Accel World - Volume 10 - Chapter Ep

“Whoa. So this is the fourth-generation full-dive test machine?” I said, as I stared up at the massive 3-D rectangle enshrined before my eyes.

The exterior panels of unpolished aluminum shone dully, and several large cooling fans whined. One side of the box was connected with a gel bed, and jutting out over it like a headrest was a rough helmet-shaped brain interface.

“It’s huge. It looks even bigger than the early arcade consoles, Higa,” I said, turning around. The male operator turned toward the control console lifted his face and shrugged, sporting a hint of regret.

“Even so, it’s much more compact than my initial estimation, Kirigaya. And the difference in specs between this and the first-generation machines in the old arcades is like a Nintendo and a Drecap captureboard!”

“…I’ve never actually seen either of those.”

“What?! You’re missing out on life! Come over to my place and we’ll have a retro game training camp…”

Going on and on about weird things like this was Takeru Higa, a senior engineer who had developed the most cutting-edge VR machines in the world, but you’d never guess that from the way he looked. With hair that stood up in sharp, thin spikes; excessively large, round glasses; and a T-shirt with a game character on it, he would have been a hundred times more at home in the shops of Akihabara than in the dim high-tech room.

But you could say the same thing about me, still in my school uniform since I’d stopped in on my way home from school. The reason why I, Kazuto Kirigaya, was here—the laboratory of a start-up in Roppongi, Minato Ward—was simple. It was just a part-time job.

Full-dive devices, evolving from the first generation of large amusement machines, into the second generation of NerveGear and AmuSphere, and then into the third generation of the medical device Medicuboid, obviously did not choose their users, but there was a certain level of so-called compatibility with them. In other words, it was a matter of how effectively the brain could connect with the machine. There was some native aptitude, but this could also be improved through long hours of dive experience.

And the people in Japan—no, the entire world—who currently had the most dive hours were without a doubt the survivors of the SAO Incident of a year and a half ago.

In this fourth-generation machine developed under the lead of Takeru Higa, the level of precision in the connection with the brain was overwhelmingly greater than any previous machine, but apparently, those high specs had brought about unexpected issues. Because the amount of information exchanged between the brain and the machine was so large, when the entire staff, including Higa, did test dives to try and get data, they couldn’t move sufficiently inside because of “VR sickness.”

Thus, Higa used a certain line to hire me, one of the survivors, to work part-time as a test diver, and blinded by the rate of hourly pay, I came out here to Roppongi.

“So anyway, I do a full dive and then just move around all over inside. Is that it?” I confirmed, stroking the cool aluminum exterior.

“Right, exactly.” Higa bobbed his head up and down in agreement. “It’s pathetic, but the instant we see the graphics inside, we’re practically barfing. We’re developing a structure right now to regulate the depth of the connection in line with the diver’s aptitude, but to make that, someone has to dive and get data, you know? Ha-ha-ha!”

“Well, you’re paying me, so I’ll do whatever you want. But before I do, let me just make sure of one thing.” I glanced at the imposing headgear interface before continuing. “Um, diving with this is not actually dangerous…right?”

“Of course not! Of course it’s not! Of course not!” Higa said three times, and nodded deeply. “You’re an SAO survivor, Kirigaya, so I totally get that you’re worried. It’s fine. The danger posed by the machine I developed is only the tiniest, seriously tiniest, bit!”

“It is? That makes me feel bet—” I swallowed the end of my sentence and looked at Higa again. “‘Only the seriously tiniest bit’?”

“No, no, no! It’s fine! Totally fine! It’s seriously fine!” After saying each part three times more, Higa continued quickly in a low voice, “It’s just, if the power suddenly goes out when you’re in the dive, it’s a little…you know…”

“What do you mean, ‘you know’?”

“No, no, no problem! We’re all set up with two types of backup power supply and an emergency battery!”

“What comes after ‘you know’?”

“No, no, no, no problem! No real damage! It’s just, well, a little, like…” Higa’s eyes darted around behind his round glasses, and I took a step toward him and stared hard. “Like, it’s, well, a little nondigital phenomenon…”

“What does that mean?”

“Basically, not logical…or maybe not natural…To put it bluntly, this,” Higa said, and dangled both hands loosely in front of his chest.

With this gesture, I finally got what the scientist in front of me was saying. “Huh…? Gh-ghosts…?”

Faced with a gaze that said, What is this guy on about? Higa shook his head quickly once again. “No, seriously—for serious, Kirigaya! I totally saw one, clear as day! Listen. As you can see, this test machine is still the only one in existence in this world. And the number of people who can dive at the same time is one. And yet…staff members who’ve dived into the test field saw a hazy human shadow more than once inside,” Higa said, with a look on his face like, if this were a manga, there would have been small queasiness effect lines on his forehead.

A smile rose up onto my own face, interfering with my brief foray into seriousness, and I shrugged exaggeratedly. “Couldn’t it have just been that they saw some kind of light effect because of the VR sickness? Or maybe there’s a bug in the shader—”

“Non! There’s no way any program put together by the génie Higa would have such a pathetic bug!”

I ignored the sudden slip into a foreign language and moved my shoulders once more. “I mean, okay, if they’re showing up in this room, that’s one thing, but ghosts appearing in a VR world—I’ve never…Okay, I have heard of that, but when I tried to verify rumors like this in Aincrad, it wasn’t a ghost or anything, it was an NPC.”

This, of course, was Yui, the top-down AI existing even now as my and Asuna’s “daughter.” Although if I told her that we first went looking for a ghost or something, she’d probably get mad.

“In other words, everything you can see on the other side is digital code, so their existence should be properly noted somewhere in the memory address. If you look into the time logs, you should be able to find out soon enough what the test divers saw,” I pointed out.

Higa pursed his lips like a child. “Of course; I checked those. But there was rien in the logs. In other words, it’s a fact that this phenomenon is not an object generated by the hardware or the software of the test machine. So it’s really a ghost…or…”

“Or?”

“…Look, this is something I shouldn’t actually be telling you. So I’d like you to pretend you never heard it.” After this showy preamble, Higa lowered his voice and continued, “The heart of this test machine incorporates quantum calculation circuits. In other words, a quantum computer.”

“…Did you make that, too, Higa?”

“I’d like to say oui, but unfortunately, the basic theory was crunched out by Kayaba. Well, at any rate, it’s been said for a long time that a quantum computer might possibly interact with parallel worlds. In the world of science fiction.”

“P-parallel worlds?! You seriously believe in that?” His way of speaking was slipping into my speech.

Higa moved his head in an unreadable motion that was half-assenting, half-negating. “Only on the level that something like that would be great! But, you know, if it is true, that would explain the ghost problem. In other words, if this test machine interfaced with another quantum computer in another time stream…the past or the future or a parallel world, you’d be able to see the shadow of a diver who shouldn’t be there.”

“There’s not too much difference between that story and a real ghost, you know.” I shrugged again before glancing up at the clock on the wall. “Well, I guess I’ll see if there’s a ghost or not when I dive. My little sister’s apparently cooking something today. If I don’t make it home for dinner, she’ll knock me into next week, so let’s just do this—”

“What? You have a little sister? H-how old is she now?!”

Feeling a curious déjà-vu at Higa’s reaction, I ignored the question and sat down on the bed of the test machine. I aligned my body with the indentations, and slid my head beneath the headgear. “Okay, I’m ready anytime.”

I urged Higa, who had a thwarted look on his face, and closed my eyes. Over the sound of the motor lowering the headgear, the final explanation reached my ears.

“Okay, I’m starting the connection. Your avatar’ll be generated automatically from your self-image, Kirigaya, so you shouldn’t feel any weirdness.”

“Got it.”

