Accel World - Volume 9 - Chapter 2

2

Against the backdrop of the shades of black and blue of the Demon City stage, it was easy to pick out the red light that had escaped from the ISS kit. Ascending vertically until he was nearly at the swirling black clouds, Haruyuki caught sight of the luminous body flying quickly dead east.

“I won’t let you get away,” he started to say, but what spilled out from beneath his helmet was:

“Graaar!”

Nothing but the howl of a Beast.

He vibrated the now-sinister-looking metal wings with all his might. Looking very much like a bird of prey chasing its dinner, Silver Crow—the sixth Chrome Disaster sliced through the black clouds.

The rage that had boiled over in him immediately after summoning the Armor had vanished at some point and been replaced with something cold and honed that could have been called the will to destroy. Or perhaps this was something Haruyuki had unconsciously brought about himself to avoid attacking Ash Roller and Bush Utan, but his mind was in no position to recognize that at that moment.

In that instant, a single determination and two facts were pushing Haruyuki onward.

Determination: He could not forgive the ISS kit wearers or the makers of those kits.

Fact number one: Those Acceleration Research Society guys created and distributed the ISS kits.

Fact number two: The black layered avatar planned the incident that would serve as the trigger for the birth of the Armor of Catastrophe.

The layered avatar—Black Vise, the vice president of the Acceleration Research Society—had barged into the final stages of the battle against Dusk Taker and toyed with Haruyuki and his friends. A fearsome enemy equipped with a terrifyingly powerful Incarnate attack whose tone and attitude were very much not those of a junior high or high school student. And due to the brain implant chip he had in his head, he possessed the ability to “decelerate” and slow his thought clock, making lying in wait for a long time in the Unlimited Neutral Field, where time flowed a thousand times faster than it normally did in reality, an easy feat.

A very, very long time ago, this Black Vise set up a heartless trap and drove one Burst Linker to total point loss with the first Unlimited Enemy Kill in the Accelerated World. Due to the rage and grief brought about by that incident, the sixth star of the Seven Arcs, the Destiny, became warped, turning into the Armor of Catastrophe, the Disaster.

These were facts Haruyuki should not have actually known. The birth of the Catastrophe was at the dawn of the Accelerated World—seven years earlier. In contrast, only eight months had passed since he’d become a Burst Linker.

And yet he did not think it strange that the fathomless hatred and resentment toward the layered avatar Black Vise raced through his whole body as his own memories.

I will not forgive you. I’ll never forgive you. All of you who created and distributed the ISS kits, led Takumu astray, hurt Ash.

I will find and kill the ones who murdered…with the fangs of the mythical beast Jormungand over and over and over. Just like that day, I will inflict the maximum amount of pain and suffering. I will keep killing them endlessly until their points are used up.

His determination hidden within him at absolute zero, Haruyuki flew intently after the red body of light. East from the northern part of the Shibuya area. He swept past Aoyama Street and the large school grounds beyond it in a single breath. The place coming into view up ahead packed with the small square stones was probably Aoyama Cemetery. The light flew along above the countless gravestones as if pulled in by something.

If this ball of light was the “core” of the ISS kit Haruyuki destroyed, then what lay ahead had to be the main body. In the middle of the previous night, Haruyuki had been sleeping while directing with Takumu and was led to the mysterious interior of the Brain Burst central server through the imagination circuit. What he saw there was a galaxy of light, interweaving all the data saved and processed in the Accelerated World, along with a lump of black meat, eating into a corner of the space and writhing—the main body of the ISS kits.

In this world, Haruyuki succeeded in destroying the kit housed in Takumu, but that made it seemingly impossible for them to return to the central server once more and attack the main body. When he thought about it, however, the fact that it was inscribed within the server as data meant that the main body existed as an object somewhere in the field that was the game world. Just like how the Seven Arcs, which glittered within the server like a constellation, existed in the field in the form of swords and armor.

And if the ISS main body was hiding, then it wouldn’t be in the normal field, where creation and annihilation happened over and over; it would be somewhere in the eternal Unlimited Neutral Field. If he tailed the red body of light, he was bound to arrive at it. And wherever it was, one of them was bound to show up. Either the despised Black Vise or one of his friends.

“Grrr…” A groan he couldn’t suppress spilled out of his throat.

Now.

Now, finally, the time was at hand. The time for the revenge he as the Catastrophe had been waiting these many months and years for, as he moved through the minds of Burst Linkers. He would decapitate them all, tear their limbs off, smash them to pieces. No matter what came as a result. Even if he lost his last shred of reason and became a demon god, indiscriminately attacking every Burst Linker and destroying the Accelerated World itself. Actually, that was a fitting end to this savage world of battle.

Tearing the thick blanket of clouds immediately above his head with the shock wave emitted by the wings on his back, Haruyuki flew with single-minded determination. The red light fled intently a mere hundred meters ahead, almost as though it had a will of its own.

Beyond it, a remarkably tall building appeared. Judging from its position in relation to the road, the building, surrounded by decorative pillars with the sharp edges characteristic of the Demon City stage, was Tokyo Midtown Tower, the mixed-use commercial structure in Minato Ward’s Akasaka in the real world. The body of light appeared to be descending, aiming for somewhere near the top floor of the building. This was it. The physical main body of the ISS kits in the Unlimited Neutral Field.

I will crush it!!

Brimming with the desire to destroy, Haruyuki pushed his flying speed to the limit.

Or he was going to. Immediately before he could, somewhere below him to the right, he felt like he could hear a voice. And no mere words. The call of a technique name.

“Parsec Wall.”

It was unfamiliar, the low, solemn voice of a boy, reminiscent of stark, craggy mountains. At the same time, Haruyuki’s field of view was painted over by a dark-green light.

A wall. One after another, countless large green crosses—bigger than a person—appeared and joined seamlessly together to create a very wide and very tall wall. He couldn’t tell how far it continued in any direction, and if he detoured around it, he might lose sight of the body of light flying on the other side. Rather than finding the Burst Linker who produced this wall, his top priority was on discovering where that red light was going. He could deal with any intruders some other time.

“Raaah!” With a low roar, Haruyuki brought up a black Incarnate overlay in his left hand. Without the slowing down, he brandished his fist and smashed it into the green wall.

The instant the dull silver aviator and the rich green defensive wall collided, the incredible impact set heaven and earth shaking in the Accelerated World. But the wall did not break. The herd of crosses slid back and forth incrementally, absorbing the collision and sending it radiating outward to stop Haruyuki’s charge.

The current Haruyuki was no longer Silver Crow, whose only strength was speed. He was now the ultimate fighting machine, layering power and defense onto that speed, the sixth Chrome Disaster. And he also had the thick Incarnate aura on his fist. The fact that the wall had repelled this blow most certainly meant that it was the product of someone’s Incarnate technique.

“Grar…” A groan of annoyance slipping out, Haruyuki pulled back the left fist he had thrust forward. There was no damage to his armor or his health gauge, but there was also no sign of a crack in the green wall. Spreading his wings to hover, he slowly turned his head and peered in the direction of the earlier technique call.

To the right—basically, due south. At a point about five hundred meters away, the space separated by the elevated Shuto Expressway No. 3, a building roughly as tall as Midtown Tower rose up into the sky. The main tower of the similarly large-scale mixed-use Roppongi Hills.

On the roof was a large heliport, and in the center, two human figures stood. One had his left hand held high, a dazzling green overlay gushing from it. No mistake, this was the source of the Incarnate wall repelling Haruyuki.

“Then I’ll take care of you first,” he muttered, and leisurely changed his orientation. The body of light he had been chasing, the core of the ISS kit, had probably slipped into Midtown Tower by now. It wouldn’t be easy to hunt down the kit’s main body in the enormous building, but if he had to, he could just destroy the building itself. He would think of this battle with the two intruders as a way to recharge the special-attack gauge he had used up flying at full speed.

Resting the sword dangling from his right hand on his shoulder, Haruyuki started flying again.

The roof of Roppongi Hills Mori Tower was about a hundred meters lower than the altitude he had been hovering at, so he basically only had to glide in. Clawing at the hard tiles with the talons of both feet, Haruyuki landed on the northern side of the heliport.

He turned his gaze to first stare at the Burst Linker using the large-scale defensive Incarnate technique, but the second Burst Linker quickly pushed in front. It was a duel avatar he’d never seen before. Medium build. Basically the same size as Haruyuki in his current incarnation. The silhouette was orthodox, but two things drew his eye.

One was the fact that both hands were ridiculously large. And they didn’t look like they had been enlarged like Olive Grab’s, but rather as if they were wrapped in round, thick gloves. And the second characteristic was the color of the Armor. The dull gleam reflecting the hazy sunlight was clearly metallic. There was no doubt he was looking at one of the few metal colors in the Accelerated World.

Haruyuki then shifted his gaze to the one behind the metal avatar, the large duel avatar who continued to hold his left arm up into the sky.

He had seen this one before. And not just that. The color, the form. He had come face-to-face with him only once before, but even if he tried to forget, the other avatar was filled with such an absolute sense of presence, forgetting him was almost impossible.

The Armor plates, radiating a weightiness, were a green so pure, it could almost be compared with nothing else. The limb and chest plates were fat and thick, but the key points were tensed, so there was nothing lumbering in the impression he made. To sum it up in one phrase, a great tree—ruler of the earth, towering forever above the land without the slightest tremor in the face of any storm.

It wasn’t possible to mistake a Burst Linker with this kind of pressure for anyone else, but Haruyuki, his mind fused with the Armor of Catastrophe, still found it hard to believe. Given that they had interfered with his pursuit of the body of light, he had to conclude that the pair were ISS kit makers—in other words, members of the Acceleration Research Society. But Haruyuki had seen the green avatar seated at the meeting of the Seven Kings the other day. And not as an attendant, but as one of the key players at the meeting.

When Haruyuki soundlessly focused his gaze on him, unable to completely push aside his misgivings, the green avatar abruptly lowered the hand he had held aloft all this time. At the same time as the intense overlay housed in his arm weakened, the wall embedded in the sky vanished from the corner of Haruyuki’s eye.

But the light didn’t completely disappear. Still lodged in the avatar’s left arm, it spread out into a square and gained substance. What appeared was a shield, glittering a remarkably pure green as though an enormous emerald had been carved into a panel.

The priority, which was enough to faintly distort the surrounding air, was not something regular Enhanced Armaments had. Which meant it was an Arc. The large shield was the gamma of the Seven Stars, the Strife.

There was definitely no doubt now. The green avatar who had generated a wall large enough to connect earth and sky with an Incarnate technique and repel Haruyuki’s forward motion was one of the Seven Kings of Pure Color, ruler of the major Legion Great Wall, the strongest person reigning in the Accelerated World.

“Green King…Green Grandé.” Haruyuki said the name in a hoarse, creaking voice.

There was, of course, pressure in being face-to-face with a king, but the emotions beyond that made him forget his fear. An aura of black flames dancing around his body, he turned toward the avatar, who was a head taller than himself. “Are you…the mastermind?” he asked. “Was it you who made the ISS kits and distributed them?”

If his opponent moved his head in the slightest gesture of assent, Haruyuki was ready to use the sword in his right hand to cut him down without a moment’s delay. But the Green King only looked quietly at Haruyuki with strangely amber-colored eye lenses, evincing no reaction at all.

