Accel World - Volume 24 - Chapter 8

8

Haruyuki had only seen two other player homes in the Unlimited Neutral Field. One was Fuko’s house on the top of the old Tokyo Tower in Fufuan. And the other was Saffron Blossom and Chrome Falcon’s house in Akatsuki Futo Park in Odaiba. They both had incredible designs, too, but in terms of size, Sentry’s was the clear winner.

Because this was the Salt Lake stage, the garden inside the fence was also submerged in water, and the Japanese-style house reflected in that water was about twenty meters across. It was maybe a three—no, four-bedroom layout. The majestic appearance of the black-tiled roof made him want to call it a samurai residence.

“How many points did you need to buy this house?” Haruyuki asked, standing stock-still in the center of the submerged garden.

She shrugged. “You seem likely to recoil, so we shan’t tell you.”

“I—I won’t recoil.”

“Nay, such a thing matters not.”

“Th-then at least tell me this. Does it have a name?”

Sentry turned her face away and fiddled with her hair for a while before answering. “Oumutei.”

“O-oh-moo-tei? Is it like some kind of meditation place?”

“No meditation or yoga here. It is written with the characters for ‘sakura’ and ‘dream,’ pronounced oumu. And of course tei is for ‘mansion.’”

“Huh, that’s a pretty name. Although there aren’t any sakura trees.”

“Due to this being the Salt Lake stage,” she explained curtly. “In the majority of stages, there is a large sakura tree growing over there. It will no doubt appear when the Change comes.”

Staring at the southeast corner of the lot at the spot Sentry indicated, Haruyuki started to ask when the Change would come but stopped himself. He didn’t know exactly when it would come, this Change that happened about once a week, but he would definitely encounter it. Because he was going to spend the next four months here training in Omega style.

He’d never stayed in the Accelerated World for so long before. Four months was even longer than that painfully long first semester at school. He felt a little faint at the thought, but this was no time to falter. “Maestro, thank you for training me!”

“Mmm.” The swordmaster nodded, composed. “We will not be kind.”

“That’s exactly what I want!”

“Then shall we begin?”

“Huh?”

“What is this ‘huh’?”

“Oh, it’s just…” He shrugged. “We walked a lot and all, so I figured we’d have some tea first. And snacks or somethin—”

“Ngaaah!” Sentry roared, causing Haruyuki to shrink into himself.

“Eep!”

“What manner of idleness is this?! You most likely think four months is a deadly long period, but we only have four months! Now come! Ready your blade!”

“O-okaaaay!” He snapped to attention and, stammering, called the voice command. “E-e-e-equip Lucid Blade!”

Fortunately, the command was recognized, and a white light poured down from the sky to materialize a slender longsword on his left hip.

After watching this process, Sentry said in an unenthusiastic voice, “Come, Claíomh Solais.”

This time, a beam of blue light shot down and gathered on Sentry’s left hip. The light flashed brightly before disappearing, and when it was gone, a sword appeared, with an extremely flowing design. It was a Western-style longsword about twice as large as Haruyuki’s blade.

He stared at it intently, and Sentry asked suspiciously, “Why do you gape thusly?”

“Oh!” He looked up at her face. “Uh, I just assumed your sword would be a Japanese one.”

“We might also face you with such a blade, if you wish?”

“Huh? Do you also have a Japanese sword?”

“We have an assortment of twenty swords that are our main weapons, a range of Western and Japanese, small and large,” she informed him.

“…Twenty…”

And then with this house, too, this is some real veteran power!

Haruyuki kept the thought to himself and shook his head slightly. “N-no, there’s no need to switch.”

To be honest, he couldn’t help but sense something superrare in a name like Claíomh Solais, but there was no point in worrying about the specs of a sword belonging to an opponent far and away more powerful than he was. He gripped his beloved sword and sighed. Sentry then drew her own blade.

In contrast with his Lucid Blade, which shone reddish because of the fire damage immunity enhancement, Claíomh Solais was tinged a faint gold. It wasn’t clear whether this was because of some kind of enhancement or if it was its original coloring.