I raised the thumb of my left hand, and as if in response to that, the test machine behind me started to hum quietly.

There it is again.

Sensing his world shake strangely, Haruyuki Arita narrowed the eyes of his pink pig avatar.

The world was frozen a uniform transparent blue. The initial acceleration space, a blue holding-zone world where he could dive with the “burst link” command. In the depths of his Neurolinker—a quantum communication device equipped on the neck of the Haruyuki in the real world—the mysterious application named Brain Burst had been installed. In response to Haruyuki’s command, the BB program accelerated his thoughts by a thousand and made him do a full dive into this field dyed blue.

The blue world existed so that players could search the matching list to find a duel opponent or to launch external apps and do all kinds of tasks. The reason Haruyuki was currently accelerated was the latter. In other words, to finish up the homework that was due to be submitted that day. More precisely, his remaining extension was only another fifteen minutes in real-world time. Not only did the report homework given in fifth period Japanese History slip out of the realm of memory in his brain, he had even forgotten to mark it in his schedule app.

If it had been math or English, he would have had the last-resort option of asking Takumu or Chiyuri to let him copy—although they would certainly make him pay them back double later—but that wouldn’t work with an essay-style report. Thus, he had used a precious burst point to accelerate and was single-mindedly typing at his holokeyboard.

But when he sensed a strange aura and lifted his head, it seemed like the center of the blue classroom projected in his vision, devoid of people, flickered lazily.

“What was that?” He got up from his seat in his avatar body. When he took a few steps forward among the rows of desks and strained his eyes, he saw a faint ripple again on part of the blackboard. Right, it was almost like there was a transparent something between Haruyuki and the blackboard.

In truth, this was not the first time he had come upon a phenomenon like this. Lately, for the last month or so, when he was on a full dive, he would see something shimmering strangely in his field of view sometimes. And never in the normal VR world; it was only when he was accelerated.

But the phenomenon that day was clearer than ever. Haruyuki forgot about his homework and focused his entire mind on what he was seeing.

When he did, he quickly realized something. “A person?”

Right. The shimmering produced at one point in the classroom looked somehow like a human silhouette. It was almost as if a completely transparent human being was standing there.

But there was no way that could be. The blue basic acceleration space was, as a general rule, the world of only the person who had shouted the “burst link” command. In order for two or more people to dive into the same space, in addition to having their Neurolinkers directly connected, they had to execute the acceleration command at the same time. But, of course, Haruyuki was not directing with anyone at the moment.

Which meant: “A—a ghost?” He accidentally murmured the word and scared himself into a gradual retreat toward the back of the classroom.

But the transparent shadow slid toward him by exactly the same amount.

“Eeeeee!!” he shrieked, and dashed backward at top speed. Unconsciously, he started to call out the command to end the acceleration. “B-B-B-B-Burst ou—”

But he stopped there.

This wasn’t the real world; it was a VR space his Neurolinker had generated from images via the social cameras. Everything his eyes were seeing was digital data that could be substituted with code. Thus, there had to be a reason for the presence of that shadow. There were no ghosts. Ghosts were just made-up.

Hiding behind the desks in the last row, Haruyuki racked his brain. There had to be a way to determine exactly what that human form was. Assuming it was another person, this “someone” had to be a Burst Linker like him, because this wasn’t a regular VR space, but an accelerated space. And if there was a Burst Linker connected to the same net…

“R-right. Th-th-there should be a name, then. On the matching list,” he muttered quickly with a dry mouth, and immediately tapped the B icon displayed in the upper left of his virtual desktop. The Brain Burst console screen popped open. He shifted tabs and opened the matching list.

At the very top was his own name. Below that were Takumu (Cyan Pile) and Chiyuri (Lime Bell), both in the same class with him. And then Kuroyukihime (Black Lotus), probably in the lounge. There should have been only these four Burst Linkers at Umesato Junior High.

And yet.

A collection of dots like bleeding ink rose up in the fifth row and squirmed. These points of light didn’t immediately take on the form of letters for some reason. Haruyuki held his breath and watched as they shook fiercely, blinked, and then finally transformed into several letters of the alphabet.

However, the row of letters did not have the standard form of “color, name” that was the template for duel avatar names. A mere six letters were lined up there. There was also no level displayed.

“K-i-r-i…t-o?”

Kirito? Who’s that?

As if guided by this curiosity, Haruyuki’s right hand moved automatically. He tapped the name of this mysterious Burst Linker Kirito and selected DUEL from the pop-up window. He touched YES in the confirmation dialog.

The blue classroom vanished, as if melting away.

While he was passing through the dim space, Haruyuki’s pig avatar was wrapped in light and transformed—into his silver duel avatar with its round helmet and slender limbs, the Burst Linker Silver Crow.

Two green health gauges stretched out on both sides of the upper part of his field of view. In the center, a timer with 1,800 on it was inscribed. And then finally, the flaming text FIGHT! blazed up and exploded.

At the same time as his metallic feet touched the battlefield grounds, Haruyuki lifted his face with a gasp.

Directly in front of him, a little ways off, someone was standing there. Someone that didn’t seem like a duel avatar.

As far as Haruyuki knew, the avatars of all Burst Linkers had hard, robot-like exteriors. There were some players among them in clothing, but by and large, their faces were not those of their real selves.

However, the person standing before him at that moment clearly had taken a human form. It was a boy. Longish hair, and his sharp eyes were jet-black. He was maybe a little older than Haruyuki. He had on a long coat that appeared to be leather, fingerless gloves on his hands, and boots on his feet. And two long items hanging across each other on his back.

“Swords?!” Haruyuki muttered hoarsely, and slowly put some distance between them.

There was no doubt. They were so-called longswords, so familiar in fantasy-type games. The hilts were black and silver. Although they would have been polygons, the way they shone with real weight made him vividly feel the existence of real swords tucked away within those sheaths.

This was not a Brain Burst duel avatar. That said, it didn’t seem like a harmless full-dive avatar, either.

Cautiously scrutinizing his opponent, Haruyuki took a deep breath and shouted, “Who are you?! How on earth did you connect to the Umesato local net?!”

Despite the fact that his voice, tinged with effects, rang out loudly through the field, the black swordsman didn’t so much as twitch. But he wasn’t being ignored. It was more like his voice never reached the other player to begin with.

When he looked very carefully, the outline of the swordsman avatar was hazy like smoke. Haruyuki wondered if he wasn’t real—if only an image was being sent in from somewhere. He took a step forward to check.

In that moment, the swordsman moved as well. The lustrous boots moved a step forward, crunching against the pebbles on the ground of the stage.

This is no virtual image!

Haruyuki hurriedly leapt back again, and his hands snapped into a ready position in front of him.

As if induced by this movement, a tension raced across the face of the swordsman, and in a flash, his right hand was grabbing the black hilt of the sword on his back.

Where exactly am I? And who is that?!

The two questions simply played on repeat in my head.

In the advance lecture, operator Higa had told me that the field I was diving into was a gentle grassy meadow in the middle of the day. But the scene spreading out around me was the exact opposite of that.

Cracked earth. A half-destroyed blockade of concrete buildings. Tongues of flame licking up out of oil drums. And a night sky without a single star in it. Like the world after the collapse of civilization.

If I had been the only one there, I would have started to wonder if there had been some kind of error with the quantum circuit, and my consciousness had been sent flying to future Tokyo. But fortunately—or perhaps not—a few meters ahead of me was another human form.

The silhouette was human at least. It wore a smooth, round helmet on its head, and the body was completely covered by metallic armor. Compared with the large head, the body, glittering silver as it reflected the light of the bonfires, was extremely slender. To the point where I could hardly believe there was a person inside. And it had something like radiation fins folded up on its back. The front of its helmet was a mirrored visor, and I couldn’t see inside that.

