Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Virtual On Chapter1 (section)

===Part 10===

“…Kh.”

Kamijou Touma groaned inside the spindle-shaped cocoon-like cockpit.

He did not understand what had happened.

He had honestly never planned to win the first set. He had only wanted to get used to the Blue Stalker’s movements. But he had been naïve. The first set had ended before he could even figure anything out and the second set was not going much better even with Index fully recovered.

Their opponent’s movements were not normal.

He did not have time to even think about coordinating with Index. His eyes could not keep up with what was happening and a piercing headache passed from right to left behind his eyes. Perhaps because his break had been cut short, simply moving his eyeballs made him feel nauseous.

He heard something like an unpleasantly high-pitched motor behind him. The V-Disc on the back of the unit was probably ominously glowing with heat.

Kamijou had incorporated artificial muscles into his Virtuaroid, so he was always surrounded by the sound of those fibrous bundles expanding and contracting as he fought, but now they sounded like they were about to snap.

Kamijou clenched his teeth as the referee sphere floated in the sky above.

(They’re on an entirely different level…)

Kamijou was “controlling” the Virtuaroid using the movements of his fingers and hands.

But that Blue Stalker was different.

They were clearly pouring their own willpower into the unit.

It was like the difference between a marionette controlled by strings and a possessed doll moving on its own. There were no apparent limits or simplifications in its actions.

(How can they control it like that? Is this the power you get from Defecting?)

Battles between Virtuaroids could not destroy the buildings or roads, so Kamijou’s Temjin sat down and leaned against a building.

Meanwhile, the Blue Stalker slowly approached.

And it held that brutal close-range sword that was longer than it was tall.

“…”

The Blue Stalker was not being careless. Even if Kamijou raised his right hand and fired beams from the Neutral Launcher that his primary weapon had become, this opponent was sure to simply vanish from his field of vision. The Blue Stalker could do that. As calm as it looked, it was being appropriately cautious.

“It’s locked onto us. Touma-sama, you need to be careful! This is the second set, so you’ll lose if you don’t recover some points! And it looks like Temjin is going to be destroyed before that anyway!!”

Lilina yelled a warning from the navigation window.

(What do I do…?)

For one thing, he had no idea what happened if he lost to a Defected player.

He had only heard the worrying rumors saying people had suffered loss of muscular strength, loss of autonomic nerve control, loss of consciousness, and more.

How much was a lie and how much was true?

He could not believe it all, but he did not want to test it out with their own bodies either.

(What do I do!? How am I supposed to turn this around now!?)

He had plenty of buttons and sticks in his hands, but he could not see any real options.

He had to do something immediately, but his fingers froze up because he knew anything he did would end badly.

Fear pinned him in place.

He could not escape that close-range sword of death and slaughter.

Given the Blue Stalker’s speed, if he simply guarded now, the Blue Stalker would immediately circle behind him and slice his back open. In fact, that unit’s movements were odd. It had so much more freedom. It felt like it could easily pull off supposedly impossible actions like a backflip or sliding between another unit’s legs.

“Damn…it.”

A meaningless sweat built up in his palms.

That horrifically long close-range sword could easily decapitate or bisect a Virtuaroid.

And it rushed in!!

“Goddammiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!!”

He shouted, screamed, and squeezed the portable device in his hands.

And at that moment, he heard a quiet tone. A small line of text appeared in the edge of his vision like a subtitle.

“A short text message? Eh? But the sender’s address is this device?”

Lilina sounded confused.

And her confusion meant she could not read the actual text that followed.

“KVV3ST10N 1T”

Despite the extreme danger he felt, Kamijou’s mind was drawn to that short string of text.

The situation was hopeless.

He could not win while the Blue Stalker was cheating.

…But was that assumption correct?

Was the power that made him special really only usable by him? If Kamijou was to shake that assumption, what was it that held him back from victory?

That was something he would never touch while playing normally.

It was a right he had abandoned even though it was right before his eyes.

(…I’ll do it.)

He felt like he was being tested.

Kamijou focused more on the portable device in his hands than on the positions of Temjin and the blue Cypher.

Was the feeling in his hand real or virtual? He was still unsure.

(If I’m going to overcome this situation and if I’m going to find a way to save Index, I have to try even the most suicidal possibilities!!)

KVV3ST10N 1T.

Kwestion it.

Question it.

A moment later, Kamijou Touma snapped the portable device in half between his hands.

He destroyed his controller.

That was the opposite of what he needed to do if he was trying to win or even just play the game, but it felt somehow allowable in this cramped space.

The various components hung in midair as if gravity did not affect them. The pieces of circuit boards and the LCD display spun while reflecting the light. And an especially tiny black chip was at the center. What had it originally been? A processing circuit, a transmission antenna, or something related to user authorization? Kamijou lacked the technical knowledge to investigate further, but his instincts told him it was the core.

This was the heart that tied it all together.

And the action he took was simple.

He bit it.

The chip was a quarter the size of a stamp, so he placed it below his canine tooth and immediately crushed it between his teeth.

That settled something. It definitively sent him off course.

Everything rapidly rewound in his hands. The weightlessly floating parts gathered back together. Even the damage to the portable device’s exterior vanished and light returned to the LCD screen.

It was good as new.

Except, that is, for the black chip.

“————”

Immediately, Kamijou heard the roaring wind. He reflexively swung his head back like someone had thrown a ball toward his face. Temjin responded to that normal movement by bending backwards, just barely dodging the Blue Stalker’s giant blade as it swung down like a guillotine.

