Part 5
(November 10 – Oahu – New Honolulu International Airport Central Lobby – From security camera footage.)
Kamijou and Mikoto had looked for souvenirs in the duty-free shops before even taking a step outside the airport, but Kamijou suddenly made a strange sound and ran off after reading an email on his cell phone. He must not have known the dangers that a major gun-toting country could hold.
"Gyaaaaaaahhh!? Th-this goes well beyond misfortune!!"
"Wait, wait! Are you really going to cut across here!? The announcement about the waxing was a hidden anti-terrorism warning!!"
"I just got an email saying Birdway set up a bomb!!"
Of course, no one would go out of their way to approach an area being odorously waxed by a lawnmower-like device. If one thought about it calmly, it was strange how airport workers were watching alertly from the outer edge of the area being waxed, but the people who had believed the announcement did not seem to sense any danger.
The warning signs and the foul odor were enough for most of the people to naturally distance themselves from the area.
Meanwhile, Kamijou unhesitatingly charged straight into the area covered in half-dried wax.
Mikoto grimaced at the smell and looked down at the clothes she was wearing, but continued on after seeming to have given up on something.
The workers on the outer edge of the area frantically tried to stop them, but the two ignored their shouts.
As he ran on ahead, the boy said, "Honestly, I can't tell who the real terrorists are here. …Am I supposed to stop Gremlin or do something about this suitcase?"
"Is that the suitcase you mean?"
A number of men were surrounding a large suitcase. They seemed to be airport security, so the police must not have arrived yet.
Instead of heading straight for the suitcase, Kamijou hid behind a nearby pillar.
Mikoto followed him.
"Is Gremlin the group behind all this? Do you think they're mixed in with those men?"
"…I'm not so immersed in that side of things to know if someone's a magician just by looking at them."
Kamijou glanced around and spotted Hamazura and Misaka Worst peering from behind a corner about seventy meters away.
He took that to mean Accelerator was probably close by as well.
Kamijou pulled out his cell phone and moved his thumb across its keys.
"Who are you calling?"
"Birdway."
After the phone rang a few times, she answered.
"I've found the suitcase you set up. There are some people who look like airport security around it. Do you really think Gremlin will show up?"
"They already have."
"?"
Kamijou frowned and Birdway continued.
"They're having unexpected troubles on their end, too. They're trying to make it past the guards using a makeshift spell, but analyzing and dispelling it is easy enough."
"…Are they altering their appearance? Is someone from Gremlin mixed in with those workers…?"
"Not there."
He heard a sound over the phone, as if she had clapped her hands together.
Immediately afterwards, Kamijou felt a chill as around twenty figures appeared out of thin air.
They were all Western men. They wore the formal dress clothes of Birdway's subordinates.
"We are not the main dish," said the man in the center, Mark Space, before he pointed toward an area with nothing in it.
"She is the one you need to focus on."
"!?"
Nothing had been there just a moment before, and there was nothing there to hide behind, and yet a girl now stood there.
She had blonde hair and white skin. The lines of her body were slender and beautiful, and she had a well-featured face. She looked less like a natural person and more like an ideal girl from a picture book. If you were to describe her, she looked like a princess, though it was mainly her clothing that accomplished that impression.
She wore an odd dress that seemed to be made of countless thin membranes placed one on top of another. The lines of her body were clearly visible through it.
The one aspect of her that did not look straight out of a fairy tale was the figure-correcting underwear binding her entire body, like a diving suit that lay at the core of her elegant dress. It was a type of modern corset that wouldn't be surprising to see on an infomercial.
She was a magician from Gremlin.
This was no longer conjecture or a story heard from someone else. For the first time, Kamijou saw the true enemy before his eyes.
What he felt was not an obvious sense of intimidation.
If he had to put a name to it, it would be a sense of something foreign.
He had an unpleasant feeling that something there should not have existed. He felt somewhat anxious, as if overlooking her now would bring great disaster later. Fear and concern were part of a life form's reaction to danger, but what he was experiencing felt purer than that. Instead of the powerful emotion of fear causing him confusion, the raw feeling of danger forcibly honed his thoughts.
The knowledge that she was a member of the organization that had unhesitatingly tried to drop Radiosonde Castle on Academy City gave rise to a sense of rational hatred within him.
"(…Did Birdway forcibly dispel all invisibility spells in the area or something?)"
The area of effect had likely been the entire central lobby.
That was why the men in black suits, who had set up the suitcase, had appeared along with the magician from Gremlin.
The Gremlin magician looked down at her hands and feet as if to check whether she could be seen by others.
However, she did not seem panicked at all.
"Old lady of the pumpkin carriage," she said in French, as if singing. Her pure voice sounded like that of a fairy tale princess. "Please give me the test of the glass slippers. Please give me the strict and cruel test of the glass slippers that dropped my selfish and dishonest mother and sisters to the bottom of the pit of despair."
Immediately afterwards, a supernatural phenomenon occurred.
Part 6
(November 10 – Oahu – New Honolulu International Airport – From the security camera in a vending machine.)
Hamazura's eyes opened wide as he peered around the corner.
The first thing he noticed was an unpleasant noise, like cracks running through glass.
"What's with them…?" asked Kuroyoru in a wondering tone, while being held by the nape of the neck by an electricity-type esper who was looking for an opening.
It had happened just after the twenty or so men in black suits had charged at the girl in the dress while ignoring the airport workers, who were overcome with surprise at their sudden appearance.
Every single one of the men tripped and fell to the floor that was wet with wax. It was as if they had run across an invisible wire or some other kind of trap.
