Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item5 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 7===

Frenda and Takitsubo returned to the ticket gate and tried to leave the station, but the gate wouldn’t open. Unlike with something called a platform ticket, the train ticket produced an error if you tried to use it to exit from the same station you entered through. They didn’t have time for that and they had paid, so they jumped the gate. It wasn’t like they could be identified.

Once outside, they ran back along the train tracks until they spotted Kinuhata.

And Mugino approaching from a different direction.

Both of them were wearing the same masks and glasses.

“In the end, where’d Miss Panties go!?”

“Super Twintails went that way!”

“Where does that cheerleader even think she’s going? An American football locker room?”

“Can someone please just use her name.”

Don’t expect that kind of thoughtfulness from the dark side, Takitsubo.

The cheerleader may have been breathing a sigh of relief after thinking she had escaped. When she came to a stop, they fired more blanks to send her into a panicked run all over again. Miss Panties sure could run fast for someone who had just jumped out of a moving train. …That may have been thanks to an esper power, so they had to keep their guard up.

The cheerleader fled while showing a preference for extremely short streets, pedestrian zones, and stairs. A car from Item’s support group wouldn’t have been much help.

“?”

Soon, they found themselves among District 3’s famous office buildings.

However, what they approached didn’t seem like a tidy office. It must have been some time since a cleaner had been called in because the higher windows were covered in dried raindrop stains. The cheerleader’s blonde twintails whipped behind her as she rushed into the basement of what appeared to be an abandoned building.

“Mugino, that’s the villain’s hideout.”

“Huh? How do you know she isn’t just passing through? Like you could with a pool or amusement park.”

“That basement only has the one exit.”

“Super when and how did you get the layout?” asked an exasperated Kinuhata.

Takitsubo appeared to have gotten the information from a disaster prevention panel pasted on the building’s outside wall for firefighters to check. According to the diagram displayed on her phone, the base was an underground studio for a video broadcast station that had been abandoned since the company went out of business. That would make for a large, soundproofed hideout set up for high-speed fiber optic communication.

There was only one exit.

So Item descended the narrow stairs with high firepower Mugino and solid defense Kinuhata in front.

“Phew, I can finally remove these,” said Takitsubo.

They no longer needed the glasses and masks meant to fool ordinary people. During strenuous exercise, the glasses would fog up and the masks were a little hard to breathe through. So they removed them.

The four reached the bottom of the narrow stairs but didn’t find the cheerleader there.

There was a single door, thick and bulletproof. The thin slide-open slit suggested a doorman on the inside would check to see if an unexpected visitor was familiar and unlock the door if so.

They had finally found what they wanted, but the cheerleader would have reported what happened when she entered. If the enemy was on guard, they wouldn’t open the door no matter what.

Mugino’s instructions were simple.

“I want to keep any of them from escaping while also learning the full scope of the incident. So leave one survivor and kill the rest.”

“Super acknowledged.”

Either way, a merely “bulletproof” door or wall couldn’t stop an attack from a Level 5 or Level 4.

All they had to do was break in, cause trouble, and kill.

But just as they thought that, the track suit girl spoke up.

“Mugino.”

“Hm? Whoa!?”

With a dull “thock thock!!”, sharp objects burst from the thick wall next to the door. They were sharp metal rods about as thick as a ballpoint pen and just the portion emerging from this side of the wall was more than 30cm long. If Item had been pressed against the wall, they would have been pinned to the wall in several locations. Plus, these were the people who used a pain stimulant that increased the human sense of pain by 350 times.

Mugino clicked her tongue by retaliating with multiple Meltdowner blasts through the door and wall.

The doorman directly on the other side would have been vaporized by the first blast, but this was a group. It wasn’t over yet.

“Tch. Was that a semi-auto crossbow!?”

A bow might seem old-fashioned, but each bolt was bigger and heavier than a bullet and the tip was sharpened. It was a lot like swinging a heavy pickaxe full force into a bulletproof vest. It produced an effect different from an ordinary bullet.

Grasping the situation, Mugino’s lips curled into a fierce smile.

Her battle freak side was coming out.

(Interesting. I like the way you don’t let my level hold you back. Battle is never boring because you never know what’s going to happen. They say a cornered animal is dangerous, but let’s find out just how hard this one can bite back!!)

