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Accel World - Volume 25 - Chapter 9




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9

Before he knew it, Haruyuki was standing on top of the quietly glittering galaxy.

“Whoa?!” he cried out before looking down at his body. His pig avatar…was not there. Although it was slightly see-through, he was wearing the form of Silver Crow.

The Highest Level.

Finally, he’d been able to reach this place once more under his own power.

“Ye—” He was about to strike a triumphant pose and then hurriedly lowered his hands. Coming to this place was not his ultimate goal, and he wasn’t so sure he could say it was entirely under his own power.

He had definitely heard a voice in the Kagami-no-ma. The composed, but still youthful, voice of a boy. It was different from Trilead’s or Chrome Falcon’s or Wolfram Cerberus’s. It was…perhaps…

He shook his head to bring his wandering thoughts to a halt. There was something else he had to do right now.

He dropped his eyes to the galaxy below once more. The countless bits of stardust shining quietly there were almost all “nodes,” indicating the positions of social cameras in the real world. When he looked at them with this in mind, he could see that they drew out a detailed map of central Tokyo through the strength of the light and the lines between them.

Directly below him was a constellation shining remarkably brightly, probably Shinjuku. Ikebukuro to the north and Shibuya to the south created their own separate constellations.

He followed the distinct road of stars that stretched out from Shinjuku station, where a multitude of nodes were crushed together, to the east. That was likely National Route 20, Shinjuku-dori. The dark area on the south side of the road was Shinjuku Gyoen Park. Beyond that, Yotsuya, Kojimachi. And the massive space even farther still, spreading out like a dark nebula over central Tokyo, was the Imperial Palace—the Castle.

Haruyuki spread the silver wings on his back—although there was probably no need for that—and dropped down toward the Castle.

He didn’t feel as though he were cutting through the air, but the sea of stars drew near in the blink of an eye. The points of light dotting the large road were probably Enemies, different in size and color from the nodes. He slipped across the Sobu line at Yotsuya and headed slightly to the left. He passed Chiyoda’s Ichibancho, flying along Daikancho-dori, and soon Kitanomaru Park, the site of that intense battle, came into view ahead on the left, while on the right, he saw the north gate of the Castle—the Genbu gate.

In the Highest Level, the Four Gods should have looked like poisonous and massive blobs of light, but the area around the Genbu gate was shrouded in darkness. Which meant that the attack hadn’t started yet.

Heaving a sigh of relief, he turned on a dime to the left. The meeting spot for the mission was the same as it had been for the Inti mission, Gijo Plaza at the Ministry of Defense, so he started to head in that direction.

“Aah!” he cried out, before spreading his wings to brake abruptly. It was actually strange to not sense any momentum at all, unlike in the Mean Level of the Unlimited Neutral Field or the Lowest Level of the Normal Duel Field, but that didn’t matter right now.

About eight hundred meters to the east of Ichigaya Station, a number of small stars of various colors were forming a line on Yasukuni-dori. There were more than fifty of them. It couldn’t have been Enemies. This was Kuroyukihime and the Genbu attack team.

When he looked at the column with that in mind, he could make out stars that were dark and light blue, green and red, and a black star with a bluish-purple shimmer to it at the head of the line. He’d thought it was impossible to identify individual Burst Linkers from the Highest Level, but now he instinctively knew that they were Takumu, Fuko, Chiyuri, Utai, and Kuroyukihime. He could see the stars of Akira, Niko, Pard, Rui, and the Petit Paquet team immediately behind them.

The party was approaching a point about two hundred meters from Kitanomaru Park. In Unlimited Neutral Field time, they would arrive at the standby position in front of the Genbu gate in less than ten minutes and then do their final mission checks.

But time on the Highest Level flowed at such a super-amplification that even the Unlimited Neutral Field looked as though it were frozen. No matter how many hours he waited here, Kuroyukihime and the others would never reach the Genbu gate.

What Haruyuki was trying to do from the Highest Level was support Utai.

Metatron had once asserted that all he could do in this place was observe. But at the same time, she had also said that it wasn’t impossible for a presence that could see everything to directly interfere with the information on the Highest Level.

