Accel World - Volume 22 - Chapter 5

5

It couldn’t have taken more than ten seconds from the moment Haruyuki saw Cobalt Blade’s death marker from the north side of the Chiyoda Ward office until the moment he landed at the crater that was once the Budokan. But during that brief time, Manganese Blade had been crushed and almost killed.

“Cerberus.” Haruyuki desperately pushed back all his rage and frustration, his anxiety, confusion, and so many other emotions and called out to the metal color before him. “Can you hear me, Cerberus?”

He got no answer.

The right shoulder armor was closed, and the face visor was open, which meant that number one—the young boy personality Haruyuki had met the first time and dueled with several times—had taken center stage. But there was nothing but a reddish-black light swirling inside the visor; Haruyuki couldn’t get any sense of the mind of a Burst Linker beyond it.

And he knew the true nature of that light: the very essence of negative Incarnate, accumulated in the “main body” at the Tokyo Midtown Tower via the countless ISS kits distributed in the Accelerated World.

The main body had been destroyed by Kuroyukihime and the Four Elements, but the Incarnate energy itself had been transferred to the Acceleration Research Society headquarters and poured into Niko’s stolen Enhanced Armament to produce the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II. Lime Bell’s Citron Call had disassembled and mostly taken back Mark II’s massive body, on par with a Beast-class Enemy, but Cerberus was still equipped with the thruster alone when he’d disappeared.

The four protrusions on his back now were those very Invincible thrusters transformed to match Cerberus’s form, and they still housed the Incarnate energy of the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II. Essentially, the thrusters now fulfilled the same role as the Enhanced Armament Disaster that had been the vessel for the first Armor of Catastrophe, but the dark potential far surpassed that earlier model.

Cerberus’s mind was being controlled by the Armor, just like the fifth Chrome Disaster, Cherry Rook’s had been. This was the only conclusion Haruyuki could come to when he saw how ruthlessly, almost mechanically Cerberus had attacked the Coba-Manga sisters. Because Cerberus had been a true Burst Linker when they’d first met; he always made a point of respecting his duel opponent.

Haruyuki knew his friend was forever changed and yet he couldn’t help but call out to him again. “Please. Answer me, Cerberus!”

The red light spilling out of his visor briefly grew brighter.

“Cerber—”

Whmp! That Haruyuki was able to guard with both arms against the blow launched at him with divine speed, fast enough to shred the air itself, was basically a miracle. Perhaps because his senses were still accelerated from his battle with Argon Array, he’d been able to sense the slight shift in Cerberus’s center of gravity. But whether he guarded or not, the result was likely the same.

The metal armor of Silver Crow’s arms shattered to pieces, together with the light-guiding crystals in his forearms, the instant the tungsten fist hit him. The impact was intense—he felt like he’d been hit in the face by the largest Enemy that roamed the Accelerated World. Unable to spread the wings on his back, much less brace himself, he flew backward and crashed into a pile of rubble on the south side of the arena. In the top left of his field of view, his health gauge was cut in half and dyed yellow.

Splayed out, his eyes flew open at the combination of the physical shock of the blow and the mental shock of his earnest plea not reaching Cerberus’s ears. Cerberus took a step toward him, armor clanking, as he came in to finish Haruyuki off.

“Run, Crow,” a hoarse voice told him.

Haruyuki managed to turn his eyes to the side at least and found Manganese Blade lying about three meters away. Her once-shiny Japanese-style armor was seriously damaged, and she’d been impaled on a piece of the building’s skeleton sticking out of the rubble. If she’d had a sword, she could have cut the bar and escaped, but Haruyuki himself had witnessed Cerberus crushing her sword with his bare hand during the fight. Manganese had to have been in excruciating pain, equivalent to being injured in the same way in the real world. Haruyuki absolutely couldn’t leave her like that.

He tried to pull himself to his feet, while in the corner of his eye, Cerberus leaned forward and extended the thrusters on his back. A single punch from a still position had snatched away half of his gauge; there was absolutely no way he could live through a charge. He would have to pull Manganese’s body off the bar and escape somehow into the sky.

“Idiot. Run…,” Manga said again, sounding pained, but Haruyuki ignored her plea as he wormed his way toward her intently.

And then Cerberus went flying just like Manganese had earlier. A second later, Haruyuki was assaulted by a metallic roar and the blue light of an impact wave.

A knight-type avatar in clear sapphire heavy armor stood where Cerberus had been only seconds before, shoulder forward in a charge position.

“Blue…King…,” Haruyuki croaked.

“Vanquish” Blue Knight turned his chiseled face mask toward him for just an instant and gave Haruyuki a nod, and then glared straight ahead again before drawing the two-handed greatsword from the scabbard on his left hip.

More than twenty meters away, Wolfram Cerberus calmly pulled himself to his feet at the base of the exterior wall, his tungsten armor entirely undamaged. Crimson light spilled out through the horizontal gap in his visor.

The Blue Knight and the gray wolf glared at each other briefly as though taking stock of the other’s power. Their auras swelled up, and the air in the ruins crackled with electricity.

“Can you stand, Crow?” A familiar voice came from behind abruptly, and a blade changed into a slender hand to help him up.

Somehow getting to his feet, Haruyuki put his own hand over the hand that continued to support him. “Kuroyukihime…”

“You did well. Leave the rest to us,” Kuroyukihime told him in a gentle, but resolute voice, and left Haruyuki to Lime Bell when she popped out from behind them.

Niko slid a dagger tinged with overlay through the bar that pierced Manganese Blade’s torso, cutting into it like butter, and set the injured samurai on Pard’s back.

“Honestly. You always do this,” Chiyuri grumbled.

“Sorry,” he replied, and looked at Kuroyukihime once more. “Um, Cerberus is…”

“I know.” The swordmaster nodded. “I’ll see if I can’t separate him from the Enhanced Armament. But, Crow, your job here’s not finished yet. Make sure you protect Bell.”

“R-right!” he said, and then added as quietly as possible, “And Ivory Tower—no, Black Vise is still hiding in the shadows around there. Please watch out for him, too.”

“Mmm. If he comes out of the shadows, I’ll take care of him immediately.” Kuroyukihime looked to the center of the crater, as though stretched to her limits, the tension in her nearly about to break.

Facing off against each other, Blue Knight and Wolfram Cerberus sprang forward simultaneously.

The Blue King’s charge was so fast that Haruyuki’s eyes, with his sensory acceleration released, could almost not perceive it. The king’s massive bulk turned into a sapphire-blue flowing line and disappeared. And then Haruyuki heard an earth-shaking roar.

Suddenly visible again ten meters to the right, the Blue King had brought his two-handed sword down about halfway. Cerberus’s crossed arms had caught the large blade, like Haruyuki had earlier. But unlike Haruyuki, his gray heavy metal armor did not so much as crack. He was fully defending himself against the Blue King’s superspeed charge and downward slash attack from an Arc.

“To stop that…,” the Purple King murmured, having come to stand beside Kuroyukihime.

The Blue King’s two-handed sword, the alpha of the Seven Arcs, Tensuu, the Impulse: One of the most powerful swords in the Accelerated World alongside Trilead Tetroxide’s straightsword Infinity and Graphite Edge’s dual swords Lux and Umbra.

