Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume10 Chapter2
Status: Incomplete
3/11 parts completed
Chapter 2: Welcome to the Psychedelic – Little_Queen_Wonderland.
Part 1
The District 10 prison contained a maximum-security cell in its greatest depths.
That cell acted as New Board Chairman Accelerator’s headquarters.
“You say you have information on Alice Anotherbible?”
“I do.”
The big screen TV embedded in the wall displayed Mina Mathers…apparently.
She was the self-proclaimed black cat witch he had encountered in the Academy City night once.
“As Academy City’s new king, you must be at least a little aware of the world outside your city’s walls. I won’t ask that you refine your own life force into magic power and construct spells, but you should know there is a mystical power other than Academy City’s espers.”
“So it’s about that side of things, is it?”
“Half the world is covered by something you could never find even when searching using your full authority. It’s simple really. When investigating the science side doesn’t turn up any answers, you should assume you are looking at a product of the magic side.”
Accelerator clicked his tongue.
Maybe it was a problem that he only had the artificial demon Qliphah Puzzle 545 to assist his decisions regarding these things.
At useful as she was, there was only one of her. Which made her an Achilles’ heel.
He needed at least two. Preferably three.
He doubted Qliphah Puzzle 545 would let it go to her head or be corrupted by it, but the greater her importance, the greater the risk of an enemy attacking her. Increasing his options wouldn’t decrease that risk to zero, but reducing the risk to more comfortable levels would be a task for later.
But for now…
“Tell me what you know. I can decide for myself if I believe you.”
“I never said I was handing over this information for free.”
“You’re trying to negotiate at this point?”
An icy mood set in.
The rioters flooding the streets were even now gradually destroying Academy City.
Anti-Skill and Judgment had been issued live ammunition, but even with high-level espers among the rioters, city residents firing on other city residents would only expand the damage to the city.
The only people to benefit from that were Alice and the Transcendents, outsiders who were distorting the city. That would let them destroy the city, and the world along with it, for free.
They needed to be swiftly attacked to shut off that deadly tap.
As soon as possible.
If Mina Mathers was using that crisis to jack up the price for her information, she had some nerve.
Accelerator was the new Board Chairman.
It was up to him what kind of city Academy City grew to be.
“I am not exactly on Academy City’s side. I am not even a pure member of the science side anymore. Thus, I am sharing what information I believe will benefit me to share. I lose all reason to share it if that condition is not met.”
“…”
“Go to Aleister Crowley. You can place me on your blacklist if you like, but not that human. He has already died once in the UK and died a second time to atone for his sins. No sin is greater than death and that human accepted his death of his own free will. I know you are the successor he directly gave his code list to, but you have no reason to treat your predecessor so harshly. In times of crisis, why not go to him for advice?”
“What’s this?”
Out of nowhere, a new voice interrupted the call without Accelerator’s authorization.
A wholly unknown line had managed to access this maximum security prison.
This was the work of a human who, in a way, knew Academy City even more thoroughly than Accelerator did.
He looked a lot different than he had when Accelerator had received the code list, however.
“It looks like the processor I built is troubling you for no good reason. She might act all wicked, but her thought processes were designed to never do anything truly bad. Whatever happens, she will hand over the information regarding Alice Anotherbible in the end. She isn’t like you or me, so rest easy.”
“Aleister. I am currently using what information I have to hold an official negotiation from an Academy City general contact point. I will be fair, so would you kindly back off and stop interrupting?”
“What has you so upset? This isn’t like you at all. People might not like me very much, but everyone can tell how skilled you are. If you prove your skill as Mina Mathers and establish an official channel with Academy City, I’m sure they will hear you out.”
“(Do you not get that my name alone isn’t enough to manage that, you lonely idiot?)”
“Leave me out of this, dumbasses,” grumbled Accelerator.
That inhuman tsundere was a pain in the ass.
“So are you giving me your information or not?” he said.
“Ahem. Fine, I will. But do remember that this is repaying a debt owed by a certain human, not me. This gives me a bargaining chip to use with the new Board Chairman.”
“Mina. I hate to interrupt when you’re trying to sound threatening by lowering your voice like that, but I can hear a baby crying from off camera. You can leave this web meeting and go comfort her if you like.”