It all happened naturally and Kamijou only caught on after the fact.

(Huh?)

That was not possible. It should not have been possible.

The Virtuaroids were controlled by a lever that only allowed 8 directions of movement, so leaning backwards to dodge a blade was simply not an available option.

(And yet I did it?)

The 8 directions of movement had grown to the true freedom of arrows sticking out in every direction like a hedgehog’s spines.

In other words, he was the same as the Blue Stalker.

He had Defected.

As soon as that term entered Kamijou Touma’s mind, a great tension left him.

His Temjin pushed on the side of the brutal close-range sword as it swung down alongside him. He used his shoulder instead of a weapon. The horizontal vector knocked the blue Cypher a bit off balance, so he made a further attack to its face. Once again, he did not use the close-range Blitz Saber.

He used Temjin’s equivalent of a forehead.

He used a headbutt.

With a dull sound, the Blue Stalker bent backwards.

Kamijou’s attack had reached that ferocious opponent. It had hit.

That was not a fatal blow.

It had only opened a tiny bit of distance between them.

And that was why Temjin adjusted his grip on the Blitz Saber. He gathered all his strength and aimed for the Blue Stalker who had been pushed back to the perfect range for the sword.

A great noise burst out.

But the attack had not hit. The blade had been thrown off course. The Blue Stalker had not set up a mysterious barrier or magnetic field. In the moment of the attack, it had kicked at Temjin’s knee joint.

The diverted blade missed its target and the Blue Stalker jumped back.

“Wait, wait, wait! What is going on? I’m receiving a storm of improper button inputs, so why is the unit reacting!? How is it moving like this? This is more than just a bug or a secret trick. The only way to explain this is that the Next Generation Game Virtual-On includes 2 or 3 times the amount of scripts that I have authorization to see!!”

“Lilina, if you have any questions, search for answers on your own.”

“I’ve found more than 174,000 hits. And the most common keyword found in the results is ‘Defected’! This is not good! Of course, some of them are strange banner ads or sites clearly meant to redirect you elsewhere, so it’s not exactly the most credible information in the entire world!!”

“''Then I don’t care. I wasn’t the one that made this.''”

“…Um. Touma-sama?”

The portable device only had colorful buttons and smooth sticks.

Could he really produce these movements with those? How could he move each limb, each finger, and even his head independently like this? Not even he knew the answer.

It all felt backwards. It was less like he was doing things by operating the buttons and more like he was taking the actions in his mind and the commands came to him after the fact. He could display the training command log, but he felt like nothing in there would let him reproduce these movements.

Yet he was doing it somehow.

And if he could do it, then there was no reason to restrain himself.

An explosive noise rang out.

The giant V-Disc on the back of the unit gave a scream as he pushed his movements past the limits. It grew red hot like heated steel. He could not see it himself, but he could tell. The state of the unit reached him the same as his own body’s senses.

He did not wait around for his opponent to move.

He was no longer a cowardly turtle. He could be a lion that freely hunted its prey.

They stood alongside each other, glared at each other, and charged forward at the same moment.

Both Temjin and Cypher became roaring wind. The colored winds filled the scenery as they used the asphalt road, building walls, roadside trees, and signs as footing to bounce around almost like pinballs.

More and more deafening sounds burst out. Anyone watching it would have had no idea what was going on. The creation of something only he could understand filled Kamijou with a solitary sense of superiority. His emotions shifted into a zone that made his head spin.

The second set was close to ending.

He had lost far too many points and Temjin’s endurance was nearly gone.

There was a serious risk of an instant loss after he and Index were destroyed.

So what?

What did that matter?

They only had the one opponent. There was no one on standby to take that blue Cypher’s place during a pit stop. If he destroyed that Blue Stalker, they could ignore the points. Victory would be theirs and they could continue on to the third set. In that 50/50 final battle, one would win and the other would taste dirt.

''Kamijou would get back at this opponent.

''He would beat them until tears streamed down their face.

“Yes, yes…”

He felt like his thoughts were escaping through his forehead.

Something was being drawn out of him.

The feeling of the portable device in his hands was fading away.

Kamijou Touma was no longer in a state of extreme combat. In fact, he was calm enough to comment on it.

“This is dangerous. This is a dangerous thing to get used to…”

“…”

Lilina started to ask what he meant, but she fell silent instead.

It was unclear if a programmed AI could feel fear or revulsion, but the boy ignored her too. But not because he was too focused on his battle with the Blue Stalker.

He would drag that opponent down from their throne.

He had placed a crude chair next to that throne.

And he had a chance to kick them down.

He focused on the ticket he could use to make it his turn to look down at them.

But that was when it happened.

Temjin and Cypher were moving in a horizontal spiral with their weapons locked together, but as Kamijou watched on, odd sounds came from the Blue Stalker’s shoulder and legs.

These sounds and movements were not necessary just to move its limbs like normal.

But hadn’t Aogami Pierce mentioned that Cypher could transform and that it was odd not to use that at all? And hadn’t he said the Blue Stalker had probably placed a restriction on themselves?

They had shaken free of their own decision. They had cast it aside.

The battle truly began now.

Kamijou’s opponent lost their humanoid form and transformed into a fighting beast.

They still had a card hidden up their sleeve.

They had kept it hidden for their own enjoyment.

And so Kamijou spoke.

“That’s dangerous, you know?”

His voice was cold and mechanical. His eyes were as emotionless as an insect’s.

As if his soul were being influenced by some unknown factor.