1

“Big brother! Welcome home!”

Arriving home, Haruyuki had taken his shoes off and trudged about halfway down the hallway to his room when he heard a voice from the living room to his left.

“Thanks,” he muttered automatically, almost unintelligible. He took another step, then another, and on the third, he yanked up the emergency brake hard.

Huh?

What was that?

As far as Haruyuki knew, the thirteen years and ten months since the birth of the human being known as Haruyuki Arita had been an unbroken chain of only-child-dom. And he thought he was grateful and happy for this fact, rather than have it be a source of dissatisfaction, but perhaps the truth was that he nurtured an unconscious loneliness, which had finally resulted in auditory hallucinations.

I’m no one’s big brother, am I? Especially not a girl with a cute voice like that? Little sisters only show up in horror movies, right?

Haruyuki was still standing there awkwardly quizzing himself when he heard the sound of the impossible once again. A singsong humming. Small slippers slapping against the floor. He even smelled something sweet. Hallucinated…scent? Was that possible?

The bag on his shoulder fell with a thud, and he whirled around a hundred and eighty degrees to stumble clumsily into the living room.

And then his hallucination even became visual.

There, in the kitchenette immediately to the left when you entered the room—a space almost never used for its designated function under normal circumstances—was where it hovered.

Probably about ten years old. Skinny enough as to be surprising and wrapped in a white blouse and navy skirt, obviously the uniform of some elementary school. The look was completed by suspenders and a pink apron over the top. Pigtailed red hair hung finely on both sides of its head, and the face below the round, smooth forehead was a shape that was nothing other than cherubic. Possibly biracial? Little freckles scattered across the milk-colored skin, the large eyes also a red-tinged green. His overall impression in sum was…

An angel? A vision from the heavens?

He stared, slackjawed, robbed of his ability to think. The girl flashed him an adorable smile before saying, “I’m baking cookies right now. You just wait a minute, okay, big brother?”

“Aaaah!” Haruyuki decided it was time to scream and tucked his round body behind the living room door. Unable to make heads or tails of the situation, he warily poked out just the top half of his head.

The girl tilted her own head to one side, looking perplexed, but soon smiled once again before turning around to peek into the oven. The two gatherings of red hair shook gently as she did, shining in the winter light coming through the window.

Having gotten to this point, Haruyuki finally decided that she was no hallucination. However unbelievable the situation seemed, the girl was too real. Which meant…she had to be malware uploaded to his Neurolinker. An ultradetailed 3-D model had been added to his vision, with extra false data for the sounds and smells. Although he couldn’t see why anyone would do something like this.

I mean, there’s no way I actually have a sister.

If it was a polygon fake, there was no reason to be afraid. Chuckling to himself, Haruyuki stepped into the kitchen and reached his right hand out toward his “little sister” as she looked up at him with a smile. He then grabbed a freckle-spattered cheek and yanked.

The Neurolinker, communicating on the quantum level with the wearer’s consciousness, was capable of generating a virtual world that was, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from reality if limited to the senses of sight and hearing.

But when it came to reproducing the other senses, touch in particular, research still lagged due to the difficulty in assigning numerical values to these senses. Even with unlimited memory and CPU capacity, the creation of a single person took all of the Neurolinker’s processing power. It was impossible to perfectly re-create in a virtual world the complex sensations of the texture of skin, the resistance of muscles, and the reflexive contraction in a human cheek. So when Haruyuki pulled on her cheek, the only thing his fingertips would feel would be lifeless rubber—

“Fwah ah you doon?”

“Holy crap?!” Haruyuki yelped, let go, and fell backward, hitting his butt on the refrigerator.

The illusion was perfect. Soft, velvety, young. In other words, a sensation of pulling on the cheek of a ten-year-old girl that was nothing shy of perfect—although he had never before had such an experience—was generated in his fingertips.

Staring into the saucer-sized eyes of the girl puffing up her cheeks in sudden outrage, Haruyuki reached a shaking hand up to the Neurolinker on his neck, released the lock, and ripped it off in one go.

The augmented reality information, like the clock, calendar, and app icons, were wiped from his vision.

The girl did not disappear.

“Haruyuki, I’m sorry, but…”

So began the message from his mother that Haruyuki belatedly noticed on their home server. Neurolinker reequipped, he stood stock-still and listened to it.

“I’m sorry, but the daughter of a relative is going to be staying with us for a few days. You know them, don’t you? The Saitos in Nakano? My cousin? He said it was a sudden business trip overseas. And I already told you, I’m in Shanghai from today. I’ll be back in a couple days, so you keep an eye on her, all right? Mail me if you need anything. Bye.”

His mother, Saya Arita, worked in the trading department of a bank that had its home office in the United States. She was never home before the clock struck midnight, and she was always flying overseas, leaving Haruyuki alone for days at a time. Although it was unclear how much of this travel was work and how much was getaways with the man she was dating. Haruyuki sometimes thought that if the divorce seven years earlier hadn’t been because his dad was cheating, it would’ve been exceedingly strange for the family court to let her have custody.

Thus, ever since elementary school, Haruyuki was often taken in by the Kurashimas—Chiyuri’s family—two floors down in the same condo. If Chiyuri’s mom and dad, who always welcomed him warmly, had ever shown him even the slightest hint that they were inconvenienced by this, he would have been crushed. He would have had nowhere to go and probably would’ve ended up bullied ten times more than he was.

Thoughts like this filling his brain, Haruyuki watched Saito’s kid whirling around busily in the kitchen.

The oven timer sounded lightly, and the girl opened the door to pull out a metal tray. The sweet scent hanging in the air became even stronger. Apparently, the source of the fragrance was the cookies.

