Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume5 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 10===

Several heavy metallic sounds happened all at once. The incinerator facility had more than just the incinerator and conveyer belts. To sort between burnable and non-burnable trash, it also needed machines and chemicals to break apart large items, remove the metal pins from cardboard, and to remove the plastic paints from wood. Not to mention machines that determined if something could be recycled or not. For Hanatsuyu Youen the Carrier, this place was a treasure trove.

Even in the noisy facility, she could just barely make out the explosion of noise.

(I caught someone. It’s not great that I can hear it myself, though.)

At a certain country’s embassy, some workers who complained off severe dizziness and a buzzing in the ear were thought to have suffered brain damage. It was likely a special form of sound wave attack. Rumors spread in the embassy that the attack was intentional and that it would develop into an international incident…but it was later theorized that the chirping of local crickets had caused it.

Crickets chirped by rubbing their wings together, so as long as you knew the dangerous frequency, you could subtly alter their wings with chemicals to reproduce the same phenomenon. It had helped that the heat-filled garbage incinerator facility had been full of creatures that couldn’t normally survive the winter.

(And it is still connected to the filthy slum with a thick pipe.)

“Now, then.”

Youen lowered the stack of cardboard boxes she held.

(Resisting too hard on the 25th was a mistake, but my Carrier trait may not be welcome outside of Academy City.)

She had never questioned any of this when Kaai was with her. She had never feared anything no matter who in the world hated her as long as they were holding hands. Even if it meant planting a tracking device in her sister’s stomach.

But things had changed.

She lightly kicked the side of the box stack with a sulky look on her face.

(So would it be best to go with Option 3 – playing dead? I can make them think I escaped the city while the citywide panic brought down their investigative abilities but then actually hide among all the bodies. As long as I change my face or ID later, I can escape them. Doing that requires overloading their ability to identify corpses, so ''more than 300 thousand'' deaths should do the trick.)

She froze in place after reaching that conclusion.

She was certain her answer was correct. She alone could take control of the 29th that way. But what did she really want to do?

She hadn’t cared what the rest of the world thought. She had been perfectly satisfied racing against her twin every day. They had worn the same clothing and eaten the same foods so their conditions were exactly the same. But Kaai had grown tired of it and left, leaving Youen all alone.

She was afraid of dying and she certainly didn’t want her life cruelly taken from her. That much was true. But what did she want to do beyond surviving? What was worth tearing down others and taking so many lives?

Hanatsuyu Youen was not like Kaai. Youen did not take lives for fun or on a whim. She might pretend to do so in order to paralyze an opponent with fear or anger, but deep down, she always manipulated her pests and vermin in the most effective and efficient way possible.

But not everyone would accept an answer just because the math proved it to be correct.

She always considered the shortest route to her destination, thought up the fastest method to achieve her goal, used every shortcut that would eliminate unnecessary steps, and received plenty of disapproving frowns from the people who only ever climbed the stairway one step at a time.

They all wondered how she could be so obsessed with something so gross.

Those questions always confused her. What did gross have to do with anything? Wasn’t the entire point to climb the treacherous mountain and reach the summit? None of them had the strength, equipment, or plan needed to reach the summit, so how could they criticize her for making all the necessary preparations to reach it faster than anyone else?

It was so strange and weird. It made no sense.

She only wanted to win first prize, to succeed, to receive praise, and to show everyone there was a perfectly safe and convenient route up the mountain.

''All she had done was minimize the time and effort required to reach the summit.

''Kaai was the only other person racing to the summit under the same conditions as her, so only she had been worth training against.

“…”

She shook her head.

She could ponder these philosophical questions after surviving and escaping to safety.

The bad kind of gifted child opened the top cardboard box and viewed the smaller boxes of drugs packed inside.

They were ethanolamine drugs. Industrial strength.

They were only allergy medication, but healthy people’s bodies could malfunction if they took enough of them. There was no such thing as a perfectly safe drug and the difference between poison and medicine was more about dosage and usage than substance.

(I need this to travel backwards from the incinerator facility to the garbage trucks, to the garbage collection areas, and to the cleaning robots, so I need something better at surviving the cold than crickets. Something with a resistance to the cold, something not afraid of people, and something that won’t be incapacitated when covered in the drug. Something that can also be used to carry pollen would be best. Let’s see…)

A low buzzing tickled her ear.

With no fear or disgust, she raised her skinny index finger to let a silver-glowing bug land on it. Then she winked.

“Drug resistant flies, perhaps?”