This work is based (mostly) on the work of Kazuma Kamachi and other writers. A translation from Baka Tsuki was used in its creation and I claim no ownership over their work. Please Read, Review, and Enjoy.
Upon walking through the buildings automatic doors, Kamijou found a rather normal scene that one could have found in any of the schools anywhere around the city.
As it was nearing the curfew for students, the entryway of the school was completely filled with people, all of them practically rushing to get out of the school and out into the slowly darkening afternoon. Kamijou had to dodge to the side just to get out of the way of the crowd that was making the automatic doors open and close with a rhythm like efficiency.
The entryway of the building was huge, though one could say it was necessary considering how many people were currently streaming through it. On either side of the room were pairs of elevators that obviously led up to the higher stories of the buildings, these machines operating with a similar rhythm as the automatic doors. Square pillars lined an unseen path in the center of the room, the path leading up to the grand reception desk that sat at the far wall, manned only by two secretaries who clearly looked like they were ready to go home.
Kamijou took in this scene with a skeptical gaze, before sighing to herself, the tiredness her brain felt slowly seeping into her body.
… This place is really normal for a place that was supposedly under control of some cult. I would have at least expected some pictures of their 'god' hidden in the architecture, but there is clearly nothing like that here. And what is with all these people here during the summer? If this many people are working so hard here, was I really applying myself before?
The high school girl shook her head in dismay at the thought of her previous self, and began to look for the red haired magician, who had disappeared pretty much the second the two of them had entered the lobby.
Kamijou caught a glimpse of the magician, who was standing behind one of the square pillars, looking at it with an expression that was a mixture of disgust and grief. None of the students that were passing by the black clad girl were paying much attention to her, despite her clearly alien appearance. Upon seeing this fact, Kamijou could only shake her head in dismay again.
Talk about a complete lack of security. That girl clearly doesn't look like any sort of student that lives in this city, yet no one seems to care. No wonder she can pretty much waltz around in broad daylight.
Sighing to herself, Kamijou unenthusiastically began to move her heavy feet towards the magician, dreading just getting back in speaking range of the girl with a snake for a tongue.
Upon getting close to the magician, Kamijou could see the girl nervously twirling an unlit cigarette in her hands as she continued to stare intently at the back face of the pillar. Kamijou waved at the magician, attempting to gain her attention.
"Oi! Miss Rune Magic! Over here! Tell me… Are you just going to stare at the back of some random pillar all day or are you going to tell me what the hell to do?"
The magician mouth twitched slightly in a sign of surprise, and slowly turned her head to look at the high school girl who was at her side, the magician's eyes barely widening as she took in the sight of Kamijou. Upon seeing the high school girl, the magician sighed in a way that alluded to her being exhausted, and lazily put the unlit cigarette into her mouth.
"So… You actually followed me in here, didn't you? Well that's one less thing for me to worry about. Here I was, thinking that you didn't possess the necessary intelligence to make a decision for yourself, but it seems…"
Halfway through delivering her choicely worded insult to the now scowling student, the magician trailed off into silence as her gaze returned to the face of the pillar that Kamijou couldn't see. After a moment of intently staring at the pillar, the magician sighed and took the cigarette from her mouth.
"You know what? Never mind. Right now… This really isn't the time where I can be as jovial and nice as I usually am."
Kamijou couldn't help but raise a questioning eyebrow at the magician's choice of words regarding her behavior.
Jovial? Nice? If those are your jovial and nice sides, then I'd hate to see you angry or mean.
Kamijou choose not to call attention to this however, and instead became curious about what it was that the magician was staring at so intently. The student began to move to get a view from the magician's perspective, a motion that did little but raise the magician eyebrows.
"By the way… What is it that has taken up your very valuable attention? Not to sound jealous or anything, but from past experience I've found that-…!"
Kamijou's question stopped dead in her throat as the student forced herself to keep from jumping back in shock. The student brought her hand up to her mouth in order to contain her utter shock at the scene which was in front of her, while the magician calmly sighed in a way that communicated her tiredness to the student.
"Yeah… This is pretty brutal to see… isn't it?"
Kamijou did not respond to the magician's question, all of her available focus directed to the scene in front of her.
Sitting down, leaning its back against the face of the square pillar, head slouched forward in what could only be a gesture of defeat, was a vaguely human shaped set of armor. The original design for the armor must have had it styled to be something akin to an old set of western plate armor, though it was quite clear anyone that the design had been modified so that it looked more aerodynamic, like some sort of fighter jet design. The metal that made up the armor took the light that was in the entryway and reflected back a pale silver glow that, in better circumstances, would have given the armor an otherworldly charm.
