A Certain Magical Index Vol. 18 Page 3

  …With the relative 186-miles-per-hour wind blast pressing directly into his face, Kamijou’s expression was currently twisting into strange shapes.

  The knights patrolling inside the train couldn’t find him as he was shivering madly from the chill, and there was a simple reason for that.

  Nobody in their right mind would ever hide themselves in a place like this.

  …And, personally, it wasn’t as though he wanted to be on the roof or anything. At first he’d certainly been hiding in the freight cars. But the knights patrolled at uneven intervals, so if he wanted to escape detection, staying in one place was actually more dangerous. Because of that, he’d been sneaking around to match the knights’ movements…and before he realized it, this was where he had been driven.

  Yeah…I’ve heard of illegal immigrants clinging to the walls and roofs of freight train cars to smuggle themselves from Mexico into the U.S. I wonder if this is what it was like…, thought Kamijou, remembering a documentary he’d seen in his dorm in Academy City.

  In his case, though, his goal wasn’t just to arrive at his destination, either.

  Index…He gritted his teeth slightly.

  When the coup had broken out, Index had been with the second princess, who was said to be the one behind it. He had no idea what sort of state Index was in now, but it was clear from the situation that her safety was not guaranteed.

  After all, she held the knowledge from 103,000 grimoires in her head.

  The idea that anyone who wanted to bolster their national combat strength even a little bit would use her for evil purposes wasn’t a strange one.

  To be frank, this wouldn’t be simple or easy. It wasn’t something an amateur would be able to confront alone.

  …But it’s not like I have to beat the enemy boss and all the forces protecting her. Kamijou spared a glance at his right fist. For now, I’ll slip through and rescue Index. If that’s all I’m thinking about, this should go better than if we brought a whole bunch of people into the enemy camp.

  But just then, Kamijou caught something out of the corner of his eye.

  When he looked over, he saw the top of a silver helmet near the area where the freight cars linked together. The person wasn’t merely trying to move between cars—they seemed to have their hands on the ladder.

  A patrol…? Crap, is someone climbing up here?!

  The armor-wearer was to his front. Frantically, he headed for the rear of the car. With the train whizzing by and the relative wind blasts urging him on, he started to slide across the flat freight car roof. Feeling a chill that it would be over were he to fall off into the gravel passing by at such a speed, he came to the tiny gap between cars and jumped down into it.

  Freight car junctions weren’t like regular trains—they didn’t have passages between them. Each car was isolated, and the place Kamijou had jumped down to was no different: small and surrounded by a metal railing.

  The gap between cars was cramped, so it looked like he could move between them if he jumped over the railings. A shudder ran through his spine as the rails and gravel sped past his feet, but he still moved to the adjacent car.

  Damn, he swore to himself. This thing’s going pretty fast. I feel like we should be in Folkestone by now…

  But it didn’t matter if they were arriving in ten minutes or one. If they found him, that was it. There was nowhere to run on this speeding train. If a group of knights converged, his right hand alone wouldn’t really be able to deal with them, either. He didn’t have a precise grasp on their numbers, but the train had originally been on the move to transport additional troops to the second princess. It looked like he could safely assume somewhere from one hundred to two hundred were packed on board.

  …Sheesh. This is a little beyond the level of street fights.

  Using both hands, Kamijou slid the door aside and slipped himself through.

  The cars near where he was hidden were actual freight cars, loaded with many articles of equipment instead of personnel. Heaps of swords and spears were messily bundled together by category, reminding him of firewood. They weren’t the arms and armor you’d see decorating mansions; each one of them was an honest weapon, maintained to kill.

  Still, though…In the unilluminated freight car, Kamijou sighed.

  He couldn’t speak much English. He could probably understand some if he broke words apart into letters and syllables like in textbook English, but locals would blend words together and leave bits out to make it easier to talk. With such fast pronunciation, he couldn’t understand any of it.

  But even he could tell that the knights on this train were ruffled by something. It seemed an emergency had happened. The exact reason didn’t come across to him, but he thought he made out one name that they repeated.

  William…

  He was pretty sure it was a relatively popular name for westerners, and he didn’t have any idea who it could belong to.

  There were probably a lot of people with that name in the United Kingdom. He considered that this William was a sorcerer from Necessarius, but he decided it wouldn’t do him any good to think about it anymore.

  And then:

 

  The sound of someone suddenly talking to him from the back of the freight car nearly stopped Kamijou’s heart in his chest.

  It was a girl’s voice.

  Kamijou whipped around to look and saw, in the shadow of a heap of silver suits of armor, something wriggling about. It was a person. A girl, with her hands behind her back and both feet fixed to the car with separate cuffs.

  Wait, those clothes…? he wondered. Her outfit looked almost like a lacrosse uniform. Feel like I’ve seen them before…Are they a fad in London?

  Without paying attention to Kamijou as he thought, the girl spoke.

  Her voice sounded languid indeed, but he didn’t have a clue what the quickly spoken English meant.

