Accel World - Volume 25 - Chapter 1

1

“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.”

The White King, White Cosmos, sounded almost plaintive as she spoke from the back of Pegasus in the night sky, as though she truly did regret their parting. As the horse rhythmically flapped its wings, she gently raised her silver scepter, the Arc Luminary. The staff glittered as it caught the pure rays of light bathing the Moonlight stage.

A second later, it sliced down smoothly, as if cutting through the red threads of fate.

Circles of crimson light rippled upward from the palm of the nearby giant—some hundred meters tall—that looked down upon the Burst Linkers on the ground. The Super-class Enemy, the Deity of Demise, Tezcatlipoca.

That crimson light was the sign of an imminent attack. Haruyuki was certain the force of it would far surpass any technique he had thus far witnessed in the Accelerated World, but there was no way he was going to be able to dodge it. He was held in place by the powerful gravitational waves that rippled out from the dark circles above Tezcatlipoca’s other hand to mercilessly press down on the Inti attack team, a union of the six Great Legions.

As he listened to the sound of his own armor cracking, Haruyuki turned his mind to a place meters ahead of where he lay pinned. He and his companions weren’t the only ones Tezcatlipoca’s red rings were targeting. Five Burst Linkers had materialized mere seconds earlier in Kitanomaru Park adjacent to the Castle where the Nippon Budokan had once stood: the Purple King, Empress Voltage, Purple Thorn; the Yellow King, Radioactive Disturber, Yellow Radio; the Blue King, Vanquish, Blue Knight; the Green King, Invulnerable, Green Grandé. And the Black King, World End, Black Lotus.

Having previously been killed on impact in the Inti drop, a suicide mission on the part of White Legion chief officer Ivory Tower, aka Black Vise, the five kings had at last managed to regenerate, thanks to the Inti attack team, the combined might of the five Legions. But this, too, was all part of White Cosmos’s plan: After Haruyuki cut Inti’s ball of flames open with his Omega style Whole Blade, the White King had appeared out of nowhere to take control of what emerged—Tezcatlipoca—with the Luminary’s Divine Light ability.

The kings had been informed by messengers from their Legions that the Inti mission had been a success and thus had appeared in the field, believing that all danger had been eliminated, so they could not have anticipated materializing in the middle of this. Even so, given their long experience in battle, the level niners shouldn’t have taken more than half a second to grasp the danger of the situation and readied themselves to take some kind of action.

And yet, they stood in a group in the center of the Budokan crater, motionless.

They couldn’t move. The absolute force pressing the ninety-six members of the attack team to the ground—Tezcatlipoca’s gravitational waves—also held the kings. When Haruyuki looked closely, he could see black circles at their feet, the same as the one beneath him, although he couldn’t see it, given that he was on his belly on the ground.

He expected nothing less of the Kings of Pure Color than for them to be able to stay on their feet without bending at the knee under the pressure of this unparalleled force, but even the power-types like Blue Knight and Green Grandé apparently had their limits. He could hear the squealing of the kings’ joints and the cracking of their armor mixed in with the heavy rumble of the giant.

While Tezcatlipoca rendered a hundred Burst Linkers powerless with its right hand, it brought up a shining red circle and then another in its left. Although the black rings in its right hand numbered five, there were already seven of the red rings, and he didn’t know what it meant, if anything, to continue charging even farther. At any rate, once it activated this attack, the five kings and Haruyuki and everyone else would be killed instantly—six kings, actually, since the Red King, Scarlet Rain, was also a member of the attack team.

Although he and his comrades had succeeded in their mission to destroy the Sun God Inti, all the kings and key personnel of the six Great Legions would fall into a new Unlimited EK.

“No…! You can’t…!”

Haruyuki heard a cry from his right. It was Nega Nebulus Submaster Sky Raker. She was clutching the wheels of her wheelchair with both hands and trying her best to stay upright, but the slender silver rims were cruelly crushed, unable to withstand the load.

The instant he heard the squeal of the spokes snapping, Haruyuki understood what Raker was afraid of.

It wasn’t the fact that the Six Kings would fall into another Unlimited EK. The Deity of Demise was under the control of the White King, which meant there was a very good possibility that the spoils of any battle involving the giant would also belong to her. If Haruyuki and the others were killed, they would only have however many points taken from them, but it was different for Niko, Kuroyukihime, and the other kings. All level niners were bound by the most ruthless rule in the Accelerated World: the rule of sudden death. If they were killed by another level-nine Burst Linker, they would lose all their points in that moment and have Brain Burst forcibly uninstalled.

In other words, when Tezcatlipoca carried out its attack, Blue Knight, Purple Thorn, Yellow Radio, Green Grandé, Kuroyukihime, and Niko would stop being Burst Linkers. They would lose their memories of the Accelerated World, the bonds they’d formed in it, and even the duel avatars that were the other halves of their own selves.

“No…No!!” Haruyuki squeezed out a cracked voice from beneath his mirrored mask.

No. Stop. You have to stop.

He looked up at White Cosmos hovering far, far above and prayed desperately. But the White King’s hand, holding the lowered Luminary, didn’t so much as twitch. She was about to send the kings she’d fought alongside since the dawn of the Accelerated World to total point loss, together with her own child, Kuroyukihime, but she appeared as aloof and removed as ever.

This—this was likely the White King’s aim. When she appeared there riding Pegasus with the first of the Seven Dwarves, Platinum Cavalier, she’d said, “All the necessary cards are laid out here.” Meaning the Deity of Demise and the Six Kings.

