Toaru Majutsu no Index SS

Volume 2, Chapter 1: Those Who Seek Bundles of Cash and a Battle. The Third Friday of January.

A single station wagon was roaring through Academy City which was created from the western portion of Tokyo. Three boys were onboard. Komaba Ritoku, Hanzou, and Hamazura Shiage. They were all members of a delinquent group known as Skill-Out.

The one gripping the steering wheel, Hamazura, was clearly too young to have a driver’s license. But there were two rules they were in violation of that made this seem irrelevant.

First, that station wagon was stolen.

Second, an ATM (they used the heavy machinery to pick it up) was stuck in the station wagon’s back seat.

The station wagon the boys were in flew down the road lined with wind turbines and below an airship floating in the blue sky.

“Oh, wow. One of these things has twenty million in it?”

Hanzou’s eyes shined as he looked at the ATM with its cracked screen and crushed body. He spoke to Hamazura who was sitting right in front of him in the driver’s seat.

“We were right to scout you. We never would’ve been able to rip out and steal a device reinforced against earthquakes without someone who could operate construction equipment.”

“Speaking of which, how did you gather money before?”

“Hm? Steal something easy and get the fuck out of there.”

“That’s pretty lame!!”

“Well, dragging someone weak-looking into a back alley and punching them a few times is faster, but, y’see, Leader Komaba won’t let us lay a hand on fragile girls.”

“But this way’s pretty exciting!!” said Hamazura as he and Hanzou laughed unintelligently.

Komaba gave no reaction to having been brought up in the conversation. Hamazura checked in the rear-view mirror and saw the large guy sitting heavily in the back seat like someone on the bench at Koshien.

“What’s with Komaba-san anyway?”

“You saw that thing before, right? There was that bow gun guy who invaded that elementary school at the start of the 3rd term and Leader Komaba sent him flying 5 meters with just his fist. It may seem out of character, but when a little girl is fond of him he gets really shy.”

The shoulders of the gorilla-sized man who would silence a crying child twitched.

“Eh...? Komaba-san’s looking at an online store on that PDA, right? He stopped and has been staring at an XL-sized Santa outfit and white beard set for almost 10 minutes now.”

His shoulders twitched even more.

“Yeah, I remember what she said, leader. She asked if Santa Claus really existed, right? So is a delinquent Santa gonna be visiting her at the end of the year!?”

As the two idiots laughed uproariously at that, Komaba suddenly squeezed the PDA in his hands as if he were wringing out a cloth.

“Fgaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!”

“E-eee!? Leader Komaba’s shyness is making him go crazy!!”

Komaba wasn’t operating the steering wheel, but the station wagon still slid to the side unnaturally.

“Hey, Hamazura. Is there a specific way to open up an ATM?” Hanzou asked while they were still heading back to their hideout in the station wagon.

“Oh, I’ll take it apart. It’s got a capsule in the safe so it can’t be opened improperly.”

“A capsule?”

“It’s got fluorescent paint in it. If you open it in the wrong way, it makes all the bills unusable. So don’t touch it until we’re back to the hideout.”

But just as Hamazura finished giving his warning...

“...Hamazura. What do you think this is...?”

“Hey, Komaba-san!! Just 5 seconds ago, I told you not to to—Wait, what?”

Hamazura looked toward the back seat via the rear-view mirror and then stopped moving.

Held in Komaba Ritoku’s thick fingers was a long, narrow stick similar to a USB drive.

Hamazura’s face paled and he whispered to Komaba.

“...It looks like a...GPS transmitter...”

As soon as he did, a shrill siren rang out from behind them. The red lights made it unnecessary to check. It was a high-speed sports car driven by Anti-Skill, the keepers of the peace in the city.

And in the middle of the road about 100 meters ahead was a large cylindrical special barricade robot with thick cushioning on the front. It looked like a large scroll stood up on one end and it was unrolling creating a cushioned wall that blocked the road.

Just when it finished, 2 or 3 Anti-Skill cars drove up on the other side of the barricade and strengthened it.

Hanzou held his head in his hands.

“Trouble up ahead and behind!? Hey, Hamazura, what do we do!?”

“Well...”

Hamazura thought for a second.

“We break through.”

