uses magic to read fengshui/leylines and find a magic transm

Accelerator flipped his electrode’s switch, temporarily releasing the power of the #1, and
jumped up to the roof of the tall building in one leap.
He stood on the railing, and looked around.
During the war in Russia, he had come into contact with “something like magic”, and he
had used a part of it. His body had been torn up from the inside by that power, but he
had managed to save a girl from the brink of death in exchange.
He had taught himself to contact that power.
After receiving some explanations from Birdway, he had been able to give clear outlines
to that vague idea he had before.
He breathed in, stopped, and then used his power.
“...!!”
The blood vessels around his temples pulsated unnaturally. The cold wind was blowing
on him, but he could not stop an unpleasant sweat from coming from his body. He
envisioned a cup so filled with water that it was just barely able to hold it all in via
surface tension. If it was tilted even slightly in any direction, something that must not be
spilled would spill out. He understood that clearly.
He could not ignore it.
He controlled the power within his body with the delicateness of someone balancing
that cup on top of their upraised index finger. He then continued his work.
Yes, his work.
He discerned the paths of the power flowing within the city or flowing in from outside
the city and then flowing back outside the city.
However, he was not directly seeing it like beams of light. Just like seeing the flow of the
colorless wind in a swaying meadow, he indirectly detected it by detecting the
movements of things affected by the power rather than the power itself.
In other words, he watched the flow of people.
(That Birdway brat said that feng shui causes the energy of leylines to bend depending
on the locations of mountains and rivers and that the most suitable palaces are built in
the most suitable places for that reason. I don’t know if these rules apply to the entire
world, but it seems this world is divided into comfortable places and uncomfortable
places by the flow of energy through the planet.)
(And people will naturally flow to those comfortable places, just like how the grass in a
meadow sways in the wind. I can’t just detect the flow of magic power, but I can observe
the movements of people from a tall location.)
When he surveyed the area from the rooftop, he realized that the flow of people was not
determined simply by the abundance of shops or the transportation facilities.
There were similar convenience stores on the same road, but people clearly went into
some more than others.
One could get to the same destination by train or bus, but people tended to use the same
method to an unnatural extent.
Even if Academy City was the center of the science side, it was of course still a part of the
Earth. Even if the city itself thoroughly eliminated all artificial magic, it could not deny
the properties and energy held by the planet itself.
When he thought about it, it was obvious.
That truth made Accelerator’s breath catch in his throat.
(...So there’s a net formed by this non-compelling “comfortableness”? Hell, and this is
right in the middle of the science side’s headquarters. It’s like the entire city is being
controlled by some strange power.)
That power could be used artificially to create the people-clearing fields used by
magicians, but Accelerator had not stepped deeply enough into the world of magic to
realize that.
For now, he merely reached out his hand for the objective in front of him.
(I can understand people gathering at brand-name shops or a bus terminal building, but
there are some strange movements. People are taking meaningless detours. If ‘they’
used feng shui to add in some trick to the ley line, then this may be a trace of that trick.)
A single spot had an unnatural amount of that kind of power gathered in it.
That power was supposed to lay out a net that created the different flows of people, but
it was all gathering unnaturally in that spot like bathwater being swallowed up by the
drain.
It was not directly sending people in a certain direction, but it was having a definite
effect in slightly altering the direction taken by the people who were freely moving
around in various directions.
(That’s the place.)
Once Accelerator had his answer, he pulled out his cell phone.
He said only what was necessary.
“I’ve found somewhere that feels out of place. It’s District 7’s Central Hub Transformer
Station. Some kind of twisted and stagnated power is gathered there.”