Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item3 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 13===

Shiratori clicked her tongue.

The wolf must have been a special assistant for that ever-composed detective. Enough so that she wanted to go help now that something unexpected had happened.

“Trick Lab,” she said.

That one term trapped enemy and ally into a shared view of their surroundings.

Yes, even herself.

For a psychological power, announcing the effect must have made it easier to take hold.

“Fire x Death = Diesel 25. The spot coolers used to maintain the ice palace are powered by a generator and that generator’s fuel can trigger a major explosion!!”

The murder tricks ruled her immediate world.

Her free form attack had begun.

But Takitsubo had already mostly revealed how it worked.

Battle Freak Mugino unleashed a bestial roar.

“A timetable, a mysterious figure in the window, and an alibi? It’s all psychological, meaning there’s a psychogenic source for this pain we’re convinced we’re feeling. Once I understand how it works, I’ve got nothing more to fear!!”

“Hee hee. You say that, but you’ve already taken significant damage while it still had you convinced.”

The detective’s confidence remained intact.

Even if her murder plan was only a plan, her deadly force remained for now.

“With my power, persuasiveness and effectiveness are one and the same. Misjudgment x Human = Mirror 03. If I use a big mirror, you are guaranteed to misjudge your target’s location. Movement x Remote Control = Wire 19. With a thin wire, I can alter the location of a small key or knife. The simpler and larger-scale the logic, the harder it is to shake. For example…”

“Ah!?” shouted Frenda.

Something must have happened because the explosives expert frantically stuck a hand into her thin poncho.

The detective now held a grenade.

“''This.'' For tricks that don’t even require any props, I don’t even need to set anything up in advance. I can pickpocket or grope you with no chance of failure. Keh heh heh. And both of those can be surprisingly useful when it comes to destroying a suspect’s interpersonal relationships as a way of laying on the pressure until they make a mistake.”

Shiratori laughed and kissed the round explosive.

As if she were toying with the forbidden fruit.

“And now I have the persuasiveness I need. This gives me a new trick to use. I have everything necessary for Fire x Death = Diesel 25. No matter how sturdy the generator’s design, a bomb is enough to blast through it.”

So, in reality, the gas pipe running below Mugino’s feet had not actually ruptured.

The ice palace’s spot coolers had not frozen Kinuhata with their icy air, nor had a hunk of ice been instantly melted to create crushing pressure with its steam.

And the entire ice palace had not moved to throw Frenda around.

“So you ''hijack and alter the tricks yourself'', detective?”

With a mini stun gun, she could apply an electric shock and detonate the gas without actually digging up the gas pipe buried in the ice.

With a monkey wrench, she could remove the bolts holding the steel frame to the ground so the entire ice palace could slide around.

By producing props like that, the detective increased the options available to her. She wanted to end this as quickly as possible, so she had remade the battleground into a more dangerous place.

This may have been similar to a detective loudly announcing an explanation that wasn’t entirely wrong but not entirely right either to rattle the killer who was the only person who knew how the trick really worked.

Mugino glared and the Class Rep gave her a calm look.

“So what if I do?”

“What kind of detective brings her own props? Your job is to explain what happened using only what’s already there. You narrow down what tricks would’ve been possible and then identify the one person who could’ve done it. I thought your job was to stop the deadly train racing down the track laid out by the villain.”

“In real cases, any number of tricks could’ve been used at the scene. And there’s no simple list of suspects to work with. A perfect alibi? There’s no such thing when people’s memories are unreliable and camera records can be easily faked in this day and age.”

“Still, the villain’s supposed to lay out the track, not you. Detectives are meant to stand opposed to whoever caused the case. The mystery solver isn’t supposed to notice the malicious trick and decide to hijack it for your own purposes.”

