Chapter 105

FINAL CHAPTER Unfettered Installing……Complete. 1 The day ended. Prep time was over. At last, the curtains were about to rise on the Ichihanaran Festival. “…Friends.” Even after parting ways with Last Order and Fremea Seivelun, Fräulein Kreutune simply stood there in the middle of the nighttime road. “Friends?” She knew the word but only as a group of letters—not as a feeling. One might be able to estimate just how unrelated to her the word was simply by considering the records of the dark witch hunts or the report on her scientific analysis. The device was still in her hand. It was shaped like an egg and was about as big. She could pull the string to call for someone. The connection within her was tiny but there. She thought about that for a moment. Then her eyeballs swiveled in a strange direction. “…Located…” A masculine voice flew into her eardrums. As soon as she perceived it, there was a bwshhh!!! of compressed air being released. A container landed at her feet. It looked like a can of juice. A few more of them flew over, thrown from a distance, and immediately began to spew out sheer white curtains of smoke. In the blink of an eye, the riot-suppression smoke had transformed into a dense fog around her that stretched twenty meters in every direction. The anti-living-body effect stimulated her mucous membranes and scrambled her senses. The anti-machine effect blocked sound and light, save for the specific ultraviolet wavelengths the chemical had been concocted to let through. The interference effects caused the voices around her to distort and whirl, driving a ferocious wave of stimulation straight into her. “Capture the woman!!! She’s the number one suspect in the attack on the General Board chairperson! Do whatever it takes!!!” The Anti-Skill officers, wearing unique masks that made their faces look like those of gray aliens, slipped through the interference effects and plunged through the smoke using special sensors. “……” Fräulein Kreutune remained silent from beginning to end. She grasped the egg-like device in her right hand. Swivel. In response to the violence, her eyes turned in an odd direction. The darkness in Academy City was multifaceted, each aspect differing in type and depth. It was like a jigsaw puzzle on the whole, with so many black pieces interlocking to create a gigantic picture of the city’s dark underbelly. It might be easier to imagine a swarm of flies packed onto a rotting animal corpse. Among those facets was one that particularly strained Academy City’s management capabilities—one close to the so-called General Board. As far as the public knew, it was a gas turbine power plant serving as an emergency electricity supply for various government offices and agencies. The structure beneath the surface of neat and tidy District 3 was massive. And that’s where he was. “Hey, now. Hey, hey, now. Sorry for abandoning you here for a while, all right? We Kiharas were really all over the place during that Baggage City nonsense.” A woman in a baggy white lab coat over an obviously premade job-hunting suit had just come down the cramped employee elevator as she said that. Since this was just a decoy facility anyway, the huge space contained no power-generating equipment. The place could have hosted an American football game and was devoid of anything that might provide cover. Normally, two people in such a space would paint a lonely picture. But that wasn’t how it felt. A dense “presence” filled the entire facility. The reason? Simple. The entire underground space, made of unfaced concrete, was white. Spiderwebs. Or perhaps silkworm cocoons. The walls and floors were totally covered. You couldn’t tell what color they were originally supposed to be. The woman in the lab coat stepped across the floor, but her feet weren’t hitting concrete. The white substance beneath her undulated unnaturally. Up near the ceiling, arched structures stretched from wall to wall or wall to ceiling like suspension bridges. And then there was the center of the space. Not just the center of the floor—the mathematical center of the room. Supported by several arches was an immense white sphere. It was like an aggregation of spiderwebs or a giant chrysalis. And from the gaps in the structure, one could glimpse the handsome features of his face. Teitoku Kakine. Dark Matter. Academy City’s number two Level Five. The symbol of his ability covered the vast chamber, disorderly scattered. No average machining tool would be able to even scratch any of it. Until very recently, he’d been barely hanging on after injuries to most of his physical body. They’d taken advantage of that. He’d been in the hands of one of the Kiharas, forced to manufacture a variety of weaponry. But once he’d constructed a means of creating internal organs using his ability, the situation had changed drastically. Kakine had explosively scattered his Dark Matter and buried in it this entire Kihara research facility. Those who considered this a matter of grave concern had sealed the place off. The woman in the lab coat and job-hunting suit knew all this. And yet her words still came so easily. “Seems like one of the General Board chairperson’s pets got out. Anti-Skill is too public—they can’t deal with her. We’re suppressing information on it, but we want your help to bring the chaos under control.” “……” He didn’t answer. Only his eyes glinted as they stared at her from the gaps in the spiderweb or the chrysalis. “Yes, yes. I do have my own motives, obviously. Letting you loose in the city comes with its own risks. But in my opinion, there’s no need to let those risks affect my actions. In fact, if you do such a good job that you destroy the Kiharas’ scenario, it would really whet my appetite for research. And that would be a big help to me.” “……” “I’ll be brief. Do as you wish. All the Kiharas share this viewpoint. Do you understand the situation?” No answer. Instead of speaking, Teitoku Kakine made the ground roll at the woman’s feet. The pure white land was already in a state of unnatural undulation, but now it began to squirm, as though recreating an actual ocean. …I see. The woman quietly smiled. Teitoku Kakine can use his ability to recreate lost organs. The line behind his actual body and his