Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item4 Chapter2
Chapter 2: Southward[edit]
Part 1[edit]
During the morning, an elderly man in a fancy Italian suit entered a florist in Yokohama Station.
“Hello, hello, miss. I was hoping to make a bouquet from a few seasonal flowers, but I unfortunately don’t know much about these things. Could you tell me what’s in season and give me some recommendations?”
“Umm. It’s fall now, so that would be the golden lace, the gentian, the balsam, and…the chrysanthemum maybe?”
“A white chrysanthemum! Excellent. And what was that in the language of flowers again? Eternal love? A final parting? Well, it doesn’t matter. Now, could you pick out a few different flowers and make a bouquet for me? And, y’know, arrange the colors so it looks nice and pretty.”
Since the young woman in an apron couldn’t recommend the more expensive and famous flowers off the top of her head suggested she was a part-timer and not a permanent employee. She built the bouquet in the laborious way of someone without much practice, but the old man watched her with a smile. More than a man watching his daughter, he looked like a man watching his granddaughter.
“It’s ready.”
“Thank you. Yes, now this is a bouquet that cheers you up at the mere sight of it. I’m glad I chose this shop.”
He paid her a generous tip and said goodbye.
After leaving the florist, two butlers in tuxedos joined him at his sides.
Their destination wasn’t far.
They left the large train station. While bringing the bouquet up to his face to enjoy the scent of the flowers, more people joined him. The number of butlers and maids in black only continued to grow. Before long, the group had reached the double digits.
They arrived at a perfectly ordinary looking multi-tenant building.
However, the first floor was not occupied by a convenience store or a cafe. It was covered by thick metal shutters. All the slots on the building directory next to the glass door were empty. The entire building was a hunk of concrete that gave off a slight sense of rejection that would make the average person think twice before opening the door and stepping in.
One of the butlers opened the glass door and the elderly man stepped in with the bouquet resting on his shoulder.
All the effort taken to make the exterior look inconspicuous was ruined by their presence.
They entered the first floor on the other side of the metal shutter.
The elderly man used a twist of his wrist to twirl the bouquet around from his shoulder.
“Any word on the stolen land deed?”
“We have found it.”
“Account books showing debt, scandalous photos, copied licenses – I don’t care what. Just retrieve anything and everything that could be used to threaten us.”
“The process is already underway.”
“That just leaves the cleanup.”
The place reeked of dirt.
A large panel had been removed from the floor, exposing the foundation of the base isolation system and the dark soil. And something was planted in orderly lines like heads of cabbage.
Except these were heads of humans.
They were still alive. Arranged 4 x 5, there were 20 in all. Each was a large man with the dangerous kind of look that would get most anyone to steer clear if they ran into them on the streets at night. They were buried alive and upright.
“You would be the alumni of a certain university’s unofficial loan shark club, correct? After all the trouble you caused, I was shocked to find it was only a hobby for you.”
He didn’t let them yell in anger.
Now was not the time to make them scream.
Those young men who had howled that life was good were now all sweating bullets and trembling. They didn’t dare speak a word even as rats and earwigs nibbled at their cheeks and earlobes.
“They were all from a country locked in civil war.”
The elderly man holding the bouquet sounded exasperated as he looked down at them from the edge.
“That old man discovered some people who had never done a single thing wrong in their lives but just so happened to belong to an ethnic minority their country decided were all political criminals and had to be purged. They were fortunate enough to escape to Japan, but then their visas expired. Sheltering them in his small workshop was nothing but a risk – it could even have gotten him arrested along with them. But if these people were deported back to their home country, a stamp on their paperwork would mark them for death. He felt sorry for them, so he took them in and hired them. …And then you came along and threatened him and threatened him and threatened him, taking everything he had, and even played at being land sharks to steal away the factory along with the land it sat on. Do I have that right?”
All of the buried men could imagine how this would end.
They probably wouldn’t do anything. They would only close up the panel and leave.
…The men could cry and shout, but in three or four days, they would either have shriveled away unknown to the world, or the mice and bugs would have eaten through all the soft bits to empty out their skulls while they still lived.
And finally…
Against his better judgment, one of the victims broke.
“Wh-what, you think you’re a good person just because you saved some weak old man? Playing at being a hero d-doesn’t change the fact that you’re as much a criminal as we are!!”
“I don’t recall ever referring to myself that way. We are certainly not on the side of good. And we don’t help the weak and suffering for nothing in return.”
“Oh,” said a butler.
Because the bouquet man had snatched a metal box about the side of a tissue box from a bodyguard.
When he rotated it like a butterfly knife, the metal box transformed into a T-shaped submachine gun.
“All I’m trying to do is save the people who do the things I can’t. As penance for being less of a man than them.”
Bang, ba-bang!!
After a few dry gunshots, the rat-and-earwig-chewed men’s heads all popped in bursts of red.
The young butler by the old man’s side held a hand to his forehead.
But not because he was horrified by the death occurring before his eyes.
“Master!! You should leave this dirty work to us. The Bloodline knew nothing because we made sure of it for their protection!!”
“Sorry, sorry. And you can call me ‘mastermind’ or ‘ringleader’. That’s more fitting for a villain.”
After casually apologizing, the Italian suit man handed the submachine gun back to the butler.
“Hm, a Russian special ops weapon? That’s too fancy, don’t you think? Gangsters like us should be slinging around Chicago Typewriters.”
“In this day and age, no one would even refer to that heavy, bulky antique as a submachine gun.”
The elderly man glanced over at the bouquet.
Then he dropped his gaze to the garden of shattered and burst red.
“I bought it to leave at their grave, but it’s honestly wasted on them.”
“You are most correct. We can use it to decorate one of the mansion’s vases.”
The elderly man departed the multi-tenant building with the butlers and maids seeing him off.
Once they had cleaned everything up, no trace would remain.
“The factory owner said he would do anything, right?”
“Yes. He cried and begged to one of the butlers like me, saying he would do anything for his family, his employees, and those youths.”
“Then tell him he isn’t allowed to live anything but a happy life from now on. Listen, that’s a man who single-handedly surpassed me, head of the Mugino Family. He needs to be proud of his decision. I won’t let him live a miserable life or die a miserable death.”
“I will make sure of it.”
“Finding youths from a country trapped in civil war and sheltering them before anyone else can, huh? I couldn’t have lost more thoroughly. Ah hah hah! To think there was a glorious fool out there who could act before I could.”
They were the Mugino Family.
Theirs was not an organization that would let a mere 10 or 20 corpses bother them.
Part 2[edit]
There had been an explosion in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
That upped the priority level for the police.
A bomber had escaped from Academy City. The bomber was no longer a “maybe”. They were a real threat. Politics and economics were no longer enough for the police to just sit by and watch because of Academy City’s extraterritoriality.
