Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume5 Chapter3
Status: Incomplete
4/22 parts completed
Chapter 3: Welcome to a World Without the Goddess’s Protection – Difficulty_the_ABYSS.
Part 1
Kamijou Touma forgot to breathe.
“Gah…”
Nothing felt real for a while.
The world came into view tilted on its side and that world was not the truck container lab. Alice, Shirai Kuroko, and Hanatsuyu Youen were nowhere to be found. The floor was littered with shards of glass and the jagged remnants of a colorful plastic jungle gym. He was apparently inside the Delivery Go Round shopping train.
(Good. Shirai teleporting Alice off the train wasn’t a favor granted by Wonderland.)
But what had happened?
When he tried to get up off his side, a storm of agony assaulted his body.
“Gahh!? Cough, dammit, what is this? Ow, is something stabbing into me!?”
Trying to move brought on a weird stiff feeling. He initially thought a broken bone was obstructing the movement of his muscles or joints, but that wasn’t it.
It was the plastic jungle gym from the play area.
When the trains had crashed, he had been flung from the café to the next car, where he crashed into the jungle gym, breaking off a few jagged plastic rods that had pierced his flesh.
But in all likelihood, it could have been far worse.
Without breaking through that “cushioning” to slow himself down, the impact with the wall probably would have killed him instantly.
(Ugh…a-a real train crash really is a disaster, isn’t it?)
His head spun within the crashed Delivery Go Round’s play area. He was at least thankful there hadn’t still been any children in here.
The plastic jungle gym had been smashed to pieces.
The bright colors had become a pile of deadly weapons.
He searched the unusual sensations in his body, grabbed one of the jagged edges that was duller than a bamboo spear, and clenched his teeth. He pulled as hard as he could. The pain when it came out was much less than he had feared, but he didn’t have time to think about that. With the plastic plug removed, he was now bleeding much more rapidly.
He was glad he had been returned to the starting point, but he had to stop this bleeding or he would die.
“Pant, pant.”
After removing the jungle gym shards from his arm, gut, and thigh, he didn’t even have the energy to writhe in agony. He crawled along the gritty floor. He hated how the metal box on the wall was all the way up at hip height. His fingers kept slipping on his own blood, but he finally managed to get a grip. He forced the box’s door open, pulled out a thick synthetic bag, and collapsed onto the floor with a wet splat.
He now had the AED and first aid kit.
He pulled out some disinfectant, removed the cap with trembling hands, and rubbed it on his arm wound. Burning pain immediately exploded in him. It was so bad he initially thought some static had ignited the ethanol. But he couldn’t hesitate. He moved on to the wounds on his gut and thigh.
“Gahhh!! Ahhh!?”
He was dripping with sweat.
But completing the hellish disinfection process wasn’t the end of it.
His real task was stopping the bleeding. But these wounds were too bad for bandages to suffice. His vision was flashing in and out, so he mostly relied on his sense of touch to pull out a device wrapped in plastic. The gadget was shaped something like a small submachinegun, but it was in fact a handheld sewing machine. He couldn’t think straight from the blood loss, so he didn’t have it in him to read through the small text. He relied entirely on the illustrations printed on the side as he pressed it against the wound in his side and pulled the trigger.
The series of “thunks” sounded more like construction work than a medical procedure, but in just a few seconds, a sturdy silk thread had closed up the dark red wound. He couldn’t fully control the full-auto compressed gas device, so he ended up overshooting the end of the wound and sewing up intact skin.
He was scared.
The whole concept terrified him, but he would die if he couldn’t close up all his wounds.
Only after the first one did it occur to him to hold a handkerchief in his mouth so he wouldn’t bite his tongue in shock. Then he sewed up the wounds on his arm and leg too.
“Damn, I really want to tap out already. Ugh. I’ll go through with this, but I’m at least allowed to cry about it, right, Alice?”
He threw the gun-like sewing machine to the floor.