She’d had a chance to wipe out the kings before. If she had used the Luminary for the Inti drop instead of giving it to Black Vise, she would have pushed all the kings, except for Niko, into sudden death rather than Unlimited EK. The reason she hadn’t done this was so that she could maneuver the combined forces of the six Great Legions to destroy Inti when it had been impossible for the White Legion to do this alone. And to control Inti’s second form, Tezcatlipoca, once it emerged, followed by total point loss for the kings. In so doing, White Cosmos would be able to reach the uncharted territory of level ten, finally clearing the impossible hurdle of defeating five level niners.

But even that was not her final goal.

The pinnacle of Enemies, Tezcatlipoca. The pinnacle of Burst Linkers, level ten. And the essence of negative incarnate power, the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II. By lining up these three ultimate powers of the Accelerated World, Cosmos was clearly attempting to accomplish something very particular, something that Rose Milady had called the great mission of the White Legion.

Whatever it was, Haruyuki couldn’t let it happen. There was no way he could accept any “great mission” that was built on the sacrifice of Kuroyukihime, Niko, and the other kings.

His perceptions accelerated to the point where his brain—no, his quantum thought circuits—threatened to burn up, while the number of red rings increased again to become eight. An instinct with no base in reason told him that the next one would be the last.

The idea of calling on his most powerful protector, the Legend-class Enemy Archangel Metatron, for help did cross his mind. She was currently in total shutdown at Fufuan on the very top of the old Tokyo Tower to recuperate from her injuries. He could wake her, though, if he called to her through their link, but then she would be facing off against a more powerful Super-class Enemy at less than full capacity. And even Metatron couldn’t cross the nearly four kilometers between here and the old Tokyo Tower in mere seconds. He couldn’t rely on her or anyone else. He had to do something himself.

Here.

If he couldn’t stand up right here and now, then his becoming a Burst Linker, reaching level six, the many trials he’d faced—all of it would have been for nothing.

“Unh…Aah…Aaaaaaaaah!!” he yelled.

But pressed down by the immense gravity, his avatar didn’t so much as twitch. He couldn’t get up, or spread the wings on his back, or turn his hand toward Tezcatlipoca. He was even using the Incarnate System already, but his invisible shackles remained as strong as ever.

If the dark, blood-red giant really was categorized as a Super-class Enemy doing the bidding of the White King, then it was indeed an absolute in the Accelerated World. A super Being perhaps even more powerful than the Four Gods of which the Anomaly, Graphite Edge, had once said, “You can’t beat them if you don’t go beyond the system.”

Beyond…the system.

This thought called up a faint voice from his memory.

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

That was what his swordmaster, Centaurea “Ruthless” Sentry, had told him. The day he’d started training at her player home, Oumutei, Sentry had revealed the secret of Omega style. She had disappeared, almost melted away from his field of view as he faced her, and had severed Silver Crow’s shoulder armor. At that time, Haruyuki hadn’t even realized he’d been cut until the chunk of armor fell at his feet.

Sentry explained to his stunned self exactly what had happened.

During battle, the system anticipates a moment into the future and shows us that image. 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.

The key here is, if you can understand the mechanism of this future prediction, it is possible to deliberately make it miss the mark.

Sentry had been talking about how the BB system produced the images that filled the players’ fields of view, but the movement of Enemies was also part of the BB system. A top-level Enemy that reacted with incredible speed to a Burst Linker’s attack wouldn’t be using that future prediction.

Tezcatlipoca was currently targeting a full one hundred and one Burst Linkers. Haruyuki could tell that the waves were no simple range attack but instead restrained each individual target separately through the black circles that appeared at their avatars’ feet. If he could remove that circle for a mere instant, if instead of lashing out with force, he could cause a future prediction error and make the system erroneously view Haruyuki as not there…

Even after his four months of training at Oumutei, he hadn’t been able to unlock the secrets of Omega style. But all the techniques Sentry had shown him, everything she’d said to him, was burned into the back of his mind.

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 the Omega style’s deepest art, Gou.

Could he really erase even his unconscious mind in this situation, in the middle of an absolute crisis when he was facing the end of everything? Especially when he was worse than anything at controlling his own nerves?

Although it had been nine months since he’d become a Burst Linker, his heart practically leapt out of his mouth before a normal duel, not to mention before the Territories, and he stuttered and stammered awkwardly when talking to a Burst Linker he was meeting for the first time. Rose Milady, aka Tsubomi Koshika, had praised him by saying he was such an ace Linker that there wasn’t a person in the Accelerated World who didn’t know who he was, but he was absolutely nothing of the sort. He had only managed to survive this long because he’d been blessed with teachers, friends, and friendly rivals. If he’d been fighting on his own, he was sure he would’ve been at a total point loss in the blink of an eye.

But. Even so.

With Niko and Kuroyukihime facing more and more certain death, he definitely, absolutely, most certainly could not use his own weakness as an excuse to give up. He had to think, think so hard that his maximally accelerated spirit burned up.

Centaurea Sentry had said that Gou, the deepest art of Omega style, used the same Image Control System as an Incarnate technique, but that the way it used this was the opposite of an Incarnate technique. It completely erased the image output from the quantum circuits and became one with the world.

Niko, the second Red King, Scarlet Rain, had once told him about a similar logic: Zero Fill. When a Burst Linker fell captive to intense despair and helplessness, the orders they gave their duel avatar were erased by negative Incarnate, and the Burst Linker was unable to move. Haruyuki himself had lost his will to fight in the middle of a battle with Dusk Taker and very nearly ended up in Zero Fill himself.