“A robot?” I murmured, and took a step forward to try and find out what it was. The sole of my boot came down on rubble, making a crunching sound.

Instantly, the silver robot flew back quickly and brought both hands up in front of it. It had no weapons. However, the tips of its fingers glinted sharply, making me suspect they held a power that I couldn’t dismiss. The moment this thought occurred to me, my own right hand automatically moved. Over my shoulder to clutch the hilt of a sword slung over my back.

A sword?

Here, I finally realized that I was not Kazuto Kirigaya, real-world high school student, but rather that I had taken on my old familiar form of Kirito the swordsman.

Higa had said that when I dived, my avatar would be automatically generated from my self-image. So that meant that more than my real self, I saw myself as SAO’s Black Swordsman, who no longer existed anywhere. I almost smiled wryly at this, but I was in no situation to lose focus. The mysterious silver robot had readied both hands, and I was holding the hilt of my sword. The situation was basically about to explode.

If I drew my sword, there was no doubt the robot would attack. Its form was a little awkward, but it left no openings in the way it held itself. The battle aura radiating from it was definitely not something a soulless NPC or monster would be able to possess. In other words, the true form of this robot avatar was an actual human being somewhere.

In the tense atmosphere, I decided to at least try talking first. “Hey. Who are you? This is a private company’s closed net. Where are you connecting from and why?”

However, I got no reply. It seemed like it couldn’t actually hear my voice. In which case, I could use gestures—but it would be hard to get where I wanted in the current situation. If I moved my right hand even the slightest bit more than I already had, the top-heavy robot in front of me would very likely come flying at me immediately. We were both that worked up.

Well, it’s my fault for immediately grabbing for my sword. You’re just a little too belligerent, you know! I told myself. The silver robot had broken through the company’s firewall and invaded the test machine, and that was very clearly some kind of illegal hacking. But in that case, it should have been acting a little shiftier or something.

I had thought things through to this point when finally, incredibly belatedly, I noticed something in a fixed display in the upper part of my field of view.

In the center were digital numbers. Currently at 1,740 and decreasing in one-second increments. And then on either side of that, shining green bars. Lined up parallel to these were thin blue bars. Beneath the bar on the left, the text KIRITO was sharply etched. No matter how I looked at it, that was my name—the log-in ID Higa had made for me before the dive. And then beneath the bar on the right, the name SILVER CROW glittered brightly.

“Silver…Crow…,” I murmured inaudibly. There was no doubt that this was the name of the silver robot before me.

This screen composition. And this situation. My eyes flew open in surprise at the sudden revelation that came over me. This—this world was not the tranquil, harmless, and peaceful test VR space. It was a duel stage. I was diving in an old-school, one-on-one fighting game, a fighter!

Higa had mentioned the possibility of the quantum circuit the test machine was equipped with interacting with a world belonging to a different time stream. In which case, was this the world of the 1990s, when fighters were at the height of their popularity? No, no, that couldn’t be. They didn’t even have an inkling of full-dive technology at that time. So then, the future? I didn’t know how many years ahead it was, but were fighters taking center stage again in the far future?

“Hey, you…Silver Crow!” I called out, forgetting that my voice wasn’t reaching my opponent. “Is this a fighting game? What’s it call—?” As I asked, I carelessly took another step forward, my hand still on the hilt of my sword.

The reaction was instantaneous.

The silver robot-shaped avatar kicked hard off the ground with its left foot. I had no sooner noticed this than the lithe body was hurtling toward me like a bolt of lightning.

After reflexively shooting forward, a corner of Haruyuki’s mind called out, Dammit!

His opponent’s approach might not have been a gesture of attack. He hadn’t unsheathed his sword, he wasn’t in an attack posture, and his front was wide open.

But Haruyuki couldn’t cancel the attack order, output at super-high speed in his mind. His avatar charged forward and launched a preemptive midkick at the swordsman in black’s side.

Normally, Haruyuki’s duel style was far from aggressive. If it was an opponent he was fighting for the first time, his general rule was initially to watch carefully and measure attributes and technique tendencies before gradually approaching. To say nothing of the fact that before him that day was a bizarre duel avatar without a color name and his real face exposed. His only special feature was the black that covered his body. If it had been red or blue, he could have guessed he was long range or short range or whatever, but he couldn’t do anything with black. While he was facing off with this mysterious avatar, he kept thinking, I should have asked Kuroyukihime about black attributes before this! but there was no use crying over spilled milk.

The reason Haruyuki had reacted with a preemptive attack to his opponent’s slightest movement despite that opponent being a complete mystery was the incredible aura he was getting from this swordsman in black, Kirito.

With a physique on the slender side and a facial structure that could be said to be still that of a boy, although he was simply gripping the hilt of his sword and standing there facing him, Haruyuki could feel a pressure that made his throat dry. A tension almost like he was a high ranker at level seven or eight—or even higher than that, like this avatar could go one-on-one with the kings even.

If the mysterious sword user had had a little more of an opening, Haruyuki would have actually retreated and hidden himself in a narrow path of the Century End stage to take stock of the situation. But the swordsman—Kirito—had nothing that could be called an opening. If he retreated even the tiniest bit, Haruyuki was afraid that his opponent’s blade would instantly be unsheathed and try to take his head off in a single blow.

Thus, the instant Kirito stepped forward casually, Haruyuki exploded with all his stored strength.

But now I don’t have any choice anymore! He resolved himself the instant before he launched the kick.

Once Burst Linkers were facing each other, they could only fight each other single-mindedly. That’s what his master and parent Black Lotus had taught him. Hit dead-on with a right middle, get his opponent off guard, and then continue to rush him, leaving no space between them. Give his opponent no space to draw the sword on his back, and when his special-attack gauge was half-full, finish him off with a dive attack from the air!

That was the intent behind this first attack, and his leg carved out a dark silver arc plunging toward his opponent’s side.

Whk! He felt something hit lightly, and then his leg flew forward emptily, only knocking a single button off his opponent’s coat.

“Wha…?” Haruyuki groaned, falling out of his battle stance. It was impossible—at that range, with that charge, a block would have amazed him, but an evasion?!

Before his eyes, as he gaped, dumbfounded, the boy’s right arm flashed and drew a jet-black longsword, accompanied by a cold metallic noise.

What incredible speed.

After the silver avatar Silver Crow broke deep into my space with a charge, his right middle kick came sliding toward my stomach in a motion so smooth it made me wonder how many thousands of times he had practiced it.

But because it was so smooth, I was just barely able to sense the target of his first attack.

Moving Silver Crow was a real-life player. There was no doubt about that. And when a human being was controlling an avatar, the slightest bit of information bled through that you didn’t get from a monster’s motion: center-of-gravity shifts, toe direction, hip height—and the gaze.

In duels in SAO, where taking just one blow might cost you your actual life, you always needed to be one step ahead of your enemy. Thus, when you were fighting an opponent as capable as you were, if you launched a major technique from a distance, it was basically a certainty that you were not going to get a hit. So you built a structure where it wouldn’t matter if leaping attacks were blocked or evaded, and always put together the critical major attacks in a flowing series.

From that viewpoint, the speed of Silver Crow’s middle kick was worthy of admiration, but it had too little in the way of a show. I sensed the intention to shoot toward my left flank in his initial movement, and so I dashed backward with everything I had. It was actually fortunate that I had made it out with just one coat button knocked into the void.

Crow apparently hadn’t anticipated a successful dodge, and his upper body shook with the force of the empty kick. It was too appealing a moment to let pass. Despite the fact that, rationally, I figured there was no reason to fight, my right hand automatically flashed and drew one of the beloved swords on my back—Elucidator.

