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Accel World - Volume 12 - Chapter 5




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5

“Nngh…unh…aaaaah!”

Chocolat’s thin screams reached Haruyuki’s ears.

“Avocado doesn’t have any teeth in his mouth. Instead, he licks at the armor of a Burst Linker to dissolve it, although the time it takes depends on the Burst Linker,” Magenta said, leaning against the wall of the temple, the look on her face indicating that she was suffering real pain from the missing-part damage. “But Cocoa’s chocolate armor seems like it’d melt pretty quick? You better hurry over there?”

Haruyuki glanced at the reddish-purple scissors user and hesitated, unsure whether he should strike the killing blow or not. But given that she was unable to operate her scissors with just one arm, it was impossible for her to activate her most powerful weapon, Remote Cut. There was the possibility she’d come at him with Dark Shot, the long-distance Incarnate attack, with her right hand, but in order to do that, she would have to throw aside her scissors. He had no evidence to back it up, but he was certain she wouldn’t do that.

“I don’t need you telling me that!” he shouted, then spun on his heel. Running with all his might, he accelerated spectacularly with the added thrust from his wings, and in the blink of an eye, he was closing in on Avocado Avoider’s massive form.

“Let go of…Chocooooooooo!!” Roaring, he kicked at the ground and shot the sharp tips of his left toes straight forward, adjusting his rudder angle with thrust from his wings so that his entire body spun at top speed. Spiral Kick: a technique effective against large avatars because it doubled his power and penetrative force, although accuracy was slightly sacrificed.

His left leg, spinning like a drill, touched Avocado’s dark-green armor, which didn’t appear to have any thickness to it, and ripped through it easily. Splrt! There was the thunder of a heavy, wet impact, and Crow’s foot plunged deep into the right side of Avocado’s back.

But that was all. The massive egg-shaped avatar continued to move his mouth in a chewing motion as though he felt nothing, even with Crow’s foot sunk more than half a meter into his body. And yet he shouldn’t have been able to stay on his feet after taking that kind of damage because of the pain—especially given that one’s pain sensors in the Unlimited Neutral Field operated at twice the normal amount.

Dumbfounded, Haruyuki nevertheless applied reverse thrust with his wings and pulled his left foot free. Normally, the light of a damage effect would gush out like blood, but not a single spark spilled from the large hole in Avocado’s back. Just the opposite: A green buffer material thinner than the surface immediately filled it, actually going so far as to regenerate the thin armor.

“E-even with that blow just now, there’s no damage?!” Haruyuki groaned.

“Exactly!” Chiyuri ran over, staggering in the chocolate pond to answer him in a panic. “You can kick him and punch him, but he just regenerates right away! He probably absorbs all physical attacks!”

“That’s—he’s not a Chocopet or anything,” he said reflexively, before suddenly realizing something and looking around quickly.

In a spot about ten or so meters away, Mint Mitten and Plum Flipper were trying to eliminate the two Chocopets circling them nimbly, but their feet were caught in the chocolate covering the ground, and they couldn’t move freely. There should also have been two Chocopets getting in Avocado’s way, but they were nowhere to be seen. One of them had probably come to Haruyuki’s aid, but the other one—

“He ate it!” Chiyuri shouted quickly, reading Haruyuki’s thoughts.

“A-ate it?!”

“She said that at the beginning, remember? That was the weak point of the Chocopets. Avocado sucked the Chocopet in right along with the air and chomped it up. And then, when Choco got closer to make another Chocopet, she got…”

Here, the two of them looked up at Avocado’s massive body. From a mouth nearly two meters above them, Chocolat’s upper body hung out, an expression of agony on her face.

“Nngh!” Gritting his teeth, Haruyuki took off from the chocolate pond, and hovering in front of Avocado’s mouth, he grabbed onto Chocolat’s arms. He pushed his wings with everything he had and tried to pull her free, but she didn’t move so much as a centimeter. On the contrary—red sparks of damage flew from her shoulder joints.

“Unnh!”

Hearing the weak scream, Haruyuki hurriedly stopped his propulsive power. But Chocolat’s face still looked like she was suffering serious pain. Most likely, her armor skirt, reminiscent of flower petals, was being dissolved inside Avocado Avoider’s mouth.

Above the meter-wide mouth, relatively small—although they were still five centimeters in diameter—eye lenses blinked at short intervals. In time with the fluctuating light, a low, heavy voice rumbled from deep in the egg-shaped body, “Like…Chocolat…like…”

Haruyuki was momentarily speechless, and then, still holding Chocolat’s arms, shouted, “Just ’cos you like her doesn’t mean you have to eat her! If you want to be friends, then just say—”

Here, he was at a loss for words. Because when he thought about whether he himself could do that, he realized it would certainly be impossible. Just inviting Rin Kusakabe to the school festival had nearly brought him to dehydration; there was no way he could take action beyond that.

And Avocado Avoider was at present parasitized by an ISS kit, which amplified negative feelings. He was in no state of mind to be persuaded by words.

So if physical attacks were absorbed, Haruyuki would also fail to pull Chocolat free. Could he and Chiyuri eat this massive body like Avocado had the Chocopet? Impossible! As he racked his brain, he heard a halting voice.

