Accel World - Volume 12 - Chapter 1

1

“…So it’s finally my turn…”

Haruyuki gaped as the pounding rain of the Storm stage beat down on him.

The owner of the voice was a relatively small duel avatar on the ground in front of him. His four limbs were splayed out, his body half-buried in the surface of the road, cracks radiating out around him. His full armor was heavy metal, a matte gray tinged with brown.

After school the day before, Haruyuki had been completely and utterly trounced by this metal-color avatar. He had been so badly beaten that immediately after the duel, tears of regret had flowed down his face. But overnight, he had managed to pull himself to his feet again and now, after a little special training, had returned to challenge his victor to a revenge match.

This duel ended up being the flip side of their first: Haruyuki had slashed his opponent’s health gauge down to a mere 10 percent by taking in his attacks and using them to slam his foe into the ground. But then something baffling occurred: His duel opponent, still prone on the concrete, had made this pronouncement about his turn, but in a voice and tone that were completely different from before.

Duel avatars—the virtual armor the Brain Burst program gave to the boys and girls who became Burst Linkers—lacked mouth and nose structures, except for a few female types. As far as eye lenses go, Takumu’s Cyan Pile and Kuroyukihime’s Black Lotus just had faint, shining spots. In the case of Haruyuki’s Silver Crow, the entire face was covered by a smooth mirrored visor.

Wolfram Cerberus, the mysterious metal-color avatar referred to as “the genius newb” by many, and his current duel opponent also followed this design line. His face was enveloped from above and below in a metal visor reminiscent of a wolf’s jaws, and the goggles inside could only be glimpsed through a gap of mere centimeters.

So Haruyuki couldn’t quite pin down where these words of Cerberus’s were coming from, lying as he was in a puddle of water on the road. Normally, this was when he assumed there was a mouth hidden under the visor, but Haruyuki felt a peculiar truth in his gut:

What had spoken had not been Cerberus’s head. It had been his left shoulder.

He hadn’t really been aware of it up to that point, but when he looked with this in mind, the shape of Cerberus’s shoulder armor closely resembled the helmet that encased his head. A form with a straight line popping up sharply like a wolf’s head, then a zigzagging line cut across the center like fangs.

Although the zigzag on his actual head had revealed the goggles inside until a few seconds before, it was now completely closed. Instead, the line on the left shoulder had opened about a centimeter, and a dark light radiated from within. This red glow colored several lines of water trailing along the armor surface, making them look like drops of blood spilling from the maw of a beast.

“Who are you?” Haruyuki asked hoarsely of the Burst Linker he’d driven to only 10 percent health via his specialized Guard Reversal technique.

“Heh-heh-heh.” The chuckle he got in reply was like metal creaking. “Who am I? It’s a little late for that, isn’t it? You just mercilessly beat me into the ground, Crow. And I know aaaaaaall about you.”

“Know? We just dueled for the first time yesterday,” Haruyuki responded reflexively, and then he shook his head slightly. “N-no, wait. Are you really the Cerberus who was fighting me until just a minute ago? It’s kinda like…like you’re a totally different person.”

“Heh-heh-heh, well, yeah. We were born like that, right from the start. You already know the meaning of Cerberus, right?” the left shoulder armor said, red light blinking.

Haruyuki gasped. In the back of his mind, the memory of the Wolfram Cerberus vs. Frost Horn duel the previous evening came back to life. His eyes had opened wide in astonishment when Cerberus had closed in with alarming speed and armor strength on Frost Horn, who was four levels higher, so Manganese Blade, an executive member of the Blue Legion, had explained the name to him.

“Wolfram” was tungsten, the heavy metal with the greatest hardness. And “Cerberus” was a creature from Greek mythology. Given that Haruyuki had played countless fantasy RPGs since he was very little, this monster was familiar to him: a massive dog with three heads, said to be the watchdog of Hell.

Three. Heads.

The instant his brain made it to this point, Haruyuki finally understood. Cerberus’s shoulder armor didn’t resemble a head; it was a head. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what kind of logic would give rise to a phenomenon like this, but at any rate, it was a fact that the duel avatar Wolfram Cerberus had been born with three heads. That was why he had been crowned with the name of that three-headed watchdog.

Most likely, the cheerful, polite boy Haruyuki had been dueling until a few minutes earlier was what would be called Cerberus’s primary personality. And the one with the rough tone conversing with Haruyuki now was the second.

“…Kerberos…” The Greek name slipped out of him.

