The members of Amakusa, beginning with Tatemiya, crossed a wooden bridge from a nearby ship and rolled in like an avalanche. The situation changed greatly, and the ring of people around Lucia and Angeline began to break up. Of their group, a girl named Itsuwa took a position next to Lucia, wielding her Friuli spear.

Now was their only chance to regroup. “Sister Angeline!”

“Y-yes, ma’am!!”

Angeline wobbled to her feet and away from the mast. Lucia stood in front of her, then had her wheel explode into the sisters’ lines to carve a path for them.

4

Touma Kamijou was far from an excellent student.

He had a rough handle on his own abilities because he was rather used to nighttime street brawls. He felt like he had a real chance of victory only when it was one-on-one. One-on-two got dangerous, and in a one-on-three, he’d run straightaway. This wasn’t because he was especially weak; it was just because numbers were more important than individual strength in fights with no rules. Needless to say, his lone fist wasn’t enough to cross the power gap when it was one-on-twenty or -thirty.

Once the battle started, he would be sunk in five seconds.

However.

Those were rules for when actual people were fighting one another.

“Ooohhhhhhh!!” Kamijou’s breath split through the wind.

It was one thing if his opponent was a proper human, and they’d fight until one or the other lost consciousness. But if he only had to touch them to win, even Kamijou still had a chance.

The armored horde charged down the narrow passage, scraping against one another as they went. Kamijou’s right hand swung almost completely horizontally against the advancing enemies. He was ignoring power—it didn’t matter how lightly, he just needed to get his hand on them.

Their movements creaked to a halt, as though their gears had been jolted out of place. Before Kamijou could make sure they were down, the subsequent armors, now just lumps of ice, smashed into them with their spears and hammers, securing the passageway.

“Urgh!!” Kamijou quickly withdrew. He could stop them from moving, but there were still ice remnants on the floor. He’d be buried alive if he fought in one place for too long.

And so, he repeated the process over and over.

Unfortunately…

“A dead end?!” As Kamijou continued to back away, he tossed a glance over his shoulder and finally noticed that there was a wall there.

He glanced back. The armors, looking like several people balled up into one, were pressed against one another, filling the passage, as they came for him.

He couldn’t defend against that. He could block an attack, but he’d be open to the ones after that.

“Uohh!!”

Kamijou immediately leaped to the side. The width of the passage was cramped, so the only thing there was an ice wall.

But he stuck out his right hand.

A cube portion of the ice wall shattered. Index had been right—the walls of the flagship were different from those in the escort ships. Kamijou dove into the hole at about the same time the armors crashed into the dead end. All of their mighty force and weight had gone straight into the wall, and their bodies shattered from the impact. Tons of little specks of ice danced into the air like mist.

Kamijou didn’t have any time to watch the spectacle. He looked around the room inside the wall, and after getting a handle on its layout, he stopped moving.

It was like a second-floor seat in a theater. Though the long rows of translucent seats extended several dozen meters each, it was only a few meters deep. If you went up to the elaborately designed railing, you could see the floor below. Like a splendid opera house, but instead of the stage and audience being far below, there were many chairs and desks lined up in a fan shape. Sort of like watching the Diet assembly on television.

It was clearly not something one would think a warship would have. It wasn’t needed for a battlefield with a clear chain of command. Maybe warships were out of the sorcery factions’ element, or maybe it actually held symbolic, magical meaning and was used as a meeting place. In either case, Kamijou couldn’t figure it out.

Nor did he have the time to.

Roar!! An ice armor plunged into the big hole Kamijou had made. He grunted. He couldn’t flee any farther. He was reminded of the railing behind him, and then he clenched his fists before instead jumping straight for the ice armor.

It swung its equally icy great sword horizontally. The thick three-meter-plus lump of ice flew at him from his right to rend his flesh.

“Ohhh!!” Kamijou responded by trying to strike the sword with his right hand.

Then, suddenly, the ice armor’s legs broke apart on their own. It began to fall backward and diagonally across an axis on its thigh portions.

