Accel World - Volume 12 - Chapter 9

9

It was only after Silver Crow’s feet touched down on the white ground of the duel stage that he was able to digest the meaning of that line of text.

The fighting game Brain Burst had single match, a tag-team match, and following that, a third type of match: Battle Royale mode. The procedure for starting a Battle Royale was easy: Simply accelerate with the normal Burst Link command, open the matching list, and select BATTLE ROYALE from the submenu. However, that said, it wasn’t the case that this pulled everyone on the list into the duel stage. Given that the system was such that only Burst Linkers who had Battle Royale standby on in the console screen settings could be summoned, everyone normally had that standby turned to off. Haruyuki, naturally, was no exception.

So why am I in a Battle Royale?! He started to panic before finally figuring it out: Because he’d been operating his virtual desktop without looking carefully at the screen when he turned automatic viewing mode off earlier, he must’ve accidentally touched Battle Royale standby in the same tab and turned it on.

“Why am I such a klutz…,” he muttered to himself dejectedly, dropping his shoulders.

“I see,” came from immediately beside him. “You’re not a hero with BR mode always on. This is instead the result of mistaken operation?” The voice sounded exasperated.

Jumping slightly, he turned his gaze and found a dazzling and majestic duel avatar, body wrapped in jet-black semitransparent armor, the sharp swords of her four limbs glittering. Naturally, it was none other than the Black King, Black Lotus.

“Huh?! Wh-why?! You can’t have Battle Royale—?!” Haruyuki cried out in a hoarse voice.

“Unfortunately, I am not the hero that you are.” The amethyst semi-mirrored goggles popped from side to side. “I was called here not as a dueler but as the Gallery because I automatically view you.”

“Oh. M-makes sense. Good.” He relaxed slightly. The probability was extremely low, but if another king—i.e., another level niner—had also been summoned to this battlefield, it would have been the abrupt start to a sudden-death final battle. With that in mind, he took a look at his surroundings and found the silhouettes of other members of the Gallery—albeit few of them—on the roofs of the buildings of the pale, frozen Ice stage.

Normally, the Gallery couldn’t come within ten meters of the duelers, but parent and child were the exception to that rule. Kuroyukihime brought her face mask close to Haruyuki’s face. “Even if the reason you were pulled into the Battle Royale space is simple carelessness, the issue at hand is the person who pulled you in. It’s essentially not possible to start a BR through an accident of operation. In other words, this person is either so brave that they don’t fear the fact that this could be a battle of many against one in the territory of another Legion, or…they have reason to believe that they can win even in that situation.”

“……! N-no way. An ISS kit user…?”

“It’s possible. And if that’s the case, you must avoid close combat to the best of your abilities. The enemy’s objective might not be simply to win the duel but to spread the kit infection.”

“R-right…” After Haruyuki nodded, he glanced up toward the left of his field of view. If this had been a normal duel, the enemy’s health gauge and name would have been displayed there, but it was blank now. In Battle Royale mode, you couldn’t see the enemy’s gauge until you came into contact with that enemy.

The sole piece of information he had was the guide cursor that popped up in the lower part of the center of his field of view, but that only told him the direction of his nearest enemy. It was currently pointing toward the southeast—the direction of Oume Highway—and was changing direction toward the south at a fair speed.

“S-so fast! There’s no hesitation in that movement. That’s probably the starter. They’re coming this way.” Together with Kuroyukihime, Haruyuki turned his eyes toward the south of the shopping street. But a loosely curving wall of ice blocked their view, and they couldn’t see through to the narrow lane beyond.

“It’d be better to make contact in a bigger space than here. I’m going back to Oume Highway,” Haruyuki said.

“Mmm.” Kuroyukihime quickly nodded. “Understood. I can’t come close once the duel starts, so make sure you take care and stay on guard against any ISS kits.”

“Roger! Okay, I’m off, then!” Haruyuki shouted and, whirling around, he started to run, kicking at the snow piled up on the ground.

Large icicles fell occasionally from the ice walls that had once been shops lining either side of the road. Each time he came across one of these, he kicked it to destroy it. They didn’t begin to compare with the crystals of the Sacred Ground stage, but even so, his special-attack gauge was charged little by little. These sorts of little acts often decided battles.

Racing along with Silver Crow’s speed, he was through the road he’d walked down while directing with Kuroyukihime in a fraction of the time it had taken them to come. He slipped through the large ice arch that had been the commercial district’s sign and came out onto Oume Highway to find a pure, snowy field spreading out to the east and west. It would be an endless delight to use one end of the stage to the other and create an enormous snowman, but that would have to be his fun for next time. Right now, he used a boost jump to get to the top of the lump of ice rising up on the northeast corner of the intersection.

Building entry in an Ice stage was impossible—or rather, because the buildings were all transformed into lumps of ice, a special power was required to ascend higher terrain. Since it seemed that his closest enemy was approaching straight down Oume Highway, if he hid here, he would be able to get a look at his opponent first. Haruyuki held his breath and stared hard at the tip of the guide cursor.

