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

===Part 11===

The villain wasn’t a nameless and faceless being.

They were an ordinary human.

The Black_Oneday user was within Hamazura’s reach.

But the passenger planes and space shuttles weren’t the only threat.

“!?”

He heard something like an electric razor.

One of the wooden crates sloppily stacked up nearby burst from within – probably using some kind of explosive – and something emerged.

The large passenger planes and shuttles that seemed capable of attacking the terrain itself weren’t the only thing to fear.

“Oh, no! Are they sending out drones now!?”

“Hm? Why should we care? We survived a space shuttle engine blast, so what can that little thing do?”

“Use your eyes!! It’s a crop duster!! Do you see the weird nozzle on its underside? Load it with an inhalable tranquilizer and it just has to spray us once from above to knock us out!!”

There was more to fear than pure destructive power.

But how far did the unseen Black_Oneday user intend to take this?

They probably weren’t optimistic enough to think they could stop after scattering their many pursuers. Their hideout had already been compromised. They would want to escape from here as quickly as possible. And they would also want to keep their identity a secret as they did so.

But how did they plan to do that from the Kujerung exoatmospheric shuttle?

“…?”

At first, Hamazura thought he was seeing a small bathtub sliding along the ground. But he wasn’t. The smooth boxy object had three small wheels like a suitcase and the height of each wheel could be adjusted separately to climb stairs and get over bumps. It had made it pretty far amid all the wreckage created by the aircraft crashing into each other. Yes, it moved so smoothly it looked like it was “sliding”.

At that size, it could only be carrying one person. …Was it a tiny mobility device?

“Is that them!? The Black_Oneday user!?”

He was going to lose sight of them like this.

A large transport plane roared nearby. One of its landing gear legs must have been broken because it was tilted at an angle. Its giant X-shaped propeller approached like a rotating blade. Hamazura somehow managed to avoid that and then grabbed onto the diagonally tilted wing. Fortunately, the propellers weren’t rotating too fast. It was moving slow enough for him to climb on.

He would lose sight of the mobility device if he didn’t secure a higher viewpoint!!

“They’re heading west… Aneri, can you stop them?”

After a short buzz from his phone, explosive light burst in front of the mobility device. Aneri must have hacked the guide lights built into the runway.

With the bright light blocking the view, the mobility device weaved hard.

This one attack wasn’t actually going to stop them, but it was still effective.

“Aneri, keep trying things! Don’t just use the same method. Mix it up so the enemy can’t predict what you’re going to do next. Do it!!”

Far below on the ground, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet shouted up at him.

“Hamazura, you pursue the villain! As fast as you can! I’ll deal with all the annoying flies!!”

“Thanks!!”

…So apparently Blodeuwedd the Bouquet could stay standing without issue within the powerful suction of a giant turbofan engine. Transcendents really did have absurd specs. Then again, maybe she had used the huge sleeves of her metal coat to grab and dig deep into the asphalt ground.

Hamazura couldn’t just watch on from up high.

Aneri was obstructing the enemy’s escape, but someone actually had to chase down the mobility device. While running and jumping from plane to plane, he heard an odd sound.

From the ground.

“What the hell?”

He saw a piece of metal about half the size of a coffin, but it had eight wheels. And it had two machine guns thicker than clothesline poles on top. In addition to several plate-like radars and lenses.

The pair of gun barrels were staring right at him.

Hamazura immediately climbed a ladder from the large transport plane’s main wing to the top of its fuselage.

“Is that an anti-air drone!?”

The booming gunfire was terribly deep. The spray of bullets from below filled the main wing with holes. Was that jet fuel dripping out? From the look of things, each shot was a 20mm round even larger than an anti-materiel rifle round. If that so much as grazed him, he would explode and die!

(I’m dead if I stop.)

But at least it wasn’t armed with missiles. With a cheap SAM unit forcibly equipped with whatever missiles were available, he would have been caught in the blast if it hit anywhere near him.

His life really was on the brink if he was thankful he was ''only'' being fired on by 20mm machineguns.

The program-controlled automatic aiming hadn’t managed to hit him with a single thick bullet, but he thought that was because those drones were meant to be sent in as a group so they could set up a barrage against an aircraft or other flying object in the wide-open sky. The targeting device didn’t seem to be designed for anti-personnel use.

Hamazura ran full tilt along the transport plane’s roof and leaped.

The next passenger plane’s main wing was ten meters away.

That of course was too far to jump.

He stretched out his arm as if trying to grab at empty air.

“Aneri!!”

Something swung his way.

Had Aneri hacked a red fire truck? That was an extendable ladder being swung around like a tank gun. Hamazura landed on the ladder as it arrived just below him.

He lost his balance…but not just because his weight had overbalanced the extended ladder.

A large passenger plane was approaching. And its engines were sucking in a lot of air.

As soon as Hamazura’s feet contacted another space shuttle’s roof, he heard an explosive boom directly behind him. The hose coiled on the side of the fire truck had unraveled and been sucked into the airplane engine.

The motor sound below him distorted.

The eight-wheeled drone appeared to have crashed into a metal drum on the ground.

