Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item2 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 8===

They had thought defeating Honey Queen would only require tracking down Ainame Caroline and Tachiuo Mary’s hideout and launching an attack.

But it wasn’t that simple.

This overturned their basic assumptions.

Honey Queen was getting a Level 5 to match Mugino Shizuri. The scales were already tilting in the enemy’s favor, so Honey Queen would be completely out of reach if a monster like that joined them.

It was unclear what Shokuhou Misaki would gain from joining these secret data thieves, but ''perhaps there were some dark Academy City secrets she was willing to do just about anything to get her hands on.

The deal was set to go down in the District 7 Stadium Dome at 8 PM.

They had to stop that at all costs.

Everything else could wait.

(I super risked my life sneaking in here, but we aren’t any better off for it. All we have is more to worry about!!)

“The Level 5 with the strongest psychological power…”

“Well, if she can directly snatch secret data and passwords from people’s minds or control the researchers to have them unlock the lab from the inside, Honey Queen won’t need to bother with their online marriage scams anymore,” said Mugino.

“At that point, it’s hard to tell if she’s controlling minds or hacking a machine,” said Takitsubo.

You could even call her a mind hacker.

They had the enemy’s critical information and they had recovered their own phones, which were full of risky personal information. It was lucky this was the girls locker room. They didn’t have time to change, but they did stuff their removed clothing in a small bag. They didn’t need to spend any more time in this illegal casino.

“Mugino. And Takitsubo too. In the end, it’s time to start the escape phase. We could use some covering fire from outside. Track our earphones’ signals and make sure at least our location is never in the line of fire.”

“I have some Body Crystal,” offered Takitsubo.

“The side effects are bad, so if there’s another way, we’ll prioritize that.”

“And what do you mean by ‘at least’? What about the other people?”

“This is an illegal casino, so no one here is harmless – visitor or staff. In the end, we won’t be violating the dark side rules no matter how many people die when you blast through the wall!”

With that, Frenda left the locker room.

In the hallway, Consultant Kawazakana greeted them with his handgun’s muzzle. Not even Kinuhata’s Offense Armor would keep her safe if she was hit by the bayonet-like 800,000V stun gun followed by some 9mm bullets.

“Not so fa-”

“Huh? But we dealt with the camera and mic in the locker room. In the end, were you tracking the location of the phones? Or did you remotely activate one of their cameras?”

White Bunny Frenda raised her hands in front of Kawazakana (whose hands were trembling so much it looked like he might fire on accident).

“That aside, I’m impressed. Most idiots would go for strengthening their dominant right hand here, but you’re holding it in your left hand. It is the smart thing to do. Even if someone can dodge the big right straight, there’s no way they can dodge the quick left jab. A real pro strengthens their left. It’s so cool that you know what you’re- '''bang!!'''”

“Huh?” grunted Kawazakana with surprise on his face.

Then he looked down to see a dark red hole in the middle of his gut.

Right behind grinning Frenda, Pink Bunny Kinuhata was casually aiming a handgun.

“Thanks for hearing me out☆ In the end, you issued everyone in the casino the same equipment and then you actually took the time to listen to your enemy in the middle of a battle? You need to take the dark side more seriously than that.”

Frenda drew her own gun and took Kawazakana out in full auto mode.

Manager Kubota immediately reacted.

“I-I didn’t do anything!!”

“What?”

The sweaty man raised his hands in surrender, earning him a skeptical look from Frenda.

“How could those filthy criminals act like they had the right to punish ''me'' for breaking the rules? They forced me to be the manager on paper as their fall guy. But if this casino is destroyed, I’m free. Ha ha. I’m leaving now, but I’d actually appreciate it if you caused even more chaos in-”

He was cut off by a deafening sizzling sound.

A thick Meltdowner beam broke through the wall to the right, obliterated Kubota’s upper body, and broke through the left wall. As gruesome as the scene was, the way his remaining lower body failed to fall over was almost comical.

“…Huh.”

“He’s the one who super said he’d appreciate it if we caused chaos in here.”

