A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 7 (7 page)

“…Well, thanks.”

Exhausted, Kamijou stepped into the site of the Hakumeiza theater.

Though the building looked giant even from far away, the parking lot right out front was so small it must have been for employees only. It was probably because there was a train station nearby, as well as a parking garage next door. The property was enclosed with two meter-tall metal plates, but the entrance for workers to go in and out had been forcibly opened—a thick chain and padlock were lying on the ground.

There was no heavy construction equipment or anything of the sort in the tiny parking lot. Even the building itself had no trace of graffiti or broken glass. Perhaps they’d found a buyer for it and someone came to do periodic maintenance on it.

When he and Orsola approached, they could see that Hakumeiza was larger than a gymnasium and constructed in a perfect square. Maybe it resembled a famous theater somewhere, and maybe it was just that designing the building had been a pain.

All right, I guess they’re inside. It’s hot out here, after all.

He directed his gaze to Hakumeiza’s entrance. It was large, with five glass double doors lined up. There were no boards or anything in the way. It was less of a ruin and more just closed for a while.

As he thought about this, one of the five doors in front of him opened up.

“Huh?” he grunted.

Out of the three that exited, he recognized two of them as Index and Stiyl.

The last one—he didn’t know her. She was a foreigner who looked a little younger than Index. She was dressed in the same black habit as the nun he’d met at the bus stop. However, this girl’s habit had been made into a pretty small miniskirt—she must have undone the fasteners on the skirt to remove that part. His eyes fell to her feet, and to his surprise, she was wearing wooden sandals with soles thirty centimeters high.

As soon as Index saw Kamijou, she burst out,

“Touma, where did you meet that sister?”

“…That didn’t take long. Anyway—and this question is mainly for the evil priest next to you—but why did you bother with such an elaborate faked kidnapping again? And I would definitely like to know why you made me exhaust myself by walking three kilometers in this insane heat! Please, go ahead! Actually, no—you’re gonna tell me whether you like it or not!!”

Stiyl turned a tired expression on the shouting Kamijou. “Ah, what? So you knew it was a trick. I wanted to call you out here to get you to help search for someone. I just used the Index of Prohibited Books as a decoy. By the way, this is the one in charge here. She’s Agnes Sanctis, from the Roman Orthodox Church.”

Stiyl pointed in her general direction with the tip of his cigarette, and the nun wearing the platform sandals bowed and said, “H-hi.” It looked like she was aware already that Japanese people bowed their heads all the time, but her motion was exaggerated, making her look like a hotel worker.

Kamijou was a little embarrassed at someone he’d never seen before suddenly addressing him. He was currently at max anger, but he couldn’t let himself vent it on someone he had no acquaintance with.

As if pressing him hard now that his pace had been broken, Stiyl said, “Sorry, but we don’t have time to go along with your nonsense. Like I said before, I brought you here to have you help look for someone. Two hundred and fifty people are looking for her now, and yet they can’t locate her. It’s a race against time. Her life is on the line, so we need you to help us quickly.”

“Nonsense…? Hey, that’s no way to treat a guest you’re asking for help! Damn it, what is this? What do you mean her life is on the line? Explain
it to me! And besides, I’m an amateur! I have no skill at tracking people down! Don’t leave such an important job to a high school student!”

“Oh, everything is all right. If you just hand over the nun next to you, that’ll be fine.”

“What?” Kamijou’s eyes became pinpoints.

Stiyl, who seemed to think this was truly foolish, exhaled cigarette smoke. “That nun is the missing person we were looking for. Her name is Orsola Aquinas. All right, thank you very much. You did very well. You can go home now, Touma Kamijou.”

“…Excuse me, but I was set up in all this, and in addition to having left the city with a suspiciously acquired Academy City exit permit in one hand, I walked three kilometers when it’s almost forty degrees out. What’s my position in all this?” Kamijou muttered, looking down. However…

“I already said you did well, didn’t I? You want me to treat you to some shaved ice or something?”

Index’s face turned blue and panicky at seeing Touma Kamijou looking down and grinding his teeth.

They heard a funny
grrkk
come from around Kamijou’s temples.

“You know, until now, I know we’re not what you could call
friends
, but we were getting along just fine otherwise. I’m serious. I seriously thought that, you know? Yeah, at least, until this moment!!”

