The van was incredibly cramped.
Upon hearing the bad news, we'd rushed to the hospital. It had only been a few more minutes away, and quick mathematical estimates suggested we'd save more time than we lost if we had a Sister on-hand for route-planning. Also, we'd get a Meltdowner out of the deal, and very few situations couldn't be made less dangerous by adding an allied Level 5 to it.
We'd found Mugino arguing with 10044 (Nickname-chan) outside of the hospital, as the sister hadn't been making the right arguments to convince her to ditch her injured teammates and get back into the fray. I'd quickly explained that there were two different Level 6 scenarios if the latest wacko got his hands on his victims for too long, and that he'd just tried to kill her and her team. Suitably convinced of the merits of committing some more murder today, she got in the van.
The back of the van was designed to be spacious and comfortable for four people, plus two extras in the front of the van; with Michan and 10044 in the front, plus two members of ITEM, four members of Scavenger, myself, and a hefty amount of space reserved by Scavenger for keeping away from people they'd tried to murder, plus the quantity of materials needed for Michan's Liquid Shadow and Sakuragi's Perfect Paper abilities… and also the shopping bag that still hadn't been taken out of the van… there was not all that much space in here. Not ideal.
But then again, nothing about the situation was ideal.
"Okay," I said. "This is now a war council. Currently, Accelerator and Misaka 10046 are being kidnapped by a giant invisible robot, for the purposes of creating Level 6s under the control of a mad scientist who'd kill random schoolgirls to stuff their corpses in giant robots. I should not need to explain why we don't want this. In the best-case scenario, we intercept them before anything happens. If Accelerator's shield is up, we have an Accelerator on our side in the villain's-" Mugino snorted. "-the villain's lair," I continued, "and we win. If it's not up, then getting him into Mental Out's range means I can puppet him while he's unconscious, get his powers working, and then we have an Accelerator on our side and we win."
"I like those plans!" said Sakuragi, giving two thumbs up to that evaluation.
"Which is why we should plan for the plans we don't like," I responded. "Our enemy is a man called Hishigata Mikihiko… His goal is similar to the AIM Burst incident; though it's using a different power source and means of distribution, his plan can be summarised as using universal, unconscious AIM fields to boost an artificial AIM source to Level 6."
"So what do we do to stop it?" asked Mugino seriously. She was all business, now, her rage simmering serenely behind that facade. She was the only member of ITEM we'd needed to add to the van. Takitsubo and Frenda were both back at the hospital, and Kinuhata had already been inside. Takitsubo was recovering from an AIM-enhancer overdose and was basically redundant with two super-powerful clairvoyants on the team already, while Frenda didn't have a leg to stand on, both literally and metaphorically; she was in surgery for that right now.
"For those not aware- there's a gestalt of around ten-thousand clones of Misaka Mikoto, who've retain the memories from ten-thousand other dead clones who were killed in combat," I explained. "Hishigata's plan is to use the memories of those deaths to resonate with universal fears of death, or something like that- I don't really understand the science, but he wouldn't pick a fight with this many Level 5s if he didn't think it would work. In the same way that Level Upper and AIM Burst spread its own brainwaves to connect to the people around it, Hishigata's plan is to work from the opposite end; if he makes pre-existing thought patterns resonate with his construct, it can syphon energy and processing power from the Personal Realities of everyone on the planet."
It was my best guess from what I knew of how magic worked. In the same way that an incantation and a spell circle in the Nihilist's lab might invoke 'Amaterasu' to make a small light from the AIM gestalt of Shinto beliefs, the memories of 10,000 deaths would resonate potently with the unconscious AIM field gestalt of 'Death' to become an inevitable, unstoppable force.
"So, obviously, the best case scenario is keeping him from downloading those memories," I said. "But it's a lot of information; it will first take time to download and transfer to the construct, and even if we fail, it will still take time to synchronise fully and reach Level 6, which means the faster we get there, the better."
Scavenger was on the job of making us go as fast as possible. Seike and his friction control had basically negated air resistance and any unnecessary friction on the van's parts; with Sakuragi's paper on the outside of the van to help control it at these speeds, we'd left the city speed limit sobbing in a corner. Ordinarily, this would have taken too much coordination for them to manage, but I was coordinating their powers and boosting them with Mental Upper.
I wouldn't normally do that without permission. But we'd all be screwed if we failed, and we'd all be screwed if the van crashed at these speeds. I was willing to relax my usual Mental Upper safety standards when we'd lose everything otherwise.
"The kidnapped girl, Misaka 10046, can get information back from the network if they need to- if we get into Mental Out range of her, I can delete the important memories, and she can reupload them from her sisters once she's safe. Same for 10044 here," I said, inclining my head towards the sister in the front, who was serving as our tracker.
The connection was based on brainwaves and AIM fields, and so the sisters couldn't manually disconnect another sister. They couldn't disconnect themselves either, except in the case of administrative permission. As long as 10046 was unconscious, her AIM fields were active, so the connection was stuck in the active 'connected' position. It did mean that Hishigata could get at the memories of death he needed, since those ones were- by definition- not locked in any one living sister's head; however, it also meant that he couldn't keep another sister from homing in on her current location, and that gave us a way to track 10046- by extension, him and his machine- down. Slowly, we were gaining.