Sobasaka Michio was raring to go.
He was a police officer.
This was the perfect chance to actually investigate Academy City who claimed to extraterritoriality despite being located right inside Tokyo. If this bomber could be used as a reason to demand an investigation, he might just be able to expose the many suspicions whispered about that city. If he let this opportunity pass him by, he would never get a better one. Plus, he couldn’t let this bomber get away with harming his city.
(So I finally have the foothold I need to go after Academy City.)
He didn’t like that this chance had fallen in his lap instead of being something he had accomplished on his own, but he wasn’t about to let it go because of that.
As a child, Sobasaka Michio had been friends with a boy.
Everyone had called that boy Hiyamugi.
His family name had been one of the most common in the country, but he had always been hanging out with Sobasaka. They had been close friends.
When they had moved from elementary school to middle school, Hiyamugi had gone to Academy City.
He had smiled and said he would grow up to be an esper police officer.
And that the two of them could solve all the hardest cases together.
“…”
He had gone to Academy City and never returned.
Sobasaka didn’t even know if he was alive or dead, but he did know Hiyamugi hadn’t safely “graduated”. He had heard rumors that Hiyamugi had been a clinical trial subject in some kind of strange research experiment, but rumors were only rumors. He hadn’t found any shred of the truth.
Only Sobasaka remained.
Only he had grown up, become a police detective, and been left all alone in the world they had dreamed of.
(I’m not letting them wriggle out of it. And it isn’t just Hiyamugi. I’m going to dig up all of Academy City’s darkest secrets and expose them to the world.)
But the voice coming from his phone was heartless.
He had succumbed to a bad habit of Japanese adults. He immediately wished he hadn’t answered the call.
“Come back immediately, Sobasaka.”
“Why, Chief!? I’m gathering witness reports of a blonde girl who sounds like who we’re looking for. Admittedly, her hat, poncho, and blonde hair stand out so much I’m having trouble getting a likeness drawn, but still! She was apparently going around asking people which train would take her to Yokohama. If she doesn’t know the city, she probably used either the subway or the slow train, so it’s not too late to give pursuit!!”
“And where is that train headed?”
Sobasaka’s voice caught in his throat.
It couldn’t be…
“It crossed the prefectural border and entered Kanagawa. That means it falls under a different department’s jurisdiction. We protect Tokyo, so this is no longer our job.”
“You can’t be serious… That just means we have to request support from their prefectural police.”
“We’re talking about a bomber. This will be a major incident if it gets designated a wide-area case and a joint investigation HQ is established. You can’t act on your own.”
Time froze.
The police were supposed to fight to protect the law, yet he was being hindered by the law.
His new partner watched on nervously as Sobasaka yelled with all his might.
Part 3[edit]
“Yum, yum☆”
Frenda Seivelun pulled a Chinese steamed bun from the bag she held in front of her chest and chowed down. With a big smile. The super sweet autumn product was apparently a sweet potato steamed bun.
She was in Yokohama, Kanagawa. Specifically, in its Chinatown.
The Mugino Family was definitely involved in this incident, but Frenda wasn’t about to take on an international organization of more than 100 thousand.
Who was calling the shots and how?
She needed concrete facts, not a general idea of a colossal organization. She needed to know who in that black box had attacked her. Once she knew that, this would be a battle against an individual. She didn’t need to battle hundreds of thousands of people.
(If the Mugino Family operates based on profits and losses, they should quickly withdraw after learning that taking me on will only hurt them. And whoever in the Bloodline or Management is behind this, once the losses grow, they’ll be isolated!)
Frenda’s objective was to locate the villain, but now that was about more than just proving her innocence.
She wasn’t going to say that truck driver had been a wholly good person. But as his victim, Frenda was the only one who could grant him forgiveness. The villain had stolen that right from her by killing him. Without even asking first.
Frenda recalled the family photo by the driver’s seat.
Killing an ordinary person came with a price. Whoever this villain was, she was going to make sure they paid up.
She wasn’t going to let this end with some nonsense about the case being in a big, troublesome black box that prevented her from finding out who in the Mugino Family had carried out that attack.
She would identify the individual.
“…”
That’s why she had come to Yokohama.
The Mugino Family mansion was located in this city’s prime real estate
(Now, if I’m really going to take on the Mugino Family, I guess I’ll need a base. In the end, the police and the underground organizations do the same thing. To prevent runaways, they’ll have a network keeping an eye on the hotels and internet cafes, so I’ll need a place their searches won’t pick up on.)
“I guess it’ll have to be a sketchy room someone’s renting out without following any of the legal requirements. Or I could take it a step further.”
From the roadside stalls to the fancy bars and restaurants, the quality and size of establishments varied. A cheap Chinese restaurant not much better than the set meal restaurant must have had its TV on with the volume cranked up because even outside Frenda could hear the famous sunglass-wearing host showering the guest with all sorts of questions.
It was that time already.
At midday, when the sun was directly overhead, a bored thug had decided to skip work and instead give an unhoused man a light beating, so Frenda consumed her second limited-edition autumn product (a potato and butter steamed bun) with a smile while she kicked the thug in the shin hard enough to break the thick bone. Everyone on the dark side placed the line between professional and amateur at a different place, but Frenda saw anyone who intentionally broke the law as being on her side of the line. Really, he should thank her for not breaking his knee.
(First, I keep him from moving very fast by breaking his support leg which he can’t guard with his hands. In the end, this is all stuff Mugino taught me. …And now all of that is going to be directed at me. That’s a scary thought.)
The thug screamed and began crawling away, but Frenda didn’t bother even watching him go.
The unhoused man looked up at her from where he sat on the side of the street.
“Y-you saved me. But will you be alright? You may have gotten yourself into trouble on my behalf.”
“In the end, you can tell I’m not just some volunteer, right?”
“Yeah, I can. Still, you saved me. Thank you. But you’re a weird girl. I’m sure you have your reasons, but not many young girls would want to spend the night in a cardboard box on the roadside.”
Part 4[edit]
Unlike the police, there was nothing to stop villains. So Item used some bits and pieces of witness information to make their way to Yokohama.
Classical music drifted gently around them.
And this was a live performance, not a recording.
The city of Yokohama had many different faces: the harbor, the Chinatown, the small electronics district full of computer shops, and more.
Mugino, Takitsubo, and Kinuhata were holding a strategy meeting on the top floor of a luxury hotel on the waterfront. That top floor was a five-star French restaurant with reservations booked out two years in advance. Their power inside Academy City didn’t apply out here, but that didn’t matter to them.
This time, they were using a different sort of power.
Mugino didn’t like how conspicuous the fancy restaurant was, but…
“This always happens when I let Mujinayama arrange things… A harbor warehouse or the back of a small general store is good enough for a villain’s hideout if you ask me.”
