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

===Part 13===

Kamijou felt something hard and heavy inside his body.

Just beforehand, the color orange had burst from the plain metal pillar in front of him, so had it been a ricocheting bullet? And Hanatsuyu Youen didn’t have a gun.

(So is someone else here!?)

He had heard a ricochet would reduce the force of a bullet, but he had also heard the jagged edges of a crushed bullet made it more dangerous if it hit you.

Both ideas came from action movies he had seen, so neither one was worth gambling his life on.

He nearly collapsed to the floor, but…

(If it only hit me by accident after ricocheting, then it probably wasn’t aimed at me. If Youen hasn’t moved, she’ll be shot!)

“Nh, bh, gahhh!!”

“Kyah!?”

He had no choice but to use his bloody body. He forced himself forward and tackled Youen to the floor. He was surprised by how cute her shriek was.

Something outside broke through the metal shutter for the trucks and a jagged sheet of metal duller than a saw whizzed by just above his head.

He looked that way, but there was no one there. And he heard a creaking sound from overhead.

(That wasn’t a gun. Did they jump up to the ceiling and cross the pool-sized pit in the blink of an eye!?)

He didn’t have time to check.

He was in no state to even get up. The most he could manage was holding young Youen tight and rolling to the side before the black shape on the ceiling dropped down like a meteor.

A metallic roar followed.

Someone had landed in a curled-up pose where he and Youen had been a moment earlier. A fist protected by thick brass knuckles shaped like a cat paw needed to be slowly pulled out of the steel floor.

The woman wore an apron and her long chestnut hair was tied back with a simple hair tie. She looked to be college aged or maybe a bit older.

But her gentle homemaker look made it hard to believe the extreme violence playing about before his eyes. She probably wasn’t an esper since she was an adult, so was this some kind of bizarre Academy City tech!?

This was completely different from the muscular Rakuoka Houfu he had seen in Alice’s world. She wasn’t surrounded by thick muscle armor and she kept her slender and soft bodylines.

Something exploded right next to her without warning.

It was a work light that was probably a later addition. A piece of the shutter may have stabbed into the fuel tank for the generator below it.

She only shook her head to the side.

Unbelievably, she dodged the shrapnel soaring horizontally toward her.

With the whirr of small motors, the pair of neon triangles on her head turned toward Kamijou.

They moved just like cat ears.

Had they detected the explosion in advance or accurately located the flying shrapnel?

(A cat?)

That was when it hit him.

This all came down to nimbleness. A chemical or something had changed her tendons and cartilage to alter the movable range of her joints.

Cats could jump four or five times their height without a running start, which was how they managed to jump onto roadside walls or reach the knob to open a door. That required powerful muscles, but it had more to do with their nimble joints and cartilage. Expand that to human size and this was perfectly possible. She could jump to the ceiling, cling to it, cross a pit longer than a school pool, and drop back down on the other side.

(Hold on. Wouldn’t a 160cm cat be a jaguar? Or a cheetah? No, this is even worse. Isn’t this on the level of a small lion!?)

What would happen if she used that speed to swing her brass knuckle enhanced fists? He wasn’t liking what his imagination was suggesting. And what if she had boosted herself in other ways as well?

But Youen’s confusion was directed elsewhere.

She forgot to even pull a test tube from her white coat. The little villain girl kicked her young legs to struggle below bloody Kamijou’s weight.

“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing!?”

“Shut…up!! Agh! ''I’m trying to save you''!!!!!!”

“???”

That must not have been what Youen had expected to hear from the stranger who had attacked her out of nowhere. The confusion drew out her 10-year-old girl side more than her extreme villain side.

“Oh, dear. Oh, my☆”

Another voice reached them from elsewhere.

There was a third person here.

“''Benizome-chan''. I don’t need the boy. Just shoot him and tear him off of her.”

“!!”

(Oh, no!! They’re after her!!)

As soon as he realized where the previous ricochet had come from, Kamijou freed Youen below him and shoved her as far away from him as he could.

But she instead pulled him toward her with her small arms. Then the Carrier’s thumb popped the rubber cap off of a test tube.

A thick black wall rose from the ground. A disturbing number of bugs created a barrier more than a meter thick. Some hot and sharp scraping sounds came from the other side, but the countless obstacles appeared to be altering the ballistic paths. It may have been like sniper shots through an aquarium’s water tanks.

Bleeding and groaning, Kamijou couldn’t even get up from the floor. He only managed a weak question.

“What are you doing?”

“I have no idea!! You idiot! You freak!!!!!”

Hanatsuyu Youen looked perplexed as she snapped back at him.

To a violent villain, incomprehensible good apparently qualified you as a freak. That was a subtle difference from in Alice’s world. He had not been rewarded in the slightest for screwing up his courage, shaking off the fear, and risking his life to tackle the little villain to the ground. Reality was not so kind.

But that was what made it so much fun.

A heavy tearing sound flew by right in front of him.

How many tens of thousands of lives were taken in that single strike? The apron woman had used her brass knuckles to tear through the wall of bugs like it was tissue paper.

All that technology and they hadn’t even earned enough time to run away while hidden from view. The primitive violence rushed toward them.

However.

Kamijou had no idea what happened next.

He could only describe it as a tower. A tower of flesh.

The thick steel floor burst apart and something grew up from the hole. It was a mass of muscles. The muscles formed a tightly clenched fist at the end of an arm longer than Kamijou was tall.

The steel floor was torn up like aluminum foil and something like a picture book ogre emerged. Except he had the head of a middle-aged man with a combover and glasses.

“What the hell!?” shouted Youen. “Why is everyone showing off their brute strength here!? I’m not letting you turn this into a contest of muscles and body size!!”

She must have been afraid of anything that could force its way through all those bugs because she grabbed the collar of Kamijou’s jacket and struggled to get away.

“Ra-” muttered the pointy-haired boy in a daze. “Rakuoka Houfu?”

Yes.

This was him.

But Kamijou Touma had another question when he saw that great muscular back before him. This was a mystery he hadn’t solved even in Alice’s world. Since that former Anti-Skill Aggressor had escaped from the Overhunting prisoner transport train, he had to be one of the dark side’s villains.

But on a more fundamental level…

(He did this in Alice’s world too. He’s clearly on a rampage, but ''what is he fighting for''?)

In that world, he had grappled with Frillsand #G. Even though a wielder of purely physical attacks could never really damage that ghost.

Fleeing the city as quickly as possible didn’t seem to be his goal. If so, he would have ignored Kamijou’s group when they were under attack and run off on his own.

On the other hand, he didn’t seem to have a grudge against Anti-Skill or Judgment for arresting him. If he did, he would have gone after Shirai Kuroko before Frillsand #G.

It didn’t fit. That couldn’t be it.

(What if?)

Kamijou gulped. He slowly backed away while tightly holding onto Youen who would try to escape and drop into the deep pit if he let her.

(''What if he’s still trying to capture the criminals as an Anti-Skill officer''!!!???)