Crossover With Non-anime Series Fan Fiction ❯ Bane Sidhe ❯ Bane Sidhe: Sisters ( Chapter 3 )

The sisters were interesting. I had several ideas for them, long term. First however, I have to stop the experiment. From a purely moral standpoint, they are people, not things. You don’t slaughter autistic kids just because they have odd speech patterns and suffer difficulty expressing emotions. And that’s precisely what Academy City was doing to these girls. They were human beings, and they were being murdered. That was Nazi stuff. And the guys involved had to die.

Step one was find a sister. That was easy. I looked around and found one. Unfortunately, she was dead. I called Kuruko on my phone and urged her to come to me. I knew her ability was better than she admitted. She didn’t have to ask where I was she just showed up. And then she screamed. I hugged her until she stopped.

“It isn’t neesan, but it’s kind of worse than that. Misaka has been cloned. This is a clone.”

“A clone? Then Mikoto is alright?” she asked, gasping in hope.

“Yes, but the clones are also Misaka. They don’t have her memories, but they are sisters, twin sisters. Lots of them, and they’re being systematically murdered. Do you think that is right?” I stared her in the eyes. Hers were wild with growing horror.

“How many?” she asked.

“Over ten thousand killed so far. Ten thousand!” I told her. Her horror turned to rage.

“Does Mikoto know?” she asked.

“Not exactly. They told her they wanted to clone her for an experiment involving the level fives. But they didn’t tell her how it would work. She thinks she’s meeting the same one. But they raise it up and a few days later they kill her.”

“Who kills her?”

“Accellerator. He looks like an Albino. White hair, red eyes, very pale skin. He uses vector control to fling away attacks. But there’s something he can’t defend against.”

“What?”

“You. You don’t use vectors. Newton isn’t involved. You teleport directly.”

“There is something you need to do, right now. This is a barrel of rainwater. It is full. Look up.” I pointed into the night sky. “Way up there is the Tree Diagram satellite. Can you teleport this full drum of rainwater into the middle of that satellite?” I asked her. She looked at me, determined, enraged. She looked up and squinted for a long moment. She touched the barrel of water. It vanished.

Far above them, outside the atmosphere where the ambient temperature was 3 kelvin in the shade, a barrel of water splashed inside of a huge icy satellite and the water turned to ice, expanding crystals into fragile electronics, corroding where they touched, wicking into warm areas and turning into steam, then freezing. Critical damage was done. The supercomputer and spy satellite failed across multiple critical systems over several minutes. The Tree Diagram died.

It was several minutes wait and then a passing blimp screen went blank.

“Can you find the next clone? They are just like Misaka, only they often wear a metal set of goggles on their heads. Some have a gun like this,” I said, holding up the FN2000 rifle. She looked at it, nodded and vanished. A few minutes later she returned with a Sister.

“Misaka is confused. Misaka has just moved 4.6 kilometers between one step and the next, Misaka says.”

“Misaka is a person. Misaka has rights, like all people. Misaka is not an experiment anymore,” I told the girl. “Is any Misaka in danger right now? Ask the rest to come here.”

“Misaka wants to know who is asking Misaka to assemble the Misakas? Misaka says in confusion.”

I just patted her on the head and told her. She was even more confused, but this would pass.

I put the rifle on safe and put it into my knapsack, slinging it over my shoulders.

Across the city, a grinning Accellerator was torturing a Misaka, flinging her bullets back at her. Then she vanished in a blink. Shirai appeared with an injured Misaka, bullet wound through her upper arm, which is a really nasty place to get shot regardless of what Hollywood movies would claim, and I lost my composure.

“Shit. Get her to a hospital. The Frog Faced doctor. There will be bone fragments in her bloodstream and maybe reach her heart or brain. Hurry!” Shirai went from elated to terrified in a second and blinked away with the girl. She was gone a long time.

“So, ever seen Children of the Corn?” I asked the swarm of 35 Misakas.

“One of us. One of us. One of us,” they all started chanting. So they had a sense of humor. That was higher order thinking. They really were people. I focused my talent and observed quite a lot of events. This went on for some time.

“So I can’t kill him. Touma needs to know. I would like to speak to Last Order. Can she be reached?” I asked the nearest Misaka sister. She considered, eyes going more blank than usual from Network chat.

“She is still in the growth capsule. She is not matured. Waking her now would be harmful.”

“How about reaching the scientist running this experiment?” I asked, then realized I had a burner phone. I turned it on, tape over the camera so it couldn’t get my face, and dialed a number from Pre-Memory.

“Who is this?” asked an angry woman’s voice. I could hear some scientists in the background complaining about tracking the subject.

“Amai Ao is taking bribes. He’s got gambling debts. That’s how they got to him. He’s going to sabotage the Misaka Network and cause them to attack everyone. Do you understand how serious this is?” he said, using a voice modulator.

“How?” asked the woman running the experiments.

“You violated ethics holding this experiment, and Accellerator is about to lose a fight against a level 0. Tree Diagram is down. Stop the murders. Add a firewall to the Sisters, and block Admin access through Last Order. Ao has a computer virus. Scan her code and remove it, or it will kill her and set off the entire network to attack the city. That would be the end of the city, and the deaths would be in the thousands, all in the open.”

“How do you know all this?” demanded the woman.

“Not important. Do or don’t, but this experiment is over.” I cut the call and removed the battery from the phone, then stomped on it. Then handed it to a sister.

