Accel World - Volume 13 - Chapter 1

1

Battle Royale, one of Brain Burst’s Normal Duel modes, was very much like a regular fighting game in that it incorporated an expanded framework to service combat beyond the regular one-on-one.

For instance, you didn’t know which opponent existed where until they had come within ten meters of you or you saw them directly. Naturally, there was a guide cursor, but only one; it pointed in the direction of your closest enemy and would disappear if you were in combat. So it was more than possible that a new duel avatar could suddenly jump in while you were battling the Burst Linker before you. That situation was actually the true thrill of the Battle Royale.

In fact, in this duel—started unexpectedly at six PM, June 27, 2047—Haruyuki had first made contact with his old frenemy, the biker Ash Roller. Only then did the duel’s initiator, the super-hard metal color Wolfram Cerberus, storm in on them.

In this third ferocious battle between the metal colors, Haruyuki had struggled with Cerberus’s hold technique, but had just barely managed to escape by using his special attack Head Butt. He flew up, dragging Cerberus with him to a high altitude, and neatly put the other avatar in check.

However, another challenger had appeared to change the direction of the battle: the mysterious F-type avatar, nicknamed Quad Eyes Analyst, aka Argon Array. From the lenses equipped in her hat—lenses that had seemed up till now to be used for data scans—she had shot a terrifyingly powerful laser and pierced one of Silver Crow’s wings, felling him. Argon then mercilessly shot Cerberus—apparently an acquaintance of hers—and even destroyed Ash and his motorcycle all in one go; she was poised to stomp down the entire Battle Royale on her own. Or so it seemed.

And then a third challenger appeared and turned the tables once more.

“You’re the one who’s going to be crushed by a level one and lose a ton of points.”

The quiet—yet unfathomably powerful—voice shook the diamond dust dancing in the Ice stage.

An avatar of a unique hue, her entire body was enveloped by clear, circulating water.

The Burst Linker Olive Grab from Great Wall also had armor with a slick coating, but the thickness of his oil layer was entirely different from this. Babbling like a small river as it flowed from her head out to her four limbs and carving out four individual arcs to return to her head once more, the total volume of water this avatar held was about the same as the size of her main body itself.

From the slender waist and smooth form, it seemed like an F-type. And the voice, too, was more feminine than not, but since the avatar body itself couldn’t be seen, it was impossible to be sure.

The duel avatar that was probably a “she” used the chill air of the stage to produce ice javelins, which she launched to block Argon Array’s laser attack. From the concept of the attack to the precision of her aim, it was clear she was accustomed to fighting—making it very hard to believe that she was a newbie, as she’d just announced.

On his knees on the road, Haruyuki quickly checked the multiple mini–health gauges displayed in the top right of his field of view. Since the gauges were automatically displayed in order of proximity, the one at the very top was that of Cerberus, who was immobile in Haruyuki’s arms. He didn’t even have 10 percent left in it, his strength having been carved away first in the battle with Haruyuki and then by Argon’s laser attack.

Below that was Ash’s gauge. He was on the ground, stunned, in a snowy field a ways off. Not only had he also been hit with the laser—he’d taken the entire splash damage from the explosion of his own motorcycle, so his remaining health was similarly under 10 percent.

And the third gauge was that of the mysterious flowing-water avatar. The level displayed contradicted her relaxed and imposing fighting style; it really did say 1. Gasping, wondering who exactly she was, Haruyuki’s gaze moved to the avatar name beside the health bar.

“…Aqua Current…” Earlier, he’d seen—no, heard—the name he now muttered softly. And it was a name that had been spoken somewhere very important.

But for some reason, he couldn’t remember whose mouth he’d heard it from or in what context.

—Wait.

Pssh. Pssh, pssh. In his ears, he could hear the sound of flowing water. The refreshing cool of it washed over the core of his mind, like a waterway that had been stagnant and then started to flow again. At the same time, a hazy feeling—no, a conviction—was born and grew within him.

“…That person…”

I know her.

And I haven’t just heard her name. Sometime, somewhere…not so long ago, we fought in the same stage. Not as enemies, but as a tag team.

That’s right—she saved me. When I was facing a crisis so serious, so massive that my life as a Burst Linker was on the line, this avatar saved me.

And not only that…something more; something even more important happened when we parted…

“…Aah, you really gave me a fright there. Never even dreamed you’d show up here, Curren darling.”

