Aaaand I'm back. I wrote this in around 3 hours to satisfy my status quo, but it's a little to late for that. Not to mention, my original fiction is draining time like nothing else.
Honestly, I'd be doing myself a service to simply power through another eight or nine chapters of this and mark it complete. There's a lot of things that can be done, sure, but I'm not in the business of serious re-writing, especially seeing as I'm considering shifting my goals from pharma to publishing... quite a leap, especially for an Asian who has everyone's expectation to go into the sciences. Anyways.
So I'll try to get to, say, the end of Prelude to War arc, and just jot down my notes for the rest. I'll not mark it complete, but likely it'll never get past the conclusion of WWII, if even there. That said, I'll probably power through if I get a TV Tropes recomendation heh
As always, I don't own TAMnI.
HARD SCIENCE
District 2, August 24th, 2:40 AM
On the southwest border of Academy City was the training center for Anti-Skill and Judgement. A testing site for all sorts of weapons, be it gun or gunship. Craters littered the ground in multiple open spaces, and armored buildings formed a good deal of the rest. Despite it being far past midnight, trucks still zoomed in and out of the city.
Takitsubo Rikou was on one of these trucks. Bullet proof. Laser proof, even. She was surrounded by crates of weapons, all marked the same.
HsMC-VW: Hard Science Modified Cartridge- Variable Wave.
A level two electromaster would be more prone to high frequency waves than a level four, because the ability to tune out and select wavelengths was far more complex than manipulation.
It was a dangerous bet, despite being given permission to use the site at will. Likely, she wouldn't be using one, though if the situation called for it...
No.
It really shouldn't.
But either way, the fact of the matter was that the Variable Wave gun was very heavy, with a lot of recoil for just using electromagnetic waves. It was actually in production for use in conjunction with powered suits, that wasn't the sort of thing she had access to. With a modified set of velcro buckles, she tied the entire armament to her left side, shoulder to index finger.
Twenty cartridges in her bag. Each VW was good for three shots. Naturally, the powered suits also came with auto-loading tech that she didn't have access to.
The elimination quota is 30.
THE EXPERIMENT HAS STARTED: 2:48AM
REMAINING: 190
66 down. Such a short time, at that.
It would be 96 at the end of the night, at this rate.
District 15, August 24th, 3:15 AM
Communications facilities. Bordered on the east and northeast by District 7, and on the south by District 2, District 15 was the major shopping district and logistics management.
All in all, it was not a place for Accelerator to visit.
Neither was it a place for Kamijou Touma to be, but both of them were there anyways.
They had yet to meet. District 15 was close to District 7, anyways, but that was far beside the point.
"We're not supposed to be here, Kakine."
"Dropped the honorific, did you? Anyways, how are we supposed to ship you out of Academy City if we don't break into the logistics sector?"
"The same way we usually do, I suppose."
The fact that there was a 'usually' was in fact a little saddening. But it was nothing he had control over.
...Okay. Well maybe he shouldn't have signed up for a demon hunter organization, but he was pressured!
"By the way, Kamijou-san. Did you know that if you learned English, you'd have passed all the requirements to be an Academy City astronaut?"
"...What."
"Yeah. They're a little more lenient about things for some reason. You'd think they'd be more worried about someone crashing their flights and getting tech stolen."
"I'm fairly certain they monitor their stuff and self-destruct it when it gets out of hand."
"Fair point. But really. Six years of high-profile ESP research, English and Russian, being capable of passing the physical. That last one's becoming a little outdated as well."
"...What's your point?"
"There is no point. But I feel like your qualifications are interesting compared to what you actually do."
Touma shot a sideways glance at a small beetle. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"No, whatever it is you do is also impressive. It's just... strange."
"Oi, oi. You don't have the right to say that." Touma sighed. "Oh, right. What was that thing the other day? About the wire-tapped phones or whatever."
"...Heh. Remember last summer? I was just celebrating a year of friendship."
"I wonder how all those Tokiwadai girls would feel if they knew some creepy white pervert spent a great deal of time in their school?"
The beetle did not have shoulders, but Touma imagined it had shrugged.
"You can't call one of your oldest friends a creepy white pervert."
"You can't try to murder one of your oldest friends."
"I don't agree, but it's a fair point."
"What do you mean you don't agree? Ahh, I can't remember the last time I was acquaintances with even a semi-normal person who hadn't been actively out for me at any time! Hell, I don't even mind if it's not a cute girl anymore!
"...Wow."
"Don't misunderstand. Oh, and as a fair warning, while I'm going to visit my parents, they don't live in our old hometown.
"Well, everyone who I could have seen there is dead now, anyways."
"..."
