Read Online A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 8 by Kazuma Kamachi - Free Book Online Page B

flesh from the inside out. The attack didn’t depend on the type of object. For teleportation, the object being moved would appear overlapping the object she sent it to.
    So it would have been odd if her attack didn’t pierce the girl’s body.
    And yet…
    “Uh,” she grunted without meaning to.
    After the men in the air succumbed to gravity and crumpled all over the place…
    The girl wasn’t there, where she’d expected.
    She had taken a few steps back and was now sitting on the luggage, legs crossed elegantly. She had kicked it backward while sitting down so it skidded across the ground like a wheel.
    All the darts Shirai fired hung in empty space for a moment, then they all clattered to the ground—just like the unconscious men had.
    Teleportation was movement between points. If she designated the coordinates a little bit wrong, her attack wouldn’t hit. The men hadn’t been used as armor to block it but as a screen to throw off Shirai’s perception.
    The girl, legs still crossed, moved the flashlight in her hand. She pointed to one of the fallen darts with it, then flung it upward like a fishing rod.
    One of the darts then vanished—and reappeared in the girl’s empty hand.
    Here it co—!!
    The girl sidearmed the metal dart toward Shirai, busy preparing herself. She hadn’t used teleportation (or Move Point, like she said). It was traversing a linear, three-dimensional route. It was, however, aimed precisely at the middle of Shirai’s body.
    She couldn’t dodge it to the side given the width of the alley.
    There was always the option of teleporting across a wall and into a building to flee, but she couldn’t use it carelessly—she didn’t know what the inside looked like. If she accidentally sent herself into coordinates overlapping with another person, it would be a terrible tragedy.
    But there was no point in retreating backward. The dart was heading straight for her.
    Therefore, she chose to teleport forward. She warped right in front of the girl, ending up on the other side of the dart. She balled a hand into a fist. It would be a counterattack—delivered right after evading an incoming attack, it would send her enemy flying. But before she could…
    Smack.
    A metal dart struck her in the flank from behind.
    “…Ah…?!”
    Shirai felt something like a tremble bubbling up from the core of her body. Quickly losing the ability to endure it, she felt all of her strength drain from her. Her legs buckled and she fell to the ground.
    And oddly enough, it now looked like she was groveling at the girl’s feet as she sat on the luggage.
    “I already told you,” she said with a smile, re-crossing her legs. “My Move Point doesn’t need me to touch the object like yours does.”
    Kuroko Shirai heard her scornful tones—but couldn’t get herself to lift her head up.
    It was simple logic.
    First, the girl had thrown a metal dart with her hand. Then, at the same time Shirai dodged it, she used Move Point on the flying arrow. To make it appear inside Shirai’s back.
    The metal dart had been skillfully flipped one-eighty degrees without it losing its momentum and had stuck farther into Shirai, toward her stomach, then finally stopped. A terrible scraping resounded from deep within her.
    Shoom, shoom!
The sound of air parting occurred in succession.
    The next thing she knew, the girl’s empty hand now held every single one of the metal darts Shirai dropped.
    “How unfortunate for you. You’re from Tokiwadai Middle School, yeah? Mikoto Misaka might be at her wits’ end right now, but I didn’t peg her as the type to get her subordinates and juniors wrapped up in her personal affairs. Well, I guess she didn’t stop that experiment by herself, either, so maybe she doesn’t care anymore.”
    Those words sent a jolt through Kuroko Shirai’s body.
    It wasn’t a shudder of pain that went through her near-senseless body but a different kind of tremor. “What…was that?” She strained her neck. She