Naturally, he was far from having reached that level. But maybe the Haruyuki of this moment might be able to interfere just the tiniest, teensiest bit—for instance, touch Utai’s star and try to send her energy. Or maybe it would all end in his own conceit, but even so, this was way better than just counting down the seconds in the real world.

In order for him to send Utai energy, however, he needed the time to proceed to the start of the Genbu attack. He didn’t have the luxury of returning to the real world for a moment and coming back to the Highest Level again. Was there a way for him to lower his acceleration rate here somehow?

He could ask Metatron how. Even as the thought came to him, he was shaking his head from side to side. There was still another day of real time before her recovery would be complete. He had no intention of disturbing her before then.

I’ll try going to the Genbu gate at any rate, he thought and ascended once more.

Metatron had said that “distance” did not exist on the Highest Level. In which case, maybe it was possible to teleport simply with a thought. But he couldn’t even guess at how to do that, and he had no reason to hurry at the moment.

He traced his route back to Kitanomaru Park. Nippon Budokan had also been restored because the Sun God Inti had been terminated and the Change had happened. Which perhaps also meant that Inti had been restored somewhere without its insides, but there was no need for Haruyuki to bother with that ball of flames anymore. He moved slowly, looking at Budokan on his right, and stopped in the sky above the National Museum of Modern Art.

Of all the landmarks in central Tokyo, the Castle of the Accelerated World was the only one that was significantly different from its real-world counterpart. The real-world Imperial Palace was a long hexagon, but the Castle was a perfect circle, completely isolated by a wide moat, connected to the outside world only by the bridges to the north, east, south, and west. To the south of Kitanomaru Park was Inuimon, corresponding to the north gate of the Castle; although it was connected by land in the real world, here it was a bottomless moat, five hundred meters across, a gaping maw to suck in any who approached. A thirty-meter-wide bridge spanned this moat, with a massive castle gate rising at the end of it. This was the Castle’s north gate, the Genbu gate.

Three years earlier, the first Nega Nebulus had divided into four teams and attempted an assault on the Castle. Leading the team to attack the south’s Suzaku gate was Testarossa, Ardor Maiden; the east’s Seiryu gate was covered by Aquamatic, Aqua Current; the west’s Byakko gate was covered by Strato-Shooter/Sky Raker and World End/Black Lotus; and the person responsible for the north’s Genbu gate was Anomaly, Graphite Edge.

The battle had ended in a mere 120 seconds, and Nega Nebulus had been annihilated. Although Sky Raker had managed to flee with Black Lotus at the west gate, Ardor Maiden, Aqua Current, and Graphite Edge had fallen into Unlimited EKs because they had helped the other Legion members escape the fierce attacks of the Four Gods.

Maiden and Current had finally been rescued the previous month, but Graph had apparently escaped from the Unlimited EK under his own power long, long ago. But, unable to make it to the other side of the bridge due to the immense power of Genbu’s gravity attack, he’d gone in the opposite direction, sliced through the gate (which wouldn’t normally open unless Genbu was defeated) with his third-stage Incarnate technique, Elucidator, and escaped into the Castle.

While he was the first seat of Great Wall’s Six Armors, he was also still a prisoner of the Castle in the Unlimited Neutral Field. It seemed that he himself was not particularly upset by the situation, and when Kuroyukihime and the others had fallen into the Unlimited EK, he’d kept an eye on Inti for them from inside the Castle for nearly a year. But now they needed him to be on the other side of the Castle walls. Not to save Haruyuki, but to stop the White King from using Tezcatlipoca.

Haruyuki suddenly remembered that Graphite Edge had naturally been told about the Genbu mission, so he should have been on standby near the gate, ready to escape. From the Highest Level, Haruyuki should have been able to see him, right?

He went higher in the black space and tried to peer inside the Genbu gate. But even though the gate, drawn out in points of white light, was semi-transparent, the space beyond it was filled with inky darkness; he couldn’t see a single node.

So the Castle exterior and interior were completely separate worlds after all. An impregnable fortress—or jail—built by a different creator than that of the expansive Accelerated World. Most likely, even if he approached from the Highest Level, he would be rebuffed by an invisible defensive wall in the air above the moat.

He gave up on looking for Graph and got to thinking. In this world where time was essentially stopped, it wasn’t actually practical to wait for the start of the mission. Was there some way he could fast-forward—or put another way, decelerate his own mind? Crossing his arms in midair, he looked around the world below aimlessly, as if searching for a hint.

