Accel World - Volume 10 - Chapter 1.5

5

Aqua: water.

Current: flow.

The name given to a Burst Linker often expressed the special characteristics of an avatar’s appearance, but Haruyuki couldn’t help thinking examples this straightforward were rare.

He had no sooner descended to stand on the stage as the silver-winged avatar Silver Crow when his eyes caught next to him a slender figure, unremarkable in terms of silhouette. Maybe a little taller than Crow. Sleek arms and legs, nothing resembling a weapon on the torso. Or perhaps, it could be said that the entire body featured special equipment.

From the top of her head to the tips of her toes, Aqua Current was completely wrapped in a layer of fast-flowing water. The liquid that soundlessly flowed from shoulder to hand, from chest to hips to feet, became thin cables of water at her digits and then rose up, carving out large arcs to the rear to envelop the avatar from the back of the head once more. Simply put, Curren’s armor was water itself, flowing in an eternal loop.

Although the water was probably only two or three centimeters deep, no matter how he strained his eyes, he couldn’t manage to see through to the avatar body beneath it. In the greenish ambient light of the Corrosive Forest stage, the water glittered a faint green. It really was just as Takumu said: Aqua Current was the color of water, but no single color. And from the physique, it was hard to tell whether the avatar was a male or female type.

Haruyuki observed this much in the two seconds or so before Curren said in a low voice, “Approximately two minutes until contact. The enemy tag team is coming south from Ochanomizu Station on Meidai Street.” Her voice also didn’t offer any hint about gender due to the strong filter effect. Plus, the slightly stilted way of speaking of the real-world Aqua Current had disappeared. If he hadn’t slammed right into her in front of the washrooms in an accidental real attack, he wouldn’t have had a single reason to suspect that Curren was a girl.

Haruyuki nodded. “O-okay. They’re coming straight at us, aren’t they?” As he switched mental gears, he stared at the light blue triangle in the center of his field of view, the guide cursor.

At that moment, they were standing above an enormous tree that was once the large bookstore on the southwest corner of the Suruga Daishita intersection in Jimbocho. He called it a tree, but unlike the powerful broad-leafed trees of the Primeval Forest stage, it was an ill-formed silhouette, thin branches stretching out apologetically from a half-rotted trunk.

The intersection far below was large—the place where the east-west Yasukuni Street crossed the north-south Meidai Street—but the ground was 80 percent covered by an odious, viscous purple fluid that burped up bubbles from time to time. A poison bog. The Corrosive Forest stage had the very irritating feature of eating up your health gauge if you so much as set foot in one of its poisonous bog zones.

Since it was a tag-team fight, there were two guide cursors, but they were basically on top of each other as they pointed north. Their opponents were probably coming south in a straight line down the gentle slope of Meidai Street from Ochanomizu. A sickly baobab-like tree was in the way, so he couldn’t see them, but the singular direction of the team seemed to indicate that they were coming in a dash, roughly avoiding the poison bogs but not worrying too much about it. One of the two opposing team health gauges in the upper right of his view was dropping slightly, in tiny increments.

“I-it really is like a head-on fight, huh?” he murmured, and finally checked his opponents’ names. The level four was Nickel Doll; the level three was Sand Duct. He had never seen either of them before.

He figured the basic idea here was that they would first take advantage of their position high up to gather information or use it for a surprise attack, but then Curren spoke and upended this theory.

“We’ll go down.”

“O-okay.” He followed her, unable to disagree.

Given that they had been on the seventh floor of a building, it looked to be more than twenty meters from the top of the tree to the surface of the ground, but the water-covered avatar moved casually forward and “flowed” down, as if perfectly adhered to the side of the vertical trunk. After watching for a moment with wide eyes, Haruyuki hurriedly stepped out into the air himself.

His special-attack gauge was at zero, so he couldn’t fly, but if he spread his wings, it was possible for him to glide. He descended, carving out a spiral in the air, and reached the ground at basically the same time as Curren. He selected a place free of poison bog to set his feet down.

Turning his face toward the upward slope of Meidai Street, it wasn’t even ten seconds before he heard the sound of weighty footsteps. It appeared that at least one of their opponents was fairly heavyweight. But for some reason, he didn’t hear a second set of footfalls, even though both guide cursors were pointing in the same direction.

