“…I know you’re all tired of the bigwigs doing whatever they want and having to pay the price for their actions, aren’t you?”

It was a single, tiny vote.

But the people now held the power to influence an entire nation, and the queen of England, Elizard, shouted to them.

“It’s time for a national general election from right out of the age of warlords!!”

At that time.

…In one place, a boy looked up. He didn’t know whether this emergency was from some sudden terrorism or a war. He’d been dragged outside by the arm by someone from the military, then brought on a vehicle into this movie theater. Warned that they’d be shot if they left the building, all the boy could do was tremble alone in the darkness. But when he heard the voice ringing inside his head, he slowly stood.

…I can run away, or I can give it to someone else.

He confirmed to himself what he had learned. Fighting was only one of many choices. The voice in his head had told him several times to think for himself and make his own decision, but…

I will fight.

That was the conclusion he came to.

As he headed up the stairway passage in the dark movie theater and to the exit, the boy encountered his parents. When they looked at his face, they weren’t surprised. They just gave him a single small nod.

I want to fight!!

The boys, all thinking the same thing, opened the exit door and burst outside.

Past the final line, beyond which lay the threat of death.

Whether or not they had strength wasn’t an issue.

The courage they had, to take that one step, was something that only existed in their hearts.

…In one place, a soldier who had confined many people inside a large hotel clenched his fist, trembling. He’d thought, acted, and cooperated with the coup d’état for Britain’s sake in his own way. And now they seemed to want him to stop the coup in order to save its leader. What had he been fighting for this entire time?

The soldier rested his back against a wall and slid down to the ground. No longer willing to fight, he watched as the entrance door of the hotel opened before his eyes and the residents of London poured out of it. They’d probably go on to become heroes like the queen said. But for a puppet who’d been cooperating with the usurpers until now, he hadn’t the right.

But then it happened.

Someone walked over in front of the crouching soldier. The person squatted down. Facing him as though leveling their stare with a small child’s, they talked to him.

He was probably one of the people confined to the hotel. The person, a man in his middle years, seemed to have tried to resist their tyranny to protect his family. The proper hero said this to the villain who had confined him until now:

“We need your strength. Let’s fight together. You were driving an armored car, right? Please, use that to take us to the battlefield.”

For some moments, the soldier ruminated on his words in silence. Eventually, he took the key to the armored car out of his pants pocket and stood up, once again, on his own two feet.

…In a certain place, the boss of a certain UK sorcerer’s society heaved a sigh. Nearby, a young girl of about twelve was almost appalled at what had become an incredibly absurd situation, from the magic trade’s point of view.

“What should we do, boss?”

“Moron. What, you were hoping you could leave everything to your youth and jump into the fray? She said that if we don’t need it, we can give it back. So just do that.”

“Couldn’t we also use this change to analyze the Curtana?”

“If we do anything underhanded, that crowned hag is gonna blow her top. Let’s stay out of things this time and observe the places that aren’t being watched anymore, from the outside.”

“All right. But, boss, your little sister, Patricia, just ran off somewhere with her chest all puffed up.”

“Get her back here, you idiot!!” called out an unusually flustered voice, ringing through the midnight London streets.

…In a particular place, a girl named Bayloupe, who belonged to an organization called New Light, sat up, her body covered in wounds. After losing the battle with the Puritans, they’d brought her to a cathedral to be healed and corralled, but when the coup d’état had begun, they’d thrown her into some strange hidden room.

She took a marker out of a tidy desk nearby, then drew an impromptu magic circle to activate a communication spell.

It wasn’t worth it to think about where she might be calling.

“Do you hear me, Lesser?”

“You betcha, Bayloupe. Florice and Lancis are connected, too.”

The answer came back immediately.

“So for real, what do we do?”

“I’m not entirely sure…” Bayloupe stood slowly, scratching her head a little with a sigh. “Well, the whole coup-accomplice thing is way past its expiration date now…But it’s our creed to do things that will benefit the UK first and foremost, right? In that case, we can’t be ashamed or worried about our reputation. We have to act.”

