Accel World - Volume 9 - Chapter 8

8

Forty-five years had already passed since the completion of construction on Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, but it remained an enormous building poking its head far above the rest of the buildings in the Akasaka neighborhood. The roof was six thousand square meters, much larger than the sports grounds at Umesato Junior High. With a height of two hundred thirty-eight meters, it fell short of Tokyo Midtown Tower soaring up to the northeast by ten meters, but the floor area was one and a half times that other giant.

Thus, the superb view that leapt into existence the second he opened his eyes stole his soul for a moment or two. Perhaps best called an enormous sky garden, walls and pillars reminiscent of Greek ruins were scattered around, made of a white, porcelainlike limestone. Small flowers he didn’t know the name of sprang up in the cracks and crumbling bases of the stone, and clouds drifted leisurely through the sky, shining madder red. Off near the horizon in the western distance was the sun, a large gold coin.

A Twilight stage, a “natural” stage with earth attributes. Its features were: terrain objects that were easily shattered; though apparently entirely comprised of stone, many things were flammable; and surprisingly dark in areas of cover. Nothing particularly spectacular.

However, for Haruyuki, this place had personal significance.

Last fall, a time he would never forget, he had been given the key to another world by a black spangle butterfly who descended suddenly before him, and the first place they had visited was this land of eternal dusk. That butterfly had reached a hand out to Haruyuki, who was obstinately hanging his head, and asked, “Do these virtual two meters feel that far to you?”

Yesterday, eight months after that day, when they direct-dueled in the nurse’s room at Umesato Junior High, Kuroyukihime had shown Haruyuki a modest, but true, miracle. She had denied the attributes of her own duel avatar through the Incarnate System—the phenomenon of overwriting—and changed the sword of her right hand into five slender fingers. The newly born “hand” shattered in a mere seventeen seconds, but that Incarnate in and of itself was nothing but a loud declaration: That Kuroyukihime herself would also close the two meters from that day in the past.

This thought drifting through his mind, Haruyuki started to shift his gaze to seek out Kuroyukihime. However, immediately before that, he realized he had forgotten the thing he should be checking first and foremost.

He hurriedly raised his hands and stared at his spread fingers. Silver Crow’s ten fingers—normally so slender that it was hard to believe he was a hand-to-hand combat type—had doubly thick armor and tapered into claws at the ends. They were basically in the same condition as when he direct-dueled with Rin Kusakabe before. He next checked the form and color of his body and found that these, too, were about the same as three hours earlier, a mix of 80 percent Crow and 20 percent Disaster. Finally, he closed his eyes and focused on the center of his spine deep within his consciousness, but it seemed that the Beast that lay there was still dozing. He couldn’t perceive its piercing pain, or its low howl.

“Just stay asleep like that a little longer,” Haruyuki murmured, as he lifted his face and once again surveyed his surroundings.

The roof of Mori Tower was large, but due to the terrain effects of the Twilight stage, countless pillars and stone walls covered it in a labyrinthine configuration, and Haru couldn’t see all the way to the other side. Clearing his ears, he couldn’t hear anything besides the howl of the desolate wind blowing.

“Kuroyukihime?” Haruyuki called out to the person he was waiting for in a slightly tense voice. But he couldn’t see a single active object, much less obsidian armor. But now that he thought about it, Kuroyukihime had said simply that she’d moved from Suginami to the roof here in Roppongi Hills; it would have been impossible for her to precisely grasp the position where he would appear. She had to be somewhere in the maze searching for him just like he was her.

With this thought, Haruyuki started walking along the narrow path between the chalky stone walls. Unlike the main tower building, the decorative walls and pillars were likely not very strong, so he might have been able to smash through them in a straight line, but he seriously hesitated to do so. The rare Twilight stage was, for him, a place to memorialize, a sacred space.

The path hit a wall soon enough and branched off to both sides. He turned right on a hunch. Taking care not to step on the small flowers blooming on the left and right of the cobblestone path, he headed toward what he thought was the center of the roof. He turned right several more times, and then left, and then he slipped through a crumbling arch to find a plaza about twenty meters in diameter, slightly lower than the surrounding area.

The center of the roof of the real Mori Tower was also a heliport, a meter lower than the wooden deck around it. So this was probably the center. Of course, there was no H mark for the heliport; instead, a dozen or so pillars stood in a ring. In the center of these there was a remarkably thick, tall pillar; water flowed smoothly from the top of it, and at its base was a shallow pond.

He stepped down into the plaza as if pulled in and walked over to the central pillar. He brought his hand up to the wet limestone surface, and just as he was about to touch it—

“Crow.” He heard a low, calm voice call his name from the other side of the pillar.

“Oh! K-Kuroyukihime!” Is this where you were? he was about to say, moving around the pillar, but the voice continued and held him back.

“Stop. Don’t move, just listen.”

“Huh…? O-okay.”

The diameter of the pillar standing in the center of the plaza was, generously speaking, eighty centimeters at best. She might have been small, but with her design emphasizing the edged areas of her limbs, Black Lotus would have had to strain to hide completely behind this pillar. Unintentionally imagining how she looked, all scrunched up, Haruyuki stopped in place.

