The break-in begins

[ACSRT: only my UNDO-KAI]

Joule watched over the link as her friends discussed plans as the event began in earnest.

Saten had brought "Ninja climbing gloves" that looked like giant cat paws, but seeing how dangerous the robotic guards could be- well… she looked quite disheartened when she realised she wouldn't get much of a chance to use them.

When another group tried to charge an armoured car at the wall, there was some sort of sound-based system that peaked the microphone that Joule was using to hear. The electronics weren't broken though so in a way, Joule's hearing came back before the others' did.

"An Acoustic weapon." Misaka remarked with some pain "Are they set up all around the facility?"

Joule paused thoughtfully as more sound blasts were heard over the stream "Misaki, why didn't Academy City adapt Capacity Down into a more major part of its systems for combating Espers?"

"The one Therestina Kihara developed?" Shokuhou checked "While the theoretic range of a speaker system playing Capacity down is farther, an AIM jammer is harder to block. Even the first rank would be affected by a jammer."

Over the phone, Shirai added "This prison already uses AIM jammers, maybe they thought it would be a waste to use Capacity Down too?"

As she spoke, she was teleporting the rest of their team closer to the wall, though out of the range of the jammers she was talking about. Shirai wasn't going to risk an AIM jammer messing with teleportation calculations- that could cause a lot of negative side effects.

Shokuhou suddenly shifted, looking worried as she looked at her own pad.

"What's wrong?" Joule asked.

A moment later, the fifth-ranked answered "Ah, no. It's fine. I was worried for a moment but they dealt with it."

Joule nodded and mused over the plans for the prison that she'd seen earlier.

"GV, how would you get inside if you had to?"

Her friend was looking at the map too.

"Generally the best place to break into somewhere is the back entrance, if the AIM jammers weren't there, I'd basically just walk up to the back door of the prison and hack them open."

"But with the AIM jammers?"

…

Capacity Down didn't work on either of them, but the Jammers were untested. Uiharu had once mentioned the jammers worked by messing with the AIM espers released to use their ability.

AIM seemed to behave strangely though in regard to their abilities, they emitted it but they didn't know if it worked for them as it did for espers.

"I'd probably be okay." GV remarked which drew a raised eyebrow from Shokuhou.

Back with the team, Saten was depressed. She had just seen someone else try to climb the wall with the same sort of gloves and had seen there were sentry guns to stop that. Her plan had failed before it had even really begun.

Then Kongou arrived… wow. It was a while since Joule had seen her. The last time was during the Daihase festival.

She'd brought a collection of logs with her to use as makeshift battering rams with her power. After all, even if you couldn't use your abilities near the wall, nothing was stopping you from launching attacks from outside the wall.

Though when the logs were launched, some sort of wind blade shot out of the wall, cutting the ropes holding them together. Without that to bind them, the logs went everywhere and caused chaos.

While that was going on, Shirai almost took a log to the head but was kicked out of the way by Misaka who'd also moved to pull Uiharu out of the way.

"Why did you grab Uiharu instead of me sis?"

"Because you can teleport, she can't." Misaka's answer was cold but simple.

…Why hadn't Shirai teleported actually? Oh… maybe she was hoping to be pulled out of the way instead. That seemed like her.

As Joule watched Uiharu's back from the monocle (As she was getting a death glare from Shirai) Misaka was running around and gathering up scrap metal.

"Oh." GV was actually the first to realise what she was doing "I haven't seen this trick for a while. Not since… STUDY, I think?"

The damage of the Railgun was dependent on the size of the bullet Misaka used, so when she made a massive ball of scrap metal that almost looked bigger than she was, Joule understood there was something big coming.

"-Like this!" Misaka had been muttering to herself while gathering up the scrap but with a yell she punched the orb, sending it shooting forwards as a Railgun blast.

The beam of light tore through the prison's outer wall, leaving a relatively smooth circular tunnel, boring through the wall and revealing the inside of the prison on the other side.

Sadly, a defence system in the wall immediately started filling the hole with quick-drying cement or something that looked like it.

As everyone tried to think of a solution, Shirai looked over as Saten pulled out one of the paws that had gotten stuck in a mix of mud and iron sand earlier from when Kongou's friends and Misaka had been fending off some robots.

It left a crater, the mud not settling to fill it in.

"Look, look! The glove left a print." Saten noted, she hadn't really been paying attention to the ongoing problem, she was just enjoying life. What she said next though gave Misaka an idea.

"The water hardened the iron sand! It's making a wall to stop the mud from flowing back in."

At that, Misaka's eyes lit up as she looked back towards the wall.

"Let's go with that."

Misaka recruited some of the other competitors who were wearing a low-weight version of the powered suits. They were something like armoured exoskeletons the pilots could just stand in to control.

With their help and another railgun shot, they were able to force the logs Kongou had bought into the hole as the cement shot out again. The cement hit the logs, and hardened, but after a moment, they could pull out the logs in the middle leaving a clear hole through to the other side.

Joule smiled, her friends were in.

Author note: As FFnet is down when I normally write these chapters, I had to download a copy of this story so I could reference what would be going on. This is mostly just a retelling of Railgun's manga chapter 101 though, just from a slightly different perspective.

I'm thinking about moving this story to SB or SV as people are talking like it's the deathknell of FFnet again.