- 10,553
- 11,744
Here's my feat dump for GT5. In case anyone finds it useful.
GT 5 feats
Chapter 1 Part 7:
“You’re kidding me, right? You want me, Mr. Misfortune, to rely on a luck-based lottery as my final hope? This will never work out. I can already see myself stuck with nothing but an empty stomach and a pack of tissues.”
“Then let the girl do it☆”
Alice stuck her little hand in the hole of the box and yanked out a scrap of paper. Unlike Mr. Misfortune, the smiling blonde girl showed no hesitation whatsoever.
She and Kamijou opened the folded paper to see what it said.
“Let’s see. Multiple Climax♂(x3)?”
“???”
“Bffff!! Wait, what!? What is that doing in there!? E-excuse me, sir, but that is the ‘for couples’ prize box!!”
Kamijou ended up learning something he would rather not about the short middle-aged clerk (who was apparently dating a very carnivorous young woman).
Later, Alice was smiling in a chain café on the 2nd floor of the shopping train.
“This tea is really good.”
“Glad to hear it. It cost me my last 100yen coin.”
Thanks to the mystery man’s eager insistence, Kamijou had been given some luxury caviar as a “special prize”. In the adult world, that might have been called buying his silence.
[Supernatural Luck for Alice?]
——————
Chapter 2:
He reflexively held his right hand out toward the unidentified threat.
“Teacher, you mustn’t use that.”
Someone grabbed his hand and shoved him to the side.
It was Alice.
A moment later, something brutal indeed shot past in a horizontal line at his chest height. It bent and broke four or five of the thick decorative pillars lined up along the concourse. This wasn’t a strange laser weapon or beam cannon. It only moved in straight lines, but it bent in a zigzag pattern. And it had been launched by a shaky silhouette?
[Strength of Frillsand lightning]
——————
He spread his arms and rushed at the girl by the lockers in what amounted to a headfirst slide more than a tackle.
And a moment later, he passed right through her.
The girl’s silhouette crumbled away.
The shoulders that looked so slender they would break if he held them too tight, the chest much too large for her age, and the young face that wore a cruel smile surprisingly comfortably all faded away.
He lost his balance like he had crashed into a pile of snow or sand and he collapsed to the floor before he could figure out what happened.
“Eh?”
His mind went entirely blank.
The 10-year-old girl simply wasn’t there. Nor was there a large LCD panel or anything like that. The image came apart into countless small specks that crawled all over his hair and skin and even got in his mouth.
“Ew!? Peh, peh. The hell? Why bugs!?”
[bug clones for Carrier]
—————————
Chapter 2 part 4
(Dragonflies and clearwing moths are just two examples of insects with clear wings. The human eye is easily fooled if you can bend light. So by using the transparency of their wings, it isn’t hard to display an image of myself a short distance away. Combine that with animal fur and feathers and, similar to an AR fitting room, I can even display clothing that isn’t really there.)
Simply put, she had in fact removed her prison uniform, but not in front of the lockers. The white coat and gasmask had been additional data she created by adding extra colors on top of the 3D image created from reflected light. Jewel beetles and morpho butterflies were just two examples of creatures that used structural coloration to manipulate light like the grooves of a CD. If she wanted to, she could display an adult version of herself or even a giant version who towered over the skyscrapers.
[Bug Illusions for Carrier]
———
“A cricket bat,” muttered Youen in a puzzled voice. “Were you hiding that under your apron?”
A second and third blast of electricity flew their way, but the bat(?) soared this way and that to block them with sparks flying. Every time, pink feathers scattered from the bat and it squawked like a bird. At times, the oar-shaped bat’s outlines started to distort.
Kamijou had not seen it emerge, but if Youen was to be believed…
“Um, hey.”
“What do you need, teacher?”
“Alice, are you doing this?”
“?”
She smiled and tilted her head in his arm.
Bending at all would be nearly impossible with that large board under her apron and he hadn’t noticed her having any trouble moving before. Had she actually pulled it out at some other time like with a stage magician’s handkerchief, or could she manipulate space like Shirai Kuroko? He couldn’t say when he didn’t know anything about Alice.
[Alice pocket space / creation?]
————
But one of Youen’s eyebrows shot up like she had felt her phone vibrating in her cleavage. She chose one of the colorful test tubes and pulled it from within her coat. She viewed the surface of the neon yellow liquid inside.
“Wow, it’s rippling,” said Alice in delight.
“Microwaves? No, the reagent’s coloration colloid particles are reacting, so it must be terahertz waves. That’s not good. Hey, you! Get away from that shutter immediately!!”
“?”
For some reason, Youen glared harshly at the concrete next to the shutter instead of the shutter itself. Kamijou had taken a step ahead of her, so he looked back her way in confusion.
Just then, two loud noises tore into the thick security shutter.
The cause appeared to be a pair of metal darts.
The destruction was focused on the top of the shutter. The upper left and right. That destroyed either the device to roll up the shutter or the latches holding it in place because the shutter dropped to the floor like a dramatic unveiling ceremony.
The view outside opened up.
A girl with twintails stood in front of them wearing strange goggles over her eyes.
“Who is this girl?” shouted Alice on reflex. “She has strong pervert energy!!”
