A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 22

by Kazuma Kamachi

  Hadn’t he come to Russia because he didn’t want to shed any more of the blood for the machinations of Academy City’s darkness?

  “Muginoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!”

  The next thing he knew, he had run over to her. He tossed his assault rifle to the side. He didn’t need something like that. Not for this.

  No attacks came from Mugino, who had stood in his way as such a formidable obstacle until now. She simply continued to shake.

  Hamazura approached her, squatted, put his arm around her back, and propped her up out of the snow.

  Now naturally in a hugging position, he felt in his palm something strange, hard and hollow, in addition to the feminine, soft sensation of her body.

  At first, he thought she was hiding something in the back of her coat, but he quickly realized that wasn’t the case.

  Something was inside her.

  Mugino’s expression hadn’t changed. For her, maybe it was natural at this point, nothing worth discussing. Seeing Hamazura’s shocked face, she moved her trembling lips and voiced her confusion.

  “…What…are you doing…?”

  “I’m sick of all this…,” spat Hamazura, wringing out his true feelings. “Why do we have to kill each other like this?! Those fights with Item and School were what caused us to be enemies, but wasn’t that really a problem the adults in Academy City were supposed to solve?! Their ambition created the darkness in that city, didn’t it? Why do we have to go this far just to wipe their asses?!”

  “…”

  “You, Takitsubo, Kinuhata, even Frenda—you were such good friends before, weren’t you?! I don’t know much about when you four were still together, but you all trusted one another, even before I was made Item’s subordinate, didn’t you?! Why? Why did it have to turn out this way?! It wasn’t just a short temper that made you kill Frenda. If Academy City’s leaders really had control over even that battle, then whatever the specifics were, they set it up so that Item would lose to School, didn’t they?! We were cornered, and then they designed it so we’d all kill each other!!”

  Academy City’s leaders controlled people’s fates like gods—had they even predicted this conversation? And were they listening to Hamazura’s exhausted words from the comfort of a dark room somewhere, laughing at them?

  “Listen. If you want to see me being pathetic, I’ll do anything. I’ll grovel until I die. I’ll lick the bottom of your boots as long as you want, and I’ll even light my bankbook on fire. I’d do anything if it would stop this fighting.”

  Expelling his true feelings from the bottom of his heart, Hamazura keenly felt as though his true enemy was coming more and more into view. And it wasn’t a monster like Mugino. It was the guys who had turned this lone girl into a monster.

  He wasn’t going to spout nonsense about it being society’s fault, or that their living environment was somehow responsible. A Mugino-level calamity would never happen in a natural environment. She was too massive a nightmare for that.

  However.

  If there was someone intentionally building everything around the delinquents and espers in those back alleys to create these tragedies and reducing them to means for profit…

  Wouldn’t that be a far more terrifyingly malicious existence than a mere monster?

  “So let’s…just stop.”

  They didn’t need to fight.

  If they took each other’s lives, the ones who stood to gain were the bigwigs sharpening their claws in a place they could never reach. Why did others have to wash blood with blood in endless battles just to increase the number of their jewels and paintings? What reason could he possibly have to call this girl a monster—a lonely girl who had been remade into a monster—and hold her at gunpoint?

  At last, having ultimately severed the mental chains strung through the giant darkness known as Academy City, Hamazura spoke.

  He said what would be the most natural thing for a normal person to say:

  “Let’s just…stop killing each other.”

  For a while, Shizuri Mugino was silent.

  Embraced by her mortal enemy, so close to her target she’d normally be able to instantly kill him without lifting a finger—the Level Five monster let her body sink into the Level Zero boy’s arms.

  Eventually, her lips moved.

  Her head swung side to side.

  “…What are you saying, Hamazura…?”

  She seemed to squeeze the words out.

  Her voice—it seemed to shatter her own heart to pieces, exposing everything inside it.

  “But you chose Takitsubo, didn’t you? You killed me twice to save her. And after all that, you’re saying you’ll save me when I’m like this…?”

