Toaru Majutsu no Index:AgneseSS Chapter1
Status: Incomplete
3/9 parts completed
Chapter 1
Part 1
Some fields of work were done in secret.
No one living a normal life would ever need their services and their stories were never told in movies or dramas. But in reality, those necessary evils were crucial for the seen and unseen sides of society to run smoothly.
Such jobs existed in the magical world as well.
A strange figure marched through an old, dark stone street of Barcelona in Spain’s autonomous community of Catalonia.
He stood two meters tall and his long hair was dyed red. His black cassock seemed at odds with the cigarette in his mouth and he even had a barcode tattoo below one eye.
He looked unbelievably bored.
The presence of a predator implied the presence of prey.
“Gasp, pant.”
The woman looked more gaunt than simply skinny.
She had silver hair and brown skin.
Her navel and thighs were visible, but not because she had intentionally chosen a revealing dress. She wore tattered rags that could not have smelled pleasant.
She recognized the large presence behind her. She knew who he was, but had never actually met him. If she had met him in the field, she would not have survived to tell the tale. The legends she had heard were more than enough to tell her that.
And the ones who had spread those legends were no more.
The entire magic cabal had been reduced to ashes.
So she had no choice but to escape on her own. She could not see anyone else around, whether to ask for help or to use them as human shields.
Assuming her pocket watch was accurate, it was past 11 at night.
At first glance, Barcelona looked like an old historical city full of stone buildings with ages measured in centuries, but it also had a shopping district with an impressive number of bars and nightclubs. No matter the hour, this central area would never be entirely deserted.
There had to be more to it. The answer was found on the old stone walls and the streetlight supports.
A people-clearing field had been established by rune cards engraved with the Opila character.
This had to be him. The bane of all magicians had arrived.
The voice from behind was short.
“Isabella Theism.”
“Eek!?”
He called her name.
That alone felt like some kind of powerful curse. The enemy knew exactly who and where she was. That was enough to bind her body with unbearable tension. She lost track of which leg she had just taken a step with, so the silver-haired brown-skinned woman named Isabella tripped over her own feet and tumbled to the ground.
Not that she had anywhere to go regardless.
She found herself at a dead end with thick stone walls in every direction except back the way she had come.
Feeling trapped at the bottom of a well, she placed her hands on the wall and looked up at the moon to check how far out of reach freedom was. The answer was over 10 meters. The wall was made of smooth concrete, so she may have been able to climb it like someone going bouldering, but he was bound to attack her back as she climbed.
She heard a solid footstep.
It seemed to block off the path she had taken here.
Sweet cigarette smoke reached her nose.
He did not let modern etiquette stop him from smoking. In fact, he seemed to use it to announce his presence before he attacked: “You will die here, so this toxic secondhand smoke is inconsequential.”
“Do you know why this is happening?”
“N-no, I don’t.”
“Then again, we no longer bother with that old-fashioned inquisition stuff. It doesn’t matter to us if you or anyone else understands. I was told I could eliminate you on sight.”
“This must be some kind of mistake!! I really don’t know anything!!”
Something spiraled around Isabella. It looked like a colored tornado, but it was in fact an exceedingly long piece of cloth. It was a spiritual item made by sewing together burial garbs obtained through graverobbing.
She was a mere 10 meters from freedom.
In her world, that height might as well have been nothing. The cloth tornado bent down like a powerful spring and then launched the gaunt woman upwards with tremendous force.
The word necromancy might bring to mind techniques of controlling a rotting corpse, but the field was divided into many different factions and schools. For example, summoning a spirit of the dead and having them predict the future was a form of necromancy. So was wearing the clothing of the dead to become one with them.
(This can’t be happening! This can’t be happening!! I’m not letting myself get killed over some stupid misunderstanding!! How in the world did I find myself here!?)
She arrived on the rooftop in a single bound.
And once she was out of that dead end, the rooftops extended around her in all directions as far as the eye could see. She could escape. This would all work out. That guy might be the bane of magicians, but he was helpless to do a thing if he lost track of her.
That imaginary optimism was cut off by a very real explosion.
“Gah, ah!?”
He was not up there with her.
Instead, all the roofs around her were covered in rune cards that would ignite when approached by someone containing magic power refined from their life force.
Isabella was knocked off balance the instant she set foot on the rooftop and she fell right back down into the dead end. Almost like her pursuer had yanked back on a leash.
