A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 8 (4 page)

Academy City’s seventh school district.

In a corner of town in the same district as the Garden of Learning that lacked any of the school’s brilliance, there was a student dormitory where a certain young man named Touma Kamijou lived.

It was a boys’ dormitory, of course, but this one room was overlooked as an exception. There was a girl of fourteen or fifteen with long silver hair wearing a completely white habit rolling around on the floor. She was a freeloader.

The rolling Index was currently in complete control of the television.

The weather forecast was on. With a giant map of Japan in the background, a smiling lady in a suit was giving the clothes-drying index. They’d been doing the UV ray announcements until a few days ago. For the average high school student, Touma Kamijou, it had finally started to feel a little like the seasons were changing. (They were still in the midst of a heat wave lingering from summertime, though.)

“Touma, Touma! How do they know tomorrow’s weather?” asked the sister without turning around. “All they have on the map are things that look like the rings in tree stumps.”

Kamijou’s exasperated voice came back from the one-room apartment’s kitchen space. “Index, sit farther away from the television when you’re watching it.” He continued to drop the seasoned chicken meat into the oil. He was making fried chicken for dinner. “And those tree-ring things are called isobars. They can roughly figure out whether it’ll be cloudy if they look at the atmospheric pressure on mountains and in valleys and stuff. Actually, sometimes clouds bump into mountains and make rain, so it’s not all about the pressure.”

“Huh. Wait, really? You can read calamities in geography…? Oh! I see! Academy City figured out how to do geomancy using artificial methods!!”

“You seem to be shaking all over in enjoyment, so I’ll leave you alone. I’ll talk to the cat instead. It’s time for the deep-fried taste testing!”

Kamijou picked one of the freshly browned pieces out of the oil with tongs, set it on a small plate, and placed it on the floor. The calico, which had been curled up near Index, reacted immediately. Like an arrow springing from a bow, it shot over to the plate and started taking little bites, then rolling around as if to say,
Hot! It’s hot but I’ll still eat it! But it’s hot!
and then coming back for more. He took out another plate and put some water on it. The cat must not have been wild before; someone had probably raised it. It wasn’t even slightly cautious about hearing the sizzling sounds of something being fried nearby.

Index saw this and stood up vehemently from her spot in front of the television. “N-no fair. Whenever I snatch food like that, you get mad at me! You’re giving Sphinx special treatment and it’s not fair!”

“What? No, you eat literally
everything
whenever I take my eyes off you…Whoa, wait! That one’s still not done! I only just seasoned the thing! Stop!!”

Skillfully using the metal tongs, Kamijou succeeded in a desperate defense of tonight’s dinner, protecting it from the human vacuum cleaner coming at him at full force. In the meantime, a couple of the pieces started to burn. The hungry and angry nun Index clamped onto his head instead of the food.

Suddenly, she childishly cocked her head to the side. “Wait, Touma, sometimes the lady on the weather forecast says stuff that’s not right. Is being a birdbrain her selling point?”

“I guess coming from
you
, she’d
have
to admit she was a birdbrain—
Ow
, hey!” he screamed in tandem with the chomping sound effect. “W-well, you know. Weather forecasts aren’t perfect, even though they act like it. They used to be perfect, but it looks like their calculation equipment is broken.”

“???”

Index seemed to have a mind full of questions, but Kamijou didn’t go into the details.

The Tree Diagram.

The ultimate supercomputer. It could accurately predict the movement of every single particle of air on earth. It was one of the three satellites Academy City had launched into space—and it no longer existed in this world.

Kamijou glanced at the television.

The weather forecast, now without the perfect cogwheels behind it, ended, and the traffic report began with news of delays.

The school bus Kuroko Shirai got on was shared among all five schools in the Garden of Learning.

With the kind of finances the young ladies’ schools possessed, they could have had separate buses, but they had put them together anyway. According to them, it was so that the students could experience a society that guaranteed the most safety possible.

