A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 7 (22 page)

Agnes immediately crossed her arms to defend her face, but her legs came off the floor.

Her entire body flung away despite her guard, and she glared at Kamijou with eyes like a mad dog.

Not even one second of hesitation.

Without even showing a moment of indecision, the young man showed his preparation to the enemy before him.

“You…little…What the fuck are you doing?!” Agnes Sanctis yelled angrily, but Touma Kamijou replied with an even louder roar.

“What I need to do! Don’t take me so lightly! I’m here to save her! Why the hell else would I be here?!”

Their emotions clashed against each other at close range.

Though they were both, in a word, “heated,” their properties and temperature were entirely different.

Her cheek muscles trembled oddly and she began muttering to herself. The sisters in black, who had been standing idly until now, all turned to face Touma Kamijou. The hundreds of weapons they held made an eerie, mechanical sound, like soldiers marching forward.

“You…That’s…pretty…funny.” Agnes’s voice and body both trembled. “There are two hundred of us. How much can you do alone in this situation?! Come on, then, show me! Ha-ha—with the number difference, I think you’ll be mincemeat in less than a minute, though!”

The sisters in black all readied their weapons at her assertion.

Meanwhile, Touma Kamijou had no weapons—only his own tightly clenched fist.

Just before the two sides clashed…

…suddenly, they heard a voice.

“Give me a break. Don’t start without me. You managed to slip right through the barrier. You could have at least given me enough time to set up the runes we need.”

“Eh…?”

The very moment Agnes turned around with a dumbfounded look, there was a roar of flames sucking in oxygen—and with it, the orange explosion instantly dissolved the darkness dominating the incomplete church.

In the back of the church, exactly opposite where Kamijou stood—

There was a big hole in one of the windows on the wall behind the pulpit, about two stories up, waiting for stained glass to be fitted inside. He’d probably used the scaffolding on the outer wall to get there. Standing in the window frame was an English Puritan priest, with a flame sword in his hand.

“…S…Stiyl?”

In a daze, Touma Kamijou whispered the name of the priest with the cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

“We sorcerers were all ready to finish things up, so we’d planned to have the
amateur
retire. All those fake explanations and fake persuasions—for nothing.”

Agnes spoke before Kamijou could. “English…Puritans? Absurd…This is solely a Roman Orthodox issue! If you interfere, they’ll see it as meddling in our internal affairs! Don’t you know that?!”

“Yeah, well…Unfortunately, that doesn’t apply here.” Stiyl blew out some smoke, annoyed. “Take a look at Orsola Aquinas’s chest. See that English Puritan cross hanging on her neck? Yeah—the very same
cross our
amateur
accidentally gave her.” He grinned teasingly. “Placing that around someone’s neck places them under the protection of the English Puritan Church—which means she has been baptized and is now one of us. Our archbishop prepared that cross personally. And she ordered me to hang it around Orsola’s neck myself…It was low on the priority list, so I had left it for later and given it to that man over there. I figured it would be a bit of insurance, to make you think the amateur was under English Puritanism’s umbrella should you have captured him…but somehow or another, it ended up on Orsola, just as planned. That means Orsola Aquinas is not a member of the Roman Orthodox Church—but one of the puritans of England.”

“I get it. So that’s why…” Kamijou absently thought back.

When he casually said he’d give her the cross, Orsola seemed extremely happy…

So this is what it
really
meant.

Agnes’s face grew bright red. After moving her mouth up and down a few times, she said, “Y-you think such sophistry will work?”

“No, I don’t. It’s not as though it was performed according to English Puritan ceremony, by an English Puritan priest, in an English Puritan church.” Stiyl wiggled his cigarette. “But that doesn’t mean Orsola
isn’t
in a very delicate position right now, does it? A Roman Orthodox disciple received an English Puritan cross—plus, someone from Academy City, in the science faction, gave it to her. I think we should take some time now to deliberate on what faction she is technically a part of right now. If you put her to trial as just a Roman Orthodox, then the English Puritan Church won’t sit idly by.”

Tap.
Stiyl jumped from the window and quietly landed in front of the pulpit. He pointed the tip of his flame sword at the distant Agnes’s face. “And above all—
you were nice enough to point your blades at her.
” Stiyl bared his teeth. “Did you think I was that naïve? That I was kind enough to let that slip?”

