Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume9

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: Battle of the Best – Zenith_of_the_Magic.

Everything had been off-kilter from the start.

When he was engulfed by the world of the dark side, Kamijou never would have escaped with his life if not for Alice Anotherbible’s assistance.

The Transcendents had a power different again from the Magic Gods.

By the time he even heard the name of their Bridge Builders Cabal, they had already driven Shibuya, Tokyo, to the brink of destruction.

The clash between the Bologna Succubus and Aradia was like a manmade disaster.

Despite their great power, the Bridge Builders Cabal made no attempt to hide their presence.

They even built themselves a consulate within Academy City.

Good, Old Mary and H. T. Trismegistus began a clash between Transcendents, but even that was surpassed by Alice Anotherbible’s punishment. Kamijou fought to put a stop to Alice’s rampage and parted ways with her.

Then the full force of the Bridge Builders Cabal took action to execute Anna Sprengel for her betrayal.

They created the Shrink Drink spear which borrowed a portion of Alice’s power.

Execution expert Mut Thebes was dispatched.

Mut Thebes was defeated at the last moment, but the Shrink Drink still struck Anna Sprengel. Not even Good, Old Mary’s resurrection could save her.

Only one option remained.

Since Alice had imbued the Shrink Drink with her power, only she could remove its effects.

But before that could happen, the reborn CRC – Christian Rosencreutz – killed Alice Anotherbible in a single blow.

Kamijou Touma and Aradia, witch goddess of the night and the moon, were on their way to bring doomed Anna Sprengel to Alice and they still did not know the deep despair their optimism was leading them toward.

“I see.”

The young man with silver hair, a silver beard, and a red robe – Christian Rosencreutz – held something that reflected the light.

It was a single transparent card. It was a crystal jigsaw puzzle of a world map, with the shape and number of its pieces in constant flux.

There were as many scattered legends about CRC as there were stars in the sky, but this was one of them.

It was said Rosencreutz had completed a perfect miniature model of the world and, by accurately recreating any and all phenomena in that miniature garden, he held all things relating to the world’s past, present, and future.

“To think so many trivialities have developed while this old man wasn’t watching. Heh heh. Then I should assume the thread of fate has again begun to weave its strange connections between myself and some unknown human.”

With that said, Rosencreutz casually tossed the incredible crystal world map over his shoulder. Once he had lost interest, he would readily discard even a spiritual item of that level.

But that did not mean the silver young man was taking things lightly.

All sound was cut off.

The light could not reach him.

It only took a middle finger.

Not a single word was uttered.

Anna Kingsford held her open palm to her mouth and blew gently on the tip of the middle finger.

Roar!!

That was all it took for a blaze easily outdoing a flamethrower to rush out. And this was not just any fire. It fed on the power of a ley line and stole vitality from space itself. This overwhelming mass of light and heat was wielded for no other purpose than to take lives. Anyone who tried to survive it using simple composite armor or special fibers would dry up and burn away in less than a second.

Aleister in the beige habit and Kihara Noukan the golden retriever did not dare approach.

But it did not reach Christian Rosencreutz.

Anna Kingsford switched to water from her index finger and invisible ether from her thumb, but it was all wrenched off course before it could reach the silver young man and thrown into an entirely unrelated space.

But the woman was not shaken.

Alice Anotherbible was dead.

Truly dead.

If nothing was done, this kind of tragedy would reach every last corner of the current world.

There was no doubt about that.

Christian Rosencreutz’s tyranny could not be allowed to spread any further.

This called for resolve, not rejection. You might fear an unknown phenomenon or being, but an expert knew all too well that being paralyzed by that fear robbed you of any chance of victory.

You could not call yourself a magician if you were unable to convert that fear into a useful learning experience.

“This old man is the one who slumbers in the heart of the holy ground guarded by the seven walls. If you truly wish to tear down these walls, you must dedicate 120 years of tireless effort to the task.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Heh heh. So you aren’t naïve enough to be deceived by mere words?”

CRC stroked his silver beard and chuckled.

Why bother shouting your special move’s name with practical magic?

What did you gain by explaining what you were doing?

There was no benefit aside from vocally confirming the process so you did not get anything wrong. To expand on the psychological side, psyching yourself up and suppressing the trembling fear may have also counted. But these experts had no need for such things.

Aleister Crowley could only watch the works of these two experts.

Kihara Noukan was shouting something in human language next to him, but his voice sounded so distant. No, Aleister simply couldn’t afford to redirect even a fraction of his attention.

Even a magician of his level could not find room to intervene. But Aleister did deserve credit for the valiant effort it took to cling to consciousness rather than fainting from extreme tension and toppling backwards.

A true expert did not need a grand spiritual item or a limited holy ground.

In fact, they would be so much easier to deal with if they did. Then you could stop their secret arts by stealing their tool or throwing them off of that land. If that was all it took, then Aleister, the one who had singlehandedly conquered the Battle of Blythe Road, would have used whatever trickery necessary to remove or neutralize his opponent’s weapon or advantage and won without so much as a word.

However, these two experts had no such weaknesses.

They used simple breaths.

They used mere fingertips.

They used no more than gestures.

When they took the fundamentals to this extreme, a magician could produce miracles powerful enough to bisect the entire world with nothing more than their own body. For one thing, Kabbalah said the small human body and the large world corresponded to each other. In that sense, relying on external tools to complete one’s spells could be seen as the heretical option.

Aleister understood that.

Intellectually, anyway.

But that argument was like saying understanding the logic behind the Big Bang allowed someone to produce a Big Bang.

Yet these two were pulling it off.

Could a feat only be called magic once it was brought to this level?

Were humans really allowed to accomplish something like this?

“What fun. I never imagined someone would bother diligently polishing their skills this far while knowing it is all essentially an illusion. Didn’t you ever feel silly going to the effort?”

“You could ❌ have been like this back when you constructed your 🏠 of the Holy Spirit with your seven disciples. What happened to your respect and 🟰 treatment of others, CRC?”

“They don’t make experts like they used to. This talking is a waste of time.”

CRC mimed rocking something with a hand.

That hand did not hold a glass vial or a toxic liquid, but that didn’t matter.

The phenomenon alone manifested there.

“That is the yellow symbol, one of the four processes sought by all people in their dreams. Thou symbolize the coming of the transformation beyond decomposition. Thy role is-”

“A single straight line.”

“Kee hee hee. Let me finish! I mean fermentation. The benevolent transformation and violence that brings even greater meaning to the cadaver!! Appear before us, Citrinitas, the color that converges the eternal four processes onto a single point!!!”

A massive amount of sand erupted forth. The brutal weapon that had once engulfed the entire city of Los Angeles approached Kingsford like it had forgotten the traits of a solid and become an effluence of sticky acid.

The goddess of wisdom had already completed the necessary response.

As announced, she simply moved her right foot to draw a single line across the ground.

That was all it took to cleanly slice through the breath of sand and return the mass of several hundred tons to the void.

A complex and incomprehensible magic circle was in fact much like an uncommented hacked-together app script. The many small bits of writing did not make it impressive. It should be looked down on with disdain for needing to write that whole mess to activate a single spell. Standard symbols like a single line, circle, or triangle were the true essence of magic. If you properly understood what they meant and drew out their effects well enough, that one line could become a last resort powerful enough to divide the world between you and your enemy and save your life.

“A true expert needs ❌ words. …Are you toying with me, CRC?”

“Of course I am. Magic is no more than illusions and child’s play – it has no worth beyond momentary amusement. Heh heh. But the most amusing part is you wielding it looking so deadly serious, descendent of the Rose.”

Rosencreutz stroked his silver beard while his shoulders shook with laughter. He looked so wide open that an attack from any direction should have been able to score a clean hit.

But the other expert knew all too well what would happen if she fell for his ruse and thoughtlessly launched an attack.

And it did not end there.

Viewing the equal threat was not enough.

“Now, this old man is about ready to end this game of house.”

“?”

His grand speeches were a diversion.

He snuck the preparations for some other spell between the words.

Anna Kingsford accurately recognized that.

Christan Rosencreutz continued his needlessly over-the-top manner of speech.

While grinning.

“Arise, Alice Anotherbible. Cadaver though you may be, the vessel of flesh remaining in this mortal world can still drag that woman down into the gaping maw of the underworld.”

An unpleasant sound followed.

It was the raw sound of tearing flesh and snapping bone. Anna Kingsford grimaced at the sound coming from the side of her head which reached her more through her bones than her ears.

The romance-loving golden retriever howled in disgust.

“You would force someone you killed to do your bidding!?”

The rusty scent came from Kingsford herself.

Headless Alice Anotherbible’s young fingers had gouged down to Kingsford’s carotid artery and then torn it apart.

“Heh heh. You mustn’t write off a threat just because of a little thing like death.” The silver young man smirked. “You appear to have at least some small connection to the Rose, but have you forgotten how to produce the red elixir which can conquer any and all disease and manipulate even one’s lifespan?”

“!!”

A single wave of her arm broke Kinsgford free of the doll. Alice’s corpse did not put up any real resistance. It flopped onto the cold ground like a discarded toy and ceased all movement. Like it had all been some kind of mistake. Like that cold lump of flesh had no further possibilities and always should have remained obediently dead.

But Kingsford remained slanted and could not straighten herself up.

Or maybe it was only her head that was tilted at an unnatural angle.

The right half of her vision was dyed red.

When she reflexively held a hand to the wound, she felt something odd. The inhumanely solid sensation was probably her own neckbone.

That one attack had been lethal.

Using only your own body to produce any and all spells meant that physical damage placed a drastic restriction on your actions.

Christian Rosencreutz took a step toward her.

Everything had gone as he planned.

…Or so one would think, but a question left that wicked expert’s mouth.

“Why do you still appear so confident?”

“You can ❌ tell, CRC?”

Anna Kingsford smiled despite the paleness of her face, the red color staining the hand on her neck, and the blood spurting between her fingers.

At some point, the smile had transferred from one expert to the other.

“I am ❌ more than a preserved corpse modified for free movement. I was ☠️ from the beginning, so why should I fear ☠️? My true fear is departing without leaving anything for those who will remain in this 🌍. But it would seem even that was an unfounded fear.”

“…”

“My pointless ☠️ will awaken others. If it will start something new and leave something behind, then I have won this ⚔️ by creating something from nothing, CRC.”

That was the end of it.

The silver young man clicked his tongue and swung his hand horizontally, bisecting the goddess of wisdom through the torso.

In her final moments, she spoke.

With a fading smile.

And no hesitation.

“I leave this 🌍 and its people with you, Crowley, my apprentice’s apprentice who will one day become an expert.”

And.

In a show of abysmal timing, Aleister was not the only one who witnessed it.

Yes, hadn’t Anna Kingsford said her death would awaken others?

“…”

The pointy-haired high school boy forgot to breathe.

The Shrink Drink spear wobbled weakly in his left hand.

Kamijou Touma had been present for that final moment. He had seen it all, his eyes widened to the limit. He had seen Alice Anotherbible, head crushed and lifeless on the ground, and the mystery woman who was sliced in two and blown away.

There was nothing here but blood, death, and the scars of destruction.

He lost control of his senses. He couldn’t absorb even the most basic information. With no solid footing, he couldn’t accept the reality before his eyes. Next to him, Aradia held a small wicked woman. Anna Sprengel had been hit by the Shrink Drink, a spiritual item designed for use against Transcendents. She was already doomed to die, with the only remaining hope being Alice who had imbued the Shrink Drink with her power. Only she could save Anna Sprengel.

But.

Alice Anotherbible was no more.

So what would happen now?

He turned toward Kamijou. His eyes shined inhumanly bright and he chuckled.

“Heh heh. And what are you going to do now?”

“Ah. Ahh.”

A single display of malice had brought it all crumbling down.

He would never see Alice’s innocent smile again.

The tears from when they had parted ways replayed in the back of his mind, mired with static.

Kamijou couldn’t even apologize anymore.

And.

Now he couldn’t save Anna Sprengel either?

“Ahhhhh!! Ahhhhhhhhhh, ahh, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

He screamed as something seemed to burst in his head.

He thought he heard Aradia’s voice coming from a great distance. He had a feeling she was trying to tell him to stop.

Kamijou Touma himself probably didn’t understand why he did what he did.

He rushed in.

With a single backhand swat, the silver young man shattered the Shrink Drink spear in Kamijou’s left hand. But the boy still clenched his teeth and squeezed his right fist so tight he could have broken his own hand.

They were so close they could feel each other’s breaths.

Christian Rosencreutz whispered.

He was definitely smiling.

He removed the stroking hand from his silver beard.

“Is that all you can do?”

Kamijou was crushed and thrown away.

Even he was unsure what had happened to his body.

His vision was squashed up and he heard a mysterious ringing in his ears, but that one voice reached his brain as clear as crystal.

“Now, I believe it’s time to slaughter those Transcendents who got a little too interested in divine roleplay.”

The voice sounded carefree.

But it was in fact making a horrific death threat.

Kamijou’s own voice spoke in his mind: but why? He soon received his answer.

“Do you need a reason to kill time?” announced the silver young man in the red robe, stroking his beard. “This is their punishment for bringing this old man into such a dull and boring world. They can soothe this old man’s ennui with their worthless lives. How else can you make up for what you have done, Transcendents?”

Chapter 1: Determine Your Stance – Right_or_Wicked.

Part 1

He was conscious, but he couldn’t see anything.

He felt like he was floating in lukewarm water.

Eventually, he realized he couldn’t even feel pain.

The first thing to stimulate Kamijou Touma’s mind was his sense of hearing.

“…not enough…? …renaline…another…milli…”

Kamijou listened dispassionately.

Even though something was being injected into his body.

Or maybe he was in such a dire situation even his ordinary danger sense wasn’t functioning.

What was happening to him?

Only once that tiny question occurred to him did something change.

He felt pain. The scattered noise rushed in toward the center of his chest.

He experienced a sensory explosion.

He was assaulted by reality.

“Countershock!! That’s three times. Just wake up already!!”

Kamijou Touma felt excruciating pain in the center of his chest while his entire spine arched.

(Gah…hah?)

His mouth flapped, but he couldn’t bring in enough oxygen.

Various colors of light danced before his widened eyes before finally forming a coherent picture. He was inundated by the unnaturally sterile white of the ceiling and the distinctive scent of disinfectant. The overwhelming amount of information turned his stomach inside out and he just about vomited.

A hard plastic mask covered his mouth and nose.

If he threw up in the mask, it would get all over his face. Even as he struggled to breathe, he gathered every last ounce of strength to suppress the nausea.

Tears formed in the corners of his eyes, but only then did he realize something.

…Had he recovered enough to be concerned about appearances?

“Ugh.”

He heard the monotone hum of machinery.

And not just one. He was surrounded it.

Kamijou Touma regained consciousness all at once.

“Ah!! Anna!? What happened to Anna Sprengel!!??”

He sprang up in bed and tried to grab at anyone within reach, but he felt a powerful tug on his entire body. This wasn’t someone restraining him. The IV, the blood transfusion tube, the ECG cords, and more were all connected to his body. Some warning sounds played when he fell back into the bed, so some of the needles or electrodes must have come off.

The pain had finally caught up with him, but that didn’t matter to him.

A young nurse rushed in and then froze in shock. She had probably meant to reattach the dislodged IV needle…but instead she stared pale-faced at Kamijou, her hands wandering hesitantly in the air. He didn’t know what was wrong with his body, but he really wished that medical expert wouldn’t appear so pained when looking at a patient. It terrified him.

At that point, Kamijou frowned.

A nurse? A medical expert???

“Good grief. Ordinarily, I would expect you to start by asking where you are or what happened to you.”

He heard a familiar voice.

It was the frog-faced doctor. Except he wasn’t actually present. His voice came from a tablet fixed to an arm resembling a floor lamp.

Hold on.

Did that mean the super delicate lifesaving cardiopulmonary resuscitation had been done remotely!?

“I really would prefer to meet with you in person when you are in my hospital, but I am unfortunately a little busy at the moment. The new year is supposed to be a joyous occasion, but I have far too many emergency patients. Or maybe the new year itself is to blame. Regardless, I hope you don’t mind a remote interview.”

“So I’m in the hospital.”

The usual one at that.

Did that mean he had been transported from District 12 on the far east of the city to District 7 near the center?

After muttering the realization to himself, Kamijou took a look around. Instead of his usual hospital room, he appeared to be in an ICU partitioned by transparent walls. That must have meant his condition was a lot less predictable than in the past.

Something already felt off.

His condition was unpredictable? Why had he been left even that well off?

How had he managed to reach the hospital in that situation? Christian Rosencreutz had already killed Alice and that mystery magician woman. Both about as gruesomely as possible: the former with her head crushed and the latter with her torso bisected.

The man’s wicked voice replayed in the back of Kamijou’s mind.

“Now, I believe it’s time to slaughter those Transcendents who got a little too interested in divine roleplay.”

Christian Rosencreutz had said he would kill the Transcendents for his own game. He was spreading true death. And to people other than Kamijou.

“Do you need a reason to kill time? This is their punishment for bringing this old man into such a dull and boring world. They can soothe this old man’s ennui with their worthless lives. How else can you make up for what you have done, Transcendents?”

Kamijou couldn’t imagine any reason he alone would have survived being there in that moment.

His thoughts turned toward Witch Goddess Aradia, but…

“It wasn’t me.”

She rejected the idea herself while leaning against the wall nearby.

And she was definitely one of the targets in CRC’s Transcendent hunting game.

“I was too preoccupied to save you.”

Then who else could it have been?

Kamijou could only think of one person who he was pretty sure had been there.

“Was it Aleister?”

But he didn’t see the woman in the beige habit here. The frog-faced doctor only shrugged. Perhaps no one in the world knew all the details. Had Aleister gone off to do his own thing after escaping Rosencreutz and delivering Kamijou and the others to the District 7 hospital?

“As much as that human insists he doesn’t believe in the goodness of humanity, he can’t bring himself to ignore a tragedy playing out before his eyes,” said the frog-faced doctor. “I don’t know what happened this time, but I doubt he could turn his back on the people collapsed before him.”

People. Plural.

“So is Anna in this hospital too!? Where is she!?”

“Right there, actually.”

On the flat LCD screen, the frog-faced doctor really did point right next to Kamijou.

Kamijou Touma whipped his head around so fast he nearly tore it from his neck.

He was speechless.

His voice refused to come.

“…………………………………………………………………………………………………………”

The ICU, the intensive care unit, was a special space for a hospital’s patients who were in an especially iffy condition, requiring a doctor’s constant attention. No one would end up there if they went to the hospital because they were feverish after catching a cold or their cavity hurt.

It was unusual for an ordinary high schooler to be there at all and it was news to Kamijou that patients in the same ICU had their priority determined by triage.

There she was right on the other side of the thick glass – no, the clear plastic wall.

He saw so much machinery. A hard plastic oxygen mask covered her lower face, countless LEDs blinked, LCD monitors of all sizes surrounded her, tubes carried red and yellow liquids, and all the power cords looked like a bundle of wet hair. The pumps repeating their mechanical expansion and contraction were the most worrying. Pumps. Plural. There were a lot of them.

What was that?

Had she always been so small?

Was that really the same Anna Sprengel who had sneered as she made a mess of the science and magic sides of the world? Her presence, her warmth, her humanity were all absent. If someone told him that thing buried within all the machinery was in fact beautiful taxidermy, he might have believed it.

“Medically speaking, she is not brain dead. Which is why she is still hooked up to all that equipment.”

The frog-faced doctor looked through the monitor to view the same thing as Kamijou.

And he had to know the truth of the matter in much more detail than the ignorant boy.

“Simply put, she would not be breathing and her heart would not be beating without that equipment. Fortunately, the legal system says, once life-support equipment is in use, it can’t be removed without consent from the patient or their family.”

“…”

“Physically speaking, you might as well say she is dead. What happened to her? She has no obvious external wounds and no signs of electric shock or poison either.”

It was the Shrink Drink.

That twisted spiritual item was imbued with a portion of Alice Anotherbible’s power and designed specifically to rob a Transcendent of their power and kill them.

After all this, was that weapon going to carry out its purpose?

(Because Alice…is gone.)

Kamijou recalled that tiny corpse lying on the cold asphalt with its head entirely missing as if it had been crushed by a tremendous force.

So much had happened at once that he still hadn’t sorted through all his feelings.

He had seen the result for himself, but he still found it hard to believe Alice of all people had lost.

(But even with Alice gone, her power remains.)

Anna Sprengel’s heart and lungs had ceased functioning. That power came from Alice Anotherbible, who was now dead, yet Anna had not resumed breathing, so did that mean that power had been cut free of Alice herself and stored inside the weapon? Like charging a battery from a power outlet?

Alice was no more.

Only Alice could save Anna.

The situation spiraled out of control from there. There was no silver lining or last laugh to be found. That one loss had started a chain reaction that would mean losing everything.

Was it unstoppable? Was there no hope left in this world?

“Sorry, but you don’t have time to mope,” said Aradia, leaning against the cold wall. “Christian Rosencreutz is still out there. Whatever choice you make, he will reach this hospital eventually.”

“…”

Christian Rosencreutz had casually stated he would kill all of the Transcendents.

That meant Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, and even Anna Sprengel who couldn’t even breathe for herself.

And he didn’t seem like the type to spare Kamijou just because he wasn’t a Transcendent.

He wasn’t so reasonable a monster. He was the kind of extreme beast who would devour everything he laid eyes on and bask in the joy of it.

Part 2

Aleister Crowley did not fly through the sky or walk through walls.

After delivering a certain boy to relative safety, that human left his old friend, the frog-faced doctor.

But he did not even make it all the way out of the hospital.

It hadn’t helped that there happened to be no one in the hallway.

“Ahhhh.”

Aleister was at his limit.

He staggered, leaned his side against the wall, and screamed.

Now that he had no task to preoccupy himself, he slid down the wall to the floor.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

Why did all the decent people have to die?

Why was it only the people like him who stubbornly survived?

Anna Kingsford. He thought he had finally found a benevolent expert even a contrarian like him could honestly respect. Maybe it was unnatural that she could speak thanks to the modifications he made to her preserved remains, but that didn’t lessen the agony of losing her.

There was one thing Human Aleister simply could not get his hands on.

As the world’s greatest villain, he had snatched up everything he could want – fame, fortune, scholarship – but he had never been blessed with a smart and kind woman.

The Battle of Blythe Road had been a war Aleister began due to the distorted fate of his wife Rose and his daughter Lilith.

When he had resided in the Windowless Building as Academy City’s Board Chairman, he had used Mina Mathers as the navigator for his plan. She was the wife of his sworn enemy Mathers. This may have been the reason why he had chosen such an awkward person for that role.

And now it had happened again.

Why?

Why?

Why?

He could mourn all he wanted, it would not change what had happened. CRC – Christian Rosencreutz. The stench of death lingering on that man was real. Aleister had singlehandedly conquered the Battle of Blythe Road, known as the greatest conflict in modern Western magic, so he could tell.

That man made use of death in the same way as Mathers and Westcott.

And at a higher level.

Aleister couldn’t even bring himself to choose between fighting or running. Ordinarily, he would have chosen to fight and fight hard. That he was hesitating at all was like accepting how fragile his heart was. He had no freedom here. He had to accept that he was a loser – that he was bound by fear.

It wasn’t just that he couldn’t fight.

He even lacked the courage to run away and found himself frozen in place.

This wasn’t about his own death.

In the fight against CRC, every action in every direction was guaranteed to consume lives, so just how many people would be sent to the graveyard by every choice he made?

“…”

The golden retriever opted for silence.

He simply watched.

Kihara Noukan knew very well that Aleister was not perfect. So it was fine with him if Aleister was an ugly and miserable wretch.

He knew deep down that this human would arrive at the right decision in the very end.

“You aren’t disappointed in me? That I could see all that and not even vow revenge?”

“Don’t be foolish. No one understands romance better than me.”

So he would wait as long as it took.

Kihara Noukan had enough tact to leave that part unsaid.

Part 3

They stood tall and intimidating.

Who did? Index and Misaka Mikoto.

“Explain yourself.”

“………………………………………………………………………………………………………Yes, ma’am.”

Kamijou was hesitant to discuss the magic side with Mikoto present, but he also felt like the public awareness of magic had changed since the rise of R&C Occultics. People thought of it as something close-to-home instead of something impossible. But that didn’t necessarily mean Mikoto really did believe in the existence of magic.

He told them about the Shrink Drink spiritual item designed to kill Transcendents.

He told them about the Bridge Builders Cabal’s goal.

He told them about the truly evil Christian Rosencreutz.

He told them about Alice Anotherbible’s death.

He told them about Anna Sprengel who was hooked up to medical machinery and unable to move.

“As I’m sure you can tell, Rosencreutz is as bad as they get. That monster one-shotted Alice who treated Academy City’s dark side like a playground and wasn’t concerned by the magic side either. I couldn’t beat him. It happened so quickly I can’t even analyze why it is I lost. I don’t remember it, but I think I would have just died if Aleister hadn’t intervened. He had no reason not to kill me.”

“…”

As his story progressed, Index’s eyes grew grimmer and grimmer while Mikoto’s eyes grew blank and emotionless.

He was scared.

But even so, he knew they would attack the instant he kept something from them.

“I could leave the hospital on my own and go into hiding, but as you can see, Anna is stuck here. If Rosencreutz is on his way here, then I need to get out there and stop him before he reaches the hospi- um, is something wrong, you two? Why are you hanging your heads and trembl-”

“Tou – ma!! Why are you just assuming you have to risk your life and fight!?”

“Look, I don’t understand even half of what he just said, but I do know one thing quite clearly: it’s in this idiot’s best interests if I punch him for saying all this while he’s in the ICU.”

They beat him up. Quite seriously.

He saw red. Half his vision was stained red!

“Aghhhhh!! Why would you chomp on my head when I’m already short on blood, Index!? Are you trying to finish me off!? And, Misaka, you need to stop zapping me in the hospital! With all this delicate machinery, you’re turning yourself into a real public nuisance!!”

Aradia made no effort to help him.

She only looked away with exasperation on her face.

Battered and spurting red, Kamijou managed to get more words out.

“M-my point is, Rosencreutz is a monster. If he’s on his way to the hospital to get Anna, then we need to stop him before he gets here. Because Anna’s in no condition to be moved. That rules out hiding her elsewhere, so we have to make a preemptive strike on Rosencreutz.”

“?”

He thought his point was pretty straightforward, so he found the lack of agreement odd.

And not just from Mikoto, but from Index too.

And…

“Okay, maybe this is a cruel thing to say as someone who’s only been watching all this from the outside.” Misaka Mikoto hesitantly spoke up. “This person wants to kill you. And we can’t deny the possibility that this will put all the other patients and doctors at this hospital in danger. Is that wicked woman really worth risking yours and so many innocent people’s lives to protect?”

Part 4

The boy wasn’t the only one who needed time to gather his thoughts.

Witch Goddess Aradia did as well.

Alice Anotherbible was gone.

There was no second or third Alice like there was for her.

The Bridge Builders Cabal had fallen apart and it was unlikely to ever be restored. The loss of its central figure was too devastating a blow and they had already seen the result of the Transcendents gathering together and trying their best.

Christian Rosencreutz.

They likely lacked the strength needed to overcome that horrific failure and regroup.

But time was still progressing.

Aradia and the others’ regrets and hesitation did nothing to slow the clock.

(I need to decide what I’m going to do too.)

Aradia heard a metallic crash.

Something had fallen over.

She checked inside a nearby hospital room to see just one bed. The room’s sole occupant was a girl of 5 or 6 wearing pajamas. Her gaunt arms dangled weakly at her sides. She may have been in this hospital since before she began Academy City’s esper development.

A red color was splattered on the floor.

She must have pulled out her transfusion needle.

“No, don’t push the nurse call.”

The girl’s parched voice stopped the question on Aradia’s lips.

The bedside table contained a few personal items, but the stuffed animals and picture book looked somehow faded. She may not have been receiving visitors as frequently as when she was first hospitalized.

Aradia glanced at the picture book’s cover.

(Cinderella, hm?)

“Witches aren’t real.”

The girl didn’t even look over at it.

Only that faded picture book remained.

“Miracles don’t happen. Nothing I do will make me even a little better. I already know that. I was surprised when R&C Occultics showed up, but that site was shut down before long. Now no one can use-”

The girl stopped midsentence.

Aradia didn’t even need to snap her fingers.

A spiral lollipop had appeared in her hand. When she spun it around, it turned into a crow, which flapped its wings to transform into a rabbit, which became a kitten that hopped onto Aradia’s shoulder.

The girl in the bed leaned forward.

“Wh-what did you do? Is that an esper power?”

“No talent is needed for this. Because anyone is free to use magic.”

With a flourish of the stick in Aradia’s hand, the cat on her shoulder unraveled like a ribbon and returned to being a spiral lollipop.

“Nothing is impossible,” she declared. This was also a command she made. “I will never let the barrier of ‘impossible’ stand in your way. I will leave you with the hope you need to live. And if you are truly interested in being a witch, seek me out once you have conquered your illness.”

“Are you…a witch?”

“No.”

Aradia shook her head.

She glanced over at the faded picture book on the bedside table with fondness.

And she reached for the nurse call button once more.

“I am the goddess of all witches. I exist to protect and guide all who hope to be a witch.”

Aradia left the room.

Just before some nurses scrambled into the room.

Alone in the hallway, the Transcendent breathed a quiet sigh.

She knew she had no right to make such promises. CRC was on his way here, so Aradia’s presence was threatening the lives of everyone in the hospital.

But.

But what did that matter?

She had never claimed to perfectly embody her borrowed name. She had known from the beginning that she lacked the power to save the world. That was why she did not use her own magic name and instead chose the path of the Transcendent, where she borrowed a god’s name and mimicked their manner of dress and their behavior.

Where had it all begun?

Hadn’t there been something she could not let happen, even if she wasn’t up to the task?

Maybe she would lose this battle in the end.

But who would be the one to suffer from that result?

“Hmph.”

Part 5

Kamijou Touma staggered down the hospital hallway.

He couldn’t seem to gather his thoughts.

Misaka Mikoto’s question had hit him like a heavy blow to the head.

But that was likely a “right answer” Kamijou never could have reached on his own. It was a reasonable argument made from a different viewpoint. Mikoto only saw Anna Sprengel as the villain who had caused so much mayhem in Academy City around Christmas and infected Kamijou with deadly microbes.

A new year had begun and it was now January.

Those girls knew nothing of the Anna who he had rescued from her imprisonment(?) as a human film canister and who had fled from Mut Thebes with him in that mobile combat vehicle. They hadn’t seen the side of her that got excited in a discount store, got embarrassed and angry at being seen naked, and had developed an interest in Japanese candy.

The same was true of nearly everyone else in the world.

It wasn’t their fault since Anna had hid that side of herself.

But Kamijou knew.

She was not superhuman. She had trembled in tearful terror when Kingsford showed up and she had used a mobile combat vehicle to save the others from Mut Thebes even though it didn’t benefit her. She had the same emotions as anyone else and she had worked to conquer her fear and press on.

Just then, Kamijou spotted someone.

“Hey, Kami-yan. Back to check out the miniskirt nurses again? Or are you more into pajama girls?”

It was Aogami Pierce.

What was he doing here?

Kamijou Touma shuddered.

“Now I remember. Didn’t you end up hospitalized after grabbing a boobs mousepad you threw in the microwave so you could feel some human warmth in midwinter? But wait…does that mean you’ve been in here all this time!? It’s the new year!! There are new rules now!!”

“Nah. I was so sick of the bland hospital food I decided to celebrate my release with a trip to Ramen Niro, but it was too great a shock to my system and it sent me right back here.”

“Ehh!? High school boys have such big appetites we’ll choose a restaurant just because it advertises a free large serving of rice with its meals, but you still managed to eat so much salt and fat they had to call an ambulance!? How ridiculous have the extra-large bowls of fatty pork ramen gotten!?”

“Heh. Kami-yan, there is nothing ridiculous about it. They couldn’t be more serious about their food. …Just as you couldn’t make a historically bad video game if you tried, food this shit is a godlike feat that can only be achieved with the kind of miraculous balance only found in someone trying their best.”

“Don’t call it shit. Not when we’re talking about food.”

“What has you all depressed? It’s January 5. New Year’s might be over, but our winter break is still going. What, are you sad because you missed seeing the giant kagami mochi they had in the lobby?”

Of course not.

Kamijou tried to say so, but the words refused to leave his mouth.

After being hospitalized so many times after his deadly battles, he had learned that hospitals tended to play these things up. What might seem like just another seasonal event to Kamijou could seem far more important to a patient who feared they might not be around to celebrate the following year.

That was the kind of place Christian Rosencreutz was approaching.

He chaotically spread very real death.

Even now, he was only doing it for fun. So who was really putting these people at risk: him or Kamijou?