Its size and gorgeous interior design had earned it the name of two-story parade bus. In fact, all the student seats were on the bottom, and the top floor was a big café lounge—that’s how extravagant it was. Because of its size, it took the bigger roads and followed a course around the five student dormitories.

Kuroko Shirai didn’t get off at the stop in front of Tokiwadai Middle School’s dorm.

She alighted in front of a completely different dormitory, surrounded by girls from another school. She stretched her arms and sighed. Seriously, what about that bus was similar to “most societies” trying to
prevent
creating sheltered girls? Other types of buses—normal ones—stopped in front of Tokiwadai’s dorm, too, and the difference between them was like night and day.

The time was half past seven in the evening.

During the summer, the sun would still be setting at this time, but now that it was mid-September, it was already dark out.

Shirai took her Judgment armband out of her bag and stuck it on her shoulder. Then she started in the opposite direction than all the girls around her. The flimsy bag felt more like baggage when she switched gears from “after school” to “on the job.” Slowly and steadily, the number of combat-related items she kept in it was beginning to outnumber her school-related necessities.

Right next to the dormitory, she could see the building of another school.

Its totally normal, square, concrete walls marked it as completely different from those in the Garden of Learning. Shirai went in. She borrowed some little-used slippers from the staff entrance and headed into the hallway, lit here and there by lights. For a few moments, she plodded over the cold, hard linoleum and then found a door with a long-winded name on it: J
UDGMENT
O
FFICER
A
CTIVITY
B
RANCH 177.

There was a glass plate next to the door. After it scanned her fingerprint, veins, and fingertips, the strict lock opened, and she threw open the door without knocking first. It made a loud
slam
.

The girl inside gave a sharp jolt. Her name was Kazari Uiharu. She was the same age as Shirai, but her short height and rounded shoulder lines made her look younger. It was rare to see a middle school student the summer sailor uniform
didn’t
look right on, but Shirai felt that was the case here. Her hair was short and black, and she wore a decoration patterned with flowers like roses and hibiscus. From far away it would have looked like she had a colorful flower vase on her head.

Shirai, glancing at her fright, rudely stepped into Branch 177. “What did you need? Judgment’s a big organization, you know. Why did you have to call me for this?”

“Weeell, after thinking about it more, maybe it didn’t absolutely
need
to be you, Shirai…”

“…You knew very well I was out shopping with Big Sister. If that’s how you feel, then maybe you should change your attitude a little bit, hmm?”

“Hooraaaaay!”

“Not like that! Why are you waving your hands and acting so inspired?!”

Shirai teleported over to Uiharu in an instant and got the small girl’s temples with her fists, then started twisting. She still had her bag on her arm, and its clasps bounced on Uiharu’s ear.

They were both in their first year of middle school. They acted like one held a spot above the other, though, because of Tokiwadai’s unique brand and the fact that Shirai was Level Four. Well, Shirai
had
rescued Uiharu, still not part of the organization, back on her first job as a member of Judgment, but Uiharu was the only one paying an undue amount of attention to that.

Branch 177 was a single room, situated in what was more like an office than a school. There were steel business desks in a row, like in city halls, and several computers.

Uiharu was facing one of those computers. She was sitting in an ergonomic chair that was soft and flabby like a Dali melting clock, whose rounded designs were scientifically proven to make it harder for the one sitting to grow tired. Shirai, giving her a noogie from behind, naturally looked up to the computer monitor.

It displayed what looked like a GPS map. There was a red
X
drawn on it—usually that meant something was going down. There were a few other points labeled on the map as well, and on another window she could see photographs and other data.

She would have to listen to Uiharu’s explanation in order to know what it meant—but she did have an impression just based on her broad glimpse of it all. “Oh, my. This isn’t a school fight, is it?”

She wouldn’t have been using GPS if it were a problem in a school setting. She would have brought a rough sketch of the school’s floor plan.

