Yurika felt her throat go a little dry, as if some immense pressure had instantly squeezed every last bit of moisture out of it.
The name Accelerator might not be very familiar to people who didn’t pay much attention to news inside Academy City, but to Yurika—someone who’d had plenty of dealings with Shokuhou, a fellow Level 5 and psychic esper—the name Accelerator was downright notorious.
Just knowing that she was now in a fight with Accelerator, Academy City’s strongest Level 5, was enough to make her shudder despite herself.
Among Academy City’s seven Level 5s, Shokuhou ranked fifth.
That was the result calculated by Academy City’s unique supercomputer—the machine that supposedly never made mistakes—
Tree Diagram.
It was a ranking summarized through analysis of all kinds of combat factors, and among them, the top two Level 5s were strong enough that they could quickly take out the five ranked below them.
And Accelerator was exactly such a person.
Shokuhou probably had no real means of resistance in front of him at all, while Yurika—thanks to the special nature of her ability—could just barely hold out against Shokuhou’s power.
If Shokuhou drove her ability at full force, then according to the researcher who’d tested Yurika’s esper power, her brain would instantly be paralyzed and her whole mind ground down until nothing was left.
In other words, Yurika running into Accelerator left her with almost no chance of victory.
If Accelerator really wanted to kill her, he wouldn’t even need to put in much effort.
“Hey, hey. You’re not just gonna give up like that, are you?”
The frail figure, dominated head to toe by that unchanging pale tone, watched as the light in Yurika’s eyes gradually faded along with her spiraling thoughts, and couldn’t help frowning slightly.
He’d thought he’d finally run into an esper who was a cut above the rest, but who’d have guessed this one’s resilience was far worse than he’d imagined.
“How boring.”
“…”
Hearing Accelerator’s words, Yurika lifted her head, and a spark of vitality flashed through her eyes once more.
True, she’d just been badly spooked by Accelerator’s reputation, but the thing was, if she thought it through carefully, it wasn’t like she had no way out—from that brief exchange just now, Yurika had actually sensed it: Accelerator’s combat strength wasn’t quite the overwhelming, sweep-everything-aside force she’d heard about.
He’d left her a certain amount of leeway. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
And though by Yurika’s guess Accelerator had held back quite a lot, that at least meant this person didn’t seem to want to kill her… at least, not yet.
Thinking that, Yurika let out a soft breath, easing the chest that had become a little uncomfortable from the earlier sudden pressure.
Resting a hand on her still-heaving chest, she set her eyes back on the white figure across from her.
Accelerator’s physical condition not only looked poor—it should actually be pretty terrible.
That sudden acceleration earlier was probably just an illusion created by altering the vectors produced when he kicked off the ground.
In other words, if she had some way to hit his body directly—girl’s body or not, Yurika still had some confidence in this body of hers that she regularly trained—knocking out that frail, albino-like frame of his shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
With that thought, Yurika put strength into her legs.
Her body, which by now looked nearly identical to a high-school girl’s figure, exploded into motion in an instant.
From a half-crouched stance not far from Accelerator to bursting forward, the whole thing happened almost instantaneously.
At a speed an ordinary person couldn’t react to, Yurika charged straight at Accelerator’s body!
I can do this!
Yurika felt she’d already hit her fastest possible speed.
The distance between her and Accelerator wasn’t far, so she quickly sprinted right up to him, and in the instant she closed in, in her field of vision, Accelerator’s expression—dazed, as if he hadn’t reacted—was reflected in her eyes.
This guy didn’t react in time.
That’s what her mind said, yet a bizarre feeling kept nagging at her.
Judging from how Accelerator hadn’t reacted at all to her getting close, he should just be someone with a powerful ability he couldn’t properly use.
But for some reason, seeing that expression on his face, an irrepressible bad premonition welled up in her heart.
But there was no extra time left to think about anything else. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
By now Yurika, still in her sprinting posture, had closed right up to Accelerator.
If she didn’t strike, then once he started moving, her mere Level 3 Telekinesis and her physical-combat skills—good for, at best, smacking a pretty-boy around—would probably get her killed by Accelerator in an instant, with even a whole corpse being hard to come by.
Somewhere along the way, Accelerator had already become equated with a homicidal maniac in Yurika’s mind.
With a complicated and uneasy heart, Yurika’s gaze tightened slightly, and then she swung her fist, smashing it hard at Accelerator’s face—though Yurika’s own strength wasn’t much, against someone as sickly-looking as Accelerator, knocking him to the ground shouldn’t be a problem.
But the instant Yurika’s fist touched Accelerator’s skin, the strange change erupted—her expression transformed drastically.
In the moment her fist made contact, she abruptly realized:
Her fist couldn’t move even an inch farther.
Accelerator’s face was like an invisible dividing line; no matter how immense the force had been a moment ago, once it touched this line it was forced to stop… and this stopping wasn’t resistance like hitting a wall.
From the other side of this line, another even more terrifying force seemed to surge out and bore into her body.
Then, under Yurika’s astonished gaze, this force—several times stronger than the force she’d charged in with—slammed her body violently back!
“Ngh!”
It was as if, after charging out with all her strength and hitting a wall, she’d been forcibly dragged back at an even faster speed.
A violent wave of discomfort flooded every corner of Yurika’s body in an instant.
And worse still, in just a moment, Yurika, still flying backward at high speed, felt herself suddenly slam hard into a wall!
I screwed up!
Seeing the mocking smile curling at the corner of Accelerator’s mouth in the distance—that was Yurika’s last thought before she lost consciousness.