Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:RailgunSS3 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 1===

As soon as they stepped through the metal door, a muffled bass beat reverberated more in their gut than their ears. They were not even in a dimly-lit backroom. All they saw were stairs leading up to the surface. Some dance music was playing in the distance and only the bass notes made it this far and rudely rubbed at Misaka Mikoto and Sakibasu Yuri’s lower stomachs.

The violin-loving girl with curly-tipped black twintails frowned and started rubbing a finger against her temple.

“Th-this is more than I can bear. I do not understand how anyone can give their body over to music like this.”

“Yeah, it is like scratching hard at the ''scab''.”

Mikoto agreed for politeness’s sake, but her tastes in music were not that biased. Still, she did find reason to criticize what she heard. A playlist like this required a theme or drama. For example, when putting together a playlist of love songs, they would start with a first love, move on to some trouble, continue with a ballad of heartbreak, and finish it off with a song yearning for a second chance. That gave the entire playlist an overall story arc. Mikoto sensed none of that continuity from the bass notes she could hear. This was just some Western music lover playing down the hit chart without even understanding the lyrics. You did not even need a human DJ for this. Just ask your phone to “play some upbeat songs, hits only” and you could get the same thing.

This was not somewhere they should be visiting in their Tokiwadai uniforms, but they had to pass through here or the attacker would escape.

After climbing the stairs and reaching the ground floor, they found large double doors in front of them.

Either for the appearance or for soundproofing purposes, the door was twice as tall as Mikoto. And standing in front of it were two men in black carrying a black device that combined a metal detector and a stun baton. This place was not made to be entered through the main entrance either. It may have been connected to an emergency exit or backroom.

One of the men, who were 2m tall, made a blunt demand.

“Your key.”

“What do we do? My Stativarius Ainsel doesn’t work anymore. Should I try that unlimited black card that worked weirdly well at the karaoke box?”

“Don’t bother. We don’t know if the same keys work everywhere and everyone here’s an enemy anyway. These men are armed and working here, so they must be the rich villain’s soldiers.”

Mikoto breathed an exasperated sigh and snapped her fingers.

“Good evening. I’ve got your key right here, morons.”

With a popping sound louder than firecrackers, the combination metal detector and stun batons burst from within. The two large men screamed and writhed on the ground. One of them tried to pull a different weapon from his hip, but Mikoto ruptured his radio’s battery to silence him.

The other one weakly raised his hands while curled up on the floor. But he had clearly not given up hope since he kept glancing up at a corner of the ceiling.

Mikoto responded by putting a hand on her hip.

“I wouldn’t place my hopes on the security camera if I were you. How do you think I got through the electric lock into here?”

“…”

“Looks like you understand now. Sweet dreams.”

Bluish-white sparks burst from the bangs of her short chestnut hair to physically silence the man in black who still intended to resist.

Sakibasu was concerned enough by the men’s low angle view to hold her short skirt down with a hand and she looked alternately between the men and the door.

“I-I’m surprised no one heard that. The explosions were pretty loud.”

“Well, the area inside has got to be a vortex of sound. Still, this won’t last forever. These men are probably meant to make periodic reports. If we don’t get in there soon, we’ll lose the element of surprise. Come with me, Sakibasu-san.”

The door was more than twice their height, but when they grabbed the knob and turned it, it was surprisingly light. It had motors built in just like an electrically assisted bicycle. …Although that introduced the fundamental question of why they did not just use an automatic door.

And as soon as the door opened just a crack…

“Yeahhhh!! You wannabe gourmet sommeliers might not know the difference between ethyl and methyl, but don’t let this 40 proof stuff get you all tipsy! You don’t need any cheap drinks around here! I’ll use the invisible hand of music to reach into your head and puree your brains!! Woo!!”

It was like a flood.

The chaotic deluge of sound felt like it would scorch their chests in an instant.

In what seemed like a failed attempt at using indirect lighting, the nearly pitch black space had blinding red and green beams of laser art flying around. And for some unfathomable reason, special lights attached to the pillars were flashing intermittently but not to take photographs. The objects glowing in the dark must have been coated in a substance that reacted to black lights.

The place stank of a mixture of sweat, perfume, alcohol, and other more unmentionable things.

Were the dresses supposed to look like that or had those people been mugged? The women here wore what might have been underwear or a swimsuit with only a skirt or shorts over it.

