Balls of green light lit up around Mugino as she prepared to attack, however, a faint sound stopped her. The soft chopping sound of distant rotors could be heard and Mugino looked towards the sound to see a helicopter rapidly approaching them. She couldn't tell what side it was on from this distance and so called out to Kinuhata.
"Kinuhata! Check that helicopter! If it's friendly, wave it down, otherwise, take it out." she ordered.
"I'm super on it." came the reply. There was no need to argue, if it was an ally, they'd only get in the way, if it was an enemy, they had to take them down quickly and there was no reason for a civilian helicopter to be here.
Kinuhata only had to reach the outer fence to discover who it was. As soon as she was visible, the door on the side slid open and a man with ridiculously large muscles and in his mid-thirties leaned out. With one hand holding on to the helicopter, he aimed his other hand at Kinuhata and a few seconds later, a rain of fire started raining down on the young esper.
She tried to move forward despite the attack, successfully navigating her way through the hail of fire raining down from above. However, the sheer quantity of attacks finally paid off as Kinuhata jumped towards the helicopter. The spell had a lot more force than it looked, and she was thrown meters back.
Once the first one hit, she lost control of her direction, making it impossible to escape the next volley. Each one hit with incredible force, pushing her back even further. Her nitrogen armour had been enough until now, but it wasn't impenetrable. It could be pierced with enough firepower and she knew that magic was capable of that.
Before it could pierce her armour though, Mugino started attacking the new enemy. She had seen Kinuhata about to get overwhelmed and had moved to protect her, giving the enemy a new target. She fired her meltdowner beams at the rotors, attempting to bring them down with a single shot. She had been in the middle of fighting Bonnie and fatigue was just starting to creep into her system. She couldn't afford to be at a disadvantage now and so was trying to end the next fight before it even started. However, the beams didn't reach the rotors, instead hitting some sort of invisible barrier surrounding the helicopter.
"Tch. Damn."
The magic barrier completely surrounded the helicopter, making attack impossible at the moment, so, Mugino picked up Kinuhata and started to retreat. She would have to wait until that barrier was down before she could attack which would most likely be at one of three moments. The first was when they fired a spell at them, if the barrier was two ways, they'd have to take down it down for the spells to reach them and put it back up afterwards. The second possibility was if they landed. Mugino doubted they would be able to keep that barrier up if they had to leave it. And the final possibility was if Bonnie were able to reach the helicopter, she would need the barrier down to be able to get in.
Mugino knew if she managed to get through that barrier and take down that helicopter, she and Kinuhata would have the advantage. Unfortunately, things rarely go to plan, especially against sorcerers.
The man hanging out of the helicopter shouted towards Bonnie.
"Bonnie! Move! That thing looks unstable! We need to get it back to base! Now!"
Mugino aimed her hand towards the helicopter. She could roughly picture where the barrier was and how large it was and timed her shots for when Bonnie pierced the barrier. Bonnie jumped towards the helicopter, her powers as a saint making the jump fairly easy. However, as her powers were unstable, she was unable to control it properly. She jumped with way too much power and was on course to take down the helicopter herself.
Mugino timed her shot perfectly, just as Bonnie passed into the barrier, she fired. But the sorcerers inside must have figured out what she was attempting and had increased the size of the barrier. By the time Bonnie had reached the point where Mugino had perceived the barrier to be, the new barrier was already up. Unknown to Mugino, the barrier had actually been down since she stopped her first attack, and the new barrier was being set up as she retreated.
Meanwhile, the man hanging out of the helicopter was able to prevent Bonnie from crashing into and taking them out by firing small attack spells at her, slowing her speed until he was able to catch her. It was a testament to her strength that she was able to hold on to the golden staff the entire time.
The helicopter passed overhead and Mugino could only watch it get smaller and smaller as it flew away from the base.
"Fuck."
