5

Unable to rank the priority of the things he needed to be investigating, Haruyuki stared for a while at the small shrimp. It sat on top of the pizza slice he held in his hand.

Making up his mind, he took a big bite, raised his head, and asked, “Taku. He…Is Nomi a Burst Linker?”

“Wow, you cut straight to the chase, huh?” Takumu raised the right side of his mouth in a wry smile and bit into his own slice.

Eight thirty at night, Haruyuki’s bedroom. Takumu had finished his team practice and taken a shower at his own place before coming over, so it had gotten a bit late.

As a rule, Haruyuki’s mother didn’t come home before midnight, and in his elementary school days, Takumu knew his parents would never have allowed him to eat supper at a friend’s house like this. Takumu had also fought battle after war with his parents about the transfer to Umesato at the beginning of the year, although he had stubbornly refused to tell them why he wanted the transfer.

In the end, he had finally managed to get them to allow it by voluntarily offering several conditions, but naturally, Haruyuki didn’t know all the details of that deal. And although he bowed his head to all the struggle Takumu had gone through, he also selfishly wondered which way worked out better for a kid: Takumu’s life or his own, with parents who paid him absolutely no attention.

“Oh! You’re eating stuff like that again?!” Haruyuki had just taken his second bite when a voice suddenly shattered his thoughts.

“Honestly!” Sidling in through the open door, Chiyuri placed her right hand on her hip and continued on her tirade. “I’ve been telling you forever that you have to learn how to cook for yourself!”

“I-I do.”

“You mean you take stuff out of a box or the freezer!”

“I-I serve it on a plate.”

“That is not a meal!” She got Haruyuki’s nose in her sights with a snap of her index finger, and then held high the paper bag in her left hand. “I figured this is what would happen, so I had Mom make some lasagna. See? Smart!”

It’s not like you made it yourself! he grumbled internally, but when the fragrance of baked cheese came wafting from the bag, Haruyuki was compelled to throw himself down before her.

The lasagna, tightly packed in the heat-resistant square container, was a rare treat jam-packed with Chiyuri’s mother’s special Bolognese sauce, and it had a flavor with which—although it was also Italian food—the frozen pizza could not compare. They moved to the living room, where it took a mere fifteen minutes for Haruyuki to polish off a fourth of the whole thing and Takumu and Chiyuri to finish a third each.

“That was delicious. Your mom should open a restaurant, Chi,” Takumu said with a satisfied expression, and Haruyuki seconded his words immediately.

“For real. She can make anything: Japanese, Western, Chinese, whatever.”

“Oh, no, no way. Mom’s cooking output’s at fifty percent when she’s not making food for Dad,” Chiyuri said, looking very serious, and Haruyuki unconsciously looked down at the now empty lasagna dish.

“S-seriously? This deliciousness is only half her real power?”

“Oh, this is about ninety-five percent here. If Mom’s cooking for a candidate for my future husband—Aah what are you making me say? I’ll kill you!!” she shouted suddenly, and actually launched a kick under the table at the shins of Haruyuki before carrying a clattering pile of plates and forks into the kitchen.

After exchanging a slightly bitter smile with Takumu, who was nearly fainting in agony, Haruyuki cleared his throat and forced them back on topic. “So, about Nomi. Right. So what’s this guy’s first name?”

“Seiji? He spells it like this.” Takumu generated holo-paper on the table and moved his fingertip briskly. The characters he wrote on the virtual paper with his virtual pen read SEIJI.

“Hmm. I wonder if he’s got any older brothers or sisters,” Haruyuki muttered, and Takumu made the paper disappear, nodding.

“Yeah. I checked the graduation yearbook, and there was a student three years ahead of us called ‘Yuichi Nomi.’ But the address’s encrypted, and only graduates from the same year can read it, so I’m not sure if that’s our Nomi’s older brother or not.”

“Three grades ahead? Age-wise, he’d just barely meet the first condition…”

Because the ones able to fulfill the first condition of Burst Linker compatibility—being equipped with a Neurolinker from immediately after birth—would inevitably be the children born in the year the first Neurolinkers went on sale. This so-called “first generation” would be in grade eleven that year—that is to say, three years older than Haruyuki and his friends.

“If this Yuichi is a Burst Linker, Master would’ve gone to school with him for a year. But I’ve never heard her say anything about there being any older Burst Linkers at Umesato.”

“Right. That’s true.” Humming thoughtfully, Haruyuki switched tracks and said, “Well, let’s leave Yuichi for now. Either way, the problem is the seventh grader Nomi. Taku, he…He accelerated during the match with you, right? Otherwise, there’s no way you could lose like that.”

“It wasn’t that big of a deal for me, you know.” Takumu smiled like the ends of his large mouth were twisting. “I mean, it’s not weird at all to lose after the first two bouts. Even without acceleration, that’s just how it is.”

“That’s not how it is. You were definitely stronger than that team captain you got in the semis!” Haruyuki was suddenly serious, protesting Takumu’s self-deprecating comments, and then lowered his voice. “Anyway, what do you think? I’m sure I saw Nomi calling out the acceleration command or something.”

After a long silence, Takumu nodded slightly. “Yeah. I saw it, too.”

“What?!”

