Here we are again with review responses! Let it be done.
Whwsms: That's not a bad idea, by any stretch of the imagination. I've combed through Old Testament's volumes and the ToAru Wiki alike in search of answers, but, ultimately, because we never got a proper portrayal of level six in-universe, as far as we've been made aware, at least, I've mostly decided to take the idea in my own, original direction.
It's entirely possible. Aleister Crowley's (purposely) vague circumstances for the achieving of level six likely left the greater scientific community with very little to actually work with, in the way of parameters. Data, as you've suggested, was likely gained exclusively through projects such as Dark May, as well as experimentation on the 'Child Errors'.
One question you didn't ask here, now that I think more deeply on the matter, was this. What will come about if Aleister was wrong, this whole time? Will he be capable of adapting on-the-fly to an unprecedented power presented before him? Only time will tell. As always, there's one, foolproof way of finding out. And that, as always my friend, is to read on!
Guest: I'm not certain what I'm supposed to say. Nice opinion? Perhaps, next time, you could offer me something in the way of actual, constructive criticism that I can thereby use to continually improve? I don't feel like I'm asking too much.
The thing lurched forward, thrashing in place as if throwing a tantrum. Apparently having concocted a contingency plan, the Old God Nsoth's greatest maw split open. Widening unnaturally, that hideous maw, spilling out pitch-dark, bubbling liquid began to spray something. Something that was not liquid.
A terrible, grey mist that quickly consumed all of this nightmarish, horrid vision of Academy City.
Nsoth breathed slow death.
The breath weapon caught Hamasaki Tsubasa by surprise; and in but a moment's time lethargy overtook him. With every passing second that he inhaled, Tsubasa grew weaker. Sank deeper into all-consuming fatigue that worked its way throughout his very veins. His eyelids became increasingly weighty, nearly impossible to hold aloft. Blinking repeatedly, Tsubasa cast his gaze this way and that, searching for anything beyond the mist.
There was nothing.
The mist had enveloped him, and there seemed to be no way out. Fatigue took hold, and for a moment's time, all Voidwalker wished to do was find a nice, quiet place to curl up and pass into an unending slumber. A slumber that would never cure this infinite fatigue.
That thing was still attacking his mind. Even as it had caught him within the mist of its breath weapon it still saw fit to torment him, show him twisted vision of that which might have been, that which might come to pass, that which had come to pass.
But, above all of those possibilities, there was one which remained his, and his alone. A thought Hamasaki Tsubasa could desperately cling to, as he might've clung to his mother's bosom as an infant.
"Saten Ruiko."
She was divorced from all of this. She was immune to this madness; she'd endured so much. She'd fought so much. She'd done so much, not only for herself, but for her dear friends; and yet, despite all of her fighting, despite all of her struggles within Academy City – a City which would never see her advance a single level, or develop a single fragment of an esper ability, so long as her name wasn't on that Parameter List – she'd always emerge on the other side, stronger. Ready for the next struggle.
"Saten Ruiko."
With a great, forceful shove, Hamasaki Tsubasa brought himself up from the 'ground', if it could be called that. The void tendrils emerging from his back thrust outwards in all conceivable directions, and then some. The tiring, lethargy-inducing mist was scattered. There were no winds in the Void; but that hardly mattered.
In a moment's time, Voidwalker was upon the Old God's emanation; he shifted further. Enormous, twitching limbs of pitch-dark void, crackling with shades of dark blue and purple burst forth from him, awkwardly jutting out where no limbs should have been. Arms sprouted from arms, legs from arms, and arms from legs. Fully-functional despite oftentimes being undeveloped, these limbs writhed until Tsubasa brought them under his control, at which point they functioned as his own four limbs did. Even those had changed in the shift. They'd grown further. Rapidly-blinking eyes had formed upon them, through which Tsubasa could see clearly.
The conflict shook this darkened outerverse as neither budged an inch. Wrapping its own colossal, barbed tendrils around the esper, Nsoth once more distended its lower jaw, far beyond the point at which it should have come entirely unhinged, and spewed forth a vast cloud of that paralyzing grey mist.
Freeing himself with the aid of his perpetually-mutating growths, those twitching limbs whose digits swatted at the Void hopelessly aiding his efforts, Tsubasa thrust himself into the emanation's maw.
The thing that sought out pain and welcomed filth slammed those jaws shut. Its countless other maws, filled with rows of jagged, sharpened fangs gnashed at nothing as if envious of their superior.
