A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 22

by Kazuma Kamachi

  “Meaning…”

  “You should be able to open the canopy without a problem, declares Misaka.”

  A moment later.

  The canopy, shaped like a rugby ball cut in half lengthwise, opened right overhead. The Sister must have pushed the button.

  Just as she’d said, Mikoto had no trouble breathing. She felt a chill on her skin, but it was a far cry from dozens of degrees below zero.

  The Sister, keeping the VTOL slightly tilted, moved it slowly. Not with the nose pointed at the fortress, but vertically…in other words, with the right wing tip approaching it, steadily sidling foward.

  Just a few meters left.

  Only a multiple of a hundred centimeters.

  The fortress was swaying unstably, and the precise distance changed each time.

  But it was far closer than she had been when she was hesitating in Academy City.

  “This is as close as we can get…,” the Sister declared. “Landing may be too much of a problem, says Misaka, tightening her grip on the yoke.”

  The fighter jet’s forward movement stopped dead in midair.

  They’d only had a little bit left until they reached the fortress.

  “VTOLs are for slowly landing on the surface, explains Misaka. If we were to try to force a landing on the fortress when it is bobbing up and down like this, we run the risk of crashing the underside of the fuselage into it, says Misaka, voicing her concerns.”

  “What about a wider area? The fortress is gigantic. If we go up some more, we should find an area bigger than a midsize farm.”

  “The fortress’s rumbling itself will not change, so we cannot avoid the risk of crashing no matter where we are, says Misaka, responding with a negatory viewpoint. And even if we were able to land on the fortress, if the plane loses its flight capability, escape would become impossible, says Misaka, frowning.”

  “Fine, then.” The canopy still open, Mikoto reached for her belt buckle. “Keep it as balanced as you can! I’m going out to the wing to pull that idiot up here!!”

  Mikoto rose from her seat and crawled toward the wing on all fours.

  She felt less fear than she thought, maybe because she could glue her feet to the main wing with magnetic force.

  She inched forward.

  The distance to the spiky-haired boy closed.

  Come on…

  Clunk. The fortress gave a major rattle.

  Her altitude had decreased.

  It didn’t feel as stable as before.

  The rattling was like…

  …the invisible strings holding up the fortress were being cut, one by one.

  Come on! Reach!!

  The VTOL, its body wobbling around and Mikoto plastered to the main wing, closed in on the fortress a little at a time.

  And then:

  Her eyes met the idiot’s.

  The spiky-haired boy seemed confused at the means of escape that had suddenly sprung up. Part of her wanted to yell What the hell were you planning on doing, stupid? but now wasn’t the time to be sticking to her old ways. She’d scold him until he was dead after this.

  After coming to the wing’s tip, Mikoto stretched her hand out as far as she could.

  Would she reach, or wouldn’t she?

  Their fingertips drew near, until they almost touched.

  However.

  Then the boy did something she’d never expected.

  He shook his head.

  And his hand, which he’d almost reached out far enough, stopped.

  Wha…?

  Mikoto was dumbfounded, and then the boy’s lips moved.

  She couldn’t hear the words.

  But she could read his lips.

  There’s something I still have to do.

  Ga-bam!! The fortress gave a massive jolt. Its descent accelerated even more, and became even more unstable, than before. It was as though a large ball rolling down a hilly road had picked up so much speed nobody could turn it back. She had to retrieve the idiot now.

  However.

  The VTOL suddenly rocked. The aircraft swayed, almost as if it was flying away from the fortress.

  “Hey!! What do you think you’re doing?!”

  “The fortress’s shaking has exceeded a threshold, reports Misaka. If we continue our approach, this aircraft may crash into it.”

  “…!!”

  Still plastered to the shaking main wing, Mikoto held out her palm and grabbed hold of nearby magnetic forces.

  She’d get him by force if she had to—she didn’t care.

  Anything would work: a button on his school uniform, a belt buckle. She’d use magnetism to drag the boy up and evacuate him from the fortress.

  That was her plan. But in actuality, the thread of magnetism that connected her to him abruptly broke off.

  “Huh…?”

  Mikoto stared blankly, completely in the dark about what had just happened.

  A moment later, though, she understood. The boy had a strange power that canceled out all Mikoto’s abilities.

  And it had cut off his last lifeline.

  Even if she had the power to take on a bunch of tanks at once—even if she had the power to stop a nuclear missile launch.

  It wasn’t enough to rescue that one boy.

  As the fortress continued its unstable descent, the VTOL drew away from it. The Sister pulled Mikoto, who was idle atop the turbulent main wing, into the cockpit and shut the canopy. The blessing of the mysterious field around the fortress was immediately lost.

  The reason was simple.

  That was how far away they’d gotten.

  Leaving the boy, who said he still had something he needed to do, behind in the fortress.

  A moment later, the only sound was Mikoto Misaka’s scream.

  5

  …There’s still something I have to do.

  The VTOL pulled away. The fighter craft that might have been his last way to escape.

  But Kamijou had turned his back on it.

