A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 20

by Kazuma Kamachi

It hadn’t destroyed the tank.

  Hamazura watched as the turret squeaked around and aimed at him.

  And then, yet another strange sound went off.

  The blast, which had missed its original target, had knocked down building walls that were on the verge of collapsing. Across from the dwelling in which he hid was a small church, the only stone structure in the settlement. The steeple on top with the bell in it came apart and fell toward the tank.

  The tank’s crew must have realized that as well.

  However, before they could run away on their caterpillar treads, the iron steeple hammer swung down onto it. The anti-aircraft vehicle was a hunk of thick steel, so it didn’t break just from that. However, the incredible weight on top of it had completely prevented it from moving. The machine-gun turrets couldn’t rotate anymore, either.

  “…”

  For a moment, Hamazura was silent.

  All the emotions that might otherwise have been bubbling up within his heart didn’t come.

  After pulling his head inside the window again, he looked around the utterly wrecked civilian home. It wasn’t just a movie set—it was a room someone had definitely just been living in.

  And in a rack that had fallen onto its side, he took a bottle of vodka that still hadn’t cracked yet.

  He left the building and stood in front of the self-propelled anti-air gun.

  If it had been a main battle tank, it would have been equipped with light machine guns in addition to its main gun in order to spray suppressing fire at any infantry that got close. However, this was an anti-air vehicle—it wasn’t designed on the premise that it would be advancing through enemy lines. No such firearms were fixed to it.

  Nothing was left to hurt Hamazura.

  He brought his mouth near the small air vent used to supply oxygen into the vehicle, then quietly spoke.

  “…Pretty cold today, isn’t it?”

  It was pure, unadulterated Japanese, but he didn’t care.

  It wasn’t his job to exchange pleasantries with them.

  “Perfect weather for roasting some meat.”

  He rapped on the anti-air tank’s roof with the bottle of vodka, and the privateer soldiers frantically burst out of the metal hatch.

  Hamazura pointed his handgun at that hatch.

  He had no hesitation swinging its muzzle toward them.

  5

  Touma Kamijou ran about the plaza, which was now in ruins.

  The results had been awful.

  The professional sorcerers Lesser, Elizalina, and Vento of the Front had been defeated. Sasha Kreutzev had been taken away by Fiamma personally, and the only things that remained of the battle were the scars.

  Kamijou was currently giving first aid to the wounded sorcerers. Still, he didn’t have much real knowledge. He was just following the others’ instructions, since they couldn’t move.

  “Vento…”

  “If you’re going to thank me, you’ve got the wrong person,” she spat, sticking her tongue out for want of being able to move her limbs in her current state. “I just don’t like how Fiamma does things. I really can’t forgive him for causing mayhem in the Roman Church any more than this. In the process, my actions only happened to be to your benefit.”

  “…”

  The voice was hateful, but Kamijou was somehow relieved.

  Not everyone in the Roman Church was saying things like Fiamma was. People who would properly argue were part of the organization, too. He’d learned that fact once again, and it lightened his load a lot more than he’d thought it would.

  Elizalina, lying down in the same way, spoke to him.

  “I never thought Fiamma would be in a state where he could use the knowledge from the one hundred and three thousand volumes.”

  “Index couldn’t completely cover the God’s Right Seat spells, though. He’s probably using her to clear away his obstacles and be more efficient.”

  “Do you know where Fiamma of the Right went?”

  Elizalina should have been in an ambulance, but she had refused personally. Maybe it was out of regret from magic having been revealed to the masses during the fight with Fiamma. Maybe she wanted to avoid leaving this place during such a difficult phase. Only Elizalina herself knew for sure.

  “…Probably a base over the border,” Kamijou answered, after thinking for a moment. “He was preparing for something there to begin with. To the point where he evicted all the people living nearby, too. I think he wants to bring Sasha there to try something.”

  As for what Fiamma was trying to do—that wasn’t clear yet.

  But his advance preparations alone had already caused this many casualties. Maybe even World War III itself was only part of them. Considering that, it was then possible that whatever Fiamma was trying to do would be even bigger than that. Either way, he couldn’t stay silent and watch. He didn’t want to let something like this happen again.

  “I’ll manage,” said Kamijou to Elizalina after a moment’s thought. “I’ll do something about him. I have to save Index, too. You all wait here. Nothing says all the crap he stirred up won’t turn around and spread back here again.”

  He tried to burst out then.

  But a hand grabbed his arm.

  It was Lesser, who had sustained relatively light wounds. She didn’t say anything in particular, but he could sense that unless he gave permission for her to come, she wouldn’t let go of his arm.

  Kamijou wavered a moment, then eventually nodded.

  Lesser let go and got up to stand beside him.

  “We don’t have much time. Let’s borrow the Alliance’s strength. We’ll ask their military for help and get right up close to the base.”

  “But they’re opposing nations, aren’t they? Wouldn’t that make them even more cautious?”

  “The Elizalina Alliance of Independent Nations is a group of countries that gained independence from Russia in recent years. The vehicles they use are all basically the same. If we break through where their border security is thin, we shouldn’t have a problem after that.”