However, announcing the true identity of his enemy was not a shadow on the horizon, but a sound. The deep, throaty rumbling that came to him on the wind was more than familiar. It was the sound of what was probably the sole Enhanced Armament in the Accelerated World equipped with an internal combustion engine, a sound he had had so thoroughly beaten into his ears that very morning—the sound of a motorcycle engine.

“H-huh?!” Unconsciously, this slipped out of Haruyuki’s mouth, and he jerked his body up from its prone position on the ice wall. At the same time, a yellow headlight shone and glittered in the distance on the white road.

“Wh-what’s going on?” Muttering, he flew down to the road surface again, and as if the rider of the American motorcycle had noticed this movement, the bike sped up slightly as it approached. The machine grew larger before his eyes and brake-drifted in, the rear tire kicking up massive amounts of snow. On the parked bike, a familiar skull face snapped the index fingers of both hands at him.

“Hey heeeeeeeey! I know you triple-heart, überlove mighty me, but maybe a surprise duel in Bat-Ro mode is a little too much, yeah?!”

The voice, gesture, and style were definitely those of the Century End rider, aka Ash Roller. And they had made contact, so a gauge with his name inscribed near it appeared in Haruyuki’s view. But the words that came out of Ash’s mouth didn’t make sense to Haruyuki in a number of ways.

“N-no, I don’t actually triple-heart, überlove you— Wait, wasn’t it you who dragged me into this battle?!” Haruyuki hurriedly hissed back.

“Whacha talkin’?” A large question mark popped up above the skull helmet. “Me and my magnificent self were just cruuuuising along Loop Seven, geddit? You seriously for real not the starter?”

The way Ash talked made it sound like he had been running down Kannana Street on the motorcycle, but Haruyuki knew that Ash in the real, Rin Kusakabe, was actually on her way home from school in a bus. However, retorting with that here would have been mean-spirited, so he set it aside and spread out his hands.

“Y-yeah, it wasn’t me. But then does that mean you always have BR standby on, Ash?”

“Naturalmente! Come at me with a battle; I’m buying in!”

“O-of course you would…But, wait—then who started this?”

“Figured you were all up in the works, living in fire town to settle this morning’s draw, you know?” Ash sat on the seat of the bike with his arms neatly crossed, and Haruyuki took on the same pose.

“Well, you know, a draw twice in a row is kind of an incomplete burn, though.” He shrugged. “But this morning, you charged in while I was in sleepytown.”

“No choice at all there. I mean, you with my sis doing that indirect—” Ash had gotten this far in the most casual of tones when suddenly, red flames sprang up in his eye sockets. From the horizontal slit at his mouth, thin puffs of white steam rose up. “And now I rememberrred…That I gotta press you niiiiiiice and flat, Crow.”

“I—I—I didn’t do anything with Rin, direct or indirect!”

“D-d-direct?! Y-you’re no blue! So why you suddenly talkin’ ’bout up-close-and-personal?!”

“I’m telling you I didn’t do anything! Anyway, Ash, the issue right now is who started this battle! I mean, whoever it was knew that you and me were on the matching list when they pushed the START button, which means they decided that they could win against one of us—or two against one if things went south.” Haruyuki earnestly blathered on and on, and “Protective Big Brother” Ash’s attention seemed to pull back to the current situation; the steam coming out of his mouth stopped.

But Haruyuki’s relief was fleeting. Now it wasn’t just steam but also orange exhaust flames gushing out.

“My mighty mega self is tera-burniiiiiiiiing!! This guy thinks he can beat Ash here and the damned crow solo?! Who’s this filthy little brat?!”

“I-I’m telling you I want to know that, too! If our luck’s bad, it might be like a high ranker, level seven or something—”

“Tch! Your level plus mine makes ten! You think I’d be driving down Kannana shaking in my boots over a level seven?!”

“Th-that’s not the point.” Haruyuki wanted to cradle his head in his hands.

Suddenly, the north side of an ice wall ten meters to the east exploded with a roar. Worried that it was a red-type long-distance bombardment, Haruyuki started to look up at the sky, but then realized that wasn’t it. The thick wall of ice hadn’t been destroyed from the outside, but been blown out from the inside.

In other words, one of the people who had dived into this battlefield was reluctant to waste the time it would take to follow the terrain and come out on Oume Highway and had moved in a direct line from the northeast—from the direction of Nakano Station. But the ice walls of the Ice stage were hard—maybe not as hard as objects in a Demon City or Steel stage, but still hard. To destroy one while moving forward, you’d have to be a Burst Linker with flame-type attack power or have some kind of armor that was so strong that ice was not even a thing—

The instant his thoughts reached this point, Haruyuki moaned, “No. Way.”

Springing to life in the back of his mind was a scene from the duel in Nakano Area No. 2 after school on Tuesday. Haruyuki had leaned back against the thick wall of the Steel stage and devised a strategy of lying in wait for an enemy who had to approach from either the left or the right. But his enemy had taken him with a surprise attack from a direction he never even imagined—by smashing through the steel wall behind him.