  She seemed to guess the problem from the look on his face. “Hmm? Oh, I get it. Sorry ’bout that. You look Japanese, so maybe I should speak your language?”

  “W-wait, you could tell I’m Japanese…?”

  “Whenever you see an Asian for the first time and they’ve got that creepy, faint smile on their face, that means they’re Japanese.”

  …Is that how other cultures think of the Japanese ingratiating smile? thought Kamijou, suddenly tired.

  The girl, however, didn’t seem to notice. “Anyway, I’ll ask again. You’re not with the Knights, right?”

  Unable to figure out what she was after, he looked back at her again.

  The girl was probably around fifteen, with white skin and blond hair. There were four physical restraints, one on each of her limbs. They weren’t modern handcuffs—more like those wooden planks with the holes you see when they put people on a guillotine.

  When Kamijou didn’t respond, the blond girl frowned unhappily. “…You don’t understand Japanese? Or is my pronunciation wrong?”

  “N-not at all. I understand you. I understand, but…”

  “Oh, okay. I’m Florice. I was, well, pretending to be in a little sorcerer’s society, but…I guess that doesn’t matter. Help me out, would you?”

  5

  A gash about two inches wide had been dug out of William Orwell’s left shoulder.

  A significant amount of fresh blood flowed freely from the dark-red wound. Ignoring his now-powerless left arm, the mercenary readied his giant sword with just his right hand.

  The distance to the Knight Leader was about thirty feet.

  Both were spaced to clash within an instant, but the Knight Leader didn’t move at all.

  Then, as though making a light practice swing, his dark-red longsword cut through empty air.

  “!!”

  A slash came at William from beside him, a completely different angle, aiming to lop off his head.

  After he crouched
to avoid the strike, several rays of flashing light crackled all around him.

  A moment later—

  Matching the longsword’s movements as the Knight Leader swung it like a baton, invisible slashing attacks came at William from every direction. The underbrush tore apart as clawlike scars scored thick tree trunks, and several leaves floating in the night air split apart one after another.

  Whether it was from the sound of the wind, some other sense, or even a supernatural premonition—William swung his head and jumped back to dodge. He caught one swing on the thick side of Ascalon’s blade and repelled it, fending off all the Knight Leader’s attempts to kill him.

  Zzzz-ghh-ghh-ghh-ga-ga-ga-ga!!

  —A flurry of sparks came next.

  Swinging his greatsword fast enough to exceed the speed of sound, sometimes protecting his backside without turning around, William spoke.

  “I am sure you do not believe that merely modifying the range of your attacks will kill me so easily.”

  “…Another thing you saw through quickly,” the Knight Leader said with a bitter face as he whipped his dark-red sword around. “As always, apart from when you absolutely need to speak, you’re detestably silent.”

  Right now, what the Knight Leader wielded were patterns.

  Many legendary weapons appeared in myths about warriors and knights Scandinavian, Celtic, Charlemagnian, and Germanic, but they all had a certain fixed pattern.

  “I had thought to compensate for my weaknesses one by one by mastering many knightly ways and combining them…but it would seem that if you pile complexities upon complexities, everything starts to simplify toward a single, simple attack. Perhaps it’s also not too dissimilar to the death of a star like our sun. Stars that grow too massive explode and create a black hole…A theoretically simple gravity field but overwhelming in its strength at the end of the day.”

  A single strike, born from layers atop more layers of every spell imaginable.

  Due to its nature, magic-based disruption or nullification would be extremely difficult. In order to unravel the knots, it would be necessary to follow every road the Knight Leader had investigated.

  “Still, that wasn’t a black hole in the sense of a complete and total end. There are several ways a star can die. If a star’s mass is below a certain amount, it can apparently turn into other things, such as neutron stars or interstellar clouds. My single attack is no different—it seems that because it is incomplete, it still possesses the attributes of a sword.”

  The Knight Leader’s slender fingers regripped his longsword’s hilt.

  “Theoretically, the attributes of swords of this level can’t be fully compressed into one category and are instead split into several. The easiest way to understand it is this: ‘severing power’ that can slice through anything; ‘armament weight,’ to create immense destructive power; ‘durability’ to prevent it from breaking; ‘movement speed’ to move faster than anyone can follow…In rare cases, a ‘specialty usage’ is needed to kill a specific monster, and ‘precision’ allows it to move automatically to strike at vital spots. And there are also the patterns, which I’m controlling now.”

  “…In other words, it’s attack range, yes?”

  The Knight Leader had probably reanalyzed the laws used by the Scandinavian Gungnir and Mjölnir, the Celtic Fragarach and Brionac, and others like them before putting them all together and concentrating their properties. His personal brand of evolution had given shape to an entirely new spell, just like how the life of an overexpanded star ends with the creation of a black hole.

  Plus, even outside of European legends, the sort of which the Knight Leader liked to work into his spells, other similar legends—the ingredients for this black hole—existed throughout the world.

