Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei - Volume 12 - Double Seven Chapter Read online

  “Izumi, we’re doing that.”

  As she said that, Kasumi ran her fingers down the console of her CAD. She was using magic without authorization. Clearly an illegal act. Moreover, for the second time. Even bearing in mind it was directed at himself, it was not something he could turn a blind eye to. She was a new student getting ready for the entrance ceremony, but having said that, there was no way he couldn’t arrest her.

  In an instant, Tatsuya made that decision; fortunately, before he could act upon it, the illegal act of magic ended up being a mere attempt.

  “Settle down!”

  Mayumi, who had until then been too paralyzed to do anything about the situation, let her fist fall on top of Kasumi’s head.

  “…”

  Kasumi did not cry out but based on the way she held her head, despite how she was trying to make it appear, that probably really hurt.

  “…Onee-chan, why did you do that?”

  “That’s my line! Kasumi-chan, you, why did you do that!?”

  Mayumi had both hands on her hips as she looked down at Kasumi, who was looking up at her sister’s face with teary eyes. She was really incensed. Right away, Kasumi’s agitated mind was cooled by her sister’s threatening attitude, the color of her face changing from red to white.

  “I’ve told you over and over again, ‘The unauthorized use of magic is a crime!’ To do this on the very day you entered high school… What on earth were you thinking!?”

  Tatsuya watched, completely dumbfounded, as Mayumi talked on and on in a voice that was half an octave higher than usual. Seeing her flustered was not an unfamiliar sight. Nevertheless, this was the first time he’d seen her in a frenzy. This honest straightforwardness was not something he could have imagined from her, so different was it from the usual enigmatic smiling façade she used to conceal her real intentions.

  On the other hand, Kasumi, who was being drenched in the display of rage, had not abandoned her resistance, although she had curled herself up. Because they were family? Or could it possibly be because she was used to it.

  “B-But, that guy was doing something indecent to Onee-chan…”

  The counterattack was certainly effective.

  “Wha… in-indecent!?”

  She did do some damage to her opponent in a sense.

  “We were not doing anything like that! What were you thinking!?”

  If you looked at the big picture though, all she had done was add fuel to the fire.

  “After all that you said about you two being fine looking around before the doors opened without me sticking with you like you two were children, Kasumi-chan, you did this!? You didn’t cause anyone else problems like you did just now, right!?”

  I see, that was the reason, thought Tatsuya. Mayumi came here because she was escorting her sisters to the admissions ceremony instead of their busy parents.

  “Onee-sama, that is absurd.”

  The one who disputed the reprimand of Mayumi’s that had taken the form of a question was not Kasumi, whose body had begun quivering, but Izumi, who was snuggled next to her.

  “Aside from Kasumi-chan’s mistake just now, we have not done anything to cause problems for other people.”

  “I see… Izumi-chan, should I believe you?”

  “I promise, there are no discrepancies.”

  Izumi’s polite tone was a bit too polite as she proclaimed their innocence, which seemed to restore Mayumi’s equanimity somewhat.

  “Understood. …Tatsuya-kun, please forgive us!”

  After seeing the affirmative in Izumi’s eyes, Mayumi turned to Tatsuya and bowed deeply.

  “My little sister did something outrageous. Kasumi-chan, you apologize to Tatsuya-kun as well!”

  Perhaps she understood how serious her sister was; whatever she was feeling in her heart, Kasumi-chan wasn’t displaying that defiant manner any more.

  “I cannot excuse my behavior.”

  She lined up next to Mayumi and bravely lowered her head.

  “I too offer my apologies. Shiba-senpai, please pardon Kasumi-chan’s rudeness somehow.”

  Kasumi was not the only interested party; Izumi followed up after her elder sister.

  Receiving a simultaneous apology from the three beautiful girls — no, one beautiful woman and two beautiful girls — made him feel ill at ease. Miraculously, there had been no witnesses to the use of power a little while ago, but now for some reason or other, he felt many suspicious gazes on them from here and there. If people mistakenly thought he was bullying the girls or something, then the damage of the aftermath would be worse than Kasumi’s flying knee kick.

