“Nothing too difficult. We’re just using everything we have available.”
After he finished pulling the twine around several more stakes, he pointed overhead.
Lesser looked up without argument and saw a thinly stretched condensation trail.
7
Brasche P. Marhaisk frowned.
He was at the front of the prisoner escort truck convoy, controlling a small, eight-wheeled carriage hitched to a Sleipnir. The carriage was covered in silver metal plates in the shape of a pill bug, looking like it was armored.
Still, his expression wasn’t due to a bad mood. To increase the durability of the escort vehicle, the driver only had a single thin, horizontal slit with glass in it to look through, so it wasn’t just Brasche—basically all armor drivers made this sort of face, whether magical or scientific.
White snowfields stretched out as far as the eye could see. It was almost impossible to tell the asphalt and the ground apart.
At a glance, it would seem like a driver could ignore the road and floor it. However, that wasn’t actually how it worked. The problem was the snow. No one could tell from its surface how deep it went. It wasn’t possible to see if there was a thick fallen tree buried in it, either.
Brasche wanted to avoid at all costs breaking the eight-legged horse Soul Arm by tripping over something carelessly. After all, Russia was nothing if not big. Its urban areas were some of the most developed in the world, but on the other hand, empty spaces were seriously empty. In fact, this area was about as unideal as a desert when it came to bad places to be stranded.
And if someone opened a map, the only thing worth writing about this place was “there’s nothing here.” Since it hadn’t been updated for years, you’d never know what was where. Which meant he really didn’t want to veer off the thin road partially hidden under the snow.
“How many more hours until the camp?”
A bored-sounding voice came in from the trucks comprising the convoy.
Over a magical Soul Arm, of course.
“Our population density is way too high, damn it. It’s like a sauna in here.”
“Why not open a door for ventilation?” answered Brasche, not sounding like he cared much. “In about ten seconds, you’ll be begging for the heat to come back.”
Just then, a shrill noise shot by overhead.
An Academy City supersonic bomber.
The HsB-02, was it? They’d gotten reports that those things had changed Avignon, in France, to a lake of molten rock. They seemed to be focusing on transport missions right now instead of bombing runs, but they weren’t the sort of thing that anyone could remain calm about while they were flying overhead.
“Damn it. What’s the regular Russian military doing? Can’t they use SAMs or something?”
“They go at seven thousand kilometers per hour, remember?” replied Brasche. “Even if they locked on and fired, the missile wouldn’t catch it. Academy City seems to think the fundamentals of aerial warfare are beneath them.”
“What about MiGs? Sukhois? Aren’t the air force’s bigger jets good enough to take on American stealth planes?”
“I don’t know. You’re asking the wrong person about science.”
Brasche leveled a baleful gaze at the bomber in the air.
…Thanks to Peter’s interception spell, the age of sorcerers flying in the sky has ended. If not for that…
If that plane had been loaded with bombs, Brasche and the others might have been dead at this exact moment. It’d be a problem if it scattered light, small, airborne tanks with parachutes, too, but when the bombers weren’t doing their real job, it made Brasche feel a lot more humiliated than relieved.
“(…Bullshit. You’d better watch out.)”
It happened a moment after he muttered to himself.
Ba-gam!!
Suddenly, roiling flames burst up on their transport route.
“?!”
It was only about three hundred meters ahead. Frantically, Brasche ordered the Sleipnir pulling the armored carriage to come to a halt. The entire convoy stopped on the road.
It should have been an empty stretch of snow all the way to the horizon.
However, a log cabin sort of building was there, perhaps for people who ran into trouble like engine stalls during their journeys. The explosions had occurred right next to it. Brasche carefully scanned the area and saw what seemed like a four-wheel-drive vehicle there.
And then the explosions continued.
This time, the log cabin itself was blown to pieces. The only manmade object on this vast field of snow had been blasted apart.
These weren’t mere bombs.
The explosions continued along a straight line, as though running along the ground, for over three kilometers. White snow immediately whipped up, followed by the ground lighting up orange. The crust of the earth, melted by enormous heat, made it seem as though a volcanic eruption had cut a swath through Russian lands.
“What the hell?! Are we being bombed?!”
Normally, Brasche wouldn’t have been able to answer his comrade’s words.
But one time, he’d heard something along these lines: that Academy City’s supersonic bombers had once carved a square out of the map of a city called Avignon. That there existed weapons with terrifying destructive power that took advantage of the air friction born of their seven-thousand-plus kilometer-per-hour speeds.
“They finally did it, the bastards…!!”
An unpleasant sweat washed down Brasche’s spine. The convoy, composed of several trucks plus armored carriages, would be easy pickings from the air out on this snowfield with nothing else around them. There was nowhere to hide, and the huge lumps of flying metal could easily get a radar lock on them.
“Hey, can we use an Opila to make it so they won’t target us?!”
“We can’t take our time setting one up,” answered Brasche, recognizing once again the sense of danger he felt. “This is bad. We’d better bail out. If we stay here, they’ll slaughter us.”
“They’re bombing us!! Unknown Academy City superweapons!! If we get out of our vehicles, we’ll have no protection from the explosions!!”
