Accel World - Volume 11 - Chapter 9

9

Silver Crow’s hard feet stepped onto a metallic floor. At the same time as he stood himself upright, he first checked the two health gauges shown in the upper part of his field of view. The player challenged was on the left, and it was a name he knew well: Frost Horn, level five. An ice user who belonged to the Blue Legion, Leonids, he was the one for whom Haruyuki had registered on his automatic Gallery list. Unusually, he wasn’t in a tag team with his partner Tourmaline Shell that day.

And the name of the challenger on the right side was one he was seeing for the first time. The roman letters below the gauge spelled out WOLFRAM CERBERUS. Level…one. In other words, a newbie—who had just not too long ago become a Burst Linker—had challenged Horn—who was getting into the veteran range.

“W-wow…When I was level one, I could barely challenge someone one level higher,” he murmured to himself, and then focused his attention on the avatar name again. “Um…W-Wallfram…Kerberus?” When he had managed to read it out somehow, someone spoke from directly behind him.

“It’s pronounced Wolfram Cerberus, with a soft C.”

“Oh! Th-thanks—Wait, what?!” He looked back and bowed his head, only to then leap back nearly a meter straight to one side.

Standing there was a girl warrior avatar clad in heavy, deep-blue armor—the person who had threatened him so cruelly at close distance only two days earlier. Belatedly, he regretted not setting a dummy avatar for Gallery use in case this sort of thing was going to happen, but it took time to manually go back to your duel avatar when you were challenged. He gave up on his flailing and rubbed the back of his head as he bowed neatly.

“Oh! G-g-g-good evening. Uh, um, Mangan— No, Cobal— No, wait, actually, M—” The reason he couldn’t immediately settle on a name was that, also unusually, she did not have her partner in tow. When they were together, he could distinguish between them as the bluer one and the greener one, but with just one of them in the gloom of a Purgatory stage, it was hard to immediately decide which one it was.

The warrior narrowed her sharp eye lenses and stared at Haruyuki, whose head was cocked far to one side, before growling, “If I were your duel opponent, I would send your head and your body home separately. I’m Manganese Blade. It’s not just our armor color; Cobalt’s head has two horns. Remember that.”

“O-oh! Right!” Now that she mentioned it, the helmet of the warrior before him had only one decorative part stretching out from the back of it. “I-I’ll remember that. Cobalt’s got pigtails and Maga’s got a ponytail—”

“Who has a ponytail?! And the only one who can call me by a nickname is our king! I’m going to challenge you once this duel is over, so be ready!!”

“Ee-eep! I-I-I-I’m sorry!” The instant Haruyuki shrank back, a loud cheer rose up from a place a little ways off.

“Hooooooooorn! Fiiiiiiiiiight!”

“Don’t let the newb do you in. Show us what you’re maaaaaaaade of!”

Taking advantage of this to turn away, Haruyuki found nearly thirty members of the Gallery outlined along the tops of buildings lining the thoroughfare. Although it was Naka-2, there still weren’t too many duels where this many people came together.

“Wow…Just like Horn,” Haruyuki said. “He’s pretty popular, huh?”

Stepping up beside him, Manganese Blade, the senior executive of the Leonids and close aide of the Blue King, changed her tone slightly as she said, “No. Over half of the Gallery here are registered to watch Cerberus’s duels.”

“Huh? B-but Cerberus’s level one?”

“You lack education, Crow. These last few days, Cerberus…,” the girl started to say, and then she closed her mouth before turning her gaze quickly to the south of the big street. “He’s here. You’ll understand the reason a newbie can get this many spectators when you watch the duel.”

“Oh…kay,” he replied uncertainly, and once again checked his surroundings.

The place was a fair ways from Honan Street, where he had accelerated. At basically the northern edge of the stage was the area around the Chuo Line at Nakano Station. The wide road that stretched out to the north and south immediately before him was Nakano Street. The large, multi-use building standing on the other side of the road was Nakano Sun Plaza, and the building beyond it was the Nakano Ward office. Similarly, the shopping mall rising up on his right was probably Nakano Broadway.

