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

===Part 13===

And so.

Two magicians stood face to face.

After failing to work up the courage to fight or even to run away, the human was finally crossing the start line.

And once he made up his mind, the rest happened quick.

History proved how effective he was at taking action.

“Aleister.”

“Stay back. And don’t let anything that happens here surprise you.”

That was the extent of the human and golden retriever’s conversation.

Space itself vibrated.

Christian Rosencreutz looked to the space around him instead of at Aleister.

Everything looked the same.

“Did you shift the phase?” asked CRC, amused.

“Is that so surprising? Even Mathers and his lot played with the phases. They would use astral projection to spy on other phases or extract power from those other phases and give them temporary mass. …It all created so many unnecessary sparks and innocent people had to pay the price.”

This was already another world.

The golden retriever standing by his side was eternally cut off from him.

Now two magicians this powerful could directly clash without any fear of the hospital collapsing or the working doctors and immobilized patients coming to harm.

“I am the fool who attempted to suppress the creation of sparks by creating a new mythology as ''cushioning'' between the many phases. Unfortunately, it didn’t work because the Christian church wanted to protect their monopoly on the concept of god and sent their billions of followers against me. But since the theory itself was sound, I can at least spirit someone away.”

The stage had been set.

Aleister and Rosencreutz both took a step forward.

Space was compressed and light was distorted.

Christian Rosencreutz held an old lamp made of glass. It contained a collection of energy said to be ''an inextinguishable light''. Releasing only the smallest amount from the glass case transformed the gentle glow into a crimson serpent consuming all the oxygen in the air.

Aleister responded with two simple words.

“''Great demon.''”

“Kee hee hee! Ee hee hee hee hee, hee ha ha ha ha ha hah hah hah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!”

The red was twisted and bent.

It crashed into an invisible wall in front of Aleister and melted the concrete wall to the side.

The human did not bat an eye.

The initial clue had come from Kingsford. He knew how to control it.

“Do not rely on your past legends, CRC. Your true colors are showing.”

Rosencreutz sighed and tossed the eternal lamp over his shoulder like a child with a toy he had lost interest in.

Batlike wings flapped behind Aleister’s back and a deadly gale blew through the world.

It swept through every nook and cranny and everything it touched grew black and rotten.

The wind itself was colorless. The floor, walls, and ceiling gradually blackened, peeled away, and pursued Rosencreutz.

At some point, a flask of powder had appeared in CRC’s hand. No, it wasn’t clear if it truly was there. His mimicry of holding it may have been so perfect it created the illusion. Either way, the silver young man popped off the lid with his thumb and scattered the red powder. The legendary Rosicrucian cabal had not been pursuing anything as trivial as eternal life.

“Revolution.”

The world at large really did change.

The black color vanished. The air grew clean and full of negative ions, like deep in the forest. Control of this world repeatedly changed hands, like a tennis rally.

It was a casual thing.

A simple thing.

If this were in the outside world, the entire city would have rotted apart and then been buried in verdant trees.

“I see. You are not fighting on your own – you are boosting yourself by borrowing the power of another. Is that the source of the false confidence allowing you to speak so arrogantly to this old man?”

“''Holy Guardian Angel.''”

“And you have more than one helper. …But don’t you feel ashamed? This does not mean you have conquered anything. You have only hid behind the backs of those stronger than you while you fling rocks at me from safety.”

“What, you didn’t know?”

“?”

“Fine by me. Because that is what gives this conflict meaning.”

After a short pause, Christian Rosencreutz moved his eyes.

To view his own fingertip.

The pointer finger’s nail had split and it was bleeding.

“You claim to only need yourself, but you worked with your seven disciples to build the House of the Holy Spirit and you were placed in that special grave. So in the end, you were a magician who had to pay attention to symbols and colors with their origins in the land.”

Aleister didn’t hesitate to explain this.

Because it wasn’t worth hiding.

“So all I had to do was transport you to another world. You don’t have the land’s support anymore, CRC. You might as well be trying to use your phone’s GPS map on Mars. The rules change outside of the world you’re used to.”

“Hm.”

Christian Rosencreutz nodded. He honestly accepted his opponent’s claim.

But he didn’t stop there.

“But removing some of my functions does nothing at all to boost your strength, does it?”

Something exploded.

Rosencreutz had not moved a step. He only held his palm out. That was enough for something to go wrong inside Aleister’s chest. A rusty flavor rose up his throat, he couldn’t stop himself from coughing up red, and the female feet below the beige habit lifted from the floor.

