Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item Chapter2

==Chapter 2: >>Colosseum.==

===Part 1===

July 7, 9 AM

“Hooray for laziness…”

“Mugino.”

Mugino Shizuri was still lying in her large bed well after students and workers alike had gotten going. And for some reason, Takitsubo was in bed with her.

The negligee girl sleepily rubbed her eye.

“Why are you in here?”

“There weren’t enough beds.”

Takitsubo’s blank expression was as unchanged as her outfit. She wore her track suit at home, when going out, and even when sleeping.

“With two extra members all of a sudden, the room allotments are a mess. And right when we can’t access our money. You said we wouldn’t be able to buy new furniture for a while, remember?”

“…”

Maybe she had said that.

That didn’t seem like reason enough to climb into bed with her, but this could be solved by making beds for the two newcomers from a sofa or yoga mat or something.

“And didn’t you say you were going for an early morning jog before it got too hot? Maybe you haven’t noticed, but this is the third time I’ve woken you. The sun is already pretty high in the sky.”

Sure enough, she heard a clattering noise from the various small items Takitsubo had in her pink track jacket’s pocket. Rolling over like that had to hurt, making it hard to sleep.

“Ugh, but I’m still tired. Besides, it’s already too late to jog today. It’s not the end of the world, so I can start jogging tomorrow.”

“Last night, you said to make you get up even if I had to spank you. Here, I recorded you saying it on this voice recorder. So what will it be? Do I have to spank you?”

“Curse my past self for being so thorough.”

The negligee girl made a highly unscientific complaint and crawled out of bed. She opened the bedroom door and entered the large living room just in time to see something green swaying in front of her.

They were in an apartment, but Frenda Seivelun was crossing the living room carrying a giant bamboo over her shoulder. But not because she had a new pet panda.

“Tanabata, it’s Tanabata☆”

The apartment’s decorative plants, tropical fish tank, and such were managed by a rental company and were replaced quite frequently, but Frenda had still stuck the bottom of some bamboo into a giant pot of moth orchids.

And some red, blue, and green decorations were attached among the bamboo leaves.

This wasn’t a school or shopping district, so it seemed unlikely individuals had attached all of those tanzaku. Frenda was apparently confusing the Tanabata bamboo with a Christmas tree.

There were far fewer tanzaku than other decorations and one of them said the following:

''Don’t let anyone on Item get hurt.

''Oh, and I want money, status, fame, time off, popularity, and friends!! As much as I can get!!!

:::''-Frenda Seivelun

Mugino held a hand to her drowsy head and sighed.

“What are you doing? This is supposed to be a city of science.”

“Mugino, what do you do with that afterwards? I doubt you can put it out with the normal trash.”

Why would she know the rules of some silly superstition?

After taking a shower, Mugino changed into a tank top and long bike shorts to exercise in. Her sneakers were an expensive shock-absorbing model. Then she grabbed her music player…no, today she went for her folding handheld 3D game console. Frenda had said it worked too. The movement of jogging seemed like it would dislodge wireless earphones, so she decided the wired type was safer. She wasn’t picky about sound quality, but she had gotten the kind with pure gold wires anyway.

Takitsubo was the indoorsy type despite wearing a track suit year round, so she had no intention of joining Mugino. She was staring at the canine pet robots bumping into each other and having a turf war. Frenda was…what was she doing? She was at the table with a notebook open and looked delighted. It may have been the finance book (for managing their evil team). And yet she was the one wasting money on decorations like that bamboo.

Mugino ended up riding the elevator down to ground level on her own.

The lower floors contained a shopping mall full of luxury brand shops. As soon as she walked out of the automatic door and lost the blessing of the air conditioning, an invisible wave of heat radiating from the pavement hit her right in the face.

“This summer heat really makes me hate my own legs. Yet another thing I can blame on eating bread. Really, the wheat culture is to blame. The Japanese digestive system wasn’t made for Western food.”

The Fifteen Bells complex was something like a small amusement park, so jogging the perimeter made for a decent distance. Mugino decided to expand the area she covered in something like a spiral after one lap.

She put her earphones in.

One she got started, jogging was easy enough.

Mugino was an expert at being lazy, but she had more than enough stamina.

And as she jogged, it became very clear that today was July 7, Tanabata. Event advertisement flags were set up like streetlights on either side of the major street and the weather forecast provided by the large screen on the belly of a blimp also had a predicted arrival time for some meteor shower or another.

Four or five high school girls were sticking quite close together on the sidewalk. But rather than some girl-on-girl flirting, one of them appeared to have a cooling power. Mugino was jealous. That girl had to be like a seaside restaurant – popular in the summer but forgotten in the winter.

As Mugino passed them, the earphones attached to the folding game console did not play a fitness rhythm or the voice of an automatic advice mode.

It played some data recorded as videos.

''“The Colosseum? We’ve been pursuing it too, but no luck so far. Several times now, one of our people goes missing and turns up a few days later as a pummeled corpse. These are people who can’t return to their dorm and have nowhere left to turn. How do you get such a valuable insurance policy on someone like that? My name is Komaba Ritoku. Contact me if you learn anything. I’ll buy any data you have with cash. I want to settle the score myself if possible.”

''“Sorry, young lady. I appreciate the Musashino Milk, but I really don’t know anything about the Colosseum. For better or for worse, I’m keeping my hands off that one. I’ve told my entire team to do the same, so I couldn’t tell you what’s going on there now. What’s that? You thought Big Spider was led by a guy called Kurozuma? …It’s probably best if you go on believing that.”

“I can’t concentrate on this while running. …Mostly because it’s too damn hot.”

The fundamental problem was Mugino oversleeping.

She knew nothing was going to come of this, but she still replayed the footage several times, focusing on the people’s breathing and word choices to try and see if they were lying.

(Their quality is about as low as it gets, but they do have numbers. And because they’re weak, they know how to take advantage of their location. That means they’ll be monitoring every last nook and cranny of the back alleys. So if those Skill Out teams haven’t seen anything, where could the Colosseum be holding their deadly matches? And if it’s true they use a different location each time, do they follow some kind of pattern?)

They had hit a decent obstacle even for Mugino.

For one thing, this kind of investigation and pursuit wasn’t supposed to be Item’s job. They preferred jobs where they were given their target’s location on a map.

Mugino turned a corner while glancing over at a luxury department store bag abandoned in the gap between two shrubs growing on the side of the road.

Then someone caught up to her from behind. No, the person came up alongside her.

“Super good morning.”

It was Kinuhata Saiai.

The external voice triggered the earphones’ accident prevention feature, automatically lowering the volume.

Kinuhata was not out of breath as she ran. Mugino wanted to stay in the shade of the roadside trees or pass through the cool mist shower to fight the summer heat, but Kinuhata stole that position.

Kinuhata had already jogged several laps more than Mugino and she looked like she could keep going just fine. Mugino and Frenda were decent fighters, but in a pure fistfight, this small girl had to be even better. But that didn’t really matter. The dark side was especially irritating because ''you needed more than that''.

Mugino removed one of her earphones without slowing her pace.

“What, are you taking an early morning jog too?”

“Early?” Kinuhata checked how high the sun was in the sky and released an exasperated sigh. “I’ve been watching movies at the theater at the bottom of our building. Seven in a row. I started yesterday, so I’m super stiff and thought I should loosen up before getting some sleep.”

“Movies, huh? Don’t we have a home theater system in our room?”

“It’s super nice, I’ll admit, but it’s just not the same as a real movie theater. Also, I thought that theater was the fashionable kind that panders to couples, but whoever selects its lineup knows what they’re doing. Especially late at night when it plays lots of super minor B and C movies that you can’t even find on streaming sites. After you freed me, I took a look around, but you super don’t see many theaters showing South American zombie horror flicks. Yeah, a big jungle chainsaw and tequila Molotov cocktails are super perfect for a tropical city where civilization has collapsed after a widescale blackout!!”

“Why do you like movies so much?”

“There wasn’t much in the way of entertainment when I was confined in that lab. I think they were super scared we’d kill someone if we had any toys. All they did was gather the subjects in a white room and super project the movie on a screen meant for presentations, but it stuck with me. …Of course, super who knows what kind of subliminal messages and ultra-low frequency sounds they were including in those.”

That explained it.

Those people imprisoned children, tested risky drugs on them, and gave them brainwashing movies as their only form of entertainment. The fact that she wasn’t disturbed by this proved to Mugino that she really was part of the dark side. Her only real thought was “sounds about right”. In dark side terms, she gave it 50 points. So exactly average.

Even the dangerous people who caused enough trouble to get expelled from school wanted nothing to do with the dark side. You couldn’t let every little thing surprise you.

“Wait? So when we went down to receive data on this job…?”

“Yes. As you’ve super guessed already, that was my first time in a real movie theater, something I’d always wanted to see. It was super weird doing it to see the data we would need to kill some super idiot, though.”

“Sorry about that.”

Kinuhata sounded blue, but Mugino’s response had no real emotion behind it.

Was that experience like fulfilling your lifelong dream of visiting Italy and being served awful pasta on the plane trip there?

“And did you find a new ''part-time job'' too?”

Kinuhata fell silent.

Mugino fanned her face with a hand while focusing on the rhythm of her jogging.

“It’s not an accusation. You’re allowed to have a side job. I believe Frenda heads out on forensics jobs sometimes.”

“Forensics? Oh, she’s a super expert with bombs, isn’t she?”

“It’s less about the explosives and more about the chemistry knowledge. Of course, she isn’t helping investigations trying to hunt down the bad guy. It’s more like she helps people know who to take revenge on for killing their buddy.”

Their conversation continued as they jogged.

“But if you are going to make drop-offs, you can’t leave the bag in such an obvious location. You’ll get complaints if the goods don’t reach their destination because someone else found it and took it away. By which I mean the client will send someone after you to reclaim their payment.”

“I think this client super wanted it to be found. They want to update the outdated criminal infrastructure. So they super want an accident with some convincing item.”

“I see.”

The dark side had its own etiquette.

They were all criminals who broke national laws and city regulations, but they could be picky about such things.

“''Super more importantly, what about Hanano Choubi-san?''”

“''Her investigation should be done soon.''”

===Part 2===

District 7.

A large outdoor space was lined with what looked like long shipping containers, but they were actually model rooms for a variety of different styles of studio apartment. But these were meant for landlords and building managers, not for residents. The rooms were created with hive construction. The rooms themselves were made whole in a single factory using a special industrial 3D printer. A jungle-gym-like framework of beams was created first and then the boxy rooms could be inserted like drawers to create an entire apartment building. If the suicide or murder of a resident threatened to lower the value, the entire room could be removed and swapped out for a new one, so hive construction was gathering a lot of attention in Academy City for the possibility of removing some of the risk from real estate.

However.

There was one sample room where it wasn’t clear which construction company had the key to its lock.

“I’m baaack.”

After inserting two keys and opening the front door, Hanano Choubi found a few chairs, a wall-sized mirror, lighting equipment, an industrial dryer, and more. It looked something like a beauty parlor, but some might have recognized it as closer to a TV studio’s dressing room, where a stylist worked. In other words, you could sleep there if you wanted, but it didn’t look lived in.

Also, a mountain of plastic clothing cases was stacked up by the wall.

Wigs, hair extensions, color contacts, false eyelashes, double eyelid gel, mouthpieces, foundation, etc. There was even a selection of implants, artificial bones, silicone artificial breast bags, and other things that should need surgery to make use of.

In the back was a tanning machine like the ones seen at a tanning salon and hyperbaric oxygen capsules used to manipulate blood oxygen to alter the ''swelling'' of the skin, but she didn’t need either of those this time.

“Nyan, nyan, nya-nyan, nyahhn.”

Maybe she wanted to be the feline type because Hanano nyan-ed a popular song as she entered the fake sample room and reached for the top of her head. She ''removed'' her long hair as simply as she might a hat.

By removing her eyebrows and eyelashes, she revealed her base face. The smooth face reflected in the mirror reminded her of a doll before it was processed.

“Now, then.”

The mirror covered an entire wall, but not all of it was usable. A lot of its surface was covered by notes and photos. Those provided data on her target.

