Frenda was trying her very best to remain calm and composed, and she was doing quite a good job of it she felt. It was quite a challenge in an environment where there was an individual who could turn you into a burned and charred smear on the floor with a thought.
What made it all the more unsettling was watching Misaka Mikoto hand feeding her armless girlfriend across from her as Frenda tried to just eat dinner and make small talk with everyone at the table. Railgun seemed appropriately distracted with her caretaking of Kuroko, who she now better recalled from all those propaganda PR blasts the Board had been sending out about a year ago. The teleporter that had saved the city… had she lost her arms then?
She felt something prod her foot and she practically leaped out of her skin, managing to stop herself before she slammed her knee into the underside of the table, looking around and seeing that it was Ruiko that had nudged her, giving her a concerned look, pointing down at the cell phone that Ruiko had concealed in her hand. Frenda slipped her hand into her own pocket in her skirt, pulling her phone out and looking at it, opening the chat program the pair used to talk so often.
"You OK? You've been acting really weird since Misaka walked in. Star-struck?"
Frenda read that, and had absolutely no idea how to respond to her friend. How exactly does one respond with "Oh, actually, see, I am a contract killer bomber hitwoman that tried to murder your friend, and she doesn't seem to remember that. I'm worried that at any moment she'll recall, and turn me into a charred paste on your wall because she's a goddamn walking electric weapon of mass destruction" in a way that is diplomatic and not friendship-ruining?
"Something like that."
Was the best that Frenda could come up with as she replied and slipped her phone back into her pocket, throwing Ruiko a smile before returning her attention to the dinner as a whole, her eyes spotting the Railgun whose eyes were on her once again.
They were already plenty of ways through the dishes Maika had made for them, and Mikoto had no idea fried mackerel could be so good. However… It was just...
Mikoto could not place it. But... she KNEW Frenda. She just couldn't remember where, and it was driving her nuts. What made it more pressing was that she could sense Frenda's anxiety. Where ever she knew Frenda from, Frenda did not want her to know. Really though, where could she have met someone like her that they could be in conflict? Frenda seemed harmless enough. Maybe a little crass by Eastern standards.
It was at this point that she realized that she had been staring at Frenda for a solid couple of minutes and Frenda was clearly starting to squirm under the stare. And she hadn't been feeding Kuroko, who took offense in the form of biting Mikoto's ear.
"OW!"
"NOM!"
"What are you, FOUR!?"
"I'm not four, I'm Kuroko. And hungry, and not being fed, and being ignored. Don't make googly eyes at the blonde."
Everyone at the table turned to look at Kuroko, dumbfounded and shocked, for while Kuroko was prone to acting a bit immaturely around Mikoto, this was… a little much. Mikoto managed to unlatch Kuroko's teeth from her ear and scowled at her, but her expression instantly softened as she looked at her. Mikoto put her hand to Kuroko's forehead.
"Kuroko… you're burning up. Are you feeling OK? Maybe we spent a little too long in the bath." Kuroko leaned into Mikoto's hand, her weight seeming to be almost entirely into it for balance.
"I feel fine… My arms are kinda… hot…" Kuroko said softly, smiling at Mikoto, who adjusted Kuroko to lean against her bodily, resting Kuroko's head against her shoulder.
"Where did this come from?" Mikoto asked as she reached into the sleeve of the kimono to feel at the metal and arm that was supposedly hot… And it was. Very, very warm. This was just getting more and more weird. The metal was hot to the touch, and her skin was warm and feverish.
Frenda stood up from the table, leaning over a little. "Want me to… run to get some medicine, or something?" She asked, a trace of nervousness in her voice. Mikoto glanced up at her, that uncertainty in her mind again as she tried to place where she knew Frenda, and why it bothered her so damn much.
Uiharu ran into the kitchen with Saten to get Maika who looked up from the dishes she was washing, her own finished dinner plates already sparkling clean.
"Is everythin-" Maika began before Saten cut in immediately.
