A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 16

by Kazuma Kamachi

  “Ow, ow, ow! Why are you so worked up today, Touma?!”

  “Now that I think about it, why are you the ‘do nothing but eat, sleep, and watch TV’ type anyway?! You’ll be working from now on. Go get a sponge and the cleaning spray and clean the bathroom!!”

  “Aww, but the Magical Powered Kanamin Integral reruns are about to start!”

  “I don’t care—just do some work around here already!!”

  As Index did nothing but act baffled, Kamijou threw her into the bathroom. Looking at an upstanding citizen like Itsuwa just cleansed your soul. Compared to when others were nearby, like that flame-throwing, cigarette-stinking sorcerer priest or that multi-spy who went “nya, nya” every day of the year, Index seemed relatively “normal.” But when he really thought about it, “girl with common sense” was a title he only felt right giving to someone like Itsuwa.

  Anyway, I should be an upstanding citizen myself and clean up the room, he thought…But he didn’t feel like it was a fair trade, since Itsuwa was making him dinner and he’d messed up the room on his own. Still better than doing nothing, he figured—a slapped-together pet theory in the end—before bundling up the open magazines littered about the floor.

  And then it happened.

  “What…What on earth is that fundamentally Japanese smell?!”

  As soon as he heard a girl’s sudden cry, there came a krrrsh-krrrsh from the veranda that sounded like plastic being destroyed. Kamijou turned, startled, and Itsuwa stopped cooking in surprise; they both saw Maika Tsuchimikado there in her maid clothes.

  She must have torn right through the board separating the verandas for each room, which were kindly not supposed to be broken unless there was a fire or other emergency, and invaded.

  “You’ll pay for that!!” cried Kamijou bitterly. “I was finally feeling clean, like an upstanding citizen, and now another freak shows up!!”

  Maika ignored him and sniffed around, getting closer and closer to the kitchen, her normally impassive face seeming extremely focused.

  “I smell it, I can smell it! …That miso soup…You’re using dried scallops ground to a powder as the secret ingredient, aren’t you…?”

  “H-how did you know?! Not even my mother ever figured that out!!”

  Itsuwa, the chef, was shocked she’d been labeled a gourmet.

  Mothers really are the root of all cooking! thought Kamijou, a little sentimental at the hidden domestic word. Meanwhile, Itsuwa, who had just served a small amount of miso soup onto a small plate to test how it tasted, thought for a moment, then, with slow motions, handed the small plate to the girl in maid clothes.

  Completely silent, Maika received it with formal gestures like a tea ceremony, bringing it to her lips and pausing for a moment—then gwaaah!! Her eyes popped open.

  “Th-this woman…She’s good…”

  “Wh-what?”

  “Gwooorraaaahhhhh!!” she roared, her tone of voice doing a one-eighty. “This…This cannot stand!!” She went back to the veranda with alacrity and returned to the next room over.

  From their open window came the conversation of siblings.

  “Wh-what?! Why are you taking away today’s white stew, nya?! Wait, what about my dinner?!”

  “Quiet, outsider!! Now that I’ve seen something like that, there’s no way something like this could stand up to it! J-just you wait! Soon, you’ll have a taste of true miso soup!!”

  “What?! I was perfectly fine with that stew just now!!” moaned the blond-haired, sunglasses-wearing agent.

  Itsuwa’s shoulders perked up ominously. “U-um, have I heard that voice before? In Avignon…? More importantly, what on earth happened to that girl?”

  I don’t really know, but you probably struck some strange chord to make that maid candidate view you as a rival, thought Kamijou, about to say it before deciding not to. Itsuwa was a decent person. She didn’t seem used to weirdos doing odd things around her.

  For Kamijou’s part, he could only think one thing.

  He prayed that she, if nobody else, would remain untainted by these oddballs.

  7

  For a while, he questioned the relationship between Index and Itsuwa, but once Index ate Itsuwa’s cooking, she seemed to completely soften up toward her. Right now, she was idling about the floor, troubling Itsuwa by wanting an eighth helping. The cat, for his part, was having his own fun chewing on a rolled-up hand towel Itsuwa brought.

