6

If someone were to ask Haruyuki what his favorite of the five weekdays was, he would have responded without a moment’s hesitation that it was Friday. This was probably the same as the majority of students—and maybe grown-ups as well. The thrill of the two unbroken days off in a row was hard to beat.

However, when it came to his least-favorite day, he was a bit on the fence. Naturally, along with most people, he was not too happy with Monday, but the first day of the week held the joy of being able to see the object of his respect and affection, Her Excellency the student council vice president, after a two-day absence. And at least for this term, the lunch special on Monday was the feast of the gods that was minced meat cutlet curry.

Thus, if he proffered an amnesty for Monday in an act of extreme benevolence, next in line would have to be Thursday. After all, Thursday had gym class first period, a completely unforgivable timetable.

“Hey, Arita! Hey!”

Drenched in sweat, legs shaking, Haruyuki reflexively moved to throw the basketball he held in both hands in the direction his name came from.

But the figure of his teammate with hands up in the air was soon blocked by a player from the opposing team, and his own teammate disappeared from view. In the lower left of his vision, the digital numbers counting down the five- and twenty-four-second violations were steadily decreasing. Panicking, he held the ball high above his head with both hands to toss it toward the very front line in a blind long pass.

But just when he was on the verge of releasing the pass like a bolt of lightning, someone reached up and seized the ball from behind.

“Gotcha!”

Leaving behind an odious voice, the tall student—a basketball team regular named Ishio—magnificently dribbled the ball toward his own side of the court. While the girls standing around the court cheered, in the blink of an eye, Ishio made his way through the two players guarding and went in for a leisurely layup. The ball swooshed through the hoop, and the right side of the score of 22–36 displayed in the overlay in the lower right of Haruyuki’s vision changed to 38.

“No big deal!” The teammate who had called out to Haruyuki clapped him on the shoulder. But Haruyuki could hear only the echoes that lamented the other boy’s bad luck at ending up on the same team as Arita, instead of his own bad luck at ending up on the team opposite Ishio.

The dual basketball courts of the gym were divided up into girls’ and boys’, with the twenty boys being further split up into four teams, so each game was only twenty minutes. An upset victory in the remaining seven minutes and thirty seconds was clearly impossible, so Haruyuki prayed he would at least not make any more incredibly obvious mistakes as he started to return to his given position.

“Haru,” a different voice murmured behind his back. “The important thing is the overall image. Just like in the Territories.”

The one dropping this little bit of advice on him before moving away was Takumu Mayuzumi, who’d happened to end up on the same team. Although they were losing, they could be said to be putting up a rather good fight, given the fact that the other team had an actual basketball team player on it; there was only a sixteen-point difference. And the reason the gap wasn’t greater was because Takumu was working hard as a forward, even though ball games were far outside his area of specialization.

The overall image? Just like in the Territories? Haruyuki puzzled the words as he ran noisily after Takumu, aiming to catch the ball after a throw-in or charge dribbling into enemy territory.

The Territories in Brain Burst took place every Saturday evening, group duels fought over territory between Legions. A normal duel could go up to only a tag team of two against two, but the Territories unfolded as large-scale battles of a minimum of three against three, with some instances of more than ten against ten.

Which meant the fight couldn’t be won by simply relying on individual battle prowess. Players had to be aware of the overall situation in the large stage as they avoided the enemy’s major attacks, while also looking for weaknesses at the same time. They needed to have a comprehensive image of the state of the war.

So was Takumu trying to say that a basketball game was the same as that?

But Haruyuki’s team was already doing something like that. Since the enemy team’s main firepower was clearly Ishio from the basketball team, their strategy was to have two people guarding him at all times to block his movement. Haruyuki and another boy were conservative centers, while Takumu was the lone forward. But unable to really stop Ishio even with two people—and with only Takumu as the core of their attack—it was clear they wouldn’t be able to score as easily as that. Still, if they abandoned defense and shifted to an attack-style formation, the suddenly freed Ishio would simply run circles around them.

So then we can’t just think of this in terms of battle strategy, Taku. It’s like our opponent has a King on their side and we have a level one on ours, Haruyuki mentally replied to his friend. Of course, he was the level one. Given that he was slow, short, and bad at handling the ball, his presence alone in a basketball game was basically nothing more than an annoying obstacle.

