Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume10 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 4===

On the District 7 bridge, the Transcendents vs. Transcendents battle was trending in one direction.

“Tch! Good, Old Mary!?” shouted Aradia, holding onto the railroad crossing barrier she had borrowed as a broom and clinging to the side of a steel beam distributing the bridge’s weight.

But the woman collapsed on the cold asphalt did not respond.

That was a bad sign.

Good, Old Mary was the foundation of their recovery magic, but she had suddenly collapsed.

This was worse than simply losing one of their number.

Vidhatri, the brown-skinned woman with model-like proportions, shook the arms and legs of the Dhatri ball-joint doll she wore on her back, intricately manipulating white thread and black hair as she whispered to Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.

“Do you still need support?”

“Nope. Everyone can do their own thing. Instead of assigning as many Transcendents as we can to attacking a single point, it would help me if we increased the total number of attack points to fill up the processing power of their minds.”

Something hovered through the air.

Some teacups and saucers were slowly flying around

Those were symbols from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The Bologna Succubus noticed and groaned while breathing heavily with her hands down on the ground.

“Kssshhh, they’ve made it this far?”

“Ha ha☆ Of course they have.”

[[Image:GT Index v10 BW4.png|thumb]]

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet smiled calmly.

A single smile on that extremely lovable face summoned a great black dragon into the night sky. Was the twisting serpent actually tens of thousands of starlings? They were not venomous, but in great enough numbers, any creature was a threat to human life.

The instant the Bologna Succubus looked up at the black dragon filling the entire night sky, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet took a large step forward.

Without hesitation.

“Kh.”

Now was not the time to be overwhelmed by the intimidating numbers.

The Bologna Succubus flapped her wings to gather as much air as possible.

She launched herself straight to the side.

The coat-shaped blast-resistant suit covered in thick metal panels snapped shut like a ferocious beast’s jaws. It was a sweet-smelling iron maiden. The air inside that isolated space was compressed with no outlet, producing a strange sound much like a steam engine.

The Bologna Succubus had just barely avoided it.

If she had carelessly stayed in place, she would have been “devoured”.

Instead of feeling fear, she gathered offensive power between her brows.

(Argh. I can’t let this chaos be unleashed on the boy’s city.)

What were Kamijou Touma and Alice Anotherbible doing right now?

She couldn’t predict how few seconds a regular Transcendent would last against Alice if she were serious about fighting, but it was still much too dangerous to let that boy stand defenselessly before Alice.

The alluring demon smiled bitterly at that thought and focused her feelings on the battle at hand.

“Oh, what’s this?”

Smiling, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet again spread her arms wide. Slowly.

Almost like a solid wall, a stifling nectar scent emerged from the blast-resistant suit and pushed toward the Bologna Succubus. Even at this distance, she had to stay focused to avoid getting dizzy.

What was happening in that closed world?

The skinny girl(?) wearing an apron over her naked body giggled before speaking.

“This won’t hurt at all, so don’t worry. I’m more interested in creating a gentle world where even the unloved are loved equally. Did you really understand my salvation condition? Kee hee hee☆ I have love even for a filthy sex demon, so get over here and let me give you a hug!!”

“Killing with pleasure, huh?”

“Ah ha ha☆ This is Total Courtship! Welcome to the sweetest, most luxurious ending to a life♪”

Roaches could rapidly build up a resistance to deadly insecticides, so they couldn’t necessarily be killed by escalating the chemical suffering. Instead, there were products that ''tricked them'' into thinking ethanol, acetaldehyde, sotolon, or another chemical compound was delicious food, luring them into the trap where they would take a different chemical back to the colony to kill them all at once. Humans didn’t just use what their target disliked – they would also use whatever their target most liked.

This girl similarly used love to kill. She was a super sweet monster who had continually honed the emotion of love into a deadly weapon. If you simply increased your defenses to prevent pain and prepared ordinary attacks, she would ''slip past them all'' and kill you instantly.

She was a specialist in that.

This Transcendent was a different form of strongest, whose trump card was the complete opposite of the Bologna Succubus’s Cold Mistress which converted all forms of pleasure into pain.

Her victims were robbed of even the right to feel fear as they were filled with no more than ''happiness'' until they lost their life. In a trippy world where everything was vague, they would cross the final line without intent or resolve.

They were stranded.

She had complete control over them, not even giving them a chance to speak their final words.

She brought a death more certain than a .44 caliber bullet and its name was love.

“Yeah, I don’t think we could ever get along.”

“Kya ha ha☆ You’re only saying that because that makes it more exciting, aren’t you!?”

This must have been her combat form.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had her enormous blast-resistant suit spread wide to display the terrarium trapped within. The skinny naked-apron girl pushed out a nectar scent so powerful it caused heartburn. And she took a casual step forward.

“You didn’t find it remotely odd? We’re all regular Transcendents here. A clash between our two groups shouldn’t end so easily. Yet you’re being easily defeated in a one-sided game. Is it a bad matchup between the individual Transcendents? Do our spells combine so well it’s like we were dealt a royal flush? No, that could never happen.”

“…”

“''No one can defeat Alice Anotherbible.''”

For this alone, she took on a respectful tone.

Almost like she was reading off the handwritten creed only she believed in.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet thought only of her own blessings as she spoke euphorically.

“You underestimated the meaning of that statement. And that optimism has brought you certain death. It doesn’t just mean you won’t survive a direct physical fight against Alice. There’s no getting around it. We control all of the coincidences and all of our baseless hunches and inspirations will work out in our favor. We have the ''trends'' of the world on our side. That is what it means to ‘resonate’ with Alice and take the winning side. To be clear, we are only firing blindly from the hip. You’re the ones ensuring we hit you.”

