2

Naturally, there were a few hurdles in making this impromptu sleepover actually happen.

Getting permission from Takumu’s parents, who definitely did not harbor any particular goodwill toward Haruyuki.

The right and wrong of Chiyu staying at the Arita house when they would be fourteen that year, regardless of the fact that they were childhood friends.

And, of course, Haruyuki’s mother.

Unexpectedly, the easiest of the three to take care of was the last. Haruyuki timidly typed out a brief mail to his mother, who was still at work, asking if it would be okay if he had two friends stay over. The response he got was brief: “If you make a mess, clean it up. I won’t be home tonight, so take care of things.”

It wasn’t clear if she had already planned not to be home or if she was taking the opportunity to go out on the town herself, or if she was actually being considerate of her son and clearing out of the house when his friends stayed over, but if his mother wasn’t going to be home, they could use the living room the whole night.

The next hurdle cleared was the first one: permission from Takumu’s parents. The simple sentence “we’re going to do homework” worked wonders.

The issue was the second hurdle. Wondering exactly how Chiyu herself and her parents would come down on the matter, Takumu and Haruyuki crossed the connecting bridge on the twentieth floor of the condo and rang the bell of the Kurashima home at 2108 of B wing. But…

“My goodness, Haru! And Taku! It’s been ages. Oh, Taku, you’ve gotten so big! How tall are you now…Oh my! A hundred and seventy-five centimeters?! You’re taller than my dear hubby now. You kids these days are really something! So why are the three of you going to do the tough homework? Oh, that’s right, you’re all in the same class this year, for the first time, hmm? When I heard you transferred to Umesato, Taku, honey, I was pleased as punch! But now things are going to be tougher for our Chiyu finally. If only both of you could marry her…”

It had been a while, and so Haruyuki and Takumu simply listened, baffled, at the stream-of-consciousness chatter that was Chiyuri’s mother’s specialty. However, here the lone daughter in question poked her head out from the kitchen and shouted, her face a raging conflagration, “Mom! You don’t have to say everything in your head! The pot’s boiling over!”

“Ooh! Goodness! Don’t let it! Turn it off! No, don’t turn it off, turn the heat down! Down!” As Chiyuri’s mother hurried into the kitchen, Chiyuri strode out into the hallway to take her place and glared down at them from the entryway’s step.

“Those faces aren’t we’re going to get up to something. Those faces say you’ve already gotten up to it,” she remarked. She did have a keen eye. And as two boys who had already gotten up to one fight, all they could do was cock their heads with a half laugh.

The mail Haruyuki sent before they came over had simply said, “Would you like to stay over tonight with Taku?” but Chiyuri was quick to whip aside that curtain in no time flat and see through to the heart of things. She had apparently showered at school after practice; her hair was half-dried as she stood there in a plain T-shirt, hands planted on her hips as she glared at them.

But eventually, she snorted softly. “Well, whatever. I’ll hang out,” she said quickly.

“Huh? R-really?” Without thinking, Haruyuki went for confirmation…stupidly.

“Weren’t you the one who invited me?!” As the corners of her eyes turned up sharply once more in irritation, he hurried to bow deeply along with Takumu.

Twenty minutes later, with a basket full of supper forced on them by Chiyuri’s mother, Haruyuki and his friends moved to the Arita home. He could never come home alone to the large, deserted, sparsely furnished three-bedroom condo in the evenings without feeling a chill, but returning with his two childhood friends, he didn’t have the time to think about things like that.

He went and dropped his bag in his bedroom, and after changing into more comfortable clothes, he launched his mailer before heading back out into the living room.

Fuko Kurasaki and Utai Shinomiya had told him about Takumu (Cyan Pile) being attacked by and then turning the tables on the PK group Supernova Remnant in the Unlimited Neutral Field, but Kuroyukihime probably also knew by now. No doubt they were all worried deeply, too. He needed to update them on the situation, but he’d never be able to explain in a mail the full details of the ISS kit and the fight between them.

So he simply wrote, “Takumu is okay. I’ll explain everything during the Castle escape mission tomorrow,” and sent the message. All three quickly responded that they understood, and in those concise replies, Haruyuki felt keenly their thoughtfulness.

Kuroyukihime, Fuko, and Utai had to have sensed long ago that something momentous, something that couldn’t be neatly tied up in the word okay had happened. However, there wasn’t the slightest hint of question in their replies. Kuroyukihime and the others implicitly communicated their intention to leave everything to the judgment of Haruyuki and Takumu.

