Accel World - Volume 26 - Chapter 13

13

“C’mon! Hurry up! Hurry! Hurry!” came an impatient voice as hands shoved and pushed at Haruyuki’s back, forcing him to advance down the hallway at a trot.

“Okay!” he yelled “I get it! Stop pushing me!”

“Huuuuuurrryyyyyy uuuuuup!” Absolutely not having any of this was his childhood friend, Chiyuri Kurashima.

She’d contacted him for the first time in three days a little before eight PM. In the end, he’d finished his quota of homework without relying on acceleration, had a dive chat with Utai, Reina, Niko, and Kao to find out how Hoo was doing, and he was finally thinking about messaging Snow Fairy when the mail from Chiyuri had arrived.

All it said was “I’m bringing food.” While he wrestled with the question of whether this sounded angry or not, the doorbell rang, so he opened the front door timidly. The moment he did, however, Chiyuri blew in like a storm, the only word coming out of her mouth being “hurry.”

Forced to retreat to the living room, he dashed away from her, whirled around, and shouted, “Hurry, hurry, hurry! What is all this hurrying for?!”

“This!” Chiyuri pulled two XSB cables out of the pocket of her culottes.

“Huh?” He gaped at the cables. “W-we’re directing?”

“No! Nooot thaaat!” she snapped impatiently. “Sit down and plug your Neurolinker into your home server, Haru! And do maybe…thirty seconds for the cutoff time.”

He finally understood that she was planning for them to dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field together. But her objective was still unclear, and more importantly…

“Huh? What about food?” he asked, pointing at the reliably bulging tote bag in her left hand.

Her response was unequivocal. “After the dive! Come on! I’m telling you, we don’t have time for this!”

“O-okay. Fine.” Realizing that something big was going on, Haruyuki accepted the cable Chiyuri held out to him and sat down on the sofa. He plugged one end into his own Neurolinker and the other into the port to connect to the home server embedded on one side of the low table. He set the automatic disconnect timer for thirty seconds and glanced to his side.

He also had a whole bunch of things he needed to talk to her about: his transfer to the White Legion, the fact that he’d gotten her mail about it but hadn’t responded, and the whole thing with him going out with Kuroyukihime. But right now, her mission came first.

“I’ll count down,” he said. “Two, one…”

And then they shouted together, ““Unlimited Burst!!””

His second visit to the Unlimited Neutral Field that day was to a Wasteland stage where a dry wind whistled. Since all the buildings had been changed into solid rock, he and Chiyuri appeared at the top of a massive stone that was roughly the same shape and height as his condo building in the real world.

“So? What was all the rush for?” he asked again.

“Um, so.” Chiyuri—Watch Witch Lime Bell—tilted her vivid green pointed hat to one side. “I have this friend in Nishi Tokyo’s Ovest.”

“Huh?” He stared at her, stunned. “You do?!”

“You don’t have to act so surprised.”

And she was exactly right. It had already been three months since she had become a Burst Linker as Takumu’s child. Given that much time, it was absolutely natural that she would have built relationships he knew nothing about.

“I guess, yeah.” He nodded. “So what’s their name?”

“This girl, Cotton Marten,” she replied. “I got a mail from her today at six thirty, and, like, it was kinda weird and rambling. She said there was this secret mission in Ikebukuro in the Unlimited Neutral Field, and she didn’t want to go, but she had to. So if I hadn’t heard from her again by eight, I should come look for her.”

“Mission?” He frowned. “What mission?”

Chiyuri blinked her cute, round eye lenses. “That’s what I wondered, too, so I mailed her back right away, but I haven’t heard from her since. And then I was trying to figure out what to do and eight o’clock came around, but I thought it was maybe dangerous to go by myself. Sorry for dragging you into this.”

“No, you were right to come with me. This maybe had something to do with Exercitus.”

“Excer…?” Now it was her turn to frown. “What?”

