Accel World - Volume 12 - Chapter 4

4

“Cocoa Fountain.”

The small, chocolate-colored avatar uttered the technique name in almost a murmur, and a glittering pink light shot from the tips of her fingers.

The light carved out a parabola and fell to the ground. There, with a burbling sound, the same dark-brown liquid Haruyuki and Chiyuri had slipped in before—milk chocolate—came gushing up. Instantly, the lesser-class Enemy Lava Carbuncle, aka Little Coolu, started moving toward them at a trot and sniffed at the chocolate pond before plunging its tapered snout in and lapping it up.

“She’s in the Enemy’s aggro range, isn’t she?” Chiyuri said quietly, and Haruyuki nodded.

The chocolate avatar was standing a mere three meters away from the Enemy now. No matter how slow and sluggish the Enemy, it would definitely attack at this close range. Haruyuki and Chiyuri had given themselves a margin of error and kept a distance of forty meters between themselves and it, but even so, they couldn’t say for sure that they were at a safe range.

“So maybe it’s been tamed?” Haruyuki wondered.

“But, I mean, don’t you need a special item for that? Reins or something, like Kuroyukihime used to tame that flying horse?”

“I thought so, too. But, well, I guess there are a fair number of exceptions to the rule in the Accelerated World.”

While they stood next to each other discussing the issue, the chocolate avatar turned her back to the Enemy, who was lapping up its treat in a trance, and marched toward them. The two chocolate puppets—Chocopets for short—that she had generated from the first chocolate pond had already disappeared, the technique having expired its effective time.

The avatar that stopped in front of Haruyuki and Chiyuri, wordlessly turning her eyes on them, was relatively small for an F-type. She wasn’t much different in size from Utai Shinomiya’s Ardor Maiden.

“I’ll introduce myself first. Chocolat Puppeteer…I do not currently belong to any Legion.”

“Oh!” At the abrupt self-introduction, Haruyuki hurriedly bowed his head. “Um, I’m Silver Crow. My Legion’s Nega Nebulus.”

“I’m also a member of Nega Nebulus—Lime Bell.”

Once they had given their names, the small female avatar, who apparently went by Chocolat Puppeteer, traced her cheek with a slim finger and nodded sharply. “I see. So you’re the famed Corvus of the Black Legion. And the Watch Witch.”

“Is that your nickname?” Haruyuki asked in a quiet voice.

“I—I don’t know!” Chiyuri’s cheeks reddened slightly as she shook her head. “Anyway, focus on the conversation!”

“R-right.”

Fortunately, Chocolat Puppeteer had fallen into a brief moment of thought. When she lifted her head, she nodded once more. “I understand that you are not ISS kit users. And that you did not come to hunt Coolu.”

“Th-thanks.” Haruyuki let out a sigh of relief before continuing in a more composed tone. “So is it maybe okay if we ask you a question, too?”

“Go ahead. Please.”

“When did you dive here?”

It was clear that Chocolat was lying in ambush for Burst Linkers who came to hunt Coolu, aka Lava Carbuncle. But an ambush in the Unlimited Neutral Field was no simple thing. Or rather, an ambush was basically impossible without knowing the dive time of your target up to the very second.

Chocolat shrugged lightly. “I’m pretty sure it was ten—no, eleven days ago. Although it was a mere sixteen minutes ago in real time.”

“E-eleven days?!” Haruyuki and Chiyuri cried out together.

The small chocolate avatar’s mouth cracked into a slight smile. “It hasn’t been boring in the slightest. I’ve been with Coolu the whole time. And…I don’t care if ten days turns into ten months. I mentioned this to you before, but I’m prepared to give up all my points on this dive.”

“…”

Haruyuki and Chiyuri unconsciously looked at each other. Losing all your Burst Points was the same as a forced uninstall of the Brain Burst program—that is, death as a Burst Linker. Too heavy a thing to say with a smile on your lips.

“Um. So what you’re saying then is that you won’t step back from protecting this Enemy—I mean, Coolu—even if it means losing all your points. Is that maybe it?” Haruyuki asked timidly.

“That is what I’m saying.” Chocolat nodded, moving her bonnet-type hat calmly up and down.

“But— That— Maybe this is the wrong way to say this, but no matter how many times an Enemy’s hunted, they’re restored once the Change comes, right?”

“That is indeed true. But the Enemy that is restored is at best one of the same species; it’s not as though the exact same individual is regenerated. The next Lava Carbuncle to pop up in this place will probably attack me the second I approach it.” Her voice shook a little at the end, and Chocolat hid her face under the brim of her hat.

Lime Bell—with a totally different armor color, but a similar hat and an overall form that resembled the other avatar somehow—took a step forward. “How long did it take for you to get so close to this baby?” she asked, gently.

“…In real time, a little over two years.”

“It did? So then you’re really friends now, huh? I get how you feel. I mean, if I made such a cute friend, I’d definitely want to protect them.”

“…”

Chocolat Puppeteer lifted her head slightly and looked at Lime Bell. “Do you really feel that way?” she asked quietly.

“Of course!”

“M-me too.” While Chiyuri was emphatic, Haruyuki was timid in his assent.

“So, then…” Chocolat smiled once more, somehow sadly. “What if the one trying to hunt that friend was also a friend? And a Burst Linker who had been a comrade in the same Legion only three days before? What would you do?”

Legion: Petit Paquet; members: three.

The members had discussed and decided on the Legion name, which means “small package” in French, Chocolat Puppeteer told Haruyuki and Chiyuri in a subdued voice.

They had moved from the large sports ground to the inside of a compact temple. The three sat in a circle on the white floor, elegant cups before them, faint steam rising up. The cups held hot cocoa, but this chocolate was not pulled from the ground with Chocolat’s special attack. Instead, it came from a porcelain pot that had appeared together with the cups, made into objects from her storage.

As a general rule, your only option was to buy items at the shop if you wanted food or drink in the Unlimited Neutral Field. The currency was, naturally, burst points, but players who had only just set foot in this world didn’t really have the points to spare for that. Which meant Chocolat was somewhat of a veteran, but her level was four, one below Haruyuki’s.

“Our Legion wasn’t especially passionate about normal duels, much less so the Territories. We’d go to the Shibuya or Meguro areas next door on the weekends and fight a few tag-team matches, and that’s about it. Which is why it took me nearly two years to reach level four, and the fact that I cleared the Legion Master quest was honestly miraculous.”

“Huh? Don’t you need a minimum of four people for the LMQ?” Haruyuki blurted.

The dark-chocolate avatar smiled ever so faintly. “The reason they say you need four people is because there are several puzzle gimmicks that require operation in four different places at the same time, but I have my Chocopets, so.”

“Oh. Ohhh. I get it.”

“That was also a part of my miraculous luck,” the tiny avatar said, then brought her cup of cocoa to her mouth.

Haruyuki watched her for a while, pushed into silence. The members of Nega Nebulus almost never went on expeditions to Shibuya or Meguro, so perhaps it was only natural that he didn’t know Chocolat’s name, given that she’d made those areas her main battleground. But an apologetic feeling still rose up in his chest.

Up to that point, he’d always treated Setagaya like an empty area. He’d never turned his feet in that direction—even though it bordered his home of Suginami—but there were indeed Burst Linkers in that region, too. Chiyuri apparently felt the same way, as she took on a formal position and bowed her head.

“I’m so sorry. I thought there was no one in this area. So I came here looking for Enemies.”

“It’s fine. In fact, even if you combined Setagaya Areas One through Five, you’d still only get a couple dozen or so Burst Linkers. If you had dived an hour later, you…wouldn’t have come across me or anyone else,” Chocolat murmured. “They’ll have taken care of everything by then.”