After carefully transferring the dozen or so cookies via tongs to a large plate covered with a paper towel, the girl exhaled sharply, as if relieved. She took the plate in both hands and turned around, looking up at him. “Um…I’m sorry for using the kitchen without asking. I thought my big brother Haruyuki would be hungry when he got home…so I…”

Her voice is even smaller than before, Haruyuki thought. Oh, duh, she’s probably worried that the “big brother” in the place she was abandoned looks put out by her. She’s insecure. I’m the older one, I shouldn’t be so freaked out, just meeting a girl.

A formless pain deep in his chest, Haruyuki did his best to put a smile on his face. “Oh, thanks. I’m starving.”

And just like that, the girl also grinned, ice melting. “Um, I’m Tomoko Saito. I’m in fifth grade. I figured you maybe forgot me since we haven’t seen each other in years, but…I think we’re second cousins. Um…I’m sorry to just barge in on you like this, but I hope we can get along.” Still holding the plate reverently with both hands, she dipped her head neatly, causing Haruyuki’s pulse to skyrocket and his sweat glands to open to their fullest.

But he quickly remembered the conclusion he’d just reached and somehow managed to respond with something along the lines of a coherent greeting. “Right! Um, I-I’m Haruyuki Arita. M-me, too, I—I hope we’ll get along, Miss Saito.”

Immediately, the girl declared, “You can call me Tomoko!” with a grin, and Haruyuki frantically reined in his distant thoughts, which were moving out into nowhere land at a dizzying pace.

If he was honest, the only memory he had of the Saitos in Nakano was a vague sense that such relatives existed. Which was, he supposed, par for the course when it came to your parents’ cousins.

“So. Are you an only child, too?” he asked, and Tomoko nodded pertly.

“My dad is the only family I have. He had to go away on business suddenly, and I said I could stay home by myself, but he said he would worry. So he brought me here from school a little while ago and then went straight to the airport,” Tomoko replied as she placed the plate of cookies on the table.

Haruyuki checked without thinking. “Oh, so you didn’t see my mom, then.”

“No. I just got a spare key to your house.”

That was extremely good luck. That mother of his wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot Tomoko a look of pure, venomous, and complete annoyance had they met.

However.

Right. So, then, that means…for the next three days, I’m supposed to live alone with this girl, right? No, no, no, no need to panic, you big dummy. She’s in fifth grade. There’s a full two years separating us…Two years…so? So then…?

Tomoko seemed unaware of the sudden uneasiness swallowing Haruyuki, and she smiled again with a “Please restrain yourself until they cool” smile before stepping back. She quickly washed up the bowl and other dishes in the sink while she waited for a pot of water to boil, returning in a few short minutes with a tray of tea. She was clearly already more at home in this kitchen than Haruyuki.

Marveling at how incredible girls are, Haruyuki shook his head abruptly. She’s a kid, a kid. She’s just a kid.

But the cookies were so delicious, they could’ve been sold in a specialty shop. Making short work of a rather large portion of them—nine, to be exact—he sipped the tea Tomoko had made for him, wondering exactly how many years it had been since anyone had baked him any treats.

On the other side of the table, redheaded Tomoko blew little puffs of air over her cup with a serious look on her face, a mannerism both unsophisticated and touchingly lovely. Just watching her, Haruyuki felt a kind of warm glow.

“Thanks for this…Um…Th-they were delicious,” he managed to say in a somewhat normal tone, and Tomoko flashed him a broad smile, as if relieved.

“Really? I’m so glad! You weren’t saying anything, so I was a little worried.”

“S-sorry, I just spaced out while I was eating.”

Chuckling softly, she rose halfway, reached out, and plucked off a cookie crumb stuck to Haruyuki’s cheek. Which she then popped into her mouth, smiling again.

Haruyuki heard a weird heart-popping sound effect in his head and frantically rubbed at his mouth. “U-uh, um, okay. R-right. What should we do now? P-p-play video games? I have a ton of them, some from, like, forty years ago—” he said, before remembering that the majority of them were bloody hellscape–type things.

Fortunately, however, Tomoko shook her head lightly, still beaming. “Um, I don’t really play video games. I’m not very good at full dives.”

“H-huh.” Shifting his gaze as she spoke, Haruyuki finally noticed that there was no Neurolinker, that essential tool of modern life, around her thin neck, which was covered by a blouse buttoned tightly all the way to the top.

He knew there were more than a few families who avoided daily Neurolinker wear while the kids were in elementary school, because the infinite global net was also a hotbed for all kinds of criminal activity. Even with the parental control function, it was hard to completely block harmful information.

He could also understand being scared of a full dive, with the way it blocked all input from your actual senses if you usually only used the audiovisual mode in classes at school. That being the case, he was beginning to seriously wonder if there was anything they could do when his eyes finally landed on the large-panel monitor attached to the living room wall.

Haruyuki pointed at it. “O-okay, we could watch a movie or something? And I’ve got some pretty good 2-D programs from way back, too.”

But Tomoko shook her head slightly again and said, as if embarrassed, “Um…instead of that, would it be okay if we talked? Like, about your middle school? I’d like to know about that.” She stood up and navigated around the table to sit down next to him.

A sweet scent like milk tickled Haruyuki’s nostrils, activating now of all times the antigirl force field he had cultivated over many years, and he reflexively threw himself backward. His chair tilted precariously, and he waved his arms out at his sides to pull out of what was nearly a side-fall onto the floor.

Tomoko stared intently at him as he thumped back down into his original position before giggling, “Big brother, you have some pretty cute qualities, don’t you?”

—Aaah.

