Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Biohacker Chapter1 (section)

===Part 10===

Kamijou thought his heart would freeze from the unexpectedly loud rattling sound made as he ran. He had to approach that dragon either way, so there was no way of getting out of this without it noticing him. He clicked his tongue, but there was no way around it.

(Damn, this tension is definitely taking years off my life. Years!!)

The roar was loud enough for the surrounding glass to rattle.

The dragon was there.

It must have absorbed the color of the building’s wall because it was colored gray as it clung upside-down to the wall of the 10-story multi-tenant building. It seemed to be peeking inside each window in turn. It probably intended to unleash a flamethrower blast if it saw anything moving inside. Whether it hit or missed, the building would be engulfed in flames, smoke, and heat, which would kill the girls huddled together and hiding within.

Then their eyes met.

The gray dragon moved its head while clinging to the wall.

Its enormous jaws opened and it roared.

Normally, Kamijou would have been helpless. His opponent was sitting high up on the wall with its sharp claws digging into the concrete. It could roast him with its flamethrower, but his fist could not reach it. And he doubted it would help much even if his fist could reach.

But things were different now.

Kamijou Touma held a tool down at his hip.

A moment later, something flew from each of them.

The dragon had launched that powerful breath from its great maw. The oxygen intake from the wind made that flamethrower hot enough to melt steel, but what had flown from Kamijou?

“Damn, that is so cool!!”

He was restraining it with his entire body, but the tool still struggled in his arms. He could not help but give an impressed cry.

The tool itself could be found anywhere.

“A firehose.”

This was his first time using one.

He was not the kind of student who actually attended the fire safety lectures.

“What else do you expect a human being to use to put out a fire!?”

The water roared out in a white stream and attacked the dragon on the wall like a laser beam. The pressurized water crashed into the armor formed by its hard gray scales and thick muscles.

The dragon breath was deflected and ended up burning things elsewhere.

Whether it used methane gas or alcohol, some kind of flammable substance was needed to produce the flames. His pressurized water had hit whatever that substance was and deflected it away.

Even a professional firefighter would have been shocked to see this.

The hose was much more powerful than normal.

It actually tore the electronic signs from the building wall.

“That’s a cake shop on the first floor, so they had plenty of dry ice for coolant!! Throwing that in the tank causes it to vaporize and increase the pressure, so it’s perfect for upping the power of the water!!”

Kamijou made it all sound like his accomplishment, but it was actually Super High School Girl Kumokawa Seria who had done all the calculations. If he had dumped it in there randomly, he might have cracked the tank, rendering it useless.

The water pressure was so high that a direct hit from close range would have dislocated someone’s shoulder.

But his target was not human.

He heard a roar from directly in front of him.

The brutal stream of water could strip the paint from a car, but it was still not powerful enough to tear off the giant dragon’s scales.

Kamijou would lose at this rate.

It was all over if that thing opened its mouth and released its flamethrower breath.

But he was not done yet.

“I said I dumped dry ice in, didn’t I?”

The effect was dramatic.

Kamijou was not using simple water.

“That coolant has a temperature of -70 degrees. Since water freezes at 0, I couldn’t exactly use it as is. But by creating supercooled water, the water stays liquid below its freezing point. It’s normally nothing more than stable water, but that strange liquid will freeze the instant it’s hit with a powerful impact!!”

The earlier dragon breath had not hit Kamijou. It had flown off in a different direction instead. That was partially due to the flammable substance colliding with the pressurized water, but it had more to do with the dragon being thrown into confusion by the damage it took and losing sight of the puny boy it assumed it could kill in one hit.

Because…

“That’s gotta hurt like hell.”

He grinned while holding that metal nozzle thicker than his arm.

He had lived a life of misfortune. If he was up against a kitten or a chick, he might have hesitated even with an animal.

But both he and his opponent had encountered misfortune and chosen violence as a tool to break free of it.

He had no reason to hold back with someone so similar to himself.

A white steam different from smoke appeared in the hot midsummer night. It looked like a breath in midwinter. Kamijou felt a stinging pain in his cheeks and earlobes just by watching it from nearby.

“Reptiles like snakes and lizards are generally coldblooded. They can’t maintain their own body heat. If they’re rapidly cooled by having a bunch of water or ice dumped on them, it can actually put their life at risk!!”

In fact, a normal lizard would enter hibernation mode from a change of 5-10 degrees. If the internal structure of the dragon was the same, then it would also have a weakness to cold, no matter how large it was.

Kumokawa Seria had said this could all be explained scientifically.

A dragon seemed like a legendary monster, but if it was truly contained in the category of science, then it was no more than an animal. No matter how big, brutal, winged, or fire-breathing it was, it had to contain the inner workings of a living creature. It breathed with its lungs, it pumped blood with its heart, and it thought with its brain. Those ordinary rules had to apply.

In that case, appearances were important. If it looked like a lizard or bat, then it would have to have the biological traits of a lizard or bat.

For the most part, it had to be based on a reptile. The bat wings were thin and had no fat, so it was unlikely it was producing and storing up body heat there.

Flamethrower sparks danced in the dragon’s mouth That was actually a blessing in disguise since it gave advance warning of the attack to come. In that way, it was the same as Mitsuari Ayu’s phone. Kamijou forcibly moved the hose struggling in his arms and adjusted its aim.

He aimed it toward the dragon’s wide-open mouth.

The stream of water could not get through its armor-like scales or thick muscles, so the cooling effect would be so much greater if he blasted it directly inside its body.

The intense roar was enough to shatter the surrounding windows.

“…!!”

Was that a bat’s ultrasonic waves instead of a lizard’s traits? Was it simply crying out in pain, or was it using sonar to accurately scan the terrain in the dark? The dragon’s giant body strained as it struggled. It apparently intended to crush him directly instead of going for a long-distance attack.

It kicked off the wall with a loud boom and small cracks spread across the building’s concrete wall like a car’s windshield.

“Whoa!?”

He let go of the firehose and rolled to the side.

It was like a meteor strike.

The thick asphalt tore up and the gravel foundation below that was scattered around. The ground was torn up in a straight line continuing for hundreds of meters. The cars parked on the curb were thrown around and the roadside trees were broken down.

But.

But.

But.

“Heh.”

The boy slowly stood up.

He was soaked with the water spraying from the firehose as it flailed about on the ground and his uniform was half frozen like sherbet, but he still laughed quietly.

The dragon had knocked the ground itself into the air, but that was the end of it.

It was no longer moving.

It trembled some, but it curled up and stopped moving to desperately preserve what little body heat it had left. Its ability to change color stopped working, so it remained that gray color that now stood out from its surroundings.

“Reptiles hibernate in the winter,” he spat out.

The firehose was launched up by its own pressurized stream and he caught the metal nozzle out of the air in a single hand.

“So you’ve hit your limit.”