Accel World - Volume 12 - Chapter 8

8

After school.

Having finished taking care of his Animal Care Club duties, Haruyuki avoided the front yard, crowded with students busy preparing for the school festival, and returned to the first school building through the inner courtyard. When he stood in front of the sliding door of the student council office, deep inside on the first floor, an entry request window popped up in the center of his field of view. But before he could tap it, the door was unlocked from inside.

“Excuse me,” he announced himself in a quiet voice and slid the door open. On the other side, the usual dignified atmosphere filled the room, so solemn it was hard to believe the room was in the same junior high. When he closed the door behind him, the hustle and bustle of the school at the end of the day receded at once, and only the faint sound of the student council office server machine could be heard.

Haruyuki took pains to walk softly—although the floor was covered in a thick carpet, so he wouldn’t have made much of a sound even if he had walked normally—and took a few steps forward when the person hard at work at the large desk facing him lifted her head and said, coolly, “Oh, sorry for calling you in when you’re busy.”

“No, I’m pretty used to taking care of Hoo now, so.”

“Mm-hmm. Sorry, just give me five more seconds…Okay, done.”

The person who saved the file she had been working on and then stood up was, of course, the vice president of the Umesato student council, Kuroyukihime. None of the other council members were there, so he was alone in a closed room at school with Kuroyukihime, a situation that gave Haruyuki heart palpitations in a variety of ways.

He had actually invited Utai Shinomiya, aka the super president of the Animal Care Club and person with whom he had been working until a few minutes earlier, to come along with him, but for some reason, she had grinned and said, I’LL HOLD OFF TODAY. Takumu and Chiyuri were at practice, and Fuko went to a school in far-off Shibuya Ward.

Thus, Haruyuki was forced to stand at attention alone in the center of the room at the unexpected situation, while Kuroyukihime moved with a gallant step from the desk to the small kitchen built into the wall on the west side.

“Is tea all right with you, Haruyuki?” she asked.

“Oh! Y-yes!”

“With milk, lemon, or perhaps brandy?”

“M-milk, please,” he replied, after judging that the last option was probably a joke.

“Mmm, understood.” Kuroyukihime nodded casually and yet was surprisingly smooth in her tea preparations. Carrying a tray, she walked over to the sofa set in the southwest corner, and Haruyuki awkwardly followed.

“Please, have a seat.”

“O-okay.” He lowered himself onto the sofa—synthetic leather but with a soft touch—and she arranged cups and saucers for two on the low table before pouring tea from the pot. Her words and movements were extremely natural, but even so, Haruyuki sensed the faintest hint of pain in the expression of his beloved sword master.

That, too, was natural. The text message Kuroyukihime had sent him between fifth and sixth periods had included the following: I NEED TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT THE FIRST RED KING, RED RIDER.

In January of that year, Kuroyukihime, at the request of the second Red King, Scarlet Rain, had gone on a mission to subjugate the fifth Chrome Disaster together with Haruyuki and Takumu. However, lying in wait for them in the Ikebukuro area of the Unlimited Neutral Field was a large attack force from Crypt Cosmic Circus, the Legion led by the Yellow King, Yellow Radio. Kuroyukihime had nonetheless turned resolutely to face them until Radio played a certain replay card.

Recorded on it was the ghastly scene of Black Lotus, the Black King, taking off the head of Red Rider, the first Red King, in a single blow at the first meeting of the Seven Kings, which had been approximately three years earlier at the time. Being shown this out of the blue had given Kuroyukihime an enormous shock, which went so far as to trigger the zero-fill phenomenon, and she had collapsed on the spot. It had been six months since then. As the leader of the new Nega Nebulus, Kuroyukihime had cut down numerous powerful enemies, but the wound carved in the depths of her heart could not have disappeared completely.

So with the surprise reveal of Red Rider’s crest on the ISS kits, I guess Kuroyukihime’s trying to face her own wounds, but is it really okay if it’s just me here? Haruyuki couldn’t help but have this thought—in fact, only recently, he would have gone so far as to drag another Legion member along with him there, or perhaps simply run away. Now, however, he said nothing, but rather quietly waited for her to speak.

Kuroyukihime was indeed Haruyuki’s parent and Legion Master, as well as an absolutely invincible level niner. But at the same time, she was just a junior high school girl, a year older than he was, a girl who had the same struggles, pain, and fears as he did, as well as the desire to be rescued from time to time, like he did. He couldn’t always be the one leaning on her and being protected.

Kuroyukihime. If I’m what you want, I’ll always be right by your side. I’ll never try to keep anything quiet from you again.

There was no way she could have heard these words he whispered to himself, but she touched her cup of chai to her lips and then abruptly began speaking as she lowered it again. But the details of what she said were, for Haruyuki, fairly unexpected. “Say, Haruyuki, what do you think the ultimate long-range attack power is?”

“Huh? The ultimate…long-range attack power?” After parroting her words back at her, he thought it over. “I guess it’d be an attack with serious range and firepower that could send a distant enemy flying in a single shot. Like Niko—I mean, Scarlet Rain’s main armament.”

“Mmm. I suppose. The Immobile Fortress’s real armament is undisputedly the most powerful long-range attack currently in the Accelerated World. If it came down to a one-on-one shoot-out, even Crikin’s robot couldn’t beat her.”

“Huh? C-Cri— Who’s that?”

