Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume3 Chapter2
Status: Incomplete
1/10 parts completed
Chapter 2: Dark Side — Ghost, Android, and…
Part 1
Tires scraped against the asphalt as they slipped to the side.
Academy City’s District 1 was a government district and that loud noise seemed out of place in such an orderly and coldly inhuman area. Especially when it was mixed in with screams and sounds of destruction.
“Hey, wasn’t that one of our prisoner transport vehicles!?”
“It didn’t just slip on a snowy road! Something’s happening inside it! Move, get down!!”
The 20-ton mass of metal swerved along a large S, broke through a makeshift barrier, knocked away the special vehicle on the other side, and crashed into the front gate of the general Anti-Skill station. After coming to a stop in front of the building, an eerie silence hung over the prisoner transport vehicle, but that did not last long.
Everyone assumed the sound of sparks was from the side door being cut away.
But in fact, the bulletproof and blast-resistant armor was cut through a centimeter out from the door.
The door collapsed outwards and a strange girl emerged from within. She looked to be 13 or 14. She had long hair colored an inhumanly bright red and she was not at all dressed for winter. The colors covering her undeveloped body were orange and black. She was only wearing something like a racing swimsuit with the toxic coloration of an insect. Surprisingly, she was barefoot.
Her bangs were cut cleanly across, she had a smartphone on each shoulder and she had several skinny tubes in the belts around her thighs. Some were rolled-up silicone keyboards and others were clear bottles full of some kind of thick liquid that definitely did not look like a drink.
Her pupils mechanically expanded and contracted without any other change to her expression and she held a 60cm blade that was much too large and thick to call a knife. It looked lot like a machete used to clear one’s way through the jungle, but it may not have belonged to any existing category.
She had used that to cut through the armor.
The vehicle’s wall was designed with bullets and bombs in mind, but it had been like gelatin to her.
The atmosphere froze. Everyone stood still like they had failed to read in these new rules, triggering an error. They had never imagined anyone would make it this far toward Anti-Skill’s center.
“The dark side!?” someone shouted.
“Good grief.”
A skinny old man wearing a lab coat over a dark blue jumpsuit followed the girl out of the vehicle.
He could have been a researcher or a mechanic. The glint in his eyes felt like it would fit either profession.
Sparks flew as his handcuffs were cut through. Not the chain, the two loops.
“Ladybird-kun, there must have been a gentler way to handle that.”
“You were captured before I could hijack a vehicle, Sensei, so I used the Anti-Skill prisoner transport vehicle to bypass the need to fight at three checkpoints. That has saved us 250 seconds.”
“Unlike you, I am human. Crush any one of my organs and I die.”
“I complied with all safety standards. If you wish for even greater safety, you would need to replace your body with carbon muscles and a heavy metal skeletal frame. I recommend depleted uranium.”
“Now I’m worried what your idea of safety standards are. Really, it’s a miracle I’m still alive.”
When the girl known as Ladybird spoke, there was a mismatch between the movement of her lips and her actual voice. Almost like she was a ventriloquist’s dummy.
The paralysis finally wore off for the surrounding Anti-Skill officers and a few of them drew their handguns.
“What are you doing here, dark side!? You damn harmfuls!!”
“Oh?” The old man looked legitimately puzzled. “Have you not heard what is happening outside? The confusion among your ranks must be worse than I thought. Maybe there was no need to pay you a visit and cripple your network after all. If so, I do apologize.”
A dry “bang!!” rang out and an Anti-Skill officer was pushed back by the recoil.
Everyone assumed the old man would collapse, but he did not.
A few of the officers pulled their triggers half in a panic, but for some reason, it was Anti-Skill who had someone collapse from a bullet wound to the head, chest, or other vital point each time.
Ladybird had expressionlessly raised the machete in her right hand.
That was all. When a bullet came whizzing in, she would accurately detect it, raise the thick blade in its path, and use the deflected bullet to attack Anti-Skill.
Yes, she redirected it toward someone other than the person who had fired it.
Anti-Skill had been a united front at first, but now their eyes turned toward their companions.
None of it seemed to bother the old man as he toyed with his own gloves.
“Ladybird-kun.”
“Yes, Sensei?”
“Kill them all. We have no other option.”
Screams continued for a while after that.