But at the same time, if something Haruyuki and Takumu couldn’t take back happened, the responsibility would also sit squarely on their shoulders.

Twenty-four more hours. The two of them—no, three of them with Chiyuri—had to make it through this one night so that Takumu didn’t lose himself again in the interference from the ISS kit. They could do it. The three of them had been on countless adventures together since they were little.

Having thought things through this far, Haruyuki suddenly realized something and his fingers froze.

He hadn’t had any specific purpose in inviting Chiyuri to their impromptu sleepover party. It had been simply the expectation, the near conviction that the three of them could get through it somehow.

However. A certain power Chiyuri possessed…If they used that, then could they maybe remove through the system itself the parasite causing Takumu so much agony? Given the utter irregularity of the situation, he couldn’t even count on the possibility, but still, it was worth a try.

“Kuroyukihime, Master, Mei…” Haruyuki softly called to his three missing companions. “I know, I just know we’ll manage something. Because Taku and Chiyu…they’re my best friends.”

Taking large strides, Haruyuki yanked open the door to the living room, where something smelled delicious.

What Chiyuri’s mother had prepared for them in a mere half hour was a soupy curry with plenty of summer vegetables. All they had to do was heat up some of the rice stockpiled in the Arita freezer and set out some iced jasmine tea, and then, just like that, a splendid, ample dining table appeared before them.

After a hearty “Let’s eat!” the threesome chowed down wordlessly. Even Takumu, who hadn’t eaten anything since the morning, seemed to have managed to get back some of his appetite somehow. Or maybe it was the power of Chiyuri’s mother’s cooking, which was impossible to resist, especially when you were carrying around a heavy emotional burden.

“Aah! Eggplant’s totally different when you fry it up,” Haruyuki proclaimed, a blissful expression on his face as he stuffed his cheeks full with eggplant slices that had been fried in olive oil before being gently simmered in the curry sauce.

“Fried and boiled eggplant’s always delicious!” Chiyuri cried out in reprimand.

“No, but unfried eggplant’s basically a sponge you can eat. Deep-fried eggplant, though, that’s the food of the gods.”

“Oh, come on! You have the taste of a child! You don’t even get the magical delight of eggplant roasted and peeled and then eaten with some ginger and soy sauce!”

After watching the back-and-forth between his friends, Takumu cleared his throat. “Okay, okay, you two. Fried eggplant and roasted eggplant are both delicious, but the best is when it’s pickled. That bright blue, pickled in brine—that is the taste of summer.”

At this very un-teenager-like declaration, Chiyuri and Haruyuki exchanged a look and let out a long “Whoooooaaaa” at the same time.

“Sorry to say this, Taku, but for me, pickled eggplant’s a bit…that’s when it’s like a sponge.”

“Yeah, me, too. I know you’re a blue type, Taku, but that you’d look for blue even in pickles…”

“Wh-what? This has nothing to do with my avatar’s color!” Takumu looked genuinely hurt, and Chiyuri patted his shoulder, grinning.

“Ah-ha-ha! Sorry! Sorry! To make up for it, I’ll ask Mom to do some eggplant, too, the next time she makes her famous pickles!”

As they chattered lightly, Haruyuki was aware in a part of his mind that it had been a fairly long time since just the three of them had had supper together like this.

The circle that bound Haruyuki, Chiyuri, and Takumu at the moment was maintained by an incredibly subtle balance. The relationship between Takumu and Chiyuri, who started dating in the winter of fifth grade, had been reset with the backdoor program incident last fall, and they had been estranged for a while after that. But Takumu transferred to Umesato Junior High in the third term of last year, and then, in the first term of eighth grade, Chiyuri ended up becoming a Burst Linker, too, so the distance between them as friends, including Haruyuki, had begun to close once more, albeit awkwardly at times. And going through the difficult fight with the Twilight Marauder, Dusk Taker, when he attacked them not long after that, once again cemented the circle that connected them. Or that’s what it had seemed like.

But that relationship was built on being Burst Linkers, on being members of the Legion Nega Nebulus. If, hypothetically, one of them was to lose all their burst points and all memories of the Accelerated World, would the three of them be able to maintain this bond? Haruyuki didn’t know.

The one sure thing was that this was not the time to cower before hypothetical dangers. They had to charge toward all obstacles head-on, break through, and race toward their sole and ultimate goal. Toward the horizon that was level ten, the objective of their Legion Master, Kuroyukihime.