“At the very least, I’m not as weird as you and your short sleeves this time of year!!”
She twirled the short metal darts rapidly between her fingers, keeping them in constant motion.
“I was right to leave that driver back at the platform.” That middle school girl – Shirai Kuroko of Judgment – readied several metal darts that could destroy even the toughest and strongest material when she teleported them through space. “Hanatsuyu Youen!! You are under arrest for escaping custody and on suspicion of property damage to the station building!!”
Terahertz waves were special electromagnetic waves that could be used to scan through objects, so they were used in airports in place of magnetic metal detectors and X-ray scanners that could cause health problems. The special waves had an extremely high frequency and a nature midway between light and radio waves, so they could easily search out the number and locations of people on the other side of a wall.
No toy could be so dangerous in the hands of a teleporter who could ignore all three-dimensional restrictions to directly attack any point in space. Currently, there was no hiding from Shirai Kuroko.
[Tetraherz sensor for Kuroko + very limited ESP for Carrier]
—————
“Here’s the thing, justice exhibitionist. If you don’t want him to die because of you, then you’d better step aside right now. I’ll fix this silly blunder of yours.” Youen held a hand to the center of her unnaturally large chest and winked. “If you need sterilization or disinfection, I can produce some ethanol or Bifidobacterium. If you need a pain relief chemical, I can extract it from a mosquito or tick. The quickest way to stop bleeding is to control the coagulation and sewing up a blood vessel requires some sturdy animal thread, right? There are so many options there, from silkworm silk to spider silk. The silkworm is praised as the most plentiful beneficial bug in the world, but it’s really just a grotesque moth larva. This is sounding a lot like my area of expertise, isn’t it?”
[first aid for carrier]
————
Frillsand #G released a massive high-voltage current in all directions.
The white light was brighter than welding at close range and the rumble of the concrete walls and ceiling coming down shook the boy’s eardrums.
[Frillsand omnidirectional blasts + blinding light]
——————
He had misinterpreted what happened last time. It wasn’t being hit by the high-voltage current that sent the strange hallucination into his mind. Yes, his phone and the station’s devices hadn’t malfunctioned because they received a direct hit from that thick beam of electricity.
The entire area around the artificial ghost was faintly electrified.
(My…hair? So that’s it. Static electricity or something is surrounding the entire surface of my head.)
The scene played out in hellish slow motion, but he still had no way of avoiding the ghost’s attack. Imagine Breaker couldn’t negate it. It was possible he could reduce the risk of death from the agonizing shock if he let the hallucination take over. Even if it only increased the odds he could get back up and fight back next time.
[Everything around Frillsand electric]
———
The high-voltage current might have actually stopped his heart for the few seconds his sense of time had been out of order.
[Current can stop hearts]
———
“Yes, that girl’s intuition is correct. The ghost is the greatest threat, so escaping the station is our top priority if we want to survive.” Youen spoke on Alice’s behalf. “I say we let the justice exhibitionist play her stupid role while we do the smart thing and get the hell out of here. Can you stand? If not, I can surround you with bees or ants and force you onto your feet with them. Go, creepy-crawly powered suit☆”
“No need!!” he insisted, springing to his feet. Having tens of thousands of ants and bees covering him too thoroughly for cutaneious respiration and tugging his arms and legs around like a puppet was the stuff of nightmares. But it turned out intense fear worked great to eliminate less-important pain and suffering. He doubted his sanity was going to last long like this, though.
[body pupperty for carrier]
————
Kamijou’s group weren’t the only ones shocked.
(What is that? A flamingo bat? That animal ears girl must be some kind of weirdo to choose a non-baseball bat in this country.)
The sniper wore a cowboy hat and a red China dress. You couldn’t find that kind of clothing at an ordinary store, so she must have stolen it back from the confiscated items being transported along with her in the Overhunting. She gulped at what she assumed that picture book dress girl must have done. A pink oar-like object had floated into the air and blocked the ricocheted bullet.
(Is she an esper, or is that a next-generation weapon? No, I can worry about the exact definition later! I just hope it isn’t something truly incomprehensible like that Coin of Nicholas.)
She lay on her stomach atop a store building on the other side of a major road from South District 7 Station. A semiauto sniper rifle’s stock was pressed against her shoulder and a plastic case bearing the Anti-Skill logo sat nearby.
[Alice blocking sniper bullets]
————
“I need to disinfect the wound before I stop the bleeding. Come on out, you adorable maggots!”
“What? What did you just say, you horrible girl!?”
“Have you never heard of maggot therapy? Ignorant, hotblooded, and short-tempered is so not a good combination.”
She intertwined spider silk around a hornet stinger and used that to sew up a thick blood vessel and then used a coagulating mixture of snake venoms to seal up the wound itself. The difference between poison and medicine was mostly in how the substance was used, so there may not have been a strict boundary between the two. Of course, an amateur attempting it would only get the patient killed.
[More healing details for Carrier]
——————
“You’re just imagining things. But if the pain bothers you that much, I could inject the affected area with a medicinal leech’s anesthetic. The stuff makes sure you don’t feel a thing while the leech tears through your skin with saw-like teeth and gorges on your blood, so it’s more effective than the morphine issued by the military. Although if I did use hirudin, your blood wouldn’t clot and the wound would open back up.”
