Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Endymion Chapter2 (section)

===Part 7===

Kamijou and Index belatedly began chasing after the magician girl just as Stiyl was.

Explosions were still intermittently occurring around them. It was unclear how the girl was aiming, but the margin of error was clearly shrinking.

“A subway tunnel…?” muttered Kamijou when he saw where the girl had fled.

It was a single straight path, so it seemed ill suited to losing pursuers. There were also no crowds inside that the girl could try to lose herself within. She must have been too cornered to think about anything like that.

Or…

Perhaps she was intentionally creating an unfavorable situation to save her comrades by bringing about her own defeat.

“Let’s hurry, Touma.”

“Yeah.”

They did not have any kind of light as they had not expected a situation like this, but they had to continue on regardless. Kamijou and Index set foot inside the tunnel that had a lukewarm wind flowing from it perhaps due to the large trains that ran through it.

They had no idea when a train would be coming, so they stayed as close to the wall as they could.

“This is basically a dead end. It’s like she intentionally chose to run towards the edge of a cliff.”

“I doubt the enemy magician would go very far in given the situation, but…”

But the situation changed in an instant.

This was because they spotted a figure further on in the darkness.

They recognized the person who was sitting down and leaning up against the wall.

“Stiyl!!” shouted Kamijou as he approached, but Stiyl only stirred slightly.

Kamijou could only see his silhouette in the darkness. He could not see the details, but it appeared the priest had been injured fairly badly.

“Stay…back.”

Kamijou assumed this was the priest’s usual rejection.

But it was not.

A small bursting sound as if from a small firework could be heard.

An explosion appeared right in front of Kamijou and Index as if creating a wall.

The explosion created a clean wall across the entire tunnel. The level of accuracy was clearly different from when the magician girl was unable to hit Kamijou before. It was obvious this was intended as a wall. It was a warning. The girl was telling them she could swallow them up in an explosion at any moment.

“Her accuracy shot way up all of a sudden!?”

“It’s the wind,” said Stiyl feebly.

He had lost to another flame user. That truth gave Kamijou an even stronger sense of danger.

“The countless terminals making up the network of Agni’s Festival Fire use a Shiva based communications method. Namely, wind. That magician is interfering with the terminals to acquire attack power at an individual level. That is why she must use the wind to acquire targeting information.”

“…”

“The flow of the wind is very inaccurate on the streets surrounded by a complex array of buildings. That is what introduced errors into her targeting. But in this single straight tunnel…”

“There is only one path for the wind, so the accuracy of her spell is on an entirely different level!!”

Kamijou had been thinking about it all wrong.

The enemy had not chosen the tunnel in order to escape.

An attacker was silently watching him from within the darkness.