Toaru Majutsu no Index:Volume SP Chapter2

Mark Space

A completely ordinary stone apartment building existed within the London Borough of Lambeth. One room of that ordinary apartment was a base of a magic cabal large enough to shake all of the United Kingdom.

The cabal was known as the Dawn-Colored Sunlight.

They did not create the grand towers or palaces used by witches in picture books. They divided up their assets as much as possible and gathered only the necessary things and people at one of their bases when they were needed to perform some kind of ceremonial magic. These bases were not strange secret lairs. Instead, they were apartments or other kinds of rented rooms. If they did not do all that, their losses due to attacks from the anti-magician organization of the Anglican Church would be too great.

The magic side was referred to as a single entity, but many different factions and forces existed within it. While some of them were divided by their specific doctrine like the Roman Catholic Church or the Anglican Church (although those two were not magic cabals), some magic cabals were created solely to maximize profit.

All sorts of different types of cabals existed and any number of things sent sparks flying between cabals. They chaotically grew, chaotically fought, chaotically destroyed each other, and finally reached some kind of strange overall balance. Like that, the different powers continued to grow and shrink below the surface where normal people never saw them.

“Ahh, now this is nice. I could get used to having one of these rather than a fireplace.”

The boss of the Dawn-Colored Sunlight, a girl named Birdway, was relaxing within a strange item she had ordered from an eastern island nation. It was called a kotatsu and it was something like a combination of a table and a bed. In order to use this strange item, she had created a “no shoes zone” in the room.

All that was well and good, but it was only the beginning of fall. It was too early to be bringing out a kotatsu. It seemed the master of the room really wanted to try out the item she had ordered from Japan.

The blonde girl who looked about 12 stuck her slender, black stocking-covered legs under the thick blanket as she flipped through a magazine and cut up some reddish-brown yokan.

The title of the magazine was Einstein.

It was a well-known science magazine.

“With the space age finally here, it seems the hot topics are acquiring lunar resources and developing low-cost launch methods. …Wait, how would you use ceremonial magic in space? The protection from leylines would weaken and the entire concept of the cardinal direction as well as up and down would be gone, so how would you create a temple? N-no, but you might be able to use that to your advantage and create some kind of never-before-seen ceremonial grounds that rotates in all 360 degrees. If you did that, you might end up with some kind of never-before-seen effect!! Dammit. I should have taken the measurements before when I had the chance!!”

“You can’t, boss,” kindly said a blond man wearing black formal clothes and a scarf.

He was pouring black tea for himself into a refined Japanese teacup.

“That is of the science side. It is outside of our jurisdiction.”

“I know, I know. …You never let me have any fun,” said Birdway with a click of her tongue in response to his realism.

But pointing out things like that could be said to be the blond man’s job.

“What is going on today? Why did you suddenly yell at me to go buy you this magazine?”

“That would be because of this.”

Birdway flipped the page and pointed toward an article titled, “Let’s Resolve the Energy Crisis! A New Weapon Appears to Advance Oil Drilling in the Arctic Ocean!!”

The blond subordinate raised his face from the magazine.

“You can’t, boss.”

“Not that, you idiot. You have guts to start lecturing me before I’ve even told you what I’m talking about.”

Birdway threw some of the cut-up yokan into her mouth and made a slurping noise as she sipped at her green tea. Her subordinate was fully permeated with European culture, so he looked displeased at the noise. The girl gave a satisfied (and evil) grin before continuing the discussion.

“Some people are saying it would be a problem if the development reaches the Arctic.”

“…? Can parts for spiritual items be found there?”

Forests and mountains where magical plants could be harvested were a vital resource for magic cabals, but the Arctic Ocean held no value for the Dawn-Colored Sunlight. They did not rely on marine products.

“No, not that.” Birdway kicked her feet underneath the kotatsu. “Suspicion has arisen that the Dusk Exit is supporting the oil drilling team in the Arctic.”

“…A British Golden-style cabal like us.”

The blond subordinate clearly looked displeased at that. The Golden-style cabals were referred to as a group, but there were countless different types. The types of spells they used and goals they held were all different. The Dusk Exit was famous for being very wasteful and causing problems for others by using up limited personnel and resources.

There was no concept of equivalent exchange in modern magic.

How great a result could one gain from a limited resource? It could be called a means of cheating each other using the exchange rate. As a result, the failure of a large-scale ceremony was all the more disastrous.

