Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item4 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 10===

“Volcano to Typhoon. Don’t worry about aiming too carefully – just keep on bombing. As long as you cut off her escape, I can finish her off with a Molotov cocktail!”

“Damn!!”

Frenda bristled when she heard the Molotov cocktail maid speaking to someone somewhere.

That cruise missile wouldn’t be the last.

If you had an effective means of attack, you could just keep on repeating it. As big as the grounds were, they were still shooting missiles into their own territory, so their aim had to be accurate.

A second and more were coming.

But the aerodynamic tactical weapons did not blast Frenda to pieces.

“But in the end, are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Are you sure you have time left to chat?”

“Oh, I’m sure. Because you’re the one about to be blown up by a Mugino brand missile.”

“?”

“You wouldn’t be firing on a map coordinate when your target is a person who can move around. That means the terminal guidance must use something else to track me, but it can’t be a laser or GPS. Is it the Molotov cocktail? An unhealthy gasoline-based cocktail wouldn’t produce a smoke quite so black.”

“You’ve already figured it out?”

“Naphthalene. Marking a bombing target with a smoke bomb is as standard as it gets, but I bet you got a little creative and didn’t just use the color. Is it tracking traces of a chemical compound? In other words, using taste or smell? But are you sure that’s a good idea? In the end, naphthalene isn’t just used to make black smoke. ''It’s a common chemical compound used to make insecticides and plastics''.”

“Tch!!”

“I’m from Academy City’s dark side. You really think I’m going to be fooled by ''a magic trick'' based on scientific knowledge!? Hwa ha ha. I can control the direction of the wind. You might think you’re secretly producing an invisible chemical compound, but in the end, you’re the one coated in it, you fool!!”

Something exploded.

As if lightning had struck nearby.

A large tree in the front yard split down the middle and burst into flames as each half fell in opposite directions.

It hadn’t directly hit Frenda or the Molotov cocktail maid, but this still proved that the program-guided missile had missed its target.

It could hit either of them next time.

Frenda took action before the maid could recover from her fear of that.

Of course, surviving a few rounds of this wasn’t enough to relax.

More cruise missiles would be coming. If she didn’t escape to safety, she would be slaughtered.

Which meant…

(In the end, that’s enough of getting right up in that dangerous maid’s face to punish her! I need to get inside the mansion ASAP!! They won’t want to blow up their own house!!)

“Ooh, what have we here?☆”

Frenda voiced her joy as she grabbed a 9mm handgun. In the chaos of the exploding cruise missiles, one of the Mugino Family’s guards must have dropped it.

She heard the rumbling of an engine.

(That’s a fancy V12, but the engine is roaring at having to carry around the thick and heavy bulletproof plating. No ordinary car sounds like that. In the end, this is that villain’s car I heard about in Chinatown during the day!!)

Maybe it was the psychological idea of the cocktail party effect where people only picked up on the voices they were interested in, but a dark side villain knew how to hear discussions of many different things while walking through peaceful crowds.

Some people were hired with a “quantity over quality” mindset to provide the numbers needed for a job, legal or not.

In other words, the mercenaries who would also hand out fliers or work as movers.

“!”

Frenda aimed the handgun toward the open front gate instead of toward the Mugino Family mansion.

She began firing at the black bulletproof car that belonged to another criminal organization and just so happened to be driving nearby.

No matter who pulled the trigger, this was a Mugino Family gun.

The wicked blonde girl grinned before tossing the gun aside.

“Wah hah hah. Enjoy your gang war☆”

“Oh, damn, get back here!!”

The Molotov cocktail maid paled and frantically shouted at Frenda, but she ducked down when gunfire erupted from a different direction. The shot bulletproof car was returning fire. And at full-auto right off the bat.

A firefight had broken out.

So that wasn’t just an Academy City thing. Damn the Mugino Family.

(Wow. Are they going to claim that’s just a small T-shaped submachine gun? Stock, dot sight, long barrel, and fore grip. With all those modifications, it’s barely any different from an assault rifle. They’ve even modified the mechanism so it can fire 5.56mm rifle rounds.)

Frenda had heard tricks like that were used to skirt the law in the original gun culture of America. Why you would bother in Japan where owning even a single bullet was forbidden, she had no idea.

The rival organization was using their bulletproof car as a shield while firing what looked like an Italian submachine gun. The manufacturer was famous for their handguns, but not many people knew they also made submachine guns.

Frenda used the breakdown of the usual guard system to move from the spacious front yard to the front entrance of the maze-like mansion.

A gunshot burst behind her.

“Kh.”

Running scared, Frenda checked behind her.

