Accel World - Volume 12 - Chapter 10.2

2

Rubbing her hair with a towel as she returned to the living room, Kuroyukihime looked in turn at the three XSB cables and the small hub set out on the glass table, then at the glass of mineral water Haruyuki reverently held out to her, and nodded. “Mmm.”

She accepted the glass and drank the water down, the ice lightly clinking. Standing at attention before her, Haruyuki sent glances at his Legion Master, fresh from the bath.

Her warm, gray pajamas were the ones she had bought at the shopping mall attached to the condo on the day of her unexpected sleepover a month earlier. At the time, she had grumbled that they didn’t have black, but she had actually brought them with her today. The top was short-sleeved, while the bottoms were knee-length, so her flushed pink skin offered a vivid contrast with the gray of the fabric.

Perhaps this thought was a trigger; in that instant, the live video from earlier started to puff up and start playing in his head. Kuroyukihime pressed the glass, now with nothing but ice in it, up against his cheek.

“Heeyaaah?!” Leaping up, Haruyuki then faced a direct hit from the special attack Super Chilly Kuroyukihime Smile.

“If you don’t hurry and forget the things you should forget, the time we dive in the Unlimited Neutral Field will only get longer, you know, Haruyuki.”

“Uh, um, we’re not doing the zero G training anymore?”

“That’ll make us sick—I mean, I don’t like the background texture, so we’ll do it next time. Or are you saying that you’d like to try and firm up your memories in a weightless space?”

“N-noofcoursenotridiculous! I’ll forget everything—I’ve already forgotten! I’ve completely forgotten!” he shouted, moving his hands and head from side to side on a horizontal.

“Oh my, is that so, Corvus? So then, are you telling me you’ve forgotten my heartfelt warning?” Now it was Fuko’s voice echoing in the living room, and Haruyuki’s entire body snapped to a stop, frozen.

He turned toward her, emerging slightly behind Kuroyukihime, with her Vacuum Smashing Raker Smile, and protested vehemently, “N-n-n-no, I didn’t forget! I remember! I completely remember!”

“What? Those words are going to extend your special training by a month, you know?”

“N-n-n-no, I don’t remem— No, I forg— Wait, um…” Flapping his hands, he displayed his powerful Mega Stunned Haruyuki Panic.

The two older girls suddenly let out small giggles and then began to laugh out loud in earnest. Unable to react any further, Haruyuki could only freeze in place.

Five minutes later.

In a state of total lethargy in reaction to the too-great mental load, Haruyuki stared vacantly from a ways off on the carpet at Fuko’s handling of the blow dryer she held to Kuroyukihime’s hair.

In contrast with the simple gray pajamas that were Kuroyukihime’s sleepwear, Fuko’s was a pale-blue, fluttering negligee. Since she was sitting on the sofa with her legs out to one side, about 65 percent of her shapely legs were exposed beneath the lacy hem. Normally, he very much wouldn’t be able to turn his gaze in that direction, but he was currently in a state of mental shutdown, so thinking it had to be okay, he took in this sight, more beautiful than anything.

“Ah!” A small cry of realization fell from his mouth. Now, he did hurriedly look away. And then hung his head deeply. It wasn’t that he had seen something he shouldn’t have; just the opposite. When he looked at Fuko, something that normally would definitely have entered his view did not now: her trademark over-the-knee socks.

“It’s all right, Corvus,” she said, suddenly.

A shudder ran through his body. But he couldn’t lift his face. “B-but…” Head still hanging, he managed to get this out.

“Right from the start today, I wanted you to see, Corvus,” came her immediate, gentle response. “So, go on then, please lift your face.”

“……”

After hesitating another few seconds, Haruyuki nervously started to move his gaze. His eyes traced out the striped pattern on the carpet, reached the angle of the sofa, and went left. Finally, his field of view captured two snowy white, bare legs. The nails shining brilliantly at the ends of the toes and the line of the metatarsals popping up slightly were entirely without uncanniness, but the construction of these legs was different from Kuroyukihime’s or Haruyuki’s. They were artificial, made of metal and biocompatible nanopolymers—prosthetic legs.

