Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume10 Chapter3

==Chapter 3: Prophecy – Last_Branch(of_Die).==

===Part 1===

Late at night in District 7, Anna Kingsford stood at the very top of an enormous crane.

She stood tall and simply directed her gaze overhead.

The night sky seemed blotted out by the lights of the city, but viewing the clear stars in the sky gave this expert access to more information than searching the world linked together by fiber optics.

And she only used this for just causes.

Which was what made her an expert.

(The ⭐s are in place. That boy should become aware of the branch he passed by now.)

She sighed.

That was a complete side issue.

For one, Kingsford had never directly met Kamijou Touma. Which made him no more than a stranger in the same city as her.

(But awareness does ❌ allow him to change it. It may be his life, but he can ❌ change the decision he made on a branch he has already passed. Just like CRC passed a crucial branch ''and was defeated in a ⚔️ he should have won easily.'' The greatest enemy in an individual’s life is their own karma.)

“Not that he can ignore it now that he knows.”

But she would not just abandon him.

That expert did not consider her own interests, the state of the battle, or even whether or not she knew the boy.

He was a complete stranger?

So what?

If anyone was troubled, uncertain, or suffering, she was already taking action.

Anna Kingsford had perfected that way of life.

A fool who had yet to reach that point spoke to her.

It was the human named Aleister.

“Where are you going, Kingsford?”

“To serve others.”

“That’s my job. There’s no reason for you to continue fighting!!”

Even her battle against Rosencreutz had essentially been a miracle.

She had not actually won the battle. CRC could instantly search for any information about the world, but he had ''just so happened'' to overlook the fact that Anna Kingsford was a preserved corpse. If not for that, he would have destroyed her more thoroughly and she couldn’t have recovered.

She was reliant on unpredictable miracles.

Even a magician who mastered the field to the point of being known as an expert would lose eventually.

She had to know that.

Alice Anotherbible had easily crushed and killed CRC and so thoroughly eliminated him from the world that he could never recover. She was a true monster.

Kingsford had not reached that point.

She had to understand that. She wielded great power using the correspondence between the microcosm within a person and the macrocosm of the physical world around them, so she would have thoroughly analyzed herself in that way.

But the woman with a proper understanding of magic’s essence smiled as she responded.

She was accurately viewing her own fate, but she didn’t hesitate to speak.

“This is 👋.”

“But!!”

Contact with the new Board Chairman had been lost.

They couldn’t hope for anymore cooperation, so they had to settle this on their own.

The situation was clearly worsening and Alice was even more powerful than CRC. Certain death awaited Kingsford. Alice waited in a land that brought death to all who set foot there.

“Aleister. You must have understood from the beginning that I am ❌ more than a preserved corpse. You are only using ⚙️s to move an already ☠️ body around, so I never was alive. I escaped the previous ⚔️ intact by pure luck, but ❌ even that can save me next time. This ☠️ body will find only ☠️.”

“…”

As an expert who understood the secrets of the world of the living and the world of the dead, she was not too attached to her own life.

The only ones who clung to life with such ugly desperation were the half-baked magicians who remained fixated on this one life.

Still, he understood in his own inexpert way.

Anna Kingsford was an expert through and through. She didn’t even think of clinging to life or staying in this world forever.

She was only interested in eliminating the unknown threat making someone suffer before her eyes.

She didn’t even consider whether or not she had ever met that person.

She had no intention of returning. Her win condition didn’t even take that into account.

She was an example of how far people could go if they mastered their field.

“What was my role meant to be? I was supposed to be a trump 🃏 for use against the unbeatable Anna Sprengel. Now that Miss Sprengel has been freed from her wicked ⛓️ and that ⚔️ need ❌ be fought, my purpose is complete.”

Aleister had no response to that.

Because she was exactly right.

This goodbye could not be avoided. This was Aleister Crowley’s reward for wielding superhuman knowledge, doing what no one else could do, and enduring trials normal people would never even know existed. Kingsford was correct that the greatest enemy in an individual’s life was their own karma.

He was already in checkmate.

And yet…

“That just means I have to do the work myself.”

He understood it intellectually but he still tried to fight it. Was that because Aleister was an inexpert and ugly human?

But you must never forget that, while that human had accumulated a lot of bad karma, he would never stop struggling for his own ends.

“Aleister Crowley officially died in 1947 and stubbornly clung to life until he actually died battling Great Demon Coronzon. I’m as dead as you are. If someone has to save that boy, I’ll do it. I can do it if necessary!! And I’m better suited for that role. The wickedest man in the world should be standing up to the world even after death, not a pure and proper holy woman!”

“But you are still fixated on this 🌍.”

She shot back.

A true expert did not bother arguing about secrets.

She had already seen into the depths of his mind that even he wasn’t consciously aware existed.

She did it naturally.

And kindly.

“Conscious or ❌, you hijacked that great 👿’s body to cling to life. Either you still have something you want to do in this 🌍, or there is something you are ❌ yet willing to give up here. Dying for him is not the same as living with him. It never can be. Either way, it is too soon for you. Everyone dies eventually, so there is no need to rush toward ☠️. Live out your life first, Aleister. You can prepare yourself for ☠️ once you have done that.”

Kingsford smiled as she said this.

Smiled faintly.

Aleister lightly clenched his empty right hand.

He felt the pressure of a staff so twisted his fingertips tingled at the mere sight of it.

Special numbers scattered from his hand like sparks.

“I’ve had enough. What if I said I would stop you by force?”

“I would knock you aside and continue on my way.”

“Kh.”

She didn’t even hesitate.

She said it gently, like it was a foregone conclusion.

Kingsford used no more than words to overpower the victor of the Battle of Blythe Road.

He couldn’t say she couldn’t do it. He was already well past his limit with Alice Anotherbible and Anna Sprengel. He had only so insolently decided to make use of this preserved corpse because he couldn’t handle them.

Trickery, betrayal, surprise attacks, intrigue, and – when necessary – direct confrontation.

He had used every trick in the book to drive the world’s greatest magic cabal to destruction at the Battle of Blythe Road, but none of it would work here.

He could not win in a direct one-on-one confrontation.

If Anna Kingsford went all out, Aleister had no way of opposing her. He knew she would simply prove how inexpert he really was. He would never manage to get his hands on the switch hidden below her skin.

“I do ❌ want you to ☠️ here. No number of previous ☠️s is any reason to accept ☠️ next time. So I will use all of my power to defeat you here. Soundly enough that you do ❌ have enough strength left to go out and ☠️.”

That was contradictory.

Kingsford kept saying she would not let people die so easily, but she was about to head out for her own death.

She was saying she would use up all of the tickets provided for her as a thinking and moving preserved corpse.

But that gentle smile of hers made the contradictory premise and conclusion seem to fit together with no problem.

It was strange really.

Was this the essence of magic known only to the few true experts – a position Aleister had yet to reach? This was the human-made miracle of protecting everyone you encountered and spreading smiles everywhere you went.

He couldn’t stop her.

This wasn’t the ''divine cosplay spell'' that simply let one dress up in the appearance and abilities of a god. Nor was it the reverse logic where one tried to divulge the workings of the world to rebel against the god they so hated.

With a quiet bump, the failure of a student buried his face in Anna Kingsford’s chest.

He sniffled like a child.

“I don’t want you to die.”

“I know.”

“You shouldn’t have to die.”

“That I met someone who feels that way and that I inspired these feelings in you, who felt betrayed by everything, tells me that I have won a victory against this 🌍.”

Clear drops spilled out.

Anna Kingsford held the lost child’s head to her chest and whispered gently to him.

She stroked the inexpert one’s blonde hair like a mother.

“I think you did have need of my preserved corpse. Especially on December 31. If no one had stopped Anna Sprengel, the 🌍 would have been thrown into chaos before CRC could even be reborn.”

One by one, the expert explained everything to the fool.

She taught him some terribly simple things that no one had ever before taught that human.

Not his parents who had thought meaningless strictness was a virtue, not his teachers who had failed to correct the social problem left in their care, and not the Golden magicians who had abandoned their pursuit of knowledge to spend their time on ugly internecine conflict.

Even though these should have been the first things he was taught.

“But you must ❌ toy with life. Because you are powerful enough to do so with ease, you have ❌ way to keep yourself focused other than using pure willpower to manage yourself. The ☠️ have their own dignity. Humans remain human even in ☠️. You ensured your own pain from the moment you disrespected the ☠️ for the sake of the living. Improve yourself, Aleister. If you do ❌ fear taking the long way around to avoid pain, there is much you can learn. Just like any magician.”

“…”

“And do ❌ worry, lost child of the living. You will not be alone. As an expert, I will do whatever it takes to save the one you care for. Even if it requires every trick in the 📖. So there is ❌ chance you will be crushed by loneliness.”

===Part 2===

Kamijou Touma heard a wet sound.

It came from inside his body.

He thought he must have imagined it.

But the sound of rotting flesh falling away was so distinct.

“…”

He was dying.

He was certain of it in that brightly lit classroom.

It was an unavoidable fate. No one had cruelly pushed him to this point. There was a chance he could have survived had he given up on saving others, but he had chosen this path for himself while on the dark side.

He felt an odd scraping.

Was that the wound from Aradia he felt in his right side and spine? The odd feeling in his neck would be H.T. Trismegistus.

Everything felt normal-ish, but that lack of extreme pain only terrified him more.

Something was definitely happening to him.

He couldn’t tell what was happening inside him. He only felt a vague disgust. It was like his silent organs were changing color without sending out any kind of alert. Death. The end. An invisible pressure. A cruel time bomb with the LCD timer omitted.

“Human…”

Even Magic God Othinus only groaned that word before falling silent.

There was no recovering from this.



''“You will die.”

''“That doesn’t change my answer.”



Thinking back, he had made that fateful choice when that god wasn’t with him.

He had carelessly made such an important decision on his own.

Of course he had screwed it up.

Everything had been wrong from the beginning.

How many times had he availed himself of Good, Old Mary’s resurrection? In other words, ''how many times had he died on the way here''? In just a few days’ time? Maybe you would survive certain death, as if by mistake, once over your long life. But he seriously doubted those bugs or errors would occur in his favor every single time like that. Not to mention that he was plagued by misfortune due to his right hand, so lady luck would never smile on him in that way.

