A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 7 (23 page)

And then he heard the scampering of footsteps.

“More of them?!”

Tatemiya was startled, but the footsteps weren’t coming after him.

The courtyard he was fighting in was between the Church of Matrimony and the diagonally positioned Church of Baptism, so it was a triangular space. And at the top of the triangle, in the slight gap between the two churches, there was the English Puritan sister wearing the white habit.

She seemed to have managed to flee from the Roman Orthodox
sisters, but she must have run into a group coming from the other direction. Well over twice the number of enemies as Tatemiya was facing were surrounding her, blocking any movement.

“Shit. Don’t go making me look bad, damn it!”

Tatemiya hurriedly tried to back her up, but the dozens of sisters surrounding her all moved like a single creature and formed a human wall. From their point of view, every time an enemy died, the people they split off to do so would move to reinforce the rest. They were fighting against a group of stragglers, which was why they probably wanted to finish this battle as quickly as possible.

Tatemiya glared at the sisters, and they glared back.

Behind them, Index was being swallowed by a wave of countless people, and she was getting harder and harder to see.

“Don’t…underestimate—!!”

At the very moment Tatemiya caught his breath to resort to a bold move and swung his sword back into position…

…he suddenly heard a man’s voice coming to him from overhead.

“Stop! You can’t get close to her right now!!”

Right when Tatemiya looked up, a second-story window of the Church of Baptism exploded outward with flames. A Roman Orthodox sister came flying out of the broken window like a bullet. She barely managed to coil her feet to kill some of the impact from landing, but that was all she could do. She lost consciousness and rolled over onto the ground.

In the window, holding a sword of flame, was Stiyl Magnus.

He spoke.

“It depends on the situation, but right now she’s strongest when she’s alone. If we get close to her, it will sap her strength. You don’t want to get caught in something like this, either, do you?”

“What?” said Tatemiya dubiously, when…

Boom!!
came an explosion from near Index.

Dozens, if not
hundreds
of people were completely surrounding her, leaving not a single gap—and then he saw Index. Meaning a
portion of their siege had fallen. One of the corners of the thick C-shaped crowd of people was struck by an unseen power and completely blown away. It seemed to have landed a direct hit on about ten of the sisters, but one of them rolled all the way to Tatemiya’s feet, dozens of meters away. At the sight of their ally flying over their heads like a rag doll, even the sisters facing Tatemiya turned around to Index.

Thud!!
came another invisible burst, sending a handful of sisters flying.

“…What the hell is that?”

Tatemiya looked at the sister at his feet. Her face was a portrait of despair; her body curled up, stuck in the fetal position. And though she was unconscious, she trembled violently as if experiencing a night terror. Closer inspection revealed that her leg muscles had snapped apart. Her explosive flight had been performed by her own feet—as though some survival or defense instinct had gone berserk in an attempt to flee from Index’s side even at the cost of ignoring her body’s physical limits.

Stiyl jumped down from the second story and landed right next to Tatemiya with a
clap
. “You are Crossist as well, so you should understand. Crossist ceremonies each have their own weaknesses—though perhaps I should call them contradictions. These weaknesses, or contradictions, are what caused so many Crossist sects to be created—and all of them have formed even more weaknesses and contradictions. It’s basically what sets Crossism apart from the rest.”

“…What does that have to do with this?” Tatemiya waved the tip of his giant sword a bit, measuring his distance to the sisters.

“Floating in that area is the wisdom of all the world—all the knowledge of the 103,000 grimoires. She’s using it to denounce the contradictions in Crossism and its teachings. The voice of magic’s bane—Sheol Fear. For those working under the Crossist operating system, the contradictions in their faith are like security holes. Sheol Fear, which pierces precisely through them, is truly their bane. It causes the hearer’s personality to fall apart like a jigsaw puzzle.”

However, it would have no effect on those unrelated to Crossism, and grimoire authors like Aureolus would construct unique barriers so that the original copy wouldn’t corrupt their minds. Of course, there were
extremely
few people in the world who could write an original copy and not be physically destroyed by it.