“If you don’t surrender, Mugino will fill you with holes. We can either get the story out of you or leave no stone unturned to gather the information ourselves. Either is fine by us, but which would you prefer?”

“Okay! You’ve made your point!! We’ll explain everything, so please be peaceful!!”

A very reasonable male voice came from within.

Mugino Shizuri had lost her chance to attack.

“…”

She silently turned to look at Takitsubo. With her mouth forming a small triangle.

The track suit girl feigned ignorance.

They were pros, so they had to prioritize their job. If that battle freak went nuts and slaughtered everyone, they wouldn’t even know how many people had been in the murderous group, which would make closing out the case a pain. So asking first made more sense.

The four girls walked in.

They found a dimly-lit space. It was large. The underground space was the size of a small public pool.

“W-welcome, honored guests.”

This was the man who had announced their surrender before. He was probably one of the leaders, making him the mastermind behind the killing.

He looked to be in his late 20s. He was wearing a tuxedo for some reason, but Mugino had seen enough tuxedos for a lifetime at her family home and this tuxedo’s fabric and stitching looked somehow cheap to her. It may have been a factory product instead of tailor made. …The place looked something like a strange cafe.

Bunny girls and dancers had abandoned their jobs to crouch down and tremble. Some expensive-looking bottles of ’18 or ’25 vintage something-or-other lay shattered on the floor. Some burly bodyguard types were watching from a distance, but most of the people had their hands over their heads with meek looks on their faces.

The interior design was clearly meant for people of that sort.

The large underground space was lined with sofas and tables that looked borrowed from fancy clubs with poor taste and large LCD monitors were set up all over. The monitors displayed numbers, numbers, numbers, and videos of students wearing track suits and gym clothes. They were apparently showing the status of different Daihaseisai events.

The structure of the numbers on the screens was extremely reminiscent of horse racing and cycle racing. Or casinos. Was the leader wearing a tuxedo because he was also the manager?

“Is this the toy you scared us with?”

They finally saw the semi-auto crossbow for themselves where it lay at the feet of a man in black with his hands up.

The Chinese Zhuge crossbow was the most famous, but weapons like this had existed since ancient times. Although the ancient version had been so complex its power had been reduced and it hadn’t seen all that much use.

The Academy City version had a large boxy sealed magazine attached directly atop the bow. Perhaps that was to prevent the user from accidentally touching the poisoned bolts. That seemed like it would get in the way of aiming, but picking it up and aiming it showed it had a dot sight attached on the side of the latch that attached the giant magazine. So was it aimed something like a shoulder-fired rocket launcher? The bowstring was pulled back with electrical power. Since it had penetrated a concrete wall, it likely was too much for human strength to pull back.

“?”

Frenda petrified when she checked one of the monitors.

One of the contestants was a smiling blonde-haired, blue-eyed 1st grader.

Frenda very nearly cried out loud.

(I-in the end, they’re involving my innocent sister in this?)

“Are you stupid? This isn’t something you should be ''gambling'' on!!!”

The manager in the cheap tuxedo rubbed his hands together and smiled.

He was sweating profusely. His thin smile was plastered to his face and wouldn’t leave.

“Th-th-this is about investment. Yes, investment. We only engage in clean and legal business transactions here. We wouldn’t dream of running an illegal online gambling casino.”

“Then what is this place?”

“I-I should have mentioned it earlier. We are known as the Investment Club.”

“So a casino going by that name, huh?”

“We are a venue for business transactions!”

He corrected her with dizzying speed.

Was that why they had needed the high-speed fiber optic communications in addition to the soundproofing?

They would predict which school would win an event, pay money, and, if their prediction was correct, receive an adjusted payment in return. The words they used and the means of putting in and taking out money had changed, but what they were actually doing was no different from sports betting.

“Is this the dark side reason you mentioned before, Frenda?” asked the blank-faced track suit girl.

“That’s right. In the end, it’s dark trading.”

“Super what’s that?”

“Something like illegal online gambling, Kinuhata.”

The Investment Club’s manager looked like he badly wanted to say something, but Takitsubo expressionlessly continued her explanation.