“What if?”

Kamijou knew this was the wrong person to ask, but the words spilled out in front of his classmate.

Or maybe he could only say it because this was a friend.

“What if someone would get hurt whether you did the right thing or not? What would you choose to do then? Would you still go with the right thing? Would you choose whatever let you save the most people? There must be countless ways to make the choice.”

“That’s an easy one. I’d choose whatever put a smile on a cute girl’s face.”

Aogami Pierce didn’t even need to think about it.

But he wasn’t just giving a joke answer either.

He looked Kamijou in the eye, showing he was deadly serious.

“All that stuff about good and evil is too much for me to wrap my head around. It’s not like we even have any way of figuring out if our definitions of good and evil are even accurate. So all I can do is see if the person in front of me speaks to my moe-loving heart. If I don’t want to see their story get canceled prematurely, then I’ll support them even if it means risking my life. Who cares about the ranking lists or how many stars it has? If I think something’s the best, then it’s the best thing in the world. Isn’t that the one and only tenet of the otaku faith?”

“…”

Kamijou Touma’s breath caught in his throat.

Yes.

Why did he need some great hero’s permission to save the person in front of him?

It wasn’t like he had an important position or was responsible for anything.

Wasn’t he no more than the kind of high school boy you can find anywhere?

“Is something wrong, Kami-yan?”

“No, it’s just that you told me something I really needed to hear. Just like with Misaka, I’m realizing how important it is to hear from people with a different viewpoint.”

Kamijou scratches his head bashfully.

But then something spilled from his coat pocket.

The flat plastic package was a video game case with the title printed clearly on the front: Jiggly☆Witch Trial.

Aogami Pierce was struck by lightning.

Kamijou could tell this had been a serious error.

“Kami-yan…that’s the legendary game that costs a fortune at online auctions and even the OLED system revival version has to be locked in a glass showcase at used game stores…”

“No, no, no!! D-dammit, Anna Sprengel. Did she sneak this into the cart back at the discount store!? How is she still ruining my life when she’s in a freaking coma!?”

“Heh. I have a gift to help you with your newfound excellent taste. The legendary original versions of JWT2 and JWT+!!”

“You mean this niche game had multiple sequels? Ahhhh, Aradia is watching from around the corner of the hallway. And I really don’t like the terrifying way her eyes are shining!!”

Part 6

Index still stood before the ICU.

Kamijou Touma had already left.

The only person still inside was Anna Sprengel surrounded by so much machinery.

Index stared intently through the thick plastic partition at the small girl who barely looked alive.

“Are you kidding me?”

Index’s hood shook a bit and something emerged onto her shoulder.

It was 15cm Magic God Othinus.

“I leave him alone for a few days and this is what I find he’s been up to? Everything moves much too fast around that human.”

“He got himself tangled up with a group of the false symbols known as Transcendents as well as the real Christian Rosencreutz who they resurrected.”

“Then this will not be an easy one. If that human and Rosencreutz fight, no matter who wins, I won’t be surprised if Academy City doesn’t survive it.”

“But can we really ignore Rosencreutz?”

“Well, I doubt a little planet like Earth is enough to contain that freak.”

By this point, Index had already arrived at her answer.

She was a grimoire library belonging to Necessarius, a special part of the Anglican Church. If a long-dead magician had been revived and he would selfishly destroy this world full of innocent people, then she couldn’t imagine a reason not to stop him.

But there was a problem there.

“What about the fact that stopping him will also save Anna Sprengel?” she asked.

“To be honest, it gives me a headache. But one problem at a time. Letting Rosencreutz go free won’t end well no matter what else might be.”

“When will Touma stop making such troublesome acquaintances?”

“You’re not one to talk, grimoire library.”

The Magic God arrogantly crossing her arms may not have been one to talk either.

Part 7

Misaka Mikoto had walked out in the hospital courtyard to try and cool her head.

“Misaka-san, you can take an awfully harsh and icy viewpoint sometimes, you know that?”

“What are you doing here?”

The #5 girl was not one to answer every one of Mikoto’s suspicious questions.

Shokuhou Misaki had a habit of appearing seemingly out of nowhere thanks to her ability to manipulate people’s memories and facial recognition.

Mikoto was immune to the effects of Mental Out, but the Queen of Tokiwadai still managed to sneak up on her a lot.

“Regretting your own words?”

“…Oh, shut up.”

Mikoto’s voice dropped in tone.

She couldn’t forget that boy’s shocked face.

Anna Sprengel. Mikoto could tell that, when the two of them thought of that name, she and that high school boy were calling on different information and experiences. And in the worst case, that idiot would probably save someone suffering before his eyes even if every reason to save that person was stripped away from him. It might be correct to say he had no reason to save a wicked woman like Anna, but it felt wrong to imagine him stopping what he was doing just because someone made a good enough argument.

She hadn’t wanted to see that look on his face.

But she had known someone had to present that problem to him.

Anna Sprengel was, without a doubt, a villain.

And with that premise established…

“What are you going to do now?”

“My role is to help him out no matter what else might happen. If he decides to take the path of evil, then I will dedicate all of my support ability toward that.”

“I’ve been wondering – why are you so fixated on that idiot?”

“You have your reason and I have mine. That’s all I have to say on the matter☆”

Although they appeared to have reached very different conclusions regarding what to do about it.

If Mikoto saw someone take the path of evil, she would return them to the straight and narrow even if she had to punch them. Indulging them and encouraging them wasn’t her idea of what a friend should do.

“It seems to me you’re not really interested in anything as trivial as what I want to do.”

Shokuhou Misaki laughed before she completing her thought.

“Aren’t you more interested in what you’re going to do?”

Part 8

The setting sun dyed the hospital roof.

After giving Kamijou Touma a (gentle) noogie headlock for so rudely viewing witches in a lewd light, Witch Goddess Aradia had emerged into the chilly air.

She was a Transcendent who had chosen ‘saving all persecuted witches” as her condition for salvation. When Kamijou Touma had wielded magic to fight Anna, knowing it would destroy him, he had become a target of the witch goddess’s salvation. If he was going to fight, Aradia was willing to join him.

But she knew that wasn’t enough to win.

Christian Rosencreutz had effortlessly killed the Transcendents participating in that ceremony. Even the extraordinary Alice Anotherbible had her head destroyed, killing her.

A single regular Transcendent of the Bridge Builders Cabal wouldn’t stand a chance against Rosencreutz.

Then what could she do?

Kamijou Touma was a target of her salvation, so she couldn’t give up just because it seemed impossible.

She had to find some way of saving him.

“Kh.”

She heard a flapping noise.

With what sounded like bed sheets beating at the air, a sexy demon alighted on the chain link fence. That Transcendent had long wavy blonde hair, pale skin, animal horns on her head, an arrow-tipped tail at the back of her hips, and large batlike wings on her back.

Aradia looked up at the person who had flown through the sky in a one-piece corset – in other words, in her underwear.

“Bologna Succubus.”

“Jhhbrhbh…I take it thou too found a way to survive.”

The Bologna Succubus’s casual comment sounded odd because her common tones were still somewhat off.

Aradia sighed softly.

“I hear Alice is dead.”

“Aye.”

“And all of you took out Anna. How many of the regular Transcendents are left?”

“Hmm? There’s me, Good, Old Mary, Mut Thebes, and I reckon a few others. The rest of y’all weren’t there, so I’m a rare example of someone who was at the ceremonial ground and survived. You should be proud of me, really.”

“What about H. T. Trismegistus?”

“Gone.”

That was an odd word choice.

Did that mean he hadn’t fought and been killed by Christian Rosencreutz?

CRC remained inside Academy City.

He had said he would kill all of the Transcendents.

And for no good reason. It wasn’t about right or wrong, or even about his likes or dislikes. She recalled what Kamijou Touma had relayed, sounding apologetic.

The Bologna Succubus breathed a heavy sigh from atop the fence.

“Because he’s bored. To kill time.”

“…”

“That means he will arrive at this hospital eventually. Sooner or later, he will set his sights on Anna Sprengel. But if we know his target, we can lay a trap for him.”

The words were steeped with the kind of mockery and malice that stuck in the back of the mind.

Having a monster like CRC after your life just for the hell of it would be enough for the average person to lose their cool, but before even reaching that point, there was an aspect of this Aradia had trouble accepting as a Transcendent.

“Can you believe this?”

“What about it?”

“The true face of our ‘savior’.”

“What you see is what you get. If he won’t do anything to save the wrongly accused, then I just have to find a different method. …He simply wasn’t what I was hoping for. We went out of our way to resurrect someone who should have remained buried and dead.”

Rosencreutz had no policy for salvation.

For what did he wield that immense power?

Whatever the answer, he had already removed the “salvation” card from his deck. This was never going to end well.

Witch Goddess Aradia truly existed to save persecuted witches.

Whoever she had been before, she had remade herself into such a being.

What if CRC wasn’t going to help with that and would in fact bring harm to the people she meant to save?

No, that wasn’t a hypothetical.

Stop kidding yourself.

He was already doing it. Since Kamijou Touma had used magic to protect Academy City, he counted as one of Aradia’s goodhearted witches.

And Christian Rosencreutz had attacked him.

He had violated that goddess’s holy ground.

“What will you and the other survivors do?”

“Ach, you have a talent for asking the hard questions.” The Bologna Succubus sat down atop the tall fence and looked down at Aradia. “I honestly care not if he comes to kill me.”

“Hm.”

Aradia didn’t seem particularly surprised.

Transcendents chose someone other than themselves to save. You could say only someone who had modified themselves to that point could claim the title. The only exceptions were Alice and Anna.

“And even if he goes on a rampage, the damage he causes doesn’t have anything to do with false accusations. I ain’t gonna save pure aggressors, but I also ain’t gonna expand my salvation conditions to include pure victims. I know it would be too much to handle and I would only be destroying m’self.”

“…”

“Don’t give me that look. You’ve narrowed down your conditions to only persecuted witches. You must know that expanding those conditions endlessly will only tear you apart.”

Aradia was aware.

But confirming that wouldn’t convince the Bologna Succubus to help. Aradia alone was no match for Rosencreutz, meaning she couldn’t save Kamijou Touma, so she needed to do whatever she could to drag the other Transcendents into her business.

“Heh heh♪”

The Bologna Succubus must have realized this.

She swung her legs atop the fence and hopped down.

She placed a hand on the center of her chest, winked, and spoke with the gentle yet toxic voice of a tempting demon.

“Good, Old Mary, Mut Thebes, and me – that should be good enough for now. Can you picture the intertwining threads in your noggin, Aradia?”

• One wanted to deliver miracles to the people who had been driven out of a special category.

• One wanted to use the art of punishment to protect the group she had chosen for herself. That group was currently the Bridge Builders Cabal.

• And one wanted to save anyone who was falsely accused.

“I shouldn’t have to tell you that we Transcendents of the Bridge Builders Cabal only act based on the salvation conditions we’ve set for ourselves. So if you want us to act, you need to match our conditions. Each of our conditions, with nary a contradiction.”

“…”

Aradia had to understand just how much of a challenge that would be.

It was the apparent incompatibility of their conditions that had led the Transcendents to hope the resurrected Christian Rosencreutz could save the entire world for them.

“So what will you do, Aradia?”

The Bologna Succubus held her hands behind her back and leaned in.

The demon smiled sweetly.

“Are you prepared to solve this impossible puzzle to save that boy?”

Part 9

It was the afternoon period past midday but before evening.

That in-between time period may have been the least crowded time. Kamijou was all alone seated in the break area with plenty of vending machines lined up alongside it.

Aogami Pierce’s words had been so simple and expressed a viewpoint Kamijou lacked.

Simply protect what you love.

That had to be one correct answer.

It was also a very easy one to cling to for a high school boy like Kamijou.

“But.”

Could he really drag everyone else into this for no more than that?

Who was Anna Sprengel really?”

“Merry Christmas, my amnesiac enemy. You looked good out there today.”

She had undoubtedly been an enemy at first.

Her mouth-to-mouth attack had taken the form of the deadly microbes known as St. Germain. Worse, due to the conflict with Kamijou’s Imagine Breaker, the strange Rosicrucian ally was doomed to die whether he won or lost.

“Did you use magic!? By making an ally of the St. Germain I implanted in you!?”

Even after they worked together to defeat her, Anna Sprengel easily escaped Anti-Skill custody and fled. She then caused another major incident in Los Angeles.

She joined the Transcendents of the Bridge Builders Cabal and messed with Alice Anotherbible to successfully push that mysterious magic cabal beyond any semblance of control.

But even Anna had a nemesis.

Aleister Crowley. And Anna Kingsford who he controlled.

Kamijou couldn’t explain why he had reached out to help when he saw Anna Sprengel transformed into a helpless film canister. He had simply responded to the thought in his head.

Yes, he hated Anna Sprengel.

But that result wouldn’t have brought him any joy.

“Fine, fine. Just this once, I will use my trump card.”

Then what was it he did want?

He couldn’t put it to words, but he could say for certain it was incompatible with Mut Thebes, who had tried to execute Anna with the Shrink Drink, or with Aleister, who had tried to kill her with Kingsford.

Maybe he wasn’t right.

Maybe he wasn’t being logical.

But he could hold his head high.

“I don’t know if someone like that exists, but if they do, I can make a compromise with this world.”

Yes.

That was right.

“I do hope they are out there somewhere, fool.”

That was it.

So what if she was wicked? Why should it matter what a powerful enemy she was?

No matter how this conflict ended and no matter where they all ended up, he did not want it to be ended by Anna Sprengel’s death.

What was so strange about being so certain of that?

“…”

But. Even so.

Kamijou had made up his mind, but a mere high school boy had no realistic way of saving Anna while she was hooked up to all that machinery in the ICU.

He couldn’t even defeat Rosencreutz who was on his way here.

The hospital contained plenty more patients. Not to mention the doctors, nurses, and other medical staff caring for those patients. Those hospitalized people had their everyday lives taken from them. They were all fighting with all their might to reclaim those everyday lives. Anna Sprengel wasn’t the only person here at death’s door. She wasn’t special. So how could he put those others at risk?

He wanted help.

But who could he ask for help and how could he convince them?

Someone approached while he was agonizing over these questions.

“Oh? I was wondering where you got off to.”

It was the frog-faced doctor.

“How’s Anna?” asked Kamijou on reflex.

“I don’t know anything about Alice Anotherbible or that Shrink Drink you mentioned.”

He wasn’t lying. The frog-faced doctor’s next words were simple.

And they tore into the core of Kamijou Touma’s being.

“So what are you going to do?”

“…”

Kamijou clenched his teeth.

He tried thinking, but it didn’t do any good.

“Anna is a villain. There’s no denying that at this point.”

He couldn’t stop himself.

His voice seemed to spill from his heart more than this mouth.

“But I still don’t want her to die.”

That settled it.

No, he had made up his own mind.

He knew where he wanted to stand, which direction he wanted to face, what stance he wanted to take.

So he let it all out.

He released the ugliness within.

“I mean, everyone keeps calling her a villain, but she still saved me. I never would have gotten that mobile combat vehicle without her there. In fact, I probably would’ve screwed up and gotten myself killed on that first night. Sure, I freed her from being a human film canister, but if all she wanted was to survive, what reason did she have to bring me or Aradia along with her? She could have lied to us and run off on her own. She loved to tease people and laugh at them, but there were moments when she reached out a helping hand for nothing in return! No, that’s not the point. I don’t want to save her because she saved me. This isn’t some transactional thing where I’m just repaying a favor!! It’s really not. She teased me and wouldn’t leave me alone in that discount store. She laughed at the duct tape around Aradia’s ankle at the gas station and she loved the Japanese candy she tried. She was a normal girl. She might be an irregular Transcendent with exceptional power, but she’s still no different from anyone else. I can’t leave her to die. I just can’t!! I can’t accept that just by saying she’s an enemy and drawing a line between us! I don’t want Anna to die!! I don’t even want to think about it! I don’t know how great a monster Christian Rosencreutz is. It doesn’t matter how stupid it is to think about fighting him. I won’t let him take her away from us. I can’t stand idly by when I know what he’s going to do! I’ll do something about him. I swear it. I’ll do whatever it takes to snatch victory away from him and protect Anna! But that isn’t enough. Defeating Christian Rosencreutz is just one battle won. It doesn’t mean I’ve won it all and it doesn’t actually save anyone’s life. That isn’t the goal. It’s all meaningless if Anna doesn’t wake back up!! There are things you can’t accomplish with a punch! Anna was hit by the Shrink Drink and now my right hand can’t save her. With Alice dead and unable to help, you’re all I have left. Your medical skills are all based on ordinary science, but you can do things I never can!! I don’t want to give up. I refuse to give up on Anna Sprengel!! I couldn’t bear to give up on her life here!!! It’s not about how much time we spent together. I’ve seen her smile. I don’t care about her mysterious ‘king’. We will drag her up out of the darkness ourselves. I want her to smile. That’s all this is about. I want to see Anna’s smile again!! I’d gladly throw my own life away for that!! So please. Once this is all over, I’ll turn myself in to Anti-Skill. If helping a villain is wrong, then I’ll accept whatever punishment I deserve. They can badmouth me on TV and online – I’ll walk into juvie with my head held high!! Ugh, ahh, so please don’t give up on Anna!! Ugh, ahh, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

Kamijou’s face was a mess.

He couldn’t find his strength. He clung to the doctor in front of him as he fell to his knees.

In response, the frog-faced doctor only breathed a quick sigh.

And he spoke.

Just like he always did.

“You’re overthinking this, if you ask me.”

“…”

“Think about this as deeply as you want, there’s no point in endlessly worrying yourself when it isn’t necessary. I’m a doctor, so you don’t need to find any lengthy justification. You only need to speak two simple words: save her.”

For a doctor, it was a normal, natural, and commonplace thing.

“But…but.”

“Hm?”

“Anna is a villain.”

“And? What’s wrong with wanting to reach out and help someone whose life is being threatened by that very accusation?”

“But I asked everyone to help…and none of them would do it.”

“If you could use a doctor, then I will do whatever I can to help. But what can you do to help?”

He had help.

He had one person willing to help his selfish and ugly wish to keep a worldclass villain alive even though it would worsen the situation and put so many unrelated lives at risk.

That man’s dedication to preserving lives was not shaken. It never was. Not even in an emergency when everyone else was panicking. Even though reading the room and cleverly pretending not to notice might be so much easier. Was he driven by his pride as a professional life saver?

Seeing it for himself reignited something within the hopelessly inexperienced Kamijou Touma.

That something was quite small but it was a solid presence within his heart.

That was his core. He now had something to support his heart.

This doctor did not lie.

If he said he would save a patient, then that patient would be saved.

Kamijou could believe that without any real evidence because of the many times he himself had been brought back from the brink of death. He didn’t know who this frog-faced doctor was, but he knew he would not betray a human life.

The real answer was nothing special. Its basis was found in the experience he had built up for himself.

And with that settled…

He would accept his disadvantage and do whatever it took to save Anna. That meant stopping anyone who would intrude on the hospital and interrupt the doctor’s actions.

Do that and he could solve everything.

Then he could once more see that little wicked woman mocking him, verbally abusing him, throwing a tantrum, and causing trouble in general. And he could once more see her smiling.

If so, that was the best possible reason for the puny boy to clench his right fist.

“Doctor.”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

Kamijou Touma bowed deep and then turned around.

He walked toward the hospital’s front entrance. And the dangerous city beyond.

Now that he had a goal in mind, he only had to clench his right fist tight and continue onward.

Christian Rosencreutz.

He would do whatever it took to defeat that greatest of enemies.

Between the Lines 1

Lambeth Palace, London.

A solemn voice rang through the residence of the Archbishop at the top of the Anglican Church.

“Attention, pawns.”

“What did you call us!?”

Agnese Sanctis was ready to fight, so Sisters Lucia and Angelene had to restrain her.

Dion Fortune, who had taken the Archbishop position after Lola Stuart’s unprecedented resignation, sighed in exasperation at what she saw before her. Namely, a travel suitcase stuffed so full the lock looked ready to burst.

The impertinent girl addressed her subordinates.

“Do none of you awkward nuns know the first thing about taking a long trip!? I won’t need my pajamas or bathroom things right away, so you can put them at the bottom of the bag. But flimsy foreign language handbooks, card games, and anything else I will need more frequently should be at the top! This is basic stuff. Did you rely on your mother superior for everything back at your original abbey!?”

“Are you serious? Why would we have a paper guide nowadays when everything is machine translated?”

“Don’t be dumb. What if my phone breaks, turning it into an expensive paperweight? And when I’m in the middle of a strange foreign country, no less!? Of course I’ll have that convenient mobile device, but I also need to bring something paper just in case. Oh, and make sure the deck of cards has two jokers. You can’t play some games with just one.”

Agnese stared icily at Dion Fortune who was smugly lecturing the combat nuns who spoke dozens of languages and were trained to blend into any part of the world if necessary.

“Why are you in such a hurry to leave in the middle of the night, anyway? Trying to skip town?”

“I’m not interested in power structures or wealth. I know I’m only a body to fill the position until the next real Archbishop is chosen. But since I have this power for now, I might as well use it, right? That would be best for the UK as a whole.”

“Then make sure you don’t forget this: your passport. It’s worth having on hand even within the EU because cops can be stupidly pigheaded at times. So where are you headed?”

Dion Fortune responded with a “nee hee” of laughter.

Like she was secretly sharing her plan for a prank.

“Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany.”

“…”

“If you have any knowledge at all of the Golden cabal, you should have a good idea what I’ll be looking for. Hint: Mathers and Westcott ran themselves ragged searching for it but never found it, so they had no choice but to claim it was a spiritual thing that existed in a separate phase.”

“The First Temple?”

“Right. Its actual name is the Licht Liebe Leben Temple. Anna Sprengel was said to belong to and directly manage that magic cabal, which can be seen as the starting point of our Golden cabal. With Miss Sprengel and even CRC showing up, I figured it was time I dug a little deeper there. Of course, this is a fairly dangerous decision for a Golden magician.”

“…”

The Isis-Urania Temple, the first one established in London, was also known as the Third Temple. They had chosen not to start at one out of respect for the First Temple which was (supposedly) run by Anna Sprengel.

“Ah ha ha!! So impressed you’re dumbfounded, you silly and useless nun pawns!? We’re talking about Anna Sprengel and Christian Rosencreutz here, so I need to investigate the Rosicrucian cabal, which always seemed more like a legend than anything! It might be a temporary gig, but I didn’t snatch the Archbishop position for no reason. So do your job as pawns by preparing your big boss’s suitcase and do your part for the UK and the world. C’mon, make sure you put the wallet, credit card, and transit card, which can also be used for shopping, in different places. Losing all of them at once would be a nightmare. Do you want me to be stuck all alone in Germany!?”

Just then, the smartphone (which she had been planning to use for checking restaurant reviews at her destination) vibrated. Dion Fortune grabbed the device that was surprisingly loud even in silent mode.

“Hello? What do you need with the great Archbishop? I’m busy as hell, so I hope you made an appointment, you piece of sh-”

“Oh? You’ve moved up in the world since I last saw you, my disappointing apprentice. Hard to believe this is the same person who spent night after night sobbing in fear of stray cat attacks.”

“!!!???”

Agnese and the others watched curiously as Dion Fortune’s back went ramrod straight despite only talking on the phone.

“M-”

But the Archbishop had bigger concerns.

She was already soaked with sweat as her old trauma was triggered.

“Mina Mathers? M-mistress, what business do you have with me today? Heh heh, eh heh heh.”

Many incidents and conflicts were recorded in the history of modern Western magic, but there was one magical battle nearly as famous as Crowley’s Battle of Blythe Road.

The compilers of that history referred to it as Mina Mathers and Dion Fortune’s magical catfight.

(But that wasn’t two girls grappling in a vaguely naughty way. I was attacked by a giant catlike thing that tore a huge slash across my back! Eek! She has some nerve calling herself the black cat witch. It really is true history is written by the winners since she chose to rewrite herself as something a lot cuter than reality!! Not all cats are cute little housecats!!)

“I predicted that my incapable apprentice would be searching for the First Temple. As things are, that human might just do something rash all on his own. With someone who can win by being self-destructive, there is nothing in this world more frightening than when they are truly pissed. I honestly can’t bear to see that happen, so you need to join me in assisting him as soon as possible. We are looking for the same thing anyway.”

“Heh, eh heh heh. My mistress, what if – purely hypothetically speaking, so please don’t take this seriously! – I were to tell you that today’s tarot reading were poor and according to Western yoga – that is, according to the Kabbalistic interpretation – I should take a rain check and try this again some other-”

“Then your kindhearted master might just lose her temper and extend her claws for the first time in quite a while.”

Chapter 2: So Much Like Tree Rings – Open_War,1st_Defense_Line.

Part 1

Sunset came early in the winter.

It was 5PM.

The first to notice the oddity in the red-dyed city was Anti-Skill.

The martial law declared across Academy City had yet to be removed. That meant Anti-Skill had established an alert network stricter than normal, so even the smallest oddity was immediately reported back to them.

The oddity was detected at the far eastern side of the city, in the strongly religious (by Academy City’s standards) District 11.

“Hey…what’s that?”

And.

Christian Rosencreutz, the silver-haired monster, wasn’t concerned with any minefields that might be in his path.

If he had somewhere to go, he would walk right on through, stepping on all the mines along the way.

“Ohh, oh, ohh?”

Presently, the silver-haired young man clad in red was focused on a plastic bottle.

Specifically, he was staring at the side where he had peeled away a small sticker.

“Hmm. This promises a gift of magic gems, but how do you claim this generous offer? I do not see any kind of contact information.”

“You there!! Show me your ID or residency permit!! Right now!!”

“Oh, I see. You must hold up one of those cleverphones, or whatever you call them, to read this square code here.”

A wet splat rang out.

Rosencreutz never even looked toward the Anti-Skill officer. He didn’t move a finger, but the shouting officer and his gun went spinning up into the air.

In this case, managing to hold onto his gun worked against him.

Because the bullets sprayed against his will struck the fellow officer standing nearby.

“Byah!!”

“Wahhhhhh!?”

The color red and a rusty scent created a brutal scene, but Christian Rosencreutz still ignored it all. With the sticker in hand, he tossed aside the bottle and folded his other hand’s fingers to count something.

“Acquire an ultra-rare trading card – check. Eat that restaurant’s frozen hamburger steak said to have a ‘new and improved flavor’ – check. Worn a heated napping eye mask – check. Tried that simple homemade mochi kit – check. Drank the new chemical pink flavor of energy drink – check. Oh, you there, could you lend me some fingers? Let’s see, where was I?”

“Ah, gah?”

“Won a stuffed toy poodle in the crane game – check. Tried the recommended shark fin cheese dumpling, hit a homerun in the batting cage – check and check. Scored a perfect 100 at karaoke – hm, that’s a check too. Which leaves…”

“Gghghghaghyghagyghagyhgaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!?”

Unrestrained cracking noises burst out again and again.

Rosencreutz had not laid a finger on him, but despite his desperate resistance, the Anti-Skill officer’s fingers bent in time with the list. The gun’s grip was crushed by unthinkable force and his index finger pulled the trigger against his will.

“~ ~ ~! Everyone, get down!!”

Something exploded.

Anti-Skill was finally making their counterattack. Snakehead self-destruct drones, which looked like isosceles triangles flying around like a flock of starlings, dropped straight down. Each Snakehead rivalled a shoulder-fired rocket and, when a group of them attacked as sharply as lightning strikes, they had enough firepower to wipe out a group of tanks.

But still Christian Rosencreutz ignored them.

Not a single hair on his head was singed.

“Hm.”

It was the same with him no matter what happened.

He obeyed only his desires when choosing what to do.

Nearly half a day had passed since Alice Anotherbible and Anna Kingsford’s deaths, but he remained in District 12 where he had been reborn.

He had a simple reason for this.

“I’ve tried everything that caught my interest, so maybe I should get moving now.”

CRC’s eyeballs rolled in his head. Everyone present could tell he was focusing on the outside world for the first time.

“You had better entertain me.”

Light was compressed.

Sound vanished.

All of a sudden, a 60ton tank was blasted straight up. Anti-Skill had no idea what had happened. Their most well-defended tank had been destroyed in the blink of an eye, so they knew their weaker armored trucks and powered suits wouldn’t stand a chance. The officers wearing military jackets meant to stop bullets and blades would be torn through like paper.

His gaze seemed to pierce right through them.

They knew every spot he turned his attention to would explode.

That wasn’t a logical conclusion.

It was more like a superstition. They were sure that was the rule and anyone who took the rule lightly would be blasted into the air. That was the world they lived in now.

An armored truck was squashed flat, pieces scattering in every direction and knocking over an armored prisoner transport bus being used as a barricade. After taking some kind of destructive damage, an attack helicopter fell toward the Anti-Skill officers fleeing in a panic. There were explosions, screams, and bestial growls.

But Anti-Skill was not broken.

“Surround him!! All units: the current coordinates are designated a max level risk zone, so set up multiple defense lines. This is your top priority!!”

By this point, Anti-Skill viewed the person before them as connected to a wanted criminal. Because they were already aware of another immensely powerful individual who had made fools of them with a supernatural power.

Something tore through the asphalt.

Their tank had been destroyed in an instant, but they weren’t through yet. They had 155mm field artillery, heavy mortars, and even shoulder-fired missiles. The ordinary Anti-Skill officers fired them with teeth gritted.

Orders were given.

“Calculate your line of fire! Keep the danger zone to a minimum!! Fire!!!”

Christian Rosencreutz responded with an exasperated sigh.

“How dull.”

He was hit by explosions from several directions at once.

Moments after massive shells were launched at supersonic speed, most of them was stripped away, focusing all the kinetic energy on the tungsten core. Those special warheads were designed to melt and break a hole through thick composite armor. Each one possessed enough force to punch through and blast apart a flesh-and-bone human, leaving only their collapsing lower body behind.

But…

“I said you bore me.”

He was unscathed.

That image broke the spirits of everyone watching. The silver young man did not hold back. Explosion after explosion blasted them into the air. The Anti-Skill officers screamed and couldn’t even continue the cycle of dragging their collapsed comrades to safety.

“…”

So.

That young Anti-Skill officer had not been abandoned.

No one around him was capable of moving any longer.

Christian Rosencreutz leisurely strolled through the world of screams, red, and explosive flames.

He stopped when he saw the young officer.

And this was in a world where anywhere that drew his attention would explode.

“Do you want me to stop? But what here could be more entertaining than crushing everyone in my path? If you know of something, I would love to hear about it.”

It all came down to that.

In his world, the mobile game sticker on a drink bottle was just as valuable as a human life.

For a brief moment, the smile vanished from CRC’s face.

“But if you do not, then this is the end for you.”

He slowly held out his hand.

The same hand that had easily blown up a tank and brought down an attack helicopter.

“Ah…ahh.”

There was nothing the Anti-Skill officer could do.

He tried to speak while trembling and unable to move, but…

“Not so fast,” someone else said.

A boy had arrived.

Part 2

There may have been one thing that gave Kamijou an advantage. He stood before an exceedingly powerful foe, so focusing on that problem helped distract him from his sorrow. Without that, the shock of losing Alice Anotherbible may have devasted him.

So should he be thankful?

Hell no.

“…”

The sunset dyed the city red.

Kamijou Touma vs. Christian Rosencreutz.

The collapsed Anti-Skill officers didn’t seem cognizant of the fact that a perfectly ordinary high school boy was confronting that silver monster one-on-one. Their minds had already yielded to the idea that such a thing wasn’t possible.

Kamijou kept his eyes on Rosencreutz but spoke to a nearby Anti-Skill officer.

“You can still move, right? Then drag the others to safety and get out of here. You need to move now if you don’t want to regret this.”

“Oh? And why should this old man just let him do that?”

“Because I won’t give you time to focus on them.”

The Anti-Skill officer got moving despite being weak in the knees. But not to run away – to find some way to get his injured and unmoving colleagues out of danger.

Christian Rosencreutz grinned.

It looked like Kamijou had successfully captured his attention.

“You cannot hold this old man’s attention if all you do is charge at me the same as before.”

“Don’t you worry. That won’t be happening.”

“How exciting☆ Simply killing you would be so boring.”

Hearing that, Kamijou Touma took a step forward.

Faint surprise showed on Christian Rosencreutz’s face.

He may have thought he would always be the one moving in first.

He too approached in amusement.

Now that they were both in motion, there was no stopping them.

Or so Kamijou thought.

“La la la la♪ To all you gentle cat lovers out there, we know you think your cat is cute, but don’t let them create lots of little kittens. Once you have too many to properly care for, it is the cats who will suffer.”

There was a pet shop nearby. It wasn’t actually open thanks to the martial law and the lack of animal cries suggested the employees had taken the animals home with them, but the LCD advertisement screen was still functioning. It may have been set to activate whenever someone walked by.

