Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume9 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 7===

Kamijou couldn’t steady his wobbly vision.

The color beige seemed to have taken over the world. He was seeing a Tokiwadai duffel coat.

That was enough to guess he was being dragged along by Mikoto.

But when had she picked him up?

“What are you doing, Shokuhou?”

“You can’t tell? I’m only cleaning myself off with the wet tissues I found in here. I had concrete dust dumped over my head, so it’s all inside my clothes. You really are a wild thing to not even bother with basic cleanliness, Misaka-san. You might as well live up on the fences with the alley cats☆”

“There is a boy here, you know?”

“Bfgwah!!? Cough, cough!! You could have told me sooner he was with you!!”

Kamijou thought he had caught a glimpse of something, but he was still too woozy to comprehend what he was seeing.

It took a while, but he finally realized where he was. It was partially collapsed and dust filled the air, but this was…

“Ugh, a convenience store?”

“Are you awake now?” quickly asked Mikoto.

She looked as bad as he felt. She had gray dust covering her head on down and her cheeks and uniform were covered in mud.

(Where’s Index and Othinus? What happened to everyone else?)

''A stranger'' was here too.

The girl with long blonde hair wore a Tokiwadai uniform, so was she Mikoto’s friend?

“You can see now that facing him head on isn’t going to work, I hope. It’s a miracle ability you weren’t torn to bits and strewn across the city.”

Why ''was'' he alive?

He knew it wasn’t his own doing.

Mikoto and this stranger must have been fighting hard too. These people had reduced their own lifespans to save him from his own reckless actions.

He understood that.

He was intensely thankful, but the situation didn’t allow him to stop here.

What had happened to Christian Rosencreutz?

“But how does that man’s brain ability work if my Mental Out doesn’t work at all? You aren’t going to tell me he actually wasn’t human to begin with, are you?”

Mental Out.

Kamijou had heard that esper name before.

It belonged to Academy City’s #5.

''But he didn’t know who used that power or what they looked like.

He did wonder if a psychological esper power would work on the Transcendents like Anna and Alice.

A high school boy like Kamijou didn’t know even a fraction of the legends surrounding Christian Rosencreutz, but if he really was the kind of person found in a children’s book, then he would have gone through intense training and obtained near inhuman power. That process could have altered his mind to an extent that not even the #5 Level 5 could control it.

That playful magician was only interested in fulfilling his passions and blowing off some steam. It was only by chance he had been depicted as a wielder of benevolent miracles like someone from a children’s book.

He had explained all that with a smile, but could this really be described using the familiar emotions that Kamijou and the others knew so well?

Deep tremors shook the area even now.

Staticky voices spoke within the partially broken store.

Wherever she had gotten it, Misaka Mikoto held a small Anti-Skill radio.



“Ksh! Escape route Cv1 secured using B2 as a decoy. Make sure Judgment gets away first! Also that military clone staring blankly into space over there! However she was born, she’s still a child!!”

“Wait! I can still fight. If you check the Bank, you will see I am a Level 4 Teleporter, so I can help rescue- argh, listen to me!”



Christian Rosencreutz had not simply lost sight of Kamijou’s group. When Kamijou wasn’t fighting, it meant Rosencreutz was fighting someone else somewhere else.

That could mean Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, and the rest of the Transcendents.

Or it could mean Index and Othinus.

“Damn.”

“Rushing in without a plan won’t help them.”

With that exasperated comment, Mikoto tossed him something.

He caught it to find it was a jelly drink.

“Hey, I hope you paid for this.”

“Idiot. There aren’t any employees here, but the phone-based self-checkout still works.”

Mikoto breathed a long sigh and grabbed a matcha iced latte from the drink section. People’s personalities showed through at times like this. With the store partially destroyed and the power out, she had chosen a drink that would give her an immediate energy boost and didn’t need to be cold to taste good. Kamijou understood why she would avoid the jelly drink since its chemical flavor got a lot more noticeable at room temperature. And yet that was still what she’d given him, dammit.

The honey blonde girl gave Mikoto an icy look.

She had opted to go without a drink.

“Misaka-san, how can you rummage through these convenience store shelves? The place is nearly destroyed and the cooling systems are down, but none of this food has gathered any bugs. Doesn’t that scare you?”

