Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:AgneseSS Chapter1 (section)

===Part 1===

Some fields of work were done in secret.

No one living a normal life would ever need their services and their stories were never told in movies or dramas. But in reality, those necessary evils were crucial for the seen and unseen sides of society to run smoothly.

Such jobs existed in the magical world as well.



A strange figure marched through an old, dark stone street of Barcelona in Spain’s autonomous community of Catalonia.

He stood two meters tall and his long hair was dyed red. His black cassock seemed at odds with the cigarette in his mouth and he even had a barcode tattoo below one eye.

He looked unbelievably bored.

The presence of a predator implied the presence of prey.

“Gasp, pant.”

The woman looked more gaunt than simply skinny.

She had silver hair and brown skin.

Her navel and thighs were visible, but not because she had intentionally chosen a revealing dress. She wore tattered rags that could not have smelled pleasant.

She recognized the large presence behind her. She knew who he was, but had never actually met him. If she had met him in the field, she would not have survived to tell the tale. The legends she had heard were more than enough to tell her that.

And the ones who had spread those legends were no more.

The entire magic cabal had been reduced to ashes.

So she had no choice but to escape on her own. She could not see anyone else around, whether to ask for help or to use them as human shields.

Assuming her pocket watch was accurate, it was past 11 at night.

At first glance, Barcelona looked like an old historical city full of stone buildings with ages measured in centuries, but it also had a shopping district with an impressive number of bars and nightclubs. No matter the hour, this central area would never be entirely deserted.

There had to be more to it. The answer was found on the old stone walls and the streetlight supports.

A people-clearing field had been established by rune cards engraved with the Opila character.

This had to be ''him''. The bane of all magicians had arrived.

The voice from behind was short.

“Isabella Theism.”

“Eek!?”

He called her name.

That alone felt like some kind of powerful curse. The enemy knew exactly who and where she was. That was enough to bind her body with unbearable tension. She lost track of which leg she had just taken a step with, so the silver-haired brown-skinned woman named Isabella tripped over her own feet and tumbled to the ground.

Not that she had anywhere to go regardless.

She found herself at a dead end with thick stone walls in every direction except back the way she had come.

Feeling trapped at the bottom of a well, she placed her hands on the wall and looked up at the moon to check how far out of reach freedom was. The answer was over 10 meters. The wall was made of smooth concrete, so she may have been able to climb it like someone going bouldering, but he was bound to attack her back as she climbed.

She heard a solid footstep.

It seemed to block off the path she had taken here.

Sweet cigarette smoke reached her nose.

He did not let modern etiquette stop him from smoking. In fact, he seemed to use it to announce his presence before he attacked: “You will die here, so this toxic secondhand smoke is inconsequential.”

“Do you know why this is happening?”

“N-no, I don’t.”

“Then again, we no longer bother with that old-fashioned inquisition stuff. It doesn’t matter to us if you or anyone else understands. I was told I could eliminate you on sight.”

“This must be some kind of mistake!! I really don’t know anything!!”

Something spiraled around Isabella. It looked like a colored tornado, but it was in fact an exceedingly long piece of cloth. It was a spiritual item made by sewing together burial garbs obtained through graverobbing.

She was ''a mere'' 10 meters from freedom.

In her world, that height might as well have been nothing. The cloth tornado bent down like a powerful spring and then launched the gaunt woman upwards with tremendous force.

The word necromancy might bring to mind techniques of controlling a rotting corpse, but the field was divided into many different factions and schools. For example, summoning a spirit of the dead and having them predict the future was a form of necromancy. So was wearing the clothing of the dead to become one with them.

(This can’t be happening! This can’t be happening!! I’m not letting myself get killed over some stupid misunderstanding!! How in the world did I find myself here!?)

She arrived on the rooftop in a single bound.

And once she was out of that dead end, the rooftops extended around her in all directions as far as the eye could see. She could escape. This would all work out. That guy might be the bane of magicians, but he was helpless to do a thing if he lost track of her.

That imaginary optimism was cut off by a very real explosion.

“Gah, ah!?”

He was not up there with her.

Instead, all the roofs around her were covered in rune cards that would ignite when approached by someone containing magic power refined from their life force.

Isabella was knocked off balance the instant she set foot on the rooftop and she fell right back down into the dead end. Almost like her pursuer had yanked back on a leash.

She was rejected from the freedom above and dragged back into the darkness below.

She slammed back-first into the ground and struggled to breath while a tall figure stared quietly down at her.

He was Stiyl Magnus, a killer priest of Necessarius, the Anglican Church’s 0th Parish.

“Is that a hybrid created by mixing that indigenous Caribbean religion with the Christian Shroud of Turin?”

Every one of his statements was precise.

And in the magical world, having your trick revealed was akin to a death sentence. Magic was a system of laws and techniques, so a countermeasure could be found once the structure of your spell was divulged.

Clothing was a symbol of one’s position.

A king wore a crown and a priest wore a habit to display the power of their position to themselves and others. Criminals would have such clothing destroyed in public. The same idea applied to the field of magic. For example, some magic could draw out great power by dressing up as the Egyptian or Greek gods and putting on grand plays. It was also said that witches would dress in male clothing to gain special power.

