6 Shift, and beat Accelerator in a fight if he tries to stop us. I know that you were involved in a project that… went dark, before you started work on Level Upper. And if we do have to fight Accelerator, then being able to use Multi-Skill or Level Upper would help put us on even footing… Even without AIM Burst and its ten-thousand espers, we know how badly things can go wrong if the AIM fields go out of control."
"We were all a part of a project called Clone Dolly," said Hokaze, "if you've heard of it. I was a part of Clone Dolly: Ideal. My powers were part of what destroyed that project- it made the scientist who was taken over by the resonant powers impossible to stop…" She swallowed, and unclenched her fists. "...I would very much like to avoid risking that with an even stronger power."
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."
"...Exactly," agreed Michan. "There's evil people in Academy City, and they're all really good at hiding from Misaki's powers- they have electrical generators all of the place to stop her. We need somewhere to start if we want to save Dolly's sisters."
"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.
…We needed to keep talking if we wanted to stop this. So I kept talking. "As far as we've figured out," I told her, "we'll need to keep the people running the experiment from selling off or killing the sisters once it's over, and we need to stop the experiment itself. Having as many leads as we can will help with that. And if we stop the experiment- well, Accelerator really wants to be a Level 6, so whatever we do, we'll have to stop him."
"...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. "So go see your friend. Level Upper didn't need much more than synchronised brainwaves, which a telepath like you would be able to recreate. I have some electroencephalograms I can use to help, since the Board encourages working in your free time. I'll need to set up the devices for your friends if I want to tell you whether you can use Multi-Skill safely or not."
Even if she didn't think we could stop it… "...Thank you," I said anyway, and followed Hokaze and Michan upstairs.
Michan was sobbing her eyes out in the bathroom.
Hokaze, meanwhile, was awkwardly crouched next to her, rubbing her back, eyes downcast. I didn't say anything.
I just sat down next to them and gave her a hug, which she returned desperately. That was enough to make the tears contagious, and gave Hokaze the motivation to just join the hug herself.
"...I-I didn't know it was that many," said Michan eventually, lip trembling. "How do we even help that many people?"
"...W-we do our best," I replied simply. I hated when my throat got tight like this.
We headed back downstairs, and after looking over the absolute state we'd all gotten ourselves into (me and Michan more so than Hokaze), she sighed.
"Miss violet-hair," she said, gesturing to a massage chair with a boxy medical device next to it. "Would you mind sitting yourself down here?"
The testing was fairly simple. And it didn't require a single vivisection, murder, or hospitalisation in the process.
First, she got a baseline for each of our brain waves; next, she had me tap into her knowledge on the subject matter, and worked on getting me to understand how to read and interpret them with Mental Out rather than via the electroencephalogram. From there, it was a fairly simple matter- basically, copying the equations she'd used for Level Upper for brainwaves other than her own.
If I'd tried to just mimic the original Level Upper, all it would have done would be connecting my brain back to her. She generated a tiny candle-flame with her finger to demonstrate it. Such a flame would be impossible for any normal adult, since trying to turn a fully-developed brain into an esper would mostly just cause brain damage. "Level Upper has mostly been suppressed, but a few idiots are still using it," she explained. "I have to keep helping them track them down… it's very irritating. When the AIM Burst broke free, it only disconnected that iteration of the network from me- it didn't disconnect Level Upper as a concept at all. It's why they're still guarding me even when I'm on bail."
With the information on Mental Out's interactions with brainwaves collected, we just had to do the maths and model the stable states it could reproduce in notable circumstances. We ended up processing the data late into the evening. Normally, the calculations would've taken days- even on a home computer fit for science, as Doctor Kiyama had- but my processing power was enough to cut that number down to a few hours.
By that point of the test, all the other two could do was wait for the verdict. Hokaze had gone home, making sure that at least one of us was back for curfew. Michan was curled up on the couch watching late-night cartoons. There wasn't much she could do to help at that stage, other than cooking some of the ready-meals in Doctor Kiyama's freezer.
Eventually, though, she was finished. Michan and I sat down in front of her, and we called Hokaze, to put her on speaker so she could listen.
"...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?"
There wasn't much left to say. As much as Multi-Skill could help… it was worthless if we couldn't find a way to leverage it properly, without risking the lives of complete strangers- or friends.
…But it was all we had to go on, right now. There wasn't much left to say after that. It was better than nothing, and maybe it would be enough, but combining the powers of two Level 4s wouldn't help much if they couldn't break past the top-ranked Level 5's defences. And I was willing to guess it wouldn't be the case.
We walked back to the bus stop in silence. The sun had already gone down a long time ago- but I caught a familiar signature.
"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.
"...Hello, Misaka. This is Michan," I introduced. "Ah, Kouzaku Mitori. She's the other one of Dolly's friends."
Michan pulled away with a watery smile- her eyes were going to be very sore tomorrow. "Hi," she said quietly.
"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.
"Misaka will see you tomorrow, alongside any assistants you believe would be relevant, affirms Misaka, looking purposefully at Miss Kouzaku," she said, taking a moment to stare at Michan. Then she looked back to me. "Misaka must leave now."
"...It was nice to meet you," said Michan, with a little wave of her hand. "I hope we can be friends."
"...Misaka considers this a reasonable sentiment," she replied, her voice neutral. "The bus is coming."
With that, she walked wordlessly into the night.
I almost had to drag Michan onto the bus to make sure it didn't leave without us.
SV5195R
C-Weapon
- Location
- Russian Federation
And so, here we see Misekai reunite with an old friend, to never be separated again, and take to the field once again.
Next time on ACMI: our heroines managing to get an inside look at the Level 6 Shift project and talk to a little girl while making preparations for an inevitable showdown.
Next time on ACMI: our heroines managing to get an inside look at the Level 6 Shift project and talk to a little girl while making preparations for an inevitable showdown.
- Location
- Santiago de Chile
Amateurs, they forgot to put uppercase letters. That should have been "098765Lol!".
- Location
- The Land of Many Bregrets
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Re-reading now this is on SV... this line really has gotten funnier and funnier as the story goes on, hasn't it?
- Location
- Gainful Employment
- Pronouns
- He/They
I mean, becoming the Immortal God Empress of Earth still isn't her goal, it's just something that she's probably going to achieve against her will after a few more decades of being herself
SV5195R
C-Weapon
- Location
- Russian Federation
I've got a feeling she'd probably still prefer the job of an immortal writer or an immortal zookeeper. The corcumstances are probably still going to push her in the direction of becoming an immortal (and eternally youthful) political leader.I mean, becoming the Immortal God Empress of Earth still isn't her goal, it's just something that she's probably going to achieve against her will after a few more decades of being herself
Still, no matter what lot in life she chooses, something tells me that Hokaze will always be by her side, especially since ShokuSI would be clearly quite willing to share the secret of eternal youth with her bestie, considering how much they matter to each other.
Last edited:
Chapter 12
- Location
- England. Tea and scones, wot wot!
The next morning, as promised, we found one of the sisters. It was the three of us again- me, Hokaze, and Michan, the latter of which we met outside our dorm rather than in another cafe. The sister herself was sitting at a cafe within the School Garden, staring blandly into space until we arrived. Something like a guitar case was holstered on her back. A little spark of static flickered from her head, a sign of Mental Out's influence, just to make sure that there weren't any plans to assassinate us the moment we walked through the administrator's door or something.
She received a hug from Michan, accepting it (or at least not denying it) stoically, before standing up the moment she was released.
"Good morning, says Misaka tiredly, silently blaming the administrator for not organising a time at which to meet the individuals from the night prior," she said. "Misaka understands that you are consultant Shokuhou Misaki and her assistants, Kouzaku 'Michan' Mitori and…? she says, trailing off as she implicitly requests the name of the person with the weird hair."