“Hah!” I gave a short battle cry, feeling the familiar weight in my hand, and brought my sword straight down. Drawing out a band of pale light, the blade caught Silver Crow’s right shoulder.

“Ngah!” Letting out a thin cry, Haruyuki stared at the sharp edge of the approaching sword.

He didn’t have enough time to dodge it or block with his arms. Kirito’s movement, from unsheathing the sword to the slashing attack, was so natural that it appeared to take absolutely no effort. It was almost as if he were gently stroking the air, but the surface of Haruyuki’s avatar tingled at the enormous force hidden in that blade.

Being a metal color, Silver Crow did have resistance to slashing attacks. But he instinctively knew that he wouldn’t get away unharmed if that sword hit him. In which case, he had to at least minimize the damage.

Despite the fact that the battle had only just started, Haruyuki’s mind started to super accelerate as though this were the sink-or-swim moment. The color of his surroundings changed, and the speed of the approaching blade slackened, albeit slightly.

Haruyuki bent his knees and sank his avatar down on a trajectory that aligned with the vector of the sword attack. The black luster of the edge touched the armor of his right shoulder. Dazzling orange sparks flew up and shot off, glinting in all directions. Just as he had anticipated, the sword did not stop there. At a speed faster than Haruyuki’s descent, it ripped into his silver armor, digging in one centimeter, two. If he fell to the ground there, the sword would be brought down on him and cut right through his right arm. However…

Now!!

His HP gauge had decreased due to the shot to his shoulder, and the instant his special-attack gauge began to glimmer the faintest bit in proportion to this damage, Haruyuki converted it into momentary flight power and flickered the silver wings on his back for a fraction of a second.

With this, he managed to generate the power to move backward, although in a posture that left him nowhere to go but down onto the ground.

Silver Crow’s body slid, albeit a mere fifty centimeters. The sword pulled away from the injury on his right shoulder.

“Aaaah!!” Haruyuki roared, and kicked off the ground with all his might to leap even farther back.

What just happened?!

I held my breath as the tip of my sword bit emptily into the ground.

Elucidator’s black blade had definitely caught Silver Crow’s shoulder. It had hit the seam of his armor, just as I intended, and I was sure it would cut through in another second, but when it had ripped in a mere two centimeters, the silver robot had suddenly escaped backward with incredible force. He certainly wasn’t in a position for that kind of movement to have been possible. It was an abnormal movement, almost like he had been pulled along on a wire from behind.

I lifted my head with a gasp and stared at the avatar as if to devour it. In the blink of an eye, he had gotten more than ten meters of distance between us. Of course, there were no wires attached to any part of his body. I couldn’t see anything of a jetlike nature, either.

Wait.

The thin metal fins folded up on Crow’s back. Immediately before his back dash, it seemed like they had shaken for the merest instant. If the secret to the impossible movement was those fins, then they were not a heat-radiating device as I had assumed, but rather some kind of propulsive device. But in that case, why didn’t he use that right from the start?

Once my thoughts had gotten this far, I noticed that there was a slight change in the information displayed in my field of view.

First, Silver Crow’s green gauge to the right had decreased the tiniest bit, about 3 percent. And my gauge to the left was still full, but the slim blue gauge beneath it was shining, also by a very little.

If this field was based on an old fighting game as I thought it was, then the meaning of the two gauges was clear. The green one was the “health gauge,” which we also had in SAO. And the blue one could be nothing other than the special-attack gauge. This gauge was probably charged when you took or dealt damage. Which likely meant that the instant he was hit with my sword and his gauge started to charge, Silver Crow used that to move the fins on his back. Put another way, as long as his special-attack gauge was not charged, Crow could not use those fins in their entirety.

But in that case, what’s my special attack? I don’t have anything like that on my back.

The avatar dual sword wielder Kirito and the beloved twin blades that I was using now were my self-image—they were generated from my memory. From the fact that they were functioning in this fighting game system, the special attack should also be called up from that image. And if I was asked what my special attack would have to be, I could state it immediately: It could be nothing other than my sword skills.

I slowly drew my right leg back and readied my sword behind me to take on the stance for Sonic Leap, a basic one-handed straight sword technique. When I did, my sword whined faintly, and at the same time, the lit-up part of my special-attack gauge flashed, but the phenomenon quickly stopped. That must have meant that I didn’t have enough in my gauge to use the technique yet.

“I get it,” I murmured, and stared at my opponent before me again.

From Silver Crow’s reaction and the unfamiliar screen configuration, it seemed that if I had to say it, I was the one intruding here—no, challenging. The brutal background was also something I could accept if this was a fighting game.

Most likely, for Silver Crow, this was a game stage he played every day, and I—or rather, the quantum circuit of the fourth-generation test machine—was interacting with it. I really wanted to log out right away and give Higa a piece of my mind for creating such a ramshackle thing, but there was no log-out button anywhere in this world, and I didn’t know the command for it.

However, given that there was a timer in the middle, once the duel was over, the connection should be severed as well. Still, even if that was the case, just standing still and deliberately taking hits until my gauge disappeared wasn’t my style. And I was the challenger, at any rate. It was only polite to expend all my strength to destroy my opponent.

For the first time since I’d been thrown into this stage, my mouth turned up into a faint smile. In my head, I heard the sharp click of a switch being flipped.

The instant he sensed the unidentified Burst Linker known as Kirito smiling, Haruyuki’s virtual skin rose up into goose bumps. For a moment, even the throbbing of the wound on his right shoulder disappeared. The intense pressure blowing over to him made him unconsciously start to take a step back, and he stopped himself abruptly.

Kirito was an intruder in the Umesato local net, but the one who found his name on the matching list and requested a duel was Haruyuki. The option of picking a fight and then running away was not permitted to the members of the Legion Nega Nebulus.

This isn’t the time to freak out! If I can’t talk to him, then the only way to get info on him is to exchange direct blows—fist against sword!

At the same time as he told himself that, Haruyuki felt a fire igniting in the depths of his own stomach.

Kirito’s reaction when dodging a midkick delivered by full-speed dash was faster than any duel avatar Haru had fought before. He wanted to see that movement again. And then he wanted to surpass it. Clenching his fists tightly, Haruyuki dropped his stance, ready for a decisive charge once more.

A major attack from a long distance definitely would not hit. And in terms of reach, his opponent had the advantage with the sword. So then he had to dive in up close and personal, and break him down with small attacks.

His opponent shouldn’t be able to repeatedly swing that heavy sword. If he dodged the one blow that would likely come as a counter, he would have a chance to stick to him.

Focus. Dodge the tip of that sword like it’s a bullet. Haruyuki’s mind shifted into high gear, and his field of view narrowed to the center. His entire awareness was focused on the tip of the glittering black longsword.

“Go!!” Haruyuki cried, and kicked off the ground. He kept himself as low as humanly possible, and closed the ten meters between them in a flash.

Kirito’s sword, held slightly back at midlevel, began to move smoothly. From below. After the tip sent sparks flying momentarily on the surface of the ground, it bounced up to welcome Haruyuki. It leaned forward, like the lethal fang of an onyx snake.

Haruyuki opened just his left wing the tiniest bit to rotate the axis of his body ninety or so degrees and dodge the blade. Even if he didn’t have any charge in his gauge, he could still use the wings to control his form.

He howled as it was yanked upward, as the sword lightly grazed Silver Crow’s chest armor. It left nothing but a brief heat and a flash of light before the tip disappeared upward. Instantly, Haruyuki stepped in closer with his right foot and brought his torso up with the launch of a right uppercut. The fist became a bolt of silver light shooting toward the thin chest beneath that black coat.

Immediately before it hit its target, Kirito parried fiercely with his left arm. Haruyuki’s right fist flowed off to the side and stopped at merely grazing his shoulder.