“Sorry, a tangent. I’ll explain later. Let’s continue with the main topic for now.” The smile bleeding out around the corners of Kuroyukihime’s mouth disappeared, and she leaned her slender body back against the sofa. “Just as you note, it goes without saying that Niko is the most powerful red type. But I wonder if that equals ultimate.”

“So you mean there’s a difference between most powerful and ultimate? What kind?” At some point, Haruyuki had been completely drawn into the conversation, and he leaned forward on the sofa.

Kuroyukihime moved her gaze around like she was thinking about something and then lifted a finger in a very teacherly gesture. “You said before: serious range and firepower, hmm? So then which do you think is the true nature of the red-type duel avatar’s power?”

“I think…” He only had to contemplate for a second before replying almost immediately. “It’s the range. The absolute firepower—the instantaneous force—is maybe higher with the blue types.”

“Mmm. Exactly. If, hypothetically, the attack had something like a damage meter attached, the Blue King, Blue Knight, would likely get a higher reading than Niko. So then, the true nature of Niko’s power is the long range. I suppose. Assuming a max of three thousand meters…”

What? Three kilometers is just too—, Haruyuki was about to say, but then he stopped himself. Because although that was the distance from one edge of a normal duel field to the other, he actually thought Niko could probably shoot that far. He wiped away the cold sweat that sprang up on his forehead with the back of his hand and bobbed his head.

“Which means even that girl couldn’t hit an enemy farther away than that. This is the reason I say the most powerful is not the ultimate. Don’t you think if the ultimate blue-type power is to cut through anything, then the ultimate red-type power is a shot that reaches anywhere?” Kuroyukihime grinned, and Haruyuki was at a loss for words for a moment.

Blinking his eyes rapidly, he shook his head quickly from side to side and objected, “B-but, Kuroyukihime, that means, then, unlimited range…doesn’t it? Like, a bullet fired in the Unlimited Neutral Field in Tokyo would just keep going to Okinawa…sort of. That kind of power, I mean, serious firepower just doesn’t exist. I don’t think.”

What if it does exist, though? Haruyuki broke out in a sweat once more, but fortunately, Kuroyukihime smiled again and laughed off the idea herself.

“Ha-ha! It’s true—I don’t know of any avatar that incredible. But…the idea that a bullet fired by one’s own weapon could reach an enemy no matter how far away they are…In a certain sense, there was someone who expressed this ultimate ability in the Accelerated World.”

Here, a moment of pain raced through Kuroyukihime’s eyes again, but drawn into the conversation as he was, before he noticed it, Haruyuki was already asking, “Wh-what do you mean? Not unlimited range, but reaching however far? I feel like that’s a contradiction.”

“It’s simple. It’s like this. The weapon is yours, but someone else pulls the trigger. In that case, theoretically, you could shoot an enemy in Okinawa from Tokyo? You’d just have to entrust the weapon to someone in Tokyo and have them go to Okinawa.”

“Th-that kind of cheat,” Haruyuki retorted, flapping his hands. “I mean, the weapon’s an Enhanced Armament, right? I don’t think you can really just hand those over to someone else so easily as that.”

As far as Haruyuki knew, there were only four ways to obtain an Enhanced Armament: (1) initial equipment, (2) level-up bonus, (3) shop purchase, and (4) driving another Burst Linker to total point loss and taking the Armament from them; that was it. Even if (4) was out of the question, the other three were also fairly difficult. Buying it in the shop seemed easy, but since a powerful Enhanced Armament actually cost enough points for a player to go up an entire level, in a certain sense, buying it wasn’t all that different from sinking the points into a level-up bonus.

“It’s just as you say, Haruyuki.” At some point, a tranquil expression had come across Kuroyukihime’s face, and she nodded gently. “However, there used to be a lone exception in the Accelerated World. The power to produce one’s own Enhanced Armament: the ability Arms Creation. The person who possessed this ability…was the first Red King, also known as Master Gunsmith, Red Rider.”

The Legion meeting over the lunch break approximately four hours earlier had ended in confusion: Immediately after Fuko gave voice to the name Red Rider, Kuroyukihime had told all of them, “Give me a little time,” and brought the topic of the ISS kits to a close there. Then she and the others had discussed the main agenda item she’d called them together for: confirming their course of action for a Magenta Scissor raid at the school festival (though, that said, the plan was basically just to be on maximum alert at the Umesato festival on Sunday), and then the meeting had been abruptly called to a close.

When they were about to leave, Fuko had sidled over to him and murmured, “June’s almost over, you know?  ” but it was still clear the double-gun crest hidden on the ISS kits was seriously troubling her.

During his afternoon classes, 10 percent or so of Haruyuki’s brain was occupied by the former Red King. He noted in his mind all the information he had ever heard about Red Rider, but the list was surprisingly short. His name, the fact that he had been the leader of Prominence before Niko, and the fact that three years earlier, he had been hit with Black Lotus’s sudden death technique, lost all his points, and been forever banished from the Accelerated World. That was basically all he knew.

Even still, from the fact that his color name was crowned with red—the pure color itself—Haruyuki had vaguely assumed that he had boasted incredibly awesome long-range attack power: massive firepower exceeding even that of Niko in fortress mode. However, this ability of his that Kuroyukihime was now telling him about was far beyond anything Haruyuki had imagined.

