Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume2 Chapter2 (section)

===Between the Lines 2===

Something pushed up from his stomach.

He thought it was vomit, but it was blood instead. After splattering something the color of tomato juice into the antibacterial sink, Kamijou Touma staggered backwards.

With so many patients living in shared spaces, lines would form at the bathrooms if they were the only places with mirrors for grooming yourself and sinks for washing your face. That was why hospitals often had separate washing stations.

They were generally used to keep yourself clean and presentable even while hospitalized.

They were not meant for going pale-faced with despair.

“Acute St. Germain, huh?” sighed Othinus from his shoulder.

The look on her tiny face in the mirror said she could not call herself a god of war if the color splattered in the sink was enough to faze her.

Pride could often be taken as a negative thing, but it was also comforting to be surrounded by people with the proper knowledge of what to do in a crisis.

“Do you know what’s happening to me?”

This was an unexplained phenomenon as far as Academy City’s scientific analysis was concerned. Kamijou Touma fully trusted the frog-faced doctor’s skill. That man had saved him countless times. But that was why it weighed on him so heavily that this was too much for that doctor.

Those Tokiwadai girls might have widened their eyes at his tone of voice here. It was unusual for him to reveal his weakness like this.

The fifteen-centimetre one-eyed god, who was also his understander, let out a soft sigh and crossed her legs while seated on his shoulder.

“The Magician St. Germain is a colony of parasitic microbes. Oh, and it won’t infect anyone else unless certain specific steps are taken, so you don’t have to worry about that. I imagine St. Germain himself wanted to avoid diluting and altering himself by spreading indiscriminately.”

“…”

“That means St. Germain himself has no life force to be used as source for magic power. This might be easier to understand from an Eastern perspective than a Western one. Without a body containing the organs, blood vessels, and nerves, the ‘energy’ can’t circulate, and it can’t refine that energy into magic power. That’s why St. Germain always uses a host body to refine life force into magic power before using magic. For an Academy City esper, the side effects of that act as an internal attack that destroys the body.”

Kamijou wiped off his sticky lips with the back of his hand, but his lips still felt gross. He looked down and found the back of his hand was bloody too. The skin had split open and the dark red liquid was oozing out.

Even after seeing the wound, he felt no obvious pain there.

He probably had too many wounds to distinguish any single one anymore. His entire body felt hot and swollen and he could have sworn it had grown to twice its usual size. He was a human-shaped blob of pain.

“The method was different, but this is pretty much the same as what Anna Sprengel is doing in the guise of a giant IT company,” said Othinus. “The students of this city are being attacked by knowledge over the internet, while you are being directly attacked from within by a microbe, but in both cases, ''it comes down to the taboo of an esper using magic.''”

He heard a group of footsteps hurrying by outside the sliding door. The nurses were probably rushing to a hospital room after receiving a nurse call.

Finding the people collapsed in their dorms or on the streets and then transporting them to the hospital was difficult enough, but the problem did not end there. The number of R&C Occultics victims would only continue to grow. Once it reached a certain point, it was even possible the hospitals would cease to function.

And even after all this, they still had no idea what Anna was even trying to accomplish.

Why did the Rosicrucians want to cause this devastating damage to Academy City?

(What am I supposed to do?)

He questioned himself.

At the very least, he knew nothing would improve if he simply waited around here. If he did not do something while he could still move, he would rapidly run out of options.

But where was he supposed to go and what was he supposed to do there?

He turned on the faucet to wash away the red blood that felt like it had been drained directly out of his lifespan.

“You will know that soon enough,” said Othinus from his shoulder.

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