But Gou and Zero Fill were only similar on the surface. What zeroed out in Zero Fill was the command to move your avatar when a large amount of negative Incarnate was output from the quantum circuits—the spirit. In order to achieve Gou, you had to completely erase the signals transmitting to the Image Control System. It was neither positive nor negative Incarnate, but a “null” Incarnate.

How was he supposed to achieve that? The key was probably what Sentry had explained as “becoming one with the world.” By expanding his mind to the entirety of the vast, boundless Accelerated World, his imagination would be infinitely diluted. He would have an image of the infinite.

Up to that point, his activity in the Accelerated World had essentially been confined to the areas between Suginami and Chiyoda in central Tokyo. Normally, it would have been impossible for him to imagine the whole of the Accelerated World stretching from Hokkaido to Okinawa.

But he had seen the whole of this world a few times in the past. Not from the Lowest Level of the normal duel field nor the Mean Level of the Unlimited Neutral Field, but from the Highest Level. In that information space, where countless nodes shone like the Milky Way, there existed not only Brain Burst 2039, where Haruyuki and his comrades existed, but also the already defunct trial No. 1, Accel Assault 2038, and trial No. 3, Cosmos Corrupt 2040, laid upon each other. That was the entirety of the Accelerated World.

He had to imagine it: The triple world spreading out without bounds. Even just for a second…Eliminate all the anxiety, frustration, and fear in his heart and melt into the world. But he couldn’t accidentally go to the Highest Level. He wasn’t trying to focus his mind on an infinitesimal point and break through the wall of the world; he was scattering himself into the farthest reaches and disappearing from the system. From the northernmost node in the BB world to the southernmost…And from the AA world above his head to the CC world spreading out below his feet…

Imagine.

Gou.

Haruyuki saw the world ripple like waves. Those waves swallowed the avatar of Silver Crow, broke it into particles, and melted them into the air and the earth.

Of course, this wasn’t physically happening; Haruyuki and the BB system were only feeling it. The world wasn’t coming to him through his eyes, but rather his brain—his soul. From the Castle and the government buildings of Kasumigaseki all around him, the skyscrapers of Shinjuku and Shibuya, and all of the twenty-three wards, to the entirety of the Kanto Plain, Honshu, Hokkaido, Shikoku, Kyushu…and even farther to the two Accelerated Worlds overlaid on the world of BB…

Wait. Is this…?

His ever-expanding consciousness was suddenly yanked back into his avatar.

He had been melting into the world for less than half of half a second. But that was enough. Tezcatlipoca’s gravity attack had lost its target for a mere instant, and the pressure pushing down on Haruyuki’s body weakened. It wasn’t enough for him to stand. But it was enough for him to move an arm.

He lifted his right hand, covered in cracked armor, and pulled it back as far as he could. He set in the tips of his extended fingers the image of light.

His Incarnate technique, Laser Javelin, had the greatest range of Silver Crow’s long-distance attacks, but he needed both hands for the launch move, so he couldn’t use it now, and it didn’t have the greatest accuracy. His second most far-reaching attack, Laser Lance, would reach about thirty meters, but Tezcatlipoca’s head was a hundred meters up, and even the hand emitting the gravity waves was fifty meters above him. Plus, if his attack did actually hit its target, it would have been like being tickled by a gentle breeze for a Super-class Enemy. He needed to come up with a completely new technique to have even the slightest effect in a situation like this.

All of his attack-type Incarnate techniques, including Laser Sword, the first one he’d learned, were in the range expansion category. By holding in mind a strong image of his hand as a sword or a lance of light, he could overwrite and do damage to a target beyond the reach of his bare hands. The reason he used the image of a blade rather than a gun for a long-distance technique was because his duel avatar was specialized in a single power.

Before the big takedown of Dusk Taker, Niko had coached Haruyuki and Takumu on the Incarnate System. After demonstrating her range-expanding Radiant Beat and her movement-expanding Pyro Planing, she had told them, “Scarlet Rain’s long-distance flame power’s like the spines on a hedgehog. Inside all that, I’m just a weakling of a little kid with no power at all. Which is why I can’t use my will to enhance the attack or defensive power of the main body of this avatar. This right here is the absolute limit of the Incarnate System.”

Haruyuki personally believed that his avatar, Silver Crow, was the manifestation of the trauma that led him to wish he were anywhere but where he was. Because he was a pure speed type with nearly all his potential poured into his flight ability and no weapons other than his fists and feet, he’d been convinced that he could only learn range and movement expansion of the four basic types of Incarnate techniques—that he couldn’t use Incarnate techniques to enhance his attack or defense power.

But was that really true?

According to the Mental-Scar Shell theory of Argon Array, a key member of the Acceleration Research Society, those people encased in shells so thick and hard that they couldn’t see into the mental trauma that formed the mold for their avatars wound up becoming metal colors. He didn’t intend to accept everything Argon said wholesale, but if this logic was correct, then it meant that he also didn’t know what was really inside of Silver Crow’s metal armor.

What if.

What if there was something inside of his avatar besides the desire to flee?

When she was explaining the second stage of Incarnate techniques to him a month earlier, Kuroyukihime, his parent and the master to whom he had sworn his sword, had told him, “To generate a positive will, the process of inverting mental scars is absolutely essential. You face head-on your own trauma, shaped into the form of a duel avatar. You accept it, and you sublimate it into an image of hope. This is no easy feat. But you should be able to do it. You realized all on your own what the image is, after all.”

Haruyuki had replied to her words with excitement, “I’ll try. I’ll fight, I’ll find it. My image of hope.”

