Accel World - Volume 26 - Chapter 5

5

Haruyuki had basically always gone through a safety device that automatically cut his connection after a set period of time when he dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field. That way, even if he ended up in an unlimited EK, he wouldn’t lose all his points, even if he did die a few times.

But today, after basically standing up and saying “bring it on” to an unlimited EK, he couldn’t very well request a safety. What surprised him was that Tomochika Kyobu and the others didn’t make any move to use a safety, either. Maybe they had an exceeding amount of confidence in themselves, or maybe they had some other safety plan besides an automatic disconnection device.

As these thoughts were wandering through his mind, Haruyuki connected his Neurolinker to the EG local net with the ID that Fairy had sent him. Normally, a global connection was necessary to dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field, but Oscillatory had apparently found a way around that limitation.

Once everyone was ready, Airi Sagisu began the slightly extended countdown.

“Here we goooo! Threeeee, twooooo, oooone.”

“““Unlimited Burst!”””

His senses were taken over by the sound of acceleration, the darkening of his field of view, the sense of falling. And then the feeling of landing.

When he opened his eyes, the look of the student council office had changed completely. The floor and walls and all their decadent natural wood had been turned into grimy metal, rippling in organic curves. In every corner of the once-tidy room, disturbing myriapods wriggled and writhed. The sky he could see through the distorted window glass was an unsettling yellowish-green.

“So it is a Purgatory stage then…,” said a voice to his left.

Haruyuki turned to find a large M-type avatar in heavy armor that was a pale, watery blue standing there with his arms crossed. He had two long horns growing from his forehead, and his face mask was also relatively fierce, giving the overall impression of some kind of demon.

He did a quick rummage through his memories, but there was no mistake; he’d never seen this avatar before.

“Um. A-and who might you be?” he asked nervously, and the blue demon avatar raised both hands in surprise.

“Now, now! It’s me, Sneezy.”

“Huh? Behemoth? But when we fought before, you were super huge, almost like a dragon,” Haruyuki said, spreading out his arms as far as he could. The Glacier Behemoth he’d encountered in the Territories a week earlier had been nearly six meters long from head to tail, on par with a Beast-level Enemy.

“It would seriously suck if he were that massive thing all the time. That’s this guy’s Beast mode,” a rose-pink F-type avatar said as she walked toward them. Countless sharp spikes glittered on her worrisomely slender limbs and torso. The face mask framed with gorgeous ringlets was sweetly dazzling.

Grumpy, aka Rose Milady, came to a stop, the needle-like pin heels on her feet clacking, and said with a sigh, “Crow, can you really beat a Beast class solo?”

“I—I don’t know,” he replied honestly.

Milady shook her head in exasperation and let out a lengthy sigh.

“Now listen.” An F-type clad in pale-peach dress-type armor approached from the other side of Milady. “Aaah, this is why I told you not to do this.”

“D-did you?” he asked, frowning.

“I did. Telepathically,” said the Prophet, aka Orchid Oracle, rather outrageously. The silver hair hanging down her back swung from side to side as she stopped in front of Behemoth. “Sneezy, are we really going to abandon him if Crow ends up in unlimited EK?”

“Oh, well…” The blue demon avatar was at a loss for words when a black shadow suddenly rose up behind him, and Haruyuki shrank back with a gasp.

It was probably a duel avatar. But he couldn’t even tell what shape it was, much less its armor color. Its entire body was covered in a dark-gray cloaked hood with absolutely no luster to it. The cloak’s ragged hem was about ten centimeters from the floor, but there were no feet to see there. The figure was almost like a ghost. Or the god of death.

The death avatar, which apparently possessed the same hovering ability as the Black King, Black Lotus, wavered from side to side as it spoke in a voice with a faint hint of an echo, “Ohhh, Orkkiiii! You’re so sweeeeet!”

Haruyuki had to brace himself to keep from being completely knocked off his feet. Inside the extremely inauspicious ragged cloak was Cypress Reaper, aka Airi Sagisu. He’d forgotten until that very second, but Kuroyukihime had once told him that “cypress” was a kind of tree, and “reaper” meant a taker of souls.

