Accel World - Volume 24 - Chapter 4

4

The meeting was stormy.

That was only natural. Down to the last avatar, the attendees were, if one had to say, an assemblage of powerful personalities.

From the Blue Legion: Cobalt Blade and Manganese Blade.

From the Green Legion: Iron Pound and Suntan Chafer.

From the Purple Legion: Aster Vine and Mauve Wire.

From the Yellow Legion: Lemon Pierrette alone.

From the Red Legion: Blood Leopard and Thistle Porcupine.

And from the Black Legion: Sky Raker and Silver Crow.

There was no reason for the merged Red and Black Legions to clash, and he didn’t really know what the Yellow Legion representative was thinking. The problem was the other three Legions. It was his first time seeing the light-purple duel avatar called Mauve Wire, but he’d seen the other five warriors quarreling incessantly at previous meetings, only now there were no kings to keep them in check.

Selected for the meeting venue was the Ministry of Defense’s Gijo Plaza in the southeast of Shinjuku Area No. 1. In one corner of the large space tiled in white, Haruyuki was in position beside—almost hiding behind—Sky Raker.

“Um,” he murmured to his master. “We are going to come to a conclusion in half an hour, right?”

The timer in the upper part of his field of view had already been cut down to 1,200 seconds remaining. Even though they’d used up a third of the duel time, they had essentially decided on nothing thus far. The main reason for that was that the Green Legion was insisting on prioritizing the Inti attack and the Blue Legion the Oscillatory subjugation, and no one was willing to budge.

“You’re too naïve, Pound! Why can’t you see that Inti is one of Oscillatory’s evil tricks?!” Cobalt Blade rebuked him.

“I’m well aware, Cobalt!” Iron Pound roared in return. “If Inti’s a trap, then instead of avoiding it, we have to smash it and seize the initiative!”

This was already the third round of this refrain. Both their arguments were logical, making it difficult for the other Legions to jump in and say anything.

“I do feel like it’s impossible in the twenty minutes that are left, hmm,” Raker replied, her voice carefree as usual.

Haruyuki responded with a long sigh.

Cobalt and Manganese’s insistence on directly attacking Oscillatory didn’t mean they had given up on the Inti attack. Although they agreed it would be possible to defeat Inti if all the Legions joined forces, they worried that Oscillatory and the Acceleration Research Society behind it would have some further trap prepared for that end.

Indeed, the possibility was not zero. At the meeting of the Seven Kings the previous day, Black Vise had repeatedly laid traps that went beyond the battle power and expectations of everyone present. The change to the Unlimited Neutral Field with Paradigm Breakdown; Argon Array’s super-massive laser attack; Wolfram Cerberus fusing with the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II; the Incarnate technique Icosahedral Insulation sacrificing Vise himself; and then the Sun God Inti dropping from the sky—every single one of these traps would have been needless if Nega Nebulus hadn’t discovered and proven that the fourth of the Seven Dwarves, Ivory Tower, was in fact the Acceleration Research Society’s Black Vise.

In which case, no one could say with certainty that Inti was the final trap. If a further “something” happened when the main forces of all the Legions were in a group to free the five kings, they had to admit that the worst-case scenario—all of them in Unlimited EK—was indeed possible.

Did they avoid the folly of jumping into an unknown trap and instead attack the main body of Oscillatory? Or did they take on the challenge of subjugating Inti with the mindset of nothing ventured, nothing gained?

Nega Nebulus had something that just might be able to break the deadlock: Haruyuki’s Lucid Blade, enhanced to be immune to heat. But they had no guarantee that this hard-won rare enhancement would be able to handle an unknown trap. That was why Fuko had instructed Haruyuki before the meeting not to bring up the matter of Lucid Blade without a signal from her. But did that mean she intended to simply watch until the meeting was over?

As he was thinking this, Sky Raker rolled forward with one push on the silver wheels of her wheelchair and spoke for the first time since the greetings and introductions at the start of the meeting. “Cobalt, a minute?”

“…What is it, Raker?”

“You’re saying we should attack Oscillatory, but that’s also no easy thing in practice. Their members will naturally have cut their global connections to the extent possible. And it’s summer break, so we can’t charge them via the in-school local networks. What do you think we should do about that?”

Cobalt glanced over at Manganese but didn’t reply right away.

Haruyuki had met Koto Takanouchi, the person inside Cobalt, and her twin sister, Yuki Takanouchi, the person inside Manganese, five days earlier in the real world, and he felt like they were good people, even though they were the executives of a hostile Legion. In fact, they had accepted the role of observer to check the matching list after their Territories battle against Oscillatory Universe. In the end, none of the Acceleration Research Society members had been on the list, but after telling Haruyuki this, Koto had added, “I actually think it’s too bad myself. But there should still be another way. I’ll be wishing Nega Nebulus success in battle.”

It hurt his heart to see them questioned by his Incarnate master, Fuko. Someone else would have eventually brought this up if she hadn’t, but he nevertheless racked his brain for ideas on the twins’ behalf.

To challenge someone in Brain Burst—that is, to apply for a duel—both players had to be connected to a shared network via their Neurolinkers or directly connected via XSB cable. Direct connection was out of the question, and if their opponents had cut their connection to the global network, then they would have to go via some other lower network.

The first thing that popped into his head was the in-school local network that basically all schools required their students to connect to, but since it was summer vacation, that wasn’t an option. Even if they were to target the day when students came to school over the break, that was usually around August 10. Which meant that their only choice was to target the local networks of commercial facilities or event venues, but if they went around and checked every single one of those, the attacking side would end up drained of burst points first.

