A/N Hello everyone, hope you all had a good week. I'd like to say, I'm so happy I decided to start doing second drafts. I think it's helped immensely. To put it in perspective, these first two chapters had been one originally, but just writing it over again a second time really helped with pacing and just adding more to the story. Anyway, here is the next chapter, I hope you enjoy it.
The bodies had a variety of different wounds, each of which were fatal, from heavy burns that coated the entire body to large indents where vital organs were meant to be. The bodies were also laid out in some sort of weird pattern that Hamazura couldn't make out from his position. He'd probably need a view from above to get a proper idea.
The building was a single room with each of the five walls that comprised the outside of the building surrounding it. There were a number of wooden desks around the outside of the room, each with a computer on it and a black office chair beside it. Hamazura noted that they weren't tucked underneath the desks, most likely because they would have jumped out of them when the intruder had attacked. At least Hamazura assumed it was an intruder. Some of the computers had been destroyed in the attack, however, not all of them.
'The destroyed computers must have been collateral, meaning whoever attacked weren't concerned about covering up what happened here.'
The desks around the bodies had been cleared to make room for them and left at the side. Hamazura started to wonder what it was the attacker was trying to do. Were they trying to make a magic circle? Could this be a trap? Or could it be a message? And if so, for who? And what were they trying to say?
He decided to leave these questions for later and started carefully walking towards the bodies, gun raised, and checked to see if any of them were alive. He didn't get a single response. He wasn't surprised but it still hurt knowing they were too late to save these people.
Meanwhile, Mugino searched the rest of the room for anybody else but, like the previous building, found nothing. Just as she finished, Tsuchimikado walked in with Kinuhata behind him.
"Clear?" he asked.
"Clear." responded Mugino. The group began to relax a bit, with the threat seemingly gone from the base. They couldn't relax fully, though, as they still had a job to do. Tsuchimikado looked at the bodies on the floor and walked over to them.
"What do we have here?"
"I was hoping you could answer that actually." Mugino answered. "Is there any magic that uses bodies to form magic circles?"
"None that I know of. We shouldn't touch it though, just in case. We'll contact London and ask them to send over the 'List of Prohibited Books' so she can analyse it."
"Ermmm. I already touched it when I was checking if they were still alive. Is that bad?" asked Hamazura hoping that he hadn't somehow activated some sort of magical trap.
"I have absolutely no idea." responded Tsuchimikado in a ridiculously cheery voice. Hamazura sweat dropped. "Just tell us if you start dying, nyah?"
Hamazura brought his gun back up and aimed it at Tsuchimikado, but before he could pull the trigger, Mugino spoke up.
"Leave it, Hamazura. We might still need him. Go and get the equipment, will you? Kinuhata, see if you can contact London with that transmission tower outside, the sooner we bring the brat in, the better."
"And contact Academy City as well, tell them the outpost is clear and we could use Railgun or one of her sisters to get everything off these computers." continued Tsuchimikado as he pulled over one of the chairs to get an overhead look at the bodies.
Sighing in exasperation, Hamazura did as he was told, making his way to the wreckage that was the front gate. Once out of the base, Hamazura looked around. They were in the middle of nowhere, with metres of snow covering the ground as far as the eye could see. He wanted to get back inside as quickly as possible and then he wanted to get back to Academy City as quickly as possible, so he started heading towards the area he had buried the equipment.
He found the marker easily and, using that, found the spot where he buried the sled and started scooping it out. Once the sled was back on the surface, he started dragging it back towards the outpost, grumbling about constantly having to do the grunt work.
When he finally managed to drag the sled back to the outpost, he found Kinuhata looking at some sort of screen at the bottom of one of the legs holding up the transmission tower. She didn't appear to be talking to anyone and she was looking annoyed so Hamazura left the sled and walked over to see what was happening.
As he approached, he noticed the screen had a lot of red on it, meaning something must have been wrong with the tower. Finally close enough to get a proper look at the screen, he saw a dialogue box pop up in the middle with a warning sign at the top left corner of it. It was telling Kinuhata that there was a problem with the wiring going up to the large dish at the top. Kinuhata sighed.
"Hamazura. It says the fault is over there. Can you super check it out?" she asked, pointing towards a grey box at the leg behind Hamazura. He did as he was told and started to open the box. He had only opened it by a crack when something exploded above him. He looked up and saw the dish that was at the top of the tower falling towards him.
"Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!" He started sprinting underneath the transmission tower to make sure he wouldn't be hit by it directly and then kept sprinting afterwards, aiming do get behind one of the small buildings. The dish would most likely shatter when it hit the ground from that height, and he didn't want to be hit by the debris that would be flying from the impact zone.
He was never going to make it of course; the building was too far away, and the dish was falling too fast. The dish hit the ground and shattered, the debris flying in all directions. Hamazura threw himself to the ground and covered his head with his arms. He heard the debris landing all around him, but when he opened his eyes, he realised he had somehow managed to avoid them. He looked back at the now destroyed dish and saw Kinuhata standing over him. That's when he realised what must have happened, Kinuhata must have gotten between Hamazura and the impact zone and activated her nitrogen armour to deflect any debris heading straight towards him.