Listening to the sound of bubbles burbling up from his mouth, Haruyuki sank deeper into the bathtub.

Bathing being a particular love of his mother’s meant that the Arita bathroom was ridiculously large. So, too, was the bathtub, and even Haruyuki, with his ample frame, had room to spread his arms and legs out without feeling boxed in. He took a deep breath of moist air, smelling the scented bathwater through his nose, held it in his lungs, and exhaled slowly.

Although he’d been fairly tongue-tied at all the wrong times, his throat hurt from having spoken at such length after so long. Interrupted only by the curry and rice Tomoko had made for dinner, he’d somehow spent a total of four hours basically talking nonstop. He was mildly impressed that he could find that much in his regular life to talk about.

In the end, he’d spilled nearly every detail about his life, starting with the various systems at Umesato Junior High all the way up to random episodes with his two childhood friends, plus this and that about a certain older student dressed in black, who happened to be the most important person in the world to him. The only thing he didn’t talk about was the bullying that had plagued him until just a few months ago. That and anything related to the other world.

And Tomoko had listened intently to every bit of it, conversation that couldn’t have actually been all that interesting, occasionally laughing out loud.

Haruyuki reflected seriously that this might be what it was like to have a real little sister. At the same time, he hated himself for not being able to get rid of that last nagging doubt that something was off.

It was just—it was too perfect. One day, he comes home from school and he suddenly has a little sister who makes him cookies, curry and rice, and—the clincher—she’s all “I want you to talk to me.” Not to mention that it would be just the two of them for three days?

His mother hadn’t raised him to simply accept surprises out of nowhere without question. But if there was some ulterior something behind this, who on earth could have put it together and what was the purpose? And how was he supposed to find out?

After thinking on this a little, Haruyuki pulled himself out of the water and picked up the aluminum Neurolinker hanging on the rack beside him. It was water-resistant, but just in case, he wiped the water from his neck before attaching it from behind. The arms of the U-shaped device swung out lightly from inside and locked around his throat.

He turned it on, and the start-up symbol sparkled before his eyes, the brain connection check continuing for about twenty seconds before his virtual desktop opened. Swiftly moving a finger on his right hand, he opened a window for the Arita home server.

Haruyuki hesitated slightly before he opened the family album in data storage. They hadn’t taken any photos or anything as a family these last few years, but there had to be hundreds of images buried in there from before he puffed up into his current physique, back when his mother and father were still in love. He’d rather have died than look at those. He went back a level and instead opened the external nets connected to his home server.

Several three-dimensional access gates opened to fanfare, all home nets of Arita relatives. Naturally, you couldn’t just go poking through the server data willy-nilly, but you could leave messages and view schedules and things made public for the family.

However, there was no “Saito in Nakano” house among the access gates. Most families used the top screen to collect family photos and recent news, so he thought he could double-check there, but of course, only his mother’s parents and siblings were connected, with a few aunts and uncles; apparently, cousins weren’t covered.

Haruyuki momentarily shifted his gaze away from his desktop and listened for noise on the other side of the bathroom door. He could faintly pick up the sound of the panel TV in the living room. Apparently, Tomoko was still watching a family-friendly variety show. He felt bad for not getting out of the bath sooner after she had so firmly insisted he get in first. And he felt even guiltier that the reason for his long soak was his doubt that she was really his second cousin.

He focused on his desktop once again and opened the access gate in the middle of it—his mother’s parents’ home net. Ignoring the peaceful family photos taken against the backdrop of a farming village in Yamagata, he clicked on the gate to connect to the net interior. And naturally, a confirmation window popped up to block Haruyuki’s progress.

Here he entered the ID and password his mother had given him. Because this login would be recorded on the other end, his mother would find out he used her ID if her parents asked her why she’d logged in, and he’d be in serious trouble. But he didn’t imagine that his grandpa and grandma, who ran a cherry orchard, would actually check their home net’s access log. Still, it was obviously best to get the job done as quickly as possible. Haruyuki hurried to dive into their home net and open the album folder.

There was an enormous catalog of photos collected over several decades. Annoyed, he applied a filter for date and number of people, narrowing down the total number of images. He dimly recalled that the entire Arita family had gotten together at his grandpa’s seventy-seventh birthday party five or so years earlier and felt like he’d said hello to the Saitos from Nakano then. In which case, Tomoko, who would’ve been about five at the time, should have been there, too.

His search filtered soon enough, throwing up several thumbnails. He flicked one after another with the tip of his finger.

Not this one, not that one, either…Oh, around here? Like the next one maybe.

“Big brooooother!”

A singsong voice came out of the blue from his right, and Haruyuki reflexively twisted his neck around. His right index finger froze in midair.

At some point, the door to the bathroom had been opened slightly, and now Tomoko was standing on the other side, face and right shoulder peeking through.

His eyes fell from her head—reddish-brown hair wrapped in a towel—to her face, with its somewhat bashful smile, then down to her slim neck and the smooth skin of her shoulder. “Wha—wh-wha—”

She turned a faintly cherry-colored smile on him as his jaw flapped furiously. “Big brother, can I get in with you?”

“Get…in…That’s—”

“It’s just, you’re taking so long. I’m tired of waiting!” Without waiting for his reply, Tomoko stepped into the bathroom, giggling.

Haruyuki frantically pushed his body under the water with a splash, shut his eyes tightly, and cried out, “S-sorry! I’ll get out right now! I-I-I’ll get out right now, so just wait a second more!!”

“It’s fiiine. I mean, we’re cousins and all.”

It’s totally not fine at all!! he screamed in his mind, but his bio-optical visual processing units—that is to say, his eyes—betrayed their master’s intention, and his eyelids lifted slightly of their own volition. Tiny bare feet stepping across the ivory tiles leapt into his field of view, and he stopped breathing.