“Damn! Just because there’s one more of you now doesn’t mean—?!” she began to shout hatefully, but once again, someone
else’s
voice interrupted.

“Man, hope you’re not thinking you’ll get away with just two!”

“?!”

As Agnes turned to face the audacious male voice, this time, the wall to her side blasted apart and crumbled. From the dense clouds of dust walked a tall man with a large sword.

“Tatemiya…” Kamijou voiced the name of the tall man holding the pure white flamberge of unknown composition.

Saiji Tatemiya.

The vicar—representative—pope of the diversified religious fusion of Crossism, the Amakusa-Style Crossist Church.

And behind him were gathered the members of Amakusa, who should have been confined in a separate building. They numbered about fifty—it was probably everyone who had been locked up.

“No need to ask me why I’m fighting here, is there?”

Surprised, Kamijou said, “Y-you…But you said it would be best to hit them while they were on the move…”

“Because I thought you’d give up and go home if I said that. I talked it over with the English Puritans and we
tried
to set things up so that we’d finish things before you made a move. You’re an even bigger idiot than I thought. But you’re fun to watch, so I can’t really hate ya,” answered Tatemiya, amazed.

And last of all, with a
click clack
of footsteps, the familiar voice of a girl in white came to him from behind.

“That’s why I told you not to worry, Touma—someone else would settle things!”

“In…dex…”

Pat
—a small, yet reassuring hand was placed on his astounded shoulder. “But we can’t help it now that it’s come to this, I guess!—Let’s save her, Touma. Let’s save Orsola Aquinas with our own hands!”

Yeah
, nodded Kamijou.

Agnes Sanctis, watching the whole thing, exploded. With a single order—
kill them!
—the hundreds of sisters in the dark leaped at them to attack.

The final battle had begun—the final battle of those gathered to settle the score of this ridiculous story.

In the middle of the night, Kaori Kanzaki stood on the roof of a building.

The landscape before her eyes portrayed the under-construction Church of Orsola. Its impression was far from that of a church—not a speck of silence, filled with the sounds of violence and breaking.

She was standing far away from the church, but her keen ears could hear what they said. They heard the words of those who stood up for a single girl.

Kanzaki never planned on taking Amakusa’s side or killing the enemy Roman Orthodox from the beginning. She had not absconded right after the incident so that she could exercise violence.

She just wanted to make her true intentions known.

She wanted Amakusa to know that even without her, they would still be Amakusa, and nothing would change.

And they had just shown that, just as she’d believed they would. She narrowed her eyes in a gentle, natural smile, as though gazing at an object of nostalgia.

A place she could never go home to again.

But now she would be able to treasure that place in her heart, forever and ever.

From behind her, she heard unconcealed footsteps.

“Nyaha! I see you’re feeling totally grateful and moved, there,
Zaky. Ain’t it a sight? Your old friends didn’t kidnap Orsola so they could use the
Book of the Law
for their own greed after all!”

“Tsuchimikado…” Kanzaki hastily erased her expression and turned around—but she couldn’t seem to accomplish that when she saw Tsuchimikado’s broad grin.

She spoke in a strict tone to hide her abashment. “Are you finished on your end? You were talking about snatching up the
Book of the Law
’s original copy using this opportunity…”

“Hmm, who knows? Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.”

“…”

“I’m kidding. Don’t look at me like that! You basically know what’s goin’ on, right? Amakusa didn’t steal the book. It was all the Roman Orthodox Church tryin’ to frame ’em. That means they didn’t need to bring the thing into Japan in the first place, yeah? The one they brought here was a forgery. The real thing is deep, deep in the Vatican Library as we speak.”

Tsuchimikado was reporting on his failure, but his voice was awfully bright. Maybe he didn’t have much passion for his work—or perhaps he had lied, and he actually managed to steal the
Book of the Law
. Kanzaki didn’t quite know what to make of it.

He walked up next to her. He placed both hands on the metal railing to prevent falling, and as he quietly gazed at where Kanzaki was looking, asked, “So, you satisfied?”

“…Yes. More so than I thought.” Kanzaki looked at the church again. “They’ll be able to keep Amakusa on the correct path without me. They’ve become very strong.”

“Mm, yes. They’re probably having a hard time, though—not gonna help ’em?”

“I do not have the right to stand before them. And they no longer need my strength. I was as training wheels on a bicycle,” said Kanzaki, sounding a little lonely but proud.

