2_Chapter 1_ The Magician Stands atop the Tower
CHAPTER 1
The Magician Stands atop the TowerFAIR,_Occasionally_GIRL.
1
If you’re an Aquarius, born between January 20th and February 18th, you will have extremely good fortune in love, money, and business! No matter how improbable the circumstances, only good things are headed your way! Go buy a lottery ticket! Just don’t get carried away with your newfound popularity with the opposite sex—no two- or three-timing, now.
“Man…I knew this would happen…I knew it, but still…”
It was July 20th, the first day of summer vacation.
Touma Kamijou was at a loss for words. His dorm room in Academy City was sweltering because his air conditioner was broken. Lightning had apparently struck in the middle of the night and blown out 80 percent of his appliances. That included his refrigerator, the food in which was now all spoiled. When he went to open his emergency rations—a cup of yakisoba—he accidentally dumped all the noodles down the sink. Then, having no alternative but to go out to eat, he stepped on his credit card while searching for his wallet, crushing it. After that, he decided to sulk back into bed and cry himself to sleep, only to be awakened by his ringing phone. It was his homeroom teacher conveying a heartfelt message: “Good morning, Kamijou! You’re dumb, so you need to come and take your makeup classes. ”
The horoscopes on TV were being broadcast like a weather report. He’d known they’d sound like this, but they were so far off it wasn’t even funny.
“…I know this is how it is. I’ve always known, but I can’t process it unless I say it out loud…”
Fortune-telling was always wrong, and good luck charms were no better. This was Touma Kamijou’s life. Luck had long since turned its back on him. You’d think it would be genetic, but his father had won the fourth place in the lottery (about 100,000 yen) once, while his mother had scored free drinks from the vending machine jackpot multiple times. It was enough to make him wonder if they were even related by blood. But as he wasn’t harboring a crush on his little sister and wasn’t in line for royal succession, no good would’ve come of discovering that he wasn’t his parents’ son.
It just boiled down to the fact that he had bad luck.
Like, so bad it was almost a joke.
But he wasn’t going to sulk about it forever.
Touma Kamijou didn’t rely on luck, and that enhanced his ability to act.
“…All right, then. The main problems right now are my card and the refrigerator.”
Scratching his head quizzically, he looked around his room. As long as he had his bankbook, it wouldn’t be difficult to get a new card. The bigger problem was his refrigerator—in particular, his breakfast. For his summer Ability Development makeup classes, he’d need to take medicine like Metoserin pills or Elbrase for sure, so he definitely didn’t want to go in there on an empty stomach.
He figured he’d stop by the convenience store on his way to school. He pulled off the T-shirt in which he’d been sleeping and changed into his summer outfit. As stupid students are prone to doing, Kamijou had for no good reason gotten all excited about summer vacation finally arriving, stayed up really late, and now his head throbbed with sleep deprivation. Making up for four months’ worth of cut classes in a single week is a pretty sweet deal, though, he thought with forced optimism.
Cheering himself up, he declared, “And it’s so nice outside that maybe I’ll air out the futon today.”
He opened the screen door that led to the balcony. When he got back from his class later, his bedding would be all fresh and cozy.
From his balcony, he could see the side of the neighboring building a mere two meters away. “The sky’s so blue, and yet I can’t see the light!”
A sudden depression washed over him. He’d said it in a bright, jocular tone, but doing so had the complete opposite effect on his mood.
Tortured by the isolation that left him without a straight man, Kamijou hoisted the futon off his bed. He wouldn’t be able to die in peace if his futon wasn’t at least soft. Bringing down his foot, he felt a disquieting squish as he stepped in something spongy. Investigating the cause, he found a piece of yakisoba bread in its clear wrapper. It had been shoved into the back of the aforementioned annihilated refrigerator, so it was probably already sour.
“…Hope we don’t have any summer showers today.”
What was sadly most likely a premonition spilled out of his mouth. He turned again to the open screen door that opened onto his balcony, only to discover that a white futon was already draped over the railing, airing out.
“?”
Even though these were student dorms, they were basically set up the same way as studio apartments, so Kamijou lived by himself. That being the case, there was nobody but him to go hanging futons from his terrace.
It was only upon closer examination that he realized it wasn’t a futon at all.
Hanging over the ledge was a girl wearing white clothes.
“Huh?!”
His mattress fell to the floor with a thump.
The scene was baffling; it made no sense. Some girl was dangling from his balcony as if slung over a metal clothesline, limp and exhausted. Her body was doubled over the rail at her hips so that her arms and legs all drooped, suspended straight down.
She was…fourteen, maybe fifteen? She looked a year or two younger than Kamijou and appeared to be a foreigner, given her fair complexion and white hair. No, not white. Silver…probably? Either way, it was long and obstructed her inverted face from his sight. It most likely reached to her waist.
As for her clothing…
“Whoa. It’s a real-life sister…but not the sibling kind.”
A habit? You know, the kind of things nuns and sisters in churches wear. Her clothing looked to be all one piece and went down to her feet. A hat perched on her head—or rather, a hood made of a single piece of cloth. In direct contrast to the standard black pigmentation one usually saw with habits, the one the girl wore was pure white. He guessed the fabric was silk. Moreover, points on it were embroidered in gold. Despite the fact that the basic design was typical of a nun’s habit, the unusual color completely changed its impression. She looked like some kind of gaudy teacup.
Suddenly, the girl’s delicate fingers twitched.
Her head began rising unsteadily from its drooping orientation. Her long, flowing hair smoothly parted to either side to reveal her face, as if a curtain were being opened.
Whoa, whoa…!
The little lady had a relatively cute face. Kamijou, who had exactly zero experience overseas, saw a freshness in her pale skin and green eyes. All things being equal, she looked rather like a doll.
But that’s not what had him flustered.
First and foremost, she was a foreigner. He’d once had an English teacher advise him to steer well clear of the wider world for the rest of his life. If somebody from God knows where ever started babbling at him, he’d just buy a down comforter or some other random thing to extract himself from the situation.
“Ai…”
The girl’s pretty—though slightly dry—lips parted slowly.
Kamijou retreated one step, and then another. At which point, his foot revisited the yakisoba bread still on his floor with another squish.
“I’m hungry.”
“…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………”
In that moment, Kamijou imagined that his feeble brain had substituted the unfamiliar language she was speaking with Japanese, like when dumb elementary schoolers make up silly lyrics to foreign songs.
“Hungry.”
“…”
“I’m hungry.”
“……”
“Didn’t you hear me? I said I’m hungry.”
The silver-haired girl slightly impatiently addressed the calcified Kamijou.
This is no good. Clearly this is very not good. This…This just sounds like Japanese.
“Err, umm…” He stared at the girl hanging out to dry on his balcony and inquired, “So, uhh…Are you about to say you just happened to collapse here on your way somewhere?”
“You could say I collapsed here and am dying.”
“…” The girl was perfectly fluent in Japanese.
“I’d be very happy if you gave me some food to fill me up.”
Kamijou looked down at the prepackaged yakisoba bread, still under his foot and making squishy noises. It looked spoiled.
I don’t know what the hell is going on, but it’s definitely better not to get involved. I’ll let this kid be happy somewhere far away from here, he thought, taking the plastic-wrapped, sour yakisoba bread and thrusting it into the girl’s mouth. Once she smells how rotten it is, she has to run away. In Kyoto, giving someone rice with hot tea is like telling them to go home, he thought.
“Thank you, I should like that.”
She chomped down on the entire thing, wrapper and all. Also her benefactor’s hand.
And just like that, Kamijou’s day once again began with a shriek and a stroke of bad luck.
2
“First, I should introduce myself.”
“…Uhh, first, why were you even hanging there—?”
“My name? It’s Index.”
“That’s a fake name no matter how you look at it! You’re an ‘index’? Like from the back of a book?!”
“As you can see, I’m a member of the Church. That’s important. Oh, not the one in the Vatican, but the Puritans of England.”
“I have no idea what any of that means, and are you ignoring my question?!”
“Hmm, I’m talking about Index…Oh, if you want my magic name, it’s Dedicatus545.”
“Hello? Heeelloooo? What kind of alien is speaking on this frequency?” Kamijou had no patience left for listening to this girl and picked at his ear with his pinkie finger. She started gnawing on her thumbnail. Maybe a nervous habit?
Why exactly are we sitting politely around my glass table like this is some kind of job interview?
He needed to leave for school soon, or he’d be late for his summer makeup classes. But he obviously couldn’t just leave this lunatic in his room by herself. The worst part of it was that this mysterious silver-haired girl calling herself Index looked like she’d taken such a liking to the place that she was rolling around on the floor.
Was this yet another expression of Kamijou’s misfortune? If so, this had gone too far.
“Also, I would be very grateful if you filled up this ‘index’ with food.”
“Why?! Why bother raising your parameters?! If I tripped some strange flag and ended up going straight into the Index route, then just kill me now!”
“Umm…is that slang? I’m sorry. I don’t think I understand what you mean.”
She was a foreigner, of course. She didn’t seem to understand Japan’s geek culture.
“If I take three steps out that door, I’ll die of malnourishment.”
“…Um, and I care about that why…?”
“When that happens, I’ll be sure to scrawl a message next to my corpse with my last bit of strength. A sketch of your face.”
“What…?!”
“If someone actually comes to my aid before I’ve expired, I might tell them I was held captive in this room and abused until all that was left was this husk of a person…and I’ll tell them you forced me to cosplay in this outfit, too.”
“You might say what?! You seem to know a lot about otaku culture over here after all, don’t you?!”
“?”
She tilted her head as if she were a kitten seeing herself in a mirror for the first time.
How mortifying. She’s playing dumb. I feel like I’m the only one who’s been tainted.
Kamijou stomped into the kitchen. I’ll do it! Okay, I’ll do it! The contents of the refrigerator had been ruined anyway, leaving only garbage. Even if I let her eat this stuff, it’s not like it’s putting a dent in my wallet. It’ll be fine if I heat it up. He plopped the remains of what had once been food into a frying pan and started cooking something like a stir-fry.
Now that I think of it, where exactly did she come from?
There were foreigners living in Academy City, too, of course. But she didn’t have that particular “scent” residents had. However, it would be very odd if she was an outsider.
Academy City was known as a “city of hundreds of schools,” but it was easier to think of it more like a “city-sized boarding school.” It sprawled across a third of Tokyo, but a Great Wall of China–like partition surrounded the whole thing at the moment. It wasn’t as strict as a prison, but it wasn’t somewhere you could just accidentally wander into and get lost.
At least, that was how it looked to the outside world. In point of fact, engineering universities had launched three satellites into space for research purposes, and they constantly had their shining, watchful eyes on the city. Anyone leaving or entering was comprehensively scanned. Anyone arousing suspicion who didn’t match up with the Gate’s records would activate Anti-Skills or members of Judgment from all the schools, either of which would be all over them in seconds. Although…
Yesterday, electro girl conjured up a bunch of storm clouds. Maybe that’s how she managed to evade their “eyes,” Kamijou thought.
“Umm, so why were you hanging out to dry on my balcony, then?”
Kamijou tried again, splashing soy sauce into the malicious vegetable stir-fry.
“I wasn’t hanging out to dry, okay?”
“Then what happened? Did the wind blow you here or something?”
“…Maybe something like that.”
He’d only been joking. He stopped moving the frying pan and turned back to the girl.
“I fell. I was actually trying to jump from rooftop to rooftop.”
Rooftop? he thought, looking up at the ceiling.
This neighborhood was chock-full of cheap student dorms. Slender, identical eight-story buildings were lined up one next to the other. As one could see from the view from the balcony, there were only about two meters between each building. It would probably be possible to jump from one rooftop to the next with a good running start, but…
“But the buildings are eight stories tall. One wrong step and you’d fall straight to hell.”
“Yeah. You know what they say—they don’t put up headstones for suicides,” Index declared. Kamijou didn’t really know what she meant by that. “I didn’t have any choice, though. There was nowhere else for me to run at the time.”
“To…run?”
Kamijou frowned unwittingly while Index replied simply, “Yup.”
“I was being chased.”
“…”
His hand stopped rocking the hot pan.
“I was actually jumping between buildings just fine, but in the middle of one leap, I got shot in the back.” The Index girl looked like she was laughing.
“Sorry. It looks like I got caught on your railing while I was falling.”
There was no embarrassment or sarcasm in her voice at all. She smiled at him as if it were perfectly normal.
“You got shot…?”
“Yes? Oh, don’t worry, I’m not hurt. These clothes also have a defensive barrier on them.”
What’s a “defensive barrier”? A bulletproof vest?
The girl spun around to show off her clothes. She certainly didn’t look like she was wounded. Was she actually shot? He found it much more probable that everything she had said was just a pile of lies, half-truths, and delusions.
