Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:AgneseSS Chapter3 (section)

===Part 2===

They needed to all be on the same page, so they held a strategy meeting in a dark parking lot.

“This unseen magician is using an ordinary delivery app to gather the materials they need.” Agnese raised a finger. “Namely, human bodies. The boys and girls who pedal on over to the destination, unaware that they are the true product being ordered. They deliver themselves to the execution ground. They enter the abandoned building, thinking something is suspicious, and then they’re killed right then and there. The magician vanishes along with their ‘product’, so all that remains is a large pool of blood and the deliverer’s bike. Who is responsible for such a cultish and inefficient ceremony? Are they after the bones or the organs?”

“Ugh.” Angelene was already groaning.

That alone made it sound like no more than a gruesome crime.

Simple tasks had a way of dulling people’s inquisitiveness. Pedaling a bike loaded with some kind of package was obviously going to wear you out. As someone made delivery after delivery over the course of a day, their thoughts would dull and they would stop questioning the information displayed on their phone. Once they became no more than a cog in the phone-guided machine, the fateful order would arrive.

Their phone’s map could not be wrong.

They were protected by a vast system that everyone used.

So they would be fine.

And once those assumptions prevented them from actually thinking, they would not hesitate to walk right into an abandoned building. Even though the international corporation that had supplied the map did not actually send out guards to protect the people using it.

Since she had been working just that kind of job, Angelene was very hesitant to ask further.

But she also wanted to know what all they knew at the moment.

“Um, uh, do they use a different abandoned building each time?”

“Obviously. The phone they use to order and the building set as the destination are all stolen. That’s why checking through the electronic order data isn’t enough to identify the magician. That would only lead us to the Dietrich or Wilhelm whose name was used for the order.”

Lucia frowned.

People with dirty minds (which she was proven to have) must have had an excess of energy because her bleeding did not slow her down a bit.

“How is the ‘ordinary’ world viewing these incidents?”

“The teenagers who work that bike delivery job tend to be gathering money to run away from home, so any suspicions have been buried in an ocean of statistical data.”

Was this a clever way of abusing the system, or did modern people just not care about strangers anymore?

Either way, the magician was continuing to use that loophole to acquire human bodies.

They clearly had a task that required them to continue taking lives.

“Our sting operation is simple,” said Agnese. “These delivery apps tend to give the job to whoever’s fastest. When an order is made, the addresses of the restaurant and the delivery location are displayed and any nearby part-timers can show their intention to fulfill it by tapping the ‘accept job’ button. So as soon as we see a job with an abandoned building as the goal, we just have to tap that button faster than anyone else.”

Of course. Ordinary users would just have the address displayed for them. They would have no way of knowing who lived there or if that location was even occupied. The overhead view on the map did not tell you what kind of building it was. That was why the past users had fallen for it and charged right into that spiderweb.

On the other hand, if you linked the app up to a database that could display the ownership of any address it was given, the magician’s trap was easy to detect. They only had to work out which of the many available jobs was to an abandoned building.

Lucia placed a hand on her slender chin.

“Does that use church data?”

“Unlike Tokyo or New York, Europe uses a lot of apartments and offices built hundreds of years ago. Even if the area is being modernized, the church can intervene in the name of preserving the scenery. The church has a strong connection to the real estate business. If people live somewhere, people will eventually die there, but the intermediary company doesn’t want the property to lose value over that, so they always make sure to call in the church to exorcise the place☆”

That gave the Roman Catholic Church a ton of city information that they could use to proselytize. And they did not let anyone else use that data, of course. Convenience stores on opposite sides of the same intersection sometimes received very different levels of business. In the same way, the church always checked their data to see where to build their churches and where to distribute pamphlets on the streets to proselytize most efficiently.

Agnese licked her lips while viewing a list of data that had started with old maps and continued to be updated until it even had the latest smart buildings.

“Now, then. I think we’re ready to get started.”

An ordinary person could have accomplished this same thing by checking the city hall database, but they would have needed to know there was a trap waiting for them to even consider doing so. And the heavy users who spent all day pedaling their bikes on the job could, as previously stated, stop questioning anything due to the exhaustion and repetitive actions.

“Now, then. Now, then. Now, then.”

“Ahhh,” sobbed Angelene, but a punishment was a punishment.

Today she would have to work toward bringing peace to the world.