CHAPTER 6

True Darkness Unfolding
Up_the_Castle.

1

Nothing was around.

The area was only a snowfield to begin with, but every last thing that could provide cover had been removed from around Fiamma’s base. Even the ubiquitous conifer trees were absent, nevermind man-made structures. The snowfield sprawling before them was smooth, prepared in such a way to quickly locate anyone approaching and accurately fire missiles into their midst.

From a spot just outside that wall of firepower’s effective range, Touma Kamijou peered down at the white snow.

And into a giant hole.

Originally, this had probably been a low hill or some similar landform. The hill’s slanted surface gave way to a well-hidden tunnel about six feet across. Rather than going straight ahead, the hole appeared to lead farther downward.

“…Another secret base,” he muttered, sounding half astonished. “Secret bases all over the place.”

“Why are you so surprised? Japan’s Academy City would be far more advanced than this. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lake there split open and a giant robot came out,” answered Lesser in a playful tone, going past him and slipping into the tunnel.

It wasn’t pitch-black inside the tunnel, which was fully covered on all sides with snow. Naked light bulbs hung from the walls at regular intervals. As they proceeded in deeper, the space widened little by little. After walking about fifty meters, they reached a freight train stop.

But—

“…Nobody’s here.”

“No train, either, it seems.”

At first, they’d been hiding behind objects to try to sneak a peek, but when they’d confirmed the total absence of people, they exchanged glances and stepped into the stop.

It was a different stop than the one they’d snuck into before, but the layout was similar. The differences amounted to the lack of any freight train or wooden loading containers. The space, illuminated by several light bulbs, felt unnatural, wrong—like a house the residents had left without remembering to turn off the lights.

Kamijou, drawn to the metal tracks, squatted beside them and put his ear to the cold rail. “No shaking at all. Can’t smell any diesel exhaust smoke, either…It doesn’t even seem like the train’s running nearby.”

“…Then maybe Fiamma already finished bringing the last of the supplies into his base.”

“But that would mean…”

Kamijou and Lesser exchanged soured looks.

It was about twenty-five miles from here to Fiamma’s base. If they couldn’t sneak aboard a freight train, they’d have no choice but to go through the snowy cave on foot. It was far enough that even if they had asphalt underfoot, one big earthquake could have them designated as stranded.

Lesser put the Steel Glove on her shoulder again. “Okay—all right. I have a plan.”

“R-right. I should have expected a professional sorceress to have some kind of backup plan. We can’t use up all our stamina just walking, then face Fiamma while our calves are about to explode. It would be awful.”

“Uppies, please.”

“I’m going to knock your lights out.”

Frustrated with himself for having embraced even a momentary hope, Kamijou looked down the long twin rails.

It looked like walking really was the only thing they could do.

Deciding it was better than going aboveground and getting pelted by the grenade launchers guarding the base, he forced himself to get pumped up.

“Let’s go, Lesser. Or do you want to mind the place while I’m gone?”

“Yeah, yeah. Make sure you remember this, please. Your dear Lesser has been admirable in her unswerving loyalty.”

As Lesser spoke, she moved next to Kamijou, but then for some reason positioned the Steel Glove upside down, skillfully balanced it, then straddled its grip like a witch’s broomstick. The four blades wriggled and squirmed like fingers, sending her body forward.

Kamijou looked at her as though he’d discovered a traitor. “…Lesser, what’s that?”

“What do you mean? I can use the Steel Glove like this, too. It does dig into me, though, in various places. I mean, Bayloupe was riding this thing all around the Tube— Hey, stop that; stop, please!! It can’t hold two people, and it’ll fall to pieces if your right hand touches it; please endure it and walk by yourself!!”

Kamijou and Lesser struggled with each other, but it didn’t last long.

Not that his Imagine Breaker had broken the Steel Glove or anything.

What broke was the passage in front of them.

With an explosive boom, the ceiling, made of snow, abruptly collapsed.

It happened about a hundred meters ahead of them. The thick white ceiling—which was probably supported by something magical—had suddenly fallen, like a giant shutter dropping.

In the blink of an eye, the passage was blocked.

And it didn’t stop there.

Right after came a bursting sound loud enough to burst eardrums.

The passage’s ceiling continued to break and fall, one section at a time, as if from the foot of an approaching giant.

If it caught them, it would bury them alive.

“Crap!! Let’s head to the entrance for now!!”

“You didn’t need to tell me!!”

Kamijou and Lesser wheeled around and sprinted at full speed. Even as they did, the passage and rails vibrated with a low sound, the snowy ceiling about to turn into an avalanche that would swallow them whole. It was pretty much like a monster’s mouth was chasing them.

“What?! Did my right hand break some spell supporting the snow?!”

