Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume1 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 5===

How was he supposed to remain calm?

Kamijou Touma’s heart was racing wildly and his throat felt so dry he could have sworn there was an invisible film coating it. He felt like his voice would crack if he was not careful.

Plus, nothing he could do would erase the fact that he had been stabbed.

His opponent was the kind of person who would do that sort of thing without batting an eye.

The wound in his side had only been roughly disinfected and sewn up. His lost blood had not been replaced and the throbbing pain continued to plague his mind. In fact, if the blood loss had not left him feeling so woozy, he might have been writhing around from the pain.

Nevertheless, he had made it here.

He was here to reward the good will of the girls who had taken over while he was out of the fight.

And.

He was here to reclaim Last Order from this absurd cruelty.

It could all be a bluff, but he had to gather every ounce of willpower and courage he had.

Revealing his weakness would do nothing to improve things here. And if things got any worse, something he could not afford to lose would be shattered. Things had fallen to a point that even an amateur could tell that. It was painfully obvious.

So.

He had to make sure that did not happen.

“Are you sure you don’t have your priorities backwards here?”

The Santa girl smiled quietly while aiming her index fingers at two different locations.

The boy’s breathing really did catch in his throat.

She had not hesitated to target him with a weapon far more frightening than a knife.

“You have to choose between defeating your enemy and saving your friends, so are you sure you want to waste time playing with me here?”

“If that were true, you wouldn’t be so chatty,” he said while taking a page out of the girl’s book.

He formed a finger gun with his right hand and pointed it at the drum-shaped cleaning robot that Santa Claus had been sitting on before. With its freedom returned, that machine was slowly moving off again.

Don’t tremble.

Don’t look away.

Simply making the effort to keep his words flowing smoothly could turn the tide. He could grab at what was slipping from his grasp and lift it back up. From his opponent’s perspective, this had to be an eerie sight. It looked like the enemy soldier she had utterly defeated and even stabbed in the gut had returned like nothing had ever happened to him.

He had to make himself look like something illogical.

If his presence here made no sense, then he could throw her off balance.

This was Academy City, where people either refused to accept the unscientific or could only accept it by restating it with scientific terminology.

But at the same time, Kamijou Touma did believe in luck.

Although it primarily hit him in the form of cruel misfortune.

“That bag you threw in the river was a bluff. When you’ve got something to hide, you aren’t going to transport it in a way someone could track down so easily. That was why you needed to create ''at least two different escape routes.'' Your recovery scenario was to gather attention on the river while you let the robot containing Last Order escape to safety. Right?”

His voice did not crack.

He could still do this.

Willpower was not enough to overcome blood loss, so he honestly felt a cold sweat on his brow and was overcome by intense dizziness with every breath he took.

He heard the crackling of sparks.

The cleaning robot had changed direction.

No, it had been hijacked. A girl with short chestnut hair stood not far away. She looked just like Misaka Mikoto but was not. Even the mass-produced military clones known as the Sisters could hijack control of a cleaning robot.

“Maidono.”

The Santa girl slowly moved her finger.

She moved her right index finger from the distant building and pointed it at him. That put both finger guns on him. She apparently saw him as enough of a threat to require everything she had.

“My name is Maidono Hoshimi. Nice to meet you.”

“Another bluff.”

Don’t let her draw you in.

He pictured their exchange of words like waves crashing together. He had to draw her in. So even if it was not like him, he had to grin and respond with the look of an absolute know-it-all.

Kamijou Touma kept his mind from falling into darkness and recited the magic words.

“A criminal would never use her real name at the scene of the crime. But adding on more camouflage here must mean you’re even more scared than I thought.”

The deadly battle began with what sounded like the city itself being destroyed.

He could guess her power was Telekinesis.

She had demonstrated enough power to slice apart buildings, lift up the road and the ground below it, and freely tear apart water and gas pipes.

Right and left.

Having two points from which to wield her power gave that power a much wider breadth of applications.

What had happened just now?

A station wagon parked on the curb was lifted up overhead and then it was torn down the center like someone slicing through soft bread. The diesel fuel within its gas tank splashed everywhere. Sparks from the battery ignited that and fire poured down. Kamijou managed to roll out of the way, but then the remaining scraps rushed in from the left and right like a giant’s boxing gloves.

Imagine Breaker in his right hand could suppress the supernatural power, but then the uncontrolled wreckage would crush him.

So he kept his momentum going and slipped below the guardrail dividing road from sidewalk. He twisted his body to keep rolling so he could use one of the thick supports as a shield instead of the long horizontal metal panel.

The shock-absorbing metal structure stopped the front half of the station wagon, but he did not have time for a sigh of relief.

With a dull sound, his vision blurred and he found himself tossed more than five meters into the air. The ground below him had explosively risen up to function like a ramp.

Five meters might not seem like much, but as seen in the Ippon Seoi Nage of judo, even a single meter could knock someone out if they were not ready to hit the ground. Worse, this was an asphalt ground covered in glass shards and heavy metal scraps.

“Kh!!”

He immediately reached out and grabbed at the trunk of one of the Christmas-decorated roadside trees. The thick light cable tore and swung around like a whip and, once he blocked that, the tree snapped off at its trunk. But it did not simply fall over like normal. It unnaturally rotated vertically like it was flipping 180 degrees upside down.

If that continued, he would have been squashed like a bug hit by a hammer, but that did not happen.

By letting go of the tree trunk instead of trying to hold on, he was not caught in the vertical rotation and was flung away instead. Specifically, he crashed back-first into the center of a giant polyurethane Christmas present decoration in front of a candy shop.

