Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume5 Ending
Academy City’s nights were a familiar home to that human, but just like a certain boy had said, it was no longer his kingdom.
A woman in a beige habit with blonde hair roughly cut to shoulder length waited in one corner of District 7. Technically speaking, she was a great demon whose body had been taken over by Aleister Crowley.
She(?) was crouched in an unnaturally open space within the closely-packed skyscrapers.
A golden retriever walked up to her and she spoke without even glancing his way.
“Are you quite done now?”
“How condescending. You had your own objective to carry out, didn’t you? And this trouble on the 29th helped hide what you were up to.”
“Fair enough.”
It had been very convenient that the center of the commotion had moved from District 7 to District 10. Otherwise, someone might have noticed that Aleister was up to something.
Maybe it would have been the prisoners running around the city’s night, maybe it would have been the artificial demon flying around unseen, and maybe it would have been the city’s new ruler watching it all from afar.
He had prepared a countermeasure for the Underline hidden in the air, but it turned out the new ruler had shut the system down.
“That was a close one,” said the dog.
“What was?”
“When you offered to take over for Kamijou Touma. Aleister, that one was entirely selfless, wasn’t it? None of it would have functioned as a diversion if you had gone to District 10 to solve it yourself. This could have all ended in failure then.”
“…”
Still crouching, Aleister fell silent.
And he finally asked a question.
“Do you think it is wrong to reach out a helping hand to someone being manipulated, even if it means your own defeat or failure?”
“Tactically speaking, it would definitely be wrong. Then again, it’s the choices like this that make me want to help you.”
Aleister Crowley’s life had been a series of failures and mistakes.
No matter how carefully he put together a plan or strategy, the smallest thing would cause it all to fall apart. It didn’t matter how much time and effort he put into it. Time and again, this had been proven to him.
So to be blunt, he had been caught completely off guard when he had lost the Windowless Building in his fight against Great Demon Coronzon and when he had been forced to battle Westcott, Mathers, and other old members of the Golden cabal in London. That was why he had barely had a countermeasure in place for those things.
But he did have a few things in mind.
He had left some trump cards behind since they hadn’t fit the situation, but they looked like they would be useful in a different way now.
The beige habit woman held a tablet attached to another device with a cable. The Windowless Building was gone, but its foundation remained in Academy City’s ground. The foundation’s power supply and communications network had been shut down, but reacquiring access to the original network was still possible if you repaired the damaged and concealed portions.
He had needed to run a search.
This was not limited to Academy City. He searched through the vast ocean of data covering the entire world known as the science side.
Of course, it was the magic side that would understand the true value of what he sought.
So it had been easy to imagine it would be hidden on the science side where it could go unnoticed.
Aleister grinned.
“Found it.”
“Good grief. My goal is the elimination all forms of magic, so don’t expect me to throw my hands in the air and rejoice this.”
“Now there’s an amusing mental image. Even more amusing since this country calls that the ‘penis’ pose.”
“I’ll bite you?”
“Why the anger? English alone has over 100 words for that body part and who knows how high the number goes if you count every language on the planet. Don’t act like you’re some refined intellectual, scientist. Whether they admit it or not, everyone loves dick. The dick is the most romantic body part.”
The human who had gone down in history as a world-class pervert was entirely serious, so the golden retriever really did attack the habit woman. The last line was apparently especially unforgivable.
“Ow, ow, ow!! So the queen of evil is brought down by the dog who is both her friend and an old man? How interesting. Heh, is this my new normal? Well done showing me even I have more to experience, Kihara Noukan.”
“Grr! We do not have time for this. We do not belong in Academy City anymore, so we need to leave.”
“I am aware of that. Now that I have this, I have no more business here.”
Aleister Crowley looked fairly beaten up after the large dog bit him on the arm and dragged him along the ground, but he didn’t bother getting up and stared up into the night sky. Then he brought the tablet’s thin screen up in front of his eyes.
The action gave enough of a tug for the taut cable to pop out.
A new message had appeared on the screen.
A pin had been placed on the map. The habit woman kissed that part of the screen.
It indicated a location where a corpse had been preserved for more than a century now.
“Hello, Anna Kingsford. This magician was Westcott and Mathers’s teacher and that woman is rumored to have been based on her. Now, I think it’s about time I treated myself to a counterattack.”