"Shirai-san is sick! She's burning up!" Maika dropped what she was doing and jumped up to grab at her medical kit from a drawer and hurried outside to the sitting room, Saten hot on her heels. Uiharu was just about to follow them, but paused as a vibration in her pocket caused her to hesitate. She fished her phone out of her pocket and opened the holographic screen to read the text on the screen. Two words were sent to her.
"STAY INSIDE."
Yomikawa Aiho leaned back in the drivers side seat of the car she had been in for the past several hours of her shift. She was a tall, curvy woman with dark, long hair pulled into a practical ponytail. Her junior, Tessou Tsuzuri, a freckled and mousy young woman with messy hair was seated next to her, yawned a bit.
"Seriously, how did I end up babysitting not one, but two of this city's living weapons of mass destruction…" Yomikawa groaned a bit, rubbing the bridge of her nose as she looked out the front window down the road at the house that served as the friendly looking fortress that currently held the Railgun of Academy City.
"You volunteered." Tessou reminded her from her left. Yomikawa was silent for moment.
"Shut up." she grumbled with a sigh. "It's time for check-in." She grabbed her radio, putting it up to her mouth. "Everyone sound off." One by one, she heard the various stations sounding off for a several block radius, like they had the past dozen or so times in the past several hours. As the check-in reached about ten blocks off at one of the guard stations, there was a delay.
"Station 34. Sound off." She called again, waiting. Static. "Station 34, again, sound-" There was a gurgling sound on the other end of the radio followed by alarms ringing in the distance- and by an explosion.
Indigo grinned as he ripped the throat out of the Anti-Skill officer just a moment too late as the man's hand hit the button on the console and set off the alarms.
"Alas… I guess this'll be a bit louder than I would have hoped." He said with a dramatic sigh. He grinned, hearing movement behind him. Turning, he saw another mutilated guard had crawled out of the control room of the Anti-Skill military station. "Now, now… where have you gone…" He hummed as he followed the trail of blood.
His smile faltered as he found himself standing in the docking bay of the armored suits, the dying man's hand on the tall-stacked pile of high-yield explosive grenade rounds that fitted into the suits grenade launchers. His hand was closed around a hand grenade resting against the stack, the pulled pin around the finger of his opposing hand.
"Burn in hell, you fucking monster." He coughed out through his bleeding throat, his hand opening, and the lever flying off.
The girls froze as the explosion caused the entire house to shake.
"That was a high-yield grenade explosion. A lot of them." Frenda muttered, moving to a window and opening a curtain, looking out and up into the sky, a plume of smoke starting to billow up from a distance away. "Holy shit…"
Uiharu quickly rushed inside. "What was that?" She looked more than a bit panicked as she ran to the window with Frenda, peeking out from underneath Frenda's chin at the billowing tower of smoke that was growing.
"Oh no…" She gasped.
"MISAKA. NO." Saten shouted, Frenda and Uiharu twisted around, spotting Saten physically grabbing onto Misaka by her arm as she was starting to get up off the ground. Kuroko had been softly laid down, her head resting on a pillow.
"I'm just going to see if I can help-"
"No, no, no! Not this shit again, I won't allow it!" Saten shouted, wrestling with her and very easily winning. "You are barely recovering, Anti-Skill can take care of whatever it is, and Shirai needs your attention!"
Mikoto winced and scowled, her expression pained. Uiharu quickly moved over to help Saten.
"Please, Misaka-san, you need to rest, you are still healing. You can let others handle this." She urged, sensing that same self-sacrificing pattern of behavior cropping up inside of her again.
"D-don't try and guilt me!" Misaka snapped at them angrily, her words like venom, both her friends jerking back looking genuinely hurt. She took the opportunity to use her crutch to stand up. She didn't expect the foot to her chest.
Mikoto gasped as she was suddenly slammed to the ground onto her back, her breath knocked right out of her lungs, leaving her hacking and coughing as Frenda stood above her, hands on her hips, her foot still hanging in the air from where she'd just kicked her down onto her ass. She looked remarkably casual and calm for having just dropped the Railgun.
