Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item3 Prologue
One thing remains true in all places and all eras.
Nothing is more frightening than justice.
Prologue: The City of Science is a Godless Place[edit]
This late at night, it was pitch black in District 4.
“Found it! In the end, is this the phone you said you dropped?”
“Wow!”
A girl of about 10 looked up at Frenda Seivelun with great respect in her eyes.
But this young girl was a complete stranger.
Since this was private property, none of Academy City’s famous three-bladed wind turbines were in evidence. There was only a vast yard with only the sporadic outdoor lighting to brighten the darkness. The occasional artificial woods only deepened the shadows.
“The GPS location was surprisingly inaccurate. That aside, you really shouldn’t take a shortcut through this unlit area on your way back from cram school just because you want to get home and go to sleep. In the end, even I might secretly be a villain.”
“Hee hee hee. I know you aren’t! Only a good person would be so nice to me.”
“If you say so.”
Frenda wasn’t looking at the child.
Her eyes were focused on something a bit further away.
The blonde girl looked up at a trio of massive silhouettes that supported food-focused District 4. That was the Clone Complex, a tri-tower agricultural building.
“In the end, the real threats are always well disguised.”
Someone was hiding In the artificial woods a mere 20m away.
That dark side pro had a reason for casually stopping the child there. If the girl had taken just one step into the woods blending in with the darkness, Frenda would have had to “silence” her.
(I’m glad it didn’t come to that, but I can’t believe she’s super showing her face to someone and chatting with them during a job.)
“Is this the super emergency standalone alarm?”
Kinuhata Saiai sighed in exasperation and then faced a metal box taller than she was. She used Offense Armor to tear off the door that was kept shut with a complex lock. Then she pulled out a special lipstick-sized device with a number written on the side in permanent marker and inserted it into the mechanical device exposed within.
The windowless multilevel building was an agricultural building which maintained artificial environments for the concentrated growing of crops and raising of livestock. The massive Clone Complex was a cornerstone of food-focused District 4, so the facility’s security was going to be quite strict.
The emergency standalone alarm here was no exception.
The standalone device would automatically alert the authorities even if the entire Clone Complex lost power…but locating it so far from the facility itself had been a mistake.
Since it was linked by underground fiber optic cable, messing with it could be used to mess with the Clone Complex’s own security cameras and sensors. And yet it was located outside without a single guard.
(I hate this precise work, but I think I super took out the cameras and sensors.)
This kind of real-time alteration of data used to be a pipe dream, but nowadays it wasn’t all that difficult using specially trained criminal AI. Kinuhata’s job was to attach a small communication antenna to the standalone device that managed the security data, giving the criminal AI a wireless access point for all that data.
“Okay. I’m super done here.”
Track suit girl Takitsubo Rikou hid behind cover in the darkness and counted something on her fingers.
She was hiding in a clearing covered in green grass located around the tri-tower Clone Complex. Specifically, she was seated with her knees up against her chest and her back against the wall of a container shut with a chain and lock. It was probably used to store gardening tools.
(The guards generally patrol in pairs. But what are these other footsteps I’m hearing at more irregular intervals?)
“Takitsubo, are you done yet?”
“Super Takitsubo-san.”
Frenda and Kinuhata were approaching, so Takitsubo waved expressionlessly.
“I think I have the human movement patterns 80% worked out. Since you’re back, Kinuhata, the security cameras must already be compromised. Waiting for me to get a more perfect analysis would only increase the risk of someone noticing the mechanical malfunction and sounding the alarm.”
“Agreed. In the end, we need to get moving and get the job done.”
“Ping, ping, ping, pooong. It is now 1 AM on August 29. Akasaka Minako’s AM party begins anew for another night! Eh? A song? Already!? Oh, god, are you playing the intro already, producer!? Um, today’s first song is Color of the Whip by the Sadistic Dolls.”
Mugino Shizuri opened the rear sliding door of a black van with a late night radio program playing within and stepped out onto the asphalt.
Frenda, Kinuhata, and Takitsubo had rejoined her.
“In the end, make way for the queen of sitting around while everyone else does all the work!”
“Don’t get so upset about my beautiful rock-paper-scissors luck, Frenda. It was a fair game, wasn’t it?”
The chilly night wind that hinted at the end of summer did nothing to help cool Mugino’s simmering irritation.
“Ugh, my joints are all popping… What’s even the point of making money like this? We can’t even spend what we earn.”
“In the end, that’s what happens when we keep getting our apartments blown up.”
Frenda pulled out a special explosive that resembled correction tape. With practiced ease, she blasted a vertical slice through the tall fence, opened it wide, and guided the other three into the very off-limits private property within.
