A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 7 (9 page)

His entire field of vision had been blocked off by the skirt and her thighs, but Index’s shout still reached his ears.

“T-To-To-To, Toumaaa! You think maybe that’s going a little far for pranks?!!”

“No getting hot and bothered during work. Come on, get up already.” Stiyl gave him a swift kick in the side, and with that Kamijou finally succeeded in removing himself from the prison of Agnes’s skirt and thighs. The kick seemed less like it was Stiyl’s own volition and more because he had to do something because Index was yelling.

Having been kicked in the gut, Kamijou coughed and shook his head.

Then his eyes met those of Agnes, who was plopped down on the asphalt. She was trembling, her face was bright red, and there were tears welling up in the corners of her eyes.

He blanched. “I-I’b sowwy…”

“N-no, you don’t need to apologize. I was the one who fell over and caused it. It’d seem when I’m nervous, my balance goes a little haywire…Umm, can you stand?”

Agnes stood up adroitly in her twelve-inch-tall platform-sandal-clad feet and slowly extended a hand to the battered Kamijou. He made a face like it was a ray of light piercing dark clouds and reached out for it. Index watched and got a little mad.

Maybe Agnes had calmed down a little from that—her body was still tense and bunched up, but the nervousness was fading from her voice. “All right, then I would like to begin explaining the current trends of the
Book of the Law
, Orsola Aquinas, and Amakusa, and discuss our actions henceforth and so on.” She was still wobbling nervously, and as if she was scared she’d fall again, she unthinkingly reached out to grab hold of Kamijou’s clothing. Her hand stopped partway there, though. She was probably opposed to clinging to a man she’d just met—and besides that, he’d just dove into her skirt a few moments ago. After groping around, she latched on to Index’s habit instead. “Orsola Aquinas has been confirmed to currently be in Amakusa hands. That goes for the
Book of the Law
as well, in all likelihood. We have a little less than fifty Amakusa members involved in this matter. It looks like they’re using the sewers to get around, but it is also possible they have already gone aboveground.”

“Does that mean you don’t know anything?” asked Index, on whom Agnes was leaning, a little painfully.

“Yes. We’re tracking Amakusa’s movements using the lingering traces of their mana, but it’s not going well. I suppose I expect nothing less from the Amakusa-Style Crossist Church, considering it’s a sect specializing in secrecy and stuff.” Still wobbly, Agnes pointed out the triangular hole in the ground. “We have another team drawing a perimeter in conjunction with them, but it looks like they’ll be the ones to nail the target first.”

“A perimeter…How big is it?” Kamijou asked, tilting his head. Index was staring at him as if pleading him to do something about the heavy Agnes on her, but he decided to ignore her.

“It’s about ten clicks in radius, centered here. One hundred thirty-two streets and forty-three sewer passages—you may consider us to have enough allies to cover the entire range.” Agnes was practically hugging Index at this point. “Of course, if they try to
take the
Book of the Law
and Orsola to their headquarters, they’ll have to run into the perimeter somewhere. Our intel says their base’s location is apparently somewhere in the Kyushu region…and, well, that
apparently
is another issue. Of course, things will change if they decided not to break through the perimeter and just force the decoding method out of Orsola.”

“They probably won’t. Even as she is now, Orsola probably readied the knowledge of how to resist mind-reading sorcery. On the other hand, there’s no good place to drag it out of her physically, either.” Stiyl gave a puff of cigarette smoke. “There are too many enemies around them for them to settle down. They need to torture Orsola, obtain the decoding method, and create a decoded copy of the
Book of the Law
. I think that’s a bit more than one day’s work. And if they want to get the information from her and break her spirit without letting her kill herself, the best forms of torture would be those that don’t require them to directly touch her—forced menial labor, sleep disturbances, or the like. But they’d need around a week for those. One or two all-nighters isn’t enough for torture; the human mind is set up so that it first starts to break at one hundred and twenty hours of sleep deprivation.”

Kamijou was dumbfounded at Stiyl’s detached words.

Those
were
the words of an expert specializing in witch-hunting and inquisitions, but that expert’s point of view was that those who kidnapped Orsola were capable of doing such a thing. And from what Agnes had said, such a group was acting in tandem with almost fifty people.

The Amakusa-Style Crossist Church.

But something was bothering Kamijou—Oh, right. He’d heard the term
Amakusa
from Kaori Kanzaki and Motoharu Tsuchimikado in the past. He heard that Kanzaki used to be its leader, and that she had left the organization to protect her precious underlings.

