Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item5 Prologue
The essence of humanity is made of two things: conflict and order.
Even the elementary schoolers racing to take first place know this.
Prologue: Keep Out Until the Day Before[edit]
We are deeply sorry.
These coin lockers will be sealed for the duration of the event.
“Okay.”
At night near the train station, Frenda Seivelun, a girl with fluffy blonde hair, ignored the notice that didn’t sound remotely sorry and reached her hand into an outdoor coin locker. But instead of using the doors covered up with yellow and black plastic tape, she was reaching into the narrow gap between the lockers and the wall.
She pulled out an oddly long and skinny bag and casually walked off with it.
(It’s getting harder to use actual coin lockers. Like these ones that only accept payment with a smart card linked to your name. In the end, you can’t hide anything dangerous like that!)
Preventing exactly that was the point, so complaining wasn’t going to accomplish much.
A short girl met up with her after taking a different route. Kinuhata Saiai.
“Super what is that? Another bomb?”
Why would she hide an explosive so near the busy train station? Ultra-cute Frenda-chan was the friendly sort of bomber☆
“An amplifier. It’s an amplifier.”
“?”
“In the end, you can think of it as an illegal device that boosts the power of a phone’s antenna.”
“Is that super necessary in a city packed full of base stations?”
“Girls and bombs take a lot of effort to get ready. Yes, quite a lot indeed.”
They were on another Item job.
But this one was a little different from the usual fare.
“Honestly, is fighting a serial killer super really a job for Item? If this person is so openly causing trouble, can’t Anti-Skill use their giant net to deal with them?”
“In the end, there are reasons why the heroes can’t do it. Like turning them into a martyr.”
A serial killer was hiding within society and killing people according to their own rules. But the strange attraction that sort of violent criminal created was one odd aspect of the human world. Especially the kind that attacked a great evil that could not be stopped by ordinary means.
The pair left the train station area together.
The unnaturally long and skinny bag was fairly noticeable, but combined with the two girls, passersby probably assumed it was a musical instrument or video equipment. Cuteness was such a wonderful weapon girls had at their disposal.
The dark side generally dealt with mad scientists who wouldn’t let a little thing like people’s deaths stop their research and various professionals who were rewarded for causing death. The current enemy was a mutation that the dark side didn’t know quite how to read.
Academy City had a serial killer.
The flippant discussions online had dubbed the killer John Doom.
“That freak’s target is Nabeyaki Precision Industry, right?”
“Right. Everything from electric toothbrushes to phones use NPI’s lithium ion batteries, but they’ve been accidentally exploding recently. There have been 15 deaths so far, 8 of which were minor children. As for injuries…well, you can probably guess. After all, even public cleaning robots and educational tablets have been exploding out of the blue, so every generation resents the company. You can see why it’d make a serial killer’s nipples hard.”
“I super heard a rumor that the executives were informed of a possible design flaw back when the initial accident happened, but the relevant documents were ‘lost’ before they could be seized.”
“Who knows if that’s really true. It sounds plausible enough, but when you track the story back its source, it comes from independently-owned online news sites and sports papers. Their name is being hidden, but I bet the stories are all by the same writer. You can’t trust something just because there are multiple sources.”
Frenda did some kind of work as they walked. The area near the large train station had been brightly lit, but the light level was dropping fast as their distance from it grew. This kind of fading scenery was seen in big cities and not just rural areas.
This nearby stagnation was like another world bordering the darkness. The atmosphere was familiar to Item.
“Super regardless, there was a class-action lawsuit, but the thick layer of corporate lawyers protected the executives and they were all acquitted.”
“In the end, they didn’t even get a suspended sentence. …But then the first board member to come strutting out of the courthouse with an ugly smirk on his face became the first murder victim. And only three steps outside the courthouse at that.”
The method had been fascinating even from a dark side perspective.
Major TV station reporters with big cameras and online news reporters with only their phones had gathered around the acquitted executive in the hopes of getting a story for the day, but they had instead ended up with a completely different scoop right on their live broadcast or livestream. Those mass media reporters had feigned decency by screaming in horror, but they had definitely been rejoicing on the inside.
“John Doom super threw a big laptop lithium battery out of the unruly crowd, right? And during the panic, they made a skillful escape without anyone noticing.”
“And from there, it’s been nothing but more sensational murders. In the past three months, five executives have been killed. Once it was attached to their house’s front door and once CO2 was used to launch it from a distance like artillery. The exact method changes each time, but the murder weapon has been consistent. In the end, they’ve all been blown up by one of NPI’s own lithium batteries. Man, this one really is messed up in the head. I mean, the killer’s really enjoying their justice. If Anti-Skill or someone like that goes after them, it could turn them into a martyr which would only give them more supporters, right?”
“Their beliefs and preferences are a super mystery, so it’d be a pain if that started spreading through an existing structure, you mean?”
So to prevent that, this dirty job was being left to dirty people to complete in a dirty way.
By the people who accepted the pure and the impure and who wouldn’t be influenced by shortsighted justice.
“Oh?” said Frenda.
A bright light was flashing down a narrow alley.
It resembled a camera flash, but was more brutal.
“What? In the end, has Mugino already gotten started?”
“Hey, I’ve driven him outside like we planned. You aren’t going to tell me you haven’t surrounded the site with traps yet, are you!?”
An honest answer would have gotten Frenda a spanking and a lie would have gotten her murdered, so she opted for silence. She heard a rustling sound from down the alley. Someone had kicked over a pile of trash bags. They were approaching. Fast.
“Bastard!!”
