Accel World - Volume 22 - Chapter 4

4

There are instances when you can manifest results even as a member of the Gallery. Just two, in fact—the Incarnate-enhanced ability to interfere with perception or…to interfere with the system directly.

Ivory Tower’s words from mere minutes earlier echoed in the back of Haruyuki’s mind as he was swallowed up by the light.

The ability to interfere with the system directly. Haruyuki had taken that to be just a different way of saying “overwriting,” the fundamental principle behind all Incarnate techniques, and carelessly let it slide. But if Tower had meant direct interference as in transforming the very rules of Brain Burst, then there weren’t too many avatars with an ability like that. As far as he knew, in fact, there were only two Burst Linkers powerful enough to bend the rules of the world itself.

One could rewind the time and status of the target avatar and make it as though any phenomenon—for instance, your torso being severed in two—had never happened. The Watch Witch, Lime Bell.

And the other was, in a certain sense, as powerful as a god, able to force the Change to occur or switch the normal duel field into the Unlimited Neutral Field. The Prophet Orchid Oracle.

He didn’t know why this was happening. None of it made sense yet. The one thing that was certain, however, was that Wolfram Cerberus’s right shoulder, which should have housed the personality copy of Dusk Taker, was now occupied by Orchid Oracle’s personality, and that at Ivory Tower’s command, she had activated her Incarnate technique Paradigm Breakdown.

In other words, this place was no longer the normal duel field, and Haruyuki and Black Lotus were no longer safe spectators. They were in the Unlimited Neutral Field now.

The pale peach light became a wall that closed in on them and swallowed up their avatars.

The instant he broke through it, Haruyuki shook away his fear and anxiety. “Master, take Bell and Choco and retreat to the outside! I’ll take care of Kuroyukihime!”

At first sight, there was no change to the interior of the Purgatory stage Budokan arena after the wall of light pushed past them. But in the Territories the previous day, while they had still been unable to get a handle on what was going on, Glacier Behemoth had locked them up with his Incarnate technique while Snow Fairy’s had annihilated them. Whatever else they did, they couldn’t stay in such a closed-in space.

“I’m on it!” Fuko replied, without the slightest delay.

Her wheelchair tires squealed against the metal floor, sending sparks flying as she did a back dash. She wrapped one arm around Chiyuri behind her and then shot forward to collect Chocolat Puppeter, frozen in place in the center of the arena.

“Pard, get Rain!” Haruyuki shouted, but Blood Leopard was already dancing through the air. Somersaulting, she transformed to Beast Mode and had no sooner landed than she was scooping Niko up onto her back.

“Hey, hang on here. I’m gonna—” Niko cried, but Pard held her in place with her tail as she raced toward the exit. Fuko chased after them with Chiyuri in her right arm and Shihoko in her left.

He had only just been thrown into the Unlimited Neutral Field, so while the health gauge displayed in the upper left of his field of view was full, his special-attack gauge was still empty—but he didn’t exactly have the luxury of destroying some objects to charge it up.

So watching his comrades retreat at top speed out of the corner of his eye, Haruyuki mustered his imagination.

“Light Speed!!” A silver overlay gushed from the wings spread out on his back.

The technique was not as stable as his Laser Sword, but perhaps his still-vivid memory of the previous day’s life-and-death struggle was an aid in his focus—the light wings snapped out and Haruyuki shot forward.

On the south side of the arena, the Blue and Purple Kings were whirling their heads to take in their surroundings, each with their Arc readied; and the Green King brandished his shield above his head, perhaps having sensed something coming; while the Black King remained still, her eye lenses locked on Wolfram Cerberus.

“Hurry! Outside!” As he flew toward his swordmaster, Haruyuki shouted to the other members of the meeting—Cobalt Blade and Manganese Blade on his left, Aster Vine, Iron Pound, Suntan Chafer, and Lemon Pierrette on his right, the latter looking unsure about what to do given that the Yellow King was still nowhere to be seen.

Up ahead, the white robes of the magician Ivory Tower melted from him into thin black panels. Wolfram Cerberus, next to him, showed absolutely no sign of movement, only a pale peach afterglow shining around her right shoulder armor.

How on earth had the personality of Orchid Oracle/Megumi Wakamiya come to live in Cerberus III? What had happened to number one, supposedly the main personality? And where was Megumi herself, after no one had been able to get ahold of her since the previous day?

He didn’t know the answer to any of these questions. But his instincts were sounding every alarm, yelling that he couldn’t stay here, whether he knew what was happening or not.

“Kuroyukihime!” Haruyuki wrapped an arm around her slender waist and with his other arm, he reflexively took a firm hold of the nearby Purple King, Purple Thorn.

“Aah! Just—what are you doing?!” Thorn cried out.

“No, Crow,” Kuroyukihime said hoarsely. “I have to help O—”

“Escape’s top priority right now!” Haruyuki was also worried about Cerberus/Oracle, so much so that it threatened to rip him apart, but most likely, even this feeling was part of Ivory’s—no, Black Vise’s trap.

Clutching the kings even more tightly to him, Haruyuki ascended abruptly, aiming for the Budokan ceiling. “Please smash the roof!” he yelled.

Before Black Lotus could react, her heart apparently still with Oracle, the Purple King raised her staff.

“Haven’t left me much of a choice, have you?” Cursing bitterly, she brought the staff down, aiming it toward the center of the ceiling. Even though her special-attack gauge had to have been just as empty as Haruyuki’s, a bolt of pale blue lightning shot out from the Tempest and ripped a large hole in the metal above them, causing the air to shake like a massive tree had been felled.

Aiming for the ashy sky he could see on the other side of the hole, Haruyuki mustered up every last drop of his mental strength and flew.

A mere second after he had flown out of the improvised doorway to the heavens, a light so dazzling it threatened to blind him poured down from somewhere in the cluster of skyscrapers in Kudanshita on the east side of the Budokan. An unbelievably enormous laser beam cloaked in a reddish-purple plasma. Not Cerberus nor Black Vise but a third enemy was attacking.

It might not have been more powerful than Metatron’s Trisagion, but there was no way that a bundle of light this massive could have been a regular special attack. It passed by the rapidly ascending Haruyuki and his charges so close that it nearly grazed his toes before piercing the sprawling roof of the Budokan.

An instant of silence.

Decelerating as he looked back, Haruyuki saw a massive fireball swelling up, and the roof and walls of the metal arena were melting like butter. A huge explosion that threatened to destroy space-time itself.

Unconsciously turning his face away from the heat wave that pushed up to the altitude where they hovered, Haruyuki shuddered violently. If their escape had been three seconds later, he wouldn’t have had the chance to activate his Optical Conduction ability before they were swallowed up in the blast, and even the metal color Silver Crow would have died instantly. A transcendent single blow on the same level as Snow Fairy’s Brinicle—though, considering the speed of the laser’s arrival, it was at least a step or two up from that fearsome technique. He had no doubt that this Incarnate technique was stage two or higher.

Had Fuko, Niko, Cobalt, Manganese, and the others managed to make it out safely? The Blue King and the Green King likely hadn’t had enough time to escape. What had happened to them? And Ivory and Cerberus?

Haruyuki peered at the smoking ruins of the Budokan, flames still flaring up all over, and Kuroyukihime pushed hard on his back.

“Crow, over there!”

He lifted his face with a gasp as the Black King pointed with a sword tip at a building in the east.

The Purple King brandished the staff in her left hand. “I have any number of things I’d like to say, but I’ll wait until later. Corvus, fly to that building!”

And indeed, before seeing to their comrades’ safety, they had to do something about the owner of the massive laser. If that attack came a second or third time, he and his friends would have nowhere to run, even if they did somehow manage to survive.

