Academy City may have been a major world city but that didn't make it especially large geographically. Not in terms of horizontal sprawl, at least: hemmed in on all sides by Tokyo proper, it was maybe twenty-six kilometres across from one wall to another. For a teleporter capable of taking a nearly direct path from one point to another, to cross the entire breadth of the city was a matter of minutes. For one Shirai Kuroko, a range of 81.5 metres every second worked out to a speed of nearly 300 kilometres an hour, or approximately five and a half minutes. In even simpler terms, if a report of gunfire went out anywhere in, for example, District 7, then Kuroko could arrive in the approximate area of the crime in under a minute.

But for all her speed, she could never arrive just as things were happening. Even an automated report of gunfire in the vicinity entailed a delay, and then there was the matter of getting her bearings. No matter how fast she reached the shipping yard, there was no sound of gunfire—not here, nor coming from the nearby streets.

Everything was caught in a moment of silence.

And then the explosion ripped through the air.

Further down the yard, past all the containers lined up near the water or tracks for easy shipping, a massive plume of smoke rose into the air. So much smoke and dust thrown up that it was alarming in and of itself. So not only was the criminal running around with guns, in one of the most student-heavy districts no less, they were throwing around an absurd number of explosives? Or maybe this was an esper ability, if it was something like the graviton bombings then there could be far more where that came from.

Going in blind against an unknown enemy with a demonstrably lethal amount of firepower… with nobody to call for backup, nobody that knew Kuroko was here, even outside of her branch's nominal jurisdiction… the smart thing to do would have been to call Anti-Skill immediately and wait for the professionals to arrive. Being the first on the scene meant nothing if you just became another casualty.

Kuroko hadn't become a member of Judgement out of a love for rules or because it would reflect well on her. She had joined Judgement in order to help people, to make sure that justice was carried out. Even in the face of mortal peril, she couldn't afford to back down just because of her own safety.

The all too familiar sound of electric arcs as the smoke cleared completely removed any last vestiges of hesitation. Kuroko couldn't afford to wait, not if onee-sama was possibly involved.

The first hop took her above the shipping containers.

The second atop another, a vantage point to study the conflict before plunging in.

The third—

What… what was this!? There were the marks of explosions, obviously, and that was normal. There was blood. Kuroko was no stranger to blood. Even somewhat large quantities. That… that was a leg. A female leg, well-toned for its age, wearing an oddball mix of a sensible shoe enforced by school uniform policies and a hopelessly baggy sock as a fashion statement.

And over there, that was a girl on the ground, wearing a uniform impeccably familiar. The simple white blouse, the pleated miniskirt, even the beige sweater vest. Kuroko was intimately familiar with each and every article of clothing down to the exact texture and how dismally warm even that light vest could get during the current weather. It was the exact same uniform that she was wearing right now—how could she not recognise it?

Even the girl's chestnut hair, Kuroko knew that as well. What it would look like when it was still damp out of the shower, when electricity danced between the strands and made each come alive so much more. How it would frame her face when she was laughing or frustrated or sleeping peacefully. It was all achingly familiar.

And achingly wrong. The girl was there and the leg was…

The third jump was straight to the injured girl's side. "Onee-sama!"

The only reaction Kuroko received was one of blank incomprehension—or maybe just entirely blank. Her eyes flickered between the gekota pin ahead—one of those oh-so-childish things onee-sama was obsessed with and how could that possibly be so important here that it would involve any of this—and Kuroko, not even seeming to recognise the teleporter. Blood loss, it had to be blood loss, with that there was no other explanation—

"Who the hell are you?" Of course, she had entirely forgotten, this wasn't any sort of self-inflicted injury. There was a boy there—at least, she thought so, it was hardly well lit down here. "Was this supposed to be another trap? Or are you not part of the plan at all?"

Whoever he was, everything… everything here made it clear that he was too dangerous. There was no way that Kuroko could engage anyone that could do that with just her bare hands. Not if she wanted to keep them. She would have to go straight to incapacitation.

The Judgement agent ran one hand over the needles on her thigh, aiming for hands, feet—areas that Academy City's medical technology could heal despite their complexity, but that would stop someone from fighting effectively or running long enough to get medical attention and backup. One by one the spikes disappeared—

—and reappeared, extra-dimensional paths reversed, stabbing right into the same thigh again and again. Not exactly where they had left, but close enough. It was almost like the pencil earlier. And this boy had done it without moving, without thinking. Kuroko would have sworn it was only the sudden pain that made her whimper… but maybe it was fear, too.

"A teleporter, huh? I'll just have to end this quick." Standing by a train car, Kuroko had no idea what that could mean. Onee-sama's powers didn't extend to explosions, so that had to be his work. But how could explosions link to reversing teleportation? Where did a train car come into it?