It happened too fast for human senses and even for great demon and Holy Guardian Angel senses to follow. Aleister bounced several times down the hospital waiting room, knocking over the sofas and making a racket of destructive noises.

CRC looked at the back of his hand and his nail.

“Do you know what I did to you?”

This was not a cheap trick.

The very foundation was different.

Christian Rosencreutz blew boredly on his fingertip.

“Masters of the Rose never use a spell or magic circle as is. They extract whatever form of the mystical they require from the symbols hidden in the scene around them. The Rod of Asclepius, the cross, the Hippocratic Oath – hospitals are a treasure trove of miraculous symbols and elements.”

“I doubt…that’s what you really did.”

‘Heh heh. Because true experts do not talk at length? Why should I follow the rules set forth by that dead girl – Kingsford?”

The air was permeated by a flammability even more frightening than a dust explosion.

But nothing more happened. Aleister lacked the strength to fight back even when someone else was being ridiculed.

Something in the air changed.

The shifted phase had returned to normal. Christian Rosencreutz stood in an ordinary hospital waiting room – in an ordinary space where the swing of an arm would destroy a pillar or wall and kill someone.

Aleister was soaked with blood. He had been thrown across the waiting room, where he crashed through the sofas, rolled along the floor, and ended up seated with his back against a column.

“You fool! Just because you admire Kingsford’s way of life is no reason to let yourself meet the same end as her!”

Hearing Kihara Noukan’s voice told Aleister that his phase shift had been reverted. The human once known as the world’s wickedest man smiled weakly, unable to even get up.

CRC did not bother looking in his direction.

“Is that all the magicians of this era can do?”

But Aleister’s face showed no sign of panic or frustration.

Still collapsed among several broken sofas, the human smiled thinly and spoke.

“Did you forget why you’re here, CRC?”

“?”

After Kingsford, he was the second to place that look on CRC’s face.

Which meant those words were not for his own benefit.

He was leaving everything in the hands of the next challenger.

He had admired that expert and her way of life.

If he really did remind Kihara Noukan of her here, then he was honored.

“You want to kill time? You’re going to slaughter all of the Transcendents as punishment for reviving you into such a boring world?”

So he gave a snort of laughter.

Bloody Aleister’s eyes displayed obvious mockery.

Viewing anything greater than himself with skepticism had always been that human’s most defining trait. Even if it got him branded an eccentric and ostracized by the majority of the world.

And while people called him a lord of devils, he had discovered a truth no one else could understand.

In other words…

“I don’t know if you’re giving a plausible excuse to hide your true intentions or if you’re trying not to think about it yourself, but you’re afraid of the parents who brought you into this world, aren’t you? The Bridge Builders Cabal used a special method to revive you, so it’s entirely possible they could ''rearrange the ceremony’s process and symbols'' to instantly kill you again. You feared having your newfound freedom taken away, so you chose to attack your parents the instant you were reborn. You moved quick so you could catch those Transcendents off guard.”

Magical astral projection existed as a single spell with two processes: one that separated the mind from the body and another that returned the mind to the body. So by rearranging the separation process, one could achieve the return process. Necromancy and doll-based curses worked much the same. Very little magic only worked in one direction. It was much the same as an explosives technician placing as much emphasis on knowing how to cause explosions as on how to safely prevent them.

In an extreme example, the Anglican Church had created a grimoire library as a countermeasure against any and all magicians.

“The means of defeating you already existed. It was there from the beginning.”

“…”

“But you didn’t want to be bound once more, so you started by eliminating that. You wanted to avoid being a world-saving bike courier who had to listen to everything the Transcendents said and save a great multitude of strangers at their behest.”

His surprise attack on Alice Anotherbible, the greatest threat, had successfully killed her and the Bridge Builders Cabal had broken apart without her to hold it together. Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, or any of the others could never gather all of those Transcendents in one place again.

Exactly as CRC had hoped.

Peel away the theatric gestures and meaningless words and that was all he was.

Aleister could state it with such confidence because he always made sure to question the gods and charismatic leaders that the people of the world heaped so much unconditional praise on.

“I was never here to prove myself. My own survival isn’t even part of my win condition. You set the rules yourself, remember? Simply put, ''this is a battle over whether or not we can protect Anna Sprengel''.”

“You mean…?”

The human was calmly approaching the territory of a true expert.

He had approached the very entrance of the stairway available only to magicians that led to being a powerful individual while also respecting others and pouring all your efforts into helping someone else.

The great goddess of wisdom had left this task with him.

So the bloody human smiled and made his point.

“I win as long as the illusion slayer boy arrives in time.”