Rei Ao: "Even so, are you still as confident as before?"
Misaka Mikoto: "Confident? Not at allyou've totally crushed my confidence! Ugh!"
Rei Ao: "Heh, so that's how you take it. Then maybe you don't need to hear any more details."
Misaka Mikoto: "Tsk, don't underestimate me!"
She wasn't just bluffing. She simply hadn't realized that an esper in that world still wasn't enough.
Rei Ao: "All right, fine. I'll indulge you. Let's start with a little story."
Mabel: "I'm not a kid. I don't need to hear a little story."
Rei Ao: "Mabel, I'll come have a talk with you later."
Mabel: "???"
Rei Ao: "It's a simple story: a group of mad scientists targeted a superhuman who showed great potential, planning to use her DNA to clone more superhumans."
""
After a while, everyone was still processing his words, and Rei Ao fell silent.
Stella: "That's it? That's the whole story? There's not even any development?"
Shinoa Hiragi: "Indeed, it's a beginning with no end."
Megumi Kato: "I get the feeling Rei Ao-kun is hinting at something."
Miyuki Shiba: "Um is he implying this?"
Miyuki Shiba: "[Picture], [Picture]."
These two images weren't selfies; they were just sent by Misaka Mikotophotos of her and the "Misaka Sister."
Upon seeing two people who were nearly identical, was taken aback, along with everyone else. It was like they'd made a huge discovery. Misaka Mikoto's own eyes went wide as a sense of unease, a dark cloud of foreboding, rose in her chest.
The chat group went silent.
Everyone more or less had the same idea, but nobody wanted to be the first to say it.
Yukinoshita Yukino: "Rei Ao, are you implying they're clones?"
In the end, Yukinoshita was the one to break the silence.
Misaka Mikoto: "Impossible! Absolutely impossible!!!"
Her reaction was extremely intense.
Rei Ao: "Mikoto, calm down. Think carefullydidn't you once donate your DNA?"
He tried to reassure her, offering that hint.
"!!!"
A memory from the past surfaced in Misaka Mikoto's mindshe recalled being much younger.
As a child, she had given a DNA map to Yamashita University Hospital. They told her it was to develop medicine for treating muscular dystrophy. The young Mikoto had believed them and donated her DNA map.
"Could it have been back then"
Misaka Mikoto murmured, trembling all over.
~~~
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Chapter 285: Absolute Power Evolution, Higuchi Pharmacology Laboratory 7, Level 6 Shift!? (Bonus Chapter)
Mikoto Misaka did not answer Rei Ao's question.
That silence alone was enough to convey the issue at hand.
Things had reached this point.
Rei Ao decided to be completely honest with her.
Rei Ao: "Mikoto, you must already know whose hands your donated DNA ended up in."
Rei Ao: "And what I want to tell you is that the person you saw is, in fact, your clone."
Mikoto Misaka: "How can that be? They told me that my DNA map was for developing a treatment for muscular dystrophy!"
Yukinoshita Yukino: "It seems you were deceived. Rei Ao is talking about 'mad scientists using your DNA to create clones.'"
Mikoto Misaka: "But but why?"
She clenched her teeth, unable to comprehend their motive.
Rei Ao: "Why? That's precisely what I'm about to explain."
Rei Ao: "Next, let me tell you about the 'Railgun Mass Production Plan.'"
The Railgun Mass Production Plan.
Its essence was to analyze and replicate the genetic sequence formula of an esper.
The goal was to reliably produce espers, which under normal circumstances appear only by chanceperhaps one in a million.
The Higuchi Pharmacology Laboratory 7, which carried out the Railgun Mass Production Plan, used the DNA of 'Railgun,' Mikoto Misaka, to mass-produce the "Sisters."
Every Misaka Sister is a clone of Mikoto Misaka.
To speed up their physical and mental development, the experiment used drugs such as Zid-02, Riz-13, and Hel-03, enabling a body identical to Railgun's to develop in just fourteen days.
Basic knowledge of speech, movement, ethics, and so on was forcibly imprinted via a learning device.
Each Misaka Sister cost a mere 180,000 yen.
In the final phase of the experiment:
According to calculations by the "Tree Diagram Designer," the mass-produced Sisters had less than 1% of Railgun's power.
Their abilities averaged only Level 2.
No amount of genetic engineering or postnatal training could produce a Level 5 clone of an esper.