Haruyuki lifted his hanging head. “Um. You told us a little about this before, but you’re on standby in this place to fight the people coming to hunt Coolu, right?” he asked timidly. “And you said they’re your friends—members of the Legion Petit Paquet. You all came this far together?”

“That’s exactly right— No, our relationship goes beyond that. One of them is my parent, and the other my child.”

“…!!”

Haruyuki and Chiyuri both gasped. But when he really thought about it, this wasn’t strange at all. In fact, it was only natural that there would be parent and child among the members of a small-scale Legion. In the six-member army of Nega Nebulus, after all, there were four with parent-child relationships: Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime, and Takumu and Chiyuri.

But in that case, it was all the more curious—why would Chocolat’s parent and child try to hunt the Lava Carbuncle she’d spent two years building a friendship with? From its size, that Enemy was no doubt a lesser class; they definitely wouldn’t get that many points for defeating it.

Perhaps seeing the question in Haruyuki and Chiyuri’s minds, Chocolat Puppeteer lowered her cherry-pink eye lenses sadly. “Three days ago, on Sunday evening, everything changed—no, everything was lost. My parent, Mint Mitten, and my child, Plum Flipper, were forcibly parasitized by ISS kits. In that instant—”

“What?!”

“Th-that’s—!”

Simultaneous cries of surprise burst out of Haruyuki and Chiyuri.

“Ah!” Haruyuki leaned forward and squeezed his question out. “The ISS kits, they can only parasitize Burst Linkers who want that themselves, can’t they?!”

“That’s what I heard, too! I mean, if it was possible to force the parasite, then they wouldn’t have needed to do that whole thing during the Hermes’ Cord race, would they?!”

Chiyuri’s observation was correct.

In the final stage of the Hermes’ Cord race held on June 9, after secretly slipping in among the participating teams, the Acceleration Research Society’s Rust Jigsaw had activated Rust Order, a fourth-quadrant Incarnate—negative will targeting a broad range—going so far as to slaughter not only the race participants but the many spectators in the Gallery.

The Acceleration Research Society’s intention was assumed to have been to make widely known across the Accelerated World the overwhelming power of dark Incarnate and make Burst Linkers more likely to reach out to the ISS kit, an Enhanced Armament that could easily be attached to the body.

In fact, Ash Roller’s junior avatar, Bush Utan, had turned to Haruyuki and said, “IS mode has that kind of incredible power. The ultimate power, skipping over all the rules of Brain Burst, even.” And: “But this ISS kit makes even losers strong. Like the more of a loser you are, the stronger you can get.”

The reason Utan had been overtaken by the ISS kit was because he had first had this awareness of that power. Put another way, if forced parasitization were possible, then just as Chiyuri noted, there would have been no need to carry out a demonstration like that during the race. If they simply challenged Burst Linkers on the matching list one after another, they could have easily succeeded in the Society’s objective of spreading the ISS kits throughout the Accelerated World—although Haruyuki still didn’t know what they were hoping to achieve with that.

Chocolat took this in and let out a long, deep sigh. “I, along with my two comrades, also understood this to be the case. We never sought out any suspicious power. It was enough for us to simply protect our small box in a corner of the Accelerated World. The truth is, I had no intention of going up any further levels. Our desire was to dive all together once or twice a week into the Unlimited Neutral Field, chat, feed Coolu, sit alongside one another and wait for the Change, simply spending the time like that…”

Chocolat hugged her knees tight, perhaps reliving sad, painful memories, and continued.

“That is why when she appeared before us to invite us to accept the ISS kit, we flatly refused. Because we had heard that you wouldn’t be parasitized by that black eyeball if you sincerely refused it. However—when we did so, she said, ‘Then you’ll need surgery, hmm?’ and attacked us. There were three of us and two of them, but we were basically no match for IS mode. They caught Plum first. They cut her chest open with large scissors and put the kit seed in.”

“S-scissors?!” Haruyuki felt a pinch in his memory.

But before he could actually dig into that memory, Chocolat said, even more sorrowfully, “Seeing this, Mitten told me to escape through a portal and pull out their direct cables on the real side. I ran desperately for the leave point at Sakurajosui Station, returned to the real world, and pulled out the cables of the two who had dived with me. However, by that point, Mitten had also already fallen into their hands…but neither of them appeared much different immediately after bursting out. They laughed and said they hadn’t been parasitized by ISS kits. But…”

“…It was too late…?” Chiyuri asked in a quiet voice.

Chocolat hung her head deeply. “In the space of one night…the next day…they were no longer the Mitten and Plum that I knew. They urged me to accept an ISS kit as well. When I refused, they said they were leaving the Legion. Since that day, they’ve been her comrades, hunting small- and midsize Enemies in the Unlimited Neutral Field in Setagawa.”

“This ‘her,’ is it maybe”—Haruyuki timidly gave voice to the name that had finally come back to him—“is it maybe a Burst Linker called Magenta Scissor?”

Chocolat jerked her face up, only to drop her shoulders once more before nodding. “Yes, it is. She was likely the first ISS kit user in the Setagaya area. Now everyone other than me is already on her side.”

Magenta Scissor.

Haruyuki had heard this name from the mouth of his best friend and Legion comrade, Takumu Mayuzumi. Eight days earlier—on the night of Tuesday, June 18—Takumu had visited the Setagaya area alone to get information on the ISS kits, and he had been given the very item by Magenta Scissor. At that time, the kit was in sealed card form, and Takumu had saved this in his storage. But the next day, June 19, he had been attacked by the most fearsome PK group, Supernova Remnant, and to fight back, he had activated the kit. That night, Haruyuki and Chiyuri went to sleep while connected with Takumu, and by attacking the ISS kit main body in the Brain Burst central server, they had just barely managed to remove the kit terminal parasitizing Takumu.

However, that said, naturally, it wasn’t as though the kit’s disappearance had destroyed the source of reproduction, Magenta Scissor’s kit. Scissor continued to distribute the kits in the Setagaya area until finally—he supposed—three days earlier, she had attacked Chocolat and her Petit Paquet near the border of Suginami, where they had been living quietly.

“Then there aren’t any more Burst Linkers in Setagaya for Magenta Scissor and them to target, so they’re hunting Enemies instead?” Haruyuki asked.

“That appears to be the case.” Chocolat assented once more. “And it seems that even with the power of IS mode, opponents of the Beast class and up are too much for them, so they’re only hunting Wild and lesser classes. I…I begged and pleaded with the changed Mitten and Plum to at least let Coolu live, but…”

Here, abruptly, a single transparent droplet spilled out of Chocolat Puppeteer’s cherry eye lens.

“With every passing day, the two of them grew colder. And finally today, they said this to me: That if Coolu died, then I would give up and also join Magenta Scissor. They said they and their friends would come to hunt Coolu after school…which is why…which is why I…”

Another tear spilled onto her chocolate cheek. Before it had a chance to fall to the floor, Chiyuri reached out and gently embraced Chocolat.

“That’s why you’ve been waiting here all this time. To protect Coolu…I’m sorry we scared you.”

There was no way he could also do something like hug Chocolat, so instead, Haruyuki bowed his head. “I-I’m sorry too. To make up for it, we’ll help you. Let’s protect Coolu together.”

Even hearing this, Chocolat Puppeteer didn’t react right away. Her shoulders continued to shake in Chiyuri’s arms for longer than ten full seconds before she finally uttered, “I didn’t think I could really protect Coolu. On the color wheel, I’m between yellow and red, more long-distance and indirect engagement—more of a support type. But I…I do have a means of an absolute direct attack that I can use against only Mint Mitten and Plum Flipper, my former friends.”

Haruyuki wasn’t immediately able to grasp the meaning of this, but from Chocolat’s tense air, he caught her true intention. Chiyuri seemed to realize it at the same time. “Judgment Blow?” they murmured together.