“It’s early January, so all the little critters are hibernating. Kuroko runs a major convenience store chain, so she’s told me all the actual facts about the additives and preservatives they put in their food. How net illiterate do you have to be to actually believe all the sensationalized stories passed around online?”

After purchasing her drink, Mikoto stuck the straw into the drink box and took a sip.

“It’s not just the artificial things you have to worry about, though. How about this, Misaka-san? Do you know where they get the matcha green coloring for lattes and chocolates?”

“Hm? That smug look on your face is enough to know it isn’t tea leaves. So what, is it some kind of chemi-”

“Caterpillar dung☆”

They really did get into a fight with hair-pulling and everything.

Kamijou stared into the middle distance. It seemed to him health nuts like that were only torturing themselves by looking up all that unnecessary information. It sounded like a difficult life, but maybe it was a trial meant to bolster themselves mentally.

Something urgent and worsening was playing out on the radio.



“We can’t waste our forces like this! All remaining forces, fall back to the 2nd line!”

“Got it. We won’t let this end here. This isn’t about our pride. The fate of the city rests on our shoulders!!”



They hadn’t given up yet.

But if they thoughtlessly challenged CRC again, it would all happen again.

(Damn, not even a professional magician or a group of Transcendents could defeat him. I just hope Anti-Skill realized magic exists during the business with R&C Occultics.)

It really sounded to Kamijou like it would be best if he went back out there.

He doubted Imagine Breaker would work against Rosencreutz, but it had to give him a major advantage over anyone else out there.

“So if you do save that Anna Sprengel, what then?” asked Mikoto, unsure what to do with her opened maccha iced latte. “I mean, if she’s connected to that Rosen-whatever guy, she might know his weak point. But she nearly killed you with those mysterious microbes called…St. Germain, was it? Then she toyed with me using that giant capsule machine full of execution items she called the Pneuma-less Shell. And it wasn’t just in Academy City. Didn’t she nearly destroy the entire city of Los Angeles? Was there some secret in common between all of that? Wouldn’t surprise me if there was, but do you really think that wicked woman will give you accurate information?”

What then?

What was his goal? The boy considered the battle he had begun out of necessity.

Eventually, Kamijou responded.

He kept his head lowered, but he spoke clearly.

“Anna says she’s searching for a king.”

“?”

“A king who will protect her without asking why she does what she does. She said she had spent so much time protecting and guiding other people, but no one ever lived up to her expectations and she has grown sick of it all. So she said it’s time she got someone to protect her instead.”

Kamijou didn’t know what exactly had happened during that process.

Something had had caused the immensely arrogant Anna Sprengel to turn away from the world and give up on life. Had it been some shocking event, or had it been a complete lack of change? The puny boy couldn’t even imagine what it might have been.

However.

“But I don’t think she really needs that. She doesn’t need a king. So I want to tell her she can open up and be a part of the world without relying on someone special. I want to tell her no one’s going to hurt her.”

Silence fell for a while.

Both girls sighed.

But those sighs carried something subtly different from exasperation.

“Telling us who she is as a person is hardly fair,” said Mikoto. “It would be nice if she could just be ‘a villain’ – nothing more than a symbol. But once I know her as a person, it’s not so easy to abandon her.”

Misaka Mikoto and the honey blonde girl exchanged a glance.

The resignation was written plain on their faces.

They heard a strange noise.

It resembled raindrops on glass, but the individual sounds were quieter than that. It was more like static on an old TV.

Something flowed in from the broken glass door.

It was the kind of fine sand found in a desert or on a beach.

Instead of pure white, it was colored a faint yellow that stimulated Kamijou’s memory. He recognized this.

The voices on Mikoto’s radio grew a lot more disordered. They were dyed in confusion and panic.



“Dammit, is this the yellow sand from the reports on Los Angeles!?”

“Fall back!! Don’t let it capture you!! Fall back to the 2nd line!!”

“I can’t agree to that. There are still quite a few civilians left in District 12!!”

“Get back here, idiot! …Dammit!!!”



“Citrinitas!” exclaimed Kamijou.

“You can’t reach them in time.”

Unsteady Kamijou was stopped by the honey blonde girl ''whose name he didn’t know''.

“District 12 is a big place, so the distance ability is too great. It would be too late by the time you arrived.”

“…”

“And the rest of Anti-Skill and Judgment have already withdrawn from District 12. These are the facts. And the martial law means no ordinary people will be out on the streets anyway.”

This wasn’t just about the official fighting force.

