Accel World - Volume 13 - Chapter 6

6

In the end, four teams came to attack the Suginami area in the Territories the fifth week of June. The breakdown was one team from Leonids, one from Great Wall, one from Pound Bag—the small Legion headquartered in Toshima Ward—and the one team from Prominence.

The defensive team of Haruyuki, Utai, and Akira fought the attacking teams from Pound Bag and Prominence and won both matches. The team of Kuroyukihime and Fuko, short one person, also had perfect victories over the Blue and Green teams. Thus, the result was a win rate of 100 percent for the defending side in all areas, and the Nega Nebulus flag was protected. That said, they’d never actually been overcome since making the territory declaration the previous November.

The reason Nega Nebulus, classified as a small Legion by the number of members, had managed to keep their win ratio in the Territories at 50 percent or more was, of course, because the Black King, the Legion Master with overwhelming attack power, took part in the defense herself. Although level differences were not an absolute wall in Brain Burst, level niners alone were indeed another class altogether. In order to defeat Black Lotus, with her sword limbs that could cut through any object just as her nickname of World End implied, the only thing to do was stop her from moving through some kind of nonphysical hold technique and then concentrate a large amount of long-distance firepower on her, but this was difficult in the Territories, where the number of people on the attacking side was restricted.

Thus, in the current state of things, when the other Kings did not come themselves to attack, the areas that could possibly fall were limited to the ones Kuroyukihime was not defending. In fact, the three-person team of younger members (Haruyuki, Takumu, and Chiyuri) lost from time to time, but they usually managed a win rate of 50 percent with one win out of two, or two out of three, so while it was close, they did protect their flag. If they lost with a team that included two of the Four Elements, even if Kuroyukihime wasn’t there, Haruyuki saw that as his responsibility, since he was charged with leading the team in her absence.

Thus, the instant they returned to the rear courtyard of Umesato Junior High when the time limit for that week’s Territories was up, Haruyuki slid down on the bench. “Haaah…Th-thank goodness…We didn’t lose…”

It was a far cry from a shout of victory. Beside him, Utai offered a faint, wry smile. UI> VERY NICE WORK, ARITA. IN THE SECOND DUEL AGAINST POUND BAG, YOU DISPLAYED SOME FAIRLY STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP.

At a glance, the words spelled out in the chat window were ones of praise, but they also pointed out by omission that his leadership hadn’t quite reached the domain of “fully,” even in the first duel against Prominence.

Shrinking into himself, Haruyuki tried an excuse on the fourth grader, who was still very much his senior. “If you’d at least designated me leader in advance, I could have mentally prepared a little more.”

UI> IN ALL SITUATIONS, YOU MUST ADAPT TO THE MOMENT!

“Y-yeah, I guess so…But it’s really great that Curren came back, huh? And now we have a lot more leeway in the formation of teams for the Territories.”

He had no sooner uttered this in the most offhand way than Utai pursed her lips adorably and glared up at him. With that look still on her face, she tapped quickly at her holokeyboard with both hands. UI> WHEN DID YOU FIND OUT, ARITA? THAT REN WAS COMING BACK TO NEGA NEBULUS?

“Th-the night before last.” Faced with the question, Haruyuki couldn’t hide it any longer. At any rate, he had said before the Territories that it was a secret for the reason of happy faces. “So it still hasn’t been forty-eight hours! I was surprised, you know. Curren suddenly showed up in the middle of the Battle Royale and saved me and Ash. A-and, look, you just said you have to adapt—”

UI> I WAS TALKING ABOUT IN THE DUEL! she typed forcefully—until her expression abruptly softened.

The light reflected in her large eyes increased bit by bit as they gazed up at Haruyuki. A point of light, the color of the evening sun spilling through a gap in the cloudy sky, finally turned into a drop of water and ran down her cheek.

Haruyuki opened both eyes wide, and cherry-colored text slowly scrolled across his field of view. UI> I’M SURE THIS TIME IS ALSO BECAUSE YOU WERE HERE, ARITA.

“Huh…? Th-this time…?”

UI> IT’S BECAUSE YOU MADE SUCH SINCERE EFFORTS THAT FU AND ME AND SACCHI WERE ABLE TO RETURN TO NEGA NEBULUS. SO I JUST KNOW IT’S THE SAME FOR REN.

“I—I didn’t do anything. In fact, Master and you and, of course, Kuroyukihime all came back to help me. And—I mean—Curren, too.”

UI> YOU SHOULD BE PROUD OF THAT. Utai wiped away the tear with her right hand and stared for a moment at the transparent droplet on her fingertip.

Shifting her gaze to Haruyuki once more, the girl four years his junior opened her lips into a circle. Her mouth strained and trembled. Tendons popped up in her slender neck and twitched.

“Sh-Shinomiya…!” Haruyuki called her name hoarsely. Utai had lost her voice from shock on the day of the accidental death of her real-life older brother and Burst-Linker parent, Kyoya Shinomiya. The only things she could utter in her real voice were two voice commands related to Brain Burst, made possible through years of practice.

The aphasia presented in her voice, but it was an impediment in the functioning of her brain. Utai’s condition was classified as subcortical expressive aphasia, and while it was possible for her to understand and write words normally, spontaneous language—speech with her real voice—was difficult. A neural blockage in the part of the cerebrum called the precentral gyrus was the main cause, but in Utai’s case, excessive psychological shock had brought about a malfunction of the relevant neural network, and this could not be recovered even with a brain implant chip.

So if she tried to force herself to speak with her real voice, Utai would have felt not just physical pain, but a great deal of emotional pain. Haruyuki started to raise his hand to stop her, but a moment before he could, a faint but definite sound spilled from her trembling lips into the air and reached his ears.

“Tha…”

Followed by “n.” And finally, “ks.”

By the time she finished uttering the word, beads of sweat had popped up on Utai’s forehead. Even so, a reassuring smile came across her lips, and she bowed her head to him gently.