“Silver Crow. I’ve been thinking for a long time about how I can help you now that you’re parasitized by the Armor of Catastrophe.” Kuroyukihime’s voice came from the other side of the stone pillar once more, with just the slightest bit of a flat echo, as though she were deliberately suppressing any intonation. Haru held his breath and waited for her to continue. “I examined several ideas, but this did seem to be the best method. Crow. Unfortunately, you have become too great a danger now. For the Legion, for the Accelerated World, and for me.”

“…K-Kuro…yukihime…?” An inexpressible confusion. The words she uttered did in fact express reality, but that way of speaking, somehow businesslike—no, even cold…

“Thus, this is my decision. Disappear from this world.”

The completely emotionless voice slammed into his ears from the other side of the pillar.

At basically the same time, something pierced the thick limestone before him and reached out in a straight line. A sharp, black blade. A sword— No, the Black King’s hand.

Dumbfounded, Haruyuki stared at the ebony tip aimed precisely at the center of his own chest, the most critical point for a duel avatar. His thoughts stopped, and he had no sensation in his limbs. But perhaps his body reacted on its own; he leaned his torso to the left a mere five centimeters.

Whuk.

With a very modest impact, the black blade plunged deeper and deeper into the right side of Silver Crow’s chest, until it came out through his back.

An instant of a chilly, cool sensation. And then—an incandescent, fierce pain.

“Unh…Ah!” A hoarse cry slipped out of him, and he focused every bit of his strength in his legs to jump straight backward. The sword slid out of his chest, giving rise to a new round of pain, and the bright-red light of the damage effect in the air shimmered like fresh blood. He staggered, bathed in that light, and plunged his left knee into the ground.

Although he had evaded a direct hit to his heart, he had taken serious damage to his torso, and his health gauge abruptly dropped over 20 percent. Naturally, his special-attack gauge was also charged by an amount corresponding to the damage, but there was one other obvious change inside him.

….GRAAAR.

A low howl. The first drop of the molten iron, the red-hot rage that was about to spill out of him. The Beast was waking up. Haruyuki hadn’t managed to dodge—albeit by only a few centimeters—the black blade’s surprise attack by chance or his own reflexive action. The Beast had moved his duel avatar.

“Kuro…yukihime…why…!” Haruyuki squeezed a voice out, pressing his right hand to the wound on his chest—or holding back the rage of the Beast trying to gush out from it. “Why…would you…?!”

It was true that they had dropped into the Unlimited Neutral Field to fight. However, this—the surprise attack, not letting him see her—had simply fanned the Beast’s rage and called it to complete wakefulness.

Wait. Did Kuroyukihime ever have any intention of dueling? Was her plan all along to bring him into the Accelerated World, beat him down, and solve this problem in one fell swoop with the Judgment Blow?

GRAAAAR…ENEMY…IF THIS IS AN ENEMY…THEN ONLY…SLAUGHTER…EVEN IF…THAT IS YOUR PARENT, a creaking voice echoed forlornly in the depths of Haru’s mind. He could no longer stop the Beast’s awakening.

But down on one knee, body curled up into itself, Haruyuki started speaking desperately to the pseudo-intelligence living within him. Wait, Beast! You’re wrong. You’re totally wrong!

Exactly. It was wrong. He couldn’t believe that the voice calling to him from the other side of the pillar and the blade that pierced his chest belonged to anyone other than Black Lotus, but…even still, it was wrong. She wouldn’t say that. She wouldn’t do that. So then, someone was faking the Black King’s voice and techniques. That was the only conclusion—no, the truth.

Haruyuki slowly stood up and glanced down at his body as his armor darkened with the awakening of the Beast. “Come out from behind that pillar ple—I mean, come out! Who are you?!” he shouted resolutely.

Momentarily, the wind stopped as if afraid, and even the flowers at his feet hid their faces.

Finally, a smooth voice. “It’s sad, Crow. You hear my voice with those ears, feel my technique with that body, and still, you can still ask a question like that.”

The chalky pillars in the center of the roof of Mori Tower shone golden in the Twilight stage, illuminated by the setting sun from the right, with the left side sinking into shadow to create a strong contrast. From that shadow, a silhouette stepped out smoothly, silently.

A face mask that tapered into a V from both sides. Armor skirt patterned after the petals of a water lily around the incredibly slender waist. Arms and legs in the form of long swords. And the Armor of the entire body a real black, more concentrated than the shadow.

“…That…” Haruyuki felt a pitch-black despair drop into his heart. And like a drop of ink in a glass of water, the darkness seeped into the interior of his avatar.

The volume of the Beast’s howl increased in step with this stain. Kree, kree. With a dry metal creaking, his hands and feet grew larger into claws. The protrusions on either side of his forehead shot out abruptly, and his visor began to shift into something resembling the maw of a wild animal.

But unaware of the changes coming over him, Haruyuki simply continued to stare at the jet-black duel avatar standing in the shadow of the pillar.

