Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:AgneseSS Chapter4 (section)

===Part 3===

After about two hours, Lucia and Angelene looked up from their piles of documents, sighed, and pulled out their phones in perfect unison. They started up their video apps and began squishing the dumbass’s cheeks.

“So, got anything to say for yourself, Sister Agnese?”

“Do have any comment at all regarding our wasted effort searching for two hours without finding a single thing? Please, tell us again how clever your theory is! With that smug look of course! I just have to hear that pathetic excuse for a theory again!! Please!!”

A porcine snort came from Agnese whose face had undergone an ugly transformation thanks to the pressure from either side.

“They’re in Italian, Spanish, French, or whatever else…and then there’s a pain-in-the-butt cipher on top of that base language,” complained Angelene. “Argh, why do grimoires have to be so hard to read? It’s a complete waste of effort!!”

“Sister Angelene, how many times have I told you to learn Latin?”

“Oh? Why would Miss Piggy think she has any right to talk back to me after this?”

It was not often Angelene straightened her back and looked down on someone else.

Yes, it had all ended up how Agnese Sanctis had said it would. If they started with a foundation of baseless doubts, mistrust, and speculation, they would only create a “highly realistic-sounding conspiracy theory”.

No matter how insignificant it might seem, they had to start with a foundation of fact if they wanted to reach the truth.

And in that sense…

“After two hours, all we’ve figured out is that there doesn’t seem to be any magical system in common to all three cases,” said Lucia.

“But we already knew that when we started,” tearfully complained Angelene. “It feels just as pointless as spending an entire century proving why 1 times 1 is 1. What was the point of all this time and effort!?”

They had hit a dead end.

They saw hints of a Person X. They were certain someone like that was out there. But they could not find any solid clues there. It was like they could see a crime taking place, but they could not gather enough evidence to do anything about it. It was like watching a politician hold an apology press conference where they insisted over and over that it was all a misunderstanding and they had done nothing at all illegal. Finding nothing at all was actually more suspicious, yet there was no way to use that in an investigation.

This massive treasure trove of information went to waste when they did not know what to search for. Right now, a single idea or flash of inspiration would be more useful than all this information. Sitting at their desks any longer would only be a waste of time.

Angelene finally began to throw a fit.

“Arrrrgh!! I need a change of pace. We’re in Switzerland, remember? I want try the food! I want to see the sights! I can barely breathe in this thick vault!!”

''Should I smack her?'' asked Lucia with a glance, but Agnese shook her head.

“I guess we can go get something to eat,” said Agnese in a resigned way.

“Fine, but what food is Switzerland known for?” asked Lucia.

“Cheese fondue of course! And mineral water!!”

Angelene’s view was fairly biased. Was she trying to say the Swiss lived on nothing but cheese and water?

But then Agnese threw a curveball.

“I believe they’re known for their instant coffee and freeze-dried food. Also their ready-made, canned, and frozen foods, their curry roux, their white stews, their instant soups, and so on. But not cup noodles. Those are a unique genre that only really developed in Japan, just like miso soup and flavor enhancers.”

“Hwuhh?”

“Switzerland is home to the world’s largest instant food company. Look around and you might find a museum or souvenir shop dedicated to it.”

Angelene pouted her lips hard at the thought of eating instant foods after coming all the way to Switzerland. Angelene understood the feeling, but instant foods were a necessity and a lifesaver for the mountain climbers who attempted the climb the Alps along the Swiss route.

They decided to leave the bank and take a walk outside.

In a city of banks and insurance companies, they had expected to see a lot of businessmen out at midday, but they instead saw a surprising number of men and women in religious habits. And Anglican ones at that.

“Wh-what is going on?” hesitantly asked Angelene.

“While Switzerland is a country of banks, most transactions are handled over the phone or internet. The people visiting directly are the ones with treasures physically stored in the safe-deposit boxes. And in this block of Zurich, that means Anglicans.”

