Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item Chapter2
Status: Incomplete
5/12 parts completed
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.”