However, the Dusk Exit did not see it that way.

It was similar to spending a hundred million yen on a piece of gold the size of your fingertip.

They were a group of savages who acted like intellectuals and they were often criticized as not even being magicians because they abandoned all thought and tried to make everything work by brute force.

“A few pieces of technology connected to Academy City are involved with this oil drilling.” Birdway dug through a small basket that held a few different types of teacakes. “Thanks to that, both the science side and the magic side are mad at the other claiming they have ‘crossed the line’. On top of that, it seems the Dusk Exit wants to use the funds they gain from the oil drilling to deal with a Portuguese market, so it seems there’s enough of a just cause.”

A market.

When they used that term, they referred to a magic cabal that dealt in human trafficking.

“A Portuguese market… So children?”

“Yes, as materials for spiritual items. They’ll just be used up. A human’s life force is used to refine magic power, but it seems they want to refine a large amount of magic power in an instant to get an explosive reaction from a large-scale spell.”

Birdway laughed and grabbed a quill that lay beside her. She wrote on a small piece of memo paper. The curves seemed extremely arbitrary, rough, and flowing like a celebrity’s signature. The verb “drawing” almost seemed more appropriate than “writing”.

After only 15 seconds, she had completed an exceedingly simplified charm.

“Apparently, the idiots in the Dusk Exit can only create a single copy of something like this using up three whole kids. As a fellow Golden-style magician, it almost gives me a headache.”

“…”

With her subordinate looking on silently, Birdway tapped her index finger in the center of the charm. That was enough to activate the spell which caused a few biscuits to pop out of the charm.

Birdway tossed a freshly baked biscuit into her mouth.

“This is only an estimate, but most likely, it will take only about 0.7 seconds for the children they use to be shattered both inside and out. They will be nothing but empty shells by the end. Doesn’t that extreme wastefulness sound exactly like something they’d do? If the oil platform being developed is completed, the Dusk Exit will set up a distribution route using the funds they receive and that will be enough to create the framework for pitiful children to be sent flowing into the darkness.”

An unpleasant strength focused itself in the blond subordinate’s brow.

It may have seemed ridiculous, but he had his own sense of morality.

Meanwhile, Birdway tapped her finger on a photo in the science magazine with a casual expression on her face.

“And so those who claim to protect the peace are going to start by destroying this.”

“The ocean resources survey ship…?”

“It’s a large ship that is searching for areas filled with oil. It also has enough equipment and materials onboard to build an offshore oil platform. I mentioned that the Dusk Exit’s oil platform was still being developed, remember? Well, if this ship is sunk, their plan will be brought to a complete halt. It seems they don’t have the excess money needed to prepare a replacement ship.”

“What does any of this have to do with us?” asked the blond subordinate cautiously. “You couldn’t possibly be thinking of creating a united front with the Anglican Church or Academy City, could you? And even if we were to do it alone, the Dawn-Colored Sunlight would gain nothing from it.”

When the subordinate thought about it, the story may have been a good sob story, but it was so simple that it actually made him cautious. If “those who claim to protect the peace” had invited them, it could be a trap.

“No,” said Birdway denying all of that with a single word. “We have no obligation to go along with the Anglican Church or Academy City’s mission of self-satisfaction. If they were going to go and crush some shitty cabal, I’d gladly just sit back and watch the show, but that’s not what this is about.”

“?”

“Ugh, what a pain. Just look at this.”

Birdway’s small finger slid to the side of the photo of the ocean resources survey ship. She pointed at a group photo of intellectuals wearing lab coats that had a caption under it saying, “The scientists who created the world’s largest survey ship.”

The blond subordinate let out a groan upon seeing that.

He recognized one of the faces.

It was Patricia Birdway.

He had heard that she had been invited as a guest researcher at a British science institution due to the high praise her internet-published paper had received from scientists around the world, but he had never thought she would be enjoying an extended cruise after working on a project to create such a ridiculously huge ship.

“…A-a suppression mission is going to be carried out soon, right? And that will involve sinking that ship as well as everyone aboard?”

“Correct,” Birdway said in a solemn voice as she brought both her elbows up onto the kotatsu and folded her hands in front of her face. “Simply put, this is very bad. Please do something about it.”

Water spread out in every direction.

