Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume8 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 7===

Something had changed.

Someone now floated in the night sky over District 12.

The skinny girl showed off most of her brown skin and wore her wavy blonde hair long.

She was Transcendent Mut Thebes.

Aradia was on top of the gun and she shouted down at Kamijou on the road.

“Get in! Hurry!!”

“Eek!?”

The 8 thick tires began to turn before Kamijou had even climbed onto the Predator Octopus’s gun by grabbing Aradia’s hand while she practically leaned out of the hatch.

And Anna Sprengel shouted an old-fashioned phrase from inside the cutting-edge mobile combat vehicle.

“''The Apostle Peter forbids Simon Magus’s demonic flight''!!”

Mut Thebes lost her balance and plummeted.

But she did not bat an eye.

She landed on her feet a short distance away and metal tubes burst from her brown shoulders. They were arranged a lot like a bouquet of flowers. Kamijou didn’t know much about weapons, but he had seen these before. They were the barrels to the guns he had seen on all the tank and mobile combat vehicle driving around the city during the day.

Except these were all colored pure white.

“Oops.”

Mut Thebes staggered from the weight of the weapons she had produced.

“I forgot this.”

With that emotionless and weirdly carefree comment, a ladder truck’s stabilizing legs emerged from her thighs. They pressed firmly against the ground to forcibly keep her balance.

There was no escape. She was faster.

She spread the gun barrels like an ominous bird’s wings and then flapped those wings to aim each gun toward Kamijou’s group.

“Fire,” she whispered.

''Boom, boom, kaboooooom!!!

A concrete building wall was blown away and the road’s asphalt was torn from the ground over a distance of several meters.

120mm shells were scattered like a massive shotgun blast.

The muzzle flashes alone produced an explosive blast that fanned out.

The Predator Octopus’s eight tires shrieked. The front four were turned right and the rear four turned left, so the mobile combat vehicle spun like a turntable to escape. Aradia only had her upper body sticking out of the hatch, but Kamijou was still fully out on the roof. Even a fragment of a shell would kill him instantly and he would be thrown from the speeding Predator Octopus if he wasn’t careful.

Mut Thebes tilted her head.

“These can’t hit from this distance? Are the biggest guns alone not enough? Why must Academy City make everything so complicated?”

She had fired several pure white 120mm tank guns at once.

A hit from any of them would obliterate a three-story building, but she was operating it like a smartphone she had picked up ''to try out and see how it works''.

What happened to the division between science and magic? Where was the treaty?

Necessarius’s Stiyl Magnus would probably have a fit if he saw this.

Meanwhile, Kamijou wasn’t exactly calm himself. The armored vehicle provided something of a shield for him, but he didn’t trust that too much. A shoulder-fired rocket could blow a hole in that armor, so a direct hit here would blow all three of them up along with the entire vehicle.

Mut Thebes threw away the white gun barrels like a toy she had grown tired of and held her hand to the side. A car was parked on the curb below the streetlight there. Kamijou heard a dull sound right before large white wheels and thick suspension emerged from her hips.

They contacted the ground.

Kamijou heard the scream of rubber and his eyes bugged out as he clung to the roof of the gun.

She was pursuing them on the high-speed roadway.

“What the hell!? Did she absorb that!?”

“Mut Thebes specializes in punishment.”

Aradia, also from the Bridge Builders Cabal, clenched her teeth.

She wrapped her arms tightly around Kamijou’s spiky head and held him to her chest to make sure he didn’t fall off.

“''Which means she has a way to supply an appropriate method of punishment for each target.'' This is not good. Academy City gives her access to so much bizarre technology.”

“More importantly, fool, this is causing quite a scene. The Academy City guards twiddling their thumbs at the checkpoint are headed this way! And if this lasts long, Kingsford will be here too!!”

As soon as little Anna shouted up from inside the vehicle, the siren began sounding across the city once more.

That meant Academy City had noticed them.

This just kept getting worse.

Anna Sprengel had given them a warning while she operated the touchscreen that gave her control over everything from the driving to the gun control, but she didn’t seem particularly concerned about the next-generation weapons.

The rhythmic noise circling in the sky above was an HsAFH-11 Six Wings attack helicopter. That cold weapon was unmanned.

Mut Thebes did not even glance up at it.

With a dull sound, a honeycomb of white missile launch pods emerged from her back. That weaponry was supposed to belong to her pursuer. Before the Six Wings could target its moving target, several missiles blew up the unmanned attack helicopter. This time, she knew what she was doing.

This was very bad.

Academy City technology was 20 or 30 years ahead of the outside world. Military weaponry was no exception. The more attention this battle gathered, the more advanced the weaponry that would be brought in and the more toys Mut Thebes would have at her disposal!

But Aradia and Anna were focused on something else entirely.

The witch goddess looked down toward her navel and shouted into the vehicle below.

“Did you notice that?”