As he reaffirmed his resolve, Haruyuki went to reach his fork out toward the nearly empty curry bowl. But just as he was about to—

“Haru, since you like them so much, you can have my eggplant! In exchange, I’ll be taking this little lovely!” Chiyuri said, grinning as she dropped a slice of eggplant onto his plate and picked up a large chunk of chicken on her way back out.

“Ah! Aaaah! You! My precious, precious baby that I raised—I mean, kept aside…!”

“Huh? You shaid behore that ehhplan was a hundred times hetter than hicken.”

“I did not! Spit that out and give it back!” Tearing up, he fought valiantly, but the soft, stewed, juicy chicken meat was chewed up in Chiyuri’s mouth before his eyes.

“Ah, sho hood. To make this delicious flavor last longer, I’d even use the ‘acceleration’ command.”

“D-dammit!” As Haruyuki stamped his feet against his chair in frustration, Takumu watched with a slightly exasperated look, but eventually…

“Pft! Ha-ha! Ah-ha-ha!” He laughed cheerfully out loud.

Chiyuri and Haruyuki were quick to join in. And the threesome kept laughing and laughing, forks in hand.

After they worked together to clear the table and do the dishes, it was homework time as advertised.

They moved to the sofa set on the west side of the living room, huddled together, and launched the homework app. In the specialized software, developed by the major education corporation that was the managing parent organization of Umesato Junior High, the specifications were utterly inflexible to the point where no copying and pasting of answers whatsoever was permitted, and it was also impossible to view another person’s screen, even if connected through an ad hoc or direct wired connection. If you used the “Burst Link” command to dive into the blue world of the initial acceleration space, those restrictions were all rendered null and void, but unless it was at school five minutes before homeroom started, they couldn’t allow themselves the luxury of accelerating to take care of their homework.

And so the three friends shared information with one another using the rather dated method of spreading out A3-size electronic paper on the glass coffee table and then writing by hand. But, in the end, it took care of their math and Japanese homework in just forty minutes. If it had been Haruyuki working alone, the whole thing would have taken twice as long.

They looked at the clock and saw that it wasn’t even eight yet, so the evening turned into an old game tournament, featuring selections from Haruyuki’s collection, something else they hadn’t done in a very long time. They connected the hardware—over thirty years old, so that if it broke, even the manufacturer couldn’t repair it anymore—to the flat-screen TV on the wall, and, enjoying even the roughness of the resolution (1080p), they got entirely and gleefully carried away by games replete with violence almost never seen in modern games.

Once the hands of the clock had swung past nine thirty, the three took turns in the bath—naturally, they couldn’t get in together anymore like they used to way, way back—changed into their pajamas, and came together once more in the living room. They put away the game console and then laid out three bouncy folding mattresses, pillows, and blankets on the floor.

“Okay, then.” Chiyuri, in light-green pajamas with a small cat print on them, looked at Haruyuki and Takumu in turn and said, grinning, “Both of you, sit down there.”

“Huh?”

“O-okay.”

They hurriedly drank down the iced tea they had poured after getting out of the bath and sat down alongside each other on the mattress in front of Chiyuri, who was still standing. The fact that they were both sitting in the formal style on their knees was perhaps because of the knowledge etched into their brains and hearts since childhood that when all was said and done, they were Chiyuri’s subordinates.

The smile still on her face, arms crossed tightly before her chest, Chiyuri continued speaking. “Now, perhaps you could explain this all to me again? What exactly did you two do this time, and what terrible position has it put us in?”

Whoa, she’s figured it out already. While he was deeply impressed, Haruyuki’s thoughts went into high gear in the back of his mind.

The biggest reason he had dragged Chiyuri into this impromptu sleepover party was because he had hoped that her presence—to be more precise, this situation with the three childhood friends huddled together like they used to be—would interrupt the interference from the ISS kit saved somewhere inside Takumu. He hadn’t thought it through to the point where they spilled everything about the current state of affairs to her. Because that would be the same as revealing the deep scars Takumu carried within him, right up to the feelings of guilt that he was the one who’d smashed the circle the three of them had once made.

But Chiyuri had already guessed at the situation to a certain extent—to a place fairly near the heart of the matter, actually. And if they were going to try erasing the kit’s power, then either way, they couldn’t hide the truth.

Haruyuki glanced at Takumu, off to his left. His friend, hair freshly washed, met his eyes dead-on for about a second before turning back to Chiyuri.

“Chii, I’m pretty sure you’ve heard the rumors by now at least,” he said. “About the ISS kit problem that’s been seriously affecting the Accelerated World for just over a week now…” And then Takumu told her everything, taking about twenty minutes to do so.