Chocolat nodded very slightly and continued feebly, “In the Legion Master quest, we all worked together and took on the challenge, but the one who obtained the clear item…was me. Mitten and Plum have already left the Legion, but for one month, I have the right to judge them. I think that’s my only choice now. Not to protect Coolu, but to save them. They’re parasitized by the ISS kits, and it is having an effect on their real personalities, too.”

“…”

An attack on Carbuncle by three or four people was something that could be fended off with the help of Haruyuki and Chiyuri. But it was impossible to get rid of the ISS kits parasitizing Chocolat’s friends with an attack inside the Accelerated World. Last Thursday, Haruyuki had witnessed ISS kit users attacking Ash Roller and Bush Utan, members of the Green Legion, in this very Unlimited Neutral Field. Spurred on by a dizzying rage, he had summoned the Armor of Catastrophe that lay sleeping in his avatar and fought the six kit users. In the middle of that battle, Haruyuki had ripped out the kit parasitizing one of his enemies and crushed it.

A strange light had escaped from the destroyed “red eyeball,” and he had chased after it to its destination, Tokyo Midtown Tower, guarded by the Archangel Metatron—but the light that had fled was itself most likely the core of the ISS kits. Even though the eyeball was crushed, the kit hadn’t disappeared. If they were going to resolve the situation with offensive power in the Accelerated World, their only option was to hit what was thought to be the kit main body that existed on the top floor of Midtown Tower.

And if that was the case, then maybe the only option was to use the Judgment Blow to liberate Mint Mitten and Plum Flipper from their ISS kits, just like Chocolat said. But—that was a final solution and at the same time a tragic conclusion. Because Burst Linkers who lost Brain Burst also lost all memories related to the Accelerated World.

Unable to find anything to say, Haruyuki simply and intently clenched his hands together. In his heart, one thought alone spun round and round: If only I’d mastered the Theoretical Mirror ability already. Then maybe, right about now, the seven Legions would be cooperatively carrying out the Metatron mission and trying to destroy the ISS kit main body. And then, if they succeeded, Chocolat Puppeteer wouldn’t have to be suffering like this…

Wait. The thing I should really be yelled at for is my lack of imagination. Even though I found out however many days ago that the ISS kits were spreading through Arakawa, Koto, and then Setagawa, I acted like it was someone else’s problem. I figured they were empty areas, so it was still okay. The thought never crossed my mind that there were Burst Linkers suffering there, too. I just selfishly kept thinking we’d figure something out before it got to Suginami and Nerima.

“Sorry. I’m sorry, Chocolat…I…If only I’d—,” he squeezed out, unthinkingly.

“Crow.” Chiyuri snapped her right hand up to cut him off. “This is a bad habit of yours. Making everything your own fault, and on top of that, thinking that it’s already too late,” she asserted curtly.

“B-but”—he raised his eyes a little—“if I hadn’t been dragging my feet…”

“You’ve been doing everything you can! And there’s still work you can do. Chocolat, you too; it’s too soon to give up. I’ve got an idea.”

Just as Haruyuki had guessed, the university that sat in this place in the real world had a neighboring affiliated high school and junior high. Chocolat Puppeteer and the two former members of her Legion were students at the middle school. The temples of varying sizes that stood in this part of the Sacred Ground stage were school facilities—in other words, Chocolat knew the terrain of this area very well. But so did their attackers, Mint Mitten and Plum Flipper. It would be hard to hide in a temple for an ambush. There was also the risk of being on the receiving end of a surprise attack and having to fight in a free-for-all in close quarters.

Naturally, their attackers wouldn’t know that Haruyuki and Chiyuri had joined forces with Chocolat. It might have been effective to use Chocolat as bait and then have Haruyuki and Chiyuri launch a surprise attack. But they couldn’t use that method now. Because the strategy that Chiyuri had come up with required them to fight openly, head-on.

“I’m telling you, we don’t have to wait for the enemy in the middle of the grounds,” grumbled Haruyuki, a big lover of surprise attacks.

“Don’t keep complaining after you’ve already agreed!” Chiyuri jabbed him lightly in the side. “Your job is to defend against any long-distance attacks from their side, Crow, so make sure you actually keep watch!”

“R-right.” He nodded, but…

Waiting for other Burst Linkers in the Unlimited Neutral Field was a matter of intense patience. Even if, for instance, you managed to narrow down your opponent’s dive time to within five minutes, that could end up being as much as five thousand minutes on this side: over three days.

And the preliminary attack warning Chocolat’s former comrades had given her was “today after school.” From a general perspective, that could have been a span of several hours, but having known the two Burst Linkers for many years, Chocolat had apparently narrowed it down somewhat to the thirty minutes between six o’clock and six thirty. Approximately twenty days inside. She had been planning to wait, earnestly and intently, that entire overly long time. In fact, eleven days had already passed by the time she ran into Haruyuki and Chiyuri. She had absolutely no idea at what point in time the attackers might appear during the remaining nine days.

Put in this position, Haruyuki keenly felt the tremendousness of the deceleration ability of the jet-black layered avatar who called himself the vice president of the Acceleration Research Society. If you could drop the speed of perception to a 1:1 ratio with the real world while diving in the Unlimited Neutral Field, it would be a fairly simple thing to lie in wait for other Burst Linkers and attack. But, of course, he couldn’t be envious of a power that relied on the illegal BIC—brain implant chip.

In the Accelerated World, if you tried to acquire something, compensation of equal value to that thing was required. A very long standby time was one of those—and the Burst Linkers who obtained incredible power via the ISS kits were definitely losing something precious inside themselves.

Haruyuki had come now to Sakurajosui in the Setagaya area here with the aim of acquiring the Theoretical Mirror ability. He had come to have the rare laser-attack Enemy Lava Carbuncle be his partner in special training, but Chiyuri had spent three days here already to find this partner. No matter how many days they ended up waiting, this was not the time for Haruyuki to throw in the towel. This was even more true now that they’d met the Burst Linker who called Carbuncle a friend, heard her sad story, and been treated to hot cocoa.

“It’s okay. I’ll make sure to keep watch, so you two just rest now, while you can,” Haruyuki said.

Chiyuri and Chocolat next to her blinked their eye lenses in surprise and then, for some reason, giggled at the same time.

“Wh-what are you laughing for?”

“It’s just, like—you’re saying stuff that just doesn’t suit you.”

“You are putting on airs a little.”

“Tch…” Unconsciously, he hung his head and then hurriedly brought his gaze back up.

They were standing by in the middle of the university grounds where Haruyuki and Chiyuri had first encountered Lava Carbuncle. Coolu, the Enemy in question, had withdrawn to a midsize temple it used as a nest. In the real world, the building was apparently the university co-op store, where they sold all kinds of sweets. (Although Haruyuki didn’t think this had any connection with that.)

A large school building rose up on the northern side of the grounds, while Coolu’s nest was on the east side, so it was the south and west sides that were open. If the ISS kit users were going to come at them, it would be from one of those directions. Haruyuki glared that way, but he also had one more important clue as to the direction of their approach: the energy crystals floating all over the Sacred Ground stage. To come across one of these and pass by without smashing it required almost inhuman restraint. Just like Haruyuki had, players would simply punch them on their way past, even if their special-attack gauge was full. And the crystals made a particular sound when they were broken.

Thus, Haruyuki split his concentration between his vision and his hearing. Would a human form cutting blackly through the milky white sky be first? Or would he hear the bell-like sound of destruction first?

Still on guard, he glanced to his side and saw that at some point, Lime Bell and Chocolat Puppeteer had sat down on the ground, back-to-back. Both of their heads were hanging, and given that neither of them was moving an inch, they appeared to have somehow fallen asleep.