The power to produce Enhanced Armaments…

“Arms Creation? Th-that means the power to make as many gun-type Enhanced Armaments as he wanted?” Haruyuki asked ever so timidly.

“It wasn’t quite that impressive of an ability.” Kuroyukihime shook her head, a faint smile crossing her lips. “I remember him telling me that to forge just one gun required serious payment on his side. Although, of course, he didn’t tell me exactly what that payment was.”

“Still, that’s an amazing ability. He could gradually enhance his Legion members with his own power.”

“Indeed. In fact, there were plenty of Burst Linkers in Prominence at the time equipped with handguns and rifles made by Rider. Apparently, some even switched over from their own original Enhanced Armaments. For that alone, I suppose Rider would have been adored by his Legion members.” Kuroyukihime cut herself off there and turned her gaze on the evening scene on the other side of the window before continuing, almost in a murmur, “The guns he forged were all extremely accurate, you see. They gave us quite a bit of trouble in the Territories. About the only one who could shake free of the barrage of bullets and break through to the enemy was Fuko, equipped with Gale Thruster. The ICBM strategy, where she would fly in carrying Uiui and airdrop her into the enemy firing squad, was something we came up with out of necessity.”

“I—I get it.” Nodding his agreement, he took another sip of milk tea before giving voice to the question that abruptly popped up in his mind. “But I mean, listening to this, it’s like Red Rider was really generous. He trusted the Legion members unconditionally, huh? I mean, there was the possibility that the Burst Linkers he gave the guns he made to would take them and transfer to some other Legion, right?”

“Mmm. I suppose. It’s true Rider didn’t concern himself with the details; he was a thoroughly positive, passionate fellow. But it isn’t as though even he would hand out his weapons without any kind of safety whatsoever.”

“Safety? What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said. All the guns Rider made were equipped with a safety modeled after the crossed guns crest you saw at lunch today. And he could lock that safety from a distance. Even after he handed the gun over to someone else, mmm? So supposing a Legion member were to switch Legions, gun and all, they would never be able to pull the trigger of that gun again.”

“Whoa, this power just keeps getting more amazing,” Haruyuki groaned admiringly. “He couldn’t actually fire long distance, could he?”

“It does appear that he indeed could not, and we kings used to roll our eyes at it.” Kuroyukihime smiled faintly. “If he’s going to activate a safety, then the power to recover the gun itself would be better. Rider would always say in response, ‘It’s not like I designed the ability, you know.’”

Here, Kuroyukihime lifted her teacup and, without bringing it to her mouth, returned it to the saucer a few seconds later. She let out a thin sigh, head hanging, and murmured in an almost soundless voice, “Haruyuki…Is it all right if I come sit next to you?”

“Huh?! Oh, uh, um, um.” His heart suddenly began to move at double speed, and he fell into a half-frozen state, unable to say yes or no.

But without waiting for a reply, the older student, clad in black, stood up smoothly from the sofa. She went around the coffee table and soon sat down immediately to his left. A refreshing scent tickled his sense of smell, and a faint warmth that would have been impossible to re-create with avatars in the virtual world stroked the skin of his left arm.

“There are social cameras in this room as well. But for this distance, no security’s going to come charging in.” As she whispered this, Kuroyukihime leaned her slender body against Haruyuki. Her arms, stretching out from her short-sleeved shirt, touched his own, and his mind raced. At this distance, he could hold in his feelings or he could leave zero distance between them—but he forced down the feelings quickly rising up within him.

He knew instinctively what Kuroyukihime wanted. She was about to confess something very difficult, and during that confession, she wanted him to support her. In which case, as her child, as a Legion member, and as a male student who adored the vice president, he had to do what he had to do.

“Kuroyukihime. I said this before, too, but…no matter what happens, I’ll always be right by your side,” Haruyuki said as if firming up his resolve.

“Before?” Kuroyukihime cocked her head curiously, still extremely close to him. “When are we talking about?”

“Huh? Uh, um.” Panicked, he replayed the movie of his memories and paused on a certain scene. He had definitely said almost the exact same thing immediately after sitting down on this sofa— “Ah! I-I’m sorry! I didn’t so much say it as just think it in my head.”

It was one thing to get mixed up with a neurospeak voice-directing, but something was wrong with him mistaking speaking for a simple thought. Haruyuki was thoroughly embarrassed.

“Honestly.” A slender finger reached out abruptly and poked his cheek. “You never change. It’s basically all right if you stay like this, but next time, make sure to communicate these kinds of thoughts in words. Out loud.”

“R-right. I will.”

“Mmm. Please do.” She nodded primly and pulled her finger away from Haruyuki’s check, tucking it back into her hand before taking a deep breath and speaking somewhat abruptly. “Summer three years ago. I was in grade six. If we cut straight to the reason I sliced off Red Rider’s head with an Incarnate-enhanced special attack, it’s…it’s directly connected with Rider’s abilities Arms Creation and Distance Safety.”

“Huh?!” Haruyuki was stunned. “It wasn’t because of the nonaggression pact the Red King was advocating?!”

“There was indeed that.” Next to him, Kuroyukihime pulled her chin back a centimeter or so. “But immediately before the first meeting of the Seven Kings was held and became the stage for tragedy, I received certain information from one of the kings. Red Rider wasn’t just proposing a mutual nonaggression pact among the seven major Legions—he was also completing ‘physical means’ of essentially forcing it to be enacted.”