The station wagon roared with enormous speed toward the barricade as if the accelerator were pressed down as far as it would go and the Anti-Skill members waiting near the barricade hurriedly jumped out of the way. Just after an Anti-Skill woman jumped out of her car that was stopped on the road just in case, the station wagon broke through the barricade taking everything out.

Eighty percent of Academy City’s residents were students, so most of the crimes in the city were juvenile crimes. The barricade didn’t have the strength of a concrete block where hitting led to an instant death. Also, the station wagon had aimed for the very front of the cars parked lengthwise, so it opened a space between two of the cars and broke through the barricade spreading metal parts from bumpers everywhere.

The car pursuing the station wagon from behind frantically slammed on its brakes before it hit the remains of the barricade.

Before long, the station wagon took a sharp turn at an intersection and disappeared.

“Wow.”

The Anti-Skill woman who had landed on the asphalt after jumping from her car that had formed part of the barricade looked at the state of things and smiled in enjoyment.

“I think I’ve found an idiot who promises to be a lot of fun.”

Hanzou turned his head around looking at the scene disappearing behind them at high speed and whistled.

“Wow!! I can’t believe you broke through a barricade like that with force alone!”

“Well, you have to figure out what kind of wall it is. If it was the kind that will stop you even if it destroys the car or that purposefully lets you through and punctures your tires that method would’ve ended badly.”

With no expression on his face as usual, Komaba opened the car window and threw the GPS transmitter out.

“...Maybe we should get a different car...”

“We need to get farther away first. There’s no sign of pursuit, but it’s better to be su—”

Hamazura’s words were cut off midsentence.

A large specialized vehicle that looked like tanker truck had driven out of a side street. It looked like a tanker truck, but it was an extremely tough looking truck with a lot of, what looked like, angular armor on it.

“!?”

Before Hamazura could respond, the front of the truck hit the station wagon as if it had grazed the back corner. The station wagon kept its speed but was forcefully rotated about 60 degrees. The guardrail that should have been directly to the side now looked right in front of them. Hamazura didn’t even try to compensate by turning the steering wheel; he let the vehicle slide and managed to avoid ending up in a spin.

The tires screeched and black lines were rubbed into the road surface.

If he slammed on the brakes, he would actually lose control, so Hamazura stepped on the gas and stabilized the vehicle.

“What the fuck was that!?” Hamazura yelled turning to look behind him.

That was when his eyes turned to dots.

He saw a tiny red light on top of the large specialized truck.

“You idiot!! Don’t tell me you’re trying to pass that off as an Anti-Skill vehicle!!”

Just when Hamazura yelled that, the truck took a sharp turn as if it was swinging the tanker portion on the back straight towards the station wagon.

Hanzou’s expression changed.

“Oh, fuck!! They’re really trying to kill us!!”

A woman with large breasts was sitting in the truck’s driver’s seat as if she had shown her badge and forcibly borrowed the truck. She had a voice amplification device like a megaphone in one hand.

“U-umm. This is Yomikawa Aiho of Anti-Skill Branch 73. With charges of theft, property damage, attempted murder, and interference with a public servant’s duties, I’m taking you pieces of shits down to hell!”

“Tch!! Miss Tits there must have a grudge to put interference with a public servant’s duties at the list’s climax!!”

Just when Hanzou had yelled that and taken out a handgun, the truck approached with tremendous horse power as if it were responding.

Yomikawa Aiho operated the truck’s hula hoop-sized steering wheel and tried to overtake the station wagon. The boy with a bandana tried to lean out the window with his handgun, but Yomikawa turned the steering wheel swinging the back of the tanker portion of the truck and striking the side of the station wagon.

She heard an enjoyable crash.

The station wagon was pinned between the truck and the guardrail and forced to move forward, but the guardrail must not have been able to withstand the impact because the metal sheet tore off. The station wagon had lost all control and it slammed into an uninhabited warehouse along with the truck.

After destroying the thick metal wall and scattering a mountain of cardboard boxes in the warehouse, the station wagon and the truck’s trajectories separated. The station wagon headed further into the cardboard box mountain range and the truck struck the inner wall of the warehouse.

The airbag in the steering wheel activated and struck Yomikawa in the face.

“Uwpphh! ...You damn kids. Now I’m going to chase you down to the ends of the earth!”

