Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume13 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 11===

“(E-excuse me. We have a report from the Former Agnese Forces. They say they’ve brought Index-san here.)”

The room was so quiet that Itsuwa’s modest whisper to Kanzaki managed to permeate the entire space.

A strange air hung over the District 2 unmanned weapon data center.

And this air was no metaphor.

The odor of death hung over the place.

Just as human sweat and the smell of a beast were different things, the stench of your own species decomposing was somehow different. The brain warned you to be on your guard and not to overlook anything.

It said danger was approaching.

“Hello, hello. I’m Isabella Theism of Necessarius. My specialty is necromancy.”

There was a stark difference between the carefree smile and the words it produced.

Necromancy.

“I know it has a sketchy reputation, but fortunetelling and the impurity of death are really about the only two superstitions that remain in the depths of ordinary people’s hearts even in a world of science. Like seeing a house as special because someone was killed there, or seeing a rope as special because it was used to hang someone. See what I mean? It’s something you can’t rid yourself of with equations. You might find it silly, but it’ll still be there inside you. That is what I make use of☆”

A stir spread around Kanzaki Kaori.

The Amakusas had been developed (by Kanzaki herself) to be pure and straightforward in that regard. They couldn’t so easily accept someone who called herself a necromancer.

And the woman appeared accustomed to the reaction.

She herself was a beautiful woman with silver hair and brown skin, but all she did was smile in rags permeated with the odor of death.

Agnese, who must have come all the way to District 2 to escort Index, joined the conversation while brushing red snow off her shoulders.

“She has experience as a team leader. I’ve heard she had cleaned up several troublesome messes on a global scale, like the Cadaver Island Struggle and the Necropolis Calamity. …Which means she was hiding who she really is ''last time we worked together''.”

“Oh, yeah. I did do those things, didn’t I? But I wasn’t hiding it exactly. I just forgot is all. Why bother remembering incidents once they’re over?”

“Then did you solve those with necromancy too?”

“Everyone starts off in their own unique way, but they all end up wailing by the end. ‘I wish I’d never been born’, and stuff like that. So I can’t say who was who. They all blur together in my memory☆”

This was no laughing matter.

Both of those had been true wars with, even looking just at the official count, over a thousand combatants. And these had all been the professional magicians of top-level magic cabals. If the count went past the official members and included the workers building barricades, the lookouts and spies hidden here and there, and the mercenaries (from the magic side of course) who were invited in to bolster their personnel, who could say how many more it was. And they had all ended up much the same.

Only Isabella herself continued smiling emptily.

“Hee hee. Did I scare you?”

An “eep” escaped someone.

Itsuwa jumped at suddenly being the target of the woman’s attention, so Tsushima, who was the big sister type, instinctually inserted herself between the two of them.

“Unfermented wine and flavorless brown bread – both symbols of death,” sang Isabella regardless. “The name necromancy sounds frightening, but that’s all it really comes down to. It did used to involve drawing magic circles on dead bodies, but nowadays everyone uses imitations so they don’t gather the attention of the police. This country has ceremonies where you burn or bury a doll in place of a person, doesn’t it? It’s like that.”

“Eh?” Itsuwa sounded surprised. “You mean you don’t actually work with dead bodies?”

“I suppose the closest thing I do would be borrowing their clothing. Although different factions are split on whether that’s to search for the deceased’s soul so you can summon it or if you use it to remind someone of the deceased so you can extract the related memories and testimony from their mind.”

To be blunt, there were ways in the modern age to legally (although only by abusing loopholes in the law) acquire a full dead human body, but Isabella did not do that.

She had a simple reason.

She didn’t see any real purpose in having a real corpse.

''At least in Western European necromancy'', the actual ceremonies were very different from the public conception.

“Going grave digging and making a servant out of the dead body? Resurrecting a mummy from an ancient sarcophagus? No, no, I would never. Nobody uses those methods anymore – they’re too inefficient. Besides, the essence of necromancy is communicating with the spirits of the dead. So instead of shutting off their physical limiters to provide superhuman strength, it’s about acquiring information you shouldn’t have by using spirits who have been freed from the physical laws. So really you could say it’s like an uglier version of divination.”

From a Japanese perspective, it was like a version of the Kokkuri-san that used the dead.

