Accel World - Volume 10 - Chapter 2.06

6

The following day, Wednesday, April 17, was also lovely.

Henoko Beach had only opened for the season at the beginning of that month, but the temperature was already up above thirty Celsius before noon, which meant that the majority of the Umesato students had immediately jumped into the ocean. They all seemed to be having fun in their own ways, some riding swimming rings, others splashing each other with water, but as for Kuroyukihime, she was focused on relaxing beneath the beach umbrella just like she had been the previous day.

“Ahhhh.” She let out a long sigh and picked up the glass of coconut milk from the table next to her, taking a sip. She nimbly recrossed the legs stretching out from her black swimsuit and pushed up her sunglasses as they started to slide down.

“You totally don’t look like a middle schooler, Hime,” Megumi said, rolling her eyes in the deck chair next to her.

“If this were a real piña colada”—Kuroyukihime flicked the large glass with a grin—“it would be perfect. We’re outside the view of the social cameras, though. How about we try ordering one?”

“Then I’ll have a frozen margarita, thank you very much.”

“Oh, we better give it up. It’s still too soon for margaritas.” She cleared her throat and glanced at her virtual desktop, noting that the time was only twelve thirty PM.

The schedule for that morning had been very interesting, but rather hard. What with a trip to the Okinawa National Institute of Technology and a hike up to Henoko Dam, her health gauge had been fairly depleted. And that was not the only thing making her body heavier. At basically the same time she opened her eyes at the early hour of six, she got a dive call from Haruyuki Arita in Tokyo.

In the VR space Kuroyukihime loaded, he first apologized for the sudden call before explaining that the reason for it was because it was hard to be so far away from her. Sensing a sadness in those words that pierced into her heart, Kuroyukihime had a hunch that this was not the only reason. She was sure that something was happening at the distant Umesato Junior High, sixteen hundred kilometers away. Something that was making the boy Arita suffer, backing him into a corner—probably something brought about by the Accelerated World.

But Kuroyukihime didn’t press him about it. Although the words “something’s wrong” were dangerously close to leaving her mouth, she desperately restrained herself. The fact that he wasn’t saying anything about it himself meant that he was trying to take care of the issue on his own. If, hypothetically, he had asked for help, she would have immediately made up a reason to fly back from Okinawa, but right now was still a time to trust him, her sole child, and let him handle it.

She had decided this inwardly, but that didn’t mean she could forget her unease. She pushed back the sense of crisis weighing heavily on her shoulders and murmured to herself, Fight hard, Haruyuki. I will also do what I should as a Burst Linker here in this land.

“What I should do” was, at any rate, the mission requested of her by the two Okinawan girls who had abruptly contacted her the day before, but she still had no idea what the details were. They had told her there was some kind of trouble in the Accelerated World in this area, and that they wanted her to meet their master in connection with that. And although she had agreed to it, when she thought about it, Kuroyukihime was leaving Henoko the following morning for far-off Yoron Island. It was fine as long as this was a problem that could resolved before then. At any rate, she would hear everything from this “master.”

She sat up, took off her sunglasses, and spoke to her friend who had her eyes closed in the neighboring deck chair. “Megumi?”

Megumi opened her eyes and cocked her head slightly.

Kuroyukihime dipped her head. “I really am sorry about yesterday. Today, I’m definitely going to get you a proper souvenir. I am going to walk from one end of the shopping street to the other and find the perfect present for you.”

Megumi blinked rapidly and moved to open her mouth. But she shut it again, took a deep breath, and nodded with a broad grin.

“’Kay. I’m looking forward to it, Hime.”

After lazing around on the beach until two o’clock, Kuroyukihime left Megumi and headed back to the hotel first.

Her meeting with Ruka and Mana was at three PM in the same café as the day before. It was painful to use buying Megumi a surprise present as an excuse for going off by herself, but she couldn’t exactly bring her along. Hiding an ever-increasing number of things from real-world friends was one of the many curses on the Burst Linker’s head. But such was the price of the power of acceleration. The BB program takes as much as it gives—or so the veteran Linkers often said, but Kuroyukihime thought that the balance in the end might be in the red.

Because someday, when you used up all your points and caused Brain Burst to force an uninstall, all you were left with was an enormous sense of loss and a hollow reality. There was a terrifying rumor in the Accelerated World that the banished Burst Linkers lost all memories connected with Brain Burst, but if that was true, she couldn’t not think that it would be as much of a blessing as it would be a punishment.

