Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume11 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 2===

Lots of legs grew from the ground.

The ground was covered in them.

“Umm.”

“This is ❌ an unusual sight in hell. This is where the simoniacs, sinners guilty of simony, are punished.”

The glasses woman provided an explanation, but the high school boy had no idea what simony was. The sight was more surreal than frightening. With the victims flipped upside down with only their legs sticking out, it reminded Kamijou of a scene from a very famous mystery movie, but there were just so many of them. It went beyond looking like an aquatic performance done in a pool and looked more like some kind of farmland.

“🔥 burns at the bottom of the pits to burn the sinners’ heads while they are never able to escape.”

“That’s a lot more horrific than I was expecting!”

“We are approaching the bottom of hell, after all. We will be 👁️ing more facilities designed to punish more serious sins.”

But all Kamijou could do was shout.

He tried grabbing one set of legs and tugged on it like it was a daikon radish, but the legs started thrashing wildly. He heard a sound like something thin peeling away, a tremor ran through the legs, and they stopped moving. Kamijou felt like he had only made the situation worse for whoever that was.

He realized he had touched them with his right hand, but they hadn’t disappeared.

What did that mean?

(It’s probably bad if I get too accustomed to the cruel scenes here in hell.)

He felt like his common sense and the ordering of events was breaking down, just like in a hell.

If he couldn’t help those people, this place left him with only guilt. They couldn’t take a break, so Kamijou’s party continued across the simony punishment zone.

“Another river,” muttered Kamijou.

That was something he had seen a few times already.

“The Rivers Acheron, Styx, and Phlegethon. Many rivers flow through hell. The idea of a river forming the boundary between life and ☠️ is ❌ unique to the 🗾ese Sanzu River. I 💭 this is the Phlegethon, but this is ❌ the original river. It should be red and flaming.”

“You don’t say,” said Kamijou offhandedly.

He was in fact listening very carefully.

Everything she said held so much more weight after Rosencreutz’s warning.

(Come to think of it, why does Kingsford know so much about the structure of hell?)

If you lived an honest life so you could go to heaven, you wouldn’t need to study how hell works. And Rosencreutz himself had said god didn’t give all that much thought to hell compared to heaven, which allowed people to imagine it in so many different ways.

Yet Kingsford knew so much about it.

Why?

And she had said the Qliphoth was a map of the realm of ghosts and curses. If she had gone to the trouble of studying that, she might be an expert in that sort of field.

She had learned it because it had felt necessary to her.

And if she knew more about it than anyone, she might have acted on that knowledge.

Kamijou was curious, but if he directly asked her about it, wouldn’t she just dodge the question? Especially if she was hiding something.

It was too soon to reach a conclusion based on her reaction, so there was no need to ask a question that would put her on guard.

Kamijou looked to the opposite bank of the river.

“But…how do we cross it? It looks too wide to swim.”

“🏊ing across would be suicide. We must use a boat. A simple raft should ❌ be too difficult to construct.”

Kamijou had pictured hell as rocky mountains and lava, but it actually had many different faces. It had forests and it had fields. The weather changed and it even rained. But he was still surprised to see Kingsford wander off and return with a toolbox she had found somewhere.

In fact…

“Um, that isn’t a torture box used for doing some DIY work on a human, is it? Y’know, like that girl in Gremlin with the silver hair and dark skin!!”

“You can’t remember her name?” growled Rosencreutz, but Kamijou chose not to react.

He wanted to hide that he had been about as serious about that comment as when watching a trivia show on TV. If the naked overalls girl with the glasses and braid found out, she would probably cry. But he could remember what she looked like at least!

“There are boats and villages in hell. And if it has been influenced enough by the Greek Tartarus, there should be an area protected by a bronze wall. So of course the tools used to build such things are lying around.”

This was the first Kamijou was hearing of this.

Were there weapon shops and inns in hell too?

“Hell will react to your unnecessary thoughts. Do you want to be pursued by obsessive oni who have boosted their deadly strength with the nonexistent legendary orichalcum series?”

CRC whispered a truly frightening idea into Kamijou’s ear. He could see that happening here. It was like the difference between a Yeti and a Yuki Onna. If the oni was a little girl oni in a tiger print bikini and with little horns growing from her head, or if it was a graceful and busty young woman oni with her kimono slipping off, he might be okay with it, but if it was a traditional muscle man oni with all the usual deadliness before even taking into account the ultimate gear, there was no upside to it at all.

But that aside, they had to build a raft.

Kamijou pictured a raft as several logs lined up side by side and tied together with rope, but apparently that wasn’t accurate.

Kingsford had also collected a few long, skinny sticks similar to clothesline poles.

Before tying them together with rope or nailing them together, she lined up the logs and poles on the ground in the general shape of the finished product. The long poles stuck out from the sides of the raft itself. And she was apparently going to tie something like empty jars or water jugs to the ends of the poles.

“What are those?”

“Tying together 🪵 will ❌ provide enough buoyancy or stability. Capsizing in a river of the ☠️ would be disastrous, don’t you think? So it’s safer to attach some extra crossarms.”

That made sense.

Jars and water jugs would act like floats using the same principle as the powerful resistance felt when trying to push a wash basin down into the bath. But where had she found those things?

The end result was shaped something like a water strider.

“Hold that 🪵 down for me. I will hold it down on this end. Oof.”

Crafting time had begun.

Kingsford lined up a few logs and tied them together with rotting rope, but that apparently wasn’t enough so she drove in a few long nails to fully fix the logs and poles together. Instead of the usual nails seen in a hardware store, she used giant nails shaped something like an upside down L. She said they were used for train tracks. Piercing the poles through would split them, so instead the horizontal protrusion of the upside down L held the thin pole tightly down instead.