“Heh-heh-heh.” The second head on Cerberus’s left shoulder laughed for the third time. “That’s right, Crow. Although it took you a little while to realize it. I’ll give you this, though: Your technique’s something else. You’re the first one who’s ever dragged me out in the middle of a duel. Such a thrill. Now I can finally fight, too.”

Hearing this, Haruyuki finally remembered that this was Nakano Area No. 2—that this was a duel stage. And that Silver Crow and Wolfram Cerberus were in the middle of a battle, with a large Gallery watching.

“…I know you have all kinds of secrets. But right now, none of that matters,” Haruyuki said resolutely, banishing his own amazement from his body. “Once you dive into the battlefield, all that’s left is to focus on the duel. Let’s continue this chat the next time we’re in the Gallery together or something.”

He glanced up at the health gauges in the upper part of his field of view. While Crow’s was practically damage-free, Cerberus had been thrown and slammed into the ground with Guard Reversal any number of times; he had barely anything left in his red gauge.

And the special-attack gauge displayed below his health was completely drained. Which meant that the effective time of Cerberus’s dreadful high-performance ability Physical Immune had ended. Haruyuki had already confirmed in the duel the previous day that given this situation, he could do damage if he aimed for a gap in the armor.

“If you’re not going to stand up, then I’ll finish things like this,” he said, looking down at Cerberus, who was splayed on the road. He straightened out the fingers of his right hand sharply like a sword and then readied them above his shoulder.

Even seeing this attack motion, Cerberus didn’t so much as twitch. He might have said, “I finally get to fight,” but it appeared he was ready to throw in the towel.

Or perhaps he was going to come challenge Haruyuki again once this duel was over. In which case, this would be a proud blow to welcome the next fight. A fundamental rule of Brain Burst was that a player could challenge the same opponent only once a day. The rule wasn’t duel the same opponent, because the system recognized the right of the loser to immediately petition for a revenge match.

“…Sheh!!”

With a sharp battle cry, Haruyuki took aim at the throat of the fallen Cerberus and drove his hand straight downward at top speed. A silver light raced forward faster than the falling rain.

In that instant, the centimeter gap in the zigzag line of Cerberus’s left shoulder suddenly opened wide, and Haruyuki realized with a shock that what he had thought was an eye was actually a mouth. The metal halves of the visor flew away from each other, and in the void of the darkness where they hid, a crimson light jetted upward like flames from deep, deep within.

The light scattered, coloring the raindrops, and touched Haruyuki’s hand, attacking on its propulsive downward trajectory.

“Nggh…!” He involuntarily cried out. It wasn’t that he had taken damage or that he had repelled it. His right hand was in fact being irresistibly pulled toward Cerberus’s left shoulder. Forced off course from the target of his attack—Cerberus’s unarmored neck—his hand was jerked toward the gaping maw of his enemy’s shoulder.

Then I just have to punch right through his shoulder! Haruyuki shouted to himself, and he put everything he had into piercing the red darkness shining deep within the armor.

But he felt nothing; there was no impact. First, his fingers, his wrist, then his arm almost up to the elbow were plunged into the dark opening, but his senses communicated nothing: no response, no sensation of touch. But that was impossible. Cerberus’s shoulder armor was exactly the same size as his head, twenty centimeters deep at best. Which meant that if Haruyuki’s arm was in there up to the elbow, then his fingers should have long broken through the other side and pushed outward already.

Haruyuki felt something cold and extremely unpleasant in his arm, through his shoulder, and up his spine. He fiercely yanked back his plunging arm to stop the charge, and his arm began to emerge from the darkness filling this strange mouth.

And then the fangs closed.

Clank! A bizarre metallic sound echoed through the stage. The members of the Gallery, watching the events unfold from the roofs on either side of Nakano Street, stirred so loudly they drowned out the din of the pounding rain.

But Haruyuki wasn’t conscious of this—nor even of Lime Bell’s scream from somewhere in the Gallery. A burning pain shot up from his forearm to the center of his brain. The sensation of pain in the normal duel field was restricted to half that of the Unlimited Neutral Field, but even still, a low cry slipped out from beneath his helmet. “Ghk…!”

He held his breath and opened his eyes wide. The sharp, tapered edge of Cerberus’s left shoulder armor had bitten deep into his right arm from both above and below. The fangs had dug down two centimeters into Crow’s metallic armor and were trying to burrow even farther in, making a disturbing creaking sound as they did so. In sync with this, Haruyuki’s health gauge was being carved away at a steady pace.