“Enough of your jokes. Just hand Orsola over to Agnes already. What? You want me to pay more attention to you? Unfortunately, I can’t take away your loneliness, and I wouldn’t want to anyway because it would be creepy.”

On top of getting seriously angry, having been ignored so briefly caused Kamijou to collapse where he stood, as if he had burned out. “Urgh, uuuuuuurrrrrrgh. I don’t even have the energy to make dinner tonight anymore. Index, we’ll have to have commonplace takeout pork bowl for dinner tonight.”

Kamijou ignored the always-hungry girl shouting, “What?! But Touma!!” and turned back to face the sister in all black, Orsola Aquinas. “…You did say someone was after you. Did this search have something to do with it? You should be fine now that your allies are here, right?”

When Kamijou addressed her, Orsola’s shoulders gave a jerk for some reason. It was a small tremble, like she had tried to suppress it and failed.

He tilted his head. She seemed to be looking at Stiyl and the others, not at him.

Stiyl closed one eye, uninterested. “Hmm. There’s no need to be anxious. We English Puritans are getting out of here as soon as our job is done. Well, I suppose you should at least have that much caution.”

For an outsider like Kamijou, everyone looked lumped together as either “someone from the Church” or “someone belonging to the magic world.”

He wondered, though, if they were viewing one another as hostile and subdividing them into Roman or English or whatever. But then…

“Oh, no. I can’t give her to you so easily.”

Suddenly, they heard a deep, male voice.

Unnaturally, it came to Kamijou from straight above. He looked up to the night sky and saw a paper balloon about the size of a softball floating around seven meters up in the air.

The thin paper making up the balloon was vibrating of its own accord, creating the man’s voice he had just heard.

“Orsola Aquinas. You should know that best of all. You could live a much more meaningful life with us than you could going back to the Roman Orthodox Church.”

That moment.

With a sharp
zip
, a single blade plunged out of the ground in between Kamijou and Orsola. It came close to being a surprise attack to the spots of Kamijou and the others, whose attention had been directed overhead.

And then two more came up around Orsola with a
zing
and a
ging
!!

The swords that leaped out at them slid in a straight line through the ground like a shark fin cutting across the surface of the water.
The three blades cut across the ground, carving out a triangle two meters on each side with Orsola at the center.

“Aahh!” As Orsola felt gravity give way, she gave a cry that sounded more bewildered than afraid. But before it could turn into a clear scream, Orsola’s body began to plunge into the dark underground along with the entire triangular piece of asphalt.

“Amakusa!!” shouted Agnes, trying to reach her hand out, but she was too late. Orsola was already being swallowed up into the pit of darkness. Kamijou frantically ran to the edge of the hole and swore angrily.

“Shit, a sewer…?!”

The paper balloon overhead continued in an enthusiastic yet still focused voice.

“If we simply follow the Roman Orthodox commander, it did not matter where Orsola Aquinas flees or who she is captured by—she would eventually be brought here. I suppose running around underground waiting was well worth it!!”

Kamijou couldn’t get even a marginal hold on this situation. Who was hiding in the sewers? For what reason had they suddenly taken Orsola away?

He knew one thing, though.

They came out suddenly and without warning with blades and had kidnapped someone. And from what it sounded like, it was not just a random occurrence, but something they had planned beforehand and had waited and waited for their chance to come.

“Damn it!!”

Kamijou peered into the triangular hole in the ground. As it was dark, his depth perception was a little off, but it didn’t seem too steep to him. He faced the hole, about to jump in, when…

“Wait! Don’t do it, Touma!!”

The very moment Index shouted…

Glitter
—light glinted off dozens of blades in the darkness.

As if reflecting a little bit of light from the evening sun, the orange rays radiated and twisted inside the sewer. With the light from the blades, only the faint outlines of those hidden underground came into view. The sight reminded him of bandits wielding rusted swords and axes, waiting with bated breath in the thickets beside a thin mountain trail for their sacrifices to pass by.

A ball of pure malice blew straight into his face like a burst of hot wind.

In an instant, Stiyl, beside Kamijou, whose movements had been locked down, pulled out cards with runes inscribed on them.

He threw the four cards on the ground, positioning them around himself.