The two Burst Linkers readied their weapons in the orthodox position in front of their bodies. The intense sunlight of the Salt Lake stage reflected off the metal blades, releasing beams of pure-white light.

Here, finally, Haruyuki realized he had drawn his sword without having been given any instructions. “Uh, um, what do I do next?”

“Fool. What good is it to simply display your weapon? We can begin nothing until we battle.”

“O-oh, but!”

But that’s definitely going to end with me dying instantly!

Unable to say this, in his compressed thoughts, he searched for a way to escape and had a sudden realization. This was not just some subterfuge but something he needed to make very certain of before fighting. “Maestro, are you all right for burst points?”

“Oh-ho!” A faint smile bled out from beneath her mask. “At last you asked the question.”

“I’m…I’m really sorry,” he apologized. “I didn’t think of it until now. Your points would have been zero when you hit total point loss. How many points do you have now?”

“It seems that when the BB program was sent to us once again, the count returned to the initial value of one hundred,” she told him. “We used ten of those points to dive, so now we sit with ninety.”

“Nngh.” He groaned unconsciously. It was one thing for a newbie who was just exchanging a single point for a normal duel, but that number was very anxiety-inducing when you were moving in the Unlimited Neutral Field. If something happened, she could quite likely lose all her points again. “I-I’ll share some points with you right now! Give me a charge card and—”

“No need,” Sentry declared, sword still readied. “You are about to do battle with Inti and Oscillatory Universe. You mustn’t waste a single point.”

“It’s not a waste!” he cried. “There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to come back to life again if you lose all your points this time, you know?!”

“Guarantee? No, in fact, it’s impossible now. We exhausted something essential in regeneration.”

“Something essential?” He cocked his head.

“We’ll discuss it at some point,” she replied briefly. “For the present, there is no need for you to concern yourself with our points. None can enter Oumutei, and we have no interest in defeat at your hand. In time, we shall hunt Enemies to replenish our supply.”

“…I understand.” Haruyuki was forced to nod, but feeling like he couldn’t just leave it like that, he added, “But I’ll accompany you when you do.”

“Yes, yes. Now then…given that your concerns have been resolved, let us battle.”

“Okay.”

He felt strangely certain now that he knew how many points Sentry had left, and he readied again the sword he had lowered without realizing. Sentry’s form, on the other hand, hadn’t wavered in the slightest from the moment she first held up her sword. Unlike any of the powerful fighters he’d come up against before, she had a mysterious gravity. Even though she was standing there in front of him, it was almost like she was melting into the background bit by bit.

Shf.

He felt like a cold breeze blew past, followed by the sound of water splashing at his feet. Wondering if a fish or something had jumped up, he lowered his eyes for an instant and found a chunk of silver metal shining in the transparent salt water. It hadn’t been there before, he noted doubtfully. And then he realized it was a piece of Silver Crow’s left shoulder armor.

“…?!” Stunned, he leapt back and looked at his shoulder. The edge of the armor and its outward protrusion had been sliced off with an impossible smoothness. The cross section glinted sharply like a blade and threatened to cut his finger if he so much as touched it.

“Wh-when?!” Flabbergasted, he looked up again. Sentry was still standing there in her relaxed stance. A long-distance severing attack like Magenta Scissor’s Remote Cut? Or—it couldn’t be—an Incarnate technique?

“You look like a pigeon—well, one must suppose a crow—that’s been hit with a BB gun,” she said, and he could hear the laughter in her voice.

“I-it’s just—I totally don’t know when you…,” he squeezed out.

“Let us make this clear now: This is no special attack or ability, nor of course an Incarnate technique. We merely closed the distance between us, swung our sword, and cut your armor.”

“What?!” he cried. “I didn’t take my eyes off you for a second, though!”

“Indeed, you did not,” she agreed. “But even so, you could not see us.”

“…How…?”

“This is one of the inner mysteries of the Omega-style Whole Blade: Gou. As it is also an effective technique against Enemies, you would do well to learn it.”

“Gou…?”