[more carrier drugs]
—————
“Hello. This is Frillsand #G-chan.”
A face emerged from the hole in the wall, swaying irregularly side to side.
“Next stop: fried to a crisp. Repeat: fried to a crisp.”
Something was slowly but surely approaching.
“Po. Popopopopopo, popo…po………po………popopo…………po………po.”
Slowly but surely approaching them.
“Am I pretty?”
They heard the sound of gathering electricity and all the shower nozzles burst open at once.
Frillsand #G.
They had no way of avoiding her. But the water soaking the floor and walls must have come as a surprise for the ghost as well. A fearsome lightning bolt was redirected so it flew right past Kamijou.
Corrupted text appeared on the shower temperature displays until “42 degrees” glowed from all of them in a red light. Wasn’t that the dividing line between life and death with a fever?
Kamijou lowered his static-covered head to look at his right hand, but Imagine Breaker couldn’t negate this. An invisible force enveloped his head and data gradually seeped into his brain from outside his skull.
A scene from the past began to play.
[Fried to a crisp = lightning attack]
—————
Finding some kind of shield wasn’t enough this time. Thick reinforced concrete broke like styrofoam and the row of metal lockers exploded. The vortex of destruction was so great it was a miracle the entire station and adjoining buildings didn’t collapse.
Imagine Breaker would not negate this
If not for the long pink cricket bat that popped out from below Alice’s apron and flew around her, Kamijou would have been hit and killed by the lightning. In fact, the bat wasn’t alone this time. Several balls dropped down from below her apron and then sharp needles shot out in every direction.
The effect was unclear. Or rather, he didn’t have time to watch what they did.
He was too busy escaping the locker room even if he had to roll along the ground.
[Destruction feats for Frillsand + Lightning defense for Alice]
————
Alice slipped out from Kamijou’s arm and jumped down an entire flight of stairs despite wearing a skirt. Unbelievably, she stuck her legs out in front of her so she would land on her butt. Kamijou’s eyes widened in fright, but then several balls made from curled-up hedgehogs spilled from below her apron. They gathered together into a cushion and she bounced softly off of them. Their flattened spines seemed to act like bed springs, but surely that still had to hurt, right!?
The disconcerting zap of busting air came from somewhere. The speaker used to inform of arriving trains exploded from within and a bundle of cables stuck out like a long tongue.
That was the artificial ghost.
[hedgehogs for Alice, enhanced tech jamming for Frillsand]
———
The deadly being had no weaknesses. That powerful grudge could maybe even destroy all of humanity singlehandedly. If she caught up and placed a hand on their shoulder, they would be killed instantly by the powerful energy. Her chaotic electric storm could break through walls and pillars, so they wouldn’t fare well if that hit them either.
[Touching Frillsand is lethal]
————
After floating up in defiance of gravity, they shot down the subway tunnel with the speed of a bullet.
Based on his shadow cast on the wall, it looked like he had sprouted giant fairy wings. No, that wasn’t it. He was extremely hesitant to look at his back, but he was pretty sure a winged bug over a meter long had grabbed onto his back like a crane game!
“What? Eh? How is it so big!?”
“It’s called parasitic enlargement. That’s one of my toys.”
Youen’s calm voice came from unexpectedly close by. She was moving just as fast as him.
Young Alice rejoiced at being princess carried by the pointy-haired boy and tried to reach out her small hands. Toward what? Toward the thing on his back.
“Wow, it’s all black and hard and shiny! I’ve never seen such a big roa-”
“Stop, Alice! Do not confirm anything for me here!! There are all sorts of flying bugs, right!? I-I am never looking back. I will never confirm which of the giant bugs from the Hanatsuyu Youen Collection is holding onto my back!!”
“Fun fact: In the bug world, particularly among beetles, a male getting up another one’s back is a symbol of a live-giving ceremony. Hee hee. By which I mean mating!”
[Carrier flies via bugs]
—————
“Those are some pretty sexy modifications to your dress there. That tells me you’re the type to use your femininity as a weapon. It means you think you’re hotter than average,” said Hanatsuyu Youen while flying alongside them using the shiny blue wings of a morpho butterfly. She pulled out a test tube and shook it, creating motion in the surface of the neon green liquid within. “Did you know spiders break down their prey’s tissue – in other words, the protein – and uses their stomach like a pump to suck it all up? Doing some real-life character creation work to the face and figure is pretty simple. But don’t worry. After melting your boobs away, I’ll make sure to give you five or even ten of them in a grape-like cluster. Got a specific number you want?”
[limited Biological Manipulation for carrier]
———
Youen popped off the rubber cap of a test tube.
A black carpet rippled around them. It was formed from tens of thousands of ants. The ground itself seemed to be moving, so Kamijou felt like he was moving backwards despite standing still. On the Carrier’s instructions, the ants marched toward the trucks, but nothing happened. They were not blown away by a high-voltage current.
“No traps.”
“Then let’s end this before Frillsand #G catches up!!”
Kamijou, Alice, and Youen circled to the back of the closest truck. The door to the metal container had a keyhole, but Youen summoned a thumb-sized ant that melted the metal inside.
