Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume2 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 4===

Anna Sprengel laughed.

She had considered going easy on her opponent if she got the right answer, but that girl apparently had no intention of trying. She turned 180 degrees around, her honey-blonde hair spreading out behind her, and she began running full speed away.

(Of course, going easy on her would just mean a longer, more painful death instead of an instant, painless one.)

It did not look like the girl was actually trying to escape.

Was this a temporary withdrawal so she could hide herself and make a surprise attack later?

(I am impressed she’s willing to risk her life for an antidote that might not even exist as far as she knows.)

“You’re used to working from behind the scenes, aren’t you? Do you normally boss other people around to wear down your enemy from a position of safety? Or are you actually afraid of letting these children come to harm? Hee hee. This is a school culture, isn’t it? You’re all children, but you upperclassmen get stuck with so much extra work.”

The girl who looked no older than ten had not moved a step from that spot. Her smile remained, yet she did not try to hide the boredom on her face as she waved her small hand to the side.

And she gave the answer to her quiz question.

“This is the world’s oldest form of bondage, courtesy of ancient Egypt.”

Several things could be heard slicing through the air.

The distance between them did not matter.

The old rope looked worn out and ready to snap if it tried to support someone’s body weight, but the Rose leader was able to endlessly draw out its essence. With that, she could bind even an asteroid falling from the heavens to hold it in place in the middle of the air.

(Running away will only mean stepping on and being blown away by a distorted ley line “landmine”.)

But…

“Wagh!!!???”

Shokuhou Misaki let out a strange cry and then pitched forward onto the ground.

Anna Sprengel had not done anything to her.

The snow had started to pile up due to the shattered roof, so the ground may have grown wet and slippery.

The rope thrown by Anna actually missed its target entirely, shooting by directly over the Queen of Tokiwadai’s head, and wrapping tightly around one of the pillars that held up the arcade roof. A light tug with her small hand was all it took for tremendous pressure to break the pillar away.

Anna had used the world’s oldest whip and a ley line landmine, yet her opponent had dodged them both simultaneously. And not with the esper powers or technology of Academy City. This was purely the girl’s lack of athletic ability.

''The'' Miss Sprengel stared in disbelief.

It was true Shokuhou Misaki was wearing a suit that supported her athletic abilities.

It was not a powered suit designed for combat, but it was still a bizarre piece of Academy City tech she had picked up in the dark side. Shokuhou would be able to take a handgun bullet to the torso without flinching and she could lift the average car from the ground with just her two arms.

But that did not mean she had overcome her own lack of ability there.

[[Image:GT_Index_v02_132.jpg|thumb]]

If she had followed the proper movements found in textbooks, she would have been killed instantly. And Anna would have looked bored throughout. Or if the suit had optimized her movements based on combat data from martial arts masters, Anna would have snorted with laughter. She would have called that high-tech solution just another way of seeking the prestige of her predecessors.

But that was not what had happened.

Shokuhou Misaki had survived in her own way.

Anna’s predictions had failed. She had not received the expected result. A loophole or vulnerability in the world had been discovered here and it had overturned Anna’s accurate predictions in a single move.

It may have been a very minor thing, but it was also so wonderfully, unbelievably sweet.

“Ha ha☆”

The sweetness burned at her mind.

She knew this was a bad habit of hers, but she went along with it anyway.

It was like a never-before-seen powerful enemy had appeared in the middle of some tedious level grinding.

She let go of that rope that should have been a sure thing for her and she once more spun the wheel on the Pneuma-less Shell. With another grinding noise, the giant orb opened along a complex arrangement of cracks and her small hand roughly snatched at what emerged from within.

Her target’s face was bright red with embarrassment as she scrambled to her feet and continued to run away. Her long blonde hair swayed side to side while she tried to leave the arcade.

“Eh heh hah, ah ha ha ha ha ha ha!! What luck! You have such absurd luck!! Well, you did emerge victorious from the endlessly-cruel screening process of gene rarity to stand here before me now, so I suppose you had already proven your luck! Even so—hee hee—I never thought you would make me laugh like this. Ha ha ha ah ha ha ah ha ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hee hee ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ah ha ha ah 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 ha ha ha!!”

The metal orb groaned some more as it opened. It was no longer holding out on Anna.

“Pff. Ah ha ha! It’s been a while since I’ve gotten an ultra-rare one like this! This is from the 20th century!!”

“Kh.”

A tree branch and a flimsy rope had been devastating enough. Shokuhou grimaced at the thought of what was to come, but she was entirely taken aback by what emerged.