  Kamijou sighed. Well, at least it didn’t turn into major trouble. If he’d known it was this easy to get Index in a better mood, maybe he’d have to start keeping a constant stock of fish sausages to throw her when she was angry…Though, no, he thought, correcting himself; she was sure to bite him as soon as she realized he was hiding treats from her. Nothing ever went that smoothly.

  In any case, with dinner done, there was nothing more to do. He didn’t have any homework today, and he was never the type to study on his own, so the only things left were to take a bath and go to sleep.

  But that was where the problem happened.

  “How the heck did you manage to break the bathtub with a sponge and spray cleaner, Index?!”

  “B-but I just did what you said! I scrubbed it!!”

  As Kamijou and Index’s shouting echoed through the night streets, Itsuwa smiled painfully. The three of them had gone out for a simple reason. The bathtub in Kamijou’s room (actually, the water heater) was busted and unusable, so they’d ended up walking over to a nearby public bath.

  “By the way, I would be willing to bet that you, in fact, did not scrub it like poor Kamijou said! And why did I smell plastic melting from the faucet? Because you poured undiluted cleaning detergent all over it! How do you like that detective work?!”

  “What? I thought you were supposed to put the detergent on to make it clean.”

  “Woo-hah! There it is—that wondrous natural confusion of yours!! And thanks to you, the inside of the water heater got burned and almost set the dorm on fire!!”

  “Ah…ah-ha-ha. W-well, it’s a nice change of pace to use an outside bath once in a while, isn’t it?” interrupted Itsuwa with a godlike support play.

  Kamijou and Index quieted down. People generally stopped being able to raise hell with someone meekly worrying about them.

  Itsuwa flipped through a small notebook. “Academy City has a surprising number of public baths. It has the traditional indoor variety, natural hot springs, and even spa resorts…Oh, why not go here? It’s apparently attached to an amusement facility.”

  “…Wait, Itsuwa, how do you have such detailed information about Academy City?” Even Kamijou, a local, didn’t know there were natural hot springs here. And she wasn’t holding a guidebook distributed by a city publisher—it was an old notepad, written in so much that it was almost falling apart.

  “(…Um, well, getting an understanding of the local geography is crucial when guarding a target…,)” Itsuwa whispered in a barely audible voice. “(And since Acqua is on the magic side, I thought the ‘lines’ running through the city would help predict how he moves.)”

  …It was all well and good that she was passionate about her work, but Kamijou was a little worried. Anti-Skill wouldn’t attack before Acqua, in order to follow the rules that upheld secrecy, right? “So where are these leisure baths anyway?”

  “Um, it looks like School District 22. This is District 7, so that means it’s the next district over.”

  “School District 22…The underground city?” Despite its status as smallest of all the districts in surface area at about two square kilometers, the super-futuristic spot stood out even in Academy City—which was already sci-fi to begin with—for its development having gone hundreds of meters belowground.

  “Hmm,” he muttered. “The last train’s already gone, though.”

  Itsuwa continued flipping through her rusty notebook. “It’s not very far away. We’ll get there soon if we borrow a rental motorcycle with a sidecar. Thankfully, it looks like there’s a shop for that ne
arby, too.”

  “Wait, you can ride motorcycles, Itsuwa?”

  “Well yes, kind of. I can drive cars, motorcycles, small boats…I can’t fly an airplane, but I could manage a helicopter…”

  She spoke as though she was ashamed. Did it bother her that she couldn’t fly an airplane?

  “Japan’s transit system is highly developed,” she continued, “so I don’t need it here that much, but…Depending on the job, there could be long stretches of desert or plains nearby.”

  She wasn’t especially bragging or anything. She was squeaking like a fly, as though she’d been scolded for something. Anyway, that would mean she didn’t have a Japanese driver’s license, but an international one. From Kamijou’s point of view, just riding a unicycle was out of this world, so he already had respect for her.