The technique was only used to learn.

You couldn’t expect to intentionally mimic the cases where the necromancer screwed up and ended up possessed, allowing a mysterious entity into their body so they could surpass the laws of physics and shoot fire from their hands. That was far too dangerous.

As long as you understood the proper methods, you could complete the ceremonies without an actual dead body.

It could be the room where someone died, the rope used to hang someone, or clothing covered in death odor. How much of “the air of death” an item required to guide you to a special mental state depended on the individual magician, but in this case the level of the technique came from how cost efficient it was.

Isabella Theism had reached the point that she could do this:

“Really, it’s best to have a recipe for a dead body where all the ingredients can be found at the average supermarket or home improvement store. You take some pork or beef and then you make a skull out of lumber and so on.”

“Th-that’s how it’s done? That sounds more like a shop class project.”

Itsuwa’s comment made Isabella clap her hands together in delight.

“It all depends on the quality. Back before CG was so easy to use, splatter films had all sorts of tricks to make convincing fake guts. The poor image quality helped, but the end result was a lot more grotesque and disturbing than what you see in modern horror.”

Kanzaki sighed and spoke up.

“I don’t know if we will have any use for you. For now, I imagine the tug-of-war over the city against Coronzon will continue as we try to delay the activation of Adikalika, but magic to artificially consume lives doesn’t sound very useful there.”

“You think you’re in control of the entire city?” quietly asked Isabella. In a mocking tone. “Do you really believe that? Take as much of the surface-level infrastructure and important facilities as you like, you won’t fully stop the city from functioning. There’s so much more still hidden below the surface. Not to mention you haven’t even captured half of the 12 directors and have no idea where the rest are. You can’t stop Coronzon’s work by desperately trying to plug all the holes. Academy City has more than one map. It looks like a peaceful city at first, but the things hidden by the multiple overlapping maps are what make it so horrifying.”

It wasn’t Kanzaki who immediately replied.

Itsuwa made the first rebuttal while trembling.

“H-how can you know that? Academy City is supposed to be an unknown world for you too.”

“''I can smell death here.'' The city is thick with it, so there has to be more we aren’t seeing.”

She made it sound obvious.

Or maybe this was a sense unique to necromancers.

Kanzaki asked a careful question.

“Finding fault is easy, but if you were in charge, what exactly would you do to solve the problem?”

“I will answer that with my first job as a necromancer.”

Isabella turned her attention toward something other than Great Demon Coronzon or Academy City.

She focused on the girl who they had supposedly been asked to retrieve and protect.

“The grimoire library, hm? Quite a troublesome thing to be left in Academy City with all this going on. It was miraculous good fortune that Coronzon didn’t secure her before we found her. Coronzon will not leave someone so dangerous free. Dealing with that must be our top priority.”

“What are you going to do with Index!?”

“For now, locking her up should work. She shouldn’t be a problem as long as Coronzon can’t abuse her knowledge, so the situation isn’t pressing enough to require ''silencing her more permanently.'' But to be clear, that’s only for now.”

Isabella Theism was saying she would do it if it became necessary.

She viewed the current Adikalika as the borderline with the worst case. She was saying they had to keep those 103,001 grimoires from being used to either greatly abbreviate Adikalika’s preparation period or to create magic even more troublesome than Adikalika.

She was correct.

While also twisted at a fundamental level.

“The other uncertain factor would be Kamijou Touma.”

Isabella Theism actually sounded amused.

The brown necromancer continued.

“The effects of his right hand are certainly fascinating, but whoever they might be, ''someone who has died once already is part of my domain.'' He is dead meat. That is a resource that should be utilized for maximum effectiveness. And I mean toward resolving the Coronzon and Adikalika problem, of course.”

“That is unaccep-”

“Oh? And who exactly can protect someone who is still considered dead on paper?”

“Wait.”

The interruption came from the white nun.

Despite the situation, Index’s concern wasn’t for herself.

“D-do you mean Touma?”

“…Sigh, what a pain.”

“Why are you talking about him that way? Died once already? Why would you phrase it that way? What exactly happened to Touma!?”

Index heard a sticky splat.

From her shoulders.

They had been grabbed by discolored corpse hands with visible bone and a rotting stench.

