icians.

Still, she managed to keep the conversation going.

“If that’s true, if you keep your feet off the ground...”

“He won’t know where I am. We just have to stay in the water or on this boat.”

Of course, it would all be for naught if the High Priest actually saw them, but they could at least escape his radar or GPS-like search.

(Of course, this is all assuming it isn’t just an act, waiting for us to reach the wrong conclusion and leave an opening.)

He could not completely deny that possibility.

He would remain cautious, but he felt it was unlikely.

He thought back to the Othinus incident. If the High Priest was a true Magic God, Kamijou doubted he would put together that kind of trick against a lowly human. He would use every means available to him and crush his enemy with overwhelming force. They were called gods because they could do that.

“The High Priest is... Good. It looks like I was right.”

Kamijou poked just his head above the edge of the work ship to check.

It also looked like they could deal with the acrobike’s battery. The ship’s workers had been taken aback by their sudden appearance, but Kamijou had bowed down and gotten permission to use one of the ship’s power plugs.

The workers seemed to think they were from an extreme video site. They had received a quick lecture, but it was not being treated as a crime.

(We finally have time to think.)

Kamijou sat exhausted on the deck.

This could be the beginning of shifting from passive to active, from escape to counterattack, and from going with the flow to altering the rails of destiny themselves.

(And I can think over everything again.)

He shut his eyes and went back over everything that had happened.

The mummy High Priest had accurately pursued an acrobike as it fled as quickly as a car, he had wielded giant arms of dirt and mud, he had attacked with high-rise buildings filled with innocent people, and he had crushed a tunnel with dirt as he approached. He was a frightening opponent who did everything on an extraordinary scale and could fill Academy City with destruction if not dealt with.

But...

(I’m not afraid of you.)

Kamijou Touma opened his eyes and confidently reached his conclusion.

(This isn’t like with Othinus. Back then, I felt like countless fish hooks were caught in my soul and dragging it from my body and I felt like my very existence was being torn away, but I don’t sense that madness from you!!)

Part 10

Misaka Mikoto slowly exhaled on the work ship.

It did not matter that it was temporary. They had at least managed to escape the High Priest’s pursuit and they had time to think things over.

But thinking was not always helpful.

(...)

Everything she had been trying not to think about swelled up inside her chest. Losing herself in that work had stopped these negative thoughts, but they had started up again.

She could not put it in words.

If she did, she would be forced to face her own ugliness.

She shook her head and forced down the phrase that was rising from her throat.

She then turned to Kamijou.

“H-hey, let’s talk about what exactly we’re going to-...”

That was when she saw it.

She saw a woman whose chocolate-colored skin was hidden only by bandages and a girl with pale skin who wore a mini China dress.

Those women had appeared, sitting on either side of the pointy-haired boy.

Mikoto’s mouth flapped opened and closed, but the women did not seem to care.

They leaned in on Kamijou from either side and each grabbed one of his hands.

They then pressed those hands against their soft chests.

“Oh, dear. Not even Imagine Breaker is enough. I had thought I would retrieve my original power if the spell inside me was broken, but that power seems to have already completely disappeared. I suppose even this power can’t remake an object that was burnt to ashes by a magical fire. ...Niang-Niang, what are you doing?”

“What do you mean, Nephthys? I’m trying Imagine Breaker on myself just like you.”

historical

“Then why are you using his left hand? It’s only in his right.”

“Oh, I thought any body part worked as long as you touched your breasts with it.”

“Niang-Niang, that’s completely backwards.”

Something burst from Mikoto’s temple.

If she had to say what irritated her the most, it was how the pointy-haired boy did nothing to stop the sudden situation.

“What. Do. You. Think. You’re-...!!!???”

She never finished her furious shout.

Before she could, Niang-Niang (who was still meaninglessly pressing Kamijou Touma’s left hand to her flat chest) pointed her baggy sleeve toward Mikoto in annoyance.

That was all she did.

A thick blade shot from her sleeve and mercilessly stabbed into the center of Mikoto’s chest.

“Wha-?”

She had no idea what this meant.

She was filled with confusion.

“Ah?”

The first thing to pierce into the girl’s chest looked like a crescent-shaped blade on the end of a spear.

But that was not the only one. Now that Mikoto was pinned in place, a great number of weapons shot out to tear, pierce, and slice through every part of her body.

A frenzied rush of dull sounds continued for some time.

