Free A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 7 by Kazuma Kamachi Page A

Kanzaki.
    “…I need to go. If you want to report this to your superiors, feel free.”
    “Is that so? Ah, we’ll handle rounding up all these groggy guys. It’d be a pain if the police picked ’em up, after all.”
    “I’m in your debt.” Kanzaki bowed her head courteously, and Tsuchimikado said to her,
    “By the way, what brought you so far from England anyway, Zaky?”
    She left her head down and stopped moving.
    After a good ten seconds had passed, she finally lifted her face.
    “Who knows…?” she said, smiling mechanically, like she was angry and about to cry at the same time.
    “…Honestly, what
do
I want to do?”

CHAPTER 2
Roman Orthodoxy
The_Roman_Orthodox_Church.
1
    The sun set and night came.
    But it didn’t come quietly. Agnes, in her black nun’s habit, was busy shouting to the other similarly dressed sisters in another language, giving commands and pointing every which way. She was also writing something in a small book with a quill pen at an incredible speed. Index told Kamijou it was like a telephone call: When she wrote in that book, the letters would apparently show up in a book somewhere else. He thought privately that it was more like a text message than a phone call.
    A brigade in black—probably the regular sisters of the Roman Orthodox Church—was heading into the sewers via the triangular hole left by Orsola’s kidnappers. Another group spread open a map and began to draw lines in red ink, also with feather pens. He couldn’t tell whether they were designating escape routes or giving directions for the search or their security net.
    On this busy, bustling night, Kamijou, Index, and Stiyl were stiffly standing apart from the others. Kamijou couldn’t speak a foreign language (and no, he didn’t even know
which
foreign language they were speaking in), so he couldn’t participate in the conversation. Index and Stiyl were keeping quiet. If they said anything careless, itcould spark chaos among the Roman Orthodox sisters—they were part of a different chain of command.
    Remembering how hungry he was little by little, Kamijou spoke up. “Hey, why did Index and I get called out here, anyway? The Roman Orthodox people are doing everything that needs to be done. We’re just sitting here bored—is there a reason we’re still here?”
    “…Well, our reinforcements should be arriving somewhat soon. What are those knights doing?” Stiyl said bitterly, blowing out some cigarette smoke. “Also, this incident requires our power. Well, more accurately,
her
power.”
    Her
must have meant Index. “Hers?”
    “Yeah. This all has to do with a grimoire. And not just any grimoire—the original copy of the
Book of the Law
.”
    In place of Stiyl, who said so in a relatively self-absorbed fashion (meaning he had no desire to explain), Index summed it up in simple terms for him.
    According to her, the
Book of the Law
was a grimoire written in a code that nobody in the world could decipher. Its contents were very valuable; anyone who could decipher it would gain vast power. And now a girl had appeared who had finally come up with a way to decode the supposedly indecipherable grimoire.
    Because of that, both the
Book of the Law
and Orsola Aquinas, the girl who could decipher it, had been taken from the Roman Orthodox Church by the Amakusa-Style Crossist Church.
    The one he had met already was Orsola, and it seemed that she had fled during the chaotic battles between Amakusa and Roman Orthodoxy, which involved her being kidnapped and rescued over and over. And they speculated the reason they didn’t know where the
Book of the Law
was, was because it was in Amakusa’s hands at the moment.
    Amakusa-Style
…
Amakusa?
    Kamijou tilted his head—he’d heard that name before.
    But anyway.
    “Nobody can decipher it, huh? Not even you, Index?”
    “No! I’ve tried to, but it’s not written in normal code.”
    “Hey. Is this
unreadable grimoire
really that valuable? I mean, nobody’s read it,