Toaru Majutsu no Index:MvM Chapter3
Chapter 3: Two Members of the Most Dangerous Non-Native Species
Part 1
The world of Celesacphear had no god. Because after creating all life in that world, its god left.
But that wasn’t a problem.
Because if anyone was in serious trouble, a pair of goddesses would break the invisible barrier and come to rescue them.
Part 2
It had seen Mikoto.
What had? The 120m dragon flying through the sky.
“Oh, no! It’s coming this way!!”
The great mass charged in at a sharp angle that clearly differed from a large passenger plane or bomber.
As soon as Mikoto jumped from the rooftop, the top three floors of the skyscraper were torn away by the dragon’s scales, which were like a grater or a saw. A graze from those would be enough to destroy a human body. Whichever building wall Mikoto chose to magnetically land on next, she was dealing with a living creature. She was doomed if it predicted her course and attacked just as she landed!!
(How many skyscrapers are left, and at what distribution? Being able to stick to building walls doesn’t buy me much in a lengthy battle against a winged beast!!)
Mikoto might be able to bring it down with a Railgun, but that attack’s range was only 50m. In a grounded fight, that was plenty, but in a fast-moving air battle, it would require being at “close range”. She had to assume the odds of hitting were close to zero if she fired at random. She needed a plan.
Meanwhile, on the ground…
“The gate is just sitting open. What is going on here?”
Shokuhou casually walked outside of Academy City.
She found roiling blue there.
The ground crumbled away like a cliff immediately outside the wall and only a tropical-looking sea could be seen far below. But that didn’t mean there was no other land. Land like broken pieces of eggshell was slowly moving overhead. They were all moving at the speed of clouds in the wind, but they appeared to be governed by some kind of rules that prevented them from colliding. They varied in size from small islands to massive continents and countless waterfalls of all sizes poured down into the sea below.
Simply put, she found herself in another world.
The eggshell shards of land had polished marble spires sticking up from them. Probably parts of castles or churches. It would be simple enough to write it off as medieval European, but Shokuhou’s knowledge of world history didn’t contain any of the designs she was seeing.
It looked like she really was in a fantasy world of swords and sorcery.
There was even a giant dragon flying nearby.
(A world with broken land floating above an ocean planet, hm? That means Academy City here isn’t on the surface either. It’s on a relatively low level, but it’s still floating above the blue core.)
Shokuhou had a question.
But she didn’t have enough power to check on the answer.
(The nearest small island is more than 50m away. I can’t reach it on foot since it’s floating and I don’t see how I can clear the vertical or horizontal distance without Misaka-san’s magnet ability. That dragon isn’t human, so Mental Out won’t work on it. That means taming it and soaring through the sky on its back isn’t an option.)
Now the #5 was also curious what this place was.
Did that mean a truce with the electric girl?
(New plan: earn that idiot’s trust ability and then stab her in the back when she lets her guard down☆)
Shokuhou let out a quick sigh to refocus her mind before aiming her TV remote toward a giant slate covered in ancient angular writing that sat on the edge of the cliff.
She was reading the residual thoughts, not the mysterious writing.
Just because this was another world full of crazy-looking nature and strange magic didn’t mean espers were entirely powerless there.
“Misaka-saaan. I think I’ve found how to defeat that legendary dragon.”
“No! I just know you’ll tell me the wrong thing on purpose!! You’re trying to get it to kill me so you don’t have to do it yourself! So no thank you!!!”
…What a great idea.
The scheming girl was just a bit impressed, but she kept that to herself.
And Mikoto didn’t wait for Shokuhou’s reaction. As she continued jumping from skyscraper to skyscraper, the 120m dragon got impatient and charged in, so Beast Hunter Mikoto hopped onto its back.
Shokuhou didn’t know if Mikoto would believe her, but she (cutely) formed a megaphone with her hands and shouted up from the ground.
