Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume14 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 22===

LAShTAL’s rampage continued.

The Amakusas and the Former Agnese Force were all fighting.

Kamijou ran toward District 17. He hated that he didn’t know how to drive. Especially when grownups did it without even thinking about it. Of course, the red snow was frozen solid across the entire area. High schoolers were allowed to get a motorcycle license, but even that wouldn’t have done him much good here. Still.

While those meaningless thoughts were spinning through his mind, a stabbing headache crashed into his brain.

An invisible dizziness made the world spin around him.

This wasn’t the first time.

(Why…now?)

Kamijou Touma groaned.

And staggered to the side.

“Gh…”

A lengthy fight tonight had been suicide from the beginning.

He had passed his body’s limits way back when he fought Coronzon to stop Adikalika. He had lost there. It was just that it hadn’t ended there, so he had been forced to keep going in a sudden death round. How could he expect to save anyone like this?

(Just a bit more…a bit longer… Only five or ten minutes! Index and Misaka believed in me. They’re all fighting. Because they believe I can do this!! So can’t you keep going just a little longer, my body!?)

But he did not collapse.

Because as he started to fall forward, someone caught him.

He heard a voice.

The strange girl’s voice sounded simultaneously childlike and grown up. 

“You really are…”

But most of all, it sounded sad.

“…allllllways like this, aren’t you? It’s like you never give your wounds a chance to heal or like you spend more days hurt than healthy.”

Who was she?

He didn’t ''think'' he knew her.

The girl wore mourning clothes and her long honey-blonde hair blew in the night breeze.

Maybe he had met her before, but he had no memory of her. Who could she be? He couldn’t find a single answer there.

“Who…?”

“I could tell you my name a billion times over and you would never remember. But maybe my esper name could stick in your mind: Mental Out.”



Academy City’s #5 Level 5.

The greatest psychological power: Mental Out.



He had heard of that. ''But only as a rumor.

If that was who she was…

If that legend was now standing before him in physical form…

His mouth felt awfully dry. No, was it just sticky with drying blood?

Kamijou somehow got the word out.

“Then…”

“Interested in forgetting it all and leaving the fight?”

“…Please. I don’t care if it’s only a trick, just do something about the pain. If you do, then I can face Coronzon…”

“Now I really do want to make you forget it all and leave the fight.”

She sounded exasperated.

And she glared at him fairly seriously.

But the honey-blonde girl hugged his head to her chest and smiled in a way that seemed to say ''she hadn’t expected anything else.

The conversation smoothly continued.

She seemed to be pouting her lips like a small child. And what was with the TV remote?

“Mental Out is a psychological power. It can erase the pain, but it has no healing ability for the physical wounds. It’s more like your body continues to send out all the intense pain signals, but your mind ability can’t sense them. Your organs will still be putting out different hormones in response to your wounds, so they could get worn out and damaged. Do you still want to do this?”

“Yes…”

“No touching your head after this, okay?”

“''Thanks''.”

Time froze for a moment.

The look on the honey-blonde girl’s face said she had never in her long life expected to hear that word directed at her.

“Saving the world isn’t my style.”

The boy wasn’t looking at her face.

His eyes were directed straight ahead, toward the goal he had already chosen.

“This is the last time the city you call home will be destroyed like this. I don’t know what it is you care for, but if it’s in this city, then it’s safe. I’ll protect all of it.”

“You dummy.”

Kamijou Touma took off running.

Without looking back.

So he could settle things with Great Demon Coronzon once and for all.