Accelerator’s arm touched the transport helicopter’s wall.
Like paper ripping, the military-steel wall began to be easily destroyed. An incredibly chilly wind blew in, but the people in the protective suits couldn’t pay attention to that. The terror of never knowing when the helicopter would plummet began to dominate the craft.
Amid it all, the king of monsters ruling over that fear simply said:
“This is my triumphant homecoming, you shitheads.”
Using one finger to toy with the transport helicopter’s minimum aerodynamic balance, wearing a smile that seemed to split his face in two, Accelerator added:
“And to start, I’ll go rescue that kid and Misaka Worst.”
Fiamma of the Right, hand trembling, opened the metal door from the inside.
Because of the damage gnawing away at his whole body, he couldn’t even get up. He rolled outside the escape container.
He was on top of a low mountain.
The Star of Bethlehem he’d built up was nowhere to be found. The skies had returned to their original color, too. And he could no longer hear that constant nearby drumfire. A silent white. As he stared across the Russian scenery expanding out from the escape container, Fiamma came to a vague answer.
It was all over.
He didn’t know what would become of the world after this. He knew he’d picked the best option at the moment. And now that it had been turned away, this world would be continuing its slide down the slope even now. How far would it fall? Or would it veer onto a different course as it fell? He was unable to make any predictions.
That man had instructed him to live in a world like this.
It hadn’t been mere lip service. The man had gone through with it, full force, even giving his only chance to escape to a stranger.
Then now’s when you start getting out there and seeing everything you can.
Those final words rang keenly in his ears. And so Fiamma, without going straight down into the snow, lay atop the ground like this, his objective lost. Needless to say, his path from here on would be a rocky one. He’d thrown the world into chaos, and they’d chase him down as the criminal who caused a war. He wouldn’t have the Roman or Russian Churches’ cooperation. God’s Right Seat was no more. He’d lost the Soul Arm that remotely controlled Index. His arm may have held a special power, but in a restricted situation, if he fought endlessly appearing enemies, it would eventually run out of steam. In this world of the victors, Fiamma would be treated as the one stain remaining.
A life on the run would be like something that whittled away at the surface of his body.
In such a swamp, he doubted he would find what that man had told him about.
“…”
But for some reason, Fiamma couldn’t easily give up the possibility that another had risked his life to leave to him. At the time, that man had certainly seen something Fiamma couldn’t. He hesitated to simply discard it without learning what it was.
He would determine where he was going once he started going, he decided.
Everything lost to him, Fiamma slowly put energy into his whole body once more, with his own feet. Wobbling, he stood up—and took his first step.
And then it happened.
Boom!!
Suddenly, Fiamma’s right arm was cut off at the shoulder.
He hadn’t been able to sense any sorcery activating, or any signs of something similar during the strike. The attack had fired from behind him and brutally sheared his limb off. His right arm, the symbol of his power. Having lost it, Fiamma, scattering red blood onto the white snow, screamed.
Holding the wound with his other hand, he turned around.
There was a strange sorcerer.
Silvery hair, colorless, reaching to his waist. A clean-cut face betraying no expression. Clothing consisting only of a green operating gown in this terrible cold. A strange atmosphere that made him look both male and female, both adult and child, both saint and sinner.
He knew him.
Fiamma of the Right knew this sorcerer.
However.
“…Aleister Crowley…?”
“As I thought, you correctly recognized me even without the vessel. By using a life-support system to mechanically create life force itself, the foundation of mana, I escaped all investigations in the past—but in this state, I suppose it only natural I would not be able to receive its blessings.”
“You—I see—but that logic creates a contradiction. It doesn’t explain why you’re here.”
“I assure you, there is nothing strange about this.”
The sorcerer who should rightly have been in a windowless building in the heart of Academy City answered the question as though it were a matter of course.
“The very existence of Anna Sprengel, window to the Secret Chiefs and collaborator in the Golden society’s establishment, was pronounced dubious…I, too, am one who functioned as a window to Aiwass—a theory of the Secret Chiefs’. Frankly, I doubt Aiwass would undertake such a grandiose, overly straightforward duty as giving permission for the establishment of sorcerer’s societies around the world, and in the first place, there is no need to get such permission, but well, it is likely of the same essence as the being of which Anna spoke. Which means there is nothing mysterious about having exceeded the domain describable with only zeroes and ones.”
Aleister Crowley, even now, existed in the center of Academy City.
But at the same time, Aleister Crowley, even now, existed before Fiamma.
There weren’t multiple clones of him.
He could simply exist in multiple locations in his one body.
A phenomenon that caused fundamental concepts of enumerability to collapse; but that itself was the highest domain. In the first place, the Sephirothic Tree provided an explanation to the spiritual world using various words and numbers, but when it came to upper organizations beyond a certain point, they were purposely left out as something inexplicable with words.
Would one who stepped into that domain arrive at one of those upper organizations? Or would arriving at that upper organization cause it to be transformed into that domain?
