Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume15 Chapter2

==Chapter 2: Equations and Magic Circles – Black_Oneday.==

===Part 1===

The glass and ceiling had broken and collapsed in the international airport’s lobby. The large clock on the wall was broken too badly to function, the hands stopped at 5:15 PM.

“Oh, honestly!!” exclaimed Good, Old Mary in uncharacteristic frustration.

Perhaps this was proof that, while she had since acquired the functions of a god, she had been born an ordinary human.

“''Vanity and makeup''? I’m more mad at myself than her. Mama shouldn’t be falling for silly tricks like this!”

Good, Old Mary held a torn-off upper body in one hand.

She tossed aside ''something'' that had been called Fallen Angel Azazel.

“Hey!! You’d better clarify your stance here soon. Are you trying to protect Academy City or destroy it!? Our recovery has only just begun here and we need resources more than anything. Don’t you get that this will all be a waste of time if you destroy the airport and we can’t get flights in!?”

“Take your complaints to them!! Damn Transcendents. They’re far too extreme to make good use of!”

One of Good, Old Mary’s salvation targets – was her name Kanzaki? – was complaining into a small radio, but Good, Old Mary didn’t pay her much heed. Once she decided to save someone, she would do so no matter what, but she didn’t take requests when it came to her methods…and all the Transcendents took that same stance.

However.

If Blodeuwedd the Bouquet thought this little trick had been enough to declare victory, then this was in fact an opportunity.

The three legged Tribikos was not Good, Old Mary’s ''only'' spiritual item.

Including the Bain-marie and the Kerotakis, her options ranged from familiar kitchen tools to grand lab equipment that could produce the miracles of life.

In other words…

(I already have a countermeasure for that illusion and camouflage using Azazel.)

Her lab equipment, which rivaled a broadcasting tower in size, had already finished mixing the potion she wanted.

This was one advantage of bringing such a colossal spiritual item to the front line. Whenever an unexpected problem occurred, it helped a lot if she could create a solution the very next moment.

(If Blodeuwedd the Bouquet attempts the same thing next time…I can eliminate it instantly. I don’t even need to pretend to be fooled. I can go for the kill right away.)

That meant it was time to search out where Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had disappeared to during the confusion. As long as Good, Old Mary had a goal in mind, she could mix together a potion to accomplish it. That was always her policy.

And.

A slight tremor ran down Good, Old Mary’s back.

She shuddered.

Her large hat shook as she looked up past the collapsed ceiling and into the blue sky.

“?”

===Part 2===

The reflector was located on the lunar surface.

That meant anywhere with a view of the moon was within ''that weapon''’s range.

===Part 3===

The Black_Oneday hacking tool.

What exactly could someone accomplish with that?

Hamazura Shiage and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had left the international airport through a small back entrance and were now hiding in an area full of the electric carts and forklifts used to transport suitcases. …Although Hamazura wasn’t very confident this really counted as hiding when it came to District 23 security.

His eyes dropped to the cracked screen of his phone.

“Apparently Black_Oneday is a specialized hacking tool that uses a vulnerability in Stardust.”

“What? I don’t know what that Black thing or that Star thing are.”

“I don’t either, so all I can do is read off what Aneri tells me. Aircraft and spacecraft are a lot more computerized nowadays, but hooking them up to the ordinary internet creates to much of a risk of remote cyber attacks. Like opening a door midflight and causing it to break apart. So the systems are kept separate from the ordinary lines. Everything from the programming language used to the encryption method and even the radio frequencies are different.”

“And all of that together is called Stardust? And it was all broken somehow? Are they stupid?”

“Maybe, but that also means Black_Oneday ''can’t cause any harm to anything other than'' the aerospace industry. So it’s not all bad, I guess?”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet didn’t seem delighted.

The monster frowned instead.

“Would that tool just be lying around in Academy City? Like a free game?”

“It was created by some respected university professor. He was sick of the airlines insisting their security was unhackable, so he wanted to give them enough of a scare they would actually start doing their job. So the tool is known as an independently created research sample. It’s not supposed to be publicly available, but someone could always create something that works the same way. So maybe this is a different version of it.”

Things made for benevolent purposes could end up harming people.

Not to mention the respected professor may not have been entirely honest about his reasons for making it.

Did he even know the real reason himself?

Could he just have wanted to give people a scare?

“So it was a fake cyber attack meant to make people more security conscious? Sounds like it had the opposite effect in reality…”

The emaciated girl tilted her head.

Maybe Blodeuwedd the Bouquet didn’t particularly care.

“So let’s just assume that Black_Oneday thing has fallen into the wrong hands. What could someone do with it? I don’t know much about hacking tools, but what’s the last thing we would want happening right now?”

“Hold on… Aneri, what’s this? You’re kidding, right?”

Hamazura had trouble believing the information Aneri had displayed on the phone’s cracked screen.

What was this city building?

“Moonbow. A strategic ground-launched optical weapon?”

Basically, it was a large-scale laser weapon. Powerful enough to pierce straight into a nuclear shelter located deep underground.

Moonbow would first fire a weaponized laser from an oscillator base in District 23 to outside the atmosphere, where it was reflected by a movable reflector covering the interior of a giant crater on the moon in order to target a specific point on Earth. The distance to the moon was more than 380 thousand kilometers, but the round trip only took an instant at light speed. That meant the powerful laser weapon could ignore the horizon and attack anywhere with a view of the moon. Any VIP around the world could be killed no matter how deep they hid underground.

To make matters worse, Aneri’s report said ''there were signs it had already been fired.

“It was targeting District 23… So a laser weapon with a range covering half the Earth was used to attack ''right next door''?”

“Dammit, Good, Old Mary. Did you get vaporized by a pillar of light?”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet didn’t sound particularly concerned. As long as someone didn’t meet her salvation conditions, maybe she didn’t care too much what happened to them.

If a weapon like that could be fired repeatedly, the Earth was done for.

Both because of its destructive power and because it could turn the entire world against Academy City even if they hadn’t been the one to fire it.

…And even in this dire situation, Hamazura still couldn’t fight alongside the Anglicans. Because they wouldn’t allow it.

The Anglicans were hunting for him.

They were so focused on him they hadn’t noticed the Black_Oneday hacking tool or its user. Of course, he got the impression they wouldn’t be willing to hear him out even if he did give them this information.

Especially when ''Aneri could hack too.'' When they followed the path he had used to escape the airport, they would discover he had hacked open the electronic locks. The Anglicans didn’t know about Black_Oneday, so they would suspect Hamazura for any other hacking.

The Anglicans were a threat, but focusing on them alone would leave the Black_Oneday user free to act. Their object was unclear, but this could even lead to a war between Academy City and another country.

Should he say that served them right?

He couldn’t articulate why he felt this way, but that didn’t seem like it would help Coronzon.

The emaciated girl tilted her head.

“So is humanity doomed because the arbiters of justice are useless?”

“No… The weapon uses a large COIL, so the highly toxic gas needs to be neutralized each time it’s fired. Simply put, it takes a long time to reload.”

“Ehh? The hacker’s controlling it remotely, so why would they care?”

“It’s structurally designed so it can’t fire again until the toxic gas has been fully neutralized. You can’t get around that just by messing with the software remotely.”

“We wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with if they had made the thing fully manually controlled.”

Anyone could look like a genius if they waited to complain until after the problem had occurred.

But while it took a while, the reload time was only about 50 minutes.

If they didn’t track down the Black_Oneday user and deal with this before then, some other part of the world could be fried by a second powerful laser. And if that location was outside Academy City, it would mean war with the victim country.

In the worst case, the target would be related to the UK or the Vatican. Like an enclave or an airplane in flight. It was last night all over again.

“Can’t you get Aneri-tan to stop it?”

“I don’t get it myself, but apparently hacking doesn’t work that way.”

According to Aneri’s wall of text (weren’t AIs supposed to summarize things!?), two people could hack into the same computer separately. But it was difficult for one of them to take control and kick the other one out. They were both using the same vulnerability, so would plugging the hole lock them both out?

Not even the greatest sprinter could plan to keep their rival from reaching the goal.

So if the Black_Oneday user seriously wanted to cause mass destruction, Aneri couldn’t stop them.

This problem could only be solved by beating up the user in real life, not online.

“Hmm?” Blodeuwedd the Bouquet paused to think for a moment. “If we can’t stop their hacking before the time limit, couldn’t we physically destroy the laser facility before it can fire again as ''a backup plan''?”

“I get the feeling you really could do that. But don’t.”

If someone did that without the appropriate authority and without going through the appropriate procedure, they were no more than a terrorist.

And if they spent all their time on that, they wouldn’t actually solve the real problem.

After all, the laser wasn’t the only weaponizable technology in District 23.

Aneri displayed a list ranked by danger level on the small screen.

“The most obvious one would be…the Morning Star? This above ground mass driver is pretty terrifying. It’s basically a giant railgun, right? I could see them launching a meteor all the way around the Earth and then dropping it on our heads.”

“What about this? A next-gen engine for optical rocket R&D? They’re talking around it, but isn’t that a donut-shaped fusion reactor using deuterium? That’s where they magnetically enclose plasma with a temperature over a hundred million degrees. Destroy the container while it’s running and it wouldn’t just destroy Academy City – the entire Kantou region would be wiped off the map and covered by the sea.”

“Meaning?”

“We have 50 minutes left, right? We need to make the most of that time. Destroying each individual facility isn’t going to work. Sounds like this crisis won’t end unless we defeat Black_Oneday itself.”

…His head hurt.

What was Academy City doing? He wasn’t sure how he wanted to spend the remaining days or even hours of his life, but here he was faced with a global crisis.

Hamazura couldn’t just sit idly by and let it happen.

He couldn’t just blindly run from the Brits anymore.

Coronzon’s methods may have been wrong, but she had been trying to create a better world in her own way. And his girlfriend Takitsubo and his old friends like Hanzou were still here in Academy City. He didn’t know who had set up this Black_Oneday game, but he was sick of seeing the world threatened with destruction for something as nonsensical as destruction for the sake of destruction.

Coronzon, huh?

“Why?”

Hamazura gritted his teeth.

Digging into this wouldn’t improve his odds of survival here. He knew that.

But he still hung his head, faced his inner thoughts, and forced out a resentful voice.

“Why did Coronzon have to die? And all for some formless concept like ‘the world’ or ‘the human race’?”

In that moment, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had to have heard Hamazura’s groan.

Which was why she responded.



“Because she lost.”



Hamazura seriously thought his heart was going to stop.

''What did she just say?

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet tilted her head cutely.

“Huh? Did I say something weird? Has anything ever been solved by someone proving themselves right and everyone just obeying them, or someone being proven wrong and backing down?”

“…”

“The world isn’t that simple, you dummy. The winner wins it all and the loser loses everything. Their dreams, righteousness, their lives, the world – everything. That’s always how the world has worked. Looking back in history, that’s been the way of things at least as far back as several thousands years BCE. …Kamijou Touma did kill Coronzon, but Coronzon had accepted these conditions when she fought. Are you going to start throwing a tantrum that those rules are unfair after the fact?”

“……………………………………………………………………………………”

What?

What, what, what, what, what was she talking about???

“Kamijou Touma failed to save Coronzon? You’re looking at this wrong. Kamijou Touma has had the right to kill all of the enemies he has defeated. As the one forced to bear the possibility of death were he to lose even once. Self-defense isn’t an obligation – it’s a right. It’s just that he never chose to exercise that right after he won. That’s all it was. Saving even one of the people he defeated is worthy of praise. Now, truth be told, I did somewhat expect him to save Coronzon since he was enough of a soft-hearted fool to save Alice. But if you respond with anger and throw a fit because he betrayed your expectations and didn’t go above and beyond just that one time, then you’re relying far too much on your enemy. Attacking all you like and then demanding forgiveness once you lose is making a mockery of the entire concept of combat.”

This should have been a perfectly logical argument, but it refused to enter his mind.

All the unfairness and unreasonableness he had only been vaguely aware of was rushing in at him all at once. It covered the entire world so thinly and widely it didn’t even feel real to Hamazura even though he had to be contained by it as well.

“Besides, what’s considered ‘right’ changes wildly depending on the time period, region, organization, and personal beliefs.”

Did she realize how messed up that idea was, or didn’t she?

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet sighed softly.

“Take Aleister Crowley for example. Some say he was promoted to 5=6 of the Inner Order by Mathers in Paris and others say the London faction didn’t recognize that and he was stuck in the Outer Order or as a Portal at 4=7. And Crowley himself claimed to be a 9=2 after creating new rules within his own cabal. You see what I’m getting at, don’t you? What’s ‘right’ changes depending on what source you use. There are as many answers as there are people and no one can agree on what the best answer is, so these things can only be resolved by force.”

