Accel World - Volume 12 - Chapter 3

3

“I’ve always wanted to say that. The whole ‘on the count of three’ thing,” Lime Bell said, touching down on the virtual ground with her trademark vivid lime-green armor, pointed hat, and the handbell Enhanced Armament that made up her left hand.

Landing in the field a moment later, Haruyuki grinned wryly beneath his mirrored visor. “You said that so suddenly, I almost shouted the usual direct-link command, you know.”

“B-be careful! If you do that, you’ll dive into my private space.”

“That cushion hel— I mean, heaven. Heaven. I kinda want to see it again…almost…”

“Then once this special training is over—no, after supper—I’ll let you in.” Chiyuri nodded back at him. “Anyway, let’s go outside.”

Haruyuki looked around at their surroundings, but because they had dived inside a building, all his eyes took in were white walls. He couldn’t identify the stage attributes from this.

The balcony window was gone, but a narrow passageway stretched out from where the door had been. It should’ve come out into the shared hallway of the condo, but to save time, Haruyuki turned back toward the wall that normally had a mirror in it. He clenched his right hand into a fist and then looked to Chiyuri, behind him, for permission. “Um. You mind if I smash this wall?”

“Seems overly complicated, but sure, whatever. We do have to build up your special-attack gauge and all.”

“Okay. Excuse me, then.” He turned to the wall once more, sank down slowly, and twisted his body sharply while at the same time launching a right straight without really pulling his arm back. He was basically unaware of it, but this was close to the way Wolfram Cerberus moved—focusing on avatar mass and rotation speed rather than the swing of the arm. Haruyuki had unintentionally absorbed the fact that the heavy metal colors were more suited to this type of movement than the normal colors from their second meeting and now used a similar technique.

The punch—which was more like his whole body slamming forward—landed smack dab in the center of the wall, and the shriek of the impact sounded like the bullet from a large rifle hitting its target. But not a single crack appeared in the smooth white surface.

“H-hey, Haru. Are you okay? Did you take damage?” Chiyuri asked, concerned, since players could only see their own health gauges in the Unlimited Neutral Field. Haruyuki said nothing; he simply continued to fire punch after punch at the wall. He knew without looking that his gauge was not decreasing—and that every bit of the force of his blows was penetrating the wall.

Crrrrack! Soon, this incredibly loud sound filled their ears, and the southern wall turned to dust. The field beyond it had no sooner sprung into view than Chiyuri shouted again. This time, her voice was bright and welcoming.

“Whoa! Incredible! It’s so pretty!”

The sky was a milky white, lustrous like melted pearls. The buildings on the ground were also all pure white, looking very much like temples and sacred spaces, and large, regular octahedron crystals floated above roads and empty lots all over the stage. The transparent gems spun slowly, turning the light from the sky into rainbow spectra dancing on the terrain.

“A Sacred Ground stage,” Haruyuki murmured as he looked out over the rare, upper-level holy stage. “Been a while since I’ve seen this.”

“I’ve only seen it once in a normal duel.” Next to him, Chiyuri bobbed her head up and down. “Um, I’m pretty sure you can charge your special-attack gauge by smashing those crystals, right?”

“Yeah. And because you’re smashing them in the Unlimited Neutral Field, sometiiiiimes, you get item cards. Apparently.”

“What? Really?” Lime Bell swung her head to turn her eye lenses—some of the cat-slant of Chiyuri’s own eyes in their shape—on Haruyuki, but she quickly shook her head back and forth. “Nope. No way! We can’t! We’re not here to play today; we’ve got special training. This is no time to go looking for items!”

“I—I didn’t say anything!”

“We’re wasting time. Let’s get going! Carrying or piggybacking, which is better?”

“Uh, um. I’m usually the one who asks tha—”

“Then ask. Okay. Let’s see. Carrying, then.” The words had barely left her mouth when Chiyuri turned toward the right side of his avatar.

Fully aware that Chiyuri had managed to completely take the reins here, Haruyuki had no choice but to reach his arms out and fasten them around Lime Bell’s back and legs before lifting her up.

The green-type avatar excelled in defensive abilities, but she was a little heavy; the resistance he felt in his arms was greater than with Black Lotus or Sky Raker, whom he had similarly carried in his arms like this. But his sense of self-preservation was developed enough that he knew to keep that thought to himself, so he simply remarked, “Okay, here we go,” and his body danced up into the air.

