The young man weakly crawled on the ground, struggling in vain to push himself off the hard, cold concrete of the warehouse floor, burns and cuts on his body sapping his strength. A cool breeze wafted through the building from a large hole in the roof, the impromptu entry point created when he was forcibly thrown through it. The steady clack of expensive dress shoes echoed behind him, and he knew he needed to stand before they reached him. His focus was interrupted as a pair of dainty feet wrapped in an extremely form fitting thin black material blocked his view.
Weakly looking up, he saw a blank silver mask staring down at him. The faceless woman reached down haltingly to gently touch one of his open wounds. He winced when her fingers dug in further, but didn't have the energy left to muster more than a grunt at just a little more pain on top of everything. She spoke, then, her words garbled behind a modulator, gravelly and rough, each syllable seeming to come only after great struggle.
"Red… wrong… way."
"It's time." Misaki's voice echoed over the comm earpiece to the others as she stepped up behind Kazari's chair. Kazari, for her part, had already busied herself tapping furiously away at the pile of workstations and displays that now dominated a whole wall of their bedroom, her face revealed in the diode-glow of her command station as much as the ambient moonlight streaming though the wall of windows at her left. She was in her element.
"Just to review. We've got two objectives," she stated firmly, not stopping to cut off any interruptions. "Misaka-san; Shirai-san. You two are going to investigate the status of a facility listed in that data haul. Based on the shipping manifests, mechanical parts and materials used for cloning were transported there in large amounts. We don't want to see a repeat of the Level Six Shift Project."
"Right," Mikoto's low growl shot back, not even fighting Misaki, so focused on accomplishing just that task to give any backsass.
"We'll get it done, not to worry." Whether Shirai was addressing Misaki or Mikoto with that reassurance was hard to say.
"Right," Misaki said stiffly, looking down at Kazari with barely hidden anxiety. "Frenda-san; Saten-san. Going through those earlier hard drives found us some suspicious mentions of a particularly irritating Board Member. If Indigo has the backing of the Board of Directors, even if just one of the sitting members, that'll make this all a lot more complicated. The address I sent you to is a villa that hasn't been used in a few years now. The man in question has hundreds of properties, so we expect security to be light. Just get in, snoop around, plant the wireless hacking device for Kazari, and get out. Nothing fancy."
"It'll be a breeze." Ruiko's confident voice replied, followed by a "Yeah, yeah, for the 4th time." from the blonde bomber.
Rolling her eyes a little, she pulled out her holographic-projecting phone, tapping a button on the screen as a timer began to run.
"Go."
Frenda and Ruiko stood up from their hiding spot on a small hill, concealed behind a small copse of trees. District 21. A mountainous region of Academy City with primarily dams and space observatories, with some parks here and there.
And a rather large, very luxurious mansion tucked away in an easily missed nook, most of the area concealed by trees. The long, winding driveway that led into the woods where the mansion lay hidden was easily missed even if one happened to drive down the oft-unused street it was connected to.
"Alright, so, this Board member… Yamamoto Akira. His name popped up over and over in the finance records Queenie's cute button of a girlfriend found." Frenda said. Ruiko shot her an odd look, so she winked back.
"Right, and we've watched the place for hours. No one has come or gone," Ruiko threw in, looking through some binoculars again. "I haven't seen any security, either."
"Well, only one way to get to the bottom of this." Frenda mused, patting Ruiko's shoulder. "Let's go." Ruiko lowered the binoculars with a nod, getting up and following after Frenda as the blonde led the way.
Working their way down to the street, both the girls dressed in black to better conceal themselves in the darkness of the night, they moved up to the sideroad from the unlit street. Ducking underneath a gate meant to block cars rather than people, Frenda pointed at a small square shape device that was sticking out of the ground near them.
"Motion sensor. That should be on, but it's not." Frenda scowled as they advanced down the road. In fact, every security measure she saw was the same way: off or broken. She pointed them out to Ruiko for future reference, but the place was clearly long abandoned.
