Toaru Majutsu no Index:Volume SP Chapter2
Mark Space
A completely ordinary stone apartment building existed within the London Borough of Lambeth. One room of that ordinary apartment was a base of a magic cabal large enough to shake all of the United Kingdom.
The cabal was known as the Dawn-Colored Sunlight.
They did not create the grand towers or palaces used by witches in picture books. They divided up their assets as much as possible and gathered only the necessary things and people at one of their bases when they were needed to perform some kind of ceremonial magic. These bases were not strange secret lairs. Instead, they were apartments or other kinds of rented rooms. If they did not do all that, their losses due to attacks from the anti-magician organization of the Anglican Church would be too great.
The magic side was referred to as a single entity, but many different factions and forces existed within it. While some of them were divided by their specific doctrine like the Roman Catholic Church or the Anglican Church (although those two were not magic cabals), some magic cabals were created solely to maximize profit.
All sorts of different types of cabals existed and any number of things sent sparks flying between cabals. They chaotically grew, chaotically fought, chaotically destroyed each other, and finally reached some kind of strange overall balance. Like that, the different powers continued to grow and shrink below the surface where normal people never saw them.
“Ahh, now this is nice. I could get used to having one of these rather than a fireplace.”
The boss of the Dawn-Colored Sunlight, a girl named Birdway, was relaxing within a strange item she had ordered from an eastern island nation. It was called a kotatsu and it was something like a combination of a table and a bed. In order to use this strange item, she had created a “no shoes zone” in the room.
All that was well and good, but it was only the beginning of fall. It was too early to be bringing out a kotatsu. It seemed the master of the room really wanted to try out the item she had ordered from Japan.
The blonde girl who looked about 12 stuck her slender, black stocking-covered legs under the thick blanket as she flipped through a magazine and cut up some reddish-brown yokan.
The title of the magazine was Einstein.
It was a well-known science magazine.
“With the space age finally here, it seems the hot topics are acquiring lunar resources and developing low-cost launch methods. …Wait, how would you use ceremonial magic in space? The protection from leylines would weaken and the entire concept of the cardinal direction as well as up and down would be gone, so how would you create a temple? N-no, but you might be able to use that to your advantage and create some kind of never-before-seen ceremonial grounds that rotates in all 360 degrees. If you did that, you might end up with some kind of never-before-seen effect!! Dammit. I should have taken the measurements before when I had the chance!!”
“You can’t, boss,” kindly said a blond man wearing black formal clothes and a scarf.
He was pouring black tea for himself into a refined Japanese teacup.
“That is of the science side. It is outside of our jurisdiction.”
“I know, I know. …You never let me have any fun,” said Birdway with a click of her tongue in response to his realism.
But pointing out things like that could be said to be the blond man’s job.
“What is going on today? Why did you suddenly yell at me to go buy you this magazine?”
“That would be because of this.”
Birdway flipped the page and pointed toward an article titled, “Let’s Resolve the Energy Crisis! A New Weapon Appears to Advance Oil Drilling in the Arctic Ocean!!”
The blond subordinate raised his face from the magazine.
“You can’t, boss.”
“Not that, you idiot. You have guts to start lecturing me before I’ve even told you what I’m talking about.”
Birdway threw some of the cut-up yokan into her mouth and made a slurping noise as she sipped at her green tea. Her subordinate was fully permeated with European culture, so he looked displeased at the noise. The girl gave a satisfied (and evil) grin before continuing the discussion.
“Some people are saying it would be a problem if the development reaches the Arctic.”
“…? Can parts for spiritual items be found there?”
Forests and mountains where magical plants could be harvested were a vital resource for magic cabals, but the Arctic Ocean held no value for the Dawn-Colored Sunlight. They did not rely on marine products.
“No, not that.” Birdway kicked her feet underneath the kotatsu. “Suspicion has arisen that the Dusk Exit is supporting the oil drilling team in the Arctic.”
“…A British Golden-style cabal like us.”
The blond subordinate clearly looked displeased at that. The Golden-style cabals were referred to as a group, but there were countless different types. The types of spells they used and goals they held were all different. The Dusk Exit was famous for being very wasteful and causing problems for others by using up limited personnel and resources.
There was no concept of equivalent exchange in modern magic.