“Or else it’s a wonderful theme-park attraction that Fiamma thought up!! Maybe we shouldn’t have tried to use the same trick…!!”

Whump-whump…The low noises continued.

Both Kamijou and Lesser ran as fast as they could.

As the collapse closed in on them, tiny ice particles whipped up.

The cloud quickly overtook them. The collapse was right at their heels.

But at that very moment, Kamijou’s body launched out of the entrance. Next to him, Lesser, without moderating her momentum, stumbled spectacularly onto the snow. But was it really a coincidence that he could see her underwear?

Are…we good…?

Hands on his knees and breathing raggedly, Kamijou went to offer her a hand. She lay faceup on the ground, catching her breath.

But his motion stopped halfway through.

He’d figured it out.

The collapse hadn’t started because his right hand had nullified sorcery holding up the snow. At the same time, it also wasn’t Fiamma’s side blowing up the passage to prevent their entry.

“Damn it…,” he murmured, hearing a high-pitched, flutelike noise.

The true cause was…

“Academy City’s bombarding the base?!”

Kamijou snatched Lesser up from the ground by the collar, swung her around, and pushed her toward the hill’s slope that used to be the tunnel entrance.

A moment later, something came.

In the sky, veiled in white snow clouds, something glittered. No—it wasn’t just one thing; they numbered fifty, at least. The shrill, flutelike whistling was the sound of metal tearing through the air at supersonic speed. And those hunks of metal were drop cannons—weapons that first used gunpowder to fire artillery shells fifteen centimeters across and about seventy centimeters long up into the air approximately five hundred meters, before precisely guiding them to a target by moving their tail assemblies.

There was no time to think about where they’d fall.

Besides, they weren’t picking their targets carefully. They were bombarding everything, from the base itself to the sensors and other equipment deployed in the surrounding area.

Sound and light exceeding his senses’ tolerance burst out, rattling Kamijou’s and Lesser’s bodies. The light was intense pain, and the sound was an impact. The white flash was so powerful that Kamijou couldn’t tell the difference between when his eyes were closed and when they were open. Despite having Lesser pressed against the hill’s slope, he could feel her slipping away from his hands. Except…that wasn’t quite correct. He’d been on top of her, and now his body was being blown into the air by the shock waves.

Over thirty seconds of pure stupefaction.

Or perhaps it was actually only an instant, and the afterimage burned into his eyes was still overloading his senses.

“Les…ser…”

When he squeezed out a word, his voice sounded abnormally hoarse. Pain shot past his temples, like he’d been staring at a fluorescent light for too long.

He didn’t have time to leisurely tend to his wounded body.

Grrr-grrr-grrr-grrr!! Heavy-sounding caterpillar treads had reached his ears.

The smell of exhaust, the kind that would irritate your chest, mixed into the white, snowy scenery.

An Academy City mobile unit…!!

Ignoring the body heat draining from him, Kamijou buried himself deep into the snow.

He had entered Russia illegally. If they found him like this, they’d arrest him for sure. He couldn’t let himself be caught now—he had to save Index.

The caterpillar-tread noise and exhaust gas came in a few different varieties.

Small, airborne tanks were at the formation’s front, probably made for dropping out of transport planes and bombers, with special vehicles loaded with long-range missiles and rockets following in their wake. Many personnel carrier trucks, too, each with over twenty powered suits on board. The unarmed, armored eight-wheelers accompanying the unit could have been power supply vehicles for recharging powered suits or UAVs. The ones with all the antennas on them might have been command vehicles for controlling unmanned units deployed in the surroundings.

Sporadic artillery fire began coming from the base. The Russian military was counterattacking.

But the return fire was erratic. Academy City’s first wave had probably reduced their combat strength by quite a bit. That didn’t matter much if even one of those arcing projectile explosives landed nearby though, since it would turn Kamijou and Lesser into messy chunks of meat regardless of how the battle was going.

“(…Now’s our chance!!)”

Then, Lesser, who had gotten close to him without him realizing, quietly spoke to him, letting herself sink into the sloped snow like he was.

Kamijou stared at her. He couldn’t wrap his head around what she was saying.

“(…Our chance?! The Russians started shooting, too. It’s gonna turn into a full-on tank battle any minute now!!)”

“(…That’s why we’ll use the confusion to sneak into Fiamma’s base.)”

Lesser watched the powered suits closely as they got off the trucks and entered combat readiness.

“(…Why do you think the Russian military is defending? Fiamma doesn’t want to move. Either he doesn’t want them to know he’s hiding there, or he’s putting some sort of sorcery to work. Anyway, if we go now, we can get to the base from the ground. Now that the underground route is blocked off, it’s our only choice.)”

Academy City and the Russian forces had begun their artillery combat.