About how he’d gone to the empty area of Setagaya by himself the night before, and the Burst Linker Magenta Scissor he’d encountered had handed him an ISS kit in a sealed state. How after he’d returned home and gone to bed, he’d had dreams that were clearly interference from the kit even though he had taken off his Neurolinker. How he’d had a slight fever when he’d woken up, so he’d taken the opportunity of his parents sending him to see the family doctor to collect information in the Shinjuku area. How his old Legion companion had sold his information, and he’d been attacked in the real by the PK group Supernova Remnant.

Takumu had dived with them into the Unlimited Neutral Field and summoned the ISS kit there to press all the members of Remnant into total point loss with the dark Incarnate. As a result, although he’d managed to keep Brain Burst, the kit had eaten into his mind all that much more. Believing he would end up hurting his friends in Nega Nebulus, he’d resolved to fight Magenta Scissor, determine the source of the kit distribution, and gather information while ready to strike out at any enemies—all while he could still control the dark power, which was, already, just barely.

However, immediately before that, he’d ended up in a direct duel with Haruyuki, who had raced to Takumu’s house from Umesato Junior High, and the two of them had fought, throwing all the power and suppressed emotion they had in them at each other. And at the end of the intense battle, he had succeeded in pushing back against the interference from the kit to a certain extent. However…

“It’s still inside me.” Finishing up the long story, Takumu grabbed his blue Neurolinker, which he had taken off before getting in the bath, in both hands and summed up in a half whisper, “The kit is hiding somewhere in this Neurolinker—and maybe part of it is somewhere in my head. It’s steadily absorbing power from the other kits it’s linked to, getting stronger with every passing second, even now, while we’re sitting here like this. Tonight…if I have that nightmare again, I might call up that black thing in my heart. So Haru’s trying to stop that by having the three of us spend the night together like this. That’s why he invited you over out of the blue. All of it…my own foolish conceit brought all this on.” Here, Takumu closed his mouth and hung his head.

Chiyuri had listened to the entire long story still standing, not moving a muscle, and now she abruptly dropped to her knees before Takumu. She stretched out a pale hand from the elbow-length sleeve of her pajamas to, with a gentle finger, wipe away the wetness from the left side of Takumu’s glasses. “I’m sorry, Taku.”

“Huh?” He lifted his face, eyes open wide.

Chiyuri began speaking softly. “I’ve known for a long time that you…you’re a kind person who is maybe as easily hurt as Haru is. But…all this time, I was spoiled by that kindness of yours.”

Her eyes, always shining brightly like a cat’s, were slowly lowered. Chiyuri brought down her hand and seated herself more formally, like her friends, before lifting her gaze and speaking in a resolute tone.

“When I was little, I believed so hard that no matter how many years went by, the three of us would be close, we’d always be able to laugh together. But the truth is, that’s impossible, isn’t it? We can’t stop the flow of time. We can’t rewind it, either. Even though I knew that somewhere in my head…I’ve been wishing all this time for just a little longer. For us to be like this just a little longer.”

She took a deep breath. Looking at Haruyuki and Takumu in turn, Chiyuri suddenly gave voice to something wholly unexpected. “Haru, Taku. We haven’t told anyone outside my family this, but…Okay. My dad might not live very long.”

As though the words went in through Haruyuki’s ears up into his brain to dam it up somewhere, he couldn’t identify the meaning in them for a while. Apparently having the same reaction, Takumu wasn’t even breathing, much less moving.

With both her friends gazing at her, Chiyuri opened her mouth to continue, the gentle expression on her face still perfectly intact. “You already know why I could meet the first condition of being a Burst Linker, right?”

“Yeah.” As Haruyuki nodded, a part of his mind started thinking.

To become a Burst Linker—i.e., to install the Brain Burst program in your Neurolinker—there were two conditions. The first was that you had to have been wearing a Neurolinker continuously since soon after you were born. The second was to have a high-level affinity for the quantum connection.

The second could be met through long-term full-dive experience and active training—like Chiyuri herself had done. But there was nothing a person could do at this stage about the first condition. In other words, Burst Linker affinity could be said to be half-inherent.

The majority of reasons for equipping a newborn with a Neurolinker could be boiled down to making child-rearing easier or gifted infant education. Haruyuki had been given an infant Neurolinker immediately after he was born for the former reason, Takumu for the latter.

But neither of these applied to Chiyuri.