How great a result could one gain from a limited resource? It could be called a means of cheating each other using the exchange rate. As a result, the failure of a large-scale ceremony was all the more disastrous.
However, the Dusk Exit did not see it that way.
It was similar to spending a hundred million yen on a piece of gold the size of your fingertip.
They were a group of savages who acted like intellectuals and they were often criticized as not even being magicians because they abandoned all thought and tried to make everything work by brute force.
“A few pieces of technology connected to Academy City are involved with this oil drilling.” Birdway dug through a small basket that held a few different types of teacakes. “Thanks to that, both the science side and the magic side are mad at the other claiming they have ‘crossed the line’. On top of that, it seems the Dusk Exit wants to use the funds they gain from the oil drilling to deal with a Portuguese market, so it seems there’s enough of a just cause.”
A market.
When they used that term, they referred to a magic cabal that dealt in human trafficking.
“A Portuguese market… So children?”
“Yes, as materials for spiritual items. They’ll just be used up. A human’s life force is used to refine magic power, but it seems they want to refine a large amount of magic power in an instant to get an explosive reaction from a large-scale spell.”
Birdway laughed and grabbed a quill that lay beside her. She wrote on a small piece of memo paper. The curves seemed extremely arbitrary, rough, and flowing like a celebrity’s signature. The verb “drawing” almost seemed more appropriate than “writing”.
After only 15 seconds, she had completed an exceedingly simplified charm.
“Apparently, the idiots in the Dusk Exit can only create a single copy of something like this using up three whole kids. As a fellow Golden-style magician, it almost gives me a headache.”
“…”
With her subordinate looking on silently, Birdway tapped her index finger in the center of the charm. That was enough to activate the spell which caused a few biscuits to pop out of the charm.
Birdway tossed a freshly baked biscuit into her mouth.
“This is only an estimate, but most likely, it will take only about 0.7 seconds for the children they use to be shattered both inside and out. They will be nothing but empty shells by the end. Doesn’t that extreme wastefulness sound exactly like something they’d do? If the oil platform being developed is completed, the Dusk Exit will set up a distribution route using the funds they receive and that will be enough to create the framework for pitiful children to be sent flowing into the darkness.”
An unpleasant strength focused itself in the blond subordinate’s brow.
It may have seemed ridiculous, but he had his own sense of morality.
Meanwhile, Birdway tapped her finger on a photo in the science magazine with a casual expression on her face.
“And so those who claim to protect the peace are going to start by destroying this.”
“The ocean resources survey ship…?”
“It’s a large ship that is searching for areas filled with oil. It also has enough equipment and materials onboard to build an offshore oil platform. I mentioned that the Dusk Exit’s oil platform was still being developed, remember? Well, if this ship is sunk, their plan will be brought to a complete halt. It seems they don’t have the excess money needed to prepare a replacement ship.”
“What does any of this have to do with us?” asked the blond subordinate cautiously. “You couldn’t possibly be thinking of creating a united front with the Anglican Church or Academy City, could you? And even if we were to do it alone, the Dawn-Colored Sunlight would gain nothing from it.”
When the subordinate thought about it, the story may have been a good sob story, but it was so simple that it actually made him cautious. If “those who claim to protect the peace” had invited them, it could be a trap.
“No,” said Birdway denying all of that with a single word. “We have no obligation to go along with the Anglican Church or Academy City’s mission of self-satisfaction. If they were going to go and crush some shitty cabal, I’d gladly just sit back and watch the show, but that’s not what this is about.”
“?”
“Ugh, what a pain. Just look at this.”
Birdway’s small finger slid to the side of the photo of the ocean resources survey ship. She pointed at a group photo of intellectuals wearing lab coats that had a caption under it saying, “The scientists who created the world’s largest survey ship.”
The blond subordinate let out a groan upon seeing that.
He recognized one of the faces.
It was Patricia Birdway.
He had heard that she had been invited as a guest researcher at a British science institution due to the high praise her internet-published paper had received from scientists around the world, but he had never thought she would be enjoying an extended cruise after working on a project to create such a ridiculously huge ship.
“…A-a suppression mission is going to be carried out soon, right? And that will involve sinking that ship as well as everyone aboard?”
“Correct,” Birdway said in a solemn voice as she brought both her elbows up onto the kotatsu and folded her hands in front of her face. “Simply put, this is very bad. Please do something about it.”
