"Damn it…I really thought I was dead."
Kamijou left the school and spoke to himself as he trudged along the dark path home.
It was October now, so it was starting to get cold around this time of day. That may have been why it didn't feel like there were as many people out as during the summer. Coming from the airship floating in the gloomy sky, he could hear an announcement giving a warning about fires due to the dry air.
Kamijou slowly walked along the sidewalk avoiding the cleaning robots and thinking about what to make for dinner. He decided to head for the department store by the station because he was a bit worried he didn't have enough food in the fridge. There was a cheaper supermarket a bit farther away, but he wouldn't make it home in time if he headed there. If that happened, Index would go nuts back in his dorm room due to her empty stomach.
As he headed toward the station, he spotted a girl with brown hair wearing a Tokiwadai Middle School uniform. It was Misaka Mikoto.
And she was delivering a high kick to a drink vending machine and tilting her head in puzzlement when nothing came out.
Seeing this, Kamijou quickly turned 180 degrees and hurried away.
"It's best to avoid danger. Let sleeping dogs lie, as they say."
"What do you mean by that?"
When his casual comment to himself received a response from behind him, Kamijou's back straightened in fright.
He ever so cautiously turned another 180 degrees and saw Misaka Mikoto standing there with a puzzled look on her face.
"Uuh…" Kamijou let out a short sigh of anguish. "Please forgive me…"
"I asked you what you meant by that."
"I'm just so exhausted from the weeding and all the other things that have happened today! So please forgive me and don't give me any more trouble!!"
"Again. What do you mean by that!?"
Mikoto grabbed the nape of Kamijou's neck, who tried to run away, at Mach speed, and yelled so close to his ear that he thought she was going to bite his ear off.
"Why must you cut our conversations short at every chance you get!? You haven't even responded to the email I sent you yet. Let me see your phone for a second!!"
"Email…? You sent me an email?"
"Yes, I did!!"
Kamijou thought about it for a second, took out his phone, opened his inbox to show it to Mikoto, and cocked his head to the side in puzzlement.
"…You did?"
"I'm telling you I did!! What? There's nothing in your inbox!? Don't tell me it's treating my address as spam!!"
Mikoto was shocked at first about her email, but then she stumbled upon a further truth.
She reached and grabbed Kamijou's hand to keep him from hitting any more buttons and stared at a certain name in his received mail folder.
"…Why do you have my mother's address in your phone?"
"Hah?"
(Come to think of it, I did run into Misaka Misuzu when she was drunk the other day.)
Mikoto wrinkled her brow and started manipulating Kamijou's phone with her thumb. She was calling Misuzu.
"H-hey, wait!"
His phone didn't have speaker phone option, so the phone's volume was fairly high. Due to this and the fact that he wasn't very far from Mikoto, he could hear the phone ringing on the other end.
"Yes, mother? I need to ask you about something."
"Huh? My display must be screwed up. It wasn't showing your number, Mikoto-chan."
Misuzu sounded confused.
From what Kamijou could hear of Mikoto and Misuzu's conversation, Mikoto was asking for a detailed explanation of how Misuzu's number ended up in Kamijou's phone.
"Hmm…"
Misuzu's answer started slowly.
"I think I met that boy in Academy City one night…but I was drunk, so I don't really remember the details. I have no idea when my number could have ended up in his phone though. Ha ha ha."
"I see. I see." Mikoto nodded slightly and hung up.
She smiled and elegantly returned the phone to Kamijou.
"What the hell were you doing with my mother while she was druuuunnnkkk!?"
"Hahhh!? What kind of crazy deduction is that!? And I'm pretty damn sure your mother remembers everything that happened! That laugh at the end really made it sound like she was lying!!"
This was something someone should be able to think through pretty easily, but Mikoto must have thought that this was a crisis that could destroy her family, because her face turned bright red as she lost her cool.
"Let's change the subject!!" Kamijou decided to steer the conversation elsewhere. "L-look! I have to wash the rice for dinner when I get back to the dorm and surely it's getting close to curfew at your dorm! The sun is setting already!"
"What? Curfew? That's so easy to get around."
Kamijou wanted to bury his head in his hands at how quickly Mikoto gave that response.
She must have been completely unaware of his state of mind, but at least he had managed to change the subject.
"But it's true they've been getting stricter about checking. Maybe it's because of how busy everything's been lately. Even the people who never read the newspaper are busy checking the news on their cell phone TVs and checking internet news sites."
