Accel World - Volume 15 - Chapter 2

2

According to the story Haruyuki was told later, it took Kuroyukihime and the others he’d left in the park at Midtown Tower a moment or two to get moving again. Haruyuki had called to them immediately before he’d flown off in pursuit of Black Vise: “Pard, please chase down Argon!” and “Someone, leave through the nearest portal and pull Niko’s cable!”

The first to leap into action had been Blood Leopard. She raced off with the full strength of Beast Mode and receded into the distance in the blink of an eye, in hot pursuit of the Quad Eyes Analyst, who had been covering Vise with her laser attack from the roof of a distant building.

Six people remained in the park: Kuroyukihime, Fuko, Akira, Utai, Takumu, and Chiyuri. But Utai had been shot in the chest by four of Argon’s lasers, and she lay cradled in Fuko’s arms, unable to move. Chiyuri had restored the shrine maiden’s health gauge with her Citron Call ability as soon as they regrouped, but it would take a little time to recover from the severe shock of the surprise attack. So the group would have to split into two, half backing Leopard up, while the others went off in search of a portal to stop Rain’s acceleration.

Just as Kuroyukihime made this decision, a huge explosion rocked the north side of the park. Turning her head, she saw a pillar of red flames rising up from one end of the pale line of buildings. She suddenly tensed, fearing an attack on Leopard.

“It’s all right,” Akira murmured quickly. “That’s Pard’s work.”

“Is it? Then…” Kuroyukihime brought her gaze back to her Legion members. “Pile, Bell, you go after Leopard!”

Takumu and Chiyuri agreed in unison.

“Leave it to us!”

“Understood, Master!”

The words still hanging in the air, the pair set to the north. Without waiting to see them off, Kuroyukihime turned to Fuko and Akira.

“Raker, Curren. We’ll head for the tower!”

The closest portal was somewhere inside Midtown Tower, the key Acceleration Research Society base. Her team had eliminated the biggest obstacle—Archangel Metatron—but they had no idea what other traps or powerful foes lay in wait inside. The two veterans didn’t immediately assent to this mission, however.

“Lotus, you don’t want to help Corvus?” Raker said with a concerned light in her madder-red eye lenses. “If he manages to catch up to Vise, he’ll be fighting a one-on-one battle with him.”

Akira nodded her agreement, the flowing water of her armor still largely depleted.

But Kuroyukihime looked up at the last remaining rays of light in the dusky sky and shook her head. “No. I believe in Crow—in my child. And you saw him, that incredible flight speed. He can beat Vise, even one-on-one!” she declared crisply.

The other two nodded understandingly, and then Utai uttered weakly, “That’s…exactly. Right. When he is fighting for someone he loves, C is…unbeatable.”

“Mei! Are you all right?!” Fuko demanded.

“I’m fine. Now,” the little shrine maiden avatar answered bravely. “Rain was stolen from under my nose because…I didn’t sense Argon’s attack. It’s my fault. I can’t stay here in your arms forever.”

Utai dropped to the ground to stand on her own two feet. Given that the sensation of pain was doubled in the Unlimited Neutral Field, she still must have been feeling the four ultraheated laser blasts, but she let no sign show in her stance.

There was no way that the responsibility for the current situation lay with Utai alone, but Kuroyukihime simply nodded, knowing she should just accept the girl’s readiness to push forward. “You can still fight, Maiden?”

“Of course I can!”

“Good. Then the four of us are breaking into Midtown Tower. I’m certain the portal is…”

“If it hasn’t changed from the old days, it should be on the forty-fifth floor,” Akira promptly finished for her.

The four young women all looked up at the pale skyscraper, ripped apart vertically from somewhere near the top floor. Metatron’s superpowered laser, as reflected by Silver Crow’s Optical Conduction ability, had split the building in two. They strained their eyes to peer into the two-meter gap between the two halves, but they couldn’t see the blue light of a portal. If they could slip onto the forty-fifth floor through that opening, though, it would save them a huge chunk of time.

“So two hundred meters and a bit. Raker?” Kuroyukihime turned around.

“Unfortunately, my Gale Thruster can’t carry the three of you to that height.” Fuko shook her head slightly. “I could go ahead by myself, or I could fly as far up as I can with all four of us?”

“Mmm.” Kuroyukihime blinked once and made her decision. “We all go together. A forced disconnection is our last resort to save Rain. We cannot fail, no matter what lies ahead. Crow will certainly buy us the time to climb the stairs.”

“Right. I’ll give this flight everything I have, too.” Fuko spread her arms out wide. Utai clung to her body, Akira to her right arm, and Kuroyukihime to her left. The booster on her back was enveloped in a pale-blue light. There was the squeal of activation, and then Fuko’s long, fluid, metallic hair spread out around her head like wings.

“Here we go!” she shouted as she pushed off the earth.

Pale flames gushed from the jets of Gale Thruster, and the four members of Nega Nebulus rocketed toward the top of the massive tower.

Utterly. Unflinchingly.

I absolutely will protect you.

Blood Leopard—Mihaya Kakei—raced along, a crimson tornado with these words echoing over and over in the back of her head.

It wasn’t as though she hadn’t anticipated an attack by the Acceleration Research Society to some degree. After all, only two days earlier, while they were out working as a group in the Unlimited Neutral Field, the Red Legion had run afoul of a surprise attack by a Legend-class Enemy rode by a duel avatar disguised as the Black King.

The fake Lotus was actually the self-proclaimed vice president of the Acceleration Research Society, Black Vise. The purpose of the surprise attack was reconnaissance on Prominence and Scarlet Rain; the Red King had noted this herself the previous day. But at present, it wasn’t exactly clear why Vise had taken on the guise of the Black King, but both Mihaya and Niko assumed that the most likely explanation was to stir up hostilities between the two Legions, which currently had a truce with no expiration date. And in fact, three Prominence members did independently attack the Suginami area in the Territories on Saturday.

However, looking at how things stood now, Mihaya was starting to think their aim had been the exact opposite. If they could present a fake Black King and attack the Red King, pushing Prominence to retaliate, the two Legions would inevitably hold a top-level meeting in order to get the situation under control. And if a member of the Black Legion or a Burst Linker with a strong connection to them—someone like Ash Roller, for instance—was infected with an ISS kit, the loyal Red King would most certainly offer to help.

Indeed, before the battle with Metatron, when they’d fought Magenta Scissor and asked why she’d targeted Ash Roller, she’d replied that she had “obligations.” There was a good possibility that those obligations were instructions from the Acceleration Research Society, all of it groundwork for abducting the Red King, Scarlet Rain, in the Unlimited Neutral Field.

There were far too many uncertainties to call it a real plan. But that was probably the Acceleration Research Society’s style. They scattered the seeds of disaster one by one through the Accelerated World and harvested whatever fruit happened to grow. When Rain’s parent Cherry Rook was taken over by the Armor of Catastrophe, when Rust Jigsaw ran wild in Akihabara Battle Ground, when Dusk Taker stole Silver Crow’s wings, the damage could have been many times worse. In fact, the Society’s scheming could actually have already brought about any number of massive tragedies, and Mihaya simply didn’t know about them.

But this time, there’s no way I’m going to let them get away with it.