“Super unlike normal, we can’t kill anyone out here. Well, anyone other than Frenda-san, since she’s our target.”
“And?”
“I think that Mujinayama-san person was being considerate. This way we super won’t get into any trouble with any fellow guests at a cheap hotel where the rooms are only separated by plywood.”
“Mh,” groaned Mugino, falling silent.
Of course, the old butler wasn’t worried about the possibility of Mugino getting hurt. He was worried about her carelessly murdering the reckless fool.
The rich tended to get around in a chauffeured car instead of using the train and would eat in fancy restaurants with dress codes instead of cheap restaurants. This was so they could avoid any trouble with who they considered “undesirables”, such as false molestation claims from the kind of woman they wouldn’t have touched if someone paid them or drunks who they really wished would hurry up and find a police holding cell where they could get something to eat. …Although Mugino personally thought of the truly deviant perverts as being part of the upper classes.
When Kinuhata saw the plate placed in front of her, she recoiled and frowned as she viewed the food from multiple angles. It was three-dimensional. The plate was covered by something more delicate than a coral reef.
“Super how are you supposed to eat this?”
“What, have you never eaten a sandwich before?”
Mugino grabbed hers in a hand and began eating like it was normal.
The crunching sounds suggested the delicate thing was made of fried pasta. All the dishes made with plenty of seafood and autumn truffles had to be weeping.
“The Earl of Sandwich was British, so super what is this doing at a French restaurant? It’s so confusing.”
“Kinuhata, they have pasta and curry rice in France, you know? That isn’t want matters. It just has to taste good.”
It was midday.
Several checkpoints had been set up in Shinjuku, Tokyo, due to the runaway and the bombing, but everything was peaceful once they crossed the prefectural border. However, that wouldn’t last if the police established a joint investigation headquarters.
They didn’t have much time.
What would Frenda Seivelun do next?
Takitsubo, who was still wearing her track suit in the fancy French restaurant, got the discussion started.
“I’m curious why Frenda came to Yokohama.”
“If she wanted to flee the country, Narita or Haneda would be too obvious and she’d get caught right away. So maybe she chose Yokohama so she could board a cargo ship and take a leisurely sea voyage.”
“If she is doing that, then she’ll have to rely on them.”
Takitsubo poked at the sandwich on her plate and licked a lobster-like orange sauce off her finger before clarifying who she meant.
“The Mugino Family.”
“…”
Mugino Shizuri fell silent again.
It was their power that let Item use this five-star restaurant on the top floor of a luxury hotel without a reservation. If Mugino hadn’t used the sommelier to relay a message preventing it, the chef would likely have come to greet them with his tall hat in his hands. They didn’t need that while discussing an illegal job.
Kinuhata hesitantly picked up her sandwich with both hands and spoke up.
“The Mugino Family, huh? They’re a system of violence in the outside world, right? And are they super really your family, Mugino?”
“Well, I will probably end up inheriting the whole damn thing eventually. Even if some of the Bloodline will be upset that grandfather skipped my parent’s generation and chose me.”
“That’s how strong a connection Mugino has to the Family,” said expressionless Takitsubo. “I doubt Frenda would flee to Yokohama when she knows Item is after her. Even if she built up funds and made her preparations in secret, Mugino would know about it all. Even if she is planning to escape by sea, there are plenty of other port towns.”
And if that wasn’t what she planned, Yokohama was a very inconvenient city for escaping from Mugino Shizuri. It was like Frenda had gone out of her way to stick her head into the center of her pursuer’s information network.
In fact…
“This talk of the Mugino Family seems super important to me. It’s like she can’t be friends with them, but she still has business with them. And if that’s the case, this smells really bad to me.”
“…”
Part 5[edit]
it was another sunny day in Academy City.
Although the direct sunlight was a little too hot for autumn.
There were rumors the weather conditions were artificially altered around major events, but the truth was unclear.
At a District 13 elementary school, the usual schedule had been changed and everyone was out in the schoolyard. The boys and girls were all wearing their short-sleeve gym clothes. Fremea really wished she could wear shorts like the boys, but for some reason the girls here wore athletic bloomers.
This was all because it was September.
The Daihaseisai was coming up. Simply put, it was a massive athletic festival involving all of Academy City’s schools.
This was the time of year for the fast runners to reign supreme.
For first graders, it was such a major event it felt like a war.
“We’ve gotta win 1st place! C’mon, Azumi, show some spirit in today’s practice! In the first place, we need to beat all the other schools and stand on the winner’s podium!”
“Fremea-chan, i-isn’t our school being split up for the Daihaseisai? Like different classes will be on different colored teams?”
Her friend, a glasses girl, tilted her head, but the fired-up 7-year-old in athletic bloomers wasn’t listening.
“If it’s a competition, I won’t hold back even if we are from the same school! You’re my rival too, Azumi!!”
“Ehh? I don’t want to compete against you.”
A female teacher formed a megaphone from her hands and yelled over.
“Okay, everyone, we’ll start today by learning the basics of the penguin flap-flap dance!”
“?”
“It can be hard to follow alone while watching the video, but once you learn the footwork, you won’t trip! So we can save the arm movements for later. Okay, everyone, I’m going to play the example video, so focus on the screen!”
“In the first place, how do they decide who wins this?”
“Everyone gets 1st place.”
Part 6[edit]
Frenda Seivelun was led to an enormous park.
According to the unhoused man…
“My home is here and the bathroom and sinks are over there. Also, make sure to have two exits in mind at all times just in case. If anything happens, I’ll try to let you escape first, but I can’t guarantee that’ll work.”
“In the end, that’ll be fine.”
She found a brand new home. So this was a Japanese cardboard box house. Unlike a child’s game, it had a lot of small tricks used to ensure there were no gaps.
“Will you want to use this?”
“In the end, what is it?”
“I feel bad this is all I have, but I just thought a young kid like you wouldn’t be able to relax without access to information.”
He held out a palm-sized device with wired earphones. It looked like a music player…but was apparently a handheld radio. It couldn’t record and it apparently could only get AM broadcasts. In Academy City, not even the old men who loved horse racing used these. It had probably been sold at a deep discount at an electronics store, but it still couldn’t have been easy for an unhoused man to get.
She honestly appreciated it.
…Especially when she was being pursued by the police, Academy City, and the Mugino Family.
“Lend me one ear.”
Inside the cardboard box house, the man shared the wired earphones with her and she listened to the staticky radio broadcast. And as she pressed the button to change the frequency…
“It’s finally time! The next three hours will be hosted by a celebrity couple who’ve been together for 8 years now.”
“We have new information on the explosion in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The police have announced that it may have been an attack rather than an accident.”
“If you call within half an hour of this broadcast, we’ll give you an even better price!”
