False Conduct

by Lacien

Unlike his famous younger sister Mikoto, Masaya Misaka is no level-5. Left behind and trapped as an underpowered level-3 esper, Masaya lives tormented by both his harrowing past involving Mikoto, as well as his powerful foes in the present—until a miraculous gift turns Masaya's world on its head, and invites him down a much more exciting, yet much more dangerous path.

5. Part 1 - Chapter 5 (Paradise Calls)

Hi, Lacien here.

It's great to see reviews beginning to come in now that the story is beginning to show some bulk. Before we start with the chapter, I'll dedicate a small segment to addressing your thoughts and reviews about the story so far.

olatudobem:

- I've already planned out when Mikoto's going to be making her full debut in the story. Right now, Masaya's treating her like some kind of mythical terror that pumps him with utter dread any time he's reminded of her. It goes without saying that his viewpoint of her is rather biased at the moment. Her presence in the story will increase over time, but I will say, that even now she's already had some behind the scenes influence on the story (and not just the backstory), we just haven't seen it yet, since we've been following Masaya mostly.
- This story will not hesitate to tread into exploring character mortality at some point (whether I'm altering the fates of canon characters, I'll stay quiet about); however, considering that we're still a year before Toaru's actual beginning, we wouldn't have much of a story if Masaya died just yet.
- Just to clarify, my primary concerns about the pacing was not with regards to the release schedule so much as it was about my tendency to endlessly extend and divide chapters, or add and extend scenes - it makes me feel like I'm taking longer and longer to move to the core of the plot that I promised my readers in the synopsis.
- Interesting theory regarding his ability. I will say nothing more on the matter just yet, except that once again, the synopsis promises that something big is coming—whether it's regarding his ability or something else entirely will be revealed in due time.

Kelk

- There indeed will be some major consequences of Masaya and Mikoto's sibling drama which will only get bigger over time. Right now, we're still in the earliest stages though, so you'll need a careful eye to catch the origin of the snowballing outcomes. It's great that you like Masaya so far, even if he's currently a somewhat volatile person—he's at the very start of his big character journey, after all.
- Good to see that you're liking the big chapters, since I'm unable to stop making them.

Guest

- I'm honoured that you think False Conduct sits as among the best already, I've got big plans for the story—hopefully you'll still be feeling that way once I've showcased them.
- You're absolutely right that the story has barely even begun yet. Even at 60k words—let's be real, I'll probably hit 100k before Masaya's hero's journey actually kicks off in earnest, with the rate I'm writing, as well as the extra scenes I've got planned before the big change that gets the ball fully rolling. That's my major concern regarding the pacing, not so much the release schedule.
- His influence in the overall Toaru timeline is not going to be as major as Touma's that's for sure. I'm writing in a way that emulates a real Toaru spinoff by Kamachi, but assuming that Masaya was already a character in Index and Railgun to begin with (good to see you think he fits well so far). Masaya's influence is intended to be done in a way that won't completely derail Index's overarching plot (as I'm pretending that the plots are compatible), but he will leave the mark of his influence on the story, just as Index's canon characters have contributed to it, even if Touma had far and away the most influence. There will be notable differences in outcome here and there—hopefully for the better—hopefully.
- I hope you stay tuned to see what's coming.

idyllic123

- I'm glad to hear that you like these kinds of stories. Toaru can be difficult to write fics for since Index's plot is pretty much all destined to happen sooner or later, so long as Touma exists, which sounds like a pain to write around while also adding something worthwhile to a story which Kamachi has already written quite well. That's why I went for this approach instead, where I emulated a spinoff starring a character that never existed—it's my job to convince the reader that he fits and belongs in this world, and that his inclusion has contributed something enjoyable to a Toaru reader's experience.
- With regards to Mikoto interactions, she's already begun contributing within the story, just off-page. You'll probably get your first taste of her subtle yet elusive presence in the next chapter after this one, so stay tuned.

Thanks for your reviews. Feel free to keep them coming.

This is the first time I've responded to fanfic reviews. There's a lot I enjoy talking about with this project, but I do need to be careful not to spoil too much. I'll become more discerning about this with time, a presume.

Now, onto the actual chapter.

A Certain Magical Index PLUS: [FALSE CONDUCT]

PART 1, CHAPTER 5

-[1]-

Were it night, the riverside would have been a decent enough place for a brawl. In the afternoon, however, it would have been a bit too out in the open in front of too many watchful eyes.

Right now, this dormant building lot was a much better choice.

Towering skyscrapers surrounded it tightly on all sides, depriving the space of any of the afternoon's golden daylight. The location felt like one of those deep and narrow valleys that never saw sunlight in the winter—or the dark pit of a colosseum.

Nothing was really built here yet—except for the deep, expansive void cut into the sand and dirt where a foundation and probably some underground parking would soon be. Inside the hole was nothing but more sand and dirt, and it took up a little over half of the giant lot's total footprint. Surrounding the pit was other materials that would soon be put to use—most likely within it.

But, besides the typical stacks of rebar, steel girders and sand piles next to that colossal pit, seven figures filled that space.

One of those figures, Masaya Misaka, eyed the other six standing opposite him some metres away.

Among the six was Kuzan Arono, the elder brother of one of Kyoji Tachikuro's personal bootlickers Danbei Arono. He had come to provide Masaya with a hard time on false pretences, not that convincing him of that fact was worth the effort at this point.

The rest of the group consisted of a rotund granite block of a high schooler, some dirty-blond hot-shot looking guy with a cocky grin and nonchalant posture, a rather short boy who looked like he compensated for it in raw attitude, a classic-looking pompadour'd Japanese delinquent type who would've looked way better in a gakuran, and a tall wavy-haired foreigner who looked right at home in the western-style cream blazer and red neck-tie.

All in all, it was quite the lineup.

A six-on-one brawl might have been manageable for Masaya Misaka—were it not for two critical factors at play here.

For one, Masaya's right arm was still bound tight in its brace. It had been a couple of days since the altercation which had crippled it—which meant that it was unfortunately still a few days too early for it to be back at its regular strength.

Under especially dire circumstances, undoing the elastic straps and removing his arm prematurely from its binding to fight with might have been a wise call, even if performing hard strikes with it was currently out of the question. Hopefully, such desperate measures could be avoided for today, if Masaya was lucky.

But that was not the only issue worth considering.

The other thing was that these six boys were from that school. That elite all-boys high school was the young man's closest equivalent to Academy City's female-only education juggernauts like Kirigaoka and the five institutions of the ever-enigmatic school garden—including of course, most notoriously, that one. In all likelihood, this dollar-store variety-pack of high school boys was packing some outrageous esper power behind their unassuming yet arrogant gazes—or at least some among them were.

All of these older boys were strangers to Masaya, but it wasn't as though he was completely in the dark here.

Masaya had never met Kuzan Arono before, but he was very familiar with Danbei Arono, and had long been aware that he had an elder brother—they had once been friends, after all. Of course, that was all before Tachikuro and his power-craze got involved and sides needed to be taken.

Something about Danbei that Masaya recalled was that, during their time as friends, Danbei had once mentioned possessing more or less the same ability as his brother.

Danbei Arono's esper ability was inanimate object duplication—basically useless in a straight fistfight.

If Masaya was recalling his facts correctly, then it looked as though Kuzan Arono himself would not be too much trouble to deal with.

But, of course, that left five other high-schoolers that Masaya still needed to concern himself with.

He had no prior information on hand regarding them.

If Masaya was lucky, then the other five other boys here simply consisted Kuzan Arono's personal social circle with a take-it-or-leave-it hodge-podge of un-assorted esper abilities averaging out to 'middling at best'. If he wasn't so lucky, then this was a carefully-selected strike team built by Kuzan Arono for the sole purpose of best countering and punishing Ohm Sight, as described by his brother's good-for-nothing cry-baby testimony.

Still, one-on-six against espers was not going to be a good time, regardless of how Masaya chose to deconstruct the situation into a possible glass half-full through some extensive mental gymnastics.

The best he could hope for would be to avoid such an unfavourable confrontation if at all possible.

To that end, there was no harm in testing the waters a bit.

"Will you be needing the whole marching band to deal with little old crippled me?" Masaya probed, "Or are you gonna be a man about it?"

Certainly, Kuzan Arono wouldn't back down from such a taunt coming from an injured middle schooler, especially not in front of an entourage of judgmental fellow high-schoolers—right?

"Enough bullshit." deflected elder brother Arono, before addressing his backup, "Come on men, let's teach this bro-beater a lesson he won't soon forget."

Shit, he's not having it one bit.

Masaya was almost impressed by Kuzan Arono's entirely forthright lack of chivalry—almost. This was some blatant Arono-style behaviour on display, even if Kuzan threw it about with much more audacity than his younger brother.

But all that didn't matter right now. Masaya had just been locked into an unavoidable fight with six possibly-powerful espers…

Or so he thought.

"Why? This is your fight, not ours." questioned the mighty boy with raw dimensions reminiscent of a refrigerator.

"Yeah, Kuzan. I've never even met your brother." the pompadour concurred.

Kuzan's peers seemed to have other ideas.

Those responses seemed to catch Kuzan Arono somewhat off-guard. It took him a few seconds and a couple of blinks to process what he'd just heard. Eventually, he was able to articulate a response.

"A-are you fucking kidding me right now? Why did you even come along, then?" His head snapped from those two towards the direction of the shorter boy. "Sano, didn't you literally just say 'This is gonna be good!' when I invited you to come help me beat this twerp?" His eyes were tense and rigid, while his smile was more S-shaped than U-shaped, and probably conveyed a feeling of despaired bargaining similar to what one might feel after discovering a big hairy spider deep inside your shoe—but only after putting it on.

"Yeah. Watching you try to fight some middle schooler Is. Gonna. Be. Good." clarified the shorter boy who gave off a similar vibe to a disobedient Jack Russel Terrier.

Now, Masaya was very much liking where this was going.

Kuzan Arono lowered his chin, took in a deep breath loaded with who-knew-what emotions, and then addressed his final two associates with a plastered-on smile and up-tilted beggar's eyes. "Kuno? Waterleiner?"

Shit, they really are brothers! silently remarked Masaya once he caught some more typical Arono-brand behaviour, including an especially bold and equally stupid-looking eyelash-flutter or two.

The shameless cartoony behaviour honestly reminded Masaya of a typical Loopy-Tunes character.

Hell, maybe this guy should get into Commedia Dell'Arte or something.

Kuzan Arono's Zanni act wasn't going over too well with its target audience. In response, Mr Foreigner less-than-subtly sucked in through his teeth and threw his gaze elsewhere, "You know, this isn't really my fight to win."

"But with your power, Waterleiner, you could knock him out instantly, right?" Kuzan beckoned—or tried to.

The black-haired westerner narrowed his slate eyes.

"Sure, but where's the fun in that? I wouldn't want to deprive you of your victory, now would I?" he said with a tilt of the head. "Your brother called upon you to win back his honour. That is not my place to intervene." explained the foreigner, apparently named Waterleiner.

Perhaps the practice of chivalry was still a thing wherever this guy came from. It was a rarity here in Academy City as far as Masaya was concerned.

That aside, sidestepping a fight with a guy whose power could supposedly 'knock him out instantly' would always be a win in Masaya's book.

