Accel World - Volume 21 - Chapter 1

1

“Paradigm Breakdown.”

From the roof of a distant building, a mysterious Burst Linker from the White Legion appeared and called this unfamiliar name. Pale-pink light rained down, and Haruyuki instinctively knew it as an Incarnate technique—not a simple special attack in-line with the game, but a supernatural power that twisted the Brain Burst system by overwriting it.

Suddenly, an impossible dawn came to the stage, and the timer vanished altogether, alongside every health gauge other than his own. There was only one place in the Accelerated World like that: the Unlimited Neutral Field. But this was the Territories, at best an expanded version of the Normal Duel Field.

The Incarnate technique had forcibly transformed the Territories stage into the Unlimited Neutral Field.

For Haruyuki and for the third Nega Nebulus formed from the merger with Prominence, the Territories battle that day—July 20, 2047—was one that absolutely had to be won. A victory would allow them to take control of Minato Area No. 3, the headquarters of the White Legion, Oscillatory Universe, and the other Legion would be then stripped of their right to block the matching list. If the names of Acceleration Research Society members appeared on the list as a result, they could prove that Oscillatory and the Society were flip sides of the same organization.

Until a few seconds earlier, Haruyuki had wanted to stand up and fight honorably, following the rules of Brain Burst and his pride as a Burst Linker. He had made the decision to obey Kuroyukihime’s teaching that Incarnate must only be used when the opponent attacked with it first. However, this shadowy Burst Linker had activated an Incarnate technique a mere ten minutes after the start of the Territories. And there was no way that she was on Nega Nebulus’s side.

Therefore, he could only assume it was the enemy—someone from Oscillatory Universe—and worse, anything was possible now that this person had used an Incarnate technique. If he didn’t mobilize every scrap of power he had to respond, his Legion might even be so badly damaged they could never recover.

If you’ve got the time to stand here shocked, you’ve got the time to start moving!!

Haruyuki forcefully rebooted his numb mind and focused on responding to the situation before him. That said, however, he wasn’t charging in recklessly or attacking the enemy. What he needed to do now was gather information. He didn’t have the luxury of a leisurely stroll around the area, but there was one other way to investigate, and he was probably the only one on the battlefield with access to it.

He focused his mind and sent his thoughts flying. “Please come, Metatron!!” The instant the golden spindle and wings of the three-dimensional icon appeared before his eyes, he continued his prayer. “Take me to the Highest Level!!”

Skreeeeee!!

The sound of acceleration ripped through Haruyuki, and his mind alone was carried to a higher dimension.

An infinite empty space. Haruyuki tried to tune his mind to the one thing in the dark world where light, sound, and even the physical senses of his avatar did not exist: an infinitesimal dot before his eyes, blinking regularly. If his synchronization with this meager light was disturbed, his consciousness would be instantly repelled from this field. He still hadn’t reached the level where he could freely come and go from the Highest Level, the ultimate, purest part of the Accelerated World.

But at the very least, he didn’t have to panic anymore when he heard the sound of acceleration for the second time. Time was essentially stopped in this space; all he had to do was calm his mind and focus solely on the golden dot blinking faintly.

Fwoom! The pinpoint opened up into countless fine lines that flowed off into the darkness to produce an elegant silhouette. A girl with a noble profile, clad in a thin dress, two wings extending from her back. Her eyes were closed, and the shining ring of light above her head generated a beautiful shadow.

The instant he touched the splendor released from the ring, golden particles also drew out from his own previously nonexistent body. He was half-relieved, half-apologetic that this was not his real-world self, but the form of Silver Crow.

Eyes still lowered, the girl—the fifteenth member of the third Nega Nebulus and Haruyuki’s self-proclaimed master, Legend-class Enemy Archangel Metatron—purposefully raised a hand and brought her slender middle finger up against her thumb…

Plink!

…and then snapped them both against Haruyuki’s helmet.

“Ow-ow-ow!”

Even Metatron, one pillar of the Four Saints, could not interfere physically in the Highest Level, so the impact and the pain were both illusions, but he nevertheless pressed a hand to his forehead reflexively.

“My servant! Silver Crow!” came the stern, scolding voice. “How dare you leave your master’s side for such a lengthy period of time!”

“S-sorry. There was just a lot going on…”

“Well then, you will explain all of this ‘a lot’ in chronological order and great detail!”

“R-right. Um.” Cocking his head to the side, he went back over his memories of the last few days. The last time he’d summoned Metatron had been the day before yesterday (Thursday evening), when he’d entered the Castle with Fuko. Inside, they’d encountered Trilead and his master/parent Graphite Edge, and the four of them had discussed the reason for the birth of Brain Burst and the conditions for clearing it.

