Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item3 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 5===

“Mugino, your clothes are all sweaty.”

“Damn this demanding body. And after the convenience store was too cold.”

“Hee hee hee. Your bra strap is showing through. This is why you shouldn’t wear a single layer of white in the summer.”

Kagiyama Sasuke was too panicked to focus on that.

He nearly gasped out loud. What was that about 2mm cameras in the walls!? Saetani Melusine kept trying to catch his eye. She was clearly confused and seeking instruction.

The woman’s voice coming from the phone was loud enough to reach the two of them as well.

“No luck there. It was in the Moe Bells, remember? All the life-size cardboard characters and giant balloons block the security cameras a lot. The elevator hall in question had this huge model airplane hanging from the ceiling by wires, so we can’t see a thing. Keeping those cameras a secret from the ordinary workers backfired because they end up covering them up accidentally. It’s always like this, I swear.”

(D-don’t scare me like that.)

“What about fingerprints?”

“Mugino, the victim was stabbed 19 times, but no one saw a bloody figure flee from the scene. They must have been prepared, so I doubt they would have been careless enough to leave any prints.”

Takitsubo answered before the voice on the phone could.

She was acting like a pet cat trying to take its owner’s attention away from the video they were watching.

And she was right, of course.

Fingerprints were the most basic thing to think of. Kagiyama and Saetani were both relieved, but…

“Hey, voice on the phone, then did they leave any hairs on the floor? Or footprints? If we check the shoe print, we can figure out the manufacturer and size. Tracking down the store where the shoes were bought could help narrow down who did it.”

…Had they been that thorough?

Anxiety slowly grew within the Frees.

Kagiyama knew it was dangerous, but he asked a probing question despite Melusine pinching his back.

He tried to be careful.

“Um, but, even if there were hairs on the floor of this...did you say it was an elevator hall? Anyway, that wouldn’t be enough to identify the killer. A lot of people would pass through there in a day and the air conditioning could have blown the hairs in from somewhere else.”

“If we end up with a list of 100 or even 1000, we can just investigate them all. Of course, it’d be our support team that did it.”

“Mugino, it wouldn’t be that many. The cleaning robots would pass through periodically, so we wouldn’t find anything from more than an hour before the killing.”

Kagiyama nodded with a smile.

“A-and how many people would that mean?”

‘Who knows. It’s not like we’ve taken exact statistics or anything, but if we assume not too many balding people were using the elevator, I’d guess ten at the most.”

“Ha ha. Oh, that’s good. Sounds like you can narrow it down a lot…”

The shotgun microphone on the table was still switched on. Saetani’s wireless earphone was still playing the distant conversation within the convenience store.

“Super by the way, what are we going to do about the support team’s equipment?”

“For now, put in an online order with this Armory person who 3D prints weapons. We’re in no position to make them ourselves right now.”

“Are guns made with craft plastic actually reliable? Are they sturdy enough?”

“Oh? So in the end, you’re worried about those delinquents now? You’ve grown. Then only order blades and blunt weapons from the Armory and order the more explosive toys from Wartime Arsenal.”

Frenda Seivelun was smiling with her laptop open in the convenience store’s eat-in section.

Kinuhata’s glum look changed to one of confusion.

“Why don’t you super order them?”

“Because I have a higher priority job to take care of.”

“?”

“In the end, it’s about you.” Frenda pointed straight at Kinuhata. “School starts after August, right? But in the end, you were trapped in a secret lab for so long you don’t have an academic history.”

“Now that you super mention it.”

“Your record will stand out as is, which could hinder your work on the dark side. It would be safer to rewrite some documents to make it ''look like'' you attend some school or another.”

“Even Mugino can’t super avoid stuff with her school, right?”

And so Frenda was writing a job order for some other sketchy worker.

“Kinuhata, I’ll have them make an ID for you, but in the end, is there a specific elementary school you want to go to?”

“I don’t care about the specifics, just super make it a middle school!!”

While those two were shouting in the convenience store, the voice on the phone was speaking calmly.

