Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Crossover Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 8===

“Oh, honestly.”

Misaka Mikoto began complaining as soon as they returned to the run-down inn.

She, Index, and Satsuki were gathered in one of their rooms.

She twisted her hips around to check her back and it was obvious what she was trying to do.

“There are marks everywhere. …You can’t just make a breastplate out of metal. I will admit they were pointlessly clever to put cloth on the inside.”

“From the looks of it, the clasps aren’t going to break or anything like that.”

“Oh, is that so? Thanks. But can’t we do something about these clothes?”

“I just hope we get some good news from the two who went out.”

Satsuki turned toward the window whose curtain was tightly closed.

The girls had been forced into these outfits by a conspiracy thought up by the boys, but the girls’ reactions fell into two general categories: those who were incredibly embarrassed and those who did not particularly mind.

The latter category contained the bunny girl, whose outfit was not that different from what she wore before, and the Zashiki Warashi, whose expression had not changed in the slightest after the change from red yukata to tropical leaf swimsuit.

The Yuki Onna also fell under that category, but that had more to do with her having no interest in her surroundings. She was likely off somewhere embracing Jinnai Shinobu’s frozen form.

Before long, a knock came on the door.

Mikoto turned the knob and the aforementioned Zashiki Warashi and bunny girl entered.

“No luck,” immediately said the bunny girl while not seeming to care. “We couldn’t find any clothes we could get our hands on. The price is of course an issue, but they also have no mass-production infrastructure, so everything is custom made. Even if we ordered something now, it would take over a week before it was ready.”

“And when people’s clothes get old, they seem to take them apart and sew them back up. It may be a lot like the relationship between a kimono and kimono fabric. If we really want them to make clothes from scratch, we have to be prepared for a pretty large burden.”

In that case, it seemed like they could earn enough to live on with the skill Quenser, Heivia, and the other boys shown in making these clothes out of the junk they had gotten from a caravan, but it also seemed unlikely they could put those skills to any worthwhile use. The skills might be exactly the same, but a greasy stalker could not become a sexy spy who kept the world safe. Those idiots could only fight in an idiotic field.

“The world really works in a twisted way, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, Touma often puts a lot of wasted effort into things.”

The way Index did not even hesitate suggested that pointy-haired boy needed to enter the mystery-solving phase of removing these wrongful accusations.

The bored-looking Zashiki Warashi leaned against the wall and spoke.

“We may be lucky Shinobu wasn’t involved in that. He doesn’t often use the full scope of his devilish intelligence, but if he had, he could easily be cruel enough to hide a slit in the center what looked like a normal bikini.”

Regardless of all that, it was looking like they would have to continue their grand adventure in the outfits that prank had produced.

“Honestly, do you think we could make some better clothes if we stole theirs and tore them up for material?”

“But then we would look like a group of Amazon warriors ruling over a bunch of naked guys. I feel like that would be embarrassing enough.”