Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item3 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 14===

The battle was over.

Kinuhata walked back on unsteady feet to rejoin the others while supported by Takitsubo.

Mugino and Frenda were looking down at the detective lying on the ice floor.

Red and black spread around her.

“Did you...super kill her? She might have been able to tell us what happened.”

“Like we had a choice. If we’d gone easy on her, she’d’ve killed us,” spat Mugino.

A voice responded to her.

It came from the Class Rep with a large chunk gone from her side.

She laughed.

“Ah ha ha. Should I take that…as a compliment?”

Frenda had plenty of friends in the light and the dark, so she could tell Shiratori Okibi was speaking as the ordinary Class Rep here. Which meant this was what existed at her deepest level – not the detective.

This was justice. The opposite of the villains who sought meaning in the darkness and found superiority in their knowledge of the special behind-the-scenes information ordinary people were ignorant of.

“Wh-what’d you do with the finger?”

But Frenda still had to check. As a villain.

“In the end, what did you do about the right thumb you cut off of Amekawa Souji, the third member of the Frees?”

“I smashed it up with a hammer and fed it to Rozeki, so there’s nothing left.”

“…”

“''Because I know the last thing criminals want to happen.'' If I sent it to Anti-Skill, you’d know where it is, for better or for worse. But logically speaking, it would scare you a lot more if you couldn’t find it no matter where you looked. And it’s not like you can 100% take my word for it here. Ah ha ha. Cough.”

Something whined weakly.

It was the wolf. Unlike her earlier ferocity, she was now behaving like a puppy with her mother. She may have only cared about being with the detective and nothing else mattered. Not even the human concept of morality.

“Rozeki...give them the key.”

The detective smiled and pet the wolf nudging her with her nose.

She touched the wolf with a bloody hand.

The wolf remained seated and tilted her head up to reveal her collar to Item. That meant exposing her throat, the most vulnerable part of her body.

After watching Mugino remove the key from the collar, Shiratori nodded from the floor.

“This means goodbye for you too… Rozeki, live free. You don’t have to accompany me in death too.”

The wolf did not obey Shiratori’s quiet words.

Shiratori brought her fingertips to her eyes.

She had tears there.

She carried those tears to the wolf’s mouth.

She placed the tears on the wolf’s tongue and had her swallow them.

“Now the two of us will always be together. We can walk together forever. So you need to go.”

And.

This time, the supposedly-extinct Japanese wolf went off somewhere.

She vanished into the mysterious darkness of Academy City.

After watching the wolf go, the detective coughed up a clump of blood. A big one. But she still managed to pull out her locked notebook with a trembling hand and toss it toward Mugino.

As if she had never actually intended to keep this a secret.

“In the end, why did you do any of this?”

“Because I am a detective of justice,” said Shiratori.

Was that why she couldn’t forgive Mugino Shizuri and the collection of villains that was Item?

That was Mugino’s assumption, but…

“So I envied you.”

She said this quite clearly.

“I’d been working for justice as a detective for so long, but, well, villainy doesn’t taste so bad. It was even better than I’d imagined.”

“…”

“It’s not like I chose this with my own logic.”

Her bloody lips displayed a hint of self-deprecation.

The true side of the Class Rep refused to hide her ugly side even on the verge of death.

“You see, both my parents are so strict… As a coward who lost her chance to even have a rebellious phase, I had no choice but to side with justice. If I’m being honest, I chose to fight villains as a detective because it was so much fun getting that peak of the world of villainy while remaining on the side of justice.”

“This world’s nothing to aspire to.”

“Oh, but it is. …You can choose to walk the path of villainy of your own free will. I wanted the freedom I saw in you.”

Mugino inserted the key taken from the wolf’s collar.

The pages inside had a space carved out and that space held a flash memory the size of a lipstick tube.

“What’s this?”

“Number 000.”

A dark red liquid spilled from the corner of the detective’s mouth.

But she still smiled.

“They are coming. You’ve been looking at the world of justice this time, so now the very top of that world is coming.”

Mugino had the flash memory now.

But she wasn’t going to directly insert it into any of Item’s phones. They would have to procure a computer from somewhere. More than that, she wasn’t in the mood to look away from the reality before her to view a rectangular screen.

The detective.

Or the Class Rep.

Shiratori Okibi wasn’t going to last. And Mugino had done it to her.

“But, well, I am sorry I made you deal with my selfishness here. I’m satisfied with this ending since I’d always wanted to join the world of the villains, but it’s probably going to mean trouble for you.”

“How so?”

“Because now you’ve lost your last connection to the ordinary world.”

Shiratori sounded troubled.

As if that was a bigger deal to her than the blood hemorrhaging from her body.

Mugino had no response for her.

“But don’t close yourself up in the world you know. That might seem the most cost-effective choice at first, but all you’ll be doing is restricting your own possibilities. The longer you keep at it, the more set in your ways you’ll be and the harder it will be to start on anything new.”

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Lying unmoving in a pool of her own blood, the Class Rep moved her eyes to look at someone else.

At Frenda and the others.

“This one thing isn’t about logic. She’s an important classmate of mine...can I trust you to take care of her?”

“Of course.”

That was all.

She didn’t complain, curse them, or beg for her life.

Perhaps someone who died truly satisfied had no need for such things.