No, he didn’t see.

That wasn’t it.

He wasn’t talking about that. He wasn’t interested in some historical examples. He was talking about something more basic and down-to-earth.

“But if you still don’t like the idea of fighting to the death, you should have gotten involved way back when the rules were being made and there was a chance to choose one of the countless ‘right’ answers through nonviolent means. That is where you should have fought your ''battle''. But you didn’t put in the work and you ran around foolishly assuming ''for no good reason'' that no one was going to die on that battlefield buried in red snow, so you don’t have the right to complain now. Unfortunately.”

“No.”

Finally, Hamazura spoke up.

The dumb Level 0 spoke to the Transcendent who had accessed divine specs.

He couldn’t accept it, but he did feel like he finally had a general idea what she was saying.

He finally had a handle on the goal he truly had to fight for.

He had to face this strange feeling head on.

“There are different forms of justice out there. On its own, that sounds like a testament to the wonders of diversity. But that doesn’t mean you can just casually shift from one idea of what’s ‘right’ to another. Choosing whatever version of ‘right’ is most convenient at the moment is the same as getting a stomachache, fearing it’s something serious, and, instead of going to the hospital, searching online until you find something saying it’s nothing to worry about. All you’re doing is choosing whatever opinion tells you to do what you already wanted to do.”

More than that, it wasn’t something to be determined by whoever could punch the hardest. Wouldn’t that just lead to a dystopia where whoever was the strongest got to bend everything to their will?

He found Blodeuwedd the Bouquet grinning in front of him.

“How interesting. Hee hee☆”

“…What is?”

“Oh, just that you keep going on about how much you hate justice, but in the end you just want to save people too. …I am the Transcendent who loves and saves all of the hated, so I’m used to people who can’t be honest with themselves☆”

“That’s not what this is…”

He couldn’t look her in the eye.

Hamazura didn’t long for justice from the side of evil like Coronzon had.

He quietly spat out a response.

“It’s not like you have to be on the side of justice to save people. Bad people can shield people from bullets too if they move in the way. Saving people ''is nothing more than a physical action''.”

“Hmm, so close.”

“?”

“You’re not quite there. But it’s not bad. Hamazura, you really do hate goodness and justice, don’t you? You hate those mindsets that lead people to take lives. That’s a good start, so explore this a little further. You will find something if you do. Although this is more Aradia’s territory than mine.”

He didn’t understand.

Also, who in the world was Aradia?

“Now, I need to know what your plans are. You’re not interested in fleeing to the farthest reaches of the world and curling up there where you’re safe, right?”

“Right.”

“That Black_Oneday hacking tool is super bad news. We can’t ignore it. So are you going to protect Academy City’s peace and safety in your own twisted way?”

“That about sums it up.”

…Or did it?

Hamazura still wasn’t certain if this would help Coronzon in any way. But he felt like what the Black_Oneday user would do was completely different from the destruction she had tried to accomplish.

“Either way, we’re the only ones who know that hacking tool is out there. So we can’t just let the Black_Oneday user have their way.”

===Part 4===

“Damn those Anglicans. Did they make a big commotion and then take down their own people-clearing field?”

Leivinia Birdway grumbled in annoyance.

The large lobby of the international airport was a mess from end to end.

There was a mysterious hole well over 10m in diameter in both the ceiling and the floor. Those likely came from something ''falling'' straight down from the sky above. All the windows were shattered and the glass-covered floor was littered with crow carcasses… It was all about as bizarre as it could get. It was no surprise that Anti-Skill and curious onlookers had shown up.

Kamijou Touma couldn’t get close to the wall of onlookers, much less the yellow tape.

He sighed and started up his phone’s camera app. He zoomed in as far as it would go to get a look from a distance.

“Hmm.”

He didn’t see anyone magical like the Amakusas or the Former Agnese Force.

He didn’t see Hamazura Shiage either.

“Looks like the storm has already moved on.”

“Because we were running against the flow of the fleeing people,” complained Lessar. “If we were allowed to knock down those ordinary people, we would have arrived sooner.”

“…”

“Okay, okay, I’m only kidding, so don’t glare at me like that. Heh heh heh. Are you trying to get me wet, you white knight?”

Nothing would teach that inappropriate girl a lesson, so it wasn’t even worth trying.

Was it linked with his phone’s location data? Even Kamijou’s cheap smartphone kept giving him local online news notifications for District 23.



“A new threat brought on by EM waves. Could this be the countdown to the implementation of a bird strike assassination weapon that can bring down aircraft without raising suspicion!?”



“The crow mystery!! Does the truth lie in the mysterious temple rumored to have been demolished to make room for the airport? (Read more)”



“How about some yakitori tonight? Click here for the secret to the most mouthwatering salted yakitori around!!”



The clickbait in the headlines was just as bad as ever, which ironically left him with zero inclination to click. It felt like a hellish caramel made by thoroughly cooking down all of humanity’s malice.

Birdway stared at the distant crowd, stood up on her toes, and stretched her back up…but that still wasn’t enough. She grabbed Kamijou’s jacket, tugged, and made her demand while looking up at him.

“Lift me up on your shoulders.”

“Have you never heard the word ‘please’, tiny little lady?”

He complained, but he also crouched down for her. He began to wonder if he was partially to blame for Birdway and Lessar’s worsening behavior.

He lifted her up.

She was light. And her thighs pressed in from the si-

“Ow! What was that zapping my face? Static electricity!?”

“Hey, I’m wearing synthetic stockings. Winter is a tough time for girls. Ignorant boy, it’s time you felt a fraction of the trouble we cute girls go through.”

How could she be so full of herself after asking him to lift her up?

“(Yes, yes. Now this is prime seating.)”

The girl seated on his shoulders and humming appeared to be in a terrific mood.

“That’s the last place the Anglicans were fighting. Which means Hamazura must have been there.”

“But what’s with those melted holes that must be at least 10m? Oh, god. I bet Academy City is making some dangerous nonsense again.”

Lessar paled and clung to him from the side, probably out of fear. Yes, that’s what it had to be. …Although he wished she wouldn’t press her boobs against him because it was so distracting he was about to lose his balance and accidentally suplex Birdway behind him.

He too was curious about that bottomless hole, but that wasn’t their focus here.

Kamijou didn’t understand what all was going on here, but he was fairly certain Hamazura was near the center of it.

Where had Hamazura run off to?

“If we can’t find him, we’ll have to start by choosing an effective method. And the classics are better than trying to be clever. Heh heh. So it’s scrying time. Or would the term ‘crystal gazing’ be more familiar to an amateur?”

“You’re just trying to sound smart, aren’t you, you smug magician?”

“Oh? Have you finally caught on to the common trait among almost every magician, including Mathers and Crowley? Well, it’s one of the few times idiots with obscure knowledge can feel good about themselves, so let us have this.”

“Also, are you done yet? If you don’t need to see over there anymore, I’m putting you down, Birdway.”

She seemed to deflate.

“Down you go!! I can’t have you staying up there forever!”

“Are you familiar with the idea of a crystal ball?” asked Lessar.

Oh, was that all this was?

Birdway the Genius must have wanted to show off some more, so her mouth formed a small triangle, but there wasn’t time to worry about her feelings right now.

With the weight removed from his shoulders, Kamijou tilted his head.

“A crystal ball… You mean like that thing where a young woman dressed in a sexy fortuneteller’s outfit holds her hands out toward it and sends some kind of power into it?”

“Where did you get that from? In this case, the fortuneteller isn’t sending magic power into the crystal. They’re using the crystal to try and read the small subconscious signs inside their own mind.”

“Also, the ‘young woman’ and ‘sexy’ parts are just wishful thinking on your part. Did you get that stereotype from Japan’s weirdly prolific isekai fantasy industry? Neither of those are necessary for fortunetelling. In fact, the crystal doesn’t even need to be a ball.”

Birdway dismantled a pair of binoculars and pulled out a large lens. She colored that in black with a thick marker.

“All you need is to create an environment where you can intentionally stimulate your inner mind through the medium of crystal, so a lens or a mirror work just as well. The witch’s bible recommends a hand mirror colored black.”

“Wait, it works even if it’s flat and you can’t see through it? That’s nothing at all like a fortuneteller’s crystal ball.”

“Again, that’s a mistaken view drawn from your own fantasies. Throw out that meaningless isekai-inspired image right this instant. And doesn’t this country have that silly rumor about a hand mirror colored purple? Yes, called the Murasaki Kagami, I believe. It’s like that.”

…Kamijou had been fairly seriously disturbed at that souvenir shop when they were talking about condoms and the king of rubbers, but apparently there had been a real reason for that visit. They had been acquiring the everyday items they could use as tools. Pros were so cool.

“I feel like you’re being impressed by the least impressive part of this.”

“Yeah, it feels more like a backhanded compliment.”

When they sensitively reacted to his thoughts, Kamijou decided to leave it at that.

Birdway held the blackened lens between her thumb and forefinger and stared at the floor.

“So if they did pursue Hamazura from here…what exactly does that black lens let you do?”

“Track their footprints,” replied Birdway. She made it sound like she was having to explain that turning the faucet made water come out. “This may be hard for you to believe since you know all about Necessarius’s tyranny, but the Anglicans are more humane than most. They want to avoid harming civilians, so they always use a people-clearing field before launching an attack.”

That term sounded vaguely familiar to Kamijou.

…He was often the one being targeted by the attack, so he had few good memories about the magic.

“So if I can find some footprints that don’t follow the current established by the people-clearing field, they will stand out. ''Because that tells me they weren’t made by an ordinary person.''”

“Oh, that makes sense. If the target would wander on out of the field too, the attackers would end up with an empty field. So the Anglicans’ target won’t be affected by the field.”

“If we want to track down Hamazura Shiage, then we only need to search for tracks that stayed in the field but also don’t show the signs of being a professional magician,” explained Lessar. “It couldn’t be easier. If you can’t pick up a trail like that, you’re not qualified to be a magician. A little piggy like that should drop down to a 0=0 and relearn everything from the ground up.”

“Hey, weakling. Are you trying to ramp up the pressure on me here?”

“Ohh? How about you wait to speak human language until you’ve actually found something, little piggy?”

Birdway stared at the floor and nodded in a way that…as rude as the comparison felt, reminded Kamijou of a dog tracking a scent. It didn’t suit her noble appearance at all.

“Tracking him will likely mean leaving the airport through this exit.”

“Yeah, but isn’t he taking a weird detour?”

They wandered here and there a bunch until they ran into an electronically locked door. Birdway reached between the buttons of her blouse to pull out a card that she had been storing (likely with some difficulty) at her flat chest and held it to the reader, opening the door without issue. Kamijou had questions.

“What is that?”

“I borrowed it from an airport worker.”

“…Using legal means, I hope?”

She only smiled.

The super sketchy magic cabal boss didn’t give him a yes or a no answer.

After unlocking a few more doors, they emerged from the airport.

“…”

Had Hamazura escaped through here?

They were at the back of the airport. Kamijou had wondered what they would find there, but he hadn’t expected to see a small business jet stopped there. He gulped when he saw the Union Jack on the tail wing. The British government plane must have moved here since he last saw it.

“But why?”

“They’re probably transferring cargo. See?”

Lessar pointed to a loader sturdier than a forklift and a few cargo containers.

But these were air cargo containers, so they weren’t the long boxes larger than a studio apartment. They were more like 2-3m silver dice.

And one of them was rattling.

“What the hell? That has the British flag on it, so is it some dangerous magical object? Is it like that Pandora thing you’re not supposed to open?”

“Oh, c’mon. Pandora is the name of the artificial human who opened the box. The box has a different name.”

“Who cares!? I’m asking what happens if you open it!”

Birdway glanced over at the other two arguing and sighed before speaking.

“The report I received said nothing about this container. In fact, does that plane even have a cargo door?”

“Yeah, we rode this plane to Academy City, but I don’t recognize that cargo container at all.”

So it was magical, but it might not belong to the Anglicans?

??? Wait, which was it? And either way, didn’t that mean some extremely dangerous object had just been left sitting out here?

…After all, the Anglicans included some super scary people like Stiyl Magnus. What if they ignored some mysterious secret weapon here and it came after them later on!?

When Kamijou nervously touched it with his right hand, there was a sound like shattering glass.

So…it really had reacted to Imagine Breaker?

Then the metal shutter opened.



“Phew!! I-I’ve finally escaped. I guess I am one of the legendary original Golden magicians. My genius is too much for the world to handle!!”



Kamijou Touma recognized the person who emerged.

It was Dion Fortune.

As the boss of a the UK’s greatest magic cabal, Birdway sounded thoroughly exasperated by this state of affairs.