With that over, it was time to escape.

“In the end, they’ll send their troops to fortify the exits to deal with this trouble. I was following along on my earphone, but that Judgment girl – Yamagami Erina, was it? – mentioned a path under the floor, right? How do we get down there?”

White Bunny Frenda was busy organizing the information in her mind, but Pink Bunny Kinuhata had a different thought.

“These bunny suits don’t provide much in the way of defense, so can you really fight in yours? There’s super not much you can do when you don’t have your bombs with you.”

“Don’t underestimate your Senpai, newbie. A bomber always has some explosives and fuses hidden on her person. Oh, but don’t expect me to get into the embarrassing details☆”

“As long as you can fight. I say we go through the central hall and super break our way out the main entrance.”

Frenda’s eyes bugged out.

“With my bombs, we can blow up any wall we like to create our own exit! In the end, why would you want to choose the route that’ll have the most bullets in the air!? Is it some stupid desire to act out a movie scene!?”

“If you make fun of movies again, I’ll super punch you. Using my power.”

With her gun at the ready, Kinuhata turned back toward Frenda.

“Let me super ask you this: are you going to just ignore the visitors still earning money in the central hall and the staff working here? Villains are villains. Even if we destroy this casino, they’ll just super start a new one.”

“Um, in the end, what did you expect a villain like me to say to that? I’m the girl who watched those deadly Colosseum battles for fun. While eating.”

“To put it kindly, you have garbage taste. If we weren’t allies, I’d super kill you.”

“So are you saying you’d do it right here and now if we weren’t?”

“Do you super want to try me?”

“…”

“Do you think this is a victimless crime because the visitors knew what they were getting into? You super remember that furnace in the cell, don’t you? This casino is a criminal enterprise that protects itself using periodic human sacrifices. And they don’t use their fellow villains for that. It’s those immoral rich people who go straight for the unintentional witnesses and the good guys from Judgment and then have a good laugh about it. So are you still going to let them get away?”

“……………………………………………………………………………I can’t tell if you’re being objective or subjective about this. Seeing what happens here up close must have really gotten to you, newbie.”

“Once we super charge into the big central hall, we can have Mugino provide covering fire. Then we take the most dangerous escape route to take all of those super shitty villains out on the way☆”

“In the end, I don’t really care one way or the other.”

So with that…

The two bunny girls kicked open the double doors and began spraying full-auto bullets everywhere.

[[Image:Item2_BW3.jpg|thumb]]

The space was so large it could have contained an entire 50m pool.

It was supposed to be a classic noble casino.

But in that moment, cards began to fly through the air, the rich visitors knocked over the very heavy roulette tables in their panic, and the slot machines began spewing chips as they were filled with holes. Some of the guards almost immediately lost the will to fight but were mercilessly shot in their fleeing backs. The Murder Team in the blast-resistant suits went red with rage and readied their .50 caliber revolvers with shoulder stocks, only to be vaporized into nothingness when a Meltdowner beam blasted through the wall to their side.

Then Pink Bunny Kinuhata tilted her head and looked confused.

She looked down at her handgun.

“Hm? I can’t seem to hit with this thing. If all I want to do is super kill them, I think it’d be faster to just punch them with Offense Armor.”

“(Yikes. She shot from behind me with aim that bad!? This might be her first time using a gun, so she could have hit me in the back as easily as Kawazakana!!)”

Kinuhata tossed the useless gun to her Senpai, yanked a craps table from the floor, and swung it around in one arm to smash the armed guards. She kicked a broken slot machine from the floor, hitting a fleeing lady in the back. Meanwhile, Frenda had upgraded to dual-wielding handguns, so she created a storm of lead around her.

Maybe they had decided to enjoy some illegal gambling in the calm underground district until the typhoon had passed, but those classy criminals were quickly mowed down.

The casino was awash with blood, corpses, and slaughter.

“Hm, we’re defeating the bad guys, but this super doesn’t feel like something good guys would do.”

“In the end, what else did you expect from Item?”

All they were doing was slaughter their irritating dark side enemies and those enemies’ source of funding.

