Accel World - Volume 21 - Chapter 3

3

“Headed your way, Lotus!”

Hearing the call of the second Red King, the Black King readied the swords that made up her arms before and behind her.

Charging toward her and making the ground shake was a Beast-class Enemy, Grada. Eight short legs sprang from its knotty torso, and a thick carapace covered its entire body; it looked like a microscopic water bear that had been enlarged tens of thousands of times over. In fact, it had apparently gotten its name from early Burst Linkers riffing on its scientific name, the tardigrade.

Just as its name would suggest, it boasted an overwhelming toughness, and although Niko’s handgun had carved countless bullet holes out of the gray carapace, it seemed that almost none had pierced it. Niko’s initial equipment, Peace Maker, was capable of a so-called charged shot, and she boasted on a daily basis about how “You gimme twenty seconds o’ charging, and I’ll blow a giant hole in the ground even.” But now, unfortunately, they didn’t have that kind of time to spare. They were fighting a Beast-class Enemy alone, when this was the sort of monster normally hunted by a party of twenty people.

“Baguuuuh!” the Grada type cried out in a low rumble as it charged her.

Kuroyukihime stopped and waited for it. Nearly three minutes had passed already since the start of this unexpected battle. They couldn’t afford to waste any more time here. She set her sights on one of the dozens of bullet holes gouged into the Enemy’s head, where the slightest amount of blue-black liquid was leaking out. It was a nearly impossible feat to strike a precise blow on this three-centimeter hole as it bounced about wildly, but she had no choice but to try.

“Baguuuuh!” The massive tardigrade lowered its head to charge, forceful enough to bring down a building, and in that instant, Kuroyukihime thrust the sword of her right hand forward.

Her Terminate Sword ability could pierce all things, and that included even the head armor of this thing, but she wouldn’t be able to do any real damage plunging it in only five or ten centimeters. But the sword cut deep into the scar made by Niko, all the way up to her elbow, opening the hole wider.

Despite the fact that a sword was stabbed nearly a meter deep into its head, the Grada didn’t stop moving. It began to crash about even more violently, Kuroyukihime still on its head. If it charged into one of the buildings behind them, she could very well be crushed to death between the hard structure of the Demon City stage and the Enemy’s massive bulk. But she had anticipated this development.

“Death By Piercing!!” she cried out sharply as she pushed her arm even deeper.

A bluish-purple light jetted out of all the gunshot holes. Black Lotus’s level-five special attack, boasting a wide and long range, reflected and refracted against the inside of the tough carapace over and over, shredding any and all soft tissue. Light spilled out of cracks that raced along the tough shell as if connecting the dots of gunshot scars.

In the next instant, the Beast-class Enemy erupted in a burst of light that reached up into the dawn sky, and the massive body scattered in all directions.

Bathed in a universe of tiny particles, Kuroyukihime landed on the ground and let out a long sigh as Niko raced over to her.

“Dang it…Just like always, you go and do somethin’ wild. If you’d made one misstep there, you coulda ended up flat as a pancake.”

“I attacked with my arm, so it would be ‘one misarm.’”

“Oh yeah…I guess?” Niko cocked her head to one side, and Kuroyukihime pushed it upright with the flat of her blade.

“Ugh! That doesn’t matter! What’s more important…is what exactly’s going on here?” Kuroyukihime looked up at the sky of the stage.

The night of the Demon City stage absolutely did not break, yet the eastern sky was steadily growing redder. And the only health gauge visible to her was her own. And above all else, there were Enemies. Which meant…

“No matter which way you look at it, this is the Unlimited Neutral Field,” Niko muttered.

They were supposed to be handling the defense of their own territory in Suginami, instead of taking part in the attack on Minato Area No. 3, the headquarters of the White Legion, Oscillatory Universe. But when they’d gotten off the bus with Fuko Kurasaki, Haruyuki Arita, and the others and crossed over to the bus stop on the opposite side of the street, she’d seen someone who should not have been there in the window of the bus that followed.

Megumi Wakamiya. Umesato Junior High student council secretary and Kuroyukihime’s good friend.

Kuroyukihime had wondered for a while if Megumi wasn’t a former Burst Linker who had lost all her memories of the Accelerated World, and she couldn’t believe her being there now was a mere coincidence. So she’d decided to give chase on the next bus. Along the way, they’d switched to a taxi, and she’d gone so far as to use the forbidden SSS Order program to cross the area boundary immediately before four PM and spontaneously take part in the Territories.

But after she and Niko appeared on the Rainbow Bridge, on the far edge of the area, they’d run for a few minutes toward the center of the stage in order to meet up with the rest of their team, and that was when a veil of light like an aurora had closed in from up ahead and enveloped them. The ground shook fiercely, and just when that was settling down, a large Enemy materialized before their eyes. Retreating to the Rainbow Bridge was not an option, and while it was all fine and good that they had won when forced to fight, she was still unable to completely process the situation.

Niko turned her gaze back from the morning sun rising over Odaiba and blinked her large eye lenses again. “If this is the real-deal Unlimited Neutral Field, then it’s either a BB system bug or something—someone who deliberately made this happen, right?”

