Chapter 99

“Huh? Um, excuse me—” “You’re visiting, too, aren’t you? What a relief. I felt so out of place here by myself. But I couldn’t exactly bring anyone else—certainly not Kuroko.” “W-wait just a minute!!! You have the wrong idea. I’m a teacher, and—” “Still, though, aren’t you in grade school? Isn’t it a little soon for you to be hunting for a high school?” “You’re being so nice it’s making me sound stupid!!!” Mikoto continued observing the school along with the little girl (?) she’d just met. There was no sense of order or regularity like there was at Tokiwadai Middle School, but from the point of view of someone who went to an academy for rich young ladies, the sloppiness actually felt refreshing. “It feels like student autonomy and house rules are a bigger thing here than at Tokiwadai… But if their teachers and school regulations are so low priority, how do they maintain any order here?” “W-we are not low priority! I’m a teacher, and I’m doing my job properly!!!” “…Where could that idiot be anyway? Wonder where the classrooms are,” Mikoto whispered. “??? What are you mumbling about?” “Uh, nothing at all!!! Don’t worry about it, little girl,” said Mikoto, frantically waving a hand in dismissal, insisting on one thing before rejecting it. Then something else happened. A female student with long black hair and an ample bosom—one large enough to contain the murder in her heart—burst past them, coming from the entrance. She was clutching a cell phone and seemed to be talking to someone. “Oh, damn it!!! I told him he had to stay over tonight! I knew he’d run away!!! I’m gonna kill you, Touma Kamijou. Himegami, do you know where he went?!” Mikoto, rather than the one the girl was actually talking to, gave a jolt of surprise at the name. The situation, however, was more dire than she’d anticipated. The huge-breasted girl talking over the phone continued. “What…? He got arrested by Anti-Skill?!” 2 Kamijou had been caught red-handed. Now he was handcuffed at an Anti-Skill station, sitting in a metal pipe chair. “What the hell?!” he cried. “Okay, sure, we had a big brawl at the fast-food place, but we don’t have time for this crap right now!!!” “This crap? What do you mean this crap? Listen here. Luckily for you, witnesses say you were mainly the one under attack. But you’re still a student, Ichihanaran Festival prep or not. You need to have some restraint, and…” The window was barred, and one wall was a one-way mirror. The room he’d been thrown into felt like an interrogation chamber, and some middle-aged officer was griping and lecturing him. Kamijou realized that Thor, so-called god of thunder, had oh so gallantly left the scene without letting anyone say anything to him…but he’d caught on to that too late. Ultimately, after a valiant performance involving a lot of groaning and insisting he was getting rice blight in his wounds (possibly perjury), he escaped the Anti-Skill station. A surprising amount of time had passed; the color of the sky showed it was definitely night. Many students were still prowling the streets in defiance of the final school closing time to continue getting ready for the Ichihanaran Festival. …Index’s danger level is probably maxed out after she’s been alone in the dorm for so long. But Fukiyose’s will be maxed out, too, because I snubbed the prep work at school… Nevertheless, Gremlin’s and Ollerus’s factions were about to break into a battle without bothering to destroy the Windowless Building at the heart of the city first. Regardless of whose hands Fräulein Kreutune fell into, Kamijou didn’t like her odds. Unfortunately, his only real choice was to prioritize her. For now, one thing rose to the top of his to-do list. As Kamijou reached the location that had been scrawled on that paper napkin, Thor spotted him. “Hey. You showed up after all, eh?” School District 7. An area chock-full of abandoned buildings almost buried under the rest of the city scenery. “Guess that counts as a betrayal,” Kamijou said indifferently. “Works for me,” Thor answered in a singsong voice. Kamijou looked around and frowned. “What’s all this stuff lying around?” Tools littered the ground. They looked like the kind of things a DIY carpenter would use. Thor’s answer was plain. “It’s what we’ll need to get into the impenetrable building. Seems like everyone’s setting up for a festival nearby or something? Snatching everything was a cinch.” …No point explaining the rules of normal society now, thought Kamijou, sighing. “The Windowless Building is supposed to be impervious to nukes, isn’t it?” he asked. “There’s no way in or out. How are we supposed to sneak in and find Fräulein Kreutune?” “Before I launch into my explanation, there’s something else we gotta do. And I’m only gonna say it once.” 3 Shizuri Mugino. The fourth-ranked Level Five in Academy City had an ability known as Meltdown. It enabled her to release electrons—which only ever appeared as a wave or a particle—in a pure state, without allowing them to be distorted into either. Her method of attack was categorized as a high-velocity wave/particle cannon, and it packed enough destructive potential to slice an Aegis-equipped ship into many pieces. Had she acquired such an ability because of her naturally wicked disposition or had her disposition become wicked as a result of acquiring the ability? It was a chicken-and-egg problem with no answer, but there was little doubt Shizuri Mugino’s current personality was fitting