“Nineteen stab wounds makes for a fairly vigorous killing, but the culprit didn’t leave any sweat or saliva splattered on the floor. We can’t expect any hair either. If they were wearing a thin, foldable raincoat or windbreaker to keep the blood off, they would have had the hood over their head.”

No.

''That wasn’t true at all'', but Kagiyama had no reason to correct them.

Just knowing they hadn’t collected any hair from the floor was good enough.

“I wouldn’t expect any footprints either. Since this was right in front of an elevator, even with the cleaning robots, there would be far more footprints than fallen hairs.”

“And,” softly interjected Saetani. She knew the risks, but it was worth directing this conversation away from the truth. “Even if you did find some, shoe prints aren’t as decisive as fingerprints or DNA. You might not be able to track down the individual who bought the shoes if they were some cheap, mass-produced kind.”

“True,” said Kagiyama, trying to look helpful.

He had to resist striking a triumphant pose, but Item didn’t seem all that shocked.

They had only been reviewing the basics.

Mugino and Takitsubo looked like they were only now getting to the main thrust of the conversation.

Mugino glanced down at her phone.

Everything focused in on a single point.

“So ''the key is the murder weapon''.”

“Exactly,” said the voice on the phone. “Find that and everything standing in our way falls apart. It’s always like that. And once we know their identity, we can ''pursue them'' as much as we like. Since we do have the corpse, we can investigate the wounds and the knife to quickly determine if it was the one used.”

Quickly.

Determine.

“B-but wouldn’t the killer have been wearing gloves?” asked Kagiyama with a smile.

“''So what if they were''?” coldly replied the voice on the phone. She spoke more firmly than expected, preventing his interruption from guiding the conversation. “Gloves would only prevent us from getting fingerprints or a palm print. We could still tell where their hand touched it. ...Also, Mugino, if you’re going to recruit on-site help, you need to support them yourself. It’s always like this with you.”

Her tone was light, but that was a fairly stern warning.

“I’m only in charge of Item itself. Just like with the delinquents in your support team, it’s not my job to protect their information.”

“As if some evil-hearted member of the privileged class is going to protect anyone at all.”

A dangerous tension filled the air, but that wasn’t enough to make a Level 5 flinch.

Mugino rested her head in a hand, looking only half-convinced.

“Gloves, huh?”

“There were some pieces of leather less than a millimeter thick on the floor, so they probably wore cheap leather gloves,” said the voice on the phone. “And it was apparently the real stuff, not synthetic. With that kind, the surface cracks in no time at all. Now, since they were cheap, there are probably tons just like them around, so tracking down the killer through purchase records probably isn’t possible.”

“So we can’t get direct fingerprints and we can’t track the purchase of the gloves. Does that mean we’re looking for DNA? Like getting genetic information from sweat that soaked through the glove and onto the knife’s grip?”

Takitsubo used the corner of a neatly folded handkerchief to dab beads of sweat from Mugino’s cheek, leading to those two fighting over the handkerchief.

“Is that really possible?”

Kagiyama was trying to put on an act to draw out information, but this question was mostly a completely honest one.

He couldn’t be certain one way or the other.

Not when Academy City tech advanced far too quickly. Especially on the dark side.

Yesterday’s safe zone might not be so safe tomorrow.

“Probably not,” said the voice on the phone. “Extracting DNA from no more than sweat isn’t happening. What we would actually want are skin cells from more than a millimeter deep. Those would come comes off with the sweat, but the glove in the way would act like a filter to block it. Plus, leather repels water.”

“…”

This relief was like violence.

Melusine’s tear ducts nearly loosened. Even though she knew crying would give away the game.

But…

“Camera check, camera check.”

It wasn’t Mugino who jumped in surprise – it was Saetani.

She could see him, but she had ignored him. She must not have expected him to use it on her.

The target had to be looking at him without noticing what he was doing and the camera had to catch them in a compromising situation. If those conditions were met, the target’s body would be physically bound. Including on the level of pulse rate and perspiration.

That was Kagiyama Sasuke’s Bind Scoop. 

