Accel World - Volume 26 - Chapter 9

9

Five PM.

Haruyuki was standing alongside Tsubomi Koshika and Megumi Wakamiya on the sidewalk, about ten meters away from the main gates of Eternal Girls’ Academy. The sun was still very much high in the sky, and the temperature didn’t feel like it had dropped at all. There was also the fact that they’d only just come out of the air-conditioned student council office, so that even as he stood still, sweat was beading on his forehead.

After wiping this away with his handkerchief, Haruyuki spoke the words he’d been holding inside all this time. “Um. Wakamiya, that was your big chance. So why would you ask for something like that?!”

“It’s just, it’s hot out,” Megumi replied nonchalantly, and next to her, Tsubomi offered a hint of a shrug.

“I really appreciate the thought, Arita,” she said. “But getting them to let me and Orkki leave the Legion is too big of an ask. First of all, the only one who can make that decision is Cosmos. And Fairy herself said it had to be within her own scope of authority, y’know?”

“Okay, yeah, that’s true, but…” Haruyuki was forced to agree, and then he asked the question that had been bothering him this whole time. “Why was the White King not there anyway? I know I’m new to all of this here, but that was a pretty important meeting, wasn’t it? I mean, if Cavalier hadn’t done what he did, we’d be fighting in the Territories right about now.”

“Mmm. Yeah.” Tsubomi nodded her agreement.

Early that afternoon, before they dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field, Tomochika Kyobu had said he had two reasons for asking them to the meeting that day. One was the test of Haruyuki’s abilities. And the other reason, which Haruyuki did not get to hear directly from Cavalier himself, was that he was putting Haruyuki and Megumi on a team to attack Minato Area No. 3 in the Territories, set to start at four. In other words, if Nega Nebulus had dispatched a defense team, Haruyuki might have been at that very minute fighting his beloved comrades.

But Tomochika himself had ruined the test and the Territories. He hadn’t come back after he’d marched out of the room, and Rioh’s mood had also cratered after the incident in the Unlimited Neutral Field. So Nanako decided that there was no way they could charge into the Territories when they were in such disarray, and the mission to take back Minato Area No. 3 was postponed until the following week. But if Cosmos had taken part in the meeting, Tomochika wouldn’t have dared to try to kill Haruyuki, and there was a good chance that the Territories would have gone off as planned.

“True, to us, that seems like it should be higher up on her list of priorities,” Tsubomi said quietly, as she adjusted the brim of her white capelin hat. “But Cosmos is one of those people who just sort of throws on different outfits on a whim. She’s always popping up at the tiny, meaningless meetings and totally skipping out on the ones that are all hands on deck, super serious. I’m sure she doesn’t have any real reason for missing today.”

“Oh. So she’s just like that?” Haruyuki asked, as he recalled what the White King had said to him at Heimwert Castle.

That’s why I made her a Burst Linker on a whim myself.

If even the act of making her own sister into her child was nothing more than mere fancy, then he guessed that things like attending a meeting barely warranted her notice and she was probably very quick to forget them. In other words, she might have readily assented to Tsubomi and Megumi leaving the Legion, but it was equally likely that she would have used Judgment Blow to destroy both of them on the spot.

So then rather than stepping up in a front attack and directly asking for permission, maybe the best strategy for Megumi and Tsubomi was to simply leave the Legion with no announcement and somehow keep running until the end of the month of the White King’s Judgment Blow authority? Transferring to a solidly powerful midsize Legion and counting on them for a deterrent effect was also one way of handling it, but having actually faced the Seven Dwarves, Haruyuki was starting to think that this sort of superficially clever move wouldn’t work with them.

To be honest, they were a friendlier group than he’d imagined. Setting Platinum Cavalier aside, anyway. Even the Snow Fairy had not a bit of thorniness in her demeanor. In fact, just the opposite—she had treated them to cheesecake.