“Heat…or ice plus attack is. The key…That’s the real weak point of the Chocopets…I’m sure Avocado also…” The owner of the voice was Chocolat, swallowed up entirely to the point just below her chest. The chocolate-flavored armor, which didn’t seem strong at the best of times, was most likely dissolved inside Avocado’s mouth. Chocolat dying was equivalent to their mission to free Mint and Plum failing. Her health gauge was already down to less than half.

“G-got it! Hang on a little longer!” Haruyuki shouted as he let go of her arms. Once he had gotten a little distance, he thought hard about the problem.

Neither Silver Crow nor Lime Bell had anything in the way of fire or ice techniques. If the Shrine Maiden of the Conflagration had been in the battlefield, she could have roasted Avocado’s massive body to a crisp in the blink of an eye, but naturally, they didn’t have the time to escape through a portal and contact Utai in the real world.

“Haru! Is your laser sword no good?!” Chiyuri shouted from the ground, likely having heard what Chocolat said.

Haruyuki shook his head quickly from side to side. “It’s not hot!”

His Incarnate technique Laser Sword did have the word “laser” in the name, but its affiliation was basically a pure severing. It didn’t produce a drop of heat. And naturally, his piercing-type Lance and Javelin were the same. Even if he attacked Avocado with them, the soft armor would regenerate in an instant.

But maybe if he threw out physical attacks faster than the regeneration, he would at some point reach the body beneath the armor (assuming it existed). The problem with that, though, was that in the process, Avocado’s special-attack gauge would be infinitely charged, the power melting Chocolat’s armor would be enhanced, and Haruyuki would run the risk of some other new technique being activated.

If this were a Century End stage, there’d be tons of burning oil drums. There’s no fire or anything in the Sacred Ground— The instant his thoughts reached this point, his eyes flew open wide. He sent his gaze racing around their surroundings until his eyes landed on a small temple in the east of the grounds.

“Choco, your friend.” He quickly turned back to Chocolat and instructed her tightly, “You have to call Coolu! Coolu can shoot a real laser!”

Chocolat opened her peach eye lenses wide, as if momentarily forgetting her agony. But she soon shook her head. “I—I…cannot. Coolu would attack…you two…”

“It’s okay!” Haruyuki took a deep breath, put his strength in his stomach, and shouted the rest. “I’ll reflect the laser!”

“…!”

Chocolat was speechless once more, but after she shifted her gaze to glance up to the left and check her own health gauge, she nodded slowly, but firmly. “I…understand. I trust you, Silver Crow.” Then she mustered up the little life remaining to her and clenched both hands before closing her eyes and shouting, “…Help me, Coolu…!!”

The reaction was instantaneous.

From the temple in the east: Krrrrrr! Haruyuki had no sooner heard the shrill voice growling than the armadillo-like figure was racing out onto the grounds. Although it was a lesser Enemy, it was easily over two meters long from its head to the tip of its tail. Its bulky mass—much larger than that of the majority of Burst Linkers—shook the ground and began to dash across the white earth.

“Choco, hold on twenty more seconds!” Haruyuki spread his wings and moved away from Avocado, charging full speed toward Lava Carbuncle.

“Leave the healing to me!” Chiyuri’s voice chased after him.

“Thanks!” he responded briefly. After just seconds of flight, he landed a scant twenty meters ahead of the Enemy, its eyes glittering red and burning with rage.

“Krrrrrrr!!” Howling sharply, Carbuncle had clearly recognized Haruyuki as its master’s enemy. It stopped, bracing its four limbs against the ground and dropping its head low. The interior of the elliptical ruby embedded in its forehead flickered with a crimson light, almost exactly like the effect when the Red King’s main armament was preparing to fire.

Apart from the Four Gods, the Super-class Enemies that guarded the Castle, the monsters that lived in the Unlimited Neutral Field—“Enemies”—were categorized into four classes.

The strongest was the Legend class, which made the deepest level of major dungeons in each region or famous landmarks their territory. A few dozen experienced Burst Linkers could meticulously prepare and strategize to challenge one of these Enemies and might still be totally annihilated by the slightest misstep. The Blue King, Blue Knight, was said to be the only one who had ever succeeded in defeating a Legend class solo, and for that, he had been presented with the nickname “Legend Slayer.”

Next were the large Enemies known as Beast class. If you got a party of twenty or so people together, it wasn’t impossible to safely hunt these creatures, but naturally, it required closely coordinated movement. And since Beast-class Enemies often moved along bullet-train tracks, occasionally, an unlucky few would stumble upon them and meet the sad fate of targeting and instant death. Very few people knew that the Green King, Green Grandé, had continuously defeated these Beast-class Enemies solo and turned the vast points he earned from this endeavor into card items to replenish other Burst Linkers.

Third was the Wild class. Their average size was about five meters, and when someone talked about “hunting,” they meant this class. However, even veteran Burst Linkers were said to have difficulty defeating these Enemies solo—and even then, the Enemies occasionally formed herds. So while a single avatar was focused intently on fighting one of them, other Enemies of the same type would link together and stampede; these sorts of tales were often told in the Accelerated World.

And the fourth class of lesser Enemies was used as a trial for recognition as a senior Linker in many Legions. The idea was that if you could defeat one solo, you had attained full Burst Linkerhood. The majority who took on this challenge were strong players who had reached level seven. Or put another way, a single lesser-class Enemy possessed fighting power equivalent to a level-seven Burst Linker.

