“Umm. They aren’t in a room but rather on the floor in the hallway.”

“Gah…?! Damn it, they really are in the corner over there, all tied into a bundle! Shit! Why didn’t you notice them there before, Touma Kamijou?! Then you wouldn’t have gotten in so much trouble…”

Kamijou began to whine and complain, and finally, the stark-naked Index’s temples twitched.

“I! Said! Why does your brain place such a high priority on people’s naked bodies?!”

“Gyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! For some reason you’re, like, twice the Index you usually are!!”

Touma Kamijou experienced his second instance of skinship through biting in these foreign lands. He could only sincerely hope Orsola wouldn’t mistake it as a strange part of Japanese traditional culture.

4

As Kamijou rolled around the floor, clutching his chomped-upon head, and Orsola continued packing up more dinnerware, the sky grew completely dark.

“Once again, thank you very much.”

Orsola bowed in gratitude, and the canvas truck rumbled, shook, and drove away. It was shaking pretty hard, and Kamijou worried about the slightly fragile tableware.

In any case, this was the end of the moving job.

There was nobody nearby, though he didn’t know if all the streets of Chioggia had emptied out or just this one spot. In the near distance he could hear the household sounds of eating and uproarious laughter.

Orsola picked up her suitcase with the bare minimum that she needed. “Thank you very much for your help, both of you. I apologize for keeping you here so long.”

“Nah, it’s all right. What are you going to do now, Orsola? We’re heading back to the hotel and then going sightseeing. Do you want to come with us?”

“No, I couldn’t.” It was a casual question, but for some reason, Orsola put a hand to her cheek and flushed slightly, looking away. “Are you asking me to come with you to the hotel now?…They do say three is a crowd.”

Kamijou suddenly sputtered and coughed.

Index, though, frowned. “??? What do you mean, three is a crowd?”

“You don’t need to ask! And you don’t need to know, either, Index!!” Kamijou stopped Orsola just before she was about to politely explain. Index still had a question mark on her face, not understanding.

“I am here on a break from my job in London, so I can’t stay for very long. And…”

“And?” asked Kamijou.

Orsola’s lips moved very slightly into a smile. “I’d like to go around Chioggia to say good-bye…And I don’t want to show that to either of you. I may not be very good to look at.”

Oh. Kamijou finally realized it. This was where Orsola’s home had been, and now she didn’t live here anymore. And she wasn’t moving out because she wanted to. If not for the nonsense with that big group called the Roman Orthodox Church, she wouldn’t have had to move.

Kamijou had convinced himself he’d saved Orsola after the incident with Agnes. That wasn’t strictly mistaken, but it certainly hadn’t come without a price. The rescue had been successful only after she’d lost her usual way of life. Still, the compromise was better than it could have been.

“…Sorry for not being considerate, Orsola.”

“No, please don’t be. It’s not as though this is the last time I will ever see Chioggia. Now, now, please don’t make a face like that. I am as interested in London as I am Chioggia.”

In front of the apartment complex, lit up by light from the moon and stars, it was now Orsola smiling and showing consideration. Index, standing next to him, silently nudged him in the gut with her elbow. She was probably telling him not to go any further. Even Kamijou understood that much, though. He had to.

“Good-bye, then. When I have the opportunity, I will invite you both to my home in London.”

“Sure. And if you ever come to Japan again…”

“Touma, I think you’ll need to clean your room before thinking about that.”

The three of them laughed before beginning to go their separate ways on the dusk-fallen road.

But after just one step…

…suddenly Index’s face shot up.

“Wait…Is this…?!” she shouted. “Everyone get down!!”

Kamijou and Orsola looked at Index blankly. Get down? Why?

Then he heard a metallic sound in the distance. Index’s face immediately became serious.

“GTTR!! (Go to the right!!)” She stared almost directly overhead.

Bang.

With a strange sound, Orsola’s suitcase went flying away.

“What?” Mystified, Orsola gawked at the hand from which the suitcase had been wrenched. It fluttered through the air and fell to the ground, undoing its metal clasps and opening up like a bivalve mollusk. Combs and tubes of lipstick scattered all over the road. An ironed black hood, probably part of a change of clothes, hung just over the edge of the canal flowing along the road.