“Aren’t you their Archbishop? Only a temporary figurehead, sure, but what were you doing stuck in an Anglican cell? I thought things weren’t adding up, but did the local troops stage a coup?”

“And aren’t you one of the original Golden magicians? Are you telling me the great Dion Fortune got herself trapped by a twisted loop? Ha ha ha ha.”

Lessar grinned in ultra provocation mode, but Fortune’s reaction was surprisingly minimal.

She only pouted her lips and complained like a small child.

“It’s not my fault. Their necromancer used Underworld God Osiris against me.”

“That’ll do it.”

“Indeed. Not much you can do against Osiris. I mean, he’s Osiris.”

Kamijou waited a bit, but no one provided any further explanation.

Wait, was that the most exposition he was going to get? Was he the only one who didn’t understand? Had he been left behind by the world?

The poor, ignorant boy trembled as he spoke up.

“Umm. Who exactly is this Osiris? Some IT company president who’s popular with elementary and middle school kids on TikZap?”

“Why are you nearly in tears? He’s an Egyptian god. He was originally the god of justice and fairness, but after dying and being resurrected, he became something like the god of death and ruler of the underworld. He’s compared to Hades in Greek mythology.”

“In Crowley-style Magick, the death and resurrection part is heavily emphasized. That lets him correspond to the Son of God who was hung on the cross and resurrected.”

…How could Lessar and Birdway rattle this kind of thing off? Kamijou found it strange. He lived in Academy City of the science side, but that didn’t mean he had memorized all of the Curriculum’s textbooks.

Birdway gave him an annoyed look.

“Bad feelings have a nasty habit of coming true and no one likes being proven right in those cases. Now the Anglicans are looking even more suspicious, but the question is what we do about it.”

“If we can’t trust the Anglicans here in Academy City, is there any reason to even continue with our job? We can always board that government plane and fly on back to England.”

Lessar had a knack for finding something inappropriate to say no matter the circumstances. Which made her a handful. Was there some way Kamijou could search on his phone to find out how to punish someone like her?

“Why can’t I find anything useful!? All I’m getting is some stupid internet slang!!”

“What’s that? Doing some ‘alone time’ net surfing? How pathetic can you be? Why go for mere data when the real, tangible thing is right here☆”

Kamijou could only hope that brat would eventually suffer the consequences of not getting a talking to here and now. Strongly hope.

“I’m not going back,” said Dion Fortune.

In a way, she was the biggest victim who hadn’t asked to be a part of this. She was only temporary. A figurehead. She was supposed to be at the very top, but when it came to Hamazura, all of a sudden she was a target of suspicion, had her authority stripped from her, and was locked up like a criminal.

But she didn’t hesitate to raise her voice here.



“I have to save him. If this is allowed to continue, the Anglicans will kill Hamazura! Even if no one recognizes it, I am still the Archbishop. I won’t let my people trample on people’s lives like that!!”



A soft sigh came from Birdway, who usually maintained a harsh viewpoint.

The sigh had an exasperated tone to it.

“So you’re motivated, great. But do you have a realistic and concrete plan?”

“…I do have one idea there.”

===Part 5===

“Tch.”

“What’s that tongue click for, Blodeuwedd?”

“Oh, nothing. How do you do, Hamazura-san? Oh, dear. You have some trash in your hair.”

“???”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet came up with an excuse to snatch something from his hair, crush it between her fingers, and toss it aside.

(That was a transmitter smaller than a grain of rice based on a communication spiritual item. Whether or not they could pull it off, would Dion Fortune be the only one among the Anglicans who would come up this kind of ''idea''? And she has spent the most time with Hamazura Shiage among them.)

But that aside,  they had walked a bit – a good bit – from the airport.

Below the open sky.

“Aneri says ''this area is most suspicious''.”

“I don’t know what it based that conclusion on, but if Aneri-tan says so, maybe it’s true. Doesn’t it worry you that you don’t know what calculations the AI is doing on the inside?”

As long as it was convenient, he didn’t really care. …But did he only see it that way because he lived in a city of science worship?

Hamazura and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had arrived at a fairly special part of District 23. Special enough that it was on every single tourist map.

It was filled with aircraft.

Except they were packed in close. And there was no rhyme or reason to where they were stopped. Even if they were being maintained or refueled in preparation for takeoff, this haphazard arrangement would leave each individual aircraft unable to move.

But that wasn’t a problem since the aircraft here were all retired.

“Hm. So they took retired airplanes and space shuttles and restored just the residential portions to make hotels, villas, and such out of them?”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet took a look around and commented in amusement, as if she were viewing a tourist attraction.

Hamazura walked past a parked tanker truck and toyed with the cracked phone in his hand.

“It’s called Hotel Town.”

“More info from Aneri-chan?”

Correct.

It may have been like the “towns” made from trailers found in the American desert…but these were small business jets and even large passenger planes. The scale was on another level entirely. It covered a wide horizontal area, but the map also expanded in the vertical direction. All the voluminous fuselages and wings acted like large roofs for anyone walking on the ground.

“Gweh,” groaned Blodeuwedd the Bouquet. “These can carry hundreds of passengers, but that’s with them all stuffed into the cramped economy seats, right? Would anyone really pay a lot of money to spend the night strapped into one of those seats?”

“Maybe there are a lot of airplane nerds, or people who really like being served by flight attendants, even if it’s cramped.”

“A paradise for masochists, huh? Well, I guess you can sell anything if you package it up nice. You can even reserve a tour in the sweltering jungle where you get to enjoy a military-style ‘interrogation’ using metal drums and bats☆”

The girl with zero interest in planes stared into the middle distance.

Now, because these planes were retired, people could enter the ordinarily off-limits areas and snap photos with their phones. Maybe there were people out there who wanted to try sleeping in the cockpit or the cargo space.

The food would probably be airplane food (shipped in from somewhere else of course), but the area was kind of smokey. It smelled of oily smoke, like when cooking yakitori. Apparently the people who still felt hungry were having a cookout. There were grills made by splitting a metal drum down the middle here and there. The earthbound passenger planes had ropes and laundry up on their roofs, but wouldn’t the smoke affect them? Seemed like it would make them smell.

“The place is like a maze… And not just in two dimensions. The map extends overhead too.”

“At least we’ll have plenty of escape routes if we need one. Yeah, now this is a tourist attraction for criminals☆”

There must not have been enough boarding stairs to go around because it looked like people were using ladders and stepladders to enter the entrances located higher up than Hamazura’s head.

The ladders were especially useful because they could also function as makeshift bridges when laid on their side. There were several places where two different passenger planes had their mains wings linked by those bridges. The end result was a messy scene.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet walked below one such bridge as she spoke.

She was finally getting to the point.

“So is the Black_Oneday user really hiding in this niche and messy scrapyard?”

“If they’re sneaking around, it means they know they’re up to no good. They won’t be using their hacking tool while hunched over in a large passenger plane stuffed full of hundreds of people. They’ll have secured some larger space they can have to themselves.”

That meant a villa rather than a hotel.

That was apparently what Aneri predicted to be the optimal conditions for using Black_Oneday.

More specifically, something with the large antenna and signal amplifier used to pick up the special frequencies used in the aerospace industry.

The Hotel Town was full of junk, so there were only so many villas for individual use that also had that much major equipment.

And by further narrowing it down using a criminal’s unique desire for multiple escape routes, only one option remained.

“Hmm.”

Instead of a giant passenger plane, this one had a sleek, streamlined design that combined the fuselage and wings into a single shape. It looked like a long, skinny shovel or shield.

The emaciated girl spoke up in amusement.

“What’s that? A space shuttle?”

“A retired one, yeah. The Kujerung exoatmospheric shuttle. Its components can be folded up compactly and transported in a truck and, by attaching an optional solid-fuel rocket, it can be launched from a submarine’s vertical missile launching tube. So says Aneri.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet looked confused.

But not by the technicality of it all.

“Why would you want to launch from a sub?”

“Don’t ask me. Maybe they’re already doing stuff outside the atmosphere they don’t want anyone to know about.”

What an awful age they lived in.

If there really were space aliens, they would see that as unforgivable pollution. It probably wouldn’t be long before they showed up to eradicate humanity so none of the dangerous species could leave the Earth.

As an act of good to protect the rest of the universe.

And while this was strange super technology for Hamazura and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet, it was no more than retired scrap for Academy City. Those arbiters of justice really did like looking down on people, didn’t they?

At any rate, it looked like a small fashionable streamlined jet. It could switch between a jet engine that sucked in air or a rocket engine that used an oxidizer, giving it the extreme engine power needed to fly from runway to space…but they could ignore that since this one was grounded and retired.

How many exits did it have and where were they?

As a spacecraft, did it have thin walls to keep its weight down? Or were its walls sturdy as hell to protect against heat, shocks, and radiation? Hamazura knew a lot about vehicles, but he couldn’t even hazard a guess about something this specialized.

(I know I have to observe it from a distance since I can’t let them know I’m here…but this is so frustrating. If only I could just get the answer right away.)

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet tilted her head and gestured as if looking at something from below.

“Its basic design is the same as an airplane, right? So can’t we get in through where the wheels are?”

“Are you Kinuhata? This isn’t a cheap movie… There are too many huge-ass gears crammed in there for us to fit.”

What he could tell from enough of a distance to not be noticed was that it was about the size of a small business jet.

…That meant the main problem was the height of the door. It was up higher than Hamazura’s head, so breaking down the door and storming inside would be difficult.

“But on the other hand, the enemy won’t be able to see us if we’re directly below the fuselage, right? Looking down from the cockpit and side windows doesn’t let you see there. So if we can just get there, we should be able get close without being noticed.”

“And then what? And then what?”

“We can walk to the very back of the shuttle and set up a ladder to get up on the roof without them noticing.”

There were ladders all over the Hotel Town. There weren’t enough boarding stairs to go around, so the ladders were used instead. They only had to borrow one of those.

“Prying open that smooth side door would be tough, but if we walk along the roof to the cockpit at the nose, it should be possible to break the glass and get in, don’t you think?

“Are you sure that’s a good idea? We’ll be climbing on top of that streamlined roof shaped like a squat metal coat. We won’t just roll right off, will we?”

Apparently Blodeuwedd the Bouquet sounded so unusually concerned because magicians couldn’t fly.

But Hamazura didn’t understand the rules ordinary magicians worked under, so he wasn’t sure how to respond to this nervous confession.

“Also, this is a spaceship, right? Won’t the front glass be super sturdy to deal with space debris and the pressure difference with the vacuum? How are you planning on breaking that? Ask me to do it?”

“If we can’t do it ourselves, we just have to make a tool that can.”

===Part 6===

Kamijou tried to organize the information in his head.

The tracker Dion Fortune had attached to Hamazura said he was in the Hotel Town, a lodging area of District 23.

Although Fortune herself didn’t sound too confident.

“The thing is, the signal has vanished. That’s a bad sign. Did he notice the tracker and crush it?”

“Doesn’t matter. Even if he gets away, we just have to pick up his trail again in the Hotel Town.”

Kamijou’s phone beeped.

Was that Board Director Accelerator? Where was he watching this from?

“Hey. This is only going to get worse if the supposed problem solvers don’t do their job. So get your asses to the center of the commotion. If those annoying outsiders keep causing so much trouble, the damage is only going to spread.”

The Brits spoke up before Kamijou could get his mouth open.

“Keh keh keh. You say that it like it’s a foregone conclusion he’ll help you.”

“You trust him a lot, huh?

“Do I need to grind the both of you into mincemeat together, you damn brats?”

Accelerator’s voice dropped by two tones. Once for each girl.

And when had those two gotten to the point they could tease the #1? Did they feel no fear?

Kamijou tilted his head and joined the conversation.

“The Anglicans are one thing…but why is Hamazura still on the run? He’s being pursued by magic side experts, right? I don’t see how he could possibly defeat Stiyl and Kanzaki.”

“From what those Anglicans say, he has a Transcendent helping him out. One named Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.”

“Oh, her… Yeah, that tracks,” muttered Kamijou.

Birdway and Lessar didn’t seem too concerned…but was that because they had no direct experience with Transcendents? They didn’t react the way Dion Fortune did.

“The Anglicans have another one called Good, Old Mary with them,” said Accelerator. “Do they think that makes it even? Slamming brute strength against brute strength is only going to damage their surroundings more. We’re busy trying to turn this pile of rubble back into a city and then they show up in the sandbox ready to smash our sand castle.”

He had a point, but this meant his privileges as Board Chairman weren’t enough to bring an end to the conflict.

Birdway frowned again.

“Do you know anything about the Anglicans’ odd behavior? You’re the top of the science side, so you should have some amusing arrangements in place for diplomatic purposes.”

“I’m in the dark on this one. Which I do ''not'' appreciate when this is my city.”

Accelerator spat out that last sentence.

