Accel World - Volume 24 - Chapter 3

3

On his second visit that day, the Unlimited Neutral Field was littered with enormous caverns, like the ruins of Cappadocia in Turkey.

His own condo had transformed into a dark-brown rocky mountain, and Haruyuki stood at the entrance to a cave in its wall. Since he was at a height equivalent to the twenty-third floor, he had a great view of the area around Koenji Station and its countless cavern ruins. At first glance, it resembled a Wasteland stage or a Weathered stage, but given the heaps of sand piled in the corners of the cave, this was…

“A Sandstorm stage, maybe?” He turned his gaze to the pale-blue sky.

The Sandstorm stage was ranked in the middle of the nature-type wind stages, and although there were no annoying gimmicks or traps, powerful sandstorms would blow up occasionally. If a player was helplessly swallowed up in one of these, it would soon devour their armor and their health gauge, and it wasn’t unusual for players to die. The sky was clear at the moment, but a mere thirty seconds after the horizon started to cloud over, the storm would come crashing down, so being constantly on guard was a must.

That said, the reason he had spent ten points to come to the Unlimited Neutral Field was not to hunt Enemies. Haruyuki moved to the center of the large cavern and whirled around to look at his surroundings.

“Um.” He cleared his throat. “Centaurea Sentry?”

There was no answer. He hadn’t thought he’d be able to make contact that easily, so he kept calling out, raising his voice.

“Centaurea…I’m sorry, but I wanted to talk to you…Centaurea…Centaureaaaa…”

The only sound was his own voice echoing futilely in the dim cave. He listened carefully for a minute, but he didn’t hear any hint of that distinctive voice in response.

When he thought about it, it was only natural that he received no response. If Sentry hadn’t lied about being the third Chrome Disaster, then he had long, long ago been subjugated by the Blue King and left the Accelerated World.

But over the last month, it had become clear that “death” in Brain Burst was a fuzzy concept. Burst Linkers who had lost all their burst points had the BB program forcibly uninstalled and all their memories related to Brain Burst removed. This was an indisputable fact. On the other hand, however, something that might have been called the Burst Linker’s spirit remained in the Accelerated World; a ghost of their quantum circuits for accelerated thought lived forever inside the Brain Burst central server, also known as the Main Visualizer.

It freaked him out if he thought about it too hard, so he’d been trying to ignore it, but in his duel avatar as he was now, Haruyuki was not actually thinking with his own brain, apparently. The brain waves of his physical body, which was left behind in the real world, slowed to the extreme—in other words, his internal clock dropped to the minimum speed, and he was basically in a coma.

This was most likely something the majority of Burst Linkers didn’t know. The first time Haruyuki accelerated, Kuroyukihime had told him that the BB program overclocked the quantum signals emitted by his heart and raised the processing speed of his brain by a thousandfold. This had long been the accepted explanation, and many Burst Linkers likely believed it. And when the Physical Burst command was used, perhaps that really was what happened.

But the exact opposite was true when using the normal Unlimited Burst command. The physical brain didn’t accelerate; rather, it decelerated. In its place, Haruyuki and his friends thought with special quantum circuits inside the Main Visualizer. Looking at the Accelerated World like this, feeling, talking, fighting—all of it happened within these circuits, a reproduced spirit. And the instant the acceleration ended, there was a memory sync with the real brain.

This was the theory Tsubomi Koshika had explained to him, so maybe the truth lay still elsewhere. But if this theory was true, it would also explain to a certain degree Black Vise’s mysterious power of deceleration. An operation to interfere with the quantum circuit clock by forcibly manipulating the accelerated real brain to decelerate again was made possible.

And the crux of this quantum circuit theory was the fact that even after a Burst Linker lost all their points and left, that “reproduced spirit” remained inside the Main Visualizer. Indeed, Kuroyukihime had encountered the former Red King, Red Rider, inside Tokyo Midtown Tower, and Haruyuki himself had fought the ghost of Dusk Taker at the White Legion’s headquarters. In which case, the ghost of Centaurea Sentry, who had lost all his points however many years ago, should still be there, too.

“Sentry,” he called out once more before dropping his head and sinking into thought.