Naturally, Haruyuki, still at level five, had never challenged a lesser class on his own. More than a few times, he had been careless and ended up targeted, but in each of these instances, he had run for his life and yelped each time his health gauge dropped dramatically at taking just a single blow from a seemingly subdued long-distance attack.

However, right now, he could not run away. For Chiyuri, who spent three days going around the dangerous Unlimited Neutral Field looking for Enemies. For Chocolat, who stood up all by herself against the encroachment of the ISS kit in Setagaya area. For Mint and Plum, who’d been forcefully parasitized and had had long years of friendship ripped away from them. And he couldn’t put the reason into words, but for Magenta Scissor and Avocado Avoider as well, he could not lose this fight.

“Come!!” Haruyuki shouted, and he crossed his arms firmly in front of his body.

Immediately, the jewel in Carbuncle’s forehead flashed crosswise, and a ruby-red laser beam shot out.

Compared with the main armament of the Red King—which had vaporized Crow ten times in a row—the torrent of energy pushing on him felt more concentrated, proportional with the narrower diameter of the beam. The instant it collided with the metal armor of his chest, the area was red-hot.

The majority of the energy was reflected into their surroundings, due to the 95 percent reflectance that was silver’s special characteristic. But the remaining 5 percent would penetrate his armor and sap his endurance. If his metal shell—his armor and greatest weapon as a metal color—were destroyed, the naked body of his avatar inside would be instantly vaporized. If he simply guarded the way he was now, it was obvious the end result would be the same as in the training with Niko.

It’s not enough to bounce back the light. Enduring a burning heat like every nerve in his body was aflame, Haruyuki began to talk himself up. A mirror isn’t just a panel that reflects light. Reflection is, in other words, rejection. Something that rejects light couldn’t be so beautiful, so unwavering.

In the back of his mind, he saw the massive three-sided mirror he had been shown in the mirror room of the Suginami Noh Theater that was Utai Shinomiya’s family home. Before a Noh performer put on a mask and stepped onto the stage, they focused their mind in front of the mirror. Utai described the mirror as the boundary between this world and the other world.

Boundary. A border, but also a path. In other words, rather than a simple flat panel, a mirror was an entrance and an exit. It accepted light, guided it, and released it once more.

As of the previous evening—when he had been shown the three-sided mirror at Utai’s house and been told the sad story of her older brother, Kyoya Shinomiya (aka Mirror Masker)—Haruyuki had sensed that mental state, albeit only vaguely. The trigger for this vague instinct to sublimate up to understanding had been the fierce battle with the mysterious metal color, Wolfram Cerberus. At the beginning of the contest, Haruyuki had suffered so thorough a loss that he didn’t even know what to say as an excuse.

But then there was the second fight with him, in which he was the challenger after special training during that day’s lunch hour. With the Way of the Flexible that he had learned directly from its master, Kuroyukihime, Haruyuki secured his victory with the strategy of warding off Cerberus’s fierce blows, turning them into power for throwing techniques, and slamming his opponent into the ground.

If, in the midst of this current offensive, he’d even once tried to resist his opponent’s power with power, in that moment he would no doubt have had his armor smashed, just like the previous day. It was precisely because Haruyuki had accepted Cerberus’s punches and been able to merge them with his own movements that he’d succeeded in his Guard Reversal.

In which case, maybe the same thing was possible against a laser attack? A true mirror accepted light and changed its direction only to send it out: the Way of the Flexible against light.

Don’t be afraid!

The guards on his arms were still in one piece somehow, but even so, his health gauge was steadily decreasing. Haruyuki ripped his mind away from the fact and told himself firmly, I am Silver Crow. I am the duel avatar currently most like a mirror in the Accelerated World. I’m probably far short of Shinomiya’s older brother—“mirror” was part of his name, after all—but even still, for one moment, just one moment, I know I can fuse with the light. I can be a boundary to guide the light.

Okay, then. Abandon your fear and your power. Accept it! Haruyuki still had his arms crossed, but he relaxed his tense, forward-pitched body slightly and lifted his face.

On the other side of his field of view, dyed red, his eyes met those of the small Enemy shooting the intense laser from the jewel in its forehead—or so he felt. In that instant, the decrease in his health gauge and the scattering of the light stopped simultaneously. It wasn’t that the laser had been interrupted. Rather, it had become a crimson sphere condensing in the center of his intersecting arms.

“That’s…iiiiiiiiiiit!!” Haruyuki thrust his right arm out straight ahead as he spun his body to the left. Toward the massive bulk of Avocado Avoider ten meters away, who was still licking at a dissolving Chocolat.

Shppksh! The air shuddered, and Carbuncle’s laser shot forward once more, bent at an angle of 120 degrees or so. The laser made a direct hit on Avocado’s armor and was almost sucked into the lower part of his body, and in short order, it was digging into his armor.

But the laser wasn’t piercing that armor. The thick, soft cushioning was absorbing the energy like it had the physical attacks.

