Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item Chapter2 (section)

===Part 8===

Up above the ceiling, Mugino Shizuri and Takitsubo Rikou exchanged a glance.

“Mugino.”

“Did that bitch just say Item?”

Their recording of the general manager had said much the same thing, but this time it came straight from the villains themselves.

Item was of course the name of Mugino’s team. If these people were body doubles in case of emergency or a group using the name to get work in the dark side, they should have been disguised as and acting like Mugino and the others, but they weren’t.

Whatever their reasons, those girls had used the Item name in a private room where they assumed no one else was listening in. That meant this wasn’t an act. It was real.

Meanwhile, Frenda was worried about something else: the clothing of the central girl.

“Isn’t that a ''Tokiwadai'' uniform? How does a rich girl from that school end up in the dark side?”

“Having money super doesn’t prevent you from making mistakes. Aren’t all of you in super similar situations?”

If that girl actually was a Tokiwadai student, then she was a real piece of work.

The girls lounging on the floor below continued their conversation.

“Anyway, Waniguchi-chan, here’s some extra for this month.”

“Oh, thanks a bunch!”

The central girl tossed over something she held between two fingers.

The object spinning through the air was a plastic-looking card. It flew back around like a boomerang and Waniguchi nimbly caught it.

“It’s only the 7th. How did you manage to spend a month’s worth of pay that fast? You are being paid a proper wage, so you need to stop wasting so much money.”

“Ibotanokikouji Kaede. You’d be perfect if you wouldn’t get on my case about money.”

The small martial arts girl pouted her lips and rubbed her cheek against the Tokiwadai girl while giving the card she held a quick kiss.

That was apparently how their Item(?) received payments.

“''A money card?''” Mugino muttered under her breath up above the ceiling.

“Those are the prepaid cards you can super use with music players and online stores, right? You buy them at a convenience store and super input the number into your computer or phone.”

Mugino responded to Kinuhata’s explanation with a finger on her chin.

“They don’t ordinarily go above 10 thousand yen on a card, but there are premium ones with bigger amounts. Like 5 or 10 million on a card. Although I think those are really only meant to buy brand-name bags online or to make donations to net idols on video sites.”

But it was clever.

Prepaid cards were a lot lighter than cash or gold. They also couldn’t be frozen without warning like a bank account. Unlike a diamond, it didn’t matter if they were handled a bit roughly and got scratched up. And since cash could be converted into cards, they were also useful for money laundering. They could then be converted back into cash either via the internet or at a pawnshop.

“Mugino.”

Takitsubo pointed elsewhere.

The central girl – Ibotanokikouji Kaede? – had a suitcase near her. It looked cheap, but a closer inspection showed the lock had been replaced with a much nicer one. Not only was the new lock much tougher, but it appeared to include a sensor that would transmit its location over the internet if the lock was forced open.

(So converting their money into cards wasn’t just to launder it. They also don’t trust the banks to hold it.)

There were no standard methods in the dark side. It wasn’t perfect, but you could get a general picture of who someone was by the methods they used for these things.

Mugino considered this for a bit.

“If that case is packed full of 10 million yen cards with some room left for cushioning, then I’m guessing it holds around 80 billion.”

“Hapyah!?”

When she heard that amount, Hanano Choubi the Chicken yelped without thinking.

The Tokiwadai girl didn’t even bother looking up.

She simply held her palm upwards while still seated in her camping chair with Inoue in her lap.

“''There.''”

The entire ceiling collapsed.

Mugino didn’t even have enough time to click her tongue.

The building materials sank down like an antlion pit and the girls were dragged to the lower floor with nothing to grab ahold of.

Mugino gave up on righting herself as she fell and focused on landing without her legs giving out below her. Even with the intruders before her, Ibotanokikouji did not get up.

She did, however, pick Inoue up from her lap and set her down next to her.

“How do you do, ill-bred thieves☆”

“You think a lot yourself for a witch who converts human lives into money.”

“My, my, my. Aren’t you brimming with confidence, Level 5. Have you never bothered to question why it is you find victory wherever you go?”

Ibotanokikouji’s confidence was not broken by being called a witch.

If anything, she seemed to appreciate the insult.

