Accel World, Vol. 17: Cradle of Stars

NICE WORK TO YOU, TOO, CHIYU, ON THE MEET. CONGRATS ON A PERSONAL BEST! CHOCOLAT AND THE OTHERS REALLY WORKED HARD IN THE TERRITORIES, SO THANKS TO THAT, WE COULD DEFEND ALL AREAS. I’LL TELL YOU THE DETAILS TOMORROW. MAKE SURE YOU GO TO BED EARLY!

Once he had hit the send button and closed his mailer, Haruyuki psyched himself up. Wohkay! We get up on the count of three. One, two—

This time, a voice call came in. From Takumu, also at a sports tournament. He relaxed back into the bed and touched the answer button.

“Hey, Taku.”

“Haru! So you’re done with the Territories. How’d it go?”

“First, you gotta tell me how you did,” Haruyuki replied, a wry smile unconsciously coming across his lips. “How’s the tournament?”

“Oh yeah. We somehow made it into the top eight for both the group matches and the individual matches.”

Takumu was at the Tokyo Metropolitan Block No. 3 junior high summer kendo tournament, a qualifier for the metropolitan meet, and Haruyuki was pretty sure that being in the top eight meant that they got the right to move on.

“Ooh! So next is the metropolitan meet, huh? Congrats!”

“Thanks. It’ll probably be pretty tough, though.”

“Don’t say that. Go all the way to the nationals,” Haruyuki urged him. “Chiyu said she got to the semifinals.”

“Yeah, she mailed me, too. We gotta celebrate her personal best tomorrow.”

“We gotta celebrate you, too. And we did a total defense in the Territories. And…GW’s Bush Utan and Olive Grab came to the area the Chocolat gang and I were protecting. They both seemed pretty good.”

“They did?” Takumu murmured, sounding relieved. “That’s great. They were able to go back to the Legion, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess Ash’s working hard to take care of them. The three formed this team called the Rough Valley Rollers.”

“Ha-ha-ha-ha!” Takumu laughed happily. “I wish I could’ve fought them, too!”

“And…” After a moment’s hesitation, Haruyuki announced, “After the fight was over, we all talked. And like, Utan and Olive, and Mint and Plum are concerned about her.”

“Her? …You mean, Magenta Scissor?”

“Yeah. Magenta was trying to spread the ISS kits and all…Anyway, Mint, Plum, and Ash were all forcibly parasitized with those scissors, so I guess they’d have the right to hate her. But—and this goes for me, too—they just can’t seem to put her in the same group as those jerks from the Acceleration Research Society, you know?”

“…To start with, I don’t have the right to say anything about Magenta,” Takumu said quietly. “I’m the one who went to Setagaya and asked her to give me a kit…”

“Hey, Taku? Are you…Are you worried about Magenta, too?” Haruyuki wondered reflexively.

“Yeah…It’s little different from worry. And she probably doesn’t want our worry or whatever…But it’s like, I don’t want her to vanish from the Accelerated World. She’s so strong. I want her to not rely on an ISS kit or whatever and fight under her own power…I guess it’s like that? And that’s a road I have to go down myself, too…”

“I started to fall into the dark side, too, you know. Or like, it was pretty critical for me.”

“That’s a weird thing to brag about,” Takumu noted, and they both laughed helplessly.

“Hey, Taku, this is kinda sudden,” Haruyuki said slowly, looking up at the ceiling where the gold of the evening sun was gradually deepening. “But before the GW meeting tomorrow, how about you and me go up to level six, too?”

“Th-that really is sudden. Does this suggestion have anything to do with Magenta?”

“Maybe, maybe not…So like, there’s no one at level ten in the Accelerated World right now, so our level five is basically right in the middle, yeah? The Mid Level.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“So, like, somewhere in my head, I’m kinda freaked about becoming level six. You still can’t really call a level six a high rank, but it’s on the high side, you know? Like, when you go up the next level, you can’t make any more excuses…And I feel like people at seven or eight challenge level sixes pretty much without a second thought,” Haruyuki added.

“Yeah, that’s true. Now that you mention it, I’ve been feeling kind of daunted by it,” Takumu mused. “Actually, even though I have plenty of points for a safe margin, I’ve basically been trying not to think about leveling up.”

“If we want to earn points efficiently, then it might be smarter to stop at level five where it’s harder for high rankers to challenge us. But…when I think about Magenta Scissor fighting all that time at level six, I get this feeling like I can’t sit here freaked out by it forever.”

“And you have that promise with me, too.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

Here, the two friends fell briefly silent.

Haruyuki and Takumu had promised that when they reached level seven, they would go up against each other full throttle in earnest. To realize this battle that was partly scary and partly exciting, they couldn’t allow themselves to be spoiled at the mid levels forever.

“Okay! So let’s level up now, Haru.”

“What? Now?!”

“No time like the present, right? And there’s not even twelve hours left until the meeting tomorrow. So then, why not now?”

“…I—I guess,” Haruyuki agreed. “We’ll use up a point, but we can replace it in the next tag team fight or something.” He stretched out on his bed. In order to do the level-up operation, he had to enter the Blue World of the initial acceleration and open the Installer. “Okay…We dive on the count of three.”

“Okay!” Takumu said.

Haruyuki took a deep breath. “One, two, three…”

““Burst Link!”” they shouted together.

The dusk-colored ceiling, the large built-in bookcases, and even the particles of light dancing through the air turned a transparent blue. Haruyuki sprang up in his pink pig avatar and landed at the writing desk beyond his bed. He glanced around the room, but it wasn’t like he was directing with Takumu on the voice call, so there was no one but him there.

