Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume10

Novel Illustrations

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  Contents Page

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  Pages 003-005

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  Pages 006-008

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Prologue: Alice Anotherbible – Back_to_Memory.

“Nyawn? The girl’s name is Alice.”

“Also, why am I your teacher?”

“Kamijou Touma is the girl’s teacher.”

“A train is about to crash into that one!! We’re looking at a head-on collision with a prisoner transport train!!” “Go!! Take Alice!” “I am Hanatsuyu Youen. I am glad you don’t recognize me because it means you’re one of those ignorant normal people.”

“Hello, dark side. I know this is sudden, but you will be handing over all your information!!” “This isn’t just about us anymore, so I swear I’ll save you too, ghost!!” “You weren’t satisfied with this ending? Then what kind of ending would you accept?”

“Then return everything to the way it was, Alice.” “You will die.” “That doesn’t change my answer.”

“Shibuya!!!???” “Bologna Succubus!!” “Ding, ding, ding! Correct☆ She’s Aradia, goddess of all witches, who rules over the night and the moon.” “Alice is a step above the other Transcendents in the Bridge Builders Cabal.” “So you split between the Rescuers and the Killers?”

“Don’t kid yourselves, you rioting criminals.” “Stop it! No one wants it to end like this!!”

“I didn’t – cough – want you to see me looking so pathetic.”

“In what world is this pathetic!? Goddammit!!”

“Leave it to me.” “Then you leave this with me.” “Anna Kingsford!?” “I simply wish to aid the 🙂 around me☆”

“I’ve come to play, teacher☆” “A consulate in District 12?”

“Probably kill her. I mean, the accusations against Anna Sprengel are anything but false.” “This case does not match mama’s condition either.”

“I am one of the so-called Killers when it comes to you, Kamijou Touma.” “Mama will defeat him.” “No.” “You can’t do it this way, Alice.”

“Stupid teacher.” “Run away with me, Anna Sprengel!!!”

“I am Mut Thebes. I provide punishment.” “She can make use of anything if her shadow touches its shadow.”

“The Shrink Drink…is safe.”

“Um, Anna-san?”

“I had it wrong?” “The Bridge Builders Cabal wasn’t a legendary magic cabal going back millennia?”

“Not even Good, Old Mary’s resurrection can heal Anna Sprengel.” “We just have to get Alice’s help.”

“'CRC.” “Christian Rosencreutz.”

“No.” “I do not need the unexpected.”

“We just need Alice.” “We just need Alice Anotherbible!!!”

“Ahhhhh!!”

“They can soothe this old man’s ennui with their worthless lives. How else can you make up for what you have done, Transcendents?” “Anna is a villain.” “But I still don’t want her to die.”

“Didn’t you hear? The cats…”

“Found you☆”

“Misaka.” “Stop, Kamijou Touma! You mustn’t do that!!” ““Fire on this GPS signal.” “You made this old man…touch the floor?”

“That is not what it means to believe in someone.”

“You completely missed the crossroads you couldn’t afford to cross and you walked right on through.” “But how is this possible!? Why would she get back up again now!?” “Shut your mouth. Right this instant!!”

“Johann Valentin Andreae.” “It all comes to an end.”

“Cackle.” “Cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle cackle!!!”

“This isn’t over.” “None of this is over.”

It was in District 12 that Index and Othinus witnessed that moment.

The frigid wind of the January night blew through, but neither of them complained of the cold.

They had long since lost their ordinary sense of temperature.

“…”

CRC.

Christian Rosencreutz’s corpse lay sprawled out on the ground.

No, that corpse technically belonged to Johann Valentin Andreae.

He still had his red cloak and silver hair, but the messy remnants of the old man had large chunks torn out by a little girl’s hand. If his remains had been entirely eliminated, that painful and ugly visual also wouldn’t have remained and his legend at least could have survived.

We’re screwed, thought Othinus.

Her knowledge as a war god was enough to know that.

Alice Anotherbible was headless and bloody.

H.T. Trismegistus wielded his cane sword.

...They couldn’t win against those two.

Index had at least 103,001 grimoires memorized and Othinus had lost her power as a Magic God. There was no way they could survive an onslaught of attacks from those two Bridge Builders Cabal members long enough to reach safety.

“Hmm, hm, hmm.”

The small girl had no tongue or teeth, so a flute-like voice left the severed and visible trachea in her neck.

But even that was soon covered up.

It made a strange noise. A horribly dry one. But it was definitely coming from headless Alice Anotherbible. Like watching footage of an eggshell breaking in reverse, more and more small fragments floated up, linked together, made a sound like something very thin and soft folding over, and eventually formed the young girl’s adorable face atop her neck like nothing had ever happened.

Her head there should have been the expected sight.

But knowing the greater context created a very different impression.

“Did I get it right?”

“Common sense says it is perfect.”

The young black-haired butler bowed respectfully.

He paid no heed to Othinus and Index’s eyes on them.

Even if surprise attacks were launched on them from all directions, he would not let anyone lay a finger on his master Alice. He said nothing and didn’t even look their way, but the Transcendent with a sword cane gave off that sense like a smell.

It was true too.

If they tried to fight here, they would die.

If they died, no one would get word out that CRC was dead and Alice was back. Knowing those two, even a few days’ delay in learning those facts could mean the destruction of the world. There no doubting it.

There was only one option left.

(Get caught on purpose.)

Othinus worked out that cold-hearted answer from atop Index’s shoulder.

(One of us is a grimoire library and the other is Magic God who would make a valuable sample even if I have lost my power. They should want to keep us alive and study us. We can use that time to find an opening to inform the human, so going with Alice is actually our best-)

“That won’t work.”

Nothing about the young butler had changed.

Nothing at all.

“I know what you are thinking. But we do are not interested in anything which does not fulfill our salvation conditions. Did you think common sense would tell me you are valuable enough for us to leave you alive? Alice alone can give us everything we could want, so what more could we ask for?”

The grimoire library was supposed to be an irresistible temptation, but not even she would work as a bargaining chip.

She wasn’t worth enough to them.

Othinus did think this made some sense. If Alice Anotherbible really was as extraordinary as the Transcendents said, then they were indeed screwed. The board had been in an unwinnable configuration from the beginning. Shifting the pieces around from there wasn’t going to change it in any significant way.

They couldn’t win if they tried to fight.

Trying to buy time through underhanded negotiation wasn’t an option either.

Alice was so far beyond the ordinary that she wasn’t even focused on the realistic issues.

“What will you do?” calmly asked the young butler.

“This,” said Index, turning tail and running.

H.T. Trismegistus watched it happen but did not immediately move to pursue. There was more than a little scorn in his eyes.

As if he were saying, “You know as well as I do that you cannot escape us on foot.”

But even if this bought them less than a minute of time, it was still time bought.

Othinus’s thoughts were racing at top speed on Index’s shoulder.

“What do we do!? We can’t escape like this and we don’t even know if we can reach my understander by phone thanks to the martial law.”

Index looked side to side as they ran through orderly rows of identical storage units.

Then the white nun grabbed Othinus from her shoulder.

“Hey?”

Index crouched on the spot and shoved 15cm Othinus into the narrow gap between two of the storage units.

The eyepatch girl’s eye widened.

“(What are you doing!?)”

“(I can’t escape those Transcendents no matter what we try. So it’s better you get away and reach Touma than for both of us to be caught.)”

“…”

The girl’s resolve made Othinus gasp.

And she was a true war god who had sacrificed an eye in exchange for wisdom.

“If Touma knows about this, he can do something. Even against Alice. So hurry!”

“(That sort of cunning sacrifice is a job for a war god like me, dammit!)”

Before Othinus could stop her, Index ran off toward a more open space.

She was intentionally getting herself caught.

After all, they had just seen Rosencreutz slaughtered for no good reason. They had no guarantee that the current Alice Anotherbible and the young butler who served her were operating on even the barest minimum of logic.

And Index still chose this.

She tried her best to suppress her trembling, pushed down the desire to run away too, and risked her life on the one possibility of getting word back to Kamijou Touma.

Magic God Othinus accepted that resolve.

(That stupid idiot can’t even fight!!)

CRC – Christian Rosencreutz – had been defeated, but this was not over. Her ignorant understander had just overcome a great threat, so he would be at his least guarded. If he failed to recognize the extraordinary threat that was Alice Anotherbible in time, the consequences could be dire.

He would regret his own actions if this led to tragedy. Even if it wasn’t his fault.

So Othinus had to reach him.

Did Index recognize the value of information more than the average person because of the 103,001 grimoires in her head? She had sacrificed herself to let Othinus escape because she understood the worst option was to let the line of information be cut off here.

Light flashed.

A dull sound followed.

H.T. Trismegistus and Alice Anotherbible had taken action.

But there was no scream from Index. However, that didn’t mean nothing had happened. Othinus clenched her teeth but forced herself not to think about rescuing Index.

Index herself wouldn’t want that.

Giving in to easy emotion would waste the girl’s resolve.

Othinus cold-heartedly turned her back and continued on, just like Index wanted of her. She silently slipped away into the gap between the storage units, which was a lot like an alley between skyscrapers for the 15cm god.

She ran through and out the other side.

“Are you kidding me? I know I’m only still alive as a form of punishment, but this still seems like a bit much, world.”

But after all that, someone stood in her way.

Othinus came to a stop.

However, this was not a Transcendent or Alice Anotherbible.

“Ugh.”

Something emerged from the shadows. And it wasn’t alone.

It was an entire group of local stray cats.

But they were more than enough of a threat for 15cm Othinus.

One would have been bad enough, but there appeared to be five or six of them.

She couldn’t stand up to them and they could catch her even if she tried to run. Then she would be literally tormented to death. If she died here, no one would pass on the news that Alice Anotherbible was back. Did the world’s destruction really hinge on something as silly as this?

“A-argh! Are these city-dwelling animals who have lost their wild side really going to be what stops me in the very end!?”

No matter how great her mission or how firm her resolve, the world remained just as cruel. Even as a Norse war god – no, specifically because of it – she could not fight this kind wicked coincidence – this kind of deadly fate.

Just then, something intruded from the side.

The many bright eyes in the shadows were thrown into disarray.

A shadowy battle had begun.

Paws kicked off gravel and weeds, fur rushed through the air, and low growls wobbled unsteadily.

The feline presences left.

Something had driven off all those bearers of claws and fangs.

A single form emerged from the shadows.

And mewed.

He wore a belled collar around his neck.

He was Magic God Othinus’s nemesis ever since being reduced to 15cm. He was the calico cat.

“Th-the beast! You did this?”

Despite being a house-raised kitten, he had taken on a group of stray adults and driven them off. It honestly made Othinus fear for her future.

The cat crouched down in front of her.

He could not speak human language.

But his eyes said “hop on”.

(Hmph. I thought he was just an insolent kitten, but he’s developed the spirit of a true einherjar since I last saw him.)

The 15cm god hopped onto his soft back and grabbed onto the back of his collar in place of reins.

“Onward, Sleipnir!! Carry your god!!!”

She was nearly thrown off.

His name was Sphinx, so he shook his body in protest.

Chapter 1: The World is Not So Strong – the_End_of_Real.

Part 1

It was January 6 at the District 7 hospital.

Furthermore, it was morning.

“Uhh…”

Kamijou Touma was zoning out in a bed that reeked of disinfectant. He was wearing his extremely lazy hospital clothes that were rapidly becoming his secondary pajamas. The look on his face said to let it slide since at least they weren’t a track suit.

His precious winter break was almost over, but he had nothing to do all morning.

“Winter break is ending. And then the new school term is starting. ...Is this really happening? And I thought for sure I wasn’t going to survive this time!!”

“Fool, don’t rewrite your own memories to tell yourself you got through this deathless. You needed Good, Old Mary’s resurrection, which is proof enough that you died. More than once, even.”

“Ugh,” groaned Kamijou in the bed.

Someone sat next to the bed on a simple folding chair.

She looked just like a small girl of around 10. Her long, strawberry blonde hair was done up in several flat fried shrimp shapes, creating a volume greater than her short, slender body. Her oversized, baggy red dress was forcibly held up against her chest, so it did very little to cover up most of her skin.

She was Anna Sprengel.

And true to the exasperation on her face, Kamijou’s current survival was not the result of a future he had acquired through his own work and choices. In his conflict against the Transcendents, Alice Anotherbible, and Rosencreutz, he had learned far too well what happened when he recklessly attempted something beyond his abilities.

His thoughts continued on from there.

But Anna was here. She was not an illusion and she would not suddenly disappear.

Also, this was a private hospital room.

...What was Anna Sprengel doing in his room? What was she doing in the men’s ward which smelled as much of sweat, tears, and unfulfilled desire as a baseball clubroom during the rainy season?

“You’re still recovering too, right? Why’d you slip out of your room to visit me?”

“To nurse you,” was her succinct response.

Kamijou blinked twice before responding.

“Ha ha ha. You were lonely without anyone to talk to, weren’t you? To think that wicked woman would end up like this. You never know what life has in store for-”

“This room reeks, fool. It smells like a lonely, loser male.”

“Really, why are you here?”

He even forgot to cry.

The high school boy had dried out to the point his mind went entirely blank, but Anna had an immediate response for him.

“Fool, is your head so defective it can’t remember what I told you three minutes ago? I am here to nurse you.”

Anna soaked a clean towel in a filled washtub and wrung out the towel with her little hands.

“First, I will wash you until you shine, so strip, fool.”

“Bff!?”

This came out of nowhere.

And it was apparently a foregone conclusion in Anna’s mind. She climbed onto the bed with the wet towel in hand. With a silent, catlike movement.

“N-n-now, wait just a second! Do you know what you’re saying!? As a girl!?”

“What’s this, fool? Are you embarrassed?”

“Don’t be silly, little kid! You’re 10 years – no, 15 years and 4 months – too young to do anything for Kamijou-san and his secret love of dorm managers!!”

Anna, who looked 10, blinked silently at first, but she eventually looked down at her own short and slender form.

And then…

“Oh? You aren’t into small bodies?”

She grinned wickedly.

And a moment later, she had grown into a fully grown woman.

“Lucky for you, I can do this.”

“Ahh!?”

“The choice is yours. I’m fine with either form.”

Anna crawled along the bed in a feline way, but this version of her was no kitty cat. She was a much bigger cat and her sweet scent was far more noticeable than before.

Something large swayed below her.

Anna chuckled with the wet towel in hand.

“Then again, now that I have taken this curvier form, it would take a lot of courage for you to come out and say you prefer the little form better, wouldn’t it?”

Could he defuse this situation faster by staying silent than by trying to correct her reasoning?

Asking himself that had been a mistake.

He was only avoiding the issue.

Because if he did nothing to actively put a stop to it, she would continue along her current course. No matter how misguided that course might be.

“Well, I probably should stick with the bigger form. It is more convenient for moving you and rolling you. But if you do get tired of it and want a change, just let me know, fool. I can change forms at any time.”

“The bigger form is more convenient? What, are you going to grab me and flip me over?”

“I am offering the noble service of washing you, so hurry up and get those clothes off, fool.”

“You’re not making any sense. Do have any idea what you’re asking!? This is as out of place as nikujaga made by a gyaru! Are you sure this is what you want to do, Anna-san!?”

Anna’s grin only grew.

Miss Sprengel apparently found his fluster to be most entertaining.

Such was the mysterious nature of that wicked woman.

“My, my. Is this one of those foolish adolescent rebellious phases? Only one day in the hospital and the forced abstinence is already too much for you? How depraved a life have you been living? Hee hee. Oh, I can practically hear a certain part of your anatomy sproinging up in response to my sinful body.”

Kamijou’s mind was driven to a stage beyond entirely blank.

He was in new territory here.

He averted his gaze and spoke up quietly.

“Um.”

“What, fool?”

“This is really awkward to bring up...but I know they use a ‘sproing’ sound effect in trashy comedies, but that’s only a metaphor and a guy’s body doesn’t actually make a noise like that.”

“Wha-!? It doesn’t?”

Anna Sprengel quaked while in oddly extreme contrast, like the portrait on a piece of paper money.

She had done a lot to come off as a wicked woman...but was it possible?

“Hey, but that’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Ha ha ha. For grownup Kamijou-san, this return to a more innocent age is honestly refreshing. Yes, it’s so nice to meet a pure young girl who isn’t ready for any of that kind of thing. Ha ha ha ha ha.”

Anna fell silent.

Eventually, she sighed.

“Fool. Maybe it would be better to spring it on you as a joke said in a wooden voice, but just so you know, girls don’t actually shout ‘I’m coming’ when they climax.”

“Eh? Wait, I didn’t want to know that. Is this you taking revenge for-”

“It’s the height of folly really. The screenwriters probably just aren’t used to putting together natural-sounding dialogue because even dramas rarely include sex scenes these days.”

“But!? It can’t be! Noooooo! ….Then how does the cosmos work? Wh-what are we supposed to believe in now!?”

“Not that this information has any relevance to a pure and upright fool who has decided to guard his virginity more fiercely than Joan of Arc despite literally no one asking him to.”

“…”

In this case, hanging his head in silence was definitely the wrong answer.

He did not know how to deal with a wicked woman like Anna.

Sensing something in the air, she grinned. That was the look of a bully who had found the perfect target.

“Well, if you do ever find the dorm manager of your dreams after journeying to some other dimension or something, let’s hope she’s the kind of person who let’s her emotions explode out in verbal form.”

“I notice you’ve taken the issue of your own ignorance and swept it under the rug like someone who doesn’t actually know how to clean.”

“What? You wanna fight, fool!?”

“––––––!!”

“!?”

Part 2

She was exhausted.

“Phew,” softly sighed 15cm Othinus.

As swift as the cat was, he didn’t have the stamina to cross a space as large as Academy City. While riding him, Othinus had held onto his collar with her little hands and given him directions. They had finally made it this far after hopping into the back of the trucks driving through the city during the night and early morning.

Still, they had made it safely.

Any knowledge of how monstrous H.T. Trismegistus and Alice Anotherbible were would tell you how miraculous that was.

There was more than just luck at play here.

This had only been possible thanks to someone else’s sacrifice.

This message had to get through.

Grimoire Library Index had let herself be captured by Alice in order to give Othinus this one and only chance. It was unclear how many screws had come loose in Alice’s little head, so it was impossible to predict when she would take a life due to a malfunction rather than any sensible reason. Index had known this but still gone through with it.

Othinus couldn’t let that be for nothing.

She would reward that effort.

This response was like an instinct for her as a god of war.

So she had traveled all the way to District 7.

She had finally arrived at the usual hospital.

“How many times...tell you...off your clothes, fool?”

“And how many...have to tell...that’s embarrassing!?”

With a big “?” in her head, Othinus gave the cat one more instruction.

Cats these days knew how to get into trouble by smoothly opening a sliding door.

The door opened, allowing the voices to reach Othinus more clearly.

“Why am I the one pinning you down to the bed, fool!?”

“Probably because you haven’t been looking after your common sense by making sure you get enough Vitamin C and coenzyme Q10!!”

The voices came from atop the hospital bed.

Kamijou Touma’s pajamas were partway removed.

Anna Sprengel had grown.

The boy had somehow gotten himself turned around while he struggled, so now his pointy-haired head was resting on adult-mode Anna’s lap who was forcibly placing her weight down on him like she had been sitting on her knees before collapsing forward.

Simply put, a human head was trapped between a pair of thighs and a pair of boobs.

Big Anna Sprengel had apparently turned herself into a human mousetrap because she needed her hands free for some other task. She had her face down near the boy’s navel and…

“Just settle down and let me wash you! I am too sexy and perfect to back down now, fool!!”

“Can’t...breathe! Boobs...too fat! Thighs...too- mgh!”

To sum up, it was one of Japan’s infamous fanservice festivals.

The exhausted god wobbled wearily.

Hatred filled her one eye.

Magic God Othinus passed judgment from atop her feline steed.

She lightly kicked the cat’s belly with her little legs to get the clawed and fanged beast to charge.

“I’m just killing you this time!!!”

“Bwah, what? At least give me a reason, Othinus!”

Part 3

Kamijou was being processed for release from the hospital.

The 1st floor lobby was busy. But was it really a good thing for business to be booming at a hospital? Not only were patients and doctors moving about, but there were workers up on metal scaffolding. A closer look revealed they were replacing the New Year’s decorations with new decorations to match the beginning of a new school term.

Winter break was ending.

He had heard Misaka Mikoto, Aradia, and some others were hospitalized here too, but he hadn’t had any chance to see them since men and women were kept in different wards. He was just glad to know they were okay.

He used the waiting time in the busy lobby to speak with Othinus.

“Rosencreutz is...dead?” he muttered.

“You must have had a peaceful night if that’s enough to surprise you. He is no longer the primary problem.”

He couldn’t see her while she sat on his shoulder, but he could tell Othinus had sighed with her arms crossed.

“Alice Anotherbible was hard enough to predict already, but I fear she may have gone completely off the rails. Even CRC may have been easier to deal with since he was only interested in malicious destruction.”

Alice Anotherbible.

Was she still alive? Even though he could still see the image of her small body tossed artlessly on the floor after Rosencreutz crushed her head?

“Hold on, this isn’t some tear jerking story,” sharply cut in Othinus. “Did you forget the part about her capturing the grimoire library?”

“…”

That chilled his excitement.

Now he couldn’t simply rejoice at the survival of someone he thought had died.

But what exactly had happened?

“It won’t be that simple with a monster like her. Christian Rosencreutz was only a detour. He was the Bridge Builders Cabal’s goal, not ours. This means we’re finally back on track and our true enemy has shown up.”

“Was...Alice mad?”

“Beats me.” Little Othinus sighed softly. “If she was acting based on a simple emotion like that, we might have a chance at predicting her, but that wasn’t the sense I got. I would find it more believable if I learned Alice’s mere presence is enough to destroy the world.”

“…”

“The fact remains that the grimoire library is missing. Because she acted as bait so I could escape. We have no idea what happened to her. An ordinary magician would spare her life and keep her around, but there’s no predicting what Alice might do.”

Index was missing.

And unlike before, Alice wouldn’t have just taken Index to her secret base to play. And even if she had done that, leaving someone in Alice’s care now was far too dangerous.

The girl had been decapitated.

But that hadn’t been enough to stop her.

She had killed CRC.

Even a monster on his level had lost his life when he angered Alice and made her take him even a little bit seriously. And now those same sharp claws were at someone else’s throat.

“But...I can’t believe Alice would threaten Index’s life.”

“I don’t think she’s killed the grimoire library yet. That’s fortunate, at least.”

“Hm? You sound certain of that. I mean, I hope it’s true, but how can you know?”

“Because Alice is still in Academy City. The only reason she hasn’t lost interest in this place and disappeared is because of her obsession with you, human. So in all likelihood, she will be hesitant to kill someone connected to you. But on the other hand, that means the grimoire library’s life comes to an end as soon as Alice loses interest in you.”

That was her prediction as a war god.

It was an analysis based on accurate data and an intuition based on a vast quantity of harsh experiences, so a simple high school boy couldn’t hope to argue with it.

Kamijou still refused to back down, perhaps because an irreplaceable life was on the line here.

“I still find it hard to believe she’s alive. Is she really still in the city?”

“It is endlessly tiresome that my word as a god isn’t enough for you and you require objective evidence for every little thing, but there is some indirect evidence you can see for yourself. Just take a look outside.”

“?”

Exasperated, Othinus elaborated from his shoulder.

“Do you remember the social phenomenon unique to Academy City that was linked to Alice Anotherbible’s presence?”

“Hm? Oh, you mean Kotatsu Syndrome?”

If he was being honest, he had completely forgotten. He had assumed that had just gone away once New Board Chairman Accelerator declared martial law.

That strange form of group psychology led people to passively protest their entrance exams and the new school term by lazing around instead.

It led people to shortsightedly seek peace and comfort without worrying about the later consequences.

“Let’s head outside,” was all Othinus said. “It may not be visible from here, but you will see soon enough.”

Skeptical, Kamijou walked to the hospital exit after his release process was complete.

The glass door was partially soundproofed, probably to make life in the hospital more comfortable for the patients.

Something was exploding outside.

At first, Kamijou had no idea what it was.

He really did think something was exploding in the distance.

But when he listened more closely, he realized it was an amalgam of voices.

“I’m sick of this martial law! You can’t tell me what to do anymore!”

“They’re keeping down the little guy, as usual!!”

“Flip them!! Flip all those armored monstrosities!!”

Was that a wave of people? Were those strange voices and noises being made by human beings?

“I already saw it all on the way here.”

Maybe the hospital was so busy because people were claiming to feel sick and hiding out there for safety.

“It probably began with the melancholy caused by winter break ending and the new school term beginning,” quietly explained Othinus. “Then the new Board Chairman declared martial law and banned them from leaving their homes, so their frustrations grew as their vacation passed them by under those restrictions. When Alice Anotherbible’s return triggered a resurgence of Kotatsu Syndrome, it pushed all the city’s residents’ minds in the opposite direction. ...This is entirely different from the gentle social phenomenon built on escapism. I get the sense that, whether it will help them or hurt them, they will yell at and physically attack anyone who tries to boss them around.”

This wasn’t Kamijou’s first time seeing a city-wide riot.

For example, he had seen Academy City during the Christmas season when Anna Sprengel had arranged the rise of R&C Occultics.

For example, he had seen Shibuya on December 31 flooded with the youths influenced by the Transcendents Aradia and the Bologna Succubus.

But this was different from those.

When it was caused by Alice Anotherbible, the nature of the riot changed.

“It’s beginning.”

“…”

“Acute Kotatsu Syndrome is a very different threat from CRC, who was the ultimate individual. This is a new trend – a countdown toward destruction by a group. If nothing is done about Alice, Academy City will be brought down by internal violence. Maybe it could be stopped by a military force, but that would require Anti-Skill, or whoever else, to fire live ammunition on the people of the city.”

Part 4

“You expect me to head home at night? Why is the school curfew in effect during winter break!?”

“Go to hell!! I’m not going back to school. We didn’t get a real break because your stupid martial law! Extend the break for as long as that was in effect and then we can talk!!”

“We’re free!! No one can tell us what to do!! Get them!!”

A large group of boys and girls shouted and climbed on top of an armored vehicle that was swallowed up by the crowd after its occupants tried to put a stop to the rioting but couldn’t actually fire their weapons.

Would you call this Acute Kotatsu Syndrome?

Human Aleister and Golden Retriever Kihara Noukan were also watching Academy City innocently fall apart.

“U-um, Fukiyose-chan? I know that’s supposed to be cosplay, but what are you thinking? What is that character even from? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a character who’s naked except for a bunch of color-changing rainbow LED ribbons! So, um, I think it’s my duty as your teacher to tell you…”

“Eh!? What’s that!? It sure is loud out here! You’re going to have to speak up, Sensei!!”

“I have one piece of advice for today: I think that outfit shows off way too much of your boobs!!!!”

The children probably saw this as making use of their rights.

Whether they were flipping cars or throwing burning tabloids into the air, they may have been diluting the responsibility and guilt by acting as a group.

But more than any of that, this reckless behavior was caused by the subconscious influence of Alice Anotherbible’s powerful charisma.

They would do things they would normally never even consider yet not find it strange. They could go completely off the rails and simply laugh it off. This was a unique space, ruled by irrational thought processes even worse than “they were drunk, so they couldn’t help it”.

Had Kihara Noukan wanted him to see this state of the world?

Aleister wondered this and creased his brow as he followed the golden retriever around.

A severed head.

A bisected torso.

Anna Kingsford.

Another life lost. He was well aware of what his own inexperience had wrought.

“...me…”

Aleister clenched his teeth as a trembling voice spilled out.

“She died because of me…”

Once he got started, the rest came so easily.

Like a dam breaking.

That human was half howling as he cursed himself.

“It’s so obvious I used her in the wrong way! If I had more sense and if I was actually strong enough to fight by her side, Kingsford might not have died!! Maybe someone had to die, but it didn’t have to be her. If I had only stepped forward instead of abandoning her, she would be right here with us!!!”

But.

That was when Kihara Noukan saw something in Aleister’s blind spot.

Directly behind him, in fact.

Anna Kingsford had the most awkward smile on her face.

This was no ghost.

Kihara Noukan firmly rejected the existence of anything so unscientific.

She was unharmed. She was perfectly fine.

Eliminating all of the silly unscientific terms and logically assessing the situation led him to a single conclusion.

(Th-that bitch survived!)

This was not good.

A change came over Kihara Noukan’s round doggy eyes. They stared far, far into the distance. Extremely complex and advanced calculations rapidly unfolded in his mind. The relative locations of Aleister weeping and howling and of Kingsford blushing, smiling bashfully, and tapping her index fingers together was very bad indeed. It was a lot like a mother looking in her delinquent son’s closet and finding the knit scarf he had used as a small child stored with great care in the back. At any rate, their relative positions were at odds with romance. Depending how this turned out, Aleister’s very existence could explode in violation of all physical laws!!

...Was there any way of safely defusing this situation?

Kihara Noukan had to let his friend know.

It was too soon to give up. Romance’s doom had already approached within 5m of that human’s back.

“Are you listening, Kihara Noukan!? I am trying to tell you about my great sin!!”

“Um, yes. B-but everyone dies eventually, so shouldn’t you see all goodbyes as inevitable?”

“Maybe so! But my point is it didn’t have to be then and there!!”

“My advice as your friend is to take deep breaths to calm this swelling of emotion! When you learn the truth, it will be a great shock and you may curse the world, but I hope you can view it as a reason why this world has its positive side and that you can peaceably lower your raised hand!!”

“What are you talking about!? Hold on, why do you keep glancing behind me?”

“No, my old friend, do not turn around!! Do not, I said!!!”

Aleister ignored that advice.

This was a mistake that human continued to make again and again.

Then his eyes met hers.

Aleister saw it all and petrified.

“Ah.”

It took a full five seconds before that sound escaped his throat.

Kihara Noukan was so nervous he actually failed to get a new cigar in his mouth. The thick, fancy cigar that cost as much as a tenderloin fell to the ground unlit, but he didn’t even glance down at it.

The cat was out of the bag.

“Anna Kingsford?”

Aleister received bitter laughter in response. The glasses woman gave a little wave.

There was some bashfulness mixed in.

She must have heard everything he said.

Aleister squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath.

But this was not a ritual meant to calm his feelings.

Kingsford was an expert, so she immediately recognized this as preparations to refine life force into magic power.

“Hm, so should I 🏃 away now?”

As always, she was correct.

The magician who authored the Book of the Law unleashed all sorts of forbidden spells from his hands.

Part 5

This place was “somewhere else”.

