Accel World - Volume 7 - Chapter 10

10

Compared with its awesome power, the mysterious ISS kit Enhanced Armament was extremely small as an object.

It was a black half sphere about five centimeters in diameter, which also looked like a social camera somehow. Bush Utan and Olive Grab had equipped it in the center of their chests. But after Takumu shouted the activation command, the half sphere popped up on the back of his Pile Driver hand. With a snap, a horizontal line ran through the center of the sphere. From there, the surface split into top and bottom, and a single orb appeared from within, reminiscent of the eye of a living creature. It shone wetly, a deep red, the color of blood…

The light of an overlay of terrifying density and scale then gushed up in a vortex from Cyan Pile’s feet. But it couldn’t actually be called light; it was stained a rich, inky black. No longer the hazy shadow that had enveloped Bush Utan, this was an almost pure aura of darkness.

Haruyuki desperately braced legs that threatened to crumble under him.

The force of the gushing aura was also well beyond anything Utan had produced. As proof that this was no mere light effect, cracks radiated out in circles on the floor from where Takumu stood.

…Taku…

“Haru,” Takumu responded gently, perhaps hearing Haruyuki unconsciously calling to his friend in his heart. He indicated the floors above and below and the smattering of pillars with his left hand. When he continued speaking, his voice was quite different from before summoning the kit. Dark, desolate, tinged with a metallic effect. “If we stay in this tiny place forever, you won’t be able to use your full strength, either, right?”

“Y-yeah. You want to move outside?” Haruyuki judged that somehow Takumu didn’t seem to be experiencing the same level of interference with his mind that Utan and the others had and let out a quiet breath as he asked the question.

But…

“No, there’s no need for that,” Takumu murmured and turned the Pile Driver, complete with ISS kit, casually toward the floor. Immediately after that came a level voice, almost entirely without fight, with the technique name.

“Dark Shot.”

Instead of the iron spike, a dark beam shot out. In an instant, it had gouged a ten-centimeter hole through the floor and disappeared into the lower floors.

One, two, three seconds later.

Haruyuki felt a tremendous vibration pushing upward from directly below him. Before he had a chance to even swallow, the floor cracked into tiny pieces, and a torrent of energy that could only be described as black flames jetted out through the gaps.

“Hungh!” Gasping violently, Haruyuki reflexively deployed his wings and dashed straight backward. Flipping his body midair, he charged toward the opening to the outside of the condo, flying at top speed with both hands thrust forward. The shock wave pressing up against him from behind shook his body as he managed to leap into the air and soar in a straight line through the sky of the Scorched-Earth stage. Once he confirmed he had gotten more than enough distance, he flipped himself around once more and looked back.

“Wha…,” Haruyuki gasped, astonished.

He watched as the thirty-story tower that was the A wing of his condo in the real world shattered into pieces from the ground floor and collapsed.

It was true that the terrain objects in the Scorched-Earth stage broke fairly easily. But even so, there were limits. Because the destruction of an enormous building like that would rip a duel strategy up from the roots, the system was set up to make such an act take a suitable amount of time and effort. As far as Haruyuki knew, the only Burst Linker capable of destroying a massive building in a single blow was the Immobile Fortress, aka the Red King, Scarlet Rain, when all her Enhanced Armament was fully deployed.

Unable to believe the sight before his eyes, he blinked repeatedly. But the condo collapsed completely in mere seconds and became an enormous mountain of rubble.

As if compelled, he checked Cyan Pile’s HP gauge in the upper right of his vision. Despite the fact that Takumu had been pulled into a collapse of this magnitude, it was still just under 40 percent full, right where the damage from Haruyuki’s Aerial Combo had left it. And although this was the Scorched-Earth stage, where the bonus for terrain destruction was weak, his special-attack gauge was at once fully charged.

Shifting his gaze back to the mountain of rubble, Haruyuki saw a mass of objects on the peak of the pyramid blown off from directly below.

Appearing from within the smashed rubble was Cyan Pile, in an even more concentrated aura of darkness.

“Taku,” he murmured hoarsely. But no other words came out.

This was nothing short of overwhelming, enough to make even shock and fear disappear. After activating IS mode, Bush Utan had also shown a terrifying leap in battle ability, but Takumu’s changed appearance far and away surpassed that. Which meant that this was how deep he had pushed into his heart a pain and suffering that was almost maddening.