"Wow, bitchy." Frenda said as she placed her foot down, staring down at Mikoto who tried to push herself up but was still coughing and hacking. "Seriously, I cannot believe how terrified I was... " Frenda wiped a little sweat from her brow.
"Y-you f-fucking-" Mikoto tried to rasp out, still hacking and cough.
"Oh, shut the fuck up, Railgun. Your friends love you too much to tell you what you need to hear. You're like a spoiled rich girl throwing another tantrum whenever she doesn't get what she wants, even if what she wants is to play the martyr. Maybe for once you take a moment to consider that the 'right thing to do' is to actually consider that the people around you don't want to see you dead in the ditch, rather than from YOU want, which seems to be suicide. Maybe, just fucking maybe, LISTEN TO THEM. Ya fucking nutcase." She said in an mocking and insulting tone, not an ounce of compassion or care in her voice. Unlike her friends who tried to appeal to Misaka's emotions or bonds of friendship or love, Frenda didn't seem to give one ounce of shit about her.
Mikoto could only stare silently with her mouth hanging open in shock. It was like her brain was suddenly short-circuiting. Uiharu and Saten could only stare like they were watching a trainwreck. Maika was covering her mouth in shock. Kuroko was lying on the pillow in a feverish daze, barely able to follow the events as they were unfolding.
"If you make Ruiko cry, I swear, I will blow your face off." She added in, stomping her foot and pointing. "AND ANOTHER THING!" She began to say, flourishing her hand and pointing once again, before another enormous explosion cut her off, nearly losing her balance as the ground shook, this one even louder than the previous.
"EXCUSE ME, I'M ON A ROLL HERE!" She screamed out in the direction of the explosion.
"What the fuck is that thing!?"
That was not the first time an Anti-Skill officer had yelled those words as countless rounds of ammo had unloaded down the road at the approaching enemy, a creature that seemed to defy all reason. A barrier of drones and vehicles had been set up to stop its approach after Station 34 had seemingly detonated and collapsed, with this crawling out of the wreckage. This… thing.
A misshapen humanoid figure surrounded by warping space and material, seeming to suck in everything around it to form appendages to attack and projectiles to launch or throw. At the nucleus of this thing was a sphere that kept warping the bullets that were fired at it around to impossible angles, deflecting them harmlessly away. The light that should have revealed the creatures form instead showed a horrific mockery of the human body, the facial expression made up of two enormous glowing violet eyes, twisting serpentine tongues slithering out of a mouth far too large, teeth and mouth merged as one, stretching and twisting.
Yomikawa had to fight the urge to vomit it was so repulsive to look at. She wasn't sure what to do. Worse still, the mocking echoing laughter that came from it told her everything she needed to know. It was playing with them. Every attack they made, every grenade and bullet they sent down lane did nothing but amuse it. If they retreated, it would continue its course toward Railgun, which was no doubt its target.
"Fuck, fuck…" She cursed. What to do… She did have one option…
Tink, tink, tink.
Everyone on the battlefield was distracted, the creature included, by a soda can that landed in the middle of the street as it landed and bounced across the pavement, rolling and rolling before it came to a stop. There was a brief pause before the creature twisted in response toward the direction of where the can came from, and an impact like no other collided with it, the shockwave sending everyone flying backwards and onto the ground.
Yomikawa groaned as she pushed herself off of the pavement, grabbing her assault rifle and shouting over the ringing in her ears.
"Sound off! Whose not dead?!" She yelled as she tried to get a grip on what she was looking at, hearing various shouts in response of her various fellow officers, and her eyes fell on the two figures before her.
Indigo ripped himself out of the storefront he'd been blasted into after the human-shaped projectile had collided into him, throwing a car with one of his tendrils made of bricks and pavement, his glowing eyes falling on the sweater-vest wearing smiling figure standing in the road, his voice screeching and echoing across several blocks in a rage of unfathomable intensity, the words layered over each other in an unnatural way like a chorus of crying demons, his facial expression twisting into an unnatural visage that no person could ever mistake as human with how the light that shaped it twisted into a barely humanoid visage of two glowing orbs and stretched out tendrils of hate for a mouth.