The girl with the braids who gave Haruyuki the biggest slice of cheesecake was a distinct mismatch for this duel avatar that was the very figure of death. But Burst Linkers whose real self and avatar diverged were not uncommon, and it was the height of rudeness to pry into the mental scars that were the mold for the avatar.

As Haruyuki recovered from his shock, Orchid Oracle said, in a slightly thorny voice, “I’m not being ‘sweet’ or whatever. When you and Sneezy took on the final task, we had a proper rescue team on standby, didn’t we? Crow’s a member of Oscillatory now, too, so isn’t it only natural for us to do the same for him?”

“I agree with youuuu,” Cypress said. “But wasn’t Crow himself the one who said there was no need for rescuuuue?”

“That’s because Crow leaps before thinking,” Oracle objected, sticking up for him. Or maybe not.

“Oracle, what you’re saying is…an insult to a warrior tackling a trial,” a quiet and cold voice said from the opposite side of the room.

Clank, clank.

Walking over to them, metallic footsteps echoing, was a knight-type avatar clad in armor of an elegant and masculine design. The armor was a silver that was almost white. If Silver Crow was a metallic silver, then the knight could perhaps have been called a clear silver.

Because the visor on the helmet with the long decorative horns was pulled down, Haruyuki couldn’t see the face mask. But from the large kite shield resting on the knight’s back and the longsword with a cross hilt hanging from his left hip, Haruyuki knew that this knight was the first of the Seven Dwarves, Bashful—Platinum Cavalier.

He stared intently at Cavalier, a user of the Femto style of swordsmanship, according to Centaurea Sentry. He’d had the chance to see him up close on the balcony at Heimwert Castle at Tokyo Grand Castle, but he’d been desperately trying to calm himself down then. He very much had not had the brain space to observe Cavalier coolly.

He’d fought any number of sword-bearing Burst Linkers since his first days in the Accelerated World as a level one, but he’d only experienced the profoundness of the sword arts after he acquired the sword-shaped Enhanced Armament Lucid Blade as his level-six bonus.

Currently, there were three Burst Linkers whom Haruyuki deemed the most powerful sword users in the Accelerated World. One was of course the Black King, swords fused with her four limbs, able to slice through all things in creation—World End, Black Lotus. The second was the Ain style user, wielding double blades of fused hyper-diamond and graphene that unified defense and offense, Anomaly Graphite Edge. And the third was his own teacher, Omega style user, Ruthless, Asura, Omega Weapon, aka Centaurea Sentry.

Naturally, there were plenty of others proficient with a sword. The Red Legion’s Lavender Downer, for example—nicknamed Tranquil, who had joined them on the Tezcatlipoca mission—was a user of a stage-three Incarnate technique; and Graphite Edge’s child and sole student, Trilead Tetroxide, was also a swordmaster of the orthodox school, freely wielding the Infinity, one of the Seven Arcs. The Blue Legion’s Dualis, aka Cobalt Blade, and Manganese Blade were masterful fencers and powerful warriors, and there was no questioning the strength of their master, the Blue King, “Vanquish” Blue Knight.

The reason Haruyuki didn’t count among his top swordmasters the Blue King, who held the Arc Impulse and who had in fact subjugated Centaurea Sentry after she had become the third Chrome Disaster, was simply because he had not experienced that strength firsthand. But there was no doubt that the Blue King was a top-class sword user, widely recognized for having established his own unique sword school, Infinite style. By a similar logic, Platinum Cavalier with his so-called Femto style would have been a swordmaster on par with Sentry, Graph, and Knight.

However.

Now that Haruyuki was getting a good look at him up close for the first time, Cavalier had an almost shockingly soft air to him. Haruyuki didn’t have the ability to expand his visual field the way Scarlet Rain did, but even still, he could, to a certain degree, pick up what she called information pressure—Cavalier’s aura. But the other Burst Linker was not radiating the pressure that Haruyuki could clearly sense from the Seven Kings of Pure Color, of course, or even from the members of the executive of each Legion. This, despite the fact that both Behemoth and Milady standing nearby exuded a powerful aura, as did Reaper and Oracle, while none of them appeared to be in direct battle mode.

