A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 16

by Kazuma Kamachi

  “What would you do if I told you my reason for fighting?” In contrast, Acqua was completely calm and lucid. “For one who acts with conviction, excuses as to the path he’s walked are unnecessary. My actions will speak with their results, for how much truth can there be in a play with only dialogue?”

  Between them in their heated contest, the bloody letters on the side of the mace ignited a small explosion of manifested mana. The saints used the chance to put distance between themselves and regroup.

  Kanzaki winced slightly, and Acqua readied his giant mace again, posture unchanging.

  He was a strong opponent who would not falter; he likely had a single conviction supporting him. But Kaori Kanzaki couldn’t even get a glimpse of it.

  “Show me, saint of the Far East.”

  Acqua’s body, his inner presence, instantly grew two sizes larger. It wasn’t an issue of solely muscle, either. It was as though the mace he held, from tip to tip, had grown heavier and increased in pressure.

  “Show me that those are more than just words. Show me the reason within your blade. Show me without words.”

  The saints clashed again.

  With speed that none could follow and with power none could attain.

  2

  Touma Kamijou’s eyelids moved.

  It was so slight that it didn’t seem like he’d done it on purpose. It was more along the lines of a spasm, as he slowly, very slowly, cracked his eyelids open. But even then, he didn’t acquire vision for a few seconds. His focus and perspective wavered, until finally, his brain perceived what looked like a hospital ceiling.

  …Whe…where…?

  He didn’t know where he was. Even if he’d seen the place before, his brain might not have been processing his visual information. His nose picked up the scent of disinfectant alcohol more quickly than his mind figured out what he was seeing.

  …What…happened…?

  He felt adhesive tape on his chest and abdomen. Electrodes were probably attached to them for taking readings.

  The lights in the room were dimmed, but he felt someone else here. A subtle pressure near the middle of his bedding…

  His eyes moved in that direction, where he found Index sleeping on a pipe chair next to the bed. He couldn’t see her face through her long hair, but she’d probably been here for a while now.

  It gave him a very slight prick of pain.

  “…”

  A little bit of energy returned to his limply hanging hand.

  He could tell the blood was circulating to his head in response to regaining consciousness.

  Acqua of the Back.

  Itsuwa.

  The Amakusa.

  Kamijou had passed out after being launched from the suspension bridge, but their battle must have still been going on. He hoped it was. Of course, there was a chance, albeit very slim, that the Amakusa had already won, and it was over. Unfortunately, he couldn’t see that happening—Acqua was genuinely a monster. He knew there was nothing a high school student like him could do if he stood up to the man, but it would obviously be better for them to have as much combat strength as they could.

  Acqua had viewed the power in his right hand as dangerous.

  That meant he still had the chance to influence the battle if he used it.

  His right hand, which could even erase miracles from God.

  He gave it a look, then nodded.

  He looked at Index again, slumped on top of his bed and sleeping.

  The girl, keenly and earnestly worried about him.

  …I’m sorry, Index. I’ll apologize later; I’ll apologize to death…

  And yet:

  So please, just let me do what I need to right now.

  3

  Pow!! An explosion ripped through the Academy City night.

  It wasn’t from flames. It was a shock wave from a massive eruption of water.

  Acqua had used sorcery to control the vast stores of river water, creating a giant hammer that almost scraped against the underground city’s ceiling. Kanzaki’s wires cut through it brutally. Tons of water in the shape of a construction arm were instantly vaporized, sending steam everywhere. But Acqua controlled that steam in turn, converting it into a glittering cloud of diamond dust.

  He had more than just a hammer at his beck and call. The entire fourth stratum, almost two kilometers across, was already in his grasp. Artificially laid rivers made completely dry, every drop of them floating in the air. It formed a slender line, drawing itself across the entire stratum and forming a complex, wondrous magic circle.

  With each formation, switch, and re-creation of the magic circle, another barrage of varied spells came to Acqua’s aid.

  Attacks of all shapes and sizes assaulted Kanzaki.

  Several spears of ice, each close to thirty meters long, flew at her.

  A watery tail, undulating like a whip, lashed out at her from various angles.

  A giant, ball-shaped mass swung down at her, then swept out to the side.

  And Acqua himself, slipping through the cracks, made his way up to Kanzaki.

  His strategy: combine several attacks, each of which was a one-hit kill move, and then send her chances of death skyrocketing even further. By Acqua’s prediction, after seventy seconds, Kanzaki should have lost enough speed for him to land a fatal wound.

  “!!”

  But even after that time had elapsed, Kanzaki counterattacked.

  In response to the watery magic circle changing its form over and over, Kanzaki spread her seven wires out in all directions, immediately creating a bounded field to deal with it. She was prepared to be his lesser in true ability, so she sometimes cut through the water jets, sometimes dove inside one to bend its path and cause his spell to fail, and sometimes hijacked one mid-cast, using it for herself.

  It was like electronic warfare—magical hacking.

  Water and wires. The two networks tore each other apart, created openings, outwitted each other, all in an effort to sap their limited world’s ability.

