Accel World - Volume 21 - Chapter 2

2

Haruyuki staggered slightly when he returned to the Unlimited Neutral Field. He managed to brace himself and then look first at his left shoulder. After confirming that Metatron’s 3-D icon was indeed sitting there, he let out the breath he’d been holding. In terms of physical sensation, he felt like he’d been in the Highest Level for more than five minutes, but in reality, not even a second had passed. Next to him, Ash Roller, Bush Utan, and Olive Grab were looking around, stunned, searching for the missing stronghold.

“I won’t let that Snowflake or whatever it was get away with this.” Metatron’s voice was unprecedentedly thorny.

“Huh?” Haruyuki flinched and pulled his head in. “Th-that thing back there? What did she try to do?”

“She tried to sever the link between you and me, the link that I have gone to great lengths to strengthen.”

“Sever…But I thought you couldn’t interfere with other people on the Highest Level?”

“That is true as a general rule. However—”

“Oy, you damned crow!” Ash Roller turned around and yelled, straddling his bike, perhaps noticing their voices in conversation. “What the heck did they…?”

Even the fin-de-siècle rider couldn’t hide his confusion, and the Petit Paquet group, Sky Raker, and the others to the rear were in the same boat. But the Oscillatory side had to have had a firmer grasp on the situation, so Nega Nebulus risked them taking the first attack if they charged their front line now.

Haruyuki decided that he first needed to get his team back on their feet and ready to fight. “Ash, we have to pull back for now!” he called toward Ash Roller and his gang. “This is the actual Unlimited Neutral Field! If we die, we could end up in an Unlimited—” The words that leapt unbidden from his mouth were fed back into his thoughts after a very slight time delay, sending a powerful chill racing through his entire body.

Unlimited EK.

When an immediate burst out was not possible in the Unlimited Neutral Field, and a player died inside the territory of a powerful enemy, they were then attacked and immediately killed by that same enemy an hour later when they automatically regenerated. Unlimited EK was this process repeated over and over until the player lost all their Burst Points. To avoid this fate, common sense motivated players to set an automatic disconnect timer with a global connection when diving into the Unlimited Neutral Field.

But what if there was a Burst Linker with attack power on par with a Legend-class Enemy? Even without playing a sudden-death card, such a player could push another Burst Linker to total point loss just like in an Unlimited EK. Not an Enemy Kill, but an Unlimited Player Kill.

That was the whole point then. If the Oscillatory camp had brought about this forced change, then that had to have been their aim. The complete elimination of Nega Nebulus, which had repeatedly checked the plans of the Acceleration Research Society and the White King.

A powerful shiver of fear numbing his avatar’s limbs, Haruyuki prepared to once again urge Ash and the others to retreat temporarily. But before he could, he heard a voice calling out to him from the rear.

“Corvus, are you serious?!”

Quickly turning around, he saw Sky Raker racing toward him, her white dress fluttering. Behind her were Ardor Maiden, Aqua Current, and the other members of the attack team. Seeing them run in, Chocolat and her friends also came running their way after their temporary retreat to the south.

Reflexively, Haruyuki counted his comrades. Three of the Four Elements, Nega Nebulus’s executive. Beside them was the Triplex, the former Prominence executive of Blood Leopard, Cassis Moose, and Thistle Porcupine. To the rear, Cyan Pile, Lime Bell, and Magenta Scissor were clustered together. Adding in Ash and the other two on his American motorcycle; Chocolat Puppeter and her friends; Haruyuki; and Metatron made a total of seventeen. Only he, their secret weapon, wasn’t there, but that was all according to the plan.

Since everyone on their attack team had been able to join the battle, that meant that the White Legion had placed the maximum of nearly twenty people in Minato Area No. 3 in anticipation of their attack. It was only natural that they would put an emphasis on protecting the area with their headquarters, but the issue was why they had included several of the Seven Dwarves on the defense team.

Bemoaning the fact that his investigation on the Highest Level had ended so abruptly, Haruyuki explained the situation to Sky Raker. “Master, we’ve been moved to the real Unlimited Neutral Field. The White Legion is probably aiming to—”

“Servant!” Metatron cut him off. “There!” The 3-D icon’s small wing pointed. Following it, he turned his head back up to the sky approaching dawn.

Countless white objects were dancing down from the rich-purple clouds, lightly, softly. When he caught one in his open palm, it immediately melted into water and then instantly evaporated. He didn’t feel any cold, but no matter how he looked at it, this was…

“Snow?” he murmured.

“There aren’t supposed to be any weather effects in the Demon City stage.” Naturally, it was Takumu who responded. “Well, though, given the abnormal situation, I can’t say anything with certainty.”

“What is this nonsense you speak?!” The 3-D icon flapped her thin wings. “This is the Mean Level overdrive phenomenon. It’s due to the power that you all call Incarnayte!”

“What?!” At a loss for words, Haruyuki looked up at the dark sky once more.

The pure-white snow was not just falling quietly from the sky above Sengakuji, but it enveloped the entire center of Minato Area No. 3 at least. There were indeed ranged Incarnate techniques, but he had never seen nor heard of a technique with such a wide-ranging effect.

Who on earth and to what end…? He followed the drifting snow with his eyes. And there he found a crouching, silent figure.

It was the White Legion’s powerful warrior Glacier Behemoth, aka Sneezy. Haruyuki had been fiercely engaged with him until just before the stage had been manipulated. Just as his name would indicate, Behemoth made liberal use of his powerful freezing techniques to push the three members of the Petit Paquet group to the line between life and death and tortured Haruyuki when he raced in as backup. So was this snowfall his Incarnate?

Haruyuki stared at the massive form encamped some twenty meters away, gripping his Enhanced Armament, Lucid Blade, in his right hand.

Behemoth had been completely silent since murmuring “King…Does this mean that now is that time?” right after the forced shift. The way the enormous avatar was pulled into himself, head hanging, it was almost as though he were afraid of something. Or—this couldn’t possibly have been it, but—

He almost looked as if he was apologizing to Haruyuki and his comrades.

In the midst of the gradually intensifying snow, Sky Raker spoke in a low, strained voice. “The situation is too unclear. I’m sorry, but we have to stop the mission for the time being and go back to the real world. The nearest portal is…”

“Shinagawa Station,” Cassis Moose noted. “If this is the real Unlimited Neutral Field, that is.”

“There’s no doubt about that,” Haruyuki said.

Fuko nodded lightly. She turned to Utai, who was standing at her side. “Maiden. Give the retreat signal.”

“That’s a roger.” Ardor Maiden turned her longbow toward the snowy sky. Just as Glacier Behemoth had called his comrades to him with a light beam technique, the Nega Nebulus troops had decided in advance on all kinds of signals from Maiden’s flaming arrows. Although the majority of the team was gathered together there, they had to let him, standing by to the rear, know about the retreat as well.

She pulled back the longbow string, and even when the bow generated an arrow of flames, Behemoth didn’t move. The Oscillatory Burst Linkers encamped on the roofs of the buildings to the rear also showed no signs of approaching. The Incarnate snow simply continued to fall silently on the battlefield.

Bowstring fully drawn, Utai released her hand after a moment of stillness. The arrow wreathed in crimson flames flew upward. But when it was barely ten meters up in the sky, its glimmer abruptly faded and vanished as though the arrow had burned itself up.

“What?!” Utai let out a small cry. Ardor Maiden’s longbow, Flame Caller, was a superior Enhanced Armament, and it had a range on par with a rifle when the bowstring was pulled all the way back. The arrow should have easily reached the low-hanging clouds and produced a light visible from anywhere in the area, but now this was no signal at all.

She moved to pull the bowstring back once more, but then her hand froze. She quickly turned her whole small body to the west. Haruyuki had sensed it, too, now. An extremely powerful pressure, enough to shake his avatar to the core. Before he could discern the source, he heard a voice.

