5

“Aaah! W-we’re gonna fall!” Haruyuki shouted, bolting upright into a sitting position. As he did, something tugged on both sides of his neck. “Huh? What?”

His heart pounding at top speed, he looked around several times. The off-white wallpaper. The extremely thin flat-screen TV. The large dining table and the kitchen counter beyond it. It was the familiar living/dining room combination of his own house. He was sleeping there on a mattress spread out on the floor.

The home server detected him sitting up and turned on the light panel on the ceiling to shed a dim illumination. Looking down in the weak gray light to see what was pulling at his neck, he found two XSB cables stretching out from his still-equipped Neurolinker. With his eyes, he followed the cable on the left to land on the face of his childhood friend Chiyuri Kurashima, sleeping a mere fifty centimeters away, blankets tossed off, stomach peeking out from the bottom of her pajama top.

No way. It was all a dream?

Turning into a duel avatar in a mysterious place, passing through the long tunnel, seeing the galaxy of light, meeting that golden-yellow girl there again…all of it, just a dream?

Just as Haruyuki was seized by doubt, Chiyuri’s eyelids flew open with an audible snap. She met his eyes for a mere second before shouting hoarsely, “Haru! What about Taku?! Did he make it out okay?!”

Her words showed that she and Haruyuki had shared the same experience.

Right, it couldn’t have been just a dream. Everything they had seen and heard in the world, everything that had happened was all real. They had passed through an imagination circuit into the central server of Brain Burst, discovered a strange lump of black flesh—the main body of the ISS kit—and Haruyuki had “awakened” Takumu with an Incarnate technique just as the lump was trying to connect with his friend. And then…

“Taku!” Crying out, Haruyuki twisted his body toward the mattress laid out to his right.

In the gloom, Takumu Mayuzumi was, in contrast with Chiyuri, in a proper sleeping position facing directly upward, eyes closed.

“Taku!” Chiyuri cried out weakly, and jumped over Haruyuki’s legs to stand on her knees immediately beside Takumu. Her hand reached out to touch his shoulder, and the young man’s eyes popped open.

Hearts in their throats, Chiyuri and Haruyuki watched as his brown eyes took in each of them in turn. His left hand snaked out from under the blanket and touched the Neurolinker on his own neck, at the cable extending from his XSB terminal to Haruyuki’s.

“It…wasn’t a dream, was it?” Haruyuki’s childhood friend said finally, in a clear voice that couldn’t be mistaken for sleep-talking. “Or wait. It was a nightmare, and you guys smashed it for me. That’s it.” And then the exact same gentle smile as always spread across his lips.

Instantly, Haruyuki reached out and gripped his friend’s shoulder tightly. “Taku!” he shouted. “Y-you…When I tell you to run, you run! You can’t usually counterattack on the spot like that, you know!”

“Exactly! What did you intend to do if those creepy tentacles got ahold of you again?!” Chiyuri also raised a shrill voice, leaning in so far toward him that she threatened to fall on him.

Rebuked for launching a counterattack with his Incarnate rather than running from the rage-crazed main body—after he had broken free of the mind control thanks to Haruyuki’s Incarnate attack—Takumu’s smile changed into something more apologetic.

“I-it’s just, I suddenly got the idea. That that thing was the bad guy, that it was the root of all evil. In which case, I felt like I had to at least send one shot back at it.”

“W-well, yeah, I mean, I wanted to get in there and send it to the hospital if I could have.” Nodding unconsciously, Haruyuki suddenly lifted his face with a gasp and hurried to ask, “R-right, more importantly…how is it? That thing inside you?”

In the “dream,” with his new Incarnate technique Laser Lance, Haruyuki had pierced and destroyed the ISS kit that had separated from Takumu’s right arm. But even if it hadn’t all been an actual dream, it was still something that had happened in the world of imagination, so he didn’t know how much of an impact it would have on reality.

Takumu lowered his eyes and then closed them tightly. He raised his hand and pressed it to his forehead, his furrowed brow trembling a little. He stayed like this for a while, before finally bringing down his hand and opening his eyes again. Takumu looked directly at Chiyuri and Haruyuki in turn.

“It’s gone.” His voice was quiet.

“Huh?”

“It’s gone, Haru. That thing that’s been sitting somewhere deep inside my head since last night, constantly whispering to me…it’s gone.”

The home server, having decided that its master was awake now, turned the lights up further. The daytime color of the panel lighting shone on Takumu’s smiling face. It was his best friend’s usual smile, the grin that was always there whenever he looked over as they devoted themselves to playing; the look that had been there ever since they became the two forwards of Nega Nebulus—no, ever since they were little kids.

It’s Taku. He’s back. He broke away from the temptation of the power of darkness and climbed out of the deep hole in his heart and came back to us again. To my side. To a place I can reach if I stretch out my hand.

The instant he felt it sincerely, Takumu’s smiling face was covered and blurred in a boisterous dance of white light. As soon as he realized what was spilling hotly out of his own eyes, Haruyuki was so embarrassed he slammed his forehead into Takumu’s broad chest.

“M-making us worry!” Shouting with a deliberate roughness, he tried intently to rein in his tears, but they only kept coming, one after another. He clenched his teeth and something like a child’s sobs slipped out from his throat. “Unh…Ngh…Huunh!”

Unable to hold anything back now, Haruyuki wept, shoulders shaking, while a large, warm hand patted his back gently.

“H-hey, Haru! I’m the one who should be doing that!” Chiyuri’s exasperated voice also sounded choked. And then she bumped her own body up against Haruyuki’s shoulder.

Feeling the warmth of his two childhood friends, Haruyuki continued to simply spill hot tears.

Thank goodness. Abruptly, he heard a faint voice deep in his own head. You managed to save your friend.

No mistake, it was the voice of the mysterious golden girl avatar. Stifling his sobs, Haruyuki thought back to her:

Thanks. It’s all thanks to you.

