Ales vs Kaori & KL

“…I apologize, but I must drive you from this city immediately.”

One leg of her jeans was cut to the base, her coat had one arm missing, and her T-shirt was tied at the bottom. The long glossy black hair of an Asian was tied in a ponytail and the belt at her waist carried the long Shichiten Shichitou.

“I do not have a second to spare if I am to save everyone who is risking their lives fighting.”

She was Kanzaki Kaori, a Saint.

There were fewer than 20 of those obvious cornerstones of a fighting force.

Meanwhile, Aleister Crowley was more like a stage actor. She used exaggerated gestures and a loud voice, but the more ostentatious she behaved, the more her presence and reality seemed to fade away like a dream or illusion.

It was like a formless tanuki or fairy showing off money made from leaves or sawdust.

“Are you shorthanded, giant of the United Kingdom?”

A roar echoed through the darkness directly behind the silver girl.

The multiple defensive lines laid out like tree rings or a baumkuchen were no longer functioning. The triple-quadruple final barrier had been lost. Nothing remained to keep out the army of Crowley’s Hazards. The capital city of London was being trampled.

But.

However.

Some new footsteps blocked the way.

A line of silver light flashed as swiftly as lightning but with a violent slicing power.

Red, green, brown, and gray. It was unclear how they had gained bodily fluids like that, but flowers of blood blossomed in a variety of colors.

Aleister and Accelerator by her side showed no sign of surprise. They must have already detected the assassin’s presence.

It was Knight Leader who softly landed behind them after swinging his double-edged sword to clear off the blood. The man in a suit had a few dozen fully-equipped knights waiting behind him.

Aleister was surrounded now, but she only scoffed.

The magician faced the Saint rather than Knight Leader.

“Those were all Aleister Crowley as much as I am. Does a loving Saint like you not feel anything when you think of the magic name you carved into your heart?”

“The Beheading Coin.”

But it was not Kanzaki who responded.

Of the two assassins, it was the head of the Knights who took a step forward.

“At the request of Holegres Mirates, I gave the final approval to issue these spiritual items in case a swift suicide attack was necessary. I spread them around the country.”

He squeezed something in his hand and clenched his teeth while burning with justice.

And he did not hesitate to unleash a shout.

“But I will not let anyone use these. Not even one of them. I am not alone here. If I work with a Saint, I can push you back. I will push through you!!”

“…Damn you, Lola. When did you cleverly shift the axis of their justice? Did you convince them that killing your enemy is a form of salvation?”

Let us make one thing clear.

Kanzaki Kaori and Knight Leader made no more attempt at conversation.

The fog and darkness were split as the monsters attacked Aleister from the front and back simultaneously.

They shattered the sound barrier.

Their extraordinary attack transformed their very bodies into deadly weapons. Kanzaki Kaori used Nanasen, seven wires blended into the exaggerated motion of drawing her sword. Knight Leader simply used his double-edged sword. They combined trickery and a straightforward attack so their enemy could only respond to one of them. It was complete overkill that would smash a criminal’s body to pieces instead of just take off their head.

But Aleister only breathed an exasperated sigh.

Meaningful numbers scattered from her right and left fingertips like orange sparks.

Immediately, silence fell. At first, it seemed like time had come to a halt in some kind of mistake. She had blocked both Kanzaki Kaori’s wires and Knight Leader’s sword.

One with a golden staff with a spherical head. The other with a large silver scythe.

The two weapons symbolized the sun and the moon.

Aleister remained between the two monsters and fended them off with a hand each.

“Is it that strange?”

She giggled.

And Aleister whispered like a demon with the strange weapons in hand.

“Is it that strange that I can easily stop your supersonic attacks when I could not even dodge Kamijou Touma’s fist? There is an answer to your question. If you have any thought left in your heads, then enjoy figuring it out. That is the greatest luxury of human life.”

They were in the midst of a battle and a war.

So Kanzaki Kaori and Knight Leader did not respond to her words.

It truly happened in an instant.

In less than the blink of an eye, a spear shredded the darkness on its way toward the national traitor’s chest.

Knight Leader had caught a spear tossed to him by another knight and made a further attack with it.

Wars were fought with the sword, but executions were a different matter. An axe could remove the head or a spear could pierce the heart. In the capital city of London, there were plenty of things that had taken more lives than the average war.

This symbolized a tragedy of the wealthy, not a war of the starving.

Knight Leader had fought on equal footing with Acqua of the Back, aka William Orwell, who held a unique position even among the Saints. Meanwhile, the silver girl already had both hands full. She should have had no way of blocking the spear aimed at her heart. This spear had its weight magically increased, so it would break her body to pieces.

“Again,” whispered Magician Aleister Crowley in a singsong voice. “I was asking if you are shorthanded.”

With a heavy clang, the spear tip was forcibly repelled. It happened at just a few dozen centimeters from the silver-haired girl’s back. After missing its mark, the spear struck a nearby steel streetlight. The streetlight broke.

Accelerator stood nearby, but he had not interfered with his control of vectors.

At some point, the unrealistically large scythe had vanished and Aleister had touched the spear with her perfectly normal right hand.

Kanzaki Kaori took a cautious step back.

Or perhaps she was creating the distance needed to launch her next attack.

“What’s wrong, frontline fighters?”

Aleister gave a cruel smile, but at what was it directed? At the proud fighting force of the homeland she so loathed, or at herself for having to once more rely on magic after coming so far?

“Surely you have not mistaken something as simple as this for Imagine Breaker. If you are that devoid of knowledge, I won’t even bother with you. I will trample you down and continue on.”

“Modern Western magic.”

Something spilled from Kanzaki Kaori’s lips.

She spat it out in an unnaturally hateful voice no one had heard from her before.

“Are you the magician who created it all?”

No matter how many Crowley’s Hazards she had fought as they arrived from the ocean, none of it would help with this battle here.

The different Crowleys had entirely different forms after walking entirely different possible paths. Some of the Crowleys had wholly abandoned magic and others had wholly mastered it.

“I’m shocked you would see me that way. Nothing I did was all that impressive. I simply took what was already there, chopped it up, and rearranged it in a more understandable form. Just like the colors of the rainbow or the do-re-mi scale used to teach children. …Of course, the fools who thought that is all there is were successfully convinced that the world is divided between science and magic. Even though there is actually a nearly infinite gradation in between those two poles.”

Knight Leader made another heavy spear jab, but he mostly meant it as a test to confirm what he already suspected. Aleister used her right hand to swat it away like a bug and the deadly spear tip was deflected out into the empty air.

“Therefore.”

She did not need a weapon or spiritual item.

Her most reliable partner was inside her head.

“I don’t care how many billions of people live on this planet. Even if every last one of them hates me, only a small fraction will be able to use magic at a practical level. And no one can harm me if they follow the theory of modern Western magic which I constructed and redistributed. Freedom vanished from the world with the introduction of the Book of the Law in 1904. No matter how hard you try, the shadow of Aleister Crowley will continue to stalk you at the foundation of your spells. I can interfere as much as I like. As the developer, I am familiar with the backdoors and zero-day exploits in the technical system known as modern Western magic. Right now, I am merely refusing you service. Perhaps I should have it blow up in your hands next.”
 - To Aru Majutsu no Index NT Vol 20 Part 8