Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item7 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 7===

The park was unusually busy that night.

Probably due to the astronomy event.

The lack of light made it hard to tell exactly how many people were around, but it was about as busy as a shopping district on the weekend.

“They’re just ignoring the curfew? What a pain…” complained Mugino.

The track suit girl expressionlessly pointed somewhere. Instead of the walking path circling the park, she indicated the woods just off that path. The shadows were deeper there.

“It’s no longer used and half buried in the greenery, but there is an outdoor stage for festivals there. The dressing room space in the rear is Morning Call’s base.”

The darkness made Mugino worried about her black stockings. Small sparks of static could shine surprisingly bright.

As soon as they took a step into the woods, the presence of the crowd vanished.

The shadows were completely silent.

A deserted battlefield appeared before Item.

The bomber had to be terrified right about now. Were they relieved at stopping their own meaningless countdown, or were they beginning to suspect a trap?

Either way, they had returned to their hideout to stop the timer on their own time bomb. After learning their life wasn’t at risk, they had ''gotten greedy''. With a lathe, a 3D printer, and an airtight glovebox, being a bomber wasn’t cheap. And the equipment was super heavy too. If a bomber wasn’t ready to abandon it all, they would be stuck going back and forth carrying expensive equipment weighing more than a ton each.

“…”

The weeds had grown to hip height.

Kinuhata regretted her choice to wear bike shorts. She envied Takitsubo her track suit. The two wearing skirts were so focused on the upcoming battle they didn’t seem to mind at all.

The short girl sighed softly.

“Then it would be best to move in and attack Morning Call before they realize how much danger they’re in. Let’s get go-”

“You should duck. In the end, you’ll die if you don’t.”

The tree branches overhead formed a tunnel.

Something swayed in the night breeze. Something about fist sized.

It was an explosive dangling from a wire.



It detonated.



The expert was correct here. It was best to do as she said.

But despite the explosion, no screaming or shouting came from the many people on the walking path outside the woods.

The explosion itself hadn’t made a noise.

The sound like gravel being slammed into the ground came from the hundreds of small metal balls known as controlled fragments being propelled into the ground by the blast, not from the explosion itself.

The gold decorations on the shoulders of Frenda’s military band style outfit shook as she laughed.

She was enjoying herself as someone tried to take her life with a bomb.

Maybe that had lit a fire in her as the Academy City Bomber.

(In the end, that they detonated it by remote means they’ve noticed someone approaching their base.)

“A silent bomb, huh? In the end, pretty clever for a second-rate bomber.”

“Is it even super technologically possible to make a bomb that blows up without making a noise?”

“Anything’s possible. A handgun silencer works by absorbing the sound of the gunpowder’s detonation, right? If you surround the bomb in that kind of soundproofing material and adjust the blast so it won’t break the sound barrier, you can prevent the shockwave itself from making the usual explosive noise. And since this bomb kills using the hundreds of scattered fragments instead the blast itself, it’s still plenty deadly. Oh, watch out there.”

Frenda slipped that in so smoothly Kinuhata was slow to comprehend and react.

It exploded.

A jet like a sharp spear more than 30m long stabbed at Kinuhata’s solar plexus. That scorching spear could melt through steel or even composite armor like it was ice cream.

Even with Offense Armor, her short body was knocked onto its back.

“Wha- bah!? Kh, what the hell was that? Cough cough!!”

“In the end, you should really ask these questions before letting it hit you.”

It was a concave directional mine. Similar to how a solar cooker focused the sunlight on a single point, the bomb focused the blast on a single point. The sharp spear-like blast was normally used to penetrate the side of a tank.

And ''because the destructive force was gathered on just the one point.'' Frenda was entirely untouched while walking right next to Kinuhata.

The lovely girl with sparkling blonde hair looked utterly exasperated.

(First the tetra-ethylnipolita and now this. This bomber loves their cheap bombs. To think someone would try to kill Academy City Bomber Frenda-chan with a plastic umbrella.)

“Hey, Kinuhata, did anyone say the enemy only used silent bombs?”

“Bgh.”

“See, that nitrogen barrier of yours is far from perfect. In the end, you’re bleeding. Okay, fine.”

“Why are you tearing a piece from your skirt? We chose that for you!”

“I bought a few more of the same, so it’s fine. This one’s a spare.”

And so the girl’s precious cloth was used to tie up her cute underclassman’s wound.

“In the end, bombers try to avoid analysis by having a large number of cards in their deck. So we can expect plenty more to come, with the order shuff-”

“Frenda, look out.”

The warning from highly-perceptive Takitsubo was enough for the bomber to pull back her foot.

The explosion came a moment later.

Some anti-personnel mines as small as a health drink would send a jet thinner than a laundry pole straight up to pierce through from heel to knee. The idea was to use as little explosive as possible while still being effective, so it did no harm whatsoever if the target was just 30cm out of position. In this case, the mine was less a weapon that exploded out in every direction and more a weapon that fired straight up.

However…

“The mine missed my foot? In the end, are they using both sensors and a remote?”

“We’re being attacked. Does that information matter for anything other than exciting the freaks?”

“Oh, just that we could track down Morning Call’s location using the source of the remote signal.”

Frenda moved out ahead of their shield Kinuhata.

Without her guidance, they would have a hard time continuing through the dark woods.

