Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume4 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 2===

The British government’s plane had arrived safely at the Los Angeles airport.

But leaving the plane proved to be a challenge. Once they got the thick door open, the cold pierced right through Kamijou’s 1200-yen synthetic jacket. He also realized just how far up the door was from the asphalt without a stair car. They ended up pulling out something like an inflatable slide to get out.

Once Kamijou, Index, Stiyl, and Kanzaki had their feet on the ground, the next step was already underway.

The plane cut away the balloon slide(?), shut its airtight door, and slowly pulled away from the landing runway. Kamijou was nearly run over by the giant wheels and started to move out of the way, but Kanzaki grabbed his collar in a hand. He realized a moment later he had nearly run into the exhaust of the turbofan engine hanging from the main wing. The massive plane was turning around so it could move to the takeoff runway.

The boy shouted at the ponytail woman so the great din would not drown him out.

“What!? Why is the plane taking off!?”

“Everyone on the ground here disappeared, so it would be dangerous to leave the pilots and flight attendants here. They will fly outside of LA and wait out over the ocean so they can provide us a relatively quick escape if we need it. They can wait there indefinitely with the help of a refueling aircraft.”

He was also surprised to find such a large plane could turn without the assistance of a tow truck. Kanzaki said they had given it that ability so they could leave a foreign airport on their own if diplomatic negotiations went bad.

At any rate, it was now just the four of them in Los Angeles.

30 million people had disappeared in this city. The silence of the night actually felt painful. It was easy to forget this was a metropolis greater than Tokyo.

The police would not arrive if they called 110 or 911 or whatever else. None of the usual assumptions applied on this silent battlefield. The thought made Kamijou shudder. There was no one here to stop whatever might happen.

At the very least, this was not a natural phenomenon.

It was an abnormal situation caused by someone’s malicious action. And he had just flown in there.

He noticed something else once the airplane’s exhaust heat and noise were gone.

“Brr, it’s cold. I can see my breath.”

“Count yourself lucky a blizzard or whiteout isn’t reducing visibility. The city is apparently under an abnormal cold wave with temperatures 20 below freezing. You might just feel cold for now, but you need to worry about your fingertips and ears before long.”

“…”

How could that sexy woman say that when she was wearing a T-shirt that showed off her navel and jeans with one entire leg missing? She was the old-fashioned samurai type and she may have been that one kid in every class that always wore shorts in the winter. Or had she actually trained herself below a frigid waterfall, not noticing how see-through her wet clothing was?

Standing around on the runway was not going to accomplish anything.

“But what do we do now? Can you just walk out of an airport?”

“What, were you planning to steal one of the fuel trucks or tow trucks to smash through the fence? The terminal is made for people to pass through, so I would recommend using that, numbskull.”

The grumpy priest’s retort shut Kamijou up.

Speaking of the trucks, a nearby fuel truck was coated with white frost, like the inside of a freezer. Before even worrying about the engine oil and battery fluid, it was doubtful they could get the door open. Kamijou was afraid his hand would stick if he touched it. Stiyl’s fire magic might be able to defrost it, but Kamijou was afraid ''that'' would cause an explosion.

A high school boy like him also didn’t know much about cars, so he followed after the priest.

“What will we be checking first?” he asked.

“The R&C Occultics HQ takes precedence of course, but 30 million people wouldn’t have up and disappeared if it was safe to just walk straight there.”

They were on a path that must have been meant for the fuel trucks. Stiyl stepped on a “no open flames” warning painted on the asphalt and lit a new cigarette.

“So I want to start by investigating what happened here. How far can we safely go and what triggers the disappearances? I want to know all the rules regarding an approach to their HQ. If the people vanished against their will, there must be some records left at the police stations, in the hospitals, and at the field base for England and Academy City’s joint unit. If we can dig up their dying message, we should have a better chance at survival.”

Dying message.

Stiyl already viewed the people of LA as dead and gone. That may have been the most reasonable viewpoint since there was no reason to take an optimistic view of R&C Occultics CEO Anna Sprengel. …But at the same time, it felt like Stiyl was hoping Kamijou would be able to pull off an unexpected outcome outside of that more dire viewpoint.

“(Male tsunderes can be so hard to read.)”

“Whoa, Othinus!?”