Sadly, Mihaya didn’t have the power to follow Black Vise as he sank into the shadows with Rain locked away inside him. But Silver Crow, whose growth was remarkable, had gone after him flying unbelievably fast, maybe even beyond the speed of sound. It was Mihaya’s role to capture Vise’s backup, Argon Array. Crow had no doubt given that instruction because he was thinking of a hostage exchange for the Red King.

Argon’s lasers had come from a building over three hundred meters away from Midtown Tower. This was a distance not so easily crossed even in a Normal Duel Field with its walls marking the area boundaries. And this was the Unlimited Neutral Field, where there were no such boundaries.

I’m not letting you get away!

Her leopard’s maw howling ferociously, Mihaya pushed against the ground with everything she had. More than ten seconds had already passed since Argon’s figure disappeared from the roof of that building. Blood Leopard had to at least stop her from meeting up with Black Vise, no matter what. She’d activated her First Blood ability, which allowed her to run at a speed of two hundred kilometers an hour, but it still wasn’t enough.

Now was the time to use it: Blood Leopard’s most powerful level-five special attack, so long sealed away.

Sight. Target set on five-story building two hundred meters ahead.

Load. Jump, limbs folded in. Formation of a tube of red light—a gun barrel around her body.

And—fire.

“Bloodshed Cannon!!”

With the call of the attack name, her special-attack gauge was essentially spent. An explosion loud enough to shake heaven and earth filled the air. Mihaya’s body, a bullet, shot forward from the semitransparent barrel. Her field of view melted away into concentric rings and then to a whiteout. A fraction of a second later, her entire body was rocked by an impact that threatened to rip it apart, and Mihaya bit down hard.

Her health gauge instantly dropped more than 30 percent, and cracks appeared all over her armor. As she recovered her vision, she saw countless white fragments scattering outward against a backdrop of orange flames—the building in Mihaya’s sights had been blown away, smashed to pieces by her “bullet” self.

Blood Leopard, Prominence lieutenant, was known as a Pure Red close-range type. She stood in contrast with the general rule of the Accelerated World because she used absolutely no long-distance attacks despite the fact that her avatar color was a highly saturated, long-distance red. Most members of the Red Legion even believed she had been dubbed Bloody Kitty because of the way she fought, shredding enemies with sharp teeth and claws, a close-range fighting style on par with even blue-type avatars.

But the truth was something else. She was “bloody” not because she bathed in the blood of her enemies, but because she split and smashed her own armor with her Bloodshed Cannon. Equivalent to blowing herself up, if the attack hit its mark, the force would kill pretty much any duel avatar instantly. But if it missed and she crashed into buildings or the ground, she died. She had gotten away with losing a mere 30 percent of her health gauge after smashing into such a large building only because this was the Twilight stage and its buildings were brittle and easy to break.

After all, her avatar name, Leopard, was not just an animal: It could also be the Leopard of real-world tanks.

But Mihaya had sealed Bloodshed Cannon away after using it for a very brief period and had fought intently ever since as a close-range type.

There were two main reasons for this. To earn the extra points she needed to withstand the Level Drain attack of the God Seiryu, she couldn’t use a technique that was such a gamble: If she hit, she won; if she missed, she lost. And she realized she would never be able to catch up to Sky Raker and her perfect control of Gale Thruster, a falsely similar power, while relying on such an uncertain ability.

Even now, at level eight, she still felt her training was not yet sufficient. But she didn’t need to set her sights so precisely here, and this was no time to hold anything in reserve. She had to mobilize everything she had within her to catch Argon Array.

This resolve burning in her heart, Mihaya scanned her surroundings from the center of the massive explosion she had brought about herself. And then, beyond the vast quantities of rubble still falling to the ground, she saw it: a purple light flashing in the gloom about a hundred meters ahead. That had to be light reflecting off Argon’s armor.

One more time!

She had no sooner pulled her limbs in and fixed the gun barrel around her avatar than she was yelling the technique name. Bloodshed Cannon seriously depleted her special-attack gauge, but when she exploded an entire building into the air, she got a massive object destruction bonus. As long as her health gauge held out, she could shoot herself forward until the end of time.

With a thunderous roar, Mihaya rocketed toward the winding roadway, piercing two smaller buildings. The massive explosions turned the area into a sea of debris. Her health gauge was further carved away, dropping to below 50 percent, but this time, her enemy couldn’t have gotten away unscathed.

She spun around once in midair, her vision returning as she came down to stand on the ground. Her wide-open eyes caught sight of Argon with both arms crossed before her, a defensive position against the blowback.

“Graar!!” A roar raged from the leopard’s maw, and Mihaya pounced.

Just as the nickname Quad Eyes Analyst indicated, Argon Array was an information-gathering type of duel avatar. Her main ability was to scan everything from the status to the storage of other avatars with the clairvoyant powers of her large eye lenses; even the executives of the six major Legions no doubt thought she was not a particularly strong fighter.

However, that information was fraudulent, just like the idea that she was on the executive team of the Acceleration Research Society. The four lenses of her eyes and her hat did not just emit harmless clairvoyant light rays; they could also shoot lasers at temperatures high enough and at speeds fast enough to dig into even a metal color.

The lone lens exposed behind her cross guard shone a vivid purple. This time, it wasn’t the reflection of the twilight sun, but it was the advance signal of the laser activation. The light flared brighter and concentrated into a single point, a beam of bright light. There was no way to avoid it at this close range.

But Mihaya ignored the fierce pain of the laser piercing her left shoulder and flew at Argon. The blow ate further into her health gauge, pushing it into the dangerous red zone, but her priority was to sink her teeth into her enemy. She knocked Argon off-balance with a body blow, got around behind her, and bit as hard as she could into her left shoulder. Four fangs dug into the thin armor, sending the red flashes of a damage effect scattering around them.

“Ow, ow! Heyyy, that hurts!” Argon tried to peel Blood Leopard off with both hands, but her maw was not so weak as to lose in a contest of strength against a long-range type. Seeing that the fangs were not going anywhere anytime soon, the analyst turned her face as far to the left as she could to try to fire her lasers, but Mihaya was just barely beyond its sights.

Miyaha’s near-empty health gauge pulsed with a red light and began to refill, the result of an ability she could use only in Beast Mode, Vital Bite. Mihaya couldn’t see Argon’s health gauge, but she knew it was dropping at the same rate as hers was increasing. This biting attack from behind was certain victory. Very few duel avatars had ever escaped her once she sank her teeth into them.

“Ow, ow, ow. Come oooon, how’s this s’posed to be an easy job, y’know? Sayin’ I just gotta fire once and then run, but the runnin’s way too hard now, innit?!”

This barrage was probably directed not at Mihaya but Black Vise. He’d long since fled the Midtown area, but since all signs of Silver Crow in pursuit had also vanished, Mihaya wanted to believe he had succeeded in his chase.

The best outcome was Crow defeating Vise to get the Red King back, but she couldn’t put such a weighty burden on his shoulders when he was still only level five. Naturally, she wasn’t so pessimistic as to expect his utter defeat, but her role was to secure Argon as a hostage to exchange. And to do that, she first had to eat away the Analyst’s health gauge.

Since Mihaya had gone up to the same level eight as Argon immediately after the mission to rescue Aqua Current, she would get only ten points for defeating her; the real prize from Argon’s death was that she would be bound to these coordinates for sixty minutes in a ghost state.