Of course, it was hard to block the global net forever. More than half the Neurolinker functions would be dead, so at some point, even the members of Oscillatory would start to connect to the net like fish gasping for breath out of water. But that was a month or maybe two months away.

“There is…a way,” Manganese Blade said, her ponytail-shaped adornment swinging. Fuko cocked her head silently and waited for the details. “Even if Oscillatory members have the mental strength to stay off the global net, they wouldn’t abandon their king. If we keep attacking White Cosmos and pushing her total points down, even if we lose over and over, the members will eventually appear on the matching list, and that includes the Seven Dwarves.”

The meeting attendees murmured quietly in response.

The next to speak was Aster Vine of the Purple Legion. As she brandished her military-cap-shaped helmet high, her voice was taut as a whip. “Attack Cosmos—that in itself is a mean feat. The White King hasn’t appeared on the battlefield for some years now. Neither on the Normal Duel Field, nor the Territories. How do you intend to draw her out onto the matching list?”

“There’s no need to draw her out,” Manganese replied.

“We went to Minato Ward Area Three today to confirm,” Cobalt continued. “There are no Oscillatory member names on the matching list, but the master’s—White Cosmos’s—name was there. Transient Eternity has no intention of blocking her connection to the global net.”

Once again, Gijo Plaza was filled with hushed chatter. Iron Pound groaned, “Seriously?” Thistle Porcupine snarled, “She’s totally sneering at us,” and Aster Vine kicked at the stone tiling with her heel.

Blood Leopard stepped forward fluidly. “In which case, that is the trap,” she declared before looking at the twins with her feline eyes. “Did you challenge the White King?”

Both members of Dualis sharply shook their heads.

“No,” Cobalt said. “It’s true—it was simply too suspicious. We couldn’t.”

“But even supposing it were a trap,” Manganese continued immediately, “the things she can do in a normal duel are limited. At the very worst, we lose and go down a few points. Even the White King’s a person—if a number of us keep charging her, she’ll get tired at some point and stop being able to fight properly.”

“Wouldn’t she for sure disappear from the matching list, then, before that happened?” Pound challenged.

“No,” Raker responded. “No matter how much she is challenged, the White King will likely not block the global net. If her name is on the list now, then it’s surely a challenge to the other kings—and to the Black King in particular. In August three years ago, Lotus blocked the global net for two years and hid from the kings’ assassins. It was the natural choice, but the White King would assert that she has no such need. She’s inviting the other kings to challenge her. She’s saying she refuses to run or hide.”

“The kings directly?!” Aster Vine cried in a sharp voice. “They would never! If level niners fight, the loser drops to zero points immediately!”

“Cosmos is well aware of that. She’s putting out this challenge with full knowledge that it would mean the end if she lost,” Raker insisted. “In other words, she’s confident that even if the kings challenged her one after the other, she would not lose. And she has good reason for that confidence. Cobalt, did you tell the Blue King that Cosmos was on the matching list?”

She shook her head. “No, not yet. We were planning to report it to him once the meeting was over, together with our results here.”

“You’d best not tell him,” Raker advised. “Given Knight’s personality, he might even go to fight Cosmos tonight. You both know what he’s like when that switch flips, yes?”

What he’s like? Haruyuki cocked his head, but no one explained.

Aqua Current lowered her face, and Manganese said quietly, “Indeed. But we can’t hide the fact that the alliance of the six Legions will be carrying out its general attack on Cosmos alone. And once he hears about that, the king will definitely insist on joining the mission. When all is said and done…this means we can’t touch Cosmos—or Oscillatory.”

Manganese gripped the hilt of the greatsword on her left hip, and for a while, no one said anything. Even Pound, who had been so firm in his opposition, kept his mouth shut and his arms crossed.

In this silence, when the remaining time had dropped to ten minutes, a gaudy balance ball rolled toward the center of the venue. Atop it deftly balanced a small F-type avatar clad in a pale-yellow minidress-type armor. This was the sole participant from the Yellow Legion, Crypt Cosmic Circus: Lemon Pierrette.

The actual younger sister of the Yellow King, Yellow Radio, she had also been at the meeting of the Seven Kings the previous day. Haruyuki had never had the chance to speak with her himself, but during that meeting, she had only repeated the last bit of whatever Radio said; he had no memory of her expressing her own ideas. But Radio wasn’t at this meeting. So then what on earth was she going to say? He held his breath.

“What is the finish line you all are aiming for?” Pierrette asked with a youthful voice, swinging about with a jester’s hat on her head, though it wasn’t quite as large as her brother’s.

“Finish…line?” Cobalt asked, baffled.

“Yes.” Pierrette nodded languidly. “Is it enough to free the kings held captive inside the Sun God Inti? Is crushing the White Legion the end goal? Or are you thinking about something further in the future than either of these things?”

“Well, obviously, it won’t end with simply freeing the kings,” Manganese answered, almost groaning. “The White Legion is a front for the Acceleration Research Society, and they’ve committed any number of terrible deeds. If we let them off here, who knows what mess they’ll make next. Total point loss for all members—well, I won’t go that far, but the bare minimum required here is the disbanding of the Legion and the seizing of their territory.”

“We’re in agreement there,” Pound said, and Suntan Chafer to the rear also nodded silently. “Unless we draw a clear line in the sand with Oscillatory and the Society, we won’t have a leg to stand on in front of all the players who ended up in total point loss because of the Armor of Catastrophe and the ISS kits.”

“Then it’s not such a big problem whether the rescue or the attack is first.” Pierrette gently spread out her hands, still sitting on the ball. “We have to do both anyway, so we should think about the possibility of a trap later and start whichever’s easiest to commence immediately.”

