The Level 5 esper and School member known as Kakine Teitoku was in District 4.
It was an area lined with a lot of restaurants even for Academy City, so there were a lot of facilities dealing with food. One of them was a refrigerated warehouse for meat. It currently had a station wagon hidden in it.
"There's no sign of Item. Looks like we lost them for now."
Kakine opened the back of the station wagon and checked on what was inside.
It wasn't frozen meat; it was a large metal box about the size of a small closet.
"…So those are the 'Tweezers'," muttered the driver who was a member of School's subordinate organization.
A smile appeared on Kakine's lips.
"An attachment-type manipulator for microscopic object interference. Well, simply put, it's mechanical fingers that let you grab particles that are even smaller than atoms. Hence the name."
All matter in the world was created from a combination of elementary particles. At the particle engineering lab, they would intentionally remove particles from matter to make it unstable and perform experiments.
Grabbing objects smaller than atoms was difficult to do with a traditional arm. The "Tweezers" were created to use things like magnetism, light waves, and electricity to "absorb" them.
"One wrong move and the atom could collapse."
"Hah?"
"Nothing," said Kakine. "There was a lot of pain-in-the-ass preparation what with replacing the sniper Item killed and shooting Oyafune, but it all paid off."
The driver stared at the large device.
"But what are you going to do with this now that you have it?"
"What? I just explained it to you. I'm going to grab some tiny things. That leads to a way to get to Aleister."
"???"
The driver had an expression that made it clear he didn't understand, but Kakine didn't give any further explanation. He opened up the tool box in the back of the station wagon, took out a screwdriver, and started loosening some screws on the large device.
"A-are you trying to break it?"
"I'm rearranging it," said Kakine in an annoyed voice. "Do you know why it's so big? To keep it from being stolen. If you gather together only the necessary parts, it must be a lot smaller."
A clattering noise continued for a while.
The "Tweezers" had been rearranged into its optimized form.
Kakine had what looked like a metal glove in his hands. The index finger and the middle finger each had a long glass claw coming from them and the glass claws had what looked like even thinner metal stakes in them. On the back of the hand was a small monitor that looked like a cell phone.
The glass claws would extract the particles and the metal stakes inside would carry out various measurements.
"I-it's that small?"
"Well, it is a state of the art piece of Academy City technology. Advancing too quickly can be a problem too."
Kakine put his right hand in the glove in order to check on it.
"Okay, feels good. …Contact the others. Time for the next step."
The driver nodded in compliance.
When he did, a sharp metallic noise rang out through the refrigerated warehouse.
Kakine and the driver looked over and a door-shaped portion of the thick wall of the warehouse had been cut open. The wall collapsed inwards and the bright light of midday came pouring in.
No one was outside.
But the attacker's influence was clearly coming towards them.
"Gyah! Gwaaaaahhh!?" screamed the driver suddenly.
Kakine looked over and saw the skin disappearing from the driver's face. Then his fat disappeared followed by his muscles. Finally, his brain disappeared and his clothes and bones collapsed to the ground.
The sound as they hit the ground sounded like light plastic.
Kakine frowned slightly.
"Kakine Teitoku, huh? Losing a Level 5 here would be a shame."
A voice reached Kakine's ears, but he couldn't tell which direction it was coming from.
He focused his attention in all directions and activated the "Tweezers" that he had just rearranged.
(I never would have guessed I'd have to use this here.)
"…Group, I assume. Or maybe Item."
"Sorry, but I am from Member. Oh, Kakine boy, do you smoke?"
The voice from an unknown source was that of a middle-aged man.
"When people remove a cigarette from the box, they tap the box with their finger, right? When I was a kid, I didn't understand why. However, I thought it looked cool, so I would tap my candy boxes."
"Ahh?"
"I'm saying that you're doing something like that now."
"Are you making fun of me? Cause it sounds to me like you want to become a nice corpse."
That was when an electronic beep came from the "Tweezers" on his right hand.
Looking at the monitor, he could see that there was some kind of tiny mechanical object mixed in with the particles of air the device had collected. In the world one could only see with an electron microscope, there was something obviously manmade.
"Nanodevices, hm? You tore off his cells one at a time."
"No. Mine are nothing as grand as that. They have no circuitry or power. They merely give specific responses to specific frequencies. They're just little bits of reflective alloy. I call them 'Mimosa'." The middle-aged man spoke in a bored voice from wherever he was. "But by using various frequencies, they can be controlled much like controlling a radio controlled car with a TV remote. Normally, they are placed on microorganisms in the air and spread around that way."
A vague noise surrounded Kakine Teitoku.
He quickly looked around, but the Mimosa attacked before he could find a path of escape.
The Professor of Member was standing at leisure outside of the refrigerated warehouse along with a mechanical beast. In his hand was a small computer terminal that was displaying the status of the program controlling the Mimosa.
The Professor was in a bazaar that looked like it had been built along the sidewalk. Business vehicles were allowed to park in that area and a commercial van that looked like a crepe stand was opened up with all sorts of fruits inside.
The mechanical beast next to him spoke.
"So they were in the refrigerated warehouse in District 4 just like the higher ups said they would."
"That's the power of the upper classes. Academy City is their territory. The city is overflowing with strange technology. It's impossible to run away."
The Professor spoke quietly while biting into a fruit from a southern country that was so red it looked poisonous.
"Art brought me to despair in the winter when I was 12."
The mechanical beast listened to the Professor's words in silence.
"I adored European architecture. I fell in love with the large scale of the 'creations' that people had made over a long period of time in order to complete a single ideal of beauty. But, at the same time, they were hard to understand. It's easy to look at the outer appearance of a building and call it beautiful. However, in order to thoroughly understand every little piece of the design, its large scale makes it necessary to put in an equally large amount of time. To be honest, there are just so many things to focus on that it becomes tiresome."
"So that's why you're so attached to formulas."
"Indeed," the Professor nodded. "Formulas are wonderful. There is no waste, they are efficient. All sorts of beauty is included in the smallest possible space. In that alone, formulas have a beauty to them and they also have a haiku-like poetic beauty. And you can look through all that beauty in a single row without missing a thing. …I want to find the beauty hiding in the corners of the world and softly admire that wonderful beauty. I will bow down to whoever I have to in order to do that. I don't care if I'm called Aleister's dog."
The Professor looked down at his watch.
The Mimosa should be done eliminating the enemy.
(Aleister won't be happy that I've killed the 2nd Level 5, but it shouldn't be a problem as he can just make a new Level 5.)
"Okay, let's go. This job will be over once the 'Tweezers' have been reclaimed and the other three with School have been taken out."
"What about our Member teammate, Saraku, who was taken out near the terminal station in District 23?"
"Accelerator called him Kill Point, didn't he? Well, he isn't dead, so we can just leave him. If you have time, go retrieve him."
The Professor spoke.
But the mechanical beast did not respond.
There was a loud explosion.
It came from within the refrigerated warehouse.
The great force shattered the glass on the buildings in the area. People ran around screaming and there was even a slight disturbance around the commercial van in the bazaar facing the sidewalk.
Dust enveloped the area.
Kakine Teitoku slowly walked out of the dust.
There was no injury on him.
Not even a scratch.
"Yo. So you say you were brought to despair in the winter when you were 12?"
The Professor hurriedly sent out commands to the Mimosa, but there was no response. Most of the tiny particles in the air had been blown away in the explosion, so the Mimosa in the area was too far away.
The Professor looked to be at his wit's end and Kakine gave a small smile.
As he smiled he spoke.
"It's about time you had another dose of despair."