Accel World - Volume 15 - Chapter 8

8

The precarious balance would have crumbled instantly if they’d had even a drop of fear or animosity or rejection in their hearts, and Kuroyukihime, Fuko, and Akira—and probably Utai, too—would have become fodder for the immense Dark Shot.

Chasing even this thought from her mind, Kuroyukihime focused her whole being on transforming the desire to protect her friends into the image of light and touched it to the hulking onyx mass.

She felt no impact, no pain.

Nothing but an absolute attraction.

The black hole of cold nothingness greedily sucked up the positive Incarnate energy Kuroyukihime generated.

Good. Swallow as much as you want. Your hunger might be bottomless, but my feelings are limitless.

The old me wasn’t able to unconditionally accept the bonds I had with my comrades—my friends. I didn’t make a sincere effort to understand them: Fuko’s longing for the sky so great she cut off her legs, Utai pleading to stand on the Noh stage, Akira chasing after the outrageous idea of a world without total point loss. I was too obsessed with my own desires, and I pulled the trigger on the destruction of the Legion.

The truth is, all I had to do was believe. In the feelings of my friends who cared for me. In my own desire to support my friends and be supported by them. Lay myself bare, accept the others, and reach out my hand…That’s all I had to do.

I thought I’d lost everything and that I’d never come back. But a small silver crow flew down into my stagnant garden and taught me that you can start again—however many times it takes. You can get back what you lost. You just have to take a step forward and say their names. Like I called out to Fuko that day on the skyscraper of Shinjuku Southern Terrace.

The tears I shed then, hugging her; the tears when Utai—when Akira—came back to me; and the tears when I knew that Haruyuki had protected me until he himself was a battered mess…they shine in the very depths of my heart even now, like precious gems. As long as I have them, the will I produce in my heart is…

…limitless.

This thought existed as the explosion of an assembled image, an instantaneous flash through Kuroyukihime’s mind. But it did indeed reach Fuko and Akira, linking their three hearts, fusing them, to create an energy orders of magnitude larger than what they were capable of on their own. Arms outstretched, the three avatars were engulfed in a shining white light that neutralized the pulsating darkness and pushed it out of existence.

When they abruptly returned to themselves, the savagely twisting lump of Dark Shot had disappeared without a trace.

Crumpling to the floor with Fuko and Akira, the strength drained from their bodies, Kuroyukihime—in a daze—thought Two minutes. We made it.

She heard the reply to this as a voice in her mind: Please leave the rest to me!

Utai’s actual voice rang out sonorously across the expansive forty-fifth floor of Midtown Tower.

“The pain of pathos, flames of rage…”

Still lying on the floor, Kuroyukihime somehow managed to move her head and look at Utai behind her.

The overlay blanketing the small shrine maiden became crimson flames that rose up to the ceiling. They couldn’t have been real flames, and yet, a definite heat reached Kuroyukihime a dozen meters away. Almost divinely beautiful, Utai danced gracefully inside the pillar of swirling flames—the very image of the Shrine Maiden of the Conflagration. She flipped the fan in her left hand upward, and then once again, her “song” echoed powerfully.

“…Dirt of the earth, we are.”

Krrr! An extraordinary roar beat down on Kuroyukihime’s back. Forgetting her fatigue, she reflexively flipped around and saw a red light illuminating the ISS kit main body from below. The floor ten meters around the bulky eyeball shone a brilliant red.

No, it wasn’t shining—it was melting. The Incarnate Utai had spent a hundred and twenty seconds kneading was overriding the thick marble of the floor and heating it to a super-high temperature beyond its melting point, turning it to liquid—the attack was turning the floor into magma.

The kit main body wrapped its fleshy armor with a dark aura and tried to block the heat, but the magma, shimmering in a gradient from the red of the twilight sun to the white of the blazing sun, evaporated even its aura and mercilessly scorched its thick armor.

Eventually, the immense body began to sink into the lake of magma. Although it seemed to have a meter or two of play, the kit body had essentially fixed its three-dimensional coordinates by locking the portal inside of it. This, in turn, became the reason it couldn’t escape the magma.

If, hypothetically, it had had a mouth, the massive eyeball would likely have been howling very loudly. The reaction of the main body was so intense Kuroyukihime could be certain of that. Its front eyelid twitched and shuddered shut, and the two tentacles flailed senselessly. From time to time, a black overlay condensed at the tip of one of them, and an incomplete Dark Blow beat at the lake of magma. But it merely stole a tiny fraction of the vast thermal energy and vanished without causing any damage.

“This…is the Incarnate technique she came up with for the God Genbu,” Fuko said quietly, glancing at Utai dancing beyond them.

“It has to be,” Kuroyukihime responded hoarsely. “The circumference of the magma will need to be about four times this, but if she can drop Genbu’s bulk in…”

“…she could burn it up.” Akira’s voice also contained a hint of tension.

More than the fearsome power of the lake of magma, what made a chill run up their spines was because Utai, the mildest and most even-tempered of the Four Elements, had generated this level of Incarnate technique. If it was categorized on the regular coordinate system, it would likely have fallen into the fourth quadrant—negative will with range as its target.

Destructive Incarnate techniques had their energy source in negative emotions such as anger, despair, and sorrow. Thus, compared with the creative Incarnate techniques produced by positive emotions, the extent to which the user was pulled into the hole of their heart was overwhelmingly greater. From the results’ end, an Incarnate technique like Kuroyukihime’s Vorpal Strike brought about significant destruction on a large scale, but the kernel of the image was formed with the creative desire to enhance her own sword technique. But the aim of Utai’s so-called Flame Dance was clearly to burn up its target to cinders. The blowback to her mind would be as enormous as the power of the technique itself.

“…Uiui…,” Fuko said, pained, clenching the hands she had pressed against the floor. In her heart, she probably wanted to run and make Utai stop her Incarnate attack right then and there. Kuroyukihime felt the same way. But whether they succeeded in destroying the ISS kit main body now rested squarely on Utai’s small shoulders.

Holding their collective breath, the three Burst Linkers watched as the kit main body finally lost all its armor and its two tentacles to reveal its true form—a hard, lustrous, ebony eyeball. With the thick flesh burned away, the eyeball was now just two and a half meters across, but this only increased the sense of otherworldliness. Even with its bulk half swallowed by the lake of magma, and even as flames spurted up from every part of it, the animosity jetting from the bloodred pupil did not weaken.

“……?!”

Now the pupil abruptly spun to the left and looked at the southern side of the floor. Following its gaze, Kuroyukihime turned her eyes but saw nothing other than the rows of Grecian temple pillars and the marble wall. There was no sign of anyone there. But the kit body was clearly looking at something. Perhaps it was on the other side of the wall, somewhere off in the distance.

The red pupil narrowed in diameter—a lens automatically adjusting its focus. And then, a single beam of red light shot out from the magma-scorched eyeball.

The beam was far thinner than Dark Shot, and no sound accompanied it.

Stretching out to the side, it hit the undamaged wall but slipped through it smoothly, butter-like, instead of destroying it. One thing was clear: It was not an attacking technique.

Regardless, Kuroyukihime felt an icy chill envelop her as she lay still, prone on the floor. Fuko and Akira similarly stiffened, and small cries slipped from their throats.

The red light, that thing—it was not a good thing. Quite the opposite. Even compared with the many, many things she’d witnessed in the Accelerated World, this object might very well have been the absolute worst.

It was…the embodiment of the vast, malicious evil the ISS kit main body had accumulated through every single kit terminal.