At the previous day’s meeting, Pierrette had essentially been a mascot, but now her logical, big-picture opinion briefly left the other participants at a loss for words.

Finally, Raker cleared her throat lightly before saying, “Setting aside the actual difficulty, if we’re talking about which is easier to start, that’s likely the Inti mission. There are fewer uncertainties there than with Cosmos herself. We also have a lot of information, so coming up with a strategy would be easier.”

“You say that, Raker, but…” Chafer stepped forward, her dark-brown armor clanking. “We can’t devise a strategy with that information. It’s immune to physical attacks and immune to attribute attacks, and on top of that, we can’t even get near it. I’m pretty sure all the Legions here have talked about this until they were blue in the face. But even supposing we could hit it, the only thing we can really do is pull together all of our long-distance types and go for a bombardment from afar, right?”

“That’s also a wonderful plan,” Raker said smoothly. “But I don’t feel like a saturation of long-distance attacks will be able to blow out Inti’s flames. Personally, I think the better possibility is to add as many buffs as possible to one close-range type and have them charge in.”

“Ha-ha!” Pound laughed out loud before quickly checking himself, raising his boxing-gloved hand, and apologizing. “Sorry. This is no laughing matter, but that’s just so Strong Arm. Raker, I like your strategy better, but the practical issue there is, no one’s gonna volunteer for the role of attacker, y’know? And we can’t force that job on anyone. One wrong step, and they’ll be in Unlimited EK, too.”

“Goodness, I do wish you wouldn’t think so little of us, Fists.” She smiled coolly. “If we didn’t have a volunteer, I wouldn’t have brought up such a strategy.”

I kinda don’t like the way this is going, Haruyuki murmured to himself as he tried to inch away from Fuko.

Across from them, Pound threw his hands into the air. “Whoa, whoa, you can’t have already decided on the attacker, can you? If we’re talking fire resistance in Negabu, that’d be Ardor Maiden, but are you really gonna make a good kid like that go on a suicide charge?”

“Of course not.” Raker sniffed. “Avatar fire resistance is no match for something like Inti’s flames.”

“So then who—?” Pound cut himself off, lifted his face, and looked at Haruyuki.

And then everyone in the venue also turned their gazes on him.

Haruyuki tried to run away, but being part of the Gallery, even that was denied to him.

“M-M-Master! How could you say that so casually?!” Haruyuki yelped from the passenger seat of the car parked in a lot near the Ministry of Defense.

Fuko, in the driver’s seat, offered a smile in return. “They were going to find out tomorrow anyway, Corvus. Don’t you think it’s better to tell them in advance than announce it in front of over a hundred Burst Linkers on the scene?”

“W-well, that’s maybe true. But I wasn’t ready,” he grumbled.

“Also, you were the one who decided to enhance your own Lucid Blade instead of Lead’s Infinity, weren’t you?” Fuko pinched his cheek. “I’m a little peeved myself.”

“Huh?” He looked up at her. “Peeved? You are, Master? Why?”

“I was thinking it was about time to have you train in the penetrating blow ability,” Fuko said, tugging on the bit of his cheek trapped between her fingers. “But since you took Lucid Blade as your level-up bonus, I suppose you’ll be devoting yourself to the sword now, hmm?”

Haruyuki was dumbfounded. “N-no, no, I’m totally not going to focus on my sword!” He shook his head rapidly. “I mean, in the Territories yesterday, I was fighting bare-handed the whole time. And…your penetrating hit is too amazing, Master Fuko. I don’t feel like I could even begin to learn it!”

In the fight the previous day, Sky Raker had taken down Shadow Cloaker, who was guarding Argon Array of the Acceleration Research Society, in a mere two blows. The palm strike to the chest was one thing, but the killing blow—it may have looked like her hands were only wedged up against the sides of his helmet, but Cloaker’s head had shattered like it had been ripped apart from inside. It seemed impossible that Haruyuki could ever learn this technique when he couldn’t even begin to imagine what logic would give birth to that kind of force.

But Fuko finally released his cheek and patted his shoulder with her now-free hand as she said with a smile, “It’s all a matter of training. If you lock yourself up in the Unlimited Neutral Field for a while, you’ll be able to awaken it at some point, Corvus. Simply throwing punches isn’t hand-to-hand fighting now, is it?”

“Well, if I could use that ability, I would have a bigger range of techniques for when I’m fighting someone with hard armor like Pound…”

The problem was that the “locking himself up for a while” she spoke of was not going to be on the order of a few days or even a week. He needed to get back to the topic at hand before she said something about this being a good opportunity, so why didn’t they just head into the Unlimited Neutral Field.

“A-anyway.” Haruyuki frantically flapped his lips. “I’m totally not interested in becoming some sword master. I only enhanced Lucid Blade because there wasn’t enough time to get Lead. I still think of you as my master…”

Here he cut himself off awkwardly. It was true that the only one Haruyuki had called master was Sky Raker. But right now, there was another Burst Linker he had to call instructor: the mysterious user of the Omega-style Whole Blade, Centaurea Sentry.

I can’t tell her yet!

Fuko looked at him suspiciously, but a gentle smile quickly rose on her face. “Well, right now, rescuing Lotus is our top priority. The mission starts tomorrow at five in the morning, so you should get to bed early. No staying up all night.”

“R-right. But when I think I have to go to sleep, I end up not being able to fall asleep…”

“Hee-hee. That’s very like you, Corvus. If you simply can’t get to sleep, dive call me. I’ll sing you lullabies until you drift off.” She patted his cheek as she spoke, and he couldn’t tell just how serious she was. Before he could say anything, she pulled her hand away and gripped the steering wheel. “Now, shall we head home? It’s okay if I take you straight back to your house?”