Bonnie sat down in the helicopter and looked around. On her left was a slim, twenty-year-old girl with a buzzcut hairstyle. On her right was the man who caught her.
"Were those attack spells really necessary?" she asked him.
"You should count yourself lucky that was all you got from me, Bonnie. You were meant to bring this in undamaged and now it's unstable. We were supposed to attack Academy City next week but that's going to have to be pushed back because of you."
"That's hardly my fault. No one told me there would be a sorcerer with them who knew how to attack saints. You gave me faulty information."
"You should have been easily able to defeat them. They're only Academy City."
"You've never fought them and it's painfully obvious. We've underestimated them, a mistake I don't intend to make again."
"No, Bonnie. We overestimated you. That's all. Academy City is weak without Aleister's leadership. The only reason we need to destroy them is to kill 'him'."
A few hours later, a large thundering noise could be heard approaching the outpost. Hamazura was inside getting some basic treatment from Kinuhata whilst Tsuchimikado was getting angrily mummified by Mugino. When she heard the approaching noise, Mugino left Tsuchimikado and stepped outside to greet their new guests.
As she suspected, the object that was the cause of the thundering noise was a large Academy City VTOL. It landed just outside the metal gates that signified the entrance to the outpost and as the back opened up, it revealed a white-haired monster with red eyes, leaning on a futuristic looking cane, Accelerator.
Behind him was a girl that looked like a slightly older version of Mikoto Misaka, Misaka Worst. The final person to step out was a young girl with long, silver hair and green eyes in a white nun's habit with gold embroidery, the index of prohibited books.
"Ah, come on. This Misaka was hoping they would all be dead. Then she might be able to see Mister Chairperson, over there, despair, seeing one of his board members dead." commented Worst when she caught sight of Mugino approaching them. Accelerator elected to ignore her. He had only brought her here because the third-ranked brat was enjoying herself with the hero in Paris. Index, however, wouldn't ignore it.
"That's not very nice!" she protested.
"Oh? You don't seem to know this Misaka very well."
The two started getting into an argument but Accelerator decided it wasn't his problem as he reached Mugino.
"This place looks like a dump, not a secret outpost in the Arctic. What happened?" asked Accelerator.
"We ran into a problem. A big one. The girl who attacked this place hadn't finished by the time we arrived. The little brat was kicking our asses until that shithead, Tsuchimikado, stepped in with whatever spell he used." Mugino responded.
"You got your asses kicked by one girl?"
"She was a saint or whatever the hell they're called. Her movements were ridiculously fast, and her spells were no joke either."
"Do we know who she was with?"
"No idea. She left a ton of bodies in the main building. The way she left them looks like some sort of signal or warning or maybe even a magic circle of some sorts. We were hoping that Index brat might know something about it. Or at least who is most likely to use it."
"Do you know what she was after?"
"Some sort of staff. We believe it's called 'Daemonium Virgam' but we need to access the data from here before we can get any more information."
"That's what Worst is here for."
The two level 5s made their way towards the building where all the computers were and where Hamazura and Tsuchimikado were resting. When he opened the doors Tsuchimikado waved to him from the desk chair that he was sitting on in the middle of the room.
"Yo, Accelerator. How ya doing, nyaa?" asked Tsuchimikado, wrapped in a comical number of bandages from head to toes. Accelerator almost didn't realise it was him.
"You look like shit, Tsuchimikado. I thought I told you to stop using those spells." replied Accelerator.
"Oh, don't be like that. I needed to contact you somehow and we needed to defeat a saint."
"Speaking of which. I thought you said the outpost was clear."
"We thought it was." It was Mugino who answered this time. "We checked the whole outpost and found no-one. When we checked again after the attack, we found a new staircase leading underground. That must have been where she was hiding and judging by all the equipment, I assume that's where the staff was."
"Oh, really?! All of them survived? Damn it." Misaka Worst complained, as she entered the building, followed by Index, who immediately noticed how the bodies were arranged and started trying to analyse it.
