A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 14 Read online

  Copyright

  A CERTAIN MAGICAL INDEX, Volume 14

  KAZUMA KAMACHI

  Translation by Andrew Prowse

  Cover art by Kiyotaka Haimura

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  TOARU MAJYUTSU NO INDEX

  ©KAZUMA KAMACHI 2007

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by ASCII MEDIA WORKS

  First published in Japan in 2007 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2018 by Yen Press, LLC

  Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kamachi, Kazuma, author. | Haimura, Kiyotaka, 1973– illustrator. | Prowse, Andrew (Andrew R.), translator. | Hinton, Yoshito, translator.

  Title: A certain magical index / Kazuma Kamachi ; illustration by Kiyotaka Haimura.

  Other titles: To aru majyutsu no kinsho mokuroku. (Light novel). English

  Description: First Yen On edition. | New York : Yen On, 2014–

  Identifiers: LCCN 2014031047 (print) | ISBN 9780316339124 (v. 1 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316259422 (v. 2 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316340540 (v. 3 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316340564 (v. 4 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316340595 (v. 5 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316340601 (v. 6 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316272230 (v. 7 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316359924 (v. 8 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316359962 (v. 9 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316359986 (v. 10: pbk.) | ISBN 9780316360005 (v. 11: pbk.) | ISBN 9780316360029 (v. 12: pbk.) | ISBN 9780316442671 (v. 13: pbk.) | ISBN 9780316442701 (v. 14: pbk.)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Magic—Fiction. | Ability—Fiction. | Nuns—Fiction. | Japan—Fiction. | Science fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / General. | FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.K215 Ce 2014 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2014031047

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-44270-1 (paperback)

  978-0-316-44271-8 (ebook)

  E3-20180201-JV-PC

  PROLOGUE

  A Church Too Dark

  Bread_and_Wine.

  Terra of the Left.

  He was in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican. It was an oval-shaped park about 240 meters wide with a public fountain a short distance away from its center. Terra sat on the edge of that flowing creation, quietly looking up at the stars overhead.

  With few man-made lights in the square, his face wasn’t visible. Only the gentle darkness enveloped his silhouette, operating as a kind of veil.

  There came a small splash.

  It wasn’t from the fountain.

  In Terra’s right hand was a bottle filled with cheap red wine. He didn’t have a drinking glass to accompany it; each time he brought the bottle to his lips, the alcohol contained within made a splashing ripple.

  Nonetheless, there was no air of inebriation to him.

  If it had been daytime and his face visible, all who saw him would think to themselves, What awful wine that man drinks. He wore the expression of someone working overtime.

  “Are you drinking again, Terra?”

  He heard a low, masculine voice. He turned his head back to look that way, remaining seated on the fountain’s edge. It was another member of God’s Right Seat—Acqua of the Back. The man wore mainly blue clothing, which resembled a golfing outfit.

  Next to him was an old man wrapped in magnificent ceremonial robes.

  The Roman Orthodox pope.

  He was supposedly the most powerful person in the Vatican, but the two God’s Right Seat members obscured the man’s presence to a mysterious degree.

  Terra wiped the red liquid dripping from the corner of his lips with an arm and said, “I am technically replenishing myself, you know. With the blood of God.”

  “Bread and wine,” said Acqua. “Just like Mass.”

  “My Raphael, the healing of God, signifies earth. The land’s fruits and blessings are the quickest way to replenish my strength.”

  He thought he’d answered seriously, but Acqua and the pope both sighed. Each let their eyes drop to Terra’s feet.

  Around them were several empty bottles.

  After seeing the label on one, Acqua shook his head. “Cheap wine,” he said. “You can’t find wine this cheap even in stores trying to rip off tourists. You could have gotten a slightly better brand if you’d said you were with God’s Right Seat.”

  “Please stop it,” said Terra good-naturedly. “I don’t understand the intricacies of wine. It’s only a tool for a ritual, after all. If I asked for more, I’d be insulting real alcoholics.”

  After hearing the pair’s exchange, the pope interjected, “…As a mentor to the faithful, though, I would prefer that you abstain from gaudier drink.”

  “Oh. Well, I didn’t expect you to be criticizing me.” Terra laughed in a low voice. “Wine is only necessary for this ritual. But you, Acqua, don’t need any such thing—yet you seem to know quite a bit about tastes and brands.”

  The pope glared at Acqua, who winced slightly. Unlike the other members, he didn’t make light of the pope, for some reason. “A carryover from my days as a mercenary,” the man explained. “One of the battlefield’s necessities.”

  “Ha-ha, well, you are a hoodlum, Acqua,” laughed Terra. “A bad boy, unlike the rest of us pious believers.”

  The pope grimaced at this casual recommendation of himself. Being lumped together with the man was, perhaps, not something he appreciated.

