Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Crossover3 (section)

===Part 5===

'''(7 Hours After)

It was 5 AM and the morning sun was rising. They were only seven hours in, but since everyone had already spent a full day in their original worlds, it felt more like 24 hours + 7 hours. The survivors felt like they had passed some kind of turning point, but they would collapse as soon as they let their guard down. The hardest part was yet to come. The early morning was the real challenge.

“Sigh…”

Young Shinobu and the gray pig turned his sparkling eyes toward the orange color outside the window. This was an unprecedented legend for them, so they may have seen it like reaching the South Pole.

“It’s not dark anymore. Yeah, I won’t be afraid going to the bathroom now!”

Shinobu trotted from the guest room, across the tea room, and toward the bathroom. The Zashiki Warashi sighed. He had only fallen asleep for a bit, but that pit stop seemed to have helped a lot.

Meanwhile, the others were approaching their limit.

Quenser’s group had fled the comfortable indoors to drive away sleep with the dirt yard. The basic idea was fine, but distancing themselves from the others had cut off any communication with those others. The dull flow of time was eating away at their psyches.

Quenser slowly raised his hands.

“Next topic: name a perverted noble.”

“Zzz.”

“C’mon, you need to answer, Princess! Oh, shit, she’s fast asleep!”

A white smile flashed through the two idiots’ minds. They went around slaying the monstrous 50m weapons that had ended the nuclear age, but there was nothing they could do against that mass of coquettishness.

That left only one way out of this.

“Take this!”

“Ahhh!? What the hell are you doing, Quenser!?”

In front of his shocked friend, the student began messing with the defenseless face of the sleeping teenage girl. Specifically, he pulled out a marker and drew new eyeballs on top of her cutely shut eyelids.

A bunch of white cloth had started leaving the house, but it all stopped. It flipped back and forth like a kitten’s tail as it approached a new toy, but it finally drew back inside.

Their Queen seemed to enjoy clichés.

“Phew…”

“Wait, wait, wait. If that’s good enough to fool her, I’m done taking this so seriously! I’ll just put on this eye mask with eyes drawn on it. Fweh heh heh. Wake me when it’s all ov-…”

With a sound of something bursting through the air, Heivia doubled over…no, that was only his afterimage. The actual boy was probably already in the house. A dreadful sound rarely heard even on the battlefield came from the forbidden room. A scene straight out of “Never to be Replayed! Records of Tragic Wars ~The Footsteps of Battlefield Cameraman Sewax~” faded and vanished.

Quenser trembled and yelled a complaint.

“What counts as a cliché and what counts as surreal to her!?”

The gloomy hoodie rabbit boy was probably the only one in the world who knew where she would draw the line, but he had already been taken out. Quenser felt like the terrorist with the code to disarm the time bomb had committed suicide.

But the normal part of the Jinnai family began to stir as the sun rose. First, the elderly grandmother opened all the rain shutters and the grandfather yawned while grabbing the newspaper out front. After a little more time, the mother and father left their bedroom.

“Yawn, morning Shinobu. Hm, I don’t see Hayabusa-kun anywhere.”

“Don’t worry. He was reincarnated in a world of swords and magic, so he’ll be fine. I bet he’s having the time of his life with a bunch of 14-year-olds following him around.”

“Did Shinobu really stay up all night? You can’t let him do that. Aren’t you his Nee-chan? C’mon, let’s get him in his futon.”

“W-we can’t! That’s too dangerous!!”

The sexy Zashiki Warashi struggled to take back 6-year-old Shinobu (Equipped: Gray Pig). This was Shinobu’s greatest challenge yet. A mother was too great a temptation for a 6-year-old. Even without a futon or pillow, he might pass out if she just lay him down and patted his stomach.

But Shinobu’s mother tossed in another unexpected bombshell.

“Okay, time to make breakfast! I don’t want to make him nocturnal, but I bet he’ll fall right asleep if his stomach is full!!”

The Zashiki Warashi was a Youkai that predicted the fortune of the family she had been drawn to and a strange vision came to mind in that instant.

Jinnai Shinobu. Probability of Death: 100%.

She then fully activated the Hyakki Yakou Prototype Ver. 39 Zashiki Warashi. If you aren’t quite sure what that is, you can just think of her as a pretty damn amazing Zashiki Warashi!

She tried to avoid Shinobu’s death by using that power to manipulate the entire world’s destiny, but…

(You’re kidding. I’m distorting the entire universe’s destiny and that white thing isn’t even budging!?)

You can just think of her as a pretty damn amazing White Queen!! Nothing could be done about her, so the Zashiki Warashi decided to focus on something other than the root cause. It was all over if Shinobu and the White Queen came into contact, but that just meant she had to put someone else in his place before that happened.

“Hmm, hmm.” She thought for a while as she looked around. “Well, he should work. He seems used to misfortune, so he’ll make an easy scapegoat.”

“Gnyahhhh!?”

Before even eating dinner, Shinobu had entered the kitchen and been given one of the wieners meant to go with the fried eggs, but he was already starting to snooze. Meanwhile, a spiky-haired boy screamed from the guest room.

