A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 7 (11 page)

There was a big metal basin in the middle of the tent. And there was a metal bucket hanging from the tent’s ceiling, right above the basin. There was something like a watering can spout in the bottom of the bucket and a faucet attached to it. It looked like a simple shower, where you put hot water into the bucket and turned the faucet in order to get it to come out. And in reality, water
was
flowing from it at the moment.

And in the middle of the basin area…At the very center of the tent, still being blessed with a rain of hot water…

“…Touma?”

…was a nun with silvery hair and green eyes, speaking in a very low voice. She wasn’t wearing anything, of course. Her slim chest, to which her hair soaked in hot water was sticking…Her belly button, to which just a few water droplets were gathered…He could see everything. She had pale skin to begin with, which ended up emphasizing the redness coming from her body warmth even further.

“N-no, please, wait, Mr. Kamijou totally thought Amakusa had attacked and he was worried so he ran over here so he hopes you take that into account, too, that would be nice and…”

“Ooh…”

“??? Ooh?”

Kamijou had been watching Index’s each and every movement with fearful eyes, but…

“…nn, hic. Waah…”

Sh-she’s cryiiiinnngg?!

Jolt!

Touma Kamijou’s body gave a strange reaction to the unexpected development. Meanwhile, big teardrops fell from Index’s eyes, and she was rubbing them with her hands.

Suddenly, he noticed excessively cold stares collected on him from nearby.

More than one hundred nuns had directly labeled him as a man who makes completely naked young girls cry (not to mention their similarly naked, unconscious leader beside him). The color drained from his face.

“Huh, wait, c-calm down, please, Miss Index! This isn’t your personality! Don’t you usually do something more like this? See, Mr. Kamijou’s head is right here! Just chomp it down as hard as you can already!! Wait, what? Stop, stop! Why do you look so unusually serious?! Th-that was just a figure of speech what are you doing with that saw you could slice up a huge cow with that thing wait a minute sto—Gyaaahhhh?!”

“Didn’t I tell you not to make a nuisance of yourself? Hm? What are you clutching your head and crying for?” Stiyl, lying down, tiredly questioned the worn-out Kamijou upon seeing him return to their tent. The tent’s opening had been shut—he may have known something had happened, but he didn’t seem to realize it had to do with Index. If he found out, the crazy priest would end up chasing him all over the camp with a flaming sword in his hands.

He would rather avoid any further trouble—after all, Agnes had just plainly condemned him, saying, “…I need to look over our plans. Please leave me alone.” So he crawled under his own blanket, still rubbing his stinging head. The sorcerer had said earlier that using even five or ten minutes of free time to get in a bit of sleep and rest your body was basic battlefield knowledge, but he didn’t think he’d be able to sleep until the pain in his head went away.

“Hey, Stiyl?”

“What is it? I am very irritated right now, so if possible, I would like you to leave this for later.”

“I want to ask something.”

“Everyone here has such bad crisis management. So what if it’s the
Book of the Law
, anyway? They’re running around like chickens with their fool heads cut off for
one
grimoire! Do they have any idea how many sorcerers are after the girl controlling 103,000 of them—?”

“Is there a girl you like?”

“Bwah?!” Stiyl’s breath caught in his throat and he broke out into a full-body shiver.

Kamijou thought this was something you were
supposed
to ask at a sleepover. It seemed
that
was a Japanese-specific custom, however. “Hey, Stiyl. I want to ask something.”

“I respect women like Elizabeth I, and St. Martha is a good example of the type I prefer. The anecdote where she exterminates an evil dragon using only prayers of love and charity mesmerizes me. Any other questions?”

“The Amakusa-Style Crossist Church…That’s where Kanzaki used to be, isn’t it?”

“…” Stiyl narrowed his eyes in thought and fell silent for a bit. He tried to take out a cigarette, but he must have figured that smoking in bed was bad, because his hands stopped halfway there. “Who did you hear that from? Kanzaki wouldn’t have gone into her personal history very easily. Was it Tsuchimikado?”

“Yeah. He told me while you were busy being that guy at the beach.” Stiyl’s face basically became a question mark, but Kamijou left that aside and continued. “But, well…Aren’t they Kanzaki’s friends?” He paused, perplexed. “…Are we still doing this? Like the time with Misawa Cram School?”

There was one other time when Kamijou and Stiyl had formed a united front in the past.

That battle couldn’t be called
pretty
even in flattery. A lot of people had been hurt, and some had even died. He got the picture—that’s what clashes between sorcerers, or between groups or organizations of them, meant. Their professional world didn’t permit weakness, and that was what created specialists like Index and Stiyl.

