Toaru Majutsu no Index:GT Volume4 Chapter2
Status: Incomplete
8/15 parts completed
Chapter 2: Suspected and Alone – Los_Angeles.
Part 1
By 7 in the morning, the yellow sun was rising, but it did nothing to change the minus-20 chill.
Did everything look so white due to the sand blown into the air by the wind? It also could have been diamond dust created by the moisture in the air freezing. The frost and ice kept everything frozen despite the sunshine.
“Uhh,” groaned a young and somehow fretful voice.
The girl of around 10 was clinging to Kamijou Touma’s hip from the side. Her eyes were shut in sleep.
She had long silver hair and brown skin.
She wore a thin white camisole that almost seemed to let her skin color show through, denim shorts that left her thighs fully bare, and knee socks. Over all that, she wore a thick leather flight jacket with an English logo on the back. Kamijou guessed it was the brand name: Space Engage.
Curious, he traced his Transla-Pen over the words and the machine gave him a translation.
“Blank character, enter into battle.”
“There’s no way that’s what it means. I swear this piece of junk is busted.”
The hair decorations on either side of her head were modeled after blue chrysanthemums. In Japan, chrysanthemums were associated with everything from tempura to funerals, but what did they mean in America?
Meanwhile, Index had her hands somewhat exasperatedly on her hips while she glared at the overly touchy little girl (and at Kamijou).
“…Touma.”
“Wait! I don’t even know why she’s doing this, okay? What are you saying I even did wrong here? Keep in mind that I can’t speak English.”
With the mystery girl sleeping like that, Kamijou could not leave the salty and greasy family restaurant that Americans called a diner. The most he could do was let her sleep in one of the booth seats with her arms around him from the side.
It terrified him to stay in one place like this.
But until they were certain the sand magician had located them, this would work for temporary safety.
It was like finding yourself stuck in some hidden corner while playing hide-and-seek or cops-and-robbers. Once you were there, you couldn’t bring yourself to leave. Kamijou’s weak heart was reluctant to leave the walls of this building. Since everyone had disappeared without the power going out, they could use the lights and heat without giving away their position. He started to wonder if they would actually be easier to find if they started wandering around outside and he started to fear even approaching the windows.
Meanwhile, Stiyl and Kanzaki had gone on a few scouting missions until dawn, using the Cheap Party diner as no more than a temporary base. They made it sound like no big deal, but they would have been at risk of being sniped by the sand magic every step of the way. Kamijou could never have done it. And searching the area around the diner had not turned up anything useful.
They had found no clues to the fate of the joint force or the current status of R&C Occultics.
Nor had they found any clues to the whereabouts of the 30 million residents of Los Angeles who had been in the wrong city at the wrong time.
Kamijou gently reached for the brown girl’s neck to check the inside of the thick jacket’s collar. He found a name stitched there: Helcalia Grocery.
“Grocery, huh?”
“The name sounds Indian-British to me,” said Index from the same booth.
“But if she moved here from England, her nationality would be American…yawwwn,” replied 15cm Othinus, yawning from jetlag on the table.
Stiyl and Kanzaki were out of the diner for another search.
Kamijou was interested in something other than the girl’s country of origin.
When he pressed the button on the side of the smartwatch he had found in the Academy City base’s safe, the name Melzabeth Grocery appeared. Was that this girl’s older sister or mother? At the very least, it seemed unlikely a sister even younger than her could have been responsible for coming up with and hiding that message on the watch. It was unknown how many more secrets were hidden in the watch’s small scratches and smudges, but it had at least directed them to this girl.
What had that felt like?
While the fearsome “disappearance” was fast approaching, Melzabeth must have known she could not escape, but even as her teeth chattered and her hands trembled, she had worked to leave a message to some unknown person who might never even receive it.
(She was counting on someone like me to follow the message, so I have to make sure it counts.)
“Zzz…hm?”
The girl’s regular breathing came to a stop.
She stirred and then rubbed her eyes with her small hands.
“Oh, she’s awake, Touma!”
Index’s bright-faced comment caused a change. A dramatic one. Helcalia Grocery scrambled behind Kamijou’s back to use him as a shield. The front of her flight jacket was open, so he could feel her warm body heat through her thin camisole.
On the table, Othinus put her hands on her hips.
“She does not like you.”
“That isn’t Index’s fault,” added Kamijou, sounding exasperated.
The blame lay squarely with that rotten priest from Necessarius. She was only 10, but he had still pulled out a rune card and wielded his flame sword the instant he saw her. All while saying any information related to her identity and the LA disappearances could be extracted from her corpse’s head.
There was no way she would know the whole picture here and anyone would be scared after being threatened with something that violated the laws of physics.
Kamijou Touma had intervened despite not understanding a word of the English argument that ensued, so now she saw him as her only ally. Hence why the girl of (presumably) 10(-ish) would not leave his side.