"The other problem is Accelerator," I said. "Hishigata has found a way to use giant robot bodies to boost the powers of espers placed within; usually he uses corpses, but he's lost the expert he needs for that, so he'll need to take Accelerator alive. It's a big gamble," I noted, "but given he tried to attack me and Meltdowner earlier today- he's probably already got a machine to use the same thing to control and boost a living Level 5. He already has the information he needs in the Misaka sister he's kidnapped, so it would be pointless to take Accelerator unless he either needs a hostage- which he already has, and a Level 6 is a carrot and a stick for anyone powerful who cares about Accelerator otherwise- or he's got a way to use Accelerator to defend himself."
"So if everything goes wrong, we're picking a fight with a power-boosted Accelerator, and we have to get past him before he finishes making a pet god," summarised Michan from the front of the van. "Fun!"
"That's… super not good," said Kinuhata, in the understatement of the century.
"U-umm," said Iizumi, nervously raising a hand, stepping up as Scavenger's leader. "I-if both people are on the same robot, and we know where they are, couldn't we just… y'know…?" She made a little 'pew-pew' gesture with her hands, glancing between me and Meltdowner.
10044 spoke up from the front. "While Misaka and her sisters are willing to die to save people, says Misaka, hoping that she has hid her nervousness sufficiently," she said, not noticing her slip of the tongue, "the information being transferred between Misaka, Shokuhou and Miss Mugino suggests that-"
"What it wants to say," interrupted Mugino, drawing a glare from me, "is that anything strong enough to shoot them down would kill me with the backlash before it penetrated enough for a clear shot. Our target is staying below the skyline- we don't have a clear shot."
"And by the time we do have a clear shot, we'll already be in range of Perfect Paper, Michan's Liquid Shadow putty control, and Mental Out," I said. "Which means we'll be in a position to rescue or subvert Accelerator, which is a much quicker way to get the enemy in range of a 'damage: yes'-level power."
"What if the Accelerator is already super being controlled by this guy?" asked Kinuhata. "How do we beat him?"
A shadow of doubt swept over most of the team. "Then it depends how good Hishigata's machine is," I said, fording onwards with the plan. "Understand that sharing this information is definitely breaking the truce: Accelerator recently took a bullet to the upper right side of his head, and his bodily control and processing ability are completely wrecked," I informed them. "He's completely reliant on the clones' Radio Noise power, and their permission, to use his powers right now- and they can remove that access at will, since it's being shared actively to a device around his neck, rather than passively. The sisters are more powerful at processing than any computer he could get his hands on, so while his powers might be stronger, his ability to use them under Hishigata's control would be massively hindered."
"We would predict anywhere from five to ten percent of his normal processing ability could be preserved with available materials, says Misaka," 10044 noted.
"He also won't be conscious- otherwise he'd control the machine himself and break free," I said. "So his power won't be at its full skill level, and might be missing pieces that he has to add consciously. His vector manipulation isn't impossible to bypass. In my last fight with him, he was only reversing vectors that tried to harm him, rather than repelling them; that was a weak point I can exploit. That one's fixed," I added, "but under the control of some guy or some drone instead of Accelerator himself, and with a rushed implementation, Accelerator will most likely have trouble adapting his strategies if we pick at another weak point."
"Like what?" asked Mugino.
"I'm thinking our best bet is oxygen," I said. "As far as I'm aware, he hasn't had the need to start working on molecular manipulation; if we can use Meltdowner to deoxygenate his immediate environment, then if Hishigata or his control module don't realise the danger, we can suffocate him into unconsciousness and take control."
Mugino frowned. "He'll melt first," she pointed out, "so don't expect to have anything to control."
"Which brings me to our next means of stopping him," I said. "This is also information not to be shared: I have a homemade version of Level Upper- including both the power-boosting for everyone involved, and the power-borrowing for the core of the network, that being myself."
"What the fuck?" said Mugino.
"Doesn't that boost people by two levels?!" realised Yakumaru. "With a boost like that on Mix Master…"
"There's a major downside," I told them. "If we're in an environment that's safe, like right now, it's fine- I'm boosting Sakuragi's paper and Seike's friction control using it. Michan is also hooked up to it. But I can't afford to die while it's in use, otherwise everyone else in the network will suffer backlash- probably fatal," I added.
Seike and Sakuragi suddenly look very concerned.
"By the time we get into combat," I said, "I'll only have volunteers connected, and there's a notable start-up time. It works by sharing information- so the more people who join, the less tug-of-war there'll be when you're using it for boosted power, and the more powerful you'll get in total. So- decide now." I looked around, to see who'd hold my gaze.
Michan just gave me a thumbs up from the drivers' seat; Meltdowner was first to speak up. "How many digits of pi can you calculate?" she asked, immediately. "No boosts from that network, arctan of x method." It was a fairly common standardisation, sometimes used in System Scans. She held up her hand, and counted down on five fingers, precisely one per second. "I have a few quadrillion."