While a gun was a projectile weapon, a young butler had rushed out from the front gate and jumped over the barricade to reach the enemy group. He was part of the Management. With even more gunfire, the silhouettes of the enemy group were torn apart.

With that 360-degree barrage, a stray bullet could fly Frenda’s way at any time.

(In the end, what was that? Did he have two shotguns connected by a chain like a nunchaku!? Th-that’s crazy, but scary!! And he took them all out himself!)

An engine roared.

Was that a lance-wielding knight? No.

Another butler rode an enormous motorcycle while wielding an American prototype 12.7mm heavy machinegun that suppressed 60% more recoil than the antiques used nearly a century ago. He was operating the large motorcycle with just the one arm, so he may have swapped the engine out for an automatic.

The caliber was .50.

And this was machinegun .50 caliber, not handgun .50 caliber. The amount of powder was completely different, so firing that thing from the surface would be enough to take down the average attack helicopter.

“Took you long enough, partner! Hah hah! Now, let’s see who can get more kills, Bakyaku!!”

“Ougigumo. Killing is not a game.”

The storm of close-range shotgun fire was joined by 12.7mm hunks of lead capable of tearing through police armored trucks. At this point, the black bulletproof car provided no protection.

One problem with criminal organizations was their lack of any kind of equipment standards like the police or military would have. So it wasn’t unusual to see these suicidal mutations in how they used guns or bombs.

(Apparently the people who survive on the front lines end up developing in weird directions outside of Academy City too, dammit. I really hope I can avoid taking any of them on directly.)

The enemy’s bullets were bad enough on their own, but friendly fire only made it worse. So while the guard system had broken down, Frenda rushed through the wide-open front door to the mansion.

(That won’t last long since they have cruise missiles. In the end, that rival organization will be defeated. I need to finish my ‘research trip’ before that happens.)

“Oops.”

This wasn’t over just because Frenda was inside the building. She heard footsteps.

She ducked behind a suit of Western armor on display in the hall.

She held her breath.

A young butler and maid passed by without noticing her, rushing outside.

“Dammit, Hanagai. She just had to fire those ALCMs. We were saving those. She had better have gotten the Bloodline’s permission.”

“Keeping them around just wastes money on maintenance, so isn’t it best to shoot them when we have the chance?”

(So the Family isn’t a monolith. Does that mean there’s a group that wants to frame me and a group that isn’t interested in me? In the end, I’d hate to take out people who aren’t with the villain and only make more of them hate me.)

Also, apparently that maid outside was named Hanagai. Frenda found Japanese names hard to figure out since they weren’t taken from past kings or saints, but that was probably a family name. She figured it wouldn’t hurt to remember that.

The mansion was split into multiple buildings with walkways connecting them. The place wasn’t even symmetric, so she wouldn’t be surprised to find unnatural stairways and passageways inside. Now, where would the villain hidden among the Mugino Family Bloodline be hiding their secrets?

They wouldn’t want to keep them too far away, but they wouldn’t want to be seen with them either.

They wouldn’t just be worried about outside thieves. They would want to keep the rest of the Family from knowing either.

“Hm.”

(A heavy vault, maybe?)

Frenda chose to rely on her dark side nose here.

A complex and heavy vault wouldn’t be built on the upper floors. Needless to say, it would weigh more than a large truck and break through the floor. That suggested a basement, but they wouldn’t be able to break through the supports and foundation of that giant mansion to dig into the ground wherever they wanted. The entire mansion would collapse if they did.

The location of the electric, gas, and water lines was an issue and all the strange additions had shifted the building’s center of gravity a fair bit.

Given the conditions at play, there were only so many places a giant vault could be located.

Where would she need to place the bombs to bring the structure down? Frenda only had to consider the opposite of that. An expert bomber’s nose could quickly work out the usable locations.

She moved aside a bookcase in a 1st floor study and descended the stairs hidden behind it.

“Found it.”

She discovered a thick door like at a bank vault, but she easily opened it by slowly operating a special drill to open a hole and dissolving the 12 tungsten rods inside using an acid. Buying the industrial version would be pricey, but you could bring the price way down by modifying discount store products. By combining the large motor taken from a juicer with a dial regulator, you could manage a lot just by controlling the rotation rate. Then you only had to modify the head that would be pressed against the steel. The acid? That was an ingredient for a common explosive. Any expert bomber could make it out of everyday household items.

Frenda found a space larger than a school classroom.

Art, gold bars, jewels, weapons, and more. But Frenda wasn’t interested in any of that.

She wanted documents.

Some further locked cabinets were lined up on one side of the vault. She knew the Mugino Family Bloodline had a few dozen members. Was this a locker for each of them?

The locks were like toys compared to the one on the vault door, but Frenda noticed something else.