Judgment was the collective disciplinary organization for schools; it generally existed to maintain peace and safety in school. There was a branch in each school in the city, and unlike police boxes, they didn’t operate at all hours of the day. They’d be locked up as the last buses were leaving and emptied out—with today being an exception, apparently.

As long as they weren’t in a state of emergency, Anti-Skill would be in charge of “extramural” peacekeeping activities. They couldn’t leave dangerous streets or night patrols to students, after all—at least, that was the adults’ point of view.

Shirai stopped grinding on the girl’s temples and Uiharu’s face relaxed a bit. “I contacted Anti-Skill like the manual says, but the situation is kind of odd. Anti-Skill seemed desperate for us to share our information with them right away, and I just thought you would be able to give better answers than I would, so…Oh, should I put on some tea or anything?”

“I’ll pass, thank you. I would rather not pour tea into an empty stomach.” Shirai considered tea to be something to enhance dishes and desserts, so she wasn’t a big fan of anything that brought the tea itself into focus, like afternoon teatime.

Uiharu’s face went blue with astonishment at her curt reply. She moaned, “But I’ve been spending so much time reading books on black tea to try and be more like a proper young lady! I even got kind of obscure spices like Japanese rose oil, too! And you evaded it with the kind of relaxed air proper young ladies have! But at school, we all yearn for black tea because it’s an upper-class thing to do, right?!”

Tokiwadai Middle School and the young ladies who commuted there were the objects of adoration of every girl in Academy City. Most of them, however, didn’t actually know anything about the lives of those who attended. Sometimes there would be girls who would be attracted by the prospect of going to a young ladies’ school, then end up studying really weird stuff, like Uiharu here.

“Right. The only ones who get into it like that are people who just came into a lot of money. Anyway, what exactly seems to be the problem?”

“Well, I suppose I am still lower class—to me, that wouldn’t matter because those people are still rich. Anyway, about the problem at hand, it’s no big deal, really. It’s like a robbery, or should I say a purse snatching. But ten people or so are attacking the victims. It’s not what you could call efficient.”

Mulling over that, Shirai put her flimsy bag on a nearby chair and focused on the monitor. It showed a map of District 7. The
X
was at the corner of a major road in front of a station. A few colored arrows were drawn from there toward nearby roads, indicating potential escape routes.

She looked at it dubiously. “That certainly doesn’t seem like something we should have anything to do with.”

“Well, this is where the problem starts. According to eyewitnesses, they stole a bag of carry-on luggage.”

“Carry-on luggage???”

“Oh, you don’t know, Shirai? It’s a kind of bag—about as big as a suitcase, and it has wheels on the bottom,” she explained briskly. “It always looks to me more like something a flight attendant might use rather than something one person would take on a trip. And the witnesses say the luggage had a tag on it.”

“So basically, there was a tag on this travel bag? What’s the problem with that?”

“Umm, well, look at this. Autonomous police robots caught it on camera, too, and I zoomed in and looked…” Uiharu hit a key and a new window opened. It showed numbers from the tag, its shipper, and its delivery address.

Shirai read the delivery address and frowned a bit. “Tokiwadai Middle School Calculation Support Facility…? I’ve never heard a name like that before.”

“Oh, you haven’t? It’s hard to get in contact with the Garden of Learning, so it’s hard to confirm one way or the other. I mean, even with the Daihasei Festival right around the corner, they’re not opening it up to the public as part of the competitions, right?” asked Uiharu, sounding disappointed at that part in particular. “I checked the number on the tag, too, but it’s weird. The number is registered, but it says its contents are a large cooling device made to prevent the overheating of a host computer that manages a grid of calculation devices. Something like that would never fit in carry-on luggage, right?”

“What…? Metal objects might be one thing, but I’ve never heard of anyone importing actual equipment into the Garden of Learning.”

“I’m doing an analysis on the image of the tag itself; I don’t have positive proof whether it’s the real thing or not. It’s probably a counterfeit tag someone copied and put on there for some reason.”

“…Wait. All this talk of camera images and witnesses…Shouldn’t you just be asking the person directly about what happened when their luggage was stolen? Wouldn’t that be faster?”