Possibly due to the Foehn phenomenon, the ocean surface glittered like it was midsummer despite the season actually being the beginning of autumn. The ocean wind grew warm and the sun sent out piercing rays of white light.

A single object floated amid it all: the Blue Research.

It was a survey ship meant to search for oil sleeping at the bottom of the ocean, but its shape was difficult to describe. One possible description was three 500 meter tankers lined up next to each other with a giant metal sheet on top. However, instead of a single metal sheet, multiple long narrow ones were lined up, creating intentional gaps between. It looked something like a giant moving set of artificial fishing ponds.

More than 30 cranes made of countless metal pipes covered the metal sheet and a winch with a small submarine hanging down was installed at one end. One portion was filled with the parts needed to construct the offshore oil platform and there were also three circular heliports with an H drawn in the middle. Sitting atop them were what were said to be observation helicopters, but they were actually attack helicopters. They were most likely there to drive back any pirates targeting the metal sheets or anything else of value.

Something floated above the world’s largest survey ship that was created from and filled with giant masses of metal.

The object was 50 meters up.

As it flew silently through the air, it looked something like a fluttering butterfly or a leaf caught in the wind. However, it was actually a card.

It was the ace of swords.

The scrap of paper that was no more substantial than a commercial trading card landed atop the end of one of the dozens-of-meters-long cranes…or so it seemed. However, it actually stabbed deeply into the thick metal pillar with a slight slicing noise.

The number one was the beginning.

A change occurred that displayed that number.

“There we go,” said a man.

A blond man wearing black formal clothes and a scarf stood on the end of the crane as if he had appeared out of thin air. His name was Mark Space. He was the magician who had come to the Arctic Ocean on the orders of the boss of the Dawn-Colored Sunlight, Birdway, whose legs had been stuck under the kotatsu at their base.

(Hm. It seems I wasn’t noticed.)

Mark quickly checked around the area as he stood on the end of the crane. Instead of a thick wire, a large drill hung from the crane. In order to carry out the drilling from atop the unstable ship, the metal pillar had joints at set intervals so it could bend freely like an animal’s spine.

He could see a few workers from where he stood, but none of them were looking his way. …Well, that was not too surprising. They were worried about pirates approaching in small armed boats, not someone being blown in on the wind.

Mark’s objective was to recover Patricia Birdway who was aboard the large survey ship, the Blue Research. If he did not meet up with the girl and get her off the ship before the imminent attack, they would get wrapped up in it.

“I suppose I should get started.”

Mark sat down on the slanted crane with his legs to the side and slid down as if sliding down a banister. He controlled his speed by strengthening or weakening his grip on the edge of the crane using his white-gloved hand. When he silently and lightly landed on the roof of the driver’s seat box at the base of the crane, he used his momentum to immediately head down to the deck.

(Was Miss Patricia’s field of study marine geology?)

Mark ran along the ship while ducking through the gaps of the complex layout of pipes that were most likely for the crude oil and mud to pass through once it was drilled. As he ran, he pulled a deck of cards out of his pocket. Mark used tarot. The 22-card major arcana was more famous and included such cards as the Hierophant and the Lovers, but he specialized in the minor arcana. The minor arcana had 56 cards divided into the four suits of wands, cups, swords, and coins.

Those four suits could be used to create symbolic weapons of fire, water, wind, and earth respectively.

Of the four suits of the minor arcana, Mark Space specialized in the 14 sword cards that corresponded to wind.

That included the number cards from ace to 10 and the court cards which were the page, the knight, the queen, and the king. Also, Mark used special tarot cards that were optimized to be used as symbolic weapons that activated the spells used by Golden-style organizations.

(Really, that princess always asks for such ridiculous things. Although, if she foolishly handed me the major arcana, that would be a problem in its own way…)

Those 14 cards were the whole of the hand Mark had to use.

And he had already used the ace of swords in his entry, so…

(Thirteen left.)

As he travelled quickly across the ship, Mark rechecked his own strength.

The sword card symbolic weapons were not all equal. Nor were the ones with greater numbers stronger than the ones with lesser numbers. Even though they all had the attribute of yellow, the number changed the power that manifested itself in the real world, so the spell activated by each card was different.

He did not have 13 of a single spell. He had 13 different spells.

Gritting his teeth at what that meant, Mark stared forward as he ran.

(I will shake off all the danger using these and rescue Miss Patricia!!)