Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume3 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 10===

A deep rumbling shook the entire reinforced concrete building.

“Shit, what is it now!?” cursed Hamazura Shiage with the borrowed phone in hand.

He heard several people running around in the darkness. Aneri, his one ray of hope, had gone silent. A look at the phone said it had no signal. Communications must have been cut off when the power went out.

He was alone from here on.

He used his memory to make his way to the room with the red dot on the map.

It was dark and all the security cameras and sensors were dead, but this was still hard to believe. If the Anti-Skill officers moving around were just a little more cautious about their surroundings, they would have found Hamazura curled up in a corner and holding his breath.

Something major had to be happening.

Someone had chosen to play the “direct attack” card that he had immediately rejected. That was convenient for him, but he doubted the monster would take his side. He had to keep in mind that he was effectively attempting to rob a burning building in the middle of a major urban riot.

Once the adults’ footsteps left, he moved out into the dark hallway.

The room he wanted was not far away.

“Takitsubo!!”

The instant he opened the door and stepped in, a powerful impact hit his right wrist. By the time he groaned, someone had already grabbed his collar and slammed his back against the wall. The phone’s screen shined light up from where it had fallen to the floor.

His assailant was a professional Anti-Skill officer.

He could not breathe.

Had this man been waiting in the dark room without lighting up his flashlight or phone to catch any intruders by surprise?

He had close-cropped black hair and muscles thick enough to look like armor. He had the stereotypical look of an authoritarian gym teacher. The delinquent boy would never have wanted to get anywhere near him even under ordinary circumstances.

“Gah!?”

“Hamazura!!”

His feet were already lifted from the floor. Nothing he did with his hands could dislodge that thick arm from his collar. Nevertheless, his world seemed to expand endlessly when he heard that girl calling his name.

“I’m…fine.”

It was Takitsubo Rikou.

He had been searching this entire time for that shoulder-length black hair, those vacant eyes, and that pink track suit.

Maybe Anti-Skill had simply not wanted to move a suspect around while security was so unstable, but the fact remained that his girlfriend was still alive in this shitty world!!

“Agh!! I swear I’ll save you. So don’t worry about a thing, Takitsubo!!”

“Another dark side punk?” asked a deep voice directly in front of him.

They had to do something about this man before they could have their emotional reunion. Hamazura briefly focused on his Coin of Nicholas, but he was unsure if he should use it here. It worked for things like “open this door” or “win me this roulette round”, but he did not know if it would work for something like “let me defeat this guy”. He wanted to avoid wasting a wish and having to wait another hour for it to charge.

“Anti-Skill will not give in to anyone. We will drag all of you out into the light, dark side. Handcuffs allows for no exceptions.”

Just then, something landed on the man’s arm.

Its surface shined even in the darkness, but…was that an earwig?

And it was not alone.

The next thing Hamazura knew, the man’s right arm was completely obscured by all the bugs covering it.

“Gwoh!?”

Once the Anti-Skill officer finally noticed, he let go of Hamazura’s collar and flailed his right arm. But the earwigs would not let go. In fact, Hamazura heard a sound like pouring sand as more of them dropped from the ceiling like a waterfall. They enveloped the man’s upper body and then crawled into his bulletproof jacket, gloves, and other equipment.

“Gya-gya-gya-gya-gya-gya-gyaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!???”

Hamazura could not bear to watch any longer. Once the dark silhouette was covered from head to toe, it began to crumble from within. It was unclear if he was being torn apart, eaten, or dissolved, but he was no longer in one piece. Hamazura was presented with an obvious death without ever seeing a corpse or an injury, just like he had watched a metal drum crushed inwards with someone stuffed inside.

He could not even run over to try to help.

Those were not just earwigs. They had something else to them – maybe a chemical and maybe a pathogen.

“Get away from there, Hamazura!!”

He had fallen to the floor, so Takitsubo called out to him. He had come here to save her, but here she was saving him. If she had not pulled him back toward her, he may have been destroyed psychologically rather than physically.

He detected an odor that stung his eyes. It was like something rotting, but not like kitchen garbage.

He heard a quiet thunk and then saw someone else standing in the room. Even though he did not recall blinking. It was a girl with twintails. The middle school girl had appeared out of thin air, but all she did was move over to the wall and then slide down to sit on the floor.

She was the one who had handcuffed him.

The armband on her right arm said she was an esper from Judgment.

“Gh…”

He noticed she was bruised all over and there were scorch marks on her uniform from some school or another.

She was burned and battered.

She had the look of someone who had narrowly escaped a fire or an explosion. He had been in his fair share of fights, but he could not even hazard a guess about any possible internal damage.

“I couldn’t…teleport away…in time.”

“Hey, what’s going on?”

She did not answer his hesitant question. She appeared to have passed out.

“Don’t just pop in here and then die! What happened!? Aren’t you Judgment people supposed to protect us at times like this!?”

He heard some quiet footsteps.

He had no idea what was happening, but this sudden visitor had apparently brought a new threat along with her. She had apparently been teleporting out of danger, but he really wished she had chosen any room but this one.

He heard some giggling laughter as a pair of twins casually peeked into the room.

They were short, yet had weirdly large chests.

“Kaai, there’s some people in here. Why not get them bitten to infect them?”

“No, Youen, this is an interrogation room. We need to be careful in who we target. That boy there has a pretty stupid face, but I don’t think he’s Anti-Skill or Judgment.”

“Hey, Decomposer? Why bother discriminating after coming this far?”

“Well, Carrier, the more careful your aim, the more they will despair at their chances of escaping.”

He did not dare even breathe.

He could tell his life was in their hands. If this room was full of the methane gas use in lighters, then a single spark from them would fill the room with an explosive blast.

The unconscious twintails girl was apparently their target, but he could not predict what they would do in this situation.

Why should they care if they accidentally killed him or Takitsubo? There was no penalty outside of whatever rules they were using to score their own performance. They might just take those two lives as casually as they would kick a small stone along the way to school.

One of the twins grinned over at him while playing with a rat at her feet.

“Do you want to live?”

“I do.”

He planted his knees down on the ''dark stain'' spreading across the floor and folded his hands in front of his face. The twins grinned in satisfaction while he looked like a loser with a gun’s muzzle pressed against the back of his head.

“''And please don’t kill the Judgment girl either.'' I don’t want to see anyone else die.”

The twins looked taken aback.

The flow of time stopped.

“Pff.”

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One of them burst out laughing while they pressed their cheeks together.

“Ah ha ha ha!! If you want, mister. You’re hilarious!!”

“Are you sure, Kaai? What happened to having careful aim?”

“It’s fine, Youen. We do need to leave a few of them alive to spread word of the fear.”

It all changed there.

The girl called Kaai put on a meltingly sweet smile and blew a kiss toward the pathetic boy.

“I quite like people who go out of their way to defile themselves.”

Youen sighed, giving the impression that her sister did this a lot.

“Tell everyone of this fear.”

That was a command. In a school society, school years created an absolute hierarchy, but this little monster looked down on him.

She explained the only way he and Takitsubo were going to survive.

“Tell them the dark side will not go away. Tell them what happens when they so foolishly try to shine a light on the darkness. Tell them what becomes of every fool who even thinks of it.”

He could not even nod, but the girl narrowed her eyes in satisfaction, pulled her head back out of the room, and walked down the hallway with her sister. The light sound of their beach sandals was joined by intermittent eruptions of shouts and screams.

Living creatures.

And infectious disease.

The darkness controlled by Kaai the Decomposer and Youen the Carrier was on another level altogether.