So far, the only time he’d heard the man’s voice was in the middle of a fierce battle—and in the middle of an extreme situation in which one blow would determine life or death. So did that mean Sentry would only contact him in that kind of situation? No. He had called himself a teacher and Haruyuki his student. If Sentry really believed that, he wouldn’t put on needless airs. The reason Haruyuki couldn’t hear his voice had to lie with Haruyuki and not Sentry.

It was an extreme situation.

Time always stopped when he was speaking with Sentry. Well, if it actually stopped, they wouldn’t have been able to talk. It was more that Haruyuki’s perception was hyper-accelerated. Accelerating beyond regular acceleration. Almost like when he shifted to the Highest Level.

“Oh!” he cried quietly.

It wasn’t almost like—it was exactly that, wasn’t it? Accelerated to the limit in an extreme situation, his consciousness approached the Highest Level for a mere instant, and communication with Sentry was thereby possible?

In which case, he would have to go to the Highest Level to talk to the man. But Haruyuki couldn’t shift by himself; he had to call the Archangel Metatron and get her to take him there. But she was asleep at the very top of the old Tokyo Tower in Fufuan, recovering the parts of herself spent in the intense battle against Oscillatory Universe. He absolutely could not disturb her until her recovery was complete.

“Just me…going to the Highest Level…”

Saying it made him want to finish the thought with “No way; not possible; forget it.” Hadn’t Rose Milady said that the only Burst Linker who could shift under their own power without help from a Being was Snow Fairy?

But that also meant it wasn’t impossible. Snow Fairy was a level eighter, the second of the Seven Dwarves, and a powerful player to whom Haruyuki couldn’t even hold a candle, but they were still both Burst Linkers in the BB system. Whatever she could do, Haruyuki should be able to do, too, someday. Five years from now, or a year, or six months—or just maybe, now.

“Equip Lucid Blade.”

A white beam of light pierced the ceiling of the cave and poured down to materialize a platinum longsword on his left hip—the simple yet beautiful design of Haruyuki’s new partner. He gripped the hilt with his right hand and slowly unsheathed it.

The blade shone like a mirror, reflecting the faint light that made it inside from the mouth of the cave. The reflected light held a hint of red that hadn’t been there before. Proof that an enhancement to nullify fire damage had been carried out at the hands of the wandering blacksmith, Mr. Smith.

He gripped the longish hilt in both hands and held the blade in front of his chest in the orthodox stance.

To be honest, he had no idea how he could shift to the Highest Level under his own power. All Haruyuki could do was re-create one of the situations when he’d heard Sentry’s voice.

He imagined a massive iron ball enshrined before him. Diameter of one—no, two meters. Bigger than Silver Crow was tall, the dully shining sphere sank into the rough floor of the cave. The volume of the sphere with a one-meter radius was about 4.2 m3, and the weight of iron was about 7.85 tons per m3, so doing the math gave him 33 tons, more or less. If there really had been a sphere of iron that heavy before him, it would have broken through the floor of his condo and smashed all the way to the ground—in the Accelerated World and in the real world.

Because of this aside, the power of the image started to weaken, so he imagined that the floor, too, was reinforced with thick steel plating and girders. The iron sphere once again took on a real texture. The moment he felt the traces of the polished surface, saw the slight rust here and there, and even smelled the faint scent of iron wafting around it, he brandished Lucid Blade and brought it down on the sphere.

There were no sparks or shrieks of metal on metal, but as soon as his platinum blade touched the dull curved surface, Haruyuki stopped. An imaginary shock numbed his hands, and he very nearly dropped the sword.

He took a step back and examined the iron sphere as he brought his sword back into position. There was a nick about the width of a hair in the place where he had hit it, but his own thin blade was also a little blunted. He wouldn’t be able to cut the sphere like this, no matter how many times he hit it. He had to make use of Sentry’s teaching and overlay the maximum on the minuscule.

The minuscule was the smallest possible point, while the maximum was a full-powered slashing attack. If he relaxed his focus even the slightest bit or tensed his arms, the logic of Sentry’s sword technique—Omega-style Whole Blade—would lose its effectiveness.

Steadying his breathing, he raised his sword once more. The sphere repelled it with an intense shock. Again. Again. No matter how many blows he rained down upon it, the iron sphere continued to exist without so much as a scratch.