There was nothing inside. Pitch darkness, as if Tsubasa had locked himself in a wine cellar and turned off the tiny room's only light source. This was all that greeted him, all that he had to contend with, all that he could see. Extending his own two arms outwards – apparently, those were the only two he presently had – Voidwalker felt for walls. For flesh. For something, anything.
"I'm dead. End of the line. This is it. Is this Hell?"
"̸̢̨̯̹͕͓̰͕͔͔̼͂̓̎́́̊̕ͅH̶̨̡̢͚͎̓̎̾̐̓̓̈́̚̚o̷͇͙̳̔̾͌͠ŵ̵͉͕̣̗͚͕̻̙̮͓͇͖̠̮̅̾͊̏͒̀̾̇̅̚͘͠ͅ ̶̢͓̟̩͕͓̖̣͕͈̹͓̝̣͍͗͂̎̇̾͋͊ġ̴̬̼̼̤̟̦̥́͑̏̎͋ỗ̵̱͜ȅ̸̜̲̯̫̅̔̈́́͝s̶͓̝̰̙̻̻̃ͅ ̸̡̨̨̢̧̩͖͚̻̦̙͚̻̰͊y̴͕̋͗o̴͎̬͓̲̪͓͙̘̺͌u̵̢̯͙͖̬̖̱͔̯͊́r̵̨̯̘̘͚͓̹̎͊͋̅̈͊̇͌̀͛̈́͋̿̉͜͠ ̶̢̛̜̟̻̮͚͇͓͋̈̍̎̅̉͝b̵̢̮̭͚͓̎̿̌̇̾̆̒̋̇̓͋̕̕͝ą̴̮͕͈̼͍̞̟̔̐͑͜͠ṟ̶̢̛̞͇͕͙̭̲͋̿̍́̄̏̑̊̄̇͜g̵̜̠̘̘̩̺̝̮̱͉̓̽́̄̋̀͑̂̏̈́̋͌̑͝ą̸̘̣̳͌̆̑͆͋į̷̨̢̡͖̲̮̼̜̹̭̠̗͗̈́͑̐̕͝͝n̸̨̨̯͙̤͓͖̜̪̪̻̭̮̣̻̈́̀̅́͝͝ḭ̷̩̬̬͓̳̦͓̳͖͚̂̄̐̈́̆͆̿̈́͐̽̑̚ͅn̴̯̪̳͍̫͆̉̉͐̇̕͝g̸̢̡̧͕̤̝̱̗̳͉͉͒̇̊̄̒͐̒̒͛̂͂̽,̷̢̲̩̥͓̱̣̫͕̜̮̌̔̀̀̈̊̄ ̶̝̥͙̰̞̱̇͆͆́̈́ͅḩ̷̛̤̮̜̲̺͉̻̥͆̾́̑̇̐u̵͙͕̹̤͚̳̪̘͉̐̒m̷̨̢̛̰̘͚͖̱͑̂̎̀̏͌͆̀̏́̀̕a̷̢̜̲̠͈͓̝̠͖̽͑̈̏͌͗͘͘n̵̲̠͙̮̟͓̺̺͎͍̙͆̓̓̏̃ͅͅ?̶̧̟̯̳̣̦̞̲͖͇̃͋͊͛̓̿̚"̴̢̦̥̦̽͐̔̉̕͝
The voice would not leave him alone. Even in this darkness beyond darkness – darker than the very Void itself – Nsoth sought to attack his mind. Horrific visions passed him, in his mind's eye.
Visions of a clinic from Hell, where unspeakable crimes were committed against women who were visibly pregnant by a 'doctor' whose face was little more than a writhing mass of twisted, barbed tendrils.
Visions of war, of famine, of plague, of human suffering unimaginable. Children literally rotting in their mothers' arms. Fathers withering and dying before their families. Households reduced to smouldering ruins, entire families extinguished. Landscapes consumed by living flesh that writhed as if in pain. Great, barbed tendrils replaced every tree that ever was. Cityscapes collapsed, replaced by masses of bubbling, grease-laden, puss-spewing flesh. Unblinking, golden-coloured eyes.
Then, the past.
This was no horrific vision.
This was no illusion, no nightmare concocted by the twisted thoughts of an unimaginable, unfathomable Old God.
