p> Of course, Frillsand #G knew exactly what that place was.

This was the collection of trucks where Drencher Kihara Repatri had spent so much time with those children. It was his mobile lab. And it was a large daycare center where he collected the specimen children who had vanished into the dark side.

She had mercilessly destroyed some garbage collectors who tried to collect the abandoned trucks. Very literally so. Their body tissue had exploded from within.

She had wanted to protect that place even if it meant spreading grudges and curses.

“..”

But now some Handcuffs criminals had made it inside, so she no longer hesitated. An all-out attack would not leave much of the lab intact.

She might blow away the very core of her memories.

She would probably be hit by intense regret afterwards, but this might let her break free of her current situation.

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.

With the exception of the time some unidentified interference had caused her to malfunction, no one had managed to escape her grudge and curse during Operation Handcuffs.

But without breaking a sweat, he once more protected some children who had fallen into the darkness.

“Why? What are you doing here!?”

Surprise appeared on her face for the first time. Her eyes may have finally focused on reality again. Something about the opponent before her eyes would not let her wander through a nightmare any longer.

This person shouldn’t have been here.

But she also wanted him to be here more than anything.

“You know exactly what I’m doing here and why, Frillsand #G-kun. How can I sit idly by while the dark side continues to devour lives? Even if it means losing my own life.”

“That’s not what I meant. This is so much more than that! How are you here? This world stole everything from me, so why is it going back on that tragedy now!?”

Her own beam vanished.

Her ghostly face silently crumpled.

An indistinct figure appeared before her.

It took the form of someone so foolish and so kind.

“Do you need a reason to protect someone? Of course you don’t.”

It only took those words.

It only took that simple whisper.

“Ah.”

She stopped.

Frillsand #G came to a stop.

Her thoughts ground to a halt and refused to function.

Attempting to exorcise her was a fool’s errand. You could build a solemn shrine and desperately worship her as a god, but whether or not she stopped was entirely up to her mood. She was like a natural disaster supported by chemistry and physics.

“Drench..er?” she muttered, eyes wide.

She just about clung to him, but then she bit her lip.

She shook and held her head.

“You can’t trick me!! I won’t be fooled!!”

Perhaps she refused to accept the possibility because it felt too good to be true. Perhaps she feared there was some malicious trick hidden somewhere. The events of Handcuffs had been so cruel they had emotionally scarred even a ghost.

So when she spoke again, there was a tremor in her voice.

The invincible artificial ghost was terrified that simply touching this man would cause him to pop like a bubble.

“You died.”

“That I did.”

“I was never supposed to see you again!!”

“Says who?”

Drencher took a step forward. Frillsand #G shook her head, but she did not step back.

What she wanted above all was vengeance. It was supposed to be an eternal battle.

But was that really true?

Weeping like a child, she leaped into the chest of the dead man once more.

He accepted her into his arms.

Even if his body was fake, he would still have a pulse.

“Everything will be alright.” He gave her a trouble smile. “Everything will be alright now. I’m not going anywhere, Frillsand #G-kun.”

No matter who got in the way and no matter how much they said this kind of patchwork happy ending couldn’t happen, there was no stopping the pursuit of happiness.

Part 17

“Ha.”

A breath that was half sigh and half laugh left Kamijou Touma’s mouth.

They had cut this one extremely close.

But the electrical damage stopped right in front of the collapsed boy’s feet. It had been like diving headfirst into a thick thundercloud and all the lab’s equipment had burst from within, but he had somehow avoided losing his life.

“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.”

“Don’t tell those two. It would ruin the romantic mood.”

The boy realized he had recovered enough to complain about that.

He gave the embracing couple a silent look while still collapsed on his rear.

Then he sighed and spoke up.

“Alice, what is this?”

Between the Lines 3

“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.

As usual, the blonde girl of about 12 cutely tilted her head like a storybook girl.

“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.”

“Magic?”

“Ah ha ha. Did you think it was an esper power? Like the #6 who you can’t see clearly?”

He was curious why Alice sounded so knowledgeable about that, but he was more interested in a different question.

Could Alice really be described using just the magic side?

“Do you modify probability so you could always win the lottery or at bingo? No, that isn’t it. That wouldn’t let you include nonexistent possibilities.”

“Correct. It is not that☆”

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.

If he had continued traveling through that comfortable world without questioning it, all of the pieces would have intertwined and become real.

Like a board game where surrounding your opponent’s pieces captured all of those pieces for yourself.

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.”

“Is that so?” muttered Kamijou.

However it had happened, it was difficult to think of a happier ending than someone being reunited with a loved one who had died. And when it was done with a technology so closely connected to herself, that had to have saved Frillsand #G.

Not everything about Operation Handcuffs had been bad.

If you avoided taking a one-sided view of that night and rearranged things like a puzzle, it could even be used to save a life.

That answer was sure to save all the people who had been dragged into that mess.

Alice wasn’t doing anything wrong here.

He understood that.

So Kamijou Touma answered her just like she asked him to.

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

She looked confused.

She looked dreadfully psychedelic covered in belts that moved all on their own and loosely bound her legs together. She looked like she had stepped out of another world altogether as she tilted her head with so much of her soft skin showing.

“Umm, are you sure you want that?” she asked.

“I am.”

“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.”

“It’s still what I want. You filling in the gaps keeps me from seeing what I really need to do.”

“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.”

“Probably not. But I’m not trying to overpower her.”

“Hanatsuyu Youen, Rakuoka Houfu, and Benizome Jellyfish escaped from the train. You aren’t na?ve enough to think they aren’t a threat just because they aren’t as powerful as the ghost, are you? Each one of them is a difficult enough enemy to take you out the instant you encounter them.”

“I know that.”

“You will die.”

“That doesn’t change my answer.”

“Hm.” Alice placed her index finger on her chin and stared into empty space. “One of them wanted to become a god, one of them wanted to be immortal, and one of them wanted to get back at academia for making fun of him. The girl has gone on a lot of strange adventures, but this is a first.”

“?”

“Ah ha ha. Curiouser and curiouser. You reject the girl, but not because you have no desires inside you. The girl has never encountered this kind of desire. ..This sounds delicious.”

Alice smiled.

But this smile looked subtly different from before.

Perhaps it had a touch of loneliness.

“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?”