However.

“I’m sorry. My concentration’s at its limit!” he shouted quickly, and all three of them lurched together in midair as the overlay in his silver wings flickered irregularly. Not only was Light Speed simply unstable, he’d originally developed the technique for maximum thrust in a short time; it was definitely not intended for stable flight at lower speeds.

“Pathetic!” the Purple King snapped.

“Thorn, after being rescued, that’s the tone you use?” Kuroyukihime returned, having finally gotten herself back together.

“Shut up, Lotus. We’ll at least check the attack! One, two…” Purple Thorn started counting down, whether Kuroyukihime was ready or not, and the Black King clicked her tongue as she drew the sword of her right arm back.

It’s all fine and dandy to say check the attack, but neither of you have anything in your special-attack gauges! Haruyuki started to panic.

“Thorn Retribution!!”

“Vorpal Strike!!”

Lightning several orders of magnitude greater than the blow that had smashed through the roof shot out from the Purple King’s Tempest, while the Black King’s Terminate Sword launched a massive lance that shone bloodred. Both were Incarnate techniques, and with imagination strong enough to make the air around them shimmer like a mirage.

Even combined, the scale of the two techniques didn’t compare with the earlier Incarnate laser, but he was certain that the same instant death would be the result of a direct hit. The two bolts of light swallowed up the rooftop of the distant building with an earsplitting shriek, shrinking into a superdense ball of energy before exploding.

The top levels of the metal building were completely annihilated. He couldn’t tell from this distance if there was a death effect mixed in with the light of the explosion, but at the very least, their attacker wouldn’t be able to fire that laser again until they retreated to somewhere safe.

As they watched the results of the Incarnate attack, Haruyuki’s own Incarnate power was finally depleted.

“We’re going down!” he announced hurriedly, before starting to glide with wings from which the light had disappeared. Avoiding the remains of the Budokan, now a massive crater glowing with red heat, he set his sights on an area immediately to the north dotted with twisted metal objects—likely trees in a park area in the real world—and started to descend. Although he intently searched for them from the sky, he couldn’t see any sign of their comrades.

“It’s strangely bright,” the Purple King murmured, looking around at the sky.

Haruyuki also lifted his head and felt like the ominous clouds of the Purgatory stage were indeed shining a little more brightly than they had been before the meeting. But unlike the Normal Duel Field where time did not pass, day and night came and went in the Unlimited Neutral Field, so it grew brighter and darker depending on the position of the sun. In fact, he could see a hazy spot that must have been the pale yellow sun on the other side of the clouds directly overhead, but it was nothing like the burning light of the Wasteland or a Primeval Forest.

“No, it’s nothing. Oh! Over there!” Now the Purple King pointed at the ground, so Haruyuki looked down once again. He felt like he caught a glimpse of a bright color in one corner of the metal grove and he turned their spiraling descent toward it.

As soon as his feet touched the metal ground and he set down the two kings, Haruyuki opened his mouth to call for his comrades.

“Crow!”

“Corvus!”

Lime Bell and Chocolat Puppeter came running out from behind the shadow of a metal tree. Following them were Sky Raker in her wheelchair, animal-form Blood Leopard, and Scarlet Rain straddling her back.

In the Unlimited Neutral Field, it wasn’t possible to see the health gauges of other players, but it looked like none of his friends had taken any real damage. He nearly crumpled to the ground in his great relief, and Kuroyukihime quickly moved to hold him up.

The first to speak was Niko. She clicked her tongue lightly and then turned her large eye lenses to Haruyuki’s side. “Seriously. You rescued her, too?”

“Hmph, it’s not as though I asked him to,” Purple Thorn snapped back. “Although if I hadn’t been there, we couldn’t have escaped through the roof!”

Niko was ready to start yelling, but Chocolat interjected a heartbeat faster, “Both of you! Now is not the time for arguments! If we don’t hurry and decide what we’re going to do now, we’ll be in danger!”

“True.” Kuroyukihime nodded and smoothly untangled her arm from Haruyuki’s before looking around and continuing. “There are many unknowns in the sequence of events, but the situation is clear. Just as in the Territories yesterday, we have been shifted from the normal duel field to the Unlimited Neutral Field by Oracle’s Incarnate technique. Ivory Tower must have prepared a trap as insurance in case he was backed up against a wall that was impossible to explain away.”

“W-wait just a moment.” The Purple King’s voice had lost all its earlier thorniness and was instead full of deep surprise and confusion. “Oracle…You mean Orchid Oracle who was in Oscillatory so long ago? I heard she lost all her points…And shifted from the normal duel field to the Unlimited Neutral Field, how on earth…?”

“Explanations will come later. Right now, we have to escape as soon as possible,” Kuroyukihime replied sternly, and she turned her gaze to the disturbingly formed Shinto gate visible on the north side of the trees. It had to have been the Tayasumon Gate standing to the north of the real Budokan. “Fortunately, as far as we could see from the sky, there don’t appear to be large Enemies placed at all the portals, unlike yesterday. Let’s try to join up with the others before Ivory strikes his next blow and then head for the nearest portal.”

“Right.” Purple Thorn nodded, surprisingly docile, and looked toward the crater with an expression that bordered on concern. Maybe she was worried about her deputy, Aster Vine.

Haruyuki unconsciously took a step toward her. “Um, I think Vine is okay,” he said, in a small voice. “Right before I picked you up, I told her to get out of the Budokan.”

“I-I know. Vine would never be taken down in such a slipshod attack!”

“H-hyah!” Haruyuki bobbed his head up and down, while next to him, Kuroyukihime let out a small sigh.

“Actually, I’m worried about Knight and Grandé,” she said. “They would have taken a direct hit from that laser. Given who they are, I’d like to think that a single blow wouldn’t have killed them, but if they are dead then we have to wait for them to regenerate.”

Hearing this, the Purple King looked at Kuroyukihime as if she had just realized something before saying, a harder edge to her voice, “Say, Lotus.”

“Mmm. What? Make it quick, please.”

“I’ll just ask at any rate,” Thorn said. “Isn’t this a golden opportunity for you? No one but six of your comrades here, and I may be good, but even I would have a hard time turning the tables with seven against one.”

“Golden opportunity?” Kuroyukihime frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play dumb,” the Purple King snapped. “There’s no way you haven’t noticed! I’m saying that if you attacked me here and now, you could take my head in sudden death!”

Kuroyukihime slowly blinked her violet-blue eye lenses behind her goggles.

And seeing this, Haruyuki understood that this idea hadn’t even been on Kuroyukihime’s radar. She hadn’t so much as had the thought that she could take this opportunity to defeat the Purple King and take a step up on the staircase leading to level ten. He himself also hadn’t realized that this was an option. Fuko, Chiyuri, and the others held their breath and watched how this would play out.

“I see. It’s true, it’s exactly as you say,” Kuroyukihime said slowly, and dropped her gaze to the sword of her right hand. “I have no right to talk about how that would be cowardly or how I want to stand tall and challenge you when we do fight under the sudden-death rule. Because I’m the one who drove your lover Rider to total point loss with a surprise attack.”

Thorn’s hand trembled ever so slightly. The tapered tip of the Tempest creaked, forced into the ground with all her strength, and left scratch marks on the gray metal.

Three years earlier, Kuroyukihime had pushed the former Red King, Red Rider, to total point loss because of the lies told to her by her real-life older sister, King White Cosmos. But Kuroyukihime had said before that she had no intention of using that as an excuse, and in fact, she didn’t bring it up now. Instead, the Black King told the Purple, “My objective of reaching level ten has not changed. It is simply a matter of priority. For me, it’s more important right now to beat down the Acceleration Research Society rather than take your head. If I send you to total point loss here, we can forget about anything resembling a joint mission.”

