Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Crossover2 (section)

===Part 2===
 
'''(Quenser/Academy City)
 
"Ah!?"

With an odd noise, Quenser woke up while still enveloped by the thick cloth(?). He found himself in a strange city full of gray skyscrapers and three-bladed wind turbines.

For a while, he simply blinked while sprawled out on the ground.

To Quenser, the city looked like something from the near future, but the artificial female voices he heard and the writing on the signs were all unfamiliar to him. There was kanji, hiragana, and katakana. It was all mixed together and he could not hope to read it, but there was some of the alphabet added on like some kind of bonus and that allowed him to just barely grasp the nuance.

(An Asian language? What? What in the world happened? This is a lot like the library footage of the Island Nation.)

He got to his feet and found he was on a giant pedestrian scramble.

This was not a studio set with backdrops built for an urban warfare exercise.

And he felt the eyes of all the people surrounding him from a distance. Most of them were middle and high school students. That bizarre uniformness sent a chill down his spine, like he had rolled a die ten times and gotten a one every time. For one thing, the Island Nation belonged to the Capitalist Corporations. Even if these were civilians, he was in trouble if he was unarmed and surrounded. In fact, he might meet a worse fate than a bullet between the eyes.

"Wah, wah, wah, wah."

Quenser waved his hands as if to cover his face and head, but...

''"Boo boo, tap tap. I'm gonna eat every last one of you. Drool."

His voice was distorted in an odd way. No, the very reverberation was strange. It was like the vibration traveled from his stomach to the top of his head instead of from his lungs to his throat. That turned it into a mass of sound he had difficulty making out.

He could only compare it to a human throat controlling a lion or penguin.

And that reminded him that he was wearing a giant gray pig costume. It fit so well he could forget he was wearing it and something was missing when he reached for his back. What was missing? The zipper!!

"Wait!? Wh-wh-wh-what? Hold on, what is going on!? This is scary! Is the zipper buried in there somewhere!?"

''"Who should I eat first? Maybe a soft-looking kid. Boo, but I'm a good boy, so I can't be picky. I'll eat every last one of you!"

He then realized the people around him were acting oddly.

They would never guess this was someone wearing a pig costume and the vibration of its voice filled his entire body, so he could feel it in his organs. And all of the eyes on him contained undeniable hostility.

He had thought the distortions to his voice were robbing it of all meaning, but thinking back, it did sound something like an Asian language. Just like the wind could sound like someone sobbing when it echoed through a cave, it was possible the strange wavelengths were colliding in just the right way to sound something like their language.

Whatever the case, he did not want to make this any worse than it already was. He immediately shut his mouth and covered the giant costume's mouth with the costume hands. The face felt damp and warm, but he was doubly surprised by the fact that the costume hands could sense that.

It was less like he was wearing it.

And more like he had become it?

(Oh, no. What is going on? I don't like the way things are headed this time!)

When his voice echoed through the pig costume, it just so happened to create wavelengths similar to their language. Much like the brazen bull that was said to make the victim's screams sound like the cries of a bull when they were stuffed inside and burned. To prevent further confusion, Quenser desperately suppressed his voice. He kept his question in his mind.

But he should have realized something.

At times, an ominous silence could induce negative emotions more than any words.

"Hello, do you have a moment? This is Judgment."

He was stopped by a girl's voice that sounded quite young but had definite displeasure mixed in. He could not understand her, but there was no denying the intense hostility in her gaze.

(If this really is the Capitalist Corporations' Island Nation, then she might be demanding to know who I am. And if they find out I'm from the Legitimacy Kingdom...will I be shot?)

Various sticky thoughts rolled around in the back of his mind, but there was only one answer:

"Run awayyyy!!"

''"Boo. Frilly black lace doesn't suit you in the slightest."

A shout of "What!?" struck him in the back as he made a mad dash in the other direction. He was fast. Unbelievably fast. His strength was well past what it normally was.

"What the hell is going on!? This has clearly become my body. It's like my fat and muscles have been expanded!!"

''"Boo, boo, boo. You should wear bear panties instead. Because you're still a child."

(Oh, damn. And my voice is taking that weird route from the bottom of my stomach to the top of my head! I wish they would at least tell me what they think I am!)

He did not just run on the asphalt. The Island Nation people seemed to have difficulty recognizing danger because they did not try to move out of the way even as a nearly-4m form approached. They all stood still and aimed cellphones and smartphones at him. He kicked off building walls, wind turbine poles, signs, and roadside trees to break free of gravity's bonds and pass over the human wall like a bouncing pinball.