(Let’s see…)
“First, slaying the Brain Edge Dragon requires the Sword of Valor, but to get that you need the Rusty Blade from the depths of the mines of Orion, Celesacphear’s western continent, and then you need to get it retempered by the dwarves who live in the Brand Mountain Range, but the dwarves are at war with the elves, which means they’re too busy to accept outside work, so you need to resolve that millennium-long conflict and bring the war to an end, but the parchment needed for the treaty can only be made from the Eternal Agreement Goat which is only found on the southern continent of Boutique and catching the goat is a lot easier if you have the Silver Throwing Net, so you should first go talk to the mermaids in the Seabed Kingdom, but mermaids are shy and you’ll first need to increase your communication ability by polishing your conversational skill which is best done by studying at the acting school in the Urban continent’s largest casino town of Vernment and you need letters of recommendation from five people to get in, but trying to negotiate for those will get you nowhere, so its best to force the issue with money ability and the fastest and most reliable way to make a lot of money is to skip the casino where the pro dealers control who wins and loses and to head out of town and work as a bounty hunter, and the best place to find high-bounty monsters is the northern continent of Snowdome, so you’ll need to charter a ship there, register with the guild, and – no, wait, chartering a ship requires a travel permit, which you’ll have to acquire on your own – and once you’ve registered with the guild, you need to head to the off-limits White Snowplains to hunt down 20 each of Rank 5 Big Mammoths and Paradise Wendigos, which will be enough to reach the sum you want, but first timers aren’t given the big jobs like that, so you’ll need to first work smaller jobs to increase your star ranking – I do hope you’re paying attention to all this – and once you have the money, you head back to the casino town of Vernment in Urban, but if you try to travel by ship with all that money, there’s a 100% chance of being targeted by pirates, so you’ll need to hire some bodyguards first and the best guards in Snowdome are the Dawnbright Valors, so you’ll want to go speak with them, but if they know how rich you are, they’ll jack up their prices and take all your money from you, so be careful about that, but don’t worry because if you challenge their leader to single combat and win, that won’t be an issue anymore, but once you’ve gotten into the acting school in Vernment, you’ll receive acting lessons, but since you’re after the shy mermaids, you’ll want to choose the comedy classes, but while it usually takes three years to graduate, you don’t need to stick around that long, so you can leave after picking up the basics during the first week, but escaping the dorm-only school requires some real technique, so it’s recommended you first contact a group of failing students and get them to tell you the best escape route, but if you escape with them, they’ll stick with you and pretend to be helping you until they eventually betray you, so keep that in mind as you escape the acting school and make your way to the Seabed Kingdom, but reaching that kingdom requires entering a whale’s belly and that doesn’t do you any good if you die in there, so you need a Survival Capsule first, but you can get one of those from the worker’s guild in the port city of Belzar, so don’t bother trying to steal one, and once you have the Survival Capsule, you can dive into the ocean, but before the whale will swallow you whole, you have to disguise yourself as-”
A deafening explosion erupted out.
The thought of traversing all those floating continents on a grand adventure must have sounded like a huge pain in the rear to Mikoto because she launched a Railgun into the dragon’s back from point-blank range and slayed the 120m monster in a single attack.
The great mass lost its speed and, thanks to its wings, slowly dropped toward the ground.
(Huh? Is it…falling this way?)
“Why are you like this, Misaka-san!?”
“Eat 120m monster, schemerrrrrrrrr!!”
The effect was like a cross between a meteor strike and a bomber performing a belly landing.
Academy City’s gate was very noisily obliterated.
Shokuhou tried to run away, but she tripped over her own feet, fell, and performed a few panty-flashing somersaults to just barely avoid the massive attack.
Mikoto was furious.
“Stop including miracles in your plans!! It’s not fair!”
“I don’t want to hear about fair play from someone who tried to kill me along with the terrain ability around me!!”
The Fan Service Queen was flipped upside down in her short skirt as she blushed and shouted back. But her spirit of fan service may have gone too far because she looked more like she had taken an imaginary belly-to-back suplex.
However, this was a fantasy world where swords and sorcery were everything.
Are you serious? thought Mikoto. It was such a shock it took her a bit to grasp it.
Those weren’t birds flying around overhead. They were half-naked winged girls. A flock of two or three harpies or sirens were flying together.
“Squawk, squawk. Let’s go snatch some souls.”
“La la la. I know it’s necessary for the cursed song, but I hate having to look after my throat.”
Mikoto waved up from the ground, but they ignored her, suggesting she couldn’t contact them.
And why were they speaking Japanese? The reincarnation goddess too for that matter.
“Was the lack of information in an emergency not the only reason that cult appeared so quickly in Academy City?”
“Are you suggesting a cult was the natural result because the city was brought to a world where myths and religions provide real power in an everyday sort of way?” asked Shokuhou.
And.
If they accepted the ridiculous idea that they had died and been sent to another world, it did help explain some things.
Yes.
To be honest, it was hard to imagine a simple gas explosion killing two Level 5s at once.