Her bomber’s nose twitched.

“Acid? In the end, will they dissolve the documents inside if you force the lock?”

With a sigh, Frenda pulled out a cheap screwdriver.

This would be a pain, but she could neutralize it by dismantling it like she was disarming a bomb. The acid was stored in a single tank and distributed to each safe through skinny pipes, so she only had to remove the tank.

“Hm, hm, hmm☆”

She couldn’t tell which cabinet was the one she wanted, so she used leverage to break open each locked door in turn and pulled out the documents inside.

A land deed, a list of names for something, photos of what looked like two people having a secret meeting, a flash drive… She found plenty of sketchy stuff, but she wasn’t interested in any of it.

“Is this it?”

Frenda Seivelun.

She found a document with her own name on it.

(This isn’t a standard format… And in the end, this doesn’t look like a plain report. The text uses some emotional manipulation tricks.)

There were techniques for that.

What might look at first like a colorful bar graph would use warm reds or yellows to color whichever bar they wanted to look larger or a weak point the writer wanted to avoid questions on would be written in a single long paragraph in small text. Neither of those was an actual lie, so they could claim any who mistook its meaning had only themselves to blame.

They would deceive not just their enemies but, if necessary, their allies too. They would feel no shame over it, even under circumstances so serious they would influence their subordinates’ and allies’ lives or futures.

The unseen villain’s personality was visible on the page.

(In the end, this looks like a draft of a project plan meant to make their many accomplices think this is a winnable fight. It’s a good thing this is the version containing the raw data before it was embellished.)



''If we stand idly by, we will lose our chance.

''We must actively change the Family’s line of succession ourselves.

''Mugino Shizuri’s Item provides a few different options, but we will be using Level 0 Frenda Seivelun.

''I have no intention of dealing with one of those strange Academy City esper powers. In that sense, the bomber girl will be the easiest to predict.

''The Mugino Family is active in Shinjuku, Tokyo, and Yokohama, Kanagawa.

''We must not kill that Academy City bomber. It is crucial that she acts of her own volition and disturbs our business.

''That way we can hold the position of “victim”.

''That will help us force Mugino Shizuri to take responsibility and drop her down the line or succession.



As a Level 0, the bomber will be easy to deal with. If we do lose control of her, we can ignore the casualties and use overwhelming numbers to kill her.

That warning at the end of the document made Frenda smile bitterly.

True enough.

But they weren’t aware of just how hard it was for a Level 0 to survive on the dark side where no one played fair and strange esper powers abounded. Nor were they aware of just how much creativity Frenda had displayed to accomplish that.

She wasn’t going to complain about them underestimating her.

That was far better than if they had an accurate grasp of the threat.

(But this is suicide. In the end, what is the Mugino Family hoping to accomplish by picking a fight with Academy City? Oh, here’s another document.)



''The Mugino Family always weighs the pros and the cons.

''In a conflict over succession, obvious accomplishments and contributions will be necessary.

''We will reach for Academy City.

''An all-out war between the Mugino Family and Academy City would be a crisis for us, but Academy City is still a business. Specifically, a business involving children and their parents.

''The children may be safe within the city’s walls, but the parents scattered across the country are a different matter.

''We can threaten ordinary people into acting as disposable pawns who will attack those parents while we remain perfectly safe ourselves. As their fear and dissatisfaction grows, the parents will cut their ties to Academy City. And then the city’s education business will collapse.

''Or we can merely threaten to do this.

''If we can successfully threaten Academy City, we can gain access to all sorts of cutting-edge technology related to esper development. This would in turn bring endless glory to the Mugino Family.

''A bloodless victory would be ideal, but we will make demonstrations if we must.

''We already have a list of “customers” who have repeatedly fallen for false billing and bank transfer scams. By cutting them off from reliable information and pushing them to the brink, we will be able to remotely control them.

''We only need to select one of these disposable assassins.

''I leave this task with Hanagai.

''The item has already been delivered.

''By using a motorcycle courier or something to deliver the imitation bomb to the disposable pawn, we can set up Frenda Seivelun as the culprit and eliminate Shizuri through joint responsibility.



“…”

That wasn’t good.

Frenda’s dark side intuition was ringing the alarm bell.

Having all the information to yourself did not always put you in a superior position.

“Attacking Academy City and dropping Mugino down the line of succession? It’s true you could accomplish both by framing super-cute Frenda-chan, but in the end, does this mean the Mugino Family has a traitor who doesn’t like the current state of their succession race?”

This was an extremely high-risk, high-return plan for the villain.

Knowing about this was reason enough to be killed.

(But I might be able to convince Mugino using this. And breaking free of having Item after me is enough for now!)