She felt no pain and she shed no blood, but she felt dizzy at the definite fact that she had been “stabbed”. This was not a mental manipulation like the #5 used. This was physically happening. Dark unease oozed out from the depths of her mind and quickly spread to every corner of her brain.

The result had already arrived, but it was such an extreme situation that the physical phenomena could not keep up.

It was just like a shockwave reaching the surroundings only after an object had moved at supersonic speeds. It was like the rumble of thunder arriving only a few seconds after the flash of lightning.

So once the situation caught up, would she already be...?

“Misaka!!”

That was when the pointy-haired boy swung his right hand around. He swept aside the countless weapons connecting the China dress’s sleeve to Mikoto’s upper body. Every last one of the weapons was thoroughly destroyed like fragile glass.

To protect her now that she was freed, Kamijou stepped forward to hold back the brown bandaged women and the pale mini-China dress girl.

(What...?)

Mikoto ran her hands along her entirely unharmed body.

(What was that!?)

“Ahh, ahh. It’s no use thinking about it too much. Destroying them all at once like Kamijou Touma did is the best plan.”

The mini China dress girl giggled.

She did not seem bothered that her weapons had been destroyed.

“After all, each and every one of my Pao-Pei has a different effect. If I release them all at once like that, you can’t exactly sit around analyzing each one, now can you?”

“Pao...?”

“Ah ha ha. Sorry. I guess using my own terminology would leave you confused, wouldn’t it? They aren’t from any religious or historical texts. Instead, they’re the weapons used by the sages in an ancient Chinese novel, but there are plenty of similar things lying around. For example, the sages would have a fake funeral to cut their ties to their earthly life and they would place their own staff in the coffin in their place. My country is filled with tools that have no official origin. There are over one hundred legendary foods that supposedly make you immortal if you eat them. When you have so much stuff, you have to categorize them and manage them all, so I just wanted a convenient name and category.”

“Niang-Niang, I don’t think that’s what they were surprised about.”

“Neh? Then what were those shocked looks for???”

To Kamijou, that puzzled atmosphere felt like a different sort of pressure from any of his previous powerful foes.

“What are you two?”

He stayed in front of Mikoto as he asked, but neither of them bothered getting up as they calmly answered.

“I’m Nephthys and this is Niang-Niang.”

“You can think of us as the High Priest’s partners, Kamijou-chan.”

Part 11

The High Priest’s partners.

The true Gremlin.

Magic Gods on the same level as Othinus.

That was enough for Kamijou to feel dizzy. Their hands were already more than full with the High Priest. They had been about to start a discussion to find a possible way to defeat him if one existed at all, but now the number of Magic Gods had increased. And not just by one, but by two.

Based on what the High Priest had said and done, Kamijou assumed they could not freely add in a new phase to the world like Othinus had done at full power. Still, there were three of them now. Without even thinking about phases, wasn’t that enough of a force to split the planet in two with brute strength?

On top of that, they were on the same level as the High Priest, but they were not complete copies of him and all his characteristics. He would have to redo everything from the beginning. He would have to analyze what Nephthys and Niang-Niang used as Magic Gods and find a weakness in it. And there was always a chance the High Priest would go on a rampage and fill Academy City with destruction in the meantime.

He was shorthanded. His mental resources were nearly overloaded.

He had no idea where to even begin.

“You don’t have to worry.”

The brown-skinned bandage-wearing Nephthys laughed.

“We aren’t thinking about destroying Academy City right this instant or anything. Didn’t the High Priest tell you what the true Gremlin wants?”

“You mean that stuff about having me score the distortions and destiny created when you Magic Gods fight over resources? And in exchange for a guaranteed wish or prayer. You aren’t interested in world domination or wiping out the human race. You just want to give me those special privileges for some nonsensical peace of mind!”

“Are you prepared to give us your answer?”

Kamijou wondered what would happen if he was not prepared.

Would they use the High Priest’s strategy and spread destruction until he changed his mind?

He tensed at that thought, but Niang-Niang shrugged and cut into the conversation.

“C’moooon. You don’t have to look so horrified. Huh? Nephthys, do you think maybe the High Priest scared him a little too much???”

“Well, he is the type that lets the blood rush to his head and ruins the plan he was working on five seconds before, so it isn’t that surprising. He really does like making his own convenient interpretations of impermanence and inevitable decline.”

“What are you...talking about?”

“Sorry if we scared you, boy.”

