A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 7 (4 page)

Before the sister in white could turn around and speak up…

A large hand pressed down over her mouth, sealing it like masking tape.

Touma Kamijou, an average high school student of the sort that seemed ubiquitous, trudged down the road in the evening sun.

An oil drum–shaped cleaning robot passed by him, and the propellers of the wind turbines that stood in for telephone poles spun around and around as if trying to swat away the city crows. There were plenty of advertisement blimps floating along in the orange sky, but the curtains hanging beneath them weren’t simple cloth signs, but rather the latest in super-thin screen technology. One display said, W
ELL-PREPARED MEANS NO WORRIES!
D
O YOUR BEST TO PREPARE FOR THE
D
AIHASEI
F
ESTIVAL!
—J
UDGMENT
, the text a marquee running from bottom to top like an electric signboard.

The Daihasei Festival was basically a big athletic meet. Academy City had millions of students, and it naturally turned into a big affair with every school in the city participating. Plus, all of the students were espers who had grown into some sort of special power or another. On top of
that
, because the Academy City General Board had originally proposed the festival so it could gather data on large amounts of espers interacting with one another, full usage of one’s powers was recommended for that day only. That meant you could see clashes between espers that you wouldn’t normally be able to see. For example, during a soccer or dodgeball game, the ball could become invisible, or light on fire, or be frozen in ice. Anything went.

During that week, Academy City would be opened to both the general public and television crews. As far as he could tell, the ridiculously over-the-top situations that sprang up during matches drew in large numbers of viewers, since you absolutely couldn’t see anything like it at normal sporting events. That was the reason Judgment always went full throttle preparing for it. Another part of it was the fact they wanted to raise Academy City’s public image during
those few days it was open. As a precaution, the city would also place Anti-Skill officers at crucial ability development locations under the pretext of special antiterrorism forces in order to prevent the general populace from getting into places the city didn’t want it to see.

“B-blech…”

At least, that was what he’d heard from voices around him this week.

Kamijou had lost his memories after a certain incident, so he didn’t know anything about the Daihasei Festival. But based on what he’d heard, he could guess, though, it would be an extremely dangerous event for him in particular. The fundamental rule was that you could use your powers freely. In fact, not being assertive enough in using them would land you right in the loving arms of a medical squad. That was Daihasei. In other words, depending on the time and place, there could be balls of fire, lightning attacks, and vacuum blades flying every which way during simple events like mock cavalry battles.

He looked at his right hand. In it was a power called Imagine Breaker. It would erase any strange ability, whether magical or supernatural, at just a touch. He still didn’t want to be charging into a fierce, chaotic battle filled with dozens of espers with just
that
, though.

…
Why do I have to work my ass off to set up for an event that could end up as yet
another
bloodbath for me
…
?

Even his preparations weren’t going smoothly. As soon as he pitched an observation tent in the schoolyard, a female gym teacher had smiled in chagrin, clapped her hands together in apology, and said, “Sorry! We didn’t actually need a tent!” And then when he put it away again, a tiny female teacher got mad and said, “Ahh! What are you doing, Kami?! Didn’t you get the message that we needed the tent after all?” Just saying
what rotten luck
wasn’t going to cut it.

He dragged himself toward his dormitory, his body completely exhausted from all the futile labor.

“Ah. Now that I think of it, the fridge is totally empty, isn’t it?”

He could see a supermarket right near him, but he would have to go back to the dorm to get money first.
Man, I have to go back out again?
he thought, limping onto his street.

His cheap sneakers had hard soles, so every time they touched the pavement, it exacerbated the pain in his feet.

Then, once he got close to the entrance of his dormitory, he suddenly heard a girl’s voice from overhead.

“Ahhh! T-T-To, T-T-T-Touma Kamijou! Hey, Touma Kamijou!”

Hm?
He looked up and saw Maika Tsuchimikado leaning over the metal railing on the seventh floor, waving her right arm. She was kneeling atop a cleaning robot as always, so her current position looked rather precarious. Her left hand held a mop, and she had it stuck on the floor. It seemed to be preventing the robot from moving forward like it was supposed to.

