The white snowfield was veiled in silence.
Accelerator had stopped singing. The tip of his crutch, supporting his body off the ground, slipped out. He buckled at the knees, covered head to toe in scarlet blood. In that white hell that denied even color, he alone gave off some of his own, borne of his wounds and pain.
Ragged breaths escaped him, scraping against his weary throat like sandpaper. His exhalations occasionally brought red fluid out with them, his body damaged even on the inside.
He couldn’t sing any longer.
Something sticky was glued to all the tubes in his body.
However.
His lips, stained dark red, were loosened in a subtle smile. That’s right, he thought. I don’t have to sing anymore. Because…
✦ ✦ ✦
“Are…you okay…? asks Misaka asks Misaka.”
✦ ✦ ✦
In his hazy vision, he heard a small voice.
The voice of a girl that he’d wanted to hear for so, so long. The words of a girl who hadn’t even been allowed to stay conscious until just now, who hadn’t had even a minimal guarantee that she would live. When he heard that voice, Accelerator had regained a little of his core—he was sure of it.
It flickered, maybe ready to disappear at any moment—a terrifyingly unreliable thing. But he knew that a pillar was placed in its center now, one that would last forever.
Last Order was finally stable.
She’d never have to suffer through this unreasonable violence ever again.
Accelerator ruminated deeply on this truth. And before he knew it, he was moving. That Level Five, once called the strongest monster in Academy City, reached out with trembling hands and embraced Last Order’s little body, still limp, devoid of energy.
Tightly.
So that they would never part again.
“…I’m glad…”
The words escaped him softly, his voice shaking.
And not only because his insides were so torn up.
“Shit. I’m so fucking glad…!!”
Those words may have never come from the true Accelerator.
But how was he able to say which was the true one? Couldn’t this also have been his true self? Before all these tragedies had begun, before Academy City’s darkness had swallowed up a young Level Five, wasn’t the true him a child who had laughed like every other, who had cried like every other?
Even as all that evil had permeated him, that was inside him, unchanged.
It had been there the whole time.
Maybe this was what Kikyou Yoshikawa and Aiho Yomikawa had seen—and what they’d tried to keep safe within a society of adults.
Last Order, who had for a long time only been occasionally conscious, wouldn’t have known any of the details of these events.
But that didn’t matter.
As he hugged her, she put her little hands around Accelerator’s back and slowly rubbed it.
As if to accept him.
In the same way, probably, as she had when she’d been the first to find what had remained inside him.
“…”
As he felt her finally regain warmth, Accelerator turned inward to think.
This world was cold, harsh, and filled with a hopeless amount of evil.
But there was salvation, too.
If you reached out with your own will. If you gritted your teeth and kept moving forward. At the end of endless, endless struggles, there would always be light. And this world wasn’t so hopeless that it would steal even that last ray of hope.
“Sorry for raining on your big, emotional reunion, but…”
Then it happened.
Misaka Worst, who was nearby, spoke in a tone with a thorn of caution in it.
“With the way things are going, this bullshit war probably ain’t gonna have a happy ending.”
Before Accelerator could turn his neck to check his surroundings, he felt something wrong.
It bolted down his back with a shudder.
An awful sensation, like something cold had entered his entire body through his skin. Except, no, that was backward. The trembling was from inside him, escaping onto his skin.
Either way, though, his five senses weren’t acting normally. This had to do with his body’s sensors, or his brain’s calculation circuits were malfunctioning because he’d forcibly taken information he shouldn’t ever have.
He felt an immense pressure from directly above.
Mitsuki Unabara, the angel of water, the parchment. Whatever those things gave off, this was like a far more concentrated version…
Still embracing Last Order, Accelerator cast his gaze to the skies.
The giant fortress was floating there.
Golden light covered the skies, steadily engulfing the fortress. The pressure of an enormous force, all converged on one point, sent a tingling sensation through Accelerator’s skin. He sensed its aim. That strange mass of power was targeting the surface.
He didn’t know what that fortress represented.
Nor did he understand what sort of effects it would bring when the power hit the surface.
But…
“…Nothing good’s gonna happen if that thing fires.”
Its goal may not have been only pure destruction. It might produce some sort of special effect. But the result was the same. If that much power fell to the ground, how far would the damage spread? Plus, if he followed the feeling on his skin and assumed it was a different sort of energy than a purely scientific force, his reflection wouldn’t work on it.
If it penetrated that, everyone would die.
Accelerator, Misaka Worst, Last Order…Every single person.
“…That’s a load of bullshit.”
It happened a moment later.
Boom!!!!!!
With an explosive sound, wings, jet-black like ink, spurted from Accelerator’s back.
The black wings that symbolized his anger.
A massive power wrapped in an enigma: It didn’t seem like something simply borrowed from the Misaka network, and it was unclear whether Last Order could force it to stop. In fact, when these wings had appeared, Accelerator himself was almost always in a state where he’d lost his mental balance. When he wanted so badly to kill the enemy before him that he’d abandon all sense of principles, of who he was. The killing intent bursting out from within his chest violated the world in the form of black wings. An incorrigible power.
It was almost like the pressure from the celestial fortress had squeezed them out of his body.
Just like when he’d fought Aiwass.
However.
“…Misaka Worst.” His words were a whisper. “I’ll go stop that thing. Can I get you to protect the kid?”
“From Russia? Or from Academy City?”
“From everything.”
Misaka sighed at the unreasonable command. Turning against both sides was like telling her to fight the combined forces of everyone in World War III.
But when she gave him a grin filled with malice, she took an iron spike out of her pocket and said, “…Well, we were already gonna make them pay for this, so I guess it’s all the same. And if we analyze Last Order and the data for the song in the Misaka network, it might grace us with a chance to obtain technology that doesn’t exist in Academy City.”
Last Order, perhaps uneasy with how dizzying these developments were, latched on to Accelerator’s clothes. “Where are you going? asks Misaka asks Misaka.”
Her eyes wavered as she looked up at him from his arms.
She probably knew what Accelerator was about to attempt. And because she knew, she was trying to stop him.
“You’re not going anywhere, right? says Misaka says Misaka, getting confirmation and stuff.”
“Nothing to worry about. It’ll be over soon,” said Accelerator, not mentioning if he’d ever return, if he’d ever come back home.
The monster who had sprouted black wings gently released the girl’s fingers that were clutching his clothing, one by one, as if to throw off the last fetters still keeping him on the surface.
“No!” came Last Order’s weak voice. “I want to be with you forever, says Misaka says Misaka.”
“…Yeah.”
Accelerator, too, admitted it.
At the very end, he gave a cherubic smile and answered: