Chapter 11: Power Plays
It's here... It's really here... ANOTHER CHAPTER! WOO HOO! I am on fahya! But less about me! More story! NAO!
[Note: I-I don't own Toaru, Copyright b-baka!]
Kamijou's apartment...
Touma set down two bowls of udon on his table, one in front of his seat, and one in front of a visibly upset electromaster. Touma nervously sat down at his seat, eyeing the girl sitting across from him. To anyone else, Mikoto Misaka looked like a schoolgirl with a cute pout on her face. To Touma, she looked like an EMP bomb on a hair trigger.
The boy took a deep breath. Tread lightly Kamijou, and just stay neutral. Nothing to provoke her, just small talk. Right, just talk. OK, play it smooth...
He picked up his chopsticks and his bowl. Tentatively, he said the traditional opening meal words,
"Itadakimasu"
Mikoto mumbled the same and picked up her chopsticks as well. Pout still on her face, she started slurping her noodles up.
"So... are you okay?" Touma tried to break the ice softly.
A silent nod.
Liar. "Worried about Kuroko?"
Another nod.
"I don't think you've got anything to worry about. I mean, I'm pretty sure the doctor can take care of it."
A nod again. Some more slurping.
"And we got to meet Kiyomi, which was nice."
Misaka mumbled a short agreement around a mouth full of noodle.
"Was everything okay with the sisters?"
A slight pause in the slurping. Slow nod.
Ok, stay away from the clones for now... Touma ate some noodles then continued.
"You're not mad that Kiyomi mistook me for your boyfriend, right?"
...
I probably shouldn't have said that...
Mikoto spit her noodles into her bowl in surprise and looked at Touma incredulously. The boy inwardly cringed.
Good going Kamijou. That was smooth, smooth like SANDPAPER.
"DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA, ANY IDEA, HOW MUCH OF AN IDIOT YOU ARE?"
Oh boy, here it comes...
"I'VE BEEN YOUR FRIEND FOR THREE YEARS, AND YOU ARE AN IDIOT!"
So I've heard. More than once.
"IDIOT, IDIOT, IDIOT!"
Add three more to the list.
"AND DENSE!"
I was wondering if you were going pull that one.
"I MEAN, BOYFRIEND? DO YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL?!"
No... although I think I'm about to find out.
"THREE YEARS! THREE! AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA! NONE AT ALL!"
About what?
"AND I'VE MADE NO PROGRESS IN MAKING YOU UNDERSTAND ANYTHING!"
Well, if you started making sense...
"SO HOW COULD I BE SO OBVIOUS AND HAVE YOU STILL NOT KNOW?!"
Know what?
"DO YOU EXPECT ME TO JUST TELL YOU THAT I LIKE YOU!?"
Wait... what? "Uh... Misaka?"
"BUT NO, YOU HAVE TO BE ALL STUPID AND DUMB AND NOT UNDERSTAND EVEN THAT!"
"Misaka?"
"SO HERE IT IS: I LIKE YOU! HAPPY?!"
"Misaka!"
"WHAT!"
"Did you just... was that... you like me?"
Mikoto was pointing straight at Touma, face red from the yelling. "YES! I MEAN, NO! YOUR NOODLES ARE DELICIOUS!"
0_o; Uhh... Okay... "thanks... I guess?"
"SHUT UP! I WANT ICE CREAM!"
Touma took a deep breath decided to ask the forbidden question. "Are... are you on your period?"
"CHOCOLATE GEKOTA!" The girl cried out before unceremoniously planting her face on the table and beginning to sob. After a good seven seconds of bawling into the poor piece of furniture, the mighty railgun looked up with tearful eyes at the boy. Feeling the hormone fueled adrenaline leave her, she realized just how much she had embarrassed herself and simply stared at the bewildered boy, begging for pity with her eyes.
Touma smiled at her three-quarters out of pity, one out of amusement.
"Come on, let's get some frozen yogurt when we're done with dinner."
The next day, at gym class
Mikoto ran onto the field looking for her group. Quickly dubbed "five minus zero" by the rest of the school, it was widely regarded as the trump card of a certain highschool in the upcoming festival. It was expected that the team events would be dominated by this group and the opposing schools would be blown away by the sheer divide in power level.
Mikoto disagreed. Strongly.
Misaki lay sprawled out on the grass, gasping for air at the feet of a very disappointed Yomikawa sensei.
"Twenty-three push-ups in two minutes. Twenty-three. C'mon Shokuhou! Even Accelerator can manage more than twice that!"
Accelerator grunted in response as he did a set of sit-ups, legs pinned by Kamijou. The raven haired boy himself had finished a half kilometer run and was already drenched in sweat from the late summer heat. His shirt was soaked through and hugged his torso like a second skin, exposing his muscular body shape for all the world to see. Mikoto fought the urge to spontaneously punch the boy and cursed her hormones as she tried to not stare too hard.
"Ah, there you are Misaka!" Yomikawa called out, noticing the Third Rank trotting onto the field. "Go ahead and stretch then run a half-kilo warm up. When you're done, join Kamijou in the cages."
The girl wilted inside, but didn't say anything out of embarrassment in case a certain someone heard. She resigned herself to her fate and begrudgingly dragged herself onto the track and began her warm up.
Thirteen minutes after the beginning of her run saw her entering the cages. Much like their namesakes, the cages were a collection of hexagons exactly twenty-five meters in diameter and were designed for use as sparring areas. The floors were covered in a layer of semi-cushioning sport flooring not unlike a tennis court, and the edges were constructed from solid concrete rising a meter into the air save for the small doorway guarded by a simple wire door. Similar wire fencing extended another meter and a half above the concrete, effectively giving the look of a wire cage, despite it's open top.
