Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume16 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 5===

“This seven veggie smoothie is so good.”

It was evening.

Shokuhou Misaki spoke to herself on a bench near a food truck. It was apparently a limited edition exam season product meant to boost brain power.

She was recharging.

The world was dyed orange. School was out for the day. She was waiting for someone who would be exhausted after finishing their first day of exams.

(Acute Kotatsu Syndrome, was it? Such a stupid name for a social phenomenon, but we can’t forget that it really did affect people’s lives.)

Hokaze Junko, #2 of her clique, was a third year in middle school, so the first general entrance exam applied to her. Yet she had apparently spent January neglecting her studies and relaxing. Shokuhou was terribly worried for her.

But not because Shokuhou was a good person.

She had a rational enough view of herself to make that self analysis.

(I can only worry about someone else during this exam season because of my own mental relaxation ability.)

Shokuhou Misaki was Academy City’s #5 Level 5, Mental Out.

She was the strongest of the pure psychological espers. It was said there was nothing related to the mind that monster couldn’t do. So the entrance exam war effectively didn’t exist for her. She had countless ways she could pass every single subject with a perfect score or pass the exam without even showing up at the exam site. She had so many options that three and even four digits wasn’t enough to count them.

(If Junko-san looks down when she leaves the exam site, I need to give her an energy boost. Still, no matter how she did on her first day, she isn’t the type to just go to bed without checking the provided answers.)

Just then, she felt a heavy vibration pass through the bench.

Someone had sat down next to her.

Shokuhou glanced over (with a bit of irritation to be honest) and then froze.

He was there.

A boy. A first year high schooler. With pointy hair!?

(Wh-wh-wh-wh-what is he doing here!?)

Her spine tensed. Her face grew hot. Wait, calm down. Shokuhou immediately aimed her TV remote at some passersby, hijacked a sample of five points of view, and checked her face, but her cheeks were not noticeably flushed! And her eyes were not spinning in her head!!

Making a move herself was easy.

Because whatever she might do, he would forget it all a moment later. That created a unique kind of confidence

But things were different when he came to her.

Wait, I’m not weady!!

(Bwah!! Ababwah, what is going on here? Is some terrible trap waiting for me here? Is Misaka-san nearby? No. What about the clique members? Also no. But wait, without any of them to hold me back, I won’t be able to stop!!)

After thinking(?) through that far, Shokuhou Misaki noticed something.

He wasn’t looking at her.

She followed his gaze and didn’t see anything of note. The cars driving by, some students talking about taking a detour, a drum-shaped cleaning robot moving out of their way, etc.

Why had the pointy-haired boy sat next to her in the first place?

It wasn’t because he had seen Shokuhou Misaki and decided to say hi to a friend.

That would never happen.

Then what had Kamijou Touma been thinking when he sat on this bench?

“Excuse me.”

The next thing she knew, she was hesitantly asking a question.

Even among the 2.3 million people of the city, he was the extremely rare person who could turn the #5 Level 5 into nothing more than “a younger girl”. Which was why she obediently scooted toward him.

She knew ''this was a weird thing to ask if they had never met before.''

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing really,” briefly replied the older boy without even looking in her direction. “Just looking at the city.”

“…”

The street hadn’t been blocked off and there was no parade marching down it.

The scene laid out before him was no more than an ordinary afterschool evening.

Kamijou Touma gently narrowed his eyes and didn’t speak a word as he really did just watch the orange-dyed world. As if to say this day and all the things that each new day brought were more valuable than Halloween or winter break.

“I’m not about to say I’ve lived a perfect life.”

He wasn’t staring blanking into the middle distance.

His voice contained heartfelt relief at being able to share this world with everyone.

“But no matter how many mistakes I made, I’m glad I never gave up.”

To Shokuhou, it looked like he was reaffirming something.

Reaffirming that the boring times and the silly things were not something you could take for granted. Reaffirming that it could all crumble away if you failed to put in the work for even a moment. And that was why he was savoring this day that had been built on a foundation of that work.