Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume3 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 16===

“Why?”

Vivana Oniguma was nearly in tears.

Her long, curly silver hair was at odds with her hakama and she was as benevolent as the dark side came. At the moment, she was completely lost inside a subway station she rarely ever used.

She felt there were two kinds of people in the world: those who could immediately find the exit they wanted inside a subway station, and those who would wander around until they found themselves in a different station altogether.

She had not asked for it, but she was part of the dark side. She could not allow Anti-Skill to find her here. Her only chance to survive and live out her life was to leave Academy City and that required searching out the secret of ''Academy City’s Greatest Taboo''.

Where had those Hamazura and Takitsubo people gone?

Had they coordinated together to lose her? Unpleasant suspicions like that kept spinning through her head. She needed to reach District 23 and she could always head to the surface to see where she was. Heading up was a risk, but it might be better than wandering around here forever.

Or so she thought.

If she had made up her mind just ten seconds sooner, she never would have encountered someone here.

“Gwah!!”

A nearby door burst open. It looked a lot like a staff-only door and the person inside ran into Vivana. The person was so short that the impact was mainly to her hip.

''It was a girl in gym clothes.

But Vivana did not have time to ask what this was about.

The wall swelled out from the other side. The wall and metal door exploded like a popping balloon and rubble flew out horizontally. Vivana immediately dropped her black and pink cloth wrappers and opened them. She grabbed the broken-tipped bamboo sword from her Japanese torture products and used it slice through the air.

The multiple pieces of the split tip made it like a multi-headed snake.

“Hm.”

''After easily knocking down the entire scattershot of rubble,'' she sensed something moving beyond the dust.

What looked like the head of a weak office worker sat atop a mass of swollen muscles, creating a unique silhouette. The few tatters of clothing that remained said he was from Anti-Skill not a corporate office.

He was covered in blood.

The girl clung to Vivana’s hip and trembled.

Shouts and screams spread around them.

“No…”

The girl’s eyes widened.

But not from simple fear. Her trembling came from seeing the blood splattered on the man.

“Where’s the doggy? No, no… What happened to the golden retriever that saved me!?”

With a heavy thud, a piece of metal larger than a railroad rail was squashed longer like a sugar sculpture being made. How much force would be required to cause that? Vivana’s research into the history of torture and execution told her that could slice right through a midsized truck if it was a whip rather than a blunt weapon.

“I found you. I finally found you.”

He spoke in a deep voice that seemed to carry some terrible curse.

He may have been crawling through the sewer because a terrible odor pushed in when he opened his mouth. The mass of muscles attempted to take another step, but Vivana stuck out her broken-tipped bamboo sword.

The beneficial torture expert directly faced the harmful mass of muscles.

“Is that supposed to be a whip?”

“?”

“If so, I hate to say it, but I can’t let this stand. I enjoy researching the cultures of torture and execution and I take that seriously. I can’t have a ''casual'' like you causing a scene here using a half-assed version of the tools. It’s nothing but a nuisance.”

She had drawn the short end of the stick here.

She had hoped the gym clothes girl would run away while she stepped forward, but that had not happened. She still felt a pressure on her hips. She looked down to see the girl wrapping her small arms around her.

“No…”

This seemed to be more than locking up from fear.

The girl squeezed her eyes shut and said something under her breath.

“No. Don’t you leave me too.”

Vivana sighed and patted the girl’s small head with her empty hand.

The man’s thin face squirmed in response.

“Are you?”

“?”

“Dark side? Too?”

As a simple blunt weapon, that pipe was heavy enough to break through a metal shutter, but he also gave it the flexibility of a whip as he swung it down.

The girl squeezed tighter at Vivana’s hips.

But then she must have wondered why the pain and impact never arrived.

She hesitantly opened her eyes to look.

“In the East and the West, executions were held in public as a sort of show.”

The torture expert with two hair horns had enough time to support the girl with one hand and move to the side.

“The most well-documented of those would be the witch hunt. The furious people so wanted the criminals to die that they could easily riot if the executioner failed. So it was out of the question for the criminal to fight back or escape at the execution ground. In that sense, setting up a sturdy enclosure around the execution ground was a crucial task to ensure safety.”

Several dull impacts sounded as wooden stakes were driven into the hard floor. They were bound together with ropes in a structure similar to scissors or a tripod and those held down the metal pipe whip after it had crashed into the floor.

“This is known as a yarai. The term actually refers to the entire fence built around an execution ground with logs or bamboo, but the basic structure only requires two or three pieces. The people of this country are so clever in how they use trees.”

