Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume12 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 5===

Gray Academy City was falling apart after so many consecutive battles.

A long narrow polished car drove slowly through the city, looking out of place among all the damage that had happened too quickly for repairs to be made.

It was colored black and gold.

It was a hearse.

There must have been a tacit understanding because the workers directing traffic rotated their red poles to keep the hearse moving.

Academy City had the unusual feature of a population 80% made up of students. The housing was overwhelmingly made up of student dorms. This greatly changed the methods for wakes and funerals compared to ordinary cities. For example, the majority of people had no blood relatives in the city, so the body was generally not returned home for a wake after the death was confirmed at a hospital. A wake was either held at a ceremony hall or the body was stored in the morgue a while longer.

Also, funerals were usually held at the student’s school.

This served several purposes: it helped reduce the impact of the death on the teachers and students, any specialized facilities for that purpose would be too few in number to cover all the city’s dead, and most importantly of all, it made a clear statement of who had jurisdiction over the body that had gone through the esper development program.

Altogether, this meant there was no hiding the date of a funeral.

Because of this, if you knew the start and end locations – the frog-faced doctor’s hospital and an ordinary high school in this case – you could predict what route the hearse would take. It helped that the unusual length of a hearse restricted what streets it could use.

A building was leaning at an angle after its rebuilding had been delayed.

On its roof, Human Aleister clutched the twisted railing and stared intently down at the ground.

The hearse couldn’t have been more vulnerable.

He could only imagine they were unaware of the value of what they carried.

The golden retriever by his side spoke bitterly.

“Don’t.”

“But this is the last chance.”

“See him off. Like a true friend should.”

“I know that!! But this is the only chance to steal the body intact!” he roared.

Anyone could choose to do the right thing. But there were paths that could not be reached in that way. Throughout this human’s history, he had been despised for taking those paths.

He didn’t ask for others’ understanding.

He had learned all too well over the course of his life that someone who feigned intellectualism by lobbing criticisms from a position of safety could never direct history in a positive direction.

If he was going to change things, it had to be now.

Chances were slippery. They were reduced in real time.

And they never grew.

“He will be at the crematorium in a few hours’ time!! Once even his bones have been burned and not even a hair remains to retrieve his DNA map from, it’s all over. ''Then I truly will be powerless.'' …Doing the right thing? Nonsense. What good is that other than a salve to dull the pain of failure??? This is how it always works in my life! It’s too late to regret your actions once it’s all over!!”

The boy’s death had already been confirmed.

He was past the point of being revived by electric shocks or a cardiac massage.

Why?

Why obsess over the presence of the body at this stage?

Why must he steal it intact?

Aleister’s opinion was simple.

He simply couldn’t accept it.

He had seen the moment of death more times than he could count.

But that didn’t mean he was used to it.

“Academy City has clone technology.”

Anyone would feel this way.

If there was a means of overturning death, what was wrong with relying on it?

This really could be the last chance. So struggle. He had no obligation to nobly give up and protect the natural order.

He shouted.

With all his strength.

“What about powered suits filled with life-support devices, cyborg tech, artificial ghosts, or even giving his preserved corpse autonomous movement! Yes, he’s dead, but so what? Death is no reason to give up!! If I make all the mistakes myself, then he can again smile in this world!!!”

The golden retriever said nothing.

Aleister had to know he was wrong.

But Kihara Noukan understood how foolish it was to reject someone’s emotions based on what was logically right. Besides, the Kihara family placed no importance on what the general public considered to be “right”.

Aleister was human through and through.

For better and for worse.

Kihara Noukan actually liked that messier side of him. That was a fact.

“But.”

The golden retriever used a skinny mechanical arm to place a cigar in his mouth.

And he prepared a special lighter to light it.

“Not everyone is going to understand your idea of romance.”

Without warning and as cheaply as in a TV drama, a cold rain began to fall.

Kihara Noukan stared at his top-quality Cuban in disappointment.

The rooftops were private property, so Academy City’s no smoking ordinance shouldn’t have applied there.

“…”

There had been no advance sign.

This rain was blatantly unnatural.

Then again, maybe it was wrong to look for anything natural inside Academy City to begin with.

A voice spoke within the pouring rain.



“Cool it.”



He wasn’t actually here of course.

The familiar voice was not playing from a speaker. Even a researcher with the Kihara name was a smidge impressed.

“That’s the sound of the falling rain. So are you superimposing your voice onto the vibrations of the raindrops themselves?”

Meanwhile, the human spoke with his voice low.

As if he were uttering a powerful curse.

“''The new Board Chairman,'' huh?”

“And get a clue. You don’t have a choice here. That third-rate bastard used up all his options that day. That’s all there is to this. Neither of us can waltz in after the fact and start messing with things.”

This rain didn’t just ''seem'' artificial.

It truly was artificial rain created by Academy City technology.

He could freely control the entire world’s weather and environment, but a single person’s life was beyond his reach. Controlling so much great knowledge wasn’t enough to make someone happy.

But this wasn’t enough to extinguish Aleister’s obsession which burned as hot as scorching lava.

Like steam, incredible emotion rose from his shoulders.

“You can’t just let this happen, can you? You must understand. He didn’t need to die. Anna Sprengel, Christian Rosencreutz, and Alice Anotherbible – those were all issues we should have solved! But he carried it all on his shoulders when there was no need to!! And now you’re going to give up? Surely you understand! If we follow the ordinary morality that everyone understands, we will lose him forever!!”

“Yes,” admitted Accelerator.

He accepted the possibility that something that should have ended could be made to continue using a cruel and grotesque method.

If all you wanted to do was make the flesh and bones called Kamijou Touma continue operating, ''that could be done.

You could mend the stopped brain and send electrical signals through it again. ''But only that.''

However.

Even then…

“But this isn’t your city anymore.”

“Kh.”

“I didn’t unfairly usurp it from you. You handed the keys to me yourself because you were satisfied. Coming back now and trying to take it back is just sad.”

He wasn’t level-headed.

He knew what this meant.

He had his own thoughts on the matter. But Accelerator appeared to be fighting his own emotions. And the #1 knew what happened when his emotions and his reason fought and the emotions won. After crawling through the city’s darkness, he knew all too well.

And he knew that bloody path led nowhere.

So he would show that his desire to not turn back and to keep his path a one-way road was more than just wordplay.

“I know,” said the new Board Chairman. His voice firm. “After choosing to participate in that experiment to kill 20 thousand clones, I know what it means for someone to die. The living are free to struggle against death. And I think they should. But someone else messing with someone who’s already dead is something else entirely. It’s similar, but so very different, Aleister.”

The 20 thousand clones’ numbers had been reduced to less than 10 thousand.

Could he atone for his sins by using the same cells to produce another 10 thousand girls with the same face?

''Like hell he could.

…Those unspoken words left Aleister stunned.

Even an idiot could understand this.

Accelerator was undeniably in the right here.

Kihara Noukan’s wet and unlit cigar wiggled uselessly in his mouth.

(The military clones, hm? That experiment was meant to evolve the #1. ''Or that was the official story anyway.'' It pushed him to grow in an unexpected direction, but you’re still the one that gave him that push, Aleister.)

“People mustn’t defile the deaths of others. The question isn’t if it’s possible. The fact that it is technologically possible is why we must show restraint.”