“Your superiors have selected jobs they know a pathetic beginner like you can complete in order to give you a taste for success. You see the same process with drugs and gambling – all of life’s vices tend to work that way. But the free ride ends here. It is now time to take you for everything you are worth. You have reached the point where it all goes downhill.”

“You’re going to reduced to charcoal soon. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Poor thing. You should really try to use your head for once. You are convinced that ''you can do anything as long as you have Meltdowner,'' but I am saying that very idea is a falsehood this city’s adults have placed in your head.”

She giggled.

Still seated in her camping chair, she peeled Waniguchi away from her side.

“Do you really believe you can survive anything as long as you have your pride as one of Academy City’s seven Level 5s? Do you really think this city’s darkness is that shallow?”

It was Frenda who stared at her confident smile in disbelief.

That girl knew who they were to an extent. And yet she still looked confident while opposing ''the'' Mugino Shizuri.

Mugino did not hesitate, of course.

They only wanted the suitcase, not to hurt the villains or get some kind of information out of them.

She held out her palm and launched a brutal beam straight at the enemy.

But.

Mugino Shizuri’s Meltdowner bent at a sharp angle and blasted through a wall.

“Wha-?” said Frenda, her face entirely pale.

She may have received more of a shock than Mugino.

Mugino herself narrowed her eyes.

“You…”

“No, I did not use electricity.”

Ibotanokikouji Kaede hadn’t even gotten out of her chair.

She giggled in an elegant but wicked way.

“''I am Academy City’s #6.''”

[[Image:Item_BW3.jpg|thumb]]

She stated it plainly.

She called herself a Level 5. She called herself the esper known as the Dark Side’s Bane.

“It is time you learned that the outdated superiority of the seven Level 5s is a thing of the past. There are compatibility issues to worry about too. And on that note, recall that I am known as the Dark Side’s Bane.”

“Th-that can’t be true.”

Frenda believed in the brand name of Item’s – of Mugino Shizuri’s – strength.

She believed in the rarity of Academy City’s seven Level 5s.

So she could only reach one conclusion.

“In the end, Level 5s aren’t just going to appear everywhere we go!! You claim you’re the mysterious Dark Side’s Bane? A-anyone could come out and say they’re the #6! It’s just a number!”

“Oh, dear. You really are ignorant of the dark side’s depths, aren’t you? There really are Level 5s just about everywhere you go here. Really, you could say the dark side is their true home. ''The top two'' go without saying, as does the ''mystery beam shooter'' in front of us here. As for the ''electric one'' and the ''psychological one''…it’s hard to say. I am reluctant to say they belong to the dark side, but given the projects they’re involved in, I would say they each have one foot in the dark side. My, my. That means your last hope of being right is ''that guts idiot''. Are you sure you want to build up your standards and values atop someone as absurd as him?”

“……………………………………………………………………………………………………”

Frenda Seivelun was left speechless.

Ibotanokikouji had a point.

What if the Level 5 known as the Dark Side’s Bane was also neck deep in the illicit and illegal?

Wouldn’t that be exactly the kind of shitty outcome you would expect in Academy City?

Besides, Academy City’s Level system was entirely based on how useful an esper was for important fields of research. So with the Level 5s at the top, it was only natural the corrupt adults of the dark side would be all over them no matter the Level 5’s own morals or personality. So they might even be tricked into getting involved.

Ibotanokikouji’s laughter seemed to rule this place.

Her eyes were directly on Level 5 Mugino Shizuri.

“You want to argue the point, but you can’t deny the possibility, can you? How much do the stories you have heard about the #6 really matter? How sure can you be that the gender and age you have pictured in your head is correct? ''Do you think any of the information you think you know will help you here and now''? This is not a rumor, a vague report, or a strange legend. I am here right before you and I am calling myself the #6.”

“Don’t get a big head just cause you’re standing on the same field as me, worm.”

Mugino snapped back in a rage, but she also maintained some rationality deep in her mind.

In other words…

(I couldn’t see it, but she did break through the ceiling. What kind of power does she have?)

Then a voice called down from the broken ceiling.

Apparently not all five of them had fallen.

“Mugino!”

“Stay up there, Takitsubo! Hanano, you’re still up in the ceiling too, right!? Get Takitsubo out of here!! Do whatever it takes to protect her! Got that!?”

Mugino heard some panicked stammering, but it was growing more distant. Hanano was scared but doing as she was told. She was the kind of chicken who got moving when she felt cornered, not the kind that froze up.