“What the—?!” the metal color standing in front of the king shouted back instead. His head was a simple cylindrical shape, but that gave it a sense of toughness as the avatar shook it and turned a glove-shaped fist toward Haruyuki.

“Silver Crow—no, Chrome Disaster! You’re the ally of the Society here!” he spat. “That filthy overlay is proof of that! The Six Kings were kind enough to give you a whole week to purify yourself, and here you are sneaking around behind the scenes, the height of cowardliness! You really are the child of the biggest traitor in the Accelerated World!”

The instant this line echoed through his brain, something pinched unexpectedly within Haruyuki. He wouldn’t simply kill this one. As he resolved himself, a part of his brain was analyzing the information like an automated digital circuit.

These two were already aware that the duel avatar standing before them was Silver Crow after summoning the Armor of Catastrophe. Still, that wasn’t especially strange. Although the Accelerated World was large, even newbies knew that the only one who could continuously fly was the crow from Nega Nebulus, and the kings and their closer associates would naturally have the information that Silver Crow had been parasitized by the Armor of Catastrophe. And Haruyuki’s current form had been revealed before the eyes of several hundred spectators in the final stages of the Hermes’ Cord race the other day.

Setting aside the question of the Green King, Haruyuki should have actually commended the courage of the metal color, perhaps, who not only did not tremble in the face of the legendary destroyer, but even spit such challenging words at him. Naturally, he gave voice to none of this and simply let his thoughts run further along.

If he was sincerely cursing Haruyuki out for being a friend to the Acceleration Research Society, that meant the two Green Legion avatars were not members of the Society. But if that was the case, then why would they interfere with Haruyuki chasing that body of light? And there was one more thing he definitely could not shut his eyes to. Before they fought, he had to ask this at least.

“If you say you’re not allies of the Society,” Haruyuki began, staring at the headgear-shaped face mask of the metal color, “then how can you just be standing around here?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“A mere three kilometers away, only a few minutes ago, two members of Great Wall were murdered several times by ISS kit wearers. If you were this close, why didn’t you go help them?”

As he gave voice to this question, the image of Ash Roller being pierced through the chest and scattering in all directions flashed across the back of his mind, and Haruyuki once again felt the absolute-zero rage race through his veins. A howl he couldn’t suppress slid out from under his visor, a growl.

“Ngh!” The metal color swallowed his breath.

Haruyuki took a step toward him and glared at his opponent from beneath his visor. “Or is it that you don’t give a crap how much the subordinate members of your Legion suffer, or if they end up in total point loss?” he said, in a voice that was almost not a voice. “And you think someone like you has the right to call anyone a coward or a traitor?”

Spitting words like pale flames, Haruyuki was still not aware of another enormous contradiction that existed within his own self. What he desired as the sixth Chrome Disaster was revenge on the layered avatar Black Vise, who had killed his beloved in the distant past, and the end of the Accelerated World itself, which was nothing more than a cradle for this kind of tragedy. And naturally, that included the annihilation of the people Haruyuki now loved.

However, the Haruyuki left inside the Armor as Silver Crow still believed in and desired the many bonds he had built in this world. Which was exactly why he got angry when his parent Kuroyukihime was insulted and felt that he couldn’t forgive the Green Legion senior members for not protecting Ash Roller. Perhaps this double standard was proof that Haruyuki was still not completely fused with the Armor of Catastrophe, or perhaps it was because the Enhanced Armament Destiny itself had originally possessed these two faces. That said, this internal struggle did not show on the outside. Haruyuki took another step, an ever-more-intense aura gushing out of him.

“Th-that was…” The dull gray metal color, holding his ground, hung his head slightly and groaned. “We have something important—”

“There’s nothing more important than the lives of your Legion members! Guys who don’t even try to protect their friends are worse garbage than the Acceleration Research Society. Right now…I am going to make you both disappear from the Accelerated World!!” Crying out sharply, he sliced sideways with the longsword on his shoulder.

The eyes of the downcast metal color shone, accompanied by the heavy sound of vibration. Slowly raising his face, he stared at Haruyuki. “What do you…know? We, our king…Do you know how much time we’ve sacrificed for the Accelerated World…Who exactly has been protecting and maintaining this world you all happily come to have fun fighting in…”

At that moment.

The Green King, who had kept silent until that point, made a move. That said, he simply took a step back and crossed his arms behind the great shield. However, the metal color seemed to take some kind of intent from this movement and stopped speaking, dropping his head as his entire body stiffened with a snap once more. Finally, he lifted his face and spoke as if he had decided something.

“Right from the get-go, I didn’t think we could do this without fighting you, aka the Catastrophe. Action before words. All that’s left is to talk with our fists.” He drew back his right foot, bending at the knee, and in a sudden change, danced about with light, nimble footwork. He raised his massive fists and readied them in front of his body side by side. “Third seat of Great Wall’s Six Armors, level seven, Iron Pound. We’re not waiting for the meeting of the Seven Kings in three days; we’re getting rid of you right here and now!”

Taking in the proudly shouted name, Haruyuki opened his mouth under his helmet. But he couldn’t name himself, couldn’t shout back, member of Nega Nebulus, Silver Crow. Even if his mental state was abnormal, he was all too painfully aware that the way he was now, he had no right to that title. Thus, he murmured the name of the cursed armor, “Sixth Chrome Disaster.”

Perhaps in response to this name, the dark aura rising up from all over the Armor abruptly increased in strength. As his upper body continued to sway rhythmically, the enemy metal color Iron Pound responded with a pale-blue aura lodged in his glove-shaped fists.

If the Six Armors was the name of a leader group equivalent to the former Nega Nebulus’s Four Elements, then the avatar before him was a powerful fighter who was ranked fourth in the enormous Legion Great Wall. And he was two levels ahead of the currently level-five Haruyuki. This opponent had power on such a different level that, normally, Haruyuki’s chances of victory would be slim, even if he took on the challenge prepared to die.

But now, he thought of Iron Pound up against him as nothing more than an annoying object. His true objective was the Green King. The distrust and rage he felt toward Green Grandé—not only had he not gone to rescue Ash Roller, supposedly a subordinate in his Legion, but he had interfered with Haruyuki’s pursuit of the ISS kit—would not subside until he had taken the king’s head.

First, he would take care of this interloper with a single blow. Making this resolution to himself, Haruyuki placed his left hand on the hilt of the longsword and brandished it high in the air. The tip stopped at the peak, and just as he was about to start moving it, a vivid red line pierced his washed-out field of view—the attack prediction line. At the same time, the attack attribute information display began. PREDICTED ATTACK: INCARNATE ATTACK; RANGE/POWER ENHANCEMENT: STRIKING TYPE…

But that was as much of the small text message as he got to read. Because with almost no delay after the moment the prediction line appeared, the enemy launched his Incarnate technique.

There was just the blink of a blue light, which even Haruyuki could not make out, despite the fact that his eyes could pick out a bullet fired from a rifle in the Accelerated World. Iron Pound launched a series of frighteningly fast left punches, blow after blow shooting out beyond his actual reach—which Haruyuki understood only after they slammed hard into his face and sent him reeling.

“Grr…raaaah!!”

A howl of rage slipping out, he braced his feet and forcefully brought down the longsword. The blade, tinged with the dark aura, came down on the head of the enemy just as he finished his attack.

Or not. What the sword actually caught was the afterimage of Iron Pound left in Haruyuki’s vision. The point of his sword dug deep into the heliport on the roof of Mori Tower, and the aftershocks from the power it contained produced sharp cracks several meters away. By that point, however, his enemy had already cut around two meters to the left, and his fist glittered once more.

Bam! Babam! The blows popped the sides of his helmet rhythmically. This time, there was no chance for the attack prediction lines to be displayed.

So fast!!

An incredible speed, exceeding even the calculation abilities of the Armor of Catastrophe. The force of a single blow wasn’t that great, but because there were so many of them, Haruyuki’s health gauge was shaved down nearly 5 percent. Given that this small technique was breaking past the incredible defensive power of the Armor, it was clearly an Incarnate attack, but the ease of use was somehow different from the techniques he had been hit with before.

As he pulled his sword from the floor and readied it in front of his chest to check the enemy’s movements, Haruyuki searched for the reason for this dissonance, and then realized what it was. Pound wasn’t calling the technique name that always accompanied an Incarnate attack. So the launch of the technique was abnormally fast, and it was also hard to get a grip on the timing. In the depths of his mind, fragments of the lecture from the Red King Scarlet Rain came back to life from what already felt like the long-distant past.

“The heart of an Incarnate technique is whether or not the image is firmly fixed in your mind. Ideally, you wanna be able to call it up as naturally as you do the abilities and special attacks you had from the start. You were concentrating for nearly three seconds from the time you crouched down to the time you moved. That’s way too slow! So first, you give your technique a name, so then you superimpose over the image with you shouting the name as the trigger…”

Something deep in his heart throbbed, but Haruyuki forcefully erased that emotion and sorted through the information in those words.

Just as Niko had said, unlike a normal special attack, calling out the technique name was not an action required by the system for an Incarnate attack. The purpose of shouting the name of the technique was to semi-automate the focusing of the imagination as a conditioned reflex, so to speak, and speed up activation. Currently, it took Haruyuki approximately 1.5 seconds to go from a natural, relaxed posture to finishing the release of his Incarnate attack Laser Sword. However, without calling the technique name, it took more than four seconds.

But the reason calling out the technique name was required to begin with for normal Brain Burst special attacks was because it was one restriction on releasing a powerful attack. Obviously, it made surprise attacks from behind impossible, but more than that, it informed the enemy of the attack timing and gave them precious moments to respond. Which was why the strongest attack was actually a silent special attack. And the attack Iron Pound was pummeling him with at that moment was precisely that. A special attack without the call of the technique name. He barely took even a tenth of a second from readying his fists to launching the punch. It was only natural that the Armor’s attack prediction line display couldn’t keep up.

However, no matter how fast, the attack was, in the end, nothing more than a bare-handed punch. Pound’s reach also appeared to be extended with Incarnate, but it still wasn’t greater than the reach of Haruyuki’s sword. If he met his enemy’s initial onslaught with a slashing attack, the sword would land first.

Leisurely raising the sword to chest level, Haruyuki concentrated on his enemy’s movements. The way Iron Pound danced about in small steps, his heels almost floating, made it hard to predict what he would do next. But although he could neglect the technique call as much as he wanted, he couldn’t hide the increase in overlay accompanying the activation of an Incarnate attack.

“Sh!” A sharp breath.

At the same time, Haruyuki saw the aura enveloping his enemy’s left fist flash brightly.

The timing of his counterattack was perfect. Immediately before Iron Pound launched his punch, Haruyuki sliced downward with his longsword. The distance between them was just enough that his opponent’s fist could not reach him, but the tip of his sword could just barely reach his opponent. The power in the blade could easily slice through even the structures of the Demon City stage, so it should have bisected his enemy’s headgear mask. And yet…

In a move Haruyuki’s experience had led him to believe was impossible, Iron Pound threw only his upper body back, leaving his feet planted where they were. The deadly blade flowed straight down into nothingness, leaving a few sparks in its wake.

A feint.