“You can say anything you like,” Thorn pushed, relentless.

“That’s true.” Kuroyukihime shrugged lightly. “But if I were the type to aim for a king’s head without thinking of strategies, don’t you think I would’ve sent that little kid to total point loss ages ago?”

“Whoa there!” Niko called out, her voice wild as she sat on Pard’s back. “Who you calling a kid—?”

But Pard wound her long tale wound around Niko’s face mask to cut her off mid-sentence.

After a quick glance at Scarlet Rain, Purple Thorn gradually relaxed her tensed slender hand over the period of a few seconds. Finally, she took a slow, deep breath and nodded with the bare minimum of movement. “Well, I suppose so. At any rate, we’ll put the sudden-death rule on hold now…So then, how do you intend to join up with Vine and the others? That laser will blast us again if we’re not careful moving through open spaces.”

“True.” Kuroyukihime looked up at the eastern sky, and Haruyuki followed her.

The view was blocked by the grove of metal trees, so he could see basically nothing, but thin plumes of smoke were still rising up from the roof of the skyscraper where the giant laser user had been hiding. If they’d died in Kuroyukihime and Thorn’s combined Incarnate attack, then Haruyuki and his friends were safe for just under an hour until they regenerated. But it was overly hopeful and optimistic to jump to the conclusion that a user of such a technique had died instantly in a single blow when it hadn’t even been a surprise attack.

“I’m reluctant to do this, but it seems we’ll have to split into two groups,” the Black King said, and the Purple King nodded.

“I suppose. The Alpha team will defeat the laser user, while the Bravo team musters our scattered comrades. I will tell you now, however. The Bravo mission is also a dangerous one. I can’t believe Ivory and that curious metal color died in that explosion.”

Wow, the Purple King uses NATO naming codes for the team names, Haruyuki thought admiringly.

As if reading his thoughts, Purple Thorn glared at him. “I’ll just tell you now. It’s Vine’s style…Now, how shall we split up?”

“Uh, um, I volunteer for Alpha team! Because we’ll have to get to the top of that building.” Haruyuki hurried to nominate himself.

He was followed by Pard waving her tail lithely. “I’m good at climbing walls.”

“No, Leopard, you stay behind,” Fuko said. She glanced at the little red avatar straddling the leopard’s back. “Ivory To—Black Vise might have his sights set on Invincible again. It’s best if you don’t stray from Rain.”

“…K,” Pard replied without a fight.

Niko nodded, too, despite herself. “I’ve been this coddled baby lately, and I don’t love it. But if I get my Enhanced Armament nicked again here, I’ll never be able to face Bell and Pile, not when they worked so hard to get it back for me the last time. I’ll stay on the ground and round up the gang.”

“Don’t lose heart, Rain,” Kuroyukihime cautioned. “It might very well be Dreadnought’s time to shine when we need to move to the portal.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Niko replied.

I worked hard that last time, too, though, Haruyuki thought almost jealously.

“I will accompany Corvus.” Fuko stood up smoothly from her wheelchair. “The two of us are enough for the Alpha team.”

“Huh? J-just the two of us?” Haruyuki said, sounding fairly pathetic.

“If we’re fighting someone with a large armament like that, rather than have our movement dulled by someone riding on our backs, it’s better to go straight for the heart and close the distance at full speed,” Fuko explained.

“True,” Niko commented. “Totes sucks that I can’t do that myself.”

And so Haruyuki had no choice but to accept the decision.

There was actually one more of their group who could fly: the Archangel Metatron from whom Haruyuki had only just parted thirty minutes or so earlier in subjective time. Given that they had been pulled into the Unlimited Neutral Field, he very much wanted to borrow her strength like they had in the Territories the previous day, but after finally finding shelter, she should have been sleeping carefree in Fufuan to heal her depleted strength, an exertion from which she still had not fully recovered.

Plus, if he turned to her for every little thing, he’d never reach his goal of becoming strong enough to protect her one day. The objective of this mission was not to defeat the enemy, but to search for and bring together the scattered meeting members—the Coba-Manga sisters, Aster Vine, the two members of the Green Legion, and just in case the Yellow Legion’s Lemon Pierrette—and then join up with the Blue and Green Kings (the vanished Yellow King had probably left on his own), before escaping through the portal, so he had to at least do this much on his own.

Of course, that didn’t mean he could let his guard down. The responsibility of the Alpha team Haruyuki had volunteered for was heavy. They had to approach and eliminate the enemy as soon as possible, before they could fire that Incarnate laser again.

Strengthening his resolve, Haruyuki looked up at the sky once more, and Chiyuri asked from behind him, “Crow, it’s fine if that’s what you want to do, but is your special-attack gauge charged?”

“Huh? …Oh.” Here, he finally remembered that the key to everything, his special-attack gauge, was totally empty. For a second, he thought he could do Light Speed again, but it was too risky to rely on Incarnate alone when fighting an enemy.

“G-got it. I’ll just go smash some trees—” And charge it.

Before he could finish his sentence, however, the Purple King commanded him, “Stand still.”

Haruyuki stiffened in place, and she pressed the tip of her staff up against his side. The tapered crystal dug into his thin armor, and he started to get confused, worrying that his health gauge would drop if it went any farther.

“Elementary Charge,” she called the technique name curtly, and the crystal shone with purple light.

Haruyuki’s special-attack gauge began to charge with incredible force. In mere seconds, it was full, and Thorn pulled the staff away.

“…Th-thank you very much.” After offering his baffled thanks, he couldn’t hold his curiosity back. “C-can that technique endlessly charge other people’s gauges?”

“Ridiculous. Why would it be able to? My own gauge decreases, of course.”

Oh, is that it? Still, it’s an amazing power, he thought briefly.

“That said, it is multiplied 1.60217662 times, however.”

“…You could just say 1.6 times…,” he muttered.

“Quiet,” the Purple King snapped. “At any rate, you volunteered for Alpha team, so ensure that you defeat the laser user. I’m not interested in being hit with it again.”

“H-hyah.” Haruyuki was frozen in place.

Kuroyukihime had a look in her eyes like she wanted to say something, but what came out of her mouth was enthusiastic encouragement. “We’re counting on you, Crow, Raker. Once you engage the laser user, we will fan out and find the others. Let’s make our meeting point the Budokan remains.”

“Roger. We’ll take care of them right away.” Unlike Haruyuki, Fuko didn’t need her special-attack gauge for flight. She put her wheelchair away using the Instruct menu rather than a voice command and summoned Gale Thruster in its place. It took effort, but she managed to turn off the flashy effect of materialization, so as not to attract the enemy’s attention. “Okay, we’re off then, Corvus. Let’s move a little ways out before taking off.”

Fuko glanced back and the two of them exchanged a nod before starting to run below the metal trees.

Behind them, Shihoko called out “Please fight hard!” to which Haruyuki raised a fist in response.

Sky Raker and Silver Crow blended into the gray stand of trees and disappeared from view. A few seconds later, Shihoko heard a roar, and Raker appeared above the treetops, trailing pale injection flames with Crow by her side, silver wings spread wide. But she saw them only for an instant before they shot away into the eastern sky at incredible speed.

Clutching chocolate hands in front of her, Shihoko prayed in her heart, Arita, Master Fuko, fight…But don’t go overboard.

Shihoko had managed to more or less fulfill the role given to her at her first meeting of the Seven Kings. Or she thought so, at least. She’d only just reached level five, and for her, Blue Knight, Green Grandé, and Purple Thorn were the stuff of legends, so just seeing them made her legs shake. But when she thought about how Nega Nebulus Legion Master Kuroyukihime was surprisingly like a spoiled child and raged with jealousy, and how Scarlet Rain, whom she hadn’t met in person yet, was adorable in a different way than herself, and yet they were both level-nine kings, it eased her nerves just the tiniest bit. By the time she had started to explain the replay card, she was even inwardly snarling at Ivory Tower. Ha! Take this!

