Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume8 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 5===

An unnatural tremor ran through the ship.

If Kamijou wasn’t careful, he would have slid to the side even as he lay collapsed on the flight deck. In this case, it looked like Mut Thebes had a harder time keeping her balance while standing up.

Yes, the giant bird created from several aircraft cruisers was clearly shifting out of place. It tilted diagonally and didn’t fix itself. One of the five legs extending down like a long skirt must have been squashed like an aluminum can.

This was no coincidence.

Good fortune had no love for Kamijou Touma.

“''Aradia''?” asked Mut Thebes, looking somewhat confused.

This couldn’t possibly be good fortune, so the boy had to ask which goddess had chosen to protect him.

“She must have lowered the anchor. But how did that cause so much damage? The anchor is a standard piece of the ship’s equipment and it isn’t even a weapon. It isn’t enough to bend and break a military ship.”

“Don’t be so sure. I don’t know what exactly Aradia did, but if that really was the anchor, it is possible for that to destroy the ship. There are standards concerning the water depth and the chain length and there are apparently detailed rules about using two anchors at once and how to lower them. Forcibly lower the anchor in the wrong way and the power of the waves tugging on the ship can bend or even break its hull.”

“They teach these things in Academy City?”

He decided it was best not to mention he knew this from an old B movie he had seen on TV recently. Even if it only came once in your life, not every day of your first high school winter break was guaranteed to be exciting.

“And let’s not forget what you said about reaching the cinema complex.”

“?”

“''You walked here.''”

Kamijou slowly gathered enough strength to stand back up.

His head was still woozy from breathing in the oxygen-deficient air, but he could still fight.

He could pass out a little later.

“You also said it took some time to absorb multiple 300m aircraft cruisers, but that means you would have needed to rush here to make up for the lost time. You would normally run and jump in those circumstances.”

“…”

“But you didn’t do that.”

No.

Was there a reason she couldn’t do it?

“Ships are made to float in the ocean, not walk on land. Even if you can pull it off slowly, forcing it to a run would bend the hull and concentrate enough weight to crush it. I’m betting you gave it five legs because you wanted to distribute the weight. And even then, you had to walk slowly and carefully!!”

Aradia had done it on purpose. By lowering the heavy anchors one after another, each part of the giant bird had been forcibly twisted in different directions. She had broken a weapon larger than the average building by using the enemy’s weight and momentum against them like a form of martial arts self-defense.

“Tch.”

This may have been a first.

Mut Thebes clicked her tongue. And her focus shifted from Kamijou to Aradia, who was flying around in the sky.

She didn’t even need to use the Shrink Drink designed to kill Transcendents.

Flying with magic was easy, but shooting her down with the counter spell was just as easy.

Kamijou couldn’t let that happen.

“Ohhhh!!’

“?”

In the precise moment her focus shifted, Kamijou Touma shot to his feet and used all his strength to push himself forward while crouched low. He threw a full-power tackle toward Mut Thebes’s slender hips.

He struck.

Gravity briefly vanished and then they both crashed down onto the flight deck.

Afterwards, a powerful vertical tremor hit them. Had Aradia dropped another anchor to the ground, tugging unnaturally at the great bird?

The shaking and tilting sent Kamijou and Mut Thebes rolling along the flight deck while tangled together. They picked up speed. They rolled on and on and belatedly realized the tilting of the deck was getting worse.

There was no stopping it now.

They grabbed at each other while sliding down the steep downward slope of the flight deck. Kamijou couldn’t stop their momentum, but by pressing the soles of his shoes against the deck and creating resistance, he could guide their slide to the sides. They would be badly injured if they hit a wall at this speed, so he desperately directed them toward the starboard side deck, slammed Mut Thebes against the base of the destroyed deck to dislodge her grip on him, and slid another few hundred meters down. They both slid all the way down to the asphalt far below.

“Gh.”

They had reached the ground.

A short distance away, the girl silently rose to her feet.

The massive bird seemed to cover the sky overhead.

A dull, heavy scraping and groaning of metal came from above. The bird could no longer keep its balance, so its upper body pressed against the remaining bottom half of the cinema complex and it stopped as if leaning against the building for support.

Most likely, that massive bird was no longer usable.

But the aircraft cruisers were not Transcendent Mut Thebes’s only weapons. She took a quick look around at the bottom of the skirt-like five legs and her eyes stopped on an armored vehicle flipped over on the road. No, it only looked like one. A high pressure water weapon was crushed between the vehicle and the road.

That meant the vehicle was an anti-NBC decontamination vehicle.

Or was Mut Thebes focused on the revolving grenade launcher fallen next to it? If it was meant to distribute gas, it likely contained tear gas or emetic gas. Artillery only fired upon a single point, but these invisible chemicals would spread to cover an entire area. Was she going to use that to take out Kamijou? It was true gas was a more effective anti-personnel weapon than bullets.

And she had already had some success with the damage caused by the oxygen-deficient air.

She licked her lips and held out her palm.

“The vulture devours the flames enveloping it and devours the dead flesh. All is reborn anew. In other words, the Dead Phoenix.”

“!?”

There was a powerful flash of light.

But it didn’t come from Mut Thebes. A nearby streetlight was blown away by a tank gun at close range. The gun was attached to an 8-wheel mobile combat vehicle – a Predator Octopus. Only one person could have used the smart glasses to control that military vehicle which should have been abandoned in the underground parking garage.

And the shadows stretching across the road were influenced by the number and position of light sources.

So.

Blowing away the streetlight and spreading explosive flames in an unexpected direction caused the vehicle’s shadow to stretch in the opposite direction, as if fleeing from Mut Thebes. Same for the grenade launcher next to it. Now she couldn’t absorb the surrounding shadows and create her white versions.

Now an ordinary fist could reach her.

“What!?” groaned the brown girl.

This wasn’t over yet.

Kamijou clenched his teeth and his right fist.

And he thought of the person who had fought alongside him.

(Anna…Sprengel.)