His call for aid from the foreigner having returned barren, Kuzan Arono turned to the last boy left.

"C'mon, Kuno," he goaded, leaning in close like a bothersome fly, "You're always up for a good scuffle, a good old bash-up, a classic biffaroo."

That boy named Kuno returned a look that looked as though he was staring at hot garbage.

"This kid is the 'Scourge of Tatenkara'." continued Kuzan. "Surely you'd want to test your strength against him, right?" His eyebrows playfully jumped once or twice at the end there.

I can seriously see from whom Danbei Arono got his sucking up skills.

From what Masaya could tell at this point, if he was anything like his brother, Kuzan Arono would not be the type who could hold his own too well in a brawl, always relying on those stronger than him to do all the work, like those scrawny white foxes that are always following polar bears around. Ohm Sight wasn't detecting a whole lot of muscle mass on him, so Masaya could probably handle him without too much difficulty. Only having one usable arm wouldn't be too much of a disadvantage so long as Masaya could avoid a grappling match with the larger boy. Luckily, halving the number of available arms didn't halve his general agility, so long as he adjusted for his slightly less mobile centre-of-mass, dodging any attacks from Kuzan and striking hard during any openings seemed more than doable.

But this Kuno guy seemed like a different story.

If Kuzan was beckoning him to fight on his behalf, then Kuno had to be a fairly solid fighter. Going toe-to-toe with him could be as good as a coin flip for Masaya as far as his shots of winning went—especially if he had a good esper ability on him.

But, at the current juncture, all that this guy, Kuno, needed to do was say 'no' like the rest of that crew and Masaya could probably get out of this more or less unscathed—even with his current handicap.

But if he said 'yes'…

In this city, such confident bravado as displayed by Kuno was not naturally afforded to those of lower levels, so he had to be a strong ability user. While not as tall as that towering concrete slab of a boy or the foreigner, Kuno was very well built and muscular. If picking fights was supposedly something of a pastime of his, then his physique indicated that his esper ability was more likely to be something that augmented his physical strength rather than anything more disembodied.

Abilities like Telekinesis or Lasers or Teleportation were the sorts to encourage laziness, so a confident buff brawler certainly wouldn't be born of someone with those sorts of powers. His ability must've worked in tandem with and promoted physical brawling.

Ohm Sight was generally very helpful at keeping Masaya one or two steps ahead of any hand-to-hand fighter's movements, but a fighter who could go beyond the limits of the natural human body using their ability was another story entirely—for that was something that Masaya himself could not do.

Masaya knew that fighting someone on the level of Kuno was likely to be seriously dangerous.

As it went, Masaya's fate today would probably be decided with his response here.

Mr Dyed-Hair Hotshot contorted his face into a shape that was generally seen as contemplative and thoughtful for high-school boy standards, before eyeing Masaya up and down.

Shit, he's actually thinking about it.

That was not a promising sign, but Masaya made sure not to let his returning gaze break one bit. He wasn't entirely sure whether appearing strong or weak was the correct call here, so he defaulted to appearing strong—actually, Masaya generally picked that option regardless.

"What do you say, Kuno? You think you can take him?" badgered Arono.

Masaya watched with bated breath as Kuno stroked his chin in thought.

I'm not worth the trouble, hot-shot. Just leave me to Arono.

Eventually, Kuno came to his decision. The corners of his mouth twitched upwards ever-so-slightly. Arono refused to sit still and stay in the dark even a second longer.

"So, will you fight him for me?" he asked with a cheesy suck-up grin.

A devious smirk grew across Kuno's face. His eyes met Masaya's.

"I shall."

"Hell yeah! Kick his ass, Kuno!" celebrated Arono while discreetly wiping the sweat from his brow and then addressing Masaya with a devilish grin. "You're so screwed, boy. Kuno'll turn you into mincemeat."

Shit. Can't win 'em all.

Complaining about the change in situation was not worth the effort, so Masaya begrudgingly accepted his fate and got to work analysing his new opponent and mentally formulating a game plan, but before he could get too far into it, Kuno continued.

"I wasn't finished, Arono."

"Uhh, what the hell are you talking about? Just kick his ass already." Arono was clearly none-too-pleased about the closing of a favourable deal being delayed.

"I have one condition."

"Yeah, yeah. What is it?" snapped out Arono is a very impatient and inattentive manner.

Kuno eyed Masaya up and down. "I shall fight this 'Scourge of Tatenkara'…" he then turned his head back to Arono. "…but only in order to avenge my dear fallen friend: Kuzan Arono,—and only should that need doing, of course."

"Nice, sound goo—wait, what?" Kuzan Arono did a double-take at that.

Masaya didn't quite get it either.

Luckily, Kuno then clarified his decision.

"Your brother placed his faith in you to win back his honour. Like Waterleiner said, that's not my fight. However, you're my pal, Kuzan, so if anyone were to bring you to harm and strip you of your honour and dignity, then I will happily take up the call to not let your assailant go unpunished. That's what pals are for, right?"

His words sounded like a pep talk that the meat-headed jock rival would say as a character arc payoff in the third act of a high-school sports movie, right before the deciding stage of the big final game. That kind of moment would have any red-blooded man responding "Hell yeah!" in most contexts—but alas, Kuzan Arono was looking especially pissy about it. A red-blooded man he was decidedly not. He almost looked to be about to break into a childish temper tantrum.

"Don't be a pussy! Arono. He's literally got one arm! Get his ass!" came a more aggressive call from the shorter boy with an attitude, Sano. "I shall also avenge you should you fall to this little shit."

Just who do you think you're calling 'little'? internally snarled Masaya.

"As will I!" declared the fridge-boy, standing stately with crossed arms.

"And I!" vowed the boy with the pomp, proudly pointing it towards the sky.

"My ability's only good for knocking him out, so I'll handle the finisher, I guess." Waterleiner promised with only a half-interested tone. Masaya could imagine that an instant-knockout ability, if he actually had one, probably got quite boring after a while of fighting with it, so Waterleiner's lack of passion about the brawl in contrast to his peers seemed somewhat understandable.

Upon hearing about just how far his friends would go for him, Kuzan Arono could only stare back at them with bewildered eyes.

"You guys…" he muttered with a tone of awed disbelief, "… Are you fucking kidding me?!" His shift in tone was comically abrupt. "You're seriously not going to help me until after I get my ass kicked?! You expect me to bust my ass against the Scourge of Tatenkara alone?! The hell is wrong with you guys?!"

The five other boys gave their response in unison.

"It's not our fight."

"It's not our fight."

"It's not our fight."

"It's not our fight."

"It's not our fight."

And then, one more voice called out in that cool open space.

"They're right, Kuzan Arono… It's ours."

That voice belonged to Masaya Misaka.

He was now locked into one of two painful outcomes. Kuzan Arono wasn't looking too confident in his own chances against Masaya, so the outcome seemed to be Masaya's choice to make.

Masaya pondered his options.

Win against Arono and get my face bashed in by the other five who promised to stick up for their buddy?

Or deliberately lose against Arono to avoid round two, but be at the complete mercy of a bitter, spineless imbecile?

When he put it like that, it wasn't much of a dilemma.

Kuzan Arono was going down.

If anything, having to fight against opponents with some gallantry to their characters (albeit gallantry by warped high schooler standards) would be quite the refreshing experience to the veteran opposition of naught but ne'er-do-wells and tyrants: Masaya Misaka.

Inevitable future thrashing aside, he was actually beginning to look forward to this.

-[2]-

Masaya Misaka and Kuzan Arono stood across from one another in that sandy building lot. The gaps in the surrounding buildings created some appropriately atmospheric wind currents. Apart from serving as good food for the local wind turbines that heavily spotted the city's domain, it also kicked around the loose sand of the building lot here and there.

The scene felt a lot like the typical western cowboy duel, except it was a few hours too late for high noon.

There were ten metres between the two of them.

A shorter figure strode out into the centre of that gap. His voice boomed and carried well for a high school boy even shorter than a kid like Hisao Sagara.

"Alright, you two! I want a nice, clean—actually, wait. I don't care. Anything goes."

His tone switched awfully quickly once he realised that this was little more than a back-alley brawl between nuisance teenagers. Without another word, the 'referee' then strode back to the group watching from the side of the battlefield.

Once again, it was just the two of them now.

With that distraction out of the way, Kuzan Arono stared daggers at Masaya. Was it his rage at Masaya, or was he pumping himself up to prepare for the dive into a brawl he'd probably lose?

He spoke.

"Once I've kicked your ass, I will have fulfilled my duty as an older brother." declared Kuzan.

Masaya made his response loud and clear.

"Once I've kicked your ass, I will have proven myself as being innocent of attacking Danbei Arono." he declared in turn. As far as comebacks went, it was a bit of a letdown, but it needed to be said nonetheless. "The issue will be dropped forevermore upon my victory."

Those were the terms of this first brawl.

In this hyper-advanced and future-sighted world of Academy City, one would not expect to see such downright medieval practices like trial by combat in their day to day life.

This city was certainly full of surprises.

"Begin!" called the 'referee's' voice from the side.

Both combatants stood dead still, their gazes glued upon each other's movements—or rather the lack thereof.

Who was going to make the first move?

Masaya drew a conclusion regarding that rather quickly.

Fine, I'll do it.

Kuzan Arono didn't look like he was going anywhere on his own accord, at least not without some 'motivation'.

And so, Masaya took one step forward.

And then another.

Kuzan watched Masaya's approach as intently as if he were an inexperienced camper watching a growling feral dog slowly approaching his meat-loaded campfire. Kuzan's face clearly read "Don't even think about it", as though he wasn't entirely sure what he'd do once that distance became zero. An empty threat.

Kuzan, who'd gone to such efforts to forcibly summon Masaya to a street brawl with his brother's honour on the line, had become awfully indecisive and wishy-washy the moment he found out he'd have to do the fighting all on his own.

In response, Masaya picked up the pace. Kuzan's feeble attitude was testing his patience.

The distance was now six metres.

Five.

Four.

Kuzan tensed up like he was pulling back a spring, preparing the snap into action. By this point, he had no other choice.

Three.

Two.

One.

At pretty much the last possible moment, Kuzan made his move. He swung a fist directly towards the now in-range Masaya—who dodged it effortlessly.

That's a bit more like it! You dragged me into this fight, so fight!

The fight was now properly underway.

Kuzan let loose a flurry of swings, loading them with his full strength and bodyweight, sending his body swinging every-which-way. Keeping himself just clear of such a predictable striking range was a trivial matter for Masaya, even without relying on Ohm Sight.

To put it lightly, Kuzan Arono seemed to be a rather pitiful brawler.

"Stay still, you little shit!" snapped Kuzan as he swung another haymaker into the wrong postcode, which Masaya then punished with a quick jab to the temple.

"Shit!" shouted Kuzan as he stumbled back from the jab. He placed his hand upon the struck temple as though he was expecting to find blood there. It wasn't a particularly strong jab, so Kuzan came off as a bit of a drama queen for reacting like that.

More importantly, by reacting in such a way, he was leaving his core entirely open, so Masaya feinted a strike to the face, just to make sure, then quickly leapt forward and ducked down to deliver a good strong blow straight into Kuzan's stomach while he was busy covering his face (and field of view).