Going back from the legs to the negligee, Haruyuki finally met Fuko’s eyes again, and she greeted him with a smile more gentle than anything.

“Please come closer, hmm?”

Kuroyukihime, having her hair brushed by Fuko, also encouraged Haruyuki with an unusually warm smile.

Steeling his resolve, he lifted himself up from the carpet and crawled over to the girls on all fours. When he plopped down on the floor again, Fuko’s hand stopped, and she sat up straight on the sofa. At the same time, the noise of a motor so faint Haruyuki normally didn’t notice it reached his ears.

“About eighty percent of the output is covered by artificial muscle fibers, but fine control is difficult with just that, so I still need servo motors in the joints.” Her fingertip traced the knee area.

When he looked closely, a faint line ran around the leg, about five centimeters wide, at the kneecap. Other than that, it was really impossible to tell the leg apart from a biological one. This line, normally covered by her over-the-knee socks, was probably the connection between her real leg and the prosthetic, but the precision with skin color, the continuity of faint shadows was such that it was thoroughly impossible to believe that the area above the line was flesh and the area below it machine.

“It’s. Amazing. It’s like…a work of art. Um, if they’re this beautiful, I wonder…if you really need to wear socks,” Haruyuki murmured.

Fuko giggled and ran her fingers from the connection line up to the thigh above. “The reason I wear the knee socks isn’t to hide my prosthetic legs, but to protect the artificial skin. In fact, from this line until about fifteen centimeters up is, strictly speaking, not biological.”

“Huh?”

“The attachment socket is covered in nanopolymer skin and wraps up my own legs. They’re fused on the skin cell level, so I can’t take off the attachment part by myself anymore.”

“Your own…legs,” Haruyuki repeated in a quiet voice.

“I talked to you a little about this before.” Fuko started to nod slowly. “My legs aren’t missing because of an accident or an illness, but because of a hereditary genetic defect. So the fetal defect would have been reported to my parents fairly early on in the pregnancy.”

The expression on the face of the older girl as she told this story didn’t seem to be at all different from her usual look, but the end of her sentence trembled just for the hint of a second. Sitting alongside her, Kuroyukihime moved about ten centimeters to the side to bring her body up against Fuko’s. She placed her hand on her friend’s knee.

As if encouraged by this contact, Fuko began anew: “Normally, with a defect like missing legs, the parents would think about aborting. There was a real possibility that I wouldn’t get life in this world…At the time, actually, my parents apparently really struggled with it. Considering that, I should be grateful they allowed me to be born. But…ever since I was little, until this year, when I turned sixteen, this feeling of resentment toward my parents has stabbed into my heart like a small thorn. Why…why did they give birth to me…?”

“…”

Unable to immediately think of something to say, Haruyuki clenched his hands tight, still sitting on his knees on the carpet.

All Burst Linkers carried in a place deep in their hearts their own individual wounds. The Brain Burst program used these wounds as a forge to produce the duel avatar, so an avatar’s appearance and abilities inevitably reflected the state of these wounds, although the degree to which they did so varied.

The most significant characteristic of Fuko’s other self, Sky Raker, was not the beautiful female-type duel avatar itself, but the Enhanced Armament it had been born with, Gale Thruster. A streamlined rocket booster equipped on her back, although its firing time was short, the thrust surpassed even Silver Crow’s flying ability.

Fuko had once described Gale Thruster as “incomplete wings”—that her feeling of being afraid of reaching the sky even as she sought it produced its absolute maximum altitude of three hundred meters. However, that was not the case. Haruyuki and Fuko had learned this in the final stage of the Hermes’ Cord race, at the pinnacle of the orbital elevator they reached together. Gale Thruster—no, the duel avatar Sky Raker—hadn’t been born to fly, instead bound to the surface of the earth by gravity.

“But, you know, that thorn, Corvus…You pulled it out for me.”

