Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume9 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 3===

Mut Thebes stood alone in District 18.

The place was completely dark thanks to the martial law.

(This iron sand hand warmer is nice. Nothing can beat the classics.)

That pointy-haired boy had given her the item before they parted.

So now the chilly girl warmed herself with that modern convenience.

Anti-Skill referred to this as the third defense line, but the District 7 hospital where Anna Sprengel slept wasn’t far from here. For that boy, this had to be the last line.

Mut Thebes was a special Transcendent who could absorb people’s and objects’ shadows using her own white shadow and then use them as she saw fit. The next-gen weapons belonged to the science side, but once she absorbed them, she could use them as part of her magic.

And she had discovered a fascinating weapon here.

The 41cm Trebuchet linear artillery.

The cannon replaced the power of explosives with electromagnets, but the shells it launched in a large arc like a long throw in baseball would reach the ozone layer before accurately striking a target 20 thousand meters away. In addition to targeting a single point and piercing deep underground, it could be switched to a secondary mode that used the great air friction to intentionally destroy the metal shell in the air above the target, blasting it into plasma that could obliterate an aircraft carrier fleet in the ocean, assuming they were packed in close enough. The result could be thought of as an artificial Tunguska event.

With the main weapon, the spare shells, the targeting unit, the antiair weaponry set up nearby to defend it, and everything else, it took up an entire schoolyard.

One of the Anti-Skill officers working in the schoolyard noticed her and yelled at her.

“You there! Martial law is in effect. Get back to your dorm immediately!”

“?”

“Wh-why do you look so confused?”

She had had a shootout with them just yesterday, but had they not distributed an accurate photo of her? That was the real source of her confusion, but she knew correcting him would only make things worse, so she kept quiet.

The schoolyard artillery looked like it had been set up in a hurry and a lot of Anti-Skill officers were moving all around it, but it didn’t appear to be ready to fire yet. If Rosencreutz wasn’t delayed at the second defense line, he would probably arrive here at the third before they were ready putting it together.

But that changed if Mut Thebes absorbed it.

(Although it will take me some time to absorb such a large shadow.)

She only needed contact the long shadow formed by the bright outdoor lights, so she didn’t even need to cross the fence surrounding the schoolyard.

She waited on the side of the road and thought in silence.

It would take some time to absorb it into her white shadow, but she had nothing to fear once that was done. Because she didn’t actually need to operate the weapon as it was designed to be used. In a recent battle, she had even shined lights on a warship from multiple angles and absorbed each of its shadows to create a giant monster out of them and march across Academy City.

“Hm. Which would mean…”

Mut Thebes nodded silently to herself.

With this, she could fortify the third defense line while also using the long-range artillery to participate in the battle being fought at the second defense line.

“Interesting.”