However…
At the very least, she really had been hanging on his seventh-story balcony.
Hypothetically, if everything this girl was saying was true…
Then who would have shot her?
Kamijou contemplated.
He considered how much resolve it would take to vault across the rooftops of eight-story buildings. How a balcony on the seventh floor had fortunately interrupted her descent. What had she meant by her claim that she’d “collapsed”?
“I was being chased,” she said.
He considered the smile plastered on her face when she’d said that.
He didn’t know what kind of circumstances Index was caught up in, and he didn’t understand much of what she was saying. Even if she’d explained everything to him from start to finish, he probably wouldn’t have understood half of it. He also probably wouldn’t have wanted to bother understanding half of it.
But one thing was true.
She’d been dangling on his balcony on the seventh floor. If she’d taken one wrong step, she could have slammed into the pavement instead. The deadly reality of that fact struck Kamijou so vividly that he felt his chest tighten.
“Food.”
Index suddenly poked her face out from behind him. She can speak Japanese, but…she doesn’t know how to use chopsticks? She was clutching the utensils in her fist like a spoon, her gaze fixed excitedly on the contents of the skillet.
A comparison of her expression to that of a kitten just lifted out of a cardboard box in the rain wouldn’t have been far from the mark.
“………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Uhh.”
Something like a (toxic) vegetable stir-fry comprised of compost simmered in the frying pan.
Hmm. Looking at the hungry girl before his eyes, he could feel Angel Kamijou (normally paired with Devil Kamijou) writhing in agony inside him.
“Uhh, ahh! B-but, you know, if you’re that hungry, rather than this gross bachelor chow I threw together, we should do it right and go to a restaurant or order takeout or something!”
“I can’t wait that long, okay?”
“…Uhh, ugh!”
“And besides, it doesn’t look gross at all. You cooked it for me without expecting anything in return. It can’t possibly be bad, okay?”
This time she smiled even more widely and more brightly, in a manner befitting an actual nun.
Kamijou’s stomach felt like it was being wrung out like a mop. Index ignored him, taking the chopsticks in her fist and scooping the contents of the pan into her mouth.
Munch munch.
“See? It’s not bad at all.”
Chew chew.
“…Ah, is that so.”
“I can taste that you gave it a bit of a sour tang to help revitalize me. Well done.”
“Egck! Sour?!”
Gobble gobble.
“Yeah. But I’m fine with sour. Thanks. You know, you’re kind of like a big brother.”
She grinned. She’d been eating so ravenously that she had a bean sprout stuck to her cheek.
“…Uhh…Whooooooaaaaaahhh!”
Vwapp!! He snatched the frying pan out of her hands at supersonic speed, and Index’s expression became the very picture of disappointment. Kamijou made himself a vow. I will be the only one to go to hell for this.
“Were you hungry, too?”
“…Huh?”
“If you’re not, then I think you shouldn’t play games and just let me eat it.”
Index chomped at the tips of her chopsticks and watched him with upturned eyes. Kamijou had a revelation.
God spoke to him: “You must take responsibility and eat this.”
His rotten luck hadn’t been the problem this time. He’d brought this entirely on himself.
3
Touma Kamijou smiled, his mouth filled with stir-fried garbage.
The girl munched on a biscuit, looking dissatisfied. Holding the biscuit two-handed and gnawing away, she reminded him of a squirrel.
“…So, you said you’re being chased. Who’s after you?”
Having returned to his senses in the wake of his holy visitation, Kamijou put this question forward as the primary matter at hand.
He’d only met her thirty minutes ago and certainly had no intention of diving to the depths of hell with her. But it probably wasn’t possible to forget the whole thing.
So, in the end, I’m just a hypocrite. A fraud. I just want to say I did something to ease my conscience, but there’s no way I can help resolve this.
“Yeah…,” she responded somewhat drily. “I wonder? Maybe Rozenkreuz or Stella Matitina…I think it’s an organization like that, but I don’t know its name, since they’re not the kind of people who place much value in names.”
“‘They’?”
Kamijou treaded carefully. This meant some kind of group was chasing her.
“Yeah,” Index answered calmly, despite her situation.
“A sorcerers’ society.”
………………
“I see. Magic, huh…? Umm. What the hell?! You’re insane!”
“Ah, er, what? Umm, was that not the correct term in Japanese? Sorcery, like, magic. A magic cabal.”
“…” The word cabal confused him even more. “What? Is that some sort of hip new cult that forces you to believe in its founder, or else ‘thou shalt be divinely punished’? And uses LSD to brainwash you? That would be dangerous in more ways than one…”
“…You’re kind of making fun of me, aren’t you?”
“Uhh.”
“…You’re kind of making fun of me, aren’t you?”
“…I’m sorry. I can’t. I can’t do this whole ‘magic’ business. I know about all sorts of abnormal abilities, like pyrokinesis and clairvoyance, but I can’t handle this ‘magic’ thing.”
“…?” Index tilted her little head confusedly.
She probably assumed that someone who believed in the omnipotent power of science would have just rejected what she said outright, claiming that there was nothing unexplainable in this world.
However, a supernatural power resided in Kamijou’s right hand.
It was called the Imagine Breaker, and no matter what nonsensical, preternatural force he was up against, his Imagine Breaker could dispel it. It could even negate miracles.
“Supernatural abilities aren’t uncommon here in Academy City. Anyone can open ‘circuits’ and ‘develop’ by injecting Esperin into your brain, sticking electrodes on your head, and playing some rhythms in headphones. If every facet of something can be explained scientifically, then obviously everyone will accept it as fact, right?”
“…I don’t really get it.”
“It’s obvious! Very obvious, so obvious! Obvious times three!”
“…Well then, what about magic? Magic is obvious, too, right?”
Index grew petulant, as if someone had just told her that her pet cat was stupid.
“Umm…okay, for example, you know janken, right? Wait, was that game played in the rest of the world?”
“…I think it’s called rock-paper-scissors where I come from, but I know it.”
“Okay, then say I played janken and lost ten times in a row. Would you think there’s a reason for it?”
“…Mgh.”
“There isn’t, though, is there? But it’s human nature to start thinking that there is something behind it,” explained Kamijou, bored. “You start thinking that there’s no way you could lose ten times in a row and that there must be some kind of hidden rules working against you. What do you think would happen to those people if you threw some astrology into the mix?”
“…Like, if you’re a Cancer, then you’re unlucky, so you should stay away from competition?”
“Exactly. Around here, that’s what ‘occult’ really means. The moment we start thinking that hidden forces like ‘luck’ or ‘fortune’ really exist, our minds mistake simple coincidences for predetermination. It’s illusory.”
Index displayed a momentary, almost feline annoyance before saying:
“…So you’re not just rejecting what I said without thinking about it first.”
“Nope. I can’t do this whole worn-out fairy-tale thing specifically because I’ve thought about it seriously. I don’t believe in wizards like the ones from picture books. Nobody would develop their brains if you could just use some MP and raise someone from the dead. Even I couldn’t believe in any of that occult stuff. It has nothing to do with reality or science.”
Supernatural abilities only appear to be “mysterious” because human brains are stupid.
It was common sense that they could be explained away by science here.
“…But magic is real.”
Index made her declaration, the corners of her mouth lowering in dismay. This statement was likely the pillar of her convictions, not unlike Kamijou’s Imagine Breaker.
“Well, whatever. But why are those people chasing y—”
“Magic is real.”
“…”
“Magic is real!”
Looks like she wants me to admit it no matter what.
“B-but what the heck is magic? Can you shoot fireballs from your hands? Can you do it without going through an esper’s Curriculum? If you can, then why don’t you show me? Then I might be able to believe you.”
“I don’t have any magic power, so I can’t use it.”
“…”
It’s like she’s one of those useless espers who claim they can’t bend spoons when cameras are rolling because it distracts them.
But it was true that his feelings on the matter were complicated.
Even though he’d said that the occult was implausible and that magic couldn’t exist, the fact was that he knew almost nothing about the Imagine Breaker in his right hand. How did it work? What kind of principles did it operate under? Not even Academy City’s System Scan, the world’s most cutting-edge program of supernatural ability development, could see through his Imagine Breaker. That’s why he carried the stigma of an Impotent, a Level Zero.
It was a power he had possessed since birth, not one he’d obtained through a scientific Curriculum.
He claimed that mysticism was unrealistic, but he himself wielded something of the “occult” that defied the rules of reality.
Still, he couldn’t just tell himself something nonsensical like, “Well, there are plenty of mysterious things in the world, so it wouldn’t be weird if magic did exist!”
“…Magic is real.”
Kamijou sighed.
“Okay. If magic does exist…”
“If?”
“If it exists,” Kamijou continued, ignoring her, “why are people chasing you around? Does it have something to do with those clothes or something?”
He was referring, of course, to her overly extravagant habit, sewn of white silk and gold embroidery. He meant to inquire if it was somehow “religiously motivated.”
“…Because I’m Index, the archive of forbidden books.”
“Huh?”
“I carry 103,000 grimoires. Those people probably want them.”
………………………………………………………………………………………………
“This conversation just stopped making sense again.”
“Hey, how come whenever I explain something, all of your verve just vanishes? Do you have a short attention span?”
“Umm, I’m trying to organize my thoughts, but I don’t really understand what a grimoire is. It’s a book, right? Like a dictionary?”
“Yep. The Book of Eibon, the Lesser Key of Solomon, Nameless, Cultes des Goules, the Book of the Dead…Those are some famous ones. The Necronomicon is really famous too, so there’s a lot of forgeries and imitations of it, I think.”
“Okay, what’s in the book doesn’t matter.”
Swallowing his urge to just call them chicken scratch, he asked:
“So, these 103,000 books…where are they?”
He would absolutely not budge on this one. A hundred thousand books were enough to take up an entire library.
“Does this mean you have a key to a warehouse somewhere or something?”
“No.” Index shook her head back and forth. “I have all 103,000 right here with me, and not one less, okay?”
Huh? He frowned. “Can stupid people just not see them or something?”
“Even if you weren’t stupid, you wouldn’t be able to see them. What would be the point if you could just look at them whenever you wanted?”
Index’s words hung in the air between them. Kamijou started to get the feeling she was teasing him. He took a look around, but there wasn’t a single moldy grimoire or anything—just his gaming magazines and manga, and his crumpled summer homework sitting in the corner of the room.
“…Ack!” He’d been listening patiently until now. But he just couldn’t take any more, and his words caught in his throat.
This whole “being chased by someone” might be a delusion, he thought. But if that is the case, then she was hopping between eight-story buildings for no good reason. And then she messed up and ended up splayed over my balcony…I wouldn’t be able to keep up with someone like her.
“…It’s really weird that you believe in supernatural abilities but not magic.” Index scowled again, irked. “Are supernatural abilities really that amazing? Having some kind of special power doesn’t make it okay to treat people like dirt, you know.”
…
“Well, you got me there.” He sighed to himself. “That’s right. You’re right. It’s wrong to think that having a funny trick gives you the right to lord yourself over other people.”
His gaze fell to his right hand.
It could produce neither flame nor electricity. It couldn’t shine, or make loud noises, or evoke strange patterns on his wrist.
However, his right hand could nullify any and all abnormal powers—regardless of whether the power in question was good or evil, and even if it was a divine miracle like from the legends.
“For the people who live here, having an ability is part of their personality; it’s their moral support. So it’d be nice if you could just overlook that part. In the end, I guess I’m one of those people, too.”
“That’s right, stupid. Hmph. Even if you didn’t mess with the inside of your head, you could just bend spoons with your hands.”
“…”
“Hmph. What’s so great about some artificial man who abandoned the natural world? Hmph.”
“Would you mind if I taped that mouth of yours shut and your pride along with it?”
“I-I will not bow to intimidation!” Index glowered at him like an irritated cat. “B-besides, you keep saying supernatural powers, but what exactly can you do, mister?”
“…Err, well, I can…”
He hesitated for a moment.
Opportunities to explain his Imagine Breaker didn’t come along very often. And the fact that it only reacted to “abnormal powers” necessitated an understanding of “abnormal” and “supernatural” powers first.
“Well, you see, my right hand…Oh, by the way, I didn’t get this through drugs; I’m a natural from birth.”
“Uh-huh.”
“If something touches my hand…If it’s an abnormal power, even if it’s like a nuclear blast, or a tactical Railgun, or even a miracle, it gets canceled out.”
“Huh?”
“…Wait, what’s with that reaction? You look like someone showed you a rock that got passed off as a good luck charm on TV.”
“Well, I mean, I was just told that someone could dispel miracles even though that someone doesn’t even know God’s name.”
