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

===Part 7===

Long Beach apparently referred to quite a large area of land. The houses or villas alongside the beach looked like toxic bite-sized chocolates with their red, blue, and pink colors. A retired warship in the ocean had been turned into a museum. If they had not known what address to look for, they would have gotten lost and frozen to death in this minus-20 open world adventure.

Kamijou did not even notice the sunset.

He just knew it had gotten a lot darker and a second night was beginning.

“Wait, it’s this late already?”

“In LA, the sun sets early during the winter. Wait for the five o’clock news and it’ll be dark out.”

Kamijou and Othinus rode long the beach to reach a concrete yacht harbor.

He did not hear any waves along the way, so he looked over curiously to find no movement there. The beach was covered with frost like the inside of a freezer and the seawater had fully frozen.

“For real? This doesn’t even feel like the yearly drift ice showing up. It’s a solid sheet like at a skating rink.”

“The entire population of Los Angeles is missing, but there must have been a large margin of error. The ocean is white out to the horizon. I wonder if that Skybus 550 is all right.”

It felt like seeing the grilled corn from a New Year’s festival frozen solid.

It was physically possible, but why bother?

It felt wrong to see such incredible waste.

The pointy-haired boy kept his electric scooter running as he spoke his thoughts aloud.

“So this is Long Beach…wait, is that it!?”

He pressed one of his shoes against the ground while his voice cracked in surprise.

Space Engage was an American high-tech start-up in the private spaceflight business, so he had expected a smart building covered in glass or a bizarre underground lab.

But he instead found the frozen ocean.

Something unusual sat at one corner of the concrete harbor lined with fancy yachts and cruisers.

It was not even made to float in the ocean.

It looked like a skinny, wheeled shed about the size of an RV. It was more like a rounded capsule than a rectangular container. He was pretty sure it was called a mobile home.

There was no vehicle to tow it around. The rear living space had been separated and left here. If he had not already been given the company’s address, he might have mistaken it for some abandoned scraps no one wanted.

It felt terribly out of place with nothing else like it here. Almost like inexplicably finding skis in the department store swimsuit section.

“Information any shareholder would know, huh?”

“What now, human? Worried you might find R&C Occultics here?”

“Yeah,” he admitted.

He had no idea how stocks worked, but the massive IT company that made the start-up an affiliate and then worked to kill it would have to have been involved. They would know anything he knew, so even if there was a crucial hint here, they might have detected it and disposed of it already. That meant anything he found here could be modified lies.

But Othinus shook her head on his shoulder.

“I doubt it.”

“Why?”

“Let me ask you this: why the mobile home? The official documentation would only have the building’s location – it points to the ''land''. So whenever R&C Occultics was coming for an inspection or examination, she would only have to remove her lab and place an identical mobile home in its place. It’s a simple way of preserving her secrets, so I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t do it.”

“…”

“If she didn’t need it, she could get rid of it. The harbor fees aren’t cheap, you know? Yet she still has her original mobile home here. That means it contains something she was reluctant to part with. So be careful. The enemy you’re imagining hasn’t been here.”

Kamijou viewed the frozen mobile home, but he could not see inside thanks to the curtains covering the windows. The metal sliding door did not have a keyhole. Instead, there was something like a calculator’s number pad next to the door. However, most of the buttons were missing.

“The panel colors are…red and black?”

“The same colors as the watch band. The decoy home may have used a different color combination.”

He approached and a bright light dazzled his eyes.

And he heard a gentle woman’s voice.

“Welcome to, ahem, Emptiness Marriage.”

“Yikes!? Eh? What just welcomed me?”

Kamijou gave a start and then glanced down at his Transla-Pen. The god sighed in exasperation.

“It’s a standard security sensor. It makes a lot of light and noise when someone approaches the entrance. But what was that weird sigh in the middle? Did Melzabeth record this herself?”

“Y-you mean no one’s here?”

“It’s too soon to say that, but try holding up that mother’s phone.”

He did as Othinus suggested and was surprised to find the metal door opened on its own. The place may have been hooked up to an external power supply to accommodate a long-term stay.

The inside was still cold, but not freezing.

He found himself in another dimension once he stepped inside.

“This is incredible.”