[ant carper and acid manip]
———
“We need some personality data on Drencher Kihara Repatri first. Maybe an oil-eating black mold would work. The distribution of fingerprints and footprints would tell us if he was meticulous, neurotic, or whatever else.”
“Y-you can learn how people think like that?”
“You think that’s strange? There’s an esper out there who reads people’s ‘residual thoughts’ from the electricity and moisture left on objects.”
[limited postcognition… or something. Also reference to Misaki]
————
“If the exterior is silicon, I can form the details with an organic solvent. I’ll need a photo of this Drencher person for that. Also some of his clothing to learn his body size. Check the drawers over there. He lived here, so surely there’s a photo somewhere.”
[organic solvent]
————
They heard the low zap of bursting air, so everyone but Alice stopped blinking.
“(Here she is,)” whispered Kamijou.
“(I can’t believe it took her this long,)” said Shirai. “(Given her previous speed, she should have attacked well before this. Could she have hesitated after seeing the lab she used to call home?)”
[Should Frillsand somewhat scale to Kuroko’s speed? If not she can track them somehow]
—————
With that in mind, she held a skinny arm toward the trucks. This was not an indiscriminate, omnidirectional attack. She took precise aim to blow up the survivors of Operation Handcuffs.
Prioritizing destruction over her memories may have shown she had now become a true vengeful spirit.
But a moment beforehand…
“Good grief. I wake up and this is what I find? Fate can be cruel, can’t it?”
“What?”
It was deflected.
It was bent.
Her torrent of electricity could bring down a skyscraper, yet it was easily repelled with a single hand.
[AP feat]
—————
“I provided a ground.” Hanatsuyu Youen was collapsed in the same lab. “Since the electricity was too powerful for the circuit boards, I just had to divert the unnecessary power into the ground. That prevented the artificial ghost from frying the android’s innards.”
She shook an empty test tube and raised her thumb even though the rubber cap was already gone.
“Now, this might alter the soil’s acidity a little, but no one around here has to worry about being electrocuted. Electricity flows along the path of least resistance and this wasn’t powerful enough to ignore the ground and race up to someone’s brain or heart.”
“Electrical stuff doesn’t sound like your area of expertise, so I’m betting you found a way to make this biological. What did you use this time? A bug? Or maybe some kind of mold?”
“Gallionella iron bacteria.”
“…”
“Don’t stare at me like that. It’s a microbe that oxidizes iron and manganese ions. They take metal inside themselves all on their own, so they’re perfect for constructing an invisible wire between the android and the ground.”
[Grounding bacteria]
——————
“Oh, you noticed?”
Time froze.
Only Kamijou Touma and short-sleeved Alice remained facing each other in the slanted and scorched truck. The girl’s presence seemed to rule this space – both the shine of her golden hair and her warmth that drove out all loneliness.
[Time freezing for alice]
————
“What part made you suspect?” she asked with a smile.
“All of it. From the beginning,” spat Kamijou.
Then he listed off what he meant by “all of it”.
“How did I escape nearly unscathed from a head-on collision between two trains?
“I jumped from the train’s 2nd floor, fell through the hole melted in the platform, and didn’t know where I was going to land, so it makes no sense I didn’t break a single bone.
“Frillsand #G built up an overwhelming pile of victims during Handcuffs. Did she really attack using something as immediately obvious as electricity?
“Even if that is what she used, I should have basically exploded if that high-voltage current even grazed me. It also doesn’t make sense she could share her memories with me using electricity. Our brains aren’t constructed the same like with the cloned Sisters.
“Is Shirai Kuroko of Judgment really the kind of person to do what a fugitive criminal says even if it’s necessary to solve the problem at hand?
“I don’t know how skilled that Uiharu girl is, but does she really know enough about the underside of the city to give us a list of Handcuffs mysteries just because someone asks her to run a search real quick? For that matter, does she have the mental fortitude needed to just smile and describe those dark side tragedies even if her search did turn them up?
“What about Benizome Jellyfish? Wasn’t it a bit much to just assume she had to know where Frillsand #G’s lab was? We had nothing to suggest that.
“Does the technology to link an artificial ghost with an android really exist? Can you really resurrect the dead by cobbling together Academy City tech?
“Why did Frillsand #G wait to attack until after we had found everything we needed in Drencher’s lab?
“Then there’s Hanatsuyu Youen the Carrier. This was my first time meeting a Handcuffs criminal, but is she really the kind of girl who would grow so attached to someone she just met even if we had a common goal? I mean, she changed in front of me and fed me a drug mouth-to-mouth. Being from the dark side doesn’t mean she’s that unguarded.
“But the most glaring error was me finding 10 thousand yen on the ground and all the other times I was insanely lucky.”
Alice sighed.
“The girl’s magic forces all of those things to work.”
[Can boost durability, increase luck and mind control people as well as ghosts, can make resurrection work by bollucks means. ]
———————
Alice slowly pointed her finger toward Kamijou.
But not at him. She pointed past him. He noticed something there and slowly emerged from the tilted truck.
The frozen outside world was not the world he knew.
