Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume1 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 4===

It was an invincible and unassailable middle school girl.

Misaka Mikoto put her hands on her hips and breathed an exasperated sigh.

“I’m pretty sure you were born under an unlucky star or something. But instead of bad luck with women, I think it gave you bad luck with little girls.”

“Misaka-san, you really shouldn’t suggest that in Academy City, headquarters of the science side. …And you might have had my attention if it was a good luck with young women and that it lets me make friends with all the young dorm manager ladies out there, but this I refuse to accept.”

“Science ''side''? What? And…ah!! Come to think of it, what ever happened with that little girl yesterday!?”

“Don’t even ask that! What absolute moron would dig back up that horror story now!? I never want to see her again!!”

Then Mikoto stopped moving.

She looked alternately between Kamijou and Index.

“So should I pry her off of you? Y’know, since she’s a little girl too?”

“To be clear, you fall into that ‘younger’ category too.”

“I try to help and you call me a little girl!?”

Anyway, prestigious Tokiwadai Middle School was apparently very strict about Christmas.

Specifically, they had a gloomy and dreary seasonal event where the students were sent out into the bitter cold while wearing miniskirts (although the shortness of her skirt seemed like it was her own fault for altering it) and had to walk around the city collecting trash for 24 hours, day and night.

They existed.

They really did exist.

Maybe they were not found under the rocks, inside a rotten fallen tree, or in an afro of wire hangers, but that did not matter. They lived in a different world from Kamijou, but he was not the only one having a miserable Christmas!!

One such girl had gotten fed up with it all, saw an opening, and made a run for it, but her teachers and Judgment had noticed and she was spending Christmas Eve with them hot on her trail. How hot? Hot enough that being caught might as well mean being wrapped in chains and thrown into a blast furnace.

Kamijou grabbed her shoulders and practically hugged her with his eyes shining bright.

He had discovered someone else who would fight by his side against this godawful seasonal event.

He had seen the smoke signals demanding a rebellion.

“We might be making an enemy of the entire world here, but let’s give ourselves a merry Christmas even if we have to fight back against fate itself!! We’re in this together!!”

“Eh? Huh? W-wait, are you forcing your plans onto me or something???”

She blushed and started acting oddly.

Nearby, Index put her hands on her hips and puffed out her cheeks (because biting the back of his spiky-haired head was apparently not enough to calm her anger).

“Ugh, I don’t like this, but if you want to join us, can’t you at least come out and ask directly?”

“Index-san, now is the time for kindness. Remember the Little Match Girl? If just one person out there had reached out to help her, she could have avoided that tragic fate!”

“Hey, wait, I wasn’t looking for pity! Even if I am thankful you saved me from that army’s grasp!!”

Kamijou Touma had no intention of throwing Mikoto out now. He was even moved to emotion. His miserable time could not be blamed on his poor, lower class lifestyle. It happened in the upper class as well. Those rich girls could treat real life like a pay-to-win game, so how badly had this girl mishandled her own life to end up with such a miserable Christmas!? Someone so incompetent clearly needed his help!!

And so Mikoto made a request.

“I want to do some Christmasy things. Because I’ll be killed if I can’t blend in here.”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

“Hm? Huh? Did I say something weird???”

“No, you’re fine. Perfectly fine.”

Mikoto sounded worried after seeing the smile frozen on Kamijou’s face, but that wooden response was all he could manage.

Do Christmasy things? As in Christmasy activities?

He had no idea what that could be. He could think of plenty of Christmasy objects like cakes, turkeys, red clothing, and white beards. He could think of plenty of Christmasy places to visit like the main roads lit up by the lights wrapped around the trees or the giant Christmas tree in the train station plaza.

But Christmasy activities?

This wasn’t like trick-or-treating at Halloween. What could you only do at Christmastime???

“…”

Of course, the confused boy could think of one thing. You could always take a lesson from that bearded man who broke into people’s homes like it was normal and shoved wrapped boxes in their stockings. You could always just exchange boxes like that.