  As if to offset this, the pope took a moment to view the square that could hold three hundred thousand people. “Still…,” he said in the quiet of the night. “Two of God’s Right Seat and even the pope of Roman Orthodoxy outdoors without actual protection…Should we not hold these meetings inside? If security saw us now, they might start foaming at the mouth.”

  “I think it’s fine, don’t you? The Croce di Pietro is still in effect,” said Terra, taking a sip of wine and looking up at the night sky. “And just look at how disgusting the sky here is. There are so many barriers colliding and competing that it looks like the aurora up there. It would be hard to magically snipe someone through all that.”

  All spells, not just barriers, could be countered and reverse engineered if you solved their formulas. The library of grimoires that Puritanism was so proud about, the Index of Forbidden Books, was the culmination of that idea.

  However, the layered barriers protecting the entire nation were intertwined by the Crossist “meanings” held
by over 90 percent of the Vatican’s buildings, forming a complex web. Analysis with the Index of Forbidden Books wasn’t an option—even the nation’s highest authority, the pope, could no longer grasp the entirety of it.

  One could spend a long time breaking an intricate cipher, but if the password’s pattern changed every second, any old solutions would lose meaning. Not only did the keyhole change shape; the number of keyholes changed, too, making it impossible to create a duplicate key.

  Despite the Roman Orthodox Church—the pope first and foremost—no longer having anyone who could enact clear controls over the barriers layered around the Vatican, the shield still brushed off every analysis spell that came knocking.

  “In any case,” began Terra.

  He put the now-empty wine bottle on the fountain’s edge. That was the last of the cheap booze he’d brought into the sanctuary.

  With slow motions, he rose to his feet, straightened his back a little, and said, “Now that I’m done replenishing the blood of God, I suppose I should be on my way.”

  Acqua’s eyebrows moved slightly. “You’re using it, then?”

  Terra’s lips opened thinly, and he laughed. He could tell from Acqua’s tone of voice that feelings of bitterness swirled inside the man. “You disapprove of using civilians, Acqua?”

  “…Bloody battles are better left to the soldiers who thrive on it.”

  “Ha-ha,” laughed Terra pleasantly. “A real noble viewpoint. Unfortunately…” He paused. “The Church’s greatest weapon is its numbers. The figure two billion is a big strong point. Begrudging the fact is less natural. Academy City only has 2.3 million in all. Different literally by orders of magnitude.”

  “War decided by the quantity of people and goods?” said Acqua. “Barbaric. I feel as though I’m peering into a war of ancient times.”

  “The simplest solutions truly haven’t changed at all since back then,” countered Terra, looking up at the sky through the canopy of barriers. Despite having practically drowned himself in wine, his gait didn’t waver in the slightest. “We of God’s Right Seat may be imperfect, but we lead the people with the mystery of those imperfections.”

  He spread his hands to the side, stood on one foot, then swiveled around to Acqua.

  “Why not let the scared lambs seek guidance where they will? By my shepherd’s hands…just like the children who vanished after the piper.”

  CHAPTER 1

  The Speed of Too Soon a Change

  In_a_Long-Distance_Country.

  1

  Academy City’s School District 3 had several international exhibition halls, and it was connected to School District 23, the city’s ocean-facing front door, by a direct railroad line. The former possessed many facilities for visitors from abroad, like hotels (all of the highest grade in the city), while the latter held all the airports. The distance and distinction between the amenities of the two was to curb flight noise around the city’s upscale lodging.

  The city hosted many of its events in District 3. Some were motor shows collecting the very best in self-driving technology, while others were robotics expositions featuring the fruits of mechanical engineering. These exhibitions weren’t purely for fun projects—mostly, they were for promoting the city’s cutting-edge tech. City officials would present technology approved by the General Board to be of the proper standard to put to use outside the city, select the trade offers from the countless outside corporations that were most beneficial (not search—for Academy City, it was always select), and amass huge amounts of funding.

  Another of those such shows was going on today.

  On display were, among other things, unmanned attack helicopters, the latest in exoskeletal powered suit apparatuses, and even high-output optical weapons that could aid in aerial bombing.

  Even the event’s name was the Interceptor Weaponry Show, showing how absurdly dangerous everything was.

  “Pfhaaa…”

  Someone let out a deep breath—a girl in the domed exhibition hall’s corner with a powered suit attached to her torso, making the act look oddly humorous.

  “It’s so hot…,” grumbled Yomikawa, her helmet tucked under her arm. “Why are these powered suit demonstrations so exhausting?”

  Next to her, a woman in work clothes shot her a glance. She was a member of the powered suit development team, looking as out of place in her outfit as a small child in a tuxedo; she was used to a white lab coat.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not just you,” she said. “There’s a lot of hot air floating around the hall.”

