Chapter 104

“I’ll be honest,” she said. “Do you realize how you’ve set up this situation? If you die here, you’d have only yourself to blame. Because you threw away your option of appealing to my emotions and begging for your life.” There was no way for them to avoid a clash. And Birdway would probably fight him using something she’d never shown him before. Despite his incredible advantage, Kamijou felt his right hand unnaturally tense around the power drill. Tension and fear spewed poison into his mind. He even felt, physically, like his right hand’s structure was about to be destroyed. The moment was shattered, however, by a sudden third voice. “Hey! What are you doing over there?!” As intense lights bathed him, Kamijou accidentally turned around. An Anti-Skill officer—a defender of peace and order in the city—ran toward him. And the man’s eyes were incapable of immediately seeing the interplay between the esper and the sorcerer. To him, it looked simple. Person A was holding Person B at weapon point. “Shit!” hissed Birdway, the first to react. “Put your hand dow—” But before she could finish, something concrete, something physical occurred. Bam-ba-bam!!!!!! Several gunshots rang out, and a ball of intense pain exploded throughout Kamijou’s body. The agony was incredible, like a scorching hot ball of fire had burst inside him. Kamijou’s right hand fell limp, and the power drill clattered to the ground. Before he could figure out why he couldn’t move his arm, the despondency reached every corner of his body. He couldn’t even lower his gaze to look at his own torso. The instant he tried, he crumpled to the asphalt and lay there. Snip, snip—he felt events chronologically detached in his mind and realized he was blinking in and out of consciousness. From somewhere far away, he heard the voices of adults. “You—idiot! Why—hell did you have—bullets loaded?!” “But—I was…!!!” He felt something important leaving his body through a hole, like the air going out of a balloon. A disgustingly wet sensation covered his upper body. He heard Birdway, too—the one who should have been his enemy. “Shut—up!!! …Listen—call—ambulance! I’ll perform—aid—here. Like hell—ever trust—you!!!” His vision blinked on and off. He couldn’t piece his memories together in the correct order. Had she said “first aid”? All she did was roll him over so that he faced up. He thought he could feel hands grope around near the center of his torso, but he couldn’t imagine how that would help him heal from this. And also. Something about the first aid felt very wrong. He heard a tearing sound, like paper ripping in half. Leivinia stopped her hands for a moment when she heard the ambulance siren. She’d called it first aid, but she’d really just been holding a handkerchief to Kamijou’s wound. The ambulance couldn’t fit down the narrow street. It seemed to have parked on the road out front. Several paramedics rushed toward them, pushing a stretcher. Birdway snarled at them, “The bullets hit his right side but came out the other! No sign of damage to arteries or organs!!! But there might still be shrapnel inside him. Don’t get overconfident just because they went through. Do a proper biopsy!!!” “We understand. You can leave him to us!!!” “Just do your damn job. Do it, and he’ll survive.” The Anti-Skill officers tried to talk to her, probably to ask what had happened—but at the sharp flash of a blade, they tensed up. If they’d actually rejected restraint and called out to her, she may have really cut them all into little pieces. She’d used her handkerchief on Kamijou, so she didn’t have anything to wipe the bright red off her hands with. Scowling, she left the area. Eventually, she took something out of her pocket. Touma Kamijou’s student notebook. She called someone on her cell phone, narrowing her eyes. “Yeah. That’s right. You heard me. Ran into some interference but from an unexpected place. Gremlin has won Touma Kamijou to their side.” She flipped through the pages of his notebook with her bloody hand. Birdway hadn’t tried to treat him out of pure compassion. She was about to lose a mouth that could be giving her hints. She needed a new information source, and she couldn’t be picky about it. That was the logical side of her justification. Kamijou was down, but she’d figured out who was behind him. Certain of it, she continued, “His connection…was with Marianne Sringeneier. Her contact info is in his notebook. I couldn’t make out some of the numbers—they were too small and blotted out by sweat or something. But it seems like Gremlin made their base in District 12. If we’re going ahead with a surprise attack to wipe them out, we’ll want to focus our forces there.” As Kamijou was loaded onto the stretcher by the paramedics, his mind hazy, he realized Birdway was contacting someone. …She fell for it, he thought. Kamijou wasn’t deeply involved in Ollerus’s forces; he certainly wasn’t a member. If he’d suddenly brought them “useful” information and warned them, they would have been suspicious. So he’d given up on trying to convey it with words. He needed them to personally pluck the information from his own pockets. If he could make them believe they’d gotten extremely important intel from him, they’d accept it—even though the intel was the same. …Nonetheless, he hadn’t anticipated he would run into Birdway—or that an Anti-Skill intervention would put him at death’s door. …Now Birdway thinks Marianne and I are connected. If she knows we quarreled in Academy City, then it’ll just be confirming what she already suspected. If Birdway gives this info to the rest of Ollerus’s forces, then they’ll all head to School District 12. Where Gremlin isn’t… Both Gremlin’s and Ollerus’s forces were now active in different places. He didn’t know how much time he’d just bought them. But he’d avoided an all-out war for Fräulein Kreutune for now, at least. …It’s up to you now, God of Thunder. She’s roaming free. If she makes too much of a scene, both groups will be drawn right back to where she is… “Gh, burph, eckk-eckk!!!” “Calm down! Hey, can we access the data banks yet?! We need his blood type to give him a transfusion. Physiological saline isn’t gonna cut it!!!” The rear door of the ambulance slammed shut, blocking Kamijou’s view of the rest of the world. It marked the moment he finally blacked out. The shrill sirens would have been blaring above him, but now he couldn’t even perceive that.