Accel World - Volume 11 - Chapter 5

5

Pushing back against the gravity of the real world, Haruyuki raised his eyelids. The Arita living room didn’t appear to have changed a bit from before the dive. Which was only natural. The approximately twelve hours they had spent inside was only the passage of forty or so seconds on this side.

However, Haruyuki couldn’t stand up right away because of the feeling of exhaustion pressing heavily on his shoulders. This was perhaps the first time since he’d become a Burst Linker that he had died that many times in a row. Because the laser emitted by the Red King’s armaments was almost too powerful, evaporating Silver Crow in a matter of seconds, the pain and the shock actually hadn’t been that bad, but he couldn’t help but be embarrassed at the fact that there had been absolutely no difference between the first time and the tenth time in how long the evaporation took.

When he stayed buried in the sofa, head hanging dejectedly, Kuroyukihime, having plucked the XSB cable from her Neurolinker, turned a kind smile on him from the opposite sofa. “Nice work, Haruyuki. You really tried your best out there. Sorry you had to have that terrible experience.”

“Huh? No, I mean. It’s just…I didn’t learn the Theoretical Mirror ability, after all…,” he mumbled in reply.

Kuroyukihime, Fuko, Niko, and Pard all exchanged a brief glance, and then Niko opened her mouth on behalf of all.

“Now, look, Crow. To be blunt, we all thought the possibility of you suddenly awakening the ability in today’s training was fairly low.”

“…Huh?”

“The job Lotus asked me to do wasn’t to help you get Theoretical Mirror—it was to make you feel with your body what a light attack was. Because you’re so good at seeing what comes next and dodging in duels and the Territories and stuff, you only take hits from homing missiles or super-barrage machine guns.”

“Uh, yeah, well…” It was true that Haruyuki had recently become able to dodge pretty much all single-shot, direct, long-distance attacks—in other words, laser and rifle types—while flying. His rivals also knew this and had thus begun to ready anti–Silver Crow firepower, like Niko said, so his chances of being hit by a laser decreased even further.

“Whaaat? So that was the goal right from the start, huh? So then, Haru, how was it? You see some kind of secret to light techniques?” Chiyuri asked, leaning forward.

Haruyuki shrugged, grinning wryly. “I mean, it’s a secret, you know. It was totally different from even the other big red techniques, like the ones where they shoot shells or release flames and stuff, but…”

“Hmm. How was it different?” This time, the question came from Takumu, looking very interested.

“Hmm, right, okay. There was no explosive impact, and there was no smell of fuel burning. At best, it’s this flow of pure energy coming at an incredible density. My armor reflected the flow for just the first instant, but it quickly burned red and then melted and evaporated…I guess that’s what it felt like.”

“I see…In the real world, at least, I’m pretty sure that of all the metals, silver has the greatest reflectivity. Um, what percent was it exactly?” Takumu quickly moved to flick at his virtual desktop.

But before he could, Pard said, “Average of ninety-five percent of visible light.”

“…Why d’you know that?” her Legion Master asked.

The senior executive in her sailor-style uniform answered seriously, “I thought this might play out like this, so I looked it up. I don’t like waiting for net searches.”

“…I see.”

How very like this impatient alien, they all thought.

Takumu cleared his throat before continuing. “S-so in other words, this metallic mirror reflects basically all wavelengths of light. Put another way, that’s why it’s the color silver. Metals look metallic because they have a low reflectance in the blue light region. But the reflectance of silver’s not one hundred percent. The light it can’t completely reflect, a mere few percent, heats Silver Crow’s armor and evaporates him.”

“Ooh, I get it. So, basically, Crow’s not shiny enough, right?” Chiyuri noted, and Takumu stopped for a moment before nodding. And then, of course, came: “So let’s polish him. If that’s it, then we just have to polish him! Like with cleansers or something, until Silver Crow’s all shiny!”