“It’s been eight years since Brain Burst started. I can’t believe there would still be such an enormous bug at this late stage. Most likely, it’s the latter.” Kuroyukihime let a certain situation play out in the back of her mind.

In Okinawa on her school trip, she had been in the Unlimited Neutral Field with the Acceleration Research Society’s Sulfur Pot when there was a sudden beam of light. A duel avatar she’d assumed was Megumi Wakamiya had appeared out of nowhere in the battlefield and changed the attribute of the stage using an incredible technique that artificially brought about the Change. Of course, changing the attribute of the Unlimited Neutral Field and changing the Territories stage into the Unlimited Neutral Field were phenomena on an utterly different scale. But the directionality was the same. And it was also very likely that Megumi had dived into this battlefield, too, probably as an Oscillatory member.

Was this astounding transition Megumi’s work? If that was the case, then was it something she had willed herself, or…

“Hey, Lotus!” Niko jabbed her in the side, and Kuroyukihime awoke from her reverie.

“Aah, apologies. This is not the time for deep thought.”

“ ’Zactly. That pink aurora looked like it was spreading out from the center of Minato Three. So it’s not just us. Pard and Crow and them musta got caught up in it, too.”

“And most likely, the Oscillatory Universe defense team, as well. We don’t know what could happen in the Unlimited Neutral Field. Let’s head for the center as planned. Crow and the others should be there.”

Nodding to each other, Kuroyukihime and Niko started to run along the deserted road, this time watching out for Enemies as they went.

This wasn’t the first time Chocolat Puppeter, aka Shihoko Nago, had died in the Unlimited Neutral Field. Back when she’d only just made level four, she’d been carelessly walking around the unfamiliar field alone and stumbled across an Enemy. Of course, she’d tried to run away, but she’d taken one laser hit from behind and immediately died with zero fanfare. She’d steeled herself then for the possibility of total point loss through an Unlimited EK.

During the hour she waited to be regenerated, she’d thought about all kinds of things and eventually decided that she had no other choice but to use her Chocopets as bait and try to flee. So once she regenerated, she activated her special attack Cocoa Fountain. But even though it was supposed to be attacking her, the Enemy had for some reason shown more interest in the chocolate pond. After sniffing at it for a while, it started to lap it up, and she’d managed to get away in the interim.

That lesser-class Enemy had been the Lava Carbuncle, Coolu, and while it had taken a long time, she was now Shihoko’s good friend. Since Shihoko had never actively gone Enemy hunting after that, she’d only died in the Unlimited Neutral Field that one time.

Which is why she didn’t know that dying with your comrades was such a difficult, painful, sad experience. In her field of view—black and white in her ghost state—fourteen death markers rotated quietly, including her own. Satomi and Yume and everyone else from Nega Nebulus would have also been transformed into ghosts like her, hanging about the area. What surprised her a little was that right before she had died, Magenta Scissor—Rui Odagiri—had tried to protect her, with her own body. It might had been an impulsive act, but Shihoko was quietly pleased by it. She wanted to thank her, but Rui’s ghost also couldn’t see or talk to her.

Around the cluster of markers, a thick wall of ice soared up high, created by the White Legion’s executive member Glacier Behemoth’s Incarnate technique Last Glacial Period. Shihoko and her friends from Petit Paquet had only been given a general overview of the existence and activation logic of Incarnate techniques, but she at least understood the underlying idea that if the imagination was severed, the ice wall would disappear. In other words, even though the fourteen members of Nega Nebulus had been wiped out, Behemoth was continuing to focus on the image.

She moved to the very edge of the ten-meter limit of movement away from her marker in the monochrome world. When she slipped through the ice wall with her immaterial avatar body, she saw the massive bulk of Glacier Behemoth a little ways off. The ice-dragon avatar, which anyone would assume to be an Enemy if they didn’t know better, had folded his arms and legs under him and was crouching down, eye lenses closed. He was probably closing off sensation and focusing solely on maintaining his Incarnate technique.

He wasn’t alone. A small fairy-like avatar was standing on his head—most likely Snow Fairy, the second ranked of the Seven Dwarves—and she, too, had her eyes closed, not so much as twitching a finger in movement. She was also getting ready, so she could activate her terrifying, instant-death Incarnate technique Brinicle the instant Shihoko and her friends regenerated after an hour.

Having only recently made it to level five, Shihoko was anxious about how many Burst Points she had left. Her supply would probably dry up first out of the fourteen if the Unlimited PK kept going. Naturally, she was afraid of total point loss, but she had only just recently learned after joining Nega Nebulus that, when her Burst Points dropped to zero, not only would the Brain Burst program forcibly uninstall, but all of her memories related to the Accelerated World would also be erased. In other words, she might forget Haruyuki Arita and Kuroyukihime and the others who she’d only just become friends with—and maybe even Satomi and Yume, too. She absolutely hated that thought.

But at the moment, more than fear, it was the deep puzzlement of “why” that settled like a shroud over the heart of ghost Shihoko. She turned and walked back through the soundless world to her own marker.

