Still flapping its innumerable wings, the angel of water also swung the watery sword in its hand horizontally in an attempt to decapitate Kazakiri. Kazakiri repelled the assault with her own sword before preparing for a new attack.
The face of the angel so close to her was blank.
It was like an incomplete doll, and while its face possessed alluring irregularity, it didn’t have any isolated parts, like eyes, a nose, or a mouth. It looked like a smooth mask—and the valley corresponding to its mouth was writhing.
It sounded like quiet mutterings.
The words didn’t belong to any nation. Maybe it was in a range unperceivable by human ears.
But Kazakiri could hear. She could understand. She could feel.
She couldn’t comprehend every little thing perfectly, of course. She probably couldn’t tell it to speak her language, either. But she could manage to pick out words in the sentences here and there.
“hbo…RETURN…fbyuo…”
At first, it was the color of an emotion.
When she realized what the color was, the words creating that color, too, began rising to the surface.
“RETURN. frPOSITION. CORRECT. SEAT. uj. HEAVENLY PLANE. ORIGINAL. MUST BE. gePLACE.”
Something was blurred.
The contours of the angel of water, whom she’d thought was a single being, swayed slightly.
It wasn’t that something was overlapping it. Nor was something trying to burst out. Kazakiri didn’t possess a body made of physical matter—and that was how she penetrated its identity.
“…Someone is forcing in power of a different format…?”
She could see fire.
Its presence was like oil to water.
The two kinds of energy had been poured into a cup and stirred up, creating what must have once been a properly blended angel. However, as time passed, they separated, and the two energies were now trying to create a line of demarcation in the single container.
Two powers must not be placed into one container.
One could have called that purity the polar opposite of Kazakiri, who was an aggregate of every single AIM dispersion field. They seemed the same at first, but in reality, they were based on two entirely different things. Two who could have been alike precisely because they stood at opposite ends. Perhaps that was the relationship between Kazakiri and the angel.
Did that amount to blasphemy, for her?
A color of anger was in the angel as it formed words.
“go back. necessary. workt. conduct. fiamma. advantage. interest. alignment. yplan. cooperate”
“…If that is the reason you would harm my precious friends, then I’ll use all the power I can muster to stop you.”
“damage. ignore. prioritize. return. correct. position. necessary. obstruction. evil. synonymy. decision. everything”
Zzzaa!! An enormous vortex of energy began to roil about from inside the angel of water.
Its watery sword swung in an even wider arc, colliding with Kazakiri’s feather sword, and both gained a small amount of distance.
The angel of water raised its sword overhead.
And then it happened: The angel of water’s halo gave a slight jerk. Its focus diverted away from Kazakiri to something else.
“capture”
Its mouth opened.
The mouth of the archangel who could now see naught but its own objective.
“necessary. information. parchment. acquire”
5
Still carrying Last Order, Accelerator climbed into a civilian car parked in the snow. He was in the passenger seat, with Misaka Worst in the driver’s.
“Where to, sir?”
“Sneaking around in the shadows is just gonna wear me out. Quickest way to make things right is to jump right into the middle of the chaos.”
“Understood,” said Misaka Worst in an offhand tone, inserting the key given to her by Elizalina and starting the engine. She didn’t seem to have any difficulty driving with one hand, maybe because the car was an automatic.
The headlights’ glow danced, piercing across the unnatural darkness that had fallen. The passenger car, driven by Misaka Worst, made it out of the small town quickly, coming out onto the snowfield.
“About five minutes until the border…Man, you can tell all the way from here how insane the battle is. Unscientific would be an understatement.”
A giant fortress had risen in the dark skies.
It was incredibly huge. It had to be quite a distance away, but it was practically covering an entire swath of the sky as though a cumulonimbus cloud had come overhead.
And then, with that fortress behind them, two faintly glowing angels clashed again and again in midair. Their respective wings tangled together and plucked the others’ out, and shock wave–like shouts were sent scattering into their surroundings. As their battle continued, a starry sky, equally as unnatural as the blackened night, began to spread.
“Gah…ah…?!”
It was just like whenever he was near Unabara. But this time, the pressure crushing Accelerator’s chest in the passenger’s seat was extraordinary, nothing like those times. He felt like it would be strange if nothing happened to his heart. Something about that starry sky wasn’t right.
Groaning through the pressure in his chest, Accelerator said, “…You really have no clue what that is? If you’re designed to pick up anger and hatred from the Misaka network, then you should be able to draw information from it, too, right?”
“Which angel are you referring to? The one over there with the ice wings? Or that one with the lightning wings?”
“…”
“And for your information, just because Academy City has the information, I don’t think that necessarily means it’s scientific.”
…Which meant maybe it was only natural not to have enough strength with only science in order to save Last Order, who was deeply related to it.
That thing.
The sky those monsters danced in—that was the world wherein lived the cause of Last Order’s suffering.