After imagining the scene of everyone joining up to roughly polish his avatar, Haruyuki hurriedly shook his head from side to side. “N-no way! That will totally hurt like crazy! And it’s not like there’s cleanser or anything in the Accelerated World…”

“Well, it’s not that there isn’t any.” Kuroyukihime nodded with a straight face, freezing Haruyuki, but fortunately, she followed up with supplementary words negating this comment. “But no matter how much we polish him, his reflectance likely won’t reach a hundred percent. Even supposing we could get it up to ninety-nine percent, he still wouldn’t be able to withstand Rain’s armaments. The force of that remaining one percent would melt his avatar.”

“…In other words, that’s also how amazing Niko’s light attack is.” Chiyuri sighed, apparently giving up on the polishing idea.

The Red King twitched her nose proudly. “Well, it’s so-so, y’know. But Crow’s the first one who’s ever been able to withstand a direct blast of my guns at that level for almost five seconds. You should be more confident.”

“True. Showered in that for a mere one second, the armor all over my body was burnt.” Kuroyukihime was referring to the time they went to subjugate the fifth Armor of Catastrophe together and Niko had lost her temper, shooting Lotus together with Disaster with her laser canon.

“Tch! What’s done is done. And anyway, you’re black to start with, so it’s no big diff if you get a little burnt,” Niko snarled.

Kuroyukihime was quick to retort. “So then, given that you’re red already, you have no issue with being boiled in tomato sauce, hmm? We’ll have spaghetti arrabbiata at the next dinner party.”

“H-hey, look, this isn’t about the real world! I’m basically no good with spicy pasta! If we’re gonna do tomato, then a regular spaghetti sauce is good enough!”

“I’ll just say this now. I’m not good with squid ink spaghetti.”

“No one said anything about squid ink!!”

If he didn’t step up and say something, the two kings were likely to work themselves up to a direct duel, so Haruyuki hurriedly stuck his body between them. “W-well, if you’re both okay with tomato sauce pasta, I’d recommend Chiyu’s mom’s special pescatora. It’s full of seafood; it’s seriously the best!”

“…Oh.”

“…Huh.”

Perhaps imagining the taste, they both fell silent, and he was able to bring the conversation back on track.

“Um, so then, Taku, my—Silver Crow’s—armor has a high level of reflectance, but it’s not perfect, which is why it can’t invalidate a super-powerful light attack?”

“Mm-hmm. That’s what I think.” The brains of the Legion went on to suggest, as his frameless glasses caught the light, “So then what could bring the reflectance rate of a metal up to the impossible one hundred percent is the Theoretical Mirror ability in question, I’m sure of it. I said this on the other side, too, but adversity and action alone are probably not enough to get it. An image arrived at through knowledge is also an essential trigger. Put simply, you need to know more deeply what a mirror is. That’s about all I can guess right now.”

“Know a mirror, huh?” Haruyuki murmured, as if digesting the idea, and then looked again at his good friend’s face. “Thanks, Taku. I feel like I can kinda see the way now.”

“You do? We’re counting on you, Haru. We need your power to cut the roots of those ISS kits taking over the Accelerated World.”

“Yeah. When I was swallowed up by the armor, lots of people helped me out, so now it’s my turn to fight.”

He and Takumu nodded sharply at each other.

“Yeah, yeah. Sorry to butt in on this little love fest, but it’s about time to call it a night,” Chiyuri interjected, clapping her hands together.

“It wasn’t a love fest!” Haruyuki hurried to protest, and when he spotted a hint of glee in the sulky face of his other childhood friend, he felt even more awkward. He began tidying up the cables on the table to hide his embarrassment, and for some reason, Kuroyukihime and Fuko and the others laughed out loud in bright voices.

The shared mission between the two Legions was adjourned there for the time being. And there was a reason he hadn’t brought up the subject of Argon Array aka Quad Eyes Analyst at the gathering that day.

Naturally, Haruyuki had reported to Kuroyukihime and Fuko that Argon Array was a core member of the Acceleration Research Society as soon as the meeting the previous day had ended. They had both heard his story with the utmost seriousness and said they would begin an immediate investigation, but at the same time, they decided that the information should stay within Nega Nebulus; they could not tell the two members of Prominence yet. The reason for this was that if Niko or Pard was to act independently, the malice of the Acceleration Research Society might be turned against the Red Legion—in fact, the possibility of that was extremely high.