Both of my eyebrows raised. "Wait, how little?" I asked, honestly surprised. Calculating pi that way was about 1.4 digits a term- I could completely control about five esper brains brains at once, and given that even an unenhanced brain was about a quadrillion calculations a second to review…
"...Tag me in," demanded Mugino.
With that, the dam broke. Nobody wanted to miss sharing processing power with two Level 5s at the same time, even with the risks (that were now rapidly diminishing with each person who jointed), and we quickly had affirmative answers from everyone in the van save 10044- she was more valuable being synchronised to the other Misakas, and she knew it.
My eyebrows raised even higher. "...We best get started, then?" I responded. I hadn't expected unanimity at all- it was my hands they were putting their lives in, after all- but I had it, now.
I started the brainwave synchronisation process.
Not even a minute later, 10044 reported that the robot had touched down. We had our destination- Hishigata was making his stand in a high school, still closed for the summer, but only a few days away from opening.
Clearly, he hadn't expected this to last much longer.
Neither did I.
__________
When we arrived, about five minutes after the enemy did, we were in crisis mode- there was no point in going quiet anymore, no point in hiding anything we could do.
Or- given that everyone here was not only part of Mental Upper, but getting fed information and directives as fast as I could think of them, or review them from other team members- there was no point hiding anything I could do.
I knew that there were five brains within the building, but somehow the information on where they were just wasn't making it to me, like when I'd tried to look at Magnus Stiyl's brain. The magical bullshit was nonsensical like that. Hishigata must have had this place protected back when Rosenthal had been part of the team, or had relocated previous protections from somewhere else; I hadn't had the opportunity to attack other DA facilities, but it didn't seem unlikely that they had similar elsewhere.
…I really needed to work on just finding a bypass for all these magical and electrical defences.
But we had a paper controller boosted by multiple Level 4s and Level 5s, and a clairvoyant that could see anything under the sky. They were holed up in a school, a building known for containing many books and papers. It wasn't hard to do the maths.
The building practically exploded as Sakuragi got into range; the members of Scavenger whooped and hollered at the sight of a hated educational institution being torn open from the inside-out. "Maid outfits? Destroying schools? I like this boss!" announced Sakuragi, to loud agreement from the rest of her teammates.
Our improvised hit squad poured out of the van, and I ordered one of Scavenger's usual tricks- combining no friction and paper control to create personal vehicles. Seiin High School was already a shell of its former self, and rapidly losing mass by the second; the concrete, bricks and mortar were crumbling like mud beneath a pressure washer. At this pace, wherever he lay within the building, he'd be exposed in not much more than a minute.
It was one hell of a way to knock on Hishigata's doorstep.
Hishigata knocked back.
Before I could even really understand what I was defending from, Meltdowner and I flared her power into a shield, and I automatically formed an ablative wall of paper between us and the heat of the twin flares. That much power wasn't unnecessary- even with a Level 5 power, it wasn't enough to redirect the attack in its entirety, and white-hot plasma sprayed out to the sides of the shield.
When we dropped the shield, it was obvious what had caused it.
In the rubble of the edge of the chemistry building, there stood a machine, covered in exposed wires and joints, with a computer screen and two megaphones obscuring the face of Accelerator, who'd been strapped into the machine's heart.
It reminded me of the mech from one of the Alien movies more than anything, really- something industrial and dirty, rather than the clean lines and sleek shapes of the previous, magic-based Coffins. The screen was lit up with a man's face, visible from here only using Iizumi's Predator ability; blonde, but with day-old stubble growing from his chin and upper lip, and with greasy hair. "Hah! I knew I'd get a reaction, but don't you think this is a bit over the top?" he said easily, voice tinny and echoing given the megaphones and the distance.
I launched the paper at the building the machine had come from- there wouldn't have been time to relocate too much. I didn't need to fight this robot unless it got in my way, so there was no point engaging in it if the telekinesis we had available could get to him and bypass the fight entirely.
"Not at all," I replied, although he couldn't hear from me at this distance.
That white-hot beam appeared again, but this time, it appeared from the flanks of the machine. I realised what they were. They were beams of hyper-accelerated matter- air, concrete, whatever- and they turned the paper into ash on the wind before cutting through nearby buildings in a burst of fire, like a pressurised water jet.
He'd done it- Accelerator's power was not only under his control, but boosted in power. He might not have had the skill and finesse of Accelerator, but in his hands, the One Way Road had just become the barrel of a particle cannon.
With no apparent means of lift, the makeshift robot lifted up into the sky, before we could try and use the cover of the building it protected to get something past it. "Apparently not," Hishigata said, in response to our attempted attack. The back of my neck tingled, and Meltdowner and I raised the shields again- another matter cannon screamed into the barriers with astounding force, and more lances of white-hot material fired out to the sides.
He was destroying the material we could control telekinetically- and he was doing a damn good job of it. Soon, all we had to work with was the material behind our shields.
The beams came down… I realised that the Accelerator-bot couldn't keep it up forever. "Don't worry, I don't have any grudge against you, yeah?" said Hishigata, through his megaphones- he was probably redirecting the sound with Accelerator's power, just so we could hear it from here. "I mean, you're going to die if you keep trying to stop me when I'm this close, but soon I'll have all I want and you can give up. I'll let you deal with this, me and Hundun have an intruder to deal with… Ciao."
