Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Virtual On Chapter4 (section)

===Part 1===

The change was instantaneous.

Kamijou heard a sticky sound from below Temjin’s feet. Then the ground melted away like ice cream dropped onto the pavement on a hot day.

No, it was more than just the ground.

The wind turbines, the building walls, the roadside trees, and the rest of the scenery lost their color and shape like chocolate melted with a blowtorch. It all mixed together. The general silhouettes remained the same, but there was no guarantee that would last.

“Kssshhh!! …Ksshh… Touma-sama, the change seems to be starting from the bottom and working its way up. The taller buildings are showing no change, so I recommend using your repulsion to jump to a rooftop while making sure you don’t hit anything sticking out from the walls!”

“Lilina, you’re back?”

“Sob… It really scares me that my self-scan shows nothing out of the ordinary. That doesn’t mean I’m safe; it has to mean I just can’t locate the cause! I mean, there’s clearly some kind of error here!!”

Anything was fine as long as he had her support.

He used the turbo for a running start.

And then Temjin used the invisible repulsion to leap in a high arc like a long throw in baseball. He kicked off a few sticky walls along the way, made his way ever higher, and ultimately reached the top of a high-rise building.

As Lilina had said, the area near the roof was unchanged.

But the world below could not have been worse.

Everything was melting. It all mixed together while gradually changing shape. It felt like peering inside a giant creature’s stomach with an endoscope.

There was no way any Virtual-On matches could continue like this, but there were still lots of referee spheres floating here and there. However, not one of them was functioning properly. They were spinning erratically as they observed meaningless locations.

“Lilina.”

“Yes, what is it?”

“The Blue Stalker made it sound like Virtual-On was remade during the design stage to create the Second Plajiner. He said it was originally a tool of war but he distributed it here after remaking it into a Next Generation Game. That means there have to be traces of him at the most fundamental levels. Does that include you, Lilina?”

“A search does not turn up any information, but that may not be grounds for rejecting the idea,” replied Lilina. “I am a voice processing program meant to help make Virtual-On run more smoothly. Whether it is an enjoyable game or some strange plan I am helping ‘run more smoothly’, I cannot refuse. That is what it means to be a program. There appear to be similarities between Ririn and myself, so it is possible I am an emulation control program meant to control the Second Plajiner.”

“I see…”

“Will you delete me?”

Those words seemed to deny herself.

And Kamijou answered by shaking his head.

“No, let’s keep going like this.”

“Are you sure you want to entrust your fate to something created by the Blue Stalker?”

“How is the Virtuaroid itself any different? I’m not about to think I can survive in this melting city with just my right hand.” He took a slow breath. “So I’ll use whatever is available to me. And that includes you, Lilina.”

“Okay. Understood, Touma-sama.”

At that moment, the situation changed.

The building rooftop had seemed relatively safe, but now it wobbled. It was like being atop a stick standing up from the sand as it slowly toppled from having water poured on it.

“Touma-sama!!”

“!!”

He used the repulsion to leap as high as he could manage, but Virtuaroids were not made to fly indefinitely. This was no more than the extension of a jump.

And the surrounding buildings also collapsed one after another.

There was nowhere nearby to land. And with no footing, he could only slowly fall.

In fact…

“What…is that?”

A gaping hole opened in the world.

It looked like a single point had opened up in the surface world that looked like black fuel oil, but then it expanded seemingly endlessly. It may have swallowed up the entire district.

There was nothing he could do.

The few remaining buildings fell into the expanding hole. He could not imagine how deep it was, but it was all too obvious that falling into it was the end.

“Rescanning the map. Touma-sama, there is a reading near the center of the hole. Is it…floating? Regardless, there is something like land there!”

“What the hell is that!? Should we really go ''toward'' it?!”

“Virtuaroids cannot fly. If you do not make up your mind soon, you will be stuck falling into that empty darkness!!”

She was right.

He had no other option.

Kamijou decided anything was better than falling into a hole that looked like it led to the depths of hell, so he focused on the turbo while altering Temjin’s actions. He fell toward the sole safe zone at the center of the massive hole.

Even when viewed from above, it was an odd place.

Something measuring several kilometers across floated at the center of 360 degrees of black waterfalls. No, floating was not quite accurate. Something like thick blood vessels colored a muddy pitch black extended horizontally and attached to the walls on the outer edge. Those blood vessels pulsated disconcertingly and seemed to be absorbing something.

“Warning: please keep an eye on your sense of perspective. Objects on too large a scale can affect your sense of distance.”

It was right in front of him, but he could not find any words with which to describe it.

It looked like a giant mass of metal. It was a cuboid measuring several kilometers across. It looked like a thick bomb shelter and like a spaceship meant to escape the solar system. But the most distinctive feature was the giant spherical bulge near the center that completely ruined the otherwise perfect silhouette.

Kamijou did not know what that was.

But his instincts told him ''it looked like a giant embedded eyeball that was staring at him.

He gulped as he saw something else.

At a point in his vision, an FCS cursor appeared at the top of the unknown structure.

Temjin had detected some kind of reading.

“There’s something there.”

“It is definitely an enemy unit reading, although an unclassifiable one. …It’s…not a Virtuaroid?”

“I really don’t want my navigator sounding so doubtful!”

“It’s making me question my purpose in life too. At the very least, I can’t find a corresponding unit in any of the data in my archive. But at the same time, a Virtuaroid is only supposed to be able to lock onto another Virtuaroid…”

“Has it been modified so much with the Material Analyze that it’s unrecognizable?”

“I can only imagine this is a new unit built from scratch. Although I can’t classify it as a Virtuaroid if it doesn’t have a V-Disc to support its structure.”

“In that case…”

A name came to Kamijou’s mind.

As a more fundamental question, were there any survivors in Academy City besides Kamijou Touma and her?

With that in mind, he shouted the name.

“The Second Plajiner!?”