He learned the reason for that soon enough.

From behind a rotting baobab that was once a sporting goods store, the super-large avatar he had been expecting came flying out, nearly two meters tall, with a super-tiny avatar perched neatly on his left shoulder.

“Sorry to keep you waaaaaaiting!” the one on the shoulder cried out in the voice of an adorable little girl. She was just barely a meter tall. Her body was a fairly whitish silver, and while her armor didn’t have quite the mirror finish of Silver Crow’s, the green light of the stage still reflected off it neatly. With her long hair parts and the armor skirt that flared out around her, she was basically a doll. There was no doubt that this was the level-four Nickel Doll.

The silver doll waited a second after her initial shout before continuing in a slightly dissatisfied tone. “Or that’s what I’d like to say, buuuuut! You’re the ones who barged in on us, and then you wait for us to move. It’s totally nooooo fair! I mean, you just wasted two whole minutes here!”

“I-I’m sorry…I’m not used to the terrain around here, so…,” Haruyuki apologized unconsciously, rubbing the back of his head with one hand.

The giant that served as the doll’s perch laughed ponderously. “Hmph! Apologies aren’t gonna cut it. While you were standing around scratching your butts, we were building up our object destruction bonuses.”

“Urk!” Hurriedly looking up at the enemy gauges, Haruyuki saw their blue special-attack gauges had indeed reached almost 30 percent full without his noticing. That was a big advantage.

The giant, the level-three Sand Duct, wore rough armor the color of sand, just like his name. Haruyuki’s eyes were immediately drawn to the square holes on the tops of both wrists. If those were air ducts as the avatar name implied, then they probably had the ability to either produce or suck air. Either way, he needed to be careful.

As he carved this into his mind, Curren had come to stand behind him at some point. “I’ll take Duct,” she said quietly. “You get Doll. She generates an electric current with her hands. Be careful you don’t get caught in it.”

“Aaaah! You’re giving him spoilers!” Curren’s voice should have been too quiet to be heard by their enemies, but the sharp-eared Nickel Doll erupted in indignation.

“As expected of the bouncer.” The foundation beneath her, Sand Duct, heavily raised his massive right arm. “You’ve got info if nothing else. Sorry, but we’ll have to break up your little strategy time now.”

Krrrr. A low rumbling. Immediately after, Haruyuki thought he felt air blowing out at them.

“Sand Blast!!” As the giant roared the name of the technique, a sandy vortex of wind shot out of the air duct of his right hand. Although Haruyuki leapt immediately to the right, he had to be careful of the poison bog, and he was a little slow off the line. His left arm was momentarily swallowed up to the elbow by the vortex.

“Aaah! Hot!” Assaulted by the sensation of being stabbed with countless needles, he cried out, unable to stand it. When he finally freed his arm from the wind, part of the shining mirrored surface was clouded over, as if worked over by fine sandpaper. The wind probably included fine sand particles, which could damage even the metallic armor of a metal color. In that instant, his health gauge was cut down 3 percent or so.

Wondering if Aqua Current, behind him and off to one side, had managed to make it into the clear, he turned his gaze in that direction—only to cry out again in surprise. “Huh?”

Although Curren had adopted a defensive stance with both arms crossed, she was simply standing upright in the middle of the sandstorm. But her health gauge wasn’t moving a pixel. He looked more closely and saw that the sand particles, the source of damage in Sand Duct’s technique, were swallowed up by the water flowing over and simply cycled around, never reaching the main body of the avatar.

When the giant’s special-attack gauge was finally exhausted and the sandstorm stopped, Curren dropped her arms as if nothing had happened. “Particle-type attacks don’t work on me,” she said. “You can have it back.”

She casually raised her right hand, and the sand particles in her water armor concentrated there. When she abruptly dropped her hand, sandy water formed a slender lance and flew from her fingertips toward Sand Duct’s shoulder, where Nickel Doll was sitting.

“Eeeek!” Cute up to the last moment—or maybe she deliberately yelped adorably—Doll leapt down from Duct’s shoulder. A second and then a third sand lance targeted the tiny avatar. Screaming “Ah!” and “Heeey!” Doll dodged them with a surprising nimbleness and bounced around the islands of ground in the poison bog.