I want to learn it, but I have no idea what happened.

As if to cut through Haruyuki’s confusion, Sentry lightly moved the tip of her sword. “Come. Ready yourself once more.”

“…Okay.”

This time for sure I’m not gonna miss it, Haruyuki resolved in his heart and raised his sword.

The two swords’ tips were a meter apart. Close but not so close that the blades could cut either avatar without crossing that short distance.

Sentry didn’t move from where she stood on the water. The platinum hair that reached her feet swayed in the breeze and shone in the sunlight. Small waves rippled across the salt lake, breaking the upside-down reflection of the samurai mansion into countless tiny fragments.

Shf.

This time, his right shoulder armor was severed and sank into the salt water with a plsh.

“…”

Unable to even open his mouth, Haruyuki stood rooted to the spot, dumbfounded.

She had cut him. He knew that much. But he didn’t know when she’d stepped forward, swung her sword, and returned to her original position. It was like she became invisible when she moved—except, no, that wasn’t it. In the instant of the attack, she had disappeared from his awareness. So even though he was supposed to have been completely focused on Sentry, he had been aware of the mirror image of the house reflected in the rippling water.

“Does this also work on a logic of laying the maximum on the minuscule?” he rasped. The mouth he could see beneath her visor carved itself into a grin.

“Of course.”

“How?”

“If we were to simply tell you, you would not understand. Now you come at us.”

She gestured for him to come with the index finger of the hand gripping her sword. His instincts were shouting not to attack, but he wouldn’t get any training done if he started flinching now.

“Okay.” He slowly inhaled deep into his virtual lungs. He pulled one foot out of the salt water and placed it on the surface.

“…Hah!” He stepped forward with a cry. Showing off the results of his training, he ran just two—plap, plap—steps across the water’s surface and closed the distance. He brought his raised sword toward Sentry’s left shoulder. He was aiming for the one point that jutted out from her armor ever so slightly—cut the minuscule with the maximum!

However, Sentry’s form instantly blurred.

It wasn’t that she’d disappeared. It was almost like she’d become embedded into the background. And not on the level that the water was blue and so was her armor. The very existence of her duel avatar faded and became part of the world around it.

The white blade he brought down with all the speed he could muster sliced through empty space in vain.

Immediately after that, his axis leg was casually swept out from under him, and Haruyuki fell face-first into the salt water, sending up a massive spray.

Although he attacked ten times in a row, not only was he not able to cut Sentry’s armor, he couldn’t even manage to scratch it. Even so, he readied his blade and was about to make his eleventh attempt.

However…

“Let us rest,” Sentry said.

She lowered her sword, so he had no choice but to do the same. Instantly, the strength drained out of his body, and he slumped to the ground.

“Why can’t I reach you?!” Haruyuki shouted petulantly.

“We shall explain, so let us have tea.” Sentry pointed at the house with her thumb. “There are also snacks.”

“Okay.” Calming his tantrum instantly, Haruyuki quickly stood up.

The inside of Oumutei was pure Japanese style. There was a main room with an open corridor along the garden, a kitchen next to that, and three bedrooms and a tea salon along the hallway. All the rooms had tatami mats covering the floors, and in the end, the floor plan was found to be just as he’d initially assumed: four bedrooms, kitchen, and living room.

After leading Haruyuki to the salon, Sentry took a tea set out of her home storage and prepared matcha tea with a practiced hand. It was his first time drinking matcha in either the real world or the Accelerated World, but the refreshing bitterness was a welcome balm to his exhausted brain.

He ate half the yokan jelly she laid out after the tea and sighed before asking the thing he was dying to ask her about. “Maestro, why do I stop being able to see you? What is the secret of Omega style, this Gou?”

“We offer this question in return. Crow, through what means do you see this world?”

“Huh? With my eyes, of course.” He pointed to the eye lenses beneath his mirrored goggles.

Sentry cocked her head slightly from where she sat formally on her knees. “Mm-hmm. Then do your eyeballs now see us with the same structure as your flesh-and-blood eyes, with the same logic?”