“Age: 52. Sex: Male. Hair: black and a bit greasy. See photo for distribution of gray. Skin: Asian with lots of blue base grease. Eyes: black with a hint of brown. Oh, and the skin is only lightly tanned and with minor dust mite allergy symptoms. Should I adjust the skin to be a bit rougher?”

Hanano’s specialty was disguise and infiltration.

The quality of her disguise was dependent on the amount of data she had on her target. This time, she had spent an entire week gathering that data herself, so she was confident she could give herself the same fingerprints, teeth shape, eyes, blood type, and scent as him. Once she was in disguise, not even the target’s parents or a police dog would notice anything was amiss.

And like in this case, sex and age were no obstacle.

After applying some makeup, she looked into the mirror to see an old man who would look at home in a fancy suit. The process wasn’t complete, so her face had swollen out to the appropriate size, but everything below remained that of a girl.

“Oops.”

Hanano Choubi’s fingers touched a rectangular box on the table, but she quickly pulled her hand back. She may have subconsciously wanted some refreshing menthol since it was summer, but these were flavored cigarettes. This target was a nonsmoker, so the smell of nicotine or tar would stand out. If she had carelessly smoked one, she would have had to start over from the beginning. That had been much too close.

(I can buy some scentless tablets later on.)

“Language: standard Japanese with a hint of an Aichi accent. Dry eyes and symptoms of neck and shoulder stiffness. Places his weight on his right leg when standing and dislikes having people stand on his left side. Holds his chopsticks wrong and mouth breaths when he loses his cool. Also…here we go. His handwriting is, um, angular but sloppy. Wow, I don’t know about his schooling, but his parents must not have raised him right. He doesn’t just confuse ‘to’ and ‘too’, but ‘two’ as well.”

Her voice grew lower and deeper as she spoke.

Her weight and body type had already been transformed.

Throw out your morals and rely on technology and anyone could transform, no supernatural powers necessary.

From head to toe, she had become the broad-shouldered ''insurance company general manager'' and spoke with the deep voice to match.

“Sigh. If only I had a friend who would do Magical Powered Kanamin cosplay with me.”

===Part 3===

It was a simple matter.

“I asked around the sketchy people who know the back alleys, but none of them had any information on the Colosseum. That leaves the insurance company general manager as our only source of hints. We have his story, but it isn’t enough. Hanano, can you disguise yourself as him, infiltrate the company headquarters, and check the central server to see who the pricey payouts were made for and who received them? Hacking in from outside is apparently too difficult.”

They didn’t just threaten the general manger – who had already been treated to torture at the hands of two girls – and have him go because he was covered in bandages. A mummy (old) would stand out too much. And as an outsider, they couldn’t predict when he would get too scared and stop. Send someone like that to the enemy base and they tended to think they had escaped and the plan fell apart. Unfortunately, the cleanup afterwards generally meant brute force via long-range attack.

“This van is so much smaller. And my body is so stiff.”

Mugino complained from the back seat of the boxy minivan.

A three-blade wind turbine was spinning nearby, but they didn’t feel remotely cool. That rotation was from the quality of the bearings, not the strength of the wind.

She missed the larger vehicle. They could still use Item’s resources, but they couldn’t replace anything that was lost. They needed a new source of funding and fast.

“They’re doing fireworks!”

Frenda leaned out the window and stared into the distance.

Was a school out for its anniversary? Or maybe they had the day off because the air conditioner was broken and the school couldn’t keep the kids inside in this summer heat. Regardless, a bunch of small children were out in the blazing heat launching parachute-equipped fireworks in some kind of competition. If advance notice was given that children would be launching fireworks, a drum-shaped security robot with a special firefighting attachment would watch over the event, but Item was too far away to see it.

The other girls in the van were speaking too.

“Frenda-san, it’s super weird that you can detect the scent of explosives from this far away. Or that it excites you so much, for that matter.”

“Heh heh☆”

“Frenda, I don’t think that was a compliment. Kinuhata is disturbed by it,” said Takitsubo.

They were in District 3.

Even for Academy City, the district had a lot of office buildings for famous corporations.

Since the children were playing here, their local park may have been taken over by bullies.

The insurance company headquarters – a giant skyscraper – was also visible from here. Item was keeping enough distance that the company’s security team wouldn’t get suspicious.

“So, Mugino, are you sure the newbie can do this? We’re talking about a company full of old men. In the end, couldn’t I get in a lot easier making full use of my cuteness?”

“That’s worked in the past, but if we have a disguise expert, we might as well use her.”

“In the end, is this when I’m supposed to groan in frustration and complain that my job is being taken from me?”

“Mugino is worried about you, Frenda. She doesn’t like you doing those risky honeytrap missions.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. But I don’t let them lay a single finger on me when I’m controlling them! In the end, the trick to luring them in is to make sure they just barely can’t see what they want.”

Frenda pouted her lips. What it was she knew was probably something only she could know. And she seemed to be ignoring the Level 0 newcomer and glaring more at the track suit girl who had taken up the position of the wife who knew everything about Mugino.

“Uhh.”

The ''elderly general manager'' was starting to get nervous and even whined like a small animal with the deep old man voice. Everyone watching had their brains rattled and had to question their understanding of the world.

She(?) put a small earphone in her right ear.

“Wh-whether this works or not, a lot of people are going to see me. That’s fine as far as I’m concerned, but won’t the real general manager be arrested for misconduct?”

“So what if he is?”

He was an immoral grownup who had refused to call Anti-Skill when he knew people were dying and even defrauded his own company to protect himself. He was a perfect example of Academy City’s shittiness. They hadn’t killed him since he had told them what they wanted to know, but they were under no obligation to protect him either.

“Speaking of him, didn’t he mention having a family?” asked Mugino. “We should probably tell him to get a divorce right away if he cares about his wife and kids. If they only get divorced after he’s arrested, his family might share the legal liability for the damages he owes.”

“If that’s the kindest option you can think of, it says a lot about the dark side,” complained Hanano.

Mugino gave an irritated look to the overly cheerful summer sunshine.

“It’s 11 AM. The perfect time for an executive to show up at the office.”

A real executive would arrive in a chauffeured black luxury car, but Item had destroyed that car last week. Unproductive VIPs needed to use their car as a status symbol to feel pride in something, so it wouldn’t be out of place for him to take the train or walk when a replacement hadn’t arrived yet.

The summery scent of mosquito-repelling incense wafted over.

The incense itself and the ceramic pig it came from were both made by Frenda, so it was extremely effective.

“Hanano, you’ll be masquerading as the general manager to get inside the building. You’ll just walk right on past the receptionist out front. What then?”

“I use his executive key card on the reader in front of the elevator that leads to the upper floors and take that straight to the central server room which is normally off limits. That means I need to be the only one to board the elevator on the first floor.”

“Good. Leave the security cameras to us.”

Mugino took out a computer smaller than a makeup bag and shoved it into Hanano Choubi’s hands.

“Physically connect this to the central server and the program inside will extract all the necessary data automatically. You don’t need to do anything more than that, but don’t let the receptionist notice you’re hiding this.”

“''Of course not. Who do you think I am?''”

Hanano Choubi had the old man’s voice and attitude down perfectly. Mugino saw her off and then returned to the van.

The van was full of small monitors. They displayed grainy footage from a variety of angles. Needless to say, that footage came from the insurance company’s security cameras.

“In the end, how did we hack into this?”

“We couldn’t reach the central server located inside the building, but the security camera footage is gathered together and sent out to the security company along a single thick line. The insurance company doesn’t have a security room of its own, you see. So we messed with that. Now we can monitor all this footage without anyone noticing and without leaving a trace. Of course, that was all done by the support organization in their work jumpsuits, so I don’t know the details.”

“Oh, is that Hanano-san super there?”

Kinuhata pointed at one of the monitors.

Sure enough, it showed one of the automatic doors opening and a broad-shouldered old man entering the reception lobby. Like any top-rate corporate building, the first floor was all about showing off, so it was given a tropical look. It was full of green and even had a waterway. The arrogant general manager hadn’t been dropped off by his car like usual, so the receptionist and security team looked a little confused as they greeted him.

Takitsubo tilted her head while staring blankly.

“Have they figured it out?”

“I super don’t know.”

“In the end, he ''took some time off without permission'', but he’s also a general manager who lives in the lap of luxury. They don’t want to ask too many questions and learn he was on a trip with a mistress or something, so will any of the ordinary employees be willing to directly ask him where he was? Damn, the security cameras can’t pick up their voices.”

Disguised Hanano raised a hand in greeting before walking through one of the security gates that resembled the ticket gates at a train station.

A tearful voice reached them through the small microphone hidden on her suit rather than through the security cameras.

That girl was smiling with the utmost confidence, but she was sobbing on the inside.

“(Stop speculating so much! I’m sure it seems fun when you’re just watching, but my life is on the line here. P-please don’t abandon me if this goes wrong. You won’t, will you!?)”

It didn’t matter if she aroused some suspicion as long as it wasn’t enough for someone to stop her. Although she was blatantly fidgeting while waiting in an elevator hall that looked like something from a luxury hotel.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry.”

“In the end, speaking aloud is only putting you at more risk. Are you doing it on purpose as some kind of challenge run?”

“Says someone who’s only watching!!”

But there wasn’t any real trouble.

The metal doors parted and the general manager entered the empty elevator with a pace quickened just enough that no one would find it unusual. After the door closed, “he” held a card up to the control panel.

A push of the button and the elevator began to rise. It had switched into a mode that wouldn’t stop on intermediate floors.

“Um, Mugino-san. Super what floor is the central server room on?”

“28.”

“Hanano won’t have anywhere to escape if the security team surrounds her,” noted Takitsubo.

“I really am going curse all four of you,” protested Hanano. “Who is that munching on popcorn right next to the mic!?”

The correct answer was cinephile Kinuhata Saiai who always wanted popcorn when she was staring at a screen, but there was no need to say so. Frenda had opened a mackerel can and was going at it with a fork.

The elevator stopped at one of the higher floors.

The doors parted to reveal the exact opposite of the gentle atmosphere of sunlight and greenery found in the lobby. First of all, there were no windows to speak of. The large floor was divided up by chain link fences and thick tempered glass walls and the entire place was taken up by computers larger than vending machines. It wasn’t clear what the divisions between areas and machines signified, but the place looked like a labyrinth. Hanano trembled, walked pigeon-toed, and held her shoulders (all with the old man look), so the temperature may have been well below standard room temperature.

“This is…the central server room.”

She could already see the server machines. They were everywhere here on the 28th floor. But she couldn’t actually touch them with the labyrinth of chain link fences and glass walls in the way. She would need to unlock the door in the fence to get through.

Of course, Hanano would have already prepared to do just that.

However…

“I-it won’t open?”

She had sounded nervous before, but now her tone of voice rose even further.

With no one else around, she didn’t bother hiding the hesitation in her wandering hands.

“I don’t believe it. How is this happening? The fence door in the central server room won’t open!!”

“What does that mean? Didn’t you spend an entire week checking over everything from the general manager’s fingerprints to his irises? Including every little idiosyncrasy he has?”

“That week was the problem. It looks like they change the door’s passcode each week, so his information from July 1 isn’t good anymore!”

“And…what does that mean?”

“Uhh,” groaned Hanano. Mugino had repeated the same words, but her ''sizzling'' displeasure had been hard to miss.

They couldn’t have Hanano remaining silent during a mission, so Mugino compromised by speaking first.

“Do you have any tricks you can use?”

“Sure, if there was an emergency. For example, in an earthquake powerful enough to possibly bring the building down, all the locks are set to automatically release to ensure no one is trapped.”

“''You don’t say?''”

Frenda had known Mugino long enough to put down her mackerel can, grab blankly-staring Takitsubo, and scoot away from Mugino. Kinuhata was still new to this, so she only tilted her head with her big tub of popcorn.

Hanano Choubi was also new, so she failed to see the danger of her comment.

“Don’t run away, Frenda. Use those goggles of yours.”

“Ugh. No stopping you, huh? Fine, fine. In the end, I’ll support you.”

That was all Mugino had to hear before she smiled thinly and took action.

She reached a hand out the car window.

And she fired Meltdowner at the very center of the distant skyscraper.

