Accel World - Volume 18 - Chapter 4

4

As soon as sixth-period homeroom ended and the teacher disappeared, the eighth grade’s class 2 was filled with an animated buzz. Apparently, even the fact that it was Monday couldn’t kill the excitement for the summer vacation that started in a week. The rainy season had only just ended, and the July sky was cheerfully bright at three thirty. Students on sports teams were scrambling to be the first ones out the door.

Shihoko Nago waited until the chaos had died down before standing up, schoolbag in hand. She cut across the back of the classroom and walked down the hallway, trying to avoid the eyes of the students laughing and chatting here and there. She steered clear of the crowded central stairs and raced up to the fourth floor via the stairs at the end of the building. When she reached the deserted floor where the special classrooms were concentrated, she let out a long sigh.

When had school become such a trial? It wasn’t as though anyone was bullying her or she didn’t get along with her classmates. Her grades were slightly above average, and she wasn’t particularly bad at sports; at a glance, she seemed pretty average. In other words, in the Shikishima University–affiliated Sakurami Junior High School’s eighth grade, Shihoko was firmly in the same place as the majority of students, and yet, for some reason, it was painful to her. She didn’t feel like she belonged.

And maybe each of the students felt more or less the same. Maybe they were all desperately trying to read the room, go along with everyone around them, and work hard to keep from being deemed an outsider. Maybe this was just what it meant to be in junior high.

If that’s the case, then I’m one of the lucky ones. The room might be small, but at least I have a place at school where I can relax, Shihoko told herself as she opened the door to the home ec room. Two people were already seated on the bench against the wall, and a wry smile rose unbidden to her lips. “You two are pretty fast, huh?”

“Oh!” The girl with the bobbed hair raised her sharp eyebrows slightly. “What’s that about? You’re the one who told us to come early for a meeting, Shiho.”

The girl with glasses and shoulder-length hair pursed her lips. “And here I went to all the trouble of making you some brownies, Shiho.”

“What?” the first girl cried. “Really? All right! I’ll put on some tea!”

“Ooh, not for you, Sato!”

“Sweet Yume, there’s no way you wouldn’t have not made some for me, too!”

“There’s that twisted grammar of yours again.”

The corners of Shihoko’s mouth loosened once more at this exchange as she closed the door of the classroom.

The relatively tiny room—about seven and a half square meters—was the office for the cooking club that Sato (aka Satomi Mito), Yume (aka Yume Yuruki), and Shihoko Nago belonged to. The club had only been launched the previous year by Yume, so the three of them were the club’s only members.

Dropping her bag in the square woven basket in one corner, Shihoko headed toward the mini-kitchen to the rear. As Satomi got the container of tea down from the hanging shelf, Shihoko filled the electric kettle with water and turned it on. By the table behind them, Yume pulled brownies from the fridge.

Once they had prepared the tea, moving in a perfectly coordinated dance, they sat down at the table. The room was long and narrow, so Satomi and Yume had their backs to the cupboards, while Shihoko had hers almost up against the wall. They were allowed to use the kitchen classroom next door for club activities, but it was too big, and they were never quite comfortable in there. This room, however, was the perfect size for the smallest club at Sakurami Junior High.

Shihoko raised her cup and took a sip of the orange-flavored black tea, and the tension in both her body and her heart gradually melted away. School was a trial, but she had this brief time after classes with these two in their tiny sanctuary, so she somehow managed to drag herself in every day.

This was enough. She didn’t want anything more.

That’s what I’d always thought, at least.

Satomi stuffed her cheeks with a large bite of brownie and chewed away happily while Yume pushed up the bridge of her glasses neatly and said, “So, Shiho, have you decided when we’re going over there?”

“Mm-mm,” she hummed in response, before biting into her own brownie. The rich, full flavor of chocolate filled her mouth, a perfect complement to the orange tea. “You’re getting so much better, President. It’s like real chocolate. Although I haven’t eaten the real thing in eight years or so.”