As it is now however… This is just horrible.
Kamijou could not help but think this as she took in the current state of the armor, which possessed no charm at all, otherworldly or otherwise.
The limbs of the armor were twisted in such as ungodly fashion, giving them the look of plastic wrappers that had been twisted together rather than things that used to resemble human body parts. The torso and helmet of the armor had also been damaged, dented and crushed in several areas, particularly the area around the right shoulder, which looked to have been crushed into a centimeter of thickness. Flowing freely from the various openings and ruptures in the armor was a dark red liquid that filled the air with a rustic iron smell, and tinged the armors silver metal red.
Kamijou wrinkled her nose to the rustic smell given off by the red liquid and fought against her morbid curiosity so she could look away from the horrible scene in front of her. With few other places to look, the student gazed over at the magician, her expression clearly showing that she was desperate for answers.
"That… That can't be… That can't be what I think it is… right?"
The magician looked at the student with a gaze that held no pity or compassion in it; the unlit cigarette in her mouth looking like it would blaze alight from the smoldering anger in the magician's gaze.
"Well… That really depends… on what you think that is, doesn't it? So please tell me… What is it that you see?"
Kamijou swallowed dryly, and, almost unwillingly, the student returned her gaze to the broken and beat armor, and felt her skin crawl as she took in the scene as second time. The student began to notice very minute details about the armor, details that all pointed to the answer she did not want to give. She stared at the armor for a few seconds more, before turning her gaze away from the suit of armor, and casting it toward the floor.
That… That can't possibly be…. It has to be something else entirely. Something that makes this scene… explainable.
Suddenly, Kamijou heard the magician sigh, the feeling of impatience and anger practically flowing out of the red haired girl like water.
"Let me just say this before you get some crazy idea in your head. This scene is completely and totally explainable if you choose to look at it properly. In fact, I'm pretty sure you already know what that is, and are desperately trying to deny what it is, aren't you?"
Kamijou swallowed dryly, again, and unwillingly turned her gaze back to the suit of armor, again. The student's brain rushed for something, anything that would make the scene at the very least palatable to her.
That… That has to be something… else. Something that isn't… that. Like… Like a robot! Yeah, that explains everything perfectly doesn't it? That isn't some suit of armor at all, but rather the chassis of some robot that some idiot in this city made. The… slight twitching is nothing more that the remaining electricity leaving the body and the red liquid spilling out of it is just some oil. Yeah… That has to be it. That thing there… It has to be a-…
At the exact moment Kamijou was going to finish the thought that would have put her mind at ease about the entire situation, the student saw a bit of vapor blow out through the mouth area of the helmet of the armor.
The moment the student saw that, her thought suddenly froze in place as if her brain had been dunked into a vat of liquid nitrogen. From beside her, Kamijou could not help but hear the magician sigh again, though the student didn't turn to face the magician.
"I won't fault you for trying to hide the truth from yourself, but there are times where trying to do so won't work, no matter how hard you try."
The magician pointed at the torn up, dented, and battered suit of armor, the feeling of the air around her being the aura of someone declaring a law to the masses.
"No matter what sort of bullshit you try to come up with, that thing… That is nothing more than a corpse. Or well… perhaps it is something that will become a corpse… in due time of course."
Kamijou could barely feel the words hit her shocked addled brain and sink in, and actual digestion of the information in those words could not even begin as the student kept her gaze firmly focused on the 'corpse' in front of her, her brain desperately searching for something that would falsify the magician's claim.
That… That… That… That can't be… It just can't… can it? There is no way… There is absolutely no way that there is a-…
Before Kamijou could even finish sorting through her thoughts on the matter and come up with a conclusion, there was a slight movement in the 'corpse's' helmet, nothing more than a twitch. Slowly, with an obviously weary movement, the battered and dented helmet began to rise up from its slouching position, and leveled its gaze with both Kamijou and the magician.
The student's entire body went numb the very moment that the helmets gaze settled on her body, while the magician simply sighed in a gesture of tiredness as the helmets gaze fell upon her.
"So… He's actually alive, despite looking like he's been through some sort of blender. I won't say that I want him to die, but considering how he looks… It might have been better for him to just die instead of going through-…?"
"What… What the hell…?"
Suddenly, all at once, the gravity of the situation suddenly hit Kamijou, and in that moment all sense of reason departed from her mind, leaving her with a quiet and empty mind. A small shiver of fear began to run up the student's spine as she continued to gaze at the dented helmet, which groggily began to look around itself, obviously not understanding what was going on.
