Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item4 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 1===

During the morning, an elderly man in a fancy Italian suit entered a florist in Yokohama Station.



“Hello, hello, miss. I was hoping to make a bouquet from a few seasonal flowers, but I unfortunately don’t know much about these things. Could you tell me what’s in season and give me some recommendations?”

“Umm. It’s fall now, so that would be the golden lace, the gentian, the balsam, and…the chrysanthemum maybe?”

“A white chrysanthemum! Excellent. And what was that in the language of flowers again? Eternal love? A final parting? Well, it doesn’t matter. Now, could you pick out a few different flowers and make a bouquet for me? And, y’know, arrange the colors so it looks nice and pretty.”

Since the young woman in an apron couldn’t recommend the more expensive and famous flowers off the top of her head suggested she was a part-timer and not a permanent employee. She built the bouquet in the laborious way of someone without much practice, but the old man watched her with a smile. More than a man watching his daughter, he looked like a man watching his granddaughter.

“It’s ready.”

“Thank you. Yes, now this is a bouquet that cheers you up at the mere sight of it. I’m glad I chose this shop.”

He paid her a generous tip and said goodbye.

After leaving the florist, two butlers in tuxedos joined him at his sides.

Their destination wasn’t far.

They left the large train station. While bringing the bouquet up to his face to enjoy the scent of the flowers, more people joined him. The number of butlers and maids in black only continued to grow. Before long, the group had reached the double digits.

They arrived at a perfectly ordinary looking multi-tenant building.

However, the first floor was not occupied by a convenience store or a cafe. It was covered by thick metal shutters. All the slots on the building directory next to the glass door were empty. The entire building was a hunk of concrete that gave off a slight sense of rejection that would make the average person think twice before opening the door and stepping in.

One of the butlers opened the glass door and the elderly man stepped in with the bouquet resting on his shoulder.

All the effort taken to make the exterior look inconspicuous was ruined by their presence.

They entered the first floor on the other side of the metal shutter.

The elderly man used a twist of his wrist to twirl the bouquet around from his shoulder.

“Any word on the stolen land deed?”

“We have found it.”

“Account books showing debt, scandalous photos, copied licenses – I don’t care what. Just retrieve anything and everything that could be used to threaten us.”

“The process is already underway.”

“That just leaves the cleanup.”

The place reeked of dirt.

A large panel had been removed from the floor, exposing the foundation of the base isolation system and the dark soil. And something was planted in orderly lines like heads of cabbage.

Except these were heads of humans.

They were still alive. Arranged 4 x 5, there were 20 in all. Each was a large man with the dangerous kind of look that would get most anyone to steer clear if they ran into them on the streets at night. They were buried alive and upright.

“You would be the alumni of a certain university’s unofficial loan shark club, correct? After all the trouble you caused, I was shocked to find it was only a hobby for you.”

He didn’t let them yell in anger.

Now was not the time to make them scream.

Those young men who had howled that life was good were now all sweating bullets and trembling. They didn’t dare speak a word even as rats and earwigs nibbled at their cheeks and earlobes.

“They were all from a country locked in civil war.”

The elderly man holding the bouquet sounded exasperated as he looked down at them from the edge.

“That old man discovered some people who had never done a single thing wrong in their lives but just so happened to belong to an ethnic minority their country decided were all political criminals and had to be purged. They were fortunate enough to escape to Japan, but then their visas expired. Sheltering them in his small workshop was nothing but a risk – it could even have gotten him arrested along with them. But if these people were deported back to their home country, a stamp on their paperwork would mark them for death. He felt sorry for them, so he took them in and hired them. …And then you came along and threatened him and threatened him and threatened him, taking everything he had, and even played at being land sharks to steal away the factory along with the land it sat on. Do I have that right?”

All of the buried men could imagine how this would end.

''They'' probably wouldn’t do anything. They would only close up the panel and leave.

…The men could cry and shout, but in three or four days, they would either have shriveled away unknown to the world, or the mice and bugs would have eaten through all the soft bits to empty out their skulls while they still lived.

And finally…

Against his better judgment, one of the victims broke.

“Wh-what, you think you’re a good person just because you saved some weak old man? Playing at being a hero d-doesn’t change the fact that you’re as much a criminal as we are!!”

“I don’t recall ever referring to myself that way. We are certainly not on the side of good. And we don’t help the weak and suffering for nothing in return.”

“Oh,” said a butler.

Because the bouquet man had snatched a metal box about the side of a tissue box from a bodyguard.

When he rotated it like a butterfly knife, the metal box transformed into a T-shaped submachine gun.

“All I’m trying to do is save the people who do the things I can’t. As penance for being less of a man than them.”



''Bang, ba-bang!!

After a few dry gunshots, the rat-and-earwig-chewed men’s heads all popped in bursts of red.



The young butler by the old man’s side held a hand to his forehead.

But not because he was horrified by the death occurring before his eyes.

“''Master!!'' You should leave this dirty work to us. The Bloodline knew nothing because we made sure of it for their protection!!”

“Sorry, sorry. And you can call me ‘mastermind’ or ‘ringleader’. That’s more fitting for a villain.”

After casually apologizing, the Italian suit man handed the submachine gun back to the butler.

“Hm, a Russian special ops weapon? That’s too fancy, don’t you think? Gangsters like us should be slinging around Chicago Typewriters.”

“In this day and age, no one would even refer to that heavy, bulky antique as a submachine gun.”

The elderly man glanced over at the bouquet.

Then he dropped his gaze to the garden of shattered and burst red.

“I bought it to leave at their grave, but it’s honestly wasted on them.”

“You are most correct. We can use it to decorate one of the mansion’s vases.”

The elderly man departed the multi-tenant building with the butlers and maids seeing him off.

Once they had cleaned everything up, no trace would remain.

“The factory owner said he would do anything, right?”

“Yes. He cried and begged to one of the butlers like me, saying he would do anything for his family, his employees, and those youths.”

“Then tell him he isn’t allowed to live anything but a happy life from now on. Listen, that’s a man who single-handedly surpassed me, head of the Mugino Family. He needs to be proud of his decision. I won’t let him live a miserable life or die a miserable death.”

“I will make sure of it.”

“Finding youths from a country trapped in civil war and sheltering them before anyone else can, huh? I couldn’t have lost more thoroughly. Ah hah hah! To think there was a glorious fool out there who could act before I could.”



They were the Mugino Family.

Theirs was not an organization that would let a mere 10 or 20 corpses bother them.