  “Please raise your heads. No harm has been done, so please don’t worry about it.”

  Is what he said, but ‘please don’t do this for my sake’ was closer to what Tatsuya meant. In order to escape from the gazes of the gradually increasing onlookers, he wanted to get away from this place as soon as possible. However, ‘don’t worry about it anymore’ was not a pretense.

  That was something Mayumi probably understood also. When she raised her head, she had a relieved look on her face. However, that look was soon replaced by a guilty one.

  “Ah, umm, Tatsuya-kun.”

  “What is it?”

  In response to her mood, which was somewhat strange for some reason, Tatsuya put his mind on alert.

  “I know that… the incident just now is supposed to be reported to the staff room, but,”

  As she faced Tatsuya, Mayumi closed her eyes and put both her hands together.

  “Please! For my sake, won’t you overlook this, please!?”

  Oh, that’s it, Tatsuya did not mutter this out loud.

  “I do not intend to make a big deal out of something as minor as this.”

  Actually, if ‘something as minor as this’ was a problem, he didn’t know how many times he and Miyuki would have been placed in protective custody. ‘I don’t want this talked about either’ was Tatsuya’s honest feeling.

  “Thank you, Tatsuya-kun!”

  So, he was troubled by the abundance of emotion. Besides...

  “No, she intended to barely miss me from the start.”

  That flying knee kick had been what is known as a bluff. If she had been attacking him earnestly, Tatsuya wouldn’t have made such a gentle response.

  Kasumi had planned for the combination Acceleration and Movement magic she had applied to herself to be caught by the other magic she linked to it when her knee was thirty centimeters from Tatsuya’s face, so rapid deceleration would be cast at the distance of ten centimeters when she would halt mid air. If she hadn’t done so, not even Tatsuya would have grasped her knee with one hand. No matter how much he had been trained, stopping a person who weighed forty kilograms and was accelerating at fifteen meters per second was impossible. Because he knew the point where the rapid deceleration started and the point where it was to halt, directly before the stopping point, he had literally forced termination by putting his hand there.

  “Ha… I’ve come to expect that from you, Tatsuya-kun.”

  As a look of astonishment and a mutter of “How the…” came from Kasumi on her side, Mayumi nodded yes-yes with an impressed look on her face. For Mayumi, abnormalities like this from Tatsuya had become a normal thing.

  “Senpai, I have the job of new student guidance, so I must go. The event site is already open.”

  To forestall Mayumi, who looked like she was going to say something unnecessary, Tatsuya made this announcement and quit the scene without waiting for a reply.

  “Pixie.”

  After separating from the Saegusa sisters, in a place where there were few people, Tatsuya put a vocal transmission unit near his mouth.

  (Yes, Master.)

  The voice that replied in a soft whisper was an active form of telepathy. This was the response of ‘Pixie’ who was in the ‘3HType P-94’.

  “Erase all the Psion sensor data from the records, from right now to ten minutes before now, for the area in fron
t of the front yard entrance to the auditorium.”

  (As you wish.)

  It seemed that Mayumi had carelessly forgotten, but Kasumi’s use of magic without authorization could not be concealed merely by Tatsuya’s silence. Everywhere inside the school grounds was covered with sensors to observe magic activity; aside from the exception of periods like the new club member invitation week, the unauthorized use of magic would be recorded by the sensors.

  (Erasure completed.)

  Naturally, Tatsuya had not gotten Pixie moved to the Student Council room simply to wait on tables. Since she was originally a housekeeping robot, he had let her do what she wanted, but Tatsuya’s intention was entirely different. It was to hack the surveillance system inside the school.