Her playback of the recording ended without incident, and as she watched the kings interrogate Ivory, Shihoko had felt relieved that now they would finally be able to pin the hated Acceleration Research Society against the wall.

But then a nineteenth person had shown up at the meeting, even though they shouldn’t have been there at all, and changed the meeting venue to the Unlimited Neutral Field, rendering Shihoko helpless again. She’d stood there dumbfounded as Sky Raker grabbed her, and as soon as they’d fled outside on her automatic wheelchair, a reddish-purple light had poured down from the eastern sky and smashed the Budokan to smithereens.

Raker, holding tightly to Shihoko and Lime Bell, and Blood Leopard, Red King riding on her back, had raced along the extremely undulating ground of the Purgatory stage at an unbelievable speed and escaped the ballooning explosion behind them. They had then continued their retreat to the metal forest on the northwest side of the Budokan, and Silver Crow had descended from the eastern sky a minute or two later, carrying the Black and Purple Kings.

Shihoko had listened to the two kings speaking and somehow managed to digest the situation they were in, but now split off onto the Bravo team, she regrettably couldn’t think of anything she could do to help. Obviously, her fighting power didn’t begin to compare with the three kings or Blood Leopard, and it wasn’t as though she had some special ability like Lime Bell. In fact, she could barely take care of her own self.

I’m still so weak. She hid her face with the brim of her bonnet and gritted her teeth.

“All right, you’re up, Chocolat,” the Black King said suddenly.

“Wha—?” Shihoko blubbered.

“You can produce five of your Chocopets using your full gauge, yes?”

“Oh. Y-yes!” She hurriedly nodded. To be more precise, she had to use up her entire special-attack gauge to create the largest possible chocolate pond and then fill her gauge again before expending it to create ten Chocopets simultaneously, but Kuroyukihime was not wrong that the maximum number of Chocopets she could create on one gauge was five.

“Good. Do it then…Thorn.” Kuroyukihime gave the signal, and the Purple King approached Shihoko, her heels clacking.

“Honestly. At this rate, my gauge is going to be empty, too.” She touched the large crystal at the end of the staff to Shihoko’s right shoulder—there was apparently no need for it to be the stomach like with Silver Crow—and called the technique name.

The charging finished with her gauge half full, so she kicked over some small metal shrubs to top it off. Once her special-attack gauge was full, she used Cocoa Fountain to create her chocolate pond and then generated five chocolate dolls with her Puppet Maker.

“Hmph. Interesting technique,” the Purple King said, sounding impressed.

“Looks kinda yummy.”

Ignoring the apparently hungry Red King, the Black King pointed in the direction of Budokan. “Good. Now, once Raker and Crow start fighting, we set out on the search of the other meeting members. We’ll move in a group, just in case, but the Chocopets will disperse. If they find a Burst Linker, they will guide them to Choco.”

“O-okay,” Shihoko said. “That’s possible, but the Chocopets can’t tell the difference between allies and enemies.”

“That’s fine.” Kuroyukihime nodded. “If they drag an enemy back to us, we’ll simply defeat them.”

“Understood!” Shihoko looked once more to the eastern sky. She couldn’t see any battle effects in the cluster of skyscrapers in Kudanshita yet. Maybe Crow and Raker were still searching, or maybe they were chasing the fleeing enemy.

“Oh! There!” Lime Bell shouted, and at the same time, Shihoko noticed several narrow lasers firing toward the northern sky from the roof of a fairly low building adjacent to the skyscraper the Black and Purple Kings had destroyed.

“All right, here we go!” Kuroyukihime shouted.

“K,” Blood Leopard replied for all of them, and then the six Burst Linkers and five Chocopets flew out of the grove of metal trees running to the south, keeping careful watch on their surroundings all the while.

Avoid being sniped by the large Incarnate laser in flight, attack the origin, kill the sniper in a joint attack with Raker: This was the scenario Haruyuki had imagined, but the laser wasn’t fired during the ten or so seconds it took for them to reach Kudanshita flying at top speed.

When they arrived in the airspace above the skyscraper that Kuroyukihime and the Purple King had destroyed with their Incarnate techniques, he decelerated abruptly to a hover. Fuko also powered down her thrusters, so he held her up with one arm around her slender waist.

Seen from above, the destruction could have only been described as extremely gruesome in a sense altogether different from the Budokan ruins. The structure that begun to fuse together in the Purple King’s Incarnate electrical attack had been knocked flying by Kuroyukihime’s Vorpal Strike. It looked almost as though the spoon of a giant had scooped out the top of the building.

“This building’s the Chiyoda Ward government office, right?” Haruyuki murmured, as he looked for enemies in the wreckage. “It’s a landmark, so it should have been stronger than the other buildings…”

“If you got caught in this attack, you’d have no hope unless you were the Green King.” Even the great Fuko had a note of awe in her voice. “But as far as I can see, there’s no sign of the enemy and no death markers, either…All ward offices have portals on the first floor, so perhaps they escaped through that.”

“That complicates everything,” he groaned. “They might dive again right away as soon as we leave the area.”

“Indeed.” Fuko nodded. “But no matter how accustomed to it you are, it takes two seconds from the time you wake up in the real world until you reaccelerate with Unlimited Burst again. That’s just over thirty minutes on this side. We were in the woods for five minutes, so they won’t be able to come back for another twenty-five minutes.”

“Twenty-five minutes…”

Would they be able to find all their comrades—well, the meeting participants—and escape from a portal before that clock ran down? Haruyuki started to shift his gaze back to the right, to the site of the Budokan.

“Corvus!” Fuko cried—or perhaps thought—sharply.

A reddish-purple light flashed in the corner of Haruyuki’s eye.

Hyoon! Together with a sound he’d heard before, two laser beams as thin as threads came charging at them, the exact same color as the super-massive laser that had destroyed the Budokan.

Reflexively, Haruyuki slid to his left at top speed, but he was unable to completely avoid one of the lasers, and it shot through a metal fin on his right wing. Because the beam was extremely narrow, all it did was cut a hole of about a centimeter in the fin. His health gauge didn’t drop much at all, but he couldn’t deny that the blow had reduced his mobility, albeit ever so slightly.

But there was a more pressing issue.

“Where…?!” Haruyuki shouted.

“I didn’t see it,” Fuko replied, hushed. “But we won’t miss it next time. Concentrate.”

“R-right!” Nodding, Haruyuki stared in the direction the twin lasers had come from.

They waited dozens of seconds, several minutes, in a game of chicken with the laser user. And then.

“There!” Fuko shouted abruptly. She pointed not in the direction of the Chiyoda Ward office with its top floors gouged out, but toward the roof of a building roughly the same height on the north side of the road between them.

“But…no one’s—” Before he could get the “there” out, the reddish-purple light flashed once more.

This time, Haruyuki saw it, too. The head of a duel avatar slipped out soundlessly from the shadow created by the three large protrusions on the roof, likely exhaust vents or something originally. The source of the light was a massive lens in that avatar’s head—no, that avatar’s hat.

“Let’s go!” Fuko cried, and was drowned out by the sound of the double laser firing once more.

Pyoo!

Haruyuki didn’t try to dodge. Instead, he stretched out his arms, now free of Fuko, and caught the two laser beams on his forearms.

Although Silver Crow’s silver mirrored armor generally couldn’t reflect a laser this powerful, there was one exception—the light-guiding crystals in his arm armor, which had reflected even the Trisagion of Metatron’s first form. These crystals caught the focused laser beams, altered their course, and sent them shooting past him.