Kamijou spoke aloud, forgetting all about the possible danger. The mobile home must have been based on an RV. About the same space as a tour bus was divided into a kitchen, bathroom, and bath and the furniture like a table, sofa, and bed could be folded up and stored in the walls. To save space, the TV, phone, and computer were all set to display on the same monitor.

But.

“The walls and ceiling are covered in these colorful things? Is it all spacecraft related?”

He was right. There was so much it obscured the color of the original wallpaper. Clippings from specialist papers were covered with sticky notes scribbled with equations. Colorful masking tape connected them to visualize the connections and possible combability between technologies.

The table was mostly covered by a 2.5m model instead of food. It looked about as big as a decent-sized surfboard.

The model was of a Logistic Hornet.

Othinus sighed when she looked to the walls and ceiling.

“The Melzabeth Method. I see. Now I get it.”

“?”

“Remember how I mentioned the difficulties of making a 5000m object fly using wings?” Othinus stood on the table and pointed her thumb at the detailed model covering most of the surface. “5km is enough to reach another train station and a new district. That means a difference in temperature, humidity, wind direction, and even the weather – sunny, rainy, etc. The different wind strength and air resistance on different parts of the craft would ‘twist’ it and ultimately break it apart in midair. But Melzabeth came up with an intriguing solution: human skin.”

“Skin? You mean it uses biomaterials instead of mechanical ones!?”

“It doesn’t have to go that far. It may be an offshoot of neurocomputers that come up with ideas using the same structure as a brain. A ''spinal cord'' is artificially created and the Logistic Hornet itself is given delicate cutaneous receptors so it can make adjustments based on reflexes that do not require conscious thought. Just like a fingertip running down your spine makes your hair stand on end. That same reaction is applied to every last part of the 5000m craft to make aerodynamic adjustments by moving the armor scales. That is impressive. There are more than a million of them in all. If you tried to think about each of them before giving a command, you would never finish in time, so Melzabeth set it up to ''give commands without thinking''. The very idea is different from all that junk AI out there.”

“…”

“Melzabeth’s own data is apparently used for the aerial attitude control. Those giant launch pads are controlled based on data taken from her subconscious muscle tension and center of gravity control while hang gliding. That means those flying machines include Melzabeth Grocery’s subconscious, from the core of her body to the very last bit of peach fuzz. Ha ha. Who creates an aerial fortress like that? We’re not just talking about an electronically-controlled stealth fighter here. That giant thing’s smooth flight is controlled by nothing more than a mother’s sensitive body. I doubt even Academy City’s Kiharas could have come up with something like this!”

Kamijou was speechless.

Was the word “genius” really enough to cover all of this?

Kamijou doubted he understood even half of what made this so impressive. He felt like the word genius was just a lazy label used to stop thinking about something he did not understand.

All the detailed math made his head spin, but he could not let himself be overwhelmed.

He wanted something to help track down missing Melzabeth Grocery. He pulled out the Transla-Pen synced with his phone. He had no idea if it would work on the text hastily jotted-down on the sticky notes, but he had to try.

No longer would he fear an unknown truth.

Melzabeth Grocery had chosen to hand over her new tech to a massive IT company because they had taken her daughter hostage. She had been ordered to do all sorts of things after receiving their assistance as an affiliated independent company, but she had eventually refused to obey and rebelled.

The current state of LA was the result.

Othinus had said they may have controlled her using some magic like the St. Germain pill. Or they could have threatened her with something other than Helcalia.

Regardless, Anna Sprengel had decided to purge the traitor by making Melzabeth destroy what she most cared about. Anna had set things up so the mother and daughter would be in conflict. So even if Melzabeth’s actions made her look like a villain involved in the disappearance of LA’s people, ''Kamijou would save that mother.'' He had made that decision before he even started working on this. Finding some inconvenient truth now was not going to stop him.

“What is this?”

Kamijou Touma was not all that great with digital things, so his focus naturally turned toward the analog media.

In addition to the many sticky notes, he found a small picture frame in the kitchen space.

An even younger Helcalia stood in the center of the photo. Her gender was hard to tell at a glance at that age. Smiling next to her was a silver-haired brown-skinned woman with a strong family resemblance in the face. That had to be Melzabeth Grocery.