Haruyuki watched in mute amazement and then suddenly gasped. Curren was deliberately limiting the range of her attack in order to separate the enemy tag team. Which meant that his job was to follow up on the attack on Doll.

I can kick and cry, but that won’t fix anything. Forget that you only have seven points left, and fight with everything you’ve got. Just like always, duel with all your might.

“Aaaaah!” he shouted, and dashed fiercely toward Nickel Doll, fifteen meters ahead of him. He kept his eyes laser-focused on his nemesis, careful not to touch the poison ground. To his left, Curren had also closed in on Sand Duct and started fighting hand-to-hand.

Abruptly, from the sky above, the cheers of dozens of people rained down on them. The Gallery. It was basic etiquette that duel spectators not shout out during the back-and-forth between the duelers before the real fight began, so they had probably been holding back until that moment. In among the cheering voices, he could hear shouts of “Crooow!” and “Flyyyy!” It seemed people knew him even here in Jimbocho, far from his home of Suginami.

As if spurred on by those cries, Haruyuki launched a right roundhouse kick as soon as he landed on the island where Nickel Doll was waiting for him. “Yah!”

The barely meter-high doll avatar crouched down and dodged the kick. But having anticipated this, Haruyuki changed the trajectory of his kick in midair to lead into a downward heel drop. Doll tried to dodge this as well, rather spectacularly, but the attack caught the right edge of the armor skirt spread out around her, and her health gauge dropped with a show of dazzling sparks characteristic of each of their metal colors.

“How mean!” She sounded very much like a game character Haruyuki had liked a long time ago, and he had never really been able to handle anyone yelling at him like that, but he was in no position to falter now. His opponent was level four, after all. A warrior who had overcome what his teacher Kuroyukihime called the “first wall.”

“I’m sorry!” Even as he apologized, he continued his relentless rush with both hands and both feet. Silver Crow had no particular attacks other than the wings on his back, but he had learned over the last two weeks that with the speed he gained from his light weight, his hands and feet, covered in hard armor, were actually impressive weapons.

That said, Nickel Doll was exactly the same: small, lightweight, and made of metal armor. Although he sent magnificent sparks scattering with a glancing attack from time to time, the damage wasn’t anything to speak of. If he didn’t throw his all into some move, he really couldn’t hope for a clean hit. The moment this thought crossed his mind, Nickel Doll leapt at him, as if seeing his panic. Her slender left hand neatly caught hold of his right, and her right his left.

Too easy! I still have my head butt! He started to counter with his head wrapped in its tough armor, but just as he was on the verge of letting fly, Curren’s voice came back to life in his ears.

Electric current from her hands…

“Ngh!!” He immediately canceled his head butt and threw everything he had into a backward leap. At almost the same time as his hands pulled away from hers, a fierce spark jetted out of the round parts visible in the center of her palms. He felt the faintest electric shock, and a momentary jolt raced through his body.

Checking that the hit to his health gauge was kept under 5 percent this time, Haruyuki touched down on the neighboring tiny island. “That was close,” he muttered to himself.

“Awww!” Doll began to scream, stomping her feet in adorable frustration. “No fair running away! I was all set to give you such a tight, shocking hug!”

“I-I’ll pass, thanks!” He shook his head back and forth, and checked both of their health gauges again. Haruyuki still had 90 percent left, and Doll had dropped to about 80 percent. Sand Duct, fighting off to the side, was also around 80 percent, while Aqua Current basically had a full tank. He deeply wanted to watch the legendary bodyguard in action, but at that moment, he needed to focus on the enemy before him.

Nickel Doll swung her silver ringlets and snorted. But then a coquettish smile rose up on her small face mask. “Heeeey? You’re him, aren’t you? That flying avatar who showed up in Shinjuku recently.”

“Y-yeah, well…” His guard up, Haruyuki nodded.

The avatar, so like a silver Western-style doll, smiled even more alluringly. “Why are you teamed up with the bouncer? Are you maybe in some trouble points-wise? Then, look—how about you join us? If you do, I’ll lend you however many points you neeeed.”

“What?!” Haruyuki unconsciously stiffened, and Doll jumped, skirt fluttering, moving to the island he was on.