“Right? The trick is to melt carob powder into butter and then really knead it— Wait!” Yume started to go along with Shihoko’s conversational turn before snapping back to her point. She leaned forward across the table. “I am the club president, but you’re the team leader, Shiho! Just suck it up and make a decision!”

“Uh, unh…It’s just…,” Shihoko mumbled, poking at her brownie with a fork.

“Honestly, quit dawdling already,” Satomi interjected, having finished her brownie in the blink of an eye. “I mean, you’re always so prim and proper on the other side, sounding all high and mighty. You need to get some self-confidence!”

“Nngh, nngh…It’s just…” Half turning her eyes up at the ceiling, she looked at Yume and Satomi in turn.

Even in Shihoko’s eyes, they were cute. Boyish Satomi and intellectual Yume were different types, but they were fairly high rankers even among the eighth graders. There was no way she could have much confidence in front of the two of them.

As if reading her thoughts, Yume pulled a tabletop mirror from the shelf behind her and stood it on the table. “Look, you’re cute, Shiho! If you met in person, that bird boy would be knocked out in a single blow!”

“Th-that’s not the issue!” She hurriedly shook her head, but her gaze was nonetheless pulled into the reflection of herself in the mirror. Her face was the very definition of the word average. Her hair, too, was very junior high, parted in the middle and tied back. Her height and weight were also normal for her age. Everything about her was just average.

“No way. No. Way,” Shihoko groaned, flopping forward onto the table. “If they find out Little Miss Polite avatar has this inside her, they’ll think I’m this painful loser and kick me out of the Legion.”

“Huh. So you’re aware you’re a los—,” Satomi started, rather mercilessly.

Yume jabbed her sharply in the ribs to shut her up as she smiled brightly. “It’ll be fine, Shiho! You can’t be any more pitiful than that king, after all!”

“You. You can never say that to her,” Satomi warned. “Well anyway, yeah. I think you’re cute, too, Shiho.”

“So then tell me how I’m cute,” she demanded, raising her face marginally.

Satomi paused before answering. “You’re cute like the dried apricots in the anmitsu at Mizunoya.”

“What’s that even supposed to mean?” Dropping her face to the table again with a thump, Shihoko muttered, “And the reason my duel avatar’s Chocolat Puppeter is because I can’t have chocolate thanks to a cocoa allergy. It’s just too obvious…”

“If we’re going to get into that, I mean, my last name’s Mito, and my avatar name’s Mint Mitten!” Satomi argued with puffed cheeks. “It’s not even like I care one way or the other about mint! On top of that, Mito Satomi’s a palindrome!”

Yume patted her shoulder with a smile. “I’m sure it’s just because you have no mental trauma, Sato. So the BB system created your avatar from your name.”

“You think? But, like, I do too! I mean, I got, like, ten or twenty mental scars, easy!”

“Huh. Like what?”

“Um…well…I mean, you’re one to talk! You became Plum Flipper just because you had the nickname Plum in elementary!”

“I did not!” Yume protested. “It’s because I almost died when a dried plum got stuck in my throaaat!”

“Whatever!” Satomi rolled her eyes.

Listening to her friends bicker, Shihoko munched on the last bite of brownie and let the flavor melt in her mouth.

Instead of chocolate chips or cocoa powder, the brownie was made from the powder of Mediterranean beans. Shihoko could not have any kind of chocolate whatsoever because of her allergy, so Yume and Satomi had developed this recipe for her.

Chocolate was used in all kinds of treats and drinks, so the allergy had been fairly difficult to cope with when she was small. She’d eat some chocolate without realizing it and then have trouble breathing and be whisked off to the hospital. But to be honest, she had a hard time believing that those memories were sufficiently traumatic to be the mold for her duel avatar. She just came off like some kind of weird glutton.

“But, like, just ’cause we’re meeting in the real doesn’t mean they’re gonna suddenly start talking avatar origin stories,” she muttered as if trying to convince herself. “That’s like the most private of private…”

Satomi and Yume turned toward her at the same time and nodded in agreement.

“That’s totally right, Shiho!” Satomi agreed. “I’m telling ya, there’s nothing to be freaked about!”