“Physical…means…”

“Yes. You might well call it an absolute power. A gun that would be distributed to all of the seven major Legions on which the safety would only be released in the event of an attack by another Legion. In appearance, it was a very ordinary revolver-type handgun, but it was no mere Enhanced Armament. It shot immensely powerful Incarnate bullets, the accuracy rate was one hundred percent, and the number of bullets it held was infinite. So, for example, if a hundred people came at you in the Territories, as long as the defending side had this gun, they would have the power to easily wipe out the enemy.”

Kuroyukihime’s words at once brought Haruyuki’s temperature—which had started to rise at being pressed up against her—back down at once. Aware of the gooseflesh standing up on his arms, he shook his head in a motion that resembled shivering. “Th-that’s…I mean, he might have been a king, but there’s no way he could make something like that, that kind of powerful Enhanced Armament from scratch. I mean, even the Seven Arcs don’t have that kind of power.”

“I…also thought that when I first heard this; I didn’t believe it. But, well, the king who told me about it had an actual Incarnate gun. Said that it was a sample from Rider. She demonstrated it for me in a duel stage with just the two of us. It was a Demon City, with its solid terrain, but…I saw a third of the stage become level ground pocked with craters in mere seconds. And the side of the gun was indeed emblazoned with the crossed guns emblem and a safety.”

Having gotten this far in her explanation, Kuroyuki slumped against Haruyuki’s shoulder. Her face was turned far downward, and he couldn’t see the look on it. After a brief silence, the voice that came was tinged once more with an echo of sorrow somehow.

“I was pushed into a state of serious confusion and anxiety. The fact that Rider hoped for the stagnation of the world so much that he would create this gun, so like the nuclear deterrence forces of old, was a shock to me. I believed his motivation for creating weapons was simply that he was seeking the excitement and delight of the duel.”

She laced the fingers of both hands together and squeezed before continuing her monologue.

“Until I was shown that gun, I thought I would be able to persuade Rider with words—ask him what the meaning was of the existence of Burst Linkers that didn’t fight, tell him we should continue to duel even if we were saddled with the level-nine sudden-death rule. I thought the other kings and Red Rider himself would accept my assertions. Because I believed—no, I was convinced that like me, everyone, from the bottoms of their hearts, more than anything else, was seeking the thing that lay beyond level ten.”

The instant he heard this, a faint, distant voice came back to life in the depths of Haruyuki’s mind.

I…I want to know. Whatever it takes, I have to know.

Accelerating your thinking, you can get money, grades, fame. Is this really the meaning behind our Duels? Is this the compensation we seek, the limit we can reach? Isn’t…isn’t there something beyond this? This…shell called a human being…outside…something more…”

Kuroyukihime had said this the previous fall at a coffee shop in Higashi Koenji, the day after Haruyuki had become a Burst Linker. He’d known basically nothing about the Accelerated World at that point, but her words had made their way deep, deep into his heart and lingered there. Even now, eight months later, he felt like he could hear the faint echoes of it if he listened hard.

“Something…more,” he murmured, and then he raised his voice to continue. “I don’t think it’s just the kings. I’m sure all Burst Linkers are thinking like that from the bottoms of their hearts.”

“…Yes, I suppose. But at the time, I thought I had been betrayed. I believed that Red Rider was so afraid of losing Brain Burst that he brought forward this nonaggression pact, and on top of that, he developed a gun incorporating the prohibited Incarnate System—the ultimate weapon. I believed he was trying to make the world stagnate. The respect I had for Rider, the solidarity I felt with him as a comrade in arms, vanished. I attended the meeting of the Seven Kings with one resolve—a murderous intent. To take Rider’s head while the safeties for all seven of the Incarnate guns that had supposedly been already completed were locked and make it so that those guns could never be fired.”

Still leaning against Haruyuki, Kuroyukihime raised her right hand slightly and stared at it for a while. Almost as though she were searching for traces of blood somewhere on those pale fingers.

“Naturally, I was prepared for the fact that the other Kings—especially Rider’s sworn ally, Blue Knight, and Purple Thorn, who was basically in a romantic relationship with him—would not understand my actions. In fact…I even suspected these two had already agreed to Rider’s plan behind the scenes. Thus I was tormented with the thought that I would never get another chance outside of this meeting to take the heads of five level niners and reach level ten. I would first push Rider to total loss with a surprise attack, and then, in the massive confusion that was sure to follow, four others.”

She paused for a moment and squeezed her right hand tightly shut.

“No, I’ll be precise. I would defeat Blue Knight, Purple Thorn, Yellow Radio, and Green Grandé. I attended the meeting of the Seven Kings with this murderous intent. You already know what happened after that. In the end, I took only Rider’s head and shamelessly lived on myself. Immediately after that, we took on the Four Gods of the Castle with the full mobilization of Nega Nebulus, and I destroyed the Legion itself.”

“…Uh-huh…” Haruyuki could only offer a small voice as he nodded. He had been told about the brave and sad end of the initial Nega Nebulus ten days earlier, when he had met Utai Shinomiya. The Legion had succeeded in rescuing Ardor Maiden from the altar of the God Suzaku at that time, but the remaining two Elements of the Legion were still in a sealed state, and Haruyuki knew only their names.