The three buildings had all been transformed into the twisted organic figures characteristic of the Purgatory stage, but since Haruyuki came to hang out in this area every so often, he could tell them apart somehow. There was a shop specializing in old video games on Broadway that had a good selection. Right, maybe I’ll just stop in there on my way home. No, wait, my real body’s way south of here…So his thoughts were running when—

To his right, from the north on Nakano Street, he heard a powerful roar, and then a large figure charged into sight. Chunky armor like cubes of ice, a fairly transparent ice-blue, and the characteristic horns stretching out from the forehead. Mr. “Go for Broke” from the Leonids himself, Frost Horn. He wasn’t running; rather, he was sliding along at high speed, hips lowered. Apparently, he had the ability to make a thin layer of ice just on the road around his feet and slide on that.

When they had fought near the government building at the beginning of that month, Horn hadn’t been using that mode of transportation. It looked fairly staid at first glance, but it was a good technique to cover a large avatar’s weakness of dulled movement speed. He’s a real fighter, develops fast. Haruyuki was quietly impressed.

But while a few members of the Gallery were watching Horn’s movement—call it a skate-dash technique—together with Haruyuki, the remaining thirty people of the Gallery were staring intently toward the south of the road, all of them wrapped in an electric air. Thinking this strange, Haruyuki also turned to face left.

In the south, he saw the overhead Chuo Line cutting across the road and the pagan shrine–like form of Nakano Station. One of the two double-axis guide cursors that told the Gallery the locations of the duelers was pointing toward the darkness under the train bridge, so Haruyuki focused his attention there and spotted a single silhouette strolling out of the thick darkness.

He was small and slender, almost the opposite of Horn. There were no noticeable protrusions on his limbs, and he didn’t have any sort of weapon. The color of the armor illuminated in the weak light of the Purgatory stage was a slightly brownish, frosted gray.

“Huh?” Haruyuki cocked his head once more. According to Manganese next to him, the name of this avatar was Wolfram Cerberus. In line with the rules of Brain Burst, “wolfram” should have been an English word expressing a color. But Haruyuki didn’t know any such color, and he didn’t even understand the meaning to begin with. He made a mental note to look it up in a dictionary app after the duel as he continued checking out the newbie avatar for the first time.

If he were forced to list the avatar’s distinguishing features, the list would have basically had one item: he had a face mask reminiscent of some kind of dog creature. From between the jagged helmet pieces with the motif of upper and lower teeth, dark goggle lenses peeked out. It was a tough design, but animal-type avatars were not that rare. Prominence’s Blood Leopard, whom Haruyuki knew well, had a face patterned after a leopard, and Great Wall’s Bush Utan was primate-ish, as the name suggested. In short, Wolfram Cerberus was in color and form a fairly staid duel avatar. What was tripping Haruyuki up was the “wolf” in “Wolfram.” If it came from his wolfish appearance, then that would mean the second part of his name, “Cerberus,” was the color name, which was the opposite of the normal rule.

Wait. I feel like I’ve seen the word cerberus somewhere before. I’m pretty sure a monster in some game had a name like that. Haruyuki started to dig into his own memories, but at that moment, the clear voice of a boy filled the stage.

“Thank you for this opportunity!!” The voice belonged to Cerberus; after emerging from beneath the bridge, he was standing still in the center of the intersection that lay before the Nakano Ward office. He put both hands against his legs and bowed neatly. The angle and his form were the perfect demonstration of manners.

“Uh…Oh?” Haruyuki said involuntarily. When he was level one, he was constantly, always aiming for a surprise attack for his first hit; he had never once greeted his opponent like that. Actually, even now at level five, he still felt the same way. “He’s really got it together. I wonder who his parent is.” Haruyuki looked around at the Gallery. It wouldn’t be strange for the parent of a level-one rookie to watch the duel—it was, in fact, normal for a parent to take advantage of the right to get within ten meters of the duelers and even offer advice.

