Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:AgneseSS Chapter1 (section)

===Part 4===

They were left filthy and disgusting.

“Ugh.”

But now Agnese Sanctis wore a thin pink fabric with surprisingly cute frills.

She groaned while laying on a sofa bed in her underwear.

From the outside, this looked like a plain metal container, but from the inside, it even had a bathroom and kitchen. Basically, it was a mobile home, but unlike the commercial models, this one had removed all unnecessary decorations, such as the windows and doors, to make it indistinguishable from a cargo container.

Her right leg slipped from the bed and hit something.

She barely had time to realize it was a silver staff leaning against the wall before…

“Ow!! Do you not know how to look after your own spiritual item, Sister Agnese!?”

“Why are you sleeping on the floor, Sister Angelene?”

It had apparently fallen over and hit someone on the forehead.

The staff had an angel carving curled up at the head, but it was known as the Lotus Wand. That magical item functioned as an all-purpose Symbolic Weapon in modern Western magic.

They had finished the work shortly before 4 AM – or just barely before dawn – but their struggles had not ended there. Necessarius was being excessively thorough for some simple training, so the nuns had showered and showered to no avail. The stench of death, that unique scent reminiscent of rust mixed with rotting eggs with a few drops of vinegar added as a special touch, still clung to them. They had somehow avoided being cursed, but that meant it was closer to midday than morning when they finally climbed into bed.

And they had a good reason for not using an ordinary hotel.

They were in the Anglican Church’s care for the time being and their former home of the Roman Catholics had more than 2 billion followers around the world. If they were seen working outside of England, it could easily develop into something more than mere training. They had no idea who would be watching or listening in, so they could not leave a paper trail by renting out a hotel room.

“Sister Lucia, aren’t you on cooking duty today? Whip us up something. Something filling but kind on the stomach and something tasty enough to make me forget all about that curse-ridden corpse.”

“You need to dial back your demands unless you’re trying to set me up for failure. Or better yet, let’s go out to eat.”

Agnese, Lucia, and Angelene donned their habits and left the container together.

It was 10 AM and Barcelona was still caught in the middle of the morning rush hour. No one expected the trains to arrive exactly on time in Europe and people generally had a more relaxed view of time, but Spain was especially that way. They were even the country that had introduced the concept of the siesta to the business world. The handwritten boards in front of the cafes tended to say morning business hours ended at 11.

Agnese’s group entered a random restaurant and sat at a table in a corner.

Spanish food differed greatly between the coastal areas and mountain areas. On one side you had seafood paella and on the other you had spit-roasted Iberian pigs. Barcelona was a coastal city, so this place naturally served a lot of shrimps and shellfish. Spain had the distinctive trait of being a European country that regularly ate octopus and squid.

“What were our plans for the day again?” asked Lucia while using her fork to poke at a large salad with plenty of seafood piled on top.

“Don’t ask me. That brokenhearted barcode arsonist insists on making it a surprise, so he’ll probably show up with some kind of training at some point.”

They were still seen as outsiders within Necessarius.

The work they were being given seemed entirely pointless, but it was possible they were actually completing some special task without their knowledge. For example, 99% of their late-night forensic cleanup work may have been done on imitation scenarios, but it was possible the last 1% had some real evidence mixed in. The on-site workers had no way of knowing what role they played in the big picture.

The Anglican Church – and Necessarius in particular – was a monstrous system created to efficiently kill, so they likely had worked out long ago how to get people to do horrific things without guilt.

“Clams, clams, delicious claaaams.”

Stoop-backed Angelene was chowing down on some elliptical shellfish.

Agnese was munching on some pizza toast flavored with sliced olives and anchovies.

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“Well, as long as they’re still telling us it’s training, the situation can’t be too serious,” said Agnese. “I imagine the danger level is between yellow and orange. We need to be cautious, but nothing is about to happen.”

“Are you sure that’s not being overly optimistic?”

“Upsetting your superiors by digging deeper for no good reason is not a good way to live a long life. So until something happens, I say we enjoy some sightseeing here in Spain. The sunny side of this city looks so much brighter after experiencing that shadowy mess of curses, death, and blood.”

She said it herself, but Agnese could not shake a sense that something was wrong.

“Something isn’t right about this restaurant.”

“Hwut dho you mwean?” asked Angelene with her mouth so full her cheeks swelled out like a squirrel’s.

Lucia tugged on her ear as an expressionless punishment and responded to Agnese.

“Yes, it’s too clean. ''I can’t sense any naturally-occurring magic here.''”

Magic was not known to the ordinary people living their ordinary lives, but that ignorance often led them to unwittingly stumble into it. For example, few people knew the shushing gesture of holding your index finger in front of your lips had its roots in an Ancient Egyptian ritual. Amateurs performed those ordinary actions all the time, so there was no need for anyone to wipe all trace of it clean.

Small jinxes could be found in the greetings people exchanged on a daily basis without knowing a thing about the magic world. Even when you did not know how to actually refine your lifeforce into magic power, you could still gather some power as a faint margin of error. It was a lot like leaving behind invisible fingerprints.

But this restaurant contained none of that.

They could only assume that someone with enough knowledge to notice those slight risks had wiped everything clean.

Agnese glanced around the restaurant.

“Did someone perform magical forensic cleaning here?”

That question came back at her and inspired a further question.

“But why?”