Desperately holding back the tears that threatened to escape him, Haruyuki murmured, “Me too. Thanks, Shinomiya. For being in this place with me now…really, thank you.”

Utai lifted her head, and her face lit up with an innocent grin reminiscent of her real age.

Once the hands of the clock had come around to five thirty PM, Haruyuki slipped through the incomplete festival gate in front of the school gates, said good-bye to Utai, and headed home alone.

Not only were Kuroyukihime, Takumu, and Chiyuri still not finished getting ready for the school festival but the entire school was filled with the enthusiasm of the night before a celebration, so heading home alone was a little sad. But to stay on school grounds after the mandatory departure time of six PM, he’d have to apply for permission from the school administration to extend the working hours of the exhibition group he belonged to. And since Haruyuki’s group in eighth-grade class C had long ago reported that their work was complete, there was, of course, no way he would get that permission.

He trudged out onto Oume Highway and stared hard at the bus stop on the opposite side of the road. If he was going to be chased out of the school anyway, then he wanted to jump onto a bus like he did the day before and take a field trip to Nakano area, but unfortunately, Kuroyukihime had also prohibited that.

The reason was the Red Legion Burst Linkers who had broken the cease-fire (which Haruyuki had reported at the meeting after the Territories were over). Once she had heard the sequence of events, Kuroyukihime was silent for exactly three seconds before she muttered with annoyance, “This is their work.”

Haruyuki had a good idea of who exactly she meant, but when she announced, “I will handle this matter,” Haruyuki couldn’t bring himself to say the name. But his Legion Master had continued to speak, her words turned mainly toward Haruyuki: Until the school festival was over, no one was to duel freely outside of Suginami, or even watch a duel.

“…Well, I just have to hang on for one day…”

The school festival would end the following day—Sunday—in the afternoon, so he could assume the ban on travel outside the area would be lifted that night—probably. He hoped. And then he would go to Nakano, duel Wolfram Cerberus again, and say it one more time: Come with me.

The next week, a meeting of the Seven Kings would be held, and if they agreed that the performance of the Optical Conduction ability Haruyuki had obtained was equivalent to the Theoretical Mirror ability, then they would finally move out on the joint invasion of Tokyo Midtown Tower. He would stand in the vanguard of the attack on the Legend-class Enemy Archangel Metatron, the most powerful enemy Haruyuki had ever faced outside the God Suzaku. Before all that, he wanted to clarify the invisible threads entangling Cerberus in complex ways and sever them.

The feeling of wanting to help Cerberus was perhaps arrogant, presumptuous, and even self-serving. In no small part because it came down to whether the level-five Silver Crow and the level-one Cerberus had matching battle power as Burst Linkers.

But two nights earlier, the Cerberus that Haruyuki had faced in the real for just a few seconds, with waves of people wedged between them, had eyes that had definitely tried to make some kind of appeal to him. In which case, Haruyuki wanted to answer that call. He wanted to offer his hand, to say something as many times as it took. The way so many people had done for Haruyuki in the past.

“…I’ll definitely come see you tomorrow,” he murmured as he looked up at the fleecy clouds colored purple in the direction of Nakano, and then he started walking home.

When he had gotten into the elevator of B wing, the mail icon in the top right of his field of view started flashing. He launched his mailer, thinking it was probably from his mother, who had left the previous day on an overseas business trip and wouldn’t be back until the following evening. He expected it would be something about how she was sorry she couldn’t come see the school festival—however, the displayed sender was not his mother, but the single letter N.

“…Wh-who?” Cocking his head to one side, he opened the mail, which said only THERE IN FIVE SECONDS. Utterly baffled, he cocked his head to the other side, and then the elevator stopped, so he automatically stepped out.

A moment after he did so, the doors of the neighboring elevator opened. In another unconscious motion, he looked that way, and the “someone” who leapt out forcefully into the hallway snapped a finger at him.

“Hey! It’s been a long— It hasn’t, has it? Maybe five days?”

“Yea— Uh, whaaaa—?! Wh-wh-wh-why are you here?!” Throwing his head back almost too far from the shock of it all, Haruyuki just barely managed to recover his balance and get himself upright again.

“I clearly gave you notice, so you don’t need to act so surprised,” the sender of the mail who had appeared precisely five seconds after the arrival of the mail said, exasperated. “I mean, like, how many times have I been here before already?”

“Uh, um. Three, four…five…”

“It’s just a thing you say. You don’t need to go counting!” Stepping over to him briskly to whack his stomach lightly with a flat hand, the girl with red hair tied back in two bundles on either side of her head—the Red King, Scarlet Rain, aka Yuniko Kozuki, aka Niko—proffered a grin that filled her face and started walking down the hallway to the Arita apartment. Haruyuki, after a bit, managed to restart his brain and hurried after her.

Niko arrived first at the door with the plate 2305, and the instant she tapped the fingers of her right hand on it, there was the sound of the door unlocking, so he was even more stunned. “Wh-whaaaat?! You have the key to our house again?! The expiration of the instant key you had was long—”

“Oh, when you let me stay over that time, I did a little fiddling with your home server and changed it into a perpetual key, so, you know.” Niko uttered this even more terrifying statement as she took off her sneakers. “I’m coming in,” she announced a moment later, heading inside at a pace that said she knew she was the master of this home.

Halfway down the hall, Niko looked back at the still-dumbfounded boy. “I’ll entertain myself, so you can go ahead and change first,” she offered quietly, and then she disappeared into the living room.

“…Notice. I mean, people usually give five hours, not five seconds.” With no other choice, Haruyuki was stuck merely muttering his complaints.

Still, he took Niko up on her suggestion and changed from his uniform into a T-shirt and shorts before returning to the living room, where Niko was lying on her side on the two-person sofa, resting her head on a cushion. The instant he cracked an unconscious smile at seeing her so unabashedly making herself at home, she glared at him out of the corner of her eye.