“Yes—,” he started to agree, then remembered that he had just one more mission to clear. “N-no! Um, could you let me off at K-Kansenen Park? I know it’s kind of out of the way, but…”

“Kansenen Park? Where’s that?” Fuko cocked her head and brought up an area map on the front windshield. After she input the destination with a voice command, a red mark flashed in between the Toden Arakawa Line’s Omokagebashi and Waseda Stations. “Well! It’s not even three kilometers away. Of course that’s fine. But what do you have to do in a place like that? Does it involve the Accelerated World?”

“Uh…Um, uhhh…” He knew that the fact that he was totally stuck for what to say was basically the same as saying yes, but he still couldn’t find any words in his empty head.

Fuko giggled. “You’re level six now, Corvus, so I know you have things you can’t talk about. I’m sure Sacchi would force a confession out of you, but I’m nice, so I won’t ask. But…don’t do anything dangerous.”

“N-no! I won’t!” Haruyuki assured her, and Fuko pushed the point home with “That’s a promise” before pulling out of the lot.

Although it was a weekday evening, the roads were surprisingly clear, and the trip didn’t take even ten minutes. Fuko let Haruyuki off on the sidewalk of Shinmejiro-dori on the north side of Kansenen Park, and he let out a short sigh after watching the taillights of the Italian car fade as it drove off.

So many things had happened that day—or rather, since the previous evening. He woke up at Kuroyukihime’s house, met Tsubomi Koshika in the Sasazuka Library, moved to the hospital in Setagaya, and set Megumi Wakamiya free. And when he returned to his own house at last and was doing his homework, Kuroyukihime, Tsubomi, and Chiyuri came over; he spoke with Centaurea Sentry on the Highest Level; and then in the evening, he attended the Legion alliance meeting in Ichigaya with Fuko. His days had been dizzying since the start of July, but this was probably the first time so many events had overlapped like this.

Now, however, he had one last mission to carry out.

The time was 5:15 PM. He glanced up at the sky, which was now finally taking on the color of dusk, before launching his navigation app to display a route to the address he’d input before he left home. Kansenen Park was just a landmark; his true destination was about three hundred meters to the north.

When he crossed Shinmejiro-dori at the nearest light and walked over the narrow bridge that spanned the Kanda River, the scene around him abruptly transformed into a residential area. He followed the navigation and kept walking in between houses and low-level condos until a small playground came into view. His destination was the seven-floor condo on the other side.

He’d input the unit number into the app, but he couldn’t exactly ring the bell out of the blue. The instructions he’d been given were to thoroughly memorize the appearance of the condo and its surroundings and to confirm the name on the postbox.

The condo with its white-tiled floor was not brand new, but it wasn’t old, either; it looked to have been built maybe ten years ago. The plants in front of the entrance were well kept and made the area feel fresh and cool in combination with the green of the park beyond it. In fact, when he drew closer, the oppressive heat seemed to ease just a bit.

Stopping for a moment in front of the condo, Haruyuki told himself that it wasn’t a crime to just go inside, and he forced his feet forward. When he slipped through the automatic door, the intercom was to his left and postboxes and delivery shelves to his right, just like he’d been told they would be. He stepped up to the postboxes and looked for the tag 505. The last name inscribed there was Suzukawa.

They didn’t move! he shouted in a corner of his heart and then turned on his heel. Fortunately, he was able to leave the premises without running into any residents or the supervisor. He went to the playground on the other side of the road and drank some barley tea from the water bottle he’d brought.

Although it was summer break, there were no children on the playground, maybe because it was already after five. Two elderly people were resting on a bench below a wisteria trellis farther back, but he figured they wouldn’t yell at him, so he looked up once more at the white condo building beyond the plants.

Until about twenty years ago, it had apparently been possible to check the area around most roads on online map services. But a law enacted a little before Haruyuki was born concentrated all information related to security guarantees and preserving public order in the Social Security Service Center, and access for the general public was prohibited. Thus, to memorize the appearance of the condo, his only choice was to actually come here and look at it.

“What good is it going to do to memorize the look of the building?” Haruyuki grumbled quietly as he wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.

The final objective of this mission was to contact in the flesh the person who was meant to be living in No. 505. But not knowing anything other than their name, and given that it was summer break on top of that, it wasn’t going to be that easy. He couldn’t make assumptions about what time they would leave the house, so he would need to stake the place out for a long time. He only came today to do the groundwork for that stakeout, but instead of memorizing the look of the building, wouldn’t he be better off looking for a spot from which to monitor the entrance?

“Well, no matter which way you look at it, this park’s the only place,” he muttered.

On the right side of the condo was another condo, and on the left was a house, and he couldn’t go in there. The road was fairly narrow, too, so if he just stood to one side, people would start to raise their eyebrows, even if he was just a kid. All that was left was this park, but it would have little kids playing in it during the day. If he couldn’t produce a reason why it was not unnatural for him to be there for long hours, someone would call the police.

“I’m observing birds and bugs for my summer research project,” he suggested to himself. “But then they’d probably tell me to go to Kansenen Park or Hosokawa Garden. I’m meeting someone here? But that’s, like, thirty minutes, tops.”

As he pondered the problem, he looked up at the condo in question. And then from either side of the road that separated it from him, he sensed people moving this way. Approaching from the right was an old lady rolling a wheeled shopping bag. From the left were three girls in gym clothes, looking like they were on their way home from practice.

He’d scouted the condo plenty, so he decided to leave before he met anyone’s eyes and got weird looks. He started to head for the exit on the opposite side of the park.