That form. And no avatar besides the Black King had that coloring. So then, those words before, were they Black Lotus’s true feelings—Kuroyukihime’s? Those cold words, announcing she would cut away Silver Crow—no, Haruyuki Arita—as a dangerous element and eliminate him from the Accelerated World…?

Skreenk! His limbs transformed into thick, blackish-silver armor with sharp edges. The top and bottom halves of the visor enclosing his round helmet had already finished generating; all that was left was for him to bring the fang-shaped serrations together and bite down hard.

THAT IS THE ENEMY. OUR ENEMY. CALL THE SWORD. BOIL WITH FLAMES! the Beast commanded Haruyuki, with an increasingly clear voice.

But still, Haruyuki gritted his teeth beneath his visor and shook his head slightly. “No. I can’t accept that. I don’t believe it. That’s not Kuroyukihime,” he groaned, half talking to himself. The voice, the form, and even the color might have been those of the Black King, but that was not Black Lotus—Kuroyukihime. His instincts, his soul, were screaming it.

The pronounced shadow of the large pillar, characteristic of the Twilight stage, swallowed up all details and painted over everything, obstructed his vision—no, all five of his senses. The avatar that looked like the Black King did not move, instead keeping her body sunk in the darkness, as if she was trying to flee the light. He felt something artificial in it.

Wasn’t there any way to make her move away from the shadow, even if only for a moment? Smash the pillar— No. If he carried out any physical attack now, the Disasterfication would be completed instantly. Don’t destroy it; illuminate it. With a new, powerful light.

Beast. Let me just check. Don’t get in the way of me activating my Incarnate, he murmured, and the pseudo-intelligence howled with dissatisfaction.

GRAAAAR…IF THAT WILL ALLOW YOU TO CONFIRM THIS IS THE ENEMY, THEN DO AS YOU WISH.

…Yeah…I’ll confirm it. Exactly what that is, there.

Haruyuki slowly turned the five fingers of his right hand, transformed into sinister claws, toward the Black King of the darkness—it was a movement like he was bracing to withstand an intense destructive impact. But in contrast, his heart was calm like the surface of a lake. He probably only had one chance, one moment. He had to focus on the image, activate, and release in less time than ever before.

Light. The image of light. He mustered up every ounce of concentration from every corner of his body to focus on the mental image that was the source of his Laser Sword, the Incarnate technique he had shot off any number of times in the past and condensed in the depths of his right hand. This image, honed so small and sharp that it didn’t even generate an overlay—he had to release it all at once!

“Light!!” he shouted out unconsciously. At the same time, a pure white light jetted out from the right hand of the more-than-half-Disasterfied Silver Crow, until it illuminated the world.

That was when Haruyuki saw it.

The form was indeed exactly that of the Black King. But it was a form that took shape only when seen from a very limited angle. In other words, it had no depth. The swords of the four limbs, the Armor patterned after flower petals, it was all just cut from panels thinner than paper—a shadow picture. The avatar perfectly resembled Black Lotus in the darkness, but this was its true form, exposed in the momentary flash of light.

“You— Who are you?!” Haruyuki cried, thrusting the talons of his right hand out.

The shadow avatar, sinking back into the darkness created by the pillar, didn’t move, as if it had been burned in place by the strobe light. In the gloom, it really was an almost perfect copy of Black Lotus, but now that he had seen its true form, he realized it was different from the Black King in one important way. Normally, the tips of the Black King’s toes floated a couple centimeters above the ground, since she usually moved by hovering. But the points of the shadow avatar’s feet were digging into the ground slightly. A minute, but decisive, difference.

Even bathed in Haruyuki’s unflinching gaze, whoever it was who was pretending to be the king maintained their silence for a few more seconds, but finally, perhaps deciding that any further deception was impossible, they leisurely spread out the swords of both arms—or rather, the thin, weak panels patterned after them. At the same time, a voice:

“I’ve underestimated you. The fact that you still use the Incarnate of the first quadrant although the Armor has penetrated you so deeply means you’ve grown, hmm?”

The tone was again basically a perfect reproduction of Kuroyukihime’s in the Accelerated World. But the choice of words and the intonation made Haruyuki’s memory ache uncomfortably. He had the feeling that he had met someone who talked like this somewhere, sometime before. It was—Right, in the Unlimited Neutral Field…in a stage colored in the same thick shadows…

“You…you…” Almost at the same time as Haruyuki moaned quietly, the dangerous thoughts of the Beast sounded in the depths of his head.

YOU. ARE. YOU ARE…THAT. THAT TIME…

Even faced with the hostile gaze containing the animosity of two beings, the shadow avatar stood calmly in place—or rather, was pasted there. Bringing down the extended arms in a slightly mechanical motion, he launched into another monologue.

“Coming into contact with you Black Legionnaires here was entirely unexpected. But, well, this sort of opportunity doesn’t come along too often, does it? Metatron on the Midtown Tower was raging after three days of quiet, so I was on standby just in case, when I was surprised by unexpected guests.”

The tone, aloof and somehow reminiscent of a teacher giving a lecture, stung at Haru’s memory sharply once more, but a physical unease great enough to override this moved Haruyuki’s mouth. “You were on standby?”