A giant towered into the heavens above the abandoned leisure spa and enormous pumpkins shaped like human faces broke through the asphalt to grow from the ground all over the place. A five-pointed shooting star drew a trail behind it in the night sky and incomprehensible ancient characters and diagrams danced about like neon signs.
Time remained frozen.
Kamijou was honestly glad for that. If time resumed now, something awful would happen to Shirai, Youen, and everyone else who wasn’t here.
“Teacher.”
The voice behind him remained entirely innocent. She hopped around in front of him.
That girl there had done all this.
She could end the current world with a snap of her fingers.
“It doesn’t matter if your real-world theories have broken down. Even if there is no direct connection between two ideas, a bridge can always be built if the girl goes on an adventure and creates a new path.”
“A bridge?”
“Hmm, like this: ‘There are four emotions and four elements, so when roleplaying, you can draw on a special power by intentionally drawing on a specific emotion in yourself.’ ”
People would normally call that “a stretch” or “sophistry”. It might sound reasonable at first, but there was no existing mythology or law behind it. In this case, the idea of the four emotions was an Eastern thing and the idea of the four elements was a Western thing commonly seen in fantasy RPGs.
But if you could build a bridge between the two and it would give you power with 100% reliability, you would have a legitimate miracle on your hands.
It reminded him a bit of the way the Amakusas combined Shinto, Buddhism, and Christianity, but this was completely different. Alice didn’t need to find points in common between the two things to form a logical connection. She could notice that a paint set on sale had 12 colors, associate that with the 12 numbers on a clock, and with nothing more than that gain a complete control over time. Except it wouldn’t just apply to Alice herself. The moment she decided that was true, all the paint in the world would gain the same power.
“Burning something requires phlogiston, observing one of a pair of separated particles determines the spin of the other one no matter the distance between them, neutrinos can travel faster than light. It might sound ridiculous, but if the girl links together the surrounding theories to build up a solid basis and makes it convincing enough, she can create an actual functioning theory. Even if the idea she started with was flawed and even if the values she started with came from faulty measurements.”
“You mean…?”
“It works even if the theory is how to resurrect the dead. After all, magic is meant to give people joyous hopes and fun dreams.”
By forcibly connecting entirely separate theories, she had created a single path to this destination.
Even if she hadn’t created anything herself and was journeying around by peering into someone else’s mind.
[Alice has the ability to make any flawed theory/connection between things she comes up with work, but then for everyone]
—————
Kamijou noticed a straining sound.
It came from within Alice.
Specifically, from her blue storybook dress with a white apron over it. It tore in a way such solid fabric never should have. The entire center of her body tore to either side like it was a thin stocking.
The ripping noise sounded somehow suggestive.
“Now.”
Immorally bright skin emerged from within.
The transformation was like a childish mint candy becoming a sticky honey dripping onto the skin.
The thing contained in the storybook dress came into view. Metal buckles shined and red and black belts glistened with oil while digging into a slender body.
Alice spread her arms wide without showing any concern for the empty shell left behind.
“Please guide the girl, teacher. She wants to go on an adventure inside you. You weren’t satisfied with this ending? Then what kind of ending would you accept? Just tell the girl and she will join the theories together, fill in the gaps, establish the necessary facts, and give you the world you want.”
[There’s another Alice inside regular Alice]
————
“The girl connects the unconnected, stabilizes impossible theories and ideas, and creates a better than optimal reality. To be blunt, you will not survive without the girl’s help, teacher.”
[Another wording for what Alice does]
————
“The girl didn’t give Frillsand #G a power she doesn’t really have. That was simply the result of emphasizing just one aspect of her. Once she has access to all of her power, you don’t stand a chance against her.”
[Manipulated which power Frillsand would use]
———
“New command from Alice Anotherbible. Immediately cease all modified kabbalah bridge linking within Live Adventures in Wonderland.”
The deep thunk that followed sounded just like a thick metal lock opening.
Kamijou Touma was enveloped in white light.
His senses gradually faded until nothing felt real anymore, but he definitely heard the girl’s sad but hopeful voice.
“Teacher. Please don’t let yourself die too easily, okay?”
————
Chapter 3
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?)
[Alice reversed time and Touma got hurt worse without her help]
———————
An unpleasant sound came from within his body. He thought he maybe had a nosebleed, but the stickiness he felt while blinking told him there was blood below his eyelids.
He saw a doll-like blue dress and long blonde twintails blowing in a way unrelated to the night breeze. She was right there in front of him, but she looked less real than a mirage.
(Frillsand #G!? Why does she have to show up now!?)
She hadn’t laid a finger on him.
She had not shot a horrific beam of light through his chest and she hadn’t caused a massive explosion.
She had simply appeared before him.
That was enough for a wet and sticky sensation to flow from his eye and ears. After falling to his knees, he was helpless to do anything but slowly collapse forward.
He was experiencing unexplained bleeding, a headache, chills, and a fever.
Death was approaching little by little – step by step.
“What? Bh…ah!!!???”
(Damn…it. I can’t even raise my right hand. This attack…makes no sense. Agh, what am I even supposed to punch with Imagine Breaker!?)
“…still…inside…”
This was absurdly dangerous.
That monotone female voice was simply too dangerous.