…In another place, the servants and gardeners who had worked at Buckingham Palace poured onto the battlefield. Professionals, civilians, beings out of place—the gap between them and the pros had been bridged completely. Now, as long as they had the courage to take that first step, they could fight equally.

“Princess Vilian!!”

“Are you safe, Your Highness?! Are you hurt?!”

Suddenly surrounded, the third princess was completely perplexed. Secretly, she’d been thinking to herself how different the queen, her mother, was acting, and how much sense it made that she could gather so many people together. But she’d never stopped to think about the people who would rally around her.

“…But…why…?”

Therefore, her question was an honest one.

The servants had saved her in Folkestone. They’d helped her in the subway tunnel. But now it was different. Their hearts should have all been focusing on the queen now.

Then why would they take a detour all the way over here?

“Royal family, servants—it doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “Everyone needs to decide for themselves how they’ll use this power. You all placed your hope in me, and I ran away on my own. I couldn’t help you at all in the end. You needn’t feel obligated to flatter me like this…”

“Her Majesty the queen told us to think freely and choose for ourselves,” one of the servants said, looking squarely at Vilian. “Will you let us use it? The courage we couldn’t show you during the coup d’état or in the subway tunnel!! Not one of us wants you to be hurt, and yet we couldn’t take up our weapons and fight for you in the end. We’re a band of fools!! So please, just this once! This one time, please, let us fight alongside you!!”

Upon hearing those words, Vilian felt ashamed of herself.

This was the virtue of the third princess?

She hadn’t even tried to learn of these earnest feelings that had been living right next to her. The title was greater than she deserved.

“…Then I will use this power for my own sake as well,” said Vilian, reaffirming her two-handed grip on her crossbow.

…And added, to herself, that it was for the sake of the future that she would walk alongside these people.

“Y-you…”

The second princess, Carissa, Curtana Original in hand, growled.

In response, the queen regnant, Elizard, assumed a barehanded stance, then grinned like a president proud of the corporation she’d built in a single generation.

“Quite a revolution, right? If we’re going to change history, we have to get everyone pumped up for it. Nobody will follow you if your methods only make the privileged class happy.”

The old and new heads of state glared at each other from point-blank range.

But while Carissa was furious, Elizard’s expression looked relaxed. “Your childish games are over. It’s time to show you what statecraft truly means.”

“Cut the crap!! What you’re doing is giving weapons to powerless citizens and sending them to the battlefield, while you watch alone from the safety of your throne, indulging in pleasure!! Are you so attached to your own privileges that you would force the citizens you’re supposed to protect to take more power than they know what to do with and use them as shields?!”

“…Why won’t you realize that’s the way an arrogant monarch thinks?”

As Carissa raged, her mother’s smile faded.

But it wasn’t because Carissa had overpowered her.

It was the opposite. The queen had stopped smiling because she was about to overpower her.

“Who decided normal people couldn’t hold the Curtana’s power? Who decided the nation would collapse if the new queen didn’t have the Curtana Original and retain total control over the country?! Winning the war with the Curtana, then setting yourself up to be stopped by the ideas of the masses—it sure sounds convenient. But in the end, your privilege as head of state, the only thing that could use the Curtana Original’s incredible power, had you caught in its spell the whole time!! A small change like that will only cause distortions. If you really want a revolution to bend this nation out of its current shape, then you cannot fear how that will change your own position!!”

“What…did you say…?!”

“I’m saying this as a concerned mother—a lecture for some brat’s stupid suicidal wish. And…one more thing. You gave up on this great nation far too easily. Now you’ll learn that its ninety million people think so much of you that they’d choose to become heroes to save you!!”

It happened at the same time as the queen spoke.

A huge whump rang out. No sooner had Carissa realized it than the servants and gardeners, the people who knew next to nothing about sorcery, created an incredible march. Their footsteps had come together to form a grand threat.