Letting these thoughts race through her mind, Kuroyukihime changed from her swimsuit to her street clothes, and once she stepped outside of the hotel, she stopped for a moment to soak up sunlight so bright that it was hard to believe it was April.

“Okay!” she shouted quietly, to change gears, and set out for the front gate at a brisk pace. It was still only 2:10; she had plenty of time to keep her promise to Megumi. Don’t get so involved in the Accelerated World that you neglect the real world—that was the first rule of the Legion Nega Nebulus.

The short heels of her mules steady on the brick paving, Kuroyukihime hurried into the shopping district adjacent to the resort.

Carefully tucking away in her tote bag the souvenir she had taken forty minutes to select, Kuroyukihime approached Sabani and flinched involuntarily at the loud voice that rained down on her from the patio.

“Heeeey! Siiiiis! Over here!”

When she looked, Ruka Asato (aka Lagoon Dolphin), with whom she had battled the previous day, and her child, Coral Merrow (aka Mana Itosu), were at a table, waving at her wildly. That day, they were both in sailor-style clothes, the uniform of a junior high school. Now that she thought about it, it was the middle of a weekday afternoon. To make it in time for a rendezvous thirty minutes earlier than the previous day, they would have had to come straight from school.

She had absolutely no complaints about that, but on the shopping street full of tourists—more than a few of them foreigners—the snowy white sailor uniforms stood out even more. As a Burst Linker sneaking through the world, Kuroyukihime made herself smaller as she trotted up onto the patio and sat down, breathing a sigh of relief as she did. She ordered guava juice that day, which arrived quickly, and after taking a sip, she looked again at the girls before her.

They had said that Ruka was in eighth grade while Mana was in seventh, and that they were three months apart in age, so Ruka had been born first, and Mana later. Both of them should have been somewhere around thirteen years old, but she couldn’t help thinking that they somehow looked a little younger than that. Normally, Burst Linkers tended to look older than their actual age, and that tendency was marked in higher-level players. There had to be a reason why these two, magnificent veterans at levels four and five, had not a trace of this about them.

These thoughts flitting through her mind, Kuroyukihime stared absently as Ruka and Mana pulled worn Neurolinkers from their school bags and affixed them on their deeply tanned necks. Those necks had unexpectedly sharp “Linker tans,” but the students at the Okinawan school they visited in the morning had said that VR lessons had been introduced in only a very few public schools in Naha. Which meant that these girls had been wearing Neurolinkers from the time they were little for a reason other than education.

“All right, then, Sister. We’re going up today,” Mana said abruptly, lifting her face, and Kuroyukihime furrowed her brow with a Hmm? The pair didn’t seem to notice as they took a deep breath.

“Here we go! Three, two, one! Unlimited Bu—”

Pft! Spitting out a bit of her second sip of guava juice, Kuroyukihime hurriedly reached out her hands to slap them over the girls’ mouths.

“W-wait. Wait, wait, wait!”

“Nnph nnph?!”

“You two aren’t actually going to dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field from here, are you?!”

“Mmph mmph!”

“Y-you can’t! That is definitely not okay!! Doing something like that without a disconnection safety, what are you going to do if you can’t make it to a portal?!”

“M-mmph…mmph mmph…”

Here, their faces grew slightly paler, so she nervously removed her hands. Ruka and Mana took a deep breath, and after confirming that they weren’t going to shout the command a second time, Kuroyukihime stood up. She went around behind them and grabbed on to the collars of their sailor uniforms before saying in her scariest voice, “I will choose the dive location. No complaints, yes?”

Dangling like kittens, the girls shook their heads vigorously from side to side.

Then Kuroyukihime led—or rather dragged—Ruka and Mana to the full-dive space set up in the resort hotel where she was staying. The safest thing would have been to use her room on the seventh floor, but if it got out that she had brought guests in, both the school and the hotel would have been angry with her.

Apparently, although both girls saw the hotel from the outside on a daily basis, they had never been inside, and they stared in awe at the chandeliers hanging from the high ceilings and the interior of the cafeteria on the first floor. Ruka and Mana both seemed to want to take in more of the sights, but Kuroyukihime pushed their backs, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and paid the additional fee for the two of them at the reception for the full-dive space, which looked like an expensive café at first glance. Kuroyukihime was a guest of the hotel, so it was free for her to use.