The great sword’s mowing path changed to match—from a horizontal one aiming for his gut to one thrusting up toward his neck from below. As if to go around his right hand protecting his stomach.

Shit…!! The burst of wind from the sword blew away the cold sweat on his cheeks. “Uooohhh!!” He crouched with all his might.

Several of his hairs touched the sword. They weren’t severed without resistance; instead, an intense pain shot through him as though the sword had pulled out a piece of his scalp with it. He heard a terrible tearing noise.

But he had still dodged it.

Enduring the pain and continuing the motion of his crouch, as though letting himself fall, he swung out his right fist. He aimed for the armor’s chest as it fell backward, its legs having broken by themselves, and his fist connected before it hit the ground. The piece of armor stopped moving and shattered the moment it hit the ground.

“…Is it over?”

He stayed alert for more as he caught his breath, but that seemed to have been the last one. He crept slowly out of the hole, on guard for the possibility of an ambush, but he needn’t have done so. He returned to the passage from the big hole he’d made.

Damn it. I hope Index and Orsola are okay. The quickest way to meet up with them is probably to break the walls and floors…On the other hand, the enemy could be alerted to such destructive activity. The timing of the ice armors’ appearance seemed to confirm that. From what the sisters had said, this flagship was slow to regenerate. Plus, it was used for controlling the rest of the fleet and other ceremonies, so they couldn’t use the cannons or enemy sisters to eliminate Kamijou’s group on the inside unless they were really careful. But that applied only to the current moment. If the flagship actually seemed like it was going to sink, they’d probably move some personnel here regardless of the risks.

He thought for a moment. Whichever way, the important part is…If I get to Agnes, the enemy boss’s first priority should be to deal with me. It’s going to happen sooner or later. Not enough reason for me to hold my right hand back!!

After quickly coming to that conclusion, he went to punch a nearby wall with his right hand when suddenly a soft electronic tone sounded from his pants pocket. It was his cell phone’s ringtone. Wait, my cell phone? Kamijou quickly checked his surroundings, and after making sure nobody was following him, he took it out. He was a little surprised it was even usable out here on the sea. How close were they to the shore?

He took a look at the screen and saw that, unbelievably, it was from Index. He pushed the Call button and put the phone to his ear. He held it in his left hand so his right was free. This device was something he was used to using, but he felt a lot of weirdness in his finger movements because of it.

“Oh, I appear to have gotten through to him.”

“…Oh, it’s you, Orsola. What are you borrowing Index’s cell phone for?”

“I decided this would be the most expedient way of contacting you. Where might you be at the moment?”

“Well, I’m not really sure…” He glanced around, but there were no signs or markings to use. Well, it was the opposite. There were extravagant pieces of art overflowing in this place, so he couldn’t actually use any of them as a guide. “I kept having to run away, and there were twenty or thirty of those ice armors, so I was focused on them. I’m not really sure where I am at the moment.”

“…You speak of such tremendous things with ease, as usual. For my part…I am currently running away with Miss Index. It seems there were more of those guardian ice sculptures…”

“…” Index and Orsola didn’t have a power like Kamijou’s Imagine Breaker. Neither of them seemed very familiar with magical combat, and if it came to a straight fight, they’d be in for a real tough time against those ice armors. “Orsola. I’m at the intersection where we split up. Which direction are you from there?”

“Which direction?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t have to be exact.”

“Well…I believe we are to the north.”

“Got it,” answered Kamijou. “I’ll be right there.”

Cell phone still in his left hand, he hit a nearby wall with his empty right hand. Bgweee!! The wall and decorations vanished, a cube-shaped hole appearing in their wake. Kamijou went inside the wall he’d destroyed and kept on breaking through the extravagant cabin walls. He was completely ignoring where the hallways and walls actually led.

“Also, Miss Index says she has something to tell you—”

A familiar voice interrupted them, as though she’d gotten between Orsola and the phone. “Give it to me, here! Touma, can you hear me?!” she called. “Touma, I heard a little from Orsola, but is one of the Queen of the Adriatic’s triggers a different spell called the Rosary of the Appointed Time?”

