Things were looking pretty good. A certain temperature controller felt she'd firmly grasped the rhythm of the battle.
While the control over the air was somewhat evenly matched, even slightly at a disadvantage, she was a clever one.
Just wait until that narrow space was completely filled, and it would naturally become her domain.
She even briefly entertained the thought that perhaps directly turning the entire area within sight into an ice kingdom might be more effective.
After all, she could lower the temperature with ease. In a place so damp it could give someone with poor health rheumatism, creating a massive ice spectacle was a piece of cake.
Once that happened, no matter how strong that fist-shattering-ice-walls guy was, she wouldn't be able to budge a decent-sized iceberg. She'd be trapped obediently inside, and she could even further compress her living space.
If it were the chilly winter, this tactic would be practically perfect. At least she wouldn't have to worry about the iceberg melting from the weather. Thinking about it, she was just downright awesome.
Anyway, achieving a flawless KO had always been her ultimate aspiration, even if this particular KO was taking a bit longer than expected.
Thus, a certain twelve-year-old girl lacking a decisive finishing move painstakingly pondered these rather bizarre ideas.
Just as she was lost in her imagination, something shifted with Kinuhata Saiai.
The nitrogen surrounding her body had been stripped away, leaving only the area immediately around her at relatively normal pressure. This nitrogen formed a thin barrier holding back the falling snow, which quickly piled into a heavy layer on top.
The same was happening below. The ice spread rapidly, the ground abruptly rising, making every step a potential stumble.
"Cough, cough." Takitsubo Rikou struggled to breathe, her face gradually growing pale and weak.
Although Kinuhata Saiai still firmly controlled the air within a few meters, her arms raised high to maintain the nitrogen armor, the encroaching vacuum was unstoppable. It was only a matter of time.
After all, Kinuhata couldn't perfectly control every bit of air.
Influenced by physics, some gas would always escape her control and rise away, increasing Item's disadvantage and highlighting the benefits of having a longer effective range.
Ever since a certain bun-haired girl became a Level 4, the maximum linear distance she could influence (with herself as the origin) hadn't grown as fast as her processing power.
Aside from gaining a few extra meters with the increased calculation ability, it had barely changed.
But this was to be expected. Natsume Sonoko's ability range could essentially be visualized as a three-dimensional sphere, with the maximum distance being the sphere's radius.
In mathematics, the formula for a sphere's volume is four-thirds times pi times the radius cubed.
As the radius increases, the volume of this sphere expands dramatically. Once it reaches a large base value, like Natsume Sonoko's hundred-plus meters, each additional meter requires significantly more effort and cost than the last, which is why the growth seemed so slow.
Returning from Natsume Sonoko's favored mathematical ponderings, our certain someone frowned slightly as she watched the still-resisting Item duo.
'What tenacious opponents,' she thought. Even though less than five minutes had passed since the conflict erupted, the battlefield was already quite the scene.
This certain Natsume Sonoko had come all this way to launch an attack, but she refused to believe it was her fault. It was all the fault of these pesky Dark Side organizations.
Otherwise, she should be back in her dorm right now, figuring out how to help Misaka-senpai.
An interesting phenomenon had appeared on the highway: both cold and hot air currents coexisted. Our someone was carefully controlling them, wary of accidentally crossing her self-imposed boundaries and letting the hot and cold mix, resulting in a harmless summer downpour.
It was a real trial of ice and fire, alright.
Maintaining this delicate balance was draining Natsume Sonoko's processing power rapidly, yet she was rather enjoying herself.
She rarely used both her heating and cooling abilities simultaneously, and the experience felt surprisingly good.
The opposing temperatures acted on the nitrogen armor, but unfortunately, no thermal expansion and contraction damaged it; it only served to further compress their living space.
Just then, confined within the narrow space, Kinuhata Saiai suddenly nodded at Takitsubo Rikou and produced two metallic, canister-like objects from somewhere, handing one to Takitsubo.
'Seriously, isn't it exhausting running around with so much stuff all day?' thought a certain Natsume Sonoko, who sometimes didn't even want to carry her own black school bag.
It was a shame bags couldn't be stored in the classroom; hauling it back and forth every day was a real pain.
