Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Crossover2 (section)

===Part 10===

'''(Quenser/Academy City)

Let’s spell this out clearly.

There were two major problems facing Quenser:

*Could the giant pig made from Cultivated Muscles be removed?

*This did not seem to be in the same region as the 37th Mobile Maintenance Battalion, so how could he get back?

He wanted to return.

Return to his original location and return to his original self.

Those were the hurdles he had to clear and the problems he had to solve. But…

“There is a paradox here,” said pink track suit Takitsubo. “The cells on which your Cultivated Muscles are based do not seem to be ‘here’. That means the pig itself functions as a powerful contradiction to history. It is probably from a timeline that does not exist here. We were never supposed to meet.”

They had stopped on top of a building, so Quenser had let go of the girls to free up his hands. There was no chalk, but he could scrape letters out onto the concrete with his fingernails. Needless to say, this was because using his mouth would cause his voice to echo complexly through the gray pig and come out as something entirely different.

“Fully agreeing with her cringeworthy delusions would probably get her to lower her guard, but I’ll pass since I’m not in the mood. There was a girl like that in my safe country. She wore a weird eyepatch and wrapped bandages around her hand. She looked easy enough to win over, but then she’d probably become a stalker, so no one went for it.”

“Mouth open or closed, you are genius when it comes to making girls super boil over.”

“You mean my very presence causes the core of your body to overheat? Not to worry, honey, I don’t mind a bit if you dirty your underwear.”

“That right there is what I’m talking about, you damn moron.” Knit dress Kinuhata breathed an exasperated sigh. “But I super agree that your presence is causing some kind of paradox. This problem starts with you and I don’t think we can start to solve it as long as you’re around.”

“Oh, c’mon! Don’t start talking like you want to murder me! All I did was some sexual harassment!”

“And that alone is worth super murdering you!! Don’t think you’re so privileged that the rules of society don’t apply! Besides, murdering you would still leave your corpse and not even our most skillful means of disposing of that would completely eliminate the fact that we murdered you. In that case, I don’t think it would solve anything.”

“Don’t talk about murder and disposing of corpses like that. You’re a scary girl.”

“You only just noticed? We’re from an underworld team called Item. A corpse or two is super nothing to get worked up about.”

“Let’s not start bragging about corpses. There are some people in our unit that will sometimes take photos of the mutilated enemy soldiers blown away by our Object in the name of journalism or keeping records of the war, but they’re grinning like crazy the whole time. You can just tell it’s giving them a boner. Otherwise they’d never take 400 photos of dark red masses so torn up you can’t tell the head from the ass.”

“Don’t throw me into the same category as those super perverts! And now I’m starting to question what kind of life you come from!!”

“Kinuhata. Get back on topic.”

“Ahem. …Anyway, to solve this super peacefully, we need to shove you back in through the ‘hole’ you arrived from. That kind of ‘rollback’ seems like the shortest route to me. Once the central paradox is gone, the distortion to history should disappear too. Y’know, like changing a timeline with a time machine and then returning it to normal.”

“You sure have a lot to say on this topic (lol).”

“Did you have to go out of your way to write the ‘lol’? It pisses me off. …But to be honest, I find this super weird myself. I bet ‘our usual selves’ would be more doubtful when faced with this kind of crazy theory.”

“You are always like this, Kinuhata. Stop deluding yourself.”

“…Did you say something, busty track suit girl?”

At any rate…

“Return to my original world, huh?”

“But you have to make sure you get the order right. You aren’t ‘going’ to your world. You’re ‘returning’ to it. Get that wrong and it could super lead to an irreversible mistake.”

“? Explain.”

“This isn’t about continuing forward; it’s about rolling things back along the same steps. Let’s say you bought a rice ball on sale for 100 yen at a convenience store, but the clerk punched it into the register wrong and super asked for 150 yen. Even if you find 50 yen on the ground after leaving, that won’t change the original payment record.”

“What are yen? Is that Island Nation money???”

“I’m going to ignore that and super keep going. To correct history, you can’t pick money up off the ground; you have to talk to the clerk and have the transaction reentered into the register. You’re down 100 yen either way, but you can’t stray from the original path.”

…Did that mean he could not just take the shortest route back to the 37th Mobile Maintenance Battalion? Quenser did not want to remain a gray pig forever. He was skeptical of all this paradox talk, but if he could make it so the Cultivated Muscles had never existed, similar to correcting history with a time machine, then he could remove it even if it had fused with him. Hopefully anyway.

But what exactly had happened to him and Heivia? If they did not understand that, they could not retrace their steps in reverse.

(But there’s more to this.)

Inside the gray pig…no, while feeling like he had become the gray pig, Quenser had a question.

(Is my knowledge enough to reach the right answer? For example, where did Heivia end up and what has he seen?)