A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 8 (5 page)

“Is that right?” Shirai nodded.

Anti-Skill, having received word from Shirai, was probably moving now as well. Any wheeled vehicles would find themselves stuck in the traffic, though. Considering they didn’t know how much importance to assign to this incident, it would take too long to go through paperwork to get a helicopter or the like. The many processes were to prevent individual troops from requisitioning equipment for personal use, but of course, organizations always came with the side effect of being inflexible.

“Jeez. I suppose it would be best to go there posthaste.”

“Ehh?! If you’re not here, Shirai, then I’ll have to give Anti-Skill an answer on my own!” complained Uiharu, truly against the idea. “That will be such a pain!”

Shirai gave her a dull stare. “You needn’t worry about a thing. I’ll go clean up the
pain
right now.” She took her flimsy bag from the chair it was on and headed for the entrance. Without turning around, she said, “Just who do you think I am? Above ground, underground—it doesn’t matter to me.”

Kuroko Shirai possessed an ability called teleportation.

It wasn’t an all-powerful skill, though. The weight limit of what she could teleport was 130.7 kilograms, and its max range—regardless of the weight of the object—was 81.5 meters. Plus, she could only use the power on things she touched. She couldn’t bring something far away to her.

On the other hand, though, that meant she had no trouble moving the constant reference point of the ability: herself.

Shoom, shoom
, came the sounds splitting the air, over and over again.

Every time she warped eighty meters, she’d designate her next destination eighty more meters away and jump again. Others would have been seeing her at a place, then not seeing her, then seeing her again somewhere else. Of course, it was far faster than traveling by foot. Translating it into velocity would mean she was reaching 288 kilometers a second.

I’m not moving in a straight line; I’m moving from point to point
, she said to herself, crossing space again.
Luckily that means inertia has nothing to do with it. It would be no joke if I were to be affected by air resistance while wearing this skirt.

She changed her foothold every jump, leaping from roads to railings to the tops of vending machines. There were voices of surprise around her, but they were espers all the same. It didn’t evolve into an especially big ruckus, probably because not only did she wear a Tokiwadai uniform but also a Judgment armband.

In contrast to the robbers running underground, Shirai was flying around above ground. But the underground mall had a limited number of entrances, so as long as she accurately held them, they wouldn’t get by her. In fact, if she were to carelessly pursue them underground and drive them down mentally, they could end up inciting violence among the civilians down there. (It was still unknown as to whether they possessed weapons, but even barehanded, ten people were a pretty big threat to civilians.) Thinking sensibly, there were only so many entrances to the underground mall, so if chaos broke out, it would be harder to evacuate the civilians. She needed to approach this delicately and from above ground.

If she was going to arrest them, it would have to be somewhere with not a lot of people
and
above ground. On top of that, it would be best if she could control the situation so she could finish it swiftly and surgically.

Then her cell phone rang.

Shirai took it in her hand, not breaking her teleportation chain. A buzzing, staticky sound came out. She was instantly crossing space, so with the radio-wave receiver constantly changing places, things went wrong.

“Shira—i, the culprits—moving…They came out—from the entran—A03 of—Area Sale mall—They seem to be going—from the end of the underground mall to the next one…”

She gave a single phrase in response. “I already see them.” She hung up and returned the phone to her pocket.

Near a building that looked like a subway entrance, she spotted people weaving through a mob of cars laid out like bricks. The cars’ horns were blaring, but all the suit-wearing men kept on going. She saw one of them pulling a wheeled white carry-on luggage behind him. They had evidently been
trying
to keep things covert, and now they seemed somehow ashamed as they crossed the large roadway and entered a narrow alley.

Shirai made sure she had a good grip on her bag, and
bam!
She took off, noticeably more powerfully this time.

The next moment, she was already in the alley. Right in the middle of the ten or so men. She exchanged glances with the man with the carry-on luggage and gave him a smile. Before he could be surprised at all, she was running a finger along the surface of the luggage.

Teleport.

She disappeared again, then reappeared at the end of the alley to prevent their exit. Beside her was the white luggage, which she’d taken with her when she crossed through space.

She put one hand on her hip and touched the other to the luggage. “Excuse me, I am with Judgment. I expect I do not have to explain why I came here?”

Her voice was condescending, depending on how one listened to it.

And so the men reacted swiftly. Each one reached into his suit’s breast pocket and brought out a black handgun, each with the same design. Just looking at them struck her with a hefty weight.

Crap, so they weren’t just some regular old purse-snatchers! When did this turn into a spy movie?!

Shirai crouched down behind the carry-on luggage to use it as a shield, but they seemed confident. Their index fingers didn’t hesitate on the triggers—they would aim precisely for the parts of her sticking just a little bit out from her “shield.” Her throat made a very slight and unnatural sound. Her teleportation wasn’t responsive or precise enough to send away every single bullet.

Fire flared from the ten muzzles.

But Shirai was crossing through space just one step faster. She was aiming to get behind the man in the back.

Kuroko Shirai and the carry-on luggage disappeared. She left only her flimsy bag behind in midair; after a moment it plopped straight to the ground.

The men seemed bewildered, their target suddenly having vanished. Meanwhile, Shirai took the giant carry-on luggage with both hands and gave a really hard wallop to the guy all the way in the back.

“Gah…!” he groaned. The other thieves all started to turn around at once. Shirai touched one of them and teleported. The man immediately changed places—but only by a few centimeters, and with his body turned all the way around.

What ended up happening was that eight men spun to look behind them, and one of them instead turned to glare at
them
.

The thieves were now all pointing their guns at one another like a Mexican standoff.