And then she noticed a fifteenth death marker spinning off on its own toward the wall. It didn’t belong to any member of Nega Nebulus. It was the marker of the Oscillatory Universe Burst Linker who had appeared suddenly inside the ice wall just as Snow Fairy’s instant death technique was on the verge of exploding and used the Incarnate technique Imaginary Time to extinguish the abilities of all the Nega Nebulus members. He, too, had been caught up in Brinicle and died. And he likely intended to keep doing the same thing until the majority of the Nega Nebulus side were at total point loss.

Why…? What pushed them to go to such lengths? What were they trying to gain out of actions like producing the Armor of Catastrophe, spreading the ISS kits throughout the Accelerated World, and annihilating Nega Nebulus?

No matter how she turned this question over in her mind as she stood there in the gray world, Shihoko couldn’t begin to understand the thinking of the White Legion and the Acceleration Research Society, given that she’d only just left the small box in which she’d been locked up for so long. But the one thing she could say with certainty was that she didn’t want to lose like this. She was afraid of total point loss, but more than that, as a Burst Linker, she refused to let them just have their way with her.

She wouldn’t give up; she would think about what she could do. At that very moment, Satomi and Yume and, of course, Fuko and Utai and everyone else had to have been doing the same thing. She crossed her semitransparent arms in front of her and took a wide stance, drawing herself up to her full height in an imposing way, and glared hard at the ice wall.

Fortunately, Kuroyukihime and Niko passed through the Shibaura Island area, slipped under the overhead Shinkansen and Yamanote train lines, and arrived in a spot near Sengakuji Temple—the center of Minato Area No. 3—without encountering any new Enemies. If the field had still been the Territories stage, the stronghold, the most critical point in the stage, would have sat within the grounds of Sengakuji. But since they hadn’t found a single of the smaller footholds along the way, the stronghold was also likely gone.

In other words, there was no longer any need to occupy Sengakuji, so the members of both armies wouldn’t necessarily be gathering there. But even so, the instant she caught sight of the roofs of templelike buildings up ahead, Kuroyukihime felt something akin to an electric shock at the nape of her neck, and her feet unconsciously came to a stop.

Niko also stopped next to her, as if repelled backward. Putting her right hand to the handgun on her hip, she produced a low, hoarse voice. “Some serious info presh here. Two—no, three of the Seven Dwarves are in there.”

“And not only that. This feeling…Someone’s using Incarnate techniques,” Kuroyukihime murmured, glaring at the tall temples rising up on the other side of the low buildings.

The light of the dawn coming from behind got in the way, so she couldn’t see clearly, but there was an obvious pale-blue light shimmering upward like a mirage from the plaza at Sengakuji. She had no doubt that it was Incarnate overlay. And not Fuko’s or Akira’s or Utai’s or anyone else on their team’s.

“Someone on the Oscillatory Universe side’s using Incarnate, huh,” Niko said, even more quietly, apparently coming to the same conclusion. “But for all that, I can’t sense the auras of Pard and the gang.”

Kuroyukihime nodded silently. If the enemy was using Incarnate techniques, then that was because they were fighting Nega Nebulus, but no sound or light of battle, much less the auras of their comrades, reached them. An ominous feeling growing stronger inside her, she took a step forward. “We can’t know the situation from here. We have to at least move to somewhere we can see the plaza.”

“Yup,” Niko replied briefly, and then she quickly scanned their surroundings before pointing toward a building standing on the west side of Sengakuji. “Let’s climb that building. The walls are all slippery, so those Oscillatory Universe kids won’t be looking there, either.”

The buildings of the Demon City stage were impenetrable as a general rule, so if you wanted to get to the roof, your only option was to climb the walls. This was possible if there were some kind of indentations to use as handholds, but the exterior of the building Niko had selected was all smooth, exposed steel plates. Unless you had the ability to move along the surface of walls like Blood Leopard, it was essentially unclimbable.

“If they won’t be watching it, that’s all well and good. But how are we supposed to climb it?” Kuroyukihime asked.

The second Red King grinned and turned her back toward her for some reason.

“…What’s that about?”

“Piggyback. Hurry up and get on.”

Whaaaat?! She very nearly shouted but narrowly managed to hold the cry back.

“I said, hurry it up. Or would you rather I carried you in my arms?”

Left with no other choice, Kuroyukihime carefully straddled the back of the other, much smaller duel avatar. With two small hands, Niko grabbed hold of Kuroyukihime’s legs and yanked her up.

“Mkay, here we go…Pyro Planing.”

As she whispered the technique name, red flames wrapped around Niko’s legs, and she began to race down the road at an incredible speed. The steel building looming up ahead drew closer with each breath. If they crashed into it with this much force, neither entity would make it out unscathed. Just when she was about to yell for the younger girl to put on the brakes, Niko jumped.

When her feet came into contact with the smooth surface of the wall, she dashed upward against the laws of gravity and climbed the twenty-meter wall in mere seconds, decelerating only slightly toward the end to sail over the perpendicular edge. She crouched down, and Kuroyukihime slid off her back, still hunched into herself.

