"First, I should introduce myself."
"…Uhh, first, why were you even hanging there—?"
"My name? It's Index."
"That's a fake name no matter how you look at it! You're an 'index'? Like from the back of a book?!"
"As you can see, I'm a member of the Church. That's important. Oh, not the one in the Vatican, but the Puritans of England."
"I have no idea what any of that means, and are you ignoring my question?!"
"Hmm, I'm talking about Index…Oh, if you want my magic name, it's Libratus404."
"Hello? Heeelloooo? What kind of alien is speaking on this frequency?" Kris had no patience left for listening to this girl and picked at his ear with his pinkie finger. She started gnawing on her thumbnail. Maybe a nervous habit?
Why exactly are we sitting politely around my glass table like this is some kind of job interview?
He needed to leave for school soon, or he'd be late for his summer makeup classes. But he obviously couldn't just leave this lunatic in his room by herself. The worst part of it was that this mysterious silver-haired girl calling herself Index looked like she'd taken such a liking to the place that she was rolling around on the floor.
Was this yet another expression of Kris's misfortune? If so, this had gone too far.
"Also, I would be very grateful if you filled up this 'index' with food."
"Why?! Why bother raising your parameters?! If I tripped some strange flag and ended up going straight into the Index route, then just kill me now!"
"Umm…is that slang? I'm sorry. I don't think I understand what you mean."
She was a foreigner, of course. She didn't seem to understand popular geek culture.
"If I take three steps out that door, I'll die of malnourishment."
"…Um, and I care about that why…?"
"When that happens, I'll be sure to scrawl a message next to my corpse with my last bit of strength. A sketch of your face."
"What…?!"
"If someone actually comes to my aid before I've expired, I might tell them I was held captive in this room and abused until all that was left was this husk of a person…and I'll tell them you forced me to cosplay in this outfit, too."
"You might say what?! You seem to know a lot about otaku culture over here after all, don't you?!"
"?"
She tilted her head as if she were a kitten seeing herself in a mirror for the first time.
How mortifying. She's playing dumb. I feel like I'm the only one who's been tainted.
Kris stomped into the kitchen. I'll do it! Okay, I'll do it! The contents of the refrigerator had been ruined anyway, leaving only garbage. Even if I let her eat this stuff, it's not like it's putting a dent in my wallet. It'll be fine if I heat it up. He plopped the remains of what had once been food into a frying pan and started cooking something like a stir-fry.
Now that I think of it, where exactly did she come from?
There were foreigners living in Academy City, too, of course. But she didn't have that particular "scent" residents had. However, it would be very odd if she was an outsider.
Academy City was known as a "city of hundreds of schools," but it was easier to think of it more like a "city-sized boarding school." It sprawled across a third of New York, but a Great Wall of China–like partition surrounded the whole thing at the moment. It wasn't as strict as a prison, but it wasn't somewhere you could just accidentally wander into and get lost.
At least, that was how it looked to the outside world. In point of fact, engineering universities had launched three satellites into space for research purposes, and they constantly had their shining, watchful eyes on the city. Anyone leaving or entering was comprehensively scanned. Anyone arousing suspicion who didn't match up with the Gate's records would activate Anti-Skills or members of Judgment from all the schools, either of which would be all over them in seconds. Although…
Yesterday, electro girl conjured up a bunch of storm clouds. Maybe that's how she managed to evade their "eyes," Kris thought.
"Umm, so why were you hanging out to dry on my balcony, then?"
Kris tried again, splashing soy sauce into the malicious vegetable stir-fry.
"I wasn't hanging out to dry, okay?"
"Then what happened? Did the wind blow you here or something?"
"…Maybe something like that."
He'd only been joking. He stopped moving the frying pan and turned back to the girl.
"I fell. I was actually trying to jump from rooftop to rooftop."
Rooftop? he thought, looking up at the ceiling.
This neighborhood was chock-full of cheap student dorms. Slender, identical eight-story buildings were lined up one next to the other. As one could see from the view from the balcony, there were only about two meters between each building. It would probably be possible to jump from one rooftop to the next with a good running start, but…
"But the buildings are eight stories tall. One wrong step and you'd fall straight to hell."