For a moment, Hokaze wasn't quite sure whether she should point out the oxymoron of describing 'silent blame', or say something about not calling people's hair weird. In the end, she instead responded, "Ah- I'm Hokaze Junko. It's a pleasure to meet you?"
"Hokaze Junko, Misaka confirms as if no pause for clarification had been necessary," she finished. "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.
Fortunately, the topic moved on before I could suggest calling one of her sisters 'Asuka'. "So!" said Michan eagerly. "Do you like dolphins?"
"Rei does not know what a dolphin is, says Misaka," she responded.
Predictably, Michan gasped in an eager sort of outrage, and began to provide every iota of detail on small-to-medium cetaceans that she'd ever learned. (Okay, maybe not every iota, there were a lot of dolphin facts I'd mentioned to her purely for the sake of schadenfreude, but it was close enough.)
The clone girl- Rei, apparently, thanks to my poorly-timed commentary- was not much of a conversationalist, and declared her vocal cords to be getting tired soon enough. Judging from how quiet she, and similar girls I'd met, had been? My guess was that between their young age, their lack of human status to give them conversation partners for most people, and their internal communications network for everyone they did actually communicate regularly with, they weren't exactly getting much practice with their vocal cords.
We took the public transport to our destination- a train, this time, due to the distance. It was the rush hour, unfortunately, so the trains were quite busy. We ended up having to stand up. "So this is why they say people are packed like sardines in the city, says Misaka," I overheard Rei mutter at one point.
Her fabled facility was a fairly ordinary-looking research complex, just another one of hundreds throughout the city. Some part of me had been hoping it might be taller, or more menacing, or… something distinguishing. Maybe it had been, before Railgun's rampage forced it to move somewhere else. "We will need to use the cargo entrance, says Misaka," Rei told us, guiding around the side of the building rather than leading us through the foyer.
At the aforementioned cargo entrance, another of the Misaka sisters was waiting, with the same goggles and the same black guitar case lookalike on her back. This one was holding a set of folded white coats in two arms, with some lanyards sat atop them. She passed them to us. "Please wear these, says Misaka," she said.
"Thanks," I replied to her, as did the others, which she didn't acknowledge. I checked the lanyards- they came with a brief description of their time of printing, who had authorised them ('Misaka 10044', and I was certain it couldn't have been following regulations since she wasn't actually an employee), as well as a notice to ensure the bearer was accompanied by a staff member at all times.
We headed inside. There were armed guards standing watch at the inner cargo door, leading to Hokaze taking the lead rather than myself or Michan, walking at the head of the group with Rei and her sister. The two guards didn't look particularly concerned, seeing the clones accompanying us, but one did hold out a hand to have us come to a halt.
"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.
She led us through the corridor. In here, I had to refrain from using Mental Out due to the telepathic barriers; still, even I could tell that people were giving us some funny looks due to how out-of-place we were, despite the clones accompanying us. The Misaka sisters also noticed, given that they occasionally tracked a passer-by that looked like they were going to say something with their gaze, which was generally enough to make them retract their comments.
As we walked, not-Rei caught Michan's eyes lingering through the round glass porthole of one of the projects. "Observations of rooms outside of those directly related to the Level 6 Shift are strictly prohibited without appropriate access, Misaka sternly warns," she said.
"Aww," replied Michan. "...So who are you, Misaka?"
"Misaka's code is Misaka 10044, says Misaka," said Misaka.
"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.
"Yes, Misaka agrees," said Rei.
We came to a security door. Rei stepped forwards as we came to a stop, pressing some buttons on the keypad. A scanner of some sort stuck itself out from the wall, and moved over her, before accepting with a blinking green light- the door opened, revealing the heart of the Level 6 Shift.
It was the same general appearance as any other part of the facility. White panelling, fluorescent bar lights… The air here felt a little cooler, though, and dryer. We passed a window, which showed a view of a large, cuboidal room we appeared to be stationed above. A viewing station, perhaps? I didn't ask myself what they'd be viewing, given the kinds of violence that the drop in numbers for the sisters implied.
To the left, a bit further beyond the wall, a pair of scientists were chatting at their workstations. They were both women, probably in their late thirties; one of them was shorter and brunette, wearing little rectangular glasses with a thick red frame, while the other was a little older, somewhat taller blonde woman with a large runner style headband wrapped around her forehead and part of her hair. Our entrance drew their attention.
"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.
"I haven't manipulated them- check their eyes if you like," I told them, my lips quirking up enough to show my teeth. "As the System Scan should let you know, the corneal starbursts would be visible if I were controlling them… or either of you, for that matter." Of course, that was a lie- I could hide those if I wanted, even if I didn't simply manipulate their perceptions. But they didn't need to know that.
"The system administrator has continually been monitoring the network for anomalous behaviours, Misaka adds," said 10044. "No anomalies have been observed, Misaka confirms. Network integrity is optimal. Shokuhou Misaki has been brought in as a consultant along with her assistants, and should be treated as such while they are on their scheduled visit, Misaka adds."
"W-well…" said the brunette scientist.
"...Would it, ah, be possible to delay the meeting?" asked her apparent senpai. "If-"
"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.
The destination of the two of them was further down the corridor. We were led to a stairwell, going downwards, with another observation window just past the turn-off to it. We couldn't see what was inside from this angle. "The administrator is down these stairs, Misaka says," said Rei, and the three of us followed her downwards.
She opened the door, and we were led to a large chamber, full of rows of what had to be incubation pods. In the middle of it all was one, large transparent tube, like an aquarium tank, with the shape of a young girl floating in the middle.
Whatever I'd been expecting… it hadn't been this. We came to a stop in front of it- then Hokaze startled. "Hokaze?" I asked, turning to her.
"The electrical fields just changed," she said, frowning. "I can't tell what, though."
"The coordinated actions of the Misaka Network, while individually weak, are sufficient to cause notable changes in local electromagnetic conditions, says Misaka," 10044 told us. "In this case, the barriers used to disrupt telepathic abilities such as Mental Out are being suppressed via electromagnetic interference- thus, usage of them to communicate directly with the network administrator is possible within this space without causing undue alarm to the rest of the building, says Misaka, implicitly requesting its usage."
"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?!"
And rather than standing perfectly still, as her elder sisters would have done, the administrator did a little twirl. The labcoat Hokaze was wearing span out around her as she did.
"Misaka is very thankful that Miss Kouzaku had such an interesting idea, says Misaka says Misaka as she bounces on the balls of her feet excitedly," said the administrator, doing exactly that. "Misaka much prefers this to communicating over the network, says Misaka says Misaka!"
"...I get that 'says Misaka' is your thing, but is there a reason you're repeating it twice?" asked Michan, utterly blindsided by the sheer childish energy that this all-powerful administrator held.
"Humph! says Misaka says Misaka as she crosses her arms in indignation," she said, pouting. "We need to send lots of information across the network, including the words we say, so being clear about what's being said is very important- especially if you have to make sure that you're explaining what you said instead of giving administrative commands, says Misaka says Misaka, demonstrating the point authoritatively!"
"Oh!" Michan realised. "So it's for your sisters?"
"Exactly, says Misaka says Misaka, pleased that she didn't have to explain it twice," preened the administrative Misaka. Such a smug expression definitely was not one that was common to Hokaze's face. She clapped her hands together. "I'm sure you want to know why I asked to talk to you though…? says Misaka says Misaka, voice full of mystery."
"Misaka 20001 should not waste time with meaningless chatter, complains Misaka," said 10044- I was getting the impression that her minor personality divergences were sending her in the direction of being something of a killjoy.
Rei looked at her, and the administrative Misaka made a very disappointed noise that sounded extremely odd coming from Hokaze, but 10044 just turned to us instead.
"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."
I considered that. Accelerator, being manipulated? It… made sense, on a certain level. He'd looked to be barely older than Michan when I'd seen him, maybe the same age as Kamijou given their similar size and builds. And there weren't many teenagers who'd agree to something as horrific as killing twenty-thousand people just to make themselves stronger…
But there was one, big problem with all that. "Even if he was manipulated into this… he's killed ten-thousand of you," I said. "How could you convince him he's wrong, after all that?"
