Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Volume SP Chapter1 (section)

===Part 6===
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A certain thing always seemed to exist within an international airport and the international airport in Academy City’s District 23 was no exception.

That thing was a duty-free shop.

“…With color printers you really can’t beat the Japanese ones,” said Stiyl Magnus in shock as he looked at the specs given next to the price.

The pale gradient display was not bad at all. He had never thought the sparkling of the scales of a tropical butterfly’s wings could be printed.

(With this level of expression on my side, I might be able to use even that symbol… The time may have come for me to construct some new rune cards. I know. Maybe I should try making some long distance attacks.)

He did not notice, but a creepy smile appeared on his face.

Seeing that, a wondering expression came to Theodosia’s face.

“Why are you carrying a bunch of the exact same type of ink cartridge you usually buy online?”

“…”

Foreign tourists had a tendency to see the Japanese-made office electronics in the duty-free shop and end up buying them. They knew they would later realize the products were not really all that great and regret buying them, but they were sucked in regardless. Even if they were told that there were other more Japanese places they could be going to, Mt. Fuji would still be a pain in the ass to climb.

Holding his shopping basket filled with products, Stiyl said, “I guess the Dawn-Colored Sunlight is heading out about now.”

“Are you sure we shouldn’t go see them off?”

“You do realize we are part of Necessarius, the group that destroys magic cabals like them, right? Why would we go see our enemies off? I hate having to say it, but we could very well be having a fight to the death with them right now if it hadn’t been for Richard Brave making a mess of things.”

“It seems there is a faction within the Anglican Church that thinks we should join forces with some of the more skilled magic cabals. Do you really have no intention of getting along?”

“That’s an issue for the higher-ranking members of Necessarius,” Stiyl said with a sigh. “I rescued Patricia Birdway because she is a normal person with no connection to the Dawn-Colored Sunlight. She should not have been forced into a clash between magic forces. If she had been acting as a member of the Dawn-Colored Sunlight, we would have had to see her as an enemy.”

“…”

“Her sister is a perfect example. Those sisters started off the same, but one ended up involved with magic while the other didn’t. Patricia is one thing, but unfortunately, I will never cooperate with the older sister that rules the cabal. What was with her anyway? She’s creepy, condescending, violent, and shows no sign of treating other people like human beings.”

“Oh? Well, isn’t that a shame.”

“!?”

Stiyl immediately turned around toward the girl’s voice that had suddenly come from behind him.

“Your threats lose all weight when you give them holding a shopping basket.”

She was the boss of the Dawn-Colored Sunlight.

Stiyl’s eyes narrowed, but she just continued speaking calmly.

“Oh, make no mistake. I didn’t come here to crush you.”

She had a youthful appearance, but she had the strength to singlehandedly defeat a unit of expert magicians and yawn about it. A cruel grin appeared on Birdway’s face as she grabbed the shoulders of a girl with the exact same face from behind. She then pushed the other girl forward. Patricia seemed oddly stiff and Birdway grinned from behind her.

“My little sister seems to want to thank you before she leaves the country. Hm? I take it you’re the type that’s more interested in little sisters than big sisters.”

“…”

Stiyl fell silent as a great number of customers passed by within the duty-free shop.

Birdway continued pushing Patricia forward.

“What’s with that look? Don’t tell me you’re going to refuse a request from a normal person. Well, I personally don’t care if you do, but my sister is quite the crybaby. She can really cry when she gets going. You should have seen her a bit ago when she tripped and her ass landed straight in a puddle. Her panties were soaking wet.”

“I-I wasn’t crying!! And I’m not a crybaby!!”

Patricia started objecting and her face grew red, but her sister held onto her shoulders too tightly for her to turn around. Stiyl felt he had a pretty good grasp of who held the power in that relationship.

Birdway must have gotten carried away due to Patricia being unable to see her because a dark smile spread across her face that befitted the leader of an evil organization.

“And so my little sister here is about to give her one and only first confession. This will be quite a bitter experience for me as her older sister, so she should be thankful I’m letting her.”

“Bfgeh!?”

Patricia started coughing with an expression Stiyl had never seen before. Birdway started laughing, but then Theodosia spoke up.

“Birdway, by any chance, do you not want your younger sister to get ahead of you in life-dgbh!?”

“That isn’t it. Don’t worry. That simply isn’t it at all.”