The enemy pretended to throw a left jab, inviting Haruyuki’s attack. Successfully luring the sword in, he dodged it by simply leaning back, and then, no sooner had Haruyuki been drawn in deep than his enemy immediately shot his right fist out in a straight line, a large rifle bullet.

Again, there was no technique call. But the powerful, focused right hook of his enemy, wrapped in a thick aura, delivered a scathing shot to Haruyuki’s face the instant he finished swinging his sword. The impact was so great that he was surprised his helmet wasn’t shattered; in fact, the only reason Haruyuki managed to avoid that level of damage was because he had reflexively flapped his wings with all his might to push himself backward. Even still, the instant the bomb hit him, his head snapped back and his field of view went white. The power of the punch and the force of his own retreat sent him flying more than ten meters backward, reeling.

“Graar!” A howl of rage slipping out, he pulled his face back down. Tiny fragments of metal fluttered off from the cracks in his visor. Somehow, he managed to get the fitful magma of rage erupting in him under control enough to speak. “That technique,” he muttered. “Boxing?”

“Yeah.” Iron Pound nodded before him, smoothly pulling his extended fist back to bring both hands neatly in front of his mouth again. “There are basically no boxing-type Burst Linkers, so I guess I’m pretty hard to deal with at first glance.”

He spoke the truth. Haruyuki had never once before dueled a Burst Linker who used boxing techniques. There were a lot of blue-type “strikers,” who had hands specialized for punching attacks, and he had fought them any number of times. But this was the first opponent he had faced who had mastered techniques from the sport of boxing to this extent and whose duel avatar was a perfect boxer form as well.

Most likely, the flesh-and-blood player in the real world also trained as a boxer. It would be hard to otherwise explain the perfect succession of those terrifyingly fast left punches (jabs), or the defensive maneuver of throwing his body back like water flowing (swaying), and the single-blow special attack of the right punch (a straight).

The heavy weighting of “player skills”—abilities the flesh-and-blood player possessed in the real world—in full-dive VR games was said to have come about a few decades earlier. The tendency for players who did kendo or who excelled in memorization to do well in sword-and-sorcery VRMMO worlds was also carried over to the VR fighting game Brain Burst.

But this so-called initial ability bonus was not large enough to upset the balance of the Accelerated World. One reason was that there were very few sporty Burst Linkers to begin with. Given the fact that Brain Burst was in the end a net fighting game, most of its players were children who liked games, i.e., the indoor type.

Naturally, there were exceptions like kendo-team Takumu and track-and-field Chiyuri. But it wasn’t the case that the skills the flesh-and-blood player had learned were always reflected as is in the duel avatar. In fact, there were almost no such examples. Takumu’s Cyan Pile had been created with a pile rather than a sword, although he was a blue type, and Chiyuri’s Lime Bell was not a particularly high-speed-motion type. And Haruyuki himself, his obsession with first-person shooters would have been put to better use if he had been born a red type equipped with at least one gun rather than the empty-handed Silver Crow. This discrepancy itself was the second reason the initial bonus didn’t really affect the duel balance.

Still, that said, very rarely, a duel avatar was generated reflecting the knowledge, experience, and abilities of the flesh-and-blood player as-is. Avatars like that were called…

“Perfect Match,” Haruyuki murmured.

Iron Pound nodded. “But,” he said, “that’s not the only reason you can’t beat me. At Great Wall, yeah? We’ve spent the last few years exhaustively researching the Armor of Catastrophe, so that the next time for sure, you wouldn’t be allowed to wreak whatever havoc you wanted and we could completely eliminate you from the Accelerated World.”

“…Researching?”

“Exactly. Unfortunately, because of the mutual nonaggression pact between the six major Legions, we couldn’t touch the fifth when he showed up north of Shinjuku six months ago. But the sixth…We’re not letting you get away. We were planning to wait until the bounty was officially announced, but running into you here like this, we have no reason to hold back on subjugating you.”

As Iron Pound spoke his very composed words, Haruyuki stared at him coolly through his cracked visor. No matter how much of a Perfect Match boxing type he was, now that Haruyuki knew that, he had any number of ways to attack him. Or rather, the moment Pound acknowledged that he was a boxer, he essentially revealed he was only adept at close-range fighting, at best six meters—the length of one side of a boxing ring. No matter how fast he was within that distance, once Haruyuki maneuvered deep inside or outside that range, it would be a simple enough matter to negate those abilities.

First, he would catch him. And then he would skewer him with his Incarnate sword and throw him off the edge of the building, and that would be the end of it.

“Then I’ll show you that your research or whatever was absolutely useless.” Haruyuki quickly thrust his left hand forward. The palm, flanked by five open fingers, snapped backward. From the base of his wrist, a silver light shot out with a faint rasp. Wire Hook. Once the hook grabbed on, no avatar could get away from him.

Originally, this had been the particular ability of Cherry Rook, the fifth Disaster. Like the first’s Flash Blink and the second’s Flame Breath, the Armor had copied it. Using it required him to be exceedingly synchronized with the Armor, but Haruyuki had reached that depth. Being able to use the powers of past Disasters could actually have been the greatest power of the sixth.

Only moments earlier, Iron Pound had said they hadn’t touched the fifth, so they shouldn’t have even been aware of the existence of Wire Hook. There was no way he would be able to dodge at first sight a hook that was so small it was practically invisible, flying at a speed equivalent to that of a bullet—

Claaang! The dry metallic noise echoed across the roof of Mori Tower.

And then Haruyuki saw it. The ultimate capture technique, Wire Hook, wielded so powerfully against countless avatars including Silver Crow himself, had made a direct hit with Iron Pound’s rounded left shoulder and bounced off emptily.

“—!!”

By the time Haruyuki had swallowed his breath, the veteran boxer was already closing the distance between them in a terrifyingly fast charge. The two gloves readied in front of his chest began to shine a fresh blue.

“Hammer Rave!!” This time, the technique name was shouted sharply.

Countless fists covered his entire field of view. A storm of machine gun–like jabs launched from the left. In between, surging in from the right came straights, like rifle bullets and hatchet-like hooks. The total number was probably more than ten blows a second.

Haruyuki didn’t even have the luxury of tightening his guard. Fierce blows slammed into every spot on his upper body, pushing him up several dozen centimeters into the air, chin and arms thrown clumsily upward. Unable to counter or even move, he was in a state of shock delay.

Iron Pound slid in close to the reeling Haruyuki, drawing a blue afterimage in the air. He dropped down, and an even more concentrated overlay came to life in his right fist. Intuitively understanding that the finishing blow was on its way, Haruyuki frantically tried to command his metal wings. But they were much larger now, and the reaction time was the slightest bit duller. Just as he was finally able to generate some lift—

A right uppercut like the main artillery of a battleship caught Haruyuki squarely on his totally exposed and defenseless jaw, carving out a blue arc as it plowed into him.

The impact nearly knocked the brain right out of his head, and he rose up into the air, all four limbs splayed. Finally, he reached the pinnacle of the parabola and fell for a few seconds. Kawhud! His back hit the floor, and after bouncing once, he came to rest, arms and legs still shooting out at all angles.

In the upper left of his field of view, his health gauge was dyed yellow, half of it whisked away all at once. Although he knew he had to stand up, the impact was too deep—his thoughts were filled with failure, and a desire to not admit the truth of the situation had pushed Haruyuki to the precipice of a zero fill state.

Through the floor beneath his back, he heard sharp footsteps. And then a voice: “That’s the weak point for all of you. Doesn’t matter which one you are, something all you Chrome Disasters have in common.”

“Weak point,” Haruyuki groaned, lifting his head to glare intently at Iron Pound, who stood two or so meters away, showering him with a cool gaze.

“The performance of the Armor is definitely incredible,” the Perfect Match boxer started, sounding detached, a somehow pitying look popping up in the simple shape of his eye lenses. “And it looks like it’s eaten so far into you that you can even use the abilities of its former owners. But in the end, it’s still the power of something borrowed. It’s like a little kid without a license driving a super car with a thousand horsepower. You might be able to recklessly slam your foot down on the accelerator on a straight course and go as fast as possible, but you can’t take the corners properly. You’re wielding a power that’s not your own, so the most basic of all fighting basics…You don’t even see your opponent’s attributes anymore.”

He raised his glove-shaped right hand, and with his thumb (his only free finger), he tapped his left shoulder—the very spot Haruyuki’s Wire Hook had bounced off.

“I’m iron, which has the greatest piercing defense of even the metal colors. Even when I’m not enhanced with Incarnate, as if your little hook could stab me.”

So that’s it. Haruyuki finally became aware of his own mistake, his clenched fists creaking.

Metal-color duel avatars, not belonging to the normal color wheel, were as rare as or rarer than Perfect Match avatars. The only ones Haruyuki knew of—in addition to his own Silver Crow—were Cobalt Blade and Manganese Blade, close associates of the Blue King, and whoever it was that had given birth to the Armor of Catastrophe in ancient times, crowned with the name Chrome. Which was basically equivalent to his having no experience fighting them.

Thus, having enjoyed for such a long time the advantages of being a metal color, excellent at all kinds of defense, he hadn’t even imagined the disadvantages when that metal color was an enemy. If that wasn’t careless, then what was?

But it wasn’t just that. When the Wire Hook bounced off Iron Pound, if it had been a technique he had generated himself and used for many years, he would have instinctively understood which opponents it wouldn’t work as well on. And during the fight with the fifth Disaster, aka Cherry Rook, six months earlier, Rook indeed hadn’t tried to use the Wire Hook on Haruyuki. That was probably because he knew it was likely to bounce off his metal-hued armor.

The power of something…borrowed. Still flat on his back, Haruyuki had barely digested those words when Iron Pound spoke again, even more quietly.

“After analyzing the Armor of Catastrophe and searching for a way to fight it, we came to a single conclusion. It’s not the power of numbers or a superstrong Incarnate technique that can defeat the Disaster, it’s just thoroughly polished basic techniques. Ever since, the Six Armors of Great Wall have spent an enormous amount of time refining our techniques, in order to bring our strongest basics into the domain where they exceed even the most powerful Incarnate. So that the next time, for sure, we would eliminate the curse gnawing at the heart of this world, without having to rely on the power of the kings.”

Fshk! The air snapped. Pound had probably sent off a left jab into the air, but Haruyuki’s eyes couldn’t catch even the afterglow of the aura piercing the space.

“All five Disasters who’ve shown up so far were dealt with by the kings themselves. Heading into the field, courting the risk of the sudden-death rule that comes with level nine, right? But there’s no greater disgrace for those of us who guard the king. This time for sure, we—no, my hand—will stop the Catastrophe. Sorry, but you’re outta here, Silver Crow. While you’re the newborn…and weakest Disaster.”

Weakest.

The instant the word resounded inside his helmet, a boiling storm of emotion whipped through Haruyuki’s entire body—before concentrating in a single point on his back.

Kill. Kill, kill, absolutely kill!!

The rage was dizzying. Rather than settling into the depths of the Armor, this energy took form, jetting out through a gap in his back; it felt like something being yanked out of him. And then stretching out behind him were countless long, sharp metal segments joined together—a tail. The emblematic organ of the sixth Disaster Haruyuki had himself severed with his own Incarnate at the end of the Hermes’ Cord race.