Nephthys pressed her index finger against her slender chin without looking remotely troubled.

“But we have no intention of starting any kind of trouble in Academy City...or in this world at all.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“Because we have no reason to.”

She said it so readily.

“I can’t speak for the other Magic God, but I quite like Academy City. Even as one of the lives crawling along the ground, you dream of the stars in the night sky and draw up diagrams for them all. You’ve even reached the level of building a mass driver and landing an unmanned probe on a comet by matching its one hundred thousand kph relative speed.”

She removed her fingertip from her brown chin and casually reached her hand toward the sun in the blue sky.

“The stars can be plucked from the sky so easily, so why are you so desperate to reach them? It’s not even remotely logical, but humans are creatures filled with that sort of passion, aren’t they? That movement of your hearts is the one thing I’m honestly jealous of.”

Niang-Niang was struggling not to laugh as she listened in.

“Neeephthyyys, you’re really, really looking down on them.”

“Oh, dear. But my experience tells me this leaves them with a more favorable impression of me.”

“Well, we are gods. It’s true people expect us to crush them underfoot instead of lowering ourselves to their level.”

Kamijou and Mikoto were right in front of them, but neither Nephthys nor Niang-Niang paid them much attention. There was a powerful division between them like with a waiter in the middle of a party.

“I got off topic, didn’t I?”

“Why are you even here?”

“Didn’t you hear from the High Priest? Thanks to ‘him’, we’re weakened at the moment. We had hoped your Imagine Breaker could do something about that, but it didn’t work. Not that it really matters.”

“We’re not the ones this is a real problem for. I just can’t figure out what ‘he’ was thinking by dragging us into the real world in this incomplete state. You could say we’re in a state where we can destroy the world but lack the strength to recreate it afterwards.”

“...!?”

“Niang-Niang.”

“Ah ha ha! Sorry, sorry. You sure were traumatized by that business with Othinus, Kamijou-chan!!”

Niang-Niang held her small belly with her baggy sleeves and burst out laughing with tears in her eyes. Nephthys could only sigh in exasperation.

“Sorry about making fun of you. At any rate, we’ll deal with our first goal on our own, but I suppose we do have a second goal we could use your help with.”

“I won’t become your scorer. I’m sick of thinking about turning the human race into tropical fish for something as ridiculous as ‘peace of mind’. I have no interest in making any wishes or prayers.”

“That can wait until another time.” Nephthys laughed. “The current issue is the High Priest.”

“The High Priest?”

“Even you can tell he’s on a complete rampage, can’t you? But that doesn’t represent the overall will of the true Gremlin. We can’t have you thinking we’re all like that.”

“Th-then...”

Hesitantly, Mikoto finally spoke up from behind Kamijou.

“Why can’t you deal with him? You know that weird old man, right? Then you go capture him and leave!”

Nephthys and Niang-Niang’s response was incredibly simple.

They acted like Academy City’s #3 was not even there.

“We want you to stop the High Priest, so we’ll give you the information you need. But don’t expect us to do anything directly.”

“Wait...”

Kamijou cut in without thinking.

Mikoto was still so shocked she did not have it in her to speak again.

But the two Magic Gods did not seem to mind very much.

“Well, if you tell us to do it, we will. But only if we receive that prayer from our cute little Kamijou-chan. Of course, that would end up with at least Academy City...no, this entire archipelago at the bottom of the sea. You know why, don’t you? A fight between us and the High Priest would be a battle between Magic Gods.”

“Wait.”

The two Magic Gods were entirely cheerful.

They sounded just like someone speaking to a friend in class.

But that was exactly why each and every word caused Mikoto to shrink down.

They felt like physical blows to the girl who was left all alone.

The two Magic Gods were cruelly erasing her presence from their mind and acting like she was not there.

“I said wait, Nephthys!!”

The next thing he knew, Kamijou had grabbed the bandages corresponding to the brown woman’s collar.

What would happen if he made a single mistake against a Magic God? Even that concern had been knocked from his mind.

“Oh, dear.”

He glared at her from close range, but Nephthys’s expression did not change.

Kamijou Touma felt a strange prickling surround him, as if something invisible were stabbing into his skin.

Still, he did not back down.

He had no reason to do so.

“What will you do?”

A teasing voice cut in from the side. Niang-Niang hid her mouth behind a baggy sleeve and a bewitching smile filled her eyes.

