“…I suppose this means this ship was not the enemy’s base but merely a single part of it.”

“Was the main fleet here all along? Could they just not all deploy near Chioggia because it was too small?” Kamijou gritted his teeth.

They were up to their necks with just one boat, and now there were even more. He felt like the slight hope of escape was quickly vanishing. Maybe he would have to abandon his idea of getting off the ship in the middle of the sea and wait in hiding until they arrived at a port somewhere.

“Jeez. I’m sure Index is fine. Her cell phone…doesn’t work. I’d love to praise Academy City for making phones that can survive being dropped into the ocean…but her zero-yen phone is probably still turned off from before we got on the plane. Wait, would the waves even reach out here on the ocean?”

“Well. I believe all my luggage has been perfectly washed away. My suitcase opened up and its contents were strewn about the road, after which this boat forced the canal water up…” Orsola seemed slightly embarrassed about it—she must have had things she needed as a woman in there.

Kamijou sighed, but he was a little impressed at the same time. “…You’re pretty tough, thinking ahead to what’ll happen after this is over.”

“Oh, but squid ink isn’t a Venetian specialty but a Chioggian one.”

Kamijou completely deflated as Orsola swung the topic in a strange direction without listening to him, but that didn’t last too long, either.

Ker-click.

The room’s doorknob suddenly turned.

“?!” Kamijou and Orsola, standing near the door, were startled. They quickly turned around. It wasn’t only one knob they heard.

Click click click click click!! Several dozen of them went off at once. Had all the doors on this floor—or the entire ship—opened automatically? The noise came at them from the right and stampeded down to the left.

There was nowhere to hide in the room.

And on the other side of the door—in the hallway made of ice with an altered melting point—a person, who had been hastily looking through each room, stopped right in front of Kamijou.

It wasn’t a person he could see shouting in such a guttural voice, like the kinds he heard on deck.

Outside the opened door was a sister. Her most unique feature, perhaps, was her red hair, tied into many braids, each about the thickness of a pencil. She was even shorter than Index, with eyes that betrayed a hint of childish mischief. She wore a black habit like Orsola, but it looked more like a dress and exposed a lot of her skin. To top it all off, he saw thirty-centimeter-high sandals on her feet.

“Agnes?!” he shouted in spite of himself.

Agnes Sanctis: a combat sister in charge of an entire unit in the Roman Orthodox Church and the nun who had once attempted to assassinate Orsola Aquinas during the incident involving the Book of the Law.

Wait, is this some kind of joke?! What is she even doing here? She already attacked Orsola once. Is she involved in this?! It was so sudden and unexpected that he couldn’t find any words to say.

“…” She didn’t seem to have thought she’d find Kamijou and Orsola behind the door, either. She stared at the young man’s face standing next to her, eyes widening a little bit, and then…

Bam!! She wasted no time hammering her fist into Kamijou’s cheek from the side.

“Gah…?!”

His vision swam. Orsola gave a quiet yelp. The strike dizzied him—not out of pain but out of being unable to react to the abruptness of it. Meanwhile, Agnes took another step in and wound up another punch. Kamijou tried to focus on protecting his face, but as if she’d read his thoughts, her small fist swung low diagonally and dug into his side.

Whop!! came a dull noise like a hammer hitting a leather bag.

Kamijou’s body made a nasty creaking sound as he doubled over in pain. Then Agnes brought her fist down from above. He collapsed, helpless, to the icy floor as she took a side step to put distance between them. She glanced at Orsola.

“Wait…I would appreciate it if you waited a moment…?!” Orsola put her arms out, frantic. Agnes narrowed her eyes a little but didn’t open her fists. Then, as she continued to be cautious, she heard…

“…I’b sowwy I’b so sowwy though honestly my heart skipped a beat because I mean your habit is like I can see your back through it and I can even see a little of your butt and your stomach too your clothes are cut along it like it’s reaching arms around you and all I can see is skin and…”

…the usual nonsensical chant-like stream of words coming from the boy’s bent form.