This voice abruptly cut off Haruyuki’s intent excavation of his own thoughts. He immediately sent his eyes racing in the direction it had come from, only to find the figure of Argon Array, standing with her hands on her hips, upon a rooftop on the south side of Oume Highway, their battlefield. The upper half of her face was covered by large goggles, so only her mouth was visible, and as always, a coquettish smile played on those lips. But at the moment, it seemed as though the tiniest bit of tension was bleeding through where there had been absolutely nothing like it before.

It was true that even if Argon had shot her apparent comrade, the battle was still three against one. This was precisely the time and place a player would normally tense up, but one of the three (Haruyuki) had 10 percent health left, and Ash was immobile, so it was basically no different from a one-on-one.

On top of that, Argon’s health gauge was still full, and at eight, she was a vastly higher level. What on earth did she have to be on guard about against the level-one Aqua Current?

Occupying the top of a building exactly opposite Ash Roller on Oume Highway, Current’s face was hidden beneath her flowing armor as she responded in her truly soft voice, “I didn’t think we’d meet again like this either, Array.”

It seemed they’d known each other for some time.

“Hmm?” Argon asked in return, lightly shrugging a shoulder. “Then what kinda scene did you picture?”

“Naturally, a fight to the death…wagering all our points.” Current uttered these fearsome words without the slightest hint of agitation.

Argon’s reaction to this was a bit delayed. After a few seconds of silence, she erupted. “Pfft! Ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha! Same as always, saying the craziest stuff with the straightest face. You wanna get into a sudden-death duel with me, you gotta escape first, yeah?” And then, a breath later: “From Unlimited EK at the Castle.”

“…!!”

The instant these words entered his ears, Haruyuki gasped sharply.

“Unlimited EK at the Castle”: In other words, that meant that just like Ardor Maiden had been, Aqua Current was currently sealed away on one of the altars of the Four Gods, who numbered among the Super-level Enemies of the Unlimited Neutral Field.

But that’s impossible! You can’t use the Unlimited Burst command to dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field unless you’re level four.

Current, at a mere level one, shouldn’t have been able to get anywhere close to the Castle.

Holding his breath, Haruyuki waited for her response.

But the flowing-water avatar apparently had no interest in continuing that conversation. She took a splashing step forward and turned toward Argon, who was thirty meters to her right.

“I’ll simply satisfy myself today with taking points from you. There’s not a lot of time left. Enough talk.”

“Ooh, don’t be cold like that. This is our long-awaited reunion, y’know? We both have so much to share…” Argon spread out her hands and shook her head—and then suddenly, her hat flashed.

She had feinted with talk and then launched her laser with no advance warning. And on top of that, it was both lasers at the same time. The super-heated purple heat beams melted the ice in the air on contact and carved out a pale trajectory, shooting toward Current.

Haruyuki didn’t even have the time to call out, “No fair!” The terrifying part of Argon’s laser attack was that there was little time lag from launch to hit. The lenses of the hat flared, and in the next moment, the beam of light was already reaching its target, dozens of meters away. Naturally, it wasn’t quite the “speed of light,” but it was fast enough to make spectators think so. Haruyuki, Ash, and not even Cerberus with all his fighting genius—none of them had been able to dodge it.

So Haruyuki believed that Current’s slender body would be blasted away with her flowing-water armor, and he reflexively turned his face away. But as he was on the verge of averting his eyes, he saw the special attack Argon Laser brush past Current and gouge into an ice pillar far behind her.

That super-precise sniper attack missed its target?!

No, hang on—!

The flowing water covering Aqua Current’s body had grown thin, and in its stead, something had appeared in front of her.

A cube made of water was floating at the end of her outstretched arm. An enormous cube, with one side around fifty centimeters long. It was so transparent he could barely make it out without straining his eyes. Most likely, that cube had bent the trajectory of Argon’s laser. In other words, it was the phenomenon of refraction.

He didn’t understand why the high-energy laser, so powerful it melted even Cerberus’s tungsten armor, had passed through and been refracted by water without simply causing it to evaporate, but at any rate, as long as she had that technique, Current had an essentially perfect defense against Argon’s attack. The difference in strength between a level one and a level eight should have been overwhelming, but that was meaningless if no attack could actually hit its target.

“…Wow…,” Haruyuki murmured from beneath his mirrored surface. The unconscious Cerberus in his arms had also overwhelmed a variety of midlevel Linkers—and that included Haruyuki, of course—with his extraordinary abilities as a level one, but Aqua Current’s strength was another dimension still beyond that. Her style, that bearing—it was the dominion of a high-level player.