"Before an experiment, Misaka has seen that Accelerator always talks to the sister he is about to fight, says Misaka says Misaka," Last Order said seriously. "He always speaks in an intimidating manner, and in his earliest fights it was only his passive reflection that killed the sisters he was fighting, informs Misaka informs Misaka. Misaka theorises that he is trying to convince us not to fight him, but so long as we can't reply to him, he'll keep fighting us, says Misaka says Misaka."
"...So why don't you reply?" I asked. If they didn't want to fight, and a reply would get him to stop fighting, then…
"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?"
Last Order nodded. "Experiment 10032 takes place at 8:30 pm tonight," she announced, stopping the rest of my thoughts in their tracks, "but Accelerator shows up early to them every single time- so if you want to stop him before then, you need to get ready quickly, says Misaka says Misaka urgently! Thank you, says Misaka say Misaka from the bottom of her heart!" she told us.
__________
It had been morning when we'd been told about the deadline, and it would be this evening that the deadline arrived.
If we failed to meet it… well, there'd still be nine-thousand, nine-hundred and sixty-seven sisters to save, but that would be small comfort to the one we failed. Or to us. Which meant we had to prepare for the worst-case scenario quickly.
Our first step was visiting Doctor Kiyama, and having her monitor us while we set up the first iteration of our equivalent to Level Upper.
Michan christened it Mental Upper, for obvious reasons. It was… a rather odd feeling, like a little fuzzy sensation in the back of my head. We wouldn't be using it for any extended period of time, due to the risks it held, but the start-up time meant it was better to prepare in advance. We confirmed that it was functioning, giddiness rising up in me despite everything as I crushed a brick with Rampage Dress and made a mini-doll of oobleck dance, but we didn't have time for more than that.
So we took a taxi, getting us into range of our next destination- I paid the driver, and the four of us stepped out. "Hmm," I said. "They've got better psychic barriers than I expected, apparently… We'll have to get closer if I want to get a good look."
The second target on our list before we started planning was ITEM. I hadn't learned all that much about the Dark May Project, but what I did know was that it implanted data from Accelerator in the heads of other people, that Kinuhata of ITEM had been a test subject, and that if I could get the data and combine it with the Misakas' information, I'd be massively closer to understanding what he was doing and how we could beat it.
On top of that- from all the information I'd picked up during the mind control, I knew where they lived, I knew their usual schedules, and I knew their defences.
Or, at least, I thought I knew their defences. They'd custom-ordered the psychic barriers, but those barriers were quite a bit better than I'd expected now I was here. Still just deterrents, but enough of a barrier to be effective at the edges of my range. We took the time to chat as we made our approach; to ensure we'd be able to contact Last Order if anything changed or if we needed more information, Misaka Rei had come with us, though she was currently declining to speak due to her throat being sore from talking too much.
Since talking to Rei was made impractical by her sore throat, the conversation was mostly in the form of the other two making observations on Multi-Skill.
"I didn't realise that your shoujo manga eyes would become shounen manga eyes," commented Michan, peeking around at my face as she walked.
Sure enough, I'd basically had the Mangekyo Sharingan treatment (or whatever it was called, my past life had been a long time ago). Doctor Kiyama had noted that- as an outfolding of the central nervous system- the eyes were likely to be affected by anything that affected the AIM field. She'd experienced a shift in eye colour, from white sclera and hazel eyes to a more vivid gold with red sclera, one that was also visible from little footage of the AIM Burst was in existence. That was the same reason why my starburst showed up in the eyes of people I controlled by default, and in this case, my pupils had become entirely obscured by larger, sharper starbursts, my sclera having shifted to their pale gold, while the starbursts themselves were a noticeable silver.
"Ugh. Sometimes I think my eyes are far too dramatic," I said with a shrug. "I just hope the boosted version doesn't show up when I'm using Mental Out…"
"Perhaps it would be problematic, but if all goes well, the benefits should be more than worthwhile, my Queen," Hokaze commented. "Especially since Miss Kouzaku is boosted, too."
Indeed- while we were basically on opposite sides of the spectrum, me and Michan were both hydrokinetics, so the Level Upper aspect of Mental Upper was giving her something of a boost even with this mild network.
For the most part it manifested as a notable boost in her fine control. I wasn't sure if it would have helped much with liquid metal, or other such high-density materials like ferrofluid, as she'd always had pretty fine control over those; with a cornstarch putty, though, the boost was enough that she could comfortably keep a layer underneath her clothes, without needing to put them in plastic bags or otherwise protect said clothing from it.
I was about to reply, when a thought crossed my mind.
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.
But an Electromaster would be able to detect those same defences easily, if she had the range. "Rei," I asked, "would the Network be able to detect unusual electronic signals?"
"Yes, says Misaka with a nod," Rei replied.
I nodded back to her (even if she didn't actually nod herself), and beamed my thoughts on the matter to her. After some consideration with her sisters, they started running the numbers for where others of those electronic defences might be. While individually weak, their Radio Noise power had excellent coverage and range as a group, which meant that snooping on local electromagnetic signals wasn't an issue for them. They returned their calculations- combining line of sight with observed electromagnetic activity- within a few minutes.
Just as I'd thought; while accessing the city's security cameras wouldn't really be possible for most people, they'd put up cameras around to compensate.
"Thanks, Rei, Misaka sisters," I told her. I clasped my hands together. "It looks like we'll be taking a few slight detours. I think they might have an idea it was me messing with their last job, but they're probably expecting my range to be slightly smaller than it is right now, with Michan's power helping me out." I glanced back to Rei, and asked, "Could you girls keep an eye out for any more cameras while we're on the approach?"
"Yes, agrees Misaka," Rei replied in her usual monotone.
Those 'slight detours' were over the rooftops, climbing a fire escape to get above the line of sight of most of the cameras, and avoiding the rest, with a little bit of interference from Rei's power in the dicier bits. She was no lightning-spitting Railgun, but with ten-thousand sisters networked to her, she was more than adept at using what she had to its fullest.
Soon enough, though, we were within about five-hundred metres, and I wagered I had a clear enough image of their brains to act quickly once I breached the psychic interference. Given the lack of massive fuck-off electron beams in our direction, I could safely assume we'd made it undetected.
Now all we needed was to identify which brain I could see through the static was Mugino; if we didn't get it right, we'd be in for a world of pain.
But we had Michan to deal with that. She sent a mini-doll of oobleck to approach to a closer distance, and crept it around the exterior of the ITEM base looking the ones near the windows. Fortunately, Mugino was in their private swimming pool(?) right now, alongside Frenda, doing laps. The glass walls to the garden outside the building were probably bulletproof, but they weren't one-way or sufficiently tinted, which was all I really needed to take advantage of them.
Trying to keep Mugino from acting while I took control was a little bit inconvenient, as I couldn't do the same easy neurochemical disruption trick I'd pulled the last time- not with the psychic barrier in the way, anyway. So poor Frenda had to deal with seeing Mugino start seizing up in the pool as I partially scrambled her nerves for the duration of the takeover, followed a moment later by the security alarm blaring.
Then I proceeded to put Frenda, and everyone else in the base, on pause for long enough to get things figured out. While she probably had a little more chlorine in her lungs than before, Mugino was fine; alas, the psychic alarms needed external verification to disable, so I couldn't do anything about the blaring noise they made. What I could do, however, was getting my scan of Kinuhata's brain. This would be my first opportunity to get a good look at Offense Shield, now I wasn't just passively reading. She'd never left the first building that ITEM had visited, so I'd never been able to control her, after all…
Which made me realise I'd done something incredibly dumb on my last encounter with ITEM. "...I just realised I made ITEM leave their mission without picking up the literal preteen on their roster in the process," I told the others. I resumed my hit-and-run of the ITEM base before they could comment on this.
