Accel World - Volume 13 - Chapter 8

8

At first, he figured she was actually just sick and it had nothing to do with Brain Burst. Rin hadn’t looked good right from the start that morning. She had said it was food-related, but a simple digestive issue wouldn’t have gone on for several hours. Cursing himself for not paying more attention, Haruyuki had Takumu help him bring her to the nurse’s office on the first floor of the second school building.

Fortunately, all the beds were empty, so they laid Rin down on the one farthest in, but there was no sign of the health adviser, Ms. Hotta. He looked around the room and found a holotag spinning on top of the desk that said, OUT FOR ONE HOUR. I’M IN THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE. BE BACK SOON.

Haruyuki started to fly out of the room to go get her, but Takumu stopped him, saying, “I’ll go get her; you stay with Kusakabe,” so, with no other choice, he returned to Rin’s bedside.

“It’s not your fault, Corvus.”

When he looked up, he saw Fuko, the only one of the troop of girls to come with them, standing next to him. Since they couldn’t exactly march into the nurse’s office en masse, the other six were on standby next to the fountain in the front yard. Fuko had come with them because, of course, she was Rin’s parent.

“…I should have noticed. She might not look it, but Rin has a tendency to push herself too hard. I knew that, and yet…”

“No…All morning, I was thinking how Kusakabe didn’t look good. But I just dragged her around all over the place anyway.”

Biting his lip hard, he looked down at the girl lying on the bed before him. Her cheeks were pale, and her breathing was shallow and quick. If she hadn’t been feeling well for several hours, then it wasn’t just simple anemia, either. Maybe an unseasonal cold or…Still reproaching himself, he sent his thoughts racing around for an answer.

Abruptly, Rin opened her eyes a crack and said in a voice that threatened to fade out of existence, “……I’m sorry, Arita. I’m sorry…Master Fuko.”

“Oh! You don’t have anything to apologize for, Kusakabe. I’m sorry for pushing you so hard. The nurse’ll be here in a minute, so…” Haruyuki worked to keep his voice from jumping up into a shout.

But Rin moved her pale face slightly from side to side. “This…isn’t. A cold. There’s…nothing wrong. With. My body. What’s struggling isn’t. Me. It’s my duel avatar…Yesterday. My brother was infected…with an ISS kit.”

Rin told them that Magenta Scissor had challenged Ash Roller Saturday afternoon, in Setagaya Area No. 1. It had been right after Rin had left school, gotten on the bus on Kannana Road, and connected her Neurolinker globally.

Ash had fought bitterly against Magenta, who used the long-distance technique Dark Shot over and over, but normal resistance to an enemy who didn’t hesitate to use Incarnate attacks was impossible. When Ash was finally no longer able to run, Magenta performed “surgery” using her scissors and forcibly infected him with the ISS kit.

Normally, this was when Rin would have immediately contacted Fuko and discussed how to respond. But Ash Roller, who had the personality of Rinta Kusakabe, Rin’s older brother, had turned his thoughts to his beloved little sister. I can hold on for a day, piece o’ cake. So you go and have fun at the festival tomorrow.

“I. I thought about disobeying my brother. And calling you, Master. A lot. But. I…felt it. My brother had also been. Excited about Arita’s school festival. For a few days. So…I,” Rin said in a trembling voice, and then brought her right hand out from under the blanket to gently touch the Neurolinker on her neck.

Here, Haruyuki finally understood the reason why something felt off when he met Rin that morning.

Rin Kusakabe normally used a pastel-green Neurolinker. She only changed to the metallic gray one when she was dueling. This was the Neurolinker her older brother Rinta had used, and it was in this one that the Brain Burst program was installed.

So on that day of the school festival, when there was no need to duel, Rin should have been wearing her own Neurolinker. But from the time they had met up at the front gate that morning, her brother’s terminal had been equipped on her neck. Perhaps the reason for that was that she wanted to communicate the atmosphere of the school festival to Rinta, who was in a coma in a hospital in Shibuya.

But the truly terrifying part of the ISS kit was that, even when you weren’t accelerated, even when you took your Neurolinker off, this mental parasite kept progressing steadily. The kit that had infiltrated Rin’s duel terminal had been growing bit by bit—after she got home the previous day, while she was asleep, when she set out for Umesato that day, and while she was going around the school festival.

“…We have to hurry and purify it before the parasite goes any farther…” Haruyuki leaned over the bed and squeezed a voice from his throat, staring at her Neurolinker, which had a crack like a lightning bolt on the outside. Once the personality change advanced, it would be extremely difficult to remove the kit. Even the two good friends of Chocolat Puppeteer he’d met the other day in Setagaya area had turned deaf ears on Chocolat’s desperate pleas at first.

No, more than anything, I don’t want to see an Ash Roller controlled by the kit. No way.

Haruyuki jerked his head up and turned back toward Fuko. The Nega Nebulus deputy also seemed quite shocked, but the second she met Haruyuki’s eyes, she nodded resolutely.