Up on the street, there was another voice shouting. The only voice that could possibly have caught Kuroko's attention in this situation. That was… onee-sama? But if onee-sama was up there, then down here was…

Then, and only then, did her eyes widen. The train was no longer on its tracks, it was—

With an earth-shaking thud, the train fell.

"Don't make me sound like some murderer. All I'm doing is fighting something they can copy with the push of a button. If someone else jumps in, it's just self-defence."

For one Shirai Kuroko, a range of 81.5 metres every second worked out to a speed of nearly 300 kilometres an hour. Even with the spikes stabbing into her, worming deeper and protesting every movement; even with a grievously injured passenger that looked identical to her onee-sama but couldn't be; even with the tang of blood filling her nostrils, there was no ambulance on the planet that could be faster.

Nothing sharpened reactions like the threat of imminent death and the first panicked jump took them both clear of the crash zone. The calculations were rough, the destination just slightly too high, but Kuroko bit back the moan that threatened as she landed on her abused leg.

She had to stay quiet, she had to stop that monster from learning they had gotten away. The scream, the sparking—Kuroko would trust onee-sama to win as always and beg for forgiveness later. Saving this girl was something only Kuroko could do and there was no time to explain.

A few months ago, she would have needed directions to find a hospital. Even after the Level Upper incident, it might have taken Kuroko uncomfortably long to find where one might be. Now, Kuroko was starting to feel uncomfortably well-associated with the facility due to the regular visits. But this did mark the first time her entrance had been into the emergency intake.

Her arrival spurred immediate action—even if teleporting straight into the middle of the room was hardly the conventional means of entry, the amount of blood staining their clothing was undeniable. As a girl very obviously missing a leg, the onee-sama lookalike got immediate attention whilst Kuroko…

… got paperwork.

Her injuries were nowhere near as threatening as long as she didn't move much until it was safe to remove the spikes. It made sense that she should fill out all necessary forms whilst waiting for a doctor to be free. But that didn't make it any more desirable; she wanted nothing more than to rush back to the shipping containers and make sure onee-sama had come out of her fight on top, to get explanations.

Instead, she got to complete forms she didn't have even half the answers to. What was the girl's name…? Kuroko didn't know, and she was hardly in a state to answer. The only clue she had to go on was the conversation just the day before for leaving the topic so fresh. A girl identical to onee-sama, down to the uniform… unless there was some identical twin that had been kept under wraps, and Kuroko was absolutely certain that there was nobody like that in Tokiwadai, then it could only be a clone.

Shelving thoughts on why there were clones of her onee-sama running around or why they were fighting violent maniacs, Kuroko obediently filled out the only family name that could possibly apply. Age… if it was a clone, there was no way to tell how old she was, and the state of cloning technology was hardly on the school curriculum. But the clone looked and felt almost identical, so if she just went with physical age then it was 14 just like the original.

Closest family… Misaka Mikoto, obviously. There were few other details she could supply—onee-sama's blood type, of course, but with the amount of blood the other girl had lost, Kuroko had given that immediately. Not that onee-sama would necessarily be happy to learn Kuroko knew that piece of information…

That was as much information as the teleporter could provide. Whatever the clone's name might have been, Kuroko hadn't thought to ask and nor was the girl in any state to provide one. You would name a clone, of course—as flippant as she had been about using a clone just to escape the Dorm Mistress's wrath, actually meeting a clone of onee-sama in the flesh put it into perspective. The very thought of treating anyone that looked like onee-sama as less than a person was horrifying. But could she treat a clone of onee-sama as less than onee-sama…?

It was possible, given how her mind was wandering on the topic of how much infidelity was expected or acceptable with a clone of such a perfect being as onee-sama, that Kuroko had lost more blood than she had thought.

"Shirai-san, the doctor will see you now."

In any similar situation, Misaka Mikoto would have ignored the buzzing of her phone. After everything that she had seen that night, everything that she had learned, she was in no mood to respond to her roommate's concerns about staying out late at night. That was the only thing it could be. It had to have been a case of mistaken identity. Moonlight wasn't that bright, there was no way that her roommate had been caught under… that…

There was doubt. Just enough that Misaka took the call on seeing her roommate's name.

"Where are you, onee-sama?" That was good, her concerns weren't needed, Kuroko was just asking when she'd be ba—"Have you returned to the dorm?"

Not 'when are you coming back'. It was 'have you gone back'. It was long after midnight, and the streets were deserted; there was no reason that someone like Kuroko would be out and about unless… it had to be a fluke. Maybe she had bent the rules to spend the night with Uiharu?

