6

However, two days quickly passed with no change at all in the situation.

Haruyuki was desperately focused on trying to learn the faces, names, and personalities of all the students in his homeroom, and honestly he had no extra time for thinking about the matter with Seiji Nomi.

Having for a long time been very bad at hanging out with anyone, to the point that the only people even talking to him were groups of bullies, Haruyuki could not believe how quickly Chiyuri became friendly with several girls. She was already sitting with them at lunch and things. And even Takumu, a transfer student, had melted into the brainy group, chatting with them over lunch, surrounded by torturous equations displayed in 3-D standing models.

Of course, if Haruyuki had asked them to, they would have declined to join their new friends and eaten with him. But the last thing he wanted was for Chiyuri and Takumu to treat him with kid gloves.

So just like in the accelerated world, he had to break free of his shell and get to the point where he could make new friends. Intent on this purpose, he kept his ears open while aimlessly wandering within the local net, attempting to find other guys he might have something in common with. But any and everyone were talking about sports or music or fashion, with not even a mere micro-second of talk about games or anime.

Well, I just have to take my time and keep trying. I mean, technically, I have someone I can eat lunch with. And she’s the most popular person in school.

He really and truly wanted to be as strong as this thought, but this popular person he could technically have lunch with was the vice president of the student council, and she was currently caught up in a whirlwind of busyness dealing with everything that needed to be dealt with before the school trip in a few days. So he didn’t even see her on the net, much less during lunch.

The situation being what it was, the next time Haruyuki got the chance to talk with her was on the Territories’ duel field at the end of the week.

“Eeeyaaah!”

Haruyuki watched Black Lotus’s jet-black right leg kick out at right angles, drawing a beam of blue-purple light as it did.

Cut abruptly in a straight line from waist to shoulder, the enemy close-range attacker shot up into the air, spinning round and round, before it crashed into a building in the distance and stopped moving.

Haruyuki gazed at the team victory display that popped up in front of him and ran over to his Legion Master, relieved that their total win rate for the battles that day was 80 percent.

“Hey, nice work, Silver Crow, Cyan Pile.”

“You, too!”

“Excellent work.” Cyan Pile’s large bulk materialized from the entrance of a collapsed building nearby, only to follow Haruyuki. As he bowed, his voice was quiet. “Please excuse me. I’m right in the middle of my team practice break, so I have to go. Master, do please have fun on your trip to Okinawa tomorrow. Take care.”

They watched Takumu as he said his hurried good-byes and burst out, and then Kuroyukihime laughed quietly.

“He’s so thoroughly a kendo guy. They started him on the regular team right away, didn’t they?”

“Yeah. Well. Anyway, um, about the kendo team.” Haruyuki glanced around to check that the three members of the enemy team and every one of the ten or so people in the Gallery had all disconnected, and then continued in a whisper. “We don’t have any proof yet, but that new seventh grader who joined the regular team with Taku might be a Burst Linker.”

“…What?”

Black Lotus’s violet eyes narrowed, and she brought her swords up to intersect, as if crossing her arms. Haruyuki turned toward her and explained what had happened at the tournament two days earlier.

Kuroyukihime remained silent for several seconds, even after he was finished. Finally, she glanced up and muttered, “Still plenty close,” before seating herself elegantly on some nearby rubble. Haruyuki sat down timidly across from her.

“Nomi…Seiji, hmm? I don’t have any recollection of the older brother, Yuichi. There were no Burst Linkers ahead of me last year or the year before. So even if this Yuichi were Seiji’s ‘parent,’ he must have lost Brain Burst by the time I started at Umesato.”

“In that case”—Haruyuki shook his head, digesting Kuroyukihime’s smooth statement—“if Nomi Seiji’s a Burst Linker, maybe he went to a different school than his parent?”

“It’s rare, but it does happen on occasion. I did it myself, in fact. But before we get to that…Are you certain? That this freshman Nomi accelerated during the tournament?”

“We don’t have any proof. Just— I mean, it’d happen in kendo if it was going to happen in any sport, right? Taku used the Physical Burst command in kendo, too, so I think he totally knew what he was seeing.”

“Hmm.” Black Lotus nodded slightly and let slip a sigh somehow like a wry smile. “But all of this does mean you’ve finally learned of the existence of the physical acceleration command. I won’t tell you not to use it, but you do know that using the command to become a baseball hero or anything of that nature is banned in Nega Nebulus.”

