Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item3 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 1===

“Fox I // Sigh. Another job? But we’re only just finishing up the last one.”

This was one of the countless games available in the app store.

Specifically, it was the simple chat on the home screen of a puzzle game.

The text from these cheap message services was not automatically indexed by the major search engines. Plus, if the management staff had very little focus on crisis management, they wouldn’t even check for suspicious messages. That meant so much could get through without question, so a throwaway account was all you needed to use the chat as a contact point for some fairly dangerous transactions. And if it was discovered, you only had to move on to another game and another account.

The person frowning at their horizontally-oriented phone was a high school girl in a white miniskirt military uniform. The pale-skinned girl wore her long flaxen hair in a single braid…which people often said looked like a fried shrimp.

Her name was Inoue Fox.

In her other hand, she casually held someone by the collar. That person had some clear plastic wrap wrapped all around him, but that was to prevent his blood and guts from spilling out of ''the many sharp lacerations covering his body''.

“(Hidden Name) // You mean you’re not done yet?”

“Fox I // We’re finishing it now. I did tell you luring out a hacker would take some doing. He’s the one that hacked into the Bank to check through the students’ DNA maps.”

After dumping the person in a plastic container, she focused on typing on her phone. ''I’d really prefer a layout that let me type one-handed,'' she complained, pouting her lips.

“Fox I // Number 000 demands we execute every single person responsible for a Judgment death. This guy took a job from that science cult leader to search out sacrifices who met whatever her conditions were, right? Without this hacker, Minamioki Sarusa wouldn’t have-”

“Fox I // That was too long, so it got cut off. Oops. *wouldn’t have died. We need to give him a proper ‘reward’ for that.”

“(Hidden Name) // Be quick about it. That is your job.”

“Fox I // Yeah, yeah.”

With that complete, the girl fought the temptation of the campaign guaranteeing an LR ticket and closed the app. While that sounded like a good deal at first, actually doing the math showed it was more expensive than testing your luck with 100 rolls.

A short distance away more girls in white miniskirt military uniforms were passing the time leaning against the wall or seated at a table.

The four of them were a team.

Yamada Coyote, who had short chestnut hair, held a hand to her forehead.

“I feel like we’ve had a lot of work recently. Does no one respect Judgment anymore?”

“It is concerning,” said Satou Lycaon, a brown-skinned and busty girl with silver ringlets who was massaging her shoulder.

Tanaka Jackal, a flat-chested girl with wavy black hair, nodded in agreement.

“We need to inject some violence into the city to restore Judgment’s reputation.”

That was their job.

They couldn’t let the criminals have the last laugh. If they allowed it to happen even once, the criminals would grow arrogant, resistance would grow, and victims out on patrol would become more common.

So they had to strike back before that happened.

Judgment was actually prioritized above Anti-Skill.

Ignorance of this fact was no excuse.

If anyone was foolish enough to take a Judgment life, they would be taught quite thoroughly how foolish that had been. By others from the same organization.

“Number 000 is a code indicating a special emergency. But if it becomes the new status quo, it loses all meaning.”

Inoue Fox duplicated a document camouflaged as a meaningless corrupted file before opening it on her phone.

The plastic container next to her was filled with red and black. The number of arms and legs matched up, but none of them were intact. They had been slashed to pieces. Letting it all stay in the general shape of a person was only meant to increase the pain as much as possible.

And despite all this, the bloody mouth was moving.

''He was alive.

The extreme sharpness of the cutting edge had been a bad thing for the victim in this case.

“Ah…”

She slammed the lid shut.

Without even looking in that direction. Inoue Fox used her entire palm to paste a shipping label on top as if to seal it shut.

“Where did we decide to send this eyesore again?”

“District 9’s Moe Bells.”

Yamada Coyote frowned at Inoue Fox’s answer.

“Oh, the poor people there. It’s not like they had anything to do with it.”

“Making the most use out of a corpse is proper etiquette for a killer, remember? We can’t achieve our goal in this case unless we scare the geeks lurking below the surface. And if you want to silence the hackers in this city, there’s no better place.”

Inoue Fox explained while pressing a large button on the wall.