But that was exactly why they were so frightening. They had to have been aware of the possibility that Haruyuki had joined Oscillatory Universe under the pretense of obeying with a secret plan to turn on them, and yet they hadn’t questioned him or searched him. Because they were confident that whatever he threw at them, they could handle it.

“Um.” He sidled up to Megumi and asked, “So about up there?”

“Huh?” She turned to look at him.

“By the time you all made it to Tokyo Bay, you’d drawn Tezcatlipoca off nearly a kilometer, right? But that thing moves in straight lines and has a stride of fifty meters. Plus, it kicks buildings and stuff all over the place. So how’d you manage to get that kind of lead on it?”

“Ohh…Hey. Wait a second.” Twirling the parasol, Megumi looked at Haruyuki dubiously. “You were supposed to have been at the museum, Arita. How could you know the distance between us and Tezcatlipoca? Did you see us from the air?”

“Oh. Uh. Um,” he stammered. “Something like that.”

There was no need to hide what had happened on the Highest Level from Megumi and Tsubomi, but once he started to tell the story, they’d be there for a while. He decided he’d have another chance to tell them all about that, and Megumi looked more or less satisfied with this explanation for now.

“Well, the MVP was Nanako, you know?” she reported. “The four of us lured Tezcatlipoca out to the waterways, and Nanako, who’d gone around ahead of us, froze it and all the water around it with Brinicle.”

“O-oh, that makes sense then. That water’s over ten meters deep and all. Even the giant’s not going to be able to break free so easy as that if both of its legs are frozen in place.” Haruyuki was very much impressed, and he also felt like he could see a ray of light into the Tezcatlipoca attack strategy he’d despaired over.

If its movement could be checked in the Shibaura waterways, then maybe it could be lured to a place in Tokyo Bay where the water was nearly a hundred meters deep. Frozen from the neck down together with the surrounding water, the Enemy wouldn’t be able to move either hand, effectively putting its Toxcatl and Miccailhuitontli attacks out of commission. Then they might be able to carry out a concentrated attack on its head.

“Hey, Crow?” Tsubomi called to him from the other side of Megumi, and Haruyuki yanked his head back up.

“Y-yeah?”

“Don’t go thinking you can do anything about that thing,” she warned. “Even with the direct hit from Brinicle, Tezcatlipoca’s health gauge barely dropped at all. And while we were running away, it nearly wiped us all out with the Blast Wave once and the gravity wave twice.”

“Y-yeah.” His shoulders slumped dejectedly, and then he heard the sound of an expensive motor from the left side of the road. He turned and saw a large black car approaching with its signal light on.

Megumi and Tsubomi had used his hard-won right to ask Nanako to get a driverless taxi for them. But the car that stopped before them was not an SUV like the one they’d come in, but rather a wide and low sports car.

“H-huh?” Peering inside the door that opened automatically, Haruyuki blinked rapidly before looking back at Megumi. “Wakamiya, this is a two-seater, though?”

“It is.” She nodded agreeably.

“‘It is’?” he questioned. “But there are three of us.”

“Whatever. Just get in, Arita.” Megumi gave his back a push. “Me and Rosie are going shopping in Azabu.”

“O-oh.” The momentum of her push forced Haruyuki to climb into the navy seat of the sports car. When the door closed, he hurriedly opened the window and called, “Um, thank you for today! Please take care on your way home!”

“You, too. See you.”

“Later, Crow.”

Megumi and Tsubomi waved at him, side by side, and Haruyuki bowed at them. When he put on his seatbelt, the taxi quietly pulled into traffic.

He waited until he could no longer see the girls before closing the window. The noise of the outside world was essentially completely cut off, and a synthetic voice announced, “Thank you for using Smart Cab Tokyo automatic taxi service…”

Haruyuki let the announcement wash over him as he leaned back into the genuine leather seat, which felt like it might actually swallow him whole, and exhaled at length. He’d been a bundle of nerves ever since he’d stepped through the EG gates, and he’d also been very nearly killed in the Accelerated World, but at least his first face-to-face meeting with the Oscillatory Universe executive hadn’t ended in total failure. Or so he wanted to believe.

