Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Railgun Chapter1 (section)

===Part 3===

After her surprise attack ended in failure, Shirai Kuroko had the rules explained to her (while she was forced to sit in the middle of the dojo and reflect on what she had done).


*The battle will take place on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. In other words, the time limit was midnight on Monday morning. During that time, Shirai Kuroko could attack Konori Mii at any time, both public or private. Konori would not make any preemptive strikes on Shirai.

*If Shirai managed to restrain Konori even once, she would win. Her goal was to get the provided handcuffs on both of Konori’s wrists. She was permitted to knock her unconscious, put her in a joint lock, or attack her weak points to accomplish this.

*Konori would win if she avoided capture until the time limit. No matter how many times she fought off Shirai, the combat training could not end from her side until the time limit.

*Shirai had to fight on her own.

*There were no restrictions on using her powers or a weapon, but she could not harm other people, property, buildings, etc. As a Judgment member, she had to fight while obeying all ordinary rules and regulations such as traffic laws.


“Any questions?” asked the busty black-haired glasses girl after explaining it all.

“If a complete surprise attack couldn’t overturn the great skill difference, do I have any chance of winning this?”

“Of course you do. Isn’t middle school a little young to be so jaded you give up before you even try?”

Shirai groaned like a dog forced to wait for food and the glasses upperclassman smiled.

“Shirai-san. Your Teleportation is very useful, but that’s why you have a tendency to rely on it too much. When you fight, you plan things out based on your power, don’t you? But there are so many things that can keep you from performing the necessary calculations in your head: injury, illness, a flash of light, and gas to name a few. If you want to survive on the job, you need to fix that bad habit.”

With that said, Konori Mii gallantly departed the dojo.

Still seated on the floor with her head drooping, Shirai watched her go. The instant she disappeared through the door, Shirai teleported a few metal darts, but it didn’t seem to work.

“Drat. And she had to have had her back turned then.”

She doubted Konori had a constant 360-degree view from using her power. She always turned her head and expanded or contracted her pupils, so her power had to be linked to her ordinary vision.

So she had the ability to see her target through any walls, doors, or whatever else were in the way, but also…

(She’s clever. She knows how to search out ''what she needs to see''.)

Shirai couldn’t deny that.

Seeing more than most people meant having more junk data that got in the way of what you wanted. It was like using a search engine that didn’t match your search terms very well. Yet Konori never seemed overwhelmed by the glut of information she provided herself.

She had the perception to accurately detect someone showing signs of planning a pickpocketing within the large crowd flooding the train station during the morning rush hour. Her experience in Judgment had built up an ability to focus on ''what she needed to see'' which allowed her to utilize her simple power. It was that ability that told her Shirai Kuroko would immediately make another attack, so she didn’t even need to look back and check.

Anyway.

“Grrr. This could not be more annoying, but I’ll do it!!”

Shirai Kuroko vanished into thin air in her seated position.

The very next moment, she had finished teleporting to the roof of the large training facility. Konori Mii was someone she absolutely did not want as an enemy, but she couldn’t wait around when she had a time limit to beat. And the more formidable this opponent, the less she could afford to waste time.

(With every tick of the clock, my lovely weekend with Onee-sama is slipping away! I need to finish this now!!)

The basic strategy for fighting an Academy City esper was as follows:

1. Confirm what you need to stay alive.

2. Keep in a safe position or keep whatever other conditions keep you safe while you observe and analyze your opponent’s power and the results of that power.

3. Use that information to come up with a way to defeat your opponent using your own power.

Of course, in a real battle, both sides would be working to ensure the other side couldn’t achieve those conditions so easily, but when you knew the path you had to take, it was easier to recover after being derailed. The fundamentals were still important.

(In that sense…)

Down on the surface, the glasses girl walked out the building’s front entrance. Konori had left the dojo first, but Shirai’s Teleportation meant she could still get ahead of her and set up an ambush. Shirai crouched silently at the edge of the tall roof, looked down at her upperclassman’s head, and sighed.

(She’s waiting for me to make my move. That means she’s given up on step 1 and is welcoming me to do step 2. She might as well be mocking me. Does she really think she can hand me that kind of advantage and stop me on step 3 alone?)

When Shirai reached for the thigh belt carrying several metal darts, Konori stopped, turned around, and smiled up at her.

“Kh.”

Simply ducking down wasn’t enough. After hiding like that out of habit, she realized the building didn’t provide cover against someone with Clairvoyance. She clicked her tongue and moved from building to building a few times, but Konori’s gaze tracked her throughout.

