Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Crossover Chapter 3 (section)

===Part 5===

Niflheim was a hopeless land entirely covered in white snow and ice.

It was a comfortable environment for Hel who ruled that underworld, but the same could not be said of the human souls cast into that abyss.

The jangling of their thick chains never ended.

Even the will to cry out in pain had been worn away, so they suffered in silence. Those “sinners” looked more like machines or dolls than humans.

There was an old man who had collapsed from old age.

There was a child who had been too sick to ever leave his hospital bed.

There was a mother who had died in childbirth but at least managed to bring her child into the world.

“…”

Hel stared at them in that white world.

Odin, ruler of the nine worlds, had proclaimed them “evil”. He desired valiant and powerful warriors and any human souls who would not help him with Ragnarök were deemed “evil”.

She had never questioned it before.

She had accepted it as normal.

“…”

It was unlikely that applied only to her.

Those “sinners” suffered until their minds broke and there was no end in sight for them. There was no purification, no rebirth into the next life, and no other system to save them. They were simply discarded here and forever abandoned, but even they had given up and saw no other option.

After all, this was the way of the world.

After all, everyone was taught that this was normal.

After all, Odin had unilaterally decided on these rules and created the system.

But…

“…”

Hel herself was not sure what exactly was brewing inside her.

Those minstrel-like strangers had told her the truly foreign moral tales of their worlds and that had broken the gears inside her.

Or perhaps the strangers themselves had been the cause.

She heard the jangling of a chain. This was a dissonant noise that stood out from the standard pace of the others. A small child had collapsed into the deep snow.

While Christianity had demons and Buddhism had oni, the Norse underworld had no specialists to torment the sinners.

The whips and clubs were held by translucent amorphous humanoid silhouettes.

Human souls were used to torture the “sinners”.

To the gods of Asgard, souls that could not take part in war were useless objects that would be no help during Ragnarök and Hel reused them as her own army.

Of the “sinful” souls who were crushed further every day, only those able to be reused were added to her army.

However, that was no salvation for those souls.

The killers, the killed, the torturers, and the tortured were all identical human souls.

They had no sense of brotherhood. That normal sense was thoroughly crushed during the eternal torture received for their supposed sins.

Some souls writhed in pain like machines and others tortured them like machines.

“…”

And that same sight continued as far as the eye could see.

It was obvious what would happen to the collapsed child’s soul.

The torturer ghosts gathered around the child who had disturbed the system and they held whips and clubs in their hands. They had no efficient set of steps or a manual. If this child would not stand back up, they would beat him until he did. If he would not obey, they would destroy his body until he did.

He was only a dead soul.

He was only a never-ending being that had shifted outside the normal ecosystem.

He was only trash that the gods had decided could not be saved.

“…me.”

But at that moment, Hel muttered to herself.

And her voice rose to a yell that shook Niflheim.

“You’ve got to be kidding me, Odiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!”

She stomped across the white snow and ice and forcefully kicked away the torturer ghosts swinging their whips toward the child’s spirit.

But those torturers had simply been given that role.

They were also human souls sent to Niflheim. The head god had judged them “useless”, so they had been thrown into a world of eternal torture where great pain would wear away even their ability to feel fear or put up any resistance.

Hel truly looked at her surroundings once more.

There were no “sinners” here. Not a single one had done anything wrong, be it stealing, lying, or killing.

And yet they had all been given that label.

It was all for Odin’s benefit and they would not benefit him any. But more importantly, it was due to the actions of Hel herself while believing in that system. She had truly believed that these victims were “evil” just because they were of no use to Odin.

There was no salvation for them.

Nothing was going to change.

Nothing could be changed.

In this world, the bearer of justice and the god who proclaimed himself on the side of good was only thinking about himself. Nothing else could be relied on to purify them. And no matter how rotten or ridiculous he was, Odin and the army of Asgard he commanded were the strongest and the largest, so they could say they were the good guys and do whatever they wanted. Even if they were wrong, nothing would change. Not ever.

If she had never questioned it, she may have at least been able to numb herself to the pain, but now she knew.

Not even she knew what had caused it, but now she knew.

She knew something was wrong about this.

She had realized something obvious.

It would have been simple to say she had grown.

But in this hopeless world of combat, it may have been more accurate to say she had broken.

And if she could only obey the movement of those gears…

“Break…”

She begged.

Hel, queen of the underworld, begged.

But not to the gods who were only concerned with their own desires and benefit. She begged to her own heart.

“Break it all!! Break everything ‘here’!! Break every last piece of it!!”

Something writhed in the center of her heart.

She was no longer the “Queen of the Underworld”, that silly role Odin had given her after the fact.

This was something massive that had been there since the moment she was born. It was something different from what Fenrir or Jörmungandr contained and it was something the prophetesses and the three goddesses of fate had been unable to grasp.