When he thought about it, the only time he had personally witnessed Cavalier’s strength was when the knight had enlarged his kite shield to protect the White King from the explosion of Tezcatlipoca’s Miccailhuitontli. Maybe Cavalier’s main weapon wasn’t the longsword on his waist but the shield on his back. Maybe he was actually a defensive-type avatar like the Green King. Haruyuki’s imagination ran wild for an instant.

Standing smack in the middle of the party, Cavalier glanced at Haruyuki. “By cutting off any path of retreat himself,” he said, “Crow showed his pride and determination as a warrior…In which case, we, too…should respect his will.”

No, no, that was simple desperation, is all!

Unable to actually say this, Haruyuki froze in place, and then heard a voice that was either offering him a life raft or striking a follow-up blow, he didn’t know which.

“None of that matters. There’s no problem as long as Crow wins.”

Clink, clink.

Stepping forward with a distinctive footfall was a woman—no, a girl—avatar clad in dress-style armor with a snow crystal motif. Her limbs and torso were even more slender than those of Rose Milady, and she was nearly twenty centimeters shorter. Her armor was an almost transparent pale blue.

Although adorable as a doll of ice, she was a high ranker with unfathomable power who had annihilated fourteen elite members of Nega Nebulus in the Territories with a single Incarnate attack and frozen Haruyuki so completely that he couldn’t even breathe on the Highest Level. Even if she had paid their taxi fare and treated them to cheesecake, she was someone he definitely needed to be on guard against.

“I’ve got plans after this, so let’s get to it already,” she said. These words were directed at Cavalier.

Even though he was higher up in the executive order than she was, Cavalier nodded without any sign of irritation at being bossed around, and looked at Haruyuki. “Come along, Crow…We’ll move to the trial location for the final task.”

They passed through hallways and went down stairs with the somehow living gills and other features characteristic of a Purgatory stage to reach the first floor and step out of the school through the back door on the opposite side, rather than through the main entrance that faced the courtyard.

The woods that had been lush and green in the real world had transformed into a clump of dead trees made of metal. The party wove through this grove toward the south and cut across a large space that was likely the EG sports ground.

As he followed Cavalier, Haruyuki quietly asked Tsubomi about the sudden concern that popped into his head. “Um, Koshi—I mean, Milady—doesn’t Tezcatlipoca come and attack if you fight Enemies on the Mean Level?”

“Apparently, yes,” she said. “But you would know more about that than me.”

“No, I don’t hunt Enemies at all,” he replied, glancing up at the sky in the direction of the city center.

Three days earlier, in the middle of the night on July 24, the White King had accepted his petition and stopped the Deity of Demise, Tezcatlipoca, which had been about to massacre Takumu and the rest of his friends. But he hadn’t had even an inkling of how she planned to do this.

Immediately after returning from the Highest Level to the Mean Level of the Unlimited Neutral Field, the White King had taken the diadem, which was one of the two Luminary parts, extended countless spikes from it, and plunged those deep into her own brain—assuming there was a brain in the head of the avatar body. Then she had held the scepter—the controller—in a backhanded grip and stabbed this into her own heart.

Being injured in a duel avatar’s most critical points should have caused her health gauge drop to near-death. And Haruyuki couldn’t understand why the act of self-harm was even necessary to begin with, but at any rate, this act stopped the movement of the giant Tezcatlipoca.

Haruyuki’s wings had already been completely destroyed in Tezcatlipoca’s Blast Wave, so he couldn’t go to his friends’ rescue. But Graphite Edge and Cyan Pile were still just barely able to move, and they fled the battlefield carrying the grievously injured Centaurea Sentry, Trilead Tetroxide, Lavender Downer, and the Archangel Metatron.

Meanwhile, he took the injured White King in his arms, raced down the stairs of Heimwert Castle, and leapt into the portal in the great hall on the first floor to burst out. In doing so, he achieved his initial objective of escaping from Tokyo Grand Castle, but with the Luminary crowns destroyed, Tezcatlipoca was released from the White King’s control and returned to its true form as the god of the end.

That massive deity had been transformed into the worst catastrophe in the history of the Accelerated World, and now prowled the twenty-three wards of Tokyo in the Unlimited Neutral Field, mercilessly killing any Burst Linkers who happened into range of its sensors.

