Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume4 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 12===

Helcalia had of course not told him where she was going. Nor did he know how to contact her.

So Kamijou Touma could only run around the frozen city hoping to find her. This close to the HQ building, he had to assume every step he took was putting his life at risk.

(Dammit, since they have those big Logistic Whatevers, should I assume the enemy is a large group? Please don’t give me the misfortune to run into one of them now.)

Fortunately, he was looking for a 10-year-old. She could not drive a car or a motorcycle. The busses and trains were not running and a bicycle would be too dangerous with all the sand and the slippery frozen roads.

A small child could only make it so far from the diner on foot.

And…

“Hey, human. What makes you think she’s here?”

“28th – UST 5 AA Secret.”

“?”

“It was on the phone we found in the hotel, remember? We already know Melzabeth abbreviated ‘downtown’ as DT, so it must be a habit of hers. That isn’t the acronym of some new weapon. It’s a place: Union Station!!”

According to Othinus, Union Station was a downtown landmark located near Little Tokyo. He still didn’t know what the 28th and 5 AA parts meant, but he guessed it may have been a secondary rendezvous point if the diner didn’t work out.

(But wait. Wasn’t the 28th…?)

“There she is!!”

The pointy-haired boy spotted the small girl on the empty station platform. Helcalia had to know no trains would be coming, so why was she here?

But at the very least, she was not on the top of a skyscraper or in a frigid frozen river.

And she had not been found and captured by R&C Occultics either.

So his immediate reaction was a relieved “thank goodness”.

He was out of breath, but the chilly air brought a dull pain to his chest.

In a world too cold for blood and tears, he pulled out his Transla-Pen and spoke gently to the girl.

“There is someone other than us out here. That sand is dangerous. Let’s go back, Helcalia. It’s safest if we stick together.”

But she did not respond to that.

She said something else entirely, as if cutting him off.

“It’s true.”

Her voice was a low, unsteady groan.

But when she looked up, it exploded into a tearful yell.

The Transla-Pen went wild.

“Mama really was a bad guy!! Tricked everyone, kept secrets from me, did bad things in secret. Mama made Los Angeles like this! It was all, all, all, all her fault!!!!!!”

She was only 10.

Her adorable face was wrinkled like a balled-up tissue. Her demonic expression was so distorted it was a miracle she didn’t have blood seeping from between her clenched teeth.

“Secret, Logistic Hornets, R&C Occultics!! I knew. I saw her sneaking around in secret! But the flying demons aren’t complete yet. If mama hands over something and the wiring is wired, then everything is all over!!”

Her words were like a curse against her own mother.

Her face had the horrifying look of someone who was ready to give up on the entire world.

“Hey, Helcalia.”

But.

Kamijou Touma sent his gentle words through the Transla-Pen. He didn’t care how silly the translation ended up as long as the feelings behind them got through.

“Do you really think your mom was a bad person? Do you think she was the kind of person who would eagerly join with R&C Occultics, do all this to the city, and defeat Kanzaki just a bit ago?”

“But it’s all shown right here! So much evidence I don’t want to see!!!!!”

Maybe Helcalia didn’t know what an Oni was, but that was the word that came to Kamijou’s mind when the 10-year-old glared back at him.

“Mama lied, tricked, kept secrets, hid things, and did bad!! What can I think!? It’s all true, isn’t it!? And I trusted. Thought I could trust family. But…!!”

“No.”

But that was exactly why Kamijou could not let her menacing appearance get to him. Hating her, rejecting her, and denying her would not bring them any closer to a solution here!!

He had to consider why she was giving him that look and saying these things.

She had to be worried.

She had to be afraid.

Betrayal was a scary thing. And she was afraid of having the critical information forced on her by someone else, so she at least wanted to deliver the finishing blow herself. She was trying to protect her own gentle heart that way. But she was not actually protecting anything. She was only looking away from what she really wanted and running headlong toward misfortune.

''Mama made all tables and shelves my height.

He had to trust her feelings. He had to look to what had made her smile so proudly.

Even if she was so shaken she was close to destroying those feelings herself, he had to stick with it.

“Listen, Helcalia.”

So he had to say this.

“Your mom didn’t choose to do this with a smile.”

The girl’s eyes widened more than he would have thought possible.

But she still bit her lip to hold back her excitement, like she was afraid of reaching for this new hope too readily.

“Your mom wasn’t a double agent for R&C Occultics.”

Now.

Give some real hope to this lonely and battered girl!!

“So, Helcalia, let’s start with what matters: Melzabeth Grocery is not one of the bad guys!!!!!”

He faced her.

Their gazes collided.