"Gwahh!"

Kuzan folded like a chair, his knees buckling and landing hard upon the sandy ground. He spent the next ten or so seconds wheezing to catch his breath, not even giving Masaya the time of day. He was especially lucky that Masaya was so graciously granting him the time to be such a big baby about a single gut-punch; most Skill-Outs would've started kicking him into a shape resembling used chewing gum by now—every spare second was a rare luxury in most every proper fist fight.

This pitiful display gave Masaya more questions than answers. He turned to ask the five members of the peanut gallery. Even if he was supposed to be fighting them next, he needed answers.

"Has this guy ever been in a proper fight before?"

"Not that I know of." responded the fridge.

"According to him, he prefers to 'let his words and wit do the fighting'." chuckled the pompadour.

Of course he's one of those types.

"Why am I even here, then?" protested Masaya.

"Well, kid, Arono's an idiot and a bit of a coward, even though he's still our guy… You know, since we're going to beat your ass after this anyway, you'd may as well give Kuzan some 'valuable life experience', if you know what I mean. He's gonna need it." offered Kuno with eyebrows raised, like a product salesman quietly recommending a competitor's superior product behind his company's back. "He'll probably be grateful for it down the line. Second year of high school is much too old to have never been punched in the face before."

Masaya, as a seasoned brawler himself, was inclined to agree with that last statement, although he found it odd that they were supposedly intending to beat him up for attacking Kuzan, but not making any effort to prevent that from happening in the first place. Was it some strange way of doing right by their friend by putting him through trials and tribulations to make him a stronger person?

Or was it just schadenfreude?

High schooler logic was lost on Masaya.

Eventually, Kuzan managed to rise back to his feet.

It had certainly taken him long enough.

He locked his eyes onto Masaya, drew in a deep breath, and then sharply exhaled through his nose like a snorting bull ready to charge.

"Rrrraaahhh!"

He set off, scrambling towards his target. He was even charging like an enraged bull.

A quick sidestep and roundhouse kick to Kuzan's side quickly put to bed the prospect of that open charge being even remotely close to a good idea.

Kuzan collapsed forward and was met with a face-full of sand.

"Give up yet?" asked Masaya to his ground-loving opponent.

Kuzan spat out a mouthful of sand, "… No!... Bro's counting on me!"

His tone indicated that he was trying more to convince himself rather than to convince Masaya.

None of that really mattered though. The way he was fighting, Kuzan would probably be down and out after another hit or two.

-[3]-

Ten minutes passed.

The fight continued ahead.

Kuzan had launched attack after heavily-telegraphed attack, and Masaya had effortlessly avoided and punished all of them.

No matter how many punches he'd thrown, or attempts at a grapple made, or feints performed that could've been seen coming from a mile away, Masaya quickly made sure that Kuzan regretted making each and all of them.

Each of his recoveries took longer than the last, and each attack had been more desperate and poorly-planned than the one preceding it—yet Kuzan Arono had, still, not conceded the fight.

Masaya countered yet another of his increasingly lagging swipes, looking to be yet another poor attempt at grappling Masaya by the seemingly-vulnerable elastic straps of his arm brace. In this instance, Masaya struck back with a perfectly-aimed uppercut straight to the chin. Kuzan fell flat on his back like a plank of wood.

"I'm telling you, Danbei was beaten to a pulp by Kyoji Tachikuro and then told to pin it on me. I didn't lay a hand on him." Masaya recounted his side of the story, as he had multiple times over the course of the brawl.

But, as with those other times, Kuzan Arono wasn't listening.

"Stop lying!" snapped Kuzan as he struggled to get up from his lying position, rather like a flipped over turtle. "My little bro would never lie to me!"

"Well, he did! Why the hell are you believing him so blindly like that?!"

His abdominals failed him, and Kuzan could only roll onto his side to escape his dead-bug position. "Of course I believe him! It's my duty as his big brother!" Huffing and puffing, he managed to clumsily scramble back to his feet. "Of course I'm gonna stick up for him."

Masaya was more ready to deliver a counter to those cheesy lines—or he thought he was. When he hunted for the words, his mind kept drawing a blank, for some reason.

"Uh, well… Look at the state you're in!" he settled on this angle instead. "Your brother lied to you, and look how that ended up for you!"

After over ten minutes of repeated bashings from Masaya's counters, Kuzan Arono was indeed looking a lot worse for wear. He was caked with sand over, bruises littered his skin, sweat soaked his hair, and even some blood could be seen escaping his mouth and nose. His stance looked about as flimsy as a house of cards—even his ragged breathing looked like it could be enough to knock him off balance if he wasn't careful.

Yet, even after all that, Kuzan Arono did not yield.

"So what?! My little bro called upon me to stick up for him in his time of need… I promised him that I would… And I intend to fulfil that promise to him… Because that's what big brothers do!"

"That's enough out of yo—."

"He put his faith in me… On my honour as his big bro… I will not see that faith squandered!" Kuzan managed to squeeze out in between laboured breaths.

"Shut up." Masaya was getting awfully tired with the moral grandstanding from a coward who not even fifteen minutes ago was whining about not getting to brutally and unfairly overpower Masaya six-on-one.

It was like Kuzan Arono was a completely different person now.

What had changed?

Kuzan drew in a deep and powerful breath.

He placed one foot forward.

He's still got another charge in him?! reacted Masaya for what had to be the twentieth time now.

No.

In his current state—with his dwindling strength, his ragged breathing, his unfocused gaze—this was most certainly his final stand.

If he was struck down now, he was absolutely not getting back up.

Masaya repositioned himself to a good open spot to receive that charge. He faced Kuzan head-on. It was an invitation—like a matador waving a red cape.

There was a little under a dozen metres between them.

"Rrraaahhh!" he roared. A lumbering foot landing in front of him—then another, and another. He put all of his remaining strength into that charge towards Masaya. His right hand was clenched into a fist, ready to throw when the moment was just right.

In response, Masaya began a charge of his own. His movements were clean and efficient. Despite the length of the fight thus far, Masaya had barely broken a sweat.

The middle school boy and the high school boy steamed towards one another. It was like a jousting match, but without the horses or lances.

There were now only five metres between them.

Four.

Three.

Two.

Kuzan swung his clenched fist back, winding up for his final strike.

One.

He swung it forth towards Masaya with all his might—or perhaps he thought that was where it was going.

The fist met only empty air.

Kuzan's eyes went wide.

His target had disappeared entirely.

His eyes searched desperately for his lost quarry, but he didn't get much of a chance.

SMASH!

Two feet slammed into his face from above the empty air Kuzan's fist occupied.

Masaya Misaka had once again employed that devastating move—the double flying kick, this time straight to the face.

He drove the force of all his lower-body strength into that impact—and Kuzan Arono was sent flying.

After a brief second airborne, he landed hard, punching a Kuzan-shaped crater into the sandy ground.

Upon executing a moderately more elegant landing onto his one hand and knees, Masaya took a second to gaze upon the results of his work.

He rose to his feet and approached his fallen adversary.

There was zero chance of Kuzan getting back up after that.

Masaya gazed down upon him, and made his declaration.

"It's done. You lost."

That result had been more or less guaranteed from the moment Kuzan launched his first hopeless attack.

That had apparently been Kuzan's first real brawl, and against a seasoned fighter like Masaya.

Even with Masaya's current handicap, there was no question about who the victor would be.

Masaya turned away from the defeated Kuzan to address those other five older boys—his next opponents—supposedly.

SPUTTER.

But, before he could do so, he heard a wet sound. Like someone trying to clear spit and blood from their mouth.

Actually, that's exactly what it was.

"Oh, you're still conscious?" remarked Masaya as he turned back to the beaten and bloodied Kuzan. "Don't try getting up. It's over."

Kuzan wasn't listening. Even now, he was contracting whichever muscles he could still feel in order to try the first step at pulling himself up off the ground.

But that didn't last long at all.

He collapsed perfectly back into that shallow crater in the sand shaped just for him.

Immediately afterwards came a long, exhausted exhale. His form seemed to melt deeper into that hole—as though he were a punctured inflatable mascot collapsing in on itself.

And then, even after all that, he still managed to speak.

"So… this is what it's like… to face your… fears… for the sake… of someone else… For family." he just barely squeezed out. His mouth was shaped into something resembling perhaps twenty percent of a proper smile; his eyes gazed out to nowhere. "Maybe… I can… finally be… the kind of big brother… he needed… this whole time."

The words were most certainly cheesy in Masaya's book, but Kuzan seemed to be uttering them with complete sincerity following his absolute defeat. Then again, Masaya had a lot more experience being in that position as well, so he had a lot more expertise when it came to delivering his 'final words'.

Actually, that kind of expertise wasn't really anything worth being proud about. Getting a feeling of superiority towards a novice of that whole 'field' probably wasn't terribly worthwhile.

Even so, all that righteous big brother talk was really starting to get on his nerves—for whatever reason.

But Masaya didn't get his chance to tell him to knock it off with the sappy nonsense, for, moments later, Kuzan Arono fell unconscious.

The first fight's victory belonged to Masaya.

But that was far from the end. Masaya wasn't walking away from this mess just yet.

Because, of course, that just would have been too easy.

-[4]-

Five high-school boys gazed upon Masaya Misaka's handiwork.

"How could you do this to him?!" cried out the shorter boy Sano.

He then continued, with just a splash of irony, or perhaps a lot more. "Do you have any idea what you've done?! He's going to be so annoying tomorrow! He'll be all like 'Have you ever been in a fistfight before? I sure have.'"

"Just ask him if he's ever won a fistfight. That'd shut him up. Hehe." commented the boy with the pompadour.

"Or maybe we should just dump him in front of this guy again whenever he starts acting up, I reckon." Sano joked while pointing a thumb towards Masaya.

To say that Masaya was confused about where the boys' priorities laid regarding Kuzan's wellbeing was an understatement.

"You did a real number on him, but without being too cruel about it" added Kuno, reviewing Masaya's performance in the brawl, while squatting down beside Kuzan and trying to hold his eyes open. "Although, I would've liked to see you go on the offensive a bit more, instead of just relying on counters."

He stopped messing around with Kuzan, and rose to his feet, looking Masaya in the eye. "I wanted to see a little more or what you were made of before I went up against you."

Well shit.

Masaya was hoping that they'd forgotten about that part of the arrangement by this point, or at least that they were joking about it from the start.

It appeared that such a convenient turn of events was not to be.

Or could it still be?

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

"If you're wanting to see what I'm made of, then are you sure you don't want to postpone the next round a bit, at least until I'm back at my optimum strength?" Masaya suggested, subtly waving his bound right arm a little to draw attention to it.

Masaya was rather likely—nay, almost certain to lose the upcoming round 2 of this battle gauntlet, so trying to implement a 'strategic rescheduling', so to speak, at least for a time, seemed like a good idea to him.

If he was especially lucky, they might even forget about the arrangement entirely in time.

Frankly, it was worth a shot.

"Nice try, kid…" Kuno immediately shot the possibility of a raincheck. "But we made a bros' promise to Arono back there. He put his heart and soul into that fight he had no shot of winning. I'm sure you can imagine how unfair it'd be for us to backpedal on our end of the agreement just because Arono's out of the picture now."