The old man known only as “Sensei” walked deeper into the building with the pace of someone strolling along their usual walking path. A storm of red, black, and orange raged around him. Anti-Skill was firing handguns and submachineguns to try to stop him, but not a single bullet hit him. Hitting him was not possible in a world where Ladybird could take control of a flying bullet with brute force and send it back the way it had come. That was like trying to fight a stealth fighter using a hot air balloon.
Their cutting-edge bulletproof and blast-resistant equipment was meaningless.
They could not break that thick machete with bullets or even with artillery-sized heavy weaponry.
“It is made of Saintium. That element’s metallic bond strength is 56 times greater than depleted uranium, so it can easily stop a warship’s armor-piercing artillery. Of course, only Ladybird-kun could hope to pick it up. As for your equipment, I am grateful that prisoner transport vehicle had plenty of horsepower.” The old man sounded like he was just having a casual chat. “Now, you won’t find it mentioned in any chemistry textbooks because it’s an artificial element that doesn’t exist in nature. A speck of it large enough to see probably costs more than any of the cars driving around out there. It was not easy running the accelerator at full power long enough to get this much. I would have been in trouble if it hadn’t shown the results I wanted.”
Anti-Skill must have shifted things up to the next level because a grenade was thrown from around the corner.
Ladybird accurately detected the flying explosive and swung her machete horizontally toward it. She hit the grenade back like a baseball and the blast and fragments shredded the Anti-Skill officer.
But then she heard a solid sound at her feet.
The officer had thrown two grenades just to be safe.
“…”
She tilted her head, making her red hair flutter, but she did not hesitate to act.
She got down on top of the grenade to suppress the blast with her own body.
A muffled boom range out, but that was all.
She slowly stood back up and stood by the old man’s side like nothing had happened. There was no red of blood. Her racing swimsuit and soft skin were both entirely unscathed. Blast resistant equipment was not enough to explain that.
“A-a machine?” The officer who had been badly injured by the first grenade moved his lips while down on the floor. “Is that one of those cyborgs we’ve heard about?”
“That term is about two generations out of date. You need to update your thinking if you hope to talk about a Kihara like me.”
Ladybird’s pupils mechanically expanded and contracted as she walked barefoot from the entranceway to a hallway. She made sure to end the life of an Anti-Skill officer reaching for a gun with a trembling hand.
She pulled one of the bottles from the belt on her thigh, drank some of the contents, and then dumped the rest over her head as if drinking it was not enough. The thick clear liquid dripped down her hair and skin and gave her outfit the unique sheen of a racing swimsuit. That was a room temperature superconductive fluid that allowed her to safely release all her excess energy, but it was also a discharge machine oil that reduced the frictional wear on her joints. That sounded simple enough, but combine that with an outer space nuclear reactor and building a manned space probe was within reach.
However, the old man was more troubled by what he saw in front of him.
“Ladybird-kun, you could really stand to be more tactful.”
“Explain to me why you equipped me with parts that trouble you when they show through my clothing.”
The old man brought a hand to his forehead when the girl did not bat an eye while fixing the butt of her racing swimsuit with a finger bent like a hook. They had no business with the elevators or emergency stairs. If they only wanted to slaughter the people here, they would have simply brought down the building from outside. Ladybird’s specs allowed her to keep up with rifle bullets using that Left Arm sword that was 56 times tougher than depleted uranium, so it was curious why she had even bothered to enter the building.
They had business deeper inside. That was when his outdated phone rang. He pressed the small button with a finger inside thick engineering gloves. That model protected against injuries and the cold while also allowing for precise movement. That sounded simple, but even professional snipers had a hard time finding one they liked.
“You’ve done it now, Kihara-kun,” said a voice on the phone.
“I would really like to throw those words right back at you. Your silly betrayal here has already brought down three Kiharas.”
“This is all the newly-appointed Board Chairman’s doing. The twelve of us did not agree to it.”
“Such arrogance. Did you really expect me to accept that? My life is on the line here. And there is no need to hide the fall of Neoka Norito. It changes nothing here, but hiding it does make it harder to trust you, Board of Directors.”
The racing swimsuit girl kicked down a metal door deep inside the building and escorted the old man toward the stairs leading down. They led to a dimly lit room of bare concrete. In addition to the boiler and plumbing, there was a metal box larger than a refrigerator. That was the fiber optic communication control box.