The flaw wasn’t in Good, Old Mary.

Bringing him back to life even once was more than enough of a miracle.

The problem was him having her use it so many times in such a short period of time without considering the usage limits.

''He couldn’t fool death any longer.

''The corner of the mask was starting to peel away.

“Hey, teacher, why do you think the girl wanted the grimoire library?”

“…”

“Because the girl wanted to use the library’s knowledge to do something she couldn’t? To correct her broken head? No, the girl is already perfect and unbreakable. The answer is simple. ''The girl wanted to help you after you passed the final branch.'' The girl wanted to search through a library of all the world’s knowledge to find some method still remaining in this world. That was all.”

“…………………………………………………………………………………”

He had passed the fatal branch.

He had foolishly chosen to cross it and he had arrived at a mistaken destination.

Which one of them was really in need of help?

“If the girl found it, she would use it. If not, she would give up, deciding the world was just too shallow. There are billions of people in this wide world, so if not even one of them has a way to save you, it means they didn’t try hard enough and then the girl would have to punish them all with her power.”

H.T. Trismegistus had said he had always been one of the Killers.

He had said the swiftest and surest way to take Kamijou’s life was to have him meet Alice. He had been right.

It didn’t help the deathly ill to fear the doctor’s prognosis. Kamijou understood that. They had come down with the illness much earlier. The real problem may have been from their exercise, diet, or other life habits.

Nevertheless, that fear was real.

The tables had been turned.

The symbol of death had shifted from Alice Anotherbible to another girl Kamijou knew quite well.

White. Pure white. The all-knowing nun who was always by his side.

He felt no pain.

He wasn’t even given the right to writhe in agony as certain death approached.

The pressure mounted.

Like he was being slowly crushed by an incredibly thick invisible wall.

Which was more horrific: being turned to red and black spray by the world’s fastest linear motor train before you could even feel the fear, or having your body gradually drawn into the wheel of a local train as it pulled into the station?

With no malice, the girl spoke with an innocent smile.

“Well, teacher? Let’s go see the grimoire library! The girl can’t diagnose you, so we can have the all-knowing nun do that part☆”

===Part 3===

H.T. Trismegistus watched from a distance.

He had known Alice Anotherbible longer than any other member of the Bridge Builders Cabal. After all, he was the one who had discovered her in the modern day.

But there was a lot the young butler did not know.

Most notably, he did not know her origins.

Where was she born, where was she raised, where was she altered, and from where had she fled?

He didn’t have a single answer.

It had only been pure coincidence when he found her in a city abroad. She was in the shadows of a roofless shelter. She had tremendous value as an open-source spell, but he had not realized this until well after taking in the wandering girl.

At first, she had been like a wild animal.

She had gone so wild he had questioned what she had even eaten to survive.

It was nothing more than luck that Alice hadn’t known how to use her power. If she had chaotically wielded her power as Alice Anotherbible at that point, she probably would have destroyed the entire world.

Alice was smiling innocently next to someone else.

She wore an expression he had never seen before.

That much was fine.

The young man simply obeyed. Of course, this was for himself, not for Alice. H.T. Trismegistus was a Transcendent who had abandoned his magic name to dress up in the appearance and abilities of a god. He could only view the world and choose who to save based on the salvation condition he had set for himself. So the first person he had to save was not himself or Alice.

He was the guardian deity of common sense.

He protected the people against anything that altered people’s sense of normalcy: war, rioting, disaster, loneliness, disease, famine, financial panic.

He sought a master who would save the world.

''Or to put it another way,'' the only person he would allow to distort common sense was the bearer of the paradigm shift that would guide all of humanity to the next stage. He could not leave this in the hands of just any old charismatic leader.

Was Christian Rosencreutz the one he sought?

Or was it Alice Anotherbible?

His objective was clear, but a question occurred to the young butler.

He knew his salvation condition.

But who exactly did he want to save?

===Part 4===

On the District 7 bridge, the Transcendents vs. Transcendents battle was trending in one direction.

“Tch! Good, Old Mary!?” shouted Aradia, holding onto the railroad crossing barrier she had borrowed as a broom and clinging to the side of a steel beam distributing the bridge’s weight.

But the woman collapsed on the cold asphalt did not respond.

That was a bad sign.

Good, Old Mary was the foundation of their recovery magic, but she had suddenly collapsed.

This was worse than simply losing one of their number.

Vidhatri, the brown-skinned woman with model-like proportions, shook the arms and legs of the Dhatri ball-joint doll she wore on her back, intricately manipulating white thread and black hair as she whispered to Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.

“Do you still need support?”

“Nope. Everyone can do their own thing. Instead of assigning as many Transcendents as we can to attacking a single point, it would help me if we increased the total number of attack points to fill up the processing power of their minds.”

Something hovered through the air.

Some teacups and saucers were slowly flying around

Those were symbols from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The Bologna Succubus noticed and groaned while breathing heavily with her hands down on the ground.

“Kssshhh, they’ve made it this far?”

“Ha ha☆ Of course they have.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet smiled calmly.

A single smile on that extremely lovable face summoned a great black dragon into the night sky. Was the twisting serpent actually tens of thousands of starlings? They were not venomous, but in great enough numbers, any creature was a threat to human life.

The instant the Bologna Succubus looked up at the black dragon filling the entire night sky, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet took a large step forward.

Without hesitation.

“Kh.”

Now was not the time to be overwhelmed by the intimidating numbers.

The Bologna Succubus flapped her wings to gather as much air as possible.

She launched herself straight to the side.

The coat-shaped blast-resistant suit covered in thick metal panels snapped shut like a ferocious beast’s jaws. It was a sweet-smelling iron maiden. The air inside that isolated space was compressed with no outlet, producing a strange sound much like a steam engine.

The Bologna Succubus had just barely avoided it.

If she had carelessly stayed in place, she would have been “devoured”.

Instead of feeling fear, she gathered offensive power between her brows.

(Argh. I can’t let this chaos be unleashed on the boy’s city.)

What were Kamijou Touma and Alice Anotherbible doing right now?

She couldn’t predict how few seconds a regular Transcendent would last against Alice if she were serious about fighting, but it was still much too dangerous to let that boy stand defenselessly before Alice.

The alluring demon smiled bitterly at that thought and focused her feelings on the battle at hand.

“Oh, what’s this?”

Smiling, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet again spread her arms wide. Slowly.

Almost like a solid wall, a stifling nectar scent emerged from the blast-resistant suit and pushed toward the Bologna Succubus. Even at this distance, she had to stay focused to avoid getting dizzy.

What was happening in that closed world?

The skinny girl(?) wearing an apron over her naked body giggled before speaking.

“This won’t hurt at all, so don’t worry. I’m more interested in creating a gentle world where even the unloved are loved equally. Did you really understand my salvation condition? Kee hee hee☆ I have love even for a filthy sex demon, so get over here and let me give you a hug!!”

“Killing with pleasure, huh?”

“Ah ha ha☆ This is Total Courtship! Welcome to the sweetest, most luxurious ending to a life♪”

Roaches could rapidly build up a resistance to deadly insecticides, so they couldn’t necessarily be killed by escalating the chemical suffering. Instead, there were products that ''tricked them'' into thinking ethanol, acetaldehyde, sotolon, or another chemical compound was delicious food, luring them into the trap where they would take a different chemical back to the colony to kill them all at once. Humans didn’t just use what their target disliked – they would also use whatever their target most liked.

This girl similarly used love to kill. She was a super sweet monster who had continually honed the emotion of love into a deadly weapon. If you simply increased your defenses to prevent pain and prepared ordinary attacks, she would ''slip past them all'' and kill you instantly.

She was a specialist in that.

This Transcendent was a different form of strongest, whose trump card was the complete opposite of the Bologna Succubus’s Cold Mistress which converted all forms of pleasure into pain.

Her victims were robbed of even the right to feel fear as they were filled with no more than ''happiness'' until they lost their life. In a trippy world where everything was vague, they would cross the final line without intent or resolve.

They were stranded.

She had complete control over them, not even giving them a chance to speak their final words.

She brought a death more certain than a .44 caliber bullet and its name was love.

“Yeah, I don’t think we could ever get along.”

“Kya ha ha☆ You’re only saying that because that makes it more exciting, aren’t you!?”

This must have been her combat form.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had her enormous blast-resistant suit spread wide to display the terrarium trapped within. The skinny naked-apron girl pushed out a nectar scent so powerful it caused heartburn. And she took a casual step forward.

“You didn’t find it remotely odd? We’re all regular Transcendents here. A clash between our two groups shouldn’t end so easily. Yet you’re being easily defeated in a one-sided game. Is it a bad matchup between the individual Transcendents? Do our spells combine so well it’s like we were dealt a royal flush? No, that could never happen.”

“…”

“''No one can defeat Alice Anotherbible.''”

For this alone, she took on a respectful tone.

Almost like she was reading off the handwritten creed only she believed in.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet thought only of her own blessings as she spoke euphorically.

“You underestimated the meaning of that statement. And that optimism has brought you certain death. It doesn’t just mean you won’t survive a direct physical fight against Alice. There’s no getting around it. We control all of the coincidences and all of our baseless hunches and inspirations will work out in our favor. We have the ''trends'' of the world on our side. That is what it means to ‘resonate’ with Alice and take the winning side. To be clear, we are only firing blindly from the hip. You’re the ones ensuring we hit you.”

Vidhatri.

2nd Saga.

And Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.

The Bologna Succubus’s side was being worn down, but all three of them were unharmed. She had gotten a few clean hits in on them, so had they managed to shrug off the damage?

And she was slipping past their expectations and landing an attack they failed to dodge or defend against, so it made no sense for them to be changing their stance to reduce the damage with 100% accuracy.

That wasn’t their individual abilities.

It was their “resonance” with Alice Anotherbible.

“Defying her means death. You had lost from the moment you bet on there being an exception to that, like that you could move beyond her reach, hide where she couldn’t find you, or escape punishment if your defiance was indirect. Not that she would let you get away with this even if you had been correct.”

“How are you on Alice’s side when you only love yourself?”