“Any flame’s gonna flicker out in my snow.”

He’d heard this lisping, sweet young girl’s voice before.

“Top of Behemoth,” Blood Leopard with her keen eyesight muttered briefly.

Taking her lead, he narrowed his eyes to peer beyond the falling snow. There was a small human figure on top of the head of the crouching beast who had lost one of his horns; the figure had probably moved there cloaked by the snow and the moonless dawn. He couldn’t make out the details, but there was no mistaking the silhouette of that armor with the snowflake motif. It was the Seven Dwarves’ number two, the one who had chased Haruyuki and Metatron to the Highest Level and tried to sever their link: Snow Fairy.

So did that mean that it was her Incarnate snow? If it was powerful enough to snuff out Maiden’s flame arrow, then it was truly a terrifyingly powerful technique. But for all that, not only did it not do any damage, he didn’t even feel any cold, so what was—?

“Crap,” Aqua Current murmured hoarsely as she flicked the fingers of a hand covered in flowing water armor to send droplets of water scattering ahead of her. Like the flame arrow, the shimmering droplets froze instantly a mere ten meters in front of her and fell to the ground like glass beads. “We’re surrounded by a super-low-temperature field.”

“Huh? S-so then is it just that it’s not cold here?” Haruyuki’s voice was tense, and Sky Raker nodded without a word. He hurriedly surveyed his surroundings again and realized that the snow was falling perpendicularly within a space of about twenty meters around the party only; just beyond that, it was swirling violently. He had no doubt that the second they stepped into that maelstrom, they would be assaulted by a fierce cold and take serious damage.

“You can’t leave that area now,” came Snow Fairy’s childish voice once more. The falling snow gradually grew thicker, and before he knew it, the buildings on all sides were basically invisible.

“We could do a power charge and retreat to the portal,” Sky Raker murmured, perhaps judging that the situation would only get worse if they didn’t act soon.

Ash Roller lightly revved his motorcycle’s engine. “I’ve been waiting for that, Master. You let us take the lead.” Seated behind Ash, Utan and Olive bobbed their heads.

Fuko gave them a nod in return. “Please do, Ash. When I deploy the defensive wall, take that as a signal and ride south. I’ll cover everyone else, and we’ll run after the motorcycle. All right?”

Everyone else nodded in unison.

This exchange was all in whispers and quiet voices, so being twenty meters away, Snow Fairy couldn’t possibly have heard it. But from the other side of the curtain of dancing snowflakes, Haruyuki felt like he could hear a faint giggling, and he clenched his fists before returning Lucid Blade to the sheath hanging on his hip and readying himself for the signal to charge.

In the center of the party, Fuko slowly brought her hand up and shouted, “Wind Veil!!”

A brilliant-green overlay jetted from the palm of her hand. This instantly transformed into a whirlwind and expanded, knocking away the snow until they were all wrapped in the wind barrier. Fuko’s Incarnate defensive wall had once protected them from even the fourth quadrant Incarnate technique Rust Order, which the Acceleration Research Society’s Rust Jigsaw had activated, and now it pushed back the vague fear and anxiety Haruyuki had been feeling to give him new energy.

The rear tire of Ash Roller’s motorcycle spun ferociously. The instant the tread bit into the cobblestones, the three-seater American motorcycle dashed ahead furiously. The remaining fourteen members also shoved off the ground and started to run.

A hundred meters to Sengakuji Temple’s south gate. From there, depending on the route, it was about a kilometer to Shinagawa Station where the portal was. If they ran at top speed, they could cover the distance in a few minutes. In a formation with the three low-health Petit Paquet members and their depleted health gauges in the center, the team charged into the extremely low temperate space where the Incarnate snowstorm was twisting a blinding white.

Or at least they were about to.

“Last Glacial Period.” The weighty technique name chased up from behind and slipped ahead of them.

Krrrrrr! An incredible roar shook the stage, and something suddenly rose up from the ground around them, blue and clear. Ice. Thick ice pillars popped up to form a circular wall.

“S’noooo!” Ash Roller put on the brakes. Sparks flying from the front rotor, the machine decelerated, but it didn’t look anywhere close to stopping.

“Got it!”

“On it!”

Cyan Pile and Cassis Moose cried at the same time and came out in front of the motorcycle from either side. Pile attacked the ice wall with his Pile Driver and Moose with the massive horns on his head. The iron pile and the spiked horns slammed into the ice wall at exactly the same moment, and then the two largest avatars on the attacking team stopped in their tracks. Unable to completely absorb the energy they generated, they were thrown backward.

“Unh!”

“Nngh!”

Pile and Moose fell to the ground, and a second later, Ash’s motorcycle also crashed into the ice wall from the side. The three riding it managed to avoid fatal injury by kicking off the wall with their feet, but the mirror flew off, and the muffler bent in half.

Haruyuki immediately deployed the wings on his back to slow himself down, catching Raker and the others running up from behind him as he cried out, dumbfounded, “It’s…not even scratched?!”

The ice wall had been hit with the full attack power of both avatars, but he couldn’t see even a scratch, much less a crack in the wall that shone slick in the faint-purple light of the dawn from the east. The wall was a prison ten meters around and even taller than that, completely locking away the seventeen Burst Linkers.

“This ice was also produced with Incarnayte,” Metatron muttered from his left shoulder.

Haruyuki reflexively looked back and caught sight of a dark shadow still crouching on the other side of the thick ice. The technique call he’d heard before had to have been Glacier Behemoth’s. When he’d fought Haruyuki, he’d insisted on a clean fight. There had been no surprise attacks, no helping hands, no challenges or jeers. And now he had launched the first strike with an Incarnate attack, the ultimate taboo for Burst Linkers.

It had been Incarnate power that had forcibly moved them to the Unlimited Neutral Field, and if the Oscillatory side’s intention was to get Nega Nebulus in an Unlimited PK, then obviously they were prepared to do whatever it took right from the start, but even so, Haruyuki couldn’t stop himself from shouting.

“Behemoth!!”

Did his voice make it through Fuko’s defensive barrier and the wall of ice to reach him? The massive creature stirred for the first time since their forced move to a new playing field, then slowly stood, Snow Fairy still riding on his head, his sharp eye lenses glittering palely.

“For the sake of our great cause,” Behemoth announced in his gravelly voice, which felt like it went straight into Haruyuki’s psyche. “And for the sake of all Burst Linkers…You’ll have to be erased here.”

“Y-your ‘great cause’? For the sake of Burst Linkers?” Haruyuki’s voice was hoarse, as if he was squeezing it out from the depths of his body. “Are you saying…what you’ve done was just?”

“You all must have realized it by now, too, actually.” It was Snow Fairy who responded, from her perch atop Behemoth’s head. “There’s a far, far more cruel curse on this world than the Armor of Catastrophe, than even the ISS kits.” The arms she stretched out toward the sky seemed far too slim to be part of a fighting game. Her slender silhouette was enveloped in a crisp, bright light. “We will set you free…from this curse that binds you.”

Her overlay spread out, shaking the air, and the falling snow turned into particles of light with no heat. “Brinicle.”

The surrounding snow started to spin violently, glittering all the while. Behemoth and Snow Fairy and the entire Sengakuji area were swallowed up in a white light and disappeared. Haruyuki instinctively dropped into a fighting stance, but the pale snowstorm simply raged on the other side of Behemoth’s ice wall.

Was this another entrapment-type technique to check the movement of the seventeen avatars? In that case, maybe they should smash the ice wall now while they had the chance.

With this thought in mind, Haruyuki stretched out the fingers of his right hand to activate his Incarnate technique Laser Sword. But before he could focus his imagination, the 3-D icon on his shoulder called out sharply.

“Servant! Above!”

Together with his immediate neighbors, who’d also heard the tiny voice, Haruyuki turned his head to the dawn sky. The rest of the group soon followed suit. A funnel-shaped white cloud was descending slowly.

