Bonus: The Grave Dilemma④

The sadistic queen who had just thrown them an impossible order, now completely unlike her earlier demure behavior, drove Frenda and Hamazura forward like prey on the run.

"Come on, asking us to smash that thing is seriously impossible…" "Why can’t we just punch the ringleader in the face instead???" The two pathetic fools began whining, but when the queen pulled out her ultimate weapon—『some kind of whip that looks like it uses amazing science』—they seemed to realize resistance was futile. Without further protest, they quickly mounted the bike and began their climb up the mountain of death.

"Shit shit shit shit!!!! I was an idiot!! I got swept up in the mood!! Hey, what the hell do we do, Frenda!? Because of you we’ve gotta destroy that thing now!! That monster of a weapon!!!!"

"Shut the hell up already! Either way, unless we smash that thing, we can’t take back the delicate science that 'Kihara' evolved with malice! In the end, destroying it was always the only path forward! So stop whining!!"

Smack! Frenda slugged Hamazura in the back as he drove the bike, then added,

"In the end, if you really hated this, you could’ve just knocked me off right here and ridden the bike back down the mountain. The fact you haven’t already shows exactly what’s going on in your gut, you wannabe delinquent."

"Shut up!! That crocodile-tear act was cheating!! You think Hamazura Shiage, elite delinquent, is the kind of loser who’d turn tail just because some cute girl puts on a pitiful face!? Hell no!!"

"In the end, Hamazura, you’re gross."

"Stop that!! If my tears blur my vision right now, we’ll both be dead!!"

Bickering noisily, the two idiots rode the bike up the mountain.

The monstrous thing, already more than fifty meters in diameter, had stabilized its form completely and was advancing across the slope like a king.

"……Bisai said that thing used microbial tech, right?"

Hamazura muttered under his breath.

Their source had been Bisai, just before she left. According to her: 『If that thing manifested as a result of absorbing my science, then microbial control technology must be part of its core system. Of course, just that alone couldn’t create such a monster… but this “Doppelgänger” supposedly already had a technique for freely manipulating matter—something called “Possession,” right? It’s very likely that ability fused with my science to create this result.』 On that point, both Frenda and Hamazura agreed.

"…Still, for the microbes we were researching to get hijacked by a robot and bare their fangs at humanity… it’s like 'Revenge of the Microbes.'"

"Revenge of the Microbes? What’s that?"

"A movie. I watched it with Kinuhata the other day, some C-class flick. The story was about microbes stored in a lab spreading worldwide after an AI goes berserk."

"Hmm…"

Frenda gave a half-hearted response, then said,

"…'Microbe Revenge,' huh."

"Huh?"

"Enemy code name. In the end, it’s hard to fight something that doesn’t have a name, right?"

As Hamazura stood dumbfounded at the sudden naming, Microbe Revenge began to move.

From its sides, four hook-like arms extended forward. And at the points those arms indicated, a main cannon constructed itself.

It was a phenomenon one could almost call magic.

A chunk of the mountain had been gouged away and reshaped into the form of a massive cannon. No scientific technology could replicate such a feat.

But Frenda recognized this ability. In fact, she had experienced it before.

"A r-railgun…!? The Railgun!?"

"Hah? Frenda, what the hell are you talking about? Isn’t the Third currently with that underground Fourth, Another Four!?"

"No… there’s a loophole."

Speaking with a shiver, Frenda recalled the battle during the Daihaseisai. Kihara Gensei had fought using borrowed abilities via the Level Upper, and word was he was doing something similar in tonight’s battlefield as well.

In other words, within Academy City’s "underground," techniques to use others’ abilities really did exist. And if so… then borrowing Railgun’s ability specifically would hardly be impossible.

"Abilities… sometimes they can be used by people other than the actual espers themselves. In the end, I think he’s exploiting that loophole."

"Even so!! No matter how monstrous the Third is, there’s no way she could control a machine that big! Do you have any idea how much magnetic force it would take just to sustain something of that size!? Even if you could shape it, look at those arms! They’re a hundred meters long!! And if you include the cannon, that’s over two hundred meters!! There’s no way even the Third could extend her magnetism that far!!"

Indeed—Doppelgänger was operating Microbe Revenge through a trick much like Rensa: setting the "ability eruption point" to itself. In that respect, Frenda’s reasoning was correct.

But at the same time, Hamazura’s point also struck true.

If Doppelgänger was using Misaka’s ability, normally the eruption point should have been located at Doppelgänger itself. If it sat at the center of the body, then yes, its fifty-meter diameter would fall within range. But with those arms extending a hundred meters, and the cannon reaching nearly two hundred meters, maintaining precise control over such distances—and even forming a cannon at the far end—was an extraordinary feat, one even the actual Third would struggle to achieve.

"………"

Frenda had no answer to that contradiction.

Nor did Hamazura seem inclined to deny the reality before them, and he let the conversation drop.

Then—

The "main cannon" at the tip of the arm swiveled with a griinn!!

