Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:MvM Chapter2 (section)

===Part 2===

The countdown to Academy City’s doom had finally stopped.

Mikoto breathed a sigh of relief and held a hand to her chest. A chest that had regained its girly softness.

But this wasn’t over yet.

She hadn’t solved the fundamental problem. If this was not an electronic virtual reality, then what was it?

(But what other possibilities are there? Other than this simply being the real world, I mean.)

This wasn’t an electronic virtual reality. That much was certain.

But she doubted that meant she and Shokuhou had been rampaging through the real world.

Their summer uniforms were enough to know where on the timeline this was happening. That meant she shouldn’t have known anything that would happen after the switch to winter uniforms, so why didn’t that hold true?

(Is this the work of an illusion esper, or did Shokuhou figure out how to get Mental Out into my head after all? Come to think of it, dream-controlling machines like Indian Poker do work on me like normal.)

Everything was mixed up if Shokuhou had Exterior while Mikoto remembered the end of the Indian Poker incident. Same for Kazakiri’s golden glowing angel form. She had first appeared that way in the blizzards of Russia during World War Three, which didn’t mesh with Tokiwadai summer uniforms at all.

How could Mikoto explain the jumbled timeline?

(But if I can’t be certain, I need to be more careful. People only have the one life, so there are no redoes. I should watch what my actions to make sure I don’t let any ordinary people die.)

That might sound benevolent, but it was just like her to not include Shokuhou (because she didn’t qualify as “ordinary”).

With a roar, two avalanches arched through the air and collided overhead.

One was a group of espers leaping from rooftop to rooftop. The other was self-driving cars and construction equipment also jumping from the rooftops. The threat of Academy City’s espers could be seen in the fact that the humans made of protein and calcium were pushing back the other side.

To be blunt, Mikoto was controlling the machines, so she was being forced back.

Academy City was terrifying!!

“Oh, no!”

(How does someone so unathletic have the macho mentality of a barbarian? I honestly don’t have time to deal with this. I want some answers before we fight.)

Mikoto wanted to know what was happening, the identity of the Academy City she saw before her, and the truth of this world. Was it simply reality, was it an illusion created by an esper, or was it a dream created by a machine like Indian Poker? Her options would change drastically depending on the answer.

So…

(If I want to know this city’s secret, I should be looking outside instead of to the center.)

If she was being shown some form of illusion, everything within a certain area would be perfectly recreated. There would be no flaws. But recreating it in such detail would require a massive amount of power. Would they really have enough leftover to do the same for places that weren’t directly related to the battle between Mikoto and Shokuhou? That raised the question of what was and wasn’t “related” to their battle. Strictly speaking, the word “world” didn’t necessarily refer just to the planet Earth.

Which gave Mikoto a quick way to check.

“''Outer space''.”

Mikoto entered a nearby multi-tenant building and grabbed a telescope from a random interior decoration shop. She just about walked out with it before realizing she hadn’t paid, so she quickly took care of that. If there was any possibility at all that this was ordinary reality, she couldn’t get too accustomed to behaving like a bandit.

An open space would be best, so she made her way to the nearest park.

She couldn’t actually see the stars in the sky since it was daytime, but she could still view the moon. It was visible from here, but it was obviously unrelated to her battle with Shokuhou. If she noticed something wrong with the celestial body, it would tell her that, while this wasn’t a virtual reality, it wasn’t the real world either.

“Let’s see.”

Mikoto peered through the telescope while making sure she it wasn’t pointed at the sun.

She didn’t see the moon.

She saw a giant Academy City satellite.

“?”