Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume12 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 4===

As the frigid rain fell, electricity crackled in the gap between two buildings.

Just adding cold rain was enough to greatly change the nature of this attack. Instead of striking a single point, it became an area of effect attack.

“District 7?” Mourning clothes Mikoto looked around skeptically. “There’s more of those Bio Secure people around here. Does that mean that idiot is hiding in this district?”

If his corpse(?) really was running around, what did she want to do?

She still hadn’t found an answer to that.

But she at least knew she couldn’t let Kihara-brand special forces retrieve him, slice him up, and then incinerate him.

This was a city of science, but there were still standards for saying goodbye to someone.

Meanwhile…

“Brrrr, it’s so cold, brrrrr.”

“Why are you so sensitive to the cold when you have so much subcutaneous fat?”

“Because all my fat has gloriously gathered in my boobs.”

“(That vending machine over there sells dashi under the brand name of a restaurant famous for only using natural ingredients, but I can wait until later to tell her that.)”

“☆☆☆Misaaaaka-saaan☆☆☆”

“Bfh!? Don’t grab onto me while drooling with hearts in your eyes!! Were you possessed by a succubus!?”

“Ahh…”

Shokuhou recovered after holding her phone up to the vending machine and pressing the warm can against her cheek. Then she wrapped her hands around the can and took small sips.

And for how much the idiot queen worried about ingredients, she sure didn’t seem to mind drinking from industrial-made cans and plastic bottles. That obsession of hers may have simply been a placebo. She was an idiot, after all.

Mikoto’s head jerked up.

There was no warning.

She could sense even slight electric and magnetic disturbances. And a powered suit was a piece of electronic equipment weighing more than 300kg. There was no preventing it from leaking invisible electromagnetism.

“Here they come. Time for wave two.”

“We are going the right way, I hope?”

Sounds of destruction rang loud.

A Bio Secure powered suit broke right through the metal wall erected around a construction site and Mikoto launched a lightning spear to pierce it.

Then they were forced to run through the rainy city.

There was no need to have Shokuhou read any residual thoughts with Mental Out.

The damage to some of the construction sites was obvious. That would be due to the powered suits going nuts, not Kamijou. Just follow the destruction and they could catch up to him.

But there was another problem.

They heard dull mechanical “gashunk!!” sounds.

“Tch!! Looks like the Bio Secure powered suits are taking this seriously too!”

“My, they must see us as infection candidates.”

Candidates.

That meant it was only a possibility.

And that assumed some strange infectious agent even existed in the first place.

Seeing a corpse get up wasn’t enough to immediately accept the existence of a zombie virus. And even if it did exist, none of that implied it was highly infectious.

Mikoto wasn’t about to be killed over maybes and assumptions.

She could probably blast through those Bio Secure powered suits with a Railgun fired at three times the speed of sound.

But if she did that for each and every one, she would quickly wear herself out.

She wanted to avoid running out of gas and fainting before she managed to find Kamijou Touma.

So she wanted to lose as many of them on foot as possible, but…

“Hurry, Shokuhou!! As low as the heels are, those pumps are only slowing you down!! Take them off already!!”

“Pant, gasp. M-my dress is wet with rain and has soaked up so much water and the veil makes it hard to breathe… Gbh, why did I choose these sexy mourning clothes again?”

Still, how was that outfit structured if she was losing to Mikoto whose kimono was like a single tube?

As the #5 gasped for breath, a powered suit’s thick fingers approached her from behind. It was probably after her long blonde hair.

Were they going after the slower one first?

(I could abandon her here, but she’ll still be useful.)

Mikoto magnetically grabbed a thick steel beam from a nearby construction site and swung it straight to the side to knock away the heavy powered suit. A lot like those things that rang the huge bells at Buddhist temples.

“Heh…heh heh. So you finally admit it, Misaka-san? You finally admit you need me? Hwa ha ha. You finally admit my human controlling ability is so much more useful than your machine controlling ability!!”

“I really should’ve abandoned this idiot and attached myself to a building wall or something.”

Shokuhou tearfully clinging to her in the rain was really annoying. She must have taken Mikoto’s joke seriously.

Furious, another powered suit readied something at its hip.

A flamethrower.

Had they received authorization to use it on secondary targets like Mikoto and Shokuhou? Or had they removed the safety at their own discretion?

If this was happening here, how much of a crisis was that idiot in?

“…”

Bluish-white sparks scattered from Mikoto’s bangs.

She didn’t even need to wield a lightning spear or an iron sand sword.

No matter how powerful they were, the powered suits were still electronic devices. With Misaka Mikoto’s #3 power, she could easily shut them down externally.

But…

“Shokuhou, what is taking you!? Hurry up and stop the human inside!!”

“I’m trying, but there’s something weird about them!!”

Shokuhou Misaki’s tearful shouting was business as usual, but it was very ''un''usual when it came to psychological things.

Mental Out wasn’t working.