“I’ll explain later,” he said. “Anyway, we should charge our special attack gauges.”

“Yeah.”

After nodding firmly at each other, they began to smash the nearby rocks.

Haruyuki set his mind to work at the same time as his fists. When he ran into the White King on the Highest Level, she had mentioned Ovest as one of the Legions that formed the core of the newly launched Exercitus. And Exercitus had a scouting party keeping an eye on Tezcatlipoca. These facts plus the “secret mission” in Cotton Marten’s mail gave rise to a single possibility in his mind.

What if on the very day Exercitus launched, they attempted to attack Tezcatlipoca? If their mission had succeeded, Cotton Marten would have contacted Chiyuri by now. So the fact that she hadn’t meant…The mission start time was seven, and it was already eight now. An hour in the real world was a thousand hours in the Unlimited Neutral Field—forty-one days and sixteen hours.

He pushed back this uneasy feeling as he kicked and shattered his nth rock to fill his special attack gauge. He raced over to Chiyuri and called, “I’m all good! You?”

“Now.” Chiyuri pulverized a massive rock with the Choir Chime Enhanced Armament of her left hand, whirled around, and jumped toward him. “I’m full up!”

“Hup!” He hurried to catch her and deployed the wings on his back. After a second of thought, he looked up at the pale-yellow sky and called the voice command, “Equip Metatron Wings.”

A pure-white light shot down from the sky, collected on Silver Crow’s back, and produced a new set of wings. A gift from the Archangel Metatron, these wings dramatically increased his flight speed and duration. Normally, he tried to use them as little as possible, but he felt they were warranted in this situation.

“Here we go,” he warned.

“Let’s do it!” Chiyuri chirped in response.

He kicked off the ground and lifted off.

From his condo, Ikebukuro was about six kilometers east by northeast. At the time of the fifth Chrome Disaster incident six months earlier, he had flown this very same course to Ikebukuro. Back then, the flight had taken more than ten minutes, maybe because he’d been carrying Kuroyukihime in his right arm, Niko in his left, and had Takumu hanging from his legs.

But now he vibrated his own wings and the Metatron wings at about half power. Even at that low level, his avatar accelerated like it had been launched from a gun, and in a mere minute or so, he had crossed Nakano and entered the ward of Toshima, home of the Ikebukuro area.

He passed Yamate-dori, which was re-created in the Wasteland stage as a massive ravine, and the overhead JR train bridge, transformed into a long razorback ridge, and then two incredibly tall rocks came into view up ahead. The one on the left was Sunshine 60, the one on the right was Ecomuse Town. And between them, a massive shadow writhed.

“Haru!” Chiyuri cried from his arms.

Graaaaaar!

An angry roar he’d heard before shook the air around them.

Despite the fact that he was still over a kilometer away, the shock waves traveled through the atmosphere to hit him hard. As he decelerated, he made a right turn and carefully approached on a course from the south, with Ecomuse Town wedged between them and the shadow.

“I’m taking us down!” he said, and cut the thrust to his wings to glide down onto the roof of Ecomuse Town. At the last second, he applied a hint of reverse thrust to cushion their landing. He set Chiyuri on her feet and made eye contact with her before bending over and pointing to the edge of the roof. Although the building had been transformed into a rock, there was a parapet standing on the edge. They hid themselves behind it, and then poked their heads out carefully to look down at the ground.

Even seen from the top of Ecomuse Town nearly two hundred meters up, the giant was still incredibly huge. Smooth, reddish-black physique. Abnormally long arms. Faceless face. The god of the end, Tezcatlipoca.

As Haruyuki and Chiyuri watched wordlessly, the giant raised one foot high and brought it down on the reddish-brown earth. Thm, thmmm. A shock like an earthquake radiated out from that epicenter, and Ecomuse Town shuddered.

And then Haruyuki saw them. A variety of colored lights blinking and disappearing.

“There,” he said, and immediately, a faint sound—no, a voice—reached him. A shriek, filled with despair.