===Part 4===

“Gyahhhh!?”

Hanano Choubi forgot all about acting and screamed for real. Not that anyone would have found it unusual given the circumstances.

A sharp tremor shook the giant building vertically, the tempered glass shattered, all the fire alarms went off, and a recorded female voice urged everyone to evacuate.

The blast hadn’t hit this floor, but her life was still at risk. The building was made of tens of thousands of tons of reinforced concrete, but it might as well have been a shaky suspension bridge. Mugino could have brought the entire skyscraper down with ease if she wanted to.

“What!? What did you just do!?”

“You said the locks would release in an emergency, right? So I figured it would be faster to make our own. Don’t worry. I had Frenda monitoring the electromagnetism produced by human bodies, so I only took out a big conference room no one was using. One less budget item for them to worry about, really.”

(This building isn’t part of the dark side. Cause a scene like this and the Dark Side’s Bane will notice. Once that #6 is after us, we’ll vanish ''without a trace'' in some back alley or another!!)

The diligent small animal of a girl slumped her shoulders when she belatedly realized she had become the kind of person who put her guard up when she saw a hero.

Meanwhile, Mugino Shizuri’s voice couldn’t have been more carefree.

Which probably meant she was the kind of person who could slaughter people while perfectly relaxed.

“Get a move on, Hanano. Or is the door still not open? How many more times do I have to blast that building? Should I target a load-bearing column next? Or maybe the base isolators? Give the word and they’re gone☆”

“No need, no need! The door’s open! That worked fine, so thank you for the very useful support!!”

(That kaiju girl!!)

Hanano shouted tearfully and opened the unlocked fence door. She pulled the miniature computer from her pocket, connected a cable to it, and connected the other end to one of the server machines. The computer would do the rest.

It made quiet sounds like scratching fingernails.

The bar on the screen gradually filled up from left to right. Alphanumeric text – likely filenames – flashed by, but there was no point in trying to read them.

A wired connection was best when dealing with so much data. Copying the files was nerve-racking enough without knowing the wireless connection could break at any moment.

“Yikes, yikes, hurry up, yikes… W-will this really tell us who received the insurance payouts when the Colosseum participants died?”

“It will, but they might have used a fake name or fake ID. Or maybe they used a throwaway go-between like the one who withdraws the money in a bank transfer scam. Anything that would leave a trail will have been faked.”

“Th-then what are we supposed to do? Is this all a waste of time?”

“This is well worth our time,” Mugino Shizuri readily assured her.

Hanano tilted her head (in old man mode), but…

“The big bosses at the top will be well-protected, but not so with the participants who end up as corpses anyway. But we’re not interested in the corpses or the criminals. ''We’re looking for the people with a high-value policy and are still alive.'' We should probably narrow it down to teenage students, a policy of at least a hundred million, and an expedited contract less than a month old. Once we have their identity, we can do this the old-fashioned way: tail them and let them lead us right to the Colosseum.”

The bar on the screen filled up and the number below reached 100%.

Hanano Choubi yanked out the cable, stuck the miniature computer in her pocket, and returned to the elevator.

“Oh, no! The elevator’s stopped because of the disaster!”

“Ah ha ha. Then it’s time for 28 stories’ worth of stairs. Should make for some good exercise.”

(Really and truly curse that terrain-obliterating god of destruction!!)

But she had no other option here, so she gave up, opened the metal door, stuck her head out into the emergency stairs, and heard hurried footsteps climbing from below. This was an above-the-board company, so were those security officer batons she heard thunking at their hips? If they realized who she was and ganged up on her, she felt certain they would beat her to death.

“Check each floor to ensure no one was left behind. Make sure every last employee, guest, and contracted janitor is safe! Teams A and B, follow me and inspect the stairs!! …Hm? Hey! Is someone up th-”

“''Wahh!!''”

While shouting, she flipped the luxury suit inside out like a stage magician’s handkerchief, wiped both hands on her face makeup to rearrange it, and transformed herself into a muscular young man on the security team. In mere seconds.

She could only prepare one emergency costume change, so the standard option was either a security guard or a firefighter depending on where she was infiltrating.

“Reporting for duty!”

“R-right. I don’t recognize you. Which team are you on? Anyway, you came from up above, right? Continue on down and join another team. Any other team! Right now, we need every single person assisting the evacuation!!”

“Roger that!!”

Muscular and handsome Hanano Choubi shouted something that seemed right and then ran down the stairs.

A predetermined plan ''alone'' was not enough to fool people. Going with the flow and adlibbing could be surprisingly useful. Of course, you would run into trouble if you relied entirely on adlibbing.

And no living thing would run around quite as actively as a cornered chicken.

“Ugh, those 28 floors are going to have me sweating… That’s like descending a small mountain. Let’s hope my makeup doesn’t come off.”

“Hanano, we’re still monitoring you via the cameras after your face change, so don’t worry. And if you want a shortcut down, keep your eye on the wall to your right.”

She didn’t even have time to look that way.

The concrete wall broke through from the outside and a slender hand appeared. Kinuhata Saiai had quickly and powerfully climbed 28 floors up the building’s wall and now she grabbed Security Guard Hanano Choubi by the collar.

“Wait, but, hey, what are you doing!?”

“It was super you who told us not to abandon you if things went wrong.”

Then the two of them dove down from that high floor.

“Gyehhhhhhhhh!?”

“Don’t worry. My Offense Armor will act as a cushion, so we won’t die when we super hit the ground.”

===Part 5===

“Finally. It’s already midday. How did it take you that long to escape one little building?”

“Huff, puff. Sh-she really is in full dominatrix mode, isn’t she?”

Mugino held out a hand in a “give it here” gesture. Hanano wiped the makeup from her face to return to her puppyish self before handing the miniature computer to Mugino. She was irritated and wanted to look cool by tossing it over, but after going through all that, she was terrified of dropping and breaking it.

Mugino looked satisfied as she accepted the computer.

“After grabbing some lunch, we can check inside this and start tracking one of the participants.”

“Shouldn’t we be running away? I can see the building from here and- wow, there’s a giant hole in the center.”

After yanking Hanano inside the van, Item left.

“Um, wait. Are you really asking me to change inside this cramped van? I have to strip down while the rest of you watch!?”

“Don’t worry, Hanano. I’m rooting for you.”

“You, busty track suit girl! What part of me were you looking at when you made that pitying comment!?”

Hanano tearfully complained, but she must not have wanted to remain in the security uniform that smelled like male sweat (because she had designed it to do so). The rustling of cloth filled the van for a while.

Anyway, next on the agenda was lunch.

Frenda knew how to access a wealth of information on her phone and she learned of a good restaurant frequented by District 3’s elite office workers. After driving to the center of the district, they left the van behind and walked the rest of the way.

Frenda spotted something on the way.

“Neat. In the end, of course a salaryman district would have miniskirt ladies handing out cans of beer.”

“That sign calls them ‘bargirls’. What does that mean?”

Takitsubo tilted her blankly staring head.

The bargirls were apparently advertising a new seasonal craft beer. But none of the officer workers in suits could drink beer in the middle of the day, so it seemed like they would have a hard time selling every can. Mugino though they would have better luck in District 5 with all its college students ready to party on Tanabata.

Mugino had also wondered what hidden gem of a restaurant Frenda had discovered, but it was a fairly large Chinese restaurant that shared a giant building with an electronics store.

“It’s normal. It’s so normal I’m about ready to punch Frenda.”

“No one here has time to wait in a long line, so anyplace that gets super lots of five star ratings will be one with a super lot of seating and decent enough food. This place is as super big as a parking garage.”

The five girls found a seat at a table in the back.

Was it a dark side habit to prefer the seat closest to the emergency exit? Or if that wasn’t available, one by a window.

“I’m going to get the vegetable gyoza meal with no garlic. It’s a good basic dish to super test the quality of the cooking. What about you, Takitsubo-san?”

“This.”

“Oh! In the end, they’re already serving the chilled noodles! I’ll get that too but with sesame sauce!!”

“It sure is summer. And I hate it.”

Mugino never passed up a chance to complain about wheat and she apparently went for the rice dishes as a result. She ordered the seafood fried rice with ankake sauce. Based on the photo in the menu, it had something extremely greasy poured on top. It had to be a giant mass of calories. The day she had slim legs was still a long way off. Although anyone foolish enough to say that aloud would have an instant 50% reduction in weight when their upper half was vaporized.

The restaurant was meant to get office workers in and out during their limited lunch break, so the young part-timer in a mini China dress had their order out in no time. Takitsubo stared blankly at the food.

“They’re gyozas, but they’re green. Kinuhata, you should eat more meat.”

“I don’t need your criticism. What are you – a super old man?”

“But you won’t grow otherwise.”

“''Are you picking a goddamn fight with me while you waste your own super boobs by covering them up with that lame-ass track suit''!?”

The growing girl who channeled the #1 when she got mad had to be calmed by friendly Frenda.

“Whew…”

Hanano’s body was demanding something unhealthy after the exhaustion of the previous job, so she nervously pulled in her bowl of stir-fried meat and vegetables that looked heavily seasoned. On the dark side, you could get your hands on a variety of pills or even a mysterious stamp that made sounds quite colorful when you placed it below your tongue, but this was the limit of unhealthy that petty bourgeoisie was willing to go for.

“Today’s Tanabata, isn’t it? Oh, this ordinary free ice water is soaking into my soul.”

“Which one is Tanabata again? The one with the pandas and lots of firecrackers?”

“Takitsubo-san, I think you’re super confusing it with Chinese New Year.”

Kinuhata looked kind of smug, but you wouldn’t see pandas on the streets of China even when celebrating the lunar new year. What Asian movie had she seen?

“Hanano, you should put this shichimi togarashi on your stir fry. You’re in the mood for something strong, aren’t you?” suggested Takitsubo.

“That sounds good, but it would make fixing my face harder, so I’ll pass. Spicy foods making your lips swell isn’t just a thing from gag manga. They have that lip cream full of capsaicin to give you fuller lips, remember?”

“Hanano.”

“Stop recommending it to me because you think that sounds funny!”

All of their food was good. But only good. The secret to the flavor was probably tubs of dashi from a factory in District 4. If this place was getting five star ratings, perhaps office workers thought it was a virtue to have no sense of adventure.

That was the opposite of Item’s way of life.

Mugino pulled out the miniature computer.

“Frenda.”

“Just one, okay!? Please, Takitsubo! In the end, a bite of my almond jelly for one of your sesame dumplings isn’t a bad trade at all, so pleeeeease! Oh, what did you want, Mugino?”

“You’ve been watching the Colosseum online, right? When does today’s match begin?”

“Hmm? The morning event should be over already. In the end, the next soonest would be the one that starts at 8 this evening. I remember the time because I tended to watch the killing while eating dinner in my room.”

“That’s super primetime. Are the managers intentionally aiming for mealtime when people are relaxing with their families?”

“Ugh.” Hanano paled and shrank down in her seat, but that was nothing as far as dark side tastes went . Mugino didn’t seem interested in that part at all.

“Damn, and it’s only 1 in the afternoon. Then there’s no point in pursuing one of the living contestants now. We can take our time and begin our pursuit at around 5.”

===Part 6===

“Beep, beep, beep,” rang a mechanical alarm.

Kitty Frenda wore baggy costume pajamas as she reached a slender arm out from bed, couldn’t reach, and had to forcibly extend her back to finally grab her phone from the bedside table.

“Ugh,” groaned another girl in the same bed as her. That was Hanano Choubi in a yoga-style tank top and hot pants. Item was short on beds with two new members added without warning.

“I feel like taking a nap was a mistake. Ah, my head feels so heavy…”

“It’s 3 PM. We don’t need to get moving quite yet, but in the end, we need to get ready soon or Mugino will chuck us outside before we have a chance to wake up.”

Frenda said that, but she wasn’t getting out of bed yet either. Maybe they had more time than she let on, or maybe she had done this enough times she was confident she could get dressed and ready quickly enough.

Frenda smiled a little while lying on her side.

“Oh, right. I forgot to congratulate you for your performance earlier today, Hanano.”

“Thanks.”

