Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item Chapter2 (section)

===Part 10===

The extraordinary engine roared. The din became a physical mass that erupted through the planetarium.

That was Hanayama Kamitsu’s modified kick scooter – the Dragon Motor.

But Mugino Shizuri’s Meltdowner was an extraordinary projectile weapon. It didn’t matter how quickly the enemy accelerated toward her. She had nothing to fear as long as she reduced them to charcoal before they reached her.

Or so she thought.

“Ha ha ha!!”

Hanayama slipped past.

In fact, that giant kick scooter was moving along the planetarium’s domed ceiling. It defied gravity like a rollercoaster.

“Tch. Quit using brute force to defy fluid dynamics!!”

“I’m moving at 1100km/h, remember? That’s why I need my own supply of oxygen. Ah ha ha!! Wah ha ha!! It’s actually a lot harder to keep it on the ground!!”

Even the tanned track girl’s cackling was distorted by her speed. The kick scooter made several passes above Mugino’s head during that one statement.

Bare skin could not survive at that speed, so she likely had some kind of gel generously applied over her entire body.

“Stupid spider girl!!”

“''Bingo''.”

Hanayama answered the insult with a laugh.

Several metallic clangs followed.

The kick scooter had just about melted into streamlines, but on the enormous rear portion, several mechanical arms spread out to the sides like a spider. Each arm had a sharp heavy metal blade attached to the end.

“Atomic number 92!! These burning swords of depleted uranium can cut through a tank!! Hee hee, you won’t even notice you’ve been cut. Ah ha ha, let’s play a game of human daruma otoshi☆”

The kick scooter moved from the curved dome to the floor and then charged straight toward Mugino. Following it by eye was superhuman enough, so not even Mugino had time to take careful aim. She calculated the length of the skinny arms and swords and then considered whether to dodge left or right.

“Tch!!”

She fired Meltdowner at her feet to leap upwards.

“Oh, you figured it out? There goes my promise to kill you before you noticed.”

Orange sparks scattered a moment later. The wreckage of the seats was sliced through like tofu or jelly even outside the range of the arms and swords.

There were wires.

“That’s why you were right to call me a spider girl.”

Mugino was still hanging in midair, but Hanayama had already made five circuits of the domed ceiling or floor.

Hanayama couldn’t directly contact Mugino in the brief moment she remained airborne, but…

“I won’t let you land. I’ll build a spiderweb of deadly wires. Making wires this thin out of depleted uranium isn’t easy, you know? Now curse your own body weight while I slice you up like tokoroten!!”

Mugino’s fall toward death was almost complete.

She twisted around in midair and launched a Meltdowner beam.

But it didn’t hit the kick scooter.

Her opponent was just too fast.

(Damn, a single straight line just isn’t enough. I need another option to deal with a target that keeps moving out of the way.)

“Ah ha ha!!”

Mugino was trapped within a vortex of laughter.

If she did her best to resist – such as by using the airborne wreckage of the seats or the metal railings as a foothold – she could probably earn herself a few more Meltdowner-powered jumps, but that was all. Once gravity dragged all of those footholds back to the floor, Mugino would fall too and be sliced apart by the wires.

The Dragon Motor continued to circle around her.

The wires were being strung up all over the planetarium and Mugino would be sliced and diced if she fell into them.

“Random shots aren’t going to reach me and they can’t break my wires either!! You can’t keep shooting those beams forever! Bye-bye, Level 5. The Item name is ours now!!!”

Immediately afterwards, part of the planetarium’s domed ceiling was noisily torn away. A mass larger than a refrigerator lost its support and fell, so Hanayama had to quickly turn the T-shaped handlebars. From the kick scooter’s perspective, it had been like the road collapsing up ahead. She escaped unharmed, but she was still thrown off her planned course.

“What just…?”

The track girl found the answer before finishing her question.

She saw holes. Big holes. Random shots had done the trick. Mugino’s Meltdowner had opened several holes of 2m or more in the domed ceiling. The dome itself could no longer support itself and thick cracks ran through it. Once those cracks covered the surface area of the dome, ordinary gravity took control and the walls tore away and fell.

“It doesn’t matter how fast you are if I don’t aim for you directly.”

Mugino used the final airborne foothold and a beam to make another leap. She grinned and aimed her palm in midair.

The girl known as a monster still had confidence to spare.

“You don’t have many options left once you’ve lost your road, courier. And didn’t you say it was hard to keep that thing on the ground?”

“You…bitch!!”

Hanayama swerved this way and that to avoid the “canyons” in the collapsing dome. But as her routes grew more limited, she ultimately had only one path she could take, which made it easy to predict her future location and fire Meltdowner there. Because if Hanayama had slowed down, she would have fallen from the ceiling.

She wasn’t even given a chance to scream.

The beam launched from Mugino’s palm erased the tanned girl and her modified kick scooter from existence.

There was no corpse, or even a single drop of blood, remaining.