With this merciless resolve, Mihaya bit down hard, her slender neck straining to recruit strength from other parts of her body. Argon had to have been in excruciating pain, being in the Unlimited Neutral Field with ongoing damage to a critical point. But that pain was nothing compared with the sum total of the pain and suffering of the Burst Linkers sacrificed thus far to the scheming of the Acceleration Research Society.

“Ah, crap…I’m gettin’ all dizzy. Yeah, this is not so…funny, y’know? At least change where you’re biting me…Askin’s not gonna do anything, though, huh?” Argon’s tone was as insolent as ever, but her voice faded in and out.

Unable to talk, Mihaya growled quietly in response. Her health gauge was already nearly 70 percent full again; Argon would be dead soon enough.

“Aah. No savin’. Me, huh? An’ kitty cat. You showed me. A seriously spectacular. Secret technique. ’S’not the time…for me to be pullin’ faces, yeah?”

“……!”

Mihaya tensed. She was out of reach of Argon’s lasers; there should have been no way for her to turn the tables. Was it simple bravado? Or was there still something else?

A sharp shiver ran up her spine. Instinctively, she decided she should just go ahead and strike the final blow now rather than completely recover her health gauge with Vital Bite. She raised her right hand to rip her claws through Argon’s defenseless back—

But a vividly sinister violet light jetted out of the avatar pinned to the ground.

It wasn’t a special attack. This was an overlay, proof of the activation of the Incarnate System.

“Infinite Array.”

By the time the whispered name reached Mihaya’s ears, the materialization of her imagination was complete. The time required for activation: a mere half second. Without a moment to so much as consider a counterstrategy, Mihaya instinctively released her fangs from Argon’s neck and tried to leap backward.

But she was too late. Tiny lenses popped up on the surface of the armor encasing the Analyst’s body. Beams of haloed light rose up from the neat rows of infinite eyes.

Pwaah. The air shuddered, and the miniature lasers fired in all directions. Sixty percent dug out black holes in the rubble blanketing the earth and the buildings that had so far escaped destruction, while 35 percent radiated outward up into the sky—and the remaining 5 percent shot through Mihaya.

“Nngh!!” First, she was hit with a mild shock, which was followed by a powerful sensation of heat, and finally, a pain so fierce it was dizzying.

Mihaya somersaulted backward and hit the ground. The health gauge she’d so recently recovered plunged back into the red zone, but she didn’t have time to check exactly how much was left. She scrabbled earnestly at the ground with her leopard paws to regain her footing. If she was hit with the same attack again, she would definitely die.

But perhaps this Incarnate attack couldn’t be used in quick succession or maybe she was showing off her advantage. Whichever it was, Argon Array took her time getting to her feet.

“Aah, that hurt, yeah? I been a BB player fer a long time, but that’s the first time I ever almost been bit to death by anyone—Enemy or avatar.”

She turned to stare at Mihaya, the millions of “eyes” still covering her armor. Nor had the hazy overlay enveloping her entire body disappeared. The activation speed, the power, the range, the elapsed time: The ability was superbly refined in every way. It even surpassed Rust Jigsaw’s Rust Overlay, a technique that belonged to the same fourth quadrant—destructive will with range as its target—that had once thrown the Hermes’ Cord race into total chaos.

It wasn’t as though Mihaya herself was completely ignorant of Incarnate techniques. But since she had learned hers to at most protect her from an enemy’s Incarnate attack, hers honestly didn’t even begin to compare with Argon’s in terms of pure power. In fact, Argon’s Infinite Array was so excessively powerful that she didn’t even need to check to know that this ability of Argon’s was abnormal.

All Incarnate techniques took the user’s “mental scars” as their energy source. The scars were absence, hunger, despair. Thus, even if you were to produce hope from those scars and sublimate them as first- or second-quadrant powers—positive will—a bias appeared in the technique itself. If you desired power, you lost speed; if you desired range, accuracy; breadth, endurance. The general principle was that a perfect Incarnate technique was not possible.

And yet, there was no flaw in Argon Array’s. Had she spent vast amounts of time refining the technique to make it this way? Or…?

Her thoughts racing, Mihaya tried somehow to pull her injured body off the ground.

“Say, kitty cat?” Argon turned toward her and asked an unexpected question. “You ever think about it? Why most creatures only got the two eyes?”

When Silver Crow had used his flight ability to carry Kuroyukihime, Akira, Chiyuri, and Takumu to the top of the old Tokyo Tower approximately ten hours earlier, he had ascended at a modest speed to conserve his special-attack gauge.

But Fuko, now similarly given the task of carrying Kuroyukihime, Akira, and Utai to the top of Midtown Tower, turned Gale Thruster up to full power right from the start, prioritizing their fight against time over a desire to conserve fuel. Kuroyukihime thought her decision was the right one, but when they shot upward at the wall of the building at missile speeds, she couldn’t help but cry out.

“H-hey, Raker! Can you—”

“—really—” came Akira.

“—stop?!” from Utai.

“Well, I’m sure it’ll work out,” Fuko replied casually, the pale wall closing in before their eyes.

Kuroyukihime’s whole body stiffened—Fuko couldn’t actually be planning to plunge into the exterior wall headfirst—and in that instant, the booster jets sputtered out. They continued to ascend through sheer inertia, but they were quickly losing force. Now they started to worry about the opposite problem—the fall—but Fuko’s eyeballed measurements were true. At the moment when they reached the pinnacle of the parabola, they were absorbed into the two-meter gap in the exterior wall of Midtown Tower.

“Ha!” The instant they entered the building, Kuroyukihime’s right hand shot out and the sharp tip of her sword pierced the wall’s cross section. Their fall was stopped for the time being, but now, the mass of all four duel avatars rested on her arm.

“Lotus, hang on three seconds!” Fuko shouted, pushing Akira up high.

Aqua Current was still missing a large part of her flowing-water armor, but she was apparently that much lighter for it. She grabbed onto the edge of the floor the laser had burned through and easily jumped on top of it. She immediately reached down to take Utai from Fuko and pull her up. Then Fuko climbed onto the floor assisted by Akira, and released from the weight of her three comrades, Kuroyukihime used the tip of the sword stuck in the wall as a fulcrum to swing her own body up. She spun once in midair and then came down to land next to her companions.

“That took five seconds, you know.” She tried pointing out the time overage, but Fuko quickly offered some understandable—or maybe not—logic.

“Five seconds here is a mere five thousandths of a second in the real world. It’s fine; don’t worry.”

Quelled, the Black King quickly changed the subject. “So then, what floor is this, I wonder?”

Posed with this question, Akira and the others looked around. The gloomy space was fairly large, with long marble tables set out at regular intervals.

“A restaurant—no, an office,” Kuroyukihime said. “I feel like we came in about two-thirds of the way up, so I think this is an office floor somewhere around the thirty-fifth floor.”

Akira and Utai nodded to indicate their agreement, while Fuko glanced up at the ceiling and narrowed her eye lenses.

“Which means ten more floors to forty-five, hmm? Then it seems like it would be faster to jump up through the gash created by Metatron’s laser than look around for the stairs up.”

“That might be, but if someone is lying in wait above, we’ll be fair game appearing from such an obvious opening…”

“So then, we make a hole in the ceiling a little ways off and attack the area before going in. Fortunately, it’s impossible to destroy the portal. We can attack all we want.”

“R-right. But…Raker, were you always so ready to charge in like this?”

