Accel World - Volume 26 - Chapter 8

8

Haruyuki couldn’t open his eyes right away, even after the sounds, smells, and gravity of the real world returned. But he felt like nothing had been done to his real body while he was accelerating. He took a deep breath before slowly lifting his eyelids.

Across from him, Rioh Koshimizu and Airi Sagisu were already waking up, and there were signs of movement from where Tsubomi and the others sat to the right. They appeared to have all burst out without incident after leading Tezcatlipoca away. The real issue, however, was…

Haruyuki ever-so-timidly shifted his gaze toward Tomochika Kyobu—Platinum Cavalier—and found that he was still leaning back in his chair, head hanging. He likely hadn’t yet returned from the Unlimited Neutral Field. But nearly three hours had passed in inside time.

And then Tomochika’s long eyelashes fluttered and shuddered upward just a hint. The exposed gray eyes shone with a faint, smoky light, but Haruyuki couldn’t read any emotion in them. But he knew that Tomochika was actually human with human feeling. When he’d remarked on Haruyuki seeing the void in the place where his left arm had been, his voice had contained very definite emotion.

Tomochika might have been the first of the Seven Dwarves, the student council president at Shirakabanomori Academy, and beautiful enough to have been a model, but Haruyuki was still going to have to speak up against him.

He opened his mouth to ask why Tomochika would conspire with Ivory Tower and go so far as to lie to Nanako and the others in order to lay a trap for him. “Uh. Um. Kyobu?”

But that was as far as he managed to get.

Tomochika abruptly leapt up out of his chair. The mesh chair was thrust backward to slam into the wall with a crash.

“Wh-what’s the matter, Kyobu?” Rioh called out in surprise.

But Tomochika ignored him completely, cut across the room on quick feet, and disappeared behind the partition without so much as a glance at Haruyuki. The door flew open and swung shut, and then the room was quiet once again.

“Whaaat?” Airi’s lazy drawl broke the silence. “What’s wrong with Chikariiiin?”

“Right when we started to lead Tezcatlipoca away, he said something about how this was all his fault because his whatever zone didn’t work, so he went back to the museum,” Megumi said, and turned to Haruyuki beside her. “Did something happen, Arita?”

“Um,” he stammered.

A whole lot more than “something” had happened, but he hesitated to tell the story. Explaining things now, when Tomochika himself was not present, felt sort of like snitching. But the other Burst Linker had renounced his chance to tell his side of the story and left the room of his own free will.

So Haruyuki set aside his reluctance and relayed in detail everything that had happened in the courtyard of the local history museum, excluding his conversations on the Highest Level. He told them how Platinum Cavalier had returned and cut off Crococetus’s front leg and his arm with an invisible, super-fast slicing attack. How he had used the secrets of Omega style to somehow create an opening and then tried to escape with his flight ability, but had been shot down with a long-distance attack that copied his own Incarnate technique, Laser Lance. How he’d just barely managed to repel the killing blow with his Incarnate technique Laser Shell and taken off Cavalier’s left arm in a counterstrike. How the Archangel Metatron had appeared and forced Cavalier to retreat with her laser attack. And how Ivory Tower had watched the whole thing from start to finish.

Five minutes later, once he’d finished telling them the whole story, Haruyuki wet his throat with the iced tea remaining in his glass.

Airi stood up without a word, went to the kitchen to get the jug, and refilled his glass. She topped up her own as well and drank it all down in one go before groaning at length, still standing up. “Aaaaaah, Chikarin, you never grow uuuuup. The stuff he did is obviously out, but sulking and running away is even more oooouuut.” She sat back down, slowly shaking her head from side to side.

“Honestly,” Nanako said from the end of the table, in the same exasperated tone. “I thought something was up when Bashful said he was going back to Crow. It was so unlike him. We should’ve made Sneezy go, too.”

“But if Rioh had gone with him, we couldn’t have crossed the ocean. In fact, if we’d been down even one Linker, we wouldn’t have been able to make a clean getaway from Tezcatlipoca,” Tsubomi pointed out, coldly. Most likely, they had made a path by freezing the ocean surface with Glacier Behemoth’s abilities. And it seemed that Milady, Oracle, Fairy, and Reaper had also made use of their own abilities to cut open a path of retreat.

I’m glad they all made it okay, Haruyuki thought, and clenched his hands into fists underneath the table. One or all of the three Burst Linkers besides Megumi and Tsubomi might have known what Tomochika was up to. In which case, the most likely candidate was actually Rioh Koshimizu, who was on the same student council as he was.

It wasn’t as though he could have read Haruyuki’s mind, but this very Rioh suddenly stood up, pressed his hands to the table, and bowed his shaved head deeply. “Arita. I must beg your pardon. On behalf of Kyobu, please accept my heartfelt apology.”

“O-oh, I mean…” Haruyuki pushed his hands out in front of him awkwardly, forgetting the fact that he had been doubting Rioh only a half-second earlier. “You don’t have to apologize, Koshimizu. I mean, there was no actual harm done, so…”

“No, no. A mere apology is in fact not nearly enough. I have known Kyobu the longest of us all, so the fact that I did not glean his plan is an unforgivable error,” Rioh stated, and bowed so low that his forehead was very nearly touching the table.