However…

“…?!” About to turn around, he froze and faced forward. From a gap in the vegetation, he stared hard enough at the girls to burn a hole through them.

Naturally, Haruyuki had never seen the girl with the short hair walking on the left or the girl with her hair up in buns in the center. But the face of the tallest girl, who had long hair and was walking on the right, jolted his memory. It was the image that had flowed directly into his head an hour or so ago on the Highest Level except it was aged three years.

It was her. There was no mistake.

He was 100 percent certain, but then what should he do? Say nothing and watch her go and wait for his chance another day? No, he didn’t know when the next time he’d be able to run into her would be. And the Inti mission was at five the next morning—in other words, a mere twelve hours away. In which case, he couldn’t let this good fortune slip through his fingers.

But…

Just remembering what he was supposed to say made his palms slick with a cold sweat. The height of this hurdle was the same as or even higher than when Kuroyukihime had told him to direct-link with her last fall in the Umesato Junior High cafeteria lounge.

While he was frozen in place, the girls steadily approached. Their shadows in the evening sun already stretched out in front of the park. The old woman with the rolling bag passed by the vegetation first. Perhaps they knew her; the three girls stopped and said hello, then started walking once more. They were not even ten meters away from the condo entrance.

If Haruyuki’s hunch was right, the girl with the long hair would go into the condo, open the front door, and get in the elevator. If she did, contact would no longer be possible. He didn’t know if the other two girls lived here, too, or if they just went in the same direction to go home, but either way, there was no moment when his target would be alone.

You just have to go. Go!!

He hit his stiff legs with his fist and took a step forward. With a gait that was basically falling forward, he stepped out of the park and onto the road in front of the three girls.

“Uh…Um!” A pathetically hoarse voice came from his mouth, but even so, the girls stopped and stared at him.

Haruyuki knew that the girl with the long hair was in tenth grade right now. In which case, the other two probably were, too. But it didn’t make much difference at this point whether they were older or younger.

All three had looks on their faces that were 80 percent confused and 20 percent on guard as they waited for him to continue. From his basically empty head, he managed to pull out the necessary information and turn it into sound.

“Um. You’re Seri Suzukawa, right?”

The instant Haruyuki uttered the name, the guardedness displayed on their faces rose to nearly 50 percent. The girl with the long hair whose name had been called retreated half a step and raised a hand as if to protect herself, but she still answered him.

“I’m Suzukawa…Who are you?”

The voice was low for a woman, with a slightly androgynous edge, definitely similar to hers—the avatar who had given Haruyuki this task. And there was something about the almond-shaped eyes, sharp eyebrows, and small mouth that made him feel like the face mask hidden by Sentry’s visor was something like this.

Firming his resolve, Haruyuki introduced himself. “M-my name is Haruyuki Arita. I’m in eighth grade at Umesato Junior High.”

“Arita?” She frowned. “Have we met somewhere?”

He desperately wanted to say yes, but Seri had no memory of that. Shaking his head quickly, he replied, “No. We’ve never met. But I know you.”

Here, the girl in the center spoke. “Are you…saying you’re a stalker?!”

“There’s a social camera right there,” the girl on the left said in a thorny voice. “If you do anything weird, the police’ll be here in no time!”

There was indeed a familiar black ball on the metal pole she pointed at. The AI analyzing the feed in real time might have already detected an abnormality in this situation. But he couldn’t pull back now.

“I-I’m not a stalker! This is the first time I’ve been in this area and the first time I’ve seen Suzukawa,” he explained desperately, but the girls remained deeply wary. If someone passed by now, the whole situation would go even more pear-shaped.

“So then what do you want?” Seri asked finally.

Haruyuki took a few seconds before replying with his prepared answer. “I—I got a request from a certain person. They wanted me to come see you.”

“A certain person? Who?”

You! The word started to fly out of his throat, and he just barely held it back. If he actually said that, the girls’ on-guard meter would blow right through the top. He swallowed to wet his desert-dry throat and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t say their name. But I can explain the reason I came.”

“What reason?”

“I can’t tell you in words. Please. Will you…?” He pulled a two-meter XSB cable from the side pocket of his cargo pants and held out a plug. “Will you d-direct with me?”

Instantly, Seri’s eyes grew wide, and the jaws of the other two dropped.

If Haruyuki was forced to say, it was the height of absurdity, but the assumption that young people directing in a park were lovers was still rampant in this world. Most likely, the three of them probably thought he was making up some story about being asked by someone just to have an excuse to confess his love to Seri. Even imagining this made him want to run away screaming, but if he did, he’d never be able to speak to her again. He continued to hold out the plug with a trembling hand.

A laugh she tried to hold back slipped out, and Seri immediately covered her mouth with one hand. She touched a sky-blue barrette in her hair with the same hand before saying in a slightly softer voice, “Arita, I basically get that you’re not dangerous or anything. But sorry, I can’t actually direct with someone I just met.”

Of course you can’t, he agreed in his heart, but he couldn’t pull the plug now. “Please. There’s something I have to tell you.”

“Tell me? What, then?”

After gulping hard again, Haruyuki told her the words Sentry had instructed him to say. “Ever since you were in elementary school, you’ve been trying to remember something, but you can’t.”

Instantly, the look on Seri’s face changed dramatically. Her eyes grew even wider, and she pressed her hands to her mouth. She took one step back, then another, and shook her head several times as if in disbelief.

Noticing the change in their friend, the other two stepped forward and started shouting sharply.

“Hey! You can’t just go saying stuff like that!!”

“How would a junior high kid know about what Seri was thinking in elementary?!”

He couldn’t help but flinch at two high schoolers yelling at him, but Seri approached and turned to her friends.