But the distortion wasn’t yet great enough to call it another world.

“…”

Index was not dead.

Not yet, anyway.

Alice Anotherbible’s whims had just so happened to work out in her favor. But whether that would remain true a second from now was anyone’s guess.

“The Bridge Builders Cabal’s objective remains unchanged,” said H.T. Trismegistus with a composed expression. “Common sense says we only want universal salvation for the world.”

“You’re going to thoughtlessly repeat your mistake? Rosencreutz wasn’t the saint spoken of in legend. You should know that in your very bones after what happened!!”

Index was not one to be influenced by false appearances or records.

She had a perfect memory.

She had been born with that ability, so it had influenced her psychological development whether she liked it or not.

“Touma and the others’ victory was a fluke. That rebirth ceremony was a type of magic, so it can be reproduced. That means you can try again after that one failure. But if CRC is brought back into this world, there really will be no stopping him!”

“Christian Rosencreutz was no more than a collection of his own desires and passions,” replied the young butler.

Calmly.

No, that wasn’t accurate.

“Yes, yes. Common sense says that can’t be true. I cannot accept that Christian Rosencreutz would bring violence and ruin. His true identity and name are of no consequence. He must have had a good reason for behaving that way. He did not save the world because we were not ready to understand his truth. Doesn’t that make far more sense!?”

“…”

Index said nothing.

H.T. Trismegistus appeared to stay true to his principles and keep his cool no matter the situation, but that was not without its problems.

Common sense.

That young butler had no way of handling unprecedented and abnormal situations. When an obvious mistake or error appeared before him, he would continue to attempt the “preexisting” solution that common sense provided him.

The common sense widely accepted by the world was not necessarily correct.

As an outcast who had worked to learn magic, he should have already known that.

“That method will fail.”

“Oh, I know.” The young butler nodded in a sarcastic way. “Of course I know. I am Transcendent H.T. Trismegistus, a regular-sized being who cannot move past that position. Which is why common sense tells me the best option is to leave the fate of the world in the hands of someone greater than I.”

Part 6

Kamijou Touma left the hospital and walked through the streets.

Aogami Pierce walked with him.

The other boy apparently rented out a room somewhere instead of living in the dorms (which was probably against the school rules), but their way home was the same for part of the trip.

“Man, we just barely got out of the hospital before winter break ended, huh?” said Aogami.

“What, are you happy you’re out? In the hospital, they serve you three meals a day and even clean the place for you.”

“Course I am. I’ll admit I’m sad to say goodbye to the intellectual lady doctors and the nurses, but school starts back on the 8th. The end of the break sucks, but I’ve gotta show up to school on the first day.”

“…”

“I mean, if I skipped the first day for a reason everyone in class accepted as legit, I’d make a habit of it and I’d never work up the motivation to go to school again. Hah hah!!”

Aogami laughed it off.

Even though they had no guarantee the new school term was going to start on schedule.

Was it called Acute Kotatsu Syndrome?

It seemed to have gotten even worse than what Othinus had seen.

The main street was packed full of costumed students like it was Halloween, so vehicles couldn’t get through. The boys and girls climbed on top of the stuck armored vehicles and some even climbed up on top of the wind turbines. It looked like they might even break the turbines down like the tower-toppling game during the Daihaseisai.

“Uh, oh. It’s as crowded as a rush hour train out here.”

“Then how about we charge headfirst into a zone with a high concentration of girls and all the plump boobs and butts that come with them?” suggested Aogami. “It wouldn’t be our fault! They’re the ones blocking our way and forcing us to push through, so we’re the victims really!!”

“Do you want to end up like the creepy guy who gets arrested at a fireworks show or on Halloween?”

The density of people was a lot like a solid wall. Kamijou did not have the courage to plunge in and try to part the crowd to get through.

So he and Aogami took a detour while complaining.

They ended up in a boxy area full of cheap artificial marble and greenery, making it a lot like a sanctuary for people who bring their lunch. But instead of a park, it was technically on the grounds of a trendy office building. The small pathway ran alongside the large building, but it was strangely void of people.

“None of those partiers here,” noted Kamijou.

“Phone GPS maps tend not to show private property. All the popular kids letting their phones guide them to the party don’t even know this kind of path exists. That’s what you get when you don’t think for yourself.”

On the main street, a taxi was being lifted like a mikoshi.

Without knowledge of paths like this, you couldn’t even get around on foot right now.

“Heh heh. The knowledge you pick up living as a Level 0 comes in handy sometimes,” said Aogami.

“Yeah, you can never have enough escape routes to use when some bored delinquents decide to chase you around.”

Now that they were out of the crowd, they found themselves able to observe it more objectively.

They watched the crowd after climbing the stairs to the top of an unnatural rise in the path, probably built up to avoid gas pipes and high-voltage lines.

People were even crowding the top of an elevated train track.

“A miniskirt, a bare midriff, and thigh armor? Hokaze-san, is that supposed to be an armored cheerleader?”

“No, Kobayashi-san, I am obviously the legendary Soaring Knight who flies through the sky and fights with a spear. The character is doing a collab with Gekota at a...I believe it is called a convenience store? Hee hee hee. These ringlets do come in handy from time to time☆”

“How is that supposed to be the ultimate gear? Is it one of those things where your strength grows the more of the heavy seals you remove!?”

“I really don’t want to hear that from the person dressed as a demon character who only wears black tape over her naked body yet has added an apron to try and pretend she is a wholesome homemaker. ...It’s probably just that the closed environment death game is so complicated people lose interest before you’re done explaining the basic rules, but I really wish they would find a less indecent way to sell the character merchandise.”

“Oh, dear. And the entrance exams are coming up soon.”

“I’m going to lie around in the kotatsu all day and no one can stop me!!”

It was honestly bad for his heart.

His distance from them didn’t really matter.

This space didn’t exist on the phone GPS maps, but it wasn’t actually a sanctuary protected by a thick wall. It simply hadn’t been discovered yet. A great crowd could flood in at any moment.

“Wow, look at all the people on the tracks there. Even the trains must be stopped.”

“Wow is right. Check out all those cute little middle schoolers showing off their navels and thighs. If they’re gonna give me some delicious eye candy, they can stop the trains all day for all I care.”

Kamijou and Aogami descended the arch-like stairs to continue along the narrow private pathway.

But their safe zone did not last for long. Once they left the office grounds, they were out on another major street.

In place of fireworks, someone had ignited car smoke bombs and started twirling them through the air.

They weren’t low-temperature fireworks, so they made a lot of noise.

“Anyway, I had no idea you could ask at the hospital reception counter and they’d arrange to have your luggage sent to your dorm.”

“I was worried with the martial law and all, but the delivery industry still seems to be working. We need to thank those delivery drones that can get through even when the ground routes are blocked like this.”

But these life-or-death issues apparently didn’t matter much to the boy who lived for moe.

“More importantly, did you see that ultra-rare cosplayer dressed as Biritta-san? I’m ready to weep for joy. I can’t imagine how hard it was to get that right. I mean, that demon girl only has black tape to cover up her naughty bits. Or maybe the hard part is cleaning up after removing it? Now that I’d love to help with.”

“What are you talking about? Biritta-san?”

“She’s the girl in this year’s winter anime who dies in the first five minutes of the closed room death game. Her death was so unnecessarily well animated that she’s become the latest meme online. The animation team really poured their heart and soul into it since it was in the first episode, so she gets slaughtered with the smoothest animation you’ve ever seen. Seriously, don’t search for ‘Biritta Burrito’. The rest of us were traumatized, but you don’t have to be.”

Oh, so was she the character the show kills off right away to make it clear people know are actually going to die in the show? Kamijou stared into the distance. What a waste. He felt like there were better ways to shock the audience without actually reducing the number of characters, like having her brought back with CPR or revealing it was actually a human-sized hunk of raw meat thrown into the tiger’s cage.

“Okay, say cheese. My phone’s the newest, so I’ll share the photo with you all.”

“Wait a second, Saten-san. …Kongou-san, we’re taking a photo, so try to cover your chest more when you lean over like that. I can see something I shouldn’t!”

“Oh, this isn’t my areola – it’s a rash on my boob. I think it’s the costume’s material making the skin turn all pink. Maybe I have a metal allergy?”

“Um, I wouldn’t know.”

“Seriously though, say cheese! We’ve gotta get a photo of us with this VIP armored car we flipped when it tried to run off!! See, this is what we can do! We don’t need esper powers! With 20 of us together, flipping a 1ton car is nothing☆”

“Oh, no! But I’m supposed to be with Judgment!”

A bunch of girls in revealing costumes were gathered around a single phone to take a commemorative photo.

They wiped their faces with sports towels, drank tea from plastic bottles, and laughed cheerfully together.

Ordinarily, these girls would be chatting peacefully. And a lot of their costumes were about as revealing as a bikini, leaving a lot of skin and curves exposed, so Kamijou got the feeling he would get yelled at if he stared.

At the same time, he had also seen them shouting while they flipped Anti-Skill vehicles.

They were enjoying the freedom of their winter break, but they would also fiercely attack anyone who tried to interrupt them even a little.

Peaceful did not always mean harmless.

They may have been like a swarm of hornets guarding their large nest of peace.

“The world is ending.”

The 15cm war god hiding in Kamijou’s coat collar whispered that in his ear.

The partiers were bad, but the ones trying to stop them weren’t much better.

“Fweeeeet!! What are you doing, you uncivilized barbarians!? And why are you abandoning Academy City’s rules right along with them, Uihar-wahhh!!?”

“But, Shirai-san, a bunch of suspicious gold bars spilled out of that car’s trunk after we flipped it. We may have actually busted a crime.”

The Judgment members were dressed in strange costumes too. Like the busty glasses girl in bikini armor or the twintails girl dressed as a necromancer in a cloak with only thick chains worn below it. This wasn’t quite the same as the Dr. Police who showed up on that giant Shibuya Scramble Crossing during Halloween. The lines were blurry, like they were simply being influenced by the overall atmosphere.

Shirai Kuroko was still managing to resist thanks to her strong sense of justice, but the glasses girl with a high STR value was viewing the riot crippling the city’s ability to function with exasperation, like she had partially accepted the state of affairs already.

Othinus stared into the distance.

She was more bothered by the moral collapse than by the actual destruction.

“These people treating Academy City like their own secret base will bring down the city. And the world economy supported by science will go down with it. They can’t suppress this with force like they do with demonstrations. Not when it’s backed by Alice’s charisma. This is being fueled from the outside. Aiming a gun at these students will not stop them, nor will actually firing on them. So like I said, the only way to stop this is to slaughter every last Academy City resident with Academy City’s guns. Win or lose, the city is done for.”

It was a shift – a distortion – in morals.

Even if captured Index lost her life now, would it be caught up in this bizarre scenery and converted into something that was considered “for the best”?

If so, Kamijou had to settle this before that happened.

He had to draw on everything he had and face Alice.

He understood what had to be done.

“But…”

Misaka Mikoto had died. ******** ****** had died too. (…? Why did I think there was someone else there?)

Aradia and the Bologna Succubus had been killed before his eyes.

Mut Thebes had likely been killed instantly.

That had only been fixed thanks to Good, Old Mary’s resurrection and they were all staying in the frog-faced doctor’s hospital, but what had happened was still etched deep into Kamijou’s heart.

Talent, aptitude, skill, equipment, hierarchy, and rank were no guarantee.

Anyone could die at any time.

That was an obvious but absolute rule.

And this time he would be facing Alice Anotherbible, who had easily slaughtered Christian Rosencreutz, the very person who had caused all that death. That simple firepower was bad enough, but there was a more fundamental condition he had to keep in mind.

As a regular Transcendent, Good, Old Mary could not defeat an irregularity like Alice. That was plain as day from the fact that her resurrection had failed to save Anna from the Shrink Drink which had only contained a portion of Alice’s power.

They already had the proof.

The resurrection would not work on anyone killed by Alice.

Or to put it in a simpler, more direct, way, if anyone died this time, it really was over for them.

“…”

Kamijou had to rethink this.

Could he really ask this of them under these circumstances?

Who would be eliminated from this unpredictable death game?

Mikoto and the others might decide they wanted to take part and the Transcendents might think it was their responsibility, but was getting them involved really the right thing to do? No, this wasn’t about right or wrong. The question was whether or not Kamijou himself could let it happen.

This wouldn’t be his own misfortune.

So many people he knew well would experience even greater misfortune than him. Could he really let that happen?

This wasn’t shogi – it was chess.

No matter how insignificant or crucial – no matter how it happened – the taken pieces were permanently gone.

Part 7

They were in Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany.

Specifically, they had snuck into a library closed for the night to search through the old books there.

Mina Mathers and Dion Fortune had been searching for the Licht Liebe Leben Temple, but the situation was changing rapidly.

Christian Rosencreutz was dead.

Baby Lilith was giggling happily and playing with the tarot cards on the table. Instead of the ordinary arcana, this was the Crowley-style Thoth Tarot which used some different symbols.

Something was unusual about the arrangements of cards she produced. They were clearly missing some of the major symbols.

The Tower, which meant doom.

The Art, which indicated the accomplishment of a phenomenon.

But at the same time, cards indicating danger kept showing up. Which meant nothing was over yet.

Like the Hanged Man, a symbol of defeat, and the Aeon, the final choice.

These cards kept gathering in concerning places.

It would actually have been a relief for to simply see Death.

Black Cat Witch Mina Mathers sighed expressionlessly.

“So CRC has left the game board after being defeated by Alice Anotherbible. That makes our trip to Nuremberg a waste of time.”

“I want to die… Look at this horrific amount of books we read through. Is this what I get for actually working hard for once?”

Dion Fortune collapsed into a heap on the same table.

If Christian Rosencreutz had been who the legends said, they would have had a hard time believing the news of his death. But from what they had heard, it sounded like that silver young man was in fact someone else entirely: Johann Valentin Andreae.

So the legend had been nothing more than a legend.

As people who were half legend themselves, that possibility could be easy to forget. The Golden cabal really did exist, so they had a tendency to believe other legends also existed.

Mina Mathers and Dion Fortune here were not the same as Aleister. They were not the same magicians who had been active during the 19th and early 20th centuries, but they could use nearly all the same thought processes and spells as the real ones.

So however he came to be, they had believed without evidence that anyone calling himself CRC would have the same specs.

Mina Mathers sighed softly.

“Then our next stop is England. The focus is now on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, so there isn’t much more we can do here in Germany.”

“Ehh!? If we’ve finished our work, can’t we go get a hotel!? Here in Nuremberg!? I don’t expect much in the way of a hot spa culture here in Germany, but we’re in the country of local beers, sausages, and potatoes. Stuffing ourselves with local delicacies and diving into a huge bed sounds like the perfect luxury to end our day with!!”

“It isn’t too late to catch a plane. And work which did not result in anything can hardly be called ‘finished’, my idiot of a student.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m the one being smart here! The idiot here is you for letting Japan’s toxic work culture corrupt you! My stupid idiot of a teacher needs a lesson in keeping a healthy work-life bal- owww!? Did you really just s-scratch me with your claws!?”

Part 8

“You’re late, fool.”

When Kamijou finally made it back to his dorm, Anna Sprengel was waiting for him like she was supposed to be there. The mystery little girl without a passport or residency papers was sitting on his bed and she patted the space next to her with her little hand.

He decided it was best not to ask why.

“Left to your own devices, you’re going to get involved with this Alice stuff, aren’t you? Both to stop the way she’s distorting the world around her and to take back that nun. But instead of rushing in blindly, wouldn’t it be better to have the help of someone who knows a thing or two about the Bridge Builders Cabal and Alice herself?”

“Hey, I never said anything about taking you with me.”

“What, afraid I won’t be much help against Alice herself when the Shrink Drink that borrowed only a fraction of her power nearly killed me?”

“No, I’m worried about you.”

That shut Anna up.

But only briefly.

She soon resumed speaking.

“If you want to rescue the hostage, you should wait for the perfect time to act.”

“Eh? Hold on, you want me to wait? Can’t we at least discuss this first!? Index was captured and Alice could make her move at any time.”

“Fool, there’s no point in trying to include Alice’s capriciousness in your calculations. The grimoire library could be killed a second from now, or she and Alice could be the best of friends a year from now. The one thing we do know is that we only have one shot at making a rescue. Screw that up and there’s no ‘could be’ about it. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum will surely die. And in a way that prevents Good, Old Mary’s resurrection from working.”

“…”

“As a wicked woman who prefers to discard her ordinary emotions to think more rationally, I would weigh the time against the necessary work and recommend you focus on the greatest quality rescue. Aiming for speed will only cause the quality to drop below the minimum line. Are you sure you want to waste your one and only shot at this?”

“Hmph. You at least understands the basics of being a trickster.” Othinus sighed softly and crossed her arms atop the glass table. “Hey, human. Don’t look so lost. Stop assuming any lost time is exacerbating the situation. Rushing in fueled by righteous anger, kicking down the door, and rescuing the hostage only happens in the movies. Real special forces who can’t afford to let a single life be lost will build a set identical to the target location and spend hours practicing there before going for the real mission.”

All the information was accurate.

Yet as the data piled up, there was no hope to be found.

The farther they went, the deeper they sank.

Othinus cast an appraising look over at Anna.

“Do you have a concrete vision of how this rescue could play out?”

“We make our move during the night.” Miss Sprengel gave a wicked snort of laughter. “Around midnight would probably be best. Which means I would want us to finish gathering intel before then.”

“Won’t they suspect an attack in the night?”

“H.T. Trismegistus will of course, but Alice is essentially a small girl. I highly doubt she will still be awake at that hour.”

“Hm.”

“Needless to say, the ideal scenario is where we secure the site before Alice wakes up. But that might not work out, so we should also simulate who Alice will attack if she does wake up. Simply saying she’s in an unstable state and impossible to predict isn’t good enough to give the go-ahead on this rescue operation.”

“C’mon, you don’t have to hold back with this god of deception. What nasty trick are you actually considering, villain?”

“Really, you have to ask? I would like to manipulate grumpy Alice so she defeats H.T. Trismegistus for us. Did you think I would even attempt a direct confrontation? If you have more than one powerful foe to deal with, then pit them against each other so they wear each other down.”

“Yes, those probably are our best bet for Plans A and B, but I’d like a Plan C just in case.”

Kamijou got to thinking while listening to those two speaking and grinning wickedly.

A switch capable of destroying the entire world was being toyed with by a capricious girl too young to stay up late.

Humanity really could be destroyed by this.

Kamijou frowned.

“Okay, we know the time, but what about the place?”

“It will be somewhere linked to you, fool,” stated Anna.

Kamijou looked taken aback, but Anna wasn’t just guessing.

“That’s the only reason Alice would still be fixated on Academy City. And if she had gone elsewhere, the Acute Kotatsu Syndrome would be slowly destroying a city or country outside of Academy City. To be honest, I saw this dorm as a likely candidate. Not to mention the hospital you were recovering in. But Alice hasn’t shown at either place. What other candidates can you think of?”

“…”

“Where would Alice want to be, or where would she have dreamed of going at some point? She will be waiting for you there. If an idea occurred to you when I asked that question, that’s probably the answer.”

Part 9

The darkness of night covered the world.

The costumed crowds filled the main streets, but they did not reach the skyscraper rooftops.

Or, in this case, the narrow catwalk along the building’s front face allowing maintenance access to the giant sign.

Anna Kingsford was there smiling but also looking unusually beaten up.

Most notably, her retro glasses had cracked lenses.

“Good grief. You have improved your skills while I was gone, Aleister. Still, ⛽ing your creativity with 😡 and hatred will narrow your focus. It can be productive, but if you aren’t careful, you can end up developing self-centered 🪄 and eroding your 🔗 to the world around you.”

“You have some nerve saying that after getting yourself killed and then provoking me like that… Are all teachers untrustworthy garbage?”

“Not what I would expect to hear from the person who created Academy City,” said the golden retriever.

He pulled out a thick cigar with his thin metal arm only for it to be snatched away by Kingsford again. That kind of casual habit and mannerism helped convince Aleister she really was alive and this wasn’t some kind of bad joke.

Anna Kingsford was alive.

“Don’t get all 😢 on me.”

“There are no tears in my eyes.”

“Now, let’s get ⬇️ to business.”

The expert added a sharp edge to her words.

The mood changed.

For a true magician, was their interior identical to the world around them?

Anna replaced her broken glasses with a spare pair as she spoke.

“I am only a preserved corpse. If the great threat to the 🌍 has vanished and my service is ❌ longer necessary, I see ❌ really reason to stick around. I can return to being an ordinary corpse. Yet I have unnaturally remained in this city even if it meant reconnecting my severed torso and neck. That means something out there is worth my remaining.”

“Are you saying this didn’t end with Anna Sprengel and Christian Rosencreutz?”

“Rosencreutz was only a side issue. The 🌉 Builders Cabal dragged him out onto the stage as their savior, but he is ❌ the real threat. The center of that cabal has always been someone else: Alice Anotherbible. She has never even tried to hide it.”

“What are you saying is going to happen?”

“He will ☠️.”

Aleister nearly missed it.

Anna Kingsford stated it so naturally.

With sadness in her eyes.

But has that expert ever said anything wrong before?

“Do you think Kamijou Touma can overcome this because of who he is? Do you believe for ❌ good reason that he will find some way pull through yet again? But things are different this time. Because he is the one who chose the current conditions.”

“…”

“So I am sorry to say, he really will ☠️ this time. …And at the very least, he alone cannot change that. No matter what.”

Part 10

The plan was to attack Alice Anotherbible somewhere in Academy City.

The attack would happen at midnight tonight.

The location would be somewhere linked to Kamijou Touma. The pointy-haired boy’s own experience and knowledge would be more helpful there than any magical knowledge.

Anna Sprengel did not know how much existing magic could accomplish against the monster named Alice. Since the Rosicrucian founder, Christian Rosencreutz, had been killed so easily, it would be nearly impossible to defeat Alice with only Rosicrucian spells.

But if Alice was not stopped, Academy City would be overwhelmed by rioting crowds.

It didn’t matter if Alice meant for it to happen or not.

A day before, Miss Sprengel might have snorted with laughter and stirred up more trouble. She would have eliminated all thoughts of morals or good sense so no one on either side could predict her actions, allowing her to achieve results beyond her abilities. That was just how that wicked woman worked.

But things had changed.

“…”

It was January 6 at 10 PM.

A battle against Alice would be bad enough on its own, but needing to rescue a hostage too made it an exceedingly delicate matter. They had to gather intel and then finalize their plan before making their move, so it was about time to get started. Anna walked through the small room and knocked on the door to the bathroom the pointy-haired boy was using as a bed.

No response.

Puzzled, she called for him and then tore open the door, lock and all, with her small hand.

There was no one inside.

“Fool…?”

Part 11

Kamijou Touma walked through the city night.

He had come to a standstill less than 100m from his dorm.

“Who are you dressed as?”

“S.T.A.R.K.S. from Zombie Hazard! Bang, bang, kaboom!!”

“Is that the movie version of the uniform? Now that’s a deep cut!”

A cosplay group was dressed up all in black as some kind of special forces. They were laughing and aiming their weapons around, but those were probably real revolvers and grenade launchers they had stolen from Anti-Skill.

They were all smiling.

They meant no harm.

All of this would prevent Academy City from functioning, which would in turn cause the world economy to collapse.

The ones dooming the world had no idea they were doing it.

All of the streets were crammed full of crowds. The density was worse than a rush hour train, so if you tried to push through the crowd, it would take you all night to make it 50m. But occasionally, there were strange gaps. Those gaps usually meant the middle and high schoolers were riding around on massive tanks or armored vehicles like they were tourist carts. None of them had licenses, so they were running right over the guardrails and street signs.

Some of them must have swiped the backpack-sized communication equipment and then stolen the necessary sync settings to fly military drones around with their phones.

The bronze statue of some school’s principal had been dragged out to the center of the road where they lifted it up like a mikoshi.

“(If this is all due to Alice’s influence, I can’t let her misbehave any more.)”

Charging in blindly would only get Kamijou repelled by the solid wall of people.

If the crowds grew violent or hit him with one of their vehicles, he would die.

Not all deaths were of the dramatic variety.

“(I can’t leave Index with her either. Dammit, they’re both just innocent gluttons. Is there really no way for them to get along and work together!?)”

The crowd parted as an armored vehicle moved out ahead on a joyride.

Kamijou ran out from behind cover to make use of that gap.

And…

“(I feel bad sneaking out on Anna and Othinus, but I have a really bad feeling about this one. It’d be one thing if this was shogi, but I can’t ask anyone to hep when it’s chess. Good, Old Mary’s resurrection doesn’t work on lethal injuries caused by Alice. I just can’t justify involving those two in-)”

“How stupid are you, human?”

“Gwah!?”

Kamijou was so surprised his feet got tangled up below him and he nearly fell to the cold ground.

The 15cm god gave him an exasperated look from her usual spot on his shoulder.

“I’ve been around you long enough to know what you’ll do. The real question is how you keep managing to sneak out on that nun when she’s supposed to have a perfect memory.”

“Y-you’re here to stop me?”

“From doing what?”

“From saving Alice.”

Silence followed.

Othinus didn’t immediately snap at him at times like this.

She used her silence to get him to continue talking.

“I mean, maybe Alice is causing all of this. And Index is in danger. Maybe these rioters will destroy the city if nothing is done and maybe Alice could destroy the entire world on a whim.”

“…”

“But is that really her fault? It isn’t, is it?”

Kamijou’s eyes dropped to his right hand.

He still felt a dull impact there. The feeling of punching Christian Rosencreutz with the giant Dragon Strike still lingered there.

That wasn’t the same as an ordinary fistfight. That power took lives. It gave up on people and robbed them of their future possibilities.

He didn’t want to do that to Alice.

Even if the world might end tonight.

Seeing Alice dead had left him an empty shell.

He hadn’t been able to think.

In a way, it had been his inability to overturn that death that had led him to pour everything he had into fighting CRC and saving Anna Sprengel.

But.

If she was still alive…

If he could still reach out his hand to her…

Alice Anotherbible’s story was not yet over. He could still correct her mistakes and save Index while he was at it.

He thought back to when Index and Alice had eaten breakfast in his dorm.

They could all be together like that again.

(And that’s worth risking my life for.)

“The Bridge Builders Cabal put Alice where she is, Rosencreutz killed her, and I gave up on her… You can find any number of other causes. Maybe I do have to settle things with Alice, but that doesn’t have to mean killing her. Whatever it takes, I will end this so Index is safe and Alice is smiling. She’s allowed to see no hope left in this world and want to do something about that and I’m allowed to feel some responsibility there! Because I’m the one who pushed Alice to this point!!”

“Sounds good to me.”

Othinus gave in surprisingly fast.

Kamijou was actually taken aback.

“What’s the confusion? I’m your understander. Alice Anotherbible is definitely the center point of all the trouble that started around Christmas last year. The way things are, the grimoire library will die at some point. No matter how stupid this current trouble looks, if we ignore it, there is no stopping Academy City from collapsing and world economy along with it. ...But does that mean killing Alice is the right move? As a war god, I won’t hesitate to say yes, but you don’t agree, do you, human?”

“…And you’re okay with that?”

“You caused me so much trouble over saving that villain Anna and now you ask if I’m okay with what you’re doing? This is well past discussing what I’m okay with and you know it.”

“…”

“The fate of the world hangs in the balance. Make the wrong move and you will never see the Index Librorum Prohibitorum again. Worse, tomorrow might never come. ...But all of that is between you and Alice...and that nun, I guess. So make your choice based on what you want to do. Nothing else is going to change what happens here.”

Kamijou smiled a little.

And then he resumed running.

“Where are you headed?” asked Othinus from his shoulder.

“School.”

That place was closely linked to Kamijou.

Anna had said his dorm was a likely candidate, but that was wrong.

Alice had already seen his dorm.

She would be more interested in visiting a place she hadn’t been before.

“I bet Alice wanted to go there at least once!!”

For some reason, this statement earned an exasperated sigh from Othinus.

“Who does she think she is, following the same logic as me?” griped the war god who had once fully destroyed the world.

Something had to be done.

He would save Index and he would stop Alice’s misbehavior.

He wouldn’t treat that girl like a monster.

He had to make sure someone he cared for did not harm someone else he cared for.

Whatever form it would take, the time had come to settle things with Alice Anotherbible.

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.

As 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 beyond 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.”

Part 4

District 7 had a certain iron bridge.

While most main streets were aflood with costumed rioters, that bridge alone didn’t have even a single car driving on it. Although it may have been better to say they weren’t allowed to.

Only a few people occupied the bridge.

It was Transcendents vs. Transcendents.

Given what spells they had, they didn’t even need to cross the bridge on foot and there wasn’t just one route leading to “A Certain High School” that had become the center point of the world’s distortions.

Still, they had all chosen to gather here.

No one had told them to, but here they all were.

Perhaps making the conscious decision to cross a river acted as a sort of ritual.

“Well, we did decide to help him because we could easily predict this would happen.”

“So from the cabal’s perspective, are we traitors to Alice?”

“These opportunists scattered the instant Alice died and came back as soon as they learned she was alive again. Their word doesn’t carry enough weight to stop the goddess of witches.”

Seeing Aradia give a snort, Good, Old Mary shook her head in her large hat.

“You certainly have taken a liking to that boy.”

“Wha-buh-no- I have no idea what you mean by that.”

“That isn’t very convincing after the stammering.”

“Well, by any normal reckoning, I don’t see how any number of us regular Transcendents could hope to win against Alice Anotherbible herself.”

The Bologna Succubus smiled bitterly and held her hands behind her head.

That much was true.

But their actions didn’t seem to agree.

“Yet here we are. I’d like to take that as our real answer.”

“The fight against CRC actually helped us in a way, Aradia. We no longer need to argue over our stance as individual Transcendents concerning that boy.”

“And I’d like to know why you think I’d agree with you on this!”

“That seems self-evident, you naughty girl.”

“Aye. She’s like the naughty girl next door who tries and fails to put on an intellectual front.”

“Aradia is naughty?”

The final comment from the expressionless brown-skinned girl made Aradia hang her head in despair.

“That’s just too much. Why am I being mocked by the goddess who instantly fell in love with that boy so hard you could practically hear the ‘kyun☆’ sound effect?”

“The fact that the punishment expert isn’t doing anything should be enough to know we don’t deserve any punishment.”

“Hm?”

Aradia, Bologna Succubus, Good, Old Mary, and head-tilting Mut Thebes had gathered to travel toward a certain high school, but they all stopped speaking to look in the same direction.

Because they weren’t the only ones here.

“Which tells me they’re the ones who need a beating.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.