“Of course, it doesn’t matter to us if you say you don’t want any divine advice. If you want to do it all on your own, go right ahead. But can you really manage that? You don’t even know the basic structure of the High Priest’s mummy body.”

“...”

Kamijou could not answer.

A silent confrontation between human and Magic God continued for a while.

“Fine, then.”

Misaka Mikoto was the one who finally spoke up.

The Magic Gods had not been counting her as part of the conversation, so she spoke to Kamijou.

“Let’s use everything available to us. This is no time to be picky.”

“Misaka...”

“But we’ll outdo them in the end. We can put up with it if we assume that. So let’s keep the conversation going. If the High Priest interrupted now after all this, it would make me wonder what we were doing this whole time.”

He looked like he had just bitten into something bitter, but Kamijou finally let go of Nephthys’s collar.

He would respect her decision, but his expression made it clear he did not like it.

Meanwhile, Nephthys’s expression remained unchanged. She had no reason to change it.

“You don’t like it, but you can’t refuse us, can you?”

“What of it?”

“You have always been greedy when it comes to victory, so you tend to use any means available to you. And right now you have someone behind you to protect. You would never worry about appearances here.”

Nephthys laughed as she continued.

“Now, how about we celebrate our common goal by talking about the High Priest?”

Part 12

It was a carefree scene.

The purple-robed High Priest used his golden sword as a staff to walk along the river.

He did not use a people-clearing field to hide himself.

He did not try to conceal the existence of magic.

He held the position of a Magic God, his presence destroyed the many bonds tying one to the world, and yet his living mummy body shattered everyone’s common sense simply by breathing. But he gave no thought to any of that. If any problems occurred, he could crush them with his strength and none of the beings living in this world could stop him. His entire body was overflowing with that pride.

“Now, where did they get off to?”

Was there really any meaning in the words he spoke?

When it came down to it, a Magic God like him had no real reason why he had to settle things with Kamijou Touma right away. His mummy body would continue to function indefinitely. Just as Othinus had lived a long, long mind-numbing amount of time to find someone who understood her, it did not entirely matter to him as long as it was all resolved in the very end. Of course, he was nothing but a disaster to those who only had a one hundred year lifespan and were being constantly targeted in this normal world. In other words, the wait may have been the most frightening part.

Kamijou and Mikoto had been desperate to escape the immediate threat, but it may have been even more frightening for him to be out of sight.

But as his pride was based in actual strength, the High Priest was not a patient person. Instead of dangling a line in the water and enjoying a relaxing time fishing, he would swallow up all of the lake’s water and grab the fish from the dried lake bottom. That was a Magic God.

After his walk, he suddenly looked up.

He turned in a certain direction and he smiled.

“Ho ho. Looks like they’re doing something interesting over there.”

Part 13

“As you know...or maybe you don’t, but the High Priest is a Magic God from Buddhism.”

On the work ship, Nephthys began with that.

“Specifically, from the unique Japanese variety that went through a number of changes after its origin in India and its passage through China and Korea. Now, Kamijou-chan, are you familiar with self-mummification?”

“?”

“Nephthyyys, you’re skipping a step in your explanation,” cut in Niang-Niang. “In Japanese Buddhism, you can’t achieve enlightenment and travel to the Pure Land in a single life, no matter how much you train. It has nothing to do with your social status. By being reborn again and again and going through harsh training each time, you slowwwwly polish your soul and only liberate yourself from your worldly desires in the very, very end. That’s when you become a Buddha. Or that’s the normal route, anyway.”

“There is a way of becoming a Buddha in the limited few decades of a single life and that is self-mummification.”

Were they saying the High Priest had performed that self-mummification ceremony and become a Magic God?

But what exactly did that ceremony entail?

“The process itself is simple. You can tell from his body, right?”

“It’s basically the Japanese version of a mummy. And strangely, they don’t even remove the blood or organs. They only close themselves in a dark room and dry up. Speaking as the Egyptian version, it makes me worry they would rot from the inside before drying out.”

That surprised Kamijou.

It was true the High Priest did not look normal, but it was still a shock to have it confirmed by someone else.

“Then he was killed in order to artificially create a Magic God!?”

“Don’t be silly. He closed himself in the underground room and chose to starve to death. It wouldn’t be ‘self’-mummification otherwise.”

Niang-Niang’s nonchalant comment left Kamijou even more dumbfounded.