“Yeah, apparently…Wait. Didn’t we talk about that during the strategy meeting?”

“I don’t think we heard the details. Are you doubting my memory?”

He couldn’t really say anything to that. The girl had memorized every last bit of 103,000 grimoires down to the letter, so she wasn’t mistaken. Kamijou broke through another ice wall and jumped out into another passage. “Yeah? I didn’t hear much, either,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like Lucia and Angeline had much information about it handed to them.”

Orsola replied. “They did suggest that in order to use the Rosary of the Appointed Time, they would have to purposely destroy Miss Agnes’s mind.”

Then he heard Index come back with a worried voice—worry was highly unusual from her when they were speaking of sorcery. “…Touma, that extra spell isn’t needed to activate the Queen of the Adriatic.”

“Wait, what?” Kamijou stopped in his tracks. He kept watch around him but still paid most of his attention to his cell phone.

“The Queen of the Adriatic is an antique-class spell. Before I explained how it was made to suppress the maritime city-state of Venice in a single strike, right?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Think carefully. That means they would need to activate it without having to wait. If they wasted time finding someone suitable and making all these huge preparations, they wouldn’t be able to stop Venice from invading.”

“Oh,” said Kamijou. She was right, now that he thought about it. The fleet’s size had fooled him, but this spell was fundamentally for countering an attack. If it didn’t have the ease of use to be triggered when an enemy attacked, it would be pointless.

“The Queen of the Adriatic can be activated by itself. Then does this troublesome Rosary of the Appointed Time spell really exist? At the very least, not one of my 103,000 grimoires mentions that it’s necessary. And I can’t think of any reason the Roman Orthodox Church would want to attack Venice right now, either.” Index paused for just a moment. “When it was completed, the Queen of the Adriatic was so powerful that everyone said there was no place to use it. Venice had enormous influence—it was the doorstep of international trade. If they were too careless, they both could have ended up defeated. That’s how people thought of it back when it was the most necessary. I can’t think of any reason anyone would want it now.”

“But it didn’t look at all like Miss Lucia and Miss Angeline were telling a lie.”

She was right. Agnes did actually hold the key to the Roman Orthodox Church’s plans. If they could have used the Queen of the Adriatic at any time, then the reason for their hesitation must have meant that the Rosary of the Appointed Time hadn’t been fully prepared yet.

The Rosary of the Appointed Time. Lucia and Angeline had no doubt it was the activation key, but even they didn’t know the details behind the Queen of the Adriatic.

“Then the question is why they’re using it with the Queen of the Adriatic. Index, do you know what kind of spell the Rosary of the Appointed Time is?”

“Hmm…I think it’s not so much a spell name as the name of a project only used in the Roman Orthodox Church. It might be hard to figure out with just that. But the terms Rosary and Appointed Time both simply refer to the measurement of time.”

Kamijou stepped on a small piece of ice, then broke the next wall with his right hand. “Rosaries are those things sisters wear on their necks, right?”

“The string through it is actually crucial for more than just Crossism. The act of putting fifty-nine small beads on it is a Catholic tradition. Those who go on pilgrimages to holy places all over the world use these beads as a tool to tell them how many prayers they’ve offered.”

“…So a rosary, for an appointed time—they’re counting down. That makes too much sense.”

Kamijou didn’t know whether his words actually reached Index and Orsola.

Because…

Bang!!

A sudden sharp sound accompanied the ceiling tumbling down.

“!!” He grunted and immediately jumped back. That, however, wasn’t enough to escape the rain of icy material. The surrounding pieces of the ceiling had been caught in a circle around the point of impact, creating an upside-down pyramid shape that turned into a giant blunt weapon.

“Shit!!” He didn’t waste any time in thrusting his right hand out from his side. The ceiling he tried to destroy was gouged out in a cube shape. Then the rest of the ceiling collided with the floor, slipping right by Kamijou’s body and sparing him. The shock wave hit his ears, and a small fragment hit him in the back. He forgot to take it easy with his left hand; his cell phone creaked in its grip.