That Burst Linker had super-hard tungsten armor, a level one cloaked in many mysteries. Manganese Blade, a senior member of the Blue Legion, had assessed this young man as a genius, and he had the ability Physical Immune, which repelled all kinds of non-energy attacks.

“Wolfram…Cerberus…” At the same time as Haruyuki uttered the name, a sharply edged silhouette appeared from within the icy fog hanging in the air.

A right foot wrapped in gray metal armor trod heavily through the snow piled up on the road. The system determined that contact had been made, and a second health gauge appeared in the upper right of his field of view. The name displayed there was indeed that of Cerberus. The visor, reminiscent of a wolf’s maw, was open about three centimeters, with dark goggles exposed. Haruyuki couldn’t see the eye lenses, but he was keenly aware of the strong, focused gaze going right through him.

Stepping over the edge of the large hole in the ice wall onto Oume Highway, Cerberus walked straight toward them, his feet crunching in the snow. He stopped a mere two meters away from Haruyuki and Ash and bowed his head lightly.

“Hey, heeey. Don’t know this face. You may be the sta—”

“Was it you who started this, Cerberus?” Haruyuki asked, interrupting Ash.

“Yes, it was me, Crow.” The face mask with its sharp design moved up and down once more, and his clear, young boy’s voice continued, “I’m glad to see you. I felt certain that you would have BR mode on.”

Haruyuki couldn’t immediately respond. Because the reason he had Battle Royale standby on was the result of an extremely careless mistake. But this wasn’t the time to be worrying about that.

Just like the Cerberus of his avatar name, Wolfram Cerberus had more than two—probably three—personalities in his body. From his attitude, tone, and the fact that his original head was functioning, the one Haruyuki was currently speaking with was the one he had first fought, Cerberus I. This boy was very neat in his language and extremely polite.

When his head visor closed completely and the armor of his left shoulder opened, his personality changed to Cerberus II. That boy was not so fastidious with language, and his tone was fairly rough. But the biggest change was that even the abilities he used switched. The Physical Immune that Cerberus I had was plenty nonstandard, but II’s Wolf Down was even more terrifying. Just as the name indicated, this was the power to eat a duel avatar’s ability; II had even reproduced Silver Crow’s flying ability, albeit for a short time.

Both I and II were fearfully powerful enemies, but in terms of conversation partners, he couldn’t help but still be nervous with Cerberus I. Thus, Haruyuki didn’t dare correct Cerberus’s misunderstanding—and a part of him did indeed want to come off looking good—so he asked another question. “But if your goal was to see me, why go to the trouble of a Battle Royale? I was planning to head over to Naka-Two again tomorrow after school.”

“That…” Cerberus trailed off, which was unusual for him, but then he replied, head hanging slightly, “I absolutely had to see—no, fight you today. I waited in Nakano, but it didn’t seem that I would get the chance to see you there today, so I moved to Suginami. But this is Nega Nebulus territory, so I can’t challenge you here. So I had no choice but a Battle Royale.”

“Oh. S-sorry. I actually was planning to go over to Nakano right after school today, but some stuff happened.” Haruyuki automatically apologized before cocking his head for the third time. “But you said you had to fight me. Why? I mean, I could understand if you wanted to fight me…”

“…Please excuse me, Crow. I can’t tell you the reason right now. I apologize for my selfishness, but I beg you, please fight me!” He took a step forward. His voice was a shout, one that sounded the tiniest bit cornered.

Vrrrrrrron! But there, the large displacement V-twin engine roared. Silent up to that point, Ash Roller slammed his right hand down on the throttle.

“Whoa, whoaiiiiing! You. Totes no clue about you, but your little chitchat, blah-blah here says neeeewb, Level One. You know who we are?! Gotta respect it! Get it? My mighty self’s already got a date with this crow here! You wanna fight, you get in line!”

Um, Ash, that—you’re assuming you’ll beat me, aren’t you?

Before Haruyuki could snap out this sharp retort, Cerberus said in a low voice, eyes still fixed straight ahead, “Excuse me, but please don’t get in the way. The only one I want to fight is Crow. I don’t know who you are, but I have no business with you.”

Instantly, clouds of angry white steam puffed out from Ash Roller’s mouth once more. “Y-you braaaaat! Now you’ve gone and done it, yeah?! So pretty please sorry, I’m not the Gallery. This here’s Bat-Ro. Lemme giga burn that into your peewee braaaain!”

Before Haruyuki had time to stop him, Ash had kicked at the shift pedal and was accelerating full throttle. Snow spun up, and the front tire he yanked up high charged toward Cerberus’s head.

Ka-klank! The sound of impact roared through the stage, and a spray of snow danced up like smoke. With hands half-raised, Haruyuki waited for his field of view to clear. The sight that finally appeared was—surprising.

The small Cerberus had caught the front tire of the motorcycle with his crossed arms. He had dropped his hips down low, but his knees weren’t touching the ground. If Haruyuki had tried the same thing, he would definitely have been unable to support the heavy weight—easily exceeding two hundred kilograms—and he would have been pushed backward, sparks shooting from every joint on his body. When he had once lifted the rear wheel of the bike a mere ten centimeters, he had taken more than a little damage to both arms.

