Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:MvM Chapter3 (section)

===Part 11===

Mikoto awoke to the cawing of a half-naked harpy.

She immediately detected a bloody scent.

She found herself wrapped in fur she didn’t recognize. A giant monster lay dead and skinned a short distance away. The 10m beast had a mixture of lion, goat, and snake traits. “That’s a chimera,” said the elf, eyes wide.

“What happened here?” sleepily wondered Mikoto in her bikini armor.

Apparently the chimera(?) had crept up to them in the night like nocturnal creatures are wont to do, but Mikoto had felt chilly as she slept, used an iron sand sword to skin the fluffy beast, and wrapped herself in the fur.

It didn’t matter that she hadn’t been conscious.

The elf – who was also wrapped in the fur because Mikoto had pulled her in like a body pillow – made a somewhat dazed observation.

“I-if she had been too sleepy to know where she was aiming, could she have cut off my ear and skinned me instead?”

She sounded fully awake already, so maybe elves were short sleepers since they lived out in nature. Like a small herbivore that needed to get up at a moment’s notice if anything happened. And Mikoto had mercilessly latched onto Patissiet while turning over in her sleep.

“Wake up, Shokuhou. It’s time for breakfast. And to be clear, I’m not making anything for you, so you have to find your own food.”

No response.

Mikoto thought maybe Shokuhou’s survival instincts were so poor she was still fast asleep, but apparently not.

She was missing.

(Where did she get off to?)

“Kyahhhhhhhhhhh!!”

But she could be heard in the distance.

Did even her death screams have to be lewd? And had she not listened at all to the warnings about the dangers of water?

Shokuhou liked to stay clean and thus liked bathing, so she was again being attacked by the waterside. And this time she had removed her own dancer outfit, leaving herself naked. She and the monster were staring each other down like cats threatening each other, but it looked silly when one of them wasn’t wearing any clothes.

The monster was a round glob of translucent goop.

Was fluorescent yellowish-green a sign of something lewd in Celesaqphere? Instead of pink.

It was a little bigger than a kotatsu.

…As comical as it looked, it reminded Mikoto of a primitive creature like an amoeba. That would mean anyone caught inside the translucent jelly would have their flesh and bones digested away, which was kind of scary.

“Why does this only ever happen to me? Are the odds ability in this world weighed against me!?”

(Hm, what to do? I could save her, but I could also use her as bait and run off.)

“I don’t need Mental Out to know what you’re thinking, Misaka-san!”

“Well, if I keep her around as bait for future lewd attacks, Patissiet and I can avoid any number of predicaments, so I guess I’ll save her. To use as a lively sacrifice.”

“Hey!! You’re in middle school too, so it’s high time you learned how to be cooperative by smiling on the outside while crying on the inside!”

Really, it was her fault for stripping naked outside when literally no one asked her to. Especially when the sun had already risen.

Mikoto decided to think of her as chaff or a flare.

She used an iron sand sword like a whip to slice through the slime slowly approaching Shokuhou.

It was a colorful glob of slime, but it did appear to have a weak point. There was a small clump with a deeper color on the inside.

(It is technically a lifeform, so why did I not think twice about killing it?)

It didn’t concern her at all during the battle, but it suddenly concerned her after she had calmed down.

Would she react in the same way if she fought an elf?

That may have been the root cause of why the humans of this world had no qualms about buying and selling slaves.

“That was not a wild plime. It may have been a new lifeform born from the kraken’s bodily fluids.”

“Eh? But we cooked and ate that stuff along with the tentacle!”

“It should have been digested in our stomachs. In fact, that creature was created from the blood stains splattered on the land. The majority of it remained in the lake, which seems to have dissolved away. My guess is we can’t let a sufficient amount of it remain on land where the wind can dry it out.”

“And of course that tentacle monster found a way to be lewd even in death.”

The slime appeared to be a part of the food chain now that it was dead. Small fish gathered near the shore in search of food.

It looked like breakfast wouldn’t be hard to find.