Shoved into a four-person booth, the junior high girls were still muttering things like “Tehgeh [whatever], fine” and “No worries. Push comes to shove, the staff would’ve yanked our Neurolinkers off,” but faced with what the boy Arita secretly called the “ultimate cool Kuroyukihime smile” (which of course she knew about), they quickly fell quiet.

Kuroyukihime took three XSB cables from the rack provided and inserted them one after another into the router for wired connections built into the low table in front of the sofa. After making the two girls turn off their wireless global connection, she pushed the plugs on the opposite ends of the wired connectors in, whether they liked it or not.

When they were connected, Ruka and Mana blushed, saying “Oh!” and “Ooh!” but since she begrudged the time to comment on that, she let it pass and set the automatic disconnection timer on the router for five minutes later. Even still, the time inside until the safety activated was five thousand minutes—just over eighty-three hours would pass. If the problem was something that couldn’t be resolved with that much time, then the assistance of Kuroyukihime alone was not enough to begin with.

Finally, she connected the last XSB cable to her own Neurolinker, and turned to the girls sitting across from her. “Listen. I will meet your master as promised, but I can’t make any guarantees about what will happen after that. In the worst case, we may end up fighting. Make sure you’re ready for that.”

“Okay!” The pair energetically raised their hands together, so even as she worried about whether or not they really understood, Kuroyukihime opened her mouth to begin the countdown.

“Now then, we dive on the count of five. Five, four, three—”

“Oh! Sis, wait!” Ruka said suddenly, sounding surprised, and this time, it was her covering Kuroyukihime’s mouth.

“Wh-what?” She turned her head, and saw that Ruka had a finger to her lips as she indicated with her eyes Mana sitting to her left.

The girl, who until a few seconds earlier had been full of energy waiting for the dive timing, had changed dramatically. Hair pulled back into a swinging ponytail, she was slowly moving her upper body back and forth. It was hard to tell where her hazily clouded eyes were looking, and it sounded like she was saying something, but extremely quietly. Kuroyukihime couldn’t catch what it was.

“Wh-what’s wrong?” Kuroyukihime leaned forward.

Ruka restrained her again and brought her face closer. “Kandahlee…Her Yuta blood’s coming out.”

As Kuroyukihime watched over the girl, dumbfounded and dubious, Mana’s unusual behavior stopped as abruptly as it had started. She blinked several times, and when she turned her face to the right, the expression on it had returned to normal. The girl looked at Kuroyukihime with eyes a color reminiscent of the depths of the ocean, and said innocently, “Sister, one more!”

“…One more what?”

“This. This string.” She grabbed on to the XSB cable connecting her Neurolinker to the router.

Unconsciously, Kuroyukihime looked around the small booth, but there was no one there, of course, besides the three of them. The door was locked with Kuroyukihime’s electronic key, so no one else should have been able to come inside.

But in Mana’s eyes was a conviction she could not deny. When she reached out a hand as if to guide Kuroyukihime, the older girl took the fourth XSB cable from the rack next to the sofa and plugged one terminal into the router. With this, both cables and all connectors were used.

“So where is this plug going?”

At the question, Mana smiled. “Please just leave it there!”

She had no idea what was going on, but as a practical issue, there was nothing to do but that. Kuroyukihime set the plug on the table, and after puzzling over it one final time, she opened her mouth again. “Now, then. This time for sure, we go on the count of five.”

She waited for Ruka and Mana to nod, and then began the countdown. “Five, four, three, two, one. Unlimited Burst!”

The incantation to open the door to the true Accelerated World, the Unlimited Neutral Field, spilled from three sets of lips. Enveloped in a rainbow of light to cut her consciousness free of reality and carry it away, Kuroyukihime murmured, “My, my,” to herself.

In the twenty-three wards of Tokyo, she was the Black King Black Lotus, known to all as the destroyer of order, the betrayer of the Six Kings, but since the previous day, these two girls had been yanking her around. At the same time, however, there was something refreshing and nostalgic about this feeling. Almost like those days long, long ago, right after she first became a Burst Linker, when she was yanked around here and there, wherever the pioneers told her.

Carried away by nostalgia, Kuroyukihime didn’t realize that her guard, normally so solid, had slackened as she lost herself in leading the girls. Specifically, she hadn’t noticed a pair of eyes staring hard at her own back from behind a pillar as she led the two girls into the dive space.

The owner of those eyes stepped out from the shadows immediately after they entered the booth and started walking briskly toward the dive space.