Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume3 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 5===

Hanatsuyu Kaai and Hanatsuyu Youen – the Decomposer and the Carrier – were brutally violent twin sisters.

One of the pair had stripped off her white coat and medical corset and looked down into a large tub in the nude. This one was Kaai the Decomposer. Her black hair nearly reached her ankles while worn up, so now it was fully dragging on the floor behind her.

The place smelled sort of like a rhinoceros beetle. And it should have because the jacuzzi was filled with sawdust instead of water. She had of course not asked the hotel for permission.

“Now, then.”

She popped the rubber cap from a test tube and sprinkled in its contents.

That produced a bubbling sound and steam really did rise into the air. The small girl turned toward the bath’s large mirror while she waited for the reaction to stabilize.

She used her small right hand to lift one of her breasts up from below.

Her breasts were abnormally large for her height, but she did not believe in the urban legend of people who sent everything they ate to their chest. The fat that entered the body would build up equally everywhere. When your entire body grew fatter, your breasts would grow. When you got skinnier, your breasts would shrink too. In that case, it was obvious how to make only your chest grow.

You let the fat cover your entire body and then you cut away only what you did not want.

That was possible using the bizarre science of this city.

The bubbling died down.

“All ready☆”

However, she was not cultivating some type of biological weapon. She stuck her own slender foot into the sawdust and then sank her entire body into the tub. While it was finer than the sand at the beach, it was still not water, so she had to dump it over herself.

The power of fermentation was causing the sawdust to steam.

It was an enzyme bath.

“Hm, hm, hm, hm.”

She frowned after noticing a solid sensation in the bath.

“Oh, there’s a weird coin leftover.”

She flipped the coin away without leaving the tub and it landed in a plastic waste receptable located a short distance away.

An infamous Hungarian countess had supposedly kept her skin beautiful by bathing in blood, but the Decomposer’s way was more efficient. She used every last part of her victims.

“ ‘I’ll help you escape with me?’ I hate those big muscular men who think they’re so righteous. Besides, I don’t plan to escape, so you’re nothing more than a thorn in my side.”

There was no preventing the smaller pieces of sawdust from sticking to her fingertips, but she did not mind. While pretending to be a rhinoceros beetle larva, she grabbed a large tablet from the edge of the tub, turned it on, and went through a bit of setup. The tablet’s own camera was too wide-angle for her liking, so she made sure to link it to a cheap web camera to give things a really underground feel.

Hanatsuyu Kaai spoke with a smile while using the sawdust filling the tub to hide her body up to the shoulders.

“Okay, let’s get this stream started, shall we?☆ Is everyone ready to finally enjoy a lonely Christmas that smells faintly of squid?”

She knew that adjusting the narrow-angle lens to keep her eyes just out of frame gathered more attention.

She was of course part of the dark side. And a legit harmful at that. Making an appearance online was a major risk for her.

But at the same time, the people who ended up on the dark side were not the type to actually follow the rules of whatever world they lived in.

“Attention, everyone. Tell me what part of my body you want me to wash first. Yes, yes. Christmas only comes once a year, so why not enjoy it, right? Hee hee hee. And if your request happens to be in line with what I have in mind, I might just make a show out of it.”

But the show did not last long. The screen froze before she could even get started.

The stream was down. She poked at the tablet’s screen with a puzzled frown and then the door burst open with the intensity of a nearby lightning strike.

An identical but blushing girl stormed into the luxury hotel suite they were using as a hideout.

“What are you doing, Kaai!?”

“Ehh? You can’t tell, Youen? I’m using this camera to give the lonely people out there a bit of excitement in their lives.”

“You promised you wouldn’t do this kind of thing anymore, remember?” Youen gave that reminder while Kaai did up her hair that was spread out in the bath. “You looked me in the eye and swore you would stop taking off all your clothes and going for a stroll around the park at night, taking off all your clothes, riding the elevator, and seeing if someone would get on at another floor, taking off all your clothes, closing yourself in the train bathroom, and leaving the door unlocked to see if anyone would carelessly open it, taking off all your clothes, taking off all your clothes, just always taking off all your clothes!! You promised!”

“But how else am I supposed to defile myself?”

“There’s something wrong with wanting to be filthy!!”

“Not filthy, Youen. Doesn’t it sound so much fancier when you use the word defile?”

Youen was trying to talk some sense into her sister, but for whatever reason, Kaai the Decomposer placed her hands on her cheeks with a spellbound look in her eyes.

She was breathing heavily despite not having a cold and she kept talking while giving off the scent of a rhinoceros beetle.

“I’ve tried all of things you described – and more – but no one ever finds me. No one notices and no one does awful things to me. It all turns out fine. This world is a surprisingly safe place. And don’t you think that’s a problem? I’m supposed to gather up the city’s impurities and cleanse them within me! That’s my job as the hated but necessary Decomposer, but how can I do that if nothing ever happens!?”

Yes.

A Decomposer was like the flies, roaches, and rats that ate all the leftover scraps in a city. People might hate them, but without them, the food chain would fail to create a full loop and everything would simply be absorbed from top to bottom. To create the proper loop, the dead lion or shark had to be broken down and returned to the soil or water. This girl was a ''researcher'' of that process.

But that did not really matter.

The biggest problem for the Carrier – the girl who used the small animals that carried all forms of pathogens – was that the two of them were identical twins.

So when Kaai the Decomposer did these things in public, Youen the Carrier was affected too.

''I saw that girl in the boutique the other day. Yes, she went into the dressing room and was doing something behind the flimsy curtain for an entire hour. I wonder what she was doing in there for so long. Ah ha ha.

The memory was enough for her entire head to boil over. Why did she have to take the blame for things her sister had done!?

But the twin who was already drowning in brain chemicals was in her own little world.

“So I had the best idea for this stream. I thought long and hard on this one. Wouldn’t an accident during a livestream fit the bill perfectly? Heh heh, eh heh heh. As a little gift to my viewers, I can have the camera ‘accidently’ set up at an angle that reveals my face in a reflection. Framing it as an accident is what will really get people’s attention, if you ask me. Then the video will spread like wildfire until everyone in the world has seen it and I can’t walk outside without people pointing and laughing and I’ll have so many stalkers exchanging my personal information on sketchy websites. And once they all know everything about me, it won’t be long before I’m abducted into a van with all the windows covered up. Eh heh, eh heh heh.”

“Please just stop this!!”

Youen ended up strangling her sister on reflex, but Kaai was still lost in her own fantasies while her sister shook her head back and forth. If anything, she liked it.

“Yes, defile me more.” Larva-mode Kaai smiled while soaking in the enzyme bath. “Cover me in rotting stench, sticky goo, disgusting filth, and even more unspeakable things. Yes, yes. This world doesn’t need order. All order does is absorb everything until it tapers off and hardens. The world needs some ''planned fluctuations'' that will cause the peak to break off and tumble into the depths. And in that sense…Academy City is so stifling right now.”

“Then we’re really going to do this?”

“Yes, let’s cause much, much more trouble for them. Let’s make sure those bright and shining tropical fish don’t die due to lack of enzymes.”

The grinning Decomposer remained true to herself from beginning to end.

All she wanted was to have fun in this city, so she had never even considered running away like all the others were doing.

"''Academy City’s Greatest Taboo''? Why would I care about that?”