Accel World - Volume 26 - Chapter 7

7

“Uhhh…um, hey, Metatron!” Haruyuki moaned, the second his senses stabilized. “If you’re gonna shift, it’d help if you said so beforehand!”

“This isn’t your first or second time coming here. Accustom yourself to it.” The exasperated Archangel was depicted in minuscule, colorless points of light, as was Haruyuki.

The half-destroyed Minato City Local History Museum building, the ground cracked in the fierce fighting, and the yellowish-green sky were all gone; only a deep darkness stretched out endlessly around them. But when he turned his gaze downward, he found an ocean of stars looking very much like the Milky Way. This was the Highest Level, an even higher dimension of space than the Unlimited Neutral Field, aka the Mean Level.

Only their minds had moved to this plane; their avatars remained behind in the courtyard of the museum. But since time was even more accelerated here than on the Mean Level, there was no danger to their defenseless bodies. On the Highest Level, time and similarly distance had no meaning. You could see everything you wanted to see, and go anywhere you wanted to go. Except for Area Zero Zero, aka the Castle, that was.

“Right. From here…,” Haruyuki murmured, finally realizing what Metatron was up to, and he looked down at the galaxy spreading out at his feet.

The myriad of white stars indicated the locations of the social cameras that existed in the real world. In this portrait of central Tokyo produced by those cameras, he could also see here and there stars of various colors. These were either Enemies or Burst Linkers on the Mean Level, but there were currently close to zero parties hunting. Which meant that if he could find a group of five Burst Linkers in one place, there was a very good chance that it was Rose Milady and the Oscillatory team. He could have also sought out Platinum Cavalier and Black Vise on the run, but he wouldn’t have been able to do anything about them from here even if he did find them.

Using the gaping empty space in the center of the ocean of light—the Castle—as a signpost, he shifted his gaze toward the south. The remarkably tall tower of light was Toranomon Hills, south of that were Shiba Park and the old Tokyo Tower, and even farther down was Shibaura—

“Ah!”

A shiver of cold raced through him, despite the fact that he had supposedly lost corporeal form. On the west side of the reclaimed land containing Shibaura-futo, a concentrated darkness swirled and twisted like a black hole in the place where several waterways came together. The dark star appeared to be on the verge of swallowing up everything around it. This was most certainly the Deity of Demise, Tezcatlipoca.

The sight of it threatened to suck in not only his gaze but even his consciousness, and Haruyuki squeezed his eyes shut.

Abruptly, a hazy heat enveloped his right hand. He looked over and saw Metatron standing next to him, holding his hand. There was supposedly no “collision detection” on the Highest Level, and yet the certain sensation of touch reached his mind.

“Th-thanks,” he said in a small voice.

The Archangel turned her face away. “Observing that on your own carries danger for an inexperienced tiny warrior such as yourself. At any rate, I found them,” she announced curtly, and pointed to the right of Tezcatlipoca with her free hand.

He squinted in that direction and saw five stars floating above the sea about five hundred meters from Shibaura-futo. Judging from the colors, that had to have been the Oscillatory group. He didn’t exactly understand how they could be proceeding across the surface of the water, since even in the Purgatory stage, the ocean was the ocean. But it appeared that they had mostly succeeded in the difficult mission of leading Tezcatlipoca away and staying alive at the same time. They were advancing in the direction of Toyosu Market, one of the most famous landmarks in Tokyo, so once they made it there, they would be able to leave through the portal.

Haruyuki let out a sigh of relief and, still holding Metatron’s hand, gazed at the inky black hole once again.

The center of the Chiyoda Ward and the Castle it housed was also shrouded in darkness, but the nature of it was entirely different. If the darkness of the Castle was a void where information was obstructed, then the darkness of Tezcatlipoca was a singularity of overwhelmingly concentrated energy. Even seen from the Highest Level, which was nothing more than a thought space, he would swear he felt the destructive intent of the malevolent Being radiating outward and becoming vibrations that shook his nonexistent body.

“The White King called Tezcatlipoca the god of the end. A devastator existing only to close the world,” he murmured automatically. When he continued, he consciously tried to put his complicated, tangled thoughts into words.

“Before, Graph was talking about how Brain Burst had two developers, right? Developer A, who created the Castle and sealed the last Arc, the Fluctuating Light, deep inside of it; and developer B, who created the rest of the world to attack the Castle and free TFL. The White King said the thing actually running Brain Burst is a control AI set here by developer B, and it was that AI that produced Tezcatlipoca.”