Then who was the man standing on the other side of the girl?

(The most obvious guess would be her father.)

Something was handwritten at the top of the photo.

The writing was large and distinct. It was very different from the birthday present’s card, so it may have been the father’s handwriting.

Kamijou ran the Transla-Pen over it through the protective glass and the artificial voice translated it into Japanese.

“A moon rock tiara for my daughter’s wedding.”

He looked to the photo again and smiled. Helcalia was still too young to easily judge her gender, so her father must have been quite the doting parent.

(But where would you even get a moon rock? The moon has its own gravity, so they wouldn’t fall to earth all that easily.)

He flipped over the picture frame and found nothing more than a cork panel. But when he removed the cork and extracted the photo, he could see something handwritten on the white back of the photo. This was the same flowing cursive he had seen on the message card.

He was unsure if the cheap device could handle cursive, but he ran the Transla-Pen over it anyway.

The awkward translation came out as follows:

''Age of death: 29. Multistage rocket Uranus III failed atmosphere exit.

“…”

Kamijou quietly clenched his teeth.

He felt like he had stumbled upon a secret origin point.

Had the mother’s obsession with her daughter’s wedding not been hers alone?

“Hey, Othinus.”

“Yes?”

Small Othinus looked back toward the kitchen space while walking back and forth along the folding table a short distance away.

“Um…about Space Engage. Did they ever launch ordinary rockets in addition to those gigantic Logistic Whatevers?”

“Of course not. The existing methods are the safe and affordable home turf of the experienced. If a new start-up wants to get into the space development business, they need some new method in order to outdo NASA.”

(Then was Melzabeth not involved in this launch experiment?)

She had lost someone in a state-run rocket launch.

The man had never gotten that moon rock. He had never been able to attend that future wedding. But Melzabeth had truly understood her husband’s reasons for venturing into space as an astronaut, so she had been unable to despise space enough to give up on it.

So she had begun to wonder if there was another way.

A safe way that anyone could use.

That was her dream for space travel.

“Othinus, space is so far away. Its an absurd dream located even higher than the clouds in the sky. So why do start-ups try to reach it without the help of their country?”

“For money.” Othinus coldly sliced through the thoughts in his mind. “There is no fair competition when the state is running the space industry. Only the companies trusted by government officials get any business, so technological development is actually pretty slow. Once a ‘belief’ sets in, all the research goes in that direction. For example, the idea that space shuttles are safe and can keep launch costs down, or the idea that lunar probes should be made out of aluminum even though there are so many nonmetals lighter and sturdier than steel these days.”

“…”

“Their neighbors in Russia are even worse. They insist that nuclear energy makes for a clean power system and actually threw a running nuclear reactor out into zero-g space. They ultimately lost control and the entire satellite fell back down to earth. Yet they continue their research into developing a clean nuclear reactor for use in space. But if you let multiple companies compete fairly and compare data, those ‘beliefs’ wouldn’t last long.”

Othinus explained that this was not limited to space. Those “beliefs” were rampant in fields with a small market share. For example, the idea that golf clubs should be made of carbon or the idea that handguns should have a caliber of .45.

In other words, that had been the starting point.

Melzabeth had wanted to change how things were done in the national space program that insisted on continuing down a mistaken path. She had believed she could reduce the number of “unfortunate accidents” if she started a new age where anyone was free to join in the industry and only the company providing the easiest and most comfortable space flight would survive.
Giving her daughter a wedding in space sounded like a joke, but she had drawn out serious plans to achieve that dream, all to help give her some peace of mind.

Yet Anna Sprengel had twisted it into something ugly.

“Hey.”

Othinus was holding something atop the table she had been walking around. At her size, it looked like a body pillow, but it was actually a USB memory stick even more compact than a tube of lipstick.

“What’s that?”

“It was inside the model. And I found it in the most important part: the storage room for the digital spinal cord.”

Othinus was 15cm tall, so searching that 2.5m model had to have been an adventure for her.

The only label was a symbolic one.

A large red X had been drawn on the side of the USB memory with a permanent marker.

“This has to mean something.”

Kamijou first assumed it was telling him not to look inside, but then why store it on the USB memory? Any unneeded data could be deleted and no one could ever read the contents if the memory itself was broken in two.