“And look, we’ve even got the same color skin.” She walked briskly toward him as she continued in a sweet voice. “We join up, and we’ll be, like, the talk of the Accelerated World, you know? And the truth is, I don’t like that sand dude. I mean, he’s super scrapey and all. But look—like, your skin’s all smooth and soft.  ”

Before he knew it, Nickel Doll was standing right there in front of him, the index finger of her left hand up against his chest tracing out lazy circles. The ticklish sensation stopped his thoughts. Something moved on the left edge of his field of view, now dyed a hazy pale pink. Doll’s right hand. Her index finger flicked out to gently touch his left hip.

“Whoa!”

Barely coming to his senses in time, Haruyuki sprang back at basically the same time as powerful sparks shot out of Doll’s fingers. A momentary shock shook him once more, whisking away 5 percent of his gauge.

“N-no fair with surprise attacks!” Haruyuki shouted angrily at having his pure male heart toyed with, moving to an island farther back.

The silver doll cackled loudly. “Awww! Did I hurt your big, manly feelings? I’m sorrrry. But if I let someone like you join up, my Legion Master would be suuuuuper angry at me!”

That was probably true, because the Legion Master for Nega Nebulus, which Haruyuki belonged to, was the Black King, the most wanted person in the Accelerated World. But for Haruyuki, this was Doll’s big mistake. He jabbed his index finger in her direction and shouted, “I didn’t even want to join up with you! And you didn’t hurt my feelings or whatever! Definitely not!”

If he was thinking more coolly, he could see how this could come off as a boy whose feelings had indeed been hurt, but he forced his brain to switch gears and leapt forward. Perhaps seeing that they were done messing around, the look on Nickel Doll’s face changed, and her electric hands snapped into a ready position. Most likely, the right hand was the positive terminal and the left the negative. He assumed that if she caught hold of him with both hands, electric current would flow through his avatar and do some serious damage.

At a speed an order of magnitude greater than anything she’d shown so far, Doll’s hands darted out to capture Haruyuki. But he feigned dodging to the right, and then sprang in the direction his opponent was not expecting—to the left, the middle of the poisonous purple bog. Both legs were swallowed up to the knee. Doll was completely taken off guard, her back turned to Haruyuki.

Still sunken into the mire, Haruyuki reached toward the small avatar a meter ahead of him and grabbed hold of her narrow waist before doing something like a German suplex–turned-throw to toss her, full strength, into the bog behind him.

“Aieeeeeee!” This time, her scream seemed real, and she plunged headfirst into the poisonous bog. An unpleasantly colored smoke rose up, and her health gauge ticked slowly downward.

Nickel Doll vaulted to her feet immediately, and after confirming that the only nearby island was behind Haruyuki, she shouted sharply, “Are you trying for a draw or something?! Well, let me tell you one thing! When it comes to HP, I have way more at level four than you do at level two…” She abruptly fell silent. She had finally noticed the fact that Haruyuki’s health gauge was basically not going down at all, even though he had been sunken in the bog this whole time.

Drawing a little on Aqua Current’s line earlier, Haruyuki snapped his index fingers at her. “I’m silver. Poison doesn’t work on me!”

The members of the Gallery way up on the tops of the baobab trees erupted instantly.

Exactly. Although they were both metal colors, the particular characteristics differed slightly depending on the type of metal. Generally speaking, precious metals like gold and silver were strong against special attacks, while base metals like steel and iron were strong against physical attacks. But even among these, Haruyuki’s silver had an absolute resistance to poison attacks. Even in the real world, silver ions were used for sterilization because of their powerful antibacterial properties.

Even during this short standoff, Nickel Doll’s health gauge was gradually decreasing. She would also have had some poison resistance due to her metal color, but taken along with her slight armor, it wouldn’t have been perfect. If they went into hand-to-hand combat in the swamp, it was obvious that Doll would exhaust her resources sooner, even if their blows were equal.

“Hmph…I get it. The reason you were avoiding the swamp this whole time was to put me off guard and drag me into a situation like this, huh?” Doll glanced down at the purple mush that had swallowed her nearly up to her waist. “And you are way over on the left end of the metal chart, too. But, like, treating nickel like fake silver, it doesn’t work like that. There are a lot of different ways to use it. You know? Like mixing in hydrogen and generating electricity, right?”