“Isn’t it cruel to expect such a small child to judge everything so accurately? They say to let your child make mistakes to learn from them, but do you think that kind of harsh parental love will work on that girl? Alice is simpler than that. Which is what makes her so frightening. At her mental age, she probably sees anyone who praises her and spoils her as her ally.”

And it didn’t end there.

“Heyyy.”

Something enormous was parting the large river to approach.

It was a special warship measuring around 100m long.

That was small compared to a nuclear aircraft carrier of more than 300m long, but it was undoubtedly a warship.

Plus, this was not the ship itself.

It was made out of smooth white shadow.

A girl’s lazy voice played from the speakers probably meant for giving warnings or making threats.

Come to think of it, hadn’t one of them seemingly vanished?

“This took some time to prepare, but I’m back.”

The ship’s bridge stood taller than the iron bridge.

She must have torn down all the other bridges spanning the river to clear a path here. It made you wonder which side was doing more damage to Academy City.

Aradia’s eyes really did bug out as she shouted.

“Mut Thebes!? What is that thing!?”

“You don’t know? It’s the Academy City drone carrier Kagenui.”

An aircraft carrier had to carry multiple large aircraft, necessitating a great size. Submersible and aerial aircraft carriers could not be made because the size and weight affected their balance too much. ...But that accepted principle had been overturned by shrinking the aircraft down by eliminating the cockpit and turning them into drones. Even the maintenance work could be carried out by an unmanned maintenance factory within the ship.

As usual, Academy City loved making bizarre things.

But now wasn’t the time for exasperation.

That was a carrier.

“Go, everyone.”

A series of explosions rang out. The boxy canisters on the flat deck rose up and opened fire. There were electrically ignited guns that could fire at a rate of a million rounds a minute. It looked like a programmed fireworks show. In truth, the honeycomb-like holes on the front of the canisters were releasing a large number of flying objects. By spreading their movable wings in air, they gathered in orderly teams and flew in formation. Now both sides had a flying swarm. The drones clashed directly with the tens of thousands of starlings ruling the night sky.

The assumptions and superiority had been overturned.

One side was alive and the other was machine.

When they were both controlled remotely and were equal in number, it went without saying whether the small birds or the man-made meter-long aerial weapons would win.

Perhaps the counterattack was necessary.

But as the drones pursued the fleeing starlings, their machinegun fire stabbed into the skyscrapers built along the river and sent sparks exploding from walls as thick power cables were ruptured.

“Mut Theeeebes!!!”

Aradia roared in anger, but then she stopped.

The brown girl was acting weird.

“Yayyy. Who wants to take a killer selfie? Just tell me when and I’ll get the timing right for you. Yippee! Let’s keep this Alice Parade Party going☆”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet giggled.

She clearly welcomed this turn of events.

Mut Thebes wasn’t enemy or ally – she was losing all awareness that she was participating in the battle at all. She was throwing that aside to enjoy herself. And her actions were clearly working against the Bologna Succubus’s side.

They sensed a trend in the series of unpleasant coincidences.

“I believe it’s called Acute Kotatsu Syndrome. Basically, Alice affects the group psychology of an area when she stays there long enough. Did you think you were ''immune'' for some reason? Even magicians and Transcendents will be engulfed by Alice sooner or later.”

“…”

“That includes all of us. Yes, you are no exception, Bologna Succubus. And most likely, neither are we. We will all lose our sense of who is on whose side in this mad tea party. The world that people across the globe have worked so hard to create could end today, but in a way that could mean the arrival of an age of peace. If everything is engulfed and everyone is a victim, then the distinction between enemy and ally loses all meaning.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet made it sound so obvious.

But it didn’t add up.

They were using their all-important salvation conditions as an excuse to love themselves and preserve their power by protecting Alice, so they wouldn’t want an ending where they were engulfed by Alice’s madness and lost sight of who they were. Narcissists who cared about themselves more than anything else in the world would never seek out a form of satisfaction created by having their internal aesthetic sense altered.

“''Do you have any idea what you’re saying''?”

“Ha ha☆ What? Are you saying I’ve already broken too''?”

It didn’t sound like she cared.

Someone on her level had lost the right to feel fear and disgust, or even detect that anything was amiss.

This space was going mad.

It had started at a single point, but the entire world would be this way eventually.

Whether or not Alice Anotherbible wanted it.

This was ominous enough to make that prediction.

“It doesn’t really matter. No one can defy Alice whether they put up a resistance or not.”

“Are you shoving responsibility for the world onto Alice’s shoulders while you alone abandon the effort of living, like you’re just a tree, grass, or flower, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet!?”

“Hee hee☆ Total Courtship – ready for dissemination. Now, I think I’ll pack you so full of super-sweet love that all your veins burst. Alice hates it when you try to lecture people like that, which is why she’s striking back at you, you know?”

===Part 5===

“…”

Anna Sprengel saw it.

She had supposedly divined the location of Kamijou and Alice, but ''something had gone wrong'' and she ended up here instead. Were you not even allowed to walk in a straight line without the proper credentials in this wonderland?

Everything within a 400 radius of the iron bridge was a zone of death. Crowds who had never even seen Alice directly were filling the streets due to her influence, but not even they would approach that area.

It may have been a type of instinct.

Just like people’s homing instincts worked even when drunk, the boys and girls who had lost sight of reality still knew they should keep away.

Although even that instinct would probably melt away eventually.

Once that happened, the world really was over.

Anna wanted to rescue Kamijou Touma. She wanted to fight against Alice Anotherbible with him. She wanted to protect him.

But so much depended on that bridge where an ''unnatural amount'' of things had gathered.

If those Transcendents scattered across the city again, Kamijou alone wouldn’t be able to deal with them. Then his world would simply fall apart.

So.

Before that happened…

“What are you planning?”

“!?”

Anna heard a female voice.

From right by her ear.

She belatedly spun around.

But she did not find one of the Transcendents who relied on the easy ''divine cosplay spell''. This was an expert who carried a magic name in her heart, stood on her own two feet, and had chosen for herself to take on the wide world.

It wasn’t a logical thing.

But Miss Sprengel could not hide the trembling and the cold sweat that came from her very soul.

“Anna Kingsford!?”

“You really should ❌ try it. It is ❌ like you. Two groups of Transcendents are ⚔️ing and one side is winning. Adding one more fighter to the fray will ❌ make a significant difference. As a self-proclaimed villain, you should know that quite well.”

“Why would you stop me? It shouldn’t be any skin off your nose if the fake Anna dies.”

“It would be. Because I do ❌ want you to ☠️.”

Kingsford didn’t hesitate.

The true villain was not used to being told these things so directly.

(First that fool and now her.)

Taken aback, little Miss Sprengel lost her chance to strike back and Kingsford laughed elegantly before continuing.

That smile was so much like Miss Sprengel’s, but she could never imitate it.

“It does appear that the side of the ⚔️ supported by ❌, resonating with Alice has the advantage. Transcendents are, after all, the false gods created when modern magicians used the incomplete 🪄 they created by analyzing the one and only success case: Alice Anotherbible. They have always been incomplete and unstable. They have a model. It should be obvious they will be 💪er when supported by the completed Alice.”

“Then what am I supposed to do? If Aradia’s side loses, who will be left to help that fool? Even if the entire world joined forces against Alice, I’m not sure it would work! And if the Alice-addled Transcendents gathered here end up scattering across Academy City, they could completely destroy that fool’s cit-”

“You only need to supply a ⛰️ greater than Alice.”

It didn’t even take a full second.

Kingsford placed her index finger on her slender chin and gave the answer with a confident smile.

An expert was a powerful guide in and of herself.

Just like sailors lost at sea would rely on the sun and moon in the sky to find the way back home.

“Blodeuwedd the Bouquet, Vidhatri, and 2nd Saga… They are borrowing a special power by resonating with Alice. So we just have to supply the same condition. If someone else leads the Transcendents, this problem is easily solved.”

Anna Sprengel only showed exasperation on her face.

Preparing a rival even more powerful than Alice was Kingsford’s idea of easy?

“I suppose someone as special as you would have no problem doing that,” said Miss Sprengel.

“Me? ❌, the only one who can do this is you.”

This time, Miss Sprengel’s eyes opened wide.

This had to be a joke.

“W-wait. I-I am no more than a common 2nd-rate magician who expanded my appearance and abilities by borrowing your name but still had to boost my specs further with Aiwass!!”

“Belittle yourself all you like, you are still an irregular Transcendent. Plus, you borrowed someone else’s name, but you did ❌ acquire the necessary 🪄 by analyzing Alice. You did your research from the ground up and successfully ‘👗ed up as’ Anna Kingsford. Which puts you on equal 🦶ing. We must refer to you as an irregular Transcendent for the exact same reason we refer to Alice Anotherbible that way.”

“…”

“You can do it.” Kingsford made this point clear. “Both you and Aleister have accomplished so much, so I can ❌ fathom why you both insist on belittling yourselves at every turn… I am saying there is something only you can accomplish, Miss Sprengel. I can ❌ do it. No matter how unnecessarily ashamed you are of yourself, your 🪄 to 👗 up as someone else is something that never occurred to me. Using that to help others qualifies as praiseworthy service if you ask me, but do you disagree?”

Silence.

Eventually followed by a wet sound.

It was the sound of a sniffling nose.

“Don’t tell that fool.”

“Sigh. I really think it is ⌚ the world recognized your talents.”

“Don’t tell him.”

“As you wish.”

“Then come forth, Aiwass!! Come to me, the walking amplifier for my will that has a mind of its own!!”

“Took you long enough, my benevolent genius.”

Anna Sprengel and Anna Kingsford.

The long-held conflict between them had been resolved.

Now they stood side by side, wielding great magic to protect an innocent life.

===Part 6===

The massive bridge had clearly been bent by an impact from the side. Cracks ran through the asphalt, steel screws larger than golf balls popped forcefully from the metal beams, and the joints between the girders swelled upwards.

The black bass and bluegills seemed harmless at first, but even at 500g each, tens of thousands of them still amounted to a large weight.

With the most lovable face, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet only had to blow a kiss to control them all.

Good, Old Mary had already collapsed after taking one to the center of the chest.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet chose Aradia as her next target.

It didn’t matter that she was directly facing the Bologna Succubus right now.

She set her sights on the witch goddess who stood on the complex arrangement of metal beams used to distribute the bridge’s weight.