If this attack had been successive firing of actual bullets or a collision wave, Avocado’s soft armor might have been able to completely withstand it. But just as Chocolat had suspected, heat seemed to be his Achilles’ heel. In the blink of an eye, the dark-green surface armor was bright red, the color radiating outward from the point of entry. Haruyuki had to admire the determination of the other avatar when he still did not spit Chocolat out, but a Linker couldn’t endure the attack of an Enemy—even a lesser one—with determination alone.

In a mere three seconds, the entirety of the egg-shaped body was incandescent, and cracks started to appear here and there in the armor. Haruyuki barely had time to register this before he heard a heavy, viscous sound.

Splrt! Avocado Avoider’s massive body was melting, the thick liquid evaporating and disappearing before it even hit the ground. Naturally, the large mouth also vanished, and Chocolat was thrust out into midair. Just as she was on the verge of falling helplessly to the ground, Chiyuri raced over to catch the chocolate avatar in her arms. Almost as if the creature were aware that Chocolat had been released, the laser emitted from Carbuncle’s forehead also weakened, until it finally stopped.

“Haah.” Heaving a long sigh, Haruyuki relaxed his shoulders. When he looked down at his arms, the armor that had been burning red hot was a silver far more clear than usual—or rather, he realized, it had changed into a “mirror color.” He stared hard as the mirror in his arms disappeared and his limbs returned to their original silver sheen.

Was that the Theoretical Mirror ability? Did I actually manage to get it? he asked himself, but of course, no one answered. If he opened his Instruct menu then and there and looked at the status column, he would have been able to check whether or not he had more abilities, but he didn’t have time for that now.

Because they were coming up on the final stage of the battle.

He checked that Lava Carbuncle’s aggro had stopped, and then Haruyuki turned toward Chiyuri and Chocolat, and he opened his eyes wide in surprise.

There was a strange object on the ground not far from the two girls: a brown sphere about thirty centimeters in diameter. He thought it was maybe some kind of Chocopet, but the material was different. As he stared, dumbfounded, short arms and legs popped out of the sphere, and once it stood upright, it ran as fast as the little legs could carry it toward the west side of the grounds. To where Magenta Scissor was watching the battle, still embedded in the temple wall.

Haruyuki went up to Chiyuri. “What…is that?” he asked, in a low voice.

“D-don’t ask me…”

“Probably…Avocado’s main body,” Chocolat answered, still in Lime Bell’s arms. “Or a pit, I suppose. I don’t think there’s any harm in leaving him.”

“P-pit…He really is a nonstandard duel avatar in all kinds of ways, huh?” Shaking his head shortly, Haruyuki switched tracks and checked Chocolat’s injuries. Her large armor skirt was almost completely gone, and the chocolate color of both legs was half peeled away. But it didn’t look like it had gone so far as her losing any parts.

As if to affirm Haruyuki’s judgment, Chocolat said weakly, “Thanks, Bell. Please put me down. I’m all right.”

“…Right.” Chiyuri stooped forward slowly, and Chocolat stepped onto the ground and stood up, albeit staggering slightly. She turned her bonnet-covered head and stared resolutely toward the south side of the grounds.

Almost as though it had been waiting for her eyes to turn in that direction, a heavy vibration, one Haruyuki was already intimately familiar with, shook the air—the sound of a dark Incarnate attack being activated by the ISS kit. Mint Mitten and Plum Flipper had pulverized the two Chocopets hindering their movement with Dark Blow.

The Cocoa Fountain covering the ground had also reached its time limit and was disappearing. On the original white tiles of the Sacred Ground stage, the two small F-type avatars walked lifelessly toward them. The eyes attached to each of their chests blinked with a red light reminiscent of blood.

Haruyuki and Chiyuri started to get into battle-ready positions, but Chocolat shook her head lightly and stopped them. Injured, battered, she took a step forward, and a few seconds later, her former best friends stopped a mere two meters away from her.

“Why won’t you come with us, Cocoa?” Mint Mitten spoke first, her head like a knit hat and her hands large and swollen.

“Come on, let’s be stronger,” Plum Flipper murmured, a perfectly round beret on her head. “Let’s get strong and change the world, Cocoa.”

The voices sounded intimate, but they were hollow somehow. Their eye lenses were also dim, so that it seemed almost as though it were the eyes on their chests speaking rather than themselves.

Though perhaps that was exactly what it was.

The most significant feature of the ISS kit was that night after night, synchronized processing of the seeds was carried out while the user slept. The kit took in the negative thoughts cultivated by surrounding users and spread the user’s own negative thoughts out around them. Mint and Plum were synchronized now with the dark will of Magenta Scissor, the parent of all the kits plaguing Setagaya.

“Min-Min. Pliko. You don’t need that kind of strength to change the world,” Chocolat replied earnestly, her injured avatar just barely managing to stay upright. “If you just believe…that will change the world. The two of you taught me that.”

She glanced back at Haruyuki and Chiyuri and then quickly turned her gaze forward again.

“In the real world, and in the Accelerated World, we have feared the outside. We closed ourselves off in a gentle, comfortable box…we never turned our eyes toward the past or the future. But that was a mistake. The reason we became Burst Linkers was…to accelerate. To shake off painful memories and move forward. With every step forward we take, the walls of our box expand that much, and the world changes. The gifted power you have now…we don’t need to rely on that, Min-Min, Pliko!” Voice tearful, Chocolat made her injured body take a step forward, just like she’d said. Then another. And another.