“AI.” Metatron’s voice was quiet. “That word refers to an intelligence created by people, yes?”

Haruyuki stopped breathing for a second. When he thought about it, he, Kuroyukihime, and his fellow Burst Linkers had likely never used the word “AI” in front of Metatron. Because they’d been reluctant to shove in front of her the idea that she had been created, when she had exactly the same intelligence and emotion as a human being.

“S-sorry,” he apologized reflexively. Metatron shook her head gently.

“Apologies are unnecessary,” she stated simply. “It is a fact that I am indeed such a presence. It’s simply that the definition of the word ‘person’ is somewhat ambiguous, and so it unsettles me.”

“Person?” He unconsciously tilted his head to one side. He was about to say that it meant a human being, but he was sure that wouldn’t be the answer she needed. He had the thought that he would ask Kuroyukihime about it later, and then held his breath for a moment, waited until the pain in his heart was gone, and said, “I think of you as a person just like me, Metatron.”

“Oh-ho! Do you then?” The Archangel sounded amused somehow and raised her hand again to point at the swirling black hole. “But my existence resembles far and away more closely that monster’s than that of you inhabitants of the Lowest Level. Because we are both Beings in the end. Do you think that Tezcatlipoca is a person?”

“Huh? Um…” When he was stuck for words, Metatron gave his hand a slight squeeze.

“That was a mean-spirited question,” she said. “For approximately seven years of your time, I have observed and analyzed that Being, but I’ve been unable to perceive any consciousness or anything resembling intellect. Tezcatlipoca walks an irregular path within a fixed radius centered on the Castle, and when it detects little warriors, it moves toward them and attacks. It takes absolutely no other action, and it does not respond to contact from me. I sense more intelligence from what you call the Lesser-class Beings.”

“Yeah.” Haruyuki nodded, remembering the Lesser-class Enemy Coolu that was the friend of Chocolat Puppeter and the other Petit Paquet girls. Now that he was thinking about it, he hadn’t talked with them or Rui Odagiri, either. He swallowed this thought and said, “But I heard Tezcatlipoca detects Burst Linkers from way farther away when they attack a Being than when they’re not doing anything, and then it comes charging right in. That’s actually what happened earlier. Doesn’t that mean it’s maybe trying to protect the Beings of this world?”

“No.” The Archangel flatly rejected Haruyuki’s hypothesis.

“Wh-why not?”

“Because when Tezcatlipoca attacks little warriors, it does not shrink from involving in the fight any Beings nearby. Did you forget that it attacked me without any hesitation whatsoever in the mission to rescue you?”

“Oh. No, no, I didn’t forget.” He shook his head vigorously from side to side and hurried to add, “Um, I didn’t actually say this before, but thanks a lot for that. Your Meteor Slash was super amazing.”

“Meteor Slash?” She frowned. “What is that?”

“Oh! Um, that thing where you bring your sword down while you’re in free fall; it was like a meteor, so…” He trailed off weakly.

“Hmm. Then I shall give that technique that name.” Perhaps it was just his imagination, but Metatron didn’t seem displeased as she said this, before letting out a faint sigh. “But your thanks is not warranted. I failed in your rescue in the end.”

“Uh-uh, that’s not true. You saved me.” Haruyuki swiveled around, reached out his other hand, and clasped Metatron’s free hand. “You said you’d transfer to Oscillatory Universe with me. And I was thinking there when you mentioned how the White King had you analyzing Tezcatlipoca, maybe the reason she accepted my request and saved Takumu and them was because she actually wanted you.”

“I had not considered that.” Metatron blinked, bewildered for a moment, but soon she shook her head. “No, that’s unlikely. Because at that time, White Cosmos could have easily—”

Haruyuki didn’t get to hear the rest of her thought because a sharp voice came flying at them suddenly from the right.

“Hark, Metatron! How long shall thou make us wait?!”

“Heeah?!” Haruyuki let go of Metatron’s hand and turned his body ninety degrees once more.

Standing a mere two meters away—although distance did not exist on the Highest Level, so this was just Haruyuki’s personal perception of the situation—was a woman clad in dress reminiscent of ancient times, her straight hair tied up in loops on either side of her head. A crown with rays like the sun sat upon her head, and the fan in her right hand hid her mouth.