“…?” Suddenly, he felt like he could hear the sound of water flowing somewhere in the distance. But when he glanced over, the faucet in the kitchen was, of course, clearly off, so he brought his awareness back to Kuroyukihime’s story. As he did, a meager doubt he hadn’t noticed before popped up in his mind.

“Um, Kuroyukihime. I understand why you went to take down Red Rider. But why were the other four you were going for those four?” He asked it timidly, but then suddenly answered himself: “Oh, right. The other person was the one who told you about the Incarnate gun, right? So you didn’t target her. Um, the kings are seven colors, so that king’s color…”

The instant Haruyuki had made it this far, Kuroyukihime shuddered violently, like she’d been bathed in electric current. She sat up on the sofa, almost as if she were being repelled by it, and long hair swinging, she whirled around and slammed her face into Haruyuki’s chest.

“Huh?! K-Kuroyukihime?!” Haruyuki’s hoarse voice was drowned out by Kuroyukihime’s tense cry.

“I…I was a fool!!” She pressed her face into his left shoulder, and her hands gripped both his shoulders tightly. The Black King let out an even more anguished cry. “The one I should have defeated wasn’t Knight or Thorn or Radio or Grandé…or even Rider! I—I should have targeted her alone! It was my first and last chance…It took me far too long…to realize that!”

Even as he was stunned by the unexpected outburst, Haruyuki instinctively placed a hand gently on Kuroyukihime’s back. When he did so, her stiff body relaxed slightly. Haruyuki summoned his resolve and asked the small ear next to his mouth, “So, this ‘her’—you mean the last person, the White King, right?”

After a few seconds, the face pressed up against him nodded sharply. “Yes. The White King showed me the gun Rider made and razed a stage with it…I knew she had absolutely no physical attack power, be it long range or short, so I believed without question that the incredible power of the Incarnate bullets was the ability of the gun itself. But…even the White King, perfect in all ways, made just one careless mistake.”

“Mistake?”

“Mmm. She overlooked the possibility that when I brought Red Rider to total loss, the Enhanced Armament he had would be transferred to my storage.”

“Enhanced Armament…S-so you mean—?!” Haruyuki’s eyes flew open.

“Yes, the gun in question.” Kuroyukihime nodded slightly. “After the fall of Nega Nebulus, having lost everything, not only did I cut myself off from the global net—for a long time, I didn’t even accelerate. But one winter night months after the incident, I suddenly opened the Brain Burst console. And I noticed there was a Rider-made gun in my storage. I—as if guided by it, I dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field and made the gun into an object. It was indeed the exact same gun the White King had test-fired for me the day before the meeting of the Seven Kings. The safety was off. I held the gun, turned it on my own home in the Accelerated World, and pulled the trigger. However.”

In a voice containing pain and regret and hatred, Kuroyukihime announced, “No bullet came out. Not the Incarnate bullets that had blown away the stage that day, not even a regular bullet. Even though there were bullets in the cylinder. As I pulled the trigger over and over again, I finally understood. That the gun…wasn’t about destruction…but rather a symbol of peace. Rider had created them with the intention of gifting all the Kings with a gun that did not shoot bullets as proof of peace and friendship after the mutual nonaggression pact was concluded.”

“B-but when the White King fired it, you said bullets definitely came out.” After he gave voice to this, dumbfounded, Haruyuki realized something. Bullets had been launched from a gun that could not fire. There was only one logic that would make that possible.

“Exactly. The bullets that so totally destroyed the Demon City stage that day…were the overwrite of the White King herself. And what was launched from the gun was a destructive Incarnate. As for the reason why she alone would have had the gun early…Most likely, Rider had discussed things with her. The design, the name of the gun.”

“What…was the name of it?”

“Seven Roads. A revolver with seven bullets. I took all the bullets out of the cylinder. They shone in the seven colors of red, blue, purple, yellow, green, white, and black.”

“Seven lords, seven roads,” Haruyuki murmured.

“The seven color trajectories reaching out from the single gun barrel did not cross, but had the same starting point. And the same end point. When I felt that this was the intent Rider had put into the gun, I understood that I had been manipulated. I had been made to believe that a gun of peace was a gun of destruction. I had been made to be afraid of a nonexistent threat. And in the end, I had been made to stain these hands with the blood of a friend. This manipulation wasn’t just pushing Rider to total loss. For a long time before that, possibly from immediately after I became a Burst Linker, she had made me dance however she pleased, for so many years.”

Haruyuki could say nothing further to this sorrowful soliloquy. He put all the feelings into the hand that gently stroked Kuroyukihime’s back, but her slender body stayed stiff, shaking. And he was able to hazard a guess as to the reason for this, albeit a hazy one.

The story wasn’t finished yet.

He had been invited to Kuroyukihime’s house in a corner of Asagaya Jutaku the previous week. The town house she lived in by herself was clean and simple and was filled with quiet and sadness. She had explained that she was living by herself as a junior high student because of an attack in the real on a certain Burst Linker. In which case, the object of this attack was the very White King who had deceived Kuroyukihime, manipulated her, and made her take the Red King’s head.

Squeezing Haruyuki’s shoulders so hard it hurt, Kuroyukihime pushed an even more strained voice from the depths of her throat. “When I returned to the real world from the nearest portal…I was still in half disbelief. Or rather, I wanted to believe—she would never betray me, trick me like that. Because…the White King, Transient Eternity, White Cosmos—in the Accelerated World she is my parent, and in the real world…my sister, older by a year.”