Nephthys did not seem to want to stick on any one point, so she continued on to the next one.

“That’s why he has a connection to dirt. In self-mummification, the priest wanting to rid himself of worldly desires closes himself in an underground room, essentially burying himself alive, and continues forming mudra and chanting sutra to the end. That creates the mummy. What seeped from his corpse as he dried filled the surrounding dirt and created a connection there.”

“All around the world, people think of the heavenly gods being up in the sky and the sinners being below the earth, but not many cultures view dirt itself as unclean. Take Japan’s Shinto for example. But Shinto and Buddhism have mixed and contaminated each other, so that influenced the High Priest, too.”

The dirt.

The underworld.

A Magic God who could draw out and control the space that had starved him to death.

“Why did he...?”

“?”

“Why did he go that far?”

This had nothing to do with strategizing.

It was an honest question.

Nephthys replied as if it was nothing.

“Isn’t that obvious? The only reason any priest aims to rid himself of his worldly desires is to save the people. In other words, he wanted to save the entire world.”

“Wha-...?”

“Ah ha ha! Pretty much all of the Magic Gods are the same, y’know? But the salvation our overwhelming power brought was twisted. Or I guess you could say salvation from an individual is no different from an absolute dictatorship. Then again, the High Priest’s story may be one of the worst.”

“Didn’t you find it odd?” asked Nephthys like this was nothing more than gossip. “There are a few peculiar aspects about the High Priest’s outfit: his purple robe, the glittering golden ornaments, the collar rising like flames, and the sword made of pure gold.”

“What about it?”

“But he has never once swung that sword, has he?”

Now that it had been pointed out to him, Kamijou realized it was true.

The High Priest had made giant arms of dirt and mud, swung buildings around, and crushed an underground tunnel. Kamijou had been distracted by the great impact of those actions, but the High Priest had never used that obvious weapon of his.

“They’re all burial accessories modeled after the Buddhist deity Acala, but they don’t represent his own choices. After he died, a faction that did not want him to become a Buddha sabotaged his attempt. No one adorned with those treasures could have abandoned their desire, so no one would think he could have achieved enlightenment. It was basically a blatant negative campaign against him.”

“Kee hee hee. In other words, he has the body of a Buddha but wasn’t given the position of a Buddha, so you could call him a wandering Buddha.”

“In polytheistic religions, every god is given a name and a role. The gears of the giant system known as mythology can start turning as long as they have those two things. But the High Priest has neither.”

“He’s a Buddha with no name besides ‘High Priest’. He’s a dangerous gear that can appear anywhere inside an already full box. And worst of all, he still fully intends to save the people.”

“He concluded that what happened to him was ‘the desire of the people’, so he believes he can save the world by acting as someone who could not abandon his petty desires and thus became a Buddha without a role.”

Hearing it was enough to make Kamijou feel faint.

He had run across quite a few magicians in the past and they had all had their unique issues.

But the High Priest was somehow different.

The other magicians had done what they did because something had ended or because they feared something would end, but the High Priest was much more rotten.

He was like a dried and eternally preserved mummy.

Everyone else was working out of fear that their HP would drop to zero, but his alone had already reached negative numbers yet he was still laughing.

“So you can’t convince him to stop.”

Nephthys provided that simple conclusion and her tone made it clear that was not uncommon for someone with that kind of past.

“After all, he’s rotted so much, but he’s perfectly satisfied with where he is ‘now’. If the emperor of the Emperor’s New Clothes was proud of being naked, then there would be no stopping him with words, right?”

“Ah ha ha!! Neeephthyyys! That doesn’t sound very convincing coming from someone who’s naked except for some bandages!”

“You aren’t any better since you don’t wear any underwear.”

As they spoke back and forth, the two Magic Gods slowly stood up from the ship’s deck.

“Well, despite what I said, if you really don’t have enough strength, call our names. If you give an appropriate sacrifice, we can restrain the High Priest in a direct confrontation between Magic Gods.”

Nephthys laughed.

“That wouldn’t be all that interesting a conclusion, but I suppose it would be somewhat entertaining. After all, it would mean you had accepted the value of a Magic God’s power.”

She held her slender brown hand out to Kamijou.

He could do it now if he wanted.

If he gave up here, she would easily end this incident.

And he would get a taste of cheating.

Once he knew how easy it was, he would feel foolish for ever working at it the old-fashioned way.

That was all it would take to save everyo-->>

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