As Haruyuki whirled his head back and forth, the murmur of the blue warrior beside him reached his ears. “His parent’s not here. Their identity is unknown.”

“Un…known?” Unconsciously, he looked to his side.

Manganese returned a sharp look from beneath her forehead protector. “Cobalt and I suspected you, but…from your confusion, it seems we were wrong…”

“Huh? Me? Wait! Whaaat?!” He barely managed to keep himself from shouting. “M-me, his parent?! A-a-a-a-as if! That’s not happening! It’s about a hundred years too early for me to have a kid! And I mean, why would you suspect me?!”

“Well—” Manganese tried to say something, but before she could, there was a fierce roar from the street below.

“Not even tryin’ for a surprise attack! You got some nerve!!” This was, of course, Horn in the middle of his skate dash. He leaned even farther forward and picked up speed. “But!! It’s not just my imagination, is it!! That attitude of yours is condescending to sweet little me!! Getting too full of yourself just ’cos you beat Tori!!”

“Y-you’re so mean, Hooooorn!!” Horn’s partner, Tourmaline Shell, shouted from the roof of a building.

Haruyuki was stunned. “Huh? He beat level-four Tori?!”

During this time, the distance between the duelers was rapidly closed. The instant it was down to twenty meters, Horn readied both his hands tightly at each side of his body. The horns on his forehead and shoulders emitted a pale glow. “Getting things off to a good start…Frosted Circle!!”

Fwsh! Together with a crisp sound effect, a ring of light spread out with Horn at the center. The ground and structures within it were quickly covered in a white frost.

In his surprise, Haruyuki forgot about his conversation with Manganese and leaned forward. What shocked him was not the effect of the technique. It was that Frost Horn had already charged his gauge fully for his special attack. Filling your special-attack gauge before you met your opponent was the most basic of duel techniques, but since hiding and smashing terrain objects as soon as the duel began actually looked pretty small-minded, it wasn’t something higher-ranking Burst Linkers usually did with lower-ranked opponents. And Horn’s motto was supposedly “go hard.” Did this mean, then, that he was sending a powerful warning to this level one?

“Ngaaaaah! Eat this, right in the faaaaaaace!!” With this battle cry, Horn adopted a tackling posture with the horn on his right shoulder thrust out. Haruyuki, in the Gallery, could see the battlefield clearly, but Cerberus, in that Frosted Circle blanketed in white fog, shouldn’t have been able to see his opponent. Without the time to see the trajectory of the tackle and dodge it, his only choice would be to gamble in the early stage and pick a direction to leap in.

Or it should have been, but the gray level one didn’t so much as flinch. Instead, he slowly lowered his body and thrust out the head patterned after a wolf. He brought his fists together in front of his chest, and the top and bottom of his visor came together with a clang, completely hiding his goggles. This sight stirred something in Haruyuki’s memory, but before he could figure out why, Cerberus was also shouting out:

“Ooo…aaaaaah!!” The dignity of the boy and the ferocity of a beast mixed together into a war cry that was almost beautiful. The air of the stage crackled electrically, and the Gallery pulled themselves upright. The frozen earth at Cerberus’s feet cracked. With almost the force of a bullet, the small avatar started into a dash, his trajectory perfectly matching the line of Horn’s charge.

“No…way. From head-on?” Haruyuki croaked, hoarsely.

“That…fool.” Manganese groaned at the same time.

The sharp roar of an impossibly hard crash filled the duel stage. The impact generated at the epicenter of the intersection in front of the Nakano Ward office was so enormous that all the windows in Sun Plaza Hall next to it shattered. The ice generated by Frosted Circle was pulverized and became pale smoke blanketing the road. The thirty or so members of the Gallery watched with bated breath until the wind blew it away.

“Wh-whoa…,” someone said.

What appeared when the ice-smoke cleared were two completely static duel avatars, a distance of zero meters between them: The horn on Frost Horn’s right shoulder and Wolfram Cerberus’s tapered jaw were touching at a single point. The metal road surface was cracked in every direction at their feet, conveying the true enormity of the impact.