“What’re you grinning about?”

“I-it’s—nada…B-barley tea okay?”

“Mmm, thanksy.”

He nodded and headed to the kitchen, poured out two glasses of barley tea, and returned to the living room, where he set himself down across from Niko. There, finally, he became aware of the slight unease residing in his heart. He cocked his head from side to side several times before finally stumbling upon the reason.

“Now that I’m thinking of it, why have you been in Normal mode right from the start today, Niko?” he asked.

“Huh?” The sixth-grade girl blinked several times before smiling complacently. “What? You want me to do it?”

She yanked herself upright and faced Haruyuki, placed her hands neatly on knees clamped together, and made a cheery, innocent smile bloom on her face. “I love my big brother, too! I’m so happy!”

She hadn’t activated this angel mode at the curry party five days earlier, so he actually hadn’t seen it in a long time, and it had a real impact on his mind. For a while, his upper body was frozen while he whipped his head back and forth.

“I—I don’t hate it, but that’s not what I meant. I was just wondering why!” The instant he said this, Haruyuki finally realized that he already knew the reason. Not just why Niko wasn’t in angel mode, but the reason she was making the sudden visit at all.

He took a deep breath and held it in his chest for a while before exhaling. “A-anyway, that is…The reason you’re here…is obviously to talk about what happened in the Unlimited Neutral Field yesterday, right?”

Niko’s face returned to normal, and she slowly leaned back until she flopped up against the sofa back. She nodded, using the reaction of the cushions to help her do it. “Well, there’s that too,” she said somewhat listlessly. “But that’s a third of the reason.”

“Huh? Then what are the other two-thirds?”

“You know half at least. An apology. Gotta apologize.”

“An apology. You mean to say you’re here to say sorry?”

“O’course! I mean, you think I’m here to get all wabi-sabi with you and barley tea?”

“H-huh? Niko, you know about tea meanings and stuff?”

“Don’t go underestimatin’ me! I might look be a kid, but I was in the tea club at school once!”

“Once…So then you’ve quit already?”

“Shaddap! I went all the way, mastered that stuff! So.” Perhaps noticing that at some point she had leaned forward on the sofa and leapt to her feet, Niko blinked several times before a wry smile rose upon her lips. “Aah, honestly, I wonder why I always get like this when I talk to you. Gets me all worked up. Before we fly off on another tangent, first I’m gonna give you that apology!”

After this crisp announcement, Niko brought her skinny legs together and slapped her hands down on her knees. Then she bowed her head deeply, her tied-back hair and its small black ribbons swinging. “As Legion Master, I sincerely apologize for the three members of Prominence who broke the cease-fire and attacked the Nega Nebulus area in the Territories today! I’m very sorry!”

Haruyuki very nearly smiled at this apology, given the mismatch between the grandiose preamble and the cuteness of her pigtails, but he hurriedly stiffened his mouth at the same time as Niko lifted her face.

“Make sure you tell that to your little Blacky,” Niko added smoothly, while he was struggling to figure out how to respond.

“Huh?! M-me?!”

“O’course! What’s the point of me apologizing to just you, at the bottom of the Legion ladder?!”

“B-bottom…Th-th-th-then you should’ve gone to see her right from the start instead of me!”

“Got no choice. This is the only place I know. Aah, c’mon, then I take back the whole ladder thing and promote you to Mysterious Crow Man.”

“I-is that a promotion? Why does this hierarchy sound like an evil organization—” He realized they were starting to get off track once again, cleared his throat, and closed his mouth. Setting aside what he wanted to say for the moment, he nodded. “Understood. I’ll tell the Black King. But none of us, not me, not Kuroyukihime, not any of the other Legion members, think Blaze Heart and the others were unequivocally wrong in attacking our territory. They had a motive that wouldn’t let them do anything else. So if possible, can you not punish them too harshly, Niko?”

“I was wondering what you’d say, and that’s where you start, huh?” Chuckling, Niko clasped her hands behind her head and nodded lightly. “Well, I obviously can’t let them off scot-free, but I’m thinking I’ll leave it at double the number of attacks during Enemy hunting next week. That said, though, I mean, me, the head of Promi— Can I just be done with an apology in words with no action to go along with it? That’s the question.”

“A-action? Meaning?” Haruyuki asked, suddenly turning semiformal.

Niko glanced at him before stopping once more and bringing her clenched hands to her chest and grinning broadly. “Whaaaat, big brother, is there something you want me to do? Cleaning? Washing? Or…”

“N-no, no, no! You don’t have to do anything! And I mean, it’s ’cos you keep doing that and putting us off track that the conversation goes in weird directions, right?”

“Weiiiird directions? Like what? I only said that I would help with the housework, though? So then, you must have imagined something weird. Big brother, you’re so kinky.  ” She maintained the smile at the end for about two seconds, and then smoothly shifted modes and continued. “That just now was good for a ’pology accompanied by action, yeah?”

“U-unh…When you switch modes like that, it kinda makes my head spin, though…”

“Then I’ll go a little faster for you!   So, like, Crow…The real issue is that incident in the Unlimited Neutral Field you started in on before.”

“Unnnh, y-yeah.” He nodded, holding his head in his hands.

“Crow.” Niko, her face now completely the Red King, stared at Haruyuki with a sharp light in her eyes. “You got an idea about the truth of the situation, yeah?”

“Huh? T-truth?”

“…So, like, I don’t think that was the real Lotus riding on the back of that Legend-class, either. I only saw it for a short time, but the information pressure was totally different…”

Niko’s words kick-started Haruyuki’s thinking, and he quickly summarized in his mind all the information he’d obtained so far.