But you only exchanged presents and said Merry Christmas just the once, and that generally happened on Christmas day. He could not play that card as camouflage every single time a violent girl barged into his life.

So what else was there?

What did people generally do on Christmas Eve?

Growing nervous, he glanced over at Index and Mikoto to see they were both tilting their heads curiously. In fact, so was the cat on the silver-haired girl’s head. They had no plan whatsoever and were counting on him to figure it out. And if he said he had nothing, they were sure to call him useless. In stereo from the right and left.

It would be one thing if a young woman were gently whispering “oh, you useless thing” in his ear along with a sigh of mock exasperation.

But this was different.

These younger girls would have dead serious looks on their face when they said it.

The meaning and the warmth of it were entirely different!!

(Eh? So if the girls form an alliance here, will I be left all alone in a sea of verbal abuse? If that’s how I end up spending my Christmas Eve, I can’t even crawl back under the gravestone!)

He was soaked with sweat despite the December chill and he no longer even saw himself as a bug under a rock. Even his metaphors were veering in a dangerous direction.

He forced a smile and pulled out his phone.

“Ha…ha ha ha. Nothing to worry about. Just leave everything to Kamijou Touma, well-known capable adult.”

“Where are you going?” asked Mikoto.

“Just checking on how crowded some places are. S-so wait just a moment, okay?”

He hid in the shadows and typed “Christmas Activities” into a search engine on his phone’s small screen, but all he saw were social media comments that made him want to vomit, so he quickly abandoned that route. Plus, the voices online were full of lies that exaggerated the romantic side of things about three times over. Or at least he hoped very much those were all lies. The world described there differed so much from his reality that he wanted to send out a curse that made sure they were actually all lonely.

He wanted help from someone he knew in real life.

After finding a male friend’s number in his address book and calling that, he waited a moment and they picked up.

“U-um, Aogami Pierce? I’d like some advice, one classmate to another.”

“Sorry, Kami-yan, but I have my hands full at the moment!!”

“Eh? Don’t tell me your Christmas schedule is jam packed. No! Please don’t leave me behind in this miserable world!!”

“I was so desperate to feel some human warmth I stuck my boobs mousepad in the microwave, but it turned out to be way hotter than I expected! So now I have no feeling in my fingers!! I couldn’t have even answered your call if my phone wasn’t sitting on the table and didn’t have voice-activated commands!!”

“It’s Christmas Eve!! That only comes once a year! What the hell were you doing at 10 in the morning!? Maybe I’d get it if you had poked at them with your fingertip out of curiosity, but did you just full-on grab them with both hands right away? Why couldn’t you direct these impulses in a productive direction, like building rockets or something!!!???”

“But VR is so lonely with just the video. I wanted some tactile feedback to make it more immersive! But I don’t want them to be cold!! I paid good money for all this equipment and it wasn’t so I could virtually touch a corpse!!”

“Let me repeat: it’s Christmas Eve!! What the hell were you doing at 10 in the morning!!!???”

“Hear me out, Kami-yan. You know how sometimes you think you’ve heated your food up, but it’s still cold in the middle? I was afraid of that happening here, so I decided to heat it up a little longer, but it turns out silicone heats up really well! This thing is legit dangerous!!”

Did this awful friend not know that they sold silicone pots for use in the microwave? This was his punishment for taking the easy route and never cooking for himself. Also, there was no point in listening to someone complain because they failed to read the warnings on the box. Kamijou ignored the idiot’s lamentations and hung up.

But giving up on his friend did not improve his own situation any.

Q. What can you only do on Christmas? He was still stuck with that deadly riddle that sounded like it came from the Sphinx (the original one, not the pet cat). If he screwed this up, a Girls Alliance would be established and he would be stuck curled up on the ground sobbing. On Christmas Eve.

“Touma.”

“Hey, you.”

The two girls asked an innocent question.

Those teenage girls had no idea how much pressure their expectations were placing on him.

“So what are we going to do?”