Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item3 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 8===

Just like bike shops tended to be near elementary and middle schools, like florists tended to be near hospitals, and like ramen shops and other restaurants that used their large serving sizes as a selling point tended to be near schools strong in athletics, there was an ideal location for every business.

Detectives tended to deal with the more unseemly side of humanity, such as infidelity and inheritance issues, so if they wanted customers, they would naturally set up shop in a district closely related to human desires.

Academy City’s entertainment district in District 16 was the most obvious example there.

The office contained a large potted plant, a business desk, a glass reception table, a leather sofa, and a fairly expensive coffee maker.

The image of a detective’s office must not have changed much since the time of old dramas. It had ended up like this by asking the interior decorator to “make it look like a detective’s office”. On the other hand, it also looked a lot like a collection of the unsold office supplies in a wholesaler’s warehouse.

Who could have predicted the sofa would have a blanket rolled up on it because it had been more or less turned into a bed? The silver metal bag on the floor was a simple forensics kit and there was a surveillance drone too. But if you wanted to use those toys at the scene of the mystery, it was better to hire an expert.

The calendar on the wall indicated plans to rent a consumer electronics accident investigation lab. That would be for reproducing large-scale physical tricks.

Although with a detective, that was less about using a specific gimmick yourself and more about understanding exactly how all of the devices worked to simulate malicious ways a criminal might use them.

However, none of that was the office’s most notable trait.

Everything was covered.

Photos and handwritten memos weren’t just pasted all over a wall – they covered the floor and ceiling too. They were all linked by colorful string, to visualize how it was all connected.



One clump was formed from photos of the five members of the Sadistic Dolls and a memo written by someone at their company.

Another clump included photos of the science cult leader and the Clone Complex agricultural building.

Photos of the four Item members were located between those two clumps.

A short distance away were the three Frees.

A few colorful strings extended from there, but were not yet connected to anything.



(My deadline is probably September 1. Logically speaking, it’s just not possible for us to pretend to be friends in class now that we both know each other’s identity. We need to settle this one way or another during August.)

…Oddly enough, Mugino organized information in much the same way when she was pursuing a case. It was unclear which one took after the other, though.

“Hm, hm♪”

The detective was nude. She had just taken a bath. There was a door leading to all the rooms with running water: kitchen, bathroom, and bath. She took a sip of the cold coffee left on the table and then searched for a snack to help settle her stomach.

Sensing food, the Japanese wolf looked up from the cushion on the floor she had been boredly lying on.

The first to solve a mystery left by a wealthy old man would receive his full inheritance, but instead of a giant pile of cash, that inheritance turned out to be a Japanese wolf and some atavism research notes. The romantic of an old man apparently thought something that couldn’t be converted into a pile of cash was a much greater treasure. The family members who had been fighting so ruthlessly before were suddenly in complete agreement that they didn’t want the wolf, so the hired detective had taken it.

The black-haired girl wearing only the towel over her wet hair opened the fridge and bent over to look inside.

“Ugh, someone ate all my food. Was the culprit me? No, I could never keep this lovely figure if I’d eaten all that ham and bacon. Which can only mean...hmm.”

Shiratori Okibi muttered to herself while directing a magnifying glass toward the fridge.

Technically, that was a multipurpose scanner with the rim packed full of 2mm cameras and sensors. It could zoom in and out and it could also visualize all sorts of data: fingerprints, bloodstains, footprints, sweat and saliva spray, and more.

She started by setting the wavelength to 385 and 455 nanometers. This revealed a trail of something being dragged out of the fridge.

There were signs of plastic wrappers being torn open on the floor.

Following the trail further led Shiratori to peer between the large potted plant and the wall where the ham and bacon wrappers had been roughly shoved.

The towel-head girl gave a single large nod.

The culprit was her assistant.

The truths revealed by a detective were always a source of sorrow.

“Rozeki! Dammit, you can try to hide it, but I can still see what you did with the ALS!!”

The Japanese wolf tried to play it dumb, so Shiratori hugged her in the nude and rubbed her cheek against her, making her yelp pitifully. Not only was Shiratori’s skin and hair wet, but the wolf didn’t like the overly sweet scent of the body soap and shampoo.

In the world of deduction, you could never say never.

Dogs and cats could operate doors and faucets with surprising skill and they could even press a button on a TV or AC remote. Of course, it was impossible to say what Japanese wolves were capable of due to the extremely limited sample size.

After completing the wolf’s punishment with a smile, (naked) Shiratori Okibi removed her face from the fluffiness.

“Okay, Rozeki, let’s head out and buy some food at the cheap place.”

“Woof!” happily barked the wolf. Rozeki preferred discount stores to convenience stores and supermarkets because of all the pet food and toys available there. One enormous store in particular had practically become a landmark in this entertainment district.