Vidhatri.

2nd Saga.

And Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.

The Bologna Succubus’s side was being worn down, but all three of them were unharmed. She had gotten a few clean hits in on them, so had they managed to shrug off the damage?

And she was slipping past their expectations and landing an attack they failed to dodge or defend against, so it made no sense for them to be changing their stance to reduce the damage with 100% accuracy.

That wasn’t their individual abilities.

It was their “resonance” with Alice Anotherbible.

“Defying her means death. You had lost from the moment you bet on there being an exception to that, like that you could move beyond her reach, hide where she couldn’t find you, or escape punishment if your defiance was indirect. Not that she would let you get away with this even if you had been correct.”

“How are you on Alice’s side when you only love yourself?”

“Isn’t it cruel to expect such a small child to judge everything so accurately? They say to let your child make mistakes to learn from them, but do you think that kind of harsh parental love will work on that girl? Alice is simpler than that. Which is what makes her so frightening. At her mental age, she probably sees anyone who praises her and spoils her as her ally.”

And it didn’t end there.

“Heyyy.”

Something enormous was parting the large river to approach.

It was a special warship measuring around 100m long.

That was small compared to a nuclear aircraft carrier of more than 300m long, but it was undoubtedly a warship.

Plus, this was not the ship itself.

It was made out of smooth white shadow.

A girl’s lazy voice played from the speakers probably meant for giving warnings or making threats.

Come to think of it, hadn’t one of them seemingly vanished?

“This took some time to prepare, but I’m back.”

The ship’s bridge stood taller than the iron bridge.

She must have torn down all the other bridges spanning the river to clear a path here. It made you wonder which side was doing more damage to Academy City.

Aradia’s eyes really did bug out as she shouted.

“Mut Thebes!? What is that thing!?”

“You don’t know? It’s the Academy City drone carrier Kagenui.”

An aircraft carrier had to carry multiple large aircraft, necessitating a great size. Submersible and aerial aircraft carriers could not be made because the size and weight affected their balance too much. ...But that accepted principle had been overturned by shrinking the aircraft down by eliminating the cockpit and turning them into drones. Even the maintenance work could be carried out by an unmanned maintenance factory within the ship.

As usual, Academy City loved making bizarre things.

But now wasn’t the time for exasperation.

That was a carrier.

“Go, everyone.”

A series of explosions rang out. The boxy canisters on the flat deck rose up and opened fire. There were electrically ignited guns that could fire at a rate of a million rounds a minute. It looked like a programmed fireworks show. In truth, the honeycomb-like holes on the front of the canisters were releasing a large number of flying objects. By spreading their movable wings in air, they gathered in orderly teams and flew in formation. Now both sides had a flying swarm. The drones clashed directly with the tens of thousands of starlings ruling the night sky.

The assumptions and superiority had been overturned.

One side was alive and the other was machine.

When they were both controlled remotely and were equal in number, it went without saying whether the small birds or the man-made meter-long aerial weapons would win.

Perhaps the counterattack was necessary.

But as the drones pursued the fleeing starlings, their machinegun fire stabbed into the skyscrapers built along the river and sent sparks exploding from walls as thick power cables were ruptured.

“Mut Theeeebes!!!”

Aradia roared in anger, but then she stopped.

The brown girl was acting weird.

“Yayyy. Who wants to take a killer selfie? Just tell me when and I’ll get the timing right for you. Yippee! Let’s keep this Alice Parade Party going☆”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet giggled.

She clearly welcomed this turn of events.

Mut Thebes wasn’t enemy or ally – she was losing all awareness that she was participating in the battle at all. She was throwing that aside to enjoy herself. And her actions were clearly working against the Bologna Succubus’s side.

They sensed a trend in the series of unpleasant coincidences.

“I believe it’s called Acute Kotatsu Syndrome. Basically, Alice affects the group psychology of an area when she stays there long enough. Did you think you were ''immune'' for some reason? Even magicians and Transcendents will be engulfed by Alice sooner or later.”

“…”

“That includes all of us. Yes, you are no exception, Bologna Succubus. And most likely, neither are we. We will all lose our sense of who is on whose side in this mad tea party. The world that people across the globe have worked so hard to create could end today, but in a way that could mean the arrival of an age of peace. If everything is engulfed and everyone is a victim, then the distinction between enemy and ally loses all meaning.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet made it sound so obvious.

But it didn’t add up.

They were using their all-important salvation conditions as an excuse to love themselves and preserve their power by protecting Alice, so they wouldn’t want an ending where they were engulfed by Alice’s madness and lost sight of who they were. Narcissists who cared about themselves more than anything else in the world would never seek out a form of satisfaction created by having their internal aesthetic sense altered.

“''Do you have any idea what you’re saying''?”

“Ha ha☆ What? Are you saying I’ve already broken too''?”

It didn’t sound like she cared.

Someone on her level had lost the right to feel fear and disgust, or even detect that anything was amiss.

This space was going mad.

It had started at a single point, but the entire world would be this way eventually.

Whether or not Alice Anotherbible wanted it.

This was ominous enough to make that prediction.

“It doesn’t really matter. No one can defy Alice whether they put up a resistance or not.”

“Are you shoving responsibility for the world onto Alice’s shoulders while you alone abandon the effort of living, like you’re just a tree, grass, or flower, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet!?”

“Hee hee☆ Total Courtship – ready for dissemination. Now, I think I’ll pack you so full of super-sweet love that all your veins burst. Alice hates it when you try to lecture people like that, which is why she’s striking back at you, you know?”