Fuko had been the Submaster of the old Nega Nebulus, but Kuroyukihime didn’t actually have that much experience fighting alongside her in the Territories. Given that they had to simultaneously defend multiple areas nearly every week, they had frequently led different teams.

Fuko merely smiled gracefully at this question, but Utai, her longtime partner in the Territories, shuddered. “I think you only get a nickname like ICBM if you’re the type to charge right in.”

“I see. That makes sense. Well then, shall we charge into our target here?” Kuroyukihime said, looking up at the ceiling. “Maiden, help me.”

The shrine maiden avatar did an about-face and nodded forcefully. “Understood!”

Of the four, Ardor Maiden naturally had the greatest long-distance attack power, but the flame attacks that were her specialty didn’t have as much piercing power as a physical attack. Each time her flames plunged through a ceiling, the force would diffuse horizontally, making it unlikely that her attack would reach all the way to their destination. Of course, she would eventually get through at some point if she simply kept firing, but that would have been a waste of her special-attack gauge.

Thus, Kuroyukihime readied the sword of her right arm to tear open a vertical breach. Utai nocked a flame arrow in her longbow and similarly aimed at the ceiling. After checking that Fuko and Akira had taken a few steps back, she focused her imagination.

“Here we go! Overdrive! Mode Red!” Black Lotus shouted, and the narrow molding lines running across her body shivered a vivid scarlet, proof that her avatar’s ability balance had shifted to long-distance. The red light was in the sword of her right hand as well, and this concentrated around the tip, squealing with the vibration.

“Vorpal Strike!!” She thrust her hand upward.

This Incarnate technique, taught to her in the distant past by her master, dug through one thick marble ceiling after another, the sounds of each hard impact echoing back down. Since a floor at Midtown Tower was about four and a half meters high, ten floors up was forty-five meters. Range-wise, this was right at the edge of hers, but she had to make it. Mustering up every bit of her image power, she pushed the red lance forward. She counted the feedback from crashing through each ceiling—eight, nine, ten—and immediately stepped back, almost falling.

Fuko grabbed the staggering Kuroyukihime by her shoulders, while Utai turned her longbow toward the hole gouged out of the ceiling and pulled the bowstring back as far as she could.

“Flame Vortex!!”

Her voice was crisp as she called the name of not an Incarnate technique but a special attack. But the force of it was greater than the Vorpal Strike. The flaming arrow set in the bow grew to an enormous size in an instant, and the arrowhead started to spin fiercely. Transformed into a crimson tornado, the arrow shot forward, radiating heat and light.

The flaming spiral flew upward, doubling the size of the hole of half a meter or so cut out of the ceiling by Kuroyukihime’s sword. If Flame Torrent, the special attack Maiden had used in the fight with Seiryu, was an attack across a broad range, then Flame Vortex was a technique that sought the straight and narrow. Its force was such that it would plunge forward dozens of meters even in the water of an Ocean stage, evaporating the liquid around it. These disembodied flames had trouble against only rock and metal walls, but if there was even the smallest hole, the flames would pass through and charge ever deeper.

Krraarn! They heard the roar from far overhead. The flame spiral, tracing the trajectory of the Vorpal Strike, had reached the forty-fifth floor and exploded. If someone had been lying in wait around the gash, they would have been instantly killed or seriously injured in the ranged attack from behind.

“Maiden, did you get any points?!” Kuroyukihime asked immediately.

“No.” Utai shook her head, longbow still in position above her head. “But there was feedback!”

“All right, we charge all at once! Everyone, go!” Kuroyukihime moved directly beneath the large hole and jumped with all her might. Even without any special jumping ability, a lightweight high ranker could jump the height of one floor of a building with just the avatar’s basic abilities.

When she slipped through the hole, the edges still melted red-hot, and landed on the floor above, Fuko, Akira, and Utai also took turns jumping up. Without stopping, all four continued their leapfrog ascent through the improvised pit gouged out of Midtown Tower.

As they approached the forty-fifth floor, Kuroyukihime felt a sensation on the surface of her avatar’s armor, like the prickling of an electric charge. It was a shiver of fear not unlike when they had charged into the territory of the God Seiryu—or when they had faced the main body of the Archangel. A certain instinct that someone was hiding up ahead—someone dripping with the dark, condensed malice separate from the battle power in the system.

However, regardless of whether some great threat awaited them, retreat was not an option. Out of a sense of chivalry, Niko, the Red King, had helped the Black Legion in their efforts to save Sky Raker’s child and Silver Crow’s rival Ash Roller, and now she’d been abducted by Black Vise. But more than anything else, Niko was a deeply valued friend to Kuroyukihime.

Two years and ten months earlier, Kuroyukihime had turned her back on all bonds and left Nega Nebulus to its destruction. Three of the Four Elements had returned to the Legion, but the majority of the members from that time did not show themselves in the Suginami area even now. That was only natural. Kuroyukihime had betrayed them twice, after all.

The first time was when, carried away by violence, she had taken the head of the first Red King, Red Rider, and made bitter enemies of the other six major Legions. And the second time was when she had fled the Accelerated World without even trying to rebuild the Legion after the Castle mission ended in tragedy and failure.

If she had simply had a will strong enough, Kuroyukihime could have rallied Nega Nebulus from that situation as well and somehow managed to at least hold on to their base of operations in Shibuya Area No. 1 while they attempted to rescue Ardor Maiden, Aqua Current, and Graphite Edge. But Kuroyukihime did not do that. She abandoned her members, who had lost massive numbers of points in the process of escaping the territory of the Gods, and locked herself away from the global net for over two years.

What had pulled Kuroyukihime out of this time of stagnation, of simply licking her wounds, was a small crow with silver wings on his back. He was supposed to be her scion, yet Kuroyukihime had been spurred on, led, and taught by him any number of times. She would never make the same mistakes again. She would never abandon a comrade—a friend. She would get Niko back. Without fail.

“Lotus, the forty-fifth floor’s next!” Fuko murmured sharply after the ninth jump.

“Got it,” Kuroyukihime replied. She stopped for a moment, waited until Utai in the rear caught up, and then instructed rapid-fire. “Raker, Curren, Maiden, our top priority is to return to reality through the portal and pull out Rain’s cable. Whoever contacts the portal first leaves. The other three will continue to investigate toward our secondary objective—the destruction of the ISS kit main body. Cut down anyone who gets in our way. No mercy. Don’t hesitate to use Incarnate techniques.”

The other three nodded firmly. Kuroyukihime looked up at the large hole in the ceiling—the cross section of which had finally cooled off—and quietly cried out, “Here we go!”

She sank her stance down and, sending dazzling sparks flying across the marble floor with the tip of her right foot, Kuroyukihime jumped for the tenth time.

“Why…creatures only have…two eyes?” Mihaya repeated in a low voice.

This was not the time for a biology lesson. But intense pain still tortured her virtual nerves after Argon’s terrifying omnidirectional Incarnate technique Infinite Array ripped through her body, and she probably wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. And if Argon hit her with the same technique again, what was left of her health gauge would be obliterated. Mihaya couldn’t figure out why Argon had decided to strike up idle conversation rather than finishing her off. But for the time being—at least until the pain receded—she had no choice but to go along with her enemy’s whim.

“Optimization through the process of evolution.” She offered up what seemed like the most commonsense answer.