The essence of a bomber was for an individual to cause more destruction than should be possible for an individual. They would take hundreds of enemy lives in a single action, ambush and blow away powerful military vehicles like tanks or armored trucks that people normally couldn’t even approach, and even bring down mountainous fortresses.

Their position as a joker that could turn a battle around from hiding made them a lot like a sniper, but while a sniper attacked individuals, bombers could attack groups of people, vehicles, and even buildings. Which didn’t mean they couldn’t also cause the precise destruction needed to kill just one person within a group.

At any rate, Morning Call had noticed Item and retaliated several times. It seemed unlikely these detonations were accidental.

It was now a race against time.

“We don’t have time to defuse every bomb we come across, so we’ll have to break through by force. Mugino, you’re up!”

“Tch. It’s a pain, but we can’t have Kinuhata step on each and every one of them!”

Mugino obeyed Frenda and Takitsubo’s instructions as she fired Meltdowner into the ground from a distance, detonating the mines there. After ensuring their safety with violence, Item ran deeper into the shadows.

A large semicircular structure was half buried in the weeds.

Those were audience seating. Something like an elevated stage was located at the center of the semicircle.

The dressing rooms in back were the bomber’s base.

The overgrown weeds rustled from something other than the night breeze.

Mugino immediately aimed he right hand toward the sound.

“There you are!! You bom-”

“That’s an escaped ferret. Morning Call is 200 meters north-northwest.”

Takitsubo somehow knew that within the hip-high weeds.

There really was something wrong with their tracker.

Mugino aimed her palm out ahead this time, accurately targeting Morning Call’s fleeing back.

And a moment later…



All light vanished, plunging everything into darkness.



They were in the woods off the walking path, but they had still been relying on the distant light to see.

That slight hint and Meltdowner’s aiming were eliminated all at once.

But this wasn’t a power outage as a form of sabotage.

“Oh, right. The astronomy event. There’s a super blackout for the entire city during the main event.”

This may have been why there hadn’t been any food stands or trucks in the park despite the size of the seasonal event.

Mugino prepared to fire anyway.

Even if the first shot didn’t hit, Meltdowner itself acted as a light source tearing sharply through the shadows. If the bright beam revealed the bomber’s silhouette, she could easily target them afterwards.

Takitsubo stopped her.

“No, Mugino. There are a lot of TV cameras and phones around. Using Meltdowner here would leave too many records behind.”

“We can deal with that!!”

“This astronomy event is being led by a few different universities, so the observation data will be saved and stored in a research-level database. With the time and place Meltdowner was fired recorded along with it. Then we would have bigger issues than operating on the dark side.”

Mugino clicked her tongue.

But no powerful beam swept away the darkness.

She had listened.

However, this also meant the Morning Call bomber would get away. When she could have killed them if she tried.

“Letting them go means it’s their turn next. If they kill just one extra innocent person, you’d better go apologize to that person’s family yourself,” said Mugino, sounding bitter.

Apparently it wasn’t the presence of the TV cameras or the data stored for university-level research that had convinced her. It had been the moment of the killing being recorded on so many innocent people’s mobile devices.

The weeds rustled from a different direction.

“In the end, what has you so irritable? When the target gets away, we need to think up our next move instead of blaming each other.”

The Academy City Bomber was toying with something in her hands as she made this exasperated comment.

It was one of those silent bombs. Since Frenda was holding it, she must have picked up a sample that failed to explode and removed its fuse.

The blonde girl observed it with a loupe like a jeweler would use.

She seemed interested in the detonator.

It wasn’t a mess of colored wires like those in movies.

To Kinuhata, it looked smarter and thus harder to deal with.

She guessed this was what you would find if you removed the special screws to open a smartphone and look inside. The card-sized surface was crammed full of centipede-like microchips and narrow gold wiring. There wasn’t even a wire connecting the battery to the circuit. The flat lithium battery was directly attached. No, more than one were. Most likely, melting one of the battery’s connections to remove it would cause the device to detonate using the other batteries or the power stored in a capacitor. It was unclear how it would attach to the bomb’s fuse or whatever, but one edge of the board was covered in gold pins. Like a retro game cartridge.

It really was just the one card.

…This didn’t feel like something someone could make at home. Like how modern electric cars were giant computers which, unlike the old cars made of metal and pipes, you couldn’t fix on your own if it broke down in the mountains.

Kinuhata didn’t know much about electronics, but she could tell this high-tech component was out of place here. In fact, was that narrow glass cylinder lying on its side at one end of the card-sized board a vacuum tube? Those were the prize products of electronics stores and she had seen them in the high-quality amps used in home theaters. Why bother including one here?

Takitsubo tilted her head.

“I have heard the center of vast military networks will use old-fashioned boards without semiconductors as a defense against nuclear EMPs.”

“In the end, are they really? I don’t think that would help much. I’m betting they heard those rumors in a science magazine or trivia news site and included the vacuum tube here mostly just for fun. I mean, it clearly serves no real purpose in the simple detonation control process. It isn’t a central part of the design. It looks like it was added in later on.”

Either way, this could become their next hint.

Hopefully it would give them the information they needed to take back the initiative and kill Morning Call before that bomber could begin some strange game.

As Academy City Bomber Frenda Seivelun took a close look at the credit-card-sized board, fascination grew on her face.



“In the end, the A-17 board, huh?”