This was the sordid past of the Earth, of the universe. That which few texts chronicled. That which no published work spoke of. That which had been buried by historical revisionism and symbolic works of fiction, such as those found in the holy books of the Abrahamic faiths.
Hamasaki Tsubasa had been reduced to an omnipresent god-audience, viewing this foul past from on high without a body to speak of. A being of purely mental energies, Tsubasa's vision seemed to be without limits. He could cast his gaze almost anywhere.
Ironically, he sought to cast his gaze nowhere. There was nothing worth looking at, here.
Hamasaki Tsubasa, Academy City's… Academy City? What was Academy City? His vast mind, that which seemed to have become one with the very skies themselves sought the answers, but found none. He'd known something, somewhere, called Academy City, once. Where had it been? Why did it feel so important?
By utterly destroying nearly seven hundred level four Voidwalkers, mindless, unthinking clones born of the Void, by expanding his capacity for calculation, had Tsubasa somehow become too intelligent? Had the level five Voidwalker expanded his mind too far?
"Saten Ruiko."
Even there, he clung to her. The mere utterance of her name was enough to clear that fog, and end the exceedingly temporary amnesia that had come over him. Academy City, in Japan. The experimental supercity where young people lived. The supercity whose goal was to develop supernatural abilities, psychic abilities. Esper abilities. SYSTEM. Level six.
With that which he'd briefly lost regained – in his apparently infinite mind, Hamasaki Tsubasa quietly, mentally thanked that precious level zero girl, Saten Ruiko, as many times as he possibly could – Hamasaki Tsubasa, Academy City's fourth-ranked level five esper tried once more to steer his gaze away from everything, everywhere.
What few trees there were dotting these landscapes, they'd died. More accurately, perhaps, they'd been snuffed out. The blackened soil beneath them, from which their withered roots could never hope to draw a single nutrient, it moved. It writhed as if in pain. Enormous swathes of landscape shuddered. Hilltops rose, then fell like the rhythmic breathing of a sleeping human. Like the horrific vision, but muted, somehow.
Odd structures, much akin to those that Tsubasa was familiar with in the Void dotted the hills, rolling into the distance. Some appeared to resemble colossal ziggurats; enormous, unsightly masses of vile architecture brought into the defiled world through the layering of darkened, putrid brickwork.
Others resembled towers, rising into the skies as if they sought to mock the High Heavens above with their mere presence. Crooked, leaning awkwardly to one side, these towers were oftentimes surrounded by collections of odd, misshapen structures which Tsubasa assumed to be settlements of some description. What sort of vile, un-living nightmares might have called these settlements – if that was indeed what they were – home, Voidwalker didn't particularly want to know.
For as wide as Tsubasa's seemingly-endless vision could conceive, the entire planet seemed to have been consumed by this cancer. Those unsightly ziggurats. The twisted towers. The nonsensical settlements whose structures, in concept alone, flew in the face of what human beings as a species knew of physics and dimensional space.
This was a world ruled by the Old Gods.
Was this the past? A distant future the Old God wished to show Tsubasa, to taunt him? Was this an effort to break his spirit, if not his mind?
If this was an effort to break his spirit, the effort failed, in theory and in practice. Perhaps he was already too broken to be affected properly.
A part of the level five esper was fascinated by it all. By the inhuman designers' stylistic choices. By the brutalist nature of these unsightly structures; this vast, astral cancer. That same part of Tsubasa wished to explore every tower. Map out every settlement. Delve deep into those twisted ziggurats and learn what profane secrets they surely held.
Another part hated all of this, and simply wanted to return to reality. To Academy City. Academy City's so-called 'darkness' was akin to a colourful, lively child's jungle gym when compared to the overwhelming toxicity of this horrific vision.
Then, finally, Tsubasa's vision caught something which hadn't been darkened, consumed, destroyed by this astral cancer. A mere strip of landscape which had not been decimated. In this mere strip, the world seemed to have healed. Full, blooming trees rose. Grasslands flowed with tall, swaying swathes of grass on which animals – animals – grazed. Animals of all kingdoms and species, not dispersed into biomes by evolution. River tributaries flowed like veins through this patch of paradise, originating from a single source; a proper lake which formed from the runoff of a waterfall, danced along its merry, carefree way. Down, down, down over the face of a mountain range. A mountain formed of proper, healthy brown earth. Not the dead, petrified, darkened filth which might have been earth, at some point or another.
"The Garden of Eden."