To the west side of the National Museum of Modern Art was a large parking lot and a stand of trees. To the north was the Science Museum, while to the east stood a mixed-use commercial building with two distinctive towers. There would be the most social cameras inside the commercial building. Looking from this distance, he could see even the faint streams of light connecting the dense clusters of lights. Since all the social cameras were connected to a special network and the information was sent to the Social Security Surveillance Center, the location of which was not public, if he followed that flow of light, he might be able to learn where the SSSC was.

These thoughts drifting through his mind, Haruyuki stared at the streams of light connecting the nodes. And then he noticed it:

The tower rising at the end of the long commercial building. And motionless inside of it, lights that were not nodes. There were four—no, five—of them. Pale purple, dark red, a saturated gray, an almost perfect black, and a strange color that mixed silver and red with darkness.

Those weren’t Enemies. They were Burst Linkers.

Had he happened upon a small Legion out hunting Enemies? But with so few people, it was hard to imagine that they would come this close to the Castle. Powerful Beast-class Enemies regularly appeared around the streets of Uchibori-dori and Yasukuni-dori. Enemies like Flame Blower, which they’d encountered right before the fight with Inti, were difficult foes that even ten high rankers would find formidable. So then, what was that group…

Dropping down from his high altitude, he stared hard at the five points of light. He had a sudden flash of ominous understanding and groaned.

The pale purple light in the middle of the group. He’d seen light of that very color any number of times before. A purple light that flickered immediately before lasers were launched from four lenses—two in the hat as well as both eyes. That point of light was Quad Eyes Analyst, Argon Array.

The instant he realized this, the identities of the other points of light popped into his mind one after the other. The dark red was Rust Jigsaw, who had barged into the Hermes’ Cord race. The saturated gray was Shadow Cloaker, whom Haruyuki had fought in the Territories with the White Legion and immediately before the Inti drop. The dot that was so black it almost melted into the background was his bitter enemy, Black Vise. And the point of light that was a swirl of silver and red and darkness was Wolfram Cerberus, made one with the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II. The Acceleration Research Society. Basically their entire battle team.

There was no way this was a coincidence. They were an ambush for Kuroyukihime and the Genbu attack team.

“The information…leaked?” he murmured hoarsely, before shaking his head as hard as he could.

There couldn’t have been an informant in Nega Nebulus or the other Legions. Through some means or other, the White Legion and the Acceleration Research Society were able to monitor the happenings in the Unlimited Neutral Field. The first thing that came to mind was Black Vise’s ability to decelerate, but this time, that couldn’t have been it. Because Vise’s deceleration used the BIC in his brain, so unlike Avocado Avoider’s Void, the effect wouldn’t be extended to other Burst Linkers.

But the how of it didn’t matter at the moment. He had to tell Kuroyukihime and the others that the Acceleration Research Society was lying in wait for them. If they got in the way of the mission, not only would Graphite Edge not be able to escape, but several people, including Utai and Graph, might very well end up in Unlimited EK with Genbu.

But how was he supposed to tell them?

Stop accelerating and take off Kuroyukihime’s Neurolinker? No, that would end up just like it had been with Haruyuki the other day: Even if the other person was lying right next to you, it took at least three seconds to wake up, sit up, grab hold of the Neurolinker, and yank it off. During that time, three thousand seconds would pass in the Accelerated World—fifty minutes. Plenty of time for Kuroyukihime and the team to arrive at the Castle’s north gate and begin the mission.

And the only ones who would be able to forcibly disconnect like that were Kuroyukihime, with Utai, Fuko, and Niko daisy-chained to her. For the other members of the group, the most powerful portion of their main force would suddenly disappear, so that would actually increase the danger they were in.

What should he do? How could he…

Floating in the inky black of the information space, Haruyuki racked his brain. He had unlimited time for thinking, if nothing else, so he would examine every method, investigate, and discard each of them until he came to one conclusion.

He had no choice but to warn them directly from the Highest Level. He didn’t even know whether or not his attempt to send energy to Utai would be effective, so he highly doubted that he would be able to snap his fingers and start talking to them, but he had no choice except to try.