“Grimoires don’t exist solely to be read. She can draw out the full power of grimoires even without magic using things like spell interception or Sheol Fear. There is probably no better candidate to be a library of grimoires than her.”

Before the dazed sisters could re-form their ranks, Stiyl and Tatemiya stormed in. Stiyl’s flame sword exploded, and the sisters pressed flat to the ground by the waves were skillfully knocked unconscious one by one by Tatemiya. Meanwhile, a little farther away, Index’s casual whisperings were blasting tons of the sisters surrounding her all over the place.

Tatemiya was half-impressed and half-amazed. “With a hidden ball trick like that, why didn’t she use it right from the start? And if she’d used it against us, she could’ve mowed us all down!”

“It’s a delicate attack, and there are frustrating limitations. Religious brainwashing is easier to pull off on a group all at once than on an individual basis. You understand that, right? Sheol Fear uses what they call group mentality in science to break through the barriers of their minds and use them as footholds.”

Stiyl caused his flame sword to burst, repelling the sisters edging toward him. One of them who tried to time her attack came away with a scalding burn on her cheek and quickly jumped away.

“The problem with activating Sheol Fear is that it requires a certain level of
purity
in their group mentality. It’s easy to cast on a homogenous group where everyone has the same thoughts, but it brings with it a difficulty to cast on muddled groups with different ideas. And during combat on an individual basis, it has no effect at all…In our battle with you, Touma Kamijou and I were in the way, so the ‘purity’ of the group fell, thus she couldn’t effectively use it against you. It has exceptions—and that’s why I’m here as a bodyguard.

“In other words, if you jump in there now, the conditions required
for Sheol Fear will be ruined,” Stiyl said, disinterested, putting an abrupt stop to their pointless talk.

Ssshhh!
A new set of footsteps.

They turned their gazes skyward to see dozens of sisters standing on the roofs of each of the two buildings surrounding the courtyard.

Inside the darkness-enclosed Church of Matrimony, Agnes stood with her back against a marble pillar.

Around ten sisters were waiting nearby as bodyguards, but every time they heard an explosion or a clash, they shivered and looked back and forth busily. Agnes simply stood with her arms folded and eyes resting—you wouldn’t be able to tell who was guarding whom if you saw.

“Quit making so much noise already. You all look like idiots. Especially you, Sister Angeline.”

“B-but Lady Agnes…”

Her clear sarcasm was met by an overreaction by one of the sisters. She looked as though she had seen the messiah as her ship was sinking. She probably wanted to ward off some of her tension by talking to someone.

“It’s been more than ten minutes since the battle started. Even if you count Orsola, there’s still such a difference in our numbers! This isn’t normal. S-see?! That explosion—which side did that come from? Maybe they’re on the offensive now…!!”

“…”

“W-we should go as well. We could use everyone we can—”

“There wouldn’t be a point, so don’t bother,” said Agnes, sounding very bored.

“Th-then what should we do? They took Orsola away, so if they run away again—”

“They cannot run away,” interrupted Agnes. Then, as if so sure about it that she was too lazy to give an explanation, she said,
“There’s no way they can escape. That’s just how this shitty world of ours is made.”

The balance crumbled suddenly.

Index brought it on. It happened while she was attacking with Sheol Fear, which she’d reassembled to only catch the Roman Orthodox sisters, and wreaking havoc on the Crossist believers’ minds by using the 103,000 grimoires. Suddenly, one of the sisters—if she recalled correctly, she was Sister Lucia, who had attacked Kamijou at the theme park with the wheel—shouted.

“
Dia priorità di cima ad un attacco! Il nemico di Dio è ucciso comunque
!!”

The sisters all stopped abruptly.

Their expressions disappeared without a sound. They joined their breathing like a military force giving a salute and took something out of their clothing. In their right and left hands were expensive-looking ballpoint pens.

“…?” At that point, Index anticipated some kind of magic attack focus fire on her.

But her prediction was completely wrong.

The next moment…

…the sisters surrounding Index, nearly a hundred strong, smoothly took their ballpoint pens and shoved them through their own eardrums.