For Saetani, tapping out Morse code on her companion’s back to communicate without Mugino and Takitsubo noticing counted as a compromising situation. Which meant Kagiyama was in position to threaten her.

“(Hey, what are you-?)”

“(You should thank me for being so cautious.)”

If he could keep Saetani’s tears from escaping, they could survive this.

But…

“Which is why the dark side’s video hunters ''use the bones''.”

The voice on the phone sent the conversation in another odd direction.

Kagiyama could feel the skin of his face going cold.

Blonde Saetani tried to recover her composure too quickly and failed.

“Bone- what?”

“I said we could find traces of the glove, right? We’ll check for those on the knife’s grip and use the distribution of the grip pressure to determine the shape of the culprit’s hand bones. That’s common practice in Academy City. Investigations are always like this.”

“Mugino, don’t the hand bones and joints have an especially complex structure for the human body?”

“Yeah, enough so that delinquents who don’t know what they’re doing will break their own fingers when they throw a punch.”

“Exactly,” said the voice on the phone. “Hand identification isn’t just done with the veins. With so much complexity in one place, it’s as possible to identify an individual from their hand bones as it is from their teeth☆”

After listening to all this and organizing her thoughts, Mugino spoke with her voice low.

“So that’s even more reason the murder weapon is our top priority.”

“What we’re looking for is pretty sharp and also heavy,” said the voice on the phone. “Maybe something like a big machete used to cut through the underbrush when hiking through the mountains, or a cleaver used to crush cow bones while chopping the meat? Whether it’s stainless steel or ceramic, it’ll be a sturdy, heat-resistant material, so it can’t be quickly eliminated in a fire like paper or plastic can be.”

“Academy City is a walled city, so it should still be somewhere in here. So would the best plan be a thorough search of trash dumps, rivers, and so on? Taking your time is the best shortcut to finding solid evidence,” said Saetani, praying it would turn out all right.

Item was close, but they were a little bit off-base.

Following this line of investigation would not lead them to the Frees. They wouldn’t expect for the murder weapon to be made from biodegradable plastic and to be slowly vanishing as they spoke.

Saetani had to calm them down.

She had to convince them they had plenty of time and then have them waste their time. As proven by the countless free-to-play online services, you could get people to waste any amount of time if you developed the right logic.

“Huh, they super sell nikuman at the end of August here? Is that cause this is Chinatown?”

“Munch, munch. In the end, I wonder if this really contains Hokkaido brand-name pork? Luckily, Frenda-chan has the forensic investigation kit needed to check its DNA map!!”

“Super cut it out.”

The convenience store conversation was still playing from Saetani’s wireless earphone thanks to the shotgun microphone.

Nothing she heard there seemed like it would lead to a solution.

But the lazy flow of time there could come in handy. With the scent of death so powerful in the gazebo, every little thing tended to make her panic and focus a little too hard. She did her best to feign normalcy and, when she couldn’t anymore, focused on those two chatting to help tap the brakes.

Takitsubo tilted her head.

“But we could be at a dead end if the knife has already been disposed of.”

“How would they do that with a metal knife? If they had the Meltdowner-level firepower needed to melt steel, they could have just used their power to kill her. I don’t get why they’d use some lame knife instead.”

“Mugino, no one said the knife had to be made of metal.”

Kagiyama’s heart leaped into his throat.

All of a sudden, they were approaching the truth.

These kinds of coincidences meant you could never relax when dealing with the dark side.

Kagiyama was soaked with sweat, but then something rested her head on his shoulder.

It was Saetani.

She tapped out a message on his back.

“(Calm down and suppress you emotions.)”

“…”

“(Take deep breaths. And focus on how often you blink. The stiffening in your cheeks isn’t worth worrying about. As long as you keep your eyes from wandering and your breath from catching, it shouldn’t be noticeable.)”

Her counseling was always perfect.

Because she could instantly scan the physical state of the target’s body and perceive their mental state.

Her Electro Reading let her “hear” the static electricity running along their skin to accurately detect the movement of their muscles and joints. And as long as she could hold her ear to their bare skin without rousing suspicion, she didn’t need the shotgun microphone.

