Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume2 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 6===

Anna Sprengel considered what to do with her right hand next. But only with the tension of someone pondering what to make for dinner that night.

She had well over a million attack options.

(The optimization should be done soon and the boring result has already shown itself.)

She had made her choice.

40 + 300. Each digit was split out separately and summed together, so that came out to a 7. That meant the true character she had extracted was Z or Zayin. That corresponded to The Lovers in tarot and it was the channel that connected the spheres of understanding and beauty in the Sephiroth.

It meant a sword or armor.

That determined the nature of her right hand.

(The emotion of irritation is a rare one for me, but I do experience it from time to time. If this result is not to my liking, maybe I should dispose of him and move on to my next objective.)

Anna Sprengel gently stretched out her slender hand. Her right hand could use just two fingers to slice through anything. In other words, simply closing those two fingers would create a massive invisible maw with her target’s head between the jaws.

Just then, Kamijou Touma took an unusual action.

“''Change''!!”

He did the opposite of his usual move of suicidally rushing in with fist clenched. In fact, he jumped backwards to move away from her.

That was still suicidal, but the boy did not have any projectile attacks.

Which meant…

(St. Germain!!)

Anna smiled.

It might look at first like Kamijou Touma had acquired a great variety of options here, but it was actually the opposite. When it came to the essence of Rosicrucianism, no magician knew more than the master of the No. 1 Temple in Germany. No one had any chance of defeating her if they challenged her on that field. They might put up a decent fight, but they could never win. They would only be postponing their inevitable death.

It could not have been more apparent that the only way to defeat this magic was to destroy the illusion.

(Attempting to keep your distance and wear me down with projectiles after all this is just pathetic.)

St. Germain specialized in creating diamonds.

That meant carbon manipulation.

(Then all I need to do is absorb all forms of carbon, both solid and gaseous, to remove it from this space.)

Something gathered in her small left palm. It was a filthy black ball a little larger than a pill.

(Now St. Germain is helpless. Or will he use his host’s own body to create a diamond? Based on the optional services offered by funeral homes, an entire human body’s worth of carbon should only get you a diamond no larger than the tip of your fingernail!!)

Anna laughed, but then she silently grimaced.

No matter what she said, she clung to success and victory more than anyone. To the point that she could not maintain herself without them.

The boy’s words were coming back to her and they were accompanied by pain.

However.

“…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………”

A brief pause followed.

After falling back—and thus gathering Anna’s attention as she pursued—Kamijou Touma lightly tossed something into the air.

It was a symbol made from cheap gold plating and it was only a few centimeters long. Instead of a number or a letter of the alphabet, this symbol looked sort of like an ‘n’ with a loop at the end.

The symbol stood for Capricorn.

Its essence was femininity, activity, Saturn, longing, and prosperity.

As well as…

(The element of earth.)

Yes.

The twenty-two characters were broken out into three, seven, and twelve. With only three in the center, the rose symbol managed by the twenty-two Hebrew characters had no place for earth in the center of the flower.

And while it was a magical symbol, it had no magic power within it. In fact, it felt like someone trying to use what little knowledge they had without any practical skills to back it up. This could not be St. Germain who did have those skills.

In other words…

“Was this Kamijou Touma?”

She knew that, but human thoughts were so easily altered by your assumptions.

Something extra had been thrown into the mix.

Capricorn was a symbol of the earth element.

How things looked in a red room was very different from how they looked in a blue room, so a train’s driver’s compartment had its coloration chosen carefully.

Because the wrong coloration could be distracting.

(This could be ''bad''!!)