You're somewhere new, somewhere you think you won't have to hurt anybody, and for all of a few days, it's wonderful.
Then.
Then some other kid wants to shove you around. You're the new kid. You're in his way. He breaks his arm against you and howls in pain and terror.
You're the rock so many people break themselves against.
The children. The teachers. The security team. Eventually, even the army. It never seems to end, everyone wants to kill you, [[to stop the nightmare that is you->The Power to Prevent Conflict]], and you stand there in the middle of the carnage, unbroken. Alone.
If power creates conflict, surely there is a power to prevent conflict.
"There's a project."
"I'm already the most powerful esper in Academy City. Why should I care?"
But there it is, [[an offer->Another White Room]], the power to change things.
You stop. It's just another person accosting you on the way back from the grocery store, but he isn't here to hurt you and be hurt. He's here, telling you it doesn't have to be this way. Perhaps, things can still change.
//Somewhere new,// you think, somewhere your childhood self should've already died. Somewhere you won't have to hurt anyone anymore.
You're so naive.
You can admit inside your own head as you stand in another white room under observation by another set of researchers in white lab coats. Level 6 Shift. Gaining power through combat. You've heard their ideas, seen the calculations, and seen incubators upon incubators of human-looking clones.
They're wind up dolls. Created with a push of a button. You'd thought they'd at least be smarter than the girl who shoots a gun at you.
She's down, she's out, it was over too quick.
"She's not dispatched," they say.
It's [[not over->Not Over]], you realize, until she's actually dead.
You hate it, but you can't admit that inside yourself. You hate how dull and tedious and easy it is to crush each one of them, to kill them in new and unique ways, to circumvent everything they think of.
Ten thousand sisters and they still die like flies. Ten thousand sisters and no matter how many times you ask if they're sick of it, if they're really that eager to die, they answer like the windup dolls they are, to get in position and start the experiment.
You can get a taste for anything, even blood.
[[It's not over->The Original]].
You can't admit you want it to be over, but you think to yourself when you realize, she's the original; she's better, stronger— maybe you can shortcut this whole thing by just going against her.
A hint of a feeling reminds you, she's a person. They aren't, but she is, even if they all look exactly alike and she does too.
It's why you say you were joking when they stop you, staring at you with their dead, windup eyes and point out logically in a dozen voices that you're going to ruin the experiment.
Fine then. You [[let it go->Deny It]].
You can't admit you want it be over, so you never admit that Kamijou saved you when he stopped you. You never admit you wanted so desperately to stop killing because you didn't even mind it anymore. You never admit you wish he'd found you before the children, the army, the second special institute that isolated you in your own class and turned you into the most powerful weapon Academy City ever made.
You never admit you could've defeated him without touching him and never [[lost your reputation->The More Things Change]].
"They live," he insists.
You deny it, but you let him win.
Something's changed. That's what you wanted, right? You wanted things to change.
You feel it like an itch under your skin, and you hate it. It didn't change the things that mattered most.
You buy your coffee and walk down the street, and they still find you, fling fists up against you, throw power against your reflection, only to fall under that power themselves. You're still the rock that others break themselves against.
You wonder to yourself if you could do it again, [[what could you possibly change?->What If]]
You can't do it again though, so you walk back home.
What if you never saw the little girl nor heard her? What if you hadn't gone back to Yoshikawa? Would the Sisters have rampaged their way through every city they'd been dispersed to?
You look at this tiny, inexplicable scrap of cloned humanity, and she's more human in five minutes than every single other Sister combined, even if she does talk weird.
She says you didn't want to go through with it. She says she didn't understand your signals every time you spoke to them. She says it [[like everything's okay->Not Good]] and things can change. It's ridiculous.
You're so naive.
You're not good. You //can't// be good. The very idea is laughable.
But you can save a little girl's life. You can make sure the people you hurt are people who try to hurt others. You can hurt her enemies and protect this one good thing that's ever happened to you.
