Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume1 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 5===

Don’t worry.

You don’t need to think about it too hard.

Put on a red hat and play a Western party game and you have enough for a Japanese Christmas.

“You gave this about two seconds of thought, didn’t you?”

“Shut up. I don’t care what you say.”

Misaka Mikoto gave a scathing review and Kamijou snapped back at her. However, he could not let the middle schooler know how relieved he was to not have his idea actually rejected.

Whether it was decorative or just how it was constructed, the building exterior looked like a few large storage containers joined together. However, the inside had a classic aesthetic of wood floors, wood walls, and ceiling fans twirling overhead.

Index looked all around the place that was dimly lit even during these late morning hours.

“What is this? Darts?”

“This is the most mature thing a high schooler could come up with on short notice, so don’t laugh, okay?”

He made sure to say that part quickly and quietly. He had decided to avoid karaoke since it was too cliché. He sometimes saw darts at all-in-one amusement facilities like bowling alleys or batting cages, but those places would be too bright. He wanted something that made him look a little more mature!!

So.

There was no such thing as a dedicated darts center, so this was probably a bar most of the time. A high school boy felt so out of place inside here that seeing the interior decorating was bad for his heart. But given the time of day, they were only serving an early lunch menu. The excessive amount of bar snacks on the side menu was probably a glimpse of the place’s true form. It was still hiding its claws.

Now, while Kamijou Touma was trying to look mature, he himself knew nothing about darts. After all, high schoolers did not go to bars! He only had a general idea that it was game where you threw small arrows at a pizza-like target board. When he rented a table for them, the employee seemed to assume everyone already knew how to play and did not provide an explanation. If he had come here alone, he might have been entirely lost.

He ended up having to get Mikoto to explain.

“The most popular version is called 01 and the object of the game is to reduce your points, not earn them.”

“What?”

“Don’t look shocked quite yet. You have 301 points to start with, you throw three darts per round, and you see who can work through their points first.”

Her explanation only confused him more. He was pretty sure you took turns throwing darts, but was it one by one or did you throw all three for your round in a row?

“I didn’t even know this was a competitive game.”

“I have to start there? I guess it might be confusing since there’s only the one board, but yes, it is a competitive game. You wouldn’t go to a tennis court alone unless you were a pro getting a feel for that specific court, right? This is the same.”

So if he had come here alone, he would have been more than just entirely lost. The employee would have treated him like an expert when he in fact was utterly clueless. That illusion would have been shattered with the very first throw and then the lukewarm looks he got would have led him to curl up in shame.

“So it’s best to hit the center, right?”

“Again, no. You play 10 rounds and you can only throw three per round and you win by being the first to ‘check out’ by getting your 301 points to exactly 0. So if you just go for as many points as you can, you’ll go too far and end up with negative points. That’s called ‘going bust’ and your score is reset to the start of that round and you have to try again next round. That means you’ve wasted an entire round. So what part of the board matters changes depending on your current number of points. If you end up with just 1 point left in the third throw of your round, you want to aim for a spot that gets you the minimum value of 1 point, right?”

“But c’mon. You’ve gotta go for the center.”

“Yes, yes! All the idiots like to focus on the bull’s eye in the center since it earns 50 points, but you see that larger ring around the center?”

“The one sliced up like a pizza?”

“Yeah, that. Hit the line in the middle of that and you get three times the normal points. So get the triple score where the normal score is 17 through 20 and you can earn more points than the central bull’s eye. That can be useful at the start of the game when you want to bring down your points by a lot.”

Mikoto grabbed a random dart while explaining. It was 15-16cm long. It was made of metal, but did not feel all that heavy. It was kind of like a somewhat sturdy pen with plastic fletching attached.

“I prefer using coins, so these are really more Kuroko’s thing.”

“?”

She casually aimed the point toward the blank board before they had powered on the scoring.

It seemed like a careless action, but she looked right at home doing it, suggesting she had done this a lot.

“You throw it from the elbow, not the shoulder. In that sense, it might be similar to throwing a paper airplane.”

They heard a thunk.

The cat on Index’s head stuck up his tail, perhaps frightened by the sound.

She had thrown from a distance of less than 3m, but instead of a straight path, it had taken a smoothly curved parabolic arc. This was entirely different from the ninja kunais seen in samurai dramas. This was only meant as a game, but did these really work as projectiles?

Mikoto’s dart had hit in the very center.

“I actually just barely missed the center, so that’s 25 points. Although the version most popular in Japan counts that outer area as a full bull’s eye.”

''Then why even mention it?'' wondered Kamijou, but he had a feeling saying it out loud would lead to a further digression. He could tell he had to get the basics down pat or he was in trouble.

“Also, most dart games have the score tracked electronically. This one does. That can be convenient, but don’t forget that we all use the same board.”

“?”

“The machine doesn’t set everything up for the next person like in bowling. You have to remove your darts from the board before hitting the switch to end your turn. Hit the switch with the darts still in there and it will use your darts for the next person’s score too, which really messes up the game. Got that?”

Kamijou glanced over at Index who was listening along with him. He was worried that he was the only one who was still confused.

With the cat still on her head, Index grabbed three of the darts lined up there and she threw them all in a row.

5 points, 10 points, 15 points.

That was no coincidence. She had intentionally scored increasing multiples of 5.

Darts was not simply about hitting the center of the board. According to Misaka Mikoto, who was being an oddly grownup middle schooler(?) today, you had to reach exactly 0 points in the end or you would “go bust”. So wouldn’t it be more important to know how to apply the brakes than the gas!?

“Hmm.”

“Hold on, Index-san. Where did these super skills come from!?”

“I thought I just needed to know my distance from the board and its diameter, but there’s still a margin of error. Maybe I didn’t get enough visual samples. If only there were more customers to observe.”

She was muttering under her breath without even looking his way.

The game had already begun.

“Oh, no. Is she using her perfect memory to memorize people’s motions!? O-oh, I get it. This wouldn’t work for karate or boxing, but body size doesn’t matter in darts since it only uses the elbow. If she understands it intellectually, she can actually pull this one off… Let’s get this game started already, Misaka! If we dillydally, Index is going to evolve too fast for us to catch up!!”

“You’re going to start playing without ordering anything? How stoic are you two? It’s not like you’re pro players. Excuse me, could we get something to eat over here? Oh, you’re doing those donuts here too? Then I’ll have one with my lucky col-”

“You are not bringing any of those trendy things to our table!!”

“?”

Kamijou Touma’s shout only made Mikoto tilt her head. She may have thought he was allergic. In truth, he was allergic to those things, but he could not let anyone know it was an allergy of the heart, not the body. If this capable middle school girl hit him with a deadpan “you’re such an idiot” right now, it would petrify him and then shatter him into a million pieces.

“Then we’ll take a party tray of snacks. Do we need to go to that counter for the drinks?”

Fountain drinks were so cheap because you served yourself, so what was the point of having to get an employee to do it for you? But now was not the time to be asking that question.

On the other hand, that kind of distraction might actually be the secret to defeating Index who was continuing to learn like a fearsome supercomputer preparing to conquer the world with its AI society.

In other words…

“I lure her in with food and drinks and move in for the kill while she’s distracted!!”

“You sure are ruthless for Christmas Eve.”