Kamijou Touma and Helcalia Grocery.

Imagine Breaker was useless here. No clenched fists were needed.

He would retrieve her smile, pat her head, and tell her not to worry.

He would make sure of it.

He swore to himself that was what his right hand was really for.

“Lying.”

The girl sniffled, but still threw that word back at him.

The verbal battle had begun.

“That big Space Engage plane is really flying! Mama gave them amazing thing, knowing it would cause troubles. She gave R&C Occultics a killing weapon!!”

“The Logistic Hornets weren’t originally designed as weapons. You said it yourself, Helcalia. You said she was excited about holding a wedding in space. She was never making a tool for killing!!”

“But she still gave it!!”

“Who ever said she was happy about it?” He could only answer with such confidence because of the information he had found himself. “Her hotel was as plain as could be!! She chose the cheapest and least comfortable room, she didn’t order room service, and the clothes in the closet were all cheap. She even just used the complimentary soap and shampoo! If she had chosen to work with that giant IT company and clung to the title of president for her own success, she would be throwing money around. But it looked more like she was actively rejecting luxury. Like the money forced onto her by R&C Occultics was filthy in her eyes!!”

“…”

“Her phone was a Grapple MilliPhone. And an inconvenient budget model at that. You can see how strange that is, can’t you? Why wasn’t she using an R&C Occultics product? Why did she go out of her way to use a rival’s phone? Doesn’t it sound like ''she didn’t trust R&C Occultics''!?”

He couldn’t be sure all of this would get through to a 10-year-old. He was only in high school himself, so it was possible even he didn’t fully understand the influence and benefits of the Logistic Hornets.

But that wasn’t what mattered.

He needed to save Helcalia and that required him to be earnest. He needed to show her everything he had, without holding any of it back.

He had to keep moving, even if it was cruel and confusing.

It was Helcalia who would break it all down and accept it at her own speed. It was not his place to set an upper limit for her.

So he spoke from her eye level.

“What did she gain by placing the entire start-up under their control and what would she have lost if she refused? She wanted the Logistic Hornets to remain in some form. That’s why she agreed to R&C Occultics’s deal! It wasn’t for money. Don’t you think it was to keep her promise with you, her daughter!?”

She had promised to hold her daughter’s wedding in space.

How serious had she been when she first said it? It may have been little more than a joke. But once she got to work, the technology started to come together, and she was so close to actually pulling it off, she had grown attached to the idea. She hadn’t wanted to throw it all away.

She must have regretted her decision.

She must have agonized over it afterwards, wondering if she had really done the right thing.

They knew she had in fact been frequenting that Academy City base. She had been working to reject the fortune R&C Occultics was offering her and instead assist in bringing them down.

Kamijou had no idea what happened in between.

But she had come to her senses in the end.

At that point, there was almost no chance of her being a double agent.

“But mama didn’t. 30 million are gone, but I still see glimpses of mama around the city!! Mama was spared because she works with R&C Occultics. She made all this terribleness!!”

“In the world of magic, there are plenty of ways to make people do things against their will,” said Othinus from Kamijou’s shoulder. “For example, ''the St. Germain pill.'' Have someone swallow that spiritual item and it will directly infect their body and create a fictional personality inside them. It isn’t unusual when the Rosy Cross is involved and R&C Occultics CEO Anna Sprengel even infected my understander here that way.”

“Never heard of that unheard-of disease. It might not have been used on mama!!”

“Then let’s talk about something with more evidence to back it up, Helcalia,” said Kamijou with a gentle sigh.

There was a much more reliable way of controlling people than with something like St. Germain. It wasn’t something too high-level for Helcalia to understand and it wasn’t speculative since Kamijou had already seen it in effect here in Los Angeles.

“Melzabeth has regretted what she did ever since doing it, so what ''vulnerability'' do you think they used to get her to obey?”

“I don’t know. Vulnerability is dirty word. Only applies to dirty grownups with skeletons in their closet.”

“How do you think R&C Occultics found out about it? The answer was right in front of them the whole time. If they knew they could use the Logistic Hornets, they must have thoroughly investigated all of their specs. And that must have shown them the ‘vulnerability’ that led Melzabeth to make her reluctant decision.”

“What are you-!?”

Helcalia shouted back on reflex, but then she gasped.

It must have come to her.

She trembled and stared blankly into the air while weakly shaking her head.

“No. Can’t be. Not true.”

“She promised to hold her daughter’s wedding in space.”

Even the Space Engage name itself pointed to that.