He didn’t have enough time to press the buttons on it. He briskly shut the phone and shoved it in his pocket, taking a few more steps back.

Fine particles of ice danced in the air, a fog-like dust before him. At the center of it, where Kamijou had just been standing, now stood one man, the hammer who had broken the ceiling.

It was a Caucasian in his forties, clothed in magnificent garb.

Though it was grand-looking, it didn’t have any of the cleanliness Index’s had. It was a pile of rich-person interests that happened to be clinging to him. Four necklaces were around his neck, forming concentric circles, each with dozens of crosses attached to it. The polished gold and silver of their make gave off a glare. It was like he’d painted them with grease from meat, as though his tenacity was being reflected into a slimy light.

The man’s movements appeared highly strung as he ran a finger over one of the crosses at his neck. His eyes were on Kamijou, but his irises were continually moving ever so slightly.

“…That right hand…”

Surprisingly, he had spoken Japanese.

“Hah. Jealous?” responded Kamijou for lack of anything else to say.

The man’s face wrinkled up in a silent display of slight repulsion and irritation. “I find it difficult to accept. Not only its nature, which rejects the grace of our Lord, but the fact that you are also wielding it as a weapon. If you had but heard the word of God a single time, the natural reaction would be to immediately strive to gain His grace, even if it meant cutting off your arm.”

His words were chilling. Not the meaning of the words—but the sheer density of the emotion in them, like yellow fat, pulled out and crushed.

“Do the words of man not mean anything to you? I suppose you are merely a heretic ape. I’ve gone through the trouble of speaking the same language, and I receive only words of poor character. Then I, Biagio Busoni, will say the last rites of this enemy of the Lord. I simply cannot stand to see an ape pretending to be a human.”

“So you’re Biagio, huh? That means you know where Agnes is.”

“Knowing and telling are two entirely different things.”

The man who called himself Biagio crossed his arms.

Kamijou heard a soft metal keen. Biagio’s hands gripped two of the crosses at his neck.

Whoosh. He then tossed both to Kamijou.

“—These crosses indicate rejection of immorality.”

Boom!! The two crosses expanded. Their rate of expansion was equal to a flying cannonball. In the blink of an eye, the crosses had turned gigantic, three meters long and forty centimeters thick, before they attacked him. It was like a metal blast of steel bars.

“Ooahh!!” Kamijou punched away a cross walling him. But he could get only the one. Meanwhile, the tip of the other cross hit him like a boulder, sending him hurtling back.

Whump!! The sound of impact echoed.

He was immediately slammed down and slid a few meters away. He scrambled to quickly put his hand on the ground, but the ice floor reacted to the movement. Ba-gan!! It carved out a cube, and Kamijou fell down to the passage on the level below.

The entire ship’s interior was made of ice, so nothing was there to cushion his fall. He clenched his teeth, enduring the pain from his entire body, and then—more carefully this time—he pushed himself up with his left hand and got to his feet.

Biagio’s voice drifted to him from the hole above.

“When the evil dragon swallowed Saint Margaret, she, too, is said to have caused her cross to grow and rend its body from the inside. The crosses standing atop church roofs also have the role of annulling enemies without and creating a safe space within…Something like this.”

From the hole in the ceiling came a few more crosses, thrown in like grenades. Ga-bah!! They instantly expanded in midair.

They looked less like crosses than laser weapons springing out in four directions. Kamijou hastily rolled down onto the floor before the four tips of the crosses, now metal beams, scraped right past his nose and got stuck in the walls and floor. There was no semblance of organization in the pattern. They randomly divided the passage with straight lines.

Crap…I need to get out of here before I can’t move anymore…!!

Kamijou went to use his right hand a moment later, and the voice came to him from above again. “On the other hand, the cross’s weight is able to cure people of their pridefulness. Saint Lucy, maiden of light, though one thousand men and two cows pulled her with a rope, moved not a step. The young Saint Christopher, known for his fantastic strength, nearly buckled under the weight of the Son of God whom he shouldered…Something like this, once again.”