The giant’s basic detection range was a circle about two kilometers across, and as long as you stayed outside that range, the possibility of an attack was low. The issue, however, was that when a Burst Linker attacked an Enemy, Tezcatlipoca could detect this even from far away and would immediately make a beeline for the site of the attack.

According to one rumor, a party that went Enemy hunting in Kinuta Park in Setagaya Ward on the far west side of the twenty-three wards, after confirming that Tezcatlipoca was in Minamikoiwa in Edo Ward on the very eastern side of the city, was attacked from the sky a mere ten minutes later and wiped out by the Blast Wave. If that were true, it meant that Tezcatlipoca’s flight speed could reach up to 150 kilometers an hour.

Naturally, the size of the party was also a factor, but even a Wild-class Enemy couldn’t be defeated in a mere ten minutes, much less a Beast-class. The Green Legion had devoted themselves to experimenting with this and discovered that the god wouldn’t notice an attack on an Enemy over a hundred kilometers away. But it wasn’t practical to head out to Gunma or Yamanashi for every hunt.

In short, all of this meant that for the majority of Tokyo Burst Linkers, Enemy hunting was for all intents and purposes off-limits. It was, in the end, only natural that the anger and frustration of midsize Legion members like Zelkova Verger be turned toward Silver Crow, who had released Tezcatlipoca from Inti and then immediately transferred to the White Legion.

“Well, I guess Cavalier’s planning to take care of that somehow,” Tsubomi said, and Haruyuki’s eye lenses pulled back from the yellow sky to focus on the duel avatar walking alongside him.

“Somehow?” he asked. “What is he going to do?”

“I have no idea,” she replied. “But if he says he forgot about Tezca after we get to the test site, you go ahead and punch him.”

“I could never,” Haruyuki groaned, feeling pressed, before turning his eyes toward the back of the knight walking at the head of the line.

He felt like he’d managed to make friends with Rose Milady/Tsubomi Koshika, and he might be able to do the same with Cypress Reaper/Airi Sagisu and Glacier Behemoth/Rioh Koshimizu if given the chance. He might even be able to make it happen with Snow Fairy/Nanako Juholt one of these days. He could almost picture this possible future.

But when it came to Platinum Cavalier/Tomochika Kyobu, he felt like he was completely at sea. He hadn’t come across someone from whom he felt this kind of remove, even after meeting in the real, since Dusk Taker/Seiji Nomi.

That said, however, he couldn’t exactly go building walls. To keep the vow he’d sworn to the White King from being a lie, he had to accept that he was a member of the White Legion. This was the sole path open to him now to continue doing what he had to do as a Burst Linker.

Right, Metatron? Haruyuki murmured inwardly as he looked over his shoulder at the sky once more.

He couldn’t see it, since the buildings of the Purgatory stage were in the way, but the old Tokyo Tower stood a mere two and a half kilometers from where he was now. He sent the gentle thought “get well soon” to the Archangel Metatron, where she was recovering at Fufuan at the top of that tower.

Cavalier cut across the grounds to the southeast, nimbly leapt over the tall wall topped with sharp thorns without any run-up, and exited the EG campus.

Fairy, Reaper, and then even the massive Behemoth also jumped easily over the wall. It was, at first glance, an unremarkable act, but precisely because of that, the fact that these were true masters came through loud and clear.

Milady and Oracle also showed off jumps that made it seem like they were weightless, and left alone on the inside of the wall, Haruyuki considered for a moment faking it with his wings. But his special attack gauge wasn’t charged, and there would be no point in putting on airs here. He did a proper run-up and then jumped with the intention of going higher than usual so that he didn’t catch his toes on the thorns.

He made it over the two-meter-high wall and landed in an area with small-scale buildings packed together. He assumed this was an upscale residential area in the real world, but the organically twisted town of the Purgatory stage was like being inside a nightmare.

Cavalier looked back for only a moment to check that everyone was with him before choosing a road stretching out to the south and starting down it. As Haruyuki trotted after him, the road butted up against another wall in a mere five or six meters, and he could glimpse a building beyond it as large as the EG school buildings.

They jumped once more at the end of the road to clear the wall, and the building that appeared before them was somewhat palatial. Carving out the shape of a C toward the west, the palace had four floors in the annex and six in the main wing. From where the Burst Linkers stood, they couldn’t see through to the courtyard.