Cerberus’s tungsten armor might have been hard, but there was no way it should have been able to defend against a full-power slashing attack launched by a king with an Arc and remain completely unscathed. Which meant that super-high-level negative Incarnate was dramatically amplifying all of Cerberus’s stats. Just like the former Chrome Disaster.

The Blue King continued to lean into his sword, adding power and weight as if to push his way through those crossed arms. Streams of orange sparks flowed from the point of contact between blade and armor, and rubble gradually slid up over Cerberus’s feet.

Given that Cerberus was a pure fighting type, with no flying tools or secret tricks, he wouldn’t be able to escape or counterattack from that position if he didn’t repel the blade somehow. If it came down to a simple show of strength, the advantage was with the Blue King.

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” a voice said from behind Haruyuki abruptly.

“Yes…” He nodded, his eyes held fast by the duel of the century. “That’s the Blue King for you, though.”

“No, no, not the king. Him.” A hint of excitement crept into the smooth, flat voice. “That he would not retreat a step with Knight as his opponent! The result is even greater than I’d expected. It would be a pity to call him by numbers forever, though, wouldn’t it? Let’s give him a new name. How about…Wolfram Disaster?”

Here, finally, Haruyuki realized that the owner of the voice was not a Nega Nebulus comrade nor any of the other meeting participants. Whirling his head around, he shouted, “Where are you?!”

Still supporting him, Chiyuri jerked her head back. “Wh-what’s wrong?!”

“Just now, Vise’s voice…”

“Huh? I didn’t hear anything?”

“……?”

He was baffled, but it seemed that Kuroyukihime, Niko, and the others watching the battle nearby hadn’t heard anything, either. But it couldn’t have been a hallucination. The sinister name Wolfram Disaster lingered in his ears.

“Cerberus…,” Haruyuki murmured, clenching his fist.

The reason he had been calling the current Cerberus “Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II” was because he saw the real issue was the Enhanced Armament, in the end. He thought that if they could just take those thrusters and the negative Incarnate they contained, Cerberus would go back to his original self. Calling him “Wolfram Disaster” was basically the same as admitting that the change was irreversible. And there was absolutely no way he could do that.

Kuroyukihime had told him to protect Lime Bell so that they could watch for their chance to strip Niko’s thrusters with Citron Call, this time for sure. And that moment was approaching second by second.

Perhaps no longer able to fight the Blue King’s sword pressure, Cerberus shuddered. Crossed above his head, his arms were still holding the large sword at bay, but the bend in his knees was gradually getting deeper. Soon he would reach his limit and fall to the ground. That was when Lime Bell would take the stage.

Haruyuki couldn’t allow Black Vise to get in the way of this once-in-a-lifetime chance from wherever he was hiding. Focusing a third of his concentration on the fight in the center of the crater, he focused the other 70 percent on watching their surroundings and then waited intently for the moment to come.

The Impulse’s blade and the tungsten armor squealed and scraped against each other. Rivers of sparks shot out in all directions, illuminating the faces of both fighters.

And then the deadlock finally broke.

A roar shot through Haruyuki’s entire body, like a cannon firing. An ocean of smashed armor fragments danced up into the air, sparkling. When they caught the sunlight and glittered beautifully, he saw the color—a clear blue.

“What?!” Chiyuri cried out in surprise, clinging to him, and Haruyuki gasped sharply. The unbelievable scene from a second earlier replayed in the back of his mind.

Cerberus looked to have been on the verge of plunging to his knees on the ground, unable to resist the pressure of the Blue King’s blade when his thrusters fired black flames for a mere instant. That was enough to bounce the Impulse up high into the air, and Cerberus used the opening to charge the king’s wide-open chest with a head butt.

That head butt had shattered Frost Horn’s shoulder armor in one blow in a duel with Wolfram Cerberus in Nakano Area No. 2 before and beaten Haruyuki back to the ground when he was about to take off into the sky. It had been Cerberus’s key move since level one, and now with the propulsive power of the thrusters—no, with the power of the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II—this head butt had become a special-attack blow powerful enough to harm even the Blue King.

His thick armor shattered, Blue Knight was knocked backward more than ten meters above the debris on the ground, but almost as if he refused to fall even if the sky itself came down around his ears, he plunged the sword in his hand into the ground and braced himself. His injuries were not serious, but that blow had to have seriously decreased his health gauge.

“Honestly! Soft as always,” the Purple King cursed.

“Knight’s always refused to even think of using his own special attacks when his opponent isn’t using theirs,” Kuroyukihime explained to Haruyuki and the others. “Naturally, the same goes for Incarnate techniques.”

“We don’t got time for that kinda noble attitude,” Niko said. “Two, three more minutes, and we’ll be up to our necks in the second wave of Enemies.”

The Green King took a heavy step forward. “It is time for us to join forces and end this.”

“That’s the long and short of it.”

The speaker wasn’t the Purple King or the Black King or the Red King or the Green King, or even Black Vise, of course.

Poof! Ahead of the four kings, a cloud of yellow smoke puffed up, and the Yellow King, Yellow Radio, leisurely stepped out.

“H-hey! Where have you been?!” Purple Thorn yelled.

“Aah, well, it’s rather embarrassing. I was caught up in the fall of the Budokan and wedged in amongst the rubble,” he replied calmly, twirling the baton in his left hand around and around.

“The ruuuuubbbblllle…,” Lemon Pierrette said, from where she stood with Iron Pound and the others on the west side of the crater, sounding slightly exasperated.

Together at last, the five kings nodded at each other and then took an almost casual step forward. Clouds of dust puffed up at their feet as they moved so fast it seemed like they were teleporting, splitting up on either side to take on a hexagonal formation with the Blue King.

Standing in the center of the hexagon, Cerberus slowly moved his crimson goggles from side to side. Although he was surrounded by six level niners—without exaggeration the most powerful warriors in the Accelerated World—his posture did not change. He simply stood there, seemingly drained of strength.

Now that he was fused with the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II, Cerberus’s battle power was indeed overwhelming. The very fact that he had been able to go one-on-one with the Blue King, the peak of close-range avatar power even without using his special attacks, was already utterly extraordinary. Even so, there was just no way he could repel a simultaneous attack from six kings at once—he couldn’t crush them all. And Black Vise, the person who had created this situation, had to have been only too aware of this.

In which case, the Restrainer’s objective lay elsewhere. All Haruyuki could think of was that Vise would aim for the moment when the six kings were focused on Cerberus and target someone else in their group. Massive piles of debris littered the crater that had been the Budokan arena a half hour or so ago, and naturally, this rubble created dark shadows beneath it. If the voice whispering to Haruyuki earlier was real, then Black Vise had to have been hiding somewhere in those shadows with his Shadow Lurker ability, waiting for his moment to move.

Peeling his gaze away from the six kings and Cerberus, Haruyuki once again checked his surroundings. Lime Bell held him up on one side, and beside her was Chocolat Puppeter, who had returned the five Chocopets to her special-attack gauge. To her right was Blood Leopard, bearing the gravely wounded Manganese Blade on her back, and Aster Vine. A little ways off in the western outer area, Iron Pound, Suntan Chafer, and Lemon Pierrette stood together.

