Accel World - Volume 16 - Chapter 7

7

But the truth was, he didn’t want to go home by himself. He wanted to hang around the school until the mandatory departure time and chat with someone about nothing. Or have an after-party at his house like Niko suggested. He wanted Chiyuri and Takumu to stay over, so they could all fall asleep after exhausting themselves with retro games.

If he could’ve greeted the next day like that, the heavy, painful throbbing of the thorn still piercing his heart would have maybe been less.

He passed through the entrance to the skyscraper condo, the exterior of which had faded to some degree since its construction fifteen years earlier, and took the residents’ elevator to the twenty-third floor. He walked down the hallway, unlocked his door, and opened it.

“…I’m home,” he muttered, but there was only silence in the dark house. His mother was on a business trip overseas and wouldn’t be back until late that night, and today, at least, there would be no surprise attacks from Niko. He slowly took off his shoes and washed his hands and face before going to his room and changing out of his uniform and into a T-shirt.

He glanced at the time, but it was not yet four o’clock. He’d left the house at eight thirty that morning with Niko, who spent the night, so it had only been a mere seven and a half hours since then. If he counted the long mission in the Unlimited Neutral Field, then, in subjective experience, he had spent nearly three times that amount away, but his heart couldn’t keep up. The reality of standing alone in his room seemed like a fake experience created by someone else.

This curious sensation would probably go away if he did the things he usually did when he came home. With this in mind, he opened the to-do list on his virtual desktop, but there wasn’t a single task on it. Of course, there would be no homework on the day of the school festival, and there were no files he needed to submit. In that case, he thought maybe he should have a big room-cleaning session, but he couldn’t find the energy.

His thoughts chased themselves round and round, and his body gradually grew heavier, so Haruyuki flopped onto his bed. He rolled over and looked up at the ceiling. Although he considered just going to sleep, he didn’t actually feel sleepy, even though he was tired. He intertwined his fingers behind his head and let his rambling thoughts drift.

In the fierce battle fought by Kuroyukihime, Fuko, Akira, and Utai, the ISS kit main body had been destroyed. All the terminals—the black eyeballs that parasitized Ash Roller, Magenta Scissor, and dozens of other kit users—had now been completely wiped out. There would be no more threat of Dark Shot or Dark Blow in duels, nor any spread of the kit infection.

But they had a new problem. Wolfram Cerberus had vanished due to a forced disconnect in a state of near death, with a mere ten Burst Points remaining. And Invincible’s thruster was still in his possession.

Niko had said not to panic, but they needed to recover and purify the stolen thruster as soon as possible. Some element of the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II, likely remained in the Enhanced Armament, and knowing the Acceleration Research Society, they would try to use this for some new sinister design. Cerberus was…He was Haruyuki’s rival and friend, and they needed to completely cut out the root of the evil before Argon Array and the others toyed with him any further.

Also, just because the ISS kits were gone didn’t mean that the memories of the people who had used them were also gone. Some people had experienced serious mental interference and beaten down what had been friends and fellow Legion members with the kit’s power. And some had forcibly infected Burst Linkers around them with the kits.

What would Magenta Scissor and Olive Grab do now? Did they still have somewhere left to go? He hoped they could come to a consensus that it was the Acceleration Research Society they should turn their hatred toward. They were the ones who had disseminated the ISS kits. The crimes of former users should no longer be a question. But he would have to wait for the decision of the kings.

And kings…the White King and her abrupt appearance in the local net duel…She was Kuroyukihime’s parent and real-life older sister, and now the shocking fact that she was also the president of the Acceleration Research Society had been made clear, but Haruyuki couldn’t decide how to process this. If they denounced her without a scrap of physical evidence, there was the risk that this could be used against them at a moment’s notice as a pretext to expel Nega Nebulus. In the end, he had to leave this, too, to Kuroyukihime and Fuko.

In short, there was nothing Haruyuki could do right now. The recovery of the thruster, getting Cerberus away from the Society, the condemnation of the White King—these were all problems he could do nothing about on his own. And he had only destroyed the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II, somehow because Niko, Pard, Takumu, Chiyuri, and…Metatron had helped him.

Haruyuki squeezed his eyes shut tightly.

The Archangel Metatron had helped Haruyuki time and time again, and now she was gone. Faced with this fact once more, his eyes grew hot. In subjective time, it had been a mere three, four hours earlier that they’d first exchanged words before fighting together, and then she’d disappeared. That was it. And she wasn’t even a Burst Linker. So why did he feel such a strong sense of loss?

It has to be because I was happy, Haruyuki answered the question he had posed. All this time, the Enemies have only been rivals to defeat. And then one talked to me—a powerful Legend-class, the terrifying guard of the impenetrable fortress Midtown Tower. I was so happy she talked to me—that she became my friend.

No. That’s just me finding a reason after the fact. The truth is that I really liked Metatron…When he lifted his eyelids, the tears that had filled his eyes absorbed the yellow light shining in through the window, making it flicker and sway.

Metatron had been chasing after the reason the Accelerated World was created and the meaning of her eight thousand years of life. She said she wouldn’t care if it meant her own extinction even, as long as she got to see the end of the world…

Haruyuki had been able to communicate to her the immensity of the real world that existed outside the Accelerated World. The nearly limitless scale of the time that had passed up to that point in the real world; that would continue onward from that moment as well.

Through the high-performance glass, he could just barely hear the sounds of traffic on Kannana Street. Right about now, the families enjoying a Sunday of shopping in the mall on the ground floor were probably heading home. In this place where Jomon children of eight thousand years ago ran around, where warriors ran wild a thousand years ago on horseback—in this burned-out field of the firebombings a hundred years ago where Haruyuki, Chiyuri, and Takumu had played hide-and-seek ten years ago, time continued to flow. In the real world…and in the Accelerated World.

Maybe I’ll go say good-bye, he suddenly thought.

Utai and Kuroyukihime had told him to make sure to rest, but they’d forgive him, surely, for just a little dive—thirty minutes or maybe an hour. And for the fact that he used ten points. Because Metatron definitely would have been their comrade, too.

He closed his eyes, and the tears that built up there flowed down his cheeks. Not bothering to wipe these away, Haruyuki murmured softly, “Unlimited Burst.”