Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume3 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 17===

“We can’t get an ambulance! I called, but all of them are being used to transport patients right now.”

“Way too much has been happening today, dammit!!”

Yomikawa Aiho clicked her tongue at her fellow Anti-Skill’s report.

Shirai Kuroko was breathing shallowly while lying on the ground where they had cleared the snow away for her. She was out in the biting cold of the late December night, but she was pouring with sweat.

And there might be more wrong on the inside.

Yomikawa pulled out her car key.

“Fine, tell them to have a hospital bed ready. I’ll shove her wherever there’s an opening!!”

Just then, something emerged from the other tower of the Anti-Skill Chemical Analysis Center in western District 18.

“Ah.”

First, it was a voice.

Then the epicenter of that vocal earthquake staggered out of the main entrance.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!???”

Ankle-length black hair was adorned with a diagonally-worn gasmask, a white coat was closed on the front like a yukata, and unusually large breasts rested on a medical corset. It was a girl of about ten.

“The other twin!?” shouted Yomikawa.

Their plan had been to use the twin tower structure to split up the twins and then focused their attacks on just one. The Decomposer’s state was unknown, but it was also unknown what the untouched Carrier would do now.

Would she decide she was outmatched and make a run for it, or would she give into anger and attack?

Anti-Skill rushed behind their vehicles and readied their weapons, but that was more out of fear than duty. They all knew what had become of South District 7.

Only one of them reached for the gun at her hip and then used every last ounce of strength to stop herself.

It was Yomikawa Aiho.

“Wait!! Lower your guns!”

There was no need to tell the girl to stop. Hanatsuyu Youen fell to her knees and held her head, so it did not seem like she was going to attack right away.

In fact, could she even see them here?

She was yelling, but it did not seem directed at Anti-Skill.

“Why? Why, why, why did she remove her personal alarm? I gave that to Kaai so I could use the GPS to watch over her 24/7!! I even put it inside her gut and ''sewed her shut'' so she would never lose it!!”

She was definitely not speaking to the adults, but Yomikawa still felt a tingling pain across her entire body. The intense rejection was like being slowly crushed by a thick invisible wall.

“''She dissolved.''”

That was not a word that should have applied to a person’s condition, but that changed with those twins.

This girl lived in a world where that was the first possibility that came to mind.

“Kaai dissolved herself!! Yes, yes. She’s flowing away. She decomposed, so I have to hurry! I have to be quick or my precious Kaai will be swept away!”

The subsequent bubbling sound was far more sinister than carbonation. Someone pulled their trigger out of fear, but no one even looked in the direction of the gunshot.

The bullet’s path curved in midair and broke a window nowhere near the girl.

Something hanging in the air around the Carrier was enough to corrode the lead bullet midflight and distort its air resistance.

“Agwahh!!”

The ground was torn through, but ''not'' by an incredible number of worms or earwigs.

Youen held something hard in her hand.

The glitter escaping between her fingers was golden.

“Open up the earth for me, Coin of Nicholas!!”

The track switched to a route that should not have been possible.

An unbelievably large human fist burst up through the ground.

“Dark…side.”

That mass of muscles was all that remained of an Anti-Skill officer.

The filthy scraps of clothing and glasses were barely enough to identify this as Rakuoka Houfu.

“Ahhhhhh!!”

“Move!!”

She shoved him aside.

Weakened though he was, the Anti-Skill Aggressor meant nothing to the girl of about ten. ''She brushed away that mass of muscles with just one arm'' and looked down into the filthy water below.

Common sense had long since left this place.

A dark sludge erupted like a geyser from the crack in the asphalt. That liquid had the terrible stench unique to the sewer.

The Carrier spread her arms while down on her knees.

She looked up and opened her mouth wide.

Then something unbelievable happened.

“Gulp, gulp, gulp, gulp!!”

“She’s…drinking it?”

Yomikawa Aiho could not even move to stop it.

She spoke the words hoping someone would say otherwise, but Youen responded with a look of ecstasy.

She opened her mouth wider than seemed possible to accept more and more of the filthy water inside and used her unusually large breasts to catch what spilled out.

“Bioconcentration. No matter how wide and thin Kaai has been diluted, I just have to gather it all inside me. Once I have it all, I just know I can concentrate it back down in my liver, kidney, or whatever else and see Kaai’s smile ag—bff.”

Her nonsensical explanation was cut off as the color red sprayed out.

Whatever she had ingested, she doubled over and coughed while bringing up an unbelievable amount of blood. But she still did not give up. She used her convulsing arms to desperately gather back up the red and black liquids she was coughing up.

She did not manage to get them back into her mouth. She ran out of strength first. Only her fingertips continued to twitch like a bug sprayed with insecticide.

“Nic—”

But she could still speak.

She kept repeating the same things like a broken toy.

“Nicholas. Hurry. Concentrate her. Concentrate Kaai inside me. Hurry, Coin of…”

(Coin of Nicholas.)

Yomikawa Aiho had seen some fantastical phenomena while pursuing criminals on this nightmarish Christmas. They would stare at the map and place a blockade along every route, but the suspect would somehow still escape. She had assumed it was due to an esper power or some kind of technology, but that was not enough to explain it.

She had not been jealous for a moment. That trump card was a double-edged sword.