…Snap.

The faint noise reached Haruyuki’s ears. Snap, snap. The hard sound was colored with a faintness like glass breaking. It was obviously not the sound of the stage being destroyed, but a duel avatar.

“So he can’t handle it after all.” Haruyuki sighed. Though, wait—the scene below his eyes was already a miracle. Wolfram Cerberus had met the full-fledged charge of level-five Horn—a heavy, close-range type on top of that—square on and not been sent flying; Cerberus, at level one, should have been amply praised for the feat. Manganese’s “fool” was too harsh of an assessment.

One of the two health gauges in the upper part of Haruyuki’s field of view was instantly dyed red, dropping below 30 percent in one go. The instant he checked the name beneath it, Haruyuki gasped, dumbfounded. “Wha…?”

At the same time as he returned his gaze to the battlefield, Frost Horn’s right arm shattered into pieces from the shoulder down to the fingertips. Staring dubiously at the enormous blue form as it lost its balance and went down on one knee, Haruyuki belatedly understood the true meaning of Manganese’s words.

They had been her assessment of a midrange member of her own Legion, as given by a senior executive. In other words, she had been expecting this result before the impact.

“Th…at’s why…this is…?!” Impossible! Haruyuki groaned internally.

In Brain Burst, there was the basic principle of “same level, same potential.” Put another way, different levels had different powers. To meet the tackle of someone not just one or two levels higher, but four, and a close-range tackle to boot—it was hard to believe you could beat that. If the sight before his eyes wasn’t some kind of trick, it meant that Wolfram Cerberus’s close-range attack and defense power was so great that he could overturn a four-level difference.

“An Enhanced Armament? Or…It can’t be an—” Incarnate attack?

Just as Haruyuki was on the verge of letting this slip, Manganese stopped him. “No. This is the basic performance produced by his—by Cerberus’s own color.”

“C-color? Cerberus, what color is that?” Even while Haruyuki asked the question in a trembling voice, the battle on the road was beginning again. But perhaps from the shock of losing one arm and having his greatest special attack ruined, Horn’s movements were dull. His health gauge was steadily carved away by Wolfram Cerberus, who came at him resolutely, not flinching in the slightest before his enormous opponent.

“His color name is ‘wolfram,’ of course,” Manganese murmured, as she looked down on the battlefield with hard eyes.

“Huh. So then it’s not connected with wolves or anything? Wolfram is…the name of a color?”

“Aye. Or…more precisely, maybe the name of the armor material, like us.” Here, Manganese Blade turned her head and looked directly at Haruyuki. “Wolfram is an English word meaning a kind of metal. In Japan, we usually use the Swedish name. Incidentally, Cerberus is similar; we mainly use the Greek name in Japan. In other words, if you translate his name…it’s this.”

On the street, Frost Horn’s enormous body, finally exhausted of strength, shattered into pieces. Haruyuki’s vision was filled with the shining winner display with Wolfram Cerberus’s name inscribed in it. As the sound effect signaling the resolution of the duel played, Manganese’s voice carried to him quietly.

“Tungsten Kerberos.”

Because his own duel avatar was a metal color, Haruyuki had looked into the main characteristics of the metals. For instance, gold was heavy and chemically stable but so soft that you could bend it with your hands. Magnesium was extremely light, and although it was sufficiently strong when forged, it bonded easily with oxygen. Aluminum was light and soft, but it was surprisingly strong when tempered as an alloy. And silver was stable, albeit not as stable as gold; it was the most electrically conductive of all the metals; and, according to the information Takumu had added the previous day, it was also apparently the most reflective of visible light. Naturally, not every little characteristic that metals had in the real world was applicable to the metal-color avatars in the Accelerated World. But at the very least, you could assume that the biggest characteristics would be reproduced.