“To be honest, I thought we were in trouble for a bit there. What was that cruel VIP bodyguard called again? Kouzaku? Regardless, when Mugino didn’t even bother defending herself while attacking that girl head on, I bet she was thinking our newbies would die if she didn’t end the fight quick. Oh, but don’t tell Mugino I said so. She’d probably tear you in two to pretend that wasn’t why she did it. In the end, she had to throw out the option of a slower fight for you. And that would have been bad for Item as a whole. We would’ve had to look after you the entire time.”

Frenda gave a mischievous smile and slowly narrowed her eyes.

“But instead, you proved your usefulness in direct combat and in indirect infiltration. Without your help, we couldn’t have gotten that data from the insurance company. I doubt Mugino would have given up, but she would’ve relied on brute force to get the job done.”

“Ha…ah ha ha…”

Hanano could only laugh weakly at that. Did blasting a hole in the center of the skyscraper not count as relying on brute force?

Frenda winked while still lying in bed.

“So we owe you one. Is there anything you want us to do for you? Or anything you want from us?”

“U-um, there is actually…”

Hanano scooted toward Frenda and whispered in her ear.

Frenda looked confused.

“Really? That’s pretty dangerous.”

“Hmm. Think of it as a last resort I can use. I am in the dark side now. And I thought you would be the best person to ask.”

“If that’s what you want.”

The blonde girl didn’t take much convincing.

Then three knocks came at the door. And the bedroom door opened before they could respond.

“Excuse me. Is Hanano-san in here?”

“Huh? Kinuhata-san? What do you want- gasp!? C-could it be!? Has this one success won me two friends at once!?”

“Super what are you talking about?” Kinuhata Saiai gave an exasperated sigh with a hand on her hip. “I heard this team has a tradition of the second-newest member super subjecting the newest member to a dress-up hell.”

“Gyahhhhhhh!?”



And so Hanano was dragged against her will to the brand-name shopping mall on the lower floors.

Kinuhata understood they didn’t have any money to work with, so she stuck to browsing and using the dressing rooms.

“Isn’t this just underwear!? I’m not an expert on Japanese clothing, but isn’t this that thing you wear when meditating under a waterfall or going to a hot spring!? Do I have to try this on here!? No, wait, it’s falling off, there’s nothing covering me, I’ll die!! Like any blushing teenage maiden would!!”

“Don’t worry. It’s just a super mini yukata for Tanabata. Super just get changed already. Super quickly.”

Meanwhile Kinuhata and Hanano’s phones both received a message.

It was a group message from Mugino, saying it was time for Item to get to work.

“We’re super going to District 7?”

“She says that’s where our target’s dorm is.”

They joined Mugino, Takitsubo, and Frenda who had taken the elevator down to the ground floor. They traveled by train.

It was 5PM and everything was colored orange by the setting sun. There were a lot of people, partially because it was rush hour, but there were also a lot more people ignoring curfew to stay out for Tanabata.

“Takitsubo-san, super what are you eating?”

“Bamboo leaf ice cream.”

“That is a very bright green,” said Mugino. “Sounds like a dessert for pandas.”

“Mugino, stop stealing licks. And the rest of you stop copying her.”

The five members of Item walked through the evening city.

They had arrived in District 7, but they didn’t know their destination yet.

They had located their target, though.

“Okay, let’s tail that contestant so she’ll lead us right to the Colosseum’s secret location.”

They had investigated the insurance company headquarters to determine the identity of a still-living contestant. With that information, they only had to tail that contestant the old-fashioned way. The contestant would of course have to arrive at the Colosseum at the appropriate time.

Item was currently in front of District 7’s train station, which was filled with a mixture of students and workers.

They could locate the enemy base starting from here.

“These are contestants for a deadly underground fight club, so I was expecting some kind of super muscular macho. But that’s just a super normal girl with her braid swaying side to side as she walks.”

“You’re the same way Kinuhata,” said Takitsubo. “You don’t look like a brawler.”

Their target was about 15m away.

It was the evening rush hour, but those dark side girls knew how to take advantage of the crowds.

The five of them chatted while following their target at a leisurely pace.

“A-are you sure this is a good idea?” asked Hanano. “What if they strike back in a way we never would have expected. I-I mean, anything goes on the dark side, right? And there are stories of people seeing ''a giant dragon'' at night recently.”

“Ah ha ha. In the end, nothing like that’s going to happen.”

“A-and should we really be following her so closely? I feel like she would see us if she happened to look back.”

“It doesn’t matter if she does see us. Why would she peg us as ‘suspicious’ in this crowd? In the end, sending out a UAV or something would be a lot more conspicuous. The traditional methods are more convenient for tailing people. …Mugino?”

No response.

A convenience store had a simple table set up outside to sell bentos to the people here for the Tanabata event. Food that had been sitting outside in this heat seemed questionable, though.

And Mugino Shizuri was entranced by something there.

Her shoulders were even trembling.

“W-wait, that generous serving of salmon only has 400 Calories!? You have to be kidding me! This is a revolution!! I knew rice was the way to goooooooo!!”

“Mugino…”

“400 Calories for a meal doesn’t seem all that unusual to me. Super how much do you usually eat?”

The best part of a bento was the ability to walk around while eating it. Just like using your phone while walking, it wasn’t recommended you do so, but the Item girls weren’t known for their manners.

“Here. In the end, I’ll take our photo.”

“(Wait, why are you taking selfies while we tail someone, Frenda-san?)”

“''Because'' we’re tailing someone. It would look weird for a group of four or five girls to not do anything with their phones.”

The braid girl entered a narrow alley, turned a corner with a traffic mirror, entered a small building, and emerged through a different exit. She was checking to make sure she wasn’t followed, but it wasn’t hard to trick her when they knew that was coming. Especially when you had a team that could split apart or regroup as needed.

“Mugino.”

Takitsubo noticed something and tapped on Mugino’s shoulder to get her attention.

The track suit girl was looking at some graffiti on a building wall.

“I saw that same anchor and chain graffiti spraypainted on another wall earlier. I think it’s meant to guide people to the Colosseum while camouflaged within all the other paint and stickers.”

Once they knew the trick, the rest was easy.

Item kept their distance and continued pursuit while a blimp flew by overhead. The screen on the side provided information on a fireworks show. That had to be one hell of a nuisance for the people hoping to actually see the stars on Tanabata.

“Did the braid girl go in here?”

“Wow, it’s a parasol market. Are they super popping up around here now?” groaned Kinuhata.

True to the name, the entirety of the small park situated between two buildings was filled with an orderly arrangement of beach parasols, plastic tarps, beach chairs, sports coolers, and more. Was all of that the kind of equipment used to create a break area at a construction site? Each parasol seemed to signify a spot, but there were some areas with a few parasols linked together.

However, this was not a construction site. A peek under the parasols showed documents, heated tobacco products, and other things lined up below. Were some of the products laid out on a bodyboard to prevent the heat of the ground from damaging them? The shops weren’t just run by adults. Several of them were run by students in aprons.

Every single spot here was a shop.

There were shops for used books, electronics, and video games. The ones selling alcohol or running a pawnshop did not have any kind of license. The law meant nothing here. All of the products for sale were of dubious origin. This was an underground flea market where everyone was ready to pack up shop and scram the instant any trouble showed itself. It was a modern Kowloon Walled City that could appear anywhere like a mirage and sold just about anything.

There was a bar with dozens of varieties of vacuum-packed space food to go with the drinks and a sweets shop selling candies so old it was a mystery how you would go about finding them in the modern day, so the place had an unusual number of smiles for something dark side related.

Kinuhata looked at some cubes of meat sizzling on a hotplate that had toothpicks sticking into them like the samples at the supermarket.

“Huh? Super how do they have pricey wagyu steak here?”

“Check the price tag. That’s imitation meat made from soy and lard, Kinuhata.”

That would have been plenty cheap and delicious as long as it was made clear what it was to begin with. That sort of product only had such a bad reputation because people tried to hide that it wasn’t real meat.

They were also selling takoyaki with no octopus and a tuna bowl made with a mystery deep sea fish, but the people swaying unsteadily with a beer mug in hand at this hour probably weren’t too concerned about the flavor.

This wasn’t a beach, so how did they have those beach parasols in place? It turned out they had used a special tool to open thumb-sized holes in the ground. Lots of them. Maybe it was to set up a grid for the shops, or maybe whoever had done it was showing off what they could do.

Hanano nervously checked one of the shops.

“Wow…the dark side really is incredible to have a dungeon like this. Eh? But this used book shop…I don’t believe it! Is that Umisuna Seiru’s makeup guide? Ha ha. But that was banned from all the stores – physical and digital – after she was arrested!”

“Hanano.”

The newcomer was extremely satisfied after paying in cash for a full-color book that looked like a pocket-sized illustrated encyclopedia, so Takitsubo had to grab her hand and hurry her along. Otherwise, the girl was liable to start searching through all of the new cosmetics that weren’t supposed to go on sale until the fall.

Mugino scoffed at the entire scene around them.

“This is only the very surface level of the dark side. Home to all sorts of thugs.”

For the braid girl, this had to be a way of ensuring she wasn’t being followed. If Anti-Skill or Judgment took a step inside this market, everyone here would notice immediately even if they were in plainclothes and the market would scatter.

But that trick didn’t work when she was being tailed by other dark side members.

It looked like the braid girl was heading straight to her destination after passing through the parasol street. It was July 7, so the city was as much of a heat island as ever. Maybe she wanted to avoid staying outside where the heat shimmered up from the asphalt, but she clearly wasn’t focused enough. She was more focused on the shaved ice with chocolate sauce and vanilla ice cream she had bought at a food truck than she was on any surrounding threats.

Mugino commented while watching the girl through the reflection in the clear plastic cover of the drink vending machine she was facing.

“She fixed her hair and clothes before heading in there. She must want to look her best for whoever’s inside. I’m betting that’s the Colosseum.”

“I super didn’t expect this. Isn’t that a library?”

A circular building was located next to a mansion-like building, so it may have been a complex containing a few different academic facilities.

“Ugh, we ended up walking around in circles for nearly an hour.”

“Odd. Doesn’t that leave them less than two hours for the setup and pre-battle inspections?”

“No one knows where the Colosseum is, right? In the end, this is a sketchy underground fight club that wants to make sure they can escape if the authorities show up. If it took them half a day to get everything set up like at a legal sports tournament, they would’ve been found out ages ago.”

Also, the braid girl hadn’t looked like the kind of person who would appear in an underground fight club. Without any advance information, most anyone would assume she was just a bookworm.

“In the end, it’s a lot like the temptation of a fire alarm. Don’t you just want to shatter that silence just once?”

“Is the #6 super napping through all this?”

Now they had the location, but they couldn’t just follow the girl inside the main entrance. The door she had used had a “closed” sign on it.

Mugino narrowed her eyes.

That quiet library was in fact a deadly arena. It was like a physical representation of Academy City’s shittiness.

“We can’t go in through the front and I’m sure they have the rear entrance guarded. H-how are we supposed to get in?”

“If we need an entrance, my Meltdowner can give us one in any wall we want.”

“Someone come up with a good idea before this sadistic demon lord gets tired of thinking and fires one of her beeeeeeeams!!” screamed the chihuahua girl like a boiling tea kettle.

Team battles were all about making up for your teammates’ faults, so nimble Kinuhata climbed the library wall and kicked down the extendible emergency ladder kept up by the window. Then the Item girls climbed the ladder one after another and entered the library through a second floor window. Getting in was easy as long as they didn’t use a door.

Kinuhata took a look around.

“There’s a lot of dust super piled up in the corners.”

“What are you, a mother-in-law?”

“In the end, they can’t let the drum-shaped cleaning robots work in sensitive areas that store old books. They don’t want the sprayed detergent getting on anything.”

Was that why the place had been chosen as a secret arena? The limited number of cameras probably helped too. Although they were probably just threatening the library director or whoever else ran the place.

And the track suit girl noticed something else.

“Mugino.”

The air was abuzz with energy.

It didn’t suit the classic mansion interior at all.

A library might have people organizing the books and performing other work afterhours, but there were still too many people here. It felt more like being in the attic of a club.

Something was happening below.