“I-I think I was just casually hit by an assassination magic attack that is made to be unanalyzable so as to leave no evidence…”

“U-um!! It seems the conversation has turned toward me confessing, but that isn’t what I want to say!!”

They all seemed to say, “Then what is it?” as they turned toward Patricia and she winced. Birdway then started pressing her sister further while holding her shoulders firmly in place.

“In other words, you’re going to be making some announcement with even more impact than your one and only first confession?”

“Uuh…”

“If you now come out and say something dull, these magicians are sure to be disappointed in you. Simply put, they will refuse to even stick their legs under the same kotatsu as you.”

“Waaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!! Now that-…Now that you’ve built it up to the point that it sounds like I’m going to be saying the most interesting thing the universe, there’s no way I can say anything!!”

With the pressure of expectation coming from all sides, Patricia lost it and ran from the duty-free shop with teary eyes. Theodosia reacted quickest as she had kids of her own and frantically chased after her.

(Huh. She really is a crybaby.)

“…Y’know, I’m surprised someone from the Dawn-Colored Sunlight knows about the Japanese kotatsu.”

“Japanese appliances really are the best. If I had a kotatsu, I’d probably never get out from under it.”

With timing that confused Stiyl, a sinister smile spread across Birdway’s face.

Once Patricia was gone, Stiyl’s expression changed.

“''So what do you really want''?”

“Oh, that’s quite a change now that my sister’s left. I guess you really are the little sister type.”

“Please don’t say things that will cause misunderstandings. If Patricia needed something, you could have given her a few guards. There was no need for the boss of the cabal to go along.”

“Heh.”

Unlike Stiyl, Birdway was still grinning.

“This is just a bit of thanks.”

“?”

“I’m not the one that wants to know something. I deduced that there were things you would want to know, so I came by. Normally, I would have no obligation to do this, but you did look after my little sister.”

“What are you talking about?” Stiyl’s expression grew suspicious. “What are you saying I want to know?”

“The whereabouts of the Donati Horoscope.”

Tension mixed in with Stiyl’s thoughts.

When Stiyl had arrived at the transport vehicle, someone had already stolen the horoscope and Richard Brave had not seemed to know where it was. So who had attacked the transport vehicle?

“Or maybe what we plan to do with the horoscope. Do either of those interest you?”

“…”

Stiyl glanced around the area.

It was possible the store would become a battlefield. He started calculating out the best places for rune cards and how many of the normal people he could get to evacuate using a people clearing spell, but…

“Don’t go on guard like that,” Birdway said cheerfully. “We aren’t planning on doing much of anything with the Donati Horoscope or the epitaph fragment. We have no interest in Norse mythology at all. The techniques of the Dvergr would be of no use to us even if we had them.”

“…Do you really think I’ll believe that?”

“Allow me to teach you one truth,” said Birdway as if it was nothing of significance. “The Donati Horoscope originally belonged to us. We purposefully allowed Academy City to find it and recover it.”

“What…?”

“To obtain the techniques of the Dvergr you need the Donati Horoscope, the epitaph fragment, and someone from my family. We had all three from the beginning. If we were planning to carry out the ceremony, we would have already done so.”

“Then why did you let it go?”

“Because we didn’t need it. What other reason could we have?” Birdway replied immediately.

She easily denied the Dvergr techniques that Stiyl and Richard had been fighting so desperately over.

“In fact, excavating the techniques of the Dvergr would just invite in unnecessary chaos. We wanted to seal them away if possible. We were thinking of splitting the three pieces up and sending them each to some place where no magic cabal could get their hands on them.”

“Then you should have just sent it to the British Museum. There was no need to send it off to the science side.”

“But there were some who were after it within the Anglican Church and you are the ones that manage the magical items there.”

“…”

Stiyl fell silent, but Birdway showed no sign of caring despite the fact that she could be seen as being one of the “victims” of the incident. To her, it had all been nothing more than a bit of “trouble”.

“We thought that sending the horoscope to the headquarters of the science side would be best because it would get the best care in a world that had no idea what its magical value was. …But Academy City turned out to be a surprisingly bad choice. We determined we couldn’t leave it here, so we came to retrieve it.”

Stiyl looked back at Birdway’s face.

His look was really nothing but a glare, but Birdway paid him no heed.

“You don’t believe me?” she asked.

“…Of course I don’t,” spat out Stiyl. “No matter what you say, the Dvergr techniques are still quite powerful. I see no reason why you would go out of your way to throw away something like that. Keeping every advantage you can is how proper magic cabals think.”