“I-I won’t use it! If I’m going to pay five points for just three seconds, I’d be way better off using ten points to dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field. Anyway, the real problem here is the reason why Nomi doesn’t show up on the matching list.”

“It is quite hard to believe, to be honest,” Kuroyukihime murmured, further narrowing both eyes. “A patch was applied after the backdoor program incident six months ago, so it should be impossible now to use the same kind of underhanded trick. If Nomi is a Burst Linker and he’s connected to the Umesato local net, he has to be registered on the matching list. If he’s not on the list, then that means he’s not connected to the local net.”

“B-but for a student not to be connected to the in-school net while on school grounds…is that even possible? Especially during lessons and kendo tournaments, good Lord!”

“It’s certainly unlikely.” Mirrored black goggles shook gently from side to side at Haruyuki’s rebuttal. “If you infiltrated the local in-school net main server or— No, it’s simply too risky. This might be junior high, but if you were discovered, you’d be expelled. Perhaps…He might be masking himself from other Burst Linkers with some kind of illegal program.”

“It has happened once before,” Haruyuki responded in a low voice, turning his silver helmet to face the ground. “I feel like…that’s the most likely thing.”

“But even if that were it, what’s Nomi’s objective? If he wanted to hide the fact that he’s a Burst Linker, using the Physical Burst command basically does the opposite. This is, indeed, the reason we’re largely suspicious of him. And despite the fact that he’s no doubt got information on our real identities, he doesn’t use it to challenge us to duels. What exactly does he want?”

Haruyuki, of course, had no answer to Kuroyukihime’s question. “I think the only thing we can do is figure out how he’s not appearing on the list, challenge him to a duel, and ask him,” he said, after thinking about it for a while. His tone was uncertain.

“Well…Hmm. For Burst Linkers, everything starts with the duel. I’d like to fight him straightaway, but unfortunately, I’ll be away from Tokyo for a week, starting tomorrow. Perhaps I can fake an illness and stay behind—”

“Y-you can’t do that!!” Haruyuki cried out, waving both arms frantically to stop her from finishing the unthinkable sentence. “Your junior high school trip only happens once in your whole life! Go. The rest of us will work something out with this Nomi thing!!”

“Mmm. You will? But don’t be reckless. Oh right, have you decided what you’d like me to bring you?”

“Oh, that. I’d feel bad asking for something too bulky. If you just showed me some videos you took or something…”

Or to be more accurate, video taken of you or something.

To go into further detail, high-resolution video taken of you in a bathing suit or something.

And throwing in that reward for defending our territory without our master, all this via a thirty-centimeter direct cable.

While listening to the request to which he added these mental notes, Kuroyukihime cocked her head and said, “What, that’s all you want? Okay, then. I’ll take plenty of video and mail it to you. I’ll record all the Okinawan food I eat during the trip.”

And then the morning of the next day, a Sunday, Kuroyukihime got on a flight departing Haneda Airport with 120 other Umesato Junior High School ninth graders and flew off toward the distant southern country.

Haruyuki could, of course, still contact her with a voice call or during a full dive. But when he thought about her physical coordinates being several thousand kilometers away, it in fact made him a bit anxious, and even after waking up and going back to bed, he continued to toss and turn.

Why can’t I be in the same grade as her?

If they were in the same grade, he might have been able to do things like see her in her bathing suit with his own eyes, graduate with her, and go to high school together…Although it was pretty doubtful they’d be able to go to the same high school…

These thoughts spinning freely around his brain were interrupted by the voice-mail icon flashing in the center of his field of view. As soon as he realized it was from Taku, Haruyuki sprang up and hit the icon with his fingertip.

“Morning, Haru. About Nomi, sorry to be reporting in so late. I thought I’d try and connect to his Neurolinker somehow and see whether or not he had the Brain Burst program, but I didn’t manage to find an opening. I finally got ahold of a photo at least, so I’m sending you that. I’ll be practicing with the team again this morning, so if I find out anything else, I’ll let you know. Okay, ’bye.”

The icon for the attached file started flashing as soon as the message playback finished. He furrowed his brow when he noticed that the data file was excessively large, but he soon understood why when he opened the file. Displayed was a group photo of all the new seventh graders on the kendo team.