His focus shifted upward automatically. Calves drawing out a surprisingly thin, smooth line. Round knees, supple legs. The base of those legs was just barely obstructed by a pink bath towel, and he wondered momentarily just what was going on before his gaze continued traveling upward, and he cursed his own idiocy. The towel covered the small torso perfectly, with minimal bumpiness, and a delicate collarbone jutted out, smooth skin above the seam in the fabric—which threatened to unravel at any second.

“That’s exactly why I’d be grateful if you didn’t look so intently at me right now!” From the freckled face, finally, eyes turned downward, as if embarrassed.

It was this view that Haruyuki compared to the Arita family photos from five years ago still displayed on the right side of his field of vision.

The children, including himself, were clustered together in the front row. After all this time, he had absolutely no clue who was who, but fortunately, photos from that period were already using technology to embed data in the pictures. If he unfocused slightly, the names popping up in front of each child would disappear.

The name he was looking for showed up on the sixth kid in line. Tomoko Saito.

When he fixed his gaze on the name, the photo automatically zoomed in on the child who bore it, enlarging the image to the same size as the Tomoko in front of him.

Five years old at the time. And girls change, so I mean, her face, in five years could have…

There’s no way.

Haruyuki took a deep breath and held it, before exhaling at length. Then he turned toward the puzzled girl calling herself his second cousin and spoke to her with a sad smile. “Tomoko…”

“What is it, big brother?”

“…You’re a new Burst Linker, aren’t you?”

Her reaction was immediate and graphic.

For a brief instant, the look on Tomoko’s sweet face was the very definition of surprise. Her cheeks were probably dyed red for reasons other than bashfulness, and her right eye twitched convulsively.

But impressively, the girl, who age-wise was definitely at least around ten, cocked her head and said in an even sweeter voice, “What, big brother? What are you talking about? Berr…st? What’s that?”

“Tan,” Haruyuki murmured in response.

“What?”

“You’ve got clean tan lines on your neck. About the same as me. That’s the kind of tan you can’t really get unless you’ve been wearing one constantly from the time you were born…A Neurolinker, I mean.”

Tomoko—or rather, the girl who was likely not Tomoko—covered her neck quickly with both hands.

“And,” Haruyuki continued, “there are still pictures from five years ago on my grandpa’s home server. Tomoko Saito’s in them, too, you know? I’ll just say this, you’re about ten times cuter.”

The girl’s face spasmed again before devolving into a look that was actually complicated. Finally, her flickering expression settled down into a sulky grimace, light-years from the naive mask she’d been showing him up to then.

“Tsk!” She placed both hands on her toweled hips and clucked her tongue fiercely. “And after I went and checked the albums here. Never expected you to go and dig them up at your grandpa’s. You’re pretty suspicious.”

Flustered at the sudden change in her tone, Haruyuki somehow managed to reply, “Y-you went too far. I’m assuming the mail to my mom from Saito was a fake, but what if she’d decided to double-check with him?”

“All mails and calls generated from your mom’s Neurolinker are set to be intercepted and sent to me. It took me three days to get everything ready.”

“Well…good, job, I guess…” An incredulous voice slid out from between Haruyuki’s lips as he clung to the edge of the bathtub.

The only way to get a virus into someone else’s Neurolinker was to connect directly with a cable. Most likely, this girl had been tracking Haruyuki’s mother’s movements and had connected to her Neurolinker in the locker room of the gym she always went to.

Naturally, he wasn’t exactly pleased that something like this had been done to a close relative, but honestly, he was impressed. A lot of Linkers called themselves hackers or wizards, but most of these soldiers weren’t too keen on leaving the safety of their own homes to tackle some social engineering in the real world—becoming another person, the ultimate hacking to break security off-line.

Perhaps hearing the praise contained in Haruyuki’s voice, the girl smiled confidently, almost smugly.

Looking up at that smile, Haruyuki continued spelling out his hypothesis. “I guess you went to all this trouble because you want to use me as a stepping-stone to hack her, but you’re too optimistic. She’d have realized you’re a fake the second she saw you. Unlike me taking five hours…And you know, I totally get how you’d be feeling like you’d lose if you just went and challenged her to a fight as a Burst Linker. I mean, you’d be going up against the Black Lotus.”

When Haruyuki finished his grumbling speech, wishing the whole time she would hurry up and get out, the girl’s attitude changed abruptly once again. Her eyes glinted fiercely, shining the same shade of red as her hair. Glossy lips twisted into an unbecoming sneer, revealing the tiniest hint of white teeth in the gap.

She looked down at Haruyuki with an expression that could only be described as arrogant and said in a low voice, “Hey, hold up. What’d you just say?”

“Huh? I—I said…if you were to challenge her—”

“I’d lose? Me? And that’s why I’m here on this superannoying, secret, real-life hack?”

Is it not? As Haruyuki asked the question with his eyes, the girl reached up with her right hand and ripped the towel off of her head. She threw it on the floor and shot her index finger out at him.

Her red hair, nearly crimson in the steam, was practically standing on end. Short, it rippled like fire as the girl threatened, “God! Enough! Let me lay it down for you: Lady Scarlet Rain here’s gonna take that insult outta your tanned hide, so you stay right there like a good little lamb while I go get my Neurolinker!!”

Tucking her index finger back into her hand, she stuck her thumb out, turned it downward, and then yanked it off to the side before whirling around forcefully. Her right foot, poised to take a step forward, encountered the towel she’d just tossed aside and slipped.

“Hyaa?!” High-pitched shrieking.