Naturally, he had some regrets. He hadn’t been able to do anything to fix Tsubomi’s and Megumi’s precarious situation, he was still in conflict with Tomochika Kyobu, and he hadn’t been able to get any information about Wolfram Cerberus.

Cerberus was most likely a student at Shirakabanomori Academy with Tomochika and Rioh. Haruyuki very much wanted to get out of the taxi right that second and charge into Shirakaba, but he knew there would be basically no one there in the middle of summer break, and he didn’t have permission to go onto the campus. He had to, at the very least, pin down Cerberus’s real name first, or he wouldn’t get anywhere trying to collect information.

Pushing down his panic, Haruyuki turned his gaze out the window and caught sight of the gently curving lines of Shirakabanomori Academy on the left side of the road.

I’ve come this far. I will come and see you. Just hang on a bit longer, he called out in his mind to Cerberus, who probably attended that school, and he sat back again.

On the front windshield, the predicted route was displayed, and when he glanced up at it, he let out a short cry. “Huh?”

His destination was the Arita house in Suginami’s Koenji, but the route shown was a bit off. The fastest way would have been to turn right at the next intersection and head down Meiji-dori, but the route drawn out on the windshield went straight, turned left, and passed by the north side of Ebisu Garden Place.

Maybe traffic was bad on Meiji-dori. But in that case, there would have been a display to that effect, some message about how the car was taking a detour because of traffic. As he wondered about this, the car was already turning left at the intersection in front of the Ebisu post office and pulling onto Shinbashi-dori. Garden Place was dead ahead.

Well, even if it was the long way around, it was only a difference of two or three minutes, Haruyuki told himself as he forced himself to relax.

After two hundred meters, the taxi turned right and started down Kusunoki-dori. The imposing figure of Garden Place came into view on the other side of the trees lining the street.

This was Meguro Area No. 1—Great Wall territory. He had cut his global connection after getting into the taxi, so there was no risk of being challenged, but he was still a little antsy. Maybe because he was still very much a baby in the Accelerated World, or maybe because even experienced veterans were nervous in the Territories of other Legions.

As he thought about this, he stared absently at the stylish brick shopping center, and the taxi suddenly started to decelerate. The left turn signal came on, causing Haruyuki to yelp, “Uh-wha?!”

The route shown on the windshield led all the way to Suginami, so this couldn’t have been the end of the ride. Nevertheless, the car slid toward the shoulder of the road and stopped neatly in the loading/unloading zone partitioned off with LED markers.

“A scheduled passenger will be entering the vehicle,” the synthetic voice announced. “Please move to the right-hand seat.”

“Huh?!” Panicking, he raised both hands to his virtual desktop. But it was Megumi who had set the taxi’s destination and other details, so canceling that would require some rather tricky maneuvering. He told himself that if necessary, he could throw open the door on the driver’s side and escape that way, and then scooted over to the other seat.

He heard the sound of the door unlocking, and then the passenger-side door opened. Slipping into the car with the heat of summer and the clamor of the world outside was a girl with long black hair, in a navy pin-striped dress, carrying a folded-up black parasol.

As she sat down, she pushed down the handle of her parasol. “Sorry, Megumi, for having you come get me—” Obsidian eyes grew wide as saucers, and after a full three seconds of being utterly speechless, the girl—Umesato student council vice president, Nega Nebulus leader, World End/Black Lotus, aka Kuroyukihime—cried out, her voice upset in a way he’d never heard before, “H-H-Haruyuki?! What are you doing here?!”

Before he could say anything in response, the taxi said, “We are departing. Please fasten your seatbelt.”

Still staring at each other stunned, they half-automatically fastened their seatbelts. The doors were locked, the turn signal blinked, and the car began to move.