"Hamazura, that was super pathetic." she commented.
"What was I supposed to do?! Let the dish hit me?!"
"You should have super taken the debris like a man."
"That would've killed me!" Hamazura then looked past her at the destroyed dish. "I don't suppose you'd be able to fix that within the next 5 minutes, would you?"
"Super not a chance."
"Thought so." Hamazura walked past her to grab the sled which appeared undamaged. "The equipment here is to make small repairs if we need to, not anything this big. We'll need to find another way to contact Academy City."
Hamazura dragged the sled towards the large building with the domed roof that Tsuchimikado and Mugino were holed up in. Entering the building, he saw Mugino at one of the computers, searching through what appeared to be the security footage from the base, however, the screens were becoming static and every time they did, Mugino seemed to get angrier.
"EVERY DAMN TIME!" she screamed. Tsuchimikado, who was seemingly playing on his phone, swinging around on one of the office chairs, stopped what he was doing and looked at her screen.
"What's going on, nyah?" he asked.
"I'm trying to find the person who killed everyone here, but every time they're about to come into shot, the camera goes dead."
"Damn, we'll need to find out who they are another way. For now, Kinuhata should have contacted Academy City, so they should get here in a few hours. Until they do, let's try to find out what was going on at this outpost before the attack happened, if we find out what was being researched, we might find out why they attacked, which will give us at the very least a clue as to who they are."
Tsuchimikado finally noticed Hamazura at the door and started talking to him.
"Hamazura, good, you're back, mind helping Mugino look for any data on what was here?"
"Sure, but first, we have an issue, the transmission tower had some sort of trap. It destroyed the dish at the top and there's no way we can repair it quickly. We can't contact Academy City."
Tsuchimikado sighed.
"Of course it is. Alright, show me where it is, nyah."
He followed Hamazura out towards the transmission tower and to the small metal box on one of the legs. It was only slightly ajar, so Hamazura opened it slowly, and with his eyes squeezed shut, worrying that it might set off another trap.
Mugino, who had followed them out watched this for about 3 seconds before gripping the door and throwing it open.
Hamazura let out a very high-pitched scream as she did so and jumped back as far as he could. Mugino looked at him, confused as to what on earth the sound that just came out of his mouth was.
"Baby." she sneered.
Hamazura quickly composed himself as he realised nothing was going to happen. Tsuchimikado started looking at the magic circle, his fingers to his chin, trying to analyse it. The magic circle was red and appeared to be made of blood. It had two circles, one inside the other, and two hexagons that fit neatly inside the inner circle with a drawing of what looked like a horned face in the middle of them. Finally, in between the two circles were words, written in a language that looked completely alien to Hamazura.
"Hmmmmmm."
"Well? Do you know what kind of magic this is? Who might have set it up?" asked Mugino.
"Haven't got a clue."
"You've got to be kidding me. We brought you here as our magic expert and now that's twice you've failed to recognise the magic. What good are you if you can't even recognise the damned magic we're up against." Mugino raged.
"I can't know everything about magic. My specialty is Onmyoudou, so if that were at play here, I'd know immediately, and if I'd seen it before I may have been able to tell you who could give you more information. But I've never seen this before, especially the writing on the outside, it doesn't look like any language I've ever seen."
"Then what do we do?"
"We'll need to contact index, get her here as soon as possible. Even if I haven't seen it, she has 103,000 grimoires in her head, surely one of them will tell us what this is."
"But we can't contact anyone, the transmission tower's destroyed."
"Yep. Which means I'm gonna need to use a magic item I stored with the equipment."
Hamazura sighed.
"I'll get the first aid kit."
Meanwhile, in a dark room, a girl looked down at the golden staff on the large, stone table. The top of the staff started glowing as she picked it up. As it did, she started grinning.
"Finally." she said. "We finally have it back. Now we can destroy that heretic and save our Demoness."
A/N And there we have it. What worked? What didn't? Any and all constructive criticism is fully appreciated. As I said at the beginning, these two chapters were originally one. I don't think I really added much in terms of what actually happened but, to me at least, I felt like it added a little more to the writing. I still need to learn more, of that I'm sure, but it does feel like a second draft helped a lot. Now, to the comments.
Blanklow: Yeah, I didn't want to have every arc focus on Touma and Misaka, I wanted the other groups to have big impacts in the story as well and right from the beginning, so this won't be the only arc that has ITEM front and centre and I may have a look at arcs that have lesser written characters in the main novels as the main protagonists. It seems like it would be quite fun. However, Touma and Misaka will be the main protagonists for the story as a whole.
GG Vegito: I will most likely have them team up at some point (I say most likely because plans can change.) but the big one I have planned is a sort of team up between one of these two and another character, but I don't want to spoil too much and that won't happen until much later in the story.
And that's it. I hope everyone has a good week and I'll have another chapter up next week.