Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume10 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 9===

Aradia had finally caught up.

She walked through the high school’s front gate, setting foot inside its grounds.

Or so she thought.

“Tch!!”

She immediately swung her black and yellow railroad crossing barrier and was answered with a dull crack. It suddenly broke at about the middle. Even with the power of the goddess of witches, she was forced back.

Good, Old Mary, who was woozy from blood loss, muttered quietly.

“It looks like a rabbit, but it doesn’t have a watch. It must be the March Hare from the tea party.”

“One of the Alice Series!?”

The flamingo bats. The hedgehogs.

The Gryphon, the Executioner, the Cook.

These were Alice’s raw and unstoppable toys which magicians had not yet turned into tools.

They seemed to be fighting as two opposing armies, but here it looked like the enemy of your enemy wasn’t your friend. The flamingo bats and hedgehogs would sometimes attack the Transcendents without provocation, so they couldn’t be trusted.

The March Hare had apparently attacked just now, but which side was he on?

For that matter, why were different monsters born from Alice fighting each other in the first place!?

“What are we supposed to do?” asked the Bologna Succubus.

“We should have Good, Old Mary stay back. We shouldn’t rely too heavily on her resurrection, but we shouldn’t waste her by sending her up against an even more dangerous enemy either!!”

The school was a rather large place.

Where was that boy?

And while they were only regular ones, it was strange that a group of several Transcendents couldn’t get past this one position.

They supposedly each wielded strange spells capable of taking on the entire magic side single-handedly.

The Gryphon, the Executioner, the bipedal hare, and the Cook throwing irons and pots.

They were all Alice’s toys with their origins in Wonderland.

But while they were only toys, they had been directly injected with a portion of Alice’s power. As seen with the Shrink Drink, that power made these far from your normal foe.

Ultimately, the Bridge Builders Cabal did not exist for Alice.

It was the result of the regular Transcendents, who sought and feared her great power, struggling to find some way of managing her.

All on her own, Alice was more powerful than countless armies.

Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, Good, Old Mary, and Mut Thebes.

Those four Transcendents gathering here was no problem at all for Alice. She probably hadn’t even decided to fight against the Transcendents. This could be seen in how the toys continued fighting each other instead of driving out the intruders.

“By the way, where did Anna get off to!?” asked Aradia.

“Did that slut use mama and the rest of you as bait for these pain-in-the-ass opponents while she went on ahead? She did, didn’t she?”

They said nothing more.

First, they sensed a great pressure. Only a moment later did they feel the powerful tremor in the ground.

It was Dinah the cat.

The fluffy white and black beast had grown larger than the gym, so a single step caused the entire space to shake. The flamingo bats and hedgehogs ran around in a panic and the Gryphon failed to get away in time and had its front leg crushed underfoot.

It didn’t matter if they were on Alice’s side.

And the culprit – Dinah – wasn’t even aware she had done it.

She was the greatest force in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

She carried such great firepower that the mice and birds who caused Alice so much trouble had fled at the mere mention of her name.

If this really was her, then she might cause destruction greater than Alice intended for.

That meant there was a risk of her crushing the entire school building with Kamijou and Alice inside.

Which was exactly what happened.

With her back to the school building, Aradia briefly froze up, so the Bologna Succubus had to flap her bat wings and tackle Aradia from the side to send them both tumbling across the ground. A gust of wind blew past them like a subway train had passed by nearby. That thing was much too large for anyone human-sized to take a direct hit from it. Aradia didn’t have time to celebrate her survival. She roared up toward the heavens while still tangled up with the Bologna Succubus.

That was the most prized of Alice’s toys.

Deadly Dinah.

Only one Transcendent could hope to battle that giant that rivaled a school gym in size.

“Mut Thebes, stop that thing immediately!!”

“It is too soon for me to attack. Wait 15 minutes for me to absorb enough shadows to create a body that can safely face the cat.”

Aradia’s eyes widened.

Mut Thebes wasn’t going to be any help.

Dinah was charging head-first toward the school building.

And just before she crashed into it, a deafening roar rang out.