It was shuddering, a whirlwind spinning at incredibly high speeds—an ice tornado.

Was this tornado the true form of Snow Fairy’s Incarnate technique Brinicle? If so, it was painfully slow for an attack technique. The tornado stretched out at a speed of about one second per meter—in other words, the tip that was currently thirty meters above them would take about thirty seconds to reach the ground where Haruyuki and his friends stood.

There wasn’t a Burst Linker alive who would stand by helplessly to be hit with this technique if Fairy had activated it on its own, meaning the technique required that its target first be restrained through some other means. An attack in which speed was completely abandoned for the sake of some other power…

“This is bad…” Thistle Porcupine’s hoarse voice backed up Haruyuki’s thinking. The fluffy fur on her back stood on end, perhaps because of her extreme tension. “That Incarnate technique’s prob’ly the type that’s all attack power; get hit, and you die. If you can’t dodge or defend, you’re in big trouble.”

“Anyone who can use a defensive-type Incarnate technique, get ready to defend!” Team leader Fuko responded quickly. “Anyone who can use physical or fire types, smash this wall!”

“R-roger!!” Haruyuki shouted back immediately, and now he really did focus his awareness in his right hand. To one side, Takumu grabbed the tip of the pile poking out of his Enhanced Armament with his left hand, while beside him, Akira crossed both arms in front of her.

“Cyan Blade!!”

“Phase Trans! Keen!”

The two blue types shouted their technique names simultaneously, causing a gush of overlay in different shades of blue. Cyan Pile’s Pile Driver transformed into a great two-handed sword, Aqua Current’s flowing armor into frozen armor and a katar shield.

Ash Roller, who hadn’t learned any Incarnate techniques as a matter of general principle; Bush Utan and Olive Grab, who had kept their distance from anything bearing the Incarnate name since they were freed of the ISS kits; the Petit Paquet group, who had only just learned of the existence of the Incarnate System from Fuko and the others; and Lime Bell, who hadn’t fully mastered an Incarnate technique yet, were put in the center of the circle, and the remaining members of the group positioned themselves to activate their individual Incarnate techniques.

The defenders were Sky Raker, who had already activated her Wind Veil; Ardor Maiden, who turned her longbow into a handheld fan; and Cassis Moose, who had a purple overlay in his massive horns. The attackers were Silver Crow, together with Cyan Pile; Aqua Current; Blood Leopard, who had grown the claws on her hands to a great length; Magenta Scissor, with large knives ready on her hips; and Thistle Porcupine, who had changed the fur on her back into sharp needles.

It took ten seconds for them all to make their preparations after Fuko’s shouted instructions, and the tip of the white tornado had already dropped down to fifteen meters above them.

Fifteen seconds left. For Burst Linkers with focus pushed to their actual limits, this was definitely not a short time period.

“We move together!” Fuko shouted.

Haruyuki turned toward the ice wall at the same time as Takumu and the others and dropped into position. Behind him, Fuko, Utai, and Cassis brandished hands toward the tornado.

“Three, two, one, zero!!”

Haruyuki swung his right hand. “Laser…Sword!!” He’d focused his imagination around the singular resolve of smashing the wall, and now it produced a sword of light.

Takumu and Akira brandished their steel greatsword and icy dagger, too.

“Aaaaah!!” A battle cry ripping out of his throat, Haruyuki moved to pierce the thick ice wall Glacier Behemoth had created.

In that instant, in the corner of his eye, someone who had not been there a mere second earlier popped into existence. It wasn’t exactly a sudden appearance, though. Haruyuki felt more like it was just that he’d finally now noticed someone who’d been there right from the start.

The time between Haruyuki activating his Incarnate technique and the sword coming into contact with the ice wall had to have been at best 0.2 or 0.3 seconds. But in that brief instant, he saw someone appear, put up a hand, and activate an Incarnate technique in a wan voice.

“Imaginary Time.”

The technique generated absolutely no light, no sound, not even a vibration. Haruyuki’s health gauge didn’t drop so much as a pixel. The Incarnate sword in his right arm simply vanished.

To his side, the two-handed sword that Takumu had been about to bring down also disappeared, and on his other side, the ice armor covering Akira’s body melted. Fuko’s Incarnate defensive wall that had enveloped them all was also gone.

Dumbfounded, Haruyuki was unable to pull out of the blow he was in the middle of dealing, the force of his entire body and soul behind it, and his striking hand crashed into the wall. Naturally, not only was the wall not smashed, it wasn’t even scratched, and the armor of his own fingers creaked as a sharp pain overtook him.

But he barely even registered this.

An Incarnate technique to cancel other Incarnate techniques. He couldn’t believe something like that even existed, but that was the only explanation he could come up with.

“Wha—?!” Takumu cried.

“Impossible!” Akira muttered.

Haruyuki turned to the left and looked directly at the duel avatar who had abruptly appeared.

A tall, slender silhouette like a tapered stick. Face mask with neither nose nor mouth. The armor covering his body was a pale, shiny porcelain-like ivory. One of the Seven Dwarves, the full proxy for the White King, Ivory Tower.

Haruyuki had only ever seen him at the meetings of the Seven Kings; he’d never fought him nor even seen him on the battlefield. His shock at someone like this suddenly showing up and exhibiting a terrifyingly powerful technique—one that could wipe out the Incarnate of nine people in an instant—quickly changed to fear.

They couldn’t move from where they stood unless they destroyed the ice prison locking them away—Glacier Behemoth’s Last Glacial Period. Snow Fairy’s Brinicle was closing in from the sky above, sure to do massive damage if it swallowed them up. The tip of the tornado had already reached the space directly above the heads of the party, and they had six—no, five seconds until it touched down.

“Corvus!!” The first to pick herself up from the shock and fear and break the momentary standstill was Fuko.

““Run!!”” she and Metatron both shouted to him at the same time.

And indeed, in this situation, the only one who could get over the 10-meter ice wall and escape was the winged Silver Crow. But he could never abandon his precious comrades just to save himself. But he brushed away this instant of hesitation. Fuko wasn’t ordering him to run for sentimental reasons. If just one of them could escape, they would still have a chance to turn the situation around. In the worst-case scenario, the attacking team could be annihilated on that very spot, and they had to avoid that at all costs.

“Okay!!” he shouted, his voice cracking with heartbreak, and spread the wings on his back.

Three seconds until the lethal tornado touched down.

Just one of them, at least. Haruyuki made an instantaneous decision about the lightest avatar closest to him and stretched his arms out as far as they would go. “Bell!!”

Two seconds left.

Lime Bell reflexively offered her own hands at Haruyuki’s call. He kicked off the ground, and clutching those hands, he vibrated the wings on his back with all his might.

One second.

Hanging onto Chiyuri tightly with both arms, Haruyuki lifted off, while behind him, a spinning drill of freezing air passed by him. It couldn’t have touched him, yet he felt a stabbing chill on his back, and his health gauge dropped ever so slightly.

“Nngh!” Gritting his teeth, he flew up toward the outside in the gap between the ice wall and the tornado.

At the same time, the cool whirling air reached the ground.

“Aah!” Chiyuri cried out in sorrow. And, at the edges of his vision, Haruyuki saw why.

The interior of the ice wall, ten meters around, was instantly dyed a snowy white. Diamond dust glittering in the pale dawn’s light swirled and cloaked his comrades from view. And then, in the center of the space, pale-blue and purple and then brown light effects erupted upward one after another. Having already taken serious damage in the battle with Behemoth, Chocolat, Mint, and Plum had died, unable to withstand the tornado. A little after that, two green effects. Utan and Olive.

Haruyuki assumed—or rather hoped desperately—that the death effects would stop there.

But the crushing noise was relentless. Two blue lights near the outer edge. Cyan Pile and Aqua Current. Gray and reddish-purple in the center. Ash Roller and Magenta Scissor.