The base, despite being dozens of kilometers away, was now within weapon range—which meant victory, essentially, was already determined. One normally positioned defensive lines farther in front than this. Either Academy City had already wiped out their defensive line, or they’d used supersonic bombers to rapidly drop forces behind it.

She was right—if they took advantage of the chaos as they charged in, they might be able to get into the facility.

“(…What do we do, then? They might be immersed in the battle, but if we just stand up and start walking, they’ll see us and shoot us.)”

“(…We’ll steal a powered suit.)” Lesser regripped her Steel Glove in both hands. “(…You probably don’t need complicated control techniques for them. If they follow the movement of your arms and legs, even we should be able to work them without any special training.)”

“(…You make it sound so easy. Those things can withstand thirty-millimeter gatling guns. My right hand won’t do anything to them. How do we take one down?)”

“(…Obviously, it’s going to be me.)” Lesser lowered herself like a predator on the hunt, weapon in hand. “(…We don’t know if they understand that base’s importance, but they can’t beat Fiamma with the gear they have. Fiamma doesn’t seem to want to move at the moment, for some reason, but he’ll show up if the base ends up at a serious disadvantage. If we can’t get in before that, everyone will die.)”

“(…Lesser!!)”

“(…If you want to praise me, you can do it in bed while you pet my head.)”

Ignoring Kamijou trying to stop her, Lesser silently began to move. She seemed to be after a powered suit that had just passed nearby and now had its back to them, but the machine’s hand gripped a giant shotgun. One of the anti-shelter weapons he’d spotted in Avignon, France.

Nobody could get hit by one of them and still be in any kind of shape to appear at their own funeral.

Right now, Lesser was basically trying to kill a large beast with a primitive spear or club. Maybe she had traditional techniques, too, but from what he could see from the outside, it would virtually be an acrobatic stunt.

“(…Shit!)” he murmured to himself, still deep in the snow.

He had other concerns besides Lesser.

Yes—

“(…There should be sorcerers in addition to the Russian military inside Fiamma’s base. When we snuck in before, there were almost two hundred Russian Catholic sorcerers in the big room with him. If they make an appearance, they could even topple Academy City’s advantage. But there’s no sign of them. Does that just mean they’ve already joined the battle? Or have they not shown up yet? If not, then why? Even Fiamma can’t possibly want that base to fall. Then why does he need to conserve them and helplessly draw Academy City’s forces toward him?)”

None of these words were spoken in hope of an answer.

He was only saying them to himself so he could get a handle on what his questions were again.

And yet…

“Hmm? That’s obvious. It’s all to lure you in—you and your precious right hand.”

…an answer came.

Dumbfounded, Kamijou searched for the source of the sound. It wasn’t in front of or behind him or to the left or right. The voice had come from inside his clothes.

“I may have caused this war, but I wouldn’t want your right arm to get caught up in some petty cannon fire. And if people show up saying ‘We don’t know what he’ll use it for, but it seems essential to Fiamma of the Right’s plan, so we’ll just kill the kid and be done with it’—that would be an issue, too. I left a hole, I suppose you could say, on purpose, to get my hands on it quickly.”

“…”

Kamijou had encountered Fiamma in the Elizalina Alliance of Independent Nations. The encounter had technically ended as a draw, but he’d stolen Sasha Kreutzev and destroyed their whole party. They’d pretty much lost that fight.

At the time, Kamijou had wondered why the man had so readily retreated. Fiamma wanted his right arm, and he’d been in full control of the battle. And yet, he’d let Kamijou escape for the sole reason that carrying both Sasha and Kamijou’s right arm with him at the same time would be inefficient.

Why didn’t he ever think Fiamma of the Right would come up with a plan after that? He couldn’t have only wanted to leave them a message in bad taste.

He’d search for where Kamijou was.

And once he found him, he could attack at any time.

With accuracy and precision.

Shit…!!

Kamijou heard several shrill, flutelike noises overhead at once.

Immediately, he tried to look up.

But he was too late.

Boom!! A rumbling broke out, enough to shake the white land itself.

A rumbling from under his feet.

2

Selick G. Kirnov let out a groan.

Where am I? he wondered.

It was a dark room. His body had been tied to a chair placed in the center. In front of him, a few steps away, was an outlined square of light—probably a door, he reasoned. The light was filtering in through the gaps.

That was the only light source, however. No windows or light bulbs, so he could only see vague silhouettes of the objects near him.

Something like metal—like blood.

The smell pressed against his chest, and it gave him a bad feeling about all this.

After all.

He had an idea what was happening.

“…Let’s make this quick.”

He heard a voice.

And then a clack.

The sound came from in front of him. Someone had set a wooden chair down on the floor and must have sat in it. With almost no light in the room, only a pair of red eyes gazed directly at Selick.