Immediately, Fuko charged, tracing the glow of the laser backward. She flipped Gale Thruster upside down and closed in on the sniper at maximum power, her right leg stretched out straight. But the shooter was already sinking back into the shadows. She wasn’t going to make it in time.

“Haaaaah!” Sky Raker roared, and the booster’s angle of propulsion changed ever so slightly.

Turning to the left in midair, rather than take out the enemy sinking into the shadows, Fuko mowed down the exhaust pipes right in front of them, smashing all three of the meter-wide tubes extending from the roof and causing their inky shadows to vanish.

Not one but two figures shot up out of the missing shadow on the roof, bounding back as though repelled by a trampoline, and danced up into the air. One was covered in a reddish-purple armor very similar to the color of the laser, an F-type avatar wearing a massive hat that swelled up in a diamond shape. And the other was an M-type avatar with dark gray armor tinged with a hint of blue and a masked face that revealed only a thin band where his eye lenses were.

Haruyuki didn’t need to see the detailed features to recognize them. The Acceleration Research Society’s number two, Quad Eyes Analyst, Argon Array. And the ninja who was Black Vise’s self-proclaimed student, shadow user Shadow Cloaker.

A bo-shuriken—a kunai throwing knife—poked out of Argon’s back, and the thin string attached to it was looped around Cloaker’s left hand. When Black Vise pulled people into the shadows, he used his panels to hold them, and it appeared his student Cloaker managed the same trick with a kunai and a string.

Knocked out of the shadows by Fuko’s quick thinking, the two Society members were already turning in midair to get into fighting position. Cloaker had already pulled out a new bo-shuriken.

This is bad.

If that blade pierced either of their shadows, Cloaker’s Incarnate technique Shadow Tying would render them unable to move or speak. And now that she had destroyed the exhaust pipes, Fuko’s shadow was deep and black on the rooftop. The ninja would no doubt throw his shuriken at the shadow of her feet the instant she landed. And then when she was unable to move, Argon would fire her lasers at close range. He had three—no, two seconds before that happened.

He hadn’t shifted to the Highest Level, but time in Haruyuki’s brain was compressed to almost that extent, and he settled on a countermeasure in 0.5 seconds after examining countless options.

The only Incarnate technique he had that could cover the fifty meters between him and Cloaker was Laser Javelin, but it took more time to activate than Laser Sword or Laser Lance, so there was no way he’d make it in time. But he did have one other long-distance attack he could use in this situation.

Haruyuki looked down and checked his own shadow falling on the southern wall of the building Cloaker and Argon had bounced out of. Matching the timing of Fuko’s descent, he ascended at full speed a mere three meters before rapidly decelerating.

At the same time, Cloaker threw his shuriken from the air with impressive control. The instant Fuko landed, it would plunge into her feet. But a tenth of a second before that, Fuko’s shadow was completely swallowed up by Haruyuki’s from where he was hung in the air.

The worst-case scenario was they would both end up paralyzed, but Haruyuki was convinced that wouldn’t happen. The essence of an Incarnate technique was that it interfered with the system through an image, and it would have been impossible for Cloaker to imagine Fuko’s shadow when Silver Crow’s had painted over it.

The shuriken plunged into the metal roof, and Haruyuki’s entire body stiffened with a creak. He couldn’t move so much as a fingertip. This was only natural, of course, given that he had intended to take Fuko’s place as the target of the Shadow Tying technique. But it was not a problem.

Frozen in midair, Silver Crow lost the thrust of his wings and started to fall. This inevitably forced his shadow to move as well, and the bo-shuriken was left all alone in the light of day.

In the span of a second, Haruyuki had regained his freedom, while Fuko kicked off the floor and moved out of range of the paralyzing effect. She jumped to stand precisely on the line between the sun and Cloaker to hide her own shadow behind her, and then turned on the tips of her toes and immediately put some distance between them.

The ninja also finally touched down on the roof and quickly pulled his ninja sword from behind his waist.

“Zan!” He had no sooner gotten within reach than he was slicing with divine speed.

“Fwah!” With a sharp breath, Fuko caught it with a right palm strike.

The cutting edge of that sword had been sharp enough to slice right through Haruyuki’s leg. And Sky Raker might have been a blue type, but she was definitely no heavyweight, so he wouldn’t have been surprised to see her arm get lopped off.

However.

Skreenk! The squeal of metal against metal shook the air, and what danced up into the air was not Fuko’s hand but the blade of the sword, broken off at the base. The ninja seemed to have not expected this, and he stopped moving for a heartbeat.

That was more than enough of an opening for Strong Arm Raker. With the smoothness of flowing water, she stepped in close and gently pressed her left palm to the center of the ninja’s chest. “Haah!!”

She roared the battle cry even more loudly than before.

Cracks spread outward in the metal floor beneath her high heels, and Shadow Cloaker’s chest together with the armor on his back shattered, exploding from inside. As the ninja collapsed onto his knees, Fuko gently wrapped her hands around the sides of his head.

Paaaan! The sound of destruction was ear-splitting. The ninja’s face mask and helmet shattered, before his entire body caved in on itself, enveloped in bluish-black flames. The fire quickly disappeared, leaving nothing but a dark blue death marker behind.

The previous day, it had taken the combined efforts of Haruyuki, Chiyuri, and Trilead Tetroxide to defeat Shadow Cloaker, and now he had been buried in a mere two blows—awe-inspiring power. Most likely, Fuko had said the name of her penetrating blow ability, but still, Haruyuki couldn’t even imagine what specific logic was at work there.

But he hadn’t simply been watching the back-and-forth between Raker and Cloaker off on the sidelines with Argon Array. The F-type avatar had tried to fire her laser at Fuko when she escaped the Shadow Tying, but Haruyuki had already started his charge to stop her.

The lasers in Argon Array’s hat and goggles required a minimum of three seconds to charge. Which meant that if Argon had steeled herself to accept the blow from Haruyuki, she could still have fired on Fuko, but she stopped and jumped back—which was what Haruyuki was sure she would do. Because nowhere in the Analyst’s doctrine did it mention the act of sacrificing herself to save a comrade.

Tracking the battle between Fuko and the ninja out of the corner of his eye, Haruyuki landed in the center of the roof and readied both arms in front of his body. Meanwhile, Argon retreated to the northwestern corner and let her arms hang loosely at her sides.

The silent standoff only lasted two seconds. Having defeated Shadow Cloaker, Fuko came to stand next to Haruyuki, and Argon heaved an immense sigh.

“Aah. This here’s why I can never trust ol’ Ba when he says it’s an easy job, just shoot an’ run.” Reaching around with one hand, she pulled the kunai out of her back and tossed it toward Cloaker’s death marker before putting her hands on her hips and heaving a deep sigh.

“Aah. Y’know, if I wanna fire that kinda laser like I did with the Budokan back there, I gotta charge it for a whole hour, yah? I don’t got the time for that. And ninja boy there’s dead, too. Can ya just let me leave through the portal?”

“Master, you can’t listen to a word she says,” Haruyuki said immediately. He wanted to plug his own ears after having been misled far too many times by the woman in the past.

“I know,” Fuko replied. “We’ll defeat her. You prioritize cutting off her retreat, Corvus.”

“Okay. And please be careful of her glamour techniques.”

He had been on the verge of defeating Argon in a joint battle with Aqua Current when he’d been blinded by the technique Razzle Dazzle, a powerful light that shone from her four eye lenses, and the Analyst had run off scot-free.

“Not a fan o’ that.” A wry smile crossed Argon’s lips below her goggles. “Boyo there giving away my secrets. Just how it’s gotta be, I s’pose. I’ll hafta run then.”

