To Aru Majutsu no Index part 2

Chapter 2: The People Who Have Slowly Begun to Move.

1

Inside an RV that one of their drivers had brought around for them sat Accelerator, Tsuchimikado Motoharu, and Musujime Awaki.

It was noon.

Fast-food meals lined a small table bolted to the floor.

Each was eating the food they'd bought—Accelerator his spicy fried chicken and Tsuchimikado his giant hamburger. They weren't kindred spirits even in what they ate for lunch.

Meanwhile, Musujime Awaki, eating a fancy salad from a direct-delivery brand in the Mediterranean, watched them.

"...That stuff will shave years off your life."

"Nya~. Eating nothing but green and yellow veggies seems too healthy, nya~. You need both meat and vegetables to maintain a healthy body, y'know. You've gotta have a balance."

"Hah. Wouldn't you be happier eating meat and dying? You'd be able to die after doing what you wanted to do until the end," said Accelerator to Musujime, licking grease off his thumb. "Anyway, find out anything about those School guys?"

"I accessed the Bank, but aside from the name, no. It looks like they're as secret as we are. It just says Group and School in there. But," she added with a pause, "When I looked around, I found a few more organization names like that."

"There weren't only two?" Tsuchimikado bit into his hamburger and hastily tried to keep the meat from coming out the other side.

"Group, School, Item, Member, and Block...," she answered, counting on her fingers. "Five, just from what I can tell. Details are unknown, but they're probably like us—unofficial teams made up of a small number of people. School were the ones plotting to snipe Oyafune Monaka. Would that make them the ones who blew up Management's mansion and attacked his escort car? Maybe Unabara Mitsuki infiltrated them, too."

"Who knows? But if he's doing spy work in School, I wish he'd at least give us a sign. We might think he's a baddie and accidentally kill him," said Tsuchimikado, listening to Musujime as Accelerator put a coffee can to his lips.

(...But why would School be trying to assassinate Oyafune Monaka?)

2

(They just do whatever they want, don't they?) thought Hamazura Shiage.

It was noon and they were at a family restaurant in District 7, but the girl known as Mugino Shizuri was sitting at one of the tables eating a convenience store bento she had bought elsewhere and she wasn't even trying to hide it. He felt sorry for the short waitress that was nervously standing nearby.

"Huh? This salmon bento seems different from the one from yesterday. Huh?"

Even inside the restaurant, she was wearing a bright autumny short sleeved coat. She crossed her stocking-covered legs as she sat next to the window and muttered those words of puzzlement. Hamazura responded silently in his heart with, "It's the same damn thing as yesterday."

Everyone at that table was rather eccentric.

"In the end, I'm getting kind of tired of canned mackerel. Now curry. Curry would be awesome."

The blonde-haired blue-eyed high school girl known as Frenda sitting next to Mugino said this while poking at the contents of a can, but she must not have been good at using a can opener because there was something that looked like PVC tape stuck around the can and the top had been burned off by an explosive with an electrical fuse stuck in it. Hamazura thought it was a tool usually used for blowing the locks off of doors.

Kinuhata Saiai, the girl sitting across from Frenda, was an obedient-looking girl of about twelve wearing a fluffy knit dress. She was paying no heed to the actions of the other eccentric girls (not because she had the good sense to ignore them or because she was broad-minded; that was just the type of eccentric person she was) and looking through some movie pamphlets.