Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume8 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 3===

Aleister Crowley, Anna Kingsford, and Kihara Noukan.

Since they looked like a foreign nun and a mysterious near-future glasses woman out walking a large dog (after martial law was declared), they had to make for quite a bizarre sight. Except they didn’t. When they walked right in front of an armed Anti-Skill group, not one person demanded they stop.

Was it Kihara Noukan who had said they were bound to be caught if they snuck into Academy City again?

Aleister sighed.

(This simple recognition manipulation won’t work on anyone with a deep knowledge of magic. That of course applies to the Transcendents, but also to the artificial demon working for Academy City – Qliphah Puzzle 545.)

He could imagine all this so easily, but he could never make sense of the human mind.

He was constantly making mistakes.

Meanwhile, Anna Kingsford curiously viewed the vehicles parked on the curb. The tanks and armored vehicles were all painted dark because they were meant for use in an urban environment.

They were closer than expected. Much too close.

The great knowledge goddess took small steps up to within a meter of one, looking just like a tourist with one of the red guards at a certain English palace.

If not for their magic, they would have been instantly discovered and forced to fight.

“Oh, how fun. It’s like a parade.”

“Don’t place too much faith in that preserved corpse. It might look just like a living body, but it’s still only a corpse being forced into motion. You can’t use any magical defenses, so if you were held in place by the ground collapsing below your feet or exposure to a high voltage current, an ordinary tank gun could blast you to smithereens.”

“Then am I relatively safe from the ones ❌ in a vehicle?”

“How did you find a way to ‘look on the bright side’ of that warning?”

When Kingsford pointed at an Anti-Skill group from less than a meter away, Aleister shut an eye and held a hand to his forehead.

That she went unnoticed was proof that she was the spell expert Aleister was not.

A true expert did not neglect these fundamental of magic.

Or rather, it was all part of a single large system. There were no unnecessary gears in the world of magic.

So instead of learning a single special move, you increased your overall strength by thoroughly honing your skills in all the most common spells until they were their own special moves.

An expert like Kingsford probably resented the very act of designing a spell exclusively for killing.

The golden retriever sniffed at the cigarette smoke exhaled by an Anti-Skill officer on break and reacted with disgust when he detected the vanilla additive.

”Explain it to her, Aleister. I would understand if you had explained it over and over and she refused to learn, but she can’t be blamed for her ignorance.”

“I know that, but still.”

The great knowledge goddess’s knowledge stopped in the 1800s, so while her magic knowledge was unmatched, she didn’t know much about the threat posed by science. The lack of knowledge wasn’t necessary a problem, but her inability to appreciate the threat was. She was too innocent, like a young child who had never touched a hot kettle.

Eventually, Aleister pointed up into the early morning sky.

“Academy City has developed 200mm self-propelled grenade launchers and multistage rocket launchers with a range of more than 30km. They can accurately drop a grenade on you anywhere in the city. And if they don’t care about damage to civilian facilities, a single Anti-Skill officer can give a signal by radio, laser, or even smoke to summon a downpour of explosives. A single volley of the rocket launchers will cover the designated area with ten thousand bomblets. Do you still feel safe?”

A sound like an electric shaver passed by overhead.

This one was not for aerial photography.

The 45cm plastic isosceles triangle was joined by hundreds more clustered together like a flock of starlings. From a distance, they appeared to undulate like a great serpent. These were self-destruct drones designed to spread out in the sky, locate their target, gather overhead, lock on, ignite their solid fuel, drop toward their target, and explode.

Aleister sighed.

“Each of those Snakeheads is loaded with as much explosive as an anti-tank rocket. The sky above is the hardest place for a ground vehicle to attack, so if those things attack from there, the tanks and armored vehicles don’t stand a chance. A person outside of a vehicle even less so.”

“My, my. The 🌍 has become a very ☠️ place in my absence.”

Anna Kingsford held a hand to her cheek and elegantly tilted her head.

She had lived in the late 1800s. That was before World War One, which meant a world without tanks, aircraft, and poison gas, so some might call it a nice place to live. Especially in an age where war without nuclear weapons sounded like something from an impossible fantasy world.

Of course, small drones commonly lost control and crashed due to signal interference and crosswinds. What would happen if those armed explosives were constantly flying through the city? As the numbers went up, what seemed like small odds of an accident would rise as well. Instead of launching a missile or artillery shell in response to a threat, explosives were ''already'' filling the sky above. Instead of avoiding the small odds of an accident, the city had ordered its people to stay home to avoid anyone coming to harm by the accidents. These next-generation weapons could only be used with martial law in place.

“What’s the plan for today?” asked Aleister right in front of the enemy.

“I 💭 it is about ⏰ to take this seriously☆”