The other boys nodded in agreement.

That position was unanimous amongst the group.

Just what especially moronic brand of chivalrous bro-code is this? wondered Masaya when he heard Kuno give his reasoning.

This whole episode had only gotten more and more outrageous with each passing minute.

These high school boys had to be madder than most Skill-Outs.

Skill-Outs threw their might around in order to obtain life's simple hedonistic pleasures: money, alcohol, drugs, access inside a girl's skirt—those sorts of thing.

These boys on the other hand…

Were they picking fights with strangers in order to obtain some sort of philosophical enlightenment or ideal?

Was that even how it worked? Surely not.

Was this what happened when high-school boys didn't have any girls at their school to direct their untamed masculine energy towards?

Masaya was left positively perplexed.

Kuno continued.

"Now, I want to see you put the same level of heart and soul into this fight that you have no chance of winning. Surely, you don't want to be outdone as a warrior by the likes of Arono, now do you?"

The grin on his face told Masaya that the older boy Kuno was being entirely serious here.

Was this just how high-school boys thought? Was Masaya going to become like one of these boys in only a year or two?

Was that supposed to be a good thing or not?

"Waterleiner, get Arono out of the way. I'll call upon you when it's time for you to use your finisher, if that's still what you want to do."

"Fine by me." answered Waterleiner, before pulling Kuzan out of his crater by the wrists and dragging him to the edge of the building lot, depositing his back against a large sand pile, then choosing to sit atop the pile himself for a front-row seat.

Kuno turned his attention back to Masaya.

"Hey, kid. Guess what?" he asked.

"… What?" Masaya responded with some hesitation.

"Round two begins now!"

He didn't even wait to finish his announcement before lunging forth with a swinging right hook aimed right for Masaya's face.

Just like that, the next fight was already underway.

-[5]-

Kuno was coming at him fast, but with Ohm Sight, Masaya was able to gauge the exact positioning and trajectory of Kuno's fist well over a second in advance. That was enough time for him to swing his head back, just clear of the fist's thundering path.

Masaya then immediately sidestepped out of the path of Kuno's charge.

However, that had not been the best choice here.

Dumbass! You can't use that arm, remember?!

Kuno had swung his right hook, leaving his right side completely open. Unfortunately, Masaya had stepped to the left, leaving his unusable right arm as the only limb in the prime spot for a counter as Kuno was rushing right past his right side.

That needed to change.

As a general rule, turning one's back to their opponent during a brawl was as good as a death wish.

Handily, with his Ohm Sight, that rule simply did not apply to Masaya. He could keep track of the entire battlefield at all times, regardless of where he was looking.

With a quick duck and a spin, Masaya was now in a prime spot to drive his left elbow straight into Kuno's side.

So that's exactly what he did.

"Gnrnr!" grunted Kuno upon receiving the impact right as he was preparing for his next swipe. He swung his right arm back in an attempt to land an elbow strike of his own, but Masaya slipped under it with ease and jumped back a few steps.

Even then, it had only been about two or three seconds since round two had begun.

A smirk grew across Kuno's face.

"Not bad, you little shit. Not bad at all."

Masaya had some words of his own.

"Good to see you actually seem to know what you're doing, unlike the other guy."

Kuno was direct and vicious in his attacks. He wasn't going to win any MMA tournaments with such an approach, but it was indeed a valid strategy to use in your typical street brawl against hooligans.

Masaya's words appeared to amuse Kuno.

"Ha! Save your words, twerp. You haven't seen nothing yet!"

Kuno turned to the other three boys not on the sidelines: the fridge, the pompadour, and the smaller fellow. "Oti. Zemonata. Sano. What're you three just standing around for! Kuzan's honour needs restoring! Help me crush this loser!"

They responded at once.

"Right!"

"Let's get his ass."

"This. Is. Gonna. Be. Good."

The three boys gathered beside Kuno.

Lined up together, they looked like they could've been the main cast of an old shounen fighting anime.

"Don't go disappointing us now, boy." Kuno said with the targeting gaze of a predator.

Without wasting a second more, the four older boys rushed towards Masaya like a tidal wave.

-[6]-

The big guy reached Masaya first. He was faster than one might've expected. He took a big swing of his fist, straight towards Masaya's head. A single swift movement of the head nullified that threat for now.

Kuno and Sano looked to be taking a flanking route for now, so the second guy to reach Masaya was the pompadour. He leapt in for a strike from beside his larger team member, jumping out in front and taking a massive downwards swing, but not with a closed fist.

He's going to strike with a wide open hand?

Mr Pompadour looked like more he was trying to slam down a mid-air volleyball.

This isn't a slapping competition!

But Masaya soon saw why his opponent had chosen that kind of attack.

Wait! What's that blue glow?!

A flash of blue erupted from each of the boy's fingertips. The light quickly stabilised, and Masaya saw his opponent swiping down his spread hand—with what looked to be the light of a blowtorch shooting out from the end of each finger.

After such a long fight against a hopeless fighter like Kuzan, it might have been easy to forget that Masaya was up against espers from a very highly-regarded high school.

These boys were no Skill-Outs.

They were much more dangerous.

Masaya ducked, dodged, weaved as the blowtorch boy swung swipe after swipe like a crazed tiger, now with both hands sporting blowtorch fingers. The flames of the blowtorches were only about a foot long at most, but any extended range was still something to watch out for.

Even though this was a pyrokinetic ability, and there was no physical gas like propane or butane being burned here, Masaya was still able to more or less gauge where the flames were when they were outside of his line of sight. This was because, as a general rule, the electrical conductivity of a material decreased with raised temperature, so Masaya was able to gauge their position with Ohm Sight using the less conductive hotter air in the path of the flames as a reference point; although the heated air did leave a wispy trail of sorts—not a huge deal.

What was a big issue was that Kuno and Sano had reached their desired positions.

They launched their coordinated pincer attack from either side of Masaya.

How observant—an attack from either side against a one-armed opponent.

In the quick prelude tussle with Kuno, Masaya had chosen to quickly execute a spinning manoeuvre in order to counterattack Kuno with his left side, rather than try to fight with his right side regardless, perhaps with a kick or slam. That had only confirmed to Kuno and Sano that Masaya's right side was a ripe low-risk target.

They had indeed been taking notes on that.

That was indeed a clever strategy, Masaya wouldn't be able to counter them both simultaneously using only his left side. For them to orchestrate such a manoeuvre without exchanging a single word about it beforehand went to show that these two were especially effective team fighters.

They were coming in fast, winding up strikes with a lot of force behind them.

In addition, the other two, while not performing any direct attacks, had definitely recognised the strategy at play, since they were repositioning themselves in order to block off Masaya's escape routes and corral him into the ideal spot for their pals' two-pronged takedown.

He was surrounded on all four sides now.

No.

Four sides, but not all sides.

There was still one escape route.

With a quick flick of his foot, Masaya managed to kick up some sand, sending it straight into the face of the large tank-like boy, blinding him for a split second.

That was enough.

In a swift motion, Masaya leapt towards the boy, then, with a step up onto the boy's knee, he kicked off the boys chest and launched himself over that central gap which was at that moment slammed shut by the clash of Kuno and Sano like a set of crocodile jaws. They had aborted their unified attack plan at the last second, and so managed to avoid a disastrous collision, just harmlessly bumping against each other instead. If would have been fantastic if they'd taken each other out with a head-on crash, but these guys weren't bumbling Skill-Outs. They knew what they were doing.

Jumping off the big guy sent Masaya straight on a collision course with Mr Blowtorch. He swivelled his body mid-air and, using the momentum of the launch, drove a knee straight into the boy's face (while also messing up his pompadour) before he ever had a chance to react with his blowtorches.

Masaya landed with a well-executed roll.

The other boy did not.

Masaya didn't let any of the momentum of that landing roll go to waste. He shot back up to his feet and dashed a couple dozen metres in order to promote some spreading of the remaining crowd.

Tackling all attackers at once would be extremely risky.

One at a time would be much more manageable.

From a spot only eight or so metres from that huge pit in the ground where a skyscraper foundation would soon be built, Masaya peered back at the fallen high-school boy.

He wasn't even trying to sprawl about in pain or get up.

He was done.

One down. Three to go.

Maybe this 'unwinnable' fight wasn't so unwinnable after all.

"Well shit. Zemonata's down." remarked Kuno, poking the unresponsive fallen pyrokineticist with the toe of his shoe.

"Waterleiner! We've got another one for ya!" called out Sano.

Meanwhile, the big guy wasn't concerning himself with what his buddies were doing.

He was charging straight to where Masaya was.

Excellent.

The thinning of the herd was going perfectly according to plan.

The larger boy, who, if the pompadour boy was indeed Zemonata, must have been Oti, was taking surprisingly little time to cover the distance to where Masaya was.

He was indeed rather quick, especially on this somewhat weak-surfaced sand ground.

Wait a minute.

Something seemed a bit off about that. Even if he was a towering hulk of a boy, he shouldn't have been running so effortlessly atop a soft sandy surface.

Masaya focused his Ohm Sight onto Oti's footsteps, and caught sight of something very interesting.

The sand was giving way beneath his feet as expected, but Oti's feet weren't slipping at all, even during the forceful kick-off of each stride.

That wasn't normal.

On top of that issue with the sand, when Masaya had climbed up and kicked off his chest to leap out of harm's way, Oti hadn't budged an inch. He was a large and sturdy boy to be sure, he had to weight close to twice what Masaya did—but still, having something of half your own mass pushing off from your chest was probably going to knock you right over.

An esper ability had to be involved.

But Masaya wasn't given any more time to stand around and think about what it could've been.

Oti had arrived.

He charged while launching a swing of his arm towards Masaya, who dodged it without issue. Oti then thrust his other fist forward, but Masaya managed to avoid that one too.

A few more missed swings later, and Masaya was beginning to pick up a pattern here.

Why is his fighting style like that of a bumbling novice?

For such a large and imposing guy, Oti's brawling style seemed closest to Kuzan's—that being, like an absolute Neanderthal.

Oti's attacks largely consisted of wide swings and poorly-aligned thrusts rather than attacks that had any hope of delivering a meaningful amount of force. He wasn't even trying to put any of the weight of his large and sturdy body behind his attacks in any meaningful way.

That said, his recoveries were quick and efficient—unnaturally so. He had absolutely no problems with redirecting the force of his body towards a different direction.

It's almost as if the very concept of leverage doesn't even apply to h—!

The puzzle pieces all fell into place at once.

Oh shit! His esper ability is leverage manipulation!

Leverage was just as important as raw strength when it came to a brawl, possibly even more so. Being strong didn't mean a whole lot without the leverage to properly make use of it. Kyoji Tachikuro's Hydro Cords were absurdly strong on their own, but they needed to anchor themselves securely into the ground in order to hold enough leverage to properly employ that strength.

Such considerations simply did not apply to Oti here.

With an ability like that, he was probably able to lift a whole refrigerator with one hand if he wanted to. Not necessarily because he was stronger, but because he was able to get the strength of his whole body beneath the refrigerator with no trouble whatsoever.