  I’m learning a lot of surprising things about Itsuwa the normal girl today, he thought, a little impressed, as they decided to walk into a branch of a motorcycle rental place near the dorms. With all the students in Academy City, there was more demand for them than rental cars, so there were more of these kinds of shops.

  Kamijou had a staring contest with the price tag on the motorcycle and eventually gave a frightful face, like he’d been hit by lightning. “I…I see. You’re not a student from District 7, so you don’t get the local discount!!”

  “Um, well, that’s fine. I have plenty of funds,” said Itsuwa.

  But he had the accounting skills of a housewife, and he knew one basic rule: get everything for as cheaply as possible. In the end, they rented a medium-sized bike on a late-night special, mainly for people who missed the last train and couldn’t get home. They paid extra to have the sidecar attached.

  Itsuwa was the one driving, and Kamijou sat perched behind her. Index was in the sidecar.

  “Touma,” said Index, “I’m sensing something from how we set this up.”

  “N-no, you’re not. You see, ladies first, a-and the sidecar is the comfiest seat here, so poor old Kamijou had no choice but to give it up,” he stated in a suspicious-sounding monotone—the best he could manage, after his heart started pounding as soon as he’d put his arms around Itsuwa.

  As Itsuwa tried to be too helpful and push the helmet down over the nun’s habit, she suddenly realized something. “Oh. Was it all right to leave your cat at the dorm?”

  “We can’t exactly bring animals into public baths,” said Kamijou. “Our cat is the type to just laze around all the time, so I think he’ll be fine.”

  Incidentally, the calico was currently in front of a super-high-class scratching post Itsuwa had brought with her, trembling and wondering, C-cypress?! It smells really good for some reason—she’s not going to get mad at me if I use my claws on it, right?! But nobody noticed that.

  In any case, once Index mastered the proper way to wear the helmet, Itsuwa started up the motorcycle’s engine.

  “Oh, wow!” she said. “Academy City sure is empty at night. The steering and the sound of the engine feel good, and the road conditions are clean. I might accidentally start speeding…Maybe we should have bitten the bullet and gone for one of the city’s famous superconductive linear cycles. I think I heard that it uses magnetic force to repel the wheels from the housing, thus moving the donut-shaped wheels using electricity or something.”

  “Well, I don’t know much about bikes, but compared to the technology outside…And I’d like to request that you drive safely—Itsuwa, you idiot! Stop! You’re going way too fast!!”

  Kamijou reactively tightened his grip around Itsuwa’s stomach, but he wasn’t thinking well enough to realize she was happy for the reaction and speeding up because of it.

  His dorm was on the edge of District 7. District 22 was adjacent to it and close enough to get to on foot. Itsuwa had brought a motorcycle simply out of consideration that they’d feel cold after the bath and want to get back home quickly.

  When they left District 7 and entered District 22, Index’s eyes went wide in the sidecar. “Wow, wow! Touma, there’s a jungle gym! A humongous jungle gym!!”

  District 22’s aboveground portion was very different from the other school districts. There were no normal houses and buildings here—it was just lines and lines of wind turbines. And they weren’t the electric pole replacements like they were in normal districts, but actual rows and columns of pillars like the cube of a steel building’s frame; the propellers stacked upward as well, reaching about thirty stories high. It looked exactly as Index said—like a giant jungle gym.

  As they headed for the gate to the underground city, Itsuwa, hands on the handlebars, said, “Since District 22 is all underground, it can’t rely on wind power or solar power like the other districts can. Plus, it apparently uses so much electricity that they had to build generators on every little bit of the district to provide enough.”

  The strangely erudite Itsuwa guided the motorcycle through the squarish gate leading underground.

  Beneath the surface, District 22 was a giant standing cylinder, two kilometers in diameter. The road crawled around the outside of the cylinder, spiraling downward as it went. If you put it together with the opposite lane going upward, it would look like the spinning pole in front of barber shops.

  The tunnel, illuminated with orange lights, seemed to gently curve around forever. The decorative lighting here was different from normal. Index waved her hands in the air in delight.