“Corvus, we should first check on Ash’s condition. But if we duel over the local net, then Sacchi and the others will be pulled into the Gallery.”

“A direct duel, then. I have a cable.” He dug around in his small daypack and pulled out an XSB cable. A similar cable appeared from Fuko’s pouch so the three of them could all direct. He opened up two of the folding chairs set against the wall and sat down before plugging one end of the cable into his own Neurolinker and offering the other end to Rin.

“Kusakabe…Can I?” he asked.

Rin showed him a faint smile, while still looking quite pained. “The opposite…of that time, huh?”

He understood what she meant immediately. Ten days earlier, when he became the sixth Chrome Disaster, Haruyuki had tried to run away from his Legion comrades, but Rin, at their first meeting (on the first floor of his condo), had stopped him. She had pushed him back in the rear seat of Fuko’s car, parked in the basement of his building, and forced him to direct. To save him.

“…We’re definitely going to save your brother,” Haruyuki said, and Rin nodded, the faint smile still on her lips, as she turned her head to the right. Haruyuki inserted the plug in his right hand gently into the exposed direct terminal of her Neurolinker.

At basically the same time, Fuko’s cable was connected with Haruyuki’s Neurolinker from the left. When the warning of two wired connections was displayed, he heard the sound of several feet approaching quickly in the hallway outside. Takumu was returning with the health adviser in tow.

Haruyuki glanced at Fuko, and they nodded together. A normal duel was at most 1.8 seconds. They’d definitely be finished before they arrived.

“I’ll be the starter,” Fuko announced, and before Haruyuki could object, she was murmuring the acceleration command. “Burst Link.”

A virtual thunder roared, and the sight before his eyes of Rin and the nurse’s office froze blue—along with the hustle and bustle of the festival, which was picking up now that it was the afternoon.

Haruyuki’s wish for a favorable stage was at last half granted.

Before his feet touched down on the ground, he could hear busy music with an accordion as the main player. In the old fighting games, each stage had its own background music, but stages with music were fairly rare in Brain Burst.

Listening to the music, which was cheerful yet slightly eerie—perhaps because the sound was off occasionally—Haruyuki quickly checked out his surroundings.

Outside. Probably the roof of the Umesato Junior High second school building. And because he was a member of the Gallery, he had materialized a distance away from the two duelers.

The sky was dark, but Umesato, on the ground, was blanketed in a warm light. About two stories above the ground, electric wires were suspended under dark clouds, with several large incandescent light bulbs, the kind that weren’t found in the real world anymore, hanging down from them.

Zzt, zzt. Beneath the lights, which buzzed and occasionally flickered unreliably, human-shaped silhouettes with no real substance writhed in groups of twos and threes. Forming circles and dancing or walking along in groups, the shapes were skinny like poles and only about a meter or so tall, so they had the same sort of bustling strangeness to them as the music did. Shabby booths were lined up along the wall of the school building, and the shadow shopkeepers—who sported no substance, of course—were selling their curious wares. Similar to the atmosphere of the school festival in the real world, but decisively different somehow, this was the Bizarre Festival stage. A midlevel dark type.

Given that it was dark, it was a tricky stage, with all kinds of gimmicks to interfere with movement built into it, but this time, there was the possibility that the battle wouldn’t even happen at all. Haruyuki raced to the edge of the roof and looked down in the direction indicated by the guide cursor.

Both duelists had already left the nurse’s office for the world outside. At the entrance of the front yard, wedged in between the second school building, which Haruyuki occupied, and the first one, he could see a slender duel avatar sitting in a wheelchair. Motionless there, paying no mind to the swarms of tiny figures around her, was the deputy of Nega Nebulus, “Strong Arm” Sky Raker.

Her eyes should have been turned toward Ash Roller, but lacking directionality, the light of the incandescent bulbs didn’t reach that far. Plus, he couldn’t see past the front gates of the courtyard, where the world sank into darkness. But if this was the usual Ash, then he’d be rolling up with a “Hey, heeeeey!” and revving his massive engine as soon as the duel started. Haruyuki was forced to decide that Ash being silent now meant he was already not in his normal mental state. Beside himself at the thought, Haruyuki flung himself from the roof.

Because he was in the Gallery, even falling from the third floor had no impact. Landing gently outside the nurse’s office window, Haruyuki moved to approach the wheelchair to discuss the situation with Raker. But immediately before he could, an intense light cut through the darkness near the main gate.

The light source was not the familiar yellowish-white halogen lamp, but rather a ruby-colored one, like a red traffic light, or blood. The black silhouettes squirmed and shuffled, trying to escape the vertical range of the illumination. Then the roar of an internal combustion engine starting filled the stage. This too was not the usual sunny sound of the V-twin; the low, wet, rumbling groan sounded more like the threatening protest of a large living creature.

Bathed in the sinister light and sound, Raker, in her wheelchair, didn’t so much as flinch. The fluid metal of her hair parts and the hem of her white dress fluttering slightly, she stared directly ahead of her.