  “As a result of reanalyzing many cultures, legends, Soul Arms, and weapons in order to compile this skill system, I came to realize something: It is the wish of all men to seize victory from a place their opponents’ attacks cannot reach, burying them in a flood of unopposed strikes…I dislike that it reeks of uninteresting gun societies, but I am forced to admit it is effective in its own way.”

  And the ingredients to make that a reality are…

  “Hah!!” William used Ascalon to parry a long-range strike that raced toward his temple from the side. It struck the sword’s thin wire that was strung like a jigsaw located along the sword’s front, sending sparks flying. When they stabbed into a nearby tree trunk, it was a blade, only a few millimeters long, that looked like dark-red rust.

  “Sword shards.”

  The Knight Leader casually revealed the trick he should have kept hidden.

  All the while, he swung the dark-red sword around like before.

  “Some excellent armaments and Soul Arms will retain much of their original power even after being reduced to fragments. After all, the sword used by King Charlemagne was forged using shards of the holy spear.”

  “Someone poised to fight France resorting to use the legend of a French king?”

  “How unusual for you to speak when it isn’t necessary.” The Knight Leader grinned.

  Roar!! Guided by the sword’s motion, rust blades went after William from dozens of directions.

  “I will use anything I can. And if you’re going to go that far, even the Curtana’s etymology comes from French. Come to think of it, it meant a sword whose tip had broken, turning it into a ‘shortsword.’”

  At that, the Knight Leader abruptly stopped moving.

  This time, William was the suspicious one.

  “Don’t make that face,” his old friend said, repositioning Hrunting. “I already told you I don’t like to acknowledge a worthless gun society. A proud and noble knight lives by the creed of defeating an opponent after he has used all the strength in his own hands.”

  “…You plan to point your sword even at powerless servants in order to brag about your pride?” William clicked his tongue softly.

  The sword Ascalon, held in his right hand, emitted a red flash of light.

  Except—the light was more than one color. It glimmered and shifted depending on the blade’s angle, like the surface of a CD.

  But strictly speaking, that wasn’t entirely accurate, either.

  The eleven-and-a-half-foot Ascalon didn’t have just one blade. It had many parts with different thicknesses and angles, one like an ax, another like a razor, yet another like a saw. There were even a can opener–like spike and a jigsaw-like wire running down the sword length equipped to it.

  The source of Ascalon’s glow lay in those functions.

  With many methods of attack to choose from, Ascalon changed color depending on which part was active and how it was used. Red for the ax-like blade, blue for the razor-like blade, green for the can opener–like spike, yellow for the jigsaw-esque wire…Mana would be supplied to a specific part of the Soul Arm, chosen in real time depending on what would provide the most destructive force in any given situation, and the section that was used would determine the light’s color.

  “I would have liked to not use it, if possible.”

  “That’s not like you. Are you holding back against the one representing the evil dragon?” The Knight Leader smiled and gripped Hrunting’s hilt tightly.

  There was more than one thing an evil dragon symbolized in Crossist teachings. For example…

  An invading force of heretics or an alien people. Even…

  A fallen angel stained with evil.

  6

  Inside the freight train, Touma Kamijou was standing face-to-face with a girl bound by her hands and feet.

  She said her name was Florice.

  …If he’d known the entirety of the incident tonight, maybe the group name “New Light” would have immediately popped into his head. However, Kamijou was no more than an adventitious amateur participant. Necessarius wasn’t exactly sharing all its information with him. Aside from Lesser, who had been gravely wounded before his eyes, he didn’t really know the names or faces o
f any of its other members.

  “Hey, stop standing around and help me already.”

  “Help…with what?”

  “Don’t you have eyes? These things. Help me get them off.”

  She grunted and held out the wooden shackles constricting her ankles.

  Kamijou saw them and scowled. “…What the heck did you do to end up in those stiff-looking things?”

  “I mean, I don’t think I did anything bad. Ha-ha-ha,” laughed Florice. Then, she added in whispered, quickly spoken English,

  “What?”

  “Nothing at all. Aren’t your circumstances basically the same? Pissed off the knights, and now they’re bringing you in or something?”

  “I snuck on board to get to Folkestone.”

  That was in itself a very interesting few words, but Florice turned a deaf ear. For now, if she knew he wasn’t one of the knights, there was no problem.

  “Anyway, here. Help me get these off, will you? Thanks to this Soul Arm, there’s a two-meter box keeping me in. So…well…there. I can’t even get to the key hanging right over on that wall.”

  “Huh? This is what you wanted?” Kamijou reached a hand for the key chain hanging on the wall, but then stopped abruptly.

  Florice made a dubious face. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that my right hand is called Imagine Breaker. The short version is, if the key is magical, then as soon as I touch it, it’ll shatter. And then we won’t have any way to get you out of those cuffs.” As he explained it, he suddenly looked up. “Wait. I don’t even have to bother with taking care with the key, right? If I just break the magical restraints directly with my right hand—”

  “Huh? Uh, hey, wait, wait wait wait!! I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but—?!”