Natsume Sonoko watched, baffled. 'Are those high-yield bombs or something?'
Kinuhata Saiai crushed the canister in her hand and hurled it upwards. The hot air controlled by Natsume Sonoko immediately retreated decisively, as if something was violently sucking away the heat, while also releasing some gas.
Natsume Sonoko silently looked up. The thick fog still shrouded everything, barely allowing the light of the moon or stars to penetrate, but the temperature seemed to have dropped another notch.
Our someone was now on high alert. She'd even constructed a thick ice wall in front of her, a good four or five meters thick.
For safety's sake, Natsume Sonoko didn't spare her processing power in the least. After all, hers was far greater than your average Level 4's.
'Yours truly is the undisputed ceiling for Level 4 processing power!'
'Yeah, right. Weren't you the one complaining about not having enough just a while ago?'
Natsume Sonoko tensed her whole body, her eyes alert. But she found the thing did nothing besides absorb heat and release gas. Just as she was feeling puzzled, she noticed the Item duo had already begun charging towards the other side of the ice wall—they needed to reach breathable air again.
"We can't just stay put and let her surround us. We have to get out of here," Kinuhata said to Takitsubo. Having been a middle schooler moonlighting in the Dark Side, she understood you couldn't just stand still and fight that Tokiwadai girl.
They had to keep moving, fight while retreating, to prevent her from creating a vacuum environment.
This applied not just to her, but to Mugino and the others as well. In fact, it was only because she was an atmospheric control-type esper that she could compete in a battle of attrition in the first place.
Kinuhata Saiai charged first. Takitsubo Rikou waited by the hole in the ice wall, then took a deep breath herself and ran towards Kinuhata's position.
Takitsubo's ability wasn't suited for combat, at least not before Level 5.
Within the Dark Side organization Item, she primarily handled logistics and support. While she appeared gentle, frail, and physically weak, her physical fitness still surpassed our certain someone's by a mile.
Takitsubo Rikou gripped a metallic, canister-like object in her hand and squeezed, imprinting five deep finger marks onto its surface.
She tossed the object into the pseudo-vacuum towards Kinuhata Saiai. The canister-like thing instantly released a burst of gas.
"..."
"That's some serious grip strength," Natsume Sonoko murmured to herself, seemingly always fixating on random details.
Natsume Sonoko rubbed her chin, like a wise thinker pondering deep matters.
Immediately, dozens of massive battering rams materialized and fell from the sky, landing around Kinuhata Saiai.
They didn't aim directly for her head, but instead struck at angles, intending to simply break the nitrogen armor.
In this vacuum environment, the nitrogen maintaining the armor couldn't be replenished. Sustained attacks were all that was needed to break it, as its defensive capabilities were greatly reduced.
But contrary to Natsume Sonoko's expectations, her attack failed. The nitrogen armor remained intact, even giving Kinuhata enough time to stop and shield Takitsubo Rikou.
"So those canisters contained nitrogen... no, liquid nitrogen, right?" she finally figured it out. So these Dark Side guys were carrying stuff like that around.
Natsume Sonoko's face fell a little, forced to watch as Takitsubo and the others escaped her manufactured pseudo-vacuum zone.
'Why run? I'm not some villain,' Natsume Sonoko internally grumbled. She just wanted to deliver them to the Anti-Skill officers, that's all. Besides, escaping wouldn't be that easy.
Just as the Item duo escaped the pseudo-vacuum zone, before they could even catch their breath, they suddenly found the highway beneath their feet had vanished into nothingness.
Kinuhata Saiai and Takitsubo Rikou exchanged a glance, their hair whipping wildly in the air like fluttering butterflies as they began to plummet rapidly.
Splash!
That was the sound of them hitting the river water, sending up a decent-sized splash. Gurgling bubbles surfaced as the two sank towards the center of the river.
The moment the Item duo landed in the river near the highway, the water immediately began to freeze. Even though they still had their nitrogen armor, the ice encased it entirely, layer upon layer.
It was like a deep-fried thousand-layer pancake from that shop called Golden Pie House in School District 7's underground mall.
Within seconds, the two were frozen solid, floating up from the river's center to the surface inside a large ice ball about seven or eight meters in diameter.