As if irritated by this silence, the red light finally moved. It approached slowly at first and then gradually picked up speed, so that by the moment it appeared beneath the light of the incandescent bulbs, the engine was howling violently. This acceleration exceeded the domain of a motorcycle, and in Haruyuki’s eyes, it looked like nothing other than the leap of a massive beast wrapped in black and silver.

Sky Raker and her wheelchair were by far the smaller of the two, but she still didn’t move a muscle, even as she saw this massive form charging toward her. She simply narrowed her dark-rose eye lenses slightly and appeared to be measuring her timing.

In the Territories not that long before, Raker had avoided Ash’s charging attack with the superhuman feat of luring him in until the very last possible second before grabbing on to the handlebars as she dashed backward to flip the bike.

But he couldn’t believe she’d be able to use the same technique again here. The acceleration of the motorcycle was on a different level, and there was a door a mere ten meters behind Raker. Plus, entry into buildings was not allowed in the Bizarre Festival stage, so there basically wasn’t enough space for her to do a back dash.

“M-Master!!” Haruyuki kept the volume of his voice in check, but he couldn’t keep himself from calling out.

But Raker stayed where she was, her hands resting lightly on the wheels of her chair. The headlight, now impossibly close, dyed her entire body the color of blood, and the roar of the engine pushed her hair and skirt up around her.

Just as the ferociously spinning front wheel of the motorcycle was on the verge of making contact with the slender wheelchair, Raker finally moved. More precisely, what Haruyuki saw was nothing more than a series of overlapping, glittering silver afterimages. The wheelchair spun around and escaped to the left so fast that Haruyuki couldn’t actually see it.

The power of Raker’s wheelchair to dash from a standstill far surpassed the speed other duel avatars could manage with their own legs. This power of mobility was essentially teleporting over short distances, but up until that point, Haruyuki had thought it could only be used to go forward or backward. After all, the wheels were fixed to the chair itself and couldn’t turn to the sides. So the chair couldn’t actually move directly sideways; to dash to either side from a stop, she would first have had to turn and then advance.

And yet, at that moment, Raker’s wheelchair was sliding directly to the left as she made multiple turns, though with what kind of logic Haruyuki didn’t know. The large motorcycle couldn’t keep up, and it skidded past, shooting up sparks for a moment as it aimed to crash into the closed door. Anticipating the collision, Haruyuki clenched his teeth.

But there was no impact nor explosion. Immediately in front of the wall, the motorcycle crouched down for an instant like a beast before leaping up at an acute angle. When the tire made contact with the school wall, the machine trail braked hard. Once the nose had come around ninety degrees, the machine stopped on a dime.

The massive metal body glued motionless to the vertical wall was such a strange sight, it almost knocked his sense of gravity out of whack. Ash Roller’s bike did indeed have the ability to drive up walls, but it shouldn’t have been able to stop on the wall like that. In fact, the bike itself was different from before, so totally transformed that no traces of its old self remained.

“…Ash…” Squeezing out this voice that was not a voice, Haruyuki stared up at the motorcycle on the wall, right where the Umesato school crest would have been. The front and rear tires were thicker, and a series of sharp, fang-like protrusions had popped up in the centers of the treads. The front fork and the gas tank were covered in silver scales reminiscent of a snake, and the exhaust pipes coming from the engine were grotesque, the innards of a living creature.

Or maybe it was actually a living creature now. Because the rider who was supposedly the machine’s master—in other words, Ash Roller himself—was fused with the bike. The hands gripping the handlebars, the feet stepping on the pedals, even the head and body were covered in a scaly metal shell, completely obscured from the outside.

Despite this, Haruyuki sensed a powerful gaze shooting out from the bike. He soon understood the reason for that. The headlight emitting the red glow was not a light fixture; it was a single enormous eyeball. A crimson eye encased in a black organism; an eye he had seen any number of times recently, empty but at the same time hiding a powerful malice and lust.

“That’s—the ISS kit…in the bike…!!”

As if it could hear Haruyuki’s groan, the red headlight slowly blinked once. The engine, like an internal organ, growled, and the black and silver organic machine slowly ascended the wall, headlight still facing the ground—it was moving in reverse. This was definitely impossible with Ash Roller’s motorcycle under normal circumstances. The direction of the red illumination rolled over to Sky Raker, who was stopped once more on the south side of the courtyard. Like a carnivorous beast eyeing its prey, the light quickly blinked again.

From the look of it, Haruyuki could only assume that it was the parasitic ISS kit itself moving the motorcycle. It was impossible to guess at present what kind of state Ash Roller had been placed in inside of the shell. The purpose of this direct duel was to talk with him and see exactly what the situation was, but to do that, it would be necessary to first render the motorcycle helpless. But given the extent to which it had become one with its user, it would be an extremely difficult job to selectively destroy the Enhanced Armament alone. Sky Raker could try to knock it over or flip it, but the machine wouldn’t release the rider it had swallowed up.