Metatron—“Archangel Metatron”—was the Legend-class Enemy guarding Tokyo Midtown Tower, which soared up five hundred meters to the northeast. Haruyuki had indeed seen the terrifying, invisible monster use a dreadnought laser attack to create a massive crater in the urban center of Roppongi in reaction to the rocket punch launched by Iron Pound. Most likely, the shadow avatar before him had hidden himself here on the roof of Mori Tower, a position that allowed easy monitoring of the other skyscraper, in order to search out whoever had caused the monster to attack.

But in reality, that was impossible.

Haruyuki had seen Metatron attack about three hours ago in real-world time. So, in the Unlimited Neutral Field, it had already been three thousand hours since then. One hundred twenty-five days had actually passed. No one could possibly wait for a hazy something for that massive amount of time without even sleeping.

The instant his thoughts got to this point, Haruyuki belatedly remembered he had been shocked once before in the same way.

The final battle in the Unlimited Neutral Field with Dusk Taker, a powerful enemy who had stolen Silver Crow’s silver wings. Despite the fact that Haruyuki and Takumu had taken the greatest measures to keep Dusk Taker from breaking his promise and setting up an ambush, people were already lying in wait on the Umesato Junior High grounds, where the fight was to take place.

Dusk Taker had triumphantly told the tale to an astonished Haruyuki and friends. About how he was the only one in the Accelerated World who could stay on standby for incredibly long times. Because he was the only one who could stop the acceleration of his thoughts during a burst link due to the brain implant chip in his head, the lone “deceleration” user…

“You…you’re…” Whirling to face the two-dimensional avatar, thin like a paper cutout, Haruyuki called out in a creaking voice:

“…Vice president of the Acceleration Research Society…Black Vise!!”

The instant he heard the name, the shadow avatar held his right hand up in front of his chest, bent at the waist, and bowed courteously.

His entire body then neatly rotated ninety degrees on the pivot of the toes of his right foot, which dug lightly into the ground. Because his every part was made of extremely thin panels, at this angle, he looked to Haruyuki’s eyes like nothing more than a single line. But Haruyuki didn’t get the chance to look too closely; the thin pieces separated once more into ten or so panels on each side and lined up neatly with a few centimeters between them. What was produced was a “layered” avatar, like a detailed radiation fin cut out into the shape of a person. This was nothing other than the true form of Black Vise, the avatar who had once made Haruyuki and his friends suffer so terribly with his unusual powers.

Vise was still courteously bent forward, right arm at his chest, but unlike when he was the fake Lotus, his left arm was missing from its socket. Still, he wasn’t injured…This strange avatar had the ability to freely detach the panels that made up his body and manipulate them over long distances. If he’d activated that ability now, then his target was likely…

“You…her, the Black King, what did you…?”

The fact that the real Kuroyukihime still hadn’t shown up on the roof of the tower like she was supposed to no doubt meant that Black Vise had gotten to her first. Haruyuki started toward Vise to press the question, when—

Suddenly, a fierce, red-hot pain pierced the center of his spine.

“Graaaaaaaar!!”

Haruyuki didn’t know whether the tremendous roar of rage sounded in his mind alone, or if it actually jetted out from his mouth. But the next time, definitely in his head, he heard the crazed howling of the Beast.

YOU…KILL! KILL! KILLKILLKILLKILL!

Haruyuki staggered at the incredible explosion of negative thought, as though something had slammed into him physically. At the same time, scenes flashed across his view in quick succession.

A large mortar-shaped hole dug out of the ground. A female-type avatar with golden-yellow armor standing at the bottom, restrained by a jet-black cross.

From the deep hole next to the cross, the figure of a strange snake slithered into view. With a mouth lined with countless fangs, it ate the girl, chewing up her armor with a loud crunch.

On the edge of the basin, a couple dozen Burst Linkers silently watched over the tragedy. In one corner, three shadows stood a distance from the rest of the group. A small avatar with four eyes that glittered eerily. An avatar cloaked completely in white light, such that her actual form wasn’t visible. And a matte-black layered avatar, several thin plates put together in the shape of a person…

This figure burned into the Beast’s memory was overlaid perfectly on the Black Vise before his eyes.

Haruyuki felt a large amount of information flowing into his mind like red-hot molten metal. Or maybe it existed within him right from the start. The “dream” he had had two days earlier, during the short nap he took after breaking into the Castle with Utai Shinomiya…Forgotten until now, that long, sad dream—or rather, all the memories of the first Disaster Chrome Falcon—suddenly came back to life.

It’s him.

He was the one who had set a trap for the golden-yellow girl, Saffron Blossom, the avatar who had held the ideal of zero total point loss. He had had the hell snake Jormungand kill her over and over and over. The very person who had brought about the incident that twisted the sixth star of the Seven Arcs, the Destiny, and the high-level Enhanced Armament Star Caster and turned them into the Armor of Catastrophe, the Disaster, was actually the Black Vise standing before him now.