Most likely, Misaka Mikoto and Shokuhou Misaki had triggered a propane tank explosion while fighting during lunch and they were in critical condition. Mikoto didn’t know what the scientific term was, but they had to be in what was commonly known as an out-of-body experience. Maybe they were in a coma and maybe they were in a vegetative state, but they were still alive and that idiot goddess had jumped the gun on sending them to another world. They would be in real trouble if they didn’t quickly find a way to wake up and return to their original world.
That meant the Academy City they had been rampaging through was in a similar state.
The physical Academy City in western Tokyo had not been transferred here. A ghostlike version of the city had been taken to the other world with the two girls.
(A nonphysical city, huh?)
Mikoto held a hand to her chin in thought.
Anyone with the appropriate knowledge might have thought of the Imaginary Number District.
But unlike the pointy-haired boy who had witnessed all sorts of dangerous things because he got caught up in trouble about as commonly as a certain housekeeper, Mikoto and Shokuhou didn’t have the necessary knowledge or experience. Even if they had gotten very close at times, like contacting Kazakiri in her golden angel mode.
“But that would mean…” thought Shokuhou as she looked up into the sky.
They had met Shirai Kuroko, Hokaze Junko, Kobayashi Satori, and Kamijou Touma here, but had those people actually been a piece of this strange city?
If so that was the first good news in a (truly) long time.
They had been weirdly casual about Shirai and Kamijou being blown away before their eyes. It hadn’t felt real.
Mikoto muttered something else with a dark look on her face.
“That’s right. The real Kobayashi-san wouldn’t be the kind of freak to use colored pens to underline all the dirty words in her thick dictionary.”
“?”
Shokuhou wasn’t sure what that idiot was talking about, but she decided it would be best not to control Hokaze, Kobayashi, and the others in their attempt to return to Earth. They might look the same and have the same powers, but that wasn’t actually them. Which meant she couldn’t fully trust them.
Besides, the telepathic link with Kobayashi had already been severed.
She hadn’t actually tested it, but she doubted any of the people in this strange city could leave its walls. In a very literal sense, they could only be residents of the city.
Shokuhou decided to quit thinking about that version of Academy City.
The world outside it was what mattered now.
“And this.”
Shokuhou sat down on the ground and tossed a pebble toward Mikoto.
Mikoto didn’t even have to catch it.
Before it hit her, it slowed and started hovering in place.
“I was right. I thought the ground here might have a lot of iron since there’s so much rust-red sand, but the iron content must be really high for your magnetism ability to react and make it float☆”
“Hm.”
Tokyo’s soil had iron sand in it, but not this much.
They were in another world.
While fighting in the city, Mikoto had assumed the map and compass apps had stopped working because Shokuhou had cut off the internet, but apparently not.
Mikoto looked up into the sky.
“It seems like Academy City’s satellite is still up there. It bombed us after all.”
“That would mean the GPS measurements are being taken, but with the actual readings not matching the preset world map in the slightest, the computer must be getting tons of error abilities, automatically stopping any GPS services from working.”
“Probably.”
In another world, the distribution of geomagnetism might be different.
That could be why an Electromaster like Mikoto had been so irritable and aggressive.
“Yes, that must be it!! It’s all the magnetic anomaly’s fault, not mine! You have no excuse for your behavior, but I do!!”
“Hey!! Stop coming up with self-serving explanations!”
They had established another rule.
They still didn’t know how the eggshell shard floating islands managed to defy gravity, but they had an extremely high iron content. Mikoto’s magnetism might just be enough to leap between the floating islands.
“Come to think of it…you picked up on that awfully quick, Shokuhou. Why do you know so much about other worlds? From those phone novels? Y’know, the ones arranged vertically for a phone screen.”
“It’s just that researchers and engineers love using those names. They’ll choose a random mythological name for their new project to hide what it actually does.”
“…”
“Hee hee. But I bet your knowledge comes from manga, Misaka-san.”
At any rate, stepping outside of Academy City brought them to a cliff with an endless ocean far below. Even with water down there, they were high enough that the shock of impact would kill them.
A big, ancient slate was stabbed into the ground nearby, but Shokuhou had already read the residual thoughts in it and it didn’t seem to offer anything else.
“Misaka-san, could you take me to the nearest floating land?”
“Why should I help you?”
“Do you know how to investigate it on your own? Can you calculate how many days it will take before you encounter your first person to question? But I can read people’s memories and the residual thoughts in inanimate objects, which seems like it would help you solve this world’s mysteries a lot faster.”
Mikoto looked away and clicked her tongue.
And she spread her arms as if asking for a hug.
They had a deal.