  Kamijou breathed in the air, tinged with the smell of exhaust. “Underground cities don’t go too well with Japan, huh?” he said. “I’d be super-scared of earthquakes and stuff. No matter how strong you make the walls, if the entire fault in the ground moves, it’ll all get torn apart, right?”

  “They do make a point of claiming their earthquake provisions are perfect, though,” mused Itsuwa. “Oh, yes—I believe they say that this spiraling road we’re on acts like a giant spring, and when an earthquake happens, it softens the impact.”

  “…That is a completely groundless rumor. Wait, why do you know about urban legends? They wouldn’t even be on the blueprints.”

  Itsuwa passed this off with an awkward laugh, then said, “By the way, what stratum are these leisure baths on?”

  “Um, I believe the third.”

  “Touma, what’s a stratum?” asked Index. “Does it have to do with rocks?”

  “No, not that kind of stratum,” he said. “They’re like floors. District 22 is divided into ten underground strata. And we’re apparently going to the third one from the top.”

  Their conversation went on, and before long, they saw the entrance to Stratum 3, ninety meters belowground. Itsuwa turned on her blinker, decelerated, and turned onto the road leading to it.

  Once they went through, the view really opened up. “Wow…!!” Index gaped.

  Unlike the orange in the tunnel, this space was a pale blue. It was giant—two meters in diameter, and about twenty meters tall. The ceiling was a giant planetarium screen, giving a real-time display of the starry skies captured on surface cameras. And because the city’s illumination was all the same color, it gave the impression to those who entered of bursting straight into the middle of a sea of stars.

  Groups of widely spaced buildings towered up as if to break through the planetarium screens, while at the same time functioning as pillars to support this underground city. Of course, the city’s roof was a steel frame carriage to distribute the weight, much like a gymnasium’s. But apparently, the roof was built so a steel frame was all it needed to support itself. There were several redundant designs in place to support things if it went awry, as well.

  Index turned around and around in the sidecar, looking at the scenery. “Are we actually underground? There’s a river, too! And a forest!!”

  “That forest is apparently an application of hydroponic technologies found inside agricultural buildings,” explained Itsuwa. “In addition to purifying the air, it’s useful for living as well, for mental health purposes. And the water is ostensibly an important power so
urce in this underground city. It falls to each of the strata in turn, all the while producing water power for them.” For some reason, Itsuwa seemed like a tour bus guide to Academy City today.

  Index tilted her head. “Itsuwa, why does it need so much electricity?”

  “Hmm. The biggest reason is probably the pumps. They have to be able to get oxygen from the surface and then pump the carbon dioxide back out. And they have to purge rainwater and domestic wastewater, so large pumps are indispensable. Forty percent of District 22’s electricity consumption supposedly goes into operating the pumps, and it’s one of the obstacles to using a place like this for practical purposes.”

  Most of Academy City’s generators relied on wind power, so they could generate however much they wanted without there being much need for worry regarding fuel expenses and environmental destruction. But it didn’t work like that in other countries and regions. With environmental issues a much-discussed topic and the price of petroleum increasing by the day, constructing an underground city while having to rely on fossil fuels was realistically too difficult a proposition. Of course, one of the reasons was that unlike Academy City, with its clear city limits, bigger nations with a lot more arable land didn’t need to build a city underground.

  Well, getting your research to show results and actually bringing it into the market are different issues, after all, thought Kamijou.

  Their sidecar-attached motorcycle raced through the man-made ocean of stars. Kamijou, riding in the backseat, pointed to the decorative illumination on a building in the distance they could now see. “Hm? Hey, Itsuwa, are those the leisure baths you were talking about?”

  “Oh, I think you’re right.”

  “Isn’t that a pretty popular place, though?”

  “Well, yes. Apparently, it’s third in the city’s bath rankings.”

  …Is that kind of info really going to help guard me from Acqua?

  Kamijou had his doubts, but Itsuwa didn’t. “What about it?” she asked.