  “Yeah…,” said Hamazura with a groan and a nod. “That’s right!! I chose Takitsubo! I swore I’d protect her with my life!! That hasn’t changed!! So I can’t do it over and choose you or anyone else!! The facts haven’t changed at all. I abandoned you so I could protect Takitsubo!!”

  He had said he’d willingly endure any humiliation. If that was what it took to stop the fighting. He knew the weight of their violence. When Mugino realized that, the corners of her lips loosened ever so slightly, so subtly that no one who wasn’t watching very closely would have noticed.

  When she looked back on it, her body had been wrecked.

  She hadn’t only lost an eye and an arm. Her insides had been messed up badly enough that her missing appendages were the least of her worries due to the effects of Academy City’s incomprehensible medical technology and the Crystals ruining her body. As she thought on her miserable state, she said, “…You’re so selfish.”

  “I know. I’m probably the worst person in all of Academy City.”

  “I killed Frenda, you know. I tore apart Item. And I tried to kill Takitsubo more than once. How exactly are you going to save me?”

  “I doubt it’ll be easy. And that goes for both of us.”

  “…?”

  “Apologize to Kinuhata like crazy, bow your head to Takitsubo, then cry and beg forgiveness at Frenda’s grave. If you do that…”

  Then Hamazura stopped talking for a moment.

  The Level Zero delinquent used every ounce of his lacking mind to form the words he’d need to get his point across.

  “If you do that, we can all be Item again. I’m sure we can!!”

  There was no argument.

  Far from it—Shizuri Mugino’s thoughts had completely frozen over.

  In the silence, only Hamazura continued:

  “Until then, I’ll keep you alive! If you, and Takitsubo, and Kinuhata—all of us—can go back to being Item, I’ll stake my life on it!! So stand up, Mugino. Please—just one more time. Stand up on your own two legs, for real!! Break through that twisted pride, the chains that Academy City wrapped around you!!”

  “…You, a Level Zero, are going to protect me, a Level Five…?” muttered Mugino before a grin split across her distorted face.

  Shizuri Mugino, Saiai Kinuhata, Frenda, and Rikou Takitsubo.

  It was the same grin from the days they held strategy meetings together in family restaurants.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding. Don’t underestimate me that much.”

  Brushing Hamazura’s hand away, her movements slow, Mugino stood up on the snow. Her body tilted to one side, wavering. He quickly put out a hand to hold her up, after which she used her jaw to gesture to the night sky, with its eerie four-colored trails of light running through it.

  An Academy City supersonic bomber was about to pass over.

  They could see three lumps falling straight down along the bomber’s flight path.

  Skreeeee!! An awful scraping noise abruptly ripped through the air. It was coming from the Russian military operative’s radio, which had fallen on the snow. The signal was being jammed.

  It was probably so that the inhumane acts sure to happen momentarily would never leak to the outside world.

  Hamazura felt an intense loathin
g, like he’d touched incredibly filthy slime.

  Hamazura could smell it again—the same smell he noticed while confronting the privateers. This time he was facing weapons from his home, Academy City, but the impression he got from them was the exact opposite of that monster plane that had shot down the Russian saboteur team. These were not the benevolent sort who would blow up Steam Dispensers for them without being asked.

  The soldiers on their way now were surely coming to kill them.

  That was their only objective.

  That was Hamazura’s gut feeling.

  While looking up at the creepy night sky, Mugino said softly, “…I was apparently disposable to begin with. They probably decided to crush the garbage before she could produce results. Their plan B or whatever is coming down now. What will you do, Hamazura?”

  “I already told you.”

  Hamazura picked up the assault rifle again, which he’d discarded a short distance away.

  “I’d risk my life if everyone could go back to being Item again.”

  “…Hmph. You’ve got guts,” said Mugino to herself so he wouldn’t hear.

