Read A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 7 for Free Online

up, too, but I can’t change the command I left for him at this point. I had wanted to meet up with him before the Roman Orthodox contact arrived, but…”
    As Stiyl spoke, a figure appeared in one of the opened entrances to the great hall.
    “…unfortunately, it looks like we, too, don’t have to wait for him before starting.”
    The figure was their contact from the Roman Orthodox Church.
4
    “I feel like I’ve been leaving the city a lot lately…It’d be nice if I could just relax and do some sightseeing,” muttered Kamijou as he walked down a road along the outer wall of Academy City. The outer wall was more than five meters high and three meters thick.
    Still, I guess security’s lax because we’re in the middle of setting up for the Daihasei Festival.
    He shot a glance over his shoulder at the entrance, now far behind him. The preparations were as large as the festival itself, with 2.3 million people participating, in addition to a lot of tradespeople from outside the city. Normally Academy City’s security was tight, but with the current situation, they had no choice but to loosen it. He had exit papers, but he felt like they hadn’t checked them as carefully as they usually did.
    And so, with a little of this and a little of that, he left the cat with Maika Tsuchimikado and walked out of the city.
    He checked his watch—it was past six. There was still almost an hour before the appointed time.
    The Hakumeiza theater in question gave him a lot of trouble finding it. The names of abandoned buildings weren’t included on his cell phone’s GPS map. It made Kamijou think they were too quick to update. He had considered picking up a “slow-to-update,” faded Tokyo sightseeing guidebook on a convenience store shelf, but when he checked his pocket, his wallet wasn’t there. When he realized he must have forgotten it in his room because he’d left the city right after talking to Maika, he opened his eyes wide enough to cause the clerk to draw back a bit and decided to read it in the store.
    Umm
…
So I take that street, then cross the big road over there
…
Ugh! I-I feel like I’m about to forget where it is. Man, Index has got some brain up there
…
    Lost in thought, he saw a bus stop nearby. The Hakumeiza building site he was going to meet them at was about one kilometer away. He would have liked to take a nice, air-conditioned bus, considering he was exhausted after school, but unfortunately, he had no money.
    Damn it
…
! Ah, doesn’t matter if it’s a bus or not—I just want to get somewhere air-conditioned.
    The bus stop was small, with only two benches and an overhang to keep out rain. It looked like it was deteriorating, though—the plastic roof had all kinds of cracks in it.
    Then, he noticed someone at the bus stop.
    She looked like a foreigner—a woman about the same height as him. She was staring at the timetable signboard from super close, like she was about to devour the whole thing. From the way she was completely frozen like that, he considered she might not know how to read it.
    And her clothing—what was she thinking in this heat?—was a jet-black habit, including, of course, long sleeves and a long skirt. Upon closer inspection, he saw lines of silver fasteners both around her shoulders and twenty centimeters above her knees, so she must have been able to take off both her sleeves and long skirt—but like an idiot, she was in full sister garb. She had a thin white glove on each hand, and he couldn’t see her hair. Her hood was different from the kind Index wore; it was a wimple that completely hid her hair and everything on her head but her face. By how easily the single piece of cloth concealed her hair, she probably had it cut short.
    He gave her a sidelong glance and thought,
Hmm, it’s a sister
…
It couldn’t be some maniacal nun who Index knows, could it?
    This was a bias that nuns throughout the world probably vehemently objected to, but Kamijou had run into all