The Kurashima home was on the twenty-first floor of the condo, so the ground was correspondingly far away, but Chiyuri had once jumped down from the top floor of the Shinjuku Government Building with him, so it was no surprise when she didn’t cry out at the beginning of their free fall. Once they had dropped about twenty meters, he spread the wings on his back and shifted to gliding. Fixing his aim on one of the crystals floating on Kannana Street directly below, he kicked it as he flew past.

There was an ephemeral clink, and the rainbow crystal shattered. No item card appeared, but his special-attack gauge leapt up to being nearly half-charged. This was enough power in his gauge to be able to fly nonstop to Setagaya. He ascended again and then hovered for a moment at an altitude that allowed them to look out over the city.

“So where in Setagaya does this laser Enemy pop up?” Haruyuki asked the girl in his arms.

As she took in the beautiful sight of the Sacred Ground stage, Chiyuri’s eye lenses flashed. “Oh, a little past Sakurajosui Station.”

“So, this way?” He turned toward the southwest, but rethought this and started to fly due south above Kannana.

Aratama Suido Road stretched out ten kilometers from the Koenjirikkyo intersection, where Kannana Street crossed Oume Highway, to the Kinuta Purification Plant along the Tama River in the distance. This road was so perfectly straight, it was hard to believe that it lay within the twenty-three wards, and Sakurajosui Station was along it.

Getting onto Suido Road a little west of the intersection, Haruyuki dropped altitude and flew at full speed a single meter above the pavement. Naturally, his special-attack gauge started to drop precipitously, but there were crystals floating on this road, too, so he head-butted and shattered one he happened to come across.

Far from being frightened by any of this, Chiyuri cried out “Go-o-o!” like he was a thrill ride at an amusement park. In the blink of an eye, the raised bridge of the Keio Line came into view, running along the border between Suginami and Setagaya Wards. He slipped under this, decelerated, and came to a stop, his legs digging out ruts in the smooth surface of the ground.

“Phew.” Still tucked neatly in Haruyuki’s arms, Chiyuri let out a small sigh and then lifted her head. “Ahhh, that was fun! We should’ve just kept flying all the way to the end of the road.”

“Y-you were the one who said we’re not here to play!”

“Don’t stress about the detaaaails!” Here, she finally jumped out of his arms. She looked around for a minute and then pointed to the east side of the road. “I found the Enemy near that big building there.”

“Big building?” Haruyuki cocked his head and called up a map of the neighborhood in his mind. If this were the real world, he could have just tapped the map icon on his virtual desktop, but there were no such convenient apps in the Accelerated World. Probably. “I’m pretty sure there’s a university here, maybe? What school was it…?”

“All the universities are the same on this side!” Chiyuri pointed out in an exasperated tone. “It’s not like you came to take their entrance exam. And there aren’t any Burst Linkers in college.”

“I—I guess.” What he was actually concerned about was the possibility of a neighboring junior high or high school affiliated with the university.

In the Unlimited Neutral Field, the places you were most likely to have an unexpected encounter with other Burst Linkers were first, near a portal; second, near a shop; and third, at any point where a large, huntable Enemy popped up—but a junior high or high school was basically next in line. In cases where multiple Burst Linkers attended the same school, they sometimes would use the school grounds as a meeting place in the Unlimited Neutral Field. Haruyuki himself had chosen the Umesato courtyard as the place for his final battle with Dusk Taker two months earlier.

That said, the flow of time in the Unlimited Neutral Field was accelerated to be a thousand times faster than it was the real world. Haruyuki and Chiyuri could stay on this side for a full day, while only eighty-some seconds would pass in the real world. The odds of crossing paths with other Burst Linkers in the same time and place were basically less than one in ten thousand.

And for all that, I feel like I still run into people on this side, Haruyuki said to himself before concluding that Setagaya was an empty area and that they were probably okay for now. Automatically, he wrapped an arm around Lime Bell’s waist in a tight hold and took off gently before he realized that his partner was staring intently at Crow’s face.

“What?”

“Nothiiiing. I was just thinking you’re getting pretty comfortable with grabbing me.”

“I—I am not! A-and you were the one who told me to carry you!”

“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, get a little higher up.”

“…Yes, ma’am…” Haruyuki would probably never win a discussion with his childhood friend. Fully aware of this, he ascended around twenty meters straight up. When he did, there was indeed a vast space on the east side of Suido Road. The large temples dotting the area were probably the university campus buildings in the real world. But…

“I can’t see any Enemies or anything.”

“Hold on a sec,” Chiyuri said and, with some purpose in mind, brandished the large bell of her left arm: the Enhanced Armament Choir Chime.

As far as Haruyuki knew, the bell had two uses. First was a direct, striking attack. The bell was terrifically sturdy and heavy, and a blow to the head would cause a ferocious bong to assault a player’s auditory system, temporarily stunning them, so it was a fairly useful weapon.