However, Stiyl Magnus had not simply been carelessly aggressive. The now-hated priest had calmly explained his actions afterwards.
“By having her reject me and open up to you, we can get a more accurate testimony out of her. And since you will share that with the team, it works out for me in the end. Rejoice – we finally found a way to make your womanizing tendencies useful.”
“No matter how you slice it, he’s still a scumbag for doing that.”
“I’m hungry. I want to eat vegetarian meat for breakfast.”
All of a sudden, she was talking to him.
The nightmarish flood of English rushed right at him. His score of 43 on his last English exam left him unequipped to tell if she was just speaking in an authentic accent or if she was still too sleepy to talk clearly. Surprised, he glanced over at Othinus to find her nodding off. The jetlagged god was still haughtily crossing her arms and legs even as she napped on the table.
This was a job for a modern convenience: the Transla-Pen. That device could translate back and forth without needing to sync with a phone, so even a boy who failed his English exam could communicate with a modern LA girl…right?
The mic was in the head of the pen, so he held it like was doing karaoke and awkwardly spoke into the still-unfamiliar item.
“Um, uh…can I ask you some questions? If you’re still not up to remembering it all, that’s fine too.”
But he had no way of knowing if it was translating his words correctly.
Especially when Helcalia responded by drowsily gnawing on his upper arm. Was she the type to start chewing on the elastic band of her sports cap when she was hungry?
Part 2
“Eh? You’re really going to eat this? First thing in the morning!?”
“Soy is healthy food. Eating it is good.”
“Yeah, um, I get that you can make vegetarian meat out of soy, but you’re making that into a burger. Won’t that tern into a hellish mass of grain with essentially tofu between two buns?”
“I desire healthy.”
Her Japanese was weirdly awkward because he was only receiving the Transla-Pen’s translation. When she spoke with her long silver hair swaying behind her, it was all in fluent English. The clearance rack gadget from Academy City could only do so much. It even left some words entirely untranslated in its so-called translation.
(Well, I can understand her and that’s what counts.)
Index and Othinus had not accompanied him to the kitchen. One of them could do housework but didn’t and the other didn’t do housework because she couldn’t, but he was beginning to think he had spoiled both of his freeloaders too much. They would never learn if all they ever did was eat and sleep.
He was currently alone with Helcalia.
Everyone needed to eat to survive. And as long as they were hiding in the diner, Kamijou figured he might as well whip up a light breakfast from the ingredients that were going to go bad anyway. But his Japanese knowledge did not apply to an American kitchen. And not just because the tools were shaped differently and the temperature displays were all in Fahrenheit instead of Celsius. First of all, the tomatoes and broccolis were so big they scared him a little. They looked like some kind of freak mutation, so he half expected them to bite his head and hijack his brain the instant he looked the other way.
He checked inside a silver fridge larger than any he had ever seen in Japan.
“It’s packed full. Are these leftovers from Christmas? Hey, Helcalia, give your thanks to the holiday season. I can make just about anything with all this.”
“Don’t like holiday season.”
“Eh? Why not?”
“My birthday is 28th. But no one comes to the party during winter break. Friends always mix it with Christmas.”
Was that what happened?
Even if the ingredients were for unsold party dishes, Kamijou appreciated the excess stock. He scraped some of the former chicken breasts from the grill with a metal spatula to secure some space for himself.
(I need to leave some money by the register for all the ingredients I use.)
He decided he didn’t need to share that overly strict thought with Helcalia. He had something else to say to her, who was clinging to his hip in her white camisole.
“Listen, Helcalia, healthy eating means a balanced diet. Escaping your dependence on meat and grease in the land of the Stars and Stripes is an impressive feat, but that doesn’t mean you can eat nothing but grains. Whether it’s trans fats or carbs, you Americans always take everything way too far.”
“Fuck. Not making sense.”
“My point is you need to find a way you can eat all the vegetables you don’t like. …And please tell me that ‘fuck’ was a mistranslation.”
The 10-year-old only gave him a blank stare.
Kamijou frowned down at the Transla-Pen. The truth remained a mystery. He could only understand one end of the conversion, so he had no idea how the machine was interpreting the English into Japanese and vice versa.
He ended up using the restaurant kitchen to cook a round pancake.
He was a poor student, so there was only so much he knew how to cook. He wanted credit for measuring out the flour and baking powder to make it from scratch instead of using a pre-made mix.
For vegetables, he knew a 10-year-old was not going to eat a salad even if he stir-fried it. He did not know Helcalia, so he had no way of knowing her dislikes. Small children could be cruel about these things. If he ended up serving her something she disliked, he just knew she would painstakingly separate it out and push it aside with her fork. So to make that impossible, he threw the veggies in the juicer and added mayo and cream to make them into a dip. That way she wouldn’t even think of it as vegetables. Kamijou had done it with sodas and shaved ice syrup, so he knew it was common for kids to choose something for its bright colors than for its actual flavor.
