Accel World - Volume 14 - Chapter 1

1

“Do you remember, C?”

Haruyuki shifted his gaze at the sudden question and found that, at some point, a small figure had come to stand next to him.

The armor of her upper body, patterned after a white Japanese robe, was the color of unbleached fabric, the whitest shade available, with pure, natural-fiber materials. Meanwhile, the hakama she wore on her lower half was a brilliant red, a fresh yet solemn color, while her avatar’s long hair hung down to the belt around her waist, covering her slender back. She exuded the overall impression of an ethereal shrine maiden.

One of the Four Elements who formed the senior executive council within the Black Legion, Nega Nebulus, and also known by the name Testarossa, Ardor Maiden looked up at Haruyuki with her cool, cherubic eye lenses. “…Do you remember what you said to me a little over ten days ago, when we were locked up inside the Castle?”

“Uh, um…” Unable to immediately answer Maiden’s—aka Utai Shinomiya’s—question, Haruyuki scratched the metallic helmet of his own duel avatar, Silver Crow, with the tips of his fingers.

Naturally, he clearly remembered from beginning to end how they had charged into the only area in the Accelerated World where entry was prohibited, which corresponded to the Imperial Palace in the real world—the Castle. Groups of super-powerful soldier Enemies patrolled the inside, and if they hadn’t been able to find a way out, Utai and Haruyuki would have no doubt ended up in a kind of pseudo–Unlimited EK situation.

Their exploration of the Castle had taken a full night, including breaks, and during that time, they had talked about any number of things. Thus, now, ten days later, the mental acuity he needed to pinpoint exactly which conversation Utai was talking about was—

Suddenly, the plate under his feet shuddered fiercely, and Haruyuki opened his wings slightly to keep his balance. As he did, he reached out to support Maiden’s back with his left hand; the female avatar neatly dipped her head in thanks.

“Sorry!” A voice came through a speaker up ahead. “There was, like, this huge hole in the road! Anyone fall off?!”

“NP.” The reply came from an avatar opposite Haruyuki and Utai, who sported a deep-crimson leopard head: Blood Leopard. The other passengers—the Black King, Black Lotus; her deputy Sky Raker; Cyan Pile; and Lime Bell—also snapped to attention and stared out ahead of the vehicle as it roared forward.

Haruyuki and the other members of Nega Nebulus, together with Pard, the Submaster of the Red Legion, Prominence—a total of seven people—were careening down the Century End stage road on a massive, twelve-wheeled armored trailer. Sitting in the cockpit was none other than the master of Prominence, the Red King, Scarlet Rain.

The treacherous vehicle held four auto cannons on the front of the tractor, multiple missile pods on the trailer area (which was where Haruyuki and the others were standing), and had large-diameter laser guns equipped on both sides. Not to mention that the trailer itself was the Enhanced Armament “Invincible,” transformed into a sort of souped-up tank by the Red King—who also boasted the nickname Immobile Fortress in the Accelerated World.

At Niko’s voice command, the trailer—Dreadnought—had departed from Umesato Junior High in Suginami about five minutes earlier and was currently barreling down a back street in Nakano Area No. 2. The shortest route to their objective, the Castle’s east gate, was to go straight down Oume Highway eastward, turn onto Shinjuku Street after passing the Yamanote Line, and then get onto Uchibori Street via Gyoen Mae and Yotsuya, but the major roads in the Unlimited Neutral Field were patrolled by Beast-class Enemies.

Naturally, with a battle formation that included two kings, they could easily dispatch even a Beast class without really breaking a sweat. But a large part of their route was also in territory controlled by the Blue Legion, Leonids. If a Leonids Enemy-hunting party happened upon them, they were highly unlikely to let the Nega Nebulus team pass through with a wink and a smile.

Given all this, the massive trailer was deliberating staying off the wide Oume Highway, but the Century End stage roads were peppered with sinkholes and overturned oil drums and other obstacles. They were not good roads by any standard. And there was no space to avoid obstacles on these back streets, so they shook rather spectacularly. But not once did they become stuck or collide with a building as they went; Niko’s skill was to be commended.

Standing alongside Utai at the very end of the trailer, Haruyuki considered this as he looked up at the sky of the Unlimited Neutral Field. Dense black clouds loomed overhead, but he spotted the light of the stars from time to time through faint breaks. Because the star map of the Accelerated World re-created the real world’s constellations, given that it was June, the large Summer Triangle would be hanging low in the eastern sky.

Haruyuki had learned about it during the time he had been locked up in the Castle with Utai. While they’d sat there, trapped, Utai had indicated a star with her small hand—Altair—and then had related that the initial Burst Linkers had also looked up at the starry night sky, and that was why the names of the major Legions were all related to space.

Nega Nebulus was a dark nebula. Prominence was a flare on the sun. The Leonids were an annual meteor shower.

According to independent research on Haruyuki’s part once they’d managed to make it safely out of the Castle, the name of the Green Legion, Great Wall, referred to a wall formed by a collection of countless galaxies in a place two hundred million light-years away from Earth. Similarly, the Purple Legion, Aurora Oval, indicated an elliptical area enclosing the poles of the Earth where auroras frequently occurred. The Yellow Legion, Crypt Cosmic Circus, seemed to be the only Legion whose name had no relation to space terminology, the sort of move you’d expect from a contrarian like Yellow Radio. And the White Legion, Oscillatory Universe, clearly indicated the scientific concept of an oscillating universe.