Yet it had been left in an accessible form.

Why do people hide things? There could be many different reasons, but Kamijou already had a reference point to gaze into Melzabeth's thoughts.

It reminded him of how she had hidden the smartwatch in the safe to show how valuable it was.

Thinking back, telling Helcalia to hide in the locker may have been something similar. She had left the possibility of someone else picking the girl up if she could not.

When Melzabeth Grocery wanted someone to find something important, she had a habit of hiding it in a conspicuous location.

“Is there any way to view the data on this? Would her phone work?”

“You can’t directly plug it into the MilliPhone; you would need a dongle. It would be simpler to check it on a computer. Do you see one around here?”

“What about my phone?”

“The hospital recommended it to you for use with their health management app, remember? That cheap senior model is entirely out of the question.”

“Eh!? This is an old person phone?”

He checked around and found a big laptop hidden behind the fridge. It was the size of a drawing board, so he wasn’t sure why you would bother making it a laptop. Thanks to the extra cooling device attached to the bottom, it was thicker than the average encyclopedia. The laptop had been criticized for the size of the computer and its bulky power adapter. Kamijou used both hands to place it on the table and Othinus stared at the enormous laptop that had to be 40 inches.

“Looks like it’s based on an e-sports gaming computer, but it’s only a terminal. This isn’t enough for a space simulator, so I bet it connects to the real computer over the internet. It might not even be in LA.”

“But it’s still a computer, right? We can use it after switching it on, I hope? What if it needs a password or fingerprint?”

“This will be easy if it just wants a fingerprint, but we might not be that lucky.”

“?”

Well, it wasn’t a self-destruct device in an old spy movie. When he tried turning on the gaming computer, it connected to the large TV. Suddenly, Kamijou’s face was displayed in a small window. A rectangular cursor appeared over his mouth and a wavy line was displayed at the bottom of the window. The camera at the top of the laptop screen had apparently activated. Othinus doubled over in laughter.

“Ha ha! Voice recognition of all things? Talk about insecure! Or is that digital exhibitionist doing it on purpose!?”

“Um?”

If it used her voice, didn’t that mean they needed the brown mama herself to get in? The legends said she could switch between god and human, but did that antique blonde gal think she could change her appearance and voice at will?

“Were you just thinking something rude, human?”

“Well, um, uh…sorry.”

“Hmph. Since you were honest, I will forgive you this once.”

She picked up a plastic pin a lot like the ones used to skewer bento meatballs and threw it at him. The famous god, whose forgiveness apparently included throwing spears at people, explained her point.

“The worst form of biometric ID is the fingerprint. The second worst is the voice. You stamp your fingerprints all over the place over the course of your daily life and the distinctive ‘traits’ of your voice can be easily recorded these days. That just means we need a recording of Melzabeth Grocery’s voice.”

“A recording?”

“And do you remember what made you jump at the entrance earlier? The sensor-triggered message most likely used her own voice, so use it.”

Walking to the front door and back was all it took to get past the login screen. Kamijou actually felt hesitant now.

“A-are you sure this is okay? I mean, the recording meant to keep people from breaking in unlocked her laptop.”

“With tech, the attackers are always a step ahead of the defenders. If you want your device secure, you at least need to use the veins or bones in your palm. Your ear hole or your teeth work as well. Really, any kind of biometric that never leaves your body works.”

Now they could see inside the USB memory.

But something else caught his attention first. The desktop displayed on the synced TV only had one icon on it. It was clear that everything else had been deleted to leave only this there. It was located at the top left and it belonged to a video file.

The filename was “Message”.

She tended to hide the things she wanted found.

“Well, this isn’t a spam email, so I doubt it’s malware.”

Othinus crossed her arms and tapped her heel twice on the laptop’s touchpad to double click. Maybe it was something Melzabeth insisted on herself or maybe this was standard in America, but Kamijou did not recognize the video player that started up and played back an image from the past in a rectangular window.

It appeared to be filmed in this very mobile home.

He guessed it had been done with the laptop’s camera because it showed a woman’s face from a flat, head-on angle reminiscent of a student ID photo.

She had silver hair cut to shoulder length and brown skin.

