"Beep~ Beep~!"
"Warning! Unit XYDS106597022, you are speeding! Please slow down!"
"Please slo—"
Crash~!!
At a street corner in Academy City, a seemingly ordinary cylindrical Anti-Skill robot suddenly rear-ended another squad of cylindrical Anti-Skill robots. After sending the entire group tumbling into a heap, the strange robot extended something like a data cable from its body. It didn't even look for a port—it simply slammed it into the robots lying on the ground, trying to right themselves with their reset programs.
Then, as the cable was pulled free and quickly jammed into the next robot, it wasn't long before the toppled robots all shuddered in unison for some mysterious reason. Soon, they had regained order and began moving away in an orderly fashion, each going its own way. They quickly disappeared into the bustling crowds on Academy City's streets, as if nothing had happened.
Of course, that scene hadn't gone entirely unnoticed...
But the passersby assumed it was just routine data transmission between the Anti-Skill robots, or some kind of regular maintenance. Naturally, they didn't think much of it.
After all, in this city of Academy City, whose technology was twenty or thirty years ahead of the outside world, there were countless cleaning robots, security robots, and other automated machines. So when they saw the robots get into a rare collision, they merely watched with curiosity, assuming it was some sort of malfunction caused by a programming error. It never occurred to them to suspect anything else.
Meanwhile, Annie, Index, Mikoto Misaka, Kuroko Shirai, and Uiharu Kazari, the Tokiwadai Middle School girl who had just been rescued, were at a sushi restaurant not far away...
After the suspect had resisted and fled on the overpass, they'd been briefly questioned by the Anti-Skill officers who arrived as backup, and had given