Just as he had when he snatched Niko at Tokyo Midtown Tower, Vise was no doubt intending to trap someone in his thin panels and then sink into the shadows with them. He would then use that hostage as a shield and force them to call off the general attack on the White Legion. That was the worst-case scenario that Haruyuki could imagine.

But at the same time, Black Vise was also at his most vulnerable in the moment when he came out of the shadows to abduct someone. Just like his self-proclaimed student Shadow Cloaker, if the shadow was erased in that instant, he would be thrown up out of the ground, defenseless for a few seconds.

Haruyuki pushed aside the urge to focus on the battle between the kings and Cerberus, and concentrated the larger part of his attention at the feet of the deputies.

Before he knew it, a weighty silence fell over the crater. The intensity of the clash between the battle spirit of the fighters in the center drowned out even the footsteps of the large Enemies approaching from the south.

There was no trigger. Without so much as eye contact, much less any signal, the six kings readied swords, shield, staff, baton, and gun, and glided inward in a high-speed charge to narrow the inner diameter of the hexagon in a perfectly synchronized movement.

There was already nowhere to run. Maybe straight up into the sky, but the kings had apparently also taken that option into consideration. Six immensely powerful weapons came down on the gray wolf from above as if to block off that particular route of escape.

But Cerberus didn’t run. He braced his feet and clapped his fists together loudly in front of his stomach. The visor on his head was clamped shut, and even the zigzag line of his crimson goggles was narrowed: the activation motion for his Physical Immunity ability. A dark aura coiled thickly around him.

Instantly.

The six kings exploded in six directions at exactly the same time, not deviating from each other so much as a millisecond, and six different light effect colors dazzled the eye.

Although they were all normal attacks, the exquisite synchronization of the level niners would have amplified the force of a single blow by several orders of magnitude. Not to mention that the two-handed sword of the Blue King, the cross-shaped shield of the Green King, and the staff of the Purple King were three of the Seven Arcs, the most powerful Enhanced Armaments in the Accelerated World, while the Black King’s limbs, naturally, but also the Red King’s guns and the Yellow King’s baton, didn’t fall far behind the Arcs in terms of sheer power.

Meanwhile, Cerberus boosted the defensive power of his superhard tungsten armor and his Physical Immunity ability with his bottomless Incarnate energy. The Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II, had once withstood even a direct blow from Metatron’s Trisagion.

The violent clash of raw attack power and absolute defense power was, contrary to Haruyuki’s expectations, very quiet. Utterly soundless, without a single vibration or shock to shake the area. Rainbow flowers of light rippled outward from the point of collision, an inky darkness swirling at their core. The six kings and Cerberus didn’t so much as twitch, as if time had stopped in the center of the crater alone.

“Why is nothing happening?” Chiyuri whispered faintly.

“…The two forces are too powerful; the result’s not coming,” Haruyuki replied in a voice that was almost nonexistent. He didn’t know if that was actually true, but he felt like it was, that the BB system itself was unable to process the clash of the strongest lance and the strongest shield. But he couldn’t imagine that this state of suspended animation would continue forever. At some point, the system’s scales would tip, and the contracted ball of ultimate energy would assault either Cerberus or the six kings. Unable to even take a breath, he simply waited for that moment.

It wasn’t as though he had forgotten Black Vise was hiding somewhere around them. In fact, even while half his attention was stolen by the clash in the crater, the other half maintained its watch on his own feet and the feet of those around him. If even a single plank appeared from inside a shadow, he intended to charge, eliminate that shadow with Incarnate light, and yank the inky avatar out of the earth.

However.

Perhaps the kings poured even more power into their attack, because the violence of the rainbow light flashed even more brightly, and in that moment, Haruyuki turned his entire mind in that direction, albeit for a mere heartbeat of time.

As if carefully aiming for that moment, a voice called out with neither fight, nor fear, nor exultation, as if it were merely emotionlessly announcing a dull fact.

“Icosahedral Insulation.”

This time, Chiyuri appeared to hear it, too, and her avatar shuddered against him.

Haruyuki ripped his attention away from the kings as thin black panels soundlessly appeared from shadows of the debris. But not at anyone’s feet.

Twenty enormous thin panels rose up in a circle large enough to easily enclose everyone in the crater’s center—Cerberus and the six kings, along with the other nine meeting members. Each panel was a perfect equilateral triangle, each side more than three meters long.

The massive triangles had no sooner lined up like interlocking gears to form a black wall than the circle’s diameter began to shrink rapidly, kicking up rubble.

A restraint technique!!

Haruyuki hesitated for an instant about whether or not he should grab Chiyuri and escape from the triangular enclosure. It would be a repeat of when they had escaped from the combined Incarnate techniques of Snow Fairy and Glacier Behemoth in the Territories the previous day. The strong aversion he felt to once again abandoning his comrades and running away delayed his reaction.

Chiyuri’s will, however, was rock solid. “Forget me. Fly out of here!” she shouted in his ear.

“But—!” He started to argue with her, and then one of the triangles that made up the black wall touched his back.

The panels themselves seemed to have no attack power, but they were relentless and unyielding as they pushed him and Chiyuri toward the center of the crater, whether they liked it or not. Choco screamed, while Pound and Chafer on the left and Leopard and Vine on the right tried to push the panels back with shoulders, heads, and hands, but even the high rankers’ physical strength wasn’t enough to slow the contraction of the circle.

The six kings, too, must have noticed by now the black wall surrounding them. But if the balance of their synchronized attack tipped even slightly in any single direction, all the power concentrated in that one point would bounce back, and kings though they might have been, they would still be hit with serious damage. That said, if the circle shrank completely, the same result was inevitable.

…No.

Haruyuki couldn’t believe Black Vise’s objective was simply to push everyone into the same spot and kill them in an explosion of the kings’ attack power. He must have had some kind of other plan for them. So maybe Haruyuki should actually escape while Vise’s intentions were still unclear. But. But.

Unable to decide, he was shoved forward by the triangular panels.

“Crow! Hurry!” Chiyuri shouted, and then shook off his arm as she fought against the wall’s contraction with her back before leaping toward the center of the circle with everything she had.

“Go, Corvus!” Choco called from behind.

“You have to go!” Pard snapped, her voice beating at his back.

A mere five meters ahead, the kings gathered ever more strength to try and break through Cerberus’s defenses. The six surging beams of light mixed together into a pillar to shoot straight up, and at its base, the dark aura cloaking Cerberus writhed violently as if it were alive.

From Haruyuki’s position, he could see Niko’s face in profile and Kuroyukihime’s half-mirrored goggles. Their voices echoed in his mind.

“Fly, Crow!”

“You gotta go!”

“……Hrn!!”

Gritting his teeth, he spread his wings and glared up.

Instantly, almost as if to obstruct his escape, the triangular panels slid upward as they continued to contract. The circle slowly transformed into a half sphere, blocking the sky above.

Haruyuki kicked off the ground with everything he had and spread the metal wings damaged by Argon Array’s laser, along with the unharmed Metatron Wings.