With a heavy metallic rumble, the entire wall began to move. No, that was a metal shutter. They were currently inside a garage.

And a mass of composite armor weighing more than 30 tons sat in the center.

That was a HsAAt-07 Matchlock. It was equipped with thick rubber panels to avoid damaging the pavement, but it was in fact an anti-drone tank with a giant gun and continuous tracks.

“Who’d ever guess a prestigious school had something like this hidden away?” said Yamada Coyote with a smile.

The thick metal shutter opened to reveal Nagatenjouki Academy in the middle of the night. The school was relatively new, but it was an elite prep school that rivaled Tokiwadai and Kirigaoka in the field of esper power development. This garage was located in the athletic club building.

The leader, Inoue Fox, clapped her hands twice.

“Okay, everyone. Hop on!”

“Dammit, I’m improving my score this time!!”

The other girls used the hatches on the gun and tank itself to board the tank. They did so with a practiced ease. They were accustomed to driving this thing across Academy City.

Satou Lycaon sighed inside the thick vehicle.

“I knew we couldn’t trust those outsiders.”

“You mean those journalists? The Frees, was it?”

“All they had to do was gather the personal information and common gathering places of the Sadistic Dolls and Item. They weren’t even fighters, so of course they got burned when they tried to attack. If only they hadn’t gotten themselves killed before they could send us what info they’d gathered.”

By leaving the plastic container outside, a cargo transport drone would fly in, read the packing slip’s barcode, and then carry it off into the night sky.

“It’s already the 31st, the last day of summer break. Judgment needs to set an example, so we can’t afford to oversleep, forget our textbooks, or otherwise embarrass ourselves once September starts. If you don’t want us to end up on the kill list, then we need to get this job done with enough time left to prepare for the new term!”

“Understood.”

“Will do.”

“Roger☆ Score, score, I am so getting a high score!!”

These four were Judgment Branch 000, aka the Special Exception Cleanup Team.

Judgment had no official records of their existence and they handled only Number 000s. These monsters existed to physically prevent justice from becoming inoperable.

The girls in white military uniforms tore noisily out into the night, but to them, the anti-drone tank was no more than a toy to set the stage.

Judgment relied on esper powers more than next-gen weapons to deal with criminals.

“Do we know their general location?”

“if the data we received is accurate, they are at District 16’s landmark. There shouldn’t be any decent people there at this hour on the 31st. And anyone who isn’t decent is none of our concern.”

An anti-tank drone required a few different things to function.

1. The accuracy to track a drone flying a complex path at more than Mach 1.7.

2. The ability to set up a barrage capable of shooting down a swarm of attacking drones with 100% accuracy.

3. Cheap enough ammunition to shoot down enemy drones for far less money than the drones cost.

…#3 was surprisingly difficult. For example, surface-to-air missiles packed full of ultra-precise equipment would mean paying a ton for each cheap drone destroyed, which would mean a financial blow for only the defending side. However, being too cheap for anything more than a peashooter of a machinegun was meaningless if drones managed to breach your defenses.

Thus, the Matchlock used large explosions that covered a wide area.

Specifically, it used thermobaric shells.

These were derived from fuel-air explosives, but if the explosion happened in the empty sky, there was no concern of accidentally bombing civilians. When striking a wall rather than aiming at a point, precise targeting and a large number of shells became unnecessary. That allowed for a high interception rate along with an overwhelming reduction in cost. The tank only needed the bare minimum of a radar and each disposable warhead didn’t need a small computer loaded in it.

But what happened if this weapon’s intended usage was ignored and it was fired at an altitude of 0m – that is, ''on the surface'' where so many people and buildings were located?

Inoue Fox actually sounded bored.

“Okay, fire the first leveling round.”

“If this first wave was enough to kill any of them, I really doubt we’d have been called in. And it doesn’t improve my score.”

“Following procedures is best. For justice, anyway. Fire.”

The HsAAT-07’s gun borrowed the design of a warship’s quick-firing gun, so it could launch more than 20 thermobaric shells a minute even while the tank was in motion.

And they would soar through the air like a long throw in baseball.