They didn’t need to worry about the stationary security cameras and sensors.
The criminal AI would be rewriting all of the data collected by the security system.
“In the end, they did surreptitiously introduce us to some fancy hideouts while making sure none of the transactions remained in the official records, but even those Criminal Real Estate people would be out of business pretty quick if all their best properties end up burned down with only the pillars and framework left.”
“Super Criminal Real Estate, huh?”
“They’re experts at altering the results of condo lotteries and handling the leases to rewrite all the names and bank accounts, Kinuhata. They know a lot about good properties ordinary people don’t want because someone died there or whatever. And our previous room was leased, not sold, so they would have wanted to continue leasing it out to other shady customers to keep making money after we left.”
The four girls trod on the well-maintained lawn on their way deeper inside the grounds.
Item was usually as self-centered as could be, but they were trying to stay quiet for once.
“Then what’s the super point of risking our lives to earn money? Are we stuck spending the night in karaoke boxes or convenience store eat-in tables like we’re runaways?”
“Kinuhata. It takes longer to rebuild a reputation than it does to lose it, but if we keep working at it, we can regain their trust. And to do that, we need to do our job. ...Oh.”
Pink track suit Takitsubo noticed something before the others did, so she held out a hand to caution them.
She had detected several people other than themselves in the darkness too deep for the outdoor lights to break through.
“…”
The four girls hid behind a transformer panel larger than a vending machine and held their breaths as those other people walked past.
This had to be one of the regular patrols. Girls in navy blue nun habits wore antenna-covered backpacks like a military signaler. The mechanical “kathunk, kathunk” coming from within their long skirts suggested they wore leg-enhancement powered suits supported by multiple actuators.
The lens-covered multipurpose night vision goggles they wore made them look a lot less human.
The long, skinny rifles(?) they held were not made to shoot bullets. They were shaped more like a bigger version of the airbrushes used to precisely paint models. The weapons most likely sprayed a powder mixture of aluminum, iron, and several chemicals at extreme speed so the friction with the air would ignite it. Those clearly weren’t guns meant to be aimed at unprotected human beings. They would reach an estimated temperature of more than 3800 degrees Celsius with a firing range of probably more than 30m. Those portable incendiary weapons could melt away a bank vault’s wall like it was made of sugar.
That was Item’s target this time.
Those high-tech armored nuns were worked in pairs. After confirming they had walked off without sensing anything amiss, Mugino spoke up in mild exasperation.
“How the hell does a cult start up in a city of science?”
“I can super understand why they were made a priority target for elimination.”
We scientists only believe the things we can see for ourselves, so we cannot be duped by talk of imaginary demons or ghosts.
The people who announced that with the utmost confidence were quite easily duped by large scale magic tricks. Saying they only believe the things they see for themselves was as good as announcing the vulnerability in their defenses, so you only had to show them a mythological exorcism hero show with plenty of special effects providing more artificial flavoring than a burger and fries. And when those important scientists would readily defend their own worldview by explaining what they saw using their knowledge of biological weapons made out of killer microbes, infrastructure-destroying computer viruses, or whatever else, their risk of falling for a cult increased dramatically.
And the last thing anyone needed in a city of esper development was a sketchy cult.
“Mugino,” said Takitsubo. “This fight is going to be different.”
“I know.”
“The cult leader is known as Dike Goddess Salvation. Her real name was erased from the Bank without authorization at some point. Her specialty is ‘miraculous escapes’. She has been attacked a few times already, but her spectacular escape artistry only serves to increase her charisma and earn her more believers. She says god’s prophet is protected by an invisible power even as the army of evil pursues her.”
“Again, I know! We can’t cause a commotion out here because it would give her a chance to escape, so we have to sneak deep inside her ‘temple’ and then murder her with a pinpoint strike, right?”
Kinuhata was a little shocked.
Repeatedly cautioning Mugino of all people and living to tell the tale had to require a special talent.
The four girls chatted and jogged toward the enormous building while avoiding the outdoor lights.
“Nothing good comes of letting dumbasses talk about ‘science’. The supposedly ‘scientific doctors’ in the 17th century would seriously tell you making a candle from corpse fat would help you find buried treasure. Ah ha ha,” Mugino laughed woodenly.
“Hm. Mugino, where did the idea of witches really come from?”
“People do keep proposing super sketchy ideas like the weight of the soul or plants responding emotionally to music. They make for good movies, though.”
“In the end, this is my first time taking on religious soldiers. How well can they fight?”
“That depends on their numbers and what kind of tech they have.”