He was the one who had told them to rest, but even so, he grinned wryly at how easily they had dropped off. But he soon wiped the smile from his face. Chiyuri had spent three days looking for an Enemy with a laser for him, and Chocolat had already been on a continuous dive in this field for eleven days. It was no wonder they were both tired.

Have a good sleep, you two, he mouthed silently, and once again he took up his stance on guard.

About four hours after they had started on standby, the enemy still hadn’t appeared, and Haruyuki was enduring a de-buff that came from within—hunger. It was true that his actual body in the real world was starving, but those signals shouldn’t be able to transmit to the Accelerated World. So the hunger was a fake that his brain—no, his spirit was selfishly creating. He knew it was a fake, but that didn’t make the sensation of his avatar’s stomach tightening up go away.

If he had known this was what would happen, he would have eaten a double order of the chocolate gelato at Enjiya. And he would have added miniwaffles to the top.

Thoughts like this rolling through his mind, he pressed his hands against his stomach, and then he saw something flash in the corner of his vision: a shiny, burned brown. His eyes moved that way as if sucked in to see the armor skirt of Chocolat Puppeteer, asleep with her legs out to one side. The more he looked, the more it seemed like the wonderful color of chocolate.

The color of normal duel avatars came in a wide range and variety, but the material was basically the same. Not plastic, not glass, and of course, not metal—a hard crystal. Chocolat would have been no exception to this rule; the armor of her entire body was an inorganic substance that was only the color of chocolate. Haruyuki understood this in his head.

But as someone who had been eating chocolate ice cream at Enjiya’s for many years, his instincts were telling him this kind of texture was not possible with a fake. Of course, he couldn’t exactly bite into it to make sure, but if he cautiously tried touching it a little with a finger…

“What are you doing?”

Suddenly, he heard a murmured voice near his ear, and with a jump, Haruyuki yanked back the left hand he’d started to extend. Timidly shifting his gaze, he saw that the light-pink eye lenses of Chocolat, who he had assumed was asleep, were shining with a reproachful light. He almost shouted immediately, “Nothing at all!” but if he woke Chiyuri—who was sleeping against the girl’s back—things would get dire.

“Uh, um. I just couldn’t help wondering whether that chocolate color was real,” Haruyuki replied in a quiet voice, still off balance.

Chocolat let out a sigh. “Nearly every Burst Linker who meets me says the same thing. Even my parent, Mint, and my child, Plum—that was the first thing either of them said to me in the Accelerated World.”

“I-it was…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you remember.”

“There’s really no need for you to apologize,” Chocolat said curtly, and then, for some reason, she raised her left hand and thrust it in Haruyuki’s face.

“Huh…?”

“Go ahead. Please confirm it for yourself.”

“Wh-what?!”

“I’d simply prefer it if you understood in advance, rather than getting curious about my armor during the battle and losing your focus.”

“R-right.” Given the go-ahead, Haruyuki couldn’t hold back anymore. “Okay then, I’ll accept your kind offer.” He brought his face closer to Chocolat’s left hand. The lower part of his visor slid up automatically, and his exposed bare mouth clamped down around the slender index and middle fingers.

Instantly, Chocolat shuddered with an “Eep!”

But Haruyuki’s mind was basically taken over by the “flavor” spreading out in his mouth, and so he was unconscious to Chocolat’s reaction. Moderately sweet, slightly bitter, highly fragrant: the perfect chocolate flavor, and far more delicious than the liquid of the Chocolate Fountain he had tasted a little while before. This flavor, right, it was the finest Belgian couverture chocolate…

“Excuse— I…I meant that you could taste the back of my hand.” Stammering, Chocolat tried to pull her fingers out, but this did not work with Haruyuki at the peak of his hunger. He licked at the avatar’s fingers again, dreaming of biscuit sticks covered in chocolate, and it felt as though his dreadfully painful pangs of hunger were gradually eased.

“Nngh…! Y-you must have understood by now.” A faint voice slipping out of her, Chocolat twisted her body, and the motion knocked Lime Bell, sleeping up against her back.

“Nyah…” Chiyuri lifted her face and looked back to witness Haruyuki’s act—and just as she was on the verge of doing so…

Kashak! The faint, distant sound touched Haruyuki’s hearing.

“……!!”

His mind instantly switched gears, and he took his mouth off Chocolat’s fingers and stood up. His visor had no sooner closed again than he was calling out sharply in a quiet voice, “Chocolat, Bell, they’re here!”

Immediately, the faces of both Chocolat Puppeteer, holding her left hand and panting, and Lime Bell, watching this curiously with sleepy eyes, stiffened.

“Where?” Quickly getting to her feet, Chiyuri surveyed their surroundings. “I can’t see them.”

“I heard a crystal breaking. Southwest. Probably about a hundred meters away.”

“There’s a passage there that goes between the university and the high school. If they come in through the gate and not over the wall, they’ll be approaching here from the west. And, Silver Crow?”

Haruyuki reflexively shrank back. Naturally, he assumed he would be censured for his previous act, but Chocolat settled with simply glaring at him and then quickly saying, “My name does take quite some time, so when you call me, you can simply shorten Chocolat to Choco.”

“Oh, then you should call me Bell.”

“J-just call me Crow.”

Chocolat nodded lightly at their responses and turned her face away. “All right, understood. They’re coming.”

Haruyuki shifted his gaze to the west once more at basically the same time as several figures assembled on the roof of a single-story temple. Four.

“Four, huh?”

“And one of them is excessively large, hmm?”

They were still some distance away, so Haruyuki and his defenders couldn’t make out color or shape, but even still, they could clearly see that the one on the far right was a very large avatar.

Bigger than Cyan Pile—no, Frost Horn, even, Haruyuki thought.

“The two on the left are Mint Mitten and Plum Flipper,” Chocolat murmured in a strained voice. Even from this distance, she could identify her longtime friends. So then the two on the right, including the large avatar, must be Burst Linkers given ISS kits by Magenta Scissor, or—

“Both of you, get down!” Haruyuki made Chiyuri and Chocolat step back while he himself took a step forward. He saw the large one on the right and the two on the left all raise a hand at the same time. He had seen this motion before.

Dark Shot.

He didn’t know if their voices actually reached him, but Haruyuki distinctly heard the technique name in his ears.

Against the backdrop of the pure, pearl-white sky, their three hands were enveloped in a dark, sinister aura. This concentrated in the centers of their palms and built up for a moment before becoming ink-black beams and gushing out.

By that time, Haruyuki was already shouting, arms crossed in front of him: “Laser Sword!!”

Shkeeenk! The crisp sound rang out, and swords of silver light expanded in an X shape.

The dark beams, now fused into one, reached him, slamming into the intersection of the blades stretching out from his arms.

The pressure pushed him back about twenty centimeters over the arabesque patterns of the ground. But Crow stopped there and roared, “Unh…aaaaaah!”

He yanked his arms down sharply to the sides. The dark beam scattered and dispersed, melting into the atmosphere of the stage before disappearing.

Dark Shot was one of the two techniques possible when an ISS kit user activated IS mode. “IS mode” was short for “Incarnate System mode.” Just as the name suggested, this was not a normal special attack but rather an Incarnate attack.

A trained imagination flowed into the Image Control circuit of the Brain Burst program, normally a supporting system, and caused an overwrite. This was the logic of an Incarnate attack. Although it was called an overwrite, the power of it basically rendered the normal defensive abilities of a duel avatar ineffective. The reasoning was that you could only handle an Incarnate attack with another Incarnate attack. Of course, this sort of attack was extremely difficult to obtain. To master just one of the four basic techniques—power expansion, range expansion, defense expansion, movement expansion—required many long hours of training in the Unlimited Neutral Field.