However…

“Um, wait, Kingsford-san? Sensei!?”

“?”

They were jiggling.

When the racing swimsuit woman crouched down, held the nail in place with one hand, and held the hammer with her other hand, her large breasts were squeezed between her upper arms. And when she started hammering away, the jiggling began. Those huge boobs were out of control! Right in front of Kamijou!!

“I-I’m doing my best not to look, but you started doing this right in front of me, so it’s fair game for me to look, right, Sensei? You won’t be mad?”

“😠 about what?”

She looked confused.

He refused to believe she didn’t know. He took that as her hitting the “consent” button, so he replenished his mental health by enjoying the joyous view. No matter who they belonged to, big boobs were big boobs. Rejoice.

Now, the raft lacked a sail like a yacht might have.

They all pushed it down the riverbank.

From the look of it, the hell river had no current at all. The raft floated in water that seemed more like a stagnant swamp than a river. Then the three of them boarded it. Kingsford held an extra of the long poles which she stuck into the water to control the raft.

Just like in the old samurai movie Kamijou had seen while playing on TV at midday during summer break.

Instead of rowing in the water, she pressed the stick against the river bottom to push the raft forward.

And if that pole could reach the bottom, the river couldn’t be all that deep, could it?

“Falling in one of hell’s rivers would be quite the tragedy. But if you want to be stuck here for all eternity after being stained by someone else’s sin, be my guest.”

Slowly but surely, they crossed the…Phlegethon, was it?

“…”

Anyway…

This was a river.

The line between life and death was simple enough, but what did these borders within hell mean?

Kamijou had died and gone to hell, but were there any further lines he couldn’t afford to cross?

“I feel like I’ve already crossed some of those. Without really thinking about it.”

“We are aiming for a jailbreak. And we can ❌ achieve that just by doing as we are told.”

That wasn’t true.

Kingsford’s objective was the very center of the mortar-shaped hell, which was the furthest point from the gate at the entrance.

He didn’t know what she wanted to do there, though.

“There is nothing beautiful about this river 🌊, but the wind feels nice. …Phew.”

Kingsford stopped working the pole and ran a hand through her long hair shaped like a big fried shrimp.

Maybe it was from being a fiery hell, but gem-like beads of sweat scattered from her hair and a sweet aroma wafted back from her revealed nape.

“Long hair really is a pain at times like this. It gathers a lot of air, which creates a thermal insulation effect on your back.”

“Please show some restraint before a giant nape emerges from the middle of the river.”

“?”

Kamijou Touma gathered all his might to fight against his own adolescence.

The bastard sharing this raft with him began taking revenge yet again.

“The surface area on the front is far greater than on the back. You could compare it to a naked apron, or perhaps like a dorm manager? Focusing on the nape is all well and good, but do not ignore the bare shoulder blades or the line of her spine. And if you lower your gaze to the back of her hips, you can even make out the bump of her tailbone showing through the thin swim-”

“Oops, excuse me.”

“Bwohhhhhh!!” screamed CRC. The raft suddenly lost its balance just as something grabbed and tugged on his long silver beard. What did? Something that emerged from the filthy river. In fact, several giant canine heads emerged and chomped at the young old man’s beard.

“My, my. It’s Cerberus again. I should have known he would do the 🐕y paddle. Perhaps we should have defeated him on the higher level while we had the chance.”

“Do dogs just really like CRC or something?”

That one had just been some silly nonsense.

There couldn’t have been any deeper meaning.

Rosencreutz hadn’t hidden any kind of code inside it…had he?

“Ghhhh. Question, boy,” said Christian Rosencreutz, who was in a very serious situation with his prized long beard being bitten and tugged on by giant canine jaws. He took the tone of a late night chat during a school trip. “Who do you have a crush on?”

“Um…”

“You…have to think about it? Wait, wait, wait. You mean it isn’t Anna Kingsford!? Then why the giant boobs and butt? Didn’t you dream of an older dorm manager in a naked apron? A-adolescence is so cruel. Are you telling me you were only ever interested in her body!?”

“Old man, you’re just trying to stir up trouble again, aren’t you? You want to increase Kingsford’s hate value and direct it this way so she’ll attack me in the middle of a river where I have nowhere to run!!”

“But none of that refutes my asser- bghbbhfgbfgh!?”

To silence this massive conspiracy, Kamijou crouched down and grabbed the red-clad old man’s ankles. He then flipped the man over, held him up by the ankles, and dipped his head into the stagnant river so he couldn’t say anything else. The world knew peace once more.

Anna Kingsford used the long pole to keep the raft moving along.

“And we’re there.”

They had arrived on the opposite bank.

They might need to turn back at some point, so they pulled the raft up onto the land so it wouldn’t float away. It looked light while afloat, but it was so heavy when dragging it along the ground. Which made sense when it was made from several logs. And the raft shape meant they couldn’t roll it along.

A question suddenly occurred to Kamijou.

In a way, there was no question where a horrific expert like Christian Rosencreutz would go when he died. Kamijou could accept his own destination too. He had selfishly chosen death and brought sorrow to quite a few people, so he wasn’t going to complain about winding up in hell.

But.

What was that purely good and benevolent expert doing here?

Maybe she could switch between life and death at will by switching off her preserved corpse. But wouldn’t someone so dedicated to goodness end up in heaven after death?

Yes.

What if Anna Kingsford was also the kind of person who would be damned to hell?