“You can be honest. You can lie. You can even stay quiet. After all, I’ll measure what’s in your mind by the response you give to my questions. Think of it as an advanced lie detector. It’ll all be over soon anyway.”

Snap!! A pale-blue flash of light covered Selick’s vision for just a moment.

He thought it was a camera.

But no. It was a spark of high-tension electrical current. It had come off of a different person, a girl standing immediately behind the red-eyed man.

“She can control electricity. That’s the kind of esper she is. An esper—you know what that is, right? I know you at least get Daihasei Festival broadcasts here…and in your line of work, it’s natural you’d be familiar with ’em.”

“…”

Sweat broke out on Selick’s face.

The red-eyed person ignored him and spoke.

“I want to know why jerks like you are hiding out around here…Oh, and again, you can answer however you want. The kid behind me is gonna measure all your brain’s electrical signals anyway. Right—I know. I have an idea. Let’s do it this way. I’ll ask a question. What were you looking for when you came to the Elizalina Alliance of Independent Nations? And you answer like this: ‘I was searching for something important on my superior’s orders.’ That’ll be good. And then we look at your mind, see how firmly you agree or reject what you’re saying, use that as a key to search the region of your brain where you store memories, and we’re done. My investigative methods might lack delicacy, but eh, don’t let it bother you.”

Selick had received so much training not to talk.

And just as much to make them think he was confessing, when he was really passing them fake information.

However.

They’d just told him they could look into his mind whether he agreed or refused. How was he supposed to stop them from doing that?

In any case, Selick G. Kirnov had one thought.

Don’t let them follow their plan.

If the enemy could read his mind unconditionally, they would have scooped out the necessary information while he’d been unconscious. They were only bothering to question him like this because they needed to. So if he didn’t let them stick to their plan to get information, he might be able to defend it to the last.

He felt the will to resist.

He would find a thread to counterattack.

And then.

As though reacting to Selick’s inner thoughts, despite him not having said a word, the red-eyed person smoothly pointed his index finger at Selick’s face.

No.

Strictly speaking, behind him.

What’s…?

Since he was tied to the chair, he couldn’t see very far behind him by twisting his neck. He could only get little glimpses out of the corner of his eye.

That was when he heard the creaking.

It sounded almost like a thin rope squeezing something, but the noise was heavier and eerier.

Barbed wire.

The stench, like metal and blood, plunged through Selick’s nose down into his lungs.

In the same moment, he realized what he’d gotten a glance at.

Barbed wire, hanging from fixtures in the ceiling. Its sharp barbs held about an armful’s worth of flesh onto them. He didn’t know what kind of flesh. It was dark red, and the skin seemed to have all been removed. But here and there, on that flesh, small bits of what looked like cloth clung to it.

Yes.

As though…

A person’s head and arm had been severed, and all their skin flayed, then the remainder was tied up with barbed wire and strung up—would it turn into something like this?

“…???!!!”

Selick G. Kirnov almost lost control over his breathing. When he looked again, several other pieces of barbed wire were hanging, too. No flesh on them. Instead, seven chunks had been torn apart and were now lying on the floor. The weight had probably been too much.

Including the hanging one, there were a total of eight. Things that looked like dark-red scraps of cloth clung to them. They’d changed colors quite a bit, but he recognized them. It was the outfits they’d been wearing before.

In the dim room, the monster only noticeable by his red eyes told him quietly, “Uncooperative—every one of them. I know it’s fastest to have the brat behind me read your mind, but it doesn’t take much to make me violent.”

Selick heard a strange rattle-rat-rat-rat-rat-rat-rat-rat-rattle.

It was coming from his feet. The chair’s legs were tapping against the floor—in time with the strange trembling that had overtaken him.

The red-eyed person ignored it and parted his lips into a smile. Bringing his face close to Selick, he said, “We don’t have any more hostages. Don’t make this hard for me.”

Accelerator and Misaka Worst opened the door and left the room.

The place they’d just been in wasn’t a gruesome torture chamber, but a storehouse for preserving food. In fact, the Elizalina Alliance of Independent Nations apparently didn’t have torture chambers to begin with.

“Well, that was pretty easy. What a bore,” said Misaka Worst. “He was a Russian spy, right? With all that anti-torture training? I thought they all had tolerance for physical violence.”

“Deception never changes. It’s about not giving them a chance to make rational decisions.”

He probably couldn’t have gotten the spy to talk through mere violence, like punching or kicking him. Even if he’d actually stripped off his skin with a blade, it might not have worked.

That was why he’d needed to bluff.

Even veteran Russian spies wouldn’t know how to fight against Academy City’s espers. But they had probably built up a body of logic they could use to fight the unknown, the incomprehensible.

So Accelerator adopted an entirely different approach to give the man a shock.