“Ah! Wha—?! You— Damned brat!” Ash Roller stood up from his seat and pushed the weight of his body hard against the handlebars, but Cerberus did not sink down. The visor on his head was still open, so Physical Immune wouldn’t have been activated, and beyond that, it was unclear as to whether or not that ability was effective against pressure damage.

In short, Cerberus wasn’t just hard, he was also tough. Now that Haruyuki thought about it, when Cerberus had collided head-on with the heavyweight Frost Horn, instead of being knocked back, he had braced his feet and stopped the onslaught. That wasn’t something you could do without some serious load-bearing capacity and impact resistance. In other words, locking techniques probably wouldn’t work on Cerberus, either. Haruyuki added another line to the list in his head.

“Tera suuuuuuuucks!” Ash shouted in exasperation. “I am gonna seriously crush yoooooou!” Still standing on the pegs, he twisted the accelerator in his right hand, so Haruyuki made a big X with both arms.

“I-it’s no use, Ash! If you open the throttle there—”

But it was already too late. The rear tire in contact with the ground spun fiercely, and inevitably, the motorcycle brought the front wheel up once again.

“Unh…aaaaah!” Without missing his chance, Cerberus howled sharply, as he stretched out his arms like a stiff spring. Its front wheel thrust up from below, the motorcycle moved into a basically vertical position, and the vehicle body wobbled in all directions.

“No—no?! Noooooooo!!” Ash tried desperately to bring down the bike in front, clutching the handlebars all the while, but the vehicle body instead slowly inclined to the rear and finally flipped over into the snow, engine racing emptily. There was a cry of “Hnrrk!” from beneath the massive engine block, accompanied by red damage light, and Ash’s health gauge displayed in the upper right of Haruyuki’s field of view dropped to around 10 percent.

Fortunately, the snow below him was deep, and he managed to escape any further pressure damage. But Ash was apparently unable to lift the bike off himself. Cursing like a sailor, the century-end rider kicked and flailed.

“H-hold on, Ash.” Haruyuki started to hurry over to him. “I’ll get the bike—”

However, a sharply edged silhouette blocked his way. Wolfram Cerberus, of course, but he seemed somehow different from before. A powerful wave of brooding torment came drifting out from the gap in his wolflike visor.

“Crow. I’ll ask you again. Please…fight me.” The clear, high-pitched voice of the young boy reminded Haruyuki for some reason of metal under pressure, on the verge of shattering.

He stopped and looked hard at his opponent’s eyes hidden beneath goggles. “I asked you this before, too, but why are you in such a rush to fight? I get that you’d want a revenge match for yesterday. But you totally crushed me the time before that and all. If today couldn’t happen, then wouldn’t tomorrow be just fine?”

“That will be too late!” Cerberus suddenly howled, and Haruyuki swallowed hard. The gray-metal avatar clenched his hands into tight fists and continued, almost forcing the words out. “I—I have to keep winning! If I don’t keep winning, I won’t be me anymore!”

“Wh-what are you talking about, Cerberus?! Sometimes you win duels, sometimes you lose, right?! That’s the way everyone gets stronger, bit by bit—”

“I don’t have that kind of time!!” The shout that interrupted Haruyuki sounded more like a scream. “I—I have to prove I’m worthy of being Wolfram Cerberus! For that…my only choice is to win against you right now, Silver Crow!!”

The words dispersed through the stage with a physical pressure and violently shook the diamond dust hanging in the sky. As if to say the conversation was over, Cerberus brandished his fists high and brought them out to his sides before slamming them together in front of his chest. Receiving the motion command to activate his ability, the visor patterned after the maw of a beast slammed shut. He had shifted into the Physical Immune state.

“So I guess we’ll say the rest with our fists, then,” Haruyuki murmured. “Got it. We’ll fight. We are Burst Linkers, after all.”

The instant he heard these words, Cerberus’s slender body shook slightly, but he quickly nodded.

“Sorry, Ash. Hold on a minute!” The man in question was still kicking and struggling beneath the bike. Haruyuki jumped back; glancing at the time, he saw there were still just under 1,200 seconds left. A fight with Cerberus, whose fighting style resembled his own, was likely to be resolved in a short time, so that was plenty of time to decide this. Haruyuki lowered his stance in the center of broad Oume Highway, readied his hands in front of him, and shouted, “Come!!”

A voice came in response immediately. “On my way!”

A massive amount of snow rolled up from Cerberus’s feet with a whump. Haruyuki focused all five of his senses on the figure charging at him in a straight line. His dash power was, as before, explosive, but the snow piled up on the ground hindered him, and his speed was slower—albeit only slightly—than in the Storm stage of the previous day.

You won’t beat me with the same strategy! Haruyuki shouted in his heart, and pulled his left foot in leisurely.

Cerberus spun his body around and launched a right mid-kick. Crushing even the atoms of ice dancing in the air, the kick closed in on Haruyuki. He caught it gently with the palm of his right hand and turned his own body suddenly to the left, pulling in the direction of the spin’s momentum, and grabbed Cerberus’s ankle with his left hand.