When the car had finished accelerating, Haruyuki finally managed to open his mouth. “Uh. Um. Wakamiya told me to take this taxi home to Koenji. Why are you…?”

“Megumi told me to wait here and she’d send a taxi for me,” Kuroyukihime said slowly.

At last, Haruyuki understood what was actually going on. Megumi Wakamiya—and Tsubomi Koshika probably in cahoots with her—had discovered at some point that Kuroyukihime was near Ebisu and sent the taxi to pick her up along the way.

Megumi and Tsubomi had told him again and again to talk to Kuroyukihime, but he couldn’t believe that they would come up with a strategy like this. Wait. Why’s she even in this area to begin with…?

Haruyuki belatedly realized that Kuroyukihime wasn’t in Ebisu to shop or enjoy a summer Saturday afternoon. She had come to defend Minato Area No. 3, the territory Nega Nebulus had taken from Oscillatory Universe the week before. Ebisu Garden Place wasn’t in Minato ward, but she had no doubt left Minato once the Territories were over.

“Um, were you on the defense team yourself?” he asked, without any real preamble.

A slight smile crossed Kuroyukihime’s face as she leaned back in her seat. “Hold on.” She slid her bag off her shoulder, pulled a small thermos out of it, took the cap off, and put the thermos to her mouth. But then she scowled. Apparently it was empty.

“Uh. Here!” Haruyuki hurriedly said. He was about to hand her the thermos he pulled out of his own cross-body bag when he hesitated for an instant. “Oh. I already drank out of it, though.”

“No matter. Thanks.” Kuroyukihime accepted the bottle and took three sips, her slender throat moving up and down. “Fwah. That brings me back to life. I appreciate it.”

“Well, it’s pretty hot again today, so,” Haruyuki replied, and then realized he was also thirsty. But he thought drinking from the bottle when she had just returned it to him would be a whole thing, so he refrained. He’d enjoyed two glasses of iced tea at EG, so this thirst was probably psychological.

“It really is so hot these days,” she murmured, and turned her gaze toward the windshield.

The taxi went south past the SDF Meguro garrison and crossed the Meguro River. They’d be on Yamate-dori Street from the next intersection, but it was late Saturday afternoon, so it would probably be full of people on their way home from a day out. Just as he had this thought, the taxi spoke again.

“At this time, level-six synchronized driving is in effect on highway three-one-seven, Yamate-dori. There will be no stopping at traffic lights.”

Per the announcement, all of the traffic signals were blinking purple to indicate that only synced vehicles were allowed to proceed, and the car ahead of the taxi plunged into the lane of cars flowing past at sixty kilometers an hour on Yamate-dori without braking. The reason there were no accidents was because a single traffic control system (TCS) was operating all of the vehicles, including motorcycles.

A notice popped up on the windshield, to the effect that control of the taxi had been ceded to the TCS. The system made minute adjustments to the sports car’s speed, and the vehicle slalomed smoothly from left to right between the smallest gaps in the flowing lanes of traffic.

He’d experienced synced driving any number of times since he was little, but for some reason, he froze up now. But of course, there was no danger in the taxi cutting in front of the other vehicles as it smoothly shifted to the right and merged with traffic on the outside lanes.

“Hmm. I never get used to this, no matter how many times I do it,” Kuroyukihime said, and Haruyuki bobbed his head up and down.

“I heard there’s never been an accident because of the system,” he said. “But I always feel like a really big something’s gonna happen one of these days.”

“I feel that all the more so when I hear that the Accelerated World is controlled by an AI,” Kuroyukihime said, tongue in cheek, and then changed her tone as she continued. “As to your earlier question. I demanded to be a part of the defense team. Naturally, Utai and Fuko tried to stop me, but I threw a serious temper tantrum, and so they let me.”