Looking up at the girl falling, essentially somersaulting backward, Haruyuki cried out, too. “Whoa?!”

His arms shooting out automatically, he caught her just as she was about to crash into the edge of the bathtub. But his foot slipped in the bath, and Haruyuki also went tumbling backward.

Splooosh!

A magnificent clamor went with a tall pillar of water and a large bath towel fluttering alongside it.

Haruyuki bumped his head on the wall behind him and closed his eyes tightly, riding out the pain before raising his eyelids slightly to assess the damage.

Himself in the large tub flat on his back. The redheaded girl using his plump belly as a cushion. His arms wrapped tightly around that slim torso.

And both of them butt naked.

“Aaaaah?!” Haruyuki cried, which was drowned out by the girl’s “Eeeeeeeeee!!”

Writhing frantically, she escaped the tub in a single leap, employing the propulsion from a foot stomping down on Haruyuki’s stomach. She grabbed the bath towel from the floor and flew into the changing room before showing her face again.

“I’m going to beat you to death.”

Listening to the sound of her footsteps as she dashed toward the living room, Haruyuki was stunned.

I saw her. I touched her…

No, wait. She’s probably an assassin from one of the Legions of the Six Kings. And what she just said now, that probably means she’s coming to challenge me to a duel.

In which case, maybe he ought to take off his Neurolinker and avoid her? But if he was going to have to face her as an enemy at some point, it would be better to find out what was going on sooner rather than later. Now that he was just barely level four, he wouldn’t lose too many points if he failed to win one duel. And he didn’t have to worry about his defeat being too embarrassing if his opponent was a child.

Although 80 percent or so of his brain was in a state of total confusion, the remaining 20 percent had managed to reach this point, and Haruyuki recalled the name she’d given him.

“Scarlet Rain.” He was pretty sure he’d never heard it before. She was probably a distance-attack red on the color circle, but he would be rash to jump to the conclusion that she was a Red Legion Burst Linker based on that alone. He’d be able to confirm that soon enough if he got into a duel with her now, but he wanted more information.

He probably still had a minute or two before the girl equipped her Neurolinker, turned the OS on, and finished the quantum connection check. He muttered voice commands, still seated in the bathtub. “Command. Voice call. Number zero one.”

Instantly before his eyes, the holo dialogue A VOICE CALL WILL BE PLACED TO THE REGISTERED ADDRESS 01. OKAY? popped up. He promptly pressed YES.

His interlocutor picked up on the second ring. “It’s me. What’s wrong, Haruyuki, calling so late?” In the background behind the smooth, graceful voice with its musical intonation, he could hear the sound of water splashing.

Oh, so she’s in the bath, too…This thought flashing through his mind, Haruyuki began speaking to the person on the other end of the call, Kuroyukihime. She was one of the strongest Burst Linkers, Black Lotus, the Black King.

“Sorry to call so late. I was just hoping you could tell me something.”

“Oh? And what’s that?”

“Do you know a Burst Linker called Scarlet Rain?”

The answer to his question was a slightly long silence.

“Uh, um, are you okay?”

“Oh, sorry. So you’re seriously asking me that?”

“Serious? Of course. I wouldn’t prank call you at this time of night.”

“I see. Hmm. I suppose this is an oversight on my part. We only use nicknames; I haven’t told you any real names, have I? But, Silver Crow, this is a bit of laziness on your part as well.”

“Huh? I…What do you—?” Cocking his head, Haruyuki could hear tiny feet trotting down the hall over Kuroyukihime’s cool voice.

“Scarlet Rain. Immobile Fortress, Bloody Storm…The second Red King herself?”

Huh? Both eyes popped open, his jaw dropped, and his brain stopped.

As if on cue, the redheaded girl reappeared, nearly slamming into the bathroom door. She looked pretty furious, in nothing more than a cute underpants set. But she seemed uninterested in hiding anything anymore, and she proudly revealed her white body, crossing her arms in front of her.

Reflexively averting his eyes, Haruyuki noticed the one item other than underwear on the girl’s body—wrapped around the slim neck, sleek, with a transparent red sheen—and stared incredulously.

The girl flashed him a ferocious grin and cried out in a voice full of both sweetness and menace, “Burst Link!!”

Skreeeeee!!

Although the screeching filling the world around him was familiar to him now, it never failed to send a shiver up Haruyuki’s spine. Instantly, his real-world senses were disconnected, and the words HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER! blazed up in the darkness before his vision returned to him.

But what he saw was no longer his own bathroom, ivory cosmetic panels attached to the wall, but an expansive flat space, such that he could only assume that several floors had been knocked out of his condo building.

Haruyuki was deep in a full dive into the virtual world created by Brain Burst, the thought-accelerating, fighting game application in his Neurolinker. The world around him was a virtual duel field recreated from images from the social camera net laid out all over Japan.

But because, as a general rule, there were no social cameras in people’s homes, including Haruyuki’s, the game came up with this kind of supplementary extrapolation—in other words, a fabrication by the software. This time, the condo appeared to have been sent back to a time when it was still being built. Sprawling floors of bare concrete were pierced only by intermittent steel-frame girders.

In this stark space, Haruyuki and the girl faced each other in the flesh, albeit for a mere half second. Soon, however, the color and form of their bodies began to change. Into their alternate selves, their fighting duel avatars.

A silver glow reached up from the tips of Haruyuki’s rounded limbs, enveloping and narrowing them at the same time, stretching them thinner and thinner while giving rise to mechanical arms wrapped in silver armor. The transformation immediately spread to his torso, cutting the girth of his stomach in half in an instant. As his superfine metal body neared completion, an orb of white light swallowed his head, encircling it in a smooth, round, mirrored helmet.