Shiratori tossed the towel from her head and changed into the bare minimum of going-out clothes. The combination of the special below-the-knee sock garters and short black stockings was stylish and cute, but it was a pain to put on. If she wasn’t careful, she would end up with runs in the stockings. She hesitated on the choice between leather shoes or boots but chose the boots.

“Staying stylish as a girl costs so much money, time, and work.”

She grabbed her phone and accessed the school phone tree group on social media. That she remained in good standing at school showed she was better than Mugino Shizuri at maintaining both sides of her life.

Summer was ending soon. She had to really start thinking about September 1 now.

(I’ll be busy again once the break ends. Then again, school is a treasure trove of jobs people can’t go to anyone else with.)

Shiratori left her detective office with Rozeki the Japanese wolf.

The detective office was located in a filthy multi-tenant building in the entertainment district full of neon and LCD signs. It had a sex establishment and a consumer finance office as neighbors. Other establishments in the building were a pawn shop that primarily bought furniture and tools off of debt-collectors and a mobile phone shop that used phone repairs as a cover for stealing people’s personal information. All the strange additions to the building made it hard to navigate.

“Yawwn. Mornin’, Miss Detective.”

A busty young woman wearing a thin camisole rubbed her eyes sleepily while staggering down the narrow hallway. How busty was she exactly? Over 100cm. While Shiratori hadn’t lifted the camisole to check, she suspected there was no underwear underneath.

The woman was a sex worker who worked in this building.

“Huh? I didn’t realize you started work this early.”

“There’s a space to take naps in the back. ''It’s too cold outside''.”

The sex worker staggering around in only a camisole was much more interested in the wolf walking beside the detective than the detective herself. The woman’s face lit up as soon as she saw Rozeki because Rozeki had in fact become something like the building’s mascot.

“Your assistant’s with you☆ Oh, she’s so cute!”

A detective’s job was to resolve a wide variety of problems, but the majority of those problems came from human relationships: investigating suspected infidelity, searching for a runaway girl, finding people who were avoiding paying loan sharks, etc. Whatever the case, a detective primarily handled tracking jobs that Anti-Skill and Judgment wouldn’t touch, so the Japanese wolf’s sharp sense of smell was a powerful weapon. At times, that was even more useful than a special ALS light that revealed fingerprints or bloodstains.

Her sleepiness gone, the sex worker smiled bright.

“Can I pet Rozeki-chan?”

“Go right ahead.”

With shrieks about how cute the wolf was, hands reached in from all sides to pet her. As soon as one was given permission, a crowd of women emerged from the nearby doors. The wolf would be given all sorts of food, snacks, and toys if Shiratori let her out of her sight for even a moment, but she was even more popular right now after driving out a particularly nasty drunk. Although it wasn’t quite clear if the women viewed Rozeki as a knight in shining armor or a maneki-neko.

The animal’s pleading eyes said, “I will let you draw eyebrows on me with permanent marker, just rescue me from this.” She had her tail tucked between her legs.

(Sigh, she’s all scared of them. And yet a human would have to pay them a lot of money to get this kind of treatment.)

But it wasn’t fair to animals to expect them to see things like humans did.

The detective searched for some way to help out her poor assistant.

“Oh? I hear a lot of noise coming from over there. Rozeki.”

Shiratori made up an excuse and whistled with her fingers. The wolf left the sex workers’ petting hands and ran to Shiratori. Ran quite quickly. Her round eyes expressed thanks.

Shiratori visited another tenant in the same building.

The Human Bike Delivery Service.

The sign was so bland it would be easy to overlook, but it was really a go-between for illegal part-time work. Instead of delivering objects, their service let people use their phones to easily have the person on the bike delivered.

The detective stuck her head in through the door.

“What’s going on? Got another job for me?”

“No. I’m busy breaking that man the ladies discovered.”

“Ewahhhhhhhh!! Ohhraghhhhhhhhhhh!!”

A neighborhood nuisance of a scream pierced through the building’s wall. Apparently loan sharks these days no longer demanded their poor victims sell their organs.

Of course, not all loan shark “customers” ended up like this.

Or rather, loan sharks worked best when the leader remained hidden on the other side of a phone call and threatened disposable lackeys to do the real work. So even if this captured lackey talked, it wouldn’t reveal who was behind it all.

One detective job was to search out the lackeys who ignored their orders and ran off in the middle of the night.

There were specialists who would drag them into a dark room and thoroughly break the reckless disobedience out of them.

Runaways like that weren’t exactly common, but if word of a single one getting away safely were to spread, a lot more would risk it.

There was no real sympathy in the detective’s voice.

There was only one reason that man had fallen this far.

“''Home schooling,'' huh?”