What was more frightening to him than anything else was the thought that the irregular phenomenon of the kit parasitizing the Enhanced Armament and the control that had grown so strong in just that short time would obstruct any purification. The whole time a duel avatar was parasitized, the kit was interfering with the Linker’s mind. If they didn’t remove it right away and return it to its sealed-card state, Ash Roller and Rin Kusakabe—Haruyuki’s precious friends, allies who had helped him out any number of times—might end up irrevocably changed.

Spurred on by a foreboding that threatened to burn him up, Haruyuki shouted in a trance, “Ash…! Please wake up, Ash! You’re not going to lose to a kit like that…Right?!”

Perhaps in response to his cry, the growling of the bike engine grew louder.

And then Haruyuki saw them: two large holes on the surface of the cowl undulating organically on either side of the red headlight, opening a mouth.

But this was not a sign that the rider was being released. Inside the holes, an energy blacker than darkness coalesced. Purple sparks flickered, and the entire machine shuddered violently.

Understanding intuitively what was about to happen, Haruyuki started to cry out again, “Master, ru—”

But his words were drowned out in the weighty sound of vibration. Jet-black energy bullets shot out of the holes in the cowl: Dark Shot, one of the Incarnate techniques the ISS kit gave to its users. The long-distance attack was fearsome, destroying everything it hit with a nihilistic energy, and now there were two of them at the same time.

If the slender wheelchair was even lightly grazed by the Incarnate bullets, it would be destroyed, robbed of the ability to dance around the stage. And yet Sky Raker did not move. Resolutely staring at the two spheres of darkness closing in on her, she smoothly raised her right hand. Leisurely opening up her fingers, she rotated the hand brandished in front of her once in a small circle.

“Swirl Sway.”

At the same time as the name of the technique was announced, a pale-blue light enveloped her right hand. The light swirled with incredible force, centered on her palm, and called up a wind. This immediately grew into a small tornado that shook the entire courtyard.

The two Dark Shots were swallowed up the instant they touched the tornado, but even as they whirled around impossibly fast, they moved stubbornly toward Raker as if they had their own will. They pressed in until they were a few centimeters from her palm, but there, they were overpowered by the tornado and flung outward. One shot hit the first school building, while the other slammed into the wall of the second.

The fact that entry was impossible also meant that it was impossible for the building object to be destroyed, but the wall was completely cut away by the explosion of nihilistic energy. Given that it could repel an Incarnate technique with that much force, the tornado of light generated by Sky Raker also had to have been Incarnate. Defensive, quick activation—very much the domain of a master.

Incarnate techniques were divided up into four categories according to their characteristics. Was the source of power hope or despair? Did the effect extend to individuals or over a range? As far as Haruyuki knew, Sky Raker—Fuko Kurasaki—was the most powerful user of “positive will with range as its target.” And that was because she believed in the Incarnate System—in Brain Burst, in the Accelerated World, and in the power of the bonds found and forged there.

Fuko would definitely be able to pull Ash Roller back from the darkness. She would beat back the malice that tortured Rin. With that conviction in his heart, Haruyuki took his gaze off Raker and looked up at the living bike stuck to the wall above the entrance. And then he opened his eyes wide, dumbfounded.

It wasn’t there. Although he had taken his eyes off it for just a couple of seconds, the motorcycle had disappeared. But that was impossible. Even the ISS kit couldn’t overcome Ash Roller’s greatest weakness of making a loud noise when he moved.

As a worst-case scenario, he could believe that, just like the kit had changed the structure of the transmission and made it possible to ride in reverse, it had somehow gotten rid of the explosive noise of the gasoline engine. But as long as the bike was a bike, it couldn’t move without the tires hitting a wall or the ground or something. And with those fang-like protrusions on the tires, Haruyuki should have heard some kind of serious noise.

No, wait.

There was just one place where it could move without even the tires making noise. That was—

“Master! Above you!!” Haruyuki screamed, looking up at the sky.

There were no stars in the night sky of the Bizarre Festival stage, and it was covered with thick clouds that threatened rain at any second. But in the center of the gray rectangle, punched out on three sides by the walls of the school building, was a conspicuous black shadow: the motorcycle. Using the cover of the roar when the two Dark Shots hit the school, it had revved its engine for just a moment and jumped from the wall.

Leaping to attack its prey, very much the act of a carnivorous beast, the motorcycle dropped from the sky toward Raker. Naturally, she could have avoided it with a dash of her wheelchair. But if an object of that weight class crashed into the earth, it would generate a shock wave more than enough to stomp a large avatar. If she took a stagger effect while she was moving, there was a danger that the lightweight wheelchair would fall over. That said, if she didn’t dodge, she’d inevitably be pinned down and hit with massive—

“…Master…!” Even though Haruyuki knew in his head that he couldn’t interfere at all as a member of the Gallery—he couldn’t even get within ten meters of the duelers—he instinctively moved to leap from the wall of the school building. But just on the verge of doing that, he saw it: Raker’s eyes shining with a sharp light in the darkness.

For her, this was not checkmate. Just the opposite. Fuko had been patiently waiting for the motorcycle to jump, for it to reveal its defenseless belly in midair, where it lost its mobility.

