Accel World - Volume 17 - Chapter 10.1

1

“Unh…Unnnh…Uuuunnnnnnh,” Haruyuki groaned, moving a trembling finger above the open window on his virtual desktop.

The window was the console screen for the fighting game Brain Burst. He could open it even when he wasn’t accelerated, to view things like the status and duel history of his avatar—and the number of Burst Points he had. Currently, he was staring at the Level-Up Bonus tab in his avatar status. Blank since he became a Burst Linker, this screen now offered him four options. This was because, last week, he had finally reached three hundred points, allowing Silver Crow to move up to level two.

When pushing the button to level up, he’d completely forgotten about making sure he had a few extra points to ensure his next loss wasn’t his final one, so his points had dropped down to the single digits, causing chills and stomach pains for both him and his teacher Takumu. But he had somehow managed to get his balance back up, and now even that frightening time was a fond memory. It was strange that he couldn’t actually remember much of the duels he’d fought to get his points back up out of the red zone, but he had bigger fish to fry at that moment.

That said, this was one of those moments where you cried for joy. The bonus screen before his eyes shone with a special brilliance, an extremely deluxe menu of four choices—two new special attacks, a new ability, and an enhancement of an existing ability.

“Unnnh…Gotta go with special attack…But it’s hard to walk away from a new ability…And if I go with the special attack, then which one is stronger…?” His finger hovered above the three buttons at random, never coming down on any one of them. Haruyuki had truly cultivated and built up his indecisiveness in the real world, but the real problem here was that the game Brain Burst did not allow players to save and load. So he couldn’t use that old trick of picking one of them and then reloading and trying again if he didn’t like his choice. It was, in other words, all or nothing.

“Ngah, nngh…If that’s the way it’s gotta be, then I just won’t look at the buttons, I’ll leave it to fate…”

He turned just his eyes upward away from the window, pulled a finger back sharply, and steeled himself before jabbing at the screen—or pretending to, at least.

“Arrrgh.” Once again, Haruyuki decided to postpone his decision and was on the verge of dropping his hand.

“Hey, sorry to keep you waiting, boy! The tests just dragged on and on,” a voice said from behind, accompanied by a strongish pat on the back, making him jump.

The rebound pushed his hand dangerously close to the window on his virtual desktop, so he yanked his arm back over his shoulder as a scream slipped out of him. “Aaah?!”

Fortunately, he managed to evade a second tragedy in careless game play, but for some reason, he heard a strange “Heep” from behind. He tried to pull his hand back down, but his fingertips caught on something.

Ever so timidly, Haruyuki turned around and saw Kuroyukihime with a cardigan and a thick shawl over her pajamas and his own fingers pushing through the front of those pajamas all the way inside.

“Hngah! I—I—I didn’t mean—!!” Emitting an unintelligible cry, Haruyuki pulled his hand back with all the force he could muster. But it was caught on her second button. The pull of his hand sent this real-world button flying, and the most definitely real fabric fell open to both sides.

It had been four weeks since Kuroyukihime—vice president of the Umesato Junior High student council, Haruyuki’s parent, and the master of the once-defunct Legion Nega Nebulus—had been hospitalized near Asagaya Station. It had been touch-and-go immediately after the accident, but thanks to the great strides made in micromachine medical treatment in the last few years and probably the willpower of the girl herself, she had come back from the brink of death. Since she had been released from the ICU, her recovery had been remarkable, and now the only physical manifestation of her many injuries was the cast on her left leg to set her broken fibula. She was expected to be released from the hospital soon.

Naturally, this would be a truly joyful event, but Haruyuki felt a little sadness at the thought. He’d been stopping in to see Kuroyukihime every day on his way home from school, but once she returned to Umesato, she would go back to being the student council vice president, an inspiration to all the students of the school; she probably wouldn’t have time for Haruyuki anymore.

“I can actually read your mind now, you know,” she said, yanking his left cheek outward.