“S-s-s-something happened, something bad happened! Also your cell phone battery is dead!”

“Huh?” At that, he took his GPS-equipped cell phone out of his pocket. Its battery had indeed run dry. He pushed a button and looked at the screen to find a ton of text messages from one Maika Tsuchimikado.

Come to think of it, though she spoke in a long, drawn-out way, her face did look a little pale.

He was a little confused, but he hurried into the elevator.

When he arrived on the seventh floor where his room was, Maika released her mop, binding the cleaning robot, which proceeded to sluggishly wander over toward the elevator. The cat, which was normally always with Index, was sitting in the hallway for some reason, its ears down. It was unhappily holding Index’s free-with-contract cell phone in its mouth.

The cleaning robot arrived before Kamijou, and Maika put the mop back down in front of it to hold it in place again. “It’s an emergency, an emergency! The silver-haired sister got kidnapped!”

“Huh?” he grunted without thinking.

She continued, her face white. “A kidnapper! She’s been taken away! He told me if I reported him he’d kill the hostage, so I couldn’t do anything! I’m sorry, Touma Kamijou!”

The silver-haired sister—that must have been Index. The maid didn’t look like she was joking. And there were plenty of reasons people would want to kidnap Index.

She was a library of grimoires—there were 103,000 of them recorded in her memories. Sorcerers throughout the world desired that knowledge. Once, on August 1, she’d been kidnapped for that very reason.

“Wait a second. What happened? Could you explain in order?” he asked.

Maika began to explain little by little.

She had come to the student dorm for her “fieldwork” two hours earlier. While she was making her rounds, she ran into the bored Index on the seventh floor and started to make conversation. Then, someone came up behind Index and put a hand over her mouth, interrupting the conversation, and made off with her.

“Before the kidnapper left, he gave me an envelope. He wrote a bunch of stuff in it…”

She handed him an envelope—a wide one, like the ones used for junk advertisement mail. Her voice was more than a little unsteady. It wasn’t plain fear—it was probably also guilt at not having been able to do anything.

He glanced down at the envelope, then back up. “No, if you had been careless, things would have gotten much worse than they are now.”

He intended those words to comfort her, but she grew more worried instead. The tension in the air could burn through skin. She was just a normal student here who had no connection to any of this, so she couldn’t help it.

“Anyway, what did this asshole look like?”

She looked up slightly, thinking to herself. “Umm. Well, he was at least one hundred and eighty centimeters tall. And he looked Caucasian, too. But his Japanese was really good, and just by looking at him I couldn’t tell what country he came from.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh.”

“And he had on these clothes that looked kinda like a priest’s.”

“Uh-huh?”

“But even though he was a priest, he smelled like perfume. And his hair was shoulder length and dyed really red, and he had a silver ring on all ten fingers, and he had this tattoo of a bar code
underneath his right eye, and he was smoking a cigarette, and he had tons of earrings!”

“…Wait, I know exactly who that is. It’s that rotten English priest.”

She tilted her head to the side with a confused look. He checked out the envelope again. Inside was one piece of letter paper.

The characters were written in pen and looked as though they’d been drawn using a ruler. It said:

Touma Kamijou

If you value the girl’s life

Come to the abandoned Hakumeiza theater

Outside Academy City

At seven
PM
tonight

Come alone

“…Using a ruler to conceal your handwriting? That’s so old-fashioned.”

Was he seriously trying to conceal his identity just by hiding his handwriting using a ruler? How behind the times was he? There were methods of appraising handwriting that looked at the indentations of characters and measuring the slight finger tremble that varied from person to person. It used the same technology as the lasers for reading data off CDs. And anyway, there was no shortage of psychometers in Academy City.

I think he’s serious about this. At this point? Is this his idea of a joke or something?
thought Kamijou, a bit baffled.
What is that idiot thinking? Did he get a late summer vacation and decided to come out here to fool around?