“Proper magic cabals, hm?” repeated Birdway with a smile as if carefully going over Stiyl’s words.

Unlike before, her smile seemed to roll naturally from her mouth.

“What?”

“It seems you’re a bit mistaken about the Dawn-Colored Sunlight. I have no obligation to explain all this and my thanks for saving my little sister is running dry, but what the hell. I’ll give you just a bit more, free of charge.”

After a pause, Birdway continued.

“First of all, the Dawn-Colored Sunlight is not a magic cabal.”

Stiyl Magnus froze in place at that casual statement.

What had she just said?

The Dawn-Colored Sunlight was one of the leading magic cabals even within the great magic country of England.

He thought he had misheard her, but Birdway’s tone did not change.

“I’m not kidding. It may be acting a lot like a magic cabal right now, but if you go back far enough, you’ll find that we are constructed entirely differently from the organizations that are devoted to a set denomination or sect.”

Birdway’s tone grew calmer.

It reminded Stiyl of the tone of someone giving priority to spreading their knowledge.

“In the Dawn-Colored Sunlight, there is no magic or science.”

“…Are you serious?” Stiyl said as a few customers passed by.

“To be more accurate, we are an old organization that has existed from an age before there was a distinction between magic and science. It was around the 18th century that natural science was developed and a line was drawn between academia and religion. Most formal organizations are older than that.”

She was right, but there was still a tacit understanding that modern organizations were either on the magic side or the science side. And the world was not kind to those who broke that unwritten rule.

“The name ‘Dawn-Colored Sunlight’ was not added on until later. Even I don’t know what its original name was and I’m the organization’s boss, but it seems the organization was established with the goal of investigating those who stand above others.”

“Investigating those who stand above others?”

“You could say that we are an organization that looks into the actions and abilities of certain types of charismatic people. To put it simply, we are trying to understand what requirements are needed to be a leader so we can make a manual for it and just follow a flowchart that lets us seize control of any nation or group. Basically, it’s a type of world domination,” Birdway said with a sneer. “Doesn’t it almost make you laugh how it sounds like the goal of some evil organization? By the way, the line between science and magic has become rather vague in Europe of late. Most of the leaders have some connection to religious power, symbols, or legends. When you investigate it deep enough, you realize that the organizations have all become tilted in an occult direction at some point.”

Birdway paused for a second.

“Something conclusive happened in the latter half of the 19th century. The world’s largest magic cabal, a group known as the Golden cabal, appeared within England. Almost all of the charismatic magicians in Europe gathered in one group. It was almost a miraculous group from the point of view of an organization that wanted to investigate the type of people that stand above others. Of course, we ended up investigating them. And we did so by joining them.”

“…And so you became dyed in their colors?”

“They pulled us from the proper course. Charismatic people have a type of attraction to them. As an organization that had investigated those who stand above others for many years, we had supposedly gained a sort of resistance to that, but the entire organization was swallowed whole.”

That was when the organization became the Dawn-Colored Sunlight.

The organization was not supposed to have either magic or science within it, but it had been pulled fully over to the magic side.

(…)

Stiyl was reminded of Richard Brave. That magician had been shaken and destroyed within that gap between magic and science. Given that, it may have been for the best that the Dawn-Colored Sunlight had tilted in the direction of being a magic cabal. Not joining either side may have made both sides their enemy.

(It was after the collapse of the Golden cabal that the science side was reorganized with the establishment of Academy City and the treaty with the magic side was formed. All of that may have worked toward saving the Dawn-Colored Sunlight.)

“So you understand now, right?”

“Understand what?”

“Our goal is to seize the position at the top of the already existing society. The techniques of the Dvergr would destroy the current society and create a new order. We wish for a more crass and practical method of domination, so that is too roundabout a method for us. There is no guarantee the new society would be a convenient one for our purposes and it simply would not be worth controlling.”

She seemed to be saying she wanted a tidy place to control.

Stiyl felt it was like a type of arrogant pacifism.

“Our ultimate goal is to control and rule everything regardless of whether it is of magic or science. As such, it would be a problem to tilt the balance too far in either direction. For that reason, the techniques of the Dvergr simply have too much weight. With them, the Dawn-Colored Sunlight would become nothing more than a magic cabal.”

“…Are you trying to remove the poison?” Stiyl said scornfully.

After all that, he was finally able to refuse to admit defeat and make a rebuttal.

