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

so couldn’t it just be scribbles inside?”
    “It could be,” Index agreed simply. But the fact that she didn’t get angry made her seem relaxed, like an adult admonishing a child—as though he were an ignorant amateur meddling in a professional’s business.
    Stiyl spat out his now-short cigarette and crushed it with his foot.
    “The techniques written in the
Book of the Law
are simply too powerful—it’s said that using them would declare the end of the entire Crossist-dominated world. It has a pretty interesting history. We don’t even
want
to confirm whether it’s truth or fiction—if it’s sealed up, then obviously we’d rather leave it alone. After all, according to one theory, it lets you use angelic techniques beyond the comprehension of man.”
    Kamijou froze upon hearing those words.
    “An…angelic?”
    “Yes? Perhaps that’s a little fanciful for an unbeliever like you to imagine.”
    Stiyl sounded like he was ridiculing him, but he was wrong.
    Kamijou knew. He knew the meaning behind the word
angel
. He knew what the angel called Power of God had done. That spell it had used on one seashore that summer night—the one that had instantly covered the entire sky in a vortex of enormous magic circles. He knew of the “miracle” that could reduce half the world to ashes. And even that was probably nothing more than a fraction of the kind of techniques angels used.
    Giving that to a person, to be used at will?
    He gulped. “But…still, if nobody’s ever decoded it before, then it might not even be real,” he said.
    Index’s head bobbed up and down. “Yep. But when it comes to the
Book of the Law
, it probably
is
, Touma. The sorcerer who strove to pen it is legendary at this point. It’s so high-level it could even appear in the New Testament. He was only active around seventy years ago, but it wouldn’t be going too far to say he rewrote whole millennia of sorcerous history. About twenty percent of sorcerers in today’sworld are his followers and imitators. And something like
fifty
percent of them are affected by him in some way. He was the real deal.” Her words were serious, and Kamijou found himself unable to carelessly get a word in. “I think the
Book of the Law
is real. I wouldn’t even be surprised if it was even crazier than the rumors, either.”
    A few sisters in black ran by them.
    After a few seconds, Kamijou finally spoke up. “Umm…Who is
he
?”
    “Edward Alexander. He’s also known as Crowley. He’s buried in a graveyard in the English countryside now.” Stiyl lit a new cigarette. “In a word, he is recorded as the
worst
human in history. In one experiment during his travels, he used his wife, who had been traveling around the world with him, as a vessel so he could contact the guardian angel Aiwass. And when his daughter Lilith died, he used her to construct a theory of magic without twitching an eyebrow. And he apparently sacrificed girls the same age as his daughter in
that
experiment…However, his accomplishments
did
lead to new definitions of other worlds—overlapping planes in different layers than our world, such as the celestial and demonic planes—and revolutionized sorcery at the time.”
    Stiyl adjusted his position because the wind had changed direction. It looked like he didn’t want the smoke to go toward Index, but instead it ended up coming straight to Kamijou. He coughed hard, and Stiyl gave a truly evil smile, bellowing smoke out of his mouth like a fire-breathing monster. “Well, the many stories about him, good and bad, just and evil, big and small, are well-known to sorcerers. It’s the same for the
Book of the Law
. When he lost his way, he would perform bibliomancy with the
Book of the Law
and choose his original path from its contents. In other words, it has the turning points of the world’s greatest sorcerer—it is a grimoire holding the reins of modern western magic history as a whole. It would be wise to consider that it has quite