And a moment after it did…

Tears spilled from Rosencreutz’s eyes.

This was no mistake.

Kamijou watched as the tears joined together to form a line down each cheek and then dripped down from his slender chin like a waterfall.

“Hey, wait, what is with you!?”

“Didn’t you hear? The cats…and the cute kittens. Don’t you feel so sorry for them?”

Kamijou’s eyes opened wide.

Did that man not remember injuring Anti-Skill just a minute ago? How could someone wield that much violence and still feel sorry for some cats!?

He was terrifyingly distractable.

Legendary Magician Christian Rosencreutz sniffled like he had completely forgotten where he was.

But he hadn’t.

He did not have some grand goal related to the fate of the world or the future of humanity. He had no plan at all. He poured all of his energy into whatever drew his attention at the time.

But his power was immense.

He had enough power to one-shot Alice Anotherbible, yet there was no predicting where he would direct it next.

“The humans must die! Every last one of them!! If they can’t be trusted to keep their promises, the only solution is to go around slaughtering them all. Hwa ha ha! And then all the cats can be happy!!!”

“What the hell is wrong with- shit!?”

Kamijou started to shout back on reflex, but he quickly swung his head to the side.

He felt something wet on his temple: his own blood.

He could guess it was some kind of magic, but he couldn’t analyze it even after being hit by it. If he hadn’t moved at the last second, it would have taken off his head.

Still weeping, Rosencreutz shouted out loud.

He had not reduced his deadly strength.

“Death to all humans!!”

“~ ~ ~! Give a thought to how powerful you are, you dumbass!!!”

Kamijou clenched his right fist, but he couldn’t reach.

They were too far apart.

And his opponent was slightly faster.

With a “crash!!”, something heavy fell behind Rosencreutz.

It was a 2m silver orb.

At first, the sensible part of Kamijou’s brain identified it as a wrecking ball meant to tear down skyscrapers, but it wasn’t. This orb had a round handle just like on a submarine’s watertight doors.

“The Pneuma-less Shell…sniff, sob.”

CRC smiled even as he cried. He was full of emotion.

He moved his feet as if performing dance steps.

But this had nothing to do with magic.

He was simply avoiding the small flowers blooming on the ground.

“Uhh, sob. You may have encountered this when battling a magician who takes after me. It is a Rosicrucian spiritual item, after all. Stones and sharp blades will stab or slash. Plant ropes will strangle or squeeze. Not even this old man can control the random fluctuations that produce the world’s oldest tools related to each cause of death and they will produce the greatest attack based on that origin!”

(Tch!! So is he really at a more advanced level than Anna!?)

Kamijou could feel his heart hammering in his chest, but this was also his chance.

If Anna Sprengel and Christian Rosencreutz were the same sort of magician, then their spells would be similar, even if the scale was different. That meant he only had to remain calm and observe. He already knew this man’s attacks. CRC wasn’t from a completely unknown legend. Kamijou had already defeated Anna who had long ruled over and protected the Rosicrucian cabal, so he might notice some familiar magic in this fight. That would be his greatest opportunity. Rosencreutz had realized this and thus produced the randomized Pneuma-less Shell to prevent Kamijou from predicting what would happen next. That could mean the man was subconsciously afrai-

Kamijou’s optimism was shattered by a dull wrenching sound.

His right shoulder had become a solid mass of agony.

Rosencreutz smiled.

He gave a twisted smile while holding his palm out from a short distance away.

He had indeed summoned the Pneuma-less Shell, but he hadn’t laid a finger on its round handle.

The possibility of recognizing the attack – and the relief that thought brought – had been part of his strategy.

In other words…

(Spoilers aren’t enough to weaken him. He knew I would recognize that and used it against me!?)

“Gahhh!!”

The distance between them was irrelevant. CRC had only needed to hold his palm out toward Kamijou. That was all it took to tear into his right shoulder and produce scorching pain. Kamijou’s legs refused to support him. Unable to fight the force of the blow, his feet left the rubble-strewn ground and he spun through the air.

What was this? He didn’t know, but what was even happening to him!?

A second time.

And a third time the same attack assaulted him.

Since he had failed to resist the first impact, Kamijou let himself to be knocked backwards to try and avoid any further attacks, but it wasn’t enough. CRC corrected his aim for each new attack.

“Hm?”

The onslaught of destruction suddenly stopped.

CRC took a single step to the side.

Kamijou blinked in confusion even as he grimaced from the pain coming more from his bones than his skin.

Why had that man suddenly dodged? It didn’t make sense.

Was it based on some kind of rule? More importantly, was there some way of taking advantage of it?

The only thing on the road there was an old abandoned civilian car. The two round headlights and the plain bumper looked something like a smiling man.

(Really? It was that? It was really nothing more than that!?)

“Oh, how cute. Oops. I do have a bad habit of getting emotionally invested in things like this. I wonder if it was a habit I picked up from using hidden symbolism to interpret secret instructions and messages.”

Kamijou shuddered.

Logic and tactics came second. He really did do everything on a whim.

The next attack would arrive before long.

“Kh.”

Kamijou focused his mind on his right hand.

What was Imagine Breaker good for?

He clenched his teeth and his fist as tight as could be.

“Don’t try to defend, Touma!! Dodge by falling to the right!!”

Hearing a shout, Kamijou immediately swung his right fist.

But to the side, not the front. That shifted his center of gravity just enough to let him roll to the side and out of the way of the deadly attack.

It was a close thing.

He belatedly realized that, if he had relied on Imagine Breaker out of habit, he probably would have failed to fully negate the immense torrent of magic and his arm would have been twisted off at the shoulder or elbow.

And.

He recognized that voice.

“I-Index?”

Index was there with 15cm Othinus on her shoulder.

Kamijou forgot all about his pain and looked up from the ground.

Those two had no reason at all to risk their lives to save a villain like Anna Sprengel. Yet here they were.

No warm light had descended from heaven and no great sea had parted before his eyes.

But what was this if not a miracle?

“Do you think we have time to explain why we’re here or how we got here? Get back on your feet already!”

“Sorry, CRC, but I have too much pride as a god to quake in fear of your legend. I am the Norse war god, so my magic is not built with your rules at the foundation.”

And those two weren’t alone. Kamijou had trouble believing the next person he saw: Misaka Mikoto.

He was speechless.

She may have read the question in his eyes.

Mikoto averted her eyes a bit as she spoke.

“I-I never said I wouldn’t help. I only presented the problem from a different viewpoint. So don’t get all excited about this, idiot.”

Something else drew his attention.

“?”

For some reason, a complete stranger had shown up too.

Why had that middle school girl with long blonde hair come to this dangerous place?

“Don’t worry about me. Even if I explained my reason ability for risking my life here, you would forget it all soon enough anyway☆”

For some reason, Christian Rosencreutz waited for all of this to play out.

In fact, his eyes were sparkling.

A bad sign.

“Fascinating!!!”

“Watch out, everyone!! That idiot is about to attack!!”

They all scattered.

Whatever happened, the air in a straight line out from CRC rapidly heated and scorched. A pedestrian bridge far behind them was sliced apart and soared through the sky.

Apparently he wasn’t guaranteed a hit whenever he held out his palm.

Gathering his attention was far too dangerous.

That alone could mean death.

Even if the silver young man himself didn’t intend for it.

After all, not even Kamijou’s Imagine Breaker could fully negate CRC’s magic. Defense was out of the question. Evasion was the only option. If your legs froze up in fear of the approaching deadly attack, you would be instantly consumed.

And it wasn’t just dumb luck that there were no victims from Kamijou’s group.

Kamijou had experienced too much misfortune to believe in that.

There had to be a real reason they had been saved.

“TBSR – TCKU (Thy body shifts right – thou cannot keep up)!!”

“Oh?”

Index had folded her hands and raised her voice in what sounded like a song, but it wasn’t.

That was Spell Intercept.

By analyzing the structure of the enemy magician’s spell and randomly rearranging the incantation or symbols into something extremely similar but with an entirely different meaning, Index could throw off the enemy’s focus.

She had only diverted his aim by the smallest amount this time.

But when she really worked at it, she could cause the magic to malfunction or even harm the enemy magician.

“Kee hee hee. Oh, how delightful! Such fun!! Is this what modern magic is like? It is missing a lot, but I see you have made a number of changes to make up for that. You could even call it a brand new genre of original recipes. This type of creativity is far more interesting than Kingsford who continued to use the musty old secret arts!!”

Christian Rosencreutz was probably being entirely honest.

But Index still clenched her teeth.

He was saying she had insufficient data and that all her knowledge was a distorted version of the original. She had dedicated her life to memorizing more than 103,000 grimoires, so his words were a humiliating insult to her.

He might as well have tried the finest dish of a chef who had worked his ass of training in French cuisine and then scoffed, calling it an amusing Japanese twist on the dish.

That man had to be well versed in ways to make people suffer.

And he used them for no more than his own amusement.

But reality could not keep up.

“Gh!?” groaned Mikoto.

She had magnetically pulled over an electric car as a shield, but now it exploded. The whitish explosion of the giant lithium-ion battery slammed into her, throwing her backwards.

Index’s instructions weren’t enough to avoid this.

Her Spell Intercept wasn’t enough to throw off Rosencreutz’s aim!?

“Hm? Weird. This doesn’t match my grimoires!?”

“Kee hee hee. Of course it doesn’t.”

CRC cackled gleefully.

He looked like he was resisting the urge to hold his sides.

“Does flipping through a recipe book make you a chef? You are a library, a collection of book knowledge, while this old man is steeped from head to toe in real knowledge and skill. We may be drawing on the same wisdom, but there is a vast gulf between what we can actually use. Hee hee ha ha ha. Did you think your lines of text on paper could outdo what this old man truly performs!?”

“Shokuhou!!!”

Collapsed on the ground, Misaka Mikoto called a name that had a terribly familiar ring to it.

The honey blonde girl immediately pulled a TV remote from her handbag. But then she froze. Not even her widened eyes blinked.

Something inside her had suddenly broken.

“What? No…way.”

“Did you really think that child’s play would work on this old man?”

He didn’t provide any further explanation.

But everyone could tell that was an absolute truth that brooked no objection. The result was plain to see. The #5’s power did not work on him and that was all that mattered.

With their attack stopped, it was Rosencreutz’s turn.

The negative trend would not stop.

“Kh!!”

Kamijou stepped out in front of the girls and held out his right hand.

But a chill ran down his spine.

Hadn’t he done this exact thing after Alice Anotherbible died and his mind went blank? Index had used the full knowledge of all her grimoires and told him not to use Imagine Breaker here. It didn’t matter what had worked in the past – she had concluded that method wouldn’t work here.

Christian Rosencreutz slowly held his palm out toward Kamijou.

“Ahhhh!!” roared dusty Misaka Mikoto.

She must have harnessed a great magnetic force because the highway overpass crossing the road collapsed and a skyscraper on either side collapsed to block the road. An artificial gale blew through. How many people would have died if everyone hadn’t been evacuated from the area by the martial law?

But Kamijou didn’t even consider that question.

The world quaked. A single attack caused the towering pile of rubble to crumble away. Hearing the cacophony was enough to know it would soon no longer function as a barrier.

The original rule stood before him.

Evasion was the only option.

It didn’t matter what had worked in the past – he must not think of trying defense this time.

A pair of eyes shined bright beyond the collapsing pile.

He was smiling with amusement.

“Is that all you can do? You gather all your strength and it buys you a measly 10 seconds?”

“!!??”

Terror squeezed at Kamijou’s stomach.

Before they could try anything else, that abnormal joy pinned Kamijou and the girls’ feet to the ground.

Rosencreutz’s approach could not be stopped.

He was coming to them!?

“Heh heh. No, no. Surely you can do more than that. You bothered to stand in this old man’s path, so you had better entertain me a while longer!!!”

Part 3

When Christian Rosencreutz shouted, the color white filled the world.

Part 4

For a moment, Kamijou’s memories refused to link together.

Like film cut apart with scissors that wouldn’t fit together again.

Had CRC’s great attack influenced him mentally as well as physically?

No.

“Gh,” Kamijou groaned, a dull ache in his temples. Yes, this reminded him of the pain felt when looking at the sun for too long.

In other words…

(A powerful flash of light? Did Misaka produce some powerful sparks to try and dazzle Rosencreutz’s eyes?)

Evasion was the only option. They mustn’t even think about defense.

This move didn’t violate that rule. And since Kamijou wasn’t dead, it must have been effective in this battle against Rosencreutz. But now that Rosencreutz had seen it, Kamijou seriously doubted it would work a second time.

He didn’t see Index, Mikoto, or the others.

He felt a strange weight in his clothing. He looked down the neck of his shirt to see a metal plate larger than his hand. Had Mikoto used that to magnetically fling him as far away as she could?

He hadn’t had time to do anything on his own.

That was fine.

Feeling fear wasn’t a bad thing. Because the fear motivated him to observe as much as he could, think through it all on a deeper level, and find an opportunity. True defeat was only found if he stopped analyzing that fear and let the trembling take over.

“But where am I?”

Still curled up in a ball, Kamijou slowly turned his head.

Had this originally been a trendy laundromat that doubled as a café? He must have subconsciously hidden himself behind the collapsed building.

He didn’t know his exact location.

But it seemed like Rosencreutz had lost track of him.

That didn’t mean he could relax, however.

With no one left to stop him, that man would resume his march toward the District 7 hospital. That endangered Anna Sprengel and the hospital staff who were working so hard to save her even though they knew she was a villain.

Kamijou couldn’t place that burden on their shoulders.

This was his selfish desire. He should carry the burden and the risk. He clenched his teeth, placed a hand on the wall, and slowly stood up.

He could still do this.

(Where are Index, Mikoto, and the rest? I just hope Rosencreutz didn’t go after them.)

Just then…

“Hey. I can’t help but notice you’re risking your life by repeatedly throwing yourself against an unrivaled monster, so I’m here to help out, laddie.”

He heard an oddly relaxed female voice. And it came from the open sky overhead.

And a moment later…

“Oops, botched my landing.”

“Bwahh!?”

Kamijou went blind. It took him several seconds to realize the Transcendent Bologna Succubus had descended from the sky above with her batlike wings and then caught his face between her two thighs and something else. I’d rather not explain what exactly that something else is. Simply put, it was like a backward and upside-down piggyback ride. Using the alphabet, it was something like an S.

“Bwbhbh, get, bhbhj, off of, bhehb, me!?”

“Nhh… Don’t breathe on me there, you jackaninny.”

“Agh, I said get off!!”

While the succubus was being extremely succubus-like, more sets of footsteps approached. After somehow extricating himself from the crotch trap(!?), Kamijou observed the new arrivals with his recovered vision.

“Is it in a demon’s nature to act so inappropriately? Or was the boy responsible for this one?”

“I think they’re having fun.”

Good, Old Mary and Mut Thebes were here.

So was Witch Goddess Aradia.

“Did you call them here?”

“Those of us with nowhere to go gathered together on our own,” simply stated Aradia, not looking him in the eye.

But these Transcendents were not like Alice Anotherbible or Anna Sprengel. They did not act on a whim. They would mechanically list out their salvation conditions and only save whoever met them. Since they were all acting together, these survivors must have been working toward a single goal, which would have required untangling the many threads and solving a challenging puzzle.

For example, there was Mut Thebes.

It seemed like a fundamental contradiction for that punishment expert to be fighting for Anna Sprengel. She was the very person who had chased Anna down before.

Although Mut Thebes herself only quizzically tilted her head.

“My Shrink Drink attack on Anna Sprengel is complete.”

“Kh.”

Those words seemed to tear sharply into Kamijou Touma’s heart.

They stated a fact that could never be overturned.

But she wasn’t done there.

“Which means my task as a punishment expert has concluded. Whatever happens to her now is none of my concern – even if she does find a way to live happily ever after. She is no threat to the Bridge Builders Cabal with her cardiopulmonary function ceased and I doubt she can leak information as H. T. Trismegistus and the others feared she might. I use punishment to protect the group I have chosen for myself. And at the moment, the much greater and more direct threat to the cabal is Christian Rosencreutz.”

“Y-you mean you’ll help us for now?”

“No? You do not fit my salvation conditions.”

So whose side was Mut Thebes really on?

But Kamijou truly felt he would be spared her deadly blade no matter how many times he failed to meet her mechanical search conditions.

However, that it was impossible to know where all that power would be directed was frightening in a different way from a capricious beast that simply obeyed its instincts. There was no chance of escaping her interest by playing dead or taming her so she wouldn’t attack. If anything, she was even more inhuman – like a drone weapon. He felt like he was being followed around by a faint chill that carried great power but could kill based on a sensor error no matter what her personal feelings might be.

In this case, a neutral stance was someone who might shoot you in the back at any time.

Mut Thebes-chan had effectively come running to his aid, but she still scared him.

However, she hadn’t malfunctioned yet, so she only looked confused.

Mut Thebes was the Transcendents’ punishment expert.

They probably had the least in common and convincing her would be challenging, but there wasn’t time for Kamijou to let that scare him into being more withdrawn.

Rosencreutz wanted to slaughter all of the Transcendents.

And only as a way of entertaining himself because he was bored.

If Kamijou failed to tell that girl some critical information, he would be responsible if she lost her life as a result. So as scared and nervous as he was, they had to work together and share their information for now.

“A-are you aware Christian Rosencreutz is wandering around somewhere nearby?”

“More or less.”

“He isn’t someone you can beat in a normal fight. But that’s your specialty as Transcendents, right? Mut Thebes, having you here is especially important. I want you to immediately fall back to District 18. You at least need to head to the second…no, the third defense line.”

Kamijou was beginning to sound like a weather forecaster during a typhoon.

“His shortest route will take him through Districts 12, 23, 18, and 7. Even if he does go through Districts 12, 6, 5, and 7 instead, you can still blast him from District 18. Your Dead Phoenix lets you absorb the shadows of people and things, converting them into your own power, so you have a lot more options than the rest of us. It would be better for you to fire on him from a safe distance than to attempt a close-range battle with that monster!!”

Mut Thebes displayed no malice.

Her head tilt came from pure confusion.

“Why should I do that?”

“Because you’re the strongest here when it comes to pure firepower. Dead Phoenix lets you absorb any shadow and make its power your own, so you can use all the next-gen weaponry you want. That’s perfect for being in Academy City. You’re the only one I can rely on here!!”

She froze in place for a moment.

After blinking twice she puffed out her flat chest.

And for some reason, she looked not to Kamijou in front of her but to the Transcendents to her side.

“Heh heh. I’m the strongest. I shine the brightest. Heh heh heh♪”

“Hmph☆” “Hmph☆” “Hmph☆”

Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, and even the usually composed Good, Old Mary reacted. Kamijou couldn’t imagine why the opinion of a high schooler like him would matter. Or, as unlikely as it seemed, did they have some kind of strength ranking within their cabal? They seemed to have a rivalry in the same vein as Yarou web novels or VRTubers.

Mut Thebes-chan’s eyes were as emotionless as ever, but she couldn’t keep the grin off of her lips.

“If you want me to deliver an effective blow to CRC, then I’m willing to help. My current salvation conditions are to protect the Bridge Builders Cabal as a separate entity from the rest of the world. If CRC is after the Transcendents, then defeating him would be the fastest way to accomplish my goal.”

“Huh? Hold on. Are you saying I bowed down for no reason?”

“If you don’t ask me properly, I will launch my own attack.”

Kamijou Touma went past 45 degrees and bowed to a full 90 degrees. The salaryman spirit carried by his Japanese blood had suddenly awoken within him.

Mut Thebes put her hands on her slender hips and gave a satisfied snort from her little nose.

“I will fall back to the third defense line, but absorbing a large weapon will take time. And if it is unwieldy enough, it would be more efficient for me to act as a stationary turret rather than try to lug it around.”

“And?”

Kamijou had to admit he didn’t want her to be stompnig along with something hundreds of meters tall like she had before. She would become the real threat to the city then.

“The question is what I do about targeting. Either I will need to absorb a targeting device capable of tracking CRC, or you will have to instruct me from the front line while you- brr, it’s freezing.”

She gave up before finishing her thought.

And she started tugging at him. He looked down to see what that was about and saw her wrap herself in his coat to warm herself.

The Bologna Succubus’s eyes widened at this display of even more brazenness than an ill-behaved high school girl unplugging the electric display in front of a convenience store to charge her phone.

“What’s this, are you his girlfriend now? I’m a lewd succubus and even I resisted the urge to steal his coat!”

But if the Japanese winter was too cold for Mut Thebes, why had she skipped right past a bikini (difficulty level: normal) and worn that even more revealing costume (difficulty level: hara-kiri crazy nightmare)? Since Magic God Nephthys had walked around outside in nothing but bandages, did ancient Egyptians have something against wearing sufficient clothing?

Mut Thebes had nerves of steel.

The cold girl was entirely unbothered by sharing someone else’s coat without asking.

“I do not dress this way because I enjoy it. I can only activate my spell by casting my own shadow on the ground, so this is merely the logical choice. Do not confuse me with those exhibitionists who have chosen to take off most of their clothing in this frigid January weather for no good reason.”

“Mama would prefer if you did not place her in the same category as the witch goddess and the horny demon. Mama dresses perfectly normally. She has never stooped to cheap exhibitionism or sex appeal.”

“Huh? How can you say that when we all bathed together back at the consulate?”

Sparking tension grew between the Transcendents.

From multiple directions.

“She pretends to be the only one who knows how to behave, but I bet she’s wearing some really sexy underwear below that chaste long skirt! Keeping that composed look when she’s secretly wearing the naughtiest panties you’ve ever seen makes her way more of a pervert than us!!”

“Stop it with the baseless speculation. Mama is nothing like you superhuman perverts; she is just as pure and adorable as she looks.”

“If you take a gander at everything from my one-piece corset to the leather outfit of Alice’s punishment mode, it doesn’t take long to notice what all us Transcendent women have in common.”

“Oh? And have you ever seen below mama’s skirt? You have not, so your words are powerless. Accusations made without solid evidence can only lead to the false accusations you despise.”

“Gh!?” The Bologna Succubus flinched back for once.

Kamijou stared into the middle distance, worried this group was going to tear itself apart before they even fought CRC.

“I never said I would save Anna. The accusations against her aren’t false. She is the villain everyone says she is,” said the Bologna Succubus, with the bluntness of a Transcendent. She laid out her conditions with frightening precision. “But if we focus on Christian Rosencreutz’s attempt to kill all the Transcendents, then I have no issue with helping. …It turns out he isn’t going to save the world. If nothing is done, it’s obvious he will destroy the entire world along with all of our salvation conditions. So I’m willing to give my all to this fight.”

Salvation conditions.

It worried Kamijou that she still hadn’t removed that self-imposed constraint, but he needed as many allies as he could get right now.

She would give her all to fight for those weaker than her.

If that was all it was, she may have been a greater example of justice than the puny boy.

Then Kamijou’s attention turned toward another Transcendent: Good, Old Mary.

It happened suddenly.

“What about Alice? Can you-”

He left the question unfinished, realizing too late that it was a meaningless question.

She silently shook her head.

Her big hat wobbled sadly.

Not even Good, Old Mary could save Anna from the Shrink Drink’s effects. Because a mere Transcendent could not resist even a fragment of Alice Anotherbible’s power.

He doubted she would be able to interfere with Alice herself so easily, especially to overturn the girl’s death.

Was there any crueler irony than her own great strength preventing her from being saved?

“I see,” said Kamijou Touma.

He had already known it, but having it stated by someone else was like a knife to the heart. Good, Old Mary’s resurrection could revert the dead to the exact moment of their death, providing a chance for CPR. But not even that could save Alice. Or Anna.

The row of falling dominos had suddenly stopped.

The frog-faced doctor was fighting to save Anna’s life.

Kamijou had his own task to complete. He could not allow Christian Rosencreutz to reach the hospital.

He noted that H. T. Trismegistus was not here.

Had he been killed when Rosencreutz first appeared? Or did he no longer see any purpose in the Bridge Builders Cabal now that he had lost his master Alice Anotherbible?

For that matter, there were so few Transcendents here given that Good, Old Mary could resurrect people. The Bridge Builders Cabal had pooled their combined strength into that ceremony. Kamijou didn’t know how many there were in all, but there had to have been a large number of Transcendents in Academy City.

Had the CPR failed after their bodies were returned to the moment of death?

Or had the CPR succeeded but they had lost the will to fight and fled?

He had no way of knowing.

“We’ve already lost to him once, so we know just how much of a threat Christian Rosencreutz is,” said the Bologna Succubus.

“But we can’t just let him go free.”

“We are aware,” said Good, Old Mary. “And since we know a direct attack will not work, what we need is observation and preparation. We must make ourselves disappear, find safety, and get a fresh start. So before Rosencreutz notices us, we must leave here, keep our distance, and find cover.”

Their argument was logical.

They had not given in to their fear.

The Transcendents were not like Kamijou. It wasn’t that they didn’t know. They had lost and they had experienced the fear of death, but they still used their reason and knowledge as weapons to challenge their greatest enemy.

“Mut Thebes. You too.”

Aradia spoke to the most dangerous of the bunch.

But maybe being known as the most dangerous actually made her the safest one when it came to the problem of a malfunction in her salvation conditions.

Good, Old Mary looked like the gentlest and calmest, so if she suddenly shot him in the back, Kamijou wouldn’t know what to believe anymore.

“What kind of weapon shadows should I absorb? Or should I absorb your Transcendent shadows now as insurance in case something happens? Given this battle’s difficulty level, it would be best if we had multiple copies of Good, Old Mary’s resurrection.”

Just then, Kamijou felt a chill.

He turned toward it without even thinking. But that didn’t mean looking left, right, or even behind. He looked up.

He was speechless.

And a voice responded to his unvoiced question.

“Found you☆”

“Dammit!!!”

The voice was peering down from the top of a wall still standing among the rubble.

Kamijou immediately rolled away just before the entire scene was obliterated. Christian Rosencreutz dropped like a meteor, blowing away the unnaturally-standing concrete wall.

The silver young man stood at the center of the resultant crater.

He displayed a joyful smile at discovering new prey.

They needed a fresh start.

They had to escape before he found them.

It was the thinnest of threads, but they had finally found a definite chance they could reach for.

It had shattered from a single blow.

“Kh.”

Fear clutched Kamijou’s heart.

But he wasn’t even given time to freeze up.

Kamijou glared at red-clad Christian Rosencreutz and swept a hand out to the side to protect Mut Thebes standing by his side. Then he shouted to her.

“Hurry to the third defense line and stock up on as many next-gen weapons as you can! A simple close-quarters battle will only wear you out, so we’ll do whatever it takes to make sure you get away!!”

“Kyun☆”

He heard a strange sound.

No, was it a voice? Kamijou looked over in shock to see the girl clasping her hands in front of her flat chest. And for some reason her cheeks were flushed pink.

What had happened?

The Bologna Succubus snapped at Mut Thebes whose eyes were wavering on her otherwise expressionless face.

“Now is not the time to let the suspension bridge effect pierce your heart! I know this is basically your first time speaking with a boy, but how about you get to know him a little before you fall for him!?”

“Wait, is that what this is? I’m flatt-”

“Mut Thebes’s specialty is hunting people down, so if she is in love with you, she’ll probably pursue you to the ends of the earth. Lucky you, if you’re into that. And with a passionate stalker loaded with a limitless supply of blades and firearms, you never have to worry about her cheating on you and you know she’ll accept your love.”

This clarification by Big Sis Aradia (whose eyes looked unnecessarily icy for some reason) made Kamijou’s shoulders jump. The gravity of Mut Thebes’s love was apparently on par with a black hole. If you got too close and let it catch you in its pull, time and space would lose all meaning and you would find escape to be impossible.

Also, based on the way they had phrased some things, he got the feeling H. T. Trismegistus didn’t count as a boy in the eyes of the female Transcendents. That young butler was getting caught in the crossfire despite having gone missing.

How did this all look to Christian Rosencreutz who wielded violence on a whim?

At the very least, he didn’t interrupt their conversation with an attack.

“The Transcendents, hm? The group that lost sight of their own selves through excessive and mistaken roleplaying. I have already defeated the lot of you once. …A repeat of that would be a disappointment. You had better have developed some new special attack now that you have chosen to stand in this old man’s way again.”

There were multiple Transcendents here.

As hard as Kamijou found it to believe, CRC did not appear to view them as a threat.

“Why?” asked Witch Goddess Aradia. “Why dedicate yourself so thoroughly to violence? Our Bridge Builders Cabal has chosen to abandon the self to take up roles that will help others and we even completed a major spell through that. Even for us, we had to define our values to wield our power without causing collateral damage.”

He was not someone to hold an ordinary conversation.

She had to know that, but she couldn’t help but ask.

And.

He gave a response.

“Passion.”

A sharp explosion erupted and Kamijou’s group each rolled in their own direction to distance themselves from it.

The blast must have hit a jeweler’s shop because lots of gold and jewelry rained from the sky.

Christian Rosencreutz traced his fingers through empty space.

He displayed no interest in the sparkling precious metal.

He delicately used two fingers to catch a small white flower carried in by a crosswind and gently inserted its stem in the gap on the door of a crushed and twisted luxury car.

He prioritized appreciating nature over strategy or his own interests.

“Playfulness, whims, letting off steam – call it what you like. Kee hee hee. This old man is well aware how great a power I hold in my hands. So I will never blame its results on anyone else. I will not say I did it for justice, for an individual, to save someone, or even to save the world. With power this great, shifting the blame onto someone else could very well break them. No matter what anyone might say, only I am capable of bearing the burden of this power. And I wield my power only to fulfill my passion and my playfulness. Because that is ultimately the kindest option for the world at large.”

“That’s all?”

This question came not from Aradia herself but from Kamijou.

He couldn’t help but ask.

“That’s your only reason!? It isn’t about right or wrong? It really is all about your own momentary whims? So you don’t even hate the Transcendents who brought you into this world? It isn’t that you can’t bear to see what the world has become!?”

“When did this old man say a single word about hating the world? The world remains as immature as it was millennia ago and its people continue to attempt a deeply flawed but adorable resistance against it. Heh heh. You thought I would solve everything for you? Ah hah hah hah!! Oh, how adorable. What other word is there for it!? This old man is only choosing who to fight based on how much they amuse me. Which is why I want in!!!”

Sordid emotion erupted from the silver young man.

He could kill because he liked the person.

He could destroy out of pure playfulness.

He was not a stalker who grew violent when the target of his affections didn’t do what he wanted. Did he threaten the world a lot like a sadistic killer who had been handed the nuclear launch controls?

“…”

Aradia fell silent.

As did the rest of the Transcendents.

They really did think only of saving the world. The Bridge Builders Cabal had resurrected someone it turned out they wanted nothing to do with. A great monster who could only be sealed by a vast span of time had been revived in the modern world.

The Transcendents understood this on a deep level because they were the ones responsible.

What had they prayed for and how much had they hoped to leave in his care?

He had trampled on all of that, but they hadn’t let that stop them. Because they needed to bring an end to the foolishness they had caused. So that this disaster could not reach the people they had vowed to protect. That was Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, and the rests’ reason for fighting.

“That too is just another silly passion,” said Rosencreutz, chuckling and holding his own body. He had seen right through them. “All this old man is doing is consciously making use of those passions. Which is why I will not say you are wrong. Ah ha hya. Because it would bore me if you tried to make excuses and shift the blame onto someone else!!!”

The silver young man took action while laughing.

He casually held out his palm.

A deadly attack that ignored the concept of distance was coming!!

With a solid clang, the air glowed bluish-white.

There was a barrier there.

Good, Old Mary held her hands together and crushed a 500mL glass container. It was an aroma water maker that extracted the scents of herbs using evaporation and cooling.

“A still contains an entire world within. Whether the life of the homunculus created in the transparent bottle or the enchanting potion that can dissolve all materials, it is all contained within. So by preparing one side and then defining the seen and the unseen – the interior and the exterior – your attack cannot reach us, CRC.”

“Oh, really? I take it you are a kitchen alchemist?”

“CRC. To a master of a single path like you, this may appear a simple and unrefined ceremony, but that is what makes it of a system older even than your own. Its influence on you is imperfect, but mama can still remove a portion of your magic and receive it from head on.”

“An alchemist wife? Heh heh. How very interesting!! All magic is an illusion, so it would be a shame to strip it of all dreams and comedy!!”

“Listen to me. Mama is unmarried, so you should address her with Ms., you imbecile.”

For the very first time, a Transcendent did not flee from Christian Rosencreutz’s outstretched palm. She received the attack head on and deflected it away.

Evasion was the only option. They mustn’t even think about defense.

That rule crumbled away and their possibilities seemed to spread out infinitely.

“But.”

Rosencreutz scoffed.

Good, Old Mary wobbled to the side. The color red stained her mouth.

