A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 19

by Kazuma Kamachi

  Specifically, part-time maids, handing out fliers for restaurants.

  As he walked through the shopping district, he watched the working girls, and his eyes relaxed slightly behind his sunglasses.

  “…The times really have taken a turn for the better, nya…”

  Not a moment after he’d muttered it, a powerful straight punch pushed into Tsuchimikado’s tall back. His little sister, Maika Tsuchimikado, was responsible. After eliciting a violent wha-bam!! noise you wouldn’t expect from her delicate little fist, she was currently, for some reason, sitting politely with her legs folded underneath her atop an oil drum–shaped cleaning robot.

  The girl, however, hadn’t physically contorted her stepbrother’s spine out of jealousy.

  “…You can’t call those professional maids. How dare they mix up maids, waitresses, and hostesses. How is this for the better, eh? That one even has Gothic fashion mixed in somehow. Do you think kneesocks make everything okay?”

  Maika growled her questions, blue veins popping on her exposed forehead, since her bob’s bangs were combed back. Her own clothing consisted of a long-skirted maid uniform, mainly in dark blue. Unlike the ladies handing out fliers, it had a plain but highly practical design.

  “M-Maika? That jagged black aura around you is making me feel like there’s a boulder in the pit of my stomach…”

  “What I mean is: It’s all well and good the term maid has spread throughout the world, but it’s a problem if it spreads in the wrong way. Now people look at us lewdly just for wearing these clothes.”

  “L-lewdly?!”

  His stepsister’s remark got a huge reaction out of him.

  This reaction was not, however, because he couldn’t forgive the unspecified large number of bastards who would apparently look at his little sister so rudely.

  “But…But is that so wrong…? Maids are healthy in the first place, aren’t they? Unerotic maids—what reason could they possibly have for existing?!”

  “…It looks like I’ll need to show my shitty brother what professional maids are made of.”

  “No, stop, gwoohhh; my stepsister is using her body to show off pro-maid techniques to me?!” called Tsuchimikado, his words a string of lewdness, as a tiny fist beat him to a pulp.

  Just then, a camper passing right by him gave a short honk of its horn. It looked like it had been trying to hurry a passenger car taking its time in front of it, but that wasn’t it.

  It was the signal.

  The camper had probably put on its blinker and gone down a side road—and it would park there for a time to wait for Tsuchimikado.

  Without waiting to see where it went, he immediately started walking toward the nearby convenience store.

  “Nya. I gotta go grab some refills for my mechanical pencils.”

  “Hmm? I’ll come, too.”

  “Wait, you’re gonna help me?! I actually have a ton of homework today, nya. I’m not even sure both of us together could finish it, but you’re really smart, so you could probably do the work of one and a half people. A brother-sister team-up operation should manage to finish by tomorrow morning.”

  “…I don’t think I’m going to your room tonight…You’re already up a creek without a paddle if you’re asking your middle school sister for help on high school homework. But at least there’s still leftovers. You shouldn’t die of starvation. And with that, adieu!”

  Still sitting politely atop the cleaning robot, Maika banged on its side with her small palm. Its sensors seemed to pick up from the gesture, since the robot swerved in the other direction, as though being controlled by a steering wheel.

  “Heartless brute!!” shouted Tsuchimikado in front of the convenience store, his spirit shattered. After hanging his head, he went into the store, properly bought what he said he would, and then went down a side road away from the shopping district.

  He opened the door of the camper that he found parked there. Inside was an earlier visitor, a white-haired Level Five, lying on a simple bed as though sulking.

  Looking at that Level Five, Tsuchimikado said:

  “…So what’s today’s homework?”

  Awaki Musujime was in District 10. The place had a host of research facilities related to nuclear power and microbiology, as well as an incineration plant for laboratory animals, but even within this district stood a particularly infamous building.

  The juvenile reformatory.

