A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 14 Read online

  “No, not at all.”

  “Oh yes. As his teacher, I would like to take Kami and the others to task as well. Do you know where they are? They left right after homeroom. Have they gone home already?”

  “Oh no,” said Suama in a louder voice, reflexively looking at the clock hanging on the wall.

  It was almost six o’clock.

  It had been hours since she’d told them to weed.

  “Ack…I’m sorry, Ms. Komoe, I’ll go get them right now!!”

  “Well, okay. But where are they?”

  The relaxed senior teacher’s words came at her back; Suama had already burst out of the faculty room. Club activities were winding down, too, and nobody who didn’t belong to an after-school club could be seen. The hallways were dim and mostly empty, so as she walked toward the faculty entrance, she quickly began to feel how much time had actually passed.

  Well, delinquents who cause fights at school shouldn’t have that much patience. They’ve probably gone home already without doing any of the weeding.

  Still, she’d meant to check on them after about half an hour, then scold them a little and make them go home, so she couldn’t help but feel reluctant now. It had been a rash punishment, so she also couldn’t easily apologize to the students now.

  Meanwhile, after reaching the faculty entrance and changing into her relatively high-class pumps, she hurried behind the gymnasium.

  And there, the inverted triangle glasses–wearing female math teacher saw…

  5

  “Come on, come on!! Thirteen wins, nine losses—that forkball of yours is nothing!!” challenged Kamijou, gripping his short broom with both hands and waggling it at Fukiyose.

  “Be quiet!! Nine losses, and you’re still running your mouth…Besides, if we were using a real hardball, it would spin a lot better!!”

  After introducing a rule where each loss equated to five minutes of full-power weeding, the match between Kamijou and Fukiyose had gotten seriously heated. Their high school souls burned with such ferocity that it would make one forget that if they just took it easy and did the work together, it would have been much easier.

  Unlike Kamijou, who was quite happily swinging the bat, Fukiyose was breathing heavily as she kept a firm grasp on the baseball, her shoulders moving up and down. She checked the time on her cell phone. “Besides, there’s still thirty minutes until schools close…That’s enough time to turn it around!!”

  “By the way, are your pitches dropping like they’re supposed to?”

  “I keep telling you they are! They’re forking great!! Why can’t you tell that they’re dropping suddenly right before getting to home plate?!”

  “Really? I feel like they’re just slowing down and falling like anything else would…”

  “Get a closer looooooooooook!!”

  Fukiyose, roaring with all her might, lobbed the ball.

  Whhhrrrrrr!! In response to the approaching baseball, Kamijou wound up for a full swing.

  A forkball…

  But then his body reacted unconsciously to Fukiyose’s words, causing him to adjust the short broom’s course down a little.

  Once again, however, the ball didn’t curve much at all.

  A normal straight pitch flew at him.

  “You…You can’t do it after all!!”

  He quickly tried to bring the bat back on track, but he was too late.

  Nevertheless, he felt the ball’s edge nick the broomstick.

  “Gwoooohhhhhhhhhhh!!” bellowed Kamijou even as he felt the hitting sensation fade.

  After taking a chip out of the broomstick, the baseball curved slightly upward and continued to fly behind him.

  Shit, I missed?!

  Fouls were a concept that didn’t exist for this contest. If Kamijou hit the ball in front of him, he won, but otherwise, Fukiyose won. They made vague judgments to decide whether her pitches were strikes or balls.

  Plus—and this was the really annoying part—whoever lost had to go get the ball. The loser already had to do five minutes of full-power weeding as punishment. Having to chase down faraway balls was a huge pain.

  So he stood there for a second in his pose, broomstick still out to the side, instantly starting calculations in his head. Gah. That’s thirteen wins and nine losses. No, wait, ten losses. Maybe I’ll filibuster her, walk real slowly to go get it…

  Smack.

  Then he heard an odd noise from right behind him.

  “…?”

