Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:MvM Chapter3 (section)

===Part 15===

The first floor of the guild doubled as a simple dining hall.

It was flooded with people.

There were Priests with slits even more risqué than China dresses and there were Dark Witches wearing thick cloaks over racing swimsuits. Apparently they really did leave the village and walk through thickets of grass hard as knives while showing that much skin. Mikoto had assumed her bikini armor would garner mockery, but she actually blended in fairly well with it. What a world.

But…

“Hm,” she groaned. Something didn’t sit right with her about this place.

For how well-equipped people were with weapons and tactics for combat and emergencies, they hadn’t made many advances in their everyday lives.

Specifically, there were no hobbies or entertainment.

Hard bread, grilled meat, some kind of soup.

All of the food was bland and uninteresting and the cooking methods and tools used to make it were from a weird mishmash of regions and time periods. They didn’t have hand-cranked pasta makers, yet perfect skinny spaghetti was readily available. Salads were nothing but raw vegetables and no one had figured out you could boil them. Of course, this was another world, so there was nothing odd about the order of inventions differing from Earth.

“Misaka-san, do you remember?”

“?”

“That slaver we met had a fancy dress, but how did she get dressed? The design of her corset seemed pretty wild.”

Now that she mentioned it.

For one thing, corsets had become fashionable during 19th century Europe, not the middle ages. And while Mikoto had seen metal clasps on bags and threads tied in bows, true corsets did not work like that. It hadn’t been unusual for maidservants to pull on the threads like a game of tug of war to forcibly constrict the woman’s waist.

The adventurers(?) walking nearby wore brightly-colored armor like it was normal, but how did they color the metal? The armor had small scratches, but the base metal wasn’t showing through. So instead of painting the metal red, it looked more like they had melted down a “red metal” and poured it into a mold, but how did they do that? If they had a convenient form of magic for it, then that was that, but Mikoto couldn’t help but feel like she had a poor grasp on the systems and manufacturing methods that went on behind the scenes.

To sum it all up…

Yes,

(Their civilization…no, their knowledge is all so shallow. It’s like a single person created this scene out of whatever trivia they happened to know.)

She wasn’t sure what the significance of that was, but it still felt weird to her.

A woman of around 20 stood behind the counter.

She stroked a hand along the big bottle sitting next to her as she smiled and spoke.

“Welcome to the Job Management Guild – Gempick Branch! I don’t recognize you, so is this your first time using our branch?”

“What can we do here?”

Bikini armor Mikoto’s question made the young woman’s smile freeze on her face.

She struggled to keep her confusion from showing.

“The Job Management Guild is exactly what it sounds like: we act as a go-between for all of your jobs. Whether you want to go monster hunting, guard a noble, explore a cave, or collect rare treasure, we will introduce you to the best job for your job type and level.”

Her smile seemed to ask how else anyone could find a job.

“You’re a go-between for everyone’s jobs?”

“''Yes.''”

“As in, everyone in the village? Including the visiting adventurers?”

“''What else would it mean''?”

Both the young woman and Patissiet tilted their heads this time.

Mikoto and Shokuhou exchanged a glance.

“That means no one’s free to choose their job ability. ‘You would make a good farmer, so here’s your farming job.’ ‘You look like a fighter, so here’s a list of jobs for you. No, it doesn’t mater if you actually want a peaceful life.’ ''That’s the only option here''? Giving someone a list to choose from isn’t a real choice ability if all three involve killing people. Yet humans have this annoying habit of starving to death if they don’t earn any money.”

“And the real victims of this system are the slaves,” muttered a disgusted Mikoto.

As a slave, you can only perform these jobs.

The jobs on this list are best for you.

They weren’t given any kind of choice, so it was laughable to act like their masters were doing them a favor. This guild seemed convenient at first, but it was actually an exploitative institution closely associated with the source of this world’s discrimination!

While Mikoto and Shokuhou shuddered, various exchanges were occurring at the counter.

The young woman and the adventurers didn’t seem to question any of it.

“Here is your pay for today’s job.”

“Thanks.”

Money here appeared to be gold, silver, and bronze coins instead of paper bills. And instead of counting each individual coin, they measured it by weight using a set of scales.

“Now, now. Elves use these scales.”

“Oh, right…”

“The elves are being gathered in the center square, so hurry on there once you’re done here.”

The reception woman said this with a smile while pouring some cheap-looking bronze coins onto the scales.

Mikoto already had a question.

(The humans and elves use separate scales? Why go to the trouble?)

This didn’t seem like a case of the humans not wanting to use the same tools as the slaves. If it was about segregation, the elves would have an entirely separate counter.

Was it a good thing that even the small issues bothered Mikoto so badly?

Simply put, ''couldn’t the guild rig the springs and weights to cheat the elves out of their fair pay?

Dancer Shokuhou raised a hand.

“Question. Do important people like the nobility and royalty have to choose their jobs from the guild’s list?”