Surprisingly, Index smirked at him and stuck her pinkie finger in her ear.
“…Ugh. H-how annoying. I can’t believe how annoying it is to be mocked by some fake magical girl who claims magic is real but can’t even show me any.”
He’d been muttering to himself, but his grumbling instantly set her off:
“I-I’m not a fake! Magic really does exist!”
“Then show me something, you Halloween reject! I’ll jam my right hand into it, and then you’ll believe my Imagine Breaker is real! How’s that, Fantasia?”
“Fine, I’ll show you!” Index raised her hands, smoke seemingly about to pour from her ears, and cried, “This! My outfit! This is the strongest holy shield you could get, the Walking Church!” Index emphasized her teacup-like habit with outstretched arms.
“What the hell is a Walking Church?! You’re making no sense! Quit throwing around gibberish like holy shield and index of forbidden books, you inconsiderate jerk! Do you even know what the word explain means? You’re supposed to break it down for people who don’t get it. Don’t you even understand that?!”
“Wha—?! Says the person who isn’t even trying to understand!” Index waved her arms furiously. “I’ll show you some proof! Go get a knife out of the kitchen and try stabbing me in the stomach!”
“All right, why don’t I?!…Wait, you’re trying to entrap me, aren’t you?!”
“Oh, so you don’t believe me!” Index’s shoulders were bobbing up and down in time with her ragged breathing. “This is a church in the form of clothing, with all the essential elements of a church crammed inside. The weaving of the fabric, the stitching, the decorative embroidery…All of it was calculated! A simple knife won’t hurt me a bit, okay?”
“It won’t hurt you…Hey, on what planet would some idiot just say, ‘Sure, I’ll stab you’? That would be a remarkably new twist on juvenile delinquency.”
“I’ve had enough of you making fun of me…This fabric is a perfect copy of the Shroud of Turin, worn by the saint who was pierced by the Lance of Longinus, so its strength is Papal class, okay? In your words…yeah, I guess it would be like a fallout shelter. It can repel any attack, physical or magical, and parry or completely absorb it…Before, I said I was shot in the back, fell, and got caught on your balcony, right? If I hadn’t been wearing the Walking Church, I’d have a bullet hole in me. Don’t you even understand that?”
Shut up, moron.
Kamijou, his affection gauge toward Index quickly decreasing, regarded her through narrowed eyes.
“…Huh. So, in other words, if your little skirt really is some kind of abnormal power, then it should get blown to smithereens if I just touch it with my right hand, right?”
“If your power is actually real! Ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Fine, then! Kamijou reached forward and grabbed Index’s shoulder firmly.
It actually felt as if he were grabbing a cloud. The texture was weird, like a soft sponge was absorbing the pressure.
“Wait…huh?”
Now that he’d calmed down a bit, he played through the scenario.
If hypothetically…if what Index was saying was all true—though he still thought it was impossible—then what would happen if her Walking Church had actually been constructed employing some preternatural means?
If his hand erased all aberrant forces, wouldn’t her clothes be destroyed?
“Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa—” Kamijou shrieked automatically in anticipation of the completely unintentional and M-rated situation into which he’d been maneuvered.
…
…
…?
“—aaaaaaat, wait…huh?”
Nothing was happening. Nothing at all.
What the hell, man? Don’t scare me like that! he thought, though in fact he did feel on some level slightly disappointed.
“See, look! Imagine Breaker? That’s nothing! See, nothing happened, did it?”
She beamed at him triumphantly, placed her hands on her hips, and puffed out her chest.
The next instant, like an unbound ribbon on a gift box, all of Index’s clothes fell off.
The threads woven into her habit severed cleanly, and the outfit collapsed into a simple piece of fabric.
One piece, however, remained. The hood resting atop her head seemed to be isolated from the rest of the ensemble. It stayed where it was, looking awfully lonely.
Still grinning with pride, her hands on her hips and her chest puffed out, Index froze.
To put it simply, she was stark-naked.
4
This girl named Index apparently had a habit of biting people when she got angry.
“Ow…you bit me all over the place. What are you, the mosquito at summer camp?”
“…”
No answer.
Index, naked as the day she was born with only a blanket to hide her shame, sat on the floor on her knees. She was busily sticking safety pins into the fabric of her habit in a (futile) effort to somehow return her clothes to a wearable state.
An aura of doom dominated the room.
It’s not like somebody from the JoJo manga had shown up and used his Stand.
“…Uh, princess?”
Kamijou tried again to rouse her, wondering as to the nature of her actual personality.
“…What?”
“I was one hundred percent at fault here, right?”
His alarm clock flew at him in reply, eliciting a yelp. His pillow followed directly after, and then a steady stream of his game systems and cassettes. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“You’re just going to casually chat with me after that?!”
“Ah no, I’m not! I was bewildered, too, and, uhh, how youthful of us!”
“Stop making fun of me…Grrrrrr!!”
“I underst— Okay, okay, I apologize! That video is a rental, so stop biting it like it’s some kind of handkerchief, stupid!”
He comedically put his head down on the ground.
Deep down, though, seeing a naked girl for the first time made his heart feel like it would be squeezed to death.
Touma Kamijou, however, didn’t let it show on his face because he was an adult.
…That’s what he thought, anyway, but if Touma Kamijou had looked in a mirror, he’d have been pretty surprised at what he saw.
“I’m done,” Index muttered with a sniffle. She spread out her pure white habit. She had returned it to some semblance of normalcy through her sweatshop effort.
Dozens of safety pins gleamed brightly on the salvaged habit.
“………………………………………………………………………………………*sweat*”
“Umm, are you going to wear it?”
“………………………………………………………………………………………*silent*”
“Are you going to wear that iron maiden?”
“………………………………………………………………………………………*sob*”
“In Japanese, we call that a ‘bed of needles.’”
“…Urgh, grrr!!”
“I get it!” He buried his head in the floor and apologized unreservedly. Index’s expression was that of a bullied child, and she was currently gnawing through his television’s power cable like a naughty cat.
“I’ll wear it! I’m a nun, after all!” With a cry that he didn’t really understand, she curled herself up underneath the blanket and started squirming around like a caterpillar to put it on. The only thing visible outside the blanket was her face, which was so red it looked as if it might explode.
“…Huh. Somehow, this reminds me of my swimming lessons.”
“…Why are you watching? I think you should at least turn away.”
“Oh, whatever. It’s no big deal. Unlike before, you changing isn’t sexy at all.”
“…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………”
Index’s motions ground to a halt, but when Kamijou didn’t appear to notice, she gave up and squirmed around some more, dressing herself. Her hood toppled to the floor, but she didn’t notice; maybe she was concentrating too hard.
It was kind of like being in an elevator, what with the awkward silence.
Kamijou’s mind had been steadily drifting away from reality, but the words summer makeup classes finally came crashing back to the forefront of his brain.
“Ack! That’s right, I have makeup classes!” He looked at the time on his cell phone. “Let’s see, umm…Hey, I have to go to school now. What are you going to do? If you’re staying here, I can give you the key.”
The “kick her out” option had already been abandoned.
Since her habit, the Walking Church, had reacted to his Imagine Breaker, there was no doubt that she was somehow involved with abnormal forces. That would mean that not everything she said was a lie.
For example—that she had been pursued by sorcerers and had fallen from the roof of a building.
For example—that she was going to continue her life-or-death game of tag after this.
And, for example—that sorcerers straight out of fantasy novels were running around a city where they’d formulated even ESP and PSY.
…Despite all that, though, he still felt like he should give the depressed Index some space.
“…That’s okay. I’m leaving.”
She leaped to her feet, still ensconced in the doom aura. She passed by Kamijou’s side like a ghost. She didn’t seem to notice that her hood was still on the floor. If he picked it up carelessly, he’d probably break that, too.
“Ah, uhh…”
“Hm? Oh no, you don’t get it.” Index turned back to look at him. “If I’m here too long, they’ll probably come this way. You don’t want to be blown up with the rest of your room, do you?”
She posed the question unflinchingly, leaving Kamijou at a loss for words.
She sluggishly drifted out through the door that was the entrance to his studio. Kamijou chased after her in a panic. He checked his wallet, thinking maybe he could do something. He only had 320 yen left. In spite of that, he energetically burst through the door in an effort to keep Index there. Unfortunately, as he walked out, his pinkie finger slammed at Mach speed into the doorframe.
“Gah, mah! Yaaahh!”
He squealed unintelligibly, bracing his finger against his leg. Index turned back, startled. As he writhed at the intense pain, his cell phone slid out of his pocket. Ah. Before he could stop it, it hit the floor, its liquid-crystal display made a criiiick noise, and he knew it had suffered a mortal wound.
“Ugh, no…! What rotten luck!”
“It’s not rotten luck. I think you’re just clumsy.” Index giggled. “But if you really do have this Imagine Breaker, then I guess you can’t do much about it.”
“…What do you mean?”
“Right. Well, you might not believe any stories of the magical world I come from, but…” She smiled at him. “You know things like divine protection or the red thread of fate? If things like that do really exist, then I think your right hand is canceling them out, too.”
Index swayed her safety pin–covered habit from side to side and said, “The power in this Walking Church is that of providence—divine favor—after all.”
“Hang on. Fortune and misfortune just refer to probabilities and statistics. That can’t be righ—”
At that exact moment, his finger touched the doorknob and was beset by a brilliant static shock. What?! His reflexes kicked in, his body flinched, and his right calf cramped in a sudden muscle spasm.
He cried out in silent agony for approximately six hundred seconds.
“……………………………………………………………………………………………Excuse me, Miss Nun?”
“What is it?”
“……………………………………………………………………………………………I’d like an explanation.”
“Well, it’s not much of an explanation,” declared Index in a matter-of-fact tone, “but if the story about your right hand is true, then I think just by having it, you’re erasing the power of luck altogether?”
“……………………………………………………………………………………………I see…so you mean…”
“So the very fact that your right hand is touching the air is making you totally unlucky. ”
“Gyaaahhh!! What rotten luck!!”
Kamijou didn’t actually believe in the occult, but he had a separate stomach when it came to the concept of bad luck. In any case, nothing ever went right for him, fostering a deep impression that the universe bore him a particular ill will.
A lone nun clad in pure white gazed upon him with the benign smile of the Holy Mother herself.
People would say that those were inviting.
“Rotten luck, huh. The fact that you were born with that power in the first place was pretty rotten luck in and of itself, wouldn’t you agree? ”
Kamijou had started crying at the warmth of her smile without realizing it, but then it finally occurred to him just how far they’d actually strayed from the conversation he’d intended.
“N-no, wait! Where on earth do you plan on going? I don’t know what’s going on, but if there are sorcerers prowling around nearby, then shouldn’t you just hide in my room?”
“No, because if I’m here, then the enemy will come here, too.”
“How can you know that for sure? If you don’t go around drawing attention to yourself and just stay put in my room, then there’s no problem, right?”
“But there is, okay?” Index pinched her clothes. “My Walking Church uses magical power. Well, the Church wants me to call it divine power, but it’s all the same mana anyway. Anyway, to put it simply, enemies seem to be tracking magical power.”
“Then why the hell are you wearing that transmitter?!”
“Because it has absolute defensive capabilities, okay? Though your right hand did smash it to pieces…”
“…”
“To pieces…”
“I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry, so stop looking at me with tears in your eyes like that! But if my Imagine Breaker broke it, doesn’t that mean it isn’t transmitting anymore?”
“Even if it didn’t, they still would have detected its destruction. Like I said before, the Walking Church’s defensive capability is Papal class. It’s basically like a fortress. If I were the enemy and I got word that a fortress had been broken, I’d head straight for it in an instant.”
“Wait a second. Then that’s all the more reason I can’t leave you. I still don’t believe in the occult, but…how can I leave you when I know someone’s after you?”
She gave him a blank, stupefied look.
He really, really could only see the face of a normal girl when he saw that expression.
“…All right, then are you willing to follow me into the depths of hell?”
She smiled sweetly.
That smile was so ripe with pain, it robbed Kamijou of his words.
Index was telling him gently…
…to stay away.
“I’ll be okay; I’m not alone. If I can flee to the Church, they’ll give me shelter.”
“…Hmm. And where is this Church?”
“London.”
“That’s really far! Just how far do you plan on running?!”
“Huh? Oh, it’s all right. I think there is a handful of dioceses in this country.”
Seeing Index standing there with her safety pin–speckled habit fluttering in the breeze gave the impression of a battered woman fleeing an abusive husband.
“A church, huh…I think there might be one here in the city.”