So what would happen if the living stole and dressed up in a cloth wrapped around the dead?

This was an extreme example.

“The Gnostics also believed the physical body was a nuisance and wished to free their soul from that prison, but with no clear definition for the soul, you will have a hard time becoming an omniscient and omnipotent being through nothing more than death. If that was all it took, the losing side of every war would have obliterated the victor in revenge.”

“Y-you misunderstand. You’re making a terrible mistake here.”

The physical damage from the fall was too much for her to get up.

Nothing could be more frustrating for a magician who had tried to solve everything with their magical logic.

“Yes, I did dig up some graves because I needed their burial shrouds for my spell, but necromancy is nowhere near as dangerous as it sounds! I haven’t actually harmed anyone, so this isn’t a job for you!!”

“Saligia Lucajay.”

Stiyl Magnus called someone else’s name, seemingly out of nowhere.

“Tellia Harleos, Rinka Sawaue, Jane Balgowa.”

But the list had a purpose.

The priest pulled a rune card from his pocket and let it go.

It attached to Isabella’s right cheek with a heavy and sticky sensation. But it was not alone. Others attached to her shoulders, chest, hips, thighs, and more.

Those were people.

People who Isabella knew better than anyone should not – could not – have been here. The necromancer was surrounded by the illusory presence of those girls.

“Church graveyards have been increasing their security these days. Of course, it’s mostly meant to stop the people who have started sneaking in hoping to earn some clicks after filming their ‘adventure’ on their phone and uploading it to a video site.”

Skill with magic did not necessary translate to skill with science.

Especially when a powerful barrier had been constructed between the two sides.

That security may have been put in place for a silly non-magical reason, but if traditional methods could not break through, the magic side was shut out just as well. Much like a thoughtlessly placed concrete structure could cut off the path for salmon to swim upstream, thus destroying the ecosystem.

“So tell me, Isabella. Where did you obtain those burial shrouds? Or was sneaking in too much trouble, so you started burying people yourself to make your own graveyard?”

“…”

“Was the ''Armada'' cabal’s ideology really so attractive you were willing to bury people alive to pursue it? Were you that dedicated to reclaiming Spain’s lost naval superiority to remake the world with Spain in the center ‘as it should be’? Well, Spain ''is'' a crossroads for several different cultures, so I can see how you had the groundwork to include everything from the Christian Shroud of Turin to Voodoo zombie powder.”

“''Detach the Ti Bon Ange and place it within me''!!”

The collapsed and supposedly incapacitated woman used the strength of her jaw to break open her own canine tooth.

Or rather, the zombie powder capsule hidden there.

An invisible explosion followed.

Even Stiyl Magnus was forced to take three steps back.

The supposedly unmoving woman stood back up. Unnatural creaks and cracks came from the joints and cartilage of her beautiful brown body. As abnormal as it looked from an anatomic and biological perspective, only someone who could see her life force and magic power could see the full extent of it. The ordinary circulation was entirely ignored and her body moved on its own – her own will had nothing to do with it. But that was no surprise since someone other than her was moving it.

“You have guts to accept that when the soul is so poorly defined.”

Stiyl Magnus narrowed his eyes a little.

When he opened both hands and closed them again, red and blue flames erupted from them. Those violent flames took a straight path like a blowtorch. They both functioned as swords containing a tremendous force.

As a priest, he had a standard line when it came to witches.

“No woman who uses magic can be left alive.”

He did not even allow it to come to an exchange of attacks.

First, he let the right sword collapse into a deluge of flame to stop her as she tried to leap at him. Once she flinched back, he used his left flame sword to slice horizontally through his own flame wall and the target’s torso.

He gave the briefest of glances to Isabella’s upper body as it spun by overhead.

“Hm, so not even death is enough to stop you.”

He once more slashed at her supposedly dead form. This time, the sword entered at her shoulder and sliced diagonally down across her torso. Octopus or squid tentacles had started to emerge from the bottom of the severed torso, but this attack burned the entire upper body away in an instant. At the last second, the back of the skull burst open and something soft frantically leaped out. Surrounded by a transparent shell and supported by countless tentacles, the disembodied brain looked something like a giant jellyfish.

By stealing the clothing of the dead, a necromancer could become one with the dead and draw out their power.

In a way, necromancy was a technique of controlling humans, living or dead. After all, some necromancers would take a summoned soul (or what seemed to be a soul) and sealed it inside their own body, so they had to understand how a living body worked as well. Using that knowledge, they could also begin to experiment and see ''how much could be eliminated from a human body while still remaining themselves.''

(Since she modeled herself after a poisonous animal in the very end, did she also store her prized zombie powder in thousands and thousands of microscopic cnidocytes?)

“You put up a good fight. You really did.”

“…!!”

She may have tried to shout something, but the disembodied brain had no speech organs.

Red and blue.

The priest raised his two flame swords and approached the magician who finally had nowhere left to run.

“But it is time you slept. Forever.”