“Hngaaaaaah!!” Transforming his helplessness into a howl of rage, Haruyuki ascended at full speed. The hole in the sphere was getting smaller and smaller before his eyes. He folded his wings up into the most acute angle he could manage, stretched his arms out straight, and charged toward the yellow-green sky he could see on the other side of the hole.

His vibrating metal fins came into contact with the edge of the triangular panels, generating an earsplitting screech and rivers of sparks. Two of his outermost fins were torn off, but in return, Haruyuki just barely made it out of the black semisphere. He immediately spread all four wings to decelerate and then quickly flipped around and stared at the half-sphere below him.

The hole he had shot out of had already vanished, and there was no way to see inside the black walls. The only way to escape the obsidian prison would have been to dig into the earth of the crater.

No, wait.

The triangles kept moving, and the bottom edge of the half sphere started to fold inward. Krak, krak! The rubble in and around it was crushed, pulverized, and the ends of the triangles came together until finally, they joined up to produce a complete sphere buried in the ground.

A completely closed-off space made up of twenty equilateral triangles. Icosahedron. Locked away inside this space, just under six meters across, were the six kings and eight Legion members, together with Cerberus. And the kings were clashing at full power in the center. If that superpowered energy was released inside the closed-off space…

Haruyuki felt a twinge of fear.

Zzuzzzmmm! He heard the heavy roar of an explosion, and the icosahedron shook violently.

“Ah…Aaaah!” Raising his voice in an anguished cry, Haruyuki once again spread his wings. His misgivings of only a second earlier had become reality.

If they had broken through Cerberus’s defenses, the larger portion of the attack power would have been absorbed by Cerberus and his health gauge, so there wouldn’t have been an explosion loud enough for Haruyuki to hear. Which meant that the kings must have indeed lost their precarious balance, causing the blast. Unfathomable energy was raging in that closed space at that very moment.

Would Kuroyukihime and the others manage to live through it somehow, despite the serious damage they would no doubt take? Or would they die, unable to fully withstand the blow? From outside the icosahedron, he couldn’t even confirm whether they lived or died.

Haruyuki clenched his fists. His only option was to destroy it.

A normal attack was obviously no good. But he probably wouldn’t be able to so much as scratch it with his special-attack Head Butt or his Enhanced Armament Lucid Blade, either. The only thing that had a chance of doing any damage was an Incarnate technique, but in the metal forest to the south of the Budokan site, a number of massive shadows twisted and squirmed. Large Enemies drawn in by the Incarnate power of Argon Array and Cerberus. If Haruyuki used an Incarnate technique, they would target him. Even still…

He took a deep breath, exhaled, and gained altitude. From the pace of the Enemy advance, he’d have just one chance. He had to smash the icosahedron in one full-powered attack. Changing his clenched fists into sword hands, he brought up a faint overlay and spread his wings as far as possible.

“Corvus! No!” a voice from behind shouted, just as he was on the verge of executing his do-or-die charge.

Haruyuki quickly turned around and saw flowing metal hair fluttering and the pale blue light of injection flames charging toward him. Sky Raker, whom he had parted with at the Chiyoda Ward office.

“M-Master!” he shouted.

Raker stopped a mere five meters in front of him, cut her boosters, and applied the air brakes with arms spread. Even so, her avatar arrived with a fair amount of force, and Haruyuki unthinkingly embraced her to bring her to a stop.

“Master! Kuroyukihime and the others!” Haruyuki cried hoarsely.

“I’m aware of the situation.” Fuko nodded deeply. “I thought someone might regenerate Argon, so I was keeping watch on her death marker. I never dreamed that this would happen here…”

“I-inside that shell, Kuroyukihime and Bell and Choco and Rain and Pard…Everyone who was at the meeting is locked up in there. And the simultaneous attack of the six kings exploded in there…Wh-what if everyone—?”

“Calm down, Corvus.” Fuko wrapped her arms around him tightly. “That black ball is the manifestation of Black Vise’s rejection. Most likely, a third-stage Incarnate technique like Graph’s Elucidator. Unfortunately, neither of our Incarnates will work against that. If we force an attack, we’ll only take damage from the blowback.”

“Th-third stage?!” Pushed to a new level of despair, Haruyuki stared once more at the black ball below.

Up to that point, he had witnessed two of Black Vise’s affiliated Incarnate techniques. The first was Hexahedral Compression, which Haruyuki himself up had been locked up in. The second was Octahedral Isolation, which Vise had used when he’d stolen Niko’s Enhanced Armament. Both techniques boasted a fearsome strength, and if Haruyuki hadn’t had help from Kuroyukihime and Takumu, he couldn’t have broken through them.

There were only five types of regular polyhedrons: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron. Considering this, it wouldn’t have been at all strange if the Icosahedral Insulation before them was Black Vise’s most powerful restraining Incarnate technique.

Having thought this far, Haruyuki abruptly realized something and sent his gaze racing across the ground around them. “Right. Vise himself, creating this icosahedron!”

He would have had to come out from the shadows to maintain the activation of the Incarnate technique. If they could find and defeat him, the icosahedron would also naturally vanish. Or so he assumed. Or perhaps hoped. But.

“That’s probably hopeless, too,” Fuko sighed.

“Huh?! Wh-why…?” Haruyuki was dumbfounded.

Fuko took her hand from his back and pointed to the black sphere. “I looked for him from the air, too, but I couldn’t so much as sense his presence. I’m sure Black Vise is using the panels of his own body to make that thing. His avatar doesn’t exist outside the shell.”

“Th-that’s…”

If that were the case, then Icosahedral Insulation was simultaneously the ultimate restraining technique and a peerless defense technique. Because it transformed Vise’s own body into an indestructible prison.

While watching over the battle of the six kings, Haruyuki had guessed that Black Vise intended to abduct someone from the shadows. But that had been a serious miscalculation. It hadn’t been just one person—he’d wanted all of them. Vise had planned to restrain everyone at the meeting of the Seven Kings with his own most powerful Incarnate technique, using Wolfram Cerberus as bait. If Haruyuki had only reached this conclusion earlier, it might have been possible to avoid the situation they found themselves in now.

He shook with enough self-reproach and regret to gouge his heart out, and Fuko squeezed his shoulder firmly.

“Calm down. If…Even if in the worst-case scenario, Lotus and everyone have been annihilated, that doesn’t mean that everything is finished.”

“Huh?”

“This is the Unlimited Neutral Field. Everyone will come back to life in an hour. And there are six Kings of Pure Color in there. I don’t know about Radio and Thorn, but at the very least Originators Knight and Grandé should be able to use third-stage Incarnate techniques.”

“…Originators…” Naturally, it wasn’t the first time he’d heard this word. When Niko appeared suddenly at Haruyuki’s house after the first meeting of the Seven Kings five weeks earlier, she talked as though she’d lost all confidence in herself, speaking of the Originators as monsters. Four days after that, he’d encountered the Green King at Roppongi Hills in the Unlimited Neutral Field, where he’d told Haruyuki that he was himself an Originator.

