A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 16

by Kazuma Kamachi

  Acqua thought about it only for a moment. But he made no mention of it in his words. “The next time I contact you will be after it’s finished. Leaving aside whether the target lives or dies—”

  Suddenly, a loud noise interrupted him.

  It was the air.

  Something had blinked, as if blending in with the darkness. It was such a small light that a normal person’s sensory organs would not have been able to pick it up. Acqua detected danger there. Leaving the cell phone between his shoulder and ear, he took an easy leap backward.

  The air swirled of its own accord, then the space Acqua had just been standing in was gouged out along with the ground, shaved away and vanished.

  Acqua furrowed his brow at the odd phenomenon and eventually came up with a guess. They’re spreading some sort of fine particles into the air, ones that dismantle objects.

  If he had been well versed in science, he would have considered Bowing Images, nano-sized reflective alloys. They were ultra-small grains without circuitry or a power source that showed a specific reaction to particular frequencies. It was like using a TV remote control to operate a radio-controlled car—except to tear off singular cells in creatures.

  As Acqua was watching for the unseen power, another change occurred, this one in the giant planetarium screen making the artificial night sky. With a shrill buzz, a warning message began to transmit in the entire stratum.

  “Anoxic warning issued for all of Stratum Three. All citizens must either quickly evacuate to buildings designated as disaster countermeasures or equip household oxygen tanks. We repeat. Anoxic warning issued for all of Stratum Three…”

  “I see.” Acqua gave a fearless grin. “It looks like they plan to disperse these attack particles all over this stratum to eliminate my escape.”

  “A bad situation?”

  “Does it look like it?”

  Acqua muttered something under his breath, and the moisture in the air became his ally. He sensed the movements touching the moisture, getting a rough estimation of the Bowing Images’ dispersal pattern.

  Then he heard a soft sound of leaves scraping from nearby brush. He glanced over and saw a powered suit among the trees, its armor reflecting blue light. From a short distance away, he heard a different kind of start-up noise. They must have prepared short-term city armored police cars, making use of both gasoline engines and electric ones.

  He wasn’t smiling. “Testing the enemy’s strength, are they? I’ll introduce them to what I call my dirty mercenary style.”

  “I would prefer if you refrained from indiscreet bloodshed.”

  “I don’t know for sure, but they’re probably all unmanned. I don’t sense human presences in them. That must have been how they got this close, but…”

  Vroom!! A new sound split the air. It was the sound of Acqua pulling his especially large mace, over five meters long, from the shadows at his feet.

  “Simply wonderful, isn’t it? Academy City?” he said, heaving the metal lump onto his shoulder. “They went out of their way to make a battlefield where no blood had to be shed. How considerate. A perfect way to get used to things.”

  As if in response, the enemy group moved. In a corner of that nighttime park, several shadows surrounded him.

  A volley of bullets flew. Bowing Images shot toward him, too small to be seen by the naked eye.

  But Acqua didn’t fall. He dodged the bullets and blew away the Images, sometimes borrowing their power to accurately deal with the bullets—which were flying in unnaturally twisting paths—and immediately shifting to a counterattack.

  I don’t know how the science works, but there must be someone in command here, hiding somewhere.

  In a single breath, Acqua broke through their encirclement, his mace, over five meters long, stabbing into the side of an armored car like a spear. He ignored its weight, swinging the car itself around on his mace, crashing it into several powered suits. Then he swung the mace down toward the ground, causing the car caught on it to explode into a million pieces. Finally, after letting the Bowing Images floating in the air restrain him, by some spell, he walked calmly into the roiling flames.

  I will tear off these powered suits’ armor, wrench open the armored cars’ chassis, and check every last one of them!!

  Acqua of the Back, of God’s Right Seat, worked.

  While thunder and destruction dominated all.

  3

  Japan and England had a time difference of about nine hours. Right now, it was the middle of the night in Japan, but in London, it was still evening. Of course, because of their different latitudes, the English sun set earlier in the autumn and winter. The sky there was already growing purple.

  The Royal Academy of Arts.

  This museum of art, counted as one of the most prestigious in all England, also sponsored art schools to foster the next generation of artists. And even at this hour, the voices of lecturers had yet to wane.

  Standing on the platform as teacher, lit by fluorescent lighting, was Sherry Cromwell.

  “We’ll be discussing coats of arms today.”

  Her hair was yellow like a lion’s, and her skin was the color of chocolate. Her clothing was a ragged, worn, black gothic lolita dress. Sherry was known as a talented sculptor, too, but her aesthetic didn’t make sense in any works but her own…That, anyway, was her students’ opinion of her.

  “You know, coats of arms. The things with family crests on them. Not some strange, occult markings—though I suppose there are some of that variety, but that’s getting off topic.”

  A few stifled laughs from the students. They must have thought she was joking. The sorcerer Sherry ignored them and moved on.

  “What we call a coat of arms is actually a combination of several elements, but what I brought today is the one that goes in the center—the escutcheon.” Her voice was drawling. “I’m sure those here aim to earn your daily bread by putting paintbrush to canvas, but when you want to impart a message to a work you create, this type of knowledge sometimes comes in handy. Anyway, it’s a way of avoiding artist’s block. Basically, just ignore everything your teacher is saying.”