“And who’s child do you think that is? Did you think shoving your baby onto a babysitter counted as doing your duty as a parent, you neglectful moron?”
Even as she said this, Mina Mathers was doing something off camera that produced delighted giggles.
And she got back on topic.
“The oldest instance of the term Anotherbible I found was during the early 20th century in the outskirts of London, England. Aleister, you wouldn’t have been there at the time because you had left on your world trip with your wife Rose.”
“You mean something happened in England while I was away?”
“A new trend began at the time. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland became recognized as a grimoire and a theory was formed that you could understand and manipulate the structure of the world if you understood all the hidden meaning written in that book. Of course this goes beyond the surface text and whatever Lewis Carroll was seeing and imagining at the time. This included ‘decoding’ the text by replacing it with numbers and rearranging or reordering them.”
“I see. Hence ‘another bible’.”
“Yes. Plenty of magic cabals attempted to forcibly decode the bible based on their own independent rules, but here people were doing this with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland instead.”
It was obvious what the unseen magician at the time would have wanted.
A medium that faithfully reproduced Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Magic in the form of a human.
“If you wanted the details to be as precise as possible, there would have been only one starting point you would want to use.”
Needless to say, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was fiction.
Wonderland and Alice did not actually exist.
But with all that in mind, Mina Mathers had an answer.
“Alice Pleasance Liddell.”
Silence followed.
Mina Mathers continued speaking like a machine.
“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was not originally written as a story to be published for a general audience. It is based on Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, a story the mathematician Lewis Carroll told a girl named Alice and a few others on July 4, 1862. So while the children’s story itself is complete fiction, the heroine was modeled after someone who did exist.”
“Are you saying some magician abducted her and thoroughly modified her, creating the current Alice Anotherbible?”
“If so, it makes sense why the regular Transcendents respect Alice as their prototype or model. They have not actually seen Alice’s skeleton or the arrangement of her organs. They have extracted and duplicated something else – the actual spell that thoroughly modified the girl called Alice and turned her into ‘Another Bible’ – and they have applied it to themselves. That is how they developed their divine cosplay spell that allows them to wear the appearances and abilities of gods.”
That was Alice Anotherbible’s identity.
She had once been a perfectly ordinary girl.
The person who had been the model for a children’s story had been remade into a fairy tale heroine.
From reality to story and from story to reality – the link between truth and fiction had become twisted like a Möbius strip.
And a single spell had made this possible.
“Honestly. Fairy tales and children’s stories are extremely useful for creating the mental images needed to focus the mind and enter a meditative state, but how did people get it in their heads that a children’s story points to the truth of the world? I can’t believe someone took it so far they actually kind of succeeded. The very idea is giving me a headache.”
“Don’t act so innocent, Aleister.”
“?”
“I’m sure you’ve already suspected, but you, Aleister Crowley, were the one who strongly recommended people read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for its magical correspondences. Or do I need to cite the exact grimoire and page number in which you said so?”
“…”
“You said an expert in Kabbalah would see the true value of the book, but I suspect you were just saying things. On the same page, you also recommend Dracula, a popular book at the time. You also recommended Maugham’s The Magician, which painted you in a rather unkind light. You went as far as calling it a must-read and introduced it to all your friends. For your own amusement. It is well-known you wrote these things deep in your grimoires, but I am sure you were verbally publicizing them well before that.”
…Accelerator sighed.
It wasn’t exactly unusual for your past to come back and bite you long after you thought you’d left it behind.
But not even the #1 had guided the world to destruction based on jokes and pranks.
“So are you saying an apprentice of mine is behind this?”
“It happened too long ago for that. There are traces of them already being active at the time of your arrival. So calling them your teacher might be more accurate.”
“Heh heh,” someone laughed.
It appeared to be Aleister.
“My teacher, huh?”
“Who would that be?” asked Accelerator.
“Beats me.”
“You expect me to believe you’ve never met this person? Give me a break. We’re talking about whoever taught you magic.”