“Do you want to be deemed harmful?”
“They were already calling us that here,” said the man. “And I’m not so sure the categories invented by those in the light really mean all that much.”
“Do you think you can escape just because you are a Kihara?”
“If you have no plan, you should really shut up now. Your threats are sounding less concerning all the time. Now, do you have any more stupid questions?”
“Do you think it’s paradise outside the city? This city is the only place you can survive. No matter what form that survival might take.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. Really, I find it strange that all of us were ever contained to a single city at all. Former Board Chairman Aleister has left the city. Without the Archetype Controller to reinforce our presence here, won’t the Kiharas naturally spread out across the world?”
The old man pulled a floppy disk larger than a tablet from his business bag. He inserted it into a special reader and then used a large device to hook it up to a fiber optic cable.
Ladybird expressionlessly tilted her head.
“Sensei, isn’t there a more efficient way of doing that?”
“When the world grows too convenient, people forget the value of a single byte. People can do anything with just one meg. If you forget that feeling, your creativity dies.”
“If you say so. I do not understand it myself.”
“Yes, yes. It may be hard to grasp for someone who is made from a flowchart of 1s and 0s. But restrictions bring inspiration to the human brain. Unlimited storage space is the same as a drug addiction.”
And in fact, a grinding sound filled the room as a horrific change occurred. The Anti-Skill general station’s network was infected through the communication control box and the ill effects spread to all 23 districts from there.
Hacking in from the outside would be difficult, but it was so much easier from the inside.
The old man smiled as he poured a fine powder into the large device.
“Parasite Hardware.”
Another nightmare took form.
“These nanodevices directly attach themselves to the signals traveling through the fiber optic cables to move around. Even light has a force capable of pushing objects, so it can actually carry devices of such a miniscule size. And the antivirus software searching for other software cannot detect this hardware, so the nanodevices pass right on through.”
“If you want a general term for software that removes malicious programs, sets up firewalls, detects suspicious activity, manages data traffic, and otherwise defends against cyber attacks, the term you are looking for is security software.”
“Good grief. We didn’t bother making all those little distinctions back when I helped build the foundation of the internet. And I’m still young, so that couldn’t have been all that long ago.”
“Unknown error detected.”
“Ladybird-kun, I am trying to do everything I can to compromise with you here, so do you have to tilt your head like that whenever I say something? You aren’t getting a correction out of me because there’s nothing at all inaccurate about calling myself young. Hey, wait, wait, wait. Not so close, Ladybird-kun.”
At any rate, the administrative network was in tatters now.
Anti-Skill communications, data sharing, and access to the cameras and sensors around the city had been brought down.
(Not that a little prank like this is enough to get past the wall.)
It was unlikely a single attack would actually be enough to bring down all of the online services, but to determine otherwise would require inspecting all of the hardware with an electron microscope, not just doing an automatic search with a program. A single drop of poison would require those in charge of water safety to clean everything down to the bottom of the dam. This was the polar opposite of a single megabyte floppy. The total amount was so great that inspecting it all was extremely difficult.
The old man had bought himself the time he needed to think up his next move.
After he left the basement, the conversation on the phone continued.
“Our reinforcements must not have arrived on time,” said the phone.
“Just give up.”
“You will die here, so enjoy this present from us, harmful.”
The call ended. The overly skinny old man stuck out his tongue and slipped the phone back into his lab coat’s pocket.
“Sensei,” said the girl in the orange and black racing swimsuit.
The walls and ceiling were sliced through at the same time.
Several silhouettes covered in black armor broke into the building. Their equipment was different from the previous Anti-Skill officers. If an ordinary human fired those giant guns, the recoil might break their spine, but these silhouettes were wielding them with ease.
They said nothing, but the text on their right arms indicated they were different from the others: Anti-Skill Aggressor.
These special personnel had been trained to reproduce the movements of the enemy – that is, the brutal criminals of the dark side – during training. These elite of the elite had been created by training specially chosen Anti-Skill officers to the limit and providing them with equipment that could not be used openly. They had been intentionally made to stand on the borderline between justice and the dark side.
They were the Board of Directors’ trump card.