“TIAFIMH (There is a fire in my hand), IHTSOAS (it has the shape of a sword), AIHTROC (and it has the role of conviction)!!” Stiyl shouted, flicking his cigarette directly upward. An orange trail followed it up, and in the next moment, a sword made of flames jumped into his hand along that line.

The newly created source of powerful light immediately wiped away the darkness in the sewer.

Stiyl brought the flame sword around in a large arc…but then stopped suddenly.

Inside the sewer illuminated by the flame sword, there was nobody. All those people had vanished into thin air along with the darkness that had been wiped away. All of those silhouettes in the hole holding swords, as well as Orsola, who should have fallen in, had disappeared in the blink of an eye—like a pack of sea lice attached to a riverbank all running away at once.

The paper balloon that had been lazily floating overhead slowly descended to them.

Nobody reached out a hand for it as it fell into the triangular carved hole in the ground.

“Shit! What the hell is going on here?” demanded Kamijou as if spitting something out. “Hey! You’re gonna explain this to me in full, right?”

“Actually, I am the one who’d like an explanation for this,” responded Stiyl Magnus, as if to crush the paper balloon under his foot.

At last, the sun set on the shore, fortified with man-made objects, and the night was welcomed in.

It was a craggy area only a few hundred meters from a swimming beach. Just onshore was a cliff almost ten meters tall, and tetrapods were piled up high so that waves wouldn’t erode it.

Now that the sun had completely set, the sea was covered in a deep black.

Then, as if awaiting the night’s arrival, a hand appeared from the surface of the dark water.

It wasn’t just a hand—it was a covered one. Heavily armored fingers, shining in silver, grabbed hold of one of the concrete tetrapods. Then, a person in Western-style full-plate armor broke the surface of the water and climbed up onto it. Clad in steel from head to toe, it was questionable whether there was even a person inside.

When the first one made it to land, twenty more of the “knights” emerged from the water’s surface. One after another, they climbed atop the tetrapods, emulating the first. The lettering emblazoned on the arms of their armor read U
NITED
K
INGDOM
—letters that also represented the nation called England.

They had swum here.

That wasn’t a figure of speech. They had begun in England,
rounded the Cape of Good Hope, passed through the Indian Ocean, and had at last infiltrated the water of faraway Japan.

It was sorcery for manipulating ocean currents using the legend of Saint Blaise as a framework. Simply put, this was a technique for high-speed sea travel that allowed one to go fast enough to circumnavigate the earth in three days. It was not a Soul Arm–like function attached to their armor—it was something activated purely by each individual knight’s own body. The armor they currently wore had no such functionality. Because the knights themselves were so highly maneuverable, adding Soul Arm effects to the armor would have just slowed them down. With their tremendous strength, they could go on rampages more violent than effects produced by Soul Arms, so they would have run the risk of destroying their armor with their own power.

They were simply called the Order of the Knights.

They had once gone by names such as “Seventh Mace” and “Fifth Axe” in England but had abandoned such titles seven years ago. That was not because the current Order had lost its outstanding individuality, but because the Order had been reborn by each knight having acquired every skill.

The reason they needed to acquire such strength was related partly to circumstances particular to England and partly to the original objective of establishing the Order.

Right now, the United Kingdom operated under a complex three-sided chain of command.

The Queen Regnant and the Royal Family Faction, headed by Parliament.

The Knight Leader and the Knight Faction, commanding the knights.

The Archbishop and the Puritan Faction, led by the faithful.

Their power relation was as follows.

The Royal Family Faction issued royal commands to the Knight Faction, controlling them.

The Knight Faction used the Puritan Faction as convenient tools.

The Puritan Faction gave direction to the Royal Family Faction under the name of Church advice.

In this beautifully triangular system, if one attempted to carry out an agenda while even one of the others was not convinced of the policies therein, the other could present total opposition by taking the long way around the chain. However, there was another reason that the United Kingdom was said to have the world’s most complex Crossist culture.

The United Kingdom was a combination of nations consisting of England, the northern part of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Reminders of this remained to this day—certain places even issued their own currency.