Kamijou began some frantic whispering when he heard a girl’s voice from within his collar, but the 15cm god had no intention of remaining hidden. She squirmed on out of his jacket.

“(What, did you really think I would stay behind and watch over your dorm room? Hmph, the other girls around you don’t know how the game is played. You don’t wait to be given a role – you create a role for yourself.)”

Her confidence was fine and all, but did that stupid god know what a passport and immigration control were? But Kamijou was afraid to ask that out loud since he knew she would just insist that a god was unbound by human law.

“Huh?” said Kamijou once they arrived at the terminal building. “What is that? Packing tape?”

“It’s duct tape. I guess you don’t see it much in Japan.”

Thick, waterproof-looking tape had been applied to the glass double doors. A long vertical strip went right down the center to cover the gap there. No, there was more than that. A closer look showed the makeshift weather stripping running along the top and bottom and even along the hinges.

“Were they trying to keep something out?”

“But what?”

They peeled the sturdy tape away and Index easily opened the door. Yes, she only had to grab the knob and turn it. It was not locked and there was no makeshift barricade of tables or chairs pressed against it on the inside.

But that made the thorough tape job a mystery. It definitely wasn’t normal, but if they went to all that effort, why hadn’t they locked it the normal way?

“???”

Kamijou tilted his head but still stepped inside. The world seemed to change around him. He had not paid much attention to it outside, but the warm air forced an odd sense of relief into his heart. It was 3 AM, long after the last flight would leave. The lights were all out, but the heat was on. Was that for the late-night maintenance and janitorial workers?

They were using the terminal building to leave the airport. They could travel through the deserted facility however they liked without anyone yelling at them, but the path intended for this purpose had to be the easiest one.

An electronic alarm began to sound.

“Hyahhhhhhhh!? Wh-what, what, what!?”

“Ah ha ha! It’s okay, Index. It’s just a gate alarm. …Wait? A gate?”

Kamijou laughed, but then the smile froze on his face.

It was hard to tell with no one at the reception desk and the lights out, but what gate had they just walked through without permission? Stiyl and Kanzaki didn’t seem to care as they continued on ahead, but Kamijou rapidly grew nervous when he looked alternately between their leaving backs and the gate he had just passed.

“U-um, Othinus-san? Please tell me that doesn’t say what I think it does.”

“Try studying the language before traveling somewhere. That is the immigration control gate. Welcome, illegal immigrant, to the land of freedom where anything goes.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no!!”

“Give up. The three second rule only applies to food. Hurrying back through the gate doesn’t erase the crime you committed.”

There was nothing he could do. He was no better than the 15cm illegal immigrant god. He sobbed and pushed on Index’s back to catch up with the two combat magicians.

But something had already drawn the attention of those British magicians.

Kanzaki looked cautiously around the dark passageway.

“There are no rats or roaches either. It wasn’t just the humans who disappeared.”

Kamijou jumped. She was saying they ''weren’t'' here, but just hearing the name of those close neighbors made him think about them. He had no real basis for it, but he imagined American roaches were extra big and nasty. And resistant to bug spray too.

Meanwhile, Stiyl pressed his index finger against the window’s stainless steel frame.

He ran his finger along it just like a sister-in-law checking for filth.

“…Sand?”

“Man, they sure were persistent to get all 30 million people.”

Kamijou was out of his element, so he just said whatever came to his mind.

The number seemed too big to him. Or maybe it was the lack of corpses and bloodstains. Whatever the case, it didn’t feel real to him.

“I mean, not even LA’s government has an accurate population number with all the illegal immigrants and homeless people, right? And there must have been a ton of people none of that paperwork can track, like tourists, long-distance truckers, and American-style hitchhikers. Tracking down every single person no matter where they’re hiding in this giant city couldn’t be easy. Sounds like a lot of unnecessary work to me.”

In fact, why even be that thorough?

R&C Occultics had supposedly done ''something'' to strike back against the joint Anglican and Academy City force, but how did attacking Los Angeles as a whole help with that? It would make sense if all the people near the joint force had been caught in the blast, but would they really bother erasing every single person on the map like this? And if so, why? Eliminating the people at the very edge of the map would do nothing to damage the joint force approaching their HQ.

“Maybe they didn’t need to,” suggested Othinus.