The tapered knifelike tip of the tail stabbed into the floor, and using the reactive force from that alone, Haruyuki gradually pushed his body up, arms and legs still splayed. When he was finally standing again, he leaned forward, armor clanking. Gripping the longsword in his right hand, shaking the talons of his left, he howled like a beast.

“Grar! Raaaar…Kill…Kiiiiilllll…” The bloodlust and rage racing through him became an inky black aura and shot outward, sending cracks radiating through the Demon City stage. His earlier reflections on his error also were sent flying off somewhere, and he tensed himself to slice out blindly.

Iron Pound didn’t seem to even flinch when faced with this Haruyuki. He simply readied his fists peekaboo style. In the eye lenses that could be seen on the other side of those iron gloves was an unwavering resolution and confidence, and a hint of pity.

I’ve seen those eyes somewhere before, Haruyuki thought, with what shred of rationality remained to him.

It was…Right, when he had taken part in the battle to subjugate the fifth Chrome Disaster six months earlier. At the very end of the intense fighting, when the Red King Scarlet Rain was on the verge of eliminating her own parent, the fifth Chrome Disaster, with her Judgment Blow—she had had the same look in her eyes then. Cherry Rook, drowning in the Armor’s power and swallowed up by rage, existing only to attack and devour others…Niko had gone to free Haru from the curse that was this armor.

The instant he became aware of this, Haruyuki raised the sword in his right hand up high and thrust it down at his feet as hard as he could. He peeled away one stiff finger at a time and let go of the hilt, and then let his arm fall away, an attempt to control the spasming violence sweeping through him.

Abruptly, in the back of his mind, he heard a howl of annoyance.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! TAKE UP YOUR SWORD. CUT DOWN YOUR ENEMY, RIP HIM APART, DEVOUR HIM SO THERE IS NOT A SHRED LEFT.

The one speaking to him was the Beast living in the Armor of Catastrophe, a pseudo-intelligence that had spent an eternity inside the Armor, made up of the concentration of negative wills carved into the Disaster by its previous owners.

All data in the Brain Burst central server—also known as the Main Visualizer—were supposedly stored and calculated in a form based on human memory. Thus, an object stained with a very strong emotion had something that could have been called an independent mind—this is what Haruyuki had been told before. But the Beast was much too dominant to be called a simple pseudo-intelligence. The instant the warped voice echoed in the back of his mind, Haruyuki’s own thoughts almost scattered once more, but he endured it intently.

Shut up!! he shouted back with his heart. I can’t beat him if I just run around in a blind frenzy!! I— No matter what, I want to beat him, I have to beat him! I can’t lose to anyone who’d say there was anything more important than their friends’ lives!!

A groan coated with irritation came back soon enough.

GRAAR! IN THAT CASE, YOU NEED MY POWER MORE THAN EVER. YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A TINY, HELPLESS CROW.

Yeah, I am. I admit it. But, like…I can’t master all the Armor’s powers right now. With his speed, unless I’m using techniques I’ve practiced and practiced, I can’t fight back. So just shut up and give me strength!! You don’t want to disappear here, either, do you?!

This exchange was actually carried out in a relay of wordless thought in less than one-tenth of a second. And although the Beast howled unhappily once more, it apparently agreed with Haruyuki’s assertion, and surrendered part of its control over the avatar.

Naturally, this didn’t mean Haruyuki’s own rage had vanished. But it was a little different from the earlier crimson inferno that threatened to indiscriminately burn anything and everything. It was more sharply honed, fluid like a pale plasma, seemingly filling his avatar to its extremities.

With sharp talons stretched straight out, Haruyuki brought his hand neatly up in front of him and lowered his stance.

Iron Pound, who had started to close the distance between them, narrowed his eye lenses slightly. Apparently trying to gauge Haruyuki’s intentions in throwing down his sword, the pugilist stopped his advance just barely in range for a left jab, and considered his enemy.

Haruyuki didn’t move. He held his left hand in front, right behind, one leg bent at the knee, the other stretched out behind him. He simply focused his entire being on the fists of his opponent.

Now that he had somehow managed to succeed in cooling his head, it seemed like dodging or a surprise attack using the pseudo-teleportation ability Flash Blink might work. But given that it was a special attack, he would absolutely have to utter the name of the technique. And after seeing his enemy’s super-high-speed punch, he knew he wouldn’t be able to make it in time if he did. Even if he got the initiative, once he revealed the technique, it wouldn’t work again.

Though, since his special-attack gauge was essentially fully charged, he could also use the wings on his back to hover just beyond his opponent’s reach and attack with the long-distance attacks Flame Breath or Laser Lance. However, his opponent already knew that the sixth Chrome Disaster was Silver Crow, so Haru had to assume Pound had naturally prepared some strategy against his flying ability. And he couldn’t forget about Green Grandé, standing off to the side, arms crossed, silent like a statue. If Haruyuki tried a unilateral attack from up in the sky, the Green King could activate that Incarnate technique Parsec Wall again.

He needed to kill Iron Pound instantly while the king was silently watching. Even with the Disaster’s power, this was a very tall order, but he had no choice but to do it—he had to neutralize these two interfering with him, break into Midtown Tower, destroy the ISS kit main body, and if there were any members of the Acceleration Research Society nearby, he had to rip them to shreds; this was Haruyuki’s sole remaining reason for existing.

“Come,” he said quietly, a thin, dark aura enveloping his body.

In response, Iron Pound’s upper half swayed, and he began gracefully dancing about. With his nimble, rhythmic footwork, he steadily closed the distance between them.

Just like he’d said before, the Incarnate jab released from the left fist with no movement and no command was Pound’s greatest weapon. The damage from one blow wasn’t all that bad, but because the blows came in rapid succession and left you essentially stunned, you couldn’t dodge the heavy-hitting right straight that followed.

If this were a boxing match against a nimble out-boxer, Haruyuki would be advised to tighten his guard and close the distance while repelling the jabs. But this was not a six-meter ring; it was the large heliport on the roof of Mori Tower. There was too much space to retreat and come around from the side. Even if he did solidify his defenses, he wouldn’t find a chance to counter. His health gauge would only be carved away instead.

So his only chance at victory was to break through that Incarnate jab.

Hey, Beast. Right hand still raised, guard up, Haruyuki again started talking to the intelligence that lived at the back of his mind within the Armor. Your attack estimate precision’s better than mine. Pick out just when he launches that jab. I’ll handle it after that.

He received no reply in words, but he did hear a definite, faint howl of agreement—although it was almost indistinguishable from the anger.

In the next instant, the overlay wrapped around Iron Pound’s left fist grew faintly thicker. At the same time, a vivid red line—the attack prediction line—cut through Haruyuki’s view.

Reflexively, Haruyuki straightened his right hand and it glittered in a spiral motion. Pound’s Incarnate jab came flying at him almost immediately after the prediction line appeared; meeting the attack after visually confirming it would be impossible. Haruyuki could only rely on his instincts.

As the palm of his hand moved from outside to inside in a circular motion, Haruyuki felt a prickly, burning sensation. It had touched the glove in the trajectory of its straight-line attack. But if he simply repelled it here, the fist would quickly be pulled back, only to have the next punch launched, and then the next.

So Haruyuki didn’t repel it; he pulled it into his own movement.

Focusing on the image of sucking Iron Pound’s jab into his palm, he bent its trajectory down and to the left. The high-level technique of interfering with and defending against the vector of the enemy attack rather than the energy it contained was known as the “way of the flexible”—guard reversal.

Even an old hand like Pound probably wasn’t anticipating that his jab would actually be sucked in instead of blocked. His upper body shook, and his footwork became disordered.

Instantly, Haruyuki shouted inside his helmet, “Flash Blink!”

The avatar clad in the dull silver armor became substanceless particles and moved a mere meter. He slipped by Pound’s body on the side—all to reappear behind him.

Whirling around as he rematerialized, Haruyuki pressed the tips of his fingers against his enemy’s defenseless back and cried out, “Laser Sword!!”

Compared with Pound’s Incarnate jab, Haruyuki’s Incarnate attack took far longer to activate. If Pound had immediately taken evasive action, he might have avoided a direct hit.

But the Perfect Match boxer’s reaction was slow precisely because he was so perfectly matched. In boxing, hitting the back was a violation of the rules. Your opponent would never actually go around and attack you from behind.

Naturally, Pound also knew all too well that there was no such rule in the Accelerated World. But it wasn’t such an easy thing to erase the reaction drilled into his real-world body. It was the same with Takumu, who been traumatized by the jabbing technique in kendo and so had stiffened up in the face of Dusk Taker’s piercing attack to his throat. And that was to say nothing of the irregularity of an attack on the back after a very short teleportation.

The momentary stiffening that came over Pound was Haruyuki’s greatest and last chance in this duel. The jet-black blade that surged out of his right hand made contact with a crash.

Even the iron armor and its superior physical defenses could not defend against an Incarnate attack launched from a distance of zero meters. The sword pierced the critical point of his heart, and Iron Pound threw his head back, a cry of anguish slipping out.

“Ngah!”

But Pound was level seven. He did not die in that one blow, but instead tried to get distance with a desperate forward dash.

Normally, Haruyuki wouldn’t have been able to follow with a pursuing attack, given that his right arm was fully extended and his big technique was newly spent. But in another reaction of instinct, he fluttered his right wing with all his might. The kinetic energy generated gave his avatar just enough torsion power to attack. Generating instantaneous thrust with his flying ability in the middle of battle to maneuver in three dimensions was Haruyuki’s own original technique, Aerial Combo.

Haruyuki roared, transmitting the sharp spiral force from his back into his shoulder and then down into his right arm. “Unh…Aaaaaah!!”

Skreeeenk!! The earsplitting sound of metal ripping apart metal reverberated and then disappeared.

Silence fell over the roof of the evening-clad Mori Tower. The silhouettes of the two fighting melted into each other completely and cast a long shadow on the broad floor.

Both arms dangled loosely from Iron Pound’s sides, and the strength slid out of his legs as well. Supporting this tough body was the right arm of Chrome Disaster, penetrating deep into his chest from behind. The sharp talons had dug into the opening gouged out of the Armor by the Laser Sword.

Arm buried in Pound’s body from the flat of his hand up to his shoulder, Haruyuki abruptly heard a low voice in his ears.

“If you’ve…mastered…this kind of technique…then why…the power of darkness…” Having gotten this much out, the Perfect Match boxer turned into countless polygon fragments and scattered.

Once the massive light effect was over, all that was left was a small flame—the dull gray of Iron Pound’s death marker flickering at Haruyuki’s feet. Looking down at the flame, Haruyuki shot off in a cracked voice, “What cultivated the Catastrophe to this point…was probably your rejection and lack of understanding.”

Naturally, the shimmering marker no longer responded. But Haruyuki continued quietly. “This darkness…is definitely in anyone’s…”

The rest was swallowed up in his chest, because in the back of his mind, the Beast raised its sinister voice.

I know, Haruyuki responded to that voice. The real show starts now, huh…

He turned around, armor clanking.

His gaze landed on an enormous figure carrying a massive cross-shaped shield, arms casually folded. The Green King, Green Grandé, nicknamed Invincible. Although his right-hand man had just been taken down before his eyes, those amber lenses were filled only with a tranquil and mysterious light.

According to the fragmentary memory Haruyuki shared with the Beast, the Green King was the lone Burst Linker who had been present at the destruction of all of the first four Chrome Disasters.