“You can only remove a portion. That is not nearly enough to repel this old man.”

“Dammit!!!”

The rule remained unbroken.

Evasion was still the only option. There were no exceptions for those who attempted defense.

Kamijou clenched his teeth.

(But even if it was just once and incomplete, she still stepped off of the rails he set up for us. There really is something different about the Transcendents. But he knows that, which is why he’s targeting them first. That’s all the more reason I can’t let him do that!!)

“Aradia!! And Bologna Succubus!!!”

The boy addressed those two because of something they had in common: they could both fly.

The Bologna Succubus flapped her wings to take flight. While carrying Good, Old Mary after snatching her up before she could fall unconscious to the ground. Aradia grabbed the sign leaning diagonally against an electric car charging station, placed blankly-standing Mut Thebes on that makeshift broom, and then soared up higher than the skyscraper roofs.

“Oh, I wanted to absorb Good, Old Mary’s shadow to have her resurrection on hand.”

“Now isn’t the time. That kind of greed will get you killed!!”

Evasion was the only option.

They had to stick to their best option.

Absorbing CRC’s shadow might have turned everything around, but that kind of greed probably would also have gotten her killed. There seemed to be a short lag before Mut Thebes could lay claim to something as her white shadow, so she would have to stand defenseless before their nemesis for a few seconds. He was sure to kill her in that time. Death was closer than ever before, so they didn’t even have those few seconds to spare.

Rosencreutz did not even look up into the sky.

The look on his face said he wasn’t interested in such a poor plan.

But it seemed unlikely he was going to just let them escape either.

“Flying is a simple task for a magician, but so is bringing them back down to Earth. Surely you know that.”

“Do you think we’ll give you the time?”

“You said that last time. You bore me.”

Even as he said that, the silver young man chuckled and stared straight ahead.

He was apparently interested in Kamijou.

“Thought up any new special moves?”

Kamijou’s vision exploded.

Part 5

District 7.

In the frog-faced doctor’s hospital, Anna Sprengel’s clinical records were finally ready.

This included CT and MRI scans.

An ultrasound.

And blood tests using a variety of reagents.

“You didn’t find anything?”

“Weird, isn’t it? Even an electric shock would leave burn marks on her skin.”

The lead medical technician tilted her head.

She would have simply looked puzzled if not for the tension of fear in her cheek.

This wasn’t surprising.

An attack using toxins or chemicals, drowning, and even carbon monoxide poisoning would have caused abnormalities somewhere in the girl’s body. It might be invisible damage to blood vessels or organs and it might be a microscopic change, but some part of her body had to be broken. If there really wasn’t any detectable harm to her skin or her organs, then there was only one diagnosis a doctor could give: natural causes.

Even though no patient had ever been more unnatural.

“…”

There had to be a cause somewhere.

But the doctor couldn’t spot it despite his thorough understanding of the human body.

That had to mean…

“Are we looking at this wrong?”

“What do you mean?”

“We are all medical practitioners here, which means we all hold the same worldview. What if that worldview is blinding us to something here?”

Part 6

The term “martial law” gained greater weight within Hamazura Shiage.

Not long ago, he had been able to stop by the local discount store, but now it took courage to even open the front door. This was different from Anti-Skill or Judgment lecturing him. He most feared the watchful eyes of their neighbors in this same apartment building.

Mugino Shizuri and Kinuhata Saiai were self-centered enough to just walk on out regardless, but they weren’t around at the moment.

What were they even doing out there when everything was so dangerous?

Knowing them, they may have seen value in that danger itself.

“I keep tapping, but the video always stops a second or two in… The phone network has really slowed down, hasn’t it?”

“Hamazura, I think everyone is messing around on their phones and tablets because they don’t have anything else to do.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t have a connection at all, but even a slight slowdown was frustrating when he was so used to more comfortable speeds. Thanks to that, he had left the old-fashioned TV on. As long as you didn’t use any of the net-connected channels, the TV always ran smoothly.

If only there was any useful information there.

When the city was under martial law, it didn’t do anyone any good to tease the audience with a special on the top 10 restaurants in the city. He understood they were just using up all their stockpiled shows, but it still felt so out of place. Didn’t they know no one could head out to visit these places?

What all was happening out there while he was stuck in here?

He was caught in the middle of it, but he could barely find any information.

“Will we be okay staying here?” asked track suit girl Takitsubo with an absentminded tilt of her head.

“It was whoever’s in charge that told us to stay in here. I’m all for having an officially-sanctioned excuse to keep the lazy holiday going.”

“Do we have enough food?”

“If not, the government will bring us some. They started this, so it’s on them.”

As soon as Hamazura said that, he heard a gentle electronic bell.

He checked the intercom screen and saw a drum-shaped cleaning robot slowly crossing the path. The machine spoke with an artificial feminine voice.

“This building is not an authorized shelter. Please check your maps and move to the nearest disaster shelter as soon as possible. Remaining here would be exceedingly dangerous to your lives and your property.”

“Ehhh!? But they’re the ones who told us to stay at home! They could at least run an emergency news broadcast telling us what’s going on out there!!”

“Let’s hope there are no hordes of zombies wandering around, Hamazura.”

Part 7

Kamijou couldn’t steady his wobbly vision.

The color beige seemed to have taken over the world. He was seeing a Tokiwadai duffel coat.

That was enough to guess he was being dragged along by Mikoto.

But when had she picked him up?

“What are you doing, Shokuhou?”

“You can’t tell? I’m only cleaning myself off with the wet tissues I found in here. I had concrete dust dumped over my head, so it’s all inside my clothes. You really are a wild thing to not even bother with basic cleanliness, Misaka-san. You might as well live up on the fences with the alley cats☆”

“There is a boy here, you know?”

“Bfgwah!!? Cough, cough!! You could have told me sooner he was with you!!”

Kamijou thought he had caught a glimpse of something, but he was still too woozy to comprehend what he was seeing.

It took a while, but he finally realized where he was. It was partially collapsed and dust filled the air, but this was…

“Ugh, a convenience store?”

“Are you awake now?” quickly asked Mikoto.

She looked as bad as he felt. She had gray dust covering her head on down and her cheeks and uniform were covered in mud.

(Where’s Index and Othinus? What happened to everyone else?)

A stranger was here too.

The girl with long blonde hair wore a Tokiwadai uniform, so was she Mikoto’s friend?

“You can see now that facing him head on isn’t going to work, I hope. It’s a miracle ability you weren’t torn to bits and strewn across the city.”

Why was he alive?

He knew it wasn’t his own doing.

Mikoto and this stranger must have been fighting hard too. These people had reduced their own lifespans to save him from his own reckless actions.

He understood that.

He was intensely thankful, but the situation didn’t allow him to stop here.

What had happened to Christian Rosencreutz?

“But how does that man’s brain ability work if my Mental Out doesn’t work at all? You aren’t going to tell me he actually wasn’t human to begin with, are you?”

Mental Out.

Kamijou had heard that esper name before.

It belonged to Academy City’s #5.

But he didn’t know who used that power or what they looked like.

He did wonder if a psychological esper power would work on the Transcendents like Anna and Alice.

A high school boy like Kamijou didn’t know even a fraction of the legends surrounding Christian Rosencreutz, but if he really was the kind of person found in a children’s book, then he would have gone through intense training and obtained near inhuman power. That process could have altered his mind to an extent that not even the #5 Level 5 could control it.

That playful magician was only interested in fulfilling his passions and blowing off some steam. It was only by chance he had been depicted as a wielder of benevolent miracles like someone from a children’s book.

He had explained all that with a smile, but could this really be described using the familiar emotions that Kamijou and the others knew so well?

Deep tremors shook the area even now.

Staticky voices spoke within the partially broken store.

Wherever she had gotten it, Misaka Mikoto held a small Anti-Skill radio.

“Ksh! Escape route Cv1 secured using B2 as a decoy. Make sure Judgment gets away first! Also that military clone staring blankly into space over there! However she was born, she’s still a child!!”

“Wait! I can still fight. If you check the Bank, you will see I am a Level 4 Teleporter, so I can help rescue- argh, listen to me!”

Christian Rosencreutz had not simply lost sight of Kamijou’s group. When Kamijou wasn’t fighting, it meant Rosencreutz was fighting someone else somewhere else.

That could mean Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, and the rest of the Transcendents.

Or it could mean Index and Othinus.

“Damn.”

“Rushing in without a plan won’t help them.”

With that exasperated comment, Mikoto tossed him something.

He caught it to find it was a jelly drink.

“Hey, I hope you paid for this.”

“Idiot. There aren’t any employees here, but the phone-based self-checkout still works.”

Mikoto breathed a long sigh and grabbed a matcha iced latte from the drink section. People’s personalities showed through at times like this. With the store partially destroyed and the power out, she had chosen a drink that would give her an immediate energy boost and didn’t need to be cold to taste good. Kamijou understood why she would avoid the jelly drink since its chemical flavor got a lot more noticeable at room temperature. And yet that was still what she’d given him, dammit.

The honey blonde girl gave Mikoto an icy look.

She had opted to go without a drink.

“Misaka-san, how can you rummage through these convenience store shelves? The place is nearly destroyed and the cooling systems are down, but none of this food has gathered any bugs. Doesn’t that scare you?”

“It’s early January, so all the little critters are hibernating. Kuroko runs a major convenience store chain, so she’s told me all the actual facts about the additives and preservatives they put in their food. How net illiterate do you have to be to actually believe all the sensationalized stories passed around online?”

After purchasing her drink, Mikoto stuck the straw into the drink box and took a sip.

“It’s not just the artificial things you have to worry about, though. How about this, Misaka-san? Do you know where they get the matcha green coloring for lattes and chocolates?”

“Hm? That smug look on your face is enough to know it isn’t tea leaves. So what, is it some kind of chemi-”

“Caterpillar dung☆”

They really did get into a fight with hair-pulling and everything.

Kamijou stared into the middle distance. It seemed to him health nuts like that were only torturing themselves by looking up all that unnecessary information. It sounded like a difficult life, but maybe it was a trial meant to bolster themselves mentally.

Something urgent and worsening was playing out on the radio.

“We can’t waste our forces like this! All remaining forces, fall back to the 2nd line!”

“Got it. We won’t let this end here. This isn’t about our pride. The fate of the city rests on our shoulders!!”

They hadn’t given up yet.

But if they thoughtlessly challenged CRC again, it would all happen again.

(Damn, not even a professional magician or a group of Transcendents could defeat him. I just hope Anti-Skill realized magic exists during the business with R&C Occultics.)

It really sounded to Kamijou like it would be best if he went back out there.

He doubted Imagine Breaker would work against Rosencreutz, but it had to give him a major advantage over anyone else out there.

“So if you do save that Anna Sprengel, what then?” asked Mikoto, unsure what to do with her opened maccha iced latte. “I mean, if she’s connected to that Rosen-whatever guy, she might know his weak point. But she nearly killed you with those mysterious microbes called…St. Germain, was it? Then she toyed with me using that giant capsule machine full of execution items she called the Pneuma-less Shell. And it wasn’t just in Academy City. Didn’t she nearly destroy the entire city of Los Angeles? Was there some secret in common between all of that? Wouldn’t surprise me if there was, but do you really think that wicked woman will give you accurate information?”

What then?

What was his goal? The boy considered the battle he had begun out of necessity.

Eventually, Kamijou responded.

He kept his head lowered, but he spoke clearly.

“Anna says she’s searching for a king.”

“?”

“A king who will protect her without asking why she does what she does. She said she had spent so much time protecting and guiding other people, but no one ever lived up to her expectations and she has grown sick of it all. So she said it’s time she got someone to protect her instead.”

Kamijou didn’t know what exactly had happened during that process.

Something had had caused the immensely arrogant Anna Sprengel to turn away from the world and give up on life. Had it been some shocking event, or had it been a complete lack of change? The puny boy couldn’t even imagine what it might have been.

However.

“But I don’t think she really needs that. She doesn’t need a king. So I want to tell her she can open up and be a part of the world without relying on someone special. I want to tell her no one’s going to hurt her.”

Silence fell for a while.

Both girls sighed.

But those sighs carried something subtly different from exasperation.

“Telling us who she is as a person is hardly fair,” said Mikoto. “It would be nice if she could just be ‘a villain’ – nothing more than a symbol. But once I know her as a person, it’s not so easy to abandon her.”

Misaka Mikoto and the honey blonde girl exchanged a glance.

The resignation was written plain on their faces.

They heard a strange noise.

It resembled raindrops on glass, but the individual sounds were quieter than that. It was more like static on an old TV.

Something flowed in from the broken glass door.

It was the kind of fine sand found in a desert or on a beach.

Instead of pure white, it was colored a faint yellow that stimulated Kamijou’s memory. He recognized this.

The voices on Mikoto’s radio grew a lot more disordered. They were dyed in confusion and panic.

“Dammit, is this the yellow sand from the reports on Los Angeles!?”

“Fall back!! Don’t let it capture you!! Fall back to the 2nd line!!”

“I can’t agree to that. There are still quite a few civilians left in District 12!!”

“Get back here, idiot! …Dammit!!!”

“Citrinitas!” exclaimed Kamijou.

“You can’t reach them in time.”

Unsteady Kamijou was stopped by the honey blonde girl whose name he didn’t know.

“District 12 is a big place, so the distance ability is too great. It would be too late by the time you arrived.”

“…”

“And the rest of Anti-Skill and Judgment have already withdrawn from District 12. These are the facts. And the martial law means no ordinary people will be out on the streets anyway.”

This wasn’t just about the official fighting force.

This would also affect Index, Othinus, Aradia, Mut Thebes, and the rest of those fighting to stop CRC.

District 12 was a lost cause.

With the Citrinitas here, it was best to assume no one was left moving.

“You could see this as a stroke of good luck,” said the honey blond girl.

“How is this-?”

Kamijou reached the answer before finishing his question.

If this was the same as in Los Angeles, then the people who had disappeared into the yellow sand were essentially trapped within it. This was still checkmate against them, but that was better than being killed with their bodies split apart like Alice Anotherbible or Anna Kingsford. It was possible Christian Rosencreutz had decided going around killing all of the unresisting people would be a boring waste of his time.

If they stayed put, he might let them live.

But that gave them no way of stopping his march across the city. Then he would make his way to District 7 and arrive at the frog-faced doctor’s hospital.

Once that happened, there was no saving Anna Sprengel.

The monster who only ever obeyed his own playfulness and intellectual curiosity would tear it all apart and take her life.

“Sorry. We don’t have many people left, but I still let you die for nothing. I don’t think I can get any closer…”

“Don’t worry about it. If you’d come running here, you’d have met the same fate.”

“Take care of the rest. If this is like in LA, then you should be able to drag the survivors from the yellow sand once the source is defeated.”

“Fall back!! The fight continues at the 2nd line!! Do not forget the words of those fools who joined the sand!!!”

Kamijou and the girls silently listened to the radio.

No.

Was silently observing really all they could do?

They heard an explosive sound from somewhere.

“?”

The wet explosion was different from one caused by explosives or gas. Kamijou hesitantly poked his head out from the destroyed convenience store and found the street covered by yellow sand. Furthermore, something was pushing in from the distance.

“What…is that?”

“Water,” said the honey blonde girl. “It’s water. District 12 is known for all its religious facilities, so it has more firefighting equipment than most districts. Instead of each building having its own, it has a Central Firefighting Tank managed by the district as a whole. That must have ruptured!”

Kamijou looked puzzled. He couldn’t figure out why Christian Rosencreutz would attack there. Wasn’t that basically a giant pool buried underground? He wondered if the man was eliminating all means of extinguishing a fire before starting a great conflagration.

But that wasn’t it.

“We need to get out of here. Immediately,” said the honey blonde girl.

“Why?”

“Did you forget it’s January!? Getting soaked by that sherbet-cold water is enough to kill!!”

Rosencreutz had used the Citrinitas to dissolve District 12’s survivors in the sand. And after that, he was attacking every last alley to ensure he didn’t miss anyone.

Getting caught in that would never end well.

If they were drenched and then exposed to the biting wind, they might just freeze into pillars of ice.

“Run!” shouted Mikoto. “Before it reaches us!!”

The water covered a wide area, but it fortunately wasn’t very deep. If they were caught in the watery zone and their shoes got soaked, they might lose a toe to frostbite, but they could escape the invasion of frigid water by jumping onto a higher ledge or onto a car. It helped that the yellow sand had created a lot of small dunes.

“Pant, pant. Wait…wait for me, Misaka-saaan.”

All the ups and downs quickly wore out the stranger and left her out of breath. The soft sand below their feet made it all the more challenging. Kamijou would have felt bad leaving her behind, so he took the honey blonde girl’s hand to pull her along with him. For some reason, that immediately silenced her complaints. She was surprisingly meek.

“What now!?” bluntly asked Mikoto, inexplicably irritated all of a sudden.

Kamijou Touma had only one answer to give.

“We fall back.”

It didn’t matter how hopeless the situation was.

It didn’t matter that he didn’t have a single idea of how to defeat Christian Rosencreutz and rescue the people dissolved by the sand.

The hospital was still a long way off.

“We attack him at the next defense line.”

The Transcendents had said the first thing they needed to turn things around and strike back was observation and preparation. That meant slipping away without him noticing, keeping their distance, hiding behind cover, and ensuring they could observe him from safety.

So with the right mindset, this was their chance.

“We lost this round, but it was a meaningful loss.”

The honey blonde girl gasped and looked up.

She was their brainpower and Kamijou had muttered something that had caught her attention.

This was undoubtedly a retreat.

But they could transform it into the first step toward victory.

Their resistance wasn’t over yet.

“If you use up all your trump cards this early, you’ll regret it later on, Rosencreutz.”

Part 8

Don’t underestimate the weeds.

If you fail to eliminate that last thin root growing deep into the dirt, your guaranteed victory has already begun to collapse.

Between the Lines 2

A trip from England to Germany could be done as a daytrip.

Of course, that was only if you weren’t interested in taking time to enjoy the trip.

“Pant, pant, gasp. W-wait, mistress. Please have mercy…”

“Just hurry up with the luggage, Fortune. This should have been a leisurely railroad trip, but you used British tax money to fly here. It would be rude to the British people if you didn’t do enough work to justify the expense.”

This was how it began that morning as soon as the two met up at Nuremberg’s international airport.

Black Cat Witch Mina Mathers spoke icily to Dion Fortune whose silhouette was swollen by multiple suitcases, a backpack, and sling bag.

Mina Mathers had a story involving her friend Annie Horniman that could easily be interpreted as belonging to the world of lilies and she was the legendary wife who had supported her (eccentric and brilliant) husband MacGregor Mathers. Dion Fortune also had her relationship with her female teacher, so even for the otherworldly lives of the Golden magicians, those two’s lives were especially rife with 2D-sounding stories. …Which made it strange that Mina alone didn’t have a particularly strange personality and even came off as a kindhearted and sensible person.

“Lies. It’s all lies. Pant, gasp. In what world can that violent back-slasher of a teacher be called kindhearted or sensible? Bleh, the winner of the war has been rewriting the history books again…”

“Did you say something Soror Fortune, my hopeless student?”

Over half of the luggage was Mina’s, so Dion chose to ignore that.

At the very least, Mina Mathers and Dion Fortune were perfectly decent and sensible magicians when compared to MacGregor, the unemployed man who one day began ranting about being a legitimate descendent of Scottish nobility based on precisely zero evidence, or Aleister, the handsome gentleman with the troubling habit of crashing high society parties with a metal butterfly attached to the crotch of his pants.

Mina Mathers had already been separated from Academy City, but she could still choose for herself to support Aleister as the transformed Thoth Tarot.

Nuremberg was an inland industrial city in southern Germany. At this time of year, the low was around -3 degrees. Since it was January, everything was covered by a light dusting of snow, but this wasn’t that far from Denmark where the story of the Little Match Girl was born. While not as large as Munich, which was also in the south, it was a large city with a population in the hundreds of thousands. It had water transportation using the canal connected to the Danube, which flowed through multiple countries, and it provided direct air transportation from its international airport. This was also proof of just how active the city was in producing semiconductors and mechanical components for cars and aircraft.

It was also a historical city.

For better and for worse.

For example, anyone with even a little knowledge of torture and executions would know what the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg referred to. That strange legend had gained a life of its own in different parts of the world, but this city was home to the world’s only extant iron maiden (in the publicly available official records, anyway).

Dion Fortune, who had spread Golden spells across the world with her remote learning correspondence courses, looked curious even through her exhaustion.

“Phew. By the way, mistress, since when did you manufacture a child? Those mourning clothes must only be for show because it looks like you’ve really been quite busy, you lewd funeral beauty.”

“Do not refer to living people as being ‘manufactured’. Besides, she is not mine.”

“?”

“Good girl. If you’re hungry, you can drink this bottle. Do not turn away because you are sick of that flavor. I know you can actually speak.”

A delighted “goo-goo ga-ga” came from the baby carrier.

Mina Mathers was keeping a baby fed. That showed an extreme evolution from when she was so hungry while wandering Academy City that she stuck a power cable in her mouth.

The cat ears mourning clothes woman(?) had used her skill as an artist to design a ceremonial ground and most of the props that complemented the texts and formulas of a magician’s logic, so Dion Fortune skeptically viewed the baby the other woman was holding and soothing. “Then where did that baby come from?” was written plain on her face.

She might have fainted if she were told that was Aleister’s daughter Lilith, though.

To reiterate, Nuremberg was a rare city that perfectly blended a dark history with cutting-edge tech. That may have been why the Rosicrucians had built their largest base there. The old phonographs and silver halide cameras people feared could record the voices and faces of the dead had once been ordinary scientific inventions. Until natural science usurped the throne of the world’s common knowledge by replacing the geocentric model with the heliocentric model and proving that objects consumed oxygen as they burned, magic had been an ordinary field of study.

“Now. Where is Anna Sprengel’s base, the Licht Liebe Leben Temple?”

“How about we check into a hotel first? P-please? Nooo! I’d rather die than begin this lengthy investigation dragging all this luggage around, mistress!!”

Mina Mathers brushed her tearful student away with an annoyed hand and calmly continued.

“We should agree on a plan before we get started, Fortune.”

“Ugh. Can’t our plan be to check into a hotel and leave the luggage there first? Sob.”

“Do I need to scratch you? Dion Fortune, as a Golden magician, you must understand the Rosicrucian ideology at our cabal’s foundation. With that in mind, which side do you take?”

“?”

“I mean.” Black Cat Witch Mina Mathers paused while holding the baby. “Do you believe the legends of the mysterious Rosicrucian cabal as literal stories, or do you think they are some kind of metaphor or code? I am asking what your stance you take as a magician regarding the rose, the cross, the ruby, and the gold.”

Chapter 3: Journey – Cut_a_Road_to_Allover_the_Goal.

Part 1

Technically speaking, this was Yomikawa Aiho’s apartment.

But she was currently busy with work, so Yoshikawa Kikyou was looking after the small girl instead. Last Order, who looked to be about 10, was sorting something in her room.

“Cute.”

That was her judgment of a crane game doll.

“Not cute.”

That rejection was passed on a flat, ruler-shaped magnet.

But she still had plenty more to sort. The cat-shaped potholder and the Christmas tree floor lamp would be judged too. Some might have judged it all as junk.

Yoshikawa held a hand to her forehead.

“Can’t you just throw it all out? Listen, mere objects don’t actually have souls. If you hug each and every thing and refuse to throw it away, your room will be full in no time.”

“But this one is so cute! And so is this one! says Misaka as Misaka hugs them.”

Last Order shouted loud and hugged an (empty) water dispenser bottle the size of a daruma doll. She had a very wide range of what she considered cute and they all brought back memories that kept her from throwing them out. Yoshikawa sighed and wondered if it would be easier to just find a cheap storage unit for her.

That was when she heard a smooth artificial voice.

It came from outside the apartment’s front door. It was polite but quite loud.

“Martial law has been declared for the entirety of Academy City. Ordinary citizens are asked to remain indoors unless you have an urgent need. Also, this building is not an authorized shelter. Please check your maps and move to the nearest disaster shelter as soon as possible.”

That had to be a drum-shaped cleaning robot and its instructions seemed contradictory.

But Last Order remained seated on the floor and made no move to get up. She didn’t even look in that direction.

“Not cute, says Misaka as Misaka presents a cruel truth.”

Apparently not all round things met her definition of cute.

Then something poked its head out from around the corner of the hallway inside the apartment.

It was a bipedal tanuki.

But instead of the mystical creature found in old folklore, this appeared to be a dance robot’s metal frame placed inside a stuffed animal.

This came as a shock to Last Order.

Yoshikawa vaguely recalled seeing something like this having fun on TV.

“That tanuki is…cute!!”

Part 2

From red to black.

The sun set and night fell.

The already chilly winter air had transformed into a wind that seemed to slash at Kamijou and the others’ cheeks. To be blunt, he wanted some way of protecting his ears.

District 23 was a unique district full of airfields and rocket launch sites. To keep the various aircraft safe, the district was usually surrounded by a tall fence and strictly guarded, but it was deserted now.

There was no earsplitting noise. Had the passenger planes been grounded due to the martial law, or for some other reason?

Kamijou could scarcely believe it.

“Did they really set their second defense line here? They thought Christian Rosencreutz would choose to pass through such a dangerous district?”

“That’s what they’re saying on the Anti-Skill radio channel. Do you think that Rosencreutz guy could rewrite those encrypted transmissions?” asked Mikoto while monitoring those transmissions.

But not even she was doing that directly through her head. She was using a radio she had picked up.

It was possible CRC wouldn’t change his route because security was strict here or laxer over there. If he took the shortest route to the District 7 hospital, he would end up crossing through Districts 23 and 18. In the worst case, it was even possible he would actively choose to cross a minefield and step on every mine along the way. Because he enjoyed the loud noises.

“Look over there. There’s light,” said the honey blonde girl.

“Sh! That’s Anti-Skill’s second defense line.”

There were a lot of tanks and armored vehicles there. Kamijou didn’t know much about military stuff, but even he recognized one vehicle type. The mobile combat vehicles resembling 8-wheel armored trucks with a tank gun on top were Predator Octopuses. Just the one had made things so much easier when fleeing with Anna, so seeing a whole line of them here sent a chill down his spine.

In addition to the vehicle headlights, Anti-Skill had gathered up the kind of big outdoor lightning used at construction sites. A maze of barricades had been set up with sandbags piled up in places to construct countless encampments of various sizes. Then there were the heavy machinegun and automatic grenade launcher emplacements set up by driving spikes into the asphalt using the power of pneumatics. Runways were supposed to be delicate areas where a single stray screw or nail could lead to disaster, so gathering all of this was quite something.

No, that had it backwards.

If you ignored the potential financial losses, the wide-open runway may have been the perfect spot for Anti-Skill to use their next-gen weaponry. It at least greatly reduced the risk of a student dorm being hit by a stray shot.

But was that their real reason?

If they were using the possibility of stray shots as an excuse for their helplessness at the first defense line, it meant they still hadn’t accurately judged the threat Rosencreutz presented.

“Oh? Misaka-san?”

“Wait a second. Onee-sama, what are you doing here!?”

“Ugh.” Mikoto uncharacteristically flinched.

She apparently knew some of the Judgment members working here. Kamijou recognized the girl with twintails. He knew her name was Shirai Kuroko. But the older girl in glasses was entirely unknown to him. Something about the super-serious glasses girl with black hair told him she would kill him if he cracked a joke here. She scared him. Her strict aura reminded him a lot of Fukiyose when she was in a bad mood. W-was she always like this? Didn’t it wear her out?

“Onee-sama, District 23 is off limits. What are you doing here?”

“Um, Kuroko? Hear me out before you chew me out. See, I am the #3 Level 5, so I thought I could lend a hand now that Academy City is in trouble.”

“Absolutely not! You don’t have the authority to just decide that! Wandering around an off-limits area is enough to have you taken into custody!! And when have I ever ‘chewed you out’!? Care to explain why you chose that phrasing in particular!?”

“Sigh, and there you go (sob).”

Meanwhile, Kamijou’s eyes were not drawn to the Predator Octopuses so like the one he had recently entrusted his life to. He saw a much more disturbing weapon.

“What…is that?”

It looked like a 70m steel snake, or like an enlarged version of the luggage carrier carts often used at airports. It was made up of 10 armored cars with ground-flattening metal wheels that might as well have been road rollers. They were linked in a long line by giant metal ball joints. Each one looked to be around 7m long, 3m wide, and 2m tall. That meant they were wide and flat, which made it look like a snake lying down on the ground.

Each car was armed with gun turrets on the sides, but these were very different from a tank or warship’s weapons. They looked more like antiair weapons. A self-destruct drone launcher and a Gatling gun rotated as a single set.

“You mean the XHsACV-15 Anaconda?”

Shirai Kuroko sounded more confused than exasperated.

Because…

“The X at the start means they’re sending prototypes out to the field.”

“It is an all-terrain armored combat vehicle. Two-car armored vehicles that can bend in the middle are already made in Finland and Singapore. You could view this as a more extreme version of that concept.”

The glasses Judgment girl held a hand to the temple of her glasses and seemed delighted to provide the explanation.

A prototype.

That would explain the green jungle camouflage that only made more conspicuous here.

That said, what was this city hoping to accomplish building that weird thing?

“Unlike a normal tank or armored truck, I doubt it’s supposed to fight while driving around.” Mikoto analyzed it with a sigh. “Is it more of a mobile barricade that can rush in when there’s a riot and use itself as a thick wall to protect one side of a school from the rioters? See how its turrets are on the sides? That means it’s designed to fight with its side to the enemy, not its front.”

“R-right.”

“But putting them on both sides doubles the cost, so no sensible designer would arrange them like that. A top-mounted turret with 360-degree rotation would be lighter and cheaper. The only reason to do it this way is if the weapons double as special armor to protect itself. So if a shell or missile hits it, it triggers an outward explosion to reduce the force of the enemy projectile trying to punch through the armor. And that’s a lot cheaper with a drone launcher than a big gun. It looks like the actual radar is split between the front and the rear. Unless you accurately shot between the weapons with something like my Railgun, the shot will be diverted at the cost of one of the modular, and thus replaceable, unmanned turrets.”

“Anything is fine as long as we have something defending us,” said the honey blonde girl.

She had a point.

After all, this was District 23. The flat runway gave a clear view out to the horizon in all directions, meaning there was nowhere to hide. They didn’t want CRC firing magic projectiles here. Having those five or ten units surrounding them to create a rough encampment would mean a lot.

Kamijou then listened in the two Judgment girls:

“It’s plenty long, but at only 2m tall, rioters can simply climb over it. But if they added rolls of barbed wire, I’d be afraid of injuring them. Well, those flaws are what make prototypes so cute.”

“Is that so? If they’re going to the trouble of using a computer for the complex calculations needed to sync the engine RPMs, I don’t see why they would bother with a giant snake that can’t even separate. Procuring 10 maneuverable armored vehicles would seem more convenient to me.”

“They must still be working out the kinks to discover its true charm as a product. Besides, don’t you love the sound of the phrase ‘mysterious prototype weapon’? Hee hee.”

“Not really. I don’t understand you biker girls who get all worked up whenever you see a mech that doesn’t even cover you up.”

That conversation hinted at a lot of effort going on behind the scenes, but the thick wall still felt unshakable to Kamijou.

But then another thought occurred to him.

(Can this traditional weaponry really stop Rosencreutz?)

It was a vague, meaningless question.

His thoughts never reached the part where he figured out what else to do.

Because he was interrupted by something floating down from the night sky.

It was colored a hot pink.

Since this was the second time, Kamijou felt more relief than surprise.

“You’re alive, Bologna Succubus!”

“Natch.”

The blonde demon smiled as she spread her large batlike wings. While Kamijou’s honest reaction made her feel a touch bashful.

This time, she managed to land on the runway without running into anyone’s face with her crotch.

What had happened to Aradia and Good, Old Mary? The latter in particular had been knocked out by an attack from Christian Rosencreutz last Kamijou knew.

“Having a Transcendent with you should expand your strategic options. My Cold Mistress spell will probably only work on him once. It swaps out a human’s pleasure with pain no matter how physically tough they are, so it should work on someone who only acts out of passion and playfulness. Still, it won’t work once he comes up with a countermeasure, so when to make use of that limited opportunity is the real key.”

And…

“A-a succubus?”

“Oui. You got a problem with that, mademoiselle middle schooler who still has a lot of growing up to do?”

Someone was trembling a short distance away.

The honey blonde girl whose name Kamijou didn’t know seemed to take issue with something about this.

Kamijou just wished those two with such nice bodies would avoid glaring at each other from so close together their big boobs were pushed together. Where was a high school boy supposed to look!?