  There came a reserved knock on the lecture room door. With the example escutcheon up on the platform, Sherry glanced dubiously that way.

  The door opened slightly and without a sound, revealing a young office worker for this art school. She’d just arrived here this year. With a slight bend of her little head, she said, voice apologetic, “I’m sorry…There’s someone calling you from the British Library…”

  “Oh,” said Sherry, her finger running along the heraldry’s edge. She thought for a moment. “Guess you’re on your own for a while, class,” she said to her students with incredible flippancy, scratching her head and leaving the lecture room.

  When she went into the hallway, the petite office worker looked at her nervously. “I’m, well, sorry about that.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Sherry. “They like self-study better anyway. You can’t teach people how to make art. The ones who don’t like self-study aren’t cut out to be creators in the first place.”

  “I…I see…” The office worker smiled vaguely.

  In a slightly annoyed voice, Sherry asked, “Anyway, someone called?”

  “Oh, yes. They’re on the phone now. Please come to the office.”

  The office worker led Sherry into the room. One of the telephones on a business desk was blinking, indicating a call on hold.

  “That one?”

  “Yes. It’s the British Library…Are they asking about how to handle pieces of art?”

  “Something like that.”

  The British Museum and St. George’s Cathedral frequently contacted Sherry. The others in her life seemed to think the places were requesting appraisals or repairs on old pieces of art.

  The office worker bowed to her, then went back to her own desk. Sherry tiredly picked up the phone.

  An awfully relaxed female voice came over from the other end.
“Oh my. Am I correct in thinking that I’m speaking to Miss Sherry?”

  “…I just knew it would be you, Orsola. Christ. Don’t they have any other book specialists around there?”

  In response to Sherry’s extremely fed-up tone, the woman named Orsola giggled. “Well! You do know that bulk trash goes out on Mondays and Fridays.”

  “I get it, I get it. You’re rewinding your words. Just get to the point,” said Sherry flatly, urging her on. She’d learned how to deal with the woman of late.

  Orsola’s story went like this.

  “I’ve been doing some research into past accounts of magical incidents still in the British Library to find information on God’s Right Seat and Acqua of the Back.”

  “Yeah, you told me before I left this morning. Find anything?”

  “As a result of verifying things like eyewitness accounts of September thirtieth, the man in question, before taking on the name ‘Acqua of the Back,’ was apparently a central figure in England. There are several first-hand testimonies of this.”

  “And you told me that this afternoon.”

  “There are also a few testimonies that state he was a knight of England.”

  “Huh?” Sherry frowned in thought for the first time. Acqua of the Back, a Roman Orthodox follower, was a knight of England…?

  In modern-day England, the peerage of “knight” was a public decoration. It had nothing to do with family. The queen would confer the title directly on any who made important achievements for the country. Knighthood wasn’t passed on to children or grandchildren, either. It was sort of like a national honor award.

  But apart from that, a sizable faction called the Knights still existed behind the scenes in England. They took up swords to protect the royalty and the people, treating any who would threaten them as an enemy, and risked their lives to wipe them out. And, just like Far Eastern samurai, they were supposed to have vanished with the development of firearms.

  “…To think a leader of another denomination would have once been one of our knights,” said Sherry. “If that’s true, we have a big problem on our hands. In the worst case, Academy City could put us through the ringer and say this Acqua of the Back incident was our responsibility.”

  “However, when I looked at the records of knight names preserved in Buckingham Palace, I didn’t find anyone who matched Acqua of the Back’s characteristics.”

  “Then your info was a false lead?” asked Sherry. Perhaps it was a case of a magic-using mercenary being mistaken for one.

  “Hmm,” replied Orsola, seeming to ponder for a moment. “It is true that I couldn’t find him in the knight name records, but…”

  “Eh?”

  “Anyone chosen as a knight prepares an escutcheon for their family, yes? I contacted a craftsman on the outskirts of London, and he had an order form for an escutcheon from an unknown person…They used a pseudonym, but apparently, it was canceled part of the way through production.”

  “…I see.” Sherry’s lips curled. “A coat of arms’ design encodes lineage, history, and role. You can investigate them to uncover the identity of this knight who isn’t in the database.”

  “Yes…I decided there might be information to be gained from the illustrations. I sent the order form to you, with them, um, ‘over fax.’”

  Sherry looked at the fax machine just as it was spitting out paper. The young office worker from before ran over to it.

  Sherry got the bundle from her, about ten pages in all, then spread the pages out on her desk. She ran her index finger over what was written. This was more like a machine blueprint than a piece of art. The pages were in monochrome and had color specifications written in all over, which really only served to deepen that impression.

  “…Two main colors—blue for the base, with green to decorate. The animals being used…A dragon, a unicorn, and…Is this woman a selkie? The shield is divided in four, and if there are three animals to place on it, that means…”

  “Does it tell you anything?”

  Eventually, after gazing at the illustrations, Sherry sighed. “Something simple, yeah.”

  “I see.”

