Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item Chapter2 (section)

===Part 7===

The Colosseum was a very important event for them.

They didn’t all gather together for every single event, but they still made sure to make an appearance on site as ''the management''.

However, those four girls were not in the ring or in the stands. They were in a separate monitor room, built from a back room of the library full of book repair equipment. They used that room to keep tabs on the situation in the arena and online.

Of course, they weren’t upstanding members of society, so they had brought camping chairs and a camping table in for themselves. The table was piled high with chips, popcorn, fried chicken, fries, and more. For drinks, there were sodas and iced coffee. They preferred to bring their own rather than order it from a catering company. That made it feel more like doing yaminabe at a girls-only sleepover, which was a lot more fun.

“Uhh…”

A small 12-year-old girl with pale skin and shoulder-length black hair groaned while staring at all the monitors. Waniguchi Nokoba was a mixed martial artist and she wore a ring costume that looked like a racing swimsuit made even more revealing. She raised her small hands and stretched her back without getting up from her chair.

However, her hands just about crushed the rubber balls she held.

“I wanna fight too!! We worked so hard to get that white tiger for today and I wanna fight it!!”

“You’re our ''executioner'' who swiftly eliminates anyone who violates any rules regarding the match or the gambling, so you need to stay put as long as things run smoothly. It’s better this way, so try and enjoy the peace and quiet.”

Ibotanokikouji Kaede, a curvy girl wearing a ''Tokiwadai Middle School'' summer uniform and with a few braids in her fluffy blonde hair, breathed an exasperated sigh, but the martial arts girl ignored her.

Despite her young appearance, Waniguchi bared her teeth and spat back.

“Damn, I thought I’d be seeing lots of action in this position, but these dark side morons are all too scared to disobey. ''You’re criminals – why the hell are you following the rules''? I’m starting to wish I’d entered as a contestant instead.”

“But then you would just win every match,” commented a tanned track girl named Hanayama Kamitsu.

“We wouldn’t make much money from the gambling side then, would we?” sighed Ibotanokikouji. “Waniguchi-chan, why are you so irritable today?”

“Her thigh,” whispered a silver-haired girl named Inoue Laspezia.

That got a response out of Waniguchi herself rather than Ibotanokikouji.

“Ah!? I’ve got another mosquito bite… No wonder I’ve been so mad today. This is why I hate the ground. Too many bugs. Hey, where’d the bug spray go!?”

“It’s too late for that if you’re already bitten. Come here. I will rub the anti-itch cream on for you,” said Ibotanokikouji.

“Yay!” rejoiced Waniguchi as she walked over, but she was interrupted by something else.

The silver-haired girl had been working in silence, but now she sat right in Ibotanokikouji’s lap.

“…Inoue Laspezia.”

“Yes?”

The silver-haired girl was still engrossed in the intricate work she was performing with her gloved hands, so she replied with just the one Kyoto-accented word. She didn’t even look up.

As the only one here immune to the lily’s allure, the track girl kept her distance.

Furious at having her special seat taken, Tiny Tyrant Waniguchi clung to Ibotanokikouji’s side, but then she noticed something else. Ibotanokikouji had a small DVD player open in addition to all of the management monitors. It was probably an item sold cheap at a discount store.

“Hey, Chief, what’s that? A horror movie?”

“One of the worst I’ve ever seen, but one of the stuntmen died in an accident during filming. If you watch carefully in slow motion, you can see him being crushed by the machinery in the background. Hee hee. I bet all those sophisticated teachers would faint if they saw this.”

In cases like this, the movie would either be banned from the online stores or the offending footage would be removed in a mystery update, so if you wanted to add it to your collection, you needed one of the limited first-edition physical copies. Because that would never be altered.

“Boo. If you want to see a corpse, just send me into the ring. I’d give you plenty of bloodshed.”

“Probably so, but I don’t need a close up of the corpse.”

Ibotanokikouji smiled thinly while operating her phone. She lovingly chewed on Inoue’s ear while she worked.

She pulled up her own personal map app which was linked to her photo album. But in her case, the map displayed a tour of famous suicide spots around Academy City.

“I want to decorate myself with other people’s deaths. I want to sleep wrapped in a blanket of their misfortune. Hee hee. So it doesn’t need to be anything exciting. Brand-name clothing isn’t for showing off. It looks best when ''you wear it casually''. You can make diamonds by pressurizing human corpses, but there is no need to go around loudly advertising that fact. True class is found in doing things so discreetly the amateurs never notice what you have. The money we make with the Colosseum is the same.”

“Boo.”

