Accel World - Volume 6 - Chapter Pr

Brain Burst was a full-dive, competitive combat network game.

However, unlike similar games on the market, the servers on the global net did not determine the fight matchups.

The standard for matchups was the location of the real-world body of the player—the Burst Linker. Burst Linkers could not be paired up in a fight unless they were within the same particular section of the real world. In Brain Burst, this section was called an “area.”

Area sizes were different in the city center than the other regions in the country. Within the twenty-three wards of Tokyo, a single ward generally had between two and four areas. Suginami Ward, for instance, was divided into three: Suginami areas one through three. For each of these areas, a list—the “matching list”—displayed all Burst Linkers currently present within the area. A player could either choose a duel opponent from this list to challenge or go into Standby mode and wait for an attack.

There was a total of approximately sixty areas in the twenty-three wards of Tokyo. Because nearly all of the roughly one thousand Burst Linkers lived in central Tokyo, there were roughly ten to twenty people registered on the matching list of any single area. Of course, this varied by place and time of day; a list of more than a hundred people around Shinjuku Station or in Akihabara on a weekend afternoon was not at all unusual.

When that many people gathered in one spot, occasionally something unexpected happened: The opponent a player had selected at random from the list would abruptly appear very close nearby in the duel stage—even mere meters away—or one of the duelers might, conversely, enter the stage from near the Gallery.

Brain Burst’s VR duel stages were re-created from images captured by the network of high-resolution security cameras set up all over the real world, the so-called social camera network. Which meant that the buildings and roads within a stage—although given a variety of new facades in line with the randomized “affiliation” of the stage—were basically the same as those existing in the real world.

This meant that when two duel avatars appeared close to each other in this terrain, both players were also right in front of each other in the real world. This was relatively unpleasant, even dangerous, because exposing the real face or name of a Burst Linker—outing them “in the real”—was one of the Accelerated World’s greatest taboos. Someone could take a Linker’s photo and follow them, outing their address and real name, and anyone who had that information could kidnap the Burst Linker or threaten them in the real world with the intent to steal all of their burst points.

And although they were very few, extremists who would run the risk of this kind of violent criminal behavior did actually exist in the Accelerated World. They were known as Physical Knockers, or PKs for short, and although the major Legions insisted that the PKs be neutralized, simply having your name revealed was extremely distressing. Because, almost without exception, any Burst Linker attacked in such a manner lost all their points, and thus, the Brain Burst program itself, together with all related memories, preventing the player from ever returning to the Accelerated World. The likelihood of this happening was small, but the terrifying risk lurked under the surface of the passionate, excited crowds in the busy weekend areas.

Conversely, the possibility of being outed in the real in areas with a low population density of Burst Linkers was infinitely reduced. Of the twenty-three wards, the western part of Setagaya Ward, as well as around Ota and Edogawa Wards in general, were three such “depopulated” areas. For as large as they were, the number of people on the list was always low. Unexpectedly, the place in Tokyo where the danger of a near miss was lowest was thought to be the center of all the areas, Chiyoda Ward.

Chiyoda was the only one of the twenty-three wards not divided up into areas. It was one of the biggest areas, outside of the special, independent area of Akihabara, but more than that, there were essentially no Burst Linkers making the area their home ground. This was because up to 20 percent of Chiyoda Ward was the Imperial Palace, and that was somewhere your average city dweller could not go.

This rule also extended into the Accelerated World. In every stage was an Imperial Palace in a form matching the stage’s affiliations, but a barrier stood in the center of the moat, preventing any entry into the palace itself; it was simply a vast prohibited zone in the center of the large city map. If a dueler were so inclined, they could easily assault their opponent with a single long-distance attack and then spend the next thirty minutes running around to win by decision.

Given the difficulty of fighting in this terrain, there weren’t swarms of players looking to fight in Chiyoda, especially in comparison with the fighting meccas of Akihabara to the immediate north and Shinjuku to the west. Thus, the Chiyoda Area matching list was always almost entirely empty of names. This was not to say, however, that the area was without value.

Given the area’s location in the center of Tokyo, the risk of a real-body near miss was low. This feature gave rise to an unexpected use for the Chiyoda Ward: a place for negotiating, rather than dueling. When powerful enemies wanted to make contact whilst keeping to the barest minimum the possibility of being outed, the vast and desolate Chiyoda Ward served quite well.

For these reasons…

SUNDAY, JUNE 16, 2047. 1:45 PM.

Kuroyukihime, aka Black Lotus, the Black King, and leader of the Legion Nega Nebulus; Fuko Kurasaki, controller of the duel avatar Sky Raker and Legion deputy; and Haruyuki Arita, aka Silver Crow, a junior member who fought alongside them, sat in a small electric vehicle parked in Fujimi Nichome, Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo, waiting for the time negotiations were to start.

No, these negotiations were not to be simple talks between separate Legions.

Because, at two PM, a meeting of all seven Kings of Pure Color would begin. They were coming together for only the second time in the entire eight-year history of the Accelerated World.