How Hamasaki Tsubasa knew this, he had no clue. Had he been informed? Had he made an educated guess? His disconnected, fractured mind sought answers within itself but, predictably, found nothing of the sort. Perhaps some other time.
"Then, where are…? There."
The first humans to ever live. They surely had to be. Who else could it have been within the protective embrace of this paradise amidst a living hellscape? How accurate the biblical account of humanity's oldest remained to be determined.
At the very least, Tsubasa could confirm that Adam and Eve, the residents of this Garden as they were, certainly were not examples of fully-evolved human beings, Homo sapiens. No. Adam and Eve were proto-humans, more akin to dull apes than the upright, proud Homo sapiens who would rise as an evolutionary pinnacle.
They were joined by creatures which Voidwalker had never before laid his eyes upon. Queer things, by any stretch of the imagination; with many darkened specks upon their form, the odd insectoid life forms, with thick, reinforced carapaces of differing colourations stood erect, each with a total of six elongated, but gracefully curled legs emerging from beneath their tall, slender bodies. Long, silky bolts of cloth dangled from their shells and from their upper torsos. Each bolt of cloth was lavender, and each was decorated with thin, golden trim.
These six limbs the insectoid creatures possessed were covered in thin, delicate little hairs; while there were not enough to completely mask their carapaces' coloration beneath, the collective was thick enough to be noticeable. All six of these curled limbs were decorated with numerous ornate bands, each of which had many carvings upon their surfaces; the letters of an unknown alphabet, and the words of a language which Voidwalker could not read. From the top of their heads there were two long, thin, singular antennae which sagged and reached the insectoid creatures' ornated midsections. Their eyes, with their golden irises and their catlike pupils glowed unnaturally as they moved about within the sockets of its gumdrop-shaped head.
Those catlike pupils. Identical to those possessed by the innumerable, puss-filled, unblinking eyes of the Old God Nsoth.
From this horrific vision, Hamasaki Tsubasa passively pulled in knowledge, understanding. As if another learned individual dictated universal truths, Voidwalker gleamed all that was simply by being.
Ahnk'ji. The insect-humanoids who had ruled the Earth even before this. They offered their aid as it was onto Adam and Eve, the first proto-humans in their Garden of Eden. The Ahnk'ji had been welcomed as honoured visitors.
In the future, these insectoids, these Ahnk'ji, would go on to give rise to the first human espers, acting as teachers, guardians and protectors of the nascent humanity.
Why?
Because they sought to atone. They sought to atone for the sins of their birth, the sins of their subjugation.
The Ahnk'ji, then, were the offspring of the Old Gods.
Hovering between them, burning brighter than millions of exploding suns was a great, surging orb. Perfectly round, bright golden in colouration, the shimmering shape brought light where there was none. Even if this light seemed incapable of breaching the Garden of Eden, even if it was smothered by the overwhelmingly toxic darkness that existed beyond the Garden's protective barriers formed of towering, snow-topped mountain ranges, the light was present.
Hamasaki Tsubasa, a child of science, an esper who had experienced induced, forced evolution through the use of Academy City's 'Power Curriculum', he felt that light. It was pure. It was loving. It was unconditionally doting, like the perfect parent from a fairytale story book.
Was this God?
Before further answers could be gleamed to his endless questions, Hamasaki Tsubasa was pulled from the vision.
Voidwalker witnessed, flashing by him in rapid succession, the beginning and the end. Alpha and omega. There was much, yet paradoxically, so little before the Big Bang, as it was called. The rapid expansion and subsequent unprecedented cooling of a superheated singularity that would become the vast, unquantifiable universe.
God, the spark that started life. Uncreated. That which had always been. Yet, there was such vastness beyond even God. Cosmic abstracts, approximations of beings which represented the fundamental aspects of cosmic functions.
There was an understanding, peering at it all for mere moments at a time. So much, passing at once. It was as if Hamasaki Tsubasa was strapped into a vehicle that was rushing headlong down an entirely straight, perfectly smooth paved highway at two hundred miles per hour; all things seemed to have become a blur.
There was an understanding. Tsubasa didn't blink. He didn't start. He didn't even swallow the amalgamation of saliva, phlegm and bile which had formed in his mouth, into a particularly disgusting concoction. The desire to dislodge it was plenty present; but that desire couldn't be acted upon.
The understanding was too potent.