ability of fiction is fading. Perhaps, in essence, everything filling this space is on the verge of becoming Teitoku Kakine. In a way, it was almost like immortality. Or maybe she should see it as an ongoing dilution of the unseen, of life and the soul. If one thought of Academy City’s number one Level Five as a distinct individual causing thorough destruction, then the contrast between the two held no end of interest to a researcher like her. Destruction and production. When you placed them side by side, with destruction reigning supreme, it almost felt like a glimpse into the pure essence of science. The woman almost smiled in spite of herself. As a scientist, she was loath to so easily accept the existence of supernatural beings like gods and devils. But the longer you worked at a research job, the more moments you had that seemed like dark jokes of an omnipotent deity—like this one. “You’re free to do as you please. The Kiharas welcome the grand experiment that you are—no matter the result.” As for Accelerator, the other side of the coin of destruction and production, he had an unpleasant scowl on his face. He and Kikyou Yoshikawa had done everything in their power in their search for Last Order; and he’d even jumped from building to building in the Academy City nightscape for a while. None of this had given him any useful information on the vanished girl. He decided to return to the apartment for now, and when he did, he stumbled upon the scene of the crime: Last Order, having quickly returned, had found the chocolate hidden in the kitchen cabinet (owned by Aiho Yomikawa, kept there in case she got mad about a failed attempt at cooking) and was now devouring it. “…What the hell do you think you’re doing?” “Mgr-mm!!! Listen to this! Misaka, she, today, um, she made friends—ow!!! says Misaka says Misaka, stunned at the random karate chop that made no sense!!!” After a few more chops to vent his annoyance, Accelerator threw himself off his crutch and onto the sofa. “Friends?” asked Yoshikawa. “Yeah! There was a really annoying blond kid, and while I was beating her in a game—oh, we were competing over tasty dinner—we met someone who told us the way back to District 7, says Misa—” “……” “……” Detecting the unnatural feel of the sudden silence, even Last Order’s danger sense—which normally never came online at all—began to work. “Dinner, you say?” said Yoshikawa. “…Wait. You went out and had dinner without us? Is that it?” asked Accelerator. The two of them had been on their evidently pointless mission this whole time—they hadn’t eaten a bite yet!!! Fremea Seivelun, on the other hand, was still lost. “Oh, oh no!!! I don’t know the way back to District 13 from District 7!!!” But she was ever unwilling to admit she had no idea where she was. She concluded it was everyone else’s fault for not telling her how to get home. And also, to be honest, she was exhausted. Midnight was fast approaching. She’d never wanted to go to bed more than now. “Nya. I guess this spot works.” She curled up on a bench in a plaza in front of a station and simply closed her eyes. Despite Fremea having gone through something exceptional—being hunted and nearly killed by the Freshmen, an Academy City underworld group—one couldn’t help but feel like her total lack of meticulousness brought her a lot of unneeded trouble. The dark writhed. Once Shiage Hamazura and Rikou Takitsubo confirmed Fremea still wasn’t back in her District 13 dorm, they ran out into the nighttime city once more. They had no idea why the girl had disappeared to begin with, what her goal was, or where she’d even gone. The Freshmen had once gone after Fremea, but with their leader Umidori Kuroyoru now hamstrung, Hamazura and company had assumed the shadowy group had ceased all activities. But there was a nonzero chance remnants of the organization were still working behind the scenes. And. Their roommates Shizuri Mugino and Saiai Kinuhata had another task. That being: to clean the apartment. “How the heck did it even get this messy? The veranda is half melted.” “I was cooking in the kitchen, and I ended up making a person. They were being really uppity, so I took a shot.” “?” None of that made any sense, but Kinuhata decided not to question it. High-level espers varied greatly, and while Mugino possessed incredible firepower, she didn’t have much control over it. For this reason, people called her more powerful than Number Three in terms of pure destructive power but ranked her fourth because of her lack of versatility. Considering the sheer strength of the ability she wielded, she was very lucky she hadn’t yet killed anyone on accident when she sneezed or hiccupped. Mugino sighed. “Well, I have to test my prosthetic hand regularly to make sure the fingers all have full range of motion. And since cleaning the apartment involves both delicate movements and strength-based tasks, that makes it a pretty good test, then, right? “Yeah, okay, but that cookbook is, like, the size of a phone book! And also, I totally hear it squeezing! Is that your prosthetic or just your emotions?!” Realizing Mugino tidying up could brick-ify every piece of furniture they had, Kinuhata recommended the girl take a break instead. Mugino opened the fridge. They were out of bottles of mineral water, though, so she decided to go to the convenience store. But something happened on the way there. She encountered a facet of the darkness that lurked in Academy City. “?” Footsteps. And they sounded sticky. Thanks to its abundance of apartment complexes, this part of town lacked the ample neon lighting typical of cities, so when night fell, the only source of illumination was the streetlights. Even though Mugino couldn’t see the source of the wet footsteps coming from right in front of her, she didn’t think it was odd. Instead, something else tugged at her awareness. Before she could figure out what it was, the next piece of information slid into her mind. “Well, look at you. Guess people’s faces really do change if you don’t see them for a while.” A high-pitched soprano. A voice Mugino recognized. “Seems like a lot’s happened while I was gone. Doesn’t matter to me, though. I doubt whatever happens to people who aren’t related to me will affect my life at all.”