Hands still on her hips, she leaned back against the metal railing that encircled the roof. She turned like that, and went over the parapet as though someone on the other side was yanking on her large hat, disappearing from Haruyuki’s field of view.

“She fell?!” He gasped and reflexively kicked off the ground, spreading his wings.

“Stop!” Fuko shouted from behind, so he grabbed the railing just as he was about to fly over it and braked abruptly. Two laser beams shot past him, almost close enough to graze his helmet. If he’d flown off like he wanted, they would have gone right through his head.

Okay, now! he thought and was about to jump over the railing fully when Fuko again grabbed him and yanked his body back. Another pair of lasers cut in front of him and plunged into the clouds above, leaving a charred scent in the air.

Having almost died twice in as many seconds, Haruyuki was unable to move, feet still on the handrail. But now Fuko slapped his back.

“Go!” she shouted, so on his third attempt at flight, his body did, in fact, dance into the air. He spread his wings and dived straight down.

Having fired both her hat lasers and her eye lasers, Argon was in free fall, already more than fifty meters ahead of him. The Chiyoda Ward office had been rebuilt at the beginning of the 2040s and was now 180 meters tall, and the building she’d fallen off was basically the same height. Even a high ranker wouldn’t be able to escape death dropping from such an altitude, but he never knew what kind of secret cards Argon Array had up her sleeves.

I’ll finish her with a full-powered dive kick before she hits the ground! Haruyuki focused on the image of light in his wings.

“Light…Speed!!” His roar became a silver overlay that enveloped his slightly damaged silver fins in a dazzling light. The toes of his extended right leg became the sharp tip of a lance, and Haruyuki charged toward Argon ten times faster than she was falling.

“Infinite Array!” Argon shouted again in the stretched-out time of his accelerated senses.

A lurid violet overlay enveloped the Analyst and converged into an ordered dot pattern to produce countless tiny lenses on the surface of her armor. Likely more than a hundred eyeball lenses, each with a purple light shining inside.

This was the first time Haruyuki had seen with his own eyes Argon Array’s Incarnate technique. But it wasn’t unknown to him. Blood Leopard had told him all about it after she’d taken serious damage from this technique in the battle at the Eternal Girls’ Academy.

Pard had said Argon’s Infinite Array had absolutely no blind spots. It was essentially perfect and almost impossibly powerful for an attack-type Incarnate technique. There was nowhere to hide from it, not behind or below her. The focused lasers fired in all directions and pierced anything and everything in the vicinity. If the technique did have a blind spot, it was not outside Argon, but inside, in her heart. That’s what Pard had told him.

And the nature of the technique meant that the closer you were to her, the more lasers you had turned on you. Which is why Argon tried to draw in her enemy unawares until the last possible second. And Haruyuki’s Optical Conduction ability reflected light attacks, so she must have wanted to shower him in infinite lasers, too many for him to handle with just two arms. However. This was a weakness he could exploit, albeit ever so slightly.

As Haruyuki charged in a Light Speed dive, his distance from Argon and her body full of laser lenses closed rapidly. Ten meters. Seven. Five…But Argon still didn’t move to fire her omnidirectional lasers. Four meters, three…Two.

Finally, the infinite galaxy of lasers flashed with bright light.

At exactly the same time, Haruyuki called the wings on loan to him from the Archangel he had bonded with. “Equip! Metatron Wings!”

This call didn’t actually come out of his mouth; it was a simple thought that didn’t even span an entire second. If it had been a normal Enhanced Armament, the BB system wouldn’t have recognized this as a voice command and he most likely wouldn’t have been able to summon the armament. But Metatron Wings were connected to the system via his link with the Archangel, and that link didn’t require his avatar’s physical voice.

A new pair of white wings appeared on Haruyuki’s back. The superb propulsive power, so great that it had broken free of even the instant death range of the God Suzaku, instantly doubled the speed of his charge. He moved faster than Argon’s exquisitely timed attack, and a mere 0.0000…1 second before the infinity of lasers fired, his white-hot toes pierced her torso.

Aah, this is why I said I didn’t wanna do this.

In his head, Haruyuki felt like he heard her complain, and then Argon Array, who had always managed to make a smooth escape and survive another day no matter how hard her back was pressed up against the wall, shattered into countless fragments and exploded in all directions.

We won! Haruyuki shouted in his heart, using his four wings to reduce velocity.

When he looked up, he saw a reddish-purple death marker slowly falling, trailing a tail of particles. But he couldn’t actually jump for joy just yet. This was only one small victory in the Unlimited Neutral Field, and Argon had lost only the tiniest fraction of what was surely a vast store of Burst Points. He would save his celebration for when everyone at the meeting had safely escaped the trap Black Vise had set.

But at the very least, they wouldn’t be shot at by the massive laser again for an hour—no, two if Argon was to be believed. All they had to do was find everyone and return to the real world through the portal on the first floor of the Chiyoda Ward office before that happened.

Still, had Black Vise really thought he could take the upper hand by dragging everyone at the meeting of the Seven Kings into the Unlimited Neutral Field and blasting them with that laser? No matter how powerful Argon Array’s charged beam was, the notion that it would kill six kings in a single blow was absurd. And even if she had managed to kill them, all that meant was the kings would lose a couple points, just like the recently deceased Argon. When they regenerated, the six kings would still kill Argon and Vise or return to the real world without killing them and immediately launch the general attack on the White Legion. Now that they knew Ivory Tower was Black Vise and Oscillatory Universe was the Acceleration Research Society, the attack was inevitable.

As Haruyuki considered this, he killed his descent and hovered twenty meters above the ground before he turned his gaze to the Budokan in the south.

“……Ngh!!”

Beyond the cratered Budokan, in an area dotted with galleries and museums, he could see several massive silhouettes thrashing around. At that size, they had to be Beast-class Enemies.

Before he could really react to this new threat, a death effect in a familiar color erupted high into the sky from the center of the still-smoking crater.

Shihoko had no sooner flown out of the metal forest than she was instructing her five Chocopets, “Disperse in that direction and find Burst Linkers! When you find them, you must bring them back to me!”

Heads with flowery markings bobbed up and down, and then the chocolate dolls ran off separately into the metal grove to the southwest of Kitanomaru Park. They couldn’t accept complicated orders, but they should have been able to search and return at least.

When she could no longer see the Chocopets, she looked up once more at the skyscraper to the east. She couldn’t see the light of battle, but Silver Crow and Sky Raker had to have been facing off against the Burst Linker who had attacked them with that incredibly powerful laser.

The chocolate-colored armor of Chocolat Puppeter was not real chocolate, unlike that of the Chocopets, but it was similarly sweet. Its smoothness and attack-absorbing abilities made it surprisingly strong against striking blows, but it had terrible heat resistance. A laser that could destroy a large Purgatory-stage building in a single bow would have melted her armor away if it so much as grazed her.

So even if there had been a way for Shihoko to go with them, she would have just weighed Crow and Raker down, rather than being any kind of help. She knew all too well that there was an infinite variety of duel avatars—right person in the right place and all that—but even so, there were so many all-rounders in Nega Nebulus, she keenly felt her own powerlessness at every turn.

Kuroyukihime had told her that it was her turn, and her Chocopets would be useful in the search, but when all was said and done, the essence of a Burst Linker was in the fight. Brain Burst was a fighting game, after all.

I want to get stronger. How can I get stronger, though? she mourned as she looked up at the building.

“Wohkay, we’ll go check out Budokan,” the Red King said nearby. “Someone mighta gone back there.”

“I suppose so.” Kuroyukihime nodded, staring at the heart of the explosion a hundred meters to the southeast. Shihoko followed her sharp gaze.