A multicopter surveillance drone flew slowly by overhead, but the four girls trusted in the criminal AI’s data alterations and walked right below it. The wireless control signal was being overwritten by a more powerful illicit signal, but since the authorization code was identical, the drone wouldn’t notice anything was amiss.
Then, all of a sudden, a nun emerged from behind a small hill.
“!”
Light gathered in a palm.
This wasn’t one of the patrols following a predefined route. The nun wore a red armband on her shoulder. She was probably a supervisor who made irregular patrols to make sure the other girls were following their routine (which would have been worked out by a personnel management AI).
Mugino was ready to fire Meltdowner right away, but Takitsubo tugged on her coat to stop her.
The armored nun girl walked right on past with her legs kathunk-ing.
Takitsubo tapped her index finger at her temple.
“She’s wearing multipurpose night vision goggles with an earphone mic. That is linked to the wireless network for support from a larger computer, so the criminal AI’s signal can affect her too.”
That meant Item had been erased from the guard’s view, so she failed to notice them.
Frenda grinned, circled in front of the diligent nun, and waved her hands.
“Pft! She might as well be walking down a back alley blindfolded. Hey, you! You got any idea how careless you’re-”
“Phew, this heat is fogging up my goggles.”
“!!?” “!!?” “!!?” “!!?”
In a surprise move, the nun pushed her odd goggles up to her forehead and removed them, so Mugino snagged Frenda by the arm and hid behind a nearby vending machine.
If they were discovered out here, the cult leader would make another vanishing act. And then she would start saying she had heard the voice of god and miraculously escaped from a Level 5. All because a certain someone had to be an idiot.
“(…)”
“(Ow, ow, Mug- Mugino, I’m sorry, I apologize, I got carried away, but if you want us all to survive here, you need to stop pinching my cheek, because it really is going to tear off soon!)”
“?” The armored nun supervisor girl took a look around and wiped the inside of her goggles clear with quick-drying ethanol-based lens wipes. Unlike the expensive goggles used for airsoft games, her goggles did not have small fans attached to the sides. She put the special goggles back on and trudged off somewhere.
Item resumed walking in a different direction.
They arrived at the glass main entrance. Frenda burned through the electric lock and they all walked in.
The air rapidly cooled.
They found an artificial atmosphere reminiscent of an ultra-clean semiconductor plant. It was a white space with massive pillars lined up at even intervals.
“Just like with concrete utility ducts, do people just naturally sense something mystical about massive artificial structures?”
“There’s more to it than that.”
The wheat production plant did not look like it belonged in late August. Unhealthy bluish-white UV lights shined on the yellow heads of wheat covering the entire floor. Item walked across a metal grate catwalk running along near the ceiling.
(The Mugino family fills the stomachs of 1.4 billion around the world, but these agricultural buildings keep it from making much headway in Academy City.)
Mugino wasn’t sure if she should be impressed or exasperated.
Thin support pillars reached up to the ceiling on either side of the metal grate bridge.
“It’s like walking through a torii tunnel. The regularity and large number are a trick used to artificially make it seem more mystical.”
“But I’m impressed the cult managed to super take over this automatic factory.”
Kinuhata glanced exasperatedly to the side.
No matter how strict the security used to ensure the safety of the food, it was useless if the user privileges were overwritten. This was known to have been a cult temple since at least two years ago.
A portrait larger than a classroom floor hung on one of the smooth walls. The coloring depicted her as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed goddess, but the facial features were those of a snub-nosed Japanese girl. The cult leader called herself Dike Goddess Salvation. She must have received cosmetic surgery to forcibly remove the pigmentation across her body.
Did the combination of armor with a skirt have some special meaning for the cult?
(So is she supposed to be an albino genius?)
Mugino thought on this cult while viewing the portrait of someone from Academy City.
They called themselves the Ark of the Electronic Sea.
Of course they weren’t going to come out and call themselves a dangerous cult.
An artificial young female voice spoke from the indoor speakers, reciting their scriptures.
“People are born in a state where they can only be used by AI. Only the chosen few who boost their humanity to the very limit through daily mental training are in a position to use AI.”
They spoke of an anxiety. Of a mental vulnerability.
“I doubt it actually means anything,” said Takitsubo after seeing Kinuhata nodding along (because she loved movie-scale conspiracy theories). “The cult’s scriptures were apparently made by training generative AI on mythological and religious scripts from around the world. The psychological basis makes it sound meaningful, but it’s actually completely lacking in substance.”
“Our most important job is to show mercy to those who reject the harsh training itself or those who are not chosen no matter how much they train. We must save all mankind without bias.”
