Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume15 Chapter2 (section)

===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!!