Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume9 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 1===

He was conscious, but he couldn’t see anything.

He felt like he was floating in lukewarm water.

Eventually, he realized he couldn’t even feel pain.

The first thing to stimulate ''Kamijou Touma''’s mind was his sense of hearing.

“…not enough…? …renaline…another…milli…”

Kamijou listened dispassionately.

Even though something was being injected into his body.

Or maybe he was in such a dire situation even his ordinary danger sense wasn’t functioning.

What was happening to him?

Only once that tiny question occurred to him did something change.

He felt pain. The scattered noise rushed in toward the center of his chest.

He experienced a sensory explosion.

He was assaulted by reality.

“Countershock!! That’s three times. Just wake up already!!”

Kamijou Touma felt excruciating pain in the center of his chest while his entire spine arched.

(Gah…hah?)

His mouth flapped, but he couldn’t bring in enough oxygen.

Various colors of light danced before his widened eyes before finally forming a coherent picture. He was inundated by the unnaturally sterile white of the ceiling and the distinctive scent of disinfectant. The overwhelming amount of information turned his stomach inside out and he just about vomited.

A hard plastic mask covered his mouth and nose.

If he threw up in the mask, it would get all over his face. Even as he struggled to breathe, he gathered every last ounce of strength to suppress the nausea.

Tears formed in the corners of his eyes, but only then did he realize something.

…Had he recovered enough to be concerned about appearances?

“Ugh.”

He heard the monotone hum of machinery.

And not just one. He was surrounded it.

Kamijou Touma regained consciousness all at once.

“''Ah!! Anna!? What happened to Anna Sprengel''!!??”

He sprang up in bed and tried to grab at anyone within reach, but he felt a powerful tug on his entire body. This wasn’t someone restraining him. The IV, the blood transfusion tube, the ECG cords, and more were all connected to his body. Some warning sounds played when he fell back into the bed, so some of the needles or electrodes must have come off.

The pain had finally caught up with him, but that didn’t matter to him.

A young nurse rushed in and then froze in shock. She had probably meant to reattach the dislodged IV needle…but instead she stared pale-faced at Kamijou, her hands wandering hesitantly in the air. He didn’t know what was wrong with his body, but he really wished that medical expert wouldn’t appear so pained when looking at a patient. It terrified him.

At that point, Kamijou frowned.

A nurse? A medical expert???

“Good grief. Ordinarily, I would expect you to start by asking where you are or what happened to you.”

He heard a familiar voice.

It was the frog-faced doctor. Except he wasn’t actually present. His voice came from a tablet fixed to an arm resembling a floor lamp.

Hold on.

Did that mean the super delicate lifesaving cardiopulmonary resuscitation had been done remotely!?

“I really would prefer to meet with you in person when you are in my hospital, but I am unfortunately a little busy at the moment. The new year is supposed to be a joyous occasion, but I have far too many emergency patients. Or maybe the new year itself is to blame. Regardless, I hope you don’t mind a remote interview.”

“So I’m in the hospital.”

The usual one at that.

Did that mean he had been transported from District 12 on the far east of the city to District 7 near the center?

After muttering the realization to himself, Kamijou took a look around. Instead of his ''usual'' hospital room, he appeared to be in an ICU partitioned by transparent walls. That must have meant his condition was a lot less predictable than in the past.

Something already felt off.

His condition was unpredictable? Why had he been left even that well off?

How had he managed to reach the hospital in that situation? Christian Rosencreutz had already killed Alice and that mystery magician woman. Both about as gruesomely as possible: the former with her head crushed and the latter with her torso bisected.

The man’s wicked voice replayed in the back of Kamijou’s mind.

''“Now, I believe it’s time to slaughter those Transcendents who got a little too interested in ''divine roleplay''.”

Christian Rosencreutz had said he would kill the Transcendents for his own game. He was spreading true death. And to people other than Kamijou.

''“Do you need a reason to kill time? This is their punishment for bringing this old man into such a dull and boring world. They can soothe this old man’s ennui with their worthless lives. How else can you make up for what you have done, Transcendents?”

Kamijou couldn’t imagine any reason he alone would have survived being there in that moment.

His thoughts turned toward Witch Goddess Aradia, but…

“It wasn’t me.”

She rejected the idea herself while leaning against the wall nearby.