She hadn’t hesitated even a moment to give her answer.

Tsuchimikado suppressed a grin at her seriousness.

“What is it, Tsuchimikado?”

“I mean, nothin’ much…It don’t matter, but ya probably didn’t
expect Kammy to get involved in this, did ya? You still haven’t thanked him for the Angel Fall business and the Index struggle, either. Now you’ve gotten him mixed up in another one of your problems—you’re totally afraid of having to make it up to him, aren’t ya, nya?”

“N-not at all. Nothing you are imagining is going to happen!”

Kanzaki replied with a very serious look, but for some reason, Tsuchimikado burst out laughing. He laughed so hard and so loudly that it brought tears to his eyes and he started to worry it would reach the Church of Orsola below.

“By the way! What could those bandages in your hands be, hmm? You weren’t gonna sneak up on your unconscious friends and do secret first aid on ’em, were ya? And then after you were done, stroke their heads softly with a hand, smile a little, and quietly retreat? Pfft, ku-ku! Man, Zaky, you’re so simple and cliché, you! I can’t believe you were thinking of something so embarrassing with a straight face!”

“……?!”

“Hm? What’s up, Zaky? Your temples are all pulsing and…Hey, wait, wait stop stop stop! I’m unarmed! You can’t seriously use the Seven Heavens, Seven Blades on me! Does this mean you’re gonna bandage me up first, nyaaaa?!”

The Church of Orsola consisted of seven sanctuaries.

Each of them was charged with one of the seven sacraments of Crossism. They weren’t all the same size, instead varying in size and money spent depending on the frequency and importance of the sacrament. Orsola and the others were currently in the Church of Matrimony, which concerned wedding ceremonies. It was planned to receive the most in the way of finances, so the building was gigantic as well. Second largest was the Church of Final Anointment, which related to funeral proceedings; others with important religious significance, such as the Church of Holy Orders and the Church of Confirmation, followed, but nevertheless they couldn’t expect much patronage from general visitors such as Kamijou, and so were the smallest ones. These small buildings were artfully adorned with statues, paintings, and stained-glass windows—it looked like they were aiming for additional income as a halfway art exhibit or museum.

That was as much info as the mobile version of its homepage on his phone could tell him. It was rather strange to see a website built by those on the occult side for their own choice, but maybe they wanted it to function as a sightseeing guide as well—the maps of its
planned completion and even of the inside being made public could have been a money grab…though of course, it was only the places they
could
show to visitors.

“Damn!!”

Kamijou swept up Orsola into his arms and dove out the Church of Matrimony’s back door. Not a hint of plant life greeted them as he stepped onto the perfectly flat stone ground. Armed sisters appeared from the doorway soon after.

He had waited for the very moment the dozens of Amakusa members clashed face-first with the Roman sisters to take Orsola and flee the Church of Matrimony. He didn’t want to be separated from Index and the others if he could help it, but they were now divided by a human wave, so there was nothing he could do.

As he ran, he looked at Orsola’s face and said, “Sorry I was late! Are you all right?!”

“…Yes. This much is really nothing at all.”

Her clothing was cut up badly; the fasteners and other metal parts of it were broken, looking like something had crushed them in its teeth. She barely moved at all—just swayed a little—and held on to him tightly, which was all he needed to deduce how badly hurt she was.

But although her face held exhaustion,
pain
was nowhere to be found.

She looked as though she were about to burst into tears. With her hands up around his neck, she looked up at him like a child who had finally found her parents.

Jeez, what the hell! It was so easy—I had a reason to fight right here.

Kamijou held on to her as he continued his run.

However large the Church of Matrimony may have been, fighting against so many people inside it would have been suicidal. Strength wasn’t the issue—it would be the human flood washing over him. And he was just a high school kid in the first place. He could win a one-on-one fight; one-on-two was dubious. Any more than that and he wouldn’t think twice about running. That was the extent of his ability.

But.

But just because he wouldn’t think twice about running didn’t mean he had been defeated.

“Hm…!!” Before the countless hands of his pursuers could reach his back, Amakusa men and women, swords in hand, leaped down from the church’s roof. Their blades blocked the Roman Orthodox weaponry close to impaling his body, and the brutal follow-up kick sent the front line of black-garbed sisters flying.

With the
whoosh
of a wave retreating, a portion of the Roman Orthodox sisters moved as a single creature and surrounded the Amakusa members.

