A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 21 Page 4

  It swallowed both Stiyl Magnus and the stone he stood upon, dropping them underground.

  The very idea of breaking his fall somehow was nonexistent.

  Every breath was accompanied by the taste of blood.

  Stiyl had fallen faceup, and it took him a few moments to finally realize what had happened.

  This was the basement’s Soul Arm storehouse.

  Index’s attack had damaged the foundation itself, the backbone of the cathedral’s structure.

  Guh…hah…! Blast, how many barriers do you think we had set up? This cathedral is the main base of anti-sorcery operations—how could she break through it all in one attack…?!

  Index’s original purpose was to serve as a defensive mechanism to keep important technology and knowledge from passing into the hands of international magic societies.

  Even ten thousand versus one wouldn’t be enough to challenge her.

  One versus one was the height of folly.

  Fighting against her in her John’s Pen state was the same as engaging in a full-scale war.

  There was a time when a saint named Kaori Kanzaki was around. Once, there had been an illusion killer named Touma Kamijou.

  But now, things were different.

  He couldn’t rely on those irregulars.

  Then, he heard a scraping noise coming from above.

  Stiyl peered up, still lying on his back, and saw the girl staring down at him from the edge of the collapsed hole.

  Her lips—were moving.

  “Chapter eleven, verse two. Confirmed effective destructive power. Determining optimal course of action—follow up with continuous attacks to deny opportunity to recover.”

  The library of grimoires jumped down from the crag-like height without hesitation.

  Stiyl rolled to the side with all his might.

  A moment later, Index’s feet ruthlessly destroyed the spot where he had been lying.

  5

  He was pressing the accelerator so hard he thought it might break.

  Turning the jeep’s steering wheel with small, jerky motions, Shiage Hamazura desperately tried to keep the car tires from losing their grip on the snow. It had studded tires, which was forbidden in Japan, but on thicker snow like they were on now, the car was still about to slide sideways.

  What was the reason he chose to drive so dangerously?

  The reason was visible in his rearview mirror.

  “Shit!! I can’t even find a chance to shake them!!” he shouted, clenching his teeth.

  Behind him, closing in from a distance of a little over 50 meters, were Academy City–made powered suits. The monsters came in a set of five like the main cast of a sentai superhero team, using the high speed of their suits to draw ever closer. Their pursuers slid across the ground with the ease of ice skates and leaped like they were participating in a triple jump event. These guys were keeping up on foot and steadily closing in.

  Hamazura hadn’t been able to get out of the encirclement safely. The enemy had troops to spare. Five foot soldiers should be more than enough to handle a single jeep was probably what they were thinking. They were clearly making light of him.

  Still, under no circumstances was Hamazura about to provoke them. Fighting even one of those things head-on would end in instant death. A battle against five of them at once wouldn’t last one-fifth of a second. Hamazura didn’t even have the vocabulary to express it properly.

  Takitsubo, securely buckled into the passenger’s seat, looked up from the map on her lap and said, “Hamazura, they’re closing in little by little.”

  “I know that!! Those bastards, coming after us like pro ice skaters or something!! With all that insane tech on full display, we’re gonna have way more urban legends on our hands soon!!”

  “It’s about five hundred meters until the border with Elizalina. Can you make it?”

  He didn’t have time to answer.

  The four-wheel-drive jeep had been just barely maintaining its balance, but now it was finally beginning to slide sideways. Hamazura hastily turned the wheel in an attempt to recover, but the car veered way off the road—which had no fence or guardrails—plunging into a forest of conifer trees.

  Hamazura didn’t have time to hit the brakes.

  If he didn’t keep the accelerator floored, the powered suits would catch them.

  The scenery change came with an immediate uptick in sensory speed.

  Trees thicker than power poles kept almost grazing the jeep as they passed at breakneck speeds.

  Five hundred meters…

  The powered suits wouldn’t care.

  Despite entering the forest at the same speed as Hamazura and Takitsubo, they continued their pursuit without hesitation, as though running across roller coaster rails. The snow-covered ground posed no problem—and sometimes they’d even kick down branches, boughs, and trunks to take bold shortcuts. Their strength hadn’t simply been amplified with the machines. Their sensors and devices for heightening the speed of their decision-making abilities were out of this world. Maybe they had electrodes plugged directly into their brains.

  Five hundred meters!!

  And then the jeep was suddenly floating.

  Inside the forest, the ground wasn’t flat like asphalt.

  The jeep had bounced off a slightly inclined bump, launching it up into the air like a jumping platform.

  “Oh…sh—?!”

  Before he could finish talking, the tires landed on the ground again.

  The vehicle began sliding around incomparably more than before. Hamazura desperately manipulated the steering wheel, but in the blink of an eye, they’d ended up spinning ninety degrees sideways.

  Still, luck was on their side.

  A moment later, the car burst out of the forest and onto a snowfield.

  And at the other side: the Elizalina Alliance of Independent Nations’ border.

  A chain-link fence, about two meters tall and topped with barbed wire, stood between the two nations, but Hamazura had already stopped thinking about it. If he was careless in trying to regain control over the jeep, he’d lose that much more time. Instead…

  I’m gonna slide right in!!

