A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 21

by Kazuma Kamachi

  He probably couldn’t have gotten the spy to talk through mere violence, like punching or kicking him. Even if he’d actually stripped off his skin with a blade, it might not have worked.

  That was why he’d needed to bluff.

  Even veteran Russian spies wouldn’t know how to fight against Academy City’s espers. But they had probably built up a body of logic they could use to fight the unknown, the incomprehensible.

  So Accelerator adopted an entirely different approach to give the man a shock.

  To do that, he’d cut a bunch of beef into blocks, stuck rags to it, and wrapped it all up with barbed wire.

  Confronted with that, the spy’s mind, completely rattled, immediately panicked. Soldier or spy, resistance to pain wasn’t because they had dull senses. It was because they trained their minds beforehand to endure it. On the other hand, if you messed up the underpinnings, you could reduce their tolerance to a child crybaby. After all, soldier or civilian, everyone was built the same way—they were all living creatures.

  Accelerator rested his back against the wall.

  Misaka Worst opened her mouth and spoke as if to make fun of him. “Heh. How kind of you.”

  “Eh?”

  “Misaka has some of your behavioral patterns input into her so she can fight you. Last Order or civilians are one thing—but isn’t this the first time you’ve settled things nonviolently against a professional enemy?”

  “No point being inefficient about it. Didn’t feel like messing around with human flesh anyway,” he spat in response. “What? Wasn’t stimulating enough for you, little lady?”

  “Aw, no! Misaka loves deceiving people.

  Seeing a proud professional succumb to nonexistent fear and turn into a mess of tears and snot is incredible. Kya-ha!

  ”

  Stretch.

  Misaka Worst flashed a smile that seemed like a crushed fruit.

  Accelerator tisked softly. “…What do you think of what the crybaby said?”

  “Totally unnatural. I mean, the Russian military was using this war as justification to attempt a serious invasion operation—including aerial bombings—against the Alliance, since they’ve been after something of theirs since before, right? Strange they’d send in spies at all in that case. Normally, you have the spies withdraw before the bombing started…Unless they were disposable! Heh.”

  “The spies were scheduled to withdraw, but a few hours ago, they were suddenly ordered to stay. And then they even sent extra spies crawling into the Alliance.”

  “Hoo-whee. It’s like they planned it around the Misakas coming into the country.”

  That was one way of looking at it.

  If that was the case, the spies lurking in this military facility must have been worried to death.

  They wanted to get out of the Alliance before the bombings. But their target had just set foot into a most dangerous spot on his own. To accomplish their objective, the spies, too, would have to follow Accelerator.

  But.

  “…Still, that spy fell for the trick too easily. Maybe it was because he couldn’t fight an esper the way he envisioned it, but it didn’t seem like it. It was more like he’d never considered possibly fighting against one at all and then happened to bump into one.”

  “Maybe it was all confidential, and they were after the Misakas, but they didn’t get anything explained to them? Like they’d give the details on-site over radio or something,” Misaka Worst offered with a shrug. “And what did the spy say the mission given to him was, hmm?”

  “To photograph the interiors of Alliance military facilities. Their mission was sneak photography using small cameras.”

  “For what?”

  “To bring secret documents out of the base before the real bombings began, then bring them to a specified point. The concrete instructions would have come from someone on the other side of a monitor.”

  As he said it, he found himself confused.

  The only “document” he had was the parchment paper. Was it that essential to the Russian military’s generals?

  “Anyway,” he said, picking himself up off the wall and leaning into his crutch again, “if we go to that specified point or whatever, we’ll meet whoever needs that parchment. Who will know how to decode and use it, too.”

  And that might be a clue to saving the still-unconscious Last Order. In which case, he didn’t have the choice not to go. Egoistic or not, he needed to have them cough up the value of a parchment they’d attack a military base for.

  “Misaka loves selfish plot developments like that. It’s making her hard all over.

  ”

  “Shut up. The destination of the parchment delivery was a frontline Russian base near the border. I’ll raid it. You do whatever you want.”

  “Oh, but obviously Misaka would tag along wherever there’s more blood to be shed. Speaking of which, what about Last Order?”

  “What would happen if I left her to you?”

  “Probably something too horrible to even look at when Misaka gets bored.”

  As he considered punching the cackling Misaka Worst, something wavered at the edge of Accelerator’s vision.

  No, that wasn’t it.

  His vision wasn’t what had wavered.

  This was…

  3

  Deep within the military base close to the border between Russia and the Elizalina Alliance of Independent Nations, Fiamma of the Right was using a book-style Soul Arm to communicate with someone.

  That someone being an authority of the Russian Church: Bishop Nikolai Tolstoj.

  “Well, things are finally getting interesting,” said Fiamma into the Soul Arm, lying open on the table, as he sat down in a plain chair. “To be honest—and I know I was having you cooperate with me—but your battle results here in Russia have been anything but praiseworthy. It’s a pain, but this time, I’ll readjust the scores.”