[[It doesn't make you good->This Is Who You Are]]. It makes you a guided missile designed to avoid too much collateral damage. You're not trying to atone. There are ten thousand and thirty-one lives snuffed out, each one's memory in that little girl's head.
You swear to save the nine thousand seventy left.
This is who you are in the eyes of the Dark Side of Academy City: the most powerful esper they ever made. You kill, you destroy, you annihilate. That's what your power was made for.
This is who you are in the eyes of a small child with an irrepressible zest for life and too much intimate knowledge of death: the reason she and her sisters were made, the reason they were killed, and the one standing between them and anyone else who ever wants to harm them again.
You'll be the brightest hero for her, the worst villain.
Accelerator.
You reflect.
It's what you do.
Noise you don't want to hear, fists thrown, bullets fired—all of it bounces back and strikes your attacker with the slightest bit of your attention, or even less.
You don't have to look in the mirror to know your colorless hair and skin and the redness of your eyes make people think there's something wrong, something past the edge of normal about you. But you've always reflected the damaging parts of the sun too.
That's not the only thing you reflect though.
[[Killers->Killer]] and [[lab rats->Lab Rat]] and villains look at you.
You reflect.
Nobody ever knew what to do with you. Your parents didn't want you once you'd proven dangerous and gave you over to Academy City, the one place that promised an answer to whatever it is you are.
You're a child error, unwanted, uncared for, and that makes you the perfect lab rat for whatever the Dark Side of Academy City wants to do.
They put you in a class by yourself, lonely and alone, and watch you destroy everything around you by simply existing. They measure and test you, lay you out on tables—experiment.
This is [[all you know->Anti-Skill]].
This is all you know: one day you wake up, and the Special Ability Institute is being raided by Anti-Skill. You stand there and watch, the way you always stand and watch as violence happens around you.
They break up the researchers, pack up equipment full of test data on you and every other student not in your class. You wonder if any of the child errors can truly be salvaged after what was done to them.
There's a woman who stops, looks at you. She lowers her gun very carefully and holds out her hand.
You [[don't->Somewhere New]] [[take it->Take My Hand]].
A woman looks at you and calls you a child.
Not an error, not a lab rat, not a subject or any of the other things you've been rightfully called.
Maybe you're not past hope yet. Maybe there's still a chance for you to learn how to be with others—to not be alone, to not be dangerous.
You reach out uncertainly and take her hand.
You're nine years old when Anti-Skill breaks up the Special Ability Institute, nine years old when Yomikawa Aiho finds you and brings you out of the darkness.
[[She takes your hand->Yomikawa]] and doesn't let go.
"You can't save anyone," the Anti-skill pretender says, certain he'll keep his prize.
You glare at him, something dark waking in your heart. Can't save anyone, can't protect— It's what everybody says when they see you, what everybody thinks once they've seen your sheer capacity for destruction.
You can almost ignore the quiet voice in your memory, Yoshikawa, never kind but soft, //We directed you to do it.//
It doesn't matter because you did it. You're a killer, and you laugh in the face of his misplaced confidence. He's already tried to kill you and failed.
Now, it's [[your turn->The Villains Along the Way]].
You're somewhere new, somewhere you think you won't have to hurt anybody, and for all of a few days, it's wonderful.
Then.
Then some other kid wants to shove you around. You're the new kid. You're in his way. He breaks his arm against you and howls in pain and terror.
You're the rock so many people break themselves against.
The children. The teachers. The security team. You don't want to admit you're frightened when Anti-Skill and Yomikawa come.
"Don't," Yomikawa says, [[standing between you and them->Fostered]]. "He didn't mean to."
You don't know if you meant to or not.
They let her take care of you because she's Anti-Skill and she's your foster mother now. They let her enroll you in a special class at a school she's vetted where they swear they can help you master your power.
You're alone again in a class of one. You work at the curriculum they give you and stare out the window at the other kids.