Dinah was knocked rolling back, gouging large pieces of dirt out of the schoolyard and sending tons of dust into the air. It made no sense. There was no thick barrier there and no steel warship had appeared.

There was only a single human silhouette.

It looked downright minuscule compared to Dinah, who was large enough to look down at the gym.

Nevertheless, it was Dinah whose max-speed charge had been repelled, sending her rolling backwards.

“Wha-?”

Aradia was speechless.

This wasn’t even a Transcendent.

“Honestly.”

A voice came from the cloud of dust.

Aradia’s group did not recognize the voice. But the female voice inspired a compulsion that prevented even the Transcendents from taking it lightly.

“Alice Anotherbible has fallen apart more than I 💭. All of these things are a 🧩 of her – they are the many opinions she has ❌ been able to reconcile. I did ❌ expect her to be so overwhelmed with emotion that she nearly crushed her own 🏰 with her inside.”

This was Anna Kingsford.

The magician stood there on her own two feet without borrowing anyone’s appearance or abilities.

A moment later, the dirt thrown high into the sky was pulled back down by gravity.

It was like a dry rain.

Kingsford casually directed her index finger skyward and something invisible became a large umbrella.  She alone was left without a speck of dust in her hair or on her clothes.

Something sliced sharply through the dusty veil.

It was a flamingo bat and the Cook.

Both sides of the conflict arrived at once.

Kingsford extended a single finger and drew out a few patterns in empty air.

They were constellations.

Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces.

The sharp sound was a moment delayed.

A scattershot of compressed water tore through the Cook like a cookie cutter through dough. When her blue-glowing fingertip turned toward the flamingo bat, the bat began to tremble while hovering in the air. Despite being inorganic, it clearly shrank two sizes.

The basics of astrology were to assign various elements and symbols to the 7 planets and 12 constellations of the horoscope and then experiment to see what effects were produced on yourself and others when they were applied from different angles and combinations. There were even tricky ways of building them into attack spells.

So by combining only the water element constellations, you could greatly amplify the power of ordinary water.

Instead of simple addition, it worked through multiplication, so it was like shifting up a gear in a car.

That expert did not bother coming up with impressive special attacks.

By earnestly working at the basic fundamentals that anyone could do and that novices tended to look down on, any magic could be brought to the point of a one-hit kill.

But none of that was particularly important.

For one, that wouldn’t be enough to kill Dinah.

“I will ❌ let you destroy the things you care about, Alice. That would be much too 😢 to see. I assure you on my name as an expert, being special does ❌ cut you off from the supply of ☺️.”

Just then…

“…?”

Anna Kingsford looked down at her right hand.

A red liquid was dripping from it.

She only had a slight cut on her fingertip, but the amount of blood was not the issue.

She shouldn’t have been harmed at all in that situation.

That expert never made mistakes.

So if something unexpected occurred regardless, it meant the problem was with the initial data she was working with, not her calculations.

In other words…

“Is this body reaching its limit?” she whispered, holding her fingertip in her mouth.

Her voice itself was a lot “rougher” than it had been when she was first booted up in Shibuya’s Miyashita Ark. It wasn’t limited to her outward appearance. This proved the injury and deterioration was also progressing where it couldn’t be seen.

She didn’t show the slightest hint of fear as she looked out ahead.

In fact, she took a step forward.

The cat large enough to crush the gym rose to her feet again.

Kingsford couldn’t continue on and leave this with the regular Transcendents. She had never figured out how to pick and choose who she saved.

These were Alice’s raw toys, which had yet to be turned into easy-to-use tools like the Shrink Drink. And this cat was the greatest of them. She was a mass of violence and destruction that wouldn’t bat an eye as she trampled all the other toys.

Dinah.

The expert faced the cat head on, holding the brim of her large hat between her fingertips.

She doubted her body would last to the end.

For that matter, it was unnatural for a preserved corpse her to be moving around at all.

(But I can accept that.)

So she decided on a more realistic goal: injuring Dinah enough to create an opening or weak point the Transcendents could take advantage of to defeat Dinah on their own.

The expert knew her doom was closing in on her, but she still spoke with her usual smile.

“⌚ to serve others.”

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