Takitsubo’s AIM stalker was a convenient power, but she didn’t need to be on the front line for it to work. She could read the enemy’s location from safety and send the information over via phone.

That left Mugino, Frenda, and Kinuhata here.

Conveniently, only their vanguard had fallen from the ceiling. Had they been lucky or had the enemy been unlucky? Either way, that sort of omen held a surprising amount of power in the world of villains.

“This is like a bad joke.” Kinuhata sounded annoyed. “She’s the #6 Level 5 ''and'' a super Tokiwadai student?”

“My, my. You seem surprised to find an elite in the shadows.”

Ibotanokikouji’s expression said she found it puzzling why Kinuhata would question it.

She brought a finger to her chin and cutely tilted her head.

“Girls like me are given a sheltered upbringing cut off from the outside world. Make no noise when you walk, when you eat, or when you laugh. Were they trying to raise a ninja? When your very existence is forced into an unnatural state, it distorts something inside you. And so something must be done to put the hands of the clock back in their proper place. Which means learning the truth of the world, no matter how ugly it might be. And it must be done on a regular basis. Otherwise that luxury hand-wound watch will again fall out of sync with the rest of the world.”

“You’ll go this far to super learn how the real world works?”

“Try to appreciate just how restrictive a life one must live to need all this to avoid being torn apart by the distortion within. This is the problem with you cheap digital watches. You cannot understand the pain of a truly upper class upbringing.”

She sighed in apparent disappointment.

She was not killing to protect herself during a war, nor was she stealing because she was poor and starving.

But she was killing people all the same.

Human cruelty was most noticeable ''during peacetime'' when there were no excuses to fall back on.

“Hee hee.”

The Tokiwadai girl softly laughed and directed her graceful hand toward the ceiling.

“By the way, I did not expect you to have a fifth. But did you really think we would sit around long enough for them to escape?”

“Did you think ''we'' would sit around?”

Frenda Seivelun and Kinuhata Saiai took a step forward.

Frenda pulled several egg-shaped explosives from her short skirt and stuck them with fuses smaller than cigarettes.

“In the end, did you think we would give you time to attack Takitsubo and Hanano? You could’ve avoided this if you had just handed over the money, but I’ll admit it’s pretty funny you would prefer getting blown up!!”

Mugino noticed something in the middle of Frenda’s shouting. She surreptitiously pulled her phone from her pocket and found an email there: “Focus on the suitcase. You’re our strongest, so you go after it.”

Mugino had wondered where all Frenda’s confidence had come from when she had been so scared of the #6 announcement earlier, but she was only shouting to keep the enemy from hearing the vibration of Mugino’s silenced phone.

The next thing Mugino noticed was that the suitcase in question had vanished. It had been taken by…presumably the art club girl who had vanished along with it.

Mugino and the others no longer cared about the job the voice on the phone had brought them.

They didn’t even need to win the prize money in the bloody Colosseum.

It was all there in the suitcase.

Stealing the 80 billion in money cards was their top priority.

“Sh!!”

Mugino fired her first Meltdowner blast straight past Frenda and Kinuhata’s shoulders. The enemy had already bent one of her beams. Since she still didn’t know what that power was, she didn’t think this one attack would defeat that enemy. The beam was only meant to blind this mysterious other Item(?) while the original Item could exchange their thoughts under the cover of the blast and dust cloud.

“Leave the case to me!!”

“Super will do. This comes down to a compatibility issue with your power, right? We’ll defeat her here if we can, but we’ll at least slow her down while trying to work out what her power is and any other idiosyncrasies she has.”

Mugino tackled through a door and nearly rolled out into the hallway.

She spotted a summer uniform skirt fluttering up ahead. She saw a girl dragging the suitcase a long way down the hallway. She was nearly just a dot from Mugino’s perspective.

(I’d love to just blast her from here, but that would require a concentrated line of destruction skinnier than dried pasta. I wouldn’t want to vaporize the suitcase full of all that money.)

“I’ll just have to get closer!!”

Once she had a plan, she was quick to act on it.

She dashed down the library hallway.

The gloomy girl running up ahead looked back just once before pulling something like a remote from her skirt pocket and pressing the button with her thumb. Mugino heard shouting voices coming from beyond the wall to her side. A pair of double doors were broken down nearby and a bloody wild animal stepped into the hallway.