Aware of his own body’s transformation into his duel avatar, Silver Crow, Haruyuki stared intently at the girl standing several meters in front of him.

Her arms and legs, slender like a doll’s, were suddenly enveloped in a scarlet radiance. As the circle of light climbed upward, it was replaced by clear, ruby-colored armor. Her perfectly flat stomach and chest were also subsumed by the semitransparent armor, with dark gray and ruby as the two highlights. Finally, in a flash of brilliance, an android-like head appeared.

A mask with nothing more than two rounded eyes. Antennas shaped like bundles of bound hair protruded from both sides of the armor. The pigtails bounced pertly; the eyes shone sharply, a vivid red.

This is the Red King?

Still standing bolt upright, Haruyuki looked intently at the duel avatar several meters ahead of him. She was small. She couldn’t have been more than a mere hundred and thirty centimeters. The only thing weapon-like about her was a handgun that looked like a toy dangling from her right hip.

“Uh, um.” His mouth moved spontaneously, and a voice with a metallic effect leaked out from beneath the mirrored helmet. “You’re really…”

Are you really one of the Six Kings of Pure Color, a level-nine Burst Linker, one of only seven in the Accelerated World, a powerful ruler leading an enormous Legion?

It was when he tried to ask this question that the space behind the cute girl-shaped avatar abruptly warped and distorted.

Four rough blocks glittering a deep crimson appeared, as if called up from the ether. They quickly covered the girl’s arms and legs. Armor plates followed, rolling up from the sides, completely concealing the slim body.

“Wha…” Haruyuki gaped at the crimson avatar, which had, in an instant, gained several times his own mass.

However, the arrival of the extra armor didn’t stop there. With a low, heavy banging, enormous hexagonal pillars, cylinders, plates, and more appeared in rapid succession and converged on each other. The avatar grew to nearly ceiling height instantaneously, quickly bridging the two meters to close the gap with Silver Crow, who hurriedly stepped back. Then it exceeded three meters.

A few seconds later, when silence finally returned, the thing towering before Haruyuki’s eyes could only be called a tank, or maybe a fort. Two enormous gun barrels slowly rose, extensions of the original arms, and white smoke puffed out from cooling vents here and there. In the center of this weapons cache, two red eyes, barely visible, glowered brightly.

“No way…,” Haruyuki muttered, as the word FIGHT!! glittered before his eyes in a flaming font before exploding and dissipating into nothingness.

Whatever! For now, just run!! Haruyuki thought immediately, turning to speed off in a fierce dash—before just barely stopping himself.

The enemy’s affiliation was long-range red. This enormous fortress-shaped duel avatar was, without a doubt, a demon when it came to distance attacks. In addition to the gun batteries on the left and right, the housings on both shoulders were most likely missile pods, and the short gun barrel protruding from the front was probably some kind of machine gun. Getting distance from an opponent like this was sheer stupidity.

Having made this judgment and mustering what little courage he had, Haruyuki turned again to face his opponent. He stood stock-still, exposed to the crimson gaze of the fortress avatar Scarlet Rain.

“So, you’re not running, huh? You sure got guts,” the Red King uttered in a voice that was both metallic and adorable.

“I-I-I’m too freaked out to move,” he replied pathetically, earnestly running his gaze over every centimeter of the king.

In games, the usual attack strategy for this kind of enormous and heavily armed boss was to stake your life on close approaches from blind spots to take out weak points. Charging her from the front was clearly off the table, and her sides were most likely within range of the adjustable main arsenal. In which case, he’d have to go in directly behind her. If he could put everything he had into a dash around her and attach himself to her back…

Perhaps realizing what Haruyuki was thinking, perhaps not, Scarlet Rain giggled. “You say the cutest things! But you haven’t forgotten, have you?”

“Huh? F-forgotten what?”

“The fact that…” The main weapon on her right suddenly squealed into motion to target Haruyuki. “…I told you I was going to kill you, you friggin’ perv!!”

“That was an act of God, okaaaaaaay!!” Haruyuki screamed back, kicking the ground savagely. He charged like a bolt of lightning toward the enemy’s left flank, turned sharply, and headed for her back.

Scarlet Rain’s swiftness turning as she followed Haruyuki was surprising given her enormous size, but even so, it wasn’t enough to keep pace with the rushing velocity of Silver Crow, a duel avatar singularly specialized for speed.

“And you were the one who just came waltzing into the baaaaaath!!” Raising his voice in a cry once more as he dashed in close, Haruyuki plunged unhesitatingly forward, his enemy’s back finally coming into view.

As expected, her rear harbored nothing more than very long radiation fins and thrusters; he didn’t see any weapons. He set his sights on the place where the armor looked thinnest, the area where a missile pod connected with a fin, raised his right fist, and—

Thrusters?

The second this thought flashed through his mind, the four black jet nozzles began emitting intense flames.

“Gaaaahot!!” Haruyuki shouted, instantly engulfed in the blaze, which produced an overwhelming sensation of heat and whittled away at his hit point gauge in the top left of his field of vision.

But he couldn’t stop his charge now. The damage wasn’t on a level he needed to worry about. Silver Crow, affiliated with the metallic colors, was resistant to heat attacks.

“Fire doesn’t work on Silver Crow!!”

Got you! Haruyuki channeled all his energy into a Punch, pummeling the joint in the rear armor. But…

“Wishful thinking, kid!!” Scarlet Rain roared so gleefully he could almost see her laughter written in the air while the lids on the casings on her shoulders popped open.

Seeing a barrage of countless little missiles let fly, Haruyuki’s eyes widened in shock.

