Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Endymion Chapter1 (section)

===Part 3===

“Everything is good in tempura! What is the mysterious reason behind the bitterness disappearing!?”

“They’ll even eat okra and bell peppers! I couldn’t believe my child who used to take chopped bell pepper out of fried rice was eating a bell pepper that had only been sliced in half! (39 year old housewife)”

“These are the impressions of the individual and the same results cannot be guaranteed for everyone.”

With the trouble on the way to school over, Kamijou had parted ways with Index and Mikoto and peacefully sat through his lessons. It was now after school and he was sitting on a park bench while reading the advertisement emails sent to his phone via the SNS that was quite popular lately.

That normal high school boy named Kamijou Touma gave a quiet sigh.

“That’s a bible we don’t need at my place.”

After all, his roommate was hardly a picky eater. She would start chomping into the hard noodles of instant ramen well before the three minutes were up, and she seemed perfectly delighted with it. The Kamijou household valued quantity over quality. What he wanted was information on sales that allowed him to acquire large amounts of food cheaply.

But the girl sitting next to him did not look pleased.

Index was peering at the cell phone screen from the side.

“Mh, you can’t do this, Touma! Food is one of the foundations of human life. You need to always strive to improve yourself!!”

“Then why don’t you try to improve yourself by learning how to cook!?”

“By the way, what are we having for dinner tonight?”

“Eh? I think the udon is getting close to its expiration date. If I add some random decorations and boil it in a pot…”

“We had that three days ago!”

“Then what about chilled udon? That would be great for the summer.”

“That was exactly what we had for lunch five days ago!”

“Oh, c’mon!! Don’t use your perfect memory for things like this!!”

That girl named Index had the special talent of never forgetting anything she learned. That ability had been used to have her memorize every line and character of 103,000 grimoires from around the world. She now functioned as a grimoire library.

However, Kamijou tilted his head in puzzlement.

“But if you can remember everything perfectly, can’t you remember the flavor of a luxurious 8000 yen sukiyaki set while eating chilled udon and be perfectly happy?”

“Ch-chasing after that kind of empty happiness does not fill my stomach!”

“Then can’t you remember what it feels like to be full…?”

“That would make me the same kind of sad person as the lumberjack rejoicing because a fairy tricked him into thinking the sawdust and leaves are piles of gold. I don’t want-…”

Index suddenly trailed off.

This was due to a bright white flash of light.

That brilliant light shot up from one area of Academy City and vertically towards the heavens.

It shot higher than the buildings and then higher than the clouds.

“Hyah!? Wh-why does that keep happening!?”

“They’re rockets. You wouldn’t think they were being launched all the way over in District 23 given how bright the light is.”

The light caused at launch was so bright, a notification had been sent out warning drivers to be careful. Recently, they had been fired at a rate of about one every 10 minutes.

The countless contrail-like trails of smoke created by the launches seemed to create a tower reaching up to heaven.

“Supposedly, the launches aren’t just coming from Academy City. There’s a rush to launch rockets from facilities all around the world. I hear there are about 400 rockets entered in the Venus Probe Contest. Anyone is free to enter, from projects put together by the EU and other groups made up of multiple nations down to regional efforts run by local shopping districts.”

But no one could hope to rival Academy City on the technological front.

After all, the technological level inside and outside the city was said to have a difference of 20 to 30 years.

The other nations were seeing if they could use quantity to defeat the great technological quality of Academy City. That less-than-intelligent plan was the only one left to them.

But even so…

(What do they get if they win?)

There was the naming of a newly discovered asteroid or mountain on Venus, but the amateur high school student Kamijou Touma could not think of any real merit beyond being recorded as the first to discover it. He wondered if they would give it the name of a convenience store in order to advertise.

The project might not have had an obvious objective such as the retrieval of some new and unknown material that would revolutionize Earth’s technology or contact with some aliens hiding behind the rocks.

Apparently, one of the most important efforts was to find materials altered by oil. The bodies of living creatures would break apart underground to form oil, so that discovery would prove creatures had lived there in the past. However, Kamijou was not sure what people gained by finding those traces of past creatures. Finding traces of rice in a rice bowl did not make that rice come back.

(This would be easier to understand if I could see something obvious people gained from this beyond simply making a historic discovery.)

Then again, if some obvious gain was found, it might change the field of space exploration from being about spectacular romance to being a fierce competition.

As Kamijou thought about all that, the girl next to him who lacked any scientific knowledge began trembling.

She said, “Y-you mean the science side has started to seize a portion of the starts that lie at the base of modern Western magic!? If the composition of the planets is changed, it would destroy the basic foundation of magic… But we will surely change to meet the demands of this age!! We will deal with this like the Japanese dealt with the arrival of ideas from the West!!”

“Um, hello?”

Kamijou tried to get a response from her, but Index seemed to be getting poor reception so she simply continued trembling.

Kamijou decided to just let her continue trembling. He looked blankly into the sky as a few more rockets were launched.

“But are they really launching 400 of them? It seems like space debris would be a problem. If there is energy being emitted from Venus, won’t they start being repelled by a mountain of debris?”