It was Chiyuri who cried out in a high-pitched voice, back in the living room having finished washing up. Slamming a plastic bottle of green tea and three glasses down on the table, she squawked, “No way! He’s a Burst Linker?! But I mean, you guys both said there weren’t any in the newbies!”

“There aren’t. That’s the problem,” Haruyuki returned, pouting his lips and ransacking his brain. “The instant I thought he had accelerated, I accelerated, too, and checked the matching list. But Nomi wasn’t there. Taku, he was connected to the local net, right?”

“Yeah. You can’t even compete if you’re not.”

“Right. But that kind of reaction without acceleration…Taku, he dodged the first blow to the mask and the second to the side of his stomach, almost like he knew in advance you were gonna do that. Especially the second time, I dunno, it was almost as if he moved his real body while accelerated…Although I guess you can’t actually do that.”

“Uh!” Takumu cried in a strange voice, so Haruyuki responded, “Huh? Wh-what is it?”

“It’s just…Haru, you don’t know?”

“Wait a second.” Those words and that look sent a wave of déjà vu crashing over him. “Quit it. This sounds like another bit of accelerated world common sense that I don’t know. Like the Unlimited Neutral Field or the Judgment Blow, any time either of those comes up, it’s totally embarrassing.”

“Yeah, well this is the third time.” Whatever he was thinking, Takumu grinned as he grabbed a glass and filled it halfway with green tea from the plastic bottle.

He held the tea-bearing glass in his right hand, and his gaze firmly focused on the yellow-green liquid—

“Physical Burst!!”

Takumu shouted the naggingly familiar command before hurling the tea in the glass straight up with a splash.

“Wha—”

“Aah!”

Haruyuki and Chiyuri yelped in tandem, and then were, immediately, doubly shocked, eyes and mouths gaping at what they saw.

High in the air, the green tea drew long and thin arcs, and Takumu, glass in hand, caught the entire quantity while maintaining that structure!

Moving his right hand in tiny increments in line with the amorphous fluid, at the end he kept splash back to a minimum by lowering the glass in a swoosh as he caught the liquid. A second later, when its bottom hit the table with a konk, the glass contained the exact same amount of tea as when he poured it, rocking gently. A mere four drops had fallen onto the table.

“No way…,” Chiyuri murmured, and Haruyuki finally remembered where he had heard a command like this one.

He was surprised he had forgotten, however briefly. It was the forbidden Physical Full Burst command, which Kuroyukihime had used to save Haruyuki from an out-of-control car plunging toward them six months earlier. Only level-nine Burst Linkers could use this function, which accelerated the movements of your physical body a hundredfold and used 99 percent of your total points to do so.

The command Takumu had just used was no doubt the low-level version. Not a “Full” Physical Burst. It was like the same command, but in an earlier stage of development.

“So then…that’s the command to accelerate your consciousness in your physical body?” Haruyuki asked in a low voice.

“Right.” Takumu nodded slowly, looking serious. “Tenfold for three seconds, uses five points. The movements of your physical body themselves aren’t accelerated, but it’s pretty easy to avoid an opponent’s attack in hand-to-hand combat or meet it with a counterattack.”

“So if you turn it on in baseball, you hit a home run. Huh…Nomi for sure used it to avoid your stomach attack, Taku,” Haruyuki added with a sigh. He understood now why Kuroyukihime hadn’t taught him the command. Unlike the basic command required to fight—Burst Link—Physical Burst was only required by people using their acceleration abilities for fame or the limelight. And there was probably no end to it once you started using it. Simply imagining the ridiculous number of points you would end up using if you relied on Physical Burst for even just a few things sent a chill up his spine.

“Seiji Nomi is just like how I was until last year,” Takumu said, the edges of his mouth bleeding into the self-deprecating smile that had stained his lips lately. “Everything about him. He’s winning at tournaments with the power of acceleration and avoiding at all costs the risks of the fight, risks that are supposed to be the price you pay for the wins you get. So even if I did lose to him, I’m in no place to say—”

Chiyuri, up and standing behind Takumu in the blink of an eye, rapped him on the head with a small fist, cutting him off. “You’re wrong.” She sniffed contemptuously at Takumu, who was dumbfounded, blue glasses sliding down his nose. “You’re not the same. You were trying to win those tournaments for me, Taku. I mean, right after you won, the first thing you’d do was wave a hand at me, right?”

“Y-yeah.”

“But he’s different. This Nomi kid, he didn’t look at anyone after the tournament. He just looked at himself and smiled. He’s totally different from you, Taku!”

Haruyuki’s eyes moved from Chiyuri and her resolute declaration back to Takumu, and he nodded fiercely. “She’s right, Taku. You’re not the you from back then anymore. And more importantly, if he’s a Burst Linker, he must already know our real identities. We can’t just let him do whatever he wants and break our law against abusing the acceleration ability in our home base like this. No matter what it takes, we need to figure out how he keeps from showing up on the matching list and then beat him black and blue in a duel.”

“Exactly! And don’t worry! He can attack you guys all he wants, but I’ll just heal you right up again!”

“……” Digging a deep ravine in the space between his eyebrows, Takumu continued to stare at the floor for a while. But finally, he moved his lips stiffly and a quiet “Thanks” slipped out.

When he brought his face back up, it was wearing his usual unfettered expression. “Got it,” he said in a low, strained voice, after nodding once. “I’ll look into it somehow during practice. Leave him to me for a while, Haru.”