Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Mental Out SS (section)

===Part 10===

Just because a girl had blonde hair and shined as sweet as honey did not mean she was Shokuhou Misaki. A careful examination of Shokuhou and Kobayashi’s conversation would have showed some oddities.

For some more obvious examples…



''“Bfff!!??”

''Kamijou took a puzzled look around, so Shokuhou quickly recovered and blended into her surroundings.



''<Queen, a left at the next fork.>

''Shokuhou just barely avoided an encounter by hiding behind the spectacular pillar of water erupting from a fountain. She recalled that a sufficient quantity of water could block electromagnetic waves.



''<Such violent thoughts. Why do you get like this whenever it comes to Misaka-sama?>

''Shokuhou visibly stewed for a bit while she worked to find something else to ask the pointy-haired boy about.



There were the many actions and expressions she made which would have been strange to do right in front of Kamijou and there was the way Kobayashi spoke as if she were in the lead.

So.

They had lured in the attacker.

Kobayashi Satori spoke through her telepathy.

<Hee hee. Otonari Hibiku, a Tokiwadai second year on the health committee. You are the attacker using her power to cause blood loss ecstasy through internal bleeding. Your motive is to free your suffering schoolmates from the weight of our stressful society.>

<!? How…?>

<They do say that people cannot be dissuaded from benevolent violence with words, but…I see. When your motivation is ''exclusively'' based on kindness and sympathy, you would be a lot more stubborn than the average villain.>

In the crowd not far away, a redhead girl with wavy, shoulder-length hair gasped. The teachers’ strict uniform checks were not performed on the weekends, but she was still wearing her Tokiwadai uniform.

Was she the attacker?

It was strange to only see what she looked like after their minds were linked.

<Cheating and trickery are fine by me.>

Kobayashi Satori grinned.

If Shirai Kuroko of Judgment were here, she might have checked her recorded voice data and deduced the attacker’s identity by ''asking how Otonari Hibiku had known the victims had all been wearing blazers which had covered up the signs of internal blooding on the upper body''.

But that kind of logical reasoning was not necessary in Academy City where people had esper powers at their disposal.

Sometimes they could jump straight to the answer.

<For a telepath, the quickest option is to listen to people’s mental voices. Academy City encourages us to use our powers, so we have lived our lives using those powers to outdo our rivals.>

“Gh!!” groaned the pointy-haired boy.

Someone had tackled him from the side. Shokuhou Misaki had dashed over from a short distance away, crouched down, and slammed into him, knocking him over where they both slid along the ground, removing that outsider from the battlefield. Around half of that had been her tripping over her own feet and falling head first into the boy’s gut, but that miraculous timing may have been part of the blushing and flustered Queen’s superb luck.

Now Kobayashi could concentrate on the battle between telepaths.

She silently thanked the Queen for that.

<And now for this.>

Telepath vs. telepath.

The battle had already begun.

In fact, in a battle between telepaths, there was no point in throwing punches or kicks. Their minds were already linked. They could read each other’s thoughts, so even swinging a metal bat from head on or firing a submachinegun from close range could be easily dodged by reading the enemy’s aim just before the attack.

In terms of a shogi match, it may have been like pitting the most powerful AI against an exact copy while they were linked by fiberoptic cable. They would only reach repetition draw after repetition draw.

And in fact…

“!!”

<!?>

Kobayashi kicked at Otonari’s ankle and threw an eye poke with one hand, but Otonari swung her body to dodge them both. Otonari sent out her palm as a counterattack, but Kobayashi stepped back, preventing Otonari from grabbing her blazer’s collar to hold her in place.

Their throws, strikes, and holds were all identical because they were both trained in the self-defense techniques taught at Tokiwadai.

For better or for worse, neither one had an edge.

(Sigh, if I had only trained beyond the standard, I might have won this easily. Is this the price of my laziness for letting Hokaze-san handle all of the physical fights?)

<nowiki><I</nowiki> can hear your verbalized surface-level thoughts, unwelcome Senpai.>

Like this, they could exchange thousands of blows without causing any significant damage.

Kobayashi telepathically checked on something.

<There is barely any lag between when you read my thoughts and when you act on them. What a pain. You must have a very solid link.>

<That goes for both of us.>

This meant attempting to cause physical injury or damage was the wrong way to go about this fight.

They had to outdo their opponent with their esper power.

The only way to end this was to break their opponent’s mind.

(That could mean distracting her by applying screaming and shouting to her auditory cortex so not even covering her ears can block it out, or combining the sounds of things like dentist’s drills or fingernails on glass drawn from my memory and sending them all into her brain at once.)

<Again, I can hear you. And if that’s the best trump card you can think up now, then I have the upper hand. You’re too focused on the term ‘mental power’. You’re forgetting that the mind and the body are a single large system.>

Otonari Hibiku’s Level 4 Mind Anaphylaxis could break anyone’s mind.

But it required three steps to activate.

1. Link to the target’s mind and prepare.

2. Send more than 20 thousand telepathic messages a second to instill a trauma in them.

3. Physically trigger that trauma from the outside to destroy their mind.

<!?>

<You can already hear my thoughts, can’t you, Kobayashi-senpai?>

Heights, sharp things, people, blood, enclosed spaces, open spaces, water, school, corpses, foreign countries, machines.

And many more.

It didn’t matter what phobias Kobayashi had to begin with. Otonari could create whatever new ones she liked.

Most likely, everyone could think of at least one phobia they had to some degree. Maybe it was blades and maybe it was heights, but it would be more worrying for someone to not fear anything at all. There were so many familiar examples, but it was still not entirely known what caused phobias.

They were said to be an overreaction of the mind and the result of a mistaken accumulation of experiences in pain, suffering, and failure, but that ''learning process'' could be artificially applied by an esper.

Using telepathy.

An esper who could only control a mental voice could not directly damage someone’s mind, but that did not mean they were not a threat.

At more than 20 thousand messages a second, they could convey information far faster than a physical voice that sent vibrations through the air, so they could compress a massive amount of information and send it straight into their target’s brain where it would stick.

<No.>

But a telepathic voice rejected that idea.

After accurately intercepting Kobayashi’s mental voice, she confidently pointed out the failure in Kobayashi’s prediction.

<It could be a fear of the color blue or of concrete. I can give you ''a completely fictional phobia'' not found in any medical literature. I could turn the entire world into a minefield capable of breaking your mind. But, Kobayashi-senpai, you will have no idea what part of the world around you is a threat.>

(Self-destruct cacophony! Max volume!!!)

Kobayashi immediately used her telepathy to artificially rattle her own inner ear, confusing and blocking out her own senses to protect herself.

<It’s no use.>

But these words cruelly slipped right past those defenses.

Because they were telepathic.

<''I’ve given you gynophobia. Cut yourself off from the outside world all you like, you cannot escape your own internal gender identity, Kobayashi-senpai''.>