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.
The whitelist was very important, for both of them; otherwise, both he and Kinuhata would suffocate for lack of oxygen, among other things. Kinuhata had indeed almost suffocated, on multiple occasions in fact, though she'd fixed the issue before they'd taken her off the nitrogen-free diving mixture that had kept her alive in the meantime. I doubted that Accelerator was some expert biochemist though; if Last Order's plan failed, as did anything else, it was possible that simply spiking his drink would be enough to leave him vulnerable.
But, depending on the type and intensity of the drug, there were a few problems with that. First, based on Kinuhata's ability to protect her own lungs and eardrums from Frenda's explosions via internal air, he could probably bypass a lot of problems by brute-forcing a problem. Second, if he'd put the drug on a blacklist that automatically bypassed his whitelist, having looked it up out of curiosity or paranoia, he'd reject it with no way for us to hide its presence. And third, many drugs would either kill him or result in an intoxicated rank one Level 5, neither of which were ideal outcomes for various reasons.
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.
Given the meagre effects of my attempts to focus on purely hydrokinesis rather than AIM manipulation with TreeESP… well, trying to manipulate his AIM with Mental Out would be a last resort, if it came down to it. And I wasn't exactly going to ask a Level 0 half-stranger to risk life and limb against the strongest esper in Academy City.
As I finished up my data collection, the phone in ITEM started to ring. Someone external had been alerted to my shenanigans, probably… I set the ITEM base's personnel on a timer to unpause, implanted a mental block against trying to commit any uber-violence against me and mine on the ringleaders (since I could only really cover up things like the panic-moment of Mugino getting telepathically ganked, rather than an entire base briefly being compromised), and shepherded our little team to safety to discuss my findings.
__________
Rei said her goodbyes for the evening as the hour came. After all, 10032 would be nearby if we needed to contact the Network; Rei herself needed to be ready as part of the cleanup crew, if it came to it.
We approached the location of the experiment in silence. Michan's ineffable bubbliness was suppressed, and Hokaze's calm grace was stiff. I watched the neurons of the birds flying overhead as we walked, just for the sake of having something to focus on.
We arrived half an hour early.
The site of the experiment was a cargo depot, of sorts. Here, crates were stacked atop one another to many times our height, and cranes towered around us; the tracks for trains were nearby, and in the morning, people would be coming here to work the deliveries coming in and out of Academy City. There was nobody here right now, save for the three of us. In the warm humidity of the summer's evening, the place was a liminal space, a moment frozen in time between here and there.
Fifteen minutes from the deadline, I felt his approach- a black void in my detection. "He's coming," I said.
He approached from the direction of the warehouses nearby, strolling slowly and casually. The minutes burned slowly- six, seven, eight. When he was finally close enough to see, turning a corner he was wearing the same thing I'd seen him wearing every other time we'd met; the black shirt, the shoes with the jeans tucked in. His red eyes looked up, and- at a distance- met our own.
Accelerator approached us.
When he was in speaking range, he spoke, walking towards us all the while. "This isn't a fun place to be hanging out, girls," he called. "Scram."
I glanced at my friends. Michan and Hokaze both looked at me worriedly, but nodded. I stood up, and began to walk towards him in turn.
"Hey, didn't you hear me? Scram," said Accelerator- before he seemed to recognise me. "Ah, wait… I know who you are," he said mockingly. "You always seem to find me in the strangest places, don't you? What is it this time? Passing through? Searching for scraps again?"
"...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-"
"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."
"Bah. If they were people, don't you think they'd try to stop walking into a slaughterhouse?" he asked lazily. "It's not pretty, y'know; I was trying out blood manipulation earlier today, and wow, I didn't know people even had that much blood in their body." I clenched my fists. "-Well, I'd guess that people have as much blood as the dolls do," he continued, catching himself. "They're supposed to be replicas, right? They had to clean up the mess, and anybody I know would've ran like hell if they tried to fight the same guy. So… explain the difference, yeah?"
I took a breath. "Brainwashing. Learned helplessness," I countered. He raised an eyebrow. "Someone once did an experiment where they took two dogs, and put them in two boxes with two halves to the floor, with a barrier between them. For one dog, the floor was electrocuted on both sides; for the other, it only got a shock on one side. When they got shocked, both of them tried to jump for the other side, but the one that got shocked on both gave up- even if it wasn't in the box any more." The corners of his mouth were starting to lose their amused tension. "I've looked in their heads- they're just as scared as anyone else would be. I've seen the insides of the Level 6 Shift facility, one of them at least… Weren't the first experiments in closed boxes? Where would they have learned to run?"
"...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?"
"The majority of the scientists in the project aren't ethicists, and people have been dehumanised as long as there's been science," I said. I racked my memories, trying to find anything that would help. "They're either oblivious, or complicit. The latter is very likely. In the Second World War, Unit 731 killed ten to fifteen times as many people as would be needed for the Level 6 Shift. None of them were clones, and some of them were the facility staff's own children via… abuses of power. Josef Mengele and other Nazi scientists-"
"Hah! This isn't some world war we're in, telepath," he interrupted. "We're living in the twenty-first century. Hell, there's a computer up there in the sky-" He gestured upwards with an open hand. "-that can just do the experiments for them, if they want. What sort of maniac would start killing this many real people when they can do that? Really?"
"Last year, Doctor Kiyama Harumi was requested to run an experiment under a man known as Doctor Kihara Gensei," I continued. "A number of orphans were taken in a class underneath her, and after one year, they performed an experiment using something called an Ability Body Crystal. Despite Kiyama's calculations, the children began to convulse and manifest their powers out of control; Kihara ordered them to continue collecting data, and after severe facial burns and other such damage, the children fell into comas. When Kiyama confronted Doctor Kihara, he informed her that everything had gone as planned, and after reports to Anti-Skill and Tree Diagram were all summarily rejected, she resorted to inventing Level Upper in an effort to get the processing power to resuscitate the children herself."
Accelerator didn't reply, his eyes starting to glare at me. I kept talking.
"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-"
"Stop talking," said Accelerator.
I did so. He stood there, breathing raggedly.
"...Do you really think I'm going to believe all this?" he asked me. "Making me out to be some idiot who couldn't tell killing people from killing lab rats? Huh? Answer me," he ordered.
"Misaka Last Order contacted us," I said. "As the administrator, she was told how to identify emotional manipulation; she believes the scientists are doing that to you. You only started fighting after the sisters wouldn't stop trying to fight you. You keep trying to talk to them. If-"
"But if you were lying, you'd still win, right?" he asked, eyes wide, a smile- or a grimace- back on his face. "I'm… thinking that makes more sense. Ten-thousand and thirty-one clones… or ten-thousand and thirty-one people who can't even be bothered to ask, 'why'?" Accelerator shrugged. "It sounds like easy maths to me. And you're the mind-controller- even if one of them threw themselves to the ground begging, I'd see the strings on the puppet easy enough. So…"
He chuckled.
"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.
She received a hug from Michan, accepting it (or at least not denying it) stoically, before standing up the moment she was released.
"Good morning, says Misaka tiredly, silently blaming the administrator for not organising a time at which to meet the individuals from the night prior," she said. "Misaka understands that you are consultant Shokuhou Misaki and her assistants, Kouzaku 'Michan' Mitori and…? she says, trailing off as she implicitly requests the name of the person with the weird hair."
For a moment, Hokaze wasn't quite sure whether she should point out the oxymoron of describing 'silent blame', or say something about not calling people's hair weird. In the end, she instead responded, "Ah- I'm Hokaze Junko. It's a pleasure to meet you?"
"Hokaze Junko, Misaka confirms as if no pause for clarification had been necessary," she finished. "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.
Fortunately, the topic moved on before I could suggest calling one of her sisters 'Asuka'. "So!" said Michan eagerly. "Do you like dolphins?"