for the fourth-ranked Level Five. In general, the girl had very little to do with household chores such as cooking or washing clothes. …However. “Ehhh… What’s this one? When did I order it? I’ve been ordering cakes and biscuits and stuff so often lately that I don’t even remember.” In an apartment in a complex being shared between several boys and girls, Mugino frowned and stared at an armful-sized cardboard box. Inside it were plastic bags holding powders like flour, silicon cooking supplies including a spatula, silver molds to be used in the oven, and a manual about the size of a notebook, among other things. She picked up a set of silver spoons—probably for measuring—and twirled them around with her left hand, then peered deeper into the box. Had they been in a soundproof place, like a music hall, maybe someone would have noticed the mechanical buzzing accompanying the movement of her fingers. A deathmatch. Not a word you often heard from Japanese schoolgirls, but Mugino had experienced several such battles. She’d lost an eye and an arm in the process. Her facial features looked shapely but were in fact burned, the damage obscured with special makeup and a false eye, and she’d swapped out her left arm with a highly functional prosthetic that now hung from her shoulder. The problem then became her need for regular maintenance to repair errors. She would have to use mechanical parts for the rest of her life, and their specs would, over time, fall out of sync with her physical body. To help adjust them, she needed specific ways to exercise her precise finger movements. The “learning tool” she’d chosen to accomplish this with was a baking set—a very common mail-order product. There were other methods for evaluating prosthetics, like writing letters or holding chopsticks, but if you wanted something all-inclusive that tested all kinds of patterns at the same time, cooking was an ideal option. “Well, whatever. I’ve got a quota to fill, and I’m going to fill it.” Mugino carried the cardboard box she didn’t remember ordering into the kitchen. She attentively used her left hand as much as possible as she flipped through the notebook-sized manual. The hot chocolate her rehabilitation had produced had gone round and round until it caused Fremea Seivelun’s cavity crisis, but she didn’t know that. “…What’s all this? ‘Boil a 0.9 percent salt solution, and use it to disinfect the tools in this box before starting’…” Compared to other mail-order kits, this one seemed more nitpicky about hygiene. That said, Mugino didn’t really care as long as she could make sure her prosthetic was running smoothly. Following the manual, she poured the white powder out of its clear bag into a bowl, then mixed it with a saline solution and whipped it into a froth. She poured the result into a silver mold, closed it, and threw it into the oven. “Fifteen minutes at four hundred degrees. Meanwhile, I’ll look through the other things…” She took out two containers a little smaller than ping-pong balls, poured some clear gelatin-looking stuff into them, and put them in the fridge. Then she found a sticky fluid, some mixture of yellow and white, and poured it into a juicer to churn it. Her arm seemed to be working perfectly fine. Once the oven timer went off, Mugino opened the door and removed the contents, including the entire rack. Using a moist towel, she grabbed the silver mold, and—as though opening a long, slender ballpoint pen case—popped it wide open from the side. “Hmm?” At that point, Mugino frowned a little. Of course, any normal girl probably would have screamed and dropped what she was holding. “…The heck? Bones?” said Mugino. She shook it a bit. Whatever they were, they looked sort of like femurs. The manual, which she thought she’d folded into place, flipped back to a different page of its own accord. The brand-new page said this. Bring the item completed per the above instructions to the bathroom. Fill a disinfected bathtub with a 0.9 percent salt solution and arrange all the pieces according to the included anatomical chart. Then wait forty-five minutes for the pieces to fully join. And then. The viscous, cream-colored fluid mixed up in the juicer became fat, the contents of the globes slightly smaller than ping-pong balls cooling in the fridge became eyeballs, the stuff she’d heated in the pressure cooker became a liver, the paper towels she used to absorb moisture became a stomach, and the raw pasta-looking stuff became blood vessels and nerves. The rest of the “cooking ingredients” all followed suit, turning into other parts of a human body. Splash!!! The water split and bubbled as a naked girl rose from the bottom of the tub. Her face impassive, the girl looked at her hands, then cocked her head slightly before speaking in French. “…Smaller than I expected. You must not have measured the quantities correctly.” Mugino, leaning against the wall of the changing room with her arms folded, understood the French words she’d spoken. But she purposely ignored them and responded in Japanese. “Who and what are you?” “Cendrillon.” The pale-skinned girl with soft blond hair grabbed the towel Mugino threw at her, then used it to wipe the 0.9 percent salt solution from her body before wrapping herself in it and leaving the bathroom. “Marianne Sringeneier made me into a human table. Then some guy named Ollerus did me the favor of turning me back into a human. Thanks to that, I was able to reassemble myself.”