“Well, I s’pose that’s one thing, sure.” Argon grinned beneath her large goggles, as though she had been anticipating this response. “Didja know? The ancestor of us vertebrates, like, back when it was livin’ in the water, it had a third eye on top of its head. They call it a parietal eye, you know?”

“……”

Mihaya held her tongue, but the Analyst continued to chirp away, not seeming to mind her enemy’s silence.

“An’ traces o’ that are still in our heads. Right in there. The pineal gland. You heard of it, right? That thing used to be a third eye, yeah? Guess it evolved back when our ancestor came up from the water onto land. Bunch a theories ’bout why. But here’s what I think. The reason three eyes’re too many for vertebrates…is ’cos the position of our eyeballs is just too high spec. Y’know?”

“Too high spec?”

“Yep. The light our retinas catch gets reprocessed as a movie we can understand. That’s some seriously heavy work for our brains. So much that just two eyes is plenty—it’s loads. And t’be honest, the only time we can see all perfect-like is when we focus our gaze in the middle of our field of view, yeah?”

Mihaya never dreamed she’d have a conversation like this in the Unlimited Neutral Field—and in the middle of a fight to boot—but she was slowly sucked in. “That’s not just our eyes. I mean, we only hear the sounds we listen for with our ears. And it’s the same with taste and smell.”

“Yer right there. But, like, our ears feel the vibration of molecules of air, and our tongue, our nose, they catch the taste and smell of all kinds of molecules, too. But it’s just our eyes what can sense these particles called light, yeah? Particles, waves—I dunno, light’s a weird one. Y’know what, kitty cat? They can’t measure the size of a photon. Our eyes can’t see a thing like that.”

“Even if they don’t have size, they have energy.”

“That’s a bingo right there.” Argon grinned once again at Mihaya’s rebuttal and snapped the fingers of her right hand. “The energy of the light flying into our eyes is sucked up by photoreceptor cells in our retinas. Gets turned into ’lectrical energy in the cell to travel ’long the optic nerve. So then that gets to the cerebrum, and it’s processed as a movie that makes sense to us…An’ then it just disappears, y’know? That’s the bit that’s different from hearing an’ taste or whatever. The air molecules don’t up and vanish from yer eardrums, and taste and smell molecules don’t go anywhere after you analyze ’em, right?”

The Analyst’s voice hadn’t lost the hint of sunniness it always held, but Mihaya noticed it had grown quieter at some point and was tinged with a new coldness. Argon glanced down with the lenses—“eyes” neatly arranged on the armor of her body as though viewing something repulsive.

“But, like, the photons that go into yer eyes disappear. Our eyes…eat light. Somethin’ that scary, even two’re too many, prob’ly.”

“What exactly are you trying to say?” Mihaya asked, the pain finally beginning to fade as she sank her animal body down gradually, preparing to jump.

“Yah, why did I start ramblin’ away like this?” Argon spread her slender arms and shrugged lightly. “Just buyin’ time…Razzle Dazzle.”

By the time she’d gotten the first half of the technique name out, Mihaya had closed her eyes tightly and was pushing fiercely off the ground. The Black Legion had told her about this particular special attack: The four lenses on Argon’s head emitted a powerful light to blind her enemies. A glamour technique; the light itself had no attack power. As long as you knew that, it was a good opportunity to attack.

Aiming for where Argon had stood a half second earlier, Mihaya brought down her right hand. Her claws, sharp as knives, scratched the hard armor.

Too shallow!

Eyes still closed, she threw her left hand forward. That Argon had gone to the trouble of buying time to use a glamour-type attack no doubt meant she couldn’t immediately fire off her Incarnate technique Infinite Array again. Mihaya wasn’t clear on what kept Argon from using her Incarnate attack repeatedly since those didn’t use up the special-attack gauge, but for now, the fact of it was enough. Like Mihaya, Argon had only a sliver of health left in her gauge. If Leopard bit her again, she could bring her down.

Yet her left hand, too, only gouged shallow grooves in her enemy’s armor. The sense of Argon’s presence receded.

But Mihaya couldn’t let her get away now. With no other choice, she lifted her eyelids, and although it was starting to fade, a flash bomb of white light stabbed into her eyes. A thin gray shadow fluttered beyond the light.

“Graar!!” With a battle cry, Mihaya leapt with everything she had.

But the claws of her hands caught nothing but flat marble. Mihaya had apparently seen Argon’s shadow projected onto the wall of the building. The brittle wall collapsed, unable to withstand Blood Leopard’s assault, and Mihaya plunged inside.

“We’ll finish this conversation next time, kitty cat.” Her laughing voice suddenly grew distant.

Mihaya couldn’t let her get away. Securing Argon was Mihaya’s job. Silver Crow had believed that Blood Leopard, of all of them, could do this, which was exactly why he left the rest to her and went after Black Vise on his own.

Even though she had seen the flash of Razzle Dazzle for only a second, her eyes still hadn’t completely recovered. But as Argon herself had noted in their earlier conversation, sight wasn’t the only sense.

Mihaya’s sharp leopard ears picked up the faint sound of footsteps; the pads on her four paws caught the vibrations in the earth. Argon appeared to be running north—a different direction from Crow’s pursuit of Vise. Mihaya didn’t know their destination, but all she had to do was chase; directions didn’t matter to her now.

Smashing through another wall to come out onto the street, Mihaya ran low to the ground. Her whiteout vision couldn’t pick out small obstacles like a railing on the side of the road or crumbling pillars, but she pulverized these with her head as she charged forward. Although her armor wasn’t that thick since she was a red type, her basic defense and physical strength had gone up a fair bit in her leap to level eight. If she’d still been level six, Argon’s omnidirectional lasers would have no doubt killed her instantly.

Mihaya had gone so long without leveling up in order to rescue Akira Himi/Aqua Current from the nest of Seiryu. Current was Mihaya’s parent and also one of the Four Elements that formed the executive branch of Nega Nebulus. There weren’t many in the current Prominence who held a grudge against the Black King for pushing the previous Red King, Red Rider, to total point loss, but there were some—Blaze Heart and the others who attacked Suginami in the Territories the day before were representative of them. But given that Mihaya belonged to the Triplex, the executive group for the Red Legion, the fact that she had stayed at level six for Current’s sake was essentially a betrayal of her Legion.

But the Red King and the other two members of the Triplex had allowed Mihaya this selfishness. And it was the Black Legion’s Watch Witch, Lime Bell, who got Mihaya’s burst points back, when they should have been gone forever after she was hit with Seiryu’s Level Drain. After so many people had supported and aided her to allow her to finally reach level eight, she basically had an obligation now to muster up every little bit of power that level entailed and push it to the very limits.

“Graaaaar!” Racing forward, Mihaya unleashed a wild roar, another of the special privileges of a half-beast avatar. A purple silhouette popped up in the center of her blurred-white field of view. There’d be no more chitchat when she overtook Argon. Only instant slaughter and transformation into a death marker.

As she concentrated her strength in her back legs and sprang forward, the glamour effect finally ended. Sight back to normal, she spotted Argon stopped in place and looking over her shoulder. The myriad lenses on her body had disappeared at some point. Was she giving up on her flight? …No, that wasn’t it.

The slender avatar was sinking into the ground before her eyes. The shadow of a large building stretched out at Argon’s feet. Mihaya strained her eyes and saw that the shadow had liquefied into a pool of ink about two meters wide, centered on Argon. The dark bog quickly swallowed up over half of Argon’s body.