Either way, Crowley was in a place in a different dimension.
In an even higher place than Fiamma, who had declared he had the power to save everyone in the world and yet was no more than one of the countable beings in this world.
“…Why?” murmured Fiamma. “I couldn’t do it. Even though I should have had the power to save the world, just as Jesus Christ did. And I couldn’t do that.”
“That was no more than a matter of how you used your power, not its quality or quantity,” said Aleister Crowley in a bored-sounding tone. “In my humble opinion, the age of Crossist spells ended with the completion of the Book of the Law. I actually think you made it quite far. Including your keen eye for the kami-jo, the god above. Had you decided to format not with the rules of a Crossist-domination world—the Age of Osiris—and instead with the Age of Horus after that, you may have set your sights on a place similar to me.”
He who created supernatural powers using science.
He who constructed angels based on their gathering.
Fiamma of the Right, who controlled Michael, knew what that meant. Producing an angel wasn’t merely creating a new form of life. A symbol of an aspect comprising the world—creating that with human hands equated to artificially interfering with the very system underlying this world.
The deed of attempting to embed a human-created cog into the mechanisms God had created, to reassemble a music box into a time bomb.
The inspiration to not only accept the occult but to try to ram precision instruments in it.
The thought processes to guide anything from the old age to the gallows just by thinking about it.
“…Is Aiwass such an attractive being?” asked Fiamma. “An angel that neither the Bible nor theology can explain. And a symbol of an aspect outside God’s hands in a world He created—the clue to tearing dow
n the fate He assigned…You didn’t want the Book of the Law. You wanted the aberrant angel itself that initiated you in its ways.”
Aleister neither confirmed nor denied it.
“Well, originally, this was not the stage in which I should have appeared,” spoke the sorcerer called the most terrible in the world. “You may not understand the value in things, but you got a little too deeply involved with that right hand. You should have just recognized it as something that simply erased any strange powers, but you likely glimpsed what lies within it. I could not rightly leave you. Loath though I may be to admit it, you’ve forced my hand.”
“What lies within…?”
“And this ending, as well. To think it would fall from my hands. Thanks to that, I need to take quite the detour…Ah, I may be feeling a natural anger as a living creature.”
“…”
Fiamma’s eyebrow twitched slightly.
He’d just remembered the thing that had flowed out when he’d cut off that boy’s right arm.
“What was that?”
“I think you know,” came the dismissive response. “Putting aside the fact that the formatting at the core of your actions was too old, it was very similar to my own plan. The idea to prepare a temple filled with aberrant forces, scour that right arm’s power within it, and with that power, readjust the depth of the very phases, resulting in a transformation of the world. How is it different from the miniature world in which a certain kind of power called Academy City is sealed? You need only realign your view of your own actions to a different standpoint. That would have been all it took for you to understand that power’s true essence…Of course, had you succeeded, you may have reached your objective a step even before me.”
And that was why Aleister had come here.
“That parchment. A badly made thing, consolidated by Russian Catholic hands, but it being analyzed by anti-sorcerer institutions such as the English Church would have been a problem as well. I had my teams act in a somewhat gaudy manner this time, but in the end, thankfully, we recovered it…But that alone isn’t enough. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
Fiamma was no fool. It was so Aleister could quash any possibility of Fiamma piecing together Aleister’s plans from the unsuccessful incident he’d caused. Because of that, he couldn’t even transfer custody to a sorcery faction. At this time, Fiamma had gotten the closest to the truth of this world.
“I see.” Only one arm left, Fiamma of the Right still slowly shook his head. “…But none of that matters anymore.”
Strangely, his face was drained of the strange passion that had followed him up until that moment.
As if something he possessed had slipped out of him.
“When I look at your face, I can feel how empty everything I’ve done is. I’ve probably made the same face myself. A face nobody who would really save the world would ever make…At that time, in that place, he stood in a spot where nobody could catch him.”
Fiamma felt like he understood a little of what he’d lacked.
And so he took his left hand, which was covering his wound to hold back the blood loss, and of his own will removed it. At the same time, there was a loud boom!! The spurting blood outlined a giant, transparent arm. His third arm. A power he could no longer control of his own volition—but for a little while, he could still fight.
“I doubt that will work.”
Aleister Crowley didn’t even take a stance. He moved the fingers on a hand, slowly grabbing something invisible. During his pantomiming motion, Fiamma sensed something strange. It felt like a staff, one that couldn’t possibly exist, had revealed itself. No—he was right. It didn’t exist in the real world. Despite that, due to unclassified information such as mood and atmosphere, it was as though he was seeing an illusion—in color, even: silver.
The Blasting Rod.
The rod from an old sorcerer’s tale where Crowley, once referred to as the ultimate evil, had decided to ask his teacher for direction out of pure respect.
“It was never about whether it would work,” Fiamma stated quietly.
Aleister would probably never understand, even given a hundred years.
If true feelings of wanting to save others took precedence, then obviously one’s chance at winning had to be relegated.