  Meanwhile, Hamazura was observing their surroundings. There would be some time before the Academy City assassins fully alighted. In the meantime, the first thing he’d do was find Takitsubo, who he’d been separated from in the avalanche’s aftermath. Once he did that, he had to think of a plan to intercept those Academy City assassins drifting down from the night sky to attack them.

  He’d been given precious little time.

  A darkness enough to substitute for Shizuri Mugino was about to close in on them to try to swallow them whole.

  5

  The basement of St. George’s Cathedral.

  Index’s fierce attack was merciless.

  She had immediately figured out that Stiyl Magnus was purposely using three flame titans as one to create a combined structure, resulting in less of a burden than normal.

  To destroy that structure, she had focused her attacks on just one Innocentius. Under her assault, Innocentius was reduced to two bodies and the unstable stress hit Stiyl all at once.

  But the battle continued.

  There was no time to rest.

  Index’s intense attack, which fully utilized 103,000 grimoires, didn’t give him that chance.

  Foreign things clung to her. In her emotionless eyes shone magic circles; from her limp, unbalanced back grew red wings; and around her floated swords, formed by light particles converging. All of them existed to annihilate any hostile entities, and at the moment, their target was Stiyl Magnus.

  “Guh…!!”

  Even now, the bloodred wings flapped again and again, and the slender swordlike objects made of light pressed him in an attack that came from multiple directions. The swords were not in Index’s hands; they were floating around her. It made Stiyl remember the sword that could fight on its own and kill enemies without anyone to wield it, the one possessed by Freyr, god of fertility.

  Angel wings and swords of Freyr…!! Quite the combination, for someone who combines Crossism and Scandinavian myth myself!!

  In Scandinavian mythology, there existed no stories of anyone defeating that sword. Even in Ragnarok, the final battle, Freyr only lost because he’d left that sword with someone else before the war began. Nowhere was a method described for what to do to beat the sword.

  Yes.

  Even Odin and Thor were defeated along with their weapons—but that sword alone was not.

  Innocentius wouldn’t be enough on its own.

  It would be worn down in an instant, then extinguished without time to recover.

  Who would stop Index if that happened?

  How do I save her? Stiyl wondered.

  Roar!!

  Without hesitation, he created a flame sword, then stepped between Index and Innocentius.

  He had only two flame titans left, so they couldn’t buy any recovery time.

  Their regeneration couldn’t keep up with Index’s onslaught, and they’d already lost their momentum as though it had been ripped out of them. If he could make up for that in some other way, he could still fight.

  If he could only buy time for them to recover, he’d be able to rotate out.

  Zng-bam-zng-bam-bang-bam-boom!! Multiple slashing attacks flew out, blood wings and titan arms swinging. More pressure was building inside Stiyl’s body, and an awful sweat dripped off his skin. His flame swords weren’t perfect either; he’d been hit by one of Index’s earlier attacks, too, which had cut him and violently flung him away. Twisting his body to its limit, Stiyl barely managed to keep fighting.

  However.

  John’s Pen, the Automatic Clerk, was a system designed to annihilate anyone, whether an individual or an organization, attempting to steal the 103,000 grimoires. The fact that Stiyl Magnus was able to deal with her alone at all was certainly unexpected.

  Stiyl had grown, but that alone was hardly enough to explain it.

  Index was clearly not operating at 100 percent.

  The remote-control Soul Arm is hurting her.

  Though he was achieving the incredible feat of breaking the 103,000 grimoires’ attack on his own, Stiyl didn’t overestimate his own ability.

  Something extra has intruded on her mind, and it’s lowering her precision and speed. If she were in the same state as back then, when I fought alongside that right-hand boy, this sort of parlor trick would never have worked.

  Still, he didn’t intend to give thanks to anyone.

  She wouldn’t have had to suffer at all were it not for that thing in the first place.

  Stiyl pushed forward.

  A momentary opening.