He hurriedly turned his face upward and found beside him the beautiful countenance of his classmate pursing her lips. “N-no, I wasn’t actually thinking anything weird—”

“I’ll just say this now. Once I am released from the hospital, I have every intention of putting you through your paces. Our objective is level three—no, four within this year.”

“Wh-whaaaat?!” Now Haruyuki felt a chill entirely opposite the one from earlier.

The fingers released his cheek, and Kuroyukihime turned to face forward, her expression softening. “Well, I, too, will be a little sad that these days will end.”

The contrast between the madder-red of the evening sun dyeing her face in profile and the lustrous shine of her black hair was so dazzling that Haruyuki unconsciously blinked before turning his gaze to follow hers.

They were currently seated alongside each other on a bench on the south side of the hospital roof, looking down at a view of the city that spanned from Asagaya to Koenji. The elevated Chuo Line drew a line in the sky to one side, and a little beyond that was Oume Highway. In some weird twist of fate, the bench faced squarely in the direction of Umesato, and if he squinted, he could make out the solar panels on the building’s roof glittering in the distance.

This part of Suginami Ward was a mix of shopping streets left over from the previous century, residential areas, and cutting-edge intelligent buildings, and all were highlighted a reddish-gold now. The sight was so beautiful that he almost wanted to call it a Twilight stage.

The skies had been clear the whole day, and the evening breeze had the slight chill that came with late autumn. Kuroyukihime pulled together the collar of the pajamas that Haruyuki had so recently defiled, and he pushed back to the depths of his mind the paleness of her bare skin that inevitably began to return to his thoughts.

“Um, we should probably be getting back inside,” he said.

“No, it’s fine. Thank you. It will be suppertime in twenty minutes…I’d like to stay here like this until then.”

“B-but it’s getting cold and all…”

“Mm. I see. So then, give me a little cold-resistance buff.” Grinning, Kuroyukihime shifted about ten centimeters to the right, and her slender body inevitably came into contact—or rather became glued to—Haruyuki’s left side, which did indeed cause the chill to recede. “Mm-hmm. This is perfect. You’re quite warm.”

“Uh, um, I am pretty confident in my heat generation.” Haruyuki threw his everything into a self-deprecating gag, but Kuroyukihime only moved her lips without smiling.

“Idiot.” She pulled her body even closer. “I’m not talking about physical warmth. I’m talking about emotional warmth. How can I put this…? I feel relieved. It’s only natural that Kurashima would face off against me when it comes to you.”

“Huh?” Unfortunately, Haruyuki couldn’t really understand what she meant, and he cocked his head to one side as he accepted her slight weight. “Chiyu—I mean, Kurashima just thinks that I’m her servant and should belong only to her.”

“Hee-hee. Well, at some point it will become clear. All kinds of things.” Now Kuroyukihime smiled and raised a finger as if she had just remembered something. “That reminds me. What on earth were you looking at before when you were waiting for me? You seemed to be excessively deep in thought.”

“Oh! Um, the Brain Burst console.”

“Oh? …Aah, I understand now. There’s only one thing that could make you agonize like that. Your level-up bonus.”

“Th-that’s exactly it.” Haruyuki’s eyes grew wide at how easily she guessed the answer. “But how did you know?”

“It’s obvious. I struggled the same way, way back when. Or rather, it’s a path all Burst Linkers walk down,” Kuroyukihime responded, still smiling, and then her expression clouded slightly. “However, it has already been several days since you reached level two, yes? Have you been fighting without taking your bonus?”

“Uh, yeah, well…I guess.” Haruyuki nodded, pushing together his index fingers, and now the face to his left was colored with a mix of surprise and exasperation.

“I don’t know whether to call that prudence or perseverance,” she remarked with a slight frown. “It’s true that these last few days, I’ve been busy with test after test, and I haven’t had the time to really work with you. But Takumu, for instance, seems like he would give you appropriate advice.”