The old man known as a Kihara gulped when he saw them.
“Unbelievable.”
The look on his face was of legitimate surprise.
“I was looking forward to whatever secret weapon you had in store for me and you send out equipment I designed myself? Worse, this version sold to ordinary Anti-Skill is at least two generations out of date.”
A stir ran through the Anti-Skill Aggressors.
The hostility and killer intent meant to overpower the old man felt like no more than a ripple to him.
In fact, the multiple Aggressors were forced back by a creaking and cracking sound. Almost like they were being crushed by a thick wall.
The space itself seemed to cry out as those collections of heavy armor and advanced tech staggered back.
“Wh-what?” The Anti-Skill Aggressors broke their silence as their control of the scene crumbled away. “Can that hunk of junk use Telekinesis!?”
“Ladybird-kun.”
The old man ignored it all.
The Kihara spoke to the girl who was toying with her swimsuit’s shoulder strap because the slipping material was bothering her.
“You have two minutes. Teach them the value of a single byte.”
The snow had stopped a bit ago.
A sticky sound seemed to defile the icy air. Sherbet-like snow remained on a main road in District 17 where many unmanned factories ran.
An Anti-Skill officer wearing a bulletproof and blast-resistant full-face helmet actually clawed at his thick helmet with both hands, but he was too panicked to perform the simple task of removing it.
He doubled over, collapsed to the snow-wet road, and began to convulse.
Almost like he was drowning inside his own helmet.
“Everyone, check your helmet seals!!”
“I’m not getting any gas or bacteria warnings, though.”
“We can’t see it, but that harmful must be using some kind of tech. If we just protect ourselv- gah!?”
After feeling a bubbling sensation from his dominant hand to the shoulder, another Anti-Skill officer collapsed to the road.
“It’s no use.”
A woman stood there. She had a light blue silhouette with long blonde twintails. She wore a tight dress that showed off her figure, but a thin cloth was worn loosely around that like a fairy tale princess’s skirt, looking something like a hanging flower. Overall, she looked like a Western doll, but her curvy figure was at odds with that.
She was known as Frillsand #G, but no one here was familiar with that development code.
“If you would stay away from here, I would have no reason to attack you.”
She was all alone, but this standoff had been going for more than an hour. She stood in the center of a six-lane road with no cover to protect her from bullets.
“What I am doing is not the question. What you need to dodge to survive is not the question.”
She actually sounded sad.
Frill Sandwich #G spoke quietly while exposed to the gunfire.
“From the moment you see me, I hold your lives in my hands.”
“My aim…” A surviving Anti-Skill officer clenched his teeth in his helmet. “My aim is off! I can’t seem to aim at her!!”
Their target was not moving. Frillsand #G remained entirely motionless. Yet they could not hit her. When they tried to aim their guns, their arms would shake. Even when they forcibly steadied their weapon on the hood of the special vehicle they were using as cover, they could not stop the shaking.
With a dull rumble, thick cracks ran through the asphalt road.
An unmanned weapon had separated from a transport helicopter passing by overhead and landed on the ground. The quadrupedal machine was larger than the average van. It was known as the Dangerous Bull.
Gas and bacteria meant nothing to that bull-shaped unmanned weapon.
Or so everyone thought.
But…
“Gyahhh!?”
It was Anti-Skill that screamed while a loud boom shook the area. The sides of the bull opened up, allowing rockets and missiles to stick out like an attack helicopter’s weapons, but none of them were launched. Inexplicably, the unmanned weapon ran right past the motionless woman and trampled Anti-Skill as they tried to scatter.
The color red burst out, the car being used as a shield slid to the side, and endless groans left the officers who were not killed instantly.
“Stop! Stop!!”
“Can it…not see us? What happened to its facial recognition!?”
Frillsand #G’s thin blue skirt fluttered as she spoke quietly.
“It’s no use.”
A dry bang rang out. It was probably pure coincidence, but when an Anti-Skill officer crawled along the snow-wet road, grabbed a submachinegun in trembling hands, and fired it, the bullet flew straight toward the doll-like woman’s forehead.
He scored a clean hit.
He smiled within his helmet, but then the despair hit.
Frillsand #G’s forehead was unharmed. Not a single drop of blood. But not because her body was absurdly sturdy or because a barrier in front of her had deflected the bullet.