  “Say whatever you wish.” Nikolai’s tone was hard. “Don’t hold anything back. You told me that you’d secured Sasha Kreutzev. Use that weapon right now! Or have you forgotten Russian soldiers are dying as we speak?!”

  “Sortie preparations are all finished. I’ll bring it out soon. When I do, the battle situation will once again become opaque. Academy City’s vaunted control will cease to work—and the true war will begin.”

  “Either way, I’m fine as long as I can achieve my objective. If our cooperation is a shortcut to that, then I will keep providing support.”

  “The Patriarch? You want to be the one that much? The Roman pope I know never looked as amused as you do.”

  “Pah—don’t compare the Roman pope to our Russian one.”

  “Are they that different?”

  “In any case,” said Nikolai Tolstoj, lowering his tone and asking slowly, “where are you right now?”

  “What would you do if you knew?”

  “It can’t be at the base. We lost your signal from there already.”

  “Ha-ha,” chuckled Fiamma, who certainly should have been deep inside the “base” before answering, “you’ll know soon enough…whether you like it or not.”

  It was easy, perhaps, to witness the phenomenon that occurred then. Few people, however, could have known what it actually meant.

  The first one to notice it was likely a man from a Florence civic group.

  He’d come before an old church with other companions for the preservation of historical relics. It was wartime, but the worst fires of conflict had yet to take hold in Italy. What had taken hold of the city, however, was a tense, high-strung atmosphere. Nobody knew what would cause a huge riot to break out.

  He felt something like tremors from time to time. Rumors were that it was city gas lines and such being ignited while people took advantage of the chaos to set fire to buildings in acts of robbery. That was what this middle-aged man figured.

  However, the one he’d just felt was different from anything thus far.

  It wasn’t something coming from a short di
stance away from the city, from the outside.

  It had come from the inside.

  In other words—it had echoed from inside the church.

  “…?”

  The middle-aged man slowly turned around.

  He had a bad feeling about this.

  He heard a creaking noise—emanating from that which he was trying to protect.

  The historic steeple, which one could call the cornerstone of the majestic church, had broken in the middle. The structure proceeded to ignore gravity and floated up, still containing the giant bell that always announced time in the city.

  Why had it broken?

  Why was it floating?

  He could feel the common sense within him shattering.

  And…

  …at that same moment, a giant steeple tore away from the Mont-Saint-Michel abbey in France.

  Several pillars ripped out of St. Mary’s Church in Italy.

  And the grand pipe organ flew out of St. Joseph’s Cathedral in India.

  With over two billion followers, the Roman Church had built many churches and abbeys all over the world throughout its long history. Their forms and design philosophies varied based on the land, era, and culture, producing unique characteristics in each building.

  Objects seen as particularly important had just been removed from those churches and abbeys.

  They all flew toward a single point, as though drawn by a magnet.

  Toward Russia.

  Toward the freezing-cold base where Fiamma of the Right waited.

  Once the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of collected cultural objects had gathered in a single place, they wove together in an intricate pattern. Not like a jigsaw puzzle, designed that way from the start; no, this process was more like forcing dissimilar parts together to bring forth a new machine.

  The enormous mountain of structures extended beyond the ten-kilometer-square base.

  They swelled farther than that.

  And the changes didn’t stop there, either.

  They went farther…

  Boom!! The rumbling broke out from directly underneath Kamijou.

  By the time he’d noticed it, he’d been thrown into the air.

  Or at least, he felt like he had been.

  But he hadn’t really. The snowy ground he’d just been standing on had risen up, breaking free a massive part of the foundation. Buried underneath the ground was the subway line Academy City’s drop cannons had obliterated. Maybe it had moved somehow in line with the changes to Fiamma’s base.

  Float.

  For just an instant, Kamijou couldn’t feel gravity.

  A moment later.

  The place he was standing on sheared off like a cliff. Lesser, about to launch an ambush on the powered suit nearby, turned around and stared, dumbfounded. It looked like she tried to reach out, but she was way too far away. She’d been left at the bottom of the “cliff.”

  “What…the…?!”

  The incredible rumbling eventually forced Kamijou off his feet. He could see Academy City tanks and powered suits, lifted up in the same manner as him, falling off the cliff’s edge in disparate groups.

  It was flying.

  The ground Kamijou stood on—and the foundation under the base where Fiamma probably was, was flying.

  While dropping the Russian military base’s facilities and weapons away, along with the snow.

  It immediately floated up about ten meters, then tore free of the last line of resistance. Whump! Accelerating, faster and faster, and all around Kamijou became fog. The abnormal, crushing pressure pushed his body to the ground. But there was no time for confusion. As he blinked, baffled, the fog that had so suddenly appeared was already gone.

  Blue sky.

  A hue at odds with the weather he’d seen from the surface.

  The scene of white winter sky was nowhere to be found.

  Kamijou knew what that meant.

  We’re…above the clouds?!

  Bam!! went an explosion.

  A supersonic bomber, no more than a pinprick in the sky moments ago, looked a lot bigger now. They’d probably taken hasty evasive maneuvers, surprised at the sudden event.