Apparently, this magnetic cannon could operate beyond the normal mechanical range of motion. The two shrank back for an instant, fearing it was aimed at them—but Microbe Revenge had its sights on a different enemy.

Ahead of it stood Kihara Gensei, locked in battle with the decoys.

"Ah, cra—!!!!"

Frenda had no time to say more.

A formless violence invaded the depths of their skulls.

Chapter Three — Souls Are Worthless, Double(Square)_Faith.
Bonus: The Grave Dilemma >>>>>District 21 Area — Ryoko Soshi Duel for Control, ④

It took them a few seconds just to realize that the true nature of the violence was the ka-BOOM!!! of an explosion.

The only reason the two of them weren’t thrown off the bike was Frenda. Because she covered both of Hamazura’s ears a moment before the blast, Hamazura was able to hit the brakes in the nick of time.

If not for that, Frenda and Hamazura would have been sent tumbling down the mountainside by now, their bodies sandpapered raw against the rock.

Still, they didn’t escape without injury.

"Ah, gu—…uggh…"

Because Frenda had covered Hamazura’s ears, she herself had taken the full brunt of the violent blast. She collapsed as if thrown off the suddenly stopped bike and was barely conscious. Her eyes drifted into empty space and her mouth hung open, powerless.

Hamazura kicked the bike aside and hauled Frenda up.

"Ya— you idiot!! What the hell are you doing, you—!! Hey! Frenda!! You okay? Your eardrums aren’t busted or anything, right!?"

Hamazura immediately slapped Frenda’s cheek to rouse her.

He put a hand to his own ears; there was no blood. Hamazura let out a relieved breath, but—this situation was already no joking matter.

Just one blow from that main cannon, and the roar in its wake, at point-blank range, had put them in this state. This was no longer the realm of direct confrontation; even the echo of the echo could kill a person. It quite literally wasn’t a fight.

"…!! Gah, cough! Cough cough!!"

"Frenda!! Are you okay!? Can you speak!?"

"Don’t shout, my head’s pounding… Damn it, what the hell was that… If Gensei took that full force, he’d be erased without a trace…"

Frenda, who seemed to have survived by the skin of her teeth, pushed herself up and looked at the sky.

As for Gensei, he apparently wasn’t the sort to be defeated by that single strike. He seemed to have warded off the blow with something like a wall of light—but even that defense didn’t look easy.

He’d paid a heavy price to repel that attack; his stance was badly shaken and he looked to be barely holding on, doing all he could to avoid being sent flying by the recoil.

"That’s bad. If it keeps firing in rapid succession, we’ll be done for, won’t we?"

"Surely the side operating Microbe Revenge knows that. If they’re not firing, there must be some reason they can’t."

"…True."

Whatever design philosophy lay behind it, the main cannon formed both shell and barrel through magnetic force.

From its shape, it was quite possible its rate of fire was limited.

"Also, those ominous arms are suspicious. If those arms are responsible for creating the barrel, then if we destroy the arms, they won’t be able to form new barrels, right?"

"—Which means, if we could somehow get close, we could plant a bomb and blow the arms off…"

But that was almost impossible.

Microbe Revenge was circling the mountain at several hundred kilometers per hour with footwork like a professional boxer.

The mountain-side trees were being knocked down, scattered and burned to ash. The armor-like lower structure reshaped itself to fit the slope as it moved. After Microbe Revenge passed, the mountain was left as if someone had painted it—wildfires everywhere.

"Are you kidding? Trying to approach a monster that basically is a wildfire. You’d end up a charred sculpture more tragic than an incompetent young wife’s failed rolled omelet."

"What’s that, Hamazura? Are you into the ‘young wife’ type?"

"No!! I object on the grounds that that’s deeply dishonorable!!"

Frenda cracked a joke and then said,

"Okay, let’s try something that doesn’t involve getting close."

She slid a party favor out from beneath her skirt.

It was a handheld rocket firework painted with a shark face. Pulling the safety pin sent it forward with a burst of gas; it would fly ahead and explode on impact.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!? Are you serious, Frenda? Even if that hits, it won’t dent the armor! You’d just be a pesky fly to a giant, that’s all!"

"If you aim for the armor, sure. But—at the end of the day—the target is the 'feet'!!"

With a click, Frenda set her aim at Microbe Revenge’s base.

A thunderous roar like rolling stormclouds echoed from the armor-like lower section, and the trees beneath were being burned away—but the very bottom clearly floated above the ground.

Not by a few centimeters—this was obvious even from several hundred meters away: a definite levitation. And judging from the Third’s ability being used, Frenda had already read the machine’s mode of movement.

"Electrostatic. Like a linear motorcar: magnets lifting that massive yokozuna body by hundreds of tons. But because of that, the feet must take a heavy load. Given it reshapes itself to match the mountain, they must be extremely sensitive about weight distribution control."

Frenda closed one eye to take final aim,—

"If that’s the case, then it inevitably means the structural integrity there is weaker than the rest!! And if the ground beneath it suddenly collapses, the inertia of an F1 car-level speed is going to bare its fangs all at once!!"

