She was lying face up as if she were staring up at the rectangular visible portion of the purple sky.
There was a sea of blood. The sea of blood was so large that it made one wonder if a single human body really held that much blood. It wasn't just on the ground. Both walls were painted red up to eye-level. It looked like someone had wrung out a human body to get every last drop of blood out.
In the center of that explosion of red lay a girl.
The arms and legs extending out from the short-sleeves and the skirt were torn up. It was most likely the same on her skin within her clothes that he could not see. Her school uniform had been dyed so red that its original colors could no longer be seen, but the clothes themselves were not torn at all.
Her body seemed to have been torn apart from the inside along the paths of the blood vessels as if someone had passed narrow wires through all of them and then forcibly torn the wires out. Her torn-up arms were reminiscent of a diagram of a dissected frog. The torn-up girl had nothing that could actually be called a "face". Instead, she had what looked like an open flower or a peeled boiled egg. It was a dark-red cavity with pink muscles and soft yellow fat inside.
"Uuh…Ahh…"
Upon seeing the red and purple scene before him, Kamijou took a step back. He must have started squeezing with his arms because the black cat started mewing like it could not breathe.
"Ah…Gh…"
Kamijou had seen a type of hell within the Misawa Cram School, but the corpses he had seen there had not had a "flesh-and-blood" feeling to them because they had either been encased in armor or transformed into melted gold.
But this was different.
He felt the urge to vomit as if he had stuck a finger down his throat. He screamed in his heart not to vomit. He used nice logic in thinking that he was looking at Misaka Imouto and he shouldn't vomit upon seeing her, but then he suddenly noticed her skirt in the edge of his vision.
Something was sticking out from within her skirt, from between her legs.
The soft and squishy object with a pink surface and a hint of purple was…
"Ugehh!"
In that instant, Kamijou could no longer hold back and his body doubled over. A sour flavor filled his mouth and then the contents of his stomach shot from his mouth.
Kamijou vomited.
He was looking at the person who he had been smiling and speaking with just 10 minutes before. That strange truth felt like it was going to blow away the gears turning in his head.
With a disgusting sound, the vomit fell to the ground. It spread out and mixed with the edge of the sea of blood creating an odd marble pattern.
Blood.
Finally, Kamijou realized that the blood had not dried at all. Blood took about 15 minutes to coagulate, so the person who had done that to her may still have been nearby.
The person who had done that to her.
Kamijou paled at his own thoughts. It clearly did not look like an accident or a suicide. He started to feel dizzy. The only other possibility was something he did not want to think about.
And then he heard a noise further down the alley.
"!?"
Ordinarily, one would assume it was a stray cat or something, but the sea of blood had already sent the situation beyond the ordinary. Kamijou's legs naturally brought him back. Something scary was ahead in the darkness, but even more, he simply could not even think about stepping over Misaka Imouto.
Kamijou took a few steps back and then noticed something hard in his pocket. It was his cell phone. He thought about calling for help, but he also thought the danger would come before help could arrive. Even if he called for help, he had to get out of there first, so he turned his back on Misaka Imouto and ran back through the alley.
The alley was completely straight, but the ground felt like it was shaking and he kept running into the walls. As he ran, he hit the buttons of his cell phone, but his fingers were trembling so much he didn't know what buttons he was hitting. It might have been 110, it might have been 119, or it might have been 117 or 177. At any rate, he pressed them. He heard it ring a few times and then he heard a slight click.
(It finally connected!)
Just when Kamijou got excited, he started hearing a cold electronic dial tone.
Kamijou removed the cell phone from his ear and looked at the screen.
It said it had no signal. He felt like throwing the phone against the wall.
(Cell phones are surprisingly inconvenient.)
He had tried to use the cell phone to call for help, but it didn't get a signal in that narrow alleyway. He had no choice, so he left the alley and dialed 119 again in front of the used book store.
He wasn't even sure what he said.
He had merely yelled something that didn't explain the situation at all and the rare number of 119 was contained within his call history.
Normal life continued on that main street and Kamijou doubted anyone would believe him if he told them a girl's destroyed corpse lay inside that alley.
"…"
Kamijou lowered his gaze to the cell phone in his hand.
He should probably let Mikoto know what had happened, but he didn't know her number. Not even being able to do that left Kamijou feeling incredibly powerless.
The cat within Kamijou's hands yawned.
He had called 119, but it was the police who had come.
