Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:AgneseSS Chapter3 (section)

===Part 8===

They were inside the restaurant’s kitchen.

Frau Halveria had suggested a simple gamble.

“We make ourselves seem dead.”

“Like Romeo and Juliet?”

“In Voodoo, you can create an absolute poison with a single lime growing on a tree. And zombie powder is a drug that puts people in a state of pseudo-death to control them. I can create anything with this industrial kitchen to work with! There’s no escaping from the Ceremony of Ba Moun, so we just have to make it think we’ve passed on. If its target – me – is already dead, it loses its purpose and should be destroyed!!”

There was no time to see if anything she was saying was true. She probably was not 100% certain herself. She would not have killed all those people if she had been absolutely confident this would work.

“I-is there anything I can do!?” asked Angelene.

“Hold the door until I get the drug ready. Don’t let it in here!!”

She had to use force.

When she slammed her shoulder into the door, a force more than twice as powerful pushed back. The bent door was nearly knocked away. The barrier that Frau Halveria had put in place would be the only reason the door had not been splintered by the impact.

But who could say how long that would last.

“Gh, hhh!!”

There were Christian spells for blocking intruders and pursuers. A lot of them. After all, it was said the Son of God had spread his teachings while constantly on the run from people who did not understand him. But this door was already protected by Frau Halveria’s barrier. If she cast her own spell on it, there could be interference between the two barriers, causing a malfunction, so it was better to leave it be.

“Ow!”

With a dull crack, the constant tackling against the other side of the door caused it to bend further while she held it with her small hands. It split and the splinters slashed her fingertips.

“Let me see,” said Frau Halveria.

She pulled out a suspicious-looking medicine bottle.

“Eh? Eh?”

“Don’t worry. Voodoo drugs aren’t just used for zombies and assassinations. In fact, a priest’s job is to listen to the people of the city or country they rule over and solve their problems. The shambling zombies are just an extreme version of that. At times, making an example of someone or providing the ultimate punishment are the only way to preserve the peace.”

She had pulled out what looked like an empty seasoning bottle, but that was not what she actually used.

She set the empty bottle down on the corner of the countertop with an audible clunk.

“Loko Atisou,” she said while working on a different medicine than before.

It looked like no more than a few different meats and vegetables chopped up and made into a paste, but when she rubbed it on Angelene’s fingertips while saying something under her breath, the bleeding stopped and the small wounds themselves slowly vanished.

“The ceremony has now closed the wounds. Oh, Mystère of medicine and healing, I thank you for guiding us to the path of life leading out from the labyrinth of death. In the name of Brave Ghede, I demand you leave this place.”

“Th-thank you.”

“Don’t worry about it. No one likes to be in pain and everyone fears death.”

Angelene’s out of place words made Frau Halveria look away.

Then she bit her lip.

“Not that I have any right to say that after sacrificing innocents. I know I can never say those sorts of things ever again.”

This may have been like an interrogation room.

A strange bond of trust had been formed between the police detective and the criminal. They might have strayed from the straight and narrow, but when faced with the way things were supposed to be, they could regain their ordinary sensibilities.

Everyone feared death.

If she had the strength to not avert her gaze from what she had done while panicked, Frau Halveria might just be able to turn over a new leaf.

“It’ll be okay.”

“What’ll be okay?”

“There is no bringing back the dead. You even said Voodoo zombies don’t work like that. But part of you still wants to help people. No matter how little of it remains, you still have enough of a heart to go pale in the face when you see someone hurt. You should be able to turn that heart toward the people who have already died and not just the people you can still save. Even the dead have dignity that needs to be protected.”

“…”

“So you shouldn’t die here. Not as long as you can feel regret. You need to save the people who died by your hand. Their lives are gone forever, but you can still give them something.”

A dull crash came from the door.

It was the decisive sound of a wooden pillar breaking, so they were out of time.

“Once you take the pseudo-death drug, get inside the fridge. That will lower your temperature to complete the illusion of death! There’s no other way of tricking the Ceremony of Ba Moun!!”

“Got it!!”

(Wait?)

Something occurred to Angelene then.

(Even if this drug can trick the demon, won’t it lock onto us again the instant we “come back to life”? We can’t feign death forever.)

But before she could ask about that, she felt a sharp pain in her neck.

“Kah!?”

That was enough to knock her out.

Evidently that woman could indeed create an absolute poison with a single lime.

Frau Halveria slowly exhaled, passed her arms below Angelene’s arms, and lifted the girl from where she had collapsed to the ground. Then she dragged her further back into the kitchen.

“But…why?”

Angelene felt betrayed.

But she sensed an odd lack of hostility. Which brought an even greater sense of danger.

“The drug was to…save you.”

“Surely you understand.”

The woman was dragging Angelene to the large industrial refrigerator.

It was plenty large to fit someone inside.

“Even if I used the drug to temporarily stepped down from the stage, it would lock back onto me as soon as I recovered. So there’s no point in me taking it. This was only ever going to work for you.”

“…”

“I should have done this from the beginning.”

“But then…you didn’t have to do this to me.”

“No, I didn’t. But if I didn’t incapacitate you, you’d be killed too.”

What had given her a change of heart?

Was it Angelene insisting that it was wrong to get innocent people killed by the Ceremony of Ba Moun? Had she realized her partner here was too weak to accomplish anything, so she was giving up on her?

Or.

Was she thankful that someone had tried to free her from her lonely battle in some form or another?