The lights were duel avatar death effects.

“Haru, those are…,” Chiyuri said, her voice trembling.

At the same time, Haruyuki noticed countless lights shimmering weakly at the feet of Tezcatlipoca, sinking into the shadows of the skyscrapers. There had to have been over a hundred of them.

“They’re all…death markers?” He shuddered in fear.

A hundred was a terrifying number. But the White King had said Exercitus membership was over five hundred Burst Linkers. In which case, he found it impossible to believe that only a hundred of them had convened for the Tezcatlipoca attack mission. It would have been more like all of the level four and higher members, around three hundred people on the high side.

Even mobilizing that kind of huge force, they hadn’t been able to defeat the god of the end. They had probably been annihilated in an instant, and all three hundred had transformed into death markers. And then they had regenerated and died over and over again for a thousand hours. This was an unlimited EK on an overwhelming scale, like nothing seen in the Accelerated World before. It was quite possible that a hundred to two hundred Burst Linkers had already been pushed to total point loss.

“Why?!” Haruyuki cried, his voice cracking as he clenched his hands into tight fists.

If they’d been observing the Enemy all that time, then they should have known there was no way they could take on Tezcatlipoca. So then why?

Below, the giant began to move again. It reached its left hand out toward a place where a number of death markers were concentrated. Rings of pale light popped up above the massive palm. The instant their number went from seven to eight to nine, the circles changed color to a glittering crimson red.

At the same time, over twenty Burst Linkers regenerated as one, and an enormous fireball shot out from Tezcatlipoca’s hand. The extermination attack, Miccailhuitontli.

Striking the ground in a direct hit, the fireball swirled and swelled upward, causing what was without a doubt the largest explosion Haruyuki had ever seen in the Accelerated World. The flames reached the belly of Ecomuse Town and shook the rocky mountain with a thunderous roar.

The regenerated Burst Linkers were all killed instantly, helpless in the midst of the flames. Two of them did not turn into death markers, but instead broke apart into countless ribbons that danced up into the sky. In that moment, they lost all of their Burst Points and were banished from the Accelerated World.

“No…No!” Chiyuri cried weakly. Haruyuki opened his clenched fist and gripped her hand tightly.

He wanted to help the hundred Linkers who still hadn’t lost all of their points. But no matter how he racked his brain, there was no way. If he and Chiyuri came down from their rocky mountain perch and approached Tezcatlipoca, they would be caught up in some attack, die instantly, and join the crowd of death markers.

He thought about bursting out for a moment and getting together as many people as possible, but even assuming he took ten minutes to prepare, over one hundred and sixty hours would pass on this side. In that time, almost all of the remaining hundred Burst Linkers would lose their points, and there was a strong possibility of the rescue team falling to the same fate.

This really was the god of the end. Hundreds of Burst Linkers, with all the knowledge and courage they could muster, were still powerless against it. And Haruyuki was the one who had released it into this world.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

He said the words over and over in his heart, tears filling his eye lenses, while ahead of him, the giant moved again.

It turned the face with nothing but a cavernous mouth toward the sky. And then it roared deeply, at length, like the sound of an earthquake itself.

Graaaaaaaaan…

But its voice wasn’t colored with the same desire for slaughter as it had been before. In fact, it even sounded like a satisfied song.

Suddenly, countless cracks raced across Tezcatlipoca’s body. Motionless, the giant lost its reddish-black coloring, turning into inky, lusterless black stone bit by bit. The stone crumbled and fell to the earth.

“Huh? Wh-what’s going on?” Chiyuri murmured, and Haruyuki could only shake his head.

Was it really satisfied? Had its role ended with pushing a couple hundred Burst Linkers to total point loss and now it was dying?