Previously, when Metatron was on the verge of annihilation in the fight against the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II, he had been able to call to her via the Highest Level and reestablish the link between them when it was nearly severed. Naturally, he’d been able to do this because the link was already there to start with. He didn’t have anything corresponding to this link with Kuroyukihime, Utai, or any of the others, but he did have a connection in the form of their bonds of friendship. He was sure that even if words themselves were impossible, he would be able to send them the idea of a warning.

“Kuroyukihime.” He closed his eyes and called up an image of his Legion Master in his mind.

It was her in her black-spangle-butterfly avatar, from when she called out to him for the first time in the squash game corner in the Umesato Junior High local net. In her uniform, when she offered him an XSB cable in the school cafeteria lounge. Her duel avatar self, fierce and awe-inspiring when she announced the return of Nega Nebulus. And the ephemeral figure like an ice sculpture, beautiful like a sprite, when she showed him the barcode at the nape of her neck.

Haruyuki and Silver Crow were knights who had offered their swords to Kuroyukihime and the Black King. His vow to protect her in the face of all danger shone a constant light on the path ahead of him and gave him the strength to keep moving forward. Even if he couldn’t do it for his own sake, he could do it for her. He was sure of this.

He clenched his hands into tight fists and closed his eyes. He spread the wings on his back and was about to move back to Yasukuni-dori, where Kuroyukihime and the team were en route.

Ping…

He heard a faint noise like an extremely thin piece of metal being hit by the world’s smallest hammer.

Ping. Ping. The crystallized sound repeated and echoed through the dark virtual space. As it gradually grew louder, it sparked something in Haruyuki’s memory.

It was when the Territories stage against the White Legion had turned into the Unlimited Neutral Field due to Megumi Wakamiya/Orchid Oracle’s Incarnate technique, Paradigm Breakdown. He had immediately called Metatron and gotten her to shift his consciousness to the Highest Level. It was there that he heard this sound.

Feeling a sharp shiver run down his spine, he looked over his shoulder.

Ping. The sound—the footsteps—stopped.

A hazy white figure floated up against the inky darkness. Drawn out in cool, semi-transparent light was a surprisingly slender F-type duel avatar. Dress-type armor patterned after crystals, long hair that fell into curls, a tiara of sharp needles. Although she was as slender as the White King, she was much shorter. He didn’t know the color of her armor, but there was no mistaking this form. The second of Oscillatory Universe’s Seven Dwarves, Sleepy, aka…

“Snow Fairy!” he cried, and the sprite avatar turned an innocent smile on him.

“It’s been a while, Silver Crow.” Her faintly echoing voice was sweetly sour, like fruit syrup dripped over a light snowfall. “So we meet again, hmm?”

“Why are you here?!”

“You asked me the same thing last time. And my answer is the same. Because I got the feeling I was being watched.”

“…”

When they’d met during the Territories, Snow Fairy had said that she’d felt his gaze on her in the Unlimited Neutral Field from the Highest Level.

“But.” Haruyuki dropped his eyes momentarily to the tower building below him. “It’s only the members of the Acceleration Research Society over there. I don’t see you at all.”

“They’re amateurs,” she announced, before smiling once again. “As are you, Crow. When it comes to the Highest Level, I’m very much your greatest senior.”

Haruyuki reflexively held up his fists. He knew that there were no health gauges or collision detection in the Highest Level, but even so, he couldn’t stop himself from taking a defensive posture.

He thought about the word “senior” for a second and then asked, “So you…You’re a contractor, too, huh?”

“Oh my! And who did you learn that word from?”

He’d heard it from Centaurea Sentry, but offering up that name would only hurt his cause. There was one other Burst Linker who’d used the same word, however. Haruyuki himself believed that he hadn’t signed a contract with Metatron but rather had become her friend, but this wasn’t the time for saying that, either.

“From the White King.”

“Aah.” Fairy cocked her head adorably to one side. “Is that it? You talked to Cosmos, then. The whims of the King are so troublesome, hmm? Even though we’re approaching the last page of the story.”

“The last page?” he parroted, but Fairy didn’t bother to explain. Instead, she brought her hands behind her body.

Ping. Piiing. She took a step or two and looked at him once again. “I wonder if I’m actually a contractor according to Cosmos’s definition. The one I contracted with is already gone from this world.”