One of the stations had some interesting information (not the sales program selling a down bedding set), but the man was listening as well. Frenda feigned disinterest and continued tuning and finally settled on a music program.
The man looked a little surprised.
“I would have thought you preferred Western music.”
“Isn’t that a little broad of a category to count as a single genre?”
Couldn’t he at least narrow it down to a single country?
They listened to some music by the male idol Hitotsui Hajime for a while, but then someone called the man over. Apparently a friend.
Frenda heard a heavy noise like a concrete block being dragged. Was that a small shichirin grill they had set up on the tile ground? That said, they didn’t seem to be using the fancy bincho-tan charcoal. They apparently used burnable trash for fuel.
Frenda spoke to the second man. While wondering if she would ever be forced to give a name for herself.
“In the end, is that fish?”
“This season, everyone thinks about the salmon and tuna, but that means you can get the smaller fish really cheap. Expiration dates are the bane of a fish seller’s existence.”
“Ugh. Once you start naming fish, the craving for mackerel really sets in…”
“?”
That said, she doubted they had dug raw fish out of the garbage. It would go bad too quick on a summer day like this. These men had no money or insurance, so they actually paid close attention to their health. So had they gone out of their way to buy some to commemorate the beginning of Frenda’s unhoused life? Even though every bit of loose change they had would mean so much more than for the average worker?
“I heard you saved Taku-san’s ass. If you weren’t a kid, I’d’ve brought drinks.”
“In the end, I’m going to end up indebted to you like this.”
“Of course! Taku-san isn’t about to stay indebted to some kid. You’re supposed to let the adults look responsible, okay?”
Frenda smiled and chose to accept their kindness.
She appreciated it. Even if it did make them more conspicuous.
Part 7[edit]
It wasn’t yet dawn.
“Nhh…”
Frenda sat cross-legged, raised her arms, and stretched her back inside a makeshift tent made from cardboard boxes. Even as she stretched, her hands didn’t reach the ceiling. The cardboard arrangement provided a fair amount of space. That unhoused man was apparently really thankful for what she had done.
Frenda Seivelun was acting as a member of the dark side. She needed to be able to adjust her sleep time and be at her best condition at an hour too early for most people to be awake.
She slipped out of the cardboard box house.
The park had a variety of facilities alongside it, including plenty of unmanned services like drink and bread vending machines, lockers, and a laundry. How was that kind of business handled on public land?
She felt sweaty after sleeping.
“In the end, there’s no one here.”
Frenda peered inside the entrance and found the outside world’s laundromats really did only have a bunch of washing machines lined up. Maybe they thought there wasn’t anything there to steal because the place didn’t even have the bare minimum of security cameras on the ceiling.
It was just past 3AM, so no one else was there.
“Okay.”
Fortunately, she still had some of her emergency cash. Laundry? That was a matter of life-or-death for a girl! (Really.) Frenda stripped off her only change of clothes and tossed each article into the washer. She didn’t even need her underwear right now. After she pressed the button to get the washer spinning, she frowned. She had chosen the more expensive express mode, but the timer said it would be 60 minutes until the washer was done.
(That’s not good… In the end, I won’t even have any underwear until this is done.)
The way she stood naked below the bright fluorescent light and stared blankly at her underwear spinning round and round may have had something to do with only just having woke up.
After a bit, she had a great idea.
She was already naked and there was no sense in wasting time, so she could take a bath while she waited.
During the day, the unhoused men had told her how to make 40-degree bathwater. After heating water up to 100 degrees in a pot using a portable stove, she poured that into a metal bucket and added cold water according to the ratio they had told her. The outside world’s lack of required fire alarms was a wonderful thing.
(Yeah, that’s it… In the end, I need a bath to really wake me up.)
She used a wet towel to wash her body, starting with her right upper arm. She left her underarms and neck for last.
For her head, she had to use up a whole bucket’s worth – 10 liters – of water. She used a single-use shampoo bottle meant for camping. You could get anything at a discount store.
(In the end, doesn’t the average bathtub take 200-300 liters to fill? I’m conserving a ton of water this way.)
And as her mind started to spin up, her capacity for shame slowly recovered.
…
Wait.
What do you mean I have to spend 60 minutes naked?
The girl’s face silently flushed deep red.
“Huh? Wait. In the end, huh???”
Even if I am still drowsy, why did I choose to act like I’m still in one of the luxury apartments we use for hideouts? I’m outside!! And I’m a young girl with perfect skin. Am I attempting an entirely pointless test of courage where I strip naked and get on an empty elevator late at night where I won’t have anywhere to run!?
(Faster, faster, faster, finish faster. In the end, fasterrrr!!)
Each minute and second seemed to drag on.
Finally, the spinning washing machine made a different sound. Now it sounded like a giant hair dryer? It must have entered its drying mode.
Was she going to make it?
No, her sharp survival instincts developed on the dark side were setting off warning signals.
It was faint, but she could hear footsteps.
And the gap between the sounds was wide, suggesting these were the long strides on an adult man.
(Wait, wait, wait, wait!?)
She heard a shrill beep.
The washing and drying were finally complete.
Frenda scrambled to get the washer open and pull out her clothes.
Her bra slipped from her hand and fell to the floor, but she ignored that for now.
As long as she got her miniskirt dress on, she could get through this. That was a simple action she did every single day of her life.
“Ugh!? M-my head and arms…why do they keep catching!?”
Was that because her maiden skin was still damp?
And the more she panicked, the less she was capable of getting her arms through the sleeves. Her head was caught inside the dress. Which of the three holes was she meant to put her hands through? The panic was really setting in now! How could she have gotten lost in her favorite miniskirt dress? She felt like a kitten with its head caught in a tissue box!
And the unhoused man who she had (calculatingly) rescued yesterday poked his head in the entrance.
Looking puzzled.
“Oh, what are you doing up this early?”
“Eek!? Ah ha ha☆ In the end, it’s nothing. Whew, barely made it…”
“?”
At the very, very last second, she draped just the thin poncho over herself, grabbed the other clothing in her hands and held it in front of herself to cover everything. Still blushing bright (and looking something like a teru teru bouzu or like her sister when changing into her school swimsuit), Frenda tried to laugh it off. Even if she had given up on putting on her miniskirt dress which kept catching on her wet skin and even if her striped panties were caught around her right ankle.
Part 8[edit]
The waterfront.
At 4:30 in the morning, the sea had a blade-like chill to it. Maybe because it was a mixture of the deadly night sea and the summer sea that made people change into swimsuits.
When really attacking someone under the cover of darkness, you would avoid the middle of the night.
It was best to attack at a time linked to biological functions, like dawn when people’s sleepiness was at its maximum or around mealtime.
Frenda could not walk straight to her destination.