Hence, the plan to mass-produce Railguns was permanently shelved.
Yotsuya Miko: "Ugh I've got goosebumps. How terrifying So these really are mad scientists?"
She wasn't the only one; many others were shaken. The mere idea of mass-producing Mikoto Misaka was chilling in itself.
Yukinoshita Yukino: "What's even more frightening is the way they've put a price on human life."
Especially after Rei Ao emphasized that a single mature Misaka Sister cost 180,000 yen and explained the purchasing power of that amount, Yukinoshita Yukino felt a cold chill rise from her feet to her head.
The fact that it cost so little to create a life was horrifying, as was the notion of valuing life in monetary terms.
Accepting that kind of setupone could only imagine the depths people might sink to.
Hiiragi Shinoa: "Humans always love to dabble in forbidden territory."
In her own world, the humans researching Seraph of the End were no different.
"So that's what this is all about"
Having come to believe Rei Ao's explanation, Mikoto Misaka sank weakly to the ground.
Fear, dread, anger, guiltall sorts of emotions churned inside her.
For the first time, she truly hated those mad scientistsand she hated her own ignorance as well.
Frieren: "Wait, there's a problem. If the project was stopped and the Sisters were all frozen, then who is the one Mikoto Misaka saw?"
Kasuga Hijiri: "Could she have escaped in secret?"
Hiiragi Shinoa: "I don't think those mad scientists would overlook something like that."
Rei Ao: "You're rightit's not some simple oversight. It has to do with a new project called the 'Absolute Power Evolution (Level 6 Shift).'"
Following that thread, Rei Ao went on to explain the project in detail.
Academy City places the highest priority on developing special abilities.
And the ultimate goal of ability development is known as 'SYSTEM'becoming an existence akin to the will of a god descended upon the mortal world.
To further approach godhood, they needed to create something beyond humana Level 6, Shift.
By surpassing human limits, they hoped to understand the will of a god.
Thus, the 'Absolute Power Evolution Plan' came into being.
Through precise calculations by the Tree Diagram Designer, only one of the seven Level 5 espers in Academy CityAccelerator, who ranks firsthad the potential to evolve into a Level 6.
But even he would need over 250 years of standard training to achieve that.
Because there was no reliable way to extend a person's life to 250 years, the Tree Diagram Designer identified a different method: actual combat to hasten ability growth.
In other words, creating specific battlefields and letting battles play out in a controlled way to guide the escalation of his power.
According to the Tree Diagram Designer's calculations, if they set up 128 battlefields on which they would kill Railgun (Mikoto Misaka) 128 times, Accelerator would be able to evolve into Shift.
But there was only one Railgun.
That was when they refocused on the Sisters produced under the concurrent Railgun Mass Production Plan.
Because each Sister only possessed about 1% of the original's powerroughly Level 2calculations indicated that preparing 20,000 battlefields and 20,000 Sisters would yield the same result.
If the Railgun Mass Production Plan was merely terrifying, then the Absolute Power Evolution (Level 6 Shift) was outright cruel.
Shiba Miyuki: "Oh my goodness! Killing twenty thousand Sisters Even if they're clones, they're still human beings!"
Busujima Saeko: "They see these 180,000-yen clones as tools, or expendables."
Hiiragi Shinoa: "These people truly are beyond saving."
Kato Megumi: "Mikoto, are you alright?"
Mikoto Misaka: ""
Alright? Far from it.
"Urgh!"
Just imagining how twenty thousand Sisters were going to be slaughtered made Mikoto Misaka fall to her knees and retch.
It was all her fault; if she hadn't provided her DNA map, they never would have been born doomed to die.
"I'm a monster"
In that moment, Mikoto Misaka saw herself as an accomplice, loathing her own existence.
~~~
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Chapter 286: Magic God
Rei Ao: "@Misaka Mikoto."
Seeing that Misaka Mikoto remains silent, Rei Ao takes the initiative to mention her again.
Rei Ao: "I know you might hate yourself right now and resent those researchers, maybe even want to take action to destroy the experiment."
""
Misaka Mikoto's gaze grows grim.
She really is thinking that way.
She plans to hack into the network, find the location of the research labs, destroy them one by one, and completely halt that damned experiment.
Rei Ao: "But I hope you won't act rashly."
Misaka Mikoto: "Why?"
Rei Ao: "You're not a match for Accelerator. You can't stop the experiment from continuing, and you'd only put yourself in danger."