Hanayama Kamitsu, the tanned girl with wavy shoulder-length black hair and a track athlete’s tank top and shorts, made no attempt to join the other three. She thought these things were nice to look at, but she had no desire to be a part of it herself. In her opinion, lesbian relationships were beautiful enough when things were going well, but they got nasty quick when things went bad. And on the dark side, the result would be a lot worse than for a band when a relationship between two members fell apart.

She normally wore something a little less revealing, so her hands wandered restlessly across the visible tan lines on the upper and lower halves of her body. She finally reached for a plastic item rather than one the chilled drinks in the cooler.

Waniguchi’s face lit up while still clinging to Ibotanokikouji’s side.

“Oh, is that an e-cigarette? I’ve always wanted to try one of those!”

“It’s a portable oxygen tank. It’s flavorless.”

As a track girl, Hanayama wanted as much oxygen inside her as she could get. Or rather, she got antsy when she couldn’t get it. She held the plastic device in the corner of her mouth, the blue LED at the end flashed, and she breathed in the compressed oxygen coming from the refillable cartridge.

“Anyway, did you see the news? That general manager was arrested. Something about attacking his own company. You really shouldn’t mug for the camera in a minute-long video just because you’re lonely and want some likes. They were playing it on all the talk shows.”

“So what? That’s not a problem for us as long as we can regularly withdraw the contestants’ insurance money. Even if they take emergency measures, that’s an adult corporation, right? They take forever to do anything, so we can still get today’s payouts. Besides, there are still plenty more insurance companies in Academy City. Not to mention executives we can blackmail.”

“Hm,” was all the response track girl Hanayama gave.

They were technically colleagues (of a sort), but they had never actually met directly to give him instructions. Even if the general manager sang like a canary, he didn’t know the girls’ real names. He had been disposable, so they didn’t care what happened to him.

To change the subject, Hanayama spoke to a different girl: the slender silver-haired girl seated in Ibotanokikouji’s lap with her eyes lowered to the delicate work she was doing. Overall, she was a squirrel-like person. But it upset her if you said she looked like a racoon, so it was worth being careful.

“Hey, Inoue. What nasty method will you be using this time?”

“…It’s nothing special.”

Inoue Laspezia wore an apron and a beret over a summer school uniform. She kept her eyes on her working hands and responded with a Kyoto accent.

Her hobby was figurines, her special skill was handicrafts, and she belonged to the art club. She didn’t even look Hanayama’s way as she made some precise movements of a thin-tipped paintbrush wet with the special iron material – that is, human blood – she had mixed to just the right color on her paper palette.

She never seemed interested in anything, but she refused to give up her spot on Ibotanokikouji’s lap.

“There was a murder in the area, so I’m just counterfeiting the murder weapon. It’s a razor with the appropriate fingerprints and blood on it. One of the big ones a barber would have. I had all the necessary materials in stock, so it doesn’t cost me anything.”

“Yikes. Remind me to never piss off a modeler.”

Tanned Hanayama grinned.

It didn’t matter if the evidence was real or not. The general manager likely had no recollection of what they had threatened him over. But what if the public and the justice system believed it? Even if the charges were false – no, especially when the charges were false – no one wanted to lose everything over it.

And once they started down that route, it would take over their life.

The rules of the world didn’t let you choose when you wanted to stop.

An adult important enough to have no qualms at all about oppressing the children would know exactly what happened the instant they took just one step off the edge of the cliff.

Ibotanokikouji had come up with the plan and ordered her to do it, but even she seemed exasperated.

She tightly hugged the silver-haired girl sitting in her lap.

“Oh, Inoue-chan. You’re such a perfectionist once you set your mind to something. Wouldn’t you have a much easier time sticking out your very cute butt on the train to make some false molestation accusations?”

“How would that work? Our targets always have a driver who takes them wherever they need to go.”

Inoue must have finished her work because she sealed the evidence razor in a plastic bag. She completed the work calmly and expressionlessly. That gave them one more trump card they could use to frame someone.

Everyone had their strengths and weaknesses. A honeytrap was probably beyond that whispering, downcast girl. …Except with the minority who were into the plain, obedient type.

“How’s this for a conclusion?” Waniguchi rubbed her cheek against Ibotanokikouji from the side. “The arrested general manager on the TV isn’t a problem for us. And we’re prepared to find us a new wallet. So we won’t throw out everything we’ve built up and we won’t go into hiding. We’ll continue running the Colosseum like normal.”

“Agreed,” said all four girls together.

But anyone capable of reading the room would have noticed they didn’t say it at the exact same time. The other three girls waited to see how Ibotanokikouji Kaede reacted before joining in.

And that secret center of attention whispered with the silver-haired girl still seated in her lap.

With a soft smile on her lips.

“Don’t worry. We are ''Item'' and we will be taking allll the profits of death for ourselves☆”