Chapter 25: Shuichi Akai! If You're Going to Embezzle Funds, At Least Use a Better Excuse!
Tokyo Bay Bridge. Evening.
The setting sun painted the colossal steel bridge in hues of fading gold. Traffic flowed like a river of light, and pedestrians hurried along, a perfect picture of a bustling metropolis at dusk. No one knew that a deadly crisis was silently unfolding.
"Conan, look!" Mitsuhiko pointed to an inconspicuous maintenance access tunnel beneath the bridge. For a split second, a strange, unnatural light had flashed from within.
What was that? Conan thought. Did I imagine it?
"No," Haibara said, her face pale as she instinctively hugged her arms. "It wasn't your imagination. I can feel it... the aura of the Organization. It's... all over the bridge."
The four of them—Ran and the three kids—were stuck in traffic on their way back from a tech exhibition. There was no way forward, and no way back.
Ran felt it too. The oppressive presence of magic, saturating the entire structure. "Don't tell me..."
An ominous thought flashed through Conan's mind. Magically-enhanced explosives?! Is this the Organization's handiwork?!
He immediately tried to contact Dr. Agasa and the police with his Detective Badge, but the signal was completely jammed. That confirmed it. Something was very, very wrong.
"Dammit!" Conan gritted his teeth. They were trapped.
A commotion was starting to build on the bridge. Other drivers and passengers had spotted them now—strange, glowing devices attached to the bridge's key support structures, pulsing with a sinister red light and visible ripples of magical energy. It was a standard terror operation for the Organization; even if civilians spotted the bombs, the magical enchantments would make them impossible to disarm by normal means.
"What is that?!"
"Is it a bomb?! Run!"
Panic began to spread. At first, it was just a few shouts and blaring horns, but the fear rippled outward, growing with each passing second. People started abandoning their cars, causing gridlock and a frantic, shoving mob. A panicked driver swerved, slamming into a guardrail. The driver, face covered in blood, slumped over the wheel.
That was the spark that ignited the powder keg. The chaos exploded.
"We have to stop them!" Ran said, her eyes determined. She saw people injured in the crash, lying helpless on the pavement. She couldn't let this happen.
"Right!" Mitsuhiko nodded, his own fear overshadowed by a sense of duty.
Haibara took a deep breath, forcing down the terror that the familiar, sinister aura brought bubbling to the surface.
Pink, blue, and silver light flared to life between the gridlocked cars. The three of them transformed, their faces now partially obscured by simple magical masks.
"Mitsuhiko, rescue first!" Ran commanded. "Get as many people off the bridge as you can!"
"Got it!" The blue magical boy became a streak of light, zipping across the bridge, teleporting those in the most immediate danger—near the bombs or in the path of the stampede—to safety. But for every person he saved, he saw another get hurt. He gritted his teeth, the dark smudge on his Soul Gem growing with every costly teleportation.
Ran focused on crowd control. She leaped from car roof to car roof, her magically-enhanced voice calling for calm, physically shoving a speeding motorcycle out of the path of a group of pedestrians. The rider went down hard, his leg bent at an unnatural angle. She checked on him—a broken bone, but he'd live. The weight in her chest grew heavier.
Haibara concentrated, her mind's eye dissecting the magical structure of the bombs. But as her senses brushed against the familiar magical signature of their creator... she froze.
It's him. Gin.
The soul-deep terror returned, and her body began to shake uncontrollably. The screams of the injured, the smell of blood... it was like being back in that lab. It was all she could do to even maintain her transformation.
"Haibara?" Ran's voice came over their telepathic link.
"I-I'm fine..." she stammered, forcing herself to focus. "The bombs... they're protected by powerful magical barriers. Conventional disarming is impossible. The core detonator... has to be destroyed from the inside."
"Leave it to me!" Ran's voice was a steel blade. She locked her eyes on the nearest bomb. "If I can shatter the barrier with pure force, can you handle the rest?"
"Ran-neechan, it's too dangerous!" Mitsuhiko cried out. "Gin's barriers have a powerful magical backlash!"
