Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume5 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 2===

All hesitation was gone once they descended the subway station stairs.

''Something isn’t right,'' gulped Kamijou.

They hadn’t arrived at Academy City’s Greatest Taboo yet. Drencher may have passed through here on the way to the Taboo, but according to Kaai and Youen, they would have to travel south from here and maybe blow up a wall before finally reaching it.

The station was warm.

And not just because they were sheltered from the winter air. A somewhat musty and sour smell helped make him feel like he was walking down the gullet of a giant creature.

“Hey,” he said.

“Yes?” asked Shirai Kuroko.

“This is ''still'' a normal subway station, right?”

The ticket gates extended from the walls.

They walked around those since they couldn’t pass through them and a bit later the floor changed from concrete to marble. The basement of a fancy department store led to the sewer, which ultimately smoothly connected to a rough stony area reinforced with steel beams. It was a lot like a cave or a mine.

Something very different was happening here. They were going somewhere else entirely without knowing what had caused the change.

Could they blame this on Frillsand #G or on the mysterious researcher named Kihara Hasuu?

“Wait, wait, wait. A mine? Since when does Academy City have one of those?” he asked.

“The Taboo was supposed to be a secret passageway for transferring materials, so perhaps they preserved the limited underground resources instead of using them. Or maybe they distributed algae that rapidly convert animal carcasses into petroleum,” suggested Shirai.

“I get the concept and maybe somewhere like that does exist somewhere in the city, but it seems wrong for this place to directly connect to those ordinary tunnels, like something from a surreal painting.”

“This could be the physical manifestation of something. It isn’t biological like the AIM Burst was, but this feels similar to me.”

AIM. That term reminded Kamijou of Kazakiri Hyouka, the girl who existed as a collection of the AIM diffusion fields made from the faint power that escapes an esper.

(But if that’s true…)

He gulped and looked around.

(Is that what ''all of this'' is?)

That did seem worth calling Academy City’s Greatest Taboo.

He had entered District 10 through the subway tunnels in Alice’s world, so he couldn’t rely on that memory. However, it did get him thinking.

The tunnels hadn’t been this expansive back then, so was something causing the distortion to accelerate?

The underground wasn’t covered by the map apps, so he doubted he could rely on them. That meant his old folk’s smartphone was only good for its digital compass. He kept them pointed south. The underground space stretched out in a network of tunnels, but he was afraid one wrong turn down a side tunnel would mean never finding the surface again.

They heard a solid sound like shoes on the ground.

Shirai Kuroko casually turned toward the source and then collapsed. Whatever she had seen had drained the strength from her legs. Kamijou recognized that phenomenon, so he kept his head turned the other way while picking up the limp girl and hiding behind a nearby pillar. He normally wasn’t aware of it, but the human body was a heavy thing. It felt like dragging a sandbag.

“Frillsand #G!!”

She didn’t respond, which was for the best. Whether or not the artificial ghost meant any harm, her stimuli were too powerful for human senses. And sight wasn’t necessarily the only trigger. An unexpected word from her could always knock him out.

With a visual threat, he could at least guess what to punch with Imagine Breaker to damage it, but this was too vague and spectral to have a punchable target.

“Please, ''restrain yourself'' a little more!! We aren’t strong enough to bear it!!”

He heard more footsteps resembling a knocking sound. Incautious Alice was clearly sticking her head out from behind the pillar and smiling, the white fluffball on the back of her apron cutely wiggling. She could shrug off a curse, germ, or any other internal threat (it was like trying to kill a mole by burying it alive) and she seemed proud of that ability, giving off some full power “compliment me” beams. The upper arms left exposed by her short sleeves shined bright without a single goose bump.

“Teacher, that ghost is leaving.”

“Is she telling us to follow her? Or is she telling us to leave because it’s too dangerous?”

“That would be good to know.”

Kamijou tried to puzzle it out while lending feverish Shirai his shoulder and leaning out from behind the pillar. Frillsand #G was already gone, but he could hear her footsteps coming from the shadows up ahead.

“I think she’s telling us to follow her.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Because she could have knocked them all out now if she only wanted to stop them. She could have done so with ease. Well, except for with Alice Anotherbible.

Kamijou asked another question while helping Shirai stay on her feet.

“She lived with Drencher and those specimen children, right? How could something so deadly live with people?”