Arriving at the mansion, it was unsurprisingly a large and opulent estate, covered in burnished bronze and detailed decor. Frenda rolled her eyes as they approached.
"Typical," she muttered. "Plants haven't encroached yet, though. A few years, maybe?"
Circling the perimeter of the property in search of a way in, and only briefly given a heart attack by a motion light turning on, they eventually settled on a second-story window reachable by an adjacent climbable tree. For all its high-tech security, the building itself was old school, with physical latches and... she chuckled. "Seriously? Is this actual silica glass? I've been waiting ages to try this!" A quick flex of her power had an antique glass cutter in her hands. It was a bit fiddly, but soon enough, both girls were sliding into a hallway.
"Ugh, what is that smell? So musty." Ruiko put her hand up to her mouth and nose, looking at Frenda, who seemed perturbed.
"Well, no one has been here in awhile, that's for sure." She said after a few moments of thought, creeping forward and starting her search, Ruiko not far behind.
Room by room, they emptied the second floor of places to search until they reached the final door of what definitely was the master bedroom- and was locked.
"Should I kick it down?" Ruiko asked to Frenda, who shook her head.
"No, let's see if we can find a key first. It might be trapped against forced entry. This asshole apparently had a hard-on for randomly mixing old school shit and advanced tech." She sighed, moving back toward a staircase they'd found earlier in their search.
Heading downward, Ruiko floated over to the front door where the stairway deposited them, grabbing at a tablet plugged in to the wall.
"Huh, power's still on. This thing was kept charged." Ruiko began going through the tablet as Frenda briefly gave her a pat and a gesture with her head to tell her she was going to keep looking around.
Browsing through the tablet, it appeared to be some kind of day planner. Expected guests, who should be coming and going. The last entry was marked… almost six years ago. She furrowed her brow at the final entry.
"Vivmu-? Veevmmbuh?" Ruiko tried to read it aloud before Misaki chimed in at last.
"Spell it to us."
"Vivmb. All caps, if that matters?" She backed out of the planner app and found the one for the house security system. After swiping away a dense flurry of malfunction warnings she nodded that it was all coming up disabled or faulted and set the device back in its cradle.
"Ruiko. We've a problem." Frenda called out to her, Ruiko turning and quickly making her way toward the sound of Frenda's voice. She found Frenda at a threshold of an archway, looking into the adjoining room.
"What's up?"
"I found what reeks." She said quickly, pointing. Ruiko turned to follow the gesture and instantly regretted it, barely holding down her gorge as the smell hit her like a wave. In a large and fancy sitting room, she saw it.
Sprawled out on the floor, reeking of death, was a splayed corpse in a bloodstained suit. Though the body was dessicated to the point of resembling a mummy, the cause of death was almost certainly the ominously huge knife buried deep in his spine.
"Hello? Describe what you're seeing." Misaki said with a testy tone as they suddenly went silent in shock at the discovery.
"A dead body." Ruiko replied as Frenda pulled her hat off and held its hidden filter against her nose and mouth, approaching the corpse to carefully rifle through its pockets.
"...What?" Misaki said quietly, her tone so clear that Ruiko could practically hear her blinking over the comm. "Whose-?" She began to say, Frenda chiming in as she pulled out a wallet and an ID within.
"Yamamoto Akira." Frenda said quietly.
A pregnant pause filled the air as all present absorbed this new information.
"Hard to say how long he's been dead, though. This ID expired two years ago, but he should be a skeleton, not... whatever this is. Dried out, somehow." Frenda chimed in as she resumed her search.
"But that isn't possible, he's still an active board member, he's made public appearances." Misaki added, her brain going a mile a minute based on her tone. Ruiko glanced down the hall from the way she came.
"Maybe that weird word I found is related? The one I saw in the house day planner guestbook visitor log thing? That entry was a few years back, too," She proposed, still not entering the sitting room for fear of breathing near the corpse. Frenda walked up, holding an old-fashioned key in her hands that she'd just pulled from the body's pocket.
"Well, let's see what we can find in his bedroom."