It was a lot like a company town where the city was financially ruled by a single company, but that had its pros and its cons. When you knew people of a certain affiliation would be in a specific restaurant, it was not hard for a third party to eavesdrop while pretending to be a customer.

Whether she realized that or not, Angelene made her own complaint.

“Then everyone here was forced to travel all the way here for research while working outside of the UK, just like us? Everyone is supposed to be equal, but those of us at the bottom always get the short end of the stick.”

They peeked inside a variety of restaurants.

Most of them served thick bacon and potatoes. It looked German at first glance, but not all of Switzerland was like this. To reiterate, the country did not have a single official language or religion. Each canton chose German, French, or whatever other language to use.

Angelene had the dark look of a child who saw curry rice for dinner the third day in a row. Yes, she had only just finished fighting for her life in Frankfurt.

“It’s not bad. It’s definitely not bad, but it’s just not what I want. Ahhh! Why couldn’t we be working in an Italian-speaking area!?”

“Be careful what you wish for. Any Italian food you got here wouldn’t seem quite right. When you want a margherita pizza topped with tomato and cheese, you don’t want to be served Pasta alla Genovese covered in ham and avocado, do you?”

Because Italy was their homeland, they could be much more particular about Italian cooking. Just like the Japanese were particular about dashi, the French were particular about sauces, and Indians were particular about seasonings, Agnese’s group could be extremely demanding when it came to pasta. (Enough so that a simple disagreement could lead to a never-ending war.) They would never approve of someone who always went with long, skinny spaghetti regardless of the sauce or method of cooking and who assumed anything was fine as long as you cooked it al dente. So they might find foreign cuisine more familiar since they would fail to notice the small differences there.

They ended up grabbing a very German-smelling pizza for lunch. Simply put, cheese and tomato sauce were spread across a round piece of dough, fries and sliced salami were placed on top of that, and then the whole thing was cooked.

“It’s called a pizza patatine,” said Angelene while staring fixedly at the large plate carried to the table.

“Hold on,” cut in Lucia to point out the fundamental mistake here. “What kind of a crazy food did you order for us here? I mean, who puts fries on a pizza!? That’s carbs on top of carbs!”

“I will admit it looks pretty wild, but it’s actually a traditional dish. For kids. Admittedly, it’s more like a snack than a proper meal.”

“You mean people eat a meal in addition to this? How can that possibly fit into a healthy diet?”

Lucia was flabbergasted, but this was actually an Italian dish, not a German one. What Italian food meant changed a lot between different regions of Italy, so it was not that strange for Lucia to be unfamiliar with this one.

(Hm, we let Sister Angelene’s tantrum convince us to eat here. Even though eating Italian outside the country can only lead to trouble.)

“Now, now. Burgers generally come with fries, right? This is a lot like combining the two since eating them separately is a pain.”

“That is not a very appetizing description!”

Food came in countless forms around the world, but it was actually very unusual to serve carbs on top of carbs when either one would have qualified as a main dish. With the burger example, the fries were only a side. The most prominent example of breaking that rule was Japan. They would put yakisoba between bread as a sandwich, serve rice with ramen, put rice cakes in udon, and otherwise mix carb-filled main dishes. The tendency had such deep roots that you would see things like a small katsudon or oyakodon listed on the menu for a soba place that was (obviously) where people went to eat soba. And that culture had been so deeply imprinted on the people of that country that they failed to even notice it was weird to assume a soba place would cook them some curry or an oyakodon along with their soba.

But anyway…

“Yum, yum. It has a pretty shocking visual, but I could eat this all day. It’s like an even better version of poutine!!”

“But in exchange, it has enough calories to keep you alive for a week stranded on a snowy mountain. And isn’t poutine that Canadian stuff that will fatten you up with ruthless efficiency?”