Black Vise was supposed to be the one with the ability to dive into the shadows, not Argon Array. She couldn’t believe Vise was anywhere near them given that he had fled in an entirely different direction. So then had Vise lent his own ability to Argon through some means? …Or…

Part of her head whirring with these thoughts, Mihaya stretched out her hands as far as she could to prevent Argon’s flight. But once again, her claws did nothing more than scratch lightly at the large hat.

A faint smile rising up on her face, the Analyst sank into the shadow.

I’m not letting you get away! Mihaya did a somersault at the same time as she landed to dive into the shadow herself. She plunged both hands into the ebony bog without the least hesitation, and they were sucked in up to her elbows together with an unpleasant sensation. Plrmp.

But that was it. At some point, the shadow bog had shrunk so that it was smaller than Mihaya’s shoulders. Not only were her avatar’s elbows caught, unable to dive, the contracting hole was making her arms creak with an inescapable pressure.

“Shape Change!” Mihaya shouted, returning to human form. The now-slender avatar tried to dive in headfirst, but the speed of the hole’s contraction was faster. Now both shoulders were caught, preventing her entry.

Most likely, this was a time-limited movement gate generated at these coordinates in advance by Black Vise. Argon’s time-buying chatter was to ensure she arrived just before the gate disappeared. If it closed up, Mihaya’s chance to follow her would vanish with it.

“Nngh…ah!” She marshaled all her remaining strength and tried to force the hole open. But the power of the hole’s inward march was relentless. The armor of her arms cracked, and her health gauge was further cut away.

There was one thing left she could try: transform back into a leopard and attack the gate with her special attack that turned her into a bullet, Bloodshed Cannon. The technique caused enormous backlash damage, which meant she very likely would not be able to live through it with the current state of her health gauge. But she had no other options. If she stayed the way she was, the contracting hole would rip her arms off and kill her.

“Shape…” She started to give the transformation command in a hoarse voice.

“Paaaard!”

“Leopard!!”

From behind her, she heard voices and footfalls. Even without looking, she knew it was Nega Nebulus’s Lime Bell and Cyan Pile.

“Help me”—she halted her transformation and called over her shoulder—“with this gate!”

Stopping at her sides, they seemed to instantly understand the situation. Lime Bell crouched down and was about to thrust both hands into the hole, but Cyan Pile stopped her.

“Wait, Bell! Please leave this to me, Leopard!” The large blue avatar readied the pile-shooting Enhanced Armament of his right arm, aimed at the gate, and shouted, “When I count down to zero, please get back from the hole! Three, two, one…”

If she pulled her arms out, the gate would close in a matter of seconds and disappear. But Mihaya shook off her momentary hesitation and leapt backward as she heard his voice call “Zero!”

Stepping forward as if to take her place, Cyan Pile called out a technique name she’d never heard before. “Spiral Gravity Driver!!”

As the spike in the Enhanced Armament was pulled in and tucked away, the barrel expanded. A flash of blue—a thick hammer drill—shot forth, more than double the size of the spike. The savagely spinning iron pillar wedged into the gate as it was on the verge of closing and stopped it with a strange crack.

But the silence was soon broken. The force of the hammer drill was greater than the pressure of the gate, and it began to rotate once more, sparks jetting up and tumbling down like waterfalls. As the drill dug deeper and deeper, cracks radiated outward in the ground around the hole.

“Ah…Aaaaaah!” Roaring, Cyan Pile thrust his right fist downward, as if to make doubly sure. There was an otherworldly sound like space itself was being destroyed, and the edges of the gate broke into pieces and fell away.

Now cracked open to a diameter of about two meters, the hole was filled with a viscous darkness. Cyan Pile pitched forward on the follow-through, and Mihaya grabbed his shoulders to pull him back.

“GJ! Leave the rest to me!” She tossed herself into the hole. She was up to her chest in the liquefied darkness when Pile and Bell nodded at each other and jumped in after her.

She had absolutely no idea where the gate led, but because Argon had tried to block her pursuit, there was a strong possibility that it was to the Accelerated Research Society base. The danger level was on par with Midtown Tower or even greater.

But before Mihaya could say anything, Lime Bell shouted resolutely: “We’re coming, too! After all…”

Here, Mihaya’s head was swallowed by the darkness, and Lime Bell’s voice along with it. But she heard the words “…we’re friends” with the ears of her heart.

The shadow tunnel pushed the three intruders along for a moment or an eternity. Her field of view was painted a uniform black, and her hearing was completely blocked. She stretched out a hand, but her fingers touched nothing. All she could do was leave herself to the current and pray that she didn’t get separated from Pile and Bell and that they could catch up with Argon. And of course, that they could rescue the Red King—Niko.

Though praying alone would not be enough. She had to squeeze out every bit of knowledge and power she had and make it a reality, Mihaya vowed firmly. With that, she curled up and allowed herself to be carried away in the lightless channel.

Tokyo Midtown Tower, forty-fifth floor. In the real world, it was the lobby of a super-luxury hotel. In the Accelerated World, this was reflected in the building’s construction: A large space with orderly rows of square pillars spread out before Kuroyukihime’s eyes as she charged in through the hole in the floor.

As she did a rough survey of the terrain, her mind switched to enemy-detection mode. The floor was dimly lit, the four walls deep in the shadows, but she couldn’t see anything moving in the area. But Utai had said she’d gotten some feedback after shooting Flame Vortex up into this floor, so there was definitely something lurking there.

In the real world, the sensation of feedback felt by the user when a flying instrument made an accurate hit would probably be classified as some kind of occult sixth sense, but on this side, it was firmly based in reality. If your long-distance attack connected with an Enemy or a duel avatar, even beyond your own field of view, your special-attack gauge would increase. The amount it was charged was clearly different from the destruction of terrain objects. There was no way a veteran like Utai would mistake one for the other.

When Utai herself appeared from the hole in the floor, followed by Fuko and Akira, she quickly set a flame arrow against her longbow. She had anticipated immediate battle, but realizing that there was no enemy in sight, she murmured as though confused, “When I shot from below, I definitely hit something dead-on…”

“And you didn’t get any points, right?” Fuko asked quietly.

“I did not.” The shrine maiden avatar nodded sharply. “Maybe it retreated after taking damage. Or…?”

“Or it’s hiding in the shadows,” Akira concluded, flicking her light blue eye lenses around the room. But even someone as sensitive as she was couldn’t find any trace of their enemy.

After a moment’s thought, Kuroyukihime turned to the others. “No matter. Our priority is a quick departure. We ignore the possibility of an ambush and dive into the portal.”

“Agreed. But one question.”

“What is it, Curren?”

“The portal’s not where it should be.”

Caught off guard, Kuroyukihime stared intently at Aqua Current. The transparent crystal of her face mask turned toward the south side of the floor. “I’ve left from here any number of times. There’s no mistake. The Midtown Tower portal should be on the south wall of the forty-fifth floor.”

Following Akira’s gaze along with Utai and Fuko, Kuroyukihime peered into the gloom fifty meters ahead of them. But she couldn’t find even a reflection of the characteristic pulsing blue light of the portal. Instead, her eyes landed on a burnt fissure that cut a straight line across the center of the floor.

“It can’t be,” Fuko murmured. “Metatron’s reflected laser destroyed the portal?”