(She can see through more than just a wall. She must be able to accurately see through an entire building!)

This went well beyond seeing a photo contained within a thin envelope. Based on this, it was possible Konori could read the text on the 100th page of an encyclopedia without even opening it.

“On the other hand…”

Something about Konori’s Clairvoyance had already caught Shirai’s attention.

She didn’t need an answer right away. Revealing someone’s power was a lot like that game where you planted flags in a grid to locate the mines. You started by risking your life with some clicks, viewed the numbers you had revealed, confirmed where some mines had to be from that, and worked your way from there. In that sense, making a grand declaration of the answer right off the bat was much more likely to get you blown to kingdom come.

“Oh, it’s the Judgment lady. Are you heading home?”

“It’s the Musashino Milk person!”

“Wow, you all are friends with a high schooler?”

Neighborhood children greeted Konori Mii when she walked through the shopping district. Any Judgment member became known to small children just from telling them to head back to their dorms. Shirai Kuroko got the same treatment when she walked by the park.

(It looks harmless enough, but it’s actually a real danger when you’re tailing someone or doing a stakeout.)

The adult teachers would say the students of Judgment weren’t supposed to be tailing people through the city in the first place.

It looked like Konori really wasn’t going to launch a surprise attack. The twintails girl knew she had been spotted, but she still moved between rooftops to follow Konori through the evening shopping district. She zigzagged between buildings on either side of the road, but Konori still looked up, smiled, and waved.

“Damn, she’s just making fun of me now! …Oh?”

Then Konori looked away.

She looked kind of awkward about it.

She may have seen Shirai’s underwear since the girl was so far above her.

Clairvoyance seemed like a poor match for such a decent person. Impure and indecent Shirai (who somehow carried a heart of justice at the same time) could not have been more jealous.

A drop hit her on the nose.

She looked up and noticed a menacing look to the sky. She teleported down to the arcade below to get out of the rain and saw Konori jogging away beyond the crowd. Konori looked tempted by the nearby bathhouse, but she decided to head home instead, suggesting she didn’t have an umbrella.

To avoid getting caught in the rain, the upperclassman girl was returning to her dorm without taking any detours. (Shirai wished she could do the same.) She entered what looked like a fashionable new apartment building. Shirai approached the entrance anyone was allowed in.

“Hm.”

She had visited here once before, but half-remembered memories could be more dangerous than no memories at all. Standing around wasn’t going to locate Konori’s room, but searching through the manager’s room would be wrong. A thought occurred to her, so she walked down to the large bicycle parking area in the basement.

Parking spots in places like this tended to be tied to the rooms. And a bicycle would have a purchase record at the store. But the clincher was how Judgment equipment could convert those numbers into a name. This was technically an official job, so she looked own at her phone.

(Here we go. Konori Mii’s registration number is 38A5172. Oh?)

She walked through the underground bicycle parking and found an unexpectedly large motorcycle parked in Konori’s space. It wasn’t a standard model. A large model had its engine swapped out for one with less displacement so it was legal for under-18s to drive.

At any rate, this told Shirai which room was Konori’s, which meant she could observe her through the window. The electric bicycle parked next to the motorcycle meant Konori had a roommate.

(Could I take a hostage? No, that’s a bad idea. It would be completely over the line with a ''civilian'', but maybe just barely acceptable with a Judgment member. Still, it would be too risky when I don’t know who they are or what they can do.)

Whoever they were, this roommate had to be on par with Konori Mii. Shirai sensed something frighteningly unfathomable about this mystery figure. Focusing on Konori alone sounded like a good idea when the alternative could mean getting caught in a crossfire.

Once aboveground again, she found the sun was already setting.

This battle was allowed to be a long-term thing instead of a short-term showdown where a split-second decision determined everything. Shirai bought a sweet bread and some milk at a nearby convenience store (that belonged to her family’s holdings) and teleported up to the emergency stairs on the building across from the student dorms.

“Munch.”

(I’d say this new product is a keeper. The light green veggie paste doesn’t get in the way of the sweet of the bean paste and it still gives you a day’s worth of nutrients, so it’s the perfect sweet bread for a stakeout.)

Although the limited number of jobs allowing for legal stakeouts might be a problem in it finding success. She had heard anti-stalker laws sometimes affected private investigators whose jobs weren’t authorized by the authorities. Calling themselves journalists was a handy loophole there, so it wasn’t uncommon for PIs in Academy City to officially call themselves freelance reporters or cameramen. There was always a technicality to be found.