“They—!” Haruyuki groaned, hovering some distance away from the ice wall.

“Servant!” Metatron yelled again from his shoulder. “There!”

He hurriedly shifted his gaze. Someone had leapt down from the roof of a building on the west side of the battleground and was now approaching in several large jumps.

“Nngh…” He couldn’t fight here. He spread the wings on his back and started to fly toward Shinagawa Station, which would have been to the southwest.

The sounds of not only his Oscillatory pursuer but also the avatars being swallowed up by the tornado chased after him. As he flew with everything he had, he counted them with every heartbeat.

Ten, eleven, twelve. For some reason, even though he couldn’t see the effect color, Haruyuki could tell which sound was whose death. Cassis Moose, Thistle Porcupine, Ardor Maiden.

Thirteen. Blood Leopard.

And fourteen. Sky Raker.

“It can’t be…,” Haruyuki said in a faint voice, tears welling up in the eye lenses beneath his goggles.

No matter how specialized in destruction Snow Fairy’s Incarnate technique was or how impossible Ivory Tower’s Incarnate technique made it to use Incarnate techniques, he simply couldn’t believe that even the veteran high ranker Elements and Triplex could be killed instantly in a single blow. And now that he was thinking about it, this was the first time he’d come face-to-face with a scenario in which Fuko, Utai, and Akira fell.

It can’t be, he was about to say once more when the fifteenth sound of destruction reached his ear. Swallowing his breath, he did a recount of his comrades in the back of his mind.

Sixteen people had been trapped in the prison of ice, basically the entire attacking team. Haruyuki and Chiyuri had escaped, leaving fourteen in the prison. In which case, the fifteenth sound of death he’d just heard…

Of course. Ivory Tower. To prevent Nega Nebulus from escaping from the Last Glacial Period, he’d snuck up right next to them and canceled their Incarnate techniques. And then he’d gotten caught up in Brinicle and died.

Fairy’s Incarnate technique was terrifyingly, overwhelmingly powerful. But what was even more terrifying was that the White Legion were so serious that they didn’t balk at sacrificing one of their own, effectively the number two of their Legion. They were intent on killing Nega Nebulus’s main force and banishing them forever from the Accelerated World.

“Our friends…!” Chiyuri cried out, face pressed up against Haruyuki’s chest. He tried to find something to say to the childhood friend he’d just barely managed to save, but before he could, Metatron’s voice came in warning once more.

“Servant, you’re being pursued!”

“What?!”

Looking over his shoulder, he did indeed see a single black shadow leaping from rooftop to rooftop, chasing after them at basically Haruyuki’s speed. That was some serious jumping power, but it was less than five hundred meters now to the Shinagawa Station. If he just kept on flying and dived into the portal, he could evade the danger for the time being. Once Haruyuki and Chiyuri woke up inside the bus running along Meiji-dori Street in the real world, they could remove the Neurolinkers from the necks of Fuko and the others, and all their avatars would vanish from the Unlimited Neutral Field, thereby escaping the threat of Unlimited PK.

The Oscillatory side also had to have known that, which was why they tried to capture them, so that none of the members of Nega Nebulus would escape. And that was why they’d sent someone after Haruyuki. But he couldn’t let himself be caught. He absolutely had to reach the portal and save his friends.

“Aaaah!” Prepared to use up everything that was left in his health gauge, Haruyuki increased the frequency of the vibration of his wings.

Ahead, the multipurpose super-skyscraper at Shinagawa Station, built with the redevelopment of 2020, rose up darkly into the sky. The portal was inside the entrance on the first floor. Because he was carrying Lime Bell, he couldn’t hit his normal maximum speed, but at this pace, they would reach the portal while maintaining the distance from their pursuer.

Haruyuki tried to knock his speed up to the next level in order to pull through the remaining three hundred meters.

However.

“Crow…That—!!” He heard Metatron’s voice once more, this time even more tense than before.

And then Haruyuki saw it, too. An enormous black shadow with organic curves crouching in the rotary in front of the station building.

The shadow writhed ponderously, perhaps sensing the approach of Haruyuki and his friends. Several heads stretched up at length from the short, stout torso, and countless red eyes glittered. Given its height of some ten meters or more, there was no doubt it was Beast level or higher.

“That is a Hydra-type high-level Being! This is not an opponent you can defeat!” Normally, Metatron would try to make him attack no matter how powerful the enemy, but she checked him fiercely now. However, if they didn’t enter that Enemy’s aggro range, they couldn’t reach the portal at Shinagawa Station.

“Dammit! Why?!” Haruyuki gritted his teeth at the question of why now, of all times, at this critical juncture, a Super-class Enemy was camped out right in front of the portal, before gasping sharply.

It couldn’t have been a coincidence. Through some means, the White Legion had lured that Enemy to the portal and fixed it there—to prevent the members of Nega Nebulus from leaving the Unlimited Neutral Field. Just like the Legend-class Enemy Archangel Metatron had been forcibly moved from the Shiba Park Underground Labyrinth to Tokyo Midtown.

When he looked even more closely, he saw a silver crown with sharp thorns biting into the center of the Enemy’s head. He had no doubt it was the same as the silver circlet that had once restrained Metatron.

“They would go that far!” Groaning quietly, he spread his wings to decelerate, left with no other choice. There were other portals in the area besides the one at Shinagawa Station, but for all that, they likely had Super-class Enemies placed at each of them. He didn’t have much left in his special-attack gauge, either; he would have to descend and recharge it.

After a glance back, Haruyuki landed on the roof of a large hotel some distance from the station. Their pursuer was probably still on the trail, but he couldn’t imagine that whoever it was could climb the iron walls without handholds. He set Lime Bell on her feet.

“Chiyu, you okay?”

“Yeah…I’m fine. No damage.” Chiyuri answered bravely, but then she quickly lowered her face. “But…Everyone else…All of them…”

Haruyuki silently patted her back. Even through her duel avatar’s hard armor, he could feel her trembling. He was just as shocked himself. They might have had three separate Incarnate techniques piled on against them, but the fact that the executives of both Nega Nebulus and Prominence had been annihilated in an instant was nothing other than a nightmare.

However, they couldn’t just stay there like that. Their fourteen comrades would regenerate in an hour, and they would very likely be killed again instantaneously with the same multiple Incarnate techniques. Fuko and the other high rankers had points to spare, but that wasn’t necessarily the case for Ash Roller and his gang—or for the members of Petit Paquet. They had to return to the bus in the real world as soon as possible and remove everyone’s Neurolinkers.

“Metatron, where’s the next-nearest portal?” Haruyuki asked in a hoarse voice, holding Chiyuri in his arms.

The 3-D icon moved to be positioned in front of Haruyuki’s face and indicated the southwest with one wing. “It’s approximately a kilometer in that direction.”

Hurriedly drawing out a map of the Minato area in his mind, he overlaid the landmarks in the real world. “Gotanda Station, then…”

“But, Servant, most likely…”

Haruyuki guessed what Metatron wasn’t saying and gave voice to the thoughts he’d had earlier. “Yeah, there’s probably a different Super-class Enemy placed there, too. Maybe we should just head for a faraway portal.”

“I can confirm from the Highest Level the presence of a Being in the vicinity of the portal, but there is a strong possibility that that Snow Fairy or what have you will interfere again, regardless of the distance. If the link between us is severed, the situation will be all that much worse.”

Metatron was right. The only advantage Haruyuki and Chiyuri had against the Oscillatory side was Metatron’s presence. Even the White Legion wouldn’t be able to easily obtain the full cooperation of a Divine-class Enemy. Tactically, he couldn’t lose her, and emotionally, he couldn’t stand the thought of being without this rapport they had.

In other words, in this battlefield, at least, scouting from the Highest Level was effectively not an option.