“A sexy young woman with long blonde hair, an amazing figure, and a mysterious sparkle ability in the eyes who specializes in nonphysical attacks? A-am I a joke to her? She just copied everything about me! And you’re telling me she’s gotten to know him behind my back!? That’s as aggressive a move as building a big-name convenience store right next to a privately run shop!!”

“You missed ‘talks weird’ on that list of similarities,” said Mikoto.

“Talks weird?” “Talks weird?”

The blondes joined forces(?) to both glare at Mikoto.

“Anyway, who do you think you are? A young doll like you needs to wait at least a decade before she can call herself ‘sexy’. And historically and traditionally, a succubus is the orthodox choice for sexy, not a middle schooler. Seriously though, I really do recommend you wait ten years so you can truly fulfill that high school boy’s dream of a dorm manager lady.”

“Why am I getting advice from an exhibitionist pervert who walks around outside in her underwear!?”

It sounded like the Bologna Succubus had won the squishy battle.

This must have been quite a shock because the mystery honey blonde girl simply stood in place with tears in her eyes. …And had Kamijou ever told that demon about his dorm manager dream? Kamijou couldn’t remember in enough detail to be sure. He had legitimately died and passed out a few times during his December 31 in Shibuya, so had he mentioned it in his sleep at some point? He wasn’t sure how she had gotten the information, but he really wished she wouldn’t spread it around to other people. Because it was embarrassing!!!

And for some reason, Mikoto looked glum.

She was hanging her head with a look of belated realization.

“(Eh? Do I not even have the honor of participating in that battle? Because of the gap in chest size?)”

“?”

Kamijou got the feeling anything he said would make her want to die, so he opted to leave her be.

Just then, a pale-faced Anti-Skill officer began showing around her tablet without knowing who to ask for further instructions.

“W-we have footage from the drone… He’s coming!! He’s head straight here! Wh-wh-what do we do!?”

“We need to set all our complaints aside. Everyone, to your posts! You don’t want to let him cross this defense line without putting up a fight, do you!?”

The busty glasses Judgment girl clapped her hands and provided instructions. She was so good at it the adults of Anti-Skill were taken aback and simply obeyed. Anti-Skill was generally made up of the muscular gym teachers and guidance counselors, so how did that girl have the upper hand?

He had only been spotted by drone, but if they knew he was close enough to judge that he was headed this way, he couldn’t be that far away.

Christian Rosencreutz was coming.

Kamijou recalled how extraordinary Alice Anotherbible had been.

Nothing was going to just “work out for the best” here.

If he lost this time, he really would die. As would the other people here. He wouldn’t be able to speak with any of them again.

The battle at the second defense line would soon begin.

Part 3

Mut Thebes stood alone in District 18.

The place was completely dark thanks to the martial law.

(This iron sand hand warmer is nice. Nothing can beat the classics.)

That pointy-haired boy had given her the item before they parted.

So now the chilly girl warmed herself with that modern convenience.

Anti-Skill referred to this as the third defense line, but the District 7 hospital where Anna Sprengel slept wasn’t far from here. For that boy, this had to be the last line.

Mut Thebes was a special Transcendent who could absorb people’s and objects’ shadows using her own white shadow and then use them as she saw fit. The next-gen weapons belonged to the science side, but once she absorbed them, she could use them as part of her magic.

And she had discovered a fascinating weapon here.

The 41cm Trebuchet linear artillery.

The cannon replaced the power of explosives with electromagnets, but the shells it launched in a large arc like a long throw in baseball would reach the ozone layer before accurately striking a target 20 thousand meters away. In addition to targeting a single point and piercing deep underground, it could be switched to a secondary mode that used the great air friction to intentionally destroy the metal shell in the air above the target, blasting it into plasma that could obliterate an aircraft carrier fleet in the ocean, assuming they were packed in close enough. The result could be thought of as an artificial Tunguska event.

With the main weapon, the spare shells, the targeting unit, the antiair weaponry set up nearby to defend it, and everything else, it took up an entire schoolyard.

One of the Anti-Skill officers working in the schoolyard noticed her and yelled at her.

“You there! Martial law is in effect. Get back to your dorm immediately!”

“?”

“Wh-why do you look so confused?”

She had had a shootout with them just yesterday, but had they not distributed an accurate photo of her? That was the real source of her confusion, but she knew correcting him would only make things worse, so she kept quiet.

The schoolyard artillery looked like it had been set up in a hurry and a lot of Anti-Skill officers were moving all around it, but it didn’t appear to be ready to fire yet. If Rosencreutz wasn’t delayed at the second defense line, he would probably arrive here at the third before they were ready putting it together.

But that changed if Mut Thebes absorbed it.

(Although it will take me some time to absorb such a large shadow.)

She only needed contact the long shadow formed by the bright outdoor lights, so she didn’t even need to cross the fence surrounding the schoolyard.

She waited on the side of the road and thought in silence.

It would take some time to absorb it into her white shadow, but she had nothing to fear once that was done. Because she didn’t actually need to operate the weapon as it was designed to be used. In a recent battle, she had even shined lights on a warship from multiple angles and absorbed each of its shadows to create a giant monster out of them and march across Academy City.

“Hm. Which would mean…”

Mut Thebes nodded silently to herself.

With this, she could fortify the third defense line while also using the long-range artillery to participate in the battle being fought at the second defense line.

“Interesting.”

Part 4

Christian Rosencreutz strolled leisurely through District 12.

There were no people or cars here. That made it a strange alternate world.

“Oops.”

He stopped his foot in midair.

Something was pouring all its strength into running across the cold ground just below his shoe.

CRC’s eyes crinkled in a smile at the rat crossing the crosswalk on the deserted street.

Thanks to the martial law, the train station’s ticket gates were all closed. The convenience store and other shops were also deserted. But that wasn’t the small children he saw were interested in.

They were gathered around the capsule toy machines lined up in front of the train station convenience store.

“What are you kids doing?”

“Wah!?”

The way they jumped made it clear the children knew they weren’t supposed to sneak out of their dorms during the martial law. And it was nighttime.

“H-he’s a grownup.”

“But he doesn’t look like Anti-Skill.”

“If this old guy is out here, he’s breaking the rules as much as we are. So it’s fine.”

Fascinating. He hadn’t called himself “this old man” to them, so did they simply consider anyone to be “old” if they had a beard?

He stroked his silver beard.

Based on his observations, these capsule toy machines had you put coins inside to test your luck on what toy you would receive.

(I see. But why do people flock to these systems that give you no guarantee you will get what you want?)

Perhaps because they were morons.

Tears welled up in Rosencreutz’s eyes as he recalled the many forms of human foolishness he had witnessed in his far-from-short history.

He was quick to tears.

The children didn’t seem to care.

“I’m doing it! I’m getting a super rare one today!”

“But is there even a super rare Gekota color plane in here? I can’t tell looking in from the side.”

“I have heard rumors there isn’t a winner inside.”

Large tears spilled from CRC’s eyes.

He was quick to tears!!

“Is this a despicable machine designed to scam young children out of the limited allowance they worked so hard to save up? No, this old man must know the true odds!! How does it really work!? Urah!!”

A loud crash rang out.

The capsule toy machine itself had shattered.

Christian Rosencreutz lined the round capsules up on the hard tile floor.

“One, two, three, four, five…there it is. So there really is a Gekota color plane inside! Hah hah hah. Good, it wasn’t a-”

He paused midsentence.

The small children were nowhere to be found. Every last one.

They must have run away.

He scratched his head and sighed, stroking his silver beard.

If he wanted to, he could have quickly located them and attacked them, but…

“No reason to chase them down, I suppose.”

With that arbitrary decision, he abandoned the search.

He held the super rare Gekota color plane between two fingers.

He knew which route to take now.

“Yes.”

It had always been the shortest route anyway.

He turned toward District 23, which specialized in aerospace.

He casually chose that destination because now he wanted to see a real one.

He did not find a life-size Gekota color plane there.

He did find several bright lights shining out from the darkness. Were they headlights and roadwork lights?

Those Anti-Skill people must have built a second defense line. And as part of that, they must have removed all the passenger planes and tanker trucks packed full of highly flammable fuel.

Christian Rosencreutz squeezed the small toy in his hand and muttered to himself.

“You are in my way.”

Part 5

An Anti-Skill officer leaned out from behind cover and shouted with special binoculars in hand.

“Visual confirmation of top-priority target!!”

Thanks to the martial law, the runway was not properly lit. That allowed Anti-Skill and Judgment to take action before Kamijou got a clear view of the figure in question.

A battle broke out at the second defense line.

“Begin!!”

Frist, they launched mortars from the ground. To Kamijou, they seemed like bigger versions of the fireworks available at convenience stores and discount stores. And they were used in much the same way. The projectiles were launched into the sky above, but instead of falling back to the ground, they decelerated above the target’s head and scattered light even brighter than a car’s headlights. These were parachute-equipped flares. Anti-Skill wasn’t showering the enemy with explosives right away – they were first ensuring a clear view.

This allowed Kamijou Touma to see the small figure more than 500m away.

It was Christian Rosencreutz.

That confirmation froze his spine and legs with fear. This was someone who made him wish the veil of darkness had not been swept away.

And the initial flares had a secondary purpose.

Anti-Skill and Judgment were meant to preserve order in the city, so they had a process to follow.

“Warning shot achieved.”

Yes, no matter what the type of projectile, they would fire the first shot above the enemy instead of directly at him.

And since the target continued walking and did not put his hands up…

“The suspect is not surrendering! Repeat, the suspect is not surrendering! Conditions for use of force have been met! Open fire!!!”

The heavy machineguns and automatic grenade launchers began to fire, held in place by the metal stakes driven into the asphalt. Needless to say, Anti-Skill was holding nothing back. They fired in the enemy’s general direction while adjusting their aim to hold him in place before taking careful aim with their tank guns and mortars that could not fire quite so rapidly. If this wasn’t Academy City where they were trained to handle espers, they might have known this was the most efficient method, but they would have been hesitant to use it against a human.

Kamijou himself felt somehow relieved.

Because he knew Christian Rosencreutz could take this kind of attack.

Although that thinking may have meant he had begun to accept how strong the man was.

With such a dense barrage underway, Kamijou couldn’t rush in with fist clenched. His Imagine Breaker could not block fragments of everyday(?) bullets and shells, so a careless approach would only get him blown away by friendly fire.

Kamijou wasn’t the only one irritated by having to stand around.

“Argh, 500m? I can see him, but I can’t reach him. My Railgun would burn away in the air before it got there!!”

And.

Kamijou heard chuckling laughter coming from among the explosions and shockwaves.

CRC was mocking them.

While on the receiving end of such a concentrated attack.

More sandbags were piled up to reinforce their defenses. This robbed the tanks of their mobility and their guns creaked as if intimidated. Kamijou understood not wanting to die, but now the tanks were no more than 120mm gun emplacements.

Christian Rosencreutz’s face showed only scorn.

“Do you really think that can defeat this old man?”

“They’re risking their lives because they do, halfwit.”

A blonde demon interrupted.

Something else happened at the same time.

The Bologna Succubus’s spell was called Cold Mistress.

It did not produce any bright lights or loud sounds. It apparently replaced the target’s pleasure signals with excruciating pain.

But what did this attack mean for Christian Rosencreutz who was only motivated by passion and playfulness?

A tank gun scored a direct hit.

Even CRC’s body had to be made of protein and calcium. He couldn’t stop shells because his body was unusually tough – he activated spells to repel them.

So.

What if he was stopped from activating those defense spells, even for a split second?

The explosive boom erupted a moment later and a cloud of gray dust swelled out.

But Anti-Skill was not foolish enough to celebrate quite yet.

“Not yet!!” shouted an adult holding special binoculars that used electronics to expand their functionality “He’s still in one piece and standing on his own two feet!!”

(Damn monster.)

Kamijou clenched his teeth.

He could only pray CRC had survived but had taken damage. The tank guns and grenade launchers fired again and again, not waiting for the dust to clear. This showed Anti-Skill’s fear that he would attack the instant they stopped firing.

“Kyahhhhh!!”

The honey blonde girl shrieked. Something other than deafening gunshots and sparks had grazed her at high speed. Probably a stray shot or a ricochet.

But Kamijou couldn’t do the obvious thing and duck down behind cover.

He was too worried.

The inability to see what was happening was wearing at his patience,.

He was intensely anxious that all of this was ultimately meaningless.

Ordinarily, they would have the upper hand here, but he was finding it harder and harder to trust that kind of judgment. Christian Rosencreutz was too much of a monster.

They were on the attack, yet they were the ones running out of options. Unable to bear this any longer, Kamijou shouted out loud.

“Is it still not over? Still!?”

“Damn, the target is walking. His shoulders are shaking… Is he laughing? He’s headed here! The dust is clearing! Wahhh!?”

The Anti-Skill officer sweatily peering through the binoculars screamed like he was having a nightmare.

With the “snap!!” of breaking metal, the heavy machinegun providing a dense barrage was suddenly destroyed and stopped moving.

It all happened in an instant.

Rosencreutz rushed in. Once he was inside the defense formation surrounded by the sandbag walls and barricades, their bullet-and-shell-based strategy would cease to function.

But Rosencreutz may have questioned what he found.

He had eliminated their optimal strategy and begun the hunt, but despite the terror on their faces, Anti-Skill and Judgment had not frozen up in fear.

“Everyone down!!” shouted a tough-looking Anti-Skill officer with something in his hand.

Kamijou wasn’t sure what he meant.

So he was slow to react.

The group of tanks and mobile combat vehicles all exploded from within.

Kamijou hadn’t been anywhere near them, but his feet were still lifted from the runway.

And he was knocked backwards.

“Boy…………………!!”

The Bologna Succubus’s voice was too distorted to understand. It was so bad he couldn’t even judge how close she was.

But what had happened to CRC who had moved deep within the group of tanks and mobile combat vehicles?

The 8-wheel Predator Octopus and the rest of the military vehicles were designed to be operated remotely as ground drones. After the first defense line was destroyed so badly, no one thought CRC could be repelled with ordinary firepower. Which led to this strategy: triggering the self-destruct only after he had easily broken through the defense line and entered the defense formation.

They probably hadn’t used your average explosive either.

“Ah…gah?”

Kamijou’s retinas were scorched by a flash of light as white as welding.

Most likely, they had made use of a special reaction using aluminum or iron powder. At more than 3000 degrees, the blast could literally melt steel and it had hit the man at point-blank range.

Shirai Kuroko shouted over the boom while lying down on the runway, protecting her head.

“Did they really have to go this far!?”

“Seems that way. The suspect is still standing. He didn’t even duck!!”

The busty glasses Judgment girl must have had Clairvoyance or a similar power because she was directing her wide eyes toward the dust cloud.

“You’re…kidding.”

Mikoto had also frozen stiff. She may have detected something with her radar produced by reflecting weak microwaves off of things.

But Kamijou didn’t have time to see the truth for himself.

He heard a deafening tearing sound.

The XHsACV-15 Anaconda, the snakelike chain of armored vehicles, had started to move. It looked like the three units were going to run over Rosencreutz, but instead they formed the three sides of an equilateral triangle and came to a rapid stop.

First, they trapped him.

That 70m giant surrounded the same area as a schoolyard.

But it was not just a thick wall. The mobility to deploy as the situation demanded was the Anaconda’s greatest strength.

Down on the ground, an Anti-Skill officer shouted into a radio.

“Fire!!”

The guns on the sides of each unit opened fire on the interior of the giant triangle. Self-destruct drones were launched sharply out and 20mm Gatling guns sprayed bullets. The noise alone was terrifying. The barrage was so dense an ordinary human would have been turned into a bloody mist and splattered across the ground in less than a second.

But only an ordinary human.

And it didn’t end there.

Something fell from heaven to earth like a bolt of lightning. 120mm shells and 20mm Gatling guns were combined to create a manmade divine punishment of lead and powder.

Kamijou had seen this before.

A large transport plane had been converted into a mobile aerial gun platform called a gunship.

It flew in a large circle overhead, raining down a massive number of bullets.

An Anti-Skill officer shouted while crawling slowly along the ground.

“So the HsAC-03 Spotlight got here. 200m around the target point is a fragment warning zone! Fall back! Everyone fall back!”

“A 200m radius? That’s bigger than your average school or stadium. Which means it covers all of us here!” protested the honey blonde girl.

Several explosions erupted in quick succession.

The Anaconda’s wall was meaningless if the metal fragments and pieces of asphalt flew up in the air and poured down on their heads. This might as well have been a volcanic eruption on the surface.

Even with the martial law, they couldn’t have carried out a bombing this large in the more urban part of the city. This all-out firepower was only possible here in District 23 with its vast expanse of runways and not a school or dorm to be found.

Again, it didn’t end there.

Even higher up than the gunship ruling the skies, a star twinkled.

Or so it seemed just before a cylinder of ultra-heavy tungsten alloy dropped straight down from outside the atmosphere. It was 10m long and 80cm in diameter. It had been launched from Academy City’s giant satellite. The heavy metal pillar just barely missed the gunship circling overhead, nearly stalling out the 50m craft with the mass of air it brought with it, and dropped straight toward Christian Rosencreutz.

Sound was compressed.

Even light was trapped, unable to escape, before everything burst outward from a single point.

An artificial comet had struck. If the blast had been unmanaged and free to spread, it might have obliterated District 23 itself. Instead, the special grooves and angular points on the pillar’s side and the angle of its tip gathered the kinetic energy together, sending it piercing straight down into the ground. It easily dug up the experimental nuclear shelter spread out below the asphalt runway.

“!?”

While the vectors were concentrated to an extent, it wasn’t perfect.

The force that did escape was enough to twist and flip the 70m Anaconda all-terrain armored combat vehicle. Kamijou was nearly crushed by it, but it could easily have been worse. Without that wall there, the thick shockwave would have hit him directly and converted him into a clump of meat.

After gathering scrap metal into a giant shield, Mikoto muttered in a somewhat dazed way.

“Could they have dropped that on my head any time they wanted…?”

Rolling on the ground, Kamijou didn’t even have time for questions like that.

His aching head felt like it was going to split open.

But instead of a blow from the outside, it felt more like the pressure inside his skull had risen.

Just watching made him feel like his eardrums were going to burst.

In a subconscious urge to find anything at all to rely on, he ended up grabbing onto the Bologna Succubus who happened to be nearby. He looked a lot like a small child clinging to his mother in fear after a nearby lightning strike.

What did it matter if they weren’t special?

So what if they were all individuals and had no legends to their name?

These people had gathered for no other reason than to protect Academy City and they had demonstrated enough power to bring Kamijou to the ground just from watching.

The strange sticky sensation coming from his right ear scared him, but he managed a trembling voice.

“What happened…to Rosencreutz? After all this, he’s got to at least be limping, right?”

“No,” said an icily certain voice. It belonged to the Bologna Succubus as she held the boy close. “Remove your rose-tinted glasses and you’ll see. He can still move.”

His breath caught.

Was Christian Rosencreutz really this powerful? He was entirely unscathed after an attack so ferocious it literally altered the terrain? Then what could a measly right fist do?

Just then, a distorted voice came from an emergency speaker directly installed in the runway rather than a metal pole so it would be out of the way of takeoffs and landings.

Kamijou recognized the voice.

“Outta the way, third-rates. That was only the opening act meant to keep the bastard still for a second.”

Part 6

It had originally been a piece of research infrastructure built directly below the wall surrounding Academy City’s perimeter.

The giant facility used a massive amount of magnetism to trap a stream of electrons and protons, send them out at nearly the speed of light, and collide different particles to create a variety of phenomena, including the creation of brand new elements that do not exist in the natural world.

The Hula Hoop.

The world’s largest particle accelerator had just unleashed and launched a tremendously powerful electron beam.

It cut a straight line from District 3 in the north to District 10 in the south.

This was New Board Chairman Accelerator’s true trump card that he had been setting up ever since the Bridge Builders Cabal had suddenly constructed a consulate in District 12 and strutted around the city like they owned the place.

The intended target had been Alice Anotherbible.

This superweapon had been adjusted to kill her in a single shot if that became necessary, but now it had struck Christian Rosencreutz. This one shot was all it had. The circular particle accelerator’s forcibly-linked container-sized capacitors and transformers blew up one after another as the giant devices were fried by the massive energy they had gathered, but the deadly spear still accurately bisected Academy City north to south.

The light swept away the night and all the moisture in the air was vaporized. The heat melted the asphalt pavement back into a liquid and the remaining small abandoned jets exploded one after another. The twisted and flipped Anaconda half vaporized while it was burned apart.

And none of that had been directly hit.

Christian Rosencreutz had been, so how much damage had he taken?

Kamijou choked on the stench of melted asphalt. It took him a while to realize he was curled up on the ground. He must have thought a thick lightning bolt had struck nearby and reflexively moved to protect himself. Similar to a stun grenade blast.

So much preparation had gone into this single attack.

New Board Director Accelerator had remotely operated the city’s cleaning and security robots to search for anyone still in the predicted line of fire. If he found anyone, he had of course guided them to safety. His plans had hit a brief snag when Last Order hadn’t obeyed the robot, but he had solved that by drawing her attention with a tanuki pet robot.

So in this one moment, he had created a singular opportunity when all that energy could cut across Academy City without causing any human damage.

The #1 wasn’t soft enough to let a chance like that go to waste.

The already world-class Hula Hoop was pushed past its power limits to accelerate the electrons to more than 99.99% the speed of light, where they tore through the scenery and rushed toward Rosencreutz.

In a perfectly straight line, the asphalt runway was boiled orange.

Even the elements making up the air must have been rewritten because the beam’s wake was electrified and sparking.

“Ugh,” groaned the honey blonde girl. “I do not want to breathe that in. That air cannot be good for your health ability.”

Kamijou had bigger concerns.

A direct hit barely seemed necessary when just carelessly looking at that could blind you.

At this level, it felt like a scientifically-created form of the occult.

“Damn…it,” said Kamijou, somehow managing to get some air in his lungs and sweating in the midwinter night. “Did that…finally get him?”

The answer did not come from Anti-Skill, Judgment, Mikoto, or the Bologna Succubus.

But he did hear a voice.

“You mean this old man?”

Kamijou’s vision fell into darkness.

He regretted asking the question.

Part 7

“We were too late,” whispered Witch Goddess Aradia, watching from outside the range of the blinding beam.

“How are they?” asked a breathless voice.

That was Good, Old Mary. As the only person who could, albeit imperfectly, defend against Christian Rosencreutz’s attacks, a battlefield without her may have looked to her like an extra-large helping of suicide.

Her own sacrifice was of secondary importance.

She was a Transcendent who, more than anything, hated ordinary people being harmed by special miracles.

“Joining them blindly would only eliminate what little chance we have left.”

“I know that.” Good, Old Mary forcibly steadied her breathing and continued. “But holding cards in reserve is pointless if the people guarding the second defense line are slaughtered in the meantime. Mama doesn’t even need to use her sacrificial defense. My very presence on the battlefield will force Rosencreutz to be cautious, thus restricting his actions.”

Running away apparently wasn’t even an option as far as she was concerned.

Not that Aradia was one to talk there.

They got to work.

Part 8

The result was in.

All that effort had amounted to nothing.

Shirai Kuroko and the glasses girl from Judgment were speechless.

They had destroyed the barricades themselves.

Flat District 23 was the only place in Academy City where the horizon was visible. There was nowhere to hide and thoughtless running would only expose their backs to this nemesis. In real war, retreating from a disadvantageous position was the most difficult thing.

“Oh?”

Christian Rosencreutz made a quiet noise.

Past his outstretched palm, his spell failed to hit Kamijou’s head and tore harmlessly into the air next to it.

Kamijou Touma had not moved. Then why had CRC missed?

He sounded amused.

“Did you rotate the ground itself? The same way an illusionist causes large objects to disappear.”

“You have unexpectedly worldly tastes, Rosencreutz.”

Since she had set this up, she knew she couldn’t remain hidden.

The witch goddess slowly walked over and positioned herself to guard Kamijou Touma.

“Did you think a witch who lives with nature can’t manipulate asphalt? Nonsense. We can manipulate soil and minerals as easily as trees and flowers. Process and harm them as much as you like, a single touch of a witch’s finger is enough for them to respond.”

A 100m circle of the melted asphalt underfoot had rotated.

Just like a grand illusion where an idling passenger plane vanished before an audience’s eyes.

Rosencreutz’s shoulders shook with laughter.

“Did you think this secret talent of yours would continue to serve you?”

“Of course not. It only had to work once,” spat Aradia. “The point wasn’t for your deadly attack to miss Kamijou Touma. You didn’t bother checking what the attack did hit, did you?”

Christian Rosencreutz briefly paused.

It took him less than three seconds to realize something.

“I see.”

He looked up.

A tremor ran through the ground like a kaiju stomping across the city.

The towering monster looked like a stadium-sized container supported by a trio of pylon-sized legs.

That was the Tribikos.

Good, Old Mary’s experimental tool was said to contain an entire universe inside and thus carried the possibility of producing anything. That ultimate container could produce nonexistent forms of death and destruction as simple playthings.

“Hm.”

Christian Rosencreutz mimed loosely holding something like a brandy glass.

But his hand remained empty.

“The paternal cross and the maternal flower are a little too convenient, so people have a tendency to rely too much on the red secret art and cease to work at coming up with their own plans.”

His corpse had remained unchanged for 120 years. He had created a perfect miniature world where he could reach any answer by recreating the past, present, and future. That sage among sages had produced the secret art that could heal the entire world.

Which meant he was exceedingly similar to this experimental tool that had mastered the art of kitchen alchemy. The only real difference was that Good, Old Mary kept the miracle sealed inside like it was Pandora’s box while CRC let it out in his strong desire to interfere with the larger world. Alternatively, this would mean Good, Old Mary’s Tribikos was so powerful that she feared what would happen if the red secret art were released from it.

“One rule applies to the entire world,” whispered Good, Old Mary. “When one person attacks, another takes revenge. This rule applies even to that which slumbers in the secret territories. Be destroyed by the divine punishment triggered by your own decision as per the law of action and reaction, CRC.”

Part 9

A sticky sound enveloped the world.

What…was it?

Cracks raced across the stadium-like Tribikos and it shattered just before filthy gray bubbles burst from within. But these bubbles did not have the cleansing feel of detergent or soap. These were small, hideous bubbles, reminiscent of human torment and death. They engulfed Rosencreutz like a deluge.

The bubbles lost force and momentum before vanishing altogether.

Were they suppose to be the foam coming from the mouth of someone who had drunk poison, or were they supposed to be fire extinguisher foam?

No one wanted to see what happened if even one of those popping bubbles touched them. What this all meant was a mystery, but doing that had to be as suicidal as a slug fascinated by salt.

“Eeeeek!”

The honey blonde girl paled.

It was written plain on her face that being swallowed up by those bubbles was the very last thing she wanted to do.

And…

“We need to run away,” was Good, Old Mary’s immediate decision.

She was not shortsighted enough to determine her strategy based on a momentary advantage.

“It is miracle enough to have bought 600 seconds against CRC. If you do not escape through the sea I have parted, none of you will survive.”

“Hey, if you could do all this…?” said Kamijou, still in a daze.

“CRC’s world model is more accurate than mine, which creates a discrepancy between the two. I caught him off guard here, but he will break through as soon as he manages to calm down and respond. Then we will be caught by an even greater calamity.”

Something like a sandstorm obstructed the view.

The sand was yellow.

That was the color of defeat. Was time already up? Was the second defense line and District 23 about to be buried in Citrinitas just like District 12 had been? The Transcendents working together could only stop one of Rosencreutz’s attacks, but not repel him?

(If we run from here, are we supposed to go to the third defense line? And if District 18 falls, we’ll be back in District 7, where that hospital is. We can only fall back one more time!!)

Kamijou’s thoughts were interrupted by a voice coming from the mountain of bubbles even more horrific than the foam spilling from the corner of a human mouth.

Something flashed.

“More of the same? You bore me.”

This was not aimed at Kamijou or the others in front of him.

The massive deadly force flew over their heads like a long throw in baseball.

They felt a tremor below their feet.

“No…way,” muttered Kamijou.

Something had exploded in the distance and that had shaken the asphalt here.

The third defense line, where Mut Thebes waited, had been destroyed in the blink of an eye.

But the immediate threat wasn’t gone either.

“Kh!!”

Misaka Mikoto immediately placed an arcade coin on her thumbnail.

She had to already know the truth.

This was CRC.

Even a direct hit at thrice the speed of sound wouldn’t kill him. Which was why she didn’t hesitate to ready this attack.

“Ahhhhhhhhhh!!”

She screamed to shake free of her own fear.

An explosive boom compressed the air.

Mikoto didn’t bother viewing the result.

“Go now!! Hurry!! Waste this chance and we really can’t get away!!”

The younger girl grabbed Kamijou’s hand and pulled him away.

What was happening over there?

The third defense line in District 18…was gone.

They weren’t even allowed a final chance.

From here, it was a straight shot to District 7. If they couldn’t find some other plan, Rosencreutz would reach the hospital!!

Part 10

And so.

No one could stop Christian Rosencreutz’s march across the city.

Part 11

The footsteps could not have sounded more normal.

The glass automatic doors were not meant to keep out intruders.

They opened with ridiculous ease.

The machine did not discriminate. It welcomed Christian Rosencreutz inside with no thought to the severity of the situation.

“Now, where did they put the Transcendent who was sent here? Was her name Anna Sprengel?” he said offhand.

Was that the extent of his thoughts about her? Despite being the inheritor of the Rosicrucian cabal he had started, she was not special to him. She was no more than one of the many Transcendents – another life to kill in the game he had defined.

“Hello, you there.”

CRC called out to a nurse.

Even though he could have read the residual thoughts easily enough if he wanted to.

He was clearly enjoying this.

“Is ICU the right term? Regardless, Anna Sprengel, or possibly an unidentified Girl A, should have arrived here. Where should I go to find her?”

“E-eek!”

The young male nurse fell onto his rear, pressed his back against the hallway door, and desperately shook his head in refusal, so he had to be a consummate medical professional.

Christian Rosencreutz viewed him in amusement.

And he slowly held out his palm.

“Heh heh. Believe me, you want as little to do with this old man as possible. Irritate me too much, and I might just take an interest in you.”

“Enough,” said a new voice.

Something sat on the edge of one of the sofas lined up in the waiting room positioned in front of the hospital pharmacy. The translucent figure took a sip of the shiruko can he held in both hands.

That mysterious being had been called a Holy Guardian Angel and an extraterrestrial.

As well as a Secret Chief.

He was known as Aiwass.

“That man has done nothing wrong. If you have business related to the modern Western magic that spans the Rose and the Golden, then stay focused on that, CRC.”

“I truly do not envy you Secret Chiefs. That priestess’s lungs and heart are no longer functioning, but do those machines really prevent you from calling her dead? If she were fully killed, your contract would be null and void and you would be free once more.”

A strange cracking sound came from empty space.

Almost like hard plastic breaking.

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“The fate of the world exists to fulfill our playfulness and curiosity. A boring world where the jokers cannot joke would only sink into darkness.”

“You claim to have despaired of the world and now choose destruction purely to satisfy your passions without forcing the blame onto anyone else, CRC, but you are surprisingly unobservant. Fortunately, that gives us some hope.”

“?”

“As the Secret Chief who guards the First Temple, it is true only one official priestess can contact me, but that does not mean she is the only one with a personal interest in me.”

A solid footstep sounded.

This was the sound of someone who, unlike Aiwass, had a physical body.

Christian Rosencreutz turned around and smiled.

“Oh?”

He showed great interest. Like he had just found a shred of amusement still remaining in this dreary world.

He saw a beige habit and blonde hair cut to shoulder length.

He saw a magician who had clung to the world of the living after his own death by hijacking a great demon’s body.

Human Aleister Crowley blocked his path.

Part 12

Shortly before the clash, the frog-faced doctor noted a mood of mounting tension.

(I take it this person isn’t the type to spare a hospital or a school.)

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much he could do about it.

He was a doctor.

And the patient lying before him was on the verge of death – in fact, her breathing and pulse would cease without the help of the life support devices. Every last form of modern examination had failed to determine the cause and none of his thick medical texts or the disease research database had turned up a previous example, but he wasn’t sensible enough to give up because of that.

Without a doubt, throwing in the towel was the frog-faced doctor’s least favorite phrase. If someone felt it was acceptable for a medical expert to abandon their patient’s possibilities based on their own emotions or mood, he thought they had no business working in the medical field.

“Now, then.”

None of his test devices could identify the cause.

So he decided to focus on the records of those failures.

“I assume the blood sample tests found nothing?”

“Y-yes. All 5.”

The young technician glanced over at the test tubes sealed with different colors of rubber cap. Finding nothing was not a cause for celebration here. They had a patient on the verge of death. It was like running a malware scan and receiving zero detections despite the computer very obviously behaving strangely.

(Something is clearly wrong, but nothing turns up in the numbers.)

