Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume9 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 12===

Shortly before the clash, the frog-faced doctor noted a mood of mounting tension.

(I take it this person isn’t the type to spare a hospital or a school.)

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much he could do about it.

He was a doctor.

And the patient lying before him was on the verge of death – in fact, her breathing and pulse would cease without the help of the life support devices. Every last form of modern examination had failed to determine the cause and none of his thick medical texts or the disease research database had turned up a previous example, but he wasn’t sensible enough to give up because of that.

Without a doubt, throwing in the towel was the frog-faced doctor’s least favorite phrase. If someone felt it was acceptable for a medical expert to abandon their patient’s possibilities based on their own emotions or mood, he thought they had no business working in the medical field.

“Now, then.”

None of his test devices could identify the cause.

So he decided to focus on the records of those failures.

“I assume the blood sample tests found nothing?”

“Y-yes. All 5.”

The young technician glanced over at the test tubes sealed with different colors of rubber cap. Finding nothing was not a cause for celebration here. They had a patient on the verge of death. It was like running a malware scan and receiving zero detections despite the computer very obviously behaving strangely.

(Something is clearly wrong, but nothing turns up in the numbers.)

They hadn’t found anything in the blood sealed in the test tubes. Then what was happening inside that small girl(?) and how far had it progressed?

But something else caught his interest as well.

“Hm?”

With a patient in critical condition, there wasn’t time to wipe them down with ethanol to disinfect them. In some cases, they were transferred directly in from the emergency arrivals treatment room where the ambulance dropped them off. That meant an ICU could not be kept as sterile as an operating room. Instead, drum-shaped cleaning robots frequently moved through, keeping the space as clean as possible.

The frog-faced doctor held out a hand to stop one, opened the lid, and checked inside.

He found a long, strawberry blonde hair.

He touched it to find it unusually stiff. Its surface was badly damaged for having recently fallen out, almost like it had been left on the floor for years.

“…”

Nutrients and oxygen were supplied to the hair and the nails.

But as can be seen from the lack of bleeding when cutting your hair, the capillaries were connected to the roots and didn’t continue on through the rest of the hair.

He knew what to focus on now.

He wasn’t one to stop here just because he couldn’t prove anything scientifically.

“Wh-what do we do?”

“Prepare her for dialysis,” calmly instructed the frog-faced doctor.

Bacteria and toxins harmed people through a wide variety of methods. But one common method was to have a nature very similar to a component necessary for human life. For example, carbon monoxide. Its similar structure to oxygen allowed it to bond with the red blood cells, keeping out the oxygen that was meant to be carried through the bloodstream. And because humans needed oxygen, they would eventually collapse.

The cause was invisible and it was similar to a normal bodily function.

The connotations of the word “curse” had distracted them.

The culprit was a lot closer to home. You can think of it like a form of fatal pollen allergy that shows symptoms in response to “something thought of as occult” like a face, a name, hair, or nails.

Then how could it be prevented?

What could they block with a mask? Was there a preventative or a cure? Use whatever terminology you like.

By swapping out the words in his head, his thoughts began to race. No matter how strange it seemed, someone’s life was at risk. So how could he, as a doctor, stop working?

“History tells of someone who ate deadly potassium cyanide but didn’t die.”

“?”

“Rasputin. There are many dubious legends about the man, but the official records say he ate cakes laced with cyanide without dying. A normal person would have a 100% chance of death when it reacted with their gastric acid, so some theorize he survived because his gastric acid was extremely weak.”

That was one example of escaping certain death.

Even when the result appeared to be a miracle or nightmare, the method of cheating death could sometimes be explained scientifically.

What did it matter if this illness could not be scientifically explained?

All he had to do was remove the conditions causing it and science could handle that.

In other words…

“This illness appears to identify an individual based on their blood and attack their bodily tissue. So ''if we artificially replace all of her blood and temporarily change her blood type'', this ‘curse’ disease will lose its target. We will remove its ability to identify her. Got that?”

Many different devices were hurried into the ICU. The frog-faced doctor temporarily stepped out of the ICU to give them space.

He sighed.

Someone was standing there: Aleister Crowley.

They were old friends, so the frog-faced doctor didn’t bother turning around in surprise. He didn’t know how or why that human was here. He simply accepted that that human could do things he couldn’t explain.

With a golden retriever by his side, Aleister asked a simple question.

Everything was packed into so few words.

“What are you going to do?”

“As long as the patient wants to live, I will lend them every skill and resource available to me.”

“How did you ask Anna Sprengel if she wants to live? You can’t converse with her just by reading the pulses of her brain waves.”

“True. But someone risked his life to leave her in my care and bowed to me. I haven’t heard from her herself and it is possible she doesn’t even have the strength left to want anything. But I know that boy will draw it out of her. Maybe she has no more reason to want to live, but I know he will give her a new one. Not a bad possibility to bet on, don’t you think?”

The frog-faced doctor knew Christian Rosencreutz was on his way here. But no matter how many of this city’s secrets he knew, he was still just a doctor. Unlike the monsters of the former dark side, he did not have the power to fight and protect his sanctuary here.

So.

“Are you interested in lending a hand?”

“…”

“You’re just dying to finally use your full strength for someone other than yourself, aren’t you?”

They did not hold a lengthy or grand conversation This was not a sketchy politician’s speech or a TV informercial pressuring you to call by saying the deal only lasted for half an hour after it aired. These two understood each other well enough that theatrical gestures and the like would only get in the way.

Aleister spoke quietly, his head still lowered.

It was possible his question had not actually been directed at the frog-faced doctor in front of him.

“I created this city, but it is no longer mine. Why should I pour all my efforts into Academy City at this point?”

He received a single response.

The frog-faced doctor’s answer was a simple one.

As old friends, he knew exactly what words would stab him deepest.

“How about because it would make ''him'' happy?”

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