Hee-hee. I didn’t do anything. The light of your heart shone through the darkness. I want you to keep walking ahead on this road you believe in. If you keep collecting all these lights, I’m sure the time will come when even his deep despair will be healed.

He didn’t really understand the meaning of those words at that moment, but Haruyuki murmured, as if guided by something, Yeah. I promise. I’m definitely going to release you—you and him from the cycle of Catastrophe.

…Thank you. I believe in you…

The voice receded and disappeared.

Finally getting himself under control, Haruyuki wiped away his tears with the sleeve of his pajamas and lifted his chin, shouting forcefully to hide his embarrassment. “W-we ran until we practically died, and now I’m starving. I’m gonna go check if there’s anything in the fridge.” He pulled out the direct cable, stood up, and padded quickly into the kitchen.

“Hey now!” Chiyuri’s exasperated voice chased him. “We might have been running, but it was actually in a dream, you know!”

Which was followed by Takumu’s laughter.

“Ha-ha-ha! Haru, bring me something, too!”

Haruyuki warmed up frozen cubes of clam chowder for three, divided it evenly into soup cups, and then carried these out to the dining room table.

A glance at the wall clock revealed that it was already nearly six in the morning. If he canceled the shade mode on the window glass, the morning sun would come pouring in from the east. It was an hour earlier than he usually got up, but he figured he might as well stay up now. Haruyuki let out a long yawn.

After putting away their bedding and sitting down at the table, the three friends took a sip of the steaming soup. They all let out a sigh and looked at one another.

“Taku.” The first to speak was Chiyuri, her face quite serious. “Umm, so I guess we can assume the ISS kit is completely gone now?”

“Yeah, I think so. I don’t have any data or anything to back it up, but that’s what my gut’s telling me.” There was no hesitation or doubt in Takumu’s immediate reply.

“Rather than breaking down endurance in the duel stage,” Haruyuki started thinking out loud, “it’s like, um, like you smashed the saved data in the server itself. And it’s actually surprising you managed to survive that.”

“‘Server.’ Haru, are you saying that place was Brain Burst’s…?”

“Yeah.” He nodded lightly at Takumu’s question. “The Brain Burst central server. That’s what she said.”

Takumu had woken up only when they were on the verge of escaping that world, so Haruyuki and Chiyuri took turns explaining what they had experienced there. The long, dark tunnel and the infinite expanse beyond it. The galaxy of shuddering lights, the inky black of the lump of flesh. And the mysterious golden-yellow avatar who had appeared from within Haruyuki to teach them so many things.

“Right.” Glasses still off, Takumu fell silent for a while, the look on his face indicating he was in his usual “full professor” mode. After a few seconds of fiercely racking his brain, he lifted his head and spoke crisply. “Haru, do you remember? Last night, before we went to sleep, we talked about the vulnerability of the ISS kit.”

“V-vulnerability…Right, we did talk about how, if it has this kind of terrifying power, then it has to have a vulnerability to match, right?”

“Right. You definitely got to the heart of that vulnerability before. The ISS kit automatically opens an imagination circuit while the person who has it equipped is sleeping at night, which connects the wearer’s consciousness directly to the central server. Then it does this parallel-processing-of-evil kind of thing with the other wearers, to strengthen the kit’s main body and its terminals.”

Takumu’s words sent a shiver through the other two.

“Th-this is seriously serious,” Chiyuri murmured. “Isn’t that beyond what a player could actually do, though?”

“Yeah.” Takumu bit his lip lightly. “To be honest, I have no idea what kind of logic could create an Enhanced Armament with such an ability. But…if there’s one thing I can say, it’s that the Brain Burst program had this function right from the start. To open the imagination circuit as a dream and connect to the central server.”

“Huh? That’s…?”

“Haru, you remember, right? What happened the night after you installed Brain Burst?”

“Oh!” he cried out and met Chiyuri’s eyes before bobbing his head up and down.

There was no way he could forget. After getting the program from Kuroyukihime the previous fall, Haruyuki had had a long, long nightmare, although he couldn’t remember the details. The program had picked through this dream and created Haruyuki’s other self, the duel avatar Silver Crow. His avatar data would have been registered in the central server at the same time—or rather, it was only natural to think this process happened within the central server.

So that night, Haruyuki had indeed been in communication with the server while he slept. It was basically the same as what had happened to Takumu now.

“So then the parallel processing every night is the key to the strength of the ISS kits,” Takumu continued, still thinking it through as he sipped his soup. “But at the same time, it’s a massive opening. I mean, however you look at it, that means calling the Burst Linkers right up to the main body. It’s not a problem if everyone’s under the control of the kit like I was, but…”

Takumu lifted his head and smiled meaningfully, and Haruyuki returned his grin. “The guys who made the kits probably never imagined their victims would be directing with another Burst Linker while they slept.”

“And even more, that that Burst Linker would be able to use a range-expansion Incarnate technique to attack from outside the range of the main body.”

The two boys laughed together, and, watching them, Chiyuri shook her head in mock exasperation but soon spoke in a half-smiling, half-grumbling way. “So then the bond between us was the winner! Right! Aah, honestly, I just want to meet whoever’s pulling the strings right now and say, ‘Take that!’”

She drained the rest of her soup in one gulp and slammed the cup back down onto the table before shaking a head of short, tousled hair and opening her mouth again. “Hey, Taku? At the end of that dream, you cut down the kit’s main body with Cyan Blade, right? Did that destroy the kit?”

“…No.” Takumu’s face grew serious again, and he shook his head slowly. “Unfortunately, I didn’t get any feedback to indicate that I destroyed it completely. But I definitely damaged the accumulated ‘evil will’ and the circuit it was using to transmit that. The clones in the same cluster as me probably lost a fair bit of power.”