The word church evoked images of the setting for a giant wedding ceremony, but Japan’s churches were, frankly, dull. The culture of the cross had never been particularly thick here, and given that it was a nation prone to earthquakes, there weren’t a lot of buildings still standing with long histories. The church Kamijou had seen from the window of a train was just a prefabricated house with a cross on top…Though, on the other hand, an ostentatious church seemed wrong, too.
“Hmm. It can’t be any old church, though, since I belong to the Church of England.”
“???”
“Umm, well, Crossism is one thing, but there are a lot of different kinds.” Index smiled wryly. “First, you have Catholicism, the old way, and Protestantism, the new way. And even the old way, which I’m a part of, is split up into Roman Orthodoxism, centered on the Vatican; Russian Catholic, based in Russia; and English Puritanism, with its headquarters at St. George’s Cathedral. There’s more like that, too.”
“…If you went to the wrong church by mistake, what would happen?”
“I’d be turned away,” said Index, still wearing a cynical smile. “Russian Catholic and English Puritanism only really exist in their respective countries, after all. English Puritan churches in Japan are rare.”
“…” The direction of the conversation was not looking good.
Maybe Index had visited a ton of churches before collapsing out of hunger. If she was turned away at the entrance every time and kept on running, how would that have made her feel?
“It’s all right. It’ll only be like this until I find a Church of England–style church.”
“…”
Kamijou thought for a moment about the power in his right hand, then called after her, “Hey!…If you’re ever in trouble, you can feel free to visit again.”
That was all he could say.
Despite being the man who could kill even God.
“Okay. If I get hungry, I’ll come over again.”
Her smile was like a sunflower, and so perfect that Kamijou couldn’t say another word.
A cleaning robot passed by Index, diverting from its path to avoid her.
“Huh?!”
Her perfect smile was wiped off her face in an instant. She twitched, then fell over backward, as if her leg had suddenly cramped. With a painful-sounding slam, the back of her head collided with the wall.
“~~~! Wh-what is this weird thing?!” Index screamed, forgetting about her head.
“Look at the pot calling the kettle black. That’s just a cleaning robot.”
Kamijou sighed.
Its size and shape were similar to an oil drum. It had small wheels affixed to the bottom, and it spun a circular mop, which looked like an industrial vacuum cleaner, around and around. It also had cameras affixed so it could avoid people and obstacles, but this made it the mortal enemy of miniskirt-wearing girls everywhere.
“…Oh. I heard Japan had unrivaled technology, but you really are living in the age of mechanized Agathions.”
“Uhh, hello?” The weirdly impressed Index scared Kamijou. “This is Academy City. We’ve got stuff like this all over the place.”
“Academy City?”
“Yeah. Basically, the western districts of Tokyo were developing more slowly than the rest of it, so someone bought up all this land and built this city. We’ve got dozens of universities and hundreds of primary schools, all crowded together. It’s a city of schools.” Kamijou sighed. “An eighth of the city’s residents are students, and the buildings that look like apartments are all student dorms.”
Though, on its underside, the city necessitated Ability Development for its students.
“That’s why the city seems so strange. The automated garbage collection, the wind-powered generators, and that cleaning robot were all originally college lab experiments, and they’re all over the city. Our tech level has advanced about twenty years ahead of the rest of the world.”
“I see.” Index stared intently at the cleaning robot. “So does that mean that all the buildings in this city are affiliated with this Academy City itself?”
“Yeah…I mean, if you’re looking for something affiliated with the Church of England, it might be a better idea to leave the city. The churches around here are all probably just places you go to learn about theology and Jungian psychology.”
“I see.” Index nodded, finally remembering that her head was in extreme pain and cradling it in her hands. “Ow?! Ah, wait? Where did my wimple and veil go?!”
“What, you just realized now? You dropped it earlier.”
“Huh?”
What Kamijou meant was, You dropped it when you were changing inside the blanket. What Index thought he meant, though, was, You dropped it when you fell over when the cleaning robot surprised you. She searched around the floor of the hallway for a few moments, looking confused.
“Ah, I get it! That electric Agathion!”
Having entirely misunderstood him, she dashed off to chase the cleaning robot that had already disappeared around the corner.
“…Hah. She’s off.”
He looked back at the door. Index’s hood was still in there. He looked back down the hallway again, but the girl was no longer in sight. Their parting certainly hadn’t been the teary sort.
She seems like the kind of person who’d survive the apocalypse, he thought for some reason.
5
“Okay! Teacher printed some things, so she’s going to pass them out first. We’ll be using these for this makeup class, okay?”
Kamijou had been in this class for a semester already, but he still thought it was preposterous.
When Komoe Tsukuyomi, the homeroom teacher of Class 1-7, stood behind the podium, all you could see was her head. At 135 centimeters tall, she was famous for being unable to pass roller-coaster safety requirements. No matter how you looked at her, she was a twelve-year-old girl, on whom you’d expect to see a yellow safety hat, a bright red backpack, and a standard-issue soprano recorder. The young female teacher was considered to be one of the school’s seven mysteries.
“If you want to talk, then Teacher won’t stop you, but you really should listen to what she has to say! Teacher worked hard to make these quizzes, so if you do badly, you’ll have to play the see-through game as punishment!”
“Wait, Miss Komoe, are you saying we have to play poker with our eyes closed? That’s for the Clairvoyance Curriculum! I, Touma Kamijou, am very worried that we’ll end up staying here all night trying to win ten times straight when we can’t even see our own hand!”
“Yes, well, Kami doesn’t have enough Development credits, so he’s going to have to play the see-through game no matter what, right?”
Ack! Kamijou choked. Her smile was all business.
“…Hmg. It seems Komoe thinks Kami is cute as hell.”
This was from a blue-haired class representative (a male one) with an earring sitting next to him. Kamijou didn’t understand.
“She may look like she’s having a good time trying to reach up the blackboard like that, but can’t you feel the pure evil flowing from her?”
“…What? If I got a bad grade and she started insultin’ me, I wouldn’t mind a bit. Hey, your EXP is quite high, having verbal play with a little kid like that!”
“…So you don’t just have a Lolita complex—you’re a masochist, too?”
“Aha-ha! I don’t only like little girls, I also like little girls!”
Are you an omnivore?! Kamijou almost shouted.
“Hey, over there! If you say another word, you’re doing Columbus’s egg, okay?”
“Columbus’s egg” meant just what it sounded like. He would have to balance an egg upside down on his desk without any support. Even students specializing in psychokinesis had to exert their brains to the brink of exploding to make the egg stay still, since if they used too much psychokinetic power, the egg would break. Difficulty: lunatic. If you didn’t succeed, you would end up in detention until morning.
Kamijou and Blue Hair had the wind taken out of them and returned their attention to Komoe Tsukuyomi behind the podium.
“Is that okay?”
The smile on her face was absolutely terrifying.
Even though Miss Komoe liked being called “cute,” she despised being called “little.”
However, she didn’t seem to care much about being looked down upon by the students. It was kind of inevitable in this Academy City. With 80 percent of the entire population being students, it was a veritable neverland. Even compared to normal schools, these “salaryman teachers” were treated harshly. Moreover, a student’s strength was based as much on his or her powers as academic ability.
A teacher was someone who “develops” students, and the teachers themselves lacked these talents. The gym teacher and guidance counselor here could blow away even Level Three monster-students with a single fully trained fist. Sort of like a member of the “elite squadron of foreigners,” but it would be cruel to expect something like that from Miss Komoe, the chemistry teacher.
“…Yo, Kami.”
“What do you want?”
“Did ya get turned on when Miss Komoe told ya off, bro?”
“That was just you, moron! Just shut up, idiot! I haven’t awakened any psychokinetic ability, so I don’t have time to play with a lowbie. And quit it with that fake Kansai accent already!”
“…D-d-d-don’t call it fake! I’m really from Osaka, dude!”
“Shut up, you rice-farming country bumpkin. You’re ticking me off. Quit making dumb comments already!”
“W-we don’t farm rice! Ah, ah, aah! Takoyakis are so good!”
“Stop forcing it! Are you gonna eat rice with takoyaki for me? Just for your character?”
“What are you trying to say? Even people from Osaka don’t eat takoyaki exclusively all the time.”
“…”
“They don’t, do they? I don’t think they do…Er, wait. Maybe…No, no way…But…Huh? Which is it?”
“Your armor is cracking apart, you Kansai wannabe.”
Kamijou sighed and looked out the window.
This makeup class is pointless. I should have stayed with Index.
The habit she’d been wearing, the Walking Church, certainly had reacted to his right hand (although reacted might have been putting it too mildly), but it still didn’t make him believe in magic per se. Ten to one, she’d been lying about most of it, and even if she hadn’t been lying deliberately, she might have just been confusing the occult for simple, natural phenomena.
But still.
…I let a big one get away, huh?
He let out another sigh. He was just going to be chained to his desk in this classroom, boiling hot for lack of an air conditioner. He should have given that “swords and magic” fantasy a shot instead. It even had a cute heroine thrown in for good measure. (He hesitated to call her pretty.)
“…”
He remembered the hood that Index had left in his room.
In the end, he hadn’t returned it. He knew that it wasn’t because he couldn’t return it. Even if he’d lost sight of her, he probably would have been able to find her pretty quickly if he’d tried. And even if he hadn’t found her by now, he’d currently be running around the city with her hood in one hand.
When he thought back on it, he felt that maybe he wanted to keep some sort of a connection. That maybe she would one day return to retrieve what she had forgotten.
The girl in white who’d graced him with a perfect smile…
He needed to leave a connection behind.
He was scared of his memory of her disappearing like an illusion.
What the hell?
After mulling it over rather poetically, Kamijou finally figured it out.
He realized that he didn’t dislike the girl who’d fallen onto his balcony. He at least liked her enough to regret not having to deal with her again.
“…Ah, damn.”
Tsk. Had he known he’d feel this way, he’d have tried to stop her.
Now that I think of it, I wonder what she meant when she said she carried 103,000 grimoires.
Kamijou had been told that the people after Index, the magic cabal or whatever (does cabal mean it’s a corporation?), were chasing her because they wanted the 103,000 grimoires she possessed and was continuing to run away to protect.
And what she carried wasn’t a key to a huge warehouse packed with books or a treasure map or anything.
When Kamijou’d asked where they all were, Index had said, Right here. But as far as he could tell, there wasn’t a single book on her. Besides, his room wasn’t big enough to hold 103,000 books in the first place.
I wonder what that was about?
He considered the situation, tilting his head slightly. Her habit, the Walking Church, had reacted to his Imagine Breaker, so not everything she’d said was a complete delusion, but…
“Hey, Teach? Mr. Kamijou’s ogling the girls’ tennis team outside and isn’t paying attention to your lecture,” declared Blue Hair in his forced Kansai accent. Kamijou grunted out a “Huh?” and his train of thought made a U-turn back to the classroom.
“…”
Miss Komoe was silent.
She looked like she was in serious shock to discover that Touma Kamijou wasn’t entirely focused on her class. Her expression was akin to that of a twelve-year-old in winter discovering Santa’s true identity.
Immediately, the class, defending a little girl’s innocence, directed hostility-laden, piercing stares at Kamijou.
Despite the fact that these were only summer makeup classes, Kamijou ended up getting detained until the hour school normally would’ve dismissed.
“…What rotten luck.”
The ill-fortunes boy muttered to himself, staring up at the three-bladed wind turbines glistening in the evening sunlight. Goofing off at night was strictly forbidden, so the buses and trains in Academy City generally aligned their final runs with the end of the school day.
Having missed the last bus, he walked through the glaringly hot streets of the shopping district. A police robot passed by him. It, too, looked like an oil drum with wheels attached; it was essentially a moving security camera. They had originally been upgraded versions of canine companion robots, but since apparently they were drawing too much attention from children to do their jobs effectively, every worker robot in the city was altered to the same basic oil-drum design.
“Oh, there you are. Hey, yo, you! Hang on a min— Hey! You, I’m talking to you! Stop already!”
As Kamijou, fried from the summer heat, gazed at the slow-moving police robot, he didn’t initially register that the voice was directed at him. He was busy thinking, I wonder where Index ended up after she finished chasing around that cleaning robot.
He finally turned. What does she want?
It was a girl who appeared to be in middle school. Her shoulder-length brown hair took on a reddish shine in the evening glow. Her face was painted an even brighter shade of red. She wore a gray pleated skirt, a short-sleeved blouse, and a summer sweater. At last, he placed the face.
“…Oh, it’s the biri biri middle schooler again,” said Kamijou, referring to the sound of the electrical crackling she emitted.
“Don’t call me Biri Biri! I have a name, you know: Mikoto Misaka! Remember it already! You’ve been calling me Biri Biri ever since we first met!”
Since we first met? Kamijou thought back.
