Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item Epilogue
Epilogue: A Path Leading to Another Time, Another Place[edit]
July 28, 2 PM. Below the blazing sun in the blue sky.
“So in the end, it’s all over.”
“It really is, Frenda.”
Frenda Seivelun and Takitsubo Rikou were watching a distant funeral hall with a chimney as large as a bathhouse’s. Hanano Choubi’s funeral was being held there. With their binoculars, they could see a middle-aged man and woman in funeral garb clinging to the solid coffin and weeping.
Hanano Choubi had died on the 14th.
It had taken this long because of the circumstances of her death.
She had died in an explosion.
She had chosen that fate herself when she decided rescue would not arrive in time.
It wasn’t clear if her remains were even inside that coffin. Generally, the remains were given some makeup before the funeral. They would even be sewed up or have wounds hidden if necessary, but not even an embalming expert could fix that.
Umisuna Seiru’s makeup techniques.
Frenda placed the half-read book and an unopened mackerel can on the railing of the park viewing platform and silently clasped her hands toward the funeral hall’s chimney in the distance. Her hair was blonde, but she did this in the Japanese style.
After watching that, Takitsubo fidgeted with her jacket’s pockets and spoke.
“Her remains were retrieved. That means Hanano protected herself.”
“Takitsubo?”
“If someone on the dark side had killed her and tried to cover it up, there wouldn’t have been any remains to find. They would have erased the existence of the murder case altogether, so it would have ended with a declaration that she had voluntarily gone missing. Even though there’s nowhere to run in a city surrounded by thick walls.”
Frenda had chosen to live in a world that worked that way.
It was summer break and the bright sun was shining down, but she had turned her back on that to soak up to her shoulders in muddy darkness.
She could not go to the funeral hall and light incense for Hanano.
Frenda viewed the distant funeral hall through her binoculars again.
She focused on the weeping parents more than the empty coffin.
She couldn’t help but think about her own 7-year-old sister.
“They say nothing remains once you’re dead, but in the end, that’s a lie, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“In the end, we could die at any time in this job. I thought I was prepared for that…but I don’t want to put my family through this.”
“Then you just have to survive.”
“No matter what that means?”
That place wasn’t found on any map.
The walls, floor, and ceiling were all made of thick concrete. The labyrinth of underground passageways looked like a shelter built by someone who believed the world was ending or a death game where victims would be trapped inside to fight to the death. Mugino Shizuri and Kinuhata Saiai walked through it, side by side.
“I still can’t believe that Enemy Item had their base directly below our apartment. I guess they were always a step ahead of us because they were spying on our conversations.”
“Super what will we do about a new hideout?”
“Yeah, that one was destroyed in the explosion. I want to avoid District 15 for the time being. I did like the feel of District 3 where we finally hunted down Ibotanokikouji Kaede. Are there any luxury apartments or private salons there?”
They were chatting as they walked, but that suddenly stopped.
Or maybe this was something Kinuhata had wanted to ask for a while.
“I really didn’t expect what super happened after that. Well, I can understand with Takitsubo-san, but…”
“You mean Frenda?”
Mugino looked confused.
And she didn’t stop walking.
“She makes tons of friends in both worlds because she can easily sympathize with the situations people find themselves in. She’s a bomb freak who enjoys killing, but it also isn’t hard to get her crying. That’s good from a human perspective, but working on the dark side like that will break you.”
“That super isn’t what I meant,” cut in Kinuhata.
They continued through the dreary underground passageway that had a way of wearing down the human heart.
“Mugino, I meant how you took such care and super held back on making our attack. I expected you to grab us by the collar and demand we head out right away.”
“That’s what I would normally do, but I wasn’t in the mood. And I liked that.”
“?”
“Calling me Mugino. Much better than adding an honorific.”
That was all it took for them to speed up their pace.
Out of nowhere, Kinuhata asked another question.
“So do you super think it was true?”
“Think what was?”
“That she was the Dark Side’s Bane. She super claimed to be the #6, remember?”
Mugino shrugged.
“She was probably bluffing.”
“That’s super what I thought.” Kinuhata didn’t seem very surprised. “Whether they know it or not, any of the Level 5s is going to be part of some super major project. It’s just the ones who act like good people super haven’t been told about it. So if we had killed one, all the awful grownups benefiting from her would have done something to get back at us, but there’s been super no sign of that.”
“Also, if she was a Level 5, then her DNA map would be extremely valuable, so attempting to leave the city with falsified documents could have gotten her assassinated. Not even I want to try crossing that outer wall. The people at the top would try to prevent the leak of the DNA map by killing the escapee even if it meant firing a powerful contactless weapon through their apartment wall.”
For that matter, a hot-blooded hero dedicated to defeating villains wouldn’t try to run away the instant she was cornered. That would only allow the weak to be devoured.
Then something occurred to Mugino.
(That would mean the real Dark Side’s Bane is on another level entirely, wouldn’t it?)
“I had to kill her before getting a clear answer out of her, so wouldn’t that mean she was actually pretty powerful?”
“Takitsubo-san was really mad about that stunt you pulled. It’s just super hard to tell since her face is always blank. I know it was necessary, but you did electrocute yourself.”
“I am technically an electrical esper, you know? I have more of a resistance than your average person.”
“Your heart super stopped for two full minutes.”
“Item fights as a team. I knew someone would collect me after I died and my heart stopped.”
“She super said she would kill you if you got in the habit of it.”
That was pretty extreme for Takitsubo, who normally acted as their brakes. So Kinuhata wasn’t joking about her being really mad.
Then Mugino’s phone rang.
She pulled it from her pocket but didn’t stop walking.
“Hello, hello.”
“First off, good work. I am glad you managed to clean up the Colosseum incident. Just to be sure, you can accept payments now, I hope? The support organization reported that the money cards they had collected were melted by a deadly electrical current.”