“Oh, really? But when a detective shows up, it means someone’s going to die, doesn’t it?” Shiratori chuckled. “The detective’s role is to judge the killer and hold the killer’s fate in their hands. Just like the killer holds everyone else’s lives in their hands. And while the killer is in a bind where the only way out is to kill for the insurance money or to satisfy their grudge, the detective has two options: identify the killer and send them off to be executed, or to ''not do that''.”

“Damn you…”

“Because no matter how unprecedented the case, it’s only another job for the detective. Just like a firefighter who couldn’t put out a fire, it’s not like professionals lose their lives when they fail in a job. So indirectly, I hold the lives of everyone on the scene in my hands. All those issues of good and evil are right here in my hands.”

Real cases didn’t end when the detective identified the killer with an impressive feat of reasoning. Especially in an isolated location where the public institutions couldn’t intervene or when dealing with dark side criminals.

What if no one believed the detective’s reasoning because the killer was more popular?

What if the criminal was so afraid of being arrested they bet it all on wielding a deadly weapon to slaughter everyone there?

What if the criminal outargued the detective in a meaningless debate that left the issue of evidence behind?

“Even when the detective gathers everyone in one place, there are plenty of ways to break free of that ‘safe discussion’.”

“…”

“In the extreme, the killer can start shouting about how it’s an insult to the people who’ve already died and that anyone would be angry about this treatment and then punch the detective in the face before they can name the killer. And silencing the detective won’t necessarily make the others suspicious right away. In real cases, the killer isn’t the only one who will rely on violence in a tricky situation. And if everyone feels that the detective had it coming, then they’ve lost the right to present any shocking truth they might have discovered. These unpleasant situations can always happen in the real world because it is in fact the real word.”

There was a more efficient method.

A more efficient way to stop the case from progressing and protect everyone’s lives.

“So there’s no need to announce the trick even if you do discover it. The detective should ''overwrite'' and redesign the existing trick so the killer who laid out that track in the first place is no longer in control. Then everyone there – including the killer – is bound by the fear of death and can’t do anything. There’s no need to resolve everything on your own. If you don’t want anyone else to die, your top priority is to forcibly stop the case from progressing further. Identifying the killer can wait until you’re free of the closed environment and plenty of Anti-Skill officers have flooded the scene.”

“Let me guess: and if the killer isn’t stopped by the fear, the detective can keep everyone safe by secretly killing the killer and have them ‘leave behind their will’ or whatever? Then the detective has solved the case and won’t be arrested for it?”

“Right.”

Shiratori gave her open and immediate agreement, making Mugino click her tongue.

“You missed something important there. To overwrite the trick that had already been used once and bind everyone, killer included, with the fear of death, the killer’s death will be at least the third one. Which means ''you’d be killing some innocent person in the second killing that you use to advertise what you’ve done''.”

“''No one’s truly innocent. Besides, someone there might be even more deserving of death than the poor killer''. That’s especially common when searching for dark side criminals.”

That was her form of justice.

So the Class Rep had trained herself into a detective who could do that.

Even the Personal Reality that produced her power had been twisted into that shape.

“Hee hee. What really matters is persuasiveness. Even material evidence is just one more way of bolstering that.”

“So even if the original trick was something as simple as strangling the victim with a wire, the detective would damage the window frame to ''upgrade'' that to the wire being used to send a key into the room through a small gap, creating a locked room? You add your own branch to the story when the case has already begun?”

“Ta ha ha. My power isn’t as convenient as you seem to think it is.”

Shiratori didn’t hide it.

Did she think explaining the details of her power would actually keep Item from trying anything against her?

“It doesn’t work well if you simply think it ''could'' happen or that it’s ''possible''. It’s a case of innocent until proven guilty, unfortunately. So I need to do things like this.”

The detective removed the grenade’s pin.

Even hearing Mugino’s low voice didn’t remove the smile from Shiratori’s lips.

“I need to bring it up to the level of ''certainty''. I need to show off definite evidence so we can share the same information.”

Would justice not flinch from evil’s threats?

In a way, this made her even more unusual than the villains of the dark side.

An explosion erupted out.