Kamijou watched the wide-open suitcase slide across the road.

An unnatural square hole, about one centimeter on each side, had been bored into it.

“Touma, get away from there!!” came Index’s strained cry.

If she’s the one alarmed…then was that sorcery?

He was about to turn back to her and ask, but he ground to a stop halfway there. Orsola’s habit—the surface was slightly sunken in, like it had been compressed with a stamp. The point on the clothing silently moved from her shoulder toward her chest.

Like a laser pointer to help someone aim.

A ranged…“Sniper?! Orsola!!”

Kamijou let go of his own luggage, pushed the idly standing Index to the ground, then rushed toward Orsola’s chest. He tackled her down to the road.

There was a soft, metallic clink. Then Kamijou felt a pain on his back, going in a line from right to left. Something was scraping against his skin.

Where are they?! Who are they?! And how?!

He endured the stinging pain and looked around. The only things he saw were rectangular buildings around five stories tall and the straight canal. Being the amateur that he was, he couldn’t tell whether it was a suitable environment for a marksman. A simple glance around wouldn’t let him spot someone with a humongous rifle, either. Whatever it was had probably come from the opposite direction the suitcase flew in, but all he could see that way were building walls. Index had seemed to see it coming, but—

“Touma!!”

His thoughts interrupted, as soon as Kamijou directed his attention outward, a cold, wet hand grabbed the back of his neck. He turned around in alarm as an arm reached out from the canal alongside the road. A black arm in a long sleeve. Someone had crawled up from the surface of the canal and now had Kamijou’s neck from behind.

“Umph!!” Before he could react, the stranger pulled him with a sharp jerk.

He lost his balance as it tore him off Orsola and into the canal. The cloudy seawater burned his throat. The scrape on his back exploded with pain. His vision was murky due to the light refracting irregularly, but he saw someone trying to climb their way back up to the road as he fell. In their right hand was a shining metal object.

A knife—or a sword.

Shit…Who the hell is that?!

Kamijou stuck out a hand to grab the attacker’s leg, but it slid out of reach just before he grabbed it. He paddled, giving himself upward momentum, and then his face burst above the surface.

Because it was high tide, perhaps, there were only a few dozen centimeters from the water’s surface to the road. But that small height difference was preventing Kamijou from seeing anything.

“Urgh!” He put both hands on the canal’s edge and hauled himself up.

Then he saw Orsola there. She was in an unnatural pose, squatting on one knee. She must have been getting back on her feet after he’d shoved her down. There was more surprise than fear plastered on her face.

And…

Standing directly in front of her was the assailant. A man dressed head to toe in a habit black as night. Like Orsola’s, there were zippers on the shoulders to remove the sleeves. Kamijou couldn’t see the man’s face, since he was turned away, but he saw his distinctive hair—it was dyed purple.

Contrary to his expectations, his soaking-wet hand was holding neither a knife nor a sword. It was a spear. The wooden handle was painted black and only seventy centimeters long, looking like it had been cut short, while the sharp blade measured ten centimeters.

If he stabbed someone with that, they’d die. The man lifted it up with both hands. As though he was about to drive a stake into the ground.

Kamijou had to stop him right this instant, but he had just managed to crawl up from the canal and was still lying on the road. It would take a few seconds for him to get to Orsola and Index, who were meters away. Meanwhile, the assailant raised his lance and then thrust it downward.

“Die, asshole!!”

Kamijou grabbed the hair dryer that had fallen out of Orsola’s suitcase and hurled it at the man. It struck the defenseless attacker in the back of the head.

His lance swerved off course, barely scraping by Orsola’s face before its tip crashed into the ground.

“!!”

The assailant whipped around. Deciding to get rid of the nuisance before his actual target, he dove for Kamijou. His blade glittered in the night, a strange orange light like the evening sun. It must have been sorcery. Kamijou, still on the ground, tightened his right hand into a fist.

“DTBTTI! (Direct the blade’s tip toward itself!)”

A moment after Index’s odd-sounding shout, the spear in the man’s hands broke apart like a chopped vegetable. The sudden dismantling of his weapon made the man in the habit freeze.