There were surveillance cameras everywhere long before reaching that destination. For some reason, the home security cameras were pointed at the road, not at their front door or garage door. Since those weren’t public security cameras, that was classified as setting up a hidden camera. Frenda slipped past more and more of the defense network that was layered like the rings on a stump.
When it came to pure technology, Frenda’s life in Academy City gave her the upper hand.
After easily clearing that obstacle, she climbed to an emergency stairs landing attached to a nearby multi-tenant building wall.
She observed the building she was interested in from the safety of a blind spot in the cameras.
The Mugino Family.
That was their mansion. Of course, it was technically owned by a shell company.
“Nhh…”
Frenda placed her hands on the metal pole vertically connecting levels of the emergency stairs.
She tangled her legs around it and squeezed with the back of her knees to spin around it. The mansion showed no sign of noticing her upside-down pole dancing, confirming this really was a blind spot.
“Oops.”
Holding her hat in place with a hand, she continued observing while upside down.
That prime coastal real estate had to cost more per square centimeter than platinum, but the front yard contained inside a tall fence looked large enough for an official soccer match. The mansion actually looked odd to a foreigner like Frenda. As a product of the Meiji and Taisho eras, its design was a mixture of Japanese and Western. It didn’t even obey the standard of symmetry and it was split into several buildings which were linked by walkways, creating something like a giant maze.
But that aside, there was something wrong with someone’s house being bigger than a school.
It was three floors tall…or four, or maybe even more? The heights of the different rooms must have differed because she had trouble working out the number of floors by counting the windows.
(Ugh, isn’t the waterfront full of reclaimed land? In the end, keeping a mansion this old would mean constantly refusing to cooperate with national-level urban development projects.)
And that may even go beyond the one country. Why had that house alone been spared the bombings during the war? That showed tremendous power, but it was even scarier that no one ever talked about it.
Yokohama had been as involved in opening up the country as Hakodate and Kobe. A Western mansion brimming with foreignness wasn’t all that out of place here, but it still felt wrong for the big boss of an illegal criminal organization to be living out in the open here. They could brazenly break the law without getting arrested. They didn’t run or hide. Because they didn’t need to. It really emphasized their power as a criminal organization.
The patrolling guards in black were well trained.
It was 4:30 in the morning.
Nothing would have happened yesterday or the day before that, yet they didn’t even yawn during this early hour.
(If I charged in through the front gate, I’d end up riddled with bullets. And climbing over isn’t a great idea either. But with the entrance that strictly guarded, the people who go in and out will have invented a secret back entrance to bypass the annoying process.)
“There it is. They’re hiding it with a green shrubbery, but there’s a square hole open in the thick wall.”
But why would the mansion’s troops want to leave and return on their own like that? Was there a supermarket or discount store nearby?
It looked like Frenda wouldn’t have to traverse the smelly sewers to get in.
And now it was time to act.
Flipping upright from her upside-down pole dancing, she set her feet on the emergency stairs landing and silently but swiftly descended to the ground.
She followed a route that avoided the surveillance cameras to approach the Mugino Family’s tall wall, parted the green shrubbery, and slipped through the square hole.
It didn’t matter how many guards they had posted when she could use a blind spot like this.
She was finally inside.
And she sensed a gaze.
Like a sharp pressure.
This was still the large front yard. Frenda hadn’t even set foot inside the maze-like mansion.
This person hadn’t been here when she investigated just a bit ago.
Had a guard just so happened to walk by, or had they predicted where Frenda would be spy on them from and hidden in a blind spot?
“In the end, did you lure me in?”
“This trap would only work on a pro. You can pat yourself on the back for that, Frenda Seivelun.”
Frenda found herself facing a maid in a long skirt.
But that long skirt had a large slit on either side. And it looked unnaturally heavy. The maid reached inside one slit and pulled out a wine bottle full of gasoline, detergent, etc. And the empty bottle used for this was from one of the finest French wines.
“Does that mean, um, in the end…”
“If I am being honest, I do not think pole dancing in a miniskirt is the best idea. Let’s just say you showed your stripes with that one.”
She had seen it all.
And being told that directly and with such seriousness was really awkward.
The maid began to move. She used the kind of old match that could be struck on the sole of a boot to light the English-language newspaper shoved into the mouth of the Molotov cocktail.
Was her weapon so powerful she couldn’t actually fight inside the mansion?
Frenda glared back at the busty maid who looked to be about the age of a high school upperclassman and smiled a little.
“I see the Mugino Family has Western tastes in all things. Is a Molotov cocktail maid their idea of hot?”
A Molotov cocktail was fire plus a flammable substance.
And this maid had been waiting here after predicting what Frenda would do.
Frenda noticed an electronic device that didn’t fit the classic maid look.
“In the end, is that a music player?”
“The Chinese ones are nice. They’re cheap and you can easily buy them in bulk. I’m not interested in sound quality or ease of use. The best part is how easy they are to dismantle and repurpose.”
It sounded like this was an explosives expert on the Mugino Family payroll.
That meant she was the one who had used the pressures of that truck driver’s personal life to lure him onto the path of evil and then killed him with a remote-controlled hopping bomb once he became an inconvenience.
The air electrified.
Frenda Seivelun spat out a growling voice.
“You piece of shit. In the end, the title of bomber is too good for you.”
“Writhe in pain and carbonize, villain. This sticky flame cannot be put out by a fire extinguisher.”
This left Frenda with only one option.
The fire on the English-language newspaper vanished.
“Wha-!?”
The maid’s expression changed.
There were several methods of making Molotov cocktails, but those that used fire for ignition were not a threat when thrown if that fire had gone out.
And every part of the world had long had methods of extinguishing candles from a distance. It was a standard illusionist’s trick and a classic way for bogus religions to fake miracles.
Frenda had to make the most of her opponent’s brief stiffening in shock.
And so she had already begun a sharp run.
Forward.
Toward the maid.
“Was it an issue of moisture or humidity? Or did I cut off the oxygen supply with a colorless gas? In the end, did you really think I was going to reveal the trick to you, you spoiled thing? Bomb experts are also experts at securing a safe location and time to act on the battlefield!!”
“Kh.”
“You looked into my identity before laying this trap for me, right? Ha ha. Are you just stupid? In the end, challenging me in my own field is suicide!”
Frenda’s shout was immediately followed by an explosion.
But Frenda hadn’t done this.
It was something else.
Had that expert bomber been caught unawares in her own field?
Her eyes widened in surprise as she just barely managed to jump outside the lethal range.
To be fair, she couldn’t be blamed for not expecting this.
This wasn’t a hidden bomb, a grenade, a shoulder-fired rocket, or any other toy used by guerrillas and criminal organizations. It had sliced through the dark sky, slipped through the valley between skyscrapers, and flown accurately toward her.
In other words…
“A cruise missile? In the end, did they attack me from the ocean!?”
Part 9[edit]
She felt the tremor while taking a hot shower.