In the subsequent Castle rescue mission, he had generated the second-stage Incarnate technique Light Speed by inverting his mental scars in order to shake off the fierce pursuit of the God Suzaku. But what if there was something other than a scar inside of Silver Crow right from the start, a hope that didn’t need to be inverted?

The armor of metal color avatars was a mental shell to protect the self from something so painful the person couldn’t look directly at it—Argon Array’s assertion wasn’t wrong. But was that really the whole story? Were metal colors born with greater defensive power than green-type avatars simply to protect themselves?

Chrome Falcon, one of the Originators and the metal color who became the first Chrome Disaster, only ever thought about protecting his partner, Saffron Blossom. When he succeeded in the unprecedented feat of breaking into the Castle and had the opportunity to take for himself either the longsword Infinity, a powerful weapon, or the full-body armor Destiny, a powerful defensive item, Falcon chose the armor to complement Saffron where she was weak rather than selecting the sword that would have made him stronger. In the end, he had fallen into the dark side of Incarnate only because the scheming of the Acceleration Research Society had pushed Saffron to total point loss before his eyes. In Chrome Falcon’s leaden gray armor, there was definitely the desire to protect the people important to him.

Haruyuki had the same feeling inside his own heart. Actually, at some point along the way, his desire to protect himself had shrunk in the face of his growing desire to keep his comrades safe—not only Kuroyukihime and the members of Nega Nebulus, but also the many Burst Linkers he’d become friends with along the way.

Naturally, the majority of the Legion members and his rivals were stronger than he was. The truth was, the times when he was protected far outnumbered those when he was doing the protecting. But even so, all he wanted right now was to protect them, protect Kuroyukihime and Niko, of course, but also the other kings and the comrades who had given everything to this fight. He wanted to protect all one hundred of them from being killed by Tezcatlipoca.

He felt something hot filling his avatar. Not flames of rage that threatened to burn him up, but the energy of a peaceful, pure light. It didn’t feel newly born, but rather like something that had lived deep inside him all this time.

Yes: A light had lived in Silver Crow’s hard armor from the time of its birth. The fact that his initial special attack, Head Butt, dealt light damage was proof of that.

The light inside me…Please protect everyone!!

Praying with enough intensity to rend his soul asunder, Haruyuki focused this light in his raised right hand and let it ride on his imagination.

“Light Shell!!”

By now, his deception of the system using Gou was fading away, and he was about to be pinned to the ground by Tezcatlipoca’s gravitational wave attack once more. But the sphere of light that spread out soundlessly from his hand pushed back the super gravity shaking the air itself. The shining white shell was so thin that he could see through it to the outside, and yet it expanded without any friction whatsoever. It grew to ten meters, then twenty, and approached the five kings standing frozen in the center of the Budokan crater.

A little farther, just a little more, and his light would reach Kuroyukihime.

“Nngh…G…ooooooooo…”

He stretched his hand out as far as it would go, and the figure of Black Lotus in the distance blurred before him. The load on his mind—his quantum circuits—was growing too large, hindering his faculties. But he couldn’t let his Incarnate stop now. He had to sever the gravity that bound the kings and create a chance for them to escape before Tezcatlipoca activated the attack in its left hand. Otherwise, both his Gou and his Light Shell would have been in vain.

The blurry world before him started to fade to black, and his other senses grew distant. Even still, he continued to squeeze out this image with everything he had left. Just a little farther, three more meters, two…

But there, the overlay in Silver Crow’s hand blinked and flickered and disappeared, and the shell of light shattered like impossibly thin glass, transforming into countless tiny particles and scattering.

And thus, the ninth crimson circle appeared in Tezcatlipoca’s left hand. The rings began to emit a dazzling light, and the energy there, already incredible, suddenly grew more concentrated, shaking the world itself. The time of the end had come.

But then light came streaming from behind Haruyuki on both sides, light of all colors: blue, red, yellow, green, purple light effects. Overlays.

It hadn’t been in vain. He’d only been able to hold the shell of light for a mere second, but his comrades had not wasted that time. Before the gravitational waves could assault them again, they called out the names of countless techniques in clear voices.

“Lightning Cyan Spike!!”

“Searing Note!!”

“Limonene Solvent!!”

“Icilin Strike!!”

“Charged Vine!!”

“Rocket Straight!!”

“Carnage Cannonball!!”

“Superluminal Stroke!!”

“Rangeless Scission!!”

“Spiral!!”

“Wind Bullet!!”

“Radiant Burst!!”

“Heavenly Stratus!!”

Those were about the only individual cries that Haruyuki could make out, but there had to have been at least fifty other voices shouting out at the same time. A rainbow of long-distance special attacks and Incarnate techniques shot up from the ground and raced across the night sky.

It wasn’t their reaction speed that was worthy of rapt admiration, attacks launching the instant the gravitational waves disappeared. No, it was the fact that, despite not having been able to confer with each other and coordinate their attack, the main force of the six Great Legions had all taken aim at the same target. Not Tezcatlipoca’s hands or face, but the White King sitting on her mount, hovering just a little behind the giant’s head.

Given her excessively slender appearance, she couldn’t have had any significant defensive power, even if she was a level niner. If she were hit with fifty simultaneous special attacks and Incarnate techniques, there was no way she would have been able to live through it. As if to offer evidence for this, Platinum Cavalier, holding the reins behind Cosmos, reached for the kite shield under his cloak that sat on his back.

But he was already too late. And even if he wasn’t, this wasn’t the kind of attack that a single shield could completely defend against.

White Cosmos had also judged this to be the case and yanked up the Luminary. In response, Tezcatlipoca moved with a speed that was out of place with its massive bulk. It raised its left hand, the blow that would end everything still hovering above its palm, and intercepted the rainbow bundle of long-distance techniques.