Vidhatri.

2nd Saga.

Several other shadowy figures were gathered on the opposite side of the bridge. They were all Transcendents. By abandoning the magic name which had acted as the pillar of their lives, those monsters had dressed up in their chosen god’s appearance and abilities, they wielded powerful spells, and they had gained enough strength to take on the entire magic side single-handedly.

The global power balance had shifted.

The balance just barely maintained by leaving the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in the center of the science side had clearly grown unbalanced.

Then again, the distortion had reached a critical point from the moment Alice Anotherbible remained in this city.

The Bologna Succubus grimaced after seeing one member of the enemy group.

One of them was particularly unpleasant.

“Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.”

“Kyahah☆ Thanks for the shout-out!”

The girl with fluffy blonde hair (who looked around 16 if her outward appearance was to be believed) gave a flirty smile. Unnaturally so.

“What’s an old lady like you doing with twintails and double chignons?”

“You should really count the candles on your birthday cake before calling anyone old.”

She had a beautiful face.

And that was all you could see.

She looked like a teru-teru bozu, or like she was wearing one of the towels that used rubber bands to cover everything below the head during pool class. Her girly silhouette was obscured by a coat-like explosion-resistant suit made by attaching thick copper armor plates to a sturdy cloth.

Or maybe she looked more like an iron maiden.

The original Blodeuwedd was a flower goddess or fairy from Celtic mythology. When the goddess Arianrhod cursed a male god to never marry, an impossibly beautiful but clearly artificial woman was created from flowers and other plants to be his bride. The created woman boasted dazzling beauty, but her internal settings were altered, turning her into a wanton traitor who colluded with a lover to murder her husband. Horror stories of an artificial monster created with too-advanced technology rebelling or running wild were not exclusive to modern SF. That was in fact a historical and traditional genre dating back to BCE times.

This Transcendent had chosen to dress up as that goddess.

And her salvation condition was…

“Saving all the lonely and unloved, wasn’t it?”

“And what if it is?”

“You’re like an animal that inundates people with condescending love and leaves them no room for reprisal. I’ve always hated you because you’re more like a succubus than I am.”

The Bologna Succubus was answered by a smile.

Blodeuwedd may have agreed with her.

“Hwa ha ha☆ Love is meant to come from an outside source. And why shouldn’t I provide you with enough of that sweet nectar you could drown in it? And since one of us has to kill the other anyway, this seems better than sharing tear-jerking stories while we slug it out.”

“On that we agree.”

But that was only Blodeuwedd the Bouquet and the Bologna Succubus’s personal beef.

The other Transcendents had no reason to go along with it.

So…

“Alice has broken.”

She looked to be around 25. She had black hair, brown skin, and a model’s figure with a height of probably 180cm. Her red eyes bent.

Vidhatri.

In Indian mythology, that goddess lived underground and controlled fate in the form of weaving. She always accompanied the goddess of creation, freely controlled the path of the entire world, and just like the goddess she was paired with, ultimately became no more than an alternate name for the top level gods like Brahma and Vishnu due to her great ability. She was a symbol who had been rearranged for human purposes.

This performer had chosen to dress up in that role.

Her icy voice seemed to slice through the air with words alone.

“The first time, it was due to Anna Sprengel’s scheming, but the real damage was done by Kamijou Touma. His ignorance caused Alice to fully shatter. I will not allow him near Alice again. It is a miracle she managed to get back on her feet at all, so I will not let you cause even more damage.”

“In other words,” sighed Aradia.

In place of a broom, she was holding a black and yellow barrier she must have torn away from a railway crossing somewhere.

She rested that on her shoulder and sent over a look containing a generous helping of scorn.

“You’re siding with Alice?”

“Yes.”

“Liar. You’re just afraid of anything happening that could threaten or eliminate the foundation of your power as Transcendents.”

Silence followed.

Which was as good as confirmation.

One weakness of open-source programs was malicious third parties taking advantage of the ability to freely view the internal code to analyze it and develop viruses and malware specialized for that program.

So the Transcendents would be in serious trouble if a third party were to collect Alice, who was their original version. Especially if that third party was one of the despicable winners like Anna Sprengel or Aleister Crowley. Maybe it would be a poison and maybe it would be a curse, but there was a risk of Alice being used to develop a countermeasure capable of eradicating the entire Alice series of magicians.

Most likely, they were acting now to prevent Kamijou Touma from unwittingly causing such an occurrence.

That would mean the only Transcendent who actually cared about Alice Anotherbible was H.T. Trismegistus. That gloomy, inconspicuous believer in common sense had certainly found a way to make his presence felt. If only it weren’t by being a world-destroying pedophile.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet did not deny her weakness.

“We have our own salvation conditions to worry about. Keh heh heh☆ And we cannot afford to lose our power as Transcendents. For their sakes.”

“And now you’re using them as an excuse, you slut.”

“Then what do you suggest?”

“How about I trample this stubborn dandelion growing from the a crack in the ground and continue on to Alice?”

With a pop, the thick copper coat covering Blodeuwedd the Bouquet from neck to toe opened to the sides like double doors. The thick locks lined up vertically down the front noisily unlocked one by one.

A dazzling light emerged.

Along with a sweet aroma so powerful it was like a thick wall.

The inside of the coat had been turned into a terrarium full of colorful flowers. That garden of eternal spring was contained in a glass container and supported by appropriate amounts of water, nutrients, electric heaters, and UV LED lights.

She herself wore only a frilly apron over her dazzlingly pale skin.

The sleeves extending from the metal coat had only been remote-controlled arms.

“Quite the showy transformation she’s got there,” said the Bologna Succubus.

“She may see that as releasing her true power. We do need to display our divinity or devilishness in an obvious form to convince ourselves as much as anyone, but is this really her interpretation of superhuman beauty? Does she think the amount of exposed skin is the only thing that matters? How vulgar,” said Aradia, sounding icy.

In her pursuit of higher morals in knowledge and miracles, that young witch was not actually used to being viewed in a sexual light (by younger boys), so it didn’t occur to her to consider how her own outfit played into this discussion.

The girl – who looked unhealthily skinny rather than sexy – grinned.

And with all the appropriate pieces present in her appearance, that sweet-smelling person spoke.

“My, my. Have you forgotten what it is we do?”

“…”

It sounded a lot like a crashing wave.

“Ah ha ha☆ Alice isn’t the only one. The rest of us regular Transcendents also have enough charisma for our very presence to distort human society and create new trends. Maybe you could call it a flaw of dressing up as a god. However, I am exceptional in that regard. In this one field, my ability is even more obvious than Alice’s.”

That they were on a bridge over a large river wasn’t enough to explain it.

This noise was unusual.

The dark water of the January night was stirring with no connection to the water or wind current.

Stirring violently.

“I am loved by all living things. And not just people – birds, land animals, bugs, and fish too.”

Something crashed into the large bridge. They were the black bass, bluegills, and other troublemakers of the river environment. They were small and common creatures with nothing divine about them, but tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands had gathered to form a giant wave.

These lives were so easily manipulated.

Red and silver.

They had enough force and mass to possibly break a bridge weighing more than ten thousand tons.

“What do you think of my Total Courtship?☆”

Using cries, pheromones, dances, and colors, she could seduce any living creature, including humans. Simply put, she was a courtship expert.

Was she already drunk on victory?

Euphoric, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet raised her voice.

“Ha ha☆ Love them, demon of the night. Love every last one of them. But there are plenty of environmentally destructive species that are hated just because there are too many of them!!!”

“Cold Mistress.”

“Agh!?”

Seeing that spell replace her euphoria with pain was quite satisfying.

Part 5

Everything set into motion all at once.

Like water and oil bursting from the surface of a heated frying pan.

Several Transcendents quickly moved back to reassess the distance between them, others moved in like arrows to prevent that, and several smaller battlefields formed within the overall group battle.

Part 6

A quake-like vibration disturbed the dark river.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet could make a weapon out of the vast city full of pests and vermin, but she wasn’t the only one responsible.

As the fish rushed in as a great wave threatening to swallow up the bridge from the side, they were stopped by a three-legged object the size of a stadium.

“Tribikos,” whispered Good, Old Mary, manager of experimental tools.

She was facing Vidhatri, Indian goddess of fate. Their eyes happened to meet and she took a breath as their piece of time and space was cut away from the confused battlefield. At times, rhythm and timing meant everything in a chaotic battle. Good, Old Mary was bound by Vidhatri in the same way.

Their clash was inevitable now.

Good, Old Mary addressed the perfectly-proportioned model wearing a red sari.

“Vidhatri, mama is serious. Mama will crush you. So what will you do?”

“Are you sure you want me to take this seriously?”

“Feel free. Mama is a fount of mercy, after all. You decided to hold onto your Transcendent power even if it meant shamefully forgetting all about your salvation condition. Mama may be facing a despicable slut, but it would be downright cruel to kill you before you can even use the trump card you have been greedily holding in reserve.”

The brown beauty suddenly grew more arms.

No, it was more accurate to say she was standing back to back with had a doll of nearly 2m. It was even larger than Vidhatri’s model-like figure. While she was stiflingly captivating and sensual, this was a life-size ball-jointed doll made of a hard, smooth material.

Was she actually wearing it on her back with thick shoulder straps?

It had apparently been contained inside a rectangular bag.

White thread and black hair was tangled around its artificial fingers.

The Indian fate goddess Vidhatri did not exist on her own. She and the creation goddess Dhatri were always depicted as a pair.

By weaving white and black threads, those gods determined the fate of the entire world, making them extremely powerful.

Threads.

Weaving.

And a doll.

Good, Old Mary sighed as she rapidly analyzed these things to predict what her opponent could do.

“A supermodel figure and a red backpack? Those doesn’t fit together at all.”

“This is no more than a leather bag marketed for all ages.”

Good, Old Mary’s vision slanted.

She tasted blood.

Her chest was sticky and red.

“…?”

A bluegill was to blame.

It was one of the tens of thousands of fish Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had summoned half as a joke. Just as a speck of lead could be deadly when moving fast enough, the fish could embed itself in human flesh if it tore through the air with enough speed.

Good, Old Mary grabbed the intruder flopping around while embedded in her chest wound and pulled it out. This felt different from a sharp blade. The open gills and countless scales caught on the wound, spreading it and rubbing in deadly germs.

But something else bothered her more.

How had the fish even made it this far?

She looked up to see the great wall was missing.

The Tribikos.

In the brief time she had looked away, her stadium-sized trump card had completely vanished.

Like it had been nightmarishly spirited away.

“You must understand.”

With the sounds of springs operating, the ball-joint doll Dhatri’s arms split and lots of pulleys and latches emerged. It formed a loom.

Extremely thin pieces of white and black danced about.

They were threads.

No, was some of that her own black hair?

“Vidhatri controls fate and Dhatri creates all things. Those two goddesses determine all that happens through the weaving of the white and black. Good, Old Mary, you may be able to create anything with your alchemy, but I decide how many different options are included in that ‘anything’.”

“I see.”

“I am Vidhatri. When paired with my partner goddess, I control fate and creation. I am the Transcendent who classifies the world based on my preferences and saves all of those that meet my preferences.”

The threads of fate were woven together to create the warp and the weft of the world.

Was this what it meant to confront someone who had control over all things?

“You are the same as mama. You contain a portion of the mystical power you borrowed from Alice, but you have failed to make full use of it. You are no more than an imperfect performer.”

“Say what you like. In this field, Good, Old Mary, I can easily erase your very existence. I must only intentionally omit all mention of you.”

Good, Old Mary didn’t even have time to hear her out.

With the breakwater gone, the fish crashed into the bridge like a silver wave.

Part 7

A flapping sound echoed through the schoolyard night.

Something flitted by the right corner of Kamijou’s vision. It was a monster with the body of a lion and the head and wings of a bird of prey.

It was a deadly creature mixed in with the other characters in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

This was the Gryphon.

“!?”

That specialist in swift destruction and cleanup was only released when Alice Anotherbible was bored with the world. He was like switching life to double speed. He had in fact bitten off Kamijou’s right arm at the District 12 consulate.

Kamijou didn’t have time to do anything.

As soon as the great wings spread wide, the trauma surfaced from the depths of Kamijou’s mind. Reflexively holding his hands up to guard himself was an obvious mistake. By flapping his wings and converting the power of the air into forward momentum, the truck-sized Gryphon charged straight toward him.

Kamijou heard a deafening roar.

But he felt no pain.

A pink color sliced sharply through the night air.

It had appeared out of nowhere.

The flamingo bat held back the Gryphon’s massive beak and even slid the enemy’s attack to the side before delivering a powerful blow in return.

The Gryphon was noisily knocked to the ground.

“You?” said Kamijou in wonderment.

He reached out without thinking and the hovering pink bat slipped away from him. He felt like he was trying to grab a leaf in the water.

Maybe it wanted to avoid Imagine Breaker.

Even so, it flew slowly but playfully around Kamijou before clashing with the Gryphon’s talons when the creature attempted another attack. Orange sparks burst into the night air.

The flamingo bat wasn’t alone. Several hedgehogs much larger than real ones were bouncing around near Kamijou’s feet. Shortly after he noticed them, they exploded. More accurately, they formed long swords made of countless spines and they struck. They all rushed in to attack the emaciated multi-armed doll that had appeared. The enemy was made of bones. It was a full skeleton made of a transparent crystal-like material.

Kamijou had seen this during the clash with the dark side on December 29.

Wasn’t that the Executioner that took people’s heads off on the Queen of Heart’s command?

The distance between them was little comfort. That thing did not use its physical strength to decapitate. It took the heads off with an attack more like an invisible curse.

The battle was fought between different monsters found in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Unlike with the Shrink Drink, these had not been converted into a tool by an outside magician – these were the pure and untouched toys. Most likely, a high school boy with nothing but a special right hand going for him wouldn’t have been able to stand up to even one of them. If he had directly clashed with these things, he would have been killed instantly before he could reach Alice herself.

But Kamijou still lived.

Beings controlled by Alice were battling with other beings controlled by Alice.

Maybe this meant she was conflicted.

Regardless, Kamijou wasn’t without allies.

Even if Alice herself was mercilessly attacking the intruder.

“Alice is waiting,” said Othinus, sounding exasperated.

“Yeah.”

“I wonder what the grimoire library is doing. Well, she was specially designed as an anti-magic combat specialist. Since she had her ability to fight directly intentionally stripped from her, I would hope she excels in other survival strategies.”

“Like what?”

“Negotiating herself a position in the enemy group, or making herself so adorable the enemy would prefer to protect her than exact violence on her.”

“…”

“What’s that silent look supposed to mean? Hey, did you just mouth ‘not a chance’? I was providing an optimistic viewpoint to assist with your mental health.”

He couldn’t picture it.

Index was the last person he could imagine doing something so Machiavellian.

Her perfect memory would let her memorize the position of every single playing card or mahjong tile, but he had a feeling she would still lose to a normal person in those games…

On the other hand, there were miracles that could occur because of her complete lack of scheming, but the same could be said of Alice.

Being unable to predict enemy or ally presented an extreme challenge. Especially when it came to rescuing a hostage.

Othinus gave a disgusted look from his shoulder.

“Does she carry the infinite possibilities of a child? Damn her. She’s physically preventing herself from making a choice and limiting herself to one course of action. At this rate, there will be no obvious distinction between enemy and ally. A million organizations and plans will spring forth from Alice and a million armies will clash in a nonsensical battle. Humanity will be dragged into it and destroyed without any say in the matter.”

“We’ll settle this before that happens.”

Kamijou spoke quietly, but with great conviction.

“Alice is only being so aggressive because she can’t trust anyone around her, but that’s because people taught her that the future is something to be feared. I think I was one of those people. I hurt her. So I need to reach her and tell her directly that life isn’t all that bad.”

“But will she listen? Human, have you forgotten that she abducted the grimoire library? Not to mention that your right hand has burdened you with such an unreasonable amount of misfortune. Has your life really been a happy enough thing for you to argue for the goodness of the world?”

“What if I put it like this? Luck is all in how you look at it. Sure I’m an unfortunate guy, but I don’t have to feel inferior to special people like you and Alice. Just because I started a lot farther back from the starting line doesn’t mean I can’t reach the goal.”

That statement carried a lot more weight coming from the boy who had dealt with misfortune for so long.

Because he was the boy who had overcome millions or billions of deaths to slowly approach Othinus during his direct confrontation with that Magic God.

The flamingo bat swooshed through the air and stopped right in front of Kamijou’s face. The hedgehogs exhaled through their noses at his feet. There were also a large caterpillar and piglet he didn’t recognize. Where did they appear in the story and what did they do? He wished he had read more of that story.

They wordlessly told him they would watch his back.

But that must have been one of Alice’s opinions.

The gym noisily split apart from within. An enormous fluffy cat emerged. It gave a displeased growl and glared at Kamijou with open hostility. It was shaped like an adorably round pet, but it was the size of a kaiju. Kamijou felt something other than fear crawling along his spine. His pride and dignity as a person were gone if he was slowly tormented to death by that thing’s kitty punches.

Humor felt horribly out of place when combine with death.

This one was different. It was clearly far more powerful than the others.

Kamijou gulped.

“What is that? The cat in Alice is, um…what was it again?”

“Do not become the kind of person who needs his phone to know anything.” Othinus sounded exasperated. “That’s probably Dinah, Alice’s pet cat. Butterflies and birds talk like normal in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but Dinah is the one being who is nearly invincible and unbeatable. She only appears in the parts of the story that take place in the real world, but she possesses such deadly power that the other characters tremble in fear and run away at the mere mention of her name.”

This was another opinion.

It was a very real thing Alice thought.

There was definitely a part of Alice that wanted to kill Kamijou.

But there wasn’t time for fear.

Kamijou hadn’t been unfairly dragged down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. He had chosen for himself to set foot in this deadly world.

“Hm, so her coat is a mixture of black and white.”

“Is that important?”

“As much as Alice bragged about Dinah, she never mentions what type of cat she is. Since Dinah is caring for a white kitten and a black kitten in Through the Looking Glass, you can infer she is one color or the other, but this appears to be using the idea that Dinah provided both kittens’ colors without needing the father’s help.”

“Is that really so important when a giant cat is about to kill us!?”

Index was here too. And had been for far longer than Kamijou.

And more than that, was this really what Alice wanted to create and proliferate?

“This is no more than the dolls and toys controlled by mere fragments of thoughts. We have yet to see the real Alice Anotherbible, human!”

“Yeah, I know. Alice is waiting for me. That’s why I came here, so I’m not turning back now!!”

Part 8

Alice was inside the school building.

This high school had been destroyed, but no one could match the construction technology of Academy City, the city that once constructed a space elevator in almost no time at all. Once the soundproofing sheets were removed, the building would be ready for classes to begin.

This was the pointy-haired boy’s high school.

Did Alice have a reason for choosing this location?

Not even the young butler who had served her for so long could tell what she was thinking. She was a great individual. H.T. Trismegistus always pursued common sense, so perhaps she had always been beyond his ability to predict.

“This place will soon change into a place more suited for Alice.”

H.T. Trismegistus gave a rectangular protein bar a skeptical look before finally tossing it aside.

Grimoire Library Index was with him.

Alice apparently still wanted the hostage alive.

“At this point, I doubt it even matters if Alice wants it or not. She is the whole of the Bridge Builders Cabal. Alice’s presence appears to have put the people of this city into a sort of high. This will probably eventually spread beyond Academy City. And the resonance from person to person will spread Alice’s garden.”

The young butler wobbled a bit to the side.

A red liquid flowed from his tailcoat’s sleeve to his fingertips.

Where had he gone and who had he fought since Index last saw him?

Regardless, H.T. Trismegistus had a smile on his face.

“It shouldn’t take long for the world to be dyed in her color.”

“Are you saying the world will be flooded with the Gryphon and Executioner I saw before?”

“Maybe so, but that is a minor issue.”

He sounded confident.

“As long as CRC is reborn.”

There was a hint of intoxication in his voice.

“If I can only bring back Christian Rosencreutz properly this time, common sense says he will save the world. As hard as it is to accept, his identity and real name are a trivial matter. I only need to prepare myself to accept his true meaning.”

“You can’t complete that large scale rebirth ceremony on your own.”

“As long as I have Alice as the prototype, I can create as many regular Transcendents as necessary. But aside from that, once word of Alice’s survival gets out, the scattered Transcendents should regather. I can hold an audition to decide whether to reuse them or to train up new performers.”

“…”

No matter how you sliced it, the Bridge Builders Cabal was built around Alice. The Transcendents had scattered after learning of her death, so the return of their “Another Bible” would draw them back in like iron sand to a magnet.

Without any thought to what that would cause.

After all, Transcendents were the magicians who had been unable to make a decision under their own responsibility, so they carried no magic name and instead dressed up as gods while leaving the salvation of the world in someone else’s hands. They were a group with no self initiative. Which wouldn’t be too much of a problem if not for the great power each of them carried.

“But that won’t work,” insisted Index.

The young butler glared at her, but she glared right back.

“You must know that already.”

“Know what exactly?”

“You can bring CRC back with your own knowledge. That isn’t a reason to want or be afraid of losing the knowledge of the grimoires in my head.”

“…”

“You’re afraid of Alice,” stated the nun.

Wasn’t one of her duties to identify people’s inner worries from the things they said?

“You aren’t certain she is the same Alice Anotherbible as the one you used to serve. That’s why you keep leaning on your past successes. Because at least until you brought back CRC, your cabal was winning. You were in a position to make decisions for the entire world. So you’re trying to turn the clock back to that time so you can stay on the rails of success this time around. Even though that isn’t actually a real option.”

“Did no one ever tell you libraries are supposed to be quiet?”

“I don’t know the real reason you captured me. Maybe you want a spell to determine if Alice really is still Alice and maybe you know she’s broken and you want to use my grimoires to fix her.”

“I said shut up.”

Part 9

Several thick shockwave-like impacts rang out in quick succession and the flamingo bat crashed into the flower bed alongside the walking path.

It hadn’t even bought them a few minutes, but it was enough.

Kamijou thanked it and tackled his shoulder into the glass entranceway door.

It broke shockingly easily.

Unable to stop his momentum, he tumbled inside, where the world changed yet again.

The change wasn’t visible.

But all sound from outside was shut out.

The dark school building was so silent his ears ached. He had shattered the glass in the entrance door, but he doubted he could have returned to the visible schoolyard if he tried. He had a feeling he would be deflected or thrown back. Not that he had any interest in testing this theory.

The presence of Imagine Breaker suddenly felt a lot less significant.

It was a reference point for the world.

And so it could negate any and all illusions.

But that meant it had no effect on anything that could distort even that reference point.

For example, his right hand hadn’t been able to destroy the infinite worlds created by Othinus.

Alice could absorb the world to that extent.

She simply hadn’t done so before now.

“What...is this place?”

Everything looked normal, but that was no reason to relax.

Kamijou felt like something was lurking on the other side of an invisible barrier.

Something he couldn’t see and that spelled doom if he ever confirmed its presence.

He sensed that collection of terror.

Most likely, not even the pursuing Gryphon and Executioner could enter here.

Not to mention the flamingo bat and hedgehogs who had taken his side.

Had they been deflected or thrown back?

Again, he had no interest in testing that theory.

He sighed once, got up, and faced forward.

“Okay,” said Othinus from his shoulder. “This looks like a greater challenge than Crete’s Labyrinth containing a bull-headed monster, but what’s your plan?”

“I suppose there’s no point in trying to predict where in the school Index is being held… That wouldn’t be Index’s choice and Alice’s own preferences wouldn’t come into it. So our best bet is probably predicting Alice’s preferences and going where we think she would be.”

“And where exactly would that be?”

“My classroom,” replied Kamijou without delay.

This wasn’t logic – his own gut instinct was enough. Where would little Alice most want to go in a school she had never before visited? That question was enough to reach the answer. And this was a method only Kamijou could use.

Several female voices whispered from the ducts in the ceiling. A gaze which spoke volumes peered out from the gap in the metal door to the fire hose. When Kamijou turned to look at the janitorial locker or a gap in the wall he had glimpsed out of the corner of his eye, something small skittered out of view.

So much was making its presence known, but it was all strangely ephemeral.

He felt like his mind would break if he didn’t stay strong and tell himself those things really did exist. He had to accept it as is and not question it. Logic was an impediment here. Once he started wondering if something was a hallucination dreamt up by his mind, he would end up circling forever in the same place. He would be stranded in a 1m square.

Othinus spoke up in partial exasperation.

“This is just like the flamingo bat and the Gryphon. They were more obvious, but the presences and scenery around us are also being controlled by Alice’s inner conflict.”

“…”

“Human, if Alice wanted to invite you in, she would only need to come out herself. And if she wanted to reject you, she could have turned the doors and windows into monsters or just created a thick wall. She’s hidden and created several suspicious locations to get you lost, but there is a proper path, isn’t there? That proves she hasn’t settled on a plan. …That she can create all of her different plans at once shows how scarily powerful she is, though.”

Kamijou heard a solid thunk.

It came from the darkness.

This one was a footstep. His heart naturally raised the alarm. A black-haired young butler appeared. It was H.T. Trismegistus.

“Hey,” complained Othinus. “Stop lurking in the shadows. I know Alice leaves more of an impression, but we just about missed you. Anyway, are you the Trismegistus we saw at the consulate before? Or are you one of the understudies?”

“Common sense says I can leave that up to your imagination.”

With a creaking sound, the wallpaper peeled away.

Mice emerged.

They were the size of sports bags and there was an entire swarm of them.

What meaning did those characters have within Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? Kamijou didn’t have time to think about it.

A pleasant “slap!” rang out.

It happened too fast for Kamijou to see.

He simply noticed a flash of light from the young butler’s hand and then the hunks of flesh split in two like some kind of joke. There was no blood. They lost all color, became dark shadows, and faded into nothingness.

It could be hard to tell how impressive that had been, but he had been attacked by dozens of beings on the same level as the flamingo bat and the Gryphon. He could probably kill Kamijou on the spot with ease.

“…”

“This way.”

The black-haired butler turned around.

Apparently he was leading Kamijou somewhere.

“Unlike during your battle against Rosencreutz, you should not expect any support from the upper levels of this scientific city this time. I had a feeling they would trouble Alice, so I attacked them at the very top.”

“Wait, but the Board Chairman right now is- you beat him!?”

“I did not need to win,” said H.T. Trismegistus. His presence here alive was enough to know how that had turned out. “I only needed to restrict his movements for the time being. Fortunately, I noticed he is receiving electronic support from his choker. Destroying the nearby communications equipment and other electronics to create signal noise and then burying him in rubble was enough to immobilize him.”

Kamijou gulped.

H.T. Trismegistus really was a Transcendent.

Anyone who knew the #1 knew that plan was much easier said than done.

The very ability to act on a plan when faced with him was unusual.

Was this H.T. Trismegistus’s true power?

Or had Alice Anotherbible linked to something that distorted the world?

While walking through a hallway with whisperings, mutterings, and rustlings beckoning toward the various gaps, a sharp light would occasionally flash from H.T. Trismegistus’s hand. The sword drawn from his cane easily sliced through the monsters wriggling out from the gaps in the walls and from behind posters, so Kamijou nervously followed after him.

Should he really have been killing those things?

After all, wasn’t everything here – enemy or ally – being subconsciously controlled by Alice? Those were the raw toys – no reasonable magician had remade them into proper tools like the Shrink Drink. They were on the same level as the “Drink Me”. Kamijou recalled a column in a corner of a textbook telling of an overstressed child causing the poltergeist phenomenon in the small territory of their home. What did it mean for Alice when a third party cut down and eliminated part of her inner conflict?

H.T. Trismegistus remained entirely composed as he spoke.

“Common sense says this should go without saying, but I am not your ally. I have always sided with the Killers when it comes to you and nothing has changed there. You do not fit my salvation condition and provoking Alice will only further distort the world.”

“Then why are you helping me?”

“Are you incapable of using common sense?”

The young butler sounded exasperated.

He smiled thinly as he continued.

“Common sense says the most logical way to swiftly and surely take your life is to have you meet Alice Anotherbible as soon as possible.”

“…”

“I see you do not deny this.”

His words were polite but as sharp as any blade.

What exactly was Alice to this butler?

“Common sense says you did this. And as a result, Alice was stupefied to the point she left herself undefended, allowing Rosencreutz to kill her. It all leads back to you. …What will happen when Alice sees you now? Nothing could be more obvious.”

They climbed the stairs.

They avoided the clear slime dripping from the ceiling and arrived in front of one of the many doors lining the hallway.

That door led to Kamijou’s classroom.

It was a perfectly ordinary door that would open when slid to the side.

But it carried more weight than an audience chamber where a king waited.

“Please enter,” was all H.T. Trismegistus said.

It felt like something from a dream.

Othinus had been calling everything into question before, but even she had gone quiet now.

Kamijou felt strangely compelled to continue.

This path was like a contradictory nightmare where he created the very thing he did not want to see.

Invisible rails had been laid out before him, so he could not leave this course.

And he didn’t even have a chance to find this strange.

He should have known opening this door would lead to grave danger. Not opening it was always an option, or he could wait to open it until he had worked up sufficient resolve and made ample preparations.

Nevertheless, Kamijou stood before the sliding door.

He grabbed the handle and opened it.

Like it was nothing.

Part 10

As soon as he slid the door open, he heard a sharp “pop!!” directly in front of him.

He immediately ducked down and froze up as something grazed his spiky hair.

He hesitantly grabbed some of it to find it was colorful streamers.

The scent of gunpowder came from the conical party popper in the little girl’s hands.

“Tah dah!!”

Alice Anotherbible stood there.

Her beaming smile was so unchanged Kamijou could scarcely believe it.

She was smiling.

Yes, Alice had a face.

That shouldn’t have been unusual, but it clashed with how he had last seen her.

The classroom looked normal too. The desks were lined up in orderly rows and there was no graffiti on the chalkboard. Had she been politely waiting for him here? While wondering which of the desks was Kamijou’s?

“Teacher, the girl is glad you made it!!”

On that signal, the lights came on.

That wasn’t limited to the classroom. Lights filled every window in the building, the gym that had supposedly collapsed when enormous Dinah made her appearance was enveloped in light, and the outdoor lights illuminated the schoolyard and pool.

The school had returned to life.

No, the new term had yet to start, so it was more accurate to say it breathed its first breath.

Dammit, Anna. I thought you said Alice would be asleep. But here she is wide awake like an excited kid on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve.

Or had the Miss Sprengel’s prediction been so wrong because of Alice’s power?

Yes…

“Al...ice?”

“That’s right.”

The little girl responded with a volleyball-sized hole in the center of her face.