To do that, he’d cut a bunch of beef into blocks, stuck rags to it, and wrapped it all up with barbed wire.

Confronted with that, the spy’s mind, completely rattled, immediately panicked. Soldier or spy, resistance to pain wasn’t because they had dull senses. It was because they trained their minds beforehand to endure it. On the other hand, if you messed up the underpinnings, you could reduce their tolerance to a child crybaby. After all, soldier or civilian, everyone was built the same way—they were all living creatures.

Accelerator rested his back against the wall.

Misaka Worst opened her mouth and spoke as if to make fun of him. “Heh. How kind of you.”

“Eh?”

“Misaka has some of your behavioral patterns input into her so she can fight you. Last Order or civilians are one thing—but isn’t this the first time you’ve settled things nonviolently against a professional enemy?”

“No point being inefficient about it. Didn’t feel like messing around with human flesh anyway,” he spat in response. “What? Wasn’t stimulating enough for you, little lady?”

“Aw, no! Misaka loves deceiving people. Seeing a proud professional succumb to nonexistent fear and turn into a mess of tears and snot is incredible. Kya-ha! ”

Stretch.

Misaka Worst flashed a smile that seemed like a crushed fruit.

Accelerator tisked softly. “…What do you think of what the crybaby said?”

“Totally unnatural. I mean, the Russian military was using this war as justification to attempt a serious invasion operation—including aerial bombings—against the Alliance, since they’ve been after something of theirs since before, right? Strange they’d send in spies at all in that case. Normally, you have the spies withdraw before the bombing started…Unless they were disposable! Heh.”

“The spies were scheduled to withdraw, but a few hours ago, they were suddenly ordered to stay. And then they even sent extra spies crawling into the Alliance.”

“Hoo-whee. It’s like they planned it around the Misakas coming into the country.”

That was one way of looking at it.

If that was the case, the spies lurking in this military facility must have been worried to death.

They wanted to get out of the Alliance before the bombings. But their target had just set foot into a most dangerous spot on his own. To accomplish their objective, the spies, too, would have to follow Accelerator.

But.

“…Still, that spy fell for the trick too easily. Maybe it was because he couldn’t fight an esper the way he envisioned it, but it didn’t seem like it. It was more like he’d never considered possibly fighting against one at all and then happened to bump into one.”

“Maybe it was all confidential, and they were after the Misakas, but they didn’t get anything explained to them? Like they’d give the details on-site over radio or something,” Misaka Worst offered with a shrug. “And what did the spy say the mission given to him was, hmm?”

“To photograph the interiors of Alliance military facilities. Their mission was sneak photography using small cameras.”

“For what?”

“To bring secret documents out of the base before the real bombings began, then bring them to a specified point. The concrete instructions would have come from someone on the other side of a monitor.”

As he said it, he found himself confused.

The only “document” he had was the parchment paper. Was it that essential to the Russian military’s generals?

“Anyway,” he said, picking himself up off the wall and leaning into his crutch again, “if we go to that specified point or whatever, we’ll meet whoever needs that parchment. Who will know how to decode and use it, too.”

And that might be a clue to saving the still-unconscious Last Order. In which case, he didn’t have the choice not to go. Egoistic or not, he needed to have them cough up the value of a parchment they’d attack a military base for.

“Misaka loves selfish plot developments like that. It’s making her hard all over. ”

“Shut up. The destination of the parchment delivery was a frontline Russian base near the border. I’ll raid it. You do whatever you want.”

“Oh, but obviously Misaka would tag along wherever there’s more blood to be shed. Speaking of which, what about Last Order?”

“What would happen if I left her to you?”

“Probably something too horrible to even look at when Misaka gets bored.”

As he considered punching the cackling Misaka Worst, something wavered at the edge of Accelerator’s vision.

No, that wasn’t it.

His vision wasn’t what had wavered.

This was…

3

Deep within the military base close to the border between Russia and the Elizalina Alliance of Independent Nations, Fiamma of the Right was using a book-style Soul Arm to communicate with someone.

That someone being an authority of the Russian Church: Bishop Nikolai Tolstoj.

“Well, things are finally getting interesting,” said Fiamma into the Soul Arm, lying open on the table, as he sat down in a plain chair. “To be honest—and I know I was having you cooperate with me—but your battle results here in Russia have been anything but praiseworthy. It’s a pain, but this time, I’ll readjust the scores.”

“Say whatever you wish.” Nikolai’s tone was hard. “Don’t hold anything back. You told me that you’d secured Sasha Kreutzev. Use that weapon right now! Or have you forgotten Russian soldiers are dying as we speak?!”

“Sortie preparations are all finished. I’ll bring it out soon. When I do, the battle situation will once again become opaque. Academy City’s vaunted control will cease to work—and the true war will begin.”