A flash of light.

A moment later, an astonishing explosion dyed the night sky red. The Burst Linkers’ special attacks and Incarnate techniques combined to detonate the tremendous energy charge in Tezcatlipoca’s left hand. A half-second later, a shock wave rocked the stage and made even Haruyuki’s armor squeal.

The giant’s enormous body lurched to one side. Haruyuki was about to reflexively call out a warning, but the Enemy threw its arm out to the side and took a step back, stopping the fall. Haruyuki would have liked to check how much damage the creature had taken, but the health gauge was displayed above its head a hundred meters up. It was impossible to see how many levels it had from the ground.

They hadn’t been able to knock it down, but when it moved its right hand to keep its balance, the gravitational wave attack had disappeared.

I have to take advantage of this chance, Haruyuki thought, but his head still wasn’t working properly, lingering aftereffects of having pushed his imagination too hard.

Suddenly, someone yanked him up.

“Crow, leave the rest to us!” Takumu shouted. Holding Haruyuki firmly with his normal arm, he brandished the Pile Driver of his right high in the air.

The other Burst Linkers also started to move as one, without waiting for commands. The fifty-odd fighters with long-distance attacks got into formation as they readied their next simultaneous attack. The remaining close-range types split into two groups and flew out front. It was a wonderfully coordinated action, but there was something more important than Tezcatlipoca at the moment. After being showered in the gravitational waves at extremely close range, the five kings in the center of the Budokan crater appeared unable to move, all of their armor horribly damaged, even that of the Green King.

“We have to…protect them!” Haruyuki squeezed out a hoarse voice and tried to take a step toward the crater.

“Bro!!” someone shouted from the middle of the long-range group. The pitch of their voice was bittersweet and high—the Yellow Legion’s Lemon Pierrette?

The Yellow King stood to the rear of the five kings, as if hiding, and spread out his abnormally long and slender arms, pulling Blue Knight and Purple Thorn to his right side and Green Grandé and Black Lotus to his left as he cried out the name of a technique. “Clown’s Last Resort!!”

A bright yellow light radiated from his entire body. This was no mere visual effect, but an Incarnate overlay. The light instantly turned into an odious smoke. There was a poof! and the figures of the five kings vanished.

And then yellow smoke puffed up from the center of the joint team to Haruyuki’s right. The night wind blew it away to reveal the five kings standing there.

“Teleportation?!” Takumu gasped.

It was no wonder he was astounded. In the fighting game that was Brain Burst, teleportation was much too strong a power, and as far as Haruyuki knew, Chrome Falcon’s Flash Blink was the sole teleportation technique. But even that was a pseudo teleportation in that it actually transformed the duel avatar into particles and moved them in a straight line at super-high speeds. When he’d become the sixth Chrome Disaster, Haruyuki had rampaged with this very Flash Blink, and the only thing that had been able to stop him was Hexahedral Compression, the special attack of Acceleration Research Society vice president Black Vise. To think that the Yellow King, who appeared least suited of all the kings to fighting, second only to the White King, would have such a powerful technique!

The place where the kings materialized was nearly fifty meters from the center of the crater. If Yellow Radio could teleport over that kind of distance, then couldn’t he have whisked them all away when Inti destroyed Vise’s confinement technique, Icosahedral Insulation, by dropping from the sky?

This question flitted through Haruyuki’s mind, but now was not the time for that. They had succeeded in defending the kings as a group, but they still weren’t out of the woods.

Resisting the urge to run over to the injured Kuroyukihime, Haruyuki looked up at the night sky. Tezcatlipoca’s massive body was still listing to one side, motionless. The afterimage of the explosion at last faded, and the left hand that had defended against the combined attacks emerged from the smoke.

Except for its thumb, the hand of the giant was essentially destroyed—which meant that some percentage of the force of the attacks had pierced the hand. In which case, the White King wouldn’t have been uninjured. In fact, there was a possibility that she had died, together with Platinum Cavalier.

As he considered this, Haruyuki stared intently into the night sky, and then a quiet commotion rose around him.

A pentagon rose against the snowy white moon, bathed in golden light. A shield—Platinum Cavalier’s kite shield. But it was too big. The shield hid not only Cavalier and the White King but even most of Pegasus.

Without a sound, the kite shield contracted, revealing the two Burst Linkers sitting on the back of Pegasus. They were too far away for him to make out any details, but it appeared that they hadn’t taken any major damage.

“…Damned Bashful. So he’s had a technique like that all this time?” the Blue Legion’s Manganese Blade muttered from his left. It seemed that this was her first time seeing this shield enlargement technique, even though she had fought Platinum Cavalier any number of times.

“But Tezcatlipoca’s left hand was smashed. It shouldn’t be able to do that annihilation technique now,” Cobalt Blade responded, from her place next to Manganese.

Ahead of them, Ardor Maiden looked back for just a second. “The gravity attack alone is a grave threat. We have to prepare so that we’ll be able to destroy it immediately if it makes any move to use its right hand.”

“True…We can’t have Crow shielding us every single time,” Manganese Blade said, and gently patted Haruyuki’s back.

He wanted to say he would shield them however many times it took, but all the strength had left his body; he couldn’t even move his mouth. If Takumu hadn’t been holding him up, he would have collapsed in a heap on the ground. He had the thought that it would be completely impossible for him to deploy Light Shell even one more time, and then told himself that if he had to, he would try to as many times as it took.