How…This…We’re in a…building…

In a flash, the concrete ceiling and floor, the steel pillars—everything was engulfed in the bright red blossom of an explosion. Above his head as Haruyuki desperately dodged a missile headed straight for him, cracks lanced through the concrete like a net, and the whole structure began to crumble.

“No way!” He just barely avoided an enormous chunk of debris falling toward him, the floor below his feet collapsing at an unbelievable pace.

“No way?!” Screaming, Haruyuki dashed for all he was worth. He couldn’t just stand there worrying about getting too much distance from his enemy. They were on the twenty-third floor, far above the ground. If he got swallowed up in the collapse, his HP would probably vanish in a blink.

Because the only parts of what was formerly Haruyuki’s condo remaining were the floor and the pillars, he could see the light that led to the exterior several dozen meters ahead. Zigzagging over the collapsing floor and pulverizing the falling lumps of concrete with his fists and his head, he glanced up to check the special-attack gauge below his health bar.

Neither the damage he was inflicting nor sustaining were very serious, but perhaps because stage destruction points were also being counted, his gauge was shining about 20 percent green. Which meant—

He could fly!!

Haruyuki took a deep breath and concentrated his power in both shoulders. The metal fins folded up on his back deployed with a crisp click. He vibrated the fins at a high frequency and accelerated his dash.

“Geronimoooooooo!!” Crying out, he turned to the gray sky approaching before him and threw himself headlong into a dive.

Haruyuki’s place was very near the top of the skyscraper complex. Therefore, the moment he leapt from the building, the city suddenly lay spread out before his eyes, from Koenji to Shinjuku. It was a picturesque panorama, but like his own condo, the buildings had all been transformed into drab affairs, steel frames jutting out of cement. So this was probably a Weathered stage. He was pretty sure its attributes were: breaks easily, dusty, and sudden gusts.

Mulling this over, Haruyuki eased up on the acceleration of his metal wings and hovered in the sky. He glanced over at his special-attack gauge; there was only a little left. At this rate, he should have had enough for three minutes of continuous flight.

When he looked back, the condo’s enormous tower was in the process of splitting in half at the middle, another stage in its progressive, merciless collapse.

“Aaah…My house…,” he muttered unconsciously. Of course, that “house” was just made of polygons generated by the system, but this was the first time his own home had been destroyed in a duel.

“Honestly, this is ridiculous.” Shaking his helmeted head, Haruyuki watched the condominium reduced to a mountain of rubble below him. The Red King had apparently gotten caught up in the massive destruction she herself had initiated and was nowhere to be seen. So even a fortress avatar was helpless before this kind of devastation.

He cocked his head to the side, wondering exactly what she had been trying to accomplish, and started his descent when he noticed something and shuddered.

Scarlet Rain’s health gauge had not dropped. Although it was somewhat less full, on the order of 30 percent less, it wasn’t an amount that could properly be called damage. And her special-attack gauge was shining brightly, fully charged.

Of course. Destroying such an enormous geographical landmark would have given her a huge bonus. Which meant that the Red King’s reckless and random missile fire hadn’t been intended to disrupt Haruyuki’s attack on her back or to entangle him in the collapse.

All of a sudden, several rays of red light surged out from the rubble under his nose. At the same time, a shrill voice shouted, “Heat Blast Saturation!!”

A strange sort of resonance pulsated the air, a thunderous sound that nearly burst Haruyuki’s eardrums as he watched a line of red fire pierce the ruins of the condo, stretching straight up into the sky.

“Eeeeaaaah!!” he cried, vibrating his left wing as hard as he could in an attempt to avoid the beam with a tailspin dive. But…

The field of fire was just too huge. Unable to completely avoid the beam, which was basically as wide as he was tall, Silver Crow hit the flickering thermosphere with his left arm. There was a sizzling sound just below his elbow, and his lower arm steamed out of existence.

His HP bar plummeted 15 percent, and he was racked by an unrelenting, scorching heat. But Haruyuki was largely unaware of either of these things.

Because he was focused on the heat beam passing right by him, he didn’t see it extend toward the east of the stage and blow away the top half of the Shinjuku government office towering over the area three hundred meters above the ground.

“No way…” The same stunned words he had uttered too many times in this battle slid once more from Haruyuki’s mouth. Jaw agape beneath the silver surface of his helmet, he shifted his gaze and stared at the remains of his condo.

The Red King emerged majestically from an enormous gash cut through the rubble. The beautiful ruby armor covering her body was perfectly untouched. The thrusters on her back and undercarriage glittered lightly with the emission of flames, and white smoke trailed from the slits in the gun of her left arm.

“Ooh, you’re flying! High in the sky!” the Red King half sang, looking up at Silver Crow with round eyes from the gap in her front armor. “I always wanted to try this stuff, antiaircraft fire. Looks like so much fun in sci-fi movies and whatnot. Just sends everything flying all over the place.”

Ka-chak.

With a spectacular metallic clack, the missile casings on both her shoulders flung wide, her right main weapon came up, and the angle of the four machine guns on her front changed.

Trembling violently, Haruyuki recalled scenes like this from movies and anime. The tiny mecha soldier tries to slip past the enemy fortress’s overwhelming curtain of antiaircraft fire and get closer. They were almost always shot down like little bugs and exploded, calling out a lover’s name or something.

I’ll go with “Kuroyukihime,” then. Although that’s just a nickname. But still, her real name would be embarrassing.

While he was busy losing himself in this kind of escapist thinking, the enemy’s main armament began to charge, rumbling deeply. What looked to be a hundred small missiles rose up from the launchers, seeker heads glittering.