Now each of the groups had sacrificed someone and no one would escape unharmed.

Then Misaka Mikoto’s eyes suddenly clouded over with despair.

“I don’t know what happened, but someone must have done something. Doryah! Confess to your crime or I’ll blast you all with my Railgun!!”

“Your guy gets taken out and you do this!? Aren’t you a little too dependent on him!?”

Quenser’s loose tongue won him the honor of being the first target.

“So it was you!?”

“Ah…!?”

With a deafening explosive roar, someone passed out in the yard. Since he was unconscious, the White Queen left the forbidden room and dragged him away.

The Princess was still standing perfectly still and breathing steadily with eyes drawn on her eyelids with marker, so she did not see any of it.

“Phew.”

You might have forgotten by this point, but there were two ways of overcoming this.

It was a championship.

To survive, one could either avoid sleeping or put the others to sleep.

“You could learn a thing or two about love. People are willing to throw out everything else for someone they care about.”

The sexy Zashiki Warashi was being a lot more active than usual. As her long black hair swayed behind her, she tried to sound cool, but that proved a poor decision.

It happened so quickly one could only assume she had stolen time itself.

At some point, the smiling White Queen had grabbed the Zashiki Warashi’s hands from right in front of her.

She smiled (from really close up!!) and nodded deeply as if she had found a kindred spirit.

“I understand completely!! If you love someone, it’s worth destroying a world or two or a history or two, isn’t it!? You appear to be wearing red, but I can smell a similar whiteness hidden inside you! I think we can get along quite well!!”

“Ah.”

Far be it from me to interrupt Her Majesty the Queen’s excitement, but what happened in the championship when someone was “caught” by her?

Something was thrown into the forbidden room.

Then Beatrice bit her lip in silent thought.

(Th-that was close! I just about agreed with her!)

But now the protection of the sexy and busty Nee-chan Zashiki Warashi was gone. Shinobu would likely be the next victim now. In a way, the entire “world” of the Jinnai house was his ally, but sadly the normal people would try to help by putting the young boy to bed.

And Beatrice’s top priority was Boo Boo. The situation was hopeless, but that round stuffed animal was adorable enough for her to want to stop time. And enough for her to fall into the thought patterns of a great demon king who would sacrifice everything else for him.

However…

“Boo! What’s this? I’ve never tasted anything so good!!”

“It’s a fried egg. There are countless variations in flavor depending on what you sprinkle on top.”

“What’s the difference between Worcestershire sauce and soy sauce? They’re both black!”

“But a real con-oh-sewer eats it with salt and pepper. Come with me! If we get in line first, we get ours first!”

(Ahhh!! If he wasn’t Boo Boo’s friend, I could have abandoned him to his fate!!)

Beatrice tore at her hair with one hand and sighed. She sounded cool enough, but she had entirely forgotten that it was her who had personally sent Armelina to the graveyard even though that young woman was Boo Boo’s friend.

Besides, was there anything she could do to protect them?

Beatrice’s ahoge lit on fire and swayed as she walked elsewhere.

“There’s a lot fewer of us now, so let’s settle this. I’ll start with you, Miss Modified China Dress!!”

“Tch. You managed to lock onto me while I was hiding my presence? And you really are consistent in how you deal with things. I can respect that in a way. But you really are a silly young girl if you think you can lay a hand on the Perfect Dragon who slayed a summoner!”

Lu Niang Lan’s anger flared up, but Beatrice wagged her index finger at her.

“Pay attention to who’s left, foolish woman. Notice anything in common?”

“Hm? N-no, wait…!?”

Aika (←Small)

Misaka Mikoto (←Small)

Index (←Small)

Beatrice (←Target of bullying)

Princess (←Said to have decent size, but does she really?)

Jinnai Shinobu (←Not the issue here)

Boo Boo (←Ditto)

Lu Niang Lan (←Warning! The only one with giant breasts)

People had one of two reactions when they saw something they lacked: aspiration or hatred!

“Tchhh! Wh-when did I end up in the out group!?”

“Looks like you’ve finally realized how much hate you’ve accumulated. Now go to hell and let those lumps of fat crush you under their weight! Attack, attack! Cut down the outsider!!”

No one was stronger than Lu Niang Lan in pure martial arts, but she would not fare so well when the battle girls of other worlds rushed at her from every direction.

Something had gone horribly wrong from the moment Kamijou Touma and Shiroyama Kyousuke were taken out so quickly. There was no salvation left in this world. They all attacked the main dish: the modified China dress. The grudges of girls who had long been mockingly called “small” were frightening indeed. They sent her to the graveyard like a swarm of piranhas.

Then the flat-chested criminals wiped the sweat from their brow and discussed what to do next.

“I feel like we can work together now. Why not join forces and try to fight the White Queen?”

“Come to think of it, that Queen was pretty big herself. I’m all for this one.”

(Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t have done that to Miss Flaaat.)

She could only pray for Armelina’s peace in the afterlife.