A dazzling blue light was born on Raker’s back.

Whm! The sound of a powerful jet.

Her white hat was blown off, her dress was ripped to shreds and then vanished, and even the wheelchair was pushed back. In the next instant, the graceful F-type avatar with sky-blue armor shot up from the ground, two jets of flame stretching out from her back, at a speed that far surpassed Silver Crow’s maximum vertical ascent power. It was the power of the booster-type Enhanced Armament, born from her heart’s desire to reach the sky—Gale Thruster.

Reaching the height of the falling bike in an instant, Raker brought her slender-looking right hand up to the bottom of the engine without a moment’s hesitation. Not a fist or a chopping hand, but a palm strike. The sound of impact rang out like thunder, and the manifold that looked so much like a gastrointestinal tract was torn free and sent flying, while red flames gushed from cracks that appeared all over the engine block.

Even still, the living motorcycle didn’t stop. The kit parasite in the headlight shone fiercely, and the front and rear tires were enveloped in a thick black aura. Of course, only the rear tire was spinning, but when Raker’s long hair touched the radiating inky overlay, it was ripped off without a sound. Most likely, this was an ability corresponding to the close-range Incarnate technique Dark Blow. If she was caught up in that rotation, even Raker wouldn’t make it out unscathed.

But the sky-blue avatar didn’t show any sign of faltering; she continued to beat at the engine with palm strikes. The cracks spread even farther, and the flames leaking out became an orange rain falling to the ground. The spin of the tire slowed, and the red eyeball flickered, struggling.

The damage to the motorcycle was serious, but Ash Roller’s health gauge, displayed in the upper right of Haruyuki’s field of view, had basically not dropped at all. Here, Haruyuki finally understood Fuko’s true aim: If she attacked the heart of the living bike that was the engine while on the ground, Ash himself, locked in the metal shell above it, would inevitably be dragged in. But if she attacked from directly below in the sky, she could target the engine alone without friendly fire on the rider. In other words, Fuko’s main priority as she fought was not to destroy the terrifying living motorcycle, but rather to avoid hurting Ash Roller.

That’s so like you, Master!! Haruyuki shouted this in a corner of his heart, and Gale Thruster roared even more loudly.

The Thruster’s propulsive force overcame the weight of the bike, and the massive black machine was yanked up into the air. Raker took her hands off the engine for just that moment and shot out each hand to strike hard with her palms. Despite the fact that these blows came from too close to have any significant force behind them, the engine block was completely shattered, and the frame was ripped apart such so that the motorcycle was basically split into two.

Immediately after that, a massive explosion dyed the dark sky of the Bizarre Festival stage red.

As the ball of flames swallowed Raker and Ash, their health gauges suddenly dropped—but that soon stopped. Opening his eyes wide, Haruyuki watched as a beam of sky-blue light shot up through the expanding ball of flames. Clutched tightly in Sky Raker’s arms as she danced high up into the night sky was the familiar skull-faced avatar in the leather jacket.

“…Master…! Ash…!!”

Tearing up, Haruyuki shouted in the loudest voice he could manage, waving his hands wildly.

Haruyuki tried to race over to where Raker landed in the courtyard, but halfway there, he stopped advancing, no matter how hard he pumped his legs. When he thought about it, the duel was still ongoing, even if the Enhanced Armament had been destroyed, so the rule about the Gallery not being allowed within ten meters of the duelers was still in effect.

As he flailed in vain at the border of the prohibited zone, Fuko glanced at him and raised her right hand, telling him, “Wait,” with the aura of a wry smile bleeding through. Then she turned the palm of her hand around ninety degrees and mercilessly chopped at the helmet of Ash Roller, who appeared to still be unconscious. Paying no mind to the fact that Ash’s health gauge had dropped to around 5 percent, she raised her hand one more time.

“Wake up, Ash,” she said kindly. “If you don’t wake up before the count of three, the next one will hurt a little more.   Okay, three, two, one…”

Whp! The second chop whistled through the air, and immediately before the center of the skull face could be cracked open, a thick cry echoed in his ears: “Nooo!”

Hands in leather gloves came together to make a small X. “No more chopping!! I’m awake! I am perfectly waked up, Master!!”

“Oh, you are? Then stand up on your own.” She had no sooner said the words than she was pulling away the hand supporting Ash’s back. Not even glancing at her beloved pupil falling with a thud, Fuko quickly brought up her Instruct menu. Still lying on his side, Ash pressed the confirmation window that appeared before him, and in Haruyuki’s field of view, flaming text announced that the duel had ended in a draw.

And then the wall that had prevented him from moving forward vanished, and he tumbled over from the excessive force of leaning into that wall. He got back to his feet after a somersault and raced over to them as fast as he could.

“A-Ash! A-are you okay?!” He screeched to a halt next to the rider splayed on the ground and peered at his face.

“The hell. You’re here, too, you damned crow? But nah, I’m all right, obvs. A chop or two is nothing for mighty me.”