With an ability like that, any half-hearted slap, jab, or swung could have the force of his entire weight behind it without even needing to consider his form or posture.

With an ability like that, almost no attack from a fellow human being would ever be able to knock him off his feet if he didn't want it to.

What a formidable opponent to face.

Knocking him down with sheer force alone was simply not going to ever work.

As Masaya continued to dodge swipe after jab, ducking, weaving, leaping, and twisting as he went, he weighed his options for taking the big guy down.

Masaya would either have to wear him down with exhaustion or pain, or he'd have to employ some downright diabolically dirty moves.

Option one showed some promise. Oti's breathing was already beginning to grow deep and heavy. Due to his manipulation of leverage, each attempted strike of his was able to carry the force of his (quite considerable) whole body with it. Even so, while he was able to deliver that full-body force into his strikes with perfect efficiency every time, regardless of his form, he still needed to generate that full-body force in the first place, which didn't come for free—he needed to actually use his whole body to create a force like that. He was eventually going to get tired. In fact, he was already huffing and puffing with an open mouth to maximise oxygen intake in order to keep going.

Unfortunately for Masaya, that would take too long. Masaya would undoubtedly get worn down more quickly than Oti, especially once Kuno and Sano got back into the fight. He wouldn't get enough time to wear Oti down before the other two got in the way and gave him a chance to recover some stamina. Ohm Sight could already see that those two were starting to make their way over, now that Waterleiner was currently busy dragging Zemonata away.

It would be less than eight seconds before they arrived. Oti needed to be dealt with, at least in the short term, before then.

Option two it was.

In fact, Masaya already had something in mind.

Ohm Sight was already keeping precise track on the pattern of Oti's breathing.

Masaya could make use of that.

Oti swung aggressively at Masaya once, twice. Masaya dodged out of the way, performing a dodge roll to escape the strikes.

That roll hadn't been entirely essential for escaping, but it came with its advantages here.

For instance, the sand that Masaya had covertly scooped up in the process.

Oti wasn't going to let him get away that easily. He lunged after Masaya even while he was only halfway through his roll.

Oti was now in range.

Perfect.

Masaya completed the roll, flicking the sand straight at Oti's mouth the moment his hand was no longer on the ground. Oti had been in the middle of deep and sharp inhale when the sand filled his mouth, leading to it getting sucked straight into his windpipe.

"Gph! Hck!" Oti began choking like a madman, clasping at his throat and collapsing to his knees.

Meanwhile, Masaya took his chance to retreat a little further, closer to that wide open pit.

And just in time, too.

"Shit, he's got Oti too!" shouted Sano, now arriving.

"Well, this little shit is just full of surprises." remarked Kuno beside him with a grin—half impressed, half devilish.

"His ass is mine!" declared Sano.

"Not so fast," argued Kuno, "He's been picking us off one by one. Let's gank him properly."

"Let's toss his ass in the pit!"

The two rushed past the still choking and wheezing Oti to face Masaya in the next stage of the brawl—at the precipice of the foundation pit.

-[7]-

The pit was approximately eleven or twelve feet deep, and dozens of metres wide on each side, possibly expanded from the dimensions of the foundation of the building that had previously been here. It looked as though digging was not yet complete, as the sides of the pit were not yet reinforced by any sort of panelling or supports. This left the very edge to appear especially prone to crumbling.

If one lost their footing here at the edge of the foundation pit, they'd be going straight to the bottom.

Falling in would be a terrible time, but due to the loose sand that'd already fallen from the edge and accumulated at the base of the pit's wall, most falling victims would have at least something of a soft landing to save them from suffering most direr injuries.

Even so, Masaya was standing precariously close to the edge.

He had worked his way this spot on purpose.

There were two steps to his survival master plan here.

Step one went without saying: Get someone into the pit.

It appeared that his opponents were thinking the exact same thing.

Good to hear that we're on the same page here.

His opponents were now well aware of how slippery and agile he was.

Him standing here was a challenge to Kuno and Sano.

He was daring them to come closer—and closer they came. Calmly. Chuckling. They tried to surround Masaya, to force his back to the pit.

Not happening.

In order to keep both of them to one side and play by his rules, Masaya retreated further along the edge of the colossal cavity. It didn't take long for that to annoy Sano, he lunged at Masaya while winding up a nasty uppercut; Kuno was right behind him.

As expected.

Sano landed right in front of Masaya. His swing was on-target and coming in fast.

All Masaya needed to do was take one step to the side.

"Wh-whoa, shit!"

Sano's eyes went wide at the sand split and crumbled beneath his feet. A huge chunk of earth slid away and cascaded into the pit, bursting into a loose pile when it hit the bottom. Kuno's advance was halted in its tracks, while Sano managed to tumble to the side onto his hands and knees and remain at the current level, at the expense of losing his footing.

More sand was crumbling away under Sano's weight, who scrambled to avoid slipping into the sandy abyss.

Masaya wasn't going to let an opportunity like that go to waste.

He wound up his foot, before swinging it straight up into Sano's face as though it were a soccer ball.

"Ag! Fuck!" shouted Sano, recoiling in pain, which destabilised his body's grip on the loose sandy slope beneath it.

He realised this too little, too late.

"Aaahhh! Shit!" he screamed as he slid off the edge and fell down to the bottom of that foundation pit. Luckily for him, he landed on the sand pile made from the giant chunk he'd accidentally loosened.

He'll live.

But more importantly for Masaya, he was out of the way.

Masaya had known that this was going to happen.

With Ohm Sight, he could see the under the ground beneath his own two feet. He could tell exactly where the sand was beginning to split and come apart. He could tell exactly where was safe to stand and where wasn't.

The spot Sano had landed on was over a metre away from the edge and looked perfectly secure, but looks could be deceiving if you couldn't see what sat below the surface.

With the right information, it was obvious that the chunk would fall away if someone were to jump on it. Even so, the moment Sano's trajectory had made it clear that his step would indeed land on that volatile spot, Masaya had made sure to press his foot into it a little while making his sidestep in order to widen the splits in the sand a little—just to be sure.

It had worked a treat.

Step one: complete.

Masaya turned his gaze to Kuno. The look Masaya was giving him had to be positively fiendish right now.

And then there was one.

-[8]-

The hole in the pit's edge that was taken out by Sano now separated Masaya and Kuno. Kuno stood there, processing what he'd just seen, shooting looks between the gap in the edge, and to the bottom of the pit where Sano was currently writhing around on his sand pile. The hole wasn't even that large, but right now, it was like a monumental chasm. On Kuno's side was the world as Kuno knew it. On Masaya's side was a strange new world that worked by his rules.

Or, at least that's how Masaya rationalised Kuno's dumbfounded reaction.

Eventually, Kuno gazed across that gap and stared at Masaya with a strange energy. It was almost half utterly disgusted—yet also half awestruck.

But, after a short time, that look disappeared, replaced by something very different.

It was a grin—a wide, wide, monstrous grin.

And then he spoke.

"Well, holy shit! I haven't had this interesting of an opponent in ages!"

He began to chuckle.

It became louder, more electric.

It felt as if some vigorous invisible energy had engulfed him.

Kuno laughed like a madman.

"Hahahaha! Alright, you little shit, now we're talking!" Kuno was manic. It was like a vibrant chemical reaction had gone off inside him. "No more holding back! I'm going all out! Hahahahaha! If you can't handle it, it's your funeral!"

Apart from the crazed energy of a dangerously-invigorated brawler supposedly meeting worthy quarry, something stood out as odd to Masaya.

"And what exactly have you been holding back, might I ask?"

From what he'd seen so far, Kuno's fighting ability was fairly solid. He was decently fast, put appropriate force into his strikes, maintained good balance and leverage, was good at locating an enemy's weaknesses, and worked well in coordinated team strikes.

All around, he was 'good'.

But being a 'good' brawler wasn't going to be enough to beat Masaya, a skilled Ohm Sight esper—especially now that his buddies were out of the picture, and especially now that Masaya had fulfilled the conditions for step two of his survival master plan.

Right now, the two of them faced one another with the building lot's foundation pit to their side. To Kuno, it was to his left. To Masaya, it was to his right.

That meant that, right now, Masaya's right side, his weak side (with arm that he could not attack nor defend with), which Kuno had been eager to make strikes against, was currently completely inaccessible. On top of that, the space immediately in front of and behind Masaya consisted of unstable ground, ready to shear off and fall into the depths of the pit. Attacking from those directions was not advised.

In other words, Kuno could only really attack Masaya from a single direction—from his left.

When he did, Masaya would be ready.

So what was all this about Kuno 'holding back' all of a sudden?

Kuno gave Masaya his answer.

"Well, you see, kid," he uttered with a chuckle, "this whole time, I haven't even been using my esper ability—my level-4 esper ability."

Ah.

That explained things.

But Kuno wasn't done explaining.

"My ability's so busted that I win every fight I'm in way too quickly if I use it from the get-go." Kuno laughed. "It makes it too easy. If I want to actually increase my fighting skills at all, I can't go using it so lightly."

Those words had made quite the impression on Masaya.

…Oh really now! he thought with a sneer.

Before the fight, Masaya had been concerned about what a guy like Kuno was supposedly capable of. But now, after seeing how easy it had been to take out the rest of his crew, he was beginning to have his doubts about how strong this guy could really be.

He gave Kuno another look over.

It all made sense.

Why was I so concerned about him this entire time?

He's bluffing!

Masaya had just taken out all of Kuno's friends one by one

Kuno had been completely unable to hit Masaya thus far through the entire fight.

And now he'd found himself up against Masaya's nigh-flawless positioning trap.

…And only now was he supposedly a super-strong level-4?

This was the game plan of desperate young man at his wit's end.

Masaya had been in enough brawls in his time to know that any time an opponent started going manic and claiming to really be a super-strong esper who'd just so happened to be holding back the whole time, then that opponent was usually going to be kissing the floor within the next move or two.

Claiming to be high level and actually being high level were indeed very different things.

A level-4? Really? At least claim to be a level-3! Masaya scoffed internally. I might've been able to buy it for at least a few seconds.

Level-4s were rare enough that suddenly claiming to be one out of nowhere in front of people about to beat you up usually raised a few snide eyebrows and elicited a few scoffs and chuckles.

A smile grew across Masaya's face.

He turned his back to Kuno (usually a big no-no in a fight, but what was Kuno going to do about it?), stepping across the few safe spots in the unstable sandy precipice in order to create some starting distance—while making sure to weaken the sand just a bit with the force of his steps.

He turned back to face Kuno.

There was now around eight or so metres between them.

"Alright, then. Show me this 'super overpowered level-4 ability' you've apparently got all of a sudden." Masaya requested sardonically.

A second or two passed.

Then Kuno's manic grin widened.

Like something had just clicked into place for him.

"With pleasure."

-[9]-

By this point, Masaya was pretty much of the understanding that Kuno's claims of secret and extraordinary strength were complete nonsense.

So, to say what happened next shocked him would've been quite the understatement.

At last, Kuno revealed his true ability—and made his move.

What the—?!

It happened so quickly.

That double take had cost him his one chance to react to that incoming attack…

…And Masaya Misaka was sent flying.