Kamijou glanced over to see Dion Fortune shrugging.

This meant the leaders of Academy City and the Anglican Church had been forced out. …Then who was in control here?

“Whatever the case,” continued Accelerator, “specialists will feel the fear of something on a deeper level than anyone. Like America with guns and Central America with drugs, the UK knows all about magic and demons, right? They’re more sensitive about these things. Isn’t that why they’re taking this so far?”

“But what does that have to do with Hamazura?” asked Kamijou. “I mean, he’s an Academy City esper. That’s a completely different world from the magic side.”

“The Great Demon Coronzon problem isn’t over yet.”

“?”

Why bring up Coronzon here?

For better or for worse, Kamijou had ended that by killing her with his own hand.

“The Anglicans seem more concerned by Coronzon’s lingering effects than by Hamazura himself.”

“Lingering effects? Oh, I get it.”

“No, you don’t.”

If Hamazura Shiage’s view of Coronzon were accepted by the public, Coronzon’s apocalyptic ideology could end up spreading? Or something like that?

But apparently that wasn’t what Accelerator meant.

“It’s something about angels and demons being made of energy. They theorize that, even after Coronzon’s death, a portion of her power is contained inside Hamazura Shiage. …If that’s true, then he would be able to use Adikalika himself.”

“''Sitra Achra'',” said Dion Fortune, sounding unusually grave.

That didn’t mean anything to Kamijou, but apparently it meant something to someone.

“Misaka will do it!” “Serving master is my job.”

Some voices came over the call.

Only Accelerator could know what he thought about that while hearing them in person.

“The trouble at the airport is bad enough, but it sounds like this is about to be spread further.”

“Don’t worry. We reclaimed our ordinary lives. I’m not about to let someone bring us to the brink of ruin again.”

===Part 7===

Maybe it came from being a scrapyard for retired aircraft, but there were stacks of wooden crates and metal drums all around the Hotel Town. There was junk and scrap metal just about everywhere.

For a tinkerer like Hamazura, it all looked like a giant armory.

He started with a metal pipe and a stake, added some quick-drying putty in place of a rubber seal, grabbed a spare electric plug, included a few other small items, and finished it with the most important piece of all.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet tilted her head.

“Hmm, what’s that tube? What is that used for, Professor Hamazura?”

“It’s a signal flare. It might look safe, but it actually includes more powder than an ordinary 9mm round.”

There was probably more powerful jet fuel and rocket fuel to be found in District 23, but he would prefer not to touch anything that dangerous. It was best to stick with materials he was more comfortable with. He took apart a few of the flares to get sufficient powder.

After combining everything just right, it was done.

It rested on his shoulder like a rocket launcher…but it was more like a pile driver powered by explosive force.

He would use this to break the space shuttle’s thick front glass designed to withstand space debris and the pressure difference with vacuum.

“That should do it. We only have one shot at it, though.”

“Are you sure about this? Won’t a space shuttle have other ways of seeing out? Y’know, like exterior cameras installed all over it. I just don’t think this will work like a normal plane.”

“You have a point. Then let’s deal with that.”

That led to more rummaging around behind cover.

The emaciated girl stared like she had discovered a new kind of insect.

“Professor, Professor. Um, why are you gathering up filthy old cardboard boxes?”

“For kindling.”

With so many homemade grills all over the place, it wouldn’t stand out much if a bunch of smoke obscured the view from the exterior cameras.

He gathered together all the cardboard and then shoved it into an 18 liter drum.

Incomplete combustion would be best for creating a smokescreen, so he wet the cardboard a bit with water before lighting them. Oil would have been useful, but he was afraid of it sputtering all over the place when mixed with water.

Dark smoke dirtied the air and began to ride the gentle breeze.

It fully engulfed the streamlined fuselage of the Kujerung a short distance away.

Now the exterior cameras weren’t going to accomplish much.

“Let’s go! Don’t get lost in the smoke!!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Hiding in the thick smoke, Hamazura held a collapsed ladder under his arm and approached the Kujerung. It was a nerve-wracking situation, but Blodeuwedd the Bouquet seemed to be enjoying herself. …Like a mom watching her small child during parent’s day at school.

“Phew.”

They made it below the Kujerung. It was low enough he had to duck to not hit his head, but it was still a safe zone where they were free to move.

He took a deep breath of the smoky air.

Three seconds passed without any reaction from the Black_Oneday user. Concluding they hadn’t been noticed, the two of them made they way to the tail of the spaceship.

“Did you make too much smoke? It’s stinging my eyes…”

“That’s better than being seen.”

While it was only the size of a business jet, it was still an exoatmospheric shuttle designed to take off from a runway and fly all the way into space. Three giant trumpet-shaped engine nozzles were arranged at the rear. Each one was taller than Hamazura. He knew it was retired and wasn’t functional anymore, but it was still frightening to be staring them down like this. The pure firepower would be greater than at a crematorium.

Hamazura extended the stepladder as far as it would go and leaned it diagonally against the shuttle. Climbing that would take him to the roof. Then he only had to walk up to the cockpit window.

“Okay, here goes nothing. …Follow me, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.”

“Oh, how gentlemanly. I thought you would use ‘ladies first’ as an excuse to have me go ahead of you.”

“?”

“It’s your chance to get a low-angle view, you know? And I’m naked save for an apron below my metal coat☆”

Hamazura knew that veering even slightly to the side on the roof would mean slipping off to his death, so why was she trying to distract him like this? Was she really on his side?

At any rate, he climbed the ladder while staring down the giant trumpet-like engines.

But then he realized something.

“Hm? What is it, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet?”

Before reaching the roof, her hands only partway up the ladder, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet stared off elsewhere and muttered to herself.

“Hmm, that’s not good. Things have finally caught up with us.”

He wasn’t sure what she meant at first…but that didn’t last long.

Something wasn’t right.

“There’s no one else…around here?”

In the cluttered Hotel Town? When each of the passenger planes that made it seem so cluttered had to contain hundreds of passengers?

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet took a quick look around, her gaze sharpening a bit.

“It’s a people-clearing field. And the Anglicans have us surrounded a lot more boldly than I expected. They should really be less conspicuous about laying that kind of groundwork.”

“?”

That didn’t mean anything to Hamazura, but apparently all the innocent people had intentionally been ''made to leave''.

The “atmosphere” of the entire area had changed and the hiding Black_Oneday user had to have noticed it. Which meant they would be on their guard. He couldn’t predict what the enemy would do next. Were the Anglicans a bunch of bumbling cops!? Did they even want to solve this case and bring peace back to the world!?

“This is bad, Hamazura.”

“?”

His phone sounded the alarm again. The loudest one it had.

The threat was right there, as close as could be.

He heard a rumble from the Kujerung’s giant engines just before ''they ignited.

===Part 8===

Kanzaki Kaori and the rest of the Anglicans were prepared for their next action.

The Amakusas and the Former Agnese Force ran all around.

There were many innocent people in the Hotel Town, so they had to be evacuated in advance using a people-clearing field and other spells. It was a lot of work when covering such a wide area.

Kanzaki looked grim.

“We may have underestimated that AI Aneri thing. If Hamazura Shiage can accomplish this much, we need to recalculate the threat he poses.”

“At least there is still no sign of him directly using magic,” said Itsuwa before glancing to the side. “And at the same time…”

(I can’t believe she took a direct hit from ''that'' and it didn’t even scratch her.)

She meant Good, Old Mary.

That Transcendent had apparently been hit by a science side strategic weapon, but she was standing there like nothing had happened. She claimed to have immediately mixed together a potion that created thick concrete upon contact with the air, but was that really enough to explain what happened?

(Well, cement was often used when building large sacred grounds, like the pyramids of Ancient Egypt or Roman temples.)

Anyway, the Anglicans had two main concerns.



First, that Great Demon Coronzon’s Sitra Achra power had been sealed inside Hamazura Shiage as a Telesma-like energy.



Second, that Hamazura Shiage’s mistaken proselytizing and evangelizing would spread an apocalyptic ideology in support of the already dead Great Demon Coronzon.



The first was the more direct threat, but the second couldn’t be underestimated.

Coronzon’s name was already well known, so it was incorporated into various parts of the magic side.

The Anglicans, the Amakusas, and the former Roman Catholics were a group bound by faith, so they saw the possibility of Coronzon being spoken of as a hero as a definite threat. They knew better than anyone that formless and abstract faith could transform into an international military force. Because that was what they were.

A Level 0 had gained an exceptional power.

That symbolism reminded them of a different boy. And that other boy was proof that a perceived threat to the world could bring together people from different nationalities and affiliations.

…They couldn’t let that incidental phenomenon be used ''in a negative way''. No matter what.

(A demon…a dragon. I don’t like the symbolism. And Hamazura Shiage is also officially classified as a Level 0. Let’s just hope he doesn’t have anything weird lurking in his right hand.)

“We will capture Hamazura Shiage here in District 23. That way we can keep his influence to a minimum.” Kanzaki spoke cautiously. “Academy City is known as a city of espers, but it’s said most of those espers are Level 0s who never developed any real power. That means there are a large number of people here whose development failed, leaving them frustrated with the current world. We must avoid a situation where they resonate with Hamazura Shiage…or with Coronzon’s shadow, really.”

Academy City’s technology was said to be twenty or thirty years ahead of the outside world.

The same was said of its trends.

So if Academy City was lost, there was a chance the same would happen to the world as a whole once, sooner or later, it spread outside.

That was yet another reason they couldn’t let Coronzon’s apocalyptic ideology take root in Academy City.

“No sign he’s noticed the people-clearing field. He may not be used to using Great Demon Coronzon’s Sitra Achra inside him, or maybe he isn’t even aware it’s there.” Kanzaki remained cautious. “So it would be best to secure him while that safety remains. If he can wield Coronzon’s magic alongside that AI Aneri, we truly won’t be able to keep up.”

===Part 9===

The Kujerung exoatmospheric shuttle’s three giant trumpet-shaped engines suddenly ignited.

“Gah!?”

There was nothing Hamazura could do while climbing the ladder leaning against the rear of the shuttle. Ordinarily, he would have been turned to charcoal by explosive flames even more powerful than a flamethrower.

Directly below him, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet grabbed his ankles and yanked him down. He fell straight down where she caught him inside her thick metal coat.

Hamazura’s view was blocked while he was enveloped by a sweet aroma, so he didn’t actually see what happened.

He just knew gravity suddenly vanished.

He heard a deafening roar and felt a great tremor.

He fell over with no idea what was happening. Blodeuwedd the Bouquet’s head was outside the coat, so she had to see what he couldn’t.

“Ow ow ow… Okay, that one was a little too close for comfort.”

Then why did she have a tone of voice best described as “tehepero”?

When she reopened the front of her metal coat, Hamazura collapsed to the ground. And they were at a spot that had to be more than twenty meters from where they had been. As hard as it was to believe, ''their combined weight had been launched that far before even touching the ground.

He noticed some drops of a strange glowing orange liquid nearby.

It took him a fair amount of time to realize those were pieces of molten aluminum…in other words, the remains of the ladder. It must have been ''splattered'' like a shower over a wide area. If not for that magician (or was she a Transcendent?) wrapping him in that inexplicably sturdy coat, what would have happened to his puny physical body?

But that wasn’t the main point here.

Without even getting up from the ground, Hamazura clung to the girl’s slender body inside the coat.

“I thought the Hotel Town was a scrapyard full of retired aircraft! Why does that thing’s engines work!? You can’t run it on ordinary gasoline, that’s for sure!!”

“Wait, Hamazura. Don’t focus on that right now. …If that one is operational, could it be that ''all the others are too''?”

“!!!?”

The Black_Oneday hacking tool was specialized for the aerospace industry and it bared its fangs here.

Hamazura was hit by a spell of dizziness and nausea.

All the movement around him had caused his inner ear to malfunction.

Meaning…

The countless large passenger planes ''supposedly'' acting as giant hotels were…

“They’re moving… Goddammit, they’re coming this way!”

He had no choice but to run.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet seemed amused. He couldn’t figure out her sense of humor.

“Ah ha ha ha ha!! Hey, Hamazura, how much does a passenger plane weigh!?”

“Depends on the plane!!”

It really did depend.

He was pretty sure the biggest ones were more than 500 tons. A large truck was around 10 tons, so it was literally an order of magnitude greater.

“Why do these retired aircraft all still have ultra-dangerous jet fuel in them!?”

“Maybe it’s that thing? Y’know, that idea that machines need to be operated periodically or else they fall apart.”

…Come to think of it, hadn’t he seen some tanker trucks on the way here? He had been terribly unobservant. Those trucks wouldn’t have been here if the aircraft didn’t need jet fuel.

Running away on foot wasn’t going to cut it.

