Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume3 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 2===

He was afraid of screwing it up, so he started by drawing marks on her back with a marker.

“Hamazura, that tickles.”

“Stay still.”

The old book had a brush-drawn diagram with no perspective or attempt to make it look three-dimensional. The indicated locations of the organs were clearly not right. Maybe it was like the difference between an aerial photograph of the clouds and the isobars on the weather forecast map. He wondered if this was what all traditional Japanese medicine was like as he drew Xs on his girlfriend’s body. She had even removed her bra and was holding her chest in her hands while showing him her smooth back. He thought his heart was going to burst every time she squirmed from the ticklishness. Even he knew that reaction was inappropriate given the circumstances. Once he finished that, it was finally time to start. He faced the girl while she lay face down on the container lab’s work table like she was sunbathing.

The moxa used for the moxibustion was like fluffy cotton, but he actually had to set it on fire.

It felt wrong doing that on her soft skin and he could even permanently scar her if he screwed it up.

“…”

His fear came to the forefront now that it was time to do it, but this was the only way to help her with the fever.

He fought the desire to shut his eyes and placed a small pile of “fuel” on her soft skin. He worked at the lighter with a trembling hand, but he kept failing. Once he finally had a small flame, he slowly moved it in close.

“Nh.”

“A-are you okay, Takitsubo?”

“I’m fine.”

He continued the process a few more times. He had his doubts, but when she wiped the sweat from her brow, no more sweat beaded up. It did seem to be working.

He could not thank the hakama girl enough.

He could not waste this chance she had given them, so they had to approach ''Academy City’s Greatest Taboo''.

That card-sized hard drive had been labelled with the word “Lifeline”.

Aneri must have decided the data would be too small to see on his phone because she displayed it a flat screen monitor in the lab instead. It was a series of numbers.

It looked like a calculation sheet made with spreadsheet software, but even that was enough to make the delinquent boy’s head hurt. Maybe it was important data, but he had no idea what he was supposed to focus on.

“This looks like materials data,” said Takitsubo after peering at it from the side.

“Materials?”

“Whether they’re beneficial or harmful, the dark side does a lot of research.” She pointed at one of the numbers. “They’re also building a lot of military weapons. But doesn’t it seem odd? Academy City is a mass consumer and it only has so much land since it’s surrounded by walls. You can’t just dig into the ground here and find oil or ores. So where do they get all those materials from?”

“Where? Isn’t that what the cooperative institutions around the world are for? They can work out a deal with them.”

“But how can they do that without leaving any record of it?”

She pointed at another number.

If a citizens group monitoring the flow of money and materials could reveal a secret, then it had never been part of the dark side to begin with.

“Look at this. The dark side is using far more materials than the total amount brought in from outside the city. Cutting off the fat and redistributing it to themselves would not be enough for this. The amount the dark side uses is several times larger. This would show up in the records no matter what you did. Important people like the Board of Directors and its Chairman can only cover up so much. This is too much. It’s well past what you could hide by cooking the books.”

“But then…”

He trailed off when Aneri opened a new window. A single point on a map of Academy City was colored in red. There was a secret there.

“They have an entrance and exit that doesn’t leave any records,” said the track suit girl while viewing the screen.

There were several files that appeared to be saved from message boards and social media pages. Reading through them showed a certain point in common.

If you boarded a train between 4 hours and 30 minutes, you would be taken to another world.

Takitsubo pointed at that bizarre statement.

“There is a way of reaching it and we should see hints of it in the rumors told around the city. Like the ‘!’ signs, a deadly train, kidnappers at the amusement park, babies in the coin lockers, or an underground construction zone where you can dump anything you don’t want found. But none of that gets at the real truth.”

“You mean…?”

“Academy City doesn’t promote recycling so much just because it wants to make the most of its limited resources. ''Sending things back to be recycled over and over again masks how much materials are actually being used.'' They can’t have an investigation revealing that we dump out several times more trash than materials we take in, right? That would violate conservation of mass. So they needed to make it hard to compare those two values. It’s a form of laundering.”

Why was that sleight of hand necessary? How did they reach the impossible result of more waste than raw materials? What was this secret that no one wanted getting out?

''Academy City’s Greatest Taboo.

This was the identity of that term they had heard so many times today.

“It…isn’t closed off? There’s a secret route through the walls surrounding Academy City!?”

That could not be. For better or for worse, Academy City was cut off from the outside world. Those thick walls prevented their tech from spreading to the world at large because that could lead to disorder and chaos.

Hamazura used to be part of Skill Out. That was a group of the boys and girls who had dropped out of Academy City but had nowhere to go since they could not get out of the city.

They had been trapped. They had dropped out of school, but those walls had kept them here. If you wanted to take a trip outside the city for just a few days, you needed to submit a ton of paperwork and receive a nanodevice injection. Because if you tried leave without using the official gates, you could be killed to prevent a data leak. There had been burglars and muggers in the back alleys, but none of those expert thieves had dared go anywhere near the walls.

If there was a way to freely move in and out, they may not have felt so much pressure. They could have made a place for themselves.

Their former leader, Komaba Ritoku, might not have had to fight and die.

“…”

But the dark side had torn down that number one assumption like it was nothing.

That counterfeiter had stored that information on a card-sized hard drive labeled “Lifeline”. Had he thought he could use that information to get some dark side bigshots to save him?

He must have never imagined he would instead have his brains blown out by a paparazzo. Hamazura was at the center of all this, but he still did not know if that had been planned or a spontaneous decision.

“It’s deep below Academy City.” Takitsubo Rikou calmly read aloud something on such a large scale that talk of an alternate dimension would have sounded more realistic. “The world’s largest particle accelerator is built directly below the city walls, so people are told that digging in that area could break the accelerator’s seal and expose them to radiation and other risks. That was meant to convince everyone that no one would be dumb enough to try it.”

The diagram they found looked like a puzzle ring. It seemed to carefully avoid the circular accelerator facility, but this was a tunnel built by the dark side. There was no chance it met all the proper safety standards.

That was the dark side’s lifeline.

They had built it to continue pumping fuel into their illicit research and its construction showed they did not care at all if they brought chaos to the world. It really was the greatest taboo. It was a dark umbilical cord that could wipe out the Kiharas and everyone else if it was cut off.

“I doubt Anti-Skill knows about this,” said Takitsubo. “So they won’t be able to block it off. We can safely escape the city if we use it.”

“…”

The red light displayed by Aneri was in District 10, the city’s biggest slum. The taboo no one wanted was hidden below the district everyone had abandoned.

It was unclear if it had always had this name. They may have changed the name periodically to help hide the truth. All the scattered information was fragmentary witness accounts and some of it would likely be intentional misinformation.

But that taboo’s gaping mouth had sat deep underground all this time.

Like a nightmarish symbol of freedom.

The dot on the map displayed on the small screen had the following name displayed next to it: Vanishing Tunnel.

That was the name of their final destination. Anyone who arrived there was given a ticket to another world.