Ever since he had become a Burst Linker, Haruyuki had sometimes thought, from the extremely one-sided information he had been given: What if Kuroyukihime had a special relationship with one of the kings? And that king was a person very close to her in the real as well?

It had been nearly six months before that Haruyuki had asked about Kuroyukihime’s parent, and she had only replied with these mysterious words:

That person was once…the person closest to me. I believed this Linker would shine brightly forever at the center of my world and keep all kinds of darkness and cold at bay.

However, one day…one incident, one instant, I realized that this was an ephemeral illusion. Now you could go so far as to say that, for me, this person is my archenemy. So much so that I could almost believe that this inexhaustible hatred existed inside me from the moment we first met.

The “instant” in this recollection—it was none other than the moment when she realized that her parent and older sister the White King had manipulated her and made her push Red Rider into total loss.

“I’m not trying to say that all the sin of taking Rider’s head should be forced onto the White King or anything like that,” Kuroyukihime noted into his ear, almost as if she had read his thoughts.

“Even if she hadn’t shown me that gun, I would have resisted Rider’s proposal to the very end, and it was me myself who fully believed the words of the White King and not a single word from the Red King…However, at the time, when I ran from my own room to my sister’s, still half in disbelief, and she acknowledged everything while smiling gently, I was seized by an intense rage, like nothing I’d ever felt before. I decided that the fact that Rider had lost Brain Burst, the fact that I had lost Nega Nebulus, was all her fault. Before I knew it, I was holding the letter opener on her desk.”

Having told this much of her story, Kuroyukihime pursed her lips together for a moment, and whether he wanted to see it or not, a visual sprang up in the back of Haruyuki’s mind.

A girl with black hair clutching a small knife in both hands, tears spilling endlessly down shuddering pale cheeks, anger and hatred swirling in her obsidian eyes, almost eclipsed by an even greater sadness. With the knife turned on a girl only slightly taller than herself, the girl closes the distance between them by one step, another. But even with the sharp tip of the blade before her, the smile on the lips of the other girl does not disappear.

“I said to my sister, ‘Push the knife in. Direct duel with me right here.’ I said I’d offer her the same fate as Rider. And her smile didn’t so much as twitch as she answered me.” At the same time as Kuroyukihime spoke, the lips of the girl in the screen of his imagination moved. “‘Don’t say that. I don’t want to take even Brain Burst from you.’ In other words, if my sister and I, both at level nine, fought, she would beat me and make me lose all my points by the sudden-death rule—that’s what she meant. And despite the fact that I had never once fought my sister seriously, I knew that was certainly what would happen. I stood there frozen, and she tried to take the knife from me. The tip of the blade cut her palm.”

The long story appeared to be coming to an end. All the tension suddenly drained out of Kuroyukihime, and she leaned heavily against Haruyuki as she continued haltingly, “You know the rest. The fact that I turned a knife on my sister was caught on the cameras of our home net, and I was expelled from the family home in Minato Ward under the pretext of mental health treatment. And thus I lost not only my Legion but also my actual family—although I never had any real attachment to them. And that is the whole of the story of me; the first Red King, Red Rider; and the White King, White Cosmos.”

After a pause, Kuroyukihime continued in a slightly different tone. “So? Are you shocked? Or perhaps contemptuous, Haruyuki? For the sake of my objective, I might someday sacrifice even you.”

The moment he heard this, Haruyuki used the hands that had been stroking Kuroyukihime’s back to pull her toward him. At the same time, he replied in a voice filled with every emotion in his heart, “If there are higher levels, it’s only natural to aim for them. I mean, that’s the reason Brain Burst exists.”

This exchange was indeed the same as the one he had had with her at the coffee shop the day after he became a Burst Linker. Eight months had passed since then, but he felt the need to assure her that his own feelings hadn’t changed a bit.

“The things you’ve lost,” he continued, “you can get them back again—no, you can rebuild. Right now, Nega Nebulus’s still a Legion with just six people, but I’m sure the remaining Elements will be back any day now. And we’ll recruit new Linkers, too, so it’ll be even bigger than it was before. And then this time for sure, as a Burst Linker, you’ll fight the White King fair and square and settle this. I’m always right by your side. Right up until you reach level ten.”

Even after Haruyuki closed his mouth, Kuroyukihime stayed silent for a while. Normally, this would be when he got anxious that he may have accidentally said the wrong thing, but at just this moment, the thought didn’t even cross his mind. He simply continued to put his strength in his hands.

Finally, the faintest sensation on his left shoulder. One small drop, then two fell and soaked into the fabric of his shirt, reaching his skin. “Thank you, Haruyuki. My decision was not mistaken, after all. From the bottom of my heart, I’m so glad I chose you.”

These words, too, were essentially the same thing she had said eight months earlier. However, at the time, Haruyuki had pulled back his clenched fist and hung his head deeply. Now, however, he squeezed her even more tightly. “Me too. From the bottom of my heart, I’m glad you chose me.”

“…Thank you.” Her murmured voice was deep and damp. Her faint sobs continued then for nearly two minutes, but Haruyuki didn’t pull his hands away; he simply accepted wordlessly the tears that fell.

What broke the warm, gentle silence was the announcement telling all students still on campus to return home.