According to Blaze Heart and her comrades, the Red Legion had been hunting Enemies in the Unlimited Neutral Field the day before—Friday—in a large group of more than twenty people, including the leader, Scarlet Rain. The location: Toshima area; in other words, near Ikebukuro. There, a Legend-class Enemy with a single duel avatar riding on its back appeared suddenly and attacked. The avatar immediately disappeared as if diving into the surface of the ground, and Niko and her group just barely managed to run from the rampaging Enemy to escape through a portal. And the avatar riding the Enemy in question had jet-black armor and sharp limbs like swords…

“Do you mean that the information pressure of the black avatar you saw…was stronger than Kuroyukihime’s?” Haruyuki asked, ever so timidly.

To his surprise, the Red King shook her head. “The opposite. It was a fair bit weaker than Lotus. I mean, my eyes basically couldn’t see the pressure.”

“Information pressure” was Niko’s personal scale for measuring the fighting power latent in a duel avatar and the battle experience accumulated through the ability Vision Extension. With this power, she had seen that, of the Seven Kings of Pure Color, the Green King, Green Grandé, and the Blue King, Blue Knight, had information pressure that far surpassed that of the others.

But Niko’s words now were what was surprising, because if the picture he had in his mind of the true identity of the fake Black Lotus was right, that avatar should have also had an information pressure on par with that of the Seven Kings.

“Y-you couldn’t see it. So then that means that the black avatar was a level-one or -two newbie or something?”

“…Hmm, when you put it like that, I feel like that’s not quite it, y’know. It’s like, even though they were there, they didn’t have a real body…Something like that…” Mumbling for a while with her arms crossed, Niko suddenly jerked her head up and glared at him again. “Hey, Crow! The way you’re talking, you do have some kind of idea, don’t you!”

“Uh, umm, ummm…” Pulling back slightly, he wrestled with it for a few seconds, and then resigned himself. “Y-yeah. I’ll tell you. Everything I know. But it’s gonna be a super-long story, so let’s do it while we have supper…”

Haruyuki was about to ask if frozen pizza was okay, but without letting him even start, Niko declared, “Curry!” Apparently, she had very much enjoyed the homemade curry and rice that had made an appearance at the curry party the other day (regardless of what she had said about it), but this request was difficult in the extreme.

“N-no, that’s impossible, Niko. I mean, that curry, it was basically just Chiyu and Shinomiya who made it and all.”

“I ain’t saying make the same thing. If you just chop up the stuff, boil it, put in the roux, something’ll work out…I’ll help, too, so let’s do it, big brother!”

And with that exchange, the mission began, and when they had made it through the shopping phase and the cooking phase to complete something curry-like, the hands of the analogue clock in the living room had made it around to seven PM.

Once two large plates of rice—he managed to at least get her to allow this to be from frozen stock—and a curry of only potatoes, carrots, onion, and chicken were set out on the table, Haruyuki double-checked something: “Um, Niko, today are you maybe…?”

“Staying over.”

“Y-you are?”

I’m so glad this didn’t clash with the sleepover with Kuroyukihime and Master yesterday! This earnest thought in his head, Haruyuki joined Niko in a chorus of “Let’s eat.” He picked up a spoon, got a good balance of curry and rice on it, and timidly brought it to his mouth.

“…O-oh! This is actually…”

“…Huh. This totally works.”

Impressed, they dug in with their spoons at the same time. For all that they had made a fairly simplified version of the preparation video displayed in the AR of the curry roux package, the fact that it tasted like a proper curry seemed amazing, but also totally natural.

After thinking about this, Haruyuki finally remembered the present Niko had given him six months earlier at the time of the Fifth Chrome Disaster incident, and he cocked his head to one side as he scooped up a second spoonful. “Huh? But aren’t you actually good at cooking, Niko?”

“…You can tell from just lookin’ at the carrot on that spoon I chopped there! No big diff from your cooking ability. You trying to pick a fight?!” Niko threatened to shift from Normal mode to Red King mode.

“N-n-no!” Haruyuki hurriedly denied. “I mean, those cookies you gave me before were super tasty, so…”

The instant she heard this, the furrow disappeared from the middle of Niko’s brow, and instead, her cheeks got just a little red. “D-don’t go saying that with a straight face! I-it’s that, right, sweets are different. I mean, Pard’s almost a pro, so I learned a bunch of stuff from her…”

“Ohhh! Is that it…”

Pard, aka Blood Leopard, the second-in-command of Prominence and something like Niko’s guardian, worked at a cake shop in Sakuradai, Nerima Ward. Haruyuki remembered her dashing figure riding her electric motorcycle still wearing her maid-style uniform.

“So then Pard’s not just working the counter, but in the kitchen, too? Wow. I wonder if she’ll go that way in the future.”

“Huh? What’re you talking about? Pard’s that shop’s—” For some reason, Niko clamped her mouth shut and smiled with satisfaction. “Well, whatevs. Anyway, my cooking skill’s limited to sweets, and just the easy ones at that.”

“But those cookies were incredibly crunchy, yet so moist! They were really delici—”

“I’m! Telling! You! Enough of that. Just eat before it gets cold!!” she shouted, and started moving her spoon rather forcefully.

Haruyuki looked at her for a moment, smiling without even realizing it, before he, too, finally scooped up piles of chicken curry and stuffed his cheeks. The carrots and the potatoes were cut in awkward chunks and a little overdone, but it was several times more delicious than whatever frozen dinner he would have eaten by himself.

When they had both had another plateful, the small pot was perfectly empty, so they worked together to clean up, took turns in the bath, and finished their homework sitting alongside each other on the sofa. Before they knew it, it was nine PM.

Haruyuki usually went to bed around eleven, but since Niko was yawning mightily, he stood up, thinking that he’d go to bed early that day, too. The following day was finally the school festival, so it was best to get a good night’s sleep.

“My mom won’t be home until tomorrow, so you can use her room,” Haruyuki said.

“Wohaahkay,” Niko replied, with a second yawn in the middle, wearing a long T-shirt instead of pajamas, and obediently headed for his mother’s bedroom.