“There are simply too many candidates for a supposed ‘Teacher of Crowley’. Because I’m just that famous. Be it my parents, my relatives, my schoolteachers, or anyone at the different magic cabals I belonged to, everyone with even the slightest connection to me falls into two general categories: those who want to act like they have nothing to do with me and those who want to take credit for teaching me everything I know. Needless to say, the later category is much larger. The people who knew me directly tend to dislike me, but the people with more indirect connections tend to worship me.”
“…”
“And so, ever since my official death in 1947, there has been no shortage of magicians the world over who claim to be my teacher. Including modern ones, even though that makes no chronological sense whatsoever. But if this person contacted Alice Pleasance Liddell when she was alive, and not just her preserved corpse, they wouldn’t have been too far off from my time. Still, I have no clue who they might be. The most I can say is they were one of the many skilled magician found all over the world.”
The accumulation of history had its pros and cons.
Accelerator was the new Board Chairman and the #1 Level 5, but this was a different kind of distortion.
“Now, the standard assumption on the magic side is that every magician that came about after I received the Book of the Law from Aiwass in 1904 has been influenced by me to some extent. In the modern era, the concept of the occult has already been remade by me. Of course, there are probably some cowards hiding in the depths of the world who would disagree out of sour grapes. But at the very least, it is impossible to learn magic today without being even slightly influenced by me.”
“Don’t forget that you also rewrote the definition of science,” said Mina Mathers. “To be scientific does not mean to be superior or more realistic. Before you were born, there was no clear division between science and magic. There was only the pursuit of knowledge of the natural world. For example, during the 19th century, the Golden cabal was seen as a secret salon where academics, poets, actresses, and intellectuals from a variety of industries gathered. Magic was seen as a proper study of the world, not the pursuit of eccentrics who refuse to face reality. Aleister, you so loathed the cabals, you changed those definitions so ‘scientific’ refers to a belief in reality and you spread that new definition around the world to create the foundation of the today’s science-centric worldview. This in turn reduced magic and the occult to toys for stubborn freaks.”
There was such a thing as being too influential. This was the perfect example of how charisma could be a harmful thing.
Did this mean you could not escape Aleister Crowley’s influence unless you hid on the dark side of the moon?
“Hey, I don’t know exactly what they used, but this Teacher of Crowley, whoever they might be, got carried away and screwed it up, right?” said Accelerator. “Can’t you clean up this mess? If you know how they do things, you can’t tell me there’s nothing you can do.”
“There are different kinds of failure,” replied Aleister with a hint of exasperation. Probably because he had seen the fate of the Golden cabal with his own eyes. “If an experiment is a dud, there’s no problem, but that isn’t the only kind of failure. For example, what if someone built an experimental reactor without the appropriate knowledge and they screwed up operating it, triggering uncontrolled nuclear fission?”
“…”
“Alice exists. And she was definitely too great a success. But the magician who created her is nowhere to be found. A magic user capable of creating her would stand out for better or for worse, but there hasn’t been any hint of them. Do you still not get it? This Teacher of Crowley may have been a Golden member I met at some point, or they could be a butcher or pub drunk with no connection to me at all, but whoever they are, they’re long since dead. My guess is, shortly after they completed Alice Anotherbible, they became their own greatest accomplishment’s first victim. They would have been annihilated to the point you could search the world with a fine-toothed comb and never find their remains or even a shred of their thoughts.”
He snorted with laughter.
With the cynical look of seeing a craftsman fall victim to the very torture device they had invented.
That human could see the humor in such things.
Aleister had developed such violent Level 5s in Academy City, but he had avoided having them directly threaten him. If the seven of them had worked together, they likely could have reduced the city to rubble, but despite nearly all of them having some kind of gripe with or grudge against Academy City, they had strangely never done that. The Level 5s might briefly join forces by random chance, but this never lasted long. But who did this benefit most? Had they been well managed in a way Alice’s creator had failed to do?
At any rate, Alice Anotherbible’s foundation was deeply rooted in the Crowley-style magic known as Magick.
Since the magician who had abducted Alice Pleasance Liddell was not an actual acquaintance of his, he wouldn’t directly understand the spell used, but as the creator of the framework behind Modern Western Magic, Aleister might be able to determine how it worked based on fragmentary knowledge.
