6_Epilogue_ In Back of Front Stage

EPILOGUE In Back of Front Stage “See? Check this out! I didn’t have to get hospitalized or anything this time. Wow, man, I’m great. It’s like I evolved into my next form! Don’t you think so?” said Kamijou in delight in the hospital ward to the frog-faced doctor. Komoe Tsukuyomi and Aisa Himegami both gave him a whack on the head, each from one side. “Kami! You caused us so much trouble! So much worry! And you’re not even caring about it, are you?! I can’t believe you’d put Anti-Skill through all that…grumble grumble. My word! I’ll hear a full report later and then give you another lecture!” “That’s why I told you. To be careful of Hyouka Kazakiri. I went through all the trouble to warn you. You are indiscriminate when it comes to women. Maybe your personality needs to be completely reformed.” “…Excuse me, these people are really scary, so, uh, can I get you to hospitalize me anyway? And put a sign up on the door that says absolutely no visitors…I request asylum until this dynamic duo cools off, at least,” pleaded Kamijou to the frog-faced doctor. The two girls began to hit him on the head at a high speed. The sun had already set, and clinic hours had long since ended. Despite looking fit as a fiddle, Kamijou was still an emergency patient. He’d gotten caught up in a firefight and attacked by landslides underground. Getting checked out despite having no injuries was really the obvious thing to do. Index and Kazakiri, meanwhile, were in the waiting room. Kuroko Shirai would be up all night cleaning up after the incident, apparently. The frog-faced doctor gave him a look like he was fed up with the after-hours work he was doing. “What I don’t understand is how you can be smiling in a situation like this, hmm? Perhaps you’re under the effects of a runner’s high due to over-exhaustion. If you had made a wrong move, your fist could have sustained a compound fracture, yes?” “…What?” “Your pupils are contracting, hmm? It certainly wouldn’t be an unnatural thing, you know. Human fists are capable of many precise movements, and it has many joints to let that happen, meaning it’s weak to impacts, right? If we’re talking about simple blunt attacks, it would have been safer to use your forehead.” Kamijou realized his right hand had, in fact, been stinging a bit. He shuddered. The ladies behind him may have been angry, but this doctor had an entirely different level of destructive power. After he’d subtly threatened his patient, the frog-faced doctor began to quickly wrap Kamijou’s hand in bandages. Now that Kamijou had stopped talking, Miss Komoe and Himegami began to quiet down. Miss Komoe looked at Kamijou’s bandaged right hand, then finally said, “There are many things we don’t understand.” “What do you mean?” “Well! We don’t know what we don’t know, so we don’t really need to talk about it…but I’m going to say it anyway, since I would feel bad keeping it to myself.” Miss Komoe smiled vaguely and held up her index finger. “Firstly! Why did this Miss Hyouka Kazakiri appear near you, Kami? Academy City should be filled to the brim with involuntary diffusion fields. She could have appeared anywhere in the city. But she didn’t—she consistently showed up close to Kami. Why? I mean, if it were a coincidence, then that settles it, but still.” Then, she held up her middle finger. “Secondly. Sherry said that Hyouka Kazakiri held the key to the ith School District, the Five Elements Society, but in the end, what did that mean? This was told to her by a Kirigaoka teacher, so if it were just baseless speculation, then that settles it, but still.” Finally, she stuck up her ring finger. “Thirdly and lastly. Why did our terrorist, who just appeared today, decide to go straight for Miss Hyouka Kazakiri? Not even the residents of Academy City knew she existed, so her information must have come from some pretty deep parts of the city. Although, if that ends up being a coincidence, too, then everything is pretty much settled, but still.” She opened the rest of her fingers and brought them to her face with a slap. “But that would just be too many coincidences, wouldn’t it? That’s the strangest thing about all this.” Silence settled upon the hospital room. They didn’t have any of the required resources to make a judgment call on any of these things. The frog-faced doctor casually looked away from them and out the window. He couldn’t see it from here, but there was a windowless building in that direction. “Are you happy now?” spat Motoharu Tsuchimikado, taking his eyes off the image floating before his eyes, in a room of a building with no doors, windows, hallways, staircases, elevators, or even air vents. Aleister, who was floating upside down in the giant glass cylinder before his eyes, smiled lightly. There was no response. The unnerving silence made Tsuchimikado force his words as if it bothered him. “And so by manipulating your human pawns, you’re closer again to the completion of the key to bring the Five Elements Society under your grasp. Honestly? You look like a monster to me.” The Five Elements Society—also known as the ith School District. “Who would have thought that its identity was actually the involuntary diffusion fields themselves? That the naturally occurring powers of the 2.3 million students who live here are creating the thing.” The Five Elements Society, constructed with