Ah, that was right. She’d gotten involved with some delinquents the first time they’d crossed paths, too. At first, he’d just thought some kids were trying to steal her wallet, and he’d decided to help her out. (He’d figured that, in a best-case scenario, his intervention might have earned him a visit to the underwater dragon palace like Urashima Tarou had.) Instead, for some reason, the girl got angry and started shouting, “Get out of here! Quit poking your nose into other people’s fights!” Biri biri! At which point Kamijou, of course, had blocked her voltaic attack with his right hand, eliciting a confused “…Huh? Hey, how come that didn’t work? Then how about this! Whaaat?” The final result of this initial encounter was, of course, their present relationship.
“…Huh? What’s this? Mommy, I’m not sad, but tears are coming out.”
“Why the heck are you spacing out like that…?”
Still burned out from his makeup class, Kamijou decided to brush off Biri Biri.
“The girl glaring at poor, exhausted Kamijou is the Railgun girl from yesterday. She seems terribly disappointed at having lost a fight, and ever since, she’s been tracking him down day after day, trying to get back at him.”
“…Who the heck are you narrating to?”
“She’s stubborn and hates to lose, but deep down, she gets lonely easily and is a member of the animal club at her school.”
“Stop making up a weird backstory for me!!” shouted Mikoto Misaka, flinging her arms out to the side. Her motion drew the attention of nearby pedestrians. This was understandable; her featureless, bland summer uniform was actually that of Tokiwadai Middle School, one of the five most distinguished schools in Academy City. The elegant and refined young ladies from Tokiwadai could be easily spotted even in rush-hour crowds, so if one of them started acting like a brat, sitting on train floors or fiddling with her cell phone, anyone would have been shocked.
“So, what is it, Biri Biri? Wait, it’s July twentieth, summer vacation, right? Why are you wearing your uniform? You got makeup classes?”
“Erk…Sh-shut your mouth.”
“Did you come see the cute bunny at the animal shed at your school?”
“I told you to quit it with that strange animal backstory! Anyway, I’m gonna jolt you so hard today that you’ll twitch like a frog hooked up to a car battery, so get your last will and testament ready, you jerk!”
“I don’t wanna.”
“Why not?!”
“Because I’m not a member of the animal club.”
“Grr…Why you little…!!”
The middle schooler forcefully stomped down onto a road tile.
In an instant, all of the cell phones in the vicinity gave off an incredible, simultaneous crackle. The wired broadcasts in the mall disconnected with a bzzt, and the police robots running around cried out with a terrible fizzle.
Biri biri. Her hair chirped with static electricity.
The Level Five esper, with the power to generate a Railgun with her body, bared her teeth like a beast and grinned.
“Hmph. How about now? Did that flip a switch in your cowardly brain?…Mmph!”
Kamijou frantically covered her mouth with one hand, covering her entire face in the process. “Sh-shut up!” he whispered angrily. “Please, just close your mouth and be quiet! All the people whose cell phones you just fried are looking for someone to murder right now!! If you give us away, they’ll all want to be compensated for the damage! And I don’t even want to think about how much all that broadcast equipment costs!!”
He recalled the silver-haired nun for some reason and offered a fervent prayer to the God who he usually only remembered on Christmas.
As if his prayer had been answered, no one came their way.
Thank God, thought Kamijou, still delicately suffocating Mikoto. He sighed in relief.
“…Message. Message. Error number one-zero-zero-two-three-one-Y-F. Electromagnetic field in violation of the Radio Law detected. System abnormality confirmed. To protect yourself against cyberterrorism, please refrain from using any electronic devices.”
Imagine Breaker and Railgun turned around in a panic.
The oil-drum drone was rolling around the road, sputtering and venting smoke. It continued its unintelligible babble.
A moment later, the police robot issued a shrill alarm siren that was audible to everyone in the vicinity.
Of course, they ran.
They fled through alleys, overturning a grimy bucket as if shooing away black cats. Wait a minute. Why am I running? I didn’t do anything wrong, Kamijou thought as he ran.
Oh, that was right. He’d once heard on a variety show that a single police robot costs 1.2 million yen.
“Ugh…” He sobbed. “Wh-what rotten luck…Just because I’m even remotely associated with someone like this.”
“What do you mean ‘someone like this’?! I have a name, and it’s Mikoto Misaka!”
The two of them finally came to a stop in a back-back-back-back alley. It was a square lot, as if one of the buildings in the line had been demolished. It looked like a perfect place for street basketball.
“Shut up, Biri Biri! You were the one who called down the ridiculous lightning yesterday and killed all my electronics! You still got something to say?!”
“It’s your fault, because you’re annoying!”
“That doesn’t even make sense! Besides, I haven’t so much as touched you, you idiot!”
After that…Kamijou used his right hand to block every attack Mikoto threw at him. It wasn’t just her Railgun. She used a whip sword made of magnetized iron shavings, powerful electromagnetic waves intended to disrupt his internal organs, and she even brought down an actual lightning bolt from the heavens as her finishing move.
But none of them can withstand Touma Kamijou.
No matter what sort of aberrant anomaly she employed, he could completely eradicate it.
“You just wore yourself out from attacking me! You just exhausted yourself by using too much power! Don’t blame your lack of stamina on me, Biri Biri!”
Grrr. Mikoto groaned and clenched her teeth as hard as she could. “Don’t give me that! It’s impossible! I haven’t gotten hit at all, so doesn’t that make it a draw?!”
“…Okay, jeez, fine. You win, Biri Biri. Beating you up isn’t gonna fix my air conditioner, anyway.”
“Gah…! W-wait a second! Take this a little more seriously!!” she shouted back, arms flailing angrily. He sighed.
“So you’re saying you want me to get serious?”
Mikoto choked on her words.
Kamijou casually formed a fist with his right hand and repeated his question. The mere gesture made her break out in a heavy, unwelcome sweat. She froze, unable to retreat a step.
The reality was that she didn’t have a clue as to the true nature of his power. To her, he was an unknown threat who kept all his trump cards neatly tucked away behind his poker face.
It was only natural for her to get skittish. He’d deflected her every attack for more than two hours now and didn’t have a scratch on him. She had to consider: If he actually got serious here, what would happen to me?
But he simply sighed and turned away.
The invisible threads binding her body finally loosened. She wobbled one step, then another.
“…This is pretty rotten luck.” Kamijou was actually shocked that she’d been shocked. “The appliances in my dorm are all fried, this morning I had to deal with some fake sorcerer, and now this electro-esper…”
“A-a sorcerer? What’s that?”
“…” He thought for a moment. “…Hmm, what is it, indeed?”
Had Mikoto been her usual self, she would have shot back with: Are you insane, you moron? I knew your power was freaky, but is your brain freaky, too?! This right before laying into him with another lightning-bolt barrage. Today, though, she was nervous, as if anticipating something. His act had been a bluff to fool his opponent, of course, but it pained him a little to see how effective it really was.
But still, a sorcerer, huh.
Kamijou remembered a little. The word had casually come up several times when he was with the nun in white, but now that he was away from her, it sounded surreal.
He wondered why he hadn’t felt this way when Index was around.
Maybe she had something—something mystical, something that made him believe.
“…Wait, what the heck am I thinking?”
Kamijou mumbled, paying no attention to Biri Biri, or Mikoto Misaka, who at the moment bore a striking resemblance to a cowering puppy.
He’d already cut his ties with Index. In this big, wide world, coincidentally encountering someone a second time for no reason was next to impossible. There was no point in wondering about sorcerers.
But he still couldn’t forget about her.
She’d left the pure white hood she wore on her head in his room.
That one last connection clawed its way into a hole in his heart, irritating him.
He honestly didn’t understand why he felt this way.
Despite being the man who could kill even God.
6
These days, 320 yen couldn’t even buy a large serving of beef bowl.
“……………………………………………………………………………………………Medium…”
Girls that nibble at their tiny bento boxes wouldn’t understand, but for growing, sweaty boys, medium-size beef bowls were really just snacks.
After chasing away the spark-plug girl, Mikoto Misaka, he enjoyed his snack at the beef bowl place. With thirty yen (after tax) remaining in his wallet, he walked back to the student dormitory, now covered in shadow.
No one was around.
It was the first day of summer vacation, so everyone was probably out having tons of fun in the city.
At a glance, the building looked like any old studio apartment complex. There was a line of tightly packed doors on the straight path along the wall of the square building, guarded by a portcullis-like metal railing. Since this was a boys-only dormitory, there were no “miniskirt-peeping prevention” plastic sheets on them.
The student dorm buildings stretched away from the road. He could see the building entrances on the sides and the individual balconies lining the gaps between the buildings.
The entrances had automatic locks on them these days, but the distance between adjacent buildings was only two meters. It would be easy to infiltrate another building if you jumped across the roofs as Index had this morning.
He disengaged the lock, slipped past the closet that they called the administrative office, and got on the elevator. The elevator had a unique charm to it. It was even more cramped and dirtier than elevators used at construction sites, and the R button indicating the roof was blocked by a small metal plate in order to prevent roof-hopping Romeos.
The elevator made a microwave-like ding and stopped on the seventh floor.
The door opened with a groan. Kamijou helped push it aside, then exited onto the walkway. It was seven floors up, but it didn’t feel like a very tall building. It seemed needlessly hot and humid, maybe because of the oppressiveness of the building next door.
“Hm?”
It was then that Kamijou noticed. On the other end of the straight path, in front of the door to his own room, were three cleaning robots. Three was an unusual sight. There were only five cleaning robots assigned to this building in the first place. They were each moving back and forth with short, quick motions, so he thought there must be a pretty nasty mess there.
…For some reason, an extreme foreboding of misfortune settled over him.
Those oil-drum droids had enough destructive force to tear off pieces of gum stuck to the ground on main roads. Just what on earth needed three of them to tackle it? He shuddered—maybe it had been his next-door neighbor, Motoharu Tsuchimikado, in another one of his delinquent, drunken tirades aimed at losing his virginity, throwing up all over the floor there instead of on the electricity pole outside the door of his room.
“Just what on earth…?”
People have a rather peculiar compulsion to witness disaster.
Taking another step or two forward, he finally saw the source.
The mysterious girl, Index, had collapsed on the floor from hunger.
“……………………………………………………………………………………………Ah—”
He couldn’t see her whole body behind the robots, but the downward-facing white habit pockmarked with shiny safety pins made it clear she’d collapsed there.
She didn’t flinch, even though the three oil-drum robots were ramming her with a rhythmic clunk-clunk. The scene had an air of tragedy, as if city crows were pecking at her corpse. But cleaning robots were programmed to avoid humans and other obstacles. Not even robots treated her as if she was human? What was that all about?
“…How should I put it? It’s rotten luck.” Kamijou muttered something along those lines. Had he checked his expression in a mirror, though, he’d have been surprised. He was actually smiling.
Something inside him had been “stuck” on her. Even if he didn’t believe in sorcerers, the situation could have been construed as a suspicious new cult chasing around a lone girl.
The fact that she’d turned up again as if nothing had happened (?) made him happy.
Even setting all that aside, he was just glad they got to meet again for some reason.
Kamijou thought back to the one thing she had forgotten—the pure white hood he hadn’t returned to her. Strangely, he began to think of it as a good luck charm.
“Hey! What are you doing over there?” he called out, running toward her, wondering why he felt like a restless elementary schoolkid the night before a field trip. Each step he took reminded him of the anticipation he felt when going to a gaming store the day some massive studio’s new RPG was slated for release.
Index still took no notice of him.
Touma Kamijou stifled a smile at her very Index-like reaction (or lack thereof).
It was only then that he realized Index had collapsed in a pool of blood.
“…Uh…?”
Surprise wasn’t his immediate reaction. Rather, it was hesitation.
He hadn’t noticed sooner, given that the throng of cleaning robots obstructed her, but her back had been lacerated by a horizontal slash near her waist. The wound had the appearance of having been inflicted by a sword, as if a ruler and X-Acto knife had been employed to carve a straight line through a cardboard box. Her neatly cut silver hair was dyed crimson.
“Human blood” wasn’t his immediate association.
The gap in reality between this moment and the one immediately preceding rendered Kamijou dazed. Deep, deep red…ketchup? Right before she collapsed from hunger, she must have used the last of her strength to drink some ketchup. He summoned the happy imagery, trying to smile.
He tried to smile, but he couldn’t.
Of course not.
The three cleaning droids, squeaking back and forth in short movements, dabbed at the mess on the floor, attempting to use their mops to arrest the spread of the crimson pool. The slick red draining from Index’s body…It was as if they were using a dirty cloth to stanch the wound. It was as if they were vacuuming out her insides.
“S…stop, stop! Shit!!”