  If this was March, when Mayumi was still enrolled, then most of her usual requests would be accommodated. She had overcome the usual limits of the powers of the former Student Council presidents and retained the intervention codes for the surveillance system. Of course, she had not gotten them by honest means. Therefore, the Student Council president that followed her hadn’t inherited them, of course.

  Tatsuya, who had various dark spots in his background, needed a means to intervene in the surveillance system other than Mayumi. Then he cast his eyes on how Pixie was constructed.

  Right now, Pixie was operating from within the humanoid home helper robot’s electronic brain where her actual body was lodged, which she manipulated directly. In short, Pixie was concealing the ability to interface and seize electronic systems without an intermediary. This is what Tatsuya realized.

  So Tatsuya spent most of spring break engrossed in teaching Pixie various hacking techniques. The techniques were ones he originally learned from the ‘Electron Sorceress’ Fujibayashi. The fruit of Tatsuya’s labor was that within the limits of the First High School’s private system, Pixie had learned how to freely infiltrate the surveillance system and overwrite the data.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  Although it was called new student guidance, it was not hard to figure out where the auditorium that was the site of the entrance ceremony was, and if you had a terminal equipped with an LPS (local positioning system) function, you couldn’t get lost. Cases like Erika’s last year where she didn’t have a terminal so she didn’t know where to go were the exception. Tatsuya and the others’ job was not to guide new students; their main job was to provide a heads up to new students who looked like they were going to be late.

  “Umm, excuse me Senpai. Which way is it to the auditorium?”

  Therefore Tatsuya had not expected to encounter a genuinely lost new student.

  The place was the tree-lined path between the library and small second gymnasium. The site for the entrance ceremony was on the opposite side. The male new student, with a puzzled look on his face that he’d seen looking hither and thither, had just called out to him; now it was up to him to reply to this sentence.

  Nevertheless, the new student was very ostentatious, thought Tatsuya. Although, there were some students in his own grade who possessed red hair, blue eyes, black skin or other colors that were unlike the majority of Japanese people. However, they were not as radiantly hued as the slight male student standing before him.

  The color of his hair was platinum. The color of his eyes was silver. The color of his skin was white. It wasn’t just his coordinating colors. His facial features did not have any distinctive Japanese traits. Perhaps, his Nordic genes were expressed to a large extent. Come to think of it, Tatsuya perceived a resemblance to the new female teacher Sumisu (Smith).

  “I’ll guide you. Come with me.”

  Even though his mind was considering such things, Tatsuya did not delay giving an answer. As he said it, the new student bowed deeply with a relieved look.

  “Thank you. Umm, I am Sumisu Kento.”

  “Sumisu?”

  Tatsuya muttered without thinking, because the surname of the person he had been thinking about resembled the family name of the boy. However, Smith was one of the common names in English speaking countries. It could be a coincidence, reconsidered Tatsuya.

  “Ah, yes, it is written with 'sumi,' the symbol in 'corner,' and 'su,' the symbol in 'counterattack,' and read as Sumisu. My parents emigrated from the States before I was born. At that time, Smith started being spelled with the symbols as Sumisu… is it a weird name?”

  However, the boy Kento took it to mean that he was talking about the strangeness of the name. The way he tapered off toward the end might mean he had experienced teasing in elementary and middle school over having Sumisu as a surname.

  “No, I did not think it weird, even a bit.”

  Middle school and elementary students might practice what is called innocent and thoughtless cruelty. But Tatsuya would have nothing to do with foolishness like that. What he was considering was that if both his parents were immigrants, then it was natural that he couldn’t see any physical traits that were distinctively Japanese.

  “By the way.”

  More importantly, there was something else bothering Tatsuya.

  “Sumisu-kun, doesn’t your information terminal have an LPS function?”

  When Tatsuya spotted the boy, he had been looking at both screens of his information terminal nearly in tears. If his information terminal was equipped with an LPS function then he should not be lost.