It was ironic that the power of the Blue and Green Kings that had frightened Niko was now their last hope. But given that Haruyuki and Fuko could do nothing from the outside, they had no choice but to trust the rest to the oldest of the kings. The problem was that if even the kings had died in the explosion in the closed space, they would regenerate in an hour, but Argon Array and Shadow Cloaker would come back to life before that. Haruyuki and Fuko’s job now was to keep those two from getting in the way of everyone’s escape.

Having somehow managed to find something for them to do, Haruyuki started to move his gaze away from the inky black icosahedron and toward the skyscraper in the east.

But before he could say anything, Fuko spoke quietly once more. “Although.”

“Huh…?”

“Vise would know that, too. I find it hard to imagine that he seriously believes he could hold the kings forever even if they used a third-stage Incarnate technique.”

“R-right.” He brought his gaze back to the black prison and nodded. “And even if they don’t have an automatic safety cutoff set, at some point, someone is going to take off a Neurolinker in the real world. And then the kings’ avatars will disappear. He would have to stay in the Unlimited Neutral Field for a whole day—two years and two hundred seventy days on this side,” he noted, having become fairly accustomed to the acceleration calculation. “But not knowing when the kings would return, there’s no way he could just sit and wait for years with this third-stage Incarnate technique activated.”

“Yes, I also don’t think that Vise’s abilities extend that far,” Fuko agreed. “But in that case…In that case.” She dropped her voice to the lowest volume possible, and her voice became even more strained. “What if there’s still—?”

It was then that the dry wind carried a voice to them down from above where they hovered in the air.

“What? …You’re not going to help your comrades? …How heartless.”

“Nngh?!” Haruyuki shot back in retreat and then looked up into the sky to see a small shadow about thirty meters away in the western sky.

No, it wasn’t a shadow. When it caught the sunlight, strong for the Purgatory stage, its entire body glittered, dazzlingly bright. The duel avatar was probably M type and definitely a metal color. The color of the reflected light was a silver more clear than Silver Crow’s. And he was floating in the air like Haruyuki and Fuko because he was riding on the back of a horse with large wings.

When Kuroyukihime had raced back from her school trip in Okinawa to rescue Haruyuki and Takumu after they’d been backed up against a wall by Dusk Taker, she had been riding a horse that was entirely black with pale flames on its hooves—an Enemy with the ability to fly.

The horse the silver avatar straddled was likely the same type of Enemy, but its coat and mane were white as snow, with a hint of red in the gently flapping wings and the tip of the long tail. The rider gripped the reins that stretched out from the black bridle on the horse’s head.

Haruyuki was about to demand the intruder identify themself, but Fuko’s sharp voice beat him to it.

“Platinum Cavalier!”

Haruyuki knew that name. It had been inscribed on the first line of the list of Oscillatory Universe members hurriedly given out for the Territories the previous day. In other words, the first of the Seven Dwarves, nickname: Bashful or Basher. The most powerful attacker in the White Legion.

As if responding to the shiver of fear that shot through Haruyuki, the clouds roiling in the sky above suddenly grew thicker, and the strong sunlight of the Purgatory stage waned. The light reflecting off the knight straddling the winged horse also waned, revealing the avatar’s form.

Helmet with long decorative horns stretching out and an armor design of mainly curving lines. Large shield on his back, left hip equipped with a slender longsword with a cross-shaped sword guard. A knight. There was no word more suitable to describe him.

Vanquish Blue Knight was of course the standard bearer when it came to knight avatars in the Accelerated World, but Platinum Cavalier’s metal armor was much more knightlike than that of the Blue King. When the Oscillatory members list had been passed out, Haruyuki had looked into the names out of curiosity. The origin of the word knight was the Old English cniht meaning “servant,” while in contrast, cavalier had its origins in the French chevalier, meaning “horse-mounted soldier.”

That wasn’t necessarily the reason for it, but the figure on the horse Enemy was simply so gracefully elegant that it was hard to imagine another avatar that better suited the name, and the clear platinum gleam of his armor, likely on the left edge of the metal color chart, the pinnacle of precious metals, stole Haruyuki’s eyes and attention, albeit if only for an instant.

As if to cover for his absentmindedness, Fuko quickly raised a hand and brought up a thin overlay.

Incarnate techniques were only to be used when attacked with Incarnate first. Fuko herself had told him this when she taught him how to use the Incarnate System. And yet, now that very same Fuko was not only using an Incarnate technique, but moving to strike first against Platinum Cavalier, who hadn’t so much as lifted a finger. In other words, he was that powerful of an opponent.

“You didn’t take part in the Territories yesterday,” Fuko snapped, her sword hand turned toward Cavalier. “And yet you appear here now. So you’re just Ivory Tower’s—no, Black Vise’s pawn in the end, hmm?”

Cavalier, who seemed to know Sky Raker as Rose Milady had, shrugged slightly. “That you would say that is surprising and regrettable…My swordmaster is the White King and her alone…I came today under her orders…I do not follow that pointy head…” The knight let the last word of each sentence linger in the air.

“Then leave immediately!” Fuko cut into those lingering notes. “Black Vise is out of control. After his true identity was found out, he attacked all six of the kings. Once we deal with the situation here, all the Legions will attack Oscillatory. As the head of the Seven Dwarves, you must have other things you need to run off and do!”

“And would that be…for instance…urging our general members to leave to protect them from the attack…perhaps…?”

“That’s what you’d do if you cared about your comrades. Vise has succeeded in locking up the six kings and their deputies, but that’s not even a real stopgap. The kings will escape from that cage sooner rather than later, and then the joint subjugation mission will begin.” Her tongue was sharp, but Fuko’s explanation held a note of real concern. “You won’t be able to fight back, no matter how many powerful members Oscillatory has. In which case, at least those Legion members who follow Cosmos without knowing the truth—”

“Impossible.” Cavalier cut her off with a single word.

“Why?!”

“For instance, the six kings…No, I suppose it’s five now…At any rate, even if we are attacked by the kings’ Legions and no one is able to flee…no member would dream of leaving Oscillatory…And also, you know, Sky Raker…You’ve made one serious misunderstanding…”

“Misunderstanding?” Fuko parroted doubtfully.

Platinum Cavalier glanced at Haruyuki, who was holding her up, before almost sighing. “Once we deal with the situation here…That is indeed what you said, yes…But things won’t proceed like that…In the Accelerated World, hopeful calculations are always betrayed…No matter how you imagine the worst, the result is always worse, sadder, emptier…”

The knight’s words were painfully pessimistic, but they sounded familiar to Haruyuki. He dug through his memories, and the voice of Argon Array in the battle earlier came back to life in the back of his mind.

I mean, a way to save someone, there ain’t no such thing in this world. Like, right from the very start and beginnin’, there was no salvation.

All that there was was hatred, fighting, betrayal, fraud, violation, lament, despair, et cetera, et cetera. I’ll teach you boys right now. Just how cruel the Accelerated World really is.

As soon as she’d told him this, Argon had called up the copy of Dusk Taker’s personality that lived in Wolfram Cerberus’s right shoulder. And that had indeed been a phenomenon that far surpassed any worst-case scenario Haruyuki could have imagined.