He hadn’t attacked them directly, but he had held fast against the attacks of the rampaging Disaster with his great shield Strife and created the moment for those fighting with him to attack. In other words, if the Green King hadn’t been there, the destruction brought about by the Armor of Catastrophe would likely have been two or three times as great.

The Green King himself was, for the Armor and the Beast that lived in it, a most bitter enemy. The howl that echoed and bounced through Haruyuki’s mind was filled with such murderous lust that he was unable to control it. It threatened to explode even now.

Control yourself. This guy for sure, we can’t beat him by just attacking at random, Haruyuki said to the Beast, and slowly approached the enormous green avatar one step, then two.

“If you guys aren’t in league with the Acceleration Research Society like Iron Pound said,” he began in a low voice, staring at the king, who didn’t so much as twitch, “then why did you get in my way before?”

He waited three seconds, but of course, no answer came back to him. At the meeting of the Seven Kings a few days earlier, Green Grandé had said not a single word from start to finish.

“I guess it’s pointless to ask. Which means I’ll just have to have you tell me with your fists.” He muttered it half to himself, before dropping his stance to take on a battle posture.

But just before he could—

“If you wait a little longer, you’ll understand the reason.”

Although it was colored with a strong effect, the voice was clear and bright. There was no mistake. It was the same male voice as the one that had called out the name of the large-scale Incarnate technique Parsec Wall earlier. However, because it sounded like it was gradually rising up from the field at his feet rather than coming through the air, Haruyuki couldn’t be sure that it had come from the avatar before his eyes.

He stared hard, but the Green King still did not twitch, as usual. His bulk, arms crossed, was turned toward the northeast, at an angle of thirty or so degrees away from Haruyuki. Unconsciously following the man’s gaze, Haruyuki understood that he was staring at another mixed-use commercial building soaring up and sandwiching Shuto Expressway No. 3, the main tower of Tokyo Midtown.

The enormous spire, decorated with the sharp ornaments characteristic of the Demon City stage, caught the light of the sun as it was on the verge of setting and glittered redly. The roof, unlike that of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, tapered into a narrow needlepoint, and other than the small flying Enemies circling it, there was absolutely no movement in the building.

But somewhere inside that tower was the main body of the ISS kits, as it blackly devoured the Accelerated World. If it was completely destroyed, the terminal kits currently infecting a minimum of fifty Burst Linkers would have also stopped functioning.

The Haruyuki of that moment was not particularly interested in trying to save the Accelerated World or anything of the like. Just the opposite, in fact—more than half his brain was ruled by a destructive urge to systematically slaughter any and all Burst Linkers who stood in his way as enemies, and he didn’t care anymore if Brain Burst itself declined or disappeared as a result. But he first had to slaughter the Acceleration Research Society, which had made and distributed the ISS kits. It wasn’t just about the kits. They had set a cowardly trap for…and as they inflicted incredible pain and suffering on her, over and over and over…

“Ngh!!”

Suddenly, a fierce pain, a high-voltage current, pierced him from the depths of his back to the center of his head, and Haruyuki’s entire body stiffened.

The Beast, which he had kept under control to a certain extent up to that point, let forth a ferocious roar. Because the pitch of the cry, filled with overwhelming rage and bloodlust, was much higher than any that had come before, it sounded even more like a sobbed shriek.

The dark aura constantly blanketing the Armor of Catastrophe became ebony flames and spurted outward. The edges of the Armor covering his body seamlessly stood up like sharp blades, and the talons of his hands and feet took on an even more sinister form. The tail on his back flew whiplike out on its own, wound around the hilt of the longsword, and plunged into the ground a little ways off.

It yanked the blade out with a rasp of metal and stabbed it down once more, immediately in front of Haruyuki. The blade, dark yet mirror smooth, reflected the figure of Chrome Disaster, stooped body spasming irregularly. In the darkness beneath his cracked visor, eye lenses foreign to Silver Crow blinked strongly, tinged with an ominous crimson light.

“Grar…raaaaaaaar!” the Beast—and Haruyuki himself—roared, low and heavy. Thought and reason were blown away, and his head was filled with only a boiling bloodlust. It was clear that this was the “overflow” phenomenon, a fitful rampage of the negative will, but Haruyuki was no longer capable of being aware of this fact.

Forgetting even the presence of the Green King standing nearby, Haruyuki spread the metal wings on his back. He pulled the longsword in front of him out with his right hand and swung it to the side, readying himself to fly off the Mori Tower to raid Midtown Tower. But before he could—

“Wait. It’s not time for that yet.”

“…Grar…” Haruyuki turned to his right, a howl thick with bloodlust slipping out.

The Green King turned his heavy face mask toward Haruyuki. The mysterious amber eyes were quiet in contrast with the Disaster’s. There was no rage, no impatience, not even concern there. He was simply standing calmly, an ancient tree in the forest that knew everything and watched over all.

But for Haruyuki at that moment, the Green King’s attitude appeared to be a challenge he could not shut his eyes to. If he was going to interfere, then just cut him down. Spurred on by a senseless impulse, Haruyuki slowly brandished the sword in his right hand. He also placed his left hand on the hilt and creakingly bent his body, so that with a single blow containing all his power, all his speed, all his Incarnate, he could slice his enemy in two.

Of course, Haruyuki had no experience training with a sword in either the real world or the Accelerated World. So this technique was a borrowed power, as Iron Pound had perceptively pointed out earlier. It wouldn’t work in a battle competing at the ultimate speed.

However, right now at least, Haruyuki was already more than 90 percent not himself. His rampaging Incarnate had brought “Silver Crow wearing the Enhanced Armament Disaster” closer to the “true Chrome Disaster” than ever before.

Haruyuki didn’t know their name, but the third Disaster had been a blue-type double-handed sword user. Renowned for their skills, they could stand alongside even the Blue King, Blue Knight—aka Vanquisher—and in the end, they were banished from the Accelerated World by the sword of that very king.

The technique the third had left in the Armor moved Haruyuki’s body now. It was the same as with the Flash Blink of the first, the second’s ability Flame Breath, and the fifth’s Wire Hook. By syncing tightly with the Armor, or rather the Beast living inside the Armor, he could make the powers of the previous Chrome Disasters his own. This itself was the true power of the Armor of Catastrophe—no, of Haruyuki, who was now the sixth generation.

The Green King also seemed to recognize the rampaging depths Haruyuki had fallen to. He set his right foot out a step and now turned his entire body to face Haruyuki. The avatar was more than half-hidden behind the massive cross shield, but regardless, Haruyuki drew his own body back like a bow. The tip of the brandished longsword went over his back and touched the floor, lightly stabbing into it. Bent as far back as he could go, the avatar strained and creaked dully. The instant this tension had reached its limit—

“Gr…aaaaaaaar!!” Roaring out of him like an explosion, Haruyuki released every ounce of strength he had.

He charged forward with utmost determination, riding the propulsive force of his wings. The virtual air was compressed and rebounded, turning into a shock wave to rip a V into the hard floor of the roof.

The distance between them, more than ten meters, was a bit too much for a close-range-type attack. But Haruyuki closed the gap in nearly zero time, and Green Grandé appeared to never have had any intention of trying to get out of the way, at any rate. Even as he watched the blade cutting out a jet-black crescent as it poured down, his feet did not even twitch; he merely raised the great shield on his left arm a little higher.

Enhanced Armaments often changed color to match the avatar who owned and equipped them, and the Green King’s great shield and the Blue King’s double-handed sword were thought to be of this type. But the shield blocking Haruyuki’s way now looked like it shone a slightly clearer, deeper emerald green than the king’s armor.

Against this green wall rising up, with a sense of presence like a deep, ancient forest, Haruyuki brought down the longsword with the absolute maximum attack power he could currently produce.

A pure and vast energy, impossible to depict with sound and light effects, sprang up where shield and sword touched. Distorting space itself, abnormal vibrations threatened to shatter the world as they radiated outward, and the top half of the enormous Roppongi Hills tower shuddered in rippling waves.

And then the building, which should have been stronger than any other due to the characteristics of the Demon City stage, broke from its midsection into a myriad of minute fragments.

Having lost their foothold, Haruyuki and Green Grandé began to slowly fall among the object fragments raining down. However, they fell with sword and shield still locked; neither moved a muscle. The Incarnates of the two avatars facing off overwrote the reactions that normally would have occurred, allowing them to remain fixed in place as they fell.

In a movement reminiscent of sprouting vines, the green aura radiating from the great shield Strife went to wrap around the longsword that had once been called Star Caster. The inky black overlay that surrounded the blade burned the green back time and again, but the verdant aura sprouted endlessly and showed no sign of withering. So much like an enormous tree—the World Tree supporting the nine worlds in Northern European mythology.

I support the world.

The instant these words cut through Haruyuki’s mind, an image—or maybe a memory—infused within his consciousness. A vast, incredibly vast, time, and a battle repeated ad infinitum within it. But his opponent was not a Burst Linker. It was an enormous monster with a form that was not human—an Enemy.

Finally, the pair landed with a heavy thud on the mountain of fine rubble that was once the top half of the Hills Tower. At the same time, their auras waned, and, following suit, sword and shield also pulled back. Compared with the scale of destruction, it was an almost impossibly quiet curtain falling. When Haruyuki came to, the storm of anger raging within him had died down as if it had never been; even the Beast was silent.

“Taking a blow like that so coolly,” he murmured. The dark effect had faded from his voice, and even the phrasing brought his own sensibilities to the front. But unaware of this, Haruyuki lightly jumped back to gain some distance. The sand crunched softly when he landed, and he lowered his blade.

Also lowering his shield, the Green King shook his head solemnly, eyes still on Haruyuki. He indicated a spot on the shield with his right hand, as if to say he was not cool.

When Haruyuki looked very closely, the upper edge appeared to be chipped a mere three millimeters or so in one place. Having made nothing more than a scratch that could hardly even be called a scratch, Haruyuki felt he had just been told you win, and he grinned wryly, unconsciously.

“I was trying to cut you down along with that shield, you know,” he remarked as he glanced around.

Due to the surplus energy of their clash, Mori Tower had been reduced by 50 percent, half as tall as it had originally been. The surrounding buildings also leaned and crumbled on one side.

The small flame shimmering a dull gray on the sand a little ways off was no doubt Iron Pound’s death marker. It had fallen along with them in the building’s destruction. Right now, Pound was no doubt anxiously observing Haruyuki and Green Grandé facing off in his ghost state, where all he could do was watch over the situation around him.

Through the direct clash of his Incarnate alongside the Green King’s, and the glimpse of his opponent’s memories, Haruyuki felt like he could understand to a certain degree what Iron Pound had said before the fight, about how much time their king had sacrificed to the Accelerated World. He turned his gaze back on the king.

“The majority of the points supplied through Enemy hunting in the Accelerated World…You actually earned them by yourself, huh?”

No answer. But the silence was colored with an air of affirmation.

For the thousand or more Burst Linkers who existed, burst points were in-game currency, experience points, and life itself. Their number increased if you won duels and decreased if you lost, but a large quantity were also exhausted in using the acceleration commands, buying items in the shop, and processing level increases. Considered rationally, the supply of points didn’t seem to match up against that pace of consumption. The fact was that each month, Burst Linkers used up an amount of points largely in excess of the monthly increase brought to the world by new Burst Linkers’ initial hundred points.