Yes:

The people of Britain, assembled under their flag, the Union Jack, in order to protect their nation.

5

Index, covered in mud from the aftermath of the bunker cluster and swaying on her feet, referred to the knowledge of the 103,000 grimoires in her head. But even as she analyzed the spells pertaining to the Curtana Original, she was purely captivated by the spectacle.

Fighting in the middle of her view were Carissa, with the Curtana Original, and the barehanded Elizard, who had discarded her weapon.

And, as if to protect the empty-handed queen, or perhaps to be her weapons, a crowd of figures had fluttered into the sky. They weren’t only mere sorcerers: A maid who clearly knew nothing about sorcery aimed for Carissa from a spot over ten meters in the air, and an office worker in a suit knocked away a giant stake created from debris. Scenes from the normal world and the magical one were intersecting, mixing, creating a stage unlike anything Index had ever seen.

As she watched, she saw the Puritan sorcerers, previously fallen but having received aid from the knights, stand up on their own two feet again. Either they, too, did so thanks to the queen’s Union Jack spell, or they did so out of their pride as professional sorcerers, unable to stay down while amateurs were out there fighting with everything they had.

The queen watched the large force, centered around Kaori Kanzaki, Acqua, and the Knight Leader, head for Carissa as well. She smiled tauntingly. “Come on, now, Carissa! You don’t look well! I’ll admit, you had the upper hand in a fight between the Original and the Second…but how long can you hold on in a ninety-million-to-one game of tug-of-war?!”

“Enough prattling!! This…isn’t…enough to shake the Curtana Original! Even now, my Curtana…may have lost some strength from going out of control thanks to your subway ploy, but I’m still holding on to all eighty percent of the power it has left!!”

“Indeed. But if your focus slips, even for an instant, ninety million people will snatch away all its power. Try not to get worked up, and don’t neglect any of the attacks coming at you!!”

“!! Was that what you were after, you damn schemer?!”

With London teetering on the edge of darkness, completely normal people like students and sales clerks ran toward them, a continuous stream of reinforcements. Some had decided it would be difficult to cross the distance fast enough, so instead dozens of bullets of light streaked in sharp arcs from the distant skies toward the second princess.

“It’s like a massive volunteer army interrupted you during a massive, precise magic ritual being performed at a giant shrine. The more control you lose over your power, the more it’ll strengthen our forces. Don’t forget that.”

“It’s all a sham!! No matter how many people arrive, they’re less than twenty percent of my total power! I hold eighty percent of it, which means they can’t defeat me, so!!”

Despite redistributing the Curtana’s power and bestowing telesma unto them, that wasn’t enough for people to skillfully handle their newfound supernatural powers. A sorcerer’s knowledge was still required to understand how to alter that power and what needed to be controlled.

Of course, a mere civilian wouldn’t have anything like that.

So who on earth was providing the support for them?

“I see. Then I can’t leave it up to the people alone. What? I was always meant to stand in the field, not sit on a throne—and to be honest, I’m actually having fun just playing this game with you.”

“?! You…That power…!! You already threw away the Curtana Second!!”

“You dolt. The queen is a member of the British citizenry, too. She has the right to cast an honest vote, same as anyone else. I may only have my fists to fight with now, but if you don’t mind, I will take my spot on the front lines of the greatest stage!!”

Index’s gaze was fixed on a single point:

The queen regnant, Elizard.

If anyone could pull off this feat, it was her. When she equally distributed power from the Curtana to the whole nation, she’d applied the communication spell she used for her speech to add all the telesma itself to it. By changing its traits to respond to the users’ thoughts and by accepting the telesma adjusted to be conveniently safe for them and stable enough that they wouldn’t go out of control, only then did the civilians gain the ability to use the power they’d obtained to perform the actions they imagined.

Putting it into words was simple. Even Index once had apparently guided Komoe Tsukuyomi to indirectly use healing magic (though she was in John’s Pen mode, so the memory was unusually hazy considering she had perfect recall). But that sort of thing worked only because it was a one-to-one relationship.