But you can't go out. You don't want to hurt them. You work harder.
Yomikawa isn't sure how to help you either, but she introduces you to [[her friend->Yoshikawa]]. "She's going to help you learn."
You try.
You try so many things. Yomikawa doesn't hesitate to trust you to her friend, though you think the friendship's over when she's shouting at Yoshikawa for having you jump off a building.
You sigh, exasperated, at the ridiculousness of it all, when you're standing, two feet on the ground, not even scratched. It was a perfect landing.
You're done listening and summon mini-tornados to your back so you can fly up onto the roof.
"Accelerator!" Yomikawa turns from Yoshikawa to you.
[[You sigh again->Teachers]], lean back against the tiles. It's not like even a nuke could kill you.
Yoshikawa is a researcher, she wears a white lab coat, and at first you think she's just like everybody else who told you to do this, do that, who hurt you and made you hurt others, all in the hopes of better understanding your power.
"[[I could do that->Project]]," she tells you. She speaks honestly with a gentleness that doesn't fit her words. "Esper power can be greatly developed through trauma."
Instead, she gives you advanced textbooks on math and physics and calculations and impossible seeming tasks, like changing the direction of the wind or soundproofing your reflect.
[["Just try."->Try]]
Yomikawa finds more teachers for you—now that you're unlikely to accidentally kill them.
Yoshikawa introduces you to a certain frog-faced doctor who finds 'fascinating' new uses for your power. You've always felt vectors in others' bodies, but now you imagine both horrifying and lifesaving possibilities.
You finally enroll in the high school where Yomikawa teaches and think the P.E. teacher is out to kill you.
"No powers, Accelerator!"
You're allowed to reflect in class—it's subconscious anyway—but they don't let you use vectors to augment speed or strength.
[["It's boring,"->Itch]] you complain.
Yomikawa laughs. "You mean it's hard."
There's a part of you that wonders if this is happiness. There's a part of you that itches at something you can't scratch.
You have a home, two mother hens that worry about you and stand up for you, and classmates. You're figuring out how to hack everything in the world with your powers, and you're becoming known as Academy City's strongest esper.
But sometimes you feel the destruction inside you and remember the darkness in Academy City that's still there. Sometimes you almost walk down a dark alleyway just to see if you remember it right.
[[You don't forget.->Protect]]
You don't forget who brought you out of the darkness. You don't forget who brought you out of your isolation and fear. You don't forget the people who cared enough to reach out and take your hand.
You don't forget that Academy City is a dangerous place, and not just because of people like you.
Trouble seems to visit the City so often now—a golem, killer robots, worse; and it's Yomikawa in the middle of it all.
You're the most powerful esper in Academy City, and you were still a child when you learned you were unkillable.
So, you protect.
It's slow learning. Despite the practical experiments she gives you, despite giving you a crack at controlling natural elements and dangerous situations, possibly more than Yomikawa even knows, you're holding back and not even testing the limits of your power or how best to control it.
"There's a project," Yoshikawa tells you, "that thinks they can make you a Level 6."
You don't scoff, barely react at all, just mull it over. "Why do you look like that?"
She smiles, softly, not kindly. "You hate hurting people."
That's your problem //now,// isn't it?
"Would it help?"
[["Tree Diagram says so."->Yes]]
You say yes.
You walk into a sterile hidden room in a research facility belonging to the Dark Side of Academy City with the same casual attitude you bring to grocery shopping and fending off gangs or low level espers with a death wish.
Yomikawa isn't here.
Your hands are in your pockets, your unimpressed gaze takes in your partner in this experiment, and you'd like to know what idiot told the girl to bring a gun.
You're both lab rats here. You listen to their cold words, then stare when the girl follows orders, shoots the gun, and [[dies->Wind Up]].
Double-click this passage to edit it.Yomikawa isn't there. She isn't going to come in with her Anti-Skill squad and break up the Level 6 Shift project. She trusts Yoshikawa with you.