So Haruyuki absolutely couldn’t lose here. If he did nothing, daunted by the power of the ISS kit, the darkness that held Takumu would only increase in strength. Takumu might step into the bottomless hole in his heart, the dark side of the Incarnate that Kuroyukihime, Sky Raker, Niko, and Blood Leopard had warned them about.

Ever since the backdoor program incident, Takumu had been earnestly trying to get back to his old self. He had transferred from the university-track school in Shinjuku with its cutting-edge education and high-level information to the frequently analog Umesato Junior High, and taken one step after another at his own pace. Haruyuki couldn’t let the malice someone was deliberately spreading interrupt that journey. Somehow, he had to drag Takumu out from the interference of the kit and sever its control over him. And to do that…

He would win this battle. It was the only way.

He would win and show Takumu. The power of the positive will. Of the light of hope shining modestly but stronger than anything else.

Hovering at an altitude of seventy meters, Haruyuki materialized the Laser Sword in both hands.

Below, Takumu stood at the peak of the rubble mountain and raised the Pile Driver with the ISS kit in it in a leisurely motion, setting his sights on Haruyuki.

The dark shot released from that barrel before had been tremendously powerful. He wouldn’t be able to repel it with his light swords the way he had Bush Utan’s technique of the same name. But if he could see the launch position and timing, it should be possible to deal with it. His only hope was to dodge it at a distance where he just barely avoided damage and settle this fight in a counter–dive attack.

Haruyuki stopped his virtual breathing and concentrated all his mental energy on the barrel of the Enhanced Armament Cyan Pile had raised.

Which was why he was late to notice. That together with Takumu’s whisper of the technique name, the special-attack gauge, not used normally with Incarnate attacks, went from fully charged to completely spent in an instant.

“Dark Lightning Spike.”

His friend called out a technique name he had never heard before, and at the same time, it seemed like the barrel of the Pile Driver flashed with black light for an instant.

That was all. The massive beam that had destroyed the condo, the thunderous roar, the shock wave—none of that. The dry wind of the Scorched-Earth stage blew drearily, and a light sensation stroked his left shoulder.

“…?”

Haruyuki suddenly felt his body shaking lightly. At the same time, several small lights cut across the bottom edge of his field of view. Shifting his gaze, he noticed strange objects falling toward the surface of the ground. A silver pole, a few thin panels. What? He strained his eyes and—

“Ngh?!”

The moment he realized what those objects actually were, Haruyuki could do nothing but open his eyes wide, dumbfounded, and suck in air. It was—an arm. And a wing.

Belatedly, he looked at his left shoulder. There was nothing there but a smooth cross section, as if it had been processed with a precise mirror finish. Silver Crow’s left arm and metal wing had been completely removed from the base.

His body listed heavily. Unconsciously, he increased the thrust from his right wing and tried to maintain his altitude, but this move actually left him unbalanced, and he plunged into a tailspin. Carving out a spiral like the leaf of a tree, he began to plummet toward the earth.

Just as he was on the verge of crashing into the ground, he recovered from his daze and tried to counterbalance the rotation with his wing, narrowly succeeding in landing on his feet. Still, he was unable to entirely absorb the impact; violent sparks flew from the joints in his knees and ankles. Losing his left arm and wing wholesale caused his gauge to drop 50 percent all at once, dyeing it yellow.

But more than the amount of damage, Haruyuki felt a massive shock at the thing that had done the damage itself.

He basically hadn’t seen it.

He had managed to notice that the shooting effect had drawn a black cross over the barrel of the Pile Driver. But he hadn’t been able to perceive the body of the projectile itself, which had to have crossed the seventy meters between them.

There had been a time when Haruyuki struggled forward with absurd special training to avoid a bullet launched from close-up in a VR program he’d made. The result was that currently, as long as he could see the shooter, he could evade even snipers with large rifles fairly consistently. Put another way, if he hadn’t been able to do at least that, he wouldn’t have been able to fly at all, given that there were no obstacles in the sky. And yet not only had he not been able to avoid this shot, he hadn’t even been able to see the projectile’s trajectory. It was completely unbelievable.

The shock was exceedingly massive, but Haruyuki’s stupefaction there on the ground lasted a mere half second.