“Huh…?” For a moment, he was at a loss for words.

Flesh-and-blood human beings—no, pretty much all animals saw things by transforming the light entering their pupils into signals on the retina, and then the brain once again transformed these signals into images. But the Accelerated World was a virtual realm, a VR world generated by the Main Visualizer. It was incredibly realistic, but it seemed impossible that every physical phenomenon would be re-created as is.

“No…I don’t think the program would actually simulate everything down to the behavior of each particle of light. The sights I can see with my eyes…They’re probably streamed directly into my brain—I mean, the quantum circuits.”

“Well, that is indeed the likely case,” Sentry agreed. “In other words, taking this to the extreme, a duel avatar’s eyes become a simple adornment.”

“Uh…Um.” That was maybe true, but it was hard to just nod and accept someone telling you your eyeballs were merely decorative. Haruyuki blinked several times.

“Oh-ho. Can’t accept this?”

“No, it’s just, well…”

“So then if the sights we see are produced by the system, this creates space for interference.”

“What…do you mean?”

“Hear me. Our perceptions, our thoughts: Both are currently accelerated a thousand times. When conducting high-speed battle in such an environment, given the capacity of the Main Visualizer, a lag—albeit small—is generated in the creation of the images that attend to the movements of our eye lenses. Thus, during battle, the system anticipates a moment into the future and shows us that image.”

“Huh?!”

Sentry lifted her teacup in a smooth motion and brought it to her mouth beneath her visor. She drank the last of her matcha, and the thick slice of yokan jelly also disappeared in one bite. Shifting from her formal position on her knees to sit more casually cross-legged, she continued her explanation.

“This future prediction is frightfully accurate, and there are no mistakes as a general rule because the system is making these predictions based on our thoughts, the signals that transmit the image control system. If we were to put it in terms of the detail-focusing system applied in the VR games of yore, would you understand?”

“No, not really.”

“…Well, no matter. At any rate, the key here is if you can understand the mechanism of this future prediction, it is possible to deliberately make it miss the mark.”

“Make the future prediction…miss the mark?” Haruyuki parroted and pulled back slightly while still sitting formally on his knees. “Are you saying you kind of do stuff with the image control system?”

“At last you show some insight.”

“I just feel like this is getting pretty Incarnate-ish again,” he murmured, and Sentry’s lightning bolt struck.

“Fool! How many times must we tell you?! Omega style is from start to finish a sword of logic, and this secret technique is no different. It does use the image control system—that much is true. But this use is the converse of an Incarnate technique. Completely eliminate the image produced from the quantum circuit…And when you do, what happens?”

“…The system can’t predict the future?”

“Aye.” Sentry slapped her knee with some force and leaned forward. “In truth, it is only on the level of the predictive system making a momentary error, but that is sufficient for reading the future of the future. Crow, the reason you were unable to witness the moment of our slashing attack is because our form was weakened in the visual field drawn up by the system.”

“Weakened,” he murmured. This was indeed the word that made the most sense to explain the phenomenon when the tip of his armor had been cut. But the logic behind it that Sentry was trying to impart to him, on the other hand, didn’t make any sense at all.

“Oh, but, like, can you actually erase the image?” he asked finally. “And even if you could, wouldn’t your avatar not be able to move anymore?”

“Indeed.” She nodded. “But remember. You lost sight of us when we were standing at the ready, not having moved a single step, yes?”

“Uh-huh,” he agreed slowly. “So then if your avatar is made completely still, you can force a bug into the predictive system?”

“It’s a bit different from that. Because the moment you attempt to be still, the image of ‘not moving’ is created. Rather than thinking you will not move, you fill your mind with nothing. Erase oneself and become one with the world—this is the truth of Omega style’s deepest art, Gou.”

“…Nothing.” He was about to say he was particularly talented at spacing out, but then he realized it wasn’t as simple as that. This was different from standing rooted to the spot with no one around. In this case, an enemy stood before you, trying to defeat you.

“Um”—he paused—“this is different from the idea of fighting free from outside thoughts, isn’t it?”