But simply by equipping it, a kit user gained the range-expansion technique Dark Shot and the power-expansion technique Dark Blow. Both were basic techniques, but with the two together, the user had all-purpose attack power. If the user launched the punch and laser, both impossible to defend against—and both of which had no connection with the special-attack gauge—in succession, there was no way for a midlevel Burst Linker without an Incarnate attack to resist.

Haruyuki had mastered the Incarnate attack Laser Sword under the guidance of his master, Sky Raker, but the category was range expansion, and the power was basically a normal thrusting attack plus a little extra. It wasn’t suited to defensive use, and on top of that, the Dark Shot launched by the enemy group contained the power of three people. But even so, Haruyuki believed he would absolutely not be pushed back by this technique. As if they could beat him.

“Shoot as many times as you want—it’s no use!!” Haruyuki shouted toward the attackers lined up fifty meters away, the overlay of his Incarnate still lodged in both arms. “I’ll watch this technique any number of times, repel it any number of times! As if I’m scared of a technique that never evolves!”

The “any number of times” was a bit of an exaggeration, but this was a fact, at any rate. However, Haruyuki had repelled Dark Shot when he was transformed into the sixth Chrome Disaster, and now that he had sealed away the armor, his defensive power had dropped significantly.

Nevertheless, in a battle using the Incarnate System, simply taking a thought to the extreme had serious meaning. When it came down to a conflict between overwrites, in the end, it was a fight pitting the strength of different imaginations against one another. The Dark Shots he had knocked back left and right when he was Disasterfied had strengthened the image in Haruyuki’s mind.

In contrast, the techniques of the kit users were not thus strengthened, because the sources of their techniques were not in their hearts but rather in the foreign objects parasitizing their avatars. Haruyuki was proclaiming that truth, but it seemed that this was not understood by their attackers; three of them raised their right hands once more.

“I’m telling you, it’s pointless!!” Now, Haruyuki took on an attack posture. He readied his left arm in front of his body and drew his right arm back at shoulder height, a motion that strongly resembled the Black King Incarnate attack, Vorpal Strike.

“Dark Shot.” This time, the lifeless sound of the technique name being called faintly reached him.

He howled his battle cry to overwrite that voice: “Laser Lance!!”

Wrapped up to the shoulder in silver light, he thrust his right arm forward with all his might, and the dazzling, shining Incarnate lance was launched with a metallic roar. It collided violently with the three black beams pressing in on him, and a spray of light and dark danced and fought each other.

Too far…?! No, it’ll reach!! Haruyuki clenched his teeth and mustered up every bit of image power inside him.

If the Laser Sword he had used before had been a combat technique that expanded and contracted at high speed, a sword of light from either hand, then this Laser Lance was a mid-range attack that took time to launch compressed light from his right hand as a lance. The range in which it maintained 100 percent of its power was at present limited to twenty meters, and the power weakened dramatically after that.

The lance was already stretched out twenty-five meters, so it was fair to say that it was at its limit for practical distance. But ever since Kuroyukihime had informed him of the existence of a second stage for the Incarnate attack—the practical technique—he had been working independently on different kinds of tricks.

There were two types of practical techniques. A “composite attack,” with two or more of the four basic attributes, and a “special attack,” which did not fit in with any attribute. In order to cover the long-distance fighting that Silver Crow was so poor at, Haruyuki had explored ways to further expand the range of his Laser Lance. The answer he had reached after countless failures was to cut the Lance with his Sword.

“Nngh…aaah!” A low cry slipping out, he pulled his fully extended right arm back bit by bit. The image of the lance trying to charge forward stretched like rubber. Once his right hand returned to his shoulder, the elasticity of the lance reached its limit. In that instant, a short sword of light was lodged in his left hand, readied in front of his chest.

“Go!” With a brief shout, he severed the lance of his right hand at the base with the sword of his left hand.

Zwwank! The air shook, and the now-freed lance of light shot forward with incredible speed. It sent the aggressive jet-black beam scattering in all directions, just like in the previous skirmish, and then closed in on the aggressors, as if following the beam’s trajectory backward.

However, the technique—which Haruyuki had secretly named Laser Javelin—had a weak point: its hit precision would worsen from logic overpowering it. The lance carved out a faint arc in the air and plunged into the roof of the low temple the four enemies were standing on. After a pause, a flash whiter than the temple itself erupted and ripped a giant hole in the building.

Here, finally, two of the attackers—Mint Mitten on the right, and Plum Flipper standing to the left—looked shaken, albeit slightly. They’d probably never had their IS mode technique repelled and counterattacked to this extent before. Their silhouettes, small like Chocolat’s, crept backward.

Yet, the tall avatar with her arms crossed threw her right hand up into the air, essentially ignoring Haruyuki’s counterattack. Perhaps she had a sword-shaped weapon; the long, sharp tip checked the movement of the two starting to retreat. Here, likely having been given some instruction, the four enemy avatars jumped down from the temple that was starting to crumble to the ground and began to slowly walk toward Haruyuki and his comrades.

“Crow, that was really something.”

“I’d like to say I expected nothing less.”

Chiyuri and then Chocolat murmured from behind him.

“This is just starting, guys,” Haruyuki replied in a quiet voice. “Or rather, now it’s you two—Bell, Chocolat…er, Choco—taking the lead now. I’m counting on you.”

“Yup! Leave it to us!”

“Indeed.”

Even during this quick exchange, the four attackers continued walking directly toward them. The two on the left still moved rather awkwardly, but the tall avatar next to them—the apparent leader—and the super-large avatar on the far right held their heads high as they strode toward Haruyuki and his friends.

Once they had gotten about five meters away, the leader raised her right hand again. Everyone stopped.

At this distance, he could pick out the details of their duel avatars. Standing on the far left was an F-type with big gloves on both hands, large boots on both feet. The armor of her body, including a head part reminiscent of a knit hat, was a bright mint green. She was probably Mint Mitten.

The F-type next to her had shoulders, waist, and elbows enveloped by popping spherical armor. She wore a round hat on her head, and her coloring was a muted reddish-purple. This had to be Plum Flipper.

Both of them were small, cute avatars with the same air as Chocolat Puppeteer. However, their cuteness was significantly damaged by the crimson eyeball attached to their chests—the ISS kit. While the eyeball emitted a powerful light like it was starving, the glittering in their own eye lenses was empty. They seemed to recognize Chocolat standing behind Haruyuki—their friend until a few days ago—as nothing more than a target for destruction.

The interference of the kit is getting stronger, Haruyuki thought to himself. He remembered that when Bush Utan was parasitized, he had basically kept his original personality even three days in. In contrast, despite the fact that Mint and Plum had been parasitized a similar three days, their appearances were already those of automatons.

Since the ISS kit terminals were synchronized through the main body enshrined at Midtown Tower every night, the more of them there were, the greater their influence over those who equipped them. Without exaggeration, this was a race against time. Digesting this, Haruyuki turned his eyes on the tall avatar, who was apparently the leader, standing to the right of Mint and Plum.

She was tall, but her torso and limbs were as slender as Silver Crow’s. Her entire body was covered with a film-type armor so that she looked like she was wrapped in bandages. Other than her mouth, her face was completely hidden, so it was hard to discern her gender. But from the lines of her body and the air about her, she was probably an F-type. In each hand, she held a strangely shaped weapon. They were probably in the sword category, but the single blades were extremely tapered, and the space between the blade and the grip was excessively long. The grip was incorporated into an enormous knuckle guard, making a distorted circular shape. The color of her armor was a bright reddish-purple.

And then the last avatar—a figure that could only be said to be bizarre. It was very large and much taller than even the reddish-purple leader; probably two and a half meters tall. It was also at least a meter wide. And its round, dark-green body had nothing in the way of a neck or a waist, but simply tapered slightly at the top. In other words, it was essentially a perfect egg shape. If it hadn’t been for the short arms and legs sticking out from the sides and bottom, alongside the eye lenses shining yellow, it wouldn’t have looked like a duel avatar at all. Even the ISS kit attached to the center of the oblong body looked ridiculously small.