The root of the word lucid was Latin for “light,” and just as the name indicated, his sword had the inherent ability to change into a laser blade, which used up an impact energy gauge set in the sword. If he took advantage of that power, he could have melted the iron sphere, but there would have been no point in that. He had to cut it using the secret teachings of Omega style, just like when he’d defeated Einherjar.

Haruyuki soon forgot why he started doing this in the first place and simply brought his sword down again and again. At some point, he lost all sense of time. The only things that existed in the world now were the iron sphere, his beloved sword, and himself. Eventually, the sky outside the cave grew darker, and a sandstorm came along, but not even the roar that shook the cave could break his focus.

The sandstorm died down. The sun set. Night fell. Off in the distance, a large Enemy roared thunderously, and several midsize Enemies responded. A second sandstorm pushed past from the direction of Shinjuku and continued on toward Asagaya.

He slashed at the sphere at a pace of one blow every ten seconds until the number of hits exceeded one thousand, surpassed three thousand, went beyond five thousand.

And then Lucid Blade bounced back in a shower of sparks, and a little piece of the sphere snapped off. Not even noticing this impossibility becoming reality—because the two-meter iron sphere was an object that existed only within his imagination—Haruyuki made up his mind that the next blow would be the last and brandished his sword.

The place he had been intently slashing at had layers of thousands of scratches; that spot alone shone a bright silver. But overall, the sphere was essentially untouched. It stood proudly before Haruyuki, as if taunting him with its thirty-three-ton mass.

A sudden realization hit him then: Up to that point, his mind had been turned to the entirety of the enormous sphere as he swung his sword. Because for the most part, the heroes in all kinds of manga and novels always talked about “taking in the big picture” and “looking at the whole.” This way of thinking was probably best in actual battles in Brain Burst, too—if you weren’t always looking at the full landscape of your opponent and the stage as a whole, you couldn’t respond to a situation that constantly changed at a dizzying pace.

However, maybe the secret of Omega style was different. Not wide but narrow. See not the whole but only a single point. Narrow the focus of your mind, ever smaller. Contract it to the limit.

Whether the iron sphere was two meters across or ten or a hundred didn’t matter. He needed to cut only the minuscule point where the straight line of the blade and the curve of the sphere collided—the gap of 0.1 nanometers that existed between iron atoms. Small…smaller…still smaller.

Keeeeee! He heard a high-frequency buzzing, like tinnitus. Lucid Blade was colored with a hazy silver light.

One point.

He swung his sword. The flow of time grew sluggish. The slowly, slowly moving sword approached the iron sphere, drew nearer and nearer…

Skreeeeee!!

The sound of acceleration.

Before he knew it, Haruyuki was standing in an infinite empty space with no floor or ceiling. The iron sphere had disappeared. He lowered the sword clutched in both hands and whirled around to take in his surroundings. There was nothing nearby, but far below, an infinite number of points of light came together like the Milky Way and glittered quietly.

“…The Highest Level?” he muttered but heard no voice in reply. He sheathed his blade and looked at his hands. Depicted in tiny dots and semitransparent, they were not those of his real body but of Silver Crow’s.

This was what he’d seen before in his previous visits to the Highest Level, but he couldn’t immediately believe he was actually there. The twenty-minute timer he’d set for automatic disconnection was about two weeks in the Unlimited Neutral Field. Even if he were to hypothetically shift under his own power, he’d thought it would be impossible to do in three days or even a week. He never dreamed he’d manage it this fast. And then he wondered how many hours exactly he’d been swinging his sword.

At any rate, it seemed that he had indeed been able to move to the Highest Level without borrowing the power of Metatron. And he had no guarantee he’d succeed a second time. In which case, he couldn’t let this chance slip away.

“Um…Cennntauuurea Sennntryyy…” His voice was swallowed by the endless darkness and disappeared without an echo.

“You called?”

“Hngaaaaah?!”

The reply came suddenly from directly behind him, so he leapt back with a shriek. He fell flat on his backside and looked up.