He had forcibly stopped the bleeding, but his head still felt just as heavy. Closing the wounds did not return the blood he had already lost. Finding the only correct answer and taking the optimal course of action did not mean everything would go his way. When your life was at risk, there was no guarantee a cute girl with highly-specialized knowledge was going to show up and fix everything for you. He smiled at the reminder he was back in the real world.
A first-aid kit would not contain a blood transfusion kit that included a pack of blood or a hematinic drug.
He would have to attempt the rest of this as he was.
(Damn, and I’m back down to 49 yen. I’m right back in the New Year’s Tokyo survival life. You really don’t just find money in the real world, huh?)
Where was Alice anyway? He doubted she was going to help him anymore.
It took him a full minute to get up on his feet with quite a bit of groaning.
The sweat on his brow was unusually chilly. He had lost so much blood he was having trouble keeping his body temperature up. He appreciated how it also dulled the pain, but the intermittent nature of his vision was disturbing. He was afraid he would pass out altogether if he let his guard down.
The situation was already on the move.
He was no longer playing on easy mode with Alice to help him along.
He doubted getting Hanatsuyu Youen or Shirai Kuroko’s help would be so easy this time. Rakuoka Houfu’s violence had been on another level and Benizome Jellyfish wouldn’t fall for a trap so easily. Even Frillsand #G would probably be even more deadly then she had seemed before.
And above all, the dead could no longer be resurrected.
Human lives did not get a continue.
“…”
He bit his lip. Everyone had just the one life, so instead of carelessly jumping out of the window, he carefully and unsteadily walked through the crashed train. He found a surviving spiral staircase, descended to the 1st floor while making sure his feet didn’t slip, checked through the bent and dislodged automatic door that the platform was safe, and only then took a step outside. He had escaped the train.
He would not push himself too hard. He could not afford to neglect the standard safety measures.
Part 2
A boy lay on his back within the ICU of a large District 7 hospital.
Four days had passed, but he was still hooked up to several tubes and electrodes. He wore a clear mask over his mouth and his blood and nutrients were circulated with the help of a machine. If just one of the many machines around him were removed or just one of the switches were flipped, it would likely begin a chain reaction of organ failure resulting in his death.
“Hamazura.”
A girl sat in a round stool next to his machine-covered bed. She was known for her shoulder length black hair and her pink track suit. But not even Takitsubo Rikou’s voice got any response out of the boy.
The air purification system and UV lights left the air sterile to the point of feeling toxic and the only sounds were the steady beeps and the rhythm of a pump.
No one would tell her anything. The doctors and nurses all gave her harmless smiles and insisted he would be all right. But she knew that too steady a reading was in fact a bad sign in cases like this.
“?”
She suddenly looked up after noticing something. But not any kind of sound or a flashing light. Still, she had detected a presence of some sort on the other side of the thick glass door.
Her esper power was AIM Stalker, which let her accurately perceive AIM diffusion fields emitted by espers.
But that did not mean this was an esper.
The pink track suit girl stood from her stool and approached the glass door. She stepped on the floor pad and the door slid aside while a flat buzzer sounded.
A bouquet of flowers sat on the bench just outside the door.
The ICU was tucked away so ordinary patients and visitors would not see it, so no one would have just been passing by on their way to somewhere else. The presence of the flowers meant someone had been here to visit the ICU.
They had come all this way and then left without opening the glass door.
Had the sight of Hamazura Shiage hooked up to the bed and Takitsubo Rikou by his side brought on too much emotion for them to continue?
Takitsubo tilted her head.
The flowers had a card with them. Had they carelessly left that behind after getting cold feet about visiting? Or had it come from a subconscious desire to leave some sign that they had been here?
The name on the card was Yomikawa Aiho.
“…?”
Part 3
After leaving through the bent platform door and setting foot on the elevated station platform, Kamijou took a deep breath and focused his mind. When his life was on the line, there was no need to take a risky gamble by rushing in shouting threats. He glanced to the side and saw a large hole the color of rotten vegetables in the platform made of concrete and steel. A few people were gathered nearby. Were they prison guards?
(Now, then.)