"Oh, come on…" hissed Meltdowner, utterly done with such casual disrespect from people doing their best to kick her ass, a moment before she had to bring up her shield again.
This time, though, Accelerator wasn't aiming at us directly- he was aiming all around us, the same bracketing maneuver I'd used to intimidate Scavenger. But he wasn't hitting air, he was aiming for the ground, and the Meltdowner shields we were using had to either expand vertically to keep them from hitting overhead or expand around our flanks to protect our sides.
If he couldn't pierce Meltdowner's barriers, or force us to bake ourselves in an effort to keep from getting sliced and charred to pieces by the streams of hyper-accelerated plasma coming our way, he- or rather, what was presumably the dim-witted but slowly-learning AI control module in charge of Accelerator- would just kill us with the splash damage.
But we'd come to an agreement, within the data-feeds of Mental Out- if he was truly using Accelerator's power to its full potential, there'd be no need to pause. Our hypothesis seemed to be correct- Accelerator needed oxygen, and while he was turning the matter into around him into super-heated plasma jets, the heat must have been converting the oxygen in the air into toxic ozone, nitrous oxide, and other such compounds.
In a battle of boosted Level 5s, Accelerator's only way to break through Meltdowner was to close in, but leaving his perch would leave Hishigata vulnerable to a last-ditch telekinetic crash of paper. We didn't know where in the building Hishigata was, but we knew enough to kill both him and 10046 if we were all going to be killed by Accelerator anyway. So now it was another single-strike battle. Whether it was Accelerator's control module finally leveraging Accelerator in a way that would kill us, or us finding a way to break Accelerator's defences, the first attack to hit would win- we just had to ensure that attack was ours.
The next clash of powers came, and this time, Accelerator aimed far in front of us. The ground beneath us shifted and shuddered, whatever open space lay below ground immediately giving under the force of the attack- but while we'd lost a lot of material, we still had some to use, and we shored up the ground beneath our feet with oobleck and paper.
Our own probing was much more subtle… but as I saw steam rising on the hull of the robot, its presence generated by Mental Out, the movement patterns confirmed something else. We'd been dead right about the loss of processing power, too.
I consulted Misaka 10044's network connection and Kinuhata's calculations for confirmation; excess moisture shouldn't have gotten through his shield if it was 100% functional. Hot water vapour was hanging in the air behind the machine, a visible gradient where Accelerator's barrier was deflecting it, but during the attack some of the vapour had been pulled through.
When it was launching an attack, it wasn't operating on Accelerator's normal 'whitelist'- it was just filtering the worst out as a cost-saving measure, relying on the mass beams' fury to make it impossible to launch an attack, and the rest of its vectors were aligning with the beams rather than the defensive shield.
But our anti-beam defence was only relying on one Level 5 ability. And we had another with which to attack.
In response to the data on the plan being passed to her, Mugino split from the group. She broke into a sprint, powerful legs working to make as much distance as possible before the next attack. One bulbous camera on the machine's shoulder followed her… But the other shoulder's camera hadn't left us. It was obviously going to attack us both- and from what we'd observed of the robot's attacks, it couldn't attack in too many directions at once. If we broke its primary attack into two directions, we'd limit the possibilities for how it could attack.
In other words, splitting up would make it predictable, in the very moment its guard was down. It fired- and drawing from Kinuhata and her implanted Accelerator equations, I calculated what the vector patterns would look like.
And knowing that, had been how I'd broken through with the reverse-punch the first time.
Once I loaded those calculations into Mental Out, and filtered my usual calculations through those altered vectors, it was all over for the machine controlling Accelerator. The beams screamed against two separate Meltdowner shields, one from me, one from the real Meltdowner, at those oh-so-predictable angles… and then they cut off abruptly.
Mental Out had used 'incorrect' vectors at the edge of the mid-attack, misaligned vectors of the machine-controlled Accelerator, and Accelerator's own power had 'corrected' them for me. The command I'd sent that way had been simply to add Mental Out's vectors to the whitelist. And that meant I could get through.
With the person at the heart of the machine as vulnerable as anyone else now, all I needed to do was break the machine before it could force through any more commands. His mathematical abilities were in shambles, without a direct network upload, but there was enough for what I needed to do.
The machine around him burst into pieces- to the wild applause of the more excitable members of the group. Even Mugino was elated to finally have a win- "Hell yes!" she yelled at the top of her lungs, seeing the Rank 1 finally fall from the sky.
It was just like Doctor Kiyama had learned back with Level Upper. Sure, you could try and match the power of a Level 5 however you liked… but if you didn't know how to use it well, the most you could hope for was a speedbump.
As Accelerator fell, Yakamaru used her Mix Master power to quickly fabricate material for a soft landing- a blast of air from Kinuhata's hand was enough to send it soaring across the shattered landscape, and it cracked open, frothing and fizzing into a mass of soft, fluffy foam. Scavenger's leader used their Predator ability to confirm he came to a smooth halt as the froth dissolved underneath his unconscious body. "He's landed safely!" said Iizuma, somewhat redundantly, but I nodded in approval nevertheless.