The dance floor was larger than a tennis court and it was packed full of people. The side wall appeared to have been made into a bar, but the elevated space in the back was the DJ booth. And the curved stairs on either side of that booth led to the VIP rooms on the second floor. Some small rooms were enclosed in thick glass. The door to the backroom could not be seen from here, but it would either be behind the DJ booth or on the second floor with the VIP rooms.

Sakibasu Yuri looked a little nauseated just from seeing the dance floor packed as full of people as a train during rush hour. Her legs contained in black kneesocks and loafers moved hesitantly back and forth like she was preparing to step into a sticky bog.

“Urp… Wh-what is this post-apocalyptic nightmare?”

“Where do the corn starch footprints lead?”

“Ugh, this way…”

“Good. We won’t be here for long.”

Mikoto fired a lightning spear at the tall ceiling as a warning shot. When the deep popping sound burst across the dance floor, the half-naked women who had been swaying like heads of wheat instead screamed and curled up like pill bugs. With Sakibasu following her, Mikoto shoved the people aside to cut across the polished glass-like floor.

Of course, the club was not going to just let this happen.

Bouncers in black moved from the corners of the dance floor and the second floor, but Mikoto detonated the batteries of the radios or phones in their pockets instead of worrying about their fancy (ha) guns or knives. That was a quick way to incapacitate anyone who did not realize their convenient modern marvels could also be used as bombs. The ones with good instincts or just good luck quickly threw their communication devices away, but that gave them one extra thing to do. The enemy essentially had to sit one turn out, so Mikoto only had to zap each one in turn using lightning spears.

“Sakibasu-san, where’s the corn starch!?”

“It has been trampled on a fair bit, but the footprints climb the left stairway to the second floor!”

By the way, the awful dance music continued playing even as all this went down. But the DJ’s fingers had frozen over, so there was no link from one song to the next. The same song kept playing over and over.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait!!” shouted the DJ. “I surrender, I surrender! What did I ever do to you!?”

“That machine you’re using to control all those awful disks! Is it the club’s, or did you bring it with you!?”

“Please no! I took out a bigger loan for this than for a car! Please don’t destroy it!! Heavy Round stopped producing this analog audio equipment ages ago, so the only way to get one is to snatch up one of the ones rotating between secondhand stores like conveyer belt sushi. There’s only so many to go around, so losing it would be a loss for the whole world!!”

Mikoto elegantly flipped him off like a proper lady as she climbed the stairs to the VIP rooms. A man in black stepped out from behind a pillar wielding a black leather blackjack full of countless metal balls, but she zapped him with a high-voltage current and shoved him down the hard glass stairs.

(Is this all? That model shop was more dangerous than this.)

“Kyah!”

Sakibasu Yuri frantically moved to the side of the stairs while following Mikoto up. She held her short skirt down while holding her violin case. Pressing her black kneesocked legs together so nervously made her seem all the more feminine. Misaka Mikoto decided maybe she should not have run up the stairs so boldly even if she was wearing shorts below her skirt.

“Don’t get hit when they fall down. Here we go, Sakibasu-san.”

The second floor VIP rooms appeared to come in different grades. Some of the thick glass booths were no larger than the waiting rooms on a train station platform and others were larger than a school classroom. When Mikoto aimed her palm toward the glass, she saw grown adults and hostesses cowering down while in each other’s arms. …You needed a key just to get inside the club, yet it was divided up even further inside. What was this nesting doll of an organization thinking? The people using them may have been delighted to pay the high prices needed to obtain their own private space, but Mikoto could only see it like a zoo with strange animals stuffed inside their cages.

“Th-those pancakes look awfully thin for such a fancy place.” Curly-tipped twintailed Sakibasu clung to Mikoto’s back as she nervously looked around. “Everyone on the dance floor and in these VIP rooms was an adult. I don’t see that attacker in a leotard.”

“Where do the corn starch footprints lead?”

“The pointe shoes continue further back.”

“Oh, there’s a door on the wall.”

The door had a heavy-duty biometric scanner, but an electric lock was an electric lock.

What Mikoto did might look the same, but she messed with the internal circuitry differently each time. She did not even let it report there had been an error. Zero-Day Link and the virus storage center were no concern of hers.

She held her palm toward the panel and forced open the door.

“Time to head backstage.”