Mugino and Frenda had too much firepower and could easily harm their own teammates if they got in the way, so they took the front and back positions to protect the group on their way into the long second floor corridor. The corridor overlooked the hall below.

An explosion of noise pushed up from there.

Cheering voices and booming music swirled up at them.

The audience had to be at least in the hundreds. Item felt silly for spending so much time tailing and infiltrating.

“Hey, hey! Sorry for interrupting you all during dinnertime! This modern Colosseum adds an exciting splash of red to your boring lives and you wouldn’t believe how much money is about to be changing hands here! We’re still taking online bets, so make sure you get in on that action! Nothing makes a match more exciting than having money riding on who lives and who diiiiiiiiiiies!!!!”

Some kind of plate was spinning.

The Colosseum was a form of entertainment, so music must have been crucial. But who was that busty gasmask girl skillfully operating the equipment at the DJ turntable?

“Frenda, explain,” said Mugino, sick of it all already.

“In the end, it’s normally something you watch online, but they do have an online drawing for a live viewing. Only the biggest whales spend enough to get put in for that drawing, though.”

Frenda didn’t seem particularly interested. She didn’t sound at all envious.

She had said she watched the Colosseum while eating dinner. She liked to watch it online ''while'' doing something else, so she may not have wanted to dedicate the many hours needed for the pregame and the actual match itself.

“But there’s so many. How were they all guided here?”

“I doubt they all super wandered around for an hour. That would be super conspicuous and having a line form at the library entrance would defeat the purpose. Maybe they were all loaded into the back of a truck and then super guided in from an underground parking lot?”

Of course, if they had a foolproof transportation method, the braid girl wouldn’t have had to walk around so much in the summer heat. If their truck was caught by an Anti-Skill inspection during some pre-summer-break crimefighting campaign, that was that. They had needed another method to bring in the (likely doomed to die) contestants since they mattered more than the audience.

All the desks had been removed from the reading space on the floor below and a chain link fence standing more than 3m tall had been placed around it. It wasn’t clear where they had gotten their hands on it, but those were temporary barricades set up on the streets to stop rioters. The 10m-diamater space within had to be the ring.

There were also colorful stage lights and speakers larger than sofas. They had brought in club equipment. The audience’s excitement was infectious, so the shouts and cheers spread like wildfire. And the match hadn’t even started yet.

Filming equipment was visible further out than the shouting crowd. Surprisingly, they were all enormous models that could be moved around on wheels, just like you would see in a TV studio. With the latest high definition specs, each one had to cost around 20 million yen. And there were tons of them here. That was all necessary for the online service, but it showed just how flush with cash the managers were.

In addition to that, over 100 small lenses were pasted all around the interior of the barricade. Those were likely for the VR composite stream. The quality of the equipment was pro-soccer level. With something that specialized, you needed more than just money. It took industry connections.

Mugino looked down from the railing in disgust.

“Is the Colosseum always like this?”

“Today is actually relatively subdued. They usually have these huge killer fireworks. Are they skipping that because of all the paper books? Or because the building isn’t properly soundproofed? In the end, look at that, Mugino. That’s one of the caged surprises! There’s a 3m white tiger in there to be thrown in there with the espers as a surprise contestant☆”

“Eeeek!” screamed Hanano, curling up in a corner of the 2nd floor. She didn’t have to fight the tiger herself, so Mugino thought the girl had too active an imagination.

Less imaginative Kinuhata and Takitsubo were more carefree.

“Huh, this super does look like a gory tournament where people die every round.”

“I feel sorry for the poor animals they make fight. I hope everyone running this place is struck down for their cruelty.”

Of course, Item’s job was not to fight in the Colosseum as contestants.

They had to slaughter the Colosseum management and take their blood-stained fortune. That would mean 15 billion, if not more.

Mugino grinned.

“Now, then. Where do these classy shitheads stash their money?”

===Part 7===

The Colosseum was a very important event for them.

They didn’t all gather together for every single event, but they still made sure to make an appearance on site as ''the management''.

However, those four girls were not in the ring or in the stands. They were in a separate monitor room, built from a back room of the library full of book repair equipment. They used that room to keep tabs on the situation in the arena and online.

Of course, they weren’t upstanding members of society, so they had brought camping chairs and a camping table in for themselves. The table was piled high with chips, popcorn, fried chicken, fries, and more. For drinks, there were sodas and iced coffee. They preferred to bring their own rather than order it from a catering company. That made it feel more like doing yaminabe at a girls-only sleepover, which was a lot more fun.

“Uhh…”

A small 12-year-old girl with pale skin and shoulder-length black hair groaned while staring at all the monitors. Waniguchi Nokoba was a mixed martial artist and she wore a ring costume that looked like a racing swimsuit made even more revealing. She raised her small hands and stretched her back without getting up from her chair.

However, her hands just about crushed the rubber balls she held.

“I wanna fight too!! We worked so hard to get that white tiger for today and I wanna fight it!!”

“You’re our ''executioner'' who swiftly eliminates anyone who violates any rules regarding the match or the gambling, so you need to stay put as long as things run smoothly. It’s better this way, so try and enjoy the peace and quiet.”

Ibotanokikouji Kaede, a curvy girl wearing a ''Tokiwadai Middle School'' summer uniform and with a few braids in her fluffy blonde hair, breathed an exasperated sigh, but the martial arts girl ignored her.

Despite her young appearance, Waniguchi bared her teeth and spat back.

“Damn, I thought I’d be seeing lots of action in this position, but these dark side morons are all too scared to disobey. ''You’re criminals – why the hell are you following the rules''? I’m starting to wish I’d entered as a contestant instead.”

“But then you would just win every match,” commented a tanned track girl named Hanayama Kamitsu.

“We wouldn’t make much money from the gambling side then, would we?” sighed Ibotanokikouji. “Waniguchi-chan, why are you so irritable today?”

“Her thigh,” whispered a silver-haired girl named Inoue Laspezia.

That got a response out of Waniguchi herself rather than Ibotanokikouji.

“Ah!? I’ve got another mosquito bite… No wonder I’ve been so mad today. This is why I hate the ground. Too many bugs. Hey, where’d the bug spray go!?”

“It’s too late for that if you’re already bitten. Come here. I will rub the anti-itch cream on for you,” said Ibotanokikouji.

“Yay!” rejoiced Waniguchi as she walked over, but she was interrupted by something else.

The silver-haired girl had been working in silence, but now she sat right in Ibotanokikouji’s lap.

“…Inoue Laspezia.”

“Yes?”

The silver-haired girl was still engrossed in the intricate work she was performing with her gloved hands, so she replied with just the one Kyoto-accented word. She didn’t even look up.

As the only one here immune to the lily’s allure, the track girl kept her distance.

Furious at having her special seat taken, Tiny Tyrant Waniguchi clung to Ibotanokikouji’s side, but then she noticed something else. Ibotanokikouji had a small DVD player open in addition to all of the management monitors. It was probably an item sold cheap at a discount store.

“Hey, Chief, what’s that? A horror movie?”

“One of the worst I’ve ever seen, but one of the stuntmen died in an accident during filming. If you watch carefully in slow motion, you can see him being crushed by the machinery in the background. Hee hee. I bet all those sophisticated teachers would faint if they saw this.”

In cases like this, the movie would either be banned from the online stores or the offending footage would be removed in a mystery update, so if you wanted to add it to your collection, you needed one of the limited first-edition physical copies. Because that would never be altered.

“Boo. If you want to see a corpse, just send me into the ring. I’d give you plenty of bloodshed.”

“Probably so, but I don’t need a close up of the corpse.”

Ibotanokikouji smiled thinly while operating her phone. She lovingly chewed on Inoue’s ear while she worked.

She pulled up her own personal map app which was linked to her photo album. But in her case, the map displayed a tour of famous suicide spots around Academy City.

“I want to decorate myself with other people’s deaths. I want to sleep wrapped in a blanket of their misfortune. Hee hee. So it doesn’t need to be anything exciting. Brand-name clothing isn’t for showing off. It looks best when ''you wear it casually''. You can make diamonds by pressurizing human corpses, but there is no need to go around loudly advertising that fact. True class is found in doing things so discreetly the amateurs never notice what you have. The money we make with the Colosseum is the same.”

“Boo.”

Hanayama Kamitsu, the tanned girl with wavy shoulder-length black hair and a track athlete’s tank top and shorts, made no attempt to join the other three. She thought these things were nice to look at, but she had no desire to be a part of it herself. In her opinion, lesbian relationships were beautiful enough when things were going well, but they got nasty quick when things went bad. And on the dark side, the result would be a lot worse than for a band when a relationship between two members fell apart.

She normally wore something a little less revealing, so her hands wandered restlessly across the visible tan lines on the upper and lower halves of her body. She finally reached for a plastic item rather than one the chilled drinks in the cooler.

Waniguchi’s face lit up while still clinging to Ibotanokikouji’s side.

“Oh, is that an e-cigarette? I’ve always wanted to try one of those!”

“It’s a portable oxygen tank. It’s flavorless.”

As a track girl, Hanayama wanted as much oxygen inside her as she could get. Or rather, she got antsy when she couldn’t get it. She held the plastic device in the corner of her mouth, the blue LED at the end flashed, and she breathed in the compressed oxygen coming from the refillable cartridge.

“Anyway, did you see the news? That general manager was arrested. Something about attacking his own company. You really shouldn’t mug for the camera in a minute-long video just because you’re lonely and want some likes. They were playing it on all the talk shows.”

“So what? That’s not a problem for us as long as we can regularly withdraw the contestants’ insurance money. Even if they take emergency measures, that’s an adult corporation, right? They take forever to do anything, so we can still get today’s payouts. Besides, there are still plenty more insurance companies in Academy City. Not to mention executives we can blackmail.”

“Hm,” was all the response track girl Hanayama gave.

They were technically colleagues (of a sort), but they had never actually met directly to give him instructions. Even if the general manager sang like a canary, he didn’t know the girls’ real names. He had been disposable, so they didn’t care what happened to him.

To change the subject, Hanayama spoke to a different girl: the slender silver-haired girl seated in Ibotanokikouji’s lap with her eyes lowered to the delicate work she was doing. Overall, she was a squirrel-like person. But it upset her if you said she looked like a racoon, so it was worth being careful.

“Hey, Inoue. What nasty method will you be using this time?”

“…It’s nothing special.”

Inoue Laspezia wore an apron and a beret over a summer school uniform. She kept her eyes on her working hands and responded with a Kyoto accent.

Her hobby was figurines, her special skill was handicrafts, and she belonged to the art club. She didn’t even look Hanayama’s way as she made some precise movements of a thin-tipped paintbrush wet with the special iron material – that is, human blood – she had mixed to just the right color on her paper palette.

She never seemed interested in anything, but she refused to give up her spot on Ibotanokikouji’s lap.

“There was a murder in the area, so I’m just counterfeiting the murder weapon. It’s a razor with the appropriate fingerprints and blood on it. One of the big ones a barber would have. I had all the necessary materials in stock, so it doesn’t cost me anything.”

“Yikes. Remind me to never piss off a modeler.”

Tanned Hanayama grinned.

It didn’t matter if the evidence was real or not. The general manager likely had no recollection of what they had threatened him over. But what if the public and the justice system believed it? Even if the charges were false – no, especially when the charges were false – no one wanted to lose everything over it.

And once they started down that route, it would take over their life.

The rules of the world didn’t let you choose when you wanted to stop.

An adult important enough to have no qualms at all about oppressing the children would know exactly what happened the instant they took just one step off the edge of the cliff.

Ibotanokikouji had come up with the plan and ordered her to do it, but even she seemed exasperated.

She tightly hugged the silver-haired girl sitting in her lap.

“Oh, Inoue-chan. You’re such a perfectionist once you set your mind to something. Wouldn’t you have a much easier time sticking out your very cute butt on the train to make some false molestation accusations?”

“How would that work? Our targets always have a driver who takes them wherever they need to go.”

Inoue must have finished her work because she sealed the evidence razor in a plastic bag. She completed the work calmly and expressionlessly. That gave them one more trump card they could use to frame someone.

Everyone had their strengths and weaknesses. A honeytrap was probably beyond that whispering, downcast girl. …Except with the minority who were into the plain, obedient type.