Just before she was born, her father had developed an illness in his throat and had his vocal cords removed, making conversation with his real voice problematic. However, Chiyuri’s parents wanted to bring up their beloved daughter hearing both of their voices somehow, so they decided to use the neurospeak function of the Neurolinker. And so, Chiyuri had been raised from the time she was a baby hearing her father’s voice through her Neurolinker.

As if waiting for Haruyuki and Takumu to imagine their way to this point, Chiyuri said slowly, “So the disease that made Dad lose his voice was hypopharyngeal cancer.”

At their panicked faces, Chiyuri shook her head lightly to reassure her once again speechless friends.

“It’s okay. None of this is immediate or anything. I mean, cancer itself isn’t the scary disease it used to be anymore, with all the advances in radiation therapy micromachines…But, you know, I guess even the technology now can’t completely get rid of the cancer cells once they start moving and spread throughout the body. And in the last ten years, Dad’s had it show up again, once in his esophagus and once in his lungs. Both times, they managed to push it back with anticancer drugs and MM treatment, but…I guess now the doctor’s saying that if it recurs somewhere, the prognosis won’t be so great.”

As she continued talking, the strong smile stayed on her face, but Haruyuki noticed her large eyes blurring over.

“Mom and Dad try to make sure I don’t worry, of course, but still, I know. We’ve been doing this family thing for a while now, after all. When Dad was in treatment, the side effects were really hard on him. And Mom would wake up over and over during the night to touch Dad. So once the treatment was over and he was better again, I prayed to God from the bottom of my heart. ‘Please let us stay the way we are now. Dad and Mom and me, and you guys, all of us healthy and close the way we are now.’ That was…in fourth grade. For me…it’s like this time wrapped in a golden light. We had so much fun every day.”

Here, Chiyuri closed her mouth and turned her eyes up to the ceiling to keep her tears from spilling out.

Still unable to actually say anything, Haruyuki had a vision of Chiyuri’s father pop up in the back of his mind. When they were in third or fourth grade and they came home exhausted from playing outside, he would go to the Kurashimas’ basically every day and eat supper with them, even taking his nighttime bath there. He regularly saw Chiyuri’s father, but he hadn’t let Haruyuki see the slightest hint of the fact that he had been struggling fiercely with cancer for years. He always had a bright smile on his thin face, and he even joined in their games sometimes.

“Chiyu…I didn’t…”

I didn’t notice anything.

As Haruyuki tried to give voice to these words, Chiyuri turned her smile on him once more and shook her head in short bursts.

“I told you, it’s not like anything’s going to happen right away or something. It’s just if the cancer comes back again, then maybe. Which is why I really shouldn’t just be freaking out about the future. But I’ve pretended that I couldn’t see anything changing. I didn’t even try to understand how you feel, Taku…Now could turn into then, and I’d still be trying to go back there. It was only natural you’d try to figure out how I really felt last fall, Taku. I mean, even though I was right there beside you, even in dive calls, I was never really looking at the Taku in front of me.”

“No.” Having been silent up to that point, Takumu clenched his hands into fists on his knees and shook his head fiercely from side to side. “Chii, you’re wrong. I’m the one to blame here for not being able to trust you. I’m the one who didn’t even notice anything about what you were carrying around. I just kept pushing you with my own selfish wish, for you to look at me, to look only at me. And in the end…I…Your Neurolinker, I…”

The voice he tried to squeeze out of his throat sounded very much like the cry of anguish when he’d fought Haruyuki earlier.

But Haruyuki believed that the Takumu speaking his heart now was not simply coming from backward-looking self-reproach or self-hatred.

Believe. He forced himself to swallow the word.

Takumu clenched his hands one final time, almost to the point of creaking, and then released them before he continued hoarsely, “But…” He lifted his head and looked directly at Haruyuki, and then at Chiyuri. “But I’ve changed, Chii. I promise. It’s only a little at a time, but I’m getting stronger. Someday I’ll pay for all my crimes, so that this time for sure, I can take your hand and pull you toward the future.”

“Uh-huh.” Chiyuri nodded, a tear spilling from her eyes. “Me, too. I’m going to stop just looking at the past. Right now…I’m too scared to look ahead at what’s coming. But still, I’m going to treasure this moment. I mean, I’m having fun now. Moving toward the same goal with you and Haru and Kuroyukihime and Big Sister and Ui, it’s fun, I’m happy. So…” She took a deep breath, straightened her back, and, after wiping roughly at her eyes, she said with her voice clear, “So I’m not going to let this ISS kit or whatever it’s called do whatever it wants with you, Taku. I’ll protect you. Me and Haru, we’ll protect you, Taku.”