Then now’s when you start getting out there and seeing everything you can.
Someone who could answer with that, without hesitation, to an enemy who had said they didn’t understand how big the world was, probably knew a lot more than he did. Much more that wasn’t recorded even in the original copies of grimoires. Fiamma wasn’t even sure he’d grasped a glimpse of it, but because of that, he thought this:
He couldn’t let Aleister crush that underfoot.
Even if it meant confronting a true monster.
That man had risked his life to save the world—and he couldn’t let Aleister trample on that anymore.
The duel’s outcome was clear as day.
Two figures collided, and one fell down the mountain’s sloped surface.
Silence once again returned to the white Russian landscape.
The victor cast a single glance down the slope before saying, while melting his body into the air, “…The fact that you sought to explain the right hand and the Imagine Breaker and the kamijou—god’s purification—with your petty Crossist ideas—that was your failure.”
And then, in faraway London, someone was smiling.
“We detected something!! Only for about seven hundred seconds, but this wavelength is unmistakable. It belongs to the sorcerer Aleister Crowley!!”
St. George’s Cathedral.
As she received the report from an English Puritan Sister, the Archbishop, Laura Stuart, gave a lip-twisting smile.
A man who should have been dead.
A sorcerer who was supposed to have been buried by English Puritan assassins.
There had been an official report that he’d died over sixty years ago, but experts on Crowley continued to exist so that they could deal with the sorcerer’s society that named itself his successor—and the theories that he himself might still be alive. And now, an individually set-up Soul Arm for searching had just given them an unexpected result.
Of course.
For Laura Stuart, that “unexpected result” was no more than how people thought the universe was born—theories existed, but nobody had ever found a way to prove it.
The search spell, which used farsightedness, was nearly useless, only showing a blurred outline of the figure that appeared. The target seemed to be conversing with someone, but they couldn’t make out the details, either.
Nevertheless, that paltry amount of information made Laura confident.
His features had changed quite a bit.
And he may have well have been using some sort of perception-blocking method all this time.
However.
…I knew it. He is alive.
Laura had never believed that his existence had truly disappeared.
Certainly, after World War III, the ones who would gain the most would be the victors: Academy City. After this, the scales of the sorcery-science power balance would unavoidably tip far toward science. The Roman and Russian Churches’ power would weaken, and though the English Church had won the war, they were no more than one of the three largest denominations of Crossism. Academy City, however, was the single leader of the science side. It was a simple matter of power distribution. The victors’ apportionment of world control would, no matter how one looked at it, be in favor of Academy City.
But it wouldn’t end in a place like this.
If Academy City’s general board chairperson was who Laura estimated he was, it then gave her the right to kill Crowley. And traditionally, targets of witch-hunting would forfeit their assets to the Church.
In other words.
There was still a chance to steal everything from the greatest winners of the war: Academy City and the science side.
Obviou
sly, even if her guess was right, he wouldn’t roll over for her. She couldn’t deny the chance a fourth war would happen, either. But those things didn’t matter. As long as there was a chance, as long as there was hope for putting the whole world at their fingertips, none of that mattered a bit.
The Royals had been concerned that it didn’t matter whether Academy City or the Roman Church won World War III—the United Kingdom would be forced to walk a path of decline. Enough so that the second princess, for example, had caused a coup.
Laura Stuart’s answer to that was this:
They could just pluck from the victors.
Pluck away everything they had.
After all, it was the English Church’s special right as an anti-sorcerer organization to put the sorcerer Aleister Crowley to death and keep his dangerous fortunes for themselves.
Had the Roman Church won, things would have moved toward a decisive expansion of the Crossist world as well as the magic side’s domination of the world, so for her, despite being an English Puritan—a faction of Crossism—she’d no longer be able to come up with a pretext. Or at least, she wouldn’t be able to use an inquisition to snatch everything away.
That was why she needed Academy City.
And the situation had taken a delightful turn for the better.
“…Now then, Chairperson Aleister—it is the hour when things truly grow interesting.”
Heh-heh, came a soft chuckle.
Atop an Academy City building, the being called Aiwass was looking at its hands and laughing, distinctly and amusedly.
When Accelerator had interfered with Last Order’s mind, the power holding Aiwass’s existence here had been greatly reduced. Soon, Aiwass would withdraw for a time from the “surface.” Nevertheless, Aiwass was cheerful.
“…You seem to be enjoying yourself.”
It heard a voice. A girl’s.
Hyouka Kazakiri.
The light in her eyes, behind her glasses, was a sharp one, unusual for the constantly afraid girl.
“I am delighted,” said Aiwass, moving its hands out slightly. “More precisely, I am happy this delightful time seems like it will continue. With that method, it would have ended in the blink of an eye. As though not very many dominoes were lined up before someone flicked the first. In order to enjoy this situation, I should retreat into the depths for a time. Livestock is best eaten once it’s fattened.”
A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 22 Page 18