His vision was tilted on its side and growing red starting from one side, but he managed to see Shirai Kuroko collapsing from the bench to the ground. His brain was hallucinating cracking and straining noises. The confusion of all his senses was worse than any pain and it felt like having an invisible hand squeezing him in its grasp.
This was Frillsand #G the artificial ghost.
Unlike in Alice’s world, she did not just launch powerful electricity and use her scientific nature to resist Imagine Breaker.
This was not a visible, physical threat like that. He didn’t understand any of it, but was she a much more dangerous being who would kill you if you carelessly looked in her direction when she spoke to you!?
At the same time…
“Yawwwn?”
He heard an odd voice.
It was cheerful, carefree, and cutely sweet. Apparently she had trouble staying up late in the real world too. She was nodding off in the middle of the crisis playing out around her.
Alice Anotherbible looked like she had stepped out of a picture book and she alone remained standing. After holding a small hand to her mouth and yawning, she placed her index finger on her chin and tilted her head to ask a question.
Yes.
The fundamental question of why was everyone around her collapsing?
“Ri…still…inside…”
“That won’t work on the girl,” interrupted Alice with a sleepily clueless smile.
This time, no cricket bat or hedgehog balls emerged from below her apron. This was a formless curse, after all. But Alice was still entirely unaffected by the invisible attack.
Was she built differently from the others on the inside?
Was this like how carbon monoxide was deadly to humans but harmless to insects because their blood was different? This didn’t seem like she simply didn’t feel any pain because she was that much stronger than the average person. It was a lot more like the conditions of the attack didn’t apply to her in the first place. Kamijou even had a meaningless fantasy about someone continually giving animal carcasses to a vulture in the hopes of giving it food poisoning.
Which was more unnatural here: Frillsand #G for causing fatal wounds without laying a finger on anyone or Alice for being exposed to that and smiling like it was nothing?
“A ghost can’t match the girl’s level of mystery☆”
“…”
A few solid impacts rang out.
They came from Frillsand #G, not Alice. Her neck kept bending unnaturally to the right or the left. At times, it bent more than 90 degrees.
The shadow extending from young Alice’s little feet had grown unnaturally long.
It slid out past Frillsand #G and a strange silhouette stood up from it. The emaciated and bony silhouette was far creepier than the flamingo or hedgehogs. But instead of white bones, these were clear as crystal.
It held a one-sided axe with a sharp sword blade extending from the butt end of the staff.
This was the horrifying side of fairy tales – the polar opposite of the candy and the stuffed animals.
(What is that?)
Kamijou had no advance knowledge and no one gave him the answer, but when he saw the bony creature wrapped in a tattered black cloak, he was strangely certain of the answer. Like the answer had been inserted into his mind.
(An executioner?)
The ominous silhouette seemed puzzled by its failure to lop off its target’s head in a single attack.
Its skull-like head tilted disconcertingly far while it spun the shaft around in its hand. It switched to the sword blade and sliced sharply at the air. Whenever it spun the shaft like a baton and aimed the point at its target, the artificial ghost’s head was mysteriously knocked aside, causing it to bend directly sideways.
Kamijou honestly couldn’t even see the axe, the sword, or even the blur of the blades in motion.
Most likely, the conditions it used to cut had nothing to do with that motion.
Maybe it was the arrangement of the fingers gripping the weapon, maybe it automatically sliced at the weak points the target reflexively tried to protect, and maybe the baton-like weapon was a spool for the threads of life and destiny and it would cut those threads, killing you instantly, if you failed to defeat it before it spun a certain number of times.
Frillsand #G was only still intact because she was an artificial ghost, but Kamijou was willing to bet he would have been decapitated before he could even try to react. He couldn’t even guess when he would need to use his right fist.
“Oops.” Alice noticed something and quickly pressed her small foot against the ground and rubbed forward with the sole. “Teacher would be mad if the girl actually killed you. Come on back, Executioner. You can’t cut the Cheshire Cat who vanishes into thin air.”
That was all it took for that powerful silhouette to collapse and disappear.
Kamijou only now realized something.
Both in Alice’s world and the real world, the pink bat and hedgehog balls would emerge and block any attack that Alice couldn’t avoid herself.
But it wasn’t about protecting her.
It wasn’t motivated by a fear of injury.
If she was hit by an attack that obstructed her movements, it would piss her off so much she would kill her opponent without even meaning to. So Alice made sure to block the attacks so that wouldn’t happen.
Not even the Executioner was Alice’s own power. Anything that slipped past the cricket defense and escape the Executioner’s blade would probably find Alice herself waiting for them.
“…”
Even after taking several lethal slashes to the head, the artificial ghost was still functioning.
Didn’t an old children’s story say you couldn’t behead a bodiless cat?
Frillsand #G silently pointed a finger up with her head still bent unnaturally far to the side.
A deep boom echoed from overhead.
It came from one of the photography or delivery drones that were common enough nowadays. She must have messed with its large battery, causing it to explode above Alice’s head. Even a single screw could become a deadly weapon when dropped from sufficient height. This was like creating a falling ceiling from the many fragments.
The artificial ghost’s formless attack had not let up.
Kamijou still suffered from the inexplicable fever and bleeding while he did his best to roll along the ground.