"Don't think you can escape my teleportation that easily! Oh, you're doing a better job of it than I thought. Argh, it's so hard to move around when you escape into such a densely-packed area!!"

The voice approaching from behind would distort unnaturally at times. Quenser was shocked when he looked back as he ran. The twintails girl kept disappearing. Like a film with a lot of frames missing, he would suddenly lose sight of her as she ran and then she would reappear in a spot she could not possibly have reached. And he was not just imagining it since it happened frequently.

Two possibilities came to mind:

*Something was wrong with his sensory organs.

*This twintails girl was the real deal. She could leap through space.

Both options scared him. But his body was moving on its own. Even while looking back and running faster than a train, he did not run into anyone. He would sometimes race down the road, sometimes lightly hop along the roofs of the cars, and sometimes cross a crosswalk while the light was red.

"Oh, honestly! Where did that thing go!?"

He could not understand her words, but her irritation was all too obvious. Even if she could ignore spatial limitations when she moved, she apparently used her normal five senses to designate a target. When Quenser ran below an overpass, jumped straight up, and clung to the underside, the twintails girl ran right on past without noticing him.

But Quenser himself was more surprised than anyone.

(Are you serious? Did I do that myself?)

Quenser shuddered at the fact that he could do this...and that he could accurately picture the next foothold in his mind.

This went beyond his body. It was beginning to mess with his thoughts as well.

He wiped unpleasant sweat from his brow while clinging to the underside of the overpass with his other three limbs. Only after doing so did he realize that sweat was on the giant gray pig's face, not his own. He found it hard to believe the damp pig nose was fake.

And just as he was thinking it was about time to drop down, he heard a sound much like a curtain flapping in the wind if the window was left open on a stormy night. When he turned toward the noise, he found himself eye to mechanical eye with a machine. It had black armor panels, a main rotor that sliced through the air, and what looked like six brutal tank guns hanging from the wings on either side of the skinny craft.

"An attack helicopter!? But what's with that insane layout!?"

''"Squeal. That metal looks hard and yucky. I prefer meat."

It reminded him a concept car at a motor show that was never designed to make a profit. And it did not end there. A 10-wheeled armored vehicle equipped with an autocannon ignored the flow of traffic and stopped below the overpass.

Quenser had some questions.

But the introduction of "military" equipment actually cleared his mind. He began to prioritize actions above questions.

He was not hindered by these new arms and legs.

He was not using tons of levers and pedals to control a crane and it did not even feel like he was "controlling" anything. These really were his own arms and legs. That was certainly disturbing, but he could deal with that after escaping his current predicament.

"..."

Still holding on with both legs and a hand, the gray pig kicked off the underside of the overpass. He dropped down like a meteor. He first targeted the armored vehicle. The roof was its weak point and that was exposed to him. He twisted around in midair to land with all of his weight on his feet. The entire vehicle sank down. And not because it had excellent suspension. The roof clearly bent in and the autocannon was crushed like an empty can.

And the attack helicopter's weak point was the very bottom of the belly. Helicopters might be reinforced with some bulletproof plating, but not many would equip weaponry on that area needed for takeoff and landing.

Quenser essentially peeled himself up off the flattened armored vehicle and jumped again. He used his powerful muscles to launch himself straight up. He was like a pinball. The autocannon must have triggered some kind of explosion because the armored vehicle blew up as the pig-faced giant dangled from the bottom of the helicopter.

But he was not holding onto the landing gear. His thick right arm had broken straight through its belly.

That threw off its balance.

Quenser swung his legs back and forth to build up momentum and then the entire attack helicopter spun around with him. He had control and he was calm enough to think about dropping it in a safe location. After building up centrifugal force with two vertical rotations, the gray pig released the attack helicopter from his right hand. The steel wreckage fell in a little-used coin-operated parking lot and exploded.

Quenser thought to himself as he stood at the top of a wind turbine and viewed the black smoke.

(Was it unmanned? It didn't show any signs of panic at the end and I don't smell any burning flesh.)

He hoped that was true, but even if there had been a pilot, they would have been military. A noncombatant would be one thing, but he had no reason to show mercy to an Island Nation soldier.

Meanwhile, he heard a normal everyday police siren.

(Crap, I need to get out of here!)

Weirdly, that shifted his mind from military mode and back into normal society mode. He jumped down from the turbine and began running away once more.