"Rei does not know what a dolphin is, says Misaka," she responded.
Predictably, Michan gasped in an eager sort of outrage, and began to provide every iota of detail on small-to-medium cetaceans that she'd ever learned. (Okay, maybe not every iota, there were a lot of dolphin facts I'd mentioned to her purely for the sake of schadenfreude, but it was close enough.)
The clone girl- Rei, apparently, thanks to my poorly-timed commentary- was not much of a conversationalist, and declared her vocal cords to be getting tired soon enough. Judging from how quiet she, and similar girls I'd met, had been? My guess was that between their young age, their lack of human status to give them conversation partners for most people, and their internal communications network for everyone they did actually communicate regularly with, they weren't exactly getting much practice with their vocal cords.
We took the public transport to our destination- a train, this time, due to the distance. It was the rush hour, unfortunately, so the trains were quite busy. We ended up having to stand up. "So this is why they say people are packed like sardines in the city, says Misaka," I overheard Rei mutter at one point.
Her fabled facility was a fairly ordinary-looking research complex, just another one of hundreds throughout the city. Some part of me had been hoping it might be taller, or more menacing, or… something distinguishing. Maybe it had been, before Railgun's rampage forced it to move somewhere else. "We will need to use the cargo entrance, says Misaka," Rei told us, guiding around the side of the building rather than leading us through the foyer.
At the aforementioned cargo entrance, another of the Misaka sisters was waiting, with the same goggles and the same black guitar case lookalike on her back. This one was holding a set of folded white coats in two arms, with some lanyards sat atop them. She passed them to us. "Please wear these, says Misaka," she said.
"Thanks," I replied to her, as did the others, which she didn't acknowledge. I checked the lanyards- they came with a brief description of their time of printing, who had authorised them ('Misaka 10044', and I was certain it couldn't have been following regulations since she wasn't actually an employee), as well as a notice to ensure the bearer was accompanied by a staff member at all times.
We headed inside. There were armed guards standing watch at the inner cargo door, leading to Hokaze taking the lead rather than myself or Michan, walking at the head of the group with Rei and her sister. The two guards didn't look particularly concerned, seeing the clones accompanying us, but one did hold out a hand to have us come to a halt.
"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.
She led us through the corridor. In here, I had to refrain from using Mental Out due to the telepathic barriers; still, even I could tell that people were giving us some funny looks due to how out-of-place we were, despite the clones accompanying us. The Misaka sisters also noticed, given that they occasionally tracked a passer-by that looked like they were going to say something with their gaze, which was generally enough to make them retract their comments.
As we walked, not-Rei caught Michan's eyes lingering through the round glass porthole of one of the projects. "Observations of rooms outside of those directly related to the Level 6 Shift are strictly prohibited without appropriate access, Misaka sternly warns," she said.
"Aww," replied Michan. "...So who are you, Misaka?"
"Misaka's code is Misaka 10044, says Misaka," said Misaka.
"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.
"Yes, Misaka agrees," said Rei.
We came to a security door. Rei stepped forwards as we came to a stop, pressing some buttons on the keypad. A scanner of some sort stuck itself out from the wall, and moved over her, before accepting with a blinking green light- the door opened, revealing the heart of the Level 6 Shift.
It was the same general appearance as any other part of the facility. White panelling, fluorescent bar lights… The air here felt a little cooler, though, and dryer. We passed a window, which showed a view of a large, cuboidal room we appeared to be stationed above. A viewing station, perhaps? I didn't ask myself what they'd be viewing, given the kinds of violence that the drop in numbers for the sisters implied.
To the left, a bit further beyond the wall, a pair of scientists were chatting at their workstations. They were both women, probably in their late thirties; one of them was shorter and brunette, wearing little rectangular glasses with a thick red frame, while the other was a little older, somewhat taller blonde woman with a large runner style headband wrapped around her forehead and part of her hair. Our entrance drew their attention.
"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.
"I haven't manipulated them- check their eyes if you like," I told them, my lips quirking up enough to show my teeth. "As the System Scan should let you know, the corneal starbursts would be visible if I were controlling them… or either of you, for that matter." Of course, that was a lie- I could hide those if I wanted, even if I didn't simply manipulate their perceptions. But they didn't need to know that.
"The system administrator has continually been monitoring the network for anomalous behaviours, Misaka adds," said 10044. "No anomalies have been observed, Misaka confirms. Network integrity is optimal. Shokuhou Misaki has been brought in as a consultant along with her assistants, and should be treated as such while they are on their scheduled visit, Misaka adds."
"W-well…" said the brunette scientist.
"...Would it, ah, be possible to delay the meeting?" asked her apparent senpai. "If-"
"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.
The destination of the two of them was further down the corridor. We were led to a stairwell, going downwards, with another observation window just past the turn-off to it. We couldn't see what was inside from this angle. "The administrator is down these stairs, Misaka says," said Rei, and the three of us followed her downwards.
She opened the door, and we were led to a large chamber, full of rows of what had to be incubation pods. In the middle of it all was one, large transparent tube, like an aquarium tank, with the shape of a young girl floating in the middle.
Whatever I'd been expecting… it hadn't been this. We came to a stop in front of it- then Hokaze startled. "Hokaze?" I asked, turning to her.
"The electrical fields just changed," she said, frowning. "I can't tell what, though."
"The coordinated actions of the Misaka Network, while individually weak, are sufficient to cause notable changes in local electromagnetic conditions, says Misaka," 10044 told us. "In this case, the barriers used to disrupt telepathic abilities such as Mental Out are being suppressed via electromagnetic interference- thus, usage of them to communicate directly with the network administrator is possible within this space without causing undue alarm to the rest of the building, says Misaka, implicitly requesting its usage."
"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?!"
And rather than standing perfectly still, as her elder sisters would have done, the administrator did a little twirl. The labcoat Hokaze was wearing span out around her as she did.
"Misaka is very thankful that Miss Kouzaku had such an interesting idea, says Misaka says Misaka as she bounces on the balls of her feet excitedly," said the administrator, doing exactly that. "Misaka much prefers this to communicating over the network, says Misaka says Misaka!"
"...I get that 'says Misaka' is your thing, but is there a reason you're repeating it twice?" asked Michan, utterly blindsided by the sheer childish energy that this all-powerful administrator held.
"Humph! says Misaka says Misaka as she crosses her arms in indignation," she said, pouting. "We need to send lots of information across the network, including the words we say, so being clear about what's being said is very important- especially if you have to make sure that you're explaining what you said instead of giving administrative commands, says Misaka says Misaka, demonstrating the point authoritatively!"
"Oh!" Michan realised. "So it's for your sisters?"
"Exactly, says Misaka says Misaka, pleased that she didn't have to explain it twice," preened the administrative Misaka. Such a smug expression definitely was not one that was common to Hokaze's face. She clapped her hands together. "I'm sure you want to know why I asked to talk to you though…? says Misaka says Misaka, voice full of mystery."
"Misaka 20001 should not waste time with meaningless chatter, complains Misaka," said 10044- I was getting the impression that her minor personality divergences were sending her in the direction of being something of a killjoy.
Rei looked at her, and the administrative Misaka made a very disappointed noise that sounded extremely odd coming from Hokaze, but 10044 just turned to us instead.
"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."
I considered that. Accelerator, being manipulated? It… made sense, on a certain level. He'd looked to be barely older than Michan when I'd seen him, maybe the same age as Kamijou given their similar size and builds. And there weren't many teenagers who'd agree to something as horrific as killing twenty-thousand people just to make themselves stronger…
But there was one, big problem with all that. "Even if he was manipulated into this… he's killed ten-thousand of you," I said. "How could you convince him he's wrong, after all that?"