Since Neurolinkers were equipped with built-in cameras, it was technologically possible to take a static image or video of your field of view at any time. But this also meant that peep shots could be taken with an ease that was unimaginable with the old generation’s camera-equipped cell phones.

Thus, the function was currently limited so that people within range of the photo would not appear in any screenshots unless they gave permission via the net. It was a different story, of course, if you happened to be using some doubtful means to avoid this regulation, like Kuroyukihime.

Haruyuki, and Takumu like him, was not that knowledgeable or handy with Neurolinkers, so to get a photo of Nomi’s face, their only real chance was a commemorative photo like this. Haruyuki ran his eyes over the photo filling his field of view and found the name SEIJI NOMI, GRADE SEVEN, CLASS A among the attached tags popping up and disappearing in succession.

Nomi’s visible face—he was simply a boy with no special features, features still plenty childish. Slightly brownish hair in a bowl cut hung long over his forehead. His eyes and nose were cute like a girl’s, but the mouth, with a slight smile playing on it, had the roughness you’d expect from a member of the kendo team.

“You’re…a Burst Linker…?” he murmured, but of course, the Nomi in the still image did not reply.

Haruyuki carved the face of the mysterious seventh grade student into the back of his brain, closed the photo, and got out of bed. He had been thinking about going to Shinjuku or Shibuya that afternoon to have a duel but, deciding to exchange those plans for a trip to the school, he got dressed in his uniform. If Takumu and Nomi were at kendo practice, there might be some change in the situation.

After hitting up the kitchen and there restlessly eating a couple slices of bread with some ham and cheese wedged in between them, Haruyuki left a short message for his mother, who was apparently still asleep, opened the door quietly, and went outside. As soon as he saw the ridiculously blue sky above another wing of the skyscraper condo, his vision blinked and flickered. Now that he thought about it, this was probably the first time since he had started junior high that he was going to school on a day off.

He changed his shoes at the school entrance and glanced at the clock. Getting ready and actually moving had eaten up an unexpected amount of time, and the clock was already rolling around to 12:15 PM. He thought about shooting off a mail to check if Takumu was still there but changed his mind, figuring it would be faster just to go and check himself.

The school on a Sunday afternoon was surprisingly deserted. It wasn’t as if there wasn’t anyone around. From the sports grounds, he could hear the shouts of the softball and the track and field teams, and if he had gone to the cafeteria, he would have found students from the culture club hanging around.

But the inside of the school building was dim, with the lights shut off and hallways shrouded in silence, making Haruyuki feel confused, like he had wandered into the wrong place somehow.

Quieting his breathing for no reason, he walked down the first-floor hallway and passed through to the sports wing. Slipping around the corner of the gym, which echoed with the squeak of basketball shoes, and heading toward the martial arts area—

“Sheaaah!” The sharp cry of a martial artist stopped him in his tracks.

Several other voices joined to form a chorus, but even among those harsh cries, repeated as a rhythmic chant, Haruyuki could definitely tell that this one was the high, piercing voice he had heard the other day—the voice of Nomi.

Making himself even more invisible, he descended into the graveled courtyard, advanced several meters while hugging the wall of the martial arts area, and peered in through a window.

Apparently, the full-team kendo practice was already over; only a few team members remained in the large, wooden-floored practice space. All of them seemed to be seventh graders, and they were all lined up and waving their shinai swords. Maybe an older student had ordered them to stay and practice or something. From where he was, Haruyuki could only see their backs, but given the small stature and the brownish, subdued hairstyle, the one on the right-hand end had to be Seiji Nomi.

Even through Haruyuki’s amateur eyes, Nomi’s bearing was infinitely more assured than that of his fellows, leaving no doubt about the strength of his actual abilities.

So if he has this kind of skill, why’s he going to all the trouble of accelerating during tournaments? Haruyuki bit his lip. Maybe he’s stuck in some situation where he’s totally screwed if he loses? Like the way Taku tormented himself?

Haruyuki let out a small breath and Nomi alone halted abruptly. Haruyuki shrunk into himself, worried his spying had been discovered, but that apparently was not the issue. Back still turned to him, Nomi walked briskly to the wall and put away his shinai.

“Hey! Nomi! You didn’t finish your reps yet!” one of the other seventh graders said, still brandishing his own shinai.