“How’s this for a conclusion?” Waniguchi rubbed her cheek against Ibotanokikouji from the side. “The arrested general manager on the TV isn’t a problem for us. And we’re prepared to find us a new wallet. So we won’t throw out everything we’ve built up and we won’t go into hiding. We’ll continue running the Colosseum like normal.”

“Agreed,” said all four girls together.

But anyone capable of reading the room would have noticed they didn’t say it at the exact same time. The other three girls waited to see how Ibotanokikouji Kaede reacted before joining in.

And that secret center of attention whispered with the silver-haired girl still seated in her lap.

With a soft smile on her lips.

“Don’t worry. We are ''Item'' and we will be taking allll the profits of death for ourselves☆”

===Part 8===

Up above the ceiling, Mugino Shizuri and Takitsubo Rikou exchanged a glance.

“Mugino.”

“Did that bitch just say Item?”

Their recording of the general manager had said much the same thing, but this time it came straight from the villains themselves.

Item was of course the name of Mugino’s team. If these people were body doubles in case of emergency or a group using the name to get work in the dark side, they should have been disguised as and acting like Mugino and the others, but they weren’t.

Whatever their reasons, those girls had used the Item name in a private room where they assumed no one else was listening in. That meant this wasn’t an act. It was real.

Meanwhile, Frenda was worried about something else: the clothing of the central girl.

“Isn’t that a ''Tokiwadai'' uniform? How does a rich girl from that school end up in the dark side?”

“Having money super doesn’t prevent you from making mistakes. Aren’t all of you in super similar situations?”

If that girl actually was a Tokiwadai student, then she was a real piece of work.

The girls lounging on the floor below continued their conversation.

“Anyway, Waniguchi-chan, here’s some extra for this month.”

“Oh, thanks a bunch!”

The central girl tossed over something she held between two fingers.

The object spinning through the air was a plastic-looking card. It flew back around like a boomerang and Waniguchi nimbly caught it.

“It’s only the 7th. How did you manage to spend a month’s worth of pay that fast? You are being paid a proper wage, so you need to stop wasting so much money.”

“Ibotanokikouji Kaede. You’d be perfect if you wouldn’t get on my case about money.”

The small martial arts girl pouted her lips and rubbed her cheek against the Tokiwadai girl while giving the card she held a quick kiss.

That was apparently how their Item(?) received payments.

“''A money card?''” Mugino muttered under her breath up above the ceiling.

“Those are the prepaid cards you can super use with music players and online stores, right? You buy them at a convenience store and super input the number into your computer or phone.”

Mugino responded to Kinuhata’s explanation with a finger on her chin.

“They don’t ordinarily go above 10 thousand yen on a card, but there are premium ones with bigger amounts. Like 5 or 10 million on a card. Although I think those are really only meant to buy brand-name bags online or to make donations to net idols on video sites.”

But it was clever.

Prepaid cards were a lot lighter than cash or gold. They also couldn’t be frozen without warning like a bank account. Unlike a diamond, it didn’t matter if they were handled a bit roughly and got scratched up. And since cash could be converted into cards, they were also useful for money laundering. They could then be converted back into cash either via the internet or at a pawnshop.

“Mugino.”

Takitsubo pointed elsewhere.

The central girl – Ibotanokikouji Kaede? – had a suitcase near her. It looked cheap, but a closer inspection showed the lock had been replaced with a much nicer one. Not only was the new lock much tougher, but it appeared to include a sensor that would transmit its location over the internet if the lock was forced open.

(So converting their money into cards wasn’t just to launder it. They also don’t trust the banks to hold it.)

There were no standard methods in the dark side. It wasn’t perfect, but you could get a general picture of who someone was by the methods they used for these things.

Mugino considered this for a bit.

“If that case is packed full of 10 million yen cards with some room left for cushioning, then I’m guessing it holds around 80 billion.”

“Hapyah!?”

When she heard that amount, Hanano Choubi the Chicken yelped without thinking.

The Tokiwadai girl didn’t even bother looking up.

She simply held her palm upwards while still seated in her camping chair with Inoue in her lap.

“''There.''”

The entire ceiling collapsed.

Mugino didn’t even have enough time to click her tongue.

The building materials sank down like an antlion pit and the girls were dragged to the lower floor with nothing to grab ahold of.

Mugino gave up on righting herself as she fell and focused on landing without her legs giving out below her. Even with the intruders before her, Ibotanokikouji did not get up.

She did, however, pick Inoue up from her lap and set her down next to her.

“How do you do, ill-bred thieves☆”

“You think a lot yourself for a witch who converts human lives into money.”

“My, my, my. Aren’t you brimming with confidence, Level 5. Have you never bothered to question why it is you find victory wherever you go?”

Ibotanokikouji’s confidence was not broken by being called a witch.

If anything, she seemed to appreciate the insult.

“Your superiors have selected jobs they know a pathetic beginner like you can complete in order to give you a taste for success. You see the same process with drugs and gambling – all of life’s vices tend to work that way. But the free ride ends here. It is now time to take you for everything you are worth. You have reached the point where it all goes downhill.”

“You’re going to reduced to charcoal soon. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Poor thing. You should really try to use your head for once. You are convinced that ''you can do anything as long as you have Meltdowner,'' but I am saying that very idea is a falsehood this city’s adults have placed in your head.”

She giggled.

Still seated in her camping chair, she peeled Waniguchi away from her side.

“Do you really believe you can survive anything as long as you have your pride as one of Academy City’s seven Level 5s? Do you really think this city’s darkness is that shallow?”

It was Frenda who stared at her confident smile in disbelief.

That girl knew who they were to an extent. And yet she still looked confident while opposing ''the'' Mugino Shizuri.

Mugino did not hesitate, of course.

They only wanted the suitcase, not to hurt the villains or get some kind of information out of them.

She held out her palm and launched a brutal beam straight at the enemy.

But.

Mugino Shizuri’s Meltdowner bent at a sharp angle and blasted through a wall.

“Wha-?” said Frenda, her face entirely pale.

She may have received more of a shock than Mugino.

Mugino herself narrowed her eyes.

“You…”

“No, I did not use electricity.”

Ibotanokikouji Kaede hadn’t even gotten out of her chair.

She giggled in an elegant but wicked way.

“''I am Academy City’s #6.''”

[[Image:Item_BW3.jpg|thumb]]

She stated it plainly.

She called herself a Level 5. She called herself the esper known as the Dark Side’s Bane.

“It is time you learned that the outdated superiority of the seven Level 5s is a thing of the past. There are compatibility issues to worry about too. And on that note, recall that I am known as the Dark Side’s Bane.”

“Th-that can’t be true.”

Frenda believed in the brand name of Item’s – of Mugino Shizuri’s – strength.

She believed in the rarity of Academy City’s seven Level 5s.

So she could only reach one conclusion.

“In the end, Level 5s aren’t just going to appear everywhere we go!! You claim you’re the mysterious Dark Side’s Bane? A-anyone could come out and say they’re the #6! It’s just a number!”

“Oh, dear. You really are ignorant of the dark side’s depths, aren’t you? There really are Level 5s just about everywhere you go here. Really, you could say the dark side is their true home. ''The top two'' go without saying, as does the ''mystery beam shooter'' in front of us here. As for the ''electric one'' and the ''psychological one''…it’s hard to say. I am reluctant to say they belong to the dark side, but given the projects they’re involved in, I would say they each have one foot in the dark side. My, my. That means your last hope of being right is ''that guts idiot''. Are you sure you want to build up your standards and values atop someone as absurd as him?”

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

Frenda Seivelun was left speechless.

Ibotanokikouji had a point.

What if the Level 5 known as the Dark Side’s Bane was also neck deep in the illicit and illegal?

Wouldn’t that be exactly the kind of shitty outcome you would expect in Academy City?

Besides, Academy City’s Level system was entirely based on how useful an esper was for important fields of research. So with the Level 5s at the top, it was only natural the corrupt adults of the dark side would be all over them no matter the Level 5’s own morals or personality. So they might even be tricked into getting involved.

Ibotanokikouji’s laughter seemed to rule this place.

Her eyes were directly on Level 5 Mugino Shizuri.

“You want to argue the point, but you can’t deny the possibility, can you? How much do the stories you have heard about the #6 really matter? How sure can you be that the gender and age you have pictured in your head is correct? ''Do you think any of the information you think you know will help you here and now''? This is not a rumor, a vague report, or a strange legend. I am here right before you and I am calling myself the #6.”

“Don’t get a big head just cause you’re standing on the same field as me, worm.”

Mugino snapped back in a rage, but she also maintained some rationality deep in her mind.

In other words…

(I couldn’t see it, but she did break through the ceiling. What kind of power does she have?)

Then a voice called down from the broken ceiling.

Apparently not all five of them had fallen.

“Mugino!”

“Stay up there, Takitsubo! Hanano, you’re still up in the ceiling too, right!? Get Takitsubo out of here!! Do whatever it takes to protect her! Got that!?”

Mugino heard some panicked stammering, but it was growing more distant. Hanano was scared but doing as she was told. She was the kind of chicken who got moving when she felt cornered, not the kind that froze up.

Takitsubo’s AIM stalker was a convenient power, but she didn’t need to be on the front line for it to work. She could read the enemy’s location from safety and send the information over via phone.

That left Mugino, Frenda, and Kinuhata here.

Conveniently, only their vanguard had fallen from the ceiling. Had they been lucky or had the enemy been unlucky? Either way, that sort of omen held a surprising amount of power in the world of villains.

“This is like a bad joke.” Kinuhata sounded annoyed. “She’s the #6 Level 5 ''and'' a super Tokiwadai student?”

“My, my. You seem surprised to find an elite in the shadows.”

Ibotanokikouji’s expression said she found it puzzling why Kinuhata would question it.

She brought a finger to her chin and cutely tilted her head.

“Girls like me are given a sheltered upbringing cut off from the outside world. Make no noise when you walk, when you eat, or when you laugh. Were they trying to raise a ninja? When your very existence is forced into an unnatural state, it distorts something inside you. And so something must be done to put the hands of the clock back in their proper place. Which means learning the truth of the world, no matter how ugly it might be. And it must be done on a regular basis. Otherwise that luxury hand-wound watch will again fall out of sync with the rest of the world.”

“You’ll go this far to super learn how the real world works?”

“Try to appreciate just how restrictive a life one must live to need all this to avoid being torn apart by the distortion within. This is the problem with you cheap digital watches. You cannot understand the pain of a truly upper class upbringing.”

She sighed in apparent disappointment.

She was not killing to protect herself during a war, nor was she stealing because she was poor and starving.

But she was killing people all the same.

Human cruelty was most noticeable ''during peacetime'' when there were no excuses to fall back on.

“Hee hee.”

The Tokiwadai girl softly laughed and directed her graceful hand toward the ceiling.

“By the way, I did not expect you to have a fifth. But did you really think we would sit around long enough for them to escape?”

“Did you think ''we'' would sit around?”

Frenda Seivelun and Kinuhata Saiai took a step forward.

Frenda pulled several egg-shaped explosives from her short skirt and stuck them with fuses smaller than cigarettes.

“In the end, did you think we would give you time to attack Takitsubo and Hanano? You could’ve avoided this if you had just handed over the money, but I’ll admit it’s pretty funny you would prefer getting blown up!!”

Mugino noticed something in the middle of Frenda’s shouting. She surreptitiously pulled her phone from her pocket and found an email there: “Focus on the suitcase. You’re our strongest, so you go after it.”

Mugino had wondered where all Frenda’s confidence had come from when she had been so scared of the #6 announcement earlier, but she was only shouting to keep the enemy from hearing the vibration of Mugino’s silenced phone.

The next thing Mugino noticed was that the suitcase in question had vanished. It had been taken by…presumably the art club girl who had vanished along with it.

Mugino and the others no longer cared about the job the voice on the phone had brought them.

They didn’t even need to win the prize money in the bloody Colosseum.

It was all there in the suitcase.

Stealing the 80 billion in money cards was their top priority.

“Sh!!”