  Countless rays of light painted the world. The water Acqua’s magic circles constructed, and the wires Kanzaki used to break it. Acqua, who filled the entire underground city, and Kanzaki who stood alone in a space inside it.

  As they carried out this staggering battle of sorcery in their minds, they also pushed forward with direct hand-to-hand martial combat in parallel. They performed feats in one battle or the other that normal sorcerers wouldn’t be able to follow if they were fully focused, and they did both at the same time.

  Explosions burst through the air. The space between Kanzaki and Acqua began to haze. Steel across steel, swung from different directions, intersecting and colliding.

  He uses the Adoration of Mary…While wielding her katana and her wires simultaneously, Kanzaki clenched her teeth. It wasn’t merely pain causing the expression.

  A special law that twisted the rigid rules of Crossist techniques: That was how Acqua had explained it, but the Adoration of Mary was for something else to begin with. It was a chance for the defeated to rise again. Whether a person had broken the rules and strayed from the path by committing a sin or causing tragedies terrible enough to abandon God, the image of the Virgin Mother would shed tears for their sake, smile to them in their dreams, and grant them the ability to carry out miracles. People everywhere used that as a starting point, devoting their minds to prayer, and in doing so, unconsciously used the spell.

  It was said that was how certain people could spread chaotic miracles about. They would be misunderstood as worshipping someone other than the Son of God, but that was wrong. The true nature of the Adoration of Mary was that it stopped the tragedies that happened in the gaps of the network built by the Church and the clergy. Mary didn’t put Crossist society out of order. There was simply enough of a reason for people to kneel and pray for the safety of their family, their friends, their comrades.

  Mary.

  The highest saint in history—the one who had performed the greatest feat
in all of Crossist history—giving birth to Christ. She’d accepted the angel’s words so she could grant the people relief and salvation, conceived Jesus, and prepared herself for a path laden with trials alongside her husband. And the Adoration was the crystallization of that faith, created by the feelings of those who adored her.

  And that.

  Those feelings…!!

  Logical interpretation of the Adoration of Mary spell, which was displayed in the form of straightforward, simple prayer, was difficult, and there were many reports of stone statues that depicted her being miraculous items, while completely missing the mark. The streets were rampant with swindlers, too, using that fact to their own ends. But Acqua was even crueler than they. He was creating actual miracles and using them to commit atrocities.

  “You are quite something,” came Acqua’s voice amid the thunderous claps of clashing longsword and blunt weapon. “To think you would bring two kilometers and five thousand tons of magic circle to submission using feats of strength.

  “But,” he continued, “it looks to me as though your body has already passed its limit.”

  “?!”

  When his indication caused Kanzaki’s movements to dull slightly, Acqua’s attacks increased in intensity and rained down on her. The difference between them seemed ready to open wide in the blink of an eye, but she swung her sword again, meaning to turn the tables.

  When activating Single Glint, Kanzaki forcibly drew out power exceeding the momentum her physical body could control. There was no way for her to fight for long in such a state, meaning her Single Glint had been polished by necessity into a sword-drawing technique that would end the contest in a single moment.

  But such instant-kill techniques didn’t work on Acqua.

  He stood before her as a saint, with power equal to or greater than her own, and on top of it, he also held the mark of God’s Right Seat, radically powering up his body. Kanzaki could only step into this world for a few moments; Acqua of the Back advanced through it steadily.

  She bit down. It was almost like he was an angel.

  Acqua of the Back presided over the power of Gabriel.

  Even Misha Kreutzev only seemed to achieve imperfect manifestation…By odd coincidence, she’d fought the real archangel of that name once before. But this is still strange. I sense something more than that from Acqua…Urgh?!

  This string of attacks seemed too much for a saint with similar capacity. Acqua felt as though he rivaled that archangel, imperfect though it may have been.

  But how was that possible?

  Could he really store so much power without destroying himself?

  “Hnn!!”

  She heard him exhale. For a moment, an odd, floating sensation enveloped her. Eventually, she realized that he’d stopped his relentless chain, then stored up energy to attack again. But by that time, his full-power strike was upon her.

  The giant mace came down hard at her from directly overhead; Kanzaki positioned her katana horizontally to stop it. When they clashed, a shhh-thud went off, sending an enormous shock rattling through her katana to her arms, her torso, and down to her feet all at once, causing her boot soles to dig inches into the ground. It was hard tile underfoot, but she sunk into it like it was mud. The attack hadn’t struck her head, but she felt herself waver, as though it had shaken her brain.

  But she endured it.

  And the moment after Acqua’s mighty attack, with all his weight behind it, there would come an opening.

  “Ooooohhhhhh!!”

  With a roar, Kanzaki followed through with her Seven Heavens Sword.

  Perfect timing; a pristine opportunity: a move to pull herself back from the brink of disaster.

  Acqua’s mace stopped even that. Ga-keeeen!! A dull shock wave proclaimed far and wide that it had dispersed the power behind her katana.

  “It has been three years since the last battle of saints. Such a long time. This has been good exercise.” At close range, Acqua gave an emotionless smile. “But let’s end this. I came here to do a job. I have no time to amuse myself with sport.”

