Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume1 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 8===

How far you had to go to properly restrain a powerful esper was an extremely tricky question, but it was obvious enough in this case that the trigger was her index fingers. Kamijou borrowed some duct tape that must have rolled in from a nearby construction site, folded unconscious Maidono Hoshimi’s hands into fists, and wrapped duct tape all around them up to the wrists. Then he put her hands behind her back and bound them there.

(Maidono, huh?)

He peered at her face while still crouched down.

That girl could not do what most anyone else could.

If Kamijou had remained fixated on his lost memories, he could have ended up much like her.

(What can a normal high school boy like me even do for her?)

“Touma!!”

“Whoa! That’s not a Santa costume, so why are your clothes so red!?”

Meanwhile, the other girls gathered around.

Misaka Mikoto descended a building wall while carrying Index.

“I’m more impressed that you got through that without a scratch on you. And that you got outside at all while the elevators weren’t working.”

“Ugh, my hair and coat are so dirty. I so hope that place didn’t use asbestos. We couldn’t do anything about the half-collapsed concrete and the combination of broken gas pipes and power cables was absolutely terrifying! It took some doing hacking the smart tower and shutting the gas off. Without that, I would’ve been here a little sooner.”

Misaka Imouto also returned while dragging along a cleaning robot with some yellow and black construction rope.

“Is Last Order in there?” asked Mikoto.

“Presumably, but we cannot carelessly open it before checking for nonelectronic traps using a glass fuse, says Misaka to show off how useful she is.”

At some point, that clone had learned the same rhetorical tricks as an office worker who wanted to get out of doing any real work.

But anyway…

“Take care of this, will you?”

Kamijou tossed over the phone he had found on Maidono, but for some reason, the two girls with the same face began fighting over it.

“This is a delicate task where max power output is irrelevant, so you wound Misaka by implying she would be no help here, says Misaka while making sure to show off that she is nothing like the ill-mannered Original.”

“Then how about we hold a cyber-attack benchmark competition? You can hook yourself up to the entire Misaka Network if you like. Also, who are you calling ill-mannered?”

“Then the prize can be one of those fashionable donuts. Misaka will order one via a bike delivery boy and we can see who has it unlocked before they arrive, suggests Misaka.”

“Deal. But isn’t the point of those to be decorated in your own lucky color?”

They continued bickering while pressing their cheeks together and staring at the phone’s screen. They may have been competing to see who could crack the passcode first, but they looked more like two friendly sisters.

Then Index cut in from the side.

“Isn’t it 58051?”

[[Image:GT_Index_v01_220.jpg|thumb]]

“You can’t just guess a random number and hope it’s- ehh!? You’re kidding! Why does my analysis say it’s 58051 too!?”

“Leave it to the occult girl to show off an occult power, says Misaka while trembling at this paranormal phenomenon. Misaka has heard that astrology and fortunetelling use math and statistics, but what exactly happened here?”

“Yay, a donut for me☆” shouted Index.

The toxic-looking item covered in whipped cream was delivered by bicycle and was inside Index’s stomach in short order. This put her on ''their'' side too. Their happy Christmastime was too blindingly bright for the pointy-haired boy to watch from his position in the shadows.

Phones were treasure troves of information.

They knew nothing about Maidono Hoshimi, including her real name.

If she had been acting alone, this would be the end of it, but if she had been working with someone else, the threat to Last Order was not yet over. Could they turn this girl in to Anti-Skill, breathe a sigh of relief, and get back to enjoying Christmas Eve, or did they have to remain on their guard? Even if they were amateurs and they were wasting their brainpower thinking about this, they could not rest easy without figuring that out first.

But.

Mikoto tossed the phone to him without even looking at the screen.

“Here.”

“?”

“I don’t know what happened, but you’re the only one with any right to look in here.”

Was that true?

He liked to think so, but he was honestly not sure.

Spying on someone else’s phone was a scummy thing to do. The links to ebooks and videos about etiquette stood out the most. Those likely had to do with using chopsticks. She seemed to be avoiding books meant for little children, probably because it would have wounded her pride too much.

He could sense raw adolescent humanity oozing from those lines of ordinary digital text.

The album contained quite a few photos, but strangely the blonde girl was in none of them. He initially thought these were all photos she had taken of her friends, but he finally realized she had been hiding her identity with a wig and color contact lenses.

When he crouched down and removed the wig from the unconscious girl, he found a surprisingly innocent-looking girl with a bob cut.

That same girl was the most common person seen in the album.

The phone did not seem to contain her real name anywhere, but it might be possible to reveal her identity by analyzing the people and background objects in the photos. He could not think of any reason to do that, though.

“…”

All the girls in the photos were smiling.

But those scenes were all something she had created to cover up and hide her complex.

Maidono Hoshimi had to be a false name.

She had been living a life much like someone who always had to choose the clothes that would cover up the tattoo they had gotten long ago. Except in her case, someone else had forced her into that situation.

(This is all stuff you can’t communicate with nothing but your fists.)

“Misaka.”