"Loneliness + alienation + fear + despair + self-worth ÷ mockery ÷ condemnation ÷ misunderstanding x guilt x shame x failure x judgment n=y where y=hope and n=folly love=lies life=death self=dark side. Whose calculations are these…? Whose…?"
The Void had returned. No longer was Voidwalker cast into literal darkness; the Void was something, at least.
"SYSTEM refers to the achieving of a body that can exceed human constraints and perform God's calculations. It is through these calculations that humanity can gain knowledge regarding the truth of the world. Something no man has ever truly gained, no matter the circumstances."
Those Gladio notes had proved useful to root through, after all. Coverage of the Level Six Shift experiments involving that defanged 'top dog', Accelerator aside, Tsubasa's consideration of his old pastime – rooting through information he had no place even knowing about – proved useful.
And, there it was. Nsoth. The Old God. The thing's countless maws sneered down at Voidwalker as its lashing, barbed tendrils slapped at nothing. From each set of cracked, deformed lips, bubbling globules of that stinking liquid dripped.
The Old God's emanation evidently sought not to attack him further, not physically.
"This is just an emanation. A fragment, a whisper, of Nsoth's true power. Even achieving what I achieved, I wasn't anywhere near strong enough. If Windsor Castle doesn't hold, this world is fucked. Arms tied, pinned up against the wall, raped… And this is just one Old God."
Something felt different. No longer was Tsubasa's body a twisted mass of tendrils, twitching, malformed limbs and surging, crackling, barely-stabilized void energies. His baser existence was that which he'd returned to. Two arms, two legs, a head. A body. A human body. Even his clothing remained intact; running his fingers' tips through locks of his dirty-blonde hair, Tsubasa found it present, shaggy, barely-kempt as always.
"YOU ARE WORTHY."
Somehow, those words made sense. The corrupting, twisted, mind-warping words spoken by the Old God suddenly made sense. No longer did that thing speak barely-comprehensible nonsense. No longer did it whisper maddening, taunting half-mutterings.
Hamasaki Tsubasa, the Voidwalker, understood it perfectly.
"And, so I say again, Nsoth… I've come to bargain."
"YOU'VE YET NOTHING TO BARGAIN WITH. DO NOT BEG FROM ME. WORTHY… DO NOT PUSH YOUR LUCK. YOU MIGHT YET BE JUDGED."
Nsoth remained a vaguely uncomfortable sight to look upon; certainly disgusting with its vile mottled flesh, plastered in grease. The yellowish-white puss leaking from between its countless eyes' lids did Voidwalker's perpetually-churning stomach no favours. In the present, however, Nsoth was not a sight which physically hurt to witness. A key had been slid into place, a lock turned.
"Level six…?"
Had SYSTEM been achieved? Had he and he alone done what Accelerator failed to do? What Kakine Teitoku, the 'Spare Plan' had never been provided with the resources to do? That, of course, required Tsubasa to assume that Dark Matter could remain stable.
Would Academy City, and the horrors it inflicted every single passing second of every single day upon a population of innocent children-turned-labrats finally come to an end? Had Tsubasa done it? That remained to be seen.
"WHAT DID YOU LEARN?"
In earnest, Hamasaki Tsubasa spoke his peace as the Old God watched on, expectantly.
"Loneliness + alienation + fear + despair + self-worth ÷ mockery ÷ condemnation ÷ misunderstanding x guilt x shame x failure x judgment n=y where y=hope and n=folly love=lies life=death self=dark side."
It all made sense; when he 'spelled' it out in such a way, allowing his higher mind to wrap itself around each individual spoken syllable, it all made sense. With the knowledge that Tsubasa had gleamed from the vision of the Earth's distant past, where he'd witnessed the first proto-humans Adam and Eve, it all made sense.
The Old Gods were failures.
Prehistoric human espers, cerebral mutations before even the Ahnk'ji had begun to teach humanity of their latent psychic potential, who had sought to achieve SYSTEM and failed. Their bodies and minds had evidently become twisted in such a way that the Old Gods, as they were, no longer resembled humans in even passing. They had become something else. Something outside of the cycle, beyond good and evil.
Agents of madness.
Bringers of pain.
Defilers of all space and time.
Adam and Eve had not been the first. They were among the first.
It all made sense. Perhaps, that was the worst part. Voidwalker couldn't turn away and scream about how it was absurd, about how it was madness that made no logical sense; it made all of the sense that anything could ever make.
"Aleister, you utter fucking imbecile!"
