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

===Part 10===

She was a headless girl.

A little corpse.

Yet she was also standing up and looking at Kamijou.

He distinctly felt the pressure of her gaze.

The atmosphere in the library changed. The scales were rapidly tilting in a direction he did not like at all.

“!?”

Without thinking, he stepped back away from her.

This was an expression of malice that shouldn’t have been necessary.

Which proved it had been intentional.

It was true after all.

No matter how you looked at it, the center of the problem was right there.

It always had been.

Kamijou pushed past the fear of death he knew was coming and shouted.

“Alice!!”

He heard a sound like tearing cardboard.

No, not like. The headless girl really did tear down the center. And something else emerged, sticky with a translucent fluid.

This had happened before.

But this was not the little girl dressed in profane red and black leather.

This form could never have fit in that small body.

But she wasn’t accepting questions.

At the top of the vertical tear, near where the head should have been, an arm jutted straight up, but this arm belonged to a captivatingly beautiful woman. With a splat, she collapsed forward to crawl like a dog. The translucent slime left behind strings that stained the floor. She squirmed like a fluffy red boa. The leather bound her bright, wet body more tightly than necessary and her long blonde hair was so wet it writhed on the ground as a single clump. After instantly becoming a woman of about 18, she crawled forward and swung her head upwards. The wet hair covering her face swung back behind her, revealing her beautiful face.

“Touma!!”

Alice Anotherbible.

Or maybe Alice Pleasance Liddell.

Her true form.

“Did you use yourself as the ingredients to recreate the ideal version of yourself?” said Othinus in disgust.

Alice worked her alluring throat to release growls and her fingers scratched at the floor like an animal with sharp and sinister claws. She could not have been farther removed from reason, intelligence, and innocent adorableness.

Violence.

Battle.

Killing.

That was all she was.

She shined with the same light as a sword that had had been made so deadly it gained an odd beauty.

The fear of death was gone.

Even that thick invisible wall had vanished.

Kamijou felt a tingling in the back of his head. With the sharp claws, the large canine teeth emerging from her lips, and the fearsome light in her eyes, he knew there was so much he needed to focus on, yet he couldn’t read even a hint of deadliness from her. But he knew this wasn’t Alice doing anything special. His own mind had numbed the fear. Because if he accurately understood the threat here, his heart would stop of its own accord. His heart would raise the white flag before his mind did.

The animal rose to her feet.

The fully grown body of an alluringly beautiful woman straightened her legs and stood up like she had only just remembered she could.

She took a fighting stance.

“Teacher…”

That one word created a distortion.

But not in Alice. The bookcases, the reading desks, the floor, the walls, and everything else Kamijou could see looked like a child had scribbled out their outlines in white and black.

“The girl…wants…only one goal. She will…have this…no matter…matter what.”

He could have understood if she said she would kill him just for fun.

Or if she said she deeply resented him.

Even if she said she would destroy the world based on some inscrutable logic, he might have decided that made sense for someone so very different.

But.

“The girl wants...to make up...with you.”

Everything froze.

Inside Kamijou Touma, time ground to a halt.

Was that it.

Was that really and truly all there was to it?

At the Bridge Builders Cabal consulate in District 12, Kamijou and Alice had disagreed over her attempted punishment of H.T. Trismegistus, who had tried to kill him, and Good, Old Mary, who had failed to protect him.

CRC had killed her and she had regained her lost head.

She had driven the world mad and might destroy it as soon as tomorrow.

But this had never changed.

She only wanted to mend that broken bond.

No matter what it took.

Even if her methods were seen as unfair.

That little girl didn’t care. Kamijou should have bowed his head and apologized, but he had completely forgotten after learning about his imminent death.

Nevertheless, she was trying to achieve it on her own, even if it meant dirtying her hands.

So they could smile together again.

“So.”

It all took a turn.

Her behavior was distorted.

Only in Alice’s mind did it all fit together smoothly.

“The girl will make up with you. She will fight you because a serious fight allows people to make up. But it has to be serious, so what can the girl do to get you to fight her? This city, this country, and this world can wait. It has to be serious. The girl understands you, teacher, so she knows you will fight her and make up with her.”

She said it all in a terribly ''drawn out'' and flat, emotionless voice. Her emotions were so intense it was all destroyed, like the recording medium itself was being burned from below by a lighter.

Alice probably really could do that.

And what would happen?

Would the world really end over this?

Maybe Alice could no longer make logical connections between the different pieces of data.