It wasn’t that they didn’t have faith in Prominence’s investigative abilities or fighting power. But unlike Nega Nebulus, it was a large Legion, with a general force of more than thirty people. It wasn’t possible to always be up-to-date on the status of all its members, and worming their way in from the edges of a Legion was the Acceleration Research Society’s specialty.

Thus, Haruyuki turned toward Niko and Pard as they got ready to head home and stood to see them off, while apologizing to them in his heart. He tried to see them to the outside door, but at the entrance to the living room, Pard said, “Here’s good,” and stopped him. Guessing that it would take her a while to put on her riding boots at the doorway, he bowed his head without protest.

“’Kay, see ya! Thanks for the curry! Make sure to call us when you’re doing the pescatora!” Niko called before shutting the door to the living room, and the sound of two sets of footsteps receded down the hallway. A minute and a half later, the door lock/unlock dialogue popped up in his field of view. Another few minutes after that, Kuroyukihime, Fuko, and Utai, all going home together in the same car, stood up and slipped out the front door—Haruyuki saw them off there this time—and then finally, Chiyuri and Takumu went home to the different floors of the same condo complex.

The second he was alone, a profound sadness washed over him, and he let out a thin sigh. Despite the fact that this was his own familiar home, the white wallpaper and hard resin flooring had quickly taken on the face of a distant stranger. Takumu and the others had helped clean up, so there was not a trace of the commotion of only a half an hour earlier.

When he glanced at the analog clock on the wall, it had just hit eight fifteen PM. On his virtual desktop, Haruyuki turned off the air conditioning and lights in the living room, gently closed the glass door, and returned to his own room at the end of the hallway. The wall to his left in his thirteen-square-meter Western-style room was taken up by a sliding bookshelf, while the right side was occupied by a semi-double bed. Neither furnishing seemed very suitable for a boy in junior high school, but he was simply using the things his father had left behind long ago when his parents got divorced.

As he increased the illumination of the LED ceiling lights slightly, set to a warm color, he moved to his writing desk, which faced the southern window, and then sat down in the mesh office chair that had also been his father’s. Although the desktop had been far away when he first started using it, even when the chair was raised to the highest setting, now it fit him perfectly, as if it had been made to order.

He set his arms down on the desk and launched the reminder app, another original from Kuroyukihime. He had one piece of homework for the next day, but he had taken care of it with the help of Takumu and the others over the course of the evening, so it was marked completed. Other than that, he had one task related to the Umesato Junior High School festival, which was coming up the following Sunday. The deadline for applications to bring guests, including parents and guardians, was in two days, but there was no way his mother would come, and he had no friends outside of school he wanted to—

His thoughts had gotten that far when several faces flitted across the back of his mind: The two members of the Red Legion he had seen just half an hour earlier. And Haru’s old rival in the Green Legion. Strictly speaking, Fuko Kurosaki and Utai Shinomiya weren’t Umesato students, either, but he was sure Kuroyukihime would invite them.

But could he really invite Burst Linkers from Prominence and Great Wall to a school festival that had absolutely nothing to do with Brain Burst? The relationship Haruyuki had with those girls was at best through the intermediary of the Accelerated World. He had met them several times in the real, including that day, but every time, the sole matter of business had been something related to Brain Burst.

After thinking about it for a while, he decided to table the matter until the following day and wiped away his virtual desktop with his hand. All the windows disappeared, and the icons quickly retreated to the edge of his field of view. He leaned back in the office chair, reclining leisurely, and his thoughts turned toward one more piece of homework.

“…A mirror, huh…?” he murmured to himself.

Wait, do I have one? he wondered, pulling open his desk drawer. It was filled with a jumble of things—memory cards of unknown content, cables of mysterious origin—but it didn’t seem like there was a hand mirror in there anywhere. And he didn’t have a wall or full-length mirror in his room. He found a chrome card case and pulled that out instead. After he polished it with the hem of his T-shirt, he looked closely at the glittering silver—

“Whoa, whoa, at least have a hand mirror or something. Geez.”