“?”

“I’ve looked through most of it, but it’s too normal. She didn’t seem to have another phone either. I don’t really know what kind of world the dark side is, but you need some tool to let people contact you if you work there, right? This phone must have a secret space hidden in it.”

“I’ll look, but is there anywhere I should check first?”

“There’s nothing in the call logs or address book, so I just want to know who she was contacting.”

“Got it,” said the middle school girl as she casually accepted the phone and the task.

And before long…

“There really is nothing.”

“What?”

It seemed unusual to him for Mikoto to so readily throw in the towel.

But for some reason, she was grinning.

“Basically, this phone is only used to connect to a dedicated server that acts as a remote digital lockbox for all her work documents and contacts. So even if she does drop her phone or have it stolen, she only has to sever that one line to prevent any sensitive information from leaking out.”

“So we’ve hit a dead end? It looked like she was sending Last Order somewhere, so there must be someone else who was to pick her up.”

“Yes, ''normally'' anyway.”

Mikoto winked and shook the borrowed phone.

It gave off a monotone beep.

“And we’re in. Okay, you’re up again.”

“No, I doubt there’s anything from her private life in there. And if it’s work info, we can all see it.”

The phone displayed a screen he did not recognize and it contained a list of filenames. Even the file extensions at the end were unfamiliar to him. He tried tapping a few, but the text within was incomprehensible to him. It was not the same as the legal contracts adults would sign, but the level of confusion he felt was about the same. It was filled with so much jargon and roundabout phrasings that he could not get any of it into his head in a sensible form.

“Shall Misaka summarize it for you?”

“Please.”

“Basically, this is related to the Board Chairman, says Misaka to keep it short.”

“''To him?''”

Kamijou sounded confused.

The “him” here was not the human known as Aleister. It was the person who had taken over that position after Aleister.

That person had a strong connection to both Misaka Mikoto and Misaka Imouto.

And more importantly, to Last Order.

“Yes, assuming this file is accurate.” Mikoto gently nodded. “This says the new Board Chairman has begun eliminating Academy City’s dark side, but the people who are more comfortable in the dark side or cannot escape it oppose that decision. So they want an effective bargaining chip.”

“…”

The Board Chairman’s plan had to be much easier said than done.

Even if you announced that ideal, the people trembling in fear might not come forward to testify and others might be opposed to the very ideal itself. And once everything fell apart and the attempt failed, the first target of retribution would be the one who had hoisted the flag and led the charge.

And he had immediately shown how far he was willing to take this.

“First, he will reveal his own crimes,” continued Mikoto.

“What?”

“It looks like he means it. He’s going to reveal everything he’s done, primarily the more than 10,000 clones he killed in that experiment. That way he can show there are no exceptions. He seems to think that’s the only way to drag the fearful skeptics out into the sunlight. …And he has in fact turned himself in at an Anti-Skill station.”

“He turned himself in!?”

“He certainly doesn’t strike me as the type to do that, but apparently it’s true.”

His punishment would not be altered by the conditions and timing of this act. Once his crimes came to light, he would have to pay for them. And it seemed unlikely he would ever again emerge from behind bars.

Misaka Imouto tilted her head while looking through the files.

“Does this mean the new Board Chairman is resigning the position before the year is even out? asks Misaka. And what good is this effort if the next Board Chairman brings back the dark side?”

“The Board Chairman has the right to resign and choose his replacement, but the system is not made for anyone below him to remove him from that position. Just like teachers casting votes in the faculty room can’t get the principal or the school’s board chairman fired.”

Academy City was a giant educational system Aleister had created ''to achieve his own goal'', so he would not have constructed it in a way that let others interfere with his actions.

Meaning…

“So does he think he can pull it off if he uses his authority as Board Chairman to run the city from behind bars?” wondered Kamijou.

“He must intend on seeing this through to the end. What is it with the people at the top of this city closing themselves up behind thick walls?”

Anyway, they now knew why someone would want Last Order.

One side wanted to destroy Academy City’s dark side and the other side wanted to stop that.

It was a lot like a direct clash between the light side and dark side of the city. That meant an entire half of the city would be after Last Order. Maidono Hoshimi had only been the vanguard. Pulling back now was not a fundamental solution.

“Isn’t there something more?”

Without even thinking, Kamijou Touma began searching for an enemy.

“Isn’t there someone else? Like an obvious mastermind behind it all!? If this is only a sporadic wave of lone wolf villains attacking, then we can never rest again!”

Error messages suddenly flooded the screen.

Someone had noticed them.

But instead of cutting off the connection, it looked more like the data itself was being erased.

“There is one person managing all that frustration. And I’m betting they’re the one supplying the money and weapons needed to take action.”

But that did not stop Mikoto.

They were not interested in evidence they could use in court.

They only needed to know the name of the mastermind behind this incident. And this rushed erasure of the server’s data only seemed to confirm that the data there was legit.

So Misaka Mikoto read the data out loud even as it was erased.

“Neoka Norito. One of the twelve on the Board of Directors.”