The shortfall was supposedly made up for by high-level Linkers hunting Enemies in the Unlimited Neutral Field, but still, Haruyuki had always thought it strange that those points were so widely redistributed in the Accelerated World.

The Green King had hunted the high-ranking Enemies that lived in dangerous dungeons, transferred the vast sum of points he’d earned onto various blank cards from the item shop, and then fed those cards to the lower-ranking Enemies living in the field, which would then drop as loot. At some later point, other Legion hunting parties would then defeat those Enemies that had eaten the cards, in turn receiving an enormous amount of points as a bonus to the initial kill. As a result, his farmed points spread out among the low-level Linkers of the midsize and small Legions.

Not unlike a great tree supporting countless smaller lives with the sunlight and water stored in its massive body.

But no matter how he thought about it, Haruyuki didn’t understand the reason the Green King had provided this service for free for so many years. The hunters of the Enemies who had eaten the point cards wouldn’t necessarily be members of the Green Legion. In fact, the opposite case would naturally have been the overwhelming majority. In other words, the king’s actions substantially benefitted other kingdoms. Looking back on it, Haruyuki himself remembered being overjoyed when the prey he had brought down with an Enemy hunting party he had been a part of spit out an essentially impossible number of points.

“Why?” Haruyuki asked in a whisper, unable to understand the foundation for the king’s actions. He had shared points with all, even enemy Burst Linkers. But on the other hand, the lives of his Legion subordinates Ash Roller and Bush Utan had not been priorities.

There likely would be no response to this question, which could not be answered with a yes or a no. That was what he expected.

“It was all to stop Brain Burst 2039—also known as Trial Number Two—from ending in vain.” The silent king uttered his longest string of words so far, but the blow to Haruyuki’s soul came more from the details contained in those words, even if he didn’t really understand what they meant.

“Trial…Number…Two?”

“Aye. A long time has already passed since Accel Assault 2038 and the following Cosmos Corrupt 2040 were abandoned. It’s likely that this Number Two is equipped with whatever elements were missing from Number One and Number Three. Until those elements are embodied, we can’t let this world be closed.”

The information the Green King put into words in his stubbornly tranquil voice far surpassed Haruyuki’s processing abilities. Even so, he managed to summarize it into three key points and list them in his heart.

One: Brain Burst—in other words, the Accelerated World—was not the one and only.

Two: The Green King, Green Grandé, was working to maintain or prolong the life of the Accelerated World.

Three: Green Grandé knew the reason this world existed.

“You the GM?” Haruyuki questioned the giant in a tense, creaking voice. “Are you— Is it actually you who’s the admin for Brain Burst? Is it you manipulating thousands of Burst Linkers, making them dance? Making them fight?” He waited for a response with bated breath, not considering what he would do if the Green King assented.

Two seconds later, the king shook his thick face mask once. “Negative.” He paused for another second and then continued, “The authority we have been given is no different from yours. If this head is cut off, I will die, and if I die, I will lose points. Once my points are exhausted, I will disappear from the Accelerated World.”

“Then…why do you know things like that, that no one else knows?!”

“That is also negative. I am not alone in knowing the name Trial Number Two. Of the Originators, there likely exist some who possess more information than I.”

“…Origi…nators.” This wasn’t the first time he’d heard the word he parroted back. After the meeting of the Seven Kings four days earlier, the Red King Niko had uttered it in a trembling voice after appearing suddenly at his house. She hadn’t told him the specific meaning, but now he could hazard a guess. Most likely, the word indicated the first Burst Linkers, the ones without parents.

Hey, Beast. In the back of his mind, Haruyuki unconsciously called to the destroyer lodged in the Armor. Whoever it was who first gave birth to you was an Originator, too, right? You know anything?

In return, he heard an annoyed groan from the Beast, which had maintained its silence for several minutes even in the middle of the heated battle.

GRAAAR…I DO NOT. I ALSO HAVE NO INTEREST. MY OBJECTIVE IS DESTRUCTION AND SLAUGHTER ALONE. YOU, TOO, WOULD DO BEST TO THINK OF NOTHING BUT THE SLAUGHTER OF THE ENEMY BEFORE YOU.

This answer very nearly made Haruyuki smile wryly, but he got himself under control again before the grin reached his lips. The Beast might have been tame at that moment, but it had to have been vigilantly awaiting its chance to overtake Haruyuki over again. And more than that, Haruyuki was not Silver Crow now, but the sixth Chrome Disaster, so this was no time for laughing. He didn’t have the right to laugh, either.

I get it, he murmured. But you have to know, even from that one blow, that I can’t beat this guy so easily as all that. And…something’s weird. Even if we do fight, I want to get as much information as I can before that.

The response he got was the Beast simply returning a short howl, and then pulling back into the Armor.

Haruyuki took a deep breath and switched gears, staring once more into Green Grandé’s eyes. The amber eye lenses, not allowing a single emotion to slip out, looked back at him quietly.

“I get that for some reason, you’ve been trying to prolong the life of the Accelerated World, and that you’ve been hunting Enemies all this time by yourself to that end,” Haruyuki said, and then raised his voice. “But then why are you getting in my way now? It’s obvious that the Acceleration Research Society and the ISS kits are trying to destroy this world. I’m sure that building—Midtown Tower—is their base. My goal is to crush that base!”

“I told you. Wait a while and you’ll see,” came the brief reply.

The Green King turned his eyes up toward the building in question, soaring in the northeast, and reflexively, Haruyuki traced his gaze. Because Mori Tower was now half what it had been, the other tower seemed twice as tall. The blue-black spire had fallen silent; not a hint of activity could be seen.

“I’ve waited plenty long. If you’re trying to buy time…,” Haruyuki started to say, until—

Suddenly, far, far off in the eastern sky, he heard a mysterious sound. Like the ringing of an infinity of bells, the fleeting echo of thin glass shattering.

Turning his gaze forty-five degrees to the right, Haruyuki saw a thin seven-colored veil rip through the thickly hanging clouds hanging low over the Demon City stage. The aurora—no, that wasn’t it. It was a light signaling the start of the end of the world.

“…The Change,” he murmured, and the Green King nodded heavily. So this was what the king and Iron Pound had been waiting for?

“The Change” referred to the phenomenon in the Unlimited Neutral Field of the switching of stage attributes—Demon City, Purgatory, Primal Forest. When the Change occurred, hunted Enemies repopped, and destroyed objects were completely recovered. Naturally, the appearance and terrain effects of the field were also completely transformed, and any duelers or Enemy hunters caught up in the Change were required to abruptly change strategies.

The timing of the Change was random, but it was said that it happened at its quickest in three days of internal time (just over four minutes, real-world time) and within ten days at the latest. Since it was impossible to predict the timing, Green Grandé and Iron Pound must have been simply waiting in this place for days.

But why?

Even while Haruyuki tried to guess at their intention, the aurora wall approached at an incredible speed. When he looked closely, he could see that at the base of the light pouring down from the sky, the buildings crowded together in central Tokyo were instantly being overwritten with new colors and shapes.

Without even a mere thirty seconds passing from the time he first heard the sound of it, the aurora had reached Roppongi Hills and painted everything in a glimmering rainbow, transmitting a faint pressure to Haruyuki as it did. Immediately, a sensation of ascent, like being in a high-speed elevator, enveloped his body—but he wasn’t flying with his own wings. Because the half-destroyed Mori Tower had started to rapidly regenerate, Haruyuki and the Green King were being pushed up to the roof, where they had originally stood. At the same time as their ascent stopped and his feet stepped onto the hard floor once more, the seven colors of the rainbow faded and disappeared.

After watching the aurora wall charging off to the west, Haruyuki looked at his surroundings.

The gloomy dark blue of the Demon City stage was completely gone. In its place, the world was dyed a concentrated muddy red. The ground and buildings were all gray tiles, but from the obvious seams oozed a viscous red liquid—in other words, blood seeped out, flowed, and pooled everywhere. The sky was also a garish red different from the sunset. The very infrequently occurring Deadly Sin stage.

Unlike the Demon City, this stage had annoying attributes with a mountain of special effects, but of these, the one Burst Linkers had to be careful of was the fact that half of the damage done in direct physical attacks would bounce back at the attacker. In other words, it was very advantageous to long-range duel avatars. At least there weren’t any red types there now.

Chiyu’s super bad at this stage. She’s probably freaking out and complaining right about now.

After this momentary thought, Haruyuki forcefully cut off the flow of his thinking. If he thought even a little more about his friends in Nega Nebulus who were waiting for him at that very moment near the southern gates of the Castle, far off to the North, he had the feeling he would simply fly apart.

Focusing on freezing his heart, he shifted his gaze and confirmed that the Green King was still in his daunting pose a little ways off before he opened his mouth.

“So? The Change happened and now what?”

Other than the slickly bloody exterior, nothing appeared to have changed with Midtown Tower rising up to the northeast. He still did not understand the Green King’s reason for blocking his approach.

The reply to Haruyuki’s question came not from the king but a quiet voice behind him.

“It means…we missed this time, too.”

Turning around, Haruyuki saw the iron boxer sitting cross-legged in a pool of half-dried blood, dropping his shoulders lifelessly. It was Iron Pound, despite the fact that not even thirty minutes had passed since he was defeated by Haruyuki and died. Haruyuki thought, suspiciously, that it was too soon for Iron Pound to have regenerated—when he realized that the Change had one other effect: to ignore the sixty minutes of wait time for regeneration for Burst Linkers in the ghost state and bring them back to life.

Although he had managed to get away with only half of the dull, boring regeneration standby, Pound didn’t seem the least bit pleased. The boxer rested his slack gloves on his legs, resigned.

“Missed?” Haruyuki asked, furrowing his brow. “The Change now? What exactly were you guys waiting for?”

“Did you know that to a certain extent, there’s a pattern in the change?”

His question met with a question, Haruyuki’s scowl grew deeper. But he restrained himself and obediently shook his head.

Pound nodded once and then continued, “Just like duel avatars, you can divide the various attributes of the duel stages into rough groups. You could say the Ice stage and the Drizzle stage are water types, Lava and Scorched Earth are fire types, Primeval Forest and Corroded Forest are wood types, and Demon City and Steel are metal types. On top of these so-called natural stages, you have dark types like Purgatory and Cemetery, and holy types like Aurora and Sacred Ground. You with me so far?”

At these teacherly words, the Beast let out a groan of dissatisfaction before Haruyuki could, but thanks to that, Haruyuki himself lost the chance to be annoyed. When he silently gestured for the other avatar to continue, Iron Pound opened his mouth once more, standing up leisurely.

“Normally, there aren’t two stages in a row belonging to the same overall category. And the appearance rates for the eight categories of earth, water, fire, wind, wood, metal, light, and dark are basically equal. But, rarely, only the first six natural categories go on for a long time. In that case, the dark-or holy-type stage that appears after that has a very high level of purity in the attributes. Basically, it’s incredibly evil or incredibly divine. There are some other, detailed rules, but this is the rough idea. Through our analysis of the long-term patterns, we predicted a super-evil stage would appear at this time today, and we were waiting for it.”