"Yeah. You know what they say—they don't put up headstones for suicides," Index declared. Kris didn't really know what she meant by that. "I didn't have any choice, though. There was nowhere else for me to run at the time."
"To…run?"
Kris frowned unwittingly while Index replied simply, "Yup."
"I was being chased."
"…"
His hand stopped rocking the hot pan.
"I was actually jumping between buildings just fine, but in the middle of one leap, I got shot in the back." The Index girl looked like she was laughing.
"Sorry. It looks like I got caught on your railing while I was falling."
There was no embarrassment or sarcasm in her voice at all. She smiled at him as if it were perfectly normal.
"You got shot…?"
"Yes? Oh, don't worry, I'm not hurt. These clothes also have a defensive barrier on them."
What's a "defensive barrier"? A bulletproof vest?
The girl spun around to show off her clothes. She certainly didn't look like she was wounded. Was she actually shot? He found it much more probable that everything she had said was just a pile of lies, half-truths, and delusions.
However…
At the very least, she really had been hanging on his seventh-story balcony.
Hypothetically, if everything this girl was saying was true…
Then who would have shot her?
Kris contemplated.
He considered how much resolve it would take to vault across the rooftops of eight-story buildings. How a balcony on the seventh floor had fortunately interrupted her descent. What had she meant by her claim that she'd "collapsed"?
"I was being chased," she said.
He considered the smile plastered on her face when she'd said that
He didn't know what kind of circumstances Index was caught up in, and he didn't understand much of what she was saying. Even if she'd explained everything to him from start to finish, he probably wouldn't have understood half of it. He also probably wouldn't have wanted to bother understanding half of it.
But one thing was true.
She'd been dangling on his balcony on the seventh floor. If she'd taken one wrong step, she could have slammed into the pavement instead. The deadly reality of that fact struck Kris so vividly that he felt his chest tighten.
"Food."
Index suddenly poked her face out from behind him. She can speak English, but…she doesn't know how to use cutlery? She was clutching the utensils in her fist like a finger, her gaze fixed excitedly on the contents of the skillet.
A comparison of her expression to that of a kitten just lifted out of a cardboard box in the rain wouldn't have been far from the mark.
"...Uhh."
Something like a (toxic) vegetable stir-fry comprised of compost simmered in the frying pan.
Hmm. Looking at the hungry girl before his eyes, he could feel Angel Kris (normally paired with Devil Kris) writhing in agony inside him.
"Uhh, ahh! B-but, you know, if you're that hungry, rather than this gross bachelor chow I threw together, we should do it right and go to a restaurant or order takeout or something!"
"I can't wait that long, okay?"
"…Uhh, ugh!"
"And besides, it doesn't look gross at all. You cooked it for me without expecting anything in return. It can't possibly be bad, okay?"
This time she smiled even more widely and more brightly, in a manner befitting an actual nun.
Kris's stomach felt like it was being wrung out like a mop. Index ignored him, taking the chopsticks in her fist and scooping the contents of the pan into her mouth.
Munch munch.
"See? It's not bad at all."
Chew chew.
"…Ah, is that so."
"I can taste that you gave it a bit of a sour tang to help revitalize me. Well done."
"Egck! Sour?!"
Gobble gobble.
"Yeah. But I'm fine with sour. Thanks. You know, you're kind of like a big brother."
She grinned. She'd been eating so ravenously that she had a bean sprout stuck to her cheek.
"…Uhh…Whooooooaaaaaahhh!"
Vwapp!! He snatched the frying pan out of her hands at supersonic speed, and Index's expression became the very picture of disappointment. Kris made himself a vow. I will be the only one to go to hell for this.
"Were you hungry, too?"
"…Huh?"
"If you're not, then I think you shouldn't play games and just let me eat it."
Index chomped at the tips of her chopsticks and watched him with upturned eyes. Kris had a revelation.
God spoke to him: "You must take responsibility and eat this."
His rotten luck hadn't been the problem this time. He'd brought this entirely on himself.