There was no sign of the Nippon Budokan and its air of proud majesty even there in the Purgatory stage. One of the outer walls remained, but the large octagonal roof and the onion on top had been completely blown away, while the interior was now a charred crater. She couldn’t believe that such massive destruction had been caused by a single Burst Linker—most likely using the power of the Incarnate System that Shihoko and the other members of the Petit Paquet group still only knew by name.

“I’m concerned about what happened with Ivory Tower and Wolfram Cerberus, but we have to join up with the others before Crow and Raker finish their fight. All right. Let’s go.” Kuroyukihime started hovering, and Blood Leopard, with the Red King on her back, followed forward, as did the Purple King.

Running after them alongside Lime Bell, Shihoko asked quietly, “Say, Bell?”

Lime Bell/Chiyuri Kurashima blinked her large eye lenses just once at the sudden disappearance of Shihoko’s overly polite manner of speaking. “What’s up, Choco?”

“Um. Do you plan to learn Incarnate techniques?”

“Uhhhh, Incarnate?” Lime Bell sounded a bit like she was playing dumb, but then Shihoko noticed the faint shadow on her face mask. “I think I’ll have to learn at some point. But…I’m a little scared.”

“Scared…”

“Yeah…It wasn’t an attack technique or anything, but I used Incarnate power once before.”

At Lime Bell’s almost whispered confession, Shihoko opened both eyes wide. She desperately wanted to hear the rest of the story, but Kuroyukihime, in the lead, stopped and looked back.

“Once we’re inside, don’t neglect to keep an eye out in all directions. I very much doubt that Ivory and Wolfram Cerberus died in that laser attack.”

“I am aware,” Purple Thorn replied, voice tense as always; Shihoko and Chiyuri nodded.

“I’m sorry, Choco. I’ll tell you the rest of the story later.”

“Mmm. I’m sorry, too, for asking you at a time like this…”

They quickly apologized to each other and then switched gears.

The remains of the outer wall were laid out before the six Burst Linkers, melted at the ends and charred in other places. Seeing it up close, she couldn’t help but feel another shiver of fear at the power of the laser, but the kings showed no particular emotion as they continued inside through a gap where the outer wall had been completely destroyed. Shihoko and Lime Bell chased after them, keeping an eye out to their rear.

They detoured around a burned-out steel pillar in the shape of a gravestone that appeared ahead of them, and when the arena came into sight, the place where they’d gathered for the meeting of the Seven Kings not more than twenty minutes earlier, Shihoko stopped dead in her tracks, dumbfounded.

She could only describe it as ground zero. The floor of the large space, perhaps sixty or seventy meters around, was completely melted away, and a crater had even been gouged out of the supposedly indestructible stage ground. On top of that, there were mountains of rubble everywhere, likely the remains of the roof and the spectator seats, with plumes of black smoke rising, still on fire somewhere deep inside.

“I can’t see a single death marker, hmm?” the Purple King commented, and Shihoko hurriedly scanned the crater; indeed, she couldn’t spot any markers, either.

“Yaah. But what if the markers are under all that garbage and stuff?” the Red King asked.

“If there’s enough space to regenerate under it, the marker stays where it is,” the Black King responded. “If it’s completely buried, the marker will shift to sit on top of objects.”

“Hmm.” Scarlet Rain paused thoughtfully. “So then if you keep piling on the garbage, you can make the marker go up and up and up.”

“If Knight or Grandé died, you could go ahead and try it,” Black Lotus agreed. “But it seems that they survived the explosion. So in that case, where—?”

“Shh!” Blood Leopard hissed, the Red King still sitting on her back. Her triangular ears moved from side to side as if trying to pick up a faint sound. “I hear a voice.”

She started padding along on four feet, and the other avatars hurried after her. Finally, the leopard stopped in front of a particularly high mountain of rubble on the south side of the crater. The entire party closed their mouths and pricked their ears. There was indeed a faint voice coming from the area at their feet.

“Oooiii, get us out!”

“…Knight?”

The Black and Purple Kings exchanged a look and then stared at the mountain briefly before readying sword and staff.

Shihoko began to panic. They couldn’t possibly intend to blow the rubble away with a special attack. Fortunately, however, that wasn’t what they were doing.

“Hah!” Kuroyukihime’s sword arms flashed faster than the eye could follow and sliced up chunks of metal and pillars on the pile. The Purple King then swung her staff almost like a shovel to send the bite-size debris flying off to the sides.

They were surprisingly in sync as they worked, and the mountain of rubble shrank in the blink of an eye from towering above their heads to almost even with the floor.

“That’s enough!” The voice was much clearer than before.

The Black and Purple Kings stepped back, and the remaining rubble flew up as if exploding from the inside. Out of the massive hole in the ground beneath it came the Blue King, Blue Knight, and the Green King, Green Grandé.

“Aah, sorry ’bout that. Making you work.” Blue Knight stretched as he thanked them, his armor covered in scratches, the cape on his back ripped to shreds.

Green Grandé’s injuries were fewer, but there were more burn marks on his armor than on that of the Blue King and the large shield he held in one hand was half-melted.

“I expected you’d be alive. But why were you buried in this hole?” Purple Thorn asked.

“Aah.” Knight scratched his horned helmet as if slightly abashed. “G defended against that wild laser itself with his shield. But, like, the area was an incandescent inferno, and we figured it was getting pretty dodgy what with the roof and the wall and everything falling on us from above. So G used his Double Payback to dig us a hole and we just sorta jumped on in.”

Shihoko had also been taught about Double Payback, the special ability of the Green King’s Arc. If Grandé completely defended against an attack, no matter what it was, he could double the force of it and reflect it back outward. So this time, rather than counterattack the invisible shooter, he had used the force to create a shelter to avoid the flames and debris.

“And so it’s all well and good that we survived, but then there was all that junk piled up on top of us. Tried to lift it off, but we were stuck in these awkward positions. I couldn’t really push properly, and my hand wouldn’t reach the hilt to try and draw my sword…Aah, you really saved our bacon.”

“So then old man Grandé defended against the laser and dug the hole. And Lotus and Thorn cleared the rubble away. You’re the only one not doing anything, ain’tcha?” Scarlet Rain jabbed at him mercilessly.

“Whoa, whoa.” The Blue King spread his hands in protest. “I could’ve gotten us out in three seconds if I’d used an Incarnate technique, y’know? But it’d be a hassle if Enemies came crawling around. We were sure someone’d come back for us once they took care of the sniper, so we waited…So? Who was it who took out that fat jerk?”

“No, not yet.”

“Huh?”

“Our Raker and Crow are fighting them right now,” Kuroyukihime replied, and glanced up toward the eastern sky. Obstructed by the remains of the outer wall, they couldn’t see it directly, but in that very moment, the two members of Nega Nebulus would have been doing battle with the laser sniper on the skyscraper in Kudanshita.

“Wh-whoa, whoa.” The Blue King sounded panicked. “So if those two get done in, we’re gonna get hit by that laser again.”

“No, they will definitely defeat the laserist,” the Black King announced curtly. “So our job is to find everyone at the meeting and move to the portal before Ivory Tower comes at us with anything else.”

“True.” Blue Knight nodded and opened his mouth to say something else, but—

“Booooooss!!”

A throaty M-type voice rang out across the crater,

“Masterrrrr!”

followed by that of a husky F type.

The entire party looked to the south as several duel avatars came running in through a gap in the outer wall. Iron Pound and Suntan Chafer from the Green Legion. Aster Vine from the Purple Legion. And still on her balance ball even now, the Yellow Legion’s Lemon Pierrette.

Four Chocopets trotted in behind them. Apparently, each one had found a Burst Linker and guided them here just as Shihoko had ordered. The last must have been still looking.