Standing there was a knight-style avatar, a tall figure wrapped in seamless armor. Although it was a knight, the overall look was different from the magnificent Blue Knight or the elegant Platinum Cavalier. The light armor fit snugly against the avatar’s body, and there was essentially no extraneous ornamentation, so it resembled Silver Crow in terms of design direction. The face was completely covered by a helmet with a rhombus-shaped visor, and hair longer than Sky Raker’s hung down to nearly its feet.

He couldn’t tell what color the armor was because avatars were depicted as aggregates of infinitesimal points of light on the Highest Level. However, one thing was clear. The chest of the armor rose up and carved out a smooth arc. If this knight was Centaurea Sentry, then “he” was actually “she.”

“Uh, um…Are you…Sentry, maybe?” Haruyuki asked, still sitting on the invisible ground, and the knight shrugged slightly. Her long, straight hair swung slightly, and the points of light flowed soundlessly.

“You did indeed call for my presence, yes? Why, then, such surprise?”

The gender-neutral husky voice was without a doubt the same voice that had guided Haruyuki any number of times. As he stared intently at the slender avatar, he muttered in reply, “O-oh, it’s…I just totally didn’t think I’d get to see you.”

“You swung your sword for such long hours with no conviction?” She shook her head in what looked like exasperation and offered him her right hand. After hesitating briefly, he timidly accepted it and was yanked hard to his feet.

When he stood face-to-face with her, he saw that Centaurea Sentry was about five centimeters taller than Silver Crow. The thin scabbard equipped on her left hip also looked somewhat longer than Lucid Blade.

“Th-thank you…” He bowed and tried to take his hand back, but Sentry didn’t let go. She held his hand in front of her face and examined it without a word before finally releasing it.

“Hmph. For someone who is originally a weaponless fighting type, your hand is passably suited to yattou.”

Haruyuki knew at least that yattou was the general nickname for swordsmanship, but unable to grasp the actual meaning of what she said, he asked timidly, “Um…Are some avatar hands better suited to swordsmanship?”

“Most naturally. As a general rule, the macho fighting types have hands that are too thick and thus find it difficult to grasp a sword. Others are endowed with hands better suited to wielding a blade.” Sentry made a C shape with one hand and clamped it open and closed.

“O-oh.” Haruyuki finally understood. “I get it.”

“Should they drop their sword, a sword user is at a true loss. This is a surprisingly important point. Your parent is the exception indeed. No fear of dropping her swords,” Sentry said, chuckling.

Haruyuki wanted to ask if she had ever fought the Black King, but he gave up on that, since he wouldn’t know what to say regardless of which of them won. After staring at his own hands for a moment, indeed quite slender for a fighting type, he lifted his gaze.

He’d looked centaurea up on the bus when he came back from the hospital that day, and apparently, this color name had nothing to do with the airport in Aichi that was pronounced the same way. It was actually the scientific name for cornflower. And sentry meant something like a guard, so a literal translation would be a “cornflower guard.”

While he was at it, he looked up cornflower and discovered that the plant with the small blue flowers that bloomed in an arrow wheel that he’d thought was Rodgers’ bronze-leaf was actually cornflower, and Rodgers’ bronze-leaf was a white flower of the Saxifragaceae family, a totally different plant. Cornflower blue was also used to describe a shade of sapphire. If they’d met on the Mean Level or the Lowest Level, Sentry’s armor would likely have shone with remarkable beauty, but unfortunately, that was not going to happen—probably.

As he chased down these thoughts, Haruyuki stood there silently, and Sentry shrugged once more.

“Silver Crow, you wished to speak with us, and thus you came all this way, yes? To ask that we haunt you no more and rest in peace, perhaps?”

“Oh, right. I—I mean, no, no. I do want to talk, but I wasn’t thinking at all that you should rest in peace and go away!!” He hurried to refute the idea, but he had too many things he wanted to ask, and he couldn’t sort them out in his head. He was strangely spaced-out and couldn’t concentrate on the situation at hand. “I-I’m sorry. I want to talk to you about all kinds of things, but I can’t really get my thoughts together.”

“Well, we don’t suppose you would be able to.”

“Huh?”

“Are you at all aware of the number of hours you spent swinging your blade on the Mean Level?”

Posed with this question, he cocked his head. “Um. Maybe two, three hours.”

“Fool.” Sentry flicked his forehead lightly with her index finger. There should have been no collision detection on the Highest Level, but just like when Metatron had jabbed him in the head, he felt the phantom sensation of a sharp collision.