One of a Burst Linker’s most critical abilities was to immediately get their thoughts together and shift their focus to their next move, however unexpected the situation they found themselves in. Haruyuki pushed his surprise aside for the time being and tried to rebuild his strategy for the current situation, in which he was essentially robbed of the ability to fly. In this case, the only chance of winning he could see was to once more bring the fight up close and personal, make it a close-range battle, combining guard reversal and Aerial Combo, even if he just had the one arm and one wing.

First of all, move!!

Rebuking himself, Haruyuki stood up to run from the courtyard of his fallen condo to the still-standing B wing.

However, once again, he was faced with the unexpected situation.

Whump! The sound of impact shook the ground, interrupting his dash. Staggering, he turned his eyes toward the source of the sound, to where a large avatar had landed on the ground a mere ten meters away. Takumu, who should have been at the top of the mountain of rubble, had leapt down to the courtyard in one bound.

Heavyweight avatars like Cyan Pile and Frost Horn had the special characteristic of being able to produce a shock wave in the Field by stomping, which obstructed the movement of lightweight avatars. However, the shaking now was less a shock and more a large earthquake. Haruyuki’s feet got caught in the cracks racing out in all directions, and he stumbled while Takumu closed in from behind him in the blink of an eye with a high-speed dash—also nonstandard—and stopped a very short distance away.

His overwhelming sense of presence, almost as if the duel avatar itself had gone up a full size, froze Haruyuki in his tracks.

Beneath the slits lined up on his face mask, there was a low sound, and Takumu’s eyes flashed. But the color had changed from the light blue of a little earlier to a dark purple. He stared quietly from his higher position at Haruyuki standing stock-still in an unsteady posture.

“Sorry, Haru.” A voice tinged with a distorted effect flowed from his mouth.

“…Taku…” All Haruyuki could do was call the name of his best friend, almost soundlessly.

“I’m sorry.” Takumu slowly took another step closer. “I—I knew it’d be like this. I knew it’d end up like this. And yet I pushed you. I forced you into a duel. I guess…there’s no helping it if you think I just wanted to beat you down like this…”

Thud. He narrowed the distance between them by another step, and now Cyan Pile’s massive body was directly before Haruyuki. A thick, jet-black aura poured ceaselessly from the enormous rocklike avatar, gushing up toward the sky. Takumu glanced down at its source, the black eyeball parasitizing the Enhanced Armament of his right arm.

“I heard that the deeper the darkness of the owner’s heart, the more terrifying the power this ISS kit manifests. So you see…I’m this kind of person. I realized this while I was massacring those four PKs with this power—though the truth is maybe I knew it right from the start. After all, I only became a Burst Linker to get good grades, win tournaments, and hold on to Chii.”

“Taku…Taku.”

You’re wrong. You’re wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!!

This word alone swirled around in Haruyuki’s heart. But he didn’t know how to say it so Takumu would hear. His vision shook, rainbow-colored and blurred. Haruyuki belatedly realized he was shedding tears under his helmet.

As he looked down at Haruyuki, meager particles of light spilled out from Takumu’s eyes as well and evaporated instantly.

“Thanks, Haru.” The gentle voice of his best friend reached his ears. “I’m glad my opponent in my final duel was you…Thanks.”

“…F-final? What…are you talking about…?” Haruyuki asked in a trembling voice.

“When this fight is over,” Takumu replied quietly, “I’m going to go take a stab at the Acceleration Research Society.”

“…What…”

“They’re the ones making and handing out this kind of terrible Enhanced Armament. I don’t think I can beat the top-level guys. But once I reach the infection route, I should be able to figure out the ones at a certain level. I’ll invite them into the Unlimited Neutral Field somehow and get all the info I can from them. Even—” He cut himself off momentarily, but soon continued again with certainty. “Even if I lose all my points doing it and Brain Burst force uninstalls, I’ll definitely tell you everything I learned. After that, it’s up to you to stop them, Haru. This kind of…power—taking advantage of the mental scars that all Burst Linkers have to mislead them—shouldn’t exist. The Accelerated World is a place for people like you and Chii and Master, people who change that pain to hope and move forward.”

“Taku…But you…I mean, you, too…” Haruyuki was frustrated and annoyed by his own inability to do anything but stammer like this.