She doesn't like how it makes you brood. "Are you all right?"
Nobody ever used to ask you that.
"Tired."
She doesn't ask further as you close your eyes and see broken, bloody bodies in your dreams. They're windup dolls. They aren't people.
You'll stop hurting //people.//
You don't tell anyone you can sense the difference in vectors between the living and the dead, but none at all between a human and a [[clone->Sisters]].
"They live!" that boy yells, ramming his words through your head.
You stare at him, deny him, taunt him. They're not human. They're not alive. They're //clones//. Nobody sheds tears over them, not even the Sisters.
"She's living the best she knows how," he insists.
You ignore everything but the vectors to destroy him.
He's a real person, determined to break himself against you, and you know the violent impulse is wrong, but you'll let him. You laugh and make plasma from wind, turn flour into an explosion, and you let him, [[break earth and his body->Broken]] and //let him.//
Yomikawa isn't going to forgive you, you think as you sneak back in the house after the experiment.
She's never fully trusted research projects after she acquired you, but she lets you participate because her friend is one of the researchers, and all you can think is you're not the only one who's naive.
You collapse into your bed, lost in [[waking nightmares->Horrified]] of broken, bloody sisters and the broken, bloody body of their protector on the ground.
Every time he touched you, you doubted your own power. You stopped letting him touch you.
Maybe you should have let him.
"Accelerator." Yomikawa is horrified.
You're the most powerful esper in Academy City, and they were right to fear you, right to bring the security forces of the city against you, wrong to let Yomikawa protect you.
Anti-Skill wasn't supposed to find the bodies. The Sisters were supposed to clean them up.
But Kamijou Touma wasn't a Sister.
She turns to Yoshikawa. "You let this happen."
"They're not people," Yoshikawa says mildly. "I considered not passing along the offer."
But you hadn't been progressing, and no one could deny that in the experiments, you were.
[["He's a child!"->Children]] Yomikawa protests, outraged.
You're all children.
The Level 6 Shift project is sponsored by Academy City. The researchers' backing allows you privileges very few have. Esper power at all is brought about by trauma.
They don't really explain that to parents. Even the teachers think of it all as a controlled environment, a controlled trauma that allows each child access to their own personal reality.
If a little trauma can make an esper, how much does it take to make someone like you, the most powerful of them all?
You're all children, but Academy City doesn't care. [[You don't want to care either.->To Care]]
She never stops reaching out her hand to you, whenever Anti-Skill comes in contact with GROUP, or just you, putting yet another brick in the wall of your reputation as the top-ranked esper, and one of the most brutal.
She never stops trying to reach you when you're pointing a gun at her or someone else because that's what you're under orders to do, and you tell yourself you don't care.
You do care.
You protect the civilians, the children she loves. You use your own harsh words to push her away.
To protect her.
Like she once protected you.
You're going to kill the man who decided to destroy a little girl like Last Order. You kill the villains along the way to reach him.
The men holding children hostage, willing to kill them. It doesn't take long.
The man who beats that woman as his punching bag. You buy his life and laugh at the joke.
The level 5 esper who dares to cut Yomikawa down in front of you, never mind you were pointing a gun in her face yourself. You can't think over the roaring of your rage.
[[Killing bad men->You Saved Me]] doesn't make you a hero.
"You saved me," says a little boy with shining eyes, and you want to tell him to stop, get away. He really doesn't want to turn out like you.
"You saved me," Misaka says, and you don't even know which sister she is, but you swore that you'd never harm one of them again or just leave them to die.
It's easier when they don't say anything, when Last Order opens her eyes and tucks her small hands around your shoulders, then closes her eyes again, content that somehow you mean safety.
Someone tries to kill them. That [[someone dies->Break]].
You're the strongest of the strong, in Academy City, in the whole world. Even after you've learned your mortality, learned you can be hurt, you don't let that slow you down.