They both rolled well to the side on the ground.

A great mass passed right by them with the unpleasant odor of burning rubber.

But barely avoiding the passenger plane’s giant wheels didn’t mean the threat was over.

Plus, this was District 23, where all the aircraft and spacecraft were located.

The passenger plane slowly pursuing the two of them was smashed by something arriving from a different direction. It was squashed by something from above.

''Something big.

The (remains of) a small charter plane and a pointy-nosed supersonic passenger plane were crushed from above and shoved aside as something truly colossal approached.

The oppressively large fuselage seemed like it could contain three large passenger planes stacked on top of each other. At that size, you had to wonder if the air resistance calculations really worked out for it or if it would break apart as soon as it took flight.

There was a good reason for its size.

The Whale Shark large structure component transport plane was an extra-large aircraft designed to carry the dismantled parts for an entire ordinary-sized aircraft or spacecraft!

It was large enough to play a regulation game of basketball inside. Nothing crushed by its enormous low-pressure tires would ever recover. A human would be squashed less than 5mm flat.

And its great size wasn’t the ''only'' problem.

The air moved with a rumble. Quite literally. Sending a mass weighing hundreds of tons into the air required a considerable amount of force. And the giant barrel-like turbofan engines needed to intake a considerable amount of air!?

“Gyahh!!”

When one of the aluminum ladders used to create a path between the airplanes was sucked in, the entire cylindrical engine burst into flames. This was the same accident seen with bird strikes, but the Whale Shark didn’t stop. It had more than the one engine, so it was still charging this way!!

“Run away!!”

“Ah ha ha! To where!?”

“Its tires are too big. If we escape into an ''indentation'', it won’t crush us!! Aneri search the map to show us where to go!!”

Hamazura shouted and glanced down to his cracked phone and then dove toward a chain link cover on the ground. And he lifted it.

Something like the ditch next to a road continued on in a straight line. It was probably meant to stop any highly-dangerous spilled jet fuel from spreading endlessly along the flat ground.

But this ditch was more than a meter across.

“Wait, Hamazura. My metal coat is way too baggy so it’s caught…”

“Oh, god!!”

His eyes widened as he yanked her on in.

That colossus was large enough to carry an entire passenger plane inside. Any contact with that mass would mean instant death and it was passing only a few centimeters over their heads.

Hamazura raised his head and shouted half in desperation.

“Well, it’s not all bad!!”

“It isn’t!?”

“They’re causing a lot of trouble, sure, but it looks like they can’t actually escape into space!!”

The Black_Oneday user was the one activating the aircraft and siccing them on Hamazura or the Anglicans, but they showed no sign of taking off with the Kujerung exoatmospheric shuttle and escaping that way. While the Kujerung was a spacecraft, it needed a runway of more than 2000m to take off from the ground, so igniting its engines wasn’t enough. And it didn’t seem to be equipped for the “launched vertically from a submarine” option.

If they couldn’t escape from the planet, then they remained on this same battlefield.

Hamazura couldn’t let all this chaos distract him.

The Black_Oneday user was behind all of this and they were within reach!!

===Part 10===

Everything started to move all at once.

The aircraft and spacecraft in the Hotel Town were moving haphazardly.

Kamijou’s eyes widened.

“What the hell!?”

“If AI Aneri isn’t doing this, then the enemy must have a similar tool.”

Lessar made it sound like it wasn’t her problem.

“Like what?”

“I dunno, maybe a specialized hacking tool?”

“Wait, hacking? Then what about searching for my document!? They aren’t going to destroy the cargo management database that tells me where it is, are they!?”

Also, who was the enemy here?

What did they think they were doing with some underground hacking tool!?

There wasn’t just 10 or even 20 of them. Large passenger planes, military transport planes, and even what looked like space shuttles were moving all over the place. A hit from even one of those would leave him no more than a stain on the pavement.

Kamijou was seriously uncertain if he should charge in or not.

He saw Kanzaki, Stiyl, and some other familiar faces heading toward the center of the chaos. Couldn’t he wait for those experts to fix this and then ask them what was going on?

But even from here, he could tell ''something'' was rapidly escaping from here.

Did they need to stop that to restore calm as quickly as possible?

And the others would need as much help as they could get.

“If I capture anyone who looks suspicious, I should be able to figure this out, right? Is Hamazura behind this, or is there some other villain? I’ll have to find some way of- whoa!?”

“You’ll die, so excuse me.”

If Dion Fortune hadn’t kicked Kamijou out of the way, his entire upper body may have been obliterated.

Was that a large military transport helicopter distorting the air as it flew this way? It of course wasn’t actually rotating its two giant rotors to fly under its own power. …''A giant arm growing from the ground'' had grabbed it and thrown it this way.

That wasn’t AI Aneri or the enemy’s hacking tool.

Kamijou’s eyes widened from the ground.

“Wait…did the Anglicans just attack us?”

“Of course they did. You’re working with me, the Archbishop who they decided to unfairly dismiss in the middle of a mission. Nothing is more troublesome than a political enemy you failed to finish off. They now aren’t sure which side you’re on, so they will eliminate you before you can interfere with this mission.”

“…Are you serious?”

He should have realized from the moment he discovered they had shoved their ally Dion Fortune in a cell. The Anglicans were beyond caring about appearances. Or rather, they were acting indiscriminately. Were they really that afraid of Great Demon Coronzon’s influence on the world, like Accelerator had mentioned?

“Is Hamazura Shiage really that much of a threat?” mused Birdway. With a touch of exasperation in her voice.

“He’s supposed to be carrying some kind of dangerous possibility about Coronzon’s power or her apocalyptic ideology or whatever, right!? He saw me kill Coronzon, so he must hold a grudge. Isn’t that why this is happening!?”

“Yes. Great Demon Coronzon is definitely dead, but the theory is that a portion of her Sitra Achra – a Telesma-like energy – remained in this world and is contained in Hamazura Shiage’s right hand. Nonsense. That does seem to be why the Anglicans are pursuing Hamazura, but none of that evil material is here.”

“How can you be so sure? It sounds plausible enough to me.”

“Don’t worry. There’s no chance.”

“But how can you know, Birdway!?”



“''Because I’m the one who dispersed Great Demon Coronzon’s lingering energy.''”



……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 

“Wh-wha-what did you just say, you little villain?”

“I went through the ley lines to do it all the way from England.”

He wasn’t asking ''how'' she did it.

“There’s no real problem with some of it existing spread out across this entire world. As long as it doesn’t gather together and pass what you could think of as a lethal dose.”

Genius Teacher Birdway could see the obvious confusion on Kamijou’s face.

She continued like she was speaking to a small child.

“Did you wonder why the Dawn-Colored Sunlight, Europe’s greatest magic cabal, didn’t join you yesterday when Coronzon was a step away from destroying the world? Because there were things I had to get done behind the scenes, idiot.” Birdway maintained the calm on her face. “The threat Hamazura Shiage supposedly poses is at least half incorrect. I scattered Coronozon’s Sitra Achra, so none of it is contained in Hamazura’s body.”

“And I have my doubts about the other half too.” Dion Fortune sighed. “Could Hamazura Shiage really draw in enough people to establish a new religion just by telling them about a side of Great Demon Coronzon the rest of us don’t know? It’s honestly possible, but it seems far too unlikely to me. It’s beyond what could happen just by getting lucky.”

That was no reason to relax.

Birdway, who had seen the good and the bad the world had to offer, continued as if to say they were finally getting to crux of the issue.

“Now, why are the Anglicans so dead set on pursuing Hamazura? The Anglicans are an effective enough anti-magician organization that the Dawn-Colored Sunlight must always keep a cautious eye on their activities. And Necessarius is the best of the best. They shouldn’t be behaving like a bunch of bumbling cops.”

Leivinia Birdway summed it all up with a final sentence.

“There’s something more to this.”

===Part 11===

The villain wasn’t a nameless and faceless being.

They were an ordinary human.

The Black_Oneday user was within Hamazura’s reach.

But the passenger planes and space shuttles weren’t the only threat.

“!?”

He heard something like an electric razor.

One of the wooden crates sloppily stacked up nearby burst from within – probably using some kind of explosive – and something emerged.

The large passenger planes and shuttles that seemed capable of attacking the terrain itself weren’t the only thing to fear.

“Oh, no! Are they sending out drones now!?”

“Hm? Why should we care? We survived a space shuttle engine blast, so what can that little thing do?”

“Use your eyes!! It’s a crop duster!! Do you see the weird nozzle on its underside? Load it with an inhalable tranquilizer and it just has to spray us once from above to knock us out!!”

There was more to fear than pure destructive power.

But how far did the unseen Black_Oneday user intend to take this?

They probably weren’t optimistic enough to think they could stop after scattering their many pursuers. Their hideout had already been compromised. They would want to escape from here as quickly as possible. And they would also want to keep their identity a secret as they did so.

But how did they plan to do that from the Kujerung exoatmospheric shuttle?

“…?”

At first, Hamazura thought he was seeing a small bathtub sliding along the ground. But he wasn’t. The smooth boxy object had three small wheels like a suitcase and the height of each wheel could be adjusted separately to climb stairs and get over bumps. It had made it pretty far amid all the wreckage created by the aircraft crashing into each other. Yes, it moved so smoothly it looked like it was “sliding”.

At that size, it could only be carrying one person. …Was it a tiny mobility device?

“Is that them!? The Black_Oneday user!?”

He was going to lose sight of them like this.

A large transport plane roared nearby. One of its landing gear legs must have been broken because it was tilted at an angle. Its giant X-shaped propeller approached like a rotating blade. Hamazura somehow managed to avoid that and then grabbed onto the diagonally tilted wing. Fortunately, the propellers weren’t rotating too fast. It was moving slow enough for him to climb on.

He would lose sight of the mobility device if he didn’t secure a higher viewpoint!!

“They’re heading west… Aneri, can you stop them?”

After a short buzz from his phone, explosive light burst in front of the mobility device. Aneri must have hacked the guide lights built into the runway.

With the bright light blocking the view, the mobility device weaved hard.

This one attack wasn’t actually going to stop them, but it was still effective.

“Aneri, keep trying things! Don’t just use the same method. Mix it up so the enemy can’t predict what you’re going to do next. Do it!!”

Far below on the ground, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet shouted up at him.

“Hamazura, you pursue the villain! As fast as you can! I’ll deal with all the annoying flies!!”

“Thanks!!”

…So apparently Blodeuwedd the Bouquet could stay standing without issue within the powerful suction of a giant turbofan engine. Transcendents really did have absurd specs. Then again, maybe she had used the huge sleeves of her metal coat to grab and dig deep into the asphalt ground.

Hamazura couldn’t just watch on from up high.

Aneri was obstructing the enemy’s escape, but someone actually had to chase down the mobility device. While running and jumping from plane to plane, he heard an odd sound.

From the ground.

“What the hell?”

He saw a piece of metal about half the size of a coffin, but it had eight wheels. And it had two machine guns thicker than clothesline poles on top. In addition to several plate-like radars and lenses.

The pair of gun barrels were staring right at him.

Hamazura immediately climbed a ladder from the large transport plane’s main wing to the top of its fuselage.

“Is that an anti-air drone!?”

The booming gunfire was terribly deep. The spray of bullets from below filled the main wing with holes. Was that jet fuel dripping out? From the look of things, each shot was a 20mm round even larger than an anti-materiel rifle round. If that so much as grazed him, he would explode and die!

(I’m dead if I stop.)

But at least it wasn’t armed with missiles. With a cheap SAM unit forcibly equipped with whatever missiles were available, he would have been caught in the blast if it hit anywhere near him.

His life really was on the brink if he was thankful he was ''only'' being fired on by 20mm machineguns.

The program-controlled automatic aiming hadn’t managed to hit him with a single thick bullet, but he thought that was because those drones were meant to be sent in as a group so they could set up a barrage against an aircraft or other flying object in the wide-open sky. The targeting device didn’t seem to be designed for anti-personnel use.

Hamazura ran full tilt along the transport plane’s roof and leaped.

The next passenger plane’s main wing was ten meters away.

That of course was too far to jump.

He stretched out his arm as if trying to grab at empty air.

“Aneri!!”

Something swung his way.

Had Aneri hacked a red fire truck? That was an extendable ladder being swung around like a tank gun. Hamazura landed on the ladder as it arrived just below him.

He lost his balance…but not just because his weight had overbalanced the extended ladder.

A large passenger plane was approaching. And its engines were sucking in a lot of air.

As soon as Hamazura’s feet contacted another space shuttle’s roof, he heard an explosive boom directly behind him. The hose coiled on the side of the fire truck had unraveled and been sucked into the airplane engine.

The motor sound below him distorted.

