“First, I should introduce myself.”
“…Uhh, first, why were you even hanging there—?”
“My name? It’s Index.”
“That’s a fake name no matter how you look at it! You’re an ‘index’? Like from the back of a book?!”
“As you can see, I’m a member of the Church. That’s important. Oh, not the one in the Vatican, but the Puritans of England.”
“I have no idea what any of that means, and are you ignoring my question?!”
“Hmm, I’m talking about Index…Oh, if you want my magic name, it’s Dedicatus545.”
“Hello? Heeelloooo? What kind of alien is speaking on this frequency?” Kamijou had no patience left for listening to this girl and picked at his ear with his pinkie finger. She started gnawing on her thumbnail. Maybe a nervous habit?
Why exactly are we sitting politely around my glass table like this is some kind of job interview?
He needed to leave for school soon, or he’d be late for his summer makeup classes. But he obviously couldn’t just leave this lunatic in his room by herself. The worst part of it was that this mysterious silver-haired girl calling herself Index looked like she’d taken such a liking to the place that she was rolling around on the floor.
Was this yet another expression of Kamijou’s misfortune? If so, this had gone too far.
“Also, I would be very grateful if you filled up this ‘index’ with food.”
“Why?! Why bother raising your parameters?! If I tripped some strange flag and ended up going straight into the Index route, then just kill me now!”
“Umm…is that slang? I’m sorry. I don’t think I understand what you mean.”
She was a foreigner, of course. She didn’t seem to understand Japan’s geek culture.
“If I take three steps out that door, I’ll die of malnourishment.”
“…Um, and I care about that why…?”
“When that happens, I’ll be sure to scrawl a message next to my corpse with my last bit of strength. A sketch of your face.”
“What…?!”
“If someone actually comes to my aid before I’ve expired, I might tell them I was held captive in this room and abused until all that was left was this husk of a person…and I’ll tell them you forced me to cosplay in this outfit, too.”
“You might say what?! You seem to know a lot about otaku culture over here after all, don’t you?!”
“?”
She tilted her head as if she were a kitten seeing herself in a mirror for the first time.
How mortifying. She’s playing dumb. I feel like I’m the only one who’s been tainted.
Kamijou stomped into the kitchen. I’ll do it! Okay, I’ll do it! The contents of the refrigerator had been ruined anyway, leaving only garbage. Even if I let her eat this stuff, it’s not like it’s putting a dent in my wallet. It’ll be fine if I heat it up. He plopped the remains of what had once been food into a frying pan and started cooking something like a stir-fry.
Now that I think of it, where exactly did she come from?
There were foreigners living in Academy City, too, of course. But she didn’t have that particular “scent” residents had. However, it would be very odd if she was an outsider.
✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦
Academy City was known as a “city of hundreds of schools,” but it was easier to think of it more like a “city-sized boarding school.” It sprawled across a third of Tokyo, but a Great Wall of China–like partition surrounded the whole thing at the moment. It wasn’t as strict as a prison, but it wasn’t somewhere you could just accidentally wander into and get lost.
At least, that was how it looked to the outside world. In point of fact, engineering universities had launched three satellites into space for research purposes, and they constantly had their shining, watchful eyes on the city. Anyone leaving or entering was comprehensively scanned. Anyone arousing suspicion who didn’t match up with the Gate’s records would activate Anti-Skills or members of Judgment from all the schools, either of which would be all over them in seconds. Although…
Yesterday, electro girl conjured up a bunch of storm clouds. Maybe that’s how she managed to evade their “eyes,” Kamijou thought.
“Umm, so why were you hanging out to dry on my balcony, then?”
Kamijou tried again, splashing soy sauce into the malicious vegetable stir-fry.
“I wasn’t hanging out to dry, okay?”
“Then what happened? Did the wind blow you here or something?”
“…Maybe something like that.”
He’d only been joking. He stopped moving the frying pan and turned back to the girl.
“I fell. I was actually trying to jump from rooftop to rooftop.”
Rooftop? he thought, looking up at the ceiling.
This neighborhood was chock-full of cheap student dorms. Slender, identical eight-story buildings were lined up one next to the other. As one could see from the view from the balcony, there were only about two meters between each building. It would probably be possible to jump from one rooftop to the next with a good running start, but…
“But the buildings are eight stories tall. One wrong step and you’d fall straight to hell.”
“Yeah. You know what they say—they don’t put up headstones for suicides,” Index declared. Kamijou didn’t really know what she meant by that. “I didn’t have any choice, though. There was nowhere else for me to run at the time.”
“To…run?”
Kamijou frowned unwittingly while Index replied simply, “Yup.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“I was being chased.”