"That was tasteless." He decided. Overall, Kakine was comparatively unlikely to fall into a tsukkomi-boke routine as compared to his other friends, though he was also far more serious... and arrogant, after a fashion. It was hardly something that held up in front of Touma, given the Imagine Breaker.
A large black building. A travel agency, supposedly. To be more clear, it was a government travel agency, the only kind that functioned in the city.
"Well, looks like we're here. Let's get this over with."
Accelerator had no business there. At all. It was a twisted curiosity of finding a certain dead body, as though cleanup was scheduled in a few minutes.
District 15 wasn't even a great place to learn about this stuff. He just happened to be there because it was on the way and he tended to take the scenic routes. Logistics and shopping. As such, there were few actual malls, adhering to the more standard 'outdoor shopping center' manner of being. Mostly one or two story shops, an occasional office building, and cell towers haphazardly scattered around.
He continued to bend light around him, creating a blanket of invisibility. Even if he bumped into someone, it wasn't him who was getting knocked over.
"Tch." He grumbled as his thoughts were interrupted.
There was quite some chatter, despite it being literally three in the morning. Turning his head, he heard two voices, but only saw one person.
...Hoh. It was the person who'd ignored his ability. Bending light to magnify his vision...
A white beetle. Now, without seeing them use any abilities, it might just be an ordinary white beetle. Then again...
Now, what were the chances of that?
They were standing in front of a travel agency. Before he could slowly creep up to them, they went in.
...He dashed to get in before the door closed. It wasn't as if he could just phase through the walls.
Midnight walks were more of a rarity for him now, anyways. But with nothing really going on, he wasn't going to let boredom perpetually circulate just because of the nun living in his apartment.
Followed them. The spiky-haired boy had stopped speaking upon entering, maybe cautious of people still working. Left turn, up the stairs. two more floors, the a door to the left in the hallway directly in front.
Accelerator walked up the stairs on 'air boots', manipulating pressure vectors under his feet.
Almost as expected, the beetle slowly morphed into a larger figure, confirming his suspicions. The black-haired one tossed a cell phone at Dark Matter, who dialed some numbers as to call another person.
He stood at the open doorway and listened.
...
...
He grimaced at the content of the conversation. Maybe he should say something.
"Are you really important enough to be planning your own vacation, second rate?"
The black haired one whipped around quickly. Dark Matter turned to face him, but in a far more calm manner.
Grinned pompously. "...Yeah. What of it?" What a shitty person. "What are you doing, following us?"
"As if I'd tell anyone who's been attacked by the machine that makes white lines on the road."
Dark Matter twitched and the other one stifled a chuckle under his hand.
"...Hah. Excuse me for being formal. So you're dipping your hands into the magic side, are you?"
"What are you talking about?" He feigned ignorance, because sometimes it just seemed to get better results. Also had the side effect of making the other party look like more of a dumbass later on.
The normal one looked up dryly. "Great. Just what we needed: more level 5s double dipping. Right, I actually heard that the... 'Index', or something, was in the city? But I'm a demon slayer, not a magician."
That was non-sequitur if anything ever was.
"I feel like you simplify that too much, Kamijou."
"Yeah, but I'm not one to put work into personal matters, Kakine. I get paid to do this."
"You got paid to do a lot of things, but the money always manages to disappear or get destroyed anyways."
They said this fairly informally, but they were still both staring intently at the Number One.
"...Whatever." Accelerator conceded. He could make sense of those freaks later. "I'm tying up loose ends." He admitted. That was all he admitted.
'Kamijou' blinked.
"...Ah. That is happening, isn't it?"
...What the fuck?
District 2, August 24th, 3:38AM
Even though Accelerator had become slightly more mild after protecting Index, he was still confident of his own abilities and preferred to not make alliances. This made the transition time to AIM Stalker's experiment rather awkward.
They waited and watched as gunfire rained through the district.
"How was your day today?" Kamijou said, drolly. It was probably meant to be ironic or sarcastic, but Accelerator felt like he should be a little bit more... reactant of talking to the strongest person in the city?
It took a while, but Accelerator found the right words to say. "Fuck off."
"Okay, okay..." Kamijou mumbled and turned away.
A pulse. Accelerator could feel the EM scrambler even from a kilometer away.
...Hm. That was interesting. It was actually shortening the wavelengths. Visible became infrared, and ultraviolet became visible. Weapons developers were clever, he had to give them that.
...The boy was gone, too. Strangely quiet, at that. He sat down and observed, not willing to interfere from such a distance. Especially with useless people in the way.
A few minutes later, he felt a pulse. A pulse of a different sort, as if trying to shake his foundations.