Mugino looked disgusted as she walked across the catwalk above the wheat field.
“I thought this was a cult bad enough the higher ups marked it for destruction. Don’t they have a hidden safe somewhere? Full of gold bars or diamonds. Y’know, the things dreams are made of.”
The track suit girl only shrugged.
“Do you really want the dirty money made by people who talk seriously about live sacrifices? Washing off all the unpleasant bloodstains sounds like a pain.”
“Live sacrifices, huh?”
“Ugh… Super how do they go about scientifically justifying that?”
“Kinuhata, there are people out there who call little grays and ancestral memory ‘scientific’. ‘Science’ is just a word, so people can define it however they want.”
Of course, if the cult hadn’t been doing things like that, Item wouldn’t have been hired to kill their leader.
The four walked along the catwalk and boarded a work lift large enough to raise and lower buses and trucks. They took that to the level above, an area not listed on the maps posted for visitors.
Floor 11.
That was fairly low for this massive agricultural building, but that was because all the big and heavy equipment couldn’t actually be carried to the upper floors. That meant the important facilities and equipment tended to be on the lower floors.
And the female announcer’s tone changed as well.
Were the greater secrets found on the higher levels? So was this the stuff the newer believers couldn’t be told lest it shock them out of their brainwashing?
“The foolish masses who fail to recognize the threat posed by technology are the great mother who will give birth to the Devil. Faithful believers, we must prepare to make ourselves Radiant Knights so we may slay the Devil before it is too late!”
The clean floor was suddenly bent by a width of more than 5mm.
Item found themselves faced with a form so large they had to crane their necks up to see the whole thing. Machines had no human presence. The four-legged mass of composite armor looked a lot like construction equipment. Instead of a head, it had a 360-degree swiveling pod equipped with a Gatling gun, missile canister, and antiaircraft gun.
The heavy combat land drone had to weigh more than 10 tons in all.
“!?”
“Mugino.”
Mugino reflexively held out her right hand, but Takitsubo calmly cautioned her. They were right in front of the thing, but this Devil or whatever walked right on past them.
The criminal AI’s signal had overwritten their presence.
Frenda felt an unpleasant sweat soaking her body despite the chilly air conditioning.
“Y-yikes… Why would they build something like that? In the end, that thing on the front was a plasma cutter made for slicing through barricades. It’s a monstrous weapon that reaches 7000 degrees Celsius.”
“The cult is terrified of things like that popping up around the world as civilization advances. I think we super just saw the cult’s vision of the apocalypse.”
“Kinuhata, what was that part about Radiant Knights?”
“Well, if that thing is super what they call the Devil, then I bet they pump their soldiers full of performance-enhancing drugs, stick them in thick blast-resistance suits, and super arm them with giant chainsaws or welding torches.”
Had the cult built their own Devil so they could practice for the coming apocalypse, or did they find some religious meaning in taming the formidable Devil?
That wasn’t the only one clunking around.
Several Devils were wandering about. If something went wrong and they recovered their ability to see Item, a battle would break out, so the other three girls followed Takitsubo’s directions to avoid the noisy machines while making their way deeper into this area.
When Takitsubo pointed at a door, Kinuhata and Frenda pressed against the wall on either side of it.
After slowly opening the door, they found an especially large space on the other side. That had to be the massive AI control room that manipulated the values controlling all of the Clone Complex’s vegetable plants and clone farms.
The place was larger than a 50m pool drained of water.
Something was evenly spaced in a circular arrangement like flower petals. They were eight humanoid figures down on one knee. Except these were robots with thin tablets for heads and silver belt-like actuators in place of muscles.
The only person standing was the dark figure in the very center.
The leader, the 8 AI disciples, and the general believers.
That summed up the cult’s structure.
But.
“Hey?” said Mugino without really meaning to.
It wasn’t just a lack of light making the figures look dark. They were scorched black. The tablet-head robots were burned into motionlessness in their kneeling positions. Heat had melted their plastic, producing an unhealthy stench.
The leader in the center was the same.
She seemed to crumble away as she broke into a few pieces of scorched charcoal and scattered across the floor.
She was already dead.
Someone had beaten Item to the punch.
“Huhh? Was someone else sent on this job too?”
Someone emerged into the light.
The girls wore heavy makeup, piercings, and clothing that had no place in an ordinary life. Overall, their outfits looked like cheer costumes made of red and black leather. The tank top and miniskirt were designed to show off their bodies and they wore thick collars, belts around their wrists, and leather boots as long as thigh highs.