“Said person isn’t around.” Shirai did a double take, surprised at Uiharu’s quick response. She spoke again. “Apparently the victim is conducting his own pursuit, separate from us. See the image right before this? There were over ten robbers, and yet here, he’s contacting someone and chasing on his own.”

Uiharu typed something and brought up a new window in the mess of windows already on the screen. It was a vivid video recording. There was a rich-looking man wearing a suit at what seemed to be a road in front of a station. He looked around, then used a wireless radio instead of a cell phone and contacted someone.

“Right here,” said Uiharu, suddenly pausing the video. “Do you notice anything strange?”

Shirai looked at the still image, but nothing particularly stood out to her. There was a slight blur on his face as she’d stopped the video right when the man in the suit with the wireless radio suddenly shook his head, so she couldn’t make that out very well.

“Shirai, do you see how the victim’s suit is turned up a little?”

“Huh. Well, now that you mention it.” The ends of the man’s suit were turned up slightly due to his movement. And near his side, she could see a blackish, suspender-like thing.

“You can make out the serial number if you enlarge it. L_Y010021. It’s an official shoulder holster made by a big-name gun manufacturer. It’s the kind for hiding a handgun inside your clothing. You know how on detective shows when the guy pulls a handgun out of his clothes? That’s what it is,” finished Uiharu, enlarging the holster’s belt.

Shirai smiled a little. “It could just be an accessory.”

“Yes. It may just be an accessory—and this could be, too.” Uiharu did something. It zoomed in on the chest of the man in the suit, and hundreds of thin arrows appeared. It was detecting the subtle unevenness in the clothing. It looked like a magnet attracting iron filings. The innumerable arrows created the vague outline of a handgun. “That’s all this image has to offer…It would have been nice to have some more pictures. What do you think, Shirai?”

Shirai thought. Was the man trying to avoid cameras? Or did he just happen to go out of sight as a result of chasing the fleeing robbers? “Good grief. I get the feeling this is going to be a huge pain, like always.”

“Huh? Shirai, I didn’t know you had farvision.”

“Oh, be quiet. I can’t say much for sure about the handgun with only this data, but the wireless radio—it looks like the professional kind I saw during Judgment training. Which means…I get it. It would appear these are some quite troubling circumstances. Even the fact that we didn’t get a report is odd.”

The victim was moving alone.

The carry-on luggage had something to do with Tokiwadai Middle School.

The things the man had on him seemed unnatural.

It was certainly different from your regular old incident. And if there really was a handgun involved, it would probably change what Anti-Skill would bring into it. At that point, Judgment would have no place in the incident (not every member of Judgment had reached Level Four power levels like Shirai had), so maybe having someone familiar with the Garden of Learning or Tokiwadai Middle School would help somewhat.

“So, Shirai…Between the culprits and the victim, which should we focus on getting information about?”

“I’d like to tell you to investigate both, but if I had to choose, it would be the ones who committed the robbery,” she ordered, taking a step back. “If we recover the luggage, then the victim would eventually get to us without us having to chase him down. Do we know where the culprits fled? Well, I mean, it took me thirty minutes to get here, so I’m sure you don’t know exactly where they are.”

“That’s not true,” declared Uiharu simply. “After they stole the carry-on luggage, they apparently went into the underground mall on foot, without using a car or anything. I think it was probably to get somewhere out of satellite view.”

“…? To escape our sight? It isn’t like the underground is completely devoid of cameras. They’re set up all over, and there’re autonomous robots patrolling the place, too.”

“Yes, but it is still easier to flee there than above ground. Without the bird’s-eye view from the satellite, he could blend in with the other people there and fool the cameras. And sometimes it’s faster to run through the underground, too. There’s currently congestion on the main lines in the area—#3, #48, #131—due to an electricity mishap to the traffic signals or something. And using a car would be particularly hopeless. Running in the underground would give both speed and stealth.”