Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item Chapter1 (section)

===Part 4===

If they were going to start on a new job, every member of Item needed all the details. That meant Mugino Shizuri’s phone was not enough.

Thus, the five girls took the elevator to the lower floors.

“How did you manage to buy Kinuhata’s clothes without your credit card?” asked blank-eyed Takitsubo.

“In the end, I dug through my pockets and found a few prepaid cards. Y’know, the kind where you input the alphanumeric string on them to buy stuff online or buy songs for your music player. If I wasn’t able to cash those out, I’d’ve been in trouble.”

“Hm? What would have happened to you then?”

“There are specialists for dealing with dark side people who don’t pay their debts, so I’d be on the run as they swarmed me like an endless stream of army ants. Now, I’m not about to let those losers take me alive and wring me out so tightly I turn into a super-rare cute girl diamond, but it’d be a pain regardless.”

“Eep. There are people like that on the dark side?”

Hanano Choubi shrank down even though this wasn’t about her.

Their destination was the classic style theater among the few different movie theaters in Fifteen Bells. It was strange for it to be deserted even at midday on a weekday, but no one voiced any confusion. Once they shut off the lights, deadly documents appeared on the large screen. Item’s job was in fact to erase and eliminate dangerous elements from Academy City.

“Huh? Why do you look so disturbed, Kinuhata-san?”

“It’s super nothing…”

They had to be surrounded by an unknown number of speakers because the voice on the phone sounded very three-dimensional as it explained. They still couldn’t see her face, though.

“Are you familiar with the Colosseum?”

“In the end, it’s an underground fight club with no rules – you can use any weapon or esper power you want,” readily supplied Frenda Seivelun.

Her immediate response suggested she was one of the ones who enjoyed watching the fights with a bowl of popcorn.

“The venue moves each time, so it’s hard to track down. The audience watches a dark web livestream on their computer or phone so they can enjoy seeing a real fight to death in high enough quality to make out each speck of splattered blood. It supports the latest high-definition resolution and even VR goggles. But they use some kind of obstruction program that prevents you from recording or screenshotting it. The contestants come from a variety of backgrounds, but I believe they’re all drawn in by the promise of the substantial prize money.”

“You know a lot about this, Frenda,” said Takitsubo. “You’re like a knowledge professor.”

“Heh heh. In the end, keep the praise coming☆”

The pink track suit girl’s off-kilter comment earned a bashful response from Frenda. Meanwhile, Hanano Choubi’s ordinary sensibilities had all the blood draining from her face.

“They claim the fights are to determine the strongest esper when it comes to pure violence rather than the Level system which is entirely based on what most benefits the adult researchers,” said the voice on the phone.

Even in the dark theater, one of Mugino’s eyebrows clearly twitched.

She was a battle freak who loved ''things like that''.

“We wouldn’t care if it was just a bunch of idiots gathering together and killing each other. The problem is the prize money your girl mentioned. The prize is 15 billion yen. Where do you think that comes from? Surely you don’t think livestream ads are quite that lucrative.”

The voice on the phone probably wasn’t expecting a response. She continued without even waiting three seconds.

“Life insurance.”

“…”

The only sound was Hanano’s groan.

“They take out insurance policies worth billions on all of the participants, kill all but one in what they claim is just a sporting event, and then give the payouts to the winner☆”

“Huh? That explains the prize money, but what about the Colosseum’s management? Taking out the insurance policies costs something and managing communications infrastructure you can’t afford to be discovered is a major risk, so aren’t those pieces of shit the ones who would super want the most money?”

“Who’s that? Never mind, I don’t care. The management makes their own money. There’s the ads I mentioned earlier, plus there’s a paid service that lets people gift weapons to their favorite contestant mid-fight.”

“In the end, that’s why a lot of the male contestants dress like hosts and the female ones wear risqué costumes in order to survive. But if they rely on that strategy too heavily, the results are pretty tragic once their fans get tired of them.”

“Right, right,” said the voice on the phone. “Then the management uses their earnings to fund insider trading and illegal loans over social media to make even more money. They of course threaten the losers who get scared and drop out of the fights and set up a breakwater of branch managers and specialized staff in order to construct a safe zone where no consequences will make it back to them even if the entire operation comes to light. Really, it comes down to how convenient cryptocurrency is. All this money is shifting hands, but no one can track any of it. So long story short, the managers aren’t interested in ''a mere'' 15 billion. Like that Frenda girl said, the life insurance payouts are only meant as bait for contestants.”

“So what do you want Item to do about it?” Mugino Shizuri did not sound happy. “Nothing as stupid as wanting us to kill them all, I hope.”

“Of course not. This job comes from the insurance company they’re taking advantage of. The insurance business is just like horse racing: they go under if the amount they take in from customers isn’t more than the amount paid out to the customers. They’re close to going out of business after paying out so many high-value policies back-to-back.”

“And we’re supposed to shut off the tap?”

“The managing director who hired us says there will be no questions asked regarding our methods. Basically, do whatever you want as a long as it doesn’t cause their company any trouble. So this is a DOA job. Got that?”

In this case, DOA meant “dead on arrival”, not “dead or alive”.

“Hm,” groaned Mugino Shizuri as she considered it.

(The managers aren’t interested in a mere 15 billion. I don’t know if they have it in cash, gold, or crypto, but their vault must contain ''even more'' than that.)

“That sounds good to me.”

“To be clear, the Colosseum management recruits powerful esper contestants, so they’ll be armed with enough firepower to deal with complaints from an entire group of those contestants. Which means they’re likely powerful espers from the dark side. Screw this up and you could end up dead.”

“This is sounding better all the time.”

They were done talking.

After the call ended, the entire theater lit up.

It was a clean space without a single stain. It seemed to perfectly represent the shittiness of Academy City.

“So in the end, what are we going to do?”

“First of all, you and you.”

Mugino ignored Frenda’s question and pointed at Kinuhata Saiai and Hanano Choubi.

“We have five people all of a sudden, so we need to figure out what to do with these newcomers.”