A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 20

by Kazuma Kamachi

  They’d never calculated for an enemy that could push in this far.

  Nevertheless, Academy City’s ground forces were on the move. Against all odds—to devour them from the inside outward.

  “…Damn it. It’s still falling,” grumbled Antseka bitterly, aiming his gaze through the gap in the hatch to the white skies. “Deploying the bare minimum defensive weaponry to protect the peace, my ass. Those are top-of-the-line vehicles that we might get zero kills on even if we had an entire platoon charge in—and they’re sprinkling them around like promotional fliers. The enemy is clearly prepared for invasion and occupation.”

  “Students make up eighty percent of their population of 2.3 million, right?” said one of his colleagues in the tank, finding it uncanny. “How can they rival Russia’s forces like that? The troop counts make no sense. Did you hear? Apparently, there’s nobody riding in those tanks, but they can move around anyway.”

  Antseka’s brow furrowed even more deeply. “It’s an absurd rumor, but I get the feeling they could pull anything off.”

  No sooner had he seen an Academy City supersonic bomber soar through the skies than a huge line of parachutes fell down in a line along its route. This time, they weren’t airborne tanks. They were probably materials for constructing a simple base.

  Their bases came in several stages.

  They were everything from “log cabins” assembled from multiple steel plates to shelters made from quick-drying reinforced cement. Those, what were they called, power suits? Their armor weapons assembled these bases at a staggering pace, and the bases were deploying all over Russia like cockroach nests.

  What’s more, Academy City seemed to dislike letting outsiders lay hands on their technology.

  Which meant these various fortresses must have been installed with mechanisms to be blown up or collected afterward. Unlike the Russian soldiers, who had their hands full with fighting, Academy City was already thinking of what would happen after the war was over.

  “We’ll never see the end of them,” spat one of his colleagues. “While we’re putting together a plan to attack a base that suddenly cropped up in front of us, they put a base behind us, too, before we even realized. Then, while we’re sitting around scared, they put down another, this time to disrupt our supply routes. Their speed is too much. Even criminals fleeing through the night wouldn’t be this fast.”

  At first, they’d tried shooting down the parachutes. But it didn’t have any effect. They could punch holes in the fabric with their anti-aircraft and machine guns, but then they’d sprout glider-like wings or deploy even more parachutes. It was limitless.

  It gave Antseka and the others a very blunt, clear impression.

  They wouldn’t be allowed to fight on their own terms.

  And they weren’t idiots, either. In terms of combat experience, they were head and shoulders above Academy City, which persisted through technology. If it came down to a pure shoot-out, they were confident they could at least achieve fifty-fifty results. They’d force the battle into a stalemate and hold off any further encroachment of their homeland that way.

  However.

  It wouldn’t turn into the exchange of gunfire that they knew so well.

  It wouldn’t become a battle of seasoned tank veterans.

  Academy City’s peculiar tactics were absolutely impossible under normal circumstances. The materials necessary for the bases—the time and manpower needed to construct them—and the resources and energy needed to maintain them: No one could look at these conditions and call it realistic to build one base after another deep in enemy territory, all the while linking the facilities together with supply lines. It didn’t take a soldier to understand—any observing journalist could take one look at it and point out all sorts of problems.

  And despite that.

  Academy City had overcome those flaws with the brute force of their technology.

  With normally impossible speed, the supersonic bombers were constantly dropping vast quantities of materials and fuel. With extreme swiftness, the powered suit groups accurately assembled the materials as they landed. The situation got more ridiculous the more you thought about it. It wasn’t possible to keep up without first rewriting the textbooks soldiers used during their training.

  “What should we do, sir?” asked one of the younger crew in the tank, though still certainly a middle-aged soldier. “We’ll run out of fuel and ammunition soon. Those bases have sealed off our escape route and supply route. I wish the strategists would come up with some sort of radical plan to counterattack.”

  “At this rate, we’ll wither away before any tank battles even begin,” grumbled another soldier, disgusted.

  The first time one of the supersonic bombers had dropped all those parachutes, their team had tried to prioritize stopping the enemy base’s construction. But shooting down the parachutes was ineffective, and the powered suits that’d landed slightly ahead of that evaded their shots with incredible mobility, then used massive shotguns that could have been for bunker busting to mount a precise counterattack.

  The enemy’s odd movements had thrown their forces into confusion, and in the meantime, the bombers had dropped additional materials and airborne tanks, one after another. The next thing they knew, a very wide gap in combat power had sealed off all of the Russian force’s options.

  By this point, Antseka was well aware that they’d fired pointlessly.

  If he’d known they’d come out with these tactics from the start, he might have been able to conserve ammunition a little more calmly, but pointing that out now would get them nowhere.

  As he recalled the situation in his mind, one of his colleagues looked in his direction.

  “It’s clear we’ll have to surrender. But I can’t stand this being over without us doing anything. Let’s at least blast one of them in the end. It might be a drop in the ocean, but if we don’t whittle down their forces even a little, this country really is done for.”