In fact, from the way Argon had spoken before, she and Current were old friends or something. If that was indeed possible, the only thing he could think of was that Current was no newbie, but an old-school veteran who had never once gone up a level that whole time.

“Aah, now that’s somethin’, Curren. You went and taught yourself a trick like that to fight me.”

Once more, the laughing voice interrupted his thoughts, and Haruyuki looked up at Argon on the top of the building, unsure.

She continued. “It’s true, with your ‘Pure-Water theory,’ my laser just goes right through, huh? But that technique’s not so simple, from the looks of it. You gotta get some pret-ty tight control over the angle of laser entry, yeah? …So, like, how ’bout this?”

Pew! The air shook, and a beam of bluish-purple light jetted forward. But the trajectory was not the extremely fine, straight line they’d seen so far—rather, it was fan-shaped. When emitting the laser, Argon had moved her head to the side ever so slightly.

The laser bent the instant it touched the cube of water, just like before. By the time it passed through the cube and came out the other side, the alignment was already more than twenty centimeters off, so it should have passed through empty air to the right of Current.

But this time was different. Because Argon had shaken the laser, once it passed through the cube, its trajectory shifted, and the beam grazed Current’s right arm, albeit very lightly.

This time, there was a shfk sound, and then pale smoke rose up from the slender arm. At the same time, Current’s health gauge was brought down to just over 10 percent.

It wasn’t simply the power of the laser that generated so much damage from a mere scratch. No matter how much she acted the veteran, Current only had the health gauge of a level one. If she was hit with the same attack ten—no, nine—more times, her gauge would be helplessly blown away.

Thinking about how Aqua Current would respond, Haruyuki finally realized something. Her laser defense with the cube of water was indeed an impressive technique, but she definitely couldn’t beat Argon with that alone. Brain Burst was a fighting game, and there had never been a single fighting game you could win with defense alone. Flying tools and special attacks would shave away health points, and no matter how perfect the defense might look, your gauge would slowly but steadily decrease. There was no way Current didn’t know that.

In which case, where was she looking for her chance at victory?

It’s obvious. That would be me! Haruyuki gritted his teeth and cursed himself for his own foolishness. Stupid dummy! Such an idiot! What am I just sitting here staring for?! The instant Curren refracted that first laser, I should have been flying up out of here. From her color and attack method, Argon Array’s a long-distance type. If I just stick to her, that should lock away her laser attack. I’m sorry, Curren. Please give me just one more chance! This time, I’ll work with you like a real tag-team partner!

Without noticing he had started to think as though Aqua Current was also an old acquaintance of his, Haruyuki focused his mind. Argon’s laser couldn’t be fired continuously, it seemed. Once she fired, it seemed to take a minimum of three seconds to charge up again. With Silver Crow’s propulsive power, that was enough time for him to fly up to the roof from the street and grapple with her.

In the brief moment before her next shot, Haruyuki turned his mind to Wolfram Cerberus, who lay motionless in his arms. He still didn’t really know what the relationship between Cerberus and Argon was, but at any rate, this mysterious level-one Linker appeared to be under the Analyst’s control. And since Argon was known to be a senior member of the Acceleration Research Society, Cerberus might have been connected to the organization that was maneuvering in secret to bring chaos to the Accelerated World, as much as it pained Haruyuki to think so.

Right. Thinking back, Haruyuki had already discussed with Kuroyukihime and Fuko the possibility that Cerberus was an artificial metal color. And the one who had proposed the Mental-Scar Shell theory that was the foundation of the Artificial Metal-Color plan was this very Argon Array.

But.

But, Cerberus, I’m sure you said it before: that if there’s something more important in this world than winning, then you wanted to see it. I believe that’s actually how you really feel. No, I know that it is.

After promising this to himself, Haruyuki completely switched mental gears.

Defeat Argon Array. Even if he beat her here in a regular duel, the number of points he could take from her wouldn’t make Argon raise so much as an eyebrow, but even so, he could show his intentions—his will.

Focusing his vision, Haruyuki looked up and saw the lenses built into Argon’s hat flash with the faint light that was the signal for her laser’s launch.

He left Cerberus to the snowy field and kicked off the ground with all his strength. His left wing had been pierced earlier by Argon’s laser, so there was a hole in a metallic fin, but he was sure he could fly at least as high as the roof of a five-story building. No—he had to fly that far.