He heard a voice from behind. Half unconsciously, he retorted, “N-not too many junior high school boys have something like that, you know.”

“Huh? From what I’ve seen, Pile’s got one, though.”

“No matter how you look at it, Taku’s one of the few—” After conversing normally up to that point, he finally realized it: This was not a voice call via Neurolinker. It was a conversation using real mouths and ears. Which meant, in other words, the distance from which this real voice was reaching him…

“—?!” Haruyuki and the chair whirled around at an incredible speed, the force of which spun him all the way around once before he could get a look in the six o’clock direction.

A light-gray blanket covered the substantial, semi-double bed. Poking out from beneath that, torso leaning up against the extra-large pillow, face plastered with a grin and red pigtails swinging, was definitely the leader of Prominence, who had supposedly gone back to the Nerima area on a large electric bike earlier. It was Scarlet Rain, Yuniko Kozuki.

“Wh-wh-wha-ah-ah?!” Why are you here?! Haruyuki stammered the line like a broken audio file playing, flapping his mouth open and shut.

Even if, hypothetically, she had once again gotten a hold of an instant key to the Arita house through some means or another, a warning would have been displayed in Haruyuki’s vision the moment the entryway door was opened. But he hadn’t seen anything like that since everyone went home. So then how had she opened the locked door…?

“…Oh…! N-n-no way! Did you not leave right from the start?! You closed the door when you left the living room, and then only Pard went toward the entryway, while you snuck into my room and hid under the blanket. That’s it, isn’t it!” Famed detective Haruyuki called out with all his might upon discovering the trick to the locked room.

“No other way, is there?” Niko readily assented. “But I mean, you shoulda noticed when you came in the room. This blanket’s so thin, it was totes obvious I was under it.”

“Unh! …I-it’s just, I didn’t actually think anyone was here or anything…”

“You’re the sort that gets killed in the first ten minutes of a horror movie.”

“Y-you’re one to— Hey, that’s not the point!” Panting as he collected his thoughts, he finally happened upon what he should say next. “Wh-why?! Obviously, Pard was helping you, right? S-s-s-so why would you do this?!”

“Like I said, I fed them this story about staying out for the night, so I can’t go back to the dorm today. And it’s all because of you asking me for help, so only natural you take responsibility,” she told him, the look on her face saying it was the most obvious thing in the world, and he actually started to feel like it was only natural. He nodded unconsciously before shaking his head frantically once more.

“B-b-b-b-but my mom’s coming home today! What am I supposed to tell her?!”

“Although it would be fun to have you introduce us, we can do that next time. She won’t find out as long as I stay in your room. Oh! But let me use the bath first. And I need a change of clothes.”

“Find out…Bath…Clothes…” Almost belatedly, the cooling mechanism for the circuit of his thoughts could no longer keep up, and he simply parroted her words back to her, while Niko peeled the blanket away and sprang out of the bed to the floor. She opened the closet on the north side on the room and rummaged through the ten or so T-shirts on hangers there.

“You got terrible taste. No red? Red…Oh! This’ll work.” With a clattering sound, she pulled out a large, bright-red shirt with the logo of an Italian motorcycle manufacturer on it and headed for the door.

“’Kay, gimme about twenty minutes. If your momma comes home before then, you just take care of it.”

Kachak! She opened the door, and then Haruyuki was left alone in his room.

That was an illusion for sure—no, wait, the real issue is, how am I supposed to ‘take care of it’? I’ll just have to use the Cousin Tomoko Saito strategy again—his mind raced until, finally, there was flashing in the edge of his field of view to indicate that the bath was in use.

If, hypothetically, he pressed that small icon and then activated emergency mode from the home server operation window that opened, it would be possible to call up a bath monitor window, but of course, he would never think of—well, he would just think of it and then reject the idea. Haruyuki let out a sigh so long it lasted at least ten seconds.

Fortunately, he supposed, even though Niko’s bath stretched out five minutes longer than she said it would, the catastrophe of his mother returning home during that time was evaded.

“Foowheee, that bath of yours really is huuuge!” the Red King commented as she returned to his room.