“Kana, Shima. I want to hear what he has to say.”

“Huh? But, Seri…” The friend with the hair buns looked worried, but Seri nodded firmly at her.

“It’s okay. I promise I’ll explain later, so you two go on ahead.”

“If you say so, Seri, then we will.” The friend with the short hair tugged on the sleeve of Buns’s sweatshirt. They both stared hard at Haruyuki once more before saying to their friend, “Call us tonight, okay?!” and continued east down the road.

Once they’d disappeared around the bend, Haruyuki said to Seri exactly what he was thinking: “Your friends really trust you.”

“That’s what friendship’s about,” she declared without hesitation and then looked around and pointed to the park where Haruyuki had been lurking until a few minutes earlier. “There okay?”

“S-sure, anywhere’s fine…”

Seri nodded and grabbed the gym bag on her shoulder in her right hand before walking toward the park entrance. Haruyuki chased after the black hair swinging against her slender back and entered the playground for the second time. At some point, the elderly people under the wisteria had disappeared. Seri walked over to that very bench, set down her bag, and looked back at him.

“So what’s the thing I can’t remember?” She stared hard at Haruyuki, a hint of guardedness lingering on her face, but now there was also a longing she couldn’t hide. Or so it seemed. Or else that was just him projecting his own hopes. He’d know soon enough.

He offered her the plug in his hand again. After a brief moment of hesitation, she accepted it. The Neurolinker around her neck was the same blue as the long, slender barrettes shining on both sides of her head. She took a deep breath and connected the noncontact plug to her Neurolinker.

When Haruyuki connected the other end of the cable, a wired connection warning floated up in the center of his field of view. The instant that was gone, he called out quietly, “Unlimited Burst.”

Skreeeeee!! The cold, dry roar of thunder made the world stop.

The wisteria above him, the evening sky beyond it, Seri Suzukawa in front of him—all were dyed the same transparent blue. This was the initial acceleration space, also known as the Blue World. A silent place connecting the real world with the Normal Duel Field.

Haruyuki jumped out of his frozen body in the form of his pink pig avatar, bounced once on the ground, and then righted himself and looked up at Seri.

If she were a Burst Linker, she would appear in a general-use avatar like he had. But even after a few seconds, there was no sign of an avatar splitting from Seri, frozen with a dubious look on her face. This was all exactly as expected. Now it was just a matter of whether or not he could carry out the last of his instructions.

“There’s no need to shift completely. It’s enough to connect with the Highest Level for a mere instant.”

That’s what Centaurea Sentry had told him a little over an hour earlier. But was that even possible? To shift from just the Mean Level of the Unlimited Neutral Field to the Highest Level, he’d needed to push his powers of concentration to the limit and swing a sword for over ten hours. And this was the initial acceleration space, even lower than the Lowest Level of the Normal Duel Field. Perception-wise, it was basically the real world.

“What am I supposed to do now?” he grumbled in the general direction of the world that proclaimed itself to be the highest and greatest, but he couldn’t exactly give up before he’d even started.

In terms of the logic, if he could do what he did with his attack on the imagined iron sphere in the Unlimited Neutral Field, he could connect with the Highest Level even from way down here…maybe. But he was only allowed to dive into this initial acceleration space for a mere thirty minutes. He didn’t have the luxury of swinging a sword for hours on end. And to start with, he wasn’t Silver Crow at the moment. He was just a squat little pig avatar.

Nonetheless, he had no choice but to try. For the sake of Centaurea Sentry and for Seri Suzukawa.

In the frozen blue world, Haruyuki readied his black-hooved hand at his hip. The key to connecting with the Highest Level under his own power was most likely ultimate focus. When he’d heard Centaurea Sentry’s voice during his battles with Glacier Behemoth and Einherjar, it had been in a span of time that didn’t fill even one tenth of a second; his thoughts had been racing, compressed to a superhigh density. When he was slicing at his imagined iron sphere, he’d been so deeply fused with his sword that he’d lost all sense of time. There were differences in the direction of his focus, but there was no doubt that they both placed an excessive burden on the quantum circuits set aside for his use. This burden brought about some kind of exceptional phenomenon and connected his consciousness to the Highest Level. Theoretically.

He should be able to do the same thing even in this initial acceleration space, because time was accelerated by a thousand here as well. Which meant he wasn’t thinking with the brain of his real self frozen behind him but the quantum circuits in the BB system instead.

Ultimate focus.

A state of mind he could not reach without an extreme situation, literally life or death, or an image polished over the course of dozens of hours. But now he somehow had to get there within thirty minutes. The 1.8 seconds that would pass in the real world during those thirty minutes were more than enough for Seri to suspect something was up. He’d best assume that accelerating a second time would be impossible.

Focus.

His hand still at the ready, Haruyuki walked over to the wisteria lattice. In the real world, it was sun-faded wood, but in the initial acceleration space, it was blue and transparent like glass. It would detect the collision but would be impossible to break. He looked at a single point on this pillar and worked on an image of smashing it with one blow. One blow, one blow…one blow.

“Haaah!” Since no one could hear him, he freely unleashed a battle cry and launched a right punch. His clenched hoof hit the pillar, and there was a sad little pok sound. Naturally, the pillar didn’t break. But for a mere instant, he felt the speed of his fist go past the limit. Almost like he was punching through the world itself…

Krrk!

He heard the sound of something ripping. And then a flood of information poured into Haruyuki through the break and flowed into Seri Suzukawa’s Neurolinker through the cable that connected them. It was no hallucination; he could actually see the transmission as a stream shining white in the air.

He waited a full ten seconds after the light cut out and then ever so timidly said, “Burst Out.”