It failed, of course. A figurative hand attempted to touch his Personal Reality, and he had come this close to simply mangling it on the spot.
The ramifications of this pulse, however, were more important than he realized.
in a windowless building
"Aiwass."
"Hm?"
"Exactly what do you plan to do with Imagine Breaker?"
"Nothing."
"...?"
"Your plans function as long as Imagine Breaker exists within the city. That thing that 'contained' the Imagine Breaker, however, is subject to my curiosity. When the physical entity is torn down, it lashes out with a unique power. But under which situation does it continue to function without an inherent link to the Imagine Breaker?"
"The Imagine Breaker exists as the hopes and fears of magicians... more specifically, the direct counterbalance of Magic Gods, a distant arbiter to decide 'what is right' and 'what is wrong.' It is for this reason that we assume the Imagine Breaker chose Kamijou Touma; who held a solid definition of the idea of 'normal.'"
"Continue."
"There's a person who currently resides in the city-an esper, by the AIM field she emits. But her ability uniquely counters 'vampires', and being proven to work, her ability verifies the existence of 'vampires.' So, the Imagine Breaker would-"
"Not as such. The Imagine Breaker, I assume, is sidereal. Based not on something vacuous and defined by humans, but rather by an arrangement of cosmic objects whose positions never change. "
"A metaphor, I presume."
"Mm. The boy without the right hand, almost immediately developed an ability, 'Phantasia.' Specifically, it deals with a 'guaranteed imitation', an unreal object that seamlessly takes the place of a real one, if only a moment."
"According to the test results, Phantasia is supposed to be a simple visual-tactile hallucination ability."
"Exactly, Aleister."
"..."
"What forms the line between ESP and Hard Science? There's a trick that'll be in mass production that uses multiple ESP-based toys to share and transport dreams. But objects built to detect a psychic force are not destroyed by Imagine Breaker. The 'split dream' should, in fact, bypass the restriction of 'ESP'. But it won't. Because a certain entity decides, at the drop of a hat, that the transferal of dreams is not part of what constitutes reality."
"Then Phantasia would simply be-"
"Just an illusion. There's nothing to it, really. But somehow, the Imagine Breaker boy is temporarily forcing it into reality. The AIM field and other results put it as bottom-tier Level 3, but due to the strange enhancement, it gains what are in turn level 4 or above abilities. Under any circumstance, I fear that the boy cannot be returned this item. It has been kept under heavy chains by the Imagine Breaker-against its will."
"We can postulate that Imagine Breaker chose Kamijou because of his hosting of 'these truths.' But, now that the chains are gone, there's a two way street between Kamijou and It. What if, one day, it decided that life itself was a supernatural, imaginary quantity, and the Imagine Breaker came into play?"
Aleister's face remained blank.
"Boom. Keep your eyes on Wadatsumi."
Dual Skill.
It's theoretically impossible because people can only have one reality. Well, technically two, but the reality of Earth is self maintained. AIM fields, and all sorts of other things didn't account for the impossibility, being simple measures of power or concepts of networking. The impossibility of Dual Skill is completely centric to the idea of Personal Reality.
But. There was a person-a few persons, in the city, who had Multi-skill of a sorts. By taking advantage of brains and using them as personalized computers of a sort, they could access the power held inside the brain.
The last clone of Misaka Mikoto... well, let's just call her the LAST ORDER, haha. Actually, it was a clone that strangely didn't have any abilities. But it was connected to a specialized network at the very start. It was able to use electric powers because it borrowed the abilities of nine-thousand something clones.
Dual Skill, however, was a different story.
It couldn't be naturally manifested. Even if a person had two personalities, and therefore two personal realities, it would still fall under Single Skill as only one could be used at any time.
But what if someone could... artificially manipulate Personal Realities?
The AIM Stalker had not reached level 5 as they had hoped.
But the pressure-the Body Crystal drug, split attention, and the very will to survive-
-for just an instant, it pushed that ability over the brink.
We're cancelling that project now, I hear. There's nearly ten-thousand Dual Skill wielders to be researching.
And that Last Order, still inside Testament in order to even keep its mind together?
Well, I suppose you still can't quite replace a Level 5, but...
...Wait. If I finished the prelude to war arc, there'd only be three novels between there and the end of the original series!? To put that into perspective, I'm currently finishing up the 3rd novel, my version of events attempting to make use of Tree Diagram's survival to boost Rikou to Level 5.
My 100th review was in Spanish. I'm surprised I understood it, considering I haven't spoken or read a word of Spanish in like, 2 years. It's certainly a milestone, but I'd have liked it more if I hadn't gotten 100 reviews for that garbage MKnR canon rehash I did the other year...