Haruyuki went to toss her the bottle of mineral water he had just taken out of the refrigerator, averting his eyes. His aim was off, and Niko caught it just as it was on the verge of crashing into the bookshelf.

“Watch out! You gotta look where you’re throwing stuff!”

“A-as if I could look! You gotta actually get dressed before you come in here!” he shrieked back.

“I am dressed.” Niko looked down at herself and spread her hands out as if to say “What are you talking about?” And she was indeed wearing clothes, but just the single T-shirt she had commandeered from his closet, her thin, pale bare legs stretching out from beneath the hem. Although the T-shirt was large enough to cover her to the knees, since she was carrying in her right hand the T-shirt and cut-off jeans she had been wearing, he was forced to know what was under the shirt.

“Th-that’s not enough, is it! I mean!” Haruyuki shot back, covering 70 percent or so of his field of view.

Niko chuckled as she pulled the hem of the shirt up three centimeters. “You say that, but it’s just you getting all hot and bothered by your leg fetish, right? Right?”

“N-no—! I-I’m not into that!”

“So what are you into?”

“W-well, that’s—” He froze, and a screen in the back of his mind came on. The image shown there was for some reason the sword legs of Black Lotus, Sky Raker’s legs in their high heels, Blood Leopard’s animal-shaped legs, and he waved his hands—What is this, anyway?!—and wiped the images away.

Seeing Haruyuki like this, Niko smiled for some reason in full-fledged angel mode and sang, “Brother’s acting stra~ange!  ” This was followed by “Thanks for the water!” as she twisted the cap off the plastic bottle and drank deeply.

Without realizing its intensity, Haruyuki felt his heart pound hard at the sight of the girl with her hair casually down, the ends still damp, as he repeated to himself like an incantation, That is the Red King, that is the Red King.

After emptying half the bottle in one go, Niko exhaled heavily, set the bottle down on the sideboard, together with her clothes, and then flopped backward onto the bed. On top of the adult-size bed, she looked extra small, making Haruyuki’s heart skip a beat in a different way than it had before.

Arms and legs splayed, Niko closed her eyes for more than a minute. Just when Haruyuki was starting to worry that she had already fallen asleep—in which case, where would he sleep—she abruptly spoke in a quiet voice. “…If you don’t want to, you can step down, y’know.”

“…Huh? Wh-what?”

“From the vanguard in the Metatron strategy. To be honest, I’m annoyed at the kings. They were all shouting about putting a bounty on your head up to today, and now, as soon as there’s no basis for that, they’re all, ‘go get the Theoretical Mirror ability.’ Too convenient, no matter how you look at it. Those guys, ’specially Purple and Yellow, they don’t care at all if you end up in unlimited EK fighting Metatron, y’know…”

Her tone was restrained, but he could sense the deep indignation in it—and a note of apprehension. He wasn’t able to reply immediately.

Abruptly, a faint voice came back to life in his ears. Right, after the meeting of the Seven Kings the week before, too, Niko had suddenly shown up at his house. And when she was leaving, she’d said to him, Look, Big Brother Haruyuki. If one of us—or maybe both of us—lose Brain Burst, we’ll probably forget everything, everything about each other, you know. So promise. That when we find a name we don’t know in the address book of our Neurolinkers, before we erase the data, we’ll send one mail. And then maybe, one more time…

“…Niko.” Haruyuki finally opened his mouth, and the girl on the bed lifted her eyelids slightly. As he stared at her eyes, shining a deep green, he added, “Um…Th-thanks. But it’s okay. I’ve seen Metatron’s laser with my own eyes. It’s too powerful for me to get close enough to end up in unlimited EK. And Iron Pound asking me to be in the vanguard…I feel that pressure, but I’m also a little happy, actually. So I mean, I mean…”

While he fumbled and searched earnestly for the right words, he noticed that Niko had at some point turned her gaze directly on him. On her youthful face, innocence and a deep discretion coexisted, making him aware all over again of the fact that she was also a king.