“Either way, I’m fine as long as I can achieve my objective. If our cooperation is a shortcut to that, then I will keep providing support.”

“The Patriarch? You want to be the one that much? The Roman pope I know never looked as amused as you do.”

“Pah—don’t compare the Roman pope to our Russian one.”

“Are they that different?”

“In any case,” said Nikolai Tolstoj, lowering his tone and asking slowly, “where are you right now?”

“What would you do if you knew?”

“It can’t be at the base. We lost your signal from there already.”

“Ha-ha,” chuckled Fiamma, who certainly should have been deep inside the “base” before answering, “you’ll know soon enough…whether you like it or not.”

It was easy, perhaps, to witness the phenomenon that occurred then. Few people, however, could have known what it actually meant.

The first one to notice it was likely a man from a Florence civic group.

He’d come before an old church with other companions for the preservation of historical relics. It was wartime, but the worst fires of conflict had yet to take hold in Italy. What had taken hold of the city, however, was a tense, high-strung atmosphere. Nobody knew what would cause a huge riot to break out.

He felt something like tremors from time to time. Rumors were that it was city gas lines and such being ignited while people took advantage of the chaos to set fire to buildings in acts of robbery. That was what this middle-aged man figured.

However, the one he’d just felt was different from anything thus far.

It wasn’t something coming from a short distance away from the city, from the outside.

It had come from the inside.

In other words—it had echoed from inside the church.

“…?”

The middle-aged man slowly turned around.

He had a bad feeling about this.

He heard a creaking noise—emanating from that which he was trying to protect.

The historic steeple, which one could call the cornerstone of the majestic church, had broken in the middle. The structure proceeded to ignore gravity and floated up, still containing the giant bell that always announced time in the city.

Why had it broken?

Why was it floating?

He could feel the common sense within him shattering.

And…

…at that same moment, a giant steeple tore away from the Mont-Saint-Michel abbey in France.

Several pillars ripped out of St. Mary’s Church in Italy.

And the grand pipe organ flew out of St. Joseph’s Cathedral in India.

With over two billion followers, the Roman Church had built many churches and abbeys all over the world throughout its long history. Their forms and design philosophies varied based on the land, era, and culture, producing unique characteristics in each building.

Objects seen as particularly important had just been removed from those churches and abbeys.

They all flew toward a single point, as though drawn by a magnet.

Toward Russia.

Toward the freezing-cold base where Fiamma of the Right waited.

Once the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of collected cultural objects had gathered in a single place, they wove together in an intricate pattern. Not like a jigsaw puzzle, designed that way from the start; no, this process was more like forcing dissimilar parts together to bring forth a new machine.

The enormous mountain of structures extended beyond the ten-kilometer-square base.

They swelled farther than that.

And the changes didn’t stop there, either.

They went farther…

Boom!! The rumbling broke out from directly underneath Kamijou.

By the time he’d noticed it, he’d been thrown into the air.

Or at least, he felt like he had been.

But he hadn’t really. The snowy ground he’d just been standing on had risen up, breaking free a massive part of the foundation. Buried underneath the ground was the subway line Academy City’s drop cannons had obliterated. Maybe it had moved somehow in line with the changes to Fiamma’s base.

Float.

For just an instant, Kamijou couldn’t feel gravity.

A moment later.

The place he was standing on sheared off like a cliff. Lesser, about to launch an ambush on the powered suit nearby, turned around and stared, dumbfounded. It looked like she tried to reach out, but she was way too far away. She’d been left at the bottom of the “cliff.”

“What…the…?!”

The incredible rumbling eventually forced Kamijou off his feet. He could see Academy City tanks and powered suits, lifted up in the same manner as him, falling off the cliff’s edge in disparate groups.

It was flying.

The ground Kamijou stood on—and the foundation under the base where Fiamma probably was, was flying.

While dropping the Russian military base’s facilities and weapons away, along with the snow.

It immediately floated up about ten meters, then tore free of the last line of resistance. Whump! Accelerating, faster and faster, and all around Kamijou became fog. The abnormal, crushing pressure pushed his body to the ground. But there was no time for confusion. As he blinked, baffled, the fog that had so suddenly appeared was already gone.

Blue sky.

A hue at odds with the weather he’d seen from the surface.

The scene of white winter sky was nowhere to be found.

Kamijou knew what that meant.

We’re…above the clouds?!

Bam!! went an explosion.

A supersonic bomber, no more than a pinprick in the sky moments ago, looked a lot bigger now. They’d probably taken hasty evasive maneuvers, surprised at the sudden event.

That wasn’t the only sound.