  Antseka looked up at the white skies from the gap in the hatch.

  Even as they talked, several bombers tore through the Russian sky at over seven thousand kilometers per hour, dropping innumerable parachutes in straight lines.

  “Hey, if those were big bombs to take out pillboxes and not resupply materials, what do you think would have happened to us?”

  “…”

  An unpleasant silence fell upon the inside of the tank.

  He was right. That was exactly what the supersonic bombers were meant to do. And that might have been a simpler way to shut Antseka and the others up for good.

  Why was Academy City purposely adopting such roundabout tactics?

  Still looking up at the sky bitterly, Antseka spat his next words.

  “Humane weapons usage, is it? The bastards are treating us like fools.”

  4

  The Elizalina Alliance of Independent Nations.

  Kamijou and Lesser had reached its interior. Since it was wartime and the country was on the verge of invasion, they’d expected the border to be in a state of high alert, but they mostly just walked on in.

  “It’s not an island nation like Japan or the UK. If countries neighbor one another on land, you can enter them fairly easily.”

  “But that was a little too easy. With the way things are going, we should have gone in expecting to be shot.”

  “They probably don’t have enough time to bother doing that. Besides, didn’t you sneak across a bunch of borders to get to Russia?”

  “Actually, I just kept hitchhiking here and there, and eventually, I ended up in Russia. I don’t know exactly how it happened.”

  “…Hmm. Maybe they just weren’t able to talk to you, making it a big adventure…?” muttered Lesser.

  They were in a plaza-like place, and all kinds of people were coming and going around them. They seemed to be of various ethnicities, not just from one homogenous group. And while he couldn’t understand much of their words, it felt to him as though several languages w
ere intermixed here.

  “The Elizalina Alliance of Independent Nations was originally a bunch of smaller regions who couldn’t agree with Russia’s way of doing things that gained independence and formed a country, right?”

  “More precisely, it’s a group of such nations,” corrected Lesser. “This area is landlocked, after all. Even if one country gained independence, they would be surrounded 360 degrees by Russian territory. If that happened, they would end up needing permission from the Russian government for any movement of people and goods. The Alliance is several small countries linked together to escape that kind of indirect control, and they apparently built their own routes out of Russia to eastern European countries…Thanks to that, though, even some among the independent nations have been isolated, particularly from Russia.”

  Because of the circumstances surrounding its formation, the Elizalina Alliance of Independent Nations stretched long and thin from east to west. Its length was around three hundred kilometers…The chances of coincidentally bumping into someone you were looking for was infinitesimally low.

  “Anyway, we’ve gotta make contact with Sasha before Fiamma does,” said Kamijou as if to hurry himself up. “Now, then. How do we go about searching for her?”

  “First, let’s find an inn we can use as a base.”

  “Yeah, I guess when we have so much area to search, we might not find her in one day.”

  “And just one room, of course, so we can conserve our funds. You may assign a degree of indecent implication if you want.”

  “Are your thought processes basically just locked to that, or what?!”

  “You don’t want an inn? Then, outside?! W-well, that might pose a problem. Being outdoors by itself is no issue, but given the incredibly cold climate, it might just be boring and difficult.”

  “…All right. Let’s be serious for a moment.”

  After grabbing Lesser by the back of the neck and heading toward a back road, Kamijou lectured her earnestly for about fifteen minutes. Then, with Lesser’s mental state completely clobbered, he dragged her back to the plaza again.

  “How are we going to look for Sasha? She’s a sorcerer, so if we can spot any traces of her using something strange and mysterious, we might be able to find her.”

  “A-actually, there’ s an easier way.”

  “?”

  Kamijou cocked his head to the side, but a moment later, he realized something was wrong.

  The issue was around them.

  Four or five men were staring at them, mixed into the crowds of people coming and going. They wore deep-green military uniforms that sort of made them stand out more against the white snow.

  “It’s the border patrol,” stated Lesser simply. “You said it was still too easy before, didn’t you? You were right. They’re no idiots, either. They don’t seem to have a way to get camo gear suited for the environment, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re trying to protect this nation.”

  “W-wait, then what do we do?”

  “Do you need me to spell it out? We’ll just ask them.”

  Lesser, saying indecipherable things…When Kamijou gave her a dubious look, she explained again, this time slowly.

  “Fiamma was searching for traces of Sasha Kreutzev by using the Russian military, right? That means some of them would have been crossing the border to look for her. Even if Sasha herself was nowhere to be found, don’t you think Alliance soldiers would know that the Russian military was hunting her? And the fact that we know the war’s mastermind will be trying to sneak into the Alliance—isn’t that a bargaining chip they can’t possibly ignore?”

  5

  The Strait of Dover, located between the UK and France, had transformed into a battlefield, with each faction staring their enemies down, face-to-face.

  The water’s surface was covered by a strange, translucent substance, and atop it, dozens, hundreds, thousands of blades were crossing. It was beyond the scope of a simple “battle” this time. This was a clash worthy of the term war.

  France had the raw numbers advantage, but the UK was the one on the advance.