This Dusk Taker re-creation was swallowed up and destroyed by the negative Incarnate energy transferred from the ISS kit main body, and now the personality of Orchid Oracle lived in Cerberus’s right shoulder. It was unclear what had happened to the real Oracle, but for her close friend Kuroyukihime, this could easily have been said to be a worst-case development. There was no way he could accept anything worse happening. He couldn’t let anything worse happen. No matter what.

“Platinum Cavalier,” Haruyuki called out to the shining knight, a high ranker of much greater standing than himself, as he roused his energy and battle spirit. “If you’re planning to get in our way, then we will defeat you here and now. I’m sick of Black Vise and the Acceleration Research Society leading us around by the nose. What they’re—no, you’re doing is bad. And you know that, too!” He lifted his hand and brought up a silver overlay in the outstretched tips of his fingers, just as Fuko had.

Cavalier didn’t react to this warning of an advance Incarnate attack. He didn’t draw his sword, and he also showed no sign of moving away from that spot. “…Indeed, I can’t find any fondness for Vise’s actions…But you see, newbie…He is paying the price in his own way…”

The knight turned his tapered visor toward the icosahedron on the ground.

“He cannot release the Icosahedral Insulation under his own power…Although it is an Incarnate created to be unbreakable by anyone, once it is activated, he cannot go back to being a duel avatar unless someone breaks it for him…Having faith only in your enemies when you do not trust any of your allies, don’t you think a person like that is strange…?”

“……” At a loss for words, Haruyuki stared at the inky black sphere half-buried in the center of the crater. Even if what Cavalier was saying was true, it was still absolutely no reason to sympathize with Vise. In fact, Haruyuki should have been thinking about a way to use this information.

If Vise couldn’t return to human form from the icosahedron under his own power, then they might be able to seal him in the Unlimited Neutral Field forever if they could rescue the Kings and everyone inside somehow and then completely isolate the sphere. But a way to get the Kings and deputies outside without smashing the icosahedron…

“Master.” He had a sudden flash of insight, and spoke to Fuko in a tone too quiet for anyone else to overhear. “If we rolled that icosahedron somewhere else, what would happen to the death markers inside?”

“That’s…” Her madder-red eye lenses narrowed momentarily. “Death markers have no materiality, so it’s impossible to destroy or move them. That’s an absolute rule of Brain Burst. Of course, perhaps no rule is absolute if someone with the power to interfere with the system comes along, like Orchid Oracle. But at the very least, I can’t imagine Vise has that power. In other words…If we could move the icosahedron, the markers might slip through the wall and stay where they are.”

“In which case!” Haruyuki’s voice grew loud for an instant and he earnestly suppressed it as he continued. “If we move that ball to a place no one can get near—like if we drop it into the super-gravity moat of the Castle, we could maybe leave Vise in ball form forever.”

“To be more precise, until someone removes his Neurolinker in the real world,” Fuko noted, and Haruyuki was completely taken aback.

He had basically never thought about it, but it was true that in the real world, Black Vise/Ivory Tower was probably a kid around his age, and if he stayed in a full dive for several hours, his family would try to remove his Neurolinker from his neck. Or else, given that he was the very person who had arranged this trap, it was also likely that he had set an automatic cutoff safety in advance.

So it won’t work. Haruyuki sighed.

“But there is perhaps value in trying it.” Fuko gripped his shoulder tightly. “Even if it is a third-stage Incarnate technique, the absolute theory means he must be mustering all of his defensive power. If you and I push it as hard as we can, we might be able to move the ball.”

“If we could move it just five meters, we could get everyone’s markers out at the very least.”

“Yes. But…What will Cavalier do?” Fuko’s voice was even more hushed.

“True.” Haruyuki shifted his gaze to the winged horse in the sky above the dome.

The platinum knight remained in the position where he had appeared. Still holding the reins in his hands, he showed no sign of reaching for the shield on his back or the sword at his hip. He said he had come on the order of the White King, but what instructions had he received exactly?

“Let’s ignore him.” Fuko’s words were full of a strong resolve.

Haruyuki blinked rapidly. “Huh…?”

“As far as I know, Cavalier doesn’t have any long-range, long-distance techniques. If he’s simply here as an observer, there’s no point in fighting him, and if he’s not, we can attack once we see him move.”

It was indeed just as she said. If he were a simple observer, then he could continue to carry out his duty in ghost form if he were to die.

“Understood,” Haruyuki said, and Fuko nodded wordlessly before starting a short countdown.

“Two, one, zero.”

Instantly, he dropped the thrust in his wings to zero. Quickly changing position in free fall, he plummeted toward the icosahedron on the ground. He slammed into the side of the sphere with so much force that if he were going any faster, he would have been the one to take damage, and then he pushed with his hands and right shoulder.

“Unh…Aaaaaah!” he howled.

“Haaaaaah!” Fuko called out from his left side, having reignited her Gale Thruster.

The pale light shining from Silver Crow’s wings and the blue injection flames gushing from Sky Raker’s thrusters stretched out and squealed in resonance. The hardness of the Icosahedral Insulation he felt against his hands was even greater than he’d imagined. He’d been able to feel a bit of give, a little creaking with the Hexahedral Compression and Octahedral Isolation. But the inky equilateral triangles that made up this icosahedron were not simply black panels—they communicated a feeling of rejection so absolute it might sever its attachment to the world itself.

But they weren’t intending to destroy the third-stage Incarnate technique.

Don’t break it, move it.

If they could push it a mere five meters from its present location, the death markers inside would slip through the panels and remain in this spot. And if they could keep pushing it all the way to the Castle in the south, they could drop it off the cliff where an inescapably strong gravity field waited and maybe make it impossible for Black Vise to do anything for a while.

Move…Move…Move…!!

Prepared to use up all the special-attack gauge he’d only just fully charged in the fight with Argon Array, Haruyuki mustered up every bit of thrust possible. A sea of white photons flowed out from his Metatron Wings, brilliantly lighting up the massive amounts of debris covering the ground.

“…M…ove…!” Unable to withstand the pressure he himself was producing, the metal armor wrapped around Silver Crow’s hands began to crack.

“Move…!” Fuko squeezed out, and Gale Thruster roared, its operation pushed past its limits.

Haruyuki felt the massive icosahedron move a little, just a tiny bit. And then he heard two voices on top of each other.

“Get away from there, servant!!”

The voice of the Archangel Metatron echoed in his head, even though she was supposed to be resting at the top of the distant old Tokyo Tower.

“And this is the worst case that surpasses the worst case…”

The voice of Platinum Cavalier, still in the sky far above, reached him faintly over the sound of his own exertions.

Stuck between the instinct to obey Metatron’s order and the logic that the sphere would move if he just kept pushing a little harder, Haruyuki turned his gaze up at the sky.

Straddling the winged horse, the knight brandished a hand high in the air. Clutched in it was the silver longsword still tucked away in its scabbard.

No.

The cross-shaped protrusion he could see on the hilt and the guard was a little too short to hold in a hand. That wasn’t a sword—it was a staff.

“The Luminary?” Fuko murmured, barely audible.