This one was the hardest for Haruyuki to wrap his mind around. The oscillating universe theory was initially espoused nearly a hundred years earlier, and put simply, it stated that the universe repeatedly expanded and collapsed. The expansion was the Big Bang, which even Haruyuki had heard more than a little about, while the collapse was called the Big Crunch. The universe, over however many billions of years, cycled through Big Bangs and Big Crunches—creation and destruction—and at some point, the current universe, including Earth and the Milky Way, would contract into a single tiny dot. Or that was the main idea, but this oscillating universe theory had apparently been refuted and shelved long ago.

So then, why had the White King, White Cosmos—also known as Transient Eternity—apparently deliberately named her Legion after a discarded theory?

Naturally, Haruyuki’s knowledge did not extend this far. The little sister of the White King in the real, Kuroyukihime, perhaps might have known, but he definitely couldn’t just ask her about it. The White King was the very person who had cleverly manipulated Kuroyukihime into sending the Red King, Red Rider, into total point loss; and the reason Kuroyukihime currently lived alone in a town house in Asagaya Jutaku was a family incident brought about by her intensifying anger and hatred toward her sister.

It had already been three days since Kuroyukihime explained all this to him. She’d told him the story in a pained voice, with a grief-stricken look, when they were alone in the student council office after school. The lurid tale started with the Seven Kings of Pure Color reaching level nine and continued up to the eventual destruction of the initial Nega Nebulus.

When, two days earlier, on Friday, she and Fuko Kurasaki had stayed over at Haruyuki’s house, Kuroyukihime had looked like she was back to her old self. He hadn’t sensed anything especially different about her in the Territories the day before or at the school festival that day, either.

But there was no way that could be. He knew there were still ripples disturbing the calm of her heart. Because the reason she had become so upset to begin with—the mystery of Red Rider’s crest, etched into the sealed ISS kit cards Haruyuki had obtained in the Setagaya area—still hadn’t been resolved.

He brought his gaze back down from the night sky and stared at the slender back of the Black King as she stood in the center of the trailer. While everyone else shuddered and shook with the vehicle, Kuroyukihime alone, with her hovering ability, maintained an essentially static position. Arms crossed, legs neatly lined up, she was almost like a single black sword. Seeing her from behind like this, Haruyuki couldn’t help but feel the strength and brittleness of her sharply honed blades.

Of the eight there, it was likely Kuroyukihime who had the greatest, most serious expectations. Their first objective: rescue Aqua Current, trapped in Unlimited EK at the east gate of the Castle. Their second: the destruction of the ISS kit main body, hidden away in Tokyo’s Midtown Tower. Both objectives were directly connected to the events that had occurred two years and ten months earlier.

They had already been reunited with Current in the real world, and they had taken pains to learn everything they could from her about her situation, so that the first mission simply required the resolve to go and do it. But there was still a large unknown at play in the second mission: the relationship between the ISS kits and the first Red King, Red Rider. As long as the mystery of the crossed-guns crest remained unsolved, they couldn’t know what would happen at Midtown Tower. They might be thrust up against some obstacle other than the Legend-class Enemy Archangel Metatron that guarded the tower.

But.

Haruyuki clenched his right hand into a tight fist and vowed in his heart: No matter what happens, I will protect Kuroyukihime. And not just her—Taku, Chiyu, Master Fuko, Shinomiya, Curren, Pard, and Niko, too, I’ll protect them all. I mean, they’re all helping me save Rin and Ash, without even complaining. We’re totally going to smash the ISS kit main body and go back to the real world together. And then I’m going to properly introduce Rin and Pard and Niko to Curren and Shinomiya, and we’ll get back to the school festival—

“Oh…”

Here, Haruyuki finally stumbled upon the crux of Utai’s question. He turned his gaze back toward Ardor Maiden, who was still standing next to him, and the small shrine maiden avatar seemed to read Haruyuki’s mind.

“Have you remembered then, C?” she said as if grinning.

“Y-yeah. I told you in the Castle, right? That I had a friend I wanted to introduce you to.”

“That’s exactly right.” Utai nodded sharply and turned her eyes to the front, toward the cockpit they couldn’t see from the back of the trailer. “The friend you spoke of at that time was the Red King, Scarlet Rain, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Returning her nod, he traveled back in his memory twelve days.

Haruyuki had indeed said that to Utai after they’d managed to slip into the main building of the Castle, when they were walking along the wooden floor of the central hallway: that once they managed to escape from the Castle and solve all the various problems before them, he had a friend he wanted to introduce her to. “Kinda sassy, kinda rough, but…but she’s really great. Maybe you could be friends with her, too.”

Yet, he hadn’t been able to finish the sentence at the time. He’d been suddenly overcome by a terrible premonition that it would never happen, that some catastrophe would befall them before he could introduce Utai to Niko. But in the end, this premonition turned out to be needless fretting on his part.

On the twenty-fourth day of this month, four days after their escape from the Castle, Niko and Utai had met at the curry party held at the Arita house and spoken, albeit briefly. The main purpose of that gathering had been a training session to help Haruyuki acquire the Theoretical Mirror ability, so they had hurriedly moved to the Unlimited Neutral Field. But they could try again, once the current mission was over. He would show Niko, Pard, and Rin to the animal hutch in the rear courtyard and reintroduce them to Utai and to Hoo.

Haruyuki made this promise in his heart and then said to Utai, “…But now that I’m thinking about it, I didn’t actually have to bring you guys together. You and Niko—er, Rain—met each other ages ago, Mei. In the territories between Negabu and Promi, way back when.”