In the small room, Agnes placed herself to be an equal distance from Kamijou and Orsola, then…

“!! There!!” she cried, stamping her thick sandal sole into Kamijou’s calf. Then she pulled up his pants leg. “I knew it! You smuggled a weapon onto the Queen of the Adriatic—!!”

Agnes’s cautious voice cut off before she finished.

Attached to his calf by a band was a spare wallet, practically screaming that he was not at all used to overseas travel.

“…” Agnes fell silent, less out of embarrassment that she’d been wrong and more out of caution at not being able to read his intent. Once again, she shuffled over, repositioning herself against the two of them.

She didn’t let down her guard, but the standoff held, telling them that they could conduct conversation without her using physical force. Orsola let out a quiet breath, and then strung together more words than she usually did.

“Well. No sooner were my moving preparations complete than people from the Roman Orthodox Church attacked. As fate would have it, we ended up on this boat. The Queen of the Adriatic…Might that be this ice ship’s name?” she asked in blank amazement.

Finally, Agnes relaxed. She looked at Kamijou, who was on the floor, though her gaze still didn’t show any signs of letting down her guard. “That…Is this a problem with her personality, usually?” she asked, rather exasperated.

Kamijou wasn’t listening to anyone right now. “…And so I’m sorry Agnes and forgive my confession in the middle of my apology but from the first time I met you I actually thought you looked really hot in that tight habit miniskirt and— Gwoh?!”

Thirty-centimeter soles dug into his side, sending Kamijou reeling away. Agnes asked the exact same question again. He sat up and, coughing, responded.

“Well…Wait, uh, why are you mad? Did Orsola say something weird again? The Queen of the Adriatic? What’s that? I feel like I’ve heard it before.”

“Oh. I must insist that I listen carefully to what others say.”

Nobody could tell what words that response had been in answer to, so the other two didn’t even bother engaging Orsola. Agnes slumped, this time seeming to have let go of her caution for real. “…This fleet’s called the Queen’s Fleet. This boat is one of its escorts. It looks like you really don’t know crap. You’re bad at bargaining—it’s written all over your face. Though if it’s all an act, it’s pretty damn impressive.”

“What are you even doing here…?”

“You’re one person I don’t have to explain myself to. But I’m here helping search for the infiltrators.” She continued with something crazy. “Never thought it would be you two, though. Maybe I can use this. I was having a rough time. That problem was more than I could solve myself. But with you two, it’ll be solved quickly—”

“Hey, wait a minute,” interrupted Kamijou. Problem, rough time, use, quickly—none of those words sounded very good. “I don’t like this. Orsola was attacked, and we were forced to get on this weird boat. We’ve been pulled around this whole time. I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but—”

“If you insist on whining and complaining, I’ll start yelling. If you want to get out of here, I think you’d better not get on my nerves. If you want to know how to depart the Queen’s Fleet, anyway.”

Kamijou and Orsola looked at Agnes with surprise.

She didn’t care much. “If you don’t want to, that’s fine. I’ll just go and call someone over, and you can deal with the rest however you want. Why not try jumping overboard and freaking swimming to land? Don’t know how many kilometers it would be, and if you make splashing noises in the water I think they’ll shoot you with cannons without question.”

Now that it had been said again, Kamijou had no way of arguing. They were in the sea. If he thought about it normally, he’d realize there was no escape. Swimming obviously wouldn’t work, and even if they stole a life raft or something like that, they’d easily be sunk.

As Kamijou mulled it over, Orsola spoke. “…By saving us, what would you gain?”

“A reward, I guess. Just think of it like that,” answered Agnes immediately.

The situation was already baffling, and now it seemed about to get even more tangled. Agnes was on the same search team as the men with the deep voices. Did she have a different goal?

Orsola sighed and looked at Kamijou again. “For now, we must do as she says. Either way, I don’t believe we’ll find a way to escape without cooperating, and if we make Miss Agnes mad, the other people will arrive.”

“Heh. So you do get it.” Agnes smiled belligerently.

Kamijou clicked his tongue. He could feel the situation growing more and more chaotic. Offhandedly, he said, “I don’t like this, but let’s hear what you have to say.”