Guiding the entire populace of the United Kingdom, all ninety million people, at the same time, and continuing to maintain enough stability so that not a single one would be caught in his or her own power running rampant—it would have been impossible for Index even if she had the 103,000 grimoires at her disposal to their fullest.

And that wasn’t even the most amazing thing.

The students and office workers who had gathered at Buckingham Palace were now witnessing strange, fantastic things, all while fighting with the power they’d gotten from Elizard. They’d probably each try to interpret the supernatural phenomena they were seeing in their own way.

Maybe some people thought they’d awakened to hidden powers within them.

It was also possible some believed this had happened because their horoscope was past awesome.

Some probably believed Elizard was an alien queen who came to Earth on a spaceship.

Some might even decide they were borrowing power from the strange dinosaur under Loch Ness.

But there was one thing Index could say about all those theories:

Not a single one of the ninety million citizens would come to the correct answer that it was magic.

Unlike Index, who had guided Komoe Tsukuyomi by pushing her grimoires’ knowledge to the forefront, Queen Elizard was thoroughly concealing any such traces of magic. She had it creep within their minds and let them use it freely, but she wouldn’t let them come near its true nature. In doing so, she’d even removed the greatest risk, that of a grimoire’s knowledge corrupting a civilian’s mind.

Index looked around at the maids and chefs flitting about in the sky.

They wouldn’t realize what it was they were truly using.

And they’d probably be satisfied with that. They were far beyond thinking about how it made sense or how it worked. It was a matter of fundamental emotion—and they’d all approach this one-night-only Halloween party with everything they had.

That was Elizard.

The true queen, flowing with many sorceries, in charge of this nation, the headquarters of English Puritanism.

What if…?

As the girl with perfect memory watched this fight, she suddenly thought of something else that she’d never bothered to think about before:

Is this one of the other reasons I was created? To support all this…?

Touma Kamijou had been watching the battle, too.

A maid, carrying a giant sword from a wounded knight, swung it around mightily. Dozens of police officers flung out, sending kicks flying at a huge, spinning, bladelike debris object, knocking it away instead.

Carissa, getting worked up as she tried to contain the Curtana’s power, lost the sharp wit granted by her military talent, and as she swung her sword around with reckless abandon, she was slowly being cornered.

The actual sorcerers weren’t taking it lying down, either.

The former Roman Orthodox sisters, numbering over two hundred, brandished their weapons as a single group. A giant golem, comprised of objects from all around, stopped an attack from a debris object. And just as he noticed a military transport plane had flown by in the midnight sky, a rain of rune cards poured down, creating a flaming titan as they scattered.

This is incredible…, thought Kamijou honestly.

It wasn’t just the turnabout Queen Elizard had brought. His eyes were pure and sparkling as he watched all the heroes running to the scene, practically burying the Buckingham Palace grounds under them.

There’re just so many actors that they’re upstaging me, Index, Kanzaki, and even Acqua and everyone else! What’s with this country? How can everyone be a main character?

The real core of what he was seeing probably wasn’t something trivial like Queen Elizard or the Union Jack.

Power was just another method to win.

The people of this nation, who had grabbed hold of that power and decided of their own volition to stand up and fight, were another, and, in fact, the core of everything.

Kamijou considered Carissa: the second princess, wielding the Curtana Original, brandishing one massive attack after another. At the eye of the great typhoon called a battlefield, she was never swallowed by the waves of the masses. But somehow, it gave Kamijou a lonely impression. For some reason, the term monarch didn’t fit her right now.

In truth, Carissa probably knew as well.

Knew how much radiance slept within the people of Britain.

That was why she’d grown so desperate to protect them.

Maybe that’s all this battle was, when you got right down to it, he thought.

But in the process, she’d relied too much on her military affairs. It wasn’t only the people attacking the nation from outside with the intent to destroy—she’d tried to hurt even the people the nation carried within it. In other words, like an extremely powerful magnum hurting the shooter’s hand.