Byook! The laser howled and reached out to Aqua Current. Once again, Argon moved her head the tiniest bit as she fired to thwart Current’s refraction defense. And just like before, the beam of light that couldn’t be bent in time grazed Current’s body, stealing another 10 percent of her health gauge.

But by then, Haruyuki was already closing in on the fourth floor of the five-story building where Argon stood. He just had to tackle her and bring this to a ground fight. He was a little reluctant to plan a fight with a pinning technique on an F-type avatar, but this was not the time for such concerns. Now was his first and only chance, created for him by Aqua Current.

“Ngaah!”

With a brief battle cry, Haruyuki was about to shoot forward the remaining ten meters when Argon, afterglow lingering in the lenses of her headpiece, turned toward him. The lips beneath the goggles curled up into a grin.

The lenses of the oversize goggles he’d thought of as nothing but glasses shone a dazzling purple.

…No way. It’s not just the hat. She has lasers in her eyes, too.

This flash of foreboding in Haruyuki’s brain did indeed turn into two bright lines jetting out with a violent, high-frequency whine. Evasion: Impossible. Defense: Also impossible.

—Don’t be afraid! Repel it!!

He couldn’t have heard the voice of his parent and Legion Master, Kuroyukihime, in reality.

The time it took for the laser to shoot across the ten meters between them and reach him was not even one-tenth of a second. And, although it was true that Kuroyukihime had dived into this field as part of the Gallery, given that she had stayed behind somewhere in Koenji’s Look Street outdoor shopping mall a fair ways off, it wasn’t as though her voice could have reached him there.

Even so, Haruyuki obeyed the voice that filled his head and spread his wings to decelerate while crossing his arms in front of his body. At the same time, the two lasers, drawing out parallel lines a few centimeters apart, slammed up against the armor of his arms.

Earlier, when he had been shot in the right shoulder, her lasers had somehow or another cut through the metal of his armor like butter, causing serious damage. But this time, Haruyuki felt a pushing resistance, and the superheated energy turned into a large ball, stopping in front of his arms. The armor there was, in fact, the toughest part of Crow’s body, along with his helmet. But resisting a laser was not simply a defensive power.

It was the ability he had learned a mere day earlier to avoid—no, bend—all types of laser attacks. The name: Optical Conduction. He shouldn’t have been able to come close to using it in an actual battle; he’d only succeeded in activating it once. And that was half in a trance, so he almost didn’t remember how to move, how to bend the laser. He had actually completely forgotten that he had activated the ability, even after the Battle Royale started, until that very moment. But there was no doubt this was the last card he had to play.

“Nngh…unh…” Mustering every drop of mental power he had, Haruyuki resisted the lump of ultra-high energy trying to burn him to a crisp.

No, that’s not right.

It’s not about resisting; accept the light, guide it, release it. Rather than just creating a physical wall to reject it, interrupt it with a path leading to another world. That’s the mirror mind I arrived at. The Way of the Flexible against light…

Casting aside his fear, Haruyuki loosely opened his clenched fists and imagined both arms, from sharp fingertips to elbows, as two light-guiding tubes.

Kashak, kashak. The guards on his arms transformed. It opened to each side from a centerline, and from the gap, long, slender crystals gradually rose up. The energy of the lasers that had been held in a ball state flowed into the rod-shaped crystals to the left and right to form a glittering X.

“…Sheeaaah!” Shouting, Haruyuki yanked his arms sharply to his sides.

The energy released from the crystalline rods flew into the space behind him, cutting two large holes in the snow-heavy clouds before disappearing.

Now that she’d watched her special-attack lasers be repelled with zero damage, the smile finally disappeared from Argon’s mouth. The lenses on her hat, apparently finished recharging early, began to shine once more.

If she alternated between shooting the lasers from her goggles and her hat, in theory, the lag between shots would shrink down to 1.5 seconds. Haruyuki’s Optical Conduction ability was 100 percent resistant to laser attacks, but if he was taking hits at that interval, it would be difficult to repel them all.

Krk.

A hard sound came at him. But it wasn’t the launch of the laser.

It was the sound of a lance of ice flying in from the opposite side of the road and plunging deep into the left lens of Argon’s hat.

“Ack…!” the Analyst let slip, reeling. The charging energy inside the hat exploded, shattering the left lens and sending tiny pieces flying. This was apparently the weak point of the powerful weapon; Argon’s health gauge dropped more than 20 percent.

Now! This was his last chance!

“…!” Without a moment’s delay, Haruyuki beat his wings with everything he had. Silver Crow’s body shot up like a coiled spring and closed in on the off-balance avatar. If he could just catch hold of her to keep her from moving, that should decide the battle.