  They plunged toward it, still going sideways.

  The powered suits’ thick fingertips came close enough to reach out toward them, but all they grabbed was air.

  An instant later, the metal fence wrapped around the jeep, and the driver’s side window shattered with a brilliant noise. The jeep continued on, hurtling into Alliance territory; a strange sound rang out, almost like the front wheels had had gotten jammed up by what remained of the fence. As soon as Hamazura had that thought, the jeep finally lost what semblence of balance it had left. It continued to spin around and around three more times before ultimately coming to a stop with its front facing the Russian border.

  They’d escaped.

  It was only about twenty meters, but the jeep had definitely made it into Alliance. The justification for the presence of the powered suits—or rather, Academy City—in this war was only to fight Russia. They couldn’t act freely within the borders of the Independent Nations.

  However.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me…,” moaned Hamazura from the driver’s seat.

  The powered suits couldn’t lay a hand on them now—but they were still relentlessly coming closer.

  They had to be aware of the border.

  They knew, and they were ignoring it.

  Nestled in their mechanical fingers were certain objects.

  Insanely huge revolvers. The muzzles were so big a soda can could fit inside them. They probably shot grenades or something. What if they were actually oversize shotgun shells? How much power could each round possibly have? Either way, this jeep ain’t bulletproof, so one shot is all it’ll take to turn into a ball of flames.

  The suits wasted no time aiming at them.

  No voices to threaten them or give them a warning.

  Hamazura immediately glanced at the driv
er’s side door handle, but outside was covered in broken fence fragments; even if he tried to open it, it was staying right where it was.

  I’d forgotten, he thought, staring at the muzzles blankly like they were tunnels connecting to death.

  This wasn’t a sporting event.

  This wasn’t a card game.

  It was actual combat.

  Hamazura had fled through countless back alleys in the City—didn’t he know best that nobody would step in to referee if a weakling or loser cried foul?

  He didn’t even notice his mouth drying out.

  The powered suits’ thick fingers, riding on the giant revolvers’ triggers, moved.

  And then—

  Hamazura heard a noise like fireworks going off. Not the bang when they exploded—it was the sound of the firework itself shooting up high into the sky from the ground.

  He frowned.

  There was no time to see where it was coming from.

  Because a moment later…

  Fwoosh!!

  The national border transformed into a straight-edged sea of fire, engulfing the powered suits.

  The scene looked like a joke.

  The blast hadn’t flown off in every direction like it should have. The flames spread unnaturally, like someone had poured oil on the ground in a line. Their height was about ten meters, and the length reached a good five-hundred. The jeep’s front windshield shattered to pieces. A fair bit of distance separated them from the epicenter, but the intense light and heat blew straight into Hamazura’s and Takitsubo’s faces. The jeep itself, which had come to a stop in the snow, seemed like it slid a few centimeters when the shock wave passed.

  “Wh…what?” squawked Hamazura, confirming that he could still use his own voice. “Napalm…?”

  “Based on the sound we heard right before it…They must have been rockets loaded with liquid explosives.”

  Takitsubo seemed like she was barely breathing.

  But she was still alive.

  He didn’t know who was responsible, but for the moment, he figured they should get out of the car now that it was unusable and take refuge inside the Elizalina Alliance of Independent Nations. However…

  Bam!!

  It was the sound of crumpling metal.

  Someone was standing on the jeep’s hood. It was unbelievable, but the person appeared to have fallen right out of the sky and landed there.

  From the driver’s seat, Hamazura could only see slender legs.

  Since the person’s heels were facing them, their face must have been looking toward the wall of liquid flames, where several powered suits writhed.

  Despite the raging inferno, they were still operating properly. However, when they saw the person standing on the hood, they edged…away. A moment before that, though, Hamazura had seen them pause for just an instant. And then, as though withdrawing deeper into the wall of flames, the powered suits began to retreat.

  The person on the hood seemed to have rescued Hamazura and Takitsubo from their crisis. But who was it?

  The answer came a moment later.

  Their apparent savior, who still had their heels facing them, used one of those heels to lightly tug on the broken windshield’s frame. At least, that was what it looked like. But the simple gesture tore the jeep’s roof off with a loud riiiip, completely separating it from the vehicle.

  Grrk-grraaa!! came the tremendous noise as the view from the interior expanded all at once.

  And dominating that new view: a monster with white hair and red eyes.

  Shiage Hamazura knew who this was.

  The monster’s identity:

  “Accelerator…?!”

  “Great. Looks like my search for nearby spies got me caught up in some extra bullshit.”

  The monster spoke as though he found all this truly annoying.

  “Spill it. Everything you know.”

  6

  “You have me at a loss.”

  In a field hospital—well, in a stone fortress that had been around for centuries, a building that the staff had simply wheeled medical equipment into—a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman spoke in Japanese.