involuntary diffusion fields, was something that would appear wherever espers were present, such as in this city. Nobody even knew if it was harmful or benign. It wasn’t an enormous power source like nuclear power. If something like that flooded the streets, everyone would notice it. The Five Elements Society was purely involuntary diffusion fields. It was so slight that you wouldn’t know it was there without measuring it with machines. However, it was an unstable existence, like water kept at zero degrees Celsius through decompression. Decompression—in other words, extremely low pressures—will reduce the freezing point of water and allow it to be brought to zero degrees without freezing. However, as soon as you disturb the water, like with a stick, the low-pressure water immediately freezes over. The concept here was the same. The power was so tiny that only machines could detect it, but given some kind of impulse, its power would explode. The strength Hyouka Kazakiri had displayed at the end was only a glimpse of the power that either the golem’s attack or some other source had given it. The issue was that they didn’t know just how strong the impulse needed to be. Just sticking a finger into it carelessly could cause an explosion, or it may not be anything to worry about. And despite saying that the energy could explode, it was nothing more than a prediction. They didn’t know how it would manifest or how wide its effects would be. It could wipe Academy City off the map or it may not be anything to be scared over. They didn’t know how deep to tread or what would happen. Thus, Academy City couldn’t destroy the Five Elements Society imprudently, either. Hence the need for a method to control it without destroying it. And for that, they needed a key… “So it’s Hyouka Kazakiri, is that it? Damn. She might be a part of the ith School District, but planting an artificial ego into her and aiding in her materialization? You must be out of your mind.” There was a boy with a right hand called Imagine Breaker. It could be said to be the one menace to the ith School District. And that threat created a self. In the same way as the desire to eat or sleep, the needs created by the instincts of biological organisms are created as signals to keep on living and to avoid death. Someone without knowledge of life or death wouldn’t have sprouted instincts or a sense of self from the start. So what about the other way around? If it were taught death by Imagine Breaker, a mindless illusion would come to acquire a self. Then, Aleister’s mouth opened, though it had been silent until now. “This, too, is a means of controlling the ith School District. Its movements become easier to predict when we’ve given it the ability to think rather than a mindless being that doesn’t know what to do. And if we play our cards right, we can even negotiate or threaten it.” “Sure, that would be fine if it created a good person like you predicted. What would you have done if it had turned out to be completely evil?” “Evil is much easier to control than good. The differences between them simply lie in what cards you use to make deals with them.” This bastard, Tsuchimikado cursed to himself. In the first place, Aleister’s idea of how to treat humans was far removed from how normal people thought. “Is there a point to going so far to wrangle the ith School District?” he finally asked. “Yeah, the ith School District is a threat to Academy City. But we’ve got other threats to worry about on the outside, too. You were the one who tolerated this incident, and now the world is slowly beginning to go mad. Whatever the reason was, you took down an official member of the English Puritan Church with the help of Anti-Skill. The people at St. George’s Cathedral aren’t just gonna sit back and allow it. You can’t possibly think that this one city could defeat all the world’s sorcerers, do you?” Aleister maintained a smile despite Tsuchimikado’s threatening voice. “Sorcerers would be insignificant if we only took control of it.” “It?” Tsuchimikado frowned. The ith School District, the Five Elements Society, was certainly an unearthly existence. They didn’t know where in Academy City was safe and where was dangerous. But that was still just limited to within Academy City. Involuntary diffusion fields only developed around espers. When he thought that far, he suddenly felt a chill run down his spine. Wait…just a minute… Once again, he thought about the Five Elements Society—that conglomeration of involuntary diffusion fields. Like infrared or high-frequency waves, it was right there, but you couldn’t observe it… A life-form created from the aggregate of a certain kind of power, existing in a different phase from humans. Motoharu Tsuchimikado knew it. He knew exactly the word used for this concept in sorcery. No…An angel? No, that couldn’t be it. If the residents of the ith School District—Hyouka Kazakiri, for example—could be expressed as an angel, then the city that she lived in…that meant it was… “Aleister…You can’t be trying to construct an artificial heaven, can you?!” “Well.” Aleister answered with one word, in a bored tone. Creating an artificial heaven…No. If you could create one using only scientific ability, you couldn’t use existing words like heaven or netherworld for it. It would be an entirely new world, a plane, for which nothing—not Kabbalah, not