Accel World - Volume 24 - Chapter 11

11

Even with the fiercest warriors of the six Great Legions assembled, it took nearly twenty minutes to destroy the entire herd of more than twenty Enemies. If they had all launched Incarnate techniques, they could have cleared them out in half that time—well, probably in less than five minutes, but then that would call over new Enemies. Thus, they brought them down one by one with normal and special attacks, and when the last one, a large Wild class, scattered on the wind, Haruyuki sank to the ground on the spot, utterly and thoroughly spent.

He fought without the nicked Lucid Blade—with only his punches and kicks—for the first time in a while, but it took a bit of time to remember how to get distance from opponents and how to move his body. He would have to make sure to keep training in hand-to-hand combat while he continued with his sword.

“Excellent work, Crow,” someone said, offering him a hand.

When he looked up, Trilead Tetroxide stood there smiling, having sheathed the Arc of Infinity. Haruyuki took the hand and pulled himself to his feet, but he didn’t have enough strength left in his legs, so he staggered, and Trilead immediately wrapped an arm around his back to hold him up.

“Th-thanks, Lead.”

“I should say the same,” the young samurai responded in a voice thick with emotion. “You showed me a wonderful technique there. You only just offered yourself to the sword, and yet you launched such a blow as that. What depth of training would be required…”

“Nah.” Haruyuki brushed it off. “I was just swinging my sword at nothing every day.”

“I see.” Trilead nodded solemnly. “Yes, the empty swing really is the basis for everything else. I want to go back to my beginner days and do my training over again.”

“What?! That’s way too much, Lead!”

As they spoke, the rest of their Nega Nebulus comrades surrounded them. All of them had warm smiles on their face masks, and when they met Haruyuki’s eyes, they nodded deeply. The last to come forward was Fuko, who stood from her wheelchair and placed a hand on Haruyuki’s shoulder.

“Now then, Corvus,” she said. “Shall we go and welcome our master?”

“Yes!” he cried, pulling away from Lead’s hand to stand tall. He was one step away from collapsing from total exhaustion, but he couldn’t do that until he had witnessed Kuroyukihime’s return.

Together with the members of the other Legions, he started walking toward the remains of the Budokan arena from which Inti had vanished. The ground had turned into a lake of magma but soon cooled and formed a rocky crater. If the five kings had hurried to dive, they would regenerate there in less than ten minutes.

Inside the crater, he couldn’t see any sign of Wolfram Cerberus’s or Black Vise’s death markers in the place where they had died with the kings—naturally, they had avoided Unlimited EK with a forced disconnect. But there was no way they would try to regenerate now, surrounded by enemies. Haruyuki didn’t care if Black Vise stayed dead forever, but he had to somehow separate Cerberus from the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II.

Hang on just a little longer, Cerberus. I’m definitely going to free you from the Acceleration Research Society, Haruyuki called out to the fighting genius who was both a rival and a friend as he looked up at the night sky.

Directly above them, the heat energy released from Inti’s main body was still quietly swirling. It was compressed to about half the size it’d been immediately after the explosion, so it would likely disappear soon enough. But the fact that it had lasted for more than twenty minutes now showed the amount of energy the Sun God contained, a terrifying volume.

Looking up next to him, Ardor Maiden said dubiously, “Is that Inti’s flames?”

“Y-yeah. It was expelled when I cut the main body. I’m glad it went up. If it had spread out to the sides, it could have swallowed and killed all of us,” he said half-jokingly.

Maiden kept her gaze on the sky. “Fu? Have you ever seen a phenomenon like this, where the energy alone remains after the Enemy’s death?”

Fuko cocked her head in thought before answering. “No, I don’t think so. But Inti was nonstandard from start to finish, so maybe this is also part of that?”

“I…suppose…” Utai frowned.

Haruyuki took his gaze off her and looked up once more at the lingering red fire spreading out across the night sky. The Enemy had died, but its energy remained. For some reason, this worked at something inside his brain.

There was no way he would have seen something Fuko hadn’t. And yet he felt like he had witnessed a similar phenomenon somewhere before…At Tokyo Midtown Tower, after a fight that felt as hard as this one with Inti…

“Metatron’s…first form.” Haruyuki unconsciously stiffened at the words that spilled from his mouth.

Even after they destroyed the first form of the Legend-class Enemy the Archangel Metatron, the long protrusion growing from her head lingered in the sky. It had been an object, not energy, but as a phenomenon, it was the same. That protrusion had unraveled from its spiral form, and Metatron’s second form, her true self, had appeared from inside.

…What if?

What if, what if…?

The Sun God Inti Haruyuki had cut into twenty minutes earlier.

What if that was its first form?

This thought was like having a bucket of cold water thrown on him.

The flames swirling in the sky high above were spinning faster. In the center, a small point of light flickered.

Suddenly, Haruyuki understood. The heat energy hadn’t just been contracting. It was condensing. It was coming together over time, trying to produce something new.