Kamijou had thoroughly broken that girl’s mind.

Issues of right and wrong or like and dislike were trivial at this point. They would no longer provide a dividing line between enemy and ally. This wasn’t like mantises that were programmed so the female would always eat the male. Perhaps it was closer to spiders where the female would sometimes suddenly leap at and devour the male in the middle of the male’s courtship display. Even with the same species facing each other one-on-one, and even with the male expressing his love and the female accepting it, she might mercilessly devour him on a whim. She would only realize she had done it after the fact. You couldn’t predict what would happen even a second into the future with a being like that.

She was such a close but distant being.

She was different.

She was a predator beautifully made by stretching out the muscles, laying out the nerves, hardening the bones.

Kamijou didn’t find her frightening anymore.

He felt sorrow instead.

“Stand back, fool,” coldly insisted Anna Sprengel.

The look she gave Alice was unusual for that villain.

Alice was another irregular Transcendent – another open-source path to power – but one who would never stand on the same side as Anna. Anna gave her a look of pity.

“You understand, don’t you? She’s a lot like an unstable animal. If you approach her now, she might turn you to mincemeat without even meaning to. In the worst case, she might decide that, if she can’t have you alive, she will tear off your head and take that away with her.”

Kamijou shook his head.

Would he battle Alice?

And defeat her?

“I can’t do that.”

This wasn’t about the size of the threat. He couldn’t picture it. It felt wrong. He wanted to trust in that part of himself.

He recalled that giant dragon.

When he had punched CRC away and given up on his possibilities, he had felt a disgusting sensation.

A future where he and CRC could stand side-by-side smiling had been lost. Kamijou had made sure of it.

And the fear caused by his prophesied death made him feel this way all the more.

Would he use that against Alice this time?

Like hell he would.

“Because I can’t save Alice that way. Isn’t there some other way!?”

Index and her 103,001 grimoires were here. So was Othinus, who had once been a Magic God. Not to mention Anna Sprengel, who was familiar with Rosicrucianism and the Bridge Builders Cabal.

Combining those three’s knowledge could reveal a way of saving Alice.

But…

“That really depends on your definition of ‘save’,” said Othinus. “Human, would you really be saving her if you grabbed that oversized head and shoved it back inside the small body? Back inside that shed skin?”

She was a god who had once destroyed the world and been pursued by all of humanity as a great criminal.

That Magic God was saying this about ''another monster capable of ending the world''.

She said it clearly, without averting her gaze from reality.

This was nothing as over-the-top as saving humanity or protecting the world.

It was a more personal miracle.

But she was speaking to the boy who really had risked his life to save a lonely god.

“You are here, human. So make your own choice. This here is the real Alice. She isn’t pure or innocent, but if the world can accept her this way, that would be one way of saving her.”

“Oh,” said Kamijou, sounding exasperated.

He just had to bring Alice back to her senses.

He kept that in mind while ignoring the issue of how difficult that would be to actually pull off.

“So if I risk my life, a path opens up?”

That was the best news he’d heard all day.

In that instant, an explosion erupted out.

Something twisted and scattered around right in front of his eyes. It took him a moment to realize they were fake roses.

Or that he would have been decapitated if not for them.

Alice had attacked.

He didn’t know why.

It was possible she didn’t either.

She was a captivatingly beautiful monster, but she was not a villain.

He had to believe that.

How deadly she looked had nothing to do with whether she was good or bad. She would bare her fangs whether it was right or wrong and whether she liked you or not. She was an unstable collection of power with only that function.

So he couldn’t falter.

He couldn’t turn Alice into a monster. He couldn’t accept that conclusion.

“Fool, the rose is a symbol of change. This applies to the Golden brooch that can create any sigil through the orderly arrangement of the 22 Hebrew letters and it applies to white and red roses colored with paint in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. ''By forcibly altering the interpretation and building a bridge,'' I can divert at least one of her attacks.”

Anna Sprengel stared straight ahead as she said this, but she had a red wound running across her cheek.

That had only been a villain’s trickery.

Kamijou couldn’t expect it to work forever.

But he should be plenty thankful it had worked at all in this real confrontation.

And while deflecting the attack was all well and good, he had no idea what Alice had done even after being on the receiving end of her attack.

The animal roared loud.

“Oooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

Was that magic?

It was an apocalyptic roar.

A great energy grounded in something other than intelligence and reason spiraled out. The roar reflected off the walls and floor before gathering unnaturally on a single point in space.

