Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item7 Chapter2 (section)

===Between the Lines 3===

It was all over.

Or it would be once one more job was complete.



Late at night, an elderly man in a brand new pricey suit put on a mask and dragged a man out of a fancy and heavily-guarded mansion and off its grounds entirely.

He stuffed the man in the back seat of a luxury car with Maid Kagyu in the driver’s seat.

The Mugino Family head immediately tore off the uncomfortable mask.

“This would have been so much easier with Shizuri…or any Academy City power.”

“And yet it took you less than 20 minutes. Head, you have again proven just what a monster you are. This is the foreign residence of a superpower’s official. How did you manage to sneak in with only a shovel?”

“I just knew I’d be in trouble if I took any longer than that. And there was no need to fire a gun. C’mon, get us out of here.”

They arrived on the outskirts of the city.

Specifically, at a large warehouse full of dust.

The Mugino Family head sat down the man with his arms tied behind his back and took up a position directly in front of him.

“Crank Serviceace.”

“…”

“Did you not study Japan’s culture and systems at all when you were assigned here? A 1-yen coin has a diameter of 1 centimeter and weighs 1 gram. They are quite well made. The insistence on those precise values shows the Japanese people’s meticulous approach to technology, don’t you think?”

The young man wasn’t listening.

The anger was gradually returning to his confused mind.

“D-do you know what you’ve done? I am an official embassy staff member. Harm me and you make an enemy of a superpower!!”

“''Ocean or mountain – choose one.''”

“…”

“''I said choose one. Hurry.''”

The head repeated the demand.

Crank Serviceace had thought he could flaunt the power of a superpower to solve any problem, but he was finally starting to catch on. He couldn’t have been taken away like this unless it was past the point of that mattering.

The Mugino Family head spoke to the young man whose mouth opened but no words came out.

This was the bastard who had abused his power to protect his own hide and continually provided Quarterback with carte blanche to commit crimes.

“Also, you ''were'' an official embassy staff member.”

The Mugino Family head strongly emphasized that one word to make a point.

Yes, the young man no longer had any connection to the country of his birth.

…Now, the Mugino Family head knew a lot about crimes. Perhaps more than anyone else in the world.

Threats came in a number of forms.

He knew them well.

If Crank had succumbed to threats against his precious family or threats to commit indiscriminate mass murder of innocent citizens of his country, the Mugino Family head might have given it more thought. He wouldn’t have forgotten the motorcycle shop burned to the ground or the boy standing blankly in front of it. Nothing would excuse what the man had done, but he might have considered lessening the dark punishment to come.

But that wasn’t who this man was.

“It turns out the US government has no need for a staff member who is so addicted to his guns he brings one with him to a country in violation of the local laws and then uses it to kill a stray dog because ‘it was annoying me’ rather than any kind of pressing reason. The paperwork has already been submitted, so you are officially fired. Congrats.”

This only sounded like a bad joke from a man with a shotgun hidden in a bouquet and so many butlers and maids surrounding him. But you couldn’t run a criminal organization if a bit of contradiction was going to bother you.

(It’s our inability to solve these contradictions that make us a ''criminal'' organization.)

He could only smile bitterly.

And this was also the scandal that Quarterback had discovered.

It may not have been much of a problem in a gun culture, but things worked differently in this country. Especially when it was done outside the embassy.

“That said, embassy staff come in contact with a lot of government secrets. Send you to an ordinary prison and who knows what brutal criminals you’d be leaking secrets to. …I guarantee if I returned you now, you’d be lucky if you were sent to Guantanamo. You’d end up in an unnamed detention facility. You’d be stuffed inside a cell smaller than a coffin standing upright and forced to live the rest of your life standing up.”

“…………………………………………………………………………………………………”

Silence.

The fact that Crank didn’t immediately brush that off as a silly conspiracy theory was proof of just how much he knew of that superpower’s secrets. For better and for worse. He knew secret detention facilities like that really did exist. And that that fastidious superpower would never allow any official statements that would leak the kind of secret that would hurt their reputation as the world police.

If things were allowed to continue the way they normally would, he would end up in exactly the situation he was imagining.

Which was a situation the ordinary person couldn’t even imagine.

The Mugino Family head smiled over at him.

“So like I said: ocean or mountain – choose one. This is your last chance to skip town. The Mugino Family will make sure everyone thinks you’re dead, so how about it? Will you be taking our offer?”

“Wh-what do you get out of it?”

“I run an underground organization. Whether we’re smuggling or laundering, ''the more chaos in the world, the more room there is for us to make money.'' So giving you some getaway cash will let us profit a lot more than taking whatever pocket change you happen to have on you.”

“You would have me make an enemy of the States? Do you have any idea how many satellites are flying overhead? There’s nowhere I can run without getting caught! …Delta isn’t the world’s strongest force. The truly dangerous ones don’t leave any records behind. You can only suggest this insanity because you don’t know about ''that nameless squad''!!”

“A paradise of everlasting spring does exist. You just have to visit another dangerous superpower where those FPS monsters can’t get at you even if they know you’re there. You ''were'' an official embassy staff member, remember? You know plenty of secrets that can act as a gift, so any country that hates them will welcome you.”

“Y-you mean I can buy my safety?”

“Yes,” nodded the elderly man. “Of course, that assumes you have the will and the resolve to seriously run from your crimes. You only live once, so you want try laughing out loud in a bathtub full of money, don’t you?”

“Yes. I’m saved. Quarterback is gone and no one’s left to threaten my freedom. I’m saved!!”

“Yes, yes,” nodded the elderly man.

The former embassy staff probably didn’t notice with all the endorphins pumping into his brain, but the Mugino Family head seemed to be checking on something.