"Wha- What the hell… What the hell is going…?"
Kamijou suddenly felt all of the strength that was in her legs leave in and instant, and the student fell down to the ground, staring at the 'corpse' with a sick, nauseous feeling beginning to form in her stomach.
"WhatTheHell, WhatTheHell, WhatTheHell?! What the hell is going on here?!"
The magician looked at the obviously panicking student, all but rolling her eyes at the state of Kamijou. The magician sighed in a gesture of her annoyance, and held out her hand to assist the student to her feet.
"Come on now; don't act like you're an idiot all of a sudden just from seeing a single corpse. I know that it might be a scary sight for someone who has never seen a corpse before, but if you act like this with every corpse we find in here, we'll be here all night. There's no telling how many such scenes we are going to see in here, so I suggest you try and get used to it."
Kamijou couldn't even begin to try and respond to the magician's cold hearted explanation of the situation before the student, her thoughts storming in her mind as she desperately sought for some small detail, some miniscule clue that would make the magician's argument false.
This… This can't be happening! This cannot be happening to me right now! I didn't… I didn't come here for something like… Something like…
Kamijou watched as the 'corpse' continued to groggily look around itself, an obviously curious movement to its searching. After a more seconds of this, the 'corpse' finally took a tired, curious glance down at its own body.
There was a single twitch of shock that ran through the 'corpse's' body, but that single twitch brought such a sense of clarity to Kamijou's panicking mind, that she was able to calm her raging thoughts and focus on a single sickening revelation.
Oh my god… did they… Did they not know how badly they were injured?
As soon as the student realized this disturbing piece of information, there was a pained, wet gurgle that resounded throughout the entryway, coming from the 'corpse' as it unsuccessfully tried to move its horribly broken limbs, causing the horrid noise of metal scraping against metal, and more of the rusty red liquid to spill out on the floor.
Somehow, whether it was the pained sounds coming from it, the horrible sights that the student saw, or a combination of the two, but Kamijou's mind suddenly became clear enough for her to finally realize that the one thing she had to do.
She had to help the dying human that was in front of her.
"D-Damn it all!"
Kamijou jumped to her feet in an instant, and began to rush with a sense of urgency to the side of the struggling human, wanting with all her heart to do something to relive the pain that the individual was feeling at that moment.
The sincere and heartfelt desire was suddenly stopped when the student felt a hand close around her rather long hair, and give it an ever so forceful yank, causing Kamijou to fall back down to the ground, this time not as gentle as when she fell to the ground by her own weakness.
"Gyaahhh!... What the hell was that!?"
Kamijou spun her head around behind her, an angry glare in her eyes directed at the person who had the audacity to prevent her from helping someone.
She was met with the face of the magician, cigarette still unlit, but eyes blazing with the flame of clear annoyance that was directed at Kamijou.
"I'm… not going to try and be nice about this. Were you… Were you just about to go running over there and try to do something stupid like helping that guy?"
For a few moments, Kamijou simply sat on the ground, blankly staring up at up at the magician who was holding her hair.
Then, in a burst of movement that Kamijou could not even begin to explain to herself, the student found that she was holding on to the front of the magician's habit, the blind rage that the student was feeling being expressed by the glare she was giving the magician.
"What…"
Though her voice was almost deathly quiet, Kamijou knew that it was just the calm before the storm that was brewing within her gut. A storm whose first gust blew out mouth in the next moment.
"What the hell do you mean by 'something stupid'? Are you telling me…? Are you telling me to do something as inhuman as leaving a person to die?!"
The magician calmly stared at Kamijou, who was roughly handling the front of her habit, her expression clearly showing her disdain for the current state of events.
After a few moments of this, the magician clicked her tongue in annoyance, and made a single gesture with her hand.
The next moment, Kamijou found herself blasted away from the magician by some strong, unseen force, which felt like a solid wall that simply pushed the student back a few centimeters.
Wha-?! What the hell was that?!
Kamijou looked back at the magician, expecting some sort of explanation as to what just happened. Instead, she was met with an expression of smoldering rage, that this time was directed solely at the student.
"Firstly… I would advise you to never, even in the worst case scenario you can think of, ever touch me again. That is… unless you really wish to pay the price for it."
Kamijou wanted to retort to the magician, wanted to refocus the magician's attention on the important fact that someone was dying in their vicinity. However, the continued pressure of the magician's annoyed gaze kept Kamijou from speaking in any way.