Five meters left…three…His outstretched fingers were about to finally touch the Analyst’s thin armor.

“Razzle Dazzle,” Argon muttered, and three lenses—the one left in her hat and the two in her goggles—shone with an incredible amount of light. But they weren’t lasers. Just a pure, white light illuminating a broad radius.

Haruyuki had no sense of damage. His health gauge and its remaining 10 percent were untouched. But bathed in light at close range, his field of view was dyed white, and all he could see was a hazy view of his gauge and the counter display. Since he was pretty sure dazzle was an English word for blind, it was probably a blinding technique with no direct-attack power, just like the name suggested. But the ability to completely rob an opponent of their vision was perhaps even more powerful than the Yellow King’s special attack Silly-Go-Round.

“Nngh…!” Haruyuki suppressed the reflexive urge to put his head down, and he spread both hands wide and tried to catch Argon with a shot in the dark. But the fingertips of his left hand simply grazed some part of her, and he charged into the icy roof of the building face-first.

“Heh-heh, trying to push me down? You’re way out of yer league, boyo.”

With only those murmured words lingering in the air, any sign of Argon vanished from his senses.

Fortunately, his vision was quick to recover, so Haruyuki sat up and intently peered into the blur the area had become, but there was already no sign of the Analyst. The guide cursor that was displayed once again pointed toward Wolfram Cerberus, who was still lying on Oume Highway below him.

Since entry into buildings wasn’t permitted in an Ice stage, Argon shouldn’t have been able to escape the battlefield so easily, and yet…

Wondering at this while refusing to give up, Haruyuki was whirling his head around when he heard a voice coming at him from nowhere:

“Two people with light defense abilities tires even me out. How ’bout we call it a day? Time’s almost up anyway.” Just as she said, the time remaining had, in the blink of an eye, dropped to a hundred seconds. Her laughter-filled voice came to him on the cold breeze, receding rapidly. “So we’ll play again, Crow. And…darling Curren, too.” And then Argon Array’s health gauge disappeared without a sound from the stack in the right of his field of view.

The reckoning of points in Battle Royale mode was a complicated calculation involving several elements, such as participant level, the values of damage taken and given, and kill bonuses. What could be said about this duel was that Haruyuki had done some serious damage to Cerberus, but he had also taken about the same from Argon, so he broke even. And although Argon had mercilessly shaved away the gauges of Haruyuki, Ash, and Cerberus, she’d been hit hard by the level-one Aqua Current, so she was also at zero gain.

As for Current, she’d had 20 percent of her health gauge shaved away by Argon’s lasers, but she’d also broken one of Argon’s lenses with her ice lance, doing about the same amount of damage, so taking the level difference into consideration, she should have taken some number of points from Argon—meaning that she’d succeeded magnificently in following through on her initial declaration of intent.

With these calculations racing through the back of his mind, Haruyuki finally recovered his vision and sought out Aqua Current. But she was nowhere to be found on the roof she had occupied until only moments before.

No way. First Argon Array disappears, and now her? But I have so many things to ask her. No, before that, I need to thank her for saving me. Still squatting on the roof, Haruyuki was about to call out her name, but before he could, a voice came from behind him:

“Nice fight.”

“Huh?” Whirling around on his knees, Haruyuki found the unmistakable avatar with the unique flowing-water armor standing before him. Beneath the membrane of babbling water, pale eye lenses shone faintly. “Uh! Um! I, um, well!”

Just a little over eighty seconds remaining. Unable to immediately decide what should come out of his mouth, Haruyuki flapped both arms from his formal sitting position and simply rattled on in whatever direction his heart took him. “I-I’m sorry! You came and stepped up for me in the fight and almost pressed her up against a wall, and then I went and got taken down by a blinding technique…”

Faced with the sudden apology, Current let the glimmer of a smile slip through. She shook her head with a splashing sound. “No, you fought well. Blinding you and then running off is her specialty. That’s just how it goes. And if you had pushed Arra—I mean, the Analyst—any further, she might have pulled a sudden death on you with an Incarnate attack. In this situation, she wouldn’t hesitate to do so.”

“I-I-Incar…” Even if there was no one within hearing range, Haruyuki snapped to attention upon hearing this forbidden word.

Seeing his reaction, Current smiled again. “Anyway, Crow, I think you still have something you have to do in this battlefield. Something Argon Array wanted to prevent so badly she stopped her watching and challenged you personally.”