Even if that last part was a joke, it was a fact that Utai and the others would have tried to stop her. He would have totally tried to stop her if he’d been there. Kuroyukihime insisted that since there was no transfer of Burst Points in the Territories, the level-nine sudden-death rule did not apply. But given that the veracity of this information was unconfirmed, no one in the Legion was willing to expose their Master to the risk of total point loss in the course of defending their territory.

Haruyuki frowned, confused. “But, Kuroyukihime, I’m pretty sure you can participate in the defense of any area as long as you’re in a territory with a connected border, right? You didn’t actually have to come all the way to Minato; you could’ve defended Area Three from Suginami, couldn’t you?”

“True,” she assented readily. “But that’s no longer possible. Nega Nebulus abandoned Shibuya Area One and Two after Great Wall ceded them to us.”

“What?!” he cried, but he had known that this might happen. He sat back down in his seat. “Oh, yeah? Well, I guess it would be too hard to defend all the way to Shibuya with Suginami Area Three in there, too. So what happened to Shibuya One and Two, then?”

“I haven’t confirmed it yet,” she replied. “But we informed them in advance, so I assume that GW reoccupied the areas. Those were originally their territory, after all.”

“But before that, it was the first Nega Nebulus’s territory, right?” he insisted. “And they didn’t cede that territory for free. You paid points for it.”

“I didn’t pay those points. Graph did,” Kuroyukihime stated with a cool look, and she casually crossed her legs. The large, two-seater sports car had plenty of leg room, and even the long-legged Kuroyukihime had more than enough space around her knees for this movement.

The taxi smoothly proceeded north on Yamate-dori. At a large intersection, another car cut across in front of them at incredible speed, so Haruyuki couldn’t help nearly jumping out of his skin. But their car didn’t slow down in the slightest, despite the heavy traffic, thanks to the synchronized drive. It had only been implemented on a few main roads like Yamate-dori. But what kind of system, exactly, could force thousands of vehicles to drive with such precision and impeccable control?

Haruyuki blinked hard and yanked back his thoughts wandering off on some traffic tangent. “Um. So who else was registered for the defense of Minato Three?” he asked casually, before panicking that he’d messed up. This was probably confidential Nega Nebulus information.

But Kuroyukihime seemed to be entirely unconcerned as she replied, counting off on her fingers. “Let’s see. Fuko, Utai, Akira, Choco, Satomi, Yume, Rui, Rin, Seri, Utan, Olive…That’s it. Chiyuri, Takumu, Niko, and Pard insisted on joining us, but I left them to defend Suginami and Nerima.”

“What?” He raised an eyebrow. “Rin came, too?”

“Oi! She’s who you focus on?” Kuroyukihime glared at him, and Haruyuki squeaked and shrank into himself.

“N-no, it’s…Rin—I mean, Ash, Utan, and Olive were only supposed to be temporarily with the Legion until the fight with the Acceleration Research Society was finished. So I just figured they’d gone back to GW,” he concluded weakly.

“The finish of that fight’s still a long way off,” she said, and she was exactly right. They’d exposed Black Vise’s true identity, Ivory Tower, and also that the Acceleration Research Society was actually the dark underside of the White Legion. But they still hadn’t stopped that group’s scheming. Ivory Tower’s appearance at the local history museum was proof of that.

“Of course. I’m sorry.” He bowed neatly before picturing again in the back of his mind the battle formation of the defense team. Instantly, a cold sweat ran down his back. “So then…That’s basically the biggest guns, right? What if—?” He cut himself off there.

If Oscillatory Universe had carried out the attack, Haruyuki would have been a part of a massive fight with the Four Elements and the Seven Dwarves clashing, but that wasn’t the reason why he couldn’t finish his sentence. He couldn’t finish it because he had very nearly said, What if we had attacked?

It was a fact that he had transferred to Oscillatory Universe, and he was prepared to do what he had to as a Legion member. But he had no intention of surrendering his heart. That’s what he had thought, anyway, but had his heart been so easily swayed, by nothing more than a few hours in the real and some cake? Am I so fickle a person as that?