The magician plucked the unlit cigarette from her mouth, chew marks clearly visible on the mouth end of the cigarette, and then the red haired girl scowled at the student.
"Second… Please don't take my acceptance of the current situation as a sign that I don't want to help someone. Wanting to help someone and being able to help someone are two completely different things."
The magician walked towards Kamijou, every step causing a shiver to run up the student's spine, eventually causing her to shiver uncontrollably as the magician began to loom over the student.
"And finally… we get to the third point in this explanation of mine. Tell me… What exactly would you have done in order to help that guy out, huh? Please tell me, because I am extremely curious as to how you thought you could help an injured person who is trapped in twisted armor."
Kamijou tried to speak, wanted to with all her might at that very moment to say something to the magician in order to break the one sided conversation, but two things kept her mouth shut. The first was the paralyzing fear of speaking to the magician in her current mood.
And the second reason was that, despite all of her musings to herself, Kamijou could not in all her knowledge figure out a way to assist the man who was trapped within the armor.
The red haired magician stared at the still shivering Kamijou with a gaze that clearly displayed her annoyance, and after a few moments the magician gave the student a sneer.
"What… Nothing to say at all? Did you perhaps think you could take him out of his armor, despite you knowing nothing about armor and the fact that the armor is damaged, or did you perhaps plan to use some hidden knowledge to close the wounds that you can't reach through natural means?"
Kamijou looked down at the ground, clenching her left hand into a fist so tight that it felt like her arm was going to break just from the force she was putting into it.
God Damn it! How in the world can you be so calm about a person dying in front of us? Even if I don't know what to do that doesn't mean…?!
Suddenly, it was as if a light went off in the student's head, and her gaze shot up from the ground and met with the magician's.
"A-A-An ambulance!"
The magician stared at the student who had just shouted out something random with a gaze that clearly conveyed her annoyance.
"An… ambulance? … Really now?"
Kamijou couldn't help but grin in victory as her hand dove into her skirt pocket, searching desperately for her phone.
"Yes of course! Why didn't I think of it earlier?! Shouldn't you call an ambulance in these sorts of situations?"
Finally, grasping at her phone, Kamijou pulled it out with the air of someone who had won some small argument. She quickly began to dial the number for the emergency services for Academy City, and as she was halfway through doing so when she heard the magician sigh in a tired sort of way.
"Sure… Why don't you call an ambulance? That should surely fix all of our problems. You know, not taking into account the fact that they won't be able to find any of what is going on when they get here."
Kamijou looked over at the annoyed looking magician, the student having a confused looked plastered over her face.
"Wha… What in the world are you talking about? Anyone who walks in here would see this and move to help, unlike some people."
The magician looked over at the student with what was at first was a completely blank expression, but slowly the bridge of her nose began to scrunch up in a gesture of utter annoyance and the magician reached up to pinch it in order to calm herself down.
"Really now, I think that the Lord God put you on this earth solely to be a test to me. Considering all the grief you put me through, that is the only plausible explanation for it."
Kamijou continued to stare at the magician with a gaze that was completely filled with curiosity, her thumb hovering over the button to initiate the call.
"What in the world were you talking about, the 'no one will be able to anything' bit? How could anyone who walked in here miss something like this?"
The magician glared at the student with such force that Kamijou had to take a step back in fear. After a moment of this, the magician sighed and put her palm to her forehead.
"Please… just tell me this straight. Did you happen to feel anything strange when coming into the building, or better yet, did you happen to forget what is going on around us?"
The student tilted her head in confusion and she began to look around the entryway.
"What in the world are you going on about? Of course I-…!"
Before Kamijou could even finish answering the magician, she realized what it was that the magician's ominous questions were trying to tell her. As if she knew about Kamijou's unspoken realization, the magician sighed and gestured towards the packed entryway.
"Honestly… you must be either blind or stupid. I mean really… You didn't seem to find it strange at all that we were the only people to notice a corpse sitting in the middle of a buildings entryway? We are after all in a building that's supposedly filled with incredibly perceptive people."
Kamijou didn't choose to answer the magician at that moment, a sense of otherworldliness settling over her stomach. The student had been so focused on the dying person that had been in front of her that she had completely forgotten about all the other people in the entryway with them. Kamijou had simply assumed that the number of people had simply dwindled down to the point where something could be easily missed, but when she turned to observe the entryway she realized that there were too many people in the entryway for that to even be a possibility.
However, that was not the only thing that the student realized.