The classroom behind her was visible through the hole and it was impossible to tell where her eyes or mouth were, but she still spoke the same as always.

“Ah ha ha! Is something the matter, teacher?”

“…”

Yes.

Come to think of it, why had they been so sure Alice had broken after having her head fatally crushed?

Because she killed Christian Rosencreutz?

Because the headless girl had cackled?

Had everyone forgotten that Rosencreutz killed her first? Was it that strange and incomprehensible for someone to consider taking revenge on the person who killed them if he was walking around free and unpunished? And forget niceties about the emptiness of revenge. In the moment someone achieved their vengeance, wouldn’t anyone laugh at being freed from all that pressure?

Alice was normal.

She had simply done some physically unusual things like getting up after being killed and tearing through someone with her hands. But the thought processes leading to those extraordinary actions were entirely ordinary.

Kamijou did still have a question.

(But why is Alice here?)

“The girl could have gone home and sulked, but she couldn’t just leave you, teacher. So she came to give you a piece of advice!”

“Advice...for me?”

“Yes!”

When the grotesque girl nodded, her adorable face had returned.

Kamijou didn’t know which version was correct.

It was possible he had never actually seen her real face.

“Teacher, the time has come.”

“?”

“The predetermined limit is approaching. Do you not remember what we said? The girl already told you what would happen.”

“…Wait.”

He had been wrong.

He had misread this.

Alice Anotherbible was the same as always. In fact, why had it seemed strange for her to do bizarre things? Had he ever once been able to determine the true meaning behind any of her whims?

It was normal for her to be unpredictable.

If Alice wasn’t behaving normally, it wasn’t something inside her that was responsible. Something in the world outside her was making her behave that way.

She was concerned.

Uncharacteristically so.

Then what was causing it? She knew what was rushing her and making her act this way. That meant this wasn’t an unknown phenomenon – the answer already existed in the past.

Kamijou had stepped on a landmine.

But when?

“Did something happen when I was fighting Rosencreutz?”

“Nope.”

Yes, it wouldn’t have been when he fought Christian Rosencreutz. Alice was already dead by then, so for better or for worse, nothing could have occurred between her and Kamijou then.

Because he hadn’t arrived in time.

Because he hadn’t saved her.

If Alice wasn’t going to accuse him for that, then it wasn’t that either.

“Then was it when we stole the Predator Octopus and-”

“Nope. What even is that?”

For the same reason, it couldn’t have been when he was fleeing through Academy City with Anna Sprengel and Aradia. Mut Thebes and the Shrink Drink that borrowed a portion of Alice’s power had been a threat, but Alice had already been in a daze by then. In all likelihood, she had been far away working with H.T. Trismegistus, Good, Old Mary, and the rest of the Bridge Builders Cabal to complete the ceremony to resurrect CRC.

Alice had filled the Shrink Drink spear with her power before all of that.

In that case…

“If it was before that, was it at the consulate?”

“Not even close.”

The Bridge Builders Cabal creating their consulate in District 12 had been a major turning point.

Alice had cried there.

Because she and Kamijou had definitively parted ways.

But Alice had been hurt there, not Kamijou. Since she had so readily forgiven him here, that wouldn’t be the root of the problem.

The current problem came from elsewhere.

“Then does it go all the way back to Shibuya?”

“Buzz. Wrong. The girl really wanted to visit Japan’s Shibuya.”

Before that would mean Shibuya on December 31, but that was meaningless. Only regular Transcendents like the Bologna Succubus, Aradia, and Good, Old Mary had appeared there. As the only person (supposedly) capable of controlling Alice, the Rescuers and Killers had fought over what to do with him, but Alice herself hadn’t been present.

Then.

Was it even earlier?

“Hold on. You don’t mean…?”

“It was when we first met.”

December 29.

A series of incidents had started with an accident involving Overhunting, a prisoner transport train carrying several dark side criminals.

That was when Alice had first wielded her power in Academy City.

What had happened between her and Kamijou then?

“The girl asked to make sure. She didn’t do this against your will. You told the girl to do it and she told you it was a bad idea, but you made the final decision. Which is why the girl asked you if that was what you really wanted.”

On that day, at that time, Alice had tried to forcibly alter the structure of the incident. To create a resolution with no deaths despite several dark side monsters being on the run, she had forcibly created a false truth in which the original culprit was Frillsand #G.

“Now.”

“Please guide the girl, teacher. She wants to go on an adventure inside you.”

Kamijou had rejected it.

He had told her to bring back the real truth, no matter how harsh it might be.

“Then return everything to the way it was, Alice. If I use your power like this, I can never truly reach the end.”

“Umm, are you sure you want that?”

That was when he had said it.

“Do you remember now?”

Some future decision wasn’t going to determine the ending.

He had long since passed the final branch.

Yes.

“You will die.”

“That doesn’t change my answer.”

He had said it.

There was no denying it.

On the very first day he met Alice Anotherbible, Kamijou Touma had said it himself. He had known Alice was dangerous, but he had rejected her idea and changed course. He had ignored her advice and demanded it.

When that horrific incident had ended, he had assumed he had gotten through safely.

But he had been wrong.

Alice had never said when he would die.

It was a prophecy.

Like Nostradamus, astrology, a dream that comes true, letting a spirit possess you to answer questions, or having an aquarium octopus predict the results of soccer matches.

It didn’t really matter what.

It could be scientific or not and it could even violate the rules of magic. If the theory had been proposed at any time throughout history, Alice could build the bridge to make it real. Once a ridiculous theory began to operate, she could toy with it until it was hers.

It may have been less concerning if she had said she simply knew it to be true with no reason behind it. Because no matter how often someone’s intuition was correct, it could always be wrong.

But that excuse didn’t exist here.

The logic behind it was nonsensical, but it did exist.

If Alice said it would happen, then it was guaranteed to happen.

Why had he let himself relax?

She had never said a single word about what hour, minute, second, or rotation of the Earth it would happen on.

Now was still an available option.

Alice’s prophecy was not over yet. The predetermined outcome was still coming.

“…”

Then there was nothing more he could do.

Struggle all he wanted, he couldn’t recover from taking the wrong turn so long ago.

Kamijou Touma’s life had been over from the day he first met Alice.

Their difference in power was just that great.

Of course, Alice hadn’t intended to harm him.

He had chosen it himself. She had warned him not to, but he hadn’t believed in the absoluteness of her prophecy, he hadn’t given much thought at all to his own life, and he had simply assumed everything would work out the way it always did. Even though things were different this time. If he had known then how extraordinary Alice was, he never would have seen it that way.

But a choice was a choice.

He had already used up his one and only ticket.

He had walked through the crossroads, so there was no way left to avoid his predetermined death.

Part 11

Did you think that statement didn’t mean much?

It meant more than anything.

Alice Anotherbible’s power is absolute. That does not apply only to direct violence.

Chapter 3: Prophecy – Last_Branch(of_Die).

Part 1

Late at night in District 7, Anna Kingsford stood at the very top of an enormous crane.

She stood tall and simply directed her gaze overhead.

The night sky seemed blotted out by the lights of the city, but viewing the clear stars in the sky gave this expert access to more information than searching the world linked together by fiber optics.

And she only used this for just causes.

Which was what made her an expert.

(The ⭐s are in place. That boy should become aware of the branch he passed by now.)

She sighed.

That was a complete side issue.

For one, Kingsford had never directly met Kamijou Touma. Which made him no more than a stranger in the same city as her.

(But awareness does ❌ allow him to change it. It may be his life, but he can ❌ change the decision he made on a branch he has already passed. Just like CRC passed a crucial branch and was defeated in a ⚔️ he should have won easily. The greatest enemy in an individual’s life is their own karma.)

“Not that he can ignore it now that he knows.”

But she would not just abandon him.

That expert did not consider her own interests, the state of the battle, or even whether or not she knew the boy.

He was a complete stranger?

So what?

If anyone was troubled, uncertain, or suffering, she was already taking action.

Anna Kingsford had perfected that way of life.

A fool who had yet to reach that point spoke to her.

It was the human named Aleister.

“Where are you going, Kingsford?”

“To serve others.”

“That’s my job. There’s no reason for you to continue fighting!!”

Even her battle against Rosencreutz had essentially been a miracle.

She had not actually won the battle. CRC could instantly search for any information about the world, but he had just so happened to overlook the fact that Anna Kingsford was a preserved corpse. If not for that, he would have destroyed her more thoroughly and she couldn’t have recovered.

She was reliant on unpredictable miracles.

Even a magician who mastered the field to the point of being known as an expert would lose eventually.

She had to know that.

Alice Anotherbible had easily crushed and killed CRC and so thoroughly eliminated him from the world that he could never recover. She was a true monster.

Kingsford had not reached that point.

She had to understand that. She wielded great power using the correspondence between the microcosm within a person and the macrocosm of the physical world around them, so she would have thoroughly analyzed herself in that way.

But the woman with a proper understanding of magic’s essence smiled as she responded.

She was accurately viewing her own fate, but she didn’t hesitate to speak.

“This is 👋.”

“But!!”

Contact with the new Board Chairman had been lost.

They couldn’t hope for anymore cooperation, so they had to settle this on their own.

The situation was clearly worsening and Alice was even more powerful than CRC. Certain death awaited Kingsford. Alice waited in a land that brought death to all who set foot there.

“Aleister. You must have understood from the beginning that I am ❌ more than a preserved corpse. You are only using ⚙️s to move an already ☠️ body around, so I never was alive. I escaped the previous ⚔️ intact by pure luck, but ❌ even that can save me next time. This ☠️ body will find only ☠️.”

“…”

As an expert who understood the secrets of the world of the living and the world of the dead, she was not too attached to her own life.

The only ones who clung to life with such ugly desperation were the half-baked magicians who remained fixated on this one life.

Still, he understood in his own inexpert way.

Anna Kingsford was an expert through and through. She didn’t even think of clinging to life or staying in this world forever.

She was only interested in eliminating the unknown threat making someone suffer before her eyes.

She didn’t even consider whether or not she had ever met that person.

She had no intention of returning. Her win condition didn’t even take that into account.

She was an example of how far people could go if they mastered their field.

“What was my role meant to be? I was supposed to be a trump 🃏 for use against the unbeatable Anna Sprengel. Now that Miss Sprengel has been freed from her wicked ⛓️ and that ⚔️ need ❌ be fought, my purpose is complete.”

Aleister had no response to that.

Because she was exactly right.

This goodbye could not be avoided. This was Aleister Crowley’s reward for wielding superhuman knowledge, doing what no one else could do, and enduring trials normal people would never even know existed. Kingsford was correct that the greatest enemy in an individual’s life was their own karma.

He was already in checkmate.

And yet…

“That just means I have to do the work myself.”

He understood it intellectually but he still tried to fight it. Was that because Aleister was an inexpert and ugly human?

But you must never forget that, while that human had accumulated a lot of bad karma, he would never stop struggling for his own ends.

“Aleister Crowley officially died in 1947 and stubbornly clung to life until he actually died battling Great Demon Coronzon. I’m as dead as you are. If someone has to save that boy, I’ll do it. I can do it if necessary!! And I’m better suited for that role. The wickedest man in the world should be standing up to the world even after death, not a pure and proper holy woman!”

“But you are still fixated on this 🌍.”

She shot back.

A true expert did not bother arguing about secrets.

She had already seen into the depths of his mind that even he wasn’t consciously aware existed.

She did it naturally.

And kindly.

“Conscious or ❌, you hijacked that great 👿’s body to cling to life. Either you still have something you want to do in this 🌍, or there is something you are ❌ yet willing to give up here. Dying for him is not the same as living with him. It never can be. Either way, it is too soon for you. Everyone dies eventually, so there is no need to rush toward ☠️. Live out your life first, Aleister. You can prepare yourself for ☠️ once you have done that.”

Kingsford smiled as she said this.

Smiled faintly.

Aleister lightly clenched his empty right hand.

He felt the pressure of a staff so twisted his fingertips tingled at the mere sight of it.

Special numbers scattered from his hand like sparks.

“I’ve had enough. What if I said I would stop you by force?”

“I would knock you aside and continue on my way.”

“Kh.”

She didn’t even hesitate.

She said it gently, like it was a foregone conclusion.

Kingsford used no more than words to overpower the victor of the Battle of Blythe Road.

He couldn’t say she couldn’t do it. He was already well past his limit with Alice Anotherbible and Anna Sprengel. He had only so insolently decided to make use of this preserved corpse because he couldn’t handle them.

Trickery, betrayal, surprise attacks, intrigue, and – when necessary – direct confrontation.

He had used every trick in the book to drive the world’s greatest magic cabal to destruction at the Battle of Blythe Road, but none of it would work here.

He could not win in a direct one-on-one confrontation.

If Anna Kingsford went all out, Aleister had no way of opposing her. He knew she would simply prove how inexpert he really was. He would never manage to get his hands on the switch hidden below her skin.

“I do ❌ want you to ☠️ here. No number of previous ☠️s is any reason to accept ☠️ next time. So I will use all of my power to defeat you here. Soundly enough that you do ❌ have enough strength left to go out and ☠️.”

That was contradictory.

Kingsford kept saying she would not let people die so easily, but she was about to head out for her own death.

She was saying she would use up all of the tickets provided for her as a thinking and moving preserved corpse.

But that gentle smile of hers made the contradictory premise and conclusion seem to fit together with no problem.

It was strange really.

Was this the essence of magic known only to the few true experts – a position Aleister had yet to reach? This was the human-made miracle of protecting everyone you encountered and spreading smiles everywhere you went.

He couldn’t stop her.

This wasn’t the divine cosplay spell that simply let one dress up in the appearance and abilities of a god. Nor was it the reverse logic where one tried to divulge the workings of the world to rebel against the god they so hated.

With a quiet bump, the failure of a student buried his face in Anna Kingsford’s chest.

He sniffled like a child.

“I don’t want you to die.”

“I know.”

“You shouldn’t have to die.”

“That I met someone who feels that way and that I inspired these feelings in you, who felt betrayed by everything, tells me that I have won a victory against this 🌍.”

Clear drops spilled out.

Anna Kingsford held the lost child’s head to her chest and whispered gently to him.

She stroked the inexpert one’s blonde hair like a mother.

“I think you did have need of my preserved corpse. Especially on December 31. If no one had stopped Anna Sprengel, the 🌍 would have been thrown into chaos before CRC could even be reborn.”

One by one, the expert explained everything to the fool.

She taught him some terribly simple things that no one had ever before taught that human.

Not his parents who had thought meaningless strictness was a virtue, not his teachers who had failed to correct the social problem left in their care, and not the Golden magicians who had abandoned their pursuit of knowledge to spend their time on ugly internecine conflict.

Even though these should have been the first things he was taught.

“But you must ❌ toy with life. Because you are powerful enough to do so with ease, you have ❌ way to keep yourself focused other than using pure willpower to manage yourself. The ☠️ have their own dignity. Humans remain human even in ☠️. You ensured your own pain from the moment you disrespected the ☠️ for the sake of the living. Improve yourself, Aleister. If you do ❌ fear taking the long way around to avoid pain, there is much you can learn. Just like any magician.”

“…”

“And do ❌ worry, lost child of the living. You will not be alone. As an expert, I will do whatever it takes to save the one you care for. Even if it requires every trick in the 📖. So there is ❌ chance you will be crushed by loneliness.”

Part 2

Kamijou Touma heard a wet sound.

It came from inside his body.

He thought he must have imagined it.

But the sound of rotting flesh falling away was so distinct.

“…”

He was dying.

He was certain of it in that brightly lit classroom.

It was an unavoidable fate. No one had cruelly pushed him to this point. There was a chance he could have survived had he given up on saving others, but he had chosen this path for himself while on the dark side.

He felt an odd scraping.

Was that the wound from Aradia he felt in his right side and spine? The odd feeling in his neck would be H.T. Trismegistus.

Everything felt normal-ish, but that lack of extreme pain only terrified him more.

Something was definitely happening to him.

He couldn’t tell what was happening inside him. He only felt a vague disgust. It was like his silent organs were changing color without sending out any kind of alert. Death. The end. An invisible pressure. A cruel time bomb with the LCD timer omitted.

“Human…”

Even Magic God Othinus only groaned that word before falling silent.

There was no recovering from this.

“You will die.”

“That doesn’t change my answer.”

Thinking back, he had made that fateful choice when that god wasn’t with him.

He had carelessly made such an important decision on his own.

Of course he had screwed it up.

Everything had been wrong from the beginning.

How many times had he availed himself of Good, Old Mary’s resurrection? In other words, how many times had he died on the way here? In just a few days’ time? Maybe you would survive certain death, as if by mistake, once over your long life. But he seriously doubted those bugs or errors would occur in his favor every single time like that. Not to mention that he was plagued by misfortune due to his right hand, so lady luck would never smile on him in that way.

The flaw wasn’t in Good, Old Mary.

Bringing him back to life even once was more than enough of a miracle.

The problem was him having her use it so many times in such a short period of time without considering the usage limits.

He couldn’t fool death any longer.

The corner of the mask was starting to peel away.

“Hey, teacher, why do you think the girl wanted the grimoire library?”

“…”

“Because the girl wanted to use the library’s knowledge to do something she couldn’t? To correct her broken head? No, the girl is already perfect and unbreakable. The answer is simple. The girl wanted to help you after you passed the final branch. The girl wanted to search through a library of all the world’s knowledge to find some method still remaining in this world. That was all.”

“…………………………………………………………………………………”

He had passed the fatal branch.

He had foolishly chosen to cross it and he had arrived at a mistaken destination.

Which one of them was really in need of help?

“If the girl found it, she would use it. If not, she would give up, deciding the world was just too shallow. There are billions of people in this wide world, so if not even one of them has a way to save you, it means they didn’t try hard enough and then the girl would have to punish them all with her power.”

H.T. Trismegistus had said he had always been one of the Killers.

He had said the swiftest and surest way to take Kamijou’s life was to have him meet Alice. He had been right.

It didn’t help the deathly ill to fear the doctor’s prognosis. Kamijou understood that. They had come down with the illness much earlier. The real problem may have been from their exercise, diet, or other life habits.

Nevertheless, that fear was real.

The tables had been turned.

The symbol of death had shifted from Alice Anotherbible to another girl Kamijou knew quite well.

White. Pure white. The all-knowing nun who was always by his side.

He felt no pain.

He wasn’t even given the right to writhe in agony as certain death approached.

The pressure mounted.

Like he was being slowly crushed by an incredibly thick invisible wall.

Which was more horrific: being turned to red and black spray by the world’s fastest linear motor train before you could even feel the fear, or having your body gradually drawn into the wheel of a local train as it pulled into the station?

With no malice, the girl spoke with an innocent smile.

“Well, teacher? Let’s go see the grimoire library! The girl can’t diagnose you, so we can have the all-knowing nun do that part☆”

Part 3

H.T. Trismegistus watched from a distance.

He had known Alice Anotherbible longer than any other member of the Bridge Builders Cabal. After all, he was the one who had discovered her in the modern day.

But there was a lot the young butler did not know.

Most notably, he did not know her origins.

Where was she born, where was she raised, where was she altered, and from where had she fled?

He didn’t have a single answer.

It had only been pure coincidence when he found her in a city abroad. She was in the shadows of a roofless shelter. She had tremendous value as an open-source spell, but he had not realized this until well after taking in the wandering girl.

At first, she had been like a wild animal.

She had gone so wild he had questioned what she had even eaten to survive.

It was nothing more than luck that Alice hadn’t known how to use her power. If she had chaotically wielded her power as Alice Anotherbible at that point, she probably would have destroyed the entire world.

Alice was smiling innocently next to someone else.

She wore an expression he had never seen before.

That much was fine.

The young man simply obeyed. Of course, this was for himself, not for Alice. H.T. Trismegistus was a Transcendent who had abandoned his magic name to dress up in the appearance and abilities of a god. He could only view the world and choose who to save based on the salvation condition he had set for himself. So the first person he had to save was not himself or Alice.

He was the guardian deity of common sense.

He protected the people against anything that altered people’s sense of normalcy: war, rioting, disaster, loneliness, disease, famine, financial panic.

He sought a master who would save the world.

Or to put it another way, the only person he would allow to distort common sense was the bearer of the paradigm shift that would guide all of humanity to the next stage. He could not leave this in the hands of just any old charismatic leader.

Was Christian Rosencreutz the one he sought?

Or was it Alice Anotherbible?

His objective was clear, but a question occurred to the young butler.

He knew his salvation condition.

But who exactly did he want to save?

Part 4

On the District 7 bridge, the Transcendents vs. Transcendents battle was trending in one direction.

“Tch! Good, Old Mary!?” shouted Aradia, holding onto the railroad crossing barrier she had borrowed as a broom and clinging to the side of a steel beam distributing the bridge’s weight.

But the woman collapsed on the cold asphalt did not respond.

That was a bad sign.

Good, Old Mary was the foundation of their recovery magic, but she had suddenly collapsed.

This was worse than simply losing one of their number.

Vidhatri, the brown-skinned woman with model-like proportions, shook the arms and legs of the Dhatri ball-joint doll she wore on her back, intricately manipulating white thread and black hair as she whispered to Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.

“Do you still need support?”

“Nope. Everyone can do their own thing. Instead of assigning as many Transcendents as we can to attacking a single point, it would help me if we increased the total number of attack points to fill up the processing power of their minds.”

Something hovered through the air.

Some teacups and saucers were slowly flying around

Those were symbols from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The Bologna Succubus noticed and groaned while breathing heavily with her hands down on the ground.

“Kssshhh, they’ve made it this far?”

“Ha ha☆ Of course they have.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet smiled calmly.

A single smile on that extremely lovable face summoned a great black dragon into the night sky. Was the twisting serpent actually tens of thousands of starlings? They were not venomous, but in great enough numbers, any creature was a threat to human life.

The instant the Bologna Succubus looked up at the black dragon filling the entire night sky, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet took a large step forward.

Without hesitation.

“Kh.”

Now was not the time to be overwhelmed by the intimidating numbers.

The Bologna Succubus flapped her wings to gather as much air as possible.

She launched herself straight to the side.

The coat-shaped blast-resistant suit covered in thick metal panels snapped shut like a ferocious beast’s jaws. It was a sweet-smelling iron maiden. The air inside that isolated space was compressed with no outlet, producing a strange sound much like a steam engine.

The Bologna Succubus had just barely avoided it.

If she had carelessly stayed in place, she would have been “devoured”.

Instead of feeling fear, she gathered offensive power between her brows.

(Argh. I can’t let this chaos be unleashed on the boy’s city.)

What were Kamijou Touma and Alice Anotherbible doing right now?

She couldn’t predict how few seconds a regular Transcendent would last against Alice if she were serious about fighting, but it was still much too dangerous to let that boy stand defenselessly before Alice.

The alluring demon smiled bitterly at that thought and focused her feelings on the battle at hand.

“Oh, what’s this?”

Smiling, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet again spread her arms wide. Slowly.

Almost like a solid wall, a stifling nectar scent emerged from the blast-resistant suit and pushed toward the Bologna Succubus. Even at this distance, she had to stay focused to avoid getting dizzy.

What was happening in that closed world?

The skinny girl(?) wearing an apron over her naked body giggled before speaking.

“This won’t hurt at all, so don’t worry. I’m more interested in creating a gentle world where even the unloved are loved equally. Did you really understand my salvation condition? Kee hee hee☆ I have love even for a filthy sex demon, so get over here and let me give you a hug!!”

“Killing with pleasure, huh?”

“Ah ha ha☆ This is Total Courtship! Welcome to the sweetest, most luxurious ending to a life♪”

Roaches could rapidly build up a resistance to deadly insecticides, so they couldn’t necessarily be killed by escalating the chemical suffering. Instead, there were products that tricked them into thinking ethanol, acetaldehyde, sotolon, or another chemical compound was delicious food, luring them into the trap where they would take a different chemical back to the colony to kill them all at once. Humans didn’t just use what their target disliked – they would also use whatever their target most liked.

This girl similarly used love to kill. She was a super sweet monster who had continually honed the emotion of love into a deadly weapon. If you simply increased your defenses to prevent pain and prepared ordinary attacks, she would slip past them all and kill you instantly.

She was a specialist in that.

This Transcendent was a different form of strongest, whose trump card was the complete opposite of the Bologna Succubus’s Cold Mistress which converted all forms of pleasure into pain.

Her victims were robbed of even the right to feel fear as they were filled with no more than happiness until they lost their life. In a trippy world where everything was vague, they would cross the final line without intent or resolve.

They were stranded.

She had complete control over them, not even giving them a chance to speak their final words.

She brought a death more certain than a .44 caliber bullet and its name was love.

“Yeah, I don’t think we could ever get along.”

“Kya ha ha☆ You’re only saying that because that makes it more exciting, aren’t you!?”

This must have been her combat form.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet had her enormous blast-resistant suit spread wide to display the terrarium trapped within. The skinny naked-apron girl pushed out a nectar scent so powerful it caused heartburn. And she took a casual step forward.

“You didn’t find it remotely odd? We’re all regular Transcendents here. A clash between our two groups shouldn’t end so easily. Yet you’re being easily defeated in a one-sided game. Is it a bad matchup between the individual Transcendents? Do our spells combine so well it’s like we were dealt a royal flush? No, that could never happen.”

“…”

“No one can defeat Alice Anotherbible.”

For this alone, she took on a respectful tone.

Almost like she was reading off the handwritten creed only she believed in.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet thought only of her own blessings as she spoke euphorically.

“You underestimated the meaning of that statement. And that optimism has brought you certain death. It doesn’t just mean you won’t survive a direct physical fight against Alice. There’s no getting around it. We control all of the coincidences and all of our baseless hunches and inspirations will work out in our favor. We have the trends of the world on our side. That is what it means to ‘resonate’ with Alice and take the winning side. To be clear, we are only firing blindly from the hip. You’re the ones ensuring we hit you.”

Vidhatri.

2nd Saga.

And Blodeuwedd the Bouquet.

The Bologna Succubus’s side was being worn down, but all three of them were unharmed. She had gotten a few clean hits in on them, so had they managed to shrug off the damage?

And she was slipping past their expectations and landing an attack they failed to dodge or defend against, so it made no sense for them to be changing their stance to reduce the damage with 100% accuracy.

That wasn’t their individual abilities.

It was their “resonance” with Alice Anotherbible.

“Defying her means death. You had lost from the moment you bet on there being an exception to that, like that you could move beyond her reach, hide where she couldn’t find you, or escape punishment if your defiance was indirect. Not that she would let you get away with this even if you had been correct.”

“How are you on Alice’s side when you only love yourself?”

“Isn’t it cruel to expect such a small child to judge everything so accurately? They say to let your child make mistakes to learn from them, but do you think that kind of harsh parental love will work on that girl? Alice is simpler than that. Which is what makes her so frightening. At her mental age, she probably sees anyone who praises her and spoils her as her ally.”

And it didn’t end there.

“Heyyy.”

Something enormous was parting the large river to approach.

It was a special warship measuring around 100m long.

That was small compared to a nuclear aircraft carrier of more than 300m long, but it was undoubtedly a warship.

Plus, this was not the ship itself.

It was made out of smooth white shadow.

A girl’s lazy voice played from the speakers probably meant for giving warnings or making threats.

Come to think of it, hadn’t one of them seemingly vanished?

“This took some time to prepare, but I’m back.”

The ship’s bridge stood taller than the iron bridge.

She must have torn down all the other bridges spanning the river to clear a path here. It made you wonder which side was doing more damage to Academy City.

Aradia’s eyes really did bug out as she shouted.

“Mut Thebes!? What is that thing!?”

“You don’t know? It’s the Academy City drone carrier Kagenui.”

An aircraft carrier had to carry multiple large aircraft, necessitating a great size. Submersible and aerial aircraft carriers could not be made because the size and weight affected their balance too much. ...But that accepted principle had been overturned by shrinking the aircraft down by eliminating the cockpit and turning them into drones. Even the maintenance work could be carried out by an unmanned maintenance factory within the ship.

As usual, Academy City loved making bizarre things.

But now wasn’t the time for exasperation.

That was a carrier.

“Go, everyone.”

A series of explosions rang out. The boxy canisters on the flat deck rose up and opened fire. There were electrically ignited guns that could fire at a rate of a million rounds a minute. It looked like a programmed fireworks show. In truth, the honeycomb-like holes on the front of the canisters were releasing a large number of flying objects. By spreading their movable wings in air, they gathered in orderly teams and flew in formation. Now both sides had a flying swarm. The drones clashed directly with the tens of thousands of starlings ruling the night sky.

The assumptions and superiority had been overturned.

One side was alive and the other was machine.

When they were both controlled remotely and were equal in number, it went without saying whether the small birds or the man-made meter-long aerial weapons would win.

Perhaps the counterattack was necessary.

But as the drones pursued the fleeing starlings, their machinegun fire stabbed into the skyscrapers built along the river and sent sparks exploding from walls as thick power cables were ruptured.

“Mut Theeeebes!!!”

Aradia roared in anger, but then she stopped.

The brown girl was acting weird.

“Yayyy. Who wants to take a killer selfie? Just tell me when and I’ll get the timing right for you. Yippee! Let’s keep this Alice Parade Party going☆”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet giggled.

She clearly welcomed this turn of events.

Mut Thebes wasn’t enemy or ally – she was losing all awareness that she was participating in the battle at all. She was throwing that aside to enjoy herself. And her actions were clearly working against the Bologna Succubus’s side.

They sensed a trend in the series of unpleasant coincidences.

“I believe it’s called Acute Kotatsu Syndrome. Basically, Alice affects the group psychology of an area when she stays there long enough. Did you think you were immune for some reason? Even magicians and Transcendents will be engulfed by Alice sooner or later.”

“…”

“That includes all of us. Yes, you are no exception, Bologna Succubus. And most likely, neither are we. We will all lose our sense of who is on whose side in this mad tea party. The world that people across the globe have worked so hard to create could end today, but in a way that could mean the arrival of an age of peace. If everything is engulfed and everyone is a victim, then the distinction between enemy and ally loses all meaning.”

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet made it sound so obvious.

But it didn’t add up.

They were using their all-important salvation conditions as an excuse to love themselves and preserve their power by protecting Alice, so they wouldn’t want an ending where they were engulfed by Alice’s madness and lost sight of who they were. Narcissists who cared about themselves more than anything else in the world would never seek out a form of satisfaction created by having their internal aesthetic sense altered.

“Do you have any idea what you’re saying?”

“Ha ha☆ What? Are you saying I’ve already broken too?”

It didn’t sound like she cared.

Someone on her level had lost the right to feel fear and disgust, or even detect that anything was amiss.