The cross decorating the tip of the staff emitted a dazzling light, and the sky split.

The thick clouds above the crater ripped apart, and as they instantly evaporated, a massive—a too massive—fireball appeared. The roar easily drowned out the sound of his wings and her thrusters, shaking heaven and earth and causing a white halation of Haruyuki’s field of view.

“The sun…”

Is falling. His words were swallowed up by the incredible shaking of the earth. His special-attack gauge emptied, the firing of Gale Thruster stopped, and he and Fuko slid down the surface of the icosahedron.

“That’s not the sun,” she said, in a hoarse voice, firmly clutching his hand. “That’s…the Legend-class Enemy, Inti…”

Haruyuki knew the name. An Enemy with power on par with the Four Gods and the Four Saints, one the Anomaly Graphite Edge had died once trying to defeat without damaging it at all. The incarnation of destruction, impervious to every attack, burning to death without exception any and all who approached, and now it was dropping toward the icosahedron charring even the air. The information pressure was so absolute that Haruyuki was convinced that even a third-stage rejection Incarnate was helpless against it.

He realized that the enormous fireball, twenty meters across, had a thin silver ring wrapped around it. The structure of countless thorns was exactly the same as the item that had been embedded in the forehead of Metatron’s first form when she was forced to guard Tokyo Midtown Tower. He didn’t understand why it didn’t melt in Inti’s heat, but there was no mistake that this was the restraint tool that the delta of the seven stars, the Arc Luminary, used to control Enemies.

What would happen when everyone was swallowed up by the heart of the Sun God Inti, a creature so powerful they couldn’t even approach it without dying? And then when Inti didn’t move from that spot? He didn’t have to think hard about the answer to those questions. Naturally, his friends would face instant death, but not just instant death—when they regenerated an hour later, they would be instantly burned to ash again, a cycle that would be endlessly repeated. A perfect Unlimited Enemy Kill.

This was the true nature of the trap Black Vise had set. His real aim hadn’t been to restrain the members of the meeting of the Seven Kings, but to annihilate them in an Unlimited EK.

“Corvus!” Fuko shouted, and pressed her hands to his chest.

They couldn’t fly anymore, and they didn’t have enough time to run. Haruyuki knew that Fuko was going to knock him flying with a palm strike to get him out of Inti’s instant death range.

No. I’m not going anywhere. If there’s no way to rescue Kuroyukihime, Chiyuri, Niko, and everyone else, then I want to die with them here. Haruyuki shook off this suicidal desire with his meager willpower. Nothing would come of such meaningless self-satisfaction. He and Fuko at least had to make it out of this trap alive.

“Master!” Haruyuki shouted and held her tightly in both arms. He had used up his special-attack gauge, and there wasn’t enough time to focus his Light Speed imagination. But he still had the snowy white wings that were proof of his bond with Metatron. And given that he hadn’t used them in the Territories the day before, Black Vise couldn’t have known about them.

Haruyuki had never used the Enhanced Armament Metatron Wings as a single unit alone before. When he’d slipped through the God Seiryu’s heat wave, when he’d gotten the jump on Argon Array’s omnidirectional laser, he’d used them like an assist booster. So he didn’t really know how much speed they could produce as a stand-alone unit, but he would have to have faith now.

“Fly!” Haruyuki’s thought became light and gushed from the white wings.

Boom! A shock raced through him, and the intense Gs of acceleration made the joints of his avatar squeal. Flying diagonally upward like a rocket, their feet were scorched by the descending Inti’s flames, instantly becoming red-hot.

As he watched his health gauge drop abruptly in the corner of his eye, Haruyuki flew and flew ever upward with all his might. If Fuko hadn’t shouted “We’re good now!” he might have made it all the way to the clouds.

Switching control from Metatron Wings back to his own wings, he shifted into a hovering mode just as the giant ball of white-hot flames made soundless contact with the jet-black icosahedron.

The scattered mountains of debris on the crater floor and the remaining shell of an outer wall instantly went up in flames. Laid bare, the silver earth grew red-hot before his eyes.

Five seconds.

That was the amount of time that Black Vise’s third-stage Incarnate technique could withstand the flames of the Sun God Inti. Rather than melt in the heat, the triangles that made up the icosahedron shattered into pieces like glass. The fragments were enveloped in white flames and condensed into a single point to produce a tusk-colored death marker.

Haruyuki expected the death markers of the six kings, their eight deputies, and Cerberus to also appear from inside the shattered prison. But he was wrong.

He could only identify two death markers, one green and one gray. Green Grandé’s and Cerberus’s. The Green King had likely used his own body to defend against the huge explosion that ripped through the interior of the icosahedron.

Four of the five surviving kings launched major techniques toward the north side of the crater simultaneous with the destruction of the icosahedron, almost as if they had anticipated Inti’s descent. Blue, purple, yellow, and black auras shot out, spiraling into a vortex to gouge out a temporary tunnel in the Sun God’s flames, the pressure generated from the kings’ techniques slightly buffering the speed of their descent.

A crimson shadow raced through the escape route created by the four kings. The Red King slid across the incandescent earth with her movement expansion Incarnate technique Pyro Planing. She was pulling something like a massive casting net in both hands, with Lime Bell, Chocolat Puppeter, Manganese Blade, Lemon Pierrette, Iron Pound, and Aster Vine stuffed inside. The net had apparently been made by Vine with her whip. Plus, Blood Leopard in Beast Mode and a brown beetle—probably Suntan Chafer’s transformed figure—were pushing the net from behind.

They hadn’t given up. Even trapped inside that indestructible sphere, they had somehow guessed at Inti’s descent and come up with a strategy to escape.

“F-fight!!” Haruyuki shouted, lost in the moment, and almost as if they heard him, Rain glided ahead even faster. But the path the kings had carved out was quickly closing, and white flames licked at Leopard and Chafer in the rear. Their armor began to melt and char, and their speed grew duller.

“Leopard!!” Fuko shouted, as a green light shot out from inside the net to envelop them. The light that revived the burned-out avatars in the blink of an eye was no doubt Lime Bell’s Citron Call. When he looked, he saw that the other Burst Linkers in the net weren’t simply being carried along, but earnestly working to push back Inti’s flames in their own ways.

The large fireball of Inti’s main body had a radius of about ten meters, with an ultra-hot death zone of another ten meters around that. Rain and the group raced through the twenty-meter escape route, and then advanced another few seconds before collapsing in a pile on the gray earth.

As if they had been waiting for the survival of these nine avatars, flames of blue, yellow, purple, and black shot up high into the air.

“Kuroyukihime!” Haruyuki’s shriek was drowned out by the roar of the Sun God Inti slamming into the ground. The area around it instantly melted and boiled to produce a lake of bright red magma.

With teary eye lenses, Haruyuki stared at the western sky. Just as when he’d arrived, the platinum knight on the winged horse had vanished at some point.

By the time Haruyuki opened his eyes in the rear seat of the EV, Fuko was already leaning over into the passenger seat to gently pull Kuroyukihime’s Neurolinker off her neck.