Now she was standing in front of Mint and Plum. Their eye lenses grew even darker, and in exchange, the shining of the ISS kits increased. On their right hands, different in both size and shape, was the exact same black aura. Haruyuki started to step forward reflexively, but beside him, Chiyuri lightly shook her head.

In a stiff movement, as though their joints had rusted, the two raised their right arms. Unflinchingly exposed before this, Chocolat spread her slender arms and wrapped them around both of her friends at the same time.

The two ISS kits flickered intensely. The inorganic sense emitted by the eyeballs could be taken as hatred but also as fear. In sync with the disturbance in the kits, a change came over the actual eyes of Mint and Plum. Eye lenses that had been essentially grayed out continually increased in brightness, and fists that had been raised and held in midair trembled and shook. The dark, swirling aura shuddered unstably, even as it increased in concentration.

If they launched Dark Blow at the same time from that distance, Chocolat would disappear without a trace. If she was going to achieve the result she had first thought of—force Mint and Plum into total point loss with the Judgment Blow—this was her first and last chance.


However, Chocolat didn’t move. Head hanging, she kept hugging her friends tight. From Mint and Plum’s irregularly blinking eye lenses, droplets of white light spilled out and fell into the air.

In that instant, it wasn’t the three members of the Legion Petit Paquet who moved, nor was it Haruyuki or Magenta Scissor off in the distance watching the scene unfold; it was Chiyuri—Lime Bell.

She brandished the Enhanced Armament of her left arm, Choir Chime, up high, and spun it in quick, broad, counterclockwise circles.

Bong! The echo, reminiscent somehow of school bells, came once, twice, then three times, and then four times. A pure citrus-green light gushed out of Lime Bell like a liquid and came pouring down directly ahead of her. At the same time, she called out the technique name: “Citron…Caaaaaaaaall!!”

The light surging out from inside the chime flowed forward in a straight line, making countless sparkling, glittering crosses, and enveloped Mint and Plum at the same time. In the center of the pillar of light that rose up from below, their two bodies were lifted ever so slightly off the ground.

Dropping her hips and supporting the bell of her left hand with her right hand, Chiyuri continued to emit the light with an intent expression on her face. Haruyuki approached her by habit and supported her back with a hand. Her body, as slender as those of Chocolat and the members of Petit Paquet, trembled all over, demonstrating her desperate mental focus.

In addition to Mode I, which restored Chocolat’s special-attack gauge in the opening stages of the fight, Lime Bell’s special attack Citron Call had a Mode II, which used up her entire gauge. Its effect was to cancel out up to four levels in the status of the target avatar. Specifically, it made it as though things like an avatar losing its limb—or being parasitized by an object, or equipping or obtaining of Enhanced Armament—had never happened.

Since the ISS kit was, in fact, a parasitic object and was also the obtaining of an Enhanced Armament, the group assumed cancellation with Mode II would be effective. However, a week earlier, Takumu, parasitized with a kit himself, had asserted that this method would not make his own kit disappear. Because the kit activated a sort of pseudo-Incarnate system with the desire for power in the heart of the user as its energy source, it could overwrite Citron Call.

In which case, it would seem that theoretically, they shouldn’t be about to get rid of Mint and Plum’s kits now, either, but there was just one decisive difference here than from Takumu’s case. And that was the fact that Mint and Plum had had their bodies cut open by Magenta Scissor and been forcefully parasitized with their kits. They had said words earlier to the effect that they wanted power, but that was not a feeling generated by their own hearts; it was something poured into them by other kit users through the nightly parallel processing. In which case, if they had inside them a resistance to the kit—no, a love for Chocolat—then there was a possibility that Citron Call could cancel the parasitization.

“P-please!!” Chiyuri shouted in a thin voice, as she continued the technique.

“Go away!!” Haruyuki also prayed intently, squeezing the words out as he held Chiyuri’s shoulders. If their plan failed, then either Chocolat would be killed or she would use the Judgment Blow on her friends before that happened.

But he didn’t want to see that outcome again. Absolutely not.

In the pale-green light, the ISS kits attached to the chests of Mint and Plum shot out a flash the color of blood in its resistance. The eyeballs swelled up enormously, the blood vessels entwining them throbbing fiercely.

And then the right arms of the two girls, still up in the air, slowly started to come back down. The dark, miasma-like aura had basically disappeared. Their fists were released, and thin fingers reached out to Chocolat, trembling.

“Min-Min! Pliko!” Chocolat shouted, taking up both their hands to clutch.

A moment later, the black blood vessels extending from the ISS kits dried up, and the eyeball weakly closed its lids. The parasite turned into black mist and evaporated in verdurous light. When Citron Call was finished, there were no objects on the chests of Mint Mitten or Plum Flipper.

Chiyuri crumpled, and Haruyuki held her up, his eyes open intently wide. When he’d crushed the ISS kit that had parasitized the Burst Linker Olive Grab, a ball of red light had flown off into the sky. But this time, there was no mistake; nothing had escaped. That could mean only one thing: Their strategy worked—the existence of the kits had been rewound, and they had disappeared completely.

“You did it. You did it, Bell!” Haruyuki clenched his left hand, and Chiyuri, in his right arm, lifted her face and grinned through her exhaustion.