It was 3m long and weighed more than 250kg.

The white tiger’s cage must have opened.

“Shut up and stay out of this!!!”

Mugino slammed her palm into it. She didn’t even use her power. A vibration of the air rattled a nearby window and the impact propagated from the white tiger’s nose down to the tip of its tail. The blow to the face silenced the 3m beast in a single blow.

A Judgment-looking girl who had somehow ended up a Colosseum contestant was slumped on the floor.

“Y-you saved me? Thank-”

“Outta the way, you ♂♀〒#!!”

After paralyzing the girl with a shout, Mugino continued running down the hallway.

The silver-haired art club girl had escaped into the door at the very end of the long hallway.

That door led into a domed space. It covered the area of about four convenience stores. A round device in the center was covered in optical devices and surrounded by seats arranged in concentric circles.

Mugino glanced around the dark, windowless space.

(A planetarium?)

Was this inside the circular building she had seen alongside the library? But that didn’t really matter.

She could see the art club girl’s back from here. She must not have been able to move very fast while lugging that suitcase around. And Mugino was only interested in that luggage, so she was willing to shoot the girl in the back without warning as long as she wouldn’t hit the suitcase too.

(If I aim for her spine and concentrate the beam down to a line the width of dried pasta, I can kill her instantly with a single shot!)

But that isn’t what actually happened.

The gloomy silver-haired art club girl escaped outside through the emergency exit.

Because…

“Ah ha ha!! If you want to play tag, play with me, not Inoue!!!”

An explosive “roar!!!” came from the wall to Mugino’s side. It arrived so suddenly that Mugino didn’t have time to launch her Meltdowner. She clicked her tongue and rolled backwards.

A giant hunk of metal grazed her while producing a blast of wind.

The seats surrounding the planetarium device were arranged in neat concentric circles. They were a lot like movie theater seats, so they had to be bolted firmly to the floor.

They were all blown away like bowling pins.

A rough estimate said that attack had been deadlier than a freight train. It could have broken through the planetarium’s wall with ease.

The ear-splitting roar continued on and on.

It came from a tanned track girl with her wavy black hair cut to shoulder length.

She had just one leg on something like a skateboard with T-shaped handlebars attached. Was that called a kick scooter?

But the rear of the board, behind where her foot rested, was unusually large. That part alone was about 3m long, the tire was extra thick, and the enlarged cylinder looked a lot an unenclosed jet engine. Of course, it had to have a variety of different propulsion devices in addition to that most obvious one.

The dark side did not always rely on esper powers.

It also made use of next-generation weapons.

“Nice to meet you, colleague. I’m Hanayama Kamitsu of ''Item''. But you can call me the courier.”

“…”

“I’m the courier who delivers death. That might mean directly delivering violence or a bomb, but even when I deliver gold bars or a first aid kit to save someone’s life, it always leads to ruin in the end. That’s just who I am. So be careful when a villain offers you kindness. Ah ha ha. Even a child knows it’s a bad idea to trust a demon’s temptations.”

Only then did she notice Mugino wasn’t responding.

It looked like Hanayama hadn’t even imagined someone might be interested in something more than her “courier” title.

“Hm? Are you still caught up on the Item thing? Did you think only you could use the name? Were you imagining a little © afterwards whenever you said it? Don’t be silly. Academy City’s darkness is never going to kindly protect a villain’s rights!”

The tanned girl laughed as she bent her hips and leaned her upper body against the T-shaped handlebars.

It was the unpleasant laugh of someone who knew the truth.

“''Whichever team is more useful to the dark side as a whole gets to call themselves Item.'' That’s how the system works. Killers who do nothing but spend money aren’t going to cut it. You only destroy – you don’t produce anything. Meanwhile, we do our assigned jobs while also making our own profits, so I’d say we score just a biiiit higher than you.”

Her modified kick scooter gave a deep roar.

“So let’s play, imposter. Our Item will knock all the other candidates out of the running. This impractical proof-of-concept prototype can produce speeds of 1100km/h without leaving the ground. I’ll flatten you with my beloved ''Dragon Motor''!!”

Hanayama didn’t wait for Mugino to respond.

She opened the throttle and melted into streamlines.