Grr-gah!! A rift opened in the ceiling.

From the broken ceiling came raining down small crosses, mere centimeters long. However, their speed was equivalent to a cannonball…No, they were heavier, like their rate of gravitational acceleration had been increased a thousandfold.

Kamijou rushed the giant cross blocking the passage and basically rammed into it with his right hand. He rolled forward, not stopping to see if the obstacle had shattered or not, but one of the superheavy crosses scraped past his shoulder. Gshhh!! Pain tore through him, like his joint would have dislocated from just that.

“…! Gahhh!!” Nevertheless, he used his right hand to destroy the nearby wall, diving out of the passage and into a cabin. He would have to move at random now, in an attempt to evade Biagio’s aim as much as possible.

“Please don’t destroy too much. It takes time to repair.”

The ceiling broke apart again, and another handful of crosses rained down toward Kamijou. Despite their small size, they had incredible weight, and it was like iron nails breaking the cabin to bits. Rather than jump, Kamijou pressed his back to the wall, managing to barely evade them.

Biagio jumped down from the opened hole.

Thud!! He stomped on the floor, sending ice particles flying up like mist.

Kamijou, his back still to the ice wall, said, “You tell me not to destroy anything, but you don’t seem to have a problem going all out.”

“I believe I know which things I can break and which things I can’t. You, however, are acting haphazardly. Yes, like an ignorant amateur made to take care of antiques. I understand you’re taking it seriously, but first, you must learn.”

Biagio’s face betrayed a hint of irritation behind his relaxed demeanor. According to Index, this flagship controlled all the escort ships. The ice ornaments were continually changing tiny parts of their shapes, which all seemed to be interlocking signs…Was Kamijou’s right hand doing damage to the fleet’s control system?

“Hmph. Guess it’s true that this junker doesn’t recover as fast as the other ones. I thought I’d finally slipped into the boss room. Kinda disappointed that it’s weaker.”

“The Queen of the Adriatic’s original potential outweighs the other escorts by over two hundred times. However, if I divert power to its recovery, it will affect the other’s completeness.”

“The other?”

“The Rosary of the Appointed Time. I cannot imagine you don’t know about it at this point.”

“…”

The Rosary of the Appointed Time again. Index had said it was an additional spell not related to the anti-Venice suppression spell the Queen of the Adriatic was triggering. Biagio might not have been telling the complete truth, but he was attached to it despite the disadvantages. It must have meant enough for him to do that.

“Whatever. I’ll beat you and drag out of you where Agnes is, and then it’s over. Not gonna think too hard about it, so I’ll just finish this.”

“Poor words—ones that run contrary to the will of the Lord.”

Biagio removed seven crosses from his neck.

Like a parting gift, he hurled them up into the air.

“—Then my crosses shall reject your immorality.”

5

They couldn’t stay on one boat for longer than a minute.

From an ice escort ship on the verge of sinking, Saiji Tatemiya used a wooden bridge he had made to cross to the adjacent ship. In front of him he could see a new escort appear up through the water in place of the ship that had just sunk.

“Ahh, damn it all! There’s no end to this!!” he shouted as he took down a few attacking former-Agnes-unit sisters with the flat surface of his flamberge’s abnormally long blade. Then he used a bundle of papers to call from thin air a surfboard-like plank. He started strapping the unconscious sisters by their stomachs and backs to the multi-person board.

The ship would be taken down by cannon fire in a moment. Still, just from the problem of how many he had to deal with, it seemed impossible to get all the fallen sisters on there and move them. So Amakusa had prepared these “life preservers,” able only to prevent the downed nuns from drowning. If they were rash and called in a giant wooden ship, it would just end up fodder for the cannons.

I know we’ll pick them up later, but it still doesn’t feel good leaving the sinking ships behind. He swore under his breath and listened to the next broadcast, which essentially said this ship was also going to be fired upon. Most of the fleet seemed to be on autopilot. Therefore, no matter how many people he defeated, it wouldn’t affect the fleet itself from moving in the slightest. Two hundred sisters strong were scary as a simple fighting force, but the biggest threat was still all that cannon fire. Until they did something about that, they’d never overturn the battle situation in any significant way.