Angelene’s eyes were shining bright, but Lucia had a gloomy cloud over her face. Calling it a snack for kids may have influenced her view of things. Incidentally, poutine was a giant pile of fries with lots of melted cheese and gravy dumped on top. It was like a culinary trap because it was so delicious you never wanted to eat anything else, but it would fatten you up no time if you ate it exclusively. Specifically, it would fatten you up so much you could no longer fit through the door and needed to call a rescue team to extract you from your room.

“Not to worry, Sister Lucia,” said Agnese who (unlike Angelene) was keeping track of how many slices she had eaten. “We’re still growing girls.”

“You can’t just use that excuse for everything.”

“Everything we eat goes straight to our boobs. Isn’t the human body a miracle?”

“Just in case you are serious about that, women’s breasts are not the same thing as a camel’s humps.”

It was during that discussion that Agnese Sanctis noticed something odd about her surroundings.

She saw a latte.

A customer at another table had ordered that item that could be ordered just about anywhere in the world. However, it was somewhat unusual for the thick espresso and the warm milk to be carried over in separate containers. The customer took a small lick of the plain espresso with the tip of her tongue and then slowly poured the hot milk in with a thin metal spoon. The action was similar to carefully mixing several drinks together with a muddler.

You were meant to enjoy the drink at the bitterness you preferred, so that was the correct method.

If you just thoughtlessly dumped in the milk, you would end up with something like a coffee milk. And if it was brought out already mixed in a single container, the individual’s preferences had nothing to do with it.

This was correct, but…

(That’s an awfully Italian thing to do.)

You would not find this method listed in an etiquette book about Italian cuisine. It was more like a stubborn life hack the common folk had invented after getting frustrated with so many places serving them something like coffee milk no matter how they tried to order it. Only someone who really knew what they were doing would know about this.

In fact…

“Sister Lucia. Angelene too.”

“Mgh?”

“Do not turn around, but I recognize the person eating three tables behind you two. …And this isn’t someone I met after joining the Anglicans. She acted as a guide for us a few times back in our Catholic days. It’s Sister Monica.”

Tension ran through them.

But that must have been too much.

The other girl looked up from her food and her eyes met Agnese’s.

She was quick to respond.

“!!”

“Tch!! Sister Lucia and Angelene! Capture her!!”

Monica only hesitated for a moment.

She stood up so quickly she essentially kicked her chair away and then spun around. She shoved aside a waiter near the entrance to forcibly run outside.

Lucia and Angelene’s eyes widened as they pursued her.

“Why did she run away? We’ve been in that Swiss bank all day, so I doubt she was tailing us. Did we run across her by pure chance???”

“I don’t know, but she must be up to something to run away the instant we saw her!!”

This block of Zurich contained a lot of Anglicans. That meant you could pretend to be a customer at a restaurant to eavesdrop on all sorts of conversations, so it seemed likely Monica had at least been working as a spy.

And since she had run the instant her eyes met Agnese’s, she must have been warned in advance she could not let Agnese notice her.

That suggested she had been spying on Agnese.

(Is she connected to this string of cases?)

Agnese could not answer her own question as she ran full speed through the city.

(If so, are the Catholics behind it??? No, wait. It’s too soon to say. For now, we just have to capture Monica!!)

The fleeing girl in a nun’s habit ran into the small alleyway between two banks.

“Wait!!” shouted Lucia.

Agnese and the other two arrived in that same alleyway less than 10 seconds later.

And yet…

The entire world seemed to change in that moment.

A rusty smell.

The color red.

The odor and hue of blood.

“Ugh!!” groaned Angelene as she came to a stop.

A dark red liquid was splattered across the ground and even on the walls up to a point even higher than the girls’ heads. Before even worrying about concrete threats like a curse or infectious disease, their legs were forced to a stop by no more than the sinister atmosphere.

Something had fallen into the very center of the pool of blood.

It was larger than the palm of a hand.

It looked like a flimsy piece of paper or plastic, but it had a few holes in it.

It had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth.

The skin of a human face had been torn away and abandoned.

“Sister Monica…” groaned Agnese.