“You…you…”

Now the Beast’s rage was Haruyuki’s. As if guided by an overwhelming urge to kill and destroy, the light armor covering his body abruptly transformed into something blackish silver and heavy, as a long tail slithered out from his back.

“You…killed Fron…!!” As he cried out, his facial visor came down with a sharp metallic clank. His view was dyed a pale gray, and only the figure of his enemy was set in sharp relief.

Even after Silver Crow had completed his transformation into Chrome Disaster, the layered avatar continued to stand calmly where he was. “Hmm. Very interesting,” he said to himself quietly, tilting just the thin panels of his head. “You know me—or, rather, you remember me from the past?”

The voice was not the one that had sounded so much like Kuroyukihime only moments earlier, but rather the low, relaxed voice of the boy once more. It was extremely quiet, but Haruyuki’s enhanced hearing clearly picked up the words uttered.

“How COULD I…forget…I HAVE continued to exist IN THIS world IN ORDER TO kill YOU.” The halting words were no sooner spat out than they turned into pure red flames and scorched the air.

Essentially, the reason the Armor of Catastrophe existed was to obliterate all Burst Linkers. The source of that dreadful urge was, of course, the death of Saffron Blossom. Blossom had had the ideal of building a mutual burst-point-sharing system and removing the fear of total point loss from the Accelerated World. For it, she was betrayed by thirty or more Burst Linkers, who set a trap for her. So then, he would give them the elimination they desired that resulted from total point loss. This resolve of the first, Chrome Falcon, had become lodged in the Enhanced Armament and spurred those who wore the Armor after him to endless slaughter.

However, in the end, the core of this massive, swollen compulsion was a hatred toward the three people who had orchestrated Blossom’s tragedy. None of the three had shown themselves center stage in the more than seven years of real-world time since that incident, and now Black Vise, the “restrainer,” happened to run into Chrome Disaster in an awakened state.

The highly pressurized desire for vengeance caught fire, and the tremendous, murderous urge that subsequently exploded in him easily blew away what little control Haruyuki’s sense of reason held over the avatar. An aura of even more concentrated darkness rising up from his dark silver armor, Haruyuki—no, the sixth Disaster—took a heavy step forward.

“I WILL NOT STOP slicing you UP UNTIL YOUR body is TRANSFORMED INTO a pile of scraps,” Haruyuki said, words riding on incandescent breath, and raised his right hand high.

The beautiful madder-red sky of the Twilight stage suddenly clouded over. Dark cumulonimbus clouds appeared from nowhere and gathered together in a spiral, swathed in pale lightning. A remarkably fierce bolt of lightning appeared from the center—the sword once called Star Caster, about to be summoned to Haruyuki’s raised palm.

Black Vise moved.

The panels making up his right arm quickly slid in from the outside as they sank into the shadows at his feet. With almost no delay, two thin sheets gradually rose up from Haruyuki’s own shadow to slam up against his avatar on both sides and tried to catch him. He had been hit with this before. It was Vise’s restraint attack, Static Pressure.

Haruyuki paused the summoning of his sword. “Flash Blink!” he called out quickly.

When he had been pinned between these panels two months earlier, the only way he had been able to escape was to crawl and yank himself free, losing all the Armor on his torso in the process. However, for the Haruyuki of the present, there was a way to evade it without injury: the ability left in the Armor by the first, aka Chrome Falcon—pseudo-teleportation. Long, long ago, Falcon himself had fled the super pressure of the thin panels with this technique.

Haruyuki’s body turned into countless minuscule particles and started to move forward at super-high speed.

Almost as if anticipating that reaction, Black Vise murmured, “Hexahedral Compression.”

Haruyuki’s field of view was closed off by darkness. Though it wasn’t that the light had been lost. No, a new panel had appeared before him to block his way.

His avatar, a mass of particles charging forward, slammed into the wall and bounced backward, rematerializing. As he staggered, his back hit a panel that appeared behind him. Flash Blink was basically almighty as a close-range movement ability, but it was still not true teleportation. His particulate body couldn’t move to a place unconnected to his starting point. There needed to be a hole or gap it could pass through.

“Grar!” A cry of rage. Completely surrounded by matte-black walls on all sides, Haruyuki had nowhere to go. So then: up. He decided instantly and moved to jump. But perhaps this action had been anticipated as well; with a bang, the gaps directly above and below him were closed off with black lids.

All light was extinguished, and Haruyuki understood that he was completely locked inside a rectangular box. And that wasn’t all. The panels on all six sides were closing in on him with a slow but certain movement. A fearsome pressure pushed against his head, shoulders, chest, back, and the soles of his feet, and his armor creaked fiercely, sparks flying.

“Gr…raaaaaar!” Howling, Haruyuki tried with all his might to push back against the panels. Unlike the total speed-type Silver Crow, Chrome Disaster was all-powerful, with a balance of speed and strength. Haruyuki was currently incomparably stronger than his former self. And yet the six panels didn’t even flex, almost as though they were the borders of the very world itself.

Then: He heard that voice, reminiscent of a young teacher somehow.

“Crow—no, Disaster. Just like it seems to be for you, this is also the second time I’ve seen this technique of yours. Before you slipped out on me, you see? So I made a few adjustments.”