“!!” After getting off the ground, Kamijou dove for the man, his posture low, aiming to come upward into him. He flung his right fist at the man’s face. The diagonal impact from below shook the man’s head.

“Agh!” he groaned, trying to retreat.

Kamijou hit him again with his fist. With a bam!!, the strike, all his weight behind it, plunged into the middle of the man’s nose, this time driving him to the ground. He landed on his back and stopped moving.

He had no time to breathe yet.

“Ack! What about the sniper?!”

“It’s okay,” said Index lightly. “I already dealt with them.”

“Dealt with what?!” shot back Kamijou, more confused than before.

A moment later.

“Agagagagagagahh!!”

From somewhere far away, the shout of a large man drifted. Kamijou’s ears perked up, and Index’s voice began to slide into them.

“If he was aiming at us from a distance, then the enemy knows exactly where we are. No matter where he is, if I use spell interception, it will hit him.”

Index seemed to have done something, but Kamijou couldn’t exactly tell what.

He heard the sole of a foot tapping on the road. He looked over to the street corner and saw a male figure leap out. He was holding his hands to his temples, and he was moving unsteadily, like an explosion had just gone off right next to his ears. It was too dark to make out any of the man’s features. He ran—not at Kamijou but straight at the seawater canal.

“Abbandonate l’avanguardia! Ora prendete la barca ritiro! Uccidete quella donna sulla nave!!” (Abandon the vanguard! Take out the retreat boat now! Kill that woman on the ship!!)

After shouting something that sounded Italian, he jumped without any hesitation off the edge of the road—the canal—and into the water.

Is that guy running away the sniper from before?! Shit, do I follow him, or would I be going too far?!

As Kamijou wondered what to do, he heard the sound of water churning.

However—

It was an extremely loud roar, far too much to have been a single person diving in.

Crash!! went the water’s surface as it parted.

The seawater flew into the air like a waterfall in reverse, and the man landed atop the object that had come out.

“What…?!” Kamijou almost stopped breathing.

A sailboat had emerged from the bottom of the canal. An old-fashioned one with four masts, the sort you could imagine sailing the seas during the Age of Exploration. But it differed from other boats because of its material. The vessels built to cross the oceans in search of new lands were made of wood—but the one that just sprang out was semitransparent and felt cold. It looked like it was made out of crystal. Even the sails and the ropes looked the same. It certainly seemed doubtful that it could even function as a boat like that. The lights from the town and the moon illuminated it so that it gave off a faint whitish color like a lightbulb.

But.

The stranger thing was the boat’s size.

“Ack!!”

“Touma!!”

The canal was only twenty or thirty meters across. But the boat that came out was so wide that it broke the canal walls on the road on both sides, then grew even bigger.

“How the hell did they hide something like this?!”

The motorboats, lined up like bicycles in front of a train station, were smashed and either sank to the bottom of the waterway or crashed into the translucent ship hull and flew into the air. With a punch, Kamijou blocked a boat fragment going for Index’s head, but a moment later, a surge of water like a flash flood swept out his feet. It was the same as a child slipping in a bathtub. Kamijou toppled over like a floating washbasin as he slid and fell.

“Ow! What the hell is this?!”

He looked overhead from his new vantage point on the water-soaked ground and saw that the triangular masts already reached forty meters high. And the ship was still continuing to come up out of the water.

It was too strange. He’d been pulled into that canal earlier, and it was only three meters deep at most. There was no space under there to hide a boat of this massive size.

Crash!! The ship’s hull sprang up yet again.

The ship’s deck had been just about at road level before. Now it crashed upward once more. Not a moment later…

“Kyah…!!” Orsola, hanging on to the edge of the boat, was lifted up off the ground as it rose. Kamijou had no time to watch, though, as another shock came from underneath him. Like an uppercut, the edge of the glimmering ship drove up into him.

Roar!! howled the wind.

He experienced a moment of weightlessness; his feet were already off the ground. No sooner did he feel his body sliding than he and the ship were hauled straight up twenty meters.

He wouldn’t stand a chance falling from this height. “Urgh!!” His hands flailed, grabbing the edge of the ship. That was his railing now.