They said good night to each other in the hallway, and when her small back had disappeared beyond the door, he let out a sigh before going into his own bedroom on the opposite side. He set the alarm clock by his bed with a voice command and flopped down onto his bed. He used to take off his Neurolinker when he went to bed, but recently, he’d been leaving it on a lot. He sometimes got calls from other Legion members while he was asleep, albeit very rarely; upon answering, he would be basically half-asleep and give strange replies, but even so, he wanted to respond to their calls. Haruyuki knew all too well the feeling of sudden helplessness in the middle of the night and the desire for a connection with someone.

Thus, he turned out the lights, closed his eyes, and thought that the voice he heard just as his mind was sinking over the edge of sleep was an online voice call.

“Hey, you already asleep, Crow?”

“Ah…Mmm, mmm, I’m still awa…”

“…So then I wanna talk.”

“Shhure, go ahead…” Blinking his eyes in the darkness, he waited for the conversation supposedly over the network to continue.

Fwump! The bed suddenly shook, and Haruyuki jumped about three centimeters into the air in surprise.

“Nwah?! N-n-night-light on!” He hurriedly called for the night-light and turned to the left, where he found the unmistakable form of Niko. She was lying on her side on the bed, supporting her head with her right hand, and glaring at Haruyuki with a grumpy look on her face.

Maybe it’s not a voice call, but a dive call? Is that Niko’s avatar? he thought with a head that still hadn’t reached full wakefulness, and he started to reach out to try touching it, but right before he did, he noticed the fresh scent of soap.

You couldn’t set a smell for your avatar. This scent was also clearly that of the soap always used in the Arita bathroom, and there was no reason why Niko would go out of her way to re-create it. Which meant…

“…Y-you’re real?”

“O’course.”

“…Wh-why…? Oh! Right, it’s okay. There are no monsters in my mom’s room.”

“That ain’t it!” She slapped Haruyuki’s stomach with her left hand. “So, like, when I think about it, you didn’t tell me the first thing about what’s actually important?”

“I-important…?” After staring intently at Niko’s face illuminated by the indirect, gentle orange light for a few seconds, Haruyuki finally remembered. He had indeed said a few hours earlier, before they made the curry, that it would be a long story so they should do it over supper. And that long story was about the mysterious black avatar who had attacked the Red King with a Legend-class Enemy.

“Oh. Oh! Right! That’s right!” He sat up in bed and instinctively sat in the formal kneeling posture before bowing his head. “S-sorry! I forgot! I wasn’t trying to slip anything by you or anything. It was just, the curry was better than I thought it’d be, so I sort of went into a trance eating it. Of course I’ll tell you. So, um, anyway, we can just go to the living—”

“Too much of a hassle. We can do it here like this.”

Haruyuki was lifting himself off the bed when Niko cut him off and flopped over onto her back and closed her eyes.

“Like this,” she says, but I mean…After a moment of internal conflict, Haruyuki had no choice but to sit up again. Now that he thought about it, they had slept next to each other in this very bed five days earlier. And someone might say that this was fine since it was the second time, but it was clearly not fine. However, given that this was the Red King, he also had the feeling that he couldn’t say no.

“All that said, I actually have a fairly good idea of it myself,” Niko murmured abruptly, so Haruyuki put his thoughts on pause and looked to his side.

Niko, red hair freed from her ribbons and spread out on the pillow she had liberated from him at some point, moved her lips with her eyes turned steadfastly toward the ceiling. “Not about the fake Lotus, though. Just about their objective. Probably had nothing to do with getting in the way of our Enemy hunting, or with hunting me, neither. Their aim was probably…to watch.”

“W-watch…? You mean…observe?”

“’Zactly. More precisely, assess the battle power…of the main power of Prominence, and of me, Scarlet Rain…” Niko’s face—the second Red King’s face—was the most severe he’d seen it since she’d appeared in the elevator lobby that day.

Haruyuki swallowed hard and then confirmed in a hushed voice, “B-but, Niko, they said the black avatar in question dived into the earth and disappeared before the fight began…”

“Yeah. They disappeared, but they prob’ly didn’t go anywhere. They were watching us fight that Enemy from somewhere nearby. Dammit! If I’d realized that right at the start, I wouldn’t have used it…”

“Used it…? Wh-what?”

“My Enhanced Armament…The power of Invincible I’ve kept hidden so far.”

When he understood the meaning of those words, Haruyuki couldn’t stop himself from shivering. The origin of the nickname Immobile Fortress for the second Red King came, of course, from her massive figure when the many containers of weapons were fully deployed. This aggregate, given the name Invincible, was a collection of Enhanced Armament Niko had obtained gradually each time she leveled up, assessed to currently be the greatest long-distance firepower in the Accelerated World. Haruyuki had also fought against or alongside Rain in Fortress mode any number of times, so he himself had tasted her overwhelming power to an almost unpleasant degree.

But from what she was saying now, that full armament deployment was not Rain’s total power. She meant there was still something beyond that.

“Hidden…Power…What?” Haruyuki asked, unconsciously leaning forward.

“Like I’d tell you, idiot,” Niko replied, naturally, but then continued with the faintest of smiles bleeding through. “That’s what I wanna say, but it’s got a little to do with you, too, so…Look, six months ago with the armor thing, you, me, Lotus, and the professor went to Ikebukuro and got caught in that ambush by the banana dude, right? That time, it was all fine that I called my Enhanced Armament, but that yellow guy was sticking to me, making me look bad.”

“B-but we didn’t have any other choice. With that many people, I mean, what were we—?”

“You know this world’s a little bit rougher than that! Can’t just say you didn’t have a choice and walk away! …So I went up the mountain and did a little more training. Learning from you, right…?”

“Training? Wh-what kind…?”