  If he detonated his flame sword now, he could knock her out. No matter how great this system was magically, the core was still a delicate girl. If she took the brunt of the shock wave, it should be enough to disable her. And in the meantime, he could put up extra rune cards to bind her mentally.

  And then it would be over.

  But at the last moment, Stiyl’s mind slightly caught on something.

  Even if it was to protect her…

  Even if the remote-control Soul Arm was forcing her to fight a battle she didn’t want…

  He’d hurt this child so much already.

  Could Stiyl Magnus’s magic name tolerate dealing even one more wound to her?

  He shouldn’t have thought about it. It was time he couldn’t afford to spend.

  And then—

  “Chapter 32, Verse 44. Preparation for counterattacks complete.”

  —the cold voice of the girl he needed to protect found him.

  INTERLUDE SIX

  It had been easy to steal one of Academy City’s tanks.

  For starters, Mikoto was the number one esper when it came to controlling electricity, and while modern tanks still ran mainly on diesel, many of their parts had been digitized. Mikoto could hack directly without needing any cables or dedicated interfaces, so weapon systems like these were no enemy for her.

  There were soldiers out there who wore plated armor that would exhaustively reflect any and all electromagnetic waves as defense against electric-type abilities, and some powered suits featured a chemical system to contract springs to avoid electrical vulnerabilities. But apparently those countermeasures hadn’t been applied to vehicles.

  After stopping one tank’s engine from afar and unlocking the hatch, Mikoto had jumped inside and beat up the drivers.

  They had tried to raise the alarm, but Mikoto had been interfering with their radio communications, too. Much like how she had been messing with the radars comprehensively monitoring the battlefield and the aerial photography of UAVs. Nobody would notice if she left the battle line.

  “Hmm. These go faster than I thought they would,” she murmured from within the tank the Sister was operating.

  “Modern tanks have always maintained the output necessary to drive on highways without issue, but going up to one hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on this
snowy road must be unique to Academy City technology, reports Misaka offhandedly.”

  “Well, these hunks of metal cost seven billion yen a pop, so they’d better be able to help at least this much.”

  “Actually, it’s hunks of composite alloys, Big Sister, corrects Misaka. Tanks these days can fire their main cannons at Mach 4.5, adds Misaka idly. That’s more output than your Railgun.”

  “It’s not like speed is the only thing that matters.”

  Railgun was just what people called her, and it was the ultimate symbol of electric-type abilities; still, it wasn’t as though every bit of her pride was concentrated into only one kind of ability. In fact, her true value was measured in her versatility, her many options to attack enemies from different angles.

  …Well, I guess that would put that idiot in a league of his own, since he can erase anything I can possibly throw at him.

  “I apologize for interrupting you during your muttering, but—”

  “Nyah?!”

  “—it seems we’ve been spotted visually by the independent unit preparing the Nu-AD1967 nuclear warhead, reports Misaka.”

  Had their full-speed dash worked against them? Their enemies must have seen the snow clouds whipping up in the tank treads’ wake through a night-vision scope or something.

  Something fired in the distance.

  Mikoto’s spine tingled—she’d been so worked up over the nuclear warhead that for a moment she feared the worst, but it soon became evident that what just went off was something else. The missiles coming their way were small, but there were a lot of them.

  “They appear to be surface-to-surface missiles for bombardment, cautions Misaka. They number thirty to forty.”

  “Nyeah, yeah.”

  “It seems you’ve been acting catlike for some time, but what shall we do? Asks Misaka, urging action.”

  “Well…” Mikoto hummed as she put her hand on the hatch above her head. She opened the cylindrical, small manhole-sized hatch as wide as it could go, then hoisted her upper body out of the top section of the main gun turret. “I’ll do what I do best and fry them up, of course!!”

  As she shouted, sparks sprayed from her bangs.

  What shot out wasn’t a lightning lance. Massive electromagnetic waves were radiating out in a wide cone in front of her, in a way that disrupted the radars used for targeting systems by the surface-to-surface missiles speeding through the air at over twice the speed of sound.