"WHY DO YOU KEEP BOTHERING ME!?"
"You are behaving in a simply gutless manner, and I can't abide that! Come now, if we go together, I'm sure we can start to make amen-" Indigo did not wait to allow him to finish that sentence before he launched himself, screeching a wordless, inhuman roar of hatred.
Yomikawa stared as her fellow officers watched, guns at the ready, her jaw hanging down.
"Lieutenant! Who… Who is that?" Tessou asked, pointing her rifle up with slightly shaky hands, unsure of how to approach as they could only watch in stark amazement mixed with horror.
"I… I can't believe it." She whispered.
The young man in the sweater-vest dove out of the way of the creature, cracking his knuckles and rotating his shoulder to stretch it out as he dove backwards casually, sliding out of range before a wide grin spread across his face.
"VERY WELL! LET US SEE IF WE CAN COME TO AN UNDERSTANDING THIS TIME AROUND!" The young man shouted toward the creature as he approached with a casual stroll.
Yomikawa shook her head.
"That's… That's the Seventh Ranked Level 5 of Academy City." Yomikawa gasped out.
"Sogita Guhna."
"I HATE YOU SO MUCH!" Indigo smashed onto the side of a building, the bizarre spherical-tentacle abomination that served as his attack vector latching on and launching a barrage of attacks at the anomaly that was Sogita Guhna, the Level 5 of Academy City whose powers defied all reason.
"You simply require some self-reflection!" Guhna threw an arm back and launched a fist skyward toward the building, a seeming explosion of air and telekinetic force crashing through the sky and smashing apart the tendrils of debris, crashing into Indigo and the building, squeezing him between the unnatural punch and the structure.
Indigo growled and plowed inside of the building, crashes and explosions of stone and metal being heard as his pseudo-construct of spatial distortions that he'd built around himself rampaged through the skyscraper.
"Property damage is a crime!" Guhna shouted from the street. "It's OK! I did it too! We can apologize together!"
"STOP. TALKING!" Came the echoing reply before a barrage of seemingly endless missiles came flying from the walls, bursting out of windows and pillars. Metal shrapnel of all kinds, nails, pipes, you name it, all flying toward Guhna in a hurricane of death.
Guhna grinned as he raised his fists, and in a flurry of movement faster than the eyes of the watching Anti-Skill could track, began to deflect the projectiles away and onto the pavement, knocking them into the ground with a mad grin. "You've been practicing!" He said in a tone that spoke of admiration of one who respected hard work.
"SHUT UUUUUUUUUP!" The wall exploded as the warped and horrific creature that was Indigo emerged once again from the building his hand reaching out as he pointed at Guhna. "And die."
There was a screeching sound from below as Guhna looked downward and saw all the metal he had been deflecting and had impaled into the ground began to collapse in on itself, causing him to blink in light surprise.
Yomikawa gasped in shock. "Synchrotron-!? EVERYONE GET DOWN!" She screamed as everyone dove for cover and an enormous explosion shook the street, sending debris flying for hundreds of meters around.
As the sound began to clear, and those around dared to begin to stand, the only sound that could be heard was the mad laughter of an insane monster.
"YES YES! AHAHHAAH!" The creature laughed and laughed. "AT LAST-"
"DYNAMIC ENTRY!"
A secondary explosion was heard as Yomikawa managed to briefly see the creature look up in the smoke as a humanoid figure seemed to descend down from the sky, Guhna seemingly having been blasted hundreds of meters into the air… and having crashed downward right onto the monsters head. The shockwave threw her right up against the vehicle behind her, knocking the wind right out of her.
She groaned as she waited rubbing her face.
"Excuse me, miss." she opened her eyes and met with the look of a smiling college-aged young man in a sweater-vest holding out his hand to her. "You seem to be in distress. My troubled friend seems to have run away. Perhaps I can be of assistance to you? That seems to be the gutsy thing to do."