  He didn’t understand, but Fukiyose, who was facing him, had a shocked expression and was standing stock-still. He could practically hear the blood in her face retreating.

  ??? Is there something behind me?

  When Kamijou turned around…

  …he saw grass and dirt stuck to inverted triangle–shaped glasses…

  …and, wearing them, the teacher Suama Oyafune, clearly having taken the ball to the face.

  The baseball would have hit her in the stomach if not for Kamijou’s swing glancing off it and changing its course—right into her face.

  “…”

  Suama Oyafune was taking slow, deep breaths, but she was obviously trembling.

  Ahhh, aaahhhhhhh…By the time Kamijou started shaking, it was too late.

  Suama Oyafune plunged toward him and swung a clenched fist just as Kamijou, unaware, went down on his hands and knees in prostration, coincidentally dodging her knuckles, and now, the math teacher’s anger at the ball and at her own missed attack compounding each other, she drove the sharp heel of her pump into his back.

  6

  Suama Oyafune hastened back to the faculty room.

  Ms. Komoe was absent; she must have gone somewhere.

  Technically, she’d already gotten the grass and dirt off her face with a handkerchief, but still…

  Waaah!! Dirt, dirt, dirt!! It’s stuck to my face, I just know it! And maybe my penciled eyebrows are coming off because I accidentally wiped them!! What to do, what do I do, aghhh?!!

  Her panic was so pronounced a blind person could have seen it. She made sure nobody was around before forgetting about going to the powder room and taking out a hand mirror to check her face right then and there.

  For now, her eyebrows were fine.

  But that wasn’t enough to relieve Suama Oyafune.

  Beautiful women had advantages. If she wasn’t beautiful, she would be disadvantaged. That was how life worked.

  Okay, so my clothes—dirty. Over here, too. And over here?! My hair’s a mess, I’m sweating, my stockings are running from walking so fast, where do I even start?!

  For now, she took her suit jacket off, brushed off the flecks of dirt that made it to her white blouse. But some clung stubbornly, so she took the blouse off and shook it out.

  Then she removed her running beige stockings so she could change into the spare pair she had in her purse. Due to the way she moved, her tight skirt turned all the way up during that, but she didn’t have time to worry about it. She had to go back to being the perfect, beautiful teacher as soon as she could.

  But then…

  …the faculty room door started clattering.

  Suama froze, one leg raised to put through her stocking.

  “Wait…I…wait!!” she said immediately.

  “Huh? For what?”

  She knew he’d heard her, and yet the door clattered open anyway.

  It was Touma Kamijou.

  And Suama Oyafune, her blouse open in the front and her black underwear visible, her tight skirt flipped up so she could put on her stockings, stayed absolutely still.

  “Ky—”

  She checked herself just before screaming.

  Instead, she reached for a nearby desk and grabbed a fifty-centimeter super-large triangle ruler with a magnet for using on blackboards in class. Then she hurled it with all her might at the faculty room entrance.

  Kamijou quickly slammed the door shut, and the triangle’s tip stabbed the doorframe like a shuriken. The lodged ruler wobbled back a
nd forth.

  A shout echoed into the room from the hallway. “Ooowwahhhhh!! That could have killed me!!”

  “Explain to me right now why you came in after I told you to wait!!”

  For the moment, she pulled the stockings the rest of the way up, closed the front of her blouse, put her arms through the suit jacket she’d hung over the back of her chair, and hurriedly started for the hallway when…

  Brk.

  This time, she heard a strange noise from near her thighs.

  “…”

  She’d just unsealed these stockings two minutes ago. Are they running already? thought Suama, thoughtlessly checking her thighs.

  “U-um, excuse me…”

  As if he’d timed it that way, Touma Kamijou nervously opened the faculty room door once again.

  To see Suama Oyafune, her legs in an O shape, her tight skirt up, bent over and looking around her crotch area.

  Beauty aside—the scene did enough damage to her very womanhood.