  A laptop rested on the engineer’s knees. There was a thin card reminiscent of a cell phone inserted in its side. Its screen displayed technical data for their exoskeletons.

  “Look, that doesn’t make me any happier, ’kay?”

  “I didn’t say it to make you happy.”

  “Still, I wonder why there’s so many gosh-darn people here,” Yomikawa went on. “An interceptor weaponry show on a weekday is pretty hard-core, y’know? Doesn’t this hall look like it’s over capacity?”

  “Actually, it’s press day, so there aren’t many here. Tomorrow it’ll be open to everyone. It’ll look like hell.”

  “Look, that doesn’t make me any happier, ’kay?”

  “I didn’t say it to make you happy.”

  Terribly discouraged by her engineer, Yomikawa placed the helmet under her arm on the floor with a clatter. The helmet was almost fifty centimeters across. It had looked like she’d been wearing one of the oil-drum-shaped city-patrolling robots on her head. The rest of the powered suit resembled thick plate armor, making the whole thing look pretty top-heavy.

  “So hot. You know what, I’m just gonna take off the rest…,” she said, wriggling her neck out, then continuing to crawl out of the suit. Underneath the armor, she wore black clothing, like the kind special forces used.

  Yomikawa sat down with her back against the motionless mech suit and started futilely fanning herself with a hand. “Jeez, these really aren’t made for wearing in combat suits, eh? Wonder if there’s a more breathable exoskel-exclusive outfit lying around.”

  “I guess you should have gone along with the planning head’s idea. Take off the suit, and bam! a knockout bikini. It’d get a lot of applause from the press. They’d be ecstatic.”

  As far as Yomikawa could tell from the monotone, the engineer didn’t care one bit about her problem. She used a towel to wipe off the beads of sweat sticking to her face. “That guy gets way too into it whenever we start talking about promotional models.”

  “It’s probably his hobby, sadly.”

  “You couldn’t find a more boorish woman in all Japan than me. I could never pretend to be a booth babe. How on earth did I end up in his sights?”

  “I guess Anti-Skill has it pretty rough, huh? They make you do odd jobs like you’re the SDF or something.”

  “If we get odd jobs, it means there’s nothing else to do and the world’s at peace. Still…” Yomikawa stopped and looked around.

  Booths all over were displaying a myriad of tools for killing people. The usual tinge of “capturing berserk espers while doing the least damage possible” had been stashed in a corner. Instead, one could see nothing but super-powerful, highly lethal weapons—the sort that would penetrate a tank if a person tried to hide behind it, and then them, too.

  The booth organizers had certainly changed course quickly. And there’s only one reason I can think of…

  Yomikawa stole a glance at the laptop the engineer was using. Along with a diagram of the powered suit she’d just been demonstrating was a small window showing a television feed. It was a news program, with a reporter reading from a manuscript.

  “Early this morning local time, large-scale religious protests have broken out in the industrial city of Toulouse in southern France,” said the newscaster. “People have flooded onto a road several kilometers long that follows the Garonne River, which runs through the center of the city, and they continue to severely affect
infrastructure networks like transportation.”

  The program showed a recorded video of a pitch-black city lit brightly by torch flame, with massive crowds of people marching along. Some of the men and women carried banners with French vilification written on them, while other young people were setting fire to Academy City signboards and holding them aloft.

  Technically, they were only protesting—these weren’t uncontrolled riots. Still, the sight of thousands parading through the streets with their anger on full display intimidated Yomikawa enough to give her a chill.

  “In Dortmund, in central Germany, a bulldozer thought to be stolen has rammed into a Roman Orthodox church, severely wounding nine priests inside. Authorities believe it’s retribution for the recent string of protests, but nobody has claimed responsibility yet. With worries of the conflict between the Roman Orthodox Church and Academy City escalating in the future on the rise…”

  She’d seen it already, but she couldn’t shake the bitter feeling. Like a tiny ember spreading to a dry heap of straw, the world had changed a lot these past few days. With the Roman Orthodox Church’s simultaneous worldwide demonstrations and certain people’s overreactions to them, the conflict was accelerating by the second.

  And now, Academy City was throwing an interceptor weaponry exhibition as though in response. At a glance, one could take it to be the General Board officially announcing that the city would not yield to the protests.

  But this…was all executed too well for that, she thought.

  Weapons development wasn’t like building plastic models. One had to submit an application for development, go back and forth with budget proposals, carefully discuss it, design prototypes, do hundreds if not thousands of simulations with what they built, hammer out the numbers they were looking for, and only then would they have a “product” to display.

  The string of demonstrations had worsened just these past few days. Weapons development needed years of work. They couldn’t possibly keep up. Which meant…

  Academy City was already prepared for this, she thought. They foresaw this happening to the world, and instead of stopping it before it started, they plotted to have control of things after the fact, didn’t they? Shit. It made her want to spit.