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

===Part 6===

Hamazura thought they had walked a good distance from the antenna tower.

But could you really call this a walkable distance?

“Kh.”

“Uh, oh. The Anglicans are here.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was right.

Hamazura hid behind a nearby metal drum while observing the distant group.

They were on a flat asphalt surface with nowhere to hide. A group of men and women in street clothing were wandering around defenselessly.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet, whose metal coat meant crouching didn’t do much to hide her, didn’t seem too worried.

“What are they doing in this dreary place?”

“Waiting for us, probably.”

Those remnants of justice were now pawns of the Black_Oneday user.

A familiar face was completely surrounded at the very center of that group.

Takitsubo Rikou.

“Kh.”

…Charging in blindly wouldn’t save his girlfriend. There were swords and spears all around her.

Besides, where were they again?

A drone airbase.

Hamazura used a cheap pair of binoculars to get a look even further away.

“It does look completely different than what I expected. I was expecting a tougher version of a normal airport, with runways, a control tower, and a maintenance hangar.”

To start with, there were no runways.

Only a few 100m cannon-like objects jutting out horizontally. Those were probably launchers…but were they electromagnetic mass drivers, or did they explosively launch the drones?

Large cloths a lot like yacht sails were raised all over the base…but were those meant to catch the drones to retrieve them? The design philosophy was a lot like a bug-catching net. Drones didn’t have any of the safety standards meant to keep a pilot alive, so their operation could be a lot sloppier.

Hamazura was afraid to approach.

He spoke up while observing through the binoculars.

“I can’t see the entire security system from here. But it’s an airbase. I don’t like the idea of walking straight in where it’s open. We might get a warm welcome from automated machineguns or self-destructing drones.”

“?” Blodeuwedd the Bouquet tilted her head.

But not because she didn’t understand what he meant.

“Then how did the villain get inside the base?”

“The mobility device is there.”

It was that one-person vehicle that looked like three small wheels attached to a bathtub-sized box. It had been abandoned quite nearby. That suggested it hadn’t been a decoy and the villain really had used it to escape the Hotel Town.

There was a red flammability warning sign in the same place.

Which told Hamazura what the manhole there was.

“They used Black_Oneday, didn’t they?”

“What do you mean, Hamazura?”

“This is a fuel transport pipe. It’s thick enough that someone could walk through it if they crouched. If they used their hacking tool to remove all the jet fuel first, they would have a direct underground route into the drone airbase.”

“Ugh… They’d really go that far?”

“There aren’t any security cameras or human sensors in the pipe, so it seems like a good route in to me.”

Of course, Hamazura and Blodeuwedd the Bouquet couldn’t follow the villain in that way. If the villain knew what they were doing, they would only need to fill the pipe with jet fuel again to drown the two of them.

They needed some other way into the drone airbase.

And without warning, they heard a deafening distorted noise.

“Hey.”

Hamazura’s heart hurt.

This was District 23 full of runways and launch pads. The disaster response speakers there were designed to be heard over all sorts of loud noises.

“The program-controlled rapid-fire guns can obliterate you there,” said the new Board Chairman. “The 127mm ones can fire more than 120 rounds a minute. The Transcendent might survive, but you will die before you make it three steps.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet pouted her lips right next to him.

“Is that even true? The Anglicans are wandering around the danger zone just fine.”

“Then they must have been added to the white list. If you aren’t and you enter that zone, the response will be instantaneous. So if you are going to do this, think it through first.”

That wasn’t what Hamazura was worried about. Which was only natural when he was speaking to someone far more dangerous than those 127mm rapid-fire guns.

“That drone airbase is one of your city’s prized possessions, right? I thought you’d be trying to stop me from getting in.”

“I don’t need any military weapons. It’s all overkill. Why does a city need enough power to destroy humanity several times over? I’m really hoping you give me an excuse to scrap it all.”

…If that was true, then was Academy City actually changing for the better?