This space was going mad.

It had started at a single point, but the entire world would be this way eventually.

Whether or not Alice Anotherbible wanted it.

This was ominous enough to make that prediction.

“It doesn’t really matter. No one can defy Alice whether they put up a resistance or not.”

“Are you shoving responsibility for the world onto Alice’s shoulders while you alone abandon the effort of living, like you’re just a tree, grass, or flower, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet!?”

“Hee hee☆ Total Courtship – ready for dissemination. Now, I think I’ll pack you so full of super-sweet love that all your veins burst. Alice hates it when you try to lecture people like that, which is why she’s striking back at you, you know?”

Part 5

“…”

Anna Sprengel saw it.

She had supposedly divined the location of Kamijou and Alice, but something had gone wrong and she ended up here instead. Were you not even allowed to walk in a straight line without the proper credentials in this wonderland?

Everything within a 400 radius of the iron bridge was a zone of death. Crowds who had never even seen Alice directly were filling the streets due to her influence, but not even they would approach that area.

It may have been a type of instinct.

Just like people’s homing instincts worked even when drunk, the boys and girls who had lost sight of reality still knew they should keep away.

Although even that instinct would probably melt away eventually.

Once that happened, the world really was over.

Anna wanted to rescue Kamijou Touma. She wanted to fight against Alice Anotherbible with him. She wanted to protect him.

But so much depended on that bridge where an unnatural amount of things had gathered.

If those Transcendents scattered across the city again, Kamijou alone wouldn’t be able to deal with them. Then his world would simply fall apart.

So.

Before that happened…

“What are you planning?”

“!?”

Anna heard a female voice.

From right by her ear.

She belatedly spun around.

But she did not find one of the Transcendents who relied on the easy divine cosplay spell. This was an expert who carried a magic name in her heart, stood on her own two feet, and had chosen for herself to take on the wide world.

It wasn’t a logical thing.

But Miss Sprengel could not hide the trembling and the cold sweat that came from her very soul.

“Anna Kingsford!?”

“You really should ❌ try it. It is ❌ like you. Two groups of Transcendents are ⚔️ing and one side is winning. Adding one more fighter to the fray will ❌ make a significant difference. As a self-proclaimed villain, you should know that quite well.”

“Why would you stop me? It shouldn’t be any skin off your nose if the fake Anna dies.”

“It would be. Because I do ❌ want you to ☠️.”

Kingsford didn’t hesitate.

The true villain was not used to being told these things so directly.

(First that fool and now her.)

Taken aback, little Miss Sprengel lost her chance to strike back and Kingsford laughed elegantly before continuing.

That smile was so much like Miss Sprengel’s, but she could never imitate it.

“It does appear that the side of the ⚔️ supported by ❌, resonating with Alice has the advantage. Transcendents are, after all, the false gods created when modern magicians used the incomplete 🪄 they created by analyzing the one and only success case: Alice Anotherbible. They have always been incomplete and unstable. They have a model. It should be obvious they will be 💪er when supported by the completed Alice.”

“Then what am I supposed to do? If Aradia’s side loses, who will be left to help that fool? Even if the entire world joined forces against Alice, I’m not sure it would work! And if the Alice-addled Transcendents gathered here end up scattering across Academy City, they could completely destroy that fool’s cit-”

“You only need to supply a ⛰️ greater than Alice.”

It didn’t even take a full second.

Kingsford placed her index finger on her slender chin and gave the answer with a confident smile.

An expert was a powerful guide in and of herself.

Just like sailors lost at sea would rely on the sun and moon in the sky to find the way back home.

“Blodeuwedd the Bouquet, Vidhatri, and 2nd Saga… They are borrowing a special power by resonating with Alice. So we just have to supply the same condition. If someone else leads the Transcendents, this problem is easily solved.”

Anna Sprengel only showed exasperation on her face.

Preparing a rival even more powerful than Alice was Kingsford’s idea of easy?

“I suppose someone as special as you would have no problem doing that,” said Miss Sprengel.

“Me? ❌, the only one who can do this is you.”

This time, Miss Sprengel’s eyes opened wide.

This had to be a joke.

“W-wait. I-I am no more than a common 2nd-rate magician who expanded my appearance and abilities by borrowing your name but still had to boost my specs further with Aiwass!!”

“Belittle yourself all you like, you are still an irregular Transcendent. Plus, you borrowed someone else’s name, but you did ❌ acquire the necessary 🪄 by analyzing Alice. You did your research from the ground up and successfully ‘👗ed up as’ Anna Kingsford. Which puts you on equal 🦶ing. We must refer to you as an irregular Transcendent for the exact same reason we refer to Alice Anotherbible that way.”

“…”

“You can do it.” Kingsford made this point clear. “Both you and Aleister have accomplished so much, so I can ❌ fathom why you both insist on belittling yourselves at every turn… I am saying there is something only you can accomplish, Miss Sprengel. I can ❌ do it. No matter how unnecessarily ashamed you are of yourself, your 🪄 to 👗 up as someone else is something that never occurred to me. Using that to help others qualifies as praiseworthy service if you ask me, but do you disagree?”

Silence.

Eventually followed by a wet sound.

It was the sound of a sniffling nose.

“Don’t tell that fool.”

“Sigh. I really think it is ⌚ the world recognized your talents.”

“Don’t tell him.”

“As you wish.”

“Then come forth, Aiwass!! Come to me, the walking amplifier for my will that has a mind of its own!!”

“Took you long enough, my benevolent genius.”

Anna Sprengel and Anna Kingsford.

The long-held conflict between them had been resolved.

Now they stood side by side, wielding great magic to protect an innocent life.

Part 6

The massive bridge had clearly been bent by an impact from the side. Cracks ran through the asphalt, steel screws larger than golf balls popped forcefully from the metal beams, and the joints between the girders swelled upwards.

The black bass and bluegills seemed harmless at first, but even at 500g each, tens of thousands of them still amounted to a large weight.

With the most lovable face, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet only had to blow a kiss to control them all.

Good, Old Mary had already collapsed after taking one to the center of the chest.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet chose Aradia as her next target.

It didn’t matter that she was directly facing the Bologna Succubus right now.

She set her sights on the witch goddess who stood on the complex arrangement of metal beams used to distribute the bridge’s weight.

“Look!! The world’s most high-tech city will have any number of unloved creatures: black bass, bluegills, rats, stray cats, pigeons, and starlings to name a few. Now, false goddess, let’s see how you handle the love-starved laments of the unloved!!”

“Tch!!”

“Hee hee☆ Or should I send the unloved humans your way?”

As soon as Aradia stiffened, stopping her interception spell, a babbler soared sharply toward her unguarded flank. A direct hit would probably kill the wild bird, but it would go through its death throes while embedded deep inside the wound and its beak and feathers would spread contaminants around.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet stuck out her tongue.

But the night wind that reached her was no more than a night wind.

It did not carry a rusty scent.

“?”

Had it missed?

When the support from “resonating” with Alice Anotherbible should have acted as a tailwind for all her actions?

Even though simply firing blindly from the hip should have always hit the enemy?

Before Blodeuwedd the Bouquet could pursue that question, Vidhatri shouted from where she stood.

“2nd Saga!! Eliminate her now!”

“Hee hee.”

An alluring female face and limbs appeared in the dark night. She was around 18, at the midpoint between girlhood and womanhood.

But that was all that was visible.

The pieces floated separately. No, her torso had clearly been torn apart. It now contained strange hollow spaces. Had her human silhouette unraveled like bandages? Was it due to the thick ribbon that had been wrapped around her torso? The lights of the city were visible in the space beyond her partially eliminated body.

The space seemed somewhat distorted.

Or maybe it was a type of camouflage.

Aradia faced this person who was strange even for a Transcendent. She had the face of a girl with short flaxen hair with the interior dyed bright blue.

“2nd Saga. Do you derive some special meaning from covering and hiding things?”

“I’ve always had trouble choosing just one thing. I never want to throw anything out, so my room always ends up a mess.”

Saga was a goddess from Norse mythology.

She was said to be extremely powerful and to manage the spring where Odin is gifted with poetry and wisdom.

But she is barely mentioned throughout all the Norse monuments and texts.

Barely anything is known about her other than that her home is called Sokkvabekkr.

Information on her was scarce.

She was a mysterious figure who is simply known to share drinks with the top Norse god.

This woman had gone out of here way to choose a god like that.

She had wanted to be her.

Aradia spat annoyed words with the yellow and black railroad crossing barrier in hand.

“If a single performer tries to forcibly dress up as multiple gods, the traits of the gods cancel each other out, diluting their presence. We normally have strict rules about what we can’t do if we want to stay in character and keep our costume authentic, but I didn’t expect one of us to take advantage of that fact.”

“By intentionally keeping a low profile, I can do things other gods can’t. I am not the star of the show. But if a tree or a bush does something they shouldn’t, the audience has no way of knowing if it was correct or not. This allows me to be a performer on the stage while also freeing me from the bonds of the script. I am the only one allowed to be myself.”

“…”

“I am the Transcendent who saves all the bit parts and understudies who never get any attention. I can’t look down on them if I’m to do that. I need to understand how they feel and be one of them first.”

She disappeared.

Did she unleash her skill to the point she became one with the air?

The bluish-white armor partially surrounding 2nd Saga’s limbs vanished into the air, causing what little of her skin and face were still visible to look unnaturally alluring.

The bright round skin of her face was like a device for giving off sex appeal.

The pupils of her blue eyes were colored an impossible bright red. Did she use a light-bending technique to pull that one off?

Even with her full body unraveled, the individual pieces were made of captivating feminine skin.

But if a member of the opposite sex were caught by her like this, it would probably break his mind.

The strange avant-garde woman sneered.

“My name is 2nd Saga, a fictional god created on the mischievous whim of the compiler. Which allows me to add on any magic I wish which is never actually found in Norse mythology. …Now, it is time you lost your one and only life. The divine curse – that is, the light of Brisingamen, necklace of infidelity – can even trigger a war between world-destroying kings. Do not assume an individual can escape that deadly fate!!”

It started at the center, where her chest had been.

The thick ribbon, which bound her skin and showed the city behind her, created a transparent distortion much like sugar water, which spilled beyond her outlines.

It forcibly gathered Aradia’s focus on a single point, much like having a finger jabbed between the eyes at close range.

Aradia sensed a definite deadliness in this unknown phenomenon.

Was she mistaken, or had that been the true trigger?

The impossible distortion became a large artillery shell that tore through the air.

This was an assassination spell.

It was guaranteed to take a life.

And the user could sidestep their own sin by saying they were only adoring the beautiful gold and jewels. The necklace brought doom, but it allowed the user to claim they didn’t know it was cursed and thought it was only a beautiful piece of jewelry. Was that to insure they would not be hit in the unlikely case that the curse was sent back the way it had come?

Aradia snorted with laughter.

The rails were laid out nicely, but it was all nonsense with no actual mythological basis. The sky is heaven, the gods shine bright, the workings of salvation and divine punishment, cats are capricious and dogs are loyal – by combining the common symbols found across cultures, anyone could fake apparent legitimacy.

Yes, this was faked.

Her cosplay was sloppy. Gods were meant to draw a strict line between right and wrong, so they couldn’t accept – much less use – a loophole like this. A real god did not choose their words carefully for fear of backlash or controversy. Even the cruelest act could be written off as “divine punishment” if it was truly necessary.

And even if this curse would pursue Aradia to the ends of the Earth, there was only one thing she had to do.

“There just have to be two Aradias.”

“Wha-!?”

Immediately after 2nd Saga’s dumbfounded shock, the invisible curse tore itself apart with its own power.

The chilly moonlight shined on two identical people.

The black and yellow railroad crossing barriers resting on their shoulders crossed like swords mounted on a wall.

Aradia hadn’t actually done anything. The curse simply hadn’t been designed to handle an abnormal situation where two identical people existed. It was unable to deal with the situation it found, so the single shell attempted to pursue two targets at once, tearing itself apart from within.

It dissipated.

It disappeared.

“Don’t you dare call this cheating. This has always been our role – we’re the perfect performers. And it was all of you who created a second one and brought her here without even asking me.”

Right and left.

The identical Aradias launched wind magic that struck the formless Transcendent.

The tides were turning.

“…”

Vidhatri was dumbfounded.

But she wasn’t simply shocked that a Transcendent receiving a tailwind by “resonating” with Alice Anotherbible had been defeated by a Transcendent who had that link severed and was alone in the storm.

More than that…

“Why did you have that idea just now?”

“What do you mean?”

“It also doesn’t make sense that you avoided Blodeuwedd the Bouquet’s initial attack. Even if there was a way for you to defeat 2nd Saga, it never should have occurred to you!! That kind of support comes from Alice. How did you break through the thought masking!?”

“I would assume conditions have changed somewhere away from here.”

“Tch!!”

Panic spread through the air, infecting the entire space.

Vidhatri seemed rushed by something unseen rather than her own will as she unspooled a lot of white thread and black hair from the ball-joint doll she wore on her back.

By intentionally omitting all mention of something, that spell let her erase anything she didn’t like from the small world set up around her. If she erased everything that could kill her, then no one could defeat her.

A moment later, a dull impact struck her cheekbone. Something flew in from the side and Vidhatri was launched spinning through the air. The impact permeated her. Before she could figure out what had happened, her ball-joint doll broke apart and her model-proportioned body soared over the pedestrian railing and toward the dark river below.

But Aradia hadn’t done anything.

“You were focused on the wrong person, dumbass.”

Aradia glanced over to see a small figure standing boldly atop a metal beam.

It was Anna Sprengel.

“Keh heh heh. Alice no longer rules this world. Worms, bow before me and beg for your pitiful lives. It wasn’t you who created the Shrink Drink – you needed Alice’s help for that. Yet all you worthless regular Transcendents had the nerve to look down on me and try to kill me!!!”

“Before she could figure out what had happened, huh?” the goddess of witches whispered in exasperation. “So Vidhatri could preemptively eliminate any threat, but she was defenseless against any threat that never occurred to her.”

If anything, that was a lot like the death of the immortal Norse god of light, Baldr. That similarity was not a case of cultural transmission between India and Europe. It was instead evidence of the Transcendents not actually being strictly bound to a single god or even a single mythology.

“Have you imagined your own fate yet, 2nd Saga?”

“Have you imagined your own fate yet, 2nd Saga?”

“!?”

Multiple beams of light flashed out at once.

The two Aradias held out their palms to launch projectile magic toward the figure leaping vigorously from beam to beam. The attacks actually hit 2nd Saga. It was hard to believe she had been so untouchable just a bit ago. She was knocked from the beam above to the bridge below.

Mut Thebes (who was on their side but had lost control of herself) had her drone carrier stopped by a three-legged object that appeared out of thin air. That was Good, Old Mary’s Tribikos.

The tides had turned in the blink of an eye.

The only one left was Blodeuwedd the Bouquet in her coat-like blast-resistant suit and naked apron.

Aradia approached her directly, the Bologna Succubus glared icily at her, and bloody Good, Old Mary slowly rose to her feet.

“Wai-”

The dull “thump!!” of pierced flesh rang out.

The Bologna Succubus had launched her sharp tail and caught Blodeuwedd the Bouquet in the shoulder.

Using a frontal attack with no tricks.

The force of the blow broke the iron-maiden-like blast-resistant suit and the double doors covered in metal panels fell to the asphalt. With her protection gone, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet’s bare skin was exposed to the frigid air while she scattered junk from her terrarium and UV LED lights. The night wind carried away the flower petals.

“This is already over,” said the Bologna Succubus.

Her voice was colder than it ever had been when that boy was present.

The naked apron girl backed away, but her legs tangled underneath her.

She fell like normal.

Her specialness was gone.

“You forgot about your salvation condition, you abandoned the people you should be saving, and you thought only of preserving your own power. And then you blamed Alice for it all. …So this is already over. You have nothing left. Nothing at all.”

“You’re going to win this...and take everything from me?”

With only her frilly apron left, Blodeuwedd the Bouquet held her wounded shoulder with the opposite hand and struggled to keep her breath.

The powerful sex appeal she gathered around her had dissipated, leaving behind only the fear of a small child.

“This is all we have. You can’t tell me the idea of losing your power doesn’t scare you.”

“I am a Transcendent. I choose who I should protect and then guard those people from the threat this world presents them. Which is why I abandoned my own identity to dress up as a god,” said Witch Goddess Aradia. “My salvation condition does not include myself. And I would never rob innocent people of their future just so I could keep my own shameful life.”

With a dull sound, the Transcendent ended things with the Transcendent.

Blodeuwedd the Bouquet was the last one.

There had been others, but they raised their hands in surrender when they saw the tides changing. That was about what you got with people who only worried about themselves.

But with Alice Anotherbible as an open-source example, more Transcendents could be created. Just like there were two Aradias here.

Remaking the city’s people into makeshift witches wasn’t an option here like it had been in Shibuya. If Academy City espers used magic, they would be harmed by the side effects and, if Alice wanted to, she could produce an unlimited supply of regular Transcendents. Those would be literally a grade above.

Any victories won fighting on the outer edges would only be temporary. And with only limited numbers to work with, they wouldn’t last if they were forced to fight the same battles over and over.

“This was no more than an opening skirmish,” said Anna Sprengel despite understanding that.

She was another host and open-source example who differed greatly from the Alice line.

They couldn’t stop here.

“Our real target is Alice. This rioting doesn’t end until she’s been stopped. The Queen of Hearts and Executioner waiting near Alice could easily be more powerful than the regular Transcendents.”

“If you have the time, could you deal with her too? Mut Thebes is shooting off ‘fireworks’ like this is some kind of party, so it would be great if you could bring that idiot back to her senses!!”

“Oh? Silly girl, are you sure you don’t want to take a video first?”

The giant white ship shook.

She must have been freed from the unseen physics that could be seen as Alice’s tailwind.

Mut Thebes must have absorbed the weapon’s shadow, but where exactly was she attached to it?

“Bff!? Wait, wait, I’ll be good.”

“Finally come to your senses? Then take a look at the collapsed city around you. I can’t wait to see what kind of excuse you can come up with while dripping with sweat, God of Partying.”

“But if my partying was enough to destroy an entire city by accident, doesn’t that make me a super powerful goddess? And since we can all see how ultra-cute I am, can’t I get off the hook with a quick: ‘Oopsie. Tee hee’?”

“Good, Old Mary, use your Tribikos to step on that god of destruction, ship and all. It’s January, so dunking her to the bottom of the river ought to cool her head.”

Aradia icily passed judgment, but then a cracking voice came over the ship’s speakers.

“Oh, and the drone carrier’s antenna picked something up,” said Mut Thebes.

“?”

“It wasn’t encrypted or anything, so it was a lot like a radio transmission. Maybe it’s best to say this is being sent out all over the place. They might have been hoping we would pick it up. It’s being transmitted from a prison in District 10 and it says it’s about Alice Pleasance Liddell.”

Part 7

After seeing off the little magician who had freed herself from her self-made bonds, Anna Kingsford sighed all on her own.

The end was nigh.

“Now, then.”

(I need to prepare for my part in this.)

Part 8

There were no subjective symptoms.

Kamijou wasn’t even allowed any obvious pain or bleeding.

Then was this a delirium or hallucination caused by all the stress he was under?

Except there was something there.

With each step he took down the long hallway, he heard a sound like thin threads snapping inside him. Like the creaking of bone or the beating of his heart, these were delicate sounds that shouldn’t have been audible outside his body.

He had heard on some trivia show that the simple action of walking concentrated a lot of weight and force on the leg bones. If that was true, then his body could no longer keep up with his movement. His insides were already breaking down to that extent.

Death.

The unavoidable destruction of the self.

Alice apparently wanted to ask Index if there was a way to heal him.

But Kamijou already knew the answer.

This was different from any of the previous times.

Or rather, this wasn’t a one-off failure. Everything he had done had pushed him too far. He was finally paying the price for it all. No one could escape the consequences of their own actions.

The end was nigh.

And it was only now that Kamijou realized something.

In a battle so severe, why hadn’t he noticed anything amiss? His survival this long had been the unnatural part.

“Hm, hm, hm☆”

Alice Anotherbible skipped out ahead of him.

She turned back, her skirt lifting disconcertingly high.

“C’mon, teacher. Everyone’s here now, so you need to hurry. Good or bad, you wouldn’t want it to end without ever learning the answer, would you?”

“…”

That was the opinion of someone watching from the outside.

It was clearly missing the viewpoint of the person on the verge of learning if their death was unavoidable.

They did not arrive at a normal classroom.

That was the door to the library.

That should have made for a poor prison. A solid kick would probably break open the sliding door and the outside windows were probably ordinary glass.

But since Alice had chosen this location, it was probably impossible to open from inside. Even with the knowledge of 103,001 grimoires at your disposal.

The door opened.

From the outside, it was surprisingly easy.

Kamijou doubted that was Imagine Breaker’s doing. He probably just had Alice’s permission.

“Touma!”

He heard a familiar voice.

She wasn’t bound with packing tape or zip ties. The windows and door were not reinforced. But there was definite relief on her face. That was the look of someone who just saw the thick door to their prison cell open.

And her smile froze in place.

The pure white sister was not concerned by Alice and H.T. Trismegistus’s presence. She was clearly looking at something else. The boy could tell that even with the mixture of truth, lies, and hallucination in his head.

“No...what is that?”

Her eyes widened because of Kamijou.

She had already detected something out of the ordinary.

Whether Alice was aware of that or not, she spoke in her childlike way.

“Okay, teacher. Ask her!”

The young butler clearly knew what was coming and struggled to suppress a grin.

Malicious words and actions were not the only way to hurt people.

Because he was bound by common sense, H.T. Trismegistus would never hurl abuse himself. The look on his face seemed to say there was no law against silence.

“I...won’t.”

“You have to,” said Alice.

“There’s no reason to force her to give an answer!!”

“Leaving the question unanswered solves nothing. Stopping here only lets the problem grow worse with time. She has 103,001 grimoires. With so much knowledge from all around the world available to her, the girl just knows she can find a way to heal you!!”

Was it even possible?

Had it been definitively proven, or was it only a theory?

Alice didn’t care about that.

It could be the geocentric theory, phlogiston, an ancient nuclear war, or that dinosaur farts caused the ice age. Of course, it could also be something accurate like universal gravitation or quantum theory. Accurate or not, if a theory had ever been proposed – if someone had thought it up and put together the logic behind it – she could build a bridge to it. She could choose whichever theories she wanted and link to them to wholly change the world. She was the ultimate conversion device. She could place Yamatai anywhere she liked, she could invent a perpetual motion machine of the first kind to produce unlimited energy, or she could remake the spherical Earth into a flat disk.

So there just had to be a single section in the more than 10 thousand grimoires.

Just one passage.

Even a single line would do.

No matter how absurd or difficult to achieve it was.

Alice could easily activate it and save Kamijou.

But.

Even then.

Index did not give a yes or no answer.

She kept her silence.

That was enough of an answer. If she wasn’t willing to say it out loud, she didn’t need to.

Her attempt at kindness was ineffective.

The verdict had been given.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Death.

That was the only option left.

Kamijou did not weep or rage.

He even forgot to fall to the floor.

In a way, he abandoned his humanity.

He simply stood there, stock still.

“Hu…man.”

Othinus’s quiet voice was enough for his head to wobble.

There was nothing there.

It wasn’t even emptiness that filled his mind.

He felt a heat surrounding him.

He simply stood there, forgetting even to collapse.

There was no way to save him.

The world had not developed that far.

It was underdeveloped.

People had studied what they liked and technology had branched off into countless directions, but never in this one.

The world didn’t care.

Time would continue on like normal even after he was gone.

And…

“Then let’s destroy it,” said a young voice.

Alice Anotherbible sounded the same as ever.

No, her voice sounded dried out.

Terrifyingly so.

This wasn’t part of the plan.

She sounded like her surprise party plan had fallen apart.

“We have our answer. And if this world can’t save you, teacher, than the girl is going to destroy it. The girl heard what you said, so she knows this world wouldn’t still be here if not for you. So it’s only fair the world goes away when you do, don’t you think?”

“Wait! Don’t, Touma!!” sharply shouted Index.

The knowledge of her grimoires must have told her Alice could do exactly what she claimed. And that she would do it the instant Kamijou gave her some kind of sign.

He would never do that under normal circumstances.

But it was wrong to assume he would behave normally now that he knew he would lose everything.

y/n.

The available options had been narrowed down as far as possible.

The fate of the world hinged on this one question.

“I do not agree.” H.T. Trismegistus finally spoke up, his shoulders shaking as he didn’t even bother to suppress his chuckling. “Destroying the world for a single individual is wrong. Maybe if this would save his life, but you should not destroy humanity if all you are doing is lashing out. Some might consider it moving, but common sense says it is not a benevolent act.”

Alice’s eyes widened like dinner plates.

And she lowered her voice.

“H. T. Trismegistus.”

“As you can see…”

The young butler raised his hands and kept speaking, undaunted.

He didn’t seem to care that the invisible muzzle of death was pressed unsteadily against his brow.

“I can tell Alice what common sense says, but I have no real way of stopping her. This is ultimately between you and her. No, make your own choice, Kamijou Touma. You cannot rely on Another Bible here and not even all the world’s grimoires contain a means of saving you. So what will you choose in the final moments now that your death is assured?”

Othinus gasped and looked up from his shoulder.

She was the only person who had just about achieved a perfect victory against Kamijou Touma.

She knew this ending.

She knew this dead end.

Because the one-eyed war god had intentionally set up a situation just like this to kill the boy when he refused to give up no matter what else she tried.

“I see what you’re doing. Hey, human, don’t listen to-!!”

“Yes, you could go crying to Alice and have her take the world out with you. In fact, you needn’t even say a word. If you remain silent, she might just be considerate enough to do it on her own. But common sense tells me that Alice’s only motivation is making you happy. So you could eliminate Alice’s motivation by taking your own life before she destroys the world on your behalf. You will die soon regardless, so why not move up the timetable just a bit to save so many people?”

Mere moments before H.T. Trismegistus completed his encircling argument, someone kicked down the library door from the outside.

With no difficulty.

“Fool.”

It was easy to miss by how easily it happened, but this should have been an unavoidable critical hit. Kamijou’s path should have ended.

But it hadn’t.

Because someone wouldn’t let it.

You could develop an attack specialized for a single individual, but that individual didn’t need to fight alone.

Just by setting foot in here, little Anna Sprengel had accomplished what no one else could.

She was probably the only person in the world not affected by Alice’s madness.

She deflected it.

And that villain mercilessly stomped her way into Alice’s territory.

No one could stop her.

“Hmph. So only I made it this far in? I feel a little bad leaving Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, and the others stuck fighting an endless battle. You basically asked us to come and even showed us the way, but then you drove your guests away? When you think about it, that’s hilariously pathetic.”

“You?”

“You haven’t figured it out yet, you gloomy microdick? You should have known better than to trust your assumptions from the moment you couldn’t kill me with the Shrink Drink filled with Alice’s power.”

Anna chuckled and Othinus gave her a look more of exasperation than admiration.

“I see. So if you had actually killed that shitty villain, we wouldn’t be dealing with this nonsense about her outdoing Alice.”

“Are you saying the world switched rails back then?” asked Index.

“That’s right, you dregs of a god and you pathetic loafer,” said Anna, giving Othinus and Index a scornful look. Then she spread her little hands. “The fool changed things. He moved many people’s hearts with his own actions rather than having Alice cheat for him. I did not achieve this miracle on my own. Don’t you think the first person to receive its blessings should be the one who worked so hard to make it happen?”

Yes.

No one had invited Anna. She did not have Alice’s permission. That meant she had faced Alice’s madness without fear, repelled it, and forced her own actions through.

She faced that tremendous charisma without being engulfed.

She had the brand name of the mystery woman behind the founding of the world’s largest magic cabal.

This villain carried a legend of equal value.

“Honestly. You always let everyone push you around when it comes to Alice, fool. Do you seriously believe in the nice-sounding but scientifically-baseless and perverted jinx that the unclouded eyes of young children reflect truths the adults have long forgotten? If you ask me, you should learn to ignore it all as the words of an ignorant little kid.”

“Anna…?”

“You might die, fool.”

Kamijou’s breath caught in his throat.

The thick invisible wall once more intruded on the ordinary scene around him.

Death.

The end.

It was approaching second by second, yet he felt no pain. Like a cruel time bomb with the LCD screen omitted.

What was wrong with feeling fear?

But Anna wasn’t done talking.

“I said ‘might’. None of this is set in stone, but Alice is acting like it’s 100% going to happen. Why?”

Othinus caught on first.

Almost like the thought had been unnaturally blocked until now.

“Oh, I get it. Everyone would prefer the opposite outcome, but she was enjoying telling everyone that he was definitely going to die.”

“It’s simple really. What did a certain monster need to do for him to drop his guard and let her in? What about showing him a greater threat so she doesn’t seem so bad? Just like I came off as a harmless companion when faced with the greater threats of CRC and Alice. But there is no threat greater at present than the Anotherbible. So a certain someone suggested the fool’s death.”

“Wait.”

“You should already know the answer. Alice Anotherbible only gets so assertive when it comes to Kamijou Touma. In a way, this is to be expected since I imprinted the fool’s past actions in her mind.”

It wasn’t her fault she had been deceived.

Anyone that little villain took advantage of already had an opening in them.

Or you could call it a vulnerability.

She could not create something from nothing. She pried open a small existing hole and then controlled them as she saw fit.

She was a reasonable but contemptible miracle-worker.

“The central factor for her has always been loneliness. Yes, I am the one who deceived her. Wherever she came from, I know the current Alice Anotherbible’s mind better than you.”

So?

What was that supposed to mean?

What was she imagining when she said that?

A cold sweat poured from Kamijou’s body.

For a brief moment, even his very real fear of death vanished from his mind.

“Hold on!! You’re not making sense. Alice means no harm. For better or for worse, what you see is what you get with her. Wasn’t that our initial assumption here? She can’t set people up, plot out some grand plan, or any other intellectual stuff like that!!”

“True,” agreed H.T. Trismegistus. “She is too powerful to do anything of the sort. Common sense says that someone capable of killing a dinosaur with a barehanded punch would never even think of inventing a gun, correct?”

“Shut up, you gloomy butler. And, fool, remind me who you came here to save?”

Anna sounded exasperated.

That was their initial assumption.

Kamijou had said that himself, but he had somehow forgotten it.

“I thought that issue had nothing to do with whether or not you will survive.”

“…”

He wanted to rescue Index and save Alice too.

That was why he had decided to fight Alice. That had been his initial objective.

And yet.

