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Accelerator steps around the bodies at his feet. He's calculated that it's only a small percentage of them – you'd think the first few would get the idea after they were blown back, but there's a reason the Association used them for cannon fodder until they could bring in the big guns.
And then—not even they could stop him.
“Not worth the effort.” He sighs. “It's not like you don't know who I am.”
There's still one alive, squirming, trying to flee. He casually stops the worm with one foot, bends down to look at him. “Pathetic, aren't you?”
“I—what--”
The man's shaking and his eyes are wide with terror. “Did you really think,” Accelerator asks calmly, “that I'd just follow your little plan?”
“You can't--” The man coughs. “We summoned you--”
“You tried to,” Accelerator corrects him. “One little line isn't going to do shit when you have as much hatred for all of you assholes as I do.” Who needs mana when revenge will do even better as fuel?
So he bends real low, smiles, his teeth like a shark's, and says, “You aren't my master, anyhow, right? There's no way shit like you could ever tell me what to do.”
“Go to hell,” the man says. “She's just a tool. She doesn't have any--”
“You first.” He slams his foot on the man's chest, listens to him scream, and it barely registers over the roar building in his mind.
He stood in the circle, wanting to rend and kill and knowing that it was them that were trying to make him that way, trying to turn into some sort of machine, incapable of anything but destruction, a monster to be put down at the end, rabid and foaming.
But there was a voice, his master calling, and he broke out, followed it through glass and stone and there it was, standing there and--
“It's all right,” she said. “I found you.”
She reached out her tiny hand and he took it, looked at the seal, and wondered what kind of fucked up system would let a child decide the fate of the world.
He's never going to go mad for them, never going to lose himself utterly in blood and rage, but for her—he's tempted to burn the fucking world down just to keep her safe.
“Accelerator.”
The voice is firm, resonant, heroic as all shit.
“Tch,” he says.
Kamijou Touma stands there, arms crossed. He doesn't look that put out at all the bodies, but then again, they know what each other's capable of. Still, he's probably going to insist Accelerator stop and listen to him.
Alliances are bullshit.
Here's how it goes.
“I think we should stop this,” Touma says, in the middle of a fucking magical duel, because of course, he does.
“Are you kidding me?” Mikoto shrieks, firing another bolt of lightning at him that misses, but it was because she was distracted, not because she wanted it to not hit him or anything.
In her head, she hears, “Misaka thinks--”
“Shut up!” Mikoto grits through her teeth. She's not sure which of the Sisters right now is wearing the seal, but she wonders if Accelerator ever has to go through this problem. It would serve him right.
“Look, we know it doesn't lead to anything good,” he says. “We'll never get our wish.”
“You don't know that,” Mikoto says. But she does. It doesn't take a hundred sisters to tell her what's always at the back of her mind, the voice that tells her the truth: this will never end. Memories vanish, but you know when something's wrong. You always do.
There's always someone screaming in her mind, even in the darkness and the emptiness before she bursts in. It's strange, she thinks, to realize that the horror and pain you feel isn't coming from you.
When she opens her eyes in the light, thousands of voices whisper, saying, “We're sorry we're weak. We'll do better now that we have you.” They all sound like her.
She runs, but it's the War and she's bound. She may be more independent than the others, but in the end, she's just a Servant as well.
Their first duel, she hates him and she doesn't even really know him, but he knows her and he laughs and laughs. “You again?” he says. “ You want to go another round?”
And in her bones, she feels far too many deaths she's never had, mourns too many lives she never knew, so she looks him dead in the eye and says, “No.”
The boy looks shocked. She wonders if it's the first time he's heard it.
His hand trembles.
“Misaka,” he says, and he's looking at her. “It's the only way to save--”
“Fine.” She can't help but shake her head at him. “Let's do it. Just as long as I don't have to work with him.”
Touma really has perfected the art of looking terribly apologetic, guilty, and utterly determined, and not even a blast of electricity to the face will wipe it off.
So she's hanging out a ledge, doing reconnaissance while that idiot goes to talk down a raging murderball, when she notices a few more lackeys from the Association hanging around.
“Idiots,” she snorts, and readies her arm.
There's the sound of yelling and sizzling behind him, which means Mikoto must have taken care of the reinforcements. She's so reliable, Touma thinks fondly.
“Accelerator,” Touma says. “We have to get going.”
“Not until he tells me what I need to know.” Accelerator's eyes are wild, his teeth bared in a snarl. “They have her.”
“I know,” Touma says.
“They promised if I took you out, I'd get her back.”
“I know.”
“I'm going to kill them all instead.”
“I know,” and Touma also knows this is something he's going to live with.
The man beneath Accelerator's feet's still breathing, and he manages to say, “I don't understand. Why would you pair up with this thing? You're not like him.”
Touma shrugs. “Of course I am. We're fighting to save the people that matter the most to us. How do you think we became Servants? Because we're the strongest? Because we're the most powerful? No. It's because we all have wills that can't be stopped or overwritten by any of your twisted plans. Our masters put their faith in us and we'll see it through.”
Accelerator looks at him in disbelief. “I think he might have died during that speech,” he says caustically. “Well done.”
“I meant it.”
“I mean it,” the girl says, stamping her foot. “I'm hungry!”
Index demands tea, demands food, demands his attention and his time and anything he can give her. He gives it to her freely, listens to her stories, keeps the windows open so she can breathe, know she's free. He doesn't ask about why they chose her as a master, or a nobody like him as a servant, but he's seen enough of the Association and the Church to know that they're walking hand in hand to hell, dragging everyone along with them.
He clenches his fist, relaxes it, makes another vow in his head, then takes the tray out of the kitchen.
They are good days, most of the time, and he thinks that he doesn't need a wish from the Grail. This is what he wants and no magical bullshit war can give it to him.
And if his fellow Servants don't feel that way--
But he knows they do.
Misaka walks in, hands still crackling with energy. “Are you guys done? Because we can wait around for more of them to show up if you're that interested in competing for body count.”
“No, we're good,” Touma says, and looks at Accelerator.
“Tch,” he says. He won't look at Misaka directly, but they can both see the same look of terror and frustration in his face that they have every time they think about what might be happening to--
No, Touma thinks. They'll save them. They'll save everyone.
“Yeah, he's done too.”
"Then let's get out of here."
The Association, the Church, everyone who created this system, who decided that teenagers should be Servants and children Masters – all will answer for the suffering that created it.
There isn't going to be a Grail War, but there's definitely going to be a battle.