Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Railgun Cold Game (section)

===Part 9===

'''(the_hermit)

Misaka Mikoto felt an indescribable sensation in her temple.

She could not help but look away from Tsujinaka Kyouka, so Shirai immediately gave her a puzzled look.

“Onee-sama, is something the matter?”

“What did you do…?” muttered Mikoto.

Her tone made it clear this was not a response to her underclassman.

“What did you bring to this courthouse!!!???”

Her enraged shout was like a nearby lightning strike, but the female glasses attorney was unfazed. She acted like she had known that reaction was coming.

“I have no idea what you mean.”

Mikoto clicked her tongue and walked off, following the odd feeling. Shirai and Uiharu hurried after her.

“You went too far, Onee-sama.”

“She’ll feel more confident if I intentionally act like I’m out of control, right? But we did manage to shake that intellectual glasses woman. Without that, we wouldn’t have found out they had played their trump card!”

“Wh-what is this trump card, Misaka-san…?”

When she heard Uiharu’s nervous question, Mikoto took deep breaths in an effort to cool herself down.

“You know I’m the strongest when it comes to electricity types, right? I’m sensing something really strongly here. Something is going haywire… It’s just like what I felt that time an office worker’s laptop burst into flames in a café. Something is short-circuiting. No, it would only feel like this if sparks were bursting from a lithium ion battery like fireworks!”

“A battery…is burning…?”

There was no need to say it out loud.

That female glasses attorney had said it herself: ''A pile of cardboard boxes may have been taken from his home, but how long will those last?'' If there was a fire in the courthouse, the material evidence would be burned along with everything else. That would make the trial even harder to continue and it would be even more difficult to avoid the claims of false charges on the internet. They had yet to solve the cold sleep and false charges problems, yet the problems kept piling up. It felt like ending up in an impossible situation in a falling block puzzle.

“But battery failures are not a very reliable way of starting a large fire, are they?” asked Shirai. “And the courthouse is equipped with sprinklers, fire doors, and other fire prevention equipment. I don’t know where the fire will start, but could it really reach the well-protected evidence?”

“The fire doesn’t have to reach the entire building. What if they directly start the fire in the temporary storage room where all the trial evidence brought by prosecutors is kept?”

“…”

“I don’t know if they keep anyone in the storage room. But if they only have guards outside it and the room itself is unmanned, then no one will notice until the fire spreads enough for smoke to leak out the door. And if protecting the evidence takes top priority, they actually won’t put sprinklers in there.”

A bulletin board in the hallway had a list of scheduled trials for the day.

One of those was a phone scam case set to be held in a different courtroom from the Cold Sleep Murder Case. Mikoto tapped that display.

“This is probably it. A phone scam case would use a lot of cellphones. Modified phones could be sent into the temporary storage room to ignite the other evidence.”

“Th-then, Misaka-san, we need to tell the courthouse officials!”

“If they want to protect the evidence, they can’t let even their own people inside for just anything. And we only have this sense of mine to go on. The battery is already shorting. By the time they get all the paperwork in order, it’ll be too late.”

“Then what exactly are we supposed to do, Onee-sama!?”

“That’s obvious.”

There was only one thing to say here.

“We do whatever we can.”