As far as he could gather from what Maika had told him, Index’s kidnapper seemed to be her colleague, Stiyl Magnus. But he would never threaten her life. Quite the contrary—he wouldn’t hesitate to protect her even if it meant charging into enemy territory or into a fortress.

That reduced his nervousness by a good deal.

At this point, he felt bad letting Maika stay so seriously depressed about it.

“Ah, it’ll be fine, Maika. I think the culprit is someone Index and I know. So you don’t need to worry.”

“Huh? You two know him?! His motive—was it love gone wrong?”

“Uh, what? No, that’s not it…Though that does seem pretty possible.”

All that did was make Maika’s face go white. Kamijou sighed.

He shook the envelope, and out came a few more folded-up pieces of paper. He unfolded them to find an exit permit and related documents. All the necessary fields had already been filled in.
Where did he even get this stuff?
he thought, mystified.
I mean, with these I should be able to just walk out the front door, but you’re supposed to go through a whole bunch of other steps to get these
…

He was appalled at the absurd juxtaposition of the threat letter and the carefully prepared documents to help him.

What could that priest be thinking, anyway?

Hakumeiza, the abandoned theater whose name meant “twilight seats,” was only about one kilometer outside Academy City.

It had gone under less than three year earlier, so there were no visible signs of disrepair inside it. The interior furnishings had all been disposed of, so the place was completely empty. There was dust piled up here and there, since it hadn’t been cleaned, but it still didn’t give the impression of a
ruin
. It seemed like it would immediately spring back to life if given a thorough cleaning and restored with all its old furnishings.

It was as though the building was only hibernating for the winter. Maybe they hadn’t knocked the place down because they were still looking for its next owner.

Index and Stiyl were up on its empty stage. The large hall, about the size of a school gymnasium, came with a fixed stage and audience seats. All of the light fixtures had been removed as well, so the only illumination was the evening light shining through the five opened entrances.

The thin dusk settled upon the stage, on which Index was sitting on her knees, with her feet out at her sides. She pouted and puffed out her cheeks. “Coward!”

“I have nothing to say to that, nor any need to.” Stiyl Magnus nearly
flinched for a moment at her hostile stare, but he would never let it show. The flame that he touched to the end of the cigarette in his mouth slowly rose and fell in the dim light. The white smoke billowing from it combed past a sign on the wall that read N
O
S
MOKING
and disappeared.

“I believe you understand the general situation. I won’t ask you if you need me to go over it again. Given how powerful your memory is, there would be no point in repeating myself.”

“…An official edict from the English Puritan Church.”

Index played back the explanation he’d been given after he’d brought her here.

Someone had appeared who knew how to decipher the
Book of the Law
, which should have been impossible to decipher.

The name of that person was Orsola Aquinas.

If the
Book of the Law
were deciphered, one might gain angelic techniques that would destroy the Crossist power balance.

During a trip to Japan, someone had stolen both the
Book of the Law
and Orsola.

The culprits appeared to be the Amakusa-Style Crossist Church.

The Roman Orthodox Church was beginning to take action to get the
Book of the Law
and Orsola back.

Nobody could contact Kaori Kanzaki of the English Puritan Church, who used to be the leader of Amakusa-Style, and they predicted she would do something less than desirable.

On the surface, the English Puritan Church was involved in this incident, since they were cooperating with the Roman Orthodox Church, but their top priority was to deal with the problem before Kaori Kanzaki had time to make any needless moves.

“So you’re going to get a normal person like Touma wrapped up in this official ‘job’ of yours?”

“Actually, I’m somewhat unconvinced about why we need to, myself. But it’s an order from the powers that be, and all that.” The cigarette in his mouth wiggled as he spoke. “And it still puts us in a difficult position. He’s from Academy City. If we went directly to him and asked for his help, people might see it as the science faction sticking their neck into the magic faction’s problems. If this issue
had occurred solely within Academy City, we could use our lame self-defense excuse again, but it’s different this time. We needed a way to give him a suitable motive for getting involved with this.”