  Kaori Kanzaki was, after all, a major force to be reckoned with. A single swing from her would unleash the power she wielded as one of less than twenty saints in the world, mowing down several sorcerers at once. On top of that, the members of the Born Again Amakusa-Style Crossist Church around Kanzaki were supporting her at times and using her as a distraction so they could carry out precision strikes, making them a far more effective fighting unit than their numbers suggested.

  “Hoooh…!!”

  Kanzaki’s katana sheath demolished a wide swath of the translucent land at her feet, and as their footing broke and bulged upward, girls in black nun’s habits leaped up and staged a surprise attack on the French sorcerers from the air.

  They were the sisters from the former Agnes unit. This team, centered around Agnes Sanctis, was performing in much the same way as the Born Again Amakusa-Style Crossist Church. Aside from pure combat potential, their intimate knowledge of their enemy—the Roman Orthodox Church’s—battle tactics were also working to their advantage.

  However, that alone couldn’t defeat the French forces. They didn’t have any sorcerers in incredibly unique positions like saints; instead, they bolstered their forces by borrowing enormous quantities of weapons and Soul Arms from the Roman Orthodox Church, an organization that boasted over two billion followers. Their armaments weren’t only the archetypical kinds equipped by individuals, like staves and chalices, but also Soul Arm vehicles, which looked like strange tanks with claymores in place of gun barrels and iron-plated suits of armor in place of normal equipment.

  When Second Princess Carissa saw that, she said in a fed-up tone, “They’re still just warming up. Probing to gauge our combat forces, and all that.”

  She still wasn’t holding any weapons.

  Protected by many knights, Carissa exuded an elegant, unwavering air.

  In a light tone of voice, she asked a question of the Knight Leader, who was standing beside her.

  “Now, I wonder what the French camp’s main forces are like. It looks like there are some who seem associated with knights mixed in with their Roman Orthodox Church–based sorcerers. Still, even the knights seem to be at a level that can be filed within the category of Crossism.”

  “If we’re talking about French-bred knights who are Crossists, wouldn’t Charlemagne be an appropriate assumption?”

  “Or maybe the holy woman, their leader who’s been napping in Versailles, swallowed what little pride she had and went crying to the remnants of the Knights of Orleans.”

  “…You would do well not to underestimate me…”

  Suddenly, a voice Carissa couldn’t pinpoint interrupted them.

  Her eyebrow twitched slightly.

  “My pride is not so cheap that I would allow something like that to remain for the sake of my protection. In fact, I am indignant that the issue was resolved by a British mercenary in the first place.”

  “Well, now. You must still be sleepy, so maybe you should do your morning routine and then come back. You may be confined to Versailles, but your slow response was to blame. Just like this time.”

  “Ah, but you, too, can do nothing,” said the Versailles “leader” in a low voice. “News that the Curtana Original has been broken reached us as well. We also know that the Second is with Queen Elizard. In other words, you have little power of your own right now. As long as you are outside the United Kingdom’s borders, the knights by your side won’t have much strength, either. I understand you are the bellicose type, but do you realize how much of a hindrance you are?”

  “Fool,” barked Carissa.

  A moment later—

  Zwaa!!

  The knights around the second princess obtained an immense amount of power from the Curtana.

  The power supply itself had come from the Curtana Second. Elizard had probably given it some kind of order. But that alone wasn’t enough t
o explain it—as far as anyone knew, the Curtana was only effective within the UK’s borders.

  “You know how, if I’d succeeded in my coup in the UK with the Curtana Original, I’d planned to advance into Europe and bury every single one of my enemies?”

  “That can’t…”

  “How, exactly, did you think I planned to carry that out? Did you think I would whine and cry about not being able to use the Curtana outside the country?”

  There was a massive thump sound.

  It came from over ten kilometers behind Carissa.

  Something was hovering there. An exceedingly gigantic structure. A mysterious object made of dozens of randomly assembled cubes—perhaps it would be best described as a square bubble. Completely removed from rational architectural techniques, it both looked like a castle wrought by human hands and an enormous boulder forced up out of the ground and into the air.

  “The mobile fortress—Glastonbury.”

  Carissa intoned its name.

  “By forcibly defining the area around this fortress as part of the British domain, it allows for a rapid extending of the Curtana’s effective radius. It doesn’t take the enemy’s intent into consideration whatsoever. The perfect large-scale Soul Arm for invasions, don’t you think?”

  The tables had completely turned.

  The knights, filled with renewed power, drew their swords to defend Carissa.

  “This is not a defensive battle of attrition.”

  The formation of knights deployed to guard Carissa smoothly began to shift to an aggressive posture.

  The voice of the princess of military affairs declared what this meant:

  “It’s mop-up operation leading into our offensive.”

  6

  Kamijou and Lesser walked through the plaza, surrounded by multiple large men. It didn’t feel good to be escorted by people he couldn’t communicate with and who appeared to be soldiers. He was on pins and needles, and Lesser, who walked next to him, reassured him, her tone sounding bored.