Now that there wasn't anything stopping us, the buildings around us- already damaged by the uncontrolled mass beams- burst their windows, as whatever nearby paper could be found was used to make a new paper swarm to finish our impromptu demolition project. "Let's get him into the network- his choker thing's wrecked, so he can borrow our calculations instead for now," I informed the others. "Mugino," I said, even after she was already running over, "you get to carry him while it loads in."
"Oh, so I have to babysit the Rank One now?" she complained, leaning over and picking him up in a bridal carry- she grunted a little at the weight, but the woman was ungodly strong for her build.
"I will bribe you by saying you're allowed to never let him live it down," I said reasonably.
"...Y'know what?" replied Mugino. "I'll take that-"
And then the courtyard between us exploded in a glowing pillar of pallid flesh.
The memory upload was already completed.
__________
The colour was gone.
…No, that wasn't it, I realised. The colours on that… thing, just looked more real than anything else around it.
It glowed with prismatic lights overlaying pale, stark tissues that I couldn't quite call 'skin' or 'bark'.
As I watched, a vivid green beam- the only thing that seemed as real as it- shrieked its fury, material bubbling and boiling on its flanks and tearing holes in its superstructure; Meltdowner clearly disliked it as much as I did. The attack annihilated what it touched- but as I felt the ground beneath my feet vibrate, and saw its flesh twist back into position, I realised that whatever it was, it was still taking in mass.
I realised what I was looking at- a tree of Sephiroth, but in massive scale, on something even less understandable than how Railgun had described the AIM Burst. And as I looked, the mound of flesh at its base continued to grow, now starting to differentiate its tissues into structures that looked like twisted, broken wings. I didn't know what it was made of, but at least some part of it was a substance that Mental Out was reacting to- the wispy substance it has brushed against, whatever that 'residual information' brain had been made of, back when Huotou had first been animated.
The destruction had divided us from Mugino and the still-unconscious Accelerator. I sent my orders through Mental Out- Iizumi and Sakuragi would be splitting off to support Mugino, as well as Yakumaru, since some of her chemical mixes would be suitable for making sure Accelerator didn't bleed out from that head wound of his (falling from the sky without his shield had done him no favours). They zoomed off on a paper construct, motivated primarily by their own terror at the out-of-control situation. Me, Michan, Kinuhata and Seike would stick together as blunt-force instruments.
Whatever circles or rituals had been here, while they might have survived our battle with Robo-cellerator, they hadn't survived this- and I could still track four people within the building. Huotou, Rosenthal, Misaka 10046, and Hishigata himself.
The fifth, I couldn't track, but I could only assume that it was somewhere in this mass of flesh- the brain of the Taowu itself.
Hishigata was apparently wearing a fail-deadly barrier, but Rosenthal wasn't. She and her zombie girl had independently deduced which base Hishigata was using in our absence, and she'd gone in to assassinate the Taowu.
Her plan was to use a particular knife. The knife she wielded was enchanted with, in effect, an emergency off-switch- something vital when Mugino was rapidly learning she couldn't find the limits of its regenerative ability. Even in its mortal form, the Taowu was nigh-impossible to kill, and with it transformed into this growing Tower of Babel we needed that knife more than ever.
With their powers boosted, and working in the perfect synchrony of Mental Out, the walls and limp tendrils of flesh that stood were largely arbitrary before Kinuhata and Seike. "They think some super piece of crap like that can stop us?!" snarled Kinuhata, her inner fragments of Accelerator shining through her usual personality, and she blasted through with concentrated pneumatic bursts. Seike moved along behind her, tense as anything, using his friction control to make sure the debris slipped quietly out of our way.
As we moved, eyes grew in our wake- we were being watched. That was fine; I could watch this thing right back.
The vanguard tore past one last wall of meat, and the five of us entered the room.
Hishigata, Rosenthal and Huotou were all standing in an elevator, with 10046 being carried, unconscious, in Huotou's arms; all the other exits were blocked by Taowu's body, and he'd been fruitlessly trying to get the elevator to work. But the destruction of the wall had been enough to draw their attention. "...Ah," he said. "End of the line, I guess. Funny… Screwing so many people over, and I didn't even get what I wanted out of it, yeah?"
"I take it that's not your sister up there," I said, approaching him with a frown. He was wearing the fail-deadly helmet- but there was blood running down the side of his head, and two small, wet screws drilled into either side of it.
"Hmm? Oh, yeah, not my brightest idea," he said. "It's easy enough to threaten someone to take off a helmet, so I thought a little bit of impromptu surgery would delay you for long enough to let this happen, yeah…?" He laughed mirthlessly. "Of course, it's not helping now that I need a crazy bitch like you to fight God, and the information is all locked up in here…" Hishigata tapped the side of his head for emphasis, and winced.
"Seike?" I interrupted- he stepped forwards. "Excuse me, Hishigata, this might sting a little."
He looked in sudden anxious confusion as Seike approached him with a vindictive grin, but didn't step away. "What are you- grhlk!" He made a strangled noise of pain, as Seike simply set the friction to zero and let the screws spin out of his head. "Agh…! Argh, fuck," he breathed, quickly tugging off the helmet so I could scan what he knew.