However, this was all part of his plan. Now, Kirito wouldn’t be able to bring both hands down right away. Haruyuki shot out a left short hook, aiming for the wide-open body.

Wham! He felt a solid response. The body wrapped in the coat stopped.

Got him! Now I rush him!

“Aaaah!!” With a battle cry, Haruyuki launched a knee kick with his right leg. Another hit. Because he was basically glued to his opponent, it didn’t cause serious damage, but that was fine for the moment. He would freeze his opponent with repeated techniques, gauge the distance, and throw in a decisive blow.

Restraining his opponent’s left hand with his right, he set his sights on short chops with his own left. At this distance, a longsword was useless. In other words, his opponent’s right was dead.

Or at least it should have been.

He launched his left fist to smash down on the swordsman, but it was held back by something from directly above. The five open fingers of Kirito’s right hand.

“Wha…?”

Wh-where’d his sword go?! By the time the question had appeared in his mind, his opponent was already moving forward.

With a light, smooth, and yet terrifyingly fast motion, Kirito’s right palm suddenly radiated an orange light against Haruyuki’s chest.

Sp-special attack! But without a weapon?!

He was a moment too slow in processing this unexpected development. In this battle, where both possessed ferocious speed, that left him wide open.

Wham! An incredible impact slammed into his chest, and Haruyuki was thrown back.

It was a direct hit, but the damage was really nothing. It appeared to be just a technique to gain some distance. So he’d let go of his sword to use it? In that case, Haruyuki couldn’t give him the chance to pick it up again.

Intent on breaking into his opponent’s space, Haruyuki’s eyes flashed wide at yet another surprise.

The empty-handed Kirito was leaping up into the sky, his right arm stretched high into the air above him.

Was he planning to unsheathe the other sword on his back? No, he didn’t have that much leeway time-wise. So then was he planning to strike with chopping hands like that? Did he think an attack like that would work on metal-colored armor—?

Wait. The light enveloping his right hand still hadn’t disappeared. Which meant that the special attack was still ongoing.

Haruyuki braced both feet, stopped retreating, and went to move forward once more, when, before his eyes, Kirito’s hand snapped shut around something.

The hilt of a sword. He hadn’t dropped his sword to the ground. He’d thrown it straight up.

By the time Haruyuki realized this, the entire longsword was already wrapped in a dazzling flame-colored light and coming down in a straight line.

This time, he really couldn’t run or guard. A ferocious impact assaulted him from left shoulder to chest. Haruyuki was swallowed up by an explosive light effect and blown helplessly backward, off to the right.

“Combined martial- and sword-arts sword skill: Meteor Fall…I could say, but I guess he can’t hear me,” I said, rubbing my stomach where he’d kicked me hard.

I couldn’t say that it was on the same level as the real world, but the pain feedback was well into the range of illegal. From this pain alone, I knew that this wasn’t a game being run in the present-day Japan of 2026.

But after I got in a clean hit with a major technique and sent him flying spectacularly to bury him halfway in a pile of rubble, the pain Silver Crow was feeling must have been much, much greater. Of course, that was assuming there existed a nervous system underneath that metallic armor.

When I glanced up to check our health gauges, I was down 15 percent from the punch and knee I took while he was sticking to me, and Crow was down nearly 30 percent. Outwardly, we were a person and a metal robot, but it seemed that there wasn’t any big difference in our defensive power. That was also very like a fighting game.

And if this was a fighter, then a damage difference of this much could be flipped any number of times hence. Deciding that this was not the time to act like I had room to spare just because I had gotten a single blow in, I ran hard while deciding on a follow-up attack.

But then the silver body twitched. The round helmet popped up. The eyes there seemed to emit a fierce light. And then the rubble half burying the silver avatar shot off in all directions.

Clouds of dust puffed up and blanketed the area. Repositioning my sword, I got some distance and waited for my vision to clear. The cool wind blowing along the bottom of the stage immediately carried away the dust. A few seconds later, the remains of the building appeared once more—without Silver Crow.

“What…?”

I quickly sent my eyes racing around to the right and left. The space to my sides and behind me was expansive and open, while an excessively wide three-story building sat in front of me. If it hadn’t been crumbling in pieces, the terrain would have looked almost like a small school.

All the windows and entrances of the building were sealed with steel panels, and there were no stairs on the outside. If Crow had cut by either side of me, I definitely would have noticed it. Which meant that even if he had brought about that dust and blocked my vision for a moment, there shouldn’t have been anywhere he could have gone. So then where on earth was that silver robot hiding?

—Wait.

He wasn’t hiding. The special-attack gauge beneath Silver Crow’s health gauge, charged to over 30 percent, was in this moment decreasing. He was executing some kind of technique. I had to assume that he’d disappeared from view because of that. Probably the ability to dive into the earth or to become transparent.

I strained all my senses to check both below my feet and all around me. I crouched down and softly readied my sword. Positioned so that I could immediately respond to the attack wherever it came from, I waited for his movement.

But…

Silver Crow appeared from an entirely unexpected direction.

Glint! I sensed something flicker above my head, and turned my face upward with a gasp.

And then I saw it. The silver avatar with the tip of his right foot thrust sharply forward, dropping quickly, almost like a lance, his metal fins deployed broadly to both sides, shining on his back with a dazzling light.

So those were propulsive devices. But they were not simply something to move at high speed on the ground. Those fins were wings!

I kicked a shot off the ground as hard as I could and leapt off to the side. But Crow, shooting down in a straight line, changed his angle, using both arms as a stabilizer, and perfectly followed my movement.

“Ngah!” A cry escaping me, I tried to parry those sharp toes with the sword in my right hand. But I couldn’t put nearly the weight behind it needed to block a movement like this. In a collision like when I was charged by the Salamander in ALO—no, definitely an impact far exceeding that—my sword was knocked aside powerlessly, and the dive kick made direct contact with my right shoulder.

For Silver Crow, who had poured all of his level-up bonuses into enhancing his flying ability, his greatest weapon was a sudden drop attack from a very high altitude.

How could he hit his target? Haruyuki had spent long hours intently studying this technique. It was still far from complete even now, six months after he had become a Burst Linker, but even so, the important thing was that it was taking shape—a perfect balance of power and precision (i.e., descent speed and homing function, respectively).

He spent all the power of his wings on acceleration and then carried out trajectory adjustment by moving his arms and body. He had no idea how many times he had crashed vainly into the earth before he got the hang of this trick.

However, all his effort was not for nothing. Because he was able to perfectly catch even Kirito, who had an awesome reaction speed.

—Wait.

Haruyuki inwardly shook his head as his dive kick slammed into Kirito’s right shoulder, and he chased the figure in black with his eyes as it tumbled and bounced endlessly along the ground.

Kirito somehow had not known that Silver Crow was a flying-type duel avatar. If he had been a Burst Linker who was dueling regularly, the instant he lost sight of Haruyuki in a cloud of dust, he would have been paying attention to what was above his head and not his surroundings. However, Kirito had only looked up as Haruyuki’s kick was on the verge of hitting home. Really, the reaction ability he had, trying to step and parry in that split second, was incredible.

He glanced at their health gauges. Kirito’s was just barely dipping below 50 percent and had changed to yellow. He had turned things around on the amount of damage given, but it would be hard to get another clean hit with the same attack on an opponent who now knew he could fly. He’d have to put this technique to rest.

Haruyuki spread his wings once more and dashed at a low altitude toward the figure crouched on the ground a ways off.

Kirito had taken a serious blow to his right shoulder, his sword hand. And the shock to his nerves would linger for at least ten seconds; he wouldn’t be able to swing his sword at full speed. If Haruyuki rushed him now, he might just be able to win this thing!

“Hnngaaaah!” Roaring, Haruyuki closed in on Kirito and launched a large roundhouse kick from a high-angle diagonal.

