Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item6 Prologue
What is right depends on one’s point of view and circumstances.
But the cost of betrayal will never be cheap.
Prologue: Betrayal’s Beginning[edit]
“God, why do I have to go to the bank in the middle of a weekday? In this day and age?”
“Of course you do, Mugino. Banks are closed on weekends and at night.”
Mugino Shizuri, Takitsubo Rikou, Frenda Seivelun, and Kinuhata Saiai.
The four of them had arrived at a small and perfectly ordinary bank in the shopping area of District 15.
It had all begun with a strange kangaroo game (that Frenda had gotten from somewhere).
The odd ritual which began in a karaoke box had ended in a complete loss by Mugino Shizuri. Owing the other three Item members lunch wasn’t that big a deal, but the real trouble had started when the e-payment function on Mugino’s phone mysteriously stopped working. …If only she had noticed this before arriving at the restaurant.
According to blonde Frenda (who had apparently trained plenty in the game with her 7-year-old sister):
“In the end, did you recently shove all your credit cards and smart cards onto your phone? I bet there’s a conflict between the different payment apps.”
And so they did some research and paid a visit to the phone service counter, but with no luck. When the young woman working the counter couldn’t solve the problem, they were forced to head to the bank which handled the link between Mugino’s phone, card, and bank account. Was this some kind of orienteering?
(How long has it even been since I spoke to a bank teller? Dammit.)
Mugino snatched a numbered paper sticking out of the machine near the tellers. #35. Looking up at the counter, the most recent number called was still in the late 20s. Even after all the trouble and walking around, this was going to take even more of her time. And there was no guarantee waiting until her turn would even get the problem solved.
“I’m not even in the mood for food anymore. I just want to get home and take a nap.”
“You only say that cause you’re the one who super has to buy us lunch. I haven’t forgotten how much business that paella place by the station was doing!”
The girls bickered back and forth and killed time on their phones. Unable to stand it any longer, Mugino lay down on the sofa while Takitsubo lent her her lap.
It was just past 2 PM when it happened.
“Nobody move!”
Someone raised their voice.
Their voice was unnaturally shrill, like they had inhaled helium or something.
It belonged to a girl with her blonde hair worn in twintails. She looked high school aged. No, or maybe middle school? She wore a combination of a triangular bikini top and a short tight skirt. A thin stole was wrapped around her body and she held a…thick hot dog in her mouth? No, it wasn’t actually in her mouth. Was it a special mask held on with a transparent band? It also had sliced olive and tomato decorations, so it was likely meant to fool facial recognition algorithms. In Academy City, it was commonly known those algorithms tended to glitch out if there were several large round objects near the face.
Mugino was still resting her head on the track suit girl’s lap.
The robber girl shouted while waving around an exceptionally large handgun that she would likely have trouble operating with one hand. The gun had a bulky holosight on the top. It was a top-of-the-line Academy City product that would accurately measure the nearby wind speed and the distance to the target (which meant it was fairly useless at close range indoors).
“I’m here to recycle all this world’s excess money! It’s called being eco-friendly and none of it will go to waste, so help me out here!! Slowly remove your hands from your landline phones, computers, smartphones, radios, and the secret switch under the table! Then gather over by the wall there!! C’mon, I can see all your smart watches and smart glasses, so remove them and give them here! Water absorbs EM waves and a certain specialized liquid does an even better job. Using that Diffuser, any message you do try to send won’t even make it two meters!!”
The bank made their move.
A middle-aged man in glasses and a suit emerged. He looked like the type of person who lived for office work. He was skinny for middle age and he approached nervously.
“P-please wait. I suspect you have chosen the wrong target. You cannot use any money stolen from a bank these days. Did you think no one would notice if the bills’ serial numbers were nonconsecutive? Oxygen and microbes deteriorate paper and the slight folds and wrinkles create something like a fingerprint. There are countless ways to track the stolen bills, so you will be caught as soon as you spend them somewhere.”
The robber girl pistol whipped the branch manager’s bitterly smiling face right in his nose.
A violent crunch and the red of blood were followed by a series of screams within the bank.
Down on the floor, the branch manager held his face and trembled while looking up at the robber girl.
The bikini girl with the lower half of her face covered by a thick hot dog mask again spoke.
Her demand was simple.
“I’m the kind of person who spams the ‘agree’ button until the long explanation finally ends. Do I need to hit you again?”
A series of loud bangs followed.
That gun was fully automatic.
