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

===Part 2===

Aleister Crowley did not fly through the sky or walk through walls.

After delivering a certain boy to relative safety, that human left his old friend, the frog-faced doctor.

But he did not even make it all the way out of the hospital.

It hadn’t helped that there happened to be no one in the hallway.

“Ahhhh.”

Aleister was at his limit.

He staggered, leaned his side against the wall, and screamed.

Now that he had no task to preoccupy himself, he slid down the wall to the floor.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

Why did all the decent people have to die?

Why was it only the people like him who stubbornly survived?

Anna Kingsford. He thought he had finally found a benevolent expert even a contrarian like him could honestly respect. Maybe it was unnatural that she could speak thanks to the modifications he made to her preserved remains, but that didn’t lessen the agony of losing her.

There was one thing Human Aleister simply could not get his hands on.

As the world’s greatest villain, he had snatched up everything he could want – fame, fortune, scholarship – but he had never been blessed with a smart and kind woman.



The Battle of Blythe Road had been a war Aleister began due to the distorted fate of his wife Rose and his daughter Lilith.



When he had resided in the Windowless Building as Academy City’s Board Chairman, he had used Mina Mathers as the navigator for his plan. She was the wife of his sworn enemy Mathers. This may have been the reason why he had chosen such an awkward person for that role.



And now it had happened again.



Why?

Why?

Why?

He could mourn all he wanted, it would not change what had happened. CRC – Christian Rosencreutz. The stench of death lingering on that man was real. Aleister had singlehandedly conquered the Battle of Blythe Road, known as the greatest conflict in modern Western magic, so he could tell.

That man made use of death in the same way as Mathers and Westcott.

And at a higher level.

Aleister couldn’t even bring himself to choose between fighting or running. Ordinarily, he would have chosen to fight and fight hard. That he was hesitating at all was like accepting how fragile his heart was. He had no freedom here. He had to accept that he was a loser – that he was bound by fear.

It wasn’t just that he couldn’t fight.

He even lacked the courage to run away and found himself frozen in place.

This wasn’t about his own death.

In the fight against CRC, every action in every direction was guaranteed to consume lives, so just how many people would be sent to the graveyard by every choice he made?

“…”

The golden retriever opted for silence.

He simply watched.

Kihara Noukan knew very well that Aleister was not perfect. So it was fine with him if Aleister was an ugly and miserable wretch.

He knew deep down that this human would arrive at the right decision in the very end.

“You aren’t disappointed in me? That I could see all that and not even vow revenge?”

“Don’t be foolish. No one understands romance better than me.”

So he would wait as long as it took.

Kihara Noukan had enough tact to leave that part unsaid.