“Gone?” Haruyuki frowned. “It’s not one of the Four Saints—wait, one of the two besides Metatron and Amaterasu?”

“It’s not Xiwangmu or Ushas. And of course it’s not Nyx.”

“X-Xiwang…” Haruyuki cocked his head to one side as one unfamiliar name after another came out of her mouth. But Fairy paid this no mind as she continued.

“I mean that there are other Enemies with light cubes. But those that have been initialized, well,” she said, shook her head slightly, and looked at Haruyuki with cute eye lenses. “Now, how about we put an end to the talking there? I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to be frozen here for a while.”

“F-frozen?”

“After all, you came to interfere, didn’t you? In the ambush?”

Slapped with the question of the hour, he hesitated for an instant before nodding. There was no point in trying to deceive her now. “Of course. Now that I know there’s an ambush, I can’t exactly sit back and watch.”

“Then I can’t let you be now that I know you’ll get in the way.”

Haruyuki gasped as he felt something like a sudden and powerful chill blow toward him from the small body of the faintly smiling girl.

It was a hallucination; it wasn’t possible to interfere with anyone else physically on the Highest Level. When Snow Fairy had appeared before, she’d tried to sever the link between Haruyuki and Metatron, but Metatron wasn’t even there now. He should have had no reason to fear any kind of damage from Fairy, but as she herself had noted, she was indeed his “greatest senior.” The true meaning of her “frozen” was unclear, but there was a non-zero possibility of her doing something other than physically interfering with him or cutting that link.

In which case.

Without any kind of preparatory movement whatsoever, he abruptly shot into the air. He raced upward to an altitude at which he could no longer make out the individual points in the herds of nodes on the ground, and then shifted to flying horizontally. He flew at full speed toward the glitter of Shinjuku he could see in the west.


Snow Fairy had walked on her own feet in the Highest Level. From the speed of her movement, it would be impossible for her to keep capturing him at flight speed. He’d pull back for the moment, take a large detour, and then drop down to just barely above the surface and fly back to Kuroyukihime and the others. Naturally, Fairy would probably show up again, but if he could just communicate the danger to Kuroyukihime before she found him, it didn’t matter what she did after that.

He flew far above Shinjuku-dori, many times faster than when he’d first come down the road, passed Yotsuya, and arrived at Shinjuku Gyoen Mae. It was then.

Ping.

He heard the sound once more.

“…?!”

Stunned, he put on the brakes with his wings. Even though he shouldn’t have had any momentum, he slid another ten meters before finally coming to a stop.

In the sky ahead of him, a white figure floated up hazily. The tiara made from ice thorns. The dress that was a lace of snowflakes. Snow Fairy, with the glittering stars of Shinjuku behind her.

Haruyuki whirled around to look back at the Castle far behind him and then turned back to Fairy. “H-how?! There’s no way you could catch up with me!”

“And that’s why you’re an amateur,” the girl nicknamed Sleepy said, shrugging slightly. “Didn’t anyone tell you that distance has no meaning on the Highest Level?”

“Y-yes, but that doesn’t mean…”

“Crow, right now, you and I are looking at something like a three-dimensional monitor that’s displaying the locations of data on the Mean Level. Because it’s a monitor, you can shift your focus anywhere you’d like. Right now, you’re desperately moving it with the cursor, but it’s much easier to specify the coordinates and jump.”

He frowned. “Does that mean that you can freely teleport to anywhere in the Highest Level?”

“If it’s a place and range that I can grasp, yes.” She nodded.

“H-how?”

“First, take something from where you want to—” she started to say, raising a hand, but then abruptly closed her mouth and paused before speaking again. “Why exactly should I tell you?”

“Why? I mean, I…”

“It’d be a waste to tell you anyway. This world’s ending soon, after all.”

“Ending?” he said.

Fairy gestured gently with the hand she held at chest level. “The end can no longer be avoided. The question is only how we Burst Linkers will end. Will we finish our time in pain, humiliation, and despair like the Assault Linkers and the Corrupt Linkers? Or…”

She cut herself off, sighed briefly, and closed her hand into a fist.

Instantly, Haruyuki was turned to stone. The sensation was far beyond a numbness or being dunked in ice. He still had his senses, but it was as though his fingers, his mouth, even his eyelids had turned into chunks of metal. Although duel avatars had no need of oxygen, they did feel their lungs filling with and emptying of air, something he had also felt on the Highest Level. But now he couldn’t even breathe.