“Look!! The world’s most high-tech city will have any number of unloved creatures: black bass, bluegills, rats, stray cats, pigeons, and starlings to name a few. Now, false goddess, let’s see how you handle the love-starved laments of the unloved!!”

“Tch!!”

“''Hee hee☆ Or should I send the unloved humans your way''?”

As soon as Aradia stiffened, stopping her interception spell, a babbler soared sharply toward her unguarded flank. A direct hit would probably kill the wild bird, but it would go through its death throes while embedded deep inside the wound and its beak and feathers would spread contaminants around.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet stuck out her tongue.

But the night wind that reached her was no more than a night wind.

It did not carry a rusty scent.

“?”

Had it missed?

When the support from “resonating” with Alice Anotherbible should have acted as a ''tailwind'' for all her actions?

Even though simply firing blindly from the hip should have always hit the enemy?

Before Blodeuwedd the Bouquet could pursue that question, Vidhatri shouted from where she stood.

“2nd Saga!! Eliminate her now!”

“Hee hee.”

An alluring female face and limbs appeared in the dark night. She was around 18, at the midpoint between girlhood and womanhood.

But that was all that was visible.

The pieces floated separately. No, her torso had clearly been torn apart. It now contained strange hollow spaces. Had her human silhouette unraveled like bandages? Was it due to the thick ribbon that had been wrapped around her torso? The lights of the city were visible in the space beyond her partially eliminated body.

The space seemed somewhat distorted.

Or maybe it was a type of ''camouflage''.

Aradia faced this person who was strange even for a Transcendent. She had the face of a girl with short flaxen hair with the interior dyed bright blue.

“2nd Saga. Do you derive some special meaning from covering and hiding things?”

“I’ve always had trouble choosing just one thing. I never want to throw anything out, so my room always ends up a mess.”

Saga was a goddess from Norse mythology.

She was said to be extremely powerful and to manage the spring where Odin is gifted with poetry and wisdom.

But she is barely mentioned throughout all the Norse monuments and texts.

Barely anything is known about her other than that her home is called Sokkvabekkr.

Information on her was scarce.

She was a mysterious figure who is simply known to share drinks with the top Norse god.

This woman had gone out of here way to choose a god like that.

She had wanted to be her.

Aradia spat annoyed words with the yellow and black railroad crossing barrier in hand.

“If a single performer tries to forcibly dress up as multiple gods, the traits of the gods cancel each other out, diluting their presence. We normally have strict rules about what we can’t do if we want to stay in character and keep our costume authentic, but I didn’t expect one of us to take advantage of that fact.”

“By intentionally keeping a low profile, I can do things other gods can’t. I am not the star of the show. But if a tree or a bush does something they shouldn’t, the audience has no way of knowing if it was correct or not. This allows me to be a performer on the stage while also freeing me from the bonds of the script. I am the only one allowed to be myself.”

“…”

“I am the Transcendent ''who saves all the bit parts and understudies who never get any attention.'' I can’t look down on them if I’m to do that. I need to understand how they feel and be one of them first.”

She disappeared.

Did she unleash her skill to the point she became one with the air?

The bluish-white armor partially surrounding 2nd Saga’s limbs vanished into the air, causing what little of her skin and face were still visible to look unnaturally alluring.

The bright round skin of her face was like a device for giving off sex appeal.

The pupils of her blue eyes were colored an impossible bright red. Did she use a light-bending technique to pull that one off?

Even with her full body unraveled, the individual pieces were made of captivating feminine skin.

But if a member of the opposite sex were caught by her like this, it would probably break his mind.

The strange avant-garde woman sneered.

“My name is 2nd Saga, a fictional god created on the mischievous whim of the compiler. Which allows me to ''add on'' any magic I wish which is never actually found in Norse mythology. …Now, it is time you lost your one and only life. The divine curse – that is, the light of Brisingamen, necklace of infidelity – can even trigger a war between world-destroying kings. Do not assume an individual can escape that deadly fate!!”

It started at the center, where her chest had been.

The thick ribbon, which bound her skin and showed the city behind her, created a transparent distortion much like sugar water, which spilled beyond her outlines.

It forcibly gathered Aradia’s focus on a single point, much like having a finger jabbed between the eyes at close range.

Aradia sensed a definite deadliness in this unknown phenomenon.

Was she mistaken, or had that been the true trigger?

The impossible distortion became a large artillery shell that tore through the air.

This was an assassination spell.

It was guaranteed to take a life.

And the user could sidestep their own sin by saying they were only adoring the beautiful gold and jewels. The necklace brought doom, but it allowed the user to claim they didn’t know it was cursed and thought it was only a beautiful piece of jewelry. Was that to insure they would not be hit in the unlikely case that the curse was sent back the way it had come?

Aradia snorted with laughter.

The rails were laid out nicely, but it was all nonsense with no actual mythological basis. The sky is heaven, the gods shine bright, the workings of salvation and divine punishment, cats are capricious and dogs are loyal – by combining the common symbols found across cultures, anyone could fake apparent legitimacy.

Yes, this was faked.

''Her cosplay was sloppy.'' Gods were meant to draw a strict line between right and wrong, so they couldn’t accept – much less use – a loophole like this. A real god did not choose their words carefully for fear of backlash or controversy. Even the cruelest act could be written off as “divine punishment” if it was truly necessary.

And even if this curse would pursue Aradia to the ends of the Earth, there was only one thing she had to do.

“''There just have to be two Aradias''.”

“Wha-!?”

Immediately after 2nd Saga’s dumbfounded shock, the invisible curse tore itself apart with its own power.

The chilly moonlight shined on two identical people.

The black and yellow railroad crossing barriers resting on their shoulders crossed like swords mounted on a wall.

Aradia hadn’t actually done anything. The curse simply hadn’t been designed to handle an abnormal situation where two identical people existed. It was unable to deal with the situation it found, so the single shell attempted to pursue two targets at once, tearing itself apart from within.

It dissipated.

It disappeared.

“Don’t you dare call this cheating. This has always been our role – we’re the perfect performers. And it was all of you who created ''a second one'' and brought her here without even asking me.”

Right and left.

The identical Aradias launched wind magic that struck the formless Transcendent.

The tides were turning.

“…”

Vidhatri was dumbfounded.

But she wasn’t simply shocked that a Transcendent receiving a ''tailwind'' by “resonating” with Alice Anotherbible had been defeated by a Transcendent who had that link severed and was alone in the storm.

More than that…

“''Why did you have that idea just now''?”

“''What do you mean''?”

“It also doesn’t make sense that you avoided Blodeuwedd the Bouquet’s initial attack. Even if there was a way for you to defeat 2nd Saga, it never should have occurred to you!! That kind of support comes from Alice. How did you break through the thought masking!?”

“I would assume conditions have changed somewhere away from here.”

“Tch!!”

Panic spread through the air, infecting the entire space.

Vidhatri seemed rushed by something unseen rather than her own will as she unspooled a lot of white thread and black hair from the ball-joint doll she wore on her back.

By intentionally omitting all mention of something, that spell let her erase anything she didn’t like from the small world set up around her. If she erased everything that could kill her, then no one could defeat her.

A moment later, a dull impact struck her cheekbone. Something flew in from the side and Vidhatri was launched spinning through the air. The impact permeated her. Before she could figure out what had happened, her ball-joint doll broke apart and her model-proportioned body soared over the pedestrian railing and toward the dark river below.

But Aradia hadn’t done anything.

“You were focused on the wrong person, dumbass.”

Aradia glanced over to see a small figure standing boldly atop a metal beam.

It was Anna Sprengel.

“Keh heh heh. Alice no longer rules this world. Worms, bow before me and beg for your pitiful lives. It wasn’t you who created the Shrink Drink – you needed Alice’s help for that. Yet all you worthless regular Transcendents had the nerve to look down on me and try to kill me!!!”

“Before she could figure out what had happened, huh?” the goddess of witches whispered in exasperation. “So Vidhatri could preemptively eliminate any threat, but she was defenseless against any threat that never occurred to her.”

If anything, that was a lot like the death of the immortal Norse god of light, Baldr. That similarity was ''not'' a case of cultural transmission between India and Europe. It was instead evidence of the Transcendents not actually being strictly bound to a single god or even a single mythology.

“Have you imagined your own fate yet, 2nd Saga?”

“Have you imagined your own fate yet, 2nd Saga?”

“!?”

Multiple beams of light flashed out at once.

The two Aradias held out their palms to launch projectile magic toward the figure leaping vigorously from beam to beam. The attacks actually hit 2nd Saga. It was hard to believe she had been so untouchable just a bit ago. She was knocked from the beam above to the bridge below.

Mut Thebes (who was on their side but had lost control of herself) had her drone carrier stopped by a three-legged object that appeared out of thin air. That was Good, Old Mary’s Tribikos.

The tides had turned in the blink of an eye.

The only one left was Blodeuwedd the Bouquet in her coat-like blast-resistant suit and naked apron.

Aradia approached her directly, the Bologna Succubus glared icily at her, and bloody Good, Old Mary slowly rose to her feet.

“Wai-”

The dull “thump!!” of pierced flesh rang out.

The Bologna Succubus had launched her sharp tail and caught Blodeuwedd the Bouquet in the shoulder.

Using a frontal attack with no tricks.

The force of the blow broke the iron-maiden-like blast-resistant suit and the double doors covered in metal panels fell to the asphalt. With her protection gone, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet’s bare skin was exposed to the frigid air while she scattered junk from her terrarium and UV LED lights. The night wind carried away the flower petals.

“This is already over,” said the Bologna Succubus.

Her voice was colder than it ever had been when that boy was present.

The naked apron girl backed away, but her legs tangled underneath her.

She fell like normal.

Her specialness was gone.

“You forgot about your salvation condition, you abandoned the people you should be saving, and you thought only of preserving your own power. And then you blamed Alice for it all. …So this is already over. You have nothing left. Nothing at all.”

“You’re going to win this...and take everything from me?”

With only her frilly apron left, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet held her wounded shoulder with the opposite hand and struggled to keep her breath.

The powerful sex appeal she gathered around her had dissipated, leaving behind only the fear of a small child.

“This is all we have. You can’t tell me the idea of losing your power doesn’t scare you.”