  His fight couldn’t end just yet. The Star of Bethlehem had a radius of over forty kilometers. If a structure this big was in free fall, the damage it would do to this celestial body called Earth would be incredibly severe. The war wasn’t over until someone did something about this problem.

  And besides…

  Kamijou looked around and searched for his objective: the remote-control Soul Arm meant for controlling Index from the outside. It had fallen through a crack in the floor after the last attack. He needed to find it and destroy it.

  His footing swayed.

  The way it shook made him anxious, like an elevator moving at a fixed speed that suddenly stopped.

  This fortress wouldn’t hold for long.

  And when he realized that again, he heard a girl’s voice ringing in his ears.

  A voice that couldn’t possibly have been there.

  “Touma…”

  It was the voice he thought he’d wanted to hear for so long.

  The remote-control Soul Arm had left Fiamma’s hands, but it was probably still working. Her consciousness, no longer suppressed by anyone, was drifting about the space around the Soul Arm.

  “Touma…”

  Then, faintly…

  …her body appeared, translucent, as if rising out of the air. Upside-down and ignoring gravity, she looked at Kamijou’s face.

  She spoke.

  “Why didn’t you escape?”

  “Because nothing’s finished yet,” he answered, going farther into the Star. He wasn’t searching blindly; her very presence was leading him to the Soul Arm. “Your Soul Arm is still around, of course, but I have to take care of the fortress itself, too.”

  After saying that, Kamijou’s expression suddenly clouded.

  There was just one thing he hadn’t resolved during his battle with Fiamma of the Right.

  “…I’m sorry.”

  The fact that he had amnesia.

  The question of whether hiding it all this time was truly the right thing to do,
he simply hadn’t wanted to hurt Index. He wanted to be the Touma Kamijou she believed in. But wasn’t that only because he personally didn’t want to see Index’s face in shock? Wasn’t he just scared she’d leave him?

  Now that he’d finished his fight with Fiamma, he understood:

  If he truly thought it was best for her, then he had to overcome.

  Overcome the painful, overcome the bitter, overcome everything.

  Don’t fear the position in which you stand.

  “I’ve done something terrible to you. I’ve been lying to you all this time. I’m going to tell you everything now. I don’t have a guarantee I’ll be able to come back from the Star of Bethlehem, so I’ll tell you while I still can.”

  Very slightly, Kamijou looked down.

  And then, once more, he lifted his eyes of his own accord.

  “I…”

  He spoke.

  And this…was the first time.

  The first time he’d ever felt like this.

  Felt like opening his mouth took so much courage.

  “I…”

  What he’d been hiding from her all this time.

  His amnesia.

  The truth.

  “

  .”

  As he moved his mouth, forming words, he thought, That was long.

  “It’s fine.”

  He heard Index’s voice cutting him off.

  “That’s all fine now. It doesn’t matter. If the same old Touma comes back home, none of it matters.”

  “…”

  For just a moment, he was silent.

  He truly wanted to take her up on her kindness.

  “I’ll come back. I promise.”

  But being hard on himself and being pessimistic were different things.

  He’d live and return for certain.

  For that, Touma Kamijou needed to promise this.

  “And it won’t just be for this Soul Arm. Once I get back, I’ll apologize to you for real.”

  He glanced at a panel on a nearby pillar. It was a communication device fitted with a microphone for broadcasting audio through the speakers all over the Star. He couldn’t read the Russian writing, but he did understand the numbers written with them.

  “Tell this to the English Puritan Church: The frequency is 50.9 megahertz. That should let them connect to these speakers. If this much matter falls uncontrollably, there’s no telling how bad the damage will be. I’ll have to lower its speed in stages and set it down somewhere safe. And the only one who can take the wheel right now is me. But I need advice to do it.”

  “I can’t do that.” The girl’s voice became troubled. “I can’t go back to my body by myself.”

  “Didn’t think so,” Kamijou agreed casually. His eyes settled on that accursed Soul Arm on the floor. “You’ll have to go back before me.”

  He reached out his right hand and grabbed the small, cylindrical Soul Arm.

  That was all.

  The Soul Arm crumbled into pieces, and at the same time, the power sustaining her was lost. Her translucent body disappeared, too, like an eraser had rubbed it out.

  Now he was well and truly alone.

  The Star of Bethlehem was still continuing its descent in the meantime. Its speed, too, was steadily increasing. Once it went past the point of no return, it really would crash into the ground at a speed close to free fall.

  A direct impact from of a mass over forty kilometers in radius.

  If that came to pass, it would demonstrate in twenty-first-century Earth that a meteor collision had caused the Ice Age. Some historians might be pleased, but for most people, it would only spell tragedy.

  The final battle was about to begin.

  As a reward for his gamble, he had been presented with the very fate of this shooting star.

  6

  “According to information from the Roman and Russian Churches, the Star of Bethlehem floats in the air using twenty large Soul Arms for levitation. Losing the power from Fiamma has caused its output to drop. At this rate, it will lose all buoyancy after one hour and fall straight down toward the surface.”

  He could hear Stiyl Magnus’s voice emanating from the speakers around the fortress. Kamijou had entrusted him with guarding Index; he’d ended that mission earlier by destroying the remote-control Soul Arm, and now he was guiding Kamijou.