And the second was, of course, the special attack Citron Call. This had the extremely rare effect of turning back time for the target. When used on an ally, it recovered their health, while when used on an enemy, it returned their hard-won special-attack gauge to zero or forced their armament to unequip; it was appropriately showy for her tiny witch–like appearance.

But there should have been no need to rewind time in this situation. Wait. That can’t mean application number one. Is she going to hit me on the head?! Haruyuki cringed into himself.

The bell started to wave back and forth in a slow movement, almost as if in invitation. After a slight lag, a sound more reminiscent of a bell than a chime spread out in waves—riiiing, riiiing. After about ten seconds, Chiyuri lowered her arm, but the sound didn’t stop. Echoing off the surrounding terrain, it propagated endlessly, gradually weakening before fading out.

What on earth was that?

Before Haruyuki could ask the question, Chiyuri stretched out her right hand and said, hushed, “Look! There!”

To his surprise, his eyes followed where her finger was pointing and found something crawling out of one of the temples.

“Huh? An Enemy?! No way! Chiyu, did you call it?!”

“Calling it, it’s kinda like— So, like, Enemies react to sound, right? When I was walking around looking for a laser-using Enemy last night, I had the idea that maybe I could call together Enemies from a wide range if I used my bell just right. So I tried a bunch of different things.”

“A-a wide range? What would you have done if a whole lot of them had shown up?”

“It was a little iffy this one time, true.” She stuck her tongue out playfully as she informed him of this rather serious fact, then moved her right hand to call up her Instruct menu for some purpose.

You could set all kinds of different conditions for the visibility or invisibility of this system window, but as a rule, tag-team partners and Legion members could see it, so Haruyuki could also see the window as it opened with a kashak sound effect. Chiyuri’s finger moved once more, and the display changed to a list of abilities and special attacks.

Lime Bell’s only special attack should have been Citron Call. With this in mind, Haruyuki stared at the screen and then quietly cried out. Because, in the ability column, there was a row of text shining radiantly.

“Acoustic Summon…Call with sound? When did you—? This ability…”

“I told you, last night. After I managed to call an Enemy the first time, I opened Instruct, and surprise! There was this ability suddenly shining there.”

“Th-there was? That’s great…” Before the desire to applaud Chiyuri’s hard work and creativity, Haruyuki honestly felt defeat. He had been assigned a mission with a high level of difficulty: Obtain the Theoretical Mirror ability. Even after he was evaporated ten times by the Red King’s main armament, he hadn’t been able to come up with anything; he couldn’t help comparing his own dumb self with Chiyuri.

But having no doubt seen precisely what was going on in his head, Chiyuri bopped Crow on the head. “Okay, look,” she said, in an exasperated voice. “Acoustic Summon and the Theoretical Mirror that you’re trying for are on totally different levels! All I can use mine for is to call Enemies. Although if I could pull out hidden Burst Linkers, too, that would be super handy.”

“W-well, you might be right…”

“And if you get Theoretical Mirror, it won’t just be Enemies; you’ll have a hundred-percent resistance to the light attacks of other Burst Linkers, too, right? There are kind of a lot of red types with lasers. You’ll be able to use it all the time in the Territories. Don’t get depressed. Let’s get right to your training. I mean, I went to all the trouble of finding you an Enemy.”

“Y-yeah, you’re right. If I manage to get it today, Kuroyukihime and Master will both be surprised—I just know it. Okay! I’m gonna do it!” Haruyuki clenched his left hand into a fist—his right was holding Chiyuri. He felt like he heard a sigh near his ear, but he ignored it and started moving forward.

At first, the Enemy was nothing but a tiny silhouette, but as they got closer, its shape became apparent: an armadillo with a huge head. Covered in hard armor, the body was round, and the four legs were short. The forehead of its tapered head was excessively large, with an elliptical red gem, or maybe a lens, embedded in it. It moved its pointed snout from side to side, apparently looking for the source of the sound that had beckoned it to this place.

“You can see the red jewel in its forehead, right? It shoots lasers from there. I was far away, so I didn’t take a direct hit, but it pierced the buildings of the Ancient Castle stage, so don’t let your guard down, okay?”

“…The Ancient Castle buildings are pretty hard…”

“It’s fine. You’ll be fine. As long as you don’t die instantly, I can heal you with Citron Call. Its aggro range is about thirty meters, so descend right before that.”