“Since her ‘face’ was left here, does that mean this was someone else pretending to be her?” said Lucia while trying to remain calm.

There was indeed magic related to faces.

In the 16th Century, Gerolamo Cardano proposed metoposcopy that determined someone’s destiny based on the lines in their forehead. Similarly, Johannes de Indagine and several other magicians developed physiognomy that determined someone’s inner character by looking at their nose, mouth, and other facial features.

And if such methods had been developed, people would also develop methods of preventing a third party from analyzing their face or to alter their face to give them the destiny or personality they wanted.

Agnese slowly crouched down while careful not to step in the blood.

“This doesn’t look like one of Isabella Theism’s imitations. This is the real skin off someone’s actual face. I hate to think what’s become of Sister Monica.”

“E-eww,” said Angelene while going pale in the face. “You mean the person we were chasing had been living with someone else’s skin over their face in order to hide their identity???”

If being seen by Angelene Sanctis had been enough to do this, whoever it was must have been taking this seriously. Removing that borrowed face had to take a lot more effort than simply removing a mask. The gruesomely splattered blood was testament to that.

Lucia made herself take a deep breath before speaking.

“We need to report this to the higher ups. This might require a discussion or information exchange between the Anglicans and Catholics. I’m curious who that was, but finding out if the real Sister Monica is safe comes first.”

“Th-that’s right!! And if that person had stolen Sister Monica’s face, then they might have stolen documents from the Catholics too.”

“Hm,” said Agnese while crouching and bringing a hand to her chin.

''Was that really what had happened?

She had been the first to start talking about the borrowed face, so she had nearly failed to view this objectively. If she had not heard Lucia and Angelene discussing it, she would have continued down that line of thinking without noticing this oversight.

Yes.

They had originally come here to Zurich, Switzerland, in order to find a point in common between their past few cases. And in that sense…

“This feels familiar.”

“Sister Agnese?”

Lucia gave her a puzzled look, but she did not look up and instead continued viewing the pool of blood.

“Doesn’t this feel familiar, Sister Lucia? All that remains is evidence of someone destroying all solid evidence and covering their tracks. That should tell us that there was a third party here doing harm.”

“Oh,” said Angelene. “That’s the same as that first case in Barcelona where we found unnatural traces of a forensic cleanup in Nihili Padpois’s restaurant!”

“And if the method is similar, there’s a good chance we’re looking at a group that reuses the same tricks. We need to at least keep in mind the possibility that no one was disguising themselves as Sister Monica at all. What if Monica ''tore off her own face and left it here'' to escape suspicion that she is Person X?”

“U-urp!?” groaned Angelene with a hand over her mouth.

Agnese pulled out a cylindrical container of fries she was hiding.

“Excellent work, Sister Angelene!! Heading out for lunch worked so much better than our time in that information broker vault! Have a reward. Don’t be shy – just stuff your mouth full of fries.”

“Bgweh, they’re so greasy!! And I have to know. A-are you being intentionally malicious here, or is it just second nature to you!?”

Living with someone else’s skin over your face was messed up enough, but tearing off your own face and leaving it behind in less than 10 seconds was terrifying in a different way.

But that method would allow Sister Monica to escape suspicion.

She would be “tearing” the Person X identity away from herself so she could abandon that identity here and escape.

Once she got her wound treated to stop the bleeding and was then picked up while wandering aimlessly around the streets of Zurich, she could walk around freely once more. She would be no more than a victim whose face had been stolen a few days before so that the wicked Person X could take on her identity.

“In that case,” said Lucia while placing her hands on Angelene’s small shoulders. “Should we stop here and investigate Sister Monica instead of chasing blindly after some other unseen villain?”

“Yes, but this does not mean the Catholics are necessarily behind this,” said Agnese with a shrug.

She was not about to defend their old organization that had abandoned them, but the Catholics had 2 billion followers. They were such a large percentage of the population that a lot of Catholics were personally up to no good or also part of some other organization. Even 0.01% of them would be 200,000 people.