Bunny Kinuhata jumped onto a baccarat table and then hit Safe Keeper Sawaki-kun with a flying kick. Before you feel jealous, keep in mind that her Offense Armor made that the equivalent of being hit by a giant construction hammer.

Then something exploded behind her, so Pink Bunny Kinuhata ducked down. One of the guards approaching them from behind appeared to have stepped on “something”.

“A…''stuffed animal''?”

“In the end, no one suspects the cute ones. So of course they’re the best thing to stuff full of bombs.”

The white bunny was busy setting up a few more ''traps''.

“That explosion was way too super close! I’m fine because of Offense Armor, but if it hit you, you’d be blown up by your own bomb!!”

“In the end, don’t insult me like that, newbie. Explosive blasts always take the path of least resistance, so I can freely control the direction and range of the blast using metal panels and concrete. That’s one of the most basic bomber skills. I can still only control it down to the meter, but Hollywood pyrotechnicians can divide up a single room into danger and safe zones down to 10cm. Those freaks are weirdly picky about guns, cars, and explosions when they’re willing to just use CG and VFX for everything else.”

“Super Frenda-san! My friend!!!”

“Hm? Hey, quit it! This is not the time or the place for hugging! That wasn’t meant as a compliment toward movies!”

Frenda hurriedly pushed away the other bunny who suddenly hugged her and rubbed her cheek against her for some reason. If Kinuhata had gotten carried away and used Offense Armor there, she could have easily crushed Frenda.

“Ahem. In the end, there are still at least 10 soldiers up ahead. So what’s the plan? If we wait here too long, more will reach us from behind. We could break through with brute force, but there’s got to be a better way.”

“Super take this.”

Kinuhata grabbed two wireless earphones lying nearby (anything that emitted EM signals was confiscated at the entrance, so were these for the guards or some of the higher-ranking staff?) and shoved them into the nostrils of Safe Keeper Sawaki-kun who had stopped moving after she rattled his brain earlier. Shocked Frenda watched as Kinuhata wirelessly connected her phone to the earphones.

“Test, test☆”

For some reason, Kinuhata’s voice came from Sawaki’s mouth. The sound waves passed through his nose and reflected inside his head to leave through his mouth, so by cranking the volume up to maximum, she had herself a facial speaker.

The man with two wireless earphones shoved up his nose began to convulse and struggle to breathe, but he did manage to speak.

“W-we will get back at you for this. I hope you’re ready.”

“You’re about to die, so why are you talking about the distant future, you super idiot? Okay, let’s end this.”

The two bunnies left Sawaki where he was and moved away in a crouch.

“Hey, hey! This way for anyone who wants a super one-way trip to heaven at the hands of a the cutest bunny ever! Come and get it, you super perverts!!”

Once the guards knew where their enemy was, they all fired in that direction, riddling Sawaki with holes.

While they were all focused on the wrong target, Kinuhata and Frenda moved behind cover to sneak around the side and reach a surviving poker table they could use as a shield. Dual-wielding Frenda fired her full-auto handguns from that blind spot to fill the 10 or more soldiers with bullets and she finished it off by throwing a grenade after removing the pin with her mouth.

“In the end, what movie did you get that idea from!?”

“I don’t use movies for anything like this. Movies are super fun because you can empty your head while you watch them.”

They left the central hall to reach the former bowling alley’s main entrance, but that was boarded up. Frenda reached into her bunny suit and pulled out an explosive that looked like correction tape, but before she could burn through the barricade with that, Kinuhata powered up her fist with Offense Armor and punched the door away.

They heard screeching tires outside.

Below the artificial cloudy sky of the massive underground space, an egglike round hybrid car slid into the rundown parking lot with weeds growing from the cracks in the asphalt.

“A Plinius? In the end, you chose that lightweight eco car for our getaway vehicle!? If someone crashes into us from the side during the car chase, we’ll be knocked clean off the road!!”

“Just get in!!”

“And, Mugino, can we get one more blast for the road? Aim for the third boarded-up window on the west side.”

