Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume13 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 3===

Heavy yet unsteady breathing sounded in the dark night of red snow.

“Pant, gasp…”

Coming from Kihara Goukei.

The end of her extended arm was grasping a giant fly head.

Her left arm was missing past the elbow and the right arm holding the corpse was already rotting away in places, revealing the greenish discoloration of the bone below.

Had her opponent called this magic? Some method that Kihara had never before seen had eliminated so many of her biological reactions that even the brains contained within her skull had been fully blown away at least twice, but, well, ''all she had to do was mend the missing biological organs.

(Still, I did lose a lot: three of the stamp-sized computer chips embedded in my body, two of my bacteria colonies, and even my precious pea crabs…)

But she had still defeated that thing.

When she tossed the unneeded fly head aside, it splatted onto the red snow-covered ground and then vanished as if melting into thin air. Like it had never existed in the first place.

Necromancer Isabella Theism was seated with her back against a building wall.

Her head was hanging limply and she wasn’t moving.

A thin layer of red snow had accumulated on her head.

She had to already be unconscious.

However, this wasn’t over yet.

Kihara Goukei heard unpleasant rustling sounds.

Coming from a golden mass resembling a giant crab.

Apparently these things had been scattered around by a visitor who went by the overblown title of “great demon”.

The small boy approached her. Probably because he was afraid.

His name was Urekawa Ousuke, wasn’t it?

She loved children. No, it didn’t have to be children. Asking for help was a gamble because it required revealing your weakness and powerlessness to someone else. To the point that a rejection from them could mean losing everything. Kihara Goukei loved anyone who would take that step to rely on her. Which was why she wanted to live up to that trust no matter what. Even though she knew, as one of the infamous Kiharas, they would all wind up disliking her in the end.

“Madame Gou…”

“Don’t worry. There is nothing to fear.”

By the time she said that, all wounds had vanished from Kihara Goukei. Only smooth skin was visible through her torn clothing. Her rotten and missing limbs were back as well.

A child was watching. Doing the correct thing always made them fear her, but that didn’t mean she should continue showing off all that gruesome blood and injuries.

…However, that didn’t mean she had regained full function of her body.

(Really, I would have been truly dead if that thing had destroyed two more of my miniaturized myocardium bunches.)

She wasn’t about to say so, though.

She was concerned, but increasing the boy’s burden by revealing the state of her remaining lives was the wrong thing to do.

As reliable Madame Gou, the correct choice was to smile and say something else.

“Let’s get you home. I will crush all the dangers and clear a path for you☆”

She was perfectly fine with leaving Isabella to die, but the boy looked up at her with damp eyes and she was forced to give herself two extra arms. …This was not a free-to-use unlimited storage space deal, though. If she didn’t orally ingest various ''ingredients'' such as protein and calcium, she would suffer from deficiency symptoms, so she had to be careful. Apparently her only choice was to fight today while carrying yesterday’s enemy on her back.

(But still.)

“This was too much of détour. I really don’t think I have enough stamina left to deal with that Coronzon person.”