She decided to try backing out of the wall, so she moved the shift lever and stepped on the gas, but the truck wouldn’t move back at all.

When she realized that either the frame was crushed or it was caught on something, she saw 2 or 3 boys with guns.

“Oh, crap,” muttered Yomikawa.

She opened the driver side door and jumped out.

A second later, a number of bullets flew in from the passenger side.

(...Three-shot burst?)

Yomikawa frowned while hiding behind the tanker portion of the truck. Three-shot burst meant that three shots would automatically be fired every time the trigger was pulled. It did increase the firepower, but...

“Oww!? Hanzou, you idiot! Why did you make that huge magnum three-shot burst!? And you can’t even change the mode!”

“Eh? But isn’t it powerful and cool to fire a bunch of bullets at once?”

“...You even adjusted the length of the magazine for that?”

(Okay, they’re all idiots, so I should be able to pull this off.)

At any rate, the boy was losing to the recoil of the three-shot burst modified handgun so he couldn’t aim it properly. Yomikawa secretly believed she could win this, but then she noticed the soccer ball-sized objects rolling from the truck and around her feet.

“Geh.”

This time, she ran at full speed.

The entire concept of Hanzou’s three-shot burst magnum was a testament to his idiocy, but it still had a reasonable amount of firepower. Hamazura felt that the truck the Anti-Skill woman was hiding behind was in the way, so he focused his fire on the fuel tank underneath driver’s seat.

Then he saw the woman running away.

She must have been worried that the fuel tank was going to explode.

“Okay, we drove her out. I almost want to capture that woman and her huge tits and show her what’s what.”

“...No sexual crimes...”

“I know, Komaba-san, I know. Anyway, the ATM. It’ll be a pain if she calls in backup and we’re surrounded. I wonder if the station wagon’ll still run.”

As Hamazura started to walk back towards the station wagon that had struck the mountain of cardboard boxes, something hit his toes.

When he looked down, he saw a soccer ball-sized sphere on the ground.

Hamazura’s face stiffened, Hanzou went pale, and Komaba remained as expressionless as ever.

“Hey, Hamazura. Is that...?”

“...Yeah...”

It was the large kind of firework normally only seen at a fireworks show.

Looking back at the large specialized truck, they saw the words “Fukuoka Fireworks Manufacturing” on the side. And they saw similar ball-shaped silhouettes spread around the warehouse.

That was when they saw something flash.

It was some kind of electric cord that had been torn off near the fuel tank under the driver’s seat by the three-shot burst magnum. The bluish white light that was emitted headed for the gasoline that had spilled to the ground.

“!?”

“!?”

“!?”

The three idiots’ yells were drowned out by large flowers flying up into the winter sky.

In the end, Hamazura, Hanzou, and Komaba had been blown into the sky like in the explosive ending of a comical story and Yomikawa had come back to arrest them and throw them in jail. There were a few other ill-bred looking delinquent boys in the room, but they must have sensed something about the three who were covered in soot and beaten up, because none of them were looking those three in the eye.

Hamazura grabbed the bars of the cell with both hands and limply hung his head.

“...I agree that stealing an ATM isn’t a good thing to do, but isn’t the worst one that woman with the huge tits!? Because of her all of the cash in the ATM was burned up!!”

“...She makes it so things would be more peaceful if she just let the criminal go. ...What a horrible Anti-Skill. You do see idiots like that in police dramas, I suppose... I really hate large breasts...”

“Ah, fuck!! Hey, Komaba-san, she doesn’t count as a fragile girl, right!? When I get outta here, I’m gonna show her what’s what! I’ll grab ‘em like this and stick it between ‘em!!”

Unusually, Komaba was complaining alongside Hamazura, but Hanzou hadn’t said anything for a bit. Maybe the shock of having the fireworks blow up in his face had been too much for him, because he was sitting on the floor in a corner of the cell with his arms around his knees and not moving.

Finally he worked up his resolve and opened his heavy mouth.

“Sorry, Hamazura. And Leader Komaba, too. I’m really sorry.”

“Huh? What’s with you?”

The other two looked at him and Hanzou turned his face to the side as if he couldn’t bear having them look directly at him.

Then he quickly spoke.

“...I think I’m in love.”

“Ugheeh!?”

“Ugheeh!?”