Kuroyukihime slowly sat up. “Wait a moment,” she said, heading into the kitchen. He heard the sound of water, which then quickly stopped. When the vice president returned, her face had essentially regained its usual cool composure, although there was still a little redness, particularly around her eyes.

They left the student council office together, walked to their separate lockers to change shoes, and met up again in the front yard. Once they stepped through the school gates, the in-school local net was cut off, and in its place, the icon for the global-net connection flashed.

Since the condo building Haruyuki lived in and the Asagaya residence where Kuroyukihime’s town house was were in opposite directions, with Umesato in the middle, normally, this was where they would part, going off to the right and the left. But Kuroyukihime stopped at the side of the gate and didn’t make a move.

“Haruyuki.” The look on her face was serious.

“Y-yes?” He naturally snapped to attention.

Kuroyukihime cleared her throat lightly before continuing. “When I really think about it, it was all fine and good to call you to the student council office, but don’t you feel like we didn’t talk about the really important thing?”

“Huh? The important thing? What do you mean?” Haruyuki replied.

She brought her face in close. “The matter of the crest inscribed on the cards you brought back.”

“Oh!” Now that she mentioned it, that was true. The reason she had called him to the student council office in the first place was supposedly because, for some reason, the crossed guns emblem of the first Red King was on the cards that sealed the ISS kits, but that matter was still shrouded in mystery.

If Kuroyukihime had some kind of theory, he wanted to hear it right then and there, but they couldn’t exactly stand and talk like that at the school gates. Haruyuki checked the time display and thought quickly. His original plan had been to head to Nakano Area No. 2 after he left school, just like he had the previous day, and duel Wolfram Cerberus for the third time. Cerberus was also wrapped in all kinds of mysteries, but if Haruyuki kept exchanging blows with him, he had the feeling that he would arrive at the truth of Cerberus at some point. But, regrettably, at that moment, he had a mission that had to take priority.

This was, of course, the destruction of the ISS kits. Magenta Scissor wouldn’t stop at taking down one school in Shimokitazawa. Before she spread the kits any farther, they had to cut out the root of the dark power. But the annoying thing was that it was, of course, impossible for Haruyuki to go on his own and attack Tokyo Midtown Tower, where the kit main body was enshrined, and it was too dangerous for even the six members of Nega Nebulus to attempt. Even if they did manage to dispose of the guardian, the Archangel Metatron, they had no way of knowing what was waiting inside the tower. Just as had been decided at the last meeting of the Seven Kings, a joint operation with all seven of the major Legions was essential.

Once his thoughts had reached this point, Haruyuki gasped with sudden realization. “Uh, um, Kuroyukihime?”

“Hmm? If we’re going to talk about the crest, we should go somewhere quiet.”

“N-no, this is something else. Right now, the Midtown Tower attack is the top priority, right?”

“Whoa, whoa! It’s too dangerous to talk about that in a public space with real voices. Even if someone unconnected overheard us, we could be suspected of being terrorists, you know.” Kuroyukihime grinned wryly, but when she noticed that the look on Haruyuki’s face was serious, she blinked once, then nodded as if to say Hold on and reached into her bag. She pulled out a meter-and-a-half-long XSB cable, and without giving Haruyuki the time to say anything, she offered him one end while plugging the other into her Neurolinker.

After all this time, there was no point in being embarrassed about directing, so Haruyuki kept his serious face on—although a light sweat did break out on his back—and accepted the plug, connecting it to his neck.

“It’s been a while since I directed with you in town.” Immediately, Kuroyukihime’s neurospeak voice echoed in his mind. “You do seem entirely used to it, though.”

“I-I’m not used to it at all. Totally not!”

“Hmm, I suppose you’re not, then.”

“Oh…s-sorry, I just…” Feeling ashamed, this time he replied in neurospeak.

Kuroyukihime laughed. “How about we walk a bit? The rain’s finally lifted and all.”

Just as she said, the rain clouds that had departed toward the east before lunch showed no signs of returning now, and the rain forecast on his virtual desktop showed numbers in the 10 percent range until evening.

“Okay. Just hold on a minute. I’ll turn off automatic viewing,” Haruyuki said briefly, and he quickly opened the Brain Burst console. When automatic viewing mode was on, if a duel started between Burst Linkers registered on his viewing list in their current location of Suginami Area No. 1, he would accelerate without warning in the middle of a conversation.

“Um, you’re not going to turn it off, too, Kuroyukihime?” Haruyuki asked her casually as he switched the mode to “off.”

“No need. Apologies to the other Legion members, but the only one registered on my viewing list is you,” she replied as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

He was surprised to hear this, but then Kuroyukihime peeked at his face and winked lightly, so his heart leapt even higher in his chest. Heart pounding and gaze frozen in place, he hit the OK button of the confirmation dialog window and fumbled to close the console. He felt like he heard some kind of unfamiliar sound effect, but his brain had its hands full carefully weighing how exactly to respond to her statement. Eventually, what came from not his mouth but his mind was “Th-that’s an honor.”

It was a simple, inoffensive statement, and Kuroyukihime nodded, still smiling.

“Well then, shall we go?” She turned her feet north.

