Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:AgneseSS Chapter6 (section)

===Part 5===

The streets of Cambridge were full of partiers.

The college students showed no sign of stopping anytime soon. The traffic laws had been thrown out the window as they drove around in convertibles with beer bottles in hand and young men in nothing but their underwear threw their hands in the air and shouted while breaking the speed limit.

But not even they took things quite this far.

“I am going to kill those two.”

She was entirely nude.

The moonlight shined down on the alluring contours of Sister Lucia’s body. That nun was more of a clean freak and got more embarrassed than any of the others, yet here she was with all of her soft skin exposed to the air and flushed a bright red. The tall girl was crouched down and covering her important bits with her hands while the other two grinned like crazy, watched from another building’s rooftop, and gave instructions.

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“Test, test. Sister Lucia, continue forward from there. Yes, forward. Bloodline Investigator Brax Mizhine’s home/office is 20m directly ahead of you. This is our last chance to find a hint leading to the guild leader known only as Tu!!”

“Y-you’re lucky the mansion is deserted because that means no one can see you like that. Isn’t that great!?”

“How irresponsible can you two be!? There is a large road lit up by streetlights right over there! Gyaahh!!”

Naked Lucia hid behind a roadside tree until a convertible full of partiers passed by for the umpteenth time. If they found her like this, they would assume she was a pent-up slut participating in a rather unique form of volunteer work.

She breathed heavily with tears in her eyes while focusing on her ear.

“I am about to enter the mansion’s grounds. I will need to throw out this communication spiritual item, so you two collect it.”

“Will do. We’ll give the order to head in, so there’s nothing to worry about. Kee hee hee.”

She did not trust them in the slightest, so she removed the acorn from her ear and chucked it into some nearby bushes. She wanted those two to deal with disposing with it. She covered her body with her hands, crouched low, took a deep breath, and ran out across the asphalt lit up by bright LED lights.

Being naked outside had been enough to fry her brain, but the world had so much more to offer.

This felt like taking yet another step over the line.

(All technology can go to hell!!)

She was blushing bright, but she moved swiftly. She silently moved up to the large metal gate and jumped more than 5m straight up without the use of any kind of tool. Once her back just barely moved past the gate, she flipped around in midair and silently landed on her feet.

She was in.

Once on the mansion grounds, she could ignore the tool-detecting security. While avoiding an obvious pitfall, she grabbed a new acorn from a nearby tree and scratched out the necessary symbols with her fingernail.

Then she stuck it into her ear.

“O-oh, nooooo! Sister Lucia, how bold of you to bend yourself up into a bridge like that in the nude!”

“Stop judging a nonexistent performance. I’m not saving the world with gymnastics right now!! I assume you’re still up on that roof, so can you see any danger around here!?”

“Ah.”

“No more jokes about me being naked! Take this seriously!!!!!!”

A bush split apart.

She quickly jumped behind a tree just before some sharp projectiles shot out. With more than 50 syringes flying horizontally her way, it was more of a barrage meant to cover a wide area than a pinpoint strike. They were packed too close together to dodge, so she did not even want to imagine what she would have been injected with if not for the tree to use as cover.

She saw a stumpy shape moving in the darkness.

It was larger than her while she crouched down and it looked like a hedgehog without its spines.

(An unmanned trap. Are some of them autonomously wandering around like that!?)

But if she focused too much on that, she might get trapped in a stationary magic circle. She clenched her teeth in frustration, but then her friends’ helpful voices reached her.

“So do you think that was an aphrodisiac?”

“W-wouldn’t a paralyzing drug be worse?”

“Ah ha ha. Oh, Sister Angelene. You have a sick imagination!”

“Ehh? You’re the one that brought up sketchy drugs.”

“You two are paying for this later,” muttered Lucia.

She had no weapons and not even any clothing. Whether she wanted to search or attack, there was only so much magic she could use with only the movements of her hands.

She threw a stick to the side as a diversion and rushed out from behind the tree while the hedgehog fired its limited remaining shots in that direction. She kept her eyes open for magic circles while giving the now spineless hedgehog a wide berth.

When she looked closer, she could tell the darkness was littered with threats.

A turtle carrying a bear trap on its back was crawling at her feet and bats with nooses for heads were hanging upside down from the tree branches. She decided it was best to keep a healthy distance from the roses that had barbed wire for vines. These combinations of plants and animals with trapping, torture, and execution tools probably had some logic and efficiency to it, but she felt like she could glimpse Brax Mizhine’s own cruelty in them.

She reached the back door.

Touching the keyhole would apparently get your torso bisected by pressurized water, so she destroyed the hinges and removed the impact-resistant door to get inside.

She rushed toward her top priority target, grabbed it in both hands, pressed her face into it, and rubbed her forehead on it.

“Yes!! A bedsheeeeeet!”

“Tch. She just boosted her defenses. That’s no fun.”