But Shiratori remained untouched despite having held the grenade.

Her trick had taken precedence.

As announced, the detective grinned and raised a clump of fire that looked like sticky fuel.

“But the damage you take from it is very real. Persuasiveness is effectiveness, so I can strengthen my trick as much as necessary by spreading more props around. If these flames reach you, you will be burned to a crisp!!”

Her Trick Lab created a psychological effect by sharing the same information between enemy and ally.

Detective Shiratori’s greatest skill was not her memory or her calculating mind. Was it in fact the verbal skills that allowed her to gather a group in a single place and hold their attention in her one-girl killer-identification show?

Mugino held her palm straight out.

“But your Trick Lab is only psychological! It can’t create a physical wall to block this!!”

The beam was faster.

In the last moment before it hit, the detective melted into a blur of lines. She may have moved even faster than the wolf.

The next thing Mugino knew, Shiratori was holding a short, thick pipe in her mouth.

“Tch. Are you smoking something!?”

“Of course not. I care too much about my health to turn myself into a doped-up soldier. But by making you think there was something to it and gathering your attention, it created a logic in which your attack could miss if your focus slipped. I don’t know about elsewhere, but it could happen here in Academy City. You yourself decided so. I just had to make it persuasive enough to convince both of us that’s what would happen.”

Trick Lab.

Did that power allow for tricks meant to keep her alive in addition to the tricks meant to kill? So instead of Shiratori dodging that, had she tricked Mugino into missing just like she claimed?

It would only work if Mugino believed it, but it still pissed her off to accept it.

“Now, how about more Trick Lab? …I can kill using the big fan used to regulate the ice palace’s temperature. In other words, I can control the vaporized fuel using the artificial wind. And once it fills this enclosed space, my target can’t escape no matter how fast they can move!!”

Frenda was more familiar with explosives, so it was her eyes that opened wide.

Knowing the psychological effect at play wasn’t enough to immediately eliminate your mental reactions. At times, trying hard to forget something would only make it stick in your head even longer.

And Mugino didn’t hesitate to fire Meltdowner.

To the side. Casually.

That was enough to instantly eliminate the vapor explosion with perfect accuracy.

“Wha-!?”

“It’s a psychological power. Persuasiveness is effectiveness and that comes from the info shared between enemy and ally. That grenade you used before didn’t actually explode. It’s simpler than that. You scatter some props around the scene to give completely fictional killer tricks 100% real deadly force, right?”

Mugino grinned in a villainous way.

“So all I have to do is destroy the location or situation your scenario relies on. That can mean blowing a hole in the wall or bringing down a bridge to throw off your timetable.”

“…I see.”

“You’re not the only one who can play that game. Whether you’re in a villa deep in the mountains or on a sleeper train following a strict timetable, your initial plan means nothing if some unrelated person happened to have a flamethrower in their bag. No matter how intricate a trick you’ve planned out, your locked room isn’t so locked if the door’s missing and your false alibi falls apart if the train is stopped. The greatest enemy of the clever sleuth is the macho construction worker. That’s all it takes to eliminate the very foundation of your preposterous trick!!”

Mugino aimed her palm straight ahead.

Shiratori responded by swiftly moving both her hands and, with the prestidigitation of a stage magician, producing a candle that could be used as a timer and a phone book that could act as a blunt weapon and then be burned away.

Several beams flashed out and more and more deadly tricks were released.

But the world did not react.

Because Frenda had used her bombs to break down the ice palace’s pillars, blast holes in its walls, and otherwise transform the location those tricks were reliant on.

It was pure chance.

If Shiratori’s imagination had outdone Frenda’s, it was Item who would have been killed.

Flesh was loudly torn through.

With none of her attacks working, the detective’s flank was burned through.

An impossible voice rang in Mugino’s head.



''“Hee hee. So I will bring you back into the light of the sun and make an honest person out of you!”



Perhaps this meant something ended within the Class Rep.