They hadn’t found anything in the blood sealed in the test tubes. Then what was happening inside that small girl(?) and how far had it progressed?

But something else caught his interest as well.

“Hm?”

With a patient in critical condition, there wasn’t time to wipe them down with ethanol to disinfect them. In some cases, they were transferred directly in from the emergency arrivals treatment room where the ambulance dropped them off. That meant an ICU could not be kept as sterile as an operating room. Instead, drum-shaped cleaning robots frequently moved through, keeping the space as clean as possible.

The frog-faced doctor held out a hand to stop one, opened the lid, and checked inside.

He found a long, strawberry blonde hair.

He touched it to find it unusually stiff. Its surface was badly damaged for having recently fallen out, almost like it had been left on the floor for years.

“…”

Nutrients and oxygen were supplied to the hair and the nails.

But as can be seen from the lack of bleeding when cutting your hair, the capillaries were connected to the roots and didn’t continue on through the rest of the hair.

He knew what to focus on now.

He wasn’t one to stop here just because he couldn’t prove anything scientifically.

“Wh-what do we do?”

“Prepare her for dialysis,” calmly instructed the frog-faced doctor.

Bacteria and toxins harmed people through a wide variety of methods. But one common method was to have a nature very similar to a component necessary for human life. For example, carbon monoxide. Its similar structure to oxygen allowed it to bond with the red blood cells, keeping out the oxygen that was meant to be carried through the bloodstream. And because humans needed oxygen, they would eventually collapse.

The cause was invisible and it was similar to a normal bodily function.

The connotations of the word “curse” had distracted them.

The culprit was a lot closer to home. You can think of it like a form of fatal pollen allergy that shows symptoms in response to “something thought of as occult” like a face, a name, hair, or nails.

Then how could it be prevented?

What could they block with a mask? Was there a preventative or a cure? Use whatever terminology you like.

By swapping out the words in his head, his thoughts began to race. No matter how strange it seemed, someone’s life was at risk. So how could he, as a doctor, stop working?

“History tells of someone who ate deadly potassium cyanide but didn’t die.”

“?”

“Rasputin. There are many dubious legends about the man, but the official records say he ate cakes laced with cyanide without dying. A normal person would have a 100% chance of death when it reacted with their gastric acid, so some theorize he survived because his gastric acid was extremely weak.”

That was one example of escaping certain death.

Even when the result appeared to be a miracle or nightmare, the method of cheating death could sometimes be explained scientifically.

What did it matter if this illness could not be scientifically explained?

All he had to do was remove the conditions causing it and science could handle that.

In other words…

“This illness appears to identify an individual based on their blood and attack their bodily tissue. So if we artificially replace all of her blood and temporarily change her blood type, this ‘curse’ disease will lose its target. We will remove its ability to identify her. Got that?”

Many different devices were hurried into the ICU. The frog-faced doctor temporarily stepped out of the ICU to give them space.

He sighed.

Someone was standing there: Aleister Crowley.

They were old friends, so the frog-faced doctor didn’t bother turning around in surprise. He didn’t know how or why that human was here. He simply accepted that that human could do things he couldn’t explain.

With a golden retriever by his side, Aleister asked a simple question.

Everything was packed into so few words.

“What are you going to do?”

“As long as the patient wants to live, I will lend them every skill and resource available to me.”

“How did you ask Anna Sprengel if she wants to live? You can’t converse with her just by reading the pulses of her brain waves.”

“True. But someone risked his life to leave her in my care and bowed to me. I haven’t heard from her herself and it is possible she doesn’t even have the strength left to want anything. But I know that boy will draw it out of her. Maybe she has no more reason to want to live, but I know he will give her a new one. Not a bad possibility to bet on, don’t you think?”

The frog-faced doctor knew Christian Rosencreutz was on his way here. But no matter how many of this city’s secrets he knew, he was still just a doctor. Unlike the monsters of the former dark side, he did not have the power to fight and protect his sanctuary here.

So.

“Are you interested in lending a hand?”

“…”

“You’re just dying to finally use your full strength for someone other than yourself, aren’t you?”

They did not hold a lengthy or grand conversation This was not a sketchy politician’s speech or a TV informercial pressuring you to call by saying the deal only lasted for half an hour after it aired. These two understood each other well enough that theatrical gestures and the like would only get in the way.

Aleister spoke quietly, his head still lowered.

It was possible his question had not actually been directed at the frog-faced doctor in front of him.

“I created this city, but it is no longer mine. Why should I pour all my efforts into Academy City at this point?”

He received a single response.

The frog-faced doctor’s answer was a simple one.

As old friends, he knew exactly what words would stab him deepest.

“How about because it would make him happy?”

Part 13

And so.

Two magicians stood face to face.

After failing to work up the courage to fight or even to run away, the human was finally crossing the start line.

And once he made up his mind, the rest happened quick.

History proved how effective he was at taking action.

“Aleister.”

“Stay back. And don’t let anything that happens here surprise you.”

That was the extent of the human and golden retriever’s conversation.

Space itself vibrated.

Christian Rosencreutz looked to the space around him instead of at Aleister.

Everything looked the same.

“Did you shift the phase?” asked CRC, amused.

“Is that so surprising? Even Mathers and his lot played with the phases. They would use astral projection to spy on other phases or extract power from those other phases and give them temporary mass. …It all created so many unnecessary sparks and innocent people had to pay the price.”

This was already another world.

The golden retriever standing by his side was eternally cut off from him.

Now two magicians this powerful could directly clash without any fear of the hospital collapsing or the working doctors and immobilized patients coming to harm.

“I am the fool who attempted to suppress the creation of sparks by creating a new mythology as cushioning between the many phases. Unfortunately, it didn’t work because the Christian church wanted to protect their monopoly on the concept of god and sent their billions of followers against me. But since the theory itself was sound, I can at least spirit someone away.”

The stage had been set.

Aleister and Rosencreutz both took a step forward.

Space was compressed and light was distorted.

Christian Rosencreutz held an old lamp made of glass. It contained a collection of energy said to be an inextinguishable light. Releasing only the smallest amount from the glass case transformed the gentle glow into a crimson serpent consuming all the oxygen in the air.

Aleister responded with two simple words.

“Great demon.”

“Kee hee hee! Ee hee hee hee hee, hee ha ha ha ha ha hah hah hah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!”

The red was twisted and bent.

It crashed into an invisible wall in front of Aleister and melted the concrete wall to the side.

The human did not bat an eye.

The initial clue had come from Kingsford. He knew how to control it.

“Do not rely on your past legends, CRC. Your true colors are showing.”

Rosencreutz sighed and tossed the eternal lamp over his shoulder like a child with a toy he had lost interest in.

Batlike wings flapped behind Aleister’s back and a deadly gale blew through the world.

It swept through every nook and cranny and everything it touched grew black and rotten.

The wind itself was colorless. The floor, walls, and ceiling gradually blackened, peeled away, and pursued Rosencreutz.

At some point, a flask of powder had appeared in CRC’s hand. No, it wasn’t clear if it truly was there. His mimicry of holding it may have been so perfect it created the illusion. Either way, the silver young man popped off the lid with his thumb and scattered the red powder. The legendary Rosicrucian cabal had not been pursuing anything as trivial as eternal life.

“Revolution.”

The world at large really did change.

The black color vanished. The air grew clean and full of negative ions, like deep in the forest. Control of this world repeatedly changed hands, like a tennis rally.

It was a casual thing.

A simple thing.

If this were in the outside world, the entire city would have rotted apart and then been buried in verdant trees.

“I see. You are not fighting on your own – you are boosting yourself by borrowing the power of another. Is that the source of the false confidence allowing you to speak so arrogantly to this old man?”

“Holy Guardian Angel.”

“And you have more than one helper. …But don’t you feel ashamed? This does not mean you have conquered anything. You have only hid behind the backs of those stronger than you while you fling rocks at me from safety.”

“What, you didn’t know?”

“?”

“Fine by me. Because that is what gives this conflict meaning.”

After a short pause, Christian Rosencreutz moved his eyes.

To view his own fingertip.

The pointer finger’s nail had split and it was bleeding.

“You claim to only need yourself, but you worked with your seven disciples to build the House of the Holy Spirit and you were placed in that special grave. So in the end, you were a magician who had to pay attention to symbols and colors with their origins in the land.”

Aleister didn’t hesitate to explain this.

Because it wasn’t worth hiding.

“So all I had to do was transport you to another world. You don’t have the land’s support anymore, CRC. You might as well be trying to use your phone’s GPS map on Mars. The rules change outside of the world you’re used to.”

“Hm.”

Christian Rosencreutz nodded. He honestly accepted his opponent’s claim.

But he didn’t stop there.

“But removing some of my functions does nothing at all to boost your strength, does it?”

Something exploded.

Rosencreutz had not moved a step. He only held his palm out. That was enough for something to go wrong inside Aleister’s chest. A rusty flavor rose up his throat, he couldn’t stop himself from coughing up red, and the female feet below the beige habit lifted from the floor.

It happened too fast for human senses and even for great demon and Holy Guardian Angel senses to follow. Aleister bounced several times down the hospital waiting room, knocking over the sofas and making a racket of destructive noises.

CRC looked at the back of his hand and his nail.

“Do you know what I did to you?”

This was not a cheap trick.

The very foundation was different.

Christian Rosencreutz blew boredly on his fingertip.

“Masters of the Rose never use a spell or magic circle as is. They extract whatever form of the mystical they require from the symbols hidden in the scene around them. The Rod of Asclepius, the cross, the Hippocratic Oath – hospitals are a treasure trove of miraculous symbols and elements.”

“I doubt…that’s what you really did.”

‘Heh heh. Because true experts do not talk at length? Why should I follow the rules set forth by that dead girl – Kingsford?”

The air was permeated by a flammability even more frightening than a dust explosion.

But nothing more happened. Aleister lacked the strength to fight back even when someone else was being ridiculed.

Something in the air changed.

The shifted phase had returned to normal. Christian Rosencreutz stood in an ordinary hospital waiting room – in an ordinary space where the swing of an arm would destroy a pillar or wall and kill someone.

Aleister was soaked with blood. He had been thrown across the waiting room, where he crashed through the sofas, rolled along the floor, and ended up seated with his back against a column.

“You fool! Just because you admire Kingsford’s way of life is no reason to let yourself meet the same end as her!”

Hearing Kihara Noukan’s voice told Aleister that his phase shift had been reverted. The human once known as the world’s wickedest man smiled weakly, unable to even get up.

CRC did not bother looking in his direction.

“Is that all the magicians of this era can do?”

But Aleister’s face showed no sign of panic or frustration.

Still collapsed among several broken sofas, the human smiled thinly and spoke.

“Did you forget why you’re here, CRC?”

“?”

After Kingsford, he was the second to place that look on CRC’s face.

Which meant those words were not for his own benefit.

He was leaving everything in the hands of the next challenger.

He had admired that expert and her way of life.

If he really did remind Kihara Noukan of her here, then he was honored.

“You want to kill time? You’re going to slaughter all of the Transcendents as punishment for reviving you into such a boring world?”

So he gave a snort of laughter.

Bloody Aleister’s eyes displayed obvious mockery.

Viewing anything greater than himself with skepticism had always been that human’s most defining trait. Even if it got him branded an eccentric and ostracized by the majority of the world.

And while people called him a lord of devils, he had discovered a truth no one else could understand.

In other words…

“I don’t know if you’re giving a plausible excuse to hide your true intentions or if you’re trying not to think about it yourself, but you’re afraid of the parents who brought you into this world, aren’t you? The Bridge Builders Cabal used a special method to revive you, so it’s entirely possible they could rearrange the ceremony’s process and symbols to instantly kill you again. You feared having your newfound freedom taken away, so you chose to attack your parents the instant you were reborn. You moved quick so you could catch those Transcendents off guard.”

Magical astral projection existed as a single spell with two processes: one that separated the mind from the body and another that returned the mind to the body. So by rearranging the separation process, one could achieve the return process. Necromancy and doll-based curses worked much the same. Very little magic only worked in one direction. It was much the same as an explosives technician placing as much emphasis on knowing how to cause explosions as on how to safely prevent them.

In an extreme example, the Anglican Church had created a grimoire library as a countermeasure against any and all magicians.

“The means of defeating you already existed. It was there from the beginning.”

“…”

“But you didn’t want to be bound once more, so you started by eliminating that. You wanted to avoid being a world-saving bike courier who had to listen to everything the Transcendents said and save a great multitude of strangers at their behest.”

His surprise attack on Alice Anotherbible, the greatest threat, had successfully killed her and the Bridge Builders Cabal had broken apart without her to hold it together. Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, or any of the others could never gather all of those Transcendents in one place again.

Exactly as CRC had hoped.

Peel away the theatric gestures and meaningless words and that was all he was.

Aleister could state it with such confidence because he always made sure to question the gods and charismatic leaders that the people of the world heaped so much unconditional praise on.

“I was never here to prove myself. My own survival isn’t even part of my win condition. You set the rules yourself, remember? Simply put, this is a battle over whether or not we can protect Anna Sprengel.”

“You mean…?”

The human was calmly approaching the territory of a true expert.

He had approached the very entrance of the stairway available only to magicians that led to being a powerful individual while also respecting others and pouring all your efforts into helping someone else.

The great goddess of wisdom had left this task with him.

So the bloody human smiled and made his point.

“I win as long as the illusion slayer boy arrives in time.”

Part 14

And.

Kamijou Touma was frozen with fear.

He had just taken the first step into the front entrance of the frog-faced doctor’s hospital.

He found himself in an alternate world of red and black.

He had seen it all before. Everything around him was destroyed, someone he knew lay in a pool of blood, and only Christian Rosencreutz stood tall and unconcerned.

“He expects a lot out of you.”

“…”

“So what will you do? After all your losses, surely you do not think you can win this all on your own. Will you seek the help of your Transcendent companions? Will you stand back and play at being their commander to wear this old man down? Heh heh. This old man has no problem with that. None at all. My goal is to kill all of the Transcendents anyway. If you will send them to the front line – kee hee hee – I will gratefully accept the gift.”

“Don’t listen,” said Aradia, holding out a slender arm to stop Kamijou. “CRC would never say anything that benefits us.”

Kamijou didn’t even have time to glance over at her.

But he could sense the powerful aura of “don’t rise to the bait” radiating from her.

Mut Thebes was out of the fight, possibly dead.

Aradia, the Bologna Succubus, and Good, Old Mary were the only Transcendents here now. If they didn’t make full use of everything they had, there was no winning this. In a way, Imagine Breaker was an even rarer trait than the Transcendents, so they couldn’t afford to have it taken out here.

“Kee hee hee. Ee hee, kee hee hee hee hee.”

He approached.

Christian Rosencreutz approached them from head on.

His fingers stroked through his silver beard.

“What, done already? No new options? No trump cards? No hopes that you will discover a power beyond all your known limits when backed into a corner while guarding someone behind you?”

This was not the action of someone fighting on the same level. It was a simple slaughter with a clear line drawn between predator and prey.

In those extreme circumstances, everything Kamijou had seen flashed before his eyes.

Was there no clue there?

Had he left any stone unturned?

He knew it was no use, but his instinct to never give up kept the gears of his mind fruitlessly turning.

• Alice Anotherbible and Anna Kingsford were dead.

• Anti-Skill and Judgment had accomplished nothing.

• The unmanned tanks with self-destruct drones and the mobile combat vehicles hadn’t stood a chance.

• The massive gunship hadn’t done any real damage.

• Index’s knowledge as a grimoire library and Othinus’s tactics as a Magic God weren’t enough to keep up.

• Academy City’s #3 Railgun and #5 Mental Out hadn’t worked either.

• The tungsten alloy bombing from satellite orbit and the particle accelerator cannon using the Hula Hoop hadn’t stopped him.

• The Transcendents’ biggest attacks, like the Bologna Succubus’s Cold Mistress and Good, Old Mary’s Tribikos, had failed to eliminate him.

• So had Aleister.

Even though it was just this one man.

Even though the monster named Christian Rosencreutz was only marching across the city on his own.

Run away, regroup, try again.

That was the most Kamijou’s group had managed. They had lost all three defense lines and now the battle had moved inside the hospital in District 7. There was no more room to fall back. They were right next to the ICU where Anna Sprengel was clinging to life thanks to all the medical equipment. If the silver young man set foot inside there, it was all over.

But.

Even so.

The boy realized something while viewing this nightmarish result.

Had he really, truly given this his all?

It was true this was on a larger scale than normal.

If he clenched his right fist and rushed onto the storm of bullets and bombs on the battlefield, he wouldn’t be any help and might even get shot in the back by friendly fire. Wielding the power to destroy illusions would do no good here.

However…

(What can I do?)

He pondered that.

Driven to the very edge, Kamijou Touma truly thought about it this time.

Could he really accept this?

Could he step out of CRC’s way and give up on Anna Sprengel because he couldn’t win this? They weren’t doing it because he had bowed his head or because they were only defending themselves. Anna was a villain, but those people had still stood back up because they could believe in her future. Was he going to stand here and watch them be slaughtered because he was out of cards and couldn’t stop CRC?

Kamijou sensed something deep in his chest.

It was his pulse.

He couldn’t do that.

Like hell he could.

So he had to lay the unfair methods out on the table too. He had to look to the options he wasn’t supposed to use. If he hadn’t done that, then he hadn’t really given this his all. He had only been watching. He hadn’t reached out his hand, so he didn’t know what cards were left in his deck. That wasn’t good enough. Kamijou, the one who had wanted to fight all alone for Anna, had strayed the furthest from that goal. He couldn’t let it end that way. No matter what.

(That’s right.)

He had to struggle.

Struggle harder!!

(There is one more thing.)

He wanted to save Anna Sprengel. He wanted to prevent innocent people from being killed along with her. The only way of making those things happen was to defeat Christian Rosencreutz here. He knew that. He didn’t see any errors in those premises. But what exactly could he do? What had he himself done up to this point?

He had the power to destroy any and all illusions.

But that was all his power could do.

He could do nothing against a harsh reality. Could he really accept that?

Wasn’t he still holding one option in reserve?

“…”

Kamijou Touma knew that this world was really and truly cruel and that people would die if a bad situation was left unfixed. Alice Anotherbible’s merciless death was proof enough of that.

So many people would die if things continued like this.

Aogami Pierce, who knew nothing of what was happening.

The frog-faced doctor who was working to save the unconscious wicked woman.

Human Aleister who had fought with all his might for nothing in return.

And.

Anna Sprengel who could no longer move her own lungs and heart.

So.

“Misaka.”

Kamijou grabbed his phone and spoke into it.

Witch Goddess Aradia looked up in sudden realization.

“Stop, Kamijou Touma! You mustn’t do that!!”

“Fire on this GPS signal. Fire through the window to the left of the 1st floor’s front entrance. Do that and we can defeat Rosencreutz!!”

He got exactly what he wanted.

Outside the hospital’s walls, Misaka Mikoto likely had no idea what was going on in there.

But Aradia saw it all.

She saw the beam, heard the boom, felt the shockwave.

It blasted straight through the wall and it struck its intended target.

Everything played out as Kamijou had wanted.

The color red splattered out.

Kamijou Touma’s right arm was torn off at the shoulder and flew through the air.

Christian Rosencreutz raised his palm and turned his gaze toward the arm to obliterate it. A little thing like Imagine Breaker could never fully defend against his attack. In fact, its presence had limited Kamijou’s options.

So.

Kamijou clenched his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut.

And he used his own willpower to force them back open.

At the same time, something shot from his right shoulder with a dull thud. The translucent mass was very obviously something other than blood. After grasping the concept of up and down, it audibly took shape. It became a great maw lined with ferocious fangs.

“Fine.”

In other words, a dragon.

Kamijou heard a voice from somewhere. It came from inside his own head.

Another boy spoke clearly.

“I was just about fed up with him myself. No more holding back. If you didn’t do it, I was about to come out on my own!!!”

The boy spoke softly, the whites of his eyes dyed red from burst capillaries.

He sounded like he was casting a curse on someone.

“I only needed that right hand gone.”

Part 15

He had summoned it himself.

Just once in his life, he chose to cheat.

In that instant, the ordinary high school boy ceased to be a mere Level 0.

Between the Lines 3

Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany.

“Mistress, can’t we stop for lunch? It’s well past noon… And how do you plan a trip to Germany without including a chance to eat a Hamburg or a Frankfurt!?”

“What do you think we are here to do? And are you planning to tear up a map and eat it? Here, Lilith, your bottle.”

Dion Fortune complained about her empty stomach, but Mina Mathers only gave her an icy look while soothing the baby in the baby carrier.

The black cat witch was here to track down Anna Sprengel’s footprints, but she had known the answer before the investigation even began.

“If you look to the accepted knowledge in modern Western magic, the answer is obvious. Miss Sprengel was a nonexistent magician. At the time of the Golden cabal’s founding, Westcott wanted to give the new cabal greater history and legitimacy, so he invented the fictional magician so he could create the legend of receiving permission from a secret cabal. It was all a one-man show put on through the medium of letters.”

“And when they searched Europe in the usual way, they never could find the First Temple, right?”

“Felkin and others wanted to see the Secret Chiefs so bad they threw money around to wander all across Europe before finally traveling as far as New Zealand.”

“Why do men love endless adventures so much? Not that I like the idea of giving up before even attempting a search and concluding the legendary First Temple doesn’t physically exist and only existed in the hearts of everyone involved in the Golden cabal.”

“It’s just like how it’s far easier to write off paranormal phenomena as neurological or psychological illusions than to try to prove them as something physical. Just goes to show that people have always fallen back on the same excuses when presented with a challenging problem. But at the time, most members thought there was no point in searching out the physical address when they could simply astral project themselves to another phase and receive messages from the Secret Chiefs and their priestess there. Just like thinking remote work is good enough as long as you’re connected with your coworkers by a fiber optic network. All the while, they had no idea who that vague, faceless shadow really was.”

That was their starting point.

And with that in mind…

“Useless student. In that case, what is this?”

“That’s a really good question, mistress.”

There was no building there.

Only stone blocks lined up on the ground in an L-shape. It was a portion of a building’s foundation. The supposedly nonexistent Licht Liebe Leben Temple had left behind physical evidence, just like any historical ruins.

“Mistress, what does this mean? I just want to drink a local beer already. One of those first-rate dark beers the Germans pride themselves in and are legendary for being cheaper than water.”

“We are not here to drink. Aren’t you supposed to be investigating at the British people’s expense?”

“Ehh? Why should you care about British finances?”

“Because Mina Mathers was originally a magician in London, my foolish student.”

The First Temple really did exist.

Or some remnant of it did.

What purpose was hidden behind this contradiction?

“Ugh. The Anna Sprengel in the secret letters was basically Westcott talking with his own sockpuppet, right? We aren’t going to discover that coroner was parading around Germany in women’s clothing, are we?”

“I honestly think that would be the funniest possible explanation, but I doubt it.”

Mina Mathers crouched down for a closer inspection of the L-shaped foundation.

Testing the carbon isotopes in the materials would provide their accurate age.

Just because they looked old didn’t mean they couldn’t be quite new.

And there were things that only showed up in a very detailed deception.

“Most likely, there was a magician called Anna who specialized in Rosicrucian magic. Anna isn’t exactly a rare name, after all.”

“Bweh? But if she was using a fake name, surely she could have come up with something better than Anna.”

“You would think that, wouldn’t you, Dion Fortune? Or should I say-”

“Cough, cough! How about we stay on topic, mistress? There’s no reason to bring that up!!”

“Violet Firth. It seems like a perfectly cute name to me.”

“Why would you go ahead and say my real name when I made it so obvious I didn’t want you too!?”

The girl who normally went by her super cool screenname was blushing, tearful, and upset. She must not have liked her name for some reason.

But ultimately, this may not have been a rare occurrence in the world of magicians where powerful individuals determined their own value.

If you worried too much what others would think of you and tried to correct yourself to their liking, you would never excel as a magician.

(If you want to go there, my husband was basically unemployed and claimed to be Scottish nobility. He got so obsessed with it he named his own bloodline and invented all sorts of other details to go along with it. He was living proof that if you have the passion, you can continue your teenage cringe well into adulthood.)

“Sigh…”

“Mistress, that was a heavy sigh. Is something wrong?”

“Oh, I was just thinking how tiring it is to be the only sensible person around.”

“Mercilessly delivering kitty claw attacks the instant you lose your temper is your idea of ‘sensible’?”

“I do not punch and I do not use the kitchen knives. That puts me well on the side of sensible.”

“I notice you didn’t mention palette knives. You’re always swinging those metal weapons around.”

“What makes you think you can criticize your own teacher, my hopeless student? Some gentle punishment is in order to swiftly correct such an unfortunately mistaken soror.”

“You’re proving my point! How is this ‘gentle’!? Ow, owww!?”

Mina Mathers immediately began some corporal punishment by shoving a metal spatula against Dion Fortune’s navel and rubbing it over her clothes, but the concept of a healthy educational environment was still a work in progress from the late 19th century to the early 20th century.

“Hee hee. This is only a wife finally reaching the end of her patience and making an adorable scratching attack with only her wrist. Meow, meow☆”

“Stop trying to pass your violence off as adorable! I was the primary victim and my back looked like a tiger had clawed it! Big cats are not the same as housecats! Your student nearly died!!”

The (according to the teacher) nonsensible student’s testimony was thrown out.

Before scraping off a sample, Mina Mathers made an accurate sketch rather than snapping a photo with her phone. All while she soothed Lilith in the baby carrier.

“But if we don’t know what Anna this Anna is, that means she is not a major magician. And not many people would have listened to what a no-name magician said. Even if this mystery Anna had proper Rosicrucian knowledge, she wouldn’t have had a way to pass it on.”

“That would explain why everyone looked down on her, decided to do things their own way, took shortcuts, and skipped pages in the thick grimoires.”

What happened afterwards went without saying.

What would happen if someone got bored after the first few pages of reading a flight manual more than 8cm thick, shut the book, and climbed into the cockpit? It didn’t take much thought to imagine the tragedy that would unfold.

The Rosicrucian cabal was also known as the unseen university.

All that knowledge was lined up in the way calculated to best foster learning, so you could not just cherry pick which parts interested you. But the hobbyists had grabbed only the most impactful and exciting terms and started using the magic without knowing what the incantations and symbols would actually do. They didn’t want to study, but they did want a degree and an academic history. The desire was understandable, but granting it would not make anyone happy. In some cases, it could even put lives at risk.

She must have despaired.

Both at the ignorant masses who refused to learn things in the proper order and at herself for being too unimportant to guide them properly.

The accuracy of her knowledge was not the issue.

No one trusted in her enough to think what she was saying was accurate.

So they looked down on her, so they failed spectacularly, so they suffered meaningless deaths and mental destruction. Again and again. When none of it would have happened if they had just listened.

And….

“She wanted a name for herself. The problem wasn’t her foolish students. Her own lack of fame had ultimately led to all the deaths and destroyed minds. If she were only someone important, she thought she could correctly guide the students who arrived in search of wisdom.”

“…”

“At the same time in England, Westcott wanted a fictional legend behind the creation of the Golden cabal, so he began his faked exchange of letters. It must have come as a shock to him when he sent a letter to an arbitrary address to help create his fictional persona and then received a real reply from someone claiming to be Anna Sprengel.”

“Yeah, that’d scare you.”

“To say the least. His face would also have been burning with embarrassment.”

In modern times, it would be like the ideal wife he had imagined in his head, or the girl he had created on the character creation screen, suddenly coming to life.

Had he felt fear, or joy? Westcott had not discussed the truth of the letters with anyone until the day he died. Not even with the other Golden magicians.

“Was it automatic writing or sleepwalking? Had another Golden magician peeked at his letter and responded as a joke? Or had the ceremonial act of writing fictional letters so many times created Miss Sprengel in distant Germany? As a magician and a coroner, he must have come up with several possible explanations.”

“Yeah, it was smart of him not to go to the church to confess or go running to a mental hospital.”

“Confessing involvement in magic to an Anglican priest would never end well and you can guess the quality of 19th century mental healthcare. He was one of the few sensible members of the eccentric Golden cabal. He cared about keeping up appearances. If he had confided with anyone, the talk of magic cabals and writing letters to himself would have made them think the man had never left his teenage fantasies behind.”

That explained why the foundation of the First Temple remained in Nuremberg.

Miss Sprengel was a role Anna had borrowed to put real weight behind her name.

Traveling all the way to Nuremberg and fabricating these ruins would have been a simple enough task to that end. She had created a surprise for any Golden magician who might travel all the way from England to southern Germany to check.

Dion Fortune sounded disgusted by it all.

“So you’re suggesting Anna read through Westcott’s letters and then altered a part of Nuremberg just to match his fictional story? That seems like a lot.”

“She must have wanted to be thorough. Westcott, Mathers, and the others believed in and respected this Miss Sprengel who appeared out of nowhere, but for Anna, the rise of the world’s largest cabal in London was no more than advertisement for her as a magician said to have played a role in its founding. The end of the 19th century was before World War One, so the center of the world at the time was the UK, not America. London would have been the best possible location for that kind of advertisement.”

However, this puzzle had proved too difficult and the Golden magicians who traveled Europe to meet the Secret Chiefs and their priestess never did find the trick set up in Nuremberg.

“Miss Sprengel was a complete lie,” whispered Mina Mathers. No matter what they found, that remained unchanged. “Even if she was named Anna, she was no more than a half-baked magician who could never hope to defeat Kingsford. But it is true she worried over her problems and poured her heart and soul into preserving and expanding the Rosicrucian cabal. And ultimately, that led to the creation of the Golden cabal in distant England. Most likely, Kingsford recognized Miss Sprengel as a true magician who had accomplished something she could not. No matter how it might have happened.”

Anna Kingsford was real.

Anna Sprengel was also real.

With those two facts established, Black Cat Witch Mina Mathers muttered under her breath.

“Then who exactly is the Christian Rosencreutz both of those legendary women believed in and dedicated themselves to?”

Chapter 4: At the Center – Duel_and_Struggle,CRC.

Part 1

The hospital’s 1st floor hallway was a straight path to the ICU where Anna Sprengel slept.

“Heh heh.”

The red-clad silver young man’s shoulders shook with laughter.

He mocked the foolishness of Kamijou Touma whose shoulder was gushing blood where his arm should be.

“I wondered what trump card you would rely on in the end, but all you did was break the glass container? That one normally sleeps within his coffin, but he naturally awakens when he locates the disease plaguing this world and returns to his coffin once he is no longer needed. Producing the world-healing elixir is all well and good, but how long can you last like this? Given the rate of blood loss, I would guess 10 minutes at the mo-”

Kamijou Touma wasn’t listening.

A single step covered all the necessary distance. He softly sent the translucent dragon emerging from his right shoulder toward CRC.

It didn’t feel like punching with a fist or biting and tearing with great jaws.

It was probably a miniscule attack like a forehead flick.

A mass of compressed sound erupted a moment later.

That was all it took to launch Rosencreutz several dozen meters down the hospital hallway.

“Oh, ohh!”

This result shouldn’t have been possible.

Misaka Mikoto, the other #5 girl, Academy City’s next-gen weaponry, the Transcendents of the Bridge Builders Cabal, the grimoire library, the Magic God, and even legendary magicians like Aleister and Kingsford had failed to achieve this.

This was the very first clean hit against him.

And it happened almost too easily.

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!?”

He bounced repeatedly, producing the sounds of physical destruction, the screams of muscle and bone, and the wet hacking of bloody coughs.

But none of that explained CRC’s trembling.

He was looking down at his own left hand.

Still seated on the floor, the silver young man viewed his own hand pressed against the floor and he trembled.

“You made this old man…touch the floor?”

This was a first.

It hadn’t been allowed to happen even once before now.

He had always stood tall on the battlefield. His march across Academy City had continued unabated even during the satellite’s heavy metal bombing and the Hula Hoop’s largescale particle accelerator cannon. With that in mind, just how much power had this small result required?

This far surpassed human limits.

The boy had chosen to cross that line.

Because he had sworn he would save the greatest wicked woman who could only wait for death.

“…”

Kamijou Touma provided no response.

He did not speak up in triumph and he kept his head lowered, hiding his expression.

A change came over the boy’s own shadow at his feet.

It flickered.

Unnaturally, like a dying fluorescent light.

What had this power cost him?

It was like the boy, who supposedly had a physical body, was shifting into the realm of shapeless and weightless illusion.

“………………………………………………………………………”

He took another step.

That was enough for the world to distort and strain. The space around him definitely sank. If he had stepped with greater purpose, it might have triggered an inwards gravitational collapse in that space, creating an irreparable hole.

The wordless action conveyed a single purpose.

Kamijou Touma was stepping forward to approach CRC once more.

This wasn’t over.

He wouldn’t let it end with just the one attack.