The way he used his wings was not just to drop from high altitudes. In short-range, hand-to-hand combat, they allowed action in three dimensions that ignored gravity and momentum. This kick, too, should have been hard to handle on first sight.

His right foot made the air sing as it raced through space like a laser. And Kirito was indeed not attempting to move, after having finally sat up.

It’s going to land hard!!

At exactly the same time as this conviction shot through Haruyuki, Kirito’s eyes glinted sharply beneath the long fringe of hair. His left arm, wrapped in the black leather coat, vanished in a blur.

Skreee! The high-pitched sound of collision. Dazzling sparks. And a heat burning into him.

Haruyuki only understood what had happened after his midair kick was repelled and he was knocked to the ground with the remaining force.

Up on one knee, Kirito was brandishing, high in his left hand, the second of his swords, shining with a vivid white light even in the dark.

Slowly standing up, the swordsman in black spun the white and black longswords he held in each hand.

Schwiiing! They cut through the air to each side.

I had to admit it. I totally underestimated the power of this fighter, Silver Crow.

Just as his name implied, the potential of this avatar was largely invested in the ability to fly. In other words, it was as if I had gained the upper hand by crushing a Sylph, whose air raid ability was its life, in a ground-based battle.

Given this, I very much wanted to finish the battle with an aerial fight, but the avatar I was housed in was not Spriggan Kirito from ALO, but the double-sworded Kirito from SAO. With no wings on my back, I obviously couldn’t fly. In which case, unless I mustered up every last ounce of power I had, I didn’t have a chance at victory.

The awareness that this battle was an accidental situation brought about by a quantum circuit anomaly had basically disappeared from my head. My entire body was cloaked in the racing tension and exultation that I had experienced with truly powerful enemies, the number of which I could count on one hand.

Feeling the reliable weight of Elucidator in my right hand and Dark Repulsor in my left for the first time in a year and a half, I stared wordlessly at the silver avatar slowly getting to his feet. Deep cuts ran along his chest and left leg, scattering pale sparks, but he still had 40 percent left in his HP bar. About the same as me, and the faint smoke rising up from the burns on my shoulder.

But now that both of us had shown off our trump cards, the next clash would likely decide the battle. The wings on Silver Crow’s back spread out wide with a clang.

The instant he saw Kirito bent over, holding his two blades, Haruyuki understood the true nature of the aura he had felt since the beginning of the duel.

It was like hers. Like the Black King, Black Lotus.

His form with twin blades in his hands and the color he was cloaked in were obviously similar, but more than anything, what they shared was an “unfathomableness.”

In all honestly, Haruyuki had never seen Kuroyukihime fighting with all her strength. In his memory, there was the one battle she had fought with another level nine, the Yellow King, which had taken place in the Unlimited Neutral Field, but even then, he had gotten the impression somehow that they had both had energy left in reserve.

That sense: like he couldn’t see down to the bottom of that strength. The sneaking suspicion: If this person truly let loose for real, what kind of ferocity would manifest? That exact same element was also latent in this Burst Linker Kirito.

If he really is as strong as Kuroyukihime, then there’s no way I can win, Haruyuki’s logic determined. But for some reason, the flame burning beneath his battered chest armor didn’t cool in the least. To the contrary, it burned increasingly hotter and redder, sending heat even down to the tips of his limbs.

He wanted to fight. He wanted to burn up everything Silver Crow had and everything Haruyuki Arita had and smash up against this powerful enemy.

Shivering with such a fear that if he relaxed even the tiniest bit, he very well might lose consciousness and burst out before the figure of the Twin Blade Swordsman slowly walking toward him, Haruyuki smiled faintly beneath his mirrored surface.

Although there didn’t seem to be a large numerical difference in the potential of their avatars, comparing the ability to intentionally control it, he was somehow at a disadvantage. Kirito was a cut above him in both the ability to analyze the situation and the ability to respond. Even though they were both seeing each other for the first time, Haruyuki was always one step behind.

In which case, the only thing he could do was bet on his speed, the one thing his meager confidence rested on.

Believe—in the longing that produced the silver wings on your back. Concentrate.

“Go beyond. Go past him,” he murmured, and the color of the world shifted slightly. Sound receded, and the movement of the sparks drifting through the air slackened.

However, not even aware of these changes, Haruyuki simply concentrated all his mental energy on the two blades of his opponent.

I immediately sensed that the nature of the aura surrounding Silver Crow had changed. Most likely, my opponent had also determined that this was the deciding moment. The wings on his back were wide open, but rather than taking off, he leisurely dropped his hips and readied his hands, waiting for me in a natural pose.

If he was going to wager everything on one clash, I couldn’t ask for anything better.

I finally noticed the faint smile bleeding out onto my lips.

This wasn’t the kind of battle you got to experience every day. I had faced the most serious battles in all kinds of game worlds up to this point, and I had even lost some of them, but the last time I felt this level of stinging tension was three months ago against the Absolute Sword at the ALO Duel Tournament.

It was incredibly strange. It wasn’t even clear why Silver Crow and I were fighting to begin with. I had encountered him, sure, but that was nothing but an accident, a problem with a test machine.

However—that was precisely why. It was precisely because this battle was taking place in an unknown game, a situation where every little thing was shrouded in mystery, that I was this excited.

And it wasn’t just that. The name Kirito and these long-beloved swords in both hands would not allow any half measures in battle.

“Now. I’ll give him everything I’ve got.” A quiet whisper.

I took a large step forward with my right foot and carried out the Sword Skill motion. Both blades became tinged with a vivid orange light.

I flung myself in a long-distance charge toward Silver Crow, like I had been shot out of a cannon.

Dual blades charge attack, Double Circular.

The figure of Kirito plunging forward, his twin swords tracing out a glittering trajectory within the depths of the darkness, was like the breath of a dragon burning everything to ash.

Haruyuki kicked aside the knee-jerk reaction to flee into the sky and simply waited at the ready. Even with his mind shifted to the highest gear, everything happened in a single moment.

Before his eyes, Kirito’s body spun around. The black sword in his right hand sliced ferociously upward through the air from below, drawing out a spiral in space.

Haruyuki moved to send the tip of it bouncing farther upward with the armor of his left arm.

The armor on Silver Crow’s arms was harder than any other part of his body. And yet, despite this, the sword ripped halfway through his arm, and brilliant sparks flowed into the night sky from that sharp wound.

“Ngh!” The cry slipped from Haruyuki’s throat, but his bull’s-eye hit was coming.

With the briefest of pauses, the white sword in Kirito’s left hand cut in from beyond of the arc of the savage slash lingering in space, as if to cross it. With terrifying accuracy, the tip was aiming for Haruyuki’s neck, faster than the attack of any Burst Linker he’d ever faced before, much faster than a bullet or even a laser.

Haruyuki was aiming to evade that blade and catch it. But he could find absolutely no opening to do so. In fact, it was a single blow of such great speed, it would not allow him to even dodge.

Thus, he spread his palms, prepared to let his right hand fly, and caught the tip smack in the middle of it.

Without the slightest hint of resistance, the sword pierced his hand and continued to push forward. However, it slowed down the tiniest amount, giving Haruyuki just enough leeway to twist his head. A light vibration came to him on the right side of his neck, and the blade ripped deeply past, to the rear.

Ten percent left in his health gauge.

This gamble is—

My win!! he shouted in his mind, and with his right hand, sword still plunged through it, Haruyuki grabbed Kirito’s left hand, hilt and all.

“Aaaaaah!!” he roared. Both feet kicked off the ground, his wings beat at the air, and Haruyuki flew up into the night sky with a force that burned up the whole of his fully charged special-attack gauge in an instant.