She looked to be in her 30s or maybe even younger. She wore a baggy white T-shirt and a tight skirt with her legs covered by pantyhose or something. The blue scarf around her neck had a chrysanthemum decoration. It was a casual but refined outfit, but it was unlikely you would find the combination in an ordinary office. It made her look like a company president announcing a new phone.

Kamijou Touma muttered her name.

While picturing a family photo taken with her daughter, not the woman herself.

“Melzabeth…”

Unsurprisingly, she did not answer him.

The woman faced the camera dead on and her eyes would occasionally flit side to side. It looked like she was worried about something and overreacting to every little noise she heard outside.

“I could not stop the powerful support…no, the invasion.”

Her face showed agony and humiliation.

And most of all, regret.

He could only get so much information through his clearance rack Transla-Pen, but the raw emotions came through in her untranslated voice and her expression on the screen.

“At first, I thought they sympathized with the dream. I thought business profit didn’t matter. But it changed when they took control of company, including right to speak, and chose to bring tragedy.”

“Either the private equity or allowing a single patron was a mistake,” muttered Othinus.

Kamijou was not quite sure what it all meant, but he could tell she had been deceived in some way.

“The company could only be bound as affiliate. But this original beginning was not told to the parent company. Maybe you are a stranger who happened across it and maybe a colleague who shared my dream. One of the engineers who left is fine too. But if you are an R&C Occultics investigation team, then I have really and truly lost. I pray that is not the case.”

The woman on the screen waved something she held between her slender fingers.

It was the USB memory with the red X on it.

“This is a type of program.”

“…”

“The program sneaks into center of Logistic Hornet system disguised as drone network mutual authorization signal and destroys chain of command. To put simply, this one thing can permanently destroy the Logistic Hornet system. …Maybe it is technically called malware or a worm. It should be treated as such unless used for correct purpose.”

Why was she leaving this with someone she didn’t even know?

If she had a trump card like that, why not use it herself?

But that was the wrong way to look at this.

With such a crucial trump card, she would never have just the one copy. And generally speaking, ''any kind of digital data could be copied.

Kamijou Touma clenched his teeth.

“Did she stay with R&C Occultics so she could sneak into their HQ as a cooperator and inject this into their system?”

“That would be suicide.”

“Kh.”

A corrupt corporation had tried to use the private space flight system she had been building to prevent another tragedy like her husband’s and to bring happiness to her daughter. She could not stop it any other way, so she had decided to end the entire project herself.

It was an admirable motivation.

What would bad people do if you gave them great riches? And the Logistic Hornets could cause cataclysms across the planet. She would have wanted to stop that no matter what.

She had been prepared to give up her life if need be. That put a new perspective on her plans for leading someone to Helcalia. Trying to retrieve the girl herself could have put her at greater risk, so she had chosen not to. She had bit her lip and shed tears of blood in order to focus on her final attempt instead.

But the result had been obvious from the beginning. It was plain as day. R&C Occultics was ''not just an ordinary company''. Reading someone’s mind and nipping their attempt in the bud was a piece of cake for a professional magician. If a normal gun was enough to defend against them, then the Academy City element of Overlord Revenge would not have lost so fully.

She had made her attempt and failed.

The smartwatch had been found in a safe within an outdoors base. She must have been attacked by the sand before even reaching the HQ building, so she hid the watch in the safe and then ran toward enemy lines even if it cost her her life. She knew nothing of magic and she attempted to reach the HQ building that not even Stiyl and Kanzaki had been able to reach.

This here was only her “insurance” in case ''exactly that happened.

“Your own judgment is fine. The decision is left with you. If the Logistic Hornets continue to fly around the world and you find the smallest danger that they guide the world in a bad direction.”

How had she felt when she left this hope?

She had wanted to hold her daughter’s wedding in space.

One by one, the colleagues and subordinates who had sympathized with that simple dream and trusted her had started leaving. And now she was baring her fangs toward their own creation. None of them had understood the painful decision she had been forced to make.

It had meant abandoning her dream of taking space development out of the country’s hands and decreasing the risk to astronauts like her husband through the free competition between companies. She had held onto the company even as so many of its engineers left and she had even earned the suspicion of her daughter.

But in order to protect her colleagues, her remaining family, and the world as a whole, she had chosen a lonely path without the chance to ask anyone else for advice.

