Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume10 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 6===

The massive bridge had clearly been bent by an impact from the side. Cracks ran through the asphalt, steel screws larger than golf balls popped forcefully from the metal beams, and the joints between the girders swelled upwards.

The black bass and bluegills seemed harmless at first, but even at 500g each, tens of thousands of them still amounted to a large weight.

With the most lovable face, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet only had to blow a kiss to control them all.

Good, Old Mary had already collapsed after taking one to the center of the chest.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet chose Aradia as her next target.

It didn’t matter that she was directly facing the Bologna Succubus right now.

She set her sights on the witch goddess who stood on the complex arrangement of metal beams used to distribute the bridge’s weight.

“Look!! The world’s most high-tech city will have any number of unloved creatures: black bass, bluegills, rats, stray cats, pigeons, and starlings to name a few. Now, false goddess, let’s see how you handle the love-starved laments of the unloved!!”

“Tch!!”

“''Hee hee☆ Or should I send the unloved humans your way''?”

As soon as Aradia stiffened, stopping her interception spell, a babbler soared sharply toward her unguarded flank. A direct hit would probably kill the wild bird, but it would go through its death throes while embedded deep inside the wound and its beak and feathers would spread contaminants around.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet stuck out her tongue.

But the night wind that reached her was no more than a night wind.

It did not carry a rusty scent.

“?”

Had it missed?

When the support from “resonating” with Alice Anotherbible should have acted as a ''tailwind'' for all her actions?

Even though simply firing blindly from the hip should have always hit the enemy?

Before Blodeuwedd the Bouquet could pursue that question, Vidhatri shouted from where she stood.

“2nd Saga!! Eliminate her now!”

“Hee hee.”

An alluring female face and limbs appeared in the dark night. She was around 18, at the midpoint between girlhood and womanhood.

But that was all that was visible.

The pieces floated separately. No, her torso had clearly been torn apart. It now contained strange hollow spaces. Had her human silhouette unraveled like bandages? Was it due to the thick ribbon that had been wrapped around her torso? The lights of the city were visible in the space beyond her partially eliminated body.

The space seemed somewhat distorted.

Or maybe it was a type of ''camouflage''.

Aradia faced this person who was strange even for a Transcendent. She had the face of a girl with short flaxen hair with the interior dyed bright blue.

“2nd Saga. Do you derive some special meaning from covering and hiding things?”

“I’ve always had trouble choosing just one thing. I never want to throw anything out, so my room always ends up a mess.”

Saga was a goddess from Norse mythology.

She was said to be extremely powerful and to manage the spring where Odin is gifted with poetry and wisdom.

But she is barely mentioned throughout all the Norse monuments and texts.

Barely anything is known about her other than that her home is called Sokkvabekkr.

Information on her was scarce.

She was a mysterious figure who is simply known to share drinks with the top Norse god.

This woman had gone out of here way to choose a god like that.

She had wanted to be her.

Aradia spat annoyed words with the yellow and black railroad crossing barrier in hand.

“If a single performer tries to forcibly dress up as multiple gods, the traits of the gods cancel each other out, diluting their presence. We normally have strict rules about what we can’t do if we want to stay in character and keep our costume authentic, but I didn’t expect one of us to take advantage of that fact.”

“By intentionally keeping a low profile, I can do things other gods can’t. I am not the star of the show. But if a tree or a bush does something they shouldn’t, the audience has no way of knowing if it was correct or not. This allows me to be a performer on the stage while also freeing me from the bonds of the script. I am the only one allowed to be myself.”

“…”

“I am the Transcendent ''who saves all the bit parts and understudies who never get any attention.'' I can’t look down on them if I’m to do that. I need to understand how they feel and be one of them first.”

She disappeared.

Did she unleash her skill to the point she became one with the air?

The bluish-white armor partially surrounding 2nd Saga’s limbs vanished into the air, causing what little of her skin and face were still visible to look unnaturally alluring.

The bright round skin of her face was like a device for giving off sex appeal.

The pupils of her blue eyes were colored an impossible bright red. Did she use a light-bending technique to pull that one off?

Even with her full body unraveled, the individual pieces were made of captivating feminine skin.

But if a member of the opposite sex were caught by her like this, it would probably break his mind.

The strange avant-garde woman sneered.

“My name is 2nd Saga, a fictional god created on the mischievous whim of the compiler. Which allows me to ''add on'' any magic I wish which is never actually found in Norse mythology. …Now, it is time you lost your one and only life. The divine curse – that is, the light of Brisingamen, necklace of infidelity – can even trigger a war between world-destroying kings. Do not assume an individual can escape that deadly fate!!”