Actually, he had met with Metatron one more time that day, in the middle of the night. But he had been asleep in bed; i.e., dreaming. So there was a good chance that he hadn’t really met with her then. Either way, he decided to start his explanation at the merger meeting with Prominence.

But Metatron raised her hand once more, and instead of flicking his forehead this time, she touched Haruyuki’s helmet with her palm. The slender hand slipped through his visor to touch the naked body of the avatar inside—and then further still to the inside of his mind itself.

Crack!

He felt something like a spark.

“…I see.” Metatron removed her hand. “There was indeed ‘a lot,’ hmm?”

“H-huh?!”

You know from just that?!

He started to ask but then finally remembered: On the Highest Level, Metatron could reference Haruyuki’s memories directly. So he figured the opposite was probably possible, too, and he started to reach his own hand out toward Metatron’s head. But the Archangel’s eyes abruptly flashed, so he hurriedly pulled back.

Metatron looked down on him with golden, half-open eyes. “In other words, although your battle with the White army began in the Low Level, you suddenly shifted to the Mean Level. Is that the situation?”

The Mean Level Metatron was referencing was the Unlimited Neutral Field, so he assumed that the Low Level was either the normal duel stage or the Territories stage. “Y-yeah. That’s basically it. Although I don’t really get that yet. Did we move from the Territories stage to the real Unlimited Neutral Field? Or did it just look and feel like it?” If it was the latter, then there would still be a way to deal with it.

“No.” The Archangel shook her head crisply from side to side. “The coordinates where you and your comrades are located is the genuine Mean Level. The little warrior you saw probably moved you with your ‘Incarnayte’ System.”

Haruyuki was speechless for a moment or two before he asked hoarsely, “I-is something like that even possible? There’s a level restriction on who can enter the Unlimited Neutral Field, and it also costs ten Burst Points.”

“Hmm.” Metatron turned and gently moved her left hand.

Faintly shining points of light appeared far below the infinite darkness. Their number increased as he watched until they were a colorful sea of twinkling stars. Lost for a moment in the complicated patterns traced out by the stars, Haruyuki realized it was the terrain of the Minato area. The place where countless stars came together and shone remarkably brightly was Shinagawa Station. The lines that stretched out above and below this were the Yamanote Line and the Tokaido Main Line. Immediately to the north of Shinagawa Station was Takanawa Station, and the west side of that was comparatively dark.

The stars they were looking at—nodes, to borrow Metatron’s wording—were social cameras in the real world, so there were naturally more of them at stations, in shopping districts, and along the main roads, and fewer at historic sites and parks. The darkness on the west side of Takanawa Station was Sengakuji Temple, the stronghold in the Territories stage. And where Haruyuki and his friends in Nega Nebulus were facing off against Glacier Behemoth and his companions on the Oscillatory Universe defending team.

Haruyuki’s subjective time was basically stopped at the moment, but the instant he returned from the Highest Level to the Unlimited Neutral Field, the battle would recommence. He had to gather as much information as possible before then. He narrowed his eyes at the Sengakuji area.

“There are traces of an abnormal space fluctuation in one part of the Mean Level,” Metatron murmured, sounding slightly more serious.

“Wh-what does that mean?”

“Come now. Look closely.” The Archangel pointed to a place a short distance from Sengakuji, the object of Haruyuki’s attention.

When he stared hard, he realized that the stars were flickering the tiniest amount, almost like a small wave rippling outward on black water. “What is that…flickering?”

“I’ve seen this same phenomenon just once before. When a large-scale interference occurs in the Mean Level, it leaves a tremor like that in the nodes. Most likely, that little warrior cut the space you occupied out of the Low Level and shifted it to the same coordinates in the Mean Level—or rather, caused it to be in sync.”

“S-so, like, cut and paste?” Haruyuki muttered, stunned, as he continued to gaze at the rippling stars.

He suddenly remembered the old games he always used to play back when he was in elementary school and didn’t yet know of the existence of Brain Burst. In one classic masterpiece of a puzzle-solving action game released nearly fifty years earlier, when the player used an item in a particular way before entering a warp zone, a bug would send them flying to a map they normally couldn’t access. The type and number of items corresponding to the map warped, too—in other words, the place itself might have been far away in the world of the game, but there was only a single digit’s difference in the program, a fact that had shocked young Haruyuki considerably.

