Kamijou and Itsuwa ran along the streets of Avignon.
The dreadful rioters were gone.
Most of them had been exterminated.
Parts of the road had been upturned and buildings and walls had collapsed, so the road was difficult to travel down. There were a lot of parked cars. As Kamijou ran towards the Palace of the Popes, the air smelled of smoke and gunpowder and he occasionally had to climb over rubble or duck through holes in walls.
There were powered suits in various places throughout the city.
Some were on the roads; some were on the roofs of buildings.
(If I'm able to spot this many while just running by, there must be hundreds or thousands of them in Avignon. Just what the hell is going on…?)
Kamijou clenched his teeth as he ran through a road that was submerged due to a broken water pipe and jumped over a toppled street light.
(It was the Roman Catholic Church that started this war. Academy City should be moving in an attempt to stop it. So why is this happening!?)
There was one thing this battlefield clearly lacked.
The smell of blood.
Since the powered suits' anti-barrier revolver shotguns used different types of shells, flesh-and-blood humans were only ever shot with blanks. But the gunshot created by the great amount of explosive used turned into a shock wave. This shell of sound was mercilessly mowing down the rioters in Avignon.
There were piles of unconscious rioters scattered around the city. And next to one, there were some powered suits inflating a giant balloon with a bulletproof fiber woven into it.
(Is that for reconnaissance…?)
Kamijou had seen something like that in an Academy City drama.
The balloon was equipped with a tiny camera and it moved around using heated air just like a hot-air balloon. Its main weakness was that the battery for the electric furnace that heated the air drained quickly, but it moved much more silently than one with a propeller and was both cheap and portable.
The one the powered suits were inflating was several times bigger than the one he had seen in the drama and it had a basket made of the same bulletproof fiber below it.
It was most likely going to be used similarly to a hot-air balloon. They would put the unconscious people on them and have them be automatically brought outside of the area of operation.
When Kamijou looked around again he noticed a number of black balloons floating in the air like dandelion seeds.
That was just how many people the powered suits had taken out.
"…"
They may have had the same idea as Tsuchimikado.
The rioters marching in the narrow streets of Avignon would be a hindrance to their mission. And the enemy using the C-Document could mix in with the rioters. So the best strategy was to quiet down the rioters first.
But…
"Tsuchimikado wouldn't do it this way…"
"Eh?" Itsuwa turned her head toward Kamijou, but he didn't respond.
As he ran, he looked at the exploded cars and tightly clenched his fist.
(Just because your actions take precedence is no reason to use violence to make the city yield to you!!)
Kamijou finally figured out what exactly Oyafune Monaka, one of the board of directors, had wanted to stop. It wasn't that she had hated the Roman Catholic Church. And it wasn't that she had wanted to defeat the enemy of Academy City. She had wanted to stop a situation such as this where things had devolved to a conflict where anything and everything was destroyed.
(I have to stop this.)
Kamijou gritted his teeth and ran through the city that was now a battlefield.
(I can't just ignore this spiral of destruction. If anyone tries to justify this situation to me, I'll destroy every last bit of that illusion of theirs!!)
"W-we're there. That's it…!!"
And so Kamijou and Itsuwa had reached the Palace of the Popes.
The name had led Kamijou to imagine a solemn church or a gaudy palace, but the actual building was less a palace and more a medieval fort. The giant building was a collection of stones from a quarry and it gave a feeling of rejection to those who looked at it.
The outer walls looking down on Kamijou were over 10 meters tall, but he looked surprised as soon as he saw the place.
"Holes…" Itsuwa muttered while carrying her spear in one hand.
The huge double doors of the main entrance had been blown inwards and walls around some of the windows on the higher floors had been destroyed. Someone must have been inside because there were intermittent gunshots and explosions coming from within.
"It's already started. Let's go, Itsuwa!!"
"R-right!!"
Entering a building with gunshots coming from it wasn't the best idea, but they had no choice.