Misaka Mikoto: ""
That's a fact.
But
Misaka Mikoto: "What about you? If I strike a deal with you, you can defeat him, right?"
If it would stop this cursed experiment, Misaka Mikoto is willing to make a trade, even if it's that shameful trade where she grants the usage rights to her body.
However
Rei Ao does not meet her expectations.
Rei Ao: "Defeating Accelerator is easy, but the people involved behind the scenes are beyond what I can handle right now."
Misaka Mikoto: "What?"
Tohru: "How is that possible? Is there someone even Rei Ao can't deal with?"
Izawa Shizue: "Stronger than a Demon King I can't imagine that."
Rei Ao: "In truth, Misaka Mikoto's world doesn't only have espers. Or rather, even espers are rooted in another systemnamely magic."
Misaka Mikoto: "?"
What is magic?
Are scientific espers built on top of magic?
Misaka Mikoto has no clue.
Rei Ao: "I won't go into detail. All you need to know is that in your world, there's the science side led by Academy City, and there's also the magic side led by the Magic Church."
Rei Ao: "In your world, the most powerful existences aren't the Level 5 espers, but rather magicians who have stepped into the realm of godsMagicians who become Magic Gods."
Life inevitably ends in death.
Apples inevitably fall downward.
One plus one inevitably equals two.
And so on.
Those are 'laws' in this world that can never be changed.
Yet the magic recorded in grimoires can break, restructure, and create any of these laws:
One plus one can become three.
An apple can fall upward.
The dead can inevitably come back to life.
Magicians who can achieve such feats are thus called "Magic Gods."
"Magic God" doesn't mean a deity from some demon world;
Rather, it's a magician who has fully mastered magic and stepped into a godlike realm, able to bend any law of existence at will.
That is the ultimate form of a magician.
Having fully mastered magic, and having elevated themselves through a special ritual to the domain of gods,
Magic Gods can manipulate all rules.
They can reverse an expanding cosmic galaxy, turn 1+1 into 3, stretch or shrink a meter in length, increase or decrease a gram in weight, and so on.
They can freely control life and death, command all elements of the world, and casually manipulate time, space, and dimensions.
Creating or destroying all things is just a single thought to a Magic God.
They can destroy the world and then recreate it, removing anything unnecessary from ever existing in the first place.
This kind of thing is trivial to them.
They can erase an enemy's consciousness or reason to fight, making it nearly impossible to encounter an actual adversary.
In other words, the only possible enemies for a Magic God are other Magic Gods.
There's only one world;
Warping that world or fighting for its limited resources would require a Magic God. Only another Magic God can serve as that God's enemy.
One could say that in that world they possess "unlimited" power, enough to overturn all laws.
For them, the world is fragile as glass.
You could say that should they descend, they would shred the universe by throwing its phases into disarray.
To keep the world from being randomly affected,
Magic Gods reside in a "Hidden World" dimension, separating themselves from reality.
That hidden world doesn't exist within the real world.
Distance and time have no meaning there.
Even a layer of thin "skin" of distance is infinitely far.
Even a strand of hair's breadth of separation is an endless distance.
The Magic God's power cannot be interpreted by the world;
It fundamentally exceeds the limits that the world can allow.
If they casually step out from the Hidden World, the world would shatter like glass.
For a Magic God to descend from the Hidden World into the real world,
They must infinitely partition their own boundless power, dividing it into something small enough for the world to barely accommodate, then overlay that infinitely.
But no matter how many times they weaken themselves,
Magic Gods still hold enough power to crush the entire world.
That's the explanation Rei Aobased on what he knowsgives everyone about Magic Gods.
As for what Magic Gods are truly like,
He doesn't know.
Perhaps only by personally visiting Misaka Mikoto's world could he find out.
Sui: "A Magic God that sounds frighteningly powerful."
Yukinoshita Yukino: "I think it goes beyond frightening. Being able to affect the laws of the universethat's completely incomprehensible."
Hiiragi Shinoa: "No wonder Rei Ao is being so cautious."
Sakurajima Mai: "So Misaka Mikoto's situation is also connected to these incredibly powerful Magic Gods?"
Yotsuya Miko: "That would be too despair-inducing"
Misaka Mikoto: ""
She truly is in despair.
Her eyes lose focus.
She's never seen a Magic God,
But just from Rei Ao's description, she's already feeling powerless.
