Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item4 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 8===

It looked like she had survived.

Frenda breathed a soft sigh.

(In the end, I hope she isn’t just waiting to kill me at her leisure.)

When she really was being hunted, the lines between optimism, being reasonable, and overthinking could become blurred. It was common in the dark side to find yourself unable to trust your own thoughts.

Despite the popular image, Shinjuku wasn’t just Kabukicho from one side to the other. When leaving the train station from the southern entrance, there was a surprising amount of green (which was of course an artificially maintained park). Frenda saw a few large corporate office buildings and hotels, passed by the distinctive Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, and kept walking a while longer. She came to a stop after the building heights had decreased a fair amount.

She had arrived at a certain building.

Several taxis were gathered around a filthy set meal restaurant. That wasn’t all grease stains, was it? There were a few large trucks in addition to the taxis. Frenda thought of Shinjuku as a collection of tall buildings, so this one-story restaurant looked out of place. Was this the result of a strong but misguided obsession? The menu out front had chilled Chinese noodles crossed out with two thick lines in marker and “ramen” scrawled in its place. Maybe that was due to the changing of the seasons.

The entire place was filthy. Even though it was a restaurant. The general vibe would make ordinary people think twice before entering.

The restaurant must not have cared how many stars it had on the food review sites.

It was like a tropical fish in an enclosed tank…no, that analogy was too clean. It was like a turtle that had lived for decades in a mossy, seldom-cleaned tank.

“Wow, this is the kind of mystery restaurant you’d find in an urban legend. …In the end, are these set meal places even any good?”

Frenda had doubted her quarry would immediately get on the highway to escape far away.

Even though there wasn’t any word on the news or internet yet, information on the “escaped bomber” must have been shared with Investigation Division 1 and Public Security. In a heavily redacted report, of course.

The driver would be relaxing at a restaurant near the scene because they were waiting for the police checkpoint to be removed.

Of course, Frenda wasn’t going to wait until the heat died down. She had been set up and was being pursued, but that crisis could come in handy at times.

According to the tracks revealed by her reagent…

(This is the truck that abducted me. There’s a family photo at the driver’s seat and the footprints lead into the restaurant. But, in the end, the driver will return here on his own.)

Just to be safe, Frenda used some dust made by shaving down aluminum foil to check around the door and she found fingerprints. Old and new ones. That meant they weren’t a last-minute trick.

“That confirms it. Now to set something up.”

Frenda reached into her thin poncho and pulled out a spray bottle other than the reagent one. This one had a thick mark drawn around the neck of the bottle in red marker.

The sliding door to the filthy restaurant opened.

A middle-aged man who looked a lot like a truck driver emerged, approached the large truck, and pressed the button on his keys to unlock the door.

Just then, Frenda silently approached from behind cover.

The driver caught sight of her in the large side-view mirror and quickly spun around, but she had planned on that.



“Okay. In the end, have a spritz of mint, chili peppers, and vinegar☆”

“Gwahhhhhh!?”



Taking the super irritating cocktail to the eyes brought the man down onto his rear.

Frenda’s area of expertise was all chemicals with explosive reactions. She had never said bombs were her only weapon.

If she blew him to bits, he couldn’t exactly answer her questions, now could he?

(Toys like this are more useful when paired with a booby trap bomb than when used on their own. In the end, just when they’ve carefully removed the screws and taken off the cover of the explosive device, all sorts of nasty powders prepared inside will float silently out and blind the bomb squad’s delicate eyes☆)

“Oh, hey. In the end, rubbing your eyes will only make your eyelids swell more. You’re only going to make this worse for yourself, so I recommend not resisting and heading on around to the back.”

“Ow, wh-what the hell did you do to me? I-I can’t see!?”

“I’d like to ask you that.”

With an exasperated sigh, Frenda grabbed the driver by the scruff of the neck and dragged him behind the large truck. His larger size made that fairly difficult.

(I can do all this and no one makes a fuss. I’m not going to ask for drum-shaped security robots, but in the end a world without drive recorders and drones is so easy it’s scary.)

Once in one of the city’s blind spots, it was time to get to work.

It was interrogation time, where she would get information out of him like turning on a faucet.

“In the end, do you have any clue why someone from Academy City would be doing this to you?”

“Uh.”

The driver’s shoulders jumped.

That would be a yes.

“A professional truck driver can drive right through Academy City’s gates. But you had no reason to do what you did. …Who hired you? Were they paying you with money? Tell me everything you know.”

“I-I couldn’t possibly tell you.”

“I gave you a taste of the tear spray I had marked as ‘safe’. The undiluted version is 20x stronger, so a spray from that will permanently blind you. In the end, are you still going to resist?”

“Wait, wait! Not my eyes! I’m a driver!”

People’s mental defenses were weak against types of pain other than simple punching and kicking.

It worked even better if you if you let their imagination do most of the work.

Frenda knew he couldn’t see her, but she still worked hard to keep her expression neutral.

Because this was how she really felt about this:

(Damn, I hate this. In the end, it’s just not my style to torture a weakened amateur.)

But at times, it was unavoidable.

Mugino had fired Meltdowner at her just recently. Item really had been released from Academy City and was hot on her trail.

It was unclear how close those destructive and deadly girls were to reaching Frenda.

But the clock was ticking all the same.

If Mugino fired another…sniper shot? Artillery blast? Whatever you wanted to call it, it might just hit the driver by mistake.

She had to play the monster.

Yes, a monster like the Japanese oni that that had scared her 7-year-old sister so badly she had trouble sleeping earlier this year. And so the big sister had to stay up with her using the voice chat on a F2P game. Based on what her sister had said, that strange monster could be defeated by roasted soybeans and fish heads. That part was a little worrying, but a true oni probably did some really nasty things.

“In the end, histamines are great for swollen eyelids. They’re the substance that causes the pain and itchiness during an allergic reaction, but you can easily extract them from rotten garbage. There should be plenty of raw materials back behind the restaurant. By getting them inside your body, I can boost the swelling as much as I want, so do you really want to experience this pain but several times more powerful? How about we start at 100x the spiciness?”

“I-I don’t need money.”

“Then did they threaten you? Using a photo taken after you fell for a honey trap, maybe?”

“I would never betray my family!!”

Then how do you explain your current circumstances, criminal?

The driver yelled at exasperated Frenda.

He sounded a little desperate.

“I needed time. Time! Being a truck driver only gets you money. We end up dedicating the majority of our time to the job. At least more than half the year. So we have money in our bank accounts, but we can’t take our families on a vacation or even on a trip to the local park! If you live like that long enough, it messes with your head!!”

But he couldn’t quit.

He knew all too well that his life would be empty if his job was taken from him.

“…We made a deal.”

“What kind of deal?”

“If I completed this job, they will negotiate with the company. No one listens to us drivers, but those experts know how to ‘talk’ both above and below board.”

Something interrupted him.

The round object was about the size of a basketball.

On closer inspection, Frenda realized the sides of the large ball slid back to act as wheels.

The sphere supported itself with the two wheels and its bottom and it turned by working the wheels in opposite directions.

But it also did something the wheels couldn’t explain.

With nothing else around, the orb suddenly hopped 3m straight up.

It was Frenda’s knowledge as a professional bomber that told her immediately what this meant.

“Shit, get under the truck!!”

“?”


The hopping orb burst from within, scattering 800 sharp fishing hooks with maximum efficiency.

The blast swept across everything around it.