Cavalier strode determinedly toward the annex and went inside through an opening that appeared to be the back door. Haruyuki chased after him to find a hall there, and the entire party climbed the spiral staircase.

Alongside Milady, Haruyuki asked in the quietest voice he could manage, “What is this building in the real world? It doesn’t feel like it’s a school.”

“Minato City Local History Museum,” she told him. “It was built about a hundred and ten years ago, I guess.”

“Whoa. But it’s still newer than the EG chapel, huh?” He was impressed for a moment, before realizing the question he should have asked. “So…why this building?”

“You’ll find out soon enough,” Tsubomi replied, and he heard a loud creaking from above.

When he looked up, he saw a yellow-green light pouring in through the door Cavalier had pushed open. He followed the party through the door to what turned out to be the roof.

Cavalier walked over to the railing facing the courtyard and said, without looking back, “Silver Crow…That is your opponent.”

Haruyuki rushed over to the railing and peered down.

There was a rectangular pond in the courtyard enclosed by the C-shaped building. The water shone like it was actually mercury, and Haruyuki couldn’t see beyond the surface. Or so he thought.

But then the silver water surged up, and a massive creature appeared from below.

If he were to describe it, he’d maybe say a whale with four legs. The streamlined body was six meters long, with two of those meters being the head. The legs were solid and sturdy, and there were fins at the tip of the tail. If the head had been a little narrower and the tail more pointed, it would have looked not like a whale but rather an alligator.

As Cavalier stared down at the whale with legs swimming tranquilly around the twenty-meter-long pond, he said, “That is…the Beast-class Enemy, Crococetus. Since it is affiliated with nearly every stage and always appears in this pond, it is the subjugation target for our final task…”

“Crococetus,” Haruyuki parroted. He had never heard the name before, and he’d definitely never seen this Enemy. So, first encounter, then.

Fortunately, Crococetus was an animal-type Enemy. The possibility of it coming at him with some annoying special attack was low compared with human- or monster-type Enemies. And it was very obviously not a flying type, so if push came to shove, he could flee to the sky. Naturally, he wasn’t taking this Beast-class Enemy lightly, but if two or three Legion members outside of the Seven Dwarves had defeated it solo, then it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility for him to do the same.

“So if I can defeat that,” he said, “you’ll also accept my Legion membership, right, Cavalier?”

“A knight…does not go back on his word,” Platinum Cavalier recited emotionlessly, and Haruyuki glanced at him.

“Understood.” He nodded. “Okay, then—”

“Hang on a sec!” Snow Fairy interrupted. “Bashful, what are you going to do about Tezcatlipoca? If Crow attacks that Enemy, it’ll come flying straight for us in a couple minutes, yeah?”

“No need for concern,” Cavalier replied, as he removed the kite shield mounted on his back with his left hand and turned it toward the courtyard. “Ignorable Zone.”

Haruyuki wondered when Cavalier had found the time to charge up his special attack gauge while bullets of silver light shot out from the shield and were sucked into the ground in front of the pond. A razor-thin dome of light stretched out from where they landed to neatly enclose a space a hundred meters across, including the courtyard and part of the palace.

Haruyuki felt nothing when the light touched his avatar, and Crococetus on the ground also did not react to it. But he could no longer see anything outside the dome, nor could he hear the wind that had only a second before been whistling through his ears.

“This light membrane blocks all detection abilities of both Burst Linkers and Enemies,” Cavalier said. “There’s no need to worry about intrusions when fighting beneath it…”

“Whaaat?” Cypress Reaper cried. “I’ve never seen this technique befoooore!”

Rose Milady nodded. “Me neither. Playing things close to the chest, as always, hmm?”

“I could say…the same about you,” Cavalier replied.

“And this’ll cut the Incarnate technique scent that tickles Enemy noses?” Milady pushed the point home.

“I believe I said…all detection abilities…,” Cavalier retorted as he lowered the shield and turned to Haruyuki. “Zone’s effect time is half an hour…You have that long to defeat the Enemy or you fail the trial.”

Haruyuki nodded firmly. “Got it.”

“If you keep your head and fight, you can beat it,” Orchid Oracle told him.

Haruyuki bowed neatly before using the railing as a stepping stone to leap down into the courtyard.