The villain commanding it must have noticed.

They made their next move right away.

He heard an odd sound like a liquid splattering.

“?”

It hadn’t actually hit him, but he quickly covered his nose and mouth when he detected the distinctive scent. His instincts sounded the alarm: breathing in too much of this was a bad idea.

(Jet fuel!?)

Was this Black_Oneday’s doing again? They must have misused the fuel ports on the passenger planes around here to spray the dangerous fuel as if from a sprinkler.

To detect the odor, enough must have vaporized to reach this height. If anything set it alight, the entire area would explode. In fact, wasn’t this essentially a tactical weapon that would burn down everything within a kilometer of here using the same logic as a fuel-air bomb!?

“Aneri, find me a route!! Give me the course that will get me outside the vaporized fuel as soon as poss-”

Hamazura stopped before finishing his command.

There was someone down on the ground directly below the main wing.

The scrawny man looked exactly like the type to have taken time off work to come here for fun. He wore an SLR camera around his neck instead of just using his phone, suggesting he was either a serious airplane fan or a serious flight attendant fan. Which one honestly didn’t matter at the moment.

Hamazura’s eyes widened as he ran atop the passenger plane.

(Damn, is this cause of that people-clearing field thing!? Supposedly those Brits use it to keep innocent people away before they do something.)

But that meant the people affected by the people-clearing field would be forced to take action without even realizing it. Their logical thinking would be shunted aside and replaced with the idea that their top priority was leaving the designated area.

Directly below, wooden crates were stacked up in what looked like a small maze from above.

The people-clearing field was a subconscious form of unnatural mental control. So maybe the people under its effects could sometimes get “caught” in a dead end or obstacle or end up looping endlessly in a maze.

On the science side, it was known there was no such thing as perfect technology, but did that apply to the magic world as well?

If the vaporized jet fuel ignited, everyone here would die.

Hamazura’s job was to pursue the villain, but this unknown man had been caught up in this due to no fault of his own.

(Do heroes only save harmless cute girls? Hell no!!)

“Aneri!!”

The nearby fire fighting infrastructure swiftly responded. Several skinny metal pipes emerged from the flat pavement and then sprayed a clear liquid in all directions. Ordinary water would only exacerbate the problem, so this had to be a special fire extinguishing agent meant for oil fires.

Jet fuel that had vaporized and spread through the air was highly inflammable and extremely dangerous, but it wouldn’t trigger an explosion if it was “washed away” with a nonflammable liquid.

“That should do it.”

His cracked phone sounded an alarm.

Hamazura belatedly realized why.

(Washing the vaporized fuel out of the air is important to prevent an all-encompassing explosion, but the threat isn’t over. The puddles of fuel on the ground can sill burn!!)

“Damn!!”

Hamazura reached for a laundry rope on the main wing and tossed it below. The attachment for hanging it up caught on the man’s belt.

He attached the other end to a heavy metal drum and kicked that off the other side of the wing.

Like using a pulley, the man was lifted up to the wing.

The very next moment, orange flames engulfed the pavement below.

They had been spared being directly exposed to the sticky flames, but intense heat still rose toward them.

The wing tilted below Hamazura’s feet. Had the rubber of the passenger plane’s low-pressure tire melted?

The specialized fire extinguishing agent took effect before long. After five minutes, the special non-evaporating liquid had covered the fuel, cut off its supply of oxygen, and swiftly extinguished all the flames. The innocent man was safe for now. …Although it did bother Hamazura that the man was excitedly snapping photos of the ground exclaiming how lucky he was to get to see a real jet fuel fire being extinguished.

That said, this had taken five minutes.

Hamazura had instinctually focused on the innocent man over the fleeing villain.

With the obvious result.

“They got away!! Damn!”

The mobility device was no longer visible.

And it was those Brits’ fault again!! He clenched his teeth. If only that people-clearing field hadn’t malfunctioned and got that man caught up in this… He didn’t want to be their friends, but if the Brits would make good use of all that power of theirs, they may have had no difficulty capturing the Black_Oneday user!

“Aneri, check the map!! What’s the closest important place in the direction the mobility device was going!?”

He received two buzzes of refusal. …Yeah, that made sense. If the mobility device had circled around wide after escaping out of his view, it could have gone in any direction.

Which meant they were back to square one.

“Dammit!!”

“Oh, dear… Try to calm down.”

Hearing an awfully peaceful voice, he looked over to see Blodeuwedd the Bouquet using a ladder to climb on top of the same airplane as him.

“But! What are those arbiters of justice even doing!? I could’ve caught the villain if not for them!!”

“Oh, really? And what proof do you have that the Black_Oneday user was even inside that bathtub-like mobility device?”

“…Excuse me?”

“They have a specialized hacking tool, remember? They may have sent that thing in one direction with no one inside while they ducked down and snuck away in a different direction.”

That…seemed unlikely, but he couldn’t be absolutely certain.

And assigning blame wasn’t the most important thing at the moment.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet turned the conversation in a much more businesslike direction.

“So, Hamazura, what are you going to do now?”