Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item6 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 2===

Kinuhata and Takitsubo arrived in District 8.

Keeping this a secret from Item’s leader Mugino Shizuri meant they couldn’t use the support team’s cars. Thus, they had to travel by train. How they managed to safely use public transportation while the authorities were on alert will be omitted here. …Because safety measures tend to be very boring.

District 8 was a jumbled mixture of new and old buildings and it contained more teachers and office workers than students. The hierarchy was plain to see. The latest, high-tech estates and high-rise apartments were home to the wealthy, so you can guess who ended up in the old buildings.

Sudori Sayu’s home was in a two-story apartment building.

She did not live alone as a student. Her entire family lived there.

The girl walking around in a bikini and a thick hot dog was half-panicked.

Even though they were getting close to her home, she had been getting more and more flustered.

Or maybe that was why she was flustered.

“W-wait. Why do we need to go to my home? I can’t let my parents see me now. They’ll think I’m friends with people like you and get all worried.”

“…” “…”

Kinuhata and Takitsubo both gave Sudori Sayu a look.

The message on their faces couldn’t have been more clear: ''we wouldn’t be in this situation if you hadn’t tried to rob that bank.

They must have gotten through to her because the public bikini girl shrank down.

“Okay, fine. I’ll die then. Sorry for being born. Look, everyone, I’m about to livestream my own death…”

Maybe they had gotten through to her a little too well.

“Ahh!!” Kinuhata frantically snatched away her phone (with a powerful Offense Armor arm). “Why are you trying to physically and socially kill yourself simultaneously, you super troublemaker!?”

“I should’ve just done this in the first place… I don’t want to be a victim, but I don’t want to be a criminal either.”

What was the bank robber saying now? While trembling. She really couldn’t be much more of a nuisance.

And Takitsubo Rikou responded with a tilt of the head.

“Suicide isn’t considered a crime, but it doesn’t eliminate civil responsibilities. That means it can create financial problems.”

She might be expressionless and seem out of it, but she was still part of the dark side.

She probably wanted to prevent this suicide, but the words she chose were pretty awful.

“Stopping a train or leaving a rotting stench in a rented room will incur a fairly large debt. And since the person who killed herself can’t be charged, the debt goes to her family. …Do you want to cause even more trouble for your parents?”

“…”

“I don’t know if video sites do that kind of thing, but if you violate the terms of service to use their site in an inappropriate way that gathers a lot of attention, you can’t exactly complain if they demand a large payment.”

That was a side issue and didn’t really matter.

It was time to get down to business.

Kinuhata sighed in exasperation first.

“Blackmailers obtain compromising information on their victims and then threaten them into committing crimes. It’s safe to assume they have a negotiator posted near your home to keep tabs on your family. That way they can threaten to harm your home or parents if you super hesitate to go through with the crime.”

“You mean one of the villains is near here? B-but would they really be that easy to find? They’re so scary because they’re a faceless presence, so I doubt they’ll be anywhere near me.”

“Sudori. If they threatened you into stealing jewels or fancy watches, how are they supposed to get the stolen goods? They must have a contact point for handing those things over. And using the mail doesn’t work well with jewels or watches that lose so much value from even a small scratch. They are threatening people because they want money. That means there is a physical connection even if you aren’t aware of it. This is one of them.”

Sudori Sayu looked left and right while cowering down, but they weren’t going to be that easy to find.

If one of the official members of the group was here, the best plan was to locate that person and get the details out of them. Using the unspeakable methods of the dark side. Once they had information on the enemy group, it would be time to physically crush it.

Then Sudori Sayu’s shoulders shook.

A door on the two-story apartment complex opened. A middle-aged man emerged. She hadn’t mentioned which room was hers, but that reaction was enough to know that had to be her father. The timid-looking man watered a planter with a watering can.

He was home at midday, but Kinuhata and Takitsubo didn’t take that to mean he was “one of them”.

Money problems also meant time problems. People in a bad position had no freedom. He may have simply been forced to live an irregular life with no boundaries between day and night or between weekday and weekend.

“My dad works at a milk delivery company. It’s small, but he’s the president,” muttered the robber girl. “All the neighbors say it’s an outdated company and it’s getting harder and harder to survive in the industry thanks to online shopping and with bike and drone deliveries soon to be common. He should really shut down his business and use his know-how in another industry, but then he would have to fire the students who are using their part-time jobs to pay their tuition. So no matter how bad it gets and no matter how bad the future looks…”

“…”

Kinuhata didn’t know the actual numbers, but she could guess it was quite dire.

This was a problem a parent would try their best to hide from their child, yet it had grown to the point even the child could tell. He must not have had any room left for pretending.

“All I wanted was to help my family pay the bills.”

The robber girl – Sudori Sayu – stared at that peaceful scene.

As if it existed in some far distant world. While trembling.

“They said I could earn 100 thousand yen in a week if I worked hard. They said it would be four times that in a month, which would be more than the monthly salary of a new office worker. I thought I could support my family. I thought I could relieve the tension there. But I didn’t know my Bank ID, so I sent them the number written in my mom’s notebook. I thought it was a normal process. I never imagined I was selling out my own parents…”

She only had herself to blame.

…Or did she?

Kinuhata Saiai was from the dark side. She was a member of Item who took jobs from the Voice on the Phone and knowingly wielded violence for money and to secure a place for herself. So she was not a kind enough person to feel pity for a foolish criminal who had intentionally chosen to set foot in that guilty world.

But this was different.

It felt wrong.

“You worry me, Kinuhata.”

The track suit girl was glaring (super exasperatedly) at Kinuhata, but that didn’t change her view.

An ordinary person was dragged into a world of crime without any advance notice, they were sent past the point of no return, and their family and friends were taken hostage to force them to commit crimes. Nothing was done to protect the victim. They were disposable tools whose eventual arrest was all part of the plan.

None of this would have happened if she hadn’t done what she did. That was true.

But…that didn’t meant she had intentionally chosen to set foot in this world.