Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item3 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 5===

When Frenda returned to the laundromat before lunch, it was finally time for a strategy meeting.

Mugino was holding a bowl of cold miso soup that seemed out of place at a Western-style cafe. It may have been part of a fair or collab. Frenda had recommended the grilled mackerel pieces as a topping, but that hadn’t appealed to Mugino.

“Now we need to decide what to do.”

“You super mean about that detective?”

Kinuhata was staring at her phone, which was tilted on its side, but this didn’t meant she had traded her love of movies for playing mobile games. She was apparently watching a VRTuber who specialized in recommending minor films.

Kinuhata made a suggestion to the rest while viewing the screen.

“She said to use deduction, right? But if we just do what she tells us to, I feel like we’ll fall right into a trap even if we do run into her again.”

Of course, contacting her public phone number or visiting her official address probably wouldn’t help.

The situation with that detective wasn’t quite the same as with the Sadistic Dolls and the Frees. Because she hadn’t killed someone in front of Item or stolen one of their targets from them.

That said, it was unknown how many lives she had taken in secret and that she didn’t kill anyone yesterday was no guarantee she wouldn’t do so tomorrow.

Besides, they couldn’t ignore her as long as she had information on Item.

“In the end, are we really going to meet with her?” asked Frenda, looking skeptical. She seemed to be saying this was the main topic here. “What was the name of that third Frees member?”

“It was Amekawa Souji, Frenda.”

“Right, that’s it, Takitsubo. In the end, we had asked our support team to dispose of him, but then that detective comes in and throws his corpse at us. So how exactly did Shiratori Okibi steal that corpse from our support team?”

“According to the support team, they were loading it into a van parked on the curb when a bunch of water rushed in and swept them and the van away.”

“That’s different from the wall of fire we saw,” noted Mugino.

Her head was lowered and her voice was even lower than usual.



''“Don’t assume all I can do is create fire anywhere I want with pyrokinesis. Rush in with that shallow an understanding and you will die.”



That hadn’t been a simple bluff.

Mugino didn’t recall seeing that kind of power at school either. Shiratori Okibi’s power was supposed to be Level 3 Impact Compressor. It should have only let her manipulate the air to hammer in nails without the use of an actual hammer.

Had she been hiding it?

Had she intentionally fooled Mugino. While smiling and calling herself a harmless Class Rep?

Had she been looking down on Mugino while knowing she was from the dark side?

“In the end, that isn’t the worst part about that demonstration.”

Mugino had been fooled during the school life she had thought was only camouflage.

What did Frenda think of seeing Mugino so out of sorts? There was a hint of exasperation in her gaze as she shrugged and spoke.

“That she only had the top half of the corpse is fine. Mugino’s Meltdowner isn’t the only source of high firepower. But in the end, we checked and found that idiot’s right thumb had been cut off. That sounds pretty intentional, don’t you think? We’d be in a lot of trouble if she sent that to Anti-Skill. That detective’s the one who killed Amekawa, but an investigation of that will mean more people looking into the two Mugino killed.”

The members of Item were not jidaigeki samurai or western gunmen, so to stay safe they had to retrieve the bodies of those they killed and keep them from ever being discovered. Having a body meant to be disposed of stolen and then having a part removed wasn’t an immediate threat, but it did mean trouble.

Justice.

Detective Shiratori Okibi.

She knew the last thing a dark side criminal would want.

Takitsubo emotionlessly tilted her head.

“But she didn’t threaten us, did she?”

“She’s not that stupid. She seemed aware of the voice on the phone, remember? She knows there would be pressure on Anti-Skill to stop an investigation if she did try to send them after us. And no matter how well she disguises the route she uses to send in the evidence, there’s always a risk of it being traced back to her, so she can’t be careless.”

“So is she still super thinking up a way to use it?”

Once her various calculations were complete, that detective probably wouldn’t hesitate to act. And whatever she did would be so much trouble for the voice on the phone that she might stop protecting Item.

Mugino breathed a heavy sigh.

“I don’t know how long we have, but we should come up with a decision fast. We’re dead if we give that detective time to work with.”

“In the end, what would happen if Shiratori Okibi got desperate and just sent the thumb in?”

“It’s no problem for us if it fails. We’d owe the voice on the phone a big favor, but it’s better than making an enemy of ''all the higher ups''.”

That settled it.

It wasn’t like Item to flee from the darkness for fear of a scandal.

Their style was to make the enemy rue the day she acquired any information on them.

And they did have some information to work off of.

Shiratori Okibi was enrolled in the same school as Mugino, so the detective had to see September 1 as a deadline. If she hadn’t left the school or dealt with Mugino by then, she would have no way of keeping herself safe.

Just like Mugino.

(So something will happen before then.)

Today was the 30th. Mugino thought for a bit.

“First, I want to know who this detective really is.”

“Hm? Isn’t she your classmate Shiratori Okibi?” asked Takitsubo.

“''Have you forgotten how many times we’ve been fooled by special makeup''? I want an expert to confirm it.”

So after making some arrangements by phone, they walked to District 9. It was blazing hot outside, so Frenda was in an especially smug mood thanks to her personal mist shower parasol. The strange atmosphere of this district was a lot more obvious when walking outside than when they took the subway before.

“This heat is making me sweat.”