Sunk into thought as he was, these words reached Haruyuki’s ears in a cloud.

The servo motors made a slight operation noise, and Fuko got down off the sofa and dropped to her knees in front of Haruyuki. She shifted to a more formal kneeling position with such a smooth motion, it was no different from biological legs, then reached out her left hand. Her soft palm gently wrapped around Haruyuki’s clenched fist.

“What you said to me at the end of the Hermes’ Cord race, ‘You’ve always been a duel avatar meant to fight in space’…these words made me finally realize what’s important. That…maybe there’s meaning even in being born with legs that are only less than half as long as a healthy person’s.”

“Meaning…”

“Yes.” Fuko nodded and took her hand away from Haruyuki’s fist, which had loosened at some point, and touched her own leg with her palm. “In the bottom of my heart, somewhere so deep that even I can’t see it, I’m sure I’ve wanted it all this time. A world that’s natural with these legs. That’s…”

“A weightless environment?” Unconsciously, Haruyuki finished Fuko’s sentence for her.

The gentle smile before his eyes moved slowly up and down. “I’d forgotten for a long time, but when I was still in the lower grades of elementary school, before I became a Burst Linker, I read this small paper media book at the library nearby. It was science fiction for adults, so the kanji characters and terminology were difficult, and I struggled with them, but I used the AR furigana reading function in my Neurolinker and pushed myself to keep reading. Because that book was about children who were given arms instead of legs through genetic engineering to be more adapted to a weightless environment. It was almost like I was one of them. I was totally captivated.”

Here, Fuko’s smile changed into something a little sadder.

“The book was incredibly old, published in the last century, so there wasn’t a rating chip embedded in it. Which was why I could read it; it was actually designated as fifteen or older. So halfway through, the librarian found me and took it away. I just had to read it to the end, so I tried to get my parents to buy me the digital media version, but there wasn’t one. The PM version was removed from the library before too long, and I never did get to finish it.”

She moved pale fingers gently on her knees as though tracing them across a paper page.

In Haruyuki’s brain, novels, manga, and anime were things scattered around as data on the network. It was hard for him to imagine a book you could lose and never read again, but even so, for some reason, he felt like he could understand Fuko’s sad bittersweetness.

“Of course, I was very sad.” Lifting her face, Fuko continued, “But I was a child, so eventually, I forgot about the book, and now I can’t even remember the title or the author’s name. But…I suppose that desire, me also wanting to go to a weightless world, remained somewhere in my heart all this time. After that, when I became a Burst Linker, the program took the mold of this wound and desire that even I had forgotten and produced Sky Raker and Gale Thruster.”

She stopped there and looked back at their Legion Master, who was still on the sofa. The pajama-clad Kuroyukihime looked at her friend with a tranquil expression and then finally, soundlessly, stood up and sat down so that she was on Fuko’s left side.

Fuko’s mouth stayed shut for a while before she started again in a slightly softer tone. “But because I forgot my true wish, I set my sights on something stunted in the Accelerated World. If I had realized sooner that the place my avatar symbolized was not the sky, but space beyond that; if I could have believed in the existence of a Space stage that would someday come and had waited for it—I wouldn’t have made Sacchi so sad, I wouldn’t have created the trigger for the destruction of the Legion—”

“You’re wrong, Fuko.” Kuroyukihime reached out both hands abruptly and wrapped her arms around the girl to cut her off. “If we’re going to talk about blame, then it also lies with me and all our Legion members for not trying to understand the strength of the feelings you were holding back all that time. You reached level eight to be freed of the yoke of gravity, and still you were not permitted to touch the sky. I should have understood and accepted you, the fact that you were willing to cast aside even your avatar’s legs. But rather than doing so, I chastised you. I was so reluctant to lose your combat abilities. I was the one pushing my desire to become level ten on everyone in the Legion, an act of ultimate self-righteousness.”

