Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Mental Out SS (section)

===Part 5===

“Ugh. Is this one of those ‘signs’?”

Makigami Komaki, a member of the Shokuhou Clique and of Judgment spoke half in exasperation and half in fear. She was in the entranceway to Tokiwadai Middle School, viewing the rows of shoe lockers.

Today was Sunday.

She had donned her uniform and come to school today because she wanted to avoid any watchful eyes.

Shirai Kuroko, also of Judgment, ran her fingers along the “sign” in question.

“This is one of the nametag stickers they sell at the school store to label your umbrella or whatever, isn’t it? There seem to be more of them again,” sighed the twintails girl.

There had long been stories of burglars and salesmen adding strange stickers or graffiti to a home’s mailbox or nameplate as a sign to their colleagues, so was this some version of that? These stickers were small and sold at the school store, so even the stricter teachers wouldn’t take issue with them.

“So someone applies this sticker to their shoe locker…”

“''To ask our mystery perp to attack them in the near future''.”

That logic made no sense, but it was the truth.

That arrangement had been uncovered while questioning a few of the victims.

Makigami held her index finger to her slender chin.

“This takes a biological interpretation of a vampire, right?”

“Right. It’s based on the stories of the victims experiencing powerful pleasure when they were bitten and had their blood sucked. There is a theory that if you rapidly remove blood from someone without triggering their sense of pain, the process of blood loss would create an illusion of ''feeling good''.”

In this case, the willing victims said they had never seen the attacker, so the attacker had not approached them directly and cut them with a blade or extracted the blood with a tube.

It was likely some kind of esper power.

Unlike inhaling lighter gas or drinking cold medicine, this blood loss ecstasy did not involve ingesting a chemical substance, which made it hard to detect. The downside went without saying: if it was done by an amateur, it could kill the victim.

Talk of this case had rapidly grown within Tokiwadai of late.

Nine girls were known to have fainted because of it. They were thought to simply be anemic at first, but it turned out they had severe internal bleeding.

Furthermore, if the point was to experience pleasure, this was a strange case where the fainting was an unfortunate accident for both the attacker and the victims. Who could say how many girls hadn’t passed out and had managed to leave before they were discovered.

Shirai Kuroko called up some recorded voices on a special phone with its security boosted to Judgment standards. These were the results of the questioning she completed during the week.

“I am Yanagisakiin Rondo from the gymnastics team. You wanted to know about internal bleeding, correct? Yes, bumps and falls are not the only way to bruise. You can tear your muscles or blood vessels if they cannot withstand your body’s movements. That is why I always tell the underclassmen to watch what they eat and make sure to stretch before bed.”

“My name is Matsuzai Shouko. My club? The biology club. You wanted an opinion from a nonathlete’s perspective, right? The capillaries are thinner than hairs, so they can break from nothing more than mental stress. Probably the most well-known example of the link between mental and physical damage is stomach ulcers.”

“I am Otonari Hibiku from the health committee. The total number of internal bleeding victims? Hard to say… We have no way of identifying them unless they fainted or came to the infirmary for advice. We are all wearing our winter uniforms now, so if only there was some way of recognizing it through the blazer.”

“Kinoshita Hagoromo. I’ve heard of that. They use those stickers as a sign, right? The source of the rumors? Don’t ask me. Oh, right. I do the school announcements, so can I add this to the lunchtime news items? …No!? Boo, boo! It seems to me we can reduce the number of victims by making sure everyone knows to be careful.”

Makigami Komaki was usually the type to be right out there with Shirai Kuroko working on the weekend, but even she sounded fed up with this case.

“That’s quite a scattering of people. Could you not find any one line of investigation to follow?”

“Oh, shut up,” quietly spat Shirai Kuroko.

They knew these were intentional attacks rather than accidents or illness, but they couldn’t even identify the cause of the internal bleeding. Thus, she had tried questioning a wide variety of people. The inability to narrow down the focus of the investigation would be enough for an expert to tell she was having difficulties.

“It’s like a crossword puzzle. Instead of writing down the answer right away, you need to fill in the surrounding words to give yourself the hints you need. This is not a quiz game where we need to slap the buzzer as quickly as possible. We cannot afford a single mistake in this investigation.”

“Let’s just hope someone else isn’t attacked in the meantime.”

Students left school store stickers on their shoe lockers as a sign.

Painless blood loss was used to achieve a kind of pleasure at the risk of their own death.

And…

“But it doesn’t always follow the sticker signs. It could be the perp searches out victims based on their own rules and, when they feel like it, also attacks anyone who has given the sign.”

“Which makes counting the total number of victims such a challenge.”

“Whoever is behind this, we need to be careful.”