That was how it appeared to be, but that was not what had truly occurred.
Hamazura heard a few groans, and then the men let out even greater cries of pain. They were all grabbing at their leather shoes. To be specific, they were holding the end of their shoes with both hands.
It was as if every single one had suddenly had all of their toes snapped.
It was as if everyone's feet had been broken within the range of some invisible explosion emitted from the girl in the dress.
Hamazura let out a voice of confusion.
"What the hell is going on?"
"Shh. She's muttering something in French."
The girl in the dress standing alone in the center of all the collapsed men was indeed muttering something.
"…Old lady of the pumpkin carriage. Please lend your power to pitiful Cendrillon. Give me the test of the glass slippers once more. Do so until all the arrogantly deceitful challengers hang their heads in shame."
"Cinderella, hm? Is she a self suggestion-type Gemstone?"
Misaka Worst rationalized what she was seeing like that, but Hamazura felt something was off.
He did not detect the distinct scent of Academy City's espers, and yet what he was seeing seemed to be following set rules.
That girl was a magician.
She was from Gremlin.
The girl who had named herself Cendrillon wielded the laws of a different world.
She was one of the those who had sent out Radiosonde Castle for their own personal objective.
Hamazura's breath caught in his throat.
"What should we do?" Misaka Worst asked bluntly.
"I don't know what she's using, so I can't tell where the safe zone is. Without knowing that, I wouldn't suggest approaching her. …It would be best to find a way to attack her without approaching."
"Misaka can think of someone that isn't safe to attack even from a distance…"
Part 7
(November 10 – Oahu – New Honolulu International Airport – From a joke pen camera dropped by its owner in the process of evacuating.)
Accelerator was holding onto an area of metal framework near the ceiling in the central lobby.
He was inspecting the situation.
"(...Can she target everyone standing on the same floor as her? No, that Level 0 and the #3 hiding behind the pillar over there weren't affected. It must simply be the distance from her.)"
If you displayed their locations on a two dimensional map of the floor, Accelerator was closer to Cendrillon than Kamijou and Mikoto, but the central lobby was tall. It reached up to a height of about three stories, so he was farther away from her in three dimensional space.
With just one piece of magic, Cendrillon had sent an attack out in every direction which had immediately turned the situation in her favor.
All of the men in black suits were holding their feet and writhing about.
Accelerator could not see what had actually happened to them, but Cendrillon herself opened her mouth and explained.
"Warning."
She was speaking toward Kamijou, but the boy did not seem to understand her as she was speaking French.
"This spell allows only my foot size, 22.5 centimeters. If your feet are smaller, the areas between the bones are forcibly widened and if your feet are larger, your toes are severed."
"…"
A vivid image of what had happened to the men entered Accelerator's mind.
"However, that was only a warning. That one only dislocated the toes. The real thing is next. So what will you do? Will you leave Gremlin alone, or must I take some collateral that is a little more certain?"
Kamijou's face finally paled once the #3 translated for him.
The "collateral" she referred to was likely the toes of everyone who opposed Gremlin.
"(…The main question is on what conditions the glass slippers activate.)"
Accelerator tried to come up with some means of fighting back.
"(If there's something that moves along the floor and explosively spreads out, I just have to destroy that. But I'm up against a magician here. If it's something like a cursed straw doll and it simply attacks anywhere there are feet while ignoring the concepts of distance and vectors, I could be in trouble.)"
Not too long before, he would have mocked that kind of thinking. But now, it was no laughing matter.
There was no guarantee that his vector transformation that altered definite values would work on that mysterious attack.
Part 8
(November 10 – Oahu – New Honolulu International Airport Third Runway – From a wild bird surveillance camera for bird strike prevention.)
The gray runways spread out like packing tape placed over a lawn. A girl of about twelve walked along one of the countless asphalt lines cutting across. That was, of course, an area where normal people were not allowed.
She was speaking with someone over her cell phone.
"Right, right. Well, that won't work. You just pretend you didn't understand her French and try to stall for time. That was all those idiots were there for anyway. I never expected them to win. Just put on an act so it looks like you and that middle school girl who's translating are too worked up for her to get her meaning across. …I am a bit disappointed that they were taken out in a single strike though."
As she spoke, the girl headed for one end of the runway.
She was not headed for a large passenger plane.
"I already told you, it won't work. …What? Hamazura and the others have started firing at her with a compressed gas gun they made from a fire extinguisher? That won't work either. She'll probably just avoid the shots with monstrous speed. She's transformed the story of Cinderella into an attack spell by overwriting religious motifs into it. In the fairy tale, an amateur girl was given the dancing skills required to win the admiration of a prince who was used to balls. She'd probably casually avoid a cluster bomb if you dropped it near her."
It had looked like an easily walkable distance from within the terminal, but Birdway was realizing that the scale of the runway was much greater when you were actually walking across it.
She was getting sick of walking.
"It was probably originally created as a countermeasure for your Imagine Breaker. Foot crushing and high speed battling… it's almost too obvious. They confirmed your survival the other day using Radiosonde Castle, so Gremlin now sees you as their natural enemy. Your right fist is a powerful trump card, but it's pointless if you can't hit them. Having enough speed to dodge a bullet is a so-so countermeasure."
Birdway finally stopped walking.
"That's right, so buy some time. Don't think you can defeat her. If you charge in, she'll counter you. She'll either take your toes or shatter your cheekbone with a straight right that has all her weight behind it. I doubt you want to experience either one."
Birdway looked up at what was stopped at one end of the airport.
What she saw was…
"I started this game, and I have an idea as to how I'm going to end it."