This suffocating feeling was an illusion. He knew that in his head, but the sheer fact of being unable to breathe filled him with a bottomless terror. He wanted to shout. He wanted to tear at his throat. But neither his mouth nor his hands moved.

“Sorry. I know it hurts. But I have no choice. It could get a teensy bit annoying if Graphite Edge came out to play now. But relax. We won’t put Black Lotus and the others into an Unlimited EK. We just want them to give up on opening the gate,” Fairy said, her voice almost kind, as she walked around behind him. Ping. Ping.

“Assume that you’ll spend a very, very long time in this state, until someone in the Lowest Level takes your Neurolinker off. Poor dear. I’ll stay with you for a while.”

She flashed him a smile and sat down, hugging her knees. She took her gaze off Haruyuki and began to rock slowly from side to side as she gazed at the Castle in the distance.

Haruyuki didn’t have the brain waves to imagine what Snow Fairy was thinking.

It hurt. It hurt. It hurt.

He tried desperately to suck in some air, but even his lungs were metal, and no matter how he tried, they would not expand. If he could only pass out, but the mind that wanted this showed no signs of fading. Only a clear agony, terror, and panic filled his thoughts.

Someone. Someone. Someone.

But this was the Highest Level, that only those guided by the most high-ranking Beings could reach. He could pray until the end of time, but there would be no help coming. Was his only choice to endure this until Kuroyukihime removed his Neurolinker for him, as Fairy had said? But how many hours would pass before that happened…

Someone. Someone…

After a minute that felt like an eternity, Haruyuki had a sudden realization.

Metatron. She knew the Highest Level backward and forward. Couldn’t she free him from this frozen state? She was his only hope. He needed her to free him from this suffering. He was about to shout the Archangel’s name in his head with all his might.

But then he mustered up what little remained of his ability to think in the troughs of the waves of suffering and terror and stopped his shrieking cry of a thought.

Why didn’t Snow Fairy leave him and return to the Unlimited Neutral Field? Because she felt bad for him? There was no way. He didn’t know what the rate of time acceleration was in the Highest Level, but assuming it was a thousand times that of the Unlimited Neutral Field, if things went very south, it could take over a thousand hours—forty days—until Haruyuki was forcibly disconnected. He had a hard time believing that she was the kind of person who would waste that much time out of sheer pity.

Snow Fairy was waiting for something. And that something was Metatron. She was trying to make him summon her to finish the job of severing the link between them. Which meant that Fairy—the White Legion—viewed the connection between Haruyuki and Metatron as a danger on the same level as Graphite Edge’s escape.

I can’t call her, Haruyuki told himself, enduring the incredible agony.

He had made a vow. He would not call Metatron until she had completely recovered. It wasn’t as though he now had a health gauge that was being depleted, and no burst points were being taken from him. And naturally, there was no damage to his flesh-and-blood body. It was just painful; it was just hard. But when he thought back to the previous year when the boys in his class were bullying him, this was nothing.

Now that he was thinking about it, a true high ranker like Snow Fairy, second of the Seven Dwarves of the White Legion, was there now to take care of him. Haruyuki. Silver Crow—a small fry to look at, with no serious special attacks, who had fought in a clumsy panic when he’d first appeared in the Accelerated World and had been laughed at by the Gallery—was now making trouble for an established top player. For a gamer, was there any greater joy?

He would endure this for however long it took, until Fairy threw in the towel. He would suffer this pain and keep her glued to this spot.

Well, but wait, that was no good—he had to tell Kuroyukihime and the others about the Acceleration Research Society ambush. Fairy had said they weren’t planning to put the attacking team into Unlimited EK, but unless his comrades achieved their goal of freeing Graphite Edge, the mission would end in failure.

He would break this petrification under his own power. He could do it. He had to do it. No matter how “senior” she was, Snow Fairy was a Burst Linker just like him. There was no distance on the Highest Level. Similarly, there were no levels or statuses.