“…I mean, they say I’m the only completely flying type in the Accelerated World, so basically, I’m a foreign body. Regardless of the fact that I’m a member of Nega Nebulus, for a lot of Burst Linkers, I’m just this irregular someone they have to figure out how to attack. In a way, I’m sort of like an Enemy. But I think Pound spoke to me yesterday as an equal Burst Linker. I was pretty surprised, ’cos, like…it was amazing. That’s why…That’s why I…” He had somehow stammered and faltered this far in explaining himself, but he couldn’t find the words that came next.

Here’s what I thought. I thought maybe, if I actually carried out my role as the vanguard in this mission against Metatron, then just maybe, that might be an opportunity for the five kings and Kuroyukihime—who’ve been so antagonistic for so long—to take a step toward each other. The way you and Kuroyukihime became friends.

“Right.” As if she had completely seen through into Haruyuki’s heart full of these thoughts, Niko smiled gently, clearly, and a tiny bit sadly. “Well, if you’ve thought it through, then I won’t try to stop you. But, like…just be careful. Metatron’s not your only enemy.”

“Huh? What does that mean…?”

“You remember what I said last week?”

Haruyuki blinked rapidly a few times at the sudden unexpected question, before replying in an unintelligible voice, “Uh, um. Yeah. Like…if I found a name I didn’t know in my Neurolinker address book—”

Suddenly, Niko’s face became as red as the T-shirt she was wearing, and the large pillow whizzed as it flew through the air at him. Taking it squarely in the face, Haruyuki heard a high-pitched shriek.

“N-n-not that! W-well, you do have to remember that, too, but—not that, the part before that!”

“B-before?” Cradling the pillow in his arms after it fell from his face, Haruyuki searched his memory once again. A single strange word came back to life in his mind. “Oh, uh, that? Um, that the Ori—Originators are monsters or something?”

“Right, that.” Niko already had her serious face back on, and Haruyuki gulped, still clutching the pillow. “At the meeting last week, pathetically, I freaked. But today, I carefully measured the information pressure of all the kings. It’s not like I have special abs like the Analyst or anything, but like any good red type, I got a bit of a scanning function in these eyes, okay?”

Haruyuki very nearly reacted to “Analyst,” but managed to control himself somehow, and asked about something different. “S-scan…? Like…you can see through things?”

“Idiot. Like a thermal scan or wind direction scan. If I really put some muscle into it, I can see the amount of memory info a Burst Linker’s built up, too. It’s like…how a ton of gravity’ll distort space. And at that meeting, radiating an information pressure that was an order of magnitude different from the others was first of all…the Green King, Green Grandé.” Niko raised one finger as she announced the name.

To a certain degree, Haruyuki had expected it. That evening four days earlier, while he was fused with the Armor of Catastrophe, Haruyuki had crossed swords with Green Grandé. In that instant, part of the vast amount of time the king had spent in the Accelerated World poured into Haruyuki, albeit just the smallest amount. “Yeah. I kinda got the sense too that the Green King was a little different from the other kings.”

“He doesn’t talk, much less duel.” A faintly wry smile crossed Niko’s face, and she quickly resumed her serious look before raising another finger. “And the second person was…the Blue King, Blue Knight.”

“Huh? Him? I kinda thought he was maybe the easiest of all the kings to get along with.”

“Because his tone and attitude are fairly informal. But, like…kinda so-so on whether that’s his true self, y’know? You hear stuff about him.” After showing the slightest hesitation, Niko lowered her voice and continued. “When Lotus took the head of the previous Red King, it was the Blue King who went craziest. Apparently, he rampaged like he was a totally different person, cutting through not just the buildings and stuff in the stage, but the earth itself.”

“Th-the earth is fundamentally indestructible.”

“That’s why, like, it’s a rumor at best. But it’s not sure if that lighthearted chairman from yesterday’s meeting is the real knight. He’s probably like the Green King, a Burst Linker with no parent—in other words, an Originator.”

