Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume5 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 6===

Kamijou Touma had no choice but to spread his arms and catch her.

“Gwah!!”

He had chosen to do it himself, but he nearly lost all awareness of where he was. The breath caught in his throat. As soon as the impact hit him, his upper body was pushed straight down. His feet nearly slipped from the ground and his hips bent more than 90 degrees. He had taken the impact on the arms, yet he felt an intense pain in his neck and back more than his shoulders.

What was the average weight of a 1st year middle school girl? 40kg? 50kg? It felt more like a small meteor had hit him. Never again would he dream of a heroine falling from the sky. If one of those actually landed on you, you’d be dead.

Nevertheless, he managed to catch her.

He just barely kept her from hitting the asphalt after falling more than 7m. Once the numbness wore off, he could finally feel her warmth. She was still alive.

“Ow… Wow, I can’t believe I did it. That was pretty badass, right? If I don’t praise myself and drown my brain in endorphins over this one, I’m pretty sure I’ll keel over from blood loss.”

“Teacher☆”

Innocent Alice spread her arms and hugged him with her higher body temperature.

She rubbed her face side to side on his stomach, poking him with the pointy animal ear curls. She gave him an endorphin-fueled smile and pointed up.

“There’s more coming down.”

“Hm!? Eek!!”

Kamijou quickly adjusted his grip on limp Shirai Kuroko and fled below the railway overpass where some rundown food carts were set up. Smiling Alice clung to the side of his hip the entire time.

He heard some heavy crashing noises as metal pieces of something rained down. Had the rails been torn up, or were those the poles holding up the power lines? Not only were they heavy, but they scattered bluish-white sparks.

“What the hell!? Is there a mountain gorilla or a dinosaur going nuts up there!?”

He so hoped the unidentified monster didn’t jump down here. He shifted the twintailed middle school 1st year into a princess carry and stepped out from the other side of the railway overpass. They needed to avoid this foe’s attention while getting as far away as possible. Alice ran alongside him staring jealously at the girl being princess carried like something from a picture book, but he didn’t have time to focus on that. Making any promises now might just lead her to leap onto his back with a smile, so just like a stray dog you can’t take home with you, showing kindness would actually be crueler in the end.

He felt a dull pain throbbing in his temple. He too had been attacked by someone up there.

“Wait, wait, wait. What happened to Frillsand #G? Death is coming on so much stronger than in Alice’s world. My skin is still tingling after making it this far away.”

“Hmm.”

What happened next went well beyond a pink bat and some hedgehog balls emerging from below her apron.

He heard a straining sound.

He looked over to see Alice’s fairy tale dress pulling to either side so hard it was about to tear. The sturdiness of the actual materials and stitches didn’t matter. It was going to tear as easily as a thin stocking. It was all too obvious that the stagnant warmth gathered inside was trying to escape.

If that burst open, the world would be destroyed.

“It’s not too late to ''use'' the girl.”

“Please, Alice. Anything but that!!”

Alice genuinely puffed out her cheeks and pouted her small lips. That was the look of a girl whose thoughtful suggestion had been rebuffed as a nuisance. The apparent innocence only made him more concerned she might ''explode'' without warning.

“Keep that hidden and don’t let it out at the drop of a hat. Please!!”

“So it’s a secret? A secret for just the girl and her teacher!? Kyah, kyah☆”

It transformed into a smile an instant later. She even held her hands to her cheeks in an extremely bashful way. That was a relief, but he had to hope the things he said now weren’t going to come back to bite him later. Saying whatever saved his skin in the moment could end up teaching her the wrong lesson.

That was when Shirai Kuroko groaned in his arms.

“Ugh.”

No matter how weak she was, he was afraid she might suddenly move her limbs and unbalance herself enough for him to drop her. He gave up on moving and stopped below the roof of a deserted bus stop.

Even stopping to ask her what had happened up on the elevated railway was taking a risk. If he didn’t keep a close eye on their surroundings, the unidentified monster could catch up and tear him in two.

But Shirai brought up some unusual points.

“Hold on. So you’re saying this Anti-Skill Negotiator is trying to bring the Handcuffs criminals onto her side to boost her power enough to fight even more powerful criminals?”

“Yes, what about it?”

“But she was directly involved in the Overhunting’s crash. She was the one who messed with the ATS brake sensor on the track.”

Shirai Kuroko was very insistent that he put her down, so he carefully lowered her onto the simple bench.

“That doesn’t make sense if she’s part of some secret special forces mobilized to capture the Handcuffs criminals who escaped the prisoner transport train. Why would the Anti-Skill Negotiator cause the crash that let the criminals escape in the first place? For that matter, ''when did she find the time'' to contact Rakuoka Nodoka and turn her into a puppet?”

There was of course another possibility.