It wasn’t uncommon for people who rarely ate whole fruits to love jam. And people who chose cheeseburgers over plain hamburgers sometimes didn’t like solid chunks of cheese. It was all in how you perceived it. And when you made something yourself, you could adjust the salt and sugar content however you liked.
“Here, all done.”
“DIY?”
He had no idea what she was talking about now, but her eyes were glued to the food on the plate and she gulped. Seeing the finished product had successfully stimulated her hunger.
“Index will eat it all if she shows up, so I’d eat that in a hurry if I were you.”
“What do you mean by index page? Maybe I should eat you tonight, kitty baby?”
Kamijou tilted his head, checked the Transla-Pen’s settings, and tried a soft reset. Meanwhile, the girl stood on an empty zucchini box as a stool, grabbed a plastic knife and fork, stood up on her tiptoes to reach the plate on the stainless steel countertop, and chowed down on the pancake. The reset meant he missed whatever she said before eating.
But it finished rebooting just in time to catch one word in particular.
“Delicious!!”
“This thing isn’t bugging out anymore, is it? Well, she does look happy.”
“This green stuff is good. What is it?”
Helcalia was happily dipping a sliced of pancake in a small bowl of dip, but he didn’t dare tell her it was made from bell peppers. He didn’t want to see the sour look on her face, so he opted to simply smile instead of answering.
She had orange juice to drink. She had pulled that out of the giant fridge on her own. Kamijou normally had miso soup and rice, so the sweet juice seemed like an odd choice, but he realized miso wouldn’t go well with a pancake anyway.
He thought to himself while watching her hold the cup in both hands and gulp down the juice.
(That juice is nice and cold, but the inside of the fridge is actually warmer than outside right now. Los Angeles really has become another world.)
“But stretching up and eating is new. Mama made all tables and shelves my height.”
“Did she?”
“When using bottom shelf, mama crouches down and has difficulty. But always smiling.”
“I see.”
He had not been directly introduced or checked the paperwork, but he realized he had just more or less confirmed the identity of the other Grocery in LA.
That woman had disappeared.
And in those last moments, she had pushed aside the fear and resentment to mark out the location of her daughter and hope some unknown person would take care of her.
(So it was her mother.)
“I want to eat lots more.”
“Ha ha. Give me a moment to wash the kitchenware, okay?”
“I want to eat infinity more!!”
“…”
Some caution entered Kamijou’s smile. He was in high school, so could not let himself fall into grandpa mode just because a little girl was flattering him. Pancakes were pure carbs, so the only person with a hellish enough stomach to thoughtlessly eat a giant stack of them was Index. This girl had been indirectly left in his care, so he couldn’t let her fall into that pancake trap.
“Eh heh heh. I’ll add this blue next. Not blueberry?”
“Hey, Helcalia?”
“Yes?”
The girl on the empty zucchini box turned toward him, the fork in her mouth.
“If you’re feeling brave enough to tell me, I’d love to hear what happened here. As much as you know anyway. You weren’t in this diner by random chance, were you?”
The smartwatch had pointed to the diner’s address and he had found Helcalia in a locker here. That meant she had not fled here on a spur of the moment decision. She must have been told to wait here. Otherwise, Melzabeth wouldn’t have been able to leave behind that information before she disappeared.
What had Melzabeth hoped to do after regrouping with Helcalia?
For that matter, why had an LA resident like Melzabeth been in an Academy City base and how had she found an opportunity to leave her own watch in a safe that would have been strictly locked down?
The smartwatch was a crucial hint, but there were also so many questions surrounding how it got where it was. Since Melzabeth had disappeared, her daughter was the only hint remaining.
She might not have told her 10-year-old daughter everything. It was common to keep the hard truths from your own child during an emergency because you didn’t want to scare them.
But even a small piece of new information could mean a lot right now.
“What if I tell?”
“I’ll go save your mother who disappeared along with everyone else.”
He didn’t even need to think about that one.
He was worried the crappy Transla-Pen might not be translating what he wanted to say.
But Helcalia Grocery nodded.
Maybe it was the conviction she saw in his eyes more than his words.
“Um.”
She opened her small mouth.
She did not want to think about the missing 30 million and Kamijou’s group could never understand what it felt like. These were the words of someone who had seen it for herself.
“Mama was sneaking, but it’s not what it looks like. Mama’s phone…somewhere at the station…but…”
“?”
“She was with R&C, but not really. Mama worked with Academy City people.”
Kamijou Touma felt like he was a step away from making some major breakthrough, but then the diner’s back door burst open and the priest with long, dyed hair barged in.
“Stiyl? What are you doing?”
“She’s gone.”
Kamijou realized Stiyl Magnus was out of breath.