At that time, Haruyuki hadn’t been a member of Nega Nebulus—he hadn’t even been a Burst Linker—so he could only guess at the details of the situation. But from the bits and pieces of information he had gained so far, he thought he had grasped the facts at least.

Two and a half years earlier, in the winter of 2044, the first Nega Nebulus had been destroyed. The sequence of events leading up to this tragedy was tangled and complex. The fact that Kuroyukihime accepted Fuko’s request and amputated Sky Raker’s legs with her own sword. The fact that at the meeting of the Seven Kings immediately after that, she had taken the head of the first Red King Red Rider, who was insisting on the necessity of a mutual nonaggression pact. And the fact that even later, everyone in the Legion had taken on the challenge of attacking the Castle and the utterly impenetrable guard of the Four Gods. These were not all unrelated incidents.

Most likely because of her perception that she had been the initial trigger, Fuko’s avatar had remained without legs until a little while after she came back to the second Nega Nebulus. Normally, damage from missing parts was healed the instant the duel ended, and what had made it permanent in this case was Fuko’s “negative will,” convinced as she was that she did not deserve to get her legs back. Put another way, it was basically a curse she had cast on herself.

However, in the Hermes’ Cord race, when she flew with Gale Thruster in the sea of stars that she finally reached, she got her legs back. The curse that had bound her for over two years—several times that, when time spent in the Accelerated World was included—had been released.

“You can just get back the things you’ve lost bit by bit,” Haruyuki murmured suddenly, abstractedly.

With Fuko and Kuroyukihime’s eyes on him, he would normally shrink into himself and be unable to say anything further, but at that moment, he earnestly put his thoughts into words.

“You get lost, you lose, you make mistakes…But if you just go back a little, I’m sure you can find the things you’ve lost again. And then you can just start walking from there. I mean, you, Master, and Shinomiya did actually come back to the Legion. I’m sure the other two members of the Elements, and the rest of the Legion members, too—they’ll come back to you soon enough, Kuroyukihime. That’s what I think…”

It definitely wasn’t a long speech, but here his vanishingly small speech engine overheated, and Haruyuki hung his head, closing his mouth. But even after waiting a few seconds, there was no reaction from the other two, and he started to think that maybe he’d made some kind of terrible mistake and that maybe he should use a So-Sorry Dash and escape to the washroom.

“Honestly, Corvus. Here you are, the younger one, making us ladies tear up. It’s not fair.”

Hearing this, he got flustered—“ladies”?!—as he gingerly lifted his eyes. It was just when Fuko lowered the finger she had up at the corner of her eye. Before he knew it, the look on her face had returned to the usual Raker Smile, and the legs she had tucked neatly underneath her slid out to one side inexplicably—until she stretched them out in front of Haruyuki.

“As a reward, you’re allowed to touch them, just a little.  ” The paleness of the legs stretching out from the hem of the negligee, and the super-destructive force of this line easily smashed Haruyuki’s mental powers.

Not noticing the unnaturalness of the situation or Kuroyukihime’s hard eyes on him, he said, “O…kay,” and gradually advanced the fingers of his right hand.

The instant his fingertips made the contact with her surprisingly thin ankle, Haruyuki gasped. The nanopolymer had an overwhelmingly smooth texture, and the faint warmth surprised him. When he thought about it, it was probably only natural that the electricity of the battery inside was continually converted into heat, but this “body temperature” definitely didn’t seem like that of a prosthetic leg. He finally moved his fingers up. The elasticity produced by the artificial muscle fibers covered by the polymer skin was indeed natural and had a suppleness of trained muscles that was far from the pudginess of his own legs. The connection area from the shin to the knee was apparently a combination of many motors, gears, and dampers, so here alone was a slightly mechanical feel.

The instant his fingers moved around to the back of the knee, an “Mmm!” slipped out of Fuko, and her leg moved slightly.

“Uh, um, you can feel that?” Haruyuki asked in surprise, hoarsely.

“Yes. Well, it’s just on the level of a rough sense of pressure. The skin sensation sensor elements are still under development. But when they’re touched gently like that, I feel a little tickle.”