Were those people she wanted so much to protect
low
enough to cause this incident out of greed?

Or
…

Or had those Kaori Kanzaki wanted to defend…

…changed after she left them?

“What’s wrong, Touma?” Index canted her head to the side, and the action caused her to collide with Agnes’s, who was clinging to her.

“Nothing. What should we do at this point, anyway? Those Amakusa guys are gonna run into your perimeter soon, right?”

“Ah, y-yes.” Agnes still seemed a little nervous. She was almost pressing herself against Index’s cheek. “Basically, I want you to be rear support…The chances are low, but they
could
always use the
Book of the Law
. I think it’d be best if an expert in grimoires was there to—”

“Argh, you’re being annoying! I can’t breathe!” Index flapped her hands around. “But are we going to be able to catch Amakusa that easily? Huh, Touma?”

“Why are you asking
me
? Wouldn’t it be? I would think if a group of forty or fifty people was walking around in suspicious nun’s habits, they’d stand out no matter what.”

“Amakusa doesn’t have an official uniform, Touma. They specialize in secrecy, so if they were just walking around the city normally, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

“…”

“What is it, Touma? Why do you look like you don’t believe me?”

“Don’t worry about it,” replied Kamijou. He didn’t see a single person dressed normally anywhere around here, so he wasn’t sure how universal her definition of
normal
was.

“Anyway, members of Amakusa are experts in hiding and fleeing. It would be stranger, I think, if they hadn’t predicted what the Roman Orthodox Church would bring down on them after they seized the
Book of the Law
and Orsola Aquinas. And if this incident
was
planned out, then they would normally have countermeasures for it.”

Agnes, now completely leaning on Index, looked a bit flurried. “B-but in reality, they have no way of busting through our perimeter—”

“Yes they do. There is such magic.”

She sucked in her breath at the immediate response.

“It’s a technique limited to Japan, though. In simple terms, there is a handful of special points throughout Japan called
eddies
, and there is a type of map sorcery that lets you move freely among them.”

“The Great Coastal Map of Japan…Tadataka Inou. I see,” Stiyl muttered bitterly, as if remembering something.

Kamijou had no idea what they were talking about, so he asked. “What’s that? Tadataka Inou…Is he a legendary sorcerer or something?”

His question resulted in everybody there shooting him an ice-cold glare.

“Umm, Touma. The first person to survey and create a map of Japan can be found in timelines in the normal world, you know.”

“You don’t seem to be too knowledgeable about history, hm? You probably don’t even remember five prime ministers back, do you?”

“…Even an Italian like me knew
that
much.”

Touma Kamijou, the young man with failing marks, began to mope at their omnidirectional verbal assault.

“Anyway, there’s a special thing planted in this Edo-period map of Japan. Everyone here knows of the Idol Theory, right?” Index paused. “Other than Touma, I mean.”

Regular people normally didn’t know any occult lingo, but everyone around him was treating it as obvious, common knowledge. He felt like they were leaving him alone in the dark.

“Study session time for Touma, then! Idol Theory is the fundamental theory describing how to effectively use the power of God and angels. Say you have a crucifix—a well-done one, replicating the one used to put the Son of God to death. If you applied the theory and put it onto the roof of a church, it would receive a portion of the actual crucifix’s divine power. Of course, the replica would normally store less than 0.000000000001 percent of it. Even the legendary replica of the Holy Manger stops at just a few percent. Well, even with one percent of the original’s power, it would have power rivaling the Twelve Apostles.”

There were countless crucifixes spread throughout the world, from the ones perched atop churches to the ones nuns wore around
their necks. Apparently, even with that power spread out across all of them, the power of the original wouldn’t decline at all. Kamijou figured that it was like the relationship between the sun and solar panels.

“And this Idol Theory is a theory that says you can reverse it. In other words, not only does the real thing affect the idol—the idol also affects the real thing.”

“A theory…So they don’t know for sure?”