Nomi said nothing in response, lifted his sports bag, and started walking toward the entrance of the dojo, as if practice for him, at least, was finished. The team member who had called out clucked his tongue showily, and the student next to him raised his own voice. “Mr. Regular Team’s not like us, huh?”

Even at this flagrant barb, Nomi did not break stride. Still in his kendo uniform, he left the dojo and turned toward the gym where Haruyuki was hiding, so Haruyuki hurriedly moved away from the window and crammed his body into the shadow of some nearby shrubbery. Nomi seemed not to notice him and proceeded straight through the passage, disappearing down the stairs toward the gym basement. There was housed the facility Haruyuki had the least to do with in the entire school: the heated swimming pool.

The idea that Nomi might actually be going for a swim baffled him, and he quickly put that guess out to pasture; the pool probably also had a shower room. Maybe he was going to get out of his kendo uniform and rinse off all the sweat he had worked up during practice.

The shower room.

“……!” Haruyuki inhaled sharply.

Given the situation, the remaining seventh grade kendo members would likely be continuing their fundamentals for the time being. And he couldn’t see any students from any other sports teams anywhere. In other words, Seiji Nomi would, for a few minutes, be completely alone.

Maybe this was his chance? His once-in-a-lifetime perfect opportunity to question Nomi about why he refused to be registered on the matching list and why he was ignoring the other Burst Linkers who went to the same school as him?

Of course, if he feigned ignorance, that’d be the end of that. But Nomi had dared to use the Physical Burst command in front of Haruyuki and Takumu, who he had to know were also Burst Linkers…Almost like he was showing himself to Takumu during the tournament. When he thought about it like that, it almost seemed like Nomi might be encouraging contact.

Still wrestling with conflicting desires, Haruyuki followed Nomi, paying attention to his surroundings. He tiptoed down the stairs, along the wall right by the gym entrance. At Umesato, swimming was an elective, and Haruyuki had never had any reason to select such a thing, so it was no exaggeration to say that this was the first time he had ever been down these stairs.

When he peered carefully around the corner to his left, Nomi was already nowhere to be seen in the short hallway. On the left-hand wall, he could see the entrance to the split shower/changing rooms. He glanced up at the ceiling, but there was no familiar black social camera dome. This passage up to the shower room interior was out of the cameras’ range.

After hesitating another ten seconds or so in the shadow of the janitorial cart around the corner, Haruyuki steadied himself and approached the locker room.

On the wall at the main entrance, the directional display signs were excessively vivid: to the left, girls, in pink; boys, to the right, in blue. He looked back at the stairs before making the expected right-hand turn, took a few steps forward, and cleared his ears. If there were any students in there besides Nomi, he would, of course, have no choice but to sadly retreat. However, there were no voices to be heard. At some point, the palms of his hands had become drenched with sweat, and he wiped them briskly on his pants.

There’s no reason to freak out here. I mean, I’m a boy who goes to this school. So if I keep going, no one can get mad at me or say anything about it. I’m just trying to spend a moment alone with Nomi here and ask him some questions about what he’s really up to. Haruyuki reprimanded himself once again and took a few clumsy steps to finally slip into the shower room.

The space was much larger than he had expected, with lockers lined up against the wall on his right. In the center was a long table, and on this was a single, school-mandated sports bag. Several shower stalls were set up along the wall to his left, hidden behind a smoke-colored plastic panel, and along with the sound of water, he could see steam rising from one stall. Otherwise, the room was completely deserted.

I’m too late? Haruyuki sighed softly. Nomi had apparently gotten into the shower while he was fretting and being indecisive. And he naturally didn’t have the guts to spring himself on someone taking a shower. He figured he would just go and come back later, and he started to quietly withdraw, but at that moment something glittered in the half-open sports bag on the long table, reflecting the light. He could only see a fraction of the object, but there was no doubt that this thing, with its smooth curve, was a Neurolinker.

Normally, if you were a security-conscious person, you would never leave this device, which was basically your second brain, anywhere out of sight. Even if you were taking a shower, you would keep it on or at least put it in a secure locker. But at school, when there’s no one but you around, you might let your guard down, not wanting the tiny hassle of turning the mechanical key on a locker.

In that case, maybe you would also not bother turning off your Neurolinker? As long as the power was off, no one would be able to touch it, since a brain-wave authentication was needed to power it back on. But if it was left in standby mode, anybody could direct with it and search the memory areas. This was exactly the same trick the Red King Scarlet Rain had used in January when she had gotten ahold of Haruyuki’s mother’s Neurolinker and set up a fake mail address in it.