There was hope.
That human had abandoned Academy City, so Accelerator was extremely reluctant to place him in a central position that could influence the city’s future, but since this had to do with magic, he would just have to let Qliphah Puzzle 545 keep an eye on things.
But just as he made that decision, Accelerator suddenly looked up.
“Who’s there?”
Several straight lines ran through the thick, explosion-resistant prison wall as it was was sliced through, the pieces crumbling away once gravity took over.
That wall was made of the same stuff as the Windowless Building which could theoretically withstand a vector attack by the #1, but it was so easily sliced through from the outside, which was in fact the back side.
“Hey.”
Accelerator stayed where he was.
He let out a growling voice while seated on the bed.
“I asked who the hell you are. If you aren’t answering, it means you’ve got a deficiency of either brains or manners. I’m not going to leave this cell, but if anyone’s stupid enough to come in here with me, I can’t guarantee they’ll leave alive.”
He heard a quiet metallic click. It was the sound of a thin blade returning to its sheath disguised as a cane.
And a black-haired young butler bowed politely beyond the rubble.
“H.T. Trismegistus,” he said.
“…”
“How you run your city is none of my concern. Except if it will anger my Alice and send her on a rampage. That would be rather troublesome. ...As for you two outsiders, common sense says this is the difficulty level you should be considering.”
Part 2
Little Anna Sprengel was miffed.
She had been left behind.
And to add insult to injury, Kamijou Touma had not disappeared on his own.
In their eyes, was she no different from the calico cat curled up in a corner of the room?
In a hurry to leave the dorm, she threw open the front door, hesitated, and realized it was meaningless. She had no idea where Kamijou or Alice would be.
(Alice Anotherbible’s irregular behavior isn’t that fool’s responsibility alone. He could have blamed me for intentionally derailing her from her position as an ordinary Transcendent.)
Alice Anotherbible was certainly extraordinary.
Even a thorough understanding of the hidden Rosicrucian arts wasn’t enough to defeat her head on.
But there was a way to deal with her.
And sneaking around doing the dirty work needed to make the impossible possible was a villain’s specialty. Had he forgotten Anna had already successfully gained access to Alice while the Bridge Builders Cabal protected her and given the girl an interest in Kamijou Touma like he was a picture book protagonist?
(That fool had better not be so stupid he snuck out because he didn’t want to pressure me to do that kind of dirty work.)
“Argh!! I guess I have to start with narrowing down the possible locations with some divination. Breaking the rules is more my style anyway. And I doubt anyone other than Kamijou Touma and Alice Anotherbible could come up with the correct answer anyway.”
Of course, she didn’t think she could just divine the answer with tarot cards or a crystal ball.
Nothing was that easy when it came to Alice Anotherbible.
But she was a Secret Chief’s priestess and magical knowledge was a rarity in Academy City. What would it mean if something in this city forcibly repelled her search?
That would be where those two were.
Real scrying did not require a crystal ball. Anna used a thick permanent marker to color a magnifying glass black.
“Okay, you had better not get yourself killed before I arrive, fool!!”
Part 3
Where was Kamijou’s school?
That was actually a tricky question because he had two schools: his original school that was destroyed by Magic God High Priest and the school he had been temporarily using after that destruction.
Neither answer was definitively correct. No one could work out a logical answer.
Kamijou himself just had to go with his gut.
Just like the storybook girl had wandered Wonderland as her whims led her.
He ended up choosing his original high school.
Academy City’s technology was 20-30 years ahead of the outside world. Magic God High Priest, the Elements, and so many other threats had smashed up the city, but it had been redeveloped or repaired back to its original form in an extremely short time.
Kamijou’s school was no exception.
No one who didn’t know it had been destroyed would think it had been rebuilt. The large school building, the dirt schoolyard, the pool, the gym, and the other additional structures were still covered in construction scaffolding and thick soundproofing sheets, but it was all already complete. It looked a bit like a present waiting to be unwrapped. The usual school was there like usual.
“That’s incredible,” muttered 15cm Othinus from his shoulder.
Kamijou frowned.