It was a silver-colored mass. It was no more than a fifty-eight centimetre sphere, but it sounded much heavier than a bowling ball when it dropped to the ground. The asphalt broke below it. But the official documents said it weighed eighty-four kilograms, so that was to be expected. It also had four metal rods that extended behind it like a comet’s tail.

In other words…

This was…

“Sputnik☆ Are satellites more your thing, Miss Science Side?”

“Wait a second.”

“The essence I can draw from this is the world’s oldest orbital launch. Although poor lonely Laika was on the second one. Now, I hope you enjoy this super-ultra-rare cause of death!!”

The instant Anna raised her hand from a good distance away, Shokuhou’s hair rose up in defiance of gravity. She was outside the shopping district, meaning no more arcade roof overhead. Only the mercilessly snowy sky waited up above her.

“Oh, no. This has to be some kind of joke ability. If she seriously going to blow me away like this!?”

She went pale and tried the best she could to run away, but…

“Eek!?”

Her right ankle twisted in an odd direction, she staggered to the side, and she fell. Anna’s predictions and calculations must not have taken that into account because the bus stop sign right next to her was torn from the ground and thrown into the snowy sky instead. Only the blue sky awaited it.

“Hee hee. You really are entertaining.”

“Oww.”

“More, more, more, more!!”

Anna rejoiced at her own bad luck.

She pulled out the next one. It was a perfectly ordinary fist-sized stone. No, it had a small indentation that the little girl stuck her finger into. What she scooped up was not paint. The thick, reddish-black substance was…

“Ha ha, ah ha ha. The world’s oldest writing tool was charcoal. Before papyrus or parchment, humanity preserved their own records by mixing charcoal with blood or fat and rubbing it on cave walls.”

She even licked her lips as she whispered the answer.

She toyed with the substance on her fingertips and moved her hand as if she were carving something into the world as a whole.

“In other words, all grimoires started from here.”

She wrote on a round table lying on its side nearby.

She wrote on a stainless-steel pillar that had avoided breaking.

She wrote on the snowman decoration positioned in front of an ice cream shop.

And all of them transformed into original grimoires that drew energy from the ley lines to autonomously defend themselves.

They all creaked as they began to move. The table’s four legs moved like an animal’s, the stainless-steel pillar bent over and crawled around like an earthworm or inchworm, and the snowman decoration’s smile gained a definite will of its own. And all three of them “glared” toward fleeing and falling Shokuhou Misaki.

“Go on. Sic her☆”

They obeyed Anna’s lazy command by rushing toward the girl, each in their own way.

The air shook.

The newly accumulating snow was blown away as they began to run.

Anna once more noted the middle school girl’s “luck” when she did not immediately look back at her pursuers. These were true grimoires, even if they were impromptu ones. If the casually written words there had entered the girl’s field of view, they would have assaulted her brain and sent blood pouring from every hole on her face.

“Ahh!!”

Anna had never imagined that someone facing such a threat to their life would run right smack into the support pillar of a wind turbine.

The table had overtaken its target and then made a U-turn to cut off her escape like a hound, but the unexpected collision threw off its aim and it crashed into a concrete wall instead.

“Pff!?”

When Shokuhou Misaki pushed her hands against the ground and climbed to her feet, the stainless-steel inchworm was clearly right there at the center of her vision, but she was so dizzy from the pain in her nose and her tension was so high that the text must never have actually reached her mind. She managed to overlook what was right in front of her and it saved her life.

Anna Sprengel could only hold her stomach with both hands and laugh.

“Ah ha ha ha!!!!!! Yes, you I like. Kamijou Touma is interesting as a raw material to work with, but he’s grown so used to his misfortune and he’s learned how to operate within it, so he’s just too unchanging. You, on the other hand, are a delight. You really are trying to do everything flawlessly, but you’re so hopelessly bad at it that it actually ends up saving you. Yes, yes. This truly is beyond any of my expectations!!!”

And how did the Queen of Tokiwadai respond while on the run?

“This city only needs one Queen: me!!”

(Now I get why Mitsuari-san never shut off the suit’s limiters no matter how cornered she felt ''back then''. This thing amplifies your unathletic side too, so one careless acceleration could have you trip or crash into a wall at twice the speed and she wanted to avoid self-destructing like that!)

Shokuhou Misaki tearfully held her reddened nose with a hand while shouting back at her foe.

Anna had called Kamijou Touma a “raw material”.

She would make her regret that. She would make her cough up whatever vaccine or antidote she was hiding. She would do whatever it took ''like the cruel queen she was.''

Anna Sprengel walked leisurely through the shopping district and poked her head out from the arcade before looking a bit to the side.

That was when it happened.

An arcade coin shot down from the top of the building at three times the speed of sound.