She was not a hostile presence, but she was also someone he absolutely needed to take care around. This was a Being of the same highest rank as Metatron, master of the Tokyo Station Underground Labyrinth, aka Ama-no-iwato, one of the Four Saints, Amaterasu.

When Haruyuki froze in place, Metatron took a step forward. “Keep you waiting? I have no recollection of promising contact with you here.”

“What?” The Saint frowned slightly. “We sensed thy shift, so We assumed that thou wished to discuss the incident that occurred since last We met. But then thou didst speaketh so intimately with the boy that We thoughtfully stepped forward.”

“In that case, you were merely waiting of your own accord! And we were not speaking intimately!” Metatron argued, squeezing her hands into fists, and then took a few seconds to force herself to relax as she cleared her throat. “No, none of that matters. Amaterasu, what is this incident of which you speak?”

“A moment, please. First.” Amaterasu snapped her fan shut and turned the end of it toward Haruyuki. “Silver Crow. Have thou not forgotten something?” she asked, her low voice elegant and graceful.

Haruyuki blinked several times before crying out. “Ah! I—I didn’t forget. You’re talking about the thing where I bring cake to Ama-no-iwato, right?”

Tsubomi Koshika’s voice came back to life in his ears. You’d best fulfill that soon. If you skip out on your promise and put her in a bad mood, you’ll be in real trouble. Seriously.

Fearing that he’d maybe already put her in a bad mood, Haruyuki gesticulated wildly as he made his case. “Um. Uhhh. The truth is, I was planning to come visit you right after the Inti mission was over, but then Tezcatlipoca came out from inside of Inti, and a bunch of stuff happened after that, so.”

“Thou need not fret. We have also grasped the situation.” Amaterasu stepped in close and tapped his forehead with her fan as if to tell him to relax. Just like with Metatron’s forehead flick, he felt the slight snap of it, as if they had physical bodies. “We shall wait for a time. At some point, thou wilt most certainly offer Us a nagabitsu worth of cake. Naturally, they will all be different flavors.”

“R-right. Absolutely.” He had never seen a nagabitsu before, but he figured it was probably a container the size of a picnic basket. “So then what’s this incident you wanted to talk about?”

“That, obviously.” The leisurely extended fan indicated the inky black hole swirling in the distance below. Amaterasu brought her fan back to hide her mouth once more and snapped it open. “We cannot sleep from the noise such an enormous brute makes wandering the land morning and night. We feel that it is long past due to handle it somehow.”

“You say that as though it were simple,” Metatron interjected, sounding exasperated, as she put both hands on her hips and let out a deliberate sigh. “That giant has power that far surpasses that of the beasts that guard the Castle. Should you approach it lightly, you would be blown away with a single one of its breaths.”

“Well understood,” Amaterasu agreed readily. “We have no desire to approach it directly, but We also cannot leave it be. We have more than scant reason to assume that should any little warriors enter our Ama-no-iwato or thine Contrary Cathedral, Tezcatlipoca would plunge through the earth itself to attack them.”

“Ah!” Haruyuki inhaled sharply, not having considered this possibility before.

Now that she mentioned it, there was no reason why Tezcatlipoca wouldn’t react to Burst Linkers inside of a dungeon. In the Mean Level of the Unlimited Neutral Field, the ground was as a general rule indestructible, no matter what the stage attribute, but that sort of everyday logic wouldn’t apply to the god of the end.

“True,” he said, nodding to himself. “It’s possible the Legions that can’t earn points anymore by hunting Enemies above ground might think the dungeons are still safe. But even supposing Tezcatlipoca destroyed your dungeons, wouldn’t they go back to normal when the Change came?”

This was an obvious question for Haruyuki, but Metatron raised a hand and Amaterasu her fan, and they hit him with a forehead flick and fan chop at the same time.

“Ow!!” he yelped.

“You bring this upon yourself for speaking such foolishness,” Metatron sniffed. “Do you think we are such cowards as to happily accept the destruction of our castles simply because they will be rebuilt at some point?”

“Nuh-uh.” Haruyuki shook his head back and forth at top speed and then turned toward Amaterasu. “So then do you have a plan of some kind?”