“…R-roger.” Haruyuki nodded and started to swoop so that he would land with room to spare, fifty meters in front of the armadillo Enemy. Since the Enemy was standing still in the middle of a large space that seemed to have originally been the university sports grounds, approaching it was easy.

The floor of the Sacred Ground stage was covered in tiles with a lovely arabesque pattern. Its opposite, the Deadly Sin stage, was also laid with white tiles, but blood-like fluid oozed from the joints of the lattice pattern in that stage, while these tiles were the very definition of purity. The friction coefficient was also just right; there was no fear of your feet slipping.

Thus, Haruyuki and Chiyuri landed fifty meters away, their eyes fixed on the Enemy ahead. However, the bottoms of their feet did not communicate the sharp hardness of tile, but rather something wet and mucusy.

“Whoa!”

“Aah!”

Crying out, the pair tumbled backward at the same time. Half-immersed in the sticky fluid, they stiffened up in tandem, too. In the Accelerated World, liquid on the ground generally caused serious issues, and so any liquid a Burst Linker encountered had to be dealt with immediately. Haruyuki first looked at the health gauge in the upper left of his field of view, but fortunately, it didn’t appear to have dropped by even a pixel. Which meant that rather than being poison or a corrosive fluid, this was some adhesive liquid.

With that thought, he threw his upper body upward, again at the same time as Chiyuri. But their backs easily peeled away from the ground.

So then what was this sticky stuff? He dropped his gaze and saw that they were sitting in a brown pool about four meters in diameter. Ever so tentatively, he raised his left hand, but the liquid dripped off, seeming to leave his metallic armor unchanged.

“…What is this…?” Haruyuki cocked his head.

Chiyuri raised her right hand to bring the viscous brown liquid to her face. “Huh. No way. Is this maybe…” Muttering, she lifted her face and turned to Haruyuki. “Haru—I mean, Crow, open your mouth,” she commanded.

“Huh?”

“Hurry! Aaah!”

He did as he was told and ran a finger from the bottom of his helmet to the top. His mirrored visor slid up a quarter of the way, revealing the hidden mouth of his avatar’s exposed body. He had no sooner popped this open than Lime Bell’s index and middle fingers—dripping with plenty of the brown sticky stuff—were thrust into his mouth.

“M-mnghaamph!” Naturally, he cried out at this sudden assault, but she didn’t take her fingers out. Fluid was forced into his mouth, and the taste of it spread unbidden across Haruyuki’s palate. Slightly bitter, with body. And sweet. More than sweet; it was terribly delicious.

When he grew still, Chiyuri yanked her fingers out. “What’s it taste like?”

“…Chocolate…”

“I knew it.”

So then taste it yourself! he wanted to shout, but the urge was circumvented by a massive question mark popping up in his brain.

Why? Why would there be a pool of chocolate on the ground—and sweet milk chocolate to boot, Haruyuki’s favorite kind? This wasn’t an attribute of the Sacred Ground stage. Or had they mistakenly assumed this was Sacred Ground when it was actually a Sweet stage or something?

Sitting there dumbfounded, he wrestled with whether or not to try having another taste when—

“Puppet Make!!”

The adorable voice of a girl rang out through the field. There was no doubt this was a special technique call—the voice command a Burst Linker shouted to activate a special attack. And if he was hearing one of those, then the basic idea was that something, at any rate, was about to happen.

Haruyuki quickly grabbed ahold of Chiyuri’s torso again and fiercely flapped the wings on his back. As they rose up, he dashed backward about three meters and once again checked their surroundings—or he was going to check their surroundings, until what happened next stole his attention. From the pool of chocolate before them, splrp!—two human-shaped figures rose up.

“No way! It’s totally not deep enough for an avatar to dive in there!”

Chiyuri was exactly right.

But the fact was that two 150-centimeter silhouettes stood before their eyes. Their forms were very simple: heads smooth and round, with arms, legs, and body all clearly visible. They had no eyes or mouths; instead, each of their faces bore only a single flowerlike mark. They were a semiglossy dark brown—the same chocolate color as the pond they’d leapt out of.

The avatars had no particular characteristics to speak of, but one feature they shared was unique to them: The pair, standing side by side, had the same external appearance. But in the Accelerated World, it was fundamentally not possible for multiple avatars to have exactly the same design. Even the senior members of the Blue Legion, Cobalt Blade and Manganese Blade—rumored to be twins—had slightly different colors and part shapes.

“Wh-what on earth—?!” Haruyuki shouted at the same time as the two avatars charged silently forward.

Without even the time to notice that the chocolate pool spreading out at the feet of the avatars had disappeared, Haruyuki and Chiyuri reflexively leapt into counterattack formation. Silver Crow launched a sharp left strike, and Lime Bell cast her Choir Chime, at the chests of their respective opponents.