Mugino Shizuri left the bathroom which was so large it was actually kind of annoying to use and wrapped herself in a white bed sheet without drying her hair. Then she moved in front of the window made by covering an entire wall with thick glass.
“They’re making a scene again…”
She muttered irritably to herself while looking down from the suite of a luxury hotel with connections to an illicit organization and viewed the commotion in the world below.
That wasn’t Frenda.
…The blonde girl hadn’t seen the launch point and imagined it was an old-style submarine, but that wasn’t accurate. That was an ALCM. In other words, it had been released by a 50m strategic bomber and launched toward a point on the ground. With deadly precision.
It had a range of 2500km. More than flying across Chiba to arrive from the Pacific Ocean, this tactical weapon could hit its target when launched from Hokkaido or Okinawa.
Only the Mugino Family could pull off that kind of absurdity.
Takitsubo silently approached from behind Mugino and tilted her head while drying her hair with a hairdryer.
“That wasn’t Frenda, right? Can the Mugino Family really get away with that?”
“They’re threatening every last one of the major communications and security companies, so there won’t be digital records from security cameras or anything else. Even if a million people saw it, it’ll be written off as ‘the vague accounts of panicked witnesses’. A good lawyer can use the term ‘mass hysteria’ to discredit it all. Without any material evidence like video footage, it’s easy to weasel out of these things. Just get rid of all the security camera footage that could make decent evidence and all that’s left are grainy phone videos that could easily have been faked.”
But the Mugino Family’s reaction here did bother Mugino.
They could get away with this in Yokohama. But only so many times. How many trump cards built up over many long years had they used up here?
A reaction of this level made it look like they knew in advance just how much of a threat Frenda Seivelun was.
(Is this just a case of Frenda attacking them, or has the Mugino Family done something bad enough to warrant this kind of overreaction?)
“So does this mean Frenda really did come to Yokohama for the Mugino Family?” asked Takitsubo.
“That’s what we’re going to find out.”
Part 10[edit]
“Volcano to Typhoon. Don’t worry about aiming too carefully – just keep on bombing. As long as you cut off her escape, I can finish her off with a Molotov cocktail!”
“Damn!!”
Frenda bristled when she heard the Molotov cocktail maid speaking to someone somewhere.
That cruise missile wouldn’t be the last.
If you had an effective means of attack, you could just keep on repeating it. As big as the grounds were, they were still shooting missiles into their own territory, so their aim had to be accurate.
A second and more were coming.
But the aerodynamic tactical weapons did not blast Frenda to pieces.
“But in the end, are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Are you sure you have time left to chat?”
“Oh, I’m sure. Because you’re the one about to be blown up by a Mugino brand missile.”
“?”
“You wouldn’t be firing on a map coordinate when your target is a person who can move around. That means the terminal guidance must use something else to track me, but it can’t be a laser or GPS. Is it the Molotov cocktail? An unhealthy gasoline-based cocktail wouldn’t produce a smoke quite so black.”
“You’ve already figured it out?”
“Naphthalene. Marking a bombing target with a smoke bomb is as standard as it gets, but I bet you got a little creative and didn’t just use the color. Is it tracking traces of a chemical compound? In other words, using taste or smell? But are you sure that’s a good idea? In the end, naphthalene isn’t just used to make black smoke. It’s a common chemical compound used to make insecticides and plastics.”
“Tch!!”
“I’m from Academy City’s dark side. You really think I’m going to be fooled by a magic trick based on scientific knowledge!? Hwa ha ha. I can control the direction of the wind. You might think you’re secretly producing an invisible chemical compound, but in the end, you’re the one coated in it, you fool!!”
Something exploded.
As if lightning had struck nearby.
A large tree in the front yard split down the middle and burst into flames as each half fell in opposite directions.
It hadn’t directly hit Frenda or the Molotov cocktail maid, but this still proved that the program-guided missile had missed its target.
It could hit either of them next time.
Frenda took action before the maid could recover from her fear of that.
Of course, surviving a few rounds of this wasn’t enough to relax.
More cruise missiles would be coming. If she didn’t escape to safety, she would be slaughtered.
Which meant…
(In the end, that’s enough of getting right up in that dangerous maid’s face to punish her! I need to get inside the mansion ASAP!! They won’t want to blow up their own house!!)
“Ooh, what have we here?☆”
Frenda voiced her joy as she grabbed a 9mm handgun. In the chaos of the exploding cruise missiles, one of the Mugino Family’s guards must have dropped it.
She heard the rumbling of an engine.
(That’s a fancy V12, but the engine is roaring at having to carry around the thick and heavy bulletproof plating. No ordinary car sounds like that. In the end, this is that villain’s car I heard about in Chinatown during the day!!)
Maybe it was the psychological idea of the cocktail party effect where people only picked up on the voices they were interested in, but a dark side villain knew how to hear discussions of many different things while walking through peaceful crowds.
Some people were hired with a “quantity over quality” mindset to provide the numbers needed for a job, legal or not.
In other words, the mercenaries who would also hand out fliers or work as movers.
“!”
Frenda aimed the handgun toward the open front gate instead of toward the Mugino Family mansion.
She began firing at the black bulletproof car that belonged to another criminal organization and just so happened to be driving nearby.
No matter who pulled the trigger, this was a Mugino Family gun.
The wicked blonde girl grinned before tossing the gun aside.
“Wah hah hah. Enjoy your gang war☆”
“Oh, damn, get back here!!”
The Molotov cocktail maid paled and frantically shouted at Frenda, but she ducked down when gunfire erupted from a different direction. The shot bulletproof car was returning fire. And at full-auto right off the bat.
A firefight had broken out.
So that wasn’t just an Academy City thing. Damn the Mugino Family.
(Wow. Are they going to claim that’s just a small T-shaped submachine gun? Stock, dot sight, long barrel, and fore grip. With all those modifications, it’s barely any different from an assault rifle. They’ve even modified the mechanism so it can fire 5.56mm rifle rounds.)
Frenda had heard tricks like that were used to skirt the law in the original gun culture of America. Why you would bother in Japan where owning even a single bullet was forbidden, she had no idea.
The rival organization was using their bulletproof car as a shield while firing what looked like an Italian submachine gun. The manufacturer was famous for their handguns, but not many people knew they also made submachine guns.
Frenda used the breakdown of the usual guard system to move from the spacious front yard to the front entrance of the maze-like mansion.
A gunshot burst behind her.
“Kh.”
Running scared, Frenda checked behind her.
While a gun was a projectile weapon, a young butler had rushed out from the front gate and jumped over the barricade to reach the enemy group. He was part of the Management. With even more gunfire, the silhouettes of the enemy group were torn apart.
With that 360-degree barrage, a stray bullet could fly Frenda’s way at any time.