“I’m not talking about the chops!! Your head—I mean, your thinking…”

“Whoa, you. My super-fine head is o’course super-mega-cool every time,” Ash replied, giving Haruyuki a thumbs-up, but his voice didn’t have its usual energy to it. Haruyuki offered Ash his hand to pull him up into a seated position, and then sat down next to him himself. Having recovered her wheelchair, Fuko also sat, so that she was facing the two of them.

The first one to break the brief silence was Ash. Placing his hands on the knees of his crossed legs, he bowed his head deeply toward his teacher and Brain Burst parent, Fuko. “…I’m sorry, Master. I messed up.”

“No need to apologize. I’m also responsible for not anticipating the situation.”

At this exchange, Haruyuki took a deep breath and then uttered the words he had prepared before the duel began. “Um…I’m actually the one who has to apologize here!”

“What do you mean by that, Corvus?”

“…On Wednesday this week—so three days before Ash was attacked—I heard it from the mouth of Magenta Scissor herself. That she was going to give up on attacking the north and invade the east. I should have remembered right then and there. East of Setagaya Area Two, where I ran into Magenta, is Setagaya Area One, where Shimokitazawa is. And immediately east of that is Shibuya Area Three, Sasazuka in Shibuya, where Rin’s school is.”

The instant after Haruyuki announced this, his heart nearly breaking, Ash was grabbing the neck of his armor, given that there was no collar to grab and yank him up by.

“You damned crow!! You— How’d you know?! I mean, that she’s a student at the Sasazuka Girls’ Academy junior high division?!”

“I-is she?! I mean, I didn’t know her school name! I just kinda had an idea it was in Sasazu—”

“Shaddap! Shaaaaaddap! So you’re all up and stalking her after the morning duel! Secretly jumping on the same bus as Rin, following her all the way to school, you creepy little crow!!”

“I-I’d be late for school if I did that!”

“Shut it. Which is more important, Rin or being late?!”

“Th-that’s a weird question!”

“All right. If you don’t end that here, it’s going t’ hurt, you know?”

Fwssh. Once they both had returned to their original positions (Ash went beyond cross-legged to formally sitting on his knees), Fuko first turned to Haruyuki.

“Corvus. It is indeed a mistake you should reflect upon for not making use of hard-won information. But I also misread Magenta Scissor’s strategy. Neither Lotus nor I anticipated her aiming to disseminate the kits not only by invading festivals through local nets but by also by courting the danger of challenging others and getting into regular duels. If I was going to make doubly sure, I had the choice of forbidding Rin from connecting globally until the issue was resolved.” The sky-blue avatar narrowed her eyes regretfully.

“No, you’re wrong, Master!” Ash, sitting formally next to Haruyuki, shook his skull helmet fiercely. “The problem’d never resolve with just me cutting off the net and doing a whole ‘run away from the Accelerated World’ thing. You and Master Lotus and even this crow here taught me that!”

Haruyuki reeled slightly at this unexpected line, and Fuko also blinked slowly once. “Huh? I—I did?” he asked.

“I do also question if I taught you that?”

“Yes, you did! Not in words, but like, through life…life…” Ash brought his face close and asked in a whisper. “Hey, Crow, how do you say ‘the way you live your life’ in English?”

“Uh, um…” Haruyuki unconsciously fell into thought. “Lifestyle…maybe that’s not quite it…It’s more like a path for living, so way…Way of life or something, I guess?”

“That’s it! That way! Of! Life! You taught me!” Ash said, the tension in his voice fluctuating wildly, and Haruyuki understood what he was trying to say.

Following the destruction of the first Nega Nebulus, Kuroyukihime cut her connection to the global net and disappeared from the Accelerated World, while Fuko also retired from dueling and lived as a recluse at the top of the old Tokyo Tower, where other people couldn’t come near her. But both of them had broken down the walls of those stagnant worlds and stepped outside. To accelerate themselves once more.

Haruyuki even understood the reason Ash had added his own name to that list, too, but putting that aside for the moment, he nodded. “Right…Even if you lose the duel, even if you lose everything for the moment, you can always get it back again. I mean, Ash, you were parasitized by the ISS kit, but you came back to us. I didn’t know what to do when Rin collapsed, but this…I feel a little relieved somehow.”

He had spoken that much until he noticed Ash and Raker both looked extremely serious still, so he gradually slowed down.

“…Um…Ash and Rin are both going to be okay now, right? I mean, the ISS kit didn’t parasitize Ash’s actual body, but the motorcycle—the Enhanced Armament, and you completely destroyed the bike before, Master, so…”

“Look, Crow. Sorry to get your hopes up for nothing, but…the problem’s exactly that.”

“…Wh-what do you mean…?” Haruyuki opened his eyes wide under his mirrored helmet.

“Corvus,” Fuko said in a quiet voice, “even if an Enhanced Armament is completely destroyed in a duel, it will return in its usual form in the next duel, yes? So then if Ash duels again, I expect he’ll be returned to that form we saw in the beginning, trapped in the parasitized motorcycle. The ISS kit hiding in his Neurolinker isn’t gone.”