Why was he now seeking salvation from Alice?

Alice was the same as always. She was alive and well. It didn’t matter that her head had been crushed by Rosencreutz.

So shouldn’t he be rejoicing?

Shouldn’t he be weeping and laughing while hugging Alice?

Why was he being driven into a dead end?

When had his objective been replaced?

Who had caused that switch?

No.

…But…

It couldn’t be? Could it?

“Fool. I agree that Alice isn’t calculating enough to put together a long-term plan to fool people. Even telling her to ‘sit’ or ‘stay’ in front of a feast wouldn’t last very long. She may only be honestly saying what she believes to be right.”

That was a weirdly indirect phrasing.

Which suggested that phrasing was somehow necessary.

Othinus gave a snort.

“Yeah, I thought that was strange for a grimoire library whose job is to provide answers. Is this why she hesitated to give a response? Because she couldn’t easily reach a yes or no answer?”

The white nun, who was the polar opposite of the villain, spoke up quietly.

“But if Alice’s mind is too badly broken to tell what is and isn’t accurate, she might not be doing the right thing. Touma, you can’t trust that the things she tells you are accurate.”

Everyone’s eyes gathered on a single point.

Even H.T. Trismegistus, who had been taking advantage of the situation.

They heard a creaking sound.

Sounds like thick, straining leather came from within the girl as she hung her head.

“Those magicians could not change the world the way they wanted, nor could they follow their own rules after coming up with lofty salvation conditions,” said Anna Sprengel in a singsong way. “It probably was pure chance that very average group discovered the artificial miracle that is Alice Anotherbible before they began dressing up as gods. But they realized something.”

“…”

“In a mishmash of fiction and reality, a real girl had been remade into the storybook Alice and the storybook Alice had been created in the real world. They extracted a portion of those ‘plans’ and applied it to themselves. By customizing themselves as they liked with pieces of the preexisting open-source spell, they could abandon their individuality to dress up as any god or demon with extraordinary precision.”

The Transcendents really had transformed themselves that way.

At the cost of their own individuality.

For the Bridge Builders Cabal, the Anotherbible was a priceless text, but Alice was no more than a target of their worship. So they feared her and respected her, but they did everything they could to avoid third parties contacting her.

What had that lonely girl really wanted?

Or, more accurately, who?

“I see,” said Othinus on Kamijou’s shoulder. Sounding somewhat exasperated. “This human was perfect for the role. I see now why that little monster was so obsessed with him.”

“Alice Pleasance Liddell listened to Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the prototype for it all, and was the one clear model for the protagonist. But in a later era, she was abducted by a ‘Teacher of Crowley’ and thoroughly modified to create the Alice seen in the story.”

Little Anna herself proved that one’s apparent age wasn’t necessarily reliable.

Even if she was already an adult when she was abducted, the magician would have made the necessary adjustments. Very physical adjustments using a scalpel and saw. It may have taken cutting through bone, sewing together skin, and rearranging organs, but they would have kept working and adjusting until she had the exact same height and adorable appearance as the fictional girl.

That could not have been an enjoyable experience.

But after being freed from the mystery magician and finding a place in the center of the Bridge Builders Cabal, Alice had not been able to live the innocent life of the storybook. Even though she was already free and more powerful than anyone. She had given up on any life other than fulfilling other people’s interests.

And she really had become an innocent child.

She probably wasn’t even aware of her own humiliation and resignation.

Anna sighed softly and dug into the ugly side of humanity.

That was something Kamijou couldn’t do.

This was a territory only allowed for a worldwide villain.

She would carry the burden of everyone’s ire as she revealed the necessary truth.

“A parent who values logic has no dreams to share with their child.

“When Mathematician Lewis Carroll later began creating the world’s greatest fantasy, he laid out symbols and meanings, discovered a special child, and used her as a model to tell the prototype of it all: Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.

“A self-proclaimed Teacher of Crowley saw value in you as no more than the one and only specimen to know of the uncorrected original version, so they remade you by rearranging everything from your bones to your organs into the optimal color, shape, and size.

“When the Bridge Builders Cabal ‘rediscovered’ the girl still wandering in the shadows of the modern world, they only saw you as an open-source spell of great power. They feared and respected you in something more like worship than anything.”

And so the girl had been craving more.

Starving for it.

It mattered little if it was a conscious or subconscious thing.

Alice was always surrounded by so many people, but none of them were really looking at her.

Her reputation had preceded her.

With one exception.

There was one boy who did not want her power as a Transcendent, had rejected the “happiness” brought by her ultimate power, and faced her with nothing but his own fist no matter how many times he was killed.

It all began there.

Like dreaming of something from a storybook, a certain girl had thought that was her last chance there.

So she wanted it no matter what.

“Touma, stand back.”

“Ah.”

“Stand back! Now!!”

Hesitantly, Kamijou got his voice out from his parched and trembling mouth.

While asking himself what it was he was so afraid of.

“Al...ice?”

“Yes?”

The girl raised her head.

Except she no longer had anything above her neck.

Part 9

Aradia had finally caught up.

She walked through the high school’s front gate, setting foot inside its grounds.

Or so she thought.

“Tch!!”

She immediately swung her black and yellow railroad crossing barrier and was answered with a dull crack. It suddenly broke at about the middle. Even with the power of the goddess of witches, she was forced back.

Good, Old Mary, who was woozy from blood loss, muttered quietly.

“It looks like a rabbit, but it doesn’t have a watch. It must be the March Hare from the tea party.”

“One of the Alice Series!?”

The flamingo bats. The hedgehogs.

The Gryphon, the Executioner, the Cook.

These were Alice’s raw and unstoppable toys which magicians had not yet turned into tools.

They seemed to be fighting as two opposing armies, but here it looked like the enemy of your enemy wasn’t your friend. The flamingo bats and hedgehogs would sometimes attack the Transcendents without provocation, so they couldn’t be trusted.

The March Hare had apparently attacked just now, but which side was he on?

For that matter, why were different monsters born from Alice fighting each other in the first place!?

“What are we supposed to do?” asked the Bologna Succubus.

“We should have Good, Old Mary stay back. We shouldn’t rely too heavily on her resurrection, but we shouldn’t waste her by sending her up against an even more dangerous enemy either!!”

The school was a rather large place.

Where was that boy?

And while they were only regular ones, it was strange that a group of several Transcendents couldn’t get past this one position.

They supposedly each wielded strange spells capable of taking on the entire magic side single-handedly.

The Gryphon, the Executioner, the bipedal hare, and the Cook throwing irons and pots.

They were all Alice’s toys with their origins in Wonderland.

But while they were only toys, they had been directly injected with a portion of Alice’s power. As seen with the Shrink Drink, that power made these far from your normal foe.

Ultimately, the Bridge Builders Cabal did not exist for Alice.

It was the result of the regular Transcendents, who sought and feared her great power, struggling to find some way of managing her.

All on her own, Alice was more powerful than countless armies.

Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, Good, Old Mary, and Mut Thebes.

Those four Transcendents gathering here was no problem at all for Alice. She probably hadn’t even decided to fight against the Transcendents. This could be seen in how the toys continued fighting each other instead of driving out the intruders.

“By the way, where did Anna get off to!?” asked Aradia.

“Did that slut use mama and the rest of you as bait for these pain-in-the-ass opponents while she went on ahead? She did, didn’t she?”

They said nothing more.

First, they sensed a great pressure. Only a moment later did they feel the powerful tremor in the ground.

It was Dinah the cat.

The fluffy white and black beast had grown larger than the gym, so a single step caused the entire space to shake. The flamingo bats and hedgehogs ran around in a panic and the Gryphon failed to get away in time and had its front leg crushed underfoot.

It didn’t matter if they were on Alice’s side.

And the culprit – Dinah – wasn’t even aware she had done it.

She was the greatest force in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

She carried such great firepower that the mice and birds who caused Alice so much trouble had fled at the mere mention of her name.

If this really was her, then she might cause destruction greater than Alice intended for.

That meant there was a risk of her crushing the entire school building with Kamijou and Alice inside.

Which was exactly what happened.

With her back to the school building, Aradia briefly froze up, so the Bologna Succubus had to flap her bat wings and tackle Aradia from the side to send them both tumbling across the ground. A gust of wind blew past them like a subway train had passed by nearby. That thing was much too large for anyone human-sized to take a direct hit from it. Aradia didn’t have time to celebrate her survival. She roared up toward the heavens while still tangled up with the Bologna Succubus.

That was the most prized of Alice’s toys.

Deadly Dinah.

Only one Transcendent could hope to battle that giant that rivaled a school gym in size.

“Mut Thebes, stop that thing immediately!!”

“It is too soon for me to attack. Wait 15 minutes for me to absorb enough shadows to create a body that can safely face the cat.”

Aradia’s eyes widened.

Mut Thebes wasn’t going to be any help.

Dinah was charging head-first toward the school building.

And just before she crashed into it, a deafening roar rang out.

Dinah was knocked rolling back, gouging large pieces of dirt out of the schoolyard and sending tons of dust into the air. It made no sense. There was no thick barrier there and no steel warship had appeared.

There was only a single human silhouette.

It looked downright minuscule compared to Dinah, who was large enough to look down at the gym.

Nevertheless, it was Dinah whose max-speed charge had been repelled, sending her rolling backwards.

“Wha-?”

Aradia was speechless.

This wasn’t even a Transcendent.

“Honestly.”

A voice came from the cloud of dust.

Aradia’s group did not recognize the voice. But the female voice inspired a compulsion that prevented even the Transcendents from taking it lightly.

“Alice Anotherbible has fallen apart more than I 💭. All of these things are a 🧩 of her – they are the many opinions she has ❌ been able to reconcile. I did ❌ expect her to be so overwhelmed with emotion that she nearly crushed her own 🏰 with her inside.”

This was Anna Kingsford.

The magician stood there on her own two feet without borrowing anyone’s appearance or abilities.

A moment later, the dirt thrown high into the sky was pulled back down by gravity.

It was like a dry rain.

Kingsford casually directed her index finger skyward and something invisible became a large umbrella. She alone was left without a speck of dust in her hair or on her clothes.

Something sliced sharply through the dusty veil.

It was a flamingo bat and the Cook.

Both sides of the conflict arrived at once.

Kingsford extended a single finger and drew out a few patterns in empty air.

They were constellations.

Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces.

The sharp sound was a moment delayed.

A scattershot of compressed water tore through the Cook like a cookie cutter through dough. When her blue-glowing fingertip turned toward the flamingo bat, the bat began to tremble while hovering in the air. Despite being inorganic, it clearly shrank two sizes.

The basics of astrology were to assign various elements and symbols to the 7 planets and 12 constellations of the horoscope and then experiment to see what effects were produced on yourself and others when they were applied from different angles and combinations. There were even tricky ways of building them into attack spells.

So by combining only the water element constellations, you could greatly amplify the power of ordinary water.

Instead of simple addition, it worked through multiplication, so it was like shifting up a gear in a car.

That expert did not bother coming up with impressive special attacks.

By earnestly working at the basic fundamentals that anyone could do and that novices tended to look down on, any magic could be brought to the point of a one-hit kill.

But none of that was particularly important.

For one, that wouldn’t be enough to kill Dinah.

“I will ❌ let you destroy the things you care about, Alice. That would be much too 😢 to see. I assure you on my name as an expert, being special does ❌ cut you off from the supply of ☺️.”

Just then…

“…?”

Anna Kingsford looked down at her right hand.

A red liquid was dripping from it.

She only had a slight cut on her fingertip, but the amount of blood was not the issue.

She shouldn’t have been harmed at all in that situation.

That expert never made mistakes.

So if something unexpected occurred regardless, it meant the problem was with the initial data she was working with, not her calculations.

In other words…

“Is this body reaching its limit?” she whispered, holding her fingertip in her mouth.

Her voice itself was a lot “rougher” than it had been when she was first booted up in Shibuya’s Miyashita Ark. It wasn’t limited to her outward appearance. This proved the injury and deterioration was also progressing where it couldn’t be seen.

She didn’t show the slightest hint of fear as she looked out ahead.

In fact, she took a step forward.

The cat large enough to crush the gym rose to her feet again.

Kingsford couldn’t continue on and leave this with the regular Transcendents. She had never figured out how to pick and choose who she saved.

These were Alice’s raw toys, which had yet to be turned into easy-to-use tools like the Shrink Drink. And this cat was the greatest of them. She was a mass of violence and destruction that wouldn’t bat an eye as she trampled all the other toys.

Dinah.

The expert faced the cat head on, holding the brim of her large hat between her fingertips.

She doubted her body would last to the end.

For that matter, it was unnatural for a preserved corpse her to be moving around at all.

(But I can accept that.)

So she decided on a more realistic goal: injuring Dinah enough to create an opening or weak point the Transcendents could take advantage of to defeat Dinah on their own.

The expert knew her doom was closing in on her, but she still spoke with her usual smile.

“⌚ to serve others.”

Part 10

She was a headless girl.

A little corpse.

Yet she was also standing up and looking at Kamijou.

He distinctly felt the pressure of her gaze.

The atmosphere in the library changed. The scales were rapidly tilting in a direction he did not like at all.

“!?”

Without thinking, he stepped back away from her.

This was an expression of malice that shouldn’t have been necessary.

Which proved it had been intentional.

It was true after all.

No matter how you looked at it, the center of the problem was right there.

It always had been.

Kamijou pushed past the fear of death he knew was coming and shouted.

“Alice!!”

He heard a sound like tearing cardboard.

No, not like. The headless girl really did tear down the center. And something else emerged, sticky with a translucent fluid.

This had happened before.

But this was not the little girl dressed in profane red and black leather.

This form could never have fit in that small body.

But she wasn’t accepting questions.

At the top of the vertical tear, near where the head should have been, an arm jutted straight up, but this arm belonged to a captivatingly beautiful woman. With a splat, she collapsed forward to crawl like a dog. The translucent slime left behind strings that stained the floor. She squirmed like a fluffy red boa. The leather bound her bright, wet body more tightly than necessary and her long blonde hair was so wet it writhed on the ground as a single clump. After instantly becoming a woman of about 18, she crawled forward and swung her head upwards. The wet hair covering her face swung back behind her, revealing her beautiful face.

“Touma!!”

Alice Anotherbible.

Or maybe Alice Pleasance Liddell.

Her true form.

“Did you use yourself as the ingredients to recreate the ideal version of yourself?” said Othinus in disgust.

Alice worked her alluring throat to release growls and her fingers scratched at the floor like an animal with sharp and sinister claws. She could not have been farther removed from reason, intelligence, and innocent adorableness.

Violence.

Battle.

Killing.

That was all she was.

She shined with the same light as a sword that had had been made so deadly it gained an odd beauty.

The fear of death was gone.

Even that thick invisible wall had vanished.

Kamijou felt a tingling in the back of his head. With the sharp claws, the large canine teeth emerging from her lips, and the fearsome light in her eyes, he knew there was so much he needed to focus on, yet he couldn’t read even a hint of deadliness from her. But he knew this wasn’t Alice doing anything special. His own mind had numbed the fear. Because if he accurately understood the threat here, his heart would stop of its own accord. His heart would raise the white flag before his mind did.

The animal rose to her feet.

The fully grown body of an alluringly beautiful woman straightened her legs and stood up like she had only just remembered she could.

She took a fighting stance.

“Teacher…”

That one word created a distortion.

But not in Alice. The bookcases, the reading desks, the floor, the walls, and everything else Kamijou could see looked like a child had scribbled out their outlines in white and black.

“The girl…wants…only one goal. She will…have this…no matter…matter what.”

He could have understood if she said she would kill him just for fun.

Or if she said she deeply resented him.

Even if she said she would destroy the world based on some inscrutable logic, he might have decided that made sense for someone so very different.

But.

“The girl wants...to make up...with you.”

Everything froze.

Inside Kamijou Touma, time ground to a halt.

Was that it.

Was that really and truly all there was to it?

At the Bridge Builders Cabal consulate in District 12, Kamijou and Alice had disagreed over her attempted punishment of H.T. Trismegistus, who had tried to kill him, and Good, Old Mary, who had failed to protect him.

CRC had killed her and she had regained her lost head.

She had driven the world mad and might destroy it as soon as tomorrow.

But this had never changed.

She only wanted to mend that broken bond.

No matter what it took.

Even if her methods were seen as unfair.

That little girl didn’t care. Kamijou should have bowed his head and apologized, but he had completely forgotten after learning about his imminent death.

Nevertheless, she was trying to achieve it on her own, even if it meant dirtying her hands.

So they could smile together again.

“So.”

It all took a turn.

Her behavior was distorted.

Only in Alice’s mind did it all fit together smoothly.

“The girl will make up with you. She will fight you because a serious fight allows people to make up. But it has to be serious, so what can the girl do to get you to fight her? This city, this country, and this world can wait. It has to be serious. The girl understands you, teacher, so she knows you will fight her and make up with her.”

She said it all in a terribly drawn out and flat, emotionless voice. Her emotions were so intense it was all destroyed, like the recording medium itself was being burned from below by a lighter.

Alice probably really could do that.

And what would happen?

Would the world really end over this?

Maybe Alice could no longer make logical connections between the different pieces of data.

Kamijou had thoroughly broken that girl’s mind.

Issues of right and wrong or like and dislike were trivial at this point. They would no longer provide a dividing line between enemy and ally. This wasn’t like mantises that were programmed so the female would always eat the male. Perhaps it was closer to spiders where the female would sometimes suddenly leap at and devour the male in the middle of the male’s courtship display. Even with the same species facing each other one-on-one, and even with the male expressing his love and the female accepting it, she might mercilessly devour him on a whim. She would only realize she had done it after the fact. You couldn’t predict what would happen even a second into the future with a being like that.

She was such a close but distant being.

She was different.

She was a predator beautifully made by stretching out the muscles, laying out the nerves, hardening the bones.

Kamijou didn’t find her frightening anymore.

He felt sorrow instead.

“Stand back, fool,” coldly insisted Anna Sprengel.

The look she gave Alice was unusual for that villain.

Alice was another irregular Transcendent – another open-source path to power – but one who would never stand on the same side as Anna. Anna gave her a look of pity.

“You understand, don’t you? She’s a lot like an unstable animal. If you approach her now, she might turn you to mincemeat without even meaning to. In the worst case, she might decide that, if she can’t have you alive, she will tear off your head and take that away with her.”

Kamijou shook his head.

Would he battle Alice?

And defeat her?

“I can’t do that.”

This wasn’t about the size of the threat. He couldn’t picture it. It felt wrong. He wanted to trust in that part of himself.

He recalled that giant dragon.

When he had punched CRC away and given up on his possibilities, he had felt a disgusting sensation.

A future where he and CRC could stand side-by-side smiling had been lost. Kamijou had made sure of it.

And the fear caused by his prophesied death made him feel this way all the more.

Would he use that against Alice this time?

Like hell he would.

“Because I can’t save Alice that way. Isn’t there some other way!?”

Index and her 103,001 grimoires were here. So was Othinus, who had once been a Magic God. Not to mention Anna Sprengel, who was familiar with Rosicrucianism and the Bridge Builders Cabal.

Combining those three’s knowledge could reveal a way of saving Alice.

But…

“That really depends on your definition of ‘save’,” said Othinus. “Human, would you really be saving her if you grabbed that oversized head and shoved it back inside the small body? Back inside that shed skin?”

She was a god who had once destroyed the world and been pursued by all of humanity as a great criminal.

That Magic God was saying this about another monster capable of ending the world.

She said it clearly, without averting her gaze from reality.

This was nothing as over-the-top as saving humanity or protecting the world.

It was a more personal miracle.

But she was speaking to the boy who really had risked his life to save a lonely god.

“You are here, human. So make your own choice. This here is the real Alice. She isn’t pure or innocent, but if the world can accept her this way, that would be one way of saving her.”

“Oh,” said Kamijou, sounding exasperated.

He just had to bring Alice back to her senses.

He kept that in mind while ignoring the issue of how difficult that would be to actually pull off.

“So if I risk my life, a path opens up?”

That was the best news he’d heard all day.

In that instant, an explosion erupted out.

Something twisted and scattered around right in front of his eyes. It took him a moment to realize they were fake roses.

Or that he would have been decapitated if not for them.

Alice had attacked.

He didn’t know why.

It was possible she didn’t either.

She was a captivatingly beautiful monster, but she was not a villain.

He had to believe that.

How deadly she looked had nothing to do with whether she was good or bad. She would bare her fangs whether it was right or wrong and whether she liked you or not. She was an unstable collection of power with only that function.

So he couldn’t falter.

He couldn’t turn Alice into a monster. He couldn’t accept that conclusion.

“Fool, the rose is a symbol of change. This applies to the Golden brooch that can create any sigil through the orderly arrangement of the 22 Hebrew letters and it applies to white and red roses colored with paint in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. By forcibly altering the interpretation and building a bridge, I can divert at least one of her attacks.”

Anna Sprengel stared straight ahead as she said this, but she had a red wound running across her cheek.

That had only been a villain’s trickery.

Kamijou couldn’t expect it to work forever.

But he should be plenty thankful it had worked at all in this real confrontation.

And while deflecting the attack was all well and good, he had no idea what Alice had done even after being on the receiving end of her attack.

The animal roared loud.

“Oooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

Was that magic?

It was an apocalyptic roar.

A great energy grounded in something other than intelligence and reason spiraled out. The roar reflected off the walls and floor before gathering unnaturally on a single point in space.

Anna swept her little hand from left to right.

That was all it took for a thick shockwave to bend like a bow and knock over a few bookcases.

It was actually Alice who paused for a beat.

With her right hand still jabbing out with the fingers together. Perhaps that would have knocked off Kamijou’s head and then stabbed through his corpse’s heart before it could even fall to the floor.

Slap!!

Little Anna, who would look better than anyone delivering a double slap, sent another attack sweeping up from below.

This may have been a first.

Alice Anotherbible’s attack wasn’t deflected or redirected – it was stopped from head on by an attack of equal power.

“Kh.”

“Why do you look so surprised?”

The little villain grinned and exchanged a glare with Alice at close range. Anna accepted Alice’s gaze without trying to escape.

She was a Transcendent not based on Alice.

She was another irregular Transcendent.

“Did you think you were special? There’s no such thing in the world of magic. I’m a magician who dressed up as Kingsford so I could stop my foolish students from ignoring my teaching and attempting self-destructive magic. I built my secret art from the ground up with the hands I had bloodied attempting to protect those lovable fools. Did you really think my way was inferior to the secret art you were simply given and have no real use for!?”

Alice’s hand was fully deflected.

She spun around, her partially-retracted arm blurring into streamlines. She chose a new target to attack. Index was chosen first, so Kamijou shoved the nun out of the way.

Fingers capable of tearing through steel rushed toward Kamijou.

Flashes of light intersected like a cross.

The fingers and claws sent horizontally toward Kamijou’s throat were stopped at the last second by an extremely thin blade.

Courtesy of H.T. Trismegistus.

No…

“My right hand contains Zeus. My left hand contains Indra. Thus I am renewed. Z.I. Trismegistus conversion complete!!”

Blinding white flashed from the point of contact between the struggling sword and fingers.

That was probably a high-voltage current.

The electrical energy was powerful enough to burn through a metal panel thicker than a thumb.

Of course, this wouldn’t be enough to defeat Alice. But dazzling her eyes for a moment meant a lot.

It gave Kamijou time to fall back.

“What the hell!? Can you just pick a side and stay on it!?” complained Othinus.

“Common sense says…”

The young butler hung his head.

He clenched his fist hard enough for his sword cane to creak.

“Common sense says I cannot expect Christian Rosencreutz to show up and save us here and now. And not just him. No one who isn’t present can do anything to help. I was wrong to place my hopes on people like that. No matter how complex and challenging the world’s problems, it is up to the people living in it to solve them.”

Now that he was freed from his bonds, H.T. Trismegistus spoke clearly.

“It is the people with us now who will decide how this ends. So it would be foolish in the extreme to not make use of that right. So says common sense!!”

Alice Anotherbible had tremendous power.

That power led a great many people to gather around her. But the Transcendents who had wanted to use her to make themselves special may have seemed like a stale and uninteresting bunch to Alice.

But that wasn’t all.

It couldn’t be.

In addition to the power someone had forced her to carry, Alice had drawn quite a few people to herself in a different way. No matter what anyone might say, as much as she might resent the magician who had created “Alice Anotherbible” and however she saw things herself, Alice had not been alone. She had been loved.

Because if she wasn’t, Kamijou Touma, Anna Sprengel, and H.T. Trismegistus – people with such different positions and intentions – wouldn’t have all gathered here like this.

They wouldn’t have been working together to save Alice.

“Hey, Alice.” She didn’t say anything, but Kamijou still smiled.

He was certain that Alice had the wrong idea of what it meant to be an adult.

When adults ran into problems, they asked for help. They would rely on and depend on others. They simply did their best to hide this in front of the small children.

Trying to do it all yourself and thinking you could solve anything if you had a special power was a child’s way of thinking.

So he had a lesson for her.

And for the world’s greatest illusion.

He would teach her that letting her ugly side show wasn’t going to destroy her world.

Alice Anotherbible wouldn’t be a lonely monster.

He wouldn’t let her.

An invisible wall had shattered inside Kamijou Touma.

He could deal with the deadly prophecy later. Because he had found something more important.

“If you think you can use your power to twist everything to your will… If you think you can take everything you loathe and make it everyone else’s problem…”

A perfectly ordinary high school boy clenched his right fist.

Tightly.

“Then I’ll destroy that illusion!!!”

None of the problems had been resolved. The boy had only adjusted his internal priorities.

Kamijou Touma would die today.

But so what?

Chapter 4: The Unfortunate Boy’s Focus – Over_the_River.

Part 1

H.T. Trismegistus looked at everything before him.

He had known the cause.

Which was why he had thought Alice would go back to normal if he killed Kamijou Touma.

He had thought he needed to punish Anna for messing with Alice.

He had always been on that small girl’s side.

Because he had thought common sense said it would be cruel to throw such a small girl out into the world alone. In that case, her tremendous power would not be an advantage. It would only be an omen of danger. She would be like a young child who inherited a vast fortune. She would be the perfect bait for all the scum lurking in the shadows. He had decided he should protect her and look after her. It wasn’t about logic. He thought anyone would decide the same thing after seeing her, which meant it was common sense. He had believed in the goodness of the world at large.

But in that case…

“Oooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

What was this?

Was this what he had wanted to see?

Wind blew wildly through the library, but this was no meteorological phenomenon. Great currents of a nonphysical power created tailwinds and headwinds in rapid succession.

As a regular Transcendent who had used Alice as an example to get where he was, he could not rescue the girl who was his starting point.

Attempting it was as meaningless as offering a hand to help her to her feet while also pinning her down below his foot. Pulling on her hand like that would only tear her arm off.

Thus.

CRC. Christian Rosencreutz.

He had thought the only way to save that lonely girl was with the help of a power not derived from Alice and that common sense told him was greater than hers.

That was the only option.

He couldn’t think up anything else.

But when the holy man was reborn, he was nothing like the common legends and he hadn’t been interested in saving the world, including Alice.

Alice had smiled like normal after having her head crushed, but it had felt somehow off.

They had reached their limit.

Alice Anotherbible had.

The Bridge Builders Cabal, who wished to save the world but couldn’t make the attempt on their own, had.

The Transcendents, who had erased their own opinions and thrown out their own identities, had.

They all had.

They had made the wrong choice. H.T. Trismegistus had passed that fatal branch and started down a path to hell. He had finally realized that. There was no undoing what he had done, so what could he do to fight it now?

There was no optimal answer.

So what kind of compromise could he reach?

“…”

He had made a fatally mistaken decision, but H.T. Trismegistus was still a Transcendent. He dressed up in the appearance and abilities of the god he had chosen, he chose his salvation condition, and then he saved everyone that applied to. So even in this situation, he directed his question not to himself but to the thing that determined all his actions.

In other words, he asked it of the entire world.

What did common sense say?

Was it really right to ignore a crying girl?

Part 2

They were in a library filled with light.

Not a grand temple or castle. It was part of a certain boy’s school, which Alice Anotherbible had said she wanted to see. That was the reason she had chosen this as the final location.

There was no further significance there.

Alice had in fact offered up her entire being, including her life, there.

What had that small girl really wanted?

This had nothing to do with the fate of Academy City or the madness spreading across the world.

Kamijou had to sense what was deep inside Alice.

He quietly clenched his teeth.

Strongly.

The time had come to directly face that cornered girl’s feelings.

“Touma-”

“Don’t bother trying to analyze this with your 103,001 grimoires,” roared Kamijou, still facing Alice.

He intentionally ignited his heart.

“I know what I have to do regardless: punch Alice to bring her back to her senses!! Being the strongest doesn’t mean she has to carry it all on her own. I refuse to let her be alone for even a second longer!!”

Kamijou Touma.

Anna Sprengel. H.T. Trismegistus.

Those three faced the girl together. They glared at her without fleeing. Their positions, plans, and abilities were completely different, but they were all working toward a single goal here.

Don’t forget.

And if you have forgotten, we’ll show you.

“Don’t falter.”

Alice Anotherbible.

You aren’t alone.

Your loneliness is no more than an illusion.

There are still plenty of people out there who want to save you!!

“Let’s do thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis!!!”

Kamijou shouted to shake off the fear and raced forward. With his right fist still clenched tight.

Well before he made it in punching range, he heard a hard crunching sound.

It came from Alice.

No, down at her feet.

He knew better than to ask why or for what purpose.

Alice was already doing something.

Whatever this was, that irregular Transcendent had chosen to use her own body to act.

And she chose to attack.

“Fool!!”

Little Anna kicked him in the back of the knee from the side.

As soon as his view dropped straight down, something tore diagonally upwards through the air.

All sound vanished.

Five clawmarks were torn diagonally through the library wall directly behind Kamijou. Same for the many bookcases in between. Only after the fact did he realize the same would have happened to him if his head hadn’t lowered by a few dozen centimeters.

Claws.

Scratches.

That primitive attack had been amplified to the extreme.

“If you die, it’s over. I know it’s obvious, but you can’t forget that absolute rule!! Good, Old Mary’s resurrection does not work against fatal wounds caused by Alice herself. If you really want to save her, then you can’t expect the world to do you any favors. You can only reach out your own hand to help her!!”

If the expert named Anna Kingsford were here, she would have easily seen through it.

The only one here who reached that level understanding was the Grimoire Library with access to 103,001 original grimoires.

“Was that magic?” asked Index in disbelief. While reaching out a hand to help Kamijou back to his feet. “Since people’s interior worlds are linked to the physical world outside them, anything you can do with your body can be used to reach a mystical power that changes the entire world. I get that, but still.”