Amakusa had no choice but to hang on and endure until everything was over.

Damn. If I could, I’d rather bust up as much of that flagship as I can…He didn’t, though. If Amakusa’s main force headed for the flagship, the big army of sisters would move the same way. If their principal battlefield changed, Kamijou and those with him would be the ones caught up in it.

“Well, not expecting any credit is the basis of our foundation, anyway.” Tatemiya waggled his wavy-bladed sword. “Nothing else for it. We’ll tighten things up here and make it easier for ya!!”

With a shout, he jumped into a part of the deck where a bunch of sisters were clustered.

6

“—Then my crosses shall reject your immorality.”

Roar!! The seven crosses each expanded explosively. They felt to Kamijou like a raging metal inferno dancing all over the place in the direction the crosses pointed. He slammed his right hand into the wall he was backed against. It was destroyed in an instant, leaving a cube-shaped hole, and he wasted no time falling into it.

Thwack, thud, bam, crash!! One after another, the thick cross tips crunched into the floor, walls, and ceiling like steel beams.

As Kamijou continued to roll over the floor, he shouted, “Piece of shit, doing whatever you want!! You think you have any right to do as you please to Venice?”

“Unfortunately, your conjecture is mistaken. My aim lies elsewhere.” Biagio laughed quietly beyond the barrage.

“What?!”

“I won’t tell you without cost. What benefit would that bring me? But, well…At the very least, it’s far more interesting than what you’re thinking.”

Kamijou groaned and clenched his teeth, springing back to his feet using the momentum of his roll. He made his right hand into a fist. Then, going back along his escape route, he ran toward Biagio, trying to close the distance in one stroke.

But before he could, Biagio continued his discourse. “Now, crosses have many meanings, but most of them were added only after the Son of God was put to death. Crosses themselves existed before that, but their roles from those previous ages were mostly wiped out by Crossism—after all, they were the traditions of immoral heretics.” He chose a cross he liked from the dozens at his chest and nervously ran his fingers over it. “Of them all, there is just one that survived from those past generations. The oldest way of using them in religious history, and one that the most important figure in Crossism, the Son of God himself, was directly related to. And that was as…”

With his right hand, Kamijou destroyed the giant cross standing between them. A step before he made it close enough to Biagio, the ostentatiously dressed man tore off the cross and raised it above his head.

“…a tool of execution.”

Biagio’s voice was scornful, low but lacking solemnity.

“—Simon carries the cross of the Son of God.”

Wobble.

The moment he heard those words, Kamijou’s vision began to spin.

“…Eh?”

He felt an impact near his right shoulder. Pain shot through him. He shook his head; his entire vision was like a motion-blur picture. Only upon feeling the hard floor against his cheek did Kamijou realize…that he was lying on his side. It took a few moments for his brain to catch up with the phenomenon that had just occurred.

What…the…? Had something attacked him? But he couldn’t understand what had been done to him in the first place. Until now, he’d been able to defend and dodge because he at least knew he was being attacked. Now it was different. He couldn’t even grasp when the hell the attack had come.

Certain death. The words stuck to the back of his lurching mind.

He tried to get up, but his arms had no real strength. He tried to roll onto his stomach and push himself up, but he just collapsed with a thud.

There was a blank in his mind. As if to redirect his attention outside, a faint metallic sound began to ring.

The sound came from dozens of crosses colliding with one another in midair.

“—These crosses indicate rejection of immorality.”

With a low voice came the continuous sounds of pounding flesh and the crushing of the ice floor.

7

Index and Orsola ran down a passage of the flagship, the Queen of the Adriatic.

It appeared on the outside to be close to twice the size of its escorts, but the passages were about the same width…No, that wasn’t it. Statues of angels carved out of the walls lined each side of the passage in place of the normal pillars, with an elaborate carving of a scene from the Bible on entire doors, as well. All the artwork was compressing the otherwise wide passage.