His vision spun, Ohm Sight calculations were missed, and his understanding of everything turned on its head as he crashed and tumbled along the very edge of the sand precipice, sending huge chunks of sand shearing off the wall like a calving iceberg and crashing down into the depths of the pit. He finally came to a stop, but the block of sand he had landed atop split off and began to slide diagonally down the wall. Without any real understanding of what was going on, and without any of the lucidity required to run Ohm Sight, Masaya's pure animal instincts kicked in and he thrust his left arm like a spear-tip hard and deep into the nearest stationary piece of sand wall he could find. The sand was more packed and rough than ideal; his bare hand was scratched and creaked as he forced it deeper into the wall. At the last possible moment, lacking any more arms to use, he managed to similarly drive his shoes into the sand as well, securely wedging himself into the stable wall as the sand block he'd rested upon just a moment ago fell away beneath him and plummeted to the bed of the foundation pit, bursting apart in an impressive display upon crashing hard at the bottom.

Despite everything, Masaya had just managed to avoid experiencing the same fate as Sano.

But that simply meant that Masaya was still at the top of the wall.

And that was where he still was.

What the hell was that?!

Masaya's lucidity returned to him, alongside a newfound pounding pain in his chest and shoulder. He immediately got to work processing what had just struck him and sent him flying.

He recalled it quite quickly.

He had been violently struck and blown away—by none other than Kuno himself in a ferocious body slam.

But how?!

It had all happened so quickly.

Kuno had crossed the distance of eight metres in less than a second.

On top of that, he had run straight towards Masaya, along the ever-unstable precipice. Every step he had taken had violently dislodged the sand there—but he had moved so quickly that it didn't even matter. By the time the sand had properly begun sliding away, he had already reached his target—and crashed into him hard with a brutal shoulder slam.

There was only one kind of esper ability that could do something like that.

He's a speedster?!

Those kinds of espers were absurdly rare to see in action. They certainly existed, but you didn't see them using those abilities for direct combat—pretty much ever.

Quite unfortunately for speed espers, those abilities worked nothing like they did in the superhero movies. Real life physics was not kind to the likes of them—the human body was simply not designed for such high acceleration and deceleration. Kicking off into a full-speed sprint from the get-go was likely to shatter your ankle, and striking someone at high speeds would break your arm just as much as it would break your opponent's face, perhaps more-so. Additionally, the capacity for high speed was useless if you couldn't get the leverage required to propel yourself to said speeds, let alone to change direction or slow down.

On top of all that, there was the issue of the mind needing to keep up with the body. Human reaction times were a serious limiting factor that put a hard cap on how well a speed ability could be used.

The best a speed esper could hope to use their ability for was travelling quickly without too many quick twists or turns, but even then, they weren't allowed to run at high speed along any highways, or any road where cars could hit them, or anywhere where they could collide with pedestrians—so, anywhere really, apart from the school running tracks or special cordoned-off races at the Daihasei sports festival.

Even after all of the very good reasons one never saw speed abilities used in combat, Kuno had done just that in spite of it all.

Wait. Where is he?!

Masaya cleared up his mind enough to get Ohm Sight working again. The volumetric image of his whole environment came back into view.

There he is!—Oh…

When he finally found his opponent, he simply looked up…

… for Kuno was right there—directly in front of him.

How long had he been there? Masaya couldn't tell. His attention had been on trying not to fall.

Kuno gazed down upon Masaya, who had desperately wedged himself into the sand wall like some kind of small lizard or insect.

Despite the serious dangers of fighting with a speed ability, Kuno appeared to be completely unharmed.

The tables had turned completely.

Kuno spoke down at that lower life form that squirmed about in the sand.

"Ha! The look on your face right now makes me glad I didn't go straight for a knockout strike right away. So, what do you think of my 'super overpowered level-4 ability', huh?"

With the monstrous grin he was giving, Masaya may as well have been a lowly insect, ready to be stomped.

And, that's exactly what Kuno did.

With a force and speed that should have been impossible for a human leg, Kuno stomped violently into the sand directly in front of Masaya.

The sand wall exploded.

Masaya's hold points in the sand were effectively disintegrated in an instant—and he slid down and plunged to the bottom of the foundation pit.

-[10]-

Masaya's twelve foot fall was ended when his body slammed into the disintegrated sand chunk that had dropped before him. He punched a comically Masaya-shaped crater at least a foot deep into slope of loosened and softened sand, before being dumped and rolled to the side by the further collapsing of the pile's side due to the impact, like a miniature version of mountain landslide. By the end of it, Masaya had become somewhat buried by a wave of sand.

Luckily for him, being buried twelve feet underground was in fact not twice as bad as being buried six feet below ground—a fall like this was easily survivable for most people.

He rolled over to escape from the mass of sand that had slid over his back, and out onto the bed of the foundation pit. The sand was more solid and compacted here, with lots of very small stone pieces strewn about—it had been a good thing he had not landed here instead.

He managed to rise to his feet, brushing away whatever sand he could with his one free arm, unfortunately being entirely unable to reach some spots with only a left arm available.

Masaya's gaze rose to the top of that sand wall, where he had just been, to where Kuno had just been—but not longer was.

What?! Where'd he go?

Kuno had disappeared from the pit's edge. As convenient as it would have been to assume that Kuno had proven his point, and thus had nothing more to do with Masaya—that most certainly would've been wishful thinking. Masaya tracked him down with Ohm Sight. He was a dozen or so metres from the cliff, walking away.

Wait, there's no way he's done already!

Until he one day found that 'hope' that he'd told Hisao Sagara about back on that day, Masaya was forced to consider himself a realist for the time being, and to him, that meant that a hard beating from an opponent who now had an absolute upper hand was rarely avoidable.

Even though from down here he no longer had a line of sight to where Kuno was on the upper level, Ohm Sight could monitor him clearly, so long as he remained in range. Masaya watched Kuno's movements intently, trying his best to catch what he was most likely to do next.

Until eventually, Kuno did do something.

He's turning around!

Kuno swivelled about on the spot to face the direction of the pit (and Masaya).

He took a step forward.

And then another.

His movement accelerated, but more than was usually possible for a sprinter—any sprinter. His dash towards the pit hit speeds closer to motorbikes than human beings.

And then, when he reached the edge of the pit…

… he jumped.

Are you kidding me?!

With his built-up momentum, he launched himself out over the edge, using the carved out chunk as a final foothold, and covering a greater distance than any long-jumper could ever hope to achieve.

What's more, he shot straight over Masaya's head…

… and landed at the bottom of the pit like it was nothing at all—right onto his two feet, stamping notably deep prints into the surface.

He simply stood there in a semi-squatted position in the centre of the foundation pit, as though he hadn't just perfectly landed a twelve-foot drop.

That's impossible.

A skilled parkour expert (or Ohm Sight user who happened to dabble in parkour) could perhaps manage a twelve-foot drop without injury by skilfully dropping into a roll upon landing at the bottom, so as to redirect the energy of the fall away from their body. That was the proper way to do it.

Kuno, on the other hand, had not done that.

Speedster or not, performing a landing like that should have shattered his ankles ninety-nine times out of a hundred.

Just how on Earth had he done it?

At last, he rose to a stand, turned, and spoke—but not to Masaya.

"Hey Sano, you farin' alright over there?"

Oh, that's right.

Masaya had more or less forgotten about Sano by this point, despite how close he still was. Without turning away his stare locked onto Kuno, Masaya looked back with Ohm Sight to where Sano was, behind him, and a few metres out from his left side. He observed as Sano caressed his temples while managing to lift himself into a seated position atop his throne of sand. He slumped forward, and let out quite the groan.

"Uhhhh…"

Masaya had landed atop a sandy slope, so most of his momentum had been safely redirected into a roll. Sano, on the other hand, had fallen flat on his back. Soft sandy landing or not, that was going to knock the wind out of you, and probably rattle your brain a good bit to boot. It was no surprise to see him in such a state, even though he seemed to be more or less uninjured—nothing more than some scratches or bruises, most likely.

"You need Waterleiner to come get you and add you to his corpse pile?" Kuno joked.

Sano's only response was a deep and exhausted exhale out the nose, followed by an eventual shake of his head.

Despite there now being the three of them down here, it was looking as though Masaya would be avoiding another one-on-two against both Kuno and Sano.

But that still meant that he still had to face that speedy lunatic once more.

As though sensing Masaya's attention returning to him, Kuno finally turned his head to address him.

"Alright, looks like it's still just you and me, you little freak." he smirked.

"Who're you calling a freak?!" retorted Masaya, "No human being should've been able to make a landing like that from such a height without some broken legs, speed ability or not."

Those words planted a growing grin on Kuno's face that he was having a hard time keeping to himself.

"You're absolutely right." he chuckled. "A simple speed ability user wouldn't have been able to make a drop like that."

Masaya was getting a bad feeling about what was probably coming next.

"But…" Kuno continued.

And then…

With a drop, then a dash, sand exploded behind Kuno as he closed the distance to Masaya in the blink of an eye. Masaya struggled to adjust Ohm Sight's distance focusing in order to keep Kuno in the highest detail possible. There were pros and cons to focusing on this. On the upside, for a split second, Masaya noticed something incredible with the higher fidelity that Ohm Sight afforded him now that Kuno was at such close range. Something downright preposterous was happening inside this boy's body.

On the downside, Masaya was focusing on something that wouldn't at all have helped him to avoid Kuno's fist, which now ploughed into his gut at twice the speed of any punch he'd seen from Kuno before.

"Ghah! Gck!"

Masaya felt tremendous pain spread through his abdomen as his feet left the ground. He was propelled backwards, as if he'd been struck by a charging bull. However, before his feet were even permitted to recontact the ground, another searing strike pelted into his back, easily cancelling that acceleration, and sending him now forward.

Impossibly, that attack had also come from Kuno, who had stepped around behind him as though it had been the easiest thing in the world.

More vicious strikes followed. Masaya was effectively being treated like glorified shuttlecock in a game of 'violence badminton'—where both teams consisted of only Kuno. Eventually, the juggling ceased, and Masaya was unceremonious dumped back onto the compacted sand ground. Those strikes had certainly hurt, but landing right onto his still-healing right arm reminded him that there was still worse pain to be had in the world.

Indeed, it could have been much worse. Kuno's punches had a lot of follow-through to them, so it seemed that pushing and knocking Masaya about had been their true purpose.

How he had knocked him around so effortlessly with hits from a single fist at a time was anyone's guess.

Kuno now towered over Masaya, who groaned and struggled to removed himself from the ground. Kuno's gaze descended upon his downed foe, and he finished what he had been about to say.

"But… I'm no simple speed ability user." his eyes gleamed, and his grin could hardly get any wider at this point.

His words were most certainly true.

And, by this point, Masaya was starting to get an idea as to what was truly going on with Kuno's power.

It was indeed no regular speed ability.

It was looking to be something much more outrageous.

Upon knowing that he had just locked himself into a world of hurt, destined to be juggled by lightning-fast fists, regardless of any attempts to thwart them, Masaya had instead chosen to hunker down and withstand the onslaught as well as he could; in that state, there was not a whole lot he could do otherwise—except for one thing.

He had focused Ohm Sight hard, sacrificing his long-range readings in order to get the maximum volumetric fidelity he could muster up close. Using it, he stared hard inside Kuno's body. What he discovered was nothing short of shocking.