Kamijou looked confused, so Index explained.

“I think she means they didn’t need to target everyone. That would also mean they didn’t have to load up the unconscious victims and carry them away. Hmm, for example, what if they used a spell that detonated a massive bomb in the center of LA and everyone hit by the invisible light it produced was eliminated? Then they wouldn’t have to search every nook and cranny, right? But it also prevents them from limiting the targets. Maybe everyone in LA was hit by whatever it was once it was activated.”

“…”

The cruelty was in the situation, not in Index herself. She had the knowledge of at least 103,001 grimoires stored in her head, so to her, drawing on this knowledge was no different from recalling how to use chopsticks.

“It’s also strange their spell made the 30 million people ‘disappear’ instead of just killing them.” Othinus gave an exasperated shrug from his shoulder. “To restate the obvious, Anna is an undeniably bad person. And if you’re enough of a scumbag to know how heavy a corpse is, you should know all too well how much trouble it is to make a human-sized hunk of flesh disappear.”

“Heh…heh heh heh heh.”

“What, is your poor little brain overloaded? Fine, I’ll put it in terms a good person can understand: try ordering 60-70kg of frozen beef online. On the bone. Then drag it into the bathroom and cover yourself up with gloves, goggles, a mask, a hat, and a raincoat and place some plastic sheets over the floor and walls. Then get to work with a knife, a saw, a hammer, a juicer, or whatever you want really. Break down all the flesh and bone, separate it out into bags, and then throw it out somewhere it won’t be found. And after all that’s done, fill a spray bottle with reagent and spray it all over the walls and floor. You can buy luminol for just over 10 thousand yen at the click of a button. …Once all that work is done, you’ll be sweaty and exhausted and the next day you’ll be a mess of pain in all those muscles you rarely use. And no matter how perfectly you think you’ve done, a single drop of blood you missed can be a critical mistake. Washing it away with the shower isn’t enough to hide it.”

The more Othinus explained, the less Kamijou understood.

“And we’re talking about 30 million people. Every last one of them is a real person, not an empty can or plastic bottle being recycled in the factory. Disposing of the bodies is hard enough, but holding them while alive is even worse. The work costs would be astronomical. Besides, where have the victims gone?”

“You mean, um, I guess…it isn’t easy to find a dumping ground or storage center no one can find?”

“There is that, but people were going to notice something was wrong no matter what, so why not just leave their defeated enemies where they lay? It’s such bizarrely wasted effort, like someone loudly kicking down the front door so they can sneak through the building. Whether you’re skipping town forever or leaving on an unannounced vacation, there’s no merit to disappearing overnight ''unless you make sure nothing else about the situation looks suspicious''.”

Japan’s most famous domed stadium could hold around 50 thousand or maybe a little more. This would require 600 of those stadiums. And they would need a secret garden that no one could ever find in an age of readily-searchable maps and images. …Everything was bigger in the USA, from the tubes of toothpaste sold in the pharmacies to the Grand Canyon, but Kamijou doubted even they could supply a secret base like that.

Index raised a finger to explain.

“Thus, we can conclude they didn’t choose to do this; their magic forced it to happen this way. It can be easy to lose focus with something on this scale, but the situation is actually pretty simple. What we need to know now is the frequency.”

“What frequency?”

“Of those ‘bomb detonations’.” Othinus kept it short to keep him cautious. “If this is a once-a-millennium attack, there’s nothing to worry about. But if it happens at the top of every hour, we’re in a lot of trouble. We could be caught in the same attack if we wait around. Ever since they abandoned the locals and ‘courageously’ withdrew from Vietnam, the American military always makes sure to secure air superiority and a supply line before doing anything. Why is that? And why do they love to launch a heavy cyber attack to confuse the enemy’s defenses and launch hundreds cruise missiles from the sea before moving in? Because their past experiences have taught them that the result of a war is determined well before the boots are on the ground. When you have a hand you know can bring victory, the trick is to keep using the same tactics to wear down the enemy forces. So…”

Othinus paused there.

Was that because she could only speculate? Or was she unsure if she should tell him this?

So it was Index who ended up blurting it out like it was nothing.

“''So was that initial attack really the end of it?'' If this is a long-term spell that activates weekly or monthly, then we just opened the oven door and shoved our heads inside.”