Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume6 Chapter2
Chapter 2: Goddess of the Night, the Moon, and Witches – “ARADIA”x03.
Part 1
Kamijou Touma was dead.
If that hadn’t been a dream, then he must have died from having that bare hand pierce right through his torso.
Yet he still heard a voice.
“Really!? Good, Old Mary, I need to borrow two lives. I’ll pay you back with interest later. I just cut off the boy’s right arm, so if you resurrect him now, I can take him back!!”
All of a sudden, he felt the pull of gravity again.
No, that wasn’t it. Something was pulling him in a different direction. Which direction? Into the sky. He suddenly found himself looking down from 10 or 20 stories up. His sense of height honestly vanished once he was high enough. It was still scary, though. He heard a loud sound like whipping bedsheets next to him.
They came from giant, thin batlike wings.
They were colored a light pink and looked horribly organic and lifelike.
A woman with a pair of goatlike pink horns sticking through her fluffy blonde hair was carrying him under one arm. If he had to guess her age, he would have gone with college aged. She had the curvy silhouette of a fully-grown woman. He was so close he had failed to notice at first, but on closer inspection, the only thing covering the bright skin of her torso was a lacy pink one-piece corset similar to what a bunny girl would wear. In other words, this was lingerie with rose thorn decorations. She also wore stockings and arm covers, but they did nothing to cover up her underwear.
“Wh-wh-what the hell!?”
“Oh, dear. Are you afraid of heights? Once we escape that scary woman, I’ll let you down on a rooftop, so just hold on tight until then.”
“Why do you sound like an old lady!? That’s a Japanese monster thing, but you look like a Western demon to me!!”
“Hm, is my common tone creation not working right? Japanese is a tricky language, so combining the Far Eastern Ocean version and the Altaic Language Family version might not be enough. Brlbrlgrlgrlbeeep!! Ahem, is this how y’all talk in this part o’ the world, dearie?”
“No, it isn’t!! But I am used to people talking weird thanks to Tsuchimikado and Tatemiya!!”
“Vrbbrjr! Then I’ll stick with the initial version since it introduces less lag into the real time speech synthesis. As long as you know what I mean, the details don’t really matter.”
She called this common tone creation.
Did that mean she was combining a few standard sounds to speak, much like mechanically synthesized voices? Kamijou had heard that the voices heard on the phone weren’t actually identical to the real person’s voice and his brain was simply interpreting it as if it were a human voice. It was a chilling thought.
And magical people didn’t use machines, so he could actually see when the voice coming from her mouth changed. That made it all the more frightening. But when he thought about it, he realized all the Western magicians he had met had been weirdly familiar with different world languages. Did they study them to travel the world and read grimoires?
He had a lot of questions. Like why he didn’t seem injured despite all the blood on his clothes, what had happened to Index and Kumokawa Seria, if Othinus was down on the ground since she wasn’t on his shoulder now, and who the woman attacker had been.
But all those questions were erased from his mind by a woman’s voice shouting up from the ground.
“Bologna Succubus!!”
The woman had white skin and long silver hair.
She wore a wimple so long it fell to her ankles and something like a modified bikini that left her navel exposed. The contradictory outfit made it hard to tell if she was a holy woman or a dancer. But she wasn’t like the ghost at the train station plaza who had clearly been cosplaying. It didn’t look artificial on her. She wore the skimpy outfit as comfortably as a sweater or coat and gave off an atmosphere all her own that easily pushed back the great pressure of the Shibuya shopping district around her. It was like she made no attempt to make herself a part of the ordinary world.
That was his attacker.
She was the woman who had shattered Kamijou Touma’s spine and destroyed his torso more than once.
“Oh, god. I can just tell she’s some monster from the magic side.”
“Ding, ding, ding! Correct☆ She’s Aradia, goddess of all witches, who rules over the night and the moon. You should probably keep that name in mind, laddie.”
The demon woman grinned (even though there was still an occasional issue with her language).
The long-haired woman remained on the ground, but she didn’t look particularly worried. That seemed to hint that flying in the sky wasn’t enough to escape a magician who could surpass the laws of physics.
Fortunately, it looked like the woman was so focused on her midair target she wasn’t paying any attention to Index and Kumokawa who were still on the ground. She spoke toward the flying demon with pure anger in her voice.
“You have strange tastes yourself. The Bridge Builders Cabal does not wish to derail Alice Anotherbible. Bologna Succubus, you and Good, Old Mary are only pretending to be peaceful and reasonable. You are only wasting what little chance you still have left. You belong to the Bridge Builders Cabal too, so you must know that killing that threat is the quickest way of correcting Alice’s condition!”
This came as a shock.
Kamijou was held high in the sky below that demon woman’s arm, so he knew breaking free of her grasp would mean plunging to his death.
But now he knew this Bologna Succubus was from some group called the Bridge Builders Cabal and the woman trying to kill him was as well. There was also someone called Good, Old Mary. They had even mentioned Alice Anotherbible. He was hit by a flood of new questions, most directly related to his own survival.
Meanwhile, the Bologna Succubus was undeterred and stuck out her tongue.
“Aradia? It goes without saying that this boy only has the one life. Even if Good, Old Mary fills in the gaps with her ability to control miracles using note compilation techniques.
End of preview. GT6 will be released on April 8.