“Sheeah!” With a short battle cry, he went for a throw to leap on Cerberus and crush him. Just like the day before, Cerberus’s direct, rigid technique was caught by Haruyuki’s Guard Reversal, and his head met the ground—

Whud! The instant clouds of snow flew up with a wet sound, Haruyuki finally realized that this development was not Cerberus’s strategic failure, but his own.

The lone source of damage for Wolfram Cerberus in Physical Immune state was throwing techniques, but in an Ice stage, the effect of those throws was halved because the snow covering the ground acted as a cushion. Cerberus’s health gauge dropped by just under 10 percent after being thrown, and he wasn’t stunned like he had been the previous day, and he wrapped his arms and legs around Haruyuki from below.

“Nngh!” Haruyuki desperately tried to break away, but the sharply tapered edges of Cerberus’s armor caught him like thorns. The wolf avatar was glued to his front, his arms around Haruyuki’s chest, and his legs around his waist, holding him fast.

“This is one other method of using Physical Immune.”

Immediately after he heard this whispered voice in his ear, an incredible pressure assaulted his chest and stomach. Crow’s metal armor creaked eerily, abnormally, and orange sparks shot off in all directions. The gauge in the upper left of his field of view was mercilessly shaved away.

Although the majority of Burst Linkers had mouths, they had no need to breathe. Thus, underwater or in outer space, or when their throats or chests were being constricted, there was no suffocation damage. The reason Haruyuki’s gauge was nevertheless decreasing was because he was taking physical pressure damage. The bare-handed restraint technique was something Haruyuki’s metal armor would have been able to resist, had the overwhelming strength of Cerberus’s armor not brought it up into the land of special attack.

Of. Course. Even as he suffered through this crushing of his body, Haruyuki seriously admired Cerberus.

“Assume the techniques you showed Cerberus in the duel yesterday won’t work on him today,” Kuroyukihime had said during the special training with Haruyuki the day before at lunch together with Fuko. Thus, Haruyuki had made free use of the Guard Reversal he hadn’t used initially and won. But Cerberus was already responding to those techniques in the span of a single day.

“You’re strong, Cerberus. Really strong.” Haruyuki pushed the words out from his constricted chest, as he endured the pain. He had said only moments before that they’d talk with their fists, but he simply could not go without asking. “So. What is making you panic like this? You said you’ll stop being yourself if you don’t keep winning…What does that mean?”

He didn’t think he’d get an answer. But in a surprise twist, an extremely quiet voice came once more from the face before his eyes.

“That…is because, just like number two, who you fought yesterday…I, number one, am also nothing more than a spare.”

“A-a spare?”

“Yes. Number two and myself are only permitted to be Cerberus during the time we are performing our respective roles. And my role…is to win duels. A tool to simply win and stock up points.”

Haruyuki forgot for a moment what a desperate situation he was in and set his brain to work at full power. Cerberus II, appearing at the end of the duel the previous day, had said he was “number two,” living in the avatar’s left shoulder. “Because I was tuned for a certain purpose.” And: “Equip that thing that you sealed off somewhere.”

Haruyuki assumed “that thing” indicated the cursed Enhanced Armament the Disaster. If the role of II was to control the Armor of Catastrophe, then the role of I was to build up Burst Points. Was that it?

“So is that the reason you’re still at level one? To increase the number of Burst Points when you win a duel,” Haruyuki murmured.

“That’s right.” The head stuck to him nodded slightly. “Therefore, I have to continue to win. I have to win…and continue to prove that I am a useful tool.”

The instant he heard these words through the armor pressed up against him, something burst into red flames deep inside Haruyuki. He remembered how he had told his parent Kuroyukihime something similar back when he first became a Burst Linker. Saying that she knew that he was actually just a disposable pawn, a tool to simply be given orders, like it was the appropriate way to treat someone like him. Hearing this, Kuroyukihime had slapped his cheek, and tears had welled up in her eyes. It was likely in that moment that Haruyuki had become a true Burst Linker.

“Prove you’re a useful tool? To whom? Your parent? Comrades? Or maybe your Legion Master?” Cerberus didn’t make a move to answer this interrogation from Haruyuki, whose rage was bleeding into the questions. Regardless, however, Haruyuki continued to shout, choking up as he did: “That kind of proof, there’s no value in that! The only thing a Burst Linker has to prove is the strength of their heart! And the one they prove that to is always and only their own self!”

“Then…please prove that right now!” Now Cerberus shouted, his voice burning with several kinds of emotion. “For you, this duel is nothing more than one fight among hundreds! So even if you lose, no one will abandon you! But it’s different for me! I have to win every duel! If you’re saying that my proof is a fake, and yours is the real thing, then prove it right now! Please win against me here and now, Silver Crow!!”

As the shriek grew louder, the pressure of the bear hug increased. His physical strength itself didn’t match that of a large blue-type avatar, but his armor, boasting an absolute hardness, was a weapon in and of itself. Crow’s silver armor grew dented, holes gouged out by Cerberus’s edges.