Then Crank spoke up again.

“By the way, I-I have a question.”

“What’s that?”

“''What is this bathtub I’m sitting in''?”

The Mugino Family head kicked away the bastard with his hands tied behind his back. Only after falling backwards and finding himself looking up at the warehouse ceiling from the bottom of the tub did Crank notice ''it''.

It looked like a kusudama.

A piece of cloth far larger than a sandbag was hanging from an overhead crane. Its bottom opened and an aluminum waterfall filled the bathtub.

“It’s your coffin.”

The silver waterfall rang loud without end.

And the elderly man spat out his words.

“I said I’d give you some getaway cash, didn’t I? So smile because I’ve submerged you up to the head in money just like you wanted. …Still, 1-yen coins really are strange things. It’s money, but ten tons of them doesn’t even add up to 10 million yen.”

There was no response.

Only a pair of ankles stuck out from the silver gleam.

The bathtub was too small to contain the mountain of 1-yen coins, so some of them spilled out onto the floor.

There had never been any chance of an exception.

Especially when this idiot demonstrated the will and the resolve to run from his crimes. He still thought of himself as one of the chosen elite. And he had made the mistake of doing this in front of the Mugino Family head who stained his hands with so many misdeeds because he hated ''that sort of illicit loophole that didn’t even amount to a crime''.

Every last person involved in this nonsense would be executed. That had been the rule from the start. The Mugino Family had set that rule even if it meant robbing a small boy of his right to revenge.

The job was complete.

He had kept his promise.

“Revenge is meaningless,” whispered the elderly man.

The most it let you do was spit on the pile of bodies you had created.

The head had said so to the innocent little boy himself.

But it had a further meaning for the Mugino Family.

“So your death changes nothing. Die a death that accomplishes nothing for the world, worm.”

Standing straight next to him, Butler Mujinayama made a suggestion.

“Shall I call my contact with that country and let them know we killed a former embassy worker who intended to leak national secrets because we knew their position would make doing so difficult? That will ensure your safety for a while and that superpower will owe you one. The White House will not comment, but the Pentagon certainly will.”

“No need. Don’t drag extra meaning into a job. It dilutes the purity of the crime. We didn’t do this for our own benefit.”

No longer interested, the Mugino Family head turned away from the bathtub full of money and headed toward the warehouse exit.

Mujinayama started work on the cleanup.

That superpower would be concerned if a former embassy worker, who could leak national secrets, went missing. There could be trouble if they suspected he had defected and began threatening other countries and regions. However, disposing of the bathtub in a public place without any way of tracing it back to the Mugino Family was no easy task.

Maid Kagyu whispered to him while walking by his side.

“Excellent work, head.”

“The fact that I enjoy coming up with these bad jokes proves I’m just another villain. The problem is this kind of cruelty is exactly what our imperfect world wants.”

“I see. You are having trouble calming down from the excitement, so you intend to spend this evening winning the hearts of the Mugino Family’s young maids using your dry wit and refined words. I have heard from the older maids it is a common occurrence in large, outdated mansions. I must welcome my unresisting self to a secret maid paradise your wife must never discover☆”

“Did you not hear what I said? Don’t drag extra meaning into a job. Going all in on that sort of erotic fantasy dilutes the purity of the crime. Stop getting so moe-moe all of a sudden!”

“Love, moe, and eroticism all have very different definitions. You must determine the nature of the maid from the aura produced by everything from the ends of her hair to the hem of her skirt. You still have much to learn about maids, head. If a puppy-style maid’s ‘Wahhh, I’m sorry. I’m such a silly, stupid ditz.’ reads as ‘erotic’ to you, I grant you 0 points. Head, you earn 0 points. Have you not been paying any attention at all over the course of your long life? Swift education and training is necessary to input everything you must know about Japanese maids. This is crucial for the improvement of my working environment.”

“…Wait. Are you planning to put a refined man like me in a maid uniform to train me from scratch, Kagyu?”

“If the head at the very top of the Mugino Family is viewing his maids with no idea how to distinguish between love, moe, and eroticism and lacks even the most fundamental knowledge on the subject and yet he suddenly wishes to attempt so great a challenge, a mere young maid such as myself could not possibly scold the head who reins so brilliantly above us. I simply could not.”

“I don’t remember clicking the ‘agree’ button, so why am I suddenly sent on this tour of hell!?”

The Management-level maid held her hands together in front of her in obedience and then sighed.

Was this really the same person she had seen 10 minutes ago?

After experiencing so many incomprehensible things in her service of the Mugino Family, she found herself able to accept even the most unreasonable thing. And this was not limited to Kagyu. All the Managers and troops serving the family likely felt the same.

“What a pain. I suppose this is what you get with the head who inherited the Mugino Family blood most strongly.”

“Eh?”

“Eh?”

For some reason, the two looked each other in the eye.

But it was Kagyu who experience the greater surprise.

“Excuse me, but I am uncertain what you mean. Why would you question that statement, head?”

“Well, I mean…”

He still looked confused.

Could it be? Kagyu was a relatively young member of the Management, so was she unaware how he and his wife had met? The elderly man explained.



“''I married into the family. I don’t have a single drop of Mugino Family blood in me.''”



A certain fact had been mentioned back when Frenda had been thrown out of Academy City.

…Mugino Shizuri did not look anything like the Mugino Family head.

Which meant it was his beautiful witch of a wife, whose age was hard to determine, who most strongly inherited the family blood.

There was another, even more frightening secret boss who hadn’t made a single appearance during the deadly battle for the head position because Sakuya was ''far too boring of an opponent''…and was the only person in the entire world capable of getting this man to eat bell peppers.

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