If she hadn’t been aiming at the ceiling as a threat, the branch manager would be dead. The middle-aged man only now realized the situation he was in and an unpleasant ammonia stench wafted up from him.
When the robber girl lowered the gun and dropped the empty magazine to the floor, another magazine flew from the back of her hip. It entered the large handgun’s grip all on its own.
“(Was that an esper power?)”
“(No. In the end, I’ve seen contraptions like that before. They do something with the ultrasonic technology used in microactuators. You can supposedly reduce your reload time below 0.5 seconds using one of those.)”
In a very Academy City move, the robber girl was using quite an odd reloading tool. It was as accurate as if an electromagnet or something were sucking the magazine into the slot.
Then the robber girl aimed her gun straight ahead and beckoned someone over.
“You, the woman who’s figured out the button below the table isn’t doing anything. Stop wasting your time and get over here! The drum security robots aren’t working either, so kicking one won’t set off the automatic alarm. All I want to do is quickly finish my work here and leave peacefully, but if this takes too long, I will line you all up by the windows. Now, a question: who wants to be my human shield against Anti-Skill snipers!?”
She must have talked too much without breathing any more helium because her voice was starting to return to normal.
The girl inserted a spray can’s thin tube in the gap between her skin and the thick hot dog mask and inhaled some helium.
“You four with the slack-jawed stares!! You’re gonna want to stay on my good side cause whoever I like the least gets to be the one to walk out in front of the TV cameras with a bomb in your hands so you can beg and cry for no one to approach the bank. If that doesn’t sound like fun to you, then do as I say!!”
Mugino Shizuri had sat up by this time and she slowly raised her hands when the large handgun was aimed her way. Very slowly.
Killing that girl would be easy.
In fact, she had left enough openings for Meltdowner to kill her at least three times over by now.
However…
“(Be careful, Mugino. You gain nothing by acting out in a bank full of security cameras. There are also laser and ultrasonic senors. The microwaves are probably blocked by that Diffuser that emits an invisible mist, but the point is the bank uses several different kinds of sensor. I can also see directional microphones in the floor. I think those are meant to detect the footsteps of someone wearing meta-materials. Anyway, this is a bad location for us. Not to mention all the witnesses.)”
“(You might be hailed as a hero in the evening news, but after they super research your identity some more, you’ll be listed as a wanted criminal in tomorrow’s morning news.)”
That made it hard to intervene.
The robber was covering her face. Did that mean the line for the special emergency buttons had been cut, but all the security cameras were still functioning? Self-taught criminals could develop their skills in weird directions, so what had this girl done? If she had cut all the lines, Mugino could just kill her without worrying.
“(You’re kidding me. These days a bank branch will only have maybe 20 million in cash sitting around. Why would you risk your future attacking here? You’d make more money attacking an armored car going around to the ATMs.)”
“(In the end, I think the money is a diversion,)” said Frenda. “(Look, Mugino. She surreptitiously stuck something into the outlet on the wall. That thing with all the cords. The door next to it is the special consultation room for high value account holders, right? Bugging that room will give you tons of advance information on stocks and futures. The room is meant for corporate executives and investors to receive consultations on loans and trades.)”
“(So it’s an information source for insider trading. Does she want to set up a cycle of continual profit instead of making money off a single robbery?)”
Did this mean the outdated bank robber had wracked her brains to come up with some way of not being left behind by the times?
And Item wasn’t about to stay quiet about this.
They were a dark side team.
Their lives and assets had been put at risk by a criminal’s attempt at profit. They saw that as picking a fight with them. The etiquette about not involving ordinary people no longer applied.
Not even a dark side team could take things too far with the bank’s strict security, but Item didn’t intend to take this sitting down. …Letting someone get away with this once would be mistaken as an opportunity by the industry as a whole and there would soon be attacks at government offices, public facilities, and relay cameras. If that happened, the victims of the stray shots would be the same kind of ordinary people who made up the majority of the people in the bank now.
“Frenda,” was all Mugino said.
“That robber has a gun, right? So in the end, I say we get it to misfire and blow her hand off. That rids her of her weapon and badly injures her, so it’s two birds with one stone.”
Frenda rattled off her response without even having to think about it.
Kinuhata gave her a look like she was inspecting the product on a shopping show.
“Can you really super do that?”
“Why would you think I can’t? In the end, I am the Academy City Bomber and I hope I don’t have to explain to you that guns use explosives.”
Frenda brushed her fluffy blonde hair off her shoulder and a small cylinder mysteriously appeared in her hand. That assassin’s handgun was about the size of a lipstick tube and held only one round. She could completely hide its presence by holding it in her palm. That the tiny thing included a suppressor and flash hider demonstrated just how insane the Academy City Bomber was.
