Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item Chapter1 (section)

===Part 5===

Item was more than just the girls. Just like the bus and its driver from the night before, there was an entire support organization below them. There was a limit to how many people could receive that level of support. As Mugino saw it, a single organization could only support three or four people at full specs. Any more and the costs would be too high and the support would become imbalanced.

Bullets were more destructive to biological matter when made from a soft metal with a high relative density, but everyone would choose a lead bullet over a gold one. Why was that? Because even the military and police preferred the much cheaper substance if the effect was similar.

So…

“One of you will be a full member, the other will do odd jobs.”

“H-hwut!?”

One girl stumbled over her word with the worst possible timing, earning her glares from the other four. That was of course Hanano Choubi.

''And that statement sealed her fate.

“This timid chihuahua can do the odd jobs.”

“Wait, please waiiiiit!!”

Hanano Choubi tearfully begged, but Mugino’s exasperated look was unchanged.

Takitsubo approached from the side and whispered in her ear.

“(Hee hee. I didn’t know you were so nice, Mugino.)”

“Huh?”

“(A Level 0 who can’t fight on her own is a lot more likely to die on the front line. And she doesn’t seem to use tools like Frenda does.)”

Mugino shooed Takitsubo away without even looking her way. Takitsubo herself seemed amused despite the careless treatment.

“Eek! I’ll do anything! Anything! So please don’t throw me out!!”

Hanano Choubi seemed truly desperate, so Frenda shrugged.

“We have another job already, don’t we? In the end, why not use that to see how useful they are?”

“(Honestly, I’m not too interested in Item, so as long as I super have food to eat and a roof over my head, I’m perfectly fine doing odd jobs to support you.)”

“Kinuhata, don’t run away from a challenge,” said Takitsubo.

Unwanted support from an unexpected direction kept Kinuhata Saiai from running away.

The five of them boarded the elevator and rode it down past the ground floor.

Hanano Choubi was muttering to herself in the corner and friend-maker Frenda immediately got to talking to her.

“(Ehhh? Wait, how many dangerous landmines does this Mugino-san person have? You should have warned me! How is a newcomer supposed to know!?)”

“Not my problem. In the end, I had to carefully search out each of those landmines myself. I’m not handing over the product of my sweat and blood that easily.”

“(Please tell me you meant sweat and tears. And there’s something super fundamentally wrong with this team if you have to super search out personal landmines like that.)”

“Mugino.”

“Do those worms think I can’t hear them in this tiny elevator?”

The older girl hung her head while burning with rage.

They finally arrived at a concrete underground parking garage.

Since they were on their way to a vehicle, Mugino Shizuri had to already have a destination in mind. Hanano Choubi tilted her head curiously.

“Um, where are we going to start investigating this Colosseum thing? We don’t know who runs it or what they look like and I thought the fights are held at different locations each time.”

“Right.” Mugino nodded like a small child. “Our client is a life insurance company’s managing director, remember? We’re going to abduct them.”

Time froze.

But only for Hanano Choubi, it seemed. Frenda and Takitsubo didn’t seem at all surprised.

“Yeah. In the end, I figured we’d be doing that.”

“It did seem like they were holding back a lot of information.”

Mugino smiled.

One vehicle’s headlights flashed a few times in the gray parking garage. It was the seemingly rundown studio bus from before. The Level 5 girl waved casually toward it.

“Exactly. A lot of those who hire the dark side are in some kind of trouble they’re hesitant to come clean about, but I’m not about to sit around solving that puzzle using an intermediary in a game of telephone. We know who has the answers, so we’ll cheat and go to them directly. Dark side investigations start with the known factors and work from there.”

“Um, um, um, um!!” Hanano Choubi finally interrupted. The girl with abysmal timing already had tears in her eyes at this point. “I don’t really understand a lot of this, but I thought that important person from the insurance company was the one who hired us. Why are you starting by attacking our ally!?”

“Because it’s faster and easier.”

“But they’re the one paying us! Make the client mad and you won’t get paid even if you finish the job!”

“Who cares about the dark side’s stingy payment? Our target has at least 15 billion and probably a lot more. We can focus on taking all that for ourselves.”

“!!!??? I-isn’t this an important person!? What if that grownup with some kind of scary influence holds a grudge and puts our lives at risk!?”

“You think that’s enough to threaten a Level 5?”

You have to remember.

Just the day before, ''Item had destroyed the stronghold of quite a few powerful grownups.

“Besides, if this was an important client, the voice on the phone wouldn’t have given away so much of their information. If all we need to do is find the Colosseum and destroy it, we wouldn’t need to know about the insurance company or its general manager.”

“B-but do you even know which insurance company it is?”

Terrified Hanano Choubi kept asking Mugino more questions (which was actually quite reckless).

Fortunately, Queen Mugino was in a good mood, so Hanano Choubi didn’t have to blossom into a bright red flower.

“They’re about to go under, right? Before hiring us, they must have gathered a lot of data to determine the cause of their problem and that would have included some conspicuous searches into the dark side. There’s only going to be one insurance company that’s done that, so we target the general manager of that one.”

The safest option was to say nothing at all.

A member of the dark side could learn this much from a single statement.

Mugino chuckled.

“I know she’d deny it, but the voice on the phone wasn’t even trying to protect this client. Anyway, resolving this incident comes first.”

“…? But isn’t the insurance company the one with the problem?”

“In the end, someone else must want this job done. And since the voice on the phone never mentioned them, that’s the real client she wants to protect.”

Then Takitsubo Rikou spoke up.

She didn’t speak loudly. It was a quiet interruption, but it gathered everyone’s attention.

“Mugino. Even if they’re up to no good, this manager isn’t part of the dark side. We need to be careful of you-know-who.”

“Those are just stories.”

“Academy City’s #6 is known as the ''Dark Side’s Bane''. I don’t think we should underestimate them.”

An icy silence settled in.

The only sound was the silly noise of Hanano Choubi’s nervous fidgeting.

There were stories of a malicious stalker being found dangling upside-down from a streetlight. There were stories of a gunrunning group being wiped out in a single night. There were stories of a small child being rescued unharmed from a kidnapping group.

This person had as many legends as there were stars in the sky, but no one knew their name or what they looked like. They assisted the weak found weeping in a back alley, they provided a means of fighting the villains, and they had saved an unknown number of lives from the inescapable pit of the dark side. That might make them sound like a righteous saint, but for those being targeted, they were like a living disaster.

The #6.

It was said you could judge whether someone was a good or bad person by how they reacted to hearing that name in a dark alley: hope or fear.

Item was of course not a fan.

Mugino Shizuri ranked higher, but in a direct fight with another Level 5, she would not escape unscathed. Although she was an extreme battle freak, so she might not avoid such an obvious risk if she encountered it.

That kind of risk management was a job for Frenda who worked with bombs, which were destructive and always required proper preparation and funding.

“So in the end, we need to set things up, nab them in an instant, and make a quick getaway?”

“I suppose.”

Mugino wasn’t too happy about it, but she did give her agreement. She required a delicate touch. If they had suggested giving up on this job, she would have exploded right away.

In a contrast to Hanano Choubi, Kinuhata Saiai remained calm.

She looked up at tall Mugino and asked a question.

“Super what should I do?”

“You were in the Dark May Project. That means you have a portion of the #1’s thought patterns in your head, right? How much can you do? I’m not interested in theoreticals. What can you actually do?”

Kinuhata Saiai didn’t even need to think about it.

She plainly responded.

“Super well, I can at least kill someone.”