“Origin…ator?” Haruyuki quietly repeated the word he had heard not only from Niko, but also from the mouth of the Green King himself. The parent-child relationship was the first bond a Burst Linker had. The parent told the child everything they knew, and the child worked to live up to the parent’s expectations. It was precisely because of this bond that Burst Linkers were able to love the Accelerated World—that was Haruyuki’s understanding. Because if you had no parent, then right from the start, every Burst Linker other than yourself was an enemy.

“My parent’s gone now, but even still, even now, I’m glad I’m Cherry’s child. Because all the many important things he taught me when I was still a chick are the reason I’m here now,” Niko half murmured, and she beat at the chest of the red T-shirt with her right hand. “But that’s exactly why I can’t even imagine it. What kind of place is the Accelerated World for the first Burst Linkers—for the Originators? What would it be like with no parent, no Legion, all you can do is fight and take points from each other, like…”

Naturally, Haruyuki was also unable to truly imagine that situation. But he could vaguely picture it. Because the Armor of Catastrophe he had been fused with until just a few days earlier was itself a product of the depth of the love and sadness of two Originators.

“In a world like that,” Haruyuki said, almost muttering, as he stared hard at Niko sitting cross-legged on the bed, “even in a world that was only fighting like that, I’m sure there were Burst Linkers who could understand each other through the duel. Like the way you and I did, you know?”

“…” Niko made a face like she was wavering between shouting and launching another long-distance attack, and then she smiled slightly, wryly.

“Guess so. Maybe there were one or two like you in those Originators…Anyway, we got off track there. From what I saw, the Green and Blue Kings aren’t really putting it out there. In fact, Purple and Yellow are actually way more up-front.”

“So then…the only Originators at that meeting were those two?” Haruyuki asked.

Niko glanced down on her own right hand, index and middle fingers still standing up, and then moved her thumb a couple times as if hesitating to add to that number.

“Yeah, probably. But, like…maybe…”

“Huh…?”

“Nah, it’s nothing. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is watch your back when you go up against Metatron. It’s not just Purple, who’s obviously hostile to Negabu. We don’t know what Green and Blue are thinking in the depths of their hearts.”

“R-right. Got it. Thanks for worrying about me, Niko.” Haruyuki bowed his head, and the redheaded girl grinned and rolled her small body over onto the bed. After a long yawn, she waved her right hand in the air.

“I’m going to sleep. Gimme the pillow back.”

“Y-you’re the one who threw it…” Grumbling, Haruyuki stood up from the chair and placed the pillow under Niko’s raised head. Which brought him back to his question of a few minutes earlier. “So then where’m I supposed to sleep?”

Niko used both hands to fix the pillow under her head as she rolled over to the left. Just like that, she closed her eyes and said, “’Night, Big Brother.”

This necessarily generated space on the right side, but still, there was the question of whether he could charge in there.

“Uh, um…A-anyway, I’m gonna take a bath, too.” Mumbling, he set aside the issue of the bed and hurriedly escaped from the room.

When he returned from the bathroom twenty minutes later, Niko was already fast asleep, complete with adorably soft snoring.

He picked up the half-empty bottle of water from the sideboard and drank down the lukewarm water before considering the optimal situation. Taking another blanket and going to sleep on the sofa in the living room would have been the gentlemanly solution, but his mother would naturally find him there when she came home. If she asked him about it, the only excuse he could think up was “There was a monster in my room,” and he certainly could not believe she would accept that. That said, it would be too painful to sleep directly on the floor of his room.

“Even if she is in another Legion, that’s still the order of a king and all,” he whispered, overcoming the logical and moral hurdles somehow to mentally brace himself and kneel on the edge of the bed. Keeping the maximum distance from Niko, he smoothly shifted to a position lying on his back and turned the LED lights to night-light mode.

The instant he was blanketed in the dim orange gloom, his eyelids abruptly grew heavy, despite the situation he found himself in. Just as he was about to drift off into sleep, he heard the small voice of Niko, whom he thought was already dead to the world.

“I wasn’t sure if I should, but I’ll tell you this.”

“Huh…? What…?”

“The person who had the Theoretical Mirror ability you’re trying to get.”

Half in a dream, Haruyuki waited for what she would say next.

“His name is Mirror Masker. He’s Ardor Maiden’s…parent.”