“Once I recharge my special-attack gauge, we’ll fly south to Kawasaki. They can’t have set Enemies outside of Tokyo, too…I think,” Haruyuki muttered, half to reassure himself, and then took his hand off Chiyuri’s back and looked around.

The roof of the hotel was deserted, but there were decorative objects arranged along the outer edges that would probably have been air ducts and solar panels in the real world. If he could smash those, he’d be able to recover his special-attack gauge to some degree.

“Hang on a sec,” Haruyuki said to Chiyuri as he was about to move toward the closest of the objects.

However, Metatron suddenly flashed a tapered beam of light, and taking this as a warning, Haruyuki instantly reached for the hilt of the sword on his hip—the Enhanced Armament Lucid Blade.

In the right edge of his field of view, there was another small flicker. By the time he realized it was a reflection of the dawn light dyeing the eastern sky red, Haruyuki had yanked his sword upward.

A glittering blade grazed Lime Bell’s pointed hat and squealed sharply. Repelled by Haruyuki’s quick draw, a metal stick with six sharply tapered cross sections was thrust into the roof—a so-called bo-shuriken. The sickening color painted on the skin of the steel was probably poison.

“Who’s there?!” Haruyuki called out to the north side of the roof, keeping Chiyuri behind him. But the answer to that question was more than half-apparent. It had to have been the member of Oscillatory who’d been pursuing them.

Finally, a human figure appeared as if bleeding out from behind an air duct. His face mask hid everything but his eye lenses, and the thin armor had a somehow traditionally Japanese shape to it. The naked body of the avatar was very slightly exposed around the neck and upper arms, and this was covered in a bodysuit that looked as if it had been knit from wire. He didn’t need to see the dark-gray, blue-tinged color of the armor; the nature of their pursuer was clear from the design motif.

“A ninja?” Chiyuri murmured from behind him.

Without reacting to Haruyuki’s challenge or Chiyuri’s question, the ninja-shaped avatar thrust his right hand into his chest. The fingers that reemerged had two shuriken wedged between them, exactly the same as the one that had stabbed into the roof.

Since the large majority of buildings in a Demon City stage were impenetrable, the blue ninja must have climbed the dozens of meters up the side of the building, with essentially no handholds. From this fact alone, it was obvious that Haruyuki needed to keep his guard up tight against this opponent. But he couldn’t fall now. Absolutely not.

“Haru, I’m fine. I can protect myself,” Chiyuri said, leaping far back before dropping into a defensive position.

Nodding wordlessly, Haruyuki readied his sword directly in front of his body. He’d obtained Lucid Blade as his level-six bonus, and that day was the first time he was using it in actual combat. If he was being completely honest, he was overwhelmingly unaccustomed to it when his fighting style so far had been punches and kicks, but even so, it meant a great deal to him to be holding the sword.

With the silver blade turned on him, the ninja avatar reached a hand around to his back and drew a truncated blade from the black-lacquer sheath equipped there. Single-edged with no curve to it, a so-called ninja sword.

Gripping the two shuriken in his right hand and the shortsword in his left, the avatar moved nonchalantly, almost as though the idea of two against one didn’t bother him in the slightest. He took three steps forward.

And then vanished.

Except—he had simply bounded to the right at incredible speed. Haruyuki managed to catch a fragment of a blue afterimage in the corner of his eye, and he sought out the figure of his enemy as he leapt in the opposite direction.

He wasn’t there. Despite the fact that there was absolutely nothing to hide behind in the center of the roof, there wasn’t another soul in the wide-open area. But it had only been the blink of an eye since the ninja stepped out of Haruyuki’s sight; there was no way he would have been able to leave the roof in that span of time.

Haruyuki stopped for a moment.

“Servant! Below!” The thought from Metatron pierced his head like a lightning bolt. But the area at his feet was covered in the steel of the Demon City stage, and only the shadow of the skyscraper a little ways off to the east—

Haruyuki gasped.

From within that shadow, the blue ninja appeared, accompanied by the faint babbling of water, slicing his sword toward Haruyuki’s right ankle.

If Haruyuki had thrust Lucid Blade downward even a millisecond later, he likely would have had his foot amputated. But the blade just barely managed to defend against the cutting attack, and it squealed fiercely, sparks shooting everywhere. It was all Haruyuki could do to hold on to the sword; a counterattack was out of the question. But rather than fight against the reactive force, the ninja slipped out of the shadow and once again put some distance between them.

Haruyuki pulled the tip of his sword out from where it had bitten ever so slightly into the steel floor and stepped once more into the shadow with his uninjured foot. But the only thing he felt was unyielding hardness; his foot showed no sign of sinking down.

In other words, he was looking at either the ninja avatar’s special attack or ability. He must have used the same power to climb the hotel wall. And Haruyuki was already familiar with a similar technique.

“That was Black Vise’s technique just now,” Haruyuki said in a low voice, staring intently at the still-silent ninja.

Here the man finally responded. He narrowed his dark eye lenses into a thread, and a voice worn like a cold wind in the dead of winter rang out. “Indeed. The secret technique Shadow Lurker, taught to me by my master.”

“So then you acknowledge it. The fact that the Acceleration Research Society’s Black Vise is a member of Oscillatory Universe!” Haruyuki had intended this to be cutting, but his adversary showed not the slightest sign of upset.

“Inevitable, that knowledge,” he replied calmly. “Thus determined, those persons shall find total loss here.” The dark-blue eye lenses shone briefly with a light as cold as ice.

There had been no information about a ninja-type avatar in Kuroyukihime’s notes. Which meant, at the very least, he wasn’t one of the Seven Dwarves, but even if he was as powerful as the likes of Glacier Behemoth or Snow Fairy, Haruyuki absolutely could not allow himself to be defeated. Fuko, Utai, and the others had gone so far as to sacrifice themselves so that Haruyuki and Chiyuri could get away. Even if all the nearby portals were blocked, he absolutely had to return to the real world and save everyone from this death trap.

This resolve humming through every cell of his body, Haruyuki readjusted his grip on his beloved sword. In response, the ninja also wordlessly readied the shortsword in his left hand.

What Haruyuki believed was the advantage to having a sword was the fact that it expanded his own range of options while simultaneously narrowing his opponent’s.

In the real world, the sword had fallen out of use in actual combat with the sudden development of the gun and had been transformed into a symbolic and decorative tool, but that was not necessarily the case in the Accelerated World. Just as could be gleaned from the fact that the red-type avatars and their long-distance attacks could fight just as well as blue-type avatars with close-range attacks, a duel avatar’s sword could perform in ways that surpassed a gun.

What made this possible was the Burst Linker’s super-high reaction speed. Just as Haruyuki had repelled the poisoned shuriken earlier, he could defend against attacks that he would otherwise have been forced to use a bare hand against. Pushing this defense via sword to the extreme, he would even be able to handle large artillery and missiles.

When Haruyuki readied his sword, the ninja had pulled out his own. Now, though he still had the two shuriken in his right hand, he could only throw them with that hand.

I’ll bring the fight in close and stop him from sinking into the shadows. If it’s a contest of speed, I can’t lose! Even against a ninja!

With this intention close to his heart, Haruyuki used up what little remained of his special-attack gauge and pushed the wings on his back into action without shifting his position in the slightest. A full-speed dash with no preparatory movement, followed by his sword slicing downward—or at least a show of that—before launching a mid-kick.

The surprise attack only half succeeded; the kick was blocked with an elbow. The ninja’s armor strength did indeed appear to be the bare minimum, however, so while Haruyuki couldn’t see his opponent’s health gauge, the feedback he got told him the damage had made it all the way to the naked avatar body inside.

While Haruyuki’s leg was still in the air, he used the charge to his special-attack gauge he’d gotten from the blow to swing into a right roundhouse kick. The ninja guarded against this, too, with his other elbow, but now that both arms had been hit with Haruyuki’s unique stinging Aerial Combo blows, they would have to have been numbed, if only for an instant.