They also held musical instruments – mic stand, electric guitar, etc. – and they were followed by audio equipment drones made by attaching small feet to amps, speakers, a drum set, etc.
The five girls with hair dyed red and black formed a single group that contrasted heavily with Item.
“Who are you?”
“The Sadistic Dolls. Do we still count as indie, or are we mainstream now? The line is so hard to draw since we primarily do streaming.”
“So you’re a competitor.”
“As a cute girls band, I’d really rather not think of this as our main job, though.”
Brutal electricity sparked out from the end of the girl’s electric guitar.
Electric stun guns might sound like safe, nonlethal weapons, but crank the power up high enough and they could easily kill. And if the power was high enough to trigger electrical breakdown to pierce straight through armor, they could even affect thick drone weapons even more than traditional weapons using gunpowder and bullets.
Were all five of them armed like that?
The girl grinned while toying with her killer guitar.
“At max setting, it sends out 18 million volts. After coming this far, you’d feel silly heading back empty-handed, right? …So we’ll share some of the fun with you.”
The guitarist followed by a multi-legged amp and speaker played a loud note.
The alarm immediately recovered.
In fact, every single speaker within the Clone Complex exploded with loud shouting and a rhythm with the regularity of desktop music. The intro-less vocal track must have had its key changed by computer because it kept jumping unnaturally from low to high and back again.
Pounding footsteps approached from all directions.
By that time, the bassist had already burned a large hole in the building’s outside wall using the oxyacetylene torch fired from the end of her instrument. This was the 11th floor, but the Sadistic Dolls jumped right through the hole and into the empty air beyond.
The guitarist went last, shouting back at Item.
“Ah ha ha!! Color of the Whip just started streaming, so if you morons actually survive this, make sure to give us plenty of electronic purchases and to donate enough for us to climb the rankings! Bye☆”
She vanished outside.
A moment later, the doors on all sides of the room burst open.
“Leader!” “How could you do this to Her Holiness!?”
Mugino Shizuri hung her head and trembled as the voices of the armored nuns and the ordinary believers surrounded her.
“Those…”
She had come this far only to have someone else reach the target ahead of them, meaning no reward, and now she she had to clean up after the job thieves?
That settled it. The Level 5 entirely forgot that her job was to eliminate any dangerous elements disturbing the order in Academy City.
“Those bitches are dead meeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!!!”
The Level 5’s rage and thick Meltdowner beams were released in 360 degrees around her, turning the Clone Complex to Swiss cheese from within.
These girls were Item.
Their job was to eliminate any dangerous elements disturbing the order in Academy City...in theory, anyway.
Between the Lines 1[edit]
Sampling Assessment – Investigated by ■■■■■■.
This time, I will be focusing on the samples relating to Item.
This goes beyond just the four members. A sampling of the branching connections to their enemies and allies can be used to estimate the movements and trends of the unseen dark side as a whole.
I am on no one’s side.
I must not forget my role as an observer.
Mugino Shizuri.
80 points.
Her Meltdowner can produce massively destructive power by firing electrons “as-is” rather than as a wave or a particle, but this makes it difficult for her to control the intensity.
I do feel some sympathy for her as she was born into one of the world’s top organized crime groups.
However, that sympathy is not enough to ignore the crimes and violence she has committed. As one of Academy City’s seven Level 5s, she should be more aware of how much power she possesses.
Takitsubo Rikou.
45 points.
Tends to dissuade the rest of Item from making poor decisions, but she considers violence a valid solution as much as the others do.
Her Level 4 AIM Stalker allows her to accurately record and track others’ AIM Diffusion Fields when she has intentionally enhanced that power beyond her control, but the true nature of that power is still shrouded in mystery. Be very careful if contacting her.
Frenda Seivelun.
53 points.
A Level 0, so unlike the other members, there is no chance the strength of her power is influencing her actions. Her crimes are all the result of her own free will. She is an expert with explosives and martial arts, but the biggest threat she presents (and the greatest contribution she provides to Item) comes from her communication skills which allow her to “make friends with anyone”.
Kinuhata Saiai.
29 points.
Her Level 4 Offense Armor controls the nitrogen in the air to envelop her body. It is supposed to be a passive and defensive power, but she has learned how to wield in in a highly offensive manner. She has not been with Item long and her history before then has been erased, so it is highly likely she has been taught mistaken morals and manners. She likely has the greatest chance of being reformed. But only when compared to the other three.
I cannot give them an overall score.
They do have one member with a low score, but the entire team’s score is well above the threshold, so I will be physically approaching them for an additional test. This test will focus mostly on their leader, Mugino Shizuri.
I will now make contact.