He grimaced as the simple act of breathing triggered dull aches all across his body.
(I fell down that hole in Alice’s world, but what happens if I don’t do that?)
A dull creaking sound passed by overhead. He looked up and could make out a few footsteps passing by on the roof covering the entire platform.
“What do you mean this wasn’t a problem with the train!?”
“I mean exactly that. This wasn’t a simple brake malfunction. It could never crash at full speed unless there was some conflict between the train’s own controls and the track’s automatic brakes!”
“Hee hee. Yay! The girl is in the lead! Follow her, everyone!☆”
“Alice!! Do not run off in random directions, you short-sleeve animal ears girl!!”
While looking up toward the voices, Kamijou saw some underwear pass by above the clear panel used to let sunlight in.
“Bff!?”
He saw a leather belt around thighs, some fancy lace, and thick white tights. He got more than a glimpse too, since it was a lot like looking up from below an open umbrella.
(O-oh, I get it. With one hole in the floor, it might break through elsewhere too. Until they know what caused the first hole, they can’t know which way is safe and sending them to the roof is easy for that Judgment teleporter.)
“Hey, Al-!”
He started to call out to her but froze.
If he stopped Alice here, she might start helping him again. And he was the one who had decided he wasn’t accepting her help.
Meanwhile, a few more shadows passed by overhead.
He was still unsure if he had made the right decision.
This was the elevated platform on the 2nd floor of the train station. On the concourse below, he would probably find Hanatsuyu Youen the Carrier, Frillsand #G the Artificial Ghost, and Rakuoka the Mass of Muscles. He wouldn’t make any new discoveries there and the difficulty level would be set much higher without Alice’s mysterious adjustments. If he thoughtlessly rushed down there, he was pretty sure he would fail to get anyone’s assistance and just get himself killed.
You only live once, so when you knew somewhere was dangerous, it was best to stay as far away as possible. He needed to instead focus on going places, seeing things, and trying things he hadn’t back in Alice’s world.
He ignored the wandering footsteps and ran straight across the platform.
Even so, something felt off to him about all this.
(Huh? Something isn’t right.)
Fortunately, the platform didn’t collapse like wet cardboard the way Shirai’s group had feared it might. He ran across it just fine. He moved from the Delivery Go Round side of things to the Overhunting side. He reached the crushed first car and worked his way back from there. He didn’t consider the possibility that the criminals remained locked up inside the train. That kind of optimism had no place in reality.
Whoever was talking to Shirai had said this “wasn’t a problem with the train”, so the cause had to be located further back.
He was fairly certain all the trains would have been stopped after the accident, but climbing over the platform door barrier and descending onto the tracks was still nerve-racking.
This was a straight-line path with nowhere to run.
He stared off into the distance from the elevated railway while he started walking down it.
(But will this problem really be something an amateur high schooler would notice?)
He was still figuring out how his old folks smartphone worked, but he managed to use its LED backlight to shine alternately between the power lines overhead and the metal rail below his feet. The railway had powered rails and overhead powerlines, probably a sign of how many different trains were researched and experimented on in this city.
Just as the track grew a lot more complex, he found he had crossed a railroad switch.
He didn’t think he had traveled more than 300m. For a high-speed train that didn’t stop at the intermediary stations, applying the brakes there wouldn’t stop it in time for the station.
“Is this it?”
Kamijou crouched and viewed something at his feet.
He did not know all that much about trains and railroads, but something here was unusual even to his eye. Some white plastic boxes were installed at a set interval in the space between the rails, but one of them had been smashed by a hammer or something.
He recalled the voices he had heard passing by on the roof.
“What do you mean this wasn’t a problem with the train!?”
“I mean exactly that. This wasn’t a simple brake malfunction. It could never crash at full speed unless there was some conflict between the train’s own controls and the track’s automatic brakes!”
(Could this be the track’s automatic brakes?)
An ATS was a large system of sensors that measured a train’s speed and automatically sent a stop signal if necessary.
This wasn’t just destroyed.