“Th-that’s…” Haruyuki paused. “When I mentioned the level-up bonus before, Taku got this faraway look in his eyes and said he didn’t think he could help me because he always just took special attacks without even thinking about it.”

“…I—I see. My apologies.” Apologizing to the absent Takumu, Kuroyukihime, with a strange expression, lifted the leg held fast in a thin, lightweight cast up onto her other leg and then sat like that wordlessly, looking up at the evening sky as it gradually deepened into purple.

“Kuroyukihime, um,” Haruyuki said to his parent meekly. “I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to decide, no matter how long I think it over. So maybe I could get you to choose for me? What bonus to take, I mean.”

“I was just wondering if I should do that or not,” Kuroyukihime murmured, and her eyes were serious as she brought her gaze back from the sky to him. “I know very well how hard it is for you to decide on your own. There are more than a few parent Burst Linkers who decide the direction of their child’s growth. The parent has knowledge and experience that the child does not. And I think perhaps this is correct because of that. However…”

She closed her mouth momentarily and set half of the black wool shawl she was wearing over Haruyuki’s shoulders. But her eyes shone with a firm light, in contrast with the gentleness of this gesture.

“It might seem as though I’m being harsh, but the parent is not the child’s creator, and the child is not the parent’s creation. It was your own heart, Haruyuki, that produced your duel avatar, Silver Crow. In which case, the direction in which to flap those wings is something you should decide.”

“…Right.” Haruyuki nodded obediently. He realized that it was one thing to get advice on how to fight, but to rely on her for even the irrevocable choice of a level-up bonus was simply fobbing off responsibility. If he couldn’t make a decision himself now, then he should never have pushed the YES button that time, that day when Kuroyukihime had sent him the Brain Burst program in the Umesato lounge. “I understand, Kuroyukihime. The next time I go to the Accelerated World, I’ll try asking him—Silver Crow. I feel like if I really ask, he’ll tell me.”

“Mm. Good answer.” Kuroyukihime grinned and hugged Haruyuki tightly, her right hand holding the edge of the shawl. He belatedly became aware of her warmth next to him, and his heart rate abruptly tripled. Frozen in a self-induced Burst Link, Haruyuki’s five senses were so inundated with information—a sweet scent, a wonderful softness—that it surpassed his processing ability, and his consciousness started to fade.

“But I’m your parent. A sad thing to simply leave it at that,” her lips murmured in his ear, so close that they nearly touched him, and Haruyuki’s mind was somehow yanked back to the here and now. “Instead of advice, how about I tell you about my own experience?”

“Y-your own…,” he repeated absently before finally recovering about 50 percent of his processing power.

Right. When he really thought about it, there was a time when Kuroyukihime—known as the level-nine Black King, Black Lotus, in the Accelerated World—had also been a beginner.

“So…are you going to tell me about…your parent?”

“No.” Kuroyukihime shook her head. “It’s not that. My parent was completely hands-off in this area…To the point where I was not even allowed to join the same Legion.”

“What? …So then, did you get this strong all by yourself?”

“That is also a no. With the exceptions of the very beginning—and the end…my parent had essentially no dealings with me. But there was a Burst Linker who I could call teacher. So I will tell you about the way he spoke of.”

“The way…,” Haruyuki parroted, before he froze in a different sense. Because his not-very-sharp intuition was announcing danger, for some reason.

But almost as if she had anticipated his reaction, Kuroyukihime squeezed the hand resting on his shoulder. Holding him tightly, she inserted one end of a black XSB cable she had pulled from somewhere into her Neurolinker.

“Huh? Um, way?”

“We’ll talk with our fists—no, our swords. That’s the way of our master.” Grinning, Kuroyukihime stabbed the other plug into Haruyuki’s Neurolinker. Before the warning of a wired connection that flashed in his field of view had disappeared, her shining lips were striking the final blow. “Burst Link.”