  “But if you destroy any of the levitation Soul Arms, we can control the Star of Bethlehem’s facing and direction. Meaning your right hand is perfect for the job.”

  “What exactly should I bust up?”

  “Hold on. I just got a map sent to me. It’s based on assumptions, so the actual model might be different. If anything seems wrong, report it at once.”

  Following Stiyl’s directions, Kamijou used the facility’s monorail, and where he couldn’t proceed with that alone, he continued running on his feet. There was no time left anymore. If he failed, six billion lives would be at risk.

  “I’ll tell you the exact positions by word of mouth, but you’ll want to destroy number three, number nine, and number thirteen in the south part. That will cause the Star of Bethlehem’s trajectory to change. Have it head for the edge of the Arctic Ocean. We’ll drop its speed as much as possible and have it land in the water to prevent the impact. Considering its altitude and mass, that’s the only way we won’t do massive damage to the planet’s environment.”

  “If we reduce the number of big levitation Soul Arms, won’t that make it fall even faster?”

  “They share a power source. If there are fewer Soul Arms, that alone will increase the output, one at a time. Of course, it’ll be limited to just one at a time, but you don’t need to worry about the power supply weakening at the moment. If you thin them out, the output might increase momentarily.”

  “What are the chances of a tsunami or something if we drop it in the ocean?”

  “The cities along the Arctic Ocean’s coastline have been warned to evacuate. The Roman and Russian Churches are being disgustingly cooperative in helping them. Otherwise, we would have had to be aware of a few casualties.”

  In the meantime, Kamijou arrived at the number three Soul Arm.

  The place looked like a factory.

  Large facilities, even bigger than school buildings, lined this enclosed space, with dozens of thick pipes running everywhere. Metal staircases and walkways were a tangled mess between them. Green light particles flitted about intermittently—were they responsible for making this giant fortress float?

  Bam!!

  Kamijou struck a nearby pipe with his palm.

  That was all. With just that, countless cracks formed in the pipe; the square, stone structure tipped over; and brilliant explosions began going off inside it. Kamijou distanced himself to not be caught up in it, then ran toward the next Soul Arm, number nine.

  “…Never did I think we’d be fighting side by side in the very end,” muttered Stiyl. “It didn’t have to be me. I’ve been getting sporadic reports from her, too, now that she’s finally woken up. Her mind was in the Star of Bethlehem earlier. Couldn’t you have solved this situation by relying on her knowledge?”

  “I’m not fooling around here. I couldn’t let Index suffer in that state for another minute.”

  “I get it. It’s not my style to owe anything to someone like you, but I’ll make an exception this time and accept it.”

  “If that’s really how you feel, could you get a recovery team or something near the projected landing site? I’d really rather not be waiting around in subzero ice water.”

  “I’ll do something about that,” answered Stiyl quietly. “If the gradual descent goes as planned, you shouldn’t die even if it lands on the water.”

  In the meantime, Kamijou desperately ran through the Star of Bethlehem.

  The number nine Soul Arm was right there.

  We’ll manage, thought Kamijou. This big war that started from a quarrel with the Roman Orthodox Church had been nothing but terrible in every way. But in the end,
they’d manage. They’d manage for sure. Confident, Kamijou ran ever forward.

  Until…

  “What’s this…?”

  …an impatient voice flew at him from the speakers.

  Kamijou listened to it as he ran.

  “That’s strange. Some kind of massive…telesma? Why would something like that be…?”

  He had a bad feeling about this.

  But he couldn’t stop now. As Kamijou headed for the number nine Soul Arm, Stiyl grumbled:

  “Of all the times—why in the hell is Misha Kreutzev surfacing now?!”

  7

  Concurrently, the archangel who had cooperated with Fiamma of the Right was about to recover its body once again on the wintry Russian lands.

  The fluctuations in the four aspects had been corrected by Fiamma’s hands. Now, she was not Misha, a mixture of the LIKENESS OF GOD, Michael, and the POWER OF GOD, Gabriel, but an archangel in a pure sense. It would not be a mistake to say that at this point, her goal had, to a certain degree, been accomplished.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  She wasn’t perfect.

  Her goal was simply to return her own existence to its original “seat.” Having been about to go off the rails once, she could see no other goal, nor did she consider how much damage would occur in achieving her goal. She would just return. For that, and that alone, the archangel began to move once again.

  The massive telesma scattered about her surroundings began to converge toward one point.

  She had been torn apart once by the power of the scientific monsters, but they hadn’t damaged her essence. Bringing a fist down on water would cause it to splash, but it wouldn’t reduce the amount of water itself. It was the same as that.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  She wasn’t perfect.

  Now that its action had been stopped once, the archangel sought an additional increase in her practical power. She knew well what would serve as material for it. She controlled water. In the winter, Russia had so much snow it covered the ground, but simply melting that wouldn’t be enough.

  But it wouldn’t be enough.

  She wasn’t perfect.

  But it wouldn’t be enough.

  She wasn’t perfect.

  But HWSR it wouldn’t be enough.