Gshh-gshh-gch-gch!! A low roaring reverberated, like stone cogs turning together. The place Kamijou now stood was like a big bridge made of assembled stone. On the other side, miles and miles away, he could see a giant mass. He could see it clearly, partly because they were in midair, and no horizons or buildings were in the way of his vision, but also because the structure itself was ludicrously gigantic.

The castle-like main section stood in the center, and four extremely long bridges stretched from it in each direction. Their lengths weren’t standard; one was over twice as long. If you considered the direction the fortress was traveling in as the front, and where Kamijou was as the back, the one abnormally long bridge would have been the right side. Church walls and doors and steeples from different cultures and different eras had been scraped together, and even now they were changing shapes in an intricate fashion.

Other than those structures with the weight of centuries in them were collected metal girders, pipes, and lighting equipment—more modern objects. They’d probably been installed in surface bases. All in all, they’d been brought together in a strange fusion reminiscent of a construction site at an old church.

Were they growing, or were they cannibalizing one another?

Unable to even grasp the meaning of what he was seeing, he heard a voice come to him from somewhere.

Maybe speakers or something were set up all over this flying castle. Unlike the wheat flour doll used previously, the sound came with noise.

“What I was setting up was not a giant facility or Soul Arm.”

Fiamma of the Right.

Perhaps satisfied he’d confined his target, the Imagine Breaker, to the firmament, his voice sounded somehow amused.

“It was a place to assemble this. I had things saved up for it all over the world. I only needed to dig into my own savings. Still, to create it, I had to prepare an area for the work, like a sterilized room. That was why I needed the consecration, vast funds and time, and people.”

Even now, the strange fortress Kamijou was looking at was expanding.

It was essentially an explosion of stone.

“Material quantity wasn’t the issue. The important thing was to create a cycle for it to expand itself. Once that cycle is complete, it can swell as large as I need it to without supplying it.”

Wham!! The stony blast wind shot past Kamijou.

Though he’d just been standing on a stone bridge a moment ago, now he was suddenly inside an old-fashioned room. There were dozens of miles between here and Fiamma’s base. Did that mean his fortress had already stretched out this far?

“…You sure putting me on this thing wasn’t a mistake?”

“Quite the opposite. Your right arm is absolutely essential for my objective.” Fiamma even laughed a little, meaningfully, before saying, “I welcome you—to my fortress, the Star of Bethlehem.”

The Star of Bethlehem.

Fiamma of the Right had said its name, which meant even that would contain deep religious and magical meaning.

From the way he spoke, it actually seemed like it was acutely related to the entire string of events—his manipulation of the Roman Church, his kidnapping of Index and Sasha, his triggering of World War III, and his attempt to steal Kamijou’s right arm:

This fortress, over three thousand meters in the air, now sat above the clouds.

Its sides reached out dozens of kilometers from the center.

It was an exceedingly impossible sight, possibly even as big as a floating Academy City would be.

Of course…

If you had the necessary mechanisms to give buoyant force to the mass and weight before his eyes, objects would float no matter how big they expanded. It was the same as a balloon—didn’t matter if it was small or big. That was how science worked. In that sense, making a huge fuss about a giant object floating might have been nonsense.

But the problem lay not in the logic or theory. The pure stability with which this man-made structure floated through the air— Had something like that ever existed in the history of humanity?

It was the meaning of the word unprecedented.

When boats were created. When cars were created. When airplanes were created.

This was one of those times.

An opportunity had been created—one so exceedingly powerful it could decisively distort the territory that humanity could control.

That feeling of abnormality wrapped over his whole body, whether he liked it or not.

Sure, it may have been a grand achievement, but at the same time, a great unease came over him—the fear that perhaps it had a darker side to rival it.

“…”

But Kamijou’s spirit wouldn’t break there.

He wouldn’t let it bother him.

The only thing he needed to do was take down Fiamma and destroy the Soul Arm remotely controlling Index.

He was almost frightened at being locked in this insanely huge fortress, but once he calmed down, he realized he had more hope here than in being left on the ground.

Giving a short exhalation, Kamijou eventually stood up.

He was worried he’d get altitude sickness after suddenly being launched up into the air, but other than a mild pain shooting through his temples, he didn’t have any serious nausea, breathing issues, or narrowed vision. No problems that would prevent him from acting.

…The air pressure and temperature are the same as on the surface…? Is there some kind of weird field around this?

Come to think of it, he thought he remembered the snow splitting apart in an unnatural way the moment the fortress had broken through the clouds. Maybe it was protected by a force field in the shape of a sphere squeezed in on the top and bottom or something.

He couldn’t really calculate how much effort it would have taken to do that magically.

But just like how a fortress this big was floating in the sky, it had to require immense resources and labor…Like the combined power of an organization encompassing two million followers.

Enough so that one could call it a symbol of that.

…He went through all the trouble to make this stupidly big facility. I don’t know what he’s ultimately after, but he probably needs the Star of Bethlehem for it, he thought, glancing at his right hand.