"Yes, I understand it now." Uttered Masaya as slowly returned to his feet on creaky knees. "You're not just moving faster. You're actually fast-forwarding yourself!"

Indeed. While being beaten about, Ohm Sight had revealed to that to Masaya. Kuno's heartbeat, blood flow, breathing, muscle flexion and tension, his general inertia, and even the sloshing about of his lunch inside his stomach—all of them were moving at close to double speed. This wasn't something that could simply be replicated by moving about twice as fast through applying conventional forces to increase acceleration—everything was actually being fast-forwarded.

In response to Masaya's guess, Kuno tilted his head some, and chortled.

"Close… But not quite."

Not quite?

Masaya had been pretty sure that his assessment had been spot on.

What more is there to it?

As if sensing Masaya's internalised questions, Kuno elaborated.

"I'm sure you're aware of what happens if you accelerate yourself to relativistic speeds—or enter exceptionally strong gravity wells."

Masaya caught onto what he was referring to at once.

Bullshit!

There was no way.

Even so, Masaya hesitantly returned an answer he was hoping to not be confirmed as relevant.

"…Time dilation—in accordance with Einstein's theories of general and special relativity."

That answer appeared to very much satisfy Kuno, much to Masaya's chagrin.

"And so, what if there was an esper ability which could replicate said effects locally—say, applied to only a single person, and without the need for all of the relativistic acceleration deltas or outrageous gravity wells?"

Bull. Shit.

Even so, despite his colourful reservations to believing Kuno's words, Masaya had seen that ability in action. Such an explanation matched up perfectly with what he'd observed.

By manipulating time dilation on a completely local level to make your personal flow of time go (for instance) twice as fast as the rest of the world, you would effectively be given double the time to do something. On the other hand, the world itself would be left unaffected, so, from an outside perspective, you would indeed appear to be moving twice as quickly.

This would have some remarkable effects on physics interactions.

Force was equivalent to mass multiplied by acceleration. Dilating time to make one's local time flow twice as fast as the world would double their acceleration from the world's perspective, in effect doubling the magnitude of the forces one could apply to the world. Additionally, forces applied onto the user by the world would have their acceleration halved from the user's perspective. Those forces included gravity. This made even leaping from a twelve foot ledge a much more manageable when acceleration due to gravity was only 4.9 metres per second squared as far as the user was concerned, as opposed to the regular 9.8.

Additionally, this also effectively broke Newton's third law—that every action had an equivalent and opposite reaction. With such an ability, every action now only had half of an equivalent and opposite reaction, since incoming forces had their acceleration halved from the user's perspective. That was why Masaya had been so effectively beaten around like a human volleyball. His weight and inertia only mattered half as much to Kuno's fists. This also halved the recoil that Kuno would've felt from punching at such high speeds.

All told, as far as Masaya was concerned, an ability like manipulation of time dilation on an entirely local level was just disgusting.

Is there even any sort of counter-play to something like that?

That was, of course, assuming that Kuno wasn't just lying through his teeth.

He has to be talking out of his ass. He has to be!

And so, Masaya just stood there with gritted teeth, trying to internally debunk Kuno's indirect claims of being able to control the flow of time.

Isn't this just one step away from time-travelling espers?

Where do you draw the line of what's possible and not? Time travelling espers have to be impossible—surely.

But that still doesn't disprove time dilation abilities. Time dilation is an absolutely real phenomenon.

Spatial manipulation abilities exist, so why not time?

Everything he's done so far matches up with time dilation. It can't be anything else.

Masaya's internal armchair debating seemed to be testing Kuno's patience.

It was time for a more formal introduction.

"Local Time. Level-4. Officially recognised and recorded in Academy City's ability bank. You're welcome."

Even with an official-sounding name like that, Masaya struggled to accept it.

Such an ability was completely outrageous and overpowered.

But…

Even then…

That wouldn't have been the first time he'd encountered an ability like that.

Actually…

Compared to Tachikuro… or Amine… or…

Masaya made no effort to actually mentally conjure that final name. His subconscious still knew well to whom he was alluding.

Now was not the time for that sort of trouble.

That aside—Kuno's ability seemed a lot less broken in comparison to the other level-4s that Masaya knew. Even with time dilation on his side, Kuno would likely be in for an uphill battle against any of them. With that noted, the power-scaling at play seemed largely appropriate now.

But that still meant that, to a weakling on the lower end of level-3 like Masaya...

Yeah, I've got next to no shot here.

Wait… Shot?

The first smoking embers of a potential plan were sent alight inside Masaya's head.

Kuno, on the other hand, wasn't terribly interested in his opponent's seemingly-futile attempt to rationalise 3 as being greater than 4.

"Don't bother trying to work around it. I'll always be faster than anything you could hope to try." he declared. "You have no chance of landing a hit on me, so why don't you just stand still while I beat you to a pulp and finish you off!"

Huh? That can't happen!

Such an outcome was unacceptable. He could not let it end in such a way.

"Wait!" protested Masaya.

"…What." responded Kuno, sounding impatient.

In order to avoid being subjected to such an improper fate, Masaya was going to need an awfully good reason.

"Didn't you say that you'd let the other guy finish me off? The foreigner guy?"

Kuno paused on the spot, as though his brain had been replaced by a buffering wheel for a few seconds. With a couple of blinks, he snapped back to reality.

"We did agree on that, didn't we?" he conceded.

"From what I know of you guys so far, you're not the type to dishonour an agreement." Masaya noted. "Shouldn't you ask him whether he's still up for it?"

Kuno's eyebrow rose. Instead of going to the great effort of leaving the pit to ask Waterleiner directly, he turned to his (literally) fallen associate, who was much closer.

"Hey, Sano!"

From his slumped over state, Sano labouredly rose his head and met Kuno's gaze.

"…Eh?" was all it seemed he could manage.

"Do you reckon Waterleiner will care if I finished this little shit off, even though I said he could?" asked Kuno with a thumb predictably directed towards Masaya. "It's not like he really cares about all this stuff, right?"

Sano just stared back through spent eyes, as if to say "You're disturbing me right now for this?"

Alas, he said nothing, and eventually just shook just head with minimal vigour, seemingly more as a dismissal than a real answer.

But, unfortunately for Sano, Kuno wasn't done with him yet.

"You sure? I know he's more about helping us out and all, but that's also important. After everything he's done for me, I really don't want to go stealing his wins or anyt—.

Kuno paused, for Sano looked about to say something.

"What is it, Sano?" Kuno prompted his friend to be honest.

Instead, Sano, with difficulty, raised his right arm, and pointed a finger out in Kuno's general direction, or perhaps out past him; he was having trouble keeping it steady.

"H-he's… He's…"

"He's what, Sano?" probed Kuno. "Waterleiner's what?"

He's… get-getting… away."

"Ah."

Kuno whipped his head around to look behind him.

Masaya was making a run for it.

Kuno clicked his tongue.

"Oh, you little shit."

-[11]-

Ohm Sight had allowed Masaya to get quite good at the whole 'sneaking around' gig.

Unfortunately, that didn't apply to the 'going faster' one.

Kuno activated his ability, the aptly-named 'Local Time', and closed that twenty metre gap in just under three seconds.

But Masaya was ready, for he had a plan.

During his escape, he had scooped up some loose sand from the bed of the pit.

But it wasn't the sand itself he was after—those cheap tricks he'd used on Oti weren't going to work on Kuno.

There was something else in the sand that Masaya needed.

No matter how fast Masaya moved or swung a strike, Kuno would always be faster. On top of that, Kuno's ability meant that Masaya's attacks only hit him half as hard from his perspective— if he ever landed a hit at all. All in all, for a brawler like Masaya, there was no real way to win here.

So, in that case, what if Masaya wasn't fighting like a brawler?

What if he fought with something fast enough that even Kuno couldn't out-speed it? Fast enough that even getting hit by it at half-acceleration was still going to be a very bad day?

Something like a gun?

Unfortunately, down here at the bottom of a dirty old pit, Masaya's luck of finding a gun was going to approximate to absolutely none.

On the other hand, luckily for him, he had everything he needed for the next-best thing.

Kuno shot towards him shockingly fast, pulling back a devastating fist to use at the perfect moment. Masaya twisted back towards the incoming Kuno as fast as he could. Even though there was no time for Masaya to fully turn around and counter that strike, he didn't need to.

Masaya only needed to turn around halfway to have a clear firing line—for that very small, sharp flake of stone currently pulled back in the elastic strap of his arm brace. As this was a dig site, small chips of stone were plentiful in the sand, especially after all the buried boulders that had needed removing had been broken down and dealt with.

At a size like this, they made for ideal slingshot ammunition, especially once Kuno had advanced to within only a foot or two of Masaya.

And so, Masaya simply let go.

The elastic strap snapped taught, and the stone flake was sent flying—straight towards Kuno's eye.

The sound a very small impact loaded with kinetic energy sounded out.

"Agk! Fu—!"

At such close range, getting hit in the eye by a slingshot strike was not going to be something that could be dodged, even if it was moving at half-speed from your point of view.

Also, regardless of whether it hit you at three metres per second or six, if it hit you in the eye, it would be a very bad day indeed.

Kuno's strike was aborted mid-swing to clasp his hand over his right eye. To make matters worse for him, Masaya completed his twist, and drove his left fist (which had already been pulled back to prime the makeshift slingshot) directly into Kuno's jaw.

Masaya's fist landed hard. It seemed that Kuno was forced to drop the Local Time calculations in response to the sudden pain in his eye, so the force of Masaya's strike had not been halved from Kuno's perspective.

In response to both attacks that had struck him in such quick succession, Kuno stumbled, lost his balance, and fell flat onto his butt.

"The fuck was that?!" he shouted.

Masaya responded only with a snide smirk.

Masaya's plan had been executed absolutely flawlessly.

But it had certainly been a gamble.

With such imperfect tools and ammunition at his disposal, it had been very difficult to perfectly chart the trajectory of the projectile. Masaya needed to absolutely maximise Ohm Sight's fidelity in the ultra-short range. Any fluctuations caused by the shape of the stone bullet, or the potentially adverse movements of the elastic strap across his body, or the finest change in movement from his fingers releasing the elastic all needed to be identified and accounted for with perfect precision.

Luckily for a level-3 Ohm Sight user like Masaya, such ultra-precise readings were just barely manageable to calculate the exact trajectory needed (or close enough) at such a close range. If Kuno had been at even only twice the distance, still less than two metres away, then Masaya would've been working with an unacceptable margin of error, and could have wasted his one and only chance to land the shot.

But still.

Masaya had landed a good, clean, and very effective shot on a level-4 esper in a one-on-one fight.

That was a very first for Masaya Misaka.

As he watched Kuno scrambling to return to his feet, a dangerous idea began to float up within Masaya's mind.

It was a ridiculous, absurdly dangerous—but oh-so irresistible idea.

Something clicked into place within his mind, and a diabolical smirk began to crawl its way across Masaya's face.

He'd caught sight of his forbidden fruit. It called to him…

…and today, for the first time ever, he was going to claim it:

Outright victory against a level-4 esper.

-[11]-

His objectives were set. He knew what needed to be done—and he was going to do it, come hell or high water.

