Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:MvM2 Depth3 (section)

===Part 1===

Helplessness ran rampant.

Conversation had all but vanished aboard Camouflaged Carrier Izanami.

Mikoto felt like more people weren’t finishing their meals.

She had also heard the Izanami’s sickbay was now a busy place.

A lot of the girls were asking for sleeping pills.

The rules-loving dorm manager had apparently been going nuts, but Watanabe-sensei had managed to placate her. Good thing too because if that tyrannical glasses women was loosed on the Izanami now, none of the girls living there would survive.

Because every one of them was deserving of punishment by Tokiwadai standards. All of their lives were out of balance to some extent.

And it all came down to one thing.

“Fear of a ballistic missile,” muttered Mikoto.

The Empire had already targeted them with a variety of Girlish Weapons, but this was on another level. Struggling to survive would have zero influence on their fate.

No matter what they did, the other side only had to press a button.

Their lives were in someone else’s hands.

It was hardly surprising they were under enough stress to neglect the everyday necessities.

Mikoto was currently in the deserted cruise ship sports gym. Specifically, she was pedaling the exercise bike. She was the kind of girl who could relieve stress and such with exercise.

She glanced over at the adjacent booth as she pedaled.

“You have Mental Out, so can’t you erase everyone’s stress all at once?”

“Huff, puff. Not…happening.”

A girl for whom exercise didn’t have that effect was clutching the handlebar while flushed, sweating, and tearful. Even though the bike was on the lowest speed setting, which was probably slower than walking.

Shokuhou wore a tank top and leggings for a yoga woman look while Mikoto (in a T-shirt and shorts) stared at her with a distant look in her eyes.

“I think your problem is your jiggling boobs shaking you side to side too much. Yeah, that’s gotta be it.”

“My – cough – my chest is not that heavy. They aren’t wrecking balls.”

“No, I’m pretty sure they’re your true form. Their jiggling is throwing around the flimsy body attached to them.”

“Huff, puff. I’m going to scratch you if you keep this up, Misaka-saa- ugh.”

Whatever the case, she was so out of shape she needed rehab with a nurse to supervise, not a training session. …So this was fine. Mikoto had no reason to feel inferior to her. None at all.

“15 days left.”

“Huff, puff. Nothing has happened yet, cough, but you don’t think that’s going to last all the way to the end, do you? Ugh, cough.”

“Look, if you want that serious expression to work, you’re going to have to stop sweatily and tearfully looking to me for rescue.”

Then someone entered the sports gym.

It was their underclassman Shirai Kuroko.

“Onee-sama, I need your help! Trouble has broken out in the dining hall and it’s too much for me to handle on my own!!”

“Hm? Not often you ask for help with your Judgment duties.”

Was the situation that dire?

The nature of this “trouble” was unclear, but as dainty as the Tokiwadai girls looked, they were all high-level espers. With so many in such close quarters, the damage they could cause if ignited was incalculable. 

“Just follow me to the dining hall!!”

“You come too, Shokuhou.”

“Huff, why should I bother? Puff, she asked for your help ability, urp, so you go deal with it yourself.”

“You must be thirsty, Shokuhou. Here have this room temperature sports drink.”

“Gurgle, gurgle!? No! So many chemicals!!”

After providing divine punishment tailor-made for that idiot who was dehydrated but refused to drink anything she considered unnatural, Mikoto skipped taking a shower and let Shirai lead her down the corridor.

“So what’s happening?”

“They weren’t physically attacking each other when I left, but it’s only a matter of time.”

That sounded bad.

They headed to the dining hall with lonely Shokuhou Misaki (still in her sportswear and unsteady on her feet) trailing behind them.

They called it a dining hall, but it was really a restaurant in the cruise ship area.

Uncertain what she would find, Mikoto opened the thick double-doors that felt like something from a party venue.



“We have no choice but to fight! When it was the Empire, they didn’t even give us a chance to talk. We’re dead if they launch even a single ballistic missile!!”

“We should surrender and explain the situation to them! We fought against the Empire, but we never touched the United States or the Republic!!”



She was hit by voices.

Mikoto was surprised to find voices could produce such a powerful storm.

She didn’t know who all it was, but the fighting wasn’t just between two people.

A large group of girls was split in two and glaring at each other while throwing fierce words back and forth.

Would they fight or not?

It was a touchy situation.

They were all wound up so tight Mikoto feared even a loud sneeze on her part could trigger a group esper battle. Was this what they got for inducing a civil war?

“Huh…”

“See what I mean?”

Tokiwadai students would sometimes claim to have never once gotten angry in their lives, but apparently that didn’t apply when death was so close at hand.

Mikoto glanced over at the #5, but Shokuhou only shrugged.

As they had touched on in the gym, she apparently had no intention of calming them down with Mental Out.

Or rather…

(She probably doesn’t want to create any unnecessary suspicion. Like that she caused the stress running rampant on the ship and she’s treating it as a way of gathering support.)

With something invisible like the mind, there was no way of disproving such things. At that point, she would have to turn them all into mindless dolls to end it.

“Kuroko, does your position as Judgment mean anything anymore?”

“I kind of doubt it…”

“Oh, I know. We can go call the dorm manager.”

The girls instantly fell silent.

The talk of battling a military power or of surrendering was just that: talk. None it felt real to them. So it couldn’t overpower something they knew all too well.

Like finding someone trembling in fear of ghosts in a supposedly haunted house and telling them all the cracks in the old building’s walls were probably releasing tons of carcinogenic asbestos dust. That would overpower anyone’s fear of ghosts and send them running for the exit. The Izanagi was here too, so they might as well make use of it.

“Misaka-saaan. That’s only going to work once.”

She knew that.

They had to come up with a plan before everyone’s fears and anxieties exploded.

Hopefully nothing would happen before they could.