“Hm. Maybe it wasn’t always like this.” Alice placed her index finger on her chin. “What is this place, anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

“Academy City’s Greatest Taboo was supposed to be near District 10’s outer wall, so whatever it is, it wouldn’t be this large. Doesn’t that mean the Taboo wasn’t originally like this and ''something destroyed it''?”

“So what is happening here?” asked Shirai.

“Who knows. But this definitely isn’t a normal place. If teacher is right and the ghost is guiding you, then maybe she knows more about it.”

Alice tilted her head while poking at her hair’s animal ear curls. Was this underground labyrinth the result of Frillsand #G coming in contact with Academy City’s Greatest Taboo?

Or had something else caused the collapse?

What did she even want them to do? Accelerator had suggested they needed to rescue Risako from Kihara Hasuu, but was that really a powerful enough enemy that not even Frillsand #G could defeat him?

It felt like all those questions had taken physical form.

They followed the footsteps up ahead. Kamijou tried his map app, assuming it wouldn’t work, but it was completely frozen. He checked the digital compass and they were definitely headed south. Nevertheless, the tunnel they were following never seemed to end. He felt like they were going to leave Academy City if they kept this up much longer.

“Gh. This is just like that 1994 theory on faster-than-light travel,” groaned Shirai Kuroko, shaking her head and still borrowing his shoulder.

He hadn’t heard of this one.

“Near the end of the 20th century, a certain physicist seriously constructed a warp theory. The idea was to compress space, cross that distorted space in a single step, and then revert space to normal like straightening out a scrunched-up carpet to ignore the speed-of-light limit.”

Shirai probably knew so much about this because she was a Teleporter. She may have wanted to research all the other ideas out there.

“This could be the opposite. Some kind of force may have ''crumpled up'' this space like a flyer being thrown in the trash. So we won’t reach our destination by counting our steps in the same direction. It might look we’re only taking one step, but if space has been ''crumpled up'', then this might actually be a third of Tokyo or an even greater distance compressed down to almost nothing.”

“Wait, then is Frillsand #G not leading us somewhere?”

“Who ever said she was?”

Maybe Frillsand #G thought she was safely guiding them, but Alice had said this space was destroyed.

In other words…

“Is this place ruled by conflicting wills, one wanting to protect us and one wanting to eliminate us?”

“The question is whether there is a third party in control here, or if this is a psychological battle being waged inside her.”

But protect them from what?

If Frillsand #G was this powerful, then why did she need someone else’s help?

An electronic sign used to display warnings sat on the rocky mine-like ground.

Text scrolled by on the orange lights.

“Why am I always the one that survives?”

Kamijou tilted his head. Would a ghost talk about “surviving”? After leaving the mine, they found a large, clean train station concourse. All of the pillars there had curved advertisement LCD displays attached.

Each one displayed a different smiling face. The voice they played was not the ghost’s.

One displayed a golden retriever.

“I haven’t seen the doggy since the sewers.”

One displayed Vivana Oniguma.

“The girl who saved me had her picture on the news. They said she died.”

One displayed Drencher Kihara Repatri.

“I saw mister shot to death.”

One was Hamazura Shiage.

“The delinquent who took Sodate-chan and me to the surface was…”

The trembling voice belonged to a girl Alice’s age or younger and was permeated with sorrow.

Kamijou didn’t recognize everyone shown.

And even those he did, he couldn’t say how much they matched up with what he had learned in Alice’s world. Take Drencher Kihara Repatri for example. The artificial ghost’s lightning attacks had burned an image into his mind, but was that what had really happened, or was it something Alice had invented just for fun?

He felt certain he would find the answer if he pursued Risako, who had been saved by villain after villain.

Maybe none of them had been good people. They probably felt more at home in the shadows. But during the chaos of Handcuffs, those villains had felt a stirring from the last shreds of a conscience in their hearts. When they had seen a young life thrown into the center of that hellish Christmas, they had reached out a helping hand with no thought to their own lives. They had wanted to smile and give her a chance to run away and survive.

These people had risked their lives for nothing more than that.

Whatever the result had been, some of the villains on that day had possessed a strong enough will to make that choice. So Risako had no reason to feel this way.

And yet…

“''So I need to be strong.''”