“So then you’ve achieved your goal. There isn’t a stage more evil than Deadly Sin. It’s not a miss, it’s a bull’s-eye hit, isn’t it?” Haruyuki remarked.

“That is true.” Pound nodded lightly before shaking his head slowly from side to side. “But…this still isn’t enough. What we need is the darkest of the dark, the ultimate evil…the Hell stage.”

“…”

It had been eight months now since he became a Burst Linker, and having reached level five, Haruyuki couldn’t be said to be a newbie anymore. But still, when it came to the Hell stage, he had heard the name only a few times. Since he had merely the haziest idea of its special effects and looks, he didn’t react immediately. From the explanation up to that point, though, he had learned nothing more than the fact that Iron Pound and Green Grandé had been waiting for something, but Iron Pound hadn’t said one word about why.

“So you’re saying there’s some connection between the Unlimited Neutral Field turning into hell and you guys getting in my way here?” Haruyuki asked as he took a step forward from the tile oozing blood at his feet. It was getting harder to control his irritation.

Standing a few meters ahead of him, Iron Pound slowly raised his right fist, mouth still closed. The iron glove, open until that moment, was clenched into a tight fist with a squeak.

Haruyuki narrowed his eyes under his visor, but it appeared that Pound wasn’t trying for a rematch. He opened his left glove and held Haruyuki off, before turning his body toward Midtown Tower, soaring up five hundred meters to the northeast.

“If you look at that, you’ll understand whether you like it or not,” the iron boxer murmured, striking a curious, very un-boxing-like pose. He spread both legs far apart, thrust his wide-open right hand straight ahead, and placed his left hand on the elbow joint of his right arm.

Immediately, an intense blue light effect enveloped the tightly clenched glove. A special attack. Reflexively, Haruyuki braced himself, but no line of predicted attack popped up from the Armor. Pound didn’t even glance at Haruyuki, who was holding his breath. Instead, he glared at the enormous spire dripping with blood off in the distance, as he shouted the technique name.

“Rocket Straight!!”

The boxer’s right arm exploded, just a little below the elbow.

No, that wasn’t it—it jettisoned. The round glove and forearm cut away from the avatar and flew off, trailing bright-red flames. Even now that he had become the sixth Chrome Disaster, Haruyuki couldn’t help but be slightly baffled by this. This technique most certainly did not exist in traditional boxing, or any fighting technique, for that matter.

So you’re not a Perfect Match boxer avatar? Haruyuki suppressed the urge to shout it and chased after the flying fist—the rocket punch—with his eyes.

Whether it was orthodox or not, given that the technique took just five seconds from preparation to activation, it was wonderfully fast. It had an impact almost on par with the main artillery attack of the pure long-distance type, the Red King Scarlet Rain. Drawing out a long trail of smoke as it charged forward, the punch soared past the Shuto Expressway No. 3 and the buildings of Roppongi in the blink of an eye and closed in on Midtown Tower in the distance.

At that moment, Haruyuki saw something move near the very top of the massive, sharply tapered tower. It was unbelievably big—that was all he knew. The reason he couldn’t pick out its precise size or shape was because it was almost completely transparent. Even with Disaster’s super resolution power, all he could see was the strange distortion of the red ambient light around the pinnacle.

Straining his eyes intently, perhaps through some ability of the Armor or generosity of the Beast, the silhouette in the air where the light was distorted was emphasized and popped up clearly in his view. Colored a pale gray, the silhouette was strange: It was like a person, but also like a bird. It held tightly on to the tower with at least ten limbs, and an excessively round, enormous head turned toward the charging rocket punch.

“Ngh!” Haruyuki’s entire body stiffened unconsciously.

From the back of the transparent something, a wide, thin film spread out to the sides. No doubt about it: wings. Their span exceeded the fifty-meter breadth of Midtown Tower. The entire creature might have even been larger than the Super-class Enemy guarding the southern gate of the Castle, the God Suzaku.

The large, transparent wings were tinged with a dim white light. And then in the next instant, a beam of light jetted out from the center of the massive head.

The intensity of the light was such that Haruyuki’s enhanced vision burned pure white momentarily. The bright line, far beyond a mere laser, contained a terrifying amount of heat and swallowed up Iron Pound’s right fist as it soared forward to smash into the wall of the building. The fist evaporated in short order.

The laser beam kept going, shooting several hundred meters into the streets of Roppongi. The beam concentrated on one spot for a brief moment, and then there was an incredible explosion, like the impact of a large meteor.

“Hngk!!” At the same time as the choked cry slipped out of Haruyuki, the Beast also moaned quietly somewhere deep inside the Armor. The shaking that assaulted them was so fierce, it threatened to destroy the Roppongi Hills tower, even though it should have been sufficiently far away. While Haruyuki and Pound braced their feet to ride it out, the Green King alone stood as calm as ever. But Haruyuki caught a glimpse of the tiniest stiffening in even that broad back.

The strength of the ray of light that the transparent something released to meet the rocket punch far exceeded the level of power any duel avatar could muster up. That was clear from the width and depth of the crater left at the center of the explosion. So it wasn’t a Burst Linker, which meant that it had to be an Enemy. But if that was the case, the power of this Enemy was on par with that of the Four Gods—actually, taking into consideration the fact that its body was transparent, which made it hard to find the right moment to attack, this Enemy could perhaps even be said to rank equal with the Gods.

But why? Tokyo Midtown was supposedly nothing more than a simple landmark, far from the Castle. Why would such a powerful Enemy be guarding it?

“You see it?” Haruyuki heard the now-armless Iron Pound whisper nearby. Without waiting for Haruyuki’s reply, he continued, “Its proper name is the Legend class Enemy, Archangel Metatron. The last boss of the massive dungeon beneath Shiba Park. Or least it was.”

“Meta…tron.” He felt like he had come across the name in games and manga besides Brain Burst, but a large contradiction caught his attention, and he opened his mouth again. “The dungeon’s…last boss? But, I mean, not only is it not underground, it’s up on the top of Midtown Tower…?”

“I said, it was. Someone moved it. Probably they tamed it.”

“Tamed…the last boss…Can you even do that?”

“It’s impossible. Everyone thought so. Until about a week ago, real-world time, when Metatron suddenly appeared on the tower,” Iron Pound said, almost groaning, and then glared at the figure of the “angel,” which had disappeared completely once more.

“Contrary Cathedral, the massive labyrinth under Shiba Park, is one of the four great dungeons. And just like the name says, it flips internal attributes one hundred eighty degrees when a duel avatar steps on particular panels. From the holiest of sacred stages, Heaven, to the darkest of dark stages, Hell. And then back again. That last boss there, Archangel Metatron, has the totally annoying status of being invisible with a sudden-death attack and impermeable to all attribute damage. Its power weakens only when the dungeon attributes are Hell, and then our attacks can actually hit it…So as long as it’s where it belongs—in the depths of Contrary Cathedral—it’s not such a terrible enemy. I mean, it’s a bit tough, but as long as you step on the control panel for the boss room, you can force Hell attributes to appear whenever you want. At the very least, it’s waaaay easier to fight than the Four Gods at the Castle. But…”

Having heard this much of Pound’s explanation, Haruyuki finally felt like he was able to see the bigger picture. Without realizing it, he gave voice to a hazy supposition. “But once Metatron gets outside…the Hell stage almost never appears, so…”

The boxer nodded in a creaking motion. “Completely invincible,” he spat. “You can’t see it, and there’s no way to defeat an Enemy if your attacks can’t hit it. Right now, the area within two hundred meters of the top floor of Midtown Tower there is completely impenetrable; no one can get in. It’s basically a tiny Castle…”

Naturally, Iron Pound had no way of knowing that Haruyuki and the other members of Nega Nebulus had not more than an hour ago succeeded in their Castle escape mission. But they had been helped by so many coincidences that their success was more miracle than anything else. One wrong step, and he could have easily ended up in a state of unlimited EK with his beloved swordmaster and teacher.

Once his brain had gotten to this point, he clenched his hands tightly again, and cut off that line of thought. He squelched the smiling faces of his loved ones springing to life in his mind and painted over them with a black brush.

“So if you get close, and die in an instant, do you stay there in unlimited EK?” he asked in a low voice.

“No,” Pound replied, without looking at Haruyuki and seemingly oblivious to his momentary inner strife. “You die instantly, but the attack is just too intense. You can’t get that far into the Enemy’s reaction range, so you don’t end up in unlimited EK. If you put everything you’ve got into a dash right after you regenerate, you can just barely make it without taking the next laser. I tested that out myself.”

An ironic smile spread across the mouth covered by headgear, but soon disappeared.

“Our king has the greatest defensive power in the Accelerated World, and even he could only last five seconds against that light beam with full Incarnate defenses deployed, so there’s no way someone like me could do much of anything. Anyway, now you know the situation. What we’re waiting for here—and why we stopped you from charging into Midtown Tower.”

Even after Pound closed his mouth, Haruyuki remained silent for a while. He did indeed finally understand the situation. Iron Pound and Green Grandé had found the pattern in the change, so they were waiting up here on the roof of Mori Tower for the Hell stage that might appear during the next one. Because only in hell did the Archangel Metatron guarding Midtown Tower lose its power and become susceptible to attack. And the reason the Green King had gone so far as to deploy his Incarnate technique Parsec Wall to repel Haruyuki’s flight was…

“Are you trying to say…that was to save me from Metatron’s instant death attack?” Haruyuki asked, in a dangerous voice.

Pound shrugged lightly. “If we had known from the start that you—that Silver Crow had gotten so ‘Disasterfied,’ we prob’ly would’ve let you keep going. Save ourselves the trouble, and the points to set a bounty.”

Haruyuki gritted his teeth tightly, and the Beast roared briefly again. The dark aura rising up from his entire body shimmered and shook, but he suppressed the urge to attack. The hardness of Pound and the Green King had been beaten into him mere moments earlier. They were not opponents he could defeat by slashing wildly.

“Chances for the Hell stage to appear next increase three days from now in real-world time, on Sunday evening.” Glancing at Haruyuki out of the corner of his eye, Pound waved the remainder of his right arm around in circles as he spoke. “After waiting up here on this roof for nearly three months, we’re tired—no big surprise there. So the king and me are going to log out for a bit. You…at any rate, I’ll just say thanks. Looks like you helped out our Legion members.”

He stopped speaking for a moment before saying, as if to himself, “You’re seriously a weird one. You’re so deeply Disasterfied, and yet we’re having a conversation like this.”

“If you’re going to thank me, then you yourself…,” Haruyuki replied, quietly, ignoring the last bit of Pound’s muttering. But he cut himself off midsentence.

Pound and the Green King had apparently been waiting here for over three months of inside time for the Change now. If that bout of asceticism was for the purpose of attacking Midtown Tower, it meant that they too were deeply alarmed at the spread of the ISS kits and were working hard in their own way. They already knew that there was no point in smashing the terminals of the lower-level members; they had to destroy the main body.

“Bush Utan of Great Wall lost once to the temptation of the ISS kit, but he tried to get rid of it of his own volition before. That’s why he was attacked by the kit wearers. So…” Once Haruyuki had gotten this far in his strangled voice, Pound nodded lightly as he turned around.

