Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume15 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 3===

The Black_Oneday hacking tool.

What exactly could someone accomplish with that?

Hamazura Shiage and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had left the international airport through a small back entrance and were now hiding in an area full of the electric carts and forklifts used to transport suitcases. …Although Hamazura wasn’t very confident this really counted as hiding when it came to District 23 security.

His eyes dropped to the cracked screen of his phone.

“Apparently Black_Oneday is a specialized hacking tool that uses a vulnerability in Stardust.”

“What? I don’t know what that Black thing or that Star thing are.”

“I don’t either, so all I can do is read off what Aneri tells me. Aircraft and spacecraft are a lot more computerized nowadays, but hooking them up to the ordinary internet creates to much of a risk of remote cyber attacks. Like opening a door midflight and causing it to break apart. So the systems are kept separate from the ordinary lines. Everything from the programming language used to the encryption method and even the radio frequencies are different.”

“And all of that together is called Stardust? And it was all broken somehow? Are they stupid?”

“Maybe, but that also means Black_Oneday ''can’t cause any harm to anything other than'' the aerospace industry. So it’s not all bad, I guess?”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet didn’t seem delighted.

The monster frowned instead.

“Would that tool just be lying around in Academy City? Like a free game?”

“It was created by some respected university professor. He was sick of the airlines insisting their security was unhackable, so he wanted to give them enough of a scare they would actually start doing their job. So the tool is known as an independently created research sample. It’s not supposed to be publicly available, but someone could always create something that works the same way. So maybe this is a different version of it.”

Things made for benevolent purposes could end up harming people.

Not to mention the respected professor may not have been entirely honest about his reasons for making it.

Did he even know the real reason himself?

Could he just have wanted to give people a scare?

“So it was a fake cyber attack meant to make people more security conscious? Sounds like it had the opposite effect in reality…”

The emaciated girl tilted her head.

Maybe Blodeuwedd the Bouquet didn’t particularly care.

“So let’s just assume that Black_Oneday thing has fallen into the wrong hands. What could someone do with it? I don’t know much about hacking tools, but what’s the last thing we would want happening right now?”

“Hold on… Aneri, what’s this? You’re kidding, right?”

Hamazura had trouble believing the information Aneri had displayed on the phone’s cracked screen.

What was this city building?

“Moonbow. A strategic ground-launched optical weapon?”

Basically, it was a large-scale laser weapon. Powerful enough to pierce straight into a nuclear shelter located deep underground.

Moonbow would first fire a weaponized laser from an oscillator base in District 23 to outside the atmosphere, where it was reflected by a movable reflector covering the interior of a giant crater on the moon in order to target a specific point on Earth. The distance to the moon was more than 380 thousand kilometers, but the round trip only took an instant at light speed. That meant the powerful laser weapon could ignore the horizon and attack anywhere with a view of the moon. Any VIP around the world could be killed no matter how deep they hid underground.

To make matters worse, Aneri’s report said ''there were signs it had already been fired.

“It was targeting District 23… So a laser weapon with a range covering half the Earth was used to attack ''right next door''?”

“Dammit, Good, Old Mary. Did you get vaporized by a pillar of light?”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet didn’t sound particularly concerned. As long as someone didn’t meet her salvation conditions, maybe she didn’t care too much what happened to them.

If a weapon like that could be fired repeatedly, the Earth was done for.

Both because of its destructive power and because it could turn the entire world against Academy City even if they hadn’t been the one to fire it.

…And even in this dire situation, Hamazura still couldn’t fight alongside the Anglicans. Because they wouldn’t allow it.

The Anglicans were hunting for him.

They were so focused on him they hadn’t noticed the Black_Oneday hacking tool or its user. Of course, he got the impression they wouldn’t be willing to hear him out even if he did give them this information.

Especially when ''Aneri could hack too.'' When they followed the path he had used to escape the airport, they would discover he had hacked open the electronic locks. The Anglicans didn’t know about Black_Oneday, so they would suspect Hamazura for any other hacking.

The Anglicans were a threat, but focusing on them alone would leave the Black_Oneday user free to act. Their object was unclear, but this could even lead to a war between Academy City and another country.

Should he say that served them right?

He couldn’t articulate why he felt this way, but that didn’t seem like it would help Coronzon.

The emaciated girl tilted her head.

“So is humanity doomed because the arbiters of justice are useless?”

“No… The weapon uses a large COIL, so the highly toxic gas needs to be neutralized each time it’s fired. Simply put, it takes a long time to reload.”