  Kamijou fell silent for a bit. “…Is it okay to get them involved, though?”

  “?”

  “Like I said before, they’re opposing nations. If they’ll cooperate, then fine, but if we get found out in Russian territory, we definitely won’t have any guarantee of survival. Is it really okay to ask them to help us, in that kind of situation…?”

  “We’re not the ones who get to decide that,” Lesser said without hesitation.

  At first, it might have seemed like a haphazard reply, but it seemed to prove that she was used to the politics of life and death.

  “The people who would be risking their lives can decide that. At the very least, they should be able to choose how to live their own lives. If they turn us down, we’ll look for a different way.”

  “…”

  But Kamijou, once again, fell silent.

  Lesser put an index finger to her temple and, in a mildly irritated tone, said, “In the end, it’s all probably the same, though.”

  “What is?”

  “Fiamma can say what he wants, but a person’s life is for the person to decide, right?”

  “…Maybe.”

  “And whatever you happen to be hiding, it’s not like you’ve been stuck like that forever, right? You’re still risking your life to keep moving ahead. As a result, you’ve saved a bunch of people’s lives, and you even stopped the coup in the UK. Frankly speaking, I think that’s a life worth being proud of.”

  Hadn’t it been a mistake to hide his memory loss and go on living?

  Hadn’t everything he’d done to protect Index’s smile been complacency?

  But she was right.

  Kamijou had resolved so many incidents and saved so many lives before now. That was probably praiseworthy, wasn’t it? He had gotten to know other people after he’d lost his memories, too. For those people, what did it matter whether he had his memories or not? Either way, it didn�
�t change that he’d fought for their sakes.

  “But still…,” said Kamijou to himself.

  As if to dig a knife into his own chest.

  “…Still, wouldn’t that mean that I’m not the one allowed to decide whether everything I’ve done has been good for Index?”

  6

  The sorcerers of the United Kingdom and France clashed atop the hardened surface of the Strait of Dover. It was nearly a melee, but they were slowly and steadily rallying around the Knights, who had borrowed the power of the Curtana Second and the mobile fortress Glastonbury.

  However, when pushed, it’s human nature to push back even harder.

  The French sorcerers weren’t the sort who would calmly calculate numbers on each side and the conditions of the field then just walk away. The more they were pushed back, the more bloodcurdling their expressions got as they utilized a myriad of offensive spells.

  Several of the British Knights tried to draw back.

  They positioned themselves as if to regauge the distance just a little bit.

  Carissa, second princess of Britain, took this as a show of weakness and stepped out onto the front line.

  “Oh, bollocks. Those French bastards are going to kidnap me and rape me to death,” she baited.

  “…???!!!”

  Now her knights’ pride wouldn’t let them withdraw any farther.

  Wielding their weapons as though ripping through physical limitation itself, they just barely managed to prevent Carissa from being swallowed up in the French throng.

  Meanwhile, Carissa put her hands on her hips and said, “I better not see you holding back on the battlefield again. You should have been fighting with that much energy from the beginning.”

  At that point, the Knight Leader finally used his communication Soul Arm to secretly contact Windsor Castle.

  “Yes. Put me through to Queen Elizard! It’s extremely urgent!! I would like to ask permission to give Princess Carissa a good spanking!!”

  “Would you quit that?! My mother might actually focus all the Curtana Second’s power on you just so you can do that!!”

  Even as they bickered and snatched the Soul Arm back and forth, the battle between the two forces raged on. As many swords and spells intersected, Carissa cast the French sorcerers a glance, then moved her lips.

  “Hmph. What a bunch of clones.”

  The words came out like spit.

  “They have a lot of sand grains with passing marks, but they lack decisiveness. Are they planning on using troop numbers as an excuse or something? If this is all they have, they certainly won’t be able to deal with a group containing saints and Knights.”

  Ga-bam!! An explosion went off.

  It was above Carissa.

  A lightning bolt had shot down from the heavens, aiming to obliterate the second princess.

  But she hadn’t sustained any injury.

  Through whatever means, the nearby knights had lofted their blades and cast the lightning attack away.

  “In the end, trying to win from a distance is all the Saint of Versailles can do,” Carissa said. “But it’s clear you fundamentally cannot leave your palace, even though no seals are preventing you from escaping. Your body was readjusted down to your very organs so that you can’t live anywhere but the magical environment inside the palace…by the foolish French powers that be.”

  The distant Saint of Versailles could probably hear her voice as well.

  There was no response.

  Even so, Carissa continued. “And after increasing the range on your spells more than necessary, you can’t easily land a finishing blow.”

  Assume a sorcerer has the power of one hundred. If the sorcerer was able to use his full power for attacking, his attack power would be one hundred. But if he combined it with a spell for extending his firing range, the percentage dedicated to attacking would go down proportionally to the increased range.

  There were certain spells that could ignore physical distances from the start and deal the same amount of damage to any location in the universe. But the Saint of Versailles’s spell had no such trait. It was a typical spell, one whose power would decrease the farther it was extended.