He would tear CRC apart, chew him up, and fully eliminate him from the world. He would save the people he considered important, even if it meant staining his hand with blood.

He had made the decision.

“I see.”

Rosencreutz did not speak at length here.

When taken to their absolute limit, formulas became beautifully simple.

Just like E=mc², CRC’s conclusion was a concise one.

Cracking sounds came from all across his body as he stood back up. He lifted his hips from the floor, placed a hand on the wall, and allowed himself all the unsightly actions it required.

“I admit it. You have convinced this old man: this world is a fascinating place☆ Eh heh heh heh! I truly did not think it had anything left to satisfy my playfulness and eliminate my frustrations. Ah hee hee hee!?”

His eyes were directed straight at the dragon boy.

Drowning in his own passions, the holy man finally viewed that single boy as an enemy.

Kamijou Touma and Christian Rosencreutz.

A clash between superhumans had begun.

Part 2

The air was strongly compressed.

There was no need to hold anything back.

Kamijou approached from straight ahead, so Christian Rosencreutz held out his palm.

That was an invisible attack capable of destroying anything.

That brutal spell was clearly magic, but not even Kamijou’s Imagine Breaker could have stopped it and it would have torn the arm off instead.

The compression of the air passed a certain point and it rumbled out like an explosion.

But Kamijou did not speak a word.

He instructed what lay beyond his nonexistent right arm and the invisible dragon moved slightly. That was enough to overturn all the assumptions.

The dragon’s maw – and its razor-sharp teeth – bit a black object, stopping it in its tracks.

The object was a bit larger than a golf ball.

“A…projectile?” muttered Aradia, her eyes widened in shock as she watched from the sidelines.

This was the identity of the extremely powerful magic that supposedly made defense impossible.

There was no mystery or miracle there. In fact, if a projectile was given a lethal amount of destructive force, it would naturally be moving too quickly to see with the naked eye. That unchangeable rule remained the same even when magic had influenced the logic. It was only a common parlor trick.

Kamijou did not bother with mockery. For that matter, he showed no human reaction at all. He only swung his arm dragon horizontally, tossing the annoyance of an object aside.

Why waste time on ordinary emotion when he could dedicate that time to devouring his prey?

That was the only thought behind his actions.

“Hee hee. So you can finally fight back and let me have some fun.”

Rosencreutz continued firing.

Annoyed and irritated by the identical attacks, Kamijou’s dragon released a deafening roar.

It was possible the boy couldn’t control it himself. The sloppily swung jaws deflected CRC’s projectiles to the side, sending them ricocheting toward hospital rooms with no connection to the fight.

The silver young man grinned.

As if to say he had guided things in that direction.

But the fearsome attacks vanished into thin air before contacting the wall.

“Oh?” breathed CRC in fascination.

He had sensed something worthy of his interest.

“You eliminated my attacks without permission? No, this is a simple matter of willpower. Any attack launched without a powerful intent to kill will be swallowed up and destroyed. And any attack that misses its mark swiftly loses all meaning.”

“…”

“After experiencing an improbably uniform amount of misfortune, you loathe lucky shots from your enemy. And this old man loathes all coincidental actions that go against my passions and playfulness. I see. Our clashing wills have distorted space on the macro level. But,” said Rosencreutz with a mocking grin. He held his palm out to the side, casually aiming at the wall there. “Kee hee hee, ee hee, hwa ha ha ha ha ha!! That leaves me plenty of room to play. As long as this old man directs his intent to kill toward those strangers, I can still hit them!”

Space was immediately sliced through over a distance of more than 100m.

But not because CRC had sliced through the innocent hospital patient beyond that wall.

A moment before he could, Kamijou Touma jabbed his dragon jaws forward and had it exhale a violent beam of light. Then he swung the jaws straight up to slice CRC’s right arm off at the shoulder.

Rosencreutz showed no interest in his own right arm spinning through the air.

“Mend.”

As soon as he spoke that one word, the nearby rubble gathered around and formed something like the smooth arm of a mannequin to stop his bleeding. This was not a resurrection that returned him to normal. He was only mending by creating something new. After traveling the world, gathering all sorts of knowledge, and going around teaching people the secret art to create a human from scratch inside a still, this was a simple task for him. He didn’t even bother checking the movement of the arm that was lither and more beautiful than a real human arm. Instead, he raised his gaze straight up.

The ceiling had split.

But not because it had been sliced through.

Like custard or gelatin, the hospital’s walls and ceiling had separated themselves to the left and right to avoid Kamijou’s attack. Including the beds, the medical equipment, and the wiring in the walls. It all forgot its original texture, spread apart at the center like a slime, and then reconnected like nothing had happened.

It was like the building itself had a mind and a life of its own.

Christian Rosencreutz drew on his vast wisdom to instantly explain it.

This was not creation or destruction.

It was…

“Did you command it? The intimidation of the crowned dragon king can command all living things, but also all inanimate objects?”

Those words carried deeper meaning than it initially seemed. And not just the silly risk of CRC himself obeying the command if he got careless.

Stray shots, hostages, other’s lives?

With this ultimate power, Kamijou wouldn’t have to worry about any of that.

Which meant…

There truly was no one in the world who could stop Kamijou Touma after this monstrous transformation!!

He attacked again. But this time, it wasn’t just a beam flying from the dragon’s jaws.

The dragon itself detached from his right shoulder and flew out.

“Hwa ha ha hah!!”

CRC laughed loud, swung his body upwards, and dodged by breaking through the ceiling.

He had reacted to the real threat rather than let it hit him and see what happened. And at this point, he had finally quit relying on magic. He had needed to move faster than he could put together a spell.

The battlefield spread beyond the one long hallway.

They moved to a rehabilitation room, a break room, an operating room, and finally a nurse station on one of the higher floors.

It all looked the same, so Kamijou couldn’t tell what floor he was on. But the boy taking a step beyond humanity did see a familiar face down the hallway.

It was Aogami Pierce.

He was a powerless high school boy. But he was standing protectively in front of a small girl in pajamas who was holding a picture book. His legs were shaking, but he hadn’t frozen in place. He had purposefully chosen to stand there.

Whether he was more interested in the young girl or her mother was unclear, though.

Right and wrong didn’t matter here. He wasn’t bound by that.

Seeing that his awful friend had meant what he said, the boy who had partially fallen into illusion briefly smiled like he always did in the classroom, but then he renewed his resolve. Kamijou Touma forced his gaze away and viewed his powerful foe instead.

CRC – Christian Rosencreutz.

He could not let that monster go free and focus on that boy and girl.

No matter what.

“Gahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

“Oh? Kee hee hee, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!”

They clashed head on.

Kamijou swung the silver young man to the side.

He kicked him away and then tossed him up into the floor above.

He didn’t stop there, of course. He had already begun his next action.

The air froze.

The giant maw gnashed its teeth intermittently, creating a disturbing sound not even a guillotine or bear trap could have mimicked.

“Kh.”

While clinging magnetically to the hospital’s outside wall and trying to pursue the fight up to the upper floors, Mikoto found her feet pinned to the outside of a window. Pinned by fear. Her instincts were running wild and weighing heavily on her reason.

“What…is this? A psychological form of paralysis?” gasped the blonde girl with her arms around the #3’s hips.

If they would ensure that even the next attack would hit no matter how long the leadup, then the intimidation of those gnashing fangs could be called a surefire attack.

But it didn’t work on the silver young man.

An unpleasant sweat wet his brow, but he was still smiling

He acted out of playfulness and a desire to blow off some steam, so this could not bind him. After all, not even the #5 power had worked on him when it was used by its mysterious owner. CRC was a monster with the mentality needed to continue smiling in this situation.

And Kamijou didn’t care.

Something flew from the dragon maw like a whip. It was a long, chameleon-like tongue. CRC stepped back before it could ensnare him, but then he realized something.

“Hm?”

He was gone.

Kamijou Touma had disappeared in the brief moment CRC’s eyes were off the boy.

But he could sense him.

A great pressure was approaching from the front!!

“You are a poikilotherm – that is, you have the ability to blend into the surrounding environment. But did you really think that would work against this old man?”

CRC swung a single arm, not hesitating to strike a point of empty space.

A cross with several sharp rose vines tangled around appeared there. It was more than a meter tall and it was entirely made of heavy gold.

It didn’t matter. A disturbing sound of bending metal rang out.

Kamijou and the dragon maw appeared out of thin air. The fangs and the cross struck each other.

The result was a series of snapping sounds.

“Kh.”

Seeing the cross bending, CRC kicked a nearby stretcher into the shutting jaws. It could be hard to tell since they were made so light for greater portability, but the stretcher was made of sturdy stainless steel to ensure it didn’t drop a critical patient. It wasn’t going to break in a crocodile’s jaws or in a brown bear’s grasp.

But the jaws were not slowed.

They closed at the exact same speed, the row of fangs approaching Rosencreutz’s hand holding the cross.

That cross was not magic.

Nor was it an illusion, but the arm jaws still chewed it up and erased the intruding wreckage from the world.

Those jaws would destroy even unshakable reality.

This was a new power Kamijou Touma had acquired at the cost of his own destruction.

It was an attack that allowed no response.

And most likely, it was a tragic power gained when someone gave up on someone else.

“I see.”

Rosencreutz smiled while dripping with a sweat of both tension and a desire to fight.

That smile contained an unusual heat as he shouted.

“Tell me. Why go to such lengths to protect Anna Sprengel? Hee hee, how much longer do you have left? What did you discover by accepting your own assured destruction?”

Only now did human language leave Kamijou Touma’s lips.

In a situation which screamed that doing so was the abnormality here.

“I will…protect Anna.”

But these were definitely his words.

Because…

“I…wrong to…search out…reason…excuse to fight…”

That was the final humanity left inside the boy who had become a monster.

It was like a tiny stone rattling around inside him, but it was something he couldn’t afford to lose.

So he refused to lose it.

That ordinary boy would never again hang his head and overlook a magical atrocity.

“Interesting – kee hee – but not good enough!”

Rosencreutz held his empty palm out toward the boy’s face.

While their weapons were locked.

That attack had already been identified as a projectile. But in this moment, the invisible dragon could not move to stop the point-blank projectile attack.

With the unpleasant sound of the air being compressed, Kamijou Touma’s entire head was obliterated.

He didn’t even have time to blink.

Kamijou took another step forward like nothing had happened. His head had already regenerated. A dragon tail appeared out of thin air and twirled away as a substitute. That was likely a lizard’s tail that would take on any damage he took. But Kamijou knew without being told that it was a move he could only use once.

Now that he knew he had that option, he wished he had held onto it for longer.

His gaze shifted to the side. The action showed some lingering regret. It all felt like it was happening to someone else. Single use and not knowing the effect until you used it was a devastatingly bad combination.

And with his eyes still in that direction, he casually sent the Dragon Strike straight toward CRC.

“Tch.”

Rosencreutz immediately fell back.

He escaped beyond the reach of the snapping jaws, but Kamijou did not bat an eye.

The entire surface of the invisible dragon jaws erupted. All its razor-sharp scales shot out. They rushed out to pummel Rosencreutz’s entire body like a point-blank shotgun blast.

“Ohhhhh!” shouted CRC just before a white steam explosively filled the space.

In the Rosicrucian cabal, clouds were an important symbol of covering up wisdom and truth to prevent the unworthy from viewing it. Inside that cloud, no attack could hit him even if made from 0cm away. The entire space could be filled with a dense scattershot, but it would be as useless as trying to attack a cat that may or may not be there because no one could observe it.

Kamijou swept the dragon horizontally to tear the thick cloud apart in an instant and then the color red sprayed out.

The cloud didn’t matter at all.

The dragon released its breath.

It looked like a sharp purple-shining blade, but was that actually the poison stored in an evil dragon’s body being released at extreme pressure?

The box was shredded, the cat was forced out to establish its existence, and then it was killed.

“Kee hee.”

CRC laughed and took immediate evasive action, but also ignored the deadly toxin traveling through his bloodstream.

That silver young man had many legends told of him, but he was an alchemist at heart. He used alchemy as a starting point for all of his miracles, from the artificial life within the crystal to the red elixir.

So…

“You would use a nonexistent toxin against this old man? All poisons and harmful substances can be converted into medicines and beneficial substances if handled properly. Just like radiation can induce the cancerization of cells, but it is also used to treat cancer. It would be rude to not present you with my own wisdom in return!!”

Rosencreutz produced a deck of cards in his hand.

He fanned them out and went on to rotate them in a full circle in violation of gravity.

“The secret spell of Rota can be flipped around to make Taro, thus it can be converted into the cards that indicate the 10 spheres and the 22 pathways. Awaken, 78 cards. You are the one and only proper entrance to the light pouring down from beyond the tree – that is, the Ain Soph Aur, Ain Soph, Ain!!”

A violent white light exploded from the emptiness at the center of the card circle.

A beam of light sharper than a razor scorched the air as it rushed toward Kamijou’s right arm. The all-destroying dragon maw was split in two. While he was dragged around by the chaotically thrashing dragon, even more blood gushed from the boy’s shoulder.

The toxic red splattered across the floor and walls.

Christian Rosencreutz scoffed at the colorful artwork.

“Hee hee hee hee hee! How much longer now? Feeling lightheaded? Can’t stop the cold sweat? Worried by your pulse pounding in your chest? Nothing you do can reach this old man!! Even if you wring out every last drop from the depths of your heart!!”

A moment later, beams of light rushed out from seemingly every direction.

“Wha-!?”

CRC realized the boy’s bloodstains had drawn out strange patterns.

The instant he gasped in realization of what those patterns meant, the magic circles glowed with a disturbing light.

The floor and walls bubbled redly. It wasn’t just the white beams. Crimson serpents that should have been controlled by a lamp emerged, as did the yellow Citrinitas sand that had engulfed Los Angeles.

They surrounded CRC and came at him all at once.

His right arm was already fake, so he sacrificed that while backing away from the deadly chaos, his eyes widening at witnessing what shouldn’t have been possible.

“A scientific esper like you has entered the realm of magic?”

That was no longer CRC’s exclusive territory. Kamijou had intruded on the legend of the rose and the cross.

But how could this be?

Christian Rosencreutz was no ordinary magician. His very existence had become a legend. He refused to accept that even a Rosicrucian expert could understand and immediately make use of the spells he used.

But the fact remained that the red blood splattered on the walls and floor crawled, glowed, and bubbled.

It all drew out secret texts and magic circles known only to CRC. Even though these were the most secret of spells that he had never even shared with the others at the House of the Holy Spirit where they had all shared so much knowledge like they were sharing a meal. Not even the grimoire library would have been able to find these spells if she searched for them.

Had Kamijou Touma already evolved into a monster who could access the world itself and automatically use the magic he found there?

Something occurred to Rosencreutz once he considered that possibility.

…Known only to CRC?

“I get it now. This is a Rorschach test.”

He should have caught on quicker.

An esper like Kamijou was using magic but showing no side effects.

“The magic knowledge did not come from within this broken esper. He showed this old man indistinct bloodstains, which I interpreted as the secret texts and magic circles I knew, unwittingly drawing out their magic!”

But however it had been done, the magic known only to Rosencreutz had still bared its fangs against him. Knowing the logic behind it did not stop his mind from imagining those shapes when he saw the bloodstains.

Of course, there was risk to Kamijou as well. He had no way of guiding what Rosencreutz imagined when he saw the bloodstains. This was a double-edged sword that could just as easily capture Kamijou himself in a powerful magical blast.

“Trithemius!!” shouted CRC, intricately moving his fingers.

Immediately, the magic light approaching him froze in place and stopped moving. He had made use of the encryption method that Westcott had coincidentally discovered. Rosencreutz had applied a random encryption to the bloodstains which had become secret texts and magic circles, eternally locking them so they could never be used. Much like ransomware encrypting a hard drive.

Rosencreutz felt a sizzling sensation at his temple.

This wasn’t like before. This emotion was anger.

The silver young man’s internal state had shifted up a gear.

“You dare force this old man to use magic out of something other than passion or playfulness? You continue to prove yourself to be my greatest nemesis!!!”

So what?

Kamijou ignored that and took action.

Something grew from the base of the great jaws that had replaced his right arm. It resembled a giant cape, but it was actually a sinister bat wing. The single wing gathered the air and then flapped.

The air became a solid mass and then became an extraordinary projectile that flew through the hospital.

At the same time, all the windows frosted over, the air electrified, and thick bolts of lightning rushed toward Rosencreutz from every direction. Was this what would happen to someone if they were thrown inside a large, swollen cumulonimbus cloud?

“You have not just created wind. The air pressure obeys your will, allowing you to control the weather!?”

This was well within divine territory, making it a legit miracle.

It could be blessed rain, or it could be electric divine punishment.

And CRC could also control clouds. He brought two fingers to his mouth and blew between them. One cloud struck the other, the weather conditions were forcibly altered, and the lightning changed course.

Kamijou Touma was already there.

He had rapidly covered the space between them, arriving right in front of Rosencreutz.

“Kh.”

The silver young man split the floor below him and broke through every floor below that, ending up in the hospital’s basement.

He wasn’t afraid of a normal punch.

He only realized after the fact that this had been a downwards strike from directly above.

But the hospital itself hadn’t been damaged. All of the floors in the way had parted like gelatin all on their own. After dragon-tamer Kamijou jumped down after him, the holes silently closed back up on their own too.

CRC held his palm out toward a thick metal door.

“The red elixir can conquer all deadly disease and even manipulate the lifespan!”

With a series of solid clanking sounds, the door, a cart, a scanning device larger than a fridge, and various other things gathered together and took the shape of a giant doll. It didn’t matter that they were all inorganic items. A liquid nitrogen tank must have burst because a thick white frost covered it all.

But Kamijou took action before it could actually do anything. In fact, Kamijou had punched Rosencreutz down here because he wanted something down here: the medical waste incinerator.

That special electric furnace could reach temperatures as high as 3500 degrees Celsius.

“…”

The wall right next to Kamijou audibly broke.

The following crunching sounds did not come from the invisible dragon maw.

Kamijou Touma was chewing it in his own mouth.

And the boy raised his right arm. The front-facing dragon jaws opened as wide as possible. This was something new. Something massive and brutal filled the depths of that mouth with a dangerous light.

He didn’t hesitate to unleash it.

Magnetron Dragon Breath.

All the dust and moisture in the air burned as a fearsome white torrent tore away at Christian Rosencreutz.

Another taboo was revealed and that monster was backed even further into a corner.

Part 3

Light was compressed, sound was released in all directions, and yet no third party was affected.

Not one.

The girls had their hands full simply keeping up with the constantly moving battlefield. Misaka Mikoto moved freely along the hospital’s outer wall with her magnetism and Shokuhou Misaki held onto Mikoto’s hips, but both of them could only watch the intense fighting play out. That had to be the same for Aradia and the Bologna Succubus who were probably outside flying in the sky. No one could intervene in this direct clash between superhumans. Attempting to would cause it all to fall apart. Just like any stimulus to calmly simmering water could cause an explosive boil. No, that wasn’t it. That was only an excuse for their own inaction. Their real reasons were nothing so noble.

(It was me.)

Mikoto clenched her teeth at the thought.

She was staring pale-faced at where the boy’s right arm should have been.

(I pulled the final trigger!)

She was simply afraid to do anything more.

She felt a deep aversion, like she were facing an unknown curse. But this wasn’t a gloomy curse born of an individual’s grudge or hatred. She was overpowered by the same sense of wrongness people had toward viewing or touching something holy and inviolable.

“What am I supposed to do about this?” she muttered distractedly.

This may have been the same feeling Level 0 Kamijou Touma had felt when it was Anti-Skill, Judgment, the Level 5s, and the Transcendents doing the fighting.

Their roles had reversed.

Now that boy alone had complete control of the battlefield.

Only he could face this enemy.

Titles had lost all meaning.

And the situation was still underway. This was no time to be stuck at a standstill. Kamijou was not a fount of unlimited possibility. Nor did he have a hidden power or special ability.

His shadow was flickering unsteadily. This power was bought at the cost of his own destruction.

Which meant there had to be a time limit.

Part 4

Kamijou and Rosencreutz clashed head on and the boy broke through a wall, flying across the hallway leading to the elevator. He was knocked up the elevator shaft and rolled along the floor before coming to a stop.

He found himself in a large cafeteria.

He felt an unpleasant sensation below him.

He could barely see it without straining his eyes, but the culprit was yellow sand.

The color of defeat had permeated the area.

Even though a hospital needed to be as clean and sterile as possible.

“…”

Kamijou Touma silently stood up and then wobbled to the side.

As if he were struggling to support the weight of the massive jaws.

Blood was still gushing from the shoulder where his arm had been torn away. He was not going to last long like this. In just a few more minutes, he would collapse from blood loss and he would not be getting back up again.

He stared at CRC. At that man driven by playfulness and curiosity who was now smirking with sweat soaking his face.

“Oh.”

So.

Kamijou didn’t care what happened to himself. His own destruction had been part of the plan from the beginning.

He had to find some way of ending this before he ran out of time.

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

Guessing a major attack was coming, CRC grabbed something out of thin air.

Whatever it was, it glowed red.

“The ruby’s shine points to the pure red of the rose. That female symbol is a pair to the cross and can produce anything and everything. So mass-produce monsters of death and destruction here and now!!”

A tremor ran through the building.

And not just one. More and more 2m silver orbs known as Pneuma-less Shells appeared, until they had filled the space.

The giant silver bubbles all opened at once. Not even Rosencreutz knew what would emerge. Still holding the mother device – the symbol of the red rose – CRC only laughed.

These things absorbed mystical power like a shaman.

They mechanically decoded it.

And they released it into the world.

“Stone tools – the oldest form of deadly bludgeoning. Wooden sticks – the oldest form of deadly whipping. Uranium – the oldest form of radiation poisoning. The oldest form of drowning. The oldest form of deadly gunshot. The oldest form of deadly burning. The oldest form of vigilante killing. The oldest form of hanging. The oldest form of decapitation, of skewering, of deadly vibration, of crushing, of electrocution, of poisoning, of vehicular homicide, of karoshi, of mincemeat death, of explosive death, of death from being buried alive!!!”

They split open.

Kamijou clenched his teeth.

And he released a brutal purple breath from the dragon.

Mutual death was fine by him.

“Gahhhhhhh!?”

There were legends of that sort.

For example, Norse mythology told of a great serpent that had grown until it could surround the entire world. During the final battle of Ragnarok, that dragon even managed to defeat the #2 god at the cost of its own life.

“Jormungand from…Norse mythology? Did you use the weight that not even Thor could lift to forcibly crush your own wound and stanch the bleeding?”

Kamijou didn’t understand any of that.

And it didn’t matter if he did or not.

There was precedent. In exchange for losing a possibly deadly amount of blood, this dragon that emerged from his right hand had robbed all power from a girl after she became a lightning god.

“Kh.”

The right arm – the invisible dragon – gained further control over the boy.

The shadow at his feet flickered unsteadily. It looked ready to flicker out permanently at any moment.

But an iron will of “that’s fine with me” could be seen within the boy.

If he could protect Anna Sprengel and the people who had helped try and save her, he was willing to move beyond the boundaries of humanity here.

So when Kamijou Touma raised his head, the light in his eyes did not waver one iota.

“~ ~ ~!”

Tears formed in Rosencreutz’s eyes.

He had not succumbed to fear.

CRC took an objective view of his own crisis and was moved to tears like he was watching a movie.

“Ha ha.”

And that cheap and irresponsible emotion was what allowed that passion-driven wicked holy man to draw on his greatest power.

“Ah ha ha ha ha ha!! Incredible, simply incredible☆ This old man has actually being driven into a corner? Death has drawn so close? Hee hee. This is where it all begins. Once this old man pulls off a miraculous comeback and escapes alive, I will truly drown in my tearrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrs!!!”

That was like a trigger.

No matter how twisted and rotten he was, his playful side could resist the temptation of achieving mutual destruction with his nemesis.

And once he shifted fully toward survival, only one option remained.

Namely…

“Run away!!!”

He didn’t hesitate.

He broke a still-intact window and jumped out through it.

As much power as Kamijou now possessed, he had lost a lot of blood from his severed arm. There was no need to actually fight him. By moving far away, CRC could wait until Kamijou ran out of time and collapsed.

Kamijou would die on his own as things were and, if he were to try to use first aid to recover, CRC only had to slice off the boy’s head or tear out his heart.

Rosencreutz never would have allowed this before. Not because he was too proud. His playfulness and desire to blow off steam simply wouldn’t have accepted it.

But his objective had already changed.

Pride was just one form of enjoyment. Now that he had changed his objective from “victory” to “survival” and he longed for the pleasure of achieving that, he knew fleeing was the best option.

“Hee ha ha!! We will meet again after the barrier of time has crushed you and stolen everything from you!!” he shouted.

The very next moment, something exploded.

Rosencreutz was forced back inside the hospital.

It wasn’t a mysterious barrier or a never-before-seen ultimate attack spell.

It was no more than a 45cm piece of plastic.

An isosceles triangle flew just outside the window. It was a Snakehead drone and it wasn’t alone. A large group of them flew together like a flock of starlings or bats. The writhing mass of machines looked like a black serpent flying through the sky.

These were by no means elite crafts. All they did was locate their target, ignite their solid fuel, tackle their target at high speed, and detonate their internal explosives.

But they had still stopped Rosencreutz’s escape.

These were only mass-produced weapons, but CRC was only human. If he didn’t respond in some way, his body would be obliterated and he would lose his life. This wasn’t a decisive blow, but it still forced him to respond, limiting his options.

A voice spoke from their small speakers.

“Don’t try to carry the fate of this city on your own, you monstrous freak.”

This wasn’t about catching up or standing on the same field.

A group of disposable pawns was enough.

“You’re still human and one of Academy City residents I’m responsible for as Board Chairman. Don’t you dare forget that!!”

More and more drones ignited.

Each blast was no more powerful than a shoulder-fired anti-tank rocket and they didn’t do any real damage to CRC. But this was never meant to defeat that man. He had to throw out his pride as the #1. If these seemingly useless attacks could keep Rosencreutz still long enough for Kamijou Touma to deliver his own attack, that was more than enough of a win.

Part 5

It all began there.

Without that one act, they probably never would have had another opportunity.

Shokuhou Misaki bit her lip, made a decision, and aimed her TV remote.

“Don’t underestimate the power of a girl in love.”

She didn’t have to catch up.

But she still decided to make herself a part of this battle.

“Category 909: Preserve Consciousness. I will support you as much as it takes☆ So I’ll never forgive you if you relinquish your mind ability over something as silly as blood loss!!”

Kamijou Touma had been wobbling unsteadily side to side, but now he stood straight and solid.

This may not have had much of an effect on the boy when he had his right hand, but things had changed.

The Bologna Succubus joined in too.

“Oops, you beat me to it. But I’ll just add my rad Cold Mistress on top of that. The pleasures of death and resignation will reach you as the most excruciating pain, so don’t let your guard down, kid!!”

“Again she’s stealing my bit.”

“I have no idea what you mean♪”

Something had clearly shifted.

It was all turning against Christian Rosencreutz.

Maybe none of them could defeat him. They couldn’t carry such a major role. But stopping his cowardly flight was another matter. As long as it would lead to the ending that boy had shortened his own lifespan to achieve.

They still had options.

And that realization ignited the hearts of everyone there.

They gathered all their power here to make sure his spirit would not be broken!!

“Tch!!”

Rosencreutz clicked his tongue in that antlion pit of a situation.

If he stropped struggling and was swept toward the center, those uniquely deadly jaws awaited him.

“What’s this, CRC?”

Ashamed of herself for relying on this, Witch Goddess Aradia danced as if sliding along the floor. Her bare feet mixed the ointment needed to prepare her Triple Reload.

“You seem awfully angry for someone who planned to slaughter us Transcendents to stave off boredom. Is that because the world you find before you is anything but boring? Yes, this is a colorful world of powerful stimuli where anything is possible – life, death, victory, and defeat.”

“!?”

“In the end, you are the kind of holy man who can only talk big when he has an overwhelming advantage. Someone like that can never understand that boy’s depths,” whispered Good, Old Mary. That Transcendent’s resurrection spell would mean she had seen all the many ways people met their deaths. “In truth, he is not all that powerful. In fact, he lost his life several times on the way here. But each of those deaths was the end result of living his life to its fullest – not once did he pull his punches when it came to living. He was constantly struggling to win, but when he did lose, he would pick up the pieces and continue forward anyway. He could not be more different from you, who grew bored with his strength but still clung shamefully to your current status.”

A quiet metal clink sounded.

Misaka Mikoto had flicked an arcade coin into the air.

When it landed back on her thumbnail, she took aim.

And she roared.

“I’m shooting a Railgun. Everyone, clear the line of fire!!!”

The air was compressed.

This normally would have been no threat to CRC. But in this one moment, the silver young man definitely frowned. He was annoyed. Which meant this was effective.

Altogether, they couldn’t have bought more than a minute of time.

But that was enough. Without a word, Kamijou Touma approached once more.

Half-dragging the giant dragon maw with him.

And…

Part 6

In the ICU, little Anna Sprengel was lying in a bed and surrounded by cold, hard machinery. Her expression looked peaceful at first, but it would have burdened a medical expert with great anxiety. She was not being given any kind of anesthesia, so the lack of response to the pain was not a good sign.

The color red flowed through several clear tubes.

There were a lot more of those tubes than normal.

“How is the dialysis going?” asked the frog-faced doctor with uncharacteristic tension in his voice.

“The process itself is going smoothly.”

Anna’s hair was unnaturally damaged. Blood did not flow through the hairs themselves, but they still received oxygen and nutrients to stay healthy.

That meant something was wrong with the patient’s blood.

“The processing of the blood before it is returned to her body is working too. Her blood type is being temporarily altered.”

The technician and a nurse were busily working even now.

Providing someone with the wrong blood type would put them in critical condition. That was undeniable. But it was also true that some people’s blood type had changed after a transplant for the bone marrow that created the blood.

So if all of the blood was changed and not just a portion of it, there was a chance of survival.

“This so-called ‘curse’ carries out its fatal attack after identifying an individual by their blood.”

The frog-faced doctor was a science-side physician.

But even if he couldn’t explain it with his own knowledge, he was not the kind of person to tell a suffering and dying patient that their pain couldn’t be real because none of the medical texts described anything like it.

He would save everyone suffering from disease.

Even if the disease had not yet been written down in any medical texts.

“So if the blood type flowing through her veins changes, this ‘curse’ should lose sight of its target and cease to function. I just hope that ends this.”

The word “curse” gave it an archaic and exaggerated impression, but he only had to think of it like a form of pollen allergy that reacted to an individual’s face or name.

(I do hope this “curse” can’t last forever without a target.)

Bacteria harmed people in order to survive and toxins harmed people because they took the place of a necessary substance. So if they could not function correctly, they would eventually be broken down, ejected from the body, and naturally disappear. They were neither good nor evil. It was no more than a struggle for survival.

“At this rate,” muttered the frog-faced doctor.

That was when a dull tremor shook the building.

And the overhead lights flickered.

While this wasn’t a complete blackout, it was highly unusual. The hospital always had multiple power sources to ensure the survival of its critical patients. So instead of a problem with the power generation facility itself, this had to be something wrong with the wiring in the wall or ceiling.

Something had changed.

Critically changed.

Part 7

Kamijou Touma slowly collapsed forward.

No one could stop it.

He had lost too much blood.

His time limit had always been 10 minutes at the longest.

Not even Shokuhou Misaki and the Bologna Succubus’s psychological support could get him around the limits of his physical body.

The only trump card capable of defeating Rosencreutz had broken.

He fell to the floor.

The dragon vanished into thin air.

“Ha ha.”

Laughter echoed out.

Of course, it came from none other than Christian Rosencreutz.

“Now your defeat is assured,” said the silver young man, looking down to the floor. Calmly. “There never was an answer. You never could have found a way of defeating this old man. But this result is still a doom born of your own choices. You sought strength as a human, but you still grasped at inhuman power once you were desperate. Everyone watching this must have thought the same thing: ‘Oh, Kamijou Touma has deviated from his usual ways.’ And that deviation is what brought this result. You made a mistake and you were never going to find real power in that mistake. None at all.”

Wicked violence had won out in the end.

And.

Death swept out.

The Bologna Succubus was blasted away like an artillery shell and Witch Goddess Aradia was embedded in a wall. Misaka Mikoto’s microwave radar wasn’t enough to detect what caused her to spin through the air and slam into the floor. Shokuhou Misaki pressed a TV remote against her own temple, but something impacted the back of her head before she could boost her eye movement. This wasn’t like someone being knocked out in a movie or drama. Something unseen clearly broke and split inside her head.

Accelerator could only watch while remotely controlling the Snakehead drone swarm.

Their time was up and defeat led to this.

“Kee hee, ee hee. Hee ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

Death.