It had taken less than a minute for the second form to appear after Metatron’s first form was destroyed, so why was it taking more than twenty minutes in Inti’s case?

To give them time to run away. Meaning whatever was going to appear was that big and scary.

“Gang…” Haruyuki took a deep breath to shout Get away from here!

But before he could get the words out of his throat, a beam of crimson light shot directly downward from the center of the swirling flames. Slamming into the bottom of the crater, the light beam moved back and forth and side to side at top speed, generating something, almost like a 3D printer. Two very thick, very long pillars, red as blood.

At first, he thought it was a building. But the pillars fused about fifty meters up in the air and turned into one fat pillar. Two more slender pillars were drawn out in the air, and these too fused into a thick pillar a hundred meters up. Finally, an elliptical protrusion was added, and the beam of light disappeared.

“A giant…,” Takumu murmured behind him.

And indeed, what appeared in the bottom of the crater was a human-shaped object, with two legs, two arms, a flat torso, and a head at the top. But the word giant couldn’t fully encompass the terrifying majesty of it. The new arrival was easily a hundred meters tall, tall enough to stand alongside the Chiyoda Ward Office. The Devil-class Enemies in the Territories against the White Legion had only reached a zenith of ten meters, and Haruyuki had felt they were impossibly huge.

“Is that…an Enemy?” Shihoko whispered.

No one there could answer her. If it was the second form of the Sun God Inti as Haruyuki had intuited moments ago, then it was nothing other than an Enemy, but his brain was vehemently rejecting this idea. It was still possible it was just some kind of immobile object like a monument to a giant or…

Suddenly, a pattern of concentric circles of white light floated up on the elliptical head of the giant.

Krrrrrrrrrrrmmm…

The dark-red massive bulk moved slightly, and the ground and the air shuddered.

“It moved,” Takumu groaned.

It was an Enemy. What Haruyuki had sliced into was not the true form of the Sun God Inti. That had been just a shell—the true Enemy had been sealed inside.

Should they turn and run? But Inti’s true form hadn’t targeted them yet. It was plenty possible it would aggro because they carelessly ran off. It seemed that their leaders Cobalt and Manganese couldn’t decide what to do, either.

Their increasingly tense paralysis was broken by a single falling star.

The silver light flew in and hit the giant’s head. The light instantly deployed into a ring shape and wrapped around the head above the concentric white rings. After flashing brightly, it became a crown with countless thorns growing from it. It was…

“The Luminary’s crown,” Trilead said. He had fought Metatron’s first form together with Haruyuki and knew what the crown looked like. There was no mistake. That was the thorny circlet produced by the delta of the Seven Arcs, Tenken, the Luminary, a weapon to control Enemies.

Krrrrrrrrrrrmmm…

The giant reeled backward. It should have already been under the control of the Luminary, but it reached up with both hands and tried to rip the crown off its forehead.

But two new falling stars shot down from inside the massive moon at the same time. These hit the giant’s wrists to produce crowns there as well.

The falling stars were still coming. Now three more fell, hitting the torso and forming crowns around the chest, stomach, and hips.

Here, finally, the giant’s movement stopped. The pattern of circles on its face flashed at short intervals, muddying the pure-white light. The arms hung limply, and the massive bulk leaned forward very slightly.

After checking that the giant was completely still, Haruyuki turned his gaze to the heavens.

Something was descending slowly against the backdrop of the pale moon. A Pegasus with white hair and wings on its back spiraled downward, moving the hooves of its four limbs in the air. On the horse’s back was a knight clad entirely in silver armor. And one more person.

White. Dress armor whiter than the moon wrapped the impossibly slender body. Long golden hair fluttered in the night breeze. The face mask was backlit, so he couldn’t make out any features, but an elegant crown rested on her head, and she held a long staff in one hand.

The Pegasus landed on the left shoulder of the giant and folded its wings.

Haruyuki knew the name of the knight avatar gripping the reins: the first of the Seven Dwarves, Basher aka Platinum Cavalier. But he had never seen the snow-white F-type avatar sitting sidesaddle in front of him. Was this the fifth or sixth of the Seven Dwarves, who so far had not shown themselves? But he was pretty sure their color names were not in the “white” line…

Standing up from her wheelchair, Fuko spoke in a voice that made almost no sound. “Cosmos.”

He needed about half a second to discern the meaning of the utterance.

Cosmos.

In other words—she meant this F-type avatar was the Legion Master of Oscillatory Universe, the chair of the Acceleration Research Society, Transient Eternity, the White King, White Cosmos. The one who had driven Saffron Blossom to total point loss; produced the Armor of Catastrophe and the ISS kits; manipulated her own sister and Brain Burst–child, Kuroyukihime, into taking the head of the previous Red King—the root evil of all these tragedies.

But the White King had never shown herself to them before—excluding the one time when she’d appeared at the Umesato school festival in a Gallery-use dummy avatar. So why now? Why here?

