He turned to face her.
To the little girl who even now suffered for no good reason.
To the true battlefield on which he needed to fight.
September 30—when he’d confronted Amata Kihara, leader of the Hound Dogs, a doctor named Heaven Canceler had pushed buttons on him that he didn’t like. But now, he thought, he could stick out his chest and stand on the same playing field. He understood the value of fighting to protect a single life, the nobleness of struggling to keep her flame alive.
Brawls weren’t the only kind of battles.
Victories didn’t only mean taking from others.
Before now, he’d vowed to reign as the paragon of villainy to protect those important to him from the unjust darkness. In bloodstained back alleys, he’d massacred one shithead after another—trash like himself—and lost many things in exchange for winning those death matches, continuing to be swallowed into even deeper darkness.
But this battle was different.
As he was now, he no longer needed to be a villain…!!
“…Hmph.”
Accelerator looked down and mulled over that thought for a moment.
He thought it over very deeply.
When his face came up again, his eyes held none of the hesitation from when he’d been wandering Russia.
“I’m starting.”
He kept it short.
He didn’t need any particularly flashy action.
He just had to close his eyes and give voice to the “answer” in his mind.
Then it would end.
It would all end.
Brwwaaaahhh!! Enormous numerical formulas began to flow into the world in the form of song.
Was Misaka Worst, watching beside him, surprised? This wasn’t anything special. Accelerator already had experience removing a virus with his own strength—the one from Ao Amai. The system was just different, that was all. Which meant he should be able to do this. He had everything he needed. If he maintained himself in the best condition possible until the end, and produced results like a machine would, that would be enough.
That should have been enough.
But he felt a slight tug in the mechanisms that were supposed to be running smoothly.
An ominous micro-vibration, like one portending a train’s complete derailment.
The golden sky…?!
The pressure weighing down from directly overhead possessed the same sort of mysterious vectors as Aiwass. Yes—with this, he figured, it wasn’t strange there had been slight interference with him and Last Order. Anyone standing close to power lines with high-tension currents in them would be able to hear white noise like on a television or radio. It was the same thing. Having figured it out instantly, Accelerator worked slight corrections into his calculations.
He imagined a ball rolling down a hilly road.
Down the hill was a cliff.
If he continued to correct his calculations like this, he’d cross some sort of ultimate line. No matter what he’d deciphered, Accelerator was currently a being who lived in the normal, physical world. He only happened to know about this mysterious rule set. He wasn’t steeped in it himself.
He’d have to cross that line.
He’d be swallowed up by that mysterious rule set.
He knew it—but he didn’t stop. He plunged forward. He shot straight down the hilly road. The cliff was already in sight. Accelerator took the deep hole beyond as a gate. He faced forward, without hesitation, flying into that bottomless darkness.
He passed through it within an instant.
And then, immediately after, something went wrong.
“…???!!!”
Crkkk. Something inside him screamed. The blood vessels on the back of his hand swelled abnormally. He keenly felt the thick pipes of blood running from his fingertips to his shoulders. Right after realizing that, the rupture occurred. His skin broke from the inside, and a dark-red fluid rushed out all at once.
Had he realized it?
The voice was too unique, using breathing impossible for normal humans, wildly flailing around the vibrations of sound not only in his throat but through his whole body, then producing it from his mouth—he was refining mana from his life force, building a spell, and outputting it onto this real, actual world…Did he realize he was performing true, genuine sorcery?
Espers couldn’t use magic. If they tried to anyway, what waited for them was an intense physical rejection.
The damage didn’t stop in that one spot. The flow of his arteries and veins and nerves strung out through him like a spiderweb rose to the surface of his mind with eerie throbbing and anguish. They were making their locations plainly known due to the compression his internal organs felt. A huge amount of sweat burst out all over him, more than if he’d suddenly entered a sauna. That clear, disgusting liquid mixed with something else, something red. Accelerator felt like little parts of his body were exploding.
And that sensation wasn’t inaccurate.
But he still continued.
Because he couldn’t stop now.
“Oooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!”
A gruff but sublime voice, similar to primordial dancing songs of indigenous peoples, spread through the white lands. Even with every part of his body soaked in blood and countless wounds pushing apart from within, those notes never broke for a moment. It was the strength of his will that kept him going—he wanted to save this one little girl, and those feelings alone overcame the real-world pain, allowing him to do advanced mental operations without even tiny errors.
There was a story like this, once.
In the days when Crossists were still persecuted by the Romans, many disciples going through horrific torture had, apparently, sometimes seen the shadows of angels.
The more boring types believed these were illusions caused by an oversecretion of brain matter to escape the worst, most terrible pain. After all, an angel appearing would be far too convenient. If a creature called an angel really existed, if such a grand being would side with them, then they would have massacred the Romans on the spot to begin with.
And maybe part of that was right.
But what if the disciples, who had passed into the extremities of the mind, had unconsciously gone through the mental labor to elaborately conduct huge and complex spells, temporarily controlling telesma to perform advanced acts of summoning? Couldn’t one have an opposing viewpoint, one a little more fantastical? Couldn’t one interpret it as actual angels coming for them, if only for a moment, in response to their mental voices and through the momentary spells they wove?
Yes:
Accelerator was praying.
With all his heart. Without asking for anything else. Without even paying attention to his own pain. Academy City’s strongest monster kept on praying—to save something more precious to him than his own life.
When that white angel, who had fallen to the depths of the earth through immense malice, had tried to crawl back up in search of light, its wings had been broken by another monster.
But could anyone think he was still forsaken after looking at his blood-covered face?
Wouldn’t they have to think that, even if he had fallen to the bottom of hell, his radiance had never clouded?
For example:
The many devout who had been physically abused, thrown into jails or brothels, and yet turned those horrifying places into shining places of faith.
The soul was not sullied merely by where it stood.
When sinners confronted their sins and risked their lives to make up for it, it washed away that black darkness.
It wasn’t just any performance.
Nobody was forcing him to do this.
This world was not so cold that it would refuse to grant salvation to those who truly and sincerely repented for their sins, kept on the struggle to change their hearts, and tried to break the shackles of their fate. Among the historically important figures in Crossism were some who were originally Roman and caused Crossist disciples to suffer. But they regretted their actions for their entire lives, and when they continued fighting to make up for their unatonable sins if only by a little, they forged a path to salvation alongside their suffering.
Who was Accelerator right now?
Was he a good or a bad person?
A human or a monster?
Science or sorcery?
If one had asked him, he’d probably have said this without hesitation.