The cluster Takumu was talking about was the group of Burst Linkers with the same ISS kit origin—in Takumu’s case, Magenta Scissor—or people who got copies of it later. If he hadn’t stopped the kit when it split off from him and tried to parasitize Haruyuki at the end of the battle the previous evening, Haruyuki would have become a member of that cluster as well.

“So, then, if we were thinking of freeing Bush Utan and Olive Grab from the kit, now would be the time,” Haruyuki muttered, remembering the figure of the dark-green avatar walking beside Takumu in the nightmare.

“Yeah. Right now, you wouldn’t have to go into the central server. You could probably destroy the kits in a normal duel. Of course, regular techniques wouldn’t work, but I think it’d be possible with Incarnate techniques.”

“Got it. I’ll pass the info along to his ‘big brother.’ I wish we could do something ourselves, but we can’t move today.”

Chiyuri and Takumu looked up at the clock on the wall. The date and time it showed was six thirty AM, Thursday, June 20, 2047.

At seven that evening—a little over twelve hours from that moment—Haruyuki would have to take on a mission of the highest level of difficulty: escape from the Castle.

His other self, Silver Crow, was currently trapped in the depths of the Castle in the center of the Unlimited Neutral Field, along with Ardor Maiden, who had the power of purification. Unless they managed to make it past the fearsome attacks of the God Suzaku one more time, Haruyuki had no future as a Burst Linker. Because, if he couldn’t purify himself of the Armor of Catastrophe that lurked deep within his avatar, a bounty of the highest order would be placed on his head at the next meeting of the Seven Kings.

Although he had gone on an unexpected adventure the night before a mission where he really needed to have a solid sleep behind him, Haruyuki actually felt unusually full of energy. He had the real sense that the duel with the infected Takumu and the experience in the central server after that had given him a certain something.

Turning their faces back from the clock, the three nodded firmly. With a smile on her face, Chiyuri slapped Haruyuki hard on the back.

“Haru, you go and cut down that stupid bird and hurry home already!”

“Right, Haru! Compared to fighting me in IS mode, it should be a breeze, right?”

“Oh! You said it, Professor Mayuzumi!”

And with the grins the two boys exchanged once more, the impromptu sleepover party came to an end.

The brave warrior Chiyuri, still in her pajamas, was the first to turn toward the front door in a bid to return to her home two floors below, soon followed by Takumu in his sweats. As he stood at the entryway seeing them off, Haruyuki suddenly noticed Takumu make a small gesture.

He raised his right hand and gently held his left arm around his wrist. The very place where the ISS kit had parasitized him.

Haruyuki took a step forward. “Taku,” he said quietly. “I have to apologize. I wrecked your power.”

His friend turned and grinned, but Haruyuki felt a certain faint melancholy behind it. Still, Takumu shook his head from side to side.

“It’s true I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss that incredible power,” he said in an untroubled voice. “But I really have to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’d rather be how I am, you know? No matter how much I worry or how lost I am.”

“…Taku…”

“And I got something way bigger than that power. Which is why you totally don’t need to apologize to me.”

“Huh?” Haruyuki blinked several times and then asked, head cocked, “So, like, some kind of amazing special attack?”

Before Takumu could answer, Chiyuri, having put on her shoes, whirled around and shouted, “Aaah! Come on! How can you be so thick!! Taku’s trying to say—” For some reason, she cut herself off there and grinned. “Actually, you think about it. It’s your homework for tomorrow!”

Haruyuki put the living room back the way it had been before the sleepover and scarfed down a breakfast of cereal and milk before changing into his school uniform and leaving for the day.

As he rode down in the elevator, he typed out a short text message to his mother. The gist of it was a report that he had gotten up and gone to school, and he wrote a thank-you for letting Takumu and Chiyuri stay over the night before. Now that he was thinking about it, all the members of his Legion would be coming together at the Arita house that evening, but the meeting would end before his mother came home, so he left that part out. He sent it as the elevator reached the ground floor.

The reply that came a few seconds later simply said “Understood,” but a money code for five hundred yen was attached. Unthinkingly, Haruyuki grinned and happily charged his account with it.

His mother, Saya Arita, was a mysterious woman, even seen through the eyes of her own child. The fact that she was thirty-seven that year meant she had given birth to Haruyuki at twenty-three. She had never told him the details of that timeline herself, but she would have been a student doing her graduate studies at a university within the city at the time. While there, she had married a man three years her senior working in a network-related company and borne a child. But the particulars of this time were unknown, and there had been no wedding, either. And apparently, this was the reason they were estranged from his mother’s family in Yamagata.

When she finished her master’s course while raising a baby—regardless of the fact that she was relying on the Neurolinker for some of that rearing—and received her MBA, she was hired by a Japanese investment bank with its head office in the United States. She had distinguished herself as a member of the trading department and, through her work on several large cases, gotten promoted in recent years to an associate.

Haruyuki had actually heard all this from Chiyuri’s mother, Momoe. She and Haruyuki’s mother had apparently been friends since back then. But Momoe also didn’t tell him about a certain incident—about why Haruyuki’s parents had gotten divorced.

The divorce was finalized seven years earlier. His mother had been thirty, his father thirty-three, and Haruyuki seven. He barely remembered it. But there was one scene burned into one corner of his memory that would never disappear.

One night, hearing voices, little Haruyuki woke up. When he listened closely, he could definitely hear a conversation on the other side of the door. He didn’t fall back to sleep right away because of the sharp edges in those two voices. Instead, he got out of bed and quietly opened the door. At the time, he didn’t sleep in the larger room he had now but rather a smaller room on the other side of the living room. At the end of the dark hallway, hazy light shone through the glass dividing door. Haruyuki moved without making a sound and crouched down next to the door.

Although his parents’ voices as he eavesdropped were forcibly hushed, they were clearly having heated words. They were arguing fiercely about something. He could catch bits and pieces like “take care of,” “promised,” and “used,” but he didn’t understand what they meant. However, young Haruyuki instinctively knew that his parents were fighting about him.

