Sneaking Past Cops

“I have a feeling that the police would have thought of any sewer routes as potential
escape paths for Hino. Well, whatever. In any case, let’s get over to Kami-yan’s house,”
suggested Tsuchimikado incredibly plainly.
Now Kamijou was flabbergasted.
“How?”
“What do you mean how? We’ll go through there, of course,” he said, pointing out the
concrete wall around a nearby residence.
The police force was blocking all roads in the vicinity.
However, put another way, there were no policemen in places where there were no
roads. The yards of the houses under mandatory evacuation—those spaces could not be
seen from the road due to shrubbery and concrete walls.
Kamijou followed after Tsuchimikado and the others, who were running from yard to
yard quite naturally. They jumped fences, scaled walls, and ran from house to house.
Of course, just that shouldn’t have been enough to escape the police force’s prying eyes.
They had been assigned to the roads, certainly, but that didn’t mean that they were
completely ignoring the house yards and the shadows cast by cars. If the police officers,
by some chance, saw Kamijou and the others, they’d be in for a chase.
Yes, if they were seen.
By some chance—for example, adjacent officers talking to one another, one
concentrating on his walkie-talkie, one looking at a stray cat that jumped out of an alley,
one casually looking up at the sky. The group ran straight by the officers by taking
advantage of those sorts of minuscule lapses. Moreover, they weren’t huddling in the
shadows to wait for openings to appear. Those inattentive moments oddly all came one
after the other and the very second the group ran past, as if it were all planned.

As a result, the magicians ran at full speed through the encirclement without stopping
for very much.
And on top of that, they did so while dragging the amateur Kamijou along with them.
Kamijou imagined video games, like the spy ones where you have to infiltrate a terrorist
hideout without being found by enemy soldiers or the ninja action games in samurai
mansions chock-full of bodyguards. He felt like they were going through a speed run of a
game like that.
However, there was one difference between real life and video games...
...Stages that, from the start, were constructed with the player being able to clear it in
mind...
...And battlefields that, from the start, were designed not to let anyone break through.
That may not sound like a huge difference, but the gap between them is virtually
impassable.
Kamijou again fully grasped the fact that Tsuchimikado was a professional after
witnessing this kind of inhuman technique, even though he had felt so close to him
before. It was a bitter sensation for him. As he penetrated the siege, humming a tune to
himself all the while, Tsuchimikado felt somehow distant.

♦

After making it past the police force’s six-hundred-meter encirclement, they didn’t see
anyone for a time. After running farther, however, a lot of people wearing body armor
and hoisting polycarbonate shields started to show up. They were the riot police. Some
of it seemed a little bit unreliable, though, given the old men and old ladies substituted
in there.

- Toaru Majutsu no Index Volume 4, Chapter 2 Part 5