She didn’t even have time to scream. Rotting corpses too melted and swollen to even tell their sex had grabbed her shoulders and pinned her down on the floor.

“Agh!!”

“Don’t worry. These are decoy bodies made from sanitary ingredients,” said a cool-faced Isabella.

But no matter what they were made from, these were “dead bodies” professionally made to be indistinguishable from real ones. The shock of unexpected contact with one was no different.

“I came all the way to Japan to do my job. I am not interested in your home drama.”

Index had a perfect memory.

So she could never forget anything she saw or felt.

So.

“Don’t…you dare.”

A new voice joined in.

Stiyl Magnus’s.

Unlike with Index, there had been no report of his arrival. Kanzaki was supposedly in charge here, but she had no idea why he was here or how he had gotten so injured and weakened.

But something must have happened for him to be so badly hurt.

Stiyl gasped for breath and practically had to drag his body over as he approached.

“What do you think you’re doing, Isabella Theism? You want to lock her up? Stop that this instant. You aren’t fit to command the Anglicans… As a Saint, Kanzaki is the one in command here. If you’re going to insist otherwise, I will punish you!!”

“Ehh? You’re really going with that? The guy who betrayed Kanzaki the first chance he got really shouldn’t be talking about the sanctity of rules.”

A large mass dropped from the necromancer’s rags, landing at her feet.

It was a thoroughly dried, and thus lightweight, corpse.

Had it been pasted to the inside of her rags, arranged just right to be hidden despite the many holes?

It was likely only an imitation made from a mixture of cow bones, pork, ceramic, and more.

“Is this really a job to outsource and leave in the hands of a subcontractor? Obviously the on-site leader should be an actual Anglican. And I would say you’ve disqualified yourself after rushing off on a personal vendetta.”

The hunk of death lying at her feet suddenly absorbed all the moisture around her.

It grew to nearly three meters and lost its humanoid shape.

Kanzaki realized what was happening.

“Wait, Isabe-!?”

A wet pop followed.

The blood and innards were red. Beads of death were scattered evenly in all 360 degrees. Each one could ''eat through'' glass used to store nearly any chemical and plastic that wouldn’t decompose even after buried for 100 years. And there were tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of them.

“!?”

Even Kanzaki Kaori flinched before that contaminant. She sharply strung out invisibly thin wires to sacrifice them to the goop. To protect the Amakusas behind her, not herself.

Which created the tiniest of openings.

The Saint who insisted she would save everyone could only watch as Stiyl Magnus and Isabella Theism both took a step forward.

The tall priest’s eyes displayed contempt.

“Is that all?”

He spread out his rune cards.

A flame sword extended from his clenched right hand.

“Did you really think that could stop me, Isabella!?”

Death by burning symbolized purification in Christianity. But it did not mean salvation for the object being burned. Instead, it annihilated the object to eliminate it from the world. Some even believed that a body burned according to a certain ritualized procedure lost the right to participate in the Last Judgment.

It was a matter of compatibility.

Any amount of that contaminant could be eliminated by Stiyl’s flame sword.

Thus, the necromancer’s trick proved meaningless as the priest’s sword sliced through that unclean space. Along with the magician who had scattered the deadly contaminant in the first place.

The flame roared loud as it sucked in oxygen. More than just toss fire at her from without, the brown necromancer’s slashed body was burned from within.

It was thorough and swift.

But she put up too little resistance for someone being burned alive.

Eventually, Stiyl caught on.

“Is this another imitation made from different ingredients!?”

By the time the words had left him, he was surrounded by brown women.

All imitations.

But he didn’t have time to gasp.

Directly behind him, Isabella Theism hid among the imitations.

The action she took wasn’t even all that difficult.

It was gentle even.

She simply placed a hand on the priest’s shoulder.



Stiyl Magnus’s eyes rolled back in his head.



He coughed up something dark. A clump of blood. More of the hideous color spilled from his eyelids and ears. But most importantly, his two-meter form crumpled straight down.

Even the veteran Necessarius members who were world-renowned for their skill in battle against magicians couldn’t tell what had happened.

“Unlike you, I came all the way to Japan to do my job.”

Only the expert in death – the brown necromancer – chuckled and spoke.

“I am not interested in your adolescent escapades.”

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