Had he been in a fierce battle or had he been running for his life?
“Kanzaki Kaori has disappeared. R&C Occultics got her!!”
Part 3
A bit earlier, Stiyl Magnus and Kanzaki Kaori were outside the diner and slowly advancing along a building wall. Stiyl toyed with the corner of a rune card and made sure he could set up a smokescreen or mirage at a moment’s notice.
They had searched outside a few times already. Not even expert magicians could take the minus-20 environment lightly. The natural plan was to designate a temporary base for themselves and gradually venture further from it, finding more safe zones.
“What a pain. And the heating is far from perfect,” grumbled Stiyl while lighting a new cigarette. His breath was visible, but not due to smoke. “It wasn’t the industrial-level heater that kept that diner safe. It was only that plus the heat from the kitchen that just barely kept it livable. An ordinary air conditioner or heater wouldn’t cut it, so we’re going to have a hard time finding more safe zones.”
“I imagine the walls and floor matter as much as the quality of the heating,” pointed out Kanzaki.
She looked calm, but she was actually focusing on the distant buildings, trying to locate any snipers.
The air sparkled with a somewhat yellowish light thanks to the early morning sun reflecting off something in the air. Was that diamond dust? You were only supposed to see that in the Arctic.
“LA is far enough south it wasn’t designed to handle a cold wave like this. I imagine the walls were built to efficiently release heat, so you can crank up the heat all you like, it all bleeds away through the walls and floor. It may be like trying to fill a water tank with a hole in the bottom.”
They needed safe zones where they could rest and be warm.
But that was only their secondary objective. Their primary objective was figuring out what had happened between the joint force and R&C Occultics and what had happened to the 30 million LA residents. They were investigating the cause to decide whether or not they could call in a second wave to attack the enemy HQ.
“We can already see it…”
“That is a mirage oasis. Seeing something does not mean you can actually reach it. We must determine the reason behind the disappearances first.”
It was not a yes or no question. If they couldn’t do it, they had to figure out why, overcome that reason, and make sure they could send back a ‘yes’ in their report. That was how professional magicians did things.
“Now, then,” sighed Stiyl. He was focused on an ordinary smartphone, not a strange spiritual item. Modern delivery drones did not require a specialized controller.
“Are you sure this will work?”
“Yes. It’s the best tool for the job.”
Stiyl Magnus specialized in rune magic. He would place laminated cards around the battlefield to construct a magical field that gave him the power to fight.
So from his perspective…
“We don’t know where the traps are on the way to the HQ building.” The cigarette waggled in the corner of his mouth. “So we only have to provoke them to draw out a reaction. And using an unmanned device is safest. Let’s hope Anna Sprengel is standing by the window on the top floor.”
The delivery drone they had captured never reached the HQ building.
It suddenly came apart in midair.
But that scattered the rune cards it carried inside.
Orange flames erupted out and gathered together.
But even that was torn apart.
Yes.
“Something is interfering?”
“Stiyl, they’re coming. We need to get out of here.”
Kanzaki pushed on his back and Stiyl Magnus ran in a different direction from the Asian Saint. In a way, this was all according to plan. It was like letting an empty can drift in the ocean to blow up a sea mine. This attempt was the perfect hook for fishing out traps.
(Is plain sand enough to explain this magic? No, if that’s all, then what is this minus-20 cold wave covering all of LA?)
The sand magician had made their presence known, so they would be here before long. There was also a risk of this being some other magician left here to defend the HQ, but it didn’t hurt to be on the lookout for that sniping attack. Stiyl rushed along a building wall to move below a translucent arcade. The cover would not function as a shield, but he couldn’t be sniped if his opponent couldn’t see him. The arcade normally only blocked UV light, but it functioned like a normal roof with all the white frost covering it.
Needless to say, Los Angeles was a big place. They needed as much information as they could get if they were to search the city as efficiently as possible. That meant their best bet was hearing what that 10-year-old girl, the only survivor they had found so far, had to say. But Kanzaki and Stiyl had not done that. Why not?
“We need to distract the enemy from our biggest clue.”
At the very least, R&C Occultics had the sand magician.
He had already set things up so the girl would feel reliant on Kamijou, so there was little reason for the Necessarius fighters to remain in the diner. Kamijou Touma had a way of getting himself involved in other people’s business and Index’s perfect memory would remember even the smallest thing the girl said. With devious Othinus there as well, it was bound to work out.
The priest’s only job was keeping Helcalia safe. He didn’t have to make her like him.
This was the path he had chosen for himself.
Thus, Stiyl and Kanzaki had gone out to draw the attention of the enemy or enemies. That was primarily to protect Helcalia Grocery, their top source of information, but ideally they would also defeat and capture any magician that attacked them.
They were the bait meant to capture a major prize.