“I am a Transcendent. I choose who I should protect and then guard those people from the threat this world presents them. Which is why I abandoned my own identity to dress up as a god,” said Witch Goddess Aradia. “My salvation condition does not include myself. And I would never rob innocent people of their future just so I could keep my own shameful life.”

With a dull sound, the Transcendent ended things with the Transcendent.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was the last one.

There had been others, but they raised their hands in surrender when they saw the tides changing. That was about what you got with people who only worried about themselves.

But with Alice ''Anotherbible'' as an open-source example, more Transcendents could be created. Just like there were two Aradias here.

Remaking the city’s people into makeshift witches wasn’t an option here like it had been in Shibuya. If Academy City espers used magic, they would be harmed by the side effects and, if Alice wanted to, she could produce an unlimited supply of regular Transcendents. Those would be literally a grade above.

Any victories won fighting on the outer edges would only be temporary. And with only limited numbers to work with, they wouldn’t last if they were forced to fight the same battles over and over.

“This was no more than an opening skirmish,” said Anna Sprengel despite understanding that.

She was another host and open-source example who differed greatly from the Alice line.

They couldn’t stop here.

“Our real target is Alice. This rioting doesn’t end until she’s been stopped. The Queen of Hearts and Executioner waiting near Alice could easily be more powerful than the regular Transcendents.”

“If you have the time, could you deal with her too? Mut Thebes is shooting off ‘fireworks’ like this is some kind of party, so it would be great if you could bring that idiot back to her senses!!”

“Oh? Silly girl, are you sure you don’t want to take a video first?”

The giant white ship shook.

She must have been freed from the unseen physics that could be seen as Alice’s ''tailwind''.

Mut Thebes must have absorbed the weapon’s shadow, but where exactly was she attached to it?

“Bff!? Wait, wait, I’ll be good.”

“Finally come to your senses? Then take a look at the collapsed city around you. I can’t wait to see what kind of excuse you can come up with while dripping with sweat, God of Partying.”

“But if my partying was enough to destroy an entire city by accident, doesn’t that make me a super powerful goddess? And since we can all see how ultra-cute I am, can’t I get off the hook with a quick: ‘Oopsie. Tee hee’?”

“Good, Old Mary, use your Tribikos to step on that god of destruction, ship and all. It’s January, so dunking her to the bottom of the river ought to cool her head.”

Aradia icily passed judgment, but then a cracking voice came over the ship’s speakers.

“Oh, and the drone carrier’s antenna picked something up,” said Mut Thebes.

“?”

“It wasn’t encrypted or anything, so it was a lot like a radio transmission. Maybe it’s best to say this is being sent out all over the place. They might have been hoping we would pick it up. It’s being transmitted from ''a prison in District 10'' and it says it’s about Alice Pleasance Liddell.”

===Part 7===

After seeing off the little magician who had freed herself from her self-made bonds, Anna Kingsford sighed all on her own.

The end was nigh.

“Now, then.”

(I need to prepare for my part in this.)

===Part 8===

There were no subjective symptoms.

Kamijou wasn’t even allowed any obvious pain or bleeding.

Then was this a delirium or hallucination caused by all the stress he was under?

Except there was something there.

With each step he took down the long hallway, he heard a sound like thin threads snapping inside him. Like the creaking of bone or the beating of his heart, these were delicate sounds that shouldn’t have been audible outside his body.

He had heard on some trivia show that the simple action of walking concentrated a lot of weight and force on the leg bones. If that was true, then his body could no longer keep up with his movement. His insides were already breaking down to that extent.

Death.

The unavoidable destruction of the self.

Alice apparently wanted to ask Index if there was a way to heal him.

But Kamijou already knew the answer.

This was different from any of the previous times.

Or rather, this wasn’t a one-off failure. Everything he had done had pushed him too far. He was finally paying the price for it all. No one could escape the consequences of their own actions.

The end was nigh.

And it was only now that Kamijou realized something.

In a battle so severe, why hadn’t he noticed anything amiss? His survival this long had been the unnatural part.

“Hm, hm, hm☆”

Alice Anotherbible skipped out ahead of him.

She turned back, her skirt lifting disconcertingly high.

“C’mon, teacher. Everyone’s here now, so you need to hurry. Good or bad, you wouldn’t want it to end without ever learning the answer, would you?”

“…”

That was the opinion of someone watching from the outside.

It was clearly missing the viewpoint of the person on the verge of learning if their death was unavoidable.

They did not arrive at a normal classroom.

That was the door to the library.

That should have made for a poor prison. A solid kick would probably break open the sliding door and the outside windows were probably ordinary glass.

But since Alice had chosen this location, it was probably impossible to open from inside. Even with the knowledge of 103,001 grimoires at your disposal.

The door opened.

From the outside, it was surprisingly easy.

Kamijou doubted that was Imagine Breaker’s doing. He probably just had Alice’s permission.

“Touma!”

He heard a familiar voice.

She wasn’t bound with packing tape or zip ties. The windows and door were not reinforced. But there was definite relief on her face. That was the look of someone who just saw the thick door to their prison cell open.

And her smile froze in place.

The pure white sister was not concerned by Alice and H.T. Trismegistus’s presence. She was clearly looking at something else. The boy could tell that even with the mixture of truth, lies, and hallucination in his head.

“No...what is that?”

Her eyes widened because of Kamijou.

She had already detected something out of the ordinary.

Whether Alice was aware of that or not, she spoke in her childlike way.

“Okay, teacher. Ask her!”

The young butler clearly knew what was coming and struggled to suppress a grin.

Malicious words and actions were not the only way to hurt people.

Because he was bound by common sense, H.T. Trismegistus would never hurl abuse himself. The look on his face seemed to say there was no law against silence.

“I...won’t.”

“You have to,” said Alice.

“There’s no reason to force her to give an answer!!”

“Leaving the question unanswered solves nothing. Stopping here only lets the problem grow worse with time. She has 103,001 grimoires. With so much knowledge from all around the world available to her, the girl just knows she can find a way to heal you!!”

Was it even possible?

Had it been definitively proven, or was it only a theory?

Alice didn’t care about that.

It could be the geocentric theory, phlogiston, an ancient nuclear war, or that dinosaur farts caused the ice age. Of course, it could also be something accurate like universal gravitation or quantum theory. Accurate or not, if a theory had ever been proposed – if someone had thought it up and put together the logic behind it – she could build a bridge to it. She could choose ''whichever theories she wanted'' and link to them to wholly change the world. She was the ultimate conversion device. She could place Yamatai anywhere she liked, she could invent a perpetual motion machine of the first kind to produce unlimited energy, or she could remake the spherical Earth into a flat disk.

So there just had to be a single section in the more than 10 thousand grimoires.

Just one passage.

Even a single line would do.

No matter how absurd or difficult to achieve it was.

Alice could easily activate it and save Kamijou.

''But.

''Even then.

Index did not give a yes or no answer.

She kept her silence.

That was enough of an answer. If she wasn’t willing to say it out loud, she didn’t need to.

Her attempt at kindness was ineffective.

The verdict had been given.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Death.

That was the only option left.

Kamijou did not weep or rage.

He even forgot to fall to the floor.

In a way, he abandoned his humanity.

He simply stood there, stock still.

“Hu…man.”

Othinus’s quiet voice was enough for his head to wobble.

There was nothing there.

It wasn’t even emptiness that filled his mind.

He felt a heat surrounding him.

He simply stood there, forgetting even to collapse.

There was no way to save him.

The world had not developed that far.

It was underdeveloped.

People had studied what they liked and technology had branched off into countless directions, but never in this one.

The world didn’t care.

Time would continue on like normal even after he was gone.

And…

“Then let’s destroy it,” said a young voice.

Alice Anotherbible sounded the same as ever.

No, her voice sounded dried out.

Terrifyingly so.

This wasn’t part of the plan.

She sounded like her surprise party plan had fallen apart.

“We have our answer. And if this world can’t save you, teacher, than the girl is going to destroy it. The girl heard what you said, so she knows this world wouldn’t still be here if not for you. So it’s only fair the world goes away when you do, don’t you think?”

“Wait! Don’t, Touma!!” sharply shouted Index.

The knowledge of her grimoires must have told her Alice could do exactly what she claimed. And that she would do it the instant Kamijou gave her some kind of sign.

He would never do that under normal circumstances.

But it was wrong to assume he would behave normally now that he knew he would lose everything.

y/n.

The available options had been narrowed down as far as possible.

The fate of the world hinged on this one question.

“I do not agree.” H.T. Trismegistus finally spoke up, his shoulders shaking as he didn’t even bother to suppress his chuckling. “Destroying the world for a single individual is wrong. Maybe if this would save his life, but you should not destroy humanity if all you are doing is lashing out. Some might consider it moving, but common sense says it is not a benevolent act.”

Alice’s eyes widened like dinner plates.

And she lowered her voice.

“''H. T. Trismegistus''.”

“As you can see…”

The young butler raised his hands and kept speaking, undaunted.

He didn’t seem to care that the invisible muzzle of death was pressed unsteadily against his brow.

“I can tell Alice what common sense says, but I have no real way of stopping her. This is ultimately between you and her. No, make your own choice, Kamijou Touma. You cannot rely on Another Bible here and not even all the world’s grimoires contain a means of saving you. So what will you choose in the final moments now that your death is assured?”

Othinus gasped and looked up from his shoulder.

She was the only person who had just about achieved a perfect victory against Kamijou Touma.

She knew this ending.

She knew this dead end.

Because the one-eyed war god had intentionally set up a situation just like this to kill the boy when he refused to give up no matter what else she tried.

“I see what you’re doing. Hey, human, don’t listen to-!!”

“Yes, you could go crying to Alice and have her take the world out with you. In fact, you needn’t even say a word. If you remain silent, she might just be considerate enough to do it on her own. But common sense tells me that Alice’s ''only'' motivation is making you happy. ''So you could eliminate Alice’s motivation by taking your own life before she destroys the world on your behalf.'' You will die soon regardless, so why not move up the timetable just a bit to save so many people?”

Mere moments before H.T. Trismegistus completed his encircling argument, someone kicked down the library door from the outside.

With no difficulty.

“Fool.”