At a loss for what he should do, Haruyuki looked at Megumi and Airi, but they showed no signs of tossing him a lifeline. “Um. So then, I’d like it if you could tell me one thing?”

Rioh finally raised his head and looked at Haruyuki curiously.

He met the other boy’s steady eyes behind his glasses and asked the all-important question. “Why do you think Cavalier would do something like that?”

“Well, that is—you see…,” Rioh stammered.

Nanako answered the question instead. “For Bashful—for Tomochika—the King is everything.”

“Everything?” Haruyuki parroted, unable to immediately grasp the meaning of this.

He could understand if she meant it in the sense that he sacrificed everything to his Legion Master as a Burst Linker. But the White King herself had approved Haruyuki’s transfer to Oscillatory Universe. Cavalier’s actions that day very clearly went against the will of his King.

Nanako continued, quiet and yet scathing. “The only driver for Tomochika’s behavior is how he can serve the King, how useful he can be to her. So I’m sure he believes he has to eliminate you for her sake.”

Not knowing how to respond to this, Haruyuki looked at the seat where Tomochika had been sitting, and then glanced at the seat that had been empty the entire time, at the farthest end of the table.

He abruptly remembered that there had been no avatar body inside of Cavalier’s armor when he cut into it. For some reason, he had hesitated to tell the group this. What if it wasn’t the figure of a gallant knight, but rather the empty armor itself that was the symbol of Tomochika Kyobu’s mental scars? If that was the case, then did that mean that he was a metal color with the purest manifestation of the Mental-Scar Shell theory espoused by Argon Array?

Despite the fact that they were talking about the person who had set a trap and tried to kill him, Haruyuki felt a curious resistance to accepting Nanako’s theory wholesale, and he earnestly searched for the words he needed.

“But,” he said, slowly, “Cavalier is the student council president at Shirakabanomori Academy, right? That’s a pretty tough job. Wouldn’t he have run for election because he wanted to make his school better?”

“Tomochika became council president of the Shirakaba junior high division because the King told him to.” Nanako cut his theory in half with a single stroke and pushed back her flowing blond hair as she blinked sapphire eyes dubiously. “Crow, why are you trying to take Tomochika’s side here? He lied to you, betrayed you, and almost killed you.”

“No, I mean, I’m not taking his side or anything like that.” Haruyuki averted his eyes from Nanako’s sharp, icy gaze. He couldn’t really understand his own feelings himself.

Rioh turned the corners of his mouth up in a pained smile. “Thank you, Arita.”

“S-sorry?” Haruyuki blinked a few times in surprise. “What for?”

“A number of things,” Rioh said, and leaned across the table, his large right hand extended.

Haruyuki gaped for a moment and then hurriedly stood up. He nervously extended his own hand to clasp Rioh’s, which was surprisingly warm. He suddenly felt ashamed of having suspected the larger boy of conspiring with Platinum Cavalier. Naturally, he couldn’t eliminate the possibility entirely, but at the very least, Rioh’s concern about Tomochika felt like the real thing.

After shaking hands for a full three seconds, Rioh finally released his hand and urged Haruyuki to sit, before sitting down himself and getting a serious look on his face.

“Arita,” he said solemnly, “this incident today was due to my own and the Seven Dwarves’ carelessness. According to our Legion rules, you have the right to request a boon that will balance the uneven scales.”

“Sc-scales?” Haruyuki automatically furrowed his brow, but then realized what Rioh wasn’t saying. They probably had a rule that said if someone incurred some disadvantage because of someone else in the Legion, there had to be compensation paid between the persons involved. Or something like that.

Still, he couldn’t immediately decide how great the damage here was. Cavalier had indeed wronged him. The scales would probably be balanced if he directly dueled with Rioh as a proxy for Tomochika, cut off one of his arms, broke his horns, and pierced his chest. But not only would that not make Haruyuki feel better, he would have been very unhappy about doing it.

“Um, you did apologize and everything, so—?” he started, and Nanako cut him off.

“Don’t hold back,” she urged him. “Burst Points, Enhanced Armament, whatever you want. Although it will have to be within the scope of what I’m authorized to give.”

“Um. It’s great of you to say that, but…” Even as he was saying these words out loud, his mind started racing wildly. Maybe like fifty points? Wait. Would they get mad if I said a hundred?

And then he had a flash of inspiration and sat up straighter as he made up his mind.

“Um. Juholt?” he said.

“Nanako’s fine.”

“Uh. Okay, then Nanako. Can I cede that right to someone else?”

“Well, sure.” Nanako shrugged.

He turned his gaze to the two people sitting to his left and declared, “Then I cede that right to Koshika and Wakamiya.”

“Huh?” Tsubomi looked extremely suspicious.

Koshika, please ask to leave Oscillatory Universe! He earnestly sent this thought at her.

Perhaps his telepathic message was received; Tsubomi blinked as if she’d understood something, and then made eye contact with Megumi. In the taxi, he’d wondered why Fairy and the others had called Megumi here, even though they knew she was the one who betrayed Oscillatory Universe in the Territories and changed the field back. Perhaps there was unfinished business yet today.

Megumi brought her mouth to Tsubomi’s ear and whispered something. The analogue secret chat was over soon enough, and Megumi cleared her throat before speaking, her voice serious. “Nanako, our request is…”