And she was right.

This wasn’t over yet.

(They might suddenly get closer to the truth in theory, but we can still distance them from us. This isn’t over. We have nothing to fear as long as Item doesn’t discover anything definitive. As long as we can get through this and leave the gazebo, we’ll have a chance to take them by surprise.)

Mugino still didn’t understand, so she pouted her lips like a small child.

Kagiyama couldn’t have her getting any closer to the truth, so he chose to speak up here. That way he could direct their thoughts away from the truth. He couldn’t give them an answer – he could only give them a hint. It was important they were convinced they had thought it up themselves.

“So if it isn’t metal, could it be made of rock or glass?”

“Those have a melting point between 1400 and 1500 degrees, so there wouldn’t be much point.”

“Ehh? Then is there something else?”

Sulking Mugino was growing more childish by the second.

She rested her head on Takitsubo’s shoulder and pushed against the girl while giving her own thoughts.

“A knife carved from wood probably couldn’t slash, but it could be used to stab. And it could be easily disposed of in a fire. But that would only be a toy.”

“It could also be biodegradable plastic, Mugino. That might sound fancy, but you can use cream to make one in your kitchen. And that would be able to slash and stab.”

“…”

They were screwed.

If Kagiyama tried to say anything here, they were screwed for sure.

“But even if the knife is buried so it can degrade underground, the bloodstains won’t go away. So maybe the blade doesn’t have any blood on it? So maybe, Mugino, this was a remote attack that could damage the target by harming a doll or a picture?”

…''How good was this track suit girl’s intuition!?

Had she really arrived at the biodegradable plastic and the remote attack without any hints to guide her!?

Whether she was guessing or had some kind of power helping her, now that the idea was on the table, it couldn’t be ignored.

It took all of Kagiyama’s willpower to avoid glaring at her with bloodshot eyes. Once they were in position to attack from a safe position, she would be the first one they silenced.

Remote Murder.

The third member of the Frees was a freelance drone operator named Amekawa Souji. His power made it so striking or stabbing a target’s shadow with a weapon would apply the same damage to the target themselves. It technically used the idea that “the mind rules the body” to produce physical injury through the placebo effect or hypnotic suggestion. Once it was in effect, it would still work even if Kagiyama or someone else was the one doing the stabbing. It was easy to avoid once you knew how it worked, but no one would be expecting it the very first time. It was especially useful that no blood or flesh that could be used as evidence ended up on the murder weapon used to attack the shadow.

If only they could contact Amekawa Souji wherever he had gotten off to.

If only they could scatter the screws and nail in his box across the ground so the downpour of sharp weapons contacted Mugino Shizuri’s shadow.

Even that violent Level 5 would be killed instantly.

If they could only do that, it would be over all at once, so where was that guy right now!?

“(He might have seen what was going on in this gazebo from a distance and gone right back home. He does use drones, after all.)”

“(If he did, I am so killing him later.)”

Without speaking aloud, Kagiyama and Melusine conversed using their fingers on each other’s back. Knowing that freelance drone operator, that was a distinct possibility. Then again, maybe it was better for one of them to be hiding somewhere than for all three of them to be trapped here.

Across the table, Mugino frowned and lifted her head from Takitsubo’s shoulder.

The track suit girl looked a bit disappointed as she turned to face her.

“A biodegradable weapon, huh? I don’t like the sound of that. If they buried it, it’d slowly disappear on its own.”

Uh, oh.

They were gradually moving in the right direction.

“B-but.”

Kagiyama leaned forward.

He wanted to direct them to a different set of rails before they settled on this one. He wanted to guide them in the wrong direction.

“While this is a walled city, you might not find it even if you dug all through the city. It could be on private property, it could be in the sewers, or it could even be in a building if they used a potted plant. And if you are going to dig up everything, you’ll need some kind of paperwork giving a justification. I don’t know, maybe disposing of unexploded ordnance or repairing aging plumbing.”