The voice seemed like it was coming from all six directions. In fact, it likely was. It was the six panels themselves that were speaking.

“Graar…Graaaaah!” At Vise’s composed words, Haruyuki—or the Beast mentally fused with Haruyuki—emitted another roar. He pressed the claws of his hands against the jet-black walls and tried to rip through them. But even these claws, which had torn through the Armor of any and every duel avatar, only scattered futile sparks. If he had at least had his longsword at hand, he might have been able to pierce the walls, but this enclosed space apparently prevented the summoning of Enhanced Armament; no matter how he called for it, there was no response.

Howling like a wild animal, Haruyuki beat furiously on the walls with both hands and kicked with both feet. As if sympathetic to the out-of-control destroyer, the voice echoed gently once more.

“It’s a little sooner than planned, but I’ll be collecting and analyzing this armor. Unfortunately, Crow, I’ll have to have you exit the Accelerated World, but what you really want likely isn’t to wander the Unlimited Neutral Field in this state, either. Well, depending on the intentions of the president, there might be another road, but…”

Thmm.

The rectangle enclosing Haruyuki sank straight down. A deeply unpleasant sensation enveloped him, like both feet stepping into a lukewarm mucus. This was the “shadow.” Black Vise was sinking into the shadow with Haruyuki trapped in the box, in order to carry him somewhere.

A numbing cold spread out from his shadow-immersed feet and stole the strength from his body. Fused with the Beast, Haruyuki tried even now to rage, but the movement of his limbs gradually lost force. The level of the shadow increased in the blink of an eye, rising up to his thighs, his hips, his stomach.

Then, suddenly, a crimson line cut from left to right across the center of Haruyuki’s field of view.

The extremely thin line of light kept going around the right side, turned ninety degrees behind him, and then bent once more to join up with its starting point. When the red thread all around him disappeared, he could see the tiniest bit of the outside world through a thin gap.

Abruptly, there came a crashing sound, like thick glass shattering, and the jet-black hexahedron holding Haruyuki crumbled. Swallowed up to the chest by the shadow, he was shot out and tumbled heavily across the white paving stones of the Twilight stage.

Wide-open eyes caught his captor Black Vise standing straight, right arm missing as well as his left.

And about ten meters away from him, standing quietly near the western entrance to the circular plaza, was another black duel avatar.

Four flowing swords. Hip armor patterned after a water lily’s flower. A face mask reminiscent of a bird of prey on the verge of taking flight. The silhouette strongly resembled the shadow produced earlier by Black Vise. But he lacked the ability to perfectly re-create several features of this figure, standing in the golden light of the evening sun.

First, the semitransparent armor that caught the afterglow within itself and glittered beautifully, like black crystal. And the eye lenses shining a bluish purple, filled with fierce resolve.

Finally, ten or twenty minutes behind Haruyuki’s dive, the real Black King, head of the Legion Nega Nebulus, the traitor Black Lotus, advanced about three meters in an easy hovering motion. When he looked closely, the embers of a faint red aura twined around the sword of her right arm. There was no doubt a long-distance attack had been launched from that sword to sever Vise’s Hexahedral Compression and free Haruyuki.

However, the Black King stopped without so much as a glance at the fallen Haruyuki, instead favoring the inky layered avatar with a bloody gaze. Black Vise didn’t flinch, although just a look from the Black King was enough to send a newbie into zero fill. He smoothly moved armless shoulders up and down.

“I am indeed always surprised by you, hmm, Black King.” He spoke leisurely, voice uncolored by nervousness or anything near it. “Since you broke through so easily before, this time, I took the initiative of completely restraining and rendering the swords of your hands and feet ineffective, but…how on earth did you slip out? Though it seems that it didn’t come without injury.”

Just as he said, the sword of Black Lotus’s left arm was cruelly shattered about twenty centimeters from the tip. But more than enough remained of the blade itself. If all four of her sword limbs had indeed been held fast by some restraint created by Vise, then she had, by some means, first destroyed her own left arm and then, with that newly freed arm, cut her right arm and her legs from their bondage.

“I’m under no obligation to disclose my secrets to you.” The Black King’s response was curt. “After all, you were the one who preached the disadvantages of being too eloquent when we happened to meet before.”

Her cool, sharp tongue brought a light, wry smile onto the face of the layered avatar. “Ha-ha! That’s a point for you. Perhaps I am indeed a little too talkative today, hmm? But just when I had waited in vain for over two hours, prepared for it to end as a fool’s errand, an unexpected and wonderful present happened to come along. It was inevitable that I should get a little excited.”

“Hmm. From time to time, unexpected presents explode when you open them, you know. From the look of it, you’ve taken more damage than we have, and although I’m sure you’ve planned all sorts of petty tricks for my partner, I believe the situation remains two against one.”

Exactly.

Even while he was listening to the exchange between Kuroyukihime and Black Vise, the majority of Beast-fused Haruyuki’s mind was occupied with a cool calculation of how to completely destroy the loathsome layered avatar for good.