Yet even those feelings had been trampled underfoot and her attempt had ended in failure.

How much strength had she poured into this will left behind in case that worst-case scenario played out?

The woman faced forward and spoke the words that seemed to reject everything she had lived for.

“Please destroy this foolish dream we started. Leave nothing left.”

The next thing Kamijou Touma knew, he had slammed his clenched fist down on the table.

Was this the truth?

Was there really nothing beyond this? It ended like this? Were there no words of salvation for this mother? Not even one!?

“Anna…Spreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeengellllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll!!!!!!!”

The boy roared loud enough to tear his throat, but it did nothing to change the past.

The video ended there, the footage flickering out just like her courage and determination had.

Her will was over.

The Rosicrucian magic cabal had hidden in the shadows of history. No one knew what exactly R&C Occultics was, even as it chose to unilaterally influence the entire world. And it was all controlled by Anna Sprengel, who stepped on Secret Chief Aiwass and selfishly wielded power greater than a god.

So what?

What did any of it matter?

Did that give her the right to trample on people’s dreams? Some geniuses had gathered their ideas together and finally made their dream a reality, but some asshole had stolen it all away just because it could be used to earn a profit. And she had remade it into a weapon of war, a trigger for meteorological disasters, and an ingredient that would bring misfortune to all!!

And it had all led to someone earnestly begging anyone who would listen to destroy the very dream she had worked so hard to realize.

Kamijou Touma would say it again

He would ask this question as many times as it took.

Who in the world had the right to mock and spit on the dream someone had dedicated their life to and then force that person to throw their own dream in the garbage!?

Kamijou was not naïve enough to think any dream would come true as long as you worked at it.

High schoolers had their own cynical view of such things.

But even so.

Someone had sneered as they selfishly stole away a dream that was already set to come true. She had decided the world’s throne belonged to her and she would force everyone on the planet to do the same. Using big data and AI, she would separate out the achievable dreams from the unachievable ones, harvest the achievable ones for herself, demand people give up on the unachievable ones, and ultimately trample on both.

Maybe it was the most efficient thing to do, but it was unquestionably wrong.

Whether it was to be an athlete, an astronaut, a chef, or a doctor, the people who had made their dreams come true deserved to be happy. Something was wrong if they were not granted as much happiness and success as the effort they put in. And no one had the right to steal away those dreams and their rewards without putting in any effort themselves. Kamijou Touma still trusted in dreams enough to reach that conclusion on pure reflex.

And yet.

This ''was worse'' than just an unfulfilled dream.

As long as Anna Sprengel placed a ceiling on the world, no one could find happiness even if they did achieve their dreams. Instead, her filthy hands would pluck the half-blossomed buds from the stems, suck out all the nectar before the flower had a chance to bloom, and cruelly throw away what remained. And this was not a hypothetical or a possible future. ''The world had already been remade in that way without anyone noticing.

“A world where you can pour all your efforts into a dream, but the result is stolen away from you. I see. That explains the extremely unnatural ending to Handcuffs. That white monster should have been able to achieve his dream of eliminating the dark side, but some asshole twisted and stole away that outcome.”

“Othinus?”

“Oh, nothing. ''Just some magic side stuff.''”

The small god cut off that line of thinking.

And she intentionally changed the subject.

“This may have been what Anna Sprengel was after.”

“?”

“Didn’t you find it odd?” asked Othinus. “Anna Sprengel holds a position similar to a priestess, but she actually has complete control of a superior being like Aiwass and has become a legendary magician greater even than a Magic God. Yet she always travels on foot and directly appears before her enemies. Why? Sure, you can say she does it for fun or on a whim since she’s the strongest, but I see a simpler theory.”

“''You mean she doesn’t have anyone else to rely on''?” stated Kamijou in a daze.

He had already clashed with her a few times either directly or indirectly, yet the idea had never occurred to him. Whenever Anna made an appearance, the world revolved around her. She held all the cards. She would mock and deny everything. She had never seemed lacking in anything.

Othinus nodded.

“That may be why she wanted Melzabeth. It had never bothered her before, but once she became aware of it, it bugged her to no end. …Doesn’t that sound like the simple logic that selfish girl operates on?”