And there his memory ended abruptly, as though slamming into a wall, and Haruyuki absently raised his face.

Before he knew it, he had crossed the large courtyard of his condo and arrived at the edge of Kannana Street. He shook his head lightly and set his thoughts on a new track. He wasn’t particularly fond of remembering the past.

At any rate, this Saya Arita was a woman who moved relentlessly forward as though possessed. Never showing anyone the depths of her heart, without even looking at her feet…

He may have at some point thought it was sad, but it didn’t particularly bother him now. She didn’t hassle him about his grades, she never forgot to give him five hundred yen for lunch, and she let his friends stay over. Complaining about that was an invitation to disaster.

He took a deep breath and then replaced the air built up in his lungs as he glanced at the AR display on his virtual desktop.

The weather forecast for the day was cloudy, with light rain in the afternoon that would stop toward evening. He didn’t see any warning message that he’d forgotten anything, and thanks to the fact that he had left the house much earlier than usual, his scheduled arrival time at school was a full thirty minutes before the first bell. He had a little time to spare for a mission before school started.

Stepping out into the crosswalk of the ring road, Haruyuki shifted his bag onto his back and started out toward the south at a brisk pace.

Where he would normally turn right at the intersection under the Chuo Line, he went straight. He climbed the hill of south Koenji and rode up the escalator to the pedestrian bridge crossing Oume Kaido. At the top, he turned left and then stopped directly above the wide, eight-lane highway. As he looked down on the stream of EVs flowing back and forth, he murmured under his breath, “Burst Link.”

Skreeeeee!! Thunder ripped through the air, and the world froze blue. Immediately, he clicked on the flaming B icon at the bottom left of his virtual desktop. From the menu that popped up, he opened the matching list for Suginami Area No. 2 and touched a name in the middle of the list of avatars, which could hardly be said to be lengthy. Without hesitating, he tapped the DUEL button that appeared in a small pop-up window.

The transformation began in the initial accelerated space, and the clear blue world creaked and groaned. The road turned into a dead valley full of debris, the buildings reddish-brown rocky mountains, the sky a dirty pale yellow. A Wasteland stage.

Checking that the guide cursor was pointing south on Kannana, Haruyuki sent his body, in duel avatar form now, over the edge of the pedestrian bridge. He landed with a thud and waited for the roar of the gasoline engine approaching from a distance.

Just the other morning, Haruyuki had challenged the exact same opponent at the exact same time in this very place. So his opponent had no doubt guessed his intention—that he wanted to talk rather than fight. Having made this judgment, he raised a hand at the silhouette that came into view.

“Oh, hi! Good morn…” Haruyuki started to offer a greeting, but his words changed midway into a scream. “…eaaaooooh?!”

He barely managed to throw himself to the right and avoid the iron monster charging at him at top speed—a large American motorcycle from the previous century.

Before Haruyuki’s eyes, the motorcycle spun around, a shower of sparks jetting off from the front and rear disc brakes, and came to a stop, leaving the smell of burning and a groove dug out of the gravel road.

Haruyuki jumped to his feet and turned toward the rider of the vehicle, shouting in a panic. “Uh, um, sorry! I wanted to talk again in closed mode—”

But the rider—member of the Green Legion, Great Wall, level-five Burst Linker Ash Roller—flicked the fingers of his right hand dismissively, interrupting Haruyuki. “Totally compredés that. I know, so mighty me’s starting things off today with a wicked turn!”

“Ah…huh.” Overwhelmed, Haruyuki nodded.

“Then listen up, you little crow!” Ash Roller snapped the index fingers of both hands at him. “Today you doo-bappity-duel my righteous self for reals! If I lose, I’ll listen to what you have to say. But, ’ey, I win, and you grant me one wish! That’s totally mega even terms, a’ight!”

“Sorry? A w-wish?!”

“Two duels in a row of nada, and the pretty little boys and girls in the Gallery who went to all the trouble of registering me are gonna be mega bummed and blue!”

Cheers like “Yeah! That’s right!” and “Show us something hot today!” came one after another at this declaration from beneath the skull–emblazoned face shield of Ash’s helmet. Hurriedly looking around, Haruyuki saw the silhouettes of the audience dotting the rooftops of the buildings along Kannana.

There wasn’t a ton of people, but it did look like pretty much everyone registered on the matching list had shown up in the stage. Many of the Burst Linkers who made their home in Shinjuku or farther west knew Silver Crow and Ash Roller as fated rivals. Their fights tended to be rather spectacular because both of their avatars had very flashy performance—and they were both level five—so a fight between them was seen as a pretty fun event.

Haruyuki glanced up at the timer, already down sixty seconds, and thought over the situation quickly.

Unlike the day before, when they had talked for very nearly the full thirty minutes, all he had to say to Ash Roller that day was the simple message “if you’re going to remove Bush Utan’s ISS kit, now’s your chance.” That wouldn’t even take three minutes. In which case, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make good use of the burst point he’d gone and spent, and take on Ash Roller in a practice match. And he couldn’t rule out the possibility that, depending on how the mission to escape the Castle that night and the meeting of the Seven Kings on Sunday went, this might be his last duel.

“Understood.” Haruyuki nodded deeply. “I’ll accept your terms. If I win, you sit down and listen to meeooowhoa!”

Before he could finish speaking, however, his sentence turned into a shout once more, and he flew off to his left—because Ash Roller’s massive bike had suddenly and ferociously charged him.

“Ah! That’s dangerous, you know! I was still talk—”

“Shut it. Shut yer yaaaaap! Duel’s started, booooyyyy! Boo-hoo to you, ’cos I’m gonna victorize totes gigacoooooool!” Ash Roller shouted, and spun his bike around once more.