“It is,” she agreed. “When one fights free of outside thought, while it is true that they are not thinking about anything in particular, that condition is one in which the image control system surpasses the movement system. That is to say, indescribable images are produced with great vigor. To reach the complete nothingness of which I speak, one must also eliminate even their unconscious mind.”

“Eliminate even your unconscious? And do it in front of an enemy?” Haruyuki muttered before sitting up straight and shaking his head. “No way. It’s impossible no matter how you look at it. I mean, even just in a duel for play with a friend, your heart’s pounding, the adrenaline’s flowing, and yet in a real fight against a real enemy, I mean…”

“We did say it was the deepest art, did we not?” Sentry reminded him gently, lightly flicking Haruyuki’s goggles where he sat formally on his knees. “If it were so easily acquired, we would not have maintained our position. You needn’t become able to use it immediately. But at some point, you must arrive at the state of Gou. To awaken to the second of the deepest arts of the Omega-style Whole Blade, Setsu.”

Just how many deepest arts are there anyway?

Haruyuki was too scared to ask that, so instead he asked, “Um, are there other sword schools in the Accelerated World besides your Omega style, Maestro?”

“Indeed there are.” Sentry nodded as if it were only natural and counted them off on her fingers. “To list only the most famous, there is first Blue Knight’s Infinite style—this would no doubt have been taught to Coba-Manga, as well. Graphite Edge’s Ain style—Lotus is of this school. And Oscillatory’s Platinum Cavalier has named his own sword as Femto style, but…”

She gave the names of three different schools, but only one was burned into Haruyuki’s memory. Graphite Edge’s style, Ain. Likely written with the Japanese characters for “bright” and “shadow,” the word probably referred to the pair of longswords he had—Lux (light) and Umbra (dark). But the fact that Kuroyukihime had been trained in this school meant that at some point, she would likely instruct him in Ain style as well, given that he expected her to train him in the sword at some point.

“Sentry…”

Is it okay to learn another school with Omega style? Haruyuki was about to ask, but if she told him no, then he wouldn’t have any way around that, so he subbed in another question again: “Can I have some more yokan?”

“Eat your fill.”

Sentry operated her storage, and a plate with two slices of yokan on it appeared before him. He picked one up, and as he munched on it, he decided he would leave thinking about the future to the future.

After the break, he was ordered to swing his blade against nothing as practice with his sword, and that night, he slept in the six-mat tatami room given to him.

The real training started the next day and was far more difficult than anything Haruyuki had imagined.

In the mornings in the garden of Oumutei, he had lessons in swinging his blade, driving forward, and attacking opponents, and in the afternoons, they went outside, and he brandished his sword for all he was worth against a sturdy object or took on actual battle with lesser-class Enemies and replenished his points at the same time. Despite the fact that he was ready to keel over from exhaustion at this alone, once he returned to Oumutei, he would absolutely have to present himself to Sentry, and since this went on until he had lost his entire health gauge, he would always die. When he regenerated an hour later, he finally got to have supper, and then he would sleep like the dead until morning.

Even after a week and then two weeks of this, Haruyuki couldn’t come close to beating his master. Even though she was kindly not using the Gou she’d revealed to him on the first day, not only could he not bring her health gauge down, he couldn’t even get his sword to hit her.

Centaurea Sentry’s fighting style was different from any of the opponents he’d ever dueled. No matter who the Burst Linker was, there was normally movement and stillness in a fight. When they were attacking and when they weren’t. This was just a matter of course ever since the era of 2D fighting games in the previous century, and yet these two states were strangely ambiguous with Sentry. When she attacked, there was no opening, and just when he thought he was guarded, a slashing attack would come at him from some unexpected angle. No matter what Haruyuki set up, she dealt with it neatly, as though she had absorbed all his strategies into her. To express it in a more sensory manner, her every action was thoroughly lukewarm.

Three weeks. Four weeks.

Haruyuki continued to die every evening. The Change came several times, and the stage switched from Salt Lake to Primeval Forest to Plague to Factory, but Sentry understood intimately the features of every stage, and he couldn’t use the gimmicks to catch her off guard, either.