That referred to back alley brain modifications done with electrodes and suggestion. As opposed to the official Curriculum administered at a school. Shiratori didn’t know if it was more like an illegal drug trip or like an advanced form of doping.

“Apparently he screwed up his own head so bad he couldn’t earn the money needed to pay the illegal lab built into a modified van, so he resorted to purse snatching on the streets.”

“He was so used to stealing, but he was still that opposed to robbing a jewelry store like he was ordered to?” asked Shiratori, sounding almost impressed.

And then…

“Have you decided on a plan yet?”

“Honestly, I’m going with your suggestion, young lady.”

“Good idea. That’s apparently an illegal store that buys stolen jewelry off of people. Stealing all their jewelry to get Anti-Skill’s attention might get them to give the place a closer look.”

“And that purse snatcher will be caught again too.”

A detective knew the last thing criminals would want.

Was that because they were on the side of justice?

''Probably so,'' concluded Shiratori.

The detective business was all about taking a different approach to solve the cases that slipped through Anti-Skill’s fingers and handing the criminals over to the authorities. They were like fixers that used every trick in the book to fill in the dark gaps left in the peaceful world.

And so Shiratori Okibi, Detective of Justice, would solve all sorts of mysteries and cases, but ''she carried no responsibility for what happened as a result.

The detective working on a mysterious serial killing, the journalists, and the famous maids didn’t worry themselves over the fact that whoever they identified as the killer would definitely be given the death penalty.

The threatening-looking guy in a gaudy suit, probably part of some support team or another, sighed in exasperation.

“Well, it’s not like we could get much money for organs ruined from years of smoking, drinking, and drugs. Sending them after jewelry and watch stores is a lot more cost-effective.”

“Really? Filthy, damaged organs might be rarer and thus more in demand as research specimens. You know, like the lungs black with nicotine and tar you see on posters in infirmaries.”

“Speaking of, I don’t know where they get the photos from, but Academy City does update the posters every year for some reason. If all they want to do is scare people off smoking with a photo of a gross lung, they could just reuse the same photo they were using a decade ago.”

“I wonder if the board of directors holds an audition for that. To see who has the dirtiest lungs of the year.”

Just then…

“Oh.”

One of the other thugs in the back of the room spoke up.

The young man (literally) bit one of the men in gaudy suits, shook free, and ran for the office’s exit.

Which meant he was approaching Shiratori since she was near the door.

“Outta the way!!”

“Nah.”

The man reached into his sleeve and pulled out something like a relay baton.

With a sound of springs and gears operating, it extended to more than 60cm. A close look would show it had a thin metal wire drawn tight like a violin bow.

The ultra-thin blade glowed orange and burned the air.

Was it an electrothermic machete?

It had the unique look of 3D-printed craft plastic, so it may have been ordered online from the Armory.

“I’m not doing your illegal jobs. Why should I follow your ‘rules’? You’re just a bunch of criminals!! I’m going home! And I won’t let any of you stop m-”

“Bow wow!!!!”

An explosive roar from Rozeki made the criminal drop his weapon.

Time froze and he fell onto his rear.

Tears formed in the corners of his eyes.

This was very different from a dog bought at a pet shop. Even if you didn’t know this dog had been genetically modified into a Japanese wolf, your instincts as a living being would recognize the true intimidation of a beast that had become a legend of its own.

That ''instinctual understanding'' was crucial.

Police in a gun culture did not use laser sights because it would improve their accuracy. By shining the red dot on a suspect’s chest or gut, they could convince the suspect to surrender without having to fire a shot.

(Because with my power, I could turn the criminal to mincemeat before they even have time to threaten me.)

A detective’s assistant had to do two things.

To be a mascot with the interpersonal skills to smooth things over in place of the unsociable detective and to physically suppress a criminal who didn’t know when to give up.

As long as they could do those two things, they didn’t even need to be human.

“And the most important skills for a detective are keen observation and a sharp memory.”

Shiratori smiled as she gently patted the wolf’s head.

Smiled thinly and cruelly.

“The difference between a detective and a hapless victim who stumbled onto the truth is the ability to maintain a safe zone where they cannot be killed even after arriving at the correct answer. Real cases do not end when you solve the mystery. That is in fact the starting line. You aren’t a real detective unless you can take control and safely suppress the killer. Directly questioning the killer one-on-one is out of the question☆”

The young man was dragged into the back of the room and the door was shut.

The sex worker in a thin camisole poked her head out of the neighboring door.

“Is the scary stuff over? Then let me see the good girl. Oh, now this is therapeutic. Look, Rozeki-chan, I brought you some bone gum☆”

The Japanese wolf tried to flee.

The smiling young woman’s danger-sensing instinct appeared to be badly broken.