So then, if there was a duel avatar with the name Tungsten, what kind of characteristics/performance did it have? In the real world, tungsten was used for the armor plating of tanks, the armor-piercing ammunition to shoot through that, or in drills and blades for processing other metals. In other words, it was hard. This hardness went beyond the realm of metals, approaching even that of a diamond. In which case, naturally, the tungsten—Wolfram, in English—avatar would have inherited this feature.

“…The hardest metal color…?” The words slipped unconsciously from Haruyuki’s mouth.

Next to him, Manganese Blade nodded. “Currently, that assessment is correct.”

In the intersection before the Nakano Ward office below them, the small avatar with the tungsten armor faced Frost Horn, already gone from the stage, and bowed deeply once more. His clear voice rang out. “Thank you very much!” At this display of politeness, rare in the Accelerated World, the Gallery, who normally didn’t do anything like this, showered him with appreciative applause.

Haruyuki moved to clap his hands together as well, but Manganese continued to speak, so he stopped himself and looked at her.

“It’s only been three days since Wolfram Cerberus appeared in the areas of Shibuya Number One, Shinjuku Number Three, and Nakano Number Two here. Given that you had your hands full with purifying the armor, it’s no wonder you didn’t know.”

“R-right. I hadn’t even heard his name before today.”

“But the impact he’s having is even bigger than when Dusk Taker was rampaging in Shinjuku and Shibuya two months ago. His strength, though, was understandable when you saw the combo of his long-distance firepower and the flight he stole from you, but…”

“Th-that—I’m sorry about that time,” Haruyuki apologized without thinking. Hearing the name of the Twilight Marauder in this unexpected place had that effect.

Manganese looked at him with exasperated eyes and snorted. “You were a victim of that, too. At any rate, unlike Taker, you can’t see the bottom of this strength of Cerberus’s.”

“Huh? Isn’t it just that he’s super hard because he’s the metal-color tungsten?”

“He’s hard. But his way of fighting isn’t really hard. Normally, a level-one chick insists on their own abilities and has a narrow field of view, so their fighting style is stiff. Like how you used to focus just on your flying and always get shot down by Red snipers, Crow.”

“R-right. I really am sorry.” Reflexively, he apologized once more, and Manganese responded with another snort before continuing her explanation.

“But Cerberus there only uses the hardness that is his greatest strength in places where it’s most effective. The reason this duel was resolved in such a short time is because that impulsive idiot Horn suddenly charged him head-on. But…a normal level one in that situation, no matter how much they believed in their own hardness, I doubt they would have been able to meet him in earnest without even hesitating.”

“It’s true, he did meet Horn’s powerful shoulder charge with his own head butt without so much as flinching. When I was level one, I would have been running around for twenty-five minutes.”

At his own words, he suddenly became concerned and checked the timer in the lower center of his field of view. It had started at 1,800 seconds, and he was a little surprised that there were still nearly 1,000 seconds left. Looking around him, he saw that more than half of the Gallery had already left the stage, and Cerberus, the issue at hand, appeared to be operating his own Instruct menu on the road. This space would not disappear until the time ran out or he burst out.

Also turning her eyes down to the road, Manganese narrowed her eye lenses fiercely and lowered her voice. “…He doesn’t appear to be accompanied by a parent or belong to any Legion. So then where did he learn that duel sense? Or if he was able to fight like that on his own right from the start, then his true power isn’t the hardness of tungsten, but…”

“…But…?” Haruyuki gulped the throat of his avatar and waited for her to continue.

“…But maybe that he’s a genius. A natural talent who’s been given everything necessary for the duel—no, for a Burst Linker—right from the start.”

Genius. The instant he heard that word, Haruyuki felt a soft part of his heart wither suddenly. Because, for the human being Haruyuki Arita, this was the word most unconnected with him. At every opportunity, Kuroyukihime told him that his speed was a talent no one else had. But he knew better than anyone that this speed—his reaction speed in a VR environment—was absolutely not something he had been born with.