  It wasn’t the sort of place a girl wearing the uniform of Kirigaoka Girls’ Academy, an elite Ability Development school, would normally be seen, but she couldn’t be picky—her comrades were interned there.

  They were comrades in the sense that they had tried to complete a grand project together.

  One that some might call a criminal act.

  Thanks to a Level Four–Level Five duo from a school for young ladies as influential as Kirigaoka—no, possibly even more so—they’d already aborted the project itself.

  Many of her comrades had been defeated through overwhelming power, then confined within this juvenile reformatory. And Musujime alone was free—only she, the project’s mastermind, the one who should have been the first to be caged.

  An implicit rule had been handed down to her.

  She would use her incredible ability, Move Point, to fight against even deeper darkness in Academy City. If she acquiesced, they would both physically and socially guarantee her comrades’ safety—and if she didn’t, that guarantee went away.

  One day, she’d outwit this city.

  She’d win this game that was supposed to be perfectly unbeatable so she could grant her comrades freedom once again.

  That alone was Awaki Musujime’s goal—and there was nothing else to it. Rather, there was nothing left. Even her attachment to their rogue-like “grand project” had already vanished. There was no longer a proactive reason that kept her moving anymore. Right now, it was the endless negativity and the crushing circumstances that forced Musujime ever forward.

  It doesn’t matter to me, she thought. I’ll do whatever this city wants, to a point.

  But she would no longer stop, even if the result waiting for them was the utter collapse of Academy City’s leadership. If that came to pass, they could blame themselves for pushing her that far.

  Musujime walked down the street, lost in thought in the dim moments just before sundown.

  And then it happened.

  Her cell phone ringtone went off in her skirt pocket. It was a different chime from a few days ago—she didn’t care about this sort of thing, so when her roommate had recommended this ringtone and then changed it for her, Musujime left it as it was, making it her default ringtone.

  She gave a soft sigh, then took her cell phone out of her pocket.

  After pressing the Accept button and placing it next to her ear, words from her roommate, which she’d grown accustomed to hearing, flew at her.

  “Musuuu!! Where are you wandering around?!”

  The voice was sugary sweet, like it belonged to a girl who hadn’t reached puberty yet.

  Her roommate’s name was Komoe Tsukuyomi.

  And in spite of her voice, surprisingly enough, she was a high school teacher.

  “Today is the day that you’ll try your very best until you can make vegetable stir-fry, so Teacher has been waiting with an empty stomach juuust for you. Please come back right now and take ooon the challenge. You have to acquire at least one specialty at sooome point, Musu.”

  At first, it might have seemed like her roommate was just trying to hand off the housework, but Musujime had been made aware in a short time that this sugar-voiced teacher had no such goals.

  It was clear when the teacher continued:

  “It isn’t like girls need to do housework or anything, but life is long, so it’s worth learning new skills to broaden your horizons. It’s not only cooking. Your teacher never heard what sort of life you want in the future, but it’s best to experience all kinds of things so you’ll be ready when you finally do dec
ide what path you want to take. But you should only seek out experiences on the absolute condition that you don’t waste your own time or hinder the path you really want to take.”

  Musujime suddenly stopped walking. Here in the twilight of District 10, she realized that, at some point, the dark pressure weighing gently down on the pit of her stomach had gone away.

  Something in her was surprised—not on the surface, but something deeper inside.

  Surprised that there was still someone who would speak to her like this.

  “…”

  Musujime wondered how to answer the teacher’s repeated “vegetable stir-fry, vegetable stir-fry,” but then a camper drove by right near her. The vehicle stopped next to a juice vending machine, and a man got out of the driver’s seat, heading to it.

  Their eyes never met even once, but she knew the intent.

  It was the signal to start work.

  She’ll be mad at me—no, mad for me, she thought, before speaking again into her cell phone.

  “…This is going to sound blunt, but something suddenly came up, so it doesn’t look like I’ll be making any vegetable stir-fry.”