It started at the center, where her chest had been.

The thick ribbon, which bound her skin and showed the city behind her, created a transparent distortion much like sugar water, which spilled beyond her outlines.

It forcibly gathered Aradia’s focus on a single point, much like having a finger jabbed between the eyes at close range.

Aradia sensed a definite deadliness in this unknown phenomenon.

Was she mistaken, or had that been the true trigger?

The impossible distortion became a large artillery shell that tore through the air.

This was an assassination spell.

It was guaranteed to take a life.

And the user could sidestep their own sin by saying they were only adoring the beautiful gold and jewels. The necklace brought doom, but it allowed the user to claim they didn’t know it was cursed and thought it was only a beautiful piece of jewelry. Was that to insure they would not be hit in the unlikely case that the curse was sent back the way it had come?

Aradia snorted with laughter.

The rails were laid out nicely, but it was all nonsense with no actual mythological basis. The sky is heaven, the gods shine bright, the workings of salvation and divine punishment, cats are capricious and dogs are loyal – by combining the common symbols found across cultures, anyone could fake apparent legitimacy.

Yes, this was faked.

''Her cosplay was sloppy.'' Gods were meant to draw a strict line between right and wrong, so they couldn’t accept – much less use – a loophole like this. A real god did not choose their words carefully for fear of backlash or controversy. Even the cruelest act could be written off as “divine punishment” if it was truly necessary.

And even if this curse would pursue Aradia to the ends of the Earth, there was only one thing she had to do.

“''There just have to be two Aradias''.”

“Wha-!?”

Immediately after 2nd Saga’s dumbfounded shock, the invisible curse tore itself apart with its own power.

The chilly moonlight shined on two identical people.

The black and yellow railroad crossing barriers resting on their shoulders crossed like swords mounted on a wall.

Aradia hadn’t actually done anything. The curse simply hadn’t been designed to handle an abnormal situation where two identical people existed. It was unable to deal with the situation it found, so the single shell attempted to pursue two targets at once, tearing itself apart from within.

It dissipated.

It disappeared.

“Don’t you dare call this cheating. This has always been our role – we’re the perfect performers. And it was all of you who created ''a second one'' and brought her here without even asking me.”

Right and left.

The identical Aradias launched wind magic that struck the formless Transcendent.

The tides were turning.

“…”

Vidhatri was dumbfounded.

But she wasn’t simply shocked that a Transcendent receiving a ''tailwind'' by “resonating” with Alice Anotherbible had been defeated by a Transcendent who had that link severed and was alone in the storm.

More than that…

“''Why did you have that idea just now''?”

“''What do you mean''?”

“It also doesn’t make sense that you avoided Blodeuwedd the Bouquet’s initial attack. Even if there was a way for you to defeat 2nd Saga, it never should have occurred to you!! That kind of support comes from Alice. How did you break through the thought masking!?”

“I would assume conditions have changed somewhere away from here.”

“Tch!!”

Panic spread through the air, infecting the entire space.

Vidhatri seemed rushed by something unseen rather than her own will as she unspooled a lot of white thread and black hair from the ball-joint doll she wore on her back.

By intentionally omitting all mention of something, that spell let her erase anything she didn’t like from the small world set up around her. If she erased everything that could kill her, then no one could defeat her.

A moment later, a dull impact struck her cheekbone. Something flew in from the side and Vidhatri was launched spinning through the air. The impact permeated her. Before she could figure out what had happened, her ball-joint doll broke apart and her model-proportioned body soared over the pedestrian railing and toward the dark river below.

But Aradia hadn’t done anything.

“You were focused on the wrong person, dumbass.”

Aradia glanced over to see a small figure standing boldly atop a metal beam.

It was Anna Sprengel.

“Keh heh heh. Alice no longer rules this world. Worms, bow before me and beg for your pitiful lives. It wasn’t you who created the Shrink Drink – you needed Alice’s help for that. Yet all you worthless regular Transcendents had the nerve to look down on me and try to kill me!!!”

“Before she could figure out what had happened, huh?” the goddess of witches whispered in exasperation. “So Vidhatri could preemptively eliminate any threat, but she was defenseless against any threat that never occurred to her.”

If anything, that was a lot like the death of the immortal Norse god of light, Baldr. That similarity was ''not'' a case of cultural transmission between India and Europe. It was instead evidence of the Transcendents not actually being strictly bound to a single god or even a single mythology.

“Have you imagined your own fate yet, 2nd Saga?”

“Have you imagined your own fate yet, 2nd Saga?”

“!?”

Multiple beams of light flashed out at once.