But…

As a professional who knew how strict it was, wouldn’t he be extremely hesitant about this?

“We are.” However, Stiyl Magnus gave a prompt decision, without even a second of hesitation. “Of course we are. Whether it’s obeying orders from above—or even if they’re trying to stop me, I already decided I’d do anything to protect her. I’ll kill anyone I need to. I’ll burn them alive. I’ll burn even their corpses to nothing. Whether it’s while she’s watching or while she isn’t.” His own words seemed to pain him. “Don’t get me wrong, Touma Kamijou. Everything I’m doing is for that girl. And if you did something to the contrary, I would turn your bones into ash at this very moment.”

“…” Kamijou gulped.

When all was said and done, that was the whole reason for the things this man, Stiyl Magnus, did. The fact that he was an English Puritan, the fact that he gained power to fight as a sorcerer, the fact that he came on orders to save the
Book of the Law
and Orsola—anything and everything.

“I made an oath long ago
—Relax, and go to sleep. Even if you forget everything, I won’t forget a thing. I will live and die for your sake
.”

His conclusion was enough to make him shudder.

At the same time, a deep sense of human kindness was in his voice.

Kamijou carefully chose his next words—he thought it would be rude if he didn’t. “But then why did you get Index involved in something like this?”

“I’m not the one who planned this—if I had the choice, she wouldn’t be anywhere near this place,” answered Stiyl smoothly. “But I must not settle things on my own. They would judge her worthless then. If I cannot display value in using Index to my superiors, they might end up sending her back to London. Tearing her away from her life in Academy City would be the most unbearable thing that could happen to her right now.” His voice was casual. Given that Stiyl Magnus was her English Puritan colleague, Kamijou would think he’d be happier if she came back—but Stiyl Magnus spoke in a casual voice. “Go to sleep. We only have two hours until the assault. We’ll start to have nightmares if we talk for much longer.”

Leaving it at that, the runic sorcerer shut his mouth and his eyes.

How am I supposed to get any sleep when people could start killing one another in a few hours?
he wondered. But after wrapping himself in a blanket and closing his eyes, drowsiness must have overtaken his body at some point. In other words, he was asleep before he knew it. Maybe he was a lot more tired from Daihasei Festival preparations than he’d thought.

Mm
…
huh
…
?

Kamijou then opened his eyes for a simple reason—because he felt a weight pressing down on him.

Rustle
—he perceived the weight of a grown person, saw some kind of swell in his blanket, and felt the soft, warm sensation of human skin.

He began to hear a soft sleeper’s breathing from inside the blanket.

Hey, wait. Crap, could this be
…
?! Damn, I just remembered that you can’t lock tents!

Normally, Kamijou spent his nights locked in his bathroom, sleeping in his drained bathtub. For a simple reason, too—to stop Index from climbing into his sleeping space no matter what. He was always so thankful he had a long bathtub he could stretch his legs out in.

Not only was the crime of invading someone’s sleeping space already having a terrible effect on the healthy young man, but Stiyl was also sleeping next to him right now (and he had just said some serious stuff about oaths before going to sleep). Depending on how this turned out, he could be quite literally beheaded for his crimes.

And atop Kamijou’s body as it exuded a cold sweat, a fairly young girl’s body squirmed about. He came in contact with all kinds of defenseless parts of her—he thought his heart would stop.

“…(Wh-whoa?! Wait, wait a minute, Index! Hey, sleeping next to me would be one thing, but taking up a position right on top of me—isn’t that going way too far?!)” protested Kamijou hurriedly in a low voice (though he thought he was practically yelling).

“Mm…What is it, Touma…?”

Then he heard a familiar voice from the entrance to the tent.

He looked to see Index, her eyes half-closed in sleepiness, opening the zipper on the tent and about to creep into his blanket.

Huh?

Kamijou looked at her, aghast.

“Mgh……Papa…
Lo non posso mangiare alcuno piu qualsiasi piu lungo
……”

The one who came out of the blanket was Agnes Sanctis.

She was probably half-asleep and so didn’t realize, but there were less than three inches between their lips.

What?! Are you serious?! She has this sleepwalking-into-other-people’s-futons habit, too?! Wait, didn’t she just get done telling me at the shower to go away?! Eeeek!

He averted his face from the small lips verging on touching him, then hastily crawled out from under Agnes. As he rolled, he pulled the blanket off of her.

“Wha?!”

Kamijou was dumbfounded.