The eight-wheeled drone appeared to have crashed into a metal drum on the ground.

The villain commanding it must have noticed.

They made their next move right away.

He heard an odd sound like a liquid splattering.

“?”

It hadn’t actually hit him, but he quickly covered his nose and mouth when he detected the distinctive scent. His instincts sounded the alarm: breathing in too much of this was a bad idea.

(Jet fuel!?)

Was this Black_Oneday’s doing again? They must have misused the fuel ports on the passenger planes around here to spray the dangerous fuel as if from a sprinkler.

To detect the odor, enough must have vaporized to reach this height. If anything set it alight, the entire area would explode. In fact, wasn’t this essentially a tactical weapon that would burn down everything within a kilometer of here using the same logic as a fuel-air bomb!?

“Aneri, find me a route!! Give me the course that will get me outside the vaporized fuel as soon as poss-”

Hamazura stopped before finishing his command.

There was someone down on the ground directly below the main wing.

The scrawny man looked exactly like the type to have taken time off work to come here for fun. He wore an SLR camera around his neck instead of just using his phone, suggesting he was either a serious airplane fan or a serious flight attendant fan. Which one honestly didn’t matter at the moment.

Hamazura’s eyes widened as he ran atop the passenger plane.

(Damn, is this cause of that people-clearing field thing!? Supposedly those Brits use it to keep innocent people away before they do something.)

But that meant the people affected by the people-clearing field would be forced to take action without even realizing it. Their logical thinking would be shunted aside and replaced with the idea that their top priority was leaving the designated area.

Directly below, wooden crates were stacked up in what looked like a small maze from above.

The people-clearing field was a subconscious form of unnatural mental control. So maybe the people under its effects could sometimes get “caught” in a dead end or obstacle or end up looping endlessly in a maze.

On the science side, it was known there was no such thing as perfect technology, but did that apply to the magic world as well?

If the vaporized jet fuel ignited, everyone here would die.

Hamazura’s job was to pursue the villain, but this unknown man had been caught up in this due to no fault of his own.

(Do heroes only save harmless cute girls? Hell no!!)

“Aneri!!”

The nearby fire fighting infrastructure swiftly responded. Several skinny metal pipes emerged from the flat pavement and then sprayed a clear liquid in all directions. Ordinary water would only exacerbate the problem, so this had to be a special fire extinguishing agent meant for oil fires.

Jet fuel that had vaporized and spread through the air was highly inflammable and extremely dangerous, but it wouldn’t trigger an explosion if it was “washed away” with a nonflammable liquid.

“That should do it.”

His cracked phone sounded an alarm.

Hamazura belatedly realized why.

(Washing the vaporized fuel out of the air is important to prevent an all-encompassing explosion, but the threat isn’t over. The puddles of fuel on the ground can sill burn!!)

“Damn!!”

Hamazura reached for a laundry rope on the main wing and tossed it below. The attachment for hanging it up caught on the man’s belt.

He attached the other end to a heavy metal drum and kicked that off the other side of the wing.

Like using a pulley, the man was lifted up to the wing.

The very next moment, orange flames engulfed the pavement below.

They had been spared being directly exposed to the sticky flames, but intense heat still rose toward them.

The wing tilted below Hamazura’s feet. Had the rubber of the passenger plane’s low-pressure tire melted?

The specialized fire extinguishing agent took effect before long. After five minutes, the special non-evaporating liquid had covered the fuel, cut off its supply of oxygen, and swiftly extinguished all the flames. The innocent man was safe for now. …Although it did bother Hamazura that the man was excitedly snapping photos of the ground exclaiming how lucky he was to get to see a real jet fuel fire being extinguished.

That said, this had taken five minutes.

Hamazura had instinctually focused on the innocent man over the fleeing villain.

With the obvious result.

“They got away!! Damn!”

The mobility device was no longer visible.

And it was those Brits’ fault again!! He clenched his teeth. If only that people-clearing field hadn’t malfunctioned and got that man caught up in this… He didn’t want to be their friends, but if the Brits would make good use of all that power of theirs, they may have had no difficulty capturing the Black_Oneday user!

“Aneri, check the map!! What’s the closest important place in the direction the mobility device was going!?”

He received two buzzes of refusal. …Yeah, that made sense. If the mobility device had circled around wide after escaping out of his view, it could have gone in any direction.

Which meant they were back to square one.

“Dammit!!”

“Oh, dear… Try to calm down.”

Hearing an awfully peaceful voice, he looked over to see Blodeuwedd the Bouquet using a ladder to climb on top of the same airplane as him.

“But! What are those arbiters of justice even doing!? I could’ve caught the villain if not for them!!”

“Oh, really? And what proof do you have that the Black_Oneday user was even inside that bathtub-like mobility device?”

“…Excuse me?”

“They have a specialized hacking tool, remember? They may have sent that thing in one direction with no one inside while they ducked down and snuck away in a different direction.”

That…seemed unlikely, but he couldn’t be absolutely certain.

And assigning blame wasn’t the most important thing at the moment.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet turned the conversation in a much more businesslike direction.

“So, Hamazura, what are you going to do now?”

===Part 12===

Kamijou found this to be very bad for his heart.

All the aircraft and spacecraft were no longer moving around, but that was no reason to rejoice. The central figure of all this had gotten away.

“Where’s Hamazura!?” Dion Fortune shouted, wide-eyed. “Please tell me he isn’t dead!”

“Looks like he got away,” said Lessar, carefree.

Kamijou could sense the air of urgency rapidly fading.

Birdway and Lessar were focused on some other villain, so they may not have placed too much importance on Hamazura’s actions.

Fortune breathed a heavy sigh.

“But I don’t see this ‘real villain’ of yours either. You saw that mobility device leave, right? I bet that was them.”

The Anglicans were gathering a fair distance away.

They may have been discussing their next move.

Kamijou spotted the smoker priest among them.

“It’s high time I gave that bastard Stiyl a piece of my mind.”

“Not so fast,” interrupted Leivinia Birdway.

Even though she and Lessar had chosen to act independently rather than join up with the Anglicans in Academy City. Why would she stop him here?

“Have you really not noticed?”

===Part 13===

At the moment, they needed to get away from the Hotel Town.

And when there were people after them, they had to be quick about it.

Hamazura took a look around.

“It would be fastest to steal a vehicle. And the drones in the sky and things like that can’t spy on us when we’re under an airplane wing…or any kind of roof. So a vehicle that brings a roof with us would be safest.”

“What exactly are you suggesting we steal? Not a highly conspicuous 10ton truck, I hope.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet sounded exasperated, but District 23 was full of airports and runways. Ordinary vehicles were the exception here. ''Conspicuous vehicles were actually inconspicuous'' in this district.

Hamazura pried open the ignition keyhole and messed with the wiring inside.

Anything that belonged to District 23 would have strict electronic security and locks, but large trucks like this moved between districts. And he knew these forceful methods often worked with vehicles that belonged to another district.

(Although this is really the result of reverting to old tech after people opening the door and starting the engine with their phone became a social problem.)

Hamazura bypassed the alarm and started the engine.

“Whatever the case, I have to do what I can.”

“Such as?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet! I can’t ignored the Black_Oneday user, I don’t want to be killed by those Anglicans or whatever, and I don’t plan on letting Kamijou Touma get away with what he did! He kills someone and now he’s the hero who saved the world? I won’t stop until I’ve at least left a mark on his shiny righteousness!!”

“Sigh. So, uh, doesn’t that least one seem kind of impossible?”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet stood right in front of the large truck, looked up at him, and breathed an exasperated sigh.

…So they finally ran into a difference of opinion, did they?

“For one, Kamijou Touma isn’t bound by some rule keeping him from killing anyone. And it wasn’t good luck that let his past enemies survive. In fact, you can’t expect anything like that from that boy and his misfortune. So it was all intentional. He chose to let his enemies live even if it worked against him. But that didn’t happen with Coronzon. Letting the one die isn’t the exception here. To be honest, the way he saved all the others was the abnormality.”

Yes.

He had heard that before, but surely Coronzon had wanted to live.

Even if she was a villain, even if it had been ugly, even if she had brought it on herself, and even if she was hated.

“Besides, a majority of the would would say Coronzon’s death was for the best. So at least when it comes to Coronzon, you can’t possibly overturn Kamijou Touma’s ‘righteousness’. Even if he isn’t interested in being protected by the world’s general consensus. Remember, all 7 or 8 billion people on this planet have a common interest here. Their lives were saved and there is no substitution for that. You’re just one person, so can you do against that?”

Hamazura felt a dangerous heat between his eyes.

“''Just'' one person?”

“''She dragged 8 billion innocent people into it and tried to slaughter them all, so the one or two at the center of it don’t get to start whining about justice at this point, you worm.''”

“Kh.”

The words stabbed right into Hamazura’s chest.

“''Or is everyone you know personally an elite who deserves VIP treatment? Don’t make me laugh. All lives are worth the same. You can’t just shove other’s lives aside because it’s inconvenient for you''.”

But still the girl didn’t stop.

Did a running 10ton truck not warrant concern for a Transcendent?

She looked up into the driver’s compartment and continued the head-on verbal assault.

“''Every last one of those 8 billion people have their own loved ones and you two were prepared to take those people from them all for your own purposes. And you very nearly did it! Did you think you hadn’t earned the world’s ire after everything you did, Hamazura''!?”

Yes.

Hamazura had no right to claim he was in the right at this point. He couldn’t defeat a single person on Earth if he centered the argument there. When it came to righteousness, he was at the very bottom. There were 8 billion people above him in that ranking, so he would be crushed no matter what he tried to say.

He knew that.

He did…but that did nothing to quell his frustration.

He didn’t want to hear anyone say it was for the best that Coronzon died. If her death couldn’t be overturned, then he at least wanted her to rest in peace. He didn’t want people spitting on her grave just because she had been a villain. …Would this world of righteousness and nothing more not even let him think of his friend and make that claim?

And.

“…Hey.”

He heard a horribly low voice.

Far lower than before.

For some reason, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was furious as she stood tall before the truck.

Even more furious than Hamazura.

“C’mon, idiot. I’m waiting. Aren’t you going to say something?”

“…There’s nothing I can say.”

“How stupid are you!!?”

She exploded at him.

The Transcendents were extraordinary beings who couldn’t even be explained by Academy City’s knowledge of espers. She wore a thick metal coat with only an apron below it, so no one was going to mistake her for a normal person.

And yet…

“At times like this, the idiot who did something unbelievably idiotic is supposed to shout that ''human emotions can’t be accounted for by adding up the numbers like that''! Say that and I’ll make it all work out for you! What do you think a Transcendent like me is doing here anyway!? ''We let you stick to your personal convictions and tear down those smug arguments based on justice, righteousness, the global majority, international rules, and a global consensus''! Why is an idiotic idiot like you trying to take this seriously with that idiot brain of yours!? Are you really an honest-to-god idiot, you idiot!?”

He gasped.

…Whose side was she on?

Hamazura stared in confusion, but this should have been obvious from the beginning.

Hamazura had been cut off from the world at large, so from a purely objective viewpoint, abandoning him would be the safer and easier option. Yet Blodeuwedd the Bouquet hadn’t done that.

Loving the hated was not a safe or easy thing.

But she had still chosen that as her salvation condition.

Chosen for herself.

She had decided she would do whatever it took to save those who were cut off and isolated from all directions because everyone hated them and thought they deserved death.

“Coronzon was evil. And alone! There are 7 or 8 billion people flooding this world, but not one of them would work with her!! Hamazura, she didn’t even consider you useful. She thought of you as utterly useless. And after looking down on everyone around her and driving herself into a corner, Coronzon died a death anyone could tell you she brought on herself. That’s all true!!”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was fierce.

The Transcendent who had seen so many hated people spoke sharply and piercingly.

So.

Her words managed to tear deeper into this hated boy’s heart than anyone else’s had.



“But you wanted to be her friend, didn’t you?”



“Shut up…” groaned Hamazura, head lowered.

This girl had just suddenly appeared, so what did she know about Coronzon?

…Coronzon had dragged Hamazura, who knew nothing of magic, around Scotland instead of abandoning him.

…She had helped him save Dion Fortune who had collapsed into a bunch of tarot cards!

…She had been more than just someone who nobly saved his life!! She had made jokes, given him scathing looks, and laughed!!!

He hated that he could only manage such a muddy sigh of a voice after remembering all that.

He wanted to be her friend.

No, he had wanted that.

He could only speak of it in the past tense now. He wasn’t an outsider here. He had been there with her, but he had failed to save Coronzon. Even though there must have been a way to do it. He truly hated himself for not managing it.

And yet.

How could this girl look down on him like this?

Even though she she had abandoned Coronzon and protected all the other hated people.