“Hints over! Anyway, yesterday, I used a secret trick to get my comrades away from that hella massive Legend-class Enemy, and they saw it. Worst case, they even recorded it.” She closed her mouth there and rolled over to face Haruyuki directly. “That’s all I got. So now you’ll tell me your story. About the true identity of that fake, shadowy Lotus.”

“…Right, got it. At best, this is a guess, but…” Haruyuki moved to cancel his formal seating mode, but his legs were already asleep, and he just fell over. He thought about trying to get up one more time, but since Niko didn’t seem to particularly care, he stayed on his side on the bed, took a deep breath, and said it:

“The name of the black duel avatar you saw is Black Vise. He calls himself the vice president of the Acceleration Research Society, the group distributing the ISS kits in the Accelerated World.”

“…Black Vise…,” Niko repeated quietly, and Haruyuki stared intently at her face.

He had his reasons for keeping Vise’s name from Niko and Pard up to that point. He didn’t want to…and he was scared. That they would think that layered avatar with the same “black” color name had even the slightest relationship with his beloved Black King.

“Niko.” Unable to stand the silence, Haruyuki opened his mouth again. “Do you know if a number of avatars have had the same color-name in Brain Burst…?”

“…Far as I know, never been any with the same color crown, at least. Crow, you see this Black Vise’s name on his health gauge or the matching list?”

“Uh, um…” He went back through the encounters he’d had up to that point in the back of his mind before shaking his head in small increments. “I didn’t. I’ve basically only run into Vice in the Unlimited Neutral Field. The one exception was the Hermes’ Cord race, but when he showed up that time, he disappeared again right away, so his gauge didn’t show up. None of us in Negabu have seen Vise’s name in a system display.”

“Hmm, right. So then, as one possibility, the name Black Vise could just be what he calls himself rather than his real avatar name.”

“Whaaat?! You mean…he just went and took ‘black,’ a pure color for his name?!”

“If that’s true, it’s more than just naming himself. It’s on the level of taking a title.”

Tch! Niko clicked her tongue lightly before she turned her sharp gaze past Haruyuki’s bulk. Following her eyes, he took in the complicated shadows the pale light of the night coming in through the window cast upon the built-in bookshelf. He brought his gaze back and started to explain again.

“…Black Vise can freely change the shape of the thin panels of his body and has the ability to create shadow images of other avatars. I was almost fooled by him when he took on the shape of Kuroyukihime. And he also has the ability to sink into any shadow in a stage and travel freely within it. So what you guys saw, this avatar jumping from the back of the Enemy and piercing the earth—”

“Wasn’t him opening up a big hole in the stage, but just sinking into the shadow. That it?”

“Yeah. So I think it’s plenty possible for him to have moved through the shadows and observed your battle from up close. On top of that, with the power of his brain implant chip, he can voluntarily decelerate his perceptions. So I think he was waiting to ambush you guys in the Unlimited Neutral Field.”

“Is that…right. So it was that…Acceleration Research Society.” Niko nodded, and the tension gradually drained from her body. She flopped over onto her back, and after a few seconds, she started to speak in a murmur. “…So the color crown stuff from before. I…I’ve thought about this a whole bunch of times, y’know. Like, if there’s not some kind of item that can change your color.”

“Ch-change your…color…?”

“It’s not like I’m bored of long-distance attacks, so I wanna be blue, or I wanna be yellow ’cos I wanna give support or anything. It’s just…like, if my color was just a little more concentrated, y’know. From Scarlet…to pure Red.”

“N-Niko…?” Haruyuki was so stunned, all he could do was say her name.

The color given to a duel avatar was not randomly decided by the system. The BB program pulled up a deep image of yourself and represented that as a single color. Thus, the color name was, in a certain sense, equivalent to a real name for a Burst Linker. And Niko had basically just said she rejected the color of her own heart.

Now she curled up on the bed and hung her head. Her lips trembled, and then an even fainter voice spilled out from them. “…Six months ago, to liberate the Armor of Catastrophe, the Yellow King called me out and tried to banish me from the Accelerated World using the level nine sudden-death rule. What do you think his reason, his motive was…?”

“That’s— So that he can get to level ten himself, of course…”

“Prob’ly not. No matter what he says, in his heart, he doesn’t want to go near level ten. He was just hunting me because I’m an eyesore. That’s all.”

“But…Prominence and the Yellow Legion, CCC, are in the west and east of Tokyo. You guys don’t even have any adjacent territory.”

“What’s in his way is not Promi, but me personally. Radio—he can’t stand it. That I—not Red, but Scarlet—would call myself a King of Pure Color. And probably, the other kings more or less think so, too.”

“Th-that’s—” Haruyuki rose up slightly and earnestly shook his head. “Kuroyukihime would never, ever—”

“Yeah, Lotus’s the exception.” Niko smiled faintly, wryly, and touched the fingertips of her left hand to Haruyuki’s chest as if to reassure him. “I mean, she tried to hunt the whole lot of ’em, so. She’s amazing. Really something…”

On the verge of disappearing, this voice shuddered violently. She pressed her small hand gently against Haruyuki’s chest and gripped the T-shirt he wore instead of pajamas.

“…Me taking the position from my predecessor to become the head of Promi was half me yanking myself up. But I don’t regret it. The Legion’s only got good kids in it, and thanks to Promi, I met Pard. So I…I want to protect Promi, protect Nerima area. But…But…” Here, Niko cut herself off and slid across the sheets to press her forehead firmly against Haruyuki’s chest. “…Even I know it already. I-I’m weak!”

This voice, so painfully squeezed out, shot through Haruyuki’s heart. He desperately reached out a hand and wrapped it around Niko’s slender shoulder. “Th-that’s not true. You’re so strong, Niko. If you weren’t, you’d never have made it to level nine…”

“I made it, which is why I know. If I seriously went one-on-one with them—not just the originators Knight and Grandé, but even Thorn or Radio or Lotus, I—I couldn’t win.” Niko lifted her face and turned damp eyes on Haruyuki before continuing with a look that smiled through the tears.