“Right, exactly,” Yume chimed in. “I’m sure they’re nice people, probably!”

“And they won that tough fight against GW! Seriously amazing!”

“And they were up against five of the Six Armors, too!”

“Are you that psyched to meet them?” Shihoko asked, and her friends exchanged a glance before giggling awkwardly. She flashed them an exasperated smile and looked around the small, comfortable cooking prep room.

The name Petit Paquet, the Legion the three of them had formed, had, of course, come from this room. Here, they made treats, chatted, and dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field to see her friend Coolu. They didn’t duel much, and the Territories didn’t matter to them at all, so other Burst Linkers might have assumed they were not very serious as a Legion. But the Legion meant everything to them. The time they spent together was precious.

But Petit Paquet had been disbanded three days earlier—the evening of Friday, July 12. And then the three had become members of the Legion that controlled the adjacent Suginami area, Nega Nebulus.

They had immediately jumped in with the Territories’ defense the following day, and she thought they’d not done too badly against the Green Legion team, even though they weren’t really used to that sort of thing. But Shihoko and her friends had received an unexpected invitation after that from the Black King, Black Lotus, their new Legion Master, to come meet in the real world and talk.

“We will most certainly take it into consideration!” Shihoko had responded, quickly and arrogantly, before bursting out, where she sat clutching her head in her hands before the exasperated Satomi and Yume at this very table. She had, in fact, been considering it for two full days since then, and her hesitation had not disappeared.

It wasn’t simply a fear of breaking the taboo of outing themselves in the real. When she asked, she learned the seven members of Nega Nebulus had been meeting in the real for a while now, and the risk of revealing her real-world self was far greater for the Black King, the greatest traitor in the entire Accelerated World. In fact, Shihoko was forced to conclude that the Black Legion fully trusted her and her friends.

The truth was, she wasn’t hesitating; she was afraid. The most average of average, Shihoko Nago, did not have the courage to stand before World’s End, Black Lotus—a legend in the Accelerated World—“Strato-Shooter” Sky Raker, and Silver Crow.

She reached a hand out toward the mirror still on the table and slammed it shut before sighing for the nth time. Shihoko had become a Burst Linker two years earlier when she was in sixth grade. Her parent was Satomi, who’d been in her class. Not only had they not been particularly close, they’d barely spoken, so Shihoko was surprised when Satomi first called out to her. And she was even more surprised when, in a corner of the schoolyard, Satomi asked, “Do you like games?”

Not long after she became a Burst Linker, she had asked why Satomi decided to make her her scion, but Satomi had only laughed and said, “It felt right.”

Shihoko didn’t exactly get it then, but later, when she saw Yume reading a cake recipe book in the school library, Shihoko herself “felt right,” so maybe that was all it was.

Interrupting her thoughts, she pushed back her chair and was about to stand up to make more tea when Satomi said, in an unusually quiet voice, “So, like, I…”

As Shihoko sat down again, Yume also turned to look at the girl.

“So, like, I’m super-happy to be sitting here with you now, chatting and eating sweets. I mean, I thought I was going to lose all this.” She slowly lifted her hand to press the center of her chest through the ribbon of her sailor uniform. As if pulled in, Yume made the same gesture. “To be honest, I can’t really remember the time when I was parasitized by the ISS kit. You said to just forget it, Shiho, and I do want to do that…But it’s not okay to forget everything. Yume and I did terrible things to you and Coolu, things we can’t take back. And then Silver Crow and Lime Bell just happened to come along and save us. I can never, ever forget that.”

Yume and Shihoko nodded slowly. A faint smile rising up on her face, Satomi nodded back and started to speak again.

“My parent was this older girl who lived in my neighborhood, but two months after she gave me Brain Burst, she lost all her points. I was super-sad then; I felt so alone. I stopped caring about dueling, and I left my global connection off for ages. I even thought about quitting the game. But I guess I did have unfinished business in the Accelerated World. And like, whatever I say, I actually do like my avatar a fair bit.”

The other two nodded again, deeply. Their duel avatars were not merely game characters. They were unique versions of themselves born from their own identities.