Sure, it was impressive, but it was nothing more than science. While she had lost her obvious powers, she was still a Magic God. Was Academy City’s construction technology really enough for her to gasp over?
“That isn’t what I meant at all. But I suppose it isn’t your fault you can’t sense ley line fluctuations and distortions. You will understand once you set foot inside. This is something you can’t avoid if you want to meet with Alice.”
“?”
They arrived at the school’s front gate.
It was getting late at night, but the sliding metal gate was open for some reason.
As soon as Kamijou stepped through, the world changed.
But this wasn’t a visible change in the color or light.
Still, he grimaced as soon as he stepped through.
It wasn’t quite like a bog.
This was much worse. To the point that trying to comprehend it by giving it a name would break his mind.
He had to focus on the costs and his stamina.
He couldn’t afford any wasted effort.
From here on, every step he took would put his life at risk.
He was only a high school boy and he could tell that.
“If Alice wanted, she could have changed the world you see before you in any way she liked,” said War God Othinus from his shoulder. “The consulate in District 12 is a good example of that.”
“I thought the other Transcendents made that.”
“You need to assume Alice can do anything the regular Transcendents can. In fact, her version is probably the original.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Did you really think the Bridge Builders Cabal members created that divine cosplay spell all on their own without any hints to work off of? Remember, these are the people who abandoned their magic names and relied on someone else because they knew they could never achieve their goals themselves. …You can think of the regular Transcendents as custom products created by taking the open-source Alice Anotherbible and tweaking the details to fit their preferences. Where Alice came from, I couldn’t tell you.”
Othinus spoke harshly, but she was that way about everyone on Earth.
In fact…
“Hm? I don’t sense much scorn in your voice there, god.”
“Because I have no real reason to feel scornful,” readily replied the real god.
This wasn’t about what was correct. They simply used different methods. She spoke like a living national treasure of a dancer appreciating the younger people in a phone video who were simply enjoying moving their bodies.
Apparently that was analogous to the one-eyed girl who had gathered faith and polished her skills until she became known as a god and the Transcendents who had chosen various gods and dressed up as them.
“Do not forget that magic itself is a way of breaking the rules. The world of magic is an absurd place where the kind of decent person who stops when the ordinary methods can take them no further are ridiculed as hardheaded. When a magician senses their power is insufficient, they do not run into the wall of reality and give up – they continue struggling to achieve their goal regardless and this comes entirely naturally to them. …Plus, the top Norse god is a god of deception. Have you forgotten that I became a Magic God by defeating Ollerus and stealing his future and possibilities?”
“…”
“Either way, I’m the person selfish enough to abandon the world of my birth to obtain an understander. Still, I wouldn’t consider throwing out everything I am inside and out to dress up as a different god.”
This was all on such a large scale Kamijou wasn’t sure what to make of it.
He had never imagined the day would come when the word “god” had any relevance to the real world.
Both as a reliable ally.
And as a very real threat.
“Basically, Alice is an extraordinary being who can build a bridge between reality and any proposed theory or concept, no matter how inaccurate or contradictory it might be. It could be the geocentric model, phlogiston, conspiracy theories about the moon landing being fake, that the Y2K problem would cause the world’s computers to run wild and destroy the world, that neutrinos travel faster than light, or anything else. The Anotherbible provides freedom on a level far behind even the framework of magic. It might be faster to just say there is effectively nothing she can’t do.”
The 15cm eyepatch girl, who existed here like normal, sighed with exasperation and looked to the school once more.
“But despite all that, Alice decided this was the best shape for this place. That shows a fixation, doesn’t it? It implies that using her all-powerful crafting to alter even a single side path or building corner would cause her to lose all interest in the place.”
“…”
“But whatever shape it takes, this is already Alice’s castle. Human, this world will not be kind to you.”
The density of death was growing.
Kamijou always had to contend with misfortune, but tonight was different.
It was intentional.
This world was designed for someone.
It had been remade for that purpose. If everything, even the unseen probabilities, would bare their fangs against any intruders, what could Kamijou Touma hope to do?
“Prepare yourself, human,” whispered Magic God Othinus.
Had she sniffed this out as a god of war, or as a god of magic and deception?
“Something’s coming.”