Misaki rubbed the bridge of her nose as she processed this new information. Ruiko and Frenda were still on-site. Hopefully they would find something to provide more answers than questions for once. She set the thought aside to check in on Mikoto and Kuroko, leaning forward next to Uiharu who was rapidly typing away as she researched every bit of new data she received.
"How is Team B doing? Take your time, there's no need to rush and risk getting caugh-" Misaki began before Mikoto cut in.
"Oh please, we're already in and going through their computers. Have a little faith. And why are we Team B?"
Mikoto leaned into her crutch as Kuroko tapped away at a computer, her hand to her ear as she spoke to Misaki. The pair were standing in a large warehouse, the facility clearly in the process of getting its equipment delivered, and not much having been unpacked from their crates yet.
"What? You weren't supposed to go in, just check the status. Did you encounter any resistance?" Misaki's tone was controlled, doing her best to not sound irritated. Not starting a fight was ideal, and Mikoto was attempting to do the same.
"Eh…" Mikoto looked over her shoulder at the five smoking heaps of destroyed metal that were formerly five walker tanks armed with exceptionally deadly looking weapons, now twisted into uselessness by magnetism, their hulls blasted, sliced, or ripped apart. Tiny fires crackled within the hulking wrecks of the death machines.
"Nothing worth mentioning," Mikoto said cavalierly as she turned back to Kuroko who had put into practice a few tricks she'd learned from Uiharu and bypassed the facility's security.
"Same goes for this, the servers here are basically empty. Just a lot of names for what the servers are supposed to deal with. Parameter List, LU-02, MB Projections, Third Season Project… Any of these sound familiar?" Kuroko asked.
"No, they don't. However, we will add that to our list of investigations." Misaki said with a sigh. "More questions than answers from your end too, it seems... Mikoto, can you fry all the equipment in that warehouse?"
"With pleasure," Mikoto chimed in with some of her old characteristic confidence, Kuroko looking over at Mikoto with a slightly nostalgic smile.
"What?" Mikoto asked Kuroko, the girl merely replying with an innocent smile and shrug.
"Then if you please, we might as well deprive him of his hardware."
She nodded to Kuroko and her easy smirk widened to a broad smile they casually sauntered toward the exit. She flexed her command of electromagnetism and streamers of plasma arced and raced across every surface of the space behind them. Once they cleared the front gate, she wheeled around and raised a hand. Her grin turned feral.
"Aaaand zap!" She snapped her fingers as she let it all out like a wound up spring, finally allowing nature to take its course and releasing the stored charge in a single massive EMP.
Better than retail therapy.
"Hello?" Misaki said as Mikoto and Kuroko's feed cut out in a short bark of static and the indicators on Uiharu's monitors went offline. .
"The EMP probably knocked out their comms. I have failsafes built in, so they should come back up in a minute or two," Uiharu provided, smiling up at Misaki in a comforting manner. "Hey, don't worry about them. They're strong. It'll be fine." She reached out and took Misaki's hand, squeezing it reassuringly. A silent moment hung in the air between the two before Misaki breathed deep and exhaled her anxiety.
"Right." She nodded. "Team A, what is your status?" She frowned at the silence. "Team A? Frenda? Ruiko?" It took another few seconds before their reply came.
"Okay, what the FUCK did we just watch?"
Frenda's blunt words came as Ruiko and her stared at the computer monitor, on which security footage was found. The video in front of them played out again as Ruiko wound it back, almost in disbelief.
On the screen, the clearly-still-living Yamamoto greeted a guest that had been brought into the sitting room by a maid. A painfully familiar, snake-faced guest.
"Thank you for coming, it's not often I get the chance to meet someone as esteemed as yourself. I daresay your picture doesn't do you justice- it must be severely outdated, A-"
"Please," he cut in before the Board member could finish, "I prefer Indigo. It's a pleasure to meet you." The snake smiled as charmingly as he could, and to the shock of both girls, he put forward a remarkably amiable air, politeness seeping from his words. It was unnerving how utterly convincing it was.