During the time when Haruyuki and his comrades were quickly inspecting the enemy group, their adversaries were doing the same thing to them. The reddish-purple leader pulled the corners of her mouth—the only part of her face not covered by the film-type armor—into a grin. “That silver and the shiny head—so you’d be the Corvus of Nega Nebulus, hmm? Then the yellowish-green one behind you’s the Witch. These are some unexpected guests, but we are glad to have you. Welcome to Setagaya area.”

From her husky voice and tone, he instinctively knew his opponent to be a slightly older girl. This was the type of duel opponent he was worst with, but he couldn’t shrink now. Haruyuki focused his strength within his abdomen.

“And you must be Magenta Scissor,” he declared, certain from her color and attitude. But then his confidence disappeared abruptly, and he muttered, “Wait, no, was it Magenta Scissors…”

Although he felt Chiyuri sighing behind him, this wasn’t the time to turn around and get her to tell him. He was pretty sure this should have been Scissor, but if that meant the office supply for cutting paper, he had a memory of learning in English class that it absolutely had to be in the plural, “Scissors.”

If it had been a regular duel field, her name would have shown up under her health gauge, Haruyuki agonized.

The magenta avatar smiled bewitchingly once more. “Scissor is right for me. I’ll tell you why, so don’t add that s ever again. I totally hate those English words that are two things when they’re one thing.”

“Like shoes and pants?” he said, inadvertently drawn in, and Magenta Scissor nodded sharply.

“Right, exactly. Like chopsticks and stuff.” She chuckled as she continued. “I mean, it’s acting like these things have no value on their own. A single shoe, a lone chopstick. Don’t you think that’s terrible? The second they’re not a pair anymore, no matter how beautiful they are, how untouched, they end up in the garbage.”

Not comprehending what she was trying to say, Haruyuki fell silent.

“Does this have anything to do with the fact that you’re going around handing out—no, forcibly infecting Burst Linkers in the Setagaya area with ISS kits?” Chiyuri snapped on his behalf from behind him.

The reddish-purple avatar moved her head, wrapped with winding ribbon armor, and laughed again. “If I had to say, it does…maybe? Once I give this to every Burst Linker, one concept of a pair that I hate so much will disappear from the Accelerated World. Because if everyone’s using the same techniques, then tag-team compatibility becomes meaningless, after all.”

“D-duels without any personality like that won’t be fun at all!” Chiyuri shouted.

Magenta spread out her hands, clutching the strange swords, and shook her head in exasperation. “They’re fun because they have personality? So then what about the Burst Linkers who were born with the kind of individuality that everybody sneers at, the kind they hate? What are they supposed to do? Like Avocado Avoider here?” She passed her left wrist through the ring-shaped grip of her sword and gently stroked the dark-green egg avatar with her now-free hand. When she did, the body—so large they had to look up at it—shuddered slightly, and a low purring voice came from somewhere unknown in that body.

The avatars generated automatically by the Brain Burst program came in all shapes and sizes, to the point where they had essentially nothing in common other than a roughly human shape. Inevitably, the great majority of Burst Linkers ended up with avatars with a cool or cute design, or with avatars that were the exact opposite. And unfortunately, in the Accelerated World as in the real world, the tendency for the former to be more popular and the latter to be the opposite was seriously pronounced.

“It can’t be everyone doing that,” Haruyuki said, before Chiyuri had the chance to reply.

“You’re right there, too, aren’t you, Magenta? From the way you’re talking, you guys were comrades before the ISS kits came out, right?”

“Unfortunately, you’re wrong. I met Avocado very recently. Only just having become a Burst Linker, he was the target of a group attack by several people and was on the verge of total point loss. One of the people attacking him was his own parent. He was cackling, saying how he didn’t want a creepy child like this.”

When Haruyuki and his comrades were at a loss for words, a rumbling groan slipped out of the massive green body. Whether he liked it or not, Haruyuki was forced to understand that this was not a voice of anger, but of sadness.

“I challenged Avocado when he was in a place where it’d all be over if he lost one more time and gave him an ISS kit. You should’ve seen him turn the tables after that. Those guys really were out of luck that they canceled the limit on the number of times they could be challenged with their Legion member privilege. Half of them were at total point loss. Including Avocado’s parent. So? Can you still say a Burst Linker needs personality? Can you actually believe it’s natural that there are Linkers anyone would pair up with and Linkers no one will join?” Hand still on Avocado’s side, Magenta shrugged lightly.

The entirely unexpected question thrust at him, Haruyuki could only fall silent once more. He thought that Magenta Scissor was wrong, bringing the idea of winning and losing teams into the Accelerated World. But at the same time, it was a fact that when he first saw Avocado Avoider, his impression was “different, weird.” At that moment, Haruyuki hadn’t thought of Avocado as a fellow Burst Linker, but only as a monster to be defeated.

Breaking the silence was Chocolat Puppeteer, who’d been silent up to then. “Pushing his parent to total point loss…I wonder if that was really Avocado’s will?”

“What do you mean, Cocoa, hon?”

Faced with Magenta, broad grin still on her face, the small chocolate-colored avatar took a resolute step forward. “The ISS kit doesn’t just take away a Burst Linker’s individuality. It also steals the user’s kindness and empathy and gives them hate in their place. Even if, hypothetically, everything went according to your plan and all the Burst Linkers were kit users, unfairness and alienation wouldn’t disappear from the Accelerated World! Absolutely not!”

“How can you say that, hmm? Your friends understand, you know, Cocoa? They get that instead of locking themselves up in a little box, it’s way more fun to get stronger, get fighting power, and change the world.”

“That’s a lie!! That’s your—that’s what you want! You’re simply forcibly infecting other Burst Linkers with this desire! And one more thing: The only people allowed to call me Cocoa are Min-Min and Pliko!!”

The end of this was a tear-filled shriek.

It seemed like Mint Mitten and Plum Flipper, who were standing lifelessly behind Magenta, shook slightly upon hearing this. But immediately after that, the eyeballs pasted to their chests flared with a red light, and the eye lenses of the two girls became empty once more.

“It’s too bad, Chocolat Puppeteer. In the end, I guess I have no choice but to operate on you, too,” Magenta Scissor said in an increasingly cold voice, removing her hand from Avocado. She twirled the sword hanging from her wrist and grabbed it once more. The sharp, tapered end glittered coldly. “Silver Crow, Lime Bell. If you sit and watch quietly, I won’t do anything to you. I only came with one kit seed, anyway. But if you get in my way, we’ll kill you over and over and over until we get bored of it, you know?”

Haruyuki reflexively called the surrounding terrain to mind. From the university here to the portal at Sakurajosui Station wedged along Aratama Suido Road was about eight hundred meters as the crow flies. He could make it there with his wings in a single bound, but if the fighting power of Magenta Scissor and her gang far exceeded his expectations, it was a little far for all three of them to retreat together. However, Chocolat Puppeteer probably wouldn’t try to run. She was prepared to free her friends from the control of the ISS kits with the Judgment Blow, even if it meant being killed over and over and losing all her points.

Their one hope to avoid this tragic end was the Mint and Plum Recovery Mission drafted by Chiyuri. And the possibility of this mission succeeding rested on whether or not they could defeat Magenta Scissor and Avocado Avoider while leaving the other two alive.

It was a fact that Avocado’s past as recounted by Magenta did move his heart. But faced with him in this situation, there was no road other than fighting, not due to hatred, but in order to talk to each other through the duel—the very meaning of a Burst Linker’s existence.