Anna swept her little hand from left to right.

That was all it took for a thick shockwave to bend like a bow and knock over a few bookcases.

It was actually Alice who paused for a beat.

With her right hand still jabbing out with the fingers together. Perhaps that would have knocked off Kamijou’s head and then stabbed through his corpse’s heart before it could even fall to the floor.

''Slap!!

Little Anna, who would look better than anyone delivering a double slap, sent another attack sweeping up from below.

This may have been a first.

Alice Anotherbible’s attack wasn’t deflected or redirected – it was stopped from head on by an attack of equal power.

“Kh.”

“Why do you look so surprised?”

The little villain grinned and exchanged a glare with Alice at close range. Anna accepted Alice’s gaze without trying to escape.

She was a Transcendent not based on Alice.

She was another irregular Transcendent.

“Did you think you were special? There’s no such thing in the world of magic. I’m a magician who dressed up as Kingsford so I could stop my foolish students from ignoring my teaching and attempting self-destructive magic. I built my secret art from the ground up with the hands I had bloodied attempting to protect those lovable fools. Did you really think my way was inferior to the secret art you were simply given and have no real use for!?”

Alice’s hand was fully deflected.

She spun around, her partially-retracted arm blurring into streamlines. She chose a new target to attack. Index was chosen first, so Kamijou shoved the nun out of the way.

Fingers capable of tearing through steel rushed toward Kamijou.

Flashes of light intersected like a cross.

The fingers and claws sent horizontally toward Kamijou’s throat were stopped at the last second by an extremely thin blade.

Courtesy of H.T. Trismegistus.

No…

“My right hand contains Zeus. My left hand contains Indra. Thus I am renewed. Z.I. Trismegistus conversion complete!!”

Blinding white flashed from the point of contact between the struggling sword and fingers.

That was probably a high-voltage current.

The electrical energy was powerful enough to burn through a metal panel thicker than a thumb.

Of course, this wouldn’t be enough to defeat Alice. But dazzling her eyes for a moment meant a lot.

It gave Kamijou time to fall back.

“What the hell!? Can you just pick a side and stay on it!?” complained Othinus.

“Common sense says…”

The young butler hung his head.

He clenched his fist hard enough for his sword cane to creak.

“Common sense says I cannot expect Christian Rosencreutz to show up and save us here and now. And not just him. No one who isn’t present can do anything to help. I was wrong to place my hopes on people like that. No matter how complex and challenging the world’s problems, it is up to the people living in it to solve them.”

Now that he was freed from his bonds, H.T. Trismegistus spoke clearly.

“It is the people with us now who will decide how this ends. So it would be foolish in the extreme to not make use of that right. So says common sense!!”

Alice Anotherbible had tremendous power.

That power led a great many people to gather around her. But the Transcendents who had wanted to use her to make themselves special may have seemed like a stale and uninteresting bunch to Alice.

But that wasn’t all.

It couldn’t be.

In addition to the power someone had forced her to carry, Alice had drawn quite a few people to herself in a different way. No matter what anyone might say, as much as she might resent the magician who had created “Alice Anotherbible” and however she saw things herself, Alice had not been alone. She had been loved.

Because if she wasn’t, Kamijou Touma, Anna Sprengel, and H.T. Trismegistus – people with such different positions and intentions – wouldn’t have all gathered here like this.

They wouldn’t have been working together to save Alice.

“Hey, Alice.”
She didn’t say anything, but Kamijou still smiled.

He was certain that Alice had the wrong idea of what it meant to be an adult.

When adults ran into problems, they asked for help. They would rely on and depend on others. They simply did their best to hide this in front of the small children.

Trying to do it all yourself and thinking you could solve anything if you had a special power was a child’s way of thinking.

So he had a lesson for her.

And for the world’s greatest illusion.

He would teach her that letting her ugly side show wasn’t going to destroy her world.

Alice Anotherbible wouldn’t be a lonely monster.

He wouldn’t let her.

An invisible wall had shattered inside Kamijou Touma.

He could deal with the deadly prophecy later. Because he had found something more important.

“If you think you can use your power to twist everything to your will… If you think you can take everything you loathe and make it everyone else’s problem…”

A perfectly ordinary high school boy clenched his right fist.

Tightly.

“Then I’ll destroy that illusion!!!”

None of the problems had been resolved. The boy had only adjusted his internal priorities.

Kamijou Touma would die today.

''But so what?

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