They could only make this choice because they were highly-skilled Necessarius magicians. Using an attack to determine the enemy’s location was especially effective against the trickier types who used curses or sniper attacks.
“(Now, then.)”
Kanzaki Kaori breathed a visible sigh while walking alongside a building wall on a different road from Stiyl.
The enemy was here. She had not forgotten what happened when they first clashed. The sand magic had attacked so fast it nearly looked like a beam of light and it had sliced right through entire buildings. And who was it they had directly attacked?
“(Me.)”
It was unknown how much R&C Occultics knew about them, but if their identities were known, then she would expect the enemy to initially target either her because she was a Saint or Index because she was a grimoire library. Stiyl’s rune magic was powerful, but it took some time to distribute enough cards to set it up and Kamijou Touma’s Imagine Breaker could be forcibly neutralized by moving faster than an ordinary person’s kinetic vision could follow. So the enemy would first want to take out Kanzaki who could move that fast and faster and Index who could directly divulge the structure of their magic. The other two could be safely dealt with from a distance afterwards.
And as hard as it was to believe, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum was having trouble analyzing the sand magic. If R&C Occultics was confident she couldn’t crack it, they would conclude Index was not a threat and leave her be for now.
That meant their top target was Saint Kanzaki Kaori.
The unseen enemy would target Kanzaki if she was walking around outside in the deserted city.
She never would have agreed to this otherwise.
Kanzaki Kaori refused to allow any lives to be lost among her enemies or her allies. No matter how tough she acted, she would never let Stiyl be the bait.
So she took a step away from the building wall.
She walked out into the center of a silent intersection.
She placed a hand on the hilt of Shichiten Shichitou at her hip and whispered.
“Come on out. Otherwise I will go to you. And I will break the sound barrier on the way.”
She was not speaking to herself. There was definitely someone out there listening.
Part 4
“What…happened?”
Kamijou Touma gulped and could not find anything else to say.
It was hard enough getting those two words out. Stiyl Magnus was still trying to catch his breath and an ominous aura seemed to push out from his body.
“What happened to Kanzaki!?”
“You want to know what happened?” Stiyl pressed his back against the kitchen’s tiled wall. He forgot to even put a cigarette in his mouth as he forced a scratchy voice out through his heavy breathing. “It wasn’t just a fistfight. It had nothing to do with physical strength or the laws of physics. I was watching from a distance – I saw it for myself – but I didn’t have time to go save her!! Kanzaki Kaori and the enemy magician rapidly produced a few explosions, vanished behind the clouds of dust…and that was the end of it. The next thing I knew, they were both gone. Kanzaki Kaori disappeared! Like a mirage or something!!”
Someone had disappeared after a battle. That meant they had either been defeated or they had left, but Kanzaki would have no reason not to return to the diner if she had won. It was not looking good.
And Stiyl had said she was “gone”. He had not seen her collapsed and bloody.
So…
“Was she taken away?”
“…”
“If so, we can’t just ignore this! Let’s go call Index and Othinus too. LA is so big they might not have taken her straight to their HQ. We need to ask Helcalia what she knows, decode the smartwatch’s message, and figure out where the R&C Occultics magicians might gather!!”
“I doubt that would matter much.” The priest held a hand to his forehead. “If that was the same attack that caused 30 million people to vanish across LA, then Kanzaki might not have been taken hostage. It is possible they would keep her around to interrogate her for information, but they might have just killed her and hidden the corpse.”
“Stiyl!!”
“But there is one thing we know now!!!!!!”
When Kamijou tried to emotionally reject the idea, Stiyl roared back to shut him up.
Stiyl glared at the boy to keep him from making any rash decisions.
“We now know the R&C Occultics magician is not fighting alone.”
“It was…a group battle?”
“The weather is on their side.”
Kamijou’s guess was wrong, so Stiyl explained.
“And if you have some way of artificially adjusting the atmospheric pressure, you have free control over the weather and the wind direction. And that includes meteorological disasters! That sand magician was getting help from the company. It explains why that girl couldn’t fully explain what they were doing… They incorporated in some science to boost their spell’s power!!”
Part 5
The sand laser tore through the air as it repeatedly flew straight toward Kanzaki. The sand magic compressed the sand and shot it out like an industrial cutter, but it failed to slice apart her flesh and blood.
She repeatedly zigged and zagged out of the way before it could.
A Saint could break the sound barrier in an instant.
“Are you trying to pin me here by forcing me to block your attacks?”
She even had time for a puzzled frown.
The R&C Occultics HQ was within view, so weren’t they afraid of a stray shot hitting them? Or were they getting desperate now that she had gotten so close?
It was safe to assume they knew Kanzaki was a Saint after their initial clash. Still, it made no sense for them to attack from head on like this. If they relied on long-distance sniping because they weren’t confident in their own skill, she would have expected them to stay out of reach and prepare an attack from a blind spot to catch her by surprise.