“Hah!” Using his wings again for a short-distance thrust, this time he really did bring his sword down with a battle cry. Given how close together they were, Lucid Blade’s sharp edge should have caught the ninja’s torso. However.

“Nin!” The ninja uttered a strange cry, and instead of retreating, he took a step closer and caught the sword on his forehead. The headband armor shattered soon enough, but a metal band like the bowl of a helmet was wrapped around the forehead of the naked body, bringing the slicing sword to a halt. Once again, a shower of sparks erupted.

“Whoa!” Haruyuki had put everything he had into the blow when he launched it in midair, and now with this unexpected defense, he lost his balance.

“Dan!” the ninja grunted, and the sword in his left hand flashed.

Haruyuki desperately thrust backward with his wings, but the shortsword slid into a gap in between the armor of his forearm and the palm of his hand to cut into the naked body of his avatar. Fortunately, the cut was shallow, and he lost less than 5 percent of his health gauge, but if it had been a few centimeters deeper, he would have lost the use of his right hand.

Once he succeeded in somehow managing to put some distance between them, he readjusted his grip on his sword, clenching his teeth against the pain in his hand. The ninja also readied his blade in a backhand grip without a word.

Judging from the earlier shadow surprise attack and this blow just now, it was clear the man was aiming for Haruyuki’s extremities—a fighting style that sought to do damage by amputation, terrifying.

But Haruyuki didn’t get the sense that he was enjoying the duel in the slightest. Maybe that was only natural in this situation, though—Oscillatory was trying to drive all the members of Nega Nebulus to total point loss; this was nothing other than total slaughter.

Haruyuki wanted to at least ask his opponent’s name, but he got the feeling that the other Burst Linker would never answer him, so he closed his mouth before it was fully open and focused his entire mind on the tip of Lucid Blade.

Lucid was an adjective meaning aware, with the root word apparently being the Latin word for light. And just as the name would suggest, the sword had one special ability. To activate it, he needed to fight under normal status and charge his attack-energy gauge above a certain amount; but after the intense battle with Behemoth, he more than met that condition.

“Conversion.”

In response to Haruyuki’s voice command, Lucid Blade’s silver body was enveloped in a pure-white light from the base as it whined in vibration. And it wasn’t simply glowing. The metal sword itself was transformed into a so-called energy blade. In this state, the sword lost basically all mass and could no longer catch or reflect the hard bodies of weapons or bullets. Instead, it would cause essentially all objects to melt due to its super-high temperature, and if the weapon was such high priority that it could withstand this heat, the blade would instead slip through it. Most likely, his adversary’s sword was in that range.

And yet, Haruyuki had a reason for daring to “convert” Lucid Blade—the powerful light that the sword itself generated.

After narrowing his eye lenses momentarily at the dazzling brightness of the energy blade, the ninja glanced down at his feet. He must have noticed the new shadow trying to make an appearance at his feet because the gradually increasing brightness of the dawn had been wiped out by the light of the sword. Of course, deep shadows were cut into the world behind them, but if the ninja’s Shadow Lurker was the same level as Black Vise’s, then he wouldn’t be able to dive into his own shadow.

Meanwhile, Haruyuki had used up his special-attack gauge in the full-powered back thrust earlier. From now on, this would be a simple contest of technique against technique.

“It’s okay! I’m going to win!” In his mind, Haruyuki spoke to Chiyuri and Metatron silently watching over him. He knew they had faith in him, but they were also likely on pins and needles. He readied the lightsword in the orthodox midway position in front of himself.

At the same time, the ninja followed suit, his own sword before him diagonally in a backhand grip. His right hand still clutched the two bo-shuriken, but at sword’s length, he wouldn’t be able to throw them. The next time Haruyuki charged in, he would press in on his opponent until the end, glued to him.

Building up resolve deep in his stomach, Haruyuki moved to kick off the steel ground just as the ninja’s body blurred gray—his super-high-speed movement. But this time, Haruyuki didn’t miss seeing the slight change in his center of gravity.

Left!

He obeyed his instincts over visual confirmation and launched a horizontal slash.

Bwon! The lightsword hummed, and the tip caught a hazy shadow. A pale beam of light scattered from the thin armor, but then the ninja’s figure blurred in flowing lines once more.

Up…No, down!

Holding his breath, Haruyuki yanked back the consciousness that was turning toward the sky and moved to beat directly downward with the lightsword.

But before he could, the ninja plastered himself to the floor like a giant spider and slid his shortsword toward Haruyuki’s ankle.

He could dodge it if he jumped. But given that he couldn’t use his wings, he wouldn’t be able to respond to the next hit if he leapt up into the air. And more importantly…

“Here!” Haruyuki kicked at the oncoming blade with everything he had.

Skreek! The earsplitting sound of metal clashing rang in his ears, as orange sparks and crimson particles jetted outward.

The sword flew out of the ninja’s hand and clattered onto the floor, but Haruyuki’s right leg was severed at the ankle at the same time. The pain—fireworks and electric shocks—raced up to the top of his head, but he gritted his teeth and brought his sword down.

Because of his unnatural position, the blow didn’t carry his full weight, but the lightsword’s attack didn’t require weight; as the ninja tried to roll away on the floor, the energy blade cut into his left shoulder, melting the arm away from its base with a roaring impact.

One more…hit!

He braced his severed leg on the floor, and the intense pain caused his field of view to go white again, but he clenched his teeth and brandished the lightsword. Using his special-attack gauge, now recharged thanks to the massive damage both taken and inflicted, he gave everything he had to a thrust dash.

The shining blade was sucked in toward the shoulder of the enemy, who was starting to get to his feet. All he had to do was bring it down, and the ninja avatar would be severed in two. The tip of the blade made contact with the blue-gray armor and instantly melted—

Haruyuki’s entire body creaked and groaned to a stop.

Stunned, he opened his eyes wide, but not only had he stopped moving, he couldn’t even speak. It was as if he were completely encased in transparent plastic. His body was leaning forward as far as possible with only the toes of his left foot touching the floor, yet Lucid Blade’s impact-energy gauge dropped to zero, and the blade returned to its original metal form.

The ninja slipped out from beneath the sword on the verge of ripping through his left shoulder and stood up straight. Haruyuki finally noticed that the two bo-shuriken had disappeared from his right hand at some point.

Had he thrown them in the middle of battle? But they weren’t piercing his duel avatar anywhere, and anyway a simple numbness was one thing, but there was no way a poison that could bring about this mysterious freezing could actually exist.

When he managed to move his eyes and shift his gaze as far to the left as possible, he saw that Chiyuri was similarly frozen in place at the edge of the roof. She was reaching out a hand toward him as if to warn him of something. A long shadow stretched out from her feet, the product of the morning sun. And at the tip, in the center of the silhouette of her pointed hat, a dark, long, slender piece of metal—the ninja’s shuriken—was standing quietly.

Even as he told himself it was impossible, he sent his gaze racing toward his own shadow, the place where Chiyuri was pointing. And there, in the head of Silver Crow’s shadow, wings stretching out from his back, he found the other shuriken.

As Haruyuki noticed this, Metatron’s voice rang out in his mind. “Servant, this is direct interference with the Mean Level—the power of the Incarnayte System!”

“A-an Incarnate technique?!” He was ready to retort that he hadn’t heard any technique name, but then he noticed that the shuriken piercing the head of his shadow was enveloped in an extremely faint gray haze. There was no mistake: That was Incarnate overlay.

The call of a technique name was an important trigger in activating Incarnate techniques, but unlike special attacks, it wasn’t a factor required by the system. The man must have spent long hours training so he could activate the technique without shouting the name. And not only that. During battle, he had probably tossed the two shuriken straight upward and had them drop down precisely on the heads of Chiyuri’s and Haruyuki’s shadows. This, too, was amazing.