From out of the blanket appeared Agnes, wearing nothing but a white lace bra and panties with rope sides that were tied in bowknots.

And as if she normally did so before sleeping, her habit was neatly folded up in a corner of the tent.

Index, in a complete daze, looked at them both and spoke.

“…Papa?”

“Waaait! Index, I don’t know what’s going on, either! I absolutely did
not
force a young girl to call me such a particular name! I do
not
have a habit of wallowing in self-satisfaction like this!!” Kamijou attempted a vindication, trembling in fear from having gotten his head bitten in regards to Agnes just a little while ago.

Index observed his expression of fear.

“Ah-ha…Maybe this…is a dream?”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, even Touma would never be this unfaithful. So this is a dream.” She yawned.

“Y-yeah, that’s it! This is a dream! You’re silly—Touma Kamijou is
a woman-discarding bad-luck flag master who always runs away. He would never do something this shameless, would he?!”

He had been attempting to lead the sleepyhead Index on as if through hypnotism, but…

“Mmh. Okay, if this is a dream, then it’s okay. I can bite Touma as much as I want and it’s okay. Since this is a dream. And I can vent all my complaints from today on him and it’s okay. Mmh.”

“Huh? Ah, what?! W-wait, Index!! No, this is all definitely re—?!”

Kamijou frantically tried to correct himself, but he couldn’t stop her—she bit down onto his head with all her might. At the healthy male high school student’s shriek—no, scream—Agnes, still half-asleep in her underwear right next to him, jerked awake and sat up. Incidentally, when Stiyl Magnus, who had been sleeping in the same tent, had given one look to all the commotion, he had rolled over to face away from them and gone back to sleep.

Eleven o’clock
PM
.

The Amakusa vicar, Saiji Tatemiya, and his forty-seven subordinates assembled at the specified eddy point for the special movement method, Pilgrimage in Miniature.

It was no mystical forest or mountain, however. It was in the corner of a huge theme park specializing in confectionery, above which hung a signboard reading P
ARALLEL
S
WEETS
P
ARK
.

The result of a collaborative effort by four major confectionery companies, the power plant–sized site played host to seventy-five sweets shops representing thirty-eight countries from around the world. Several donut-shaped waterways overlapping one another like the Olympic rings formed the basis of its structure. The confectionery booths, which were small as food carts but clearly manned by skillful folk, lined the outer edge of each circular waterway. The spaces inside the waterways were open plazas and spaces for manufacturer exhibitions and events. At the moment, they appeared to be
running a campaign involving chilled sweets and sherbets—perfect to battle the lingering heat of summer.

The eddy positions established by Tadataka Inou remained fixed, but the development situation of the town changed on a daily basis. This place was still relatively usable. On some eddies, however, there were apartment rooms or bank vaults constructed on them, making this method of movement completely unusable.

The members of Amakusa, already having infiltrated Parallel Sweets Park, immediately got to work preparing for their Pilgrimage in Miniature.

The method could only be used starting at midnight, but it was an established tactic to prepare beforehand. They would only have five minutes to actually utilize it, after all. Beginning the preparations when that window opened wouldn’t give them enough time. And there was no rule saying they had to finish preparing at midnight exactly, either. They could finish up beforehand, then just flip the switch at midnight to activate it.

And though they were preparing sorcery, they weren’t drawing suspicious magic circles or reciting spells or anything.

Aside from sneaking into a theme park after closing, the young adults weren’t behaving particularly strangely. A group of four or five of them was having a chat. Some were opening up wrapped hamburgers or bags of potato chips and eating them. A few were pointing at the park map directions and arguing about them. Some were standing around and flipping through guidebooks. All of them were only doing very normal things.

Even their clothing looked quite a bit more natural than Index’s or Stiyl’s. One girl was wearing a white camisole and denim shorts. One boy was wearing layered shirts and big, baggy black pants. One woman had taken off her suit jacket and had it hanging on her arms. If there was anything a little weird, it was that ten of them, at most, were carrying things like sports bags, cases for instruments and surfboards, and canvas cases—as transport for weapons.

But those who were knowledgeable would understand.

Their clothing and casual actions all, without omission, held calculated, magical meaning.

The gender distribution. Their age variations. The combinations of clothing colors. The act of the four or five of them forming a circle. The details of their casual chat. The religious rites of eating. The ingredients and color of the hamburger and the ritualistic meaning of eating meat. The number of bites. The timing of taking drinks. The directions the men and women were walking. The positions they stopped at. The way they read their books. The total number of characters on each page.