“All those fancy gestures and ceremonies are only meant to purify and cleanse your will,” said Othinus.

Kamijou took this time to gently push the little god into Index’s hands.

Everything about Alice was the ultimate enigma, so he wanted to ensure the survival of anyone who could help explain it all. And he didn’t think he could protect Othinus if she was with him.

“But Alice Anotherbible has had her baseline purity forcibly increased, so each and every one of her actions is pure without going through that process.”

“We should consider ourselves fortunate,” said H.T. Trismegistus.

That was the gloomy young butler’s assessment.

Because…

“We are in fact incredibly fortunate that Alice cannot kill her enemies with a thought or set the world in motion to kill her enemies if she wills it. This tells us she must take a physical action to trigger her attacks. Common sense says we are lucky indeed.”

But that also meant this wasn’t limited to her scratching claws.

The girl who had become a fully-grown woman faced Kamijou while tilting diagonally.

She took a step.

Just one.

“Touma, she’s coming!!”

“!!!???”

He understood that, but he couldn’t restrain his reflexes as a living being. Crossing his arms in front of his face was a definite mistake.

The sweet scent of tea filled the boy’s nose. Something was overpowering the library’s old paper smell.

Alice Anotherbible already stood behind Kamijou.

Walking

In other words, she took action to move to her desired location.

She had not formed a special shape with her fingers, nor had she stepped in a complex pattern.

She had taken the same action anyone could.

She was blessed with a special result without having to focus on it.

The meaning extracted from her ordinary actions was just too pure!?

“Ali-!?”

She was already right there.

Kamijou spun around and swung his right hand back in something like a backhand blow.

But it found only air.

The grown woman pressed her four limbs down against the floor like an animal and lowered her head as far as it would go.

Crawling.

She had moved to his blind spot and then his last-second counterattack had missed. What this meant squeezed at his heart. He might as well have offered her the perfect chance to attack him.

The young butler did not hesitate to move.

Light flashed from his right hand as the blade hidden in his cane turned to light and sliced through the floor. The strange slash had an effect well beyond the length of the sword. And it struck right were crawling Alice’s lowered head was. It definitely hit. Except the metal blade passed right through her. Like she was intangible.

A specific meaning had been extracted from her ordinary action: evasion.

“It doesn’t matter if you hit her or not!?” hatefully spat Othinus.

As long as the adult woman moved to dodge, no external damage could affect her. Even if she took a direct hit from a nuclear missile. Alice showed no interest in H.T. Trismegistus even with his attempted decapitation of her. Still crawling, she raised her head and casually extended her hand toward Kamijou.

“I was right.”

Apparently the young butler’s attack had been to check something.

He had ended up cutting through the floor below Alice instead of her, so it fell.

That had been his intent from the beginning.

He had intentionally destroyed the floor so he could gather more information and survive.

Kamijou would die today.

But he didn’t care about that anymore.

“Hey, wait, human!”

“(Keep Othinus with you, Index!)”

Just as he passed that message on with a look, the entire floor collapsed.

His feet were freed from gravity and his vision slid straight down. Along with the heavy bookcases held in place with quake-resistant screws.

“Gah!?”

Kamijou, Anna, and Trismegistus himself were caught up in it too, successfully distancing them from Alice’s hand.

They just barely escaped alive.

Instead of an ordinary classroom, they found themselves in a large space that must have been lined with steel office desks. Or the remains of it, anyway. The first term in the new school had yet to begin, but the desks already had some personal items on them. Was this the faculty room?

Only Alice wasn’t affected.

The grown woman’s long blonde hair swayed as she looked down at them from the upper floor. The floor only remained in the corners of the room and Alice alone stood there.

Like a wounded animal bleeding and furious while trapped by a fishing hook or some plastic tape that a human had thoughtlessly discarded.

Like a lonely animal.

One that’s threats and howls echoed with melancholy.

This isn’t over, thought Kamijou as he forced his aching body back onto its feet. No matter how battered his body was – even if he was in such a bad state it would make a doctor scream in horror – he was still alive. For now, at least.

The power balance of Transcendents and whatnot no longer mattered. Just a person was good enough. As long as he still lived, even the puniest human had the right to change the course of the battle with his own conscious decisions.

And the extraordinary strongest being was only looking at him.

That much was a relief, at least.

(Index and Othinus are probably up there. And unlike Alice, they were by the door, so they can escape at any time. They don’t need to stay on the dangerous frontline. As long as I can call them, they can still provide information support!)

“She uses a variation on this, doesn’t she?”

Kamijou heard a dull “thud!!” and turned to see a 2m metal orb next to Anna. That was the Pneuma-less Shell, a spiritual item that produced tools from civilizations the world over and extracted the world’s oldest causes of death from them.

“But in Alice’s case, she doesn’t even rely on a tool. She draws out the meaning contained in the actions she takes and unleashes them as an attack. It’s a type of magic and also a type of miracle. She takes the ridiculous-sounding legends of holy men and woman producing miracles empty-handed and develops a logical way of actually doing it. Or that’s the sense I get from it, anyway.”

“…”

“Supposedly she was created when some Teacher of Crowley went a step too far and modified Alice Pleasance Liddell, so maybe if you follow the path back from Magick to Golden magic and then Rosicrucian magic, you can see the essence of my spells in what she does.”

On the floor above, Alice ignored their conversation and moved.

She tapped her heel down.

Creating a vibration.

It didn’t matter that they were on separate floors.

Kamijou and the others went stiff. They were pinned in place.

Stomping.

It was a juvenile act of resistance and intimidation. A challenge and attempted reversal against someone who was clearly your superior. It was a threat meant to overpower adult logic with childish instinct and a primitive gamble that all humans attempted at some point.

It worked.

The adult Alice jumped down in the single second the world was frozen.

She aimed to land on Kamijou. On the top of his head.

A dull sound followed.

Alice again knocked something sharply to the ground.

That broke the spell and Kamijou quickly leaped toward Anna and rolled along the floor.

Alice’s heel dropped like a shooting star and smashed deep into the floor.

Little Anna smirked in Kamijou’s arms while they lay in a jumble on the floor.

As if she were bragging to Alice that, no matter how powerful Alice was, it was Anna the boy had done this for.

“Now, did you switch over to 1.5x speed because you thought it was just a boring exposition scene? The Pneuma-less Shell is not a demonstration-only show item. It is a spiritual item that randomly produces a cause of death and not even I can fully control what it does!!”

She held a staff.

The strange staff looked like a giant golden cross decorated with a red ruby rose.

“You should thank my excellent luck of the draw, fool. The gold cross and ruby rose – the world’s oldest human-made miracle of the rose is the destruction of the origin. It brings death through disillusionment. It supposedly has ancient origins, but it was first depicted in the middle ages and rediscovered in more recent times. It contains all the violence found in the magic of extreme growth and maturity!!”

Miss Sprengel raised the staff in her little hands.

That was all.

There was no fancy incantation or complex magic circle. Flames simply appeared in the empty air and were released from the staff. They shot toward Alice with a liquid motion. These were not ordinary flames. They were magic flames that scorched and burned away space itself regardless of the physical material, like an old photograph being burned from behind.

Alice grabbed her long hair as a single mass.

And she swung her head around.

In a move straight out of kabuki, the thick bundle of hair drew a large circle in the air, which narrowed down as soon as the crimson flames passed through it.

The orange flames stopped in midair.

Binding.

In other words, stopping all movement of a target. And separating the target out from all possible interference.

“Tch!!”

The Pneuma-less Shell was Anna’s spiritual item, but what weapon she acquired was a matter of chance. She wouldn’t receive the same weapon if she tried again.

But that brief moment of regret was a mistake.

Alice tugged on her hair binding the flames, causing little Anna to pitch forward and lose her balance.

At that same moment, the grown woman took a step forward. They had seen what this did already. Whatever the distance, Alice would have already arrived at her destination.

Which meant right in front of Kamijou.

For an instant, he lost all depth perception. Alice’s grown chest suddenly blocked his view and his pupils couldn’t focus in time.

She arrived straight up in front of him with a flowing motion.

By the time his eyes had finally caught up, Alice’s fingers – and their sharp claws – were extending lithely toward his throat.

Time stopped. He tried to swing his head to the side and dodge, but his body couldn’t keep up.

He couldn’t die yet.

He might die, but it couldn’t be now.

He thought that so hard it seemed to burn into his mind. After all, the girl who had forgotten how to cry and instead howled like an animal was right there in front of him. He couldn’t die until he had saved her.

Light pierced sharply in from the side.

Time resumed flowing.

Alice doubled over and rolled along the floor.

This first clean hit did not come from Kamijou, Anna, or H.T. Trismegistus.

They heard a voice.

“What the hell? Did I really just hit Alice? Not to mention I thought we couldn’t even approach this center area because we were cut off spatially and temporally in that labyrinth!”

It was Aradia, god of witches, the moon, and the night.

A short distance away, the Bologna Succubus was on the ground grappling with a bipedal hare. After absorbing the shadows of next-gen weapons until she was large enough to trample the school building underfoot, Mut Thebes was engaged in a direct fistfight with an equally gigantic cat.

Hadn’t Anna mentioned the other Transcendents had arrived at the school too?

Kamijou and the others must have fallen far enough to reach where those Transcendents were battling the Gryphon, the Executioner, and so on.

Unlike Kamijou, Alice had not invited them.

And they couldn’t slip past those defenses like Anna could.

They had forcibly entered a labyrinth with no goal. In there, they fought an endless battle against Alice’s brutal toys – which might look comical but were all monsters capable of overwhelming Academy City’s dark side. That they were still alive showed just how abnormal Transcendents were.

For a brief moment, the dark pressure of death vanished within Kamijou. He felt strength growing from the center of his being.

Alice really wasn’t alone.

The world was not such a heartless place.

Good, Old Mary, Aradia, and the others gained nothing by winning this battle, but they were still here risking their lives. Even though this battlefield was ruled by the ordinary and inviolable rule where death meant losing everything they had been working to achieve.

What motivated their desperate battle?

What could it possibly be other than kindness?

“Fool, this is bad sign. Encountering the bait meant to buy us time means we have more enemies to deal with. By which I mean the Gryphon, the Executioner, and the rest of the Alice Series.”

“You have some nerve running off on your own to flirt, you goddamn villain,” said Aradia. “Just so you know, I’m more than willing to employ spankings as punishment as long as you aren’t one of the witches I’ve sworn to protect.”

“My, my. Quite an outdated way of thinking for such a young-looking goddess. Makes me wonder how old you really are.”

“I don’t want to hear that from the preserved little girl from who-knows-how-many centuries ago.”

Alice extracted herself from the collapsed cabinets half-burying her.

Her eyeballs rolled in her head.

Even now, that enchantingly lithe woman only ever looked Kamijou’s way. She didn’t even glance over at Aradia who had delivered the attack.

“Kh. Anyway, let’s fall back. We need to put some distance between us!!”

A sharp voice rang through the broken faculty room. Aradia held out her palm and launched a scattershot of light to keep Alice back. Each shot moved like a sea snake as they tore through the air and targeted adult Alice from multiple angles.

The storybook girl said nothing.

She didn’t even look Aradia’s way.

She only extended a finger and rotated it once clockwise.

Like some kind of joke, all of the glowing projectiles veered away from the fully-grown woman, blasting through walls and pillars instead.

Cursing.

That one childish action easily confused every eye on her, bringing them under her spell.

“Kh.”

Aradia didn’t even have time to gasp in shock.

Alice really didn’t look her way the entire time. She simply changed the arrangement of her casually extended fingers. She curled up her middle finger and held it down with her thumb like she was preparing to flick something.

There was no light or sound.

It was a lot like returning the favor.

Aradia broke through the wall and flew off somewhere.

Kamijou’s face paled.

That had definitely hit.

Flicking.

What even was that?

What meaning had been extracted from that simple action anyone was capable of?

Warning bells rang loud in Kamijou’s mind.

If you died, it was over.

Death really and truly meant goodbye.

Because Alice’s attacks were the one thing not even Good, Old Mary’s resurrection could cure.

“Aradiaaa!!”

“Don’t worry, fool. It looks like the two of them distributed the damage between them. But that would have caused her heart to burst if there hadn’t been two identical Aradias here.”

Kamijou knew now wasn’t the time to ask why that would have caused her heart to burst or what splitting that in half would mean.

He heard a dull impact and saw sparks.

After a short delay, he heard an explosion as a shockwave crashed into the distorted scene.

Something again intersected between Anna and Alice.

In the deadly battle against Alice, the value of each second was far greater than normal. Death was the end. Truly the end. The clock was always ticking in real time and everyone was moving at once.

He could not forget the fundamental rules revealed here.

“But that isn’t reason enough to relax. Splitting the damage in half means receiving the same attack twice will mean the end for both Aradias.”

“…”

So Aradia couldn’t do it.

Mut Thebes could grow endlessly by absorbing weapon shadows and Good, Old Mary could create any tool or chemical with her alchemy, including ones with great destructive power, but Kamijou couldn’t picture either of them stopping Alice.

The Bologna Succubus’s Cold Mistress spell could replace all pleasure with equal amounts of pain, regardless of the target’s physical toughness and endurance. That attack had made even Christian Rosencreutz grimace, but would it work here? Was this version of Alice in a mental state where she experienced that sort of human emotion?

Then would he give up?

He needed to give himself some credit for immediately answering that with a “hell no”.

He had a reason for saying that.

He needed to thank his past ordeals for preparing him for this.

“There is little meaning in analyzing each and every thing she does,” said Anna.

She raised her golden cross staff as if judging the distance between herself and Alice.

“We need to start with tearing down the idea that we can never defeat Alice. And it isn’t the Transcendents and their obvious strength that can do that. It needs to be the more unorthodox fighters like me or you who do that, fool!!”

The grown woman vanished.

The golden cross staff and the primitive and violent jabbing claws crashed together head-on.

Anna had reacted.

She was capable of it.

When the Executioner attempted to make his own attack from the side, Anna bisected him straight down the middle with only a glare. The ruby decorating her staff shined a moment later. Its role complete, a clump of compressed air burst, buffeting Kamijou’s hair and cheeks as a violent wind.

The monsters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland could actually die.

There were no absolutes in this world.

Kamijou realized it had been that way from the beginning. Alice had always been so absolute, but when Anna Sprengel showed up, the little villain toyed with the situation, laid traps, took control, and otherwise overshadowed Alice.

While Anna hadn’t managed any clean hits, being able to lock weapons with Alice was unusual in and of itself.

Anna and Alice.

Two irregular Transcendents.

Just like Alice Anotherbible brought everything to her side, including probability and insight, Anna Sprengel was manipulating some unseen factor in real time.

“Accept me, H.T. Trismegistus!! You regular Transcendents are based on Alice, so you can never harm her. But if you swap out foundations, you can bypass Alice’s precedence over you. Like comparing heights of the Tower of Babel and the World Tree Yggdrasil!!”

“I am in your debt.”

“I’m only doing this to make that fool smile. And you want Alice to smile in the same way, right? Then hurry!!”

An invisible change came over the air. A weight vanished.

New possibility had presented itself. If Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, and the other Transcendents also swapped out their connection, they could possibly overturn Alice’s absoluteness.

The young butler once more held his right hand to the staff at his hip in an iaido pose.

The meaning of his sword strikes had changed.

But he was a moment too slow.

With a dull thud, the equilibrium was broken. Anna’s small body took a powerful blow.

Even though they were supposedly equal.

With a single hand, Alice casually grabbed the beaten-up Gryphon to use it as a weapon.

As if it were a giant club.

Grabbing.

The act of denying an object its own will and applying her own will to it by unilaterally wielding it for its offensive or defensive functionality.

Anna could compete with Alice on her own, but that changed if Alice boosted her strength with something else.

That is, if Alice turned someone else into a weapon.

That absurdly powerful magic could boost her stats by forcibly equipping herself with something else: a sword, a shumai, a goddess – anything.

(Is that a superior version of Mut Thebes’s ability to absorb the shadow of any weapon!?)

“Gahh!?”

“Anna!!”

Alice made a further attack. The Gryphon extended her reach, so the little villain failed to dodge. She was pummeled hard enough to bend backwards.

Anna groaned and tried to raise her golden staff.

But Alice was again faster.

Alice was always a step ahead. To an unnatural degree.

She grabbed H.T. Trismegistus’s wrist as he tried to attack her from the side. She turned him into a weapon, equipped that weapon, and swung it artlessly to the side.

A direct hit.

A dull impact rang loud.

In this case, taking Anna’s side had been a mistake.

Or maybe he had been thwarted by Alice’s tailwind.

That magic stole power from external sources. If H.T. Trismegistus had remained no more than one of Alice’s toys, he couldn’t have provided more power on top of her own.

The little villain struggled to breathe and a red clump splattered from the corner of her mouth.

The equilibrium was broken.

Despite dropping her golden cross staff, Anna clenched her teeth and stepped forward.

Another impact sounded.

But not from more of Alice’s unreasonable violence.

It didn’t end there.

This time it came from Anna.

Anna and Alice crashed foreheads together.

“You wanted recognition, didn’t you?”

With their foreheads pressed together, Anna spoke from extreme close range.

“You wanted forgiveness, didn’t you? And you wanted love!! Just like me!!! Then you shouldn’t give up. He didn’t care that I’m a villain. I’m here now because he didn’t hesitate to run away with me back then. As long as that fool continues to reach out his hand, don’t just assume all light has vanished from this world!!!”

Alice said nothing.

But a subtle tremor did run through the cheek of her bestial expression.

Kamijou thought that came from something other than her intense emotion.

Then Alice made her next move.

Smelling.

She sniffed out her target’s precise location. Which meant her next move was guaranteed to hit, no matter how poorly aimed it was.

Once again, Alice swung H.T. Trismegistus around with a single hand and struck Anna’s little body with her boosted attack. The force of the blow caused the gloomy young butler to slip from Alice’s grasp. No, his right wrist shattered like pottery. Only his hand remained in the grown woman’s hand.

This wasn’t like a home run in baseball or a strike in bowling.

The two of them were knocked away with a strange sound.

Neither one cried out.

Kamijou didn’t even want to think about how much damage that had done to Anna.

While collapsed in a daze, H.T. Trismegistus simply stared up at Alice as she tossed his hand aside. The lack of blood only made the scene more bizarre.

“I…”

Something spilled from the young butler’s lips.

They were words.

That magician had believed common sense would lead anyone to think the same thing after seeing that girl with an unwanted power forced upon her. And the words left his mouth now.

“I wanted to place a roof over her head and protect her from the threats of the world…but I failed.”

Alice Anotherbible wasn’t listening.

The fully-grown blonde woman tilted her head and spun around.

“Teacher.”

Toward Kamijou Touma.

As if he was all she could see.

He understood that Alice wasn’t in a normal state of mind.

She hadn’t been when a magician had altered her body, she hadn’t been when she was surrounded and protected by the Bridge Builders Cabal, she hadn’t been when Anna had given her a deep interest in Kamijou Touma, and she hadn’t been when Kamijou’s rejection had left her dazed.

She hadn’t been for so very long.

He understood that.

But that was not a statement she should have ignored.

She had become animalistic and irrational, but it wasn’t like she couldn’t talk. She had just spoken to Kamijou. But she had still chosen to brush off the young butler.

He didn’t interest her, so she wouldn’t speak to him.

Was that the only reason she didn’t react?

(Not yet.)

Don’t lose hope.

Don’t give up on Alice.

Choose to not let her madness grow.

If you began using personal misfortune as an excuse, that was the end for you. In a way, Kamijou understood that better than anyone.

The world was cruel, so he had seen plenty of people unfairly and unreasonably devastated by it.

But Kamijou hadn’t faltered with those people.

He had fought them.

“I was unlucky” was a convenient phrase applicable to most anything, but he knew relying it and overusing it would prevent you from ever finding the way out of the darkness and would meaninglessly force you into a life of misfortune. He knew in his bones that irresponsibly relying on your misfortune would mean rotting away in that filthy dead end forever.

So.

He would teach Alice the proper way to live with unreasonable misfortune.

“You can still fight, can’t you, teacher?”

“I can.”

Kamijou readied his one and only weapon. He clenched his fist.

Hard.

“But that doesn’t matter so the girl will overturn her prophecy because she will make sure to do something to help you and then make up with you and fight with you and be happy so she doesn’t believe what that incomplete library says because there must be a way to help you out there and she refuses to fail because the girl is Anotherbible so we can make up.”

“Sure!! But I hope you don’t think saying that will stop me, Alice!!”

Part 3

He couldn’t rely on Anna Sprengel or H.T. Trismegistus anymore.

The other Transcendents were a far way off too.

The ordinary faculty room was everything.

It must have been cut off from the rest of the world long ago.

So it was one against one.

Kamijou Touma vs. Alice Anotherbible.

This had been about them from the beginning, so there was no better two to settle it.

So.

“Ooooooaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

“Ooooooaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

They clashed head on.

Alice roared like an animal and spread her arms wide.

Hugging.

An act of reliance on another and using your full body to acquire a sense of fulfillment from the outside world.

Of course, a hug from her here would have easily torn Kamijou’s body apart.

A dull sound indicated a direct hit.

From Kamijou. He felt the solid impact of landing a punch.

The sensation in his fist was enough to clear his mind.

In a way, this was to be expected when Alice went all in on attack, spreading her arms and coming straight toward him without even considering defense.

“Kh.”

Beads of sweat flew from the grown woman as she bent back and left her “hugging” pose. With the trunk of her body still collapsed, she clawed at the air with her fingers bent like hooks.

The boy dropped his body down.

After just barely dodging a deadly attack that sliced through the walls and pillars, he threw another punch that Alice blocked with her other hand. But unlike with her “walking” or “binding”, there was no special effect here.

Alice didn’t have time to extract and refine a miracle out of that action.

They clashed a few more times after that, but still Kamijou was not dead.

They both took a step back.

“Curioser and curioser.”

Alice tilted her head.

The fully-grown bondage woman moved with the mannerisms of a 10-year-old.

It was strange and bizarre.

Everything about her was.

“You’re the only one still standing, teacher, but you’re moving in ways you shouldn’t be able to on your own.”

“Of course I am.”

When Alice was taking evasive action by “crawling”, any and all attacks would pass through her.

H.T. Trismegistus had proven this for everyone to see by not hesitating to bisect the girl he so adored.

Alice could extract miracles much like the Pneuma-less Shell but without relying on any tools.

That knowledge came from Anna Sprengel.

However.

“So why don’t you just keep on ‘crawling’ while you attack? Then you could remain untouchable the entire time you send your unfair attacks our way.”

“…”

“Since you aren’t doing that, I can only assume you’re limited to using one miracle at a time. For example, your ‘crawling’ causes any attacks to pass right through you, but it also keeps you from laying a finger on us, so you can never actually end the fight that way, can you? Your ‘walking’ and ‘cursing’ are the same. Your miracles are isolated things – they can’t be combined or used in parallel! Which means I’ve found your weakness, Alice Anotherbible. I don’t know how tough you are, but you can’t make yourself untouchable while you attack. The damage will reach you then!!”

So he would aim for a cross counter.

It wasn’t much, but that was the one and only way out of this battle against Alice Anotherbible.

Alice could use any and all miracles with nothing more than her own body, but she had the mannerisms of a child. She was extremely powerful, but her attacks were all made “on a whim” or “on reflex”, which made it easy to match her timing.

Kamijou hadn’t realized this on his own.

He never could have.

He wouldn’t let anyone say the defeated people’s feelings had been any weaker than anyone else’s.

If Alice could “grab” any object, phenomenon, or person and make it her weapon, then he was supported by the strength of the feelings that had led him to this point.

He couldn’t let this end in tears at this point. He wouldn’t leave anyone behind in the darkness. He would grab Alice’s hand and drag her out of there.

Because that was the power of reality, something not even Imagine Breaker could eliminate.

“What does it matter if they’re not standing here with me? Anna, Trismegistus, and the others showed me the way. They risked their lives to test your abilities and I never would have made it this far without everything they learned. Don’t you get it? They’re still here fighting alongside me.”

“Then the girl will heal herself.”

That was all Alice said.

She was so powerful she had never had a chance to experience defeat and so didn’t worry too much about who won an individual battle. She didn’t fear the possibility of being beaten and dying.

If she did ultimately bury the enemy who stood in her way, it was no skin off her nose if she died once or twice first.

Because…

“Have you forgotten, teacher? The girl already had her head crushed by someone calling himself Rosencreutz. And yet here she is as good as new. So it doesn’t matter to the girl even if you do manage to kill her in exchange for severe damage on your part. The girl just has to resurrect herself a billion or even a trillion times if necessary and wait for you to finally wear yourself out.”

“But you can’t do anything else while you’re focused on healing yourself, can you?”

He also had an immediate response.

This wasn’t enough to break him.

Kamijou did not fear that the wishes and feelings left with him would amount to nothing and that all his efforts would be negated in an instant.

She could heal herself?

It would all be for nothing?

So what?

Surprisingly, it was Alice who spoke next.

The fully-grown woman spoke with an oddly calm and quiet voice, like a pot on the verge of boiling.

“What do you think you can accomplish?”

“What, out of miracles already? Why not search through my mind yourself, Alice?”

Alice’s prophecy was accurate.

Kamijou Touma would die.

He had accepted that.

And he had decided he would save this girl using the power he gained in exchange.

So he took the first step forward.

They clashed.

Part 4

In a merciless head-on assault, Alice’s fist compressed the air and tore through the existing faculty room while the path of her five claws sliced through the entire building and space itself.

Dodging was meaningless against this.

If she made a single roundhouse kick, it would probably become an AoE attack that struck everything around her. When her attack was like a massive gale sweeping right to left, there was no way to avoid it just by moving your body out of the way.

So it hit.

(Gah…)

Kamijou’s body didn’t just strain.

His body produced dull cracking and popping noises he had never heard before.

He didn’t have time to assess what exactly had broken.

The dulling of his sense of pain was actually a blessing in this case.

Yes.

The difference between fortune and misfortune was ultimately a matter of viewpoint and usage.

He bit his lip so a bloody flavor wouldn’t spill from his mouth and he swung his fist again.

He wanted a cross counter.

But if all he wanted was to knock Alice down to stop her, he didn’t actually need to skillfully evade every attack launched by that fully-grown monster.

He was lucky if he could even get an attack in for each of hers.

“Rahh!!!” he shouted, completing the swing of his fist.

He placed his body weight behind it.

Even if she was up against a being known as a god or a demon, or a human who had trained themselves up to the point that everyone would see them as such a thing, this version of Alice would likely crush them underfoot without them even realizing they had been killed.

But that didn’t matter.

Kamijou did not stop.

No amount of willpower would let him avoid taking hits here. And each time one of Alice’s attacks hit him, critical sounds of destruction came from within his body. Red beads of blood swam through the air and even ordinary pain vanished behind a wave of scorching heat.

But none of that was any reason for Kamijou to falter as he clenched his teeth and fist.

He was up against an extremely deadly power.

But what did that matter when he was going to die anyway?

The prophecy had been made quite a while ago. Nothing he could do would change the fact that he was going to die. Since he didn’t have time to spend on that issue, he was approaching death with each tick of the clock. His fate was the same no matter who won this fight.

That was enough to know that his own life was a secondary concern here.

Something else mattered more.

Namely, the girl right in front of him. The girl who was feared but also revered by so many. No one was interested in anything other than treating her like a monster, she had forgotten the proper way to lose, and she believed she could make others happy as long as she wielded her great power. And as a result, that lonely girl would lose everything she thought she had.

She was his top priority.

And this wasn’t limited to him.

Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, and the other Transcendents had to know what it meant to leave the Bridge Builders Cabal and oppose Alice. H.T. Trismegistus had stayed by Alice’s side to serve her to the end, but he had also chosen to turn his blade against her when necessary. And Anna Sprengel who had viewed Alice the way people used to view her.

None of them were fighting because they could win.

Only the people who had chosen the option least likely to ensure their survival had stuck with Kamijou. And the Transcendents understood just how much of a threat Alice was, so it must have been a much harder decision for them than for ignorant Kamijou.

Even so…

He heard yet another dull impact.

Which meant he had again failed to avoid an attack.

His movements slowed with each consecutive hit. His body felt so heavy. But this was far better than having his body explode, leaving nothing but a stain on the floor.

Kamijou knew he didn’t have luck to thank for this.

Was Alice holding back?

He smiled a little.

How happy it would make him if that were it.

Their fists collided.

Sound vanished for a brief moment.

Creating a blank.

Perhaps some vital lines had been severed inside his body.

His fist felt hot. It may have already broken.

The world seemed to tilt around him.

But he still gathered strength in his legs to keep himself from falling.

Alice’s legs were shaking too. Her shoulders were heaving as she breathed and one eye was unnaturally closed. The eyelid may have been cut.

But she was still on her feet.

This wasn’t about right or wrong and it wasn’t about like or dislike.

Both of them simply refused to back down. No matter what.

So it wouldn’t end. Kamijou refused to die before he was through. He still held his ticket to change destiny.

It would be such a waste if he collapsed before he could use it.

He would stop her.

And save her.

Kamijou Touma forced his pain-numbed body to move and clenched his fist once more.

Another attack came.

Realizing where Alice was aiming, he immediately balled up to protect himself.

To protect his right arm.

If his arm was torn off, that thing would emerge. He had proven that when he severed the arm himself to summon it against Rosencreutz.

That would work if he was only interested in defeating her.

That thing may have been the only remaining mystery in this world that rivaled Alice.

But Kamijou had made a decision back then.

He had made up his mind.

He would never use that thing again. Never against another person. Plus, a little thing like death wouldn’t be enough to stop Alice!!

He took the full brunt of the attack as payment.

He couldn’t see it, but he was pretty sure his back had split open.

He finally heard a rupturing sound within his own body.

It reminded him a lot of a water balloon.

He coughed up blood. Enough to feel like a solid clump.

That didn’t matter.

He refused to collapse.

He hadn’t saved Alice yet. So he would keep fighting until he had. No matter what anyone said – no matter what analysis had been made by the magician smart enough for Aleister to rely on and Anna to fear – whoever remained standing in the end was the winner.

So.

Kamijou ignored the red spilling from between his pursed lips and clenched his broken fist even tighter. He may have been further breaking his bones with his own strength, but he didn’t care in the slightest.

He used his knees to push Alice back a bit while feeling her warmth.

He secured the optimal position while right up in front of her.

Surprise colored her face.

It was the look of a child refused a hug.

He smiled a little.

Because he would never do that.