The Void bent to his whims. This lifeless, sky-less outerverse with its flashes of pitch-dark lightning, flowing multicoloured, crackling ribbons glowing shades of darkened blue and purple did as Hamasaki Tsubasa commanded.
If shifted and warped. Colossal beams of unchecked, destabilized void energies that crackled with enough wild, untamed intensity to bring about the end of several billion entire dimensions surged, crashing down against the warping spatial structures. Colossal orbs and their interconnected, fleshy, shuddering bridges were reduced to less than nothing in mere moments.
Total control over an entire endless, ever-expanding realm that wasn't a realm. A place that wasn't a place. That which existed between the lines, as if space and time alike were embarrassed by its presence and sought not to acknowledge it.
"Nobody should have this kind of power."
To fail to achieve level six, SYSTEM, was to devolve into that which would come to be known as an Old God. A twisted life form that lacked a resemblance to anything from any dimension that a human being could understand.
To achieve level six, SYSTEM, was to realize that all of this was meaningless. There was simply nothing. It was the same understanding which God had reached with its divine, metaphysical calculations.
"Loneliness + alienation + fear + despair + self-worth ÷ mockery ÷ condemnation ÷ misunderstanding x guilt x shame x failure x judgment n=y where y=hope and n=folly love=lies life=death self=dark side."
Yet, God had not fallen into a fit of mania nor descended into all-consuming nihilism once it had discovered how devoid of meaning all of this was. God found meaning in acting as the spark that started all possibilities, that which was responsible for the Big Bang.
Still, all of these realizations aside, Hamasaki Tsubasa had come to the same conclusion a second time.
"Nobody should have this kind of power."
It was definitive. That which Academy City existed for had been achieved. SYSTEM had been achieved. Level six had been reached. The very concept of level five had been left behind, abandoned, like a caterpillar emerging from its cocoon as a butterfly, having undergone months of metamorphosis.
The Void, then, was Tsubasa's cocoon.
With a simple calculation – one which hardly even necessitated the usual sort of mental preparation necessary for control over the Void and its energies – Hamasaki Tsubasa departed from the darkened outerverse, leaving the Old God, Nsoth, behind. A rift in the Void itself formed, offering a glimpse of reality beyond. Academy City's seventeenth school district. That fateful switchyard. The image swam as if reflected on a small body of water's rippling waves.
Nsoth was no longer alone, however.
There were six others who had joined the Old God Nsoth at its side. Twisted and warped in their own ways, seven Old Gods were as one, there, in their Void. Mere emanations of their true power; but Tsubasa felt them. He felt each forcing their collective will outwards.
Tsubasa recognized each, despite having interacted with these disgusting, vile aberrations only passingly as the one who appropriated the power of their Void for his own uses. Yet, he could not place a name to them, save for Nsoth.
The Old Gods were not wishing the newly-crowned level six esper well on his departure from their Void. They weren't looking on with longing, nor with a sense of satisfaction that another human had reached their level.
Their farewells were not farewells at all. The Old Gods had uttered a silent challenge. A warning. In time, they would show Hamasaki Tsubasa their power. They may have failed where he'd succeeded, but this meant nothing to them. His success was an affront. An insult. There were seven; and if they had their way, there would never be eight.
Free of the Void's grasp, Voidwalker had returned himself to reality. He'd stepped through the rift, and it closed shut behind him. Miniature tendrils lashed out at the world beyond the Void as the created rift devoured itself, finally closing shut and leaving behind not a single trace of having been at all.
"General Superintendent!"
There was no one in the switchyard. The manual labourers and foremen barking their orders had long since returned to their homes. Tsubasa's call echoed into the night.
"It's over! It's all fucking OVER! SYSTEM is complete! Now, end Academy City! Tear it all down! Your purpose is achieved! There's no point to this shithole existing anymore! I DID IT!"
Voidwalker wasn't particularly surprised to receive no response at all; but there didn't have to be anyone physically present within the switchyard. UNDER_LINE was always present. No matter where, no matter when, UNDER_LINE would always be there. Waiting. Watching. Aleister Crowley's endless eyes and ears throughout his City of Science.
UNDER_LINE had heard, and, in turn UNDER_LINE had dictated to this experimental supercity's lord and master the truth of the matter. On the numerous screens hovering around his personalized life preservation chamber like so many fussy housemaids, supported by enormous, mechanical limbs which protruded from the reinforced, heavily-wired inner walls of his sanctum, his Windowless Building, Aleister observed, quietly.