And she was definitely one of the targets in CRC’s Transcendent hunting game.

“I was too preoccupied to save you.”

Then who else could it have been?

Kamijou could only think of one person who he was pretty sure had been there.

“Was it ''Aleister''?”

But he didn’t see the woman in the beige habit here. The frog-faced doctor only shrugged. Perhaps no one in the world knew all the details. Had Aleister gone off to do his own thing after escaping Rosencreutz and delivering Kamijou and the others to the District 7 hospital?

“As much as that human insists he doesn’t believe in the goodness of humanity, he can’t bring himself to ignore a tragedy playing out before his eyes,” said the frog-faced doctor. “I don’t know what happened this time, but I doubt he could turn his back on the people collapsed before him.”

People. Plural.

“So is Anna in this hospital too!? Where is she!?”

“Right there, actually.”

On the flat LCD screen, the frog-faced doctor really did point right next to Kamijou.

Kamijou Touma whipped his head around so fast he nearly tore it from his neck.

He was speechless.

His voice refused to come.

“…………………………………………………………………………………………………………”

The ICU, the intensive care unit, was a special space for a hospital’s patients who were in an especially iffy condition, requiring a doctor’s constant attention. No one would end up there if they went to the hospital because they were feverish after catching a cold or their cavity hurt.

It was unusual for an ordinary high schooler to be there at all and it was news to Kamijou that patients in the same ICU had their priority determined by triage.

There she was right on the other side of the thick glass – no, the clear plastic wall.

He saw so much machinery. A hard plastic oxygen mask covered her lower face, countless LEDs blinked, LCD monitors of all sizes surrounded her, tubes carried red and yellow liquids, and all the power cords looked like a bundle of wet hair. The pumps repeating their mechanical expansion and contraction were the most worrying. Pumps. Plural. There were a lot of them.

What was that?

Had she always been so small?

Was that really the same Anna Sprengel who had sneered as she made a mess of the science and magic sides of the world? Her presence, her warmth, her humanity were all absent. If someone told him that thing buried within all the machinery was in fact beautiful taxidermy, he might have believed it.

“Medically speaking, she is not brain dead. Which is why she is still hooked up to all that equipment.”

The frog-faced doctor looked through the monitor to view the same thing as Kamijou.

And he had to know the truth of the matter in much more detail than the ignorant boy.

“Simply put, she would not be breathing and her heart would not be beating without that equipment. Fortunately, the legal system says, once life-support equipment is in use, it can’t be removed without consent from the patient or their family.”

“…”

“Physically speaking, you might as well say she is dead. What happened to her? She has no obvious external wounds and no signs of electric shock or poison either.”

It was the Shrink Drink.

That twisted spiritual item was imbued with a portion of Alice Anotherbible’s power and designed specifically to rob a Transcendent of their power and kill them.

After all this, was that weapon going to carry out its purpose?

(Because Alice…is gone.)

Kamijou recalled that tiny corpse lying on the cold asphalt with its head entirely missing as if it had been crushed by a tremendous force.

So much had happened at once that he still hadn’t sorted through all his feelings.

He had seen the result for himself, but he still found it hard to believe Alice of all people had lost.

(But even with Alice gone, her power remains.)

Anna Sprengel’s heart and lungs had ceased functioning. That power came from Alice Anotherbible, who was now dead, yet Anna had not resumed breathing, so did that mean that power had been cut free of Alice herself and stored inside the weapon? Like charging a battery from a power outlet?

Alice was no more.

Only Alice could save Anna.

The situation spiraled out of control from there. There was no silver lining or last laugh to be found. That one loss had started a chain reaction that would mean losing everything.

Was it unstoppable? Was there no hope left in this world?

“Sorry, but you don’t have time to mope,” said Aradia, leaning against the cold wall. “Christian Rosencreutz is still out there. Whatever choice you make, he will reach this hospital eventually.”

“…”

Christian Rosencreutz had casually stated he would kill all of the Transcendents.

That meant Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, and even Anna Sprengel who couldn’t even breathe for herself.

And he didn’t seem like the type to spare Kamijou just because he wasn’t a Transcendent.

He wasn’t so reasonable a monster. He was the kind of extreme beast who would devour everything he laid eyes on and bask in the joy of it.