“Yes. But we only were able to say hello once on the battlefield, and of course, we had never met in the real. I’m truly delighted that you introduced Rain to me, C…We’re both red colors; I’m sure we’ll be able to be friends.”

“Yeah. I know you will…I just know it,” he replied, half for his own benefit, before bringing his face back up.

Toward the front of the trailer that was roaring down the road, a remarkably massive building appeared on the right, in the midst of half-destroyed buildings. The distinctive silhouette of the twin towers was, without a doubt, that of the Diet, Tokyo’s main government building. The tip of the five-hundred-meter-tall edifice was completely cloaked in twisting black clouds.

Rumor had it that the throne of the Blue King, Blue Knight, sat on the special viewing platform at the top of that building in the Unlimited Neutral Field. Naturally, the king himself wasn’t always seated there, but there was a 0.0001 percent chance that the level-niner Niko, called an Originator, was glaring down at the world below from the summit that Haruyuki was currently staring up at.

According to the original schedule, the mission to invade Midtown Tower was to have taken place the following weekend after the fourth meeting of the Seven Kings, to be held in a few days. The attack party was to have been made up of elites carefully selected from all the Legions, with perhaps even Blue Knight and Green Grandé participating, which would give the attack force fighting power on a scale far and away beyond that which the eight on the trailer at that moment could manage (well, the nine of them, if you counted Aqua Current’s eventual participation).

But just as Kuroyukihime had said before they sallied, there was a possibility that information from the meetings of the Seven Kings was being funneled to the Acceleration Research Society through the Quad Eyes Analyst, Argon Array. So naturally, the Acceleration Research Society was likely to be waiting to greet the attack party with a multitude of clever traps that played to their specialty. So a plan where a large party basically marched on the front door didn’t seem to be the best strategy.

Put another way, to succeed in the surprise assault strategy that the nine had adopted that day, they would have to attack with the perfect combination of shock and speed. They had to render Metatron helpless, swiftly penetrate Midtown Tower, and destroy the ISS kit main body before the Acceleration Research Society noticed them.

A critical component of this strategy was the Optical Conduction ability Haruyuki had acquired, and whether or not this power—a counterfeit of the Theoretical Mirror he had originally been trying to get—would work against Metatron’s instant-death laser. This was directly connected to the success or failure of the overall mission; he probably should have taken a shot from Invincible’s main armament before the big day just to make sure this ability would actually reflect it.

But it wasn’t as though they had the time for him to train and try for the mirror ability again if he did fail. And even if he did deflect Niko’s lasers, that wasn’t proof he could do the same thing with Metatron’s. With things where they were now, Haruyuki was better off believing, rather than doubting.

In himself. And in Chiyuri and Utai and his precious friends who had given everything they had to helping him obtain his current abilities.

The trailer passed the northern side of the Diet and pulled onto Yasukuni Street from a back road. Soon enough, he could see the large guardrails on the north side of Shinjuku Station. The massive armored vehicle made the earth shake as it approached the underpass to slip below the overhead bridge of the Yamanote train line.

“…Ah, crap.” Niko’s voice came suddenly from the speaker.

“State the nature of your ‘crap,’ Red King,” Kuroyukihime immediately replied.

“Nah, I was just thinking it’s gonna be a tight squeeze here. And by tight, I mean for you guys up on top.”

“…”

They all fell silent and stared doubtfully at the guardrails rapidly drawing near. Indeed, given the distance from the road to the bridge, it seemed the vehicle would clear it somehow, just barely, but any way they looked at it, the heads of the seven passengers on the roof would slam into the steel frame—and that likely wouldn’t be the only hit they took.

“C-come on! Now that you’ve realized that, you can just stop, can’t you?!” Kuroyukihime’s voice was strained now that she understood the situation, but the vehicle’s twelve spinning wheels showed no signs of slackening.

“Nah, the thing about that, see, this thing doesn’t have any brakes.” Niko’s reply was nonchalant over the roar of the trailer’s engine.

“Wh…wh…what?!”

“So, like, Lotus, I’mma let you handle this. Over an’ out.”

“Not ‘over and out’! A car without any brakes, I mean, that’s like…Aaah…” Apparently, Kuroyukihime couldn’t immediately come up with a suitable analogy.

Beside her, Fuko casually remarked from her wheelchair, “They say love is like a car without brakes, but the opposite metaphor is difficult, hmm?”

“…How can you be so utterly relaxed, Raker?”

“Oh my, when push comes to shove, I do have Gale Thruster, after all.”

“Th-that’s not really fair!”

Haruyuki’s heart raced as he listened to this conversation between Legion Master and Submaster, and he realized, Oh, I can fly. So NP. But he really shouldn’t escape into the sky on his own.

The trailer started down the hill directly in front of the steel bridge, picking up even more speed.

Then came a firm voice: “Please leave it to me, Master!”

Cyan Pile—Takumu—his body wrapped in heavy indigo-blue armor, took a few steps forward. He readied the Enhanced Armament of his right arm, Pile Driver, as he shouted, “I figured something like this might happen, so I made sure to fully charge my special-attack gauge! Here we go! Lightning Cyan Spike!!”

The steel spike poking out of the barrel of the Enhanced Armament became a pale-blue lance of light and shot forward in a straight line. The superheated plasma instantly ripped through the rust-covered steel of the overhead bridge, gouging out a hole about ten centimeters wide before disappearing into the eastern Shinjuku sky.