Tungsten, Wolfram Cerberus’s armor color, had the greatest hardness of all the metal colors. Up until then, that hardness had basically been used for defense, but in the real world, tungsten’s main use was in tools—particularly drills and saw blades. Put another way, this was exactly the kind of situation where tungsten demonstrated its real value.

Haruyuki decided his armor could withstand the attack, and as he endured the excruciating pain, he tightened his left hand into a fist. He took aim at the dark-gray body exposed at the base of Cerberus’s left shoulder and launched a series of short punches. His enemy’s health gauge was below 10 percent; Haruyuki should have been able to eat away the last of it with three hits.

But an instant before the first punch could land, Cerberus’s right arm moved to cover the weak point at the base of his neck.

Nonetheless, Haruyuki beat down with his fist but, hindered by the hard tungsten of Cerberus’s forearm, he was basically unable to do damage.

The reason Haruyuki had been able to unilaterally back Cerberus into a corner in this revenge match was because of the way he had broadly applied throwing techniques; taking his opponent’s blows and beating him against the ground had rendered Cerberus’s Physical Immune ability useless. In which case, all he had to do now was throw the already downed Cerberus down farther. But with one arm held fast in his opponent’s mouth, that would be difficult. If he forcibly pulled Cerberus up off the ground, the damage to his right arm might grow in scale, and he would be the one injured by the move.

What am I going to do?! What should I do?! Haruyuki frantically racked his brain as he vainly launched strikes with his left hand.

It had been eight months since he had become a Burst Linker the previous fall, but this was the first time he had been caught in a biting attack with enough force to dig into his metal armor. But if he couldn’t handle the technique just because he hadn’t seen it before, he’d never seriously be able to make his way through the world of level-six and -seven high rankers. No matter what the attack, there was always a way to counter it. Even in a situation like this, with one arm held fast and the other hand guarded against, there was always some secret trick to turning it all around.

Haruyuki. He heard the voice from the deepest depths of his head. Against simple hitting techniques, your Way of the Flexible will be an effective weapon. But you must not think you can win with that alone. Your opponent is not an Enemy that merely repeats the same attack patterns; he is a Burst Linker with knowledge and courage. Once he knows his blows will be repelled, he will immediately counter that. For instance, with a throwing technique, a hold technique, some kind of flying tool…

The owner of the voice was, of course, Haruyuki’s parent—the Black King, Black Lotus, aka Kuroyukihime. But it wasn’t as though she had dived into this battlefield; even if she had been there, the heavy rain would have prevented her murmured words from reaching him. Instead, this was Haruyuki’s memory. As much as he could, he had carved all the lessons from his swordmaster into the deepest parts of his spirit: an archive for all eternity. The voice came from this place.

And of those techniques, although it may appear staid, the hold is actually the most difficult to respond to. Because there is a great deal of diversity in the technique logic. In addition to simple physical restraint, there are many attacks that hinder movement with electricity, magnetism, vacuum, and viscous liquids. It is difficult for even a veteran Burst Linker to respond appropriately to all of these the first time they see them.

However, Haruyuki—in the Accelerated World, you alone have a seemingly effective method of dealing with more than half of the hold techniques. Remember the time when you were sucked in by the magnet avatar of the Yellow Legion? If, rather than a hold fixing an opponent to the terrain, the hold affixes you to the enemy himself…then fly! Fly with your opponent still attached to you. If you reach an altitude high enough to definitively kill your enemy with drop damage alone, then you at least will not lose. As far as I know, there is basically no one who has been able to crash into the most impenetrable object—the ground—and walk away uninjured.

“…!!”

His master’s words played back within him as a flash of light less than one-tenth of a second long. And the instant that light reached the end of his nervous system, Haruyuki shifted to action.

He brandished his left fist in the same motion as his previous useless punches. His opponent Cerberus’s second personality—maybe he could call him Cerberus II—continued to guard the sensitive area at his neck with his right arm. Haruyuki’s fist, which came down toward it regardless, this time opened up halfway down and tightly grabbed ahold of his opponent’s wrist.

“Unh…Aaah!” Howling, Haruyuki threw his upper body up. His special-attack gauge was nearly fully charged from the battle thus far. He poured all of that shining blue light into the metallic fins on his back.

Chak! The silver wings deployed. The high-speed vibration of the blade fins pulverized the drops of rain as soon as they hit them, turning the water into a fine mist.