Brain Burst 2039 was several million times—no, several tens of millions of times—the capacity of that old game, but its basic nature was the same. The Territories stage and the Unlimited Neutral Field seemed endlessly far apart, but the physical distance similarly held no meaning. Incarnate techniques could overwrite any phenomenon in the Accelerated World. So it was possible in principle to overwrite an address given on a certain map with that on a different map.

But how much imagination exactly—how much image power would be needed to do that? An Incarnate technique that interfered with the Accelerated World itself would have the ultimate range.

“Who could do this?” Haruyuki narrowed his eyes at the stars below, remembering the sweetly clear and yet somehow sad voice calling out “Paradigm Breakdown.”

In the Highest Level, it wasn’t only the nodes that mapped out the terrain that were visible, but also the Burst Linkers currently diving in the Unlimited Neutral Field. When he really focused his mind, a small silver light appeared in the center of the darkness of Sengakuji Temple, a little toward the eastern side. Haruyuki instinctively understood that this was Silver Crow. While he savored the strange sensation of staring at his own self from the outside, his perception of the world grew broader.

The gray dot of light that appeared immediately to Crow’s side was Ash Roller. A bright-green Bush Utan and a rich-green Olive Grab were also stuck to them. The group of three brown, purple, and pale-blue lights a little down to the south were Chocolat Puppeter and the other members of Petit Paquet. And the large, shining, ice-blue dot that looked to be facing off against Haruyuki and his friends had to have been Glacier Behemoth—one of the Seven Dwarves, the White Legion’s executive group. Only these eight were within the Sengakuji Temple grounds, but he could see several more points of light on the roofs of the office buildings on the east and west sides of the temple. He couldn’t make out which light was who, but the high rankers of Nega Nebulus were camped out on the east side, while the west side was occupied by Oscillatory Universe.

And there was also a small light on the lone building standing tall and narrow to the north of Sengakuji. The pale pink with a hint of purple was the same color as the overlay that had enveloped the Territories stage like an aurora. This was without a doubt the Burst Linker who had activated the Incarnate technique at work, but in the Highest Level, he couldn’t know her name or what she looked like, which was extremely frustrating.

“I have absolutely no way of knowing anything other than the location information from the current situation,” Metatron said, as if reading his thoughts. “However, only those belonging to the army of the attacking or defending sides are permitted in the Low Level of your ‘Territories stage,’ so given that you do not know her, the little warrior in question would presumably be a member of Oscillatory Universe or whatever you called it.”

“Right. I guess…” Although he bobbed his head in agreement, Haruyuki stopped it at an angle that was neither here nor there.

Immediately after the forced change from the Territories stage to the Unlimited Neutral Field, Glacier Behemoth had let slip some mysterious words.

King…Does this mean that now is that time?

Haruyuki had no idea what this really meant, but at the very least, Oscillatory executive member Behemoth had also been caught off guard by the progression of events. That’s what it had felt like, anyway. But it could also have been taken to mean that he knew what this forced change was. So was the one who activated this Incarnate technique, Paradigm Breakdown, Behemoth’s king—the head of Oscillatory Universe, the White King, White Cosmos? And was this light that flickered alone with an air of sadness on a building to the north the White King herself?

In his mind, Haruyuki compared the voice that called out the Incarnate technique name today with the voice of the White King when she’d presented herself in a dummy avatar on the day of the school festival the previous month to see if they were the same. He felt like they both had that sweet clarity. But he hadn’t sensed even a hint of sadness in the White King’s voice when she had barged into the Umesato local net. Even in that situation, she’d maintained an air of calmness—of detachment—and left without having revealed anything of her interior.

If they were different people, then there was no way Haruyuki would know the pale-peach duel avatar, likely a White Legion high ranker.

“Huh? But…” Furrowing his brow, he put his hazy hand to the side of his helmet. “That voice…I feel like I’ve heard it somewhere?”

“What are you talking about, Servant?” Metatron asked.

“The voice of the Burst Linker who dragged us into the Unlimited Neutral Field—I feel like I’ve heard it before,” he replied, half on autopilot. “But where? …Not at the meeting of the Seven Kings…Not at the merger meeting, either.”

“Hmm. In that case, I shall search your memories.”

“Yeah, okay— Wait, what?!” He started to bring his head forward obediently and then yanked it back in a hurry. “S-search? You can do that?!”

“We’ll see. The memories of you little warriors and of us Beings are stored in a similar format, I assume? If I can expose them, we will be able to understand something.” Her words deeply frightening, Metatron clamped her left hand onto Haruyuki’s helmet. Even though her hand was much smaller and more slender than Silver Crow’s, he was rendered unable to move his head at all.