When she peered down, two tracks remained on the wall and the surface of the earth, shining a bright red. These, too, quickly faded and disappeared. Most likely, this was a first-quadrant movement-expansion type of Incarnate technique, in which the flames on her feet melted the ground very slightly and allowed her to slide on top of the molten metal like skating. Kuroyukihime understood the rationale, but to run up a vertical wall took a fairly high level of overwrite.

“Have you always been able to use that technique?” she asked, pulling herself back upright.

“Yeah, but it’s only lately that I’ve been practicing climbing walls,” Niko replied. “Sixty percent success rate, so we got lucky here.”

“You…No, never mind.” Kuroyukihime shook her head and then turned her mind to the area ahead of them.

Since they were both crouching down, they still couldn’t see the plaza at Sengakuji. They briefly made eye contact and then moved, their bellies pressed to the cold steel plates of the roof. When they reached the front edge and raised their heads just a little, the full spread of Sengakuji finally came into view.

Because it was a Demon City stage, the main gate and hall had been transformed into curious temples. But the main building had been smashed to pieces; there was no sign of it. The stronghold should have been in the plaza between the main gate and building, but she couldn’t see it anywhere. It hadn’t been destroyed, however. This was an effect of the field changing from the Territories stage to the Unlimited Neutral Field, as she’d guessed earlier.

In its place was a strange object in the center of the large space. A mountain of ice, transparent blue. Actually, it looked like the inside was a cave, so it was not a mountain but a tower perhaps. Ten meters or more around—and even taller than it was wide. The pale-blue overlay enveloping it was proof that it had been created through Incarnate.

And she instantly knew which Burst Linker had activated the Incarnate System. A frighteningly massive shadow was crouched quite close to the tower of ice. At first glance, it looked like a four-legged Beast-type Enemy, but it was not. This was the seventh of Oscillatory Universe’s Seven Dwarves, Glacier Behemoth.

And a small Burst Linker was sitting on top of his head. Compared with the enormous beast avatar, she was ridiculously tiny, but her sense of presence was even greater than Behemoth’s. The second of the Seven Dwarves, Snow Fairy.

Around the plaza, Kuroyukihime could identify twelve other human shadows. It appeared that the majority of Oscillatory Universe’s territory defense team was gathered at Sengakuji.

Meanwhile, however, she couldn’t see a single member of the Nega Nebulus attacking team. Were they gathered somewhere else and standing by? If that was the case, then they had to find out where.

That was when Kuroyukihime realized a large number of somethings were locked away inside the massive tower of ice.

All that made it through the thick wall was a variety of colors, but they were too small to be duel avatars. Was the brightness cycling regularly because they were spinning at a fixed speed? Some kind of item. Or maybe a marker…

Kuroyukihime gasped, and Niko shuddered beside her.

They were all Burst Linker death markers. Whose? No, it was obvious; they belonged to the newly born third Nega Nebulus’s territory attacking team—to Sky Raker, Aqua Current, Ardor Maiden, Silver Crow, and the others. Oscillatory Universe had changed the Territories stage to the Unlimited Neutral Field, brought Raker and the others together in this plaza, and then eliminated them in one go with Incarnate techniques.

And not only that. Given that Behemoth continued to close the death markers off inside the ice wall—the cage—with Fairy standing by, they were planning to do the same thing again. The instant Nega Nebulus regenerated in an hour, they would kill them with Incarnate once more. Until every member of the attacking team lost all their Burst Points.

It had been a trap. Oscillatory Universe, no, the White King herself had foreseen Nega Nebulus’s attack in the Territories and made meticulous preparations in order to completely annihilate the Legion and remove them from the Accelerated World forever.

Kuroyukihime’s field of view was dyed a faint red, and the swords of both arms were trembling.

You’d probably say that the one who is caught in a trap is a fool, hmm? But in that case, you won’t object if I do the same thing to you. You can’t complain if I eliminate everyone here with Incarnate and take all their points in an Unlimited PK, Cosmos!!

Kuroyukihime was on the verge of leaping to her feet when Niko quickly caught the sword of her right hand. The passive ability Terminate Sword was always activated in the swords of Black Lotus’s limbs—the manifestation of Kuroyukihime’s mental trauma, of hurting everything by simply touching it. The sharp blade dug a few millimeters into Scarlet Rain’s slender fingers, and a red damage effect like blood spilled out. But Niko didn’t move to open her own small hand.

“Wait, Lotus,” she said, hushed.

“I can’t!” Kuroyukihime replied, barely keeping her voice down. “They’re planning to drive Raker and the others to total point loss! And Leopard and the Triplex are in there. Niko, you—”

“Yeah. My blood’s boiling, too. But that’s exactly why you need to calm down for a sec!”

Scolded by a girl three years her junior, Kuroyukihime had no choice but to obey. She let out a long sigh, and the tension left her body.

Niko finally took her hand off the sword and turned her gaze back to the plaza. “Crow’s prob’ly not in there,” she said unexpectedly.

