Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:RailgunSS2 Chapter2 (section)

=== Part 5 ===
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Changing somewhere other than a dressing room took courage, but Mikoto managed to change out of the red dress and into her uniform.

She then headed to the occult convenience store.

Souvenir shops at tourist spots tended to close the earliest of any kind of store in the world, but that place did call itself a convenience store. Even after the date had changed, it was still filled with white-ish fluorescent light.

The girl named Lessar who had been working there had told Mikoto to watch out for oranges.

She had to know something.

On top of that, the occult convenience store was filled with suspicious looking goods. It was possible they treated horrible ants as pets.

Mikoto was planning to meet up with Lessar in order to get what information she could from the girl and then borrow a staff room at the occult convenience store or some other place that had a bit of privacy where she could use the Semipublic AR to search for some information on the living bombs.

However…

“Wait, where’s Lessar?” Mikoto asked as soon as the door slid open and she got a look inside the store.

The girl who had been working there just a few hours before was nowhere to be seen. A different girl had brought a folding chair behind the register counter and was flipping through a few Japanese sports newspapers.

“Hm?”

The girl was shorter than Mikoto. She had short brown hair that was forced up with a headband. Her nametag said “Lancis”. She was white just like Lessar.

She spoke after shuddering for some reason.

“…Lessar has not come back yet…”

“That brat. And she’s the one that said to meet up here,” Mikoto said accidentally letting her resentment leak into her voice.

The girl who seemed to be named Lancis looked at Mikoto’s chest with a confused look.

“…Lessar seems like more of an adult than you, though.”

“Where are you looking and what is your basis for that judgment, you damn brat!! I can’t lose to a child like that!!”

“Nnn, despite how she looks, Lessar broke the record at her school by starting to wear a bra in fourth grade.”

“Uuh!?”

Mikoto faltered. It was a secret that she did not start doing so until halfway through her first year of middle school.

“A-anyway, it seems Lessar isn’t here, so I can’t ask her about the orange. Have you heard when she’s going to be back?”

“I have this.”

Lancis waved around something in her hand. Mikoto grabbed it doubtfully. It seemed to be a postcard. The entire backside had some kind of painting printed on it. It may have been a religious picture. The picture was in truly bad taste as it showed a lady being captured by incredibly large ants.

“…Wait a second. If Lessar hasn’t come back yet, where did this postcard come from?”

“They can be delivered very quickly within the shopping mall. Although it’s still not as fast as just sending an email.”

Mikoto flipped it over to look at the front. The top half had the destination address and the bottom half had the message. The area for the sender’s location was left completely blank, but the message section had round English letters written in black marker.

It said: ''There is an incident carried out that follows a rumor, but what if the rumor itself was intentionally spread for that reason?''

“…”

Mikoto looked up from the postcard.

“I don’t have time for riddles.”

“Don’t look at me,” replied Lancis without much energy before collapsing over the newspapers and the counter. 

It seemed the late night shift had made her rather tired.

“…We cannot predict what Lessar will do. And Bayloupe got after her about it recently, too…”

Mikoto even heard a snore. It seemed the girl had just fallen asleep.

For an instant, Mikoto thought of smacking the girl to wake her up and get Lessar’s cell phone number, but she decided that wasn’t the best idea. If Lessar was seriously intending to flee, she would not stay on the phone long enough to allow Mikoto to trace her using it.

(Anyway, it seems she didn’t immediately report me. I wonder how far the fact that I was involved with that orange incident and am fleeing from the security guards has spread.)

That kind of convenience store could have an alarm button under the register counter, so she could not let her guard down, but she wouldn’t worry too much until security guards actually showed up.

She had something she needed to investigate.

Mikoto put her hands on top of the register counter and called up a keyboard to control the Semipublic AR. Of course, she was using one of the accounts she had acquired in the casino. Her fingers raced across the surface as she began her search for the information she needed.

What she needed was…

(The security camera records for the entrance near the east gate.)

That orange had just been lying on the ground at that entrance with people streaming in both directions. If she checked on the footage from around that time, she might be able to find who put the orange there and where they went afterwards.

Of course, that information was not open to the public.

Mikoto put together her knowledge and ability to search for data she would normally not be able to access.

She almost immediately made it to the entire library of security camera footage.

However…

“The data is corrupted and cannot be read.”

That simple message popped up. Mikoto tried to open a different file. There was more than one camera set in each place. Because things were being monitored from multiple different points, there were multiple files that could be used.

And yet…

“The data is corrupted and cannot be read.”

“The data is corrupted and cannot be read.”

“The data is corrupted and cannot be read.”

Consistently receiving that same message surprised Mikoto more than it annoyed her. Someone had deleted the data for only that specific time.

Someone who worked at the shopping mall would be the most suspicious, but a third party could still have done it as shown by the fact that Mikoto had been able to hack in that far. It was difficult to narrow down who had messed with the security camera data with that situation alone.

She could not track where the oranges could have gone using those recordings.

Even then, the countdown continued until the eggs would hatch causing the living bomb to go off.

(That means I have no choice but to chase after the oranges using only the flow of the people.)

Mikoto looked back down at the postcard.

The riddle-like text seemed to be a hint related to the incident, but Mikoto could not get anything concrete out of it.

The picture of the ants and the lady reminded Mikoto of the crimson long-legged army ants, but it still did not seem to have any real information in it.

But…

“This pattern…?”

Mikoto focused on the lady’s clothes. They had a white and black design on them, but the balance seemed to be off at the edges as if it had turned into a monotone mosaic.

Her eyes were drawn in toward one point.

It looked familiar.

It was a square with a random arrangement of black and white.

(A QR code…?)

Mikoto pulled out her cell phone and aimed the camera lens at it, but it failed to read it. Mikoto almost gave up thinking she had read too much into it, but she suddenly looked over at the wall of the occult convenience store.

She recalled that the QR code used for the information on that orange had been in a format that needed to be read ultrasonically using the Semipublic AR.

She approached the wall.

Just like before, she pressed the postcard against the wall.

A rectangular window opened up like a large poster. It seemed to be different from a normal webpage. It was the type of page that could not be accessed via a search engine and could only be accessed directly through its IP address.

However, there was no information there.

It only had text in the center telling her to enter a password.

(Should I break through using brute force?)

Mikoto thought of using her power on it, but she then spotted a small signature at the edge of the backside of the postcard. However, the arrangement of the letters of the alphabet was too random to be a penname.

Mikoto entered those letters into the wall as the password.

She made it through on the first try.

After that confirmation, a great amount of information was displayed in the large poster.

What it said was…

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