Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume4 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 1===

Continuous gunfire erupted in the Long Beach yacht harbor where even the seawater had frozen. The din signaled the beginning of a clash between the mass-produced military clones and the remote-controlled Five Overs. The Five Overs were designed to surpass the original Level 5s with pure technology and the Sisters had failed to match the original, so it should have been a difficult battle for the girls.

But the other two people present did not even turn in that direction.

Kamijou Touma and Citrinitas.

The latter included a ball-joint doll holding a thick leash and a young woman wearing the collar and crawling on all fours. The solid doll and the silver-haired, brown-skinned woman were both fakes. R&C Occultics had set a trap where saving either one would make him look like a fool.

“Gee kee ee hee hee!” The Transla-Pen was not enough to explain away the distortion in their voices. “So you built more? You built up a lot more people beyond yourself? It looks almost miraculous, but does that mean victory? In fact, the more help you borrow, the same amount you lose. Like a house of cards! Because if you lose from here, you can never crawl back out again!!”

“Let them talk.” Othinus crossed her legs on Kamijou’s shoulder and coolly shrugged off the enemy’s scorching malice. “I’m sure you can tell this is a lonely magician, who doesn’t know the first thing about friendship, imagining what it must be like and critiquing the neighborhood birthday party based on that. Don’t worry. No matter how reasonable any one of their claims might sound, it doesn’t fit together. …As your understander, I guarantee you the power you hold in your hand is great enough to reject the destruction of the world.”

“But that solid core is why I want to see your face when it breaks in twoooooooooooooooooooooooo(■A portion of the voice has left the human audible range)!!”

With a dull sound like a car’s shift lever moving, the crawling woman’s jaw joint opened wider than should have been possible and something glittered deep in her throat.

A great roar followed, but was that the sound of all the sand spewing from the pet’s mouth like a laser cannon, or was it the sound of the boy’s right hand obliterating the attack?

It happened so fast it was impossible to tell the two apart. If he had not already known Citrinitas used a spell capable of slicing through reinforced concrete, he would have been decapitated before he even put up his guard.

And negating the one attack did not end the battle.

“Upwind!!”

“I know!!”

Kamijou reacted to Othinus’s shouted warning by sliding to the right instead of charging straight ahead. That kept him from being caught in the cloud of sand that billowed out like cotton candy. Turning his back on the magician, the edge of the harbor, and the ocean was dangerous, but he could always stand on the frozen ocean if he had to.

Citrinitas referred to a type of fermentation.

That magician remade humans and all other life forms into nutrients and absorbed them into sand to trap them alive. That meant they fought by ''claiming territory'', not by violently striking the enemy.

Kamijou would be caught by an unavoidable insta-kill attack if he was surrounded, enveloped, or swallowed up.

But on the other hand…

“I can touch the surface just fine. As long as I focus on its presence in 3D space, your magic doesn’t scare me!!”

“Is that a fact!?”

Kamijou circled upwind and then rushed in toward the enemy.

His target was the poor doll holding the leash and being pulled about by the collared woman. He clenched his right fist as tight as he could and threw a punch toward the doll’s smooth face. The owner and the pet were both highly unnatural. If they were made from magic, they could not survive his right hand.

So he could defeat Citrinitas if he got in just one direct hit.

He felt something soft.

The doll had spun around to face him.

But this did not feel like human flesh and bone. It was also strange to feel something soft on a ball-joint doll. A pillar of sand thicker than Kamjou’s torso had risen from the ground a moment earlier, distributing the impact of his fist.

The next thing he knew, the doll had spun around in midair to begin crawling like a dog. And like they were on opposite sides of a revolving door, the woman now held the leash, facing Kamijou.

Had they switched modes?

“A…sandbag!?”

“Hee hee. I thought magic doesn’t scare? Disproving yourself pretty fast there!!”

Whether it was Imagine Breaker taking effect or not, the sand pillar came apart and exploded in every direction.

“Kh.”

It was enough to force Kamijou to fall back. In that brief opening, the doll once more grabbed the leash and the woman put on the collar. She crawled on all fours, not caring that the collar of her baggy T-shirt created a tunnel toward her chest, and opened her mouth abnormally wide.

The attack was powerful enough to tear through the scenery, concrete and all. The faint curtain of sand was shredded by the compressed sand laser.

Kamijou quietly clicked his tongue while hiding behind a grounded cruiser.

“Damn, they’re indiscriminately slicing through the boats. Is a simple yacht not enough to block that?”

“A ''simple'' yacht? That boat you’re leaning against now costs about 30 million.”