All the concourse lights went out. In the pitch darkness, an image was displayed across an entire wall, like projection mapping.

A small girl hung her head and bit her lip while an artificial ghost flew around her.

“I want the kind of power that lets me keep anyone else from getting hurt. I need to protect Sodate-chan, the ghost lady, and everyone else from my weakness. ''No matter what it takes''.”

The text displayed on the wall received a response.

Frillsand #G shouted to the girl.

She said that wasn’t true, she said drowning in the darkness would accomplish nothing, and she said the people lost during Handcuffs had gladly risked their lives to drag her out of that very darkness.

But none of it reached the girl.

Frillsand #G was so dreadfully powerful, but her voice couldn’t even reach this small girl’s ears.

Why was that?

Because someone else didn’t want the nightmare to end and thus silenced the saving voice that would guide the girl to the safe exit.

“Hee hee. Ah ha ha. Your voice will never reach Risako-kun. You already lost during Handcuffs because an artificial ghost like you cannot exist in this space, remember? So you cannot reach her. She can only hear me! You are as powerless to protect her as the man you loved!! Gee hee ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!”

An old man laughed crudely.

But this voice did not come from a mouth. It came from near the girl’s feet. Her young hands held a horrifically brutal chainsaw.

A voice seemed to bleed through from the depths of the earsplitting roar. Just like you started fantasizing a meaning in any white noise if you listened to it for long enough.

“Quite the retro sound, don’t you think? But it contains everything needed to destroy.”

A vague shape other than Risako appeared alongside her.

It stood across the chainsaw from her and held the weapon along with her, like a bride and groom holding the knife to cut the cake. Maybe the brutal chainsaw functioned as a link between the living and the dead.

The other figure could no longer be called human.

Frillsand #G and the heavy weapon spewing malicious words glared at each other with oblivious Risako in between. Yes, the old man clashed directly with the artificial ghost and even held his own.

“You cannot reach her.”

The mocking words did not come from the spectral old man. He was moving his mouth in time with them, but the sound actually came from the violent power tool young Risako held in her hands.

Something evil resided in that rotating blade.

“Your words cannot reach her. ''Only logical words can reach Risako-kun now''. No matter how cruel it might seem, anyone can understand something if it is logically sound.”

“Kh.”

“Rejecting someone’s logical argument with groundless, subjective emotion feels so terribly violent to them. And violence is what Risako-kun detests most of all after the events of Handcuffs, so won’t she just push you away?”

“''Kihara…Hasuu''!!”

This would be over in the blink of an eye if Risako would simply open the door to her heart, but that would not happen. Other people’s emotions were so difficult to predict and they could even lead to violence if you weren’t careful, so the young girl would reject them herself.

Even though there was nothing at all wrong with emotions.

Was logic a symbol of calm stability and emotion a symbol of violent outbursts? Of course not. Anyone who lived in Academy City long enough would realize the great value of the ordinary kindness and gentleness that helped hold wild logic in check. If the world was ruled by nothing but logic, life would be so much colder and crueler. Hadn’t Drencher Kihara Repatri tricked profit-focused Academy City and taken in those specimen children so he could fight back against exactly that?

“I attempted to ''reproduce my mind'' based on you, but several of the details differ. For example, I can control the malfunctions brought on by Academy City’s Greatest Taboo. I can also hold objects to an extent. But unlike you, if I try to leave the Taboo, I would apparently release such a powerful and uncontrollable burst of electricity it would fry the entire city. It saddens me I would destroy any valuable experimental equipment I might try to approach, so I need a convenient body to use.”

“So you’re going to hijack Risako’s body!?”

“Oh, this is nothing so cliché.”

Why had Risako come all this way in the first place?

If Kihara Hasuu couldn’t leave, he couldn’t have forcibly taken her here.

Had she survived the 25th, but something hadn’t sat right with her?

Had she descended to this place in the hopes of collecting the traces of the people who hadn’t survived and then encountered a horrific monster?

If so, this was as horrifying a crime as a murderer killing a complete stranger while they visited a loved one’s grave.

“Admittedly, finding a way to possess people and jump from body to body would be interesting, but I bet the #5 could do that if she were willing to abandon her body. As a Kihara, I want my death to give the world an even greater dream.”

That guess was wrong, off base, and mistaken, but did that mean he wasn’t threatening Risako’s life?