2

“What’s the Queen’s Fleet, anyway?”

That was the first question Kamijou asked in the small cannon room.

“Well, it’s a fleet meant to keep watch on the Adriatic Sea.”

Agnes’s tension had finally gone away, and despite not getting any closer to him than she needed to, the energy was draining from the tips of her hands and feet.

“Its goal is to collect data from stuff like the stars, the wind, and the surface of the water to see where and how much mana is being used on the Adriatic. Unlike on land, we can’t simply put guards on the ocean. But it’d be a problem if people were doing weird sorcery experiments on the water.”

“…Keeping watch on the Adriatic…,” Orsola repeated, looking around the icy room with doubt on her face. “Is it necessary to build something so tremendous for that?”

“At this point we probably could’ve made it more compact, but, err, the Queen’s Fleet was made hundreds of years ago…back when peace and order on the Adriatic was so unstable that they had to patrol it constantly,” Agnes explained, bored. “And part of it is to scout out other religious sects, I bet. The organizational diagram of the groups on the sorcery side has started shifting around lately, so they wanted a big event to fix all that.”

Which meant that the English Puritan Church and the Russian Catholic Church would know about the Queen of the Adriatic’s move. If not, they wouldn’t be able to meet their goal of showing it off. Kamijou noted as much to her.

“Right, well, I’m sure the higher-ups knew and just kept quiet about it, yeah? Fooling around with scouts isn’t going to cause waves, and if their underlings stupidly run out ahead and react too violently, that’ll cause a much bigger problem. Like what’s happening right now.”

“…Wait a minute. I still don’t get what’s going on. We didn’t know about the Queen of the Adriatic, and now that we know how dangerous the situation is, it feels like we’re not really…”

“You think they give a crap about you two? What I’m saying is…”

Agnes stopped.

They could hear the pattering of footsteps from outside the room. Agnes pressed her ear to the icy door and waited until it quieted down. How many people were on this ship? The man in the habit who attacked them and the men with the deep voices yelling instructions on the icy deck couldn’t have been part of Agnes’s unit.

“But I don’t recall ever hearing about this while I was still a Roman Orthodox.”

“I didn’t know until getting here, either. I mean, the Church’s got two billion followers. Which means there’s an insane number of disparate units. We only know about the places and things we use regularly and the super-famous people all the way at the top.”

“…Now that you mention it, I don’t even know how many units there are in total,” Orsola replied, thinking back to her old post and the group she belonged to.

But…

“Hey, is this fleet really just set up for keeping watch?” Kamijou turned to Agnes, suspicion on his face. “Look at the facts: Some guy attacked us, probably from this ship. And then a huge freaking boat came up and broke the canal. Next thing we know, we’re in the middle of a huge fleet. Why do we have to suffer through all this?”

“Hmph,” sniffed Agnes for some reason. “I’ll ask one more time. You two are truly unrelated to the Queen of the Adriatic, right?”

“Yes, like I said, I was in the middle of moving. And now that I think of it, I do wonder if everyone from Amakusa is all right,” said Orsola, somewhat worried.

Agnes sighed tiredly. “Well, then you simply got caught by those keeping watch, didn’t you? You two destroyed a Roman Orthodox Church project in the past. You’re obviously on a blacklist, stupid. Plus, one of you came all the way from Japan and the other came from London with a combat brigade of Amakusa people with her. With everyone who took part in the battle over the Book of the Law, it’s no wonder they thought you were up to something again.”

“Is that right?” said Kamijou, confused. In all honesty, he couldn’t imagine what a “normal” response from the sorcery side would entail.

Agnes grinned. “But anyway, you’re pretty sharp to notice something wrong with this all being just for observation.”

“Huh?” replied Kamijou.

She continued. “The whole thing about it being just for keeping watch is a front.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“The real reason for it is, well, this is basically a workers’ facility.” Agnes’s smile darkened. “They round up all the sinners and failures like me and make them pay off whatever they owe the Roman Orthodox Church. So most of the people on the boat are the sisters from my unit…or rather, my former unit. The rest are mostly people overseeing the work and stuff.”

