Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume15 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 9===

He ran away.

Refusing Dion Fortune’s proffered hand.

Now Hamazura Shiage really was on his own. While still a fugitive who could be killed as a villain at any time.

And while he couldn’t work with Fortune, she was, in a way, correct. So correct that her words had pierced him sharply.

…A drowning man will grasp at straws.

That perfectly described what was currently driving Hamazura. Maybe anyone would do the same when their life was on the line, but he needed to do something about the thought process leading him to act so haphazardly. If he really wanted to survive, it wasn’t the straws floating on the water’s surface he needed to grasp when doing so meant using up one of the few action tickets he had left. He needed to evacuate to a firmer and sturdier goal, like a boat, island, or continent.

But what exactly was there?

It would sadden his girlfriend if he died. Now that he had chosen to act, he had to make it worth it.

“Aneri, search for a path to an open lobby!”

His cracked phone buzzed twice. Apparently Aneri was concerned he would be seen by too many people. But the negative vibration did not change Hamazura’s mind.

There was no perfectly safe route here.

“Sure, no one’ll see me if I go hide in a narrow, deserted dead end, but that’s just offering myself on a platter to be killed. I need more innocent observers around so they can’t get at me!!”

He was working from the baseline of not wanting to die.

Since the Anglicans planned to kill him on sight, he couldn’t just approach them with his hands in the air. They would simply kill him as planned.

In that case…

“Getting arrested by Academy City law enforcement like Anti-Skill or Judgment would be best. ''For me.''”

The cracked phone buzzed twice.

Aneri was apparently asking why.

“Like I said, I doubt those Brits will even hesitate to kill me if they find me and there’s no one else around,” said Hamazura. “But what if ''other people are watching''? Academy City must have accepted some kind of explanation for handing me over to Britain. They expect the Brits to give me a fair trial. So can they choose to give me a summary execution here just cause it would be easier? By placing an Academy City resident between me and the Brits, they won’t be able to kill me even if they want to.”

And while the Brits were sitting around trying to figure out what to do, Hamazura could enter a cell and let himself be arrested. That would rob the UK of their justification of killing him because he was a dangerous fugitive.

Enemies from a major power could be frightening, but that also meant they had to obey the rules of their home country. And they didn’t have the right to kill an ''appropriately managed'' criminal on their own discretion.

(Sounds like Aneri doesn’t know much about politics and diplomacy. Well, that makes sense for an AI that ''only'' has to be correct. When all you have is data to understand a world full of imprecise things like conjecture and reading the room, making precise predictions can’t be easy.)

“So what’s the quickest way I can get Anti-Skill to arrest me? The immigration gate for international flights? No, that’s where Fortune was. I can’t go back there. Other than that, maybe the office that handles drug enforcement? Anyway, Ane-”

He started to give a command, but his mouth froze mid-word.

He noticed a smell that didn’t belong in a public facility. He caught a faint whiff of cigarette smoke.

Puzzled, he looked around…and his eyes were drawn to a decorative column.

“What is that ''card''?”

Something was pasted there. The smooth laminated object was about the size of an ordinary credit card. But what was that drawn on it? It looked kind of like a letter composed of straight lines, but he could tell it wasn’t English at least.

The card wasn’t alone.

He saw a second and a third. …No, they were pasted all over the lobby. On the floor, on the walls, and even on the ceiling located higher up than in a gym!? He might not have given it much thought with just the one, but the sheer quantity made it creepy. What the hell were they?

And that wasn’t the only thing out of the ordinary.

This was the spacious lobby of an international airport, yet he hadn’t seen a single other person for a while now!?



The cracked phone suddenly played its loudest alarm.



“Aneri, what is this!?” he shouted, already getting down.

He had already developed a habit of obeying Aneri before asking what was happening, which proved fortunate for him in this case.

It would have been at his neck height otherwise.

Something orange raced by horizontally, burning the air and exploding. Flames erupted in a single direction like a fiery avalanche. Empty air was scorched. If Hamazura had remained standing, he wouldn’t just have lost his head – his charred mincemeat would have been scattered across the area.

He would swear no one had been there a second earlier.

Hamazura frantically rolled away along the floor. He had his hands full staying alive, so he didn’t care how this made him look.

“Eek!?”

Someone appeared as if from thin air.

Without any warning whatsoever, they appeared less than three meters away from him.

Right in the middle of the giant airport lobby with nothing at all to hide behind.

He heard a gloomy voice.

“Thermo? No, was it that phone’s signal? Did you spot me with a makeshift anti-personnel radar using microwaves? …Honestly, this is what makes Academy City so strange and disturbing.”

(That wasn’t meta materials!? Did he use heat or something to expand the air and bend the light!?)

Simply put, a mirage.

While Hamazura was familiar with the natural phenomenon, it was still uncanny seeing someone make such skilled use of it. Something felt so badly off his skin tingled.