But it seemed that his childhood friend of more than ten years still understood Haruyuki’s feelings. He felt a gentle smile beneath the mask.

“Haru, I have to thank you for one more thing.” In contrast with the dark aura streaming from his body, even more wildly, his voice was nothing but gentle. “That time…at the end of our first fight, thank you for forgiving me. The eight months from that day to today, fighting as a member of the new Nega Nebulus, have been so much fun, it’s like I’ve been dreaming. Thanks, Haru. It’s too bad I got knocked out in the middle of your purification mission and the Legion’s work to reach the ending, but…tell Master, Raker, and Maiden thanks for me. And…tell Chii I’m sorry.”

“Don’t say that! Don’t talk like that, Taku!!” Haruyuki screamed, suppressing a pain like his heart was being ripped in half.

He clenched his remaining hand into a fist and focused on the glittering Incarnate lodged there. Reflecting his violently shaken emotions, the light flickered irregularly, but even so, the dark color winding around the two of them weakened the tiniest bit.

“Chiyu’s gonna cry if you leave the Legion, you know! She’ll totally cry! You wanna make Chiyu cry, Taku?!”

Takumu hung his head slightly. Finally, an even more gentle voice. “Yeah, she probably will, huh? But…I know she’ll get over those tears and keep moving forward. After all, I’m the one who’s been making her want to go back to the past. Haru, please. Look out for Chii.”

Grinning, Takumu clenched his enormous left fist tightly in front of Haruyuki.

The condensing dark aura roared ferociously. The midnight black, absolute as a black hole, easily overwhelmed the modest silver light in Haruyuki’s right hand.

“Okay, let’s finish this, Haru. You don’t have to look so sad for me. This darkness was inside of me right from the start. You just have to make the opposite choice you did eight months ago. I’m making you do it.”

Perhaps due to the concentration of such enormous power, an infinite number of sparks shot into the air from his left fist as Takumu slowly pulled it back.

As if to comfort Haruyuki, to encourage him, the call of the technique name was somehow kind. “Dark Blow.”

Haruyuki tried to guard with the silver light of his right hand against the fist, which shot down at him with pressure akin to an enormous meteor pouring down from space.

However, an impact unlike any he had ever felt before, as if the world itself were exploding, made his entire body dance. Meager though it might have been, if he hadn’t had his Incarnate defense, his avatar would have been blown to bits instantly.

He managed to avoid annihilation, but, very much unable to stand his ground, Haruyuki went flying backward toward the condo’s B wing at a terrifying speed.

He flew for half a second or so, parallel to the ground, before his back crashed into the exterior wall of the building. His body gouged out a large hole in the scorched concrete, and he still didn’t stop but plunged inside. Only once he had smashed through the next wall, and the next, and then yet another, was his momentum finally diminished. After bouncing once on the floor of a large, empty room, Haruyuki tumbled onto his back, arms and legs splayed.

Something was flashing red in the top left of his vision, sunk into gloom from the intense impact. His brain had basically stopped working, but even still, Haruyuki understood that this was his HP gauge, reduced to a few pixels.

The power imbalance was enough to make him lose hope. And here, for the first time in all of this, Haruyuki felt despair filling his heart.

How conceited he had been to think that he’d win using his full force on Takumu, and then he’d save him. After all, right from the start, Takumu’s abilities far exceeded Haruyuki’s in all things. That’s why he looked up to him. That’s why Takumu was his hero.

If this Takumu had pushed himself up against this wall and made up his mind, then what on earth could Haruyuki do, with his sole power—his wings—taken from him…

He felt a heavy vibration from off in the distance. Takumu was coming straight for him, punching out the walls of the condo as he did, to finish this duel.

Beneath his cracked helmet, Haruyuki’s eyes once again filled with tears. He never thought it would end this way. He had really believed that he, Chiyuri, and Takumu would be able to hang out together forever. All this time, he had believed that Brain Burst, the Accelerated World, existed precisely for that reason.

“That’s right.”

Abruptly, someone’s voice echoed inside his head.

He absently opened his eyes. Against the scorched, bleak ceiling, he saw a strange sight: another human form gently slipping away from Silver Crow’s body on the floor and standing up silently.

Haruyuki had no idea who this someone was, faintly transparent, basically a hallucination.

