Toaru Kagaku no Railgun Manga Chapter 118

Darkness (暗闇) is the 118th chapter of the Toaru Kagaku no Railgun manga series, released on September 27th 2019 in Monthly Comic Dengeki Daioh.

Synopsis
In a particular Child Error orphanage, there were five girls: Aohoshi Suzuran (aged 14), the oldest of them and the motherly figure; Wanigawa Raifu (aged 5), the youngest and often the target of bullying; and three others—Tsurigane Saryou (aged 6), Shundan Kimi (aged 7) and Shirakinu Honoka (aged 8) who protected Raifu. With Aohoshi reaching her last year in the orphanage, Aohoshi prepared Honoka to becoming the oldest in the group and she revealed her wish of wanting to support the girls so that they can live together again.

With Aohoshi leaving the orphanage, Honoka watched over the others. Meanwhile, the orphanage slowly fell into financial distress, and the manager became tempted to accept an offer from a loan shark in exchange for four girls from the orphanage. Tsurigane, Kimi, Honoka and Raifu were then taken to a "Powers Boosting Lab", with the manager only hopeful that they would be treated kindly in their new home.

The girls had varied responses to the scientific experiments performed on them. Kimi remained a Level 0, Raifu rose to Level 3 but became generally unresponsive, and Honoka's level fell from 2 to 1. Meanwhile, even at a young age, Tsurigane worked for the sake of the Kouga school and, one night, looked into their experiment data. There, she discovered that the experiments are not only questionable but also inaccurate to what they are promoted to do. Regardless, she let the experiments continue.

Tsurigane then overhears a conversation about two scientists about the unusual readings from Kimi. They noted that Kimi's readings are "too static", without an emission of AIM diffusion fields, and hypothesized that either the conditions are not met or that her AIM diffusion field cannot be detected in some way.

Major Events

 * The past of Aohoshi, Raifu, Tsurigane and Kimi is revealed. They are Child Error s sold as part of a deal with a loan shark to a "Powers Boosting Lab" which actually performs experiments on the brains of test subjects.

Characters
By order of appearance:
 * Wanigawa Raifu
 * Yamashiro Shoubu
 * Tsurigane Saryou
 * Aohoshi Suzuran
 * Shundan Kimi

New Characters

 * Shirakinu Honoka

Abilities

 * Pyrokinesis - Shirakinu Honoka, Level 2 → 1

Locations

 * Academy City

New Locations

 * Powers Boosting Lab
 * Unnamed Orphanage

Trivia

 * Unnamed bully wears Ponkichi-kun shirts.

Cultural References

 * Raifu once said Ore (オレ) and Honoka said Jan (じゃん) at the end of sentence. These wording makes Aohoshi Suzuran angry.
 * Typically Japanese women use mainly “watashi” (私), but for men there are other options such as boku (僕), ore (俺) and more. Typically you will find that Japanese people typically select the first-person pronoun based on the context of the conversation and who they are talking to. Ore is a first-person pronoun with an extremely rough image, it is only used in a casual setting between people who are very close. Also It can be very rude to who is older than you.
 * Honoka used 「じゃん」 at the end of sentence. 「じゃん」 is an abbreviation of 「じゃない」, the negative conjugation for nouns and な-adjectives. Using じゃん at the end of the sentence can be considered as informal and slang.

Tankobon Version

 * The tankobon version of the chapter shows how Tsurigane Saryou got introduced into the orphanage and how Raifu got into trouble with the boys. In the magazine version, the introduction of Tsurigane is removed and starts right where the boys bullying Raifu. Events play out the same just like in the magazine version afterwards.