“You saw that power!! With only the Soul Arms we have on us, they’ll reduce us and our vehicle to smithereens! We should make it so they don’t aim for us instead. If we hide ourselves in white camo and spread out over the snowfield, there’s a good chance we’ll live!”
“What do we do about the people from the settlement we captured?!”
“Leave them.” Brasche picked up his trusty staff and headed for the armored carriage’s exit. “Either way, we were bringing them to a concentration camp. Who cares if they end up as fodder for the bombings?!”
Meanwhile.
What Touma Kamijou and Lesser were hoping for was quite simple.
“You said the Steel Gloves you’ve got have been improved, right? Something about the blade fingers not having to touch—and being able to grab anything you hit with that red laser thing even if you’re far away?”
“Yes, but what about it?”
Kamijou pointed overhead in response to her question. “Then could you grab that for a sec?”
“?”
She followed his instructions, still frowning.
“Wait a minute. One more request. If you, like, stick the gloves into the ground, is it possible to go a little farther away and then make them move with your mind?”
“…That sounds like such a pain…”
“You can’t?”
“I can,” said Lesser, sticking the Steel Gloves upside down into the snow and walking a few meters away. From there, she slowly channeled mana into the Soul Arm and grabbed the distant object.
Yes:
An object flying high at an altitude of ten thousand meters, racing ahead at over seven thousand kilometers per hour—a supersonic bomber.
A moment later.
The Steel Gloves, dragged by the supersonic bomber, divided the Russian land in two.
&
nbsp; It was a simple matter of air resistance.
Ripping through the space close to the ground, which was mostly air, at over seven thousand kilometers per hour, created an enormous amount of energy.
With a tremendous roar, a line of orange light about three kilometers long shot through the white landscape, tracing the supersonic bomber’s flight route. The ground, melted like magma, threw all the white snow into the air. Likely unable to withstand the friction midway through, the line of destruction crawled to a stop just as the Steel Gloves fell to pieces.
Lesser was the one who was surprised.
“Oooooooooowaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh?! M-my-my Steel Gloves!! My Lesser Special Custom, the only one of its kind!!”
“Hmm. That re-created the Avignon effect pretty well. Maybe the Russian Catholics will be nice enough to let it fool them.”
The carriage–truck convoy, protected with a durable magic spell, was being abandoned in the middle of the snowfield. Kamijou saw a group of tough sorcerers, the likes of whom an average high school student wouldn’t have stood a chance against, running on foot to get as far away from the convoy as they could.
If he’d simply faked an aerial bombing with some explosives, things might not have gone this well. Kamijou was an amateur who couldn’t tell the difference, but explosives came in several varieties, and the way they detonated and the sounds they made were all different. For example, an explosion using propane gas or gasoline wouldn’t have matched that of a bomb and might have clued the guards in.
However, bombings using air friction were a product of Academy City’s special technology. Even when compared to a list of domestic Russian weapons, there wouldn’t be a single comparable reference.
That was why it’d worked as a deception.
Whether professional sorcerers or hardened soldiers, it was possible, at least once, to dupe them.
“If they were transporting something they had to protect with their lives in those trucks, this plan probably wouldn’t have worked so well. But they don’t give a crap about their guests, so they were sure to abandon them in a crisis.”
“…You seem to be feeling very accomplished about something, but those Steel Gloves belonged to me!! How are you going to pay me back for breaking them like that?!”
“How much do Soul Arms cost exactly anyway? Do they even sell them?”
Kamijou, asking offhand questions, broke into a run toward the convoy about three hundred meters ahead. Lesser followed him, muttering under her breath.
It seemed like residents who had been living in the area where they planned to construct the base had been all crammed into the trucks.
Kamijou had gone around to the back of one, but he couldn’t figure out how to get the door open. He tried shaking around the big metal mechanism he found, but it didn’t budge. Lesser had mentioned Russian Catholic sorcerers could have been driving, so thinking they were using a magical lock, he touched it with his right hand, but it had no particular effect.
Then, Lesser reached out from beside him. With a surprisingly simple motion, she easily pulled open the truck door.
The eyes of hunched-over men and women of all ages greeted them.
Some were frightened, others confused.
They feared that the convoy had arrived at their decidedly awful destination—and wondered why it hadn’t been Russian Catholics who had opened the truck door.
Kamijou tried to speak to them to set their minds at ease, but he didn’t know the slightest bit of Russian. He considered using hand and body gestures, but he gave up on that. Next to him, Lesser sucked her teeth.
“Can you tell them we’re escaping and ask for their help?”
“I can’t be bothered, honestly,” noted Lesser. “This act doesn’t seem to be for the United Kingdom’s benefit.”
Kamijou pointed haphazardly back at the snowfield. “If you don’t do it soon, those Russian Catholic sorcerers will realize something’s up and come back.”
“…”
Lesser made a face but seemed to have decided to comply without further argument. Seeing her turn to face the people in the truck, Kamijou went over to another of the trucks. The mechanisms on the doors were the same, and this time, he opened it himself. It would have been a pain to explain over and over again, so he used gestures to instruct them all to go over to where Lesser was.