Of course, this was strictly forbidden, in terms of both morals and school regulations. If a teacher found out he had secretly directed with another student’s Neurolinker without permission, he wouldn’t get off with just a reprimand.

But however pervasive the social camera net was, constantly monitoring the nation’s citizens, it didn’t cover school wash-and shower rooms. And the educational authorities did not deign to concern themselves with violations of regulations for which there was no video evidence. Like how they had so magnificently let things slide when other students had beaten and blackmailed Haruyuki outside the view of the cameras. Furthermore, if Haruyuki directed and took a peek at Nomi’s physical memory, there was a strong possibility that he would not only find out whether Nomi was a Burst Linker, but also that he would resolve the mystery of the mechanism that kept Nomi from appearing on the matching list.

After getting this far with a couple seconds’ thought, Haruyuki made his decision.

He held his breath, listening to the sound of water echoing from the shower stall, and approached the bag to pull it up slightly. Inside was a neatly folded jersey and on top of that, a pale purple Neurolinker, indicator flashing a pale blue. It was in standby.

He yanked a cable out of his pocket and promptly inserted one end into his own Neurolinker before grabbing the other end dangling in the air. Then the Neurolinker inside the bag—

No, wait.

This color. Purple-tinged satin silver. He knew this Neurolinker almost as well as he knew his own, and it wasn’t Seiji Nomi’s.

As he stood there, frozen, gripping the plug, thoughts at a standstill, he heard the sound of the shower taps being twisted shut. The sound of water was cut off. He raised a dumbfounded face as the swinging panel creaked open, and his gaze crashed into Chiyuri Kurashima stepping out, wrapping a large towel around shoulder-length hair. Two sets of eyes popped open wide.

The gears of his deactivated brain exploded with a bang, and Haruyuki simply continued to stare at Chiyuri’s face, not having the mental leeway to shift the focal points of his eyes downward—a slight saving grace in this situation. Likewise, she froze as well, still in her hair-drying pose.

“Chiyu,” Haruyuki whispered almost soundlessly, finally regaining control over his mouth somehow. “Why’re you in the boys’—”

“Haru,” Chiyuri said at the same time, after blinking hard once. “What’re you doing in the girls’ shower?”

What?

Which was when Haruyuki at last noticed that the keynote color of the space around him was not blue, but pink. The floor treated with an anti-slip finish, the smooth walls and ceiling, the table before his eyes, all of it was tied together by a light grayish-pink.

But— I mean— So stupid!! Haruyuki shouted inside, peeling back his eyelids as far as they would go. I’m sure I went down the side with the boys’ sign. And it was painted right on the wall, so there’s no way someone could have switched it as a prank. Or maybe someone just painted over it with something? No, no one would have had the time to do something as big as that.

While Haruyuki was putting his brain through furious paces, Chiyuri seemed to finally remember her current state. She glanced down at her body, and her eyes immediately turned into perfect circles, ears blooming blood red. She yanked both arms down to cover as much surface area as possible; lifted her face again; drew in a deep breath; and, right before she began shrieking and freaking out at maximum volume—

He heard the voices of several female students coming closer in the passage outside. Instantly, although quite belatedly, Haruyuki understood that this situation would not be dismissed as a joke or a simple misunderstanding. This was a genuine crisis. If the school authorities found out, he could be suspended or expelled— No, he could even be reported to the police.

As Chiyuri seemed to come to the same conclusion at the same time, the color drained abruptly from cheeks flushed bright red. While they stared at each other’s frozen faces, the girls’ voices grew steadily louder.

Chiyuri thrust out her right hand, grabbed Haruyuki’s tie and his collar along with it, yanked him forward with such force he was unable to speak, and shoved him into the shower stall she had been using until a moment ago. She got in after him, pressing Haruyuki up against the wall, and hung her towel over the top of the smoke-colored door. Grabbing the showerhead, she cranked the temperature to the maximum of sixty degrees Celsius, and then turned the tap all the way on. A stream of water gushed out against the wall to his right, and scaldingly hot water bounced back, immediately obscuring the stall in white steam.

“Don’t say anything! Don’t even move!” Chiyuri hissed, and he felt a minimum of three girls coming into the shower room, separated from them by a single panel.