So maybe, in order to rescue Last Order from there, Accelerator himself would need to ascend into that territory.
How?
Aiwass’s power had been overwhelming. Accelerator’s black wings alone didn’t put up any kind of fight. His trivial villainous crown couldn’t protect the little girl. What should he do, then? How could he protect her smile from this unreasonable world?
The sheaf of parchment hidden in his inside pocket almost felt sarcastic in its insistence on its own existence.
The scribble-like spells and magic circles drawn on them were linked to their technology, which could use “mysteries” on the same level as the angel Amata Kihara created on September 30 or even higher levels. He would fight a problem where theory didn’t apply in a way that ignored theory. It was a dangerous gamble, one that came with many unknown risks. Normally, he would have needed to strictly avoid entrusting Last Order’s fate to something like that. But still, maybe at this point that was his only chance to win. It was like groping through utter darkness, not knowing what paths would lead to a cliff.
And then—
—It happened.
The two monsters fighting in the skies, tangled together, rapidly descended. The scene would have been so powerful to a religious man that it would add a page to the legends; but Accelerator didn’t shed tears of emotion. He didn’t have time. The monsters with those wings growing out of them were, no matter how one thought about it, headed straight for their car.
More specifically, it looked like one of them was after Accelerator while the other chased it.
“…Did they catch a whiff of this parchment?”
Feeling it in his pocket, Accelerator grinned evilly.
He recalled Elizalina saying something about there being a chance the Russian organization responsible for this situation wouldn’t be able to complete their little project without retrieving the parchment.
In the driver’s se
at, Misaka Worst, gripping the steering wheel, whistled. “Phew!! What now, what now? This could be more dangerous than a hurricane rushing our way!!”
“Natural disasters and man-made ones have a simple difference,” said Accelerator in a low voice, opening the passenger’s seat window. Without paying attention to the fiercely cold, stabbing winds, he said, “It’s whether there’s an enemy to kill. How nice it is to have a clear target in front of me. Means I don’t have to let anything annoying hold me back, like my anger not having an outlet.”
After finishing, he leaned his upper body out from the passenger’s seat. Then he sat on the window frame like some motorcycle gang member in the old days.
“You take care of the kid. Buy me some time until I can settle the score.”
“Not sure about you trusting Misaka. She’s absolutely awful with that stuff, you know.”
“You’re lucky you’re useful. You still have a chance not to get killed even after a shitty joke like that.”
“Mm-hmm. Misaka likes that better.”
He didn’t have any more time to chat. The two monsters would make landfall in a moment.
Accelerator flipped his electrode’s switch.
Manipulating air currents to extend four tornado-like wings from his back, he threw himself from the car window frame.
He didn’t crash into the ground.
His body shot through the battlefield like a rocket.
Another monster had just joined the fight.
6
Like the advent of a solar eclipse, darkness had spread. In addition, a large number of unnatural points of light twinkled like the interior of a poorly constructed planetarium. A few, however, were straightforwardly joyful at the sight, which one could express as either eerie or mystical. Even now, all kinds of explosions and rumblings echoed in the distance.
Amid all that, Grickin was walking through a snowy forest.
He was the Russian soldier who had operated the mobile anti-air gun with Hamazura and Digurv to protect the settlement that had been under attack from privateers.
Currently, because Academy City’s forces had garrisoned there, the danger of a Russian follow-up attack had decreased. Thanks to them building temporary housing, the people of the settlement no longer needed to worry about freezing to death in a blizzard, even with most of its original wooden buildings destroyed.
“…”
However, Grickin couldn’t meekly accept the favor.
He’d come from the Russian military. And the air base he belonged to had been attacked by Academy City. Their conduct and the armaments they’d used had been wholly different; those providing emergency supplies to the settlers and those merciless killers seemed clearly to be separate units, one official and one not. Even so, he wasn’t in a state where he could simply trust them.
It was different from anger.
At the core of that resistance, there was fear.
…From the moment I fought the privateers, I no longer had a home in Russia. Maybe I should have just gone to Elizalina while I still had the chance.
That was what Grickin was thinking, but getting away from the settlement wasn’t why he was walking around the snowy forest like this right now. Even if he was going to the Alliance, he felt an obligation to thank the people of the settlement who had saved him.
Then why was he wandering around a place like this at all?
Where the hell did that kid get off to…?
He was lost.
There were children, too, in the settlement. And once they were freed from their state of extreme tension from the privateer attack, they’d started running around to play again—that was how kids were. Maybe they’d gotten even more excited now that the danger to their lives had passed. After all, even the adults in the settlement had started drinking and carousing.
In that time, a girl of about ten had vanished.
The children she’d been playing with said they hadn’t seen where she’d gone, just that she suddenly wasn’t there anymore.