The everyday road that continued just under a hundred meters from the school gates was deserted, but the instant they stepped out onto the sidewalk of Oume Highway, housewives carrying bags of groceries and office workers headed for the station filled Haruyuki’s field of view. Naturally, mixed among them were students from nearby schools, and a variety of expressions popped up onto their faces upon seeing Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime with their Neurolinkers connected by a thin cord as they passed by.

I’ll never get used to this, Haruyuki complained to himself, but he kept it as a thought deep enough not to be output as a voice.

“Now then,” Kuroyukihime said coolly as they waited for the red light to change. “About your question concerning the priority of the Midtown Tower attack that you started to ask before, the answer is, at any rate, yes.”

“Huh? Oh, y-yes. Right.” Haruyuki rewound his thoughts by several minutes and bobbed his head up and down. “Um, the thing that was bugging me…For the Tower attack, the seven Legions will be working together, but then that means we’ll be taking a cooperative stance with the White Legion, but for you, I mean, the White King…”

“…Is that it? Sorry to make you worry about that.” At the same time as Kuroyukihime lowered her eyes slightly, the light changed to green. The time remaining for the green light displayed in the navigation window in his view had dropped three seconds before her black loafers finally moved forward. “It’s true that the hatred I have for my sister—for White Cosmos—has not faded in the slightest since that night. To the point where if I were to face her without any mental preparation, I don’t know what I’d do. However, even so, I have a reason for attending the last meeting and the meeting before that of the Seven Kings, and for accepting this shared mission.”

“Reason? What sort of reason?”

“The White King does not show herself before Burst Linkers of other Legions as a general rule. In the very early days of the Accelerated World, naturally, she also dueled, but even then, whether by ability or the power of an Enhanced Armament, most of the time, her form was wrapped in a light that dazzled the eyes and so couldn’t be seen. And since she reached level nine, I suppose basically the only ones who have seen her are the other kings and the senior members of the White Legion Oscillatory Universe. Well, until I met you, that was me, so I can’t really talk,” she added as they finished crossing the road, and without the slightest hesitation, she turned them toward the shopping street ahead. They continued to walk north, farther and farther from Kuroyukihime’s house, but because of the short cable directly connecting them, Haruyuki had no choice but to follow.

“In other words, although this is pathetic, I was able to attend the meetings precisely because I was certain she would not be there. The shared mission is the same. The location is also the Unlimited Neutral Field, and hypothetically, even if the kings were asked to participate in the operation, she would simply send her representative, as she has up to now. What I hate is not Oscillatory Universe, but White Cosmos alone, so it doesn’t make sense to reject the joint mission with my hatred as a reason.”

Kuroyukihime stopped there and slid the fingers of her left hand along the XSB cable swinging between the two of them. Almost as if it were the physical manifestation of the connection between Haruyuki and Kuroyukihime, she held it tight in her palm.

“But it would be a lie to say I have no misgivings or anxiety whatsoever. I was counting on you to get the Theoretical Mirror ability, and even if the name is different, I have faith that the Optical Conduction ability you did learn will play a wonderful role. But even so, my uneasiness—no, my fear—hasn’t gone away since the moment the meeting ended on Sunday.”

“What…is that fear of?”

This time, it took a while for an answer to come back to him. The pedestrian-only shopping street was more crowded than Oume Highway, so they were forced up against each other as they walked. Kuroyukihime’s arm brushed against Haruyuki’s, and she was cool to the touch.

“She’s a terrifying person.”

Suddenly, these words echoed in Haruyuki’s brain. As she continued, the strained thought would have been barely a whisper if it were communicated in a real voice.

“She sees through to the wounds in the hearts of all people, prescribes the appropriate words and attitudes, and heals them. But on the underside of this, she controls the hearts of those other people and manipulates them. The reason I haven’t said anything to you before about the White King is because I was afraid that by hearing about her, that terrifying ability to manipulate might affect even you indirectly.”

“Th-that’s— I wouldn’t be manipulated!” Haruyuki replied reflexively.

“Yes, of course, I believe that.” Kuroyukihime nodded. “I spoke frankly with you about my relationship with the White King today because…I realized that being afraid of losing you was the same thing as doubting you.”

Here, her feet stopped abruptly, and she placed her hands on Haruyuki’s shoulders and moved the two of them to the side of a large sign so they weren’t in the way of the people passing by. Still, it wasn’t as though they were now far removed from their surroundings, so the flickering glances of passersby were still turned on them.

Normally, Haruyuki would be painfully aware of those glances, but at the moment, he couldn’t take his eyes off Kuroyukihime’s serious face. She closed in until their noses were about twenty centimeters apart, and then Kuroyukihime moved her lips to say in both thought and real voice, “Haruyuki, I have one other thing that I must tell you.”

“O-okay.”

“That—”

However, he didn’t hear the rest of it. Because at the moment when Kuroyukihime took a deep breath, a familiar sound slammed into his auditory nerves. Skreeee! Cold, dry thunder. The sound of acceleration.

Wh-why?! Haruyuki was stunned. Neither he nor Kuroyukihime had given the acceleration command, and their present location was Nega Nebulus territory, so duels should have been blocked. And he had definitely turned automatic viewing mode off. There should have been no reason for him to accelerate.

This surprise was doubled the instant he saw that message that flamed up in the center of his now-dark field of view. It wasn’t the HERE COMES… from when he was challenged, nor was it the REGISTERED DUEL… when automatic viewing was activated.

A BATTLE ROYALE IS BEGINNING!!