“Ow!”

“We, too, were not observing your efforts from their start, but we can say that the time you spent with your sphere easily surpassed ten hours. That you would continue to brandish your blade without pause for such a length of time simply because you did not shift to the Highest Level…There is perhaps something off about you.”

“O-off about me?” Haruyuki started to hang his head in disappointment that his self-proclaimed master would say that after he worked so hard to meet her, and Sentry pushed his chin up with a finger.

“Do not despair. Those were words of praise. A follower of Omega style cannot succeed unless there is something off about them.”

“F-follower?” he parroted. “So then are—were there other people besides me?”

“We made note of this earlier. That you are our sole successor. There are none other than you.”

“…Th-there aren’t?” He wondered if that meant she hadn’t found any Burst Linkers besides him who were “off” enough to have merit in Sentry’s eyes, but he decided not to pursue it. At any rate, the reason he was spacing out was apparently because he’d spent over ten hours on image training. And then he suddenly realized something. “H-huh?”

“What is it this time?”

“Um. I’m thinking with the quantum circuits inside the Main Visualizer right now, not my physical brain. So basically, it’s like an electric clone, which is kinda scary, but I feel like it’s not actually possible for my brain to get tired, whether it was ten hours or a hundred.”

“‘Kinda scary,’ hmm? There really is something off about you in a good way.” Sentry chuckled briefly and then crossed her slender arms in front of her chest. “We also do not entirely understand the logic there. Or rather, we ourselves are something along the lines of the residual thought of Centaurea Sentry, who was relieved of all her points in the distant past. The question of the logic by which we exist is mysterious, and we are not particularly eager to consider it too deeply, but we shall answer within the scope that we are able. Crow, you used the words quantum circuit, but are you aware of what that is specifically?”

“Huh…?” His right hand twitched, but he couldn’t look anything up online in this world. Scraping together the bits of knowledge he did have, he managed to respond, “I-it’s, um, the circuits of a quantum computer…That’s what it is. Lots of quantum gates put together.”

“Mmm, the current mainstream for quantum computers is an electron spin-type quantum circuit that makes use of an artificial diamond chip. That said, however, our knowledge base ends with the moment of total point loss. But the Brain Burst central server is different. It uses the light quantum circuits that were formerly researched and developed but then vanished at the end of the 2020s.”

“Light…quantum?”

Electrons and photons are kinda the same, aren’t they? he wondered.

As if reading his mind, Sentry shrugged a third time, arms still crossed. “We are no expert on the matter, either. We cannot explain the details. But…it would seem that light quantum circuits are able to perform a task that electron spin circuits cannot.”

“What’s that?”

“To reproduce and save human consciousness—in other words, the soul.”

“…”

Haruyuki was overcome by the feeling that the conversation had suddenly jumped from science to the occult, and beneath his goggles, his mouth flapped open and closed. “Wait…Th-the soul?”

“This indeed sounds dubious, but think for a moment. At the present time, are you yourself nothing other than the soul reproduced from the physical body of Silver Crow?”

“…”

Now that she mentioned it, she was exactly right. What Haruyuki had said before about a quantum clone was basically defined the same way as a reproduced soul.

“S-so then the BB program uses the Neurolinker to copy my soul from my brain and save it to the light quantum circuits of the Main Visualizer…Is that it?”

“Mm-hmm.” Sentry nodded. “You had a dream the night you installed it, yes?”

“Y-yes. I forget what it was about now, but it was a really bad dream.” He shuddered slightly.

“We also dreamed. We were told the dream was the scanning process necessary to create the duel avatar. But most likely, our soul was copied over the course of the night. And the crux of all this is that the soul in the head of the physical body and the soul inside the light quantum circuits are, in principle, one and the same. Thus, when the heavy calculations continue for a long period, this places undue burden on the circuits, and you space out. This is how we understand the process to be.”

“A burden on the circuits…Can I fix it?” he asked, unconsciously touching his head.

“It can be fixed. A normal burden, that is.” Sentry’s tone was somehow different now. “But some errors are irreparable.”

“Huh?”

“The darkness produced by Incarnate— No, let us not discuss that now. We do not wish to give you any strange, preconceived notions.”