“That is what We came to discuss,” she replied. “We will tell thee now, however; We are not the only one who finds the colossus extremely tedious.”

“Huh? What do you—?” Haruyuki started to ask when he was interrupted by a bell ringing in the infinite darkness.

Ting! Ting!

He couldn’t identify the source, because it sounded like it was echoing, despite the fact that there were no walls or any surfaces to echo off of. He looked both left and right, and then quickly looked back.

He saw someone walking toward them slowly on invisible ground and instinctively braced himself, thinking it was another Burst Linker. But the figure drawn in minuscule points of light looked to be not a duel avatar, but rather a woman of the same origins as Metatron and Amaterasu.

Her outfit resembled a kimono, with the same broad collar overlapping across the chest and lengthy sleeves, but the square apron stretching out from the belt sash differed from a Japanese-style furisode kimono. Thin pleats made neat lines on the skirt that reached her ankles, and she was wearing a crown somewhat more subdued than Amaterasu’s sun adornment. The source of the sound that came with her every step was the small bells that dangled on either side of the crown.

Is this maybe another of the top-ranking Beings? It can’t actually be one of the other Four Saints? Haruyuki wondered and started to retreat backward with a sliding step, but Metatron pushed him back into place.

“There is no need to shrink back, servant,” she told him. “Compared with Amaterasu, she has a rather gentle nature.”

“You say ‘rather,’ which is totally not reassuring at all,” he protested quietly, as he stubbornly tried to retreat again.

“You are Silver Crow?” the third Being said, as she stopped in front of him, bells ringing.

Her voice was a clear soprano, different from both Metatron’s crisp mezzo-soprano and Amaterasu’s refined alto. Her eyes were of course closed, but the small face, with its faintly childish air, was so cute that he unconsciously stared.

Maybe she really isn’t scary. Clutching this ray of hope, Haruyuki stood up straight and introduced himself. “Y-yes. I’m Silver Crow. And, um…You must be…?”

“Bari,” she said crisply.

“B-Bari…?”

“Lady Bari.”

“Lady…Bari,” he repeated.

“Or Your Highness,” she added. “Or Royal Abandoned Princess.”

“A-abandoned…?”

See? I knew she wasn’t going to be as straightforward as all that, he said to himself.

“That’s enough for introductions,” Amaterasu said, annoyed. “Bari, how does that look to thy Buddha eyes?”

“It is no Being,” Bari asserted immediately.

“What say thee?” Amaterasu demanded. At the same time, Metatron stared at the princess dubiously and said, “What do you mean?”

Haruyuki also blinked in surprise.

The “that” Amaterasu spoke of was of course Tezcatlipoca. So what did “It is no Being” mean in relation to the Enemy? “Being” was the same thing as “Enemy,” and there wasn’t a creature that was more suited to the title of Enemy than Tezcatlipoca, in terms of both the game and as a hostile presence.

Haruyuki glanced down at the sea of light below him and the giant dark star swirling in one corner of it. “Um, Bari—I mean, Lady Bari. Does that mean that Tezcatlipoca doesn’t have a light cube?”

“So close,” replied the Abandoned Princess as she flipped her skirt to one side lightly and sat down in midair, where there was nothing.

Metatron to his left and Amaterasu to his right followed suit, so Haruyuki started to sit, too. But then he had the sudden feeling that he would end up flat on his backside, and so he earnestly stayed on his feet.

Sitting directly in front of him, Bari said, a faintly exasperated look on her face, “Looking at Beings as a whole, those who have light cubes are in the small minority. The egg Inti did not have one, so it is no surprise at all that Tezcatlipoca, born of that egg, would also not have one.”

She spoke with just the hint of a lisp, and he got the nagging feeling he’d heard this somewhere before. And then he realized where: It was likely simple coincidence, but her smooth, slightly sweet speech reminded him of Snow Fairy.

He thought for a second about mentioning her name, but then reconsidered, given that now was not the time to go on tangents, and gave voice to a different question. “Um. How did you confirm you all had light cubes? It’s impossible to actually see the light cubes, right?”

“We haven’t confirmed. It’s simply a guess,” Bari replied evenly, and she shrugged adorably. “There is one large difference between the lower-ranked Beings that roam the field following a given algorithm, and Beings with castles like Metatron, Amaterasu, and myself. And that is whether or not we can use language to communicate. A loooong time ago, we discussed all kinds of theories as to why we could speak and proposed the hypothesis that it was because we had been given the same circuits for thinking as the little warriors. That hypothesis has yet to be proved, but it has also not been disproved.”