This would also affect Index, Othinus, Aradia, Mut Thebes, and the rest of those fighting to stop CRC.

''District 12 was a lost cause.

''With the Citrinitas here, it was best to assume no one was left moving.

“You could see this as a stroke of good luck,” said the honey blond girl.

“How is this-?”

Kamijou reached the answer before finishing his question.

If this was the same as in Los Angeles, then the people who had disappeared into the yellow sand were essentially trapped within it. This was still checkmate against them, but that was better than being killed with their bodies split apart like Alice Anotherbible or Anna Kingsford. It was possible Christian Rosencreutz had decided going around killing all of the unresisting people would be a boring waste of his time.

If they stayed put, he might let them live.

But that gave them no way of stopping his march across the city. Then he would make his way to District 7 and arrive at the frog-faced doctor’s hospital.

Once that happened, there was no saving Anna Sprengel.

The monster who only ever obeyed his own playfulness and intellectual curiosity would tear it all apart and take her life.



“Sorry. We don’t have many people left, but I still let you die for nothing. I don’t think I can get any closer…”

“Don’t worry about it. If you’d come running here, you’d have met the same fate.”

“Take care of the rest. If this is like in LA, then you should be able to drag the survivors from the yellow sand once the source is defeated.”

“Fall back!! The fight continues at the 2nd line!! Do not forget the words of those fools who joined the sand!!!”



Kamijou and the girls silently listened to the radio.

No.

Was silently observing really all they could do?

They heard an explosive sound from somewhere.

“?”

The wet explosion was different from one caused by explosives or gas. Kamijou hesitantly poked his head out from the destroyed convenience store and found the street covered by yellow sand. Furthermore, something was pushing in from the distance.

“What…is that?”

“Water,” said the honey blonde girl. “It’s water. District 12 is known for all its religious facilities, so it has more firefighting equipment than most districts. Instead of each building having its own, it has a Central Firefighting Tank managed by the district as a whole. That must have ruptured!”

Kamijou looked puzzled. He couldn’t figure out why Christian Rosencreutz would attack there. Wasn’t that basically a giant pool buried underground? He wondered if the man was eliminating all means of extinguishing a fire before starting a great conflagration.

But that wasn’t it.

“We need to get out of here. Immediately,” said the honey blonde girl.

“Why?”

“Did you forget it’s January!? Getting soaked by that sherbet-cold water is enough to kill!!”

Rosencreutz had used the Citrinitas to dissolve District 12’s survivors in the sand. And after that, he was attacking every last alley to ensure he didn’t miss anyone.

Getting caught in that would never end well.

If they were drenched and then exposed to the biting wind, they might just freeze into pillars of ice.

“Run!” shouted Mikoto. “Before it reaches us!!”

The water covered a wide area, but it fortunately wasn’t very deep. If they were caught in the watery zone and their shoes got soaked, they might lose a toe to frostbite, but they could escape the invasion of frigid water by jumping onto a higher ledge or onto a car. It helped that the yellow sand had created a lot of small dunes.

“Pant, pant. Wait…wait for me, Misaka-saaan.”

All the ups and downs quickly wore out ''the stranger'' and left her out of breath. The soft sand below their feet made it all the more challenging. Kamijou would have felt bad leaving her behind, so he took the honey blonde girl’s hand to pull her along with him. For some reason, that immediately silenced her complaints. She was surprisingly meek.

“What now!?” bluntly asked Mikoto, inexplicably irritated all of a sudden.

Kamijou Touma had only one answer to give.

“We fall back.”

It didn’t matter how hopeless the situation was.

It didn’t matter that he didn’t have a single idea of how to defeat Christian Rosencreutz and rescue the people dissolved by the sand.

The hospital was still a long way off.

“We attack him at the next defense line.”

The Transcendents had said the first thing they needed to turn things around and strike back was observation and preparation. That meant slipping away without him noticing, keeping their distance, hiding behind cover, and ensuring they could observe him from safety.

So with the right mindset, this was their chance.

“We lost this round, but it was a meaningful loss.”

The honey blonde girl gasped and looked up.

She was their brainpower and Kamijou had muttered something that had caught her attention.

This was undoubtedly a retreat.

But they could transform it into the first step toward victory.

Their resistance wasn’t over yet.

“If you use up all your trump cards this early, you’ll regret it later on, Rosencreutz.”