  “—!!”

  This time, the math teacher silently threw a super-large protractor for blackboard use at the entrance of the faculty room. The door closed again, and the second teaching aid got stuck in it as well.

  A quaking voice came in from the hallway. “I was just trying to explain why I came in before!!”

  “It had better be worth making this situation so much worse. I demand a concise explanation of logical fact!!”

  “Uh, the schools close down soon, so can we stop weeding now?”

  “That was all?!”

  Blood vessels appeared around Suama Oyafune’s temples. She grabbed a super-large compass for blackboard use from a desk, then burst out of the faculty room, ready to wallop the failure of a high schooler with it.

  But Touma Kamijou wasn’t there.

  All she saw was a figure dashing around a corner and vanishing toward the stairs.

  “What on earth is going on…?” muttered Suama, decidedly exhausted, but her voice went unheard.

  7

  “Crap…I really thought she was gonna kill me,” muttered Kamijou to himself as he trudged home in the dying light.

  With October starting, this time of day had been getting chillier, little by little. In response to the temperature change, there were somewhat fewer people around, too, compared to the summertime. The big screen on a blimp floating in the darkening sky featured a newscaster telling everyone to be careful with flames because the air was dry.

  As Kamijou weaved around the cleaning robots ambling along the sidewalk, he wondered what he’d have for dinner, then decided to stop off at the department store by the station. He was a little worried about his refrigerator’s contents. If he traveled a little farther away, there was a cheaper supermarket, but he’d be late getting home if he went there now. That would lead to Index, who was waiting in his dorm room, throwing a fit because she was hungry.

  In any case, with the station close, he caught a glance of a brown-haired girl wearing a Tokiwadai uniform, facing away from him. It was Mikoto Misaka, he realized.

  Moreover, she delivered a high kick to a juice vending machine, then started to wonder if all the machines in the area were malfunctioning…

  When Kamijou saw that, he decided not to say anything and leave and promptly made a 180-degree turn. “…They say a wise man keeps away from danger. Also, to let sleeping dogs lie,” he whispered to himself.

  “Who says that?” came the answer from right behind him. He gave a jerk and went ramrod straight.

  Cautiously, he made a second 180-degree turn to find Mikoto Misaka. Bewildered, he groaned in spite of himself. “Please spare me…”

  “Again, from what?”

  “Mr. Kamijou is extremely worn out from weeding after school and many other things! So please spare me any further trouble!!”

  “What the heck are you even talking about?!”

  As he tried to flee at Mach speed, Mikoto grabbed the back of his neck and snapped into his ear, “And would you stop trying to end all our conversations whenever you get the chance?! You never answered the text I sent you, and I want to see what happened to that, so let me see your cell phone!!”

  “A text…? You sent one?”

  “Yes!!”

  Kamijou thought for a moment, then took out his cell phone, opened his mailbox in front of Mikoto, and looked at it askance. “…You did?”

  “I just said yes!! Geh, your in-box is empty?! It’s not treating my address as spam, is it?!”

  Mikoto was astonished at this whole text thing, but then she arrived at another fact.

  As Kamijou pressed the buttons, she clamped onto his hand to stop him, then peered at the names in his in-box folder.

  “…Okay. Why, exactly, do you have my mom’s number in here?”

  “Huh?” Come to think of it, I did run into drunk Misuzu Misaka in Academy City the other day…

  Mikoto, still frowning, used her thumb to control his cell phone, then called up the person in question.

  “Wait, hey!”

  It wasn’t on speakerphone, but between the volume being turned up loud anyway and the short distance from him to her, he heard the call tone.

  “Okay, Mother, I have something to ask you.”

  “Huh?!” came back Misuzu, sounding shocked. “Is my display bugging out? My phone isn’t showing your number, Mikoto.”

  Just from what Kamijou heard from their conversation, she seemed to ask how Misuzu ended up with his phone number.