Did that mean Agnes was working here? Maybe looking for infiltrators was part of their job. But the air here felt oddly dangerous, what with the people who suddenly attacked them and the fact that they’d been hiding themselves.

“What exactly do you do here?” asked Kamijou.

“The work itself is simple. Anyhow, they ask for as many hours of labor as they can get. We’re worked around eighteen hours a day. For the sisters who aren’t used to stuff like this, it seems like hell.”

He was startled. Wasn’t there a form of torture like that…? Overwork was banned as a form of punishment right now. It was a method of wearing away a person’s mind by forcing them to continue doing simple, fruitless labor over long periods of time. The more meaningless the work, the more it stung. The feeling of all your work not being good for anything was probably like telling a marathon runner that time would be reset after they finally reached the goal, making them do it over and over again.

“Anyway, this is the important part. In exchange for my letting the two of you escape…I want you to rescue two of my subordinates. Their names are Sisters Lucia and Angeline.”

Lucia and Angeline. They didn’t ring a bell at first, but when Kamijou thought hard, he realized it was the sisters he’d seen during the incident regarding the Book of the Law and Orsola. He felt like they’d beaten him to a pulp in Parallel Sweets Park.

“But however shall we rescue them?”

“Right…Well, this is going to sound like karma, but…” Agnes sighed. “The two of them broke out of the Queen’s Fleet. Apparently, they plan on breaking out the other sisters and me. All I can really tell them is, ‘Yes, yes, good work,’ though. I’d rather they get out for now, then actually prepare something to rescue the rest of us.”

Agnes’s answer was bored, unenthusiastic.

“How did they say they did it, again? I think it was a spell that used the Queen’s Fleet’s searching characteristics against it…Well, in any case, they really did escape. That much is trustworthy information.”

Before Kamijou could open his mouth to ask why she wanted them to save the ones who had already broken out, he came to the answer. They had run away once—and then been caught again and dragged back.

“So they got brought back here and now they’re in detention?”

“Detention? Well…,” Agnes said in a bored voice. “This is a prison, so. Including myself, all the nuns here are Roman Orthodox prisoners. The most important thing they need to do is plug any potential escape holes. So stopping spells for breaking out comes first. Still, this isn’t an execution site, so they’re not gonna just up and kill ’em to keep ’em quiet. At most they’ll be dealt with so they can never use that spell again.”

“Dealt with?” repeated Kamijou casually, but Agnes took a moment before speaking.

Instead, Orsola gave an uncharacteristically bitter frown, then asked her, “…Preventing the use of sorcery means robbing them of their ability to think. Meaning, they will break down the structure of their brains?”

That unnerved Kamijou, who still sat on the ice floor. She hadn’t suggested a concrete method, but that only let terrible ideas spring up in his imagination.

Agnes, too, gave a sigh. “It’s not like they’re corpses for Vetala sorcery. And a labor force without minds would be horrifying to look at. That’s why my request is that you rescue them before that happens.” She started to scratch her head in annoyance. “…Just you two for now. The other sisters have the bare minimum of food, clothing, and lodging right now. And they probably don’t have the willpower to resist even poorly. Sisters Lucia and Angeline. If you get to them before their brains are wrecked, you’ll probably get the spell they used, too.”

“But is this escape spell not already known to the Roman Orthodox Church?”

“The Queen’s Fleet has something big coming up. Only the people higher up know the details, though. As long as they have enough people to spare for that, they don’t give a crap about one or two people breaking out. The Roman Orthodox Church isn’t dumb enough to let something this important go wrong because they were paying attention to something minor.”

Agnes collected herself a bit.

“So if they’re going to get away, now’s their only chance. If you two will act, this will be quick. I’ll go to the Queen’s Fleet’s flagship to create a diversion, so get the job done while I’m there, please.”

If she was going to the flagship, then did that mean there was a way to cross over there from this escort ship? These were magical facilities, so maybe there were some weird warp devices or something.

“…So you’re saying you’ll help us?”