The moment he heard those words, something flickered in the back of Haruyuki’s mind.

In the present day of 2046, nearly all the EVs and electric scooters racing along the roads of the town—but also of course mobile devices like Neurolinkers—used lightweight, large-capacity silicon nanowire batteries. However, he had learned in science class that until twenty or so years earlier, there had been a secondary battery with an emphasis on safety. He was pretty sure it had been called a nickel hydrogen battery. This was the backbone to Nickel Doll’s electrical abilities.

The silver Western-style doll smiled faintly, seemingly paying no attention to her HP being steadily shaved away by the quagmire. “And, like, silver also has a bunch of properties other than antibacterial. I’ll teach you about them right now.”

The words had no sooner left her mouth than she was thrusting both hands into the swamp water. Her health gauge began to drop even faster, but her special-attack gauge was simultaneously charged, and the instant it had passed 70 percent, the call of the special attack name rang out.

“Anode Cathode!!”

Pale sparks shot out in circles on the surface of the bog, some too quick for Haruyuki to escape.

Zzzt! He was hit with a brutal shock. His field of view basically whited out. He couldn’t even cry out with the pain.

“Ngh!!” Instinctively, he tried to leap up onto the island behind him, but for some reason, his avatar had stiffened in place and wouldn’t obey him. In the top left of his white-hot field of view, he saw his own health gauge being rapidly eaten away. Trapped in position, Haruyuki realized for the first time the immense risk that had been hidden in his own strategy to bring the fight to hand-to-hand combat.

It might have been a bog of poison, but it was essentially water. And the more impurities water had, the better an electrical conductor it was. Leaping into the bog meant that he’d deliberately connected a circuit between himself and his opponent.

However.

Nickel Doll was also waist deep in the bog herself, so she shouldn’t have been able to escape from the electrical damage, either. Although it was rare for a full-dive fighting game, Brain Burst allowed self-attacks, meaning that it was possible to attack your own self, and, depending on the situation, you could also be dragged into the range of an attack. Maybe Doll thought she could make it out alive even if she was taking damage at the same time, based on the difference in their total HP, but if the damage she was taking from the swamp was added in, she was the one whose gauge would run out first.

Making this instantaneous judgment, Haruyuki endured the ongoing electrical shock as he turned his eyes to his opponent’s health gauge. And then he got another shock.

Her gauge was clearly dropping more slowly than Haruyuki’s.

“Heh-heh-heh. You finally noticed?” Doll’s voice sounded slightly pained, but was still quite clear. “Even exposed to the same electrical current, you’re the one getting more damaged. I mean, at normal temperatures, the electrical resistance of silver is only one-fourth that of nickel. Silver’s, like, the most electrically conductive of all the metals!”

Gah?! So does that mean that of all the metal colors, I’m the weakest to electrical attacks?! We haven’t learned that in science yet! So then, it’s not my fault, it’s the Ministry of Education’s! Wait, this isn’t the time to be thinking about that. Something, something, I have to do something…!

Unable to speak or lift a single finger, Haruyuki earnestly racked his brain. No special attack lasted forever. If he just waited, her electricity attack would end at some point, but his HP gauge would be almost completely whisked away by then. And by bathing herself in her own electricity, Doll was also recharging her depleted special-attack gauge. If she activated it again the instant this attack ended, he’d be out of options.

Haruyuki’s HP gauge had dropped to 50 percent, dyeing the bar yellow. The instant he saw that his special-attack gauge below this was basically fully charged, he finally figured out his next move. Even if his whole body was numb from the electric shock, Silver Crow was equipped with one organ that could be operated through willpower alone.

“Flyyyyyy!” he cried thinly, from between clenched teeth.

Kachak! The comforting sound of metal rang out, and the ten fins folded up on his back deployed at once.

“Ah!” At the same time as Nickel Doll cried out, the wings extending from Haruyuki’s back flapped powerfully, and the wind pressure they generated pushed aside the water surface around him.

Silver Crow shot up into the sky with the force of a rocket. He shook off even the sparks attempting to chase after him and danced up higher and higher.