Finally, Kamijou’s eyes adjusted to the reality before them. He tried grabbing the janitorial droids gathered in a frenzy around the gravely wounded Index. They were constructed to be stupidly heavy in order to prevent theft, and they had quite a bit of horsepower, too, so peeling them off was no simple task.
Of course, the automatons were only cleaning the “mess” expanding across the floor, and they diligently avoided any direct contact with Index. But in Kamijou’s mind, these were termites come to feast around a festering wound.
Despite the adrenaline fueling him, Kamijou knew a single robot was too heavy and powerful for him to peel off, much less three of them. When he focused on one, the other two went for the “mess.”
He couldn’t even budge these stupid toys.
Despite being the man who could kill even God.
Index was silent.
Her motionless lips were purple from blood loss. Whether or not she was even breathing was questionable.
“Damn it, damn it!!” Kamijou shouted impotently. “What the hell? What the hell is this?! Who the hell did this to you, damn it?!”
“Hm? Oh, that would be us sorcerers.”
The voice behind him was not Index’s.
Kamijou turned his whole body toward the elevators as if he were about to take a swing at someone…but it wasn’t the elevator…The figure seemed to have emerged from the emergency stairwell.
The Caucasian man was almost two meters tall, but his face looked younger than Kamijou’s.
His age…was probably the same as Index’s, so fourteen or fifteen. His height was a trait of foreigners. His clothes…looked like something a priest might wear: jet-black vestments. However, there probably wasn’t a soul in the world who would call this guy “Father.”
Perhaps because he was standing upwind, Kamijou caught a whiff of some way-too-sweet perfume, even though the man was more than fifteen meters away. His shoulder-length blond hair was dyed red like a sunset, and silver rings lined up on each of his ten fingers like brass knuckles. Gaudy earrings hung from his ears; a cell phone strap peeked from his pocket; a lit cigarette lounged in the corner of his mouth; and, to top it all off, a tattoo resembling a bar code was engraved under his lower right eyelid.
Neither delinquent nor priest seemed to adequately describe this guy.
But the man standing in the walkway clearly emanated an abnormal aura.
Kamijou felt like the normal rules governing life no longer held sway, as if some entirely new set of physical laws had taken hold. He felt icy tentacles floating in the air around him.
Neither terror nor anger took hold as his immediate reaction.
It was once again hesitation. Hesitation and unease. It felt as if his wallet had been stolen in a foreign country where he didn’t speak the language. It was that kind of hopeless isolation. The icy tentacles probing the air took hold of his heart. It was then that he understood.
This was a sorcerer.
This world was now an abnormal environment—a world that supported the existence of sorcerers.
He could tell at a glance.
He still didn’t believe in sorcerers.
But this person clearly existed outside his world—the world in which his common sense applied.
“Hmm? Hm-hm-hm. My, this certainly turned into a big show.” The sorcerer looked around, making the cigarette twitch in the corner of his mouth. “I heard that Kanzaki had cut her, but…Well, I thought things were okay because there wasn’t any blood trail, but…”
The sorcerer noted the cleaning robots gathered behind Touma Kamijou.
Index had probably been cut somewhere else and had run for her life. When she arrived here, her strength had failed. The droids in the meantime had neatly wiped away the trail of her fresh blood on the floor.
“But why…?”
“Hmm? Oh, the reason she came back here? Who knows? Maybe she forgot something. Now that I think of it, she’d been wearing a hat when we shot her in the back yesterday. I wonder where she dropped that?”
The sorcerer in front of Kamijou had said that she “came back.”
In other words, he’d been trailing Index the whole day. And he knew about her forgetting the hood of her habit, the Walking Church.
Index had mentioned something along the lines of them searching for its magic power.
So the sorcerers were tracking her by searching for the abnormal power inside her habit. Kamijou was pretty sure she’d also told him that they would know the Walking Church had been destroyed and that its signal had been cut off.
But Index should have understood what that meant, too.
She knew all of it, but she still tried to rely on the defensive prowess of her Walking Church.
And why on earth would she come back? Why did she need to retrieve one piece of the shattered, ineffectual habit? If the entire Walking Church had been rendered useless by Kamijou’s right hand, then the hood would serve no purpose.
…All right, then are you willing to follow me into the depths of hell?
Suddenly, everything clicked into place.
Kamijou remembered that he hadn’t actually touched the last piece of the Walking Church. In other words, there was still magic power inside it. Index had figured that the sorcerers would use it to find her.
So she’d braved the danger and come all the way back here.
“…You idiot.”
She hadn’t needed to do that. It was entirely his fault that the Walking Church had been destroyed, and he’d kept the hood in his room on purpose. She had no duty, obligation, or authority to protect his life.
But she wouldn’t have been satisfied unless she returned.
She’d been compelled to turn back for Touma Kamijou, a complete stranger whom she’d only known for thirty minutes.
She risked her life so that he wouldn’t get involved in her battle with the sorcerers.
She wouldn’t have been satisfied unless she’d come back.
“…You absolute idiot!!”
Index wasn’t moving an inch. It ticked him off for some reason.
She had told him that his rotten luck was caused by his right hand.
He was unconsciously erasing even fishy abnormal forces like the divine protection of God and the red thread of fate.
If he hadn’t carelessly touched her with his right hand, if the Walking Church hadn’t been destroyed, then she wouldn’t have come back.
No, whatever. No need for excuses like that.
Whatever his right hand was or wasn’t, and whether or not the Walking Church was shattered, she hadn’t needed to come back.
If Kamijou hadn’t wanted that connection…
If he had only returned the hood to her properly when he’d had the chance…
“Hmm? Hm-hm-hm? Aww, don’t look at me like that.” The sorcerer’s cigarette twitched again. “I wasn’t the one who cut that, and I’m sure Kanzaki didn’t mean to make it bleed so much. Everyone knows about the Walking Church’s absolute defense, of course. It shouldn’t have put a scratch on her…Man, how on earth did it end up getting broken, anyway? The Dragon of Saint George hasn’t been resurrected yet, so it’s impossible for a Papal-class barrier to be torn down.”
His words ceased, as if he’d been muttering to himself, and his smile disappeared.
But that was only for a moment. He started wiggling his cigarette again right away, as if he’d suddenly remembered the motion.
“Why…why?” Kamijou stammered, without thinking, without expecting an answer. “Why? I don’t believe in magic or fairy tales, and I can’t understand you sorcerers. But don’t you know the difference between good and evil? Don’t you have something or someone you want to protect…?”
He had no right to say that. He was nothing but a fraud.
He’d allowed Index to go off on her own, returning to his daily life.
But he just had to say this, no matter what.
“You all bullied a young girl, chased her around, and made her bleed like this…Can you really claim to have any sense of justice, you dick?!”
“I already said I wasn’t the one who made it bleed; it was Kanzaki.”
The sorcerer cut him off plainly, unaffected by Kamijou’s words in the slightest.
“Anyway, I’m picking up what I came here for, blood-soaked or otherwise.”
“Picking…up?” Kamijou didn’t understand.
“Hm? Oh, I see. I thought everything had been leaked, since you knew what a sorcerer was. It was probably scared of getting you involved in all this.” The sorcerer exhaled a drag of cigarette smoke. “That’s right, I’m here to pick that up. To be more precise, I’m not here for that but for the 103,000 grimoires it possesses.”
…Again with the 103,000 grimoires.
“I see, I see! You probably don’t understand, since religion is pretty weak in this country,” the sorcerer explained, his tone sounding bored despite the smile on his face. “Index Librorum Prohibitorum—translated, it means the ‘index of forbidden books.’ It’s a list of wicked, evil books, published by the Church, which it insists would corrupt your soul if you read so much as a little. Even if the Church were to send out word that such dangerous books were in circulation, one of the vile tomes could still end up in someone’s hands if the unwitting fool didn’t know the title. So that was transformed into a crucible of poisonous knowledge, containing 103,000 ‘bad books.’ Ah, you want to be careful. For someone like yourself, living in a country with feeble religious views, just looking at one would cripple you for life.”
Kamijou heard the sorcerer’s diatribe, but Index still didn’t have a single book with her. If she did, he would have been able to see it under her habit; he had, after all, seen every line on her body. Someone carrying a hundred thousand books wouldn’t be able to walk anyway. A hundred thousand books was enough to fill an entire library.
“Qu-quit messing with me! Where the hell are they then, huh?!”
“They’re there. In that thing’s head—in its memory,” the sorcerer replied smoothly, as if stating the obvious.
“Have you ever heard of eidetic memory? Apparently, it’s an ability that lets you memorize anything the instant you see it. It’s also called perfect recall. Like a human scanner.” The sorcerer smiled, still bored. “We’re not talking about our occult magic or your scientific supernatural abilities here. It’s just a trait. It went to places around the world like the British Museum, the Musée du Louvre, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the ruins of Pataliputra, the Château de Compiègne, and the Mount Saint Michael Academy and ‘stole’ the grimoires sealed there using only its eyes. It is a library of grimoires.”
There was no way Kamijou could believe that.
He couldn’t believe in these grimoires or this “perfect recall” stuff.
But it wasn’t important whether or not they were true. In reality, there was a person right in front of him who’d slashed a girl’s back because he believed it was true.
“Well, the girl herself can’t train her magical power anyway, so she’s harmless.” The sorcerer rocked the cigarette around in the corner of his mouth gleefully. “The Church must have a few ideas of their own, preparing a stopper like that…Well, I’m a sorcerer, so it doesn’t have anything to do with me. Anyway, those 103,000 books are dangerous things. So before it falls into the hands of someone who’ll use it, I’ve come here to place it under my protective custody.”
“Pro…tection?”
Kamijou was flabbergasted. With this crimson landscape before him…What did this man just say?
“That’s correct. That’s right. Protective custody. However much common sense or goodwill she may have, she probably won’t be able to stand up to torture and drugging. Thinking about handing over a girl’s body to people like that just breaks your heart, doesn’t it?”
“…”
Something in Kamijou’s body was quaking.
It wasn’t simply anger. Goose bumps were breaking out on his arms. The man he was looking at truly believed that he was always right. His way of life was beyond reproach, never seeing his own faults. It made Kamijou feel as if he’d just lowered himself into a bathtub filled with thousands of slugs. A chill surged through his entire body.
The phrase lunatic cult came to mind.
This sorcerer was hunting people out of blind faith, without any sort of grounding or logic behind it. When Kamijou thought about that, his nerves snapped.
“You…you bastard!!”
His right hand felt as if it surged with an intense heat, and it made a cracking sound as if resonating with his anger.
His legs, once glued to the floor, moved faster than he could think. His dull body made of flesh and blood shot toward the sorcerer like a bullet. He clenched his right hand so tightly it seemed as if his intention was to crush his own fingers in his grip.
His right hand was useless. It couldn’t take down a single delinquent, or raise his test scores, or make him popular with girls.
But his right hand was very convenient because it was capable of punching the shit out of the prick standing in front of him.
“This would be the part where I introduce myself as Stiyl Magnus, but I suppose I should call myself Fortis931 at this point.” He casually twisted his mouth, his cigarette dancing at the motion. He muttered something to himself before declaring to Kamijou as if bragging about his cool black cat:
“That’s my magic name. Not used to hearing that? Apparently we sorcerers mustn’t reveal our true names when we are employing magic. It’s an old convention, and I don’t really get it.”
Fifteen meters separated them.
Touma Kamijou halved that distance with just three steps.
“Fortis would be something like ‘strong’ in Japanese. But the etymology doesn’t matter. What’s important is that I used this name to introduce myself. For sorcerers like me, it’s less of a magic name and more of a…”
Touma Kamijou continued sprinting down the hall another two steps.
The sorcerer kept smiling despite that, as if to imply that his opponent wasn’t someone capable of wiping away his smug grin.
“…a killer name, perhaps?”
The sorcerer, Stiyl Magnus, removed the cigarette from his mouth, flinging it aside with his fingers.
The butt flew horizontally, slid along the metal railing, and struck the wall of the neighboring building.
An orange trail of light outlined the trajectory of the cigarette, and when it hit the wall, embers scattered.
“Kenaz…”
As Stiyl spoke, the orange afterimage suddenly exploded with a loud roar.
The straight line became a flaming sword, as if expelled by a fire extinguisher filled with gasoline.
Kamijou could hear the paint on the walls boiling and changing colors. It sounded like a photograph being roasted with a lighter.
He hadn’t even touched the sword, but Kamijou felt as if just looking at it would scald his eyes. He stopped automatically and covered his face with both hands.
His legs weren’t moving. It was as if they’d been hammered into the floor with a bang.
Kamijou experienced doubt.
The Imagine Breaker could erase any abnormal power with a single touch. Even the biri biri girl Mikoto’s Railgun, a power conceivably capable of destroying an entire nuclear bunker with a single blast, was no exception.