“You can’t. As a magician, I know. Anyone who knows even a bit about magic or establishes their place in the world using magic can’t rid themselves of it. Once the scales tip, they can’t be brought back.”

“True,” Birdway quickly agreed. “And it may be best for the world if that holds and we can never become anything more than a magic cabal.”

“…”

“But society will move on regardless of what we want. And it will bring us along with it. At some point in the future, we will overcome the framework of a mere magic cabal. When that happens and we or our descendants have regained the original power the organization was established with, who knows what will happen.”

A hint of loneliness could be heard in her voice.

However, the evil grin on her face made one suspect they were just imagining things.

Some change must have come over Stiyl because the type of grin on Birdway’s face changed when she looked at him.

“Well, there’s no reason to become pessimistic. We may merely lose our individuality, lose the ability to hold together as an organization, and simply collapse.”

“What about Patricia…?” said Stiyl cutting in for the first time. They had exchanged words, but he felt that was the first time he had actually cut in. “Is Patricia Birdway some kind of guidepost?”

“Perhaps. She is a normal person who is not part of the science side or the magic side. She does not rely on either side’s power and lives her life as a completely normal person. Well, I suppose my desire is to bring the organization to a halt once it regains its original form. …There is a possibility that both the science side and the magic side will not allow such an organization to exist. Although, I doubt all of the organization’s members will approve of my desire.”

What was the proper word to describe the expression on Birdway’s face there?

It was true that Patricia had been given the epitaph fragment on her orders, but not even Birdway herself must have known the true reason behind that decision. The interests of the organization and her personal feelings were intertwined complexly.

Suddenly, Birdway’s smile grew fully evil once more.

“At any rate…”

“?”

“My sister Patricia and I are the same type of person. I am not satisfied with being the boss of a magic cabal. I am a cute girl that courageously wants to cast all that aside and try to somehow bring the organization to a halt as a normal person. Shouldn’t you be speaking to me a bit more politely?”

“…I see the boss of the Dawn-Colored Sunlight has a terrible sense of humor. That would have quite a bit of impact in high society.”

“Don’t be so stingy. One way of looking at things says you held my little sister’s hand and escorted her through the city at night while you cheered each other on.”

“That damn brat!! Is that what she told you…!?”

“In fact, she came to me and proudly bragged about it. It doesn’t bother me at all, but how about you treat her a little more gentlemanly in the future if the situation should ever arise again.”

“Do you have to speak down to people no matter what you talk about?”

“Tch. I had a feeling you wouldn’t. Well, whatever. Due to some hot-headed idiot, I was carried in someone’s arms like a princess for the first time in my life, so I guess I’ll use that to lord it over my little sister on the plane ride home.”

Stiyl frowned at the term “hot-headed idiot”.

The face he least wanted to recall in the world came unbidden to mind.

“By any chance, did this hot-headed idiot have spiky black hair?”

“Oh, do you know him? He kept going on about misfortune, so I decided to show him a thing or two about real misfortune. He turned out to be pretty tough and he’s fun to play with.”

(Now that damn hot-headed idiot has made another connection to some strange part of the world!?)

As one whose job was to see to the safety of the magic industry, Stiyl almost brought his hands to his head.

Birdway waved her hand around.

“Now then. I need to be going.”

“I see.”

“I’ll leave you with one last comment,” she said as she turned her back on him. “We do not want the techniques of the Dvergr to bring chaos to society.”

“…What are you saying?”

“Do I really need to spell it out? I’m saying that the Anglican Church’s ongoing attempt to analyze them through the proper methods is no exception.”

“!?”

Stiyl frantically turned toward her, but she was already gone.

There was nowhere for a person to hide in the area.

No one else seemed to have noticed anyone disappear.

In fact, some people were looking at Stiyl because of his strange actions.

“…”

As Stiyl stood there dumbfounded, he heard his cell phone ringing.

It was from the Necessarius communications official.

“This is a notification for Stiyl Magnus. The time for your periodic report on the incident regarding the Dawn-Colored Sunlight has passed. Please immediately provide the information through the proper method.”

“You speak well for someone who was led around by Richard so easily.”

“All of the problems have been resolved, have they not?”

“Yes, they have,” replied Stiyl after thinking for a second. “It’s all over.”

(…Is it really?)

Stiyl Magnus added that last bit silently within his heart.

Something remained after that battle was over.

Stiyl’s thoughts remained on that new small flame that could one day grow into a much larger blaze.

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