Mugino fired her first Meltdowner blast straight past Frenda and Kinuhata’s shoulders. The enemy had already bent one of her beams. Since she still didn’t know what that power was, she didn’t think this one attack would defeat that enemy. The beam was only meant to blind this mysterious other Item(?) while the original Item could exchange their thoughts under the cover of the blast and dust cloud.

“Leave the case to me!!”

“Super will do. This comes down to a compatibility issue with your power, right? We’ll defeat her here if we can, but we’ll at least slow her down while trying to work out what her power is and any other idiosyncrasies she has.”

Mugino tackled through a door and nearly rolled out into the hallway.

She spotted a summer uniform skirt fluttering up ahead. She saw a girl dragging the suitcase a long way down the hallway. She was nearly just a dot from Mugino’s perspective.

(I’d love to just blast her from here, but that would require a concentrated line of destruction skinnier than dried pasta. I wouldn’t want to vaporize the suitcase full of all that money.)

“I’ll just have to get closer!!”

Once she had a plan, she was quick to act on it.

She dashed down the library hallway.

The gloomy girl running up ahead looked back just once before pulling something like a remote from her skirt pocket and pressing the button with her thumb. Mugino heard shouting voices coming from beyond the wall to her side. A pair of double doors were broken down nearby and a bloody wild animal stepped into the hallway.

It was 3m long and weighed more than 250kg.

The white tiger’s cage must have opened.

“Shut up and stay out of this!!!”

Mugino slammed her palm into it. She didn’t even use her power. A vibration of the air rattled a nearby window and the impact propagated from the white tiger’s nose down to the tip of its tail. The blow to the face silenced the 3m beast in a single blow.

A Judgment-looking girl who had somehow ended up a Colosseum contestant was slumped on the floor.

“Y-you saved me? Thank-”

“Outta the way, you ♂♀〒#!!”

After paralyzing the girl with a shout, Mugino continued running down the hallway.

The silver-haired art club girl had escaped into the door at the very end of the long hallway.

That door led into a domed space. It covered the area of about four convenience stores. A round device in the center was covered in optical devices and surrounded by seats arranged in concentric circles.

Mugino glanced around the dark, windowless space.

(A planetarium?)

Was this inside the circular building she had seen alongside the library? But that didn’t really matter.

She could see the art club girl’s back from here. She must not have been able to move very fast while lugging that suitcase around. And Mugino was only interested in that luggage, so she was willing to shoot the girl in the back without warning as long as she wouldn’t hit the suitcase too.

(If I aim for her spine and concentrate the beam down to a line the width of dried pasta, I can kill her instantly with a single shot!)

But that isn’t what actually happened.

The gloomy silver-haired art club girl escaped outside through the emergency exit.

Because…

“Ah ha ha!! If you want to play tag, play with me, not Inoue!!!”

An explosive “roar!!!” came from the wall to Mugino’s side. It arrived so suddenly that Mugino didn’t have time to launch her Meltdowner. She clicked her tongue and rolled backwards.

A giant hunk of metal grazed her while producing a blast of wind.

The seats surrounding the planetarium device were arranged in neat concentric circles. They were a lot like movie theater seats, so they had to be bolted firmly to the floor.

They were all blown away like bowling pins.

A rough estimate said that attack had been deadlier than a freight train. It could have broken through the planetarium’s wall with ease.

The ear-splitting roar continued on and on.

It came from a tanned track girl with her wavy black hair cut to shoulder length.

She had just one leg on something like a skateboard with T-shaped handlebars attached. Was that called a kick scooter?

But the rear of the board, behind where her foot rested, was unusually large. That part alone was about 3m long, the tire was extra thick, and the enlarged cylinder looked a lot an unenclosed jet engine. Of course, it had to have a variety of different propulsion devices in addition to that most obvious one.

The dark side did not always rely on esper powers.

It also made use of next-generation weapons.

“Nice to meet you, colleague. I’m Hanayama Kamitsu of ''Item''. But you can call me the courier.”

“…”

“I’m the courier who delivers death. That might mean directly delivering violence or a bomb, but even when I deliver gold bars or a first aid kit to save someone’s life, it always leads to ruin in the end. That’s just who I am. So be careful when a villain offers you kindness. Ah ha ha. Even a child knows it’s a bad idea to trust a demon’s temptations.”

Only then did she notice Mugino wasn’t responding.

It looked like Hanayama hadn’t even imagined someone might be interested in something more than her “courier” title.

“Hm? Are you still caught up on the Item thing? Did you think only you could use the name? Were you imagining a little © afterwards whenever you said it? Don’t be silly. Academy City’s darkness is never going to kindly protect a villain’s rights!”

The tanned girl laughed as she bent her hips and leaned her upper body against the T-shaped handlebars.

It was the unpleasant laugh of someone who knew the truth.

“''Whichever team is more useful to the dark side as a whole gets to call themselves Item.'' That’s how the system works. Killers who do nothing but spend money aren’t going to cut it. You only destroy – you don’t produce anything. Meanwhile, we do our assigned jobs while also making our own profits, so I’d say we score just a biiiit higher than you.”

Her modified kick scooter gave a deep roar.

“So let’s play, imposter. Our Item will knock all the other candidates out of the running. This impractical proof-of-concept prototype can produce speeds of 1100km/h without leaving the ground. I’ll flatten you with my beloved ''Dragon Motor''!!”

Hanayama didn’t wait for Mugino to respond.

She opened the throttle and melted into streamlines.

===Part 9===

Frenda Seivelun and Kinuhata Saiai. Ibotanokikouji Kaede and Waniguchi Nokoba.

Two against two.

“Oh?”

The first to speak was the small girl in a ring costume.

“You let your ace leave while your two substitute fighters deal with the Chief and me? You must be confident.”

“Waniguchi-san, should we do the usual?”

“Yes, please.”

They weren’t even given time to prepare.

Something blew across the room and all four walls were blown down. Even the wall behind Kinuhata and Frenda.

That meant the spaces divided by the walls were now connected.

This was now part of the Colosseum arena which was boiling with excitement after a shocking accident.

The crowd fell silent from panic, but it wasn’t long before a booming cheer erupted. All their voices joined to form a single powerful mass of noise. The leader girl tensed her brow in slight concentration.

Waniguchi casually grabbed a microphone ''that flew over to her on its own''.

“Yeehaw!! I know you’re upset about having your fight taken from you, but we have a much more exciting event for you. Get hyped because it’s time for a purge. Hey, hey, yo, yo! A round of applause for the executioner! This livestream is about to get a hell of a lot bloodierrrrrrrrrr!!!

“Outta the way, newbie!!” shouted Frenda.

Some objects fell from her skirt and ruptured. She wanted a vibration. Libraries contained a lot of paper, so they were made to be especially sensitive when detecting earthquakes and electrical fires.

Ibotanokikouji Kaede stuck out her tongue a bit.

“Tch, trying to trip the breaker? How boring. You did manage to stop the livestream, though. And unfortunately, we took up the audience’s phones to keep them from recording the valuable match and uploading it to a video site.”

“In the end, those are professional cameras on wheels, so they’re going to use a wired connection. And in a real TV studio, they’ll have some junior staff member in charge of cable management!”

Having a video of your killings revealed worldwide was about the worst case scenario for people who worked underground jobs, but they had just barely avoided that here. However, this had only triggered an emergency system meant to respond to an earthquake, so the room’s power would be back on in about 10 minutes if no further problems were detected.

“But we’ll still kill you.”

Waniguchi pounded her fists together in front of her flat chest.

The 12-year-old girl gave a belligerent smile as she announced her opponents’ deaths.

“It’ll be an on-site exclusive event now, but that just means we have to make it even more exciting!!”

Waniguchi didn’t hesitate to step forward.

This was probably her role on the team. While the vanguard kept the enemy busy with direct combat, the rear guard would keep their distance and do something else. That rear guard claimed to be the #6. Anything she did was bound to be deadly.

(I super don’t know what that will be, but we can’t give her time to use it!!)

Kinuhata took a powerful step forward of her own.

The two girls both broke into a run. They took the shortest route to close in on each other.

Waniguchi spread her arms.

“No tricks? I like your style. You’re no better than some hunk of rotting meat in the garbage, but you’re at least meat worthy of some respect!!”

Just then, mere moments before they clashed, Kinuhata flew unnaturally to the right. It was fortunate she had Offense Armor. An ordinary human could have been mangled by the blast that hit her.

That wasn’t Waniguchi’s doing and it wasn’t Ibotanokikouji’s power either.

''Her ally Frenda'' had used a bomb to knock her to the side.

A moment later, Waniguchi’s small hand tore through the air. It was less a straight punch and more of a spiraling motion to pull in everything around her hand. The attack missed its target and instead hit a bookcase, tearing it to pieces. She had to be using some kind of esper power. From the looks of that, she could tear a car in two with just the one arm.

“Are you stupid!? In the end, you need to fix your habit of relying on your tough shield to charge in and learn what you can about the enemy’s abilities! You’ll get yourself killed right away doing that on the dark side!!”

Frenda started to say more, but a large form loomed over her.

“Super watch out!!”

Kinuhata had fallen to the floor, but she threw over the heavy metal stand to some stage lighting, hitting Frenda hard enough to knock her away from ''something''.

“I’m pretty sure I can survive longer than someone who stands super still to give a lengthy explanation in the middle of a deadly battle!!”

“You, bgh. I save your life and this is how you repay me? In the end, are you in one hell of a rebellious phase?”

This was no time to be complaining.

A tremor ran through the floor.

Frenda was being targeted by a grizzly bear that stood more than 3 meters tall when up on its hind legs.

“The Colosseum is usually about espers, but this was our insurance in case the white tiger was too powerful and mauled all of today’s contestants. We hoped to distract the audience from the lack of a winner by pitting the two beasts against each other and having people bet on the outcome.”

Ibotanokikouji held a hand to her mouth and laughed with no cage or anything else between her and the enormous bear.

She wasn’t even using the circus tricks of keeping it back with a whip or with fire or making herself look big.

“In the end, does this mean her power is controlling animals!?”

“No, that super doesn’t make sense. How would that explain when she destroyed the ceiling or the walls!? And it was easy to overlook, but she made the microphone fly over super on its own.”

That was true.

However, Ibotanokikouji was in fact demonstrating multiple strange phenomena. She held her palm out toward the grizzly without even glancing its way and it came to a stop. That unpredictable ferocious beast could attack anyone if it was in a bad mood, but she controlled it like she had a remote control.

The agitated beast was freed from whatever bound it and it swung its forelegs toward Frenda since she was closest.

Waniguchi ignored that as she walked forward.

A soft crunching sound followed.

That beast could stand to a height of 3 meters and its muscles would stop a .45 caliber handgun shot, but the 12-year-old girl had grabbed it with her slender arms and crushed it.

Even the bloodthirsty audience was briefly ''shocked into silence.

“………………………………………………………………………………………………………In the end, did that really just happen?”

She hadn’t used a physical blow. That had looked more like a joint lock.

Waniguchi smiled sweetly while drenched in bear blood. That smile contained the perfect combination of innocence and intimidation, making it extremely popular for some.

“Ugh, really? Chief, I know playing with animals is fun and all, but try not to interrupt my fight.”

“Hee hee. Sorry about that. Please do forgive me. I messed up my control a little.”

Frenda was stunned.

An explosive danced meaninglessly in her hand after she froze in her throwing stance.

Would this even affect that girl?

Explosives were a symbol of humanity’s technology and violence, but it felt so inadequate against that smile.

“Leverage Struggle.”

Waniguchi smiled belligerently as she pulled a thick pair of pliers from her pocket.

''She grabbed the wall with them and tore it right off with only one arm.

Just like a piece of heavy machinery demolishing a building.

“I’m not trying to hide my power. I’ve shown it off in the execution videos when someone violates the rules, after all. Scissors, crowbars, seesaws, and joint locks – if it uses leverage, I can use it as a weapon. Yeah, I can grab a concrete pillar as big around as your torso and bend it with my bare hands. Hell, I could do the same with one twice as thick.”

“Is this super idiot serious?”

With a splash, Kinuhata grabbed a bucket of machine oil and dumped it over her head. That was an odd thing to find in a library, but it was probably meant for the wheels of the heavy camera equipment. Or maybe it was a flammable weapon meant for use in the Colosseum.