Still…
Kamijou had never seen a supernatural force besides metahuman abilities.
What about magic?
Would his right hand work against magic—a completely unknown equation?
“…Purisaz Naupiz Gebo!” The sorcerer laughed through the hands Kamijou was using to cover his face.
As he laughed, the white-hot fire blade seared into Touma Kamijou’s side.
On contact, it lost its cohesion and erupted indiscriminately like a volcanic torrent. It spewed waves of heat, flashes of light, explosions, and black smoke all around him.
“Did I…overdo it?”
Stiyl scratched his head. The scene had just been bombed. He’d checked the surrounding area for bystanders beforehand. Most of the students who lived in this dormitory were probably out enjoying the first day of summer break, but if there were any friendless shut-ins still around, things would get complicated.
A screen of black smoke and fire blanketed Stiyl’s view.
But he didn’t need to bother checking to know what had happened. His attack was a hellfire that burned at 3,000 degrees Celsius. Apparently above 2,000 degrees, human skin liquefies instead of burns, so the kid was probably a thick mass of ooze stuck to the wall like gum, just like the metal railing that had melted like molten candy.
He exhaled, realizing that his decision to draw the boy away from Index had been justified. If he had used the wounded Index as a shield, things would have gotten a little ugly.
…But he couldn’t pick up Index like this.
Stiyl sighed. He wasn’t able to cross the flame-strewn hallway to retrieve her. If there were an emergency flight of stairs on the other side of the hallway, he could reach her, but if she melted in the flames while he went around, it wouldn’t be funny.
He shook his head, trying to work out how to proceed. As if he could see through the smoke, he spoke up again. “Excellent job. Congratulations, but I’m sorry for your loss. If that’s all you’ve got, then you couldn’t win even if you tried a thousand times.”
“Who couldn’t win a thousand times?”
The sorcerer froze, startled, at the voice emerging from the hellfire.
With a massive roar, the fire and smoke obscuring the area were suddenly dispelled in a gust.
It was as if a tornado had suddenly appeared in the center of the conflagration and blown everything away.
In its place stood Touma Kamijou.
The railing had liquefied like candy, the paint on the floor and walls was peeling, and the fluorescent lamps mounted on the ceiling dripped, having melted from the heat. In the eye of the inferno, the boy stood there, wholly unscathed.
“…Jeez, of course. What was I so scared about?”
Kamijou uttered the words from the corner of his mouth, sounding bored.
“…This was the right hand that destroyed Index’s Walking Church.”
He honestly understood nothing about magic.
He didn’t grasp the mechanism of the thing or what was going on if he couldn’t see it. Even if someone explained it to him from start to finish, he probably wouldn’t understand half of it anyway.
But stupid as he may have been, he did know one thing.
In the end, it was just another abnormal power.
The scarlet flames he’d expelled hadn’t been completely extinguished.
A neat circle of flame still crackled around Touma Kamijou.
“Out of the way.”
With this command, Kamijou touched the 3,000-degree-Celsius flames. The lot of them were expunged simultaneously, like birthday candles on a cake blown out with a single breath.
Kamijou sized up the sorcerer in front of him.
The conjurer was confused at this clearly unanticipated turn of events, as any human would be.
Oh, this “thing” was human.
If he was punched, he’d feel pain, and if he was sliced with a hundred-yen X-Acto knife, he’d bleed red blood. He was just a human being.
Kamijou’s knees no longer knocked, and his body was no longer frozen.
He moved his limbs just as he always had.
It moves!
“…Wha—?”
Stiyl, on the other hand, almost backed away from the unexplainable phenomenon he had witnessed.
Considering the environment around him, there was no way his attack could have misfired. Then was the boy’s body strong enough to withstand temperatures over 3,000 degrees Celsius? No, he wouldn’t even be human, then.
Touma Kamijou didn’t stop to consider Stiyl’s confusion.
He slowly advanced one step at a time, clenching his hot right fist into a boulder.
“Damn!!”
Stiyl waved his arm horizontally. Another flaming sword appeared, just like the first, and slammed into Kamijou with explosive force.
A detonation. Flames and black smoke everywhere.
But when the fire and brimstone dissipated, the boy was still standing. Again.
…Could he…be using magic?
Stiyl considered the possibility but immediately discounted it. There was no way there was a sorcerer in a foolish country that thought Christmas was a day for dating.
Besides…besides, if Index, who had no magical power, joined forces with a sorcerer, she’d have no need to flee. That was how dangerous her memories were.
Possessing those 103,000 grimoires was fundamentally different from having something like a nuclear missile.
Living things die; a suspended apple falls; one plus one equals two…These were inviolable laws. But in fact, they could be broken, rewritten, and born anew. One plus one would become three, apples would fall up, and the dead would rise.
Sorcerers called those the “demon gods.”
Not a demon from hell, but rather a sorcerer who had trespassed into God’s domain.
A demonic god.
But he could sense no magical power from the boy before him.
As a sorcerer, he could tell with a glance. This kid didn’t have the smell of someone from Stiyl’s world.
Then why?
“!!” As if in denial of the frigid sensation shooting down his spine, he conjured a third flaming sword and rammed it into Kamijou.
This time, there wasn’t even an explosion.
The instant Kamijou touched the fiery blade with his right hand, the entire thing shattered like glass, melted into the void, and disappeared. He did it as casually as swatting a fly.
His bare right hand, with no magical enhancement, had destroyed Stiyl’s 3,000-degree hellfire blade.
“…Uh.”
For some reason—no real reason he could think of—something popped up in the back of Stiyl’s mind.
Index’s habit, the Walking Church, was Papal class, which meant it was absolute. The power of its defensive barrier rivaled those of London’s cathedrals. As long as the legendary Dragon of Saint George hadn’t reappeared, destroying it was absolutely impossible.
But Kanzaki had sliced Index. That meant the Walking Church had been shattered beyond recognition. But by who? And how?
“……………………………………………………………………………………………”
Touma Kamijou was already right in front of him.
If he took one more step, he could punch the sorcerer.
“MTWOTFFTO, IIGOIIOF (one of the five elemental components of the world, the great fire of beginning)…”
A nervous sweat broke out all over Stiyl’s body. Because the living thing in front of him, wearing a summer school uniform, looked human. He sensed something else coiled within the boy’s body, beyond the blood and the meat. Stiyl felt his very spine shaking.
“…IIBOL, AIIAOE (it is born of life, and it is the arbiter of evil)…
“…IIMH, AIIBOD (it is mild happiness, and it is the bane of death)…
“…IINF, IIMS (it is named fire, and it is my sword)…
“…ICR, MMBGP…!! (I call thee into reality; masticate my body for great power…!!)”
The chest of Stiyl’s vestments immediately expanded like a balloon; the buttons flew off, popped from within.
As the flame devoured the oxygen with a roar, a giant ball of flame leaped from his clothing.
It wasn’t just a ball of fire.
Inside those brightly blazing flames was a core of thick petroleum-like bile. The core had the shape of a man. It looked like a human being covered in suffocating black oil, like a bird fallen victim to an oil spill. It burned incessantly.
Its name was Innocentius, the Witch-Hunter King—and its very name implied certain death.
The flaming giant with inevitable death’s moniker spread its arms and charged at Touma Kamijou like a bullet.
“Out of the way.”
Boom.
Delivering a simple backhand with all the annoyance of brushing through a spiderweb, Touma Kamijou swatted away the sorcerer’s final trump card. The oil-drenched human figure of the flaming giant sprayed out in all directions, like a water balloon pierced by a needle.
“…?”
Just then, Kamijou decided not to take that last step forward. There was no logic behind his decision.
Stiyl, whose last gambit had been eradicated, was smiling, and that made Kamijou hesitate to take that final step carelessly.
Suddenly, he heard a squelching sound of jelly coming from every direction.
“Wha—?!”
He took a step back, startled, and the black spray reconstituted itself in midair, once again taking on human form.
If he had taken that last step, the giant’s flames would have encircled his entire body for sure.
Kamijou was confused. If what he knew about the Imagine Breaker was true, then it could destroy even divine miracles with a single blow. As long as this sorcerer’s attack was a magical, abnormal power, he should have been able to completely nullify it with a touch.
Inside the flames, the thick, oily figure writhed, changed shape, and transformed into the silhouette of a person gripping a sword with both hands.
No, that was no sword. It was a giant cross, more than two meters tall, that looked as if a man could be crucified on it.
The demon wielded the cross in a large arc, bringing it down on Kamijou’s head like a pickax.
“…!!”
Kamijou grunted and immediately shielded himself from the blow with his right hand. After all, he was just a regular high schooler. He lacked the combat skills to see an attack like that coming and avoid it.
The cross collided with his right hand with a giant metallic crash.
This time, it didn’t disappear. Instead, Kamijou felt a slight resistance to his grip, as if he was squeezing a rubber ball. The enemy used both hands, but Kamijou could only use one. Millimeter by millimeter, the flaming cross edged closer to his face.
Panicked, Kamijou only just barely noticed. This ball of fire, Innocentius, the Witch-Hunter King, was definitely reacting to his Imagine Breaker. But no sooner was it destroyed than it managed to resurrect itself. The interval between destruction and revival was probably no more than a hundredth of a second.
His right hand was trapped.
If he freed it for even an instant, he would immediately be reduced to ash.
“…Runes.”
Touma Kamijou heard something.
He couldn’t turn around to look behind him due to the crisis in front of him consuming his attention, but he immediately recognized the voice.
“…Twenty-four letters that describe mysteries and secrets. A magical language employed by Germanic tribes since the second century, in which Old English is said to have its roots.
He knew it was Index, but he couldn’t believe it.
“Wha…?”
How can she be speaking so calmly when her body’s wrecked and drenched in blood?
“Attacking the Witch-Hunter King will have no effect. The walls, floor, and ceiling. As long as the inscribed runic seals surrounding us remain intact, it will be reborn ad infinitum.”
Touma Kamijou was only barely able to stop the cross’s advance by bracing his right wrist with his left hand.
Very slowly, he turned his head.
A solitary girl was still curled up where she’d fallen. But he couldn’t call that Index. Its eyes were like a machine’s, utterly devoid of emotion.
With every word it spoke, blood seeped from the wound in its back.
It was unfazed, nothing more than a system created for the sole purpose of explaining magic.
“Y-you’re Index…right?”
“Yes. I am the library of grimoires belonging to Necessarius, the Church of Necessary Evils, the 0th parish of the English Puritan Church. My proper name is Index Librorum Prohibitorum, but you may call me Index for short.”
Kamijou felt a tremendous chill as he considered the life of the library of grimoires—the index of prohibited books. It was nearly enough to make him forget about Innocentius, who was currently trying to kill him.
“If introductions are complete, I shall return to my explanation of runic magic…To put it simply, it is comparable to the moon reflected in a pool of water at night…No matter how much one slices the water’s surface with a sword, the moon will remain unaffected. If you wish to cut the moon reflected in the water’s surface, you must first direct your blade toward the real moon floating in the night sky.”
Index’s lesson complete, Kamijou finally remembered Innocentius, the enemy before him.
So then, this wasn’t the actual aberrant force? Then it was like destroying a photograph but not the negatives. Unless he destroyed the actual abnormal power manifesting the flame giant, it would continue reviving forever. Was that what she meant?
At this point, Kamijou still didn’t believe what she was saying.
Even though he’d come this far, his common sense still screamed that magic wasn’t real.
Anyway, with his right arm sealed by Innocentius and his body immobilized, he couldn’t have tried a different tactic even if he wanted to and asking the blood-soaked Index for help seemed an unlikely prospect.
“Ashes to ashes…”
He flinched. Behind the giant, flaming god, Stiyl manifested another sword in his right hand.
“…and dust to dust…”
A second sword, this one white-hot, appeared soundlessly in his left.
“…Squeamish bloody rood!” shouted the sorcerer, charging forward, his blazing sabers held parallel to the ground like a pair of scissors, as if he intended to slice through the flaming giant as well. Kamijou stood helpless to defend with his right hand occupied by the Witch-Hunting King.
Oh, shi— Gotta run!!
Before Kamijou could so much as scream, the two fiery swords collided with the infernal behemoth and ignited it like a bomb, engulfing Kamijou in the conflagration.
7
The fire and smoke cleared to reveal a hellish landscape.
What had remained of the metal railing had been pulverized like a jawbreaker, and even the floor tiles slopped around like molasses. The paint peeling off the walls had turned to ash, revealing the concrete beneath.
The boy was nowhere to be seen.
But Stiyl did hear the sound of footsteps retreating beneath him.
“…Innocentius.”