  The woman, sitting up in bed, had bandages wrapped around various spots. But even disregarding them, she didn’t appear physically fit. Her skin was more wan than fair, she sported large rings under her eyes, and her body was more bony than it was slim. On the whole, she was the kind of person who might have been beautiful if someone made her go on a sumo wrestler’s diet for half a year straight.

  Elizalina.

  In a melancholic manner, the woman after whom the Alliance was named held her slender hands to her head.

  “…If there was even a chance to use recovery magic, I’d like to do something about myself first in this situation.”

  “Ahhh. Uh, sorry.”

  “No need to apologize. I’m the one who claimed I didn’t need to rest, and that only resulted in my aide needing to perform emergency surgery on me.”

  She seemed to be wounded in her own right, but it sounded like she’d treat Takitsubo. Mentally thanking her, Hamazura was still confused.

  What was re-coverie majik supposed to be?

  For a moment, he thought she’d learned some sort of incorrect Japanese, but Elizalina clearly had a better command of the language than the idiot Hamazura. If he took her words at face value, then…what did that mean, exactly?

  Without thinking, he glanced over at Accelerator, who clicked his tongue at him and looked away.

  Hamazura’d heard that the Independent Nations might have some kind of special medical technology that Academy City didn’t. He didn’t know whether it could alleviate Takitsubo’s symptoms, but he’d figured that it would be worth asking. That was why he’d carried the limp young woman on his back to this field hospital, and yet…

  Recovery? Recovery magic— Am I hearing that right? Like in RPGs? Or is it related to medicine somehow…Like convalescence? But wait, what about “magic”? Is that a medical term around here?

  More question marks were popping up in his mind by the second, but he didn’t ask them immediately because Elizalina had talked about it so fluidly and naturally. It could have been a con, but with all the words coming one after another without giving him a chance to interrupt, it made him feel like there had to be some kind of logic behind it.

  Elizalina ignored him and turned her head.

  Elizalina glanced over at Takitsubo, just barely sitting up in a small chair, and another girl of about ten years, lying asleep on a bed. She’d been called one of the oddest names Hamazura had ever heard—Last Order. Was that an ability name or something?

  “I’ll start with my conclusion.”

  Elizalina pointed to Takitsubo, then Last Order, from her bed.

  “The girl in the tracksuit, I think I can manage. The little girl’s condition doesn’t look promising. That is all.”

  “…” Accelerator, still leaning against a wall, twitched an eyebrow.

  Hadn’t Last Order come here first?

  Hamazura blinked; Elizalina had made the declaration calmly—or put another way, cruelly. “Uh, wha?” he stammered. “What do you…? You think you can manage?”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t understand if I told you it was sorcery.”

  “What?”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t understand if I told you it was sorcery,” she repeated. She didn’t seem willing to proceed with the conversation until he offered some kind of reaction.

  Hamazura nodded for now. Sorcery? What’s sorcery?

  “Leaving aside whether it really exists or not,” she said casually, cutting out the most important point, “you are familiar with how witches and whatnot have always done occult rituals since ages past, right? Leaving aside whether they have any real effect, in an era when people believed in it, you know that rituals were performed based on a certain sequence of actions, right?”

  “What, like wrinkly old women stirring big cauldrons and stuff?”

  “You
understand that such rituals used all sorts of herbs—well, in modern day, plants close to what we refer to as narcotics, as well as poison taken from animals and such, right?”

  “??? Hang on a second. What does all this have to do with Takitsubo’s symptoms?”

  The cause of Takitsubo’s affliction was Crystals, created by Academy City’s science and technology. All this talk of strange, occult spells didn’t seem very helpful for fixing it.

  “Leaving aside for now whether it is simply a hallucination or whether it truly provided supernatural effects,” she said, sounding strangely like she was implying something, “it means that since rituals that dealt with poison were so rampant, they would have orally passed down methods to perform them safely. For example, training yourself to grow used to the poison little by little so you don’t break down. Or antivenom methods that heal by removing the toxins accumulated in the body.”

  “That’s— Uh, what do you…?” Hamazura almost shot out of his seat. “You mean you can cure her?!”

  Elizalina stopped him with a hand. “That’s right. The girl in the tracksuit and the little girl each have their own symptoms. The little girl essentially has toxins perpetually being injected into her, so even if you remove it temporarily, it’ll fill back up again. But with the girl in the tracksuit, she should manage if we can remove what’s accumulated inside her. I don’t mean to say that I can completely cure her, but she’ll be a lot better off than she has been.”

  Was Elizalina talking about the Crystals? Either way, her theory was correct—if they could remove the Crystals from Takitsubo’s body, she might not see a full recovery, but her condition would immediately improve. He was suspicious of how far civilian medicinal methods could go when dealing with Crystals developed by the cutting-edge Academy City, but even health methods that seemed fake at a glance sometimes revealed scientific underpinnings if examined closely, and it wasn’t rare that new medicinal techniques were devised based on such inspired breakthroughs.

  “…Okay.”

  Slowly, hope was building inside Hamazura.

  Without thinking, he embraced Takitsubo.

  “Hell yeah!! We did it, Takitsubo. It’s a little different from what we planned, but coming to Russia was the right move after all!”