“?”

“The safe room is through there. I figured we should super burn up all their cash while we’re at it.”

Not only did explosive flames blow out all the boarded-up windows and doors, but the roof was launched straight up. It almost looked like a mushroom cloud. The hybrid Plinius was in the middle of a sharp U-turn, so the blast lifted its left wheels from the ground and nearly flipped the entire car.

Mugino had done it, but her eyes still widened.

“What the hell!? Meltdowner doesn’t fill an entire space like that!!”

“The ''traps'' I left for them would have activated by then, so they must have ignited. They were sprayers releasing aerosolized ethylene oxide into the air. In the end, I created a fuel-air explosive☆”

“…” “…” “…”

They had let the foolish Judgment girl escape and only the villainous staff and visitors remained in the illegal casino, so that wouldn’t be an issue.

Embers, broken pieces of the building, and lots of paper money poured down from the sky while the Plinius moved from the cracked parking lot to the road. Kinuhata and Frenda took a running start and jumped through the open door into the back seat, but that was where Mugino and Takitsubo were sitting. The small Plinius’s back seat was fairly cramped with all four sitting there. In fact, someone had to sit on someone’s lap to make it work.

The driver holding the wheel was a college-aged woman with her long red hair tied back. However, she also wore an apron over a maternity dress and had a very pregnant belly. She was strapped in tight with a seatbelt, but was that safer or more dangerous in this case?

She looked like the last person to be on the dark side.

“Super ehhh?”

“A bigger family means more expenses. Kinuhata, cars these days can be driven by AI, so you don’t need a lot of driving experience to help with dark side jobs. Although the car’s location and ID need to be spoofed since it’s being used for crimes.”

“Super what? If it drives itself, couldn’t anyone be in the driver’s seat?”

“Do not understanding an AI tamer. It’s a lot like creating a secure password or inventing a new recipe. You have to give the exact right commands in the right order to get a Plinius to stop driving safely and start drifting,” explained Mugino.

Kinuhata looked to the pregnant woman with an “I doubt that” look.

“Go, go straight, yay, Plinius-chan, you’re super cute, now just zoom greenly on through this one-way street, then zip around the corner in a really yellow way and take a nice warm turn to the right, wow, wow, you really are cute, Plinius-chan, that was a great job, I could kiss you, next blast right on through that pointy light even if its red!!!”

“You may have a point. I super couldn’t do that. Not the way she’s doing it, anyway,” said Kinuhata, her mouth forming a small triangle.

She thought just using the steering wheel like normal would be easier. She also wondered if this woman could cause a supposedly unbeatable shogi AI to bug out.

A bulletproof sportscar shot out from an intersection up ahead. Likely pursuers from the casino. If they did have three shifts, then not all of them would have been in the casino.

“Uh, oh!”

They couldn’t let the people in the sportscar see the bunny suits through the window, so Mugino and Takitsubo quickly pushed Frenda and Kinuhata down. Once the sportscar was gone, the egglike hybrid car entered the giant looping slope leading to the surface and out of District 22.

Bunny Frenda spoke to Kinuhata while the two of them were still pinned below the other girls.

“''Kinuhata''. In the end, are you hurt anywhere?”

“…”

Frenda gave her a “what?” look, but Kinuhata didn’t give a direct answer.

“Heh heh heh.”

“Again, what!?”

The Plinius reached the top of the slope and emerged outside.

A solid blast of wind and pouring rain struck the windshield, so the small car slid unnaturally to the side. A drum-shaped security robot suddenly fell from the sky, hit the road, and bounced away. It had been easy to forget while underground, but a typhoon was about to make landfall.

But that wasn’t what was Kinuhata focused on.

“Why is it so dark? Damn, I lost track of time while underground. What time is it!?”

“6:30 PM.” Mugino pointed at the LCD screen next to the A/C controls “Honey Queen’s deal with Shokuhou Misaki is supposed to be at 8 tonight at the District 7 Stadium Dome, right? Looks like we’ll have barely enough time to get a look at the place and work up an attack plan.”