1_Prologue_ The Night It Began

PROLOGUE The Night It BeganGood_Bye_Yesterday. 1 (Aug31_AM00:00) He had a nosebleed. It was the middle of the night, and Touma was rolled up in his emptied-out, wiped-down bathtub, holding his nose. The bleeding was probably because he ate too many of the peanuts in that mixed snack bag earlier. He’d been fiddling with his cell phone, but he decided that it was in its best interest to evacuate it to the edge of the tub. This bathroom was Kamijou’s bedroom. He lived in a student dormitory, but one other person—a girl calling herself Index—was living with him. Being a healthy high school student, this caused him no end to his worries. He’d been locking himself in the bathroom until dawn broke every night so that he wouldn’t commit any blunders involving the entirely defenseless girl staying there. (Incidentally, he didn’t know why he was living with her. He was an amnesiac. One day he’d woken up, and there she was, already beside him.) Normally the girl would be the one to use a locking door, but Index wasn’t any girl. She would just get up, still half-asleep, then unlock the door and go to where he was anyway. There wouldn’t be a point in doing things that way. Urgh, where’re the tissues? His fingers still gripping his nose, Kamijou unlocked the bathroom door. The lights were all out, and Index had probably fallen asleep by now. Only the dim moonlight allowed him to discern the faint outlines of objects. He thought briefly that he could hear people fighting somewhere far away—likely outside the dorm—but he couldn’t make it out from where he was. His attention was directed out the window only for a moment, and then he reentered his room. It was a disaster. Unfinished magazines and manga were scattered all about the floor. His books were all stuffed into his bookcase out of order. A handful of video game consoles were all attached to his television with another handful of extension cables. An unfinished plastic bottle of juice lay on its side, enshrined on his laptop on the table. My bed is by the window, so the tissue box should be on the floor nearby, he recalled in sequence, making his way across the dark room. When he reached the bed, his foot came down on something and squashed it. It felt suspiciously like a paper box. He picked it up; upon closer inspection, it was, indeed, the now-flattened tissue box. “…Rotten luck to the twentieth power. I guess if they still work…right?” He hesitated for a moment at the thought of stuffing his nose with something he’d stepped on, but it wasn’t like he had any other ones. He sighed, pulled one out of the box, balled it up, and stuck it in. All of a sudden, a light shone in through the window. Only about two meters separated Kamijou’s dorm building from the one next door. When the light came on in the room right across the way, it would flood into his room. The other room’s curtains were drawn, but it only blocked so much. The artificial glow blanketed his whole room in a weak light. Objects he could only see the contours of before now took on a myriad of colors and textures in the darkness. Urgh. The brightness startled him for a moment. Then came the sound of soft snoring. Following it led his eyes to the girl sleeping on his bed. She had long silver hair and pale skin and was fourteen or fifteen years old. She was short and light, but her body temperature might have been warmer than that of the average person. An ever-so-slight sweet scent wafted from her, even though she never wore any perfume—it was one of her unique traits. The girl asleep in a single rumpled button-down shirt was named Index. Her blanket had been knocked off the bed; it didn’t look like she took well to the heat. She was flopped on her side with her arms and legs curled up, making her resemble a baby in a mother’s womb. The bed wasn’t that wide, and yet for some reason, she slept at the edge of it. It left an odd sort of space—the kind one would think had been prepared for another person. Urgh…I’m no barbarian. I know I shouldn’t even ask who that “other person” is. Kamijou’s face flushed a bit in the dim light of the room, but he shook his head. He got the feeling that her consecutive displays of defenselessness were because she trusted him—not quite because she liked him. It felt more like she was just being honest as a small child might. He didn’t sense anything adult about it. Besides, her trust wasn’t in the person here right now. Touma Kamijou was an amnesiac, and Index didn’t know that. In other words, the old Touma Kamijou was the one she placed her confidence in, not this one. So he wouldn’t let himself misunderstand anything—not her defenseless slumber, not her attempt to use the bed with him, not the little movements of her lips every time he heard her quiet snores, not the rise and fall of her petite chest with her long breaths, not the white color of the thighs poking dangerously out of her shirt… …Well, hmm…what I mean is, well, you know. Right. Kamijou tightened up as he began to break out in a questionable sweat. Then, Index’s breathing ceased to be consistent. She stirred restlessly on the bed, then began to breathe consciously. Finally, she opened her closed eyelids wide and groaned. “…Touma?” she addressed him, rubbing hard at her eyes. “Oh, sorry. Did I wake you up?” “No, it’s kinda bright, so I might have woken up on my own.” She grunted. “The neighbors have their lights on, don’t they? Goodness, and at a time like this! Have they no decenc—” She broke off mid-sentence. I wonder what’s wrong? Kamijou thought as, for some reason, Index began to look over various parts of her body and check her rumpled shirt. When she was finished, she hugged her own shoulders and glared up at him with the most reproachful eyes he’d ever seen. “Umm, Touma. Just making sure…What are you trying to do here exactly?” “What am I…? Hey, I just had a nosebleed—” He was the one to break off this time as the situation hit him like a ton of bricks. The sleeping Index, her single piece of clothing, her thighs poking boldly from it—and he was basically staring right at her face. Depending on how one looked at it, he was practically hanging over her. And he happened to have a tissue in his nose. And that meant he had a nosebleed. Question one: If you were the girl who’d just woken up in bed, how would this look? An unnatural sweat burst out on Kamijou’s palms. He got an intensely bad feeling about the situation, and as if to lend support to his premonition, Index’s eyes were rapidly