Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:AgneseSS Chapter6 (section)

===Part 7===

“The Sickle of Saturn?” groaned Stiyl Magnus in a distant location.

In Greek mythology, that would be the Sickle of Adamant.

Necromancer Isabella Theism clapped her hands in front of her face while smiling.

“Oh, so Tu was Saturn!!”

As similar as they might sound, the names Saturn and Satan had nothing to do with each other. The Roman worshipers may have resented any similarity as the spread of Christianity had them viewed as demon worshipers themselves.

That solved the mystery of the destroyed statue.

“Saturn is equivalent to Cronus in Greek mythology, right?” Isabella sounded excited. “Yes, Cronus the usurper god who staged a successful coup by cutting off chief god Uranus’s you-know-what with his sickle. Kyah☆ Of course, Cronus then had the chief god position taken from ''him'' by Zeus.”

The Sickle of Saturn.

A spiritual item that could bring down a god and usurp the ruling throne.

Of course, this was the same as the grimoire author Hermes Trismegistus. It was not actually made by a god and was simply a spiritual item that borrowed the name.

But that was not what mattered here.

Stiyl bit down on his cigarette’s filter as he spoke.

“''I’ve seen the Sickle of Saturn and its owner. I thought I had burned even their bones to ashes.''”

“Yes, the enemy’s ceremony failed there, didn’t it?”

Isabella casually referenced that intense battle from the past.

Anyone who worked for Necessarius would have no shortage of ridiculous stories that were so full of secrets they could not tell them at the pub.

“So did Bloodline Investigator Brax Mizhine’s unwanted lip service cause Tu’s ceremony to fail, nearly getting Tu killed by a witch hunting squad, so he angrily returned and executed Brax?”

“…”

Stiyl put out his cigarette on his portable ashtray and put a new one in his mouth.

“If so, what do you think is happening this time?”

“First, we need to go over what the Sickle of Saturn is. By stabbing that spiritual item into the ground, it takes over the local ley lines and remakes that area into the user’s territory. It’s similar to the Croce di Pietro that Catholicizes any land it is stabbed into, but this one is worse. That sickle can provide a ‘foundation’ to any land, cut it away from the surrounding land, and grants its user near-godlike authority there.”

“It’s basically a largescale field constructor that uses the ley lines running through the planet. And it’s powerful enough to wear down any unauthorized intruders’ souls to the point of death.”

The effect was simple enough, but there was no greater reign of terror.

This would search out and eliminate any defiance in that territory more efficiently than nanoweapons that selected people to kill based on race or skeletal structure. Auto-searching weapons was a new form of fear. Slaughtering all who did not convert was a very Roman mythology way to rule. And since this used the ley lines running through the planet, the sickle’s location could cause the field to cover more than just a single town.

The guild believed it was Christianity’s time to go, so they would destroy it.

“They failed last time.” Isabella’s relaxed words were like a sickening incense that artificially created the scent of death. “Their plan was to stab that sickle into the Vatican, the very center of the Roman Catholic Church, so they could steal away the vast land where their 2 billion believers live, but it ended in failure. Thanks to your efforts, Stiyl.”

“A lot of good those efforts did in the long run.” Stiyl Magnus audibly crushed the new cigarette’s filter between his teeth. “I thought it was odd even after I submitted my report. He slipped from our grasp, so we shouldn’t have been able to stop it. But now it makes sense. His spiritual item just so happened to be a fake.”

“And that’s why Tu was stopped by a last-second reversal ''that never should have happened.'' So many of his reliable subordinates were burned before his eyes and he was forced to go into hiding, but now he’s climbed back onto the main stage of magic. As if to say he no longer needs to hide his plans because he has long since been ready to go.”

“You mean…?”

“''Doesn’t it seem likely he has the real one this time''?”

Stiyl fell silent.

The enemy had been faster this time. And since they had not directly tracked him down, they could not immediately stop him.

“Tu.”

Stiyl had known the answer from the beginning, so now he spat out the name of a man he thought he had killed.

“Albert Dying!!”