Kamijou was already inside, performing stretches on the light blue floor.
"I still don't get why we have to train for sparring," The girl stated as she closed the cage door behind her.
Touma looked up from his stretching. "Don't ask me, I'm not the one in charge of PE. If you really want to know, ask Yomikawa sensei."
"Whatever. let's just get this over with." The Railgun opened up with a casual lightning bolt.
A negation from Imagine Breaker. It's owner began his advance.
"I wouldn't call this 'sparring'. This is more like a onesided curbstomp," Touma stated.
"Maybe, but of who?" Mikoto replied, throwing another bolt of electricity.
The boy ducked under the attack and put in a short burst of speed before reaching up and lightly bonking Misaka's head. "You, apparently."
The girl pouted. The boy smiled.
"C'mon, let's take this seriously. I know you can do better than that."
"Ugggh, fine." Misaka relented. Touma took a few paces backward and brought his hands up, one slightly further in front than the other, in a ready stance. Mikoto sighed once more before deciding to put her all into this practice session..
A few more rounds of fiercely intense sparring found the two combatants tired and exhausted. The metal fencing of the cages were so hot they were smoking, and the ground was scorched in various areas. Touma had to kick the fence gate open because it was too hot to touch. As the two left, the next sparring pair in line to use the cages looked at the damage and then back at the two in shock and were dumbstruck that the worst guy in their entire school had managed to spar with the rail gun at such a level and wasn't being carried out on a stretcher.
Windowless Building...
Aleister Crowley furrowed his brow. He was looking over the curious cases of Heaven Canceler's patients, and was so far stumped as to what had caused them to loose consciousness. And the fact that he was at a loss for a solution troubled him.
Aleister was a highly intelligent man, with a couple thousand years of experience to suite. As much as he was a planner of incomprehensibly grand and intricately complex schemes, Crowley was also a brilliant detective. Plans of his caliber required attention to detail, and that same attention allowed him to comprehend and understand mysteries that others could not. This coupled with his vast knowledge accrued from tens of hundreds of years meant that he was one of , if not the, most brilliant minds on earth.
So why couldn't he figure it out?
Most cases he could solve in less than a minute. The more complex ones, an hour at most. This was his second day on the task and he was still nowhere near close to solving the case. He had expected to call Heaven Canceler back the same day he phoned in the issue with an answer, instead he called late at night with only a few bits of information.
Both Kamijou's group and the sole case of Kuroko were knocked out by the same cause. Whatever it was, it wasn't of magical or scientific origin because it had knocked out Imagine Breaker. Both times, a spatial distortion would occur near the victims without displacing any mass, much like what had happened earlier that month, followed by an EMP pulse so small it was barely detectable. Neither would have been able to knock a person unconscious, but for whatever reason everyone near the distortion would pass out into a coma. But these small pieces of information still left so many questions unanswered.
Why did the Level 4 teleporter have a much more adverse reaction to the distortions than the other victims? What was causing the distortions in the first place? Why are there EMP waves following the appearance of a distortion? Were they directly affecting the victims? Or where they just byproducts of another force untraceable by machine? Aleister closed his eyes to think, something that he hadn't done in a long time.
After almost thirty minutes of trying to find any rational solution to his conundrum, Aleister open his eyes again being no closer to understanding anything then he was half an hour ago. The man closed the various open windows of information and statistics lining the wall of his tank. As he floated there, upside down, the man decided that the best and, quite frankly, only option was to keep an eye out and look for new developments.
Aleister, for the first time in a long while, felt apprehensive for the future. These events were too controlled and out of the norm to be natural occurrences. Whoever was behind this was attacking without warning and in a way that was impossible to guard against. And Aleister had a feeling in his gut that these distortions were only the beginning...
A week later, in another Windowless Building...
The Conquer sat in a throne-like chair examining his wall of screens and displays. Half were covered in charts and graphs, and the others were filled with computer generated reports. The screens bathed his skin a dull blue tinge as he took in all the readings and reports, his hair shining like polished obsidian under the dim illumination. Looking over the information before him one last time, he brought his hand up in one smooth calculated motion and snapped his fingers.
The white dressed girl quickly and quietly entered the room, her long brown hair trailing in the air behind her. She stopped at the Conquer's side and knelt.
"Yes master?"
"Increase the frequency by twenty-three percent and fire the test. We are close, I can feel it."
"As you wish. It will be done immediately." The girl stood and left the room, leaving the Conquer alone once again. The man smirked as the hum of machinery in another room started up. Soon, his plans would become reality. Soon.
Dinnertime, Touma Kamijou's apartment
Touma dropped his chopsticks as a sharp pain suddenly exploded inside his skull. He barely had time to reach for his head before his consciousness left him and his body slumped forward, limp. His arms dropped to the ground, useless, and a distraught Mikoto Misaka had to save his unconscious head from drowning in his own bowl of ramen soup.
Sorry this took so long! Vacation, School, work, it all just piled on and I had to drop some of my other activities in order to keep up. But, despite all that, I hope you all will be happy to know that as this chapter goes out, Ch 12 is already being written and will hopefully be out by the end of July. Well, it's late and I better get to bed. Cya in the next chapter!
As always, please leave a much appreciated review and PM me if you have any questions or suggestions!
-ShadowShuriken