To be more precise, the flesh-and-blood Haruyuki was lying on the bed, but because there were naturally no social cameras in this room, the parts that couldn’t be captured with the Neurolinker’s built-in camera were supplemented by the game system. The face of the real Haruyuki was extremely bland terrain, and looking at it made him depressed, so he whipped his face away and tapped the B icon on his virtual desktop.

From the Instruct menu that popped open, he moved to the points tab. He then clicked through to the level-up screen and compared the number of Burst Points he currently had with the number he’d use going up from level five to level six. He’d had a fair number of points added to his total when they destroyed Metatron’s first form in the battle at Tokyo Midtown, and just as Takumu said, he had plenty to leave a safe margin.

Even still, he needed courage to press the button, but if he chickened out now, he would have wasted the point he used to accelerate. He raised the small hooved hand of the pig avatar and went ahead and slammed it down on the button.

A thrillingly cool chorus of fanfare echoed through his ears, and the number five that showed his current level was wrapped in flames and burned away. The flames danced for a moment in the window before drawing out the number six and disappearing.

…I did it.

In the fleeting moment of this thought, Haruyuki stared hard enough to burn a hole in the new Instruct screen that appeared automatically. Displayed there was what might be called one of the greatest joys of the Burst Linker life, the level-up bonus selection menu. The number of options there was the same as it had been up to that point: four.

The top left was a level-six special attack, Digit Pursuit. The top right was similarly a level-six special attack, Bulletproof. The bottom left was an Enhanced Armament, Lucid Blade. And the bottom right was an enhancement of his flight ability.

Haruyuki had poured all four of the bonuses he’d been given when he leveled up thus far into enhancing his flight ability. In the duel the other day, the raise-and-drop strategy he’d used on Chocolat Puppeter was a technique made possible precisely because of those enhancements, and he believed he’d made a choice to extract the maximum potential in Silver Crow, such as being able to fly carrying a maximum of four avatars as long as he didn’t try to go fast. But that said, that didn’t mean he was enlightened enough to cut free of worldly desires and immediately push the button on the bottom right.

“Unh, aaah…Like, the special attacks and the Enhanced Armament, they all look so cool—I mean, strong…I say this every time, but I wish you got a trial period or something.” He folded his short arms and continued to moan and groan.

Ten seconds later, the conclusion he’d come to was…

“…I’ll think it over carefully and then decide. I can get my bonus later, after all. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.” Muttering, he made the entire Instruct menu vanish.

Letting out a long breath, he checked the accelerated time and found he still had twenty-five minutes. He’d gone to all the trouble of using a point, so he decided to make effective use of what was left on the clock and activated the homework app on his virtual desktop.

“If I was going to end up doing this, I should’ve called Taku and directed.”

He opened his math homework, which seemed the most difficult. But when his final exam had been given back the day before, he saw the best grade he’d ever gotten—although he still couldn’t begin to compete with Takumu, even if Haruyuki was closing in on Chiyuri—so his awareness of being bad at studying itself was fading just a little.

“Okay! I’ll solve five—no, four, problems in this acceleration!” he declared to himself as he glared at the first quadratic equation.

Twenty-five minutes later—1.5 seconds later in the real world—the acceleration ended, and he let out a sigh as he pressed the save button on the homework app.

“From the sound of the sigh, you either couldn’t decide at all on a level-up bonus, or you were doing homework inside.” Takumu’s laughing voice rang out in his mind.

Haruyuki had forgotten he was still connected to the voice call. “I-it was homework,” he hurriedly replied. “I decided on the bonus in ten seconds!”

“Wow. So what’d you pick?”

“Oh. No. I decided to put off the decision. What bonus did you get, Taku?”

“I put it off, too, of course. I decided to really think about it before picking.” Under orders from his parent, Takumu had chosen special attacks for the three bonuses up to level four. He seemed to regret this sometimes, but that was probably exactly why he’d decided to really mull it over in his own head.

“Yeah. If we have time tomorrow, I’ll try talking about it with Kuroyukihime or Master. Although I’m pretty sure they won’t give me any direct advice.”

Takumu laughed. “No doubt about that. But it’s exciting, huh? …Oh! But, Haru, don’t get all spaced out with your head all over your level-up bonus. The meeting with Great Wall tomorrow is very important. The future of Nega Nebulus kind of rests on it. We have to focus.”

“Yeah, I know. I won’t let a single word get away from me.”

“And depending on the situation, maybe…”

“Huh?” Haruyuki asked. “Maybe what?”

“Oh, just maybe they’ll ask us to speak, too, you know?”

Haruyuki felt like Takumu was trying to sneak something by him, but it was usually pointless to press him for details at times like this, so he decided to just let it pass. “True. Anyway…let’s make sure we’re on our toes for real from the moment we enter Shibuya Area tomorrow.”

“Yeah. I think we’ll have our global connections off, but that doesn’t mean someone won’t challenge us via the local net of some store or something. No matter what happens, it’s our job to protect Master, Haru.”

“Yup. We can’t let her down!”

“Yeah!” Takumu shouted.

Unseen by his best friend, Haruyuki clenched his hand tightly as he ended the call.

Right…Tomorrow, Kuroyukihime would be stepping flesh and blood into a region controlled by Great Wall, the biggest Legion in the Accelerated World. And moreover, the GW executive knew that. He didn’t think the Green King himself would plan a surprise attack now, but a knight serving his master needed to be ready for any possibility.

He absolutely could not let his guard down, from the time they left Suginami until the moment they returned. Carving this into his heart, Haruyuki set back to work on his math homework.