In the middle of this full-throttle acceleration, he flipped his body around. Taking advantage of the force of the inertia, he flung Kirito straight up with everything he had.

The sword slid out of his hand and grew distant, leaving a thin trail of sparks. With no wings, the twin-blade swordsman ascended endlessly in the night sky with ferocious force he could do nothing about.

Even in this situation, surprisingly, the swordsman didn’t seem the least bit shaken. He wasn’t flailing his arms and legs, but instead spread them out, trying to control his posture.

But now that it had come to this, there was nothing left he could do.

The majority of Burst Linkers likely didn’t have a clear understanding of the fact, but physical attacks were generally a reaction against an action. Whether it was a punch or a kick, a sword or a blunt weapon, unless you stepped firmly with your feet, kicked off the ground, and put some weight behind it, you generated no power. This was the reason that the effects of hand-to-hand combat were weak in the Ice stage, where your feet slipped in strange ways.

And in midair, there was no ground. Kirito could probably still swing his swords, but that fearsome power lodged within their blades would be no more.

In contrast, Haruyuki could use the thrust of his wings to kick off the air. For instance, even if they both struck simultaneously, he would deal a far greater amount of damage.

“This,” Haruyuki shouted, as he stared at the silhouette of Kirito, the force of whose assent slackened as he approached the upper dead point, “is the eeeeeeend!!”

Fwoosh!! The air howled in his ears. He concentrated the force of his charge in the singular point of his right foot, and launched a long-range roundhouse kick.

Kirito tried to catch this with the sword in his left hand, but it was easily repelled with a high-pitched noise, and the kick pushed deep into his flank.

The black figure bounced off into space once again, and Haruyuki chased after him in another dash. Deflecting the slashing attack again with crossed arms, Haruyuki kept going, lunging forward with a head butt. He beat ferociously at the center of Kirito’s chest.

And with that, both of their health gauges were left with 10 percent.

He only had that much left in his flight gauge as well. But that was enough. He would finish this with the next blow. He clenched his fist with all the strength he had and started on his final charge.

Instantly.

Kirito’s eyes flew open. Long coat flapping fiercely, his entire body seemed to be wrapped in a pale red aura. The black longsword in his right hand radiated a crimson red light akin to blood.

A special attack! Don’t freak!!

Haruyuki gritted his teeth, and kept shooting straight ahead. It might have been a long-range thrust attack, but in midair, with nowhere to brace himself, it should flow off to the rear along with Haruyuki. A technique like that couldn’t pierce the armor of Silver Crow!

“Unh…aaaah!” Haruyuki was turning his grunt into a roar when ahead of him, Kirito flipped around.

Krrrrrr!! With a roar like a jet engine, the black swordsman launched a straight-jab piercing technique from his right hand. Haruyuki could clearly feel its incredible force as it rent the night sky rather dazzlingly.

—And headed in the exact opposite direction of Haruyuki’s approach.

“Wha…?!” Haruyuki gasped as Kirito took the reactive force of the fierce thrust attack and plunged forward implacably.

The sword in his left hand burned a flash of pale crescent moon into Haruyuki’s eyes. It came slicing down on his chest. The tip touched, and he simultaneously felt heat and cold.

Who is this guy?!

To use everything left in his special-attack gauge not for an offensive move, but to gain a moment of thrust…Haruyuki was taken by a moment of amazement once more. However, at the same time, his mind was attempting a final counterattack.

Haruyuki thrust his right fist directly forward, crossing the trajectory of the sword. But his reach wasn’t long enough. Reflexively, he extended his fingers and made his hand into a flat edge. His sharp fingers lined up and shone whitely, almost like a sword of his own.

You gotta make it!! To at least tell him I fought right to the end!!

The white sword started to pierce Silver Crow’s chest.

His silver fingertips touched Kirito’s coat.

In that instant, Kirito’s avatar changed into particles of white light without a sound.

The sword lost physical form and passed through Haruyuki, as Haruyuki’s right hand slipped through Kirito’s body. The two made contact in midair and their bodies intersected.

The instant they passed each other, Haruyuki felt like he heard a voice in his head. A soft yet clear echo, a good voice.

“That was a good duel. Let’s fight again someday.”

And then the mysterious Burst Linker Kirito was removed from the virtual field.

In the center of Haruyuki’s field of view, the system text DISCONNECTION blinked lightly.

“…to. Kazuto!”

He jerked his eyes up to find Suguha across the dining table from him, lips pursed in a pout.

“Oh! S-sorry! What?”

“Your hand hasn’t really moved for a while, so I asked if you like it!” Suguha puffed out her cheeks even farther.

“O-of course I do!” He hurriedly shook his head. “This oden’s really good.” I opened my mouth wide and shoved a piece of potato in, nodding appreciatively as I did so, but Suguha still wasn’t happy.

“This isn’t oden. It’s pot-au-feu.”

Are you supposed to put whole eggs in pot-au-feu? I thought, although naturally I didn’t say this out loud. I handled the situation by shoveling down whatever it was, and my plate was empty in no time, so I thrust it out in a gesture of More, please!

As always, Mom was late, so it was just me and Suguha for supper again today. I fell silent there, and the table was quiet. But even as I started to take my second plate of French-style oden, my thoughts were always pulled back to the mysterious incident I’d experienced that afternoon.

In the strange one-on-one fighting game field, I had gone up against the unknown avatar Silver Crow in a white-hot contest, but just before the deciding blows were landed, we were disconnected; the whole thing had happened a mere four hours or so earlier.

I leapt out of the test machine, and of course, I rambled on and on to Takeru Higa about everything.

And yet Higa actually got a skeptical look on his face, so I got mad and said that I would connect to the game again and rather than sword and fist, we would exchange information.

What I saw on the second dive was…the bright woodland scene, just like Higa had told me about. There was no health gauge or timer in my field of view, and no opponent appeared. After I collected data there, just like in the initial plan, Higa and other staff members also tried diving just in case, but none of them saw any mysterious human figures.

Right, the quantum circuit of the test machine had been “fixed.” Almost as if having witnessed the fight between me and Crow, the machine was completely satisfied…

Or maybe that fight was a fleeting dream I had on my first full dive in the fourth-generation machine. That’s what Higa had said when my task was finished, and I was about to leave the lab.

But I couldn’t completely believe that. Silver Crow’s movements were almost a wonder and his battle spirit was like a super-high-temperature flame. We tried to burn each other up. There was no way that duel was just a dream.

“Come on. What have you been thinking about this whole time?” came Suguha’s voice once more, to pull me out of my head again.

If this kept up, she would get mad at me, so I decided to bring her into those thoughts, and as I pierced a wiener with my fork, I said, “Oh, it’s just today, I dueled an amazing opponent. The connection got cut, so it was no count. But, well, I can’t really say I won.”

“What? You ended up in a draw with an unknown player? Is there actually someone like that?” Interest piqued, Suguha also leaned forward. She seemed to have misinterpreted it as something that happened in ALO, but even if I did want to correct her, I’d sworn to keep the test machine secret, which meant I actually couldn’t talk about that, so I just left it.

“Let’s see. He flew in the sky incredibly naturally. It looked like the real deal, real flight.”

“What do you mean?” Suguha cocked her head, and, fork still in one hand, I tried to stage it for her.

“It’s like, in ALO, you don’t really control your wings with just your brain. You actually use the movement of your shoulder blades, right? Like this to accelerate.” I pulled my shoulders back and pressed my shoulder blades up against each other. “This to decelerate.” This time, I stretched my arms out ahead of me and pulled my shoulder blades apart. “As you get skilled at it, the motion gets smaller and smaller. But you’re still moving a little, at least. So during an air raid, no matter what, it interferes with your attack motion.”