Frozen in place, sword brandished in one hand, Haruyuki heard the hoarse voice of his opponent.

“Secret technique, Shadow Tying.” The announcement of the name came very much after the fact.

The ninja picked up his shortsword deftly and flipped it around to point down, showing no hint of the pain of having his left arm melted away.

“Your life is forfeit!” he hissed, closing the distance between them as though he were sliding along the steel floor surface. Divine speed and a special sword attack closed in on Haruyuki’s neck.

If he died there, the ninja would take Chiyuri’s head next. He’d do it over and over and drive both of them to total point loss. Haruyuki couldn’t let that happen.

Placing all his bets on a sliver of hope, he concentrated his imagination into his wings. If he was being held by an Incarnate technique, then it was possible to break the restraint with an Incarnate technique. He couldn’t speak, so he wouldn’t be able to yell the technique name, but even still, he had to try. Forgetting at some point the pain in his right leg, Haruyuki mustered up every bit of his mental energy.

Light…

But he couldn’t activate the Incarnate technique.

The ninja also couldn’t take Haruyuki’s head, however.

“Blast Wave!!”

He heard a cool, clear shout, accompanied by a high-speed shock wave coming right at him—or rather, a crescent-moon-shaped slicing wave slammed into the ninja.

Now he did indeed show a reaction, throwing up his shortsword in defense, but he was pushed backward over ten meters altogether, the ground squealing and creaking beneath him.

A figure landed silently between Haruyuki and his adversary. Haruyuki knew who it was simply from the voice.

The design of the armor, shining a deep sapphire blue, was reminiscent of an ancient noble. The hairstyle of a young samurai, not yet come of age, and the cool, sky-blue eye lenses. In his right hand was held a somewhat slender straightsword, an overwhelming sense of presence clinging to it.

Trilead Tetroxide. The young samurai had only just joined Nega Nebulus before the start of the Territories, and now he glanced at Haruyuki, nodding as if to say, “Leave this to me.”

Facing forward again, he readjusted his grip on the two-handed sword. It was one of the Seven Arcs, The Infinity.

Trilead had been instructed to stay on standby to the rear until the opening of hostilities. Most likely, he’d noticed Haruyuki in flight and the ninja in pursuit and had come after them. Given that he didn’t have the ability to dive into shadows or anything, he’d have to have undertaken the life-threatening and serious task of climbing the hotel wall. But Trilead had climbed it. To save Haruyuki and Chiyuri.

“Oh, Lead…,” Haruyuki earnestly called out to his friend in his immovable mouth.

“You’ve been saved, hmm, Servant?” Metatron also sounded relieved, having already met Trilead in the Castle.

“Yeah…But…” He pushed away the new anxiety bleeding into his heart without letting it into his thoughts.

Lead would win. He was the sole child of the Anomaly Graphite Edge, and he’d trained to become a transcendent swordsman, befitting the owner of an Arc.

Haruyuki prayed desperately, still restrained by the ninja’s Incarnate technique.

The navy ninja and sapphire samurai continued to face each other wordlessly. The tips of both the shortsword, with its dull-steel-gray blade, and the straightsword, with its hint of icy blue, didn’t so much as twitch, both aimed squarely at their opponents.

In the silence, only the massive morning sun continued to inch its way upward. The buildings standing to the east of the hotel were already showing more than half their faces, and the bloodred light of the dawn pierced the thick clouds of the Demon City stage to shine down on them. The ninja stood on the west side and Lead on the east, so Lead’s shadow stretched out near the enemy’s feet. If a shuriken got lodged in his head, Lead would also be rendered immobile, so Haruyuki wanted to warn him somehow, but he still couldn’t even speak.

“He’ll be all right, Servant,” Metatron spoke to him in his mind, as if reading his thoughts—or maybe she had actually read them, in fact. “Trilead Tetroxide must have realized that the dagger plunged into your shadow is the reason you cannot move.”

“Yeah…And that dagger’s called a shuriken.”

“Oh-ho! I shall remember this.”

It wasn’t as though Trilead could have heard Metatron, but for a mere instant, he dropped his gaze to the shuriken plunged into Haruyuki’s shadow.

Instantly, the ninja moved. His sword-arm flashed like lightning, and he pulled a third shuriken out from his chest with his fingertips. With just a snap of his wrist, he tossed it at Lead’s shadow on the floor.

Clack! A hard sound rang out, and the sharp blade dug into the steel floor.

But the instant before it did, reacting at a speed that would have been impossible had he not been anticipating the blow, Lead turned his head and made his shadow dodge the shuriken. He planted a foot hard on the floor.

“Kaaaaaaaah!!” With a shriek, he launched a slicing stroke diagonally to the right.

It was incredibly fast; so fast that even Haruyuki’s eyes couldn’t pick it up, and he was accustomed to high-speed battle. There couldn’t have been many swordmasters in the Accelerated World who could have swung the two-handed greatsword that was The Infinity at such a speed.

However.

The blow with Trilead’s full weight behind it sliced through only an afterimage of the ninja, barely visible as he zipped through the air. The blast of wind kicked up by the Arc made the thick steel floor shudder. Having swung the heavy blade, Lead sank down, bending at the knees to absorb the massive inertial energy.

The ninja didn’t miss this hint of an opening.

“Zan!” Having dodged Lead’s blow, the ninja flashed his shortsword as he passed by. A red damage effect shot off the young samurai’s right elbow, and deep-blue fragments followed.

Straightening up again, Trilead tried to counterattack with a horizontal slash while turning around forcefully, but by that time, the ninja had already put some space between them again.

Fortunately for Lead, the armor shape around his elbows was complicated, and while the ninja had been looking for severance damage, he hadn’t managed to completely catch the seam. Trilead had barely managed to avoid having his right arm severed, but the tip of the ninja’s sword had to have reached down to his avatar’s flesh, causing him intense pain. Worry wormed its way into Haruyuki’s heart.

Trilead Tetroxide had been inside the Castle all this time, meaning that this was probably his first person-to-person fight that wasn’t training. And it wasn’t even in the Normal Duel Field, but in the Unlimited Neutral Field, in a slaughter where Incarnate techniques were more than possible and extra-painful.

Naturally, Lead had undergone extensive, even cruel training with Graphite Edge, one of the most powerful swordsmen in the Accelerated World. Strong enough to freely manipulate the Arc of Infinity, which Haruyuki would have barely been able to hold on to. Trilead was easily in master territory, technique-wise.

But in a real battle where anything could happen, you couldn’t win with skills alone. You needed the determination to deceive your opponent, hide yourself, and use anything and everything at your disposal.

And the shadow-using ninja was no doubt a master of attacking his opponents’ weak points, given that he had named the Acceleration Research Society’s Black Vise his master. To fight an opponent like this, Trilead’s sword was too beautiful, too pure—and too honest.

Crimson light dripping from his elbow, Lead readied his sword directly in front of himself once more.

The dark eyes of the ninja shone coldly beneath his metal forehead covering.

“It’s no use, Lead. No matter how fast you strike, if you show any initial motion, you’ll never hit that ninja!” Haruyuki called desperately in his mind, but his thoughts couldn’t reach Lead.

His comrade had to have felt the fierce speed of the ninja. But the young samurai did not flinch; he attacked from square one once more. Taking a large step forward, he brandished the greatsword.

“Seiyaaaaaah!”

A heroic downward strike from on high, enough to sever even the air. It wasn’t a special attack, yet pale sparks bounded across the stage, and even Haruyuki’s body, in forced stasis, shuddered and shook.

This was a blow so powerful that if it hit its target, Haruyuki wouldn’t have been surprised if it ripped his health gauge out from the root. But his misgivings turned to reality once more.

“Nin!!”

Call echoing in the air, the ninja’s figure blurred. With divine speed, he dodged the powerful blow and shot out with a counterattack in a flash of white light.

