Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume12 Epilogue
Epilogue: An Unwanted Trick – Open_Your_Lock.
Stiyl had been defeated.
Magic Gods Nephthys and Niang-Niang were still unconscious.
But…
“We caused too much of a scene. We can’t stay here at the dorm.”
“?”
Little Alice tilted her head, so Kamijou continued.
“No word from Accelerator. What happened to Bio Secure? They’re an organization and apparently their boss Kihara Goukei intentionally self-destructed, so no one knows how to stop them. I’d really prefer it if their organization didn’t continue running endlessly at full capacity.”
Kamijou Touma was alive.
At the very least, he wasn’t a zombie or the undead.
But now that he thought about it, how was he supposed to prove that? Being alive was such an underlying assumption he had never considered it before. What could he do if they suspected him of being an infected corpse even when he had a pulse and brainwaves?
Anything that required opening him up and dissecting him was out of the question.
After some thought, he spoke again.
“Should I go to the frog-faced doctor?”
“Hm?”
Kamijou couldn’t imagine how it could be done, but he had a feeling that doctor would be able to save him from any threat. As long as he was alive anyway.
(But if I go to that hospital with Bio Secure after me, I could draw the enemy there. I want to avoid causing the hospital any trouble.)
What if he called the frog-faced doctor somewhere instead of visiting the hospital himself?
Then the hospital wouldn’t become a battlefield.
In that case, he would need to construct a safe zone where the frog-faced doctor could safely examine and test him. He couldn’t have a ton of powered suits armed with flamethrowers storming the place partway through.
He was also worried about Index and Othinus.
They hadn’t been at his dorm room. Then where were they right now? Were they in England like Stiyl had suggested? No, they didn’t even have official IDs. He doubted they could get permission to leave the city and catch a flight from the District 23 airport.
Wouldn’t they be kind of stuck?
If they had nothing to prove their identity, then they might be as reluctant to gather any attention from Anti-Skill as Kamijou was.
Stiyl had mentioned another team outside the wall, but if Index and Othinus had secretly contacted that foreign group, it would lead to even more misunderstandings with Academy City. They could even be arrested on suspicion of being spies.
Where had they gone?
Had they really understood their position when they left the dorm room?
After all, Kamijou Touma was still alive.
It sounded like he needed to prove he was alive as soon as possible. He needed to show he was an ordinary living human and not some strange undead creature. That would show Index and Othinus they were taking on an unnecessary risk.
“Alice.”
“Yes?”
“I want the frog-faced doctor’s help to save Index and Othinus. There’s a lot I need to do. But none of this benefits you in any way. So you don’t have to stick with me if you-”
A small fist hit him before he could finish. Hit him right in the gut.
“You should live a more selfish life.”
“This isn’t the first time I’ve been told that.”
But right now he still had to push himself.
He had come back to life, so he had to bow his head in apology to each and every person who had been saddened or troubled by his death. This was the ultimate luxury the dead were never afforded. And to do that, he first had to reclaim Index and Othinus’s home.
That half-destroyed dorm wasn’t enough for this.
The school teachers and Anti-Skill probably weren’t going to help him here.
Wasn’t there something?
Kamijou thought for a bit and then his eyes were drawn to someone.
To Alice Anotherbible as she looked innocently up at him.
Yes…
“The consulate.”
“?”
“The Bridge Builders Cabal had a consulate in Academy City! It was in District 12 and the science side couldn’t touch it because of the extraterritoriality. As long as I can prove I’m alive, I can protect Index and Othinus’s home. And if I’m going to get help from the frog-doctor, calling him to that consulate would be best, wouldn’t it!?”
“But, teacher, wasn’t that consulate completely destroyed in our fight?”
Was it?
Maybe so.
He wasn’t sure if Good, Old Mary or H. T. Trismegistus was more responsible there.
But the level of damage didn’t really matter.
“Maybe it’s a pile of rubble now, but on paper it should still function as the grounds of a consulate. Look at the city, Alice. The recovery process has barely even gotten started, right? After all those battles, it must be chaos at the top levels too. They won’t have had time to do the paperwork to strip that location of its consulate status and they’ll be hard pressed to find the document they want within all the mountains upon mountains of paperwork they have to do.”
It might be shut down eventually, but it wouldn’t have happened yet.
This finally gave him a safe zone, even if it wouldn’t last long.
(That was the enemy headquarters around New Year’s. Funny how it looks so different now that my position has changed.)
But would it really give him what he wanted?
Kamijou was astonished by how calculating he could be.
But it was what it was.
No longer would he use his time being chased and running away. He was still facing ton of problems of course, but he knew he could solve a lot of them if he just had time to settle down and think.
He knew he would find plenty of ways to prove that he was a living human and not some strange zombie boy.
Christian Rosencreutz and Anna Kingsford.
Those experts had pushed up from the depths of that hell, where no bluffs or white lies worked and where your sins, past, and desires were all brought out into the open. They had sent him back to the world of the living.
He had come back from the dead.
He wasn’t going to let himself be killed again because of a mistake or because his resurrection could cause unnecessary confusion.
Little Alice hopped up and down next to him.
“Then, teacher, let’s go to District 12!”
“Yeah… I’m not going to find Index and Othinus by running around at random anyway. I need to get ahead of them. We’ll need a strategy meeting to discuss how to narrow down the search.”
With that, Kamijou left the half-destroyed dorm and started toward the train station.
But had he forgotten?
Kamijou Touma was thoroughly plagued by misfortune. When had a plan ever panned out the way he had imagined it?
“?”
He heard something solid breaking.