“Right.” Suguha nodded deeply. “When you swing your sword, you have to open your shoulders, so you end up ordering your wings to brake at the same time that you’re attacking. The only ones who can attack flying at full speed without being killed are people with lance-type weapons readied at the hip. But there’s no way around that. After all, human beings don’t have real wings. You have to substitute some other motion of your body.”

“Right. But this guy, it looked like he controlled his wings with absolutely no conflict. After this one intense dash at full power, he accelerated even more and thrust his fist out.”

“What? That’s impossible!” Suguha opened her eyes wide.

I smiled slightly. “Right. It’s impossible. It probably just looked like that because he was so fast. If he could freely control just his wings, he wouldn’t be a person, he’d be a birdman. Or…”

Or in that world, there’s a human-machine interface that goes beyond my understanding.

Right. If, rather than picking up movement orders from the medulla oblongata like the AmuSphere, it read movement images directly from the consciousness. Or…But there was no way that could be done. Accessing the consciousness—in other words, the soul itself…

Yet it was the only thing I could think of that would allow Silver Crow to move like that.

Image power. In other words, a world where a person’s very will was digitized into actual power. Right. Thinking about it like that, hadn’t the test machine there read my self-image and produced the swordsman Kirito avatar that way? So then, the fourth-generation dive machine Higa made communicated not with the brain cells, but directly with the soul. Did that mean that in that world, it was possible for divers to make use of the ultimate output—the power of will?

I closed my eyes tightly for a second before looking at Suguha across from me. I ended up grinning.

“What are you smiling about, Kazuto?” The Sylph swordswoman speedaholic was getting annoyed.

“Maybe someday,” I said. “No, maybe in the unexpectedly near future, we might be able to really fly. Not any pseudo, involuntary flight, but flapping our wings just as we imagine it in our hearts, yeah?”

Suguha blinked rapidly, and then her whole face broke out into a broad grin. “Yeah, it would be great if that happened,” she agreed.

As I chewed loudly on a wiener, in my mind, I called up one more time that figure.

The beautiful silver crow flying through the dark night sky.

“…yuki. Hey, are you listening to me, Haruyuki?”

Hearing his name, Haruyuki hurriedly lifted his head. Kuroyukihime was staring seriously at him from the opposite side of the round table.

“Ah! I-I-I’m sorry! I was just thinking…”

“Well, what exactly is this item for investigation that is more important than discussing where you would like to go with me? I’d be very interested to hear.”

Shrinking back with an eep, he gulped back the iced latte in his paper cup to buy some time.

The lounge after school was deserted; there wasn’t another student to be seen. Even so, just in case, Haruyuki looked around and checked that no one would overhear their conversation before he mumbled his reply.

“Um, well…the truth is, I dueled with this weird Burst Linker…” He deliberately left out “over lunch today.” A mysterious enemy appearing over lunch and on the in-school local net was serious, even without the Dusk Taker incident this spring. Really, immediately after the duel, he should have reported to all members of Nega Nebulus and cracked the real of this enemy, but Haruyuki hadn’t done that.

Because he hadn’t gotten any sense of malice or even enmity from that dueler. He had only displayed the pure excitement and joy of the duel. The battle had been so fierce, and yet he had left Haruyuki feeling refreshed.

He probably wouldn’t appear a second time. Haruyuki had no basis for believing that, but believe it he did.

“He was weird, but he was amazing,” he said slowly. “He had two swords for weapons, and I basically couldn’t even see his techniques.”

“Two swords,” Kuroyukihime murmured distinctly, and furrowed her brow slightly. But when Haruyuki turned puzzled eyes on her, her expression returned to normal and she continued, “Oh. No, it’s nothing. And? Did you win?”

“Oh! Um, right before the deciding battle, the connection was cut…but if it hadn’t been, I’m sure I would’ve lost. My final blow probably wouldn’t have landed.”

“My! To overwhelm you in close combat. What was his color and level?”

At Kuroyukihime’s question, Haruyuki got a troubled look on his face and shook his head. “Maybe it was a system error or he was using some kind of filter, but I couldn’t see his color name or his level. Just…looking at him, he was incredibly…black.”

Faced with the Black King narrowing her eyes slightly once more, Haruyuki, still not thinking too deeply, casually asked the question that had come up during the battle. “Oh, right. I meant to ask you a million times before. What kind of attributes does ‘black’ have, anyway?”

Kuroyukihime blinked, puzzled, and then smiled a wide, wry grin. “Where’s that coming from all of a sudden?”

“Oh! S-sorry.” When he unconsciously shrank into himself, a smile like that of one a wise older sister would turn onto a thoughtless younger brother crossed her lips.

“No, no need to apologize. Because the answer is, I don’t know, either.”

“Huh?”

“That said, I have made certain suppositions.” Her glass of iced tea clanking, Kuroyukihime began to explain, her eyes turned to the hazy light of the afternoon sun. “On the color wheel, there’s close-range blue, long-range red, and intermediate yellow. And then green and purple with attributes in between there. Except for the metal colors, pretty much every duel avatar is categorized in this wheel. The greater the saturation, the purer the affiliation.”

All of this was laws Haruyuki also knew very well. For instance, Cyan Pile, controlled by his good friend Takumu, was a fairly vivid blue, but he tended just a tiny bit toward the purple direction. This was why his initial armament Cyan Pile did double duty with long-distance attack power.

As if reading Haruyuki’s mind, Kuroyukihime nodded as she continued, “Conversely, the lower the saturation, the more the affiliation is particular. Your friend Ash Roller is a green type, but he’s so gray, you basically can’t tell. That’s because a large part of his potential has been poured into the special Enhanced Armament of his bike. But even with the same lowering of saturation, why do some avatars go darker and others go lighter? That still hasn’t been properly explained.”

“Some get darker…some lighter…,” he parroted, and Haruyuki finally got it. The end of an avatar getting darker and darker was, of course, black—pure black. Conversely, at the end of getting lighter was white—pure white. Both had the ultimate in specificity, but in that case why were black and white split up as total opposite colors? He didn’t have a clue.

Haruyuki twisted and craned his neck, and Kuroyukihime spoke abruptly, clearly, “Black is the color of refusal. Or so I thought for a long time.”

“Huh? R-refusal?”

“Yes. It refuses to be dyed with any hue. It is a nihilistic color, possessing nothing. You can’t go any further than that. The color of the bottom of a deep well.” Her words were cold, but Kuroyukihime shook her head before Haruyuki could open his mouth to say anything. A faint smile bled onto her pale lips. “But…but lately, I’ve been feeling that maybe that’s not the case. And that’s because…” Abruptly, she slid her slender hand across the table and squeezed Haruyuki’s. “…You have held my hands like this countless times. Because you made me remember that even someone like me can have that contact with another person.”

Faced with eyes gentler than he had ever seen, Haruyuki turned red right up to his ears, but still, he managed to resolve himself and squeeze Kuroyukihime’s cool hand. His heart was pounding, and it didn’t seem like he was going to be able to say something really appropriate, so he tried earnestly to communicate everything in his heart through their touching fingers.

Black definitely isn’t the color of refusal. I mean, you, you were the one who reached a hand out to me alone at the bottom of my pit. You wrapped yours gently around it; you healed my wounds.

Right. And him, too. That black swordsman had the same sort of composure somehow. He had a strength and breadth to accept and support all things.

Haruyuki lifted his face timidly, as if pushed from behind by the Kirito in his memory and managed to get something akin to words to come from his mouth. “Um. Uh, I was taught in class that black things look black because they don’t repel any light. So…so it’s definitely not a sad color. I think it’s bigger and warmer than any other color.”

Kuroyukihime’s eyes flew open wide for a moment. And then a smile like the bud of a lotus flower unfolding spread across her face.