And then at that moment, Takumu was knocked down onto the court with a heavy thud. An opposing player had panicked, seeing that Takumu was charging the enemy net for a three-point shot, and slammed into him. A sharp alert sounded and the word FOUL glittered blue in the center of his field of view. Blue was the enemy team’s color.

“T-Taku!” Haruyuki raced to his side, but Takumu raised a hand to indicate he was okay, and then stood up again.

He calmly took his three free throws, and the points he gained changed the score to 25–38. As Takumu quickly ran back, Haruyuki started to call out to him, but then swallowed his breath.

The word image his friend had used before—what if it wasn’t meant on the level of a weak point or a strategy? What if he had meant something bigger?

At the beginning of class, the in-school system had randomly divided them into teams. The moment Haruyuki saw that Ishio was on the opposing team, he had told himself it was all over; three of his four teammates had no doubt done the same thing. So before the game even began, they had been seized by a negative image.

Takumu was different, however. Because of his quiet manner and intellectual appearance, it didn’t really show on the surface, but he was a natural-born fighter. Which was why, when they were in elementary school and he was horribly bullied at his kendo lessons, he didn’t quit going. This was also why he couldn’t stop himself from checking into the rumors about the ISS kit, which had the power to overwrite the weak point written into his avatar because of that bullying.

And even in this pointless twenty-minute mock game in their completely meaningless gym class, Takumu refused to have a negative image, even knowing the clear differences in fighting power. So, right, it was exactly like the Territories in Brain Burst. In those battles, both sides expended every effort in tactics and strategies, and the first one who tossed out the words It’s impossible was the one who lost.

“Sorry, Taku.” His muttered apology probably didn’t reach his friend, but Haruyuki looked at the broad back of his good friend and clenched his teeth.

Six minutes, twenty seconds remaining. He would at least shed his negative image in that time. He would do whatever he could without thinking it was impossible. So then what could he do? Beautiful baskets, sharp dribbling, these things were beyond Haruyuki. But there should have been something that one enormous obstacle could do. Obstacle…

Haruyuki’s eyes flew open, and he immediately began fiddling with his virtual desktop at top speed.

There was a variety of functions in the gym ball-sports app carefully produced by the Ministry of Education, but ball games and AR displays were fundamentally incompatible—because obviously, the display got in the way of seeing the key bit of the whole operation, the ball—so AR was basically used only to display an overlay for the points and the time in the game at the edge of a player’s field of view. They could have played just as well without their Neurolinkers, but they weren’t allowed to because the school was legally obligated to monitor the heart rate, body temperature, and blood pressure of students exercising.

But when Haruyuki opened a tab for the court status in the app, it gave him a bird’s-eye view just below the center of his vision. Five round red marks, five blue moved irregularly in a diagonal rectangle. These were obviously the current positions of the players. He narrowed them down to two with a filter function. The remaining red circle was himself. The blue was the enemy ace, Ishio.

The instant the game started again with the enemy throw-in, Haruyuki moved noisily and held out his arms right above the line connecting the ball he could see with his eyes and Ishio moving behind him. He tried to ruin any pass opportunities for Ishio simply by waving his arms frantically and making his already wide body larger. The members of the Gallery burst out laughing at his ridiculous movements, but the enemy player holding the ball clicked his tongue lightly and passed sideways to another player. Yet Haruyuki ran several meters to the left at the same time and began waving his arms up and down again.

This was the “something” he could do.

The opposing team’s strategy was a “post” play to bulldoze through the game, using the ace posted around the basket. Since Haruyuki knew the ball was eventually going to be thrown toward the low post area, he first had to get an accurate understanding with the AR display of Ishio’s position behind him, and then be an “obstacle” in the trajectory connecting Ishio and the ball.

Given the momentum Haruyuki generated, a perfect man-to-man defense clinging to the ace himself was simply not possible, but if he guessed at the pass route and optimized the distance he moved, Haruyuki might be able to keep filling this role until the end of the game.

The opposing player indicated he was going to throw the ball directly to one side once more, so Haruyuki also started to move in that direction.

However, on the verge of doing so, he put on the emergency brakes. Ishio, three meters or so behind him, was running in the opposite direction. It was a feint. With the right foot that slammed into the ground, Haruyuki managed to absorb the inertial mass and throw his body to the right. His earnestly outstretched right hand smacked hard into the ball the opposing player threw. As it was about to bounce off somewhere, he unconsciously killed his force with the way-of-the-flexible trick from Brain Burst and pulled the ball toward him, holding it tightly against his chest.

“No way!”