Mint Mitten and Plum Flipper had lost consciousness temporarily, and Chocolat was also leaning against them, eyes closed.

As Haruyuki and Chiyuri started walking toward them, the chocolate-colored avatar lifted her hanging head. There were streaks of white light on her smooth cheeks.

“In the end, when I held their hands…I could heard their voices. ‘Cocoa, we’re sorry,’ they said…,” she murmured hoarsely.

“Yeah, they’re okay now.” Haruyuki nodded deeply, together with Chiyuri. “They should be back to their old selves.”

“You really fought hard, huh?” Chiyuri said. “It’s because your feelings reached them, Choco, that I could make the kits disappear.”

The girl nodded sharply and paused a second before speaking again. “You can both call me ‘Cocoa,’ too.”

Unwittingly, Haruyuki smiled wryly at this sign that Chocolat was quickly getting back up to full speed. But this was soon followed by “However, I will not let you taste me again.”

He stiffened immediately.

“What?” Chiyuri cocked her head, and Chocolat started to open her mouth to expose Haruyuki’s deed.

Before she could, they heard a sharp cry of krrrrrr from a slight ways off. At this warning, Haruyuki reflexively whirled his eyes around.

A slender silhouette jumped into his view, approaching slowly from the west. He braced himself, but soon relaxed. Magenta Scissor had her greatest weapon, the enormous scissors, split into two once more, and those pieces were dangling from her sides. Naturally, she was still equipped with an ISS kit, so a long-distance attack with Dark Shot was a possibility. But she didn’t look like she had it in her now. Her left arm was missing, having been severed by Haruyuki’s light sword, and her right arm held a brown ball about thirty centimeters in diameter—the seed of Avocado Avoider.

“Cho— I mean, Cocoa, don’t let Coolu attack. She’s probably not here to fight,” Haruyuki said, quietly.

Chocolat nodded, albeit with a worried look on her face. She raised her right hand toward Carbuncle on the east side of the grounds, and with just that, the Enemy obediently lay down.

“Wow. Well trained,” Chiyuri murmured admiringly. She also seemed to feel that the battle was over, but even still, she joined Haruyuki in stepping out in front of Chocolat and her friends to wait for the reddish-purple avatar.

Magenta Scissor came fairly close before stopping. Silver Crow was covered in injuries, cut with scissors and burned by Coolu’s laser, but their fuchsia enemy was much the same. Her ribbon armor was smashed all over, leaving a fair amount of her actual body exposed. Above all, she should still have been hurting from having her arm cut off. However, not only did none of that show on her face, but the tall F-type avatar smiled faintly.

“I was plenty surprised just at you bending the Enemy’s laser and melting Avocado’s armor, but then you go even further and get rid of the ISS kits, huh? Just like that girl’s subordinates, I suppose.”

“Do you know the Black King?” Haruyuki asked.

Her sharp shoulders bobbed up and down. “At the very least, I don’t want to have any more to do with you lot lest she herself appear…is about the extent of my knowing her.”

“If you’re saying that, then you’re not going to come at Cocoa and her friends anymore, right?” Chiyuri pressed.

Magenta smiled again. “It’s annoying, but I don’t really have a choice. If I do parasitize them again, you’ll just make it disappear, after all. I’m giving up on the north and moving east.”

These words were a declaration that, even if she did temporarily abandon the idea of recruiting Chocolat and her friends, she had not given up on her larger, true objective—spreading the ISS kits to the whole of the Accelerated World. Haruyuki was about to ask why she would go that far and then gave up on the idea. He had already heard her motives—that she was going to remove inequalities caused by differences in abilities and appearances from the Accelerated World.

Tightly gritting his teeth beneath his mirrored goggles, Haruyuki turned his gaze to the brown, ball-shaped avatar in Magenta Scissor’s arm. He had a hard time believing that the small sphere was the true form of Avocado Avoider, that massive avatar, two and a half or more meters tall. But the short arms and legs and the beady eye lenses shared the same design as his original appearance. And a shrunken ISS kit was attached to him in a place that corresponded to the chest.

“So then it’s on, huh?” Haruyuki said, swallowing back all kinds of feelings. “Are you going to achieve your goal first, or will we destroy the ISS kit main body first?”

“I didn’t expect this kind of trash talk from you. It’s weird.” Magenta smiled more broadly than she had so far. “Okay, fine, let’s say it’s on. But first. You all won here today, so I have to give you your prize, hmm?”

She snapped out two fingers of the hand holding Avocado, and two rectangular shapes were suddenly embedded in between them, although Haruyuki had no idea where she’d pulled them from. He was more than familiar with card items, but these were a matte black. This was the first time he’d seen them in this color. It looked like the item name was inscribed on the front in a crimson-red font.

“These are the ISS kits cut out of Mint Mitten and Plum Flipper. They came back to my storage, but the data might be contaminated, you know…by considerateness or kindness. I have no use for them, so I’ll leave it to you all to dispose of them,” she said, her tone making it impossible for him to grasp her true intent. She flicked her fingers, and the two cards spun through the air to plunge to the tile at Haruyuki’s feet.

“D-dispose…I mean…” He twisted his neck as he wondered to himself if they were burnable or nonburnable garbage.