Yes, the bullet had entered her forehead.
And passed right through her.
The officer saw sparks flying from the factory wall behind the woman with the silhouette of a fairy tale princess. He had not wanted to see that and it acted like a toxin physically eating away at his nerves.
Then he noticed something.
His tablet showed the footage coming from the Dangerous Bull that had trampled his allies, but something was wrong. The autofocus was not working and it was full of the glowing artifacts known as orbs.
The woman was standing right in front of it, yet the facial recognition cursor was flashing at a different point altogether.
One of his fallen colleagues’ face and hands were weirdly erased from the footage. Almost like some form of lock-on symbol.
He did not have the guts to see what he looked like through the lens.
“It…can’t be.”
It was not possible.
He wanted to reject this possibility since it should never have even occurred to him in a city of science.
“No, that’s just not possible. This must be a hologram using a mirage.”
“No, I am not that.”
“Then you’re using ultrasonic waves outside the audible range to exhaust our brains until they malfunction!!”
“No, I am not.”
“Symbols on the wall are messing with our view of three-dimensional space!!”
“No.”
The helmeted Anti-Skill officer shook his head in protest.
Every scientific approach he could think of had been denied.
So he had to accept it.
“A gho-”
“It is best to let sleeping dogs lie,” whispered the doll-like woman whose long double skirt hid her legs from view. “Leaving here is always an option. If you give up on entering this place, I need not bring further harm to you.”
She was an unknown. But this was Academy City where science worship thrived, so instead of sealing it away and leaving, the residents here reflexively chose to challenge the unknown.
“You…”
The woman appeared to breathe a quiet sigh when the man raised his gun.
“You damn harmfulllllllll!!”
“Hello, this is Frillsand.”
The man’s hands stopped unnaturally while holding the gun. And the bizarre song of the lifeless determined his fate.
“Next stop: mincemeat. Repeat: mincemeat.”
An unpleasant sound followed.
The woman had not moved a finger, but the human silhouette inside the bulletproof equipment crumbled away.
Slowly.
“I was only supposed to buy enough time to transport the children away, but Anti-Skill is not going to last at this rate.”
The Anti-Skill officer could not even scream as he drowned in his own blood. Frillsand #G watched that as she spoke to herself and her long twintails fluttered with movement entirely disconnected from the wind.
“Are you safe, my Drencher Kihara Repatri?”
A ghost could not hold physical objects, so she could not even wear a communicator on her ear.
Thus, these words were entirely meaningless.
But she had mentioned a certain family of researchers. Anyone with any contact at all with dark side research would be familiar with that name.
“Gasp, pant.”
District 8 was a dreary place with very little lighting even on Christmas. A schoolgirl with long and unruly silver hair and wearing a hakama was being chased down a narrow alley lined with used bookstores. The path was narrow enough already, but there were also piles of snow getting in the way. She pressed her back against the filthy wall and slid down onto her butt where she protected her head with both hands without worrying about how wet with snow the ground was.
She looked like she would wet herself if left like this for long.
“I-I haven’t done anything, so please help me! Don’t kill me!! Gasp, pant. Why does everything bad always have to happen to me!?”
Two fully-equipped Anti-Skill officers had her surrounded, but even they seemed taken aback by this.
“Hey, is she one of them?”
“She’s in Outrank. Vivana Oniguma, a dark side researcher.”
“Not what I meant. Is she a gentle beneficial or a brutal harmful?”
A simple flashlight caused the hakama girl to jump like she was on the receiving end of a laser attack. Afterwards, that girl, whose silver bangs were hardened into two decorative horns, actually looked confused, like someone who thought they were having boiling water poured on them from a tea kettle only to find it was room temperature.
One of the officers sighed in his helmet.
“What did you do?”
“N-nothing! It’s all a big misunderstanding!”
Vivana sniffled and answered honestly. A closer look showed the pattern of her hakama was made up of mascot characters, but if that was special-ordered, it had to be expensive. It may have been something like a red lacquered guitar or phone case.
“I don’t know about this beneficial or harmful stuff, but the dark side can refer to all sorts of people. My field of research just so happens to – eh heh heh – get some disapproving looks from most everyone in the educational field, so the next thing I knew, I had fallen down to this level. But I’m really not doing anything wrong, I swear.”