Thanks a bunch
…
!

He ran farther, kicking an empty can left by a construction worker with his heel into the air. Of course, the effects of launching something like that were far from mowing down the sisters in black.

But when something flew through the corner of their eyes, they’d look that way whether they wanted to or not.

“?!”

As soon as they noticed the sisters’ attention waver, the Amakusa members cut through the encirclement. They gave Kamijou a quick bow, then each of them began to flee as well.

He didn’t have time to see that through to the end. The weapons wielded by the sisters may have been heavy, but they couldn’t have been heavier than a human body. To close the slight distance that formed between them, the Roman Orthodox killers ran after Kamijou again.

A sister closed in on him, swinging a lit torch. A softball-sized rock of ice came flying at him from behind her. He continued to dodge them, holding Orsola close. He soon spotted metal construction-pipe scaffolding surrounding the long and thin Church of Confirmation, which was behind the Church of Matrimony, and dashed up in bounds. He used the slanted rungs to run up to the second floor. The torch-holding sister carelessly came after him—he kicked her down to the ground with his right foot. A moment later, another sister somehow jumped from the ground up to where he was with a single
leap; as she set foot on the unstable scaffolding, Kamijou swept her legs out and sent her tumbling back down.

“—”

The eyes of dozens of sisters on the ground stared up at him on the scaffolding, observing him mechanically.

They would have realized by now.

They could surround him with dozens of people and attack all at once—they wouldn’t have anywhere to run then. But if he found a place where they needed to fight one-on-one, he could pick out an escape route.

The metal pipes making up the scaffolding he stood on were long, thin, and unstable, so the sisters couldn’t deliver a unified attack from all directions. If they were to follow him up the narrow scaffolding, they would inevitably need to get in a neat single-file line. In fact, if that many people all ran onto the scaffolding, it would buckle under their weight and collapse. Unless they were prepared to die, they couldn’t use their numbers to their advantage because of the sacrifice it might require.

The sisters in jet-black pondered on what that meant…

…and then without exchanging a single word, their opinions aligned, and they all readied their weapons, still on the ground.

From staffs, axes, crosses, and Bibles to a giant clock hand you might use on a clock tower—the tips of all these myriad weapons pointed straight over their heads to where Kamijou was. Their blades shone in all the colors of the rainbow—red, blue, yellow, green, purple, brown, white, gold.

Agh
…
shit
…
?!

Kamijou hoisted the unconscious Orsola’s body again in his arms, then began a mad dash farther up the metal pipe scaffolding. As he did so, feathers of brilliantly colored light flew at him one after the other. The shining weapons were like feather pens with arrowheads on their tips. In the blink of an eye they were speeding toward where Kamijou was sprinting with Orsola, trying to shoot right through them. The storm of feathers of light destroyed the outer wall of the church and the scaffolding alike without mercy. As soon as he
heard the huge
clank
and the scaffolding swung, he realized they hadn’t been shooting at him—they’d been going after the base of the scaffolding.

They certainly didn’t seem to care about Orsola’s safety. They just knew they needed to keep her alive—as long as her brain and heart were working, they probably didn’t care what state she was in.

The entire scaffolding they were running on tilted over like a sinking ship.

Of course, jumping to the ground would land him right in the middle of the dozens of sisters.

“Ugh, aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh?!”

He gave a meaningless shout. Because the scaffolding was tipping over, his path was getting steeper and steeper. It was getting closer to vertical with each passing moment. Kamijou ran through it. The two-story scaffolding, at some point, had reached up to the roof of the three-story church.

He tightened his arms around Orsola and jumped with all his might.

Just when his feet landed on the marble church roof, the coffin of metal pipes and parts clattered to the ground in a heap.

His spine chilled at the sight of the scaffolding he was just on having collapsed, then finally stopped in place, still holding Orsola, and took a deep breath.

“A-are you all right?” she asked anxiously up at him, perhaps feeling like a heavy burden to him.

“Yeah, no problem,” he replied, waving it off, looking at how Orsola was doing again. Her habit was torn all over thanks to the countless violent acts, her clothing fasteners were broken, and her skirt fabric was in shambles. Under normal circumstances the sight might have been rather arousing, but her thighs were black and blue with bruises like a rotten fruit, the discoloration of internal bleeding pushing any trace of that thought out of his mind.