Given that he was able to set up simultaneous, large-scale restraint attacks for both Black Lotus and Chrome Disaster, Black Vise was indeed a formidable foe, but both restraints had been destroyed, and Vise had lost both of his arms. In other words, this likely meant he could no longer use larger-scale techniques, including Hexahedral Compression.

However, as he had declared before, his greatest ability was fleeing.

Just as he had said, Vise did have what was essentially the ultimate escape technique; he folded his own body up into a single panel, sank into a shadow somewhere in the stage, and moved that way. Countless pillars and walls were crammed together on the roof of the Twilight stage Mori Tower; it would be an easy feat to move through the shadows they cast to the edge of the roof. Once he reached the shadow created by the wall of the massive building, he could run off anywhere. For instance, the shadow cast by all two hundred thirty-eight meters of Mori Tower, as it stood illuminated by the westerly sun, swallowed up over a kilometer of the urban center of Roppongi by itself.

Thus, to make sure he brought down his sworn enemy and peeled one panel after another from his body until he brutally slaughtered him, Haruyuki couldn’t simply charge in recklessly. First, he had to remove the avatar’s avenue of escape.

“Grar…” With a low howl, Haruyuki slowly picked himself up and crouched down low, checking his gauges with a glance. Thanks to the first surprise attack to the chest and the pressure damage from being inside the box, his health gauge had decreased by just over 30 percent. But his special-attack gauge was nearly zero, crushed after he activated Flash Blink. He wouldn’t be able to use his wings or any other abilities for a while. In which case, rather than first aiming for Vise’s body, he should target the large pillars in the center of the plaza. Destroy those and take away the shadows Vise is in constant contact with.

Haruyuki himself couldn’t have been aware of this, but being able to run through these sorts of calculations even while completely fused with the Beast was an ability the previous Chrome Disasters had not had. Once they were clad in the Armor of Catastrophe, all they could do was rampage, propelled onward by the instinct to fight. As a result, their mental strength was gradually worn away, and in the end, each was as hungry as a large animal caught in a trap.

However, even while spurred on by an inexhaustible rage toward Black Vise, Saffron Blossom’s murderer, the sixth Chrome Disaster, aka Haruyuki, maintained the ability to analyze and judge, arguably Silver Crow’s greatest power. Was this because not much time had passed since he’d become the Disaster? Or because he was more deeply synced with the Armor than anyone else had been?

The answer came unexpectedly quickly—a mere minute or so later.

Surprisingly, the first to move was Black Vise. He leisurely stepped out from the shadow of the plaza’s central pillar, which he had stubbornly stayed so close to, and exposed himself to the light of the sun.

Under the red light of the sunset, he had an obviously different quality from the Black King, similarly ruled by the name black. Unlike Lotus’s semitransparent armor, shining like an obsidian crystal, the thin panels that made up Vise’s avatar were a matte black, which basically absorbed light.

On the tips of the toes—even these looked like simple pieces of black paper in a row—Black Vise turned toward the crouching Haruyuki. “Two against one. I see,” he stated calmly. “You believe in this boy that deeply, even now when he’s changed into the Catastrophe entirely. The bond of parent and child, hmm? To be honest, I’m jealous. Right from the start, I’ve never had any connections.”

Abruptly, the outermost of the panels that made up Vise’s right leg broke away. No sooner had it turned into a square in midair than it began to spin at high speed. In an instant, it looked like nothing more than an extremely thin, blurry gray disc.

“I am jealous. So shall I at least take that bond with me?”

At the same time as he spoke, the disc began to shine red like blood. Overlay. Some kind of long-distance Incarnate attack was coming.

Haruyuki braced himself, but he was somewhat confused after reading the row of information displayed in his view. Because, all it said was: PREDICTED ATTACK: INCARNATE ATTACK; RANGE/POWER ENHANCEMENT: SEVERING TYPE; THREAT LEVEL: 5. The predicted trajectory shown in red was also a simple straight line. If he were to believe the analytic powers of the Armor, the technique was such that it could be dealt with by moving a single step or simply repelling it with his arm.

However, this attack was not actually carried out.

“I will not allow it!!” the Black King shouted sharply, and charged toward Black Vise. The sword of her right hand was wrapped in a vivid blue overlay.

“Death by Piercing!!” She called out the ominous name of the special attack at the same time as she activated it, boosted with the power of Incarnate.

The tip of the sword shot forward, containing enough power to shake the entire massive tower, threatening to pull it to pieces—and the inky layered avatar did not move to dodge or defend against it.

Instead, the instant before the attack hit its target, his body changed form once more. In the blink of an eye, every part of him came together into a single thin panel, including the piece spinning at top speed. His body, now an extremely thin line, rotated dozens of times before drawing out a human shape into the air again.

A flimsy shadow portrait appeared before Haruyuki once more, again with no depth. But it was not the fake Black Lotus he had tried to deceive Haruyuki with before.

The edges were short hair turned up at the bottom. Armor at the shoulders and waist reminiscent of flower petals. Slender arms and legs, a cute baton gripped in the left hand.