Maybe that Anti-Skill Negotiator named Tessou Tsuzuri had arrived after the fact to solve the case and the crash had been caused by some third party like Frillsand #G.

But Kamijou Touma shook his head even as he described the possibility.

“No, that couldn’t be.”

“Why not, teacher?”

“Then she would have no reason to attack me to hide the cause of the crash. If it was just me, fine – maybe she got confused. But she did the same thing to Shirai. And Shirai was wearing a Judgment armband. It doesn’t make sense to assume she’s a criminal just because she’s approaching the scene of a crime on the off-limits elevated railway. That wasn’t a mistake. She’s attacking anyone who comes by to investigate the crash. To hide her own guilt.”

“You mean?”

“Her plan was to let the criminals escape so she can kill them while they ‘resist arrest’ or whatever excuse she comes up with. If they end up in prison, they’ll be out again eventually. So what’s the only way to ensure they never commit another crime? She may feel the need to settle this once and for all since it was Anti-Skill that risked their lives arresting these criminals in the first place.”

Anti-Skill only had the right to arrest. They couldn’t convict a suspect or adjust the severity of their sentence. According to Shirai, Tessou’s colleague had brought that up over the phone and Tessou had said she didn’t care about the criminals’ rights.

That was the answer right there.

She wasn’t satisfied with the sentence the courts had given and decided to carry out a capital punishment herself. And she was willing to destroy a strictly-defended prisoner transport train to do it.

She had taken it upon herself to determine the weight of their sentence.

She felt Anti-Skill deserved to redefine those criminals’ punishment.

(Was it that bad? Can she not bear to go on if she doesn’t cling to her hatred of Handcuffs?)

Kamijou had not directly experienced the hellish night of the 25th, so it was hard for him to say.

The metal rails or poles falling from the railway suggested it was an absolute mess up there. Perhaps Tessou was physically eliminating all evidence of her sabotage. She and Rakuoka Nodoka had come from elsewhere, so they may have been going around destroying each piece of sabotage in turn. So even if a forensics team went over the place with an electron microscope, they would only find the scars left by Rakuoka Nodoka’s rampage. And that was no skin off Tessou’s nose when she only saw the other woman as a useful tool.

Tessou Tsuzuri, the mastermind behind it all, could walk away unchallenged and find someone else to capture and threaten. She didn’t feel an ounce of camaraderie with Rakuoka Nodoka, so she would use up a human being like a bullet. She would repeat that process until all of the infamous Handcuffs criminals were wiped out. So she would proactively gather anyone related to that event and set them up to destroy each other.

She was joining forces with the criminals on the other side so she could gather together all the technology seen at Handcuffs.

Kamijou had chosen that same path in Alice’s world. All while that small girl guided him around by the hand. Did that choice really look so twisted and ugly from the outside?

“It won’t be that easy, Tessou Tsuzuri.”

Before, Kamijou had assumed he only had to hand the captured criminals over to the adults in Anti-Skill, but this proved that idea wrong. He had to protect the prisoners from the sinister scheme set up by some of the adults.

“This greatly changes how we have to go about this,” whispered Shirai Kuroko, holding a hand to her swollen forehead that had to ache pretty bad. “This Anti-Skill Negotiator only sees the escaped prisoners as a means to expand her power. She seems to be doing fairly well with Rakuoka Nodoka so far, but if Tessou Tsuzuri was planning to deal with the Handcuffs criminals from the beginning, would she really assume she ''only'' needed verbal threats to get them to obey? She already knows how far those villains are willing to go.”

“Are you suggesting she has something else set up?” asked Kamijou.

“It’s too soon to say anything for certain, but her plan seems to be to actively bring criminals onto her side and use them as efficiently as possible to defeat and threaten even more powerful prey. We need to ''protect'' them before she can capture them and use them as a disposable tool. Who knows how far the harm will spread if we don’t.”

Kamijou smiled a little at that.

She gave him a puzzled look.

“What? This is no laughing matter.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She had said they needed to ''protect'' them.

Belonging to Anti-Skill or Judgment did not mean you had to blindly hate the criminals and view them as an enemy.

People were too delicate and complex to be described with simple, named emotions. They would make seemingly contradictory or incomprehensible choices all the time.

And this unexpected choice felt really nice.

Not everything was permissible simply because it was considered “just”.

This was not the convenient world Alice had created for him. Good was not guaranteed to prevail and evil was not guaranteed to be punished in this version of the 29th. The prisoners didn’t stay in the train station forever, someone not even on his mental cast of characters had attacked him, and the dead would not come back to life. If you declared it unfair and came to a stop, you would be the next one to be mercilessly destroyed. This world could only be described as harsh and unforgiving.

But it meant so much to hear those words here in the real world.

Kamijou Touma had finally found something that made him glad he had chosen this more difficult path.