A head poked out from each side of the ice ball: one belonged to a rather grim-faced Kinuhata Saiai, who believed she'd been thoroughly tricked, the other to a Takitsubo Rikou, whose eyes held a trace of inexplicable excitement.
Kinuhata Saiai's body was still covered in nitrogen armor, but she couldn't even move a finger.
The pressure inside the ice ball rendered them completely immobile; even superior physical strength was useless here.
If she could get the ice ball rolling, denying them any leverage, escape would become even more impossible.
"Total success!" Natsume Sonoko's face finally broke into a delighted expression, a grin threatening to split her face from ear to ear.
Then she seemed to recall Tokiwadai's school rules—young ladies' smiles ought to be elegant and charming.
Natsume Sonoko was quite mindful of school regulations and such, so her face quickly settled back into a placid, somewhat blank expression.
As for sneaking out earlier that night without the dorm supervisor's knowledge, Natsume Sonoko reasoned that was completely justified, all for the sake of protecting Academy City's peace. It couldn't be lumped in with this. Therefore, she was still a model student of Tokiwadai Middle School.
"As long as I'm on the case, just using my brains and a little clever trick is enough to handle any enemy."
For a moment, her confidence skyrocketed, filled with the petty triumph of a successful prank.
"...Takitsubo, do you know what just happened?" The two heads, positioned on opposite sides of the ice ball, could barely see each other's line of sight. Their physical condition, at least, seemed fine.
"I think we ran into the river. It feels... strange," Takitsubo Rikou languidly lay inside the ice ball, her head lightly resting against the spherical surface, comfortably gazing at the stars in the night sky.
"Super weird. We were clearly running along the highway. How could we possibly end up in the river?" Kinuhata Saiai was baffled, a look of defiance on her face. She tried headbutting the ice surface to break free, only to get a faceful of snow.
"Pfft." A faint smile touched Takitsubo Rikou's lips seeing Kinuhata with her snow-covered face.
"She can create mirror images and hide her body, so she must also have the ability to control light. It's possible she made us see the highway as the river and the river as the highway. For example, by changing the angle of the light on the road, she could shift its apparent position in our eyes," Takitsubo explained, a hint of wry admiration in her tone.
"And with such thick fog, we'd long since lost our sense of direction, hadn't we?"
"But we were clearly running in the opposite direction from the ice wall. The ice wall was right in the middle of the highway from the start. We shouldn't have gotten it wrong," Kinuhata Saiai argued, unconvinced.
"Actually, just changing the angle of the ice wall slightly would have been enough to confuse us," Takitsubo Rikou sighed.
"...This is bad," Kinuhata Saiai felt rather disheartened. As members of the Dark Side, they knew their likely fate from the beginning.
The mortality rate in the Dark Side was never just a number on a computer screen for them.
"We might not need to worry that much. She doesn't seem to have much ill intent," Takitsubo Rikou said lazily, still looking at the night sky.
A certain Natsume Sonoko had also landed on the ground by now, saving a bit of processing power.
The fog blanketing the highway was no longer maintained, and both the hot and cold air began to dissipate, leaving only her own optical invisibility and the reinforcement of the two prisoners' 'ice prison.'
"Now this is a bit of a problem. How am I supposed to hand over such a huge ice ball to the Anti-Skill teachers?"
Fresh from her victory, Natsume Sonoko looked at the massive ice ball with dismay. If she opened it, she worried they'd escape. If she didn't, transporting it was a major headache.
Just as she was feeling stumped by these two Item members, the phone in her hand suddenly rang.
"It's Shirai-san," Natsume Sonoko paused for a moment before answering the call.
"Natsume-san, where did you go? Why haven't you been answering your phone?" Only then did Natsume Sonoko notice the four or five missed calls on her phone. She'd been too focused to notice earlier.
"Don't worry, I'm fine. Shirai-san, I'll tell you a secret~ I caught those two bad guys, you know?" Natsume Sonoko said proudly.
--+--
T/N: While I am an inexperienced Translator, I have a Patreon! While it may seem empty as of now, webnovel will get 3 Chapters Every Day, and advanced chapters will be uploaded on Patreon.
It may not seem worth it now, but maybe in the future. Who knows!
[email protected]/AspenTL
If you guys wanna check it out.