Haruyuki shrank inward, and a gentle hand reached out from his left to pat his shaking shoulders.

“Come now. Take a deep breath. Have a drink.”

“Right.” He earnestly focused on getting air down his trembling throat before opening the thermos he’d been holding all this time. He gulped down the still barely chilled liquid, and then let out a long breath. “Um. I’m sorry about that. Out of the blue.”

“No worries,” she replied kindly. “You don’t have to tell me why it happened.”

Haruyuki’s eyes grew hot.

Even though I haven’t contacted you in three days. Even though I’m making you worry by dueling recklessly every day. Even though you have the right to be angry, to tell me off…in fact, you have the right to “judge” me. So how is it that you can be so kind?

He closed the lid of the now-empty thermos, wiped at his eyes with one hand, and said, “I…Snow Fairy sent me a message and…I went to Eternal Girls’ Academy with Wakamiya and Koshika.”

“Mmm.” Kuroyukihime nodded evenly. “Megumi didn’t tell me that, but I thought as much.”

“The White King wasn’t there,” he continued. “But Fairy, Glacier Behemoth, Cypress Reaper, and…Platinum Cavalier were. We had tea and cheesecake in the student council office. And then I was almost killed by Cavalier, but everyone was just like me, like…I mean, they’re all super strong in the Accelerated World, but they’re actually regular kids, and I…I…”

His eyes grew hot once more, and he was unable to hold back this time; tears slid down his cheeks.

All this time, he’d believed that the culprit behind all of the calamity and tragedy that had happened in the Accelerated World was the White King. He’d made up his mind that she, the Acceleration Research Society, and Oscillatory Universe were pure evil, and they had to be eliminated from the Accelerated World.

But after meeting Nanako, Rioh, Airi, and even Tomochika in the real for the first time, it was impossible for him to feel as though they were opponents to be despised. They were all the same as he was. They had their mental scars, so difficult to bear, and they’d become Burst Linkers, found their place in the Accelerated World, and were doing everything they could to protect it. If he was going to trust them and pledge his loyalty from the heart, then…even the supposedly absolutely evil White King, too, was perhaps…

“Well, I suppose so,” Kuroyukihime said, her voice calm. “Even if our positions and principles differ, at the end of the day, we’re all Burst Linkers. Which is why I’m not worried about you. I know you’ll be able to perform magnificently, even if you have transferred to the White Legion, Haruyuki. As long as you stay true to yourself—”

“We will shortly be turning left onto Highway Number Five, Oume Highway,” the taxi said abruptly, and drowned Kuroyukihime out, “at which point the level-six synchronized driving will be released.”

And just as it had announced, the taxi pulled into the left lane and turned at the Nakano-Sakaue intersection. After it drove another dozen meters or so, control reverted from the TCS back to the car’s AI. There was the faintest hint of a change in their speed, but then the car accelerated powerfully and entered cruise mode.

“We’re almost at Suginami,” Kuroyukihime said.

“Yeah.” Haruyuki nodded. “Oh! Please drop me off once we’re on the other side of Kannana.”

“That’s nearly a kilometer from your house,” she protested. “Don’t stand on ceremony. This is Megumi’s treat, at any rate.”

“Um. It’s actually Fairy’s treat,” he said, and Kuroyukihime blinked a few times in surprise before chuckling.

“Ha-ha! Is it then? All the more reason not to stand on ceremony. Perhaps we should simply keep going all the way out to Mount Takao.”

“That’d be fun, actually.”

While they chatted about nothing, the taxi continued its smooth progress. Only five more minutes until it reached his condo.

But I want to talk more. There’s still so much I want her to hear.

The irresistible urge made his mouth move. “Um. Kuroyukihime!”

“Mmm.” She glanced at him. “What is it?”

“Uh. I know you’re probably busy, but if you have time, would you like to come over for just a little bit?”