“Sorry, but we can’t just stand by and watch,” Haruyuki declared. “We have our own reason we have to fight you.”

“Oh?” Smile still on her face, Magenta cocked her head slightly to one side. “And what’s that?”

“Don’t tell me you forgot you parasitized our precious comrade with an ISS kit last week.”

“Oh, Cyan Pile, right? And I had high hopes for him, too. I mean, a change of heart in the middle of syncing and then attacking the main body—that was disappointing. You’re barking up the wrong tree complaining about that to me. After all, Cyan was the one who came all the way to Setagaya wanting the kit, you know? All I did was give it to him as a present in card form, just like he wanted.”

“Even if you did, you had to have known. That even if it was sealed in card form, the kit would whisper to the owner’s mind and tempt them into equipping it. You’ve probably experienced that yourself, haven’t you?”

“…”

At this from Haruyuki, the smile vanished from Magenta’s lips. She raised the bizarre swords dangling from each of her hands and lightly brought the points together with a clink. “I’m a bit offended by that. I accepted this of my own free will. In order to remake the Accelerated World into what it should be.”

When Magenta slowly opened the swords crossed in front of her to both sides, almost as if that was a signal, part of the ribbon armor wrapped around her chest peeled away. The crimson-red eye snapping open on the surface of her exposed avatar body was, of course, the same ISS kit that Mint and the others had attached to their chests. But for this one, the coloring, so reminiscent of blood, was darker, and the eyeball was also a size bigger. Because Magenta’s face was hidden under the layers of ribbon wrapped around it, it almost looked like the kit was her own eye. After this eye, inorganic and yet clearly hate-filled, glanced at Haruyuki and his comrades, Magenta declared coldly, “I guess we’re going to have to make you disappear, after all, hmm? And if you two are gone from the Accelerated World, Cyan’ll probably come back to me, too.”

It had to have been more than ten days since the ISS kit had taken up residence in her body, and yet it appeared that she had almost completely retained her self; did that mean the power of her will was incredibly strong?

Banishing the fear that threatened to rise up in him, Haruyuki shouted, “A-as if that’s going to happen! No matter what, he’ll never come back to you again!”

“Well then, let’s test that theory. I’m getting pretty tired of chatting already. Just as you wished, I’ll be your opponent. Mint, Plum, the two of you take Lime Bell. Avocado, you can eat Chocolat.”

Haruyuki and his comrades were startled by this last order, and in that moment of stunned surprise, Magenta Scissor brandished the sword of her right hand high—and then dropped it sharply. The two former members of Petit Paquet to her left and Avocado Avoider on her right started to move.

“Bell! Choco! Just like we planned!”

“Leave it to us!”

“Absolutely!”

Haruyuki and his team exchanged quick words and then started to act. First, Chocolat thrust both hands out in front of her.

“Cocoa Fountain!!”

Together with the call of the technique name, pink light poured down in a broad range from her ten fingers. With a burbling sound, large amounts of chocolate gushed out of the ground. This spread out and covered a diameter of thirty meters of the field, and Mint, Plum, and Avocado got their feet caught and staggered.

“Tch!” Clicking her tongue, Magenta Scissor leapt back and then stepped even farther back, avoiding the pool of chocolate—more like a chocolate lake, actually.

Naturally, Haruyuki too was within the effective range of Chocolat’s technique, but he had used his wings as she activated it and so was hovering ten or so centimeters above the ground.

Behind him, Bell and Chocolat also retreated to get some distance and immediately got to work on the next part of the plan. Bell brandished the Choir Chime of her left hand and whirled it in large circles. “Citron Call!”

She swung it down. Accompanied by the tinkling of a bell, the Chime’s light zeroed in on Chocolat, standing beside Bell. The brown avatar had broken an energy crystal before the arrival of their enemies to charge her special-attack gauge and had then used up that charge for the full-power Cocoa Fountain, but now, thanks to the effect of Citron Call Mode I, which rewound the status of the target in units of seconds, her special-attack gauge was replenished once more.

No sooner was it fully charged than Chocolat was calling out her second technique. “Puppet Make!!”

Snap! She turned four fingers toward the chocolate lake. The smooth milk chocolate surface bulged up in four places, and the now-familiar chocolate puppets—Chocopets—jumped up from within. Two of them flew at Mint and Plum, while the other two headed toward Avocado to surround the enemy avatars. With their feet caught up in the chocolate on the ground, the enemy was unable to move freely.

Long/midrange duel avatar Chocolat Puppeteer had the ability first to make chocolate bubble up in the field with the prerequisite technique of Cocoa Fountain, which also hindered enemy movement. And then with her special attack Puppet Make, she could create automatic combat dolls from that chocolate pond and make them attack specific targets.

The scale of the chocolate pond and the number of Chocopets were determined by the number of fingers she held up when activating the techniques. With ten fingers, she could create a chocolate pond thirty meters in diameter, but that completely exhausted her fully charged special-attack gauge. Which meant, essentially, that if she created the biggest pond possible, she couldn’t call any Chocopets until she charged her gauge once more. But when working in combination with Citron Call, she could smash through that limit.

Although the chocolate pond was 40 percent smaller after the creation of four Chocopets, it was still more than large enough to hold the feet of Mint Mitten and the others.

Haruyuki first confirmed that step one of their strategy had succeed and then shouted, “You guys take Avocado! I’m going after Magenta!”

He spread his wings and flew at top speed, skimming the surface of the sticky-sweet pond. He slipped between Avocado and Plum and closed in on Magenta Scissor beyond them.

“This is some seriously cheeky action!” The reddish-purple avatar readied her swords to meet Haruyuki. The thick blades glittered and glinted, but he charged forward regardless. Of the metal colors, Silver Crow’s antiphysical defenses were on the low side, but even so, his resistance to severing attacks was higher than the average regular color. He caught the swords that sliced down from both sides at the same time with the armor on his upper body.

Skreeek! A high-pitched metallic screech sawed into his ears, and bright sparks shot out, lighting up the armor of both fighters. Of course, he couldn’t escape from this unscathed; the health gauge in the top left of his field of view dropped the tiniest bit, a few pixels, but he ignored it and flapped his wings as hard as he could.

“Aaaaah!!”

As if pushed back by Haruyuki’s roar, Magenta Scissor’s feet floated up. Not letting this chance get away, he started in on another charge, still at close range. Cutting directly across the grounds, he shoved her back to the temple where she and her team had first appeared. Magenta crashed thunderously into the wall right beside the hole Haruyuki had opened up with his Laser Javelin. Her body half-embedded in the white wall, a groan escaped her lips.

Using the reactive force to get a little distance from her, Haruyuki began another rush on his opponent to settle this match before she managed to pull herself back together.

“Hngaaah!”

Barely touching the ground, his Aerial Combo—which used the instantaneous thrust of both wings to launch both hands and feet at her over and over—ripped into Magenta, and she was steadily hammered deeper into the wall. Her two swords took about half his strikes, but Haruyuki had four limbs. Punches and kicks slipped past her guard to smash into her reddish-purple ribbon armor one after another.

He had suspected from the start that her defensive abilities were not that great. Reddish-purple was a little closer to long-distance than close-range on the color wheel. She shouldn’t have been able to really take a hit in close combat.

But hold on a sec. In that case, why is her weapon a sword? If she’s a sword user, then her color ought to be way closer to blue…

Haruyuki continued his onslaught, but just as this question popped up in the back of his mind, Magenta crossed the swords in both hands in front of her body. Ka-ching! It was the sound of the two metal elements fitting together. What had been two swords were in that moment transformed into something else: two blades opening like a jaw with a single rivet as the fulcrum and large ring-shaped grips.

Those aren’t swords anymore! Those are scissors! Haruyuki realized.

“You’re in danger! Dodge!!” Chocolat’s voice reached him from behind.