The color inside wasn’t right. He could tell a few of the cords below the smashed cover had been rewired.
“But wait…”
This was odd.
(Huh? Huh??? This isn’t right at all. An electric being like Frillsand #G could probably destroy the train’s brakes, but was she really behind this mechanical sabotage? She could just blast the train from a distance and fry its systems, so why would she even need to mess with the track at all?)
An alarm was blaring inside his mind. Was this the only piece of sabotage? He had a feeling it wasn’t.
A moment later, he felt a heavy blow like someone had swung a metal bat into the side of his head. He didn’t just lose his balance. He was launched to the side from his crouched position. By the time he realized how bad this really was, he had already broken free of gravity. He could feel himself leaving the elevated railway and soaring toward the empty air beyond. He was about to cross the pivotal line. He would soon be past the edge.
But intense confusion hit him before the pain did.
“Gh, bh?”
(Why? Why wasn’t it electricity? That artificial ghost’s attacks didn’t feel like being hit by heavy metal. Then what is going on here?)
He had been attacked.
Attacked by someone deadly enough to put his life at risk with just the one blow.
However…
(Was Frillsand #G not the one who caused the crash!?)
He was not viewing the same incident as before, just from a different vantage point.
The actual answer was different than in Alice’s world.
As soon as he realized that, he flew over the edge of the elevated railway and plunged toward the city 7m below.
Part 4
Kamijou Touma fell.
His body landed on a light truck. He thought the parked truck was loaded with scraps, but apparently it itself was considered scrap. Some inconsiderate people had dumped their garbage in the back of someone else’s truck. The scraps weren’t enough to absorb the impact, so he rolled off to the side.
His body slammed into the asphalt.
“Gahh…”
Every part of him felt weirdly hot. Just as he realized his forcibly-closed wounds had reopened, his vision blurred.
Reality was not so kind.
Humans would die if they lost just two liters of blood. They were so fragile it was hard to believe they could live for a hundred years without spilling all of that. And if the conditions allowing their survival ever collapsed, death would reach them soon enough. The grim reaper wouldn’t sit and wait long enough for the human to find the solution to a mystery or to settle things in a final showdown with their true enemy.
When it was time to die, it was time to die.
They would lose their life without finding any answers and without leaving anything behind.
The special rules of Handcuffs applied today, so the rules were different from the back alley brawls Kamijou was accustomed to.
He heard a solid footstep.
“!?”
The extreme tension allowed him to quickly regather his hazy and scattered mind.
Who was this and what were they up to?
Had the attacker descended from the elevated railway to finish him off? Or had some other dangerous person discovered someone close to death they could prey on? Anything was possible today. This was a world where death was meaningless and lives were taken as no more than a handy consumable item. Handcuffs was thought to have ended, but it had returned today to corrupt Academy City once more.
His cries for help hadn’t reached anyone, but he was sure the same had been true of so many people during Handcuffs.
“Hello, hello.”
Kamijou Touma couldn’t get up, so he simply stared into the shadows.
The person who casually stepped out below a streetlight was accompanied by a large dog.
“You have a way of getting yourself beaten up, don’t you? That was a piece of tungsten steel this time, wasn’t it? There was something strange about the makeup of that housewife’s body, though. Isn’t it funny how you seem so at home in this world of bloodshed even though you claim to want peace and love more than anyone?”
The city decided to hit Kamijou with another surprise.
This person looked nothing like the one he knew. She was a woman with blonde hair cut to shoulder length, blue eyes that carried both a rational look and the look of a mischievous cat, and feminine curves that pushed out her plain beige habit so much it looked sinful. Wasn’t she the one known as a great demon? But Kamijou Touma spoke another name after she came into view.
“Alei…ster?”
“Ha ha.”
He was answered by sarcastic but intensely dry laughter. The face and body were different. Even the sex was different from what you would find in the history books. But Kamijou was certain of it.
Even though the dead weren’t supposed to come back to life.
“Ah, ahh…”
The boy’s emotions swelled before he could wonder why or how. He got up from the filthy asphalt and staggered forward.