“Wh-what? But now I’m curious.”

“You did not come to the Highest Level because you wished to discuss quantum circuits, did you?”

“Oh.” Haruyuki could only bob his head up and down. “Y-yes, that’s right.” Unconsciously, he clenched his hands and looked up at Sentry’s sharp visor. “Um, I…I want to train in the sword—Omega style. I’m not so hot on the name, but I can’t forget that smooth sensation from when I cut into Einherjar’s armor.”

“Oh-ho-ho. Addictive, isn’t it?” she asked boastfully.

He didn’t want to admit it, but there was no point in trying to hide it at this stage. “Yes, very.”

“When we first cut iron with the principles of the sword, we, too, vowed that we would not return to the real world until it belonged to us completely,” Sentry said, shifting her gaze from Haruyuki to the sea of stardust. After briefly taking in the sight of central Tokyo depicted in countless points of light, she lifted her face. “We are willing to take on this challenge of training you. You clearly have some ways yet to go, given that a mere object such as Einherjar’s armor gave you that length of trouble.”

“A-a mere…? That was a Legend-class Enemy. And the first time I’d seen it…”

“Now then,” Sentry continued, ignoring Haruyuki’s complaints completely, “in this Highest Level, we cannot impart to you in full the principles of the sword that we have refined. There exists here not a single grain of dust to be cut. The most we would be capable of here is to speak to you of the essentials in words.”

“Um, I’m okay with even that. If you could just tell me the secrets of Omega style—”

“Imbecile!” Once again, Sentry raised a hand faster than he could see and jabbed him in the forehead.

“Augh!”

“Any knowledge you acquire standing like a pole and listening will fall out of your head without a trace after the sleep of a single night. You cannot hope to absorb the true techniques without the intent and single-minded training that pains the body, combined with actual battle that hones the soul.”

“Th-that’s maybe true, but I can only meet you here, Sentry,” he protested. “And I don’t know when I’ll be able to come to the Highest Level again.”

“Hmph.” For once, she seemed unable to argue with him. She crossed her arms and started to walk in small circles. She passed before him two, three times and then stopped on the fourth round.

“So the time has come, then, has it? Indeed, that may be the only way,” the knight murmured.

Haruyuki stared at her face, almost entirely hidden by her visor. “W-will you teach me?”

“We shall. But not the principles of Omega style.”

“Huh? …Then what?”

“Our name.”

And then Centaurea Sentry told Haruyuki an entirely unexpected name and what to say when he saw its owner. Finally, she added, “From now on, you will not call us Sentry, but Maestro.”

After returning from the Highest Level to the Unlimited Neutral Field and then escaping to the real world through the portal at Koenji Station, Haruyuki sank more deeply into the sofa he was sitting on. He’d only been accelerated for a dozen or so hours in subjective time, which meant that not even a minute had passed in reality. But he’d spent the whole time swinging his sword against an iron sphere, so he felt a weighty exhaustion.

When he thought about it, though, this exhaustion was strange. According to Sentry, it was the light quantum circuit in the Main Visualizer that bore the burden of the long hours of training. The brain of the flesh-and-blood Haruyuki was supposed to have been in a decelerated state—basically at a standstill. Even if his memories were synced when he burst out, it didn’t make sense that even the exhaustion would be carried over.

In other words, this tiredness was an illusion, Haruyuki told himself, and used the idea to encourage his body to stand.

He still had over half an hour before Fuko came to pick him up, enough time to polish off two or three questions of his math homework. But as soon as he opened the app, he knew he couldn’t focus on it. Because Centaurea Sentry’s instruction—well, command—was terrifying in its content and incredible in its difficulty level.

“I can’t. No matter how you look at it, there’s just no way,” he murmured as he gazed at the gray streets beyond the window, but of course, there came no reply.

“Haaah…”

A deep sigh. The whole idea weighed too heavily, but he unfortunately didn’t have the option of shirking this duty. To defeat the Sun God Inti and triumph in the battle against the White Legion, he knew he absolutely had to learn Omega style.

“I’ll do it. I’ve come this far,” he said to his teacher on the Highest Level and headed toward the front door, thinking he’d kill time in the shopping center on the first floor.