Buddhism, not Crossism, not Shinto, not Hindu—had a name for. And the construction of this plane would mean the annihilation of magic. Suppose, for example, that the fundamental values of buoyancy and lift changed greatly. Under such conditions, amateurs could create an airplane from a blueprint drawn on paper, but it wouldn’t ever fly. But if you got a professional—perhaps a sorcerer—to create a proper airplane based off a blueprint…it still wouldn’t fly. And if it did just keep running along the runway and manage to get into the air, it would immediately flop over and be destroyed. That’s what would happen to a magical environment if a new world appeared. If sorcerers tried to use magic, their bodies would explode. The temples and cathedrals supported with magic would lose their pillars and collapse in on themselves. This would apply to every religion. Think about it—every religion and form of sorcery follows rules. The rules, of course, aren’t the same. Buddhism has its own rules and Crossism its own. The world is like an enormous canvas with paints of many colors overlapping one another. Every religion operated under some type of rules. That didn’t change. And if a new plane were to appear in the midst of those rules, which were already set in stone, what would happen? The formerly stable rules would be messed up, and sorcerers would find themselves engulfed in their own accidents. No matter how wonderful a violinist is, if the instrument itself is badly tuned, she won’t be able to perform well at all. That’s what it meant to mess up these rules. The key to the ith School District seemed to be incomplete for the moment, but when it was, sorcerers would no longer be able to use magic within Academy City. Academy City was like a microcosm of the world. Its ability development would expand to a global scale, and once everyone in the world had awakened to supernatural abilities, the entire world would be covered with involuntary diffusion fields. The ith School District, too, would blanket the whole world, having been limited to only Academy City. No… Preparations for that had long since been completed. The ten thousand man-made espers, the Sisters, that Kamijou had saved…They had been sent to establishments cooperating with Academy City all over the world to recover. Tsuchimikado had already doubted the need for sending them all outside the city for physical adjustments—and here was his answer. That insane experiment that had used Accelerator hadn’t been a plan to Shift him into Level Six at all. It was to mass-produce espers and place them throughout the world. In order to send them outside in the most natural way possible, the Radio Noise project was destroyed, and even the project that used that as a front, the Level Six Shift experiment, was crushed. With those two incidents as a front, the Sisters had been spread across the planet. The scheme had clearly been successful. In reality, the various Church factions, not least of all the English Puritans, had not noticed that the Sisters had been distributed outside the city walls. And even if they had, they wouldn’t be able to grasp its importance. They wouldn’t think of it as anything more than the cleanup for one of the city’s private problems. Espers had been placed throughout the entire world like antennae for the ith School District. Now, if they could completely control the incomplete ith School District and bring forth a new plane… The appearance of this plane would cause every sorcerer to self-destruct by his own hand… And espers wouldn’t be affected in the slightest by the involuntary diffusion fields. If it came to that, the result of any wars between the worlds of science and magic was clear. Actually, it wouldn’t even get to that point in the first place. It was like shooting the heads of enemies who had raised their hands one at a time. No… After thinking that far, he shook his head. Is this really Aleister’s final goal? Maybe, maybe not. I get the feeling that he would smile and say that was all just preparations for something bigger. And it’s possible he’s not thinking about any of this. I don’t know. Aleister—who appeared both male and female, both old and young, both holy and sinful—connoted all human possibilities. Thus, he couldn’t predict how the person thought. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that he held every opinion humanity could possibly conceive. He shuddered, then grumbled like he had been the one to be defeated. “Hmph. If the English Puritans knew about this, they’d open fire immediately. At this point, I can sympathize a bit with Sherry Cromwell. Having gotten a taste of your words and actions, I realize she wasn’t purely the bad guy here. She was respectable—another person who stood up to protect the world she lived in.” “Do not inflate such absurd delusions. Not a hair on my head wishes to make an enemy of the Church. And to create an artificial heaven, like you are thinking, would require knowledge of the original kingdom first. That is the territory of the occult, of course. For me, a scientist, it is out of my expertise.” “Nonsense. Nobody on this planet knows more than you. Right…?” Tsuchimikado’s lips twisted. “…Aleister Crowley, the sorcerer?” Long ago, in the twentieth century, lived the greatest sorcerer known to man. He was called both the most talented sorcerer in the world and the one who held