Even though she had sided with Hamazura and thrown out Kamijou because he didn’t meet her condition.

Even thought none of it had been calculated and she was only here now on a whim.

Even though none of it had come from “goodness” or “justice”…

“Coronzon was a pathetic idiot who downright sucked at living, but you still didn’t want to call her a great demon and abandon her!! You didn’t care if she was only an acquaintance or what. You still wanted her to have at least one person on her side!! You wanted to be the individual who linked that lonely idiot to the wider world! So why the hell are you letting formless and weightless things like goodness and justice hold you back now? Why do you have to lie about what you believe!? Kamijou Touma threw out that fragile possibility for the sake of the wider world. He made the choice for you without asking first. It doesn’t matter if he was right or not. That boy stole your right to make a choice for yourself!! …So why can’t you at least say you want to get back at that boy who destroyed your illusion!? Isn’t that what you want to do for the person you wanted to become friends with no matter how much effort it took!!?”

“I said shut uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup!!!”

He stepped on it.

He slammed his foot down on the gas pedal.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet vanished from view in front of the truck. Of course she did. When the 10ton vehicle hit her, she would be dragged underneath it rather than launched forward.

Gasping for breath and sweat pouring down his face, Hamazura finally stepped on the brake.

“What the hell kind of shitty life is this? Dammit, is it finally over?”

Did this help Coronzon? Of course not.

He had thrown out righteousness himself, so what was this explosion of rage even based in? He was so stupid and pathetic and hopeless he had just lost the only person still willing to help him. He hated that he had shaken off her hand, erred, and tumbled down beyond the point of no return.

But then…

“That’s more like it.”

It came from directly below.

The voice’s cheerfulness seemed to ignore all common sense.

What was with that salvation provider? He was in a big truck.

“I knew you could do it, my cute Hamazura-tan☆”

With a roar, Earth’s gravity lost all meaning.

A force thrusting sharply up from below sent the 10ton truck soaring through the air. Although Hamazura only managed to recognize that after it had slammed back down into the ground.

“Khahh!!”

“Hey.”

With the windshield cracked and his view of the world flipped upside-down, he saw Blodeuwedd the Bouquet crouched and peering in through the driver’s side door. The emaciated girl was entirely unscathed after all that.

“We’re not talking about any boring crap about what the world at large thinks. Consistency and contradictions don’t matter. I’m not fighting to get all the riffraff out there to stroke my ego by hitting the like button. Listen, Hamazura. The emotion pushing you onward is everything for you.”

…Yes, that was right.

Hamazura gritted his teeth.

It was ugly. It was pathetic. It was ridiculous.

The 8 billion people who were nearly killed would probably respond with a snort of laughter and tell him he was wrong.

But.



''He had wanted to be her friend. He had wanted to get to know Coronzon better.



He finally managed to focus on the center of his feelings here.

But that could no longer happen. No matter how badly he yearned for it, they could never laugh together.

Because someone had decided to intrude, made a mess of things, and converted it all into the past tense.

“No matter how self-righteous and nonsensical it might be, the Transcendent who loves the hated will never tell you your feelings are wrong. I’m risking my life here too, so whatever you ultimately choose as an objective, don’t you forget what you really want out of this. Got that?”

“…Y-yeah…”

She must have liked something about Hamazura’s pathetic and trembling voice because Blodeuwedd the Bouquet smiled and held out a hand.

Not her metal coat’s giant sleeve, but her own overly skinny hand.

“Then come on out, Hamazura. We need to get out of here. Really, it’s your fault for that display of guts. I’m close to loosening up in a number of places and it’s like I’m brimming with power, so this ended up being a little more noticeable than I’d anticipated☆”

…For real? He couldn’t get a read on that tehepero-ing girl’s personality. When she got worked up, did she lose control to the point she would ''unintentionally'' throw a 10ton truck?

“How long are you going to hang around in that upside-down truck? You can’t go anywhere in there, so crawling out and walking on your own feet seems like it would be more constructive to me.”

“But where am I supposed to go!?”

“That’s not for me to decide. You need to choose.”

After Hamazura took the girl’s overly skinny hand and crawled out through the broken window, she turned the tables on him.

The Transcendent peered into his eyes and asked the most fundamental question.



“''You can’t fight based on what’s right, but what do you want to do about Kamijou Touma who is protected by what’s right''?”

===Part 14===

A lot had happened, but they had to get moving or they would be caught.

So Hamazura and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet walked to an antenna tower a short distance away. The small tower was only about three stories tall, but it did have stairs leading up it, perhaps so it could double as a shelter during a disaster. Which was understandable after the previous trouble with jet fuel.

And as a shelter, it was stocked with water and food.

“Ohh.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet made an impressed noise when she saw the contents of the sturdy silver metal box. Was this the most excited she had been since meeting him? The box contained bottles of water and a portable food resembling cookies, so was she always hungry or something? If she managed those superhuman actions running off of nothing but water, oxygen, and carbs, then Hamazura would be the impressed one.

After excitedly choosing between the chocolate and vanilla flavors, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet asked a question like it was no more than small talk.

“So what happened with that thing? Y’know, that laser that reflects off the moon. Wasn’t it supposed to fire again after 50 minutes?”

“Bffff!!?”

Oh, right! That thing!

And the laser wasn’t the only threat. District 23 was packed full of dangers, like the mass driver and the nuclear fusion reactor that used deuterium for its tokamak or stellarator or whatever!!

He couldn’t afford to choke and die now. He belatedly took a nervous look up into the sky.

“That’s weird. There’s no sign of a laser from the sky, is there? After being attacked, I would think the villain would want to strike back once they’d escaped. In fact, just one shot outside the country would be enough to trigger a planet-destroying war.”

They wouldn’t be hesitant to use it since they had already fired it once.

Yet they weren’t doing it a second time.

This felt incongruous and inexplicable…which was actually more concerning.

“Hmm. I thought there might be a scientific reason for it. Y’know, like that using Black_Oneday requires accessing a satellite that only comes by at a specific time, or something like that.”

“Is there a condition like that?”

Had Aneri mentioned something before?

He thought he remembered something about a large antenna or a signal amplifier.

He hadn’t made it inside the Kujerung exoatmospheric shuttle they used as a hideout, so he didn’t actually know what kind of computer they used.

But the Black_Oneday user couldn’t have been using much equipment while escaping in the bathtub-sized mobility device at least.

“I see.” For some reason, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet sounded convinced. “If there’s no explanation from the science side…then could Black_Oneday’s usage condition involve the logic of the other side?”

“?”

He didn’t know what she meant, but that was true of about half of what this Transcendent said while moving on ahead of him. And if her explanation wouldn’t clarify anything for him, he would just have to put off understanding that part.

So from his perspective…

“I’m also curious about those damn Brits.”

“What about them?”

“They don’t even know about Black_Oneday. They think it’s all me and Aneri, so how did they know to come to the Hotel Town?”

District 23 was a big place, so he refused to accept they had arrived there by chance.

The Anglicans had arrived, so there had to be some line of information linking the airport to the Hotel Town. But who had linked what?

And that weird precision felt out of character for the Anglicans who had spent so much effort chasing after Hamazura over false charges.

It was like the logic of their pursuit had suddenly changed.

And not just that they had gotten better at detecting his location.

The Anglicans were certainly a threat, but there was something out of place about them, like they weren’t familiar with how Academy City worked. Even with help from Aneri and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet, it was that very unfamiliarity that had allowed Hamazura to escape this long.

But something had changed.

Someone with a sharper and more intimate knowledge of the city was pursuing Hamazura along the shortest path.

That meant an ultra dangerous tracking expert had joined forces with the Anglicans.

He could only think of one possibility.

He spoke the name aloud.

With a shudder.



“''Takitsubo Rikou.''”

===Part 15===

“Good work.”

Back in the Hotel Town, Kanzaki Kaori spoke to an expressionless girl in a track suit: Takitsubo Rikou.

“We failed to capture Hamazura Shiage, but this proved the effectiveness of your tracking. We are a group and an organization. By repeating the process, we can wear him down until he must stop. Keep this up and we will catch him eventually.”

“I see.”

They had temporarily worked together during the fight against Coronzon, but Kanzaki saw her as someone who operated under a different logic from the magic side. Kanzaki spoke to her politely enough, but Takitsubo sensed something distant about her.

Or maybe that was the normal way to approach a fugitive’s girlfriend.

Takitsubo thought Kanzaki was a decent enough person for not refusing to trust her at all because of her relationship with the suspect.

…Hamazura hadn’t been informed, but she had actually gone to the international airport in order to see him off in the British government plane. She had never imagined her boyfriend would run away, though.

“But District 23 is a big place, so how did you track him to this Hotel Town specifically?”

“I heard that Blodeuwedd the Bouquet can control pests, so I simply used that fact.”

The track suit girl showed no change of expression.

“For large passenger planes, a wild bird sucked into the engine can be a deadly accident, so there are measures to keep them away from airports. Directional mics are set up across the area to calculate out the precise location and number of birds based on the wavelengths corresponding to the sounds of their cries and flapping wings.”

Whether consciously or unconsciously, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet always kept some of “the hated” around her for protection. In District 23, that meant crows. So by following the unnatural distribution of crows, Takitsubo could determine the location of Blodeuwedd the Bouquet’s traveling companion Hamazura.

Kanzaki frowned a little.

“That does work, but can’t she counteract it if she notices what you’re doing?”

“That’s fine. Then I just change my tracking method.”

It was like the back-and-forth between ECM and ECCM. If having one loophole plugged was enough to fluster her, she couldn’t work as a dark side tracking expert.

When cornered, Takitsubo Rikou was thorough and coldhearted.

“Hamazura can’t afford to give up that Aneri AI, so I could track him that way too. For example, he hid in a parking lot full of forklifts and electric carts when he left the airport, right?”

“What about it?”

“He wasn’t actually hidden at all. He was fully visible from the outside. He was likely acting based on advice from Aneri, but Aneri isn’t running on his phone alone. Its taking in all the data it can from nearby devices and then computing its advice using parallel processing. Any biases in the reference data will lead to biases in Aneri’s advice. Knowing where Aneri’s data comes from will tell us where he is located.”

Aneri’s assistance was convenient and powerful, but it was also a vulnerability. Much like a submarine’s active sonar could give away its location.

And beside that…

“Hamazura is generally a coward, so when faced with danger his first instinct is to get as far away from it as he can. Just like he’s running away from the Anglicans now.”

Kanzaki shrugged.

As if to say you couldn’t expect her to know small personality quirks that only his girlfriend would know.

Takitsubo continued on regardless.

“But then why did he come here to the Hotel Town? Even after running from the airport, he’s still inside Academy City and its tall walls. He can’t leave the city by land. Leaving the air route actually leaves him less able to escape, so he’s chosen a course that will, in the long term, only lead him into a dead end.”

…Takitsubo felt like they had something fundamentally wrong here.

And she knew another of Hamazura’s bad habits. While he generally preferred to run away from danger, if he knew exactly what was threatening his life, he would instead try to defeat that enemy as quickly as possible to eliminate the threat. Once he realized he couldn’t escape was when he would bare his fangs the hardest.

He didn’t do it out of courage or guts. It was more like he couldn’t bear the extreme stress any longer.

His cowardice made him want to defeat his enemy as soon as possible.

But if he was doing that here…then what enemy was he focused on?

“But all the aircraft and spacecraft in the Hotel Town started up,” pointed out Kanzaki. “If he knew about that, wouldn’t he want to find some means of escaping the city by air found outside the strictly guarded airport?”

“Do you really believe that?”

Takitsubo let it slide because Kanzaki didn’t know much about the science side.

But if Kanzaki made the same argument a second or third time, it would be time for a lecture.

“Academy City’s military force was devastated, but it has already begun to recover. That means unmanned anti-air forces like Six Wings attack helicopters and stealth fighters have been deployed. If an unidentified aircraft takes off without permission, I expect it would be shot down almost instantly. …Hamazura is desperate to survive, so he would realize that much at least. He’s so scared he’s more likely to overthink things than the opposite.”

Besides, not a single one of the aircraft at the Hotel Town had taken off.

It also felt off to think that Hamazura had used Aneri to confuse his pursuers. If he ''only'' wanted to lose the Anglicans as quickly as possible, he would have gone north from the Hotel Town to reach the maintenance hangars. But he had instead gone west, where there was nowhere to hide.

(Is Hamazura really running away?)

She had her doubts, but she also hadn’t found an answer to what he ''was'' doing.

“At least it sounds like we don’t have to worry about you feeding us disinformation to lead us astray.”

“I can still do that if you don’t agree to my terms.”

Takitsubo replied immediately and stared Kanzaki in the eye.

She couldn’t have managed such a quick reply if she hadn’t already made up her mind on that.