“Ah, ugh! I’m covered in sweat!”

“Right? I want to pull out our summer gear already.”

“Maybe we should just change to mesh for our Linker pads?”

They were probably on the track team with Chiyuri.

The sound of zippers being pulled down followed the voices. But Haruyuki obviously did not have the luxury of imagining the scene outside as he pressed his face to the wall, closed his eyes tightly, and desperately muffled his breathing.

Panic ruled approximately 90 percent of his brain, but the remaining 10 percent continuing to consider exactly how he had ended up in this situation. He simply could not believe he had misread the signs for the boys’ and girls’ shower rooms. And physically switching the signs was impossible. In which case, there was only one trick that would explain it.

Quantum masking of his visual field. Overwriting the visual signal from his Neurolinker. Someone had used a program to paint over the shower room signs with a fake image, making the boys’ into the girls’ and the girls’ into the boys’. As soon as he reached this conclusion, he belatedly realized that the signs he had seen a few minutes earlier had been excessively vivid in the dim hallway. Almost as if they had been emitting light themselves.

How a program like this had gotten into his system was still a mystery, but he was pretty sure he knew who had gotten it in there.

Seiji Nomi.

It was all a trap set by Nomi. He knew that Haruyuki was spying on the kendo team. And so he led him to the showers, made him get the signs wrong, and sent him to the girls’ side, thereby ensnaring him in this precarious situation. To get him expelled, and thereby wipe every trace of Haruyuki, the Burst Linker Silver Crow, from Umesato Junior High School.

A strategy so brilliant, cold, and merciless, it was terrifying. On the same level as the time Kuroyukihime had a student by the name of Araya removed—maybe even more so.

“Huh? Chi? You’re still in there?” The voice of one of the girls came abruptly from the other side of the swing door.

Cringing with fear, Haruyuki heard Chiyuri reply right next to his ear. “Yeah. I managed to sweat a ton!”

“You must have. I know it’s right before the regional prelims, but, man, you were pushing too hard.”

Haruyuki was drenched in sweat. Steamed as he was in the extremely hot water vapor—wearing a jacket over a blazer over a button-up shirt over a T-shirt—he didn’t feel the heat at all. Quite the opposite; his skin was so chilled his teeth were almost chattering.

If that girl outside decided right now to play a joke on Chiyuri and open the partition, Haruyuki wouldn’t be the only one with his neck on the chopping block; Chiyuri would also be in serious trouble. She wouldn’t be able to play the victim of his peeping; she’d probably be punished just as harshly as he.

“But Chi? Isn’t the water too hot? It’s crazy steamy.”

“Huh? It feels better hot. Gets the blood moving, too.”

“Ugh, you sound like my grandma!”

The other students laughed loudly. Chiyuri laughed along with them, and Haruyuki could feel her muscles shaking lightly through his back glued to her body.

Sorry. I’m sorry. Forgive me. I was an idiot. If I hadn’t been looking for the Neurolinker in that bag, none of this would be happening! he cried out in his heart, clenching his teeth so hard they threatened to break.

Then he heard the creak of a door swinging open, and his feet left the ground.

But it was the sound of a girl going into the neighboring stall. He heard two more doors opening and closing, and then the sound of showers all starting at nearly the same time. Several seconds later, he felt Chiyuri peel away from him and step outside.

When she came back after a moment, Haruyuki looked over his shoulder at her, and she said, only her lips moving, Now! Get out!

Unable to voice his gratitude at Chiyuri’s quick thinking because he was still holding his breath, Haruyuki simply nodded and staggered out of the stall. He forced himself to focus on nothing but the exit and worked hard to make his stiff body move: one, then two steps in a half-crouched posture. If he fell or something now— Or if another girl were to come in…

Just thinking about it was enough to make him pass out, but, somehow, he miraculously succeeded in escaping from the shower room without tripping on his own feet. He half jogged along the curved C-shape of the passage, reached his starting point of the boy/girl bifurcation, and leaned back against the wall, rubbery with exhaustion. The last of his strength drained from his legs, and he nearly slumped to the ground. But it was indignation, abruptly erupting within him, that kept him on his feet.

“Bastard!” he shouted in his mouth and raised his head abruptly, before charging into the real boys’ shower room on the opposite end of the hallway.