“Impossible!” Kuroyukihime refuted, voice emphatic. “The portals of the Unlimited Neutral Field can’t be destroyed or moved. This entire building could be destroyed, and the portal would stay in its fixed coordinates!”

“I thought so, too, but…”

“Wait,” Akira said sharply, staring hard at the place where the portal had once sat. “Something…There’s something there.”

“What?” Kuroyuki turned together with Fuko toward the south side of the floor and focused her entire being on seeing. The contrast in her visual field improved, and something that had melted into the thick darkness up to that point popped up hazily. It was big. Nearly three meters across. It appeared to be a sphere, but from this distance, that was all she could tell. “Maiden, shoot a flame arrow into the wall over there.”

Utai nodded and readied her long bow. The flame arrow, launched diagonally upward, carved an arc out of the air and plunged high into the wall on the south side, pushing back the darkness with orange light.

“Wh-what is that?” Fuko whispered hoarsely.

The other three simply opened their eyes wide without a word.

Some thing was occupying an area just under ten meters to the right of the fissure splitting the floor. “Brain” was the first thing that popped into Kuroyukihime’s head. There was a ruggedness—mazelike indentations—rising up on the surface of a massive spherical object. A pattern of fine stitches crawled all over it, pulsed, and throbbed, forcing to mind the image of a living creature’s brain—more specifically, a human being’s.

But the sphere was a matte black that sucked in all light, and a deep fissure cut horizontally across the front. If it had been modeled after a human brain, it should have been split not top and bottom, but right brain, left brain. This difference, however, only served to make the object even more unsettling. As though, despite the powerful resemblance to a human brain, it was actually the brain of a decisively different creature…

And now, Kuroyukihime finally noticed that the enormous organ was pulsing softly in the darkness.

She knew this sight. She hadn’t witnessed it herself, but she had received a detailed report from Silver Crow and Lime Bell. About their encounter inside the Brain Burst central server with the root of the dark force running rampant in the Accelerated World.

“…This can’t be…” Kuroyukihime’s voice was almost inaudible.

“…the ISS kit main body?” Fuko finished for her.

At first, Kuroyukihime couldn’t believe that their final objective, the thing they had been convinced was hidden somewhere deep within the massive Midtown Tower—although at present, this objective had dropped to number two on the list of priorities—was placed—no, left here defenseless like this. It would have been logical to think it was a fake meant as a trap for intruders, but her eyes and instincts were insisting that this really was the kit main body. A mere shell of an object could never produce the weighty pressure she felt oozing from the massive brain, this unearthly force.

“…I think it’s real.”

“I concur…”

Akira and Utai confirmed Kuroyukihime’s instincts in hoarse voices.

“Mmm.” Nodding, Kuroyukihime put aside her shock for the moment and set the gears of her mind racing furiously. If this massive brain was the ISS kit main body, then they had to destroy it right away. Then the kit terminals parasitizing Ash Roller and so many other Burst Linkers would disappear, and the danger they presented would be gone from the Accelerated World. That was indeed the final objective of the series of missions the combined team of Nega Nebulus and Prominence had set out on.

On the other hand, Kuroyukihime and her comrades needed to reach the portal as soon as humanly possible and pull out the cable that connected with Niko’s Neurolinker in the real world. Assuming they succeeded in destroying the ISS kit main body, if the price for that success was total point loss for the Red King, then the damage to both the Red and Black Legions would be more devastating than that caused by the ISS kits plaguing the Accelerated World. Both inside and outside this world.

If the Midtown Tower portal was gone, as Akira said it was, then should they leave the building right away and head for the next-closest leave point in Roppongi Hills Tower? But if they did that, would the ISS kit main body still be unguarded when they returned to this place?

There was also the option of striking it as a test to see whether or not they could destroy it, but she didn’t expect they’d be able to see its health gauge, and it was quite possible that that one blow might bring about an unexpected situation.

The other three must have felt the same anguish as Kuroyukihime faced with the choice between two alternatives and no room for error.

“Your choice is our choice, Sacchi,” Fuko said in a clipped but gentle tone as she drew near. “No matter what the result is, we will share responsibility for it together, all of it.”

Akira and Utai also nodded deeply, their eyes shining with unwavering light.

Nodding briefly in return, Kuroyukihime announced her choice to her trusted comrades. “We head for Roppongi Hills. Seven hundred meters in a straight line to the building, forty-fifth floor for the portal. We’ll be there in less than five minutes.”

“Understood!” they shouted in unison.

With this reassuring push, Kuroyukihime stepped to the south. Roppongi Hills was southwest of Tokyo Midtown. Rather than drop down to the ground, it would be faster to have Fuko use Gale Thruster, likely charged up to some degree by now, to fly them as far as she could on that charge from the fissure cut out of the southern wall.

They began to run alongside the gash Metatron’s laser ripped north-south through the marble floor and were about halfway across the fifty-meter-wide floor, when the massive brain enshrined ahead of them moved.

“Look!” Utai called out, running at the tail end of the group.

Reflexively, Kuroyukihime turned her head and saw the crack running horizontally across the front of the ebony brain slowly opening. At first, she thought it was separated into upper brain and lower brain, rather than left-right. But it seemed that it wasn’t just the surface of the brain that was moving. The complicated indentations became wrinkles and folded back, gradually revealing something hidden inside.

“Don’t stop. Keep running!” Even as she gave the command, Kuroyukihime couldn’t take her eyes off the monstrosity.

Inside the membrane peeling back was a curved surface with an unexpectedly smooth luster. A sphere made of what looked like wet glass was enclosed inside the brain. The center of the exposed part rose up in the shape of a lens and emitted a hazy light. This lens part—perhaps a meter and a half around—abruptly moved. Then the entire glass sphere began to spin in all directions.

Whrr, whrr. The movement was so biological it called up an indescribable loathing.

Finally, the lens moved to the right and focused on the four runners.

Instantly, Kuroyukihime understood that the large object was not a brain, but an eye. The crack running from left to right wasn’t the longitudinal fissure of the cerebrum, but the slit between upper and lower eyelids. The exposed glassy sphere was the white of the eye, while the perfect circle of the lens was the pupil and the iris. The massive eyeball was watching Kuroyukihime and the others with some sort of hidden purpose.

A reptilian vertical pupil sat in the center of the black lens, a blue light shimmering like the surface of water beyond it. The light was ridiculously pure in contrast with the extremely repulsive design of the eyeball. A clear blue she’d seen before, a color that evoked a feeling like homesickness.

“Wait,” Aqua Current murmured sharply, her voice colored with an unusual tension that stopped the others in their tracks.

“What’s wrong, Curren?” Fuko asked.

Akira didn’t reply right away, keeping her focus instead on the gaze of the massive eyeball. “The portal,” she said finally, sounding even more tense. “It’s inside that eyeball.”

“What?!”

“How is that—?!”

Fuko and Utai cried out in surprise simultaneously.

Holding her breath, Kuroyukihime peered into the black lens one more time. She compared the regular pulsation of the blue light with her memory of the portal she’d passed through too many times to even count. The color. The shimmering. The size. All of it matched perfectly.

“You’re right!” Utai cried in a thin voice. “That’s the light of the portal!”

“B-but…” Kuroyukihime—and likely Fuko as well—could find no basis on which to refute her. “Is it even possible for an object to fully incorporate something indestructible, like a portal?” she asked, baffled.