The wall of the ship’s hull, which had just been under the water, was now a towering cliff over twenty meters tall. It was probably about seven stories high. He could see over all the surrounding apartment buildings now. As he hung there, he looked to the side and saw Orsola hanging on like he was—and the ship’s hull, over one hundred meters long, continuing on.

“Orsola! We have to get on the ship!!” I’d rather not get on something so strange, but it’s better than the alternative!! he told himself bitterly, grabbing the strangely slippery, almost-white construction material and managing to climb up onto the ship’s deck.

The ship was enormous.

Over one hundred meters long and just under twenty meters from the deck to the ship’s bottom. Everything from the deck to the tops of the masts was made of the same translucent material, giving off a faint whitish glow. Kamijou and Orsola were near the center of the ship, but the front and back led to staircases, with the cabin on the same level. They were essentially in the middle of an earthenware mortar right now.

Three levels above and probably five levels below, making eight stories in all. This ship was bigger than Kamijou’s dormitory building. The shores of the canal were cracked open, the seawater pushing up through them into tiny streams, flowing farther and farther out.

“This is insane…How can something like this suddenly pop out of the canal?”

The hull of the ship was also made of the strange translucent material. All the light from the moon refracting every which way inside was giving it the dull white glare.

This…I thought it was glass or crystal, but it’s not. It’s almost like ice.

Out of all the practical buildings made of ice, the domed igloos built and lived in by the Inuits in Canada were famous—but this was on an entirely different scale.

Kamijou ran his fingers along the deck to check. It certainly looked like ice, but it had none of the chill that lingered on your skin. It was lukewarm, almost like plastic…The rule that water froze at zero degrees Celsius applied only under a certain pressure. Given the correct conditions, the boiling point and freezing point of water could be changed, so there were instances of ice being twenty degrees Celsius and water boiling at eighty.

It must have been created through sorcery.

Despite the ground being ice, his feet didn’t slip on it. He’d heard before that people slipped on ice because there was a film of unfrozen water on the top, which reduced friction. Ice with an altered melting point wouldn’t melt when touched by human skin, so maybe it couldn’t create that watery film. Though it was sorcery, Kamijou’s right hand touching it wasn’t enough to break it. Maybe it had some kind of trick like Stiyl’s Innocentius.

Then, one last time, the boat heaved upward. He felt a shock come from below. Orsola’s hands were too slow, and she fell off the edge of the ship.

“Kyaa?!”

“Grab on!!”

He immediately stuck his hand off the deck, managing just barely to catch one of hers. She weighed only as much as a girl might, but supporting that weight with his unstable posture made it feel several times heavier. He broke into a cold sweat but somehow managed to drag Orsola up onto the deck.

She came over the edge and they both toppled down to the ice.

“Touma!! Are you okay?! Touma!!”

He heard a worried shout from Index, far below the cliff-like ship hull.

Kamijou had no time to answer her. Ga-clunk! No sooner did the boat shudder than he was thrown back. He coughed as Orsola’s body, still on top of him, pressed into his chest.

He took a look around. They were the only two here. The giant ice ship was silent, but it presented one answer to Kamijou.

Is it actually moving forward? You’d think with this thing’s size, it would get caught in the canal and stop. Isn’t it basically just a beached jellyfish now?!

But contrary to his surprise, the giant sailboat was in fact moving smoothly forward. Like a curling stone sliding across a sheet of ice…And then it hit him. If this glimmering ship was made of ice with an altered melting point, maybe it was able to create a temporary film of water only on the bottom of the hull to reduce friction.

“Are you okay, Orsola?”

“Y-yes…,” replied Orsola uneasily, suddenly realizing she was lying on top of him. The usually easygoing lady pulled away with a jerk—and then lost her balance and fell back.

Kamijou himself was a little out of sorts—her womanly scent was now clinging to his sticky, soaked shirt—but now wasn’t the time for that.

He grabbed hold of the edge of the ship—a slightly higher wall that acted as a guardrail—and spared a furtive glance below. He shuddered; he was so high it was like leaning over the top of a lighthouse. The ice sailboat was still pushing itself through the canal, widening it and eating through one parked boat after another as it advanced little by little down the stream.