“I…”

Angelene clenched her teeth.

Even though she knew she would not have the strength to do so for much longer.

“I didn’t do all this to push you toward death!!”

Frau Halveria only smiled.

Gently.

It looked like the face of a corpse to Angelene.

Then the door from the rest of the restaurant was mercilessly broken through. The time had come. No one could stop it now. The cold rules of the magic world would bare their fangs against a living human.

And.

“Hello, hello. Coming through.”

An absurdly casual voice interrupted.

There was someone else inside the realm of death this restaurant had become. And they were very close. A woman with silver hair and brown skin stood so close to the sinister collection of spider legs extending from the shredded backpack that she could have rubbed her cheek against a thorny leg if she only bent her hips a bit.

“Well, I’d say your first mistake was figuring out how to draw out so much power from such a half-assed design. The cost performance on this thing is wild. Well, the spells that catch on as rookie-killers tend to be the easiest to set up. Like the Kokkuri-san or the Ushi no Koku Mairi.”

No one was allowed to enter this place.

“Wahh!”

Once that innocent-sounding curse was uttered, the woman who smelled of death had her right side mercilessly bitten away with what sounded like a wet explosion. Her overall silhouette now looked like a red crescent moon. Her blood and guts spilled out into the air, but they came to a stop before hitting the floor. But not because the spider legs had caught them. The woman herself remained standing tall.

Corpses were all she could create.

But if she had methods of manipulating corpses, she would also have a way of controlling them remotely.

“I see. Looks like my experiment was a rousing success. If it wouldn’t react to a corpse made from rearranged animal blood and meat, even I would have to give up. So we’re lucky it considers anything that moves a threat, whether it’s alive or dead.”

“Wh-what?”

Angelene was speechless.

The Ceremony of Ba Moun had ruled over this place, but that atmosphere had been obliterated by the gore of this silver-haired brown-skinned new arrival.

“This shouldn’t be so surprising. The Ceremony of Ba Moun is admittedly powerful and nearly impossible to mess with, but it has one crucial different from normal spells. Since its power comes from a contract with a demon, the curse has a master. It is not a truly formless collection of malice or anything like that. It has a definite and physical source, so you just have to do something about that.”

Her pieces began to fall again, but she maintained her smile even as she piled up on the floor.

“With the Ceremony of Ba Moun, the demon itself will come to take the life of anyone who fails to follow the rules. And that demon is an individual. No matter how powerful it is, this will always be a one-on-one deal. In other words…”

The female cadaver smiled and calmly pointed at something with a remaining finger.

“You only need to present it with two corpses of the exact same person.”

How long had those been there?

They were Frau Halveria herself.

Or more accurately…

“Especially when that demon will bite at anything that moves, even a corpse.”

If Angelene had found one of those first, she would have doubted the woman standing next to her now was alive. She would have suspected she was speaking with a ghost. That was how detailed the doppelgangers were, yet it was really nothing more than large animal bones and organs patched together.

There were indeed two fake corpses lying on the floor.

There was a dull tearing sound.

The demon had just one body, yet there were two of its target lying at two distant points on the floor. As powerful as it was, it was a single being, yet it could never ignore its own objective. And what happened when it tried to move to attack both targets at the same time?

This time, it was not a baby’s cry.

This was much more brutal. It was a primal scream that seemed to deteriorate the soul of all who heard it. But make no mistake. That was not an adorable baby. It was something very different. If you felt even a twinge of guilt or any of your ordinary emotions were stirred, it would draw you into a vortex of inhuman malice.

The demon split itself apart and splattered itself across the floor.

All the pieces came in contact with all the perfectly ordinary shadows in the room and disappeared as if absorbed by them.

“That should do it.”

Someone other than the cadavers on the floor entered through the broken door.

It was the silver-haired brown-skinned necromancer.

“Ooh, I really nailed the colors today! The attention to detail really pays off when you see how the corpse splatters itself around. Check out how taboo this all this. The stickiness is subtly different from when a living human is crushed!!”

This one did not seem to be made from pig and cow parts.

It was obvious enough once you met her directly.

Isabella Theism wore the clothes of the dead with a childlike smile on her face. Those clothes were the source of her faint scent of death; it did not actually come from her skin. It was most accurate to say she was a living person who dressed up as the dead. But the woman from before had been nothing but death. She had carried the flat and simple scent of death found from no more than a corpse.

“Well, that should solve your Ceremony of Ba Moun problem. Although even that ''didn’t actually kill it''.”

She made it sound so simple.

Should they fear that demon for living up to its name? Or should they breath an exasperated sigh at this wielder of death who had so easily dealt with it?

“If a demon is particular about its name, you just have to properly name it. If a curse is particular about numbers, you just have to use a numbers trick. If you can’t actually pull that off, you shouldn’t try to use those things. Do you get that now?”

The magician named Frau Halveria looked to the restaurant floor in shocked silence.

“What do we do about this? There are two corpses of me here, but if we leave them here, it’ll definitely lead to problems.”

“Well, it wouldn’t have fooled the curse if you could visually tell them apart from you.”

Isabella Theism grabbed a mop and tossed it over to the woman.

Frau Halveria caught it in confusion and the other woman winked while providing the name of the ultimate punishment game.

“Have you ever heard of forensic cleanup?”

“…”

“Not many people get a chance to clean up their own corpse. Did you know the word grotesque was originally an art term? Give this gruesome scene a good hard look and rethink your path in life if you don’t want to end up like this yourself.”

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