“Wh-what?” Kuroyukihime hurriedly peered into the ice cage.

The Incarnate-generated ice was nearly a meter thick, and the interior was only hazily visible. She could barely manage to see that there were some dozen or more death markers inside; she very much could not identify which one was whose. “How do you know that?”

“That ice’s open at the top.” Niko grinned. “A crow could just fly away.”

“N-now, look.” Kuroyukihime struggled with how exactly to retort to that logic.

Niko grew serious again as she continued, “And with my Vision Extension ability, I can visualize things like wind changes and heat sources and info pressure. The information pattern of death markers is unique, so that’s easier to identify than trying to see through that ice with my eyes. I can’t tell which marker is whose, but at the very least, I know there’s only fifteen of them in there. That’s for sure.”

“Fifteen…,” Kuroyukihime muttered, reconfirming the formation of the attack team in the back of her mind.

Three of Nega Nebulus’s Four Elements. With Crow, Bell, and Pile, that was six. Ten adding in the Petit Paquet group and Magenta Scissor. Sixteen with the Ash Roller group and the Triplex. And with the addition of Trilead Tetroxide, who had only become a Legion member that day, seventeen. If she excluded the Archangel Metatron, who she assumed would not have a death marker, it was true that there were indeed two missing.

“But how do you know that it was Crow who escaped?” Kuroyukihime asked before coming upon the answer on her own. “Oh, I see. To escape that Unlimited PK, one way would be to return to the real world through a portal and pull everyone’s Neurolinkers off their necks. In which case, that role would have been assigned to Crow, who can fly.”

“That’s the gist of it.” Niko glanced up at Kuroyukihime before smiling faintly. “And, like, if you were locked up in there in this totally desperate situation, you’d have tried your damnedest to get Crow out of there, logical or not, yeah? I’m pretty sure Pard or Raker would’ve done the same.”

“Mm. That is true.” She jabbed Niko lightly in the side as if to say the younger girl was no different and then turned her gaze up toward the dawn sky. “All of which means that Crow is currently moving toward a portal somewhere. But even if he did manage a lucky escape with no tail, it would take at least ten seconds for him to pull off everyone’s Neurolinkers by himself, even if he did hurry. Ten seconds in the real world is nearly three hours in the Accelerated World. Which means we can expect that they will be hit another two times at the very least by this Incarnate attack.”

“I don’t think twice is gonna knock anyone down to total point loss,” Niko said. “But we got just two other probs here, okay? The bike guy’s buddies coming from GW to help—Bush Utan and Olive Grab, yeah? Weren’t they supposed to join the Territories from a train or platform on the Yamanote Line?”

“Right. Crow can’t force them to burst out then,” Kuroyukihime replied. “And the second problem?”

“That one’s simple. It’s that you and I will have to stay hidden here like this and watch fifteen of our pals be killed two more times.”

“You were the one who stopped me before,” Kuroyukihime pointed out.

Niko snorted. “Doesn’t change the fact that I was on the verge of explodin’ myself. Can’t say I can just sit here without chargin’ in there if those guys actually try to kill Pard an’ them.”

“Nor can I.” Kuroyukihime thought a moment. “If Crow succeeds in leaving, at the very least, one or two of the markers will disappear before everyone is regenerated. Let’s wait first for that. If not a single marker disappears, then it means that Crow’s escape has been obstructed. At that time…”

“We strike when Pard and the others regenerate. You’re good with that, yeah?”

“I’m good with that.” Kuroyukihime nodded again and took slow breaths, and let the tension slip out of her entire body. An incandescent rage still twisted and churned inside her duel avatar. She focused it all into a single point in her chest in time with her breathing and condensed it into a pale light.

If she was to be honest, she did actually want to leap down from the building that very second and go full throttle with a destructive Incarnate, ripping the members of Oscillatory Universe limb from limb. Despite knowing that if they fought back and she lost, she would end up trapped in an Unlimited PK together with Fuko and the others—or maybe it was precisely because of that.

But there were far too many unknowns at the moment. The fact that the entire Nega Nebulus attack team had made it into the stage meant that there should have been nineteen on the Oscillatory defense team. But in the plaza below, no matter which way she counted, there were only fourteen people. Which meant that the other five were somewhere other than Sengakuji. Was one of those people Megumi Wakamiya?

She met Megumi the day she started at Umesato Junior High. With the largest bounty in the Accelerated World on her head as a king killer, Kuroyukihime could only refuse when she was invited to a class party outside of school because she couldn’t connect to the global network, and she decided to stay at school until the final order to leave at the end of the day. However, she had plenty of things she needed to do. When she was walking around trying to get a handle on the positions of all the social cameras in the school, she came across Megumi in the library—or maybe Megumi had found her.

Kuroyukihime had bumped into her between the stacks, so with nowhere to run, she bowed lightly after confirming that the other girl was also in seventh grade and moved to pass by. But the girl with the fluffy hair grinned and started talking to her.

“Do you like real books, too?”