“Can you fry this to slag?” I asked her. She sent current through it and dropped it before it could burn her. What to do?

“So do you know any good jokes?” I asked the crowd of stoic goggled schoolgirl clones.

It was two hours later before Shirai returned.

“I saved her arm. And I removed the fragments from her bloodstream. That was… hard. I’ve never done healing work before. Frog Faced doctor is really good. He will get started on hormone therapy and genetic therapy to stabilize the sisters,” she said. She looked at all of them.

I was sitting on an overturned bin that was relatively clean, sad about the loss of a human life to that walking psycho Accelerator. It wasn’t entirely his fault. He’d been conned into this, and they’d been brainwashing him for years to see everyone else as toys to destroy. He had the Hammer problem: when your only tool is a hammer all your problems start to look like nails. The sisters remained around me, staring. I kept telling them jokes. I’m Irish. I know lots of jokes.

“I have a way forward. There is some risk. We need Touma.”

“That guy? I can’t teleport him.”

“That’s kind of the point. Touma used to know the albino when they were kids, before he became Accelerator. He’s probably the only person who can get through to him, and can stop his power. Can you call Oneesan and get her to call Touma and get them both here?”

“There are 36 sisters, plus Last Order, still alive at this time. Others can be finished and awakened. After we rescue them from the experiment, we need to get them to Frog Doctor so he can prevent organ failure and other systemic causes of death from bad cloning, like basic immunizations. They also need their hormones balanced to their current apparent ages,” I said, thinking out loud.

“Where do we house them?” asked Shirai.

“I think there are too many for your dorm room. And too many for my apartment. Or Touma’s either. It might be smarter to spread them out. But that’s for later.” Touma and Misaka both showed up. Misaka looked at all the Sisters and Touma was grim faced. The remains of a sister were wrapped in a tarp for removal and destruction. Then he looked at me.

“You?” he asked.

“Kamijou, nice to see you. I want to ask you to do something really difficult. The guy killing these girls is someone you know. Someone you knew before Academy City. He’s hurting, and keeps trying to talk to them before the fights, but he kills them. You need to get through to him, and he’s really dangerous. He can turn the environment around him into weapons with a stomp or a kick. But he himself is weak as a kitten to your right hand. You might need to punch him, to knock some sense into him.”

“The next fight is at the rail yard. Use his name to get his attention, and tell him these girls are people not things. Do what you’re good at after that,” I explained. “Oh and Touma? Don’t die.”

The fight took place an hour later that evening, after dark fell. It was brutal. Accelerator flung railroad rails at Touma, who barely dodged. He tried to use force to break his limbs, and Touma’s hand stopped it cold. He tried to reverse his blood and Touma punched him right in the cheek, then the other one, and again on the chin. It got his attention, and confused him. Accelerator stood and raised his arms, spinning the air above his hands and the light of plasma generated looked ominous but… plasma is just the fourth state of matter. It’s not radioactive or particularly explosive. Useful for welding and cutting thin sheets of metal, but far from magical. Showy, but not very dangerous. Without containment it collapses back into gas. Then Accelerator started shooting streamers of it at Touma, and it looked pretty dangerous as it hit various things.

“Tell the Sisters to spin the air turbines to generate wind and blow away that showy ball of plasma. It’s not really dangerous once it loses containment, but he’s avoiding the conversation,” I suggested. The Misaka sister nodded and the big multi-hundred foot tall wind turbines began to spin the correct direction and wind picked up across the railroad yard. After a few minutes the bright light died.

I watched from a hacked camera via an app on a burner phone, with Misaka’s help. The original girl, not the sisters. Touma was tough. I admit this fully that the kid was extremely determined and worthy of being called a hero.

Kuroko Shirai waited, watching, with a 16 penny nail in her hand. If things got too far, she would teleport it into Accelerator’s brain and he would die. This was why I had so much respect for the girl. Why she was a level 5. She could assassinate anyone she could see, and she could see more than her eyes showed her. Her skill gave her 3D total sensory perception as far as she could jump. She didn’t want to show up Neesan, so hid this skill. Crowley probably knew just how strong she really was, but Shirai was probably an Ace In The Hole, in the event someone like Accelerator got genocidal.

“I know this isn’t you,” Touma said, and then said the boy’s real name.

He looked shocked at being remembered. Back when he had black hair and a tan like all the other kids. Back when his power had only just manifested. Back when they’d fought on the playground over something stupid and he’d reflectively used his power and broken Touma’s arm. He was so ashamed, and things just escalated to secret police, assassins, and then tanks and military copters. He had voluntarily given himself up to the lab for study at Academy City then, and years of what must have been not-so-subtle brainwashing had taken place. Years of pretending to forget his real name. Years of trying to convince people he was the strongest so they would stop attacking him, stop getting hurt by trying.

It was a touching moment. Then a spark set off the cloud of flour and a huge fireball arose over the site.

Misaka called the ambulance. Shirai rescued the Misaka sister from the wreckage, only slightly wounded. She’d been further away from the explosion and could still breathe. Touma was unconscious but not dead. Accelerator was gasping for breath and eventually overcame the oxygen deprivation. They took Touma off to the hospital and one of the Sisters went with him, getting first aid from a med tech.

“Okay then. Put that on the internet so everybody knows Accelerator can be beaten. He won’t like it, but hubris is a heavy burden to bear,” I said. Original Misaka and the Sisters complied after some editing, with a title of “Level Zero Beats Level Five”.