Next, there was a rubbing noise.

It sounded like rustling clothing, but it was actually the sound of a thick rope being wrapped around the pinned-down pipe.

“Bondage, whipping, pressure—the basic form of all torture is the distribution of weight.”

“…”

“After all, you can’t have the victim dying before you get the desired information out of them. So whether you’re tying them up in rope and hanging them from the ceiling or you’re seating them in a chair covered in needles or thorns, you have to be extra careful to ensure their weight is distributed evenly and not focused on any one point. Humans are tougher than you would think. We can build up a tolerance to pain, so there’s even a record of someone staying strong with a weight of more than two-hundred kilograms placed on them.”

Of course, her opponent was not just going to sit there and politely listen.

Fed up with all the talking, he used brute force. The mass of muscles gathered his strength and sent waves of force through the bent steel to tear through the partial restraints formed by the yarai and rope.

But that was all according to plan for the girl whose two sweet-smelling horns shook.

“But on the other hand,” she whispered with some red tape visible within her loose hakama. “Mess up that distribution and allow the weight to focus on a single point, and you have a tragic accident on your hands. Turtle shell bondage has a silly image thanks to its use in comedy, but just like professional wrestling moves, that is not something amateurs should try and mimic. ‘Rope master’ was originally used to refer to a martial arts expert, which should tell you just how dangerous ropes can be. Attempt it without knowing what you’re doing…and this can happen!!”

A dull snapping rang out. She had used her opponent’s momentum, but it was still unclear how she had applied so much force to the steel whip with the rope binding it. That pipe thicker than a human torso suddenly broke in half.

The mass of muscles staggered forward and Vivana actually licked her lips.

She still held a bamboo sword with the tip split apart. That torture tool took a safe weapon used for practice and modified it into something dangerous enough to tear through flesh.

She targeted his right arm on the outside of the elbow.

Even a child knew that was a weak point.

Instead of slicing, it sounded more like something being shredded with a giant file.

“Humans are funny creatures.” Time seemed to stop as Vivana grinned and spoke. “We have a set upper limit to how much pain we can tolerate. Torture is all about intentionally extending the pain and suffering as long as possible, so the trick is to stay just below that upper limit. And what happens when you pass the limit? ''That isn’t something you can change no matter how much you train your body.''”

The mass of muscles wobbled to the side.

The two eyeballs behind his filthy glasses had rolled back in his head.

He did not even scream. His giant body simply crumbled below him.

“Of course, some people suggest that certain Eastern and Western execution methods were designed to provide ''too much'' pain in order to quickly knock the victim out in an age before anesthetics.”

She spoke to the monster as he fell to his knees and collapsed forward.

“Okay.”

With that casual word, she swung the solid stick along a whip-like horizontal path. It struck that giant with a load roar and sent him flying back into the hole he had opened in the wall.

Vivana twirled the stick that had broken in half from the incredible destructive force.

“W-wow.” The girl gulped and then hopped up and down. “You beat that big muscle guy like it was nothing!”

“Yes, yes. Don’t look so excited about watching such brutal torture. Now I’m worried about your future. Also, where are we?”

“Oh, right. I need to get home!”

“Where are we???”

She smiled.

She fixed her slipping hakama and waved until the gym clothes girl was out of view.

Then she doubled over.

And Vivana Oniguma coughed up a lot of blood.

(Of course.)

Her surroundings grew louder as she wiped her mouth with a handkerchief.

(Distributing the weight doesn’t make it go away. That isn’t a defense if there’s enough weight to be deadly even when evenly distributed. I’m lucky I wasn’t turned to mincemeat by the initial concrete scattershot.)

But she had been ''torn up'' quite a bit on the inside.

As a torture expert, she knew exactly how bad the injury was. She was in serious trouble. Anti-Skill would chase her down if she did not leave Academy City, but she had no idea if medical technology outside the city could heal an injury this bad.

(But I don’t regret it.)

She was unsteady on her feet, but she began to walk.

It had been a long time since she last felt she had been useful to someone like this.

She had started this strange research into torture and execution for a similar reason. She had thought someone might thank her if she gathered up all the research material this country turned its nose up at and made sure that history and culture was not lost to the next generation.

She had wanted her actions to put a smile on someone’s—anyone’s—face.

Getting a thank you would be even better.

“…”

At any rate, she had to reach District 23.

But where was Vivana Oniguma really meant to go?