Whoosh!!

The launched rocket round shot straight and true, sucking itself into Microbe Revenge’s leg propulsion unit—then BOOM!!!! exploded in a blast.

Its electrostatic propulsion system may have spelled its own misfortune. The static charge released into the ground triggered a sympathetic detonation with the rocket, causing part of its propulsion system to burst apart in a flamboyant explosion of fire.

"Yes!! Nailed it!! …It slammed the brakes pretty hard, but in the end, that leg is toast, that’s what—"

Frennda pumped her fist in triumph—but then, her words died.

Beneath the torn armor plating lay an obscene mass of "slime mold webbing."

The grotesque sight could only be compared to the flayed face of a human. Feeling the uncanny dread lurking beneath what had once seemed clean and orderly, Frennda froze with a sharp intake of breath.

And in that single instant, the slime mold webbing crackled with electricity.

Crackle-crackle!! Sparks leapt, and the shattered armor slid back into place, welded together in the blink of an eye by continuous arcs of lightning discharge.

In less than two seconds, the destruction Frennda had inflicted was effortlessly undone.

"……………………"

A harsh bzzzt of static-laced sound came from Microbe Revenge.

Apparently, the monster weapon had even been equipped with a system for dialogue. Surely, that was intended as some crucial function to achieve world peace.

"You’ve been scurrying about like an insect for a while now…"

With a grinding creak-creak, the main cannon swiveled toward them.

"Noisy little pest. I should just dispose of you."

"UooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!"

Naturally, Hamazura gunned the bike with everything he had.

Frennda clung desperately to his back as he hurled a furious scream at her.

"This is so freaking hopeless!!! We’re the ones being targeted!! What the hell were you thinking, you idiot!! You take care of it on your own! I’m not dying in a smoldering crater, vaporized by some monster weapon’s main cannon with not even a corpse left behind!!"

"Idiot!! Get a grip, Hamazura! C-c-calm down!! If it actually fired that kind of main cannon directly at us, the whole mountain would collapse, obviously! And when that happens, it would topple over and kick the bucket too! Which means that thing’s just a bluff! A scare tactic! We’re safe!!!"

"If you really thought it was safe, then why the hell are you firing off rocket rounds like crazy, huh!?! All you’re doing is desperately throwing up smokescreens, that’s what it looks like!!"

Hamazura’s voice cracked in half-panic as Frennda kept popping out rocket fireworks and launching them one after another—

KABOOOOM!!!!

Suddenly the ground erupted, and the momentum of their speeding bike hurled both Hamazura and Frennda into an unwanted flight through the sky.

Hamazura briefly thought it was a landmine, and it wasn’t an unreasonable assumption—such was the abruptness of the strike.

"…Ugh, damn it, feels like I burned through a lifetime’s worth of luck in just one day…"

"This is the kind of crap we’re stuck fighting. In the end, this so-called ‘silver lining’ still adds up to like minus one billion in bad luck…"

The only stroke of luck was that the two of them managed to land relatively softly in a thicket after being blown away.

On top of that, no follow-up attack came. That was thanks to Frennda’s reckless barrage of rocket fire. Among her rockets were rounds loaded with chaff for jamming radio signals, and by firing them indiscriminately, she managed to disrupt Microbe Revenge’s detection systems. Combined with the cover of the thicket, their survival was successfully hidden.

"But something’s off… Back there, I was panicking, but I still think I wasn’t wrong. If it had really fired a blast of that output straight into the mountainside, the whole slope would’ve been blown away. …No, what’s weird is that, even if its shot went wide, as long as it was roughly aimed in our direction, there’s no way we’d have gotten away with nothing more than this much damage…"

That’s when Frennda realized it.

Through the smoke and fire, she could make out Microbe Revenge’s main cannon.

It had shrunk—to barely ten meters in length.

"I get it now…!! If the barrel itself is generated by magnetism, then of course its size can change too…!!"

In other words, Microbe Revenge didn’t need to worry about collateral destruction when firing its main cannon.

It was a weapon designed with one goal in mind—fighting in mountainous terrain, pushed to its absolute extreme.

"What the hell are we supposed to do now…! It’s not just some giant cannon that can blow away an entire mountain. If it can resize itself down to a man-killer that punches clean through a single person, then there’s no loophole left! There’s no way in hell we can destroy this thing…!!"

Hamazura’s voice trembled as he spat the words, his face drained of all color. He hadn’t given up, but fear had completely robbed his expression of blood.

Frennda, by contrast, was calm. Or rather, she was weighing Hamazura’s analysis in her head.

A mechanism that could alter the cannon’s size through magnetism.
A static-electric propulsion system that could adapt its form to the shape of the slope.
Self-repairing armor that instantly restored itself after being damaged.

Taking all of those cards into account, Frennda spoke.

"…I’ve got a plan. So in the end, Hamazura… will you entrust your life to me?"