“Huh…O-oh!” Right, it was just like Current had said. Immediately before his wing had been ripped through by the sudden appearance of Argon, Haruyuki had been trying to communicate something very important to the genius Burst Linker Wolfram Cerberus, who’d arrived on the scene so abruptly in the Accelerated World.

“R-right. Excuse me. I’ll apologize properly later!” Haruyuki shouted, bowing at Current before racing away, almost falling over himself. Without hesitation, he leapt from the roof of the building into an unstable glide with his injured wings. Once he’d landed in the middle of Oume Highway, he lifted up Cerberus from where he still lay on the ground.

The smaller avatar had yet to regain consciousness. Haruyuki looked over at Ash Roller a little ways off; his frenemy was now recovered from the stun effect and was wailing before the remains of his bike (“Noooooo! My glorious machiiiiiiiiine!”), so Haruyuki figured that Cerberus’s unconsciousness was not due simply to damage taken.

There was a good possibility that this was a sign of the personality change that had happened in their last duel, but it wasn’t just his helmet; the armor on both shoulders was also silent. After looking up and seeing that they only had forty seconds left on the clock, Haruyuki steeled himself and started shaking the other boy. “Cerberus! Wake up, Cerberus!”

Haruyuki would still be fine if the one that awakened was the Cerberus II of the left shoulder, but he didn’t know what would happen if Cerberus III—the currently unconfirmed personality Argon called “Onesie”—in the right shoulder (or so he assumed) ended up coming out. But if he let this chance get away, it was totally unclear when he’d be able to contact Cerberus next. And he had no guarantee that even if they did meet again, he would be the first personality, Cerberus I.

“Cerberus…!!” He couldn’t be sure that his earnest cries actually reached the boy. But a faint light blinked beyond the wolf’s maw visor of his helmet. At the same time, the body encased in tungsten armor began to shiver.

“…Crow…”

The voice that finally slipped out was unmistakably that of the Cerberus I Haruyuki had now fought three times.

He pushed back a sigh of relief. “Cerberus, there’s no time left! But I want to talk with you more! Please, as soon as this duel ends, disconnect globally to keep Argon Array from challenging you, and”—he shook off a momentary hesitation and mustered up the next words—“come to this spot in the real world, the Oume Highway entrance to Look Street! I’ll be waiting for you there!!”

“…”

Cerberus didn’t respond right away. He simply stared at Haruyuki’s face without nodding or showing any other kind of reaction. But Haruyuki distinctly felt a swell of powerful emotion seeking release in the small metallic avatar. In the upper part of his field of view, the counter mercilessly sliced the time away. Twenty seconds left. Fifteen. When the digital readout entered the single digits, Haruyuki nodded deeply at the still-silent Cerberus and turned his face to the sky—and then set his eyes on a completely unexpected sight:

Aqua Current, the flowing-water duel avatar, still on the roof of a building on the south side of Oume Highway. And then, on the northern side roof that Current had originally occupied, a lone jet-black silhouette stood silently.

Swords for all four limbs; skirt patterned after a lotus. Mask in the sharp shape of an inverted V, crowning a slender, supple body. Haruyuki’s parent and the master of Nega Nebulus, the Black King, Black Lotus.

Having registered Silver Crow on her spectator list, she’d dived automatically into this battlefield as a member of the Gallery when the surprise Battle Royale had started. But even if she were only a spectator with no fear of being attacked, it was risky for a king to reveal herself without a full understanding of the situation, so she had remained at the north of the shopping street where they had materialized in the Accelerated World.

And yet now, she had appeared in such a conspicuous place, albeit only for the few remaining seconds. The reason for that was…

As Haruyuki stared upward, bewildered, Kuroyukihime raised her right arm smoothly. But not at Haruyuki.

The sharp tip of the Terminate Sword was pointing at Aqua Current. But this gesture held not the slightest hint of hostility; on the contrary, it looked like an expression of Kuroyukihime’s heart, a desire to cross the ten-meter limit for distance between duelers and spectators and move closer. Or perhaps, more accurately, a desire to touch her directly.

Perhaps feeling the same thing, Aqua Current also raised her right hand and turned a fingertip with a thin line of water flowing down it toward Black Lotus.

A faint part opened in the gloomy clouds filling the sky of the stage, and a thin ray of evening light made the obsidian and water duel avatars shine the same shade of orange.

A second later, the counter hit zero, and the words TIME UP!! quietly burned before Haruyuki’s eyes.