With her right finger gun still at the ready, the Santa girl going by Maidono twirled that slender index finger in a small circle.

She could indicate the same target with both fingers.

By pulling the fingers apart, she could tear the target apart. By pushing them together, she could compress it. But by shifting the points of force a bit out of alignment, she could provide rotation. Her power would be dangerous enough if she could only set a target with her fingertip and indicate movements with a flicking motion, but by using both hands, she could also ''alter the vector''.

Her long blonde hair swayed as she quietly assessed his performance.

“You never stay still, do you?”

“You sure do. Are you a stationary cannon?”

He could do this.

The veil was still functioning. For better or for worse, the Santa-costumed assailant had shown too much of her power. That had to be a sign of her fear. She was afraid of ''an esper with an unknown power''.

So she wanted to believe showing off her power would cause her enemy to reveal their own, or that her pure brute strength could end it without needing to solve that mystery.

That ridiculous violence was of course frightening.

But once he saw her fear there, even that violence felt like a mask.

The more powerful the attack she used, the more her fear showed through.

(I can still win this. I’m the one making enough waves to draw her in.)

The girl pointed her index fingers high in the sky. It almost looked like she was posing for a photo, but that was actually the sign of a coming aerial bombing. She “grabbed” something in the sky and swung both hands down to slam it toward him.

He could not think of that as empty space above him.

There was air there.

(She isn’t limited to solids?)

Kamijou felt the gears of his mind jam. This was bad. The unknown always swallowed people up and blanked their mind.

She had shaken him.

His body was already in bad shape, so if the same happened to his mind, he had no chance of winning.

He had to figure this out and fast.

He could not stop here. He had to grease the wheels of his thoughts.

Otherwise, he would be swallowed up and crushed.

(This is not a freaking joke!!)

“Tch!!”

He quickly removed his belt and wrapped it around a nearby roadside tree as a lifeline. The mass of air crashing down from above might be enough to give him a light concussion, but after the wind slammed into the ground, it would scatter in all 360 degrees in search of a way out. If he only prepared for the impact from above, his feet would be scooped out from under him and he would be sent tumbling for dozens of meters.

Plus, the road was littered with small pieces of asphalt and glass shards.

What if the wind gathered those up and chucked them toward him?

The road was enveloped in an explosion even more gruesome than a directional mine that scattered countless metal balls in a fan shape to instantly negate a charge made by 50 enemy troops. This was like cleaning out the bath’s water pipes.

He could only cling to the back of the thick tree and bear with it.

The hard bark was stripped away as if by a giant file and the Christmas light cables and small branches were torn away into the wind. If he took just one step from behind that trunk, his flesh and blood body would not last even a single second.

But that was not what really mattered.

He raised his voice while sounding on the verge of coughing up blood.

“Misaka Imouto!! You’re okay, right!? Then don’t lose sight of that cleaning robot and chase after it!!”

Yes.

The girl using the pseudonym of Maidono was not really trying to kill Kamijou here. She was only trying to get away with that container carrying Last Order. And she had to cut off all pursuit. This flashy attack was no more than a stage magician preparing to do something below the table.

That was the entire purpose of this indiscriminate explosion of wind.

He did not know if she assumed the cleaning robot could move through the storm of glass and metal since it did not feel pain or if she had intended to launch the robot away with the wind, but he had to do more than simply endure this immediate threat. Defeating this girl was meaningless if the robot got away.

And he had figured something out from this.

(This whole time, she has never “grabbed” and thrown around an actual person with her Telekinesis.)

If she only needed to remove Last Order from the scene, that would have been fastest method. Either by throwing the hostage or by using her power on herself to fly. Even when she had launched Kamijou into the air, she had done so indirectly, by lifting up the ground below him when it would have been easier to directly grab and throw him.

Yet she had not done that.

No.

Once the storm died down, he let go of the belt wrapped around the tree and rushed out from behind the tree trunk.

He began a charge along the shortest route toward the blonde Santa.

She of course aimed both index fingers at him, but…

“''You can’t do it'',” he immediately announced.

This mostly seemed like an attempt to convince himself of that fact to put himself at ease.

He had to understand this or he would be swallowed up. He had to tell himself he was the one making the waves and attacking her. He was not the only one who would want the upper hand psychologically and who would be willing to lie to hold onto that. But once he considered why he wanted to make that kind of bluff, he could actually see through to her fear.

He forced himself to bare his fangs while going for a psychological cross counter.

Yes.

“At the very least, you can’t ‘grab’ living humans!! Maybe it’s about the material, like protein or something, and maybe the other person’s mind jams your power, but it’s something!!”

If that was true, she would be unable to directly stop his charge.

Her power may have been similar to a poltergeist that caused furniture to move around on its own in an old mansion. It was said those cases were often the work of an undiscovered naturally-occurring esper known as a Gemstone, especially a small child whose power spontaneously erupted during a period of high stress. This girl may have been able to consciously wield that same power.

She could grab things and move them around.

She had to stop him with an indirect attack and that would create a moment’s delay.

So he only had to arrive before that happened.

In close quarters, a knife was stronger than a gun. Similarly, he did not have to fear her power once he was right in front of her!!

“So?”

That was when she separated her index fingers.

She moved them far to the right and left.

She had been just a bit faster. She had “grabbed” something and then she directed those two fingers toward him again.

Much like jaws snapping shut.

“Why should that matter?”

A dull tremor followed.

The two giant buildings on either side of them were torn from their foundations and mercilessly crashed together with Kamijou Touma in between, erasing him from the scene altogether.