And that was it. The bridge continued to exist in front of them, not destroyed nor flying through the air. Lightning Cyan Spike, a level-four special attack, was a powerful technique with both piercing and heat characteristics, but because the force was concentrated in one spot, when it struck a sparse object, the majority of the energy plunged out to the rear, which made it not so useful for large-scale destruction.

Or so Haruyuki suspected.

As he built his mental hypothesis, his friend Takumu stood rooted to the spot, astonished, and Chiyuri patted his arm consolingly.

A few seconds later, Kuroyukihime nodded deeply. “No, well, we mustn’t waste Pile’s efforts,” she intoned solemnly. “Leave the rest to me.” Arms still crossed, she moved to the very front of the trailer, switched places with Pard encamped there, and smoothly raised the sword of her right leg. The distance to the bridge was a mere five—three—meters…

“Death by Barraging.”

At the same time as she voiced the technique name, the Black King’s right leg transformed into a conical shadow. It hadn’t lost its physical substance; it was just kicking outward repeatedly at incredible speed. Even Haruyuki’s eyes couldn’t completely capture the multiple blows—reaching a hundred hits in an instant.

The trailer cockpit charged into the overhead bridge, the edges scraping along the metal, sending sparks flying. On the verge of smashing into Kuroyukihime, the girder broke up into innumerable metallic fragments that shot off to both sides. Black Lotus’s leg dug farther into the steel bridge, opening up the hole Cyan Pile had gouged out. Haruyuki expected it to be noisier, with more sparks; it was like she was cutting through craft paper rather than metal.

With the Black King transformed into a boring machine, Pard crouched down behind her, and so the others also hurried to their knees all in a line (Fuko stayed in her wheelchair). In less than three seconds, the tank had passed through and come out onto the east side of the Yamanote Line.

In the rear, Haruyuki looked back to see that a large hole, around a meter and a half wide, had been gouged out of the steel bridge.

“’Ro’s footwork is as frightening as ever,” Utai noted coolly from her place crouched down in front of him.

“And her handiwork’s plenty scary, too,” Haruyuki added quietly.

Kuroyukihime brought her right leg down smoothly and headed back to the center of the vehicle roof.

“Mmm,” she directed at a slightly glum-looking Takumu after clearing her throat. “…Pile, don’t get so down. I was the one who told you to extend your powers in line with your avatar characteristics, after all. I know there’ll be a situation when you save us all with your technique’s piercing ability.”

“Y…yes, I understand that. But lately, I’ve been thinking it might be a good idea to expand the breadth of my attack abilities a little…”

“A difficult problem,” Fuko added gently. She moved her wheelchair forward a little and continued from Kuroyukihime’s side. “Which should you aim for: all-rounder or specialist? This is a topic that has been debated since the earliest days of the Accelerated World, and in the more than seven years that have passed since then, no one has come up with an answer. Or I suppose, to be more precise, I should say the answer is different for each Legion. Our policy in Nega Nebulus is ‘If you can’t decide, specialize!’ but there are many all-purpose avatars in Aurora Oval and CCC. And Prominence’s policy is?”

“Specialize and specialize some more, o’course!”

All present nodded at Niko’s excited voice coming through the speaker. The Red King, Scarlet Rain, was basically a classic example of an avatar hyper-specialized in long-distance firepower. Her deputy Blood Leopard, seated at the front of the trailer, was also specialized in agility and biting attacks, even though she was a red type.

“Ooh! I’ve got a question!” Now it was Chiyuri raising her hand. “But, like, if you get too specialized, don’t you have zero hope of winning sometimes when you get dragged into a stage you’re not compatible with? I mean, an extreme example would be, like, an avatar specialized in fire attacks not being able to do anything in an Ocean stage since all the fighting’s in the water. So I was just kinda wondering about that, too, you know?”

“Normally, that would be exactly right.” Smiling, Fuko readily agreed with Chiyuri. She turned her eyes toward Utai, standing next to Haruyuki. “For instance, Ardor Maiden is the duel avatar in Nega Nebulus most specialized in long-distance firepower. But it can hardly be said that she is compatible with a water-type stage, because her main weapon, the flame arrow, disappears in a heavy rain, much less in the middle of an ocean. Maiden must have also hit a wall of her own around level four or five. Isn’t that right, Mei?”

Utai bobbed her head up and down. Perhaps because of the attention suddenly focused on her, she shrank into herself, embarrassed.

“…But Maiden didn’t seek out some power of a different affinity.” Warm eyes still fixed upon the small shrine maiden, the sky-blue avatar told the story: “She instead intently refined her own abilities. And then her duel avatar responded to that intent. Mei, the most powerful flames you can produce now—with a normal special attack, of course—how far can they penetrate in the sea of an Ocean stage?”

“Um…probably around thirty meters, I guess,” Utai responded bashfully, and the three junior members of the group—Haruyuki, Takumu, and Chiyuri—opened their eyes wide in surprise.

“…Maiden,” Takumu said after a minute or two, incredulous. “So then a fire attack you launch in the water will travel thirty meters without disappearing?”

Utai only bobbed her head silently, so Kuroyukihime spoke on her behalf:

“I remember it being about half that range, when I saw it way back when. So you’ve kept working on it since then, Maiden? Those flames charging through the ocean, churning the water into a white foam, that was really beautiful.”

“Wow! I want to see it, too!” Chiyuri cried out in delight. “Maybe the next Change will be an Ocean stage!”