“M-makes sense.” Haruyuki nodded in agreement, before another question popped into his head. “Where is your castle anyway, Lady Bari?”

“The place that you call the National Stadium,” she told him.

“Huh.” He saw in his mind’s eye the stadium that looked like a massive spaceship, which had been rebuilt for the Olympics a couple decades earlier. “So there’s a dungeon there, too. I’ll have to come and—,” he started to say casually.

Amaterasu glared at him. Remembering his promise to bring a nagabitsu full of cakes to Ama-no-iwato, he hurriedly returned to the subject at hand.

“Uh, wait. We were talking about Tezcatlipoca. Um, if having a light cube isn’t the condition for existing as a Being, then…Lady Bari, why is Tezcatlipoca not a Being? It walks around and has a health gauge.”

“You surrender already?” A faint smile rose on her face, but Bari replied simply, without any pretension. “I found within it something that a Being would not have.”

“Wh-what?” he asked, baffled.

“A circuit connecting the Mean Level and the Lowest Level,” she said. “What you little warriors call a portal.”

“What?” Haruyuki’s jaw dropped beneath his goggles at this entirely unexpected response.

Perhaps Metatron and Amaterasu were also surprised; they maintained their silence without moving a muscle. Forced to bear the brunt of this conversation, Haruyuki took a moment to collect his thoughts before asking Bari, “A portal inside of Tezcatlipoca? But you’d get killed just getting close to it. No one can use a portal like that. Why on earth would the giant have a portal inside of it?”

“I cannot know that.” Bari’s response was extremely correct. If there really was a portal inside of Tezcatlipoca, the only ones who would know the reason for that were the giant’s creator, the Brain Burst manager AI, or—to go a level higher—Developer B. Haruyuki might have been able to find more information about the portal and its creator if he defeated Tezcatlipoca and went through this portal. But the reason this was an issue at all was because Haruyuki hadn’t been able to defeat the giant.

“I-I’m sorry,” he said. “So you mean that Tezcatlipoca’s true nature is not a Being but a portal?”

“If Inti’s true nature is to be the egg for Tezcatlipoca,” Bari replied, “then it’s reasonable to assume that Tezcatlipoca’s true nature is also inside of its own body.”

“True,” he agreed.

Metatron nodded her approval. “I cannot believe that your Buddha eyes would see wrongly, Bari. If there is a portal inside of Tezcatlipoca, then we should deem that to be directly connected with the destroyer’s reason for existing.”

“We suppose so.” Amaterasu also nodded, and leaned far back against her invisible seat. “But what is critical is how we can link this information to an attack strategy against it. Portals are without exception indestructible. Hearing that such a thing is inside of it, we’ve come to feel that any possibility of defeating the colossus is actually receding.”

“If that is the case, it is not my fault,” Bari said, seeming the slightest bit put out, and she stood slowly from her air chair. “I’ll keep watching it. If I find anything else, I shall inform you.”

“Yes. Please do that,” Metatron said.

Bari nodded, and then turned her closed eyes toward Haruyuki. “And Silver Crow.”

“Y-yes!” he half yelped.

“When you come to my castle, bring cake,” she demanded.

“R-right…” He bobbed his head up and down, and next to him, Metatron sighed.

“Your obligations only increase, servant.”

“We must tell thee, however, that our cake comes first,” Amaterasu made a point of saying, and Haruyuki agreed once more before adding inwardly, Once we take care of Tezcatlipoca.

After leaving the Highest Level, Haruyuki said good-bye to Metatron, who returned to Fufuan, and then moved to the third floor of the main wing of the Minato City Local History Museum.

In the center of the hall, which had so narrowly escaped destruction, an elliptical blue light shimmered like a mirage, just as Glacier Behemoth had said.

Thanks to Metatron, he now knew that Behemoth and the others were safe, making their way across the Shibaura Sea. Running along the water’s surface, it would take them less than three minutes to cover the kilometer to Toyosu Market. If he burst out right at that moment, the delay between their leaving the Accelerated World and his own departure would be around 0.2 seconds.

Even so, he slowly counted to one hundred in front of the portal before making up his mind and jumping into the swirling blue light.