“I call it gambling, but betting money isn’t legally allowed, so they use different words like ‘investment’ and ‘speculation’ to place their money on entire schools instead of individual athletes. But the profit the gamblers receive depends on which schools win the events and which esper development theories are accepted as correct.”

The only guaranteed way to profit off of stocks was insider trading, but the next best thing was market manipulation. Of course, many different grownups were carefully checking for those illegal acts. But unlike ordinary corporations, the distribution of profits from public institutions – in this case, school management – tended to not be monitored. Did that come from the assumption that Academy City’s schools were sacred institutions of learning with no connection to worldly moneymaking? If so, that was even more naive than a belief in sportsmanship.

And so this was entirely possible during the Daihaseisai, where the results could greatly change the value of a school’s esper development theory or patents. This ''profit margin gambling'' worked by paying money up front and then receiving a distribution of the intellectual property.

A vicious smile formed on Mugino’s face.

“Well, the Daihaseisai is basically a motor show or race featuring human bodies. If you see it as an exhibition of each school’s esper development tech, you can imagine all the sketchy researchers and investors watching on among the spectators, can’t you?”

“Ugh, is that really super acceptable?”

“It’s just barely allowed under Academy City’s rules. And since it isn’t gambling, they don’t have to consider an upper rate limit. …But of course that’s only when no one ends up dead.”

The track suit girl’s piercing words made the Investment Club’s manager tremble.

“I thought it was odd,” continued Takitsubo, expressionless. “The initial data on the victim said she was a pharmacist who lived in District 3, right? This district is full of tall office buildings and doesn’t have many homes. At most, it has luxury apartments for investment. The director of a major hospital might live there, but not an ordinary pharmacist.”

That meant she had a secondary source of income. One that earned far more than her day job.

“In the end, this disgusting facility that takes the glory and first place awards of the innocent athletic bloomers and turns them into moneymaking tools…is viewed like a VIP trading room at a stock exchange?”

Frenda took an exasperated look around.

Bunny girls, alcohol, dancers in frilly outfits, and young women in hostess-style dresses. The place really did feel more like a casino than a stock exchange.

Clearly irritated, Mugino said, “Tell us everything you know about Matsuba Sarina. The dead drug tester.”

“She did work with us, but she was altering the drug tests after the events to get athletes disqualified and alter the outcome of the event after the fact. Alter it any way she liked.”

“That’s a lot like fixing matches, Mugino. Was she receiving payment from specific customers for manipulating the results?”

The Investment Club’s manager nodded several times at the track suit girl’s question.

“Y-yes. And this was a major betrayal of all our clients. In our business, we must be fair or we lose all trust and lose most of our customers. We could not overlook the situation.”

So she was punished.

They had given her a thorough death to punish her for a crime too serious for a single life to cover. And more than that, it must have been a sign to the gamblers that nothing like this would happen again.

To sum up, the villains had only been killing one of their own. You could even call that a good thing since it meant no ordinary people had been harmed.

“Excuse me…but what is going to happen to us?”

Mugino concentrated a beam in her palm.

“''What do you think?''”

“Wait, please wait!! We can make a deal. This is a once-a-year festival. With our services, you can be rich beyond your wildest dreams by the end of the Daihaseisai week!! Okay? Okay? Letting us live is very much in your best interests!!”

The next move was made before Mugino Shizuri could say anything.

Some kind of explosive detonated.

Something entered through the door that was the only entrance and exit. A whole group of somethings. Just like seeing a swarm of insects, their numbers and movements inspired a deep-seated revulsion.

Frenda instinctively shouted out loud when she saw the men hiding their faces behind ant-like masks.



“''Army Ant''!?”



It happened so suddenly.

Weren’t they debt collectors? But what were dark side debt collectors doing here? …No, wait. They had a connection to Frenda Seivelun from a previous incident. When she had feared her sister might be abducted, hadn’t Army Ant been the disgusting kidnappers targeting the 7-year-old as a group? And hadn’t it been the bright and wonderful Frenda who had hired someone to stop them by killing them!?

Every member of Army Ant was carrying a semi-auto shotgun. And these were bare-bones models with almost all the parts removed. The ultra-light shotguns were probably meant to be attached below an assault rifle and used for door breaching.