“Grar…” Unable to speak, because his mouth was clamped down on Crow’s right arm, Cerberus II groaned like an animal. But he apparently decided not to release his biting lock. It seemed that II had not inherited the brilliant fighting instincts of the polite first boy—Cerberus I.

Once he had built up plenty of flight energy, Haruyuki stared at the black clouds above his head and kicked hard off the ground. A sudden fierce shock slammed into him as his left hand gripped his enemy’s right wrist and his imprisoned right arm stretched out below him. Given the relative weight of tungsten, Cerberus was fairly heavy for his small size, but not so heavy that Crow’s propulsive force couldn’t yank him up into the air.

“Aaah…!” Haruyuki cried out once more and flapped his wings with everything he had. Cerberus peeled away from the dent in the road surface where he’d been half-buried moments before. They ascended rapidly, slicing through the pouring rain. Haruyuki flew at full speed, charging upstream along Nakano Sun Plaza, redeveloped and reborn as a skyscraper some ten years earlier, and windows shattered one after another from the shock wave.

He flew up past the 180-meter-tall building, and after ascending another 50 meters, Haruyuki shifted into hovering mode. The very little remaining in Cerberus’s gauge would definitely be knocked out if he were dropped from this altitude.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the members of the Gallery—which had shifted to automatic Battle Follow mode—appearing on the roof of Sun Plaza as Haruyuki released his left hand. Cerberus II lurched to one side; now the only thing keeping his significant mass in midair was Haruyuki’s right arm, still caught in his mouth.

“The previous you would have blocked my chance to fly at first glance. I was surprised that your insides changed as well, but I can’t really say you’re stronger than the other one.”

“…Grrr…” Cerberus’s left shoulder growled at Haruyuki again, still biting down on his arm. The viselike pressure had stopped, fixing the distance between upper and lower fangs; the pain wasn’t so great that he couldn’t stand it.

As for Cerberus, he couldn’t exactly bite off the arm in his mouth (although more precisely, it was in his left shoulder). The instant he did that, he would fall helplessly downward from an altitude of 230 meters. He might crash into the roof of a tall building rather than into the ground, and with the Physical Immune ability active, the terrain objects might have acted as a cushion, allowing him to live with 1 percent or so of his gauge. But Cerberus II, the personality in control now, did not appear to have that ability.

Although the whole thing had sent a serious chill up his spine at first—the second personality in the shoulder armor, the force of the tungsten fangs’ biting attack—Haruyuki meant what he’d said. When he assessed the situation coolly, pre-switch Cerberus I was more troublesome than this II. Cerberus I was one of the least-compatible enemies Silver Crow had come across, but Crow was actually the natural enemy of Cerberus II, whose main weapon was a biting-hold technique. When II was yanked up from the ground to a high altitude the instant he bit down, the best he could hope for was a draw.

Having finally gotten this far in his analysis and regaining a little mental leeway, Haruyuki turned toward the avatar dangling from his right arm, not even trying to move, and spoke once more: “…Who’s your parent?” He didn’t expect Cerberus to obediently offer up an answer, but he still had to ask.

That day at lunch, during the special anti-Cerberus training session, Kuroyukihime and Fuko had told Haruyuki about two unfamiliar—and fearsome—ideas. The first was the “Mental-Scar Shell theory,” a mechanism for the birth of metal-color avatars espoused by the Quad Eyes Analyst, aka Argon Array, at the dawn of the Accelerated World.

And the other was the “Artificial Metal-Color plan,” a plan to push the Mental-Scar Shell theory forward by intentionally producing metal colors…apparently. It wasn’t clear whether it had been implemented or not. But Kuroyukihime and Fuko seemed to think that Cerberus’s too-sudden appearance and his battle power, almost impossibly ferocious for a level one, was something other than coincidence. That was someone’s will at work.

“Fight him and watch carefully,” Kuroyukihime had told Haruyuki.

He had drawn one new characteristic out of Cerberus, but it wasn’t enough to be certain. Thus, he asked for the name of his parent. But, naturally, he got no verbal response.

Instead, the mysterious metal color exerted a pressure several times anything he’d displayed so far on the tungsten fangs eating into Haruyuki’s arm.

“Nngh…!” Haruyuki groaned again at the lancing pain.

A disagreeable snap echoing in the air, Cerberus’s left shoulder closed completely. Silver Crow’s right arm was severed a little below the elbow, and the crimson damage effect dyed the raindrops around them the color of blood.