“Ooooh!” A gasp rose up from the members of the Gallery who were seeing his flying ability for the first time.

Haruyuki cut through the drifting fog and the green phosphorescence of the Corroded Forest stage and flew. He ascended ever higher, almost brushing against the members of the Gallery clustered together on the rotting baobab trees. Finally, he broke free of the miasma of the forest, and everything around him changed to blue skies.

Now that he had flown to this altitude, he could no longer be completely seen from the ground. Bathed in sunlight, his entire body glittered silver as he did a one-eighty turn. At once, he shifted to a sudden descent.

Haruyuki stretched out his sharply tapered right foot, let gravity join the propulsive power of his wings, and shot forward like an arrow or a laser. The compressed air crackled and burned the tips of his toes, sending orange particles shooting off on all sides. In the blink of an eye, he had plunged into the green miasma, passed the baobabs, almost brushing the treetops once more, and was shooting toward his target on the other side of the guide cursor.

Nickel Doll had climbed up onto a small island and was staring dumbfounded up at the sky when she seemed to come back to herself and tried to leap back and out of the way. But Haruyuki made a slight adjustment to his trajectory with his arms and wings.

“Hnngaaaaah!” With a forceful battle cry, the tips of his toes made perfect contact with the shoulder of the tiny enemy avatar.

A flash of light and vibration, an enormous explosion, rocked the entire stage.

The five-meter-diameter island was instantly transformed into a crater. Nickel Doll flew back helplessly, twirling in the air, a high-pitched cry trailing after her. The 60 percent she had left in her health gauge was devoured, sending her into the red zone of less than 20 percent.

This was Silver Crow’s best technique at the moment. This Dive Attack could decide a battle in a single blow, so if his enemy did manage to dodge, he would be damaged himself and be frozen for a few seconds. But for a Burst Linker seeing it for the first time, getting out of the way was nearly impossible since he was attacking in a straight line from directly overhead. The reason he had been able to hammer out an average win ratio of 70 percent over the last two weeks was solely because he had this technique.

On one knee in the middle of the crater he had created, Haruyuki lifted his head. Given the force that had sent her flying, Nickel Doll should have taken another big hit when she landed. One that might even decide the battle.

However.

The little avatar—about to plunge headfirst into the center of the Suruga Daishita intersection—was caught and held fast by two massive hands.

Sand Duct. He had temporarily abandoned his fight with Aqua Current and run over to prevent Doll’s fatal fall. A cheer rose up from the Gallery at the unexpectedly knightly act.

Duct’s health gauge was also already down below 50 percent in the yellow zone. Curren, who had been fighting one-on-one with him, however, was still at over 90 percent somehow. Either their compatibility was indeed very unilateral, or the difference in their technique was.

Aqua Current came gliding around from the south of the intersection, avoiding the poison bog, and stopped next to Haruyuki. As he stood up, he heard her low murmur: “That was a good hit back there.”

“Th-thanks.” Unconsciously, he shrank into himself.

“But it’s not over yet,” Curren continued. “Those two must have some reason for joining up with each other. They’ve definitely got something up their sleeve. Don’t let your guard down.”

“O-okay!” Haruyuki nodded.

“Oh, come oooooon!” Nickel Doll shouted in indignation from on top of Sand Duct’s shoulder standing some ten or so meters away from them. “Now I’m mad! Flying ability’s totally no faaaiiir!!”

“Y-you can say that, but…” Without thinking, he started to argue with her, but Doll jabbed the index finger of her right hand at him as if to say she would brook no argument.

“Shut up! Shut uuuuup! If this is how things are, then we’re gonna let you both really have it with our super-gorgeous, super-special attack and send you into next week!”

“S-super…”

Is there even a system like that in Brain Burst? There’s not, is there? He had a silent conversation with himself, but he was sure that what was coming next was the “up their sleeve” that Curren had mentioned. Haruyuki still had about 40 percent left in his health gauge, so depending on the scope of the technique, it was even possible that a single blow could kill him. And because he had used up his special-attack gauge in the earlier dive attack, he couldn’t fly and dodge it this time. He dropped his hips and concentrated on his enemy’s movements.

Nickel Doll struck a daunting pose on Sand Duct’s shoulders, her right foot on his right shoulder, left on left, and then shouted sharply, “Do it, Sandy!”