“There are a lot of exceptions it doesn’t cover—that’s why it’s just a theory. But that’s where getting punished for mishandling a Bible comes from. The Greeks persecuted Crossists long ago, and there are plenty of stories in the Bible of Greek idols getting struck by lightning and destroyed. And long ago in Japan, there were plates called
fumi-e
that had Crossist symbols on them, and you were supposed to stomp on them to prove you weren’t Crossist. It’s theorized that by harming such an idol, it would work in reverse, and it would cause harmful effects on the original.” Index seemed a little dissatisfied as she spoke. She probably didn’t like words like
apparently
or
hypothesis
, being a self-styled treasure trove of knowledge. “Tadataka Inou reversed this Idol Theory. If the real thing can influence the replica, then why not reverse it? He wrote in entrances and exits to teleportation points on his Great Coastal Map of Japan that weren’t originally there and, in doing so, actually
created
forty-seven ‘eddies’ on the islands of Japan.”

Kamijou desperately tried to mentally organize all this “common” information being rattled off to him.

The Japanese archipelago and the elaborate miniature map of Japan that this Tadataka Inou guy had made were linked in some way. He had scribbled in some warp points onto that map of Japan, and that led to actual warp points being created on the Japanese archipelago.

So then, whatever you happened to doodle on a map of Japan would become the truth? “Wait. That’s absolutely nuts! What if someone erased part of the map? People and cities would just be wiped out!”

“That wouldn’t happen. Listen, in order for something to be an idol, it needs to be a proper miniature. If there is even a slight magical disturbance between it and the real thing, it loses its function as an idol. That’s why Idol Theory isn’t all-powerful. If the original ‘image’ gets messed up, the theory itself no longer applies.” Index told him in a serious tone that there used to be a branch of sorcery that tried to use likenesses of the Son of God in order to manipulate the Son of God in Heaven, but that all ended in failure. “On the other hand, it means Tadataka Inou was amazing. He added something that was clearly not right and bent the ‘golden ratio’ of his miniature by a tiny bit. I think he’s the only one who’s ever been able to do something like that in the whole history of sorcery. If he was a sculptor, he might have even been able to manipulate the Son of God and angels…Of course, just controlling the map of Japan is pretty shocking in its own right!”

“…Okay, so then Amakusa can use it freely?”

“Yep. Tadataka Inou had a strong interest in foreign countries during the Edo shogunate, and there was even one time his faction tried to sell the Great Coastal Map of Japan to Philipp Franz von Siebold. He would have known about the current ban on Crossism through his Dutch studies, so it would be appropriate to say that he had unofficial contact with Amakusa mainly out of academic interest.”

Whatever the pesky details were, this was the conclusion: Amakusa had magic right now that would let them instantly warp to anywhere in Japan they wanted. So they wouldn’t even need to break the perimeter.

Agnes had been listening to Index with a dumbstruck face.

As he continued arranging the information thus far in his head, Kamijou asked, “Then what do we do? They might have already warped, right? Since there’s only a certain number of points, should we investigate them all?”

“We can’t do that. Only twenty-three of the eddies from the Great Coastal Map of Japan have actually been discovered—even though when they tried to sell the map over to the black ships, the specifications said there were forty-seven of them.”

More than half of the points were still a mystery. That meant they couldn’t follow them or meet them where they were going.

“And in addition to this special movement method using the Great Coastal Map of Japan, Amakusa is famous because the location of their base is unknown…That’s how it should be, though, since otherwise they could have their escape routes cut off. Agnes said earlier that it was
apparently
in Kyushu, but that’s not certain, either. There are countless pieces of information saying where Amakusa’s headquarters are, and it still isn’t even close to being pinpointed. Either the information is false or they’re using all of those places as bases. And we don’t even know which of
those
it is.”

Agnes paled. She grabbed Index’s shoulder with both hands to support her body and shouted, “Th-then what do we do?! Wait, if you had information like that, why didn’t you say anything until now?! We can’t get the jump on them, and we can’t pursue them to their base. If they make the jump, it’s all over! If we had hurried to deal with them before that, we might have been able to do something! Why are you so relaxed about this?!”

“Because there’s no need to hurry,” said Index flatly, dumbfounding Agnes once again. “The Great Coastal Map of Japan was a map surveyed by using the stars in the night sky. The motion of the stars is a special quality permeating the map itself, and it has a big effect on using this method. Basically there’s a time restriction. You can only use the method at certain times.” She looked up into the sky, her silver hair swaying. “Right now…As far as I can tell from the stars, it’s about seven thirty
PM
. The usage restriction will lift right after the date changes, so we still have about four and a half hours. Plus, the eddy point they need to warp from is in a fixed location. Out of the twenty-three known eddies, there’s only one within the perimeter that they can use,” Index declared confidently. “Of course, we can’t discard the possibility that there’s another one that hasn’t been discovered yet.”