it in the highest contempt. And his greatest insult to sorcery in the long history of the world, which no sorcerer had ever done… …was to abandon mastery of magic and attempt to master science. No one knew why Aleister, the man who had stood at the pinnacle of sorcery, had abandoned everything. However, it was the greatest humiliation to the world of magic that had ever occurred. The most superior sorcerer in both name and reality had abandoned magic and tried to rely on science. In other words, Aleister had named himself representative of the culture of magic and, without anyone’s permission, had raised the white flag to the culture of science. In so doing, Aleister Crowley turned the entire world’s sorcerers against him. Not only the witch-hunting English Puritans, but every single person who knew the least bit about magic, without exception. There was a reason Stiyl hadn’t seen through Aleister’s facade when they met face-to-face. The English Puritan Church had been basing its pursuit of Aleister Crowley on information they’d gathered over many long years—but this information was all planted by Aleister. Since their information source was nonsensical, it would do them no good to investigate him either magically or scientifically—nothing would add up. As a result, he was treated as someone who happened to have the same name or someone who was using it as an alias. Tsuchimikado had to marvel at the skill and guts that brought him this far. Tsuchimikado would never have crossed such a dangerous bridge even if it were possible. That was just the extent of the gap between their strengths. “This is gonna come off totally as my being a sore loser, but let me warn you about one thing, Aleister.” “Hmm. Let’s hear it, then.” “Do you know the term hard luck?” “It is another way to say rotten luck, correct?” “It has another meaning behind it—the strong luck with which one will always overcome hellish misfortune, no matter how many times one encounters it.” Tsuchimikado gave a little grin. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, and I probably wouldn’t understand if you explained it. But if you’re really set on making use of that Imagine Breaker, then you’d better be prepared. If you confront it with shallow conviction, that right hand will devour your world of illusions.” When he finished, the teleporter entered the room, as if timed. Escorted by the girl, thirty centimeters shorter than him, Tsuchimikado left the building. Now alone in the room, the man floating upside down said to himself, “Hmm. The world I believed in has long since been destroyed.” Index and Hyouka Kazakiri sat next to each other on a couch in the hospital waiting room. Hospitals generally don’t allow pets, so the cat was waiting back in the student dorm. The sister in white swung her arms lazily like she was uncomfortable, maybe because the cat wasn’t with her for once. Kazakiri said to her in a withdrawn voice, “U-umm…Aren’t you going to fix your skirt?” “Huh?” Index looked at her legs. She had taken out the safety pin in it during the battle with the golem, so the skirt part was open on one side like a cheongsam. “It’s…It looks really b-bold and defenseless. It’s kind of dangerous…you know?” “But we got caught up in all those problems, so I figured I’d leave it for later. Hyouka, does it really look that weird?” “I-I think so…It looks really weird. You were already suspicious…and now you look more so.” “Already?” Index lowered her eyelids. She got the gist of how she was feeling. Then, something strange happened. As she gave a vague, wry smile, Hyouka’s outline blurred, like mist wavering in the wind. Index felt like the girl’s body would disperse and melt into the air if she wasn’t paying attention. Kazakiri’s contours blurred a lot, then a little, in front of the surprised Index. Not a second went by without her blurring like that. “H-Hyouka, you’re…” “Umm…yeah…well, a lot happened, so…” She was smiling. “My body, it’s really…like a big, rolled-up ball of supernatural abilities…I’ll always be unstable like this, no matter what…since I won’t exist forever…,” said Kazakiri, but Index considered a different possibility. The Imagine Breaker. The ultimate right hand that could cancel any preternatural powers at a touch, whether good or evil. “No, that isn’t it,” assured Kazakiri, judging her thoughts from her expression. “I didn’t come into contact with his power…And if I had…I would have just disappeared without a trace right then. So it isn’t his fault…,” she said gently, though her voice was uneven. “…It’s all right. I may disappear, but it won’t happen that soon…My body is…made of the power of 2.3 million people…So in terms of life span, I have many times longer than you all to live…” She was smiling. Index knew she should feel reassured, combining her knowledge with Kazakiri’s words… …but for some reason, a heavy unease settled in her chest. Without making any noise, Kazakiri’s outline continued to blur back and forth. The flickering somehow seemed to be getting larger, little by little, as if a thick fog were steadily lifting. “Oh…right, I forgot…This might be…important to you, but…maybe not…” “What is it?” “About his power…I don’t…know the details or anything, but…” Hyouka Kazakiri stopped for a moment there, then finally told her… …about how Touma Kamijou’s right hand couldn’t be explained by supernatural abilities. “Huh?” Index froze in her seat. “Wait. Wait a minute, Hyouka. That can’t be. Because…because there’s no hand like that in sorcery, either! I have the knowledge from 103,000 books in my head, but I don’t know of any rule-breaking powers like that! If it’s not a supernatural ability, then how do you explain it?” “Sor…cery?