“Myyy. Those dolls—Chocopets, was it? They’re rather capable, aren’t they?” The Purple King slid over to Shihoko, and whispered, “Are they treating you right in Negabu? If you’re unhappy, you can—”

“Hey! You there! Don’t you take advantage of this situation to try and steal our hope away from us!” Kuroyukihime shouted, while Shihoko simply froze in place.

But the Purple King continued, undaunted, “Get in touch,” before returning to her original position.

Iron Pound ran over, and the Blue King started in on him instead of the Green King.

“Where’d you all run off to? That laser’s a mean piece of work, I know, but the executives of seven—no, six great Legions, I mean…”

Shihoko was quietly impressed with the nerve—or shamelessness—of Blue Knight lecturing the members of the Green Legion with Green Grandé standing right next to him.

“N-no!” Pound shook his head back and forth quickly. “We didn’t run away, it’s—”

“Enemies, Master!” shouted the Purple King’s deputy, Aster Vine, whip bundled up in one hand. “It appears that that laser was an Incarnate technique, at least second stage. Enemies drawn in by it are gathering in droves from the south. The lesser classes came at first, and we managed to crush them, but now, Wild and Beast classes are approaching!”

“Aaaaaproaaaaaching!” Pierrette added, an edge of panic bleeding into her voice.

Shihoko quickly pricked her own ears and felt like she could indeed hear the faint sound of heavy footsteps.

Open spaces in the Unlimited Neutral Field—large parks and school grounds—were often Enemy nests. Shihoko, Yume, and Satomi had also first met their pet Coolu on the grounds of Sakurami Junior High School. There had to have been all kinds of Enemies living in the southern part of Kitanomaru Park, as well as in the east gardens and Imperial Anterior Gardens to the southeast, and now they were moving north, drawn in by the scent of an Incarnate technique.

“Enemies,” Black Lotus groaned. “Was this Ivory Tower’s—no, Black Vise’s plan?”

Scarlet Rain clicked her tongue. “Trying for Unlimited EK, huh? Sounds like something that planky jerk’d think up. In which case, Vise and Cerberus musta run away.”

“NP,” the crimson leopard beneath the Red King said calmly. “This group, we can even break through Beast class.”

Exactly. It was probably just as she said. Shihoko had only just reached level five, so it went without saying that even Wild-class Enemies were so powerful she’d have been helpless against them on her own, much less Beast-class Enemies. But she was standing there with five kings and their deputies. Plus, the Blue King was a legendary swordsman who had defeated even Legend-class Enemies on his own.

“It’s all right, Vine. We’ll handle the rest.” The Purple King stepped over to Aster Vine and patted her on the back as if commending her. “Once we join up with Blue’s Dualis and Black’s Alpha team, we’ll break through the circle of Enemies and escape through the nearest portal. You did well.”

“No…I couldn’t…couldn’t do anything…” Aster Vine’s voice was hoarse, as if she was overcome with emotion.

“King! You’re all right!”

“We dishonor ourselves for our late appearance!”

New voices came to them from the east, followed by Cobalt Blade and Manganese Blade appearing through a gap in the outer wall. Shihoko could also see the fifth Chocopet trailing along behind them.

“Good. We’re all here. Now it’s just Crow and Raker.” Kuroyukihime looked up at the eastern sky once more.

At precisely that moment, circles of vivid purple light shimmered outward on the side of one of the skyscrapers. Countless tiny explosions erupted on the wall and then on the ground and the nearby buildings.

“That’s…Argon’s Infinite Array,” Leopard muttered.

“Argon…Quad Eyes?!” groaned Iron Pound.

For a moment, everyone, including Cobalt and Manganese trotting their way, focused on the building in the distance. And almost as if taking careful aim at this momentary opening, a duel avatar appeared soundlessly from the shadow at the base of an outer wall panel that had survived the fire on the south side of the crater, where the destruction was greatest.

A slight metal color with gray metal armor and a face mask like a wolf. Today was the first time she’d seen him with her own eyes, but she knew his name: Wolfram Cerberus. The duel genius who had shown up in the Accelerated World about a month earlier and managed an overwhelming win rate centered in Nakano Area No. 2 when he was still only level one.

And then she heard the same voice as in the Territories the previous day, the one that sounded like a schoolteacher somehow. “Cerberus I. Activate.”

Dark lines of red light flared to life on the face of the gray avatar, its head still hanging.

Krk! The face mask opened, zigzagging like a wolf’s fangs, no light in the eyes behind goggles that were three centimeters thick. Only a dark red light Shihoko recognized from somewhere swirled in the open maw.

“Be careful!”

She couldn’t tell who shouted.

Black flames, darkness itself, gushed from the four sharp protrusions on Cerberus’s back, and the small avatar instantly disappeared from Shihoko’s field of view. Even though she’d trained her dynamic vision as a fighting type, she still couldn’t even catch a glimpse of the afterimage.

Skreeenk! She heard an extremely unpleasant sound on her left and turned—

Where she saw Manganese Blade, gripping the hilt of her sword on her left hip with her right hand in order to draw it. Cobalt was similarly about to unsheathe her blade, but her right hand stopped just above the hilt. Her body had no head. It had been mercilessly ripped off her slender F-type neck, and the blood-colored damage effect shot up into the air from the cross section.

Cerberus stopped nearly ten meters to the left, and in his right hand, he held the double-horned head of Cobalt Blade.

Almost as if the BB system itself couldn’t figure out what was going on, two whole seconds passed before the body and the head of Cobalt were enveloped in vivid blue flames. When the particles scattered, the death marker appeared where her body had been.

Cerberus stood up, blue flames lingering on his scythe-like fingers.

“M-monsteeeerrrrr!” After witnessing the beheading of her older sister, Manganese Blade roared loudly enough to make the debris on the floor of the crater shake.

She unsheathed her sword with a sharp klak and bounded off the floor, blade held above her head. Cerberus snapped his head to the right, an entirely inhuman movement, and kicked off the ground to charge her with just the power of his legs.

This time, Shihoko managed to see the attack, even though Manganese Blade’s slash shot out so quickly that the blade nearly melted into a pale blue blur. However, she sensed something akin to leisure in Cerberus’s reaction.

He caught the blade with a lazily outstretched hand as it swung toward his own head from the side, and Shihoko had a vision of the sword slicing through his thumb and into his forehead. But.

Keeen! The sharp screech of metal made the air in the crater squeal. Manga’s blade stopped in midair, while Cerberus casually gripped half of it. The strange creaking sound was the blade trying to cut through his fingers.

And then she realized that it wasn’t. With another wailing squeal, the blade shattered to pieces from the center.

The female warrior stared, stunned, while Cerberus kicked her in the side. Her peacock-blue armor shattered as abruptly as the sword, and Manganese was sent flying. She slammed into a mountain of debris to the rear and lay there, motionless.

She appeared to have escaped instant death, but even Shihoko and her limited experience fighting in the Unlimited Neutral Field was certain that the warrior had basically nothing left in her health gauge. Perhaps intending to strike the killing blow, Cerberus sank down as he stared at Manganese. The thrusters on his back spread out with a snap.

But the charge did not happen.

Booooom!

A cloud of dust puffed up in front of Cerberus. Not a bombardment or a bombing. Something—someone had plummeted out of the sky and just barely hit reverse in time to decelerate before slamming into the floor of the crater.

When the northern wind blew the dust away, Shihoko opened both eyes wide in surprise. Before the gray metal-color avatar, a silver metal-color avatar crouched on one knee, two pairs of wings spread wide.

“Haru,” Chiyuri murmured from Shihoko’s side, loud enough for only the two of them to hear.