I’ll protect her.

Touma Kamijou gripped his fist once again on this battlefield.

I swear I’ll drag her out of this stupid negative cycle.

And then, once again, he stepped forward on his own two feet, onto the hellish battlefield of the Curtana Original’s overwhelming slashes and the whirlwinds of diversionary attacks from the giant debris objects.

Then it happened.

“STCTU! (Shift the Curtana’s trajectory upward!) SAAARTET!! (Stop all attacks and redistribute the excess telesma!!)”

As soon as Index’s cry rang out, Carissa’s arms, holding the Curtana Original, bounced unnaturally. Spell Interception—Index, who had analyzed the inner workings of her magic, had interrupted in an attempt to block it.

“Ugh…?!” Carissa gritted her teeth and hastily tried to bring the sword back under control.

She was probably frozen for only a few seconds at most.

Kamijou clenched his right hand again, but he wouldn’t make it from here.

So he took the straightforward approach and asked allies for help—in order to pour all his strength into this greatest night.

“Acqua!!” he shouted.

The powerful mercenary responded. Kamijou kicked off the ground and jumped a few dozen centimeters into the air, and Acqua thrust out with his sword into the space between him and the ground. Kamijou planted his feet onto the giant sword’s flat side, landing on it like a surfboard.

Kamijou and Acqua didn’t need to exchange words, much less have a strategy session. They didn’t have the time—and they both knew what they had to do without saying it.

Keeping up appearances with words wasn’t needed anymore. Kamijou’s resolution spoke entirely to that idea, and because Acqua had accepted the weight of that resolve, he gave his aid to someone who had once been his enemy.

“…!!”

Acqua gave a short exhalation, then whipped Ascalon around in a horizontal arc as hard as he could.

He may have been wounded, but it was still the full power of one of less than twenty saints in the world. Considering that, it would be obvious what would happen to Kamijou, who was standing on the side of the sword.

Then there was a huge boom!!

Touma Kamijou’s body, borrowing Acqua’s Herculean force, shot away like a cannonball.

Wha…?

In that moment, Carissa was, without exaggeration, dumbstruck.

The Curtana Original was about to go berserk, and its control still hadn’t returned to her. And the boy, with a right hand that could cancel out all magic, had plunged among his many allies, shooting straight for her.

There was maybe 0.1 seconds before he arrived.

But in that single instant, the second princess, Carissa, saw it:

Touma Kamijou’s face as he squeezed that fist ever so tightly—and the reassuring grin plastered on it.

Wha-pooooom!!

After flying a distance of over thirty meters, Kamijou’s fist connected directly with the Curtana Original.

The kingmaking sword, the Curtana Original, shattered from that one attack.

Carissa didn’t have the time to check and see.

The fist that had broken the sword plunged without mercy right into her face.

Like metal balls hanging from strings, this time, the momentum all transferred to Carissa, shooting her off into the night sky like a cannonball. She collided once with Buckingham Palace’s nearly collapsed ceiling, then bounced upward on a different trajectory, flying farther and farther away.

Kamijou heard an awful noise from his wrist, his elbow, and his shoulder, as though the bones had all dislocated in a chain.

But before he could feel the pain and his face could twist in anguish, he proceeded over ten meters farther before finally landing. Still, he obviously couldn’t stand on his own feet now, and as he fell down, he kept going, bouncing a few times.

Is it…over…?

Kamijou tried to speak, his body covered in wounds, but it came out only as a groan.

But he didn’t need to ask the question—the answer had been shown before his eyes.

There was a shrill keeeen.

He looked and saw that the end of the sword, broken in the middle, had thrust into the black soil plowed by many an attack. As he watched it, it began to crumble, as though a mountain of time was weathering it, and eventually it flowed into the night breeze and disappeared.

The Curtana Original had been lost.

That meant the second princess, Carissa, had been defeated—and this long coup d’état had ended.