Anti-Skill was merciless to criminals who resisted to the bitter end, but there was nothing they could do with someone who fell onto her butt and confessed everything. The two of them exchanged a glance in the silly atmosphere they found themselves in.
Two large pieces of luggage sat near the girl: one black and one pink. But instead of suitcase or sports bags, they were large cloth wrappers stuffed full of things.
One of the men casually picked up the pink one.
“We can discuss this further at our car. This is your stuff, isn’t it?”
“Ah.”
“It’s pretty heavy. …Wait, it’s full of old Japanese books. Um, is this shung-?”
“G-gyahhh!!”
She frantically snatched the thick book away from him before he could open it.
The other man snapped back at her.
“Hey!!”
“Stop it, you idiot! This is fine! Don’t pull out your gun!!”
The two Anti-Skill officers started arguing. Vivana remained entirely motionless with the old Japanese book in her arms. She had even placed her butt back on the damp ground.
She was too panicked to get back up, but things were taking an unusual turn.
“I’ve had enough! Dark side is dark side. She’s a harmful, so we’ve got to do this!!”
“Are you insane? She’s clearly beneficial. She hasn’t even tried to resist!!”
“You never know where a harmful has a deadly weapon hidden.”
“She’s beneficial, so she isn’t hiding anything!”
“Get out of my way!!”
“Why should I!?”
Several dry gunshots rang out.
“Um.”
For a while, the silver-haired hakama girl squeezed her eyes shut and covered her head as if grabbing her two horns. But…
“Huh?”
When she hesitantly opened her eyes, it was already over.
The two officers must have accidentally pulled the trigger while fighting over the handgun because they were both collapsed on the ground with dark red holes in them. Strangely, Vivana found there was an unmistakable difference between a living person and a dead person. They seemed separated from their surroundings, like the color had faded from the background in that one spot.
When she noticed the red stain spreading toward her luggage, she quickly picked them up. That caused both cloth wrappers to come undone. They nearly spilled their contents of rare shunga books, rope, candles, a bamboo sword with a broken tip, tatami needles, incense, and a collapsible water wheel and wooden horse, but she shoved them all back inside.
(Uhhh.)
When her hakama slipped down from her shoulder, cheap red tape could be seen within. That was an even more familiar bondage material than ropes or leather. The taping techniques developed for sports medicine could also be used in more inappropriate ways.
(Why does everyone find this field of research so strange? Almost every country stops you from researching torture and the history of execution methods. They probably just don’t want me stumbling onto past cases of false charges. All I ever wanted was to do some ordinary, wholesome research, but the next thing I know, I’ve been shoved all the way into the dark side for it.)
Vivana Oniguma tearfully pouted her lips like a child while holding one of her favorite books in both hands.
“It’s not lewd.”
“How far did you wander off?”
“Ehh? You were the one that got lost, Onii-chan!”
Children’s voices could be heard on the Christmas streets. The little sister had emerged from the labyrinthine back alleys with her arms around a large dog that probably weighed more than she did.
“The doggy showed me how to get back to the street!!”
The golden retriever was wearing a thin backpack and he calmly looked up into the chilly sky.
The snow had stopped earlier.
He wanted a smoke, but he would wait until the children were gone.
(So after benefiting from our work for years, the Board has finally decided to cut us loose to save face. Not even this upheaval can dislodge those at the top. It is a reasonable choice on their part, though.)
He was helplessly petted by small hands while he thought in human language.
(Still, I know the one way the dark side has any chance of victory here.)
“The snow will still be here in the morning, so you can wait until then for your snowmen and snowball fights. Head home for today, children.”
“It talked!?”
“It talked!?”
The young siblings stared wide-eyed at the talking dog.
His name was Kihara Noukan.
He was unusual even for a Kihara and his very existence was near legendary. He was a researcher who loved both logic and romance. He was not a hero. If someone actively stepped into the darkness to gorge on the profits within, he would make a guinea pig out of them no matter who they were, but he would not go out of his way to intrude on a peaceful family.
Was he a gentle beneficial? Nonsense.
He was a Kihara. He understood that illogically drawing that kind of dividing line was the way villains thought.
“Make sure you’re home before even the moon is swallowed up by the darkness.”
