Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:MvM2 Depth1 (section)

===Part 16===

This was their last chance.

It had been pried open by Shokuhou Misaki.

“Mental 00 to Railgun 01. Her ear! Target her ear from the side and fire your Mounted Railgun S!!”

“?”

“More specifically, you should hit her inside the ear. Can you aim that well!?”

“That is usually a weak point, but not even this huge railgun is enough to harm her skin!”

“That isn’t the point.” Shokuhou wasn’t shaken. “We weren’t wrong to view breathing as her weakness. It’s true burning the oxygen away is meaningless when she can create her own supply from the air or seawater. But what if we overly compress it and shove it inside her body?”

Shokuhou was right that a means of creating oxygen wasn’t a defense against too much oxygen. This could be a loophole. And the Ruler herself had proven all too well that simple air could be used as a weapon depending on how much was in motion.

But…

“Wait. Did you forget, Shokuhou? The Ruler can compress air to use it as a weapon!”

She used her punches and kicks to drag along the air and compress it. She could even use the extreme pressure difference to create thick thunderclouds. And from the naked girl’s perspective, this all happened at extreme close range.

“There wasn’t any carbon dioxide,” plainly stated Shokuhou. “In the recon footage, there were moments when the distribution of carbon dioxide coming from the Ruler’s mouth and nose vanished. That tells us she holds her breath when she swings her limbs, jumps, or compresses the air. Even though holding your breath while moving is usually a fairly unpleasant experience.”

“Wait, are you saying…oh!”

Mikoto caught on too.

“The Ruler can create as much oxygen as she wants using electrolysis. That’s why we can’t suffocate her.”

“But what about the opposite?” asked Shokuhou. “If we compress the air and force it inside her, it should cause a variety of problems.”

“But she might shut her mouth tight to guard against it, so we should use the ear.”

“The ear can’t cover itself. Now, I’m not actually sure if she even has a brain, but with a mouth, nose, and ears, she should have Eustachian tubes connecting to her nasal cavity to protect her ears. There is a safety valve, but it isn’t as strong as the jaw. Send air in through there and it will reach her throat. Then we can vibrate her vocal cords from the outside. If we send more air through than she can breathe, the intense vibration should tear apart her throat with her own voice!”

“!!”

They didn’t know how many organs the Ruler had, where they were located, or what function they served, but she appeared to locate the airborne fighters with something like sonar. She at least had lips, a tongue, and a throat.

They had to bet on this.

Either way, external attacks and burning away the air to suffocate her weren’t going to accomplish anything.

The only possibility they had left was the Mounted Railgun S.

And they could use her own organ to increase its destructive power.

The Shinshin made a sharp turn and flew toward the Ruler along a dangerously straight course.

To the naked girl, the Shinshin must have been like a pesky fly buzzing in front of her face.

There was no fear in her eyes.

They were empty.

The Ruler made a horizontal sweep with her fingers bent like hooks.

A gale roared out.

The ground was torn up and blown away over a 10km space and seawater began to pour in.

“Ghh!?”

(Good. That’s far better than having her hop or jump and keep me from attacking!!)

The very next moment, Mikoto’s radar died.

The Shinshin had plunged into a thick thundercloud produced by extreme pressure difference.

Even so, the enemy was right there.

Mikoto didn’t need the machine to establish a lock.

The colossal girl must have realized the Shinshin hadn’t been destroyed because she stared at it head on. Like someone reflexively reacting to an eraser flying toward their nose, she folded her arm and slowly guarded her face with her empty palm held to the side.

If Mikoto was still focused on human-based weaknesses and had aimed for the eyes or nose, her attack would have been thwarted.

“Not…ksh…the front!! Target her ear…ksh…the side!!”

(I just hope the Mounted Railgun S wasn’t damaged!!)

Mikoto rolled the Shinshin 90 degrees like turning a dial, pointing the right wing toward the heavens.

The fighter veered just above the Ruler’s left shoulder.

Then she rolled 180 degrees the other way to point the left wing straight up. But she couldn’t complete the turn like this.

She operated the thrust vectoring nozzles to their absolute limit.

The Shinshin performed an impossible action, like a leaf in the wind. Instead of passing by the Ruler’s face, it forcibly spun its nose around toward the side of her head.

If anyone saw it, they might have worried the intense wind pressure had stopped its engines.

But that wasn’t it.

A stealth fighter full of advanced technology could pull off maneuvers even greater than Pugachev’s cobra!

“Gah, gh…gh!!”

The great inertial force exceeded the flight suit’s limits. Gravity squeezed at Mikoto’s body and darkness slowly crept in from the sides of her vision.

Still, she refused to let go of the control column.

She had already switched armaments.

She focused only on the trigger.

A single color filled her view.

The Ruler.

Her left ear. She stared intently at the tunnel-like darkness of the hole there!



''Bavwoom!!!



She couldn’t check to see if it had hit.

Her positioning was too much. The fighter was tossed about by the intense shockwave it created, shaking harshly up and down and preventing from getting a good view. Even with Kongou’s considerable modernizations, firing that weapon in ordinary atmosphere was just too much.

And it didn’t end with firing that.

(Not yet.)

Mikoto clung to her fading consciousness.

She recalled the sensation of the control column in her hands.

She forced her eyes back open.

(This isn’t over yet. Not until I get back to the Izanami and Izanagi!!!)

Her awareness grew.

In that moment, the Shinshin nearly stalled from the shockwave.

Still, Mikoto didn’t let go of the control column.

She directed the Shinshin from above the naked girl’s shoulder toward the back of her head. And she shoved the Shinshin into the gap there where she wouldn’t collide with the long, billowing hair.

She flew on through.

She passed the colossus by.

“Izanami to all fighters. The Ruler…is collapsing. Collapsing forward.”

Kobayashi sounded astonished.

Like she couldn’t believe in the success they had snagged.

But it was real.

Mikoto’s fighter flew in a large circle to direct its nose back toward the naked girl just in time to see her weakly falling over.

The damage may have already spread.

She fell face-first, unable to brace herself for the impact. The ground quaked and a massive cloud of dust flew high into the air.

“Railgun 01 to all fighters.”



Mikoto spoke into the radio.

She provided the necessary report.



“One down. The Ruler is down!!”



Cheers erupted.

She heard cannon fire from the land and sea, so were people shooting their weapons to celebrate?

The world had not ended today.

It had been a close thing, but the girls had saved the day.

Meanwhile.

Mikoto looked down at the naked girl who lay face down and unmoving.

That perfect life form had ruled this world before humans. But unable to bear the loneliness of living alone without a single rival, she had surrounded herself in thick ice and entered an eternal slumber.

(What did you think of the world you found, Ruler?)

Mikoto wanted to think she hadn’t been lonely at least.

Once finally freed from her lonely cage, the naked girl should have been able to compete with the people to her heart’s content.

But when she did wake, she had not worked to fit in with the people she had so longed for.

Her selfish behavior had turned her into a disaster for everyone else.

That was why she had been alone from beginning to end.

Even though the Girlish Weapons made from her cells had been able to get along with the humans.

She hadn’t been able to live that way.

It didn’t matter that she had the ultimate power. That wasn’t enough to find happiness.

“…”

Maybe it was the same for the Level 5s.

There were only seven of them in Academy City, but what did that matter?

If things had been just a little different and they had made one wrong choice, Misaka Mikoto and Shokuhou Misaki could have found themselves on that same path.