Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item4 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 5===

Inside that wall lay Academy City.

Some men performed their final checks in the back of a windowless work van parked on the curb during the night.

It was clear they had done this before.

“Our target is Fremea Seivelun. Age: 7. Location: a District 13 student dorm.”

“Why are we nabbing her?”

“We weren’t told. But given the size of the reward and the chosen intermediary, it probably isn’t just some pervert.”

They were Army Ant.

Their usual job was debt collection on the dark side, but making money off of villains on the brink of losing everything meant they also dabbled in abduction. If it was necessary to get someone to pay their debt in full, this group would crush that person with hundreds of thousands of atmospheres of pressure to convert them into diamond pieces.

Thus, they did not bother demanding an exorbitant ransom from Anti-Skill. They were already making a profit just from the share they received when getting the debt repaid.

Stability was best.

Although on occasion, those talents would inspire an intermediary to hire them for a job like this.

They saw it like a bonus side job.

“''What’s the roleplay''?”

“The target’s a first grader. And it’s September shortly after the end of summer break. The standard route would be to say this was her first year in the esper development and finding out she’s a Level 0 was too great a shock for her.”

“So she despaired about the future and ran away?”

“Then let’s prepare for that.”

New school years and new school terms were always a time for trouble.

The abduction of a 7-year-old child would stand out, but they only had to scatter around some false signs and explanations that would get the story buried in all the other records. Like placing a translucent red sheet over the problem set to hide the red text.

Besides. A unique city where 80% of the population were students was an extremely strange closed environment where accidents and incidents involving children were too common to stand out.

Which created room for a business profiting off of such things.

“This was one of the good intermediaries. Only the big shots in the administration use them. Like the Board. What do you think the girl’s family did?”

While the District 13 dorms were well defended, those defenses could be neutralized by rewiring the security system. By loading a gas-powered injection gun with a fast-acting liquid anesthetic, they could snatch the girl without her even uttering a scream.

“Don’t forget the neutralizer in case the anesthetic is too effective. 7-year-olds are small, so a mistake in calculating the dosage could kill her.”

“It doesn’t matter if she does die as long as whoever’s being threatened with her doesn’t know it.”

As they chatted, the men donned large masks shaped like ant heads to hide their identities.

The work van’s rear door opened and they began to exit.



Immediately, a giant bluish-black blob swept the first one away.



They didn’t understand.

It was warm and soft…and yet was the polar opposite of gentle.

The lead man vanished outside the van and the rest froze inside the van.

Completely baffled, they noted a very familiar smell.

The stench of a filthy urban river.

In other words… 

(Sludge?)

It would sometimes fill rivers or the sea, preventing even large ships from traveling, but it was in fact an accumulation of dead organic material that could not decompose. ''In other words, it was the corpses of microbes.

“My, my.”

Someone stood there.

A woman in a gas mask.

Hanatsuyu Kuchikusa the Converter.

The biology researcher (wearing a knit dress that actually had large holes all over it) waved test tubes of colorful liquids.

Unable to leave the work van, the men fired their gas-powered injection guns from the open rear door in a panic, but the bluish-black mass wriggled all on its own to protect the roughly-dressed young woman from the tranquilizer rounds.

Attempting to defeat her in the field of toxins and medicines was a fatal mistake.

By mixing still-living microbes and precisely controlling their release of putrid gases, she could move that 50ton troublemaker of urban rivers as easily as her own limbs.

Of course, this technique was one of the mutations born of the dark side.

The ultimate mama(?) systematically scattered liquid droplets from her test tubes.

“I must be getting old to be so upset over the possibility of harm coming to a child. Hee hee. Having a family really does change how you think☆”



It wasn’t just the humans. The wet sound of destruction crushed the bulletproof van as well.