Awaki Musujime lay her belly on the muddy ground at the top of the hill and held her binoculars up to her eyes. They were a new, digital model that Accelerator had given each of them to help with situations like these where they were scouting out the place they were about to infiltrate, but she wasn't far enough away to properly test them. In all honesty, a pair from the outside world would have been more than enough from this distance, but Musujime had this pair, so she may as well put them to good use.

Her target was a large mountain directly in front of her, or more specifically, the base of that mountain. She was looking for an entrance into the structure they believed to be within the mountain, but it must have been concealed pretty well because she was unable to find it and she'd rather not try to teleport someone into the mountain without knowing the layout of the structure, if any, hidden within it.

"Are you sure this is the right place?" she asked the boy next to her, taking her binoculars away from her eyes.

"I'm sure. This is where the tracker is leading us. They have to be underneath the mountain somehow." the boy named Etzali replied. Musujime had known him for about two years now, since their days working for the old Dark Side of Academy City, so she could trust him a bit more than the others.

"So how did they get inside? Don't tell me it's like the Windowless Building and they use a teleporter to get in."

"I have no idea, but we have to consider everything at the moment. We've already confirmed they have one esper, we need to consider the possibility that they have a teleporter as well."

Musujime sighed.

"Well, either way, we're going to need a plan of the layout, otherwise I can't safely teleport any of you in… Unless you want me to just teleport one of those two in anyway?"

Etzali sweat dropped.

"Let's try to not team kill, shall we?"

Musujime seemed to almost pout as she looked through her binoculars and Etzali wasn't sure whether she was joking or not.

"Huh?"

Musujime looked behind her, as if to confirm something before looking through the binoculars again. Etzali looked back as well and found the cat eared Kuroyoru Umidori, and only the cat eared Umidori. Etzali quickly put two and two together and realised Worst was now down at the base of the mountain.

"What the hell is she doing?!" Musujime nearly screamed.

She watched as Worst looked at her feet and started stomping on the ground before looking a little confused. She then put her hand on the area she had been stomping her feet and bluish white sparks came from her hand.

Musujime pressed a button on her earpiece and transmitted her voice to the other three members of the team.

"Worst, what are you doing? We agreed to scout the place out before sneaking in. That doesn't look like sneaking in."

"Eh, but that's boring. This Misaka wants to try blowing open the front door and go all guns blazing. That seems a lot more fun." Worst explained.

Musujime sighed.

'Why can't she just behave herself for one mission?' she thought. The answer was obvious.

Because it was Worst.

She was more likely to screw the team over than the actual enemy. Whether that was on purpose or not was up for debate.

Suddenly Worst started to lose her balance, nearly falling over and started moving to the left without moving her feet. She must have used her powers to open something on the ground, so Musujime and the others hurried down to her to check what was going on.

When they got there, they found the ground opened up with some sort of thick metal doors.

"Why does it have to be an underground base? Can you get any more cliché?" Musujime asked, her eyebrow raised.

The group all looked down to find a VTOL sitting there on top of a large platform with no one around it. The lack of people waved an instant red flag for each of them. Each of them were well accustomed to Academy City's old Dark Side, so when they saw an area that was meant to be the enemies base empty, they immediately grew suspicious. Especially when they hadn't exactly been subtle with their entrance.

"This has got to be a trap." Musujime stated matter-of-factly.

"Yeah, I don't like this one bit, but if we don't get these people back, Accelerator's gonna have our necks." Etzali argued.

"Well, no point in standing here doing nothing. This Misaka is going to find a console to plug into." Before anyone could stop her, Worst picked up Umidori and jumped down onto the platform. The drop was only about four or five metres, so they wouldn't get hurt from the drop. Unless, of course, Worst decided to use Umidori to cushion her fall. The pair fell onto the platform with Worst on top of a groaning Umidori who was thankful her body had been upgraded recently. She looked up at Etzali and Musujime and attempted to give them puppy dog eyes to ask for help.

It didn't work.

Both Etzali and Musujime avoided eye contact and jumped down themselves, keeping an eye out for any potential ambushes.

"There's no way the light of Venus can reach in here, so it looks like I can't use the spear of Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli." Etzali lamented, looking at the roof of the facility.

"What about that grimoire thing that you have?" Musujime asked.

"The calendar stone? I'd rather not use that unless absolutely necessary. Grimoires can be dangerous and difficult to use. Besides, Xochitl gets mad every time I use it. I'll have to rely on science for now." he explained as he took out a handgun.

"You know, you could've just taken that out in the first place, then I wouldn't've asked."

Meanwhile, Umidori picked herself up from the ground and looked at her surroundings, not that she could see much of it. They were in some sort of hangar with the large shutters above her providing the only light. This made the hangar too dark to really see anything outside of the platform, which kept her on edge with every step she took, not helped by the noise of Worst breaking down every door she could find, looking for something where she could access the data stored in the base. Umidori's eyes darted from point to point looking for any sign that an attack was coming. But none ever came.