This was convenient for Hamazura at least.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet clearly wanted to say something, but he held out a hand to stop her.

“Do you know anything about this, Mr. Great Board Chairman? You’ve got a better view of it all than some Level 0 crawling down on the ground.”

“About what?”

“The system.”

At first, that term was so simple it seemed detached from the reality before him.

''But it wasn’t.

“I can’t see it. I’m not even sure that’s the right word. But Coronzon said she had been given a ‘function’ and the world wouldn’t work without it. The way she talked about it like drawing the short end of the stick, hers can’t be the only one. It sounded like there are several ‘functions’ that support the world. …But what is all that? What pushed Coronzon to the point she resorted to destroying the world? There has to be something that pushed her in that direction, but what is it really?”

There had to be a cause for the effect he had seen.

You could even say Coronzon had proven its existence with her death.

There was a system that had driven wicked Coronzon to her doom.

“You’re wasting your time.”

The Board Chairman’s response was immediate and a rejection.

It was almost painful how much Hamazura had expected this. And it was the perfect 100% correct answer for the ''leader of the science side'' where the occult and the mystical had no place.

“You’re talking about a conspiracy theory. There is no grand system running the world. Functions? Illusions? Miracles? Misfortune? You can’t just flip a giant switch to change those things. This world is run by a collection of billions of individual thoughts. Like a beanbag. When you look up at it all, it can look like it all forms giant gears, but there isn’t actually some strange system making all the decisions.”

“A perfect model answer.”

It’s all humanity’s fault. It’s all your friends’ fault. It’s all your fault.

Common sense said it wasn’t possible.

And as long as their thoughts were bound by what was ''realistic'', no one would dig any deeper.

“Any misfortune and disaster in the world is brought about by people. Power turns people into monsters. That’s why I’m serving as Board Chairman to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

But then they wouldn’t reach the truth of the system.

Which was awfully convenient for the mysterious system running every last part of the world.

Hamazura was a Level 0 at the bottom of the hierarchy. He didn’t think he was smarter than the #1 Level 5. There was no way Accelerator couldn’t understand any idea he had.

Unless…were smarter people more easily affected and influenced by the unseen system?

If so, he could redefine his existence as a Level 0 as not so useless after all.

Hamazura suddenly wanted to talk with Kamijou Touma. That Level 0 had gone on ahead of him. Even though Hamazura knew he was the very one who had called Coronzon a great demon and killed her.

That boy had faced Coronzon and seen something inside her.

A pressure with no outlet burst inside Hamazura like a piece of unexploded ordnance.

“Then are you saying that collection of individuals just happened to coincidentally kill Coronzon? Yeah, right!! I won’t place the blame on all of them. I bet most people out there have never even heard of Coronzon! They wouldn’t create that kind of concrete malice. So! There must be a greater system out there that wanted to kill Coronzon and did so!! This isn’t a fantasy or figure of speech!! It’s real and it’s out there!!!”

Hamazura and Accelerator had reached an impasse.

The #1 had the scent of evil on him, but he was clearly different from Hamazura and Coronzon.

He had the confidence of the privileged.

“''I’ll reveal it'',” quietly said Hamazura.

He spoke in a low growl, like a wounded animal.

What could he do for Coronzon after carelessly surviving? That vague idea suddenly came into sharp focus.

“That’s it. I’ve made my own decision… There is a great system that decided Coronzon was a great demon of absolute evil and finally sent her to her death. I don’t care how cleverly it’s hidden itself – I will reveal it for all to see!!”

That was the end. With a click, the disaster response speakers went silent.

…

“Huh? You’re moving, Hamazura?”

“What else can I do?”

The great Board Chairman at the top of the city knew where he was. Hamazura had no idea ''how much'' that boy knew. He wanted to believe he wasn’t that foolish, but he couldn’t get careless. If the Board Chairman was still being buddy-buddy with the Anglicans, all that information would be passed right on to them.

Staying here was too dangerous.

He had to find another route to get close to the drone airbase.