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.

Part 3

“Here goes.”

“Gyahhhhhhh!?”

Familiar gravity vanished.

Mikoto leaped about 30m with Shokuhou clinging to the side of her hip. This was a vertical jump. Shokuhou had asked for this, but she blanched and screamed at the sudden weightlessness.

The jump took them toward the closest floating land.

…But did this world have any other people living in it? If so, how did they travel between floating landmasses? If they couldn’t cheat with magnetically-fueled jumps, this had to be a very inconvenient world. Or did they all live all their lives on the floating land they were born on and leaving their home was severely frowned upon?

“Pant, gasp! Th-there’s something over there!!”

Still clinging to Mikoto’s hip, Luggage Girl Shokuhou pointed somewhere with serious tears in her eyes.

Mikoto cut the magnetic assistance and came to a brief stop in midair.

Then she magnetically tugged herself horizontally to forcibly bring her to new footing.

It was more like a large hunk of rock than an island. It had to be one of the smallest of the “eggshell pieces”. Still, it was about the size of a school classroom. Something was flattened atop the barren piece of rock. It was hard to identify while squashed flat, but it wasn’t quite the same as a hot-air balloon. It may have originally been an airship shaped like a rugby ball.

“But that would only be 10m even when inflated, wouldn’t it? I thought airships weren’t very efficient unless you made them humongous.”

“The logic ability of our world might not apply. The atoms, molecules, and technology here could be completely different from in our world, so maybe there’s a light and stable incombustible gas here.”

Whatever the case, that didn’t look like the result of a proper landing.

If it had been caught in the fight against the giant dragon, Mikoto and Shokuhou could be partially responsible, so they decided it would be best to investigate the flattened airship.

There was indeed someone there.

“Ow, ow, ow, ow…”

A woman of about 20 crawled out from below the gasbag’s thick material. To the two middle schoolers, a woman who skipped right past the three years of high school looked quite a bit older than them. …Although she seemed a little sad that she lost to Shokuhou when it came to boobs.

“Are you really in middle school?”

“Are we still doing that?”

The young woman, who was their first encounter with a resident of this world, was wearing a red princess dress. Her long purple hair was worn in gorgeous ringlets.

Her hair and clothing were both colored dazzlingly bright.

After crawling out on all fours, she didn’t seem capable of getting back up and tearfully tapped her lower back.

“I-I can’t believe I took a direct hit from a Continent Blade. Not a good start to a long journey… Now I have to pay for the airship and they’ll demand I pay more for breach of contract. If I’d known this would happen, I would have just thrown around some more money and bought one instead of going with a rental.”

Mikoto and Shokuhou were actually relieved to find she sounded like a sheltered rich girl.

They had plenty of experience with those in Tokiwadai, so seeing someone so obviously out of touch with ordinary people was like finding some good miso soup while traveling overseas.

Mikoto reached out a hand to help her up.

“Are you alright? And what’s a Continent Blade?”

“Thank you very much. Continent Blades are vacuum blades that appear unpredictably as the paths of the floating lands move through the air. They generally weaken and disperse quickly, but what do you think happens if you run into one in midair?”

Did this world have giant guillotines flying through the air year round?

According to the bright-colored young woman, airships and winged bicycles were crucial means of transportation in this world where floating lands were arranged in multiple layers, but simply running into one of the naturally-occurring Continent Blades had caused this disaster. A hole had been torn in the airship and it had crashed, the impact flattening it.

“This world has dragons, magic, and flying continents, but I guess it can’t all be fun and games.”

“But as inconvenient as it is, I am glad I was born in such an interesting world.”

There was no lie in the woman’s smile. Mikoto was honestly envious.

She felt nothing but disgust for her home of Academy City.

But why had this woman embarked on such a risky journey?

“I am 20 now. I have completed my magical education, so it is about time I left home and started my own business.”

“Huh, is that how it works here? Flying continents and magic schools. I’d love to go to one of those.”

“?”

The way Mikoto put that made the young woman tilt her head.

“So will you be living on your own now? Not having a dorm manager sounds great, but no allowance and having to earn your own living sounds nerve-racking.”

“It is. I am still a complete novice, but I thought the easiest business to get into for now would be the slave trade!”

Hm?

Did she…?

Did she just say something extremely messed up?

“Um?”

“Yes?”

“What, uh, did you just say? The easiest business to get into would be…?”

“The slave trade, what else?”

She said it as casually as someone saying they were going to try online stock trading to learn about money.

There was no wicked smile on her face. She only looked confused.

“Yes, any real merchant must eventually be wealthy enough to finance a large elf hunting group and buy a large slave airship. Personally, I hope to run a major market myself one day. You will never hit it big without first dreaming big, after all.”

“Ugh…”

Someone else crawled out from the squashed airship.

The girl of about 10 had long blonde hair. Her pointy ears were twitching, but her threadbare green dress was a lot more noticeable. It was sleeveless and had a mini tight skirt, but it was so filthy it was hard to focus on any of those details. The accident couldn’t have caused this. Those were stains that had accumulated over a long period of time. A jangling sound came from her. She had a thick steel collar around her skinny neck with a thick chain loosely attached to her emaciated ankles.

She was a slave.

The woman hadn’t been using slang or a dialectic term. She really sold people?

“My, my.”

And she didn’t even try to hide it.

This was perfectly normal as far as she was concerned.

They really were in another world.

“Can you do nothing right, slave?”

“…I-I’m sorry…”

Such a heavy apology should never have come from such a small child.

Her sluggish movement may have been the result of extreme exhaustion weighing on her body.

Her tiny hands held onto a large trunk made of thick leather.

