Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item4 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 2===

“C’mon, kid. Crying isn’t going to help you find your missing commuter ticket. Oh, and what’s this? Why, it’s a commuter ticket someone dropped in the ditch☆”



“Old lady, you forgot your cane after leaning it against the railing back there, didn’t you? In the end, you need to keep better track of it.”



“Whoa, what!? No dog can escape m- yikes, now it’s running this way. Are you kidding? In the end, is that one of those poodles that’s anything but small!?”



The girl who ended up half knocked to the ground by a serious hound and licked all over by the poorly-trained boy was Frenda Seivelun.

Of course.

Academy City’s elites were closing in on her all the while. She knew that much. In the worst case, it could be Item led by #4 Mugino Shizuri who was after her. It was best to assume that every minute and second counted.

But…

“Well, in the end, it wouldn’t bring anyone a happy future if I just let that innocent poodle go charging into that group of little kids in their school backpacks.”

Still down on the ground, Frenda commented to herself after handing the leash back to the elderly man who was repeatedly bowing in thanks.

…Frenda knew all too well (thanks to the excellent nose for such things she had developed on the dark side) that she couldn’t be wasting her time on this, but the people in Shinjuku, Tokyo, had hopelessly poor defenses. Frenda knew far too well (thanks to the excellent…well, you get the point) that leaving even small pieces of trouble unresolved could lead you into much bigger trouble, so she honestly couldn’t sit idly by.

She patted her hands along her thin poncho.

(Hm, all my bombs and fuses are gone… In the end, I feel naked without them.)

“Okay.”

Frenda moved behind cover, reached inside her clothing, and pulled something from a fairly unspeakable place.

She still had her phone at least.

In the right conditions, she could control a bomb or drone with that. And dark side standard practices meant she didn’t have to worry about anyone tracking her position using it. That changed if she transmitted anything from it, of course. She reached between the phone and its cover to pull out a few (paper!) 10 thousand yen bills.

That was all the funds she had to work with.

“In the end, what a pain. The famous wicked socialite is reduced to this? I’ll have to work fast.”

Her shoulders drooped as she returned to the main area.

Men and women in suits were staring at her.

Now, if it was widely known that a bomb expert had escaped from Academy City, they would be panicking right about now. So that wasn’t what this was about.

(I see. Frenda-chan must just be too dazzling for them to behold. In the end, the age distribution of the population is different outside Academy City. Especially on weekdays. It might still be morning, but a super cute teenage girl shouldn’t be wandering around in casual clothing at this time.)

Each exit from the massive Shinjuku Station led to a very different part of the city. Wanting to avoid an obvious entertainment district where there would be more police patrols, Frenda left through the south entrance, but that led toward the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building and a district full of fancy office buildings. For the health-conscious government workers who walked to work instead of taking the subway, a (self-proclaimed) cute blonde girl doing volunteer work in casual clothing instead of going to school may have been an unusual sight.

Things really were different on the outside.

The only reason she wasn’t being questioned and taken into protective custody was her blonde hair and blue eyes marking her as a foreigner. They probably couldn’t decide if she was an ordinary tourist or an unusual sort of runaway girl.

(Then maybe I should have pretended to not speak Japanese. No, wait. In the end, that would only make me stand out more.)

It was hard to fake speaking in broken language while making it sound natural. If it looked too much like she really could understand Japanese, people would think she was making fun of them, but if they thought she couldn’t understand them at all, it would put them on guard.

Frenda sighed and moved over to the edge of the sidewalk. She leaned back against a convenience store’s glass wall to rest. Which places sold canned mackerel on the outside? She noticed the security camera distribution was poor, so she could get this close to a store without any of them capturing her face. There also weren’t any mobile security robots and no constant satellite surveillance.

Frenda glanced at the security company’s logo sticker on the glass wall.

(Based on this, I’m betting the security camera data is divided up between security company and no one has a combined database of it all. Leave it to Criminal City Shinjuku to have huge electronic blind spots too.)

Technology inside Academy City was said to be 20-30 years ahead of the outside world, but Frenda was so used to Academy City that this felt like traveling into the past.

The sign on a nearby building mentioned an internet cafe, but Frenda shook her head.

Should she contact Mugino and the others and explain her predicament?

They would definitely trace the call and snipe her with a long-range Meltdowner blast. How long they had worked together meant nothing here. Mugino and the others were professionals. If their dark side job was to hunt her down, they wouldn’t hold back on the violence. Whether or not they would kill her had already been determined when they chose to accept the job or not. Frenda knew better than to hope they would have a change of heart after arriving on the scene.

“…”

''That'' was after her.

Frenda felt a tingling in the back of her head and all her pores opened to expel a cold sweat.

She shouldn’t have imagined it so concretely.

She took a deep breath to calm her rattled nerves.

Panicking would only limit her options, but she needed time if she was going to face the situation and regain her cool. Only by expanding her options like that could she survive.

She raised her head.

She saw the city’s horizon. But it was located quite high up.

Far above the skyscrapers, a giant wall drew out a horizontal line. That was the border with Academy City.

“Now, then.”

Needless to say, Frenda had not escaped by foot.

Some unseen villain had drugged her and taken her outside the city.

That much she knew for sure.

But something bothered her about that.

(Why didn’t they just kill me then?)

If she had been unconscious and defenseless for hours, they could have killed her at any time. Yet they hadn’t.

That would mean keeping her alive benefited them more than killing her.

Or it would cause more damage.

It meant they saw some meaning in creating this situation where she was on the run while the rest of Item hunted her.

(Are they trying to tear apart Item without facing us directly, or is the trouble we cause only supposed to draw attention away from something else they’re doing?)

“…”

Mugino Shizuri, Takitsubo Rikou, and Kinuhata Saiai.

Those three had to be hot on her trail. No matter where she ran, they would catch her in the end. Before that happened, she had to find and capture the villain who had thrown her outside of Academy City to frame her and then present that villain to Mugino and the others when they showed up to kill her.

Her own survival?

Revenge against the true culprit?

The blonde girl’s motives were nothing so trite.

Do not forget that she was more than just a dark side bomber.

She glanced up at a skyscraper wall to check a retro digital clock resembling a giant calculator.

(So today is September 10.)

Frenda Seivelun silently gathered her resolve so that no one around would notice.

Yes, she had a reason to return to Academy City alive no matter what.

Specifically, she had to be back by the morning of September 18.

Because…

“That’s when all the city’s schools gather for the Daihaseisai athletic festival. My sister is in the 1st grade, so this is her first one. In the end, no self-respecting big sister could miss an event like that!”