Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Crossover Chapter 1 (section)

===Part 4===

Kamijou and the others searched around here and there.

Nanajou Kyouichirou had been abducted by the far-too-surreal enemy that was a quickly moving sofa, but they found him in a room on the same underground floor.

He looked dazed and his bangs were a mess like a physical comedian who had fallen victim to the following gag: ‘Go wait in your dressing room for a bit!’ → The floor opens to reveal a pitfall → A trip down a steep slide.

“Eh? Eh? Wh-what? What is going on?”

“Oh, I guess he’s still alive.”

That surprisingly cruel comment came from Mikoto.

Kamijou Touma, Heivia, and Higashikawa Mamoru did not speak a word. <strike>Perhaps due to the fact that they had failed to rescue him because it wasn’t a beautiful girl being abducted.</strike>

The Zashiki Warashi noticed what lay around the room. The Nanajou boy was weakly sitting with his legs collapsed to the side, but the room also contained a bus stop sign, the kind of elephant placed in front of drugstores, a Jizou statue, and a giant Shigaraki ware tanuki.

“Do you think this is set up so everything that sofa touches is brought back here?”

“You’re kidding. So this is like the failure room on a map filled with warp points or conveyer belts? Y’know, the ones where you’re always sent back to the beginning. That means we’re going to find ourselves back in this room quite a bit.”

Kamijou sounded annoyed, but giving up would not improve their situation.

They knew they would not find any important information or facilities near the failure room, but they still felt like they had to check behind every single door.

The bunny girl asked Heivia a question.

“What do you think?”

“Seems likely.”

The room contained a single table, a few chairs placed irregularly around it, and enough plates and mugs for a few people. The grilled salmon and cooked potatoes on the plates were cold, but they looked like they had been partially eaten.

“What is this place anyway?”

Higashikawa Mamoru spoke from the door without stepping into the room.

“If we were in some ancient ruins, I might think it was a king’s tomb or something, but it definitely looks like someone lives here. Is it some kind of shelter?”

“This isn’t enough to know for sure. This could be the grave keeper’s room for all we know.”

They checked other nearby doors and found more strange rooms that made no sense at first glance.

For example, one room contained only three giant treasure chests lined up in a row. The Zashiki Warashi sighed and spoke.

“It would be a little too on the nose, but do you think there are steel swords and armor inside?”

“I feel more like it’s only meant to look like that and they’re spring-loaded so the box will chomp shut on us.”

For example, one room contained an abandoned casino filled with poker tables and slot machines.

“Hey, maybe our luck’s finally turning around. Poker and roulette might be out, but it looks like we can play the slots without anyone here.”

“Don’t. These things will be rigged to eat up everything we’ve earned so far. Look, there’s no sign of a bank or a save point anywhere!”

For example, one room contained a large shower room with nothing but nozzles hanging down from the ceiling like in a prison or at a school pool.

Grab!!

“(Hey, kid. Based on the standards set by the entire human race, there’s no way we can just pass this one by, right!?)”

Heivia grabbed Kamijou’s collar and began some direct talks with the same expression he normally got at around page 350 to 400 when the war looked like it was going to drag on.

“(That older girl in the kimono and that bunny girl are clearly hiding a really nice body below their clothes, so what is there left to hope for if we pass right by the showers? Right!? You know what I mean, don’t you!?)”

“After everything we’ve seen, doesn’t this look like a trap to you? The tiles are pink and the walls are needlessly made of glass, so this is blatantly suspicious!”

“Quit trying to sound clever, moron! I already know you’re the same as me, so surely there have been times when you’ve known something was a scam but still clicked the agree button. If a girl in your class said she’s show you her tits if you broke thirty roof tiles with your forehead, you’d keep at it until your head was a bloody pulp, wouldn’t you!?”

“I-I… Kamijou Touma has no idea what you are talking about.”

“When the options are to go for it and regret it or chicken out and regret it, we’re the ones that grab the imaginary steering wheel and swerve over to break through the mountain pass guardrail!! So quit hesitating! It may be cliché and it may seem silly, but we have to stick to the tried-and-true classics and run straight toward the steamy shower sceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeene!!”

Someone grabbed Kamijou and Heivia by the back of the neck and lifted them up like in the crane game.

It was the Zashiki Warashi who could casually wield great strength in addition to ignoring physical attacks.

She tossed the two boys into the shower room and twisted the wheel-shaped faucet on the wall to spray a shower of cold water down from the ceiling.

Then it was Misaka Mikoto’s turn.

A tremendous high-voltage current surged from her bangs and a storm of bluish-white electricity enveloped the shower room.

“Fwa ha ha ha ha! Is that all? This is like a reward for meeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!”

“Wait! I! Stop! Such misfortuuuuuuuuuuuuune!”

His inability to make his protests in full added to his misfortune.

No one showed any concern for the two boys whose legs were twitching like a frog’s in a science experiment (even if one of them had been falsely accused).

“I feel like every room in here is a trap, including that room of half-eaten food,” said Mikoto with an exasperated sigh. “After all, if this was the third or fourth day of our exploration, 
we’d be ready to get into a fistfight over a cup of water. You would probably worry about poison in untouched food, but you might actually assume half-eaten food is safe.”

“And we don’t actually know who ate it or if they only tore some food away with a knife and fork,” added the bunny girl.

For some reason, she sounded ''very, very'' happy about it and Higashikawa Mamoru looked annoyed by that.

“So can we ignore all of the rooms around here?” he asked.

Nanajou Kyouichirou continued from there.

“Well, we are near the room that weird sofa took me to. Yeah, they must gather all the intruders on the floor to the one spot, put them at ease, and then have every room around them be a trap. Anyone who’s suddenly brought here will search everything around them to gather as much information as they can, so if they’re all dead-ends, this is a pretty cruel layout.”

With that, they continued on while ignoring the excessively numerous doors.

But even if they knew a plethora of traps had been set up, it gave them no hint what this giant manmade structure actually was.

They had assumed there would be some kind of family crest if it was a king’s tomb like the pyramids.

Kamijou glanced around and spoke.

“Just with what we’ve seen, this place is too big to build in just a year. And who knows how much farther it goes. From a financial standpoint and an effort standpoint, they would have needed a reason for building it that an entire nation wanted to get behind.”

After travelling about one hundred meters in an arbitrary direction, the rush of doors petered out. The corridor began to take irregular right angle turns again and there were no doors or stairs to be found.

They began to grow anxious as the corridor continued on and on.

They were worried they would find a dead-end and have to walk all the way back.

However, that fear proved groundless.

The long, long corridor led to a single thick door. It was clearly different from the many doors they had passed by.

Kamijou stared at it and spoke.

“We don’t need a special Gold Key or Silver Key to get through, do we?”

“If so, I can always just shoot out the lock or the hinges. Whatever the case might be, we can get this thing open right away.”

The pointy-haired boy grabbed the knob.

He was afraid of getting a high-voltage shock as soon as he turned it, but that did not happen.

The knob easily turned and the door opened inward.

And inside, they found…

“What…is this?”