  “Hmm…” But Misuzu spoke slowly as she answered. “I think I remember meeting that boy one night in Academy City, but…Mommy can’t remember things from when she’s drunk. Even Mommy doesn’t know when any of this happened! Oh-ho-ho-ho.”

  “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.” Mikoto nodded before hanging up.

  She smiled sweetly, closed the phone with both hands, and returned it.

  “What…do…you…think you’re doing, getting my mother drunk like that?!”

  “What?! What kind of eccentric reasoning is that?! And I’m sure your mom remembers! That laugh at the end was too suspicious for her not to!!”

  It only took a moment’s thought to figure it out, but she seemed convinced that her little family was on the brink of destruction, since her face was bright red and she’d lost her cool.

  Time for a change of subject!! thought Kamijou, deciding to take the plunge and steer the topic away through brute force. “C-come on. Mr. Kamijou has to go home and polish rice now…Wait, don’t you have a curfew, too? The sun’s already down!”

  “What? Curfew? Easy to get past,” she said flatly.

  Kamijou was already feeling fed up with this conversation.

  Mikoto, meanwhile, didn’t seem to care about his mental health whatsoever, but the change in topic seemed to be successful. “The checks do feel like they’ve been getting stricter, though. Maybe because of all the stuff going on lately. Even people who never read the newspaper are all busy checking the news on their cell phone TVs and looking for info sites on the Internet.”

  “…”

  “I guess everyone’s worried, huh? …Especially after how it got like that before.”

  Mikoto was probably talking about September 30.

  The incident that directly triggered the current “unseen war.”

  The incident where Academy City’s gates were destroyed; residents all over the city, student and teacher alike, were systematically “attacked”; the peacekeeping groups Anti-Skill and Judgment were completely shut down; and a road demolished into a hundred-meter-long crater.

  No one person was responsible for them all. Thanks to several organizations and opinions intersecting, not even Kamijou, who was directly involved, had a full view of it…Actually, he was starting to think nobody could understand the whole thing. And if a central figure felt that way, those who were only dragged into it would have pretty limited information.

  Maybe the farther from the center one was, the more opportunity they had to observe from a safe locatio
n. And even Mikoto probably didn’t take Academy City’s announcement that “foreign religious groups were conducting scientific supernatural ability research in secret, and espers they’d developed were the attackers” at face value.

  Mikoto looked away from Kamijou and stared off in the distance.

  About five hundred meters from here was the street leveled by a certain great “angel’s” appearance. Kamijou thought maybe she was thinking back to what happened on September 30, but she actually appeared to be gazing at the airship in the darkening skies. The giant screen attached to its side was running a news program right now.

  “The large-scale Roman Orthodox demonstration and protest activity, which was limited to European nations until now, has begun in the United States.”

  The newscaster reading the script was calm.

  “Today, protests have occurred in San Francisco and Los Angeles, shore cities on the West Coast, but they are predicted to spread throughout the entire country.”

  The image changed to what was probably Los Angeles. It would have been the middle of the night there, but the video took place during the day, so it must have been recorded.

  Damn it. It made another big jump…Kamijou’s face unconsciously twisted, like he was looking at terrible wounds.

  As though a marathon had just started, an ocean of people was covering a big three-lane road. They were holding what appeared to be homemade Academy City banners, setting them on fire and holding them overhead or slashing through horizontal ones.

  The idea was to tout how angry they were by marching down a mostly set route for hours. It wasn’t like a riot, where everyone let their anger consume them and destroyed everything in sight.

  But that didn’t mean it was safe. The video showed a man bleeding from the head leaning against the side of an ambulance—there must have been a brawl. A sister, her face black-and-blue, was helping an exhausted priest to his feet, calling for help.

  All of them were just normal people. None seemed related to anything like espers or sorcery.

  Maybe, in a broad sense, the demonstrators were Roman Orthodox followers. Some would be wearing crosses around their necks, and others would be singing hymns from the Bible.