Just as Kinuhata moved to cover Takitsubo who was standing in a daze, there was an explosive blast and a blossom of blood. Army Ant had blown away a large man of the Investment Club with a 12-gauge shotgun. Blown him a whole two meters away.

Frenda quickly hid behind a thick pillar, but she was also confused.

(Huh? So in the end, they aren’t after me?)

She was afraid that speaking out loud would gather the perverted kidnappers’ attention and remind them of her, so she kept her mouth shut.

Investment Club did put up a fight. The macho bodyguards in tuxedos snatched up the semi-auto crossbows on the floor and began shooting Army Ant with them.

“Gegyahhh!?”

One Army Ant who was hit screamed and rolled on the floor. Those definitely weren’t ordinary bolts. He collapsed on his side, arched his back hard, and didn’t seem capable of stopping.

The track suit girl spoke softly while Kinuhata protected her.

“The tryptophan-based pain stimulant.”

Didn’t that thing boost your pain signals 350 times? At that level, the rubbing of your clothes against your skin would have you writhing on the floor and slowly fry your brain too badly to ever recover. What would happen if your torso was pierced by a bolt went without saying.

The Investment Club and Army Ant began a fierce firefight.

There were explosive sounds other than the shotguns. Clay-like objects flew through the air. Army Ant was likely throwing their door breaching explosives as grenades. And the Investment Club was throwing fancy bottles of whisky as Molotov cocktails. Their methods were so similar Frenda wondered why they couldn’t just get along.

Mugino would gladly let the two sides kill each other off like this, so she would have loved to snatch away Frenda’s brand new phone (that she had bought despite the cost so she could record her sister’s glorious performance on the field) and watch the moving footage of some salmon swimming up the river, but that wasn’t an option.

Stray shots were flying this way all the time.

Mugino saw someone holding a crossbow in the corner of her eye, so she reflexively aimed her right hand that way and fired Meltdowner. The person looking with shock at the giant hole in their gut was the Investment Club’s manager. He had been trying to fight Army Ant who had suddenly burst in and begun firing.

“Oops.”

“Mugino, both sides are our enemy, so it’s alright.”

Kind Takitsubo kindly forgave her.

But the Investment Club and Army Ant both turned this way.

They didn’t look like they were viewing an outsider.

They wanted to deal with the smaller annoyance first so it wouldn’t act as a thorn in their side during their all-out war. And so they silently agreed to a truce.

And Mugino Shizuri had an even shorter temper.

“Ugh, really?”

In that moment, there was no denying that both the Investment Club and Army Ant had underestimated Academy City’s #4. No matter how powerful she was, she could only fire one straight-line shot at a time. That wasn’t well suited for defense, so if they surrounded her and fired projectiles from multiple directions, one of them would manage a lethal blow that brought her down.

“What a pain in the aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaasssssssssssssss!!”

They were far too naive.

Item’s leader was the dangerous sort of person who would kill because she found someone annoying.

Pissed, Mugino Shizuri snapped her fingers and tossed a card into the air.

And she fired Meltdowner at it.



At the Silicon Burn.



''Boom!!!

Passing through the special semiconductor caused the beam to split and fan out over 180 degrees, creating an electric downpour that pierced and silenced them all in an instant. It was like a blowing storm of light. To have this much power even as small streaks of light showed just how absurd Level 5s were.

There was no scent of blood in the air.

Only a scorched stench.

Frenda spoke from the floor where Kinuhata had grabbed her head and pulled her down.

“I-in the end, I nearly died. Could you give a little warning before doing that?”

“Mugino is special, so she can use her special move without any preparatory motions or incantations. Isn’t she wonderful?” said Takitsubo.

“Hey, don’t encourage her like that. In the end, that’s a big reason there’s no stopping that battle freak when she’s on a rampage!!”

At any rate, the Investment Club and Army Ant were all dead. Frenda was pretty sure the bunny girls carrying drinks to the tables, the blonde twintails cheerleader who had fled in here, and even the fancy guests had been filled with holes along with the rest, but they had all been villains with wallets full of dirty money, so why should she care?

“Hm,” murmured Mugino.

That semiconductor card was something she had asked the unscrupulous adults to make based on a ''past experience'' of hers, but it was only a prototype and the scatter distribution hadn’t been as even as she would have liked. There was much room for improvement.