For example, there could be bad blood between the Puritan Faction’s English and Welsh members, despite them belonging to the same group. Conversely, it wasn’t unusual for separate factions within one nation, like the Puritan and Knight Factions of Scotland, having pipelines to each other. When Sherry Cromwell, the code-breaking expert, bared her fangs at the English Puritan Church—which she belonged to—she had this sort of backing in addition to her personal motive.

Three factions and four cultures.

This two-dimensional diagram where each affected the other led to the nation called England becoming more complex. In turn, the greatest mission given to the Knight Faction was to
make sure this complex combination of countries didn’t break apart in midair.

Thus, these particular knights hadn’t been persuaded beforehand…

…that the English Puritans—the Puritan Faction—had gained the same power as the Knight Faction.

The English Puritan Church, also known as the Anglican Church, had originally been created to oppose Roman Orthodoxy, which had the entire world under its rule. They wanted to operate their own nation themselves, but if they didn’t obey the Roman Orthodox Church, they would be attacked as a nation that disobeyed the teachings of the Crossist god. So by placing an independent church within
England, they could explain themselves by saying their actions were in line with the teachings of the god of Crossism—meaning English Puritanism—even if they weren’t strictly following Roman Orthodox canon.

In other words, the English Puritan Church had been created as a political tool.

The Church was the oil they had created to lubricate the giant cogs of the royal family and the knights under its command.

But right now, the relationship between the Puritans and the royal family and knights was being undermined by the Puritan chain of command.

Nobody appreciated the fact that their actions were being restricted by something created to be a tool.

Actually, though, with the Knight Leader and Queen Regnant as their masters, the knights would not only cut corners when carrying out the Archbishop’s orders—in severe cases, they’d outright spurn them.

Their answer to their current mandate, to support the rescue operation of the
Book of the Law
and Orsola Aquinas, had been simple: All members of Amakusa should be killed.

They had no obligation to put their lives on the line for an order from someone who didn’t acknowledge them—the Archbishop.

They didn’t take their religious and ethical relationships with the Roman Orthodox Church or Amakusa even slightly into consideration.

It wouldn’t affect England’s national interests in the least if Amakusa were to disappear.

It would be easy to kill them. The skills of the knights—the many works passed down through legend by the Murder Crusaders, who buried multitudes of heretics during the Crusades—were powerful enough to wipe a small island off the map.

A sect on a far eastern island nation, they could destroy within a day.

And they wouldn’t care what happened to the possible hostage, Orsola, in the process.

The English Puritan Church didn’t actually have any interest in
the contents of the
Book of the Law
. They were already recorded in the prohibited Index’s memories, so they just needed to leave it to her. Whether Orsola lived or died, it wouldn’t damage English interests. The Roman Orthodoxy might cause a fuss about it, but the chore of suppressing that would fall to the Archbishop.

The Archbishop had warned them to be careful of what action Kaori Kanzaki, former leader of Amakusa, might take, but the knights were far from taking that piece of advice to heart. If Kaori Kanzaki came upon them, blinded with rage over Amakusa being annihilated, they would just make her into a bloodstain on the wall as well.

Or they
would have
.

But all those plans went awry in just three seconds.

Once the knights had broken the surface and climbed atop the tetrapods…

…
it
appeared from below and pierced through them.

Bang! Boom!!
The many tetrapods, each weighing more than a ton, blew away like a volcano had erupted. The knights on them, having also been thrown upward, recovered their balance in midair and scanned the surface below to look for a landing point.

At ground zero—the center of where the twenty-one knights and vastly numerous tetrapods had gone flying—was a lone girl.

She had long black hair tied in the back, white skin covered in lithe muscles, a squeezed short-sleeved T-shirt, jeans with one leg cut off, western boots, and a katana more than two meters long called “Seven Heavens, Seven Blades” resting on the leather belt at her waist.

Kaori Kanzaki.

She didn’t speak. She began her attack on the twenty-one airborne knights without a word.

It was a simple thing she was doing. She would attack each of the twenty-one knights, one at a time, who were floating without footing and unable to move. Not by using her sword to slash, either—but by politely bashing them with its sheath.

But she was so desperately fast. Too fast.

The knights hadn’t actually been in the air for one second yet. But they all immediately felt like they had been frozen in midair. That was how fast Kanzaki’s movements were. It was like time had stopped, and she alone was moving through it freely.

If someone had been observing time properly, it would have looked like an invisible storm erupting from ground zero.