“Whoa! ” Niko shouted roughly from the cockpit. “Careful what you wish for there! My tank’ll sink to the bottom!”

“NP. Just develop a battleship mode,” Pard retorted, and everyone burst into bright laughter.

“I understand, Master. Raker.” Takumu nodded deeply once the giggles had subsided. “In short, it’s a matter of how much faith you have in your duel avatar. My mind produced Cyan Pile here, and no matter what happens, I’m going to believe in this guy…Though I also have an important promise to keep with Haru.”

Takumu turned to Silver Crow at this last note, and Haruyuki heard his intent loud and clear.

Five days earlier in Takumu’s room, when Haruyuki had gone over after his first battle with Wolfram Cerberus had left him utterly trounced, the two best friends had made a promise. That once they reached level seven—the entrance to being known as high rankers—then the two would face off for real, with everything they had. This was still a long way off, given that neither had even made it to level six, but they could never forget this vow even for a moment. Because all their fights, all their experience in the Accelerated World, led directly to that time that would someday come.

“That’s right, Taku,” Haruyuki said, forcefully taking a step forward now. “And I mean, Silver Crow is specialized on the one point of flight ability, so I’m not thinking of trying to make him all-purpose at this stage of the game. Our duel avatars aren’t game characters given to us by the system…”

“…They’re avatars of our own selves.”

The two boys nodded meaningfully at each other.

“…What’s this about?” Chiyuri looked slightly creeped out. “You guys got some big-deal promise?”

“Um, sorry, Chii, this is—”

“A promise between two men isn’t something you go ’round telling everyone!” Haruyuki cried, thrusting his chest forward.

The third member of the group of childhood friends glared at him. “I feel like when you guys keep secrets, it generally develops into a whole thing, though,” she commented doubtfully.

“Th-that’s not true! I mean, up to now, the only things that have been a big deal are, um…”

That and that. Oh, that. That, too…Watching Haruyuki count off with the fingers of his right hand, the girls all shook their heads in exasperation as one.

While this conversation was going on, the armored truck continued to race ahead full speed, passing by the northern side of Shinjuku Gyoen and drawing near Yotsuya Station. If they drove a few minutes more, they would plunge into Hanzomon in the real world—the western gate of the Castle in the Accelerated World.

Kuroyukihime and Fuko had led a team from the former Nega Nebulus to challenge the Super-class Enemy guarding that gate—Byakko, one of the Four Gods. Although they had been trampled by the claws and tusks of the divine beast, which boasted a terrible and powerful speed, they managed to just barely escape Byakko’s territory, thanks to Fuko’s Gale Thruster. So now, the west gate was the only one of the Castle’s four gates that had no one sealed away at it. Thus, for the time being at least, Haruyuki wouldn’t get the chance to see the beast. Not until Nega Nebulus once again took on the challenge of a Castle attack.

The trailer passed Yotsuya Station and climbed up a gentle slope to reveal an enormous silhouette up ahead. Given that this was the Century End stage, all buildings should have been half-destroyed, but there was not a single blemish on the high Castle walls; they rose darkly up into the sky. The design of the main building, faintly visible on the other side of the walls, brought together ancient Gothic keynotes with modern hardness. The flickering of countless watch fires in the night fog was eerily beautiful.

The Castle in the Unlimited Neutral Field, unlike the palace in the real world, carved out a perfect circle 1.5 kilometers in diameter. It was surrounded by a bottomless ravine, above which an abnormally powerful gravity was at work, meaning that neither Haruyuki’s wings nor Fuko’s booster could make it across. The only means of getting to the other side of the ravine were the thirty-meter-wide bridges connecting the Castle to the gates at the cardinal points.

Niko brought the truck/tank out onto Shinjuku Street from the back road and cut power momentarily at the T-intersection where it hit Uchibori Street, so that they naturally decelerated. Ahead of them, the great bridge—and the gate—were visible, but the God Byakko would open its eyes only if they stepped onto it. All twelve wheels screeched as the trailer turned sharply right, onto the road stretching out along the infinite cliff, before the engine roared back to life, and they began to race to the south.

Haruyuki went over to the left side of the vehicle and looked up at the dark wall rising up into the sky beyond the five hundred meters of ravine. On the other side of that wall lived countless sentinel Enemies and one boy Burst Linker. Of course, he wasn’t always in a dive, but he had talked like he spent a lot of time on this side, so the probability that he was right then, at that moment, a mere thousand meters away, was probably higher than that of the Blue King being at the government building.

At the time of the Castle escape mission ten days earlier, Haruyuki had promised that they would meet again someday—he and the young samurai avatar who held the Arc of Infinity, Trilead Tetroxide. In the mission to rescue Aqua Current that was about to start, they weren’t planning to charge all the way into the Castle, although that had also been the case during the previous mission to rescue Ardor Maiden. Still, Haruyuki couldn’t help hoping that he and his young friend would be reunited that day.

But we’ll definitely meet again one day, Lead, Haruyuki resolved, as if calling out silently to the other side of the wall.

Utai smiled and nodded, almost as though she could hear his thoughts.

The tank continued to charge along the curving Uchibori Street until it finally passed in front of the south gate, which was guarded by the God Suzaku.

The place where Ardor Maiden had been locked away until ten days earlier…Haruyuki looked out onto the wasteland to the right, which was likely Hibiya Park in the real world, as their trajectory gradually shifted to the north.