She started going through the different scenarios in her head. The place could be abandoned, but the signal was definitely coming from this location. Were they being led into a trap? But wouldn't they have attacked by now? They had plenty of opportunities to do so from the darkness. Could someone else have beaten them there? If so, where the bodies? Alive or dead?

Umidori kept running through the different possibilities, but her thoughts were interrupted by Worst's cheering.

"Woohoo! This Misaka found something!"

Umidori followed the noise she was now making and the blue light that her sparks were emitting as she fiddled with whatever she had found.

She found her in a small room off to the side, crouched next to a small console that she had plugged her PDA into. The room had a large window looking into the hangar, most likely it was to operate the hangar and the systems within it. It could also communicate to other systems within the facility, so that the person who was operating it could communicate to whoever they needed.

It also gave Worst access to what she needed. A map of the facility.

She quickly downloaded it and sent it to the other PDAs and each of them looked at their PDAs. However, when Umidori looked at hers, she couldn't find it anywhere on her device.

"Huh? Where's mine? I thought you were giving everyone a map?" she asked, dreading what the answer may be.

"What are you talking about? You'll be with this Misaka the entire time. Why would you need a map?"

Her worst fears were realised. She sprinted up to Etzali and grabbed him, shaking him back and forth whilst pleading for his help.

"Please, Etzali! You can't let her do this! You have to save me! She'll do something to me again, please! I still can't get these damned cat ears off!"

"But those cat ears are cute. Oh, I know. This Misaka will give you a cute tail as well."

Umidori froze and looked over to Worst, her eyes wide in fear. She was visibly trembling and tears were forming in her eyes. She turned back to Etzali and resumed shaking him and shouting at him, a lot more violently this time.

"Please! Don't leave me alone with her! You can't! You just can't!"

Tears were streaming down her face now as she tried desperately to escape the fate being left with Worst doomed her to.

Eventually, Etzali grabbed her to free himself from the shaking torture before he was sick.

"Relax, will you? We're all sticking together. We've got a map of the facility, so there's no reason to split up to look for the target." he said, trying to calm Umidori down.

That seemed to calm her down a little bit and Etzali and Musujime compared the map of the facility to the location the tracker was directing them to.

"Arghhhh. The facility is way too compact. There's no way we can accurately pinpoint their location. As far as I can tell they're about here." Etzali explained, using his finger to circle an area consisting of three corridors on top of each other, each corridor with a number of small rooms connected to it on both sides. "We'll need to check all of these rooms which, I assume, are prison cells."

Etzali turned off his PDA and walked to a door close by.

"Worst? If you be so kind?"

Worst put her hand to the door and used her power to open it. The group then made their way through the bright corridors of the facility with plain, white walls on each side. Each of them on guard as they made their way to the corridors they had identified, but there was still no sign of any attackers.

Eventually they reached the first corridor. Thick red doors with heavy locks holding them shut, spaced evenly apart made up the two sides of the corridor and they could faintly hear a noise from below them.

"Well, this just got a lot more complicated." Etzali muttered.

"Why? What's wrong?" asked Musujime.

"It would appear they have capacity down active here."

"The one Therestina Kihara used?"

Etzali nodded.

"We'll check this corridor just in case, but we'll need to find another method to open the doors in the other two corridors. Worst? Can you open these?"

"I could, but there's no electricity here, so it would probably be quicker if those two handled that." she explained, pointing her thumb at Umidori and Musujime.

Etzali looked at the doors. They looked like the doors that were used to hold criminals in modern prison cells. Each door had a metal flap in the middle of the door to view who or what were inside and to pass things such as food to the prisoner. And there were no electronic locks, just heavy, physical ones. He then nodded at Musujime and Umidori.

Musujime reached her door and placed her hand on it. Musujime could teleport anything with a mass of up to 4520 kg, however, she was told that teleporting anything over 1000 kg would damage her body, but she didn't have to worry about that here as each prison door weighed less than 100 kg, so teleporting them out was fairly simple.

Umidori used her bomber lance to destroy the locks and pulled open the cell doors, before checking for her targets inside. Both looked through the cells, finding nothing until finally, behind the last door on Umidori's side, a man none of them had ever met sat on the bed, waiting for them.

A/N Hi everyone, hope you all had a good week. This chapter had a lot of exploration, much like one of the early Investigation in the Arctic chapters. I don't really know why, but I seem to enjoy writing these kinds of chapters, where it's a bit more investigative rather than actiony, but I won't keep writing these kinds of chapters, otherwise it will start to get repetitive and boring, so no need to worry about that.

Now for the comments;

GG Vegito: Thank you. Fortunately, I've been able to take time off Uni for now, so I can concentrate on enjoying things like writing again, because there was a period of time where I wasn't enjoying anything. I'm glad you enjoyed the chapter and I hope you enjoyed this one as well.

AsIfIKnewMyName: Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it, I feel the down times and interactions are just as important as the tense fight scenes and the story, because it makes the characters, and by extension the story, enjoyable to read so I do put quite a bit of effort into those interactions. Thank you.

And that's everything for this week. I hope you all enjoyed this chapter and that you'll read the next one which will be out next week. Until then, I hope you all have a good week. Bye.