Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume14 Ending
The room was small and dark.
The only door was as sturdy as can be and locked up tight, turning the room into a hopeless steel box.
It was rattling, so was he being carried somewhere?
Maybe he would be forever forgotten.
“…”
Hamazura Shiage sat with his back against the wall and his head slumped against his chest.
What was that?
How could something like that happen?
Were they just going to accept Coronzon’s death? She was a girl. A lonely girl who didn’t expect anyone to help her! But they all called her a demon, violently ganged up on her, and even took her life!! And now the entire world was going to throw their hands in the air to celebrate and mark this day as a holiday!?
It was wrong.
This ending was terribly wrong.
And once he started questioning it, the rest came quickly. The world around him looked different.
There was no such thing as justice. Only the violence of the majority forcing their ways onto everyone else.
No one truly had happiness. It was no more than someone else’s rights you had stolen in a zero-sum game.
There was no beauty in flowers. They were filth that stole people’s breath from the air and laid their roots in the dirt full of rotting garbage.
The sun was not a blessed light. It was a terribly dangerous thermonuclear inferno.
“I finally see it, he muttered.
A dark flame roared to life in his heart even as he slumped weakly down.
“I finally see what you saw, Coronzon.”
This was the world seen through the eyes of the evil.
No, this was the value system that the majority had judged evil.
…Was learning of it an evil act that needed to be punished? Would they kill him for noticing something they found inconvenient? Was there some bastard who went around killing people based on whether their values lay on the wrong side of an arbitrary line drawn by someone up in their ivory tower? If so, they had to be quite “righteous” indeed.
(This way of thinking probably isn’t going to make the people in charge like me very much.)
He wouldn’t blindly trust in the concept of justice. He wouldn’t immediately reject those who were called evil. He would observe everything before his eyes, question everything, and then decide for himself what was really right. That was an ability that every single person was supposed to have. …But it would be a drop of the greatest poison to the people trying to control everyone by force. Because it would endlessly create more people like Hamazura who would start to fight back against their idea of what was good and right. Once you knew – once you had noticed – you would naturally start to see it.
These thoughts were the first step toward resisting a higher power.
“…”
But all he had done was see something.
The way he saw the world had changed, but so what?
He was a powerless Level 0. With nothing extra like a rare ability to do something more. He was really and truly useless. This was beyond the point of struggling in vain to accomplish something. His name and identity were known and a foreign group had arrested him as a threat. How could he do anything for Coronzon like this?
He couldn’t even escape this one little metal box, so how could he fight back against the entire world?
But.
Then he heard a noise. Something fell to the floor. A phone. And something was moving around in a vent less than 15cm wide up on the wall near the ceiling. But it wasn’t necessarily a living thing.
A small beep came from the floor.
Hamazura hesitantly picked up the phone to see something on its cracked screen.
Come to think of it…he did have something.
“…Aneri?”
The AI responded.
Here was a rare ability.
This Level 0 did have something extra.