Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Biohacker Chapter2 (section)

===Part 3===

''Buzz, buzz, buzz.

The cicadas really were loudest when the sun was high overhead.

“Why aren’t you in school? At your age, you should have entrance exams to prepare for.”

An exasperated voice spoke on a roadside that was already shimmering with heat that morning.

It was hardly fair how a beautiful older girl could look stunning no matter where she was, from a party hall to a park bathroom.

But the pointy-haired boy gave her a dubious look.

“Classes are at irregular hours ''because'' we’re preparing for entrance exams. The teachers are so busy doing practice interviews with the kids hoping to get a letter of recommendation that us normal kids have had study hall after study hall.”

“That doesn’t mean you can just skip school, you know?”

“Yeah, well, what are you doing wandering around in your school uniform on a weekday morning?”

“Oops.”

“You act like a capable older girl and you’re definitely a grownup girl, but you seem more like me deep down. Do you even go to the school that uniform’s from?”

Kamijou Touma gave Bare-Midriff High School Girl Kumokawa Seria a skeptical look, but he could not break through her jokey atmosphere. A super high school girl’s personal space was inviolable.

“Now, you never answered my question.” She put a hand on her hip. “What are you doing here?”

“Nothing really.”

“They do say the criminal returns to the scene of the crime.”

“I’d rather you didn’t put it like that.”

Kamijou kept things casual as he sighed and moved his chin to point at the ordinary ground.

Yes, there was nothing here.

Despite the excitement from the day before.

Heat shimmered up from the asphalt as if to mock them.

“It’s all been cleaned up without a trace. I was aware this kind of mysterious phenomenon could happen when some rich kid drunkenly destroyed a street sign or something, but the scale was way bigger here. This was more than knocking over and breaking a sign.”

After all, that dragon had been around three stories tall when standing on its hind legs. He had stopped at putting it into hibernation since he had been hesitant to kill it, but what had happened to it afterwards?

Someone had not wanted it making the news and becoming the talk of the town.

But based on what he knew of Anti-Skill, he doubted it was them that cleaned this up. Running across them while out late at night was unbelievably annoying, but he knew they did their job. It was not like them to cover up a crime due to special circumstances.

That meant someone else had done this.

And if that someone else could hide all this, they could probably make a corpse or two disappear just as easily.

The beautiful older girl used her flip phone to search the online news.

“It looks like the story was passed off as a propane gas container rupturing behind that multi-tenant building.”

“That sounds plausible enough, but did you see any of those big gray metal canisters in the alley yesterday? Cause I didn’t. I’m pretty sure the place received town gas through underground pipes.”

Kumokawa only shrugged.

The motion was enough for her large chest to jiggle a little. Delightful.

And whether the building used propane or town gas, those two knew all too well that the fire yesterday had not been a simple accident.

The upperclassman girl made a grownup suggestion.

“It’s probably best to keep out of this from here on. The immediate threat is gone at least.”

“You said that dragon was a chimera creature made by a Biohacker…so through genetic manipulation or however that all works, but could an individual really create and raise a creature that big?”

“…”

“What if it’s a group instead of an individual and what if they have more than just that dragon? Then aren’t we in trouble? They might have learned what we look like and who we are.”

That was why he had wanted to see it on the news.

He had wanted to hear that the incident was over and that everyone involved had been arrested and he had wanted to see footage of the tough-looking heroes in fancy suits carrying box after box of evidence out of the secret lab.

He had wanted to know nothing more was going to happen.

And yet…

“I wonder what happened to him,” he muttered while surrounded by the noisy cicada cries.

His words sounded oddly tranquil.

After the dragon, he had punched out the researcher who had released and guided the dragon.

“He should have been arrested by Anti-Skill, so I can’t imagine he could do anything more. But then why didn’t the newspapers or TV news say anything about what happened?”