Instead of the impact of his sharp fingers shooting through hard armor, Haruyuki felt something wet and soft, like he had plunged his hand into a lump of modeling clay. His strike dug deeply into the chest of the faceless avatar and continued out through their back. With the one blow, the torso was split in half, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if their health gauge dropped over 50 percent. After taking an injury on this level in the Unlimited Neutral Field, they wouldn’t be able to move for a while because of the pain dancing through their nervous system—twice the pain experienced in a normal duel field.

They shouldn’t have been able to, anyway.

“Wha—?” His left hand still following through on the blow, Haruyuki opened his eyes wide.

The faceless avatar only staggered very briefly and then, without a single cry, countered with a right straight. The punch hit Haruyuki hard on the left side of his helmet, whisking away 5 percent of Crow’s health gauge in one shot.

Throwing himself back to avoid a follow-up attack, Haruyuki glanced over to check on Chiyuri. She, too, had knocked the faceless body flying with a strike from her handbell. But that didn’t stop her enemy, either. With a large hole in its body, the avatar shot off a right roundhouse kick. Chiyuri blocked it with her left arm. At the same time, she jumped and bounced over to Haruyuki’s side.

“What the—?! These guys are weird!” Chiyuri shouted, and Haruyuki bobbed his head in agreement.

And then they witnessed something abnormal that went far beyond weird.

Although both of the faceless avatars had taken serious damage to their bodies, the areas around their wounds suddenly melted, becoming a dark-brown liquid to fill in the holes. In just a few seconds, the bodies of the no-faces were completely restored, taking on their original smooth, dark-brown surface.

“So striking and hitting have no effect,” Haruyuki groaned.

“To begin with”—Chiyuri cocked her head slightly—“are they really Burst Linkers? Their armor seems sort of made, like—to be honest, like chocolate, I mean…”

“Oh, yeah. And the chocolate pool from before is gone. If these two are dolls made from that chocolate…Maybe we could find out if we took a bite?”

“You just had chocolate ice cream!” Chiyuri retorted, and in that instant the faceless avatars who had been steadily closing the distance between them stiffened awkwardly. Or so Haruyuki felt. They actually started to retreat, and he gradually stepped forward after them.

Unfortunately, however, he didn’t get the chance to taste the chocolate-color avatars. Before he caught up with them, the girl from before spoke again.

“Figuring out the weak point of my Chocopets so quickly! You’re not so bad at this, hmm!”

The source of the very slightly nasal, sweet voice was not the no-faces before their eyes. Haruyuki and Chiyuri quickly looked over to their left and saw a tiny silhouette standing on the roof of a small temple about twenty meters away.

She was smaller than the faceless avatars. Her armor was a similar semiglossy chocolate color, but her shape was different. From the long hair coming out on both sides from beneath a hat with a large brim and the large skirt-type armor covering her lower half, she was clearly a female-type avatar. Her eye lenses shone a clear pink.

The instant he saw her, Haruyuki was certain of two things. First, that this F-type was, this time, for sure a real Burst Linker. Second, that the two faceless avatars were combat dolls created with her power. The “puppet make” command they’d heard at the start of the offensive was probably a special attack that created dolls.

He had all kinds of other questions—for instance, what was a Chocopet?—but he put them aside for now and asked the one he had to ask before all others. “Why are you attacking us?! You…Are you a member of the Acceleration Research Society?!”

The chocolate F-type avatar blinked with surprise and then stamped a high-heeled foot down on the roof of the temple. “I belong to the Dessert Lovers’ Society! And you! Playing dumb despite the fact that you came here to hunt Coolu! As long as my eyes are the color of strawberry cream, I absolutely will not allow you to do that!”

And there’s another weird word. He searched the index in his brain, but he found nothing about a person called “Coolu,” so he tried to confirm.

“Um. Who’s Coolu?”

“It’s pointless to feign innocence! I was witness to your attempted attack on little Coolu over there!” Her slender left hand snapped up and pointed to the center of the plaza.

Shifting his gaze, he saw the small armadillo-like Enemy sniffing just like it had been before. “Huh? The Enemy? That’s ‘little Coolu’?”

“She is! The species name is Lava Carbuncle—Coolu for short. She’s my friend! I’ll stand and lose all my points right here and now before I’d allow you to go ahead and hunt my poor baby!” Turning her left hand on Haruyuki and Chiyuri, the chocolate avatar continued boldly. “Now you’d better hurry up and use them! Those filthy…ISS kits!”