At the unexpected development, Kuroyukihime was a bit stuck even as she replied, “W-well, I don’t hate them.”

Her tone came from her Legion Master days, burned into her bones, and this apparently stimulated some specific neurons in the other girl. Megumi’s smile grew even broader, and she invited Kuroyukihime to go talk in the lounge once they had borrowed paperbacks. Encouraged by the unexpected conversation, in the end, she agreed to meet the next day.

She found out a few days later that there was an unwritten rule that seventh graders were not permitted to use the Umesato lounge, but Megumi didn’t show the slightest concern, boldly continuing to use it, albeit only after school. At some point, Megumi became Kuroyukihime’s closest and basically only friend.

Of course, it would be a lie if she said she hadn’t suspected the possibility that Megumi was an assassin sent by the Six Kings. After checking that Megumi was connected to the in-school net, she’d investigated the matching list—and not just once or twice. But no other name besides Black Lotus ever appeared there, and Kuroyukihime soon cast that doubt aside.

Without Megumi, Kuroyukihime’s junior high life would have been extremely buttoned down, and she might not have run in the student council elections, either. It never got to the point where they were going to each other’s houses, but the time they spent chatting at school or having tea and going shopping off school grounds after school was priceless to Kuroyukihime. For starters, it was Megumi who had given her the nickname Kuroyukihime, which was slightly embarrassing, but she still liked it anyway. There was no way this girl was an Oscillatory member who had originally approached her for the purposes of a day such as this.

But today, Saturday, July 20, after the closing ceremony and homeroom were over, Kuroyukihime had attended a student council meeting and chatted with Megumi for a bit before leaving the school and heading to the Arita house. Having known her for a long time, perhaps Megumi had picked up on Kuroyukihime’s nervousness at the merger with Prominence and the decisive battle against Oscillatory. She may very well have figured out where she was going through some means and pursued her on the bus.

Was that what happened? Was Megumi Wakamiya an Oscillatory spy? Had she spoken to Kuroyukihime that day in the library two years earlier on the instruction of the White King and Kuroyukihime’s own flesh-and-blood older sister, White Cosmos?

No!! Kuroyukihime shouted violently in her mind.

Even if Megumi was a Burst Linker capable of tricking the BB system the same way Cyan Pile once had, even if she was helping with the plan to annihilate Nega Nebulus that day, it absolutely wasn’t out of her own free will. There had been tears in Megumi’s eyes when she’d glimpsed her in the bus window.

Those tears were the truth. I believe that. So, Megumi…Hang on a little longer. I will destroy Oscillatory Universe and White Cosmos and set you free.

Holding her pale light in her heart, Kuroyukihime spoke to her friend, somewhere out on that battlefield.

Haruyuki flew just six hundred meters south from the roof of the large hotel rising up to the northwest of Shinagawa Station, avoiding the aggro area of the Hydra-type Enemy encamped in the plaza in front of the station and then landed for the time being. In the real world, the place was probably a large condo. The courtyard-type space was surrounded by excessively tall buildings, and strange monuments dotted the area. Chiyuri smashed these to charge up her special-attack gauge.

“Okay, here I go,” she said briefly, brandishing the handbell Enhanced Armament Choir Chime equipped on her left arm. When she swung it around, the clear sound of a bell rang out. “Citron Call!”

At the same time as she shouted the technique name, she brought down her arm toward Haruyuki and Trilead, who stood facing each other. The green light released from the bell enveloped them, rewound time, and healed Haruyuki and Lead where they’d been cut.

Lead looked over his own body, unable to hide his surprise, and Haruyuki took his hand off the other avatar’s shoulder, planting his newly restored foot firmly on the ground before nodding at the young woman.

“Thanks, Bell.”

“No biggie.” Chiyuri shook her head slightly and then added in a small voice, “I couldn’t do anything in the fight back there, so this is basically the least I could do to repay you.”

His ever-cheerful childhood friend sounded uncharacteristically glum, so Haruyuki unconsciously blinked a few times before hurrying to deny that. “That’s not true. I mean…If you’re gonna say you couldn’t do anything, then it was the same for me. If Lead hadn’t come along, we would definitely have been done for.” He remembered then that he hadn’t thanked his friend properly, and he bowed his head at the young samurai avatar as well. “Lead, thanks. You really saved us.”

“No…I only did what was natural. I, too, am a member of Nega Nebulus, after all.” There was no brightness in Lead’s face mask as he spoke, either. He dropped his head, bangs swaying, and continued in a pained voice. “And…I watched from afar, hidden as you and Raker and all the others were annihilated by Incarnate techniques. I searched for the right time to come in and assist, but those holding the Sengakuji plaza left essentially no openings, so that, in the end, I left everyone to die.”

“Th-that’s not true!” Chiyuri shouted, even though she herself had only a few seconds earlier sounded similarly self-recriminating. “There were more than fifteen members of Oscillatory there. Even the Kings couldn’t have turned a situation like that around on their own. And because you held on there, you managed to save us. And, like…” She glanced at Haruyuki and asked in a small voice, “Who is this person? What does he mean when he says he’s part of Nega Nebulus?”