shifting into all-out rage mode. Yes—he mustn’t let himself misunderstand anything. Her unguarded appearance was out of trust toward him, but not because she would just allow him to do anything. Slipping into someone’s futon while they’re half-asleep and letting someone in are two totally different things. “Hey, whoa, wait a minute now, Miss Index, don’t get me wrong, noses don’t only bleed because people get excited, I mean, this isn’t some cliché manga or anything, and seriously, it would never happen anyway, it’s only symbolic, a metaphor, get it—” “Touma?” She cut him off flatly. He couldn’t tell from her expression if she was mad, or about to cry, or what—it was a supremely dangerous face she was making. She asked him, “Did you really feel nothing when you looked at me while sleeping? Can you swear it with God as our witness?” She spoke to him with such straightforward, direct eyes that he was taken aback. He grunted and shuffled in place. The truth—the real, actual truth—was that when he saw her asleep, he did shake a bit. At the very least, he thought her face was cute, and when he really tried, he thought he could remember gulping to himself at the sight of her pale white thighs. Obviously, he couldn’t confess any of this to her. She was a bomb on the verge of exploding. She had a certain vice, this girl, and it involved biting. On a good day she would just playfully nibble on his upper arm, and on a bad one, she’d go straight for his head. He’d never seen her doing any of this to anyone but him, of course, but this habit had him at a loss. A handful of his clothes had already begun to wear out, and he was a little young to be worrying seriously about skin damage. “So do you swear?” Index asked again in confirmation. Kamijou, who was ethically against biting habits, put on a facade of composure and retorted, “Hah! Don’t be such a prude. Yeah, I saw you, but I felt nothing—” He hadn’t even finished the thought before Index had kicked him over and started chomping down on his head. If this were a fighting game, she would have just used all three gauges. She demanded, “Nothing? What do you mean nothing?! I am a girl, you know, so it wouldn’t shock me if you did feel that way” Her teary eyes were filled with rage. It hurt more than necessary because she was speaking while biting him. “Oh, you meant that? I misunderstood you! I’m sorry, Miss Index, the truth is that I, the lowly Touma Kamijou, did feel my heart skip a beat when I looked at you sleeping!” “You can’t just take it back at this point!” “Hey, wait, so you’re gonna bite me no matter what I choose?! Damn, not even that Railgun, Mikoto, gets this violent!” One of Index’s eyebrows twitched. “…Touma, who is this Railgun Mikoto?” “Ah…” His bad feeling swelled to unprecedented proportions. “Well, you know, she’s related to Izanagi-no-Mikoto. The Japanese god who created all the islands.” “You’re lying! You’re definitely lying! I don’t know what in the world a Railgun is, but the word clearly isn’t Japanese!” “No, actually, I have this faint recollection of who Izanagi is. Come on, there can be a Railgun-firing legend in Japanese mythology if we want—ow, oww!” Kamijou desired nothing more than to be free of this berserk girl’s straddle as soon as possible. Unfortunately, though, she had managed to pinpoint his center of gravity. The power sleeping in his right hand, the Imagine Breaker, could cancel out any abnormal power just by touching it, but in this situation, he was a totally useless Level Zero. His neck was the only thing that he could still move. When he flapped it around, the tissue stuck in his nose tumbled out. Drip. The red fluid came out of his nose. Index, after all this time, regained her calm at the sight of his blood. Her eyebrows came up with worry. “T-Touma, that’s a really bad nosebleed. How did that happen?” “Huh? Oh, well, I think I just ate too many peanuts in that snack mix.” “…So I lost to a bag of peanuts, huh…?” The silver-haired, green-eyed sister dropped her head sullenly, still on top of him. Now that he was more composed, he realized that a girl being on top of a man like this while wearing a single button-down shirt wasn’t anywhere near what one could call a common occurrence. There was actually a strangely soft sensation around Kamijou’s stomach, but it seemed like she was too downtrodden to notice anything. She groaned. “I can’t believe Touma’s the sort of person who gets turned on by peanuts enough to make his nose start bleeding. But it’s okay—I’ll accept you anyway and prove that I’ve grown up that much more!” “You know, it’s almost funny how much you’ve managed to twist the conversation.” He sighed. “Anyway, I’d like to stop this bleeding, so get out of the way. Or just give me a new tissue. It would be kinda gross to stuff a used, wet one into my nose again.” “Tissues, tissues…Wait, Touma, where are they?” Index, still straddling him, bobbed her head to glance around, but she must have overlooked the box—it should have been right there. She tilted her head skeptically. Then, as if struck by lightning, she burst out, “Touma, Touma! There’s some paper over here if you need it.” “Don’t be dumb. If I stuck a piece of gritty printer paper in my nose it would totally wreck the mucous membrane. Man, just move it, Index. I’ll get one myself—” Suddenly, his mouth stopped working in the middle of his declaration. He stared dumbfounded at the letters written on the scrap of paper Index was holding out to him. “Uh, what? Hey, wait up, what does this say…?” “Huh? Umm…it says ‘Summer Vacation Homework: Math Problems.’ Touma, I know there are some illiterate people in this country, but I didn’t think you were one of them.” Kamijou’s thoughts came to a complete halt. That’s right—his homework. His summer assignments. He’d spent his break in such a dramatic, fantastic, acrobatic way, but now that she mentioned it, none of those times involved the most binding shackles of all: his…summerhomework. Still beneath Index, he twisted his head to look sideways at the clock and calendar. He then confirmed the time and date. It was August 31, twelve fifteen AM. There were approximately twenty-four hours remaining until the end of summer vacation. “…Heh-heh-heh. You thought I’d say what rotten luck, didn’t you? But you know, when someone is having really, really bad luck, they don’t even have time to do that. Heh-heh, heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.” “Touma, why’d you change your voice like that? And who are you explaining this to?”