There was only one conclusion.
“(Cutting me with the sand laser isn’t their goal!?)”
Also, what was this sand magic? As the R&C Occultics name so clearly indicated, they were a Rosicrucian magic cabal. That meant their members’ spells came from the legend represented by the ruby rose and the golden cross.
Kanzaki could only think of a few Rose legends related to sand.
“Black, white, yellow, and red. It is a cycle of the four stages: death, bonding, fermentation, and rebirth.”
30 million people had disappeared in Los Angeles?
Why go to the effort of making them disappear instead of just leaving them alive or killing them?
“This is Citrinitas.”
It all clicked into place once she figured that out.
For example, the yellowish sunlight.
The sunrise came relatively late in LA, but that was not enough to explain this. It was unnaturally yellow. And Kanzaki was familiar with a certain natural phenomenon. More severe desert sandstorms could blot out the sun. When that happened, the brightness and color of the sky could change, making it look like evening.
For example, the sparkling she saw in the air when the sun shined on it.
Could that be fine sand, not the frozen moisture of diamond dust?
“This is the third stage in creating the miracle stone. There must be a spell that fills the compound with yellow sand and ‘ferments’ it just the right amount. R&C Occultics has not killed the people or hidden them. They were decomposed to change their shape. Instead of leaving them alive or killing them, you preserved them by converting them into formless nutrients that soaked into all this sand!! That is the truth behind the disappearances!!”
Anyone the sand fell on would be dissolved and made a part of the sand. The victims were neither alive nor dead. They were buried on the assumption that they would eventually be retrieved in some different form. Their flesh and blood were converted into simple nutrients and then absorbed into the soil to trap them. It was almost like a form of cold sleep.
That was why R&C Occultics needed no cages for survivors or dumping grounds for corpses.
That was why R&C Occultics had only been able to make the people disappear, whether it was necessary or not.
“Your long-distance pressurized sand attack and the water and ice you sent at us were not meant to cause direct bloodshed. It’s also why carrying the rune cards in the drone didn’t work. You win from the moment you can dump sand on your target’s head!! Isn’t that right!?””
She finally knew what would make her lose.
She just had to think of the sand like a powerful acid or magma. She doubted the LA residents had figured out the details of the spell, but the weatherstripping on the doors and windows had been a response to their fear of the sand, not to keep out the cold or violent attackers.
Once she knew how it worked, it could no longer control her. Kanzaki took a few steps back to accurately escape the curtain of fine sand that dropped toward her.
She could hear what may have been footsteps beyond the thin curtain. Visibility was poor, but someone was definitely there. She could sense a faint shadow and a barrier of pressure.
Her first impression was something entirely out of place. She initially saw it as someone going for a walk. The feminine silhouette she saw was holding a large dog on a leash and walking through the LA streets.
Next, she wondered if the dog was a well-trained military dog.
But that guess was not cautious enough.
It delayed the realization by two whole seconds.
“That’s a person?”
She was not focused on the figure standing straight and holding the leash.
She was focused on the large figure down on the frigid asphalt on all fours.
In fact…
“Could that be the real magician!?”
That was when the figures moved.
It looked like a poorly-trained dog dragging along the poor woman who owned it. The figure in the collar forcibly dragged the figure holding the leash to continue the fight. With their wrist pulled hard by the leash, the “owner” recited an incantation that sounded more like a scream and something gathered deep in the throat of the “pet” as they opened their mouth wide.
“!!!???”
Kanzaki only managed to dodge the head-on attack because she was a Saint. The sand laser tore through the air and then swung to one side and the other, slicing through the buildings lining the major thoroughfare.
Most notably, a 100m broadcast tower collapsed. It was not large enough to be a tourist attraction, so it may have only been a sub or support tower used to preserve the quality of the TV or radio signal within the high EM density of the big city.
When it crashed down, a great cloud of sand would billow up from the ground.
If she was caught in that, she was done for.
Conversely, if she avoided being caught in it, the spell could not affect her. There was no need to make this complicated. If she simply assumed that cloud could dissolve the human body, she could think of any number of countermeasures.
“Okay!!”
The answer was simple.
While the tower fell and came apart in midair, Kanzaki used her legs to leap straight up. She kicked off pieces of the collapsing tower and used that falling footing to climb ever higher.
That much mass would create a great cloud of dust when it collided with the ground. It would look like a massive cumulonimbus cloud at 0 above sea level. Normally, the sand would have covered the entire sky above the target and they could not have avoided being reduced to nutrients.
But.
“I just have to climb higher than the cloud.”
A Saint could break the sound barrier in no time. The way she kicked off of midair steel beams and surviving building walls to jump to ever higher footing looked a lot like a rocket blasting off into space.
“If I climb higher than your cloud of dust, your spell loses all meaning!!”
She made it 300m above the ground.