The two Aradias held out their palms to launch projectile magic toward the figure leaping vigorously from beam to beam. The attacks actually hit 2nd Saga. It was hard to believe she had been so untouchable just a bit ago. She was knocked from the beam above to the bridge below.

Mut Thebes (who was on their side but had lost control of herself) had her drone carrier stopped by a three-legged object that appeared out of thin air. That was Good, Old Mary’s Tribikos.

The tides had turned in the blink of an eye.

The only one left was Blodeuwedd the Bouquet in her coat-like blast-resistant suit and naked apron.

Aradia approached her directly, the Bologna Succubus glared icily at her, and bloody Good, Old Mary slowly rose to her feet.

“Wai-”

The dull “thump!!” of pierced flesh rang out.

The Bologna Succubus had launched her sharp tail and caught Blodeuwedd the Bouquet in the shoulder.

Using a frontal attack with no tricks.

The force of the blow broke the iron-maiden-like blast-resistant suit and the double doors covered in metal panels fell to the asphalt. With her protection gone, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet’s bare skin was exposed to the frigid air while she scattered junk from her terrarium and UV LED lights. The night wind carried away the flower petals.

“This is already over,” said the Bologna Succubus.

Her voice was colder than it ever had been when that boy was present.

The naked apron girl backed away, but her legs tangled underneath her.

She fell like normal.

Her specialness was gone.

“You forgot about your salvation condition, you abandoned the people you should be saving, and you thought only of preserving your own power. And then you blamed Alice for it all. …So this is already over. You have nothing left. Nothing at all.”

“You’re going to win this...and take everything from me?”

With only her frilly apron left, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet held her wounded shoulder with the opposite hand and struggled to keep her breath.

The powerful sex appeal she gathered around her had dissipated, leaving behind only the fear of a small child.

“This is all we have. You can’t tell me the idea of losing your power doesn’t scare you.”

“I am a Transcendent. I choose who I should protect and then guard those people from the threat this world presents them. Which is why I abandoned my own identity to dress up as a god,” said Witch Goddess Aradia. “My salvation condition does not include myself. And I would never rob innocent people of their future just so I could keep my own shameful life.”

With a dull sound, the Transcendent ended things with the Transcendent.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was the last one.

There had been others, but they raised their hands in surrender when they saw the tides changing. That was about what you got with people who only worried about themselves.

But with Alice ''Anotherbible'' as an open-source example, more Transcendents could be created. Just like there were two Aradias here.

Remaking the city’s people into makeshift witches wasn’t an option here like it had been in Shibuya. If Academy City espers used magic, they would be harmed by the side effects and, if Alice wanted to, she could produce an unlimited supply of regular Transcendents. Those would be literally a grade above.

Any victories won fighting on the outer edges would only be temporary. And with only limited numbers to work with, they wouldn’t last if they were forced to fight the same battles over and over.

“This was no more than an opening skirmish,” said Anna Sprengel despite understanding that.

She was another host and open-source example who differed greatly from the Alice line.

They couldn’t stop here.

“Our real target is Alice. This rioting doesn’t end until she’s been stopped. The Queen of Hearts and Executioner waiting near Alice could easily be more powerful than the regular Transcendents.”

“If you have the time, could you deal with her too? Mut Thebes is shooting off ‘fireworks’ like this is some kind of party, so it would be great if you could bring that idiot back to her senses!!”

“Oh? Silly girl, are you sure you don’t want to take a video first?”

The giant white ship shook.

She must have been freed from the unseen physics that could be seen as Alice’s ''tailwind''.

Mut Thebes must have absorbed the weapon’s shadow, but where exactly was she attached to it?

“Bff!? Wait, wait, I’ll be good.”

“Finally come to your senses? Then take a look at the collapsed city around you. I can’t wait to see what kind of excuse you can come up with while dripping with sweat, God of Partying.”

“But if my partying was enough to destroy an entire city by accident, doesn’t that make me a super powerful goddess? And since we can all see how ultra-cute I am, can’t I get off the hook with a quick: ‘Oopsie. Tee hee’?”

“Good, Old Mary, use your Tribikos to step on that god of destruction, ship and all. It’s January, so dunking her to the bottom of the river ought to cool her head.”

Aradia icily passed judgment, but then a cracking voice came over the ship’s speakers.

“Oh, and the drone carrier’s antenna picked something up,” said Mut Thebes.

“?”

“It wasn’t encrypted or anything, so it was a lot like a radio transmission. Maybe it’s best to say this is being sent out all over the place. They might have been hoping we would pick it up. It’s being transmitted from ''a prison in District 10'' and it says it’s about Alice Pleasance Liddell.”