“Yeah. The policy of the king and the Legion for this whole thing’s not to just go and pass Judgment on anyone. Most likely, at the meeting of the Seven Kings three days from now, the six Major Legions will agree on a unified policy for dealing with the Incarnate study kits or whatever…Although, naturally, that’ll be after they’ve decided on the number one item on the agenda, the Armor of Catastrophe.”

The iron boxer finished this little businesslike speech and walked over to the Green King a few meters away. They briefly exchanged words before starting to walk together. They were probably going to take the elevator at the southeast edge of the heliport down into the building, and then use a nearby portal to return to the real world.

Watching their backs as sure steps took them farther and farther away from him, Haruyuki thought with a mind that was somehow numb. Guided by anger and hate, I summoned the Armor of Catastrophe, and now this time, I really am the sixth Chrome Disaster. I tore apart those six ISS kit users who attacked Ash and Utan. I slaughtered them with an overly strong power that really doesn’t belong to me. I’m basically tracing out the same path as Takumu yesterday. With the darkness generated by the ISS kit, he completely and utterly crushed the PK group Supernova Remnant after they attacked him. What did I say to him then?

The instant his thoughts made it this far, his own tearful voice was replayed from a great distance in the back of his mind. I know you can fight this black power, too! You can fight it and break it and move forward again! You can, Taku!!

And then Takumu had stood and faced the darkness hiding inside him, just as Haruyuki had insisted he could: He had brandished his sword and magnificently cut free of the ISS kit parasitizing him.

I can’t do that, Taku. Looking down at the sinister talons of his own right hand, Haruyuki muttered to himself with a self-deprecating air, There’s not the tiniest bit of strength left in me, separate from this armor…but I’ve fused so deeply with it and the Disaster, maybe I didn’t have any real strength to begin with. The fight with Great Wall’s third-in-command was super hard, and I barely made a mark on the king. So the fourth I saw in the replay, and the fifth, who sent the Yellow King running with one blow, were way stronger. And if even they couldn’t escape the control of the Armor, then there’s no way someone like me’s going to be able to fight back now…

If Kuroyukihime had been there at that moment, she would perhaps have been exasperated—“Quite the trick there. You turn into Chrome Disaster and become so utterly negative!” But, naturally, he didn’t hear that voice now. Instead, from somewhere near the base of the tail growing out of his back, he heard the Beast speak, words mixed with a howl.

GRAAAR. YOU ARE THE PERFECT VESSEL BB PLAYER, THE ONE I HAVE SOUGHT FOR MANY YEARS. YOU ARE THE FIRST ELEMENT TO HAVE FOUGHT TO SUCH AN EXTENT SO SOON AFTER FUSING WITH ME.

What? Haruyuki lifted his hanging head and replied with a thought colored with a wry smile. Are you…comforting me?

GRAR!! Instantly, a howl thundered explosively in his mind. IF YOU HAVE THE TIME TO OFFER WANTON JESTS, THEN GO AND FIND OUR NEXT PREY!!

Still, you know, we first had our eyes on Midtown Tower, but we’re not going to be able to attack with any normal means, huh? You saw it, too, that serious laser before.

RRRRR. IF WE COULD OBTAIN THE THEORETICAL MIRROR ABILITY. OR…

At some point, he had started having a conversation with the Beast nesting inside of him. And then Haruyuki realized that Iron Pound, who he thought had left a while ago, was standing in front of the elevator tower, staring at him over his shoulder.

Wondering if he wanted a rematch maybe, Haruyuki shot a glare at him in return, and the boxer moved his truncated right arm as if to say Haruyuki had the wrong idea, before he opened his mouth.

“Nah, don’t worry about it. My eyes were just playing tricks on me, I guess. For a second, the color of your armor…”

Reflexively, Haruyuki looked down at his own body, but naturally, all he saw there was the evil form of the Armor. The color was, of course, the shadow-tinged chrome silver.

“Just forget it,” Iron Pound called to Haruyuki as he lifted his face again, and then shouted, “Listen, Silver Crow! You have three days left in the deferment they gave you! If you don’t completely remove that Armor there from your avatar before Sunday at one PM, the highest bounty in the Accelerated World will be put on you!!”

“And when it is, make sure you’re the first to come for my head. You want a rematch, don’t you?”

Not responding to Haruyuki’s retort, Iron Pound turned his back and quickly thrust his left glove up into the air—maybe a sign that he wouldn’t lose the next time? He then followed the Green King into the bloodstained elevator. The box covered in dirty tiles disappeared to the lower floors with an unpleasant slithering sound.

Left alone on the rooftop of the Deadly Sin stage building, Haruyuki murmured out loud, unconsciously, “Three more days, huh…”

If he thought about it calmly, that was the rest of his life as a Burst Linker. No matter how strong the Armor—the Enhanced Armament Disaster—might have been, if duelers came after him single-mindedly one after another whenever he was connected globally, his own powers of concentration would soon be exhausted. And you could have the most expensive sports car in the world, but if you drove it half-asleep, you’d get in an accident soon enough—well, the control AI would forcibly take control before that happened. There was nothing so fragile as a Burst Linker who couldn’t concentrate. In fact, basically all the Chrome Disasters, first to fifth, had lost in this way.

“Hey, what’re we gonna do, Beast?”

Naturally, it wasn’t as though his rage and urge to destroy had disappeared, but perhaps they had been burned up to a certain extent in the intense fighting with Iron Pound and Green Grandé; right now, resignation, emptiness, and self-loathing, seasoned with a dash of despair, were the stronger emotions in him. He was already annoyed with thinking about this and that, and when he started talking to the creature casually, it quickly responded with thoughts like a flare-up.

WE MUST GROW STRONGER, MUCH, MUCH STRONGER. STRONG ENOUGH TO EASILY SLAUGHTER AND DEVOUR THE ENEMY, WHETHER THAT BE AN ORIGINATOR OR A PURE COLOR…

“You sure are full of life, huh?” Haru laughed briefly beneath his visor.

The Beast—more precisely, the many negative memories and feelings incorporated into the Enhanced Armament Disaster—functioned like a pseudo-intelligence through the special characteristics of the memory medium. And its objective was very simple: Treat all Burst Linkers as enemies, fight them, beat them, devour them. Due to this simplicity, its mental control was very strong. The first, who had given birth to the Armor of Catastrophe itself, and the second and third, had, to greater and lesser extents but without exception, had their minds eaten into by the Armor and been transformed into terrifying berserkers. The number of Burst Linkers their hands had forever banished from the Accelerated World definitely didn’t stop at a hundred.

In other words, if he thought about it mechanically, currently, more than the ISS kits or the Acceleration Research Society, this Armor of Catastrophe = Beast = sixth Chrome Disaster = Silver Crow was a much more enormous threat, an enemy of the entire world.

In the final stages of the Hermes’ Cord race two weeks earlier, Haruyuki had summoned the Armor once, and he had not stopped at instantly killing the enemy before his eyes; he had tried to attack even the hundreds of people in the Gallery. He had just barely been pulled back into his original state with Lime Bell’s special attack, but he had felt then that the next time he called the Armor, he probably wouldn’t be able to return to his normal self again. That his own mind would be instantly erased, and he would simply be a presence raging in the darkness.

And now Haruyuki had actually set foot into that boundary region. He had summoned the Armor a second time, become more deeply fused with it than before. He had indeed let the anger take over and run wild for a time. But something had started to change in the middle of the fight with the difficult Iron Pound and through the great clash with the Green King. He was strangely quiet now, for some reason.

Was this proof that Haruyuki had already completely become one with the Disaster? Or was it not Haruyuki at all, but some factor within the Armor, on the Beast’s side?

“Hey, you…So, like, you…,” Haruyuki began saying to the Beast. And yet for so long, all this time, he had thought of it as the terrifying root of all evil, basically a time bomb lurking within his own self. “If you fight your enemy and win, and win and win and keep winning, until you beat the very last one, what’re you going to do after that?”

For a while, there was no reply. He wondered if maybe the creature hadn’t actually thought about what came after that, but finally, a low roar thundered deep in his head.

I DO NOT KNOW. IT DOES NOT MATTER. OUR PURPOSE IS SIMPLY TO DESTROY THE ENEMY BEFORE US AND NOTHING MORE.

“Heh, ha-ha. I guess so.” Haruyuki laughed briefly and nodded.

Now that had he summoned the Catastrophe of his own will and completely awakened it, there was a strong possibility that even if he turned to Lime Bell’s Citron Call and Ardor Maiden’s Purification, he wouldn’t be able to go back to normal. In other words, just like the Beast, Haruyuki no longer had anywhere to go home to. Because he had no guarantee that the instant he saw the faces of his friends in Nega Nebulus, he wouldn’t lose all reason like he had before and slash at them wildly.

Of course, at some point, he would have to leave the Unlimited Neutral Field and face Chiyuri, Takumu, Fuko, Utai, and Kuroyukihime in the real world. But Haruyuki had no idea what he should do or what he should say to his loved ones when that happened, to the point that he even had the thought that his only choice was to simply continue to wander in the Unlimited Neutral Field, where time flowed accelerated by a factor of a thousand. Attack anything that came into sight without discrimination, Enemy or Burst Linker, and defeat it. Wear himself down during the long, long hours, until he was on the verge of disappearing.

Then he might be able to get through it without feeling too sad. Even if he had to say good-bye to those very important people only halfway through their journey.

“Looks like we’re gonna be spending a lot of time together, huh, partner?”

All Haruyuki got in reply was a brief, displeased roar.

I can’t believe I can chat like this with that terrifying Beast now. And animals don’t usually really like me… As this thought wandered through his mind, he decided to head east for now, toward Ginza. He walked toward the edge of Mori Tower.

At that point, Haruyuki didn’t bother to concern himself with two important facts.

One was that if he had truly become one with the Armor of Catastrophe, aka the Disaster, then he wouldn’t be able to hear the Beast’s voice to start with. In fact, for a while after he summoned the Armor an hour earlier in the northern part of the Shibuya area, Haruyuki had been basically unaware of the existence of it—because he himself had become “the Beast” and had been rampaging.

He had become able to hear the consciousness’s voice in his head in the instant he tried to fight the control of the Armor with his own will—in the middle of the fierce battle with Iron Pound. Ever since, Haruyuki had fought while communicating at super-high speed with the Beast. In other words, battle power aside, this could actually be seen as proof that his level of fusion with the Armor was low on the mental side…but the Haruyuki of that moment wasn’t able to recognize this.

And the second fact, which Haruyuki had completely forgotten:

An hour earlier, as he had been about to leave the members of Nega Nebulus in front of the southern gates of the Castle and fly off to look for Ash Roller, Chiyuri had said, Haru, if you’re not back in an hour, we’ll pull the cable on the other side, okay?

As he prepared to fly off aimlessly from the eastern edge of the roof as a wandering mercenary, a reddish-purple system message flashed fiercely in the center of his field of view. DISCONNECTION WARNING. He was being disconnected.

It took a few seconds for him to realize what was happening. His friends had returned to the real world ahead of him through a leave-point, and now they were physically pulling out the XSB cable connecting him to the Unlimited Neutral Field out of his Neurolinker. The bloodstained scene of the Deadly Sin stage began to disappear, stretching out vertically like toffee. On the verge of being cut loose from the Accelerated World, he heard the brief howl of the Beast.

In addition to the usual rage and annoyance, the voice seemed like it also held the slightest note of some other, unfamiliar emotion.