“Ehh? The hacker’s controlling it remotely, so why would they care?”

“It’s structurally designed so it can’t fire again until the toxic gas has been fully neutralized. You can’t get around that just by messing with the software remotely.”

“We wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with if they had made the thing fully manually controlled.”

Anyone could look like a genius if they waited to complain until after the problem had occurred.

But while it took a while, the reload time was only about 50 minutes.

If they didn’t track down the Black_Oneday user and deal with this before then, some other part of the world could be fried by a second powerful laser. And if that location was outside Academy City, it would mean war with the victim country.

In the worst case, the target would be related to the UK or the Vatican. Like an enclave or an airplane in flight. It was last night all over again.

“Can’t you get Aneri-tan to stop it?”

“I don’t get it myself, but apparently hacking doesn’t work that way.”

According to Aneri’s wall of text (weren’t AIs supposed to summarize things!?), two people could hack into the same computer separately. But it was difficult for one of them to take control and kick the other one out. They were both using the same vulnerability, so would plugging the hole lock them both out?

Not even the greatest sprinter could plan to keep their rival from reaching the goal.

So if the Black_Oneday user seriously wanted to cause mass destruction, Aneri couldn’t stop them.

This problem could only be solved by beating up the user in real life, not online.

“Hmm?” Blodeuwedd the Bouquet paused to think for a moment. “If we can’t stop their hacking before the time limit, couldn’t we physically destroy the laser facility before it can fire again as ''a backup plan''?”

“I get the feeling you really could do that. But don’t.”

If someone did that without the appropriate authority and without going through the appropriate procedure, they were no more than a terrorist.

And if they spent all their time on that, they wouldn’t actually solve the real problem.

After all, the laser wasn’t the only weaponizable technology in District 23.

Aneri displayed a list ranked by danger level on the small screen.

“The most obvious one would be…the Morning Star? This above ground mass driver is pretty terrifying. It’s basically a giant railgun, right? I could see them launching a meteor all the way around the Earth and then dropping it on our heads.”

“What about this? A next-gen engine for optical rocket R&D? They’re talking around it, but isn’t that a donut-shaped fusion reactor using deuterium? That’s where they magnetically enclose plasma with a temperature over a hundred million degrees. Destroy the container while it’s running and it wouldn’t just destroy Academy City – the entire Kantou region would be wiped off the map and covered by the sea.”

“Meaning?”

“We have 50 minutes left, right? We need to make the most of that time. Destroying each individual facility isn’t going to work. Sounds like this crisis won’t end unless we defeat Black_Oneday itself.”

…His head hurt.

What was Academy City doing? He wasn’t sure how he wanted to spend the remaining days or even hours of his life, but here he was faced with a global crisis.

Hamazura couldn’t just sit idly by and let it happen.

He couldn’t just blindly run from the Brits anymore.

Coronzon’s methods may have been wrong, but she had been trying to create a better world in her own way. And his girlfriend Takitsubo and his old friends like Hanzou were still here in Academy City. He didn’t know who had set up this Black_Oneday game, but he was sick of seeing the world threatened with destruction for something as nonsensical as destruction for the sake of destruction.

Coronzon, huh?

“Why?”

Hamazura gritted his teeth.

Digging into this wouldn’t improve his odds of survival here. He knew that.

But he still hung his head, faced his inner thoughts, and forced out a resentful voice.

“Why did Coronzon have to die? And all for some formless concept like ‘the world’ or ‘the human race’?”

In that moment, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had to have heard Hamazura’s groan.

Which was why she responded.



“Because she lost.”



Hamazura seriously thought his heart was going to stop.

''What did she just say?

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet tilted her head cutely.

“Huh? Did I say something weird? Has anything ever been solved by someone proving themselves right and everyone just obeying them, or someone being proven wrong and backing down?”

“…”

“The world isn’t that simple, you dummy. The winner wins it all and the loser loses everything. Their dreams, righteousness, their lives, the world – everything. That’s always how the world has worked. Looking back in history, that’s been the way of things at least as far back as several thousands years BCE. …Kamijou Touma did kill Coronzon, but Coronzon had accepted these conditions when she fought. Are you going to start throwing a tantrum that those rules are unfair after the fact?”

“……………………………………………………………………………………”

What?

What, what, what, what, what was she talking about???