And she had sent shockwaves throughout the entire world as a result.

She had destroyed Los Angeles and made 30 million people disappear.

This monster was much harder to deal with than an evil demon king who meticulously built up a master plan.

“Citrinitas is a term found in one of the three sacred Rosicrucian texts. Through conversions to black, white, yellow, and red, an expert void of worldly desire can acquire the supreme stone. Citrinitas is the yellowing stage and it refers to the act of burying it in sand so it can ‘ferment’.” Othinus sighed. “Once something has died and decomposed, it undergoes a beneficial transformation underground, giving it new value. Hmph, Anna is more obsessed than I thought. Even after Melzabeth turned her back on her and betrayed her, Anna was using Citrinitas on her to redo things. To get her to turn back her way.”

“But why? She runs a giant IT company, so she must have hundreds of thousands of employees. So why the obsession with Melzabeth?”

“Because of what Melzabeth did,” answered Othinus with a snort. “Out of those hundreds of thousands around the globe, who was the only one to disobey and display noble justice in the end? Who was the fearsome individual who resisted all of the sweet promises and threats and refused to throw out her good heart even though she knew she couldn’t win? To Anna, that must have shined as bright as a crimson jewel. She must have been smiling even as her pet dog bit her hand and got burned playing with fire. She wants to break her and make her hers. The genius named Melzabeth Grocery has impressed her that much.”

“But…”

“It seems wrong to start a war to apply pressure to a single individual? Einstein’s brain was removed and preserved. When Saint Thomas Becket was assassinated by four swords, the people nearby gathered up his splattered blood and brains and took it home, believing it to be a panacea. …So in this one instance, we can’t just chalk it up to Anna being insane. Humans are willing to go to such lengths for people in which they sense mystery. We should assume Melzabeth has reached that level for Anna.”

Othinus let out a quiet but heavy sigh.

“If only it was that easy to obtain a true understander. No comfort is found in validation found through brainwashing. A lesson I am sure ''a certain #5'' is very well acquainted with.”

Melzabeth Grocery.

Even Kamijou wished he could have spoken with her sooner. He wished he had gotten to know her so he could have helped her, at least a little bit.

But that would be entirely meaningless if he was forcing it on her for his own purposes.

Melzabeth had her own dream.

She had her pride, her dignity, and so much that she had wanted to protect more than her own life.

If all of that was stripped away and control of her very being was taken from her, then you could no longer call the result Melzabeth Grocery.

Did lonely and isolated Anna Sprengel not realize that?

“And, human. The situation could hardly be worse, but we have not hit a dead end yet. I don’t know if that USB memory is the original or a copy, but the malware does exist. It is not too late to plug that it into the control server deep in the HQ building and destroy the global distribution network and dangerous meteorological weapons created by the network of 12 Logistic Hornets.”

“Right…”

He clenched his teeth.

He clenched them tight because he could only live in the world that existed after that cruel defeat.

“Right!! She left this task with me. She begged me to destroy her dream because she couldn’t, even though she had no idea who would receive the message!! So I’ll do it. I won’t let Anna abuse those geniuses’ original dream any longer!!!!!!”

Then he heard a small sound.

But it came from outside the mobile home’s thin wall. So why hadn’t the security sensor reacted?

Kamijou Touma and Othinus both understood that 30 million people had vanished from Los Angeles, leaving no one to make a sound like that.

And they understood that Anna Sprengel would not hesitate to steal away someone’s dream and she had a childish, short-tempered personality that left her with no patience for anything that stood in her way.

“Human!!”

“I know!!!!!!”

He shouted his response and held his right palm toward the wall just in time.

That very moment, the aluminum and stainless steel mobile home was shredded like tissue paper and blown away.

But Kamijou Touma was not focused on that.

The real threat was the sand. ''He could not let it envelop him.'' His right hand obliterated a torrent of pressurized sand flying his way like a laser and, unsatisfied with that, he rolled on out through the newly-formed gash in the mobile home’s wall. He focused upwind and made extra certain he was not swallowed up by the billowing cloud of sand.

Needless to say, the magician did not have to worry about being caught in the scattered sand.

Citrinitas was it?