  “Ah, please call me Kento. About the LPS… the function is attached, but,”

  As he was speaking, Kento retrieved his rather large information terminal from his pocket. His height wasn’t even up to Tatsuya’s chest. One of his inherited traits must be having an extremely small stature. Height-wise, he would be classified with the shorter Japanese males of his own age. So perhaps because he thought it would be hard to see if he merely held it in his hand, he held it above his head when he pointed it toward Tatsuya.

  The information terminal was an extremely old model. Tatsuya couldn’t determine anything about it other than that it was old, but the model was at least twenty years old. And it wasn’t a domestic brand. A type that had been constructed in the USNA and fairly common.

  “I didn’t have anything but a visual model terminal, so my father lent me the information terminal he used to use, but… it doesn’t have standard LPS.”

  I see, thought Tatsuya. Since it was designed for an earlier version of the public infrastructure, it has low compatibility with the current version — no, that would be limited to domestic models.

  Japan and the USNA process data by subtly different methods. Besides the USNA’s LPS is at most a supplement of their GPS system, it is not an independent function like Japan’s LPS.

  “Let me see it.”

  Tatsuya reflexively checked the processing power and unused capacity of the terminal Kento handed him. It was an old model, but it had undergone various tune ups. Kento’s father might be an electrical engineer. Deciding that it would be fine, Tatsuya linked Kento’s terminal directly to his own by a wire and transferred the local position application.

  “I’ve installed a school map that uses GPS. It is lower in speed than an LPS application, but it should serve you as a map guide.”

  He returned the terminal to Kento after the installation was completed.

  “Thank you!”

  Despite the fact that that was all he did, Kento looked at Tatsuya as if he had saved his life.

  “Of course, it would be better to buy a replacement. After all, this is only a temporary fix.”

  He was giving out advice that did not need to be said because behind his poker face, Tatsuya was a little taken aback. He soon found out the reason for Kento’s excessive response.

  “Uh, umm, are you Shiba Tatsuya-senpai!?”

  “Oh, that’s true, you know of me?”

  “Yes! I saw your activities in last years Nine Schools Competition!”

  Tatsuya was not surprised at Kento’s answer. Although it was in the Newcomers Division, he had played a leading role in the Monolith Code matches. On occasion,
someone should probably remember his face from that.

  That was what Tatsuya thought, but,

  “Your tactics were incredible! Your tune ups were brilliant! I chose First High School because you would be my senpai here!”

  He had been half right. Kento hadn’t recognized him as an athlete but as an engineer.

  “Until I saw last year’s Nine Schools Competition, I intended to enroll in Fourth High School. Because, my practical skills are poor. But when I saw Senpai’s super technical skills, I decided that I absolutely had to go to the same school as Senpai!”

  Listening to Kento’s enthusiastic words made Tatsuya feel like he was hearing someone else being talked about.

  “Right now, I am as you can see a Second Course student, but I’m determined to try to transfer into the same Magic Engineering Course as you Senpai, next year!”

  “…I see; work hard. With such enthusiasm, you should be alright.”

  “Thank you!”

  His interests were in a little different direction, but he was probably a male version of Honoka. Tatsuya was a little confused by the enthusiastic puppy dog eyes Kento used to stare at him.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  Kasumi and Izumi parted from Mayumi at the entrance to the auditorium and selected seats in a row close to the front. Kasumi took her seat first, but she didn’t wait for Izumi to finish sitting down in her polite and elegant manner before turning to face her.

  “Izumi, do you know that skirt-chasing boy from earlier?”

  There were still twenty minutes until the entrance ceremony began. There were many new students who were chatting with their neighbors like the girls. In their midst, Izumi’s posture said ‘what’s up’ when her elder sister, who was the same age as herself, deliberately whispered to her, but she looked like she lost interest when she understood the meaning of Kasumi’s question.

  “Yes. …Could it be that you really didn’t recognize him, Kasumi-chan?”

  When Kasumi’s face told her that Kasumi was asking the question in earnest, Izumi looked stunned.

  “…Is he a famous person?”