Before he knew it, two months had passed, then three. He had never dived continuously for this long before. And naturally, he had never trained for this long, either. And yet it was impossible to think he was making any progress, so he gradually started to feel anxious.

Their time limit was four months. Or more precisely, 125 days, so in another 35 days, the Arita home server would automatically burst out both of them. He had to learn something before then, even if it wasn’t the deepest arts, but he couldn’t see even the merest hint that he was anywhere near the next stage.

The evening of the ninetieth day, Haruyuki woke up in the middle of the night for the first time. As he lay on his futon, laid out on the floor of the Japanese-style room, he turned his ears to the chirping of insects for a while. Three days earlier, the stage had changed to Heian. It was the most perfect match for the samurai-manor style of Oumutei, but he had no attention to spare for the scenery.

In the bluish darkness, he stared at the ceiling, thinking. Maybe his panic wasn’t because he couldn’t see the results of his training. The fear of disappointing Centaurea Sentry, who had been kind enough to take on the role of instructor, had settled into the pit of his stomach a while ago.

Now that he thought about it, Haruyuki had always lived his life in fear of disappointing someone. His mother and father. Chiyuri and Takumu. His Nega Nebulus comrades. Kuroyukihime. He kicked and struggled as hard as he could so that he wouldn’t disappoint any of the people he met. He’d somehow made it through his previous trials, but maybe he just couldn’t this time. Maybe, unable to acquire Omega style, unable to fulfill the important role of attacker, he would betray the expectations of so many people.

He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to shoo away the bothersome thought, but sleep did not return. When he gave up and rose from his futon, he checked on Sentry sleeping soundly in the next room before sneaking down the hall. He cut across the main room toward the veranda that opened up onto the garden. When he pulled back the sliding door, pale moonlight poured down on him.

Although bright-red fall leaves danced on the night wind, the ancient sakura tree in a corner of the garden was in full bloom. He sat down on the veranda and looked out at the feast of the moon, the blossoms, and the autumn leaves.

He had the sudden desire to talk to Metatron. If he opened up to the Archangel, who acted like he was her servant, she would scold him without mercy before giving him just a little encouragement in the end. But at that moment, she was in full self-sealed mode in faraway Fufuan, healing her wounded body. He couldn’t call on her before that process was complete.

What if Sentry scolded him? If she really let him have it for not getting anything even though she was out there working with him every single day, would he be able to breathe a little easier?

He laughed self-deprecatingly at his thoughts, since even self-pity had a limit, and hugged his knees to himself.

“Drink?”

He heard a voice from behind, and when he looked back, the supposedly sleeping Sentry was standing there, holding a white sake bottle.

“Oh! No…I’m going back to bed, so…”

“Come, now—don’t say that.” Sentry pushed him back down just as he was about to stand, then sat beside him. She offered him a small vermillion sake cup that he automatically accepted. Soon transparent liquid was pouring from the bottle into his saucer.

“…What is this?”

“The full moon, a sakura tree at night, and the autumn leaves as the accompaniment. Unlikely to be water, hmm?”

“B-but I’m underage…”

“Fool. As am I. It’s fine. Drink.”

When she gave him the order, he couldn’t very well refuse. He brought the cup to his lips and knocked it back. The sweet, spicy, bitter, sour liquid slid down his throat, and his stomach grew hot. Japanese sake, he supposed, but he couldn’t say with certainty, since he had never drunk it before, in either the real world or the Accelerated World.

Sentry also emptied her cup and let out a satisfied sigh. “We intended to reserve this for our last night, but then the Heian stage came along…”

“Is alcohol expensive over here?” he asked.

“Hmm?” She glanced at him. “Well, depends on the quality, but it’s certainly not cheap. This wasn’t purchased in a shop, however; we drew it from the spring of sake that wells up in the belly of Fuji.”

“Huh. So then if you drew loads and sold it in Tokyo, you could earn big?”

Sentry grinned at Haruyuki’s greed. “The spring is such that all who have thought in that manner have ended on the verge of total point loss.”