That meant something else was interfering.

(Is an entire human body being precisely controlled without using the brain?)

A parasite, moisture control, a virus, a drug, electrical stimuli, or a microscopic shape-memory alloy that reacted to certain frequencies. Mikoto came up with a few possibilities, but she wasn’t convinced any of them really could control someone’s body like this.

Still, the #5’s Mental Out really was being repelled.

These were abnormal people who had received the blessings provided by a Kihara.

“Damn, now it feels like there are zombies on both sides!!”

If she had to deal with an entire group of people like that, Mikoto would be worn down first.

Had they been intentionally designed that way?

A collection of endlessly replaceable ordinary people were used to defeat an irregular individual. By eliminating individuality, that group had made itself immortal. Kihara Goukei had bit her tongue and taken herself out of the fight right away, but maybe she wasn’t interested in making herself special.

On the other hand, this was apparently a group the grownups had put together in order to battle “reanimated corpses”.

While sporadically releasing 1 billion volt currents, Mikoto turned around just as they descended a slope leading down into a culvert.

She magnetically attached her purse to her belly to free up her hand and then flicked an arcade coin with her thumb.

She fired a Railgun.

The roar of compressed air. The orange streak. A moment later, a shockwave swept across the scene, and the tunnel-like entrance collapsed.

She turned on her phone’s light so she could see.

“This is only going to buy us some time. A culvert this big is going to have other entrances and those powered suits might have the horsepower to dig through the concrete rubble.”

“Pant. Why do you…seem to come alive…when it’s time to fight?”

The #5 looked ready to slump to the ground, so Mikoto grabbed her arm and continued further in.

There were fewer hints compared to all the signs of destruction in the construction sites, but Mikoto’s microwave radar could scan the detailed dust on the ground and any traces of water while Shokuhou could read residual thoughts.

So they could search for signs along a single path.

Or they should have been able to…

“Wait,” said Shokuhou on reflex. “What is this?”

“Looks like something happened here.”

It wasn’t that there were no signs.

There were too many.

In a word, something had exploded. Whatever had happened here, nothing had escaped unharmed.

With nothing at all, the small hints could show the way, but this was the opposite. Like the red cellophane placed over a problem set, there were too many signs everywhere to tell which one was the right one.

Mikoto, their physical fighter, spoke cautiously.

“The rebar is melted. This explosion was even hotter than city gas. Could it have been an oxyacetylene flame?”

The explosion itself had been powerful, but that meant the trail ended here.



Where had Kamijou Touma gone in this cold and rainy world?



Eventually…

“Hmm,” groaned Shokuhou, twirling her TV remote like a handgun.

She may have been lonely.

She was focused on a bucket-like powered suit helmet.

She appeared to be reading something slowly and deeply.

“Bio Secure. Experts at solving Academy City’s problems without the Board Chairman knowing. But then they send the responsible corporation or lab a bill for some percentage of the estimated damage the problem would have caused if left unchecked.”

Mikoto wasn’t even surprised.

She had given up on excepting anything remotely resembling decency from the adults of Academy City.

“Well, if a corporation let a bacteria or alloy that reanimates dead bodies escape their secure area, they could easily go out of business. So it’s not surprising there would be experts at cleaning that up before anyone finds out.”

At that point, Mikoto frowned.

“But they send the bill after solving the problem? Without any sense of threat, I would expect those immoral grownups to try to get out of paying.”

“And can the big boss of Academy City really be so easily fooled? I would expect their stealth ability to be nowhere near as effective as they think. Then again, the surveillance system seems to have gotten a lot more lax ''of late''.”

Bio Secure likely had more than just this.

Unlike the esper children, the adults who fortified themselves with next-gen weapons would use overwhelming numbers.

“…”

Several Six Wings unmanned attack helicopters flew by overhead.

Mikoto might be able to forcibly take control of them…but she was afraid of doing so in the city. If she screwed up controlling them, she could make them crash.

And more than that direct threat, the 14-year-old in mourning clothes spoke up.

“I feel like I’m forgetting something.”

“Oh, you ‘feel like’ it, do you? You’re actually looking at your memories in their chronological context, I hope? If not, you can prophesy the end of the world all you like.”

“Or is it something that happened behind the scenes where I didn’t know about it? There’s a chance there’s something in this city I’ve only managed to catch glimpses of out of the corner of my eye.”

It felt like grasping at clouds.

Or was it?

These things had happened in the same city, no matter how big the city was.

For one, she still didn’t know how that boy had died. Maybe there was something there that explained how he came back to life.

“I don’t think we have much time.” Mourning clothes Shokuhou sighed in mild exasperation. “Let’s find some water and food. Ingredients are important. I would rather not consume any gelatins, blocks, or other chemical stuff.”

“We don’t even know if that idiot is alive or dead.”

Mourning clothes Mikoto bit her lip while hanging her head.

“There’s no way I could get any food down.”