The sorcerer’s voice came in a whisper. The sporadic flames once more assumed a human form, which leaped over the railing in pursuit of the footsteps.
Subjectively, Stiyl was surprised. It wasn’t a problem. Just before the explosion, his swords had cleanly bisected the flaming giant, and Kamijou had released his right hand, hurling himself over the rail.
As he fell, the boy had likely grabbed hold of the railing the next floor down and pulled himself onto the walkway. He’d done so without a safety net of any kind, pulled it off by sheer force of will. Stiyl considered it reckless.
“But, hmm…”
The sorcerer smiled to himself. Index’s 103,000 grimoires had revealed the weakness of his runes. As she’d said, his runic magic was fueled by a series of seals he’d inscribed. If those seals were removed, any magic drawn from them, no matter how powerful, would be instantly annihilated.
“But so what?” he reassured himself, relaxing. “You can’t do it. You can’t possibly destroy every single rune I’ve inscribed on this building.”
“I thought…! I thought I was…! I thought I was really gonna die!!”
Kamijou’s heart was still attempting to pound its way free of his chest following his seventh-story free fall without a lifeline.
He sprinted down the straight passageway, looking around. He didn’t wholly trust Index’s assessment. At this point, his immediate concern was to get the hell away from Innocentius and regroup.
But faced with the reality confronting him, he couldn’t help but shout, “Damn it! What the hell is going on?!”
The problem wasn’t that he didn’t know where in the sprawling dormitory the runes were inscribed. Actually, he’d already found some of them: on the floor, on doors, on fire extinguishers. Paper scraps the size of credit cards hung everywhere he looked, just like in the fable of Hoichi the Earless.
He didn’t want to think about her puppetlike expression, but according to Index, the magic was like an interference field, and those paper runes were antennae emitting the interference signals. I…think? Can I even pull them all off? There are, like, thousands of these stupid paper antennae things all over the place.
Rumble! He heard the thunderous roar of oxygen being absorbed as the humanoid flame descended over the metal railing.
“Crap!”
If he got caught again, he wouldn’t be able to hold it back. Kamijou immediately ducked into the emergency stairwell running alongside the walkway. Even there, as he hopped farther and farther down the steps, more of the runic characters or whatever could be seen hanging in nooks and crannies on the stairs and ceiling—suspicious shreds of paper with symbols on them, adhered everywhere with cellophane tape.
They’d obviously been mass printed on a copy machine.
How does something that stupid even work?! Kamijou thought angrily. Considering it further, though, he realized that fortunes could still be read using free giveaway tarot cards that came with shoujo manga, and it was certainly possible to mass-produce copies of the Bible at a printer.
This whole occult thing is totally cheating…
Kamijou wanted to cry. There were tens of thousands of these runic seals stuck all over the building. Could he actually find every single one? Even if he tried, couldn’t Stiyl just start hanging up more to replace them?
His thoughts were cut short as Innocentius began descending the stairway after him.
“Damn!”
He gave up on the stairs and exited onto the next floor’s hallway. The flame giant collided with the pavement, scattering embers everywhere, and bounded down the passage in pursuit.
The hall was completely straight. At his usual speed, Kamijou wouldn’t be able to shake Innocentius.
“…!” Kamijou grunted and glanced at the entrance to the emergency stairs. A label informed him that this was the second floor.
Rumble! Innocentius barreled straight for him to restrict his right hand.
“O-oaaahhh!”
Kamijou neither used his right hand, nor did he retreat farther. He hurdled the second-floor railing with everything he had.
As he fell, he realized that asphalt and a handful of bicycles were waiting below.
“Ack, aahhhh!!”
He barely managed to land between bikes, but the hard asphalt below couldn’t be avoided. He tried bending his legs to absorb the impact, but he still heard his ankles crack. They didn’t feel broken—maybe because he had only fallen two stories—but there was definitely some damage.
Rumble! The flames overhead released another massive roar as they sucked up oxygen.
“?!”
Kamijou rolled aside, scattering the bikes, but nothing happened.
…? He looked up, confused.
Innocentius, the Witch-Hunter King, was still stuck at the second-floor guardrail. It watched him closely, still rumbling. It was like an invisible barrier blocked its path, preventing it from pursuing him.
The runes must only have been hung in the dormitory. Kamijou would be able to escape Stiyl’s magic by just abandoning the building entirely.
Now that he’d figured out the rule behind it, he felt like he’d gotten a handle on the aspect of the invisible system of magic. Just like the supernatural abilities with which he was familiar, magic was governed by its own laws. It wasn’t like the crazy enemy mages in RPGs who could do whatever they wanted with a single spell.
Kamijou sighed.
Now that his life wasn’t in immediate peril, all his strength drained from him. He had to take a seat on the ground. This wasn’t fear—what settled over him was more like lethargy. He even started thinking, If I just ran away like this, I’d be safe, right?
“That’s right! The police…,” Kamijou mumbled to himself. Why hadn’t it occurred to him before? Academy City’s police force was a special anti-esper team. Wouldn’t it be better to contact them instead of almost getting himself killed?
He fished around in his pockets but remembered that he’d stepped on his cell phone that morning.
Instead, he searched the street in front of the dormitory to find a public phone.
Not to run away.
Not to run away.
“…All right, then are you willing to follow me into the depths of hell?”
Her words once again pierced his heart like an arrow.
He hadn’t done anything wrong. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, was he?
He couldn’t be expected to plunge into the depths of hell with a complete stranger he’d only known for thirty minutes, even if she had returned for his sake in what was essentially the same circumstance.
“Damn, fine then…If I don’t want to follow you into the depths of hell, then…” Kamijou grinned. “I guess I’ll just have to pull you out of there, now won’t I?”
It was about time to believe her.
He didn’t care about the rules governing magic. He didn’t know what was going on behind the curtain. After all, did he need a blueprint of a cell phone in order to send a text message?
“…Well, it’s no big deal once you’ve figured it out, is it?”
If he knew what needed to be done, all that was left was to do it.
Even if it ended in failure, it was better than sitting around doing nothing.
Rumble! The crushed metal guardrail, glowing orange, fell toward him. He rolled to the side in a panic.
He wanted to settle everything in a cool way, but in order to save Index, he needed to do something about that flame freak, Innocentius, first. The problem at hand was figuring out what to do about tens of thousands of runes.
Could he actually peel off every single scrap of paper taped throughout the building?
“…Man, it’s kind of weird that the fire alarm isn’t going off, what with all the smoke.”
Kamijou muttered to himself inadvertently. Suddenly, he stopped.
The fire alarm?
All at once, every fire alarm in the building suddenly started blaring.
“?!”
Stiyl looked up at the ceiling amid the storm of warning sirens.
The sprinklers overhead started spraying man-made rain without wasting a second. He’d made sure to inscribe a command to Innocentius instructing it not to touch any security sensors, since things would have gotten exponentially more complicated if the fire department had been called in. That meant that Touma Kamijou probably pulled the fire alarm.
Was he trying to douse the Witch-Hunter King’s flames?
“…” It was such a ridiculous notion that Stiyl couldn’t bring himself to laugh. But for that ridiculous reason, he was now getting soaked. He was so frustrated that he felt his brain might explode.
He glared with venomous hatred at the bright red fire alarm on the wall.
Setting them off was simple enough, but from here, he probably couldn’t do anything to stop them. Most of the dorm’s residents were out enjoying their summer vacation, but he preferred not to be around when the fire department arrived.
“…Hmm.”
Stiyl assessed his surroundings and decided to pick up Index and make a hasty retreat. His objective being her retrieval, there was no need to obsess about annihilating Kamijou.
Besides, the boy would probably be a pile of white or black ash, incinerated by Innocentius on automatic, by the time the fire department reached the scene.
…I wonder if the elevators have stopped.
He’d heard that elevators were designed to shut down in case of emergencies. The prospect made him even more miserable. He was on the seventh floor and had no desire to lug a limp body down seven flights of stairs. Even if it was just a little girl, it would be exhausting.
So he was relieved when he heard a ding like a microwave timer sound off behind him.
But he quickly came to his senses.
Who’s that? Who’d be in the elevator?
He’d already verified that the dormitory was deserted with its residents out gallivanting for an evening of summer vacation. Who on earth was it? Moreover, what would possibly motivate someone to use an elevator now of all times?
The Dumpster of an elevator opened its doors with a low rumble. He heard the echo of a single footstep splash against the drenched floor.
Stiyl turned slowly.
He couldn’t fathom why his insides were trembling in fear.
There, at the end of the hallway, stood Touma Kamijou.
…What? What happened to Innocentius? I set him on autopilot to run that kid down, didn’t I?
Thoughts chased one another through Stiyl’s mind in a whirl. Innocentius functioned not unlike a fighter jet with a payload of cutting-edge missiles. Once locked onto a target, it was relentless; no matter where the victim might try to run or hide, the 3,000-degree colossus would melt through anything in its path, be it a simple wall or a sheet of metal. There was no way a target could evade it just by running around.
And yet there stood Touma Kamijou.
Audaciously. An invincible, savory, worthy opponent. The fated enemy. There he stood.
“So, those rune things were ‘carved’ into all the walls and floors, right?” Kamijou called out, soaking in the artificial rain. “…Man, you really got me there. You’re really a piece of work, you know that? Had you actually carved them with a knife, I’d have been screwed. You can brag about that.”
He raised his right arm and pointed above his head with his index finger.
The ceiling. The sprinklers.
“…No! Not a chance! A 3,000-degree inferno can’t be snuffed out like that!”
“Stupid! Not the fire—those stupid things you stuck all over my house, dumbass!”
Stiyl worked it through. The tens of thousands of runes he’d planted around the dormitory had been printed on copy paper.
Paper dissolves in water. Even kindergarteners knew that.
If the building was flooded with water, it wouldn’t matter how many thousands of runic characters he’d inscribed. You wouldn’t need to run around taking them all down. You’d just have to press a button, and every last sheet would be destroyed.
The muscles in the sorcerer’s face contorted involuntarily.
“Innocentius!”
The next moment, the flame giant crawled into the passageway behind Kamijou, crushing the elevator door as if it were made of gingerbread.
With every raindrop, its fiery body hissed as the water evaporated—the sigh of a beast.
“Ha…ha-ha. Aha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Amazing! You truly are a tactical genius! But you lack experience. Copy paper isn’t toilet paper, you know. It’s not weak enough to be melted by a little water!”
The sorcerer spread his arms wide, smiling tremendously, and barked, “Kill him!”
Innocentius, the Witch-Hunter King, hoisted his arm back like a hammer.
“Out of the way.”
That was all he said. Kamijou didn’t even bother to turn around.
Blorp. The boy reached around to initiate contact between his right hand and the fire titan. Accompanied by a frankly hilarious sound, it went kablooey every which way.
“Wha—?!”
Stiyl Magnus’s heart skipped a beat.
Innocentius was gone, and he wasn’t coming back. Oozing blobs of pitch coated the walls, the floor, and the ceiling, doing little more than wriggling around a bit.
“Th-that’s…impossible. How? How?! My runes aren’t wrecked yet…!”
“What about the ink?”
It seemed as if it took five years for Touma Kamijou’s words to reach his ears.
“Even if the copy paper isn’t ruined, the ink starts to run when the water hits it, right?” Kamijou explained calmly. “…Though it seems like it didn’t destroy every one of them.”
Fragments of Innocentius continued to writhe.
The black blobs dissipated, one by one, with every spritz of artificial rain from the sprinklers, in much the same way that the ink on the talismans hung around the building was being diluted and sapped of its power.
One by one, they faded, until finally the last of them melted away and was gone.
“In…nocentius…Innocentius!” the sorcerer wailed, but he was pleading with someone who’d already hung up the phone on him.
“All right, then.”
Kamijou’s statement made the mage’s entire body twitch.
His feet took one step toward him.
“In…no…centius…,” the sorcerer called out. The world did not answer.
A foot advanced a second step.
“Innocentius…Innocentius, Innocentius!” the sorcerer bellowed. The world held firm.
Touma Kamijou shot at him like a projectile.
“Ah…ashes to ashes, dust to dust, squeamish bloody rood!” the sorcerer howled. Neither flaming giant nor fiery sword appeared.
Touma Kamijou’s feet finally closed the gap. He took one more step in…
…and made a fist with his right hand.
With his completely ordinary right hand. A right hand that was useless against anything but abnormal powers. A right hand incapable of taking down a single delinquent, of raising his test grades, or making him popular with girls.
But his right hand was very convenient.
After all, it was capable of punching the shit out of the prick standing in front of him.
Kamijou’s fist plowed into the sorcerer’s face.
The mage’s body spun around like a top, and the back of his head collided with the remnants of the metal guardrail.
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