Was that 2m guy…a priest? He had long hair dyed red, a barcode tattoo under one eye, and a cigarette in his mouth. None of those things seemed very priestly, but it was his eyes that most clashed with that identity. This clearly wasn’t the sort of person who kindly listened to people’s worries and provided advice. Those were the eyes of a predator.

“Well, at least the people clearing field is up. Now we don’t have to worry about any normal people getting mixed up in it. So let’s enjoy this, enemy of all creation who chose to stray from the righteous path.”

(This disturbing feeling… I can’t be sure, but I don’t think he’s even an esper!!)

“Kh!! Aneri, a little help!”

A booming sound dully and deeply stirred up the air.

The scene ahead of Hamazura was obscured from right to left by an enormous, thick steel wall extending like a police baton. A fire shutter. The ceiling here was even higher up than in a gym, but the airport had to protect its guests from the threat of fire and smoke. This thick wall worked much like a maintenance hangar’s giant shutter as it cut off the space between Hamazura and the big guy.

“Okay, I need to get out of here before that guy can find a way around! Aneri!!”

This was an international airport. They dealt with jet fuel here, so the fire shutter was blessedly thick.

Or so Hamazura thought.

Until he heard some kind of…unpleasant…and very sticky sound.

“…”

The fire shutter built to aviation accident standards turned orange and melted before his eyes. Like it had been thrown into a blast furnace.

A large hole formed.

And the tall priest didn’t hesitate to step through with red and blue flame swords in his hands.

“You have got to be kidding!” shouted Hamazura, wide-eyed.

A moment later…

''Crash!!!

It came from the side.

A 10-ton tanker truck crashed through the airport wall and slammed into Stiyl Magnus.

Maybe it was out of habit, but the redhead priest swung a flame sword toward the incoming object on reflex…and only then recalled it was a tanker truck.

He stopped the motion, but it was too late.

And this was a special vehicle loaded with the special kind of jet fuel used at international airports.



It exploded.



Hamazura was watching from a good distance away, but even he was thrown horizontally when the wall of compressed air hit him. He knew he had to have slammed into the floor less than a second later, but his sense of pain was just gone.

He ignored the intense ringing in his ears and gathered all this strength to shout into his cracked phone from the floor.

“Aneeeri!!!?”

He felt two buzzes.

He looked to the cracked screen to see a photo of the tanker truck moments before it exploded. Aneri was probably trying to show him there wasn’t anyone in the driver’s seat, but that wasn’t his only concern.

That priest hadn’t died, had he?

Hamazura was struggling to his feet and worrying about the possibility of secondary and tertiary explosions when the sea of flames swelled out from within and exploded again.

“Come forth, Innocentius.”

His heart froze.

He heard something. He thought he heard a voice from beyond the orange flames.

He saw a dark figure. A big one. No human was that size! Maybe the lighting was creating an optical illusion, but he didn’t have time to confirm that!

“Forget worrying if a stranger survived!! I’m getting out of here!!”

Was that guy a magician? They were honestly too much for Hamazura. After living in Academy City’s back alleys, he knew scientific espers were bad enough, but those magicians were something else entirely. They inspired a ''nastier'' fear that couldn’t be explained by cracking open a physics or chemistry textbook. The fear of taboos, of curses, of divine punishment, of hexes.

But.

No, maybe “so” was the better word.



All of a sudden, she was there.

He didn’t even have time to blink.



Quite literally so. The next thing he knew, a woman with a long black ponytail was running alongside him. But this wasn’t a case of her ignoring the distance between them by teleporting in. The explosive blast of wind that blew in a moment later was undeniably the sonic boom created by her compressing and pushing the air out of her way.

In other words, she had broken the sound barrier.

Without using any kind of gear. If the textbooks he never read anyway couldn’t explain these people, could someone tell him what he could rely on to understand them!?

“This is bullsh-”

He didn’t even have time to complain to the world how unfair this was.

''Her sword flashed.

The fact that she was wearing a nearly 2m katana at her hip in a supposedly safe airport was bad enough, but now she was attacking too fast for his eye to follow. He couldn’t even hope to dodge or defend. Before he even knew what was happening, the world seemed to spin around him and his back slammed into the floor.

How had she used a sword to flip him around?

He wished someone could at least explain that to him.

“Gah!!”

It knocked the breath from him. The flow of time returned to normal, but he wasn’t at all happy about it. He wasn’t used to feeling pain and agony from inside his body instead of at the skin level. In other words, he was terrified. The idea of an out-of-body experience was starting to sound awfully nice.

Gasping for breath, Hamazura used what little air was in his lungs to shout.

“Do it, Aneri!! I don’t care what, just do it now!”

Another empty tanker truck crashed in from the outside world.

It changed nothing.

The ponytail woman didn’t even swing her ridiculously long katana. She artlessly held her empty hand out to grab the 10-ton vehicle barreling toward her and stopped it. Easily.

With a thunderous “thoom!!”, the large truck’s bumper and engine grill dented deeply in. The wipers bent and the windshield shattered. Meanwhile, the katana woman didn’t seem to have a scratch on her.