“Not necessarily,” said the track suit girl, expressionlessly pointing somewhere nearby.

At the ground.

A few objects the size of tennis balls were scurrying around.

They were rodents. And not hamsters either. These were the uncute variety.

“Wah!?”

“They aren’t all that unusual in areas that serve food.”

Mugino jumped in uncharacteristic surprise, but Takitsubo didn’t seem to mind their presence.

In fact, she looked a little happy.

“Hee hee. I just found one of your weaknesses, Mugino. It can be our little secret.”

“Shut up. My Class Rep has told me way too many scary stories about rats. Like that they spread the plague and that they carry so many germs their bites are really dangerous. Apparently they even used to chew through the wiring in tanks, bringing them to a standstill. And if that Class Rep says so, it must be true!!”

“…”

Takitsubo used two sticks to pick up a filthy rat and tossed it at the Level 5. Mugino screamed.

She seemed annoyed her partner would trust anything her Class Rep said.

Then Takitsubo expressionlessly continued the conversation.

“There are different kinds of biodegradable plastic, ''but it can be made by chemically altering cream.'' And if it was made from that, it wouldn’t surprise me to find small animals can sniff it out. They can apparently dig up tissues and drink bottle lids from the bushes on the side of the road. And District 4 is far enough from the scene of the crime that the culprit might try to use a public space here to let the knife quickly degrade without creating any connection leading back to themselves.”

Mugino didn’t react at all to this explanation (because she had her feet pulled up onto the bench to keep herself as far away from the ground as possible), so Takitsubo tilted her head and used a stick to shoo the rats away.

Saetani spoke to the track suit girl bent over toward the ground.

“A-a stray dog might have buried some kitchen garbage. You might find something gross. And even if the killer did use biodegradable plastic, we don’t know if they used cream.”

“Any non-dairy ingredient would be hard to come by. And they wouldn’t have any reason to not use it.”

Takitsubo stuck the end of the stick into the ground and began digging.

Were the sounds of thin threads snapping coming from hair-thin grassroots?

Mugino looked puzzled, her feet still up on the bench.

“Wait, you’re really going to dig here? We don’t even know how deep the killer would have buried it.”

“It can’t be too deep if the rats could smell it.”

Mugino had nothing to do but didn’t want to stick her hand where the rats had been gathering, so she spoke as if to just fill time.

“So what, did they 3D print a knife using biodegradable plastic made from cream? Damn, anyone could acquire all of that, so it’ll be hard to track them down.”

“But, Mugino, what would they gain from killing the guitarist?”

“If they were professionals, they wouldn’t have cared who it was. There’s no point in taking a job that puts you up against someone else in your business because that only leads to unnecessary trouble.”

“If the killer themselves didn’t have a motive, maybe they were doing it for someone else,” softly suggested Saetani.

“You mean it was a hired killing?” asked Mugino and blonde Saetani nodded.

“But it might not have been spelled out so clearly. It’s possible the killer was moved to do something after seeing the poor people whose family members were killed,” added Saetani with a chuckle.

“Hm.” Mugino nodded (her feet still pulled up on the bench). “But if that’s why they killed the guitarist, they were pretty damn stupid.”

“?”

“I mean, think about it. No one asked them to do that and even the surviving family members told them not to, but the killer refused to listen. I’m not going to deny the fake news flooding the world is a problem, but dumbasses who can only view accurate information in a distorted light are an even bigger problem.”

Saetani poured all her willpower into keeping a straight face.

Kagiyama wondered if he had managed the same.

And eventually, Takitsubo came to a stop while using her stick to dig into the dark soil.

Kagiyama and Saetani had a very bad feeling about this, so they started to reach for their SLR camera and shotgun microphone on the table. Their hands collided.

“(Now is not the time to try for a bittersweet romance! And I haven’t forgotten you unhooked my bra earlier! Are you in love with me or something!?)”

“(Can’t you just let bygones be bygo- oh, no! We lost our chance!!)”

Her feet still pulled up onto the bench, Mugino peered down into the hole dug in the dark soil.

“I’ll be damned. There it is.”