She would of course take the original documents with her, but that didn’t feel like enough. Just to be safe, she snapped photos of each page with her phone.

With that simple work complete, Frenda stuffed the documents in her pocket and dashed from the underground vault to the front hall.

“My, my.”

She heard a voice. The graceful voice of a mature adult woman. By the time Frenda realized the danger, she had already emerged and didn’t have time to react. There was no turning back.

“If you had only continue scampering about in the streets and let the police catch you, Academy City would have sent out an assassin to silence you for us. I never imagined you would rush right into the Mugino Family mansion on your own.”

(You don’t sound too concerned about it!! In the end, did they manage to outmaneuver me!?)

She was an attractive woman. Frenda couldn’t say how many anti-aging techniques she was using, but she had the appearance of a woman aged 30 or a little younger. But her perfect beauty seemed thoroughly artificial. This violent queen had her long chestnut hair rolled and wore a storybook dress. Her slender hand toyed with a long, skinny kiseru.

“In the end, I can see the family resemblance. I’d still be surprised to find you’re Mugino’s mom, though.”

“That would be my younger sister. Really, if Eika had only kept her daughter under control, none of this would have happened.”

So this woman and Mugino Shizuri were aunt and niece?

The Mugino Family.

The term “family” there meant something entirely different from the standard nuclear family in Japan. With a criminal organization bound by blood, Frenda couldn’t even begin to speculate on how convoluted their family tree was.

Then an old man in a tuxedo moved forward to cover the lady.

“Sakuya-sama, please stay behind me.”

Mugino Sakuya.

That was the name on the cabinet containing the documents.

Then there was this old butler wearing an old-fashioned tuxedo and monocle.

“Mujinayama. Since Academy City seems incapable of cleaning up their mess, we must play the card of violence ourselves. You can handle the rest.”

“I am a sniper. Close quarters combat is outside my field of expertise.”

“…”

A cold sweat soaked the blonde girl’s back.

Frenda was a bomber, but she could manage other forms of combat.

But that was how she could tell that Mujinayama was bad news. Just standing here in front of him was enough to know she had to avoid fighting him head on.

“Thus, I am not confident I can kill you without inflicting pain and fear upon you. So please forgive me if you do suffer.”

(There’s no way I’m fighting this guy! Is there any other way out!?)

A thick beam flew in.

The wall was destroyed from the outside. Not by breaking or crumbling, but by melting.

Academy City’s #4, Meltdowner.

Flanked by a girl on either side, the girl carrying Mugino Family blood in her veins stepped out onto the front line.



“What do you think you’re doing, old hag?”



That one question changed the mood.

All attention was now on her.

This girl was the reason why Mugino Sakuya had so cautiously built up her plan in the shadows.

And everything in her behavior pointed to her, Mugino Shizuri, being the true heir, no matter how many other members of the Bloodline there were.

Mugino glanced over at the tuxedo and monocle man standing next to Sakuya.

“Mujinayama…”

“I have my reasons. I need not justify siding with Sakuya-sama at this time.”

That was all.

Even her fellow Item members of Takitsubo and Kinuhata may not have caught how much emotion was shared in that short exchange.

To say nothing of the filthy traitor among them.

Mugino Shizuri stared at the violent queen who held the long, skinny kiseru.

And she spoke.

“My grandfather seems lively enough to keep going for another hundred years. Starting a succession war now will just wear you down. And it’s your troops who will die, not you.”

“Oh? Are you sure about that? You never do know what surprises life has in store.”

“In other words, you already know the answer. You know exactly when that old man ''will unnaturally kick the bucket.''.”

A thin smile was Sakuya’s only response.

She shrugged off the outrageous accusation.

This was a coup by Mugino Sakuya. It was a civil war in which she made a calculated threat on the current head’s life, disgraced the heir who would follow him, and placed herself at the top of that violent organization of more than 100 thousand.

Of course, this was not enough to prove her murderous intentions.

Frenda knew the gist of the plan, but she hadn’t found any documents planning the family head’s death. In a world where deception was the norm, definitive proof was a must, but she didn’t have any.

And because Sakuya knew all the answers herself, she was willing to turn over the cards that couldn’t pin her down.

“Now, the question is: what am I doing? You can’t prove anything. Even if you go to the head, he won’t listen if all you have is suspicion. But this is a very inconvenient truth for you. So, Shizuri. You have no way of fighting back. What do you plan to do now that you know the truth but are short on evidence?”

“…”

“Clean up this mess, Mujinayama. They are companions of Frenda Seivelun who disturbed Mugino Family business in Tokyo and Kanagawa. That makes them enemies of the Family.”

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