“To begin with, what would the ISS kit main body be in the system classification?” Fuko voiced her own doubts. “From its form, it’s probably not duel avatar or Enemy. And if it were an item, which includes Enhanced Armament, it would be wiped out with the Change, right?”

Now that she mentioned it, that was actually true. Assuming it was the Acceleration Research Society that had made this enormous, jet-black, brain/eyeball object and that they had left it like this in the Unlimited Neutral Field, it would have been forcibly erased during the Change when the stage attributes switched. If the Society wanted to prevent that from happening, they would need a semipermanent guard for it: The instant they sensed the Change, they would have to return it to storage and then rematerialize it after the attribute change. Considering the Change occurred at minimum once every seven days—once every ten minutes in real-world time—this was for all intents and purposes impossible.

Faced with nothing but questions, there was at least one thing that could be settled in that moment.

“Whatever class of item it is, if the portal’s inside it, our plan’s changed.” She pushed her surprise and confusion aside and continued firmly, “We are going to smash that creepy eyeball—the ISS kit main body—right now. And then we’ll leave the Unlimited Neutral Field through the exposed portal. Raker, Curren, Maiden…” She threw her sword-arms out with a clang. “This is our do-or-die moment! Get ready to attack!!”

“Understood!” The voices of her three comrades echoed with double the resolve from before and cut through the darkness of the floor.

They pulled together in a diamond formation with Kuroyukihime in the lead, Fuko to her right, Akira to her left, and Utai at the rear to face the massive eyeball enshrined twenty meters ahead. Blue light flickering inside the long pupil, the glassy eye looked back at them with an inorganic gaze utterly devoid of feeling.

No. It wasn’t that.

The eyeball brought its eyelids down slightly…and laughed. That’s what it looked like to her.

A shadowy pulsation poured from the massive body. The instant she touched it, Kuroyukihime knew that the inside of the eyeball was filled with a vast malice. Its lust for destruction, tragedy, and slaughter had become a dull black fluid, a flood inside the organ that threatened to burst forth at any moment.

The blue light of the portal leaking out of the pupil suddenly changed to a dark bloodred. Several lumps noisily popped up on the surface of the brain-like structure enclosing the eyeball. Tumorlike, they swelled up like balloons before bursting, releasing a viscous fluid and…something else.

Smaller eyeballs.

About twenty centimeters large, more than ten of them. The pupils shone the same muddied red as the main body, and long, skinny legs stretched out from the bottoms. No sooner had they fallen to the floor than they were quickly crawling around, the legs making a dry rustling sound like some kind of monster bugs.

“M-most likely, that’s what my Vortex hit before!” Utai said in a shrill voice, readying her longbow. Even she, with her conviction to respect all life, couldn’t hide her revulsion at the leggy eyeballs. And to be fair, the small eyeballs were not critters that belonged to the Accelerated World.

“Careful! They’re probably ISS kit terminals! They might be able to parasitize us if they touch us. Destroy them before they can get close!”

Up to that point, the little eyeballs had been racing around the main body of the kit randomly, but as if Kuroyukihime’s order was the trigger, they began to run as one toward the girls.

Utai made her bowstring sing over and over. Her flame arrows found their marks on the kit terminals and sent them up in flames, but unfortunately, there was a limit to how rapidly she could get arrows in the air. Four of the eyeballs leapt over the blazing flames and spread double that number of needlelike legs to charge them.

Kuroyukihime raised the sword of her right leg and set her sights on the eyeball closest to her left. “Death By Bashing!”

So fast it was undetectable to even herself, her right leg shot out a flurry of kicks. The instant the eyeball came into contact with the effect range for the series of blows—a hundred per second—it exploded in a burst of red light.

The tip of her left leg jammed into the floor as a fulcrum, Kuroyukihime spun around to the right. The storm of kicks flowed with her, leaving a gray afterimage, and knocked one attacking eyeball after another flying. The ISS kits had thrown the Accelerated World into chaos with their overwhelming power, but the individual terminals were unable to use the two Incarnate attacks, leaving them with no method of fighting other than trying to touch an avatar to parasitize them.

Kuroyukihime’s special attack destroyed seven of the eyeballs, and the last one was finished off by Fuko skewering it with a sharp heel. Sky Raker’s specialty was flowing palm strikes, but even Strong Arm was apparently reluctant to crush them with her bare hands.

The dozen terminals the main body had produced were all destroyed in less than ten seconds, but given that the ISS kits should have been simple Enhanced Armaments in the system, that they could move on their own like that at all was incredible. There was the precedent of an Enhanced Armament with its own independent will in the Armor of Catastrophe, but even that fearsome armor couldn’t act on its own; it absolutely required a host. What exactly were these ISS kits? How on earth had the Acceleration Research Society produced such an object?

Struck once again by questions, Kuroyukihime pulled herself back into the present moment. “Beat down the main body before any new eyeballs come out! Ready for all-out attack!” In this situation, all-out meant a full attack using everything the Incarnate System had to offer them.

The reckless use of Incarnate attacks in the Unlimited Neutral Field drew in large Enemies, but there was no need to worry about that on the forty-fifth floor of a skyscraper. And although there was the risk of being swallowed up by the sense of omnipotence when using Incarnate attacks on other Burst Linkers—the forbidden delight of striking enemies down with overwhelming power could drag the user down into the dark side of the Incarnate—that wasn’t much of an issue here, either, given that their opponent was a soulless eyeball.

The four Burst Linkers colored the marble floor with their various overlays and waited for the moment to launch their attack.

Kuroyukihime took a deep breath to shout Here we go but was interrupted by the somehow languid voice of an M-type duel avatar flowing across the deserted floor.

“Merciless as always. Looks like you haven’t changed. I’m glad. Seriously.”

“Who’s there?!” Kuroyukihime barked, instead of giving the signal to attack.

Any number of large pillars littered this floor, which was a hotel lobby in the real world. Not only were there plenty of places to hide, but the voice reverberated in complicated ways, making it hard to pinpoint the source of the sound.

Regardless, Kuroyukihime knew. The voice was coming from the ISS kit main body.

But her instinct turned out to be only half right.

Chik, chak. She heard the hard sound of footsteps, and a duel avatar stepped out from behind the massive eyeball.

The kit terminals had been running in all directions around the main body, which meant that the owner of the voice would naturally have been within their reaction range, and yet, the person hadn’t attacked him. So she had to assume he was an ISS kit user equipped with a terminal—in other words, an enemy. In which case, they should immediately beat him back with all their might and destroy him together with the main body.

This was the judgment handed down by reason, but the instant she set eyes on the foot of the avatar that first appeared from the shadow of the eyeball, that reasonable decision flew right out of her head.

Long-boot armor encasing his feet. Notched spurs stretching out from the heel. And the coloring of both was so pure that it could be compared to nothing else.

Red. So red.

“…It can’t. Be…”

Was it Fuko who spoke or Akira or Utai? The same words tried to escape Kuroyukihime’s throat, but her avatar’s mouth was completely frozen in place.

Chak. Chak. Chak. The spurred boots echoed against the floor three more times before stopping.

Leaning his left shoulder against the brain-like external skin of the ISS kit main body, the M-type duel avatar brought his right hand to the brim of his ten-gallon hat. “Hey there. Been a while, Lotus.”

In her completely numbed mind, Kuroyukihime heard a cracked voice spill from her own mouth.

“Red King…Red Rider…”