But the pale blue-gray-painted space was absolutely deserted. There wasn’t even any trace of the shower stalls having been used. Most likely, while Haruyuki was busting into the girls’ side, Nomi had gotten pretty far pretty quickly.

“Dammit!” Haruyuki shouted and slammed his fist into the wall behind him.

Two hours later, at his own condo building’s twenty-first floor. The Kurashimas, Chiyuri’s bedroom.

“Excuse me, sorry, my bad, I really am sorry!!” Haruyuki repeated his apology chant again for the millionth time and pressed his forehead against the laminate floor with each word.

The owner of the room sat on the edge of the bed, still in her school uniform, arms crossed, emitting a fiercely murderous aura. The fact that she had said almost nothing since she invited the contrite Haruyuki in made her even more frightening.

He understood only too well that the mess he had made was essentially an act of barbarism of such magnitude that it would be stricken from the realm of possibly funny things for the rest of time—or he thought he understood that. But Haruyuki, being a boy, wasn’t equipped to truly relate to the enormity of the shock Chiyuri had suffered.

He had witnessed her naked as the day she was born from extremely close up: a mere one meter away. It went without saying that this was a greater crime than Takumu infecting Chiyuri’s Neurolinker with that virus last year. It was different from when they were kids and got in the bath together. Everything about it was different. Her collarbone clearly defined now, pectoral muscles connecting shoulders to chest, and the unexpectedly voluminous, very real, white—

“You’re remembering it, aren’t you?” she said abruptly in a low voice, and Haruyuki jumped at least a centimeter, still prostrate before her.

“I-I’m not! I wasn’t!”

“Liar. Your ears are bright red. Let me tell you one thing right now. If you use that for anything weird, I will make you dive into that—what’s it called, that U-Unlimited Neutral Field until you lose your memory. For like a hundred years.”

He jumped up again with a small squeal. “I-I won’t! I won’t use it!”

It was true that he would end up spending more than forty days inside if she did make him use the Unlimited Burst command right then and there and keep watch over him for an hour. There was no doubt that the images stored in his brain would degrade in line with that lived time. But if another Burst Linker or an Enemy were to pursue him during that time, forget about his memory, he would end up dying of overwork instead.

“I-I’ll forget it! I’ll totally forget it!” Haruyuki shook his head and his extra chins desperately.

“Well, for real, I’m still going to think about what kind of penance you need to do for me, Haru. I’ll hold off on it for now, though.”

Something thumped into Haruyuki’s head with an indignant sniff. Glancing up, he saw that it was a large stuffed animal cushion.

“So you can quit with the bowing and scraping. Sit up already.”

“O-okay.” Nodding, he picked up the cushion. He had thought it was an elephant, but the nose was too short, and it had six legs, three on each side. “Wh-what is this?”

“Water bear. Strongest creature on earth…Anyway! You said the reason you snuck into the girls’ shower room was because of this virus, and the one who infected you with the virus was this Nomi kid. Really?”

“I’m totally positive.” Haruyuki hurried to sit in a proper kneeling position on the strange creature and jerked his head up and down. “I know I went in the side with the boys’ shower sign. I might be a total scatterbrained alien, but I’m not going to get pink and blue signs mixed up.”

“But when would he have done that? I mean, you haven’t even talked to Nomi, right?”

“Y-yeah.” He nodded sharply.

The truth was, how he had been infected with the virus was a total mystery. At some time during the week between the entrance ceremony and that day, someone else had apparently handled his Neurolinker, but Haruyuki couldn’t believe he had left an opening like that.

If he could isolate the virus, he would be able to determine the date and time it had been uploaded, but no matter how many times he poked around in his physical memory, he couldn’t find anything that looked suspicious. When he checked his Neurolinker’s operation log, he found traces of a single unknown file being automatically deleted immediately after he went into the girls’ shower room. Since he had no recollection of performing this operation, the virus had most likely been set to launch and then self-destruct immediately after fulfilling its objective—i.e., applying a mask to Haruyuki’s vision.

“But…” Chiyuri brought her thick eyebrows together tightly and cocked her head. “If he can do something like that, why didn’t he just mess up the OS on your Neurolinker or delete the Brain Burst program or something? If he wanted to make it so you can’t duel, wouldn’t that work better?”