“Uh.” The man who had gotten turned around hurriedly pointed his away, and that was when Shirai delivered a massive kick to his back. The robbers all fell to the ground like dominoes. She swung the carry-on luggage up with all her might, then brought it down on each of the gun-wielding men’s wrists in turn. There was a series of short shrieks. They couldn’t run—they couldn’t move. It was like they were wrapped in spider thread. If they tried to use their guns, they’d probably have to go through their own piled-up allies. As a result, despite all their murderous weapons, each one only waited helplessly to be knocked out and lose consciousness.

“Well, that was nothing to write home about. In fact, it was a little
too
easy for my tastes,” she said derisively, though to no response.

She poked the men with her toes to make sure they were all unconscious, then bound them all in Judgment’s nonmetal handcuffs. She ran out after the first four, so she made use of a loose cable lying on the ground. Despite the pressure on their wrists, none of them woke up.

After giving Anti-Skill a quick call, Shirai glanced at their equipment.

She looked at the name and model number of their guns, but she didn’t understand them. She knew they were completely different from the ones they’d held during Judgment training, though. The main pieces of handguns developed by Academy City weren’t made with metal and were thus extremely light. These men’s guns, though, were hunks of steel. There were numbers and English letters engraved on their sides. She briefly wondered if they were their official model numbers, but that was all. She didn’t have much technical knowledge regarding the armaments—Anti-Skill, which fought mainly with firearms, was one thing, but she used her ability for combat.

Aside from that, she couldn’t find any identification on the suit-wearing men. It looked like they might have purposely erased them. She looked at the face of one of the fallen men and clicked her tongue in annoyance. “…Gold teeth?” she muttered dubiously at the wide-open mouth of the unconscious man. There were a number of better materials for that job in Academy City. Nobody used gold teeth in this city these days.

She found cell phones with no registered numbers in the pockets of their slacks, but they were old as well. Academy City didn’t sell any of this stuff.

It was said that Academy City’s internal technology level was twenty or thirty years removed from the outside world. Electronics went without saying, but even smaller articles that wouldn’t appear to have anything to do with “technology” sometimes looked different here.

They were trained to a certain extent, given the way they held their guns, but they were completely led on by my ability, so it must have been the first time for them…Perhaps they do not have any ties to espers at all and are professionals from the outside.

“…”

And now for the carry-on luggage. Those outsiders had sneaked all the way into Academy City to get their hands on it. She looked down at it once again.

It was large. Like other travel luggage, it was rectangular in shape. If she curled up, she could probably fit inside the thing. It was white, and its surface was made from a special material with a glossy finish, like it had been waxed or something.

She put a hand to the latches keeping it closed—to no avail. “Locked…I suppose I should have expected that.”

But upon surveying it again, she realized the lock was extremely elaborate. There were two physical locks, one electronic one, and even a magnetic lock, which was said to have a practically infinite number of patterns.

“Well, none of that matters to my ability.”

Her ability was teleportation. She couldn’t move something unless she touched it, so she couldn’t take an object out of a box. However, if she moved only the box itself, she could get the contents that way.

She couldn’t move really heavy “boxes” like the ones in bank vaults, but a piece of luggage wouldn’t be that difficult. She casually held her right hand out to the luggage, then placed her fingers on its surface.

Huh?

Then she noticed it.

This case had essentially no gaps in the outside. Something like rubber packing was stuffed into various places, as if to make it waterproof. All of the gaps in it were shielded.

Wait…Is whatever is inside sensitive to light? Like photography film?…It must be something delicate. Oh, and there I went, slapping those men silly with it.
She thought for a moment, then came to a quick conclusion.
I suppose putting off opening it would be for the best. I will have a clairvoyant or mind-reading colleague check it first
, she decided as she scrutinized it, put off by its excessive shielding.

Suddenly, though, she spotted some kind of tape stuck to its side, as though it were keeping its cover on. It was the tag from before. It was printed elaborately and reminded her of paper money. There was probably an IC chip embedded in it somewhere, too.

The things written on it were the same as what Uiharu had shown her earlier. They wouldn’t be able to distinguish it without putting it through a machine, but at the very least, none of it seemed strange to her eyes.

What’s this marking…?
Shirai looked down the side of the luggage again. There was a marking engraved directly into the case, separate from the tag. It was a simple mark, with a few rectangular shapes overlapping inside a circle. She felt like she’d seen it somewhere before, but she couldn’t remember exactly where.

She decided to stop thinking about it. “Best to ask others what I don’t understand, I suppose.” She took her cell phone out of her skirt pocket, then removed the super-thin scroll-looking part out of the small tube. She then used its camera to snap a picture of the entire carry-on luggage, the tag, and the marking, sending it all in a message to Uiharu with only the words
look at please
.

Sure enough, one hundred twenty seconds later, she got a response. Shirai hit the talk button before the second note in her ringtone could play.

“Shiraaai, it’s Uiharu. You finished your job, so I have a report for you and a demand for a prize.”

“I’ll accept the report but not your demand,” she answered smoothly, though inside she was astonished at Uiharu’s investigative prowess—she didn’t let it into her voice, though. She might have had access privileges to the city’s data banks, but her response time was insane.

“Demands are demands because you have to demand them! Well, anyway, I’ll give you my report first. That carry-on luggage is special, basically. It’s really airtight and blocks all kinds of cosmic rays. See how the surface is gleaming like that?”

Now that she mentions it
, thought Shirai, looking at the luggage’s surface. It was like it was waxed. It reflected light, showing Shirai’s own face.

“It looks like the really good stuff they use in astronaut suits and the outside of space shuttles. And obviously, given the technology used to make it, it was created in Academy City.”

“Wait, cosmic rays…What for?”

“Just how it sounds. You don’t need much in the way of protection from cosmic rays when you’re on Earth. Though I can’t say for sure, since the ozone layer has been doing badly lately.”

Which means…Outer space, so…Were they going to use this in some kind of EV work in space?