Ever since he was little, Haruyuki had fled to the virtual world to forget about his unpleasant reality and spent a great deal of his time with a variety of VR games. His reaction speed was nothing more than something polished and refined through that. His high score in the squash game corner in the Umesato local net that had drawn Kuroyukihime’s eyes to him was also nothing but a number built up because he hid in that place to escape his bullies.

It was a fact that that speed had given his Accelerated World duel avatar the unique flight ability. However, the reason Haruyuki had been able to overcome all kinds of crises without losing all his points up to that day was exactly because of the many, utterly many people who had helped him. There probably wasn’t one problem he had solved alone under his own power. The current mission to obtain the Theoretical Mirror ability was the same. Even though Niko and Utai had been kind enough to diligently show him the path, he had finally only been able to see a single hazy hint—

“Honestly. This and that all at once, it’s too much!” Manganese exploded abruptly, interrupting Haruyuki’s negative thoughts.

“A-all at once?” he asked, jerking his head up.

“That’s right. You have the creepy generation of the ISS kits, the transfer of the Archangel Metatron, and now the appearance of Wolfram Cerberus. All these things have happened in the last week.”

“R-right. That’s true.”

“Given all this, I should actually say it’s fortuitous that we took care of everything concerning the issue of your Armor of Catastrophe yesterday. I don’t even want to imagine the situation where you have a bounty on your head and we have to send a team to subjugate you. Not that I’m thanking you or anything, though!”

“W-well, of course, no.” As he bowed his head, the thought suddenly popped into his mind: He could maybe say that he had only fought just the slightest bit under his own power to purify the Armor of Catastrophe aka the Disaster. It wasn’t a problem to have a lot of people helping him, but there had to be one or two situations where he stood firm on his own. Even if he didn’t have a natural talent, he was growing bit by bit, for sure. With that thought, he managed to cheer himself up just the tiniest bit, and Haruyuki bowed his head unconsciously to Manganese once more. “Um. Th-thank you.”

“…You have no reason to thank me.”

“Oh, I—I guess so. Ha-ha-ha!”

Perhaps Cerberus on the road had finished with his Instruct while they were talking; he suddenly looked up at the Gallery, down to ten or so people now, and called out in a voice that carried, “Well then, I’ll take my leave of you here! Thank you so much for watching!!”

Normally, the Gallery was for having fun watching duels or gathering information on an opponent you would fight one day, so there was really no need for a thank-you here, but with Cerberus’s too-fresh attitude, everyone responded unthinkingly with another round of applause.

Finally, the gray metal color bowed neatly once more and raised his voice. “Burst O—”

He stopped halfway through.

Haruyuki realized the wolfish face mask was looking in their direction, and he unconsciously tried to hide behind Manganese. But before he could, the clear voice of the boy reached the roof of the building.

“Um, please excuse me if I’m mistaken! Standing up there…are you perhaps Silver Crow of Nega Nebulus, by any chance?!”

Gah! He threw his head back. If it had been just the two of them, he surely would have shaken his head swiftly back and forth and said, “You’ve got the wrong avatar.” But starting with Manganese, all the other remaining members of the Gallery would certainly have been aware that it was Silver Crow standing there, so he couldn’t even come close to pulling that off.

He had no choice. In a relatively smooth voice, he replied in a mumble, “Y-yes, well…I guess, yeah.”

Cerberus immediately ran up to the spot directly below him at street level and shouted even more forcefully, “It’s a pleasure to meet you! I’ve wanted to meet you for so long! When I reach level two, I was thinking about coming to visit the Suginami area. I never dreamed I’d see you here today. I’m overwhelmed!”

“Th-th-that’s very nice of you…” Although he had been told many times that “it was a pleasure to be able to shoot you down,” he had never gotten “I’m overwhelmed to meet you,” so Haruyuki simply pulled his head in, unsure of how exactly he should respond. He couldn’t decide whether he should he run away right then and there, or if he should continue the conversation a little longer.

The words that Cerberus uttered next stabbed right through him.

“I have a request, Crow! Please duel with me now!!”