“Gah…ah!?”
(That ghost woman doesn’t just harm anyone she meets. Can she also make machines malfunction!? I-is there anything she can’t do!?)
“Hmm.”
It was Alice’s turn to act.
She removed the finger from her chin and directed her small palm toward empty air.
She had the look of a child when the stone they were kicking down the road on the way to school fell into the ditch. It was the look of someone abandoning some meaningless, self-imposed restriction and preparing to unleash whatever they were holding back.
Most likely, this wasn’t due to the electric ghost’s approach. It was something else that made Alice spread her long blonde hair to the sides.
All the assumptions were breaking down.
The cricket defense had been slipped past and the Executioner’s blade had been escaped, so it was time for Alice herself to make her move.
“The girl kind of has to now, doesn’t she?”
“Alice!!!!!!”
[Alice Executioner, what the defenses are for, her resisting Frillsand and Frillsand causing fever and stuff]
—————
(No, this alley isn’t that far away. So is it seeing and hearing the ghost I need to avoid?)
That did sound like in ghost photos where it was the photographer or someone else in the photo who was cursed just because a ghost appeared in the photo.
[Hearing Frillsand works too?]
—————
“The girl knows about poisonous moths! They already have their pokey bits as caterpillars, so everyone says not to touch them. They can’t do anything to the girl, though.”
[Poison resistance Alice]
————
“Cr-”
He tried and failed to force his dried throat to operate.
Alice’s cheerful voice spoke for him.
“Crickets!”
They all looked up. A glistening light moved in waves along the corridor ceiling. As soon as they noticed, tens of thousands of crickets began vibrating their wings at once, creating an explosion of sound.
[…]
At a certain country’s embassy, some workers who complained off severe dizziness and a buzzing in the ear were thought to have suffered brain damage. It was likely a special form of sound wave attack. Rumors spread in the embassy that the attack was intentional and that it would develop into an international incident…but it was later theorized that the chirping of local crickets had caused it.
Crickets chirped by rubbing their wings together, so as long as you knew the dangerous frequency, you could subtly alter their wings with chemicals to reproduce the same phenomenon. It had helped that the heat-filled garbage incinerator facility had been full of creatures that couldn’t normally survive the winter.
[Sound attack carrier]
————
The noise was enough to rattle the mind and the bugs were cascading from above, but she had the same smile as ever and held both soft hands out toward him. She pulled his upper body out like she was rescuing the victim of an avalanche and then she dragged him away.
Neither the cricket defense nor the executioner made an appearance.
Tens of thousands of bugs apparently wasn’t enough for her to feel repulsed or disgusted. She had used the bat and balls before. Poison gas, curses, and other forms of internal damage never seemed to affect her. (It almost felt like trying to drown a fish in water.) But her soft skin could not deflect the macroscopic external damage of the crickets. Plus, she was wearing a skirt and short sleeves.
[Sound resistance and others for Alice]
—————
Meanwhile, Kamijou crawled deeper into the facility.
He got his trembling legs moving enough to stand up and slowly walked forward.
He chose to trust in the things he couldn’t see. When he had a bad feeling or sensed a mysterious pressure, he kept away from that room even if it meant going the long way around. He didn’t know if it had helped at all, but he wasn’t attacked by anymore bugs. It was possible he had noticed a faint dizziness or headache from the chemical smell or the change in room temperature or air pressure.
Regardless, he referenced the map photo on his old folk’s phone to take an S-shaped detour around the most direct route and finally reached the destination of that labyrinth.
[Touma limited danger sense… maybe]
————
Was she summoning a swarm of crickets to act as an acoustic weapon, a swarm of hornets or spiders filled with deadly venom, or something so horrific a high schooler couldn’t even conceive of it?
With several dull sounds, she tore open the nearby pipe until white steam erupted from it. She may have wanted a secret ingredient for her test tubes, but the real surprise was how she tore the pipe open with her teeth.
“What? My teeth melted away during Handcuffs, so I replaced them with nonmetallic implants I made myself. It’s the same stuff they make airplane fuselages out of.”
Apparently she used more than just chemicals. And how had she managed to implant herself with that new equipment while restrained? He had been shot before it could happen, but if he had managed to tackle her and incapacitate her, would she have bitten into his chest or shoulder?
[teeth implants]
————
A liquid erupted from underground.
The skin-colored syrup surrounded Hanatsuyu Youen and blocked the bullet as a thick liquid barrier.
Yes, skin.
That whitish cream color could have applied to so many other things, so why was that disturbing word the first thing that came to Kamijou Touma’s mind?
The answer was obvious.
It was so similar to the color of Hanatsuyu Youen’s skin while she stood there in a daze.
“Ka…?”
“Nee hee hee hee hee.”
After spiraling around the girl, the liquid swelled up in violation of gravity and finally formed a silhouette seemingly made of melted wax. Once the details formed, it looked exactly like Hanatsuyu Youen.
No, not quite.
Another girl was toying with the crushed rifle bullet held between her little fingers.
“I dissolved myself into the sewers to bathe in all the city’s filth forevermore, but I just couldn’t do it. Humans are great at adapting to their environment, but the Japanese spirit isn’t made to eat curry rice three days straight. Hmm, maybe I should’ve gone to train in India, the mystical curry capital of the world, before melting my body.”