The magician smiled thinly at being identified so easily.
“Perhaps it is my inability to stay dead that makes the world despise me so. And I suppose seeing Aleister Crowley change form again isn’t going to surprise you too much when you already saw me change sex once. …Wait, what?”
“Ahhhh!! Ahhhhhhh!! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!”
The beige habit woman(?) reacted first with surprise and then with an exasperated sigh when Kamijou wrapped his arms around her.
The great villain sounded legitimately uncertain while asking a basic question.
“Is this really worth bawling your eyes out over? I can imagine the Anglicans hid the details of the message I left in LA, but even without that, I am the human who ruined your life to use a certain aspect of your nature.”
“I don’t care. And no, I can’t explain why I feel this way!!!!!!”
The boy squeezed his arms so tight he thought he might break that delicate body.
And despite what he said, the magician did not push Kamijou away. He even patted Kamijou’s trembling back like he was consoling a young child. The originator of all modern magicians simply let the boy sob into his chest.
Kamijou wept at this human’s survival.
As a small child, the human had butted heads with his schoolteachers and his parents had accepted the teachers’ malicious view and refused to believe their son. He had grown to loathe that family and the god they worshiped, but he had been denied the chance to build a warm family of his own and continued on in constant loneliness. No matter how many victories he accomplished, he was never satisfied and so judged them all to be failures. His had been a life of needless cruelty, so how many people had shed tears for him not out of anger or humiliation but out of joy? That thought may have crossed his mind for just a moment there.
“Are you ready to hand this off to me?”
“…”
“You should know all too well now that your methods are useless against the dark side. Letting Aleister Crowley take over seems like a valid choice to me.”
“Not happening.”
“You will die. Or someone you know very well will.”
Kamijou clenched his hands tight with his arms still around that human.
Alice Anotherbible had distanced him from the harsh reality. And Aleister Crowley, who knew Academy City’s darkness better than anyone, had also concluded Kamijou could not do it. That meant it was probably true. If he strayed beyond the expectations of those monsters, he would lose his life.
“But it’s still not happening.”
“Why not?”
“The victory you would bring…” Kamijou Touma spat the words out weakly. It took him a full minute before he could pull away from Aleister’s warmth. “Is not the path the next Board Chairman wants to follow. Handcuffs ended on the 25th. Maybe it was a failure, but that doesn’t mean we can trample on its corpses now. If anything can be salvaged, I have to salvage it now. All you would do is pour cement into the path toward salvation and seal it up tight. Along with all the still-breathing people collapsed down there too weak to move.”
“Your point?”
“I’m not letting that happen. I’ll clean up my own blood. I really am happy to find you’re alive, but you chose to leave this city, so you don’t get a say in what happens here anymore.”
“…”
“You created Academy City. It’s true. But it isn’t your city anymore. Maybe you only did it on a whim, but that’s the decision you made. Don’t come back and start pushing for more tragedies here with a grin on your face, Aleister. There isn’t a single life in this city you can control anymore. If you think you can ignore the rules and get away with it because you’re special, then you’re no different from the rest of the dark side.”
This might be the only option that would let Kamijou safely back out.
It wouldn’t solve everything, but it would let him escape the darkness without losing any more blood.
But he refused, even though he couldn’t even support his own weight.
Kamijou Touma didn’t know Hanatsuyu Youen.
Kamijou Touma didn’t know Rakuoka Houfu.
Kamijou Touma didn’t know Benizome Jellyfish.
Kamijou Touma didn’t know Frillsand #G.
He didn’t know anything about Handcuffs where so many people had risked their lives to fight.
He couldn’t rely on what Alice had shown him before. He doubted the real Handcuffs had room for the love, tears, and laughter he had seen there. That meant he couldn’t say he actually knew those people.
However.
Was not knowing them really enough of a reason to refuse to save them?
Someone was trying to take the lives those people had somehow managed to preserve after so much unspeakable suffering and humiliation. Wasn’t that reason enough to stand up and fight for them?