The sword shimmered, and a large damage effect jetted from the back of Lead’s neck. The ninja wasn’t aiming for the limbs, but rather instant death through beheading.

A second layer of ice descended on Haruyuki’s body as he stared while Lead swayed. But the samurai managed to brace himself somehow. A wound about five centimeters long was revealed when the droplets of virtual blood had settled down.

The reason his head hadn’t been completely cut off was because Lead’s downward slice had been exaggeratedly full power—or put another way, he had attacked with the intent of sacrificing his own self. The gut knowledge that the ninja wouldn’t escape with a mere scratch made him take an extra-large step to avoid the blade.

That said, the tables had most definitely not yet turned in their favor. Trilead just barely dodged the next blow. If he took another blow from that sword in the same place, the damage would be lethal.

“Lead!” Feeling as if he had to somehow break the ninja’s Incarnate restraint, Haruyuki tried to focus his imagination again.

“Believe in Trilead, Servant.” Metatron’s voice echoed in the back of his mind.

“…But…!”

“It was you who taught me the ability to have an information link—no, a ‘bond.’”

His eyes flew open at this. Adjusting his gaze, he saw Chiyuri staring back at him intently with her large eye lenses, similarly restrained on the south side of the roof. Although he saw worry and frustration there, he saw no hint of despair. She, too, believed Lead would get out of this predicament.

“I guess you’re right,” Haruyuki murmured in return, once again focusing his mind. Not in order to forcefully break the ninja’s Shadow Tying with his own Incarnate, but so he could move the second the ninja’s focus was broken by Lead’s attack and the technique was canceled.

Although deeply wounded on his elbow and his neck, Trilead readied his greatsword for the third time at waist level.

The one-armed ninja also held his ninja sword in a backhand grip with his right hand. There wasn’t a drop of wasted energy in his stance, and his cold bloodlust came through loud and clear with the message that this time he would take Lead’s head.

After inhaling deeply, Lead gently raised the Arc he gripped in both hands to a position up above his head.

In response, the ninja also lowered his center of gravity the slightest bit.

The tension in the air grew a hundredfold. Perhaps in response to the swirling blood lust, the clouds began to rise up and cover the nearly risen morning sun.

As if refusing to be pushed back by the encroaching darkness, Lead’s battle cry gushed from his throat. “Taaaaaaaaaah!!”

Stepping forward hard enough to crack the steel panels of the roof, his sword came down with a roar like thunder. This was, without a doubt, the blow containing the most raw power Haruyuki had ever seen in any normal attack he’d witnessed thus far. It shook him to his core, surpassing even World End’s and Anomaly’s slashing blows.

But of course, it was too much of a straightforward stroke.

Once again, the figure of the ninja melted into flowing lines. In a step that was also terrifyingly fast, he dodged to the left. The greatsword cut through the blue-black afterimage and, not stopping in the air, went on to dig into the floor.

A booming roar ripped past Haruyuki, so loud that he was convinced it would have ruptured his eardrums if duel avatars had them. The force of the overhead slice was completely absorbed by the iron plates, the Arc cutting deep into the building of the Demon City stage, and then stopped.

Lead was unable to move, and the ninja blade closed in on his neck in a sneak attack.

However, at the same time, the rupture The Infinity had created stretched out in a straight line—and swallowed up the small shuriken pinned into Haruyuki’s shadow.

There was no way this was a coincidence.

Lead had been aiming for this from the start. As he swung his sword in his simple, honest slices and swallowed the painful counterattacks, he’d moved to a position where he could aim for Haruyuki’s restraints. If Lead had taken any obvious interest in the shuriken, the ninja would have no doubt prioritized taking off Haruyuki’s head. To prevent him from doing that, Lead had played dumb and used himself as a pawn to create a momentary opening. In which case, Haruyuki had to rise to that challenge.

The instant the shuriken was swallowed up in the fissure and the restraint released, Haruyuki was moving. Half instinctively, he thrust his blade toward the back of the ninja about to take Lead’s head off. Seven meters between them. This was not a distance he could cross no matter how he stretched his arm.

However.

As he sent the imagination power he’d so intently built up while restrained to his hand, Haruyuki shouted, “Laser Lance!!”

Pure-white light jetted from the tip of his sword. This light was obviously narrower, sharper, and faster than the Laser Lance he’d been able to activate before with his bare hand.

The time it took for the ninja to dodge Lead’s blow, step in, and slash with his ninja sword couldn’t have been more than a second. But the Incarnate lance launched from Lucid Blade pierced the ninja’s back before his special-attack blade could cut into Lead’s neck.

Even duel avatars with no flesh and blood to speak of had what were known as critical points. So, for instance, if their head was cut off, the majority of avatars would die instantly. The next critical point was in the center of the chest, in the position of the heart, and no avatars except those with extremely high endurance could have a hole opened up there and not die.

Having had his heart pierced by Haruyuki’s Incarnate technique, the ninja was only able to make a shallow cut on Lead’s cheek, his blade knocked off target by the impact. He stopped with his ninja sword brandished high above his head, and Haruyuki fully expected him to scatter in all directions.

However.

“Nin!!” Shouting louder than he had before, the ninja quickly rotated his upper body, light effect spilling from the hole in his chest, and tried to thrust the shortsword into Lead’s neck once again.

But an instant before he could, the young samurai pulled his trusty blade from the rupture in the floor.

“Aaaaaii!” Shouting, he yanked the thick blade up and to the right.

The sun pushed through the clouds once more and illuminated the motionless ninja and the young samurai. From where Haruyuki stood, their shadows looked like half silhouettes, and then one of them split soundlessly in the middle and tumbled to the floor. It jetted up blue-black flames before bursting and scattering.

Slowly getting to his feet, Trilead tucked the greatsword away in the sheath on his left hip, and Haruyuki was about to race over to him, lost in the moment. But he totally forgot that his right foot had been cut off, so he lost his balance and nearly fell over.

“Whoops!” Chiyuri called out, coming up from behind to support him, having been released from the Incarnate restraint at the moment of the ninja’s death.

He stood, leaning on his childhood friend’s shoulder, and waved a hand wildly. “Lea—,” he started to shout, but just when he was in danger of the 3-D icon on his shoulder whapping him on the head with her wing, he noticed it.

A modest dark-gray death marker remained in the place where the ninja had died. Haruyuki and his comrades couldn’t see him, but the ninja avatar still existed there in a ghost state. Lead was Trilead Tetroxide’s nickname, but even still, there was no need to give it up to their enemy. Letting him hear their conversation was absurd.

Guessing the reason that Haruyuki snapped his mouth shut, Lead was also silent as he walked over to them, and he bowed lightly with a smile.

Nodding in return, Haruyuki turned back to the silently spinning death marker and said in a hard voice, “If we wanted to, we could kill you again with an Incarnate technique the moment you regenerate here in an hour or set up some dangerous energy…But we won’t. We’re not like the Acceleration Research Society.”

Of course, he couldn’t hear the reply. But even if the death marker could speak, Haruyuki couldn’t imagine that the ninja avatar would give him an answer when he hadn’t even given voice to his own name. Haruyuki looked back and held out his left hand to Chiyuri and his right to Lead.

They approached and grabbed onto him. After checking that his special-attack gauge was charged nearly 80 percent, he spread the wings on his back and took off. Maintaining a high altitude, he looked down just one more time at the roof of the hotel.

The ninja avatar had called Black Vise master. Did he know that Vise had cruelly abandoned Dusk Taker, his former comrade in the Acceleration Research Society? That to Vise, it wasn’t just Taker, but probably also Rust Jigsaw and Sulfur Pot and maybe even the Quad Eyes Analyst, who were nothing more than pawns for the sake of achieving his objective?

Haruyuki pulled his gaze away from the ghost that would’ve been standing near the death marker and flew off to the southeast.