Haruyuki was thinking the same thing his opposition shouted, eyelids peeled back. But if he let himself be dumbfounded there, Ishio would come up from behind and snag the ball from him again.

“Hey!”

Haruyuki heard the voice from his left and reflexively threw the ball, this time without bringing it above his head. The player on his team who caught it—a member of the swim team called Nakagawa—dribbled the ball for a few meters into the enemy camp and passed to their team’s ace, Takumu, running up on the right side.

Catching it firmly, Takumu headed toward the enemy basket in a fierce charge—Haruyuki would expect nothing less from a blue type—and finished up with a magnificent jump shot, making good use of his height. A light beep sound effect echoed in his ears, and the score display changed to 27–38.

“Nice, Arita!” Nakagawa called out to him, having promptly returned to their side of the court. Grinning, the typically buff swimmer raised his right hand, and Haruyuki, reflexively thinking, He’s going to hit me! somehow managed nonetheless to lift his right hand and accept the high five.

Takumu ran up from behind and simply exchanged a quick smile with him, but that was still enough to communicate what needed to be said.

In the just under six minutes that were left, Haruyuki ran, ran, and ran. A waterfall of sweat poured down his face and drenched his body, he panted heavily, and his legs and arms trembled, but he didn’t stop moving. His field of view—no, his mind—was filled with nothing but the ball in front of him and Ishio behind him. He imagined the course he should take in relation to those two and simply traced it out. Image and execution.

In one corner of his mind, becoming somewhat hazy at last, Haruyuki abruptly remembered that he had had a very similar experience only a few days earlier.

Exactly. When he was cleaning the animal hutch in the rear yard by himself. After thinking hard about exactly how he was going to clean up the mountain of old leaves piled up there, so many that it seemed it would be impossible to remove them by hand, he had imagined the result and then simply trusted in that, setting his hands to work. That had also been a difficult job, but in the end, the seemingly infinite number of dead leaves was gone.

Of course, a basketball game and cleaning a hutch were totally different. But maybe at the root, they were similar in what could be called the essence of action. He was pretty sure, though, that he had started to realize something more important at the time.

Words someone had spoken to him in that other world echoed faintly in the back of his mind.

…An image…strongly projected from the consciousness…overcomes restraints and becomes real.

Words to explain the other power hidden there. The ultimate power surpassing the normal system framework, close to a supernatural phenomenon. A miracle that shouldn’t exist in the real world. And though that logic might be incredibly simple—

Even as he thought this through, Haruyuki continued to intently run back and forth. Naturally, he couldn’t prevent every single pass to Ishio with his hastily prepared block. Sometimes, he was unable to get in the way of the ball being handed over, and in those instances, the enemy ace racked up points. Although they had closed the gap to a five-point difference with Takumu and Nakagawa’s counterattack, from there, it was one step forward, one step back; only the remaining time steadily decreased.

However, at some point, Haruyuki had removed the timer and even the score display from his consciousness. From the Gallery came the occasional commotion, mixed with laughter, but none of it reached Haruyuki’s ears.

Hah. Hah.

Listening only to his heavy breathing and the pounding of his heart echoing in his ears, he focused intently on tracing the expected image for the next second. He had nothing left over for attacking, but if he could simply counterbalance the weight of the opposing team and his own team one-for-one, the remaining four players should be more than even.

Once they were down to two minutes left, the two players on his team who had been guarding Ishio also went on the offensive, pushing through the gaps in the bewildered enemy defense to shove the ball through the hoop.

Three-point difference.

“Over here!”

Frustration building—and with good reason—Ishio returned to the far end of his team’s side and raised a hand to accept the throw-in directly. His two former guards from the red team tried to obstruct his movement forward once more, but in a lightning-fast spin, Ishio pulled out and away from them. Apparently, the “real technique” of the basketball team regular had been locked away until then.

Vision blurred by sweat, Haruyuki stood, paralyzed, in the face of Ishio charging at him. One-on-one, dead-on, the Neurolinker AR display was of absolutely no help to him.

Physical Burst!!

Haruyuki desperately fought back the urge to call out the command.

If he used Physical Burst—which accelerated his perceptions by a factor of ten while his mind was still lodged in his physical body—it would be a simple feat to steal the ball from Ishio, no matter what dribbling technique he tried to use. But this so-called cowardly acceleration was strictly forbidden by his Legion. And besides, it was an insult to Ishio, who was taking on the challenge of a true fight.

