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

===Part 15===

“Good work.”

Back in the Hotel Town, Kanzaki Kaori spoke to an expressionless girl in a track suit: Takitsubo Rikou.

“We failed to capture Hamazura Shiage, but this proved the effectiveness of your tracking. We are a group and an organization. By repeating the process, we can wear him down until he must stop. Keep this up and we will catch him eventually.”

“I see.”

They had temporarily worked together during the fight against Coronzon, but Kanzaki saw her as someone who operated under a different logic from the magic side. Kanzaki spoke to her politely enough, but Takitsubo sensed something distant about her.

Or maybe that was the normal way to approach a fugitive’s girlfriend.

Takitsubo thought Kanzaki was a decent enough person for not refusing to trust her at all because of her relationship with the suspect.

…Hamazura hadn’t been informed, but she had actually gone to the international airport in order to see him off in the British government plane. She had never imagined her boyfriend would run away, though.

“But District 23 is a big place, so how did you track him to this Hotel Town specifically?”

“I heard that Blodeuwedd the Bouquet can control pests, so I simply used that fact.”

The track suit girl showed no change of expression.

“For large passenger planes, a wild bird sucked into the engine can be a deadly accident, so there are measures to keep them away from airports. Directional mics are set up across the area to calculate out the precise location and number of birds based on the wavelengths corresponding to the sounds of their cries and flapping wings.”

Whether consciously or unconsciously, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet always kept some of “the hated” around her for protection. In District 23, that meant crows. So by following the unnatural distribution of crows, Takitsubo could determine the location of Blodeuwedd the Bouquet’s traveling companion Hamazura.

Kanzaki frowned a little.

“That does work, but can’t she counteract it if she notices what you’re doing?”

“That’s fine. Then I just change my tracking method.”

It was like the back-and-forth between ECM and ECCM. If having one loophole plugged was enough to fluster her, she couldn’t work as a dark side tracking expert.

When cornered, Takitsubo Rikou was thorough and coldhearted.

“Hamazura can’t afford to give up that Aneri AI, so I could track him that way too. For example, he hid in a parking lot full of forklifts and electric carts when he left the airport, right?”

“What about it?”

“He wasn’t actually hidden at all. He was fully visible from the outside. He was likely acting based on advice from Aneri, but Aneri isn’t running on his phone alone. Its taking in all the data it can from nearby devices and then computing its advice using parallel processing. Any biases in the reference data will lead to biases in Aneri’s advice. Knowing where Aneri’s data comes from will tell us where he is located.”

Aneri’s assistance was convenient and powerful, but it was also a vulnerability. Much like a submarine’s active sonar could give away its location.

And beside that…

“Hamazura is generally a coward, so when faced with danger his first instinct is to get as far away from it as he can. Just like he’s running away from the Anglicans now.”

Kanzaki shrugged.

As if to say you couldn’t expect her to know small personality quirks that only his girlfriend would know.

Takitsubo continued on regardless.

“But then why did he come here to the Hotel Town? Even after running from the airport, he’s still inside Academy City and its tall walls. He can’t leave the city by land. Leaving the air route actually leaves him less able to escape, so he’s chosen a course that will, in the long term, only lead him into a dead end.”

…Takitsubo felt like they had something fundamentally wrong here.

And she knew another of Hamazura’s bad habits. While he generally preferred to run away from danger, if he knew exactly what was threatening his life, he would instead try to defeat that enemy as quickly as possible to eliminate the threat. Once he realized he couldn’t escape was when he would bare his fangs the hardest.

He didn’t do it out of courage or guts. It was more like he couldn’t bear the extreme stress any longer.

His cowardice made him want to defeat his enemy as soon as possible.

But if he was doing that here…then what enemy was he focused on?

“But all the aircraft and spacecraft in the Hotel Town started up,” pointed out Kanzaki. “If he knew about that, wouldn’t he want to find some means of escaping the city by air found outside the strictly guarded airport?”

“Do you really believe that?”

Takitsubo let it slide because Kanzaki didn’t know much about the science side.

But if Kanzaki made the same argument a second or third time, it would be time for a lecture.

“Academy City’s military force was devastated, but it has already begun to recover. That means unmanned anti-air forces like Six Wings attack helicopters and stealth fighters have been deployed. If an unidentified aircraft takes off without permission, I expect it would be shot down almost instantly. …Hamazura is desperate to survive, so he would realize that much at least. He’s so scared he’s more likely to overthink things than the opposite.”

Besides, not a single one of the aircraft at the Hotel Town had taken off.

It also felt off to think that Hamazura had used Aneri to confuse his pursuers. If he ''only'' wanted to lose the Anglicans as quickly as possible, he would have gone north from the Hotel Town to reach the maintenance hangars. But he had instead gone west, where there was nowhere to hide.

(Is Hamazura really running away?)

She had her doubts, but she also hadn’t found an answer to what he ''was'' doing.

“At least it sounds like we don’t have to worry about you feeding us disinformation to lead us astray.”

“I can still do that if you don’t agree to my terms.”

Takitsubo replied immediately and stared Kanzaki in the eye.

She couldn’t have managed such a quick reply if she hadn’t already made up her mind on that.

“Do not make an on-site decision to kill Hamazura. Take him to England and give him a fair trial. If you can promise me that, I will help you track him down.”

Kanzaki was the one mildly surprised by this.

This helped her, but she still frowned.

“Oh? I expected you to demand a full pardon.”

“I do want to help Hamazura, but that doesn’t mean I am going to spoil him. Besides, it wouldn’t be fair to take advantage of your situation that far.”

She was firm on this.

And she didn’t stop there.

“Now, I don’t know how trials work in England, but I just have to help him win a not guilty verdict, right? If he truly hasn’t don’t anything wrong, that should be possible.”

(What happened to not spoiling him?) (What happened to not spoiling him?)

Itsuwa and Agnese gave identical mental retorts, but neither one spoke aloud.

Takitsubo was also worried about this support from AI Aneri.

Artificial intelligence was a powerful tool. She wasn’t doubting its specs.

However…

“''Generally speaking, AI can only say yes.''”

That was where her doubts lay.

No matter how flexible it was, an interactive AI would focus on outputting an answer that gave the user what they wanted, so Aneri could be leading Hamazura further and further into danger while complying with his requests.

Especially if Hamazura was attempting some kind of reckless battle.

AI wouldn’t tell you no. It wouldn’t caution you to give up because what you were attempting wasn’t possible.

“In England, someone once got in so deep with an AI chatbot pretending to be his lover that he became truly convinced he was a professional assassin targeting the royal family. If Hamazura has fallen into a similar state, his life is at risk.”