There was a strange feeling that seemed to encase Kamijou as she stood in the entryway, shocked still. The feeling was as if there was some sort of cocoon of invisible force surrounding Kamijou, making feel as if the very air was weighing down on the student. Kamijou could still move fine under this weight, but the feeling was enough to make her shiver in fear.
The student turned to look back at the magician, her fearful gaze enough to communicate her feelings about what was going on.
"What… What in the world is going on? Because… I doubt that something like this is normal."
The magician had reverted to chewing on the unlit cigarette yet again, thought this time Kamijou could clearly see the frustrations that had previously been hidden behind a stony mask.
"Well… There is one more test that I have to do before I can draw a final conclusion, but from what I'm seeing, we are dealing with a barrier of some sort."
Kamijou raised her eyebrows in surprise, despite not knowing anything about what the word barrier meant in the current context.
"A… barrier? Wha-What kind of barrier... are we talking about here?"
The magician continued to bite at the unlit cigarette that was hanging in her mouth, until she sighed and looked down at the tip of it. When she did that, the nicotine stick burst into an ember of red flame that the magician plucked from her mouth in a nonchalant manner.
With the air tossing a harmless piece of trash into a trash can, the magician tossed what was little more than a small flame at the nearest passing student. Kamijou would have been enraged by the magician doing that, had it not been for what happened when the ember reached its target.
The ember of flame connected with the student's eye, after which it bounced off of the student, leaving not even a mark that anything had ever hit them. The student continued to walk past the pair of Kamijou and the magician as if nothing had just happened, while Kamijou stared intently at the magician, fully expecting an explanation for what just happened.
After a moment of silent contemplation, the magician finally sighed and began shake her head in dismay.
"Well… Looks like the barrier is the absolute worst kind that we could have to deal with right now. It's a barrier that separates an area into two 'sides', a normal one and an abnormal one, while making sure that one side of the barrier cannot directly affect the other. Considering what just happened… I would hazard a guess that we are on the side where we cannot affect anything."
Kamijou simply nodded her head in false agreement to what the magician was saying, not a word of it making sense to the student. The magician began to look around the entryway with a discerning eye, as if she were searching for some secret within the architecture of the room.
"Well then… Now what do we do? We could try to continue this mission, but with one person down already and we haven't made it past the entrance, there are just so many risks to take. We might just be able to pull this thing off… but it will require a lot more than I was hoping to give."
The magician crossed her arms, shaking her head as she took in the entryway. Kamijou took one more look over at the person who was supposed to be dying, and felt her heart being pulled once again.
The man had stopped thrashing around in a panic as he had almost a short while ago, obviously stopping due to the pain being too great for him to continue. The man was still breathing, evidenced by the vapor pouring out of the helmet with each breath, though they were getting shallower by the moment. Kamijou could not see the man's face due the helmet covering it, but the student could almost picture tears streaming down the man's face as he hung his head, utterly broken.
Kamijou grit her teeth as she turned to look at the magician, who turned out to be looking at the student, somehow preemptively figuring out that the student had something to say.
"I know what you are going to say already, but even you should already understand. That person is nothing more than a corpse right now. Even if we managed to get him out of here, which is very unlike, all we would be doing is changing where he died, nothing else."
Kamijou grit her teeth at the magician, trying her best not to clench her left hand into a fist. The student took one more look at the dying man, and nodded in an understanding way.
"I… I get it okay. I know… that even if we tried our best… we couldn't save him… It's just… It doesn't feel right. There is absolute nothing we can do… I just don't feel right leaving things like this!"
The magician stared at the student for a few moments, before sighing in a defeated manner. She then walked right pass Kamijou and kneeling before the dying man.
"Well… There is something we can do though in the long run it won't do anything. This might not save him… but it will at least allow him to pass on with a comforted mind."
Taking a deep breath, the magician began to speak in an obviously foreign language, one that Kamijou couldn't even pretend to recognize. Though despite not being able to recognize it, Kamijou could clearly tell that whatever the magician was saying, it was having an effect on the dying man.
The man raised his helmeted head, first with it moving in a panicked, pleading motion, but slowly it softened into a fearful twitch, until finally it was an accepting nod. Kamijou expected that something was wrong with the man's vocal chords, because the man responded with what was little more than a pained gurgle before his body slowly began to grow less and less animated.
The magician silently watched as the last little movement of the armor stopped before lowering her head in a silent prayer. Once she was finished, the magician rose to her feet turning to reveal eyes that had as clear sense of profound purpose within them.
"Now then… While we still had plenty of reasons to fight before… It just seems that one more got added to the list."