The search of the mobile home must have taken longer than he thought because it was already dark out. He heard solid clacking sounds out there. Almost like a large dog was pressing its full weight on its thick claws while walking along the asphalt.

Two figures appeared through the murky curtain, as if parting the row of luxury yachts and cruisers brought up onto land.

But…what was that?

One stood tall and held a dog leash.

The other wore a collar and crawled on the ground.

He would have called the second one a dog if their silhouette was not so weirdly alluring. And they were not standing on a pair of front legs and a pair of back legs.

They were down on hands and knees. They were a crawling human.

There was a chance Melzabeth Grocery was being manipulated using some kind of magic.

After doing so much to 30 million people, R&C Occultics was never going to worry about respecting someone’s rights. So there was a concern they would control a captive ''like that''.

Or so Kamijou Touma thought.

''But he was wrong.

“Ugh!?”

A chilly breeze swept away the sandy curtain.

The enemy made no real attempt to hide.

Kamijou groaned when he saw the identity of the magician standing in the yacht harbor.

The one figure was wearing a large collar at the end of a thick leash. The dog was large enough to weigh 50kg, or maybe more. If it leaped at him, he would be knocked to the ground and helplessly pinned while it ripped his windpipe out.

Or so he feared.

“The unanalyzed sand magic and largescale weather control using the Logistic Hornet…”

''But he was wrong.

Those were not a pair of front legs; they were five-fingered hands.

Othinus clicked her tongue on his shoulder while holding the USB memory like a body pillow.

“I thought it was strange when Kanzaki Kaori lost. She is a Saint, so she can draw on a portion of the Son of God’s power. She should have won, so I had wondered what made her stop attacking. Well, now we know!!”

The thing crawling around like a dog was not covered in clothing or skin. It was a feminine doll with exposed ball joints. The face was covered by something like a cage made by bending panels of black metal about the size of sticks of gum. A section the size of a coffee can stuck out in front almost like a dog’s snout. And it clacked open and closed like a bamboo tube or cup split vertically.

Then who was the figure being weakly tugged along by the leash?

[[Image:GT_Index_v04_283.jpg|thumb]]

“You’re…kidding.”

She had shoulder-length silver hair and brown skin.

She wore a baggy T-shirt, a tight skirt, and pantyhose. She wore a blue scarf around her neck. It was definitely Melzabeth Grocery, the woman he had seen in that video. Or was it? There was something wrong with her. Her shoulders were slanted, her head was tilted limply to the side, and there was no light of intelligence in her eyes. A string of drool dripped from the corner of her mouth.

The leash and collar were not playing their intended roles. Like a poorly-trained animal, the crawling doll was dragging the woman around behind it.

It was unclear who was in charge.

Should he simply break apart the ball-jointed doll and save the woman holding the leash since she looked just like the woman in the video? Really??? Yet the doll looked so masochistic crawling around like a dog. Its butt was lifted higher than its head and it kicked at the sand with its back legs. Come to think of it, the doll was a size larger than Melzabeth, so was it possible ''an entire person had been forcibly stuffed inside?

Was it the obvious answer, or was it a trick?

Or was it a reverse trick?

Where did R&C Occultics and Anna Sprengel’s malice lie? It could be a reverse trick, where the appearance of trickery was used to distance him from the obvious answer. Or was this some larger trap set by the giant IT company? The more he thought about it, the more dark uncertainty roiled within him.

Was it the unsteady woman holding the leash, or was it the collared doll pulling her around? They both demonstrated ways of stripping someone of their dignity.

Who was in control? Which one was being controlled?

What was the crux of the issue?

Who did he need to defeat?

“Which one?” he muttered.

That was when an even nastier problem came to mind.

Kanzaki Kaori refused to kill and she was aware of her great destructive power as a Saint, so she had hesitated to attack.

She had failed to reach an answer out of fear of choosing wrong.

And that moment of hesitation had been her undoing.

Kamijou Touma clenched his right fist in the icy night and spoke his question aloud.

The sand magician had seen him too. Could his right hand react in time to a direct attack? Holding it in the wrong direction could be fatal.

He felt like a grotesquely blossomed rose was swallowing up the world around him.

A precarious tightrope walk had begun.

“Is it the owner or the pet? ''Which one is the real Melzabeth Grocery''!?”