But she wasn't with Uiharu earlier, a traitorous voice inside the Railgun's head reminded her, And if she was, how would she ever know that you didn't go back on time?

It could just be pattern recognition! It was a nice night and sometimes she got back to the dorm after curfew, it wouldn't even be that unusual. But that was a weak excuse, even to herself. What were the odds that Kuroko would call up and ask without some reason to believe she was still outside at this time of night?

"Onee-sama?"

"No… I haven't gone back yet."

There was a pause, time for Misaka to say where she was, but… she didn't want Kuroko to see her like this, dirty and beaten up, and ask what was going on. This entire mess was her fault, her responsibility to solve, and she couldn't let her friends be pulled into it. Especially not Kuroko. How could she look her best friend in the face and admit that she was complicit in the murder of nearly ten thousand of her own clones and counting? If she just stayed silent, she could keep Kuroko in the dark.

"I went back to the shipping as soon as I was finished at the hospital. There was no sign of a fight, not even…" not even the person-crushing behemoth of a train, inexplicably dislodged from its tracks. Not even the bloodstains from where her own clone's leg had been brutally torn off. "Onee-sama, Kuroko just wants to make sure you're not hurt!"

It had been Kuroko. Somehow, Kuroko had gotten involved in this mess, but gotten out before… and if that was the case, if Kuroko had known that she was there too, then there couldn't be any denying the situation, could there? Misaka had no ability to change someone's mind, to make them forget what they had seen—nothing but to go beg for a favour from the Queen of Tokiwadai, but to go beg for someone like that to go digging around in her friend's minds, letting her know about the project... that would be the opposite of keeping them safe.

If she could convince Kuroko that she wasn't hurt and that everything was under control, there was still a chance. She could keep everyone else from getting involved any further.

It was maybe a minute later when Kuroko appeared, looking by far the worse for wear of the two. The blood had been cleaned off her person, but there were still stains along her skirt, and the vest was equally ruined from carrying the clone. Then there were the bandages around her thigh, though the shallow injuries looked worse at this point than they were. Whatever the planned response had been to her arrival from where her onee-sama was curled up on a bench seemed to be driven out of the older girl's mind by the stains.

"Kuroko, what happened to you!?"

"Ah… most of this is from taking that girl to the hospital," the teleporter answered, seating herself, "These scratches are from that boy. Something he did reversed my teleportation."

Reversed… just like the magnetism controlling her iron sand or the railgun fired after. Even against eleven-dimensional movement, Accelerator's vector control was a perfect defence.

"Kuroko, no matter what, never fight him!"

"Eh?" Kuroko's confusion was as palpable as Misaka's panicked expression. When she had left, onee-sama had already been fighting. In all of Academy City, there were only seven Level 5's and the idea that anyone might cause such a response at the mere thought of a fight was… unsettling. Just what had happened after she left?

"He's the number one Level 5! If you fight him, you'll just get killed, like…" like the nine-thousand, nine-hundred and eighty-two clones this wretched experiment had already chewed up.

"She survived, onee-sama. Academy City's medical technology is the best in the world, and the doctor even said it would be possible to visit in the morning." A morning that wasn't far away now, the sun rising over the empty streets. "But… why was the number one trying to kill your clone? Why do you even have a clone?"

This was the hard part, then. Misaka needed to somehow convince Kuroko that whatever was going on only involved the one clone and was under control—or that, at least, she had no more idea why there was a clone of her going around in the first place.

"With that guy… who knows? He probably thought it was me and wanted to prove how strong he is," that sounded close enough to the truth. If Kuroko and Accelerator never met again, the explanation should hold up. It wasn't like there was a massive amount of accurate information known about the Level 5s going around.

But that still left trying to explain why she had a clone. Something that would be hard enough to explain even if she wasn't trying to conceal the truth at the same time. One that wouldn't be incriminating based on her response to the very same topic just a few days ago. "Would you believe me if I said I didn't know why there's a clone?"

Feigning ignorance was probably the best she could do. As long as Kuroko couldn't interrogate the hospitalised Sister, then there wasn't anything to get suspicious about, and she wouldn't be able to answer the code any more than Misaka had.

The sound of footsteps reminded the pair that they were still in public.

"Long time no see."

AN: Accelerator's an odd one at this stage. For all he's quick to jump to killing people, he's not super invested in doing it where the project isn't concerned unless attacked. If some teleporter gets away, why should he care?

Mostly, this follows the anime timeline? At least so far as the anime has gotten in everything. Interestingly enough, some of the anime-only parts have crept into the novels-originally, Kuroko would have been in Judgement Branch 004 (Tokiwadai) and 177 was just Uiharu and Saten's school, but it now seems Kuroko's wound up there in the latest volumes anyhow.