His internal clock was not working properly, so he had no idea how much time had passed since he had called. He had a feeling it had been more than an hour, but he also had a feeling it had only been 10 seconds.
Looking at his phone, it had apparently been half an hour.
At first, Kamijou had thought his phone was broken, but he looked up and saw that the purple of evening had changed to the blue of night. He stared blankly up at the shining stars.
"…"
Kamijou silently watched the police who had arrived.
However, they were technically Anti-Skill not police. They were not espers. They were something like soldiers armed with next-generation weapons. They must have been thinking that it was possible it had been a murder committed by an out-of-control esper because a windowless station wagon pulled up and around 10 Anti-Skill members got out. They wore black helmets and suits made of special fibers which made them look a bit like some kind of robot. They also held a strange kind of rifle in their hands. Their equipment seemed to boast that they were putting priority on capturing the criminal rather than on protecting the civilians.
"…Hey! Hey, you!"
As Kamijou stared at them blankly, one of the Anti-Skill members suddenly called out to him. He was confused at first. He had only called, so they should not have known what he looked like. But then he noticed that they were calling out to all the people in the area.
"Oh, I was the one that called in. But I was calling for an ambulance not the police."
"I see. The police are contacted as a matter of course in issues like this. We probably just arrived first." The Anti-Skill man looked at Kamijou. "Is that the alley? And it would help if you could explain what you saw in there."
Kamijou closed his eyes.
It felt like the scene he had witnessed in that back alley was stuck to the underside of his eyelids.
"…A person was dead," he said.
It irritated him that his own voice was surprisingly calm.
"It was like her body had been torn up. …I don't know what kind of weapon was used. It might have been some kind of power."
Something swelled up within him with each word he spoke.
It was an unpleasant feeling like all his paralyzed senses were returning.
"She was an acquaintance of mine. I only met her two days ago, but I know what she looks like well enough to identify her from a photo. Ah, no. Why am I so calm? My thoughts should be more scattered, so why am I so…!"
"That's enough," said the man shaking his head. "I'm sure you made the best choice. That's why we are here. You were able to do something."
"…But I ran away."
"You still did something to help," the Anti-Skill man said.
Kamijou knew that the man was only saying that to console him, but it still managed to hold him in check. Kamijou just barely managed to stop before he reached definite destruction.
"We normally like to bring the person who discovered the crime scene along with us, but what will you do? We won't force you."
A chill ran down Kamijou's back. That scene of blood, flesh, and guts was stuck on the underside of his eyelids and his fingertips seemed to go numb.
Yet…
"…I'll go," Kamijou said slowly as he held the cat.
He didn't know why, but he did not want to run away anymore.
As he thought about seeing it again, Kamijou's body started to tremble. He trembled, but he had to go back into that alley. What had happened in the darkness there? He had to find out.
Kamijou led the way into the back alley as the armed Anti-Skill group acted as a shield for him.
(…Huh?)
However, something seemed off the instant he stepped into the alley.
The shoe was gone.
When he had first entered the alley, he had seen a girl's loafer lying in the entrance. And there had been another shoe a bit further into the alley.
Kamijou spun around.
The shoe at the entrance was definitely there.
However, the other shoe that was supposed to be further into the alley was gone.
(…?)
Kamijou felt something heavy within his gut, but the Anti-Skill group continued on. Next, they should have come across the scrapes on the wall and the empty cartridges. Yes, they should have. However, the cartridges were gone. As if someone had cleaned up the alley, not a single one could be found on the dirty ground. The scrapes on the wall had been scraped off. The scrapes themselves couldn't be erased, but it looked like someone had desperately tried to hide them by making their source impossible to identify.
(…Wait a second.)
Kamijou had a bad feeling. He felt a pressure in his stomach. He wanted to stop and think for a second, but the Anti-Skill group continued on. He felt as if bugs were crawling about under his skin. The missing shoe, the missing cartridges, and the obscured scrapes on the wall. Those words seemed all over the place, but they seemed to lead toward a single meaning as if their combination created some kind of chemical reaction.
Kamijou wanted to stand still, but he could not. As if he were being dragged by an invisible rope attached to the Anti-Skill group, he headed forward.
And they finally arrived.
Kamijou's breathing stopped.
They had arrived at the murder scene where Misaka Imouto had been lying dead in a pool of blood.
However, the corpse was nowhere to be found.