“Ah…Aaaaaah!” What Haruyuki could do unaccelerated was simply shout as he spread out his arms as far as they would go.

The flesh-and-blood left hand of Ishio flashed before Haru’s eyes, and the ball disappeared from view. The instant Haruyuki realized Ishio was dribbling behind his back, Ishio was already dashing past Haruyuki’s left side.

Even though he knew he couldn’t possibly catch up with the enemy ace as he charged ahead toward his team’s basket, Haruyuki went after him.

After he had run a few steps, an unfamiliar red font flashed before his eyes. A warning that his heart rate or his blood pressure or something had gone outside the normal range. But he ignored it. He resolutely chased after the hazy figure in the center of his field of view, which was starting to flicker and white out around the edges.

And then he stared, dumbfounded, as a silhouette as tall as Ishio stood on the other side of the ace, blocking him. At some point, Takumu had returned to directly below the basket. With him going into a match-up defense, Ishio pulled out all the stops. Ball between the legs—crossover.

“Hngh…Hah!” Spitting out the last of the air remaining in his lungs, Haruyuki dove with everything he had toward the ball Ishio was attempting to dribble behind his back.

The tips of his painfully outstretched hand touched the bumpy rubber—or didn’t. Haruyuki wasn’t sure. Because his vision went completely black then, and his thinking abruptly decelerated. The front of his own body hit something big and hard, and just as he realized it was likely the floor of the gymnasium, he heard a high-pitched voice shout from somewhere in the distance.

“Haru!”

Definitely Chiyuri, who was herself in the middle of a game on the neighboring court.

Come on. Focus on your own game. With this final thought, listening to the footsteps racing over to him, Haruyuki lost consciousness.

Something thin was inserted into his mouth, so he tried sucking on it, and a sweet, cold liquid flowed in. He drank it in a daze, eyes still closed. After sending the liquid down to his stomach in gulps that made it almost hard to breathe, he inhaled deeply.

When he tentatively opened his eyes, he was confronted with a bright white light. He hurriedly closed his eyelids, blinked several times, and then opened his eyes once more.

The source of the light was panels embedded in the ceiling. That, and the white curtains enclosing his field of view in a square. It would seem that this was not the gym. And beneath his body was not the hard floor but rather smooth sheets—a bed.

Before he could wonder where he was, the curtain at the foot of the bed was pulled open with a light sound.

“Oh! Arita, you’re awake?” Appearing there was a woman with midlength hair pulled back, wearing a crisp white doctor’s coat over a patterned T-shirt—Umesato Junior High’s health teacher. Last name: Hotta. Which meant this was the nurse’s office, situated at the eastern end of the first floor of the school’s second building.

“Oh…um…I…,” Haruyuki muttered, and an exasperated smile appeared on Ms. Hotta’s somewhat masculine face.

“It’s important to try hard in games, but you have to watch your own condition, too, okay?” she said. “If your blood pressure had gotten any lower, you’d have been in an ambulance.”

“O-okay. I’m sorry.”

So that’s it. I collapsed in the middle of the basketball game from anemia or dehydration or something, and they brought me to the nurse’s office.

Now that he finally understood the situation, Haruyuki glanced over at the time display in the lower right of his field of view and saw that second period had started a long time ago. He had apparently been unconscious—or sleeping—for over half an hour.

The health teacher deftly flicked around her virtual desktop and checked that Haruyuki’s vital signs were all back to normal before nodding lightly. “Rest here during second period. And get plenty of fluids, okay? I have a meeting in the teachers’ room to go to, but don’t hesitate to press the call button if anything happens. Okay, be good!”

Shhk! The curtain was closed once more, and the sound of footsteps softened by slippers receded. Finally, he heard the door opening and closing, and then the nurse’s office returned to silence.

Ms. Hotta had probably stayed to watch over Haruyuki until he woke up, even after the meeting started. What a hassle for her. But, well, I guess it’s her job and all. Vague thoughts drifted through his mind, while a thin straw stretched out again from the left side of his face toward his mouth.

He took it unconsciously and sucked. A nicely chilled sports drink poured pleasantly down his throat. Here, Haruyuki finally wondered curiously just what the straw was attached to and turned his gaze to the left. Maybe some automatic water-supply device? It couldn’t be a robotic nurse?

But the straw extended from a completely uninteresting thermos. And holding the bottle was a pale, slender hand that did not belong to Haruyuki.