“Kaai!? Is that you, Kaai?”
[Decomposer returns; could you consider her carriers equipment now?]
———
“Un.”
“Un.”
She heard something like giant gas bubbles floating to the surface of a swamp and popping.
No, the popping bubbles were growing from the cream-colored slime surrounding Youen.
“Deux♪”
“Deux♪”
And Tessou’s original association had been accurate. These were giant gas bubbles.
“Trois☆”
“Trois☆”
“!? Tch!!”
A single spark of static electricity would trigger a massive explosion. Had they used their crazy microbes to rapidly turn the raw garbage into petroleum? Worse, this wasn’t just an indiscriminate gas explosion. It was directed in a single direction to accurately launch shards of metal like a sniper shot. And when the Decomposer and the Carrier were behind it, those “arrowheads” were likely coated with a horrific poison.
[Decomposer & Carrier gas gun]
—————
At that exact moment, a much more powerful shock hit her from behind. She immediately lowered her head, but that didn’t stop the sharp scratches from raking across her cheek.
Rotten gas had expanded inside the can until it exploded.
The attack had come from the can’s lid. She had just barely dodged that, but the scattershot of caviar had still broken her skin. It was like a needleless tranquilizer dart.
(Oh, no! The fish eggs burst inside the wound!)
[Caviar gun]
————
“I see. And even if he did seal up the underground passageway, we can break through a random wall to make a shortcut. A biological acid or a methane explosion should do the trick.”
[Carrier melting walls]
————
Unable to just watch any longer, Youen popped off the rubber cap of a test tube and then Kamijou felt something hot at the center of his gut. Right at the bullet wound.
“It’s a nontoxic mold. It can only place a thin film over the wound, but that’s better than nothing, right?”
“Mold?”
“If you don’t want it, you can remove it by rubbing on some ethanol, but that would probably cause the wound to open up all the way, killing you.”
[healing mold… I guess]
—————
He heard more footsteps resembling a knocking sound. Incautious Alice was clearly sticking her head out from behind the pillar and smiling, the white fluffball on the back of her apron cutely wiggling. She could shrug off a curse, germ, or any other internal threat (it was like trying to kill a mole by burying it alive) and she seemed proud of that ability, giving off some full power “compliment me” beams. The upper arms left exposed by her short sleeves shined bright without a single goose bump.
[Idk; anyway Frillsand can not restraint herself so her death bringing is passive now?]
—————
Maybe that cry had come from an artificial ghost whose anger had caused her to swallow up Academy City’s Greatest Taboo, which stood on the dividing line between science and magic and made her voice deadly to even listen to.
[Support for sound now being deadly]
——————
Chapter 4
The demon girl showed off her ratty dress made of English newspapers held together by tape.
The articles began to wriggle and change.
The demon spread her arms to display the text personalized for Risako.
Almost like there was no reason to hide any of it even with the girl’s eyes still closed.
“Demons like me are sensitive to people’s desires. And I’m the Qliphah Puzzle 545 who used the mood of war to confuse the people of an entire country, so the dark parts of people lives are like my backyard. If I want to know the history of my target, I just have to take a look at my dress’s articles.”
[Qliphah sensitive to desire]
————
“I’m a demon, so I can see your desires. But I’ll ask the question anyway.” Qliphah Puzzle 545 moved her face toward Risako’s, her smile growing. “Refusing to think about it wasn’t enough to push back Kihara Hasuu. That’s why you lost to that mean old man in the end. So let’s keep going from there. Instead of hesitating and putting it off, it’s time to reject his answer with an answer of your own. Show him there’s an answer other than asking for the power to fight.”
[More Qliphah sensing desires]
—————
That plan was wiped from his mind by what happened next.
Several radiant objects pierced through his back and out from his chest.
They were logs with the ends sharpened like pencils. They were bound by rope in a crisscrossing pattern to create what was originally used as a brutal fence. They pierced the ghost’s body and tore apart the wreckage of the chainsaw he still held. Rainbow flames flickered from his wounds, perhaps due to interference from the soot created as the logs burned.
This was a yarai.
Instead of a weapon, it was actually used by torture and execution experts to surround an execution ground.
One had even made an appearance on the 25th. It had been used by a hakama girl with long curly silver hair who had sacrificed her life to save an unfamiliar child and some unexpected companions.
Kihara Hasuu muttered in utter shock.
[Kazakiri can manifest stabby thing - see picture. NPI for stabbing him dead.]
———
“The girl saw it coming from the moment he refused to use Live Adventures in Wonderland. Ah ha ha. Because the better the person, the less they need the girl.”
[Name of Alice’s spell]
————
Alice would go on adventures where she linked together laws and definitions to find new meaning there while she innocently used her Live Adventures in Wonderland that affected the entire world, so all of their efforts here were a small price to pay if it let them work that girl into their own plans.
[Planetary range]
—————
Chapter 1 Addition
The general public is apparently abuzz with talk about water and traces of life being discovered on a planet dozens of lightyears away, but how do you think that got there? That girl got upset and started throwing her ceramic pot, teacakes, and whatnot.