"Before an experiment, Misaka has seen that Accelerator always talks to the sister he is about to fight, says Misaka says Misaka," Last Order said seriously. "He always speaks in an intimidating manner, and in his earliest fights it was only his passive reflection that killed the sisters he was fighting, informs Misaka informs Misaka. Misaka theorises that he is trying to convince us not to fight him, but so long as we can't reply to him, he'll keep fighting us, says Misaka says Misaka."
"...So why don't you reply?" I asked. If they didn't want to fight, and a reply would get him to stop fighting, then…
"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?"
Last Order nodded. "Experiment 10032 takes place at 8:30 pm tonight," she announced, stopping the rest of my thoughts in their tracks, "but Accelerator shows up early to them every single time- so if you want to stop him before then, you need to get ready quickly, says Misaka says Misaka urgently! Thank you, says Misaka say Misaka from the bottom of her heart!" she told us.
__________
It had been morning when we'd been told about the deadline, and it would be this evening that the deadline arrived.
If we failed to meet it… well, there'd still be nine-thousand, nine-hundred and sixty-seven sisters to save, but that would be small comfort to the one we failed. Or to us. Which meant we had to prepare for the worst-case scenario quickly.
Our first step was visiting Doctor Kiyama, and having her monitor us while we set up the first iteration of our equivalent to Level Upper.
Michan christened it Mental Upper, for obvious reasons. It was… a rather odd feeling, like a little fuzzy sensation in the back of my head. We wouldn't be using it for any extended period of time, due to the risks it held, but the start-up time meant it was better to prepare in advance. We confirmed that it was functioning, giddiness rising up in me despite everything as I crushed a brick with Rampage Dress and made a mini-doll of oobleck dance, but we didn't have time for more than that.
So we took a taxi, getting us into range of our next destination- I paid the driver, and the four of us stepped out. "Hmm," I said. "They've got better psychic barriers than I expected, apparently… We'll have to get closer if I want to get a good look."
The second target on our list before we started planning was ITEM. I hadn't learned all that much about the Dark May Project, but what I did know was that it implanted data from Accelerator in the heads of other people, that Kinuhata of ITEM had been a test subject, and that if I could get the data and combine it with the Misakas' information, I'd be massively closer to understanding what he was doing and how we could beat it.
On top of that- from all the information I'd picked up during the mind control, I knew where they lived, I knew their usual schedules, and I knew their defences.
Or, at least, I thought I knew their defences. They'd custom-ordered the psychic barriers, but those barriers were quite a bit better than I'd expected now I was here. Still just deterrents, but enough of a barrier to be effective at the edges of my range. We took the time to chat as we made our approach; to ensure we'd be able to contact Last Order if anything changed or if we needed more information, Misaka Rei had come with us, though she was currently declining to speak due to her throat being sore from talking too much.
Since talking to Rei was made impractical by her sore throat, the conversation was mostly in the form of the other two making observations on Multi-Skill.
"I didn't realise that your shoujo manga eyes would become shounen manga eyes," commented Michan, peeking around at my face as she walked.
Sure enough, I'd basically had the Mangekyo Sharingan treatment (or whatever it was called, my past life had been a long time ago). Doctor Kiyama had noted that- as an outfolding of the central nervous system- the eyes were likely to be affected by anything that affected the AIM field. She'd experienced a shift in eye colour, from white sclera and hazel eyes to a more vivid gold with red sclera, one that was also visible from little footage of the AIM Burst was in existence. That was the same reason why my starburst showed up in the eyes of people I controlled by default, and in this case, my pupils had become entirely obscured by larger, sharper starbursts, my sclera having shifted to their pale gold, while the starbursts themselves were a noticeable silver.
"Ugh. Sometimes I think my eyes are far too dramatic," I said with a shrug. "I just hope the boosted version doesn't show up when I'm using Mental Out…"
"Perhaps it would be problematic, but if all goes well, the benefits should be more than worthwhile, my Queen," Hokaze commented. "Especially since Miss Kouzaku is boosted, too."
Indeed- while we were basically on opposite sides of the spectrum, me and Michan were both hydrokinetics, so the Level Upper aspect of Mental Upper was giving her something of a boost even with this mild network.
For the most part it manifested as a notable boost in her fine control. I wasn't sure if it would have helped much with liquid metal, or other such high-density materials like ferrofluid, as she'd always had pretty fine control over those; with a cornstarch putty, though, the boost was enough that she could comfortably keep a layer underneath her clothes, without needing to put them in plastic bags or otherwise protect said clothing from it.
I was about to reply, when a thought crossed my mind.
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.
But an Electromaster would be able to detect those same defences easily, if she had the range. "Rei," I asked, "would the Network be able to detect unusual electronic signals?"
"Yes, says Misaka with a nod," Rei replied.
I nodded back to her (even if she didn't actually nod herself), and beamed my thoughts on the matter to her. After some consideration with her sisters, they started running the numbers for where others of those electronic defences might be. While individually weak, their Radio Noise power had excellent coverage and range as a group, which meant that snooping on local electromagnetic signals wasn't an issue for them. They returned their calculations- combining line of sight with observed electromagnetic activity- within a few minutes.
Just as I'd thought; while accessing the city's security cameras wouldn't really be possible for most people, they'd put up cameras around to compensate.
"Thanks, Rei, Misaka sisters," I told her. I clasped my hands together. "It looks like we'll be taking a few slight detours. I think they might have an idea it was me messing with their last job, but they're probably expecting my range to be slightly smaller than it is right now, with Michan's power helping me out." I glanced back to Rei, and asked, "Could you girls keep an eye out for any more cameras while we're on the approach?"
"Yes, agrees Misaka," Rei replied in her usual monotone.
Those 'slight detours' were over the rooftops, climbing a fire escape to get above the line of sight of most of the cameras, and avoiding the rest, with a little bit of interference from Rei's power in the dicier bits. She was no lightning-spitting Railgun, but with ten-thousand sisters networked to her, she was more than adept at using what she had to its fullest.
Soon enough, though, we were within about five-hundred metres, and I wagered I had a clear enough image of their brains to act quickly once I breached the psychic interference. Given the lack of massive fuck-off electron beams in our direction, I could safely assume we'd made it undetected.
Now all we needed was to identify which brain I could see through the static was Mugino; if we didn't get it right, we'd be in for a world of pain.
But we had Michan to deal with that. She sent a mini-doll of oobleck to approach to a closer distance, and crept it around the exterior of the ITEM base looking the ones near the windows. Fortunately, Mugino was in their private swimming pool(?) right now, alongside Frenda, doing laps. The glass walls to the garden outside the building were probably bulletproof, but they weren't one-way or sufficiently tinted, which was all I really needed to take advantage of them.
Trying to keep Mugino from acting while I took control was a little bit inconvenient, as I couldn't do the same easy neurochemical disruption trick I'd pulled the last time- not with the psychic barrier in the way, anyway. So poor Frenda had to deal with seeing Mugino start seizing up in the pool as I partially scrambled her nerves for the duration of the takeover, followed a moment later by the security alarm blaring.
Then I proceeded to put Frenda, and everyone else in the base, on pause for long enough to get things figured out. While she probably had a little more chlorine in her lungs than before, Mugino was fine; alas, the psychic alarms needed external verification to disable, so I couldn't do anything about the blaring noise they made. What I could do, however, was getting my scan of Kinuhata's brain. This would be my first opportunity to get a good look at Offense Shield, now I wasn't just passively reading. She'd never left the first building that ITEM had visited, so I'd never been able to control her, after all…
Which made me realise I'd done something incredibly dumb on my last encounter with ITEM. "...I just realised I made ITEM leave their mission without picking up the literal preteen on their roster in the process," I told the others. I resumed my hit-and-run of the ITEM base before they could comment on this.
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.