He swung his fist with all his might.

There was just one sound.

Alice’s fist finally swished through empty air while Kamijou’s found a solid cheekbone.

The impact rang dully out.

The blow actually broke his elbow and shoulder.

Nevertheless, he kept his full weight on his broken fist to the end.

He brought her down.

Part 5

“…”

Kamijou Touma was standing.

He had remained on his feet to the end.

Something appeared to have torn through his arm, but he felt no actual pain.

He saw white bone.

The skin and flesh had come away more easily than with chicken on the bone.

Maybe he was hallucinating it.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

He didn’t let it bother him. His sense of pain melted away within the growing heat and he lost all interest in his own injuries. To be blunt, they didn’t matter.

He took a step forward.

“Tea…cher?”

Alice Anotherbible was still down where she had fallen on her rear.

She was trembling.

She may have seen a bit of what she had done. It had come into focus for her. Who could say when it would all “cloud over” once more, but for this moment at least, her vision was clear.

She sounded more than a little dazed. The fully-grown woman spoke with unstable confusion in her voice.

Like she had finally caught on.

“It’s alright.”

Kamijou smiled.

The smile came to him naturally.

“You did enough to deserve that. But now we’re even. Aren’t we, Alice?”

“No…”

The fully-grown woman shook her head.

Like a small child.

Something floated in the air. The teacups and saucers had been flying around weightlessly, but now they vanished into thin air like fading sparks. Everything around them distorted as the illusion inside the girl crumbled away.

Alice’s dream was ending.

Kamijou could sense reality pushing its way in.

It wouldn’t be long now.

He had not put together any kind of response to the prophecy from that absolute being.

But he had accomplished a more important task.

He had saved her.

So.

It was time to pay the price.

“…”

Had it taken a long time, or a short one?

Reality had raised the white flag almost immediately, so maybe this hadn’t been a path that could be measured with time.

So many events had happened in such a condensed time period.

December 24.

In the middle of the Christmas season, R&C Occultics had suddenly risen to prominence and revealed the hidden existence of magic online.

And CEO Anna Sprengel had appeared in Academy City.

She had mouth-to-mouth delivered the body-hijacking St. Germain microbe to Kamijou, infecting him.

December 25.

Anna Sprengel had stood on center stage.

Kamijou had attempted to communicate with the St. Germain microbe infecting his body and had fought Anna using magic despite the side-effect it had on his body.

Kamijou had just barely managed to defeat Anna, but to protect Kamijou’s life, St. Germain had negated himself with Imagine Breaker. This made it a bitter event for Kamijou.

December 25.

Another incident occurred in Academy City that same day.

Defeated Anna was left in Anti-Skill’s custody, but the problem hadn’t ended there. A probability-manipulating spiritual item called the Coin of Nicholas had been spread around Academy City. The new Board Chairman’s plan to quietly correct the city’s darkness was hijacked and Anna easily left her cell.

Kamijou was barely involved in this incident.

But it was very significant that he encountered Alice Anotherbible after that incident full of so much death and defeat.

December 26.

The threat of R&C Occultics was not limited to Academy City. Los Angeles was suddenly engulfed in yellow sand and its tens of millions of residents disappeared. While pursuing this, it was revealed that Anna had caused such a large-scale incident just to acquire a skilled engineer.

At first glance, it looked like an arrogant act that ignored the costs and risks.

But thinking back, Anna had already been mentioning her “king” at this point.

December 29.

But the true center of the world’s problems was not Anna Sprengel.

Anna readily threw out her global IT company to join the Bridge Builders Cabal.

Alice Anotherbible, the mysterious girl at the top of that cabal, caused plenty of trouble for Kamijou in the darkness of Academy City.

This was the true starting point.

Alice had warned him thrice.

She told him he would die if the altered branch was returned to normal.

December 31.

In Shibuya, Kamijou began working to correct his extreme lack of funds. There he found the Bologna Succubus and Aradia waiting for him. Those magicians were known as Transcendents and possessed powers on another dimension entirely. A clash between just those two produced enough overflowing charisma to engulf the entirety of Shibuya in rioters.

January 1.

A building calling itself a consulate for the Bridge Builders Cabal suddenly appeared in District 12, which had a focus on mythology and religion. The greater focus on the idea of Transcendents further showed how unique Alice was.

Alice wanted to provide deadly punishment for H.T. Trismegistus and the other Transcendents who threatened Kamijou’s life, but Kamijou himself intervened, driving a decisive wedge between the two.

January 3.

Kamijou happened to rescue Anna Sprengel after she was captured by Aleister and fled around Academy City with Aradia, who they had happened across. They were pursued by Mut Thebes, a Transcendent in charge of punishment.

This was when Kamijou first heard Anna clearly talk about her “king”.

She wanted someone who would restrain her wickedness and protect her.

But she never had a chance to meet this person. She was doomed to die after being hit by the Shrink Drink, a special spear that borrowed a portion of Alice’s power.

Alice was the only one who could save Anna, but at the same time, the Bridge Builders Cabal was working to bring back a dead magician: CRC, Christian Rosencreutz. But when he was reborn, he was not the man seen in the legends. He obliterated the Bridge Builders Cabal just to stave off boredom and Alice Anotherbible was killed.

January 5.

The reborn Christian Rosencreutz began fighting his boredom.

Kamijou faced that ultimate threat to protect Anna who was on the verge of death in the hospital. As the ring of defenders grew, ultimately Academy City as a whole was working to stop CRC from taking that life.

Once it was all over, Alice got up like nothing had happened to her.

CRC was not the greatest monster.

And today.

It had been a long time.

Yes, a very long time.

Unbelievably long.

This wasn’t about the literal time it had taken.

Far too much had happened over winter break. Kamijou had been exposed to multiple new forms of threat and been badly beaten, but that had built up his unseen heart and soul enough to make it this far.

And.

He had dragged his heavy body far enough to stand before Alice Anotherbible.

He had stood right in front of her.

He could say that for certain.

Everything that had happened had been leading up to this moment.

He had arrived.

All the past storms seemed like a fantasy now.

It hadn’t been pretty and he had been badly delayed, but he had made it.

On his own two feet.

“I’m here, Alice.”

He barely got his voice out.

With all the blood clogging up his throat, he wasn’t sure if his voice was even audible.

“I made it here.”

“You can’t defeat the girl, teacher. If everything had gone as planned and the girl had used her full power, you might have been spared this death coming from the outside.”

Alice could say what she liked, but the winner made the decisions.

That’s what he had been fighting for.

So he could tell her it would be alright.

The girl might not get what she wanted.

If Kamijou died here, Alice’s wish to make up with him would go forever unfulfilled. She had become a world-destroying storm to make that happen, but Kamijou himself had put a stop to it.

But.

He just hadn’t been able to leave her all alone and howling.

“…”

His limit had arrived.

He would die today.

But Alice still had her life. She still had plenty of happy paths left for her. She could meet so many people and surround herself with so many smiles she forgot all about today.

Surely he was allowed to wish for that.

She had been abducted, remade, worshipped, and rejected.

She had appeared free, but she had always been bound by something unseen. She had always been underneath someone’s foot. And no matter how powerful she was, she had ultimately been unable to change that herself.

So on the verge of death, surely Kamijou was allowed to imagine a world where she was happy enough to make up for all that with interest.

Allowed by who?

Not that bastard god.

Kamijou Touma would allow himself that happy wishful thinking.

He would celebrate this ending.

Slowly, fully-grown Alice once more got up from the floor. She stood up.

As if to cling to him.

“You will die if you move any more, teacher. You will die and leave nothing behind.”

“So...what?”

The pointy-haired boy dragged his body along and struggled to support himself.

He faced Alice head on.

The girl seemed unable to move beyond her incessant trembling. She was extraordinarily powerful. She had easily killed the reborn Christian Rosencreutz, who not even all the regular Transcendents working together had been a match for, but she was rendered motionless at the sight of this ordinary high school boy.

It wasn’t a physical matter.

But just this once, Kamijou Touma had defeated Alice Anotherbible.

He was an unfortunate person.

He had lost his memories, been placed in mortal peril more times than he could count, and actually died on occasion. Not even being killed had been enough to end it. There probably wasn’t any real reason why. He just so happened to be there, so he was dragged into it. His life was a series of those coincidences.

It hadn’t started here.

And it had probably happened plenty of times he couldn’t remember.

But.

Even so.

“I…”

He felt the grasping hand of death at the center of his chest.

He didn’t need to hold his hand to his chest to know his heart wanted to rest.

Wounds caused by Alice Anotherbible could not be healed with Good, Old Mary’s resurrection.

The tearing sound inside him was continuing.

Only he could hear it. Were those blood vessels tearing? Or maybe muscles?

It didn’t matter.

Some major arteries and even his heart had probably already ruptured.

But there was something he still had to say.

“…I…”

Maybe it was the blood loss, but the sweat on his brow was unusually cold. His tongue and cheeks were numb.

He had trouble speaking.

He prayed that he would get the words out. Failing to say this before the end would just be too cruel.

But what was he praying to?

Not to god, that was for sure. He knew better than to expect anything from that jerk.

So he chose to pray to himself. To the human being he was. Only he could change the world with his will. He would endure until the end. He just had to think back on the path he had taken and compare this to all that pain and suffering.

A little thing like death was nothing.

If he clenched his teeth, he could keep on moving for a little while longer.

He had a lesson for that girl.

If she understood this, she would be alright.

Alice Anotherbible could probably do anything.

But there were no absolutes for any human.

So he had to tell her.

No matter how extraordinary she might be, if she acted thoughtlessly and carelessly long enough, she would pay a painful price eventually.

And if she took it too far, that price could even be the life of someone she cared deeply for.

Alice could protect herself from anything. Even if she died, she could resurrect herself right away. She was so powerful it was fundamentally wrong to even think about defeating her. But could she protect other people?

Violence took important things from yourself and others.

She could fight and win, but would that even matter?

Had Kamijou gained anything at all when he released the mysterious dragon from his severed right arm and defeated Rosencreutz with it?

Violence was not a valid solution.

He had forever lost a future where he and CRC could smile together.

He had done it himself.

By giving up.

That wasn’t a solution.

He had realized that afterwards.

And he had stopped himself from making that mistake again.

“I don’t…”

So.

If Alice was greater than Rosencreutz – if her power was truly extraordinary – she had to think even deeper about strength and power.

Kamijou was just an ordinary high school boy. He wasn’t arrogant enough to think he was in any position to teach anyone anything. But if Alice realized this for herself, she could stop herself. She could learn to think about compromising with the wide world around her instead of focusing only on what she wanted.

That was Kamijou’s battle.

There was no avoiding death for him, so that was his one and only win condition.

So he made sure to keep speaking to the end.

Because he had to accomplish that.

He held the fully-grown woman’s face between his bloody hands.

He looked Alice straight in the eye.

And the ordinary high school boy got the words out.

He made it in time.

“I don’t want to see anyone suffering from even more misfortune than me!! You got a problem with that!?”

From the start, they had both known how this would end.

There had been no changing it.

Alice fell back onto her rear. As if she were backing away from a truth she didn’t want to accept.

She had blood on her cheeks.

The faint red stains left by the boy’s fingers.

What little warmth was left in that blood was fading fast.

“Tea…cher?”

Her voice was scratchy.

It was a definite physical voice.

The voice of her original young form.

But no one answered her fearful, trembling question.

The boy had not fallen.

Whoever remained standing in the end was the winner. So he had refused to fall until he had saved Alice. This proved his resolve more than anything.

Part 6

Kamijou Touma was still standing.

He was no longer moving.

His brain, his heart, and everything that provided life had fully ceased functioning.

Epilogue: Kamijou Touma – Notice_of_the_Death.

The gears of society were very well made.

Even during such an unusual situation, there was a system in place to swiftly extract the patient from the center of the madness and search out the shortest route to transport them to the closest hospital.

An ambulance had arrived.

Several girls hopped into the back of the same vehicle.

“Fool. Damn, his heart has completely stopped!!”

“So what? There are plenty of ways to restart a stopped heart. I’m more worried about the ambulance. It was lucky it was nearby, but it’ll be blocked by the rioters on its way to the hospital. Alice Anotherbible has been pacified, but that doesn’t mean the crowds flooding the streets will head home right away!”

“Should we go knock them out of the way?”

“Calm your weird excitement and face reality, villain. Emotional arguments will only waste precious time. More importantly…hey, there’s a radio in this ambulance, isn’t there? Call one of those things. Don’t even try to tell me Academy City doesn’t have them!!”

The ambulance couldn’t do its job with the streets flooded with rioters, but its radio was still functioning. No matter how full the streets were, a helicopter ambulance could still get through.

The stretcher was reloaded in a large park.

The boy strapped to it with thick belts didn’t say a word.

He was only luggage.

An object.

“Emergency transport request, 1 patient, a teenage boy, condition is DOA! His wounds? I don’t know. I just don’t. I’ve been doing this job for twenty years now, but I can’t imagine how he got wounds like this!!”

“J-just send the photos and data to the hospital. That’ll be faster!!”

The EMTs showed no restraint as they shouted to each other.

Even though they were a kind of professional, they were in too much of a hurry to give a thought to the boy’s acquaintances in the helicopter with them.

“Damn, we were delayed by a few minutes. Close up the wounds and don’t let his temperature drop. Our job is getting him to the doctors.”

“But…I’m pretty sure it’s already too-”

“Shut up!! He’s still a patient until a licensed doctor has officially declared him dead. I don’t know why you’ve decided you want to transfer out of this job, but don’t give up on a life when you’re not even qualified!!”

The helicopter ambulance conversed over the radio on its way to the nearest hospital’s heliport.

The landing was careful and flawless.

The loading hatch on the rear yawned open.

Hard, heavy metallic sounds swelled out.

It was hard to tell if they were unloading a person or medical equipment.

It looked like the stretcher had as much machinery, electric cords, liquid-filled bags, and tubes attached as they could manage.

Academy City had (unofficially) made cyborg tech practical.

Ultimately, he didn’t need any of his organs. Most of the human body’s functions could be handled with external life support devices that didn’t need to be shrunk until they would fit inside the body. In the modern day, people could go on living with a few of their biological organs crushed. It didn’t matter if it was handled internally or externally – as long as they breathed, had a pulse, and had brainwaves, then they were “alive” medically speaking. As long as the cycle of ingestion, production, transportation, consumption, and expulsion was maintained, then a human could continue living from a biological perspective.

Think of it like a simple electric circuit made from a battery and a light bulb.

If the cord completing the circuit was cut, the light bulb’s light would go out.

The circuit’s stability would vanish.

But if two batteries were hooked up in parallel, you could cut one of the cords and the light bulb would continue to shine.

The stability would remain despite the destruction.

This simply applied that logic to the extremely complex and advanced field of biology, including electrophysiology, molecular biology, and hematology.

The ancient idea of the “soul” could be spoofed with cutting edge technology.

It was a lot like the “deception” done by a stage magician or a food sample craftsman.

It was a happy trick done to please everyone.

Nevertheless.

Even with all that advanced technology, not a single noise came from that boy’s body.

His condition was on a level beyond all of that.

His bangs blew in the chilly night wind.

But even that looked like weeds on the roadside. There was no will there.

It was even crueler than a complete absence of motion.

The special monitor thinner than a piece of copy paper displayed only a flat horizontal line. Indicating the number zero. And an equally flat tone played on and on forever.

That was all.

Everyone listened to that merciless tone.

An emergency transport team, some doctors, and – for some reason – a couple of non-medical people were out on the dangerous roof.

“Eek!?”

That quiet shriek came from Misaka Mikoto.

The girl who had been left behind.

The fighter held in reserve.

She felt like this was her karmic retribution for always being so close to that boy but never managing to see any of it through to the definitive end.

Another girl was also out on the heliport.

She spoke with her long honey-blonde hair buffeted by the helicopter wind.

The girl bore a different kind of karma from Mikoto.

“I told you this would eventually happen if you kept on like that.”

The tone grew more distant.

The people surrounding the stretcher were yelling at each other as they quickly withdrew into the hospital. Were they headed to the operating room, or the intensive care unit?

Had they given up yet?

Had they still not accepted the truth?

Were they afraid they would realize the truth if they let themselves come to a stop?

Everything became silent.

Finally.

But…

Index had been on the helicopter ambulance, but she hadn’t been able to disembark.

She couldn’t move at all.

She simply held her hands over her mouth.

The pure girl had crystal tears in the corners of her eyes. She covered her entire face with her hands.

Darkness had been thrust before her.

A sign of parting.

Of death.

“…”

She couldn’t speak a single word.

Was her perfect memory a curse at times like this? Or was it a blessing because it allowed the boy to remain forever with her, even if only in her head?

Eventually, the frog-faced doctor slowly shook his head.

“January 6, 11:58 PM.”

That side-to-side motion said it all.

The doctor who never gave up still said the words here.

“The transported patient has been confirmed deceased. There is nothing I can do when he’s already dead.”

Kamijou Touma never made it to January 7, the final day of winter break.

His death had already been confirmed.

Afterword

If you picked them up one at a time, welcome back. If you bought them all at once, welcome.

This is Kamachi Kazuma.

This is the ending. This was determined all the way back when he first met her. I think Alice’s threat level grew with each volume, which may have made you readers curious about what she had said in the past. Everything that had been building up was released in this volume. The karma of an easy decision came back to bite him. If you read it all from the beginning with that in mind, it should change the overall impression you get.

I have already placed an emphasis on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in several of my series like the Simple Series and Blood-Sign. You can find some frightening imagery when looking into the original versions of Cinderella and Snow White, but Alice is a little different. Is Alice the truly strange one for adjusting to everything happening in Wonderland so quickly? I like how you can’t quite tell which side is making the rules.

I had trouble deciding how to depict Alice’s world. One idea was to have her create a physical Wonderland and another was to focus more on childlike logic and image association. Especially when depicting Alice’s “internal conflict”, I thought it would be good if reading the text left you puzzled. There should have been some parts where you found yourself reading through the dialogue and narrative without really questioning it, but I tried to structure it like a children’s story. The part where Transcendents from both sides strangely gathered on the bridge would be the most obvious example, but the way Kamijou and the rest of the characters were being dragged along by invisible rails was another part of them being bound by Wonderland logic after entering Wonderland.

Then there was Anna Sprengel. If you look at the foundation of Modern Western Magic, you will quickly learn that she was a mystery young lady involved in the founding of the Golden cabal. The term “irregular Transcendent” has been used all over the place in the Genesis Testament Series, but did you expect it to have such an important role? The most likely theory is that she was a completely fictional person who Westcott based on Kingsford while tweaking some of the details, but my story is fiction. While considering what it meant for a fictional person to be walking around, it reminded me of identity fraud. That then led me to create the framework of the Transcendents. There is also otaku-friendly magic where people prepare the handmade costumes and a stage to cosplay as gods, so I made use of that too.

On that note, let’s talk about Anna Kingsford. She isn’t quite as well-known as Aleister Crowley, but since the occult world tries to remain hidden, being “well-known” isn’t exactly a good thing for them. If you’re curious, you can start with Mathers and work back from there and find a lot of (complimentary) information on her. Just like with Mina Mathers and Annie Horniman, there were far too many highly unique and charming women around that man… Mathers, the eccentric and arrogant genius who caused trouble for everyone around him, including Crowley, asked her to teach him. She laid the foundation of the ideologies for the great occult leaders of the 19th century like Westcott and Mathers, and she led to the creation of a magic cabal that allowed female members when banning women was still standard practice. Her various legends show just how incredible a person she was.

This battle was a clash between the two greatest illusions created in the 19th century and then breaking them down with Modern Western Magic, which had converted even Wonderland’s nonsense into logic, but I think it made for a nice twist that both Anna and Alice were fighting for the illusion killer boy.

Last time in GT9 all the scientific and magical firepower in Academy City gathered together to attack Human Kaiju Rosencreutz, but here in GT10 everything was focused on just those two illusions. Pure and frightening Alice vs. villainous and kind Anna. Neither are your average heroine, but that’s why I hope you saw something you could identify with in those two polar opposites who both make reassuring allies and terrifying enemies.

Maybe they weren’t your standard heroines, but with a standard heroine who can just ask for help, your standard person living in a standard world can save them.

It was because they took a step beyond that which allowed Kamijou Touma to reach his right hand where not even the top espers and magicians could reach.

He is the illusion killer boy, but that is why he can’t save himself after he returns bloody from the realm of illusion to reality. He knew that and was made to recognize it, but what was it he wanted to do in the very end?

I hope you give some thought to that.

I give my thanks to my illustrators Haimura-san and Itou Tateki-san and my editors Miki-san, Anan-san, Nakajima-san, and Hamamura-san. Transcendents all over the place, plenty of named characters among the cosplayers, and Alice going full-on psychedelic. This one had to have been a lot of work. Thanks so much.

And I give my thanks to the readers. Kamijou Touma is not a clever person. He is no more than a foolish and powerless Level 0 who can’t recover well from what’s already happened. But if he returned to GT5 when it all began and again faced Alice as she offered to distort reality and create a false culprit to create a happy ending where everyone was smiling, he would choose the same thing again every single time. I trust that you will accept that foolish boy for who he is. Thank you so much.

It is time to close the pages for now while praying that the pages of the next book will be opened.

And I lay my pen down for now.

What was he thinking in the very end?

-Kamachi Kazuma

Ending

He woke up in an empty white space.

He sat up.

White – everything was white. Not even the concept of a horizon existed in this silent place.

It was like a bad joke.

Still sitting, Kamijou Touma looked down at his hands, at his surroundings, and thought.

What was this place?

Was there really more after what he went through?

He hadn’t seen this any of the times Othinus had killed him.

He had thought death was a lot emptier – that what came apart could never be repaired, preventing any hope of salvation.

Yet he found himself…somewhere.

He saw no damage or red stains on his clothes. He tried moving his body around but didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. This wasn’t just his sense of pain numbing over. As far as he could tell, he didn’t have a scratch on him. Which, in this case, was odd. Hadn’t he been so badly beaten even his bones and organs were damaged?

Kamijou Touma was here.

But it didn’t feel real. He didn’t feel like a physical being. Weight, thickness, warmth, scent, or color… He was definitely here, but he just couldn’t accept this as reality.

Almost like he had become one of the illusions he had spent so much time negating. He realized it was painfully silent here, but he couldn’t hear his heartbeat. Or his breaths.

He glanced down at his right hand.

What had happened to that?

Was it still in there?

Aleister had said it moved from host to host whenever the old one died or was destroyed. Before him, it had been in an arrow created from a holy man’s right hand.

Imagine Breaker.

What if, hypothetically, he no longer existed? Was an illusion allowed to possess it?

“Could this be…?”

Maybe it was strange for Kamijou to suggest this since he was from a city of science and his worldview was formed there, but the thought naturally came to mind.

(The afterli-)

“My, my.”

He heard a graceful voice.

He didn’t know her directly, but she had made the occasional appearance at some important scenes.

Just as Kamijou was wearing his clothes, she was wearing a hodgepodge of clothing including an ancient witch’s hat and something like a modern racing swimsuit. She even had glasses on.

He didn’t know how it worked, but it would have been awkward if they were both naked.

She stood in this white void like she belonged there.

How abnormal was that?

She made it look so natural it was hard to tell, but she must have broken the rules in a big way to pull it off.

The woman who was fixed in this place spoke to the boy who was fixed in this place.

“It is ❌ ⌚ for you to be here yet, is it?”

“Aren’t you the other one? Um, Kings…oh, right. Anna Kingsford?”

“🎯.”

Why was she here?

Was this place really so easily accessible?

“I quite like that you view me as ‘the other one’. You do ❌ see either of us as superior. You naturally view us both as a real Anna. Seeing it that way might save her more than anything, while also tormenting her more than anything. But you saved her in a way I could ❌. I am impressed, benevolent one.”

Each question that came to mind led to another, quickly saturating his brain. Thinking about this normally wasn’t going to work. While his eyes widened, Kingsford elegantly held a hand to her mouth and laughed.

“Did you forget?”

“Forget what?”

“Or perhaps you did ❌ know in the first place.”

The other Anna neatly laid out the information.

She seemed like a calm and gentle teacher.

As a high school boy, she made him think of a liberal arts teacher, but not quite like an English teacher.

“I am ❌ more than a preserved corpse rigged up to move. Thus, I have ❌ forced my way in here – this is where I belong. So by stopping the ⚙️ parts and bidding a 😢 goodbye to the 🌍 of the living, I can visit here any time I want. ...First I come back from the ☠️, then I get killed, then I put his mind at ease, and now I’m saying goodbye again – I have put Aleister through a lot. Well, he should accept it since it is for you. Besides, I am meant to be ☠️.☆”

“…”

“And I predicted this outcome from the beginning.”

She said it so easily.

He had struggled so hard to reach this ending within the psychedelic world of unpredictable Alice, but this other Anna came out and said this was well within her expectations.

He was glad she was a good person. She would make the worst kind of evil villain. And if she was a detective, he would definitely punch her for letting so much crime go unpunished. When someone had brought trouble to other people’s lives, Kamijou wasn’t the type to let them off easy just because they were a girl. This woman might make the perfect dorm manager, but he would harden his heart and do it anyway!!

“❌ one can escape their own choices. You had already passed the final branch before I was even brought back as a preserved corpse, so not even I could have intervened. You had ❌ choice but to ☠️.”

The expert spoke to speechless Kamijou.

She seemed to be viewing his life and scoring it.

“But at the same time, all people deserve to be set free once they have received their punishment. Simply put, you made a mistake, but you do ❌ deserve to be criticized for it now that you have died for it. You have atoned for your sin.”

“I...have?”

“You have indeed, Kamijou Touma. Even as your life slipped away, you did ❌ hesitate to try your very best to save Alice Anotherbible even though she was the cause of it all. That service was truly praiseworthy. I, Magician Anna Kingsford, guarantee it. And I am ❌ strong willed enough to sit idly by when someone is ❌ rewarded for their efforts.”

“What are you talking about?”

“How long are you going to hold it all inside? As you can see, this place is ‘outside it all’. After everything you have been through, I would expect you to be searching out god to give him a 🧩 of your mind. Are you just going to accept that you ☠️ed? Seeing you be this obedient is honestly pissing me off. 😠.”

“Hold on. Don’t just make decisions for me! I sense some kind of great power in you. Which is giving me a really bad feeling about this!!”

“Besides, first years in high 🏫 are only 16 in your country, aren’t they? You seem awfully accepting for someone right smack in the middle of their rebellious phase. Isn’t there anything you still want to do?”

“Oh, come to think of it, it is almost my birthday.”

“Which would mean you’re still only 15! Then you definitely should ❌ be giving up so soon!! How sad. This isn’t just an outdated 19th century way of thinking, is it!?”

“I said wait! Nothing you say can change the fact that I’m dead, can it!? What are you even trying to do in this literal dead end!?”

“I am trying to serve those around me.”

She brought her hands in front of her large chest and pushed just the tips of the fingers together.

The expert smiled as she spoke.

“As an expert, I have a secret technique you could call a Hell Tour.”

“…”

“My, my. If that does ❌ mean much to you, what if I called it a Jailbreak?”

“……………………………………………………………………………………………………Wait, really?”

“Yes, really. If the 🌍 cheats you, you cheat it right back. That is how magicians did things in the 19th century. Have things really changed that much?”

He was speechless.

It couldn’t be.

Was this woman really saying she could manipulate this place as she pleased?

Could magic really do that?

In that empty world of white, Anna Kingsford reached a slender hand out toward Kamijou who was still seated.

Her right hand.

“Now, how about you kick out this shitty predetermined ending and join me in making comeback?”

…So what part of this was a lie?

The unfortunate boy refused to fully believe this offer. To him, it sounded far too good to be true.

Prev	[v d e]Toaru Majutsu no Index: Genesis Testament GT Volume 1 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword GT Volume 2 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 3 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 4 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 5 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 6 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword GT Volume 7 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 8 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 9 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending GT Volume 10 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending [v d e]Side Stories Volume SP Illustrations - Stiyl Magnus - Mark Space - Kamijou Touma - Uiharu Kazari - Afterword Railgun SS1 Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 Kanzaki SS Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 Railgun SS2 Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 Road to Endymion Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 Necessarius SS Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 Virtual-On Illustrations - Preface - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword Railgun SS3 Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 Biohacker SS Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 Agnese SS Illustrations - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 Railgun LN Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword Item LN Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending Item LN 2 Illustrations - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - Afterword - Ending Toaru Kagaku no Railgun: Cold Game Toaru Jihanki no Fanfare Toaru Majutsu No Index: Love Letter SS Toaru Kagaku no Railgun SS: A Superfluous Story, or A Certain Incident’s End Toaru Majutsu no Index: New Testament SS Toaru Majutsu no Index: Shokuhou Misaki Figurine SS Toaru Majutsu no Index: A Certain Midsummer Return to the Starting Point Toaru Majutsu no Index: Using Final Bosses to Determine a Sociological Threat Toaru Majutsu no Index: New Testament Bonus Short Story Toaru Majutsu no Index: Thus Spoke the Kumokawa Sisters Toaru Majutsu no Virtual-On: Vooster's Cup, The Day Before Toaru Majutsu no Virtual-On: Misaka Mikoto's Dangerous Tea Party Toaru Majutsu no Index: Birthday Through the Glass Toaru Majutsu no Index: New Testament 20 Bonus Short Story Toaru Majutsu no Index: Misaka Mikoto’s Teamwork A Certain Magical Index: Genesis Testament SS [v d e]Official Parody Stories A Certain Prophecy Index A Certain Academy Index A Certain Gift Exchange A Certain March 201st Novel I Don't Want This First Story of A Certain Magical Index!! or I Don't Want This Final Story An All-In "World" Tour of Academy City, the 37th Mobile Maintenance Battalion, and Ground's Nir Kamijou-san, Two Idiots, Jinnai Shinobu, Gray Pig, and Freedom Award 903, Listen Up! …Fall Asleep and You Die, But Not From the Cold☆ We Tried Having a Group Blind Date, but It was an All Stars Affair and a World Crisis Will the Spiky-Haired Idiot See a Piping Hot Dream of His Wife? Dengeki Island: A Girl’s Battle (Still Growing) Kamijou Touma Visits Another World Toaru Majutsu no Index X Apocalypse Witch Crossover SS Toaru Majutsu no Index X Apocalypse Witch X Heavy Object Crossover SS I Still Want to Do a Summer Fair A Certain Collaboration Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 Kamachi Crossover Illustrations - Preface - Prologue - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Epilogue - A.E. 02 - Afterword Durarara Crossover Preface - Academy City Chapter - Ikebukuro Chapter	Next NA