The cute menace operated the weapon with practiced ease and a bullet flew from the bottom end. It was based on a 9mm, but it wasn’t made made of lead.
Mugino didn’t seem particularly surprised.
“A disappearing bullet, huh?”
“Technically it’s made by using a press to compress a clump of dust at 80 thousand atmospheres. When the bullet shatters and scatters through the air, the forensics team will ignore the pieces even if they do find them.”
The robber’s gun would end up rupturing from an exterior impact instead of from within, so there would actually be room for suspicion, but the bullet fired from a second gun would never be found and, more importantly, the first gun belonged to a criminal. The normal(?) conclusion would be that the exterior of the gun had already been damaged from rough usage.
The robber girl took a silver attache case from the sweaty branch manager.
She put on quite the act for someone who wasn’t actually after the cash.
“Perfect. Oh, and there is a reason for the locations being hit, so do look into that after I leave. If you don’t solve the puzzle, people much like me will keep doing this.”
It wasn’t just an issue of lax security. Her point was to ask why this specific branch had been singled out as especially lax. That meant someone on the inside had leaked information. …But the branch manager didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy holding a security paintball gun behind his back and waiting for an opportunity.
Item couldn’t care less what harm came to the VIPs who used that secret conference room in the back of the bank.
But they had come to the bank because the link between Mugino’s phone and credit card wasn’t working. Any further problems and the bank would be unable to continue its ordinary duties for the day. Mugino couldn’t stand having to wait a full day without solving this little annoyance.
“In the end, are you really gonna do it here, Mugino? If we wait for her to leave, we won’t have to worry about the bank’s cameras.”
“If that dumb bitch takes one step outside the building, this gets promoted from ‘attempted robbery’ to ‘robbery’. Then Anti-Skill will really start working on it, making it all a huge pain in the ass, so I’m crushing her now.”
“Fair.”
No matter how foolish it was, that girl was still a bank robber. If she had worked out a plan and broken in, she had to have put some real effort into this. She wouldn’t just thoughtlessly leave through the front entrance. There had to be a secret entrance for safely carrying in large quantities of cash. And secrets were worthless if they had been leaked. Reforming an entire sturdy building was hard, so they preferred not to let even Anti-Skill and the fire department know about them.
In this case, it was a nearby silver door that looked like no more than a small fire door.
However, the two keypads were unusual for a simple fire door.
If they were going to do this, it had to be when the girl was so confident of her success she had let her guard down. In other words, now.
Kinuhata had nothing to do, but she figured she should at least stay in a position that let her protect Takitsubo from any stray shots. It was during that somewhat detached decision that she noticed something.
The robber girl was acting weirdly.
She was whispering something. Kinuhata focused on that.
A young male voice came from the robber girl’s phone, like a synthetic voice reading a text.
“You are falling behind the timetable we gave you. Hurry up and end it.”
“(But someone is going to end up taking the fall for this, won’t they? Insider trading is a crime. If suspicion falls on whoever uses the conference room, won’t they get arrested by mistake?)”
“Did you think you were in any position to defy us?”
“(Point made! I’ll do it – I’ll set it up like you said, so keep your hands off my parents!)”
“…Ughhh.”
Kinuhata Saiai heard it all.
She quite earnestly wished she hadn’t heard that.
So was this person just an ordinary person who was being threatened by a specialist!?
(Th-this is crazy. Have criminals gone so far past blackmailing people into picking pockets that they’re getting them to attack banks!?)
Wasn’t the Diffuser supposed to block EM waves? Or was she communicating using IR?
Mugino Shizuri was already in murder mode. Her dark side persona had switched on.
Item would show no mercy when a villain bared their fangs against them.
If Kinuhata tried to protect the girl, she could get killed right along with her.
A glance over at Frenda was enough to tell she was super serious about this too. She toyed with the one-shot assassin’s handgun hidden in her palm and licked her lips. That was the look she got when she was preparing to “play with” a powerful dark side foe.
Kinuhata Saiai stepped to the side, blocking Frenda’s line of fire.
This person didn’t seem to be powerful or from the dark side at all.
“(Huh!? In the end, acting like a klutz won’t make me find you cute, you stupid dead weight!)”
Kinuhata-chan didn’t let the fierce irritated glare from the older girl get her down.
(I can’t help it. If I super don’t do this, you’ll kill an ordinary person who’s only being threatened! I don’t know what the response to that will be, but it’s possible Item as a whole will be branded a team of dumbasses who accidentally killed an innocent person!!)