“More or less, yes.”

Kamijou had no idea what that short exchange was referring to.

Aradia adjusted her grip on Kamijou when he nearly slipped from her arms.

“There, there. That helicopter was way up there in the sky, but she absorbed its weapon just as easily as she did that car. That means distance isn’t the condition for her absorption.”

“Wait.”

“She uses the same thing I do,” said Aradia stiffly, still holding Kamijou tight. “''She can make use of anything if her shadow touches its shadow.''”

“…”

Come to think of it.

Back at the consulate, H. T. Trismegistus’s surprise attack had hit Aradia because their abilities both came from the number 3. Good, Old Mary with her resurrection and Bologna Succubus with her ability to use sexuality as an attack could both be seen as directly using “life”.

Did all the Transcendents overlap like this? They seemed completely different at first, but was that hiding some hidden logic?

If so, what did that make Alice Anotherbible who the rest of the Transcendents so feared?

“That’s why she didn’t need to fly up and approach the airborne helicopter to absorb it. She only had to combine her shadow with the shadow it cast on the ground. Anna!!”

The rear four tires slid roughly along the pavement as they made a sharp turn at an intersection and Anna Sprengel even fired the 120mm gun in the middle of the unsteady curve.

The boom made Kamijou duck down and his eardrums briefly forgot what their job was.

Instead of directly hitting anything, Anna had detonated the tank shell in midair air to hit everything with the shockwave. In other words, it was an air burst. All of the nearby streetlights were torn from the pavement.

That should have prevented Mut Thebes from using her shadow which she needed for her spell. But…

“Ah!?” shouted Kamijou.

He heard something like a bursting firework.

Mut Thebes raised her right hand overhead and launched a bright light into the sky. The flare floated gently down thanks to the small parachute attached.

“Why would she use magnesium instead of a flashlight or a handheld fluorescent light? Does she need a certain level of illumination? If it’s based on natural sunlight, it might require tens of thousands of luxes.”

Anna carefully analyzed the situation, but Kamijou was not so calm.

The blinding light was more like welding light than a firework, so deep shadows stretched long across the ground all around it.

As soon as the brown girl’s shadow contacted the shadow of a giant object abandoned on a construction site, Mut Thebe’s right arm seemed to explode. A white club disproportionately large for her body emerged. Anna sent the 8 wheels weaving across the road to try and escape, but then Kamijou saw it.

That was not in fact a meters-long blunt weapon.

It was a reel containing wire thicker than a thumb. It was big enough to function as a table if set down on its side, so it had only looked like a giant club when it emerged from her thin arm.

The vehicle was moving at more than 100km/h now. If she whipped them with that wire, it could easily take out the thick military tires. If it so much as grazed a human, it would tear off a limb.

Mut Thebes herself staggered because the enormous wire reel threw off her balance.

But she still swung it horizontally.

“Oh, no!! Anna, you need to turn there! Hurry!!” shouted Aradia while very nearly biting Kamijou’s shoulder as she held him.

The thick tires screeched against the pavement. Kamijou had to hold on with all his might to avoid falling off. The Predator Octopus had not turned onto another road. It had turned toward a giant church. Unusual for District 12, it was a standalone building instead of part of a skyscraper.

But instead of plowing onto the church’s grounds, the eight wheels took them down below ground.

The church was ''painted to look'' old, but a concrete slope led to a parking garage directly below it. Was that just Academy City’s style?

Orange sparks scattered everywhere outside.

That pure white shadow was joined by the roar of death slicing through the air. The thumb-thick metal wire crashed into the entranceway, tearing away a concrete wall.

Mut Thebes must have decided the table-sized wire reel would keep her from entering the narrow entranceway because she cut it loose. She walked nimbly down the slope on her own two feet.

But it was a single straight path in there.

Miss Sprengel only had to make the command on the touchscreen.

Her small finger tapped the console at the commander’s seat.

“And done.”

A 120mm blast roared out.

It struck Mut Thebes square in the gut.

The Transcendent doubled over as she was launched back up the slope like a human rocket.

“Hee hee. Now is the time to compliment me to death, fool!!”

Of course, one hit wasn’t enough to relax. Kamijou could still sense the tingling tension of imminent death at the back of his head. The tires tore at the ground as the mobile combat vehicle raced through the parking garage. Anna kept the gun aimed backwards for defense while breaking down the metal shutter on the slope back up to another road on the other side of the building.

“Wait! Is this what you meant by hidden routes we can use to avoid the checkpoints!?”

“Good job. It is always worth thinking for yourself and reaching the answer on your own, fool. We can pass through the large parking garages to reach another street. That lets us sneak right past the barricades Anti-Skill set up while staring at their map apps which only show them the public roads.”

“Great, wonderful. By the way, if Aradia hadn’t yanked me into the hatch just before you crashed into that shutter, the mangled wreckage would have taken my head off!!”