“Not help you—use you. If you don’t like it, I won’t go to the flagship. Instead I’ll just turn you in.” Agnes’s lips twisted into a mean smile, but Orsola smiled.

“Now, now! There is no need to be so embarrassed about it. If you had no intention of cooperating, you wouldn’t have approached us about it.”

“Mgah?! H-hey, what are you hugging me for?!”

Agnes found her face buried in Orsola’s arms, massive goodwill, and enormous chest, so Kamijou instantaneously turned his head and averted his gaze. He heard a nasty-sounding grrk.

But that wasn’t important right now. “While you’re there…But you’ll be captured, too, won’t you? We should break out together,” he said from his spot on the floor, looking up at Agnes.

However, after escaping Orsola’s bonds, Agnes quickly responded, “No, I have a symbolic role.”

“Umm, that was really vague. I don’t get it.”

“I’ll explain it real nice and simple. Most of the people captured in this fleet are from my unit. The managers here are afraid of a laborer revolt. Basically, I’m like a mental safety switch to prevent that. Let’s see…For example, I’m like the boss of all the prisoners.” She smiled thinly and sardonically. “By getting me, the most influential person in the whole former Agnes Unit, to obey and never resist, it makes the others think that, well, if she couldn’t, then what chance do we have?…Of course, that’s all basically just an illusion.” She exhaled a little.

The fact that she was moving on her own instead of with a supervised group was probably due to her having the authority to do so. Agnes seemed to have come to check on Lucia and Angeline while she searched for them, though.

“I’m a prisoner, but I have the right to walk around freely in the fleet. I’m also exempt from manual labor. They allow me the luxury of having three meals a day and the option of coffee or spremuta after eating. Pretty good deal, right? Everyone else needs to work for me to have it, though.”

“…”

“They’re treating me like a guest. From my point of view, what Sisters Lucia and Angeline are doing is a waste of time. They’re, like, idiots. All the other sisters are being really obedient. If they were going to fight back, they should have just run away by themselves. But they came all the way to my tightly guarded room and told me they’d rescue me someday.”

There wasn’t much seriousness in Agnes’s voice. The words were simply tumbling out, and that was all.

“Besides, I don’t need to do any labor, so I don’t have to break out. I can just laze around on a couch and eventually I’ll be back at my post. They’re pathetic, huh?”

Agnes’s words ticked Kamijou off a little. Maybe it was a nuisance for her personally, but he didn’t think she had to put it like she had.

“Whatever you two want, it’ll be freakin’ important to assure their cooperation to find out how to get safely away from this fleet at sea. Might have to rough up a few people. Anyway, I guess just do the best you can manage.”

“What do you mean ‘best we can manage’?”

“Just my honest opinion. If you want my thoughts on it, in case you’re lucky enough to get out of here, never get involved with the Roman Orthodox Church again.”

He didn’t like her decisive tone, either, but she was still right. They couldn’t hide out in one place forever. If they were going to flee, it had to be soon. And they had a way out right in front of them.

Kamijou, still sitting on the floor, let out a massive, spiritless sigh. “…All right, fine. But if we get seriously outnumbered, we’re not going to have much time.”

“You picked a fight alone against two hundred and fifty sisters before, and that’s what you have to say now?”

At the moment, she seemed to acknowledge Kamijou’s strength as her enemy. The corners of her lips pulled up into a sardonic smile as she bent over and offered her hand as if for a handshake.

She must have been telling him to stand up. “Oh, thanks.” Kamijou amenably grabbed her hand with his right. In addition to her slender fingers, his hand closed around her habit’s baggy sleeve, and a moment later…

Thud.

The seams in Agnes’s habit broke apart and it fell straight down.

“Oh my,” said Orsola, putting a hand to her cheek. “Well. I had thought it was a somewhat odd design. Your revealing habit was a special garment meant to act as a countermeasure against anything magical?”

That was beside the point.

Most importantly was that Agnes now stood bent over before him in only her underwear, and though they were full of lace like last time, the white panties were somehow cute. And also, she wasn’t even wearing a bra because her clothing had had a wide-open back. Then there was her modest chest, slightly and charmingly emphasized because she was bending over.