Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item7 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 3===

And so they had a route to search through all past bombings.

An active Anti-Skill officer had lent them her ID and password, so they could access all the Bank’s important data which was often used for criminal investigations. They couldn’t say how long this route would remain open, but it only had to last the day.

A bright voice came from the TV.

In ''first class'', they apparently didn’t attach a screen smaller than a bento box on the back of the next seat up. An impressive HMD compatible with ultra-high resolution VR was hanging there instead. Mugino preferred not to use those because the complex arrangement of bands used to support the weight of the goggles messed up her hair. Not to mention that the flat rubber bands kind of hurt when they tugged at her fluffy hair! And hadn’t cinephile Kinuhata said her view quickly fogged up when she got too excited watching an action movie as if it were on the big screen?

A sergeant caught standing in place during an FPS match was probably fighting with a lens wipe for that same reason. Not that that would stop anyone from headshotting them.

A young female voice was speaking like sound leaking from someone’s headphones.



“Academy City is holding an astronomy event to celebrate the autumn moon viewing season. Now is the perfect time to acquire accurate knowledge and say goodbye to the silly superstitions running rampant in our world. Will o’ the wisps, ghost photographs, and mysterious voices in abandoned buildings all have very real scientific explanations.”



Could nothing be done about the scourge of weird ads being inserted in an online streaming service when you were already paying for a monthly subscription? It would be one thing if the ads were for new winter-color cosmetics, but this sounded like Academy City government PR and was no use whatsoever.

(God. Ads that completely miss the mark do mean my data’s being protected, but safety has its drawbacks.)

They were in District 2.

The district of cars, explosives, and military technology.

Item’s current base was a model room. Which meant it was inside a skyscraper. On the wall were special windows with rounded corners. The type of window with a lowerable plastic shutter like those seen on passenger planes.

Cruise ships, passenger planes, airships, and even submarine cruisers.

The guest cabins and seats used in all those vehicles were on display here, but their positions were scattered around. You could open a ship’s cabin door and step out into the corridor to relax in a first-class airplane seat.

Kinuhata took her seat after filling a paper cup with soda from the drink bar.

“No normal customers will be visiting during the legal inspection, right?”

“''That’s the story'' ensuring no first-timers ever show up at this dark side rental villa,” explained Mugino, sounding bored.

“Phew, that was a good swim.”

The airtight door opened and Frenda walked in barefoot and wet-haired. And for some reason she was wearing a bikini.

“No need to choose between beef and fish for me! After a workout like that, I can eat them both! In the end, I’ve already worked off those calories!!”

“…Why the swimsuit?”

“Mugino, did you not see that pool? There’s a heated pool on the model cruise ship deck! Yeah, I always want to swim when I’m in a big bath, but I can satisfy that desire here.”

Frenda was celebrating on her own, but the other three had no interest in changing into a swimsuit at the end of October. Nor did they feel a desire to swim in a big bath.

Takitsubo lay in a luxuriously reclined first-class seat while swiping her finger across a tablet. But she wasn’t activating the seat’s massage.

“Anti-Skill’s official infrastructure sure is convenient. While they are labeled as unsolved, you can find bits and pieces of dark side incidents recorded in here. Although it seems to take someone from the dark side to link the pieces together. The official algorithms can’t do it even if you remove their restrictions.”

“Super where in the world are you going to find an industry with no villains?” asked Kinuhata, looking disgusted.

At the very least, they weren’t going to see one as long as they remained in Item.

Takitsubo must not have been expecting any goodness from the world in the first place because she didn’t seem bothered.

“Tetra-ethylnipolita isn’t used much these days, so I should be able to quickly find all the similar incidents from the past.”

“You can figure it out that super easily?”

Kinuhata sat in a seat that had to cost more than a king-size bed.

She didn’t use the massage. As the shortest one, she knew from experience the function meant to relieve the day’s stress for sexy young women by rubbing their shoulder blades would instead pummel the back of her head. Nothing brought tears quite like being betrayed by a convenient and pleasant service. It was a similar problem to having the movie you thought you had recorded on your DVR erased due to limited space. But the TV version often had a completely different dub script and sometimes even used different voice actors, so they were a valuable product you couldn’t find on the streaming services!

“With the exception of phantom thief weirdos who send advance notice of their crimes to the mansion they’re about to steal from, no criminal is super going out of their way to leave their calling card at the scene of the crime. Isn’t it possible they intentionally used the rare tetra-ethylnipolita in order to frame some other bomber for their crime?”

“It is possible of course, but I think that is highly unlikely in this case, Kinuhata.”

“Super why?”

“If they wanted to frame someone, they would have thoroughly mimicked Frenda’s bombs to provoke her that way. This criminal wants Frenda to notice them, remember? It seems to me the bomber would find it humiliating if their precious Frenda thought some other bomber was responsible for this incident.”

That did make sense.

It sounded a lot like the actions of someone who wanted to use their homemade bombs to create a world for just the two of them.

However, that was no more than “sounded like”.

Psychology wasn’t material evidence, so this left Kinuhata feeling unsatisfied. She didn’t know much about profiling, so it sounded more like fortunetelling than anything. …Although fortunetelling did have techniques to guide people into revealing their problems and convince them they had been solved.

“Found them.”

Takitsubo showed Mugino the tablet and everyone gathered around the screen. Cramming in that close made them feel overheated even here at the end of autumn.

Of course, they weren’t just going to get a real name or appearance.

If that much was known about the bomber, Anti-Skill would have arrested them already. With a currently active bomber, the best you could hope for was a nickname linking together different bombings.

“They’re known as Morning Call. …Frenda, you already look disgusted. It speculates here that they call themselves that because they use precise booby trap bombs to wake up the world.”

“But is that really true?” confidently asked Frenda, who knew a lot about the bombing industry(?). She also reached back with a finger and fixed the rear of her wet bikini bottom. “In the end, bombers who name themselves will soon make a mistake and get either arrested or assassinated. This is probably just a collection of online rumors. Do you want to know how many nicknames I’ve been given by the investigators who have no clue who I am? Ha ha ha. They give me a new nickname and create a new file each time, showing how well I vary my apparent profile to throw them off☆”

“Their primary target is…oh, Anti-Skill. They leave time bombs no amateur can defuse where they will be found and forces the bomb squad to complete a puzzle game.”

Item had never heard anything about this bomber called Morning Call.

This was Frenda’s turf, but it was news to her as well.

…That meant it was likely Anti-Skill had declared a gag order for the media. They likely claimed it was to avoid social disorder and to prevent any copycats, but they really just didn’t want to reveal that their own people had failed in a battle of wits. If the only victims had been from the professional bomb squad, they could make that work. Although that relied on Academy City being shut off from the outside world.

Mugino frowned.

“Why did they suddenly start targeting Frenda?”

“That I can’t tell you. They haven’t done much for about half a year and the file theorizes they stopped finding the bomb squad challenges exciting.”

“Another cringe theory that probably came from online. In the end, I bet someone got lazy and had genAI write the report for them. Is there even a logical through line from beginning to end?” asked an exasperated Frenda.

And even if that theory was correct, it meant the bomber had decided to do deadly battle with another dangerous bomb expert instead of the bomb squad who had the necessary knowledge but had no experience in killing.

Really, this wasn’t a motive-guessing quiz, so it didn’t really matter. They only needed to know a bomber known as Morning Call physically existed and was now obsessed with Frenda.

“So what we super know is the bomber is after Frenda-san, they use tetra-ethylnipolita, and they’re called Morning Call? How does that let us launch a preemptive attack on them?”

“In the end, there are ways☆”