Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume5 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 11===

In a vortex of noise too loud to hear his own shouting voice, Kamijou saw Shirai Kuroko stagger to the side. She couldn’t use her teleportation. And this was the girl who had just barely managed a jump when under attack by Frillsand #G.

Looking purely at simple damage, the chorus of tens of thousands of crickets was apparently worse than the ghost.

“Gah.”

Kamijou collapsed to the floor. There was nothing he could do. He saw a few crickets drop from the ceiling and then they all came down like a black waterfall. They didn’t bite or scratch, but he did feel the weight of the bugs – not something he was normally even aware of.

And within it all…

“Oh, dear.”

A small girl’s voice reached his eardrums with unexpected clarity.

It belonged to the storybook girl named Alice.

The noise was enough to rattle the mind and the bugs were cascading from above, but she had the same smile as ever and held both soft hands out toward him. She pulled his upper body out like she was rescuing the victim of an avalanche and then she dragged him away.

Neither the cricket defense nor the executioner made an appearance.

Tens of thousands of bugs apparently wasn’t enough for her to feel repulsed or disgusted. She had used the bat and balls before. Poison gas, curses, and other forms of internal damage never seemed to affect her. (It almost felt like trying to drown a fish in water.) But her soft skin could not deflect the macroscopic external damage of the crickets. Plus, she was wearing a skirt and short sleeves.

“Heave ho, heave ho. Hmm, you are heavy, teacher. Ah ha ha. Boys backs really are big☆”

“…lice, wai…second. Shirai…still…!?”

“The girl can’t carry you both at once.”

Did she drag him 10m or 20m?

Alice acted like the shiny bugs weren’t even there as she walked backwards down the corridor and stepped into another workroom. The swarm of crickets vanished entirely once they crossed the threshold. There was no way that was natural for them. An invisible maze must have been drawn out with a predator’s bodily fluid or some other chemical.

The high frequency wave continued to rattle his head, but it sounded more muffled, like hearing live music through a wall.

“Agh! Ahh!!”

“Kya ha ha. There’s still a cricket in your mouth, teacher. Don’t move, okay? There, got it!”

Kamijou still couldn’t get up from the floor as Alice shoved her small fingers in his mouth and pulled out a surprisingly large and squirmy bug, but he grabbed her wrist.

“Please, go save Shirai too. Hurry!”

“What will you do?”

The endlessly superhuman girl smiled and he glanced deeper inside the facility.

“I doubt I’d be any help just waiting here, so I’ll keep going and prevent that stuff from being spread across the city.”

‘''The difficulty level is way higher that way.''”

“''Doesn’t matter. Really, that’s all the more reason I can’t make you or Shirai do it.''”

Alice nodded and turned back so readily it actually worried him. In fact, she spread her little arms and toppled forward to do a bellyflop into the torrent of black bugs. Her definition of gross appeared to be different from his. He heard her laughter from beyond the thick black wall, like a child enjoying getting dirty in the mud. She really didn’t seem to have any hostility or malice inside her.

Meanwhile, Kamijou crawled deeper into the facility.

He got his trembling legs moving enough to stand up and slowly walked forward.

He chose to trust in the things he couldn’t see. When he had a bad feeling or sensed a mysterious pressure, he kept away from that room even if it meant going the long way around. He didn’t know if it had helped at all, but he wasn’t attacked by anymore bugs. It was possible he had noticed a faint dizziness or headache from the chemical smell or the change in room temperature or air pressure.

Regardless, he referenced the map photo on his old folk’s phone to take an S-shaped detour around the most direct route and finally reached the destination of that labyrinth.

He had found the dumping pit on the westernmost end of the facility.

The large hole there was used to hold all the garbage gathered by the trucks that lined up outside. It was longer and wider than a school pool and there was a drop of more than 10m just to reach the top of the trash piled up there now.

He saw someone small standing on the edge of that steel cliff.

The black-haired girl wore a white coat tightened around the hips with a medical corset and she wore a gasmask on the side of her head.

She was surrounded by opened cardboard boxes and she was crouched down shaking a test tube with a frown on her face.

She was already preparing to infect the pit.

“Youen!! Please wait!!”

“!? …''Who are you''?”

She looked back in surprise without standing up and her question filled Kamijou with an irrational feeling. It made sense. Nothing in Alice’s world had really happened, so this was her first time meeting him. Having a stranger use her given name out of nowhere may have come as a surprise.

Maybe it was cheating and maybe it made no sense, but he did already have some information on her.

(Hanatsuyu Youen is the Carrier. She can attack individuals or entire areas by distributing dangerous microbes or chemicals using urban pests and vermin.)

Once she got started, he would have no way of stopping her.

Her Carrier abilities were not an esper power, so Imagine Breaker wouldn’t work. If she used artificial pheromones and synthetic nectar to draw in tens of thousands of gross creatures, he would be swept away by the swarm.

However…

(So no matter how dangerous she is, she doesn’t use her poisons directly! She uses the nectar in her test tube to gather creatures, places the toxins on them, designates the target, and sends them in to attack. That’s a lot she needs to do. She’s a threat, but not an immediate threat like a gun! I can win this as long as I rush her before she can act!!)

“!!”

Kamijou Touma took his first step forward.

To repeat, the Carrier abilities were not an esper power. She only had some bizarre technology and she herself was only a girl of around 10. He could see her eyes widening and her legs locking up in the face of such primal violence. Kamijou didn’t actually need to punch her. She needed her test tubes to attack, so he could neutralize her by tackling her to the floor and pinning her arms against her body. Without her pests and harmful substances, she was only a 10-year-old girl.

On the other hand, he lost all chance of winning if she broke free of her surprise.

If that happened, Academy City was doomed. If she managed to spread that efficient industrial-strength drug, he couldn’t even imagine how many people would collapse and be gnawed on by rats and roaches.

(That makes this my one and only chance.)

Maybe Hanatsuyu Youen really was a horrific villain in the real world, but he was certain she could end up like the version in Alice’s world if she made the right choices. She wasn’t the worst of the worst and she wasn’t pure evil. Her preferences trended in a dangerous direction, but if she happened to switch paths just a bit, she might be able to find a future where she smiled like that.

So he wasn’t going to give up.

Kamijou Touma refused to give up on someone else’s life. Even if she wasn’t even aware that path existed!!

(I know your abilities can be used to save lives. And that’s enough of a reason to risk my life for you!!)

He stepped into arm’s reach of her. A height difference this great actually limited his possible arm movements, but it didn’t matter if she could predict his actions. He only had to tackle her and pin her arms to her hips to neutralize her. Then he could place his weight atop her.

But before he could do any of that, a dark red hole was blasted in the center of his gut.