A shiver of tension raced through the Burst Linkers in the area. Tezcatlipoca had started to move. But it merely righted its inclined body and lowered its crushed left hand before stopping once more. Platinum Cavalier and the White King in the night sky were also stationary. The only things moving on the battlefield were the gently flapping wings of Pegasus.

“Wonderful.”

It was an impossibly innocent sound, smooth and sweet. This was the voice of Transient Eternity, White Cosmos. As if truly impressed, she continued, holding the Arc to her chest with both hands:

“Incredible that you would destroy in an instant Tezcatlipoca’s Toxcatl, something the fiercest warriors in history have not been able to resist.”

Haruyuki furrowed his brow skeptically. Tezcatlipoca had appeared from inside the Sun God Inti, which had never once been defeated since the dawn of the Accelerated World. In other words, no Burst Linker, including the White King herself, had ever encountered this Enemy before. And yet the way she spoke made it sound as though a group of high rankers had fought it before.

And why did the White King have such thorough knowledge of the Deity of Demise, Tezcatlipoca, anyway, from its proper name to its techniques? Where had she gotten the information that this giant would appear if Inti was defeated, something that not even the Blue or Green Kings—Originators themselves—or the Saints Metatron and Amaterasu, knew? He wondered at it all while Takumu propped him up.

“I seriously doubt you have the time for such observations now, Cosmos.”

The voice that rose from his right was sharp and ready to fight, albeit with an exhausted edge. The Black King, Black Lotus—Kuroyukihime—raised the sword of her right hand, its edge only slightly nicked, and pointed the tip squarely at the White King.

“No matter how strong this enormous monster is, you can’t believe that we would be caught up in that same attack once more. If we destroy its right hand as well and seal away the gravitational wave attack, the rest is just the usual Enemy hunting. However great its HP, if it can be damaged, then it’s a far easier challenge than Inti. It might take some time, but we will defeat it. And I have no intention of letting you or Cavalier get away!”

The White King appeared not the least bit ruffled by this ferocious speech from her own child and real-life younger sister, Kuroyukihime. “Always charging in without proper preparation is a bad habit of yours, Lotus. You can’t honestly believe that Inti’s so-called second form would be easier to subdue than Inti itself? The Sun God could be tamed with just one of the Luminary’s circlets, but this child needed six, hmm?”

Indeed, crowns to control Tezcatlipoca were embedded in its head, wrists, chest, stomach, and hips. Put simply, this would imply that the difficulty in taming it was six times greater than in taming Inti. But if he looked at it another way, this also meant that it was possible to tame even a Super-class Enemy if the crowns hit in just the right places.

The instant this thought occurred to him, Haruyuki felt something catch fire in the center of his mind. The question he’d had a few minutes earlier popped back to life. What was White Cosmos trying to do by assembling the three ultimate powers of the Accelerated World?

It had to be the Castle. Defeat the invincible Gods who guarded the four gates; destroy the Eight Divines, the world’s most powerful Enemies in the basement of the Castle’s main building; and obtain the final Arc, the Fluctuating Light. That was the ultimate objective for all Burst Linkers. In which case…

Haruyuki put a hand on Takumu’s shoulder and summoned the meager energy he’d managed to recover to pull himself up. “White King!!”

In the distant sky above, Cosmos turned her face ever so slightly. Eye lenses colored with curiosity looked straight through him.

Bracing his legs to keep them from shaking, he yanked the words up from the bottom of his soul. “White King, if your power extends to even Super-class Enemies…then if you had the cooperation of everyone here, you could control even the Four Gods of the Castle! Why can’t you take that road? Instead of this path of blood, why can’t you choose to combine forces with all the Legions to take on the final mission?!”

The White King was for Kuroyukihime, and for Haruyuki himself now, their most powerful and almost unforgivable enemy. And yet, he couldn’t keep himself from belting out the thought to her.

Even after the lengthy echoes of his scream of a question had disappeared, no one moved to say anything.

Breaking the silence colored by the dim white of the moonlight was the almost whispered response of the White King: “So strange, hmm?”

She continued before he could wonder what exactly was strange.

“Long, long ago…in a totally different virtual world, a very similar situation occurred. A large number of players came together in the world, pressed with the choice of working together to clear the game or kill each other before they could be betrayed. There was a player who spoke up idealistically like you, Silver Crow. And there was no doubt that more than a few people took those words to heart. But in the end…” She closed her mouth and shook her head slightly.

Haruyuki felt the aura enveloping the pure white avatar change instantly. From the utterly and entirely pure, saintly aura to an absolute zero that could freeze everything.

“It’s too late. Everything, it’s all too late.”

The sudden biting chill of her tone froze the core of his body. Takumu’s avatar, pressed up against his, also stiffened.

Breaking the paralysis of the overwhelmed Burst Linkers was the roar of Kuroyukihime, as though she were unleashing the fire of her heart: “In that case, this is the final stop for you!”

Skreenk! Together with a metallic squeal, a bluish-purple overlay jetted from the body of the Black King. The other kings also produced auras of varying colors, and this heat instantly spread to the surrounding Burst Linkers.

We have no choice but to fight. To stop this series of tragedies, Haruyuki vowed in his heart and then clenched his hand into a fist. He was still largely powerless, but he figured he had enough left in him to launch at least one Incarnate blow.

He knew what had to be done. Now that Tezcatlipoca’s left hand was destroyed, the biggest remaining threat was the gravitational wave attack of the right hand. When that hand, currently facing straight down, moved to reveal the palm, they would beat it back with multiple full-strength attacks. Even if the giant was six times stronger than Inti, if it could be damaged, then it made sense that they would be able to defeat it at some point, just like Kuroyukihime said.