Let them hurt you. Let them try to kill you. You take all the inputs they give you and learn and crunch and calculate, and build them into your personal reality until you encompass the entire world.
Let them try to destroy you. They always have, they always will. They hand you the tools to destroy them.
You're the rock [[they break themselves against->Misaka Worst]], and you let them break.
Misaka.
Her face. Her hair. Her signature electricity.
They've fixed whatever's wrong with the Sisters in her. She smirks and feels and doesn't need a visor to see and manipulate electrical currents. She even has the railgun.
You could walk away and leave her if it was just you. But Last Order is with you.
You don't break until she tries to kill Last Order. You don't break until you take her down with an ease she didn't expect.
She's stronger than the others, but she isn't stronger than you.
You stare at her [[broken, bloody body->Bloody]], and [[you break->It Hurts]].
You're a killer. You kill. It's what you always do. It's what you've always done since someone first shot a bullet at your reflect. You learned as a small child, anyone who tries to kill you tends to end up dead.
You've seen so much blood, learned so many ways to destroy a human body //(more than ten thousand)//; this is the moment that breaks you—knowing they want to force you to kill one more Sister, made for you.
"It hurts," she says. "Help."
You killed them because they didn't know how to say, [[it hurts->Only for Her]].
It hurts. It hurts because you tried to save someone and hoped that somehow it could change you. You knew it couldn't, knew there was no forgiveness, no atonement in changing who you killed but not the killing. But this hurts because there is one person you've promised never to kill again.
"It hurts," she finally says, lost voice, lost eyes, and you think you'd kill anyone who tried to hurt her.
[[You make a choice->Lost Child]], and you use your power in the ways you've rarely used it before. Only for her, you think. Only for them. You save her.
You're so tired of everything.
You refuse to kill the spies. Some would say it's useful to interrogate spies, excuse themselves, but you strike them down to protect Last Order, so the place she'll be is safe. You refuse to kill them because you're so, so tired of being the Governing Board's killer.
Whatever Misaka Worst says—and she says a lot, all of it justified—Last Order doesn't look at you and see a killer. You cling to that, remember the softness in her eyes when she saw a lost child.
You.
You [[don't have to kill->Song]] any more.
You're willing to kill yourself to save her. You don't calculate it that way, but.
You look at the inputs—from AIWASS, from angelic clashes in the heavens, from an intercepted diagram, from dark matter and strange magic of an artificial soul gone mad in the monstrous body of a level 6. You take what Worst gives you of a song she can't produce—and you sing.
It tears at your body, your blood, tries to outright pull you apart, but it's for Last Order, so you sing and don't stop.
It doesn't matter what happens to you. [[You promised->Wings of Light]].
Your power is suited for destruction. Everyone who sees you knows it. Even Misaka Worst looked at you and knew you were a killer: the only way she could accomplish her mission was if you refused to kill a Misaka.
You refuse to let any of them die.
Something fundamental shifts within you, reflecting new parameters, new laws, a new way of thinking. In a way, the you you've always understood yourself to be, dies, and the you Last Order sees finally wakes up.
This is what it is to fight [[to protect something->Family]]. You fly on wings of light.
This is who you are in the eyes of Academy City: a hero that helped them win World War III. They placate you by acceding to your demands.
They dismantle the organizations that forced you and other espers to be killers, to be weapons. They allow you to take Misaka Worst, designed specially to kill you, and Last Order, who'd always been slated to die, and remove them from experiments and dark plans.
You're a family now, with Yomikawa and Yoshikawa and the three of you, figuring out how to make a home.
This is who you are now. Finally.
The moment she goes to kill Last Order is the moment you stop letting her beat you up without fighting back. You were willing to let her, though it hurt, though you might die, because Misaka, of all people, has the right to judge you. Because swore not to hurt them anymore.
"I see. This won't end without someone dying," you realize. You killed ten thousand thirty-one sisters. You know these rules.