That was higher than the falling tower. With a Saint’s leg strength, she could even make stepping stones out of the leaves and shopping bags blowing in the wind.
No matter how much sand flooded the surface, none of it could capture Kanzaki Kaori as she soared through the sky.
Or so she thought.
But she could not shake a sense of foreboding even after finding the answer.
If the spell really was that simple, why hadn’t the Grimoire Library Index been able to analyze it?
Then a massive shadow blotted out the sun.
Something new was slowly flying by even higher in the sky than her.
“Wha-?”
Part 6
“R&C Occultics is involved in every form of online business,” said Stiyl. He was reviewing some basic facts while narrowing in on the crux of the matter. “The most prominent of those is online shopping. But they could not let the distribution centers and shipping routes reveal the location of their HQ, so they focused on unmanned distribution using drones.”
“What of it?”
“They have delivery drones all over the world. They could not build any obvious stationary bases on the ground, but they still needed some way of receiving and sending out products, recharging the drones, and performing maintenance on them. So that massive IT company built mobile bases that need not belong to any country in particular.”
Kamijou and the others in the diner had not known about this, but they could not ask any questions. Maybe they could sense the intensity of this priest who had seen one for himself.
“They use aerial spacecraft launch pads known as Logistic Hornets. Those mobile space development bases look like flying wings measuring 5000m across. They were originally developed as mother ships for the spacecraft meant to replace the old-fashioned rockets and space shuttles, but R&C Occultics has no interest in space travel. They have 12 of the things on standby in the skies around the world and they launch their spacecraft to carry cargo between them. Then the drones carry the actual deliveries to the individual addresses. The mother ships wait at an altitude of 30 thousand meters and they use their bulti-in mass drivers to launch the spacecraft into a ballistic orbit that lets them ignore air resistance. It takes them about 20 minutes to carry cargo containers to the opposite side of the planet.”
“Wait, wait.”
“When cargo on the ground is sent to the Logistic Hornets, they launch unmanned gliders from mobile launch vehicles. You know, like the ones that launch ballistic missiles. It keeps the cost of the launches down and sticking to mobile facilities allows them to avoid the concept of nationality for all twelve of the Logistic Hornets.”
“I said wait!! Logistic what!? How do you know what they’re called and how they work!? I’m not the only one feeling lost here, am I!? This is news to the rest of you too, right!?”
A pair of small shoulders jumped.
Helcalia could not understand Japanese, but that may have made the incomprehensible yelling all the more frightening. She would assume the situation was deteriorating.
“I picked these up after I was separated from Kanzaki.” Looking irritated, Stiyl tossed a thick stack of documents onto the countertop. “I found them in one of the abandoned Academy City bases. And rune magic lets you activate a carved rune’s effects by dyeing it and complete the ceremony by destroying it. When used correctly, it can dig up residual thoughts like a needle reading the groove in a record.”
So instead of reading the text on the documents, had he spied on the thoughts of the person who had written it?
The method could not be used in court, but in contexts where magic was accepted, it could provide a decent level of “proof”.
Kamijou gulped.
“Then those things are how R&C Occultics makes all its money? They’re part of the collection that Anna Sprengel will start a ridiculous war to keep whole?”
“If they can transport that much cargo, they must be able to manipulate the weather conditions too. Their spell included a scientific piece that the grimoire library wouldn’t cover,” said Stiyl. “Maybe they use liquid nitrogen and maybe they use the naphtha found in napalm, but if they can rapidly heat and cool the air at high altitude, they can change the density of the air. That lets them change the atmospheric pressure. And if you can do that, you can bend the wind to your will. Fighter crafts and missiles need to travel through the air, so they could never even get close to those Logistic Hornets. Combine that with the R&C Occultics magician using sand as a weapon and we have a serious threat on our hands!!”
Part 7
It flew.
It twisted and coiled.
“Wha-?”
It looked like a single massive pillar. It sucked up the white sand covering the surface and swept it up to the stratosphere.
It was a tornado.
Even Kanzaki Kaori was slow to respond when faced with a true natural disaster. The Saint had jumped only 300m up, so she could not escape that pillar that rose tens of thousands of meters into the sky!!
It engulfed her.
She felt her mind fading and her body breaking apart, but she still clenched her teeth.
Several white smokescreens scattered in the frozen sky.
They looked like the midday fireworks seen at athletic festivals, but there were too many of them. Hundreds or even thousands of the white smokescreen fireworks filled the air above Kanzaki like a thick roof.
Had countless delivery drones been released into the sky, flown toward specific aerial coordinates on the guidance of a group control system that kept them from colliding with each other, and then swiftly self-destructed?
(Liquid nitrogen!! They’re cooling the air to control the atmosphere pressure. Does that mean the scientific machines are an amplifier used to endlessly boost the sand magic!?)
“This is…not good!”
