CHAPTER 4

Battle of Fire Ships and Cannons
Lotte_di_Liberazione.

1

Agnes Sanctis was in a room on the Queen’s Fleet’s flagship, the Queen of the Adriatic. Everything about it was already different from the other escort ships, but this room was even more conspicuous.

The room had four walls.

Each wall was close to twenty meters long, and it appeared to be a perfectly square room. But if you looked closer, you could see that each of the four walls was ever so slightly leaning in toward the middle. It wasn’t a cube but a quadrangular pyramid. If you looked up along the walls, glimmering in their pale off-white light, you could see its pinnacle far overhead.

From here, it looked like it was roughly one hundred meters high. The sailboat wasn’t actually that tall, of course. Either this space was governed by magical rules to fit inside the ship anyway, or there was an optical illusion involved.

That wasn’t the only strange thing about the room. The pale-white pyramid room was made entirely out of equilateral triangular panels of ice. You couldn’t actually create a proper quadrangular pyramid using only equilateral triangles, so there had to be panels of other shapes somewhere to make it all fit.

But despite a lot of looking around, she didn’t see anything like that.

The figure was an armchair theory—it seemed impossible in reality. But it had been created anyway. It was a straightforward indication that this was hallowed ground, a space inexplicable using the normal laws of the physical.

Nothing adorned the room.

The perfectly flat surfaces, made of ice that gave off pale-white light, seemed to be rejecting all others. It was cold to the point of being called absolute, and its outer reaches were emitting a heavy, invisible pressure on the inner portion.

Agnes looked at the center of the room.

A transparent ball of ice, about seven meters across, sat there, somehow fixed to the floor. The strange, empty object was like a soap bubble—and was the prison she was supposed to be inside.

Whrrmm…A low vibration reached Agnes’s ears.

She frowned. “Saint Barbara’s Divine Cannon…? Who on earth are they firing at?”

Her voice echoed through the vast pyramid.

A few moments later, the one standing in the vaguely glimmering room with his back against the ice orb answered. “You do not know, Sister Agnes?”

The figure was a man.

He wore heavy, dragging clerical garments and four necklaces around his neck. They looked like the rings in a tree stump. Dozens of crosses were attached to them. A menorah, thought Agnes. Another expression of the Sephirothic Tree, a symbol of the four planes using seven candles.

“Bishop Biagio.”

Suddenly, a third voice interrupted them. It came from one of the crosses the man wore.

“Ship Thirty-Seven has been sunk. We may want to cease our attack…Any more and we may incur interference from land. The fleet is already deployed in Veneto’s—”

“Let the proper departments handle the attention,” he ordered. “It is not our jurisdiction.” The man called Biagio ran a finger over one of the crosses around his neck. The person’s voice cut off, as though the cross was a switch to turn a communication spell on or off.

He looked at Agnes and smiled. “I have been in many departments, but talented subordinates are not easy to find, are they?”

“I believe it is an officer’s job to take care of subordinates with no talent so as to draw it out.”

“Mere idealism. And that is the reason your life was a failure, Sister Agnes. You don’t take care in selecting your subordinates, and that has brought you here.”

“I bet,” said Agnes, brushing aside the comment.

Biagio clicked his tongue bitterly. “…I did order Ship Thirty-Seven not to approach the rest of the fleet until those rats were found. To think you ended up using even the ‘connecting bridge.’ What would you have done if the rats had moved to a different vessel? None of this will work if something happens to you.”

Agnes wrapped her arms around herself. It probably couldn’t hide the fact that her habit’s functionality had been destroyed.

It was specially made for her, its highly revealing design incorporating the Crossist tradition of punishment. Public humiliation was the goal, and included in the garments were defensive mechanisms to prevent death by any cause, whether suicide or homicide. Her life was not protected out of kindness—but to lengthen her suffering for much longer. It couldn’t be used for long periods of time, though, because of the immense strain it put on her.

“It is quite ironic, you know.”

“Be quiet, Sister Agnes,” said Biagio with a chuckle. “To think an apostate like you is the only one with the affinity for this grand spell that has protected the Adriatic since the early days of the Church.”

The Rosary of the Appointed Time was the key to activating the Queen of the Adriatic. Agnes didn’t understand the exact inner workings or effects of it, but one of its functions was apparently that it would destroy her mind.

“Humans use their minds to temper mana within their bodies. The Rosary of the Appointed Time, however, does not function properly with mana created by normal humans. And that is where you come in, Sister Agnes. Put that talent of yours to its utmost use.”

Grandiose words, but essentially all they said was that in order to create mana that wasn’t normal, they had to reshape a person’s mind into something that wasn’t normal—in other words, to turn them into a living husk. Agnes’s innate qualities—the way her mind would be broken—were well suited for the spell.

It was infuriating, but she knew saying that wouldn’t change anything.

She’d been prepared for something like this since she set foot here.

“Anyway, what did you mean by Ship Thirty-Seven sinking?”

“You want meaning beyond those words?”

“…I would think your own subordinates, the overseers, were aboard as well.”

“I am the one who decides how to use people. Am I wrong?”

Agnes fell mum. Then she considered the possibility that their group had gotten off the ship before it sank, but…

“Don’t you think that having such faith in their escape spell is rather too optimistic?”

“…What are you talking about?”

“Showing you their corpses would be fastest, but collecting all their scattered fragments in the Adriatic would be backbreaking work. It would take some time to confirm their identities as well. Yes, so how should I deal with the situation?”

Agnes grated her teeth. The faint sound caused a satisfied smile to cross Biagio’s face.

And then…

“Bishop Biagio! We have an emergency!!”

One of the dozens of crosses around his neck interrupted them with an urgent voice.

Biagio frowned. “What is it?”

“We detected a giant structure beneath the Ship Thirty-Seven wreck! It appears to be gathering the ship’s wreckage…”

Biagio spat. “A submerging spell…From the sea’s floor again, like Sister Lucia did before? We clearly need to rethink the Queen’s Fleet’s surveillance. And a giant structure? Not the sort of thing an individual could prepare…Which means the ‘group’ really was in Chioggia. That’s why I said to crush them early. I gave the orders, but my subordinates have failed me once again. First we fail to deal with this ‘group,’ and now the infiltrators can escape…”

Biagio looked at Agnes. This time, he wasn’t smiling. Instead, a hint of irritation was starting to creep into his eyes. “…Really. Every single one of you is absolutely useless.”

2

The burning taste of seawater slowly roused Kamijou.

He was underwater.

He saw his limbs drifting loosely in front of him. He couldn’t tell how far underwater he was. The night sea seemed to be closed off by a curtain of darkness, and all he saw upon looking up was the surface covered in blackness. The fleet of ice ships was sure to be surrounding him, but he couldn’t see any light at all, like a thick film covered it up.

Blub. White bubbles left his mouth, the pockets of air breaking apart and floating ever higher.

What…about…Or…sola…and…the…others?

Names of people tugged at the back of his mind.

There wasn’t even any rubble from the ice ship anymore. The special ice had probably reverted to seawater. Perhaps a new ship had been created somewhere else.

Lucia…and An…geline…Are they…?

He knew he had to get himself to the surface, but his thoughts weren’t leading to any physical action.

His mind was yielding to the overwhelming sleepiness he felt. His thoughts weren’t connecting that goal to actions or results.

He coughed.

More air bubbles leaked from his mouth, floating ever upward.