Haruyuki made a mental note that the turn radius was much tighter than when they’d first met, as he flung back his own bravado. “I-I’m the one who’s gonna pull off a teragorgeous perfect win! But, like, the terms are not even at all. I mean, I win and you listen. You win, and I grant—”

“Suuuuuucks! Not my style to get all worked up over details!”

Exhaust jetting from the fat muffler, the American motorcycle rushed Haruyuki for the third time.

Ash Roller was an irregular Burst Linker, having poured the majority of his duel avatar’s potential into the Enhanced Armament that was his bike.

The rider himself had basically no fighting power, close-up or long-range. Instead, the motorcycle had both serious mobility and serious stamina. A vehicle Enhanced Armament was in and of itself rare, but even among the ones that existed, the performance of this one was likely at the top of the class.

If pressed to list its weak points, Haruyuki would have to say that it wasn’t as maneuverable as a flesh-and-blood avatar and that it lacked the element of surprise because of its sheer size. To attack the latter weakness, a concentrated long-distance firepower attack was effective, but Haruyuki had essentially none of the attack power endemic in red-type avatars.

Thus, if he was fighting Ash Roller on the ground, he ended up risking his life on close-range attacks. Specifically, when he dodged to one side as the charging vehicle was a hairbreadth away and then showered counterattacks on Ash himself or the motorcycle engine.

The best thing was to use Silver Crow’s nimble agility to jump straight up into the air and aim for the rider’s head, but his opponent was well aware of this strategy. The instant Haruyuki assumed a posture to leap upward, his opponent would no doubt pull up into a wheelie and bring out the “antiaerial attack,” front wheel spinning at high speed. The jump attack and the antiaerial attack were mutually incompatible, a game of rock, paper, scissors, and if he took that hit, he wouldn’t be able to avoid serious damage. An unstrategic leap was suicide.

“Eeeeeeyaaaaaah!”

Together with a high-pitched battle cry from its rider, the bike charged toward Haruyuki, and he concentrated all his mental energies on its enormous front wheel.

His opponent was also no doubt assuming Haruyuki would dodge and was ready to make tiny adjustments to his trajectory one way or the other immediately before Haruyuki could jump. Which was fine if Ash plunged ahead on the opposite side, but Haruyuki was just another jumper on a busy train line if he dodged in the same direction.

Which way…right or left…Don’t look at the tire, watch the angle of the bike itself…

Haruyuki activated the hyperpowers of concentration—limited to game play and nothing else—he had polished long before he became a Burst Linker and focused every inch of his mind on the behavior of the entire motorcycle.

Then.

The turn signal on the bike’s side, the right from Haruyuki’s perspective, began flashing orange.

“Huh.” The sound slipped out of him as he reflexively flew to the left.

But at the same time, the bike also angled to the left, and the tough, charcoal-colored tire pressed in on him.

An incredible impact like being hit with an enormous hammer. The entirety of the stage spun round and round. Or rather, Haruyuki himself spun round and round. In a magnificent display that outshone even the more silly anime programs of the day, Silver Crow flew dozens of meters head over heels at top speed through the air before smashing headfirst into one of the rocky mountains along the east side of Kannana Street.

After blacking out for a minute, he braced his hands on the stony face of the mountain and yanked his helmet free. The moment he leapt back to his feet, he shouted indignantly, “Y-y-you turned the opposite way of your signal! That’s a traffic violation! Fine of two hundred million yen!!”

“Heeyah-ha-ha-haaaaa!” The skull-faced rider laughed long and loud at this, even as he turned to follow Haruyuki and rush him once more. “Mighty Ash right here! Just me existing’s a traffic violation, you knoooooow!”

That was true. In the present day, bringing something that burned fossil fuels onto public roads and generated even a cubic centimeter of carbon dioxide was basically asking to be immediately arrested. And the noise coming from the muffler easily tore through standards for public order; the bike didn’t even have a license plate on the back. But of course, in this Accelerated World, there were also no white bikes to pull him over.

Instead of sirens, they were showered in the enthusiastic cheers erupting from the Gallery all around them, as Ash Roller plunged forward to send Haruyuki flying again.

“Damn him!” Cursing, Haruyuki glanced to the top left of his field of view. Silver Crow’s health gauge had dropped nearly 20 percent from that hit. In contrast, his special-attack gauge was charged 30 percent, but he still couldn’t be sure he could win this if he activated his flying ability.

He’d fly after going up against Ash one more time on the ground. Having resolved this, Haruyuki dropped his stance and waited for the assault. He’d never seen the feint with the turn signal before, so he’d unconsciously fallen for it, but he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. This time, he shouted in his heart, he’d dodge the charge at the very last moment and pummel Ash with a fierce counterattack.

But it seemed that Ash Roller also didn’t think the same feint would work a second time. Rather than flicking on his turn signal—

“Huuuup!” he called out as he jumped straight up on the vehicle and stood, using the seat and the handlebars as footholds. He plunged ahead, riding the motorcycle like a surfboard. Ash Roller’s so-called secret technique, the V-Twin Punch.

Seemingly a joke in both name and appearance, the technique in fact held a power that couldn’t be so easily dismissed. Haruyuki could dodge the front tire of the bike, but then the rider’s kick would come flying at him, so it was hard to find the timing for a counterattack. Although he had come up against the V-Twin Punch several times already, he still hadn’t been able to find an effective countermeasure to it.

“Yaaahooooooooo!”

Haruyuki glared intently at the motorcycle, slaloming lightly left and right as it pressed in on him, and at the rider shouting on top of it. It was possible for him to evade the attack with a large jump, but then he wouldn’t be able to counter. Ash’s teacher and parent, Sky Raker, had taken down the V-Twin Punch with the superhuman feat of dashing backward while clutching the motorcycle’s brake lever, but that was still beyond Haruyuki’s abilities.

Some other weak point, somewhere, somehow—

“Ngh!” A light went on abruptly.

Could Ash Roller still make the bike do a wheelie in that position? No, it was probably impossible. If he did a wheelie, he’d fall off the bike himself. So then where Haruyuki needed to aim was—

“Up!”