“Kamijou Touma failed to save Coronzon? You’re looking at this wrong. Kamijou Touma has had the right to kill all of the enemies he has defeated. As the one forced to bear the possibility of death were he to lose even once. Self-defense isn’t an obligation – it’s a right. It’s just that he never chose to exercise that right after he won. That’s all it was. Saving even one of the people he defeated is worthy of praise. Now, truth be told, I did somewhat expect him to save Coronzon since he was enough of a soft-hearted fool to save Alice. But if you respond with anger and throw a fit because he betrayed your expectations and didn’t go above and beyond just that one time, then you’re relying far too much on your enemy. Attacking all you like and then demanding forgiveness once you lose is making a mockery of the entire concept of combat.”

This should have been a perfectly logical argument, but it refused to enter his mind.

All the unfairness and unreasonableness he had only been vaguely aware of was rushing in at him all at once. It covered the entire world so thinly and widely it didn’t even feel real to Hamazura even though he had to be contained by it as well.

“Besides, what’s considered ‘right’ changes wildly depending on the time period, region, organization, and personal beliefs.”

Did she realize how messed up that idea was, or didn’t she?

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet sighed softly.

“Take Aleister Crowley for example. Some say he was promoted to 5=6 of the Inner Order by Mathers in Paris and others say the London faction didn’t recognize that and he was stuck in the Outer Order or as a Portal at 4=7. And Crowley himself claimed to be a 9=2 after creating new rules within his own cabal. You see what I’m getting at, don’t you? What’s ‘right’ changes depending on what source you use. There are as many answers as there are people and no one can agree on what the best answer is, so these things can only be resolved by force.”

No, he didn’t see.

That wasn’t it.

He wasn’t talking about that. He wasn’t interested in some historical examples. He was talking about something more basic and down-to-earth.

“But if you still don’t like the idea of fighting to the death, you should have gotten involved way back when the rules were being made and there was a chance to choose one of the countless ‘right’ answers through nonviolent means. That is where you should have fought your ''battle''. But you didn’t put in the work and you ran around foolishly assuming ''for no good reason'' that no one was going to die on that battlefield buried in red snow, so you don’t have the right to complain now. Unfortunately.”

“No.”

Finally, Hamazura spoke up.

The dumb Level 0 spoke to the Transcendent who had accessed divine specs.

He couldn’t accept it, but he did feel like he finally had a general idea what she was saying.

He finally had a handle on the goal he truly had to fight for.

He had to face this strange feeling head on.

“There are different forms of justice out there. On its own, that sounds like a testament to the wonders of diversity. But that doesn’t mean you can just casually shift from one idea of what’s ‘right’ to another. Choosing whatever version of ‘right’ is most convenient at the moment is the same as getting a stomachache, fearing it’s something serious, and, instead of going to the hospital, searching online until you find something saying it’s nothing to worry about. All you’re doing is choosing whatever opinion tells you to do what you already wanted to do.”

More than that, it wasn’t something to be determined by whoever could punch the hardest. Wouldn’t that just lead to a dystopia where whoever was the strongest got to bend everything to their will?

He found Blodeuwedd the Bouquet grinning in front of him.

“How interesting. Hee hee☆”

“…What is?”

“Oh, just that you keep going on about how much you hate justice, but in the end you just want to save people too. …I am the Transcendent who loves and saves all of the hated, so I’m used to people who can’t be honest with themselves☆”

“That’s not what this is…”

He couldn’t look her in the eye.

Hamazura didn’t long for justice from the side of evil like Coronzon had.

He quietly spat out a response.

“It’s not like you have to be on the side of justice to save people. Bad people can shield people from bullets too if they move in the way. Saving people ''is nothing more than a physical action''.”

“Hmm, so close.”

“?”

“You’re not quite there. But it’s not bad. Hamazura, you really do hate goodness and justice, don’t you? You hate those mindsets that lead people to take lives. That’s a good start, so explore this a little further. You will find something if you do. Although this is more Aradia’s territory than mine.”

He didn’t understand.

Also, who in the world was Aradia?

“Now, I need to know what your plans are. You’re not interested in fleeing to the farthest reaches of the world and curling up there where you’re safe, right?”

“Right.”

“That Black_Oneday hacking tool is super bad news. We can’t ignore it. So are you going to protect Academy City’s peace and safety in your own twisted way?”

“That about sums it up.”

…Or did it?

Hamazura still wasn’t certain if this would help Coronzon in any way. But he felt like what the Black_Oneday user would do was completely different from the destruction she had tried to accomplish.

“Either way, we’re the only ones who know that hacking tool is out there. So we can’t just let the Black_Oneday user have their way.”