"You took your time. Check the computers. I want to know everything that was going on here." Accelerator ordered, pointing at the computers inside.
"Yes sir, Mister Chairperson, sir!" Worst offered a mocking salute before marching towards the computers as if she were in a military parade.
"So, did you find out anything on your end?" asked Tsuchimikado.
"Nothing. All we know is that an alert was sent to Aleister personally that this place was under attack, meaning he must have had some sort of interest in it."
"And anything Aleister was interested in, you are too, right?" Tsuchimikado didn't receive a response. "Is it possible you're being manipulated? That someone is just using you?"
"Entirely, but that's exactly why we need to investigate this shit. The sooner we get to the bottom of all this and who's behind it, the better." He then turned to Index who was examining the dead bodies in the middle of the room. "Hey, brat. You see anything like that before.?"
"There's nothing in the grimoires that uses dead bodies to make a magic circle like this. The only possible thing it could be is a message, or more specifically, a warning. The only group I can think of that would do something like this would be the Satanic Church, but they were wiped out nearly two decades ago, weren't they?"
"They were." confirmed Tsuchimikado. "By an early Academy City according to reports. I've no idea why Academy City got involved, though."
"Great, more digging to do." complained Accelerator. "I'll contact Esther on the way back, but by the sounds of it they weren't thorough enough and they appear to have returned."
"And have replenished their forces a bit, considering that girl didn't look twenty." Mugino chimed in. "Who were they anyway?"
"A cult who worshipped Satan." Index explained. "They wanted to help destroy Heaven by remaking Earth into the image of Hell to give Satan and his demons a steppingstone that they could use to invade. That would of course mean everyone on the planet would have to be sacrificed to remake the Earth, but they were willing to die along with the planet."
"What a cheery bunch." Accelerator commented sarcastically before turning to Worst who was still on the computer. "You got anything Worst?"
"This Misaka has found nothing. It looks like they didn't actually hold the data here. They only have meaningless stuff like rotas and cleaning duties and stuff. They seemed to be connected to some sort of external data site that seems to have been cut off as soon as the outpost was attacked." she explained.
"Huh? Weren't they worried that the data would be intercepted?"
"Maybe they were super confident in their encryption?" suggested Kinuhata who had finally finished attending to Hamazura. "If Aleister was involved, then they should super have Academy City grade encryption."
Accelerator sighed. This was becoming more of a pain by the second.
"Alright, I've got more teams on the way that'll take this place apart. Hopefully, they'll find something that we missed."
Accelerator walked out the door and towards the VTOL. There was a lot of work to do.
A/N Hey everyone, hope you all had a good week and that you enjoyed the chapter. This was the last chapter of the arc and, honestly, I was quite happy with this arc. I'm happy with the fight and I'm happy with the threads that I've set up, hopefully you guys will agree. For this final chapter, I've revealed more about who the antagonists for this arc are but I didn't want to go into too much detail so I can keep adding more to them as I go along. I know everything I need to add, it's just a case of slowly adding those details over time.
Now for the comments.
Stryper88: I was watching a video a while back where they talked about fight scenes in books and movies and the such. In that, they talked about the importance of having fights toing and froing a bit. If one side starts getting too many blows in a row, then the fight starts to become a bit boring, so I tried to let the fight swing from side to side in terms of which side has the upper hand. I think I just managed to pull it off.
GG Vegito: Thank you, I'm glad you're enjoying it. It always means a lot to me when people say they're enjoying my stories.
Blanklow: For the new group, I have a lot of plans for them and the presence of a saint in their ranks will be explained later on in the story. As for what else they have, you'll just have to wait and see. I'm glad you're enjoying it though.
And there we have it. Hope you guys enjoyed it. Next week will be a single chapter arc and then we go onto another arc the week after, but we'll get onto that when we get onto it. Hope you guys have a good week and I'll be back next week.