Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item5 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 2===

At present, it was September 19. So a full day later. Item gathered at a movie theater that morning, but only three of them were there.

Nothing happened on the first day of the Daihaseisai. The dark side had been on edge during the opening ceremony, but against all their expectations the event remained peaceful.

The first move was only made on the 2nd day.

Right away, the big screen displayed some gruesome footage. A hanged woman swayed below an overpass. The corpse was an adult, not a student, and her clothing made her look like the scientist type.

The audio-only voice on the phone sounded carefree.

“She was discovered three hours ago. There are some unnatural aspects to the body, so there was a request for someone ''from the city’s backstage'' to investigate separate from the ordinary Anti-Skill.”

“It was a hanging. Isn’t that super just a suicide?”

“It’s always like this with you. What if I told you she was injected with a tryptophan-based pain stimulant beforehand? It’s hilarious, really. 350 times the ordinary level would mean feeling the kind of pain you normally wouldn’t get by slicing yourself down the middle with a chainsaw☆”

So she had been made to take a large quantity of a pain-causing substance?

While suicide was wrong, it did take quite a bit of courage, so a lot of people would fail to go through with it due to pain or fear. Taking something to shut off the pain would make sense, but trying suicide after amplifying your pain was certainly odd.

“Mugino, something else is odd too. She suffocated from constriction to her trachea. And the nails on both her hands are broken, so she didn’t die right away. It looks like she was fighting the rope around her neck for quite a while.”

“Huh? She was hanged, so of course she died from constriction to her neck.”

“Death by hanging can also come from breaking the neck or constriction of the carotid arteries. And if the length of the rope is wrong, they can gather too much momentum and decapitate themselves. It’s actually pretty unusual for it to only cut off their breath, forcing them to suffer for a long time.”

“Hm? But in movies they struggle for a super long time after the chair falls out from under them.”

“The nooses used for filming are made to not put any weight on the neck.”

So said Takitsubo.

Which made sense since doing it for real would kill the actor.

“The point is there are different ways for hanged people to die. Not breaking the neck and suffering for this long is an unusual type.”

“You’re on the ball today, track suit girl. Most likely, this was designed to intentionally let her struggle until the very last moment. It’s always like this with those people.”

And again, the unnaturally long suicidal suffering had been amplified 350 times by a pain stimulant made from tryptophan. That was one unnatural aspect atop another.

Yes, this was sounding a lot like the cruelty found on the dark side.

Track suit girl Takitsubo tilted her head.

“So this is officially being handled as an ordinary suicide, but it was actually a ceremonial punishment based on some complicated rules?”

“Tryptophan itself is a necessary amino acid used to preserve health. So finding it in the human body isn’t going to raise any red flags, right? So it threads the needle where word of this won’t spread among ordinary people, but the dark side will take notice and tremble in fear.”

This made them curious about the victim and why she had been killed in this complicated fashion. After all, this had been a punishment that had to be kept hidden. That was a much greater level of bad luck than angering a drunk and getting beaten to death for it.

There was of course a file on her.

It had likely been pulled from the Bank or something like it because it only listed her official history.

Mugino scanned through it.

“Matsuba Sarina, age 29. Lives in District 3 and works as a pharmacist, but currently volunteering as a Daihaseisai drug testing official?”

“Even if she lived a clean life and did everything above board, that position could make her some enemies in the elite schools, don’t you think?” said the voice on the phone. “The festival’s official drug tests are too sensitive. No one wants to spend a full year training up an athlete only to have them disqualified because some cold medicine or mouthwash triggered a false positive.”

Ordinary people saw the Daihaseisai as no more than a large scale athletic festival, but the elite schools were different. For them, it was more like a technical skill expo where the results of their esper development theories – that is, their high-level espers – competed to show who was best. The results greatly influenced how many student applicants the school received and it could determine whether or not they could land large sums of research funding from the city’s higher ups.

Specifically, in values counted by the billions of yen per year. And they would receive that each year as long as their school’s position in the rankings didn’t shift too drastically. That was more than enough money to kill over. After all, even a prestigious school that got first place each year would be counted as last if they were disqualified. That would mean disaster for their funding.

But Mugino had a question.

“Hah. You expect me to believe the proud teachers at Tokiwadai, Nagatenjouki, or some other fancy school would go to the effort of carrying out this ceremonial punishment?”

“If they didn’t want to dirty their hands, they might have gone through a middleman to hire someone like you to do it. It’s always like that with them.”

So that was a possibility too.

Also, there was no guarantee an elite school was behind it. Someone else might benefit from the killing somehow.

“Anyway, I want you to leave behind all your preconceptions and gather whatever information you can to objectively work out who the killer was. And since the Daihaseisai is this week, watch out for the outside reporters who are in the city with all the guests. We’d have a harder time pressuring them.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“By the way, where’s the other girl? The bomber. That little scientist knows a lot about chemistry and can play at being a forensic investigator, so I would think you would want her on this case. It’s always like this with you.”