As he gave commands to his still-decelerated thinking, his gaze now stopped on this hand. The slender arm extended from the sleeve of an open-collared black shirt. A dark-red ribbon on the chest of that shirt. Piano-black Neurolinker equipped on the graceful neck. Jet-black hair flowing over that.

“Bwhaaah!”

The instant he noticed the person sitting right next to the bed—the existence of whom he hadn’t even been aware of until that point—sports drink jetted forcefully from his mouth and nose. He watched a drop of liquid fly onto that black shirt, and immediately, his temperature and heart rate shot up.

“I-I’m—” he shouted hoarsely, moving both hands in a panic. “I’m sorry! W-wi-wipe it off or it’ll st-st-stain—”

“Mm. It will?” The person sitting on the simple folding chair set the thermos on the bed in a calm motion. “I’ll wipe it off, then.” She raised both hands and removed the hook-type ribbon before unbuttoning the open-collared shirt from the top.

He saw the skin of her chest, impossibly pale, and even caught a glimpse of the top of the gently rising curve.

“Hngoah!” Haruyuki uttered in a strange voice, throwing back his head, unable to close his eyes. But fortunately—or so he should say, at least—the two hands stopped their reckless movement.

“Kidding. Don’t worry about it getting wet. The fabric’s a washable shape-memory polymer.” The person buttoning her shirt back up, her expression unmoved, was of course the only owner of a black uniform at Umesato Junior High, the student council vice president, Haruyuki’s parent Linker and Legion Master, Kuroyukihime.

Seated with perfect posture on the chair, having returned her shirt to its original state, the beauty in black clothing opened her mouth once more, with a look on her face that allowed him to feel a faint tremor beyond its sternness. “Haruyuki. Ms. Hotta said this, too, and I won’t say that it’s bad to work as hard as you can in gym class. But given that you have the Neurolinker right there, you should heed the vitals warnings it sounds. This time, you managed to get away with a little light dehydration. But if things had taken a turn for the worse, this could have led to a serious incident.”

“I—I know. I’m sorry. I accidentally got caught up in the game.” He had meant to fight hard, but the only result was that his classmates had laughed at him, and in the end, he’d collapsed during the game. And then news of that foolishness had spread even to Kuroyukihime. Haruyuki hung his head, but her pale right hand reached out to cover his left.

“You don’t have to apologize. I’m not reproaching you. It’s simply…don’t make me worry too much.” Her voice dropped, and he raised his head. Kuroyukihime murmured, her expression more gentle, “When I heard from Chiyuri that you had collapsed, I thought I might pass out myself, you know. I just barely kept myself from using the forbidden physical acceleration command to race to the nurse’s office.”

The forbidden command was the Physical Full Burst permitted only to level-nine Burst Linkers. It was treated as a higher level of the “Physical Burst” command that Haruyuki had almost used facing off against Ishio, but Physical Burst couldn’t begin to compare with Full Burst. That was because not only was consciousness accelerated, but movement of the physical body in the real world was also accelerated nearly a hundred times the normal speed.

Of course, the price paid for this was nothing to scoff at. The user lost 99 percent of their accumulated burst points and was, in an instant, pushed to the brink of total loss. Kuroyukihime was likely joking, but even so, Haruyuki reflexively shook his head quickly back and forth.

“I-I’m glad you didn’t use it. I didn’t really collapse, it was more like I was just too tired and got dizzy. So then Chiyu was the one who told you?”

“Mm. At about the same time you were carried here. She’s quite fair in that way.”

“F-fair?” When he cocked his head, not quite understanding what she meant, a faint, wry smile crossed Kuroyukihime’s lips, and she indicated her left side with her eyes.

“Chiyuri and Takumu were sitting here with me for a while, until second period started. If they’d stayed, they would have been counted absent, so I sent them back to class. They were very worried. You should probably mail them.”

“R-right.”

Haruyuki nodded and launched the local net mailer from his virtual desktop. To his two childhood friends, he sent a report that he had regained consciousness and that there was nothing wrong with him, along with a brief thank-you for staying with him. And then he had an abrupt realization and looked at Kuroyukihime. “Um, is it okay for you not to go to class? Skipping without a note leaves a record on your permanent file, doesn’t—”

“Now, just who do you think I am? I submitted confirmation that I’m a health aide, naturally. Ms. Hotta signed it for me easily enough.” She grinned as she delivered this line, and he could only feel sorry for how completely thoughtless his question had been.

