Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume6 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 4===

“Gh, gah.”

Aradia had fallen and hit the ground hard.

She worked to keep her woozy mind in focus.

She wasn’t going to let mere pain stop her. She clenched her bloody teeth and sent strength back into her legs.

She wanted to be someone who could protect all witches.

Some might mock that as an outdated idea. In the age of smartphones and the internet, anyone could do a quick search and see that the witch hunts had been wrong. They would assume no one would ever do that again.

But they were wrong.

This wasn’t a fantasy from centuries ago.

The emotional witch hunts had never ended.

The words and framework used had changed with the times, but similar social attacks could be seen in the real world and on the internet all the time. Even today at this very moment.

Now, this violence was not led by the pros of the Anglican Church. It wasn’t part of a system for carrying out investigations and meting out punishments for magical crimes.

But that didn’t mean they weren’t involved.

It was easy enough to say the witch hunts had been wrong and they were a terrible mistake made in the distant past.

But no one ever went on to say who had been in the wrong or why they had made that mistake. They sealed it away as a thing of the past and avoided talking or thinking about it. That let the people feel no responsibility and didn’t allow any feelings of guilt to take root, so by swapping out the names and framework used, the same social phenomena could continue forever in new forms.

The true violence came from the ordinary people who had no real power and were ready to believe just about anything. It came from the common folk who raised their crosses high and clung to “history” and “tradition”. It was always those “innocent” people who didn’t think twice before burning to death a little old lady who lived a short distance from their village and raised small birds because she liked cute things! It was those pieces of shit who, after it was over, would shrug it off as “mass hysteria” and return to their lives like nothing had happened!! They’re just normal people? Those “peaceful” and “carefree” slaughterers think “we didn’t mean to kill an innocent person” is an adequate excuse. Are those rotten sadists trying to say laughing as you burn a woman to death is acceptable if she really was a witch!?

So Aradia would protect them even in the modern day.

She would protect the people accused of being witches, no matter how much power they did or didn’t have.

She would become someone who would hear the lonely cries of the person isolated behind a solid wall of “common sense”.

She would become the last defense of those who had been ostracized from all other systems meant to provide help.

She would become the goddess of all witches.

And she was willing to dirty her hands if it was to that end.

She might fall from the sky, cough up blood, curl up in a miserable ball, and tremble.

But she would not stop here.

She was a Transcendent of the Bridge Builders Cabal. It was time she demonstrated the ''strength'' of a magician with a wish she would make sure came true even if it required dealing with that fearsome tyrant Alice!!