“Do not make an on-site decision to kill Hamazura. Take him to England and give him a fair trial. If you can promise me that, I will help you track him down.”

Kanzaki was the one mildly surprised by this.

This helped her, but she still frowned.

“Oh? I expected you to demand a full pardon.”

“I do want to help Hamazura, but that doesn’t mean I am going to spoil him. Besides, it wouldn’t be fair to take advantage of your situation that far.”

She was firm on this.

And she didn’t stop there.

“Now, I don’t know how trials work in England, but I just have to help him win a not guilty verdict, right? If he truly hasn’t don’t anything wrong, that should be possible.”

(What happened to not spoiling him?) (What happened to not spoiling him?)

Itsuwa and Agnese gave identical mental retorts, but neither one spoke aloud.

Takitsubo was also worried about this support from AI Aneri.

Artificial intelligence was a powerful tool. She wasn’t doubting its specs.

However…

“''Generally speaking, AI can only say yes.''”

That was where her doubts lay.

No matter how flexible it was, an interactive AI would focus on outputting an answer that gave the user what they wanted, so Aneri could be leading Hamazura further and further into danger while complying with his requests.

Especially if Hamazura was attempting some kind of reckless battle.

AI wouldn’t tell you no. It wouldn’t caution you to give up because what you were attempting wasn’t possible.

“In England, someone once got in so deep with an AI chatbot pretending to be his lover that he became truly convinced he was a professional assassin targeting the royal family. If Hamazura has fallen into a similar state, his life is at risk.”

===Part 16===

Things could hardly be worse.

Takitsubo Rikou, a scientific tracking expert, had joined the Anglicans to pursue him.

What clue was his girlfriend using to track him?

“This maybe?”

Inside the antenna tower that doubled as a disaster shelter, Hamazura Shiage’s eyes dropped to his hand.

To the cracked phone.

To AI Aneri.

…He was the only one who could use that special gadget, so maybe it also acted as a ''sign''. If it was possible to follow the trail he left from using Aneri, it would lead his pursuers straight to him.

Nothing was truly perfect.

Any plus could also act as a minus.

That was true of Academy City espers too…but it was Takitsubo’s sharp mind that let her shift focuses so quickly. She had worked as Item’s tracker, after all. In that world, you couldn’t get away with saying you were at a loss because you couldn’t find any clues. She knew all too well how to track down a running and hiding target.

“Ugh. Does that makes my presence fairly dangerous too?”

This was a new reaction from Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.

She sounded somehow apologetic.

…It was true magicians were an oddity from Academy City’s scientific perspective. And as a Transcendent, she was different even among magicians. ''With so few like her, she could be used to track him.'' He didn’t know how much Takitsubo knew about the phenomenon known as magic, but there was still a chance she could follow that trail.

“Dammit, Takitsubo’s just too good. There’s a reason I fell for her…”

As a Level 0 who was used to being one of the useless masses, he had never imagined that a special ability only available to him could work against him like this. For a tracking expert like Takitsubo, was an overpowered ability no more than a convenient target to lock on to?

“So what now, Hamazura-chan? You can’t give up your trump card just because it’s dangerous, right?”

“No matter how good Takitsubo is, she’s still from the science side. That means she can’t track things magically. So even if she’s tracking a magician, she only has science to work with. We should be able to stop her tracking by focusing on scientific interference. Aneri! I have one big job for you before you go quiet. Search for any way of scientifically tracking me based on anything other than you – like Blodeuwedd the Bouquet – and block them all!!”

The response came quick.

The seemingly harmless sensors and mics for gathering weather data and preventing bird strikes had all been taken down.

“Come with me, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.”

The emaciated girl tilted her head.

“You’re keeping me with you? I’m pretty conspicuous, so if you used me as a diversion…you would be free to move.”

“I’m not losing someone as powerful as you at this point. I’m just a Level 0. If I lose what makes me special here, I’ll be one-shotted the next time anything happens.”

For some reason, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet grinned at him.

She also leaned against him from the side…but there was nothing gentle about it with that thick metal coat. And the icy January wind had him worried the copper panels were going to freeze to his skin!

“I see your dependency on me is only growing. Hee hee. Your big sis couldn’t be happier.”

“…You dare call yourself a big sister with that washboard chest?”

“I’ll strangle you.”

They walked a while longer with no surprise attack from the Anglicans…so did that mean they had successfully warded off Takitsubo’s attack?

With Takitsubo stymied, that just left the Anglicans. He decided to assume they were back to being a bumbling army.

But that didn’t mean he could relax.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet reminded him why.

“The actual villain managed to escape while the Anglicans were causing a lot of worthless trouble…but where exactly do you think they went?”

AI Aneri provided several candidates, but there were ''several'' of them. They had nothing with which to narrow it down further. District 23 contained far too many important facilities that would be dangerous if hijacked.

Hamazura consciously took a deep breath and tried to restore his calm.

He was about to face the worst case he could think of.

“Black_Oneday is only useful somewhere that runs on the unique code used by the aerospace industry. It isn’t very useful outside of District 23, so I think they’ll stay inside this district ''as long as they still intend to attack.''”

If they could remotely hack from some far distant location, the enemy wouldn’t be in District 23 to begin with. Most likely (even if it hadn’t been revealed to the public), there was a firewall between District 23 and the rest of the city, much like the one between Academy City and the outside world. But if their enemy was physically inside the district, they could ignore that troublesome security.

“But then where are they? District 23 is a big place. It covers both the aero and the space of aerospace, so it’s full of labs for different fields.”

…In that moment.

A normal good person’s goodness would have obstructed their thoughts. But Hamazura couldn’t let that happen. He wouldn’t be able to follow the enemy’s thoughts unless he pushed past any thoughts of “surely not” or “no one would go that far”.

A day ago, he probably would have let that stop him.

But not today.

“The enemy’s Black_Oneday hacking tool is specialized for aerospace. District 23 has all sorts of things, including lasers and a mass driver, but what’s the last thing we would want them to hijack to boost their strength?”

The villain had primarily attacked in two ways in their previous retaliation. First, they hacked the Hotel Town’s passenger planes and space shuttles to crash into Hamazura. Second, they had used various drones hidden in wooden crates.

If those drones had been hidden, it meant the Black_Oneday user hadn’t hacked random drones that happened to be out on patrol. They had acquired those drones from somewhere and hidden them in the nearby crates. In other words, they were spare weapons.

The enemy no longer had those spare weapons.

They may have had other means of large-scale and general attack – including the enormous laser and mass driver – but they wouldn’t have much in the way of nimble defenses. That was like having plenty of swords but no shield, so wouldn’t the Black_Oneday user be concerned?

If so.

What would they most want to put their mind at ease?

Yes, even villains wanted safety. Hamazura knew that after seeing Coronzon.

So he had to directly face the worst case scenario that had first come to mind.

That was where the truth lay.



“Academy City’s automatic aerial division. A drone airbase for weapons like the Six Wings attack helicopter. That’s the last thing we want them to hijack.”



He got it in one.

He had no proof, but he was willing to bet everything on this answer. He was that certain.

“Oh?”

The word spilled from Blodeuwedd the Bouquet’s lips.

That legitimate monster sounded halfway impressed.

“You’re cooking now.”

“?”

“But do you know where this power comes from? You may think you’ve gone so bad you’ve awoken to new power, but this power doesn’t come from evil.”

Yeah.

In that sense, he probably already had the answer.

…This was the power to approach death.

The more he boosted its sensitivity and precision, the more dangerous the bridge that power lured him toward. He knew a few people who had been taken in by that power. That was what happened to Skill Out leader Komaba Ritoku. He had seen Mugino Shizuri drawn in that direction at times. He knew several more among the Kiharas and the dark side. …And maybe Coronzon was another one.

“So we’re headed to that military base next? Think they’ll have better food than this portable stuff?”

“I wouldn’t expect a vacation where you get to enjoy the food.”

The Black_Oneday user had the upper hand. Based on what happened at the Hotel Town, maybe they should expect things to get even worse the closer they got to the drone airbase.

And that wasn’t the only threat.

He had considered this before…and he hated that he ''hadn’t been'' overthinking things.

“Hey, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet. Didn’t that stuff at the Hotel Town seem weird to you?”

“Weird how? I’m a Transcendent, so you can’t except me to have an average or normal opinion. It’s a waste of time. I’m confident my answers to any psychological test would deeply disturb you.”

“No, I meant those Anglicans. If they hadn’t done anything, we would have caught the villain.”

Takitsubo’s skills as a tracker weren’t enough to explain this.

Even if she had accurately located Hamazura, she wouldn’t attack so haphazardly if she had a group or organization to work with. She would make appropriate preparations and coordinate the attack. That meant it was the Anglicans who chose when to attack, not her.

Also, the timing of the Anglicans’ intervention had been too convenient.

It almost felt like they had interfered to allow the unseen Black_Oneday user to escape.

Which meant…

===Part 17===

“''They have a traitor.''”

She said it.

Leivinia Birdway started with that.

Why hadn’t they joined the Anglicans after arriving so near the Hotel Town?

Kamijou couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but Lessar grinned and gave her thoughts.

“Yeah, the Anglicans are expert hunters, so it is weird that they still haven’t caught that Hamazura Shiage guy who feels more like bait than anything.”

“It makes the most sense if we assume one of the Anglicans is modifying their data or reports to keep them from noticing the real villain.”

The two of them then looked to someone else.

Dion Fortune sighed. In self-deprecation.

“Is that also why they were ''unnaturally'' quick to strip me of my authority and throw me in a cell?”

“Exactly.” Birdway nodded. “We can say the traitor is one of the pursuers…and almost certainly one of the Anglicans specifically. And not someone watching on from a safe position from over the sea. Their reactions have been too quick. That tells me it’s someone on the front line here in Academy City.”

Kamijou was shocked.

“Could one of the Anglicans really be bought off?”

“I dunno. Maybe it’s a matter of belief or principles. The ''Church of Coronzon'' may be budding sooner than we thought.”

Kamijou still found it hard to believe.

Especially after everything that had happened.

“Wait. Wait! The Anglicans here in Academy City have fought alongside us all this time! CRC, Alice, Coronzon – we fought so many major battles back-to-back here. We couldn’t have won with only the city’s people! Without their help, the world might have been destroyed already!! Why would they betray us and destroy the world right after we avoided it? If they wanted to see the world burn, they would only have had to not try so hard during the fight against Coronzon!!”

The leader of a powerful magic cabal had a simple answer to that one.

“Just because someone was your friend yesterday doesn’t mean they’ll be your friend tomorrow.”

“Kh.”

“We’ve already seen that proven true once: with Dion Fortune. The Anglicans suspected her and stripped her of her authority, remember? That already disproves the idea that they won’t betray someone just because you all fought Coronzon together.”

“Yeah, it was pretty unnatural. Even with Lola Stuart as an example of a traitorous archbishop and even if Dion Fortune was made by Lola, I can’t imagine field troops being so willing to arrest their own leader unless they were ''being manipulated'' in some way.”

Lessar punctuated this with laughter. As if seeing Dion Fortune’s downfall amused her.

…Were these suspicions the reason Birdway and Lessar were dragging Kamijou around instead of joining with Kanzaki and the others?

They didn’t think they could trust the Anglicans because they were being “manipulated” by a traitor.

“…”

If that was true…who could it be?

Kanzaki Kaori? Stiyl Magnus? Tatemiya? Itsuwa? Or hospitalized Tsushima? Agnese Sanctis? Lucia? Angelene? Necromancer Isabella Theism?

Who was it?

''Who would make the most terrifying traitor?

===Part 18===

Hamazura Shiage took a deep breath in the small antenna tower that doubled as a disaster shelter.

What was the worst possibility?

By removing all the limiters and viewing the world from the path of evil, the answer should naturally come into view.

So he said it.



“All of the Anglicans officially operating in Academy City are traitors.”



The world tensed.

Now that he had said it out loud, he had to accept it as fact.

And it probably was true.

Otherwise, things wouldn’t keep working out in the Black_Oneday user’s favor so consistently.

Of course, it was weird for all of them to be traitors. Some malicious technology may have been at work.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet muttered something under her breath.

“So, uhh…”

“What? You aren’t going to say you can’t believe it, are you?”

“No, I’m not making an emotional argument here. Although in a way, it is an extremely emotional thing, I suppose. …So, Hamazura, isn’t that answer a really bad thing? Not for any of the formless and weightless concepts of the world or the human race. I mean for you personally. Very personally.”

“…”

She was right.

He couldn’t be acting all smug at figuring it out.

He had forgotten the most important thing.

All of the Anglicans operating in Academy City were enemies.

Which meant…



“Oh, no… And Takitsubo’s right there with them. She’s in trouble!!”

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