“Huh…? So, so then the interference with Rin’s mind…”

“We should assume it will continue unchanged after this duel.”

“B-but—!!” Haruyuki held his breath and stared at the timer in the upper part of his field of view. There were about six hundred seconds left. Once that time passed, the kit Fuko had worked so hard to destroy would be regenerated, and Ash would return to that terrifying form. Was that what she meant?

“Then…let’s hurry and purify it! We’ll call Mei or Bell and get them to burn the kit out or return it to a sealed-card state, and then the interference will end!” Haruyuki said forcefully, but Fuko didn’t nod her agreement this time.

“It’s unfortunate…but I’m forced to conclude that that would be difficult as well. Regardless of whether we use Maiden’s purification flames or Bell’s rewinding time, in order for the ISS kit to be removed from the user, there needs to be the will to refuse the temptation of that power. A will strong enough to negate the negative Incarnate that the kit itself possesses.”

“Then there’s no problem! Like Ash would ever lose out to that kit! I mean, he’s here with us right now, the usual Ash…”

Haruyuki leaned forward, and Ash gently pushed him back with a hand wrapped in a riding glove. “…Sorry, Crow. Nice you feel that way an’ all…But you said it yourself, yeah? The problem’s that that eyeball’s parasitizing my Enhanced Armament. Listen. The bike’s a part of me. But, like, the bike itself isn’t self-aware. It can’t come up with any kind of willpower to reject the ISS kit, y’know.”

“That’s exactly it,” Fuko agreed. “Most likely—no, undoubtedly, even if we tried purification of rewinding, we wouldn’t be able to separate the bike from the kit. Despite this, because the motorcycle and Ash are strongly connected through the Image Control System, the kit will generate mental interference. If she planted the kit in the motorcycle rather than Ash with the deliberate goal of bringing this situation about…Magenta Scissor is a fearsome opponent.”

“S-so then, Ash, you could use the Image Control System, too, and communicate a will to the bike—” But at this, Haruyuki finally remembered a critical piece of information:

This wasn’t the first time he’d seen an ISS kit parasitizing an Enhanced Armament. Ten days earlier, when he had been given the kit by this same Magenta Scissor and ended up equipping it, Takumu—Cyan Pile—had also been parasitized not with the red eyeball in the center of his chest, where it usually took up residence, but in the Enhanced Armament of his right arm, Pile Driver.

When Chiyuri asked him if she could erase the kit with Citron Call Mode II, Takumu had rejected the possibility. He had said the reason was that the kit itself refused to be separated through Incarnate power, but perhaps Takumu had sensed this, too. That if the kit had invaded his Enhanced Armament, which was equivalent to a part of his own body, the separation would be more difficult than a parasite in the main body of his avatar.

As if to add evidence to Haruyuki’s thoughts, Ash hung his head low. “When this duel started, I was desperately trying to get back control from inside the bike. But, like, the instant the battle started, some kinda will or something poured into me, like this tsunami, from the kit, and I basically passed out. Next time I opened my eyes was after Master rescued me. It’s, like, when the kits got Olive and them, it sorta got in the way of what they actually wanted, right? But for me, the kit—the bike, parasitized by the kit, the only thing I can think is it’s moving on its own. Honestly, wrestling back control from that thing is serious no-way town when I haven’t even trained in the Incarnate System…”

“…Now that you mention it…the kit that parasitized the Pile Enhanced Armament tried to parasitize us with several kits of its own will. And that time, too, rewinding with Citron Call was no good in the end,” Haruyuki muttered, growing more disheartened by the second, until he finally thought up the next solution and yanked his head up. “I—I got it! Even when the Enhanced Armament is parasitized, we could— If we directly attack the ISS kit during parallel processing in the Brain Burst central server, we can annihilate it! I-I’ll direct with Rin and sleep with her tonight! And then when I sneak into the central server, destroy the kit—”

Here, Haruyuki finally became aware of what exactly he was saying and hurriedly waved both hands while shaking his head. “N-no, it’s not like that, Bro! I don’t mean it like that! No way!”

“Who you callin’ brother, you giga suuuuuuuuck!” Roaring, Ash yanked his left fist up high—and then placed it on Haruyuki’s right shoulder.

“Huh?” He stopped shrinking into himself. “Uh, um…?”

“……Well, you know. Gotta say thanks, Crow. You thinking about my sis—about Rin.”

“……A-Ash?”

“But, like, sorry, you know? Time’s up. That ISS kit parasite’s movin’ hella fast. Def not gonna make it to tonight. I even thought about destroying the Enhanced Armament, the bike itself, but that’s a hella tough job, too. I either have to yield it to another Burst Linker in a direct duel or sell it in a shop in the Unlimited Neutral Field, but whichever way, the bike won’t actually be gone. And if I mess it up, not only does the mental interference keep going for Rin, I maybe might make everything a whole lot worse, y’know?”

