Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume2 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 5===

It was past the point that thinking of her as a ten-year-old mattered.

“Eek!”

Shokuhou’s throat trembled at the sudden explosion.

A powerful explosion and shockwave erupted around Anna Sprengel, sending smashed plastic and concrete into the air as a fine dust. Invisible but thick walls rushed out in every direction, forcibly tearing the inchworm and snowman from the ground as they tried to attack the honey-blonde girl. It was the same principle as a ship’s sail or an umbrella during a typhoon. Shokuhou had fallen to the ground while the monsters had their large bodies raised, so the blast affected them differently.

“Oh, my.” Anna laughed from a short distance away while holding the thin red cloth to her chest. “You finally found the courage, did you? Good girl. You seemed to be arguing before, but does she actually mean a lot to you?”

But they had bigger issues to deal with.

Shokuhou looked up while still trembling.

Academy City’s #3 had her feet perfectly balanced atop the raised edge of a short building’s rooftop. But the A.A.A. was gone. Instead of sticking with that half-destroyed junk, she must have abandoned it to focus on escaping the rocket fuel explosion.

Shokuhou Misaki raised her voice while grimacing at the unpleasant wetness of the snow that her own body heat had melted below her butt.

“What is this sticky dust ability!? Microplastics? Concrete powder? Ew, ew, ew, ew! Are you trying to kill me by having me breathe in all this gross stuff!?”

“Shut up and go back to eating your organic vegetables covered in caterpillars and worms!! I just saved your snowy ass, so you should be rubbing your forehead into the ground to thank me! And get on up here. I can’t aim my Railgun at those ''drones'' with you down there!!”

“…”

Shokuhou leaped straight up before she could even look back on reflex. She jumped a full seven meters with no footholds on the way up. Unfortunately, she had been too panicked to even think about how she would land. In fact, she jumped clear over the building rooftop, lost her balance in midair, and began to rotate vertically.

“Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no!”

“(The world would probably be better off if I just let her fall ass-first into one of the TV antennas or Christmas trees around here.)”

“Enough calm calculation ability! Just save me already! Humanely, I mean!!”

Mikoto fired a few extra Railguns down.

Instead of Anna Sprengel herself, these were launched at the table, stainless-steel pillar, and snowman that had been attacking Shokuhou.

Explosions and shockwaves erupted out and they knocked the honey-blonde girl further off course, sending her through two flips along an unnatural trajectory. And for some reason, she landed neatly in Mikoto’s arms.

She was being princess carried in a highly unusual fashion.

“Kyun☆”

“Don’t say that out loud, you liar Queen!!”

“Well, this isn’t my first time being princess carried, so this is fine by me.”

Mikoto did not like where this conversation was headed, so she relaxed her arms to let Shokuhou fall straight down. She let Shokuhou’s defenseless back fall right onto her raised knee, bending her spine at an unpleasant angle.

“Agwahh!?”

“Stop thinking you have the upper hand here and tell me one thing. I need to know to stay focused right now, okay? The first time you just mentioned: was it with that idiot? I can’t imagine who else it would be.”

“I-I’ll leave that one to your imagination.”

A gloomy darkness entered Mikoto’s eyes, but she was also focused on the reality before them. Now was not the time to be having fun with Miss Exhibitionist in her high leg swimsuit (with one portion of her body a bit damp after sitting in the snow).

Their enemy was not dead yet.

And that did not just refer to the table, stainless-steel pillar, and snowman.

Anna Sprengel parted the dust while laughing. Yet the asphalt at her feet was torn up, so the Railgun blast had definitely hit there.

(You damn monster!!)

Mikoto clenched her teeth, but she had honestly doubted a surprise attack would be enough to settle this.

That was why she had been able to fire the shot without worrying about accidentally killing the girl and forever losing the only means of saving that boy.

Her Railgun was supposed to be her trump card, but ever since the 24th, it had been reduced to a mere door knocker that always lost to the enemy’s defenses. However, she was most humiliated by the fact that she was actually growing accustomed to that fact. Of course, that was due to the fact that she had high enough base stats to swiftly accept unpleasant information so she could work towards another solution instead of being a one-trick pony.

“What do we do!? My Mental Out isn’t showing any sign of working!!”

“Has she abandoned her humanity in body and mind? Anyway, we need to get away from her for the time being! Even if we are going to take the fight to her, we need to at least lure her into a soccer field, nature park, or other open area. Otherwise we’ll just do more damage to everything around her!!”

They knew it would only sadden Kamijou Touma if they caused a ton of collateral damage while trying to save him.

And that side of him was part of what made them want to save him in the first place.

Shokuhou Misaki was wearing an enhancement suit, but she would still trip and fall (with several times the force of normal), so she could not exactly jump from rooftop to rooftop in the middle of battle. If she slipped on the snow during her running start, she could end up falling and going splat at the bottom. Thus, Mikoto continued princess carrying her while leaping from frozen building to frozen building.

The Queen of Tokiwadai brushed her hair from her shoulder.

“Yes, this is how it’s supposed to work. The super genius beauty handles all the cool and calculated brainwork while the brawny dumb-dumb handles all the fighting and the transportation while also looking after me☆”

“I’ll drop you from this twelve-story building, pork buns.”

“Whaaaat!? How can you look at this perfect, lustrous body and think of that horrifying convenience store product full of additives!?”

The dumb Queen roared back with various (meat-filled) parts of her jiggling, but Mikoto ignored it. Although she did decide to be a little kinder to Shirai Kuroko who she always used as a convenient means of getting around. She had discovered that asking for help and being asked for it were completely different experiences.

She also noticed she had calmed down enough to think about other things like that.

Not receiving any additional attacks from Anna Sprengel would of course be best, but Anna also had no real reason to stop. It was hard to imagine ''her'' losing sight of someone just because they fled across the rooftops. This was an improvement, but it had been handed to them by the enemy. Mikoto was honestly unsure if she could simply accept it, so she grew cautious.

“…”

After coming to a stop on a rooftop (while princess carrying the hot and juicy pork buns), she looked back into the distance.

She saw nothing there.

Nor did she hear anything.

She waited for a bit before realizing what had happened.

“She… isn’t following us?”

Why not?

She thought to herself in the falling snow, failed to find an answer, and felt her mind boiling over.

She thought back to the sign she had seen Anna Sprengel looking at: ''Straight Ahead – District 15.''

In other words…

“''Did she lose all interest in us!?''”