The instant the massive tire filled his field of view, Haruyuki bent forward and kicked off the ground as hard as he could to fly up into the air.

“Hungaah?!”

The rider let out a strange sound as Haruyuki crashed into him and clung to him for dear life. The pair fell away from the motorcycle and hit the ground with a thud. Having lost its master, the American bike raced off north on Kannana.

“You! This! Hold me tight—No way, lemme go, dude!” Ash Roller howled, kicking and flailing, while Haruyuki tried with all his might to hold him down. He couldn’t let this chance get away from him.

“Nope! You without your bike is like soy sauce pickles without curry!”

“The hell! When it comes to curry, I’m totally on the pickled leeks team!”

The Gallery erupted once more at the two wrestling on the road. But when it came down to actual fisticuffs, Ash Roller simply didn’t have the power to pierce Silver Crow’s metal armor. Regardless of the punches landing on his face and chest, Haruyuki pushed his way behind Ash Roller and held his chest with both arms.

“Gah! Hey! D-d-d-d-d-d-don’t go hugging me, man!”

“I-it’s not like I want to be hugging you!”

“Don’t say you’re hugging me! Dammit, dude!”

“You’re the one who said it…first!!” Haruyuki shouted back at Ash Roller, as he deployed the silver wings on his back. His special-attack gauge had been charged a further 10 percent in this ground scuffle, and he used it to deploy the ten metal fins with everything he had.

Vwwmp! Silver Crow and Ash Roller took off directly up into the air like a rocket.

“Ngaaaaah! Wh-what the hell?! Fly hiiiiiigh!”

Ash Roller continued his nonsensical yelling, but Haruyuki was done responding; he simply ascended at full power. In an instant, they passed the stony mountains the members of the Gallery stood on, reaching an altitude of one hundred meters, two hundred, three.

“N-noooooo! Heights are no good, no way, no thank you—” The high-pitched cry was abruptly cut off. The body flailing frantically in Haruyuki’s arms stiffened, and Ash Roller asked hoarsely, “Uh, um, Crow? Mighty me’s not actually? Like a falling star in the night sky?”

“Yes. Like space debris falling out of orbit.” Nodding, Haruyuki moved to release his hands, merciless.

He had worked out a number of battle strategies to make use of Silver Crow’s flying ability in an actual duel. The one he had been using since the early days was a super-high-speed kick or a punch from a high altitude—his dive attack. And lately, he had been practicing the Aerial Combo technique, which used momentary thrust from his wings in close-range battle on the ground.

But there was a way of using his wings that was more reliable and effective than either of these. He pinned down his duel opponent, carried them high up into the sky, and then released them from serious altitudes for drop damage. It was hard to use on large avatars, and he couldn’t manage to even pin down opponents with real fighting abilities, but the moment he got an enemy in the air, real damage was basically assured. The reason Haruyuki didn’t use the technique that much was because the second his opponent saw that he was coming in close, they tended to make him eat a painful counterattack. Plus, more than a few avatars were resistant to being dropped even if they couldn’t fly, so he couldn’t count on a situation like this one, where all the different factors happened to come together. Given that Ash Roller had very weak armor and no hovering or three-dimensional movement abilities, if he was dropped from this height, the maximum value for fall damage would probably be applied.

Haruyuki had gotten swept up in his impending victory and completely forgotten his initial objective, but Ash was not the sort of gallant opponent who could simply keep his mouth shut, even when faced with a stalemate like this.

Before Haruyuki could remove his hands, Ash Roller grabbed on to them tightly and shouted, “Then my mighty self and you are riding tandem straight into hellllllll! Flyyyying Knucklehead!!”

A special attack?! Unconsciously, Haruyuki stiffened up. He hadn’t even imagined that Ash Roller’s body had a special attack.

But a few seconds passed, and still nothing happened. Deciding that it had been a bluff to buy time, Haruyuki opened his mouth to complain about how his opponent just did not know when to give up, but his words quickly turned into a shout of surprise.

“Come on, Ash! There are limits even fowaaaaaaaah?!”

What had stunned Haruyuki so was not Ash still held in his arms, but rather two spots of light racing toward him from directly below. Long, thin cylindrical bodies closing in, jetting orange flames. Four small wings near the tails and red lenses at the heads. No matter how he looked at them—

“M-m-missiles?!” he screamed as he shot upward in the sky.

But the two missiles were apparently equipped with a homing function and followed him with unerring precision. No matter how he zigged and zagged, he couldn’t break away from them.

Now that he was thinking about it, Ash Roller had said something before about getting missiles on his motorcycle. Which meant the launcher of these missiles was that American bike, which had probably fallen over somewhere along Kannana. Which meant that voice commands were still possible even when separated from the Enhanced Armament. However.

“Y-y-you’re gonna get blown up, too, though!”

“Ha! Way better than just getting dropped, booooyyyy!”

That was definitely true. Haruyuki tried earnestly to dispose of his burden, but Ash, looking for a draw, had wrapped both arms and legs around him and was clinging to him tightly. Because of this, Haruyuki couldn’t manage to produce more than half his usual speed, which meant the missiles would be reaching for the tips of his toes in a few seconds.

“Key shooooooop!” At the same time as Ash Roller shouted this incomprehensible cry, there was a magnificent explosion.

The really terrifying part of explosive attacks—although this naturally depended on the power and range of the explosion—was that when you were hit, you didn’t know which way was up for a while. Falling from a height of three hundred meters upside down, head spinning, Haruyuki just barely managed to collect himself before he plunged headfirst into the earth and spread both wings to apply the emergency brakes.

Still tangled up with Ash Roller, he landed in the middle of the intersection of the original Kannana and Oume Kaido. He peeled off the clinging Ash Roller and pushed him half a meter or so away before asking in a groan, “Hey, Ash. What was that ‘key shop’ thing before?”