That stopped Frenda, but there was still Mugino.
Then Takitsubo Rikou detonated a fire extinguisher.
That blocked the robber girl’s view, but it also hit Mugino Shizuri.
“Wow.”
“Gyahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?”
As white foam covered anything and everything around, Takitsubo accurately and gently grabbed the robber girl’s hand. She then obtained a firm grasp on the wrist of the hand holding the gun.
“Uh!?”
“(This way. You too, Kinuhata.)”
Takitsubo super intentionally raised her voice for the next part.
“Mugino, you’re in the clear. The fire extinguisher foam will keep anyone from seeing, so start blasting with Meltdowner.”
“Cough, cough. Not your best ad lib, you idiot! I can’t see a damn thing! And don’t use my name and esper name here!”
Now Mugino definitely wouldn’t start firing blindly.
Takitsubo and the other two made their way to the inconspicuous back entrance for armored cars.
…Kinuhata Saiai followed along as told, but then she tilted her head. Huh? Was there any real reason for her to escape too?
But she had already exited into the small employee parking lot in the back.
Returning now to the bank packed full of killer intent would be mega awkward.
So the three of them walked from alley to alley until the robber girl held the handgun to Kinuhata’s temple while so worked up she was trembling. Wait, why did that track suit girl let her break free so easily!?
It looked like the girl had passed some kind of limit.
And someone like this was actually more likely to kill someone than an always cool and composed assassin.
“Wh-who are you people!? Stop right there! I can’t take any more of this! Nothing’s going as planned and you’re just making it all so much more compli-”
“I’ll be super taking that.”
With that causal comment, Kinuhata now had the gun in her hand.
The robber girl’s eyes widened and Kinuhata gave her an exasperated look.
“What, have you never heard the standard theory? Even the Anti-Skill manuals super tell you to keep your gun out of the suspect’s reach when aiming at them.”
Plus, Kinuhata had Offense Armor, so she didn’t even have to risk her life to snatch the gun away. It helped a lot to be able to tank a gunshot. When you weren’t worried at all, you could move swiftly and accurately.
Track suit girl Takitsubo gestured toward the direction of the bank with her chin.
“If you still want to follow your plan, you can always return to the bank. Armed Anti-Skill officers will probably be rushing in right about now, making it a nightmare for you, though. Not to mention that Mugino will use whatever openings she can find in the chaos to come kill you.”
“Who the hell is Mugino?”
The mystery bikini girl had shifted from anger to trembling. She quivered like a wet puppy. Even though the helium had run out and her natural voice was a mature-sounding alto.
“You will die if you don’t stray from your plan,” said Takitsubo with no emotion in her voice. “So can you be brave for now?”
The (attempted) robber girl nodded over and over. Something wobbled up and down in front of her face. Why didn’t she just remove that thick hot dog mask already?
Emergency vehicle sirens passed close by, distorted by the Doppler effect.
Kinuhata sighed in exasperation.
“But she does have a point: super what do we do now? She’s still at risk, so we’ll have done a poor job of saving her if we just let her go.”
“Kinuhata, she’s being threatened right? So let’s take out whoever’s at the top.”
“You make that sound super easy, but we’re combat experts who take jobs from the Voice on the Phone. I can’t imagine Mugino permitting us to pour a bunch of money into helping someone in need when there’s no profit in it.”
“Worse than that, she sees this robber as an enemy of Item. Mugino will probably kill her as soon as she finds her, so we can’t let Mugino find out about this.”
(Huh? Hold on. Does that super mean…?)
The blank-faced and harmless track suit girl explained what she meant.
Without prevarication.
“If we really want to save this girl, we need to betray Mugino.”
?
Kinuhata’s mouth formed a small triangle.
No one had told her that.
No one had said this would mean that. They hadn’t even hinted at it!!
“Wait, hold on, why are you more super into this than I am? Takitsubo-san? Hey, wait!”
“I’m trying to protect you, Kinuhata. I can’t believe you would turn on Mugino to protect a criminal stranger. How can I abandon someone so careless?”
“…”
“Or are you going to give up here and go home? By abandoning that bank robber? That would be a lot easier for me.”
“……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………”
“Okay, we have our work cut out for us.”
“You must know how terrifying Mugino Shizuri is more than anyone else!! You’ve been with her the longest!!!”
You mustn’t forget.
Takitsubo Rikou was also a member of Item. She too was one of those super dangerous people.