She was rejected from the freedom above and dragged back into the darkness below.
She slammed back-first into the ground and struggled to breath while a tall figure stared quietly down at her.
He was Stiyl Magnus, a killer priest of Necessarius, the Anglican Church’s 0th Parish.
“Is that a hybrid created by mixing that indigenous Caribbean religion with the Christian Shroud of Turin?”
Every one of his statements was precise.
And in the magical world, having your trick revealed was akin to a death sentence. Magic was a system of laws and techniques, so a countermeasure could be found once the structure of your spell was divulged.
Clothing was a symbol of one’s position.
A king wore a crown and a priest wore a habit to display the power of their position to themselves and others. Criminals would have such clothing destroyed in public. The same idea applied to the field of magic. For example, some magic could draw out great power by dressing up as the Egyptian or Greek gods and putting on grand plays. It was also said that witches would dress in male clothing to gain special power.
So what would happen if the living stole and dressed up in a cloth wrapped around the dead?
This was an extreme example.
“The Gnostics also believed the physical body was a nuisance and wished to free their soul from that prison, but with no clear definition for the soul, you will have a hard time becoming an omniscient and omnipotent being through nothing more than death. If that was all it took, the losing side of every war would have obliterated the victor in revenge.”
“Y-you misunderstand. You’re making a terrible mistake here.”
The physical damage from the fall was too much for her to get up.
Nothing could be more frustrating for a magician who had tried to solve everything with their magical logic.
“Yes, I did dig up some graves because I needed their burial shrouds for my spell, but necromancy is nowhere near as dangerous as it sounds! I haven’t actually harmed anyone, so this isn’t a job for you!!”
“Saligia Lucajay.”
Stiyl Magnus called someone else’s name, seemingly out of nowhere.
“Tellia Harleos, Rinka Sawaue, Jane Balgowa.”
But the list had a purpose.
The priest pulled a run card from his pocket and let it go.
It attached to Isabella’s right cheek with a heavy and sticky sensation. But it was not alone. Others attached to her shoulders, chest, hips, thighs, and more.
Those were people.
People who Isabella knew better than anyone should not – could not – have been here. The necromancer was surrounded by the illusory presence of those girls.
“Church graveyards have been increasing their security these days. Of course, it’s mostly meant to stop the people who have started sneaking in hoping to earn some clicks after filming their ‘adventure’ on their phone and uploading it to a video site.”
Skill with magic did not necessary translate to skill with science.
Especially when a powerful barrier had been constructed between the two sides.
That security may have been put in place for a silly non-magical reason, but if traditional methods could not break through, the magic side was shut out just as well. Much like a thoughtlessly placed concrete structure could cut off the path for salmon to swim upstream, thus destroying the ecosystem.
“So tell me, Isabella. Where did you obtain those burial shrouds? Or was sneaking in too much trouble, so you started burying people yourself to make your own graveyard?”
“…”
“Was the Armada cabal’s ideology really so attractive you were willing to bury people alive to pursue it? Were you that dedicated to reclaiming Spain’s lost naval superiority to remake the world with Spain in the center ‘as it should be’? Well, Spain is a crossroads for several different cultures, so I can see how you had the groundwork to include everything from the Christian Shroud of Turin to Voodoo zombie powder.”
“Detach the Ti Bon Ange and place it within me!!”
The collapsed and supposedly incapacitated woman used the strength of her jaw to break open her own canine tooth.
Or rather, the zombie powder capsule hidden there.
An invisible explosion followed.
Even Stiyl Magnus was forced to take three steps back.
The supposedly unmoving woman stood back up. Unnatural creaks and cracks came from the joints and cartilage of her beautiful brown body. As abnormal as it looked from an anatomic and biological perspective, only someone who could see her life force and magic power could see the full extent of it. The ordinary circulation was entirely ignored and her body moved on its own – her own will had nothing to do with it. But that was no surprise since someone other than her was moving it.
“You have guts to accept that when the soul is so poorly defined.”
Stiyl Magnus narrowed his eyes a little.
When he opened both hands and closed them again, red and blue flames erupted from them. Those violent flames took a straight path like a blowtorch. They both functioned as swords containing a tremendous force.
As a priest, he had a standard line when it came to witches.
“No woman who uses magic can be left alive.”