“Mugino. In the end, your bra’s showing through☆”

Three Judgment girls were gathered together in that district of anime-style primary colors. They were attaching fliers to the wind turbine supports. Was that part of their official duties? Frenda glanced over and, to her surprise, discovered they were missing person posters.

They must not have been having much luck because the girls huddled together to discuss something.

“Hey, Erina-chan. Can’t you find the answer real quick with your Precognition?”

“Hwehh? I-it’s not that simple. If I could choose what to see with my power, I wouldn’t have gotten into so much trouble at that colosseum or that casino.”

“Right, didn’t you say you had predicted a giant meteor crashing into the Earth thirty thousand years from now? And some small thing you did changed the future to avoid it, so now there’s no way of knowing if the original prediction was even accurate? Sigh, not often I come across an ESP power even less convenient than my Clairvoyance.”

Item’s destination was the General Tower for Next-Generation Information and Arts at the center of the cityscape.

That was the Moe Bells they had visited before.

Takitsubo gave an expressionless look to the girl holding a parasol indoors.

“Frenda, people don’t like your parasol. You’re gathering a lot of attention.”

“?”

“Didn’t you say it’s a personal mist shower? They’re super putting up posters and life-size cardboard ads in front of the stores, so they probably don’t like moisture much. Even though their usual clientele are so sweaty.”

At one end of a floor full of anime and game production companies was a VRTuber streaming studio. It contained a classroom-sized studio, an A/V mixing room of the same size located beyond thick soundproof glass, and a refrigerated room full of computers the size of vending machines.

That was the stronghold for a certain video investigator.

“Whaddya want?”

Item was greeted by a stubbly young man wearing an obscene T-shirt and well-worn jeans. He held a nearly-used-up cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

As the newest member, Kinuhata must have been the only one to never meet him before. She stared in shock at the giant poster on the wall and at the stubbly man.

“Eh!? Isn’t this the super VRTuber streaming studio? Don’t tell me Natsuno Cacao from the minor movie recommendation channel is actually you…”

“Ha ha. No, I’m just the choreographer. This here’s a recycling plant for idol voice actors who’ve screwed up so bad it’s best not to mention their stage name anymore.”

Maybe it came with being from the dark side, but the young man smiled and described the place in a very uncharitable way.

“You used to work out of District 15, since all the TV stuff is there.” Mugino sounded displeased. “You should’ve contacted us if you were going to move.”

“TV isn’t the center of the moe world anymore, you see. But if you’re this pissed off, you must have a rush job for me as a video investigator.”

The way the man in the obscene T-shirt and jeans grinned made Mugino click her tongue and toss him a flash memory the size of a lipstick tube. Her crisis management skills weren’t so bad she would give a data expert her phone.

The video investigator caught it in one hand and shoved a younger video staff member aside.

“I’ll be using this console. ...Wait, you idiot!? Why are you making little adjustments here!? The jiggle needs to come from the spine, not the chest! Our job is to adjust the values when the raw motion data actually looks more fake. The key to popularity is whether the girl on the screen’s flirting looks natural or not. If you can’t sense any weight behind the movement, then everyone just sees it as a bunch of data no matter how much money we spent on a high-quality model!!”

Some nonsensical complaints echoed through the room.

“This sounds silly now, but we might be in trouble if AI takes over one of these, declares itself a superhuman god, and gets really popular,” said Takitsubo with a sigh.

“Eh? I thought the AI MO was to attack with a rebel army full of super machos. I super haven’t seen any movies about the apocalypse happening because the machines were so cute humanity just let them take over.”

The man inserted the flash memory into the filming equipment console, extracted the video on it, and looked to one of the many LCD monitors.

“Hm. You have her face and voice, but you still can’t tell who she is? And so you decided to rely on me?”

“Can you tell anything from her bones?”

In addition to their face and fingerprints, people could be identified by how they stood and their stride.

VRTuber motion capturing was a technology involving human movements. If the skeleton and joints didn’t behave properly, the models couldn’t behave cutely and their dancing would just look creepy.

However…

“There are signs of alterations.”

“…”

“I’m not finding anything searching dental records and I have no matches from the random facial recognition at automatic registers. Either she takes great care of her teeth and avoids sugary drinks, or she periodically randomly updates her teeth and bone structure.”

There were stories of a runaway criminal intentionally removing one of their back teeth in a desperate attempt to avoid this kind of search, but frequently remaking your entire body was rare even for the dark side.

An unlicensed doctor they knew had the following to say when they contacted her through a social media counseling service: “Well, you did say she’s skilled enough to mess with a dog’s genes enough to make a Japanese wolf out of it, so I could see her messing with her own teeth and bones to avoid having her personal information tracked.”

Frenda frowned.

“In the end, she attends a normal school, right? Then she must be in the Bank.”

“Mugino. If the same ID had its skeletal structure change that many times, it would trigger a data alteration alert. Since that hasn’t happened, could she ''have the technology to return her bones to normal'' when she gets her official measurements taken?”

Then who was she really?

Was the Class Rep frequently altering her bones, or had a complete stranger taken on the Class Rep’s skeletal pattern ''as a disguise''?

The video investigator shrugged.

“If the trail goes cold tracking down the individual, you can always search their base. You can gather up all the paper and data in her room and follow the money, such as how she’s renting the room.”

“…”

“There must be something. You have this video, so there could be something she says or does that hints at where she’s from.”