The frozen blue world gradually took on its original colors again. His pig avatar vanished from his terminal, and his consciousness returned to his physical body. The chorus of cicadas that filled the park, the noise of the cars on Shinmejiro-dori, the footfalls of the children running along the small adjacent street—feeling these environmental sounds pushing in on him suddenly, Haruyuki stared at Seri Suzukawa’s face hard enough to burn a hole in it.

Seri had closed her eyes at some point. Beneath her shortish bangs, her long eyelashes twitched. Her upright body shuddered, and her head was thrown back slightly.

He worried he would have to hold her up if she leaned too far back. But there was no need for that: After one large final shudder ran through her body, Seri’s eyes snapped open so forcefully, he could practically hear the pop.

The gaze that was turned toward the evening sky slowly settled on Haruyuki. She moved a hand in front of her face and blinked several times before she spoke, her voice sounding somewhat more powerful than before they started directing.

“Basically, all my memories have been synced.”

“Huh?” He gaped. “Uh? What do you…?”

“It means I remember,” she told him. “The fact that I was a Burst Linker…Centaurea Sentry.”

“…!”

Haruyuki gasped and froze in place, while Seri looked at him, her face serious for a moment. Finally, her small lips curled into a faint but warm smile.

“Good job, Arita—well, Silver Crow. To be honest, I thought this didn’t even have a ten percent chance of succeeding. I figured it was more likely I’d think you were a weirdo and report you to the police.”

“Th-that’s awful!” he cried out before staring at her. “B-but are you really Sentry?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“It’s just—you talk totally differently…”

“And if we were to speak in this manner, you would believe?” She abruptly switched to an old-timey manner of speech, and her smile turned wry as she continued. “We may speak in this fashion here as well, but it’s a bit much for a high school girl to use that kind of archaic speech. In the real, I’m quiet and talk like a normal person.”

She neatly returned to her original tone halfway through, and Haruyuki was basically at his wits’ end.

“I—I believe you,” he said finally. “But…why do you talk like that over there anyway?”

“In the early Accelerated World, there were tons of places where people would look down on you just because you were an F-type.”

“Th-there were? Uhhh, I dunno. It’s like…,” he started. “You said you synced your memories, but then what happened to the personality of Suzukawa from a minute ago?”

“It’s not like it disappeared,” she replied as she removed the plug from her Neurolinker and returned it to him. She pushed her gym bag off to one side of the bench and urged him to sit with a gesture.

After winding up the XSB cable and returning it to his pocket, Haruyuki sat down. She took a seat beside him and stared at her hands for a minute before speaking.

“I lost all my points in the third term of sixth grade, and I went through junior high having totally forgotten about the Accelerated World. The three and a half years of memories I’ve lived through since then, up to where I am in tenth grade today, are still there inside me. But at the same time, I’ve also got the memories of Centaurea Sentry, who woke up every so often while she dozed in the Main Visualizer and meditated on things. It’s not like my personality’s changed…I guess it feels like waking up from a dream. A peaceful, happy dream but one that’s not quite enough somehow.”

“…”

Haruyuki didn’t know what to say at first. And it was no wonder. Seri Suzukawa/Centaurea Sentry next to him had smashed the most critical rule of Brain Burst, total point loss = forced uninstallation = permanent banishment. The second survivor after Megumi Wakamiya. And Seri had been able to get her memories back basically on her own, without borrowing the power of the White King.

He had absolutely no idea how she’d done it, but if others who had lost all their points could do the same, it would turn the Accelerated World on its head. Even Red Rider, pushed to total point loss in a surprise attack from Kuroyukihime (who still blamed herself for it), might have been able to truly come back to life.

But unable to broach this subject, Haruyuki instead asked something totally unrelated. “Seri, what team are you on?”

“Maestro.”

“Huh?”

“I told you on the other side, didn’t I? Call me Maestro. If that’s not your style, I guess I could also accept Master.”

“…S-so then, Maestro, what team…?” he asked again.

Seri yanked her right foot up. “Soccer.”

“S-soccer?!”

“Why are you so surprised?”

“O-oh,” he said. “I just assumed it’d be kendo…”

“Because I started soccer in junior high,” she half muttered, lowered her foot, and looked up at the wisteria that doubled as a roof above their heads. It was already the end of July, so the flowers had long since dropped, but through the gaps in the lushly growing leaves, the evening sky shone bright orange like it was on fire.

“Ever since I stopped being a Burst Linker, I’ve carried this emptiness inside me. Always trying to remember, never being able to…There was constantly this empty space that I could never seem to fill. When I started junior high, Kana and Shima—the girls I was with before—invited me to join the girls’ soccer team. I really threw myself into it, but still, the empty space never went away.”

Seri’s words made him realize all over again how cruel Brain Burst was. It could steal your memories, but it couldn’t fill in the hole left in the place they used to be. If all the Burst Linkers who had lost their points so far felt this same emptiness, then it was like some kind of unbreakable curse.

“Have you known any Burst Linkers who lost all their points?” she suddenly asked him.

He looked at her before nodding, almost hanging his head. “Yes. I…pushed him to total point loss. In a sudden-death duel with all our points on the line.”

The Twilight Marauder aka Dusk Taker aka Seiji Nomi. Haruyuki hadn’t been able to avoid this final battle with the other Burst Linker. He didn’t regret striking the final blow when Nomi had begged desperately for his life, pushed to the edge with just a few pixels remaining in his health gauge.

Even so.

“Once he lost all his points, he was like a different person. He got serious and worked hard in school and at practice,” Haruyuki told her. “But does he actually feel the same as you? Has he been going around with this unfillable hole all this time?”