The shadow portrait, which should have been a solid black, in that instant alone, reflected the eternally fading light of the Twilight stage, and glittered a dazzling golden yellow. At the same time, Haruyuki heard a name spill out of his own mouth.

“…Fron.”

On top of this trembling voice came the hard sound of impact. The sound of the thrusting technique the Black King had released deeply piercing the chest of the golden-yellow girl-shaped avatar.

As the girl slowly reeled back, she reached a hand out toward Haruyuki. Deep, deep in his ears, he felt like he could hear a hazy voice, like a faint breeze.

…Fal…

Crack!! A dreadful spark popped inside Haruyuki’s head. His entire field of view was dyed red, and the sky, the ground, and each and every terrain object disappeared. In the bloodred world, only the two entangled silhouettes stood out in sharp relief.

The girl with the sharp sword plunged deep into her chest dropped lifelessly to her knees and fell on her side before disappearing completely, as if sucked into the ground. The other figure was briefly fixed in position, at the end of her technique, but eventually, she, too, turned her face away from him, as if repelled. But he could no longer recognize this other, dark avatar.

Sparks burned his consciousness a snowy white. In that moment, the reason of Haruyuki, of Silver Crow—what little remained in the form of the power of judgment—disappeared completely. All that was left was a lone Beast, seeking vengeance and slaughter.

“Graaaaaaaaaaaaar!!” He roared with enough force to shake the heavens, and black clouds appeared, whirling in the sky once more. From their center, a bolt of obsidian lightning poured down into his right hand, extended high into the air. Instantly, it gained form and became a sinister longsword.

“Graaaar!!” Howling once more, the Beast kicked hard off the ground and headed toward the black avatar standing frozen a few meters away. That avatar was the attacker who had killed the girl he loved more than anyone else—his enemy.

Charging, he brandished the sword high above his head. The slashing attack carved out a trajectory of black sparks, filled with an incredible power. But as long as its target had a certain level of expertise and read the timing, it would have been an easy thing to avoid it.

But his enemy didn’t dodge. Instead, she crossed her sword-shaped arms—although the tip of the left had been shattered—and a vivid green light grew there.

The longsword clad in dark thunderbolts and the green cross drawn by the two swords came into contact. The incredible energy of their clash compressed into a single minuscule point and glittered like a new star.

Kwaaan! The power was immediately released and radiated outward into the surrounding air. Swallowed up by this energy wave, the countless limestone objects lining the roof of the tower crumbled silently and disappeared. Although the building itself was not taken apart like it had been when he’d hit the Green King, the impact was still powerful enough to turn the entire roof into a vacant lot instantaneously.

Even after the shock wave died down, the two fighters stood with swords locked. Each time the intersection between them creaked, dazzling sparks illuminated their faces.

Bluish-purple eyes narrowed in what looked like anguish beneath black mirrored goggles, his enemy appeared to be desperately shouting something as she held back the longsword of the Beast. But words did not reach the Beast, transformed now into a mass of senseless fighting instinct.

“Graar!!” Howling briefly, the Beast beat at the slender body of his enemy with a tightly clenched fist. Although his opponent tried to deftly respond by going around to the right, he vibrated just the right side of the wings, abruptly rotating his entire body to change the trajectory of the punch. This was an application of the technique Aerial Combo, which the Burst Linker who was now a vessel for the Beast had once trained intently to master, but even that memory no longer remained within the creature.

Wrapped in dark aura, the fist caught the enemy’s right side and drilled into it mercilessly, breaking and cracking her armor.

As though she had been blindsided by an enormous hammer, the enemy flew sideways more than ten meters, bounced off the wall of the empty roof, and fell. Before his opponent could stand again, the Beast used his wings to fly fiercely toward her. He had no sooner straddled the body lying on its back than he cried out once more.

“Grr…aaaaaaar!!”

He thrust the sword in his right hand into the ground, across the enemy’s uninjured sword-arm as a means to check her movement. Then he removed his hand from the hilt, tightened it into a fist, raised it—until he smashed it into the mask of his enemy.

The single blow sent cracks like spiderwebs racing across the black mirrored goggles. He clenched his left hand as well and slammed it into her chest. The tiny fragments that went flying glittered red, reflecting the sun.

Right, left, right. Howling endlessly, the Beast alternated fists to beat at his enemy.

This could no longer be called a duel, or even a fight. It was an explosion of the ultimate ugliness of resentment and hatred built up over many, many long years.

In the back of the Beast’s mind as he lashed out wildly with both fists, someone’s voice sounded weakly, kindly.

—It’s…better this way.

—I will take. Everything. That pains you.

—Because I am your parent, your teacher, your senior…

—And because I love you more than anyone.

The once-beautiful black crystal armor was smashed beyond recognition, countless fragments dancing in the air. In between these fragments, several drops of a different hue, a silver light, hung perpendicularly.

The source of the light was the sinister visor covering the Beast’s face. From the gap between the top and bottom biting together like the maw of a carnivorous animal, droplets of silver fell one after another, pouring soundlessly onto the shredded and destroyed black armor. Almost like rain.

Like tears.