“Huh? I thought you’d be more upset. Wasn’t that insurance company general manager our client? We did kind of abduct him and beat him up.”
“If you took this job seriously, you should already know that isn’t an issue. Academy City needs to keep its six-stage hierarchy of Level 0 to Level 5. Two or more conflicting systems of evaluating power would only lead to chaos. The city leaders didn’t want that happening.”
“I get the feeling you actually hoped that general manager would get dragged into all the trouble.”
“Based on what?”
Mugino kept walking through the gloomy underground passageway, taking a deep breath of the damp air.
And she gave her answer.
“Kouzaku Mitori. It sounds like you managed to stop her attack on the Windowless Building, but if her plan had worked out, that general manager would have been the one who gave her the information she needed. And someone would need to punish the traitor to tie up all the loose ends.”
“I am much too nice to give you any answers here☆ You would be in a lot of trouble if you knew anything for sure.”
“In other words, the higher ups are up to their usual tricks: hammering down any nail that sticks up too far.”
Mugino’s mood changed.
It silently but definitely grew colder.
“How much did you know about there being two Items? The two teams were set up to fight and whichever one survived got to officially keep the name. But when you get down to it, victory there doesn’t really give us anything of value, does it?”
“…”
“The higher ups wanted to hammer down a nail. Or some real idiot thought they would earn some points by taking the initiative. That means that girl with the stupidly long name stepped on someone’s toes. The battle over the title of Item was set up to eliminate that group for violating some kind of taboo.”
“Are you asking for confirmation? Again, you would be in a lot of trouble if you knew for sure.”
The voice on the phone’s tone dropped a bit.
An ordinary person would conclude this was a landmine. Anyone familiar with Academy City’s darkness, and with the voice on the phone who held special privileges there, would immediately back off. Even if they just barely managed to avoid the landmine, they would be stuck trembling in bed with the covers pulled up over their head for three days and three nights afterwards.
But these shadowy girls were different.
Kinuhata checked the map, nodded twice, and pulled a can of spray paint from her pocket. She roughly drew out a 2m circle covering the dank concrete wall.
That just left firing Meltdowner.
The underground shelter was designed to resist a nuclear attack, but the wall instantly raised the white flag. The girls now had a hole large enough to easily step through.
“Wha-?”
A woman in her mid-20s sat on the other side.
She wore a gawdy tight skirt suit and wore her long black hair pulled back.
She looked a lot like the highly sophisticated secretary of a major corporate president. Surprisingly, her desk contained an old-fashioned black telephone and a reel-to-reel tape recorder the size of a bookcase. Those were old enough to be rare. Although they had to be heavily modified in unseen ways to convert the analog signal to digital, encrypt it, and replace it with quantum bits.
(Her love of analog suggests she’s with the District 19 faction.)
“Wh-wh-wha-buh-wuh!?”
The voice on the phone was too shocked to speak, so Mugino casually spoke instead.
“When the wall’s more than a meter thick, I end up with a magma tunnel. Kinuhata, cool the edge of the hole for me.”
“Sure, sure. I’ll use my liquid nitrogen tank for that, but as you can see, this is an enclosed space. Don’t get yourself killed by super breathing in the nitrogen vapor.”
“Your eyes are bugging to an amusing degree, but I get the feeling you want to know how we got here. Or is it the ‘why’ you’re interested in? God, this is the problem with you utter morons who believe you’re safe just because you’re sitting in the important seat given to you by some higher up you’ve never even seen. Everything’s two sides of the same coin, so we all live in the same world.”
Mugino grinned and stepped inside.
But that smile didn’t mean she was truly enjoying this.
“I don’t even care about that shitty excuse for another Item. We still haven’t settled things concerning Hanano Choubi. If you were only trying to direct us toward killing them, then that chihuahua’s death was just an unfortunate accident. It never would’ve happened if you hadn’t recruited her and sent her to us.”
“And from the moment you approved of that Item vs. Item duel, you were dragging us into some show business nonsense. That alone deserves the super death penalty if you ask me.”
A faceless, nameless mysterious voice only had an advantage while they remained hidden.
Once they were identified and tracked down in person, all they could do was tremble in fear.
Strip away the shiny Academy City gilding and only shit remained.
The voice on the phone fell from her chair and clutched the black phone’s receiver to her large chest, but she could not call anyone for help. This was the secret hideout she had created for herself. The soldiers didn’t know she was here. If she did shout for help, her subordinates wouldn’t even find the entrance.
“So anyway, this is our revenge. …Prepare yourself, string puller. I will never forgive a traitor. Did you get that? I will never, ever forgive a traitor. Yes, I know a real idiot like you needs to hear something several times before it sinks in, so let’s try it again. I will never forgive a traitor. Did it get through your thick skull yet?”
“We super couldn’t let Takitsubo-san see this part. Or Frenda-san who’s been acting uncharacteristically nervous.”
This was just as unreasonable as letting someone sink to the bottom of the ocean in the bulletproof car they had designed to be indestructible.
The dark side was all about using people’s circumstances against them.
“R-really?”
“Ibotanokikouji Kaede asked the same thing.”
“I am the voice on the phone. I am the manager of the darkness – the one and only chosen one who passes down all the orders. If you kill your commander, it will be seen as a rebellion. You will make an enemy of Academy City’s 2.3 million people!!”
“Like I told her, I’m not fighting to survive.”
She was Meltdowner, one of Academy City’s seven Level 5s.
Mugino Shizuri held her palm out, gathered a beam there, and smiled belligerently.
No one was ever going to mistake her for a righteous hero.
Nor did she want to be one.
But she was still a kind person who cared deeply about her teammates.
“You’re – dead – meat.”