“Oops, I killed them all. Now we can’t ask them for information.”

“So when the Demon Lord fights, the options super aren’t ‘live or die’ like they are for the rest of us…”

Anyway, why had Army Ant attacked out of the blue like that?

After Item had made such a commotion firing blanks around town, the voice on the phone would probably be extra mad if their final report was short on details. They could leave cleanup of all the blood and bodies to the support group, but it was worth poking around a bit before everything was cleaned up.

“Look, Kinuhata,” said Takitsubo. “These Army Ant guys don’t have any phones. And their wallets don’t have any IDs or cards. Do they always do that on a job? Maybe so their belongings won’t lead to anyone else in the group if they’re killed.”

“But no phones? Isn’t that super inconvenient? How do they coordinate?”

“There’s something hidden behind these ant masks. It’s hard to tell since they’ve been taken apart, but these are the wireless LAN devices that were in the news a while back for being able to use nearby routers without being properly registered.”

Some of the dead bodies lying around were pierced by sharp metal bolts with a pain stimulant applied, so Takitsubo and Kinuhata made sure to be careful as they removed one of the helmets and discussed the matter. Everything was peaceful.

Mugino discovered something too.

“Found a car key. But with how thorough they’ve been, I doubt this will be enough to track down the car’s owner.”

And so rummaging through the Army Ant members didn’t turn up much of anything.

Then what about the Investment Club who had been their target?

Frenda had been searching on that end.

“The computer is…a little too much. With a communications facility this big, in the end there’s no searching anything out without a specific keyword to go on.”

“Frenda. What about Army Ant?”

“C’mon, Takitsubo. There’s no way it’ll be that eas- what the hell? In the end, that worked.”

A list of files came up.

But none of them were all that important.

Army Ant’s primary job was debt collection on the dark side, but it looked like those same skills had led the Investment Club to hire them as couriers for dark trading payouts. Maybe the online banks were unreliable due to all the traffic during the event, but there were records of Army Ant making a few deliveries of heavy gold bars.

“So was this some super infighting? But why? It’s all super confusing.”

“Kinuhata.” The track suit girl beckoned her over. “I moved the wine cooler behind the bar counter and found a safe hidden in the floor. Can you use Offense Armor to ''tear off'' the door?”

Kinuhata didn’t even bother responding. She tore away the 5cm-thick piece of special alloy.

They found a space about the size of below-the-floor kitchen storage.

“Wow,” exclaimed Frenda, her tone rising.

There was cash from a number of different countries, gold bars, and even diamonds. Regional banks would only store a few tens of millions of yen in paper money nowadays, but there was far more than that here.

“If a client wins but they’re slow to pay out, it could lead to a major problem or even put their lives at risk. And an always online server could be hit by a DDoS attack at any time, so they would want some amount of hard cash in case their online bank isn’t usable. It’s a safety measure.”

Since Army Ant had actually delivered some gold bars, the Investment Club’s caution must have been warranted.

Still crouched, Frenda held her hands out toward the glow of the gold bars like she was warming them over a campfire.

“In the end, what do we do with these? Nee hee hee. Slip them into our pockets?”

“''I wouldn’t.''”

Frenda looked confused.

Since when was Item such a pure and honorable team?

But Mugino sighed.

“Those are fake.”

“…”

“They’re well-made counterfeits. Try to use them and you’ll be tracked down and arrested. Take them with you if you want to analyze them, but you won’t be able to liquidate them. This is a murder scene. If Anti-Skill gets suspicious, you won’t be able to explain where you got them and you won’t be able to claim you didn’t know about any of this. And if you don’t have an answer, they’ll just find you guilty.”

Frenda’s mouth formed a small triangle.

Well, this sucked.

“Could this be what made Army Ant mad enough to come here and kill the Investment Club people? Basically, their professional pride as debt collectors was wounded. The goods they were carrying, heart pounding and sweat pouring at the thought of being found out and arrested, turned out to be worthless counterfeits.”

Item had discovered the truth behind drug tester Matsuba Sarina’s death.

This concluded the Investment Club case.

But…

“I get the feeling there’s ''something more'' hidden behind all this.”

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