Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Railgun Chapter4 (section)

===Part 1===

This was supposed to be Tokiwadai Middle School.

It was the most prestigious of the five fancy schools in the School Garden.

But Misaka Mikoto looked grim as she spied on the schoolyard from behind cover.

She had lost track of how many times she had repeated the same phrase today.

“Well, this sucks.”



“How about we take a vote? Who thinks Akazame-sensei is guilty?”

“Guilty!!” “Guilty!!” “Guilty!!” “Guilty!!” “Guilty!!” “Guilty!!”

The stadium-level roar was horrifying.

Those were cheers. All those voices were joined in anticipation and celebration.

The person using the megaphone used an old-fashioned dialect, but she was in fact a young girl. And the person about to be physically yanked from the ground by the neck was a female teacher.

No men were allowed in the School Garden, so the angry mob surrounding them was also entirely female.

“Do they really expect us to accept these new school rule proposals!? What right do they have to ban us from wearing silk or synthetic underwear!? What right do they have to demand we only wear cotton underwearrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!?”

Shouts of support.

“What right do they have to ban the use of deodorant spray!? What right do they have to insist we only use certain brands of soap or shampoo!? There’s no rhyme or reason to it, so I can only imagine it’s based on some sick desires held by one of the grownups!! Find the sicko dictating our private lives while hiding behind the rest of the faculty!! Drag them out here so we can string them uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup!!”

More shouts of support.

“They claim to have created the perfect environment to prepare us for life, but that was nothing but a lie! They don’t even see us as human! This place is a love doll factory where they transform us to cater to all their perverted ideals!! Death to all the teachers using the rules as an excuse to sexually harass us alllllllllllllllllllllllllllll!!”

Thunderous shouts of support.

The shouting group was not some mob that had broken in. It was made of all the same girls who normally lived such pleasant lives in the School Garden.

Mikoto couldn’t bear to watch.

She agreed the new school rule proposals were awful, but they were just that: proposals. They would probably be rejected even if the students didn’t lift a finger.

“Yet they’re doing all this.”

Mikoto’s gaze focused on something that was perfectly innocent. You could find one at most any school. She didn’t know the technical term for it, but it was the metal pole used when raising a flag. It even had a device at the bottom that let you turn a crank to raise the flag.

But no one gathered around it had a flag with them.

The end of the thick wire was tied into a loop.

It went without saying that was meant to go around someone’s neck.

The meaning was clear. That shape itself was a well-known symbol.

(We haven’t even had dinner ''since that happened'', and they’re already doing this? A sanitized upbringing is a scary thing.)

It was absurd to think the upper classes never caused trouble. Did they never explode no matter what happened to them? Quite the opposite. Just look at all the wars and revolutions that had been fought around the world. No matter how graceful, refined, and ladylike the girl, she would still shout “kill” if the conditions were right.

This kind of thing was common in the west and these girls did love copying western culture.

(It doesn’t help they never learned how to vent their anger.)

Maybe some blame lay with the teachers for raising them that way. The students at a school like this probably questioned things less often than average. They weren’t used to feeling malice and they were easily influenced, so when it started to set in, it spread shockingly fast.

The girls raised here according to the adults’ wishes had completely derailed from those wishes and started rioting. It was like a failed attempt at winemaking that left the barrel full of mold.

People who tried to live pure lives without ever considering what that meant were easily shaken when the rules themselves came into question.

Pure crystals were fragile to external shocks.

Maybe Mikoto hadn’t been affected because she had exposed herself to enough impurities while wandering the streets on a daily basis.

(Even Shokuhou’s brainwashed world is better than this. In fact, where is that she-fox right now? That schemer must have taken in far more impurities than me.)

The megaphone voice continued to agitate the mob of girls.

If Mikoto didn’t intervene soon, the teacher standing up on the “gallows” would end up dangling from her neck like a mascot phone strap, but if she rushed in without a plan, she would end up ''like that'' as well. She was at the top of the ranks when it came to her power as an individual, but a battle against hundreds of high-level espers at once was something else entirely. Plus, even Academy City’s #3 had to worry about compatibility issues with a potential opponent.

Not to mention that she had to worry about keeping her friends Shirai, Uiharu, and Saten safe.

But more than any of that, no one won if a deadly fight broke out within Tokiwadai or the School Garden. They would only be pitting allies against each other.

Mikoto’s only enemy here was the agitator using the abnormal situation to transform the crowd of girls into an angry mob.

(On the other hand…)

She looked to the side.

When things got this bad, it was probably best to call in Anti-Skill from outside the School Garden, but that wasn’t an option this time and the reason why was right in front of her.

It was only three steps away.

The megafloat lightweight aluminum alloy used to build floating airports had been used to swiftly and secretly fortify the ground, but it hadn’t been perfect. Some squares of ground several meters long were just ''missing''.

Yes.

The blue of the open sky spread out before her.

The School Garden was currently floating at an altitude of 5000m.

She heard a deep thrumming.

The sound was even heavier than a chainsaw’s roar. It reminded her of a military transport plane’s engine, but the principle behind it probably wasn’t related to aircraft.

It was more like a flying car.

Or the coaxial rotors used for aerial photography drones.

(Geez. If all these cubes of earth crumbled, how many rotors the size of circular fields would we find inside? I’m sure they’re linked in parallel using a grid pattern, so shutting down individual ones would only imbalance the entire structure and send us crashing to the surface.)

That was why the ordinary laws and Academy City’s unique rules did not apply here.

She had a very physical reason she could not expect support from the adults. The entire area had been cut away before declaring its independence. No one could escape the aerial cage. Anyone who carelessly let it slip that they disagreed with the central agitator would be snitched on and ''end up like that''.

Misaka Mikoto’s exhalations were white.

How had this even happened?

She once repeated the same phrase she had used so many times today she had lost count.

“Well, this sucks.”