Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume6 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 4===

''Splat, splat, splat, splat, splat, splat, splat, splat, splat, splat, splat, splat, splat!!

The thick and sticky white and yellow was reminiscent of rotten slugs.

It was in fact raw animal grease.

An unbelievable number of those disgusting faces were plastered to the windows and walls where they dripped down to form bizarre silhouettes. The process was disgusting to watch. Screams erupted from all around and a crowd fled from a shopping building offering excellent New Year’s Eve bargains. There were some young people holding clothing not in a bag and some of them may have used the panic to avoid paying.

“Phew.”

Aradia, goddess of witches and ruler of the night and the moon, sighed below the night sky.

The Wiccan world operated under the Rule of Three.

That rule stated that any magic used by a witch – whether it was used for a good deed or a bad – would be returned to the user at thrice the strength.

So a witch that used magic to steal money would lose three times as much and a witch that used magic to kill someone would receive a wound three times as lethal.

Aradia heard a dull thud.

She looked down with her long silver hair swaying and saw a small boy on the verge of tears. She also saw a crepe-like stain on her ankle-length wimple.

“''I see.''”

Someone must have stolen some clothing using the panic caused by her magic and now she was paying for it. The sartorial loss had returned to her three times larger.

The witch goddess placed her hand on the boy’s head and soothed his tearful emotion.

(I should really consider myself fortunate three times the negative result wasn’t any worse than that. The biggest concern is people getting trampled in the commotion. Even if I do have a spell prepared to dodge any trouble caused by these events.)

Aradia existed to save all witches, so her own personal issues were secondary. Her priority was Kamijou Touma who was indirectly guiding Alice and could end up ruining the Transcendents’ plans for his own personal ends. She knew he meant no harm, but with the entire world at stake, he was more dangerous than a wicked temptress leading a king astray.

In the area known as Shibuya, there were 38,020 buildings with 5,030,750 rooms. She only knew the exact numbers because the bear grease had told her.

She had eliminated all the artificial blind spots, but she still hadn’t found Kamijou Touma and the Bologna Succubus.

“I suppose they wouldn’t just be standing out in the open.”

That meant her next task was to see if there were any faces or silhouettes caught in an unnatural loop anywhere. Half of half of half of half of them were. She used that additional search condition to narrow things down. If the Bologna Succubus was somehow deceiving the search, her quarry had to be near the grease behaving oddly.

“Time for some good deeds.”

If she wanted to find someone, she just had to invite in that result.

If she found someone that someone else was searching for, she would be repaid threefold.

The crepe boy appeared to have gotten separated from his parents in the panic. ''How fortunate.'' She crouched down to his eye level, smiled, and worked at “reloading” her spell. The good deed of finding the boy’s parents would return to her but three times as powerful.

She didn’t want anything from the boy.

She only wanted ''the simple act'' of performing a good deed.

She used her conversational skills to earn the boys trust, so he held onto the side of her hip while she performed a simple divination to find his parents and walked through the streets of Shibuya.

“Now, is this the destiny of the world handing out fortune and misfortune? Or is it the sparks of disaster created from the interphasal pressure caused by the magic I use? Either way, I will be taking back my action with an exorbitant amount of interest.”