He did not even allow it to come to an exchange of attacks.
First, he let the right sword collapse into a deluge of flame to stop her as she tried to leap at him. Once she flinched back, he used his left flame sword to slice horizontally through his own flame wall and the target’s torso.
He gave the briefest of glances to Isabella’s upper body as it spun by overhead.
“Hm, so not even death is enough to stop you.”
He once more slashed at her supposedly dead form. This time, the sword entered at her shoulder and sliced diagonally down across her torso. Octopus or squid tentacles had started to emerge from the bottom of the severed torso, but this attack burned the entire upper body away in an instant. At the last second, the back of the skull burst open and something soft frantically leaped out. Surrounded by a transparent shell and supported by countless tentacles, the disembodied brain looked something like a giant jellyfish.
By stealing the clothing of the dead, a necromancer could become one with the dead and draw out their power.
In a way, necromancy was a technique of controlling humans, living or dead. After all, some necromancers would take a summoned soul (or what seemed to be a soul) and sealed it inside their own body, so they had to understand how a living body worked as well. Using that knowledge, they could also begin to experiment and see how much could be eliminated from a human body while still remaining themselves.
(Since she modeled herself after a poisonous animal in the very end, did she also store her prized zombie powder in thousands and thousands of microscopic cnidocytes?)
“You put up a good fight. You really did.”
“…!!”
She may have tried to shout something, but the disembodied brain had no speech organs.
Red and blue.
The priest raised his two flame swords and approached the magician who finally had nowhere left to run.
“But it is time you slept. Forever.”
Part 2
“Soooo was that good enough, Stiyl?”
“The point of the training is to prepare them for anything that could realistically happen. If we do not keep it somewhat realistic, they cannot develop the skills they need, Isabella.”
Part 3
“What kind of training is this, you morons?”
A short nun was terribly frustrated.
Blood and gore were splattered everywhere.
If the Anglican magicians did not clean up all of that red and black before it was seen, it was sure to cause an international incident. This was the Roman Catholic nation of Spain, so things worked very differently than in the English capital of London. They could not leave behind any chance of trouble.
Agnese Sanctis had originally led a team of Roman Catholic nuns, but they had since joined the Anglicans instead.
“Even so, this is honestly impressive.”
A taller nun in an identical habit sighed next to her. Sister Lucia was something of a clean freak, so she viewed the mess with obvious disgust while repeatedly crossing herself.
“This is very high quality for an imitation. What did they say they did? Rearrange pig and cow bones and organs to match human anatomy and then treat them with chemicals?”
“AEDs and epinephrine are apparently off limits. Trying to revive this could cause the soulless doll to get up and start moving.”
A Necessarius magician could conceivably make something like that.
The nuns were here for training, but not against Stiyl Magnus or Isabella Theism. Their task was to clean up afterwards. The combat magicians could were not going to hold back, so the logistical support nuns had to show up after the fact and erase anything that risked an international incident. That was why those two Necessarius members had traveled to a foreign country, fought an imitation of a real battle, and left a fake corpse splattered all over the scene.
They had of course not informed Spain of this and the corpse was so realistic even the average magician would mistake it for real. In other words, a real international incident was still very much a possibility.
“Wh-what do you think he meant when he said this could ‘realistically happen’, Sister Agnese?” asked Angelene, whose hunched back made her look even shorter than she really was.
The answer to that was obvious enough.
“I imagine he meant exactly what he said. A magic cabal called Armada probably really does exist here.”
The Anglican Church, and especially Necessarius, were second to none when it came to eliminating magicians who had strayed too far. They never stopped gathering intel on existing threats and they could easily create identical models for training purposes.
Agnese pointed her thumb at the red splattered on the walls and ground.
“Anyway, we need to get to work. Let’s get this over with already.”
“I would rather not. There isn’t much I would like to do less.”
“B-but they’ll be mad at us if we don’t. And we need to meet our quota if they’re going to keep us around.”
A clattering sound came from Agnese’s feet.
They already had all the necessary tools: buckets, mops, spray bottles, rags, etc.
“Let’s do everything we can. I can’t wait to see the looks on their faces when they see our Catholic thoroughness .☆”
This kind of work was known as forensic cleanup.