“Huh?” Blinking once again, Haruyuki finally realized that he, Kuroyukihime, and Fuko were the only ones who knew about Trilead joining the Legion, given his special circumstances and the fact that he would just barely make it in time for the Territories. “Oh, um. I think you know his name already. This is Trilead Tetroxide.” He looked next at Lead. “And this is Lime Bell. You met Metatron the other day, right?”

The 3-D icon on Haruyuki’s shoulder flapped her wings, and Lead bowed his head politely before turning to Chiyuri and extending his right hand.

“A pleasure to meet you. My name is Trilead Tetroxide. I’ve been permitted the honor of joining Nega Nebulus. It is the first time I’ve been a member of a Legion, so I’m sure there will be areas where I am less scrupulous. I would appreciate your kind instruction.”

At this extremely polite greeting, the likes of which were not heard in the Accelerated World, Chiyuri gaped for just two seconds before hurrying to shake his hand. “Oh! H-hi. I’m Lime Bell. The pleasure’s mine…Or, like…” She pulled her hand away, approached Haruyuki, and rattled on in a quiet voice, “Hey, Crow. Is this Trilead the Lead who lives in the Castle who you talked about before?! Wh-wh-why’s he suddenly joining up with us?!”

“It’s a long story. But you can totally count on him. You saw that fight just now, right?” Haruyuki replied, and then he realized something.

It was already obvious that Oscillatory Universe had anticipated Nega Nebulus’s attack and made the most thorough preparations. They had readied a Burst Linker with the astounding power to force the Territories stage to change into the Unlimited Neutral Field, and they had gone so far as to lure large Enemies to all the nearby portals in order to block any escape to the real world in their plan to rob Haruyuki and his friends of all their points. On top of that, given the fact that nearly twenty people had been registered on the defending team, they had even taken into account Nega Nebulus’s growth in numbers.

But no matter how meticulous they might have been, they couldn’t have predicted that one pillar of the Four Saints, the Archangel Metatron, would be accompanying Haruyuki or that Trilead, bearer of the Arc of Infinity, would join the Legion immediately beforehand. In other words, Metatron and Trilead were perfect thorns in Oscillatory’s mission to annihilate them. Metatron’s knowledge and Trilead’s armed might—as long as they had these, it might still be possible for them to turn the situation around even now.

The thought popped up abruptly in Haruyuki’s mind, and he quickly pushed it aside. Right now, they had to reach a safe portal as soon as possible, return to the bus, and remove the Neurolinkers of Fuko and the others. If he flew south along the Tokaido Main Line, they would cross the Tama River in about ten kilometers and enter Kanagawa prefecture. He doubted Oscillatory would have placed a large Enemy all the way out in a spot like that.

“Metatron, how much time until everyone regenerates?” he asked the 3-D icon on his shoulder. It was possible for him to find out the total dive time by opening his Instruct menu, but it was faster to ask Metatron.

“Servant, I am not a time-measuring device,” the icon replied, somewhat prickly, as she quickly did the math in her head. “…There are forty-seven minutes remaining.”

“We still got a fair bit of time.” He glanced up at the northern sky. He felt like ages had passed since they’d escaped Snow Fairy’s Incarnate technique and shaken the pursuit of the ninja avatar, but the battle with the ninja had effectively been less than five minutes. He and the ninja were both optimized for speed and had fought in a super-high-speed battle, leaving his sense of time compressed.

But it was best to hurry. Even if they managed to succeed in returning to the real world, while they were yanking off Neurolinkers, that time would flow one thousand times faster in the Accelerated World.

“Okay, let’s go.” Turning back to the south, Haruyuki faced Chiyuri and Lead and stretched out his hands. Once again, he grabbed hold of each of them tightly, spread his wings, and took off.

As a secondary effect of Citron Call, the special-attack gauge he’d used up flying here was recharged to a certain degree. And today, at least, he had no reason not to fly with Incarnate power. Ignoring the issue of mileage, he was about to head south at maximum speed. However.

They hadn’t even flown a mere five hundred meters, nearing the border between Minato and Shinagawa, when Metatron suddenly shouted.

“You must stop, Crow!!”

“H-huh?!” As stunned as he was, he reflexively spread his wings and applied reverse thrust. Chiyuri cried out as she swung back and forth. And then Haruyuki saw it.

In the sky up ahead, an extremely faint light spread out in all directions, shimmering like an aurora. The sense of presence he got from it was infinitesimally weak, but he instinctively understood that it was something he shouldn’t go slamming into at top speed.

“Nnnnnnggggh,” he groaned as he put the brakes all the way on. But the inertia of the three people was not negated, and Haruyuki hit the aurora dead on at a speed of about ten kilometers per hour.

Ptan!

“Hngah!” Chiyuri moaned.

“Nngh!” Lead cried.