Perhaps Melzabeth Grocery had been unfamiliar with human cruelty. Leaving your innermost desire out in the open like that was far too careless. It introduced the risk of having that desire used as a vulnerability. Because when someone was gasping for breath in the middle of the vast desert and they asked for a cup of water, the other person would only sneer and jack up the price.

In other words…

“Who was that promise meant for? Nothing could be more obvious: you. And when the villains who control the world threatened her 10-year-old daughter, what could she do but obey!? Maybe you didn’t know you had been taken hostage, but R&C Occultics would have always had someone close by so they could attack you at any moment. And Melzabeth wanted to escape that situation so badly she went to Academy City, even if it felt like grasping at straws! Why do you think you were the only survivor when 30 million people disappeared in LA? Were you just lucky? Did she use that opportunity to pull a fast one on R&C Occultics? No, whatever agreement she had with them ''required them to spare her daughter’s life''!!”

But in the end, Melzabeth had betrayed R&C Occultics.

She had tried to do the right thing even if it meant betrayal.

She had broken her promise. Once she had disappeared, there was no real reason for R&C Occultics to keep the hostage alive. They could have slaughtered her along with everyone else.

But CEO Anna Sprengel had not done that. Why?

Knowing Anna Sprengel, it was because she thought that way would be more cruel and more entertaining. She had derived great pleasure from trampling on the dignity and pride of a mother who had tried to do the right thing.

With Kamijou Touma and St. Germain, she had enjoyed the worst of aristocratic games where she had forced that magician to infect the boy’s body against either of their wills. And she had enjoyed watching that nightmarish Christmas like she was observing bugs in a cage.

So what would she do here?

Would she let Melzabeth go after she betrayed her? Would she be satisfied simply dissolving her nutrients into the sand like with the other 30 million?

Would she crush the woman between her back teeth when she still had the tiny treasure that was Helcalia that she could use for further entertainment?

''Not a chance.'' That woman in particular would never do that.

“She would force Melzabeth Grocery to do bad things.”

Or if not that, she would try to defile the one thing Melzabeth lived for.

“Melzabeth wanted to protect her daughter more than anything, so Anna would set things up so that daughter hated her. And in the end, she would force her to kill her own daughter. That’s the kind of cruelty I would expect if Anna Sprengel was out for revenge. So if you and your mother end up attacking each other and hurting each other, you’re playing right into her hands!! …Listen carefully, Helcalia, to make sure you don’t regret this!! It might look like Melzabeth is trying to do something terrible, but you lose from the moment you doubt her, hate her, give up on her, and stop seeing her as your mother!! The rest of us can’t truly save Melzabeth Grocery here! The only person in the world who can do that is you, her daughter!!!!!!”

He threw the answer at her.

Othinus had warned him over and over that if he faced the darkness to save Melzabeth and Helcalia, he might find an even worse answer hidden there.

And what had he said?

No matter what answer he found, he still wanted to tell Helcalia there was nothing to worry about.

So he would see this through to the end to save this lonely girl.

“I won’t be tricked. Not again.”

Helcalia sniffled and shouted with all her strength, like she was trying to reject all of it.

She rejected it over and over again.

“Mama lied. Mama didn’t tell me! Nothing anyone says can change it! She had to have some guilty secret. Otherwise she wouldn’t keep secret! It’s proof that she did bad thing!!”

But she was wrong.

Kamijou Touma knew it.

“There was Secret, the key to making the flying demons complete. The wires diagram for connecting the optical neuro machine thing! She was going to give to R&C!! So I have to stop her, reveal the bad things, and save everyone in LA. I have to fight mama!!!!!!”

Helcalia was so adamant on asserting malice on her mother’s part because she was afraid. She was terrified of letting herself trust again and then feeling the pain of betrayal by her own mother all over again. She had decided that abandoning all hope now would be less painful. So she distanced herself from the answer she actually wanted to shout louder than anyone else.

So he had to destroy that.

Until nothing remained.

He would bring back a world where this girl could insist that her mother was not a villain. That was enough of a reason for Kamijou Touma to direct his fist toward something that had grown larger than any one country.

“Of course she had a secret. But that doesn’t mean she’s a villain.”

“So you admit mama had secrets.”

“So what if she did?”

Melzabeth Grocery had been hiding something from her daughter.

What was it? And why? The answer was obvious. He already had everything he needed to answer those questions. He had found this answer on his own, so now he only had to present it with confidence.

So he revealed the answer to this final secret.

“Two days from now…”

“What?”

“December 28th!!”

She may have realized something when he said that.

Her tearful eyes widened in surprise as he threw the decisive truth at her.

“''Isn’t that your birthday, Helcalia''?”

He would tear down that wall of suspicion.

It wasn’t meant to come between a mother and her daughter.