"Miss Shokuhou…!" said Rosenthal, appalled.
In response, I just gestured wordlessly at the giant mass of flesh that was slowly creeping into the world. "Literal apocalypse scenario," I pointed out reasonably. "I am allowed some moral leeway!"
Hishigata hissed. "It's fine, Esther," he said. "Get that shiny knife of yours- we should solve this sooner rather than later, yeah?"
Michan raised us up on Liquid Shadow, with our two wallbreakers opening a hole in the elevator roof. We stepped back outside, into the pale light left behind by the imminent Level 6.
I'd been monitoring the situation with Mental Out, but it certainly hadn't improved. "Why won't you die?!" shouted Meltdowner, off in the distance; I only knew what she was saying because of Mental Out. She was desperately trying to find some weak point, some injury that would stick. But no matter how many times her emerald blasts tore boiling holes in the beast, the damage didn't stick- and now, with tendrils like the roots of a redwood, it was starting to fight back.
No longer was Meltdowner attacking its main body- she was being forced to send her searing beams into the masses of writhing flesh that were trying to attack her, tipped now with clacking human teeth.
"Th-that's the perfect vessel… for the perfect soul…?" said Rosenthal, looking into the sky in disbelief. The thing was still growing; its upper reaches were scraping the edges of my unenhanced range.
"No," I responded. "It's still growing." I glanced at her knife- a magical object. "I'm not sure if we can use that… but I'm sure we can get you into position."
Hishigata's knowledge suggested that the talisman acting as that thing's core would still be in its human body. To check, I had Meltdowner redirect a beam from her defence against the maw-tendrils to attack it, mostly out of spite- but when it simply regenerated from that too, despite having technically destroyed the talisman, I knew from Rosenthal and Hishigata that the talisman itself would keep regenerating until we destroyed it properly.
There was only one obvious way to kill this thing, and it was in melee combat, with a small, delicate knife. Its regeneration, and the sheer mass it was drawing into itself from the concrete of the buildings around it, was only getting stronger the longer we left it.
If only we could wait for Accelerator to finish synchronising… but if it reached Level 6 for real, and Level 6 was truly the level of power that the title promised, waiting too long would be signing our death warrants regardless of what Accelerator could do.
"Miss Rosenthal, Huotou," I asked. "Could Huotou please get Misaka to safety? It'll be easier to protect ourselves without someone unconscious here."
Rosenthal looked to Huotou- she nodded to the zombie. "I will do this, Adonai," said Huotou to Rosenthal. "Please, stay safe." Then she leapt, and tore off at superhuman speeds- tendrils snapped in her wake, but with a few paper blades to divert the attacks, she quickly left their reach with her human cargo safe and sound.
With that seen to… I braced myself, pressing my crutch into the oobleck platform below us. "Let's get this done," I said.
Then- raised up by a geyser of fluttering paper, still soggy from tearing through the meat in the building below- our half of the team soared into the sky, to meet the abomination head-on.
Seeing our approach with a billion eyes growing from its sides, Taowu turned its grublike head towards us, the tiny body that had once been a girl called Hirumi staring smugly at us from where it was embedded at the creature's peak. It shouted something- and though it was too far away to hear, with Predator, I could read its lips.
"Ah, more to experiment with?" said Taowu, licking its lips. "Hundun was far too small a meal to fuel my evolution… Ah, if only we'd kept some of those rebel guard pawns around. But perhaps this will help. And coming right to me, instead of fleeing… Come on then, little magicians!" it declared. "Come and serve the god of the new world!"
Seven tendrils came down at us- one for each of us. Rosenthal, Hishigata, Misaka 10044, Seike, Kinuhata, Michan and myself. Clearly, Taowu wasn't expecting failure in its attack.
Taowu definitely should have expected to fail. None of the snapping maws reached us- a wall of paper rose up around us, and with a single touch from Seike, the wall's friction was set to 'no'. The attacks slipped right off the shield, like a dog biting a beachball- and then the tendrils burst into flame, Seike's power having jumped to them with the contact, setting their friction to 'yes'.
"Ow!" cried Seike, and I turned to him- I realised that we'd had an injury, even if none of them had touched us. He'd started bleeding from the leg, taking his weight off the unexpected injury. His arm was bleeding, too, and he was clutching his waist. "What happened?!"
After a moment, I recognised what had happened- I grimaced, quickly improvising the tissues back together. He was still hurt, neither I nor anyone else in the team were healers by any means, but I had enough different powers and points of comparison to knit him up enough that he wouldn't be falling over. "...Everyone. Don't try and directly manipulate that thing's flesh with your powers, if you can help it," I said, transmitting to the other members of the team too, just in case. "They're using a different technique to Academy City, and it's embedded in the stuff it's made of- if you can't deal with the backlash using your powers, it'll hurt you, and if that backlash hits you in the brain, you're dead."
The tendrils that we'd redirected, already having regenerated after having gotten far enough for Seike's friction powers to fail, lunged again- this time from below. Meltdowner's power strength was reserved for her own problems, so I couldn't afford to use her beams right now; that didn't mean I was out of options, though.