It was easy to miss by how easily it happened, but this should have been an unavoidable critical hit. Kamijou’s path should have ended.

But it hadn’t.

Because someone wouldn’t let it.

You could develop an attack specialized for a single individual, but that individual didn’t need to fight alone.

Just by setting foot in here, little Anna Sprengel had accomplished what no one else could.

She was probably the only person in the world not affected by Alice’s madness.

She deflected it.

And that villain mercilessly stomped her way into Alice’s territory.

No one could stop her.

“Hmph. So only I made it this far in? I feel a little bad leaving Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, and the others stuck fighting an endless battle. You basically asked us to come and even showed us the way, but then you drove your guests away? When you think about it, that’s hilariously pathetic.”

“You?”

“You haven’t figured it out yet, you gloomy microdick?  You should have known better than to trust your assumptions from the moment you couldn’t kill me with the Shrink Drink filled with Alice’s power.”

Anna chuckled and Othinus gave her a look more of exasperation than admiration.

“I see. So if you had actually killed that shitty villain, we wouldn’t be dealing with this nonsense about her ''outdoing Alice''.”

“Are you saying the world switched rails back then?” asked Index.

“That’s right, you dregs of a god and you pathetic loafer,” said Anna, giving Othinus and Index a scornful look. Then she spread her little hands. “The fool changed things. He moved many people’s hearts with his own actions rather than having Alice cheat for him. I did not achieve this miracle on my own. Don’t you think the first person to receive its blessings should be the one who worked so hard to make it happen?”

Yes.

No one had invited Anna. She did not have Alice’s permission. That meant she had faced Alice’s madness without fear, repelled it, and forced her own actions through.

She faced that tremendous charisma without being engulfed.

She had the brand name of the mystery woman behind the founding of the world’s largest magic cabal.

This villain carried a legend of equal value.

“Honestly. You always let everyone push you around when it comes to Alice, fool. Do you seriously believe in the nice-sounding but scientifically-baseless and perverted jinx that the unclouded eyes of young children reflect truths the adults have long forgotten? If you ask me, you should learn to ignore it all as ''the words of an ignorant little kid''.”

“Anna…?”

“You might die, fool.”

Kamijou’s breath caught in his throat.

The thick invisible wall once more intruded on the ordinary scene around him.

Death.

The end.

It was approaching second by second, yet he felt no pain. Like a cruel time bomb with the LCD screen omitted.

What was wrong with feeling fear?

But Anna wasn’t done talking.

“I said ‘might’. None of this is set in stone, but Alice is acting like it’s 100% going to happen. Why?”

Othinus caught on first.

Almost like the thought had been unnaturally blocked until now.

“Oh, I get it. Everyone would prefer the opposite outcome, but there was someone that enjoyed fueling the idea that he was definitely going to die.”

“It’s simple really. What did a certain monster need to do for him to drop his guard and let her in? What about showing him a greater threat so she doesn’t seem so bad? Just like I came off as a harmless companion when faced with the greater threats of CRC and Alice. But there is no threat greater at present than the Anotherbible. So a certain someone suggested the fool’s death.”

“Wait.”

“You should already know the answer. Alice Anotherbible only gets so assertive when it comes to Kamijou Touma. In a way, this is to be expected since I imprinted the fool’s past actions in her mind.”

It wasn’t her fault she had been deceived.

Anyone that little villain took advantage of already had an opening in them.

Or you could call it a vulnerability.

She could not create something from nothing. She pried open a small existing hole and then controlled them as she saw fit.

She was a reasonable but contemptible miracle-worker.

“The central factor for her has always been loneliness. Yes, I am the one who deceived her. Wherever she came from, I know the current Alice Anotherbible’s mind better than you.”

So?

What was that supposed to mean?

What was she imagining when she said that?

A cold sweat poured from Kamijou’s body.

For a brief moment, even his very real fear of death vanished from his mind.

“Hold on!! You’re not making sense. Alice means no harm. For better or for worse, what you see is what you get with her. Wasn’t that our initial assumption here? She can’t set people up, plot out some grand plan, or any other intellectual stuff like that!!”

“True,” agreed H.T. Trismegistus. “She is too powerful to do anything of the sort. Common sense says that someone capable of killing a dinosaur with a barehanded punch would never even think of inventing a gun, correct?”

“Shut up, you gloomy butler. And, fool, remind me who you came here to save?”

Anna sounded exasperated.

That was their initial assumption.

Kamijou had said that himself, but he had somehow forgotten it.

“I thought that issue had nothing to do with whether or not you will survive.”

“…”

He wanted to rescue Index and save Alice too.

That was why he had decided to fight Alice. That had been his initial objective.

And yet.

Why was he now seeking salvation from Alice?

Alice was the same as always. She was alive and well. It didn’t matter that her head had been crushed by Rosencreutz.

So shouldn’t he be rejoicing?

Shouldn’t he be weeping and laughing while hugging Alice?

Why was he being driven into a dead end?

''When had his objective been replaced?

''Who had caused that switch?

No.

…But…

It couldn’t be? Could it?

“Fool. I agree that Alice isn’t calculating enough to put together a long-term plan to fool people. Even telling her to ‘sit’ or ‘stay’ in front of a feast wouldn’t last very long. She may only be honestly saying what she believes to be right.”

That was a weirdly indirect phrasing.

Which suggested that phrasing was somehow necessary.

Othinus gave a snort.

“Yeah, I thought that was strange for a grimoire library whose job is to provide answers. Is this why she hesitated to give a response? Because she couldn’t easily reach a yes or no answer?”

The white nun, who was the polar opposite of the villain, spoke up quietly.

“But if Alice’s mind is too badly broken to tell what is and isn’t accurate, she might not be doing the right thing. Touma, you can’t trust that the things she tells you are accurate.”

Everyone’s eyes gathered on a single point.

Even H.T. Trismegistus, who had been taking advantage of the situation.

They heard a creaking sound.

Sounds like thick, straining leather came from within the girl as she hung her head.

“Those magicians could not change the world the way they wanted, nor could they follow their own rules after coming up with lofty salvation conditions,” said Anna Sprengel in a singsong way. “It probably was pure chance that very average group discovered the artificial miracle that is Alice Anotherbible before they began dressing up as gods. But they realized something.”

“…”

“In a mishmash of fiction and reality, a real girl had been remade into the storybook Alice and the storybook Alice had been created in the real world. They extracted a portion of those ‘plans’ and applied it to themselves. By customizing themselves as they liked with pieces of the preexisting open-source spell, they could abandon their individuality to dress up as any god or demon with extraordinary precision.”

The Transcendents really had transformed themselves that way.

At the cost of their own individuality.

For the Bridge Builders Cabal, the ''Anotherbible'' was a priceless text, but Alice was no more than a target of their worship. So they feared her and respected her, but they did everything they could to avoid third parties contacting her.

What had that lonely girl really wanted?

Or, more accurately, who?

“I see,” said Othinus on Kamijou’s shoulder. Sounding somewhat exasperated. “''This human was perfect for the role.'' I see now why that little monster was so obsessed with him.”

“Alice Pleasance Liddell listened to Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the prototype for it all, and was the one clear model for the protagonist. But in a later era, she was abducted by a ‘Teacher of Crowley’ and thoroughly modified to create the Alice seen in the story.”

Little Anna herself proved that one’s apparent age wasn’t necessarily reliable.

Even if she was already an adult when she was abducted, the magician would have made the necessary adjustments. Very physical adjustments using a scalpel and saw. It may have taken cutting through bone, sewing together skin, and rearranging organs, but they would have kept working and adjusting until she had the exact same height and adorable appearance as the fictional girl.

That could not have been an enjoyable experience.

But after being freed from the mystery magician and finding a place in the center of the Bridge Builders Cabal, Alice had not been able to live the innocent life of the storybook. Even though she was already free and more powerful than anyone. She had given up on any life other than fulfilling other people’s interests.

And she really had become an innocent child.

She probably wasn’t even aware of her own humiliation and resignation.

Anna sighed softly and dug into the ugly side of humanity.

That was something Kamijou couldn’t do.

This was a territory only allowed for a worldwide villain.

She would carry the burden of everyone’s ire as she revealed the necessary truth.

“A parent who values logic has no dreams to share with their child.

“When Mathematician Lewis Carroll later began creating the world’s greatest fantasy, he laid out symbols and meanings, discovered a special child, and used her as a model to tell the prototype of it all: Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.

“A self-proclaimed Teacher of Crowley saw value in you as no more than the one and only specimen to know of the uncorrected original version, so they remade you by rearranging everything from your bones to your organs into the optimal color, shape, and size.

“When the Bridge Builders Cabal ‘rediscovered’ the girl still wandering in the shadows of the modern world, they only saw you as an open-source spell of great power. They feared and respected you in something more like worship than anything.”

And so the girl had been craving more.

Starving for it.

It mattered little if it was a conscious or subconscious thing.

Alice was always surrounded by so many people, but none of them were really looking at her.

Her reputation had preceded her.

With one exception.

There was one boy who did not want her power as a Transcendent, had rejected the “happiness” brought by her ultimate power, and faced her with nothing but his own fist no matter how many times he was killed.

It all began there.

Like dreaming of something from a storybook, a certain girl had thought that was her last chance there.

So she wanted it no matter what.

“Touma, stand back.”

“Ah.”

“Stand back! Now!!”

Hesitantly, Kamijou got his voice out from his parched and trembling mouth.

While asking himself what it was he was so afraid of.

“Al...ice?”

“Yes?”

''The girl raised her head.

''Except she no longer had anything above her neck.

===Part 9===

Aradia had finally caught up.

She walked through the high school’s front gate, setting foot inside its grounds.

Or so she thought.

“Tch!!”

She immediately swung her black and yellow railroad crossing barrier and was answered with a dull crack. It suddenly broke at about the middle. Even with the power of the goddess of witches, she was forced back.

Good, Old Mary, who was woozy from blood loss, muttered quietly.

“It looks like a rabbit, but it doesn’t have a watch. It must be the March Hare from the tea party.”

“One of the Alice Series!?”

The flamingo bats. The hedgehogs.

The Gryphon, the Executioner, the Cook.

These were Alice’s raw and unstoppable toys which magicians had not yet turned into tools.