“What the hell is going on?!” he yelled, though it didn’t change what he was seeing. Eyes peeled, he looked for something, anything that hinted at a way out. “Over twenty meters from here to the ground…And even if I jump into the water, I’ll probably still break bones. Wait, since the ship is bigger than the width of the canal, is the bottom of it actually made of stone? Damn, can I only see water from here because the boat is pushing up all the seawater?!”

The seawater appeared to be flowing inside buildings from the cracks under their front doors. He could hear panicked noises coming from some of them—and then they stopped, dumbfounded, as they witnessed what was causing all of it.

“?! No, please, wait!!” cried Orsola, abruptly leaning over the railing. Her eyes opened wide as she stared ahead of them. “Oh no…How terrible…”

“Wh-what is it, Orsola?”

“This boat seems to be forcing its way through the canal in an attempt to escape north out of Chioggia and into the Adriatic.”

Before Kamijou could ask what was wrong with that, she continued.

“Please lower yourself. The Vigo Bridge across the canal is coming up! The boat is going to break through the stones and leave!!”

“Are you kidding me?!” Kamijou hastily grabbed Orsola’s back as she leaned over the railing.

A moment later, a heavy wham!! split through the air.

The boat destroyed the bridge in one hit.

“Urgh?!”

Kamijou’s hand slipped away from Orsola’s clothing. As he crashed down onto the deck, the impact drove out all his breath.

Gah…! What about…Orsola…?!

He pushed off the deck and unsteadily stood again. Fortunately, Orsola had been knocked toward the inside of the ship and was lying there like Kamijou. Honestly, that was more a relief than anything. If she’d been knocked in the other direction, it would have been a twenty-meter drop.

Damn it…Even against the monumental situation, he forced himself to think. Some weirdos attacked us. Now I’m on a strange boat made of ice. Index and I have been separated…Seriously, what’s going on?

Orsola looked past the ship’s wall, then said in a daze, “It seems…we are leaving land.”

“Yeah. Where in the world could this boat be going?” he said with a cough, catching his breath, watching land grow smaller and smaller.

But not even this silence lasted very long.

From far away—but from inside their boat this time—he heard multiple sets of footsteps running around.

“Cerca. Loro devono essere a bordo!” (Search. They must be on board!)

It was a large man’s shout. Kamijou shivered. He didn’t know what the words meant, but he definitely heard the hostility in them.

Orsola lowered her voice. “What should we do? They seem to be looking for us…”

“I know! We can’t exactly jump off and escape. We wouldn’t be able to tell what direction we were going in with how dark it is.”

There was a chilling lack of anything nearby on the sea. We went that far already? he thought hopelessly. He got the feeling that the ship had been getting shorter as they made their way farther out to sea. Before, it had been riding on the bottom of the canal, but now it was actually floating along the water. Boats were generally built so that around half their height was underwater. That meant from their point to the surface of the actual sea were about ten meters.

But more importantly, you needed special skills to do long-distance swimming in rough waters with your clothes on. He could struggle all he wanted, but in all probability he’d drown before reaching land.

From what he could tell, this icy boat was modeled after an old-fashioned warship; some dozen or so translucent cannons protruded from the walls of the hull on either side. Without an oxygen tank or a snorkel, he’d have to swim with his head above the water’s surface. But those on the ship would spot the irregular ripples in the water and discover him immediately. If those cannons could actually fire, he’d die as soon as they saw him.

He watched as land grew smaller and smaller, but Kamijou and Orsola were unable to disembark.

“Shit…!!”

The clattering footsteps from inside the boat were coming closer. Up here, there were no safe places to run. The light source of the boat itself wasn’t very strong. The ice’s surface was faintly glimmering; only darkness lurked in the air above.

Weak as it was, however, light did radiate from the floor, the walls, and everything else. The silhouettes of Kamijou and Orsola would be clear as day. Blending into the darkness would be difficult.

Perhaps the only good thing about all this was that the boat was large, over one hundred meters long, and seemed to have many obstacles and cabins they could duck into.

“Orsola, we’re going inside. They’ll find us for sure if we stay here. We should look for an opportunity to hide for now.”

“Y-yes! I understand.”

Kamijou grabbed Orsola’s hand. He ran across the icy ship’s deck, crouching.

Their presumably fun-filled vacation to Italy was starting to show unexpected complications.