  On top of that, the Knights, currently borrowing strength from the Curtana Second, had superhuman abilities to begin with. They were not the sort an enfeebled spell would do anything about.

  “Anyway,” Carissa said to the Saint of Versailles, who was probably observing the state of battle from afar, “if you don’t mind, I’ll be getting serious now. Please, twiddle your thumbs and watch us as we land on your shores.”

  7

  The crack of purple lightning cried out across the snow.

  The Third Season.

  A project executed to put a guaranteed end to Last Order, growing ever more useless thanks to Aiwass’s existence, and to get rid of Accelerator, whom the powers that be could no longer rein in.

  A series that was different from the twenty-thousand-plus-one Sisters, who came as a single set.

  In the end…

  “An extra specimen—you could say Misaka Worst.”

  The assailant named herself. Likely in the knowledge that she was an organism that never should have been born, whom nobody particularly desired.

  In her hand danced short metal nails, each a few centimeters long. Now and again, with a balloon-like pop, a nail would fire at him at supersonic speeds.

  But…

  Judging by the electric power she’s using, she seems different from a Railgun.

  Cornered, Accelerator desperately worked his nearly chaotic mind and analyzed her.

  The same method as a magnetic rifle some sniper used. It’s simpler than Fleming’s left hand; she’s using an electromagnet to fire metal ammunition at me.

  Even having come this far, he still hadn’t used his reflection.

  Manipulating his leg-force vectors and conducting short bursts of super-high-speed movement, he was instead taking evasive action to avoid Misaka Worst’s aim.

  To align with the situation, and to protect Last Order, he wouldn’t be able to avoid fighting.

  But it was also true that he didn’t want to kill this girl if he didn’t have to. Even if she’d been created through a different project than the Sisters, even if she was a specimen from a third development project designed to kill Accelerator and Last Order, he still felt an extreme aversion to letting any of these somatic-cell clones die.

  It was a cruel thing, but Accelerator couldn’t help thinking of what he’d do if it had been Amata Kihara or Teitoku Kakine. If it was a shithead like that, he probably wouldn’t hesitate. He’d mercilessly shred them, flinging the resulting pieces in all directions, for the sake of protecting Last Order.

  After all, Accelerator was no philanthropist. He wouldn’t stop himself from getting into a killing match with an enemy if that lined up with his own objectives. But even still, he absolutely wanted to avoid applying that rule to the enemy who had appeared here now.

  And.

  Naturally, Misaka Worst had realized that.

  She’d realized he was hesitating, and she’d taken advantage of it, working it into her tactics.

  Because that was why she’d been born.

  “Might want to be careful.”

  Grin.

  With an “expression” clearly different from any of the previous Sisters, Misaka Worst spoke.

  Yes—while wearing a smile filled with malice.

  “Misaka doesn’t have as much power as the original, but even this Misaka can manage to get up to two billion volts. I’d probably be around Level Four.”

  Roar!! A blast went off.

  And the girl’s body vanished.

  She’d ignited the air by using a huge amount of high-tension current, then used the force to take flight. It was the same as what she’d used to land on the ground from the transport plane.

  By the time Accelerator realized it, it was too late.

  “Look—one more for you.”

>   He heard the voice from overhead.

  And then a two-centimeter-long metal nail shot down at him.

  He jumped directly to the side, but halfway through his jump, he lost his balance and fell spectacularly onto the snow.

  There was a dark-red wound in his thigh. This metal nail had apparently stopped in his body.

  “Would you please run away some more?”

  Misaka Worst stepped down onto the snow, the metal nails in her hand jangling. It was an aggravating noise—was it affected to torment her target as much as possible?

  “You killed over ten thousand times, over ten thousand Misakas, didn’t you?”

  The words cut deep.

  It carried a whole different weight than if a complete stranger had been blathering on about it.

  The subtle vibrations in the air from her voice caused Accelerator, who could even reflect nuclear attacks, to begin collapsing from the inside out.

  “So run away. Beg for your life like a dog. You’re not a normal person facing a normal death. The books won’t be balanced unless I trample over your human rights at least ten thousand times worse. And just so you’re aware, that’s a minimum number. It’ll be more than three times that, with interest.”

  The skin on Misaka Worst’s face twisted from the inside.

  Her carefully crafted face distorted like a vinyl puppet in the oven.

  The source: abhorrence.

  Her insane smile, something more than anger, something more than horror, spread across her face so much it seemed her original face would never come back.

  …Don’t let her get to you, thought Accelerator desperately, holding back the intense pain crawling out to his arms and legs. She isn’t one of them. She wasn’t born for that experiment specifically. She’s literally a fake who talks with the same face and body. I don’t need to trip up over every little thing she says!

  With a shudder, he felt a strange sensation begin to gather toward the center of his forehead.

  Could he apply his reflection to his whole body?

  Should he even block Misaka Worst’s voice with it? The scales were starting to tip.

  However.

  “Misaka is the same.”