“…Th-they did?” When he shrank into himself, his empty cup was filled once more. He tossed it back and felt it was strangely more delicious than the last cup. Feeling a pleasant warmth in the depths of his body, he looked up at the night sky.

The way the autumn leaves and sakura petals mixed and flowed with the wind was indeed the very picture of grace. He understood well the reason this house had been given the name “a dream of sakura.” Or maybe the very act of drinking sake like this with Sentry was itself a dream the old sakura tree was having.

Perhaps caught up in this feeling, Haruyuki gave voice to a question he hadn’t intended to ask:

“Seri, why are you being so nice to me?”

And he called her by her real name instead of her avatar name to boot, but he couldn’t take it back now.

Sentry gazed at the full moon reflected in her cup for a while before drinking it down and answering him in a different tone. “Nice? Even though I kill you every day?”

“…You are nice,” he insisted. “We’ve been training for three months, and I just get killed every day without making any progress. But you’re still here doing it with me.”

Tears threatened to well in his eye lenses, and Haruyuki hung his head. But the words didn’t stop coming.

“I thought…I could grab hold of something a bit more, sooner. That if I trained, I’d be able to get that much stronger. But my sword skills haven’t changed at all from day one. Not only can I not catch the minuscule, but I don’t even scratch you. I’m sure I never had any talent for it right from the start. It was a mistake to take the sword for my level-up bonus…”

Haruyuki squeezed this out in a hoarse voice, tears falling beneath his goggles. Despite the fact that they were his own words, sharp thorns scratched at his throat and cut his tongue.

A few seconds later, he heard Sentry’s voice.

“Mmm, I see.”

Haruyuki expected her to tell him that if that was the case, they should end it now. But that wasn’t what he got.

“So the reason you’ve been down these days is because you were thinking about this stuff, huh? Sorry if I made you feel like you’re not progressing. It’s the first time I’ve ever taught anyone anything, so I don’t know how to get that balance right.”

“…?”

Unable to understand what she meant, Haruyuki lifted his head just a little.

“You’re all right.” Sentry patted his back. “You’re definitely making progress.”

“Please don’t try to make me feel better,” Haruyuki said as he squirmed away. “I know better than anyone if I’m making progress or not. I mean, when I was training in Incarnate, I had a little more of a response. But the sword…The more I train, the further away you get, Seri.”

“So then let me ask you.” Sentry peered at his face and asked in a hushed tone, “Arita, did you think that in a mere three months of training, you could catch up with me?”

“Huh?” After blinking several times, he shook his head firmly. “No, I never thought anything like that. Catching up means beating you in a duel, right? I know I can’t make it to that level. But…I can’t even make a centimeter—no, a millimeter-long scratch on you. You’re just too…You’re just too far away.”

“It’s the same thing,” Sentry replied, and this time she slapped a hand against the center of his chest. “Omega style is a special-attack sword. If you slice in a centimeter, limbs go flying, a heart is cut out. If your sword manages to reach me, you can consider yourself having won at that moment.”

“…”

When he was unable to respond, Sentry gently pulled away and poured more sake into the cup he still held in one hand. She then filled her own, and the bottle was empty.

Rather than drain this last cup in one go, Sentry took a sip and returned to her previous tone to say, “If you wish to conclude your training, then that is acceptable, as well. A portal stands slightly to the west, at Waseda Station.”

“…”

Mouth still shut tight, Haruyuki looked at the moon reflected in his sake saucer. He raised the cup gently so that the moon wouldn’t waver, brought it to his lips, and tilted it back, intending to drink the moon in a single gulp.

“I’ll keep going.”

And then he was overcome with a sudden sleepiness. His body slumped forward, and when he pulled it up, this time he fell backward. Letting the tatami mat hold him, he looked up at Sentry’s face.

“I see.”

This was all she said in reply, and then Sentry took another sip of her sake. Unable to fight the feeling of sleepiness, Haruyuki closed his eyes.

His teacher’s profile lingered for a while on the backs of his eyelids.