The body leaning against the seat back shuddered, and a faint sigh came from the pale face in profile. Her eyelashes slowly lifted and she blinked several times before sitting up. Kuroyukihime looked at each of them in turn, and then said calmly, “Everyone, well done in surviving.”

He felt like he had to say something, but he couldn’t find the words. It was true that Haruyuki, Chiyuri, Fuko, and Shihoko had managed to survive the Unlimited EK trap set by the White Legion and Black Vise, but the five kings, including Kuroyukihime and Grandé—who had already been struck down with Cerberus—had been swallowed up in the center of the Sun God Inti and died instantly in order to ensure the safe escape of the other nine Burst Linkers.

In the Unlimited Neutral Field, Haruyuki and Fuko had joined up with Niko and the others, and waited for Cobalt Blade to regenerate just barely outside Inti’s heat-death zone thanks to the fact that she had been instantly killed by Wolfram Cerberus. They held the barest minimum of a meeting before moving to the portal on the first floor of the Chiyoda Ward office building and returning to the real world. Although they had to have regenerated a little before Cobalt, Argon Array and Shadow Cloaker were nowhere to be seen.

Haruyuki and his comrades had been able to leave normally, but that sadly wasn’t the case for Kuroyukihime after she’d been swallowed up by the immobile Inti. Because Fuko had moved with top speed the second she woke up to remove their Legion Master’s Neurolinker, the death marker would disappear from the Unlimited Neutral Field for the time being, but the next time she used the Unlimited Burst command, she would die instantly.

“Sacchi,” Fuko murmured and a transparent droplet slid soundlessly down her cheek. Seeing this, the three in the back seat held their collective breath. “Sacchi…I was supposed to protect you whatever happened and yet…”

“Hey, hey. That’s a bit over-the-top, Fuko.” Smiling wryly, Kuroyukihime lifted a hand and gently wiped Fuko’s eyes with her fingertip. “I merely died once in the Unlimited Neutral Field. That is absolutely no obstacle to duels in the normal field or the Territories, and the joint subjugation mission against the White Legion will be carried out as planned. In fact, thanks to Vise playing a card like that, the unified will of the five Legions is rock solid now. This meeting of the Seven Kings was our win.”

She turned to look into the back seat.

“Shihoko, Chiyuri, Haruyuki, well done. I think Black Vise’s aim was actually you more than the kings. As your Legion Master, I am very proud that you all survived in such a situation without losing a single person. And…did the forced cutoff for Knight, Grandé, Radio, and Thorn make it in time?”

Chiyuri and Shihoko both had tears in their eyes and neither looked ready to speak anytime soon, so Haruyuki took the lead in answering Kuroyukihime’s question. Of course, his own chest was pretty full, too, but he pushed that down and worked to keep his voice under control.

“Y-yes. The Blue King dived with Coba-Manga, the Purple King with Vine, and the Yellow King with Pierrette, so they said they would be able to remove their Neurolinkers right away. The Green King was alone, but Pound said he has something like a forced cutoff safety, and he’ll be fine.”

“Mmm, I see. I thought Radio would be in more danger than Grandé, but I see that he and Pierrette are close enough to dive from the same location.”

Haruyuki suddenly remembered the Yellow King’s surprising weakness revealed during the meeting.

“I secretly asked while we were waiting for Cobalt to regenerate,” Chiyuri said brightly, as she rubbed at her eyes with one hand. “I guess Pierrette is Radio’s actual little sister!”

“Oh-ho, makes sense then. In which case, I suppose they’re also parent and child…” Kuroyukihime nodded.

If that’s the case, we can relax. Wait. Can we relax? he asked himself.

“Um.” Shihoko timidly raised her hand. “I’m glad the kings were all able to cut off their connections, but there were two others caught up inside Inti, weren’t there? Wolfram Cerberus and Black Vise. It’s not that I’m worried about them, but I was just wondering how they plan to escape the Unlimited EK.”

“Oh. True,” Haruyuki muttered.

Fuko peered at him from the driver’s seat. Her eyes were still a little red, but her usual gentle smile had returned to her lips. “Corvus should know the answer to that.”

“Huh? Um, uhh…” He groaned, and a silver silhouette rose up in the back of his mind. The platinum knight brandishing the long, slender staff. “Oh! Right! …He can make Inti do whatever he wants, so he can just move Inti while you’re all gone from the Unlimited Neutral Field and then move it back to its original location after Vise and Cerberus regenerate.”

“Ohh, is that it?” Shihoko nodded and then quickly added, “So then if we can detect that timing, it would be possible for Kuroyukihime and the others to dive in the moment that Inti moves and escape from the Unlimited EK, right?”

“Mmm. In theory, that is indeed the case. But it would be hard to put into practice. We would have to intently monitor Inti in the Unlimited Neutral Field without them noticing, and I would have to always be ready to accelerate on this side.”

Shihoko’s shoulders slumped. “I suppose so.”

“It’s okay, Choco.” Haruyuki unconsciously put his hand on her uniformed back. “If we put our powers together, I just know we’ll be able to get Kuroyukihime and the others out. And it’s not like Inti’s invincible and immortal system-wise. There has to be some kind of weak point, some strategy.”

The two girls in the front seats looked at each other and smiled meaningfully.

“Huh?” Haruyuki was baffled. “Um. Did I say something weird?”

“No, we were just thinking you sounded like the idiot hero somehow, Corvus,” Fuko remarked.

“Honestly.” Kuroyukihime rolled her eyes. “But thank you, Haruyuki.”

“But Haru,” Chiyuri added. “I dunno about being so touchy-feely with a girl there.”

“What?”

Here, he finally realized that his hand was firmly fixed to Shihoko’s back, and he recoiled his whole body. “Whoaaa!” But with three of them in the distinctly non-spacious back seat, he ended up slamming the back of his head into the window.

Tears welling up in his eyes, he pressed a hand against his new bump, and the four girls laughed brightly.

The chime of an alarm ringing in the cabin of the car put an end to their laughter. The automatic driver AI connected to Fuko’s Neurolinker was letting her know about the arrival of a message.

Quickly flicking across her virtual desktop, Fuko composed herself and said, “It’s from Pard. They’re going back to Nerima for now.”

“Mmm. They are?” Kuroyukihime nodded. “Well then, it’s about time for us to get moving, too. Absolutely no changes to the schedule. Chiyuri will go cheer for Takumu at the Budokan, and Haruyuki and Shihoko are off to take care of Hoo at school, hmm?”

“Yes!” Haruyuki said on behalf of the entire back seat.

“Okay then, first we’ll head to the Budokan entrance.” Fuko pushed the EV’s start switch. “I hope Mayuzumi’s winning and moving up the ranks.”

“The fact that we haven’t gotten a message from him means he’s winning, Sister,” Chiyuri said.

“You’re actually exactly right. Okay, let’s hurry.” Fuko pushed the steering wheel switch, and the EV automatically pulled out of the parking lot. She quickly switched to driving mode and stepped on the accelerator.

Although it wasn’t quite on par with Pard’s large motorcycle, the vehicle began to accelerate with verve, and Haruyuki looked up at the beautifully clear sky through the window. The intense light of the midsummer sun was strong enough to dazzle his eyes even through the UV IR-blocking glass.