  That wasn’t the only sound.

  Gshh-gshh-gch-gch!! A low roaring reverberated, like stone cogs turning together. The place Kamijou now stood was like a big bridge made of assembled stone. On the other side, miles and miles away, he could see a giant mass. He could see it clearly, partly because they were in midair, and no horizons or buildings were in the way of his vision, but also because the structure itself was ludicrously gigantic.

  The castle-like main section stood in the center, and four extremely long bridges stretched from it in each direction. Their lengths weren’t standard; one was over twice as long. If you considered the direction the fortress was traveling in as the front, and where Kamijou was as the back, the one abnormally long bridge would have been the right side. Church walls and doors and steeples from different cultures and different eras had been scraped together, and even now they were changing shapes in an intricate fashion.

  Other than those structures with the weight of centuries in them were collected metal girders, pipes, and lighting equipment—more modern objects. They’d probably been installed in surface bases. All in all, they’d been brought together in a strange fusion reminiscent of a construction site at an old church.

  Were they growing, or were they cannibalizing one another?

  Unable to even grasp the meaning of what he was seeing, he heard a voice come to him from somewhere.

  Maybe speakers or something were set up all over this flying castle. Unlike the wheat flour doll used previously, the sound came with noise.

  “What I was setting up was not a giant facility or Soul Arm.”

  Fiamma of the Right.

  Perhaps satisfied he’d confined his target, the Imagine Breaker, to the firmament, his voice sounded somehow amused.

  “It was a place to assemble this. I had things saved up for it all over the world. I only needed to dig into my own savings. Still, to create it, I had to prepare an area for the work, like a sterilized room. That was why I needed the consecration, vast funds and time, and people.”

  Even now, the strange fortress Kamijou was looking at was expanding.

  It was essentially an explosion of stone.

  “Material quantity wasn’t the issue. The important thing was to create a cycle for it to expand itself. Once that cycle is complete, it can swell as large as I need it to without supplying it.”

  Wham!! The stony blast wind shot past Kamijou.

  Though he’d just been standing on a stone bridge a moment ago, now he was suddenly inside an old-fashioned room. There were dozens of miles between here and Fiamma’s base. Did that mean his fortress had already stretched out this far?

  “…You sure putting me on this thing wasn’t a mistake?”

  “Quite the opposite. Your right arm is absolutely essential for my objective.” Fiamma even laughed a little, meaningfully, before saying, “I welcome you—to my fortress, the Star of Bethlehem.”

  The Star of Bethlehem.

  Fiamma of the Right had said its name, which meant even that would contain deep religious and magical meaning.

  From the way he spoke, it actually seemed like it was acutely related to the entire string of events—his manipulation of the Roman Church, his kidnapping of Index and Sasha, his triggering of World War III, and his attempt to steal Kamijou’s right arm:

  This fortress, over three thousand meters in the air, now sat above the clouds.

  Its sides reached out dozens of kilometers from the center.

  It was an exceedingly impossible sight, possibly even as big as a floating Academy City would be.

  Of course…

  If you had the necessary mechanisms to give buoyant force to the mass and weight before his eyes, objects would float no matter how big they expanded. It was the same as a balloon—didn’t matter if it was small or
big. That was how science worked. In that sense, making a huge fuss about a giant object floating might have been nonsense.

  But the problem lay not in the logic or theory. The pure stability with which this man-made structure floated through the air— Had something like that ever existed in the history of humanity?

  It was the meaning of the word unprecedented.

  When boats were created. When cars were created. When airplanes were created.

  This was one of those times.

  An opportunity had been created—one so exceedingly powerful it could decisively distort the territory that humanity could control.

  That feeling of abnormality wrapped over his whole body, whether he liked it or not.

  Sure, it may have been a grand achievement, but at the same time, a great unease came over him—the fear that perhaps it had a darker side to rival it.

  “…”

  But Kamijou’s spirit wouldn’t break there.

  He wouldn’t let it bother him.

  The only thing he needed to do was take down Fiamma and destroy the Soul Arm remotely controlling Index.

  He was almost frightened at being locked in this insanely huge fortress, but once he calmed down, he realized he had more hope here than in being left on the ground.

  Giving a short exhalation, Kamijou eventually stood up.

  He was worried he’d get altitude sickness after suddenly being launched up into the air, but other than a mild pain shooting through his temples, he didn’t have any serious nausea, breathing issues, or narrowed vision. No problems that would prevent him from acting.

  …The air pressure and temperature are the same as on the surface…? Is there some kind of weird field around this?

  Come to think of it, he thought he remembered the snow splitting apart in an unnatural way the moment the fortress had broken through the clouds. Maybe it was protected by a force field in the shape of a sphere squeezed in on the top and bottom or something.

  He couldn’t really calculate how much effort it would have taken to do that magically.

  But just like how a fortress this big was floating in the sky, it had to require immense resources and labor…Like the combined power of an organization encompassing two million followers.