This was an idea world that made information visual. The nodes, Enemies, and Burst Linkers expressed as points of light were its true essence, and the figures of Haruyuki and the others depicted as duel avatars were merely what he felt through his subjective experience. But the truth was, his duel avatar was not here. All that existed was the mind of the observer, Haruyuki. Snow Fairy had interfered with that mind and given it the sensation—or rather the hallucination—that it was unable to move.

Haruyuki couldn’t do the same thing to her. But maybe he could interfere with his own mind? Like when he’d escaped from Tezcatlipoca’s gravitational wave attack, Toxcatl.

At that time, he’d succeeded in slipping out of the giant’s sights, albeit only for an instant, through the null Incarnate that diluted his mind to the limits. If he could do the same thing here and now, maybe he could escape from Fairy’s interference.

But to do that, he would have to completely banish the terror and pain of not being able to breathe from his mind. Even if he knew in his head that his duel avatar didn’t exist, much less his flesh-and-blood body, it wasn’t easy to fight back against the sensation that no air was coming into his lungs. The fact was, the moment his thoughts stopped, his senses all focused on this suffering. If only Fairy had not just frozen his avatar but also taken all sensation, he could have gotten away without this pain…

Wait.

If that was possible, then Fairy had deliberately left his senses alone. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to make him suffer. She’d done it to force him to summon Metatron to escape from his pain.

So then all he had to do was eliminate his senses.

The image. Imagine it: There was no flesh-and-blood body inside his avatar. There was only the light of information. Light felt nothing. It couldn’t be broken. It couldn’t be captured. It simply existed…

His body gradually grew warmer. The sensation receded from his fingertips and toes. His arms and legs were cut away. His hips, his stomach melted into nothing. His chest became particles of light and spread out, and in that instant, the pain vanished like it had never been at all. His neck, his face, his head also disappeared. Now Haruyuki was a congregate of white photons drifting through space.

Snow Fairy sat motionless, arms around her knees. She was still looking at Silver Crow’s avatar through her subjective lens. She hadn’t noticed that he had cut himself off from physical sensation.

His avatar was gone, but he still couldn’t move. Snow Fairy’s mental interference of “can’t move” continued. Unless he broke free of it, he wouldn’t be able to warn Kuroyukihime.

The next quadrant. He could expand his consciousness with null Incarnate and escape Fairy’s sights.

Imagine it.

This mind that was now light, spreading out through the entire world. A flow of information connecting infinite nodes. Coming together, pulling apart, creating complex routes. Those routes spread out endlessly. From Tokyo to Kanto to Honshu to the farthest reaches of Japan.

The flat information map was split above and below. The triple-layered Japan—the true Accelerated World. Although myriad Enemies and so many fewer Burst Linkers existed in the central layer that was Haruyuki’s world, there was no active information in the worlds above and below. Accel Assault and Cosmos Corrupt. They had both been closed. And if what the White King and Snow Fairy had said was true, then that time was also approaching for Brain Burst.

No.

This was…

One more. High, high, high above…Another map in the distant heights?

A fourth world. A very small, but very active, new world.

Unable to believe what he was sensing, Haruyuki earnestly tried to send his mind there. His mind was unintentionally dispersed to the limit and he disappeared from Snow Fairy’s awareness.

The restraint came undone, and with the backlash of that, the congregation of photons that formed Haruyuki scattered to and permeated every corner of the Highest Level—or put another way, the Main Visualizer.

At that instant, five top-level Beings touched Haruyuki’s mind, each reacting in its own way.

Abandoned Princess Bari.

Goddess of the Dawn Ushas.

Queen Mother of the West Xiwangmu.

Storm King Rudra.

Shrine Maiden of the Sun Amaterasu.

Two were mildly interested at the sudden contact, but one was a little annoyed, and one was angered. This Being tried to expel Haruyuki’s mind from the Highest Level, but it laid down its arms through Amaterasu’s intervention. All five Beings, however, marked him and established extremely fine links, but Haruyuki didn’t notice that.

The vast amount of information that flowed into his dispersed mind was far too great for him to possibly begin to process, and he selected just one presence out of all the noise to focus his senses on. The information didn’t include a form or a voice, but even so, he knew who it was. If he had to say, it was the scent that gave it away. More brisk than sweet, a clear aroma that was pure and strong.

Kuroyukihime!

He concentrated his dispersed mind. Instantly, the cascade of information filling his senses receded, and a single point of light appeared before his eyes.