To tame the second form of the Sun God Inti? Had she helped the Burst Linkers just when they were about to be trampled down even further? Haruyuki wondered this in his half-numb brain, and in his ear, he heard a voice he’d heard just once before. Sweet like that of a young girl, pure like a noble holy woman.

“Thank you, Silver Crow.” Although Cosmos was a hundred meters above them, her voice penetrated Haruyuki’s mind with perfect clarity. “I’m a little surprised and greatly delighted that it was you who cracked the egg that I could not, no matter what I tried. You really have gotten strong, hmm?”

“E-egg…?”

“This Enemy that was called the Sun God Inti is an egg that encloses all of this universe’s distortions.” The White King spoke as if she’d heard Haruyuki’s hoarse voice. “When it breaks, the end of the world begins. Let me introduce you.”

Cosmos lightly waved the staff—no, scepter—in her hand, and the dark-red giant began to move once more, bringing its right hand to its chest.

“Super-class Enemy Deity of Demise, Tezcatlipoca.”

Haruyuki cocked his head, feeling like he’d heard that somewhere.

“Enough of your lies, Cosmos!” A sharp voice came from the group. It was the vice leader of the Purple Legion, Aster Vine. “Inti is a god from Incan mythology! It doesn’t make sense that an Aztec god would come out of it!”

“Hee-hee. I suppose not,” Cosmos agreed. “But you see, Aster, hun. There’s no real meaning to the names used in this world. The majority of proper names are just things the system scooped up and embedded somewhere. Even my name and yours, hmm?”

Haruyuki abruptly realized White Cosmos hadn’t tamed Inti’s second form—what she was calling Tezcatlipoca—in order to save the Burst Linkers. There was no way she would do that. She didn’t care whether they lived or died.

Almost as if to affirm this flash of insight, the White King raised her scepter. “Now then, all the necessary cards are laid out here. As a thank-you, I’ll let you be the first to see Tezcatlipoca’s power.”

When she waved the scepter gently, the giant moved the hand on its chest, spread its fingers wide, and turned to Haruyuki and the others.

“Retreat!!” Cobalt Blade shouted.

Not even one tenth of a second later, nearly one hundred Burst Linkers whirled around and started to run toward the Tayasumon gate.

However…

A black ring appeared in the palm of the giant’s hand. Once again, he heard the low, heavy sound like a mountain rumbling. Haruyuki’s body was suddenly heavy like lead, and he sank to his knees. All around him, his comrades were thrusting their hands against the ground. The sole exception was Sky Raker, sitting in her wheelchair, but the slender wheels screeched and squealed and seemed ready to come apart at any second.

In front of him, Chocolat Puppeter, unable to bear the weight pressing down on her, fell forward. Cracks appeared in her chocolate armor, and a faint scream slipped out of her.

“Choco!” Haruyuki stretched a hand out as far as he could, but he couldn’t reach her. Most likely, the giant’s hand was amplifying the local gravity.

The speed at which his health gauge dropped was surprisingly gentle, but even so, if this crushing kept up, he would die at some point. To escape, they were probably going to have to do something about the giant’s—Tezcatlipoca’s—hand.

“Fight, everyone!” Haruyuki squeezed out and changed the orientation of his body so he could claw at the ground.

It seemed like Tezcatlipoca was retreating bit by bit. Still maintaining the gravity attack with its right hand, it walked backward and stepped out of the crater. The White King on its shoulder was no longer looking at Haruyuki and his comrades. She was staring intently at the empty center of the crater.

There’s nothing there, though. This thought abruptly turned into a shiver up his spine strong enough to freeze all the blood in his body.

There was nothing there now. But there would be something. Soon…Maybe in a few seconds.

“…No…” As he fought to stand against the strong gravity, Haruyuki screamed as if he were ripping his throat apart. “No!! You can’t come!!”

But his voice wouldn’t cross the wall between worlds.

His worst fear became reality two seconds later.

A small light appeared in the center of the crater. It quickly grew and became a small, spinning icon. A death marker. But because more than enough time had passed since its owners had died, the marker immediately deployed to regenerate the lost Burst Linker.

The first to appear was the Yellow King, Yellow Radio.

All of the contact personnel had apparently carried out their duties at top speed. Less than a second later, the next marker appeared, and the Green King, Green Grandé, was regenerated, followed by the Purple King, Purple Thorn; the Blue King, Blue Knight; and then…the Black King, Black Lotus. The five level niners who had at last escaped the Sun God Inti’s Unlimited EK.

The White King called down from on high, “It is unfortunate that we have to say good-bye so soon after being reunited. Good-bye, my friends. Good-bye, my beloved child. You performed your roles wonderfully, right up until the end.” As if with great reluctance, she slowly lowered the scepter.

Tezcatlipoca raised its left hand and turned it toward the five kings. A circle of crimson light shone in its open palm.

To be continued.