I couldn't tear through them entirely with paper alone, but I could hamstring them enough to delay- quite literally, tearing through muscles with the intent to redirect and slow rather than to actually cut anything apart. This was no longer a question of whether we could fight them off or not- we couldn't, not forever. Now we just had to stall the enemy long enough to strike the final blow. It was the position that Hishigata had been in, a few minutes ago; if we got our win condition, all the strength in the world wouldn't matter.
With one last lurch, the paper geyser that sent us into the sky threw us forwards, and then dissolved into a shield to guard our backs. Michan's power brought us skidding to a halt on the crown of the beast's head, putting us face to face with our foe.
"You're more resourceful than I thought you'd be," Taowu gloated, a torso embedded in a crevice of abominable flesh, even as our platform rushed into close range. "But you-"
Rosenthal plunged the knife forwards, aiming for its heart as we reached it.
But a tendril grew from nothing to stop it- it lodged in the flesh, and with a horrified gasp, its writhing made Rosenthal lose her grip.
"No!" shouted Michan, thrusting her power forwards with all her speed- but the tendril flicked to the side lazily, and the knife was flung away as it came loose, the blob of putty falling down, down, down off the side of the beast with it. Then Michan had to redirect her attention back to the tendrils; a single sweep was enough to force the platform backwards just to keep it from bisecting us all, a thunderous noise ringing out at the impact.
I lunged with every single sheet controlled by Perfect Paper I could manage- but a single great tendril came crashing down on the knife, and slammed it down to the floor, more than a kilometre below us, faster than any of our powers could catch up to. As the tendril lifted, Predator's view spotted the knife… but a few estimates of the speed of the tendrils, the mass that would need to be forced aside, suggested that- from here- Taowu could intercept any attempts to get that knife until its growth became exponential.
The knife was gone, and too far away to reach before Taowu reached Level 6. Our win condition was no longer an option, I realised, with growing dread.
"As I was saying, before you so rudely interrupted- but you can't win," finished Taowu, grinning wide as it unknowingly echoed my thoughts. "Do you have any last words, before you're repurposed to serve the needs of the ultimate golem?"
More tendrils sprouted from underneath it, closing in slowly, lazily, taking pleasure in the growing fear amongst our ranks. Rosenthal put her hands to her mouth. Seike, Kinuhata and Michan stepped closer to me, each raising their powers to cover a different angle.
Hishigata didn't step back- he stepped forwards, stepping off the Liquid Shadow platform. "...Hirumi," he said, "if you're in there-"
Before he could finish, a pair of jaws sprouted around him like a moray eel from a hole- crunching through his ribs, and then snapping open to swallow him entirely before his torso could fall. Rosenthal let out a strangled cry of despair at the loss of a man who'd once been her friend, Kinuhata physically holding her back from trying to follow the jaws as they retracted.
"...Any last words- that aren't utterly inane, I should clarify?" Taowu said, unbothered.
We didn't have the knife… What could we even do, other than wait to die…?
My fists clenched. If we'd just been able to keep it from getting the memories-
I realised something.
If Mental Out could sense some fluid other than water in the body of this beast, and merely using his power on this thing had given Seike magical backlash…
I could sense something loud and clear, and the most notable physical component of the Taowu's god-body seemed to be 'magic'.
And the same could be said for that 'residual memories' brain, back when Huotou had first been resurrected.
…Did that mean Mental Out could treat magic as a fluid?
And if the knife was just an emergency override, written in that fluid, just like how brains were a person written in the electrical solutions of the neurons…? If I could copy the magical pattern, rearrange some of the magic around me to fit it…
Trying anything would risk backlash, strong enough to kill us all. Accelerator's power had partially loaded- it would have to be enough. There wasn't enough time for anything else. I set an equation to minimise the change of vectors within my own body, hoping that the partial strength of the One Way Road would be enough to protect me from the backlash.
I opened my metaphorical third eye to the construct around me, and my whole body suddenly felt a sharp pain- but the pressure didn't overwhelm me, the vectors firmly controlled, and I stayed firmly on my feet.
Now that I could see it all, Mental Out alone wouldn't be enough. I was finally able to look for its brain, but I saw that its mind was protected, like whatever defences Rosenthal had, and whatever way Magnus Stiyl had shielded his own mind.
The knife, as far away as it was, still lay within my boosted range. And now I was actively looking for such things, I could see it- the patterns on it, inscribed in that not-material that I was somehow picking up.
In need of a solution, a guide, I dived into Rosenthal's mind- and suddenly clutched my head. The knowledge I needed… It would be on one of those grimoires, and it hurt in a way I couldn't describe to flick past the knowledge of artificial souls, the-
There. I saved the fragment of knowledge I needed to my own memory, almost feeling like a brand within my skull and got the hell out of her head. She seemed to realise something had happened, turning towards me despite the sadistically-encroaching danger around us.
My mind burned and sputtered. But I'd found what I needed to get the access code. I didn't have any means to stab Taowu from here- but the talisman was embedded in magic, and if I could manipulate that-
I took hold, a strange light glowing behind me for a moment. Mental Out's influence snagged the talisman, and twisted.