A jet-black star wrapped in a bluish-purple glow. Around it were stars of blue, red, light blue, and green—Kuroyukihime and his Nega Nebulus comrades. Haruyuki teleported from the sky above Shinjuku Gyoen Mae to near Kitanomaru Park. Snow Fairy must have noticed that. He had no doubt that she would also move once more in a second—no, half a second.

Now he himself had turned into a silver star, like Kuroyukihime and the others. He had no hands or mouth, but he instinctively knew what to do. He advanced ever so slightly and fused part of the silver and black stars.

The moment he sensed that his and Kuroyukihime’s quantum circuits were linked, he communicated to her not in words with a voice but in compressed thought itself.

Acceleration Research Society ambush. Black Vise, Argon Array, Shadow Cloaker, Rust Jigsaw, Wolfram Cerberus. East of the National Museum of Modern Art, inside the tower of the commercial building. Snow Fairy is also lying in wait nearby, detailed position unknown. Fairy is watching the attack team from the Highest Level and can see all your movements.

Haruyuki transmitted this information in less than 0.1 seconds of his own subjective time. He had no sooner finished than he felt Snow Fairy about to materialize nearby.

He released his mind once more. This time, he didn’t spread out across the Highest Level, but rather, the instant he sensed the presence of a certain Burst Linker, he flew toward it.

The nodes and points of light around him that were his comrades shrank to a single point in the center of his field of view and scattered. Before his eyes now, stars of a different color assembled: gray, rust, light purple…and black.

One star boasted a darkness so deep it threatened to suck in his consciousness from just looking at it. This was without a doubt Black Vise. But when he thought about it, “Black Vise” was only what the avatar called himself, and this was actually Ivory Tower. In which case, the star should have been ivory colored…

Wait. Now was not the time to be concerned with that. Snow Fairy would catch up with him soon.

Haruyuki shifted his gaze to look at the fifth star, slightly apart from the others. It was entirely different from the other Burst Linkers he’d seen. The base was a steel color slightly more saturated than his own silver, but mixed into it were bloodred and a dense darkness, giving the star an irregular marbled appearance.

This was Wolfram Cerberus. The red light was probably the hover-thruster stolen from Niko’s Enhanced Armament, Invincible, and the inky darkness was the massive amount of accumulated negative Incarnate energy. When he looked at it with that in mind, it seemed to him that the red and the black were holding the steel planet captive.

Black Vise had called Cerberus “Wolfram Disaster,” as if to declare that this change was irreversible. But that couldn’t be. Just as Haruyuki had been able to undo the curse of the Armor of Catastrophe, it had to be possible to release Cerberus from the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II, and return him to his true self—the boy who loved the duel more than anyone else, the boy Haruyuki had seen only the one time in the hustle and bustle of Koenji.

As he had with Kuroyukihime, Haruyuki fused their two stars the tiniest bit. Instantly, an incredible amount of information pushed toward him. But it wasn’t exactly information in a certain sense; rather, it was a tumultuous darkness swirling with anger, pain, hatred, and every other negative emotion.

Deep inside this, however, in the place that corresponded to the star’s core, a skinny boy crouched, clutching his knees. He was protecting himself, preventing himself from being swallowed up by the overwhelming negative Incarnate.

Cerberus!

Fighting against the darkness that pushed at him, Haruyuki tried to send his thoughts to the boy.

I’m going to get you out of there! I will! We’ll purify the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II, and put an end to the plotting of the Acceleration Research Society! So when we do, let’s duel again!

He wasn’t sure if his message got through. But he felt like the crouched boy lifted his face just the tiniest bit.

He was out of time. Snow Fairy was trying to manifest somewhere nearby. He felt bad that he couldn’t send Utai any energy, but if his warning had gotten through, Kuroyukihime would be putting a stop to the Genbu mission. They had nearly a full day before the main event of the Tezcatlipoca attack, so they could stop for the time being and try again later.

There was nothing else Haruyuki could do there now. He cut his connection with Cerberus and prayed.

Burst Out.

Everything rapidly grew distant, but Fairy’s sweet and sour voice chased him, echoing faintly from afar.

See you, Crow.

Something like the acceleration sound in reverse washed over Haruyuki, and his field of view was dyed white.



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