In moments, Misaka Worst lies bleeding in the snow, //dying// from injuries you inflict, from her own suicide mechanism in light of her failure.
You [[can't->Scream]] save anyone.
You swore to become the worst villain to save Last Order, and you are. Back to the blood and darkness you'd stepped out of. An all too familiar face, another body on your hands.
You swore to stop killing them, to never kill another sister again, and your vows should never have had to conflict.
You feel the tornadoes of blackness breaking from your back, hear the insane laughter welling up inside as you scream. You just wanted to save and protect one life, one little girl, who [[never deserved->Hold On]] anything they've done to her.
You want to destroy everything.
You've never known how to stop, give up. You take Last Order to the Elizana Alliance of Independent Nations. You learn that Elizana can't heal her.
You're not angry, not rattled, not surprised. This is how it is.
You create a reality that displays the laws you're unfamiliar with and learn them, tracing back the vectors, but you need the song from the Misaka Network, and to come this far to be stopped by that...
There are Sisters in Russia. You're sure of it. You take Last Order and head for yet one more distant destination.
[["Hold on,"->Struggle]] you whisper.
She tries to hold on, you think. She keeps breathing for so long, whimpering in her unconscious state, and you think back to the first night you were with her, a [[virus->Cost]] run amuck through her head. You think of her fighting and flailing against you when you forcibly shoved it out.
//Hold on.// You need her to hold on.
You'd do anything to save her, struggle through Russian snow and flinging Russian soldiers and sorcerers alike out of your path. You have to [[reach another Misaka->Loss]] with some memory of the healing song.
//Please,// you think. //Just hold on.//
Virus.
What was that thought? You needed your entire calculating power to do it once, unable to even subconsciously reflect, and the Misaka Network doesn't give you nearly so much power.
You needed a copy of her data before the virus. You don't— You can't—
You set your mouth grimly. You can.
She'll forget everything before she left the tube, forget every second you ever spent together, every moment you cling to as precious. It's better this way, better for everyone, you tell yourself.
You don't believe it.
You need more power than you have. You feel your [[spreading wings->An Impossible Task]].
You don't reach another Misaka in time.
A soft, pained gasp and she's gone.
For a moment, you can't even process it. The little girl who found you over and over again, who gave you something to live for, who you //loved//. You break down, weeping tears you've never cried before.
It doesn't matter that the war overhead is ending badly. It doesn't matter when a rogue power strikes the entire world from overhead. Let the whole world die with her. Dying doesn't hurt as badly as losing this girl in your arms.
You hold her close one last time.
An impossible task. You don't care. You mastered reflect. There's no reason you can't master control.
You sense the bioelectric vectors in Last Order's brain and draw on a pattern you assimilated once before. You just have to delete everything else that isn't that.
Every time she took your hand. Every time she scowled at you and teased you and tugged your shirt and chided you and threw things at your face. You wipe the slate clean, taking comfort that everything that's killing her is also being destroyed.
Your power is infinitely suited for destruction. It takes [[everything you have->Alive]].
When you're done, there's nothing left. Your body is breaking under the strain, you've wiped out your resources, and you stare at her face, wondering how much you'll break when she opens her eyes.
"Where am I?" she says softly, worriedly.
She sees you and she recognizes you for exactly who you are— the one who killed her over and over and over.
"Accelerator," she says, frowning.
You're not safety and warmth to her. You can't even speak right now, your broken brain out of battery to compensate.
She looks lost and small and unhappy. But she's alive.
[[She's alive.->Last Order's Guardian]]
This is who you are to Academy City: the most powerful level 5 esper and one of their most useful tools. A weapon. A killer.
The one who will kill anyone who hurts a little girl living with Yomikawa Aiho.
Last Order remembers you as the one who took her back and somehow still doesn't begrudge the calculating power of the Misaka Network. The Sisters look at you with too much understanding in their flat grey eyes.
There's nothing left for you but to watch from the shadows of the Dark Side of the City.
This is who you are.