The tendrils shuddered, stopping their advance. Flashes of green light started to show through the forest of flesh; the tendrils had stopped for her, too, and she was starting to cut through them to attack the main body. Taowu itself had stilled before us; its expression had gone from leering triumph to frozen confusion, and now, it was shifting to dawning horror.
"No…" it breathed. "No! I will- I will not- I DO NOT PERMIT THIS!"
The tendrils burrowed into its own flesh, and with a great ripping noise, the meat beneath us was sent flying into the air, scattering us to the winds.
But that was okay. With a paper-based telekinetic on our side, the fluttering winds came up to catch most of us; Kinuhata simply manipulated the air to control her fall, and myself and Seike amped up the air resistance just enough to act as a parachute. The acceleration hadn't been fast enough to do any real damage to us squishy mortals, though some of the team probably had whiplash, all that Taowu had done was take us out of melee range.
Taowu's defences had already been broken by the magical access code contained on the knife; while the regeneration was a property of its body alone, the defences of its mind were not, and its whole endeavour was reliant on one, single, critical point- just like AIM Burst, just like the Coffins, just like every other attempt at reaching Level 6 through artificial means.
Technologically-downloaded memories were always easy to detect. I reached in, Accelerator's power bracing me against the magical backlash, and I deleted the memories of ten-thousand deaths.
For a moment, nothing changed- it continued to regenerate. For a moment, I wondered if we were too late.
Then one of Mugino's beams cleaved into its flank, and rather than healing, the beast's upper body buckled under the loss of support. Its wings began to droop, and when they started to be cleaved off by beams of vindictive green light, I knew that it had lost. Without its powers being artificially boosted by the ritual it had tried to perform… The sheer mass it had added to itself was enough to make it as powerful as any Level 5, but it didn't know how to use esper powers, and so before the onslaught of a real Level 5's attacks, its size simply made it an easier target.
I redirected my fall, away from the others, and requested a few firing targets from Meltdowner. She obliged. By the time I touched the ground, the Taowu's core was already falling towards me, and- picking up the ritual knife, held in a motile blob of oobleck that had come forth to meet me- I ambled forwards to meet it when it hit the ground.
Above me, the Taowu's body was caving in on itself, turning to dust- like a deflating blister, and like a vampire under the sun.
Remembering the trick I'd improvised in the battle with Accelerator, I set Mental Out to generate moisture in the air; the water droplets gathered and condensed, and the dust above and around me fell as pale white rain. I didn't feel that breathing in a monster that ate concrete would be healthy, even if it was dissolving into nothingness.
A lump of pale meat hit the ground with a thud, about ten metres ahead of me. After one last burst of Meltdowner- hearing a cry of pain as I did it- I disconnected the Mental Upper network, feeling my range shrink suddenly, and stumbled with my crutch towards the fallen, severed body of Taowu that had one been Hishigata Hiromi.
"Taowu," I greeted, as it glared up at me with one baleful eye open, speaking to it in its own language- an old dialect of chinese, to be specific, as he'd been born and raised in that country. "Or should I say, Isaac Rosenthal?"
"Hah… How did you hear that?" it said, its voice full of hate. "What… what sort of interfering creature are you?"
"Really?" I asked bemusedly, still approaching it. "The giant zombie meat-lump wants to know what sort of creature I am?"
"I… am a golem… that was almost the perfect combination, of body and soul," spat Taowu. "But you… none of that should have been possible. Not for magicians, not for one of you… 'esper' creatures. What are you…?!"
"Ah, well… I actually had a conversation about that earlier today," I said. "For people I like, I'm just somebody who wants to see people smile. But for people like you…"
I grinned. Taowu pushed with its two remaining limbs, trying to make distance from me- but as broken as it was, it couldn't even escape from a middle-schooler with a crutch, and I closed in on it.
"Well…" I said. "Every mind within a kilometre of me is allowed to have a pleasant day, with little things like free will and self-interest and not being cogs in a greater mind, because I don't feel that being a hyper-controlling megalomaniac is a desirable end goal. I don't think you'd understand that, Mister Rosenthal. I don't think you understand at all…"
It tried to keep moving away as I reached melee range- I stabbed at it with my crutch, between the head and the shoulder, to keep it from moving away any further.
"So, with that in mind," I said. "I control hearts and minds with impunity. I can have any power of the people around me I like, and I live in Academy City. I can generate matter from nothing… What sort of creature- pray tell, Mister so-called God- do you think I am, from that narrow-minded perspective of yours?"
"That…" said Taowu. "That's-"
"The correct answer is: someone who's going to end you, and do it the right way," I replied with a wide smile, raising the knife.
And, just to ruin the drama he probably desired from his final moments, I added, "Because I have no idea how zombies work."
And I brought the knife down.
It pierced the talisman attached to Hirumi's chest with ease. Taowu mouthed in wordless pain for a moment… then it crumbled, into just as much dust as anything else.
I left the knife where it lay, and slowly pushed myself back to my feet. I took a few, deep breaths, and let the tension drain from my body. Then, I relayed a few, simple words to the scattered members of the team- "Give yourselves a pat on the back, guys," I said. "We've done it."