"There's no time to worry about that!" Pink light condensed around her fist. She launched herself toward the bomb. "HAAAA!" With a deafening roar, her fist connected with the shimmering barrier.
BOOM!
A shockwave erupted from the point of impact. The barrier spiderwebbed with cracks, and Ran was thrown backward by the violent recoil, a grunt of pain escaping her lips. Mitsuhiko teleported behind her, catching her before she hit the ground.
"The barrier's structure is compromised!" Haibara announced, her mind racing as she analyzed the now-exposed internal mechanisms. "The core is powered by a network of magical circuits. The weakest point is right... there! At the main energy junction!"
Steeling herself against the lingering fear of Gin, she focused a razor-thin beam of silver magic and fired it through a crack in the barrier, severing the junction. The bomb's red light flickered and died.
It worked! But their victory was short-lived. A hulking figure suddenly appeared in the shadows. It was Vodka, in his absurdly mismatched gray maid's dress. His eyes, cold and merciless, locked onto Haibara.
"Don't you touch her!" Ran roared, intercepting his massive hand with a block of her own. The impact sent cracks spiderwebbing across the bridge's pavement. Vodka was a monster, his strength magically enhanced to superhuman levels.
Far away, on the roof of a skyscraper, Shuichi Akai watched it all through a sniper scope. Magical girls, a cross-dressing magical boy, Gin's magic bombs, Vodka's monstrous strength... His previous report to the FBI had been met with ridicule. This time, he was recording everything.
He took a breath, steadied his aim, and found his moment. He squeezed the trigger. The custom-made armor-piercing round tore through the air, aimed directly at the silver-haired figure in the gothic dress.
But a meter from its target, the bullet struck an invisible wall, deforming and ricocheting harmlessly away. Gin slowly turned his head and stared directly at Akai's position, kilometers away.
He saw me. Akai felt a chill run down his spine. That perception... it's inhuman. He packed his gear and vanished.
Gin was about to give the distant sniper a lesson, but he suddenly realized... his bombs were being disarmed. This little team of magical girls was surprisingly competent. A new directive came through his communicator. Something more important had come up.
"Vodka, withdraw," he commanded coldly, and dissolved into a black mist.
The crisis was, for the moment, over. But the bridge was a scene of chaos and carnage. And Mitsuhiko's Soul Gem... it was now more than a third full of black corruption.
FBI Headquarters.
In a smoke-filled conference room, Akai's video played on a loop. The senior agents watched, their expressions ranging from disbelief to amusement.
"Magical girls? Seriously, Akai?" one of them scoffed. "Is this your new angle for getting more funding?"
Another, a silver-haired man with shrewd eyes, sighed. "Shuichi, we all know how these things work. But 'magic'? It's a little... lazy, don't you think? If you needed some 'off-the-books' operational funds, you could have just said so. We could have approved a requisition for 'new surveillance tech' or something." The implication was clear: they thought the video was a poorly-made fake, an insult to their intelligence.
From a monitor on the wall, Akai's face was impassive. "You can have your tech teams analyze the footage. I hope you will treat this situation with the gravity it deserves. The world is not as simple as you think."
"Still," the first agent mused, pointing at the screen where the bullet had been deflected, "embezzling funds with a story this crazy... it's bold. I'll give him that." He paused. "And after that whole social security audit found over a million people in their 300s still collecting checks... I guess anything is possible..."
After a long, heavy silence, the silver-haired agent sighed, a look of weary resignation on his face. "Alright, fine. We'll... operate under the assumption that you're telling the truth. For now." He waved a dismissive hand. "Classify all this material at the highest security level. I'll put pressure on the Japanese authorities to give you more leeway. And we'll have our people analyze this video of yours."
He looked directly at Akai's image on the screen. "But Shuichi, a word of advice. You're our ace in Japan. Next time you need a 'bonus', just use a more... professional reason. These fairy tales are bad for your judgment."
Akai simply nodded. He had gotten what he needed. What these corrupt old fools thought of him didn't matter.