“So it was when I was all lost, there was a bit of a thing in class. At lunchtime, this dumb boy was fooling around, and he dropped some chocolate sauce on this girl’s bread. But she had a cocoa allergy, right? So the girl, she yells ‘Fine! You eat it!’ and slams the bread into the idiot’s face, and he had to get down on his hands and knees while looking totally ridiculous. It was so good.”

Shihoko felt her face grow hot. She did feel like maybe there had been a thing like that when she was in sixth grade. “Was that maybe that?” she asked Satomi.

“Yeah, that’s when it clicked. I’d always pegged her for a quiet kid, but then it was like ‘Oh, you’re a fighter.’ And just as I expected, she succeeded in installing Brain Burst, and she even went on to claim her own child not long after that. I was so happy. That time was…” Satomi looked as though she was thinking hard about those days, and Shihoko also fell into thought before being pulled back by her. “Actually, how did you and Yume meet the condition for BB installation, Shiho? That one about having a Neurolinker equipped right after you were born.”

“You’re asking that now?!” Shihoko slumped down in her chair and cleared her throat. “I was kind of premature, so I had one to monitor my vitals. And I’m pretty sure it was early education for you, Yume?”

“Iiit waaas. Didn’t do much, though.” She giggled, the light glinting off her glasses, but there was no doubt that of the three of them, she had the best grades. “So what about you, Sato?”

“Oh! It was the education thing for me, too,” Satomi replied, somewhat awkwardly.

“It waaas?” Yume quipped. “No effect, hmm…?”

“Yeah— Hey! Don’t go saying that! I mean, I’m in the middle of a super-good story here! Shut up and listen!” Satomi kicked and pouted in her seat for a minute before cocking her head to one side. “Uh, where was I?”

Swallowing a sigh, Shihoko picked up the thread of conversation. “Yume and I became Burst Linkers, and you were sobbing, overcome with emotion.”

“I—I wasn’t crying! Um, so basically, what I’m trying to say here is we might have disbanded for now in terms of the system, but I super-super-super-love Petit Paquet. And I’m super-super-super-super-grateful to the bird and Bell for saving it when it was on the verge of being destroyed. So I wanna fight with them. And…if we can be friends with them in the real, then I wanna do that, too.”

Shihoko yanked her head up with a gasp.

Satomi had said she was happy that Shihoko became a Burst Linker. But the truth was, Shihoko was the one who’d been rescued. She’d finally found a place in this painful world where she could actually be comfortable. For Shihoko, Petit Paquet and this prep room were a shelter. Here, there was nothing to fear. She could breathe so deeply, the air filled her lungs.

But she couldn’t stay closed off in a little box forever. Nothing lasted forever, not in the Accelerated World and not in the real world, either. At some point, the time would come when the lid was lifted off the box, and she would have to go outside. No matter how hard it was, the time would certainly come when she would have to try her best to breathe and move forward.

The truth was, that opportunity might have already come a long time ago. It might have been the day when the white crow suddenly danced down in the Unlimited Neutral Field and offered her his hand. Sinking into thought once again, she stared absently at her own hand.

“Aah, Shiho, you’re thinking about that time when the crow was licking you!” Yume said, laughing.

“Wha—? N-no! I was just thinking about how I’d punch him when we met in the real!” She clenched her hand into a fist and stood up forcefully before announcing, “I’ve decided! We’re going to Suginami tomorrow after school!”

““Wooo!”” Satomi and Yume cried out together and clapped.

“So then, let’s make some treats to take!” Satomi said. “I wanna be in charge of the tarts! Tarts!”

“If we’re gonna do it, let’s make some treats that are like us,” Yume suggested. “Mint cheesecake, aaaand plum tart, aaaand carob-chocolate gâteau maybeee?”

“All right! We’ll go stock up at the market by the station and then go to your place, Yume!”

““Let’s do it!”” They each thrust a hand up into the air.

“That’s gonna take so long, though,” Shihoko complained as she looked up at the small kitchen window. There, the shadow of a bird cut briefly across a summer sky tinged with the faintest orange.