(You don’t need any special rights or qualifications for this.)
He had been bloodied from the starting line.
Gritting his teeth wouldn’t close up his reopened wounds.
But…
(People’s lives are on the line here, so I can’t sit around waiting for the perfect opportunity. I need to figure out what I can do and then do it, even if it means sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong!!)
“Move, Aleister. Whatever happened on the 25th, the 29th belongs to me. I won’t let Handcuffs end in failure again. I’ll give it a happy ending this time.”
That was all Kamijou Touma could do while wearing down his very life.
He was so battered he couldn’t even stand up without leaning against Aleister’s chest. The beige habit woman(?) stared coldly down at him and snorted with laughter at his decision.
“Hmph. You can dream all you like, but what do you think you can do when you’re in such bad shape here in reality? What can you do against me? I am Aleister Crowley, the human who conquered history’s most intense magical battle, destroyed the world’s largest magic cabal from within, divided the world between magic and science, created the very concept of the science side, built Academy City during the confusion of postwar rebuilding, and manipulated the entire world to my own selfish ends.”
Kamijou fell silent, tasting a rusty flavor on his breath.
The culprit behind the crash was still at large.
Aleister’s solution would be indiscriminate. Anyone even tangentially involved in the Handcuffs-related events of the 29th would be sealed away below the concrete if he got his way. And he could almost certainly pull it off since he had single-handedly won the Battle of Blythe Road.
(What can I do?)
Whether he went for a direct confrontation, a surprise attack, or set them up to defeat each other, he would not just aim to be the reigning champion of the dark side. He was the one who had designed and managed the city’s dark side. He was on another level entirely, so if he used his power, he would slaughter everyone in his way.
That would mean Shirai Kuroko, Hanatsuyu Youen, Rakuoka Houfu, Benizome Jellyfish, Frillsand #G, and anyone else Kamijou hadn’t encountered yet.
Aleister would mercilessly bury them all before even hearing them out or battling them.
(You want to know what I can do after being shown this nightmare?)
For a brief moment, Kamijou’s mind came into sharp focus on this single point.
The bloody boy slowly raised his head.
He stared straight into that fearsome monster’s eyes at close range.
He was still woozy, but the kind of normal high school boy you can find anywhere gave his answer in a low voice.
“I’ll get mad.”
Aleister Crowley smiled.
Still smiling, the human took a step back, leaving Kamijou to fend for himself.
“I would readily get into a physical battle with William Wynn Westcott who was rumored to be immortal. I would have no problem with killing that clown Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers who had the nerve to name himself the originator of modern magic.”
Aleister slowly raised both hands.
He didn’t turn his head, but he didn’t seem able to look Kamijou directly in the eye either.
Almost like a small child whose mischief had come to light.
“But the one thing I never want to do is get into a verbal argument with you.”
“I know reality isn’t going to play nice,” spat Kamijou Touma, surrounded by terrifyingly dark shadows.
Aleister had taken a step back, so he couldn’t use the human for support anymore.
But he managed to stay on his feet with the bestial gleam found in the eyes of any challenger.
“But that’s why I need to overexert myself and stretch out my hand as far as it can go if I hope to grab anyone’s hand. Are you kidding me, Aleister? Yeah, they’re hopeless villains. Sure, they’re criminals who harm everyone they come into contact with. But so what? Don’t just give up on people’s lives. That should be all the more reason to make a real effort to save them. What if I can prove everyone wrong and save them? What if I can pull off a happy ending after the rest of the world threw in the towel and pretended they couldn’t see what was happening anymore? It’ll feel pretty damn good, don’t you think? You’re supposed to see this as a chance to point and laugh at the god in heaven who claims to be all-powerful and all-knowing but still lets these tragedies happen. Am I wrong?”