Each knight that took a hit from the scabbard crashed into the ground, sank into the cliff face, or struck the road on the shore. Those launched into the sea skipped across it like a thrown pebble.

After mowing down twenty-one knights in all, Kanzaki quietly landed atop one of the tetrapods.

When the damp night wind lightly caressed her hair, the floating knights at last fell to the ground. A loud
wham
echoed across the dark seashore.

“I tried to hold back. This way, there would be no fatalities. Wearing sturdy armor made my job easier, and for that I thank you.”

“You…bastard…”

The knights took her quiet voice as an insult and tried to stand. But they had been utterly shaken to their cores, and moving their fingers was all they could manage.

That’s why the knights instead moved their mouths—the one thing they could still operate freely.

“Do you…understand? Who you just…attacked? You’ve just bitten the hand…of the three contracts and four lands…of the United Kingdom itself!”

“I, too, am a part of it. I’m sure those above me will take care of this, as it was trouble not between us and Roman Orthodoxy or Russian Catholicism, but within the English Puritan Church itself…Oh.” She realized the knight who had spoken had lost consciousness, and she promptly stopped talking.

“There were some I tossed into the ocean…But it didn’t look like they had disengaged their submersible technique yet, so I don’t believe I must worry about them drowning,” whispered Kanzaki to herself, glancing once at the dark surface of the sea.

“Your words lack punch when you say them with such worry on your face, you know.”

“Hm?” Kaori Kanzaki finally stirred and turned around to the familiar voice. It was a young man with short, spiky blond hair, blue sunglasses, a Hawaiian shirt, and shorts.

Motoharu Tsuchimikado.

Kanzaki saw where he was standing and was surprised. Her honed senses wouldn’t have missed someone’s approach in the first place…Nevertheless, when she looked at Tsuchimikado, ten meters away, she still couldn’t feel his presence.

“Have you come to stop me?”

When Kanzaki reached for the hilt of her katana, the eyes behind the sunglasses remained smiling.

“Give it a rest, Kaori Kanzaki. You can’t beat me.” Despite the situation, he showed no nervousness, held no weapon, and didn’t even position himself for a fight. “No matter how strong
you
might be, you can’t kill people. And an esper like me might die just from using magic to fight you. This battle…I would die whether I won or lost, but are you really prepared to kill Kamikaze Boy Tsuchimikado and keep moving forward? Eh?”

Kanzaki clenched her teeth.

She manipulated her techniques so that people wouldn’t die. For Kanzaki, a fight in which someone would die whether they won or lost held no meaning. In fact, that was the worst outcome she could imagine.

She could feel her fingers trembling as they touched her katana’s hilt.

Then Tsuchimikado pulled a one-eighty and switched to an innocent, childlike grin. “That’s fine, you can keep glaring. I wasn’t told to stop ya personally, Zaky. Though I was told to head you off and eliminate you if it looked like you were gonna cause an issue. And I’ve got my own job to do anyway.”

“Your…own job?”

“Yeah. I got the cushy job of digging around for the original copy
of the
Book of the Law
while the Roman Orthodox Church and Amakusa are preoccupied with their little firefight.”

Kanzaki’s eyes narrowed slightly. “On whose orders? The English Puritan Church’s or Academy City’s?”

“I wonder. Well, common sense will lead you to the answer. Which wants grimoires—the magical world or the scientific world, hmm? Well, considering which I’m the spy for, it’s pretty easy to figure out.”

Kanzaki fell mum at Tsuchimikado’s words.

There was a terrible air dominating the area, one that could freeze even the tropical night wind flowing between them.

Seconds of silence ensued, and the first one to break eye contact was Kanzaki.

“…I need to go. If you want to report this to your superiors, feel free.”

“Is that so? Ah, we’ll handle rounding up all these groggy guys. It’d be a pain if the police picked ’em up, after all.”

“I’m in your debt.” Kanzaki bowed her head courteously, and Tsuchimikado said to her,

“By the way, what brought you so far from England anyway, Zaky?”

She left her head down and stopped moving.

After a good ten seconds had passed, she finally lifted her face.

“Who knows…?” she said, smiling mechanically, like she was angry and about to cry at the same time.

“…Honestly, what
do
I want to do?”