She used her fingertips, which just barely still existed, to accurately control seven invisibly-thin wires.
She used Nanasen.
She could easily slice through the air to blow the sandstorm away in an instant, but that would not get rid of the fine grains already caught in her hair and inside her clothing.
It was too late for her.
So she left this in someone else’s hands.
“Stiyl!!”
The sun had already risen and swept away the shadows of the night, but Kanzaki’s eyes accurately located a single point of orange light.
That was a lit cigarette hidden in the city far below.
She could not waste this. She could move their game piece at least one more space along the board.
She needed to find something useful, no matter how small, so she tore apart the curtain blocking her partner’s vision, opening the way to the next hint. If she could see him on the surface, he could see her from there. The two of them had split up so if anything happened to one of them, the other could at least get the information back to the rest of the team.
Kanzaki clenched her teeth for placing this burden on Stiyl’s shoulders.
She was forcing him to do something she had failed at. Even though she knew receiving a hint by watching your partner’s sacrifice was more painful than any injury to yourself.
And.
Kanzaki Kaori saw it even as she disappeared.
All while praying at least one other person would see this too.
She saw the HQ building’s defender. She could tell it was some kind of technology, but she was not sure of what kind.
Overall, it looked like a giant aircraft with V-shaped wings. It was several kilometers across, rivalling an entire town in size. The craft extended back from the V-shaped wings and ended in another triangular tail wing at the back, so even with a gap between the two sets of wings, the overall silhouette still looked like a single isosceles triangle.
But more than that…
“What?”
It was hollow.
Kanzaki’s mind was drawn toward the gaping hole. The very center of the V-shape was entirely empty, even though this was an aircraft. Did the hole itself matter, or did the donut shape around the hole matter?
One of the massive flying object’s main wings had the words Logistic Hornet 06 written on it.
But that was not all.
The Saint read one more thing aloud even as her throat disappeared.
“Space…Engage?”
Part 8
Kamijou saw the girl’s eyes widen.
He and Stiyl had been speaking in Japanese, but she must have recognized one of the terms they were using. The instant she heard the English term, a clear change came over her.
The phrase was Space Engage.
Kamijou recognized it too. He only had to look at the young girl’s back and see what words were printed on the flight jacket she wore over her camisole.
He had assumed that was a brand name, but it must have been the name of a company instead.
Kamijou immediately gave Stiyl a stiff smile.
“Y-you’re joking, right? You must have misread it.”
“I am serious and I know what I saw.”
He heard a crunch as Stiyl Magnus bit the filter of his cigarette.
The priest gave into his anger and raised his voice.
“Kanzaki did everything she could to ensure I received this information even as her body came apart around her!! She left this mission with me and I will do whatever it takes to complete it. There is an undeniable connection between the R&C Occultics magician and Space Engage’s new weapon. I will not budge on that. We must start from there if we are to find a solution.”
“…”
This was the only possible conclusion based on the “starting point” he had gained from his partner’s sacrifice, so he glared straight at Kamijou’s face.
“Why was Helcalia the sole survivor out of 30 million people? You expect me to believe R&C Occultics overlooked her just because she was hiding in a locker? Preposterous. We’ve searched all over and not found a single other exception in a washing machine, a car trunk, a basement, or anywhere else. Every last dog house and bird cage was cleaned out as much as everything else. It only makes sense if you assume she was spared because she’s family of one of the villains!!”
“H-hey, Helcalia?”
“Not true. Can’t be.”
When interpreted by the Transla-Pen, the girl’s response didn’t sound like much, but even Kamijou could tell she was distraught. He could not understand her untranslated English, but he could still hear the fear and anger in her trembling voice.
“Mama isn’t!! She promised to make it true before I become grownup. She was excited about making a wedding in space. So nothing to do with R&C Occultics!!”
“How about this?” Stiyl Magnus slowly exhaled and finally moved his trembling hand to pull out a new cigarette. “Do you know why this girl’s mother was at that Academy City base? Melzabeth Grocery was the president of a space start-up. She used to do experimental launches outside of LA and on the ocean, but not anymore.”
He lit the cigarette and filled his lungs with smoke, but that did not seem to make him feel any better.
“But Academy City didn’t ask for her cooperation because she knew so much about space.”
No, they wouldn’t, thought Kamijou. Academy City technology was 20-30 years ahead of the outside world, so they would never ask for someone outside the city for help when it came to technology.
But then why had they contacted Melzabeth Grocery?
“Her start up got off the ground with support from R&C Occultics and she was one of the company presidents in their crucial independent affiliates division. Academy City wanted her as an insider who knew the inner workings of that enigmatic IT company. …But seeing as the Logistic Hornet is assisting the Citrinitas magician, that was probably a bad idea. She was working with Anna and she was sent to Academy City as a double agent. She worked on the inside to sabotage Overlord Revenge!!”