“No matter what kind of crazy virus you use, you won’t be able to destroy system files with it. The best you can do is use its functionality to play tricks. And if you’re already a Burst Linker, you can redownload the Brain Burst program itself anytime. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to change Linkers or anything, would you? Of course, you have to put your core card in the new Linker, but…”

Having made these rebuttals, Haruyuki scowled suddenly. “But wait…if he’s doing such serious and seriously hard stuff like overriding my vision, that’s not at the prank level anymore. He’s crossed over into really rough territory. I mean, taken to the extreme, he could basically kill me, couldn’t he? If he made me mistake a red light for a green one or if he completely masked a moving car from all my senses?”

“K-kill—” Chiyuri cried out unconsciously, before remembering that her mother was probably in the living room and clapping a hand over her mouth before speaking once more. “Kill you? What are you even saying?! W-we’re talking about a game here!”

All Haruyuki could do was smile weakly and shake his head from side to side. “Brain Burst both is and isn’t a game. A guy like Nomi, who’s using acceleration for status in the real world, will do anything to protect that power. Think about it. If it hadn’t been you who’d come out of that shower stall then, but some other girl, right about now I’d be—”

“At the police,” Chiyuri murmured, and a belated tremor ran up his back. “But…So then, does this mean that that Nomi kid is going to set up traps like this from now on? Not just targeting you, Haru, but…Taku, Kuroyukihime, me…?”

“No. I won’t let him,” Haruyuki declared, uncharacteristically firm, trying to reassure Chiyuri. “Now that we know how he works, we just have to wait and watch. Maybe Taku and I will take him on tomorrow. I don’t want to, but…if we have to, we’ll force him to direct, and we’ll get to the bottom of why he doesn’t show up on the matching list.”

“Haru.” Chiyuri looked even more anxious, biting her lip and turning her face downward. “I…I dunno, I don’t like it. I feel like there’s a mistake somewhere. I mean, it’s a game…But you, and Taku, and Nomi, you don’t seem to be having any fun at all.”

He quickly shook his head, but at the same time, he wasn’t surprised in the least that she would feel that way. Because Chiyuri was in possession of a rare healer avatar, she still had not experienced a normal duel even once. Right away, he wanted more than anything to show her the size and details of the field, the excitement of battle, and the exhilaration of victory, but for that, he would have to wait a week for Kuroyukihime’s return to Tokyo.

“I-I’ve changed since I came across Brain Burst, at the very least. I went up against Taku for real, and I feel like my groveling parameters have gone down a little…p-probably,” he stammered.

Chiyuri blinked hard, and a meaningful smile rose up on her face. “Well, I guess that’s true. If the old Haru had seen me naked, he would’ve spent a whole month running away from me without even trying to apologize.”

Gulp.

His throat closed up, and the screen in his mind generated a problematic image once again. “Excuse me, sorry, my bad, I really am sorry!!” Haruyuki prostrated himself once more, this time to hide the band of heat coloring his face.

“Enough already!” Another cushion came flying at him, hitting him squarely in the head.

“And one more thing,” Chiyuri proclaimed quietly, her voice taking on that dangerous edge again. “If you tell Taku about the shower room thing, I really will kill you. And I’ll tell Kuroyuki, too.”

“What?” Haruyuki froze like a block of ice.

Although it was true that he had not the slightest intention of telling Kuroyukihime, he had thought to report to Takumu once his apology was finished. “N-not even Taku?”

“Obviously not! What are you even thinking?!”

Taking a third cushion to the crown of his head, Haruyuki wondered how it was so obvious. But if he couldn’t tell Taku, then how was he supposed to explain Nomi’s attack? Maybe he could just say that he was mistakenly led into the girls’ shower room and not say anything about bumping into Chiyuri there. He was slightly ashamed at the idea of creating secrets to keep from his good friend and partner, but he took a deep breath and shook it off.

This wasn’t the time to be dragging out a shower room incident.

This had been Nomi’s declaration of war. For the battle about to begin, Haruyuki needed to muster every bit of willpower he had in him. And then, if possible, take care of the problem before Kuroyukihime came back from Okinawa. He couldn’t be exposing that level-nine fighter to danger.

Haruyuki chanted this to himself as he left the Kurashimas’ and returned to his own condo, two floors up.

He was wrong, however. He had misread the situation so badly that there would be no coming back from it.

The battle had already started and ended before he even realized it.