Apparently recovering his senses a little more slowly, the motorcycle rider shook his skull helmet lightly back and forth as he whispered in reply, “Okay, so, like…when you set off fireworks, you shout out tamaya or kagiya, right? I just figured I’d translate that into English…Would ‘ball shop’ be more compredés for you?”

For once, Ash had translated them correctly, albeit entirely too literally to make any sense. “I’m telling you from the bottom of my heart, either is fine. Which is to say they’re both incomprehensible,” Haruyuki muttered, and checked both of their health gauges.

Immediately before the direct hit from the missiles, Haruyuki’s had been lower, but apparently, his metal armor had cut the damage from the explosion; both gauges currently had a mere 10 percent or so remaining. If one of them got in two or three clean punches, the battle would be decided, but as they lay sprawled out on the ground, Haruyuki and Ash Roller glanced at each other before speaking at the same time:

“Should we call it a draw?”

“How about we leave this a draw?”

Each nodding at the other, they pulled themselves to their feet.

Wordlessly, Haruyuki looked around at the Gallery gazing down upon them, and then shouted in a tense voice, “Um, sorry! We’re going to end this duel here as a draw!”

He thought a few people at least would grumble, but to his surprise:

“Good game!”

“Thanks for the great show!”

“Looking forward to next tiiiime!”

The spectators shouted their appreciation and burst out, leaving only their thundering applause. As he watched this, Haruyuki abruptly became aware of a certain kind of deep emotion filling his heart.

This was the duel. There might be thrills and excitement, but there was no resentment or anger. The duelers might be rivals competing against each other, but they were not enemies to hate.

Considering the cool rationality of the burst point system, perhaps the creator of this world had envisioned a more bloodthirsty survival game. But the players had of their own will rejected the expectations of the creator. That feeling was certainly included in the name “Burst Linker,” something not set by the point system: the feeling that they were comrades.

The ISS kits and the Acceleration Research Society were trying to destroy this world. Bush Utan, whom Haruyuki had fought a few days earlier, and Takumu in the fight the day before, didn’t seem like they were having fun. Even the members of the Society themselves, Dusk Taker and Rust Jigsaw, were at a complete disconnect from the pleasure of the duel.

That was wrong. That was definitely wrong.

As Haruyuki stood there stock-still, fists clenched, a hand wrapped in a leather glove came down with a slap on his left shoulder.

“Good fight, you crazy crow. Way to see through the weak point of my mighty V-Twin Punch.”

“I’m sure the same thing won’t work again next time, though, huh?” Haruyuki replied, and Ash Roller snorted with laughter.

“Absolutes! Check it. Next time, I’ll be popping wheelies standing up, man,” the skull face bragged before glancing upward. He was checking the timer. Six hundred seconds left. It wasn’t a long time, but enough to talk for a bit.

Ash Roller sat down on one of the more reasonable-size rocks dotting the intersection and jerked his chin toward Haruyuki, as if to tell him to start talking.

Haruyuki nodded and took a seat on a rock opposite him. “Umm, I wanted to talk to you about Bush Utan.”

In name at least, Ash was a member of an enemy Legion, so Haruyuki couldn’t get into the details about Takumu, but even so, he expended every effort to tell Ash Roller as much information as he actually could.

That the ISS kits were essentially a colony, that they were linked to kits “genetically” close to them. That the wearers of the kits were guided by that link when they went to bed every night and connected with the main body. That Haruyuki and his Legion comrades had attacked that main body the night before on an information level and damaged it considerably.

“So right now, you might be able to destroy the ISS kit parasitizing Utan in a normal duel. But…there are two problems there,” Haruyuki said, staring at Ash Roller, who had taken in the whole story without comment. “The first is, the ISS kits probably can’t be damaged without using an Incarnate attack. And the second is, even if you destroy the kit, that doesn’t resolve the essential problem. Now that he’s experienced the Incarnate firsthand—he calls it ‘IS mode’—after Rust Jigsaw launched that massive attack from the tenth shuttle in the Hermes’ Cord race, Utan’s really suspicious of the veteran Burst Linkers who kept the existence of the Incarnate System a secret. And I think that feeling is creating an urgency in him, like he doesn’t care how legit or not the power is as long as it makes him stronger. Like there’s no point if he doesn’t get stronger. And as long as he feels like that, I’m pretty sure if you smash this ISS kit he has now, he’ll just go looking for another one.”

“Yeah, I know. I think so, too.” Ash flipped up the skull-patterned shield of his helmet with his right hand. Beneath it, a face mask reminiscent somehow of a science nerd looked up at the sallow sky of the Wasteland. His quiet voice flowed out, voice effects weaker, surprisingly subtle.

“I already told you how that kid U, his parent ended up at total point loss, yeah? Only natural, I guess, but it was a huge shock for him. Ever since, he’s had, like, this enormous terror…unhappiness or annoyance or something, just hanging out inside him. I’m supposedly his big bro, so I prob’ly shoulda done something for him. But y’know, I still hadn’t…come to terms with this whole total-loss thing, either. I didn’t know, y’know, what I should even say to U.”

“Come to terms?” Haruyuki asked.

Ash nodded slowly and turned pale-green eye lenses on him. “When the number of burst points becomes zero, the Brain Burst program itself forcefully uninstalls, and you’re done being a Burst Linker. Master Raker taught me right off the bat this was the biggest rule of the Accelerated World. You must’ve gotten it, too, Crow?”

“Y-yeah. Ku—Black Lotus told me that pretty clearly the day I became a Burst Linker.”

“Right. But when I really think hard about it, I’ve actually never been backed up against that wall, where I’m seriously for real on the brink of total loss. I mean, if you really pushed, maybe the worst I’ve come up against is when I went up to level two and I had a pretty narrow margin, and then I lost to level one you. That got me a bit freaked.”

Feeling the man’s eyes on him, Haruyuki reflexively shrank into himself.