"…"
"But I guess anyone would be worried with what's happened."
Mikoto was most likely referring to what happened on September 30th.
That event had been the trigger that started an invisible war.
That event where the gate to Academy City was destroyed, residents all over the city regardless of whether they were teachers or students were "attacked", the functioning of Anti-Skill and Judgment, the keepers of the public order, was completely halted, and a 100 meter radius crater of destruction was created in the cityscape.
All of that had not happened due to a single person. It had been the result of multiple organizations and their ideas crossing paths. Even Kamijou who had been in the middle of it all didn't know the whole story. In fact, he doubted there was any one person that understood the entirety of the situation.
And if someone in the middle of it all felt that way, someone who only got wrapped up in it like Mikoto would know very little.
Maybe it was because she was at a distance from the center of it all that she felt like she could investigate it from a safe distance.
And surely Mikoto didn't completely buy the official story that the attack was carried out by an esper scientifically developed in secret by a foreign religious group.
Mikoto removed her gaze from Kamijou's face and looked off into the distance.
About 500 meters from where they stood was the area destroyed by the appearance of a certain "archangel". Kamijou thought she might have been recalling the incident on September 30th, but it actually looked more like she was staring up at an airship floating in the gloomy sky.
The news was playing on the large screen on the side of the airship.
"So far the large scale demonstrations and protests held by members of the Roman Catholic Church were only occurring within Europe, but now they have begun within America as well."
The announcer's voice was calm.
"Currently, they are only occurring in west coast cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, but they are expected to spread throughout America before long."
Some footage started playing.
It was most likely from LA.
It would have been late at night there, but it was midday in the recorded footage.
(Damn it. It's spreading pretty quickly…)
Kamijou's face held the expression of someone looking at a horrible wound.
Just like shortly after the start of a marathon, one side of a three-lane highway was completely filled with people. They were burning Academy City posters they had made and were ripping Academy City banners to shreds.
They were filling up major roads for hours at a time in order to get across how mad they were. They weren't just letting their anger take over and going throughout the city destroying things.
But it still wasn't safe.
Some fights must have broken out. The footage showed a man who had blood streaming from his head leaning against an ambulance. A nun with dark bruises across her face was supporting a priest who couldn't stand up on his own and screaming for help.
All of the people there were just normal people.
None of them looked like they had any connection to the world of espers and magicians.
It was true that the people taking part in the demonstrations were technically a part of that world by being believers in the Roman Catholic Church. They wore crosses around their necks and they could probably recite portions of the Bible.
But it was hard to imagine that they could have any connection with the depths of the Roman Catholic Church or know about people like Vento of the Front. They went to school and they went to work. On the weekends, they would laze around the house and have cookouts in their large backyards. They were normal, everyday people.
"…What's going on?"
Mikoto muttered this as she stared up at the screen on the airship.
"I don't know what happened on September 30th, but this isn't what I wanted. Even if they say that incident was what triggered this, Academy City is still completely peaceful. Why are those people fighting each other and injuring each other over this? It's not right for the person truly behind this to stay hidden while those people suffer."
"…"
Kamijou listened to Mikoto's words in silence.
The person behind it.
Mikoto had subconsciously decided there was one. That was probably what she wished was true. If someone was behind this, you could fix that one problem and everything would go back to normal… Since Mikoto had a powerful ability known as "Railgun", that was the easiest way for her to think about the situation.
But there was no one person behind this.
It was true that the incident on September 30th that triggered it all was caused by specific people: Vento of the Front and Kazakiri Hyouka. And there was "someone" behind their actions. If the events on that day had been properly stopped, things may have been successfully solved by the method Mikoto wanted.
But the current situation was not the spark that was the origin of the damaging fire.
This was the huge conflagration that comes about as the result of the spark.
This was well past the stage where capturing the person behind it all would stop it.
The people carrying out the demonstrations were all normal people. And they weren't being forced to do it on anyone's command. They read the newspaper or watched the news and decided to take part out of indignation. They were all merely acting on their personal beliefs.
To "stop the person behind this" you would have to punch out every single person throughout the world who was taking part in the demonstrations.
That wasn't a real solution.
But how else could it all be solved?
"…What's going on?"
Mikoto merely repeated what she had said before, but it pierced Kamijou's heart this time.
This wasn't a problem a kid could come up with an answer for.