It had begun as a service for real estate owners. When a mummified or rotting corpse was discovered inside an apartment or hotel room, every last trace of the corpse – including any stains on the floor after it was reduced to a stew – had to be removed lest it bring down the value of the room. Even though forensic cleanup often required handling a dead body, no special license was required and it was done by cleaning professionals (for an extra fee) instead of by the police or fire department.
However.
When magic was involved, the cleanup job had to include some more unseen areas.
“Residual thoughts are our top priority. Make sure you eliminate any readable impression of who did this or what happened here.”
“That rune freak put those cards everywhere around here, but does he expect us to collect all of them!? How many thousands is that!?”
“U-umm, Sister Lucia? Don’t some of those explode when they sense magic power nearby?”
Now they had to play the bomb squad as well. If you were not familiar with the magicians who fought on the scene, you could run across some unpleasant surprises while cleaning up. They didn’t want to be cursed while dragging the corpse around, and triggering an explosion while removing a card would create lots more material evidence needing to be cleaned up.
They needed to be careful so that did not happen.
The trick to cleaning was to “loosen up” and then “wash away” the filth.
If you did not know what was filthy and what was dangerous, you would miss something.
Thus, Agnese started by clapping her hands together in front of her flat chest.
She kept her eyes open but focused them on some unseen place while speaking under her breath.
“Apas of Prithvi, you are a silver crescent moon shining within a yellow square. Open the door of otherworldly afterimage and provide us with the eye that perceives the unseen realm.”
A buzzing groan ran through the space around her and the objects, bloodstains, and anything else with traces of human-altered magic power glowed with a faint light. The rune magic with a faint blue and the necromancy with a faint red. Angelene groaned like a young wife who discovered a clump of wet hair in the drain of her brand-new home.
“Ugh. Y-you can’t get away with anything, can you?”
“This is what you get with the short-term memory of something that happened less than an hour ago. Now, we need to clean all this up so it doesn’t become long-term memory and soak into this location.”
If Agnese could do this, so could other magicians.
To prevent that, they had to erase all hints leading back to the Anglicans and then make themselves scarce. Of course, they also could not let anyone see them in the process of cleaning it up.
Lucia stuck a mop in a bucket and sloshed it around.
“Are we using water for this?”
“92% water, 6% protein, and then some salt and other minerals for flavor.”
“Th-that isn’t the recipe for holy water.”
Stoop-backed Angelene was right.
The Roman Catholic Church would add salt when sanctifying water, but this included more than that.
“Basically, we are making artificial human blood. Although it will be transparent since it won’t have any red or white blood cells. Wipe up the bloodstains with this to eliminate any residual information before the cleaning begins. It’s the same idea as adding a decoy stamp over the addressee’s name on a letter so that personal information is no longer readable. Even if someone catches on that this place was cleaned, they won’t be able to recreate what was cleaned up. Once that’s done, we can get to the actual cleaning.”
“We also have to worry about that zombie powder and the rune cards, right?”
“The Haitian toxin can be decontaminated with heat of 1000 degrees or higher and that isn’t enough to melt the stone walls. But Stiyl’s cards are resistant to flames, so that method won’t work. Still, it would take all night if we tried to manually remove them all, so would acid be the best way to deal with them all at once?”
“What makes you think that?”
“Runes were originally carved into stone and I hear acid rain is a real threat to cultural preservation. Something made from nitrogen oxide or sulfur dioxide would probably be best.”
That might sound awfully ordinary for this kind of work, but that was normal. Almost anything found in everyday life could be used for magic. In particular, things used for cleaning and sterilization could be used for purification and things that led to pollution and decay could be used for curses. Good examples of the former were water, salt, and fire. Good examples of the latter were mud and animal blood.
“Well, it’s a pain, but let’s get started on this thankless work.”
Magic could seem all-powerful, but all the preparation and cleanup it required were actually a pain in the rear.
And every field had annoying tasks that were traditionally left with the newcomers. A top-rate stage magician would carefully check over the stage and props that could kill them if not properly set up, but they would not clean the theater bathrooms themselves.
“Umm, Sister Agnese? Am I imagining things or are the clumps of flesh on the ground moving? Ah! I’m not imaging it! They’re definitely throbbing!”
“Argh! We need to gather those up before they run off and form a globster!! Everyone, prepare the tarps. We’ll wrap up these stubborn Iberian pigs and roast them in the incinerator!!”
“Plastic tarps don’t burn, Sister Agnese.”
