Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume15 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 5===

Magicians could hack?

So claimed Leivinia Birdway, but it felt wrong from Kamijou’s science side viewpoint. Watermelon and curry were both tasty, but you wouldn’t want to pour curry over your watermelon. Could you really pull off a combination like that?

“For one, the Dawn-Colored Sunlight doesn’t wholly reject science.”

“?”

“But that’s not important.”

Instead of joining the Anglicans at the Hotel Town, Kamijou’s group was staying in a maintenance area further north. They had wanted somewhere safe to speak.

“Also…even if it didn’t last long, Anna Sprengel did start up R&C Occultics online. Shouldn’t you be more open minded after that? But you’re not… That line between magic and science a certain idiot embedded in the world sure is a pesky thing.”

Birdway sighed in an exasperated way.

And then…

“I shall remove your collar. Listen, isn’t there a more familiar example?”

“Hm??? Like what?”

“Grimoires. The original ones.”

The pointy-haired boy gasped.

Grimoires.

That was a familiar and yet mysterious term for him.

“Most grimoires are encrypted so you won’t receive much data if you read them as is. That is partially meant to protect the reader from an original’s toxin…but more than that it’s a security measure to keep their knowledge from the unauthorized,” said Birdway.

Encrypted, data, and security?

“But there are third parties who decrypt grimoires against the author’s wishes and steal the knowledge stored within. You are quite familiar with one, aren’t you? The biggest example would be Grimoire Library Index Librorum Prohibitorum. She has gathered at least 103,001 grimoires, after all. That is on another level entirely. And she uses all of that knowledge as countermeasures against criminal magicians, so you could call her the world’s greatest white-hat hacker.”

…Was she saying the magic side had always had the concept of breaking someone else’s code to steal their data? And it had been there for millennia?

“The thing is, magic side codes are ''whimsical''. With alchemy symbols and coded images, the exact same mark can have a different meaning for each person who made it. You have to read between the lines and guess what the creator was thinking.” Lessar let out a cruel “nee hee hee” of laughter. “If you want another example, there’s the Egyptian pyramids and the ancient ruins of Central America. I mean the grave robbers, of course. They break through the security to steal the treasures away from their rightful owners.”

“You sound like you know a lot about that.”

“Because I’ve done it before. Who did you think dug up Curtana Original and transported it to London, leading to that mess that shook the entire UK to its core?”

Lessar brought up yet another dangerous topic.

If she knew how dangerous it was, Kamijou wished she was also smart enough to not do it in the first place.

“In a way, that girl right there is another simple example.”

“Hm? Me?”

Birdway was (rudely) pointing at Dion Fortune.

“Fortune specializes in a logic that mixes ancient magic with the psychology that was new at the time. Her texts include several methods of using the psychological world to reveal people’s secrets. Without the victim noticing, of course. If she can really do that, that’s a form of hacking beyond anything a computer can manage.”

“What do you mean ‘if’ I can do it!? Do I need to demonstrate it on you?” belligerently shouted Fortune, requiring Kamijou to calm her down.

There was no doubting it now.

Even if they didn’t use terms like “hacking” or “cyber attack”, the magic side had similar concepts. And had for a long time.

Maybe the only difference was whether it referred to physically navigating a labyrinth, breaking a grimoire’s textual and numerical code…or accessing electronic data.