  “What?! Again?! Then what now? Your teacher was waiting for that stir-fry! To be honest, I figured you’d mess up a lot, so I bought so many vegetables that the refrigerator is insanely packed!”

  “That’s good, isn’t it? Vegetarians live longer, you know,” said Musujime offhandedly and then hung up.

  After looking at her phone for a few moments, she put it back in her skirt pocket and started toward the camper. When she opened the door, there was a white-haired Level Five napping on a plain bed and a blond man in sunglasses sitting at the table playing a portable game where miniskirted maids equipped with gigantic laser cannons went on rampages.

  Giving the passengers a nasty look, Musujime spoke.

  “…Since this is a camper, there must be a kitchen, right?”

  Mitsuki Unabara was in a District 7 hospital. It was past six PM, but visiting hours seemed to run relatively late, perhaps part of the hospital’s policy. At the moment, it was right before closing.

  The hospital room he was in was an individual one, but he wasn’t the patient. He’d come to visit a girl who had been hospitalized here.

  “…You still seem to like that face, Etzali.”

  The brown-skinned girl, sitting up in bed, spoke to him with a voice that sounded deliberately low. Her wavy, shoulder-length hair was black, but somehow it seemed different compared to the hair Japanese people had. The girl—Xóchitl—hailed from Central America.

  “And you still seem like you’re in a bad mood. Do your synthetic-fiber pajamas not suit your skin?”

  As Unabara spoke, he placed a large wrapped object he’d brought with him on the side table.

  “This is Aztecan native clothing. I struggled to procure it…But, well, you’d probably stand out if you wandered through the hospital in this. You can secretly change after lights-out and sleep in them.”

  “Are you looking for gratitude?”

  “What in the world has been getting on your nerves?”

  “I guess you won’t understand unless I spell it out for you.” Xóchitl’s head swiveled, and she glared into Unabara’s eyes again. “What’s been getting on my nerves? You grinning like nothing even happened.”

  “?”

  “The original copy…You picked it up, didn’t you?”

  Xóchitl’s gaze lowered to stare at her hands.

  Slowly opening and closing her five fingers, she said, “Originally, my body—save for one-third of it—was supposed to be a complete dummy…And what happened? You tore every bit of it off before I even realized it. I’m still coming to grips with the difference in our skill and capacities as sorcerers.”

  Before, a certain sorcerer’s society had ground away two-thirds of her physical body and made it into raw materials in order to weaponize and wield a powerful original grimoire. And Unabara was the one who had privately saved her.

  Xóchitl moved her gaze from her palms to Unabara.

  “…You’re holding on to the original copy, aren’t you?”

  “It’s here.”

  Unabara used a hand to open the collar of the suit he was wearing.

  There was something like a holster there, like for holding a gun, but a rolled-up book written on animal skin was stuck inside. Before Xóchitl could examine it more closely, Unabara returned his suit to normal.

  “Even after turning my flesh to dust, I couldn’t control it—and you can command it without doing anything?”

  “Well, no…Frankly speaking, it feels like it’s taking everything just to keep it suppressed.”

  Unabara’s voice was relaxed, but he understood a fraction, at least, of exactly how fearsome this original copy was.

  And of how irregular Xóchitl’s situation had been—she’d been made into a mere specimen in order to use something like this as a piece on a game board.

  “What happened?” asked Unabara.

  It was the question he’d held onto ever since they’d reunited. He’d spoken it now because he decided Xóchitl’s body and mind had stabilized enough to do so.

  Xóchitl fell silent for a moment, turning her face away from Unabara. With her brown-skinned cheek facing him, she muttered:

  “You know of our fight against the American research institution, right? Against Scholarship City.”

  “Yeah, and the particulars, too. I heard an official announcement say it had been destroyed by terrorists who had purchased an older, low-cost fighter jet.”

  “The truth, of course, was that we launched a magical attack on it.”

  That was all she said before going quiet again, but just for a few moments.