Killing.

And red.

“Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!! …Whew.”

Christian Rosencreutz once more appeared from the background. No, he had finally come to a stop after moving so fast he had become no more than flowing lines.

His only remaining enemy was Good, Old Mary.

Had he intentionally left her until last, or was it only a coincidence? It could also be that she had partially defended against his attack.

“Now, joker. Who will you resurrect with that single-use trump card?”

“…”

“Do not expect this old man to sit idly by and watch. You will only be able to resurrect one of them at the cost of your own life. …And, Good, Old Mary, I seriously doubt you can defeat this old man on your own. Your only value is in your resurrection. So who will you entrust your dreams with? Who will you choose to turn this all around?”

Would it be Misaka Mikoto or Shokuhou Misaki?

Or would it be Aradia or the Bologna Succubus?

Each of them possessed tremendous power. Not one of them was an ordinary human. With the Ace, the Queen, and so many others with varied talents available, who would Good, Old Mary choose?

“Take your time and think about it.”

He laughed.

He scoffed.

Because the answer was obvious from the start.

“Hee ha ha!! But there is no real answer! No matter who you bring back to life, they cannot defeat this old man. If human death were absolute, you could have given up. But because you possess that resurrection trump card, you are now trapped in my prison, kitchen alchemist. Will you agonize over it for eternity, or will the pressure be too much to bear so you make a careless choice only for this old man to tear you both to shreds!? Watch as your own actions reveal just whose side you have taken and who you have made your enemy. Kee ha ha ha ha ha. Regret your own choices as you search in vain for an answer!!!”

In response, the final remaining Transcendent breathed a soft sigh.

And Good, Old Mary spoke.

“No one.”

“?”

“I will not bother resurrecting anyone at this point. You are the one who has run out of time. A second before, you might have managed it. But you lost sight of what truly matters here, you continued to ignore the life you should have been focused on taking, and you carelessly crossed the final crossroads. It is too late to put things back the way they were. No matter how much you try.”

He tilted his head.

CRC expressed pure confusion.

But the silver young man should have shuddered in fear at that simple truth. He was drawing a blank. He could not come up with anything that fit the situation presented to him. But if whatever it was could slip his mind, how much of a threat could it really be?

He still didn’t understand, so Good, Old Mary pointed elsewhere.

The answer was there.

Aleister Crowley.

The magician CRC had defeated and proceeded to ignore had stood back up.

He was badly injured.

It was incredible he was still alive.

If he had feigned death, he might have had a greater chance at survival.

But he had instead clenched his teeth and stood up. Who out there had inspired him to do that? Why could that human challenge CRC over and over with the golden retriever by his side?

Who did that human really, truly aspire to emulate?

“I don’t care…how many times you fail.”

Words spilled from his cracked lips.

The person he had entrusted this fight to had already collapsed.

And as a result, 99% of the people who had trusted that boy enough to gather here were now dead.

That was a defeat.

Kamijou Touma had failed to meet their expectations.

But despite the red and black stains covering his body, that human’s spirit was not broken.

Because…

“I will not lose hope in you, no matter how many times you lose or fall. I swear it. Thinking back, it was rare that you found an easy victory from beginning to end. But you always made sure to collect someone’s life before it was lost. That was no illusion. So I will believe in you. …You expect me to accept that a little thing like defeat is enough for you to give up? No matter how many times you fall to your knees, I know for a fact you will stand back up again.”

“Young one?”

“So consume me if need be. Great Demon Coronzon! Holy Guardian Angel Aiwass!! You monsters were always too much for a constant failure like me to handle. But just this once, support me. Help me buy the time we need. Give me the power to uphold my promise!!”

“You think he will get back up? Based on nothing? That loser is soaking in his own bloody vomit and you would still place all your hopes in him? Good, Old Mary could perhaps resurrect at least one person here if she were willing to sacrifice herself to my attack, but you won’t even do that!?”

“That is not what it means to believe in someone,” stated Good, Old Mary. She directly cut down that unbeatable adversary’s words. “You do not believe in someone because it is logical or because the odds are favorable. Human beings believe in and pray to the people they truly want to believe in. You were once a target of that sort of belief. If you have forgotten this, then you really are unworthy. Unfortunately, the savior that mama and the rest of the Transcendents prayed to was not at all what we hoped for.”

So Good, Old Mary had chosen to believe in that boy instead.

Truly believe.

If she sacrificed herself to resurrect one person here, it ended there. Once she died, her resurrection could never be used again. But if she was patient, survived, and believed that this deadly battle would be overcome without choosing the easy option of self-sacrifice, she could use her resurrection on each and every one of them. Only then was the possibility of saving everyone available.

That was what it meant to believe in someone.

Such belief was never spoken of in terms of “at least”.

Not everything came down to superhuman actions. There were options that became available if you wished for them hard enough.

No one was discussing logic or odds. The thread of possibility was so very thin, but Good, Old Mary chose to believe in the future she most wanted to believe in. Because she knew the foolish compromise of forcing herself to believe in something she didn’t want to believe in would never lead to a gentle and happy world.

“And no matter how absurd it might seem, there are times when our selfish expectations and beliefs are answered. There are people who will crawl through the mud and do whatever it takes to make that happen, no matter how poor their chances. And sometimes they will ultimately reach what they were struggling for.”

“…”

“People value such things as miracles. CRC, I am certain you were once capable of that. You might have done so even in the modern world. But while you let your passions and playfulness guide you, you passed the final crossroads and reached a point from which you can never return.”

In the very corner of his vision, Christian Rosencreutz saw something rise up.

Whatever it was, it was stained red and black. It was someone who should not have still been alive.

The answer was obvious.

This was what the living and the dead had all believed in.

Kamijou.

Kamijou Touma.

“Impossible…” blankly muttered Christian Rosencreutz, suddenly trembling. “You never had a chance to use your resurrection. This old man would never have missed it.”

“True. But mama did not use it on anyone. Not even him.”

“Then this can’t be happening! A normal human had his arm severed and was left to bleed out for 10 minutes. Do you have any idea how much blood he would have lost in that time!? The answer is in liters! And you expect me to believe he overcame that because of some nonsense about believing in him!?”

“Should you really be spouting nonsense at the moment, CRC? Need I remind you that you are the corpse the Bridge Builders Cabal once believed in?” solemnly stated Good, Old Mary. “He answered our call. Unlike you, he did not run from the power of belief. The rules have changed. You completely missed the crossroads you couldn’t afford to cross and you walked right on through. The legend so many people believed in and prayed to is long gone. You are no more than bait now. Bait used to show off a new legend that has accepted the power of belief and is working to create a better future. You allowed yourself to be reduced to this, CRC.”

Kamijou made a horizontal swing of his nonexistent right arm.

The invisible dragon burst out.

It emerged once more.

That was the answer.

Kamijou Touma and Aleister Crowley stood side by side, both bloody and battered. They didn’t need to exchange any words. This team up should have been impossible, but it was possible within the legend of this moment.

There was no cue.

Aleister simply gave a thoughtful look.

A moment later, they both raced forward.

Straight toward their greatest enemy – Christian Rosencreutz.

“Ohhh!!” “Ohhh!!”

In response, CRC gulped and calmly worked out the answer in his head.

“The scientific angel Kazakiri Hyouka and the artificial demon Qliphah Puzzle 545.”

And the person behind those two.

New Board Chairman Accelerator.

“That particle accelerator cannon that gathered all the city’s power was not aimed at this old man.”

Using the Hula Hoop particle accelerator to launch a deadly attack within the city was all well and good, but what happened at the other end? They couldn’t have it pierce through the outer wall on the opposite side of the city and then burn down Shinjuku and Yokohama beyond. This group was too soft to accept that level of sacrifice. So what had they done?

His miniature model was useful for running searches, but there was one thing he had to watch out for.

It only provided the information he actively worked to search for.

Which meant he could miss something.

Especially when it came from a blind spot he hadn’t considered.

“You were holding two nonhumans in reserve, but you knew they could not defeat this old man if you simply sent them after me. So you found a way to inject them with a massive amount of energy without me noticing. Angels and demons are effectively collections of energy, so this boosted their raw strength and energized them?”

They had sided with Kamijou Touma.

Realizing they couldn’t defeat CRC even in their boosted forms, had the scientific angel and magical demon instead opted to assist Kamijou?

As the leader at the top, the question for Accelerator wasn’t who achieved the victory. As long as he could eliminate the threat of Rosencreutz and bring peace back to the city, nothing else mattered.

It wasn’t an issue of logic or odds.

People believed in the person they wanted to believe in.

So while he wasn’t physically present, the #1 had not hesitated to focus on that particular trump card.

“Did you use the absence of his right hand to sneak them into his body? So that their invisible hands could squeeze his stopped heart and start it beating once more!?”

Thus, it wasn’t just two people approaching Rosencreutz.

Far more people had believed in that boy. They had entrusted him with their lives, their futures, and the fates of Academy City and the world.

“Rosencreutz. It doesn’t matter how hopeless a reality you are.”

“Yes, and it doesn’t matter how much of this world you destroy.”

Kamijou Touma would not run away.

He carried all those things on his back as he poured all his strength into the invisible dragon.

“If you insist we can’t save anyone here…”

“Yes, and if you insist the good and the wicked cannot be equally saved…”

The hits landed simultaneously.

“Then we will destroy that illusion!!!”

The God Purifying Demon Destroyer and the Conqueror of the Battle of Blythe Road.

Two inhuman fists flew and mercilessly launched Christian Rosencreutz beyond District 7’s borders.

Part 8

When the little wicked woman opened her eyes, she had no idea where she was. She saw a white ceiling, detected a chemical scent in the air, and noticed a great quantity of medical equipment surrounding her. The hard plastic mask over her lower face irritated her. But she was hesitant to move. She didn’t think she even could move right away and, given the tugging sensation from beneath her skin, she could guess she had several needles piercing her blood vessels and had tubes and electric cords attached all across her body.

Nevertheless, she was alive.

Anna Sprengel was alive.

“Where…am I?”

Peering down at her was a doctor with a froggy face.

He gave her a gentle smile.

This doctor had lived up to the belief a certain boy had placed in him.

Heaven Canceler spoke in the same way he always did.

“You’re going to be fine. It’s all over now.”

Some who saw this might have praised it as a miracle.

The commonplace miracle of life.

Between the Lines 4

“Ugh, is this for real, mistress?”

“Yes. As much as I would prefer not to believe it, it appears so.”

Epilogue: A Certain Truth and the Collapse of It All – Black_Humor.

It was his own groan that did it.

Kamijou Touma’s mind was shaken and he awoke in a bed.

He was in the hospital.

“Honestly. Why are you making me save you, fool?”

He heard a sulking voice.

A little wicked woman sat next to him in the visitor’s chair, something inserted into the inside of her elbow. Blood was gathering in a bag through a tube. Apparently she had given her own blood to save Kamijou from the massive blood loss of cutting off his own arm.

That was Anna Sprengel.

He wasn’t dreaming.

He hadn’t relied on Alice’s ridiculous power.

He had poured in all the strength a human had and even prepared himself for death to finally achieve this little miracle.

This was what he had gritted his teeth all this time to see.

“…I see.”

The transfusion tube descending from the stand led to Kamijou’s right arm. The arm he had supposedly lost was now attached to his shoulder like usual.

He still couldn’t get up, but he somehow managed to move his terribly dry mouth.

“How long?”

“It’s just about midnight.”

“What happened to the others?”

“They died.”

Those were icy words.

But it didn’t end there.

“You were right to hold onto Good, Old Mary and her resurrection right up until the end. If you had forced her to sacrifice herself, you would be cleaning up after a tragedy right about now.”

He wasn’t sure if he could say this was a good thing.

But at the very least, it wasn’t the end.

Misaka Mikoto, Witch Goddess Aradia, and everyone else involved in the hospital battle must have been revived. That resurrection only reverted the dead body to the moment of death, allowing an attempt at CPR. That meant there had to have been restrictions and the possibility of failure, so he was glad to hear they had overcome all of that. The large hospital would have had plenty of blood and iron supplements to go around.

“Districts 12, 23, 18, and 7 were freed from the yellow Citrinitas sand. And just like in Los Angeles, there is nothing for you to worry about, fool.”

If possible, he wanted to add someone else to the list.

But…

“Alice won’t be so simple.”

“…”

“Good, Old Mary is a regular Transcendent, so she cannot interfere with an irregular one like Alice Anotherbible who has far surpassed the usual bounds of the category. If she is dead, there is no overturning that. Like it or not, the simple hierarchy prevents an ordinary Transcendent from changing that.”

“I see,” was all Kamijou could say, releasing the breath remaining in his lungs.

He would have to accept that goodbye.

Alice Anotherbible was dead. He hadn’t reduced the number of losses to zero.

But the tragedy had been stopped there.

He had settled things with Christian Rosencreutz.

He knew this was only the selfish idea of a survivor, but he felt Alice would have wanted it to end this way.

Then Anna Sprengel asked a question.

“Why?”

“?”

“Why did you save me, fool?”

Her tone seemed to point out that her death would have meant the end of all the calamity starting with the rise of R&C Occultics.

His answer was obvious.

“I wasn’t risking my life to determine the truth and name the culprit.”

“I brought suffering to so many. And that includes you.”

“That means we’re the ones that get to choose to forgive you for it.”

“I am nothing but a villain.”

“That’s no reason to let you die.”

“I chose to let the Shrink Drink hit me. I was prepared to die.”

“But I never said I would just let that happen.”

He didn’t hesitate.

He didn’t even need to think about it. The words felt so natural on his lips. Like they were leaving his mouth before they even reached his mind.

That was what it meant to do the right thing.

You didn’t need to rack your brains working out what was right. You didn’t need to seek confirmation or prove it. You didn’t need to dress it up in fancy words or figure out how to make it look good.

Of course someone who thought about it first would have trouble reaching an answer.

Eventually, Anna Sprengel lowered her head and presented one more idea.

“You could have ended this so much sooner and easier if I had died.”

“Not on your life, Anna Sprengel.”

He didn’t hesitate.

He felt something soft.

While Kamijou lay on the bed, the little wicked woman had pressed her forehead against the center of his chest.

She sobbed.

And she couldn’t get any more words out.

In the end, that was the answer.

Anna Sprengel had created a giant IT company that encompassed both science and magic, she had stirred up trouble across the world, and she had carried out all sorts of evil deeds. But before meeting this boy, had she had anyone she could speak her mind to?

“You don’t need a king.”

Kamijou forced his still stiff and awkward body to move and rubbed Anna’s head.

She did not disappear at the touch of his right hand.

That proved she really was alive.

“There are larger umbrellas to protect you in this world. So many reliable people will risk their lives to fight for you. So I promise you, Anna Sprengel, you do not need to wander this world searching for some nonexistent king.”

At the same time, he confirmed that he could feel his own right hand.

It was definitely there.

He only vaguely remembered when his shadow had flickered like a dying fluorescent light and his existence was being gradually dragged into illusion. Had he not been conscious enough for the memories to be created properly, or had he touched on such a great taboo that his brain refused to access the memories? Either way, he knew one thing: that was a direct path to death. For him and for his opponent. It was the path of rejection that ensured someone would be left on the battlefield. It was a greedy antlion pit that swallowed up all life, both enemy and ally.

What would have happened had Good, Old Mary not been there?

How many people would have been lost during that one night?

“…”

He would never do that again.

Never again would he choose to throw out his own life and the lives of others.

He would never give up on his humanity and turn to illusion instead.

But.

He was still glad he had done everything he could to save Anna Sprengel.

There was a definite moment when he let himself think that too.

The hospital door was cracked open

Two girls had lost their chance to knock and had ended up listening in.

“What do we do about this, Misaka-saaan?”

“Don’t ask me.”

Christian Rosencreutz had been an extremely formidable foe. It was still hard to believe they had safely settled things with that monster. That they had was a cause for celebration, but that didn’t address what they should do about Anna Sprengel and her many evil deeds.

Misaka Mikoto thought Anna deserved to be punished.

That was her honest opinion.

Not for the sake of the world or the people who lived there.

This was nothing so grand.

For her, it was the simple fact that the boy she knew so well had nearly been killed.

But…

“He’s forgiven her before we can even have our say.”

“Anything we do now would be the super kind of fluous, wouldn’t it?”

Something else was underway as well.

It was midnight, marking the beginning of January 6.

“Was it over here?”

A nun in a pure white habit walked to District 12 with a little Magic God on her shoulder.

Their focus had been different from the start.

When the chaos of battle split everyone up, Index and Othinus had intentionally left the battle line. Christian Rosencreutz was a powerful magician whose spells were a mystery even with the knowledge of an entire library of grimoires to draw on.

Which was why they had felt a strong need to carefully observe him and divulge a weakness.

Index was specialized for that role in the first place.

…Kamijou and the others had ended the fight in a rather forceful way before these two could figure out Rosencreutz’s spells, but coincidence had worked in their favor there.

They had successfully seen what happened to CRC after he broke through the hospital wall and flew off like a shooting star.

Othinus rushed Index from atop her shoulder.

“Hurry. It’s already been several hours. If he can still move, he might decide to retreat. This is all for naught if he manages to recover his strength and returns for a rematch.”

“I know that,” snapped Index, still facing forward. With an expression she would never show in front of Kamijou. “That was clearly not a battle Touma should have won. If he’s forced to fight something like that again, there’s no way he survives.”

And they found him.

It was hard to miss. The asphalt was broken and torn up in one spot. Something stirred at the very center.

“Hee.”

It was Christian Rosencreutz.

He was still alive.

“Hee hah. This is not over. This old man’s passions have not been extinguished. So I have no reason to stop. And I have found it. The Transcendents of the Bridge Builders Cabal, the ones who created this body, are not who will obstruct this old man’s curiosity. There is only one. Just one pathetic life not even spoken of in historyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!”

“I’ll do it,” coldly stated the 15cm god, despite the great discrepancy in heights. “I’m a war god, so I’m used to taking lives. Grimoire Library, you keep your hands clean. That would be best for my understander.”

CRC’s head turned their way.

What did they look like to that ugly young man who could only view the world through his passions?

“You would try to stop me?”

“?”

“No matter how torn my flesh and broken my bones, taking two lives is a simple task. Shall I take them as a souvenir? Not that you have any say in the matter!!”

“No, no that…”

For some reason, Othinus was no longer looking at CRC.

To the very end, he didn’t understand why.

Because the 15cm god had given up on conversing with him.

“Whatever. It’s not like saving you would accomplish anything.”

There was a sticky tearing sound.

Again, Index didn’t understand.

She had more than 103,000 grimoires in her head, but she still couldn’t explain what had just happened before her eyes.

A large chunk had been taken from the side of CRC’s neck.

“Eh? Uh?”

His grunts of surprise were disturbingly wet.

If not even Index understood, there was no way CRC could know what had happened to him.

The answer was a small hand.

The child’s hand slowly opened and closed in empty air, as if tearing off a piece of soft bread.

“Gbwah!? Eh? Huh? What happened to…this old man!!?”

The pain must have caught up to him because Christian Rosencreutz held a hand to the side of his neck and raised his bloody voice. The dark red liquid continued to flow out from between his fingers. And from his mouth. Where was the blood coming from and where was the flow connected? It was a frightening thing to imagine.

He received no mercy.

He slipped on his own blood and fell to the filthy ground where he found someone peering down at him. Someone very small. She had been short to begin with, but she was even shorter due to the lack of anything above her neck.

He recognized her.

There was only one person this could be.

Alice Anotherbible.

That little headless corpse stood firm on her two legs.

A dark figure stood next to her.

The young butler wore a tailcoat and held a sword cane.

He did not speak a word.

H. T. Trismegistus was entirely unchanged, still serving his master as common sense dictated, so he must not have felt any particular need to speak.

Only that butler remained dedicated.

He was a true Transcendent in that he had not set one foot outside his own salvation conditions.

“Why?”

The pain vanished once more within CRC.

A much greater question had numbed his entire brain.

Or maybe it was the common fear.

“Yes, this old man made use of her body. I made her dead flesh rise again to launch a surprise attack on Anna Kingsford! But how is this possible!? Why would she get back up again now!? That spell does not last forever. Rigor mortis should have faded away and decomposition should have begun by now!!”

“Stop.”

That word was not directed at Alice or at Rosencreutz.

Othinus had stopped Index from thoughtlessly rushing in.

That calamity was already over.

So do not get yourself involved.

“You are looking at this the wrong way around. You completely killed Alice Anotherbible? So what? We don’t even know for sure if Alice is really human. She could be a tarot deck or the result of someone’s special right hand parting with them. You should have been more thorough and made sure her body couldn’t resume moving after death – by hanging her corpse from a tree, by skewering her and lifting her high into the air, or whatever else.”

“…”

“Good, Old Mary is one of the lesser Transcendents and she can resurrect people. So why are you surprised to learn that Alice Anotherbible, a greater and highly irregular Transcendent, has a more powerful version of the spell? Good, Old Mary is out of options if she is the one to die, but maybe Alice can absorb power from a ley line or gather Telesma to activate her magic and revive herself after death.”

“……………………………………………………………………………………………”

Rosencreutz couldn’t do anything.

Death loomed over him, but he was rooted to the spot. Even though each movement of the little hand produced a disturbing sound while more of his body was torn away.

So.

He couldn’t stop the movement of the headless corpse.

The incomplete vocal cords vibrated.

He should have stopped this immediately.

“…Ah…”

“?”

“The man always…resented it.”

It was like the beginning of a storybook.

The words were spoken in the smooth, gentle tone of a mother reading to her small child.

“He resented his own creation. He resented that a legend which should have been laughed off as an obvious lie instead gained a life of its own. So he tried to put a stop to it and reject it. He wanted to make it nothing more than a joke. But by that time, too many people had come to truly believe in that legend. So no one believed what he said.”

However, the actual story being told was a terribly cruel one.

CRC stared blankly, forgetting all about the destruction of his body.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed.

It was more like the shock was so great his mind had gone blank.

“Eventually, the pitiable man’s words were entirely ignored. And as time passed, knowledge of him faded until he was entirely forgotten. Why? Because that was more convenient for the people of the world. Because no one cared anymore if their truth was in fact an obvious lie. So the poor man resented it all the more. He resented the foolish people who refused to listen to him. But more than anything, he resented that the character he created had gained eternal fame while he had vanished into obscurity.”

Why?

Why did she know this!?

(Is she reading this from the pieces of my body she is tearing away? Like a potter checking the broken fragments in the kiln to see what went wrong!?)

“So to give his character a bad name…”

“Stop. Wait…”

“…he chose to become his character.”

“Shut your mouth. Right this instant!!”

She did not stop.

Something sharper than any blade stabbed deep into Christian Rosencreutz’s chest.

No…

“Johann Valentin Andreae. The foolish ordinary man who created the fictional Rosicrucian legend and was crushed by the truth that came from that fiction. Oh, how tragic. But now the self-debased clown’s mask has been stripped away and it all comes to an end.”

There was smoke.

Strange, unhealthy-looking smoke much like that created from chemicals or acid.

He screamed.

And when the smoke cleared, it did not reveal a silver young man.

He was now a wrinkly and unkempt old man who was nothing but skin and bones. All charisma had been stripped away.

This was his true identity.

He was an author who had so loathed his own fictional creation he had chosen to roleplay that character and carry out enough contemptible actions that the entire world would be disillusioned. That ugly nature was on display here.

“This explains why the supposed founder of Rosicrucianism was so intent on killing Anna Sprengel. His stated objective of slaughtering the Transcendents was only camouflage to disguise his weak will. Johann only wanted to destroy CRC and everything that had built that nonexistent man’s legend.”

“Ahhhh!!”

Collapsed and lying on the ground, the wrinkly old man still raised his empty palm.

This action was clearly driven by fear, not passion or playfulness.

The air was compressed.

Kamijou Touma had already proven this was no more than a projectile attack.

But.

“I…don’t believe it,” muttered Rosencreutz.

The headless girl hadn’t moved a finger. She hadn’t dignified him with any kind of response. Instead, a cricket bat had flown in and blocked the bullet on its own. It resembled black coal the size of a golf ball, but its surface shined with a strange luster.

This was the truth of it.

“Diamond.”

This had one-shotted Kamijou despite his special right arm.

This had injured Good, Old Mary.

This had tossed aside Aleister in the hospital.

“All you did was cling to old legends. Your magic was a rehash of St. Germain. A certain right hand failed to negate it because the diamond crystal is constantly growing too quickly to be fully negated.”

To those in the know, that may have reminded them of the Innocentius spell. Yes, it was not impossible to force through Imagine Breaker with pure magic.

Forcing the Anti-Skill officer to count on his fingers was also an application of that carbon-controlling spell. There was nothing unknown about CRC. It could all be explained using the Rosicrucian St. Germain.

“Thinking back, something about what my understander said seemed off from the start,” spat 15cm Othinus on Index’s shoulder.

When Kamijou Touma had first clashed with Rosencreutz, that boy had been easily defeated.

But why had CRC started by destroying the Shrink Drink?

That spiritual item was only effective against the Transcendents who took on roles to perform, so the reborn Christian Rosencreutz shouldn’t have had anything to fear from it.

So.

If Rosencreutz feared the Shrink Drink, he too had to be a fake playing a role.

That also explained why Index and her vast knowledge had failed to predict Christian Rosencreutz’s actions and thoughts.

Because he wasn’t CRC.

The knowledge contained in the grimoire library was not actually flawed or incomplete. She was never going to find the correct countermeasure if she was searching the wrong bookcase.

“This is just sad,” muttered Othinus.

CRC had frequently said magic was nothing but a boring illusion.

And there had been a faction within the Golden cabal that claimed magic was not something used to influence the physical world – it was ultimately something to enrichen your own soul.

So.

Had he been trying to enrichen his soul by misrepresenting himself and ruining the reputation of the fictional character? He was like a self-hater. He displayed the world’s most unproductive form of malice.

“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ends with it all being a dream. Alice wakes up before the climactic trial can end and that’s it. That is world-famous nonsense story dressed up in countless illusions, but it is also a story that presents the reader with hard, unshakable reality right at the end. I will admit that is a side of Alice, but this seems a bit much.”

This may have been a sliver of the real reason the Transcendents had all feared Alice. She had the power to reveal your true nature, no matter how deep you tried to bury it.

And there was no need to deliver a finishing blow.

She had already torn out the side of his neck.

No, it was much more than that.

Pieces had been torn from all over his body. She had taken away pieces of his muscles, his fat, his blood vessels, and even his bones. The legendary Christian Rosencreutz may have been able to recover from that, but the grounded Johann Valentin Andreae would not be so lucky. The color drained from his face as the blood gushed from his wounds, his eyes rolled back in his head, and the old man lay unmoving on the cold ground.

Never to move again.

He was dead.

This unsightly fate left no room for resurrection or any other form of salvation. And…

“Cackle.”

Something happened.

It came from the headless girl. Because she had been so lovely and beautiful to begin with, the loss of the head, her most identifiable feature, gave her remains a horrifyingly grotesque sort of beauty.

The severed vocal cords vibrated in the blood-drained neck stump.

It took even the war god several seconds to realize this was laughter.

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

There was no room for conversation here.

Had Alice Anotherbible always hidden this cruelty within her?

Or had the destruction of her head knocked some gears loose?

Either way, one thing was for sure.

“This isn’t over,” said Index.

The false CRC wasn’t the only one. They were faced with the magician who the grimoire library’s wisdom had truly failed to comprehend.

“None of this is over.”

What was Alice Anotherbible?

How was she defined?

That question had been there from the start and they had put it off until now.

And now that greatest of mysteries was truly baring its fangs.

Afterword

If you picked them up one at a time, welcome back. If you bought them all at once, welcome.

This is Kamachi Kazuma.

While GT8 showed a variety of groups and plans intersecting, this one was focused only on the battle against Rosencreutz! In GT8, they had made an enemy of Academy City and were on the run, but this time I had them all gather together to face a single powerful enemy. How are Magic Gods and Transcendents different and what is Christian Rosencreutz who exists beyond the Transcendents? You might make some discoveries if you compare this one to NT9.

I’m sure you could all guess it was going to happen as soon as they had set up multiple defense lines, but this was the story of losing, falling back, and trying again. Instead of crawling up toward victory, I wanted to research ways to show beautiful defeat and I poured all of that into this superhuman battle, but what did you think?

Anyway, Kamijou Touma would not be broken this time. No matter what! With the exception of Magic God Othinus who suggested that the world would be happy if he alone were gone, Kamijou always continues resisting. Maybe he’s weak to the North Wind and the Sun approach?

And this time, the Academy City next-gen weapons that caused Kamijou’s group so much grief in GT8 are now on their side. Weapons themselves are neither good nor evil – it all depends on who is using them. Not that whoever is on the receiving end is going to care much about the morality of the issue. I also had some fun turning some things around, like having Kamijou Touma finally do the one thing I never had him do before or having him deliver the final punch with someone else. There are options he only has after abandoning his right hand. Of course, this was a one-time-use cheat, but I hope part of it still tugged on your heartstrings.

I showed them plenty of love in my other series Godhorn Tech, but I love gunships made by forcibly modifying a transport plane. (I called it a bomber in that series, but if you look at how it’s described, you should be able to tell its based off of the lines of machinegun fire pouring down from a gunship.) I can’t get enough of the path forward being opened by heavy supporting fire from a giant aircraft in the sky. There are some video games where you play as the gunship shooting down at the ground, but you don’t see many where you’re the one on the ground and the airship blesses you with the motherly(?) love of bullets pouring down from the sky to support you… Sad, since I want to receive more gunship love. Aside from that, I think my favorite part was the anti-magician Rorschach attack. I love adding in some more intellectual moves in the middle of all the brute force attacks!

I give my thanks to my illustrators Haimura-san and Itou Tateki-san and my editors Miki-san, Anan-san, Nakajima-san, Hamamura-san, and Matsuura-san. The Level 5s! The Transcendents!! The angel, the demon, the Holy Guardian Angel, the Great Demon, the old and the new Board Chairmans, the cat ears teacher, and the correspondence course student!!! Despite only having one primary enemy, the battle itself threw in so many characters, both old and new, so it couldn’t have been easy. Thank you for again going along with all of this!!

And I give my thanks to the readers. What did you think of all-out Dragon Lord Kamijou holding nothing back? Like Kamijou said in the story, he can only gain this power by choosing to give up on and reject the possibility of connecting with someone. While it is incredibly powerful, I hope you agree with his immediate decision to seal that option away. Were you wondering what happened to CRC after he was abandoned? Did it not seem like Kamijou!? Anyway, thank you for reading this far!!

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.

You didn’t forget the very first mystery, did you?

-Kamachi Kazuma

Ending

Her torso had been sliced clean through.

She had been dumped on the ground and abandoned.

And.

“Sigh.”

The clock struck midnight and January 6 began. Death hung thick over one corner of District 12 where a silly-sounding voice could be heard.

It came from Anna Kingsford.

“Okay then. It’s about 🕛 I reconnected my 🧩s and got moving again.”

She had been sliced in two.

Her torso had definitely been bisected.

But Anna Kingsford was already a preserved corpse being moved by the machinery inside her.

She had been killed? What did that matter?

She wasn’t alive to begin with.

“What a pain.”

Christian Rosencreutz had made a mistake at the very beginning.

And, most likely, that was why he had been killed at the hand of the very girl he had killed himself.

“You are a surprisingly sensible person to assume ☠️ing someone once is enough to eliminate the possibility of counterattack, CRC…or the man using that name. But you can ❌ peer into the true depths of 🪄 with such shallow 💭.”

That he fell for that may have been further proof he had only been using the Rosencreutz name.

Plus, the true Rosicrucians preferred to avoid naming themselves such.

Saying nothing and going into hiding would be the safest option now, but the expert who could not be stopped by a little thing like death was not interested in her own safety.

She had made a show of dying to remove everyone’s attention from herself so she could carefully observe CRC and work out a weakness, but that was no longer necessary.

Instead, it appeared the nun and the little god were in trouble after approaching the truth.

(Honestly. You are going to get yourselves ☠️ed, young ones. Feigning ☠️ requires a fair amount of direct 🔥power or you risk being ☠️ed off without anyone the wiser. You remind me of the second victim in a murder mystery who 👁️s something they shouldn’t have, does ❌ share this vital information with anyone, and goes to confront the murderer on their own.)

It was unnatural for her to be an active part of this world in the first place.

She was willing to sacrifice herself if it would save those two who had happened across a deadly threat.

Anna Kingsford was the opposite of CRC.

Her actions were driven by just one thing.

“Serving those around me.”

It was time for the counterattack.

Everyone had to be sick of bloody tragedy by this point.

She had an announcement for all the people who didn’t want to see the world fall any further into red and black.

That expert was willing to show them the kind of magic that protected people’s lives and made their dreams come true.

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