“I-I’m sorry,” he hurriedly apologized, and he started to pull his hand away.

But Fuko pushed on his hand and grinned. “It’s all right. I want you to really know my legs, Corvus. Please, continue.”

“…O-okay…” As he was told, Haruyuki returned his fingers to the artificial skin. He moved around from the back of the knee to the top of the round kneecap and arrived at the faint connection line. From there down was completely prosthetic, but from what Fuko said, the top was also the connection attachment and socket, and on top of that, the nanopolymer skin and her own skin were fused at the cellular level. But he couldn’t tell at all at a glance how far the polymer went. Admiring the high level of cutting-edge cybernetics technology, he slowly traced his fingers along the slender thigh. He advanced five, ten, fifteen centimeters above the connection line, and the instant he was fairly near the hem of the negligee—

“Ah!” With a faint voice, her whole leg twitched back again.

“Fr-from that area, it’s my own skin. Original human sensors are indeed amazing, hmm? The sensation of touch is totally different.”

“Huh? Th-this is the border? I totally can’t tell from the feel or the look of it. They really are fused, huh?”

“Mmm! C-Corvus! If you touch me like that, it tickle—”

Gnyaaaaang! There was a sudden assault on his left cheek, and Haruyuki took his fingers off Fuko’s leg and flew up.

“O-owhowhowhowhahaha!”

“Just. How. Long. Are you going to do that?!” The one shouting was, naturally, Kuroyukihime, yanking as hard as she could on Haruyuki’s cheek with her right hand. “Normally, a person pokes a little and stops! And you, Fuko! You! Why would touching your leg be a reward?!”

“Goodness! It’s just that Pard from Promi told me that Corvus was apparently quite weak to legs.”

“What?” Kuroyukihime’s voice held a dangerous edge.

“Wh—N-no!” Haruyuki jumped a little, left cheek still pinched. “I definitely don’t have a leg fetish or anyshing!”

“Setting aside the veracity of the information, why would Blood Leopard know something like that?!”

“I—I—I don’t hnow! I jush rode behind her on the motorshaicle and on her avatar’s back!” he protested, totally absorbed in his defense, and now it wasn’t only Kuroyukihime, but also Fuko’s eyes that suddenly grew cold. Without even the time to think, Crap—

“That reminds me, Fuko. There’s still something we have to do, hmm?”

“That’s right, Sacchi. We forgot our responsibility to give Corvus special training in the Unlimited Neutral Field, didn’t we?”

Held tight on either side, Haruyuki was dragged over to the glass table.

“Uh, um, it’s late already, and we have school tomorrow.”

“Not a problem. We took care of homework a while ago, didn’t we?”

“B-but we have to do the Space-stage training, too.”

“Don’t worry. We can do as much of that as we want later.”

“B-but it’s getting to be time to go to bed…”

“It’s fine, Haruyuki. The night is long in the Unlimited Neutral Field.” Kuroyukihime had no sooner said that than she was inserting a cable into his Neurolinker. The other two cables were quickly connected to each of the girl’s Linkers, and three indicator lights flashed on the hub on the table.

“All right then, we’ll go on the count of five. Corvus, for each minute you’re late, the special training menu will go up a level, hmm?  ” Fuko announced this with a smile even kinder than the one she had flashed him earlier, and there was no way he could not shout the command and just run away somewhere instead.

Sweat oozing down his forehead, Haruyuki was still secured on both sides as his Legion Master and Submaster began the countdown together.

“Five, four, three, two, one…”

“““Unlimited Burst!”””

Shouting in unison with the girls, Haruyuki thought, It’d be great if the Space stage happened soon. Then I could tag-team with Master, and we’d win all over the place with the combo of Gale Thrust’s propulsion and Crow’s maneuverability. I won’t ever let anyone call Master “Icarus” again. I mean, Master’s—Sky Raker’s—wings have finally arrived, glittering sky-blue.

In the world of the stars—that world she’s wanted more than anyone else…

END