“Musashino Milk. Konori-senpai seems obsessed with the stuff.”

She wished she had some binoculars, but they didn’t sell those at a convenience store. Instead, she aimed her phone’s camera and zoomed it in as far as it would go.

Her eyes suddenly met Konori Mii’s.

“…”

That clinched it.

''The other building was 300m away.'' Plus, it was sunset with night falling over the city. During an idol concert on an outdoor stage, you would need binoculars to even see the idol’s expression from this distance, but Glasses Girl Konori stared right at Shirai while holding a carton of that Musashino Milk and enjoying some balcony camping with her roommate. The two girls had pulled some beach chairs and an electric barbecue set onto their balcony.

(I was wondering how she managed to avoid my darts so easily.)

In that case…

Shirai looked away from her high-tech screen in exasperation and took sip of her milk carton through the straw.

(By seeing through the dust and dirt or the air itself, she can eliminate any margin of error introduced by light refraction and attenuation. This gives her truly perfect vision. She can see the space around her without any distortion, so she can dodge without any margin of error.)

When you took a casual picture with your phone, did you ever find the color looked wrong? That wasn’t necessarily a problem with your settings or the specs of the phone camera. The scenery humans saw was actually fairly distorted. The moisture and temperature differences in the air would weaken or bend light. When light passed through a small gap, it would diffract. When it hit a wall, it would reflect. So even with the sun as the only light source, the light could be coming in from multiple directions at once. Why did the morning and evening sky look so different? No one was checking the clock and repainting the sky. It was a natural phenomenon caused by the bending and absorption of different wavelengths of light.

But those distortions meant nothing to Konori. Her Clairvoyance let her ''ignore any and all obstacles'' keeping her from seeing her target. She could see the world as it really was, with no margin of error, so she would never make any mistakes.

She had truly perfect vision.

A millimeter as seen by Shirai was not as accurate or valuable as one as seen by Konori.

(She wears glasses, so it would be wonderful if her poor eyesight drags down her power as well.)

That was only a prediction – or a hope really – on Shirai’s part. She could not objectively prove it. In fact, didn’t Konori point at distant things and shout instructions when she was using her Clairvoyance? Did she not use her power at all times because she would bump into the nearer obstacles?

This was even more trouble than Shirai had thought. Ordinary human eyesight had certain limits. The air itself would gradually attenuate light, so you could not see clearly past a certain distance. But Konori could ignore the air in between, so that attenuation by distance didn’t apply to her. Konori probably wouldn’t lose sight of Shirai even if she tailed her from more than a kilometer away. And going indoors or underground to hide herself wouldn’t work when Konori could see through those obstacles, at least to an extent.

“I really hope she wouldn’t be able to see through a 5km wall…or through the horizon.”

Konori’s inability to see through the earth was only wishful thinking on Shirai’s part and not actually proven. She couldn’t rely on that yet. And if Konori climbed up onto a broadcast tower or something, the distance to the horizon changed, allowing her to easily break through that wall.

This was only training, but in a real battle, there was no rule preventing Konori from using a weapon. What if she used a projectile weapon – such as a bow and arrow that used both an arrowhead and an acoustic weapon, or an anti-materiel rifle with a ridiculously long range – and lay in wait to launch a surprise attack?

“The more I learn, the more that power feels perfect for a delinquent who specializes in sneak attacks.”

That comment earned her a glare from the glasses girl 300m away. Apparently she knew how to read lips. She could see everything at this distance, even with a wall or door in the way. Trying to find a blind spot to sneak up on her was never going to work. There was no point in challenging her on her turf like that.

Had Shirai been wrong to even try using sneak attacks against Konori in the first place?

But the attack in the dojo had proven well enough that directly challenging her wouldn’t work either. Konori had more than just her Clairvoyance. Her old-fashioned fighting skills were top notch as well.

Shirai had to keep her from using her Clairvoyance and from using her more ordinary skills.

She still didn’t have enough information. The special circumstances and conditions created by challenging Konori Mii still gave that upperclassman girl the advantage.

Shirai had to tear that down. She couldn’t win with the standard anti-esper combat rules. She had to set things up so the circumstances and conditions worked against Konori.

Dressing in layers to withstand the snowy mountain’s chill wasn’t enough.

She needed to be willing to trigger an avalanche that swallowed them both.

“…”

Shirai Kuroko leaned on the emergency stairs railing and sipped more milk through the straw while she considered the problem.

What if?