“Roger!” the sand giant responded in a weighty tone and raised the massive air ducts on his hands, then slammed them loudly together.

“Aaaaaah! Take this! Turbo Molecular!!”

He shouted the name of the special attack, and the turbine propellers inside the ducts in his hands began to rotate at high speed. But they were facing the wrong way. The right duct seemed to be the exhaust, while the left had the power of intake.

“I see,” Curren said. “The reason they were able to hear our private conversation before the fight started was because that left hand was secretly sucking in the air, hmm?”

Haruyuki nodded in agreement. Even during this exchange, the air was moving stormily between Sand Duct’s hands.

“But…blowing on the right and sucking on the left, is he telling us to come get them…or what’s it mean?” Haruyuki cocked his head.

In that moment, Duct threw his hands out, and Haruyuki thought he could see a strange heat haze. The thought had no sooner crossed his mind than his entire body was caught by an intense suction.

“Whoa! I-I’m being sucked in!” He hurried to dig his feet into the ground, but he was essentially powerless to resist. Carving out ruts in the little island with his feet, he was dragged toward Sand Duct, ten meters ahead of him. Next to him, Aqua Current, too, was moving forward bit by bit, the water covering her body half ripped off.

“Heh-heh, soooo? What do you think of Sandy’s Turbo Molecular Pump?” The triumphant voice of Nickel Doll reached them against the direction of the sudden squall. The wind had captured only Haruyuki and Curren with surprising precision.

“I…see. With the turbines on both arms, he sends air molecules flying and creates a vacuum region.” Even as they were pulled inexorably forward, Curren was coolly analyzing the situation.

Haruyuki panicked automatically. “Th-th-this isn’t the time to admire it! I-i-if we don’t do something, w-w-we’ll be sucked in!!”

Now that I’m thinking about it, there was a scene like this in that full-dive picture book Journey to the West I read when I was a kid. Wait, that scene where he gets sucked in was super scary. I cried so hard, and Chiyu laughed at me.

Haruyuki’s thoughts abruptly ran down an escapist tract, while, in contrast, Curren spoke as if she wasn’t disturbed in the slightest.

“No need to be afraid. There’s no attack power in the wind itself. Once we’re dragged in, it’ll just be a close-range fight.”

“Huh.” Unconsciously, he let his gaze wander through space and then bobbed his head up and down.

It was true that although they were exposed to the gale, their health gauges hadn’t budged a pixel. This technique was probably to bring in mid- and long-range avatars, in order to turn the fight into close-range combat. But Haruyuki was a complete close-range type, and Curren hadn’t been unskilled enough to be taken down in one-on-one combat with Duct. Getting closer was actually exactly what Haruyuki’s team wanted.

Okay! Then I can use this wind and go flying in. Haruyuki started to make a plan in his head, looking for the right timing, when his eyes caught sight of something unexpected:

A smirk slashing across the face of Nickel Doll as she stood on Sand Duct’s shoulder, even as his hands continued to generate the vacuum. It was the exact same look she had given him immediately before she caught him in the electric trap in the swamp.

Doll bent forward abruptly and touched both hands to her partner’s vacuum region. At the same time, the technique name call: “Anode Cathode!!”

Crack! Crack! Fierce sparks snapped to life in the space between her small hands. But this technique had an effective range of zero, and without some kind of conductor, she wouldn’t be able to do any damage to distant enemies. So what on earth—?

It was then that Haruyuki witnessed an unbelievable scene.

From Duct’s hands, a stormy spark vortex climbed backward through the vacuous region, reaching out to Haruyuki and Curren.

“Unh…Aah?!” All Haruyuki could manage was a hoarse cry. His avatar, unable to move from being sucked into the wind, was enveloped in a dazzling electric light. The shock made his head spin. His body froze; he couldn’t even speak.

The remaining 40 percent of his health gauge was mercilessly ripped away by the storm of current. His special-attack gauge was charged by the same measure, but it was nowhere near enough for him to fight this wind and take to the skies.

“Glow discharge,” Aqua Current announced abruptly. “In pressures close to vacuum lows, the insulation between the electrodes is destroyed, and the current flows through the air.”