  “A dragon, a unicorn, and a selkie. All creatures that don’t actually exist,” explained Sherry. “The colors of the coat of arms are odd, too. You can’t overlap a basic color like blue with another like green. It’s against the rules…It’s so indecent it makes me want to laugh. This guy must have been really unhappy about being placed on the list of Knights.”

  Like a phonograph, Sherry translated the information on the figures into words.

  “I’m almost certain this person was welcomed by the royal faction and, unable to refuse, grudgingly accepted a summons to the knighting ceremony. Which means…he was a combat pro working as a freelancer before becoming a knight. And probably doing work that benefited England…For a lowly mercenary to be chosen as a knight indicates he followed through with his own upright moral code even on dirty battlefields. There’s no more annoying enemy than one without any dirt on their record.”

  Just to be sure, she checked the date on the order form. It was from over ten years ago. The fact that a craftsman had been cherishing this order form, which was both old and supposedly canceled, gave her a glimpse of how much popularity Acqua of the Back had had during his days working for England.

  “Also,” added Orsola, “the requirements for being named a knight in the magic world state that only someone from England can receive it. Should I create a list of mercenaries stationed at bases in England?”

  “No,” said Sherry, tapping on the animals drawn on the pages with her index finger. “A dragon, a unicorn, and a selkie. All three of these appear in legends across the entire United Kingdom, not just in England—in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, too.”

  “…? I was under the impression that unicorns were from Greece.”

  “Elizabeth the First supposedly had a unicorn horn in her personal collection. Turned out it was just a regular animal bone, though,” muttered Sherry. “In any case, this is someone born in the United Kingdom, a mercenary-for-hire working for England’s benefit…This whole story of a lone-wolf merc who wasn’t in any rigid sorcerer’s society being welcomed as a knight is pretty suspicious. And given how they couldn’t turn down a request they weren’t happy with…Check anyone the royal faction treated with some importance.”

  4

  The fifty members of Amakusa, Saiji Tatemiya first and foremost, were in a back alley in District 22’s seventh stratum. Tatemiya had gotten a call; he was holding his phone in one hand while talking to his comrades.

  “Looks like an unmanned Academy City mech unit ran into Acqua of the Back in a park on the third stratum.”

  That put everyone present on edge. The third stratum was where Kamijou and Itsuwa had just been attacked.

  It went without saying who won the fight this time, as well. Acqua of the Back was a monster, and they knew beyond a doubt that a crowd of mass-produced machines wouldn’t be enough to kill him.

  Tatemiya looked at Ushibuka, who was nearby.

  “…Are we going?” asked Ushibuka.

  “No,” said Tatemiya, shaking his head and clapping his phone closed. “We’d be going in blind. I think we all know how that would turn out. Let’s wait for word from England. We need optimal preparation and an optimal strategy, then we’ll challenge him to an optimal fight at an optimal time.” He paused. “This is the final battle. This is what it means to get serious.”

  Acqua of the Back had floored Kamijou, their precious comrade and one who saved their lives, but though they knew his current location, they would endure for now. Hellish flames probably raged in Tatemiya’s mind. But for the sake of a single victory, he stifled all those emotions—and told them that they would wait.

  “Now isn’t the optimal time. To make the best plan, we have time to wait for Miss Orsola’s data organization skills. What does that leave us to do now? It’s simple—we have to make optimal preparations.”
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br />   Tatemiya looked around. The scattered members of Amakusa got to work cleaning and maintaining their swords, spears, and other weapons. To follow their principle of hiding and waiting, they normally had to give up a certain amount of weapon hardness or power, but now they were reinforcing them, removing their limiters.

  “…Please, wait about three hours.”

  Suddenly, someone spoke. Tatemiya looked over and found Itsuwa, wearing a leather belt to tuck up her sleeve like the Shinsengumi. She was looking down as she reinforced her spear—actually, it was almost a full-fledged retrofit. Since her spear was made of several short sticks that attached to one another, it necessarily fell short on hardiness. Now, however, she was spraying a fixative on the length of the shaft, making the resin weapon a size thicker, while also using sandpaper to polish the surface to a smooth one.

  “It will take a bit of time for me to get this into a state where I’m comfortable using it, and to sharpen the blade to use against that monster…Please leave it to me. He hit me directly with his attacks, so I know what kind of weapon I need to fight him skillfully…”

  After using the sandpaper to reshape the spear, if there was a part of the resin that had gotten too thin, she sprayed it once again. She repeated that process several dozen times, again and again and again.

  Scratch! Scratch!! Even the noise of her whittling the resin down sounded like it had bloodlust in it. Tatemiya felt a minor chill run down his spine. She was like a psycho killer, polishing her knife in the middle of the night. He thought, Uh, crap. Did I get ahead of myself when I criticized her before?

  Nearby, Ushibuka must have been thinking the same thing. He whispered into Tatemiya’s ear.

  “(…What now? Now it’s like you incited her too much and set a petrochemical complex on fire.)”

  “(…W-well!! Listen here. She was acting like an empty shell or something in that hospital, so, well, yeah!! I was just cheering her up.)”