“Nicho…Nicho…Nicholas. Lend me your power. Is it not charged? Oh, I used it for the wrong thing. I’m going to die now. Did I screw up???”

Without that coin, the Carrier never would have attempted this reckless plan.

And even if she had, she might have been able to escape after it failed.

But that was not an option after she used the Coin of Nicholas wrong. She had closed off her own possibilities by using it.

Were the people using the tool, or was the tool manipulating the people?

It felt like a curse.

(Come to think of it.)

An unpleasant sensation ran down Yomikawa’s spine.

(Didn’t Shirai have one of those coins? Is it not just the criminals? Was the Coin of Nicholas given to us too? Have there been so many accidental deaths from people unnaturally breaking the rules because some of us were secretly praying to these coins???)

She only had suspicions.

It was always possible that it all came down to mistakes on Anti-Skill’s part. Searching for this other cause before investigating it may have been her way of trying to avoid responsibility. She needed to be careful.

And…

She cautiously approached Youen who had gone silent in a pose similar to an unnatural prostration. She grabbed the girl’s slender shoulder and flipped her onto her back. She could not let the girl drown in a pool of her own vomit.

Her teeth had dissolved away.

The surrounding snow was sizzling, but not from heat. Yomikawa could not figure out why the girl’s hair and skin were so untouched. That suggested this was more than just a powerful acid.

“One suspect secured. She’s still breathing, so someone arrange to have her transported.”

“Ugh,” someone groaned.

It was Rakuoka Houfu collapsed on the half-frozen road nearby. It was unclear how much damage he had taken, but he had been soaking in that filthy water that had dissolved human teeth.

His muscles rapidly deflated like a balloon, but he still reached a hand out toward Yomikawa.

That hand held one of the test tubes they had so feared.

It was filthy with sludge, but the seal of its blue rubber cap appeared to be intact.

“For…Shirai-san.”

As soon as she took it, his enormous hand fell to the ground.

“I don’t know what kind of chemical this is, but it might be an antidote,” said Yomikawa. “We might have a chance of saving Shirai, so someone get this to the molecular biology lab or the ultramicrochemistry lab for—”

She was cut off by a dry bang.

She ducked down and looked back, but this was not a case of an Anti-Skill officer firing on the unresisting suspect out of fear.

The officer had gone limp. The smoking gun was still in his hand while he lay atop the hood of the car. His helmet had shattered and a dark red liquid was spilling out. He had clearly shot himself in the head.

“No.”

And he was not alone.

“I can’t take it anymore!! This…this isn’t what Anti-Skill—'sob'—what we’re supposed to do. Forgive me, please forgive me, just forgive me.”

Another one followed suit while pressing the gun against their chin from below. One adult slammed their helmet to the ground, turned around, and ran off into the darkness. One educator got down on their knees and held their hands together to ask to be handcuffed.

They were all teachers.

They had all been feeling the guilt. No matter how much the gears had shifted out of place and even if it had all been the result of unnatural accidents, dark feelings had gradually built up in their hearts as they saw more and more dark side children meet their doom before their eyes.

''I want to protect the children.

''I want to see smiles all around me as a teacher they can trust.

''I want to bring peace to this city so everyone can enjoy their lives here.

Something invisible was shattering within them.

This had been the final drop. The filthy water had finally overflowed the cup.

And through the unseen connections of group psychology, it rapidly spread from a single individual to the entire group. Almost like an explosive trend. But it was not isolated to this one group. However it had spread, they could hear strange shouting and dry gunshots over their radios.

“Wait, calm down!! It’s over!! Take a deep breath!!”

Yomikawa’s cries did not reach any of them.

One of them even collapsed while foaming in at the mouth with a Coin of Nicholas held between hands clasped as if in prayer.

More and more of them were overcome by a desire for a way out, hope for an escape from the great pressure of responsibility, regret that any of this had happened, and a wish that everything could just be peaceful again.

Of course, Yomikawa Aiho did not have enough information to realize what this was.

It was a return, or a regression.

A hint of this had already been seen with Rakuoka Houfu when he was down in the sewer.

Mechanical static pierced Yomikawa’s eardrums. She grimaced and reached for the source of the noise: her phone.

The display was not functioning. She tapped it with her finger, but the data she wanted would not appear.

“What happened to Outrank?” She shouted into her radio and received no response. “We can’t pursue dark side without it!! Someone…someone please answer!”

She ducked down after hearing an explosion. She looked over to see a portion of the scene on fire. The operation command vehicle, a vehicle the size of a large tour bus with all the windows covered with armor, sat there in pieces. The many antennas told her that was definitely it.

The thin datalink they had recovered was down. That final hope had been cut off, presumably by one of their own going berserk.

This was the final attack by the Carrier. To the very end, she had acted as a carrier for fear and panic. Destroying her own body had spread chaos and the dark side’s unique form of gruesome destruction.

Outrank had been lost and they could not examine the evidence they did gather now that the forensics lab was destroyed. More than that, the adults had reached their limit. Their own consciences were crushing them, like their own immune systems were overreacting and destroying their bodies.

(I can tell the organization is collapsing. Anti-Skill is done for. Handcuffs can’t continue.)

Yomikawa Aiho could feel something breaking inside her.

She slowly dropped to her knees.

She knew someone must have flipped some kind of switch.

(''We can’t play a role in how this ends.'')