Haruyuki had just under 30 percent left in his health gauge. At this rate, he wouldn’t last another minute before being blasted away. Even so, Haruyuki nodded his helmet firmly. “Understood. I’ll prove it.”

He had no sooner made this brief statement than he was placing both hands on Cerberus’s head and trying with all his strength to tear him off. This was normally the place where he would attack with blows if his hands were free, but punches and elbows wouldn’t work on Cerberus while Physical Immune was activated.

“Nngh…aaah!” A groan slipping out of him, he strained his arms desperately, but even when their two masks were fifty centimeters apart, the arms Cerberus had wrapped around his back showed absolutely no sign of releasing him. In fact, the pressure damage increased due to Haruyuki’s efforts, and the speed of his gauge’s decrease accelerated.

“It’s no use, Crow. I’ve been shown a vault’s worth of material on you. You have no means of turning a situation like this around.” The voice that came from the visor pinning him down had regained its quiet.

Those words were definitely not a boast. His special-attack gauge was fully charged, so he could have flown up to a high altitude with Cerberus still hanging on to him and slammed into the ground with a sudden drop to do damage, but Haruyuki’s back—the part that deployed his silver wings—was currently held fast. If he tried to force them open, he might actually damage his wings instead.

So the reason Cerberus had used his restraint technique on Haruyuki’s chest rather than his more fragile head was because he was aiming to render his flying ability useless. He really had somehow looked into Silver Crow’s weak points. Haruyuki was curious about who exactly had prepared those materials, but he had more important things to deal with at the moment.

“Then those materials were apparently…not complete,” he said with a groan, and he mustered up every ounce of strength he had to stretch his arms out all the way. Sparks scattered not only from his constricted chest but also from his shoulders and elbows. Their two masks were nearly a meter apart, but even still, Cerberus’s arms would not let go. However, that was not Haruyuki’s aim.

A mere meter. To create this distance, he had accelerated the loss of his already negligible gauge.

“Unh…aaaaaaah!!” Shouting, Haruyuki released his arms and quickly crossed them before his eyes.

Rrrk! The air shook, and a pure white light gushed from Silver Crow’s mirrored visor.

“Wha…?” Cerberus gasped, hoarse.

Haruyuki glared at the goggles, which had narrowed to centimeter-long slits, before flinging his arms open and shouting the technique name.

“Head…buuuuuuuuuutt!!”

Drawing out a trail of light like a comet, the round helmet charged downward diagonally at an incredible speed. Instantly, his head crossed the meter between them and slammed into Cerberus’s face. The impact, enough to make the stage shudder, radiated outward and sent the piles of snow around them flying off into the distance.

If this had been an ordinary head butt, it would, of course, not have broken the protection of Physical Immune; it would, in fact, have shattered Crow’s visor. But what Haruyuki launched was Silver Crow’s level-one special-attack Head Butt. Its range was small, and the pre-motion was long, so normally, even when he did bring it out, it didn’t make contact. In fact, the first time he had deployed it, a moment that should have been commemorated, he’d been shamefully crushed by Ash Roller’s motorcycle before it activated, so he had basically gone entirely without using it ever since.

Thus, the majority of Burst Linkers wouldn’t even know of the existence of this technique, and the reference materials Cerberus had seen would be no exception to that. And even if in the unlikely case that it was noted there, the detailed characteristics of the technique would absolutely not have been.

The damage characteristics for Head Butt were half-physical/striking and half-energy/light. A light energy attack had the exact opposite characteristics as the nihilistic energy attack best represented by Dark Blow and was falsely similar to a laser attack. With no heat, it pierced essentially any armor and gave a pure impact with no directionality. In other words, even if half of the Head Butt power was repelled by Cerberus’s Physical Immune, the other half would reach him.

And there was one more thing. The majority of close-range special attacks canceled out any reaction damage, no matter what the target of the attack. Attacking with a normal head butt would have carved away Haruyuki’s own gauge, but right now—

“Nngah!” Cerberus cried out, showered in the entirely unexpected, extremely close-range impact, while at the same time, he released the hold of his arms. This one instant knocked him onto his back on the exposed white road. Just like the day before, throwing damage was applied, and the health gauge that had dropped more than 30 percent in the initial impact decreased another 30 percent.

Half-embedded in the hard road by the impact, Cerberus boldly attempted an immediate counterattack. He reached out once more and attempted to grab ahold of Crow, who dropped down a moment later.

But Haruyuki’s own hands flashed out lightning quick to seize Cerberus’s arms instead, and the metallic wings on his back, now free, were deployed to the fullest.

“Ah…Aaaaaah!” The battle cry pouring out of him, he peeled the heavy metal avatar off the road surface and ascended vertically upward at top speed. In the blink of an eye, he had reached an altitude of nearly a hundred meters.

Hazy sunlight pushed through the clouds high up in the distance to make the Ice stage glitter beautifully, the pure white of snow and the pale blue of ice. With Cerberus dangling from his hands, Haruyuki went into hovering mode, and the two avatars were also wrapped in the spectacular silver light.