“…I’ll tell you something. When the Armor of Catastrophe took over Cherry six months ago, I used some forceful means to crack you in the real and get into the house. To have you catch the Armor with your flight ability…But it wasn’t just that. I—I was freaked out to the bottom of my heart at the re-formed Black Legion, at the Black King coming back to the Accelerated World. I figured if she was gonna attack, the first place she’d go was Nerima. And if the Black King came after me herself, there was no way I could win. So. Crack Silver Crow in the real when you were still low-level. Try to make it so she can’t attack, get some insurance. That’s the cowardly, cheap way I was thinking.”

From her wide-open eyes, a fat tear finally spilled out. Even so, the self-deprecating smile remained on her lips, and Niko added in a thin voice, “And then…And then, so, like. You and Lotus, you’re both good kids. You actually listened to me, let me stay over here. You ate with me, played video games with me, slept beside me. I was super-happy, relieved. But I’ve been lying to you and Lotus ever since that day. Putting on a show of being strong, talking like we were equal. But the truth is, I’m not a pure color, I’m a fake red. I’m just the same as he is, giving myself the title of king!”

“N-no, you’re wrong. You’re totally wrong!!” Haruyuki shouted as he wrapped his other hand around her slender back and pulled her to him. “Niko, you’re not a fake anything! You’re strong and braver than anyone! You’re an amazing leader for your Legion! I mean, Blaze and them that we met in the Territories today, they all had total faith in you; they adored you. There’s no way a fake could inspire that.”

“But I, like, I can’t protect them!! I couldn’t even protect Cherry, my own and only parent!!” Niko gave a blood-curdling shriek, and she pressed her face into Haruyuki’s chest again. The small fists clutching his T-shirt were clenched so tightly that they threatened to crush themselves. “…I feel it. Something’s about to happen in the Accelerated World. Something bigger than the ISS kits, bigger than the appearance of Metatron. I mean, the mutual nonaggression treaty between the six major Legions probably won’t last forever. If…Radio and the other Kings seriously tried to crush me and Promi again…”

“Even still…Even still, you wouldn’t lose! Isn’t that why you’ve worked so hard to get an even greater power than your Invincible Fortress Mode?!”

“If level nines seriously tried to kill one another…at the end of the day, all the rules go out the window. It would turn into an Incarnate free-for-all. You know it too. I can’t use an attack-type Incarnate technique. What produced my duel avatar is fear. I wrap myself up in a shell of weapons, like a hedgehog, and desperately try to get my distance from the outside world. That’s my true nature. No matter how I enhance my range or my ability to flee with Incarnate, it’s— I totally can’t beat their destructive Incarnate with that.”

Niko’s tone gradually weakened as she reached the end of the sentence. The tension ran out of her left hand, and she let it flop down onto the sheet. She clasped her knees to her chest and curled up into a ball as if trying to withstand a sudden chill.

Although he wanted more than anything to say whatever it took to cheer her, Haruyuki’s mouth was too stiff to move. Niko had indeed told Haruyuki and Takumu that the only Incarnate techniques she could use belonged to the range and movement expansion categories; she could never learn attack or defense expansion techniques. And in fact, Haruyuki was the same. Of the Incarnate techniques he had currently obtained, Laser Sword and Laser Lance were range expansion and Light Speed was movement expansion; he couldn’t use a single technique to enhance his attack or defensive abilities.

Despite this—Haruyuki took a deep breath and said, “…Then I’ll protect you.” The slender back under the palm of his right hand trembled slightly. “If you get into a jam, I’ll come flying. Anytime. And I’ll knock whoever it is flying with a destructive Incarnate that’d make an originator shake.”

“…Can you use somethin’ like that?” Niko asked, her voice so faint that if they hadn’t been pressed up against each other, he couldn’t have heard it. But even so, it had just a little of her normal swagger back.

“Nobody can beat me when it comes to negative power! A giga terrorist technique that’ll massively blow up an entire duel stage, not to mention a king, to force the whole thing to an end. Well, I’m going to develop it, anyway…”

“So, like, you’re prob’ly gonna drag me into that, too,” Niko muttered, slowly relaxing her curled-up body and lifting her face. Her eyes were red, and there were more than a few droplets of water resting on her eyelashes, but there was a faint smile on her lips, too. She raised a hand and pinched Haruyuki’s cheek lightly. “…You really are a simple one, huh? What if I was fake crying, and it was all a plan to get you to switch sides to Promi?”

The instant she said that, grinning, a silver light tumbled from her eyes. There was no way these droplets, as beautiful as gemstones, were fake tears.

However, she only showed him her crying face, which made her look her actual age, for an instant. Releasing his cheek, Niko closed the fifteen-or-so-centimeter gap between them to zero without a moment’s hesitation. The tips of the toes of her bare feet touched Haruyuki’s legs, and her smooth forehead was pressed against his left cheek.

“Huh? Uh, um, uhhh.” Although this wasn’t the first time they’d slept in this bed, they’d never been in close contact like this, so Haruyuki belatedly raised a tense voice in alarm. But before he could say anything else or move, he heard, “…Thanks.”

The voice came to him with the movement of her lips and sank into his insides. His head suddenly grew quiet, his rising heart rate calmed back down, and finally a strange tranquility enveloped Haruyuki. “Y-yeah,” he responded, not sure himself what he meant by that, and he brought his right hand to her unbound hair in an unconscious movement, stroking it gently.

Niko relaxed even more, and murmured in the most natural voice, “I can’t even tell this stuff to Pard. Sorry for barfing all this up on you.”

“It’s okay. If you just need someone to talk to, I’m here anytime. Oh, of course, when I said I’d protect you, I was serious, though.”

“Heh-heh, I’m counting on you. For serious,” she replied, laughter mixed into her voice, and then Niko looked up at Haruyuki for just a moment before quickly bringing her face back down. “As a thank-you for listening to all that, I’ll tell you a little thing while we’re at it.”