They seemed to be fighting as two opposing armies, but here it looked like the enemy of your enemy wasn’t your friend. The flamingo bats and hedgehogs would sometimes attack the Transcendents without provocation, so they couldn’t be trusted.

The March Hare had apparently attacked just now, but which side was he on?

For that matter, why were different monsters born from Alice fighting each other in the first place!?

“What are we supposed to do?” asked the Bologna Succubus.

“We should have Good, Old Mary stay back. We shouldn’t rely too heavily on her resurrection, but we shouldn’t waste her by sending her up against an even more dangerous enemy either!!”

The school was a rather large place.

Where was that boy?

And while they were only regular ones, it was strange that a group of several Transcendents couldn’t get past this one position.

They supposedly each wielded strange spells capable of taking on the entire magic side single-handedly.

The Gryphon, the Executioner, the bipedal hare, and the Cook throwing irons and pots.

They were all Alice’s toys with their origins in Wonderland.

But while they were only toys, they had been directly injected with a portion of Alice’s power. As seen with the Shrink Drink, that power made these far from your normal foe.

Ultimately, the Bridge Builders Cabal did not exist for Alice.

It was the result of the regular Transcendents, who sought and feared her great power, struggling to find some way of managing her.

All on her own, Alice was more powerful than countless armies.

Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, Good, Old Mary, and Mut Thebes.

Those four Transcendents gathering here was no problem at all for Alice. She probably hadn’t even decided to fight against the Transcendents. This could be seen in how the toys continued fighting each other instead of driving out the intruders.

“By the way, where did Anna get off to!?” asked Aradia.

“Did that slut use mama and the rest of you as bait for these pain-in-the-ass opponents while she went on ahead? She did, didn’t she?”

They said nothing more.

First, they sensed a great pressure. Only a moment later did they feel the powerful tremor in the ground.

It was Dinah the cat.

The fluffy white and black beast had grown larger than the gym, so a single step caused the entire space to shake. The flamingo bats and hedgehogs ran around in a panic and the Gryphon failed to get away in time and had its front leg crushed underfoot.

It didn’t matter if they were on Alice’s side.

And the culprit – Dinah – wasn’t even aware she had done it.

She was the greatest force in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

She carried such great firepower that the mice and birds who caused Alice so much trouble had fled at the mere mention of her name.

If this really was her, then she might cause destruction greater than Alice intended for.

That meant there was a risk of her crushing the entire school building with Kamijou and Alice inside.

Which was exactly what happened.

With her back to the school building, Aradia briefly froze up, so the Bologna Succubus had to flap her bat wings and tackle Aradia from the side to send them both tumbling across the ground. A gust of wind blew past them like a subway train had passed by nearby. That thing was much too large for anyone human-sized to take a direct hit from it. Aradia didn’t have time to celebrate her survival. She roared up toward the heavens while still tangled up with the Bologna Succubus.

That was the most prized of Alice’s toys.

Deadly Dinah.

Only one Transcendent could hope to battle that giant that rivaled a school gym in size.

“Mut Thebes, stop that thing immediately!!”

“It is too soon for me to attack. Wait 15 minutes for me to absorb enough shadows to create a body that can safely face the cat.”

Aradia’s eyes widened.

Mut Thebes wasn’t going to be any help.

Dinah was charging head-first toward the school building.

And just before she crashed into it, a deafening roar rang out.

Dinah was knocked rolling back, gouging large pieces of dirt out of the schoolyard and sending tons of dust into the air. It made no sense. There was no thick barrier there and no steel warship had appeared.

There was only a single human silhouette.

It looked downright minuscule compared to Dinah, who was large enough to look down at the gym.

Nevertheless, it was Dinah whose max-speed charge had been repelled, sending her rolling backwards.

“Wha-?”

Aradia was speechless.

This wasn’t even a Transcendent.

“Honestly.”

A voice came from the cloud of dust.

Aradia’s group did not recognize the voice. But the female voice inspired a compulsion that prevented even the Transcendents from taking it lightly.

“Alice Anotherbible has fallen apart more than I 💭. All of these things are a 🧩 of her – they are the many opinions she has ❌ been able to reconcile. I did ❌ expect her to be so overwhelmed with emotion that she nearly crushed her own 🏰 with her inside.”

This was Anna Kingsford.

The magician stood there on her own two feet without borrowing anyone’s appearance or abilities.

A moment later, the dirt thrown high into the sky was pulled back down by gravity.

It was like a dry rain.

Kingsford casually directed her index finger skyward and something invisible became a large umbrella.  She alone was left without a speck of dust in her hair or on her clothes.

Something sliced sharply through the dusty veil.

It was a flamingo bat and the Cook.

Both sides of the conflict arrived at once.

Kingsford extended a single finger and drew out a few patterns in empty air.

They were constellations.

Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces.

The sharp sound was a moment delayed.

A scattershot of compressed water tore through the Cook like a cookie cutter through dough. When her blue-glowing fingertip turned toward the flamingo bat, the bat began to tremble while hovering in the air. Despite being inorganic, it clearly shrank two sizes.

The basics of astrology were to assign various elements and symbols to the 7 planets and 12 constellations of the horoscope and then experiment to see what effects were produced on yourself and others when they were applied from different angles and combinations. There were even tricky ways of building them into attack spells.

So by combining only the water element constellations, you could greatly amplify the power of ordinary water.

Instead of simple addition, it worked through multiplication, so it was like shifting up a gear in a car.

That expert did not bother coming up with impressive special attacks.

By earnestly working at the basic fundamentals that anyone could do and that novices tended to look down on, any magic could be brought to the point of a one-hit kill.

But none of that was particularly important.

For one, that wouldn’t be enough to kill Dinah.

“I will ❌ let you destroy the things you care about, Alice. That would be much too 😢 to see. I assure you on my name as an expert, being special does ❌ cut you off from the supply of ☺️.”

Just then…

“…?”

Anna Kingsford looked down at her right hand.

A red liquid was dripping from it.

She only had a slight cut on her fingertip, but the amount of blood was not the issue.

She shouldn’t have been harmed at all in that situation.

That expert never made mistakes.

So if something unexpected occurred regardless, it meant the problem was with the initial data she was working with, not her calculations.

In other words…

“Is this body reaching its limit?” she whispered, holding her fingertip in her mouth.

Her voice itself was a lot “rougher” than it had been when she was first booted up in Shibuya’s Miyashita Ark. It wasn’t limited to her outward appearance. This proved the injury and deterioration was also progressing where it couldn’t be seen.

She didn’t show the slightest hint of fear as she looked out ahead.

In fact, she took a step forward.

The cat large enough to crush the gym rose to her feet again.

Kingsford couldn’t continue on and leave this with the regular Transcendents. She had never figured out how to pick and choose who she saved.

These were Alice’s raw toys, which had yet to be turned into easy-to-use tools like the Shrink Drink. And this cat was the greatest of them. She was a mass of violence and destruction that wouldn’t bat an eye as she trampled all the other toys.

Dinah.

The expert faced the cat head on, holding the brim of her large hat between her fingertips.

She doubted her body would last to the end.

For that matter, it was unnatural for a preserved corpse her to be moving around at all.

(But I can accept that.)

So she decided on a more realistic goal: injuring Dinah enough to create an opening or weak point the Transcendents could take advantage of to defeat Dinah on their own.

The expert knew her doom was closing in on her, but she still spoke with her usual smile.

“⌚ to serve others.”

===Part 10===

She was a headless girl.

A little corpse.

Yet she was also standing up and looking at Kamijou.

He distinctly felt the pressure of her gaze.

The atmosphere in the library changed. The scales were rapidly tilting in a direction he did not like at all.

“!?”

Without thinking, he stepped back away from her.

This was an expression of malice that shouldn’t have been necessary.

Which proved it had been intentional.

It was true after all.

No matter how you looked at it, the center of the problem was right there.

It always had been.

Kamijou pushed past the fear of death he knew was coming and shouted.

“Alice!!”

He heard a sound like tearing cardboard.

No, not like. The headless girl really did tear down the center. And something else emerged, sticky with a translucent fluid.

This had happened before.

But this was not the little girl dressed in profane red and black leather.

This form could never have fit in that small body.

But she wasn’t accepting questions.

At the top of the vertical tear, near where the head should have been, an arm jutted straight up, but this arm belonged to a captivatingly beautiful woman. With a splat, she collapsed forward to crawl like a dog. The translucent slime left behind strings that stained the floor. She squirmed like a fluffy red boa. The leather bound her bright, wet body more tightly than necessary and her long blonde hair was so wet it writhed on the ground as a single clump. After instantly becoming a woman of about 18, she crawled forward and swung her head upwards. The wet hair covering her face swung back behind her, revealing her beautiful face.

“Touma!!”

Alice Anotherbible.

Or maybe Alice Pleasance Liddell.

Her true form.

“Did you use yourself as the ingredients to recreate the ideal version of yourself?” said Othinus in disgust.

Alice worked her alluring throat to release growls and her fingers scratched at the floor like an animal with sharp and sinister claws. She could not have been farther removed from reason, intelligence, and innocent adorableness.

Violence.

Battle.

Killing.

That was all she was.

She shined with the same light as a sword that had had been made so deadly it gained an odd beauty.

The fear of death was gone.

Even that thick invisible wall had vanished.

Kamijou felt a tingling in the back of his head. With the sharp claws, the large canine teeth emerging from her lips, and the fearsome light in her eyes, he knew there was so much he needed to focus on, yet he couldn’t read even a hint of deadliness from her. But he knew this wasn’t Alice doing anything special. His own mind had numbed the fear. Because if he accurately understood the threat here, his heart would stop of its own accord. His heart would raise the white flag before his mind did.

The animal rose to her feet.

The fully grown body of an alluringly beautiful woman straightened her legs and stood up like she had only just remembered she could.

She took a fighting stance.

“Teacher…”

That one word created a distortion.

But not in Alice. The bookcases, the reading desks, the floor, the walls, and everything else Kamijou could see looked like a child had scribbled out their outlines in white and black.

“The girl…wants…only one goal. She will…have this…no matter…matter what.”

He could have understood if she said she would kill him just for fun.

Or if she said she deeply resented him.