(In the end, what was that? Did he have two shotguns connected by a chain like a nunchaku!? Th-that’s crazy, but scary!! And he took them all out himself!)
An engine roared.
Was that a lance-wielding knight? No.
Another butler rode an enormous motorcycle while wielding an American prototype 12.7mm heavy machinegun that suppressed 60% more recoil than the antiques used nearly a century ago. He was operating the large motorcycle with just the one arm, so he may have swapped the engine out for an automatic.
The caliber was .50.
And this was machinegun .50 caliber, not handgun .50 caliber. The amount of powder was completely different, so firing that thing from the surface would be enough to take down the average attack helicopter.
“Took you long enough, partner! Hah hah! Now, let’s see who can get more kills, Bakyaku!!”
“Ougigumo. Killing is not a game.”
The storm of close-range shotgun fire was joined by 12.7mm hunks of lead capable of tearing through police armored trucks. At this point, the black bulletproof car provided no protection.
One problem with criminal organizations was their lack of any kind of equipment standards like the police or military would have. So it wasn’t unusual to see these suicidal mutations in how they used guns or bombs.
(Apparently the people who survive on the front lines end up developing in weird directions outside of Academy City too, dammit. I really hope I can avoid taking any of them on directly.)
The enemy’s bullets were bad enough on their own, but friendly fire only made it worse. So while the guard system had broken down, Frenda rushed through the wide-open front door to the mansion.
(That won’t last long since they have cruise missiles. In the end, that rival organization will be defeated. I need to finish my ‘research trip’ before that happens.)
“Oops.”
This wasn’t over just because Frenda was inside the building. She heard footsteps.
She ducked behind a suit of Western armor on display in the hall.
She held her breath.
A young butler and maid passed by without noticing her, rushing outside.
“Dammit, Hanagai. She just had to fire those ALCMs. We were saving those. She had better have gotten the Bloodline’s permission.”
“Keeping them around just wastes money on maintenance, so isn’t it best to shoot them when we have the chance?”
(So the Family isn’t a monolith. Does that mean there’s a group that wants to frame me and a group that isn’t interested in me? In the end, I’d hate to take out people who aren’t with the villain and only make more of them hate me.)
Also, apparently that maid outside was named Hanagai. Frenda found Japanese names hard to figure out since they weren’t taken from past kings or saints, but that was probably a family name. She figured it wouldn’t hurt to remember that.
The mansion was split into multiple buildings with walkways connecting them. The place wasn’t even symmetric, so she wouldn’t be surprised to find unnatural stairways and passageways inside. Now, where would the villain hidden among the Mugino Family Bloodline be hiding their secrets?
They wouldn’t want to keep them too far away, but they wouldn’t want to be seen with them either.
They wouldn’t just be worried about outside thieves. They would want to keep the rest of the Family from knowing either.
“Hm.”
(A heavy vault, maybe?)
Frenda chose to rely on her dark side nose here.
A complex and heavy vault wouldn’t be built on the upper floors. Needless to say, it would weigh more than a large truck and break through the floor. That suggested a basement, but they wouldn’t be able to break through the supports and foundation of that giant mansion to dig into the ground wherever they wanted. The entire mansion would collapse if they did.
The location of the electric, gas, and water lines was an issue and all the strange additions had shifted the building’s center of gravity a fair bit.
Given the conditions at play, there were only so many places a giant vault could be located.
Where would she need to place the bombs to bring the structure down? Frenda only had to consider the opposite of that. An expert bomber’s nose could quickly work out the usable locations.
She moved aside a bookcase in a 1st floor study and descended the stairs hidden behind it.
“Found it.”
She discovered a thick door like at a bank vault, but she easily opened it by slowly operating a special drill to open a hole and dissolving the 12 tungsten rods inside using an acid. Buying the industrial version would be pricey, but you could bring the price way down by modifying discount store products. By combining the large motor taken from a juicer with a dial regulator, you could manage a lot just by controlling the rotation rate. Then you only had to modify the head that would be pressed against the steel. The acid? That was an ingredient for a common explosive. Any expert bomber could make it out of everyday household items.
Frenda found a space larger than a school classroom.
Art, gold bars, jewels, weapons, and more. But Frenda wasn’t interested in any of that.
She wanted documents.
Some further locked cabinets were lined up on one side of the vault. She knew the Mugino Family Bloodline had a few dozen members. Was this a locker for each of them?
The locks were like toys compared to the one on the vault door, but Frenda noticed something else.
Her bomber’s nose twitched.
“Acid? In the end, will they dissolve the documents inside if you force the lock?”
With a sigh, Frenda pulled out a cheap screwdriver.
This would be a pain, but she could neutralize it by dismantling it like she was disarming a bomb. The acid was stored in a single tank and distributed to each safe through skinny pipes, so she only had to remove the tank.
“Hm, hm, hmm☆”
She couldn’t tell which cabinet was the one she wanted, so she used leverage to break open each locked door in turn and pulled out the documents inside.
A land deed, a list of names for something, photos of what looked like two people having a secret meeting, a flash drive… She found plenty of sketchy stuff, but she wasn’t interested in any of it.
“Is this it?”
Frenda Seivelun.
She found a document with her own name on it.
(This isn’t a standard format… And in the end, this doesn’t look like a plain report. The text uses some emotional manipulation tricks.)
There were techniques for that.
What might look at first like a colorful bar graph would use warm reds or yellows to color whichever bar they wanted to look larger or a weak point the writer wanted to avoid questions on would be written in a single long paragraph in small text. Neither of those was an actual lie, so they could claim any who mistook its meaning had only themselves to blame.
They would deceive not just their enemies but, if necessary, their allies too. They would feel no shame over it, even under circumstances so serious they would influence their subordinates’ and allies’ lives or futures.
The unseen villain’s personality was visible on the page.
(In the end, this looks like a draft of a project plan meant to make their many accomplices think this is a winnable fight. It’s a good thing this is the version containing the raw data before it was embellished.)
If we stand idly by, we will lose our chance.
We must actively change the Family’s line of succession ourselves.
Mugino Shizuri’s Item provides a few different options, but we will be using Level 0 Frenda Seivelun.
I have no intention of dealing with one of those strange Academy City esper powers. In that sense, the bomber girl will be the easiest to predict.
The Mugino Family is active in Shinjuku, Tokyo, and Yokohama, Kanagawa.
We must not kill that Academy City bomber. It is crucial that she acts of her own volition and disturbs our business.
That way we can hold the position of “victim”.
That will help us force Mugino Shizuri to take responsibility and drop her down the line or succession.
As a Level 0, the bomber will be easy to deal with. If we do lose control of her, we can ignore the casualties and use overwhelming numbers to kill her.
That warning at the end of the document made Frenda smile bitterly.
True enough.