Taking damage from losing a part, the health gauge on the upper left dropped dramatically. But with this, the duel was Haruyuki’s victory. Rather than be peppered with questions while dangling in space, Cerberus II had chosen to fall and drop the curtain on this fight.

Haruyuki intended to watch his opponent’s resignation right to the end, and he shifted his gaze down from his gauge—

“—?!”

—and then gasped in amazement.

Cerberus was not falling.

To be more precise, he had dropped about two meters in altitude the moment he bit off Crow’s arm, but for some reason, he stopped there without falling any farther. Haruyuki wondered if Cerberus had hooked on to him with an ultrafine thread or something when he wasn’t looking, but if that were the case, Cerberus would have to have been directly below him. But his hovering enemy was off ahead of him by at least a meter.

Haruyuki’s eyes, opened wide in shock, could not discern any reason why his enemy failed to fall. Instead, his ears caught an uncomfortable sound.

Krrk. Rrk. Skrk. It was the sound of something hard being forcibly pulverized by something else. When he looked very, very carefully, the armor of Cerberus’s left shoulder was moving slightly up and down. That was the source of the sound—it was the grinding. He was chewing Silver Crow’s torn-off right arm.

The dreadful sound stopped after mere seconds. But the next phenomenon was even more chilling.

From Wolfram Cerberus’s back, ten thin, sharp protrusions—wings—started to slowly stretch out on both sides. They had the same shape as Silver Crow’s silver wings. But they were basically transparent, and the buildings around Nakano Station were hazily visible through them. It wasn’t that they were made of a glass-like material; they seemed to not actually be real, because the ceaseless pelting rain didn’t bounce off them.

But even if they were phantom wings, they were generating definite thrust. As the transparent fins vibrated, Cerberus floated upward and ascended to the same altitude as Haruyuki before settling into a hover again. The cries of the Gallery, ensconced on the roof of the Nakano Sun Plaza building fifty meters below, reached them as if chasing after them.

“H-he’s not falling! He’s floating!”

“Cerberus can’t be a complete flying type, too, can he?!”

“No way! He has that power on top of Physical Immune?!”

These sounded very much like the cries Haruyuki had heard when he first flew in the Suginami area eight months earlier. He was frozen, unable to say anything.

“Relax,” Cerberus said curtly, offhandedly. “My ability’s not stealing. Unlike him.”

This statement contained some critical information, but his brain could not process this in the moment, and Haruyuki simply parroted back, “Not…stealing?”

“Yeah. It’s Reproduction. Although even if it was stealing, you don’t really have the right to grumble about it. I mean, you took something important from me.”

“You’re saying I took something from you?” Haruyuki asked, hoarsely, his mind finally 70 percent back online. The answer was something even more unexpected.

“I can’t answer your earlier question about who my parent is, but I’ll answer this one. I suppose you could call what you took from me my reason for existing.”

“Reason…for existing…?”

“Exactly. More than half my basic potential’s sealed away. I only have the one power, the Wolf Down I used before. Because I was tuned for a certain purpose.”

“Tuned? …What’s this ‘purpose’?”

“Simple. Equip that thing you sealed off somewhere. I say any more than that, and I’ll get yelled at. And we’re out of time anyway. I only ate half an arm, after all.”

As Cerberus spoke, the wings on his back grew even more transparent. They lost form as if melting in the rain and turned into a hazy warping of space before finally disappearing. The gray avatar lurched forward. In the instant before he went into free fall, he tossed out his quiet final words.

“We’ll meet again, Silver Crow. I’ll finish up here today…And a message from Number One. He says, ‘It was fun to duel with you. Honestly.’”

And then the super-hard metal color, the source of many mysteries, fell to the ground, curtained by large drops of rain. A few seconds later, the thunderous roar of impact sounded, and the health gauge in the upper right dropped to zero.

YOU WIN!!

The flaming text burned brightly in the center of his field of view before the results screen was displayed, but Haruyuki remained frozen in midair, unable to move. In the depths of his ears, Cerberus’s speech from moments ago continued to play on repeat.

Equip that thing you sealed off somewhere.

That thing you sealed off.

Haruyuki had an extremely clear gut feeling about what this signifier meant. But even in his head, he seriously hesitated to give it form.

When the duel ended, the pounding rain of the stage turned into a drizzle, and the members of the Gallery applauded and cheered from the roof of Nakano Sun Plaza to send him off (although some of the voices sounded a little bewildered). But for a while, he wasn’t even aware of that.