From atop the train, Hamazura took in what Mugino had said.
The Level 5 who had forcibly stopped the train smiled so it looked like her face was split in two.
"…!!"
All of the hair on Hamazura's body stood on end. He hurriedly got down from the roof of the train and ran across the gravel. He was surrounded on the left and right by concrete walls making the area almost like an artificial river, but he found a set of metal stairs partway along. He ran up those stairs and into the above ground road.
He turned around.
Mugino was climbing the stairs a bit away. She was 20 or 30 meters away and staring at him through the crowd of people. She had already singled out Hamazura Shiage as her prey.
(Shit!! I can't get away by mixing in with the crowd!!)
He cut through the large crowd of people out on their day off and continued to run. But he soon reached his limit. He looked around and headed for one of the nearby buildings. He slammed open the door with a tackle, not even bothering to check if it was locked or not, and tumbled inside.
"…Damn it. What is this place?"
It wasn't a normal business building. There were plants slightly taller than Hamazura growing all over the floor. Above his head, wires were laid out entwined with the branches. They were grape vines. Looking to the ground, he could see hydroponic containers lined up. The bluish purple illumination must have been from UV lights to promote photosynthesis.
(So this is an automatic refining plant for biological ethanol fuel…)
The development of biological ethanol fuel was being done as an alternative to gasoline. Normally sugarcane or corn was used, but, since something with a low alcohol purity rate like grapes was being used, this must be a high grade product that stressed the brand. Apparently, the celebs in District 3 wanted to even have a distinction between the fuel they put in their cars and the fuel normal people put in their cars. It was like they were letting their cars drink wine.
"What a nice place."
Hamazura's entire body stiffened when he heard that voice come from behind him.
"You've got taste to choose a deserted facility, Hamazura. It's best to die alone."
Before he could turn around, an impact hit his back.
With a loud disconcerting noise, Hamazura's body flew a few meters before it landed. A large number of the hydroponic containers were knocked over, many grape plants were broken, and Hamazura's body rolled even farther.
In that one attack, a pain so intense he thought he was going to die attacked his entire body.
It was actually surprising that he didn't suffer any broken bones.
"Fuck…!!"
Hamazura left the large area as if he were dragging his hurting body. There was a staircase, so he headed up it. He found a large group of silver machinery that was twice his height lined up and they were connected vertically and horizontally by metal pipes. It was like the beer breweries you sometimes saw in commercials. In actuality, the grapes were fermented to bring out the alcohol, so the equipment worked in a similar way. There also had to be equipment to create a high concentration of alcohol to turn it into car fuel.
Compared to before, there were a lot of blind spots.
(Even if she is a Level 5, she isn't invincible.)
Hamazura passed through a gap in the complicated arrangements of pipes and leaned his back up against a piece of machinery about the size of a small room. As he did, he hurriedly tried to come up with anything that gave him an advantage.
(When we were attacked by the mobile crane near the particle engineering lab, she didn't try to destroy the wrecking ball with her power. And with the train just now she went for the power cables buried in the ground instead of the fast-moving train itself.)
Hamazura gritted his teeth at the pain all over his body and noticed a means of getting out of this situation.
(Most likely, Mugino Shizuri's power takes a certain amount of time to aim in exchange for how powerful it is. In other words, she's weak to surprise attacks. She can't deal with a sudden attack from someone.)
That wasn't because Mugino hadn't trained her power enough, but rather it was a flaw created from it being too powerful. If she wasn't extremely careful in using her power in only a specified area, she could end up getting caught up in the blast.
But he didn't really care about the reason behind it as long as it was a demerit for her.
In an area with lots of cover, Hamazura Shiage had a slight chance of victory.
But…
"Haaamazuraaa."
With that one word, Hamazura's body was covered in a sense of danger.
He ignored his theory and got down on the ground and at the same time "that" came.
A rain of beams flew by.
With the woman known as Mugino Shizuri at the center, lines of bright, unhealthy-looking light shot out in all directions. They weren't special electron beams shot out with the force of a lightning strike. Just like light, electrons have the properties of both particles and waves, but Mugino had the power to forcibly control electrons that remained in that "ambiguous" state.
When electrons that were fixed in that ambiguous state struck an object, they couldn't decide whether to react as a particle or as a wave, so they would "stop" there. Normally, electrons had a mass that was incredibly close to zero, but that "stopping" created a false wall that caused a dreadful amount of destructive force to be strike the target at the speed with which it hit that wall.
That was Meltdowner.
The technical classification was Particle Waveform High-Speed Cannon.
Unlike the #3 Railgun, she was a Level 5 who manipulated electrons without using waves or particles.
Each one of the beams tore through the metal like it was paper, melted the thick walls, and tinted everything orange. The heat must have reached the refined alcohol, because small explosions occurred all over the place. Hamazura had somehow managed to avoid being directly hit, but a metal fragment the size of a guitar pick was stuck in his left shoulder. And it wasn't just that one. There were 4 or 5 of them stuck there.
"Gwaaah!!"
Holding his bloody shoulder, Hamazura unintentionally yelled out.
Since the areas for cover were in her way, Mugino was just going to destroy them all. Once she had leveled everything to rubble, Hamazura would have to face Mugino in a hopeless situation.
"The machinery here is like that thing in the goldfish scooping games at festivals. Umm…I forget what it's called. Anyway, it won't cut it as cover against my Meltdowner."
Number 4 in Academy City.
The group of machinery that had been covering the floor just a bit before had been reduced to rubble in just one attack. Every kind of cover had been crushed and even the outer wall had been greatly damaged. Mugino stood in the center of the destruction that could easily bring the entire building down as a smile slowly, slowly spread across her face.
"Those fucking scientists said that my survival instinct keeps me from putting out any more force than that, but apparently it was originally enough to kill Railgun instantly. Well, I can't complain too much, since they say that the recoil would blow my body to pieces if I actually did it."
Fear spread through Hamazura Shiage's body.
The Level 5 monster quietly approached him.