“Do whatever you want with them.” Magenta shrugged once more. “Boil them, fry them, analyze them…Hmm? Oh, right! And tell Cyan Pile. That when I said I was giving it to him in that form because I liked him when I gave him the kit card last week, I was serious.”

“Hey!” the so-far-silent Chiyuri snapped to attention and shouted the instant she heard this. “Wh-why should we give him a message like that?! More importantly, why do you like Pile?!”

“Goodness! Well, he is wonderful, isn’t he? That asymmetrical form…Oh my, now that I’m thinking of it, you’re quite nice as well, hmm?” Magenta retorted coolly, and as an added bonus, flashed Lime Bell a bewitching smile.

This apparently was impossible for even Chiyuri to process immediately, and Magenta’s smile deepened momentarily at the other girl’s frozen form before she wordlessly turned on her heel. Resettling Avocado’s seed in her arms, she walked toward Sakurajosui Station.

Staring after her, Haruyuki was taken by a brief conflict. Magenta Scissor would likely keep disseminating the ISS kits in the Accelerated World. If he was going to try to stop her, maybe he should attack her here, defeat her, and then defeat her again when she regenerated in an hour, continuing to kill her and force her into total point loss. With the difference in their current battle abilities, it was definitely possible.

However, Magenta also had to know that Haruyuki and his comrades had that option. If, at the point in time when Mint and Plum’s ISS kits were purified, she had instantly withdrawn to a leave point, she probably could have removed the danger of successive kills.

But rather than doing that, she had walked over to exchange words with Haruyuki and Chiyuri. He found it hard to believe that she had intended to set some malicious trap, including the gifting of the two cards to them. Most likely, Magenta had dared to stay on the battleground as the loser for the sake of her own pride—pride she still had even after playing host to an ISS kit.

Haruyuki couldn’t attack an opponent like that from behind. He took his eyes off the receding shadow and crouched down to pick up the black cards at his feet.

“I-is it okay to touch them?” Chiyuri asked, in a worried voice.

“I guess maybe it’s okay as long as I don’t press the ‘use’ button or shout the activation command or anything.” Even as he said this, he was reluctant to hold them for a long period of time, so he quickly opened his Instruct menu, moved to his storage screen, and tucked the two cards away there. When he lifted his head, job finished, the figure of Magenta Scissor was already gone from the large grounds.

Clenching his teeth against the complex mix of emotions that he himself didn’t really understand upwelling in his chest, Haruyuki turned around. In the arms of the kneeling Chocolat, the two girl avatars were just starting to wake from their slumber; their slender limbs trembled.

Haruyuki moved to approach them, but Chiyuri grabbed his arm.

“Let’s just leave the three of them to themselves,” she whispered, and he nodded in agreement.

He couldn’t hear their exchange, but Chocolat Puppeteer, Mint Mitten, and Plum Flipper appeared to be talking slowly. After the passage of some time, brown and green and purple arms were stretched out, and the three girls hugged one another tightly. Captivated by this beautiful scene, Haruyuki snapped back to reality when a massive shadow entered the frame suddenly from the left. The shadow turned out to be an Enemy with short limbs extending from an armadillo-like body wrapped in armor, an elliptical ruby glittering on its forehead—Coolu.

Chocolat had ordered it to stand down, but it probably couldn’t hold on any longer. It rubbed its streamlined head against the girls, a sweet voice slipping out of it. Krrr, krrrr.

At some point, Haruyuki had grabbed Chiyuri’s hand beside him, and they watched over the three girls and one creature that made up the Legion Petit Paquet. They had originally come to the Setagaya area with the sole goal of special training with an Enemy opponent and had then gotten dragged into an unplanned, fierce battle that had started with an unexpected encounter. But from the bottom of his heart, Haruyuki was glad that they had visited that place at that time on that day.

Chiyuri appeared to feel the exact same way; her slightly teary voice reached his ears. “Thank goodness.”

It felt like they had been accelerated for a fairly long time, but when they returned to the real world via a portal, only the seconds displayed on the clock in the lower left of his virtual desktop had changed.

From the faint crack under the door, the tantalizing scent of sweet-and-sour pork with pineapples wafted in, but it was still nearly ten minutes until the six-thirty suppertime. Even though he was starving from all that flying and waiting and fighting! But no matter what kind of Burst Linker you were, you still couldn’t fast-forward time. Body still flat on the mattress that was a little softer than his own bed, Haruyuki let out a long sigh.

“C’mon, Haru. There’s no need to be crying on this side.”

He heard Chiyuri’s voice from his immediate left and reflexively turned his face in that direction. When he did, a mysterious fluid that had indeed built up in both his eyes spilled out and cut across his cheek to make a light stain on the sheets.

“I-I’m not crying!” Trying out a protest like an elementary school kid, he rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. But perhaps the tear-gland bubble was broken; the droplets welled up one after another and slid along his cheek. He gave up on interrupting them and tried to turn his back to Chiyuri. And then he noticed that Chiyuri’s face, twisted through the film of fluid, was also shining with little drops of light.

“I mean, you’re crying, aren’t you?” he asked, pursing his lips.

“It’s just”—Chiyuri didn’t try to hide her tears, but rather smiled through them—“I mean, like, I’m just about the same amount of happy and sad. A double dose. I can’t help it.”