Kuroyukihime changed the nuance of her smile slightly before leaning forward. “To reward Chiyuri’s sense of fair play, I did consider issuing an aide pass for her as well, but she understood my selfishness,” she whispered mischievously. “After all, just yesterday, I used some tricks so we could be alone in the student council office, but we couldn’t really have a real conversation. Well, given the situation, that was unavoidable.”

“Oh. Uh. Yehuh.” At the shining, unutterable beauty of those black eyes this close up, Haruyuki unconsciously turned away.

At lunch the previous day, Kuroyukihime had suddenly burst into eighth grade’s class C and shouted that she was requesting the immediate presence of the president of the Animal Care Club. Having been appointed to that very position after announcing his candidacy through a misunderstanding, Haruyuki had followed her to the student council office, bracing himself to be yelled at for some reason or another, when it turned out it was all simply an excuse for the two of them to be alone together.

Of course, Haruyuki was also happy to talk with Kuroyukihime alone—it was, in fact, a dreamlike experience beyond happiness.

But she was too impressive and important to him. It wasn’t just that she was his parent as a Burst Linker and his Legion Master. She had saved his life, pulled him free of the bog, and given him hope. The sword master he had sworn his absolute and eternal loyalty to. And that didn’t even begin to describe what she was to him. Perhaps there was just one word that could sum her up: miracle.

Kuroyukihime lived charging single-mindedly toward the distant stars, and although she had her own issues to deal with, she had set her eyes on someone like Haruyuki, spoken to him, and reached out to him; this could well be called a miracle. Now she was at the center of his world, a massive jewel glittering dazzlingly. She was too beautiful, to the point where he felt she might disappear if he touched her, nothing but a fleeting memory.

He had only recently been able to relax around her enough to the point that he could speak normally, but when he realized they were alone together in a closed room, his heart started to pound, and his breathing became shallow. The current situation was much more critical than the day before in the student council office. After all, they were neatly surrounded by thick white curtains on all sides, and Haruyuki was lying in bed, with Kuroyukihime pushing a hand over the edge of it, leaning forward and staring at him.

His thoughts threatened to shoot off into some inexcusable territory if he stayed silent, so Haruyuki forced himself to pull back on the joystick and restart the conversation. “Uh, I’m sorry about yesterday. Now that I think about it, I didn’t actually explain the situation to you.”

“Mm. Well, I got the gist of it from your mail. And I did want you to tell me the details, but then you ended up here, and it all flew completely out of my head.”

“I-I’m sorry.” He apologized for the second time in a row, rubbing the fingertips of both hands together.

The reason Haruyuki had raced out of the school and run home the day before was because of his fear for Takumu, of course. And instead of that fear being absolutely unfounded, Haruyuki had discovered his best friend was on the verge of falling completely under the control of the ISS kit. But through a duel with Haruyuki, Takumu had gotten himself back, and the kit itself had been completely destroyed in the fight in the BB central server the night before.

Although he had given Kuroyukihime, Fuko Kurasaki, and Utai Shinomiya a rough overview of all this in a mail after his duel with Ash Roller that morning, he hadn’t been able to include all the little details in its short message. Haruyuki himself didn’t fully understand the events in the central server, and another, more important matter had been added to his list of things to do before the mission to escape the Castle commenced.

To wit, Ash Roller’s entirely unexpected “wish.”

Even though he should have had a million things to say to Kuroyukihime, Haruyuki closed his mouth once more, unable to figure out exactly where to start.

“Even still, that you would try so hard in gym class that you’d collapse…,” Kuroyukihime said gently, as if she understood Haruyuki’s confusion and was trying to ease it to some degree. “Perhaps this might sound rude, but it’s a little unexpected.”

“Y-yeah. I was super surprised, too.”

“Did something change for you?”

At this question, he cocked his head, puzzled. Now that she was asking, he did feel like there was something, but at the same time, he felt like nothing at all had changed.

“Umm. It’s not that anything particular happened. But I was messing up all over the place in the game, and Taku came and said to me that the important thing was the image. So I decided to at least stop playing the game with a negative image in my head. And then I guess I just got into it before I knew it. That reminds me, I wonder how the game ended.”

“Takumu said you lost by one point.”

“We…did?”

According to his hazy memory, Haruyuki’s team had been down three points with a minute or two left on the clock and opposing ace Ishio going on a serious offensive against them. If they had narrowed that down to a one-point difference, then they had blocked that swift offensive attack and managed to score on the rebound, which is where the game ended. He figured Takumu managed to pull that off with some shocking counterattack.