  An open, straightforward battle between Central America’s largest sorcerer’s society and a nation that was, on the surface, the global police force. She would have contributed to that war from the back lines.

  “I screwed up,” she said, as though delivering a boring report. “At the last possible moment right at the end, I violated orders a tiny bit. The price I paid was letting them mess with my body quite a bit. Considering our society’s codes, they were in the right.”

  That couldn’t be true. Unabara had been a part of that society for a long time, but he’d never heard of any instances where they’d crush someone’s body to fuse it with an original grimoire, no matter how grave their crimes.

  “There was nobody to stop them? Tochtli? She was your war buddy, right?”

  Unabara knew it was over and done, but he couldn’t help saying the name of another girl—Xóchitl’s colleague.

  But Xóchitl shook her head.

  “I haven’t seen her since before they carried out my sentence. I was just a weapon until you extracted the grimoire. Maybe Tecpatl would know—he was in command of the operation—but I haven’t seen that creep since then, either.”

  Xóchitl leveled her gaze again at Unabara’s suit…where the original copy was stored away.

  “In the end, it wasn’t a matter of the magician’s natural gifts. It seems like the idea of trying to use a grimoire’s original as a convenient tool was too much to ask, given the limits of the human body. Even after all that, I was at the mercy of the grimoire’s every whim.”

  “…I think I agree with you on that. Original grimoires aren’t something you can simply use as a trump card. Even if you use teamwork to bring out a power you don’t understand, it would still only invite destruction…Actually, with Group and me…Joking aside, if I caused them any trouble, they’d probably put me through the ringer.”

  For some reason, Xóchitl was quiet for a moment.

  “…Teamwork, huh?”

  “?”

  “Never mind. When you talk about your friends now, I’m sure the first people you think of are people I don’t know.”

  “Xóchitl—”

  “Don’t try to tell me I’m wrong.”

  The brown-skinned girl blocked Unabara from speakin
g, as though creating a thick wall between them.

  “Whatever your reasons were, the fact is that you defected to Academy City, and now you’re doing secret work as one of their pawns. You knew that would constitute a betrayal of the ones you once called friends. I mean, look at me— You took me down. That was some great teamwork, eh?”

  Xóchitl spoke quietly, admitting that she’d lost while rubbing salt in the wound anyway. When she saw Unabara’s expression tighten slightly, she finally made a satisfied—but slightly gloomy—face.

  “Isn’t that right?”

  After saying that, Xóchitl averted her face slightly from Unabara.

  She pursed her small lips, and in a voice low enough that she didn’t know whether he could hear her, said:

  “…Etzali, my brother.”

  For an instant, time stopped.

  And before Mitsuki Unabara could make any reaction, the hospital room door flew open with a bang!!

  A blond young man with sunglasses, Motoharu Tsuchimikado, burst into the room.

  “Unabara, you bastard!! How the hell are you gonna explain what she just said, nya?!”

  “Etzali, stand back!! They must be new hunters from the organization!! Damn, did they decide they needed to get rid of me along with you?!”

  Before Unabara could advise her that, no, this visitor was a complete weirdo but not an enemy, Tsuchimikado stomped closer to him, veins popping out of his temples.

  “Unabara…!! Does this mean that you had a little sister back in your homeland all along? Then what are you doing falling head over heels for a middle school girl in Academy City attending Tokiwadai?!”

  “Wait, I…What are you talking about?!” Unabara’s shoulders gave a major jolt.

  Xóchitl, who had previously been cautious of Tsuchimikado, stopped moving immediately after hearing him talk, then turned to stare at Mitsuki Unabara again.

  “…A middle school girl? You don’t mean you betrayed the organization for a reason like that, do you?”

  Unable to deny this, Unabara started sweating bullets. He avoided looking her in the eye. After all, it wasn’t as though he was infatuated with that girl just because she was in middle school. It wouldn’t have made a difference if she’d been in high school or college instead—he wasn’t some huge lolicon who had risked his life because of his inclinations.