Thinking back, Ash Roller had been his first fight as a Burst Linker and the first opponent he had lost to. Later, his parent, Kuroyukihime, had lectured him about all sorts of things and come up with the perfect strategy for him to challenge Ash Roller to a rematch. But in the space of a single day, Ash had gotten to level two, and thanks to his newly won ability to ride up walls, Haru’s carefully planned strategy had been useless.

Although he despaired of winning at that point, he had frantically racked his brain and realized that the weak point of the old-style motorcycle was that the drive power was in only the rear wheel, which allowed him to turn the tables and win the match. That duel had been the starting point for Haruyuki’s tactics.

The “margin” that Ash Roller spoke of was a word originating from the unique ways players leveled up in Brain Burst.

In normal RPGs and other games, the player automatically leveled up when their experience points reached a certain fixed number. But in Brain Burst, to go up a level, a player had to spend experience points they had saved up—their burst points. Specifically, the number of points required to go from level one to level two was three hundred. In other words, when the player executed a level-up in the system menu, their points decreased by three hundred all at once. Thus, when moving up a level, a player needed to ensure they had sufficient wiggle room to lose several duels in a row without being forced to face total point loss—they needed a margin, in other words. It only made sense when he thought about it a little.

Hearing this from Ash Roller, Haruyuki composed a pathetic smile and confessed, “Th-the truth is, I wasn’t thinking at all, and I went up a level as soon as I had saved up three hundred points. I was almost at total point loss.”

“For real?! Back then, Suginami wasn’t even Negabu territory, was it? Can’t believe you made it back from that okay.” Ash Roller sounded exasperated, and Haruyuki shrugged again.

“Y-yeah. My partner, Cyan Pile, helped me out, and I kinda…” He started to tell the story, but he couldn’t really remember exactly how he had gotten his points back up at the time. So Haruyuki turned the straying conversation back to its original route. “A-anyway, what did you mean before by ‘come to terms’ with total loss?”

“Ohh. Okay, so look. I can totally see how the whole system of forced uninstall when you lose all your points is a totally mean, for-real-awful rule. But I also kinda feel like if you’re gonna be a Burst Linker and get this massive present, acceleration, then a risk that size is only natural. Honestly, I can’t totally come down on either side. I mean, like, it’s easy to say it’s mean…But the flip side of me and you getting all the way to level five here is however many guys got those points stolen from them and ended up in total loss. It’s like indirectly, the points I won and used totes casually were points taken from U’s parent by someone else when he was pushed to total loss.”

Haruyuki was speechless as he listened to this speech that was slightly—no, considerably different from the usual yee-haw century-end rider.

As if reading his mind, Ash snorted and turned away before continuing, as if embarrassed. “But then, I think a Burst Linker’s gotta be ready right from the start for total loss at least. The one dishing it out and the one taking it, y’know? And in that sense, I really respect your parent, the Black King. Dunno if I should be saying this when I’m in Great Wall, but…she’s amazing. She’s undisputedly number one in the Accelerated World when it comes to being totally ready to leave this world. I wanna get that kind of mega cool, too. But y’know…like, if I was up against you in a duel, Crow, and say I found out you’d be at total loss if you were crushed one more time, would I be able to mercilessly slam that final blow into you, all cool-like…I honestly got no idea. At the very least, I can’t say I wouldn’t hesitate.”

“Ash.” This time, Haruyuki was genuinely surprised and turned serious eyes on the biker.

“Hey you!” he responded in a slightly threatening voice. “You look like you’re gonna be all, I’d have no problem putting you at total loss. Come on, now!”

“N-no no no no way! I’d hesitate, too! I’d super hesitate!”

“Dude, for serious?! You sound all like, I’d hesitate, but I’d still put you at total loss. Come on!”

“B-but you just said it like you would hesitate! Right now!” Shaking both hands and head at top horizontal speed to dodge Ash Roller’s follow-up jab, Haruyuki remarked, lips flapping, “But I mean, it’s only natural to hesitate. My parent…Black Lotus, I mean, I know she hesitates. No matter how hated her opponent is. Because at the core, they’re both Burst Linkers. And I owe you for this one, too, but that time the guy stole my flying ability this spring, he was an enemy, we were in total conflict, and I hated him from the bottom of my heart. And still, when I was defeating him in the Sudden Death Duel, I hesitated a little. I wondered if maybe we could have met a different way, had a different duel…and now I feel like that hesitation is maybe something we’ll never be able to get rid of completely as long as we’re Burst Linkers.”

This time, it was Ash Roller who fell silent.

Eventually, he lowered his eyes to the brownish-red earth between his feet and muttered slowly, “Maybe so. But, like, because of that hesitation, I couldn’t say anything to the U kid. I’m s’posed to be his big bro; I really should’ve said one or the other, clear as day. I totes will never forgive the dude who pushed your parent to total loss. I’m def gonna get revenge. Or else, We all fight carrying around the risk of total loss. You can’t mope about it forever. One of those things. But I couldn’t. Which is why U just filled up with anger and fear and went looking for something other than the power he had. This guy sitting right here made one of the reasons he went chasing off after the ISS kit.”

Ash Roller slammed a foot on the ground with a crunch, and Haruyuki couldn’t immediately figure out what he should say. But before he could open his mouth, something began flashing red in the top of his field of view. The timer had crossed into the last hundred seconds.

“That reminds me, Ash. Didn’t you say you had a wish you wanted me to grant?”

“Oh. Y-yeah. Right, right.” The biker lifted his face and yanked down the skull shield of his helmet before continuing in a suddenly wilder voice. “It’s kinda connected with the whole U thing. Well, it’s no big, actually. Sorry, Crow, but can you, like, mega quick and cool, teach me?”

“T-teach you? What?” Haruyuki cocked his head, and Ash Roller responded without hesitation and with a singular objective:

“The Incarnate System.”