No.

The old man sharing the chainsaw with her wasn’t so kind.

He hadn’t appeared in Alice’s world, which meant even Alice had done everything she could to keep Kamijou away from him. The dead ends of so many lives were gathered on this one point.

The roaring engine tricked the mind into hearing a human voice once more.

“''Which is why'' Risako-kun is simply buying me some time until my work is complete. The thing is, I am apparently too powerful on my own at the moment. I don’t know if she will survive until the end of my work, but she was always meant to be a research specimen. I might as well use her as she was intended. Gee hee, gee hee, hee hee hee ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!”

Frillsand #G wasn’t just going to stand there.

This may have been Kamijou’s first time seeing the artificial ghost’s right hand form a fist, take direct aim at something, and send hostility their way.

But Kihara Hasuu looked entirely unfazed.

The old man had implied he had defeated her during Handcuffs. He smiled thinly, took one hand from the chainsaw, held out his right hand so their arms crossed, and formed a finger gun.

“You cannot win.”

“Gah!?”

“So leave it all to me. Both the Taboo that has ''swallowed you whole'' and this puny life you still try to protect.”

There was no light or sound, but something like an invisible thread definitely snapped. Frillsand #G was rapidly pushed away from Academy City’s Greatest Taboo. She reached out in desperation, but Risako failed to notice while standing down in the deepest depths of the darkness.

Frillsand #G was clenching her teeth and trying so hard to rescue her, but the young girl remained oblivious while speaking to herself.

“This time, I will protect the ghost lady.”

The concourse’s bright lights came on, blowing away the image projected on the wall.

This wasn’t over and Kamijou’s group were the only ones who could do anything about it.

The ''very future of Academy City'' had to be riding on this one.

“This isn’t right,” said Kamijou Touma.

No one disagreed. That silence was a wholehearted agreement.

It was an agreement with the boy who questioned the darkness and chose to stand up to the city’s remaining cruelty.

“We can’t let this happen.”

Risako was clearly acting oddly. Something had been implanted in her mind.

Why would she see anything logical as correct and reject everything else? Why didn’t she allow anything based on emotion?

What if everyone had responded with cold, mechanical logic during the Cold War when two superpowers had aimed nuclear missiles at each other, during World War Three when science and magic had clashed directly, or when Othinus had half-jokingly blown away the world with Gungnir? The world would have ended long ago.

When people saw the world approaching destruction, they felt fear. When they failed to protect their loved ones, they felt pain. When they learned powerful people were manipulating the world from the shadows, they felt anger. When they wanted to ensure they could continue living their lives tomorrow, they decide to screw up their courage.

What was wrong with those feelings filling people’s hearts?

So many things couldn’t be explained with logic.

Why do people laugh? Why can’t you see people’s thoughts? Why are there so many stars? So many problems become a tangled mess once you try to explain them logically.

“She wanted to say that herself, but she couldn’t. She kept shouting it, but it never reached Risako who was lured into the depths of the darkness and now wanders there all alone. Dammit, is this the regret keeping that ghost from passing on?”

They now knew the motive preventing the ghost from truly dying.

They had finally found the reason Frillsand #G fought. Unlike in Alice’s world, she wasn’t fighting for herself. She wanted to respect the feelings of the dead by protecting this young life that still lived, but she couldn’t do it. So she had needed someone else’s help. No matter what.

Kamijou did not know the whole story of Operation Handcuffs. Maybe he didn’t really have the right to be standing here. But this small life had barely survived thanks to the work of so many people risking it all on that day and now some piece of shit was trampling on it all by repeating that stupid tragedy while sneering out from the shadows.

He had finally found the last person still struggling in the sticky darkness.

But he hadn’t reached her yet.

Handcuffs still wasn’t over. It would never end unless someone put an end to this tragedy.

“…”

Kamijou Touma stepped away from Shirai Kuroko who was still supporting herself on his shoulder.

“Hey, you said we’ll never reach our destination like this, didn’t you? Because this space was broken against Frillsand #G’s will?”

“I did.”

“And you said the space is essentially crumpled up, right?”

“What of it?”

He silently turned to face one of the concourse’s pillars.

It could have been anywhere. He only had to clench his right fist.

“''So what happens if I do this''?”

He slammed his fist against the illusion before his eyes.