There was a
squelch
like of fingers crushing grapes.

Crimson-red blood dripped from the holes in their ears.

They all tossed aside the two ballpoint pens they’d stabbed their ears with and took up their weapons once again.

Their faces were colored with intense pain, and yet their desire to destroy put magnificent smiles on their faces. On the sharp ends of the pens on the ground were stuck white stringlike things soaked in blood. They were human eardrums.

Index felt an overwhelming urge to vomit coming from deep within her.

“Are they…doing that to avoid Sheol Fear…?”

If they couldn’t hear her voice, Sheol Fear wouldn’t work. As Index realized this shocking fact, the sisters surrounding her all came for her at once.

“Damn it…?!” Stiyl had been the first to realize it. He moved to go help Index in a hurry, for a moment throwing off the rhythm of his linked combat with Tatemiya that had been going well.

He burst one flame sword after another, toppling sisters with their impacts left and right and momentarily blinding them with their light. But reaching Index was as far as he could go—the sisters had gotten used to his series of identical attacks and had even found a counter for them.

“Over here!!”

Just then, the double doors of the nearby Church of Final Anointment flew open, and Touma Kamijou shouted from them. A wound-covered Orsola was behind him as well, and she was using a big clock hand wrapped in bandages as a cane. He must have run out of ways to fight on the run with the wounded girl and decided to hide out for a while.

Index, Stiyl, and Tatemiya all managed to dive into the church. Kamijou hurried and shut the doors, and not a moment too soon—one after another, blades came piercing through the black oak more than five centimeters thick.

They had successfully shut the Roman Orthodox sisters out for the time being.

However, who knew how many minutes the doors would last? It was like the three little piggies nestled in their house of straw.

Kamijou sank weakly to the cold marble floor. “Looks like everyone’s safe for now…Hey, can you walk, Orsola?”

“You are…quite a worrywart. I haven’t sustained…such bad wounds.”

Orsola’s hands and feet were entirely covered by her habit, so it was difficult to tell by looking, but she appeared to have taken quite a bit of
pain. Nevertheless, she gave a smile, though weak. Kamijou felt a pang in his chest, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. So instead, he tried to force a change in the topic. “…So what do we do now?”

No one present answered his question. They’d been keeping up the precarious balance of the battle, but it had come toppling down all at once, and everyone here knew it.

The members of Amakusa fighting outside were also barely maintaining equilibrium through individual surprise attacks and great escapes. They had their hands full with their own problems, so it would be hard to ask them for help.

With the
gash
ing and
thwack
ing of iron nails being hammered into a tree, holes opened one by one in the church’s door. Index’s face went a little pale. “I-I don’t think my Sheol Fear can, umm, a-affect them with their ears like…th-that at all.” She blanched, remembering the sight of them piercing their eardrums. “And I can only use spell interception against one person at a time. I don’t think I can interrupt hundreds of people casting hundreds of spells all at once!”

“???”

Index gave an analysis of her own combat potential as though it were the normal thing to do, but Kamijou had no idea what was going on. What had Index done, anyway, and how had it worked?

This time, Tatemiya spoke. “My guys’re doin’ their best, but it’s gonna be tough. The scariest thing is when people attack you prepared to die. If that flood of people hits us, it won’t matter how much skill we’ve got, man. It’s like an army of ants devouring a wild beast.”

Along with his bitter words came the sounds of blades stabbing and thrusting into the doors. From the other side of the shredded door peeked in many sets of eyes.

Kamijou felt his gut freeze over.

If that door came down, the armed sisters would flood inside like an avalanche. They only had a few minutes’ reprieve. If they couldn’t find a way out of this, they were dog food—but the more they discussed it, the more it felt like they’d been cornered in a dead-end street. Kamijou felt a panic beginning to burn up in the back of his mind, but he couldn’t do anything about it.

“Well, maybe if…Maybe if we had the
Book of the Law
here, we could use my decoding method and discover a way out…,” said Orsola Aquinas suddenly.