Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Biohacker Chapter4 (section)

===Part 4===

The following morning, the booth door opened and Kumokawa Seria put her hands on her hips in an exasperated way.

“I’m surprised you two can sleep with your mouths hanging open like that.”

“Huh!?”

Kamijou immediately woke up, but Mitsuari appeared to still be slumbering. She was breathing gently with her head on his shoulder, but his movement shook her awake.

She rubbed her eyes.

“Ugh, I feel all sticky. Not letting me take a shower really isn’t fair.”

“You mean from sweat, right?” he said. “You don’t mean anything more than that, right?”

“Nh, hhh? …I’m all stiff. It was my first time doing that, so my body doesn’t feel quite right. I’m still tingling in places.”

“Boy.”

Kumokawa grabbed him by the collar and lifted him up, but there was nothing he could tell her. He did not remember when he had fallen asleep!!

“(I set up this sleepover, so why was I the one left out!?)”

“?”

Fortunately, Kumokawa Seria did not seem short on cash. The manga café’s late-night course ended at the same time as the first train, so they left and visited a spa that was open in the early morning. After washing off their sweat, it was time to visit a convenience store for breakfast. 5 in the morning was too early for breakfast at a café.

Mitsuari was surprised by the blessings of a big city while she started eating the corner of the roast beef and sliced onion sandwich she held in both hands.

“We can’t go home, but we can still get by fairly well, can’t we?’

“From toothbrushes to movie tickets, you can buy most anything at convenience stores these days.”

“Do they sell shoes anywhere? Walking around in these is tiring.”

Kumokawa breathed an exasperated sigh at the other two’s casual conversation.

“Have you already forgotten you were attacked in the bathroom yesterday? Like I said, this is a temporary solution – it won’t last long. We need to break into L.S.S.’s fortress before they can corner us.”

As one would expect from a giant corporation, their HQ building was located in tidy District 3. That was an area full of government buildings and corporate headquarters, so students rarely went there. The morning train was fairly empty and they did not have to worry about getting caught in rush hour.

Kumokawa explained why this was.

“They say the poor are always busy and the opposite is true as well. The rich tend not to get into work until after lunch.”

She guided them down a deserted block.

The building they wanted was at a corner between neatly-maintained major roads. It was a distinctive tri-tower with between 30 and 40 stories. Three tall buildings formed the corners of a triangle and were connected by midair walkways. The area around the buildings was covered in greenery, so if not for the sign, they might have mistaken it for a park.

Kamijou looked up at the tri-tower.

“I was expecting something more…I guess you would say biotechnological? Y’know, shelters all over the place and the employees and guards all wearing octopus-like masks.”

“Car companies don’t build their own HQ either. This is where they deal with the business rights and put together projects before actually doing the work.”

Kamijou’s mind filled with question marks when he tried to imagine what a biotechnology project would be, but companies came in all forms. Still, he could guess that cloning humans did not just happen on accident.

In other words, if that dragon came from a company, then someone had approved that project because they saw some apparent profit there. Someone had spent all night creating a proposal and gathering materials for a slideshow, they had made their presentation with a projector in a conference room, and the project had been approved. That made the whole thing seem almost comical.

“How exactly are we going to sneak inside?”

“That’s the easy part.”

Kumokawa Seria pushed something into Kamijou and Mitsuari’s arms.

They were raincoats large enough to cover their entire bodies and dust masks that covered their faces.

“We live in convenient times. You can buy handy things like this at 24/7 discount stores.”

“Um.”

Before Kamijou could say anything, she put on her mask and raincoat.

Congratulations! Your BUSTY HIGH SCHOOL GIRL evolved into OCTOPUS ALIEN!

“Let’s break through the glass front door. No one will notice right now.”

With a loud crash, the deactivated automatic door’s glass shattered.

The culprit was the firehose Kumokawa Seria held. The pressurized water was bad enough on its own, but the destructive force increased considerably when she dropped some pebbles and metal screws into the stream. At the very least, it did more than a commercial air gun would.

“Don’t use the additives when spraying a guard! That’ll tear through their flesh and bone!!”

“There’s something wrong with you!!”

The L.S.S. HQ’s open grounds looked something like a park, but that was a problem for the company here. It was equipped with proper fire hydrants instead of simple fire extinguishers.

While dragging the long, long hoses along, Kamijou and the others entered the first floor lobby through the shattered glass wall.

“I thought for sure you were going to use some kind of hypnotism to slip right past the guards.”

“Why would I use my special abilities when I’m wearing a mask to hide my identity? Not doing what you could do is a good way to muddy the waters.”

The firehose was contained in a reel, but it was still only so long and they could not drag it around forever.

“Mugyuh!?”

The sound of those loose leather shoes suddenly stopped.

Kamijou heard a weird voice, so he looed back to see Mitsuari had fallen on her butt with the raincoat covering up her summer uniform. Her hose had apparently reached the end of its length, so it had gone taut without warning and she had lost her balance.

“O-oww.”

“Hurry back to your feet, idiot!!”

“H-how dare you call me an idiot! Who do you think you are!? I am Mitsua-…”

“Why would you use your real name, you absolute dumbass!!”

A firehose must not have been as threatening as a knife or gun because the private guards bravely charged straight toward them and Kamijou was forced to knock them away with the pressurized water.

(If not for the hoses, we wouldn’t have to worry about this single point of entrance. They’ll have a fire hydrant inside the building, right?)

“Senpai, which way to the server room!?”

He turned back and shouted just in time to see Kumokawa Seria throw aside her firehose and leave through the very same automatic door she had destroyed herself.

“Hey!?”

“It’s fine. I was never planning to break in through the main entrance! Now, you need to follow me or you’ll be trapped in there!!”

She gestured for them to follow, so she must not have simply lost her marbles. He quickly grabbed fallen Mitsuari’s arm, followed after the older girl, and was very nearly hit by something like a guillotine.

“Whoa!!”

Mitsuari practically slid along the floor while face down.

After they had rolled out, metal shutters dropped down to cover up everything.

“This is the same method used by South American banks,” explained Kumokawa who had left ahead of them. “Lure the criminals inside and then trap them in there.”

“But now we can’t get inside.”

“And that’s fine. The point was to seal off the building so no one can get in or out.”

She pulled out a red fire extinguisher that looked a lot weaker than the previous firehoses.

Needless to say, she did not plan to use it to extinguish a fire or to break through the metal shutter.

She popped the cover off of a nearby switchboard and blew a pink powder onto the exposed contacts there. That produced a distinctive electric popping noise different from gunpowder, so Kamijou and Mitsuari ducked down.

“Kyah!!”

“You aren’t intentionally finding every excuse you can to cling to the boy, are you?” The capable high school girl seemed irritated for some reason. “Anyway, that shut off all their communications. No external command can lock down or erase the server’s data now. I don’t know if we’re up against the president, an executive, or a low-level employee borrowing their authority, but the villain can’t interfere physically or digitally. So let’s take our time sneaking in and investigating.”

“But how are we supposed to sneak in!?”

“Using the secret entrance I left open, of course.”