“If super all you can do is amplify the power of joint locks that use leverage, then you can’t do a thing against a straight punch or kick. Simply put, ''you’re nothing to worry about as long as you don’t grab me.'' Why would you go out of your way to tell us that? There are super tons of ways of killing you.”

After hearing all that, Waniguchi’s face scrunched up.

She was trying very hard to hold back the tears. All of a sudden, she looked like a normal 12-year-old girl.

“Now, now, Waniguchi-chan. Don’t cry. This is why I told you not to reveal your power like that.”

“Sob. Chief.”

“And even if she is too slippery to grab with your bare hands, you can still hit and tear at her with those pliers. You can also try something trickier by using a seesaw to launch projectiles or yourself. It isn’t very smart to limit your options by focusing solely on barehanded joint locks.”

“You don’t need to attack me tooooooooo!!”

“There, there.”

The sadistic girl (who had made the 12-year-old cry for real) pulled Waniguchi into a comforting hug.

Concentration gathered in Kinuhata’s brow.

“You sure are confident. Do you think you can super win while protecting that idiot and fighting us essentially one-against-two? Let’s super hope you aren’t a meathead too.”

“Hee hee. Yes, ''you have a point.''”

Ibotanokikouji laughed like it had happened to slip out.

It was the amused laugh of a mother who had finally secured a house for her family with a 35-year loan and then learned her daughter was myopically planning to run away from home and live independently.

“But I will still emerge victorious. Can I fight while protecting the weak? Can I win one-against-two? ''Of course I can.'' When you are powerful, you can fight back against this unfair world. But I can’t blame you for being too weak to know that.”

“?”

The #6 held a finger to her lips and whispered sweetly.

“You are in luck. You are about to receive a special demonstration of what the Dark Side’s Bane can really do.”

She only needed a single instant to end the fight.

===Part 10===

The extraordinary engine roared. The din became a physical mass that erupted through the planetarium.

That was Hanayama Kamitsu’s modified kick scooter – the Dragon Motor.

But Mugino Shizuri’s Meltdowner was an extraordinary projectile weapon. It didn’t matter how quickly the enemy accelerated toward her. She had nothing to fear as long as she reduced them to charcoal before they reached her.

Or so she thought.

“Ha ha ha!!”

Hanayama slipped past.

In fact, that giant kick scooter was moving along the planetarium’s domed ceiling. It defied gravity like a rollercoaster.

“Tch. Quit using brute force to defy fluid dynamics!!”

“I’m moving at 1100km/h, remember? That’s why I need my own supply of oxygen. Ah ha ha!! Wah ha ha!! It’s actually a lot harder to keep it on the ground!!”

Even the tanned track girl’s cackling was distorted by her speed. The kick scooter made several passes above Mugino’s head during that one statement.

Bare skin could not survive at that speed, so she likely had some kind of gel generously applied over her entire body.

“Stupid spider girl!!”

“''Bingo''.”

Hanayama answered the insult with a laugh.

Several metallic clangs followed.

The kick scooter had just about melted into streamlines, but on the enormous rear portion, several mechanical arms spread out to the sides like a spider. Each arm had a sharp heavy metal blade attached to the end.

“Atomic number 92!! These burning swords of depleted uranium can cut through a tank!! Hee hee, you won’t even notice you’ve been cut. Ah ha ha, let’s play a game of human daruma otoshi☆”

The kick scooter moved from the curved dome to the floor and then charged straight toward Mugino. Following it by eye was superhuman enough, so not even Mugino had time to take careful aim. She calculated the length of the skinny arms and swords and then considered whether to dodge left or right.

“Tch!!”

She fired Meltdowner at her feet to leap upwards.

“Oh, you figured it out? There goes my promise to kill you before you noticed.”

Orange sparks scattered a moment later. The wreckage of the seats was sliced through like tofu or jelly even outside the range of the arms and swords.

There were wires.

“That’s why you were right to call me a spider girl.”

Mugino was still hanging in midair, but Hanayama had already made five circuits of the domed ceiling or floor.

Hanayama couldn’t directly contact Mugino in the brief moment she remained airborne, but…

“I won’t let you land. I’ll build a spiderweb of deadly wires. Making wires this thin out of depleted uranium isn’t easy, you know? Now curse your own body weight while I slice you up like tokoroten!!”

Mugino’s fall toward death was almost complete.

She twisted around in midair and launched a Meltdowner beam.

But it didn’t hit the kick scooter.

Her opponent was just too fast.

(Damn, a single straight line just isn’t enough. I need another option to deal with a target that keeps moving out of the way.)

“Ah ha ha!!”

Mugino was trapped within a vortex of laughter.

If she did her best to resist – such as by using the airborne wreckage of the seats or the metal railings as a foothold – she could probably earn herself a few more Meltdowner-powered jumps, but that was all. Once gravity dragged all of those footholds back to the floor, Mugino would fall too and be sliced apart by the wires.

The Dragon Motor continued to circle around her.

The wires were being strung up all over the planetarium and Mugino would be sliced and diced if she fell into them.

“Random shots aren’t going to reach me and they can’t break my wires either!! You can’t keep shooting those beams forever! Bye-bye, Level 5. The Item name is ours now!!!”

Immediately afterwards, part of the planetarium’s domed ceiling was noisily torn away. A mass larger than a refrigerator lost its support and fell, so Hanayama had to quickly turn the T-shaped handlebars. From the kick scooter’s perspective, it had been like the road collapsing up ahead. She escaped unharmed, but she was still thrown off her planned course.

“What just…?”

The track girl found the answer before finishing her question.

She saw holes. Big holes. Random shots had done the trick. Mugino’s Meltdowner had opened several holes of 2m or more in the domed ceiling. The dome itself could no longer support itself and thick cracks ran through it. Once those cracks covered the surface area of the dome, ordinary gravity took control and the walls tore away and fell.

“It doesn’t matter how fast you are if I don’t aim for you directly.”

Mugino used the final airborne foothold and a beam to make another leap. She grinned and aimed her palm in midair.

The girl known as a monster still had confidence to spare.

“You don’t have many options left once you’ve lost your road, courier. And didn’t you say it was hard to keep that thing on the ground?”

“You…bitch!!”

Hanayama swerved this way and that to avoid the “canyons” in the collapsing dome. But as her routes grew more limited, she ultimately had only one path she could take, which made it easy to predict her future location and fire Meltdowner there. Because if Hanayama had slowed down, she would have fallen from the ceiling.

She wasn’t even given a chance to scream.

The beam launched from Mugino’s palm erased the tanned girl and her modified kick scooter from existence.

There was no corpse, or even a single drop of blood, remaining.

===Part 11===

Mugino heard something sharply slicing through the air.

“Whoops.”

With the domed ceiling destroyed, the taut wires had lost their support. It was like a blade-sharp bowstring suddenly snapping. She would have felt pretty silly losing a limb or her head to this.

But this also meant she didn’t have to worry about being sliced apart when landing on the broken floor.

She had defeated Hanayama Kamitsu, courier of the enemy Item.

But that wasn’t why Mugino was here.

The silver-haired art club girl with the suitcase was nowhere to be found. She had escaped. This was a job for a more intelligence-oriented member, not a combat specialist like Mugino.

She pulled out her phone while focusing on things outside the crumbling planetarium.

She knew exactly who to call.

(I need the support organization to set up a perimeter around the library. Hopefully they can at least catch a glimpse of her. Then Takitsubo just has to register her AIM Diffusion Field to track her even if she tries to flee the solar system.)

“Hanano! Have you gotten Takitsubo to safety? I want her to use AIM Stalker, so tell her to take some Body-”

“'Oh, hello. I have your mysterious 5th member in my custody.''”

“Kh.”

Mugino scowled.

She recognized that voice, but it wasn’t who she had called. A call to Hanano Choubi’s phone had been answered by Ibotanokikouji Kaede’s voice, which could only mean one thing.

(She has the worst timing!)

“Please do not blame her for this. Hanano-chan did exactly as you asked. She suppressed her fear and fought tooth and nail to let Takitsubo-chan escape. You should really praise her for her admirable – if ineffective – efforts. But if she no longer has a place on your team now that she has failed you, I am more than willing to invite her to join mine. Hee hee. Sinfully cute, isn’t she?”

“Damn you.”

With a dull metal clang, someone tackled down the half-broken planetarium door. A battered-looking Kinuhata emerged. She was supporting Frenda with her shoulder, but was Frenda even conscious?

“Super sorry.”

Mugino didn’t have time to respond before those two collapsed limply forward.

Ibotanokikouji had to know the safest option was to say nothing at all, but that didn’t stop her.

“Just so you know, they scored surprisingly well escaping from that situation at all. Although my own indecisiveness is really to blame there. If I had been focused on them, they wouldn’t have lasted a second.”

Quiet laughter snuck in over the electronic device.

Ordinarily, this alone would have cost her her life.

“''I told you I am the Dark Side’s Bane, didn’t I''? You don’t seem to have the brainpower to understand what that means, so I hope this taught you the same lesson on a more instinctual level. This is my territory for hunting the likes of you. You cannot defeat me as long as you remain in this darkness. No matter what.”

“Shut the hell up, worm. That’s just a legend. Propaganda. Are you saying you would’ve self-destructed if we were heroes or schoolgirls from the sunny world?”

“You already know the answer to that.”

Those words seemed to take hold of the atmosphere.

Strange rules seemed to seep out from the cracks.

“None of you are anything more than prey, so when you gather together, you only end up devouring each other,” said Ibotanokikouji. “I am your bane – your predator – so your puny claws and fangs cannot reach me. There are no three-way deadlocks in the food chain. It is a pure top-to-bottom hierarchy.”

“…”

“We used a different insider at the insurance company for each match anyway, so that man was disposable to begin with. We can replace him at any time. Our only failure here is…well, that you are still alive must mean Hanayama-chan is dead. But we can overcome that too by negotiating with Hanano-chan and making her our new teammate. She’s a cute one, so I would be lying if I said I didn’t want to add her to my collection. Our four-girl structure will not be broken. Hee hee. Violence, starvation, sleep deprivation, itching, disgust, panic – there are any number of ways to remove someone’s will from their body. I can’t wait to see her cute attempts at resistance.”

Ibotanokikouji Kaede kept going. She was not done speaking yet.

“A life for a life. That makes us even, doesn’t it?”

===Part 12===

The city was full of life that Tanabata night.

Colorful light decorated the night sky as fireworks were launched from somewhere.

The meteor shower would apparently be visible soon.

But Item returned straight to their hideout without speaking a word.

Their group of five was incomplete.

They knew that, but there was nothing they could do right away.

“Mugino…”

Takitsubo started to say something, but she stopped.

There was no need to say it out loud.

Mugino had decided it would be safest to give that girl a role so she could escape first with Takitsubo. This was the result. Did everything always have to backfire in the dark side?

The weakest link would always be targeted and bitten off first.

And no matter what their intentions, their wounds and exhaustion were just as real. If they had stayed in the library, they would have been captured too. They had also lost sight of their initial objective, so Mugino and the other three had been forced to return home.

A symbol of a certain girl’s presence could be found in the Fifteen Bells apartment. The bamboo that Frenda had forcibly stuck inside a moth orchid pot had a certain tanzaku blowing in the air conditioning.

''I want to be a part of Item! A useful part!!

''Please let me find some way to make myself worthwhile to them as thanks for taking me in.

:::''-Hanano Choubi

There was nothing else.

Only silence.

Even the violent Level 5 simply stared at the tanzaku for a while, not speaking a word.

Kinuhata and Frenda didn’t dare speak to the silent tyrant. They sensed a much greater rejection in this than in an enraged outburst.

“Mugino.”

But the track suit girl did quietly call out to her.

And with real force behind her voice.

Takitsubo had been with Mugino the longest, so she had to understand that girl’s violence better than anyone. But that was exactly why only she could safely pass between the countless landmines laid out there.

This was something that Mugino would never, ever say.

But it would reward the foolishly honest and kind newcomer who had arrived to bolster the team’s numbers and had faithfully protected Takitsubo from this dark world.

“This isn’t over yet. We can still rescue Hanano from that fake Item.”

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