When he pressed his palm to a random wall, orange light ran through it like cracks, and about three feet of the wall surrounding that spot broke. However, by some sort of power, the fragments didn’t fall, instead floating in the air and apparently trying to get back to their original positions. There was probably a core.

…In that case, if I destroy the core, I can deal a lot of damage to Fiamma, too. While I’m looking for him, I’ll do everything I can, wherever I can. The enemy could use it in the war, after all. Don’t need to leave it alone.

A boom hit Kamijou’s ears.

Windows were fitted in the stone room, but their glass shattered. Kamijou, who had reflexively covered his ears, looked outside and saw several fighter jets dancing in the blue skies.

Academy City fighters.

Crystallizations of the latest strides in science, crisscrossing through the Russian sky.

Fiamma must have seen them, too—he made this declaration in a slightly more impassive voice.

He sounded like someone had thrown a wet blanket over his fun.

“The angelic medium, Sasha Kreutzev. The 103,000 grimoires’ remote-control Soul Arm. The ritual site, the Star of Bethlehem. And your right hand, suitable to wield my power. I’ve acquired everything I need, so I will have to ask the supporting actors to leave.”

Kamijou had a bad feeling about this.

But if he couldn’t figure out where Fiamma was in this huge fortress, he didn’t have any way of stopping his words.

And then.

Fiamma of the Right quietly offered:

“Sally forth, Archangel Gabriel, the POWER OF GOD. Blow them all to bits.”

Boom!!!!!!

The world shifted to night.

In the span of a moment, the sky changed to one completely painted in black.

“That…can’t be…,” murmured Kamijou in a daze, confronted with powerful sorcery that held even the location of the earth, the moon, and the sun in its hands.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t comprehend the phenomenon before him.

He knew what it was—and that knowledge made his eyes widen to their limits as he began to tremble.

He’d witnessed it before.

An angelic spell.

A supernatural phenomenon that ultimately became the bridge toward an even greater spell of purging, one that interfered with the very movement of celestial bodies and strengthened the user’s power to the point where it was possible to obliterate all humankind without even twitching a fingertip. In which case, it was obvious what one should call a being who could use it.

Kamijou’s face lost more color than the night sky had as Fiamma’s words continued unchallenged and amused, like a soldier during a training drill, showing off a weapon he was proud of.

“Actually, maybe in this case, I should call it Misha Kreutzev.”

A moment later, Kamijou got a glimpse of some sort of blue point of light in the jet-black night sky.

If he strained to see it, it may have resembled a human figure. That was how tiny this light was, that appeared as a mere speck, and how far away it was.

However.

Sound ceased.

Something like giant wings extended from the blue speck of light, cutting horizontally through the heavens, as far as the eye could see.

The sound of an explosion ripped past Kamijou’s ears moments later.

The unmanned fighter squadron storming about high over Russia exploded, wiping out the dozen or so jets all at once. Several of the ones that had moved more organically—probably manned—had their main wings severed, and Kamijou could see from the parachutes that the crews were frantically ejecting.

The destruction didn’t stop there.

That blue dot of light must have only flapped its gigantic wings to blow away the unmanned fighter squadron coming its way. But those giant wings destroyed themselves partway through, everything from halfway down breaking off and flying. A huge explosion went off near the horizon where they’d landed.

Enormous clouds of earthen fragments danced into the air.

An entire mountain was completely destroyed.

“Well, I suppose the foundation itself, Angel Fall, was nothing more than a coincidental spell. A summoning method based on a further derivation of it must have some issues with stability.”

This was insane.

The numbers difference had been reversed in an instant.

This was what angels were.

Beings that simply reigned with absolute supremacy.

“Still, now things are getting interesting, aren’t they? The science side has been unveiling all kinds of secret weapons—it’s only right that the sorcery side should eventually respond in kind.”

And deep within the fortress, Fiamma smiled.

…The Star of Bethlehem is still incomplete. I lifted it up in order to panic Academy City’s surface units, but now that I’ve had Misha Kreutzev act, my victory is assured.

Yes.

Something was missing.

“That parchment.”

The Soul Arm Fiamma had acquired was for freely accessing Index, who possessed 103,000 grimoires. But that alone wasn’t enough. Several pieces of knowledge were missing regarding truly esoteric secrets, such as angels and God’s Right Seat. The parchment was to complement that. Once he obtained that bridge of knowledge and fed it back into the Star of Bethlehem, only then would Fiamma of the Right’s plans come to fruition.

“Now, then,” he said in a leisurely tone. “Time to go retrieve it, Misha Kreutzev. He may be weak, but that’s no reason to show mercy. Don’t hesitate, now—use all your power to bring it to me.”