“Eeaaah, h-help…”

Without so much as twitching an eyebrow at Haruyuki’s cry, Metatron stretched out the index and middle fingers of her right hand and was about to thrust them straight into his helmet. But then her entire body froze. Left hand still gripping his head, she whirled around.

“Who are you?!” she barked.

Haruyuki opened both eyes wide in amazement. This was the Highest Level, where time was basically stopped. The abyss of the Accelerated World that Haruyuki could only reach while linked with the Legend-class Enemy Metatron. There was no way anyone else could appear here, however strong they were.

Ping!

He heard a faint sound, like a fingertip popping off an extremely thin metal film.

Ping. Ping. Repeated at regular intervals, the sound grew louder bit by bit.

It was…footsteps? Haruyuki managed to pull free of Metatron’s hand somehow and then stared into the distant darkness.

At first, all he could see was a white shape, shimmering hazily. As it approached, it took on human form. Just like Haruyuki and Metatron, it was an outline of faint light, a small F-type duel avatar. She only came up to Silver Crow’s chest, with a surprisingly small torso and limbs, and her whole body was wrapped in dress-type armor with a geometric pattern reminiscent of snowflakes. The girl stopped immediately before Haruyuki and Metatron, her sweet face mask brightening into a smile.

“Oh-ho! I finally found you.”

“…Wh-who are you?” he stammered.

“It’s polite to give your own name before you ask someone else’s. I’d like to say that at least, but I know your name, so I’ll make a special exception and tell you. I’m Snow Fairy, also known as Sleepy.” The girl’s voice was sweet and sour. “Nice to meet you, Silver Crow.”

The instant he heard the cutesy name, Haruyuki forgot he was in the Highest Level where physical interference was not possible and took a step back into a ready position.

And that was because this name had been given a fairly high number on the list of Oscillatory Universe members Kuroyukihime had shared.

She was a member of the executive group, the Seven Dwarves. Glacier Behemoth, the powerful enemy he’d fought earlier, was seventh among their ranks.

Snow Fairy was number two.

With regard to the order of the list, Kuroyukihime had said, “It’s not that they’re simply in order of strongest. If I had to say, it’s in order of who is the most villainous.” In other words, the avatar before his eyes was one of the uber-villains among the White Legion.

“H-how did you get here?” Haruyuki asked immediately.

Snow Fairy grinned once more. “I felt like someone was watching me somehow. It’s scary, so I don’t really like to come here. But I like being spied on even less.”

“Like someone was watching you?” Haruyuki repeated, dumbfounded.

If he were to believe what she’d just said, the girl avatar grinning before his eyes had sensed Haruyuki’s gaze as he observed the Unlimited Neutral Field from the Highest Level. He absolutely could not believe that that was possible. In his understanding, observers on the Highest Level were like the gallery watching an old-style online game through a monitor. What kind of dueler could notice the presence of a third party in the distant network?

Haruyuki might have been training his powers of instantaneous thought, but now he froze in his ready position, not knowing how he should respond to the situation.

Meanwhile, Snow Fairy turned her gaze to Metatron next to him, and her smile faded just a little. “I wonder why you two are so unreasonable…If you’re an Enemy, then you should just be an Enemy and satisfy yourself bullying Burst Linkers. It’s because you’re here like this that there’s weird interference.” She stopped for just an instant before shrugging lightly. “Well, whatever. We’re never going to meet again, anyway.”

She took a step toward Metatron, who had maintained an uncharacteristic silence, and casually raised one hand. Her fingers—so surprisingly slender that it seemed impossible she was a fighting-game avatar—moved as though pinching something.

Metatron reacted instantly. She remained motionless, but the ring above her head flashed, and Fairy took a step back as though repelled by an invisible impact.

Haruyuki couldn’t begin to imagine what was taking place between the two of them, when interaction was impossible in the Highest Level. But then he suddenly felt as though the floor had dropped out from beneath his feet, and he cried out unconsciously. “Unh…Aah?!”

Reflexively, he tried to hover with the wings on his back, but that had no effect. Whatever was happening, though, it seemed that Metatron was doing it and that it was not an attack by Fairy. Standing alongside the still-silent Archangel, he plummeted into the darkness.

The pixie avatar shrugged slightly, growing distant in the blink of an eye. “Aw, too bad…”

As this faint voice reached him, a wave of noise enveloped him like the Brain Burst acceleration sound played backward, and the world faded to white.