He couldn’t believe things could work out so conveniently, but Tezcatlipoca continued to fall apart. It had already lost its entire head, and once the destruction reached its shoulders, its arms were cut off and plunged downward. The right and left hands that had brought about so much devastation crashed into the ground and shattered. The destruction of the torso proceeded down from the neck to the chest. At the giant’s feet, the several Burst Linkers who had regenerated during this time stared upward in amazement, not even trying to run from the rocks raining down.

Finally, the giant broke down from the chest to the stomach. A red light gushed from inside the infinite fissures running along the cracked surface. The true nature of this light was revealed little by little as chunks of rock fell away. It wasn’t an Enemy or an item. The swirling red light was an elliptical object without physicality.

“A…portal?” Chiyuri whispered.

That was exactly what it looked like to Haruyuki’s eyes, too. But the portals all over the Unlimited Neutral Field were without exception blue.

The destruction of Tezcatlipoca stopped once it reached the center of its stomach—the bottom edge of the portal.

This was followed by another unprecedented phenomenon.

Massive hexagons the same color as the mysterious portal popped up in the pale-yellow sky of the Wasteland stage. The word WARNING was engraved on each in unadorned letters. It took a mere five or six seconds to fill the entire sky from the northern to the southern horizons with the crimson hexagonal patterns.

There was no way that this was the end. The next thing that happened would be the climax of whatever was happening.

Certain of this, Haruyuki shifted his gaze away from the red sky and brought it back to the portal shining on top of the last half of Tezcatlipoca.

Shf. Something appeared from inside the swirling light.

A foot. And then an arm. Followed by a body.

Someone basically the same size as Haruyuki and Chiyuri was manifesting in this world from the other side of the portal.

Instantly, Haruyuki understood everything. The portal inside of Tezcatlipoca, the existence of which the Abandoned Princess Bari had predicted, wasn’t an entrance to take Haruyuki and his fellow Burst Linkers to the Castle or some other place. It was the opposite: an exit to bring someone from some unknown place to the Accelerated World.

When the someone had stepped out of the portal entirely, another shadow immediately appeared. Three. Four. They kept coming. And they were very obviously not duel avatars. They didn’t have the characteristic semitransparent armor, or face masks, or eye lenses.

The first person to come out of the portal looked to be a real person, more or less. He appeared to be a boy, but long hair fluttered behind him, and his frame, not so large but sturdy, was wrapped in a form-fitting red suit.

The second person had a totally different physique. And their entire body was covered in robot-like silver armor, while three lenses shone with pale light on the face area.

The third was a girl. Surprisingly slender body clad in a black dress, she had a witch’s pointed hat on her head, and carried a long twisted staff in her right hand.

The fourth and fifth people again had a totally different appearance; there was no sense of unity. They were all over the place, like they had each come from a different world.

Wait. No. As they lined up to either side of the first person, Haruyuki got the impression that although there were no commonalities in terms of design, they were all based on a single concept. And that concept was…

Hero. So-called superheroes.

With the tenth person, the output from the portal stopped at last.

The heroes stood in a neat row on top of the crumpled Tezcatlipoca’s stomach, below the sky ripped apart into hexagons.

A small-statured person taking up position on the right side, wearing a blue mask that hid their entire face, glanced at the Burst Linkers looking up soundlessly from the ground and said in a voice that carried well, “Y’hang on for eight whole years, and those are the looks on your faces. Is what I’d say, but I can’t even see any of your damned faces.”

“You’re not exactly one to talk,” the witch in the pointed hat retorted. Looking closely, Haruyuki saw that her feet were floating just a little above the ground.

Blue Mask glanced at her and shrugged theatrically. “That’s just how it is. The masked man’s the hero standard. Anyway. Listen up, gang!”

Blue Mask leaned far forward, seemingly unafraid of the fifty-meter height, and declared in a loud voice to the Exercitus survivors, “Trial Number Two service ends today! Any of you wanna disappear, you go right ahead. Anyone sticks around, and we’ll give you your final notice. This game’s official version, the name’s Dread Drive 2047!!”

To be continued…