…
Damn it.
He gritted his teeth, not saying anything aloud but yelling inwardly.
Not even a grown man could have stood up against your numbers, and you all ganged up on Orsola and beat her up like
this? Agnes Sanctis!!
He really wanted to charge into the enemy line right this instant, but Orsola worried him more. He needed to do some quick first aid and let her rest somewhere, he thought urgently.

But there wasn’t any calming down in this place.

They moved away from the edge of the roof toward the middle to avoid as many projectiles as they could, coming to a spot where the building walls would block seeing him from any angle below.

“Which means…”

He let Orsola down out of his arms onto the under-construction roof, and then grabbed a nearby box of construction tools with his hands…

…and
bam!!

The next moment, with a tremendous noise, three sisters came jumping up from the ground.

Kamijou swung the box of construction tools, heavy enough to make him feel like the one being swung around. It struck one of the three sisters, who lost her balance and fell to the ground.

The other two landed on the roof without a sound, one readying her giant hour hand and one her giant minute hand. Each had bandages around the base, maybe to let them grip it.

He heard the rest of them, who didn’t have such jumping abilities, running up the stairs inside the building to get to the roof, right below him.

He felt like he was at a disadvantage, so he looked around with his eyes only, without moving his neck, for an escape route…and then he saw the girl wearing a white habit, running through the middle of the vast church site that could be viewed in its entirety from the rooftops.

Behind her were likewise dozens of sisters clad in jet-black.

But his bird’s-eye view told him how hopeless her situation was. There was another group of sisters closing in farther along her escape path. She must not have realized there were enemies in that direction as well. If she kept going, she would have to run straight into them.

“Index!!” he shouted unthinkingly—and at that, the two sisters jumped at him from the left and right, giant clock hands at the ready.

His voice didn’t reach the girl running along the ground.

Between the Church of Matrimony and the Church of Baptism, Saiji Tatemiya brandished his sword. Because the Church of Baptism was positioned diagonally from the Church of Matrimony, it created a triangular courtyard.

Until he was the last one there, he brandished his sword. After the members of Amakusa had bought time at first to let Orsola escape, now Tatemiya was buying time for the rest of Amakusa to escape the Church of Matrimony. Dozens of his peers were currently scattered around, fighting.

Here and there on the polished stone courtyard without a hint of greenery, there were pedestal-looking things for sculptures to go on top. Once the church was finished, there would probably be an orderly line of angels, famous religious figures, and saints, but right now they just radiated emptiness. It felt like ruins after heretics had attacked and destroyed every piece of religious art here.

Saiji Tatemiya didn’t fight while running, like Touma Kamijou did.

That was because he was skillfully throwing off the timing of the enemies’ attacks. He would never launch into a full assault, nor resign himself to complete defense—he maintained a position right in between.

As soon as the sisters came forward to attack, Tatemiya would take just one step forward.

The sisters would then back off and regroup, and in that moment, Tatemiya would take just one step back.

With their predictions gone wrong and the wind naturally taken out of the enemy group’s sails, their pace would be thrown off for just a moment. Tatemiya aimed for that moment and mercilessly
brandished his sword. When the sisters would panic and move to defend, his heavy sword would knock an enemy—and her defense—way back.

Tatemiya wouldn’t follow up. After pulling out one attack, he would patiently move back. By neither attacking nor defending, but keeping a precarious balance between the two, he purposely erected an invisible wall—a state of deadlock—that shouldn’t have been there originally.

Though I’m not gonna be able to rely on this tactic for very long
…, Tatemiya thought, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, catching his comrades brandishing their own swords out of the corner of his eye.

He pretended to give a smile of superiority, but on the inside he was nervous. Right now, all he was doing was taking advantage of the fact that the sisters were able to analyze the situation, and that they had some leeway to work with. If they decided to fight to the death, lost their minds’ balance, and came at him in a full-blown assault, prepared for friendly fire and mutual kills, Tatemiya’s plan would come crumbling down.

Whether it was attack or defense, the moment the balance tipped toward either of those sides would be the moment his psychological wall would collapse and he’d be swallowed up in the giant wave.

It was like fishing, he thought as he brandished his sword. If he recklessly cast his line into the water, the fish would just tear apart the string and run away. If he wanted to fish well, he needed to go along with the fish’s movements to a certain extent, let them play with it, and make them think they had a chance of winning.