Still carrying Last Order, Accelerator climbed into a civilian car parked in the snow. He was in the passenger seat, with Misaka Worst in the driver’s.
“Where to, sir?”
“Sneaking around in the shadows is just gonna wear me out. Quickest way to make things right is to jump right into the middle of the chaos.”
“Understood,” said Misaka Worst in an offhand tone, inserting the key given to her by Elizalina and starting the engine. She didn’t seem to have any difficulty driving with one hand, maybe because the car was an automatic.
The headlights’ glow danced, piercing across the unnatural darkness that had fallen. The passenger car, driven by Misaka Worst, made it out of the small town quickly, coming out onto the snowfield.
“About five minutes until the border…Man, you can tell all the way from here how insane the battle is. Unscientific would be an understatement.”
A giant fortress had risen in the dark skies.
It was incredibly huge. It had to be quite a distance away, but it was practically covering an entire swath of the sky as though a cumulonimbus cloud had come overhead.
And then, with that fortress behind them, two faintly glowing angels clashed again and again in midair. Their respective wings tangled together and plucked the others’ out, and shock wave–like shouts were sent scattering into their surroundings. As their battle continued, a starry sky, equally as unnatural as the blackened night, began to spread.
“Gah…ah…?!”
It was just like whenever he was near Unabara. But this time, the pressure crushing Accelerator’s chest in the passenger’s seat was extraordinary, nothing like those times. He felt like it would be strange if nothing happened to his heart. Something about that starry sky wasn’t right.
Groaning through the pressure in his chest, Accelerator said, “…You really have no clue what that is? If you’re designed to pick up anger and hatred from the Misaka network, then you should be able to draw information from it, too, right?”
“Which angel are you referring to? The one over there with the ice wings? Or that one with the lightning wings?”
“…”
“And for your information, just because Academy City has the information, I don’t think that necessarily means it’s scientific.”
…Which meant maybe it was only natural not to have enough strength with only science in order to save Last Order, who was deeply related to it.
That thing.
The sky those monsters danced in—that was the world wherein lived the cause of Last Order’s suffering.
So maybe, in order to rescue Last Order from there, Accelerator himself would need to ascend into that territory.
How?
Aiwass’s power had been overwhelming. Accelerator’s black wings alone didn’t put up any kind of fight. His trivial villainous crown couldn’t protect the little girl. What should he do, then? How could he protect her smile from this unreasonable world?
The sheaf of parchment hidden in his inside pocket almost felt sarcastic in its insistence on its own existence.
The scribble-like spells and magic circles drawn on them were linked to their technology, which could use “mysteries” on the same level as the angel Amata Kihara created on September 30 or even higher levels. He would fight a problem where theory didn’t apply in a way that ignored theory. It was a dangerous gamble, one that came with many unknown risks. Normally, he would have needed to strictly avoid entrusting Last Order’s fate to something like that. But still, maybe at this point that was his only chance to win. It was like groping through utter darkness, not knowing what paths would lead to a cliff.
And then—
—It happened.
The two monsters fighting in the skies, tangled together, rapidly descended. The scene would have been so powerful to a religious man that it would add a page to the legends; but Accelerator didn’t shed tears of emotion. He didn’t have time. The monsters with those wings growing out of them were, no matter how one thought about it, headed straight for their car.
More specifically, it looked like one of them was after Accelerator while the other chased it.
“…Did they catch a whiff of this parchment?”
Feeling it in his pocket, Accelerator grinned evilly.
He recalled Elizalina saying something about there being a chance the Russian organization responsible for this situation wouldn’t be able to complete their little project without retrieving the parchment.
In the driver’s seat, Misaka Worst, gripping the steering wheel, whistled. “Phew!! What now, what now? This could be more dangerous than a hurricane rushing our way!!”
“Natural disasters and man-made ones have a simple difference,” said Accelerator in a low voice, opening the passenger’s seat window. Without paying attention to the fiercely cold, stabbing winds, he said, “It’s whether there’s an enemy to kill. How nice it is to have a clear target in front of me. Means I don’t have to let anything annoying hold me back, like my anger not having an outlet.”
After finishing, he leaned his upper body out from the passenger’s seat. Then he sat on the window frame like some motorcycle gang member in the old days.
“You take care of the kid. Buy me some time until I can settle the score.”
“Not sure about you trusting Misaka. She’s absolutely awful with that stuff, you know.”
“You’re lucky you’re useful. You still have a chance not to get killed even after a shitty joke like that.”
“Mm-hmm. Misaka likes that better.”
He didn’t have any more time to chat. The two monsters would make landfall in a moment.
Accelerator flipped his electrode’s switch.
Manipulating air currents to extend four tornado-like wings from his back, he threw himself from the car window frame.
He didn’t crash into the ground.
His body shot through the battlefield like a rocket.
Another monster had just joined the fight.