An adult like Grickin would have been somewhat cautious of this unnatural night sky (even if he knew he couldn’t do anything about it). But the girl who had disappeared was just a child. She was at an age where she still believed in Santa Claus. It was even possible she’d wandered out too far while looking up at the sky with some kind of hope.
But the Russian winters were severe. The biting cold, for one thing—and there was a significant possibility of encountering a carnivorous beast woken from its hibernation by the clamor of bombings and artillery fire. To top it off, he’d heard there were land mines seeded throughout this area. This wasn’t an environment you could safely let your child play in.
The girl’s mother had apparently wanted to join the search, but everyone else stopped her. The child’s life was important, but if she succumbed to the chill or the land mines in a second tragedy, that would defeat the purpose. Instead, a small number of people, starting with Grickin, were now looking around here and there in the settlement.
Their group was small, so only Grickin was here right now.
He’d walked about three kilometers from the settlement, but he hadn’t spotted anything even resembling a girl. He wondered if a little kid’s legs could even bring them this far in this amount of snow. It might be possible with a child’s stamina, if they were walking with the intent to die, but if she’d simply been playing, that would reduce her motivation to come all this way; normally, she’d decide to go back to the settlement. So should he go back for now?
As Grickin began to mull it over, he spotted an indistinct figure moving through the blizzard.
But it was large.
“?!”
He rushed to hide behind the trees, thinking he’d accidentally found a bear or something. But that wasn’t it. Wild bears didn’t wear white combat clothing made for soldiers operating in extremely cold regions. He could tell from its design that they were Russian army uniforms, but he’d never put his arms through anything that high-class.
…An unofficial saboteur team?! Wait, isn’t that the unit everyone calls the Eastern Angels of Death?!
It was a team that mainly relied on sniping or bombings to assassinate important targets from other countries and one that had provoked wars between nations that brought disadvantage to Russia. During the Cold War, people whispered about them like an urban legend: All someone in power had to do was write a name on a piece of paper, and they’d immediately come assassinate them.
This may have been wartime, but they weren’t the sort one could run into for no reason. If that team was walking around in those clothes, then they were already dragging tragedy along behind them on chains.
What were they doing here?
And why had they gotten out of their vehicles to advance on foot?
Grickin couldn’t help but think of Digurv and the others in the settlement, which had been targeted so Russia could create a frontline base, and the Academy City people who had garrisoned it.
But if Grickin, who had been on indoor service in the air base here, took on a team of handpicked elite agents, he’d have no chance of winning. He could only see one right now, but if they were in the middle of some military operation, they’d have multiple people on the move, even if this was for unofficial combat.
The best thing to do would be leave here immediately and go back to the settlement.
If those Academy City people did something—and it bothered him to say it—they’d handle this team of saboteurs. These guys didn’t win through massive numbers; they were pros at secret maneuvers with only a few people, causing enemy military forces to fall into chaos. If one only knew where they were and the timing of their attack, one could repel them with numbers.
Grickin took a step away from the tree he was hidden behind.
But he couldn’t take a second.
The figure through the blizzard had suddenly jerked to a stop. Shit, Grickin thought, feeling a pressure from a set of eyes.
Nobody else
was around—and that was why Grickin clearly sensed those eyes, staring straight toward him.
“…”
He was at quite a distance, but even so, each read the other’s silence.
A moment later, the agent put his assault rifle stock to his shoulder, then swung the muzzle mercilessly in Grickin’s direction.
“Damn it!!”
Forcing down the terror strangling his heart, Grickin turned his back. The rifle bullet stabbed into the trunk of the tree he’d just been up against. As the gunshot sounded, a piece of tree bark bounced off and grazed his cheek. Without time to reflect on that bit of luck, he simply kept running through the snowy forest.
It didn’t seem like he’d have a chance to win.
Simply fleeing the one soldier coming after him wouldn’t save him.
He called me in, he thought, desperately working his legs, which seemed like they were about to collapse out of fear. I don’t know how many people they have, but if they surround me, I won’t be able to escape!!
The snow under his feet as he ran was flung about by a rifle bullet. He kept running, practically in a stumble, and then actually twisted his foot and fell into the snow. But he didn’t have time to stop. Even now, an enemy aiming for him was following him from behind. The more the distance dropped, the higher the chance that he’d die. But when he forced his snow-covered body up again to start running, he was presented with yet another obstacle.
But not an enemy.
It was the girl who had been lost until now.
She must have come here after hearing the shots ringing out in the snowy forest. For Grickin, that was the worst thing that could have happened. There was no guarantee he’d be able to escape even on his own—if a kid was holding him back, they’d definitely be overtaken.
But that didn’t mean he could leave her here.
The agent hadn’t confirmed Grickin’s identity before discharging his rifle. He was simply getting rid of any witnesses. And it probably didn’t matter if that witness was a civilian or a child.
A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 21 Page 15