Even if she said she would destroy the world based on some inscrutable logic, he might have decided that made sense for someone so very different.

But.

“The girl wants...to make up...with you.”

Everything froze.

Inside Kamijou Touma, time ground to a halt.

Was that it.

Was that really and truly all there was to it?

At the Bridge Builders Cabal consulate in District 12, Kamijou and Alice had disagreed over her attempted punishment of H.T. Trismegistus, who had tried to kill him, and Good, Old Mary, who had failed to protect him.

CRC had killed her and she had regained her lost head.

She had driven the world mad and might destroy it as soon as tomorrow.

But this had never changed.

She only wanted to mend that broken bond.

No matter what it took.

Even if her methods were seen as unfair.

That little girl didn’t care. Kamijou should have bowed his head and apologized, but he had completely forgotten after learning about his imminent death.

Nevertheless, she was trying to achieve it on her own, even if it meant dirtying her hands.

So they could smile together again.

“So.”

It all took a turn.

Her behavior was distorted.

Only in Alice’s mind did it all fit together smoothly.

“The girl will make up with you. She will fight you because a serious fight allows people to make up. But it has to be serious, so what can the girl do to get you to fight her? This city, this country, and this world can wait. It has to be serious. The girl understands you, teacher, so she knows you will fight her and make up with her.”

She said it all in a terribly ''drawn out'' and flat, emotionless voice. Her emotions were so intense it was all destroyed, like the recording medium itself was being burned from below by a lighter.

Alice probably really could do that.

And what would happen?

Would the world really end over this?

Maybe Alice could no longer make logical connections between the different pieces of data.

Kamijou had thoroughly broken that girl’s mind.

Issues of right and wrong or like and dislike were trivial at this point. They would no longer provide a dividing line between enemy and ally. This wasn’t like mantises that were programmed so the female would always eat the male. Perhaps it was closer to spiders where the female would sometimes suddenly leap at and devour the male in the middle of the male’s courtship display. Even with the same species facing each other one-on-one, and even with the male expressing his love and the female accepting it, she might mercilessly devour him on a whim. She would only realize she had done it after the fact. You couldn’t predict what would happen even a second into the future with a being like that.

She was such a close but distant being.

She was different.

She was a predator beautifully made by stretching out the muscles, laying out the nerves, hardening the bones.

Kamijou didn’t find her frightening anymore.

He felt sorrow instead.

“Stand back, fool,” coldly insisted Anna Sprengel.

The look she gave Alice was unusual for that villain.

Alice was another irregular Transcendent – another open-source path to power – but one who would never stand on the same side as Anna. Anna gave her a look of pity.

“You understand, don’t you? She’s a lot like an unstable animal. If you approach her now, she might turn you to mincemeat without even meaning to. In the worst case, she might decide that, if she can’t have you alive, she will tear off your head and take that away with her.”

Kamijou shook his head.

Would he battle Alice?

And defeat her?

“I can’t do that.”

This wasn’t about the size of the threat. He couldn’t picture it. It felt wrong. He wanted to trust in that part of himself.

He recalled that giant dragon.

When he had punched CRC away and given up on his possibilities, he had felt a disgusting sensation.

A future where he and CRC could stand side-by-side smiling had been lost. Kamijou had made sure of it.

And the fear caused by his prophesied death made him feel this way all the more.

Would he use that against Alice this time?

Like hell he would.

“Because I can’t save Alice that way. Isn’t there some other way!?”

Index and her 103,001 grimoires were here. So was Othinus, who had once been a Magic God. Not to mention Anna Sprengel, who was familiar with Rosicrucianism and the Bridge Builders Cabal.

Combining those three’s knowledge could reveal a way of saving Alice.

But…

“That really depends on your definition of ‘save’,” said Othinus. “Human, would you really be saving her if you grabbed that oversized head and shoved it back inside the small body? Back inside that shed skin?”

She was a god who had once destroyed the world and been pursued by all of humanity as a great criminal.

That Magic God was saying this about ''another monster capable of ending the world''.

She said it clearly, without averting her gaze from reality.

This was nothing as over-the-top as saving humanity or protecting the world.

It was a more personal miracle.

But she was speaking to the boy who really had risked his life to save a lonely god.

“You are here, human. So make your own choice. This here is the real Alice. She isn’t pure or innocent, but if the world can accept her this way, that would be one way of saving her.”

“Oh,” said Kamijou, sounding exasperated.

He just had to bring Alice back to her senses.

He kept that in mind while ignoring the issue of how difficult that would be to actually pull off.

“So if I risk my life, a path opens up?”

That was the best news he’d heard all day.

In that instant, an explosion erupted out.

Something twisted and scattered around right in front of his eyes. It took him a moment to realize they were fake roses.

Or that he would have been decapitated if not for them.

Alice had attacked.

He didn’t know why.

It was possible she didn’t either.

She was a captivatingly beautiful monster, but she was not a villain.

He had to believe that.

How deadly she looked had nothing to do with whether she was good or bad. She would bare her fangs whether it was right or wrong and whether she liked you or not. She was an unstable collection of power with only that function.

So he couldn’t falter.

He couldn’t turn Alice into a monster. He couldn’t accept that conclusion.

“Fool, the rose is a symbol of change. This applies to the Golden brooch that can create any sigil through the orderly arrangement of the 22 Hebrew letters and it applies to white and red roses colored with paint in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. ''By forcibly altering the interpretation and building a bridge,'' I can divert at least one of her attacks.”

Anna Sprengel stared straight ahead as she said this, but she had a red wound running across her cheek.

That had only been a villain’s trickery.

Kamijou couldn’t expect it to work forever.

But he should be plenty thankful it had worked at all in this real confrontation.

And while deflecting the attack was all well and good, he had no idea what Alice had done even after being on the receiving end of her attack.

The animal roared loud.

“Oooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

Was that magic?

It was an apocalyptic roar.

A great energy grounded in something other than intelligence and reason spiraled out. The roar reflected off the walls and floor before gathering unnaturally on a single point in space.

Anna swept her little hand from left to right.

That was all it took for a thick shockwave to bend like a bow and knock over a few bookcases.

It was actually Alice who paused for a beat.

With her right hand still jabbing out with the fingers together. Perhaps that would have knocked off Kamijou’s head and then stabbed through his corpse’s heart before it could even fall to the floor.

''Slap!!

Little Anna, who would look better than anyone delivering a double slap, sent another attack sweeping up from below.

This may have been a first.

Alice Anotherbible’s attack wasn’t deflected or redirected – it was stopped from head on by an attack of equal power.

“Kh.”

“Why do you look so surprised?”

The little villain grinned and exchanged a glare with Alice at close range. Anna accepted Alice’s gaze without trying to escape.

She was a Transcendent not based on Alice.

She was another irregular Transcendent.

“Did you think you were special? There’s no such thing in the world of magic. I’m a magician who dressed up as Kingsford so I could stop my foolish students from ignoring my teaching and attempting self-destructive magic. I built my secret art from the ground up with the hands I had bloodied attempting to protect those lovable fools. Did you really think my way was inferior to the secret art you were simply given and have no real use for!?”

Alice’s hand was fully deflected.

She spun around, her partially-retracted arm blurring into streamlines. She chose a new target to attack. Index was chosen first, so Kamijou shoved the nun out of the way.

Fingers capable of tearing through steel rushed toward Kamijou.

Flashes of light intersected like a cross.

The fingers and claws sent horizontally toward Kamijou’s throat were stopped at the last second by an extremely thin blade.

Courtesy of H.T. Trismegistus.

No…

“My right hand contains Zeus. My left hand contains Indra. Thus I am renewed. Z.I. Trismegistus conversion complete!!”

Blinding white flashed from the point of contact between the struggling sword and fingers.

That was probably a high-voltage current.

The electrical energy was powerful enough to burn through a metal panel thicker than a thumb.

Of course, this wouldn’t be enough to defeat Alice. But dazzling her eyes for a moment meant a lot.

It gave Kamijou time to fall back.

“What the hell!? Can you just pick a side and stay on it!?” complained Othinus.

“Common sense says…”

The young butler hung his head.

He clenched his fist hard enough for his sword cane to creak.

“Common sense says I cannot expect Christian Rosencreutz to show up and save us here and now. And not just him. No one who isn’t present can do anything to help. I was wrong to place my hopes on people like that. No matter how complex and challenging the world’s problems, it is up to the people living in it to solve them.”

Now that he was freed from his bonds, H.T. Trismegistus spoke clearly.

“It is the people with us now who will decide how this ends. So it would be foolish in the extreme to not make use of that right. So says common sense!!”

Alice Anotherbible had tremendous power.

That power led a great many people to gather around her. But the Transcendents who had wanted to use her to make themselves special may have seemed like a stale and uninteresting bunch to Alice.

But that wasn’t all.

It couldn’t be.

In addition to the power someone had forced her to carry, Alice had drawn quite a few people to herself in a different way. No matter what anyone might say, as much as she might resent the magician who had created “Alice Anotherbible” and however she saw things herself, Alice had not been alone. She had been loved.

Because if she wasn’t, Kamijou Touma, Anna Sprengel, and H.T. Trismegistus – people with such different positions and intentions – wouldn’t have all gathered here like this.

They wouldn’t have been working together to save Alice.

“Hey, Alice.”
She didn’t say anything, but Kamijou still smiled.

He was certain that Alice had the wrong idea of what it meant to be an adult.

When adults ran into problems, they asked for help. They would rely on and depend on others. They simply did their best to hide this in front of the small children.

Trying to do it all yourself and thinking you could solve anything if you had a special power was a child’s way of thinking.

So he had a lesson for her.

And for the world’s greatest illusion.

He would teach her that letting her ugly side show wasn’t going to destroy her world.

Alice Anotherbible wouldn’t be a lonely monster.

He wouldn’t let her.

An invisible wall had shattered inside Kamijou Touma.

He could deal with the deadly prophecy later. Because he had found something more important.

“If you think you can use your power to twist everything to your will… If you think you can take everything you loathe and make it everyone else’s problem…”

A perfectly ordinary high school boy clenched his right fist.

Tightly.

“Then I’ll destroy that illusion!!!”

None of the problems had been resolved. The boy had only adjusted his internal priorities.

Kamijou Touma would die today.

''But so what?

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