But they weren’t aware of just how hard it was for a Level 0 to survive on the dark side where no one played fair and strange esper powers abounded. Nor were they aware of just how much creativity Frenda had displayed to accomplish that.
She wasn’t going to complain about them underestimating her.
That was far better than if they had an accurate grasp of the threat.
(But this is suicide. In the end, what is the Mugino Family hoping to accomplish by picking a fight with Academy City? Oh, here’s another document.)
The Mugino Family always weighs the pros and the cons.
In a conflict over succession, obvious accomplishments and contributions will be necessary.
We will reach for Academy City.
An all-out war between the Mugino Family and Academy City would be a crisis for us, but Academy City is still a business. Specifically, a business involving children and their parents.
The children may be safe within the city’s walls, but the parents scattered across the country are a different matter.
We can threaten ordinary people into acting as disposable pawns who will attack those parents while we remain perfectly safe ourselves. As their fear and dissatisfaction grows, the parents will cut their ties to Academy City. And then the city’s education business will collapse.
Or we can merely threaten to do this.
If we can successfully threaten Academy City, we can gain access to all sorts of cutting-edge technology related to esper development. This would in turn bring endless glory to the Mugino Family.
A bloodless victory would be ideal, but we will make demonstrations if we must.
We already have a list of “customers” who have repeatedly fallen for false billing and bank transfer scams. By cutting them off from reliable information and pushing them to the brink, we will be able to remotely control them.
We only need to select one of these disposable assassins.
I leave this task with Hanagai.
The item has already been delivered.
By using a motorcycle courier or something to deliver the imitation bomb to the disposable pawn, we can set up Frenda Seivelun as the culprit and eliminate Shizuri through joint responsibility.
“…”
That wasn’t good.
Frenda’s dark side intuition was ringing the alarm bell.
Having all the information to yourself did not always put you in a superior position.
“Attacking Academy City and dropping Mugino down the line of succession? It’s true you could accomplish both by framing super-cute Frenda-chan, but in the end, does this mean the Mugino Family has a traitor who doesn’t like the current state of their succession race?”
This was an extremely high-risk, high-return plan for the villain.
Knowing about this was reason enough to be killed.
(But I might be able to convince Mugino using this. And breaking free of having Item after me is enough for now!)
She would of course take the original documents with her, but that didn’t feel like enough. Just to be safe, she snapped photos of each page with her phone.
With that simple work complete, Frenda stuffed the documents in her pocket and dashed from the underground vault to the front hall.
“My, my.”
She heard a voice. The graceful voice of a mature adult woman. By the time Frenda realized the danger, she had already emerged and didn’t have time to react. There was no turning back.
“If you had only continue scampering about in the streets and let the police catch you, Academy City would have sent out an assassin to silence you for us. I never imagined you would rush right into the Mugino Family mansion on your own.”
(You don’t sound too concerned about it!! In the end, did they manage to outmaneuver me!?)
She was an attractive woman. Frenda couldn’t say how many anti-aging techniques she was using, but she had the appearance of a woman aged 30 or a little younger. But her perfect beauty seemed thoroughly artificial. This violent queen had her long chestnut hair rolled and wore a storybook dress. Her slender hand toyed with a long, skinny kiseru.
“In the end, I can see the family resemblance. I’d still be surprised to find you’re Mugino’s mom, though.”
“That would be my younger sister. Really, if Eika had only kept her daughter under control, none of this would have happened.”
So this woman and Mugino Shizuri were aunt and niece?
The Mugino Family.
The term “family” there meant something entirely different from the standard nuclear family in Japan. With a criminal organization bound by blood, Frenda couldn’t even begin to speculate on how convoluted their family tree was.
Then an old man in a tuxedo moved forward to cover the lady.
“Sakuya-sama, please stay behind me.”
Mugino Sakuya.
That was the name on the cabinet containing the documents.
Then there was this old butler wearing an old-fashioned tuxedo and monocle.
“Mujinayama. Since Academy City seems incapable of cleaning up their mess, we must play the card of violence ourselves. You can handle the rest.”
“I am a sniper. Close quarters combat is outside my field of expertise.”
“…”
A cold sweat soaked the blonde girl’s back.
Frenda was a bomber, but she could manage other forms of combat.
But that was how she could tell that Mujinayama was bad news. Just standing here in front of him was enough to know she had to avoid fighting him head on.
“Thus, I am not confident I can kill you without inflicting pain and fear upon you. So please forgive me if you do suffer.”
(There’s no way I’m fighting this guy! Is there any other way out!?)
A thick beam flew in.
The wall was destroyed from the outside. Not by breaking or crumbling, but by melting.
Academy City’s #4, Meltdowner.
Flanked by a girl on either side, the girl carrying Mugino Family blood in her veins stepped out onto the front line.
“What do you think you’re doing, old hag?”
That one question changed the mood.
All attention was now on her.
This girl was the reason why Mugino Sakuya had so cautiously built up her plan in the shadows.
And everything in her behavior pointed to her, Mugino Shizuri, being the true heir, no matter how many other members of the Bloodline there were.
Mugino glanced over at the tuxedo and monocle man standing next to Sakuya.
“Mujinayama…”
“I have my reasons. I need not justify siding with Sakuya-sama at this time.”
That was all.
Even her fellow Item members of Takitsubo and Kinuhata may not have caught how much emotion was shared in that short exchange.
To say nothing of the filthy traitor among them.
Mugino Shizuri stared at the violent queen who held the long, skinny kiseru.
And she spoke.
“My grandfather seems lively enough to keep going for another hundred years. Starting a succession war now will just wear you down. And it’s your troops who will die, not you.”
“Oh? Are you sure about that? You never do know what surprises life has in store.”
“In other words, you already know the answer. You know exactly when that old man will unnaturally kick the bucket..”
A thin smile was Sakuya’s only response.
She shrugged off the outrageous accusation.
This was a coup by Mugino Sakuya. It was a civil war in which she made a calculated threat on the current head’s life, disgraced the heir who would follow him, and placed herself at the top of that violent organization of more than 100 thousand.
Of course, this was not enough to prove her murderous intentions.
Frenda knew the gist of the plan, but she hadn’t found any documents planning the family head’s death. In a world where deception was the norm, definitive proof was a must, but she didn’t have any.
And because Sakuya knew all the answers herself, she was willing to turn over the cards that couldn’t pin her down.
“Now, the question is: what am I doing? You can’t prove anything. Even if you go to the head, he won’t listen if all you have is suspicion. But this is a very inconvenient truth for you. So, Shizuri. You have no way of fighting back. What do you plan to do now that you know the truth but are short on evidence?”
“…”
“Clean up this mess, Mujinayama. They are companions of Frenda Seivelun who disturbed Mugino Family business in Tokyo and Kanagawa. That makes them enemies of the Family.”