…I don’t know…what that is, but…” Kazakiri smiled faintly. “At the very least, it isn’t an ability…I mean, my body is made up of…the powers of every esper in Academy City. If he were an esper…then that tiny little power would have gotten into my body, and I would have fallen apart in the blink of an eye…” Now that she mentions it… Index thought back. It didn’t seem like his power was something that Academy City had made. It wasn’t artificial—it was completely natural, and he’d had it since birth. Then…then just what is his power? she thought. It wasn’t sorcery, and it wasn’t an ability. It was like a power from another dimension. “Okay, well…I need to get going soon…,” Kazakiri said, rising from the couch. The thoughts swirling in Index’s mind all blew away and her head bounced back up. Suddenly she didn’t like this. Get going? Where was she going back to? Thinking normally, it was getting late, so one would think she was going home…but Index, for no reason, couldn’t help but think that casual utterance held more meaning than she realized. Kazakiri smiled gently to her. She looked like a child who had been left behind by her parents. “You don’t need…to worry. Even if my body disappears…I won’t…die or anything. You just won’t be able to see me…or feel me, that’s all. Even if…you don’t understand…I’ll always be at your side…” Why is she saying something like this now? Index wondered. She was talking like they would never be able to meet again. Index didn’t know why. Hyouka Kazakiri hadn’t said anything that sounded like a clear farewell. “Hyouka” Index shouted in spite of herself to Kazakiri’s receding back. She turned around slowly and asked, “What is it?” “Tomorrow…you’ll come and play tomorrow, too, right?” asked Index, about to burst into tears. Hyouka Kazakiri smiled. She smiled and answered. “Of course.” AFTERWORD Good to meet you, those of you who decided on a whim to buy all six volumes at once. And hello again to those of you who have been buying each volume as it comes out. I’m Kazuma Kamachi. So, this is volume six. The main character, heroines, enemies, the ending, and the backstage are depicted in a strangely different way from the series thus far. As for how exactly the ball is changing up on you, well, you’ll just have to read the book. The occult keyword this time around is golem. A lot of people will think of a golem like a slime, in that they’re relatively popular in video games, and thus aren’t used as a final boss—but apparently actual (well, not actual, but you know what I mean) golems were really pretty fantastic. Especially the part about all of it being magic based on the mystique of God’s creation of man, and how followers of Kabbalah were the only ones able to use it and master it. It’s kind of like alchemy’s philosopher’s stone, in that having it proves that you’re number one. I mean, they even had safety mechanisms, so if you ever wanted to destroy it, you could easily reduce it back to dirt. It feels like the basis for giant robots frequently having a self-destruct button. I’d like to give great thanks to my illustrator, Mr. Haimura, and the editor, Mr. Miki. Thank you both for not discarding my works despite being so extremely busy. And a big thank-you to all of my readers who took the time out to pick up my books. It is, without a doubt, because of all of you that I am able to eat white rice.Now then, as I give thanks for this book reaching your hands, and as I quietly hope that it won’t ever leave them, today, at this moment, I lay down my pen.In the end, the so-called killer of illusions actually protected hers, didn’t he? Kazuma Kamachi Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Yen On. To get news about the latest manga, graphic novels, and light novels from Yen Press, along with special offers and exclusive content, sign up for the Yen Press newsletter. Sign Up Or visit us at www.yenpress.com/booklink ContentsCover Welcome Insert Title Page Prologue: In Front of the Backstage Chapter 1: Entrance Ceremony Chapter 2: After School Chapter 3: Blockaded Chapter 4: Full Stop Epilogue: In Back of Front Stage Afterword Yen Newsletter CopyrightNavigationBegin Reading Table of Contents Copyright A CERTAIN MAGICAL INDEX, Volume 6 KAZUMA KAMACHI Cover art by Kiyotaka Haimura Translation by Andrew Prowse This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. TOARU MAJYUTSU NO INDEX ©KAZUMA KAMACHI 2005 All rights reserved. Edited by ASCII MEDIA WORKS First published in Japan in 2005 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo. English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo. English translation © 2016 Hachette Book Group, Inc. All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. Yen On Hachette Book Group 1290 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10104 www.hachettebookgroup.com www.yenpress.com Yen On is an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Yen On name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. First Yen On eBook edition: February 2016 ISBN 978-0-316-31664-4 E3 Word Cound: (4987)