And then Kuroyukihime made a surprising statement, smile on her lips. “The truth is, it was Takumu and one other boy, the basketball player in your class, who carried you to the nurse’s office.”

“Huh? Ishio? Carried me?”

“Mm. He left a message for you. He said, ‘You crushed me this time, but that trick won’t work on me again next time.’”

“Ah! Cr-crushed?! But I mean, his team won the game.”

“Apparently, his own personal definition of winning is that it’s a loss unless he wins with a twenty-point difference.”

“H-huh, really?” He couldn’t tell if this message from Ishio was humility or arrogance, and unconsciously, he smiled wryly.

The reason he had been able to stay in Ishio’s way during the game was because the opposing team stubbornly refused to change their strategy. If they played basketball in gym class and he ended up against Ishio again, the simple method of using the AR display to block him would no longer work. It was the same as in Brain Burst duels or the Territories. In that world, too, succeeding a second time with a strategy that worked once was very rare. Because it wasn’t an AI he was fighting, it was a human being with his own image power.

His thoughts drifting along that thread, Haruyuki was abruptly aware of the important “something” he had felt during the game starting to flicker back to life in his mind. “Oh!”

“Mm? What is it?”

“Oh no. It’s no big deal. I mean, I might be way off, but…” Pushed by Kuroyukihime’s gaze wordlessly encouraging him, Haruyuki moved his mouth again before it came to a complete halt. “…‘An image strongly projected from the consciousness…overcomes restraints and becomes real.’”

Kuroyukihime’s eyes opened wide for an instant, and then she smiled gently. “It had to have been Fuko who said that to you.”

“Th-that’s right. How did you know?”

“I told you before. She is the most genuine user of the positive will I know. And those words are very Fuko, and her belief in the light side of the Incarnate System above all else.”

Haruyuki didn’t think he completely understood the meaning behind Kuroyukihime’s soft words. But not daring to ask her about it, he continued speaking himself. “That’s obviously a description of the Incarnate System in the Accelerated World. But when Takumu said that to me about one’s ‘image’ being important during the game, I just somehow thought, like, maybe when we really try hard in this real world…we’re doing the same thing? Of course, it’s not like we can use superpowers like Incarnate attacks on this side. But, like, my going up against the Ishio in a basketball game or managing to clean the animal hutch by myself, it’s a miracle greater than superpowers for me. Umm, basically, I guess I’m trying to say…um…”

Here, Haruyuki reached the limit of his power of speech, and all he could do was flap his mouth open and shut like always.

Fortunately, however, it looked like he had communicated what he needed to say to Kuroyukihime. Her obsidian eyes opened wide once more, and a long breath slipped past her glossy lips. “Haruyuki. When exactly will you stop surprising me? I certainly never dreamed you would reach this mental state so quickly, and under your own power at that.”

“Huh? M-mental state?” Haruyuki parroted back, dumbfounded.

“Yes.” Kuroyukihime peered into his eyes and nodded deeply. “The words you’ve just given voice to are precisely the entrance to the second stage of the Incarnate System. To move past the basic expansions of range, power, defense, and movement and learn the so-called practical techniques, you must understand exactly what the imagination is not through reason, but rather through intuition. Just how big, how deep this power given to us is, this power to imagine.”

“Im…agine…”

“Mm. Up to now, you thought the overwriting through the image that is the basis of the Incarnate System was a game system logic that existed only in the virtual world, yes? But that’s incorrect. Imagination holds unlimited power in this real world as well. Of course, you can’t do anything that would defy the laws of physics. But drawing on the aid of the power of the image, it is possible to overwrite a wall that appears to be an absolute limit. Just as you yourself proved during the basketball game.”

Kuroyukihime’s words shook Haruyuki somewhere deep in his heart, but at the same time, they also generated a serious confusion in him. He unconsciously leaned forward and, staring at Kuroyukihime—who similarly leaned forward—he asked in a hoarse voice, “The power of imaging takes you beyond your limits. That fundamental is the same in the Accelerated World and the real world. I feel like I basically get that. But how are that and this ‘second stage of the Incarnate System’ connected?”

Kuroyukihime didn’t respond to his question right away. She lowered her eyes, as if seized by uncertainty after having come this far, and bit her lip lightly.