  “?!”

  Unable to properly respond, Kanzaki pulled back her katana and swung even harder, delivering a relentless attack.

  But Acqua wasn’t in front of her.

  She sensed him with her mind, rather than her vision: Her target was above.

  He had jumped about twenty meters up. A leap like a rocket launch, impossible for normal people. Becoming a single point in the air, he placed the satellite representing the power of Gabriel, the moon, at his back.

  Strictly speaking, he didn’t. It was only the planetarium screen, torn to shreds, displaying the night sky.

  When he got near the ceiling, Acqua turned himself one hundred and eighty degrees, then placed his feet on the artificial canopy.

  “!!” Kanzaki immediately tried to pursue, but the damage from earlier—and, most of all, the strain on her body that she’d been accumulating—created a few instants’ lag.

  Stopped in place, a chill surrounded her from all sides. It was the rhythm of life and death, which only true warriors could sense. One could glimpse it when the entire flow of the battle had shifted, shaken. Like the slanting of a seesaw that didn’t physically exist.

  And overhead was Acqua.

  “The Holy Mother mitigates severe punishment.”

  In response to his whispers, the moon hanging behind him gave off a burst of light. No—the mechanism displaying video on the planetarium screen had come under some kind of load and shorted out. Crack-snap!! Several sparks escaped, as though ticking down a countdown to the unknown.

  No normal sorcerer could use that sort of logic—but Acqua’s Adoration of Mary forced it to work.

  This is…!! The bluish-white flash enveloped the steel mace, and she could tell it was storing an immense amount of power.

  “This power, which at times appeals directly to God’s law. Let it wrap you in mercy and ascend to heaven!!”

  With a cry, he kicked the ceiling away from him and lunged downward. The already damaged false sky collapsed in its entirety from the strike, and the blue tranquility returned to a jet-black darkness.

  A straight-line descent.

  And a giant mace swinging down at her.

  What unleashed from there was not a slash, nor a stab, nor a firing, nor an explosion, nor a burst, nor a severing, nor a crushing.

  It was simple pressure.

  The overwhelming destructive force pushing down surpassed even a small planetary collision.

  All sound vanished from the world then.

  Even the sound of the world breaking was gone.

  In a circle one hundred meters around Acqua, the ground of Academy City District 22’s fourth stratum found itself brutally razed by his massacring attack. The descent’s impact didn’t even let a crater form—it simply smashed the steel and concrete ground to bits, transforming it into a giant hole.

  It didn’t matter if the ground had shelter-level toughness or anything else.

  The destroyed land across that hundred-meter circle merely rained down into the fifth stratum below.

  Explosions, quakes, and so much dust.

  The sequence of smashing and crashing echoed on and on.

  Water poured down like a waterfall; the rivers and water power generator pipes had been severed.

  “Guh…urgh…”

  Amid it all lay Kaori Kanzaki.

  She’d stopped the attack itself with her Seven Heavens Sword, but the ground beneath her feet hadn’t been able to withstand it.

  The immense pressure had cast her down, along with a mountain of rubble, from a height of over twenty meters. Now, she lay faceup on a chunk of concrete.

  Her body was in tatters. Even though Acqua’s attack hadn’t landed a direct hit, its pressure went through her weapon to damage her. She’d been caught between his extra-large mace and the man-made ground, and now a dark red liquid dripped from every part of her—from her arms, from her legs, from h
er torso.

  One of the saints had been brought to this.

  Immediately, she realized that if she was hit with that again, she would die.

  However…

  “…” As she grated her teeth in frustration, there was no fear or shock on her face.

  Only anger.

  She was directly below the crater, in the fifth stratum. She’d fallen into a large plaza, so thankfully, it didn’t seem like the collapse had killed anyone. That, however, was merely being wise after the event. What if this had been a residential area? What if someone had happened to be walking through the plaza? Just thinking about it gave Kanzaki a chill down her spine. Academy City must have implemented some sort of measure, but unlike the fourth stratum, the bare minimum magical Opila ward wasn’t even here.

  He was a saint like her.

  He had a talent not even twenty people in the world had.

  Why was this absurdity the only place he wielded that power?

  “Acqua…,” she growled, dragging her upper body into a sitting position and snatching up her sword from where it had fallen atop the rubble.

  Acqua of the Back had made a rough landing on the fifth stratum ground with her. “Where is the Imagine Breaker?” he asked, the mace that had caused this incredible destruction laid lightly on his shoulder. “Or will I meet him eventually if I crash through more strata?”

  “Acquaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!”

  Kanzaki blasted to her feet so forcefully, her own blood lashed out around her.

  Her Seven Heavens Sword, held in a two-handed grip, wavered unsteadily. She’d clenched her fists so tightly that she’d broken several nails, and red blood dripped between her fingers. The immense impact she couldn’t completely withstand had damaged her from the inside, and when she tried to take a breath, she ended up coughing up a chunk of blood.

  But the light in her eyes was no weaker than before.

  And as long as that light didn’t fade, her blade would never stop.