Masaya's facial expression froze, as though he was once again donning his stone mask.

This time, however, that stone mask bore a wide grin.

Kuno was once again on steady feet, clasping his hand over his scratched right eye, and glaring death at Masaya with his left.

Now was not the time for words. This was an all-out clash between two young men with their dignity and futures on the line. Right now, they each wanted nothing more in this world than to bring the other down.

Nothing else mattered.

For what reason had they initially ended up fighting each other, again?

To Masaya, Kuno was going down—decisively. He had to. He felt as though his very being was being funnelled into this moment—that everything he had dealt with and suffered had been for the purpose of growing his strength to one day prove his worth—right here, right now.

If he won here, he would have achieved his first real victory that actually mattered: to conclusively defeat a level-4 in one-on-one combat.

If he could do it once, then perhaps he could do it again.

Just imagining the possibilities of that were utterly euphoric to Masaya.

Tachikuro.

If Masaya won here, then maybe that tyrant would learn to think twice before thrashing Masaya around like a ragdoll whenever he willed it.

Amine.

If Masaya won here, then maybe that crook cop would be a bit more hesitant to kowtow to Tachikuro's will if he knew that there was actually a risk involved.

And…

… Her.

Masaya felt so invigorated and exhilarated by sheer possibility, the first he'd felt in such a long time, that he didn't even feel any terror at alluding to that person in this moment.

With her, if Masaya defeated a level-4 esper here and now, the possibilities were practically endless.

But there was only one that he was truly interested in.

Nothing was going to change unless he proved his strength, reclaimed his position…

… and made it as though that incident that had destroyed him so severely…

…had in fact utterly failed to do so all along.

Masaya was beyond ecstatic.

Finally!

He could at last see a way out from his miserable stagnation—his pit of utter and endless defeat.

A road to a brighter future was at last within sight.

All he needed to do to take the first step…

…and that was to mercilessly beat the level-4 esper Kuno into the dirt.

What a beautifully simple win-condition! Masaya rejoiced to himself.

He felt as though he could feel paradise was almost within his grasp.

"Hey, you little shit! Don't go thinking you've won from landing just one stupid hit!" a voice shouted out. "Fucking retard! I'll wipe that dumbass grin off your face!"

Of course.

Someone still stood in the way of Masaya finally reaching that paradise—and he wasn't out of the fight yet.

Not by a long shot.

Kuno lunged forward with Local Time, winding up a nasty punch—but he threw it a split-second too early, and Masaya was able to avoid it by quickly leaning back in quick recoil.

With only one currently-usable eye, Kuno's depth perception had been severely compromised. Masaya welcomed that development.

Thinking quickly, Masaya pelted the remaining stone chips in his hand directly into Kuno's face, forgoing using the slingshot—his window of opportunity for a counter was simply too narrow. Kuno tried to block the incoming small rocks and grit with his left hand, but with his dominant arm having already been put towards a wasted strike, and his depth perception crippled, there was little chance of him intercepting the projectiles before they hit his face and sent grit into his remaining good eye—Local Time or not.

"Shit! Bastard!"

Masaya managed to recoil enough to avoid the wild flailing of Kuno's arm, making sure to retreat a good few steps and scoop up some more 'ammunition' while he still had the chance.

Kuno recovered his vision enough to lock onto Masaya once more. He darted forth with Local Time, straight towards Masaya, this time in a shoulder charge.

At first glance, this might have looked primitive and brutish, but by this point in the fight, Kuno had just been severely punished for attempting a strike from directly behind. Additionally, he had to have realised by now that his depth perception was currently too unreliable to rely on throwing punches right now.

To top it all off, a charging strike like that had already worked wonders for Kuno before, up atop the edge of the pit.

Masaya knew that Kuno had indeed picked the most appropriate attack here. If Masaya hadn't had the elastic of his arm brace right now, Masaya wouldn't have had much of a chance to quickly counter such a strong attack coming in at double speed.

But, right now, Masaya was not completely helpless.

He could still fight back, even against such an outrageous ability.

Kuno's charging strike was less than a second away now.

Masaya threw his body back through the air while loading the small pointed stone shard into the elastic. He twisted his body so that the elastic that he was pulling like a bowstring with his left arm would line up perfectly with Kuno's position.

His target: Kuno's left eye.

If he missed this shot, then his chances of seeing his glorious future paradise would fall away from him—perhaps forever.

He could never allow that to happen.

Right now, Masaya was like a young man possessed.

He sent Ohm Sight into overdrive. His trajectory calculations required absolute precision. He kept track of the exact positions and movements of everything. Every moving part of his slingshot assembly, as well as its target, needed to be mapped with perfect precision for the shot to have any chance of properly striking its target with any acceptable accuracy.

All of the conductivity readings he used to make up his volumetric map of the world were double-checked—triple-checked. He was pushing his absolute limits with Ohm Sight right now. His brain ached like crazy at having to maintain the ridiculous amount of calculations he needed to perform.

Even then, his accuracy was still not optimal.

Masaya didn't have any other choice. His window of opportunity was closing right now.

Dammit!

He released his hold on the elastic, and internally screamed an instantaneous prayer to God as the stone bullet was sent zipping through the air.

Shit!

Even before the projectile reached its target, Masaya's Ohm Sight was showing him that the bullet was already straying from its ideal course.

The stone projectile left a scratch as it struck Kuno on the cheek barely a centimetre or two below his left eye.

Masaya's one shot had been wasted.

But.

"Ack!" yelped Kuno in response to the shot, twisting his head to the left in recoil, breaking his line of sight with Masaya, if only for a split-second.

Had God just answered his call?

Masaya's one chance at beating a level-4 and setting off towards his paradise was not gone just yet.

He had sacrificed everything his position had allowed him in order to line up that strike. He was currently midair, falling onto his back.

Acting on pure instinct, and with every spare millisecond he could get, Masaya repositioned his foot to be right where Kuno's was supposed to land.

Still dashing in at double speed, Kuno's foot landed hard atop Masaya's. Crushing pain shot through his foot, like a horse had just stomped on it. However, standing on Masaya's foot proved to be terrible for Kuno's balance.

Before Masaya knew it, Kuno had lost control of his centre of gravity and crashed hard into him—both were sent rolling across the sandy stony ground.

With Ohm Sight and Local Time at their disposals, Masaya and Kuno quickly regained control of themselves in their rolls. Unfortunately for Kuno, he had built up a lot of momentum, which was very difficult to eliminate in a roll with the poor traction of only sand beneath him, Local Time or not. The lower gravity from his perspective also greatly impeded his efforts to slow himself any quicker than usual.

In other words, Local Time afforded him effectively advantages as he rolled across the sand.

And so, Masaya's roll actually came to a stop before Kuno's did.

Masaya recognised an opportunity when he saw it. He would not waste what luck, or perhaps God, had given him.

This is it!

Masaya had been afforded one final opportunity to take that first step towards his paradise.

It was as though his paradise was also calling out to him.

He quickly scrambled to his feet with a small stone in his hand as Kuno's roll at last came to a stop.

There were three metres between them.

Working as quickly as he could, Masaya dedicated every last fibre of his existence to loading and drawing that one miracle shot in his improvised elastic slingshot and orienting his body accordingly such that Kuno would be to his right—and squarely in the firing line.

Kuno was now rapidly rising back to his feet. Masaya could not allow his opponent to gain stable footing. He needed to act right now.

If he could just temporarily blind Kuno completely, then victory here would be a foregone conclusion.

This was his one and only chance to definitively defeat a level-4 and get his life back.

He drove Ohm Sight to its limits—no, he had to go beyond his limits.

That was the only way. He had no time to consider the consequences.

A distance of three metres was simply too far for anything less, and there was no time to lessen that gap without wasting his one and only chance. There were too many variables, too many moving parts. Masaya needed to be able to keep track of all of them at a microscopic level and modify his trajectory calculations accordingly and perfectly.

There was nothing else for it; his precision needed to be absolute.

Kuno's one open eye came into a clear and open shot. If Masaya fired now with the tension he'd built up, Kuno would be left unable to block it before it struck him—even with his Local Time.

More precision! Calculate faster!

The variability of the projectile's potential flight path was still too wide. His brain felt like it was being wrung out like a wet towel—but he pushed it further still.

Every variable needed to be accounted for. He squeezed his countless conductivity readings closer and closer together, and pumped out the calculations to generate more and more, and faster and faster. This was far and away the most readings he'd ever kept count of at any one time. There was a very good reason why he'd never made it this far before now, but that didn't matter right now.

Absolutely nothing else mattered right now.

He pounded every single conductivity reference coordinate with more focus, with more authority. He forced them to keep place. No positional margin of error was to be accepted from any of them.

The possible trajectories of the stone bullet became more and more precise.

MORE!

His window of opportunity was closing fast—only hundredths of a second remained before he would lose it forever.

But right now, Masaya needed that victory more than he had ever needed anything in his entire life.

He pushed the limits of Ohm Sight one last time—consequences be damned.

And so, in the very following instant, the clash between level-3 Ohm Sight esper Masaya Misaka and his opponent, level-4 Local Time esper Kuno, was decided...

…and instantly concluded.

AFTERWORD

Hello again, dear reader.

Welcome back to the latest chapter of A Certain Magical Index PLUS: [FALSE CONDUCT]

This chapter is all action. That was not the intention. This fight scene was initially supposed to just be the first half or so of the chapter, with some very cool character moments coming afterwards. Those character moments will have to wait for next chapter, as the fight scene accidentally became 17k words long, because I kept wanting to add cool sequences to it.

In other words, whoops I split the chapter again.

When planning my big action sequences, I usually just have a start point and an end point mapped out— but just about anything can happen in between. Even I often don't know what it'll be before I write the scenes. I almost feel like I'm placing myself into Masaya's shoes: he's got an end goal in mind, but he needs to come up with the ways he'll actually win with some creative thinking. He'll use absolutely anything at his disposal, just like I do when writing his fights.

The whole slingshot sequence came to me as I was stretching my legs after so long sitting down wondering how I should move the fight along, then I remembered his arm sling probably has some elastic in it. Making the foundation pit itself into a cool plot device to use in the fight likewise came to me rather spontaneously as I was writing. Exploring use of environmental, terrain, and positional advantages and disadvantages in combat can be quite mentally stimulating while writing. Hopefully you prefer this sort of extended fight with multiple stages and sequences over a much more straightforward one, such as what I initially had in mind.

We met a bunch of new characters this chapter, the six high school boys: Kuzan, Kuno, Zemonata, Oti, Sano, and Waterleiner. They're an odd bunch. What do you think of them? Their interactions amongst one another are certainly as strange as you'd expect from rambunctious esper high-school boys. A few of them we may even become story mainstays, who knows?

All that aside, Masaya was willing to crank Ohm Sight up to eleven and beyond once he realised what was truly at stake in this fight. Was that indeed the 'hope' he's been searching for this whole time?

More importantly, at the end of it all, who won?! After all the cliffhanging I put in the middle of the chapter, I put some more (not so literally this time) at the end too.

As always, feel free to share your thoughts about the story so far. What are you liking so far? What are you looking forward to seeing? Don't hesitate to let me know.

-Lacien