Wolfram Cerberus didn’t so much as twitch. Haruyuki thought that maybe the personality switch had happened again, but that didn’t seem to be the case. The visor covering the original face opened with a clack.

Cerberus looked around at the icy world that continued to the far-off horizon with the exposed black goggles. “I had no idea…So you can see this far even in a normal duel stage, hmm?”

“Yeah. This world’s infinite,” Haruyuki replied, and then continued after a brief pause. “There’s still a ton of things you don’t know about the Accelerated World, Cerberus. It’s the same for me, though. Sometimes, I think that even the wins and losses of the duels are really nothing more than one element of this world.”

“One…element,” Cerberus murmured in a voice that was almost inaudible.

“Yeah.” Haruyuki nodded deeply. “A long time ago, in that hospital you can see over there”—as he spoke, he fine-tuned the direction of his body to make it so that the large hospital soaring up to the northeast of Asagaya Station would enter Cerberus’s field of view—“I fought a close friend. It ended up with me dangling him just like this. He was on the verge of total point loss, and I was about to drop him to the ground.”

“…”

“…But I couldn’t. And not because he was my friend. It wasn’t because I felt sorry for him, either. It was because I realized that what decides the meaning of the duel isn’t the BB system; it’s us. We fight to get Burst Points, go up levels, and get stronger. But that’s not everything. I’m sure there’s something bigger that we win and lose in the duels.”

“And…what is that?”

“I still don’t know. But I think if I fight—no, live in this world with my friends, someday I’ll find out.”

“…”

Shifting his gaze from the hospital in the distance to Wolfram Cerberus, silent once more, Haruyuki gasped and opened his eyes wide.

Because he saw glittering droplets of ice falling from the edges of the goggles he could spy beyond the visor patterned after a wolf’s maw. It wasn’t that the diamond dust dancing about the stage had gotten stuck there. They were frozen tears.

“…I, too.” His voice trembling, Cerberus moved his hands and grabbed onto Haruyuki’s arms from below, his own wrists clasped by Haruyuki’s hands. “I, too…would like…to know that. If there is something in this world…more important than winning fights…I would like to…see it.”

“You’ll get to,” Haruyuki said, pushing back whatever it was welling up inside him, and then took a deep breath, about to continue with “Come with me” in a firm voice. But he didn’t get to utter those words.

A pale-purple light reaching up from somewhere on the ground quickly pierced his left wing. A little after that, bwwan! He heard the high-pitched sound of vibration.

“Ngah?!” Haruyuki cried out in surprise.

“Aaah!” A shriek slipped out of Cerberus as well. He sounded almost like he knew the true form of the light, but before Haruyuki had time to check, he was plunging to the ground in a tailspin.

He tried desperately to get his body under control with just his right wing, but he couldn’t manage it with the heavy Cerberus dangling from his hands. To at least not have damage for a fall from up high applied to him, he forced a reverse thrust as they were on the verge of slamming into the ground and somehow managed a soft landing.

The place where they came down, kicking up snow, was about fifty meters to the west of the original intersection. Having finally gotten out from under the bike in the intersection, Ash Roller was for some reason pointing the index fingers of both hands intently to somewhere on the west side.

Pulled in, Haruyuki looked in that direction.

Bwwwan! He heard the sound again. A purple light shone on the roof of a five-story building, and at almost the same time, an incredible heat pierced his right shoulder. Combined with the previous blow, it brought the remainder of his health gauge down to less than 10 percent.

“Ngaaah!” Haruyuki collapsed with a moan.

In front of him, a figure blocked the way, arms spread out. Cerberus.

“Wh-why?! It’s supposed to be my role to fight Silver Crow!!” Once more, a shout that was a shriek. These words made it clear that he knew the attacker behind the purple laser.

Pressing on the injured area of his right shoulder with his left hand, Haruyuki stared intently at the roof of the building. It appeared that someone was standing there, but they were backlit; he could only make out a silhouette. Slender body, disproportionately large head. This figure raised the right hand that had been on its hip, popped up one finger, and lightly waved it.

“Not like I wanna be doin’ this sorta thug stuff, Onesie.” A girl’s smiling voice.

He had heard that Kansai accent before. More than heard it—knew it. It was the voice he had heard by his side when he had been made to stand on the witness stand at the meeting of the Seven Kings a mere four days earlier.

“Argon Array.” The instant Haruyuki called the name in a trembling voice, the sunlight was blocked by the clouds again, and the silhouette took on color.

Pale-purple armor covered her entire body. She wore a large hat, and the upper half of her face was hidden by large goggles with round lenses. On the front of the hat, two lenses even larger than the goggles were embedded; one was covered by a shutter, while the other was exposed.

Argon Array—also known as the Quad Eyes Analyst—had the unique ability of being able to see the status of other Burst Linkers. Thus, she was given her nickname, or put another way, Haruyuki had been convinced this meant she was a type with no remarkable abilities, but…

“So then why are you interrupt—?” Cerberus started to say in a hoarse voice, and purple light flashed.