A slender girl-shaped avatar. The design, with the flower petal motif at the shoulders and hips, resembled Chiyuri’s Lime Bell somehow. But the short hair on her head, ends flipping up, and her armor color were totally different.

A bright, golden yellow that reminded him of spring sunlight.

This unnamed someone sat down on a pile of rubble beside Haruyuki, flat on his back, and spoke once more. “It’s just as you say. Brain Burst doesn’t exist simply to fight and hate each other. We can join hands; we can build bonds.”

“…Who are you…?” Haruyuki asked vacantly. “Why are you here…? This is a direct duel field…”

The ephemeral, transparent someone smiled lightly. “I’m…a memory. A tiny fragment of a thought living in a corner of the enormous body of quantum information that makes up a certain object registered in the central system.”

“…A memory…” The instant he murmured this, Haruyuki felt a prickle stab his own memory somewhere.

I know her. We’ve never met, and I don’t know her name, but still, I know this person…

Almost as if to affirm this thought, the golden yellow avatar nodded lightly. “Because you traced a past memory in the Castle, the system circuits were temporarily activated, and I’m able to talk to you like this. But I’m sure it won’t last long.”

The girl broke off and then announced in a voice with increased strength, “There’s still a way to help your friend.”

“What…” His eyes flew open. Supporting himself with his battered right arm pressed against the floor, he desperately struggled to sit up. “Wh-what? Are you saying there’s something else I can do?”

“You still have power inside you. The lone power that can resist the deep darkness penetrating your friend,” the golden girl murmured, smile fading.

After a moment’s confusion, Haruyuki intuitively grasped what she was getting at. Reflexively, he shook his head.

“N-no way. I can’t use that. If I summon that again, I definitely won’t be able to come back from it ever again.”

That. The cursed Enhanced Armament parasitizing Silver Crow deep inside, currently returned to a seed state by Lime Bell’s Citron Call Mode II.

The Armor of Catastrophe.

A somehow sad smile rose up onto the golden yellow girl’s face. “It’s not as though the armor was born crowned with the name Catastrophe, you know. So many sad, sad things happened, and its form was distorted.”

“The form was…distorted…”

“I’ve been waiting all this time in a little corner of that armor. Each time a new owner came along, I prayed, ‘Please, let this be it.’ The appearance of someone who could remove the curse of it. I’ve waited all this time for someone who could heal his fury and sadness…”

Nimbly standing on the pile of rubble, the girl knelt down in front of him and touched the injured silver avatar gently with her slender right hand.

“And you. You’re so much like him, I’m sure you can do it. It might take some time, but someday, I just know it. So don’t give up here. For the sake of your friend, stand up just one more time.”

The girl’s figure became even more transparent. As she changed into a hazy silhouette, she stepped back inside Haruyuki.

In his head, far, far away, the last of her voice: “Now, remember. Call that name…the name of the armor before it was twisted into the Disaster…You should…already know it…”

Abruptly, a scene rose up on the screen of his memory. The pedestals of the Seven Arcs they found inside the Castle. The metal plate adorned with the name of the zeta star of the Big Dipper, kaiyou.

And at the very bottom, several roman letters. He had indeed felt something when he saw that. A tiny throbbing something deep in his soul. Like it called to mind a sad memory from a long, long time ago.

Thud. The heavy vibration came to him through the floor, and Haruyuki lifted his face.

Takumu had apparently arrived in the next room or the one beyond that. Now matter what attack Haruyuki faced next, the remaining pixels in his HP gauge would be easily blown away.

Can the me I am now stop Takumu? He’s brooded over it so deeply; what words could I say to bring him back?

A cold despair threatened to fill his heart once again, but Haruyuki gritted his teeth and shook it off.

Not words.

Feelings. With fists containing feelings. Me and Taku are both Burst Linkers. So then there’s only one thing to tell him, only one way.

“Go at each other with all we’ve got. Right at the beginning, I did, you know, Taku,” Haruyuki murmured in a low voice, and intently forced his battered avatar to stand. Fragments of his cracked armor fluttered to the floor.

There was no longer any fear, any panic.

Staring through the large hole in the wall, Haruyuki quietly gave voice to the name that had come to life from the depths of his memory.

“Equip…the Destiny.”

To be continued.