The sky above the battlefield crackled and shook as though electrified. Perhaps called by the one hundred and one auras, black clouds rolled into the night sky, twisting like living creatures.

But the White King did not move.

Was she waiting for their focus to break? But most of the Burst Linkers on the ground there were high rankers well versed in the Incarnate System. If it was a matter of simply maintaining the image, they could likely keep going for an hour or two. They could also have a messenger leave through the portal while they were glaring at their foes, and call for reinforcements.

And Pegasus, which Cosmos and Cavalier were riding, couldn’t fly forever. Silver Crow’s flight ability used up his special-attack gauge, so he wouldn’t have been surprised if there was also a limit on the flying time of the winged horse. Once they descended to the earth, the close-range avatars could join the battle. He couldn’t imagine that prolonging a stalemate now would be to the White King’s advantage.

And then he suddenly felt the ground beneath his feet shake faintly. He wondered briefly if the intense fighting spirit of the Burst Linkers had shaken even the field itself, but he quickly banished the idea. He could hear a ponderous sound like something heavy moving. From the right and the left, from ahead and behind. It was…

“Enemies,” he murmured.

“Dammit!” Manganese Blade hissed. “I’d thought they wouldn’t pop up for the time being, given the sheer number wiped out in Inti’s destruction. Guess I was too optimistic.”

Incarnate techniques were a siren song for Enemies. It wasn’t as though Haruyuki had forgotten this piece of common knowledge. But it was just as Manganese said: They had only just used normal attacks to defeat the more than twenty large Enemies who had been called by the Incarnate techniques they’d used to destroy Inti. He figured that all the Enemies around Kitanomaru Park had been exterminated and wouldn’t recover until the next Change. But apparently, the multiple Incarnate attacks that had destroyed Tezcatlipoca’s left hand had been too powerful and drawn in Enemies from even farther afield.

And now, large Enemies in the Wild and Beast classes would close in from all directions, and he and his comrades would no longer be able to focus solely on Tezcatlipoca. But they had no guarantee they would be able to destroy the right hand as they had the left when the palm was turned away from them.

“Enemies should also target a tamed Enemy,” Sky Raker pointed out from behind Haruyuki. She stepped up from her half-destroyed wheelchair and called a green aura into her readied hands.

Given that Kuroyukihime called Raker a user of pure positive Incarnate, Haruyuki had thought all her Incarnate techniques focused on range defenses, like Wind Veil and Swirl Sway, but when they had attacked Tezcatlipoca’s left hand, she had used a powerful attack-expansion Incarnate technique called Wind Bullet.

When users of first-quadrant Incarnate techniques—in other words, positive power with range as its target—made use of the fourth quadrant, negative power with range as the target, it generated an excessive mental burden. Utai, with her purification powers, was as specialized as Fuko in positive Incarnate, if not more so. When she unveiled her terrifying Incarnate technique, which drowned enemies in a bog of magma and burned them up, the burden had been so great that she dropped into a coma. But Fuko sounded fresh and alive, no hint of exhaustion in her voice.

“And top-level Enemies won’t simply target the nearest foe; they’ll start with the foe they feel is the greatest threat. If several Beast-class Enemies turn on Tezcatlipoca, even the White King won’t be able to overlook that. We’ll just have to use that opening and destroy its right hand.”

“Good. That’s the plan, then,” the Blue King, Blue Knight, replied. Readying one of the Seven Arcs in both hands, the greatsword Impulse, he glanced over at the Black King. “Lotus, you tell us when to go with the synchronized attack. You can read Cosmos’s movements better than anyone.”

“Understood,” Kuroyukihime agreed. The Green King hefted his shield, the Strife, up slightly, while the Purple King held her staff, the Tempest, up straight. The Yellow King twirled his magic baton, Rotary Rod, and the Red King drew her sidearm, Peace Maker.

The ground beneath their feet shook more and more intensely, basically an ongoing earthquake at this point. Haruyuki narrowed his eyes and made out several massive shadows—although nowhere near as big as Tezcatlipoca—advancing along the Castle’s moat.

Most likely, half of these Enemies would target him and his comrades. They would simply have to deal with this as they prepared to launch the attack on Tezcatlipoca as soon as Kuroyukihime gave the signal. Without anyone giving the order to, the close-range and defensive-type avatars began moving toward the outer edge of the group.

Would the Burst Linkers of the six Great Legions break ranks first, unable to handle the Enemy attacks? Or would the White King try to use the gravitational wave attack first, unable to ignore the damage to Tezcatlipoca? The answer to this would decide the result of this battle—and thus of the ongoing and protracted fight with the White Legion and the Acceleration Research Society.

“Haru, can you stand on your own now?” Takumu whispered from beside him as quietly as possible.

“Yeah, thanks, Taku,” Haruyuki said. “I’m okay now.”

“Okay, I’ll go around to the defense, then. I should be more useful there. I’ve got nothing left in my gauge.” He had only a few minutes earlier used Lightning Cyan Spike in the general attack, but that technique devoured his gauge so he couldn’t fire it at random. His Incarnate technique, Cyan Blade, was powerful, but entirely close range, so unfortunately, Tezcatlipoca’s hand was far beyond its reach.

“Got it.” Haruyuki pulled away from his childhood friend and stood tall. He nearly staggered forward but managed to brace himself before taking the sheathed Lucid Blade from his hip. “Take this. I won’t be using it in this battle.”

He held the sword out hilt-first. Takumu started to protest and then closed his mouth. In his head, he knew that this was the optimal course of action. Haruyuki would either join the multi-pronged attack with his Laser Javelin or use his Light Shell again in the worst-case scenario; his sword would do him no good in this battle. But if Takumu was going to be joining the defense team, then he couldn’t use Cyan Blade. It might draw the attention of Enemies who focused on Tezcatlipoca.