The whitelist was very important, for both of them; otherwise, both he and Kinuhata would suffocate for lack of oxygen, among other things. Kinuhata had indeed almost suffocated, on multiple occasions in fact, though she'd fixed the issue before they'd taken her off the nitrogen-free diving mixture that had kept her alive in the meantime. I doubted that Accelerator was some expert biochemist though; if Last Order's plan failed, as did anything else, it was possible that simply spiking his drink would be enough to leave him vulnerable.
But, depending on the type and intensity of the drug, there were a few problems with that. First, based on Kinuhata's ability to protect her own lungs and eardrums from Frenda's explosions via internal air, he could probably bypass a lot of problems by brute-forcing a problem. Second, if he'd put the drug on a blacklist that automatically bypassed his whitelist, having looked it up out of curiosity or paranoia, he'd reject it with no way for us to hide its presence. And third, many drugs would either kill him or result in an intoxicated rank one Level 5, neither of which were ideal outcomes for various reasons.
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.
Given the meagre effects of my attempts to focus on purely hydrokinesis rather than AIM manipulation with TreeESP… well, trying to manipulate his AIM with Mental Out would be a last resort, if it came down to it. And I wasn't exactly going to ask a Level 0 half-stranger to risk life and limb against the strongest esper in Academy City.
As I finished up my data collection, the phone in ITEM started to ring. Someone external had been alerted to my shenanigans, probably… I set the ITEM base's personnel on a timer to unpause, implanted a mental block against trying to commit any uber-violence against me and mine on the ringleaders (since I could only really cover up things like the panic-moment of Mugino getting telepathically ganked, rather than an entire base briefly being compromised), and shepherded our little team to safety to discuss my findings.
__________
Rei said her goodbyes for the evening as the hour came. After all, 10032 would be nearby if we needed to contact the Network; Rei herself needed to be ready as part of the cleanup crew, if it came to it.
We approached the location of the experiment in silence. Michan's ineffable bubbliness was suppressed, and Hokaze's calm grace was stiff. I watched the neurons of the birds flying overhead as we walked, just for the sake of having something to focus on.
We arrived half an hour early.
The site of the experiment was a cargo depot, of sorts. Here, crates were stacked atop one another to many times our height, and cranes towered around us; the tracks for trains were nearby, and in the morning, people would be coming here to work the deliveries coming in and out of Academy City. There was nobody here right now, save for the three of us. In the warm humidity of the summer's evening, the place was a liminal space, a moment frozen in time between here and there.
Fifteen minutes from the deadline, I felt his approach- a black void in my detection. "He's coming," I said.
He approached from the direction of the warehouses nearby, strolling slowly and casually. The minutes burned slowly- six, seven, eight. When he was finally close enough to see, turning a corner he was wearing the same thing I'd seen him wearing every other time we'd met; the black shirt, the shoes with the jeans tucked in. His red eyes looked up, and- at a distance- met our own.
Accelerator approached us.
When he was in speaking range, he spoke, walking towards us all the while. "This isn't a fun place to be hanging out, girls," he called. "Scram."
I glanced at my friends. Michan and Hokaze both looked at me worriedly, but nodded. I stood up, and began to walk towards him in turn.
"Hey, didn't you hear me? Scram," said Accelerator- before he seemed to recognise me. "Ah, wait… I know who you are," he said mockingly. "You always seem to find me in the strangest places, don't you? What is it this time? Passing through? Searching for scraps again?"
"...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-"
"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."
"Bah. If they were people, don't you think they'd try to stop walking into a slaughterhouse?" he asked lazily. "It's not pretty, y'know; I was trying out blood manipulation earlier today, and wow, I didn't know people even had that much blood in their body." I clenched my fists. "-Well, I'd guess that people have as much blood as the dolls do," he continued, catching himself. "They're supposed to be replicas, right? They had to clean up the mess, and anybody I know would've ran like hell if they tried to fight the same guy. So… explain the difference, yeah?"
I took a breath. "Brainwashing. Learned helplessness," I countered. He raised an eyebrow. "Someone once did an experiment where they took two dogs, and put them in two boxes with two halves to the floor, with a barrier between them. For one dog, the floor was electrocuted on both sides; for the other, it only got a shock on one side. When they got shocked, both of them tried to jump for the other side, but the one that got shocked on both gave up- even if it wasn't in the box any more." The corners of his mouth were starting to lose their amused tension. "I've looked in their heads- they're just as scared as anyone else would be. I've seen the insides of the Level 6 Shift facility, one of them at least… Weren't the first experiments in closed boxes? Where would they have learned to run?"
"...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?"
"The majority of the scientists in the project aren't ethicists, and people have been dehumanised as long as there's been science," I said. I racked my memories, trying to find anything that would help. "They're either oblivious, or complicit. The latter is very likely. In the Second World War, Unit 731 killed ten to fifteen times as many people as would be needed for the Level 6 Shift. None of them were clones, and some of them were the facility staff's own children via… abuses of power. Josef Mengele and other Nazi scientists-"
"Hah! This isn't some world war we're in, telepath," he interrupted. "We're living in the twenty-first century. Hell, there's a computer up there in the sky-" He gestured upwards with an open hand. "-that can just do the experiments for them, if they want. What sort of maniac would start killing this many real people when they can do that? Really?"
"Last year, Doctor Kiyama Harumi was requested to run an experiment under a man known as Doctor Kihara Gensei," I continued. "A number of orphans were taken in a class underneath her, and after one year, they performed an experiment using something called an Ability Body Crystal. Despite Kiyama's calculations, the children began to convulse and manifest their powers out of control; Kihara ordered them to continue collecting data, and after severe facial burns and other such damage, the children fell into comas. When Kiyama confronted Doctor Kihara, he informed her that everything had gone as planned, and after reports to Anti-Skill and Tree Diagram were all summarily rejected, she resorted to inventing Level Upper in an effort to get the processing power to resuscitate the children herself."
Accelerator didn't reply, his eyes starting to glare at me. I kept talking.
"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-"
"Stop talking," said Accelerator.
I did so. He stood there, breathing raggedly.
"...Do you really think I'm going to believe all this?" he asked me. "Making me out to be some idiot who couldn't tell killing people from killing lab rats? Huh? Answer me," he ordered.
"Misaka Last Order contacted us," I said. "As the administrator, she was told how to identify emotional manipulation; she believes the scientists are doing that to you. You only started fighting after the sisters wouldn't stop trying to fight you. You keep trying to talk to them. If-"
"But if you were lying, you'd still win, right?" he asked, eyes wide, a smile- or a grimace- back on his face. "I'm… thinking that makes more sense. Ten-thousand and thirty-one clones… or ten-thousand and thirty-one people who can't even be bothered to ask, 'why'?" Accelerator shrugged. "It sounds like easy maths to me. And you're the mind-controller- even if one of them threw themselves to the ground begging, I'd see the strings on the puppet easy enough. So…"
He chuckled.
"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.
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
The sisters are great. I imagine Misaki had a shit eating grin when she was talking to the scientists. Accelerator is appropriately built up by just how many words are spent trying to figure out any way to do anything to him, meanwhile item gets clowned on a second time.
And finally the confrontation. Misaki wins the argument, but Accelerator has too much blood on his hands to be convinced with words alone at this point.
And finally the confrontation. Misaki wins the argument, but Accelerator has too much blood on his hands to be convinced with words alone at this point.
Strictly speaking, she doesn't. Both doing something about this, and bringing Michan in on it, are active and difficult choices.
Shokuhou is visibly not okay.
Learning has occurred! Not that it is helping Railgun much, but we're going from two people against the city to a whopping three.
An impressive three, admittedly. It would be hard to do this with just two.
Michan is quickly making up for the separation. Shame they were separated!
Them going their separate ways has traumatic backstory behind it, unfortunately. Shokuhou has not quite dug into the timeline and emotions of it, but, well, as she explained, all of Clone Dolly is gone now. So the kids went back to their normal schools.
The survivors did, I mean.
We immediately start to see both their shared trauma responses and why Shokuhou instantly called her in on this.