“…”

''On second thought, go ahead destroy all of them,'' silently cursed the boy with only 5800 yen to his name (that he could not currently access with the ATMs not running at the end of the year), but that would actually mean no more cover for him.

“So Imagine Breaker can negate their attacks, but the attacks remain deadly afterwards? That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a huge pain!”

“Yet Citrinitas does not keep themselves surrounded by a sandstorm at all times.”

Othinus hinted at a terrifying possibility.

If the enemy built a 360-degree barrier of deadly sand, a close-range fighter like Kamijou would have no way of approaching them.

However…

“There is no rule forbidding Imagine Breaker’s user from also using weapons,” said Othinus. “So are they hesitant to obstruct their own vision in the great gun country of America? Or are they afraid the fine sand will damage their lungs? Either way, this gives us a chance.”

“Okay, I get that it could be worse, but that doesn’t actually tell me how to win this.”

“Of course you aren’t going to find the answer to everything right away. This is a Rosicrucian elite.”

A cruiser was sliced through horizontally.

Kamijou crouched down and got to work. The sand in the air was indeed frightening, but nothing around here would work as a shield when the enemy could bring down a broadcast tower. Keeping his distance would only give them a chance to target him. That risk remained at close range, but at least he would be in punching range.

He heard a quiet thunk like a knife chopping through a radish or a carrot, but instead he saw a transparent blade stabbed into the harbor’s frozen concrete ground.

It was glittering somewhat.

Sharp glass shards were raining down from overhead.

The yacht harbor jutted out toward the frozen ocean, so there weren’t any skyscrapers with windows to break. That left just one explanation:

“Sand!? They can turn it into glass!?”

“Not just once!” shouted Citrinitas. “Did you think this was only a park sandbox debut!?”

He frantically twisted his body and knocked over the joint lever of a towing vehicle parked on a nearby road. Its yacht collapsed on its side and he rolled beneath the thick sail.

He now had a waterproof fabric roof sturdier than a tent.

The deluge of noise was even higher pitched than pouring rain. The mass of noise exploding from the concrete ground was so loud he thought it had to be directly damaging his eardrums.

“Gh!?”

He felt scorching pain in his thigh.

(It pierced the sheet!?)

Screaming would only let Citrinitas know the attack was working, so he grimaced, clenched his teeth, and touched the shard embedded in his leg. He felt the transparent blade become sand once more.

He did not have time to stop the bleeding.

“Come out.”

The crawling woman opened her mouth wide and fine sand spilled from the corners of her mouth. The wind gently swept the sand into the air and then pressurized it into a 2m box.

It was a like a sea lion playing with a ball.

“Is run away and hide all you can do? Then it can never end!”

The crawling woman jumped up to lift the cube resting on her head and the doll began to crawl instead. The standing woman slapped the falling cube with her hand.

She almost seemed to be rolling a giant die. Except that was a block of sand weighing more than 5 tons. It smashed up the fallen yacht as it rolled through.

Kamijou had no choice but to rush on out.

He covered more distance than expected because the force of the exploding yacht pushed on his back, launching him through the air.

“Gahh!?”

“Tch. Rolling would have been more fun because of you shredded by glass. Sparkle, sparkle.”

The two parts of Citrinitas kept switching the pet and owner roles while they spoke and laughed as one.

(Damn. I thought yachts were economical boats that used the wind to move!)

His back felt hot.

He tried to strip off his cheap jacket, but it caught on something. Then he realized the heat was not from burns. Some shards – glass and metal ones the size of his little finger’s tip – had stabbed through the jacket and into the skin on his back. He preferred not to imagine how many there were in all.

It looked like those two did not fight by having the crawling woman chase their target like a hound and then having the doll supply the finishing blow. If anything, they may have seen each other as weapons or tools, like a witch’s broom or a crystal ball.

Not that there was any point in asking which one was the master and which the servant.

“You failed, don’t you think you did?” The standing doll and crawling human cackled and moved in bizarre synchronization. “Your fight is empty. No guarantees are found in real battle! Isn’t that the truth!? Then you should have told the clones to quit. From the moment you agreed to their offer of help, you dragged them into inescapable battle!!”

“No.” He cut them off. He clenched his fist, stepped forward, and rid himself of all hesitation. “I believe the Sisters’ good will and kindness will be rewarded. They are far stronger ''people'' than a mere high school boy like me. I trust them enough to rest easy knowing they have my back!! So I won’t worry about them!! I refuse to believe this was wrong. They created this miracle by standing up for Los Angeles, for Melzabeth and her daughter, and for everyone’s happiness! So I’ll make sure they don’t regret it!!!!!!”