Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:MvM Chapter5 (section)

===Part 19===

The battle had begun.

However, that didn’t mean Mikoto and Shokuhou raised war cries and charged the capital with arrows and spears pouring down on them like rain.

The change was more like a wave.

It began with a quiet murmur of activity among the merchants in Tuonela. Expensive furniture stopped arriving in the city, food was bought up based on no apparent plan, the money and bonds the merchants possessed were exchanged for other forms, and an influential merchant who had been living in the city for 100 years suddenly vanished.

When the guards finally noticed something was amiss, they caught a merchant trying to escape the supposedly convenient and comfortable capital and got him to tell them what was going on.

His answer was simple.

The value of fulgurites was crashing.



“After all, they’re more valuable than platinum or diamonds and their value is stable too.”

Bikini armor Misaka Mikoto grinned as she kept low and watched the chaos in the capital from afar.

There were no bank accounts or ATMs in this world. To protect their assets, the king and lords converted their money to small fulgurites and stored those in a safe. Because even special-made safes were only so large. When paying for the construction of a cathedral that would take decades to complete, a pile of gold coins would be too bulky and heavy to transport, so major contracts would use small fulgurites instead. The same was true of deals between kingdoms, so the value of each kingdom’s currency was ultimately determined by how many fulgurites it could buy and that determined the exchange rates between kingdoms.

But at the same time, fulgurites were no more than glass.

When lightning struck the ground, clumps of sand would be turned to glass by the heat. That glass was the mystical jewel (in a world where people could not yet control high-voltage electric currents) known as fulgurites.

Which meant…

“C’mon, Misaka-san. Keep those things coming☆”

“I’m working on it!!”

With a brutal zap of bursting air, electricity shot out.

Electricity was not a household technology here and there was no lightning magic. In Celesaqphere, fulgurites were only created when lightning happened to strike from the heavens above. That made them fairly rare jewels, but not so for Mikoto.

In a single night, she could create more fulgurites than existed in this entire world.

And of course, fulgurites were only so valuable because of their rarity. The fact that bioelectricity was experience points here may have also given a religious basis for that value, though. But even then, what would happen if someone mass-produced them to the point that she could easily be crushed to death if the pile were to collapse?

“''Hyperinflation''.” Dancer Shokuhou grinned. “The biggest denomination of money on Earth was 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars, I believe. And that would only buy you some soap or a towel. Producing a ton of money doesn’t make you rich – it just devalues the money itself☆”

Then they only had to flood the market with all those fulgurites.

If they were fake, the people of this world could gather appraisers and crack down on counterfeiting, but unfortunately the fulgurites Mikoto made were the real deal. That meant not even an expert could tell the difference. And because fulgurites were created by unpredictable lightning instead of being mined from land someone owned, it was hard to apply mining certificates to them. If lightning struck in your garden and created a fulgurite, it was authentic. Where it came from did not influence its value.

Sparks crackled from Mikoto’s bangs.

“Their army is around 80 thousand. That means they need to supply 240 thousand meals a day. The fulgurite crash will reduce the contents of the kingdom’s treasury to worthless glass, so they won’t be able to even think about fighting. They’ll be too busy dealing with their newfound debt.”

“And the capital below was a problem because of all the knights, adventurers, merchants, bandits, and so on who could be hired to fight, but ''once the money is gone, so are they''.”

On top of all that, this economic attack did the most damage to the people who had gone out of their way to convert their money into valuable fulgurites.

The exploited elves hadn’t had any money in the first place, so this would hardly affect them.

“Being able to target a single class for destruction is pretty funny.”

Once it was known there was no money to be made in the capital, the visitors would quickly leave. They wouldn’t be able to pay for their own necessities and they might end up being conscripted or forced to hand over their private property to the king, so it was a high-risk, no-return situation. They would be better off setting up a tent out in the field.

The rapid drop in population and private property would bleed the capital to death.

It came down to arguments.

The people wanted to leave the city and the army wouldn’t let them.

Before, attacking the king would mean making an enemy of the world.

But now he was a nuisance to the world around him.

“I think the stage is set.”

“Then let’s get going☆”

The two girls got up from where they were hiding.

On the way to the battlefield, they heard some voices.

The voices came from a formerly enslaved succubus and nymph who had stayed with them after being freed from Valhalla.

“It’s the goddesses. They’re the goddesses.”

“Yes, the two goddesses who protect us while fighting their eternal conflict.”

“?”

“They must mean us,” said Shokuhou, brushing her hair off her shoulder.

“They’re being ridiculous,” said bikini armor Mikoto with a self-deprecating smile.

But Patissiet was not smiling.

Misaka Mikoto and Shokuhou Misaki had disagreed on what to do. They had taken separate paths, causing confusion on their side, but through that they had saved a great many people and then joined back together without any delay to their original plan.

''They were opposing storms who had saved more people than they would have had they agreed and everything had gone according to plan.

The two goddesses who appeared after breaking through an invisible barrier were said to eternally fight each other, but that power was exactly what kept this world turning and protected the people’s lives.

In what meaningful way did this differ from that myth?