“…”
“I don’t know how many Handcuffs survivors there are in all. There might be someone everyone’s forgot who’s still out there struggling in the depths of the darkness. They might be shouting – screaming – for help, but we just can’t hear them. And as long as that chance exists, I’ve got to plunge into this godforsaken darkness and search for them. I won’t settle for a partial solution with Alice’s help. I’m not burying it all under cement and going home when there might still be someone down there. That’s why I refused her help and came back here, knowing it would hurt like hell. So don’t waltz in here and try to do the same damn thing like you’d be any better.”
His head wobbled on his neck.
He had lost too much blood.
But he clenched his teeth, held his ground, and got out the words.
“Don’t cement over it all and call it fixed. The all-knowing god in heaven might be able to accept an answer like that since he can see all the right answers, but you’re only human. So don’t you want to see a future that tears down that coldhearted conclusion, Aleister?”
“I can’t believe it.” Aleister sighed with an indescribable look on his face. “To think I would find a glimpse – however small – of the Thelema leading to the 21st Aeon in the very home I have already abandoned. This part really is frustrating. This always seems to happen to me. The things I pursue flee me and the things I discard turn out to be treasures.”
“…?”
“Just speaking to myself,” whispered the beige habit woman(?). “Now, I have a simple question for you: how do you intend to turn this around?”
“First, promise me an overpowered joker like you won’t get involved in this. If you can’t promise me that, then I’ll punch you right in the face until you cry and change your mind.”
“Why does justice always side with you when what you’re saying isn’t much different from a tyrant’s criminal code?” Aleister sounded somehow exasperated, but he had turned his back on goodness and justice for so long he wasn’t about to change his mind on the matter at this point. “I get that you intend to turn down my generous offer and settle this on your own, but how exactly are you planning to do that? You don’t understand what is really going on today, not to mention how the original Operation Handcuffs ended.”
“Personally, I find it strange that you would know so much more about it when you were supposed to have left the city.”
Kamijou poked at his temple. This was not like when he had Alice’s strange adjustments to protect him. He had a bruise there where some kind of blunt weapon had hit him.
(Really, Alice’s intervention has only complicated things. The real culprit wasn’t Frillsand #G. I’m betting Alice switched the real one out for a powerful enemy she thought I could actually defeat, but that false information got in my way here.)
He could use his knowledge from Alice’s world as a reference, but he couldn’t rely on it too much. The number of people involved didn’t match up and everyone’s plans and situations were different. After all, he didn’t even know if Youen, Rakuoka, and Benizome had really wanted to escape the crashed train of their own free will.
He exhaled, focused on his aching temple, and gave his answer.
The wounds on his body were the one thing he knew to be real.
“I start by figuring out who did this. I might not like the answer, but I can never find the path to a solution if I don’t know who my real enemy is.”
“Then the girl will help you, teacher☆”
“Gweh!?”
His senses were taken over by something soft, warm, and sweet.
An incautious blonde girl had apparently jumped right toward his head from the side. She had taken a running start and then buried his head in her flat chest. When she wrapped her arms and her legs around him, he couldn’t help but focus on her body heat. Her arms were latched onto his shoulders and her legs onto his hips. There was only one person this could be:
“A-Alice!?”
“Yes, the girl’s name is Alice.”
He tore her from him and then held her under the arms like a cat. She tilted her head, demonstrating the same otherworldly and gentle fairy tale aura she had shown in her world.
The beige habit and golden retriever were nowhere to be found anymore.
He briefly wondered if he had wandered back into Alice’s world, but that wasn’t it. Aleister could pull off a miracle of that level on his own.
“Where did you come from?”
“From there☆”
Her little finger did not point north, east, south, or west.
It pointed up.
That came as a surprise. Firstly, because it meant she had recklessly jumped down from the elevated railway like he had. It did sound like her to ignore the defined path like that. And secondly, because if she had jumped down with no concern for her skirt, she may have had a good reason to leave the railway in a hurry.
(That’s right. What happened to whoever hit me in the temple!? The culprit who destroyed the ATS sensor is up there. If someone else tries to investigate the track, they’ll run right into the culprit too!!)
He heard an impact of heavy metal.
Then someone flew over the elevated railway’s wall and fell toward him.
“Shirai!!”
