Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item Chapter3 (section)

===Between the Lines 3===

It happened all of sudden while she was changing clothes.

“Pant, pant.”

It interrupted the selfie photoshoot she called medication.

Ibotanokikouji Kaede, the curvy girl with a braid in her fluffy blonde hair, held a hand to her head and leaned against the wall like she had bumped into it from the side. That was enough for the wall to collapse like wet cardboard, so she had to quickly catch herself.

The power was out.

A ceiling board had fallen and several wires dangle down with intermittent sparks spilling out. That gave her some light to go on in the darkness.

“Inoue-chan, Waniguchi-chan?”

She had hit her head, so it ached now. The voice that spilled from her mouth was so horribly hoarse she barely recognized it.

What had happened?

An explosion?

She wobbled on her feet as she searched her pocket, but she couldn’t find her phone. She was disinclined to get down and crawl through the dark searching for it. First, she needed to find out what happened.

It didn’t appear to have been a gas explosion from the bathroom or kitchen.

She called her teammates’ names while searching for them.

Her first guess was the room holding the hostage.

She smelled something like fireworks before she even got close. That plus a smoky smell. It looked like the door had been blasted outwards from within. But instead of the bent door lying on the floor, its splinters were stabbing into the opposite wall.

“Please answer me. Inoue-…”

She trailed off.

She could barely see the floor in the dark, so she ended up kicking something. It was about the size of a soccer ball, but heavier.

It was a human head.

Inoue Laspezia’s.

It was burnt beyond recognition and Ibotanokikouji held a hand over her mouth upon seeing it. When she looked away, she saw something hanging on the wall. It reminded her of a coat on a hangar, but that was no coat. It was skewered by a rainstorm of sharp metal scraps and partially embedded in the wall. It took her a second to recognize the motionless object as…a burnt human body.

“Wanagu-”

The name was cut off by the need to swallow the vomit threatening to climb her throat.

The hostage had done something to trigger an explosion.

Emotions could come later. She had to think about what needed to be done now. This explosion would have been visible from the outside. Anti-Skill, the press, and even online news reporters who were little more than gawkers would be rushing here before long. And Mugino’s team would follow this very obvious signal.

Ibotanokikouji’s Item had now lost three members.

She was the only one left.

In that sense, this last-ditch suicide attack had been very successful.

Now wasn’t the time to argue about individual power.

She could never have run the Colosseum and its 80 billion in profits if she let her emotions take control at times like this. Her opponent here wasn’t just a Level 5, but that Level 5’s entire team. That meant they could cover for each other’s vulnerabilities and blind spots. She had to assume she gained nothing from a direct confrontation.

Ibotanokikouji reigned supreme only as a criminal.

As seen in how she ran the Colosseum and how she abducted Hanano, her general policy was to hide herself in the crowds so she could remain invisible.

So in this case…

“I need to run away.”

She made the decision instantly.

This had nothing to do with how strong or weak her power was. Waiting here for an entire group of enemies was out of the question.

She needed to slip away for now.

She could consider how to kill them later.

“I need to escape to safety and gather my strength. And gather people as well.”

''Once she made a decision, she was quick to take action.

She grabbed a bent oil lighter originally meant to light aroma candles. At the very least, she needed to gather up and burn or otherwise dispose of the documents, the evidence, the phone she had lost and given up on finding, and anything else incriminating. She left the corpses and burnt wreckage alone while grabbing her Tokiwadai summer uniform and the suitcase containing 80 billion yen. Then she left the destroyed hideout.

It was a room in a District 15 luxury apartment.

Specifically, ''it was the room on the floor directly below Mugino’s hideout.

(We already had a room soundproofed to use as a cell, so keeping a hostage here was no problem. And we could spy on their conversations using a device that reads the minute vibrations in the pillar running between the two floors.)

“Since the blast broke though the ceiling, did this destroy their hideout too?”

She went straight to the elevator, saw it was already rising from the ground floor, and changed direction. She stepped out onto the emergency stairs, descended just one floor, and pressed the elevator button from there.

The rising elevator would not react to the down button, so she could slip past Anti-Skill, the firefighters, or whoever else was coming up from below.

She boarded the elevator that did arrive and rode it down to the ground floor.

That brought her to the bottom of Fifteen Bells, but the outside was awash with flashing red lights. She had no intention of being seen by the cameras of the press and onlookers gathered just outside the “keep out” tape. She instead left through the back staff entrance.

“You’re dead, counterfeit Iteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeem!!!”

She heard a shout from the crowd, but she kept her face impassive.

She poured all of her strength into her facial muscles.

They hadn’t noticed her yet, so the Tokiwadai girl slipped away from the explosion site with her suitcase in tow.

She didn’t risk using her power.

She could have ''manipulated the crowd on a subconscious level'' if she wanted, but she preferred to avoid giving herself away with any unnecessary actions.

Ordinary behavior was the ultimate camouflage.

This wasn’t over yet.

The rules hadn’t changed: the name Item went to whoever won in the very end.

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