“Don’t’ be silly. The lords with their own territory are the ones who run the guild. We open these branches on the behalf of the lords and kings, a portion of the money and experience everyone earns through the guild is collected, and that is paid to the lords and kings as a tax. That’s the basic system.”

So that was normal here.

Mikoto had to wonder if the percentage taken for that tax could be changed any time the lords and kings felt like it. Maybe even as high as 98% or 99%? They could squeeze everyone dry.

And hadn’t Patissiet said the kings had reached the level cap of 9999?

This was a terrible world where you could work and train all you wanted and never level up without the guild leaders’ permission. And at the same time, the lords and kings were taking away other people’s experience points as a tax, allowing them to level up endlessly while just sitting around.

That was why the kings who never did any work grew big and fat.

That was why the elves who worked themselves to the bone could never achieve happiness.

“…”

Academy City had its own cruel hierarchy. But Mikoto and Shokuhou had leveled up within that esper development system, so they found it hard to accept this system where people’s talents and efforts were stolen away by others.

Plus, it reminded them of the experiment using so many clones.

''A great many were being sacrificed for the benefit of a specific individual.

Simply put, it strongly rubbed the #3 and #5 the wrong way.

…Mikoto knew she had to take a deep breath to calm herself. Because there was more she wanted to ask about.

“But aren’t there a lot of people here for a rural village? In fact, I feel like there are more outside adventurers here than there are actual villagers.”

“Of course there are, miss.”

A muscular man with a sword, shield, and armor spoke to her from behind.

She was relieved to find his armor was not of the bikini variety.

“The area around Gempick Village is known for its excellent gems.”

“It is?”

“How do you not know this? Are you a rookie who just ran away from home, or something? Admittedly, finding the gems in the vast field ain’t easy, but even a small one is worth enough to buy a house. To get rich quick, head to Gempick, as they say.”

The man laughed and then went elsewhere. He was apparently interested in the display board on the wall, not the counter.

Mikoto sensed something on her skin.

And she sensed it from both the man and the counter. Was it coming from the giant bottle the young woman was holding her hand to and rubbing like it was a crystal ball?

“?”

“What’s wrong?” asked Shokuhou.

“Nothing really,” said the #3 girl.

But there was no doubting it anymore. Every time a powerful adventurer passed by in the guild, she felt a tingle on her skin. Maybe this was something only Misaka Mikoto could sense. Maybe you needed the #3 Level 5’s control over electricity and magnetism and her radar using EM waves.

“The reaction is stronger from the higher-level adventurers who must have earned more experience.”

The answer was right there.

It was obvious if you considered what kind of esper she was.

“Are experience points…electricity? That’s it. There’s a special bioelectricity running through their bodies and they call that experience!! The guild manages people’s experience and leveling by using a capacitor-like tool to transfer it from the people to that bottle or from the bottle to the people!”

She realized something.

Her understanding of this world explosively expanded.

(If you want to develop all your muscles as efficiently as possible, it’s best to constantly stimulate them with a weak electric current. The legend says anyone who irreverently interferes in the goddess’s level grinding will be destroyed by divine punishment, causing them to explode, but that’s just talking about people who were struck by lightning.)

The details of the system this world called magic were still unclear, but they must have developed a technique of turning that growth in a non-physical direction.

So wait.

''Did that mean Mikoto could hijack control of the entire human race’s experience points?

''If so, this world really was designed for the Railgun!!

“What’s wrong?” asked the woman tilting her head behind the counter.

This girl’s realization rendered the guild entirely meaningless, but this woman was sadly unaware of that paradigm shift.

Mikoto held this world in the palm of her hand.

She heard a commotion outside the guild.

The elves were being gathered in the village square for some reason.

That was the girls’ true purpose here.

Now that they had gathered some other information, it was time to get to the heart of the issue.

“So what’s that about?”

“What’s what about?”

“The elves being gathered in the village square. They were wearing collars, so you see them as slaves, right?”

“Oh, that. It’s about tax season, which means everyone wants to own 0 slaves, but it would be so much effort for each family to work their own slaves to death. So there is a yearly event where everyone in the village gathers their slaves in the square and kills them.”

“Oh, really?”

That settled it.

Were they going to take those elves’ lives like it was some year-end roadwork? Every year, the elves were captured, bought and sold, and abused. But when the time came, they were all seen as a nuisance, regardless of their age, strength, or physical condition.

Mikoto didn’t know if elves lived for hundreds or thousands of years, but once they were captured, they lived for a single year. They were worked so hard it psychologically scarred them and then they were all killed and thrown out.

“I see, I see, I see how it is.”

One year? To hell with that. There wasn’t time to wait even one second.

Plus, Mikoto had reached her limit.

She glanced over to see Shokuhou pull the elf to her ample chest so she would be safely out of the way and then pull a TV remote from the handbag she wore diagonally across her chest.

The look on Shokuhou’s face said she was ready to go.

Academy City’s #3 Level 5, the Railgun, grinned and spoke to the woman behind the counter.

She was declaring war.

“''By the way, were you aware I’m an abolitionist''?”

“''Eh''? ''Huh''?”