Watching Mikoto Misaka's panicked fleeing back, Misaki Shokuhou pursed her lips.
"Is it really okay to let Misaka go check on her own?"
Though she had been completely checkmated, Roland had still not received a definite answer from her until the very end.
This was not because the girl's keen intuition was warning her that installing the Dream Creator would most likely unlock a defeat CG or something like that.
Rather, it was because Mikoto Misaka herself was still putting up a final struggle.
Though she had presented herself as righteous and dignified, refusing the Dream Creator did not mean she was truly a conservative who only acknowledged power gained through her own training.
It was just stubborn talk.
Students who grew up in Academy City had a much higher acceptance of brain devices. Though Mikoto Misaka had never personally experienced it, she had seen several similar experiments.
After all, the idea of assisting calculations through external devices was not particularly novel-it was just that the technical level of those projects was worlds apart from Blue Dream Company's.
The pride of being an Esper, along with her innate competitiveness, made this method of indirectly receiving a gift from an enemy's hands impossible for the girl to get past the final hurdle in her heart.
So, after Roland extended the invitation again, Mikoto Misaka subconsciously adopted an evasive attitude, willing to lose face rather than brush it off.
But this attitude of neither agreeing nor opposing already showed that she did not dislike the matter itself.
This degree of wavering meant only two final steps remained before Mikoto Misaka would actively seek power herself.
The first step was the established fact brought by the power of Magnetic Field Power.
Power itself was a temptation. Having been defeated several times at the