Stuck to a nearly transparent wall, they started to slither down to the ground. Haruyuki applied reverse thrust one more time and managed to somehow land without any damage. After checking that Chiyuri and Lead were okay, he looked at his own recently rewound health gauge to find it had dropped, albeit only by a few pixels. If they’d crashed at full speed, it would have been catastrophic. Unconsciously, he let out a sigh of relief, but this was definitely not the time nor the place to relax.

“What is a wall doing here?” he muttered, bringing his hand up to the pink aurora.

It was so thin, he could see through it to the other side almost perfectly clearly, yet it was inviolably hard. He instantly knew that they could not break it no matter how many times they kicked or punched or attacked with weapons. It wasn’t quite a material strength, however. He didn’t feel a wall touching his fingertips, but more like a disconnect that rejected all interference.

“Is this an area boundary?” Chiyuri asked.

“Yeah, it sure feels like it.” Haruyuki nodded. “But why is there an area boundary in the Unlimited Neutral Field? And it should be the middle of Shinagawa area, anyway.”

“To be more precise, it is two kilometers, Servant,” Metatron said suddenly.

“T-two kilometers?” Haruyuki cocked his head to one side. “From where?”

“From the center point of the large-scale space change generated in the Mean Level.”

Haruyuki gasped and looked back suddenly. The steel buildings blocked his view, but two kilometers to the north was Sengakuji Temple—or more precisely, a single building standing on the north side of Sengakuji. Exactly two kilometers from the place where the mysterious Burst Linker had appeared and forced the change to the Unlimited Neutral Field with an Incarnate technique. That’s what Metatron was saying.

“This wall…That Burst Linker made it?” Haruyuki asked.

“Rather than an obstructing wall produced deliberately, it is more likely that the range affected by the space change stops at this point,” Metatron corrected him. “This is at most a supposition, but the little warrior you saw is overlaying the Mean Level on the Low Level with Incarnayte. The range of this effect is a perfect circle of a radius of two kilometers, and there, the space logically severed. I suppose it’s something like that, hmm?”

“In which case,” Trilead said in a serious tone. He turned his wise-looking face mask toward Haruyuki. “That means that this Burst Linker continues to activate this Incarnate technique even at the present moment. To maintain this kind of phenomenon requires incredible concentration. If we attack and disrupt that concentration…”

“The shift to the Unlimited Neutral Field will be canceled?!” Chiyuri shouted, and Lead nodded wordlessly.

After a moment, Metatron flashed her small angel halo briefly. “It is possible. However, in that case, naturally, the people from Oscillatory Universe would also be aware of this. They would have quite the solid defense prepared.”

“On top of Behemoth and Fairy, there are more than fifteen uninjured Oscillatory members at Sengakuji. To charge into that would be…” Difficult. Haruyuki swallowed the word.

He couldn’t break the wall of light before his eyes. The field might as well have ended in that place. And the portals that existed within the two-kilometer radius inside the wall would have Beast-class or higher Enemies guarding them without exception. Put another way, it was precisely because they could limit the range that Oscillatory had taken action to block the portals with Enemies.

There was only one way now to rescue Fuko and the others from Unlimited PK. Just like Lead said, they would have to attack the Burst Linker who shifted them to the Unlimited Neutral Field and interrupt her Incarnate technique. But was it even possible to get close to this Burst Linker without being discovered? To start with, they didn’t even know her current location. How could he ever apologize to Fuko and the others after they worked so desperately to get Haruyuki out of the ice cage if he bet everything on a reckless surprise attack and failed?

The instantaneous power of thought that he’d been training wasn’t working at all now, and he simply stood there stock-still.

And then on his shoulder, the Archangel Metatron spoke in a voice colored ever so slightly with hesitation, although that could’ve just been in his mind. “There is just one means remaining to break through the Oscillatory Universe guard.”

“Huh?” Haruyuki’s eyes widened in surprise, and the icon floated up to stop directly in the center of the three Burst Linkers, her halo blinking irregularly as she began to explain. “This space severance spreads out in a circular shape of a radius of two kilometers centered on the shrine that you call Sengahkugee. The south side extends to here. In which case, do you know where the north side extends to, Servant?”

“Huh? The north?” Still not understanding where this was going, he opened the map of Minato Ward that he had so desperately memorized.

If they went north from Sengakuji, there was Sakurada-dori, the street they had once used as a catapult on the mission to rescue Ardor Maiden. On the other side of that was the Mita campus of a certain famous private university. And beyond that…

“Oh! Shiba Park?” At this from Haruyuki, Lead cocked his head slightly to one side, but Chiyuri gasped.

“Shiba Park Underground Labyrinth!”

“Exactly.” The small icon nodded solemnly.

“According to my calculations, the gate to my palace, Contrary Cathedral, is just barely within the two-kilometer range. If, hypothetically, the space severance extends underground, then you won’t be able to go farther than that. However, in terms of the BB system, all the dungeons are a separate space from the aboveground. If you can simply make it through the gate, there is a possibility that you can reach the deepest level of the palace.”

“I-is there something on the deepest level, Metacchi?” Chiyuri asked.

Who are you calling Metacchi?!

But rather than erupting in anger, the Archangel replied, “It’s obvious. My main body, the Being Metatron.”