She tried several times to lift it, but it simply wasn’t possible. Before Mikoto could hurry over and assist her, the girl was overpowered by the weight and toppled forward, causing the trunk to fall over with her.

Someone sighed.

It was the gaudy young woman.

“I explained the punishment for getting my precious clothing bag dirty, didn’t I? And it’s such a pain to do. Why must you waste so much of my time over something so silly?”

“…Ah…”

“The first three mistakes are a simple whipping, but the fourth means losing an ear. Those are the standard rules for slave elves, which you should know quite well as a slave so useless she wasn’t even worth putting on the market.”

The young woman grabbed one of the long, twitching ears, and yanked hard.

In her other hand, she all of a sudden held a large razor like a barber would use.

She wasn’t even angry.

She pressed the blade against the base of the ear just like someone might head to the front door after hearing the doorbell ring.

The small elf girl didn’t resist.

Her lifeless eyes carried the resignation of someone who had decided the destruction of her body and the death that followed would at least mean an end to the suffering.

But that was no mercy or kindness. It was the same as the illusionary warmth felt if you kept your hand buried in the cold snow long enough.

“…”

Mikoto knew nothing about this world.

She didn’t know its history, its culture, or its values.

But.

She couldn’t bear to see eyes without the spark of life in them.

Everything she saw here dug up painful memories. Memories of other girls who were treated as throwaway tools for a loathsome experiment and who obeyed without a word of complaint as they were slaughtered one after another.

She was reminded of the mass-produced military clones known as the Sisters.

Of the more than 10 thousand girls she had failed to save.

“Hey, there must be plenty of other jobs out there. Why would you go out of your way to be a slaver?”

“Because it’s so easy.”

The young woman didn’t even need to think about her answer.

“You don’t need any kind of qualifications or license to start. And if you want to start a big business, you need a quick way of earning enough money to get it off the ground, right? Anyone can do a job as simple as this, so it’s no more than the first step on the path toward greater success.”

“You cruelly rob people of their freedom, you force them to work against their will, and you wear them down to the bone… Haven’t you ever felt just a little bad about that?”

“Why in the world would I? Slaves are meant to be worked hard. If a slave is tough enough to last longer, that just means you have to push them even harder so you won’t have to continue feeding them! Keeping around healthy slaves for too long would only bankrupt me!!”

She sounded just like she was explaining that it was cheaper to throw out and replace an old, inefficient air conditioner.

It wasn’t any more than that in her mind.

…This wasn’t her crime alone. That was how this world worked. The real culprit was the environment that had raised the young woman to think this way.

Mikoto understood that intellectually.

But she was at her limit.

In a number of ways.

“I see,” muttered Mikoto under her breath.

She was getting sidetracked.

This trip to another world was likely the result of a mistake, so her top priority had to be investigating this world and finding a way back to Earth while this out-of-body experience was still only that. What to do about this slave elf had nothing at all to do with that goal.

She understood that.

But for some reason, Shokuhou didn’t try to stop her despite taking a cynical view of human nature and prioritizing efficiency.

Shokuhou’s silence didn’t mean she was opposed to Mikoto’s choice.

In fact, Shokuhou gently hugged the dazed little elf to her chest. And she did it so smoothly the master with the large razor just let it happen. So the young woman probably hadn’t even realized she had given up her hostage. Even though that had been to ensure the elf wouldn’t be hit on accident.

The #5’s look of silent approval told Mikoto she was free to do whatever she wanted.

“They look like us, they think like us, and they speak like us, but just because they’re ‘not human’ you think it’s okay to chain them up, buy and sell them, and work them to the bone? And even worse, you think it’s more economical for the master to work them literally to death? I see, I see.”

“?”

The slaver woman tilted her head.

There was no hostility or caution on her face. She truly could not figure out what about this was bothering Mikoto so much.

And.

Misaka Mikoto loathed this sort of unjust killing.

Crash!!!

A flower of light blossomed.

Thick electricity scattered, a rapidly-vibrating iron sand whip sliced through the air, and a Railgun scorched the air at three times the speed of sound.

The battle had begun.

Part 4

The noise was deafening and the light blinding.

Most likely, these supernatural phenomena would seem impossible even to the people of this world.

“Don’t worry.”

Shokuhou twirled the TV remote in her hand and pressed it against the forehead of the slave elf in her other arm.

“I can erase all the painful memories, but only if you truly want me to. First…yes, I know. I can remove those painful feelings and bitter emotions from deep in your heart☆”

With the click of a button, something returned to the slave’s lifeless eyes. That was probably the natural power to protect your formless life and seek a better future.

It was a light that should have been within the elf girl all along.

“Um.”

The slave girl moved her lips while held gently to Shokuhou’s large chest.

After being worn down so far her very core nearly broke, she asked a question.

“Why are you helping me? I’m only an inhuman elf…”

She sounded truly puzzled.

She had accepted the chain connecting her thick collar to her ankles as something normal, so she must have abandoned all hope of ever being rescued.

Shokuhou Misaki was not Misaka Mikoto.

But she too couldn’t bear to see anything like this.

The #3 was not the only who had failed to save a girl in the past.

Even if the deceased had accepted their death without resistance, it wasn’t so easy for the survivors to accept.

It never was.

“Well.”

(Telling her this rotten system reminds me of Dolly would be rude to this girl and that girl both.)

Shokuhou twirled her remote again and kept that answer to herself.

Academy City’s #5 Level 5 gave another answer instead.

“Maybe because you aren’t ‘only’ anything.”

“?”

“I mean, my Mental Out works on you. So whatever you might be, I have to accept that you have a mind just like mine☆” explained the honey girl with a smile.

It was just like Tokiwadai’s wicked Queen to imply Mikoto didn’t deserve human rights since Mental Out didn’t work on her.