In contrast with his enemy’s special-attack gauge, which was full again—likely from the bonus earned by destroying the government office—Haruyuki’s had less than 5 percent left. He would probably be able to fly at full power for a couple minutes at best. It wasn’t his style, but he was in a position where his only choice was to bet everything on a simple, straightforward suicide assault.

“Well, let me just tell you that everybody knows it’s always the lone mecha that brings down the enormous battleship!” Psyching himself up, Haruyuki took a dash position in the sky.

“As if a mecha with a perv in it could do anything like that, stupid!” The Red King spat her comeback at him and added in a shriek, “Hailstorm Domination!!”

Zzgrrm! Tat tat tat tat tat! Krr krr krr krr!

Three kinds of gun reports thundered simultaneously as her main weapons, the missiles, and the machine gun unloaded as one. It was basically a “greatest hits” look at the sorts of long-range anti-aerial assaults that had been causing Haruyuki such grief. Last week and the week before, too, he had been forced out and shot down by firepower not even a tenth of this.

And yet, for some reason, it was only now that he wasn’t scared or disheartened. Maybe it was complete apathy in the face of an enemy so much more powerful than himself, but for the first time in an incredibly long time, Haruyuki was overtaken by heat, as if all the blood in his body were boiling. And that heat was excitement for the duel.

“Nnngyaaah!!” With a war cry, he first dashed in midair to the right, somehow dodging the superheated beam of the main weapons. If he got hit dead-on with that, he’d sizzle up instantly. The beam narrowly missed him, passing immediately by his side to open up a huge hole in either Park Tower or the NS Building.

But his enemy seemed to have anticipated this maneuver. Countless small missiles closed in ahead of him, seekers twinkling.

Taking a deep breath, Haruyuki put everything he had into super-high-speed maneuvers. To draw the batch of missiles flying in a straight line, he turned back sharply, more than ninety degrees. Rocked by the explosion of the missiles that had lost their homing target, he lured off the next group, avoiding that detonation as well. Silver Crow flew on, carving out a zigzag in the sky like a UFO, countless explosions blooming behind him.

Strangely, he felt he could clearly make out the trajectory of the missiles and the barrage of the machine guns. He wasn’t sure if this was the fruit of his training in that white room or not…

At the apex of the limit of his high-speed flight, Haruyuki felt suddenly deeply annoyed with himself. Why couldn’t he have been moving like this in the Territory Battles at the end of every week? Why, when just a lone rifle was pointed at him, did his legs—no, his wings—cramp up and leave him grounded? If he was going to chalk it up to pressure, he should have been under much greater pressure now, engaged in a one-on-one battle with the notorious Red King.

I’m this fast. I can fly like this. So why do I end up eating bullets like a total klutz when it really counts? I need to get stronger. I have to be stronger, up my levels, and then she’ll—

“..…Ngh!” He gritted his teeth beneath his helmet, and his flight speed decelerated slightly, such that he failed to trace a single escape route. The remaining thirty or so missiles were converging from all directions ahead of him. At his back was the barrage of machine-gun fire. And on the ground, Scarlet Rain’s left main weapon had finished charging and was beginning to track him.

“D-dammit!”

Haruyuki kicked down a missile closing in before him, blowing off the tips of his toes in the explosion. Using the reactive force, he altered the angle of his body and dropped into a sink-or-swim dive straight down. But the enormous maw of the main weapon was waiting there for him.

At that moment, a stormy wind blew across the battlefield, a geographical effect of the Weathered stage. A large cloud of dust rolled up from the naked concrete and the surface of the ground, and his vision was instantly obscured to a single shade of gray. The missiles around him lost their target and were forced to detonate one after another.

This is it!!

Haruyuki opened his eyes, focused his entire being on the ruby color glittering in the depths of the sand storm, and plummeted in a spiral.

The beam of the main weapon fired, piercing the center of this trajectory, but burning nothing other than empty space.

“Aaaaah!!” Battle cry torn from his lips, Haruyuki changed his posture and became a streak of light, plunging forward feet first. He was betting everything on a Kick to the gap between the two missile launchers he could vaguely make out on Scarlet Rain. If he managed a critical hit, he could come back from this.

But.

“Wha—?!”

As the tips of his remaining toes pointed swordlike converged on her, the enormous fortress-shaped avatar suddenly fell to pieces. The casings and main weaponry separated and disengaged along with the armor plates. The slender girl’s avatar appeared at the center and regarded him before sidestepping like quicksilver and avoiding Silver Crow’s Kick.

Haruyuki drilled a large hole into the ground with a grinding crash, falling awkwardly, and something struck his helmet with a clunk. Turning his face, he saw the muzzle of a small gun. Scarlet Rain’s real body, the tiny girl avatar, leveled a crimson pistol at Haruyuki with her delicate right hand.

The second she avoided that Kick so easily, I lost. Although he admitted this in his heart, Haruyuki had a hard time surrendering and barked: “You think a toy like that’s gonna pierce my armor?”

Conveyed only through the lenses of two round eyes, a smile blossomed clearly across the Red King’s mask. “If I said that this gun is my most powerful weapon, would you believe me, big brother?”

Haruyuki took a deep breath, exhaled all at once, and held up both hands—even though his right hand had already been completely severed.

“I believe you. You win, Scarlet Rain.”

The Red King laughed once again and asked, “Then will you do me a favor?”

“Huh? A favor…?”

She couldn’t be asking him to betray the Black Legion. That was definitely off the table. Haruyuki panicked in his mind, but her response was completely out of the realm of the expected.

Suddenly threatening, the girl demanded haughtily, “Let me meet your guardian. In the real world…Both of us, flesh and blood.”