After Kamijou left Mikoto, he headed towards the department store by the station as he had originally intended. He looked in the perishable goods section in the first basement and decided to buy 4 days' worth of vegetables because they were pretty cheap that day.
(…Hm, the section selling completed dishes seems to be popular, while there aren't many people in the sections with meat, vegetables, and other ingredients.)
(Are fewer people cooking for themselves these days?)
Kamijou turned his head quizzically as he wondered this and left the store.
He looked up and at the airship displaying the news floating above. As before, it was about the protests in America...or so he thought. It now seemed to be about Russia. All the news was about the protests, so it became difficult to distinguish between old stories and new ones.
"..."
Kamijou stopped to think while holding grocery bags with both arms.
He couldn't get what Misaka Mikoto had told him before out of his head.
It wasn't that there was no cause behind the demonstrations and protests around the world; the problem was just so big that there were too many causes and therefore no simple way of solving it.
Mikoto probably most resented having been used in the incident on September 30th. Their efforts to bring back peace were instead used to bring about an entirely different kind of chaos.
Kamijou wanted to do something about it, too.
Vento of the Front who caused the chaos did have her reasons. And Kazakiri Hyouka who stood at a point halfway between science and magic didn't want that chaos. It was a bunch of people "outside" of it all getting all worked up and throwing the world into chaos now. That was clearly wrong.
But...
(What can I do...?)
Kamijou clenched his teeth as he stared at the airship floating up in the air.
(This problem has to be stopped. What I want to do is obvious, but what can I actually do about it?)
He could contact Tsuchimikado who knew about the underside of the Academy City. Or he could contact Kanzaki and the others at the Anglican Church. But Kamijou couldn't imagine even those people being able to completely solve a problem that had grown so large. He had a feeling that working behind the scenes to stop the problem from getting this large in the first place was their way of dealing with this kind of thing.
(Well, standing here isn't going to solve anything. And I don't even know how to contact the Anglican Church in the first place. I guess I should head back to the dorm and go pay Tsuchimikado a visit.)
(And I need to get on his case about skipping out on the weeding.)
(I suppose having contact with an agent like Tsuchimikado puts me in a better position than most students...)
Kamijou forced his thoughts in a more positive direction and started walking along the gloomy street.
Maybe it was because of all the thoughts whirling around in his head, but the grocery bags in his hands felt heavier than usual. It was around the time everyone was heading home so the street was crowded, but he still felt like he was running into people more than usual. He began thinking that fixing dinner and preparing the bath after he got home was going to be a real pain in the ass and started seriously wondering if there was a nice recipe that let him use the microwave or the rice cooker and skip the hardest parts of cooking dinner. It seemed that Index would end up biting him because she couldn't stand to wait while watching him when he leisurely made dinner like usual.
While thinking about all this, he ran into another person.
This time it was an aging woman who looked to be in her 50s or 60s.
"Oh, sorry."
"It's all right."
The woman gave a refined smile and lowered her head.
She didn't have a stooped back, but she was about two sizes smaller than Kamijou even while standing up. She was rather heavily dressed for the start of October with a coat folded over her bent arm and a scarf around her neck. Kamijou surmised that perhaps she got cold easily.
The aging woman raised her lowered head and began speaking in a calm voice.
"I'm the one that should be apologizing."
"No, you're not. I'm the one that ran into you."
"No, no. Not about that."
Kamijou was about to raise an eyebrow at the smiling aging woman's remark when she continued.
"I need to apologize for the trouble I will be causing you now."
He heard a metallic noise.
He lowered his gaze to where the noise originated - the area next to his own stomach.
The aging woman's arm was also there. However the thin fabric of the coat folded over it hid the area from her elbow to just past her wrist so he couldn't really see.
All he knew for sure was what he could feel on his stomach.
It felt like the tip of a hard rod and Kamijou's body stiffened slightly at the sensation.
"I'm sorry. I really am."
The aging woman spoke those words slowly and lowered her head once more.