“Huh? …What?” He cocked his head slightly to one side, and unexpected words came back to him.

“The reason why me and Pard and the girls in Negabu look out for you.”

“S-sorry?” He blinked rapidly in confusion, but this was actually a somewhat—no, fairly—interesting topic. Because it was true that, each time the troop of girls in the Legion interacted with him in a favorable manner, somewhere in his heart, he wondered, Why someone like me?

But the words Niko uttered after a pause were also entirely unexpected. “Maybe you won’t get it if I just tell you in words, but…us F-type Neurolinkers are always afraid when we’re in the real world—just a little, but still. A different type of fear from what I was talking about before.”

“A…fraid? Of what?”

“Yeah, right. Other people. Or more specifically, real-world M-types, I guess.”

“E-em type? You mean, guys?”

“Yeah. When we’re duel avatars in the Accelerated World, we’re protected by hard armor. F-types and M-types all have enough power to fight as equals. But once the duel’s over and we return to the real world, that power disappears. The more hours you spend as a Burst Linker, the more you end up feeling how weak and helpless your real body is.”

“…Helpless…real body…” It was just as she’d said before: This was indeed something Haruyuki had a hard time understanding intuitively. Naturally, when he was in the real world, he dreamed of being able to fly the way Silver Crow did. He might have even wished he were as strong as Crow. But that wasn’t a serious thing; it was a simple fantasy.

No. That’s not right. That day when he had accelerated for the first time in his life, he had wanted it so, so badly.

After learning about the miraculous power of the BB program from Kuroyukihime in the lounge of Umesato Junior High, the first thing Haruyuki had asked about was whether he could win in a fight if he used Brain Burst. At the time, he had desperately wanted to beat down the boy who was bullying him so cruelly. He had asked this precisely because he was painfully aware of how helpless the real him was.

If Kuroyukihime hadn’t quickly ejected those delinquents, Haruyuki might want that even now. To be able to fight like Crow in reality, too. And he might have lived in fear because of the fact that he couldn’t.

Once he had thought things through that far, Haruyuki finally saw the current situation in a new light. He swallowed hard. “Uh…So, Niko, right now. You have that fear of me, too…?” he asked timidly.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to say.” Fortunately, Niko didn’t pull any “Big brother, you’re scary”–type mode changes that were so bad for his heart; in fact, she patted his cheek. “…You basically don’t make me afraid at all. And I think it’s prob’ly like that for Pard and Lotus and Rake and Maiden, too. And this, it’s pretty incredible, y’know? I mean, at school, just ending up alone with a boy for some weird reason is enough to make me nervous. Even though I know in my head, he’s not gonna do anything to me, it’s still no good.”

“…You’re scared even with the social cameras…?”

“Yeah. You can’t not feel it. The fact that I’m not protected by armor, that I don’t have special attack or Enhanced Armament or anything at all—that fear just gets bigger the more time you spend in the Accelerated World. At any rate, maybe you just always end up having fear wrapped around you when you’re in the real world.”

“Th-that’s…” Haruyuki earnestly fumbled to say something that would ease Niko’s fear, even if just by a little. But the “Niko, you’re strong” that he’d repeated over and over before wasn’t encouraging or meaningful in this context. It was precisely because she had gained such impossible power in the Accelerated World that she felt this unease in the real.

Haruyuki opened and closed his mouth over and over again until Niko, watching, started giggling happily for some reason. “It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything. I told you before, you’re the only one I’m not afraid of. And it’s not just that. When I’m with you—when I’m with Haruyuki, the fear built up inside me just gets smaller. When I stick to you, I feel safe. The frozen negative Incarnate…it’s like it gets purified into a warm light…”

“……Um…” Haruyuki no longer had the slightest clue about how he should react.

“I’m sure the old hands of Negabu gotta be feeling the same way.” Niko leaned in as if she were entrusting her whole body to him. “At the curry party the other day, I mean, their faces…Their guards were completely down, they were all happily laughing. I mean, come on.”

“…W-were they…?” He had been totally unaware of this, and he could only recall moments of harsh severity with Kuroyukihime and Fuko, so he cocked his head to one side. After thinking about what Niko had said for a while, he furrowed his brow. “Um. So then, Niko, does that mean from the look of me, I’m the absolutely safe and totally harmless character?”

In that case, what did that really say about him as a real M-type? He had just started to have uncharacteristic thoughts like this when Niko stretched out both hands and clapped his face between them.

He expected her to yank his cheeks out to either side as hard as she could, like always, but Niko kept her hands as they were and smiled peacefully. “That’s not it. I’m talking about what’s inside this round head. Your mind. It’s ’cos we know you’re always thinking of us for real with everything you got that we feel safe with you. I mean, I’ve even thought this— Someday, I gotta thank you properly. That idea.”

“Th-that’s—I mean, I’m not actually doing anything.”

“It’s fine. As long as you stay close, that’s enough. So don’t go changing on me, ’kay? Even after you go up levels and get to be a high ranker, you just stay the way you are. And…like, if I someday—” She cut herself off there and moved the hands on Haruyuki’s cheeks down to his neck. Then she brought her face closer and touched it to him like she was trying to listen to his heartbeat before she closed her eyes, a smile still upon her face.

When we wake up tomorrow morning, Niko will probably be the same old Niko. She’ll be back to the absolute power of the Red King, not showing me the slightest weakness, much less tears. But I won’t forget. Niko’s the Red King, but at the same time, she’s a girl two years younger than me. And I promised to protect that Niko.

Haruyuki carved this into his heart as he peacefully sank over the edge into the rising waterline of sleep. When he closed his eyes, he heard a faint breathing in his ear. As he listened to it, his thoughts started to expand, and immediately before they faded to black, the source of the sound shifted a little, and he felt like something was touching his cheek. But Haruyuki didn’t know whether that was a dream or not.