Michan also did somewhat clumsy vigilantism in canon. Sorry, I think I said that wrong. She got super extra triple traumatized in canon, identified the person most responsible, and picked a fight, lost, and turned into a supervillain for a bit.
The canon divergence is strong with this one, though Michan is recognizably the same person.
Michan is coming at this from a perfectly reasonable perspective. Shokuhou went through a lot to get as much of a happy ending as possible for as many people as possible. Clone Dolly is over. The trauma and horror is over. The new horrors shouldn't get in the way of that happy ending.
Also, again, Michan is ride or die with Misaki. Whatever happened between them, this is the result.
She barely even knows what this is about and she's already chomping at the bit to fight a Level 5 for love, justice, and Shokuhou Misaki.
The happy go lucky stuff isnt an act. Rather, Michan is deadly serious in her energetic way. She's not dropping a mask, she's drawing a weapon. Hokaze is not quite understanding as much of the context, but she's focused as well. And yet, what can possibly prepare either of them for the answer?
...As I said. This is several steps beyond the worst possible answer.
And here we go. No doubts, no what if they aren't people, no what if there's a justification. No worship of Level 6 or Accelerator or Science.
The kids are alright.
Also, horribly traumatized. And they have superpowers and a bone to pick.
An idle thought floats across Shokuhou's mind: we can always just escalate faster than anyone imagines, right? I can probably find out where he sleeps and make sure the person who wakes up the next morning will be exactly who I need him to be.
There are various problems with this, since it would be not very ethical, might not even work, and wouldnt resolve other parts of the problem. But. On the list as a possibility.
Oh, thank goodness. Surely our dear friend Hokaze will find a more reasonable path forward.
Never mind. This is an unreasonable situation, calling for solutions beyond the norm.
Our first look at Michan's superpower. A fluid-kinetic with some more oomph than Shokuhou.
And here we see Hokaze show off. She's an electrokinetic, but in an entirely different way than others we see. In short, she's the world's strongest ojou-sama.
Not a bad plan. And maybe if the prison wanted to stay intact, it could lock up the people running these experiments so middle school girls dont have to play vigilante?
This wasn't a casual decision. It was just such a dire situation that them doing some breaking and entering got put on the table.
Again, this is a dire situation, so her assistance is entirely optional. Reminder: at any point during the following conversation, Mental Out could have just mugged her for her knowledge. If she hadn't just done some crazy stuff because she has too many emotions about children hurt by experiments, Shokuhou would have just run her over and left. Instead, they recruit her like normal people.
Shokuhou: Some scientists have human rights. They just have to earn them by unwavering devotion to trying to do the right thing under duress.
Hokaze: Maybe we should dial it down a notch?
Michan: She is on thin ice, but I like being nice until I have to stop being nice.
Oh, right. The numbers. Hm. Probably can't hide them under Shokuhou's bed. Her room isn't quite that empty!
Shokuhou neglected to specify this number. The girls aren't doing this because there are ten thousand lives at stake. They would do this for any single one of them.
There is no world in which Michan could have possibly guessed the number of dead and trapped clones was this large without it being specified. The girls aren't nearly depraved enough to think that number could be justified until they see the evidence of someone trying to justify it.
For reference, this is the exact moment Shokuhou Misaki and the Board Of Directirs having a problem became inevitable.
Kiyama: I hate to say it, but these guys are untouchable. You need to keep yourself safe.
Shokuhou: That safety is going to require me extracting certain concessions and ending certain careers.
(If Mental Out knew how to get into the same room as these people, the story would start going in a very different direction. For better or worse, they presumably go to great effort to prevent this.)
See! It CAN be done! Those other scientists are hacks.
This is a great line. Not likely to stop a bunch of chuuni 14 year olds with superpowers from using the deadly powerup for great justice though.
Though Shokuhou does take this seriously. The problem is, taking the situation seriously means taking this risk.
What a surprise! (Not.)
Okay, it is a bit surprising she didnt start crying again. Michan is strong. This would be a very reasonable point to have another freak out.
Seen here: The Misaka sisters definitely not having personalities.
This is why random people who stumble on the experiment without already accepting the lie universally decide it needs to stop. The sisters have so much personality, even about 'not having personality'.
Alas, the reader is inherently a very specific kind of telepath. This mistake is immortalized. At least Rei is happy!
The girls are outliers among outliers. They could roll this lab up, probably. Surviving after and saving the sisters while doing so is the hard part.
Wow, that's a reaction. What did Shokujou do to deserve that?
(Be THE telepath + explode Exterior)
On any other day, these two would be destroyed. But right now Shokuhou is playing nice. Until the meeting ends.
Accelerator is a kid as well. He didn't come up with this idea.
That doesn't mean he is safe. Or reasonable. But this was not a plan he proposed or funded, or implemented. He is the other half of the lab rats in each death match.
The kids are traumatized and brainwashed, but otherwise alright. It's a narrow bit of hope, but take what we can get, right?
Misaka 20001: I really appreciate your assistance. Please try not to murder Accelerator. It would be really nice if he was alive at the end of your discussion. We want him to be happy.
Shokuhou: Oh wow, you actually mean that. It's not reverse psychology. I guess I can try for a pacifist run.
Scientists: *Shrieking noises of doom as their lives crumble around them*
Misaka Rei, insistently: It would be really really nice if Accelerator was alive at the-
Shokuhou: Fine. It's fine. This is my fine smile.
Misaka 20044, suspiciously: ...Pinky promise?
Oh, more bullying. Wonder if anything changed since yesterday?
The clones don't get to talk nearly as much as they want, clearly.
Shokuhou, having been tasked to win at friendship with a child who has killed 10000+ clones and actually agreed, now begins to reap the very chuunibyou benefits of anime protagism.
Things changed. As we get to see, not changed nearly enough to STOP Mental Out, but all the bullying has led to unfortunate escalation. Winning at friendship is hard, it seems. Meltdowner is not going to be happy when she wakes up, and Shokuhou is too busy trying to do the right thing, damn the torpedoes, to stop and do this better.
"I am being pragmatic," Shokuhou lied like a liar, making idealistic decisions at great personal risk for emotional reasons driven by care for the physical and emotional well-being of 10000 children.
Off to a great start. Interesting that Accelerator starts out the gate with "that level of casual institutional evil can't possibly exist". He is very dangerous, but that's not at all incoherent with Last Order's assessment if him.
Well. He did ask. Not that he is happy that Shokuhou has an answer.
It's interesting, though. She could have talked about Clone Dolly. About Exterior, about how the scientists treated her, about Dolly with comparison to the Radio Noise sisters. About Ideal and Lateral.
But she aims at what's in the news, what he had his part in, and what's recent.
She's not trying to emotionally connect with him over the similarities between Mental Out and Accelerator. She's taking this debate very seriously, deadly seriously, but she's not making it about her own trauma. Maybe she should - maybe it would resonate - but maybe he'd dismiss her problems as not being his problems.
She can't know in advance. If she really had to win an argument with these stakes against most opponents, she could and probably would cheat. But she can't read his mind. Or change it, except the hard way.
Accelerator is defensive. He frames this as opposition. When he says she would win, he means that he would lose.
It's his loss if she's right. If she's right, then he's part of something unacceptable. So she has to be wrong.
She has to back down. Or she has to lose. Her win - his loss - means something unforgiveable.
So he just has to fight her, until she runs or loses.
After all, he's Accelerator.
Fights against him can only end one way. So that's what has to happen. It has to be a fight, so he can't lose. Because he can't afford that. Not with these stakes.
But Shokuhou can't run away from these stakes either. Problem is, that doesn't necessarily mean she can win. She has Mental Upper, has two allies, but Accelerator is the strongest Esper by... a lot.
I like to believe that every scientist in the facility who saw Misaki made the same noise, hoping that She didn't notice them.
She noticed, and took a small bit of sadistic joy at their fear.