Lying on the wet asphalt was a supermodel-looking woman with beautiful long black hair and brown skin. But the ball-joint doll positioned back to back with her was shattered with its parts scattered around her.
“Vidhatri,” whispered Alice.
Kamijou had no direct knowledge of her.
But Alice knew her. If she was a Transcendent like Aradia and the Bologna Succubus, then her power had to be tremendous. She would be a monster capable of single-handedly waging war with the entire magic side. It would take Alice’s power to one-shot a Transcendent, but the little girl’s eyes were currently widened in surprise.
Yet.
The woman had been defeated so easily?
“Run…Alice…”
When Vidhatri noticed their eyes on her, she groaned, unable to get up in the pouring rain.
“She’s coming. We managed to hold her back this far, but we’ve hit our limit. There’s something weird about her!!”
Kamijou didn’t notice at first due to the sound of the rain.
Someone was there.
But this wasn’t the adults of Anti-Skill.
Nor was it Bio Secure with their powered suits and flamethrowers.
Kamijou looked puzzled.
“Aleister?”
He didn’t respond.
He wasn’t even holding an umbrella.
Only the sound of the rain stretched on and on as white noise.
It must have taken at least 10 full seconds.
That was plenty of time for the atmosphere to solidify like gelatin.
“…Why?” asked Aleister, his head lowered.
The deep, deep resentment in his voice seemed to rumble up from the depths of the earth.
“Why was it only you, Kamijou Touma?”
It was Kamijou’s turn to fall silent.
At first, he didn’t understand what Aleister meant.
But after some though, he made a guess and drew on the knowledge he had.
“The two experts sent me-”
“What happened to Anna Kingsford?”
Aleister silently raised his head.
There was unmistakable rage and hatred there.
Kamijou had never before seen Aleister Crowley like this.
A white flash burst out.
The #1’s artificial lightning had struck.
But that wasn’t the source of the light. Without even swinging an arm, Aleister had sent white light scattering to deflect the strike from the heavens.
And it didn’t end there.
The danger of this world had just gone up a notch.
“I thought maybe you could do it. I had given up, but I thought maybe you could produce a miracle.
“But,” he continued.
That human was not celebrating.
He spoke only rejection.
“Oh, yes. I know. I know all too well. Even if I am correct and your formless soul was forcibly recovered with an artificial hell, that could only have saved one at most. Obviously CRC couldn’t be allowed to return and I doubt Kingsford of all people would shove an amateur like you aside to reclaim her own life. Yes, that was the natural course for events to take.”
His unstable voice displayed the polar opposite of acceptance.
That’s just how the world works.
It can’t be helped.
Over and over, that human had seen lives mercilessly lost for those reasons. So many more than Kamijou Touma had.
“But it was you.”
Kamijou had betrayed something.
Even if it hadn’t been intentional.
He could tell he was standing here because he had taken away someone precious to someone else.
Even if Anna Kingsford herself had accepted it with a smile.
Even if.
“I thought maybe Kamijou Touma would find a way to save more than one in a situation where only one could be saved. I believed in you…”
Anna Kingsford.
Dead Kamijou Touma wasn’t the only person who had been reliant on that benevolent expert.
He didn’t know what exact connection there was between Aleister and Kingsford.
But she had been enough of a person to make that misanthrope Aleister hesitantly open up once more.
No matter the reason, that wasn’t something someone else should intrude upon and tear apart.
“Why was it only you?”
Aleister shed tears of blood.
He may have opened his eyes with such force he had physically torn the corners of his eyes.
“Why did you follow her instructions and board the lifeboat? You might as well have splashed cold water on the one who gave you her seat. Why didn’t you question her words even as you could see the look of death in her face?”
The red blood trickled down his face.
And Human Aleister roared with a voice even more sinister than that.
“Why did you abandon her and come back to life like she told you toooooooooooooooooooo!!?”
“Hee hee.”
It came from deep within his chest.
No, that wasn’t accurate.
Hadn’t Aleister explained that he was only borrowing that body?
Aleister Crowley himself had long since died. The human managed to continue functioning regardless because he had hijacked the physical body of Great Demon Coronzon.
Thus, it was more accurate to say it was all the cells of his body that were whispering.
“Hee hee…hee.”
Regardless, something sealed in the deepest depths was returning to life.
The lock had been smashed.
Why was obvious.
Her value was 333 and her meaning was dispersion.
She ruled the invisible higher Sephirah of the Sephiroth and sat nonchalantly upon the path of evolution to intentionally obstruct people’s growth.
Mathers had deemed her an absolute evil and Crowley had hypothesized she was one aspect of relative evil.
And now she whispered.
“Feeling the despair, Aleister?”
A wet “pop!!!” sounded.
Similar to a water balloon bursting.
The back of the beige habit split apart and something burst out. They were sinister clawed wings that resembled bat wings except much, much bigger.
Also, the blonde hair that had been roughly cut to shoulder length grew rapidly. And it tangled together complexly like a spiderweb attached to the odious wings.
The glow of the golden hair formed a giant face.
With an unmistakable sneer.
“Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!”
The woman spread her arms wide and roared into the sky.
This clearly wasn’t Aleister any longer.
This was something else.
Or perhaps this was the moment life returned to the monster meant to reside within that body.
“I was waiting. Waiting for the moment your will weakened!! Kee hee ee hee hee! There was nothing I could do on the inside, but I knew the wide world out there is made to torment you! Hee hee ee hee hee hee hee gee hee!!!”
Great Demon Coronzon.
The enemy of humanity who had been there all the while had regained her freedom.