There had been that which was simply beyond his reach; but he'd had an idea. There were no means of truly confirming it, were there? Had he simply not planned this far?
The failure of the Level Six Shift Experiments conducted on the Main Plan utilizing the living remnants of the Radio Noise Project 'Sisters' had been a purposeful one. Regardless of Kamijou Touma's intervention, Aleister Crowley would have had those Experiments fail. At some point. The exact point at which those clones of the third-ranked Railgun would have been released from their existential bondage would have been entirely up to the moods and whimsies of the General Superintendent.
What would have happened if, in a fit of manic curiosity, Aleister Crowley had allowed the Main Plan to decimate all twenty-thousand Radio Noise 'Sisters'? Would those tendrils from some other, forbidden non-reality have claimed the Main Plan, only to eventually spit him back out as a changed being?
"Show me a sign, Aleister!" Voidwalker exclaimed, then. Were Hamasaki Tsubasa not in a forlorn school district which saw very little in the way of human activity during the night's hours, Crowley would have chastised his toy for throwing around his true identity so ignorantly. "Or I'll show you a sign."
"A threat…? An interesting proposal."
The level fives were not a problem to deal with. There were the FIVE_OVER Modelcases. There was Useful Spider. There was Gladio and the Oculus. Aleister Crowley knew well enough that entire algorithms had been developed specifically to deal with the level fives.
Yet, no such algorithms had been developed to deal with a potential level six. A being that, by all accounts, would be the scientific counterpart of a Magic God.
There was no need to panic. Aleister would simply pull this situation into his control, and find a way to benefit. As always he had. As he always would. The 'Worst Magician' would not be one-upped nor toyed with by one his own creations.
The fact that Voidwalker hadn't simply broken the entire multiverse simply by being too powerful was a good start.
In his pocket, Hamasaki Tsubasa's personal smartphone began to vibrate. In truth, he'd forgotten that the device even existed. He'd forgotten that a lot of things existed, while in the Void, parlaying with the emanation of an Old God, seeing visions from the past, and learning the history of the entire multiverse itself in moments.
Reaching in, his fingers fiddling within the pocket of his Sakugawa High School uniform's pants, Tsubasa's shaking digits managed to clutch the smartphone in their grip. Pressing the device against the side of his face, Voidwalker found a manmade tower of multicoloured shipping containers to lean against, across from an empty stretch of railway track. There, he fell upon himself, collapsing into a heap.
"… Yeah."
"Voidwalker. To me. Use a discreet means of entry."
"Who am I speaking with?"
"The one to who you owe all, whether it be your life or your esper ability."
"Aleister fucking Crowley. Conversations with a dead man, is that what I'm having now? I'm worthy of your attention? Dark Matter would string out my guts for this. He always did like you."
"The Spare Plan has become more relevant than ever. No longer am I in a position to rely upon the Main Plan, nor is the Main Plan a continuing necessity. Come. To my sanctum. For the moment, you're worthy of my attention. Do not make the mistake of presuming upon my need for you. Consider this an official summons as an active agent of Gladio."
So, that was how it was going to be. Hamasaki Tsubasa chuckled, shaking his head as if reacting to a joke uttered in particularly poor taste.
"I know what'll happen if I refuse, anyways. You're nothing if not predictable. You're a glorified terrorist cell leader. Can't say much for myself, either. Not much room to speak on others."
"Don't presume that you have me figured out, Voidwalker. You cannot comprehend my mind, nor understand that which drives me. Regardless of whatever power you may have gained, borrowed or otherwise."
Before Tsubasa terminated the two-way exchange, he remarked in passing, as casually as he might've greeted a vendor proclaiming the brilliance of their wares on the street, "There's really not that much to figure out, Aleister. You're not that deep."
Whatever wrath he'd face for his unchecked verbal aggression, Hamasaki Tsubasa would face it in stride.
Once more in passing, he briefly paid mind to Saten Ruiko. How was she doing? Was she asleep? Perhaps she'd spend most of her short stay in the hospital awake. Her mind was curious, always going. The gears never really did stop turning, did they? She was a girl who didn't accept answers. She needed to come to her own conclusions.
She was too smart, too kind, too honest for this horrible City.
With any luck, there wouldn't be an Academy City for much longer.
"Saten Ruiko."