“Well, if it’s a double dose, I guess you can’t, huh…” Agreeing with this curious logic, Haruyuki thought, Oh, that’s it.

After he had seen Magenta Scissor and Avocado Avoider off, a major ingredient in the mix of feelings that had risen up in his chest was “sadness.”

Why was he sad? Because he thought they could also have a different future.

“Why—?” Turning his face to the ceiling once more, Haruyuki squeezed his voice out from his nearly blocked throat. “Why do we have to fight like that…?”

If the duels that took place in the Normal Duel Field were a fighting game in which opponents pitted their knowledge, technique, and willpower against each other, then the Incarnate battles in the Unlimited Neutral Field were life-and-death conflicts, with rage and hatred alone slamming up against each other.

It had only been eight months since he became a Burst Linker, and Haruyuki had just finally reached level five, but he had been put in that position several times already. None of those fights had given him a shred of the excitement and fun of the duel, though. The fierce battle with Magenta Scissor that day was the same. He had found the opening in the Dark Blow she relied on and launched his Laser Sword to win with difficulty, but all that was left in his chest was a deep despair.

“If we hadn’t treated Setagaya like an empty area and had gone to hang out there more…If we had met just as Burst Linkers, all of us, and dueled normally, I’m sure that—”

We could’ve been friends with them, too. He swallowed this part back and moved to turn over onto his stomach on the bed, when Chiyuri grabbed his shoulder tightly.

“It’s…It’s not over yet, Haru. We’re going to get rid of all the ISS kits in the Accelerated World, and then we’ll go see Magenta and Avocado again. Next time, we’ll invite Taku and Kuroyuki and our sister Fuko and little Ui, too, right? And then…And then…”

“Yeah. We will.” Haruyuki nodded, wiping at his face with his right arm, and this time, he managed to stop the tears somehow.

Chiyuri sat up, pulled some tissue off the headboard, and dabbed at her eyes. Then she removed the cable from their Neurolinkers and wound it up. “Anyway, anyway, Haru!” she said, shifting gears rather remarkably. “I saw it! You seriously reflected Coolu’s laser, didn’t you! So that means you obtained the ability, right?!”

“Huh? Uh, um. I dunno.” He sat up on the bed and scratched his head.

“Cooome on.” Chiyuri turned a magnificent look of exasperation on him. “It’s your own self. You should at least know whether you got it or not!”

“B-but, like—to confirm it, I’d have to get someone to shoot me with a laser again.”

“O! Kay! Look! Here! You don’t have to do all that. Just open your Brain Burst console right now and look at Silver Crow’s status screen, and that’s that!”

“……!!”

Haruyuki slapped his knee in a moment of understanding, and the look on Chiyuri’s face advanced from exasperated to eyeball-rolling. But he paid her no mind and ran a finger across his virtual desktop. He tapped the flaming B logo and displayed the avatar status in the console screen that opened.

He nervously switched from the default normal attack tab to the abilities tab, and then turned his face away for a moment. But when he gritted his teeth and stared at the window out of the corner of his eye—there were two rows of alphabet text.

“O-oh! There’s two!” Haruyuki shouted.

Chiyuri leaned forward, unable to stand it anymore. “Hey, show me, too!” She unwrapped the XSB cable she had been about to put away and with her left and right hands inserted the ends into their Neurolinkers. Normally, the Brain Burst program menu screen was invisible to other people, even while directing, and that restriction was canceled only when the other person was also a Burst Linker.

“Let’s see. Where? Show me…” Chiyuri pressed her face in from the left, practically sticking her cheek up against his, and they read the text that had popped up in the window together.

The first line: AVIATION. It went without saying that this was his flight ability.

The second line: OPTICAL CONDUCTION.

“…Huh…” slipped out of Haruyuki.

“Whaaat…?” Chiyuri cocked her head hard to the right. “I’m pretty sure the English for the mirror ability was…Theoretical Mirror, wasn’t it?”

“Y-yeah. I feel like that’s what I heard…” Haruyuki nodded, sensing the bad feeling oozing into his chest in drips and drops grow enormous in the blink of an eye. But I definitely reflected the laser, right. I became a mirror, right, he told himself as he launched the English-Japanese dictionary app on the right side of his virtual desktop. He pressed the voice entry button.

“Opticull. Conducshun.” He specified word lookup with the most Englishy pronunciation he could manage, and with a wait time of basically zero, the meaning was displayed.

Since Chiyuri was looking at the same screen, the two of them read it out loud together. “‘…Light. Guidance…’?”

Even knowing the definition, he couldn’t grasp the meaning of the ability at all. He cocked his head from the right to the left in sync with Chiyuri, and then they heard the long-awaited voice of Chiyuri’s mother on the other side of the door.

“Chii! Haru, hon. Suppertime!”

He worried that the ability he had worked so hard to awaken was somehow apparently not the Theoretical Mirror that he had been asked to obtain at the meeting of the Seven Kings, but his anxiety could not cancel out the impetus of his empty stomach seeking sweet-and-sour pork with pineapple.

Haruyuki took a deep breath and looked at Chiyuri next to him. “Let’s finish this after supper.”

His friend of fourteen years shook her head lightly from side to side. “Very occasionally, there are times when I think you might be extremely strong mentally.”



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