“S-Sister Agnese,” said Angelene. “Your standards have dropped significantly if you think walking around in only a sheet is a solid defense!”

Naked time was over.

Her skills were not on the level of the Amakusas, but she could construct a basic spiritual item with a combination of everyday household items. She went for the ceiling fan slowly rotating on the guest room’s ceiling.

Her usual spiritual item was based on the wooden wheel in the legend of St. Catherine. The wheel, rotation, and cross symbolism were all useful to her.

She pressed a hand to her ear.

“I have secured a basic weapon. So where in his home should I search?”

“Everywhere.”

“I was afraid of that, goddammit!”

Too much clothing could also be a problem. When the sheet filled with air and inflated, it threatened to slip down. This may have been why bath towels were only made so large.

There were of course traps inside the unlit house as well, so every step she took was risky.

She had to keep her eyes peeled for anything on the floor, walls, or ceiling. She checked the good hiding spots for a person out of her usual habits, but mobile traps could approach her from pretty much anywhere – even from the ducts or the fireplace. Not to mention that the doors and chandeliers could be traps themselves.

The mansion was large enough to mistake for a university building.

It doubled as an office and a home, but if she searched at random, she could step on a trap at any moment. And all of this was wasted effort of she ended up in combat. All she wanted was a hint related to Tu, so she wished she knew exactly where to look to find that.

“Sister Agnese,” she said. “Check our information. Did Brax Mizhine use any fake names while staying at hotels?”

“Sometimes yes and sometimes no. He probably hid his real name when working on magic-related jobs.”

“Then how did he travel for the jobs when he used a fake name?”

“He avoided using his own vehicle or public transportation. He would take a taxi past his destination and then slowly walk back to it on foot, stopping at a few stores along the way. He may have hoped that would mask what his true destination was.”

(The roundabout method.)

Lucia sighed and lifted up the ceiling fan.

“Then I need to check the kitchen, not the study.”

“U-um, why???” asked Angelene.

“The ways people defend their secrets fall into a few different categories. Some keep their secrets at a distance, some prefer to keep their secrets on them at all times, some go for the ‘hiding in plain sight’ method, and some send it to the bottom of the ocean where no one will ever get close. Brax Mizhine would have wanted to sever any connection between himself and his secrets, so he wouldn’t keep it in his bedroom or office. But if it was completely out of sight, he was afraid someone might dig it up, so he wanted it close enough that he could check on it.”

“I-I see. And that means the kitchen?”

“A mansion of this size will have a gardener, a cook, other housekeepers, and maybe a plumber for the fountain. Outsiders would be coming and going fairly regularly, so he had it set up so any problematic documents could be pinned on the people he had hired if word got out. So it would be best to hide them in a room the master of the house would never visit. Or that’s what he probably believed anyway.”

“W-wow. You’re just like a porn hunter mom checking under her son’s bed while he’s out!”

Lucia looked up at the moon through the window. Something was wrong with those two. It was not a full moon, but this night seemed to be messing with their heads somehow.

She even focused on the intensity of the light and the weight of the air as she kept an eye out for traps on her way down the dark hallway.

She had decided on the kitchen as her first target, but she needed to have a Plan B ready. If she did not find anything there, the garage or boiler room might be good options.

“…”

She slowly opened the kitchen door.

It was as large as a restaurant kitchen and it had plenty of doors and drawers thanks to the cabinets, cupboards, refrigerator, oven, microwave, dishwasher, and more. She never knew when something would leap out at her.

She also had no idea what exactly she was searching for.

Any hint leading to Tu’s identity would work, so she had to consider the possibility of flash memory smaller than a kernel of corn or a magical charm pasted to the underside of a drawer.

The microwave and dishwasher seemed like likely possibilities, but she chose the refrigerator first.

“Why that?”

“I’m the one out here working, so I should be the one getting information from you. But anyway, a fridge has more devices installed inside it than you would think, but it also has a lot of gaps. Plus, the insulation and the vibrations and magnetism caused by the large motor will mask it from a lot of searches.”

Of course, that would also make it a poor spot to hide a medium vulnerable to magnetism, but it was still worth checking. She stood in front of the red refrigerator that had two doors and a drawer. She cautiously grabbed the handles on the device taller than she was and pulled them toward her.

“–––––”

“Sister Lucia?”

She fell silent, so Agnese called out to her.

Nevertheless, Lucia remained silent in front of the refrigerator.

The truth she had seen in the refrigerator’s lights remained real. There was no denying it, but she still wished those bright LED lights would go out.

She was hesitant to inhale, but she spoke all the same.

“…I found something.”

“What did you find, Sister Lucia? We can’t see what you’re seeing!!”

It was in the fridge, so it was of course nice and chilled.

The way it was so neatly stored showed this had been done by a tidy and orderly person.

There had to be about 60 liters in all.

An entire person’s worth of human flesh was chopped up and stored inside the fridge.