“Thanks,” Takumu said, as he accepted Lucid Blade and mounted it on his right hip. It was a slender weapon for Cyan Pile, who was larger than Silver Crow, but Takumu, of all people, would be able to handle an irregular two-handed style with the Pile Driver of his right arm and the sword in his left hand.

Haruyuki watched him run off to the edge of the group before he turned his mind back to Tezcatlipoca and the White King in the sky above. Takumu and the others would repel the Enemies. He believed that and waited for Kuroyukihime’s signal.

The shaking of the earth intensified with each millisecond. The flood of Enemies was already not even a hundred meters away. But the White King didn’t move. She maintained a mysterious silence, still holding the Luminary to her chest.

The Enemies split into two groups. One kept on straight at the Burst Linkers, while the other charged toward Tezcatlipoca’s feet. The Enemies and the defense team, and then the Enemies and Tezcatlipoca, made contact—and that was when an enormous shock rocked the world.

The White King whipped the Luminary down.

“Ready!!” Kuroyukihime shouted, knocking her right sword arm against her left. Haruyuki similarly dropped into a ready position and mustered up as much overlay as he could in both arms.

Tezcatlipoca raised its right hand and began to charge the gravitational wave attack that the White King had called “Toxcatl.”

But before the five black concentric rings arrived, the layered long-distance attack of the Six Kings and several dozen Burst Linkers destroyed the right hand—

Or it should have.

However:

A yellow circle rose not in either hand of the dark-red giant, but rather in the center of its chest.

A circle of the same color appeared at Haruyuki’s feet.

“Corvus!!” Sky Raker cried.

“Crow!!” Manganese Blade shouted.

The two tried to grab his arms from either side, but their hands only slid down his metal armor. A sudden gravitational pull sucked Haruyuki up into the air.

“Whoa?!” he cried out, stunned, and tried to spread the wings on his back. But before he could, a massive hand—Tezcatlipoca’s—came toward him with a howl and grabbed hold of him in midair.

Terrible pressure. The armor covering his body shrieked, and a large part of his health gauge was cut away.

Pushing aside the terror of being crushed to death, Haruyuki shouted, “Black Lotus!! Please fire!”

Even if he died there, he would only lose some points and regenerate in an hour. If they could destroy Tezcatlipoca’s hand with just one death, it was a small price to pay. Kuroyukihime must’ve understood that.

However.

Through their invisible bond, he felt her hesitate for a mere fraction of a second.

Thus, the White King was the tiniest bit faster.

She brought the Luminary down so quickly it was invisible to the eye, and Tezcatlipoca crossed the right hand holding Haruyuki with the destroyed left hand. He almost didn’t have time to register it as some kind of preparatory movement before a red circle that looked to be more than ten meters across appeared at the giant’s feet.

Only seven or eight Beast-class Enemies were inside the circle; the Burst Linkers were farther out, safe. Even so, Haruyuki couldn’t help but scream as if in agony, “Everyone! Defend!”

Crimson flames jetted up from beneath Tezcatlipoca’s feet. The large Enemies must have had huge health gauges, and yet they burned up in an instant and turned to ash, shrieking in all kinds of horrific ways.

The power of this ranged attack…If close-range Burst Linkers had encircled Tezcatlipoca’s feet instead of the Enemies, they would have all been completely annihilated in less than a second.

This guess that sent a shiver up Haruyuki’s spine was, however, half-wrong.

His avatar was fixed firmly in place, and yet the gravitational pull changed. Tezcatlipoca’s massive bulk was starting to ascend. The flames jetting from its feet weren’t an attack, but a jet to achieve liftoff for the 100-meter-tall Super-class Enemy.

Suddenly, a roar like the ground giving in filled his ears. The propulsive flames grew increasingly intense. Smoke and waves of heat shimmered out, cut across the crater, and swallowed up the Burst Linkers. He saw several defense techniques light up before these, too, were enveloped by black smoke.

That was all Haruyuki could make out.

Tezcatlipoca shot up into the night sky like a rocket, and the ground grew distant in the blink of an eye. When he turned his head, he could see Pegasus racing ahead in the night sky. The White King had chosen to flee rather than fight.

But why? If the giant had enough power left that it could cause the instant deaths of nearly ten Beast-class Enemies with the surplus energy from takeoff, then even if its right hand was gone, couldn’t it have kicked the Burst Linkers away?

Why didn’t the White King do that? And why is she not killing me…

Haruyuki finally realized the position he was in. This was no time for relief that he was alive. It was possible that dying in Kitanomaru Park would have been better. Because he was currently being abducted.

He hurried to peer at the ground far below, but it was nothing but endless rows of the temple-like buildings particular to the Moonlight stage, and he couldn’t immediately tell which direction they were flying in. But from the speed at which the landscape was rolling by, he could see at least that they were moving relatively fast. If they kept flying in a straight line like this, they would soon leave Tokyo.

What should he do? It would be a Herculean task to escape when his body was bound so firmly, and he couldn’t attack the White King. If he could shoot lasers from his eyes like Argon Array…His thoughts inevitably drifted in this direction, and he desperately tried to focus.

What he needed to do at that moment was understand his current location and pinpoint with accuracy the place where Tezcatlipoca eventually landed. He should be able to do that. He’d been memorizing a map of the Tokyo environs ever since he became a Burst Linker.

Thus, Haruyuki swallowed his fear and stared at the field below with wide eyes.