“I don’t know,” Seri said softly, her long hair swinging to the side. “I’ve never seen a Burst Linker who lost all their points in the real. I’ve pushed more than a few to that state, though.”

“M-more than…a few?”

“That’s why they used to call me Ruthless. Or Asura. Even though I was given the avatar name Sentry, I never protected anyone.”

“But…” He looked at her face once more and said earnestly, “But you protected me a bunch of times. If you hadn’t been giving me advice, I couldn’t have beaten Glacier Behemoth or Einherjar.”

“I was just playing around. On a whim,” she told him. “I didn’t think you’d actually be able to hear me.”

“Huh?”

“So I’m not letting you pin some debt of gratitude on me for that.” She grinned. “From now on, it’s going to be different, though.”

“F-from now on?” Haruyuki gaped at her, and Seri deliberately flicked his forehead. “Ow!”

“Crow, have you already forgotten why you brought me back to life?”

“Um.” Rummaging through his brain, he finally remembered. He’d asked Centaurea Sentry to teach him Omega style and, as a result, been given this assignment. And the reason he’d wanted to learn Omega style was to help him in the mission to subjugate the Sun God Inti, which was coming up in a mere eleven hours.

“O-oh, right! Will you teach me Omega style?”

“If I wasn’t going to, I wouldn’t have named myself Maestro,” she responded, fortunately, but then she quickly furrowed her brow. “However, there’s still one more hurdle to overcome.”

“H-hurdle? What?”

“I have my memories of being Centaurea Sentry back. But I absolutely have to have one more thing in order to return as a Burst Linker.”

What on earth could that be? he thought but then finally realized it. “Oh! The BB program…”

“Exactly. When I lost all my points, it was forcibly uninstalled from my Neurolinker.”

“The icon hasn’t returned to your virtual desktop?”

“I don’t see it yet.”

This response reminded him of a moment a few minutes earlier. Right before she announced that her memory was completely synced, Seri had swiped her left hand to the side. The gesture to shrink a virtual desktop.

How great had her despair been when she’d gotten her memory back but not the BB program? He so keenly felt her pain that he didn’t want to know the answer.

“Uh…Um!” Suddenly, he set both hands on her arm. “If it doesn’t come back, I’ll send the BB program to your Neurolinker!”

“…Crow, do you understand what that means?”

“Of course.” He nodded deeply.

To copy and install the Brain Burst program was, in other words, to become parent and child. Only one attempt was permitted, and Seri clearly met the requirements to become a Burst Linker. But even if it did succeed, Haruyuki would not be able to make another child.

Around the time he reached level five, he had started thinking about if he would become a parent at some point. But he’d thought that choice was far in the distant future, and he didn’t even know if he really wanted to become one. He wouldn’t begrudge using his only attempt, however, if it was for the sake of Centaurea Sentry, to whom he owed a real debt.

With a gaze that included all these thoughts, he stared directly into her eyes.

Her expression suddenly softening, Seri patted his hands lightly. “The master becoming the student’s child—it would not be seemly. Never fear. Even without relying on your assistance, we shall find a way.”

…Why did you change back?

Seri didn’t give him the time to ask. She was already brandishing her left hand and waving her right to bring back her virtual desktop. Her jet-black eyes stared into the empty space until finally she said, “It’s there.”

“I-it is?! The Brain Burst icon?!”

“There’s no way I’d mistake it for something else. It’s back exactly where it used to be.”

“Y—”

Yesssss! He very nearly shouted and wrapped his arms around her, but he managed to restrain himself in the nick of time. He quickly returned his half-open hands to his lap, and an awkward smile rose on his face.

“Th-that’s great,” he said. “But was it copied from somewhere, then? Did my Neurolinker just send it on its own before?”

“Hmm.” Seri nimbly moved the fingers of her left hand and then shook her head. “No, it seems like something else. The sender in my logs is masked, but it was probably sent directly by the central server. Almost like—”

“Almost like?”

She shook her head. “No, it’s nothing. Anyway, that’s the final hurdle cleared. From this moment, Crow—Arita—you are formally my student,” she announced and then turned her torso toward him as she extended her right hand.

This time he had no reason to hesitate. Haruyuki gripped her hand firmly before bowing deeply. “Th-thank you!”

Having come all this way, he’d finally acquired his second—er, third—instructor, and while the question of how he was going to explain this to Kuroyukihime and Fuko popped into his head, he could worry about that once they’d rescued Kuroyukihime. Right now, his priority was to learn the mysterious Omega-style Whole Blade and fulfill his important role as main attacker within the Inti mission.

Lifting his head, he let go of Seri’s hand and her powerful grip, befitting someone as athletic as she was. They both stood at the same time and stepped out from under the wisteria to look upward.

At some point, the color of the evening sky had grown quite rich. As if sucked in by the vermillion on the verge of changing to indigo, Seri took a deep breath before returning her gaze to Haruyuki.

“You spent long hours swinging your sword on the Mean Level, so go rest for today. I have practice tomorrow morning, so our training…” She paused thoughtfully. “Okay, so eight-ish tomorrow night—”

“Oh!” he interrupted. “I’m sorry—that’ll be too late.”

“Too late for what?”

Haruyuki finally realized he hadn’t mentioned anything to her about the huge battle coming up in the morning. “Um, it’s…At five tomorrow morning, I have to defeat this Legend-class Enemy, the Sun God Inti.”

Seri’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped. She froze in that position for five solid seconds. Finally, a deep groove was carved out between her brows, and her lips trembled slightly.

“Of what do you speaaaaaak?!”

Her shout sent the sparrows perched on the wisteria flapping into the sky.