The source of the light was the lenses on Argon Array’s hat. Rather than targeting Haruyuki this time, the thin laser that reached out from there, with an audible vibration, passed beside Cerberus’s head and dug deep into the ice wall behind them.

“Interrupt? You’re awful, Onesie. I was jus’ helpin’ you. Now quit messin’ around and take the boyo’s points already. Otherwise”—she was nearly thirty meters away, but even so, Haruyuki could see the cheerful and yet freezing chill-inducing grin that popped up on her face—“this time fer sure, Threezie’ll come out?”

This statement was meaningless to Haruyuki, but as soon as he heard it, Cerberus shuddered noticeably. The angle of the arms raised to protect Haruyuki dropped slightly. However, his gray hands were clenched into tight fists. The small level-one Burst Linker looked directly at Argon, already at level eight.

“I…I don’t want to fight only to earn points anymore!” he shouted. “Crow taught me something! That there’s something in this world…more important that points, than winning and losing—”

Bwaaaan!

The fourth laser shot hit Cerberus’s left side. The beam of light, narrowed down to the diameter of a needle, easily pierced the super-hard tungsten armor and its absolute resistance to all physical attacks, and the health gauge with over 30 percent left in it was instantly whittled down to less than 10 percent.

Cerberus staggered and almost fell backward, but Haruyuki caught him with outstretched arms. However, with no strength in his body, he dropped to his knees in the snow.

“Tut-tut, Onesie!” Argon said in a voice that even now did not lose its sunshine, even as she looked down on the two crouched helplessly on the ground. “No talkin’ back to me now. Your job’s to get loads of points, yeah? You don’t need to think about nothin’ else. I mean—”

Her speech was interrupted by the sudden roar of an engine. Followed by a voice shouting even louder.

“Tera suuuuuuuuucks!”

Haruyuki shifted his gaze and saw that, having gotten back on his motorcycle again in the intersection off to the east, Ash Roller’s eyes burned with flames of unprecedented rage.

“Hey! Four-Eyed Violet up there! Quit yer smaaack taaaaalk! Mighty Me! Is gonna give you a lesson! Time to mean the dueeeeeeeel!” Red exhaust flames jetted out of the double muffler, and the longhorn motorcycle charged in a straight line toward the building upon which Argon stood.

“A-Ash!” Haruyuki shouted desperately. “No! Run—”

The laser that shot forth cruelly punched out the headlight of the bike and apparently kept going to pierce and ignite the gas tank. The bike was enveloped in hot, red flames struck through with black smoke.

Even as it burned, momentum propelled it forward for a while, but eventually, the bike fell over on its side, and Ash staggered a few steps away from it before pitching forward and collapsing. Perhaps stunned from the serious explosion damage, he showed no signs of getting to his feet again. His health gauge was, like Haruyuki and Cerberus’s, down to 10 percent.

“Ah…Aah…”

This was not the Unlimited Neutral Field, but rather the Battle Royale variation of the regular duel space. Thus, even if Haruyuki’s gauge did drop to zero, the number of his battle losses would go up by one, and his points would drop by however much, and with that, he could escape from the stage. Even still, a cry of anguish slipped out of his mouth, and tears filled his eyes.

The exchange of Burst Points was not the end-all for the duel. There was surely something bigger that they were winning and losing. Haruyuki had said that to Cerberus earlier. Argon Array’s merciless and overwhelming attack was taking something precious away from Haruyuki, Ash, and Cerberus. His tears were for that. Although he wanted to take that something back, to stand and face her, his body wouldn’t move. Still holding Cerberus, Haruyuki looked up at Argon, who stood atop the building.

“That’s that, then.” The Analyst smiled again. “Guess we’ll have to call it a day here. Lucky, huh, boyo? Gettin’ killed by me, you won’t lose too many points. Rest easy.”

A purple light was lodged in the hat lens targeting Haruyuki. Before his eyes, it grew brighter and stronger, and finally focused on one point—

Glint!

What shone was not the laser. A blue glimmer flew in from somewhere and scraped Argon’s left shoulder. A second shot, and a third. Pouring down one shot after the next were not lasers, but ice. Ice lances with sharp tips like needles.

Interrupting her own shot to dodge the others, Argon was pushed to the edge of the roof before the barrage of lances finally stopped.

The smile gone from her face, Argon shot a glare outward, and Haruyuki absently followed her gaze. There was a building about the same height on the north side, with Oume Highway in between them. A fifth Burst Linker stood on the southeast corner of that building, clad in an aqua blue even more transparent than the lances.

It was indeed a female type, but the form wavered unsteadily because her entire body was covered in a clear, flowing liquid—water. Perhaps due to the chill of the Ice stage, particles of ice were mixed in with the water, and these made the avatar’s entire body glitter like diamonds.

The eyes that shone with a pale light in the flowing lines of the face mask locked on Argon Array, and the mysterious water avatar spoke in a quiet yet powerful voice.

“You’re the one who’s going to be crushed by a level one and lose a lot of points.”

Somewhere deep, deep in Haruyuki’s memory, he could hear the babbling of flowing water.

To be continued.