…She was on another level entirely.

Even Aneri fell silent. The AI would smoothly answer any question the human asked, so ''he had never even considered the possibility of it not having an answer.'' How much of a monster was that woman!?

Hamazura couldn’t rely on Aneri anymore.

Those dangerous people had been unleashed. Dion Fortune claimed to be in control of the Brits, but where was she now? He seriously doubted she was safe.

What could Hamazura do on his own?

He couldn’t escape.

Part of that was his inability to make full use of AI Aneri’s abilities. …But in the end, the biggest problem of all was that he didn’t have clear idea of what he wanted to do now that he had left his cell.

What could he do for Coronzon by gritting his teeth and surviving?

He could never defeat anyone if he hadn’t settled on a goal.

(Dammit.)

What was he doing?

That fundamental and critical question rose in the back of his mind.

This entire incident wouldn’t have happened if he had stayed put. No one would have had to wield any kind of deadly power. This slapstick comedy of meaningless slaughter wouldn’t help anyone out there.

He wanted to live. To survive.

The more he wished for that, the more confusion and chaos he spread through the world. The more trouble he brought people, the more they hated him, and the more he was pushed to the outskirts of the world.

…''Just like happened with Great Demon Coronzon.

(Dammit!!)

He didn’t know what this invisible “something” was. What kind of mine had he stepped on here? He could definitely feel the outlines of something unfair and unreasonable, but his underdeveloped vocabulary couldn’t produce the words he needed to tell him what it was!!

Hamazura didn’t even have the strength left to shut his eyes in the final moment.

That was when it happened.



He heard a dull, dull impact.



He was dumbfounded.

Hamazura was accustomed to violence as the recipient, but even he froze.

That was not a sound a human being made when punched. The heavy metallic tone was more like the peal of a giant bell.

And the ponytail katana woman who had presented such an insurmountable threat suddenly flew straight to the side. That monster had stopped a 10-ton tanker truck with a single hand…but some other monster had knocked her back well over 15m with a single punch?

“Hwa ha ha☆”

It was a girl.

The excessively thin blonde girl wore an apron and a thick blast-resistant coat covered with sheet copper. Did her sweet aroma come from the terrarium of various flowers contained on the inside of her coat? The metallic tone had apparently been the result of punching someone with the coat’s overlarge sleeves. They appeared to move independently even without her arms in them.

Hamazura didn’t know her name.

But another boy who Hamazura loathed would have recognized her immediately.



She was one of the Transcendents.

Specifically, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.



Hamazura had shown up late to the battle against Great Demon Coronzon, so he didn’t know everything that went on there. Still, hadn’t that girl been working with Kamijou Touma? Wouldn’t that make her one of those who hunted Coronzon down, calling her a Great Demon!?

“What the hell!? Whose side are you on!?”

“Huhh? Did you think I was on someone else’s side? Ah ha ha! I very clearly just saved you, but you still can’t believe it? You must be really hated to have trust issues like that!”

Even Hamazura could tell she was talking down to him.

And that she had the power to back up that attitude.

After all, the focus here had completely shifted away from the katana woman. The entire world had accepted that ''she'' was the star of this scene.

Apparently she could joke around in such a hopeless situation because she even blew him a kiss.

“To be honest, Coronzon was fairly tempting too, but she was actually rejecting the love she was given. If not for that, I could have protected her along with the rest of the world’s hated people. I did let the amateurs handle things that night, but that doesn’t mean I grant ''that resolution'' a perfect score or anything.”

“Wha-?”

“If you want to know why I was fighting by Kamijou Touma’s side yesterday, well, that’s why. I just wanted to stop that ridiculous mess from harming the many unknown hated people on the other side of the world who wouldn’t even have been counted among the statistics. So all I wanted was to prevent the end of the world. I didn’t actually hate Coronzon so much I wanted her dead. But now Coronzon no longer exists as the greatest threat to the world. I say that wipes the slate clean on your threat level too. And if the world is still going to unfairly hate a harmless leftover like you…well, then this is a job for me. I hope you’re ready, world, cause I’ve got a light, happy, and comical lesson to teach you. Don’t think you can stay so cold and heartless forever☆”

Hamazura was speechless.

This was ridiculous.

It was goddamn ridiculous, but Hamazura still felt himself trembling.

''There was still someone left in the world who would talk fairly about Coronzon instead of just calling her a Great Demon!

“I have just one salvation condition: ''someone thoroughly hated by the world as a whole''.”

She held a finger to her lips.

The emaciated girl whispered alluringly. With a melting look on her face that felt at odds with her appearance.

That monster explained her primary purpose in life.

“A boy who sided with a great demon, lost, and still can’t bring himself to spit on the person he bet on? A human being who decided to stick to his guns even if it makes the rest of the world loathe him? …Now there’s a way of life I can get behind. So I now recognize you as passing my Transcendent salvation condition. The isolation your choices have brought you may be self-inflicted, but I, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet, will show you that it was neither meaningless nor worthless☆”