“How are we going to run away?”
“We can use the trucks. There are probably adults here who can drive, right? In any case, I want them to go to the nearest town.”
“…Well, that’s fine. It’s just that I don’t see much in the way of concealment magic on them. These vehicles will look like they belong to the Russian military, and Academy City’s tanks have been deployed inland, so I hope they don’t get attacked.”
“We’ll take the carriage in the front. The one that resembles a pill bug covered in metal plates.” Kamijou gazed at the small carriage. “That seems like the best thing to keep people from seeing our faces from the outside. I’m clearly Asian, and Lesser…I can’t really tell myself, but I’m sure British people and Russian people have pretty different features and stuff. We’ll want to hide our faces as much as possible. That armored carriage would be perfect for heading for that base, too, but…there’s a problem I wanted to ask you about.”
“You’re not about to say you can’t drive the carriage, are you?”
“If there’s a high school kid these days who can say with a straight face they know how to drive a carriage, I’d like to meet them.”
“Well, if you’re going to put it that way, I’m only in middle school,” said Lesser, nevertheless taking the lead and heading for the armored carriage. She seemed to be rather confident about it.
As Kamijou began to follow her, he felt a sudden tug at the hem of his clothes.
He turned around to a little girl.
She seemed to be trying to tell him something, but she also seemed to understand that the words she and Kamijou used were fundamentally different.
Kamijou slowly removed the small hand grabbing his clothes but, unable to think of any way to get his point across, decided to speak to her in Japanese.
However, his voice never got a chance to come out.
A woman carrying a baby, who appeared to be the girl’s mother, hastily took the girl’s hand and pulled her away from him. He couldn’t understand what the mother was saying either, but hostility and fear filled her eyes.
…World War III—Japanese people from Academy City are Russia’s enemies, huh…?
He felt something dig into him, but without letting it enter his expression, he used Japanese to say everything he wanted to say.
“One day, when I’m in trouble like you, you can just repay the favor. So don’t worry about it too much.”
A quick honking noise came from the armored carriage. Impressed at the horn being no different from a normal automobile, Kamijou ran off toward its call.
8
The armored carriage’s interior couldn’t exactly be called comfortable. It wasn’t cold, thanks to an air conditioner–like Soul Arm set to regulate the temperature inside, but instead, the air was thick with the smell of sweat. Hemmed in by thick steel, they couldn’t see outside either, making it feel oddly claustrophobic.
Inside the parked armored carriage, Lesser had slipped cleanly into the driver’s seat. Nothing exposed there, either—it was totally covered in metal plating. Only the reins connected to the metal horse, the Sleipnir, reached through a slit.
“Wow. I figured it would be muggy in here, but not this muggy.”
“…Does this air-conditioner thing only have two settings, or what? I bet if you turned the dial just a tiny amount, it would get really cold really fast. Well, before that happens, it would probably break if I accidentally touched it with my right hand.”
“Hahhh, screw it—I can’t stand this! Time to undo my shirt buttons and air out my skirt.”
“Bfft!! What’s wrong with you?! I don�
�t understand why you suddenly do this stuff!!”
“I’m trying to use my sex appeal, so react to it already!! Just push me down, get it over with, and that’s one vanguard down for the sake of Britain!!”
“Hah! I bet she doesn’t even know what any of those things mean, and she’s still running her mouth with a smile on her face! Let me give you a piece of advice as someone who’s ever-so-slightly wiser—you’re really seriously saying some dangerous stuff right now! Be more careful next time!!”
Fool! You fell for it!!
The little devil Lesser, shaking the tail coming out of her miniskirt, gave a wicked smile, as though she’d found a way to counterattack.
“Okay then, fine, I hear you loud and clear!! In that case, let me prove to you just how serious I really am!!”
9
And on the Strait of Dover battlefield, a girl from the Born Again Amakusa-Style Crossist Church, Itsuwa, sensed something cold run down her spine as she clenched her spear in both hands.
“Hah, hawahh?!”
“?! Wh-what’s up, Itsuwa?”
Itsuwa slowly and nervously looked away from Saiji Tatemiya, who was startled at her strange behavior, and said, “N-nothing…I just had a bad feeling, for some reason…”
10
Nothing the late-bloomer was anxious about was happening, of course, and Lesser, gripping the Sleipnir’s reins, was sullenly driving the armored carriage.
“I was a little scared at first since this was a Russian-made metal horse, but the basics seem the same as a normal carriage.”
“A normal carriage, she says…”
Kamijou and Lesser were riding a Russian Catholic armored carriage, which probably helped ease their nerves somewhat. Still, he didn’t think they’d be able to get into a highly guarded fortress like this.
After Lesser had driven the thing for about thirty minutes, she suddenly stopped on an empty snowfield.
“We’re getting close to the fortress’s defensive perimeter. To be frank, if we go any farther, we’ll end up getting showered with missiles and grenades. The defensive Soul Arm installed in this carriage probably won’t be able to hold up against all of it.”
A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 20 Page 5