“Nngh!” He forcibly stopped the right roundhouse kick his leg was in the middle of and forced some backward thrust with his wings.

Magenta started to move her arms, but Haruyuki was already more than three meters away. It seemed to him that the range for the swords and the scissors was the same—or maybe the range for the scissors was smaller, since she had to operate them with both hands?

But a faint smile played on Magenta’s lips. In a movement filled with certainty, her arms slowly closed the scissors. The blades, opened to their maximum of nearly a meter, closed in on seventy centimeters, and then fifty.

Snip! He heard the jarring sound through his avatar body. He felt cool, chilled metal touching him on either side of his waist. He hurriedly turned his eyes in that direction, but there was nothing there. But the hard pressure increased with each instant, and the chill turned into pain.

“Wha—?!” he cried out in surprise, and just as he was on the verge of flying even farther back, the sound of metal ripping through metal echoed across the stage.

A crimson damage effect cut across Silver Crow’s stomach. A dizzyingly fierce pain raced through his nervous system, and he very nearly screamed, but managed to grit his teeth and endure it.

Glancing up to check his health gauge, he saw that it had dropped nearly 20 percent in just this single hit. If his dash backward had been half a second later, his avatar would no doubt have been cut right in half. But more importantly, why had the attack reached him? There were nearly four meters between the scissors and Crow now.

“Ability: Remote Cut. And now that you’ve made me use this technique, you won’t die quickly,” Magenta Scissor said in a whisper, then opened the two blades all the way once more. When they had been separated, they were smallish swords, but now that they were fused, they were enormous, sinister scissors. The weapon, its sense of presence orders of magnitude greater now, closed again with a cold snap.

Haruyuki instantly folded his wings up as he jumped to the right, but even still, she managed to inflict a shallow cut on his left arm, and then a burning pain assaulted him. His health gauge decreased another 5 percent.

Snip! Snip! Snipsnipsnip! Still embedded in the wall of the temple, Magenta opened and closed her scissors over and over. Haruyuki moved intently to avoid the line extending from the tip of them, but in the blink of an eye, his body was peppered with countless cuts.

He badly wanted to escape into the air with his flying ability, but his instincts told him that was not a good move. After all, he didn’t know how far the cutting power of the scissors reached. If he deployed his wings, the projected area of Silver Crow would nearly double—her target would get bigger, in other words. And if she took aim to cut even one of his wings, that was basically the end of the plan he and his allies had put together.

Intently slipping through snip after snip of invisible blades on the ground, Haruyuki groaned. This is definitely a red long-distance attack—and a fairly powerful one at that.

The power to cut a target at the end of a line extending from the scissors was, if looked at in a different way, perhaps the same as a rapid-fire slicer gun. The problem, however, was that he couldn’t see the attack. All he could do was guess at the line of sight from the direction of the scissors, and Magenta Scissor could freely adjust the timing for generating the cutting force. She could throw in all the feints and the random shots she wanted.

But if she had this kind of powerful technique, then why hadn’t she used it right from the start? Why had she actually had the scissors split into two pieces? These doubts in his mind, Haruyuki continue to do his best to dodge the double blades.

And then, suddenly, a human shape leapt in from the side in front of him. Simple body, a face with no eyes or mouth, entirely a dark brown. One of the Chocopets, the combat puppets created by Chocolat Puppeteer. The puppet, with nothing other than its fists as weapons, faced Magenta resolutely, as if to hide Haruyuki behind it. Ahead of it, the blades of the scissors closed cruelly.

Snap! Simultaneous with the metallic sound, a red line raced across the Chocopet’s neck. Whether Haruyuki wanted to or not, he was forced to visualize the puppet’s head tumbling to the ground. But naturally, it didn’t.

The head did separate momentarily from the torso, but the cross-section melted and fused the two back together in the blink of an eye. When he thought about it, the Chocopets had apparently taken absolutely zero damage from Haruyuki’s striking hand or Chiyuri’s bell attack when they were first fighting them. Most likely because their entire bodies were made of chocolate, cutting and piercing attacks were normally ineffective.

Seemingly annoyed at the Chocopet recklessly charging in, the scissors snapped together even more violently. Instantly, the puppet’s body was cut into five, six parts, but they were indeed soon all stuck together again.

Mouth twisting, Magenta switched from holding the scissors in both hands to carrying them in her right as she clenched her other into a fist.

The ISS kit attached to her chest emitted a crimson light. Her entire body was covered in a faint, dark aura, and this quickly concentrated in her left hand. Even seeing that inky black pulsation that warned of overwhelming force, the Chocopet showed no sign of fear. Wordlessly, it kicked at the ground and brandished an empty fist as it flew forward.

A cool smile spreading across her lips once more, Magenta murmured the technique name: “Dark Blow.”

Her left fist, enveloped in a viscous darkness, shot out, making the air and the earth shudder. It met the Chocopet’s descending right fist in midair. Rather than melting, the chocolate arm—immune to striking attacks—crumbled as if sucked into the surface of contact. The affinity of the Incarnate technique generated by the ISS kit was a nihilistic energy type. Even a chocolate puppet had no way of resisting it.

The right chocolate arm was instantly blown off from the elbow to the shoulder. However, not stopping there, the Dark Blow began to swallow the puppet in darkness from its torso to its head. Whmm! A heavy vibration sound shook the air, and when Magenta yanked her fist out, the remaining lower half of the Chocopet turned back into liquid chocolate and scattered into the air.

Through the brown mist, he could see Magenta Scissor’s mouth open wide.

Charging forward as if chasing after the puppet, Haruyuki finally noticed it. Perhaps to shoot off another Dark Blow or unsure about whether to pick up the scissors again, her left hand scratched at the air. But before it could choose either one—

Your sacrifice won’t be in vain! Haruyuki vowed to the Chocopet as he brought his right hand down in a sharp chop.

“Laser Sword!!” The silver sword of light that extended from his fingertips cut through Magenta’s left arm above the elbow. After the faintest time lag, her arm slipped apart, top and bottom. Without a sound, the bottom fell, bounced once on the arabesque patterns of the ground, and scattered into tiny fragments before disappearing.

“Nngh!” Magenta Scissor groaned deeply and bent in half. She was likely withstanding the pain of losing a limb.

Haruyuki turned to her. “Now you can’t use your scissors anymore. You can’t open and close them with just one hand.”

“And that’s why I hate them, the two things that are one. I despise them. Scissors, shoes, the bilateral symmetry of the human body.” This was Magenta’s response.

He had the feeling that her words also contained the reason why she hadn’t moved to use the scissors right from the start, and also why she was trying to eliminate the concept of the tag-team pair from the Accelerated World. But before he had the chance to think very deeply about it, her lips moved once more.

“I’ll admit that was some fine work realizing you can render me nearly useless if you take one of my arms, boy. But, you see, you’ve seriously gotten the wrong idea about one thing.”

“Th-the wrong idea? About what?”

“Well, that…That’s the fact that you judged me to be the main power of the enemy.”

“But I mean, no matter how you look at it, you’re the leader, aren’t you? You were giving all kinds of instructions and all.”

“It’s not necessarily the case that the leader is the strongest, you know? Me luring you all the way over here means we win,” Magenta said, grinning. “Go on, take a look behind you.”

“C-Crow!!” Chiyuri’s scream reached Haruyuki’s ears. “What should we do?! I keep hitting him and hitting him, but it’s not doing anything at all! If we don’t hurry, Choco’s—!”

Haruyuki whirled around to find the enormous avatar Avocado Avoider standing imposingly over Lime Bell, who was slamming the Choir Chime against his egg-shaped body over and over.

And then, swallowed up to her chest in Avocado’s massive mouth clamped shut around her, Chocolat Puppeteer screamed in agony.