Haruyuki had the vague sense that he could guess at why. Kuroyukihime carried a kind of fear about the Incarnate power she had learned. She feared that her power—unlike the positive power Fuko/Sky Raker used—was negative, calling up destruction and despair.

But Haruyuki fervently believed that couldn’t be true. Because Kuroyukihime’s Incarnate attacks (though he had seen only her long-range attack, Vorpal Strike) were so beautiful as to render him speechless. Even if it was awesomely powerful, a technique that beautiful couldn’t be the result of negative imaging.

“Kuroyukihime.” Haruyuki leaned a few centimeters closer and gently touched her right hand with his left. “First, Raker, and Niko after her, taught me very important things about the Incarnate System. But…you’re my ‘parent.’ I want to know everything about you. I want you to teach me everything. Please. Please tell me about your Incarnate.”

Her reply wasn’t quick in coming.

The sun at half past ten on that June morning had already risen to very close to the center of the sky, and the light coming in through the windows didn’t reach the corner on the other side of the nurse’s office. In the space cut out by the snowy white curtains on all four sides of his bed, dimly illuminated by the lowered light of the ceiling panel, only the sound of the two of them breathing echoed faintly.

Finally, Kuroyukihime’s fingers moved gently to tangle themselves among Haruyuki’s. A subdued murmur followed. “In that case, we’ll first need a direct cable.” As she lifted her face, the only thing he saw there was the same enigmatic, mysterious smile as always.

Haruyuki let out his breath and then said, panicking slightly, “Ah! I-I’m sorry! My cable’s in my bag in the classroom.”

“Mine, too. But they have cables here.” As she spoke, Kuroyukihime manipulated her virtual desktop with a light touch, likely searching the equipment list. She nodded soon enough, removed her fingers from Haruyuki’s hand, stood up, and disappeared quietly beyond the curtain.

He could hear the sound of a drawer opening and closing, and when she returned seconds later, her hand held a white XSB cable. But…

“I-isn’t that a little short?” Haruyuki blurted the instant he saw the cable, which looked to be just barely fifty centimeters long.

But Kuroyukihime shrugged lightly. “Then we just have to make it reach. Fortunately, we’re out of view of the social cameras here.”

“Huh? B-but how—?” he started to say, and then swallowed his words hard.

Because Kuroyukihime hopped up onto the bed, entirely nonchalantly.

“Huh?! Um! That’s…” Belatedly, he realized he was still wearing his white gym clothes and pulled back. Thanks to the quick-drying fabric, his sweat had already dried, but he must have still stunk.

But Kuroyukihime reached out her left hand, seeming to pay all this no mind, and pushed gently on Haruyuki’s chest to make him lie back down before lying down herself immediately to his right. From extremely close up, she turned a somewhat mischievous smile on him.

As usual, the engine of his mind raced emptily while his heart rate shot up into the red zone.

Her sigh contained a smile as it gently touched his ear. “Ha-ha! After everything, it’s a bit late to get this nervous now. We did sleep together in the same bed the night of the Hermes’ Cord race, didn’t we?”

“Y—! Yee—! W-w-w-w-we did, but!”

The aforementioned race event had happened a mere two weeks earlier in the Accelerated World, but because so many things had happened since then, it seemed like something out of the distant past. But the memory of that night was deeply etched into the back of Haruyuki’s mind.

Then, too, they had direct-dueled from the same bed. Although Haruyuki had challenged Kuroyukihime over and over again with his recently acquired Aerial Combo, she had fended off his attacks effortlessly with her ever-more-powerful “way of the flexible,” and in the end, he had taken a hit from her level-eight technique Death By Embracing and been killed instantly.

I have a feeling it’s gonna turn into something like that this time, too, Haruyuki thought as the girl brought the end of the fifty-centimeter-short XSB cable toward his Neurolinker. Reflexively, he started to move his head away, but the plug was inserted whether he liked it or not.

“Ah!”

Not heeding Haruyuki’s strangled cry, Kuroyukihime next connected the plug on the opposite end to the piano-black communication device equipped around her slender neck. A wired connection warning blinked red in his view.

“Yesterday, I made you use a point for my own selfishness. So today, how about I treat you?” Those whispered words meant that rather than both of them accelerating simultaneously to dive into the initial blue world, Kuroyukihime alone would accelerate and then challenge Haruyuki.

“O-okay. Thanks,” Haruyuki replied.

He watched her light-peach-colored lips move slightly to call out, “Burst Link.”

And then the dry thunder of acceleration filled his hearing.