Kinuhata took a step forward to stop them, but her small body was instead launched backwards. Which was unusual. Her Offense Armor could forcibly stop a shotgun blast, but apparently a small explosion had occurred when the projectile hit her. With a white flash as bright as a welding flame.
With the shield gone, Frenda would be next.
It didn’t even take a full second.
In an unnatural ducking stance, the dark beast aimed the barrel her way. The gun’s silhouette was unexpectedly large. At close range, she could tell it was larger than a plastic umbrella.
A finger found the trigger.
Thick lightning dropped from the sky above.
No, that was a self-destructing drone that had purged its main wings and charged straight down toward the ground.
It pierced sharply into the ground and exploded, launching the dark beast hard into a nearby wall. They slowly slid down to the ground. The movement was sort of sticky, so they were probably bleeding badly.
Frenda had needed the amplifier because of the vertical distance required. Base station antennae were not floating in the air. A toy like this was necessary when sending a drone up too high for even the signal from an antenna on top of a skyscraper to reach.
Frenda sighed with her phone in hand.
(A margin of error of 3 meters. These plastic bottle drones I made leave something to be desired quality-wise.)
A few meters might not seem like much, but those few hundred centimeters could lead to failure when aiming for a narrow alley. When bombing a target deep in an alley, she couldn’t afford to accidentally carve away part of the neighboring building’s roof instead.
(In the end, retrieving all the traps set up around the entire area is such a pain, so I was hoping I could just keep a mobile trap circling in the sky above. But I’m not sure I’m willing to trust this with my life.)
“Kinuhataaa? In the end, did you think I was chatting with you for no reason? I said John Doom has been consistent in their weapon choice, didn’t I? They always use one of NPI’s defective batteries to blow people up. I gave you the clues you needed, so you need to pay attention. It’s called reading comprehension.”
“Ugh, super dammit… Why do I have to have my verbal ability mocked by this blonde girl whose writing skills are suspect at best?”
“Oh, what was that? In the end, this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone talk about ‘writing skills’ in the normal world.”
“People super don’t normally talk about reading comprehension either!”
Ignoring that complaint, Frenda kicked away the gun that had fallen to the ground.
It was primarily made of special steel and military plastic, but the silhouette itself was similar to an old-fashioned hunting rifle. However, the muzzle was odd. It opened up like a conical funnel.
“A blunderbuss. That ancestor of the shotgun could turn pebbles, glass shards, fish bones, or just about anything else into a bullet by shoving them into the muzzle. Is this a modern version? In the end, this killer does have interesting taste.”
Scattering a pile of trash to hit the enemy at high speed must have been the serial killer’s preferred method. Perhaps because they saw it as returning the defective trash their targets had thrown out into the world and then roasting them like it was an incendiary round.
“Keh. A drone attack…huh?”
The “genius criminal” who had sent shockwaves through society turned out to be a young boy. He had probably only just started middle school. He could even be described as plain.
In a city where 80% of the population were students, younger criminals was a known trend.
“Come to think of it, that’s one thing I never tried on those fat ass executives. Why didn’t I think of it? It sounds fun…”
Fun.
He really was a serial killer. He had been focusing on a great evil, but he didn’t seem to be acting out of panic or anger.
Two more people emerged from further down the alley: Mugino Shizuri and Takitsubo Rikou.
“What, he’s already dying?”
“So we made it in time for the climax.”
That made four.
Item was fully present.
The small boy showed no interest in the weapon that had left his grasp.
“Wow. A secret group of only girls? Sounds like something from a movie.”
“Flattery will only get you a quicker death.”
He didn’t need one.
The boy known as John Doom collapsed to the side and stopped moving. With his eyes still open.
Something exploded.
It happened far in the distance, at the center of a vortex of light making up the city’s nightscape.
The 55-story headquarters building tilted diagonally before falling straight down. No. After its balance was thrown off, it collapsed under its own weight. Just like poking at a house of cards. Filthy gray dust spread out at ground level, thickly blotting out the lights of the city night.
If all that had been done with defective batteries, it was one hell of a waste of resources. Both by John Doom for setting it up and for the corporation for making so many of those explosive batteries.
“Ah, wait, why!? But John Doom is super already dead!!”
“He doesn’t have any electrons attached to him, so it wasn’t his brain or heart stopping that triggered it. In the end, maybe he had set up some junk on a timer. And a whole lot of it.”
“Who cares,” Mugino said coldly. “Our job was to deal with the crazed criminal. The defense team screwing up their job isn’t going to get our reward reduced.”
“That was the kind of company that has people work tons of overtime, right? In the end, there were probably a lot of normal people in there.”
“Normal?”
Mugino’s tone was unchanged.
Everyone placed their dividing line between the outside world and the dark side differently. This was hers in this case.
“The company was the target of a serial killer, but that doesn’t change the fact that quite a few people died from their products exploding. Everyone in the company knew about it and said nothing. They could have become a whistleblower, organized a strike, or otherwise fought it from the inside, but they didn’t want the trouble and just kept on receiving their generous paychecks. They’re not innocent.”
“I wonder if the defense team protected them. I hope that team wasn’t slacking,” said Takitsubo with her usual blank look.
In the end, Nabeyaki Precision Industry didn’t matter all that much to Item. They were simply completing the odd jobs so common at this time. Just like the train station trash cans being removed and the coin lockers being sealed.
All the ultra-thin LCDs wrapping around the decorative columns were playing the exact same ad.
“Not long now until the Daihaseisai. Let’s all make the year’s best memories together!”