“Th…That’s…” Haruyuki was at a loss for words.

Ash had casually tossed out the idea of getting rid of the motorcycle, but there was no way he didn’t understand just how serious that was. Ash Roller was a Burst Linker with basically all of his potential poured into his American motorcycle Enhanced Armament. If he lost it, his battle power wouldn’t just be halved. Forget leveling up; it would be a mean feat just to maintain his points.

But Ash Roller’s resolve, his feelings for his little sister Rin Kusakabe, were even greater than Haruyuki had imagined.

“Crow.” Hand still on Silver Crow’s shoulder, Ash spoke in the calmest voice Haruyuki had ever heard from him. “But, like. There’s just one way to stop Rin’s suffering. A way to totally erase the ISS kit from inside the Neurolinker and end the mental interference.”

“…What’s that?”

“Me disappearing. Right here, right now, I leave Great Wall, and I get Master to let me join Nega Nebulus. Then in the next duel, I get the Judgment Blow from the Black King. Then I’ll vanish as a Burst Linker. With the ISS kit, yeah?”

Even after Ash closed his mouth, Haruyuki couldn’t react for a while. Finally, he slowly shook his head. Over and over and over, he intently moved his head from left to right and back again. While he did, he pushed a hoarse voice from his throat: “No. No way, not that. You said this to me ten days ago when I was one with the Armor, didn’t you? You said hang on right to the last second, don’t give up. Grit your teeth and fight to the end. So I fought. I managed to make it back to everyone again. So why…? Why…?”

“Aah…that’s right. If—if it was just my problem, that’s prob’ly what I’d do. Even with the parasite progressing and me getting even wilder than before, I’d prob’ly be all ‘as long as it works out in the end, that’s okay by me.’ But you know, Rin…” He cut himself off and lifted his gaze from the ground to stare directly at Haruyuki through his skull-patterned face shield. “…If Rin said something awful to the people around her now, even just once, because of the kit—especially you, Crow—she’d never come back from it. Even if we did manage to purify the kit after that, she’d never forgive herself. She’d blame herself, just blame, blame, blame, and then cry, cry, cry. And I don’t wanna see that Rin. I wanna settle this on my own before it’s too late. And that’s what Rin wants, too. She was ready for this. She came to your school festival to make her last memories as a Burst Linker. She’s been looking forward to this day for forever…”

“…But. But when you’re not a Burst Linker anymore, then,” Haruyuki said, forcing his voice out, “then…memories related to the Accelerated World, all of them…”

“…Yeah, guess so. But I’m pretty sure she won’t forget today at least. Going around with you, seeing the stuff, laughing her head off, having a great time. Just her memory of today, you know. So, Crow— No, Haruyuki. Make friends with her again. Even if you can’t duel, there’s all kinds of other stuff to do. Like study together or go watch motorcycle racing or something. But I’ll tell you one thing, as her big bro, I’ll be giga damned if I let you do anything more than that.”

The last part Ash said more as a joke, but Haruyuki couldn’t look him squarely in the eye; virtual droplets of water kept obscuring his vision from the other side of Silver Crow’s visor.

It was just too sudden. He had never even imagined this ending. It had only been ten days since he met Rin Kusakabe. There were so many things he wanted to talk to her about, ask her about, but he wouldn’t get to say any of it, ask anything. And it wasn’t just Rin. Ash Roller was the opponent in Haruyuki’s first loss as a Burst Linker, and in his first win. Ever since, they had dueled countless times, polishing each other’s skills in the process. They were rivals from different Legions, and two players with the same goal, aiming for the limits of speed.

He absolutely could not accept losing both Rin and Ash at the same time. Haruyuki turned his eyes pleadingly toward Sky Raker, sitting in her wheelchair nearby. The Burst Linker, master to both Ash and Crow, silently returned his gaze, her mouth shut. Her twilight-colored eye lenses appeared to be urging him to accept it—or waiting for him to rise up.

Haruyuki felt it was both. Fuko was putting the choice on Haruyuki. Would he simply nod at Ash’s words and accept an eternal good-bye? Or would he lift his face even higher in this situation and try to seek out a path to the sky?

He blinked hard, shook off his tears, and stared up into the night sky of the Bizarre Festival stage. Perhaps the aftershocks of the large explosion still lingered; there was a meager break in the thick clouds. On the other side, a single small star glittered alone. It couldn’t have been, but whenever he was on the edge of despair and disheartened, he felt like it was always this same star he found in the night sky.

Haruyuki took Ash’s hand from his shoulder, brought it in front of his face, and squeezed tightly, as hard as he could. “Ash. There’s still…There’s still just one way left to fight. Just one way to remove the ISS kit from the bike and cut off the mental interference with Rin right now.”

“……”

Ash Roller waited silently for him to continue.

Mustering all the force he had to stare intently at Ash Roller, Haruyuki stated, “We cut out the root of the chain. We’ll destroy the ISS kit main body in the Tokyo Midtown Tower in the Unlimited Neutral Field. Right now.”