"Of course, of course." Yamamoto replied politely, turning to approach his wet bar. "Could I get you a drink?" He asked, blithely unaware of the mistake he'd made by exposing his back to the monster in his presence.
"Oh yes, that would be lovely. I AM feeling rather… parched," Indigo said softly as he slithered up to the man from behind, pulled a knife out from his coat and, without even a moment's hesitation, plunged it into the back of his host.
Even on a second viewing, it was a distinctly uncomfortable experience to watch as Yamamoto desperately crawled along the floor after collapsing in a dying heap, instinctively trying to escape from the sudden and shocking pain in his back. Indigo merely watched, slowly following until he went limp in the same position the girls had found him in.
"Thank you, sir." Indigo said, his voice changing as he spoke, and his form shifting as light seemed to shine and bend around him- taking on the form and voice of the man he'd just murdered as the corpse shrivelled like a time-lapse video of an embalming. "I was quite thirsty indeed."
Frenda jabbed the pause button. "But no, what the FUCK is he? These powers are so fucking weird!" Frenda ranted, even as Ruiko did her best to calmly explain what they'd just seen.
"...And then he… he turned into him. It was like… like some kind of ancient optical illusion. The kind with the mirrors?" Ruiko said, biting her lip in uncertainty. They stood there awkwardly, still staring at the image frozen on the screen.
"What happened to all the staff that was here?" Ruiko finally wondered aloud. Frenda winced.
"If it involves that freak, I'm not sure I want to know."
Misaki heard them talking. Frenda and Ruiko were talking. But whatever they said didn't register, didn't MATTER in the face of the terrible truth they had uncovered.
"Indigo is sitting on the Board," she said in a horrified whisper. The others didn't understand. Even Mikoto didn't fully appreciate just how bad the situation had just become. Suddenly, so many strange inconsistencies and minor mysteries made sense. As a Board Member, someone who could tap Academy City's own assets almost unchecked, his available resources were staggering. Covering up his own misdeeds became laughably easy. He could manipulate Anti-Skill to some degree, use the city's intelligence network… but it also raised some serious questions. Most saliently: why? What was his goal? Why did he orchestrate Treefall when the net result seemed to only hamper anything anyone might want to do in a city cut off from the outside world?
"Viv… Viv M.B… No relevant substring matches... permu- no, no, he wouldn't have done that in his own home..." Uiharu muttered next to her, prompting Misaki to look at the smaller girl."'MB' could be dozens of things but it's probably separate, so what if it's... three parts? Roman!?" She didn't need to be a mind reader to see that Kazari had just had a moment of sudden realization. In a blur of movement, she was typing away, Misaki unable to even keep up with what she was doing.
"What're you…?" She asked before a screen came up. Misaki stared at it, furrowing her brow. "Is that…?" She stared at the profile in front of her that had just been pulled up.
"...I think… I think I found him," Uiharu whispered in a daze.
"No… No, this can't be right, if he's…" Misaki shook her head as she stared. "The picture isn't right-" She paused as she remembered some of Yamamoto's last words that Ruiko had told her: His official photo was severely outdated. But it couldn't, certainly not…
"Misaki… look at that kanji." She pointed at her screen, Misaki's eyes widening in increasing horror.
"Oh god…" She whispered, the emotions beating in her chest barely contained. She unconciously grabbed Kazari's hand in a comforting gesture, when she realized it was violently shaking. She turned to look at her lover, and saw her expression. Kazari wasn't looking at the screen, her eyes wide and tears forming around them as a look of pure terror was echoed by the impression she received over their link.
Misaki's head slowly turned to follow her gaze, out the window and up.
"...No…" Misaki whimpered at the sight as despair threatened to swallow her.
There, standing at the edge of the opposing building, staring down at them from the ledge with a wicked, sadistic smile, was Indigo.
And in his hand, held aloft by the neck, in a gesture of dark and vile triumph, was the blood drenched, burned, and limp body of Sogiita Gunha.
The tableau was broken as suddenly as it began by masked figure with silver hair leaping from seemingly nowhere at the window.
With a crash of glass and panicked screams.