“Heh-heh, you really know your stuff, bouncer!” Nickel Doll smiled sweetly, fiery sparks shooting from her hands. “It’s me and Sandy’s ultra-gorgeous combo attack. First public appearance in this place. Whaddaya think? It might not be on the same level as that old purple lady’s super-high-voltage arc discharge, but our thing still works pretty good, huh?”

Old purple lady? Who’s that? The thought flickered through his mind, but the raging storm of sparks sent it flying.

The terrifying part of a combination attack like this was that while they were subject to the damaging power of the electrical current and the sudden wind that kept them from moving, the rate of consumption of the special-attack gauges was overwhelmingly low, despite the very showy nature of the attack. If this were one person’s technique, the attack would have barely lasted five seconds even from a full gauge. But there was enough left in the special-attack gauges of both Doll and Duct to burn through all of Haruyuki’s little remaining HP with change left over.

Here, Haruyuki finally felt a chill run up his back. Am I going to lose? Lose, and have my points taken?

Faced with a terror so powerful that it made him want to give up everything and crumple into a ball on the ground, Haruyuki gritted his teeth and fought back.

Even if I’m going to lose, I’m going to charge ahead and go down fighting. That’s the only thing I can do right now. Even if I can’t fly up, I can fly forward.

He still had enough HP to break through this electrical storm and strike one blow. So then he’d fly. She would definitely do the same thing. Okay…

Fly! Haruyuki called out in his mind, and the wings on his back trembled faintly, spread out, and—

“You’re fine.” A calm voice washed over him. A hand was placed on his left shoulder. From the palm, a transparent stream of water flowed over Haruyuki’s entire body, completely covering his armor. Smooth, sleek. The world was suddenly blanketed by a babbling murmur that was somehow calming, reminiscent of something warm and long gone.

Poof! All the pain disappeared.

At first, he thought the enemy combo attack had ended. But that wasn’t it. The glowing discharge sparks still filled the vortex of the vacuum, raging and storming. And yet none of the current made it to his body. The veneer of water completely cut it off, so that all it did was crawl harmlessly around on the surface.

But…but this…

“Impossible!” Sand Duct called out, the vacuum still streaming from both hands. “Water’s a conductor! Why…why would it deflect the current?!”

“In my water, there is not a single impurity,” Aqua Current replied coolly. “The pure water of theory.”

“Huh? Ah?!” Nickel groaned, as if intuiting something.

Curren nodded. “Water with zero impurities is essentially a perfect insulator. Electric attacks do not work on me.”

Haruyuki’s eyes snapped up to check the health gauges in the top left of his view. Although Silver Crow’s had dropped below 20 percent into the red, Curren’s gauge was still green with 90 percent left in it. Even this terrifying combination attack of Doll and Duct didn’t do the slightest bit of damage to the bouncer.

So strong. This kind of strength at level one…

There was no way she was a newbie. Most likely, she had fought her way through the Accelerated World for many long years, so many years that Haruyuki couldn’t even begin to imagine it. The vast battle experience and the unwavering confidence in the water that was her own attribute produced a power that easily blew away any difference in levels.

Finally, the special-attack gauges of both Doll and Duct ran out, essentially simultaneously.

“You’ve shown me what I needed to see.” After collecting the defensive membrane of water from Haruyuki, Aqua Current took a step forward, accompanied by a splash. “That’s a nice trick, Doll, Duct.”

“Ngh! Eeeeeee!!” Nickel Doll shrieked piercingly. Kicking and screaming on top of Sand Duct, she shot the index fingers of both hands straight out at Haruyuki and Curren. “If this is the way it is, then it’s on! For real! No tricks! We’re going to corner you and then show you what we’re really made of!”

“Roger!”

The large and small avatars snapped their fists up into a ready position at the same time and charged in a straight line.

“Just what we were hoping for!” Aqua Current shouted back, cycling the streaming water armor of her entire body even more swiftly. “Let’s go, Crow!”

“O-okay!” Haruyuki kicked at the ground to follow her.

Perhaps seeing that this was the final climax, the Gallery members around them cried out in excitement. Bathed in their cheers, the four avatars collided in a dazzling display of light and sound, and everything melted away into the white-hot vortex produced by the passion and excitement of the duel.