Right around the time the office buildings in the Marunouchi neighborhood started to appear from the within the darkness, the vehicle’s speed dropped. They coasted along another hundred meters or so on inertia before the tank came to a halt in the middle of a large intersection.

“Last stop! Castle, east gate! All passengers, pleeeaaase disembark!  ”

Obeying the announcement (which for some reason was in Niko’s angel mode), the passengers dropped down to the ground one after the other. When Haruyuki landed last, carrying Fuko’s wheelchair, the massive tank was swallowed up in red light and vanished. A bright-red female avatar jumped forward from where the cockpit had been.

The drive from Umesato Junior High in Suginami across the city to Marunouchi finally over, the Red King, Scarlet Rain, thrust both arms out ahead of her. “Aaah, all those narrow roads!” she hissed at a stretch. “I really had to concentrate, dammit. We’re taking the expressway home!”

“Whaaaat?! But there aren’t any brakes!!” Haruyuki cried out, before hurrying to add, “A-and the expressway overpasses looked like they were crumbling all over the place. It’s just, maybe they can’t hold up a big vehicle, you know? I mean…”

“Between the two missions, there’ll prob’ly be at least one Change,” Niko replied evenly, hands clasped behind her head. “Or, like, I seriously wish we’d get one already. And it’d be the best if we got a fire type, like Lava or Scorched Earth.”

“Huh? Why—? Oh! I get it. If it’s a fire-related stage, Seiryu’s power will weaken.”

“Mm. But there’s also the possibility of a water stage, though,” Black Lotus said, turning her mirrored goggles up at the dark sky as she stood beside Niko. “We should be happy with the Century End stage. It doesn’t rain in this one, at least. At any rate, if we’re going to cross our fingers for a Change, I’d rather save our luck for the attack on Metatron.”

“Right. A bit of a higher-level dark stage, and if we could, the best would be…” Haruyuki was still gripping the handles of the wheelchair where Fuko was sitting, and she quietly picked up where he left off:

“…The pinnacle of dark types, a Hell stage. That way, we’d be able to fight Metatron together with you, Corvus…”

“Mm, true…But even I can basically count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen a Hell stage in the Unlimited Neutral Field. We do have the option of waiting until the very last minute of our seven-day time limit, but the probability is fairly close to zero…”

“I’m sure it’ll work out!” Chiyuri’s bright voice broke the moment of silence that fell over them. “That’s why Crow worked so hard to learn Optical Conduction! He’d knock Metatron’s laser right back at the thing easy as pie, I’m sure of it!”

This is probably where I step in and say something like “Yeah! Leave it to me!” Even with this thought in his mind, what came out of Haruyuki’s mouth was the usual “I’ll do what I can.”

But Pard slapped him on the shoulder, having come to stand behind him at some point. “’Kay. You can do it.”

“R-right!”

Her tone was curt, but the older Burst Linker had always gently encouraged him, so Haruyuki turned to face her, wanting to let her know that he was genuinely committed to the act. But by the time he had taken a deep enough breath, Pard was already walking away. Long tail flicking, she moved on silent feet to the west side of the intersection, facing the towering Castle.

Haruyuki watched the slender, tough back of the leopard avatar and slowly expelled the air stored in his lungs. Right. This was not the time to get preoccupied with the Metatron fight. They had an objective to achieve before that one, one that required his complete focus:

The rescue of one of Nega Nebulus’s Four Elements, Aqua Current, sealed away at the east gate of the Castle.

Haruyuki removed his hands from Fuko’s wheelchair and clenched them into fists. He stood like that as he turned in a slow circle, carving his surroundings into his memory.

To the north, he could see the Tokyo fire department and the Japan Meteorological Agency, along with the overhead bridge of the expressway ring road.

To the east, Tokyo Station sat at the end of a broad road. Even in the Century End stage, the redbrick construction was maintained, but the walls were crumbling and scorched in places.

When he turned to the south, he found Hibiya Park, which they had passed only moments earlier, and the government buildings of Kasumigaseki. Was the thin iron tower soaring far off in the distance the old Tokyo Tower?

And then: To the west, there was the iron bridge spanning the sheer precipice of the bottomless ravine and the massive gate closed tight on the other side. The gate doors, likely thirty meters tall and wide, were also made of steel, but not a trace of rust or denting could be found on the dark surface. It appeared to be the only thing in the world of the Century End stage—which took post-apocalyptic as its theme—that refused to be corroded at all.

“The Castle…The east gate,” Haruyuki murmured.

Moving to his right side, Kuroyukihime nodded softly. “Curren is locked away on the altar in front of that gate. We’ll have a briefing now on the details of the mission, but just like with the south gate, I’ll no doubt be asking you to play a critical role. It’s cowardly of me to consistently rely on you as your parent and as your Legion Master, but I am counting on you, Haruyuki.”

“That’s— To start with, I’m the one who asked you all to come on this mission today.”

“No, ever since Curren returned to the Legion, her rescue from the Castle has been an objective we needed to achieve as soon as possible. It’s the same for the Metatron mission. The spread of the ISS kits has come to a point that’s one step away from an epidemic. In fact, I think your insistence was the push I needed when I was hesitating.” Kuroyukihime touched the flat side of the sword that was her left hand to Haruyuki’s shoulder, and then brought her face mask very close.

“…To be honest,” she murmured, “that fear inside me hasn’t gone away. Will we not see fresh sacrifices against this opponent, the God Seiryu? Will we not confront some unexpected truth at Tokyo Midtown Tower? But at the same time, I also have faith. That no matter what the hardship, your silver wings will slice through it…for us.”

“…Yes.” He wanted to say so much more, but a hot lump had risen in his throat, and it was all he could do to push out that short answer. Instead, Haruyuki wrapped the fingers of his right hand gently around the tip of Kuroyukihime’s left. He squeezed as hard as he dared—any harder, and he risked having his fingers chopped off by her Terminate Sword—and then managed to add a few more words: “It’s okay. Whatever happens, I’ll protect you. And everyone else.”

Kuroyukihime’s reply was to nod deeply and then lightly touch her head to Haruyuki’s helmet.

Just this once, none of the others made an attempt to tease them or comment on the scene. The pair simply leaned against each other as they looked up at the Castle gate.

After a few seconds, Kuroyukihime stood up once more and turned back to the others behind them. She reached out and opened her Instruct menu, and then after a glance at a window only she could see, her clear voice rang out:

“It’s been exactly thirty minutes since we entered the Unlimited Neutral Field. In the real world, 1.8 seconds have passed. Aqua Current is scheduled to dive ten seconds after we did, which works out to two hours and forty-six minutes on this side. In other words, we have two hours and sixteen minutes left to wait. First, we’ll take a fifteen-minute break before we start the mission brief.”

“Wellll then, I’ll just go poke around Tokyo Station—,” Niko started.

“No!” Kuroyukihime barked instantly, frighteningly. “There’s a portal there, and Aurora Oval territory is on the other side of the tracks. Worst-case scenario, if you run into Thorn’s people, the situation will instantly become a major hassle.”

“Aah. Yeah, I guess so.” Niko nodded meekly. Apparently, even she wasn’t too interested in actively engaging the Purple King, Purple Thorn. “Nothing to be done about that. So how ’bout you show me around the Castle, Professor?”

“Wh-what?! Why me?!” Takumu immediately panicked, like someone had just dumped a bucket of cold water on him.

“You didn’t actually forget, didja?” Niko stared at him with her green eye lenses. “How I was there for all that Incarnate training of yours? I’ll say this right now—I’ve never even done that kinda special lesson for my own Prominence kids!”

“I—I didn’t forget! Of course not! But how can I show you around when we can’t go inside…?”

“Just what we can see from here’s fine. The east gate there, it has a different name with some kinda historical trivia in the real world, yeah?” Niko pointed an adorable hand at the steel gate, and Takumu and the others followed with their eyes.

Now that she mentioned it, the four gates of the Castle did correspond to the gates built to the north, east, south, and west of the former Edo Castle—the Imperial Palace in the real world. And just like the Hanzomon gate in the west and the Sakuradamon gate in the south, the east must also have had a name.

“Um.” When all eyes were back on Takumu, the blue duel avatar that served as the Legion’s staff officer cleared his throat once before explaining, slightly awkwardly, “The Castle’s east gate is called Sakashitamon in the real world. It was one of the inner gates of Edo Castle, and where, in January 1862, six Mito Domain soldiers attacked the roju elder Nobumasa Ando.”

Haruyuki’s brain was about to reject the sudden school vibe in the air and tune out, but at the same time, Takumu’s speech jogged a part of his memory, and he twisted his upper body at a strange angle and groaned.

“Um, um, um. I feel like I’ve heard that before…You know, that— Right, the Sakashitamon Incident!” he shouted, having miraculously succeeded in replaying the memory.

“Anyone would remember that when they heard Sakashitamon.” Chiyuri immediately came back with a merciless retort. “So then, question! What was the reason for the attack?”

“Uh! Um, that was, like, they couldn’t stand the roju Ando, so a PK—”

“Details, please! The reason they couldn’t stand him?”

“Uhhhh. Um. Pretty sure…” Haruyuki hadn’t been expecting a test on Japanese history here, and he did his best to pull up what little half-baked knowledge he had. “That’s— Ando signed a treaty with the US and totally persecuted the imperialists who were against it—”

“Bzzzzt!” Chiyuri made an “incorrect” buzzer noise.

“So close, Corvus.” Fuko turned toward Haruyuki, wheelchair and all, holding up her index finger and grinning. “It was the tairo elder Ii Naosuke who carried out the Ansei Purge. Incidentally, he was also attacked by the Mito Domain soldiers, but that was at the south gate over there, the so-called Sakuradamon Incident. That happened in 1860, so two years before the Sakashitamon Incident.”

“Oh! I-it did…So then why was Ando attacked?”

“To strengthen the shaky feudal system, Nobumasa Ando recommended uniting the Imperial court with the shogunate. As a symbol of this, he had the younger sister of Emperor Komei, Kazunomiya, married off to the fourteenth shogun, Iemochi Tokugawa. They say that this was what made the lordless, imperialist Mito samurai attack.”

The cache memory in Haruyuki’s brain had just barely enough capacity for this string of proper nouns, but he managed to process it somehow and bobbed his head up and down. “I—I get it. There were six samurai who attacked, right? And the defense—I mean, the samurai guarding Ando, how many of them were there?”

Takumu cleared his throat before answering. “I guess forty-five samurai from the Iwakitaira domain were guarding him. Iwakitaira was Nobumasa’s territory in what’s now the southern part of Fukushima prefecture.”

Haruyuki automatically converted this explanation into forty-five members of the Legion Iwakitaira, but he kept that to himself, and instead crossed his arms and groaned. “Whoa, six against forty-five, huh? So what’s happening in the boss figh—I mean, attack?”

“The Mito samurai were all cut down and killed; there were no deaths among the Iwakitaira samurai. Nobumasa Ando’s back was hurt, but he escaped into the Castle and was safe.”

“Hmm. He was…” Of course, Haruyuki didn’t know enough to root for one side or the other when it came to samurai who had crossed swords in that place in the real world a hundred eighty-five years earlier. But listening to Takumu, he couldn’t help conflating the two. The eight Burst Linkers taking on a powerful Super-class Enemy and the six samurai who were cut down in the distant past.

“Aah, honestly, why are you so easy to read, Haru?” Chiyuri sounded suddenly exasperated, and Haruyuki flinched. The yellow-green witch-type avatar was shaking her triangle hat in a way that suggested she was rolling her eyes.

“Wh-what do you mean, easy to read?”

“We’re also going to be struck down and killed. You were brooding or something like that, weren’t you?”

“Unh!”

“Now, look, this is totally different! We didn’t come to assassinate a roju; we came to help Curren! And you were fine when you got shoved into the Castle, so don’t go getting freaked out now in front of the gate!”

He did feel her logic was a little forced, but when his childhood friend rattled on at him with her usual vigor, Haruyuki inevitably agreed with an “I get it.” Nodding deeply, he clenched his right hand. “Right, no matter how you look at it, we’re in the right this time! If we could somehow defeat Seiryu with justice power, then our points would—”

“Don’t get carried away!”

Thmp! The edge of Choir Chime was jabbed into his side, and Haruyuki fell silent, leaving the others to sigh in unison.

“Now that preparations for the upcoming final exams are complete, how about we get to the strategy meeting?” Kuroyukihime said as if to change the subject, clearing her throat lightly and moving to the mouth of the bridge. “You’re ready, yes?”

The voices that chimed their assent were a little lackluster, and Haruyuki was convinced it was because of the words in the Black King’s speech that every student had long ago learned to dread.

The waiting time of two hours and fifteen minutes, which had seemed ridiculously long when announced, slipped by in the blink of an eye with a thorough briefing and a run-through of the mission.

Kuroyukihime checked the total dive time display on her Instruct menu once more before turning around. “All right. Fifteen minutes until the mission begins. Curren should be fairly precise with the timing, but an error of 0.1 seconds in the real world expands to a hundred seconds over here. Which is to say, we need to add a window of two minutes or so to our calculations.”

In the mission to rescue Ardor Maiden twelve days earlier, once they had finished their preparations on the Unlimited Neutral Field side, Takumu had left through the nearest portal and told Utai in the real world to accelerate.

But this time, they had fixed Aqua Current’s—Akira Himi’s—dive time in advance. So if, for some reason, the advance party’s charge onto the steel bridge had been delayed, Akira would have been killed by the God Seiryu immediately after she appeared. Fortunately, thanks to Niko’s “taxi,” they had arrived at the east gate without incident and completed their preparations without delay, but now, the real fight started. Haruyuki focused his mind so as not to miss a single thing Kuroyukihime said.

“The last time, after going up against Suzaku twice, we learned that the Gods have apparently been given an AI more advanced than Legend-class Enemies. It’s not necessarily the case that they continually target whoever is doing them the most damage, and they also move as if to deliberately outwit us. We might be put into a situation that we didn’t cover in our simulation. In that case, all we can do is play it by ear, but make sure you place top priority on your own withdrawal. We must at least avoid anyone else getting sealed away.”

The Black King’s voice was calm, but Haruyuki noticed a faint hint of struggle in her last sentence.

When Kuroyukihime and Fuko had nearly been roasted alive in the previous Castle rescue mission, they had tried to sacrifice themselves to save Haruyuki and Utai. That act was a clear contradiction to what she was saying now. Most likely, Kuroyukihime had again already resolved in her heart that she alone would prioritize the withdrawal of her companions.

But he was sure it was the same for Fuko and Utai and Takumu and Chiyuri and Niko and Pard. It was precisely because they all shared the conviction that they absolutely could not abandon a friend that they were gathered together there in the first place. That feeling was a Burst Linker’s greatest strength.

“Yeah, yeah, got it, Lotus!” Scarlet Rain said, sitting on an oil drum instead of a chair and kicking both legs up and down. “Basic idea, we go charging in, all raaah, get Aqua Current, and then we all run away, like whoa, right? It’s only five hundred meters each way. Piece of cake!”

“You say only, Rain, but when you’re running, five hundred meters is really far. The return trip is a kilometer.”

“So what’s a kilometer! I mean, at my school marathon, the grade sixes ran three kilometers! Aah, seriously, I’m getting tired just thinking about it.”

“Don’t underestimate us! Our school’s marathon is five kilometers! That’s a distance the word tired doesn’t begin to express!” The kings’ exchange was sliding further and further off track.

“Niko, Kuroyukihime,” Chiyuri interjected, exasperated. “I run that far-ish every day at practice.”

“…Are you serious? You trying to die, Lime Bell?”

“…I apologize for the low-level argument.” Kuroyukihime dipped her head and then straightened up to look at everyone, easing the slightly tense pre-mission atmosphere, albeit only slightly. She slowly blinked her bluish-purple eye lenses, then spoke in a voice that was calm yet full of her strong will.

“Just as Rain said, the mission itself is simple. I believe it’s possible to break through Seiryu’s powerful attack with this battle formation. Ten minutes to show time. Let’s take our starting positions.”