Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume4 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 4===

“Long Beach?”

Kamijou Touma tilted his head and stared down at his phone.

Othinus sighed on his shoulder.

“I get the feeling you wouldn’t recognize Anaheim or Chinatown either.”

Shirai Kuroko had sent him a certain data file. It was not password-locked or anything, but it had an extension he had never seen before and he had trouble figuring out to open it on his phone. That had required nervously downloading a free decompression tool from a sketchy-looking foreign site. Why couldn’t they use a reputable app store?

“Oh.”

“Wait, Othinus! This is safe, isn’t it!? If ''you’re'' lost, then I’ll be forever trapped in this online world!!”

Everything was done paperless these days, so he opened the file to find a company pamphlet. Except it included a few specialized numbers and names, providing data not released to the general public.

He was unfamiliar with this sort of document, so it took some time to read through it.

It was the afternoon before he knew it.

“Long Beach is exactly what it sounds like. It’s strong in the aerospace and steel industries and its beaches are pretty fancy.”

“Fancy? You mean like an invite-only-”

“They are not nudist beaches.”

“Do you have to glare at me like I’m a bug crawling on the floor!!!???”

Despite wearing little more than a cape herself, that god did not like people who were too eager.

She continued her explanation, sounding like she was only giving the bare minimum she felt obligated to provide.

“But being a nice area means it gets crowded fast, so getting any land there has to be a challenge. So instead of doing launches on a vast stretch of land, they may have run their experiments out at sea. Space Engage is a space company, right? A simulator would be enough for their initial experiments, but practical experiments would be necessary eventually. Even if they only used scaled-down models.”

It didn’t really matter, but it was apparently 20-30km from Downtown to Long Beach. If they did not find some kind of vehicle, it would be time for a marathon in the minus-20 weather.

“This might be exactly what we needed.”

“In what way?”

“You know what I mean.” Othinus crossed her arms on his shoulder. “Melzabeth Grocery screwed up. You could even say you were only following the rails of failure she had set up. The smartwatch was a convenient collection of hints, but following it to the end would only have led to the same fate as her. The best way to use that watch is to ''play a game of chicken where you get as much use out of it as you can and bail at the last second.'' You at least need to jump from the car before it plummets from the edge of the cliff.”

In that sense, maybe it was good they had found a new source of information.

This would give them a view from outside that single set of rails.

The world would open up around them.

Every part of the frozen city was marred by sand. Every step had the same crunch as at a busy seaside restaurant, but it was all a remnant of R&C Occultics’s attack.

The sand magic had caused everyone to vanish from Los Angeles.

Kamijou’s focus turned to his right hand.

The Rosicrucian magic was called Citrinitas and the 30 million missing people had been turned into nutrients and absorbed by the sand…or so he had been told.

This was an occult effect, so he might be able to negate it with a touch from his right hand.

He might be able to save the trapped people.

“Don’t even think about it,” warned Othinus. “You can negate the magic, but what happens then is a mystery. You might be able to drag them all out of the sand safe and sound, but what if ''you negate the special life support effect keeping them alive as no more than nutrients''? Then only the nutrient-rich sand will remain and the people can’t be revived.”

“That’s…a good point.”

He could negate it, but he could not define how the occult would be destroyed.

Was this Citrinitas magic similar to a cold sleep device? They did not know if they could safely retrieve the victims by smashing the device from the outside, so it was best to avoid touching any of it until they knew for sure. People’s lives were at stake.

“So would it be better to directly defeat the villain using the Citrinitas magic? I feel like it would save everyone if I destroyed the tool they’re using as a core of the magic. Like a magic wand or a crystal ball.”

“I’m reluctant to agree with that, but it would be fastest to get the defeated magician to tell you what to do. And you don’t need to be friends to get them to talk. You just need to do whatever it takes to win.”

That would require searching out someone.

Maybe the sand magician, maybe Anna Sprengel, and maybe Melzabeth Grocery.

Who would know the answer? Where could they find any hints to their whereabouts?

“What is this? Rental scooters?”

“Use that pen of yours to read the English sign, human. They have a big motor attached, so they can reach speeds of around 50km/h.

“You can use these on the streets? What kind of license does that require?”

“Forget the restrictive Japanese rules. American standards are always scarily relaxed.”

You could apparently hold your phone up and immediately pay to rent one. Othinus sighed when Kamijou held his own phone up to the reader.

“There’s no one here, so you could just use Melzabeth’s phone.”

“I’m not doing that.”

Toys that looked like someone attached T-shaped handlebars to a motorized skateboard lined the sidewalk. He removed the stopper from one and pulled it out with both hands.

“Huh? Why do you look so pleased, Othinus?”

“I have a soft spot for these American toys. Especially two-wheeled ones ridden standing up.”

He took off along the road without a helmet.

It was unthinkable in Japan, but Othinus insisted that you drove on the right in America. His Japanese instincts very nearly led him to his doom. In fact, he might have died almost immediately if LA wasn’t deserted.

The wind was agonizing in this 20-below world. His cheap jacket was no help whatsoever.

He finally understood why Stiyl had insisted on using the dark subway tunnel before.

“My ears are gonna fall off!!!???”

“How is this too much for you? You trekked across frigid Denmark with me, remember?”

Othinus started talking like an old grandmother who insisted rubbing yourself with a dry towel was the best way to fight the cold.

“I don’t care what, just tell me something that will distract me from this biting pain!”

“Fine. You might be interested to know that even America requires a helmet and a license to drive one of these on the streets. Oh, and you broke another law too. You need to be 18 to drive one.”

“Why did I ask!?”

Riding out on the open road felt dangerous, but it was still a relief to rapidly leave the area they had been sniped in earlier.

He saw something slowly pass by overhead in the distance.

“What is that?”

“A Logistic Hornet. One of the 12 mobile delivery bases surrounding the world.”

“Are you sure it doesn’t use magic? It really uses no more than the laws of physics to stay in the air?”

“Does that look like a flying broomstick to you?”

“I-I guess Academy City isn’t the only place with crazy tech…”

From a distance, it looked like a V-shaped boomerang, but it actually had another triangular tail wing attached behind that. But more than that, the center of the main V had a giant hole in it. The centerless aircraft produced a low rumbling.

At the same time, orange sparks flew from it.

The donut-like part surrounding the hole began to glow and then the flashing moved back to the tail wing. Then an orange beam of light was launched diagonally upwards.

Like with lightning, the loud boom shook Kamijou’s eardrums and gut after a short delay.

“Wh-what the hell!?”

“That would be the mass driver that carries cargo outside the atmosphere. A linear motor builds up circular acceleration and then it’s fired from the rear launch port. The orange light is probably the heated electromagnets being exposed to the external air to cool down. I guess you can think of it like a roller coaster where the track ends partway through. …But that one was moving awfully slow. I can’t imagine it would do much more than glide slowly through the upper atmosphere.”

That aircraft boosted the Citrinitas magic by creating sandstorms and other weather conditions made by manipulating the temperature with liquid nitrogen and naphtha.

“I-it disappeared beyond the horizon.”

“You have to look at it on the scale of the weather map. You’ve seen the maps they show during the forecast with what look like the rings of a tree, right? This intentionally creates and distorts those, so their sketchbook has to cover 50 or even 100km.”

Kamijou saw an unnatural sunrise in the southern sky. No, was that the naphtha fire being used to heat the air? It shined for about 10 seconds before gradually vanishing once more.

Even Othinus sounded shocked by the extraordinary American size of it all.

“That thing can carry an obscene amount of supplies. If that was pure napalm that just detonated in the sky, we’re talking about enough firepower to have ended the Vietnam War in three days. I know they needed it to control the wind and carry enough sand to the city for their magic, but this is still impressive.”

“More like absurd… Why even control the weather when they can blast us with that explosion?”

“I’m sure it has its restrictions. It was originally designed for peaceful launches, so the coordinate settings and the mass driver’s movement range won’t allow it to target the nearby surface.”

“Can’t planes flip upside down?”

“You fool, don’t you know what would happen if you flew a large transport plane or strategic bomber the same way as a small fighter? And this thing is 5000m across, so it’s a miracle it stays airborne at all. The tech here is even better than that Radiosonde Castle we used in Gremlin.”

At that size, he wondered if it could change the wind currents by tilting just enough to catch the wind.

“Does it launch everything by noisily blasting it into the air?”

“That would be unnecessarily inconvenient. At 5000m across, its wings can be used as runways. They can also hang transport planes and drones from the bottom and accelerate them like a monorail.”

But Othinus was viewing this from another angle as well.

“The hornet name is a symbol.”

“?”

“The rose is the organization, the nectar hidden within the flower is knowledge, and I supposed the hornets buzzing around the flower would be the experts seeking that hidden knowledge. Hmph, quite the name for the tools flying around the world for a massive IT company.” Othinus sounded half exasperated and half impressed. “They function much like an aircraft carrier, but the upwards-pointing mass drivers can also launch flying objects into ballistic orbit. And if that asshole priest is to be believed, the launches cost less than 1% of a multistage rocket launch.”

“How incredible is that?”

“More so than an oil field that never runs dry. Even if it is limited to ballistic flight, this invention makes spaceflight more accessible than the highway. Melzabeth Grocery must be the kind of person who ends up unhappy after winning the lottery.”

A high school boy did not know much about oil fields or highways either, so Kamijou still didn’t really get it.

But more importantly…

“How does that giant thing take off and land? I doubt it can use an ordinary airport.”

“I was guessing either the ocean or the desert, but since we’re on our way to Long Beach, probably the ocean. Then again, they might rely on midair refueling to stay in flight indefinitely.”

“You mean using an air tanker?”

“They went to all that trouble to create stateless mobile bases, but those would require using ordinary airports for refueling. Maybe they send up tanks attached to giant balloons. That would let them refuel from land or sea without needing a stationary airport.”

Kamijou recalled Stiyl mentioning that in the diner. Something about them using gliders and missile launch vehicles to send cargo to the Logistic Hornets. So they might do the same thing to provide fuel and maintenance equipment.

However they worked, they were R&C Occultics’s toys now.

It would not be that easy to neutralize them by cutting off the fuel supply.

Those things were so big that nothing they could do on the surface would bring it down. It was like challenging the moon or the sun.

He was driving at the speed of a motorcycle, but it was still a long distance to travel. And time was passing the entire time. The abnormal weather was bad enough to begin with, but he felt like his body temperature was dropping as time passed.

He finally grumbled a complaint while operating the unusually fast scooter.

“So you’re saying we have to fight that thing? Stiyl said it’s so big it can control the weather and entire meteorological disasters. Isn’t this entire 20-below mess its fault? Not only can it part the ocean or send spears raining down on our head, but it can boost